中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

New Identity for Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant with Applications to Symmetric Tensors and Entanglement

Authors:
Isaac Dobes↗

arXiv:2512.03093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article, a new formula for computing Cayley's first hyperdeterminant in terms of the Levi-Civita symbol is given. It is then shown that this formula can be used to compute the hyperdeterminant of symmetric tensors in polynomial time with respect to their order (assuming fixed side length). Applications to quantifying the entanglement of states of bosonic quantum systems are then discussed. Additionally, in order to obtain the fast calculation of the hyperdeterminant on symmetric tensors, generalized elimination and duplication matrices are defined and their explicit formulas are derived.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimal multi-spectral squeezing via deterministic 2D-phase optimization

Authors:
Bastien Oriot↗Peter Namdar↗Emilie Gillet↗RL Rincon Celis↗Valentina Parigi↗

arXiv:2606.20192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimization routines are ubiquitous in quantum information technologies and essential to reach the resource levels required by quantum protocols. Specifically, multi-spectral squeezing for use in such protocols requires that losses be kept minimal at every stage, including coherent detection, which is performed by interfering the signal with a classical local-oscillator beam. This in turn requires control over all optical degrees of freedom of the beam in order to optimize the detection. The most general framework for this optimization relies on agnostic, off-the-shelf machine-learning techniques. Here we take the opposite approach: by focusing on a physical description of the specific optical process, we develop a deterministic sequential algorithm that provably reaches the global maximum of the visibility in a pixel basis and scales linearly with the number of pixels, thereby offering an efficient and theoretically grounded alternative to black-box optimization. In our waveguide-based setup, the optimized mask increases the visibility from 76% to 84%, corresponding to a 20% gain in mode-matching efficiency. Multi-spectral squeezing measurements confirm that this improvement translates directly into quantum readout: for the most squeezed spectral mode, the squeezing increases from $-2.08$ dB to $-2.64$ dB, consistent with the inferred efficiency gain. These results establish deterministic spatial phase shaping as an effective, interpretable route to enhanced multimode squeezing in waveguide platforms.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Neural ARFIMA model for forecasting BRIC exchange rates with long memory

Authors:
Donia Besher↗Madhurima Panja↗Shovon Sengupta↗Tanujit Chakraborty↗

arXiv:2509.06697v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Exchange rate forecasting remains a challenging problem, particularly for emerging economies, where the observed time series exhibit pronounced long-memory dependence, nonlinear dynamics, and sensitivity to macro-financial drivers. Classical models such as ARFIMA capture long-range persistence but fail to adequately represent nonlinear relationships, while modern machine learning approaches often neglect the underlying long-memory structure in macroeconomic series. To address this gap, we propose a Neural AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated Moving Average (NARFIMA) model that integrates ARFIMA-based long-memory modeling with neural networks for nonlinear function approximation, while incorporating exogenous macroeconomic and uncertainty indicators. The framework provides a unified approach for capturing persistence, nonlinear dynamics, and external shocks. We establish asymptotic stationarity of the NARFIMA process and develop conformal prediction intervals for distribution-free uncertainty quantification. Empirical results for BRIC exchange rates show that NARFIMA consistently outperforms a broad range of forecasting benchmarks across multiple horizons, underscoring the importance of explicitly modeling long-memory dependence in exchange rate dynamics. The `narfima' R package provides an implementation of our approach.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AnnotateAnything: Automatic Annotation of 3D Assets for Robot Manipulation

Authors:
Haoran Lu↗Mutian Shen↗Shuyang Yu↗Yu Xiao↗Songling Liu↗Jianshu Zhang↗Shang Wu↗Yue Chen↗Guo Ye↗Jiayi Wang↗Zhaoran Wang↗Han Liu↗…

Simulation enables scalable robot data collection, but raw 3D assets provide only geometry, lacking the semantic, interactive, and physical knowledge needed to specify where and how robots should act. In this work, we present AnnotateAnything, a general automatic annotation framework that converts passive 3D assets into manipulation-ready assets with structured, diverse, and executable manipulation labels. AnnotateAnything is built around two complementary pipelines. First, a unified visual-language annotation pipeline using vision-language reasoning to infer object semantics, interaction constraints, and 3D-grounded cues, providing human-prior guidance for identifying meaningful interaction regions. Second, a fully automatic and massively parallel physics annotation pipeline grounds these priors in each asset's geometry and physical constraints through candidate generation, geometry optimization and trajectory generation. This pipeline produces diverse and executable action annotations, including grasp poses, dexterous contacts, articulation waypoints, insertion directions, hanging affordances, and navigation targets. Using the generated annotations, we further build an asynchronous parallel simulation data-collection system across diverse objects, tasks, and robot embodiments. Experiments demonstrate that AnnotateAnything achieves superior annotation efficiency, data-collection efficiency, and task success rates over existing annotation and data-generation pipelines, while also supporting downstream tasks such as affordance detection, robotic VQA, and visual instruction finetuning. We provide project materials on the project page and plan to release the full code, annotations, and benchmark to facilitate future research. Videos, code, demo assets, and annotations are provided in supplementary materials Project page: https://tourmaline-caramel-169490.netlify.app.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

STRIDE: Strategic Trajectory Reasoning via Discriminative Estimation for Verifiable Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Qinjian Zhao↗Zhihao Dou↗Dinggen Zhang↗Xiangyu Li↗Chaoda Song↗Zhongwei Wan↗Xinpeng Li↗Yanyan Zhang↗Kaijie Chen↗Qingtao Pan↗Chengcheng Feng↗Zhiqiang Gao↗…

arXiv:2606.15866v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become an effective post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, existing RLVR methods typically rely on final-answer correctness to assign trajectory-level rewards, providing sparse supervision and treating all tokens uniformly regardless of their actual contribution to reasoning. Although recent studies introduce intermediate signals such as process rewards, high-entropy tokens, and semantic uncertainty, these signals are often not inherently verifiable and may fail to distinguish beneficial strategic patterns from harmful ones. To address this limitation, we propose STRIDE (Strategic Trajectory Reasoning with Discriminative Estimation), a fine-grained RLVR framework that derives strategic reasoning supervision from verifiable outcomes. STRIDE contrasts successful and failed trajectories within each response group to estimate the outcome-discriminative preference of each $n$-gram strategic pattern, and further combines this signal with reasoning saliency entropy to identify decision-relevant strategic patterns. These patterns are assigned differentiated advantage values during RL optimization, enabling more precise credit assignment while preserving the verifiability of RLVR. Extensive experiments demonstrate that STRIDE consistently improves reasoning performance across diverse models, tasks, and extended settings, including VLMs and agent-based systems.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Developmental Associations Linking Childhood Trauma and Early Cannabis Use to Adolescent DNA Methylation and Psychotic-Like Experiences

Authors:
Trotta↗Liu↗Austin-Zimmerman↗Spinazzola↗Sideli↗Aas↗Rodriguez↗Li↗Leung↗B. M↗Zhang↗Sham↗…

Background. Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) index early risk for psychotic disorders and are consistently associated with childhood trauma, yet underlying biological mechanisms remain poorly understood. DNA methylation (DNAm) may capture the biological embedding of early adversity, while adolescent exposures such as cannabis use may modify these processes. We examined epigenome-wide associations of childhood trauma and PLEs, tested the moderating role of early cannabis use, and evaluated DNAm as a potential mediator. Methods. We analysed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a UK population-based birth cohort. Childhood trauma was assessed prospectively and retrospectively. Epigenome-wide DNAm was measured in peripheral blood at ~17 years using the Illumina 450K array, and PLEs were assessed at 18 using a structured interview. Epigenome-wide association studies were conducted for trauma-DNAm and DNAm-PLEs associations in the final sample (n = 1,457), adjusting for demographic, biological, and technical covariates. Differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were identified using DMRff, followed by functional enrichment analyses. Cannabis use at 15.5 was modelled as a moderator with multiple imputation for missing data. Mediation was tested using the Divide-Aggregate Composite-null Test (DACT). Results. Childhood trauma was associated with widespread DNAm differences, primarily at the regional level, with enrichment in pathways related to cellular stress responses. In contrast, DNAm associated with PLEs was more limited and implicated loci involved in epigenetic regulatory processes. These signatures were largely distinct, and there was no evidence supporting mediation after multiple testing correction. Incorporating cannabis use altered the pattern and extent of DNAm associations, with stronger and more significant signals observed at both CpG and regional levels, although these did not translate into evidence of mediation. Conclusion. Childhood trauma and PLEs show distinct DNAm signatures in adolescence, with trauma-related DNAm reflecting broad stress-related processes and PLE-associated DNAm implicating regulatory mechanisms. We found little evidence that DNAm mediates the trauma-PLE association. Instead, adolescent exposures, particularly cannabis use, may distinctly influence trauma-related epigenetic variation with limited detectable downstream effects on PLEs. These findings support a context-dependent model of epigenetic risk and highlight the need for larger longitudinal studies to clarify causal pathways linking early adversity to psychosis.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Not All Retrievals are Useful: Cross-Attention for Input-Aware RAG in Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Seunghan Lee↗Jaehoon Lee↗Jun Seo↗Sungdong Yoo↗Minjae Kim↗Tae Yoon Lim↗Dongwan Kang↗Hwanil Choi↗SoonYoung Lee↗Wonbin Ahn↗

arXiv:2603.14709v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhances zero-shot time series (TS) forecasting by leveraging external knowledge bases, yet existing approaches overlook input-level relevance when fusing retrieved samples with the query. We argue that not all retrievals are equally useful, and irrelevant ones can degrade performance. To this end, we propose Cross-RAG, a zero-shot RAG-based forecasting framework that selectively attends to query-relevant retrieved samples via query–retrieval cross-attention. By modeling input-level relevance between the query and retrieved samples, Cross-RAG jointly incorporates three sources of information: 1) the query itself, 2) the retrieved samples, and 3) their relational interactions. In particular, this input-aware design enables Cross-RAG to remain stable as the number of retrieved samples $k$ grows, whereas prior methods without cross-attention require careful $k$ tuning to avoid degradation from irrelevant retrievals. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Cross-RAG consistently improves zero-shot forecasting performance across multiple TSFM backbones and various RAG methods, with additional analyses confirming its effectiveness across various retrieval scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/cross-rag/.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum deformations of $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$. Part I: Fidelity and experimental benchmarking

Authors:
V. Mariscal↗J. J. Relancio↗L. Santamar\'ia-Sanz↗

arXiv:2606.19462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work explores the effects of both the standard quantum $q$-deformation and the non-standard $h$-deformation of the Hopf algebra $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$ on multi-qubit systems. By constructing the states of a Hilbert space of $N$ qubits through the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients associated with the deformed algebras, we show that these states naturally coincide with the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the $q$- and $h$-deformed Kittel-Shore models. We compare the resulting deformed states with those typically targeted in quantum information experiments, providing a bridge between algebraic constructions and experimentally relevant quantum resources. Fidelities with respect to the undeformed states are computed to establish how the quantum correlations are affected, both for few-qubit systems (including Dicke and non-Dicke states), and in the macroscopic limit ($N \to \infty$) through closed-form formulas derived for arbitrary Dicke states. The results reveal different behaviors between the two deformations. The $q$-deformation smoothly modifies the states and maintains a residual overlap with the original configurations, while the $h$-deformation rapidly makes the states orthogonal to their undeformed counterparts. Both models demand a standard $N^{-1}$ rescaling to preserve fidelity stability in the macroscopic limit.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Authors:
Zhi Wei Xu↗Torbj\"orn E. M. Nordling↗

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Searching Neural Architectures for Sensor Nodes on IoT Gateways

Authors:
Andrea Mattia Garavagno↗Edoardo Ragusa↗Antonio Frisoli↗Paolo Gastaldo↗

arXiv:2505.23939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents an automatic method for the design of Neural Networks (NNs) at the edge, enabling Machine Learning (ML) access even in privacy-sensitive Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The proposed method runs on IoT gateways and designs NNs for connected sensor nodes without sharing the collected data outside the local network, keeping the data in the site of collection. This approach has the potential to enable ML for Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), designing hardware-friendly and custom NNs at the edge for personalized healthcare and advanced industrial services such as quality control, predictive maintenance, or fault diagnosis. By preventing data from being disclosed to cloud services, this method safeguards sensitive information, including industrial secrets and personal data. The outcomes of a thorough experimental session confirm that – on the Visual Wake Words dataset – the proposed approach can achieve state-of-the-art results by exploiting a search procedure that runs in less than 10 hours on the Raspberry Pi Zero 2.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse

Authors:
Celestine Achi↗

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task (positive, negative, neutral). We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate a frontier language model (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. The headline finding is the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. The composite Meaning Intelligence Score increases by 5.4 points (73.2 to 78.6) under schema-informed prompting, with the largest practical gains in register identification, coded-subtext detection (+10 points), and strategic action recommendation (+10.3 points). We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and the 30-item public calibration set to support reproducibility, while retaining a private holdout corpus for contamination-protected evaluation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Quantification of Uncertainty with Adversarial Models in Medical Image Segmentation

Authors:
Hana Jebril↗Thomas Pinetz↗G\"unter Klambauer↗Hrvoje Bogunovi\'c↗

Reliable pixel-level uncertainty quantification holds the potential to transform clinical workflows by enabling high-fidelity longitudinal monitoring and distinguishing true pathological changes from artifacts. Ideally, these models provide the stability required for critical treatment planning and surgical intervention. However, standard deep learning models often suffer from miscalibration, yielding overconfident predictions that mask underlying vulnerabilities at subtle pathological boundaries. To address this, we propose QUAM-SM, a post-hoc framework using targeted adversarial search to identify "adversarially fragile" pixels. By actively seeking perturbations that expose predictive instability, our method highlights regions where decisions are most vulnerable to being flipped. Importantly, the framework disentangles epistemic uncertainty from aleatoric uncertainty. Experiments on two public datasets with multiple expert annotations demonstrate that QUAM-SM outperforms both standard and recent uncertainty estimation approaches in terms of reliability and boundary sensitivity. Code is available at https://github.com/HanaJebril/quam_sm

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reasoning Text-to-Video Retrieval for Operating Room Clips via Action-Driven Digital Twins

Authors:
Yiqing Shen↗Hao Ding↗Mathias Unberath↗

Text-to-video retrieval in operating rooms (OR) is an enabling technology for OR safety, as it allows stakeholders to retrieve and inspect recordings of specific events. However, because the most safety-critical events may not follow the common structure, to unlock its full potential text-to-video retrieval must be able to handle implicit queries that require reasoning to identify the right video (e.g., the step right before clipping). However, existing methods rely on global embeddings that cannot reason over such queries. We propose OR3, a text-to-video retrieval method that converts clips into action-driven digital twins (ActDTs), grouping concurrent subject-action-object triplets under non-overlapping temporal intervals. Moreover, rather than cross-modal matching through paired encoders, OR3 performs imagination-based retrieval where an LLM generates hypothetical ActDTs from queries. This enables intra-modal matching via a single encoder trained with ActDT-tailored hard negatives. Finally, evidence-grounded refinement revises imagined ActDTs based on discrepancies with top candidates to capture procedure-specific patterns. We construct a benchmark from MM-OR with 276 implicit queries across four reasoning categories over 386 clips from robotic knee procedures. OR3 achieves 57.6 R@1 and 77.3 R@5, outperforming the strongest baseline. These results demonstrate that OR3 enables fine-grained discrimination between visually similar OR video clips through temporal action reasoning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

PhaseWin: An Efficient Search Algorithm for Faithful Visual Attribution

Authors:
Zihan Gu↗Ruoyu Chen↗Junchi Zhang↗Li Liu↗Xiaochun Cao↗Hua Zhang↗

Visual attribution is a fundamental tool for interpreting modern vision and vision-language models, particularly when their decisions must be inspected, diagnosed, or audited. Its goal is to explain how a model's decision depends on local regions of the visual input, typically by assigning an importance ordering over candidate image regions. Given an image partitioned into $n$ regions, faithful attribution can be cast as an ordered subset-search problem, in which progressively inserting the selected regions should recover the target model response as early as possible. Exhaustive search over region subsets incurs exponential cost, while the widely used greedy search still requires a quadratic number of model evaluations, because every selection step rescores all remaining candidates. We propose PhaseWin, an efficient subset-search algorithm for faithful visual attribution. PhaseWin reorganizes greedy region selection into a phased window-search procedure: rather than re-evaluating the full candidate set at every step, it alternates between global candidate screening, adaptive pruning, and localized window refinement, while preserving the essential region-ranking behavior of greedy search. We analyze PhaseWin under monotone evidence-accumulation conditions and show that, under feature-level structural assumptions, it attains controllable linear evaluation complexity together with near-greedy faithfulness guarantees. Extensive experiments on image classification, object detection, visual grounding, and image captioning show that, among all compared attribution methods, PhaseWin reaches high faithfulness with the fewest forward passes, empirically realizing the predicted reduction from $O(n^2)$ to $O(n)$. The code is available at https://github.com/Qihuai27/phasewin-va.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Safety Data Extraction

Authors:
Jonas Grill↗Thomas Bayer↗S\"oren Berlinger↗

Accurate extraction of structured information from Safety Data Sheets (SDS) remains challenging in industrial safety due to heterogeneous document formats and the limitations of traditional rule-based methods. This study benchmarks state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated SDS data extraction, comparing text-based and multimodal processing pipelines. We systematically evaluate four models: Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1-70B, across three prompting strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought. The evaluation framework assessed accuracy, latency, and cost across more than 50,000 extracted data fields. Results show that text-based extraction consistently outperforms multimodal processing across all metrics. Gemini 1.5 Pro combined with a Chain-of-Thought prompt achieved the highest accuracy (84%), outperforming GPT-4o (81%) and Claude 3.7 Sonnet (79%). However, no model surpassed the 90% accuracy threshold commonly required for reliable real-world deployment. These findings indicate that general-purpose LLMs are not yet robust enough for unsupervised industrial use, though performance suggests strong potential with task-specific fine-tuning. Future research should focus on domain-adapted training, model calibration, and the integration of Human-in-the-Loop verification to ensure safety-critical reliability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

When Smaller Wins: Dual-Stage Distillation and Pareto-Guided Compression of Liquid Neural Networks for Edge Battery Prognostics

Authors:
Dhivya Dharshini Kannan↗Wei Li↗Wei Zhang↗Jianbiao Wang↗Zhi Wei Seh↗Man-Fai Ng↗

arXiv:2601.06227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Battery management systems increasingly require accurate battery health prognostics under strict on-device constraints. This paper presents DLNet, a practical framework with dual-stage distillation of liquid neural networks that turns a high-capacity model into compact and edge-deployable models for battery health prediction. DLNet first applies Euler discretization to reformulate liquid dynamics for embedded compatibility. It then performs dual-stage knowledge distillation to transfer the teacher model's temporal behavior and recover it after further compression. Pareto-guided selection under joint error-cost objectives retains student models that balance accuracy and efficiency. We evaluate DLNet on a widely used dataset and validate real-device feasibility on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE Sense using int8 deployment. The final deployed student achieves a low error of 0.0066 when predicting battery health over the next 100 cycles, which is 15.4% lower than the teacher model. It reduces the model size from 616 kB to 94 kB with 84.7% reduction and takes 21 ms per inference on the device. These results support a practical smaller wins observation that a small model can match or exceed a large teacher for edge-based prognostics with proper supervision and selection. Beyond batteries, the DLNet framework can extend to other industrial analytics tasks with strict hardware constraints.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Synthesizing Arbitrary Non-Hermitian Hamiltonian with Stochastic Floquet Engineering

Authors:
Lingzhen Guo↗Hui Jing↗

arXiv:2606.15664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The conventional Floquet engineering scheme synthesizes a given target Hamiltonian with a deterministic temporal periodic driving field. In this work, we introduce the stochastic Floquet engineering scheme that can synthesize an arbitrary non-Hermitian target Hamiltonian using a time-periodic driving field with noisy amplitude. Our method is rooted in the Hermitian dynamics taking noise as a valuable quantum resource with no need for loss or gain in prior. We apply our method to engineer a cavity Hamiltonian with dissipative coupling between Fock states, and to prepare a given quantum state from a generally arbitrary quantum state. The stochastic Floqut engineering also provides a way to generate non-unitary quantum gates, which take advantage in certain tasks compared to unitary quantum computing, without the need for ancillae or state-dependent updating.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all connectivity

Authors:
Anthony Ransford↗

Quantum computers require both high-fidelity operations and large qubit numbers to surpass classical capabilities1. Trapped-ion platforms have demonstrated the highest gate fidelities of any modality2–6 but scaling to larger qubit numbers while preserving performance has remained a central challenge. We report on Quantinuum Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture7. Helios features 137Ba+ hyperfine qubits8,9, all-to-all connectivity enabled by a rotatable ion storage ring connecting two quantum operation regions by a junction10,11, speed improvements from parallelized operations12 and a new software stack with real-time compilation of dynamic programs13. Averaged over all operational zones in the system, we achieve average infidelities of 2.5(1) × 10−5 for single-qubit (1Q) gates, 7.9(2) × 10−4 for two-qubit (2Q) gates and 3.3(5) × 10−4 for state preparation and measurement (SPAM), none of which are fundamentally limited and probably able to be improved. These component infidelities are predictive of system-level performance in both random Clifford circuits and random circuit sampling (RCS), the latter demonstrating that Helios operates well beyond the reach of classical simulation and establishes a new frontier of fidelity and complexity for quantum computers14. A new quantum computer, Quantinuum Helios, which is a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor built on the QCCD architecture, demonstrates performance well beyond classical capabilities and provides a path for scaling up quantum computing.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

RATS! Patches Talk Through Registers: Emergent Parts in Register Attention Transformers

Authors:
Timing Yang↗Predrag Neskovic↗Jansen Seheult↗Wenchao Han↗Anand Bhattad↗Alan Yuille↗Feng Wang↗

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" – they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

QPILOTS: Efficient Test-Time Q-Steering for Flow Policies

Authors:
Yifan Ruan↗Chenyang Cao↗Andreas Burger↗Ali Pesaranghader↗Kaveh Kamali↗Jaehong Kim↗Nandita Vijaykumar↗Alan Aspuru-Guzik↗Igor Gilitschenski↗Nicholas Rhinehart↗

arXiv:2606.14801v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow-matching and diffusion policies are expressive action generators, but optimizing them with temporal-difference reinforcement learning (RL) remains difficult. Effective policy extraction requires exploiting the critic's action gradient, yet directly backpropagating this signal through a multi-step denoising process can be numerically unstable. Existing methods work around this either by discarding gradient information, distilling the policy into a simpler one-step actor, or repeatedly fine-tuning the denoising policy as the critic improves. We propose QPILOTS, a method that leaves the original policy unmodified and steers the denoising process at inference time. At each denoising step, instead of evaluating the critic on the noisy intermediate action where critic predictions are unreliable, we first project that intermediate state to an estimate of the final clean action and compute the critic gradient there. We introduce two variants: QPILOTS-U uses a fast single-point approximation, while QPILOTS-M draws differentiable posterior samples via a learned auxiliary network. On a standard offline-to-online RL benchmark, QPILOTS achieves the best aggregate performance, reaching an average success rate of 90% across 50 tasks. We also apply QPILOTS to steer a large, frozen, pretrained Vision-Language Action (VLA) foundation model, outperforming or matching prior inference-time approaches across six manipulation tasks in simulation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

Authors:
Davide Ghia↗Jaspreet Ranjit↗Tania Cerquitelli↗Daniele Quercia↗

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TriAdReview: Triangular Adversarial Review Architecture for Multi-Model Technical Document Generation

Authors:
Zhiqiang Zhou↗Junliang Dai↗Xu Ling↗

arXiv:2606.15074v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for technical document generation, yet single-model outputs often suffer from over-engineering, security blind spots, and incomplete coverage. We propose TriAdReview, a triangular adversarial review architecture that employs two independent reviewer models (engineering and boundary perspectives) and a triangular judging mechanism to iteratively improve a generator model's output. We evaluate TriAdReview across five benchmark tasks - architecture design, code generation, proposal review, security audit, and requirements analysis - using three configurations: single model (baseline), dual model (single review), and triple model (full system). Results across 75 experiments (n=5 per cell) show that the triple model configuration achieves a 10.1% overall improvement over the single model baseline (26.2 vs. 23.8 out of 50; p

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Authors:
Omar Sharif↗Eftekhar Hossain↗Nikhil Singh↗Patrick Ng↗

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparative Study on Agility, Efficiency, and Impact Absorption of Bipedal Robots with Active Toes

Authors:
Joong-Gil Kim↗Wontae Ye↗Geunwoo Cho↗Seong-Ho Yun↗Se-Hyoung Cho↗Yong-Jae Kim↗

arXiv:2606.19699v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human legs exhibit high efficiency, agility, and impact absorption, with toes playing a crucial role in these capabilities. While many attempts have been made to implement human-like toes in robots, they have not fully replicated human characteristics nor rigorously validated their benefits. We propose a 14-DOF biped robot emulating human toes' lightweight, high-torque, robust nature. To quantitatively analyze the effectiveness of the active toes in terms of agility, efficiency, and impact absorption, we developed a high-fidelity simulation training environment that reflects actual actuators with coupled transmissions and accurate power consumption. To ensure a fair comparison between configurations with and without active toes, we designed a minimal RL reward function and applied an identical training procedure to both. The simulation results indicate that, at 1.33 m/s walking, the toe-equipped robot reduced CoT by 17.5% and heel-strike GRF by 5.0% compared with the toe-ablation configuration. On the agility test, average and maximum path deviation decreased by 25.0% and 34.0%, respectively.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Authors:
Ngo↗T. P↗Dunham↗A. E↗Santos↗G.-M↗

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

Read & Discuss → View Source →