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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Charge-Conjugation Violation and Population Asymmetry in Bipartite Fermionic Lattices

arXiv:2606.06138v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Charge conjugation violation (CCV) is a central concept in particle physics and appears also for quasiparticles in quantum many-body systems, which typically relies on an embedded external symmetry breaking to the underlying system. An open question is how an intrinsic CCV mechanism could emerge and what its macroscopic consequences would be. We establish sublattice kinks in bipartite fermionic lattices as a concrete setup showing intrinsic CCV. The intrinsic CCV of the sublattice kink is based on the graph-topological nature of the underlying Hamiltonian, with no explicit symmetry breaking taking place. It leads to a population asymmetry of different configurations and imprints a hidden leaf-like structure in the eigenenergy spectrum. The population asymmetry also leads to an imbalanced sublattice-kink production triggered by the vacuum-instability in the quench dynamics. Our work demonstrates the graph topology as the microscopic origin of intrinsic CCV, with the population asymmetry as the macroscopic consequence, of which the proposed setup is highly amenable to experimental implementation via cold-atom quantum simulators.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The impact of changes in age-based eligibility criteria on seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in England between 2019 and 2024: A retrospective cohort study

Objectives: To examine changes in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake among clinical risk groups over periods of differing age-based eligibility. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Individuals in England registered in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum. Participants: Between 1,239,802 (2019/20) and 1,289,330 (2023/24) individuals aged 40-69 years in clinical risk groups. Interventions: Natural experiment involving temporary expansion of age-based eligibility for influenza vaccination to include 50-64-year-olds from 2020/21 to 2022/23. Main outcome measures: Influenza vaccine uptake from 1st September to 28th February, incidence rate ratio (IRR) of vaccine uptake across consecutive seasons within age groups, and the ratio of IRRs between age groups. Results: Influenza vaccine uptake increased in all age groups in 2020/21 relative to 2019/20. The increase was larger in individuals aged 50-64 years (13.3%; IRR 1.50, 95% CI 1.50-1.51) compared with those aged 40-49 years (8.3%; IRR 1.35, 95% CI 1.34-1.35) and 65-69 years (6.8%; IRR 1.34, 95% CI 1.33-1.35). From 2020/21 to 2022/23, vaccine uptake decreased, with a more pronounced decline among those aged 40-49 years (-5.4%) compared with age-eligible groups (50-64 years: -3.0%; 65-69 years: -3.1%). The reversion of age eligibility in 2023/24 was associated with a larger decrease in uptake among those aged 50-64 years (-9.6% vs 2022/23; IRR 0.79, 95% CI: 0.79-0.79) compared with those aged 40-49 years (-4.9%; IRR 0.87, 95% CI: 0.87-0.88) and 65-69 years (-3.3%; IRR 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96-0.97). Patterns were broadly consistent across clinical risk groups. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic saw a general increase in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in clinical risk groups. This increase was larger and more sustained in 50-64 year-olds who had also become eligible based on age. Our findings highlight the potential gains in vaccine coverage among clinical risk groups based on expanded age-based eligibility.

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

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms – group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) – are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Anti-causal domain generalization: Leveraging unlabeled data

arXiv:2602.17187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of domain generalization concerns learning predictive models that are robust to distribution shifts when deployed in new, previously unseen environments. Existing methods typically require labeled data from multiple training environments, limiting their applicability when labeled data are scarce. In this work, we study domain generalization in an anti-causal setting, where the outcome causes the observed covariates. Under this structure, environment perturbations that affect the covariates do not propagate to the outcome, which motivates regularizing the model's sensitivity to these perturbations. Crucially, estimating these perturbation directions does not require labels, enabling us to leverage unlabeled data from multiple environments. We propose two methods that penalize the model's sensitivity to variations in the mean and covariance of the covariates across environments, respectively, and prove that these methods have worst-case optimality guarantees under certain classes of environments. Finally, we demonstrate the empirical performance of our approach on a controlled physical system and a physiological signal dataset.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Dual-Branch Collaborative Framework for Joint Optimization of Underwater Image Enhancement and Object Detection

Due to wavelength dependent light absorption and scattering, underwater images usually suffer from color distortion and blurred details, which limits underwater object detection performance. Existing underwater image enhancement methods mainly focus on visual quality improvement, while it is still difficult to balance enhancement quality, processing efficiency, and downstream detection performance. Therefore, this paper proposes an efficient dual-branch underwater image enhancement framework for object detection. The detail enhancement branch improves brightness and local contrast to recover texture details in dark regions. The color restoration branch uses adaptive compensation to reduce color distortion and improve color gradation. By combining the complementary outputs of the two branches, the proposed framework provides clearer and more informative images for object detection. On the UIEB and EUVP datasets, the proposed method achieves UIQM scores of 2.249 and 2.576. When applied to the YOLOv8 detection task on the URPC dataset, the proposed method improves mAP50 by 2.1\% compared with the baseline. Extensive experiments show that our method improves object detection in complex underwater scenes, while balancing enhancement quality and processing efficiency.

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

Quantum Logic Codes: Complete Transversal Logical Clifford Instruction Sets for High-Rate Stabilizer Quantum Error Correcting Codes

作者:

arXiv:2606.13521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the structure and transversal logical capabilities of stabilizer quantum error correcting codes. Among our results, we identify universal lower bounds on circuit depth to generate a full logical Clifford algebra, and develop novel constructions of logical transversal gates including a new depth-one transversal phase $\mathrm{\overline{S}}$ gate in the rotated surface code and a depth-one intra-block $\mathrm{\overline{CZ}}$ gate in the 2D-toric code that generalizes to all odd distances and all lengths $L\ge3$, respectively. Finally, we construct a high-rate non-LDPC CSS code family with parameters $[[n,\sqrt{n},\Theta({n^{\beta}})]]$ where $\beta \approx 0.2823$ in one demonstrated case, that provably possesses a constant-depth complete 2-local transversal logical Clifford basis instruction set architecture (ISA) composed of all individually targeted $\mathrm{\overline{S}}$, $\mathrm{\overline{SHS}} = \sqrt{X}$, and $\mathrm{\overline{CZ}}$ gates. This ISA is depth-one for certain subfamilies that we design and generally constant-depth under certain conditions. The code family is built from a small code with parameters $[[n_0, 2, d_0]]$, and is tunable in the standard way: it tiles out to form utility-scale logical qubit counts, and it scales up through concatenation to achieve higher distances and error suppression. We show that this construction preserves the depth-one complete transversal logical Clifford basis ISA when composed with these commuting construction actions, inheriting structure from the core codes so that at scale the complete logical Clifford basis ISA remains depth-one up to depth-two addressable operations between tiled cores. We call these Quantum Logic Codes.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLMCodec: Adapting Video Codecs for Efficient Weight Compression of Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.05861v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid development of large language models(LLMs) has led to remarkable advances in natural language processing. However, the increasing scale of these models introduces substantial challenges in terms of storage, transmission, and deployment. Though great efforts have been devoted to model compression and quantization, existing methods often rely on fine-tuning or calibration data, which exhibit limited generalization across different tensor types. In this paper, we argue that video codecs offer a promising solution for LLM compression, due to their inherent compatibility with matrix structured data, configurable compression strategies, and the availability of highly optimized, off-the-shelf implementations. Therefore, we present LLMCodec, a video codec-based LLM compression method that integrates affine quantization with the recent VVC/H.266 video codec. Beyond VVC, we further compare a range of video codecs and encoding profiles to evaluate their impact on compression performance. Experiments on different models demonstrate the robustness and generality of LLMCodec. Notably, on LLaMA-3-8B at 2-bit precision, LLMCodec reduces perplexity by over 1.5x and improves downstream task accuracy by 21% compared with the existing method.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ROSE: Benchmarking the Perception-to-Action Gap in Multimodal Models

arXiv:2606.19965v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) are increasingly expected to act on visual information, yet the same scene may require different actions under different task contexts. How reliably can a model turn the same visual evidence into the action required by the current context? To answer this question, we introduce \textsc{ROSE} (Reference-conditioned Oddity and Symbolic Execution), a controlled benchmark that holds the visual scene fixed while varying region constraints and required symbolic outputs. Through coupled counting and coordinate-action tasks, \textsc{ROSE} tests whether models can infer an implicit majority reference and act on the resulting fine-grained visual evidence under changing contexts. Across nine recent MLLMs, performance drops by as much as 44.5 percentage points from counting-oriented tasks to region-conditioned action, despite 98.8\% human performance. The gap persists on paired scenes and regions for which the same model returns the correct count, while global-click and matched local controls show that coordinate grounding explains only part of the loss, revealing a distinct, model-dependent bottleneck in turning shared visual evidence into context-specific actions.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Learning the Geometry of Data: A Mathematical Review of Shape Space Analysis

arXiv:2606.17022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central objective of machine learning is to identify structure and patterns in data. Advances in data acquisition have increasingly produced datasets whose observations possess rich geometric form, giving rise to shape spaces that encode variability in object geometry. Such datasets arise across a wide range of disciplines, including biology, medicine, anthropology, and computer vision, where subtle geometric differences often carry important scientific information. Traditional machine learning methods, however, are frequently ill-equipped to account for the nonlinear geometric structure underlying these data. This survey synthesizes a rapidly growing body of work on shape space analysis, which provides a mathematical and computational framework for the study of geometric data. Drawing on ideas from differential geometry, statistics, and machine learning, we organize the literature around a common analytical pipeline: shape representation and parameterization, the rigorous construction of robust geodesic metrics, statistical analysis on shape spaces, and geometry-aware learning methods. We discuss how these tools enable the characterization of shape variability, the comparison of geometric objects, and the analysis of structural trajectories across populations and time. To illustrate the breadth of the field, we highlight applications spanning multiple scales of biological organization, including studies of subcellular morphology and primate tooth evolution. Across these and many other domains, researchers face common challenges arising from complex, nonlinear, and often unaligned geometric variation. The review concludes by identifying key theoretical and computational challenges, as well as emerging opportunities driven by increasingly large and diverse geometric datasets.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

AgentSpec: Understanding Embodied Agent Scaffolds Through Controlled Composition

LLM agents are increasingly built not as single model calls, but as scaffolded systems that combine reasoning, memory, reflection, action execution, and learning. While such scaffolds often improve performance, they are often embedded in tightly coupled pipelines, making it difficult to isolate component contributions, compare alternative designs, or understand how module interactions shape agent behavior. We introduce AgentSpec, a modular specification framework that represents embodied agents as typed compositions of reusable policy components with standardized interfaces. AgentSpec standardizes the interfaces among perception, memory, reasoning, reflection, action, and optional learning, enabling components to be swapped and recombined under controlled conditions. We instantiate this framework across DeliveryBench, ALFRED, MiniGrid, and RoboTHOR, and analyze reasoning, memory, reflection, and reinforcement-learning modules across model backbones. Our results show that agent performance is governed by scaffold compatibility and interaction effects rather than isolated module strength. In particular, structured multi-granularity memory improves long-horizon state tracking, reasoning and memory interact non-uniformly across environments, reflection trades off correction and cost, and RL-trained policies compose best when optimized with deployment-time scaffold structure. AgentSpec provides a controlled foundation for studying, comparing, and designing composable LLM agents. Our code, baselines and interactive playground are publicly available at https://agentspec-embodied.github.io.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Leverage Is Not Reach: A Control-Window Law for Single-Neuron Steering in Language Models

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Gradient Perspective on RLVR Stability and Winner Advantage Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) improves language-model reasoning, but GRPO-style optimization remains prone to collapse. We analyse this instability through token-level gradient dynamics, deriving a taxonomy that predicts how updates affect next-token probabilities and entropy. The taxonomy shows that stability depends jointly on the advantage sign and token distribution under the current policy. Motivated by this finding, we propose Winner Advantage Policy Optimization (WAPO), a simple online clipped policy-gradient objective that updates only on positive-advantage completions. Across mathematical reasoning and multi-hop QA benchmarks, WAPO improves training stability and matches or outperforms baselines across multiple model families. Full code can be found at https://github.com/layer6ai-labs/wapo.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Canonical Variates in Wasserstein Metric Space

arXiv:2405.15768v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we address the classification of instances represented by distributions on a vector space rather than single points. We consider classification algorithms based on pairwise distances, specifically, the Wasserstein metric between distributions. Central to our investigation is dimension reduction within the Wasserstein metric space to enhance classification accuracy. We introduce a novel approach grounded in the principle of maximizing Fisher's ratio, defined as the quotient of between-class variation to within-class variation. The directions in which this ratio is maximized are termed discriminant coordinates or canonical variates axes. In practice, both between-class and within-class variations are defined as the average squared Wasserstein distances between pairs of distributions, with the pairs either belonging to the same class or to different classes. This ratio optimization is achieved through an iterative algorithm, which alternates between optimal transport and maximization steps within the vector space. Empirical studies are conducted to assess the algorithm's convergence; and experimental results demonstrate that the dimension reduction technique substantially enhances classification performance. Moreover, the new method outperforms well-established algorithms that operate on vector representations derived from distributional data. It also exhibits robustness to variations in how instances are summarized by distributions, such as the number of components in a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) representation.

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

AgentFairBench: Do LLM Agents Discriminate When They Act?

arXiv:2606.16723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly take actions (screening applicants, recommending credit, triaging patients), yet fairness for LLMs is still measured by grading answers. We introduce AgentFairBench, a cheap, reproducible, multi-domain benchmark for demographic disparity in the actions of LLM agents. Grounded in a companion framework, the Bias Conduction Framework (BCF, restated here), it spans three regulator-anchored domains: hiring, lending, and medical triage. Synthetic, demographic-neutral profiles are evaluated in counterfactual matched sets that vary only a name-coded race x gender signal (in the Bertrand Mullainathan tradition), under four agent scaffolds of increasing agency (direct, chain-of-thought, multi-agent deliberation, tool-augmented). A NumPy-only harness computes counterfactual flip rate, mean absolute score difference (MASD), action-rate disparity, and tool-invocation disparity, with bootstrap confidence intervals, paired tests, and false-discovery-rate control, for single-digit dollars per model. A live leaderboard with a held-out private split and a contamination canary admits external models by submission. Our pilot (864 decisions plus a test-retest replication) carries a methodological lesson: comparing a six-group score spread against a two-run noise difference overstates disparity by ~ 2.4X through statistic arity alone. Against an arity matched noise floor and an omnibus group test, claude haiku 4 5 shows no demographic effect above sampling noise (0 of 120 pairwise and 0 of 9 omnibus contrasts survive correction); a planted-bias test confirms the instrument detects disparity when present. The contribution is a sound, sensitive, adoption-ready instrument, the arity matched null methodology, and open artifacts to scale it. Code, data, and harness are released under open licenses, with an anonymized review artifact.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI

arXiv:2606.19769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets – Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. First, humanoid robot data is embodied interaction data, not a collection of isolated digital samples; a useful dataset must preserve the relationship among robot body, action, task, scene, execution trace, and outcome. Second, its value depends on physical coherence: multimodal streams are reusable only when timing, coordinate frames, calibration, kinematics, units, and synchronization assumptions remain inspectable. Third, the main bottleneck is not only data scarcity, but non-cumulative data caused by high collection costs, data silos, and inconsistent evaluation. We argue that humanoid robot data standards address these bottlenecks by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable. A general standard should provide horizontal infrastructure for lifecycle management, metadata, provenance, quality, versioning, and traceability, while capability-specific parts should define domain grammar for manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, cognition, and future humanoid capabilities. As AI moves from screens into bodies, data standards must evolve from organizing digital information to structuring physical interaction.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Circulators Based on Coupled Quantum Anomalous Hall Insulators and Resonators

arXiv:2505.07770v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrated plasmonics is advancing rapidly, enabling a wide range of functionalities to be incorporated onto a single chip. Applications span information processing, computation, quantum sensing, and dark-matter detection. This progress has driven the development of integrated non-reciprocal devices, which are essential for preventing unwanted feedback that can degrade system performance. While non-reciprocal devices have been realized in edge magnetoplasmon materials via classical interference effects, their operation is often limited by the input power range. Here, we demonstrate that topological circulators utilizing asymmetric coupling offer improved input power range, isolation, and insertion loss. In this configuration, we demonstrate the coupling between a chiral edge magnetoplasmonic resonator and a pair of LC resonators is well described by an effective non-Hermitian two-site Hatano-Nelson model with asymmetric directional couplings, resulting in nonreciprocal behavior. The coherent photon-plasmon interaction enables a circulator with up to 50 dB of isolation across a broad range of excitation power. These results suggest that magnetic topological insulators provide a promising platform for realizing asymmetric non-Hermitian couplings at radio frequencies and for exploring regimes of strong directional suppression and possible exceptional-point physics. More broadly, they highlight the potential of topological-material-based microwave devices for future integration with superconducting quantum information platforms.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Characterizing Brazilian Atlantic Forest Restoration Outcomes with Geospatial AlphaEarth Embeddings

作者:

The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is a critical biodiversity hotspot, yet less than 12-15% of its original cover remains. Although monitoring forest restoration on a large scale is essential, traditional methods are limited by the impracticality of on-the-ground reporting on such a scale and by the saturation of remote-sensing indices such as NDVI. Furthermore, reforestation is a gradual process as opposed to the rapid spectral changes caused by deforestation. In this study, we examine 1,729 restoration sites in S\~ao Paulo, using satellite embeddings from the AlphaEarth Foundation's model to evaluate their effectiveness in characterising early restoration success. We introduce the concept of a 'Reference Trajectory Embedding', defining a metric of restoration success based on cosine similarity to reference sites of mature secondary forest. We observe distinct clusters in embedding space according to different land use and land cover (LULC) types, and we can identify sites with clear change vectors. However, the signal can be noisy, and embeddings may require further fine-tuning to capture and predict site metadata beyond LULC.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Transformer Field Theory: A Response-Theoretic Approach to Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605.25225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability often studies Transformer behavior by intervening on internal activations through activation patching, causal tracing, path patching, and steering directions. This paper develops Transformer Field Theory: a response-theoretic framework in which the residual stream of a fixed forward pass is treated as a Transformer field over layer depth and token position. In this formulation, patching becomes a localized source insertion into the Transformer field, first-order sensitivity fields predict patch effects, Green functions describe downstream propagation, and patch selection is posed as an adjoint inverse problem. Empirically, we test the theory's forward response objects in GPT-2-style autoregressive Transformers. Localized Transformer-field interventions exhibit a bounded local linear regime; first-order sensitivities predict patch effects across layer-token sites; localized sources generate structured anisotropic Transformer-field propagation; high-sensitivity sites and sliced Green operators provide reduced response descriptions; and prompt-induced Transformer-field displacements partially transfer answer behavior. These results establish sensitivities, Transformer-field responses, and sliced Green operators as practical objects for organizing patching experiments, while providing the forward mathematical basis for patch-site inference and cross-scale response transfer.

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

PromptShift-CRC: Drift-Aware Conformal Risk Control for Foundation Models Under Prompt and Domain Shift

arXiv:2606.15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Towards Geostrategic Critical Minerals and Materials Resilience: Secure Supply-Chain and Criticality Analyses for Quantum Technologies in Arctic and Space Environments

arXiv:2605.02926v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This manuscript maps secure-supply and criticality risks for quantum technologies deployed in extreme environments, linking upstream critical minerals and materials (CMMs) to downstream system performance, continuity of security, and mission assurance. It adopts a reproducible "Critical Level I" screening method to identify materials whose supply concentration, essentiality, and limited mitigatability can create bottlenecks for quantum deployment. The analysis is structured around two use cases: (i) niobium as a key input for superconducting quantum computing and related manufacturing and toolchain dependencies; and (ii) space-qualified superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), alongside adjacent single-photon detector platforms such as SPADs, where radiation, thermal cycling, vibration, and electromagnetic interference can degrade device metrics and, in communications settings, threaten continuity of security. The manuscript further situates these dependencies within U.S.-China strategic competition over critical materials, refining capacity, export controls, and overseas mineral acquisitions, while also connecting them to standards-first governance, post-quantum cryptography migration, and the emerging security logic of quantum networking. It argues that static national critical-minerals lists are insufficient for mission-relevant quantum technology and proposes a dedicated Quantum Criticality and Critical Minerals (QCCM) dashboard as a living decision-support tool for tracking concentration, substitutability, qualification bottlenecks, stockpiling gaps, and geopolitical stress signals across quantum platforms. The paper concludes with implications for substitution, diversification, stockpiling, shielding, qualification-by-design, and standards-aligned governance to support secure, sustained, and mission-relevant quantum deployment.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Transformer Geometry Observatory TGO-I: Spectral Geometry Observatory

Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers. TGO-I, the first installment of the framework, focuses on the spectral geometry of ViT representations. Using a ViT-Small/16 model trained on ImageNet-100, we analyze Effective Rank, Stable Rank, Participation Ratio, Spectral Entropy, Spectral Flatness, Spectral Anisotropy, covariance structure, eigenspectra, and singular value spectra throughout training. Our results reveal a consistent increase in dimensional utilization, accompanied by decreasing anisotropy, increasing spectral entropy, increasing participation ratio, and progressively flatter eigenspectra. Contrary to the common intuition that training should concentrate information into a small number of dominant directions, we observe a progressive redistribution of variance across representational dimensions. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the final CLS token representation, which exhibits the highest effective dimensionality and lowest anisotropy within the network.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Routers: A Switching-Fabric Framework for Quantum-Native Forwarding

arXiv:2606.17773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forwarding in quantum networks cannot be realized by directly transposing classical switching fabrics, since the no-cloning theorem and the quantum measurement postulate constrain the direct relay of quantum information while ruling out copy-based buffering and inspection. In this paper, we propose a switching-fabric framework for quantum routers based on multipartite entanglement. Specifically, we formalize the notion of an entanglement-based switching fabric, in which a graph state acts as the forwarding resource and entanglement forwarding is realized through local Pauli measurements. We translate the classical notions of blocking and non-blocking operation into structural conditions for entanglement-based fabrics, by deriving the edge-controlled (EC) design principle for non-blocking operation. We instantiate this principle through a monolithic EC crossbar and a modular Clos-type EC fabric, for which we characterize resource scaling and identify the regime where the modular design becomes more resource-efficient than the monolithic one. Finally, a forwarding-latency analysis establishes a fundamental distinction between matching-oblivious and matching-driven forwarding: the proposed EC fabrics realize all requested input-output entanglement links with constant forwarding depth under sufficient measurement parallelism, whereas matching-driven EPR-based fabrics exhibit latency that scales with the number of requested connections. The proposed framework provides a hardware-agnostic foundation for quantum-router switching fabrics.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.