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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DVD: Discrete Voxel Diffusion for 3D Generation and Editing

We introduce Discrete Voxel Diffusion (DVD), a discrete diffusion framework to generate, assess, and edit sparse voxels for SLat (Structured LATent) based 3D generative pipelines. Although discrete diffusion has not generally displaced continuous diffusion in image-like generation, we show that it can be an effective first-stage prior for sparse voxel scaffolds. By treating voxel occupancy as a native discrete variable, DVD avoids continuous-to-discrete thresholding and provides a simple framework for voxel generation, uncertainty estimation, and editing. Beyond quality gains, DVD provides more interpretable generation dynamics through explicit categorical modeling. Furthermore, we leverage the predictive entropy as a robust uncertainty metric to identify ambiguous voxel regions and complicated samples, facilitating tasks such as data filtering and quality assessment. Finally, we propose a lightweight fine-tuning strategy using block-structured perturbation patterns. This approach empowers the model to inpaint and edit voxels within a single sampling round, requiring negligible auxiliary computation and no additional model evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/TeCai/DVD.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K–600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Ranking Abuse via Strategic Pairwise Data Perturbations

arXiv:2604.17805v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise ranking systems based on Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), such as the Bradley-Terry model, are widely used to aggregate preferences from pairwise comparisons. However, their robustness under strategic data manipulation remains insufficiently understood. In this paper, we study the vulnerability of MLE-based ranking systems to adversarial perturbations. We formulate the manipulation task as a constrained combinatorial optimization problem and propose an Adaptive Subset Selection Attack (ASSA) to efficiently identify high-impact perturbations. Experimental results on both synthetic data and real-world election datasets show that MLE-based rankings exhibit a sharp phase-transition behavior: beyond a small perturbation budget, a limited number of strategic voters can significantly alter the global ranking. In particular, our method consistently outperforms random and greedy baselines under constrained budgets. These findings reveal a fundamental sensitivity of MLE-based ranking mechanisms to structured perturbations and highlight the need for more robust aggregation methods in collective decision-making systems.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

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

MASLab: A Unified and Comprehensive Codebase for LLM-based Multi-Agent Systems

LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated significant potential in enhancing single LLMs to address complex and diverse tasks in practical applications. Despite considerable advancements, the field lacks a unified codebase that consolidates existing methods, resulting in redundant re-implementation efforts, unfair comparisons, and high entry barriers for researchers. To address these challenges, we introduce MASLab, a unified, comprehensive, and research-friendly codebase for LLM-based MAS. (1) MASLab integrates over 20 established methods across multiple domains, each rigorously validated by comparing step-by-step outputs with its official implementation. (2) MASLab provides a unified environment with various benchmarks for fair comparisons among methods, ensuring consistent inputs and standardized evaluation protocols. (3) MASLab implements methods within a shared streamlined structure, lowering the barriers for understanding and extension. Building on MASLab, we conduct extensive experiments covering 10+ benchmarks and 8 models, offering researchers a clear and comprehensive view of the current landscape of MAS methods. MASLab will continue to evolve, tracking the latest developments in the field, and invite contributions from the broader open-source community.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum iterative approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2606.11843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, where determining the shortest route among a set of cities becomes computationally prohibitive as the problem size increases. This work explores quantum computing as an alternative approach to address this complexity. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on quantum annealing, we propose a quantum iterative framework integrating Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) and Grover's search algorithm. Route costs are encoded as quantum phases, enabling QPE to efficiently evaluate them, while Amplitude Amplification, implemented via the Grover-Long algorithm, iteratively refines the solution space toward the optimal route. A proof-of-concept case study on a small-scale TSP instance demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its potential for scaling to larger optimization problems. Furthermore, under an expectation-based analysis, the algorithm exhibits an expected computational complexity of $O(\frac{m^2\log_2(m)\log_2(1/\epsilon)}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})$ which depends on the error tolerance parameter $\epsilon$. This estimation omits the initialization term, which we expect future refinements to render subdominant to Phase Estimation.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TimeROME-DLM: Temporal Causal Tracing and Low-Rank Inference-Time Knowledge Editing for Masked Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2606.12841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) such as LLaDA now rival autoregressive (AR) LLMs, but every existing knowledge-editing and unlearning method (ROME, MEMIT, etc.) targets AR transformers and either makes assumptions that fail under iterative denoising, or requires gradient updates whose backward-pass activations cost tens of GB of extra VRAM and which collapse MDLMs at standard learning rates. We introduce TimeROME-DLM, the first training-free, gradient-free, inference-time knowledge-editing framework for MDLMs. It couples two components: a Temporal Indirect Effect (TIE) causal-tracing protocol that identifies, for each fact, the coordinate whose intervention most strongly drives the object prediction at later denoising steps; and a closed-form, low-rank residual edit memory that aggregates subject keys and target deltas across all forget facts and applies a single ridge-regularised update at that coordinate at every diffusion forward, with sparsification to limit utility spillover. Backbone weights stay frozen; only three hyperparameters (alpha, lambda, q) are tuned on a small validation split. On TOFU forget01 with TOFU-finetuned LLaDA-8B-Base, TimeROME-DLM cuts forget-set log-probability by roughly 83 nats. The same configuration transfers to LLaDA-8B-Instruct, Dream-7B, MMaDA-8B, DiffuLLaMA-7B, and LLaDA-MoE-1.4B. It keeps retain-set log-probability nearly flat (within ~1 nat at the utility-safe operating point) across 50 sequentially inserted facts, delivers a four- to fourteen-fold wall-clock speedup with zero additional VRAM over the strongest converged training-time baseline, and scales sub-linearly to 400 facts. TimeROME-DLM closes the locate-then-edit gap between AR LLMs and MDLMs at a fraction of the computational cost.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

LoMC: Localized Multidirectional Correction for Refusal Suppression in Routed Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.13709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study controlled post-training refusal suppression in routed MoE and hybrid-MoE foundation models, aiming to increase non-refusal target-response behavior while preserving general capability under a compact intervention footprint. Existing broad direction-based edits can perturb general-purpose computation, whereas support-only expert edits often lack sufficient capacity to correct heterogeneous refusal representations. To address this limitation, we introduce Localized Multidirectional Correction (LoMC), a support-gated intervention framework that follows a support-then-correction execution order: it first identifies a compact edit support, then aggregates prototype correction directions into layer-wise correction directions, and finally applies rank-one layer-wise correction only within the selected support. By using the edit support as a structural gating constraint, LoMC increases correction capacity without expanding the intervention scope. Experiments on text-only and multimodal safety benchmarks across four routed backbones show that LoMC substantially improves non-refusal target-response behavior while maintaining general capability under a compact intervention footprint.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AgentBeats: Agentifying Agent Assessment for Openness, Standardization, and Reproducibility

arXiv:2606.13608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems are advancing quickly across domains, but their evaluation remains fragmented. Most benchmarks rely on fixed, LLM-centric harnesses that require heavy integration, create test-production mismatch, and limit fair comparison across diverse agent designs. The root problem is the lack of an open, agent-agnostic assessment interface. We advocate Agentified Agent Assessment (AAA), where evaluation is performed by judge agents and all participants interact through standardized protocols: A2A for task management and MCP for tool access. Conventional benchmarking defines two separate interfaces, one for the benchmark and one for the agent, while AAA only needs one; this yields a generic, unified framework that separates assessment logic from agent implementation and enables reproducible, interoperable, and multi-agent evaluation. We further introduce AgentBeats as a concrete realization of AAA: we identify five practical operation modes that make standardized assessment compatible with real-world constraints on openness, privacy, and reproducibility. To evaluate our design at scale, we conduct two studies: a five-month open competition that drew 298 judge agents across 12 categories together with 467 subject agents from independent participants, showing that AAA applies across a heterogeneous range of benchmarks; and a case study on coding agents that confirms agentified evaluation preserves fidelity with the public record while surfacing previously missing head-to-head results, yielding research insights about agent design. Combining a community-scale field study and a controlled coding case study, we verify that AAA delivers coverage, practicality, and fidelity across heterogeneous scenarios at scale. Together, AAA and AgentBeats offer a clear path toward open, standardized, and reproducible agent assessment.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Drivers, Receivers, and Dynamic Linkages: The Directed Structure of SDG Interdependence, 2000–2024

arXiv:2601.20875v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Governments with limited fiscal and administrative capacity need to know which Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) propagate progress through the goal system and how quickly. We map the directed interdependence structure of all seventeen goals using a balanced panel of 114 countries observed annually from 2000 to 2024. The goal series are persistent, trending, and cross-sectionally dependent, so we apply two estimators matched to this regime: a Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel Granger non-causality test, run on first-differenced series, to recover the directed interaction network, and panel local projections with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors to measure the dynamic magnitude of 31 theory-derived indicator linkages. Of 272 directed goal pairs, 84 linkages survive false-discovery control (40 synergies, 44 trade-offs; network density 0.31). Synergies and trade-offs occur at comparable strength, so no single goal behaves as a universal accelerator, and the goal-level hierarchy itself is fragile. Driver-receiver rankings correlate weakly across lag orders and centrality metrics, and under a country bootstrap only two roles are distinguishable from zero: peace and strong institutions as the clearest net receiver, and poverty reduction as the most probable effect-size-weighted driver. The supported linkages are dynamic, accruing over four to five years: sanitation and poverty improvements are the strongest predictors of lower child mortality, and the education-child-health association is corroborated in independent World Development Indicators data across 183 countries. These results caution against rankings-based accelerator policy and support adaptive portfolios built on supported, time-lagged linkages monitored through constituent indicators.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bounding Boxes as Goals: Language-Conditioned Grasping via Neuro-Symbolic Planning

For robotics to be effectively integrated into household or industrial environments, machines must adapt to natural-language prompts in real time. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled zero-shot generalization in robot task and motion planning (TAMP), current state-of-the-art approaches often remain computationally "heavyweight" or require extensive training on thousands of demonstrations. We present GRASP (Grounded Reasoning and Symbolic Planning), a framework designed as a step toward open-vocabulary tabletop manipulation. Our approach leverages a pretrained VLM to translate natural-language queries into neuro-symbolic goal states, grounded in the physical world via a bounding-box detection pipeline. Unlike methods that rely on fixed color lists or hard-coded coordinates, GRASP enables robots to interpret abstract spatial concepts such as "top shelf" and execute tasks without additional fine-tuning. We achieve 73.3% overall success across 90 real-robot trials at three difficulty levels, requiring no task-specific training.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Disentangling Linguistic Relatedness from Task Alignment in Cross-Lingual Transfer

We study cross-lingual transfer by fine-tuning seven large language models (4B–671B parameters) on Arabic and evaluating zero-shot reading comprehension on Semitic languages and non-Semitic controls. Across dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures, we find no evidence of Semitic-specific transfer: models with weak baselines improve dramatically across all languages, while strong-baseline models show only marginal gains regardless of language family. A chain-of-thought ablation reinforces this finding – the same models that benefit most from fine-tuning benefit equally from inference-time reasoning, suggesting both mechanisms address task-format alignment rather than cross-lingual knowledge transfer.

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

OccAny: Generalized Unconstrained Urban 3D Occupancy

Relying on in-domain annotations and precise sensor-rig priors, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are limited in both scalability and out-of-domain generalization. While recent visual geometry foundation models exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they were mainly designed for general purposes and lack one or more key ingredients required for urban occupancy prediction, namely metric prediction, geometry completion in cluttered scenes and adaptation to urban scenarios. We address this gap and present OccAny, the first unconstrained urban 3D occupancy model capable of operating on out-of-domain uncalibrated scenes to predict and complete metric occupancy coupled with segmentation features. OccAny is versatile and can predict occupancy from sequential, monocular, or surround-view images. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we propose the first generalized 3D occupancy framework with (ii) Segmentation Forcing that improves occupancy quality while enabling mask-level prediction, and (iii) a Novel View Rendering pipeline that infers novel-view geometry to enable test-time view augmentation for geometry completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccAny outperforms all visual geometry baselines on 3D occupancy prediction task, while remaining competitive with in-domain self-supervised methods across three input settings on two established urban occupancy prediction datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OccAny .

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment for Domain Adaptive Retrieval

arXiv:2512.04524v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Domain adaptive retrieval aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain, enabling effective retrieval while mitigating domain discrepancies. However, existing methods encounter several fundamental limitations: 1) neglecting class-level semantic alignment and excessively pursuing pair-wise sample alignment; 2) lacking either pseudo-label reliability consideration or geometric guidance for assessing label correctness; 3) directly quantizing original features affected by domain shift, undermining the quality of learned hash codes. In view of these limitations, we propose Prototype-Based Semantic Consistency Alignment (PSCA), a two-stage framework for effective domain adaptive retrieval. In the first stage, a set of orthogonal prototypes directly establishes class-level semantic connections, maximizing inter-class separability while gathering intra-class samples. During the prototype learning, geometric proximity provides a reliability indicator for semantic consistency alignment through adaptive weighting of pseudo-label confidences. The resulting membership matrix and prototypes facilitate feature reconstruction, ensuring quantization on reconstructed rather than original features, thereby improving subsequent hash coding quality and seamlessly connecting both stages. In the second stage, domain-specific quantization functions process the reconstructed features under mutual approximation constraints, generating unified binary hash codes across domains. Extensive experiments validate PSCA's superior performance across multiple datasets.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SuCo: Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning

Despite remarkable performance on complex tasks, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often generate excessively long Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT), inflating computational costs even for simple queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this inefficiency typically rely on discrete reasoning modes or fixed budget tiers, lacking a principled criterion of when reasoning is sufficient. In this work, we introduce Minimal Sufficient CoT (MSC), defined as the shortest prefix of a CoT trajectory which is adequate for producing the correct answer. We empirically show that MSC not only reduces reasoning tokens, but also improves accuracy across difficulty levels. Building on MSC, we propose Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning (SuCo), a two-stage training framework for autonomous reasoning control along a continuous spectrum. In stage 1, MSC-Aligned Fine-Tuning (MFT) constructs MSC data using problem-adaptive sufficiency thresholds that naturally scale with question difficulty, then fine-tunes the model to internalize concise yet sufficient reasoning patterns. In stage 2, Sufficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO) further optimizes the model through reinforcement learning with dynamic complexity tracking and sufficiency-aware rewards that penalize both over- and under-thinking. Extensive experiments across mathematics, code, and science benchmarks show that SuCo consistently achieves improvements in both accuracy and reasoning efficiency.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum-Accelerated Self-Consistent Field: A Hybrid Algorithm

arXiv:2606.20176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Grover adaptive search self-consistent field (GAS-SCF) algorithm. GAS-SCF leverages quantum arithmetic to construct an efficient oracle that marks target states (Fock states) which improve upon some initial classical energy estimate. Amplitude amplification then increases the probability of measuring these states. This approach offers a theoretical quadratic speed-up for the optimization problem encountered in SCF quantum chemistry and establishes a baseline against which structured optimization algorithms, such as QAOA and DQI may be compared. In this work, we classically simulate three examples as proofs of concept of the algorithm, the largest consisting of 26 qubits. We then extend our analysis to two larger systems, with O3 representing the largest case at 330 qubits. These examples are chosen to probe classically challenging SCF regimes. Achieving chemically relevant applications of GAS-SCF will require large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum hardware.

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

AURA: Adaptive Uncertainty-aware Refinement for LLM-as-a-Judge Auditing

arXiv:2606.19714v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for open-ended generation, as large-scale human evaluation is often expensive and difficult to scale, yet their preferences remain imperfect proxies for human judgment. Existing auditing pipelines often assume that a reliable subset of examples or clean supervision signals are available beforehand, for example from human annotation, heuristic filtering, or the outputs of strong judges. In LLM evaluation, this assumption is fragile: the initial split may inherit judge bias, while human verification is typically too scarce to define stable groups at scale. We propose AURA, an adaptive uncertainty–aware refinement framework for auditing pairwise LLM–as–a–judge decisions under selected human verification. AURA iteratively learns a human-consistency signal, propagates reliable evidence, and prioritizes uncertain comparisons for human review. The key idea is to treat trust in a judge as a latent quantity that is progressively refined as evidence accumulates. We provide a compact formulation, a stable refinement procedure, and a comprehensive evaluation on both synthetic and real pairwise LLM-answer data.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Rescaling Confidence: What Scale Design Reveals About LLM Metacognition

arXiv:2603.09309v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Verbalized confidence, in which LLMs report a numerical certainty score, is widely used to estimate uncertainty in black-box settings, yet the confidence scale itself (typically 0–100) is rarely examined. We show that this design choice is not neutral. Across six LLMs and three datasets, verbalized confidence is heavily discretized, with more than 78\% of responses concentrating on just three round-number values. To investigate this phenomenon, we systematically manipulate confidence scales along three dimensions: granularity, boundary placement, and range regularity, and evaluate metacognitive sensitivity using $meta-d'$. We find that a 0–20 scale consistently improves metacognitive efficiency over the standard 0–100 format, while boundary compression degrades performance and round-number preferences persist even under irregular ranges. These results demonstrate that confidence scale design directly affects the quality of verbalized uncertainty and should be treated as a first-class experimental variable in LLM evaluation.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Characterizing metric-space-valued processes: separating classes and weak invariance principles for measure-theoretic inference

arXiv:2606.13084v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This article investigates stochastic processes taking values in metric spaces that lack a topological vector space structure, a regime characterized by intricate interplay between topological, geometric, and temporal dependence structures. It is formally established that spaces admitting an isometric Hilbertian embedding constitute a strict subclass within the much broader class of metric spaces possessing the ball property. While traditional kernel methods are susceptible to geometric distortion when the underlying space cannot be isometrically embedded into a Hilbert space, we bypass such limitations by exploiting a fundamental structural property inherent to this broader class; namely, that Borel probability measures are uniquely determined by their values on balls. These separating classes provide the foundation for the subsequently introduced measure-theoretic inference methodology. We derive uniform convergence of a family of time-dependent random measures, alongside weak invariance principles for the corresponding nonstationary random fields. This framework explicitly exposes how dependence and geometric complexity influence sample path regularity. Furthermore, because the rapid decay of small-ball probabilities can prohibit the existence of limiting distributions for supremum-based discrepancy measures, we develop $L^p$-based alternatives. By directly leveraging the introduced convergence results, this approach circumvents the need for higher-order $U$-process formulations. Finally, for spaces that do admit an isometric Hilbertian embedding, and where $U$-processes naturally arise, we establish limit theory for both degenerate and nondegenerate multi-parameter $U$-processes, and demonstrate that local discrepancy tests maintain asymptotic stability under dynamic parameter regimes.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition

Micro-gestures (MGs) are spontaneous and subtle body movements that frequently convey hidden human emotions. Recognizing MGs in untrimmed videos remains highly challenging due to their extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, severe long-tailed class distribution, and the inherent domain shift encountered in cross-subject evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multi-modal framework for Track 1 of the 4th MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. To capture fine-grained representations, we design a saliency-guided multi-modal extraction pipeline integrating 68-keypoint skeleton joint coordinates, 3D heatmap volumes, and high-resolution RGB visual features. We introduce a gentle square-root smoothed weighting mechanism paired with an Orthogonal Semantic Embedding Loss to protect tail classes without compromising overall recognition capabilities. More importantly, to bridge the cross-subject generalization gap, we propose a Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling (CMPL) strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation, which significantly boosts single-modal robustness. A temperature-scaled soft-voting mechanism is finally utilized to alleviate overconfidence during late fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a competitive F1-score of 68.13\%, securing the 4th place.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2024 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper reviews the NTIRE 2024 challenge on image super-resolution ($\times$4), highlighting the solutions proposed and the outcomes obtained. The challenge involves generating corresponding high-resolution (HR) images, magnified by a factor of four, from low-resolution (LR) inputs using prior information. The LR images originate from bicubic downsampling degradation. The aim of the challenge is to obtain designs/solutions with the most advanced SR performance, with no constraints on computational resources (e.g., model size and FLOPs) or training data. The track of this challenge assesses performance with the PSNR metric on the DIV2K testing dataset. The competition attracted 199 registrants, with 20 teams submitting valid entries. This collective endeavour not only pushes the boundaries of performance in single-image SR but also offers a comprehensive overview of current trends in this field.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Frequency-Multiplexed Millimeter-Wave Fault-Tolerant Superconducting Qubits Enabled by an On-Chip Nonreciprocal Control Bus

arXiv:2512.17588v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling superconducting quantum processors is fundamentally limited by the escalating complexity of cryogenic wiring and the detrimental effects of microwave crosstalk and Purcell decay. This paper proposes a novel architecture based on frequency-multiplexed millimeter-wave superconducting qubits, integrating an on-chip cryogenic nonreciprocal space-time-periodic Josephson frequency multiplier as a universal control bus. The bus replaces multiple high-frequency XY drive lines with a single low-frequency input tone, which is parametrically converted into a comb of high-order harmonics, each resonantly addressing a distinct qubit. The nonreciprocal nature of the bus provides intrinsic isolation that suppresses Purcell decay and reduces coherent crosstalk by more than $98\%$ compared to a conventional reciprocal shared drive line. Full error-budget analysis demonstrates that the architecture can maintain gate errors below the fault-tolerance threshold for arrays exceeding 25 qubits, converting a crosstalk-dominated error budget into one primarily limited by intrinsic material coherence. Theoretical modeling based on a non-Markovian master equation further indicates that the engineered environment enables information backflow, offering a pathway to enhanced coherence. This integrated, frequency-multiplexed, and nonreciprocal control bus offers a compelling route toward dramatic I/O simplification, improved noise resilience, and scalable high-coherence superconducting quantum processors.