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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

The Standard Model, The Exceptional Jordan Algebra, and Triality

作者:

arXiv:2006.16265v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jordan, Wigner and von Neumann classified the possible algebras of quantum mechanical observables, and found they fell into 4 "ordinary" families, plus one remarkable outlier: the exceptional Jordan algebra. We point out an intriguing relationship between the complexification of this algebra and the standard model of particle physics, its minimal left-right-symmetric $SU(3)\times SU(2)_{L}\times SU(2)_{R}\times U(1)$ extension, and $Spin(10)$ unification. This suggests a geometric interpretation, where a single generation of standard model fermions is described by the tangent space $(\mathbb{C}\otimes\mathbb{O})^{2}$ of the complex octonionic projective plane, and the existence of three generations is related to $SO(8)$ triality.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A More-Than-Human Approach to Designing for Mental Health: Remixing Prototypes for the Contexts of Complex Healthcare Infrastructures

Digital mental health tools (DMHTs) often fail to be successfully implemented in clinical settings. While user- and human-centred design frameworks are frequently proposed for developing effective tools, they are insufficient to address the sociotechnical complexity of healthcare environments. This paper addresses this limitation by detailing the application of a more-than-human design framework to incorporate wider contextual factors into design decisions. To demonstrate the application of this more-than-human design framework, we present a case study showcasing the design of one specific feature within a DMHT intended to support Health Improvement Practitioners (HIPs) in New Zealand's Integrated Primary Mental Health and Addictions (IPMHA) service. Our process blends usage-context storyboards with interface prototypes, using think-aloud interviews to test the contextual fit of our prototypes. The initial design concept failed due to contextual factors such as inconsistent wait times and the administrative burden on clients and clinic staff. This led to a pivot to a more context-appropriate, practitioner-focused, in-session concept for digital psychometric administration and automated scoring. This case study demonstrates that for DMHTs to be viable within complex healthcare environments, design must focus on more than the needs of a single user, incorporating multiple stakeholders and contextual variables across the wider service-delivery context.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Beyond the Linear Separability Ceiling: Aligning Representations in VLMs

A challenge in advancing Visual-Language Models (VLMs) is determining whether their failures on abstract reasoning tasks, such as Bongard problems, stem from flawed perception or faulty top-down reasoning. To disentangle these factors, we introduce a diagnostic framework centered on the Linear Separability Ceiling (LSC), the performance achievable by a linear classifier on a VLM's raw visual embeddings. Applying this framework to state-of-the-art VLMs, we uncover a pervasive ''alignment gap'', where most models fail to generatively outperform the linear separability of their representations. We find that the few models surpassing this ceiling do so via two mechanisms: by further refining visual representations into a more linearly separable format or by executing non-linear decision logic. We demonstrate that this bottleneck is not a fundamental limitation but a solvable visual alignment issue. Our method augments standard next-token prediction with a contrastive objective to restructure the visual manifold into a more one-dimensionally linear geometry, improving image-to-image comparison and enabling models to significantly surpass the LSC on abstract compositional reasoning tasks.

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

FORGE: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings

arXiv:2508.20330v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Still, learning-based approaches to accelerate combinatorial optimization often require solving a large number of difficult instances to collect training data, incurring significant computational cost. Existing learning-based methods require training dedicated models for each problem distribution, for each downstream task, severely limiting their scalability and generalization. We introduce Forge: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings, a framework that pre-trains a vector-quantized graph autoencoder on a large, diverse collection of mixed-integer programming (MIP) instances in an unsupervised manner, without relying on optimization solvers or optimal solutions. Vector quantization produces discrete code assignments that serve as a vocabulary for representing optimization instances. We evaluate Forge in both unsupervised and supervised settings. In the unsupervised setting, Forge embeddings effectively cluster unseen instances across problem domains and sizes. In the supervised setting, we fine-tune Forge embeddings and show that a single pre-trained model helps predicting both the integrality gap for cut-generation and variable hints for search guidance across multiple problem and size distributions. In both tasks, we improve the performance of a commercial optimization solver and outperform state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Finally, we open-source our training code, pre-trained Forge weights, and embeddings for multiple MIP distributions to foster further research in representation learning for optimization problems https://skadio.github.io/forge/

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

SPRI: SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization for Data-Constrained MoE Upcycling

arXiv:2606.16456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable efficient scaling, but training them from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. MoE upcycling mitigates this cost by converting pretrained dense models into sparse MoE models. However, existing upcycling methods typically rely on large-scale continued training and often perform poorly under data-constrained supervised adaptation, due to either homogeneous experts or overly disruptive perturbations to pretrained parameters. In this setting, effective upcycling must leverage pretrained weight structure while introducing sufficient diversity among routed experts. To this end, we propose SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization (SPRI), which distributes SVD-partitioned residuals derived from pretrained feed-forward network (FFN) weights across routed experts, introducing controlled expert diversity grounded in pretrained spectral structure. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy to improve adaptation stability. We evaluate SPRI on multilingual speech-to-text translation, where limited supervised data challenges MoE upcycling and multiple target languages provide natural routing heterogeneity. On CoVoST2 across 15 En-to-XX directions, SPRI improves average BLEU and COMET over fully fine-tuned dense models by 2.58 and 3.32 points, respectively, and outperforms the prior best MoE upcycling baseline by 3.39 BLEU and 4.34 COMET points.

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

SpatialClaw: Rethinking Action Interface for Agentic Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning, the ability to determine where objects are, how they relate, and how they move in 3D, remains a fundamental challenge for vision-language models (VLMs). Tool-augmented agents attempt to address this by augmenting VLMs with specialist perception modules, yet their effectiveness is bounded by the action interface through which those tools are invoked. In this work, we study how the design of this interface shapes the agent's capacity for open-ended spatial reasoning. Existing spatial agents either employ single-pass code execution, which commits to a full analysis strategy before any intermediate result is observed, or rely on a structured tool-call interface that often offers less flexibility for freely composing operations or tailoring the analysis to each task. Both designs offer limited flexibility for open-ended, complex 3D/4D spatial reasoning. We therefore propose SpatialClaw, a training-free framework for spatial reasoning that adopts code as the action interface. SpatialClaw maintains a stateful Python kernel pre-loaded with input frames and a suite of perception and geometry primitives, letting a VLM-backed agent write one executable cell per step conditioned on all prior outputs, enabling the agent to flexibly compose and manipulate perception results and adapt its analysis to both intermediate text and visual observations and the demands of each problem. Evaluated across 20 spatial reasoning benchmarks spanning a broad range of static and dynamic 3D/4D spatial reasoning tasks, SpatialClaw achieves 59.9% average accuracy, outperforming the recent spatial agent by +11.2 points, with consistent gains across six VLM backbones from two model families without any benchmark- or model-specific adaptation.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

UniECG: Understanding and Generating ECG in One Unified Model

Electrocardiogram (ECG) interpretation is a fundamental skill in medical education, yet students often need more than static examples to connect waveform evidence with diagnostic reasoning. This paper presents UniECG as a step toward interactive ECG education. UniECG supports two complementary learning interactions: given an ECG signal or image, it generates an evidence-based explanation; given a textual learning objective, it generates a corresponding ECG signal example for case-based learning. The model follows a two-stage design. First, it learns grounded ECG explanation from ECG signal–image–text data. Second, it introduces special ECG generation tokens and aligns their hidden representations with a pretrained text-conditioned ECG diffusion model, enabling controllable signal-level ECG generation. We evaluate UniECG through grounded ECG explanation and generation-oriented qualitative analysis, examining its potential to support explanation and case-based learning. UniECG is intended as an educational aid and a research step toward interactive AI-assisted ECG learning, rather than a clinically validated diagnostic system.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DDP.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics reveal nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response signatures in critical illness

Background: Plasma proteomics may identify host-response signatures in sepsis, but it is unclear whether extracellular vesicle (EV)-enriched plasma provides distinct or redundant information compared with plasma. We compared paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomes in critically ill patients with sepsis and critically ill non-sepsis controls (CINS). Methods: In this prospective observational study, paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma samples were analyzed from 56 critically ill adults, including 40 patients with sepsis and 16 CINS patients. Protein abundance was quantified using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Analyses compared proteomic depth, protein overlap, global concordance between compartments, and differential protein abundance between CINS and sepsis. Exploratory Gene Ontology enrichment was performed as a supplementary analysis. Results: EV-enriched plasma expanded proteomic detection, identifying 2,476 filtered proteins compared with 506 in plasma. Only 386 proteins were detected in both compartments, while 2,090 were unique to EV-enriched plasma and 120 were unique to plasma. Among shared proteins, plasma and EV-enriched plasma showed modest global concordance across critically ill patients (Spearman coeff = 0.322, p = 9.19 x 10^-11), with similar findings in sepsis alone. Differential abundance analysis identified 11 sepsis-associated proteins in plasma and 22 in EV-enriched plasma. Only SAA1, SAA2, and IGFBP6 were significant in both compartments. Exploratory pathway analysis supported acute-phase and inflammatory enrichment in plasma sepsis-associated proteins, while EV-enriched signals were directionally plausible but did not meet prespecified FDR thresholds. Conclusion: Plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics capture related but nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response information in critically ill patients.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Reversal Q-Learning

arXiv:2606.17551v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Iterative generative modeling techniques, such as flow matching, provide powerful tools to model complex behaviors for effective offline reinforcement learning (RL). In this work, we propose a new off-policy RL algorithm that trains a flow policy based on prior data. Our idea starts from the "expanded" Markov decision process (MDP) framework, which treats individual flow refinement steps as separate actions in an MDP. To enable off-policy RL within this framework, we apply two techniques: we generate virtual on-policy trajectories (by "reversing" flows) to make this framework compatible with prior data, and we apply a bias-and-variance reduction technique to mitigate the curse of horizon in off-policy RL. We call the resulting algorithm Reversal Q-learning (RQL). RQL has several advantages over previous flow-based RL methods: it does not suffer from backpropagation through time, makes better use of the learned value function, and directly trains the full, expressive flow policy. Through our experiments on 50 challenging simulated robotic tasks, we show that RQL leads to the best average offline RL performance compared to state-of-the-art flow-based offline RL algorithms.

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

Sustainable Materials Discovery in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21527v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed materials discovery, enabling rapid exploration of chemical space through generative models and surrogate screening. Yet current generative AI models for materials discovery, which now drive exploration of vast chemical and structural spaces, optimize candidates exclusively for structural stability and functional properties, with no integration of environmental assessment at any stage of the design loop. Prospective and ex-ante life cycle assessment methods exist and have been applied to emerging technologies, but they operate as standalone downstream analyses, not as active constraints within generative or active-learning pipelines. The result is that environmental feedback, even when produced, arrives after design decisions have been made rather than informing them. The disconnect between atomic-scale design and lifecycle assessment (LCA) reflects fundamental challenges: (i) data scarcity across heterogeneous sources, (ii) scale gaps from atoms to industrial systems, (iii) uncertainty in synthesis pathways, and (iv) the absence of frameworks that co-optimize performance with environmental impact. In this Perspective, we propose integrating upstream ML-assisted materials discovery with downstream LCA into the ML-LCA framework, comprising five components: information extraction for building materials-environment knowledge bases, harmonized databases linking properties to sustainability metrics, multi-scale models bridging atomic properties to lifecycle impacts, ensemble prediction of manufacturing pathways with uncertainty quantification, and uncertainty-aware optimization enabling simultaneous performance-sustainability navigation. Case studies spanning polymers, glass, photoresists, and cement demonstrate both necessity and feasibility while identifying material-specific integration challenges.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Measurement incompatibility and quantum steering via linear programming

arXiv:2506.03045v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of deciding whether a set of quantum measurements is jointly measurable is known to be equivalent to determining whether a quantum assemblage is unsteerable. This problem can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP). However, the number of variables and constraints in such a formulation grows exponentially with the number of measurements, rendering it intractable for large measurement sets. In this work, we circumvent this problem by transforming the SDP into a hierarchy of linear programs that compute upper and lower bounds on the incompatibility robustness with a complexity that grows polynomially in the number of measurements. The hierarchy is guaranteed to converge and it can be applied to arbitrary measurements – including non-projective POVMs (Positive Operator-Valued Measures) – in arbitrary dimensions. While convergence becomes impractical in high dimensions, in the case of qubits our method reliably provides accurate upper and lower bounds for the incompatibility robustness of sets with several hundred measurements in a short time using a standard laptop. We also apply our methods to qutrits, obtaining non-trivial upper and lower bounds in scenarios that are otherwise intractable using the standard SDP approach, although such bounds are significantly looser than the ones obtained in the qubit case. Finally, we show how our methods can be used to construct local hidden state models for states (i.e., to prove that a state cannot lead to steering under any possible local measurements), or conversely, to certify that a given state exhibits steering; for two-qubit quantum states, our approach is comparable to, and in some cases outperforms, the current best methods.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cross-Device Adaptation of Mirai for Mammography-Based Breast Cancer Risk Prediction

Fine-tuning can adapt pretrained medical imaging models to new clinical datasets, but device-specific domain shifts may limit generalizability. We evaluated Mirai, a mammography-based deep learning model for breast cancer risk prediction, in a large screening cohort containing Hologic and General Electric (GE) full-field digital mammography systems, including GE Premium View (GE PV) and Tissue Equalization (GE TE) post-processing software. Native Mirai showed lower performance on TE images than on Hologic or PV images. Fine-tuning on TE images improved TE performance, particularly for short-term risk prediction, but substantially reduced performance on Hologic images, consistent with catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate this effect, we developed a device-invariant model using interleaved multi-device sampling and conditional adversarial training. This approach largely restored Hologic performance while maintaining improved TE performance, providing better robustness across heterogeneous imaging platforms. Comparison of cumulative and annual risk AUCs over a five-year time horizon further showed that performance gains were driven mainly by short- and intermediate-term predictions. These findings highlight both the value and dangers of device-specific fine-tuning and support balanced domain-adaptation strategies for deploying mammography-based risk models across diverse clinical imaging environments.

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

Indexed Bellman Information Complexity

作者:

arXiv:2606.11171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop indexed Bellman information complexity, a representation-level theory of interactive decision making centered on information indices and reference histories. The representation strips away problem-specific syntax and retains only the ingredients needed for dynamic programming and information accounting, thereby unifying the earlier framework of indexed algorithmic information ratios (AIR). On the upper-bound side, regret is controlled by Bellman supersolutions or potential identities whose gradient bracket is paid for by indexed information. Upper-confidence-bound (UCB), estimation-to-decision/decision-estimation-coefficient (E2D/DEC), and adaptive-minimax-sampling or exploration-by-optimization (AMS/EBO) methods appear as three relaxations of this same identity. On the lower-bound side, the posterior-reference trajectory supplies both the information telescope and the ghost quantile of small-regret trajectories. The resulting critical radius in the lower bound is an effective-dimension-scale quantity, as in Fano and local-prior-mass lower bounds, rather than the constant radius of a two-point Le Cam argument. The examples show that DEC is best viewed as a one-step relaxation of indexed Bellman information complexity, not as a universally tight conversion mechanism. We illustrate the framework through several applications, with particular emphasis on kernel bandits. In this setting, the active action marginal provides a concrete basis for comparing UCB, E2D, and AMS/EBO.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Expanding gene regulatory networks from transcriptome data through graphical modeling with heterogeneous priors

Gene regulatory network inference is widely used to reconstruct large-scale networks and identify functional genes from transcriptome data. Meanwhile, in many biological fields, core regulatory genes have been extensively studied, leading to the establishment of small-scale gene regulatory networks, and novel genes connected to these networks remain to be identified. However, methods for expanding existing gene networks by identifying novel regulatory interactions, rather than reconstructing the entire network, are not well established. Here, we propose a method for gene network expansion that incorporates known regulatory relationships and evaluates each candidate gene individually to infer its regulatory connections to the existing network. Using simulated datasets from the DREAM4 benchmark and the PRECISE-1K experimental dataset, our method outperformed conventional methods by incorporating prior knowledge. In particular, it improved the ability to distinguish true regulatory interactions from indirect associations arising from strong correlations among genes in the existing network. The method also showed strong performance for interactions involving genes with high outdegree or centrality. Furthermore, it maintained stable performance as the size of the existing network increased and was robust to noise in prior information. These results demonstrate that our method provides an effective framework for expanding existing gene regulatory networks by leveraging prior knowledge.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Consistent Evaluation of Operators Involving the Position Operator in the Bloch Representation: Application to the Orbital Moment

arXiv:2606.11679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The position operator plays a central role in condensed-matter observables such as velocity, orbital moment, and electric polarization. In solid-state physics, the evaluation of operators incorporating the position operator has not reached a consensus, as observed in the operator-level discrepancy between the local circulation of Wannier functions and the self-rotation of wave packets. Here, to achieve a consistent evaluation of such operators, we propose three rules for evaluating operators involving the position operator in the Bloch representation. The rules are devised to satisfy physical conditions: independence from the choice of unit cell, preservation of Hermitian conjugacy for the product of operators, and recovery of the correct intraband velocity. We further address the gauge dependence of the position operator and introduce a scheme termed gauge filtration, which systematically removes gauge-dependent contributions from the operators containing the position operator. This methodology ensures that the quantities obtained from the operator evaluation correspond to observable physical phenomena. By applying our framework, we reconcile the results concerning the self-rotation of the wave packet and the local circulation of the Wannier function. We expect our proposal to establish a consistent framework for evaluating operators involving the position operator.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Real-world financial decision-making is a challenging problem that requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals derived from regulatory filings and trading signals computed from price dynamics. Recently, with advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), financial analysts have begun to use them for financial decision-making tasks. However, existing financial question-answering benchmarks for testing these models primarily focus on company balance sheet data and rarely evaluate reasoning about how company stocks trade in the market or their interactions with fundamentals. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning that integrates company fundamentals and trading signals. FinTradeBench contains 1,400 questions grounded in NASDAQ-100 companies over a ten-year historical window. The benchmark is organized into three reasoning categories: fundamentals-focused, trading-signal-focused, and hybrid questions requiring cross-signal reasoning. To ensure reliability at scale, we adopt a calibration-then-scaling framework that combines expert seed questions, multi-model response generation, intra-model self-filtering, numerical auditing, and human-LLM judge alignment. We evaluate 14 LLMs under zero-shot prompting and retrieval-augmented settings and witness a clear performance gap. Retrieval substantially improves reasoning over textual fundamentals, but provides limited benefit for trading-signal reasoning. These findings highlight fundamental challenges in the numerical and time-series reasoning for current LLMs and motivate future research in financial intelligence.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Structural Attention Tax: How Retrieval Format Hijacks In-Context Learning Independent of Content

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content – distinct from its semantic relevance – can independently distort the model's attention distribution. We identify and formalise a phenomenon we term the structural attention tax: knowledge graph (KG) triples, due to their relational delimiters and repeated slot patterns, capture 2-3x more attention per token than semantically equivalent natural-language text ($\hat{o}$(KG) $\approx$ 0.70 vs. $\hat{o}$(neutral) $\approx$ 0.25), compressing demonstration attention by up to 42% – regardless of whether the triples are relevant or noise. We develop a formal framework decomposing attention scores into semantic and structural components (Eq. 2), derive a compression bound (Proposition 1) connecting token-level format bias to demonstration attention loss, and show that the structural term governs how much attention is diverted while the semantic term governs whether this helps or hurts. This decoupling reveals two orthogonal axes for improving retrieval-augmented ICL: optimising retrieval quality (semantic axis) and reducing format-driven attention capture (structural axis). Empirically, across two model families (Mistral-7B, LLaMA-3-8B) and three QA benchmarks, we observe that source-task alignment dominates: task-matched BM25 retrieval achieves 58-62% on HotpotQA vs. ConceptNet's 25-27%, a >30 pp gap that dwarfs all gating strategies ($\leq$2 pp). We derive five structure-aware mitigation strategies from the framework, ranging from zero-cost prompt modifications to training-time regularisation; format flattening (S3) is validated by both accuracy and attention-level evidence from a verbalized-triple control, while structural dispersal (S1) yields mixed results that illuminate the challenges of format-level intervention.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A prototype differential atom interferometer for fundamental physics

Gravitational waves and ultralight dark matter are among the most compelling frontiers in fundamental physics, motivating proposals for very-long-baseline atom interferometerssuch as AION1, MAGIS2, AICE3 and AEDGE4 that aim to detect at frequencies at which ground-based5 and space-borne6 laser interferometers lose sensitivity. Very-long-baseline atom interferometers look for signals by comparing the quantum phase evolution of widely separated atomic ensembles interrogated by a common laser. However, their performance depends critically on suppressing noise sources, particularly laser phase noise. The experimental validation of such noise rejection remains an important challenge. Here we demonstrate a prototype differential atom interferometer based on the single-photon clock transition of fermionic 87Sr. Thus, we obtain a gradiometer configuration with a species intrinsically suited to kilometre-scale and space-baseline operation. The instrument operates at the standard quantum limit7 with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise. The differential configuration maintains quantum-limited sensitivity in the presence of several radians of artificially injected laser phase noise per shot, which emulates the conditions expected in a very-long-baseline atom interferometer. We also demonstrate the recovery of coherent oscillatory signals across a broad frequency range under fully phase-randomized conditions, a capability that is inaccessible to a single interferometer operating in the same regime. These results provide an experimental validation of the noise-immune measurement principle underlying very-long-baseline atom interferometers and mark an important step towards next-generation quantum sensors for gravitational-wave detection and searches for ultralight dark matter8,9. A prototype differential atom interferometer operates at the standard quantum limit with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise, achieving performance in line with the specifications for future long-baseline atom interferometers.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Measuring Semantic Progress in Multi-turn Dialogue via Information Gain

Evaluating multi-turn dialogue is challenging because quality emerges across turns rather than within individual responses. We focus on a key dimension of information-seeking dialogue: semantic progress, defined as the accumulation of new, question-relevant, and non-redundant information over the course of a conversation. We formalize semantic progress as question-conditioned uncertainty reduction and introduce an information-theoretic metric that approximates it in embedding space. Our main estimator uses a tractable Gaussian formulation with closed-form updates, while a complementary maximum-entropy argument shows why log-determinant structure arises more broadly when only second-order embedding information is retained. This formulation yields desirable theoretical properties, including monotonicity, additive decomposition of total information gain across turns, and diminishing returns for redundant evidence. Unlike LLM-as-a-judge approaches, our metric requires no autoregressive inference at evaluation time and is fully reproducible for a fixed embedding model. Experiments on MT-Bench, Chatbot Arena, and UltraFeedback show that the proposed metric achieves competitive agreement with human judgments despite targeting only semantic progress, with improved alignment on MT-Bench and UltraFeedback compared to several LLM-based judges. Notably, the method remains effective with lightweight embedding models under CPU-only execution, indicating that semantic progress can be captured without reliance on large model capacity.