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

Coherent Dark State Formation of a Lead-Vacancy Spin Qubit in Diamond

arXiv:2605.27841v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A lead-vacancy (PbV) center in diamond exhibits coherent emission above the liquid helium temperature, making it highly attractive for quantum network applications. Here, we report the magneto-optical and spin properties of PbV centers in diamond. We record a spin lifetime of 12 ms at 7.5 K under large off-axis magnetic field. Furthermore, we observe formation of the coherent dark state by coherent population trapping and estimate a spin dephasing time of 177 ns at 6.5 K. This work demonstrates the outstanding thermal robustness of the PbV spin compared to other group-IV centers above 4 K.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Learning Augmented Exact Exponential Algorithms

arXiv:2606.18807v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The field of learning-augmented algorithms has demonstrated that machine-learned predictions can bypass worst-case lower bounds across a wide range of problems. So far, however, the focus has been almost exclusively on polynomial-time algorithms, where predictions improve competitive ratios, approximation guarantees, or running times. In this paper, we raise the question of whether predictions can push the frontier of exact exponential-time algorithms for NP-hard problems. We answer this question affirmatively by proposing a general approach that augments an entire family of state-of-the-art exact algorithms for a variety of subset selection problems. We show that a noisy predictor that is only marginally better than random guessing suffices to provably reduce the search space, and that the resulting runtime speedup scales smoothly with the prediction quality. Importantly, our algorithms require only pairwise independence of predictions or, alternatively, do not require the knowledge of the predictor's accuracy - both strictly weaker and more realistic settings than typically assumed.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Data Bias Mitigation under Coverage Constraints & The Price of Fairness

arXiv:2606.20461v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models have been shown to exhibit discriminatory outcomes or degraded performance for individuals at the intersection of multiple sensitive attributes, such as race and gender. This stems in part from two interrelated challenges: the lack of principled measures for quantifying bias (potentially intersectional), and insufficient representation of intersectional subgroups in training data. We extend a recent bias mitigation framework to incorporate coverage constraints that enforce sufficient representation across groups, including intersectional subgroups. Since achieving exactly zero bias for all groups may not be data efficient (meaning it may require large amounts of data), our solution trades small approximation errors in bias for greater data efficiency while satisfying coverage constraints. We also formulate bias mitigation as an integer linear program that optimizes over all mitigation strategies, and characterize the price of fairness, the minimum data modification cost, as a function of fairness tolerance. This is essential both for legal compliance, where regulations may mandate specific fairness thresholds, and for data governance, enabling practitioners to make informed trade-offs between bias reduction and data modification (particularly, data purchasing) costs. We evaluate our techniques on publicly available datasets, demonstrating that bias mitigation via our framework preserves predictive accuracy across multiple classifiers, and that coverage constraints, while motivated by statistical considerations, are essential for preserving downstream ML performance.

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

If These Walls Could Talk: Critical Play with Large Language Models in Museums

arXiv:2606.15565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used in museums to as role playing chatbots which let visitors talk to simulated versions of people and artefacts from the past. While such installations can be playful and engaging, they are also problematic because LLMs cannot be trusted to speak truthfully. I identify a fundamental dilemma for the use of LLMs in museum chatbots: LLMs cannot be trusted to tell the truth, and efforts to make them more reliable may ruin that which is attractive about the bots in the first place - their ability to engage in life-like conversation. In response, I propose designing for critical play with LLM-based bots: Designing for playful interactions with bots that are unreliable but still able to represent the past in an adequate and engaging manner - as fictional characters representing historical narratives, styles of discourse, diverse perspectives, humor and satire.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Statistical Mechanics and Symmetries of Non-Abelian Anyon Proliferation: From Deformation to Decoherence

arXiv:2606.12527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological quantum computation relies on braiding non-Abelian anyons, but requires the underlying topological order to survive imperfect state preparation and environmental noise. We show that the instability of topological order to wavefunction deformations and to decoherence, with the latter probed by syndrome distributions, are generically captured by stat-mech models whose symmetries naturally expose the corrupting anyonic excitations. As an example, we combine this framework with Monte-Carlo simulations to resolve the stability of $D_4$ topological order under deformations and quantum channels that proliferate multiple non-Abelian anyon species that individually are unable to condense. We show that beyond a finite threshold, proliferation of two non-Abelian anyon species parasitically condenses a shared Abelian-anyon fusion outcome, destroying the topological order. Our symmetry-based approach sharply differentiates the resulting trivial phase from that obtained by condensing all Abelian charges; in other words, the trivial phase "remembers" which anyons condensed. This framework provides a first step into identifying the relevant symmetry for optimal decoders, conditioned on syndrome measurements, of non-Abelian topological order.

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

HeteRo-Select: Informativeness as the Participation Driver in Heterogeneous Federated Learning

arXiv:2508.06692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning systems typically allocate gradient compression by link speed. This is sensible when bandwidth and data informativeness align. However, under non-IID data, these signals often decorrelate or invert. A bandwidth-driven allocator then risks compressing the most informative gradients hardest. We propose HeteRo-Select, a framework that replaces bandwidth with a per-client informativeness score as the primary driver of compression. The score jointly governs three decisions per round: client selection, compression ratio, and server aggregation weight, with bandwidth retained only as a hard ceiling. Score-proportional selection provably reduces the effective heterogeneity of the chosen subset; score-proportional compression provably lowers aggregate top-$k$ error at fixed traffic. Under the exact FedCG simulation protocol, HeteRo-Select delivers a $1.78\times$ speedup and an $18.2\%$ reduction in traffic on CIFAR-10. The same configuration, unchanged, scales from a $7{,}850$-parameter logistic regression to an $11.27$M-parameter ResNet-18, hitting the accuracy target on three of four benchmarks. When bandwidth and informativeness are deliberately anti-correlated, the method still achieves the target accuracy with less traffic than the normal-bandwidth run.

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

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects

Person re-identification via 3D skeletons is an important emerging research area that attracts increasing attention within the pattern recognition community. With distinctive advantages across various application scenarios, numerous 3D skeleton based person re-identification (SRID) methods with diverse skeleton modeling and learning paradigms have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and analysis of recent SRID advances. First of all, we define the SRID task and provide an overview of its origin and major advancements. Secondly, we formulate a systematic taxonomy that organizes existing methods into three categories centered on hand-crafted, sequence-based, and graph-based modeling. Then, we elaborate on the representative models along these three types with an illustration of foundational mechanisms. Meanwhile, we provide an overview of mainstream supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised SRID learning paradigms and corresponding common methods. A thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art SRID methods is further conducted over various types of benchmarks and protocols to compare their effectiveness, efficiency, and key properties. Finally, we present the key challenges and prospects to advance future research, and highlight interdisciplinary applications of SRID with a case study.

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

A Two-Phase Stability Study of LLM Judges and Bar Council Examiners on Thai Bar-Exam Free-Form Essays

Free-form legal essay evaluation in NLP treats expert inter-rater stability as a single ceiling number, and treats LLM-judge agreement with that ceiling as evidence of judge stability. We test both assumptions on the Thai bar examination through an identical-inputs protocol: three Bar Council-trained examiners (A, B, C) and a 26-LLM judge panel score the same 15 cross-graded answers from the same four inputs (question, official Bar Council grading regulation, gold answer, candidate answer). The headline finding is asymmetric. On 10 of 15 cells where the rubric prescribes both axes, all 29 raters converge in a tight band: panel agreement is universal. On the remaining 5 cells where the rubric does not prescribe how to grade a correct final answer that omits a decisive statutory citation, the human panel splits between two coherent readings (B/C majority at the upper rubric band, score 6-8; A minority at the lower band, score 1-2). The LLM judge population does not split symmetrically: 22 of 26 LLMs score in or near B/C's contested band, 3 sit in the regulation-silent middle gap, and only 1 (GPT-5.4 Nano) approaches A's band without consistently scoring within it. Zero LLMs in our 26-judge panel reproduce the minority human reading on the contested cells. The B/C-direction cluster spans every model size, vendor, and price tier we tested. An instrumented three-LLM anchor sub-panel (Claude 4.6 Opus, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.4 Pro) carries determinism probes, input ablations, and bootstrap CIs, and reaches anchor panel $\alpha = 0.77$ on the 15 cells against human-panel $\alpha = 0.36$. The high LLM-panel $\alpha$ reflects systematic convergence on the majority reading rather than balanced reproduction of both readings; a benchmark that selects its LLM judge by maximising agreement with a human reference panel will inherit this asymmetry by construction.

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

Spatial-Aware Reduction Framework: Towards Efficient and Faithful Visual State Space Models

arXiv:2606.19932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mamba demonstrates strong efficiency in modeling long visual sequences. However, when token reduction is applied to structurally enhanced Mamba variants, these models exhibit a severe performance collapse. We attribute this degradation to the spatially agnostic nature of existing reduction methods, which violate the two-dimensional structural premise required by the selective scanning mechanism. In this work, we propose STORM, a spatial-aware token reduction framework designed to maintain structural integrity throughout the compression process. STORM reformulates reduction into a structured operation on spatial units, enforcing localized constraints to maintain both grid topology and neighborhood coherence. As a plug-and-play module, STORM equips existing reduction pipelines with explicit spatial awareness without any training. Empirical results demonstrate that STORM achieves state-of-the-art pruning accuracy across diverse vision Mamba backbones under training-free settings. Notably, STORM delivers a substantial accuracy recovery on VMamba, outperforming prior methods by up to 63.3\% in top-1 accuracy. Meanwhile, STORM incurs only a 1.0\% accuracy drop on PlainMamba, achieving performance comparable to ViT.

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

TreeSeeker: Tree-Structured Trial, Error, and Return in Deep Search

arXiv:2606.11662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search requires agents to answer complex questions through multi-step web search, browsing, evidence comparison, and synthesis. A central challenge is deciding how to search when several directions look plausible but only some will later lead to reliable evidence. If an agent greedily follows the current best-looking direction, it may keep extending a weak continuation. If it explores without discipline, it may waste budget on disconnected trials. We propose TreeSeeker, an inference-time framework for controlled trial-and-error in deep search. TreeSeeker organizes search as branch-and-return search over tree-structured states, where each branch is a tentative direction for a sub-goal. At each round, TreeSearch reads all sub-goal trees, identifies active goals, and uses textual UCB signals of value, uncertainty, and risk to select among exploiting a promising branch, exploring an uncertain alternative, or pruning an unproductive continuation and returning to an earlier branch point. TreeMem supports this control loop by keeping evidence, uncertainty, conflicts, progress, and failure cues attached to the branches that produced them, so trial outcomes can guide later decisions. Experiments on XBench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-ZH show that TreeSeeker consistently outperforms strong open-source baselines, suggesting that explicit branch-and-return control complements stronger reasoning and tool execution.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Menopausal symptoms in peri- and postmenopausal women: systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence, incidence, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes

Introduction: The global epidemiology of menopausal symptoms among middle-aged and elderly women remains unclear. Methods: Data on prevalence, comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms published up until March 1st 2019 were searched in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases. We used a random-effects model to compute point estimates of prevalence for 24 types of menopausal symptoms. We narratively summarized the patterns of the comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms due to limited data. Results: A total of 239 studies (n{approx}2.5 million middle-aged and elderly women) from 56 countries and regions were included in the analysis. The global pooled prevalence analysis revealed that hot flashes (48%) and night sweats (30%) were highly prevalent, alongside psychological symptoms like insomnia (47%), irritability (46%), anxiety (39%), and depression (30%). Physical symptoms including joint aches/pain (50%), backache (47%), and tiredness (61%) were also commonly reported. Heat intolerance showed the highest prevalence (76%), while symptoms like urinary incontinence (24%) and poor appetite (8%) were less frequent. These findings highlight the diverse and widespread impact of menopause on women globally, with significant variations across symptom types. Africa showed the highest pooled prevalence across a series of symptoms, compared with other continents. We observed high prevalence in developing countries, especially for psychological and physical symptoms; significant intra-Asian variation in vasomotor symptoms; hypertension and obesity as the most common comorbidities; joint pain, urinary incontinence, and vasomotor symptoms as the most incident complaints; and positive associations with cardiovascular disease in the psychological (depression and insomnia) and physical (joint pain) domains. Conclusion: This study highlights the global burden of menopausal symptoms, with significant differences across continents. The findings call for more inclusive research on underrepresented groups (particularly in Africa) and further investigation into drivers of this marked global heterogeneity in prevalence of menopausal symptoms and their comorbidities, incidence and outcomes.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

DIFF-ERO: A Conformance-Aware Loss for Deep Learning in Process Mining

arXiv:2606.14283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning has driven many recent advances in process analytics, especially for predictive and prescriptive monitoring. However, standard objectives such as cross-entropy optimize local next-step likelihoods and only implicitly capture control-flow structure. As a result, models can achieve high token-level accuracy while permitting imprecise global behaviour. We introduce DIFF-ERO, a conformance-aware loss function for deep learning models on process data. DIFF-ERO is a differentiable formulation of entropy-based stochastic conformance that incorporates control-flow information during training. Our approach constructs batch-level stochastic transition matrices with soft edge memberships, allowing structural precision and recall signals to directly inform backpropagation. The loss is model-agnostic and can be applied whenever the final representation parametrizes stochastic transitions. We instantiate DIFF-ERO in transformer encoder-decoder pipelines for next-activity prediction and use it jointly with cross-entropy to analyse its theoretical components with respect to convergence. Across benchmarks comparing other loss functions and targets, DIFF-ERO shows improved predictive performance where structure matters most while maintaining parity elsewhere. At the same time, the learned stochastic automaton converges towards the structural ground truth, indicating that the network internalizes process model structure.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Second-Order Approximation of Limit Order Books in a Single-Scale Regime

arXiv:2308.00805v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We establish a first- and second-order approximation for an infinite dimensional limit order book model in a single (critical) scaling regime where market and limit orders arrive at a common time scale. With our choice of scaling we obtain non-degenerate first- and second-order approximations for the price and volume dynamics. While the first-order approximation is given by a coupled ODE-PDE system, the second-order approximation is described in terms of an infinite-dimensional stochastic evolution equation driven by a cylindrical Brownian motion. The driving noise processes exhibit a non-trivial correlation in terms of the model parameters. We prove that the evolution equation has a unique solution and that the sequence of standardized limit order book models converges weakly to the solution of the evolution equation. The proof uses a non-standard martingale problem. We calibrate a linearized model to market data and explain how our model can be used for deriving confidence intervals of portfolio liquidation values.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Parent and physiotherapist perceptions about movement skills of young children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Objective: The onset of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) in the early years ([≤]5 years) may negatively impact movement skill (encompassing related concepts of gross motor skills, fundamental movement skills, and functional ability) development. Few studies have explored the perceptions and needs of parents and physiotherapists towards children's difficulty with these movement skills, essential to identify potential areas for added support. The objective of this study is to understand the perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards movement skills of children with JIA. Methods: Seventeen parents and 24 physiotherapists completed an online questionnaire consisting of multiple choice and open-ended questions about the movement skills of young children with JIA. Demographic and multiple choice questions were quantitively analysed using descriptive statistics. Open-ended responses were analyzed using qualitative conventional content analysis. Results: About half (47%) of parents perceived their children to have movement difficulties, and 75% of physiotherapists described the movement skills of children with JIA as worse than other children of the same age. Our qualitative analysis revealed three general themes including: functional task difficulties; clinical variability in movement skills; and psychosocial components of movement skill difficulties. Conclusion: This study provides an analysis of perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards the movement skills of young children with JIA. A significant proportion of parents and physiotherapists identify movement difficulties among children with JIA that impact daily life. Future interventions co-designed with both parents and care providers targeting movement skills are needed.

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

Demystifying Variance in Circuit Discovery of LLMs

arXiv:2606.16920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circuit discovery is a key technique in mechanistic interpretability to pinpoint the model components that are crucial for performing a given task. Although the current state-of-the-art method (EAP-IG) performs well on the metric of (un)faithfulness, it suffers from substantial variability. This includes resampling variance, where the circuit changes when we probe with a new batch of data from the same distribution; rephrasing variance, where the discovered circuit shifts when the prompts are rephrased; and sample-wise variance, where a circuit with low population unfaithfulness exhibits large fluctuations in unfaithfulness across individual samples. This paper studies the roots of these variances. We demonstrate that CEAP, our new circuit discovery method that improves upon EAP-IG with a theoretical guarantee, can substantially lessen resampling variance. We further show that rephrasing variance arises because prompts with different templates tend to activate different circuits in the model. This leads us to argue that it may be challenging to find a comprehensive circuit that explains and controls the model's behavior on a task, which can be expressed in countless templates, suggesting that LLMs may be inherently hard to steer. We show that sparsity, which has been claimed to form more compact and interpretable task circuits, fails to solve this problem. Regarding sample-wise variance, we argue that it is largely benign: extremely poor unfaithfulness scores often stem from how unfaithfulness is defined, rather than from defects in the measured circuits. We show that the magnitude of unfaithfulness is affected by selective contribution scaling, a neural mechanism that accounts for the extremely poor scores sometimes observed.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fun with Graph States: Nonlocal Bell Pairs and the Arf Invariant

arXiv:2606.06582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study inner products and partial amplitudes of graph states–a commonly employed class of quantum states, which are specified by graphs. We find that the magnitudes of these quantities are simply related to the rank of the adjacency matrix of the graph over F_2 while the phase is determined by the Arf invariant of its quadratic refinement. These facts motivate a nonlocal tensor factorization of the Hilbert space, with respect to which all graph states are products of Bell pairs with unentangled ancillae. These results may illuminate the quantum advantage in the framework of Measurement-Based Quantum Computation and suggest that graph states can be usefully visualized in the language of algebraic topology. In addition, we develop a specialized technique for computing expectation values of qubit-wise permutations in graph states, which is useful for calculating multi-invariants.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Geometry of critical discrete structures: long-range percolation on the hierarchical lattice and the discrete torus

arXiv:2509.09589v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Consider (a) balls $\Lambda_n$ of growing volumes in the $d$-dimensional hierarchical lattice, and (b) the $d$-dimensional discrete torus $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ on $n^d$ vertices. Place edges independently between each pair of vertices $x\neq y\in\Lambda_n$ or $\mathbb{T}_n^d$ with probability $1-\exp(-\beta J(x, y) )$ where $J(x, y) \asymp \| x-y \|^{-\alpha}$ for some $0

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

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606.14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Resourcefulness of non-classical continuous-variable quantum gates

arXiv:2410.09226v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In continuous-variable quantum computation, identifying key elements that enable a quantum computational advantage is a long-standing issue. Starting from the standard results on the necessity of Wigner negativity, we develop a comprehensive and versatile approach in which the techniques of $(s)$-ordered quasiprobabilities are exploited to provide rigorous statements on the simulability of photonic quantum circuits consisting of previously characterized gates and thereby identifying the contribution of each quantum gate to the potential achievement of quantum computational advantage. This is achieved by means of an analysis of the so-called transfer function, allowing us to highlight the resourcefulness of a gate set. As such this technique can be straightforwardly applied to current continuous-variables quantum circuits, while also constraining the tolerable amount of losses above which any potential quantum advantage can be ruled out. We use $(s)$-ordered quasiprobability distributions on phase-space to capture the non-classical features in the protocol, and focus our technique entirely on the ordering parameter $s$. This allows us to highlight the resourcefulness and robustness to loss of a universal set of unitary gates comprising three distinct Gaussian gates and any non-Gaussian unitary gate, providing important insight on the role of non-Gaussianity.

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

Definitional alignment before capability alignment: a Design-Science framework for adjudicating claims about AGI

arXiv:2606.12713v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Claims that artificial general intelligence has already arrived and claims that it remains decades away are often defended from overlapping evidence. "AGI" lacks a single shared and stable referent and competing operationalizations can return different verdicts on the same system. This article treats that under-specification as a design and governance problem. Following Design Science Research Methodology, it develops DAF-AGI, a second-order conceptual artifact with two coupled components: five ordinal criteria for assessing the adjudicative fitness of candidate definitions and a structured governance audit of authorship, interest, certification, external verification and revision authority. The artifact is demonstrated on five prominent measurement families and one deflationary boundary position in a documented corpus and then stress-tested against a stylized strong arrival claim: that current generative systems constitute AGI because they outperform a well-educated adult on many cognitive tasks. On evidence from the cited 2024-2025 sources, the claim was certifiable only under a performance-based operationalization; capability-ontology, psychometric and skill-acquisition approaches did not certify it, the economic family remains indeterminate and the deflationary position refuses binary adjudication. The contribution is a novel integration and operationalization, not an empirical validation: independent application, inter-rater testing and author-external cases remain necessary. The paper further proposes definitional sovereignty as an enabling component of algorithmic sovereignty: the institutional capacity to contest, certify and revise imported technological categories under public accountability.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Surrogate Benchmarks for Model Merging Optimization

arXiv:2509.02555v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model merging techniques aim to integrate the abilities of multiple models into a single model. Most model merging techniques have hyperparameters, and their setting affects the performance of the merged model. Because several existing works show that tuning hyperparameters in model merging can enhance the merging outcome, developing hyperparameter optimization algorithms for model merging is a promising direction. However, its optimization process is computationally expensive, particularly in merging LLMs. In this work, we develop surrogate benchmarks for optimization of the merging hyperparameters to realize algorithm development and performance comparison at low cost. We define two search spaces and collect data samples to construct surrogate models to predict the performance of a merged model from a hyperparameter. We demonstrate that our benchmarks can predict the performance of merged models well and simulate optimization algorithm behaviors.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mitigating Trotter Errors via Post-Processed Symmetry Restoration

arXiv:2606.20242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum simulation is a powerful tool for exploring complex quantum many-body systems such as condensed matter physics and gauge theories. Trotterization, which approximates the ideal time evolution operator by decomposing it into a sequence of local gate operations, is one of the most widely used quantum simulation algorithms. However, such Trotterized implementations generally fail to preserve the symmetries of the target Hamiltonian during compilation. As a result, they can drive quantum states out of symmetrically allowed subspaces, leading to unphysical dynamics and symmetry-violating algorithmic errors. In this work, we propose a symmetry-based Trotter error mitigation protocol using classical post-processing. By applying symmetry transformations to the initial state or interleaving them between discrete Trotter layers, and then averaging an ensemble of the resulting measurement outcomes via classical post-processing, our method systematically projects out the symmetry-violating components of the Trotter error while leaving the ideal dynamics unchanged. Importantly, this framework naturally accommodates non-local spatial symmetries and anti-unitary operations such as time reversal, which are difficult or impossible to implement directly with hardware-native quantum gates. We benchmark our protocol on the one-dimensional XY model and the one-dimensional Schwinger model. In the XY model, enforcing reflection symmetry suppresses the leading-order Trotter error, whereas in the Schwinger model, interleaving gauge transformations between Trotter layers enables gauge-twirling effectively to reduce unphysical violations of local Gauss's law. These results demonstrate that symmetry-based post-processing provides a depth-preserving route to substantially improving the fidelity of Trotterized quantum simulations on near-term devices.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Edit the Bits, Diff the Codes: Bitwise Residual Editing for Visual Autoregressive Models

Text-guided image editing with visual autoregressive (VAR) generators requires controlling both what the model samples and where the sampled change is written back into the image code. Existing VAR editors mainly operate on token streams, features, or flat next-token logits, leaving two native structures of bitwise-residual VAR models underused: the per-bit Bernoulli prediction head and the additive multi-scale residual code field from which the image is assembled. We propose BitResEdit, a training-free editor for bitwise-residual VAR generators such as Infinity. BitEdit performs source-negative guidance by tilting the post-CFG per-bit log-odds along a source–target contrast computed on a shared edited prefix, then projects each update into a closed-form Bernoulli-KL trust region around the clean CFG sampler. ResEdit converts the sampled bits into per-scale continuous-code residuals, gates them with a localization mask, and re-injects them through the generator's native sum-of-scales. Together they couple decision-time bit guidance with combination-time code composition, so masked-out latent features are preserved exactly by code arithmetic while localized, scale-aware edits are applied inside the target region. On PIE-Bench with Infinity-2B, BitResEdit attains the strongest text alignment among same-backbone VAR editors, improving CLIP on the edited region by +1.07 over the strongest prior editor while keeping background preservation competitive with it. Ablations show BitEdit and ResEdit play complementary roles in target alignment and background preservation.

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

An Ethical eValuation Agent (EeVA): Results of a Proof-of-Concept Test on a Prototype Agentic-like Workflow to Assist Ethical Deliberations

arXiv:2606.11218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ethical deliberation is often misunderstood as a search for single right or wrong answers, creating difficulties for non-ethically trained personnel who must address ethically laden challenges. We developed EeVA, an agentic-like LLM-based workflow designed to support comparative ethical reflection rather than deliver definitive ethical answers. EeVA was programmed in n8n using three interconnected workflows: starter, worker, and emitter. It evaluated uploaded use cases against 10 ethical frameworks through evaluator and synthesis prompts. Proof-of-concept testing used three published cases from urban mobility, peer-to-peer energy trading, and social-service resource allocation. Across all cases, EeVA produced consistently structured framework-specific evaluations and integrated syntheses. Outputs differentiated between frameworks, identified convergences and divergences, recommended modifications to increase alignment, and highlighted persistent ethical tensions. Syntheses were readable for non-specialists and shifted attention away from simplistic answers toward design conditions, safeguards, and areas where full cross-framework agreement was unlikely. The findings suggest that LLMs can be organised into usable workflows that preserve ethical plurality while helping bridge the communicative gap between ethicists and non-ethically trained personnel. EeVA's value lies not in replacing ethicists or resolving moral disagreement, but in scaffolding structured ethical deliberation. EeVA offers a promising proof of concept for supporting ethical reflection where access to ethics expertise is limited. Further work is needed on reproducibility, human evaluation, user testing, and efficiency before it can be considered a mature tool.