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01.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-09 DOI: HASH:a61cfb6874e3659cd593d7a61aa29bf9

My overseas job offer was rescinded. Here’s how I bounced back

作者:

Andrew Kythreotis↗

Andrew Kythreotis re-evaluated his personal and professional priorities after a mid-career opportunity to move abroad fell through. Andrew Kythreotis re-evaluated his personal and professional priorities after a mid-career opportunity to move abroad fell through.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16215

PACT: Privileged Trace Co-Training for Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agents

作者:

Zhenbang Du↗Jun Luo↗Zhiwei Zheng↗Xiangchi Yuan↗Kejing Xia↗Dachuan Shi↗Qirui Jin↗Qijia He↗Shaofeng Zou↗Yingbin Liang↗Wenke Lee↗

Multi-turn tool-use agents must reason, call tools, and adapt to observations across several interaction turns. Post-training such agents is challenging, as reinforcement learning often suffers from sparse rewards and weak credit assignment despite matching the prompt-only inference setting, while supervised fine-tuning on expert traces provides dense process supervision but can over-constrain the model to fixed trajectories. To tackle this, we propose PACT, a Privileged trAce Co-Training framework for multi-turn tool-use agents. The key idea is to use expert traces only as training-time optimization signals rather than rollout-time hints. PACT keeps rollout generation prompt-only, then uses expert traces to guide optimization through two complementary signals: a trace-conditioned RL surrogate that evaluates prompt-only rollouts under expert-trace context, and a component-aware SFT loss that supervises reasoning prefixes and tool-calls with annealed strength. To reduce over-reliance on the training-only trace context, PACT further introduces a prompt-only anchoring. We also provide a latent-trace view that connects the two trace-based objectives and explains how expert traces can guide optimization without being used during rollout generation. Experiments on FTRL, BFCL, and ToolHop show that PACT consistently improves over strong SFT- and RL-based baselines, highlighting the value of privileged trace co-training for multi-turn tool-use learning.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17165

Statistical Foundations of LLM-based A/B Testing: A Surrogacy Framework for Human Causal Inference

作者:

Joel Persson↗M{\aa}rten Schultzberg↗Sebastian Ankargren↗

arXiv:2606.17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost. We study when a treatment effect estimated on LLM outcomes recovers the effect that would have been measured on the human population of interest. Distributional equivalence between LLM and human outcomes would make any standard estimator valid but is unrealistic. We therefore develop a statistical framework that adapts surrogate endpoint theory to LLMs. The framework shows that calibrating LLM outcomes to human outcomes identifies the average treatment effect under surrogacy and comparability conditions that are jointly weaker than distributional equivalence. When these conditions fail, the effect of interest is only partially identified, and we provide diagnostics that can falsify surrogacy on historical experiments together with a bound on the worst-case bias from limited overlap. We further show that the stochasticity inherent to LLMs introduces both bias and variance, but using an average of multiple draws as the surrogate mitigates both. We illustrate the methods and theory in simulations and an application to A/B tests on Upworthy headlines. A central takeaway from our work is that the validity of LLM outcomes as surrogates can only be falsified for past treatments and never verified for new ones, so human experiments remain indispensable for novel interventions. We discuss the role of LLM choice, prompting, and temperature as design variables, and how to size human experiments for validation.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18778

Online Distributional Prediction via Latent Cluster Geometry Under Drift and Corruption

作者:

Navyansh Mahla↗Prateek Chanda↗Ganesh Ramakrishnan↗

arXiv:2606.18778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online learning in non-stationary streams is often formulated as tracking a point estimate, but many applications require predicting the full data-generating distribution. We study online distributional prediction under drift and adversarial corruption. Our approach represents each candidate law through a latent cluster geometry: a variable-size configuration of centers that organizes probability mass and induces a predictive distribution. A Gibbs quasi-posterior over these configurations yields an online predictor by posterior averaging, and the resulting variable-dimensional posterior can be sampled with reversible-jump MCMC. The method therefore avoids specifying a parametric streaming law while retaining a structured latent space for uncertainty, regularization, and comparison. We evaluate performance by cumulative Wasserstein-1 regret against the time-varying true law. The analysis separates two effects: corruption perturbs the loss-based posterior update, whereas drift makes long-horizon posterior memory stale. We address the latter with a restarted variant that temporally localizes the same quasi-Bayesian update. The resulting high-probability bounds decompose into a PAC-Bayesian complexity term, a corruption-sensitive posterior perturbation term, and a dynamic optimal-transport term driven by \(A_T^{\mathrm{OT}}=\sum_{t=2}^T W_2^2(p_{t-1}^*,p_t^*)\). Under bounded support, stable latent geometry, predictive-map regularity, oracle realizability, localized restart windows, sublinear transport action, and sublinear corruption budget, the restarted predictor achieves sublinear cumulative Wasserstein regret. These guarantees require no parametric model for the stream, drift mechanism, or corruption process.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13061

LaME: Learning to Think in Latent Space for Multimodal Embedding via Information Bottleneck

作者:

Peixi Wu↗Biao Yang↗Feipeng Ma↗Bosong Chai↗Bo Lin↗Wei Yuan↗Fan Yang↗Tingting Gao↗Hebei Li↗Xiaoyan Sun↗

Reasoning-driven universal multimodal embedding has advanced rapidly by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into the embedding pipeline. Despite the strong performance across both general and complex tasks, this paradigm suffers from two core limitations: (i) autoregressive CoT reasoning incurs high computational cost, making it impractical for low-latency retrieval; and (ii) embedding performance is heavily coupled with CoT annotation quality, making large-scale training unreliable. These raise fundamental questions: Is textual CoT the optimal form of reasoning for embedding, and can effective embedding reasoning be accomplished in latent space? To this end, we propose LaME (Latent Reasoning Multimodal Embedding), which formulates embedding-oriented latent reasoning as a weakly supervised information bottleneck. LaME employs K learnable reason tokens as a fixed-capacity bottleneck, completing all reasoning within a single forward pass. The two weak supervision signals structurally decouple contrastive from autoregressive objectives and eliminate dependence on CoT annotations, while a two-stage training pipeline ensures stable convergence. Experiments on MMEB-v2 and MRMR show that LaME achieves competitive performance, surpassing some explicit CoT-based models, while delivering 60x faster inference than explicit CoT methods and 2x faster than latent baselines with throughput comparable to discriminative embedding models. Code will be released.

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06.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:5dea537644017f9516a0d147dad369fb

DLDN-Bench: A Benchmark Framework for Deep Learning de Novo Peptide Sequencing in Proteomics

作者:

Schneider↗Hartwig↗Chadt↗Lehr↗Al-Hasani↗Turewicz↗

De novo peptide sequencing is an essential approach for analyzing mass spectrometry data because it enables the identification of novel peptides without relying on protein sequence databases. Recent advances in deep learning have substantially improved the performance of de novo sequencing methods, but the rapid emergence of new models has led to heterogeneous evaluation practices and limited comparability. To address this, we introduce DLDN-Bench, a benchmark framework including a set of benchmark datasets derived from human muscle biopsy mass spectrometry data retrieved from PRIDE and annotated through consensus across multiple widely used database search engines. Using these datasets, we systematically benchmark recent deep learning-based de novo sequencing tools alongside traditional approaches. Performance is assessed using established metrics, including precision and coverage relative to a pseudo-ground truth defined by cross-engine agreement. To demonstrate the utility of DLDN-Bench, we benchmark four recent deep learning models and make all results publicly available. This benchmark framework provides a standardized basis for comparing state-of-the-art methods and offers an extensible resource for evaluating future tools in de novo peptide sequencing.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15570

An Extensive Benchmark for Single-round and Multi-round Instruction-based Image Editing

作者:

Yiwei Ma↗Ke Ye↗Weihuang Lin↗Jiayi Ji↗Xiaoshuai Sun↗Tat-Seng Chua↗Rongrong Ji↗

In recent years, there have been notable advancements in the area of instruction-based image editing (IIE), which focuses on the automatic alteration of input images using a model. Nevertheless, assessing the effectiveness of these editing models poses a considerable challenge due to the intricate nature of instructions and the wide variety of edits. To tackle this problem, one urgent task in this domain is the development of a robust evaluation framework that can precisely gauge the quality of editing outcomes and offer valuable benchmarks to guide future improvements. To address this challenge, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark named I2EBench2.0, designed for single-round and multi-round assessment of IIE models. I2EBench2.0 has four key features: 1) Evaluation Across Single and Multi-rounds: I2EBench2.0 simultaneously evaluates both single-round and multi-round instruction-based edits, assessing the precision and consistency of the edits. 2) Extensive Evaluation Criteria: I2EBench2.0 encompasses a broad range of criteria, evaluating both high-level and low-level aspects of each IIE model. Specifically, it incorporates 16 dimensions for single-round evaluations and 7 for multi-round evaluations. 3) Alignment with Human Judgment: To ensure our benchmark aligns with human evaluation, we conducted a comprehensive user study for each criterion. 4) Research-driven Insights: By analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of current IIE models across all 16 single-round and 7 multi-round dimensions, we provide critical insights aimed at directing future research in this area. We tested eight recently developed IIE models using I2EBench2.0 and derived academic insights through meticulous comparison and analysis. The related code, dataset, and images generated by all IIE models are available on GitHub: https://github.com/cocoshe/I2EBench.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.17043

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

作者:

Tongyan Fang↗Siyuan Huang↗Naiyu Fang↗Ganlong Zhao↗Zhongjin Luo↗Jianbo Liu↗Xiaogang Wang↗Ying Dong↗Hongsheng Li↗

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20520

Sovereign Execution Brokers: Enforcing Certificate-Bound Authority in Agentic Control Planes

作者:

Jun He↗Deying Yu↗

arXiv:2606.20520v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous agents are increasingly connected to cloud, deployment, and data-control workflows, but production mutation authority should not reside inside non-deterministic reasoning processes. Existing access-control mechanisms authorize identities, while assurance layers certify proposed actions; neither alone provides a mandatory enforcement point for certified authority at the moment of mutation. This paper introduces the Sovereign Execution Broker (SEB), a runtime enforcement boundary for certificate-bound agentic infrastructure. SEB consumes certificates issued by the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), verifies that the requested mutation matches the certified execution contract, checks validity windows, policy epochs, revocation epochs, and live-state drift, mints scoped execution identity, invokes infrastructure APIs, and records signed decision and outcome records. By separating proposal, admission, and execution, SEB turns certified authority into a short-lived, revocable, auditable runtime capability, provided that production mutation APIs reject non-broker identities. We present the SEB execution model, certificate and replay-verification predicates, scoped identity semantics, bypass-prevention deployment patterns, failure behavior, and a concrete prototype implementation. We evaluate the prototype on AWS and Kubernetes clusters, measuring latency overheads, revocation propagation, drift detection, and security under fault injection.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12018

MODF-SIR: A Multi-agent Omni-modal Distilled Framework for Social Intelligence Reasoning

作者:

Shang Ma↗Jisheng Dang↗Wencan Zhang↗Yifan Zhang↗Bimei Wang↗Hong Peng↗Bin Hu↗Qi Tian↗Tat-Seng Chua↗

arXiv:2606.12018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a multi-agent collaborative framework built upon a lightweight Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), specifically designed for social intelligence reasoning. A key feature of our approach is that both the training and inference phases are augmented via knowledge distillation. Within this architecture, multi-modal data pertinent to social intelligence is precisely localized. Furthermore, relevant long-tail events are identified, extracted, and rendered as formatted, explicit text. This formatting strategy prevents critical long-tail information from being overshadowed by head events and environmental noise during the tokenization process. Specifically, we integrate Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) across the entire reasoning pipeline, encompassing the extraction and representation of long-tail events, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, and self-reflection. This TTA mechanism is also distillation-enhanced, utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the foundation model exclusively for instance-level reasoning. Extensive evaluations against various open-source and proprietary AI models across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. With around 30% of training data from IntentTrain, we achieve state-of-the-art results. Codes are available at https://github.com/eeee-sys/MODF-SIR, demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR, LoRA is available at https://huggingface.co/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR and the dataset for training router is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Harry-1234/IntentRouterTrain.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13361

Can I Buy Your KV Cache?

作者:

Luoyuan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.13361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Right now, across the world, AI agents are repeating the same absurd act: to read one document, they each recompute it from scratch. Every agent re-runs prefill, the most compute-intensive step a large model takes, over identical text, only to rebuild a key-value (KV) cache identical to the one the agent before it just built. The same answer, computed a million times. We make a proposal that is almost offensively simple: compute it once. Let a publisher precompute a document's KV cache, and let every other agent buy the right to load it and skip prefill. It works, and it is token-exact: loading a precomputed KV and continuing matches prefilling from scratch (24/24 greedy tokens, and at the logits level), with no accuracy cost. On Qwen3-4B, reuse is 9-50x cheaper in compute than prefill, and the gap widens with length (prefill's attention scales with L^2), so a single reuse already pays it back. Then the part that matters: where the KV lives. Shipping it fails, because KV is nearly incompressible, so per-load egress costs more than the prefill it saves. Hosting it provider-side, exactly as production prompt-caching works, removes egress entirely. The size of the prize is set by our measured compute saving: serving one hot 3774-token document to 80M agents costs ~$1.5M to re-prefill but only ~$0.03M of reuse compute (49.7x less). The 0.1x cache-read tariff APIs charge passes a 10x discount to users while sitting inside this measured envelope, so the 10x is a floor that the measured ~50x compute saving clears, and the gap to the physical ~50x is provider margin: millions of dollars per popular document. We frame the resulting agent-native prefill CDN and leave lossless KV compression and a cross-party payment layer as the open problems.

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12.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:31cd31d1966b33c759bae528f06cf85a

Reduced nighttime smartphone use among cohabiting partners: a longitudinal study under the lens of social control of health behaviors theory

作者:

Klasson↗T. A↗Rod↗N. H↗Zucco↗A. G↗

Objective: We examined the link between cohabitation with a partner and nighttime smartphone use through the social control of health behavior theory. Background: Nighttime smartphone use is a behavioral risk factor for sleep problems. While previous research has predominantly focused on individual-level risks of sleep disturbances, the role of social context remains underexplored. Theoretical frameworks, specifically the Social Control of Health Behavior, suggest that social relationships regulate health-related behaviors; however, it is unclear how far this regulation extends to modern digital behaviors among couples. Method: We analyzed survey data from three waves of the SmartSleep Study (2018, 2020, and 2023; total N = 25,028), including a longitudinal follow-up subset (N = 1,003). We tested multivariate associations between living with a partner, changes in cohabitation status and frequent nighttime smartphone use by fitting generalized linear mixed-effects models. Additionally, we mapped the complex interplay between indicators of social integration, social support, smartphone use, and sleep quality using hierarchical clustering of non-linear correlations. Results: Cohabiting participants had lower odds of frequent nighttime smartphone use compared to those living alone (OR = 0.66; 95% CI: 0.61, 0.72). This lower risk was driven primarily by cohabitation with a partner (OR = 0.49; 95% CI: 0.36, 0.66). Longitudinal analysis supported these findings, showing that sustained cohabitation was associated with less frequent nighttime use (OR = 0.56; 95% CI: 0.38, 0.82). Clustering analysis revealed that indicators of social integration and support clustered with favorable sleep quality. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that the health-protective effects of cohabitation with a partner extend to digital behaviors. Consistent with social control of health behavior theory, the presence of a partner appears to reduce frequent nighttime smartphone use, highlighting the critical importance of considering social context when addressing digital health hygiene and promoting sleep.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18089

From Reasoning Traces to Reusable Modules: Understanding Compositional Generalization in Language Model Reasoning

作者:

Lingjing Kong↗Xin Liu↗Guangyi Chen↗Martin Q. Ma↗Xiangchen Song↗Yuekai Sun↗Mikhail Yurochkin↗Taylor W. Killian↗Ruslan Salakhutdinov↗Kun Zhang↗Eric P. Xing↗Zhengzhong Liu↗…

arXiv:2606.18089v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training pipelines that combine supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with reinforcement learning (RL) have emerged as the key recipe for transforming large language models (LLMs) into robust reasoners. We argue that this combined success is driven by compositional generalization, which we formalize through a hierarchical latent selection model. In this framework, reasoning traces are generated by a cascade of discrete latent selection variables corresponding to reusable atomic modules, including both skills (local operations) and routing mechanisms (how intermediate information is selected, reused, and composed). Within this model, we theoretically show that SFT and RL play asymmetric, complementary roles: SFT supplies the raw module materials in compositional traces, and RL decomposes those traces to identify the latent atomic modules and enable compositional generalization. We design controlled experiments to validate this theory. Our results demonstrate that RL can extract atomic modules from compound traces supplied by SFT and recombine them to solve new configurations. Moreover, we find that training on compound traces yields stronger generalization than training on isolated atomic modules. Finally, we investigate the relationship between SFT and RL data and identify an effective protocol in which SFT ensures coverage of all atomic modules through compositional traces, while RL focuses on novel compositions outside the SFT support to drive exploration.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14750

Pixel-TTS: Image based Text Rendering for Robust Text-to-Speech

作者:

Adarsh Arigala↗Arjun Gangwar↗S Umesh↗Yova Kementchedjhieva↗

Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2509.10005

TUNI: Unifying Pre-training and Fine-tuning with Modality-Aware Mutual Learning and Rectification for RGB-T Semantic Segmentation

作者:

Xiaodong Guo↗Xianda Guo↗Tong Liu↗Zhihong Deng↗Yanlun Peng↗Xiang Li↗Wujie Zhou↗

RGB-thermal (RGB-T) semantic segmentation improves the environmental perception of autonomous platforms in challenging conditions. Prevailing RGB-T segmentation frameworks suffer from suboptimal multi-modal feature extraction and fusion, unbalanced modality dependency, and inadequate utilization of thermal information. To address these challenges, we propose TUNI, a unified pre-training and fine-tuning framework for efficient and real-time RGB-T semantic segmentation. It pre-trains an RGB-T encoder that incorporates an RGB-T local module that selectively emphasizes salient consistent and distinct local features across modalities, thereby integrating cross-modal feature extraction and fusion in a unified manner. To alleviate the modality bias issue during RGB-T pre-training, modality-inverted contrastive mutual learning is introduced to enable knowledge exchange between two RGB-dominated and thermal-dominated encoders. In the fine-tuning phase, modality rectification learning fully exploits residual thermal information by focusing on correct yet divergent prediction regions between two modality-specific decoders. We further develop three TUNI variants, covering lightweight, balanced, and high-performance requirements. Extensive experiments on five RGB-T semantic segmentation datasets demonstrate that TUNI achieves superior accuracy, generalization, and compactness compared with 15 state-of-the-art models. The code is available at https://github.com/xiaodonguo/TUNI-v2.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11205

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

作者:

Matthew James Buchan↗

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2510.18977

Symmetry-Accelerated Classical Simulation of Clifford-Dominated Circuits

作者:

Giulio Camillo↗Filipa C. R. Peres↗Markus Heinrich↗Juani Bermejo-Vega↗

arXiv:2510.18977v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical simulation of quantum circuits plays a crucial role in validating quantum hardware and delineating the boundaries of quantum advantage. Among the most effective simulation techniques are those based on the stabilizer extent, which quantifies the overhead of representing non-Clifford operations as linear combinations of Clifford unitaries. However, finding optimal decompositions rapidly becomes intractable as it constitutes a superexponentially large optimization problem. In this work, we exploit symmetries in the computation of the stabilizer extent, proving that for real, diagonal, and real-diagonal unitaries, the optimization can be restricted to the corresponding subgroups of the Clifford group without loss of optimality. This ``strong symmetry reduction'' drastically reduces computational cost, enabling optimal decompositions of unitaries on up to seven qubits using a standard laptop – far beyond previous two-qubit limits. Additionally, we employ a ``weak symmetry reduction'' method that leverages additional invariances to shrink the search space further. Applying these results, we demonstrate exponential runtime improvements in classical simulations of quantum Fourier transform circuits and measurement-based quantum computations on the Union Jack lattice, as well as new insights into the nonstabilizer properties of multicontrolled phase gates and unitaries generating hypergraph states. Our findings establish symmetry exploitation as a powerful route to scale classical simulation techniques and deepen the resource-theoretic understanding of quantum advantage.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18627

PACT: Preserving Anchored Cores in Task-vectors for Model Merging

作者:

Ningyuan Shi↗Zhipeng Zhou↗Hao Wang↗Chunyan Miao↗Peilin Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.18627v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has emerged as a training-free alternative to multi-task learning, aiming to combine multiple task-specific fine-tuned models into a single multi-task model. Most existing model merging approaches follow the Task Arithmetic paradigm, which decomposes fine-tuned weights into pre-trained parameters and task vectors, and performs merging exclusively in the task-vector space. The effectiveness of this paradigm implicitly relies on the assumption that task-specific knowledge is encoded solely within task vectors. We argue that this assumption generally does not hold due to the intrinsic task preferences of pre-trained models. Specifically, we identify Load-Bearing Wall (LBW) dimensions, namely some task-critical knowledge that remains embedded in the pre-trained weights rather than being fully transferred into task vectors. We characterize LBW dimensions from both scalar-weight and subspace perspectives, thereby covering the major paradigms of existing model merging methods. Our analysis reveals that, by ignoring LBW dimensions, task-vector-based approaches fail to fully resolve task conflicts and may inadvertently damage task-specific knowledge encoded in the pre-trained model, leading to degradation. To address this issue, we propose PACT, which preserves the anchored task-specific cores (i.e., LBW dimensions) within task vectors by aligning their orthogonal complements with the subspace of the pre-trained weights. These aligned subspace components are then removed from the task vectors before applying existing model merging algorithms. Furthermore, we develop an efficient variant based on randomized SVD to improve scalability. PACT can be seamlessly integrated with existing methods. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PACT consistently enhances mainstream model merging approaches and establishes new state-of-the-art performance.

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19.

PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:d8bad9c5f1d769d67ec5f93b1eed8f05

Fung-AI: An AI/ML-driven pipeline for antifungal peptide discovery

作者:

Daniel S. Berman↗

by Daniel S. Berman, Libby M. Lewis, Tom D. Curtis, Olivia N. Tiburzi, Daniel F. Q. Smith, Arturo Casadevall, Laura J. Dunphy Emerging fungal pathogens represent a concerning threat to both global health and food security. In this study, we aimed to address our rising vulnerability to fungal pathogens through the development of the Fung-AI pipeline: an AI/ML-driven approach for antifungal discovery. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained to generate novel candidate antifungal peptide sequences. Next, in silico antifungal and hemolytic classifiers were built to further prioritize AI-generated peptides for experimental validation. From a pool of ~10,000 candidates, thirteen peptides were selected for testing over two-stages of experimentation. Five peptides were found to display mild antifungal activity against the wheat pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 250 µg/mL to 500 µg/mL. Four of the five peptides also showed activity against the human pathogen, Candida albicans (MIC: 500 µg/mL). Two of our AI-generated antifungal peptides additionally demonstrated low cytotoxicity in HepG2 human liver carcinoma cells (LC50 > 704.2 µg/mL) indicating that they may be useful as scaffolds for future optimization for therapeutic applications. None of our peptides were found to considerably inhibit the emerging pathogen C. auris, suggesting the need for pathogen-specific down-selection of candidate peptides. Overall, we present a proof-of-principle, generative-AI-based approach for the rapid design of de novo antifungal peptides.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17606

Flux-Guard: Facial Identity Protection using diffusion models

作者:

Jie Wang↗Tao Wang↗Ru Zhang↗Jianyi Liu↗

The widespread deployment of face recognition (FR) systems exposes personal images shared on social media and public platforms to identity linkage and privacy risks. Existing adversarial privacy protection methods can degrade unauthorized FR performance but are not compatible with generative face editing. Artificial intelligence-driven face editing tools are gaining popularity, which has significantly increased user demand for personalized portrait generation and social sharing. However, current editing methods often preserve identity features, making the edited images still susceptible to tracking by malicious FR systems. Thus, this paper proposes Flux-Guard, a privacy-preserving face editing framework based on adversarial attacks, which integrates face editing and privacy protection within a unified generative process. Specifically, we design a flow trajectory control method to align semantic manipulations with the generative process and introduce latent-space adversarial optimization with an adaptive perceptual-loss-driven weighting strategy, dynamically adjusting adversarial strength to maximize attack effectiveness while preserving visual quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Flux-Guard supports face editing while significantly improving attack success rates against cross-domain face recognition models on the CelebA-HQ and LADN datasets. Furthermore, evaluation results for commercial APIs have confirmed its effectiveness in real-world applications. The code is released at https://github.com/JLMWang/Flux-Guard.

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21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14638

Improving Lunar Topography with Deep Learning Schrödinger Bridges

作者:

Matthew Repasky↗Erwan Mazarico↗Michael K. Barker↗Stefano Bertone↗Terence J. Sabaka↗Yao Xie↗

Increasing the resolution of planetary topography models can enable a better understanding of surface processes and geomorphology; however, existing analytical super-resolution methods are expensive and difficult to apply at large scales. Generative models provide the tools to learn complex relationships within data and can be applied at scale due to hardware accelerators and parallelization. We present a diffusion-based Schrödinger Bridge (SB) generative modeling approach for lunar topography super-resolution, connecting the distribution of low-resolution topography to that of high-resolution topography, incorporating physically-constraining optical imagery. Our approach is inspired by existing Shape-from-Shading methods, which improve a priori low-resolution topography by using optical images at the target resolution. We train SBs on a novel dataset of rendered lunar topography, emulating optical imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera. The result is a flexible approach for topography super-resolution which can provide pixel-level uncertainties in the reconstruction.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2510.02524

Unraveling Syntax: Language Modeling and the Substructure of Grammars

作者:

Laura Ying Schulz↗Daniel Mitropolsky↗Tomaso Poggio↗

While language models achieve impressive results, their learning dynamics are far from understood. Many domains of interest – such as natural language syntax, coding languages, arithmetic – are captured by context-free grammars (CFGs). In this work, we extend prior work on neural language modeling of CFGs in a novel direction: how language modeling behaves with respect to CFG substructure, namely subgrammars. We define subgrammars, and prove a set of fundamental theorems connecting language modeling and subgrammars. We show that language modeling loss recurses linearly over its top-level subgrammars; applied recursively, the loss decomposes into losses for "irreducible" subgrammars. Under additional assumptions, and empirically, parametrized models learn subgrammars in parallel, unlike children who first master simple substructures. We find that subgrammar pretraining can improve final performance, but only for tiny models relative to the grammar, while alignment analyses show that pretraining consistently leads to internal representations that better reflect the grammar's substructure.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18487

SFT Overtraining Predicts Rank Inversion via Entropy Collapse Under RLVR

作者:

Siddharth Aphale↗Kelly Liu↗

The standard heuristic of selecting the SFT checkpoint with the highest pass@1 for GRPO can fail when SFT compresses the rollout distribution. For binary rewards, the expected within group advantage variance is $p(1{-}p)(g{-}1)/g$; when early GRPO drives $p$ below $p^*(g)$, most groups have identical rewards and provide no group relative signal. We study SFT depth ladders for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B. We test Qwen2.5-Coder-3B across five depths and three seeds, and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B across four matched depths and three seeds. On Qwen, pre RL pass@1 rises with SFT depth, but peak GRPO pass@10 falls from $0.806$ to $0.481$ (3 seed mean, $n{=}20$); pre RL entropy is positively associated with the GRPO outcome ($\rho{=}{+}0.69$). On DeepSeek, pass@1 remains far above $p^*(8){=}0.083$, and GRPO outcomes compress rather than invert. A two stage diagnostic, combining pre RL entropy triage with an early GRPO entropy monitor, flags high risk checkpoints and can stop failing runs early. Simple KL to reference regularisation and label smoothing variants do not rescue the collapsed Qwen checkpoint in our setting, suggesting the failure is not a trivial GRPO hyperparameter artefact.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18019

Reading between the Lines: Leveraging Large Language Models for Global Dementia and Depression Assessment from Clinical Interviews

作者:

Franziska Braun↗Alea R\"uggeberg↗Thomas Ranzenberger↗Hartmut Lehfeld↗Thomas Hillemacher↗Tobias Bocklet↗Korbinian Riedhammer↗

Dementia and depression are the most prevalent neuropsychiatric disorders in geriatric populations, and their overlapping symptoms pose major challenges for differential diagnosis. In this study, we investigate open-weights Large Language Models (LLMs) for predicting dementia and depression severity from speech samples collected during standardized history taking interviews with 154 German-speaking subjects. We introduce an observer-based Global Depression Scale (GDS-D) aligned with the established Global Deterioration Scale (GDS), enabling parallel global staging of affective and cognitive symptoms. We compare three LLMs (Mistral 3.1, DeepHermes, Qwen3) in two settings: (1) zero-shot prediction and (2) LLM-based feature extraction for Support Vector Regression, using human and pause-enriched transcripts. Results show that LLMs effectively predict depression severity in zero-shot settings (best MAE of 0.60), while dementia assessment benefits substantially from structured feature extraction (best MAE of 0.78), reducing errors by up to 35% over zero-shot baselines. Pause-enriched transcripts achieve competitive performance with human transcriptions, demonstrating the viability of fully automatic screening pipelines for differential neuropsychiatric assessment.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2511.12572

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

作者:

Mohamed Youssef↗Lukas Brunner↗Klaus Rundhammer↗Gerald Czech↗Oliver Bimber↗

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

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