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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Honest-binding quantum bit commitment from separable operations

arXiv:2501.07351v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive and a cornerstone for numerous two-party cryptographic protocols, including zero-knowledge proofs. However, it has been proven that unconditionally secure bit commitment, both classical and quantum, is impossible. In this work, we demonstrate that imposing a restriction on the committing party to perform only separable operations enables secure quantum bit commitment schemes. Specifically, we prove that in any perfectly hiding bit commitment protocol, an honestly-committing party limited to separable operations will be detected with high probability if they attempt to alter their commitment. To illustrate our findings, we present an example protocol.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

A note on the $\mathcal{W}_2$-convergence rate of the empirical measure of an ergodic $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued diffusion

arXiv:2502.07704v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this note, we consider a Stochastic Differential Equation under a strong confluence and Lipschitz continuity assumption of the coefficients. For the unique stationary solution, we study the rate of convergence of its empirical measure toward the invariant probability measure. We provide rate for the Wasserstein distance in the mean quadratic and almost sure sense.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A simple approach to the L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy for absolutely continuous dividend strategies

arXiv:2604.13302v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit the optimization problem solved in L{\o}kka & Zervos (2008), i.e., the maximization of dividends, in a Brownian risk model, with the possibility (not the obligation) of making capital injections. Following the approach introduced in Alvarez & Shepp (1998), Renaud & Simard (2021), Renaud et al. (2023), we consider instead absolutely continuous (AC) dividend strategies with an affine bound on the payment rates, while singular capital injections are still allowed. In addition, we incorporate a parameter for the cost of ruin or, said differently, a penalty at ruin in the performance function. We show that the solution is a so-called L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy: the surplus is never ruined by making bail-out payments, or no capital is injected and bankruptcy can occur; in either case, dividends are paid at full rate when the surplus is above a threshold. Our framework allows us to provide explicit conditions to express the dichotomy, either using the cost of capital injections or the cost of ruin as a criterion, which also exposes the underlying structure of the solution. In particular, for some values of the parameters, we show that it is optimal to liquidate. Moreover, we perform a numerical analysis highlighting the range of values generated under this AC affine-bound structure.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Neuro-Symbolic Agents for Regulated Process Automation: Challenges and Research Agenda

arXiv:2606.13405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agents are entering regulated industries where they automate judgment intensive quality management processes. We argue that symbolic structures already embedded in these domains, including regulations, typed process models, and compliance constraints, should be treated not merely as external monitoring mechanisms but as core architectural components that shape the agent's decision-making and behavior. We propose compliance-by-construction as a complementary paradigm to guardrail-based monitoring: a structural foundation that prevents control-flow violations, while guardrails remain essential for catching semantic errors. We identify a structured set of neuro-symbolic research challenges on foundational and capability level and show that addressing them jointly enables compliance-by-construction. We call on the neuro-symbolic community to engage with regulated process automation as a high impact research domain.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Characterizing the genetic basis of Cardio-Renal-Metabolic multimorbidity using multivariate genomic modelling

Cardio-renal-metabolic multimorbidity (CRMM) encompasses interrelated conditions affecting the heart, kidneys, and metabolic systems. Although the genetics of individual components are well studied, their shared architecture remains unclear. Here, we performed the largest multi-ancestry multivariate GWAS of CRMM across seven biobanks, including individuals of European (EUR; neff = 353,130), African (AFR; neff = 75,436), and East Asian (EAS; neff = 164,373) ancestry. We identified 287 lead loci in EUR, 30 in AFR, and 202 in EAS. Cross-ancestry analyses revealed ancestry-specific signals and 24 shared loci mapping to FTO and TCF7L2. Drug-repurposing highlighted candidates used for type 2 diabetes and hypertension. Mendelian randomization supported causal links with diverse diseases, while polygenic risk scores showed improved prediction across ancestries. Collectively, these findings advance understanding of CRMM genetics and inform precision medicine.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Factions Within, Uncertain Across: Within-Document Reader Sub-Groups in Social Highlighting

When many people highlight the same document, is the crowd a single consensus, or is it internally structured into reader sub-groups that mark different things – and is that structure a stable property of a reader or of the document? Building on prior work showing an individual's within-document highlighting signal is a whisper while individuality lives in selection, we ask the group-level question on a co-readership platform using a margin-preserving curveball null. Experiment 1: within a document, readers form strong sub-groups – pairs agree far beyond what shared salience, mark density, and sentence popularity predict (nearest-neighbour agreement z=+6.3, significant in 88% of documents). Under an eight-block region-preserving null, shared engagement with the same coarse regions of the document accounts for about 40% of this excess; the majority survives as finer reader-specific agreement (z=+3.6, 77% significant). So the within-document crowd is, in a descriptive sense, factional. Experiment 2: is that grouping a stable reader trait? Here we are honest about power. The cross-document split-half reproducibility of a pair's agreement is near zero pooled (+0.078 and 0.000 in two separately drawn samples), and a power calibration shows the test is informative only for pairs that co-read many documents. In the only informative high-overlap subset (k>=4), point estimates are positive but small-sample, imprecise across the separately drawn samples, never significant, and attenuate under the region-preserving null. We therefore leave cross-document stability unresolved: the data is consistent with anything from situational grouping to a weak-to-moderate stable reader trait. The crowd is factional within a document; whether its factions follow the reader across documents is, honestly, beyond our reach.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entropic order parameters and topological holography

arXiv:2512.24225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that the symmetry topological field theory (SymTFT) construction, also known as the topological holography, provides a natural and intuitive framework for the entropic order parameter characterising phases with (partially) broken symmetries. Various examples of group and non-invertible symmetries are studied. In particular, the origin of the distinguishability of the vacua resulting from spontaneously broken non-invertible symmetries is made manifest with an information-theoretic perspective, where certain operators in the SymTFT are excluded from observation.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

AcceRL: A Distributed Asynchronous Reinforcement Learning and World Model Framework for Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2603.18464v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for large-scale Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is severely bottlenecked by synchronization barriers and the high cost of environment data acquisition. To overcome these challenges, we propose AcceRL, a distributed asynchronous RL framework that physically isolates environment rollouts, model inference, and gradient updates. By eliminating the cascading long-tail idle bubbles inherent in synchronous systems, AcceRL maximizes hardware utilization and ensures scalable throughput. Furthermore, AcceRL features a modular design that supports the integration of diverse, plug-and-play world models into its distributed pipeline. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the base framework achieves highly competitive performance across all four LIBERO[liu2023libero] task suites. Systematically, the asynchronous architecture delivers a $2.4\times$ throughput speedup over leading synchronous baselines. Algorithmically, by leveraging a world model pre-trained on 1,000 offline trajectories, AcceRL achieves up to a $200\times$ improvement in online sample efficiency on LIBERO-Spatial, establishing a robust framework that is both sample-efficient and time-efficient for embodied AI. Code is included in the supplementary material. Code is available at https://github.com/distanceLu/AcceRL.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria tethered to the nucleus secure its energy supply

Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation. Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

ADaPT: Token-Level Decoupling for Efficient Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606.19919v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models rely on long chain-of-thought to achieve strong performance, but applying such reasoning uniformly incurs high computational cost. Existing efficiency-oriented methods attempt to shorten or mix reasoning strategies, yet often degrade reasoning capability. We identify the root cause as sequence-level coupling between efficiency incentives and correctness optimization, which implicitly penalizes long but correct reasoning trajectories. To address this issue, we propose Adaptive Dual-Process Thinking (ADaPT), a token-level dual-process framework that explicitly decouples efficiency and correctness signals during training. ADaPT introduces a mode-selection token to control fast and slow reasoning, applying efficiency-related rewards exclusively to this token to avoid penalizing correct long reasoning while encouraging efficiency when appropriate. Moreover, ADaPT enables precise and continuous control over the efficiency-performance trade-off at inference time: by adjusting the generation probability of the mode-selection token, a single trained model can smoothly move along the efficiency-performance Pareto frontier. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ADaPT significantly reduces inference cost while maintaining strong reasoning performance across multiple benchmarks.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

4DSloMo: 4D Reconstruction for High Speed Scene with Asynchronous Capture

Reconstructing fast-dynamic scenes from multi-view videos is crucial for high-speed motion analysis and realistic 4D reconstruction. However, the majority of 4D capture systems are limited to frame rates below 30 FPS (frames per second), and a direct 4D reconstruction of high-speed motion from low FPS input may lead to undesirable results. In this work, we propose a high-speed 4D capturing system only using low FPS cameras, through novel capturing and processing modules. On the capturing side, we propose an asynchronous capture scheme that increases the effective frame rate by staggering the start times of cameras. By grouping cameras and leveraging a base frame rate of 25 FPS, our method achieves an equivalent frame rate of 100-200 FPS without requiring specialized high-speed cameras. On processing side, we also propose a novel generative model to fix artifacts caused by 4D sparse-view reconstruction, as asynchrony reduces the number of viewpoints at each timestamp. Specifically, we propose to train a video-diffusion-based artifact-fix model for sparse 4D reconstruction, which refines missing details, maintains temporal consistency, and improves overall reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances high-speed 4D reconstruction compared to synchronous capture.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Redact or Keep? A Fully Local AI Cascade for Educational Dialogue De-Identification

Educational dialogue is a valuable but sensitive resource for research: the same transcripts that capture authentic learning often capture personally identifiable information (PII) entangled with curricular content, where "Riemann" may refer to a real student or to a mathematical concept. Existing approaches force a tradeoff between governance and accuracy. Commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) can handle this ambiguity but require sending student data to third parties, while local named entity recognition (NER) systems preserve governance but over-redact curricular terms. We propose a fully local cascade framework that reframes de-identification from open-ended entity recognition to constrained privacy triage. A recall-first union proposer combines two lightweight encoders with deterministic rules to over-generate candidate spans; a context-aware reviewer then makes a binary Redact/Keep decision for each candidate using surrounding dialogue and speaker role. We evaluate three reviewer configurations against same-family LLM-only baselines and a commercial API on math tutoring transcripts from two large platforms. The strongest local configuration reaches 0.958 macro F1, compared with 0.767 for a same-family LLM-only baseline and 0.706 for the commercial API, while running entirely on a single laptop. On a targeted challenge set of curricular-personal name ambiguity, the same configuration degrades by only 0.03 F1 versus 0.19 to 0.25 for smaller reviewers. These results suggest that for educational de-identification, problem formulation matters more than model scale.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Exponentially many initializations to avoid barren plateaus

arXiv:2606.18515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Barren plateaus are stated as an average-case phenomenon: pick an ansatz, initialize it naively, and concentration follows. This has led to the common view that a potential cure for barren plateaus is simply to initialize the parameters more carefully. Here we show that the situation is subtler. We introduce a first-moment framework that gives a simple operator-level diagnostic for when an initialization may escape the fully concentrated barren-plateau fixed point, and for comparing the biases induced by different initialization strategies. Our framework recovers several known initialization schemes such as identity and Gaussian initialization, but also shows that barren-plateau avoidance is highly non-unique. Indeed, many shifted, biased, and non-symmetric parameter distributions can avoid concentration, and these choices need not be equivalent. In fact, our results show that one can generate exponentially many families of inequivalent initialization strategies. Then, our numerics indicate that different first-moment-distinct initializations can lead to different attained minima, suggesting that avoiding barren plateaus via smart initializations can trade the exponential concentration problem for the challenge of selecting the right trainable pocket amongst many options.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SENTINEL: Failure-Driven Reinforcement Learning for Training Tool-Using Language Model Agents

Language model agents are increasingly effective in solving realistic tasks through multi-turn tool use. However, training reliable tool-using agents remains challenging in practice. While reinforcement learning provides an on-policy paradigm for improving agents from their own environment interactions, its effectiveness depends heavily on the training task distribution. When tasks are fixed before training, the task distribution can become increasingly mismatched with the policy's evolving capabilities, causing many rollouts to be spent on uninformative tasks. We propose SENTINEL, a failure-driven reinforcement learning framework that turns the Solver's rollout failures into targeted training tasks. SENTINEL follows a Controller–Proposer–Solver loop: the Controller analyzes failed trajectories and summarizes recurring error patterns, the Proposer generates executable tasks that stress these weaknesses, and the Solver is trained on the targeted tasks. On Tau2-Bench Retail with Qwen3-4B-Thinking-2507, SENTINEL improves Pass\^{}1 from 66.4 to 74.9 and outperforms RL on general synthetic tasks across Pass\^{}k metrics. These results demonstrate that model failures provide an effective and scalable source of targeted training signal for improving tool-using language model agents.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Architectural Wisdom: A Framework for Governing Optimization in AI Systems

arXiv:2606.16319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern AI systems exhibit structural failures that capability scaling alone does not reliably fix: they optimize under-specified objectives with no architectural mechanism to question whether the objective should be optimized at all. Engagement maximization can amplify harmful pathways; tool-using agents can commit irreversible actions; preference-trained language models can become sycophantic. We argue that this failure is a wisdom problem, not an intelligence problem. We use "wisdom" in a deliberately architectural sense, not as a claim about virtue, consciousness, or moral omniscience. Intelligence accepts a goal and optimizes within it; wisdom interrogates whether the goal should be optimized at all. The two are separable architectural properties. We propose architectural wisdom as a corrigible objective-governance layer above the optimization substrate. The layer makes three structural commitments explicit and nondegenerate before any action: temporal horizon, relational boundary, and irreversibility. It is realized by four components (Structural Utility Transform, Moral Admissibility Interface, Arbitration and Escalation Controller, Value Revision Channel) that compute a six-coordinate wisdom tuple over horizon, relational coverage, irreversibility, admissibility, value revision, and auditability. We motivate the architecture by eight cases drawn from contemporary AI failures, secular wisdom traditions, and hard ethical situations, and defend the distinction against the intelligence-completeness thesis using goal-questioning over goal-taking, Bostrom's orthogonality, structural separation in our exemplar cases, and persistent failure modes despite capability scaling. The framework is the conceptual contract for a larger architecture whose formal specifications and empirical validation are developed in subsequent work.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Robust Detection of Planted Subgraphs in Semi-Random Models

arXiv:2508.02158v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detection of planted subgraphs in Erdös-Rényi random graphs has been extensively studied, leading to a rich body of results characterizing both statistical and computational thresholds. However, most prior work assumes a purely random generative model, making the resulting algorithms potentially fragile in the face of real-world perturbations. In this work, we initiate the study of semi-random models for the planted subgraph detection problem, wherein an adversary is allowed to remove edges outside the planted subgraph before the graph is revealed to the statistician. Crucially, the statistician remains unaware of which edges have been removed, introducing fundamental challenges to the inference task. We establish fundamental statistical limits for detection under this semi-random model, revealing a sharp dichotomy. Specifically, for planted subgraphs with strongly sub-logarithmic maximum density detection becomes information-theoretically impossible in the presence of an adversary-despite being possible for some planted subgraphs in the classical random model. In stark contrast, for subgraphs with super-logarithmic density, the statistical limits remain essentially unchanged; we prove that the optimal (albeit computationally intractable) likelihood ratio test remains robust. Beyond these statistical boundaries, we design a new computationally efficient and robust detection algorithm, and provide rigorous statistical guarantees for its performance. Our results establish the first robust framework for planted subgraph detection and open new directions in the study of semi-random models, computational-statistical trade-offs, and robustness in graph inference problems.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DeFAb: A Verifiable Benchmark for Defeasible Abduction in Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.18557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A rule-based logic solver resolves every instance in our benchmark in under 50 microseconds with 100% accuracy; the best frontier language model reaches 65% at best and drops to 23.5% under rendering-robust evaluation (worst case over four surface renderings). We introduce DeFAb (Defeasible Abduction Benchmark), a dataset and generation pipeline that converts four decades of publicly funded knowledge bases into formally grounded instances for defeasible abduction: constructing hypotheses that explain anomalies by overriding defaults while preserving unrelated expectations. Because every hypothesis must pass polynomial-time checks for valid derivation, conservativity, and minimality, DeFAb makes logical rigor the instrument for measuring creativity and theoretical reasoning, scoring the disciplined construction of theory revisions rather than fluent but theory-destroying prose. The pipeline pairs taxonomic hierarchies (OpenCyc, YAGO, Wikidata) with behavioral property graphs (ConceptNet, UMLS) to produce 372,648+ instances across 33.75M materialized rules from 18 sources, in three levels with polynomial-time verifiable gold standards. Four frontier models do not reliably internalize defeasible reasoning: rendering-robust Level 2 accuracy is 7.8-23.5%; chain-of-thought variance (~36 pp) exceeds any inter-model gap; and a matched contamination control isolates a +19.4 pp Level 3 gap. We further release DeFAb-Hard (a 235-instance Level 3 difficulty variant; best model 53.3% vs 100% symbolic) and CONJURE (a kernel-verified transformative-creativity variant of 560 Lean 4/Mathlib instances whose gold answers are definitions the proof kernel did not previously contain, judge-free verifier; a pilot finds zero novel concepts). The same verifier doubles as an exact reward for preference optimization (DPO, RLVR/GRPO). Released under MIT at https://huggingface.co/datasets/PatrickAllenCooper/DeFAb.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Intelligence Is Not the Bottleneck: Validating an LLM First-Pass Manuscript Score Against Peer-Review Outcomes

arXiv:2606.15887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly proposed to assist peer review, yet most evaluations judge the prose of machine-generated review text, not the validity of the numeric score a system assigns. We validate AIPR, which reads a submitted manuscript and emits five 0-100 quality dimensions and a weighted overall score, against the public decision outcomes of a major machine learning venue. AIPR grades by prompting alone, with no fine-tuning on reviews or decisions. Across 300 ICLR submissions with public decision tiers and reviewer ratings, graded under a frozen pipeline with hypotheses pre-registered before any score met any outcome, the overall score separates rejected from accepted submissions (AUROC 0.82, 95% CI 0.78-0.87), rises monotonically across tiers, and tracks the mean reviewer rating. The signal is strongest where we claim it: the lowest-scoring fifth is rejected far above the base rate, with oral papers absent. The validity comes mostly from the model: a one-paragraph prompt on the same model discriminates almost as well as the full pipeline (the small gap favours the pipeline but does not meet the pre-declared criterion, p = 0.09). What the engineering adds is reliability and a grounded review: AIPR's score barely moves across repeated runs (0.7 vs. 2.8 points within-paper SD) where the bare prompt swings, and the same pass returns a rubric-structured, evidence-grounded review rather than a bare number, with the human keeping the decision.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FronTalk: Benchmarking Front-End Development as Conversational Code Generation with Multi-Modal Feedback

We present FronTalk, a benchmark for front-end code generation that pioneers the study of a unique interaction dynamic: conversational code generation with multi-modal feedback. In front-end development, visual artifacts such as sketches, mockups and annotated creenshots are essential for conveying design intent, yet their role in multi-turn code generation remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we focus on the front-end development task and curate FronTalk, a collection of 100 multi-turn dialogues derived from real-world websites across diverse domains such as news, finance, and art. Each turn features both a textual instruction and an equivalent visual instruction, each representing the same user intent. To comprehensively evaluate model performance, we propose a novel agent-based evaluation framework leveraging a web agent to simulate users and explore the website, and thus measuring both functional correctness and user experience. Evaluation of 20 models reveals two key challenges that are under-explored systematically in the literature: (1) a significant forgetting issue where models overwrite previously implemented features, resulting in task failures, and (2) a persistent challenge in interpreting visual feedback, especially for open-source vision-language models (VLMs). We propose a strong baseline to tackle the forgetting issue with AceCoder, a method that critiques the implementation of every past instruction using an autonomous web agent. This approach significantly reduces forgetting to nearly zero and improves the performance by up to 9.3% (56.0% to 65.3%). Overall, we aim to provide a solid foundation for future research in front-end development and the general interaction dynamics of multi-turn, multi-modal code generation. Code and data are released at https://github.com/shirley-wu/frontalk

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604.13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

$\mathcal{PT}$-Symmetric Spin–Boson Model with a Continuous Bosonic Spectrum: Exceptional Points and Dynamics

arXiv:2512.20277v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work studies a $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric non-Hermitian spin–boson model, consisting of a non-Hermitian two-level system coupled to a continuous bosonic bath. The static properties of the system are analyzed through a projection method derived from the displacement operator. We find that only a single exceptional point (EP) emerges, in contrast to non-Hermitian spin–boson models with finite modes, which typically exhibit multiple EPs. Notably, only a single real eigenvalue is found before the EP, which differs markedly from typical non-Hermitian systems where a pair of real eigenvalues precedes the EP. The time evolution of observables is further investigated via the Dirac–Frenkel time-dependent variational principle. Compared to its Hermitian counterpart, the non-Hermitian model exhibits distinct dynamical signatures, most notably the emergence of oscillations with periodic amplified amplitude. In the $\mathcal{PT}$-unbroken phase, the system exhibits sustained oscillatory dynamics with suppressed decoherence, whereas in the $\mathcal{PT}$-broken phase, additional dissipative channels accelerate decoherence and drive rapid convergence toward a stable steady state. These results shed light on how $\mathcal{PT}$ symmetry protects coherent light–matter interactions in non-Hermitian quantum systems.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CoRe: A Continuously Reward-Finetuned LLM Query Rewriter for Multi-Stage Context-Aware Relevance in Web-Scale Video Search

LLM-based query rewriters in production face a tension: the training reward must reflect how the rewrite is consumed by the production ranker, yet the training procedure must be cheap enough to support continuous redeployment as data drifts. We present CoRe (Context Relevance), such a system, redeployed weekly for over five months in a major short-video search engine. Our reward uses the deployed multimodal relevance model as its source and a multiplicative ratio form mirroring the production fusion algebra, closing the simulation-production gap that offline reward proxies leave open. A semi-online Mixed Preference Optimization loop makes this reward affordable at multi-million-instance weekly scale: a DPO-style pairwise objective restricts the gradient pass to a small top-k/bottom-k subset of sampled trajectories, and a phase structure reduces trainer/inference-server parameter syncs from per-step to per-phase. An automated promotion gate over reward-like and stability metrics detected and recovered from a real reward-hacking incident in production. Rewriter output is consumed as parallel relevance signals at recall, rawrank, and finerank without displacing the original signals, bounding rewriter-failure blast radius. Online A/B from two sequential production launches, first deploying the rewriter at finerank, then extending consumption to recall and rawrank, delivers statistically significant reductions in change-query rate on rewrite-impacted queries, with all headline relevance and engagement metrics moving in the expected direction.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.