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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Asymmetric quantum steering harvested near a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole

arXiv:2606.12766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the harvesting of quantum steering and its directional asymmetry between two Unruh-DeWitt detectors in a Lorentz-violating BTZ black hole spacetime. Since the detectors are located at different radial positions outside the black hole, they experience inequivalent local environments induced by gravitational redshift, causing Alice to undergo stronger effective thermal noise than Bob. Remarkably, we uncover a counterintuitive phenomenon in which the detector subjected to a higher effective temperature exhibits stronger steerability than the other one, revealing a nontrivial inversion of thermal intuition in curved spacetime. Furthermore, quantum steering survives only within a finite window of detector energy gaps and reaches its maximum within an optimal regime. We find that Lorentz violation suppresses steering most strongly near this optimal energy gap, indicating an enhanced sensitivity of maximal correlation extraction to symmetry breaking effects. Our results demonstrate that Lorentz violation acts as a geometric constraint on the quantum information capacity of spacetime, simultaneously restricting both the strength and the directionality of quantum correlations.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

pFedUL: Layer-Aware Federated Unlearning for Personalized Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.16304v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated unlearning (FU) enables the removal of specific data contributions from federated learning (FL) models to comply with regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). However, most existing FU methods are designed for the FedAvg paradigm, where all clients share a single global model. In practice, personalized federated learning (pFL) methods such as FedPer, FedRep, Ditto, and FedBN have become widely adopted due to their superior handling of non-IID data. These methods decompose the model into shared global layers and client-specific personalized layers, fundamentally altering the semantics of unlearning, yet this setting has received little attention. We formalize FU under the pFL paradigm, identifying a tension between unlearning completeness on shared layers and personalization preservation for remaining clients. We then propose pFedUL, a layer-aware selective unlearning framework comprising three components: (1) gradient-based layer-wise contribution attribution that separately quantifies the target client's influence on shared and personalized parameters, (2) adaptive selective unlearning that applies differentiated forgetting strategies across layer types, and (3) a lightweight recalibration protocol enabling remaining clients to restore personalization with minimal overhead. We further introduce two new metrics, Personalization Preservation Score (PPS) and Cross-client Fairness Index (CFI), to evaluate pFL-specific unlearning quality. Experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and FEMNIST under varying non-IID settings indicate that pFedUL achieves unlearning effectiveness comparable to full retraining while maintaining an average of 97.3\% personalized accuracy for remaining clients. Compared with six state-of-the-art FU methods adapted to the pFL setting, pFedUL consistently achieves superior personalization preservation.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Delayed acceptance sampling with Hamiltonian proposal subchains for random field materials inference

arXiv:2606.14743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper focuses on accelerating Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling in Bayesian inverse problems in which forward model evaluations dominate the computational cost. It builds on several established ingredients previously used in related scenarios: delayed acceptance, neural network surrogate models, Hamiltonian proposals, and proposal subchains. The main framework is the delayed-acceptance Metropolis-Hastings algorithm of Christen and Fox (2005). The first-stage proposal distribution is constructed from a subchain of Hamiltonian trajectories targeting the surrogate posterior. For each fixed surrogate model, the Hamiltonian subchain and delayed-acceptance correction define a kernel invariant with respect to the exact posterior. In the present work, the surrogate is updated only during a burn-in phase, after which the production run uses a fixed surrogate model. The sampling framework is implemented in Python using parallel processes. Several chains are generated in parallel and share a single surrogate model trained during burn-in on all collected data. The forward model is treated as a black box; therefore, the application area is broad. However, the main motivation is efficient solution of geotechnical inverse problems with material properties represented by Gaussian random fields. In this study, the sampling framework is applied to a geotechnical inverse problem in which hydraulic conductivity and porosity are modeled as non-stationary Gaussian random fields approximated using truncated Karhunen-Loeve expansions. Based on a precomputation, the truncation dimensions are chosen separately for hydraulic conductivity and porosity. The forward model outputs are pore pressure values at control points and selected observation times. These are compared with in situ pore pressure measurements collected over one year during the Tunnel Sealing Experiment in an underground laboratory in Canada.

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

Detect Before You Leap: Mirage Detection in Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) can produce confident visual answers even when the required visual evidence is missing, blank, or unrelated to the question. This failure mode, recently described as mirage (mirage2026), is especially concerning in medical and document VQA, where a plausible but visually ungrounded answer may be mistaken for image-based evidence. We study the complementary problem of pre-release mirage detection: given an image-question pair, determine whether the VLM should answer or abstain before generation. To that end, we propose a novel model-agnostic Text-Conditioned Layer-wise Internal Alignment (TC-LIA) method that probes patch-token representations across the layers of a CLIP ViT-H/14 vision encoder. The key idea is to project layer-wise image patch tokens into the final CLIP embedding space and measure their similarity with the question embedding, thereby tracking whether question-relevant visual evidence emerges across vision layers. TC-LIA summarizes this alignment trajectory using final image-text cosine similarity, late-layer top-k patch-text alignment, early-to-late gain, and layer-wise slope. These features are combined with pixel-statistic based blank/noise detection, zero-shot domain routing, and structured VLM self-assessment in an ensemble. Across five VQA domains with related, unrelated-real, and blank/noise inputs, and across twelve VLM backbones, Qwen2.5-VL-32B achieves the highest three-class detection accuracy of 94.7% with a 3.0% mirage rate, while Qwen2.5-VL-72B achieves 94.6% accuracy with a lower 2.8% mirage rate. Baseline mirage rates span 21.7-66.6%.

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

Vision-Language Models as Zero-Annotation Oracles in Histopathology

Foreground segmentation is the critical first step of every computational pathology pipeline, yet existing methods rely on hand-tuned heuristics or supervised models that overfit to narrow stain and scanner distributions, failing silently on specialised stains such as Jones silver or Elastica van Gieson. We propose a coarse-to-fine approach that recasts foreground segmentation as a visual perception task and leverages general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) as zero-annotation oracles. Our key insight is that tissue-versus-background discrimination is a natural-image recognition problem, not a histopathological one, so VLMs trained on internet-scale corpora generalise where domain-specific models cannot. We introduce Leica-75, a benchmark of 75 renal transplant whole-slide images spanning three stain families. On Leica-75, our method achieves the highest segmentation quality on out-of-distribution stains (Dice 0.858 +/- 0.027 on Jones, 0.853 +/- 0.041 on EVG) with 7x lower cross-stain variance than the best supervised baseline, while remaining competitive on in-distribution H&E. Few-shot prompting with automatically curated exemplars (Auto-context) rescues hard cases on Stress-32 (n=32), a curated stress-test subset (Dice 0.470 to 0.819 for the 2B model). VLM-based annotation review matches human expert consensus (kappa=0.989 for blur detection; mean precision/recall grading accuracy 0.708 vs. human 0.646 for segmentation mask review). The resulting pseudo-labels are used to distil lightweight student models that are as performant as the teacher model while running for a fraction of the cost. Our framework provides a principled, scalable solution to a persistent infrastructure bottleneck in digital pathology.

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

Physics in 2-Steps: Locking Motion Priors Before Visual Refinement Erases Them

Image-to-Video diffusion models leverage input images to generate visually stunning content, yet frequently produce motion that violates physical laws. We reveal a surprising finding: a 2-step generation often exhibits better physical consistency than a 50-step output from the same model. Through spectral analysis, we trace this to phase erosion during denoising; the phase degrades significantly (dropping by $\approx 18\%$ from step 2 to step 50), whereas the magnitude remains relatively stable. Building on this insight, we propose PhaseLock, a training-free framework that preserves the valid motion priors from few-step inference throughout the denoising trajectory. Rather than relying on full-step inference for physical consistency, PhaseLock extracts a motion prior from just 2 steps and enforces it onto high-fidelity generation via Latent Delta Guidance. Our approach effectively mitigates phase degradation, improving physical consistency by an average of 6.2 points across diverse models while largely maintaining visual fidelity, with negligible overhead ($1.06\times$ time, $1.02\times$ memory) and reduced reliance on expensive external guidance methods ($\sim5\times$ time). Project Page: https://dnwjddl.github.io/phaselock

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Patients With Personality: Realistic Patient Simulation through Controlled Diversity and Selective Disclosure

arXiv:2606.17441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating realistic patient interactions is a key requirement to testing clinical applications of LLMs at scale without time-consuming and expensive user studies. However, existing approaches often lack realism and controllability, often oversharing information unprompted, and failing to capture the wide variability of patient behavior. Here, we introduce PatientsWithPersonality (PWP), a patient simulation framework that generates realistic yet diverse virtual patient responses through explicit personality parametrization over a latent patient state. Grounded in HEXACO, a six-dimensional personality space used to quantify and parameterize human behavioral traits, our approach enables fine-grained control over conversational style, cooperativeness, and information disclosure within a unified framework. In a clinician evaluation, PWP is judged nearly as realistic as recorded human actors and clearly ahead of prior simulators, while being flagged as "too informative" far less often. Conditioning on HEXACO axes yields personas whose configured traits are recoverable by both clinicians and an autorater, span a substantially wider behavioral footprint than the closest baseline, and prevent oversharing. Altogether, our framework paves the way for more accurate and informative LLM benchmarking through our realistic and steerable patient simulator.

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

Hybrid Transformer-Mamba for Weakly Supervised Volumetric Medical Segmentation

Weakly supervised segmentation enables model training from plane-level labels. Existing methods often rely on 2D encoders, neglecting the volumetric nature of medical data. We propose TranSamba, a hybrid Transformer-Mamba architecture designed to capture 3D context via cross-plane modeling. TranSamba augments a Vision Transformer backbone with Cross-Plane Mamba blocks, leveraging linear-time modeling for efficient information exchange across neighboring planes. This exchange improves in-plane self-attention and subsequent attention maps for object localization. TranSamba maintains linear time complexity and constant space complexity with respect to the input volume depth. Extensive experiments on three datasets covering diverse modalities and pathologies show that TranSamba achieves state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the generalizable efficacy of cross-plane modeling. Code is available at: https://github.com/YihengLyu/TranSamba.

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

RealityBridge: Bridging Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting Driving Simulations and Real-World Videos

Long-tail hazardous scenarios are essential for safety-oriented autonomous driving, yet they are difficult to collect and reproduce at scale. Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulation offers a promising alternative by reconstructing real driving scenes and supporting controllable scene editing. However, edited 3DGS-rendered videos still suffer from a significant Sim-to-Real gap, including rendering artifacts, degraded foreground assets, inconsistent illumination, and temporal flickering. Existing restoration and video generation methods are insufficient for this task, as they often fail to jointly repair 3DGS-specific artifacts, improve visual realism, and ensure temporal consistency. To fill this gap, we propose RealityBridge, a structure-preserving and asset-aware Sim-to-Real framework for edited 3DGS driving videos. RealityBridge uses multimodal controls, including rendered videos, foreground masks, edge maps, and semantic masks, together with a lightweight GateNet for adaptive condition allocation across backbone layers. We further construct targeted training data and introduce autoregressive long-video training with reward-guided post-training to improve restoration quality, temporal stability, and hallucination suppression. Extensive experiments on internal and public driving datasets show that RealityBridge outperforms existing methods in artifact removal, illumination harmonization, and long-sequence temporal consistency.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Physiological Aging of the Respiratory System (PARS): from development to application

Background: Aging has a critical role in lung changes and the outcome of lung disease. Several lung aging equations have been proposed to measure deviation from physiological aging of the respiratory system. In this study, we aimed to develop a single measure of accelerated lung aging and show its application as a measure of lung aging. Method: We used a pre-bronchodilator pulmonary function test (PFT) from NHANES adult participants recruited from 2007 to 2011. We applied Klemera-Dubal Method (KDM) to four PFT measurements, FEV1, FVC, FEF25-75, and PEF, to calculate a measure of lung biological aging. Physiological Aging of the Respiratory System (PARS) was calculated from the residual method vs. chronological age. We tested the construct validity of PARS by measuring its association with risk factors of lung health. The prognostic validity was measured using a survival analysis. Sampling weights were applied to all analyses. Results: In 14,123 adult participants, the mean (SD) of accelerated lung age (PARS) was 0 (8.2) years. Participants with a history of asthma and emphysema had 4- and 10-year higher PARS. Cigarette smoking, lower socioeconomic status, black race, higher serum cadmium, and lower serum selenium and magnesium were associated with higher PARS. During 116 months of follow-up, PARS was associated with a higher mortality (HR = 1.06, 95%CI: 1.05-1.07 per year). Females with higher PARS had a higher risk of death (P for interaction < 0.001). Results were consistent across different subgroups and sensitivity analyses. Conclusion: PARS is a noninvasive lung aging marker and can be applied as a single measure of lung accelerated aging in the adult population. Its strong construct and predictive validity support its future application among different populations with and without lung disease.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Analysis of the asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In an asymmetric shelf shuffle, a deck of $n$ cards is dealt sequentially from the bottom and assigned one of the $m$ shelves uniformly at random. The card is placed at the top of the assigned shelf with probability $p$, and at the bottom of the assigned shelf with probability $(1-p)$. Analysis of the shelf shuffle has gained much attention recently, and the case $p=1/2$ was first treated by Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes [Ann. Appl. Prob. 23 (2013), no. 4, 1692–1720]. In this paper, we extend the analysis of the shelf shuffle to general $p\in (0, 1)$. In particular, we study the distribution of cycles, cycle lengths, number of descents, number of valleys, number of inversions, and the RSK shape of a permutation obtained from an asymmetric shelf shuffle. Our results extend the analysis of Diaconis–Fulman–Holmes to arbitrary $p$. Furthermore, our analysis of the distribution of descents and inversions is new even for $p=1/2$.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MAGE-RAG: Multigranular Adaptive Graph Evidence for Agentic Multimodal RAG in Long-Document QA

Long-document multimodal question answering requires a system to locate sparse evidence in long PDFs and integrate clues from text, tables, images, charts, and complex layouts. Existing RAG methods mostly rely on fixed Top-k retrieval over text chunks or pages. Text retrieval can compress the context but often loses visual and layout information; page-level visual retrieval preserves the original page, yet it also sends large irrelevant regions to the reader, leading to a static trade-off among evidence coverage, noise, and inference cost. This paper proposes MAGE-RAG, a multigranular adaptive graph evidence framework for long-document multimodal QA. MAGE-RAG uses page retrieval as the entry point for query-time evidence construction. Offline, it builds an evidence graph with page nodes and element nodes, encoding containment, reading order, layout adjacency, section hierarchy, and semantic-neighbor relations. At query time, an online evidence controller iteratively activates, opens, searches, and prunes evidence under explicit budgets. The resulting evidence subgraph is then rendered into structured multimodal reader input, allowing the LVLM to consume compact and relevant evidence within a limited context. On LongDocURL and MMLongBench-Doc, we establish a unified comparison and analysis protocol covering Direct MLLM, Text RAG, Page-level Visual RAG, and Graph/Agentic RAG. Experiments show that MAGE-RAG achieves 52.75 overall accuracy on LongDocURL, and 53.26 accuracy with 51.19 F1 on MMLongBench-Doc. Fine-grained breakdowns, budget-performance curves, ablations, and trace-based analysis further show that query-time evidence subgraph construction can balance dispersed evidence coverage with context-noise control. Our code is available at https://github.com/laonuo2004/MAGE-RAG.git.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Probing Low Frame Rate Degradation in Neural Audio Codecs

arXiv:2606.16969v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low frame rates in neural audio codecs are attractive for autoregressive speech synthesis, where the generation cost scales linearly with the sequence length. Recent work has demonstrated that codecs can operate at 12.5 Hz and below, but the mechanisms underlying low frame rate degradation remain insufficiently understood. We investigate these mechanisms through a controlled frame rate ablation. We reproduce a quality cliff at 6.25 Hz reported in previous works and evaluate candidate explanations: phonemic collisions and codebook saturation, neither of which shows evidence of a fundamental barrier. The cliff is instead caused by suboptimal training configuration: fixed clip duration during training yields too few tokens at low frame rates, starving the decoder of inter-token context. Once corrected, WER degrades smoothly with phonemic load down to 3.1 Hz and 1.6 Hz, suggesting the inference-time efficiency gains of low frame rate codecs are more accessible than previously assumed.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Posterior-calibrated multimodal motor states reveal longitudinal and imaging-associated heterogeneity in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) motor heterogeneity is commonly summarized by hard subtype labels, although clinical states vary longitudinally, severity can dominate unsupervised structure, and model uncertainty is rarely calibrated. We developed a posterior and refit-stability calibrated multimodal motor state framework that assigns probabilistic MDS-UPDRS-III motor states, aggregates them at the patient level, separates global burden from residual tremor-axial profile, and tests whether imaging can recover the resulting posterior distribution. In 29,366 aligned PPMI motor-posterior visits spanning 4,773 participant identifiers, patient-level state families were stable on average (modal-family fraction 0.925; 95% CI 0.921 - 0.930), but 25.5% of patients transitioned state over follow-up (95% CI 24.1 - 26.7%). PD-only cohort definitions produced smaller denominators and are reported as sensitivity cohorts with rerun calibration and imaging-posterior checks. Severity and covariates explained substantial motor-domain variance, especially bradykinesia (rsecond=0.850), but residual profile modeling retained five active components across total-severity, principal-component, leave-one-domain, non-target-burden, and clinical-only severity axes. Refit-stability calibration with 250 patient-blocked bootstrap refits showed high nominal posterior confidence (0.989) but lower empirical label consistency (0.849), quantifying overconfidence rather than hiding it. Patient-held-out temporal modeling predicted future axial burden (best XGBoost rsecond=0.605) and future state transition (XGBoost AUC=0.830; 95% CI 0.822 - 0.837). DaTSCAN plus FreeSurfer ROI features predicted patient-level soft motor posterior vectors (RF jsd=0.209; 95% CI 0.199 - 0.220; macro-AUROC=0.692), while severity/demographic-adjusted imaging features further improved soft posterior recovery (jsd=0.188). BioFIND transfer reproduced clinically meaningful endpoint gradients after state assignment in 225 external patients, supporting external face validity rather than definitive transportability. These results support PD motor phenotypic states as calibrated, dynamic, clinically interpretable profiles with convergent imaging associations, not as definitive biological subtypes.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Model-Driven Approach for Developing Families of Reinforcement Learning Environments

arXiv:2606.20324v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Virtual training environments are software-intensive systems in which reinforcement learning (RL) agents learn, adapt, and demonstrate meaningful behavior. Virtual training environments offer a safe and cost-efficient alternative to training agents in real-world settings. However, to converge, most realistic RL problems require training in multiple, mostly similar but slightly different environments - i.e., families of environment variants. The typical development process of environment families is a labor-intensive and error-prone manual endeavor that does not scale well. To alleviate these issues, in this paper, we propose a model-driven approach for developing families of RL training environments. To obtain the family of environments, we develop an approach and prototype tool. In our approach, a hybrid genetic algorithm - a combination of population-based global search and heuristic local search - generates environment families. Mutations and constraints are expressed as model transformations and are operationalized into a search process by a state-of-the-art model transformation engine. We demonstrate the soundness of our approach in a wildfire mitigation scenario and curriculum learning - a particular learning paradigm that relies on environment families.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scaling

We present MaxProof, a population-level test-time scaling framework for competition-level mathematical proof in the MiniMax-M3 series. M3 first trains three proof-oriented capabilities – proof generation, proof verification, and critique-conditioned proof repair – using a defense-in-depth generative verifier engineered for low false-positive rate. These capabilities are merged into a single released M3 model. At test time, MaxProof treats the model as a generator, verifier, refiner, and ranker, searches over a population of candidate proofs, and returns one final proof through tournament selection. With MaxProof test-time scaling, the M3 model reaches 35/42 on IMO 2025 and 36/42 on USAMO 2026, exceeding the human gold-medal threshold on both.

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

Tensor network compression using fluid dynamics as a testbed: Analytical foundations in one dimension

arXiv:2606.17064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High performance computers produce extreme-scale data sets that require sampling or compression if they are to be used to their full potential. Existing data compression techniques typically exploit features such as sparsity in the data, homogeneity in the data, or {\it a priori} knowledge of what subsets of data are of most interest. Fluid dynamics data in general do not exhibit these features and so are attractive test beds for generic compression techniques that are objective, robust, and tuneable with respect to information lost due to compression. Presented here is a method based on tensor networks, specifically matrix product states or tensor trains, that meets these requirements. The method is demonstrated for compression in one-dimension and is extensible to higher dimensionality. Lossless compression is demonstrated for random Fourier series for sufficiently high bond dimension of the tensor network, with the memory required to store the tensor network scaling directly proportional to the bond dimension. The lossy compression exhibited at lower bond dimension can be well within the relative error of many fluid simulations. The compression algorithm is tested for the time evolution of Burger's equation with excellent results. We additionally demonstrate the capability to perform computations in the compressed form through a tensor network periodic convolution that can be orders of magnitude faster than using fast Fourier transforms and the convolution theorem. In addition to being an attractive method for working with data sets generated by existing computers, the tensor network methods utilised are directly translatable to the emerging paradigm of quantum computing.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Representing Piecewise-Linear Functions by Functions with Minimal Arity

arXiv:2406.02421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Any continuous piecewise-linear function $F\colon \mathbb{R}^{n}\to \mathbb{R}$ can be represented as a linear combination of $\max$ functions of at most $n+1$ affine-linear functions. In our previous paper [``Representing piecewise linear functions by functions with small arity'', AAECC, 2023], we showed that this upper bound of $n+1$ arguments is tight. In the present paper, we extend this result by establishing a correspondence between the function $F$ and the minimal number of arguments that are needed in any such decomposition. We show that the tessellation of the input space $\mathbb{R}^{n}$ induced by the function $F$ has a direct connection to the number of arguments in the $\max$ functions.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Which Sections of a Research Paper Best Reveal Its Research Methods? Evidence from Library and Information Science

Research methods are essential carriers of knowledge contribution in academic papers. Automatic multi-label classification of research methods can support knowledge services such as method retrieval, review generation, and research intelligence analysis. While existing studies primarily rely on titles and abstracts, abstracts often provide only limited methodological information, whereas utilizing full-text content faces challenges related to excessive length and information redundancy. Therefore, this paper proposes a segment combination strategy by partitioning the full-text content according to its physical postion. Using an annotated corpus of 1,954 full-text articles from three representative journals in Library and Information Science (JASIST, LISR, and JDoc), we evaluate the classification performance of various segments and their combinations across multiple models. Experimental results indicate that methodological information is distributed unevenly within the full-text content, with the middle-to-late and final segments exhibiting greater discriminative power. Furthermore, integrating bibliographic metadata with cross-segment combination strategies effectively enhances classification performance.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

QMaxCal: Path-Space Regularization for Open Quantum Control via Girsanov's Theorem

arXiv:2606.19947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable quantum control in the presence of decoherence requires policies that combat the effect of environmental noise on the controlled dynamics. Open quantum systems under continuous monitoring generate classical measurement records whose drift depends on the noise experienced by the system; the records of two evolutions sharing the same decoherence channels differ only in this drift, so Girsanov's theorem yields a closed-form, differentiable estimator of the KL divergence between their trajectory distributions. We instantiate this estimator with two physically motivated reference measures, yielding two regularizers that both drive the system toward states where the effects of decoherence are minimal: the Wiener KL (KL_W), which is empirically more effective under certain conditions on the noise model, and the drift-variance regularizer (R_DV), which works for all noise models. Both are qualitatively distinct from existing penalties on control fluence or smoothness: they penalize the observable consequences of control on the decoherence channels rather than the control amplitude itself. The regularizers outperform unregularized gradient-based and reinforcement-learning baselines across a range of open quantum systems – including single- and multi-qubit benchmarks and a multi-qubit chain calibrated to a published snapshot of the IBM Kingston processor – along several axes of evaluation: final-state fidelity, robustness to mismatch in the assumed noise model (gains grow from +17 pp at training noise to +27 pp under 2.5x noise mismatch), and occupation of forbidden states. The regularizers reduce infidelity by up to 50%, with ~16% gains on the calibrated IBM Kingston chain.

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

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

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.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Charging Quantum Batteries with Chiral Squeezing

arXiv:2606.16764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a quantum-battery charger based on a driven bosonic Kitaev chain (BKC), where chiral squeezing converts passive input fluctuations into ordered, non-passive battery states. While a coherent input pulse exhibits phase-sensitive chiral transport, the charging dynamics is dominated by bidirectionally propagating fluctuations that are amplified and squeezed into orthogonal quadratures at opposite chain ends. In contrast to conventional phase-preserving amplifiers, our scheme stores largely extractable energy and achieves a work-like signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) near unity, even in the presence of thermal noise and moderate symmetry-preserving disorder.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Eigen-Spike Emergence and Quadratic Equivalents for Conjugate Kernels on Nonlinearly Separable Data

arXiv:2605.29669v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work in random matrix theory (RMT) has developed the notion of deterministic equivalents: typically linear surrogate models that approximate the spectral behavior of large nonlinear random matrices, such as nonlinear feature maps in neural networks (NNs). Such equivalents make theoretical predictions tractable by reducing a complex model to a simpler one with properties that fall under the umbrella of classical RMT tools. However, this leaves open the question of whether this idealized linear equivalence remains meaningful for classification of high-dimensional nonlinearly separable data. Motivated by this, we consider the conjugate kernel (CK), which is the nonlinear feature map of a one-layer feedforward NN, under a canonical nonlinearly separable dataset for the XOR problem; and we use the study of informative outlier eigenvalues in the CK and whether their corresponding eigenvectors asymptotically align with XOR labels as a proxy for nonlinear learnability. We develop a robust quadratic equivalent of the CK matrix that enables a precise analysis of emergent informative spikes, as one modifies various knobs common in ML practice: sample complexity, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), nonlinear activation choice, and pretrained features. We identify regimes in which these knobs move the CK beyond the linear equivalent and produce BBP-type transitions to label-aligned outlier eigenspaces. Our analysis helps bring deterministic-equivalence tools from RMT to bear on problems of practical relevance in ML.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

VeriGeo: Controllable Geometry Question Generation with Numerical and Analytical Verification

arXiv:2606.14176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geometry problem generation is useful for AI-assisted education and multimodal mathematical reasoning, but reliable synthesis remains difficult because the problem statement, diagram, constraints, and solution should be mutually consistent. Existing methods often trade off controllability and reliability: seed-based rewriting is flexible but weakly verifiable, whereas diagram-first construction improves validity but is less suited to arbitrary user-specified constraints. We introduce VeriGeo, a controllable geometry generation framework grounded in executable reasoning traces. Given user constraints such as target concepts and difficulty, an Author agent generates a problem and diagram, and a Solver agent produces a proof-aligned solution. Both agents use a shared action sequence that connects natural language, diagrams, geometric constraints, and proof steps into a verifiable representation. A three-stage pipeline checks numerical consistency, analytical realizability, and global consistency, using verification-guided reflection to repair recoverable failures and reject unrecoverable ones. Across five LLM backbones, raw generations frequently fail these checks, while VeriGeo repairs a substantial fraction of the invalid attempts. Supervised fine-tuning on 8.7k examples generated by VeriGeo achieves the best reported GeoQA performance among end-to-end multimodal LLM-based solvers, and obtains strong results on PGPS9K and MathVista-GPS, demonstrating the effectiveness of verified synthetic data for improving multimodal geometry reasoning.

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

ReNikud: Audio-Supervised Hebrew Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion

Grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion for Modern Hebrew is needed for applications like text-to-speech (TTS), but is challenging due to the language's abjad writing system, which leaves vowels largely unwritten, creating substantial ambiguity. Standard approaches first predict vowel diacritics (nikud) to produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, but this is limited: vocalization data is scarce and laborious to produce, it does not specify features such as lexical stress, and it reflects formal grammatical rules rather than everyday spoken pronunciation. Direct sequence-to-sequence IPA prediction, meanwhile, struggles on limited data and fails to exploit the character-level alignment characteristic of abjads. Our method, ReNikud, overcomes these limitations with two key insights: (1) Weak audio supervision via a phoneme-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) pseudo-labeling pipeline on thousands of hours of unlabeled Hebrew audio, yielding phonemic transcriptions that reflect natural spoken norms without manual annotation. (2) A pseudo-vocalization architecture that predicts IPA phonemes at each character position, enforcing character-level alignment as an inductive bias. Results on existing Hebrew G2P benchmarks and the new targeted MILIM benchmark for spoken Hebrew show that ReNikud surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods. We will release our code and trained models to support further work on Hebrew TTS and speech technologies.