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

Unleashing Emergent Fermions with Rydberg Atom Simulators

Authors:
Hanteng Wang↗Xingyu Li↗Shang Liu↗Yingfei Gu↗Chengshu Li↗

arXiv:2606.19444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rydberg atom simulators, in both analog and digital modes, have attracted significant recent interest due to their versatile geometric reconfigurability. In this work, leveraging this feature, we propose two complementary approaches, one for each mode, to characterize emergent fermions in critical quantum many-body systems. In the analog mode, we assemble the Rydberg atoms in a "developable" (namely, preserving local couplings) Möbius band geometry to realize antiperiodic boundary conditions, where fermionic states reside. Spectroscopic measurement in this sector then reveals universal energy ratios of the bosonic and fermionic states. In the digital mode, we carry out a fermionic version of Kibble-Zurek ramping with a quantum circuit, directly addressing the fermionic scaling form. Reconfigurability allows an exponential speed-up of this task, with an $O(\log L\log\log L)$ circuit-depth overhead. Our work establishes the Rydberg atom simulator as a uniquely powerful platform to attack the notoriously difficult issue of experimentally probing emergent fermions that are nonlocally defined in a bosonic system.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GeoDisaster: Benchmarking Orchestrated Agents for Operational Disaster Geo-Intelligence

Authors:
Maram Hasan↗Aman Verma↗Savitra Roy↗Hariseetharam Gunduboina↗Daksh Jain↗Muhammad Haris Khan↗Subhasis Chaudhuri↗Biplab Banerjee↗

Remote-sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) have advanced Earth-observation analysis toward visual interpretation and instruction-following, yet fall short of operational geo-intelligence, which demands tool-grounded spatial reasoning and structured, evidence-backed decisions. We introduce GeoDisaster, an operational geospatial disaster reasoning benchmark with 2,921 verified instances across 43 question types and five task families: deforestation monitoring, multi-hazard analysis, building-damage assessment, flood-safe routing, and Sentinel-1 SAR flood monitoring. Instances integrate heterogeneous EO/GIS evidence-optical and SAR imagery, raster masks, vector geometries, road networks, and exposure layers-spanning hazard detection, damage assessment, exposure estimation, and diagnostic report generation. Ground-truth answers are grounded in executable geospatial workflows and deterministic consistency checks, removing the need for language-model annotation. We further propose an orchestrated multi-agent framework with 18 disaster-oriented tools, where role-specialized agents coordinate through explicit execution contracts, aligned via Role-Contract Expectation Alignment (RCEA): failure-aware supervised fine-tuning combined with contract-grounded reinforcement learning over dense step-level signals. Experiments show that GeoDisaster challenges existing RS-VLMs and agentic systems, while RCEA improves tool use, evidence grounding, state consistency, and decision generation.

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

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Authors:
Tianyi Lin↗Chuanyu Sun↗Jingyi Zhang↗Changxu Wei↗Huanjin Yao↗Shunyu Liu↗Xikun Zhang↗Liu Liu↗Jiaxing Huang↗

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.

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

Who Drifted: the System or the Judge? Anytime-Valid Attribution in LLM Evaluation Pipelines

Authors:
Yitao Li↗

arXiv:2606.15474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous evaluation of LLM products relies on a strong LLM judge treated as ground truth: a cheap monitor scores every interaction and a team is paged when the score drifts down. But the judge is itself a model behind an API, and a silent version bump or scoring-prompt update changes how it scores – so every drift alarm is ambiguous between a worse product and a changed judge. We resolve the ambiguity with a fixed, human-labeled anchor set that the current judge re-scores at a steady interleave, a second betting e-process on the judge-versus-human gap, and a guard-window rule returning a verdict in {none, system, judge}. We prove anytime-validity, one-way identification (only the judge can move the anchors), an attribution race whose design law is that the anchors must out-run the main process they guard, and process orthogonality. On two real judge changes, a silent version bump is detected as judge drift in 60/60 runs with zero judge-to-system misattribution, and a contaminating strict-prompt change is correctly attributed on 110 of 120 runs at guard width 300 – while the industry-default rolling z-test false-alarms on 75% of drift-free streams. Every experiment replicates on a second domain (TL;DR summarization) with nothing re-tuned, and where the domains differ the differences are the ones the race predicts: the strict-prompt change shifts scores harder there, so the anchors fire faster and attribution becomes perfect (240/240). The monitor runs at approximately 0.64 of the cost of strong-judging every item, or 0.21 in a cheaper-but-deafer regime.

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

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Authors:
Saraswathy Amjith↗

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

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

Approximating Whittle-Matern Fields over Discretized Manifolds

Authors:
Srinivas Nambirajan↗

arXiv:2606.13827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Markovian Whittle-Matérn fields have been convergently approximated by discrete Gauss Markov Random Fields (GMRFs) with sparse precision matrices using a Finite Element approximation of the two-parameter family, \[ (\kappa^2 - \Delta)^{\alpha/2} u = \mathcal{W}, \;\; \kappa \in \mathbb{R}, \; \alpha \in \mathbb{N}. \] of SPDEs. Using recent developements in the analysis of Discrete Exterior Calculus (DEC), we present a different, yet closely related, convergent GMRF approximation to these Matérn fields over complete, boundaryless Riemannian manifolds discretized as well-centered simplicial complexes. This convergent method (i) is agnostic to $\alpha, \kappa$ and thus allows a universal approximation scheme for the precision and covariance matrices of the entire $(\alpha, \kappa)$-family of GMRFs, so they may be inferred rather than guessed. (ii) inherently models pointwise and piecewise-smoothed measurements of a random field and approximates both equally well (iii) is computationally independent of the interpolants used - it suffers no overhead if one convergent interpolant were replaced with another suitable interpolant over the same mesh. Furthermore, we show that, on discretizations that are well-connected in a precise sense, and volume-concentrated, the precision matrices are spectral functions of a graph-laplacian. We provide a low rank approximator to the family of such Matérn GMRFs and mention a use case: reducing the number of measurements needed to model the GMRF by compressed-sensing.

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

FlowMPC: Improving Flow Matching policies with World Models

Authors:
Chandon Hamel↗

arXiv:2606.16286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) is a powerful approach for behavior cloning in multimodal action spaces [Jiang et al., 2025], but because it is not trained to directly maximize expected return, there is still room to improve how FM policies act at test time. This work investigates whether a learned world model can improve FM policies by enabling Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning over candidate action sequences proposed by the policy. Building on TD-MPC2 [Hansen et al., 2024], I introduce FlowMPC, a framework that combines an imitation-learned FM policy with a learned world model for test-time planning in ManiSkill manipulation tasks [Tao et al., 2025]. Across PickCube and PickSingleYCB, adding the world model improved performance over the FM policy alone, with especially clear gains in end-of-episode success. These results suggest that world-model-based planning can effectively complement flow-based imitation policies without modifying the FM training objective.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Compositionality Emerges in a Narrow Depth-Connectivity Regime: Architecture Constraints and Solution Manifolds

Authors:
Dat H. Do↗Rushi Shah↗Duc V. Le↗Dianbo Liu↗

arXiv:2606.19941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositionality is believed to be the foundation for generalization, enabling models to reuse meaningful primitives in novel combinations. Yet, models trained with standard gradient-based optimization rarely, and often only weakly, exhibit compositional internal structure, and it remains unclear how or why such compositionality forms. In this work, we show that compositionality emerges in a narrow connectivity-depth sweet spot. Along the connectivity axis, compositionality only appears in some specifically sparse networks, heavily depends on which connections remain rather than on weights' sparsity alone. Along the depth axis, compositionality emerges within a narrow, target-dependent regime, peaking at specific depths, while both shallower and deeper networks fail. When either the depth or connectivity condition is violated, gradient descent silently converges to fractured solutions rather than compositional ones. To discover and exploit this emergence, we introduce (i) similarity-based pruning (SP) to recover compositional connectivity and (ii) a heuristic depth predictor to estimate where compositionality is most likely to appear. Finally, we support these empirical findings with a theoretical framework based on compositional sparsity, volume-ratio arguments, and feature-interference bounds, explaining why compositional solutions are reachable only in a narrow depth-connectivity regime.

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

PlaceRep: Geospatial Place Representation Learning from Large-Scale Point-of-Interest Data

Authors:
Mohammad Hashemi↗Hossein Amiri↗Andreas Zufle↗

arXiv:2507.02921v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning effective representations of urban environments requires capturing spatial structure beyond fixed administrative boundaries. Existing geospatial representation learning approaches typically aggregate Points of Interest (POIs) into pre-defined administrative regions such as census units or ZIP code areas, assigning a single embedding to each region. However, POIs often form semantically meaningful groups that extend across, within, or beyond these boundaries, defining places that better reflect human activity and urban function. To address this limitation, we propose PlaceRep, a geospatial representation learning method that constructs place-level representations by clustering spatially and semantically related POIs. PlaceRep summarizes large-scale POI graphs from U.S. Foursquare data to produce general-purpose urban region embeddings while automatically identifying places across multiple spatial scales. By eliminating model pre-training, PlaceRep provides a scalable and efficient solution for multi-granular geospatial analysis. Experiments using the tasks of population density estimation and housing price prediction as downstream tasks show that PlaceRep outperforms most state-of-the-art graph-based geospatial representation learning methods and achieves up to a x100 speedup in generating region-level representations on large-scale POI graphs. The implementation of PlaceRep is available at https://github.com/mohammadhashemii/PlaceRep.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

Authors:
Noah Golowich↗Ankur Moitra↗Dhruv Rohatgi↗

arXiv:2606.11437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $\mu^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat \mu$ which yields approximate density estimates for $\mu^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $\mu^\star$ given query access to $\hat \mu$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.

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

EWAM: An Enhanced World Action Model for Closed-Loop Online Adaptation in Embodied Intelligence

Authors:
Xin Zhou↗Cong Miao↗

arXiv:2606.12690v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we propose the Enhanced World Action Model (EWAM), a closed-loop online adaptation architecture built upon a pretrained and fully frozen Cosmos3 backbone network. Evaluated entirely under a zero-shot task protocol, EWAM is centrally focused on reducing the amount of additional deployment data required to adapt to new task layouts. Notably, no extra task-specific demonstration sets were introduced in any of the evaluations, and no fine-tuning was performed on the backbone network. Its performance gains stem entirely from an inference-time co-reasoning mechanism composed of four inserted lightweight neural layers: the Neural Experience Memory Layer located in the intermediate layers of the Diffusion Transformer (DiT) provides task-relevant execution context; the Neural Anomaly Detection Layer after the state prediction head monitors the divergence between predicted and actual states in real time; the Neural Policy Routing Layer dynamically selects direct execution, conservative replanning, or rollback recovery based on the anomaly severity; and the Neural Action Correction Layer refines the generated action chunks using execution diagnostics. Unlike naive feature fusion, the memory, anomaly detection, and correction modules are deeply integrated into the Cosmos3 forward path in a differentiable manner, with only the final routing decision being a discrete supervised one.

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

Quantum Otto engine powered by an anisotropic Heisenberg XYZ model under independent local magnetic fields

Authors:
Meiru Li↗Maimaitiyiming Tusun↗Fang Zhao↗Hasiyatihan Abudoula↗Tongcheng Wei↗

arXiv:2606.12877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a quantum Otto heat engine whose working substance is an anisotropic two-qubit Heisenberg XYZ model. Independent local magnetic fields are used to control each spin individually. The influence of the longitudinal coupling, anisotropy, transverse coupling, and local fields on the net work output and efficiency is systematically examined. Reducing the longitudinal coupling is found to markedly improve both the maximum work and the peak efficiency. The engine performance reaches an optimum at a particular value of the anisotropy parameter. A local work analysis clarifies how work is produced during the cycle. Because of the asymmetric local fields and the intrinsic spin-spin interaction, the two qubits play markedly different thermodynamic roles; the interaction term itself contributes crucially to the total work. We further analyze the variation of quantum entanglement, quantified by concurrence, along the cycle. The results indicate that a pronounced change in entanglement between the hot and cold isomagnetic strokes is closely correlated with the efficiency enhancement. This work offers new insight into the operating principles and control of quantum Otto heat engines.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Reference Fields Transformations in Linearized Quantum Gravity

Authors:
Lin-Qing Chen↗Flaminia Giacomini↗

arXiv:2606.09344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffeomorphism invariance is a central feature of general relativity. Without external reference structures, matter and geometry must be specified relationally, with respect to internal subsystems serving as reference frames. In quantum gravity, these reference systems must themselves be treated as quantum, motivating the use of quantum reference frames. In this work, we address how such a relational description could be formulated within linearized quantum gravity. To this purpose, we introduce quantum reference fields, i.e. sets of four dynamical scalar fields whose stress-energy tensors enter the gravitational constraints. These fields extend the notion of quantum reference frames to local field-theoretic reference systems, allowing matter and gravitational degrees of freedom to be described relationally with respect to physical quantum systems. By generalizing the perspective-neutral construction of quantum reference frames, we show that relational, gauge invariant observables admit reduced descriptions in the perspective of each quantum reference field, and we derive the unitary transformations relating them. The resulting unitary maps implement local quantum coordinate changes between different internal perspectives, and act on the linearized gravitational field with an analogous structure to a linearized diffeomorphism, but with the classical gauge parameter replaced by a physical quantum field. Finally, we construct a relational von Neumann-type measurement scheme, showing how the corresponding reduced observables can be accessed operationally from the perspective of a quantum reference field.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

Authors:
Aoyu Zhang↗Dongping Liu↗Luyao Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block

Authors:
Hao-Yuan Ma↗Li Zhang↗Minjie Qiang↗Jie Gao↗

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to image resolution limits their scalability. Mamba offers a promising alternative due to its linear complexity. However, previous Mamba-based methods have two main limitations. On the one hand, the inherent causal formulation of Mamba constrains the bidirectional spatial dependency modeling required by non-causal vision tasks. On the other hand, existing Mamba-based vision models often overlook the unconstrained high entropy in the spatial token responses, which can weaken local details and high-frequency cues. To address these limitations, we propose MambaCount, an efficient framework built on the Spatial Sparse State Space Duality (S^4D) block. Specifically, we analyze and reconstruct the decay dynamics of hidden states in Mamba to alleviate the dependency constraints introduced by causal modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Spatial Token Selection (STS) sub-block to reduce the unconstrained high entropy in spatial token responses within Mamba. In addition, we design Multi-Granularity Prototypes (MGP) to identify object-like regions at different semantic levels, improving cross-modal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments on FSC-147 demonstrate that MambaCount achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without secondary querying, obtaining a test MAE of 12.23, while retaining linear complexity.

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Single Photon Cross-Phase Shifts Can Be Enhanced by Localization in both Frequency and Time

Authors:
Xinyu Jiao↗Vida-Michelle Nixon↗Kyle Thompson↗Aephraim Steinberg↗

arXiv:2606.11516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-photon optical nonlinearities face a fundamental trade-off: maximum nonlinearity requires both spectral resonance (narrow bandwidth) and high peak intensity (short duration), constraints that are incompatible due to the time-energy uncertainty relation. We demonstrate experimentally that this limitation does not need to exist in cases involving post-selection. We measure a cross-phase shift (XPS) produced by a resonant photon from a narrow-band source that is first transmitted through a cold atomic cloud and then localized in time through detection. The peak size of this XPS is greatly enhanced compared to that of Gaussian single-photon-level pulses without post-selection, benefiting from the narrow bandwidth of the resonant prepared state and the high intensity of the post-selected state simultaneously. We measure enhancements in the peak XPS of 6$\pm$1 at an optical depth (OD) of 2.4$\pm$0.1, and our results are in qualitative agreement across a range of optical depths with the recently developed weak value theory of atomic excitation [Thompson et al., APL Quantum 2, 036108 (2025)] for such post-selected photons. This work uncovers new consequences of having simultaneous knowledge of frequency and time, raising new foundational questions about how a particle behaves, and interacts with other systems, when its preparation and post-selection are non-commuting.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

T2S: A Rehearsal-Based Approach for Extraction-Resistant Model Watermarking

Authors:
Jian-Ping Mei↗Weibin Zhang↗Ao Yao↗Tiantian Zhu↗Jie Xiao↗

arXiv:2606.11698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model watermarking safeguards AI model intellectual property by embedding distinctive knowledge that induces unique behavioral signatures. The primary technical challenge lies in ensuring watermark robustness against various post-processing attacks on the watermarked model. Model extraction attacks emerge as the most severe threat, where adversaries exploit prediction outputs to train surrogate models that illegally replicate the original model's functionality. In this work, we propose a rehearsal-based watermark embedding framework to enhance the robustness of model watermarks against model extraction attacks. By simulating the extraction process, our method leverages the loss of a simulated stolen model on a trigger set as a training signal to fine-tune the watermark knowledge within the target model. This fine-tuning step encourages the watermark to be embedded in a way that boosts transferability, thereby increasing its chances of persisting and remaining detectable in stolen models. Comprehensive experiments conducted under diverse settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the robustness of model watermarks against both model extraction and subsequent watermark removal attacks.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Korzhinskii-Net: Physics-Informed Neural Network for Sub-Surface Mineral Prospectivity Modelling

Authors:
Boris Kriuk↗

arXiv:2606.13695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mineral prospectivity modelling (MPM) underpins exploration economics, yet most operational pipelines reduce to data-driven classifiers trained on shallow surface proxies. Such models are blind to the subsurface physics that actually localises ore: heat advection, fluid flow, and lithology-dependent precipitation. We present Korzhinskii-Net, a 2-D radial physics-informed neural network (PINN) that couples Darcy flow, advective-diffusive heat transport, and a softplus-saturated reaction rate into a single differentiable forward model, weakly supervised by surface and remote-sensing proxies. The network is named after Dmitri S. Korzhinskii (1899-1985), whose theory of infiltration metasomatism provides the physical scaffold. We evaluate Korzhinskii-Net on five ore provinces spanning four commodity classes – Norilsk (Ni-Cu-PGE), Pechenga (Ni-Cu sulphide), Udokan (sandstone-hosted Cu), Sukhoi Log (orogenic Au), and Mirny (kimberlitic diamond) – under a fair, leakage-controlled 5-fold cross-validation protocol with hard ring-shaped negatives. Korzhinskii-Net attains a mean PR-AUC of 0.885 versus 0.281 for the strongest classical baseline (gradient boosting), and a mean fractional rank of 0.019 versus 0.413. The improvement is consistent across all five provinces and four commodity systems, suggesting that physics-informed differentiable simulators, even when constrained only by global open-data proxies, can recover localisation patterns that pure feature-based learners systematically miss. We release the full pipeline and evaluation harness as open source.

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

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Authors:
Tianyi Xiang↗Mingming He↗Li Ma↗Jing Liao↗

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Daily Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) scoring reveals diet quality patterns masked by aggregation

Authors:
Singh↗Salathe↗

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) is conventionally computed by aggregating intake across days before scoring. Digital food logging enables an alternative: scoring each day and averaging daily scores. These methods are not equivalent. The HEI's density-based structure and component caps cause aggregation to inflate adequacy scores when intake is irregular. Using Food & You data, we show daily HEI correlates more strongly with microbiome diversity, and recommend co-reporting both metrics.

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

Representation Costs in Data Science: Foundations and the Quasi-Banach Spaces of Deep Neural Networks

Authors:
Greg Ongie↗Rahul Parhi↗

arXiv:2606.14954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a general framework for analyzing representation costs of parametric data-fitting methods through their parameter-space regularizers. From this abstract perspective, we define representation costs for arbitrary parametric models and reveal their induced (native) function spaces. This unifies recent function-space views of data-fitting methods. We also prove that many natural results hold in this abstract setting, including representer theorems for parametric methods on their native spaces. The framework also rigorously connects parametric methods with their equivalent nonparametric descriptions under sufficient overparameterization. Classical methods and their native spaces, such as kernel methods / reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces, wavelets / Besov spaces, and shallow neural networks / variation spaces emerge as special cases of our abstract framework. A byproduct of "axiomatizing" the study of representation costs is that we also immediately obtain new results for deep neural networks: For depth-$L$ feedforward ReLU networks, their induced native spaces are $p$-normable quasi-Banach spaces with $p = 2/L$. This reveals that the inductive bias of deep neural networks (as given by the representation cost) cannot be captured by norms for depths $L > 2$.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

Authors:
Alvaro Javier Vargas Guerrero↗Xinguang Wang↗Quang Manh Doan↗Guy Nagels↗

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

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

Continual Adaptation for Pacific Indigenous Speech Recognition

Authors:
Yang Xiao↗Aso Mahmudi↗Nick Thieberger↗Eliathamby Ambikairajah↗Eun-Jung Holden↗Ting Dang↗

Speech foundation models struggle with low-resource Pacific Indigenous languages because of severe data scarcity. Furthermore, full fine-tuning risks catastrophic forgetting. To address this gap, we present an empirical study adapting models to real-world Pacific datasets. We investigate the impact of data volume, adaptation strategies, and representational drift on speech foundation models for various Pacific languages. Additionally, we analyze a continual learning framework for sequential language acquisition. Empirical results across three distinct Pacific Indigenous languages demonstrate that adapting to these linguistically distant languages induces severe internal representational drift. Consequently, these models face a strict plasticity and stability dilemma. While LoRA adapts well initially, it suffers from catastrophic forgetting during sequential learning. Ultimately, this study highlights the urgent need for robust adaptation strategies tailored to underrepresented languages.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

DEFINED: A Data-Efficient Computational Framework for Fine-Grained Creativity Assessment in Debate Scenarios

Authors:
Tongzhou Yu↗Mingjia Li↗Hong Qian↗Wenkai Wang↗Zongbao Zhang↗Yaoyu Jiang↗Xiangfeng Wang↗Aimin Zhou↗Jiajun Guo↗

Human creativity has emerged as a critical competency in the era of large language models. Assessing creativity in complex, open-ended environments is a grand challenge in data mining, currently hindered by a reliance on standardized simple tasks and the scarcity of fine-grained expert data. As an ecologically valid assessment context, debate reflects multiple dimensions of creativity, encompassing both divergent thinking and convergent thinking. Moreover, debate is a data-rich domain, with a large volume of publicly accessible materials. Current mainstream automated scoring methods are poorly suited to complex settings such as debate, and therefore still rely on costly human evaluation. To this end, this paper proposes DEFINED, a data-efficient computational framework for fine-grained creativity assessment in debate scenarios. DEFINED operationalizes debate creativity through a hierarchical eight-dimensional metric system, implemented via a pre-trained autoregressive language model with a hierarchical scoring head that supports both fine-grained and coarse-grained evaluation. Statements and their associated expert scores were obtained from authentic debate competitions, and a constrained data augmentation strategy was employed to address the elite bias inherent in the original data. DEFINED adopts a mixed-granularity training strategy enabling robust learning from limited fine-grained supervision annotated by trained graduate experts. To rigorously validate ecological validity beyond synthetic benchmarks, we incorporate an empirical study with debate-naive participants, utilizing these authentic data to serve as a qualitative case study for mid-to-low proficiency populations. Across our evaluation protocol, our scoring model achieves accurate and stable scoring, outperforming prompt-based large language model evaluators and existing debate scoring methods.

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

L-Proto: Language-Aware Episodic Prototypical Training for Multilingual Speaker Verification

Authors:
Hyung-Seok Oh↗Deok-Hyeon Cho↗Seung-Bin Kim↗Seong-Whan Lee↗

arXiv:2606.17416v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual speaker verification remains challenging because language-dependent acoustic variability causes speaker identity to become entangled with linguistic characteristics, degrading generalization across languages. In multilingual training, embeddings often encode language cues with speaker identity, causing speakers to form language-specific clusters. We propose L-Proto, a language-aware episodic prototypical training strategy that constructs language-consistent episodes. By sampling speakers from a single language per episode, L-Proto reduces language-driven variation during training and encourages embeddings to focus more directly on speaker identity. Experiments on the TidyVoice Challenge benchmark demonstrate consistent performance improvements over conventional fine-tuning and random episodic sampling across multiple backbone architectures.

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