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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The t-Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond Model

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we consider an Aztec diamond model split into two unequal regions which are asymptotically fixed in size. Each region is weighted with a distinct two-periodic weighting. We refer to this model as the t-split two-periodic Aztec diamond, to signify its difference from the previous work title Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond, where the model was split into two equal regions. We derive an integral expression for the correlation kernel of the model and give a partial description of the scaling limit behavior, along with a conjecture for the remainder. We refer to the larger and smaller sides of the model as the dominant and non-dominant sides, and to the location of the weight change as the interface. The dominant side exhibits a limit shape that depends only on its own weighting and is identical to that of the two-periodic Aztec diamond, while the non-dominant side appears to have a novel limit shape that depends on both weightings and the location of the interface. Lastly, we consider the complete limit shape in the case where the dominant side two-periodic parameter goes to 0.

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

From Frames to Temporal Graphs: In-Context Egocentric Action Recognition with Vision-Language Models

Action reasoning in egocentric video requires capturing fine-grained transitions of hand-object interactions, a task where general-purpose Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle when operating directly on raw pixels. We propose to decouple visual perception from symbolic reasoning by converting videos into Temporal Action Graphs. In a multi-stage prompting pipeline, we first generate dense natural language narratives over short temporal windows as a semantic bottleneck, then formalize them into structured, open-vocabulary graph representations. On the EGTEA and Epic-Kitchens-100 datasets, the symbolic representation unlocks efficient in-context learning: few-shot graph demonstrations yield substantial accuracy gains over zero-shot frame and graph-based inference alike. Even in the zero-shot setting, graph-based reasoning remains competitive with pixel-based inference despite potential pretraining contamination favoring the latter. Across 11 open-weight VLMs from 6 model families ranging from 2B to 235B parameters, our findings indicate that current VLMs are more effective as symbolic reasoners than as direct visual observers. By projecting video into the language domain, we provide a scalable, fine-tuning-free alternative to end-to-end approaches that better leverages these models' latent reasoning strengths. The code will be made public.

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

Integrated Marketing Attribution: A Bayesian Framework for Privacy-Safe Granular Measurement Anchored in MMM

arXiv:2606.16878v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retail marketing measurement increasingly requires granular campaign-level insights without relying on user-level tracking. However, the two dominant approaches, Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA), often produce fragmented insights. MMM is privacy-safe and robust for channel-level planning but is too coarse for campaign optimization, while MTA provides granular attribution but has become less reliable under increasing privacy restrictions. We propose Integrated Marketing Attribution (IMA), a unified framework that combines MMM with channel specific Bayesian attribution models to derive campaign-level effects from aggregated data. By leveraging MMM-informed priors, IMA delivers granular, privacy-safe attribution while preserving consistency with MMM.

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

Taming I2V models for Image HOI Editing: A Cognitive Benchmark and Agentic Self-Correcting Framework

Current image editing methods excel at static attributes but fail at complex Human-Object Interactions (HOI), a critical challenge unaddressed by existing benchmarks that conflate HOI with static attributes, relying on global metrics incapable of simultaneously assessing dynamic interaction validity and entangled human-object pair preservation. Thus, we first introduce HOI-Edit, a comprehensive benchmark with three progressive cognitive levels, which features an automated metric HOI-Eval that reliably evaluates instance-level interaction by letting VLM Q&A after thinking with images containing grounded Human-Object pairs. Considering the task's essence of remodeling dynamic relationships, we benchmark Image-to-Video (I2V) models, finding them inherently suited for dynamic editing due to their temporal generation capabilities. Crucially, beyond superior performance, this capability provides a "replay of the failure process," offering unique diagnosability into why errors occur. We thus propose SCPE (Self-Correcting Process Editing), a novel, agentic self-correcting framework that constrains the generation of I2V models through iteratively refined prompts, enabling the generated videos to more accurately present the target HOI. Extracted frames from these videos are the final editing results. On HOI-Edit, SCPE achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) editing models like Nano Banana on interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/HOI-Edit.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Transformer-Based Warm-Starting for Feasible and Optimal Terminal Approach to Tumbling Objects with Space Manipulators

arXiv:2606.17317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time trajectory generation for on-orbit robotic servicing is challenging due to the nonlinear coupling between spacecraft bus motion, manipulator dynamics, visibility cone, and trajectory-level safety constraints. This paper studies learning-based warm-starting for sequential convex programming (SCP) in the terminal approach of a space manipulator toward a tumbling target. The proposed framework decomposes the problem into a system center-of-mass translational planning stage and a coupled attitude–manipulator torque-allocation stage, and applies a causal transformer warm-start to the latter, which constitutes the dominant computational bottleneck. Linear and flow matching action decoders are compared under different action-chunking and training dataset sizes, and the resulting warm-starts are evaluated under both cost-optimal and feasibility projection using SCP. Across 300 held-out scenarios, the learned warm-start reduces the second-stage SCP iteration count by up to 28% and the runtime by 23% while preserving the final control-cost distribution. When the learned warm-starts are used for nonconvex feasibility projection, they nearly halve the runtime relative to cost-optimal SCP, while avoiding the catastrophic high-cost tail behavior observed when initialized heuristically. These results indicate that sequence-model warm-starts can improve both the computational efficiency and trajectory robustness of optimization-based terminal guidance for space manipulation.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

E2Vec: Feature Embedding with Temporal Information for Analyzing Student Actions in E-Book Systems

Digital textbook (e-book) systems record student interactions with textbooks as a sequence of events called EventStream data. In the past, researchers extracted meaningful features from EventStream, and utilized them as inputs for downstream tasks such as grade prediction and modeling of student behavior. Previous research evaluated models that mainly used statistical-based features derived from EventStream logs, such as the number of operation types or access frequencies. While these features are useful for providing certain insights, they lack temporal information that captures fine-grained differences in learning behaviors among different students. This study proposes E2Vec, a novel feature representation method based on word embeddings. The proposed method regards operation logs and their time intervals for each student as a string sequence of characters and generates a student vector of learning activity features that incorporates time information. We applied fastText to generate an embedding vector for each of 305 students in a dataset from two years of computer science courses. Then, we investigated the effectiveness of E2Vec in an at-risk detection task, demonstrating potential for generalizability and performance.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

RoboNaldo: Accurate, Stable and Powerful Humanoid Soccer Shooting via Motion-Guided Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets. Motion tracking-driven reinforcement learning (RL) provides stability in whole-body movement coordination, but a fixed reference makes it hard to adapt to varied ball positions and strike timings; in contrast, task reward-driven RL struggles to explore and discover valid kicks from scratch. We therefore introduce RoboNaldo, a three-stage motion-guided curriculum RL framework for high-impulse humanoid interaction. A single human-kick reference is used as a scaffold and progressively shifts optimization towards shooting performance. The curriculum first learns a stable whole-body kicking prior, then adapts the kick to free-kick settings where the ball is stationary at random positions, and finally extends it to moving-ball shooting through a locomotion-command and kick-trigger interface. A high-level heuristic planner controls this interface during training, while alternative high-level controllers can drive the same low-level policy at inference. In simulation, RoboNaldo demonstrates free-kick shot error 48.6% lower and shoot velocity 2.96x than prior work baselines. In real world on a Unitree G1 with onboard perception, RoboNaldo attains 0.73 m and 0.86 m average target shooting error from 3 m away in free-kick and moving-ball cases, accordingly. And the post-contact ball velocity reaches 13.10 m/s, which is 59-71% of reported professional open-play shot speed. Project page: https://opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Multi-objective design of photon blockade for bright single-photon sources

arXiv:2606.20160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality single-photon sources, realized through saturable emitters, photon blockade, or heralded pair generation, are indispensable building blocks for photonic quantum platforms. Although these mechanisms suppress multiphoton emission through distinct principles typically captured by analytical models, their practical implementation is constrained by conflicting requirements for purity, brightness, and indistinguishability, which must be balanced within high-dimensional design landscapes. Here, we propose a computational framework for optimizing competing metrics of single-photon sources. Building on a Liouville-space adjoint formulation that efficiently evaluates multiple objectives in Markovian open quantum systems, we develop a Jacobian-based update, which ensures first-order monotonic reduction of multi-objective costs. By incorporating simulated annealing to escape gradient-vanishing plateaus, our framework achieves a design success rate of nearly 60 % for photon blockade with g2(0) smaller than 0.1 and theoretically bounded brightness across a broad parameter space, without any analytical guidance. This framework provides a general recipe for multi-objective design of open quantum systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Rescaling MLM-Head for Neural Sparse Retrieval

arXiv:2606.18811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learned sparse retrieval (LSR) models such as SPLADE have traditionally used BERT-style masked language models as backbone encoders. A natural expectation is that replacing BERT with stronger pretrained encoders should improve retrieval effectiveness. However, we find that under standard SPLADE training recipes, backbones with large MLM-head L2 norms can suffer performance degradation and even training collapse under standard SPLADE training recipes. We identify this failure as a scale mismatch in the MLM head: SPLADE directly uses MLM-head outputs to construct sparse lexical representations, and query-document relevance is computed by an unnormalized dot product over these representations. As a result, an inflated MLM-head scale can amplify sparse activations, distort matching scores, and destabilize contrastive training under common training settings. To address this issue, we introduce a simple initialization-time correction that rescales the MLM-head projection by a constant factor before SPLADE training. This zero-cost adjustment improves training stability without modifying the model architecture or training objective. Across both in-domain and out-of-domain retrieval benchmarks, this simple correction substantially improves large-norm backbones such as ModernBERT and Ettin, turning unstable training runs into competitive sparse retrievers. In several settings, the corrected models further match or surpass the classic BERT-SPLADE baseline. These findings suggest that the bottleneck in adapting pretrained encoders to LSR is not encoder capacity alone, but the calibration of the MLM-head scale used to construct sparse lexical representations.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Reverse Telescoping Coordinate System for Positive Definite Matrices: Geometry, Computation, and Generative Modeling

arXiv:2606.15442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We design a new unconstrained coordinate system where a $p\times p$ symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrix $\Theta$ is represented by a reverse telescoping map $\Theta(x)=\rm{RT}(x)$, with $x=(v,d,r)\in\mathbb{R}\times\mathbb{R}^{(p-1)}\times\mathbb{R}^{p(p-1)/2}$, representing respectively the log volume or log determinant; and the shape, as encoded by log relative diagonal scales and partial covariances among the nodes. This construction results in important properties not available in other charts, e.g., matrix logarithm, such as Jacobian depending on only the log-determinant. A useful feature of our construction is $x$ contains a lossless symbolic representation of both the matrix and its inverse. Many important computations involving a matrix and its inverse can be performed in $O(p^2)$ in the transformed domain, while it is the rendering of results in matrix forms (on demand) that must incur an $O(p^3)$ cost. Moreover, two unit-determinant matrices in the transformed domain can be joined by a straight line with pathwise unit determinant. For generative modeling, this allows designing a split volume-shape flow model trained by conditional flow matching for transporting the shape over the unit-determinant path, with a separate one-dimensional flow for transporting the volume or the determinant. The forbidding SPD constraint, tamed thus into a powerful guiding force, leads to the surprising insight that it is in some sense easier to design a volume-normalized shape flow for SPD compared to the unconstrained $\mathbb{R}^{p\times p}$, with no intrinsic notion of volume to aid normalization, unlike the determinant of SPD matrices. We apply our construction for up to $p=200$ in generative modeling of SPD matrices on a difficult synthetic bimodal target, and in generating brain connectivity networks by models trained on fMRI data; as well as in intrinsic diffusion on the SPD manifold.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Towards practical PDMP sampling: Metropolis adjustments, locally adaptive step-sizes, and NUTS-based time lengths

arXiv:2503.11479v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Piecewise-Deterministic Markov Processes (PDMPs) hold significant promise for sampling from complex probability distributions. However, their practical implementation is hindered by the need to compute model-specific bounds. Conversely, while Hamiltonian Monte Carlo (HMC) offers a generally efficient approach to sampling, its inability to adaptively tune step sizes impedes its performance when sampling complex distributions like funnels. To address these limitations, we introduce three innovative concepts: (a) a Metropolis-adjusted approximation for PDMP simulation that eliminates the need for explicit bounds without compromising the invariant measure, (b) an adaptive step size mechanism compatible with the Metropolis correction, and (c) a No U-Turn Sampler (NUTS)-inspired scheme for dynamically selecting path lengths in PDMPs. These three ideas can be seamlessly integrated into a single, `doubly-adaptive' PDMP sampler with favourable robustness and efficiency properties.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Multi-Source Cybersecurity Logs: An ATT&CK-Labeled Dataset and SLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.18190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-stage cyberattacks span system, network, and browser logs. Detecting them requires correlating events across all three sources. Machine learning methods can learn these cross-source patterns, but they need labeled multi-source data. Existing public datasets fall short. Network-only datasets such as CICIDS and UNSW-NB15 miss host and browser activity. Host-focused datasets such as LMDG and CICAPT-IIoT lack browser telemetry. ATLAS includes all three sources but labels events only as malicious or benign, without MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) technique granularity. No public dataset combines all three sources with per-entry ATT&CK technique labels. We close the gap by building a multi-source log dataset of 870 sessions (70 attack, 800 benign) and approximately 2.3 million events. We captured system, network, and browser activity simultaneously on Windows endpoints. We labeled malicious events with ATT&CK technique IDs, covering 12 tactics and 53 techniques. We generated all attack data using real tools, including Remote Access Trojan (RAT), Command and Control (C2) tunnels, and cloud exfiltration. To demonstrate learnability, we fine-tuned three Small Language Models (SLMs) (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Llama-3.2-3B, Phi-4-Mini) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We compared each against its base variant across ten metrics on two tasks: chunk classification and ATT&CK technique identification. Fine-tuning improved every model on every metric. Chunk classification accuracy rose from approximately 8% in the base variants to between 90% and 97% after fine-tuning. Technique identification remained challenging, with the best exact-match accuracy at 42%, although high partial-match scores show the models captured most of the underlying reasoning.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Decoding the Genetic Architecture of Autistic Traits in the Aging Population

Autism research has mostly focused on diagnostic frameworks in childhood. However, autistic traits including social skills, communication, attention switching, attention to detail, and imagination may also vary in many undiagnosed individuals beyond childhood, and the genetic architecture of autistic traits in undiagnosed aging adults remains poorly understood. Here, we performed an exome-wide association study of autistic traits in adults aged >=40 from the UK Biobank (n = 161,269) and independently validated key findings in the SPARK cohort (n = 142,357). We identified exome-wide significance at 17q21.31, represented by a lead variant associated with social skills (rs199533, beta = 0.081, P = 2.04e-11). In addition, we identified an independent signal for communication (rs12632110, beta = 0.042, P = 3.07e-12) and two independent signals for attention switching (rs690733, beta = 0.046, P = 4.26e-12; rs2164272, beta = -0.047, P = 1.73e-12). Gene-based analyses further implicated loss-of-function variation in ZSCAN2 (beta = 1.00, P = 2.44e-6), which was associated with communication differences. Enrichment analyses revealed preferential expression of implicated genes in the cerebral cortex, while phenotypic and neuroimaging analyses linked those variants to cortical brain structure and regional volume. Taken together, these findings delineate the genetic architecture of autistic traits in the aging population and link genetic variation to downstream molecular and neuroanatomical mechanisms.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

On Subquadratic Architectures: From Applications to Principles

arXiv:2606.12364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

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

CODEBLOCK: Learning to Supervise Code at the Right Granularity

arXiv:2606.18286v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of code LLMs typically applies uniform cross-entropy loss to all response tokens, implicitly assuming that every token provides equally useful learning signal. Recent token-level selection methods challenge this assumption in natural-language SFT by supervising only high-value tokens. However, directly transferring token-level masking to code can break syntactically and semantically coherent program units, because code depends on structural completeness and definition-use relations. We therefore propose CodeBlock, a structure-aware sparse supervision framework that selects structure-complete code evidence rather than isolated tokens. CodeBlock first selects high-quality instruction-response pairs, then partitions code responses into syntactically coherent coding items, estimates their utility by aggregating generalized cross-entropy over core logic tokens, and reranks them with data-flow reach and bridge signals to prioritize blocks that propagate or connect important program dependencies. During training, the full response remains available as context, while loss is applied only to selected code items and informative natural-language tokens. Experiments on six code-generation benchmarks show that CodeBlock achieves stronger average pass@1 than full-token SFT and competitive selection baselines, while using only 1.9% of supervised response tokens.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Promera: a unified model for biomolecular structure prediction, filtering, and design

Generative models have become staple tools for modeling and designing biomolecular structures. However, although these tools have improved in structural prediction accuracy, their ability to filter designed binders—an essential use case—remains insufficient; whereas design methods have focused more on unconstrained binder generation rather than capabilities enabled by controllable design. We introduce Promera, a unified generative model that combines all-atom structure prediction with improved filtering and controllable design. We find that Promera's confidence metrics are more accurate for filtering binders from non-binders for both miniproteins and nanobodies, while its co-folding performance surpasses popular open-source models (OpenFold3-p2, Boltz-2) on therapeutically relevant categories. As a design model, Promera generates binders by predicting masked protein sequences with optional epitope, paratope, and template constraints. Remarkably, our nanobody designs match the in silico success rates from backprop-based techniques (mBER) when evaluated under co-folding confidence filters. We further provide two in silico demonstrations of the the versatile capabilities of our design method: epitope targeting of the Andes hantavirus glycoprotein with VHHs and active state stabilization of the beta-2 andrenergic GPCR. We conclude by proposing a scaling law for co-folding models, suggesting a path for further performance improvement.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Relational Structural Causal Models

arXiv:2606.14892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An artificial intelligence must have a model of its environment that is causal, supporting reasoning about interventions and counterfactuals, and also combinatorial, supporting generalization to unseen combinations of objects. In this work, we formally study when and how such a model can be learned. We develop relational structural causal models, extending structural causal models (Pearl 2009) to settings where objects and their relations vary. First, we show how answers to not only causal but also observational queries about unseen combinations of objects can not be identified without further assumptions. To enable such identification–including in the presence of unobserved confounding–we define relational causal graphs and derive symbolic identification criteria. Finally, we propose relational neural causal models, a provably correct approach that outperforms non-relational baselines on simulated traffic scenes with varying cars, signals, and pedestrians.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Deciphering cell type-specific causal genetic effects on brain imaging-derived phenotypes and disorders with single-cell Mendelian randomization

Authors:

by Anyi Yang, Xingzhong Zhao, Xing-Ming Zhao, Yucheng T. Yang Reconstructing causality routes from genetic effects to complex phenotypes in particular cell types is crucial for understanding biological mechanisms underlying the brain-associated phenotypes including imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs), and brain disorders and behaviors (DBs). Here, we develop a single-cell Mendelian randomization framework to infer cell type-specific causal relationships between gene expression and diverse brain-associated complex phenotypes by integrating single-cell expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTLs) and genome-wide association study findings. We identifiy a set of 254 and 217 cis-eQTL target genes (eGenes) that may have causal effects on 112 IDPs and 26 DBs in eight cell types, respectively. These causal eGenes exhibit strong cell type specificity and varied pleiotropy among different types of brain-associated phenotypes. Further integrative analysis reveals putative causality routes among cell type-specific causal eGenes and brain-associated complex phenotypes. Finally, we characterize the spatiotemporal expression patterns of these causal eGenes, and highlight the coordinated associations of the brain-associated phenotypes based on the expression of their causal eGenes. Overall, our study presents a large-scale analysis of the genetic effects of brain structures, disorders and behaviors, providing a catalog of cell type-specific causal eGenes.

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

Which Models Perform Better in Inheritance Reasoning?

This paper presents the participation of team PSL in the QIAS 2026 Shared Task on Arabic Islamic inheritance reasoning. The task evaluates the ability of large language models to solve inheritance cases that require legal interpretation, multi-step reasoning, and precise numerical computation. We compare commercial and open-source models under a unified prompting strategy to assess their effectiveness in structured legal reasoning with minimal task-specific adaptation. \\ Our results show a clear gap in reliability between the two model families. Commercial models demonstrate stronger performance in identifying eligible heirs, applying exclusion rules, and maintaining consistency across reasoning steps. In contrast, open-source models exhibit greater instability, particularly in cases involving dependent legal decisions and fractional share adjustments. The best performance is achieved by Gemini 2.5 Flash, with an MRE of $0.989$.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HACMatch Semi-Supervised Rotation Regression with Hardness-Aware Curriculum Pseudo Labeling

Regressing 3D rotations of objects from 2D images is a crucial yet challenging task, with broad applications in autonomous driving, virtual reality, and robotic control. Existing rotation regression models often rely on large amounts of labeled data for training or require additional information beyond 2D images, such as point clouds or CAD models. Therefore, exploring semi-supervised rotation regression using only a limited number of labeled 2D images is highly valuable. While recent work FisherMatch introduces semi-supervised learning to rotation regression, it suffers from rigid entropy-based pseudo-label filtering that fails to effectively distinguish between reliable and unreliable unlabeled samples. To address this limitation, we propose a hardness-aware curriculum learning framework that dynamically selects pseudo-labeled samples based on their difficulty, progressing from easy to complex examples. We introduce both multi-stage and adaptive curriculum strategies to replace fixed-threshold filtering with more flexible, hardness-aware mechanisms. Additionally, we present a novel structured data augmentation strategy specifically tailored for rotation estimation, which assembles composite images from augmented patches to introduce feature diversity while preserving critical geometric integrity. Comprehensive experiments on PASCAL3D+ and ObjectNet3D demonstrate that our method outperforms existing supervised and semi-supervised baselines, particularly in low-data regimes, validating the effectiveness of our curriculum learning framework and structured augmentation approach.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Graph Reinforcement Learning for Calibration-Aware Quantum Circuit Routing

arXiv:2606.12816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum circuit routing is a key step in compiling programs for noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors. Routes that appear efficient by standard overhead metrics can still lose fidelity when they pass through poorly calibrated couplers. We study a calibration-aware graph reinforcement-learning router that uses same-day IBM Heron r2 calibration data to choose hardware-edge SWAPs. We train the policy with proximal policy optimization and evaluate it with exact simulated fidelity across nine Munich Quantum Toolkit (MQT) Bench circuits and three calibration snapshots. Across these evaluations, pooled mean exact fidelity is $0.727$, compared with $0.440$ for SABRE-best20 and $0.481$ for target-aware SABRE. Fidelity gains come with higher routed two-qubit counts and are concentrated in the 5q and 8q circuit families; under the fixed tree action graph, all 10q families favor SABRE-best20. Overall, our results show that calibration-aware learned routing can improve fidelity beyond gate-count-driven compilation.

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

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Testing the problem of time with cold atoms

arXiv:2509.07745v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We realize a cold-atom system to quantitatively test relational constructions of time. A well-isolated atomic Bose-Einstein condensate evolves in a conservative trap that is partitioned by a thin optical barrier into an observed and unobserved sector, with negligible dissipation on the experimental timescale. Motivated by relational-time approaches discussed in the Wheeler-DeWitt framework, we ask whether the dynamics of the observed sector can be ordered using only internal degrees of freedom. To this end, we construct an entropic time from an experimentally defined coarse-grained entropy, and demonstrate that it can robustly order the events in the observed sector across repeated cycles of expansion and recollapse. We finally derive an effective Schroedinger equation parameterized by this internal time and show that it is able to reproduce the measured evolution. These results establish a controlled experimental setting in which relational-time constructions can be quantitatively tested.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Digital programming of spin correlations in a fermionic lattice quantum simulator

arXiv:2606.13772v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Analog quantum simulation provides a highly controlled platform to study diverse quantum many-body phenomena. However, current methods for state initialisation are limited to thermal ensembles or uncorrelated product states. Here we present a hybrid approach that complements analog preparation with a digital quantum-gate protocol. This approach enables the engineering of target states with specific, long-range spin-correlations from the same initial resource state. By applying collisional gates to adiabatically prepared and filtered four-fermion singlet chains, we program diverse spin-correlation patterns, including that of a Heisenberg chain. We measure the spin correlations using a sequence of quantum gates followed by singlet-pair measurements. Our method paves the way to the targeted preparation of strongly correlated states of matter.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SAG: SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation with Query-Time Dynamic Hyperedges

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers an effective approach for large language models to access external knowledge. However, existing methods rely on dense similarity retrieval and face inherent limitations in handling structured constraints and multi-hop reasoning. Incorporating knowledge graphs partially alleviates these issues, but at the cost of semantic fragmentation, high maintenance overhead, and difficult incremental updates. This paper introduces SAG (SQLRetrieval Augmented Generation), a structured architecture for retrieval and agent systems. Instead of pre-building a global static graph, SAG converts each chunk into one semantically complete event and a set of indexing entities, then uses SQL join queries to dynamically link events that share entities into local hyperedges,constructing, at query time, a dynamically instantiated local index structure. This design avoids the need for global graph rebuilding and ongoing maintenance; the system naturally supports incremental writes, concurrent processing, and continuous scaling through its reliance on standard database infrastructure. Across HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHop, and MuSiQue, three standard multi-hop benchmarks,SAG achieves the best results on 8 out of 9 Recall@K metrics, reaching 80.0% Recall@5 on MuSiQue, the benchmark with the highest multi-hop reasoning demands.SAG has also been deployed at a production scale of hundreds of millions of data items, with online retrieval latency kept within seconds. Project site and code are available at https://github.com/Zleap-AI/SAG-Benchmark.