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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-Order Hermite Optimization: Fast and Exact Gradient Computation in Open-Loop Quantum Optimal Control using a Discrete Adjoint Approach

arXiv:2505.09857v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces the High-Order Hermite Optimization (HOHO) method, an open-loop discrete adjoint method for quantum optimal control. Our method is the first of its kind to efficiently compute exact (discrete) gradients when using continuous, parameterized control pulses while solving the forward equations (e.g. Schrodinger's equation or the Linblad master equation) with an arbitrarily high-order Hermite Runge-Kutta method. The HOHO method is implemented in QuantumGateDesign$.$jl (https://github.com/leespen1/QuantumGateDesign.jl), an open-source software package for the Julia programming language, which we use to perform numerical experiments comparing the method to Juqbox$.$jl (https://github.com/LLNL/Juqbox.jl). For realistic model problems we observe speedups up to 775x.

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

FinBalance: A Multi-Document Accounting Reconciliation Benchmark

Existing financial-NLP benchmarks mostly evaluate prepared artifacts such as filings, tables, or extracted values. Real accounting begins earlier: source documents must be reconciled into cited journal entries, aggregated into a balance sheet, and checked for contradictions. We introduce FinBalance, a multi-document accounting reconciliation benchmark built from source-document bundles across eight industries, three period types, and five difficulty levels. Human-authored business scenarios, accounting policies, tax/FX treatments, document schemas, distractors, and inconsistency templates are composed by a deterministic generator whose ledger produces journal entries,balance sheets, and 23 inconsistency-code labels. On a 710-record evaluation split, six contemporary LLMs reach at most 46% exact final-balance-sheet accuracy. Four models show a 26-41 pp gap between BS_exact, the model's reported balance sheet, and BS_recon, the balance sheet obtained by replaying its entries through our ledger. Models often recover numerically plausible entries but fail to bind them to supporting documents and aggregate them consistently. Citation-pressure prompting barely changes document-linking errors, while ledger-feedback ablations substantially improve reported balance sheets and expose inconsistency-detection trade-offs. Expert finance reviewers validate the benchmark design and labels.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

When and How Severely: Scenario-Specific Safety Envelopes for Driving VLAs

arXiv:2606.14238v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety certification of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) driving planners under ISO 21448 (SOTIF) rests on an Operational Design Domain (ODD) specification that answers two complementary questions: when does the planner start to fail, and how severely does it fail once it does? We evaluate Alpamayo R1, a 10B-parameter open-weight driving VLA, on 15,968 (clip, attack) pairs. We find a conservative-aggregate gap: an aggregate safe threshold of $\sigma \leq 50$ under a 15% average displacement error (ADE) budget masks well-sampled scenarios that tolerate the top of the tested grid ($\sigma = 70$). A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) on the changed-explanation subset identifies six discrete severity bands (BIC-optimal $k{=}6$), so two perturbation conditions with the same mean error can differ materially in their share of high-severity (C4/C5) failures. Joining the two analyses on the same corpus surfaces a finding neither yields in isolation: the scenarios with the loosest noise thresholds are not those with the lowest high-severity rate: STOP_SIGNAL concentrates roughly $4\times$ the C4/C5 share of LANE_KEEPING despite tolerating a larger $\sigma$. A deployable SOTIF ODD specification for driving VLAs therefore requires a two-dimensional safety envelope, not a single aggregate value per hazard.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Efficiently Linking Real Scenes with Synthetic Data Generation for AI-based Cognitive Robotics and Computer Vision Applications

AI vision models are a driving factor for the potential use case scenarios of cognitive robotics within in the industry and household applications. A large array of methods from semantic environment analysis towards 6D and grasping pose estimation have been proposed based on the latest AI achievements. However, such advancements require further strong and efficient methods w.r.t. training data and AI-architectures, which are capable in synergy to tackle current challenges, precision limits, and scalability beyond domain gaps. In this paper, we discuss these current limits and trends in the related state-of-the-art which are challenging those. Further we discuss our current work in progress on bridging the domain gap between simulations and real world applications by linking those in the training data generation.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

High Demand, Low Possession: Dilemmas and Strategies for Research Capability Cultivation in Clinical Medicine Postgraduates

Most previous studies have examined medical postgraduate research training from a single dimension, lacking a full-chain analysis that integrates capability demand, actual possession, obstacles, and output. Consequently, the measurement of capability gaps and the analysis of underlying training model deficiencies remain insufficient. To address this gap, we administered a self-designed multidimensional questionnaire to 86 clinical medicine postgraduates at a medical school, covering research cognition, interest, capability demand and possession, participation pathways, difficulties, and outputs. The aim was to systematically characterize the current situation, identify problems, and propose optimization strategies. Over 90% of participants expressed interest in research, yet only 1.16% self-rated as very knowledgeable. The largest demand-possess gap was for writing and publication (86.05% vs. 16.28%), followed by independent research capability (75.58% vs. 11.63%). A total of 59.30% cited lack of foundational knowledge, making experiments very difficult, as the greatest challenge, and 66.28% had no research achievements. The primary source of research topics was supervisor assignment (54.65%), with only 4.65% choosing topics independently. No statistically significant differences were found across grades or training types (P > 0.05). These findings reveal a structural high demand, low possession gap in medical postgraduate research training, with early research experience deficit and a passive research model as key constraining factors. Accordingly, an integrated bachelor-postgraduate progressive research competency training system is proposed.

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

Divide-and-Denoise: A Game-Theoretic Method for Fairly Composing Diffusion Models

The abundance of pre-trained diffusion models provides an opportunity for composition. Combining several models, however, runs the risk of one model dominating or models disagreeing with each other. Here, we propose Divide-and-Denoise, a method for coordinating multiple pre-trained diffusion models during sampling. Much like managing a specialized workforce, our method creates a fair but efficient division of labor across models. Central to our method is the notion of an allocation which defines the responsibility of each model to every region of the noisy sample. At every timestep, we then denoise by (i) updating the allocation by solving a fair division game, where we divide the sample into regions that maximize total utility under fairness constraints, and (ii) aligning the models with this allocation, where we guide each model to denoise within its assigned region. This leads to a new composite denoising process that evolves in tandem with a division process. We evaluate Divide-and-Denoise on conditional image generation. Across several quality metrics, including the GenEval benchmark, our method outperforms baselines and resolves common failures including missing objects and mismatched attributes. Experiments show that Divide-and-Denoise utilizes each model's expertise without neglecting any other model.

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

RQUL-UIE: Revitalizing Quality-Unstable Labels for Underwater Image Enhancement via In-Dataset Self-Supervision

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is essential for mitigating degradations caused by water medium. Although learning-based methods have advanced significantly, most rely on paired datasets with unstable label quality, which bottlenecks model performance. This paper proposes a diffusion-based, in-dataset self-supervised learning strategy designed to exploit the quality distribution of training labels. Specifically, we evaluate label quality via semantic perception embeddings from a pre-trained diffusion model in a training-free manner. These quality scores are subsequently quantized into noise-level indices, guiding a multi-step denoising process for level-wise supervision. This mechanism prevents low-quality labels from degrading the model while maximizing their utility during training. Furthermore, a Fourier-based refinement network is incorporated to explicitly reconstruct high-frequency components. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms SOTA approaches in restoration quality. The code and pre-trained model will be available once accepted in link.

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

DataMagic: Transforming Tabular Data into Data Insight Video

arXiv:2606.20388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data videos integrate dynamic charts, voice narration, and synchronized animations to communicate data insights as temporal narratives, making them an effective medium for improving data consumption efficiency in the data management lifecycle. However, producing high-quality data videos requires expertise spanning data analysis, narrative design, and video production. Existing approaches fall short: static visualization tools (e.g., BI dashboards) lack narrative logic and animation; authoring tools require users to pre-prepare visualizations rather than working from raw data; pixel-level video generation models cannot guarantee data fidelity or provenance. We demonstrate DataMagic, an end-to-end interactive system that transforms raw tabular data and natural language queries into narrative data-insight videos. To ensure data fidelity, DataMagic introduces the declarative specification DVSpec, which binds visual and animation elements to underlying data fields through data-driven semantic references. To address the combinatorial explosion of the design space, DataMagic adopts a Generate-then-Orchestrate multi-agent architecture that generates candidate scenes in parallel and then optimizes narrative coherence through global orchestration. Leveraging DVSpec's decoupling of logic and rendering, the system further supports three interaction modes and structured provenance-based data Q&A, transforming one-way videos into explorable interactive data interfaces. Evaluation on 109 real-world samples validates the effectiveness of the DataMagic. Homepage: https://datamagic-home.github.io/

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Resurgence of the Thermal Transition between Bounce and Sphaleron

arXiv:2606.13778v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the thermal transition between the bounce and the sphaleron in quantum mechanics with a metastable vacuum from the viewpoint of Borel resurgence. For two models representing a second-order and a first-order transition, we compute the perturbative expansion of the thermal free energy to high orders and extract the leading Borel singularity data $(A,b,S)$ as functions of temperature. The Borel singularity location $A$ reproduces the on-shell action of the dominant saddle on both sides of the transition, joining smoothly in the second-order case and developing a kink in the first-order case. The characteristic exponent $b$ jumps between $0$ and $1/2$ across the transition, counting the zero modes of the corresponding saddle. The Stokes constant $S$ matches the one-loop determinant around the saddle. The perturbative expansion around the false vacuum thus determines the transition temperature, the order of the transition, and the decay rate including the one-loop prefactor without relying on semiclassical inputs.

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

OCSVM-Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2507.21164v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) aims to detect anomalies without labeled data, a necessity in many machine learning applications where anomalous samples are rare or not available. Most state-of-the-art methods fall into two categories: reconstruction-based approaches, which often reconstruct anomalies too well, and decoupled representation learning with density estimators, which can suffer from suboptimal feature spaces. While some recent methods attempt to couple feature learning and anomaly detection, they often rely on surrogate objectives, restrict kernel choices, or introduce approximations that limit their expressiveness and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose a novel method that couples representation learning with an analytically solvable One-Class SVM (OCSVM), through a custom loss formulation that directly aligns latent features with the OCSVM decision boundary. The model is evaluated on two tasks: a \deleted{new} benchmark based on MNIST-C, and a challenging brain MRI \deleted{subtle} lesion detection task. Unlike most methods that focus on large, hyperintense lesions at the image level, our approach succeeds to target small, non-hyperintense lesions, while we evaluate voxel-wise metrics, addressing a more clinically relevant scenario. Both experiments evaluate a form of robustness to domain shifts, including corruption types in MNIST-C and texture or population age variations in MRI. Results demonstrate performance and robustness of our proposed model, highlighting its potential for general UAD and real-world medical imaging applications. The source code is available at https://github.com/Nicolas-Pinon/uad_ocsvm_guided_repr_learning.

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

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

LapidaryEngine: Fully Conversational Crystal Generation

arXiv:2606.14215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inspired the vision of generating bespoke crystal materials directly from natural-language instructions, enabling users to design materials through intuitive, conversational interaction. Existing text-to-crystal generative models represent important early steps toward this goal, but they suffer from two critical limitations: (i) restricted input formats that require highly structured descriptions (e.g., chemical formulas), and (ii) one-directional generation, where models can map text to crystal but cannot perform the inverse. These limitations prevent fully conversational workflows and hinder alignment with users' inherently ambiguous and evolving desiderata. We address these challenges with LapidaryEngine, the first model to support fully conversational crystal generation. LapidaryEngine accepts free-form natural-language requests and performs iterative refinement and editing in a dialogue-like manner. The key innovation is a pivot representation, a third, intermediate form that enables bidirectional translation between text and crystal structures despite the absence of direct paired datasets. Leveraging this pivot allows robust interpretation of user feedback and precise structural control. We demonstrate LapidaryEngine across diverse tasks, including insulator discovery, stability optimization, compositional modification, and structural editing, showcasing its ability to align generated materials with user intent in an interactive manner.

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

StereoGeo: an end-to-end stereo camera calibration method

In this work, we propose StereoGeo, an end-to-end network-based approach for stereo camera calibration. Our method estimates the focal lengths and gravity directions of the left and right cameras, as well as the relative extrinsic transformation relating them. Existing methods often rely on calibration patterns in structured environments or address only a single camera configuration, being limited to either intrinsic or extrinsic estimation, and depending on a multi-view setups. StereoGeo extends the GeoCalib algorithm, integrating deep neural network feature extraction with a differentiable optimizer. Extensive experiments on real-world benchmarks demonstrate that StereoGeo achieves competitive performance for intrinsic calibration and provides accurate stereo extrinsic estimation, outperforming existing methods that are limited to monocular settings. The dataset used in this work is partially publicly available at https://github.com/meddourimane/StereoGeo-dataset.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ShearFuse-UNet: Hadamard, DCT, and Shearlet Transform Fusion for Next-Day Wildfire Spread Prediction

We propose ShearFuse-UNet, a lightweight and computationally efficient deep learning model for next-day wildfire spread prediction from multi-modal satellite data. The model integrates three complementary transform-domain branches inside each encoder block of a U-Net backbone: a 2D Fast Walsh-Hadamard Transform (WHT) branch, a 2D Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) branch, and a cone-adapted digital Shearlet residual branch. The WHT and DCT branches establish orthogonal latent spaces with learnable spectral scaling and fixed soft-thresholding, while the Shearlet branch provides anisotropic, multi-directional feature decomposition that explicitly encodes the elongated edge structures characteristic of fire fronts. A learned SpectralFusion gate adaptively combines the WHT and DCT responses, and the Shearlet reconstruction is added as a residual. This three-branch design bears a loose structural analogy to transformer self-attention: the WHT and DCT branches provide complementary spectral representations that are adaptively fused, while the Shearlet branch contributes directional content through a residual pathway. Unlike self-attention, the proposed design relies on fixed mathematical transforms rather than learned projection operators, reducing parameter count and computational cost. Evaluated on the WildfireSpreadTS dataset, ShearFuse-UNet achieves an F1 score of 0.596 with only 267k parameters, outperforming a ResNet18-based U-Net (14M parameters, F1 = 0.589) and demonstrating a highly favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off. Results on the Google Next-Day Wildfire Spread dataset further validate these findings across a different benchmark.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Laws of Large Numbers for Non-Independent Random Variables on Hyperspaces with respect to the Hausdorff Metric

arXiv:2011.07199v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the limit behavior of the Minkowski sums for sequences of set-valued random variables. When the underlying space is finite dimensional, by using the support function, we establish the weak and strong laws of large numbers for non-independent random variables in the hyperspace with respect to the Hausdorff metric $d_H$.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Reduced basis algorithm for solving nonlinear differential equations on quantum computers

arXiv:2606.13457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As quantum computing moves toward scientific computing applications, nonlinear differential equations remain a central challenge since quantum evolution is intrinsically linear. In this work, we introduce a reduced basis algorithm (RBA) for polynomial nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and spatially discretized partial differential equations (PDEs). After time discretization, the method composes the resulting polynomial update map over $m$ timesteps, identifies the reduced monomial basis appearing in this composed map, and constructs a linear RBA operator whose action recovers the exact $m$-timestep nonlinear dynamics. Thus, at the level of the chosen discrete update rule, the method introduces no additional approximation error beyond the time discretization error. The qubit number requirement is governed by the size of the reduced monomial basis. For an $n$-dimensional polynomial ODE system of degree $p>1$, the lifted register requires at most $q_m^{\mathrm{ODE}} = O(nm\log p)$ qubits in the full basis scenario. For PDEs discretized on $N^D$ grid points, a locality-based construction requires at most $q_m^{\mathrm{PDE}} = O(D\log N + n m^{D+1}\log p)$ qubits. Hence, the dependence on the grid size remains logarithmic, while the nonlinear overhead is controlled by local reduced basis size. The main computational burden is moved from the quantum computer to a classical preprocessing step, where the reduced monomial basis and RBA operator are constructed for the chosen timestep window. Through numerical tests on the Lorenz system and the one-dimensional Burgers equation, we verify that the RBA reproduces the corresponding discrete time nonlinear dynamics exactly, while exposing the trade-off between timestep composition, reduced basis growth, and locality.

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

Oranits: Mission Assignment and Task Offloading in Open RAN-based ITS using Metaheuristic and Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2507.19712v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we explore mission assignment and task offloading in an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN)-based intelligent transportation system (ITS), where autonomous vehicles leverage mobile edge computing for efficient processing. Existing studies often overlook the intricate interdependencies between missions and the costs associated with offloading tasks to edge servers, leading to suboptimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce Oranits, a novel system model that explicitly accounts for mission dependencies and offloading costs while optimizing performance through vehicle cooperation. To achieve this, we propose a twofold optimization approach. First, we develop a metaheuristic-based evolutionary computing algorithm, namely the Chaotic Gaussian-based Global ARO (CGG-ARO), serving as a baseline for one-slot optimization. Second, we design an enhanced reward-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, referred to as the Multi-agent Double Deep Q-Network (MA-DDQN), that integrates both multi-agent coordination and multi-action selection mechanisms, significantly reducing mission assignment time and improving adaptability over baseline methods. Extensive simulations reveal that CGG-ARO improves the number of completed missions and overall benefit by approximately 7.1% and 7.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, MA-DDQN achieves even greater improvements of 11.0% in terms of mission completions and 12.5% in terms of the overall benefit. These results highlight the effectiveness of Oranits in enabling faster, more adaptive, and more efficient task processing in dynamic ITS environments.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Simulation of Spin-Dependent Electron Transfer in a Synthetic Chiral Lattice with a Trapped Ion

arXiv:2606.13930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electron transfer through chiral structures can exhibit spin asymmetry, known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect, whose microscopic origin remains an open question. While path-interference within the chiral moiety has been proposed as a key mechanism, its experimental validation requires precise and versatile tunability of system parameters. Here we implement a programmable quantum simulation of spin-dependent electron transfer in a donor–chiral-bridge–acceptor model using a trapped ion. The bridge is encoded in internal states of the ion with tunable nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor couplings, while donor and acceptor states are coupled via a spectator bosonic motional mode. We observe spin-dependent interference within the bridge, and further reveal spin-dependence in donor-to-acceptor transfer dynamics, controlled by amplitude and phase of the coupling parameter. Our results identify interference among spin-dependent pathways as a microscopic origin of spin-dependent transfer, and open a route toward quantum simulations of complex chiral lattices with multi-level and bosonic degrees of freedom.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing

Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.

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

Efficient Stochastic Optimisation via Sequential Monte Carlo

arXiv:2601.22003v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The problem of optimising functions with intractable gradients frequently arises in machine learning and statistics, ranging from maximum marginal likelihood estimation procedures to fine-tuning of generative models. Stochastic approximation methods for this class of problems typically require inner sampling loops to obtain (biased) stochastic gradient estimates, which rapidly becomes computationally expensive. In this work, we develop sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) samplers for optimisation of functions with intractable gradients. Our approach replaces expensive inner sampling methods with efficient SMC approximations, which can result in significant computational gains. We establish convergence results for the basic recursions defined by our methodology which SMC samplers approximate. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the reward-tuning of energy-based models within various settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

EmoMind: Decoding Affective Captions from Human Brain fMRI

Decoding visual experience from brain activity has advanced substantially, but current brain-to-text systems largely recover semantic content while discarding affect. Additionally, language models can generate emotional text when prompted with categorical labels, but such labels collapse rich inter-subject variability into coarse discrete bins. We present EmoMind, the first end-to-end pipeline for decoding affective captions directly from fMRI signals. EmoMind first retrieves a semantically grounded neutral scene description from brain-decoded visual features, then rewrites it using a continuous 34-dimensional emotion vector decoded from the same fMRI recording. To control the balance between content preservation and affective expression, we train the rewriter with classifier-free guidance against an identity-preserving null branch, enabling smooth interpolation between semantic fidelity and affective expressivity. We evaluate affective caption generation with a three-axis validation framework spanning subject-specificity, structural geometry, and causal control. We further augment this framework with a synthetic-brain substitution test that probes robustness to the measurement apparatus, and we benchmark each axis against GPT-4 prompted with brain-decoded top-5 emotion labels as a strong discrete baseline. Across two independent emotion fMRI datasets, EmoMind significantly outperforms label-prompted GPT-4 on all three axes, with the largest gains on metrics that require person-specific affective structure rather than population-level emotion aggregation. These results establish continuous brain-decoded affect as a viable control signal for individualized affective caption generation and open new directions for studying individual affective brain organisation.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Acceleration-induced spectral blind spots in stimulated atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.17396v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stimulated transitions are among the most fundamental processes in light-matter interaction, underlying resonant absorption and emission in atomic systems. Here we show that uniform acceleration can convert this familiar response into a frequency-selective absence of response. Specifically, when an incident photon has a nonzero momentum component transverse to the acceleration, the stimulated transition probability vanishes at a discrete set of frequencies fixed by the acceleration, the atomic transition frequency, and the photon propagation angle. At these spectral blind spots, both ordinary stimulated absorption and acceleration-induced excitation are simultaneously suppressed, rendering the atom effectively unresponsive to the incident radiation. The effect arises from the nontrivial response of accelerated atoms to quantum vacuum fluctuations and provides a distinctive signature of the Unruh effect through the absence, rather than the enhancement, of stimulated transitions. We further provide an order-of-magnitude estimate showing that an electron-based implementation with spin splitting in combined electric and magnetic fields could access the required parameter regime. These results reveal an unexplored form of acceleration-modified light-matter interaction and identify spectral blind spots as a new manifestation of the Unruh effect.

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

SICI: A Semantic-Pragmatic Complexity Index Reveals Regime Shifts in LLM Stance Detection

Prompt-based LLMs are increasingly used for stance detection, but harder examples are not always repaired by clearer instructions, reasoning prompts, retrieval, or debate. We introduce SICI (Stance Inference Complexity Index), a seven-dimensional diagnostic measure of the semantic-pragmatic burden imposed by a target–text pair. Across SemEval-2016 and VAST, SICI predicts LLM accuracy better than surface proxies and shows substantial cross-scorer reliability ($\alpha=0.771$). More importantly, LLM errors change regime as SICI increases: low-complexity examples invite over-attribution, especially Against predictions; intermediate examples form an unstable boundary; and high-complexity examples rapidly concentrate on None. This phase-transition-like structure persists across GPT-3.5, GPT-4o-mini, DeepSeek-V3, and GPT-4o, although stronger models move the boundaries. A 15-method intervention study further shows that prompting, retrieval, and debate often shift models along the attribution–abstention axis rather than removing the high-complexity bottleneck.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Deployment-Centered Evaluation: Predicting Query-Level Rejection Risk in a Clinical LLM System

arXiv:2606.12702v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into clinical systems, making it essential to evaluate the real-world utility of these systems. However, static benchmarks tend to measure correctness rather than user acceptance, aggregate performance across queries, and require densely annotated datasets – leading to major blind spots for evaluating clinical systems. In this work, we perform a deployment-centered evaluation of an LLM system embedded within electronic health records at an academic medical center, where user feedback is sparse but closely reflects the deployment conditions. Specifically, we train a pre-response classifier that estimates the risk that a future interaction will result in the user rejecting the LLM response, based on query content and deployment-specific context available before generation. We conduct a prospective analysis of our model over 4.5 months of user feedback, finding that our prediction model achieves an AUROC of 0.719. Further, we estimate the benefit of such predictions in two downstream use cases (guardrail triggering and abstention). Our key conceptual insight is that making use of deployment-specific context (i.e., the provider type, department name, language model used for response), as opposed to only query content, improves the ability to predict whether the user will reject the system output. Altogether, our empirical case study demonstrates the feasibility of predicting user rejection using deployment-specific context, opening the door to targeted guardrails.