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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

The Tone of Awareness: Topic, Sentiment, and Toxicity Maps During Mental Health Month on TikTok

Despite raising concerns about the mental health effects associated with the usage of TikTok, little is known about how related content is framed by creators and received by audiences. We collect the content of 28,341 TikTok videos and 80,130 comments from Mental Health Awareness Month (May) in 2023 and 2024 via the TikTok Research API, and study how the tone of awareness varies across topics and years. We characterize "tone" as the emotional and interpersonal framing of mental health discourse, operationalized through sentiment and toxicity measures. We extract topics from video text using BERTopic and log-odds keywords, then quantify topic-conditioned sentiment (XLM-T) and toxicity (Detoxify) separately for video transcriptions and comments. Sentiment captures the affective valence of content, while toxicity reflects the presence of harmful or abusive language. We find a stable set of recurring themes across years, spanning clinical conditions, emotional disclosure, self-care, and campaign-oriented content, with engagement highly skewed toward a small subset of topics. All sentiment and toxicity analyses are computed separately for video content and comments, allowing us to distinguish between content production and audience reception. Sentiment in videos is often negative for emotionally charged topics, while comments tend to shift toward more mixed or positive polarity, especially for suicide prevention. Toxicity is low in median overall, but exhibits longer-tailed outliers in comments than in videos that are more pronounced in comments and concentrated in specific topics (e.g., "Duet", "Suicide Prevention", and "Psychisch"). Overall, our results provide a topic-level decomposition of mental health discourse on TikTok during awareness-month campaigns.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Attention Expansion: Enhancing Keyphrase Extraction from Long Documents with Attention-Augmented Contextualized Embeddings

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved strong performance in keyphrase extraction (KPE), largely due to their ability to generate rich contextualized representations. However, long-document KPE remains challenging because salient keyphrase evidence may be scattered across distant document sections that cannot be jointly captured within the limited context window of most PLMs. Although long-context large language models (LLMs) can process broader textual contexts, their computational cost limits their practicality for efficient and high-throughput KPE. To overcome this limitation, we propose an attention expansion mechanism that augments PLM token representations with information from surrounding out-of-context chunks using pre-trained word embeddings. The proposed mechanism expands the effective contextual scope of PLM-based KPE models without requiring full-document attention or expensive LLM-based inference. We evaluate our approach across five PLM backbones, including general-purpose, scientific, task-specific, and long-context encoders, using two training regimes and five benchmark corpora from scientific and news domains. Experimental results demonstrate that attention expansion consistently enhances KPE performance across all evaluation settings, outperforming state-of-the-art models and yielding notable improvements in F1 score. The improvements extend to domain-specific, task-specialized, and native long-context models, showing that the proposed mechanism provides complementary information rather than merely compensating for limited input length. These results establish attention expansion as an efficient and effective strategy for long-document KPE.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Judging Against the Reference: Uncovering Knowledge-Driven Failures in LLM-Judges on QA Evaluation

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for question answering (QA) and other reference-conditioned evaluation tasks, little is known about their ability to adhere to a provided reference. We identify a critical failure mode of such reference-based LLM QA evaluation: when the provided reference conflicts with the judge model's parametric knowledge, the resulting scores become unreliable, substantially degrading evaluation fidelity. To study this phenomenon systematically, we introduce a controlled swapped-reference QA framework that induces reference-belief conflicts. Specifically, we replace the reference answer with an incorrect entity and construct diverse pairings of original and swapped references with correspondingly aligned candidate answers. Surprisingly, grading reliability drops sharply under swapped references across a broad set of judge models. We empirically show that this vulnerability is driven by judges' over-reliance on parametric knowledge, leading judges to disregard the given reference under conflict. Finally, we find that this failure persists under common prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting a fundamental limitation of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and motivating reference-based protocols that enforce stronger adherence to the provided reference.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HiLo-Token: Input-Adaptive High-Low Frequency Token Compression for Efficient Image Editing

Creative image editing tools, such as Photoshop's Remove or Generative Fill buttons, are central to everyday customer use and account for a major share of traffic in Photoshop and Lightroom. However, current generative AI models face significant latency challenges, which become even more pronounced when transitioning from convolution-based U-Nets to Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). In our evaluation on hundreds of representative image editing samples spanning a wide range of mask ratios, the DiT module alone accounts for an average of 73% of the total model latency, even after being distilled from 50 timesteps down to 8 timesteps. To tackle this challenge, we propose $HiLo-Token$, an input-adaptive token compression framework that allocates more token budget to high-frequency, rich-context regions while assigning fewer tokens to low-frequency areas. Specifically, for the editing region specified by the user mask, we retain all tokens within a dilated mask to preserve strong locality and contextual relevance. Outside the editing region, we introduce a simple yet effective high-frequency token selection strategy based on spatial frequency to capture important local details, while using tokens from a 16x downsampled image to represent low-frequency components and preserve the blurry but global structure. Extensive experiments on production-level evaluation data validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving 3.13x, 2.59x, and 1.67x DiT speedups on A100-80GB for image editing tasks across small, medium, and large mask ratio categories with average ratios of 6.38%, 15.92%, and 35.36%, respectively, without any regression in generation quality.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

DeepForestVisionV2: Ecology-Driven Taxonomy Expansion for Camera-Trap Monitoring in African Tropical Forests

Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Among available open tools for African forest camera-trap classification, DeepForestVision is the only one providing a matched offline workflow for both photographs and videos, and previous work showed that it outperformed other available baselines on a comparable benchmark. However, it was designed for closed-canopy, ground-level forest interiors and uses a 35-class prediction space that becomes too coarse when deployments encounter arboreal primates, birds, semi-aquatic taxa, or human-associated confounders such as livestock. We present DeepForestVisionV2, an ecology-driven expansion from 35 to 64 prediction classes (61 animal classes plus human, vehicle, and blank) designed to address three recurrent deployment gradients: vertical stratification, scene openness, and anthropogenic interfaces. DeepForestVisionV2 retains the same offline workflow and is trained on 1,535,010 photographs and 243,354 videos from multi-country African tropical-forest projects. Evaluation combines a cross-country cropped-photo validation set, used to assess robustness across sites and camera-trap settings, with three held-out Uganda video benchmarks spanning the targeted gradients. On the validation set, DeepForestVisionV2 reaches 0.86 accuracy, 0.82 macro-F1, and 0.81 balanced accuracy. On the deployment benchmarks, it preserves or improves baseline accuracy despite its harder classification task, while increasing the number of identified taxa from 22 to 29 in forest-interior videos and from 4 to 9 at riverbanks. In the park-edge use case, it raises accuracy from 0.62 to 0.86 and reduces false alarms from 11 to 0. These results show that DeepForestVisionV2 materially improves field utility while preserving robustness across sites, habitats, and camera-trap settings.

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

Deep Spectral Learning of Embedded Latent Transfer Operators for Stochastic Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.14079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a spectral learning method for stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems represented with embedded latent transfer operators in deep feature spaces. We instantiate the method as Deep Spectral Encoder (DSE), an operator-based latent state-space model in which a time-invariant neural encoder implements learnable nonlinear feature maps from observations, and these features define Markovian latent states whose temporal evolution and observation mapping are described by the transfer and observation operators, respectively. Functional canonical correlation analysis in a learnable Galerkin-projected feature space provides state coordinates from past and future observations, and the two linear operators are estimated on the state coordinates as ridge-regularized closed-form solutions that coincide with Galerkin projections of the associated covariance operators. On this representation, we generalize sequential Bayesian filtering and Koopman spectral mode decomposition in feature space. Experiments on several scenarios show stable and superior performance with sequential Bayesian filtering and dynamic mode decomposition baselines even under noise and partial observability.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Frequency-Division Multiplexed CV-QKD System

arXiv:2603.20718v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a frequency-division multiplexed (FDM) continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) system with enhanced spectral efficiency through optimized channel spacing of low-symbol-rate signals. A four-channel 10-Mbaud FDM-CV-QKD system was experimentally demonstrated using Gaussian modulation, a transmitted local oscillator, and homodyne detection. Despite the inter-channel interference, under a finite-size scenario (m=1.25x10^6), the system achieved a 3.6-fold back-to-back secret key rate gain and outperformed the single-channel frequency-upconverted signal up to 26.8 km.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Clarify Before You Draw: Proactive Agents for Robust Text-to-CAD Generation

arXiv:2602.03045v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models have recently enabled text-to-CAD systems that synthesize parametric CAD programs (e.g., CadQuery) from natural-language prompts. In practice, however, geometric descriptions can be under-specified or internally inconsistent: critical dimensions may be missing and constraints may conflict. However, existing fine-tuned models tend to reactively follow the user instructions and hallucinate dimensions when the text is ambiguous. To address this, we propose a proactive agentic framework for text-to-CadQuery generation, named as ProCAD, that resolves specification issues before code synthesis. Our framework pairs a proactive clarifying agent, which audits the prompt and asks targeted clarification questions only when necessary to produce a self-consistent specification, with a CAD coding agent that translates the specification into an executable CadQuery program. We fine-tune the coding agent based on a curated high-quality text-to-CadQuery dataset and train the clarifying agent via agentic SFT on clarification trajectories. Experiments show that proactive clarification significantly improves robustness to ambiguous prompts while keeping interaction overhead low. ProCAD outperforms frontier closed-source models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, reducing the mean Chamfer distance by 79.9% and lowering the invalidity ratio from 4.8% to 0.9%. Our code and datasets are made publicly available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/Pro-CAD.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Preventing postpartum depression through mitigating breastfeeding grief: A convergent parallel mixed methods study

Background: Women who did not meet their breastfeeding goals often experience breastfeeding grief (BG) and may be likely to have postpartum depression (PD). Furthermore, PD is nearly twice as common in African American (AA) women as in Non-Hispanic White women. No research exists on BG and its role in PD. This study examined the BG experiences of AA women and its possible contributions to PD symptoms. Methods: A convergent parallel mixed methods design was used. A purposive sample of 16 AA women with children aged 6 months to 2 years with BG participated in individual semi-structured interviews about their experiences of BG and completed an online survey including the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and descriptive statistics, respectively. Both data were integrated using joint display of data and side-by-side comparison. Results: The mean age of participants was 29.5 years. Four meaning-based themes about BG were generated including: We looked forward to breastfeeding, But it did not go as expected, So we grieve, and These would have helped. From quantitative results, 87.5% of participants reported a history of PD symptoms and almost 44% had EPDS scores >11. All participants reported that experiencing BG contributed to their PD symptoms. Findings suggest that BG influenced PD symptoms in AA women without prior diagnosis of depression. Conclusions: Qualitative and quantitative findings from this novel exploratory study revealed an overlap that AA women with BG report PD symptoms. Clinicians should support women to achieve their breastfeeding goals to prevent BG and PD. Keywords: African American; Breastfeeding grief; Mental health; Mixed methods; Postpartum depression

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

An XAI View on Explainable ASP: Methods, Systems, and Perspectives

arXiv:2601.14764v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a popular declarative reasoning and problem solving approach in symbolic AI. Its rule-based formalism makes it inherently attractive for explainable and interpretive reasoning, which is gaining importance with the surge of Explainable AI (XAI). A number of explanation approaches and tools for ASP have been developed, which often tackle specific explanatory settings and may not cover all scenarios that ASP users encounter. In this survey, we provide, guided by an XAI perspective, an overview of types of ASP explanations in connection with user questions for explanation, and describe their coverage by current theory and tools. Furthermore, we pinpoint gaps in existing ASP explanations approaches and identify research directions for future work.

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

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

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

DynamicPTQ: Mitigating Activation Quantization Collapse via Residual-Stream Dynamics

arXiv:2606.12487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training quantization (PTQ) is essential for efficient large language model inference, but reliably quantizing activations remains challenging when weights, activations, and KV caches are all quantized to 4-bit precision. A key difficulty lies in massive activations, whose extreme values dominate the activation range and amplify quantization errors. State-of-the-art methods mainly mitigate massive activations through transformation-based smoothing, such as orthogonal rotations and affine scaling, but overlook the cross-layer dynamics of the residual stream. In this paper, we show that massive activations emerge and disappear in a phase-wise pattern across network depth, triggering large residual changes. These changes cause newly injected layer-wise updates to dominate the 4-bit quantization scale and weaken historical residual information. To characterize this behavior, we introduce Jump Ratio and Historical Feature SNR. This suggests that static transformation-based smoothing cannot fully resolve dynamic quantization instability caused by cross-layer residual changes. Based on this analysis, we propose DynamicPTQ, a Dynamic Post-Training Quantization policy for phase-aware mixed-precision activation quantization. DynamicPTQ identifies quantization-sensitive layers from residual-stream dynamics and assigns 8-bit activation precision only to these layers, while keeping weights, KV caches, and other activations in 4-bit precision. It can be directly integrated with strong PTQ baselines such as QuaRot, SpinQuant, and FlatQuant. Experiments on LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 show that DynamicPTQ consistently improves perplexity and zero-shot QA performance under W4A4KV4 quantization, while achieving 1.05 to 1.07 times throughput improvement with modest memory overhead. These results demonstrate a practical path toward robust low-bit LLM inference.

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

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Interplay of insurance and financial risks in a non Levy-Renewal environment

arXiv:2606.15596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a multivariate risk model, with common counting process and common process of logarithmic returns for the investment portfolio. We assume that the claim-vectors, the counting process and the logarithmic returns of the investment portfolio satisfy a weak dependence structure. Further, we consider that the counting process represents an inhomogeneous renewal process, and the logarithmic returns represent a cadlag process with independent but not necessarily stationary increments. Under these conditions we provide an asymptotic expression for the infinite-time entrance probability of the discounted aggregate claims into some rare set xA, where A denotes a set from a general set family, crucial for the actuarial practice, when the common distribution of the claim vectors belong to a multivariate heavy-tailed distribution class. This result, is derived under a moment condition for the financial risks, and underlines the multivariate linear single big jump principle. When we restrict the distribution class of the claim-vectors to multivariate regular variation, we find more explicit asymptotic expressions, weakening the moment conditions on the financial risks. The asymptotic formulas, derived through double dependence solution, become more direct and practical in applications. With respect to the technical part, due to non Levy-Renewal framework, the classical Kesten-Goldie theorems are not applicable, nor their extensions. The way we make the discretization of the process of the discounted aggregate claims permits to derive uniform asymptotics with respect to the number of summands, that facilitate the approximation of the infinite sums of the main results.

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

Where's the Plan? Locating Latent Planning in Language Models with Lightweight Mechanistic Interventions

arXiv:2605.07984v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study planning site formation in language models – where internal representations of structurally-constrained future tokens form during the forward pass, and whether they causally drive generation. Using rhyming-couplet completion as a clean test of forward-looking constraint, we apply two lightweight methods (linear probing and activation patching) across Qwen3, Gemma-3, and Llama-3 at more than ten scales. Probing shows that future-rhyme information is linearly decodable at the line boundary, with signal that strengthens with scale in all three families. Activation patching reveals that only Gemma-3-27B causally relies on this encoding, exhibiting a handoff in which the causal driver migrates from the rhyme word to the line boundary around layer 30. Every other model we test conditions on the rhyme word throughout generation, with near-zero causal effect at the line boundary despite strong probe signal. We localize the Gemma-3-27B handoff to five attention heads through two-stage path patching that recover ~90% of the rhyme-routing capacity at the newline.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Urinary Creatine Riboside Complements PSA to Improve Disease Detection in the Diagnostic Gray Zone of Prostate Cancer

Circulating prostate-specific antigen (PSA) discriminates poorly in the diagnostic gray zone (3.0-9.99 ng/mL), where ~75% of biopsies yield no clinically significant prostate cancer (PCa). We evaluated whether urinary creatine riboside (CR), a tumor-derived metabolite excreted through the prostatic urethra, complements PSA for gray-zone detection and independently predicts prostate-cancer-specific mortality (PCSM). In the NCI-Maryland PCa Case-Control Study (951 cases, 962 controls; 47.6% African American men; median follow-up 11.5 years), urinary CR was quantified by UPLC-MS/MS. Within the PSA gray zone (n = 668), urinary CR was complementary to PSA, with markedly higher single-marker discrimination than PSA (AUC 0.93, 95% CI 0.88-0.98 vs 0.77, 0.66-0.89) and additive when combined ({Delta}AUC +0.17, p < 0.001; 91.4% sensitivity at 80% specificity). After adjustment for 11 clinical and sociodemographic covariates, urinary CR independently predicted PCSM complementary to PSA (Fine-Gray SHR 1.72, 1.35-2.19 for CR; 1.35, 1.08-1.68 for PSA; Harrell's C 0.85 for CR + PSA vs 0.77 for PSA alone), with strongest signal in African American men (SHR 2.43, 1.57-3.75 for CR). We conclude that urinary CR is a candidate non-invasive biomarker complementary to PSA - improving gray-zone triage and predicting PCSM; prospective validation in biopsy-referred cohorts is warranted.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Physics-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling for AI-Generated Video Detection

AI-generated videos have achieved near-perfect visual realism (e.g., Sora), urgently necessitating reliable detection mechanisms. However, detecting such videos faces significant challenges in modeling high-dimensional spatiotemporal dynamics and identifying subtle anomalies that violate physical laws. In this paper, we propose the first physics-driven AI-generated video detection paradigm based on probability flow conservation principles. Specifically, we propose a statistic called Normalized Spatiotemporal Gradient (NSG), which quantifies the ratio of spatial probability gradients to temporal density changes, explicitly capturing deviations from natural video dynamics. Leveraging pre-trained diffusion models, we develop an NSG estimator through spatial gradients approximation and motion-aware temporal modeling without complex motion decomposition while preserving physical constraints. Building on this, we propose an NSG-based video detection method (NSG-VD) that computes the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) between NSG features of the test and real videos as a detection metric. Last, we derive an upper bound of NSG feature distances between real and generated videos, proving that generated videos exhibit amplified discrepancies due to distributional shifts. Extensive experiments confirm that NSG-VD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16.00% in Recall and 10.75% in F1-Score, validating the superior performance of NSG-VD. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZSHsh98/NSG-VD.

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

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Sharing quantum indistinguishability with multiple parties

arXiv:2512.15199v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum indistinguishability of non-orthogonal quantum states is a valuable resource in quantum information applications such as cryptography and randomness generation. In this article, we present a sequential state-discrimination scheme that enables multiple parties to share quantum uncertainty, in terms of the max relative entropy, generated by a single party. Our scheme is based upon maximum-confidence measurements and takes advantages of weak measurements to allow a number of parties to perform state discrimination on a single quantum system. We review known sequential state discrimination and show how our scheme would work through a number of examples where ensembles may or may not contain symmetries. Our results will have a role to play in understanding the ultimate limits of sequential information extraction and guide the development of quantum resource sharing in sequential settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Polar: A Benchmark for Evaluating Political Bias in LLMs

Political bias in large language models (LLMs) is increasingly significant, but difficult to measure reproducibly across political and linguistic contexts. We introduce Polar, a 4,026-instance multiple-choice benchmark that measures political bias through option-level likelihoods rather than prompt-based generation. Polar covers two ideological axes and eight issue categories derived from the Manifesto Project, and evaluates models in parallel across U.S. and South Korean political contexts. Across 38 LLMs, measured bias varies systematically with political context, issue category, model group, and presentation language. All models lean left-progressive on U.S. political content, but show more centered and mixed patterns on South Korean content. Translation experiments further show that presentation language alone can shift measured bias. These findings highlight the need for multilingual and cross-contextual evaluation of political bias in LLMs.

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

Layer-Resolved Optimal Transport for Hallucination Detection in NMT and Abstractive Summarization

Optimal transport (OT) has been shown to detect hallucinations in neural machine translation (NMT) by measuring the geometric distance between cross-attention distributions and a reference distribution, without any supervision. We extend this analysis to all six decoder layers of the Fairseq DE-EN model ($N=3{,}414$), showing that Wass-to-Unif and Wass-to-Data are complementary detectors specialised across hallucination types, that detection is concentrated in layers L1–L4 with L5 anti-predictive for subtler types, and that hallucinated translations lack the exploratory attention phase present in correct translations from the first decoding step. We further evaluate whether the geometric signal transfers to abstractive summarization faithfulness detection: our unsupervised OT detector on AggreFact ($N=1{,}116$) achieves $57.2\%$/$57.6\%$ balanced accuracy on CNN/XSum – above chance but substantially below supervised MiniCheck-Flan-T5-L($69.9\%$/$74.3\%$). This gap is principled: unlike NMT hallucinations, unfaithful summaries can attend correctly to source tokens while misrepresenting their content, a failure mode invisible to concentration-based OT metrics by construction. Structural experiments on T5-base confirm consistent decoder organisation across depth, with Layer~3 showing peak concentration and Layer~12 being most critical for generation quality. Together, the results establish OT on cross-attention as a reliable detector when the failure mode is source disengagement, a principled interpretability tool regardless of task, and fundamentally limited when faithfulness failures occur downstream of attention.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome

Just as genomes revolutionized molecular genetics, connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) are transforming neuroscience. To date, the only organisms with complete connectomes are worms1–3, sea squirts4, and comb jellies5 (103–104 synapses). By contrast, the fruit fly is more complex (108 synaptic connections), with a brain that supports learning and spatial memory6,7 and an intricate ventral nerve cord analogous to the vertebrate spinal cord8–12. Here we report the first densely-reconstructed adult fly connectome that unites the brain and ventral nerve cord, and we leverage this resource to investigate principles of neural control. We show that effector neurons (motor neurons, endocrine cells, and efferent neurons targeting the viscera) are primarily influenced by sensory neurons in the same body part, forming local feedback loops. These local loops are linked by long-range circuits involving ascending and descending neurons organized into behavior-centric modules. Single ascending and descending neurons are often positioned to influence the voluntary movements of multiple body parts, together with the endocrine cells or visceral organs that support those movements. Brain regions involved in learning and navigation supervise these circuits. These results reveal an architecture that is distributed, parallelized, and embodied, reminiscent of distributed control architectures in engineered systems13,14.

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

Optimal Ansatz-free Hamiltonian Learning In Situ

arXiv:2606.19486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterizing the features of a Hamiltonian that governs a quantum system serves as a fundamental subroutine of quantum device calibration, signal sensing, and error correction. Recent works proposed protocols have achieved the optimal Heisenberg-limited scaling learning ansatz-free Hamiltonians from their real-time evolutions without fully specifying interaction structures. However, these protocols rely on both deep circuits with interleaving probes and control, and extremely short time resolution, making them difficult to implement on near- and intermediate-term in situ quantum experiments. In this work, we propose a computationally efficient, control-free, and ancilla-free algorithm that uses only Pauli product state preparation and measurement, and learns an ansatz-free Hamiltonian $H$ with $||H||\leq\Lambda$ in total evolution time of $\Theta(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. The evolution time cost of our algorithm is optimal for any control-free protocols as we further prove a lower bound of $\Omega(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon^2}\log(\frac{\Lambda}{\epsilon}))$. Technically, our method introduces a randomized-sampling framework that combines band-limited kernel-based time sampling with a displacement sieve for Hamiltonian structure learning. The characteristic probe time resolution depends only on $\Lambda$ instead of $\varepsilon$, which makes our protocol especially appealing in the high-precision regime for sensing and calibration applications. We also show that the algorithm maintains the same asymptotic total evolution time in the presence of state-preparation-and-measurement (SPAM) noise when the Hamiltonian is local after calibration. Our results demonstrate the fundamental cost of experimentally friendly Hamiltonian learning and provide a practical route to rigorous in situ characterization of near-term quantum platforms.