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

Bright Emission from Dark Sources in Hyperbolic Media

arXiv:2606.16071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperbolic media enable ultra-strong light-matter interactions through their extreme field localization and small mode volumes, but low-loss realizations are fundamentally limited to the mid-infrared, owing to the long lifetimes of optical phonons in high-quality crystals. Here we show that bright emitters operating at visible or near-infrared frequencies can be used to generate radiation in this regime by inducing mid-infrared population dynamics, thereby creating a source in the hyperbolic frequency band without a corresponding dipole transition. We demonstrate that even a source with vanishing dipole and higher multipole moments - strictly non-radiating in any isotropic medium - becomes radiatively active in a hyperbolic environment. This enables visible and near-infrared control of light-matter interactions in polaritonic hyperbolic materials, establishing a new low-loss solid-state quantum optics platform.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Symplectic coherence: a measure of position-momentum correlations in quantum states

arXiv:2507.15738v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The interdependence of position and momentum, as highlighted by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, is a cornerstone of quantum physics. Yet, position-momentum correlations have received little systematic attention. Motivated by recent developments in bosonic quantum physics that underscore their relevance in quantum thermodynamics, metrology, and computing, we establish a general framework to study and quantify position-momentum correlations in quantum states. We introduce symplectic coherence, a faithful and easily computable measure defined as the Frobenius norm of the block of the covariance matrix encoding position-momentum correlations, and demonstrate that symplectic coherence is monotone under relevant operations and robust under small perturbations. Furthermore, using a recent mapping by Barthe et al. (Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 070604) which relates the covariance matrix of a bosonic state to the density matrix of a finite-dimensional system, we show that position-momentum correlations correspond to beyond-classical correlations in a virtual finite-dimensional quantum state, with symplectic coherence mapping naturally to geometric quantum discord. Taking energy constraints into account, we determine the maximal position-momentum correlations achievable at fixed energy, revealing structural insights about the corresponding optimal states. Finally, we illustrate the operational relevance of symplectic coherence through several examples in quantum information tasks and quantum thermodynamics. In the process, we establish new technical results on matrix norms and quantum covariance matrices, and demonstrate the conceptual significance of viewing covariance matrices as density matrices of virtual quantum states.

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

Infant Spontaneous Movement Noise Improves Exploration in Deep RL

arXiv:2606.16590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is commonly implemented as temporally uncorrelated white noise. However, recent works show that temporally correlated colored noise can improve exploration efficiency by producing smooth trajectories with better coverage of the state space. We inquire whether action noise inspired by infant spontaneous movements can also improve exploration in deep RL. We find that the power spectral densities of babies' end-effector velocities follow a colored noise process where the spectral exponent increases with age. Inspired by this developmental pattern, we introduce a mechanism that progressively increases the temporal auto-correlation of exploration noise during RL training, matching the infant statistics. Experiments across several RL environments show that infant-inspired noise produces structured exploratory behavior and can improve learning efficiency compared to conventional exploration strategies. These findings suggest that human motor and cognitive development can provide useful guidance for designing learning mechanisms in artificial agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/trieschlab/baby-noise-rl.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Measuring Rényi entropy with an Echo Protocol

arXiv:2504.05237v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present efficient and practical protocols to measure the second Rényi entropy, whose exponential is known as the purity. Our approach is based on expressing the purity in terms of transition probabilities generated by an echo-type forward-backward evolution sequence, making it applicable to quantum many-body systems. Notably, our approach does not rely on random-noise averaging, a feature that can be extended to protocols to measure out-of-time-order correlation functions, as we demonstrate. By way of example, we show that our protocols can be practically implemented in superconducting qubit-based platforms, as well as in cavity-QED trapped ultra-cold gases.

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

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

VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

arXiv:2606.17294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.

07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Daily briefing: Ancient ground squirrels ate like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

Authors:

Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise. Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of an automated, imaging-based preoperative screening model for early identification of malnutrition in an abdominal surgery cohort

Background: Clinical malnutrition affects one in five abdominal surgery patients and increases postoperative complications and mortality. Current screening occurs after admission, closing the window for preoperative nutritional intervention. No objective, scalable preoperative screening tool exists. Objective: To determine whether automated volumetric CT-based body composition analysis improves preoperative identification of surgical patients at risk for clinical malnutrition compared to clinical variables or single slice imaging alone. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of adults undergoing elective abdominal surgery at a quaternary academic medical center (2018 to 2021) with a preoperative CT scan within 90 days and complete nutrition assessment. Clinical malnutrition was diagnosed by a registered dietitian using ASPEN/AND criteria. Three sex stratified Elastic Net models were compared: (1) base clinical variables; (2) base plus L3 single slice skeletal muscle index and attenuation; and (3) base plus comprehensive 3D volumetric quantification of five muscle groups and two fat depots. Discrimination (AUROC), calibration (Brier score), and clinical utility (decision curve analysis) were assessed via 10-fold cross-validation. Results: Among 1,143 patients (52.4% female; mean age 60.5 years), 231 (20.2%) were diagnosed with malnutrition. Malnourished patients had significantly higher complication rates (36.4% vs. 15.4%, p

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

Topological Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.15897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching is a powerful generative modeling framework, valued for its simplicity and strong empirical performance. However, its standard formulation treats signals on structured spaces, such as fMRI data on brain graphs, as points in Euclidean space, overlooking the rich topological features of their domains. To address this, we introduce topological flow matching, a topology-aware generalization of flow matching. We interpret flow matching as a framework for solving a degenerate Schrödinger bridge problem and inject topological information by augmenting the reference process with a Laplacian-derived drift. This principled modification captures the structure of the underlying domain while preserving the desirable properties of flow matching: a stable, simulation-free objective and deterministic sample paths. As a result, our framework serves as a drop-in replacement for standard flow matching. We demonstrate its effectiveness on diverse structured datasets, including brain fMRIs, ocean currents, seismic events, and traffic flows.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Visual Place Recognition in Forests with Depth-Aware Distillation

Visual place recognition in natural forest environments remains challenging due to repetitive vegetation, weak structural cues, and significant appearance variation across traversals. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a lightweight depth-aware distillation framework that injects geometric cues into a DINOv2-based place recognition model, while maintaining its pre-trained descriptor space. Evaluated on the recent WildCross benchmark, the proposed approach yields gains over an appearance-only counterpart, providing robustness to appearance variations. These results demonstrate the importance of depth as a strong complementary modality for place recognition in natural environments and identify depth-aware distillation as a promising direction for more robust forest perception.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Robust Local Polynomial Regression with Similarity Kernels

Authors:

arXiv:2501.10729v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local Polynomial Regression (LPR) is a widely used nonparametric method for modeling complex relationships due to its flexibility and simplicity. It estimates a regression function by fitting low-degree polynomials to localized subsets of the data, weighted by proximity. However, traditional LPR is sensitive to outliers and high-leverage points, which can significantly affect estimation accuracy. This paper revisits the kernel function used to compute regression weights and proposes a novel framework that incorporates both predictor and response variables in the weighting mechanism. The focus of this work is a conditional density kernel that robustly estimates weights by mitigating the influence of outliers through localized density estimation. The proposed method is implemented in Python and is publicly available at https://github.com/yaniv-shulman/rsklpr. The population analysis quantifies the bias induced by density-based robust weighting, and the reported experiments show lower empirical bias than iterative robust LOWESS while remaining competitive with standard LOWESS. This advancement provides a promising extension to traditional LPR, opening new possibilities for robust regression applications.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Can In-Context Learning Support Intrinsic Curiosity?

arXiv:2606.19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect. While large sequence models have revolutionized data modeling, the problem of automated data selection, or "intrinsic curiosity", remains a significant challenge. Classic approaches incentivize exploration by rewarding an agent based on its "learning progress", which measures how much a newly acquired observation improves a world model's predictive ability. However, evaluating these rewards traditionally requires expensive inner loops of gradient descent updates within each trajectory, rendering them computationally impractical at scale. In this work, we investigate whether the emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of sequence models can eliminate this bottleneck by serving as immediate, update-free world models. Specifically, we evaluate whether an exploration policy can be trained to maximize learning progress, using solely the prediction errors and counterfactual context manipulations of an in-context learner. We first prove that in general Markov decision processes, this is in fact impossible in an unbiased way: the resulting intrinsic rewards either suffer from nuisance terms that bias their estimation of true learning progress, or they cannot be implemented using an in-context learner's prediction errors. Conversely, we prove a positive result for a broad subclass of non-temporal settings, encompassing active learning and Bayesian Experimental Design: here, ICL-derived rewards successfully bound and asymptotically converge to the true learning progress. We corroborate our theory with controlled experiments across continuous and symbolic environments, demonstrating that our ICL-driven framework successfully trains curious data-collection policies that explore optimally.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

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

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

arXiv:2602.00845v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Silent Cost of Artificial Intelligence Assistance: A Theory of Autonomy Surrender, the Recovery Mechanism, and the Restoration of Human Agency

arXiv:2606.13962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The integration of artificial intelligence into human decision-making environments has introduced a previously undertheorized cost: the gradual surrender of human autonomy in exchange for access to information and computational assistance. Building on the Human Identity and Autonomy Gap (HIAG) framework, this paper advances a theoretical model of autonomy surrender as a measurable, cumulative process driven by cognitive bandwidth depletion. The model proposes three interacting mechanisms: the silent cost of AI assistance, in which autonomy is transferred incrementally and without awareness; the surrender threshold, beyond which reclaiming autonomous function becomes cognitively and psychologically difficult; and the recovery mechanism, which establishes the design obligation and the ethical responsibility accompanying deliberate human re-assumption of control. The paper argues that human re-entry into the decision loop is not a passive option but an active cognitive event requiring intentional bandwidth restoration. The design of AI systems must incorporate structured re-entry pathways, here termed recovery mechanisms, that preserve human agency while appropriately distributing responsibility. The model further predicts a terminal state, here termed preference inversion, in which functional dependence on AI assistance is experienced not as a deficit but as a preference, transforming the restoration of autonomy from a design problem into a cultural and political one. Implications are drawn for AI system design, governance frameworks, and human factors research.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

OrthoReg: Orthogonal Regularization for Hybrid Symbolic-Neural Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.19145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamical systems are fundamental to modeling the natural world, yet modeling them involves a persistent trade-off: manually prescribed mechanistic models are interpretable by design but often overly simplistic and misspecified; in contrast, flexible data-driven neural methods lack physical insight. Hybrid modeling aims for the best of both worlds by combining a prescribed or symbolic, physics-based component with a flexible neural network. A critical challenge, however, is that the neural component may relearn mechanistic parts, yielding redundant and uninterpretable models, especially when the symbolic structure itself is discovered from data. Existing methods based on standard $L^2$ regularization rely on a projection argument that breaks when the symbolic component is learned through sparse discovery, allowing the neural augmentation to overlap with symbolic structure. We introduce OrthoReg (Orthogonal Regularization), which directly penalizes overlap between the symbolic and neural components, preventing symbolic structure from being absorbed by the neural residual. This yields a complementary decomposition: the symbolic part captures what the library can express, and the neural part captures what remains. On benchmark dynamical systems with partial library mismatch, OrthoReg improves symbolic recovery and out-of-distribution behavior.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RLPR: Radar-to-LiDAR Place Recognition via Two-Stage Asymmetric Cross-Modal Alignment for Autonomous Driving

All-weather autonomy is critical for autonomous driving, which necessitates reliable localization across diverse scenarios. While LiDAR place recognition is widely deployed for this task, its performance degrades in adverse weather. Conversely, radar-based methods, though weather-resilient, are hindered by the general unavailability of radar maps. To bridge this gap, radar-to-LiDAR place recognition, which localizes radar scans within existing LiDAR maps, has garnered increasing interest. However, extracting discriminative and generalizable features shared between modalities remains challenging, compounded by the scarcity of large-scale paired training data and the signal heterogeneity across radar types. In this work, we propose RLPR, a robust radar-to-LiDAR place recognition framework compatible with single-chip, scanning, and 4D radars. We first design a dual-stream network to extract structural features that abstract away from sensor-specific signal properties (e.g., Doppler or RCS). Subsequently, motivated by our task-specific asymmetry observation between radar and LiDAR, we introduce a two-stage asymmetric cross-modal alignment (TACMA) strategy, which leverages the pre-trained radar branch as a discriminative anchor to guide the alignment process. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that RLPR achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy with strong zero-shot generalization capabilities.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Arbitrarily Configurable Wavefunctions via Imaginary Gauge Phase Imprint in Non-Hermitian Lattices

arXiv:2603.28153v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a general framework, termed the imaginary gauge phase imprint (IGPI), which enables engineering arbitrarily configurable wavefunctions with exact solutions and self-organization dynamics in any-dimensional non-Hermitian lattices under imaginary gauge fields. Using this method, we uncover a novel phase with exact critical wavefunctions, dubbed the skin critical phase (SCP), which is marked by unconventional localization, topological-skin, and dynamical characteristics. Furthermore, we validate the IGPI by imprinting and visualizing complex fractal states with Sierpinski-carpet and Koch-snowflake profiles, as well as exotic super-moire and 3D-moire states in regular lattices. Our work not only offers fresh insights into non-Hermitian critical and fractal physics, but also provides a rigorous paradigm for controlling and visualizing wavefunction patterns using the IGPI in engineered non-Hermitian systems.

20.
Science (Express) 2026-04-23

Structural N- and O-glycans revealed by high-resolution cryo-EM analysis of tubular mastigonemes | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

The chemical complexity and non-templated biosynthesis of glycans have posed significant challenges for establishing sequence-structure relationships. Here we report cryo-EM structures of tubular mastigonemes from a golden alga species, Ochromonas danica , in which a large number of N- and O-glycans are resolved at 1.8-2.2 Å resolution. Beyond high-mannose and complex N-glycans, we identify a non-canonical N-glycan on the Ala- Asn -Asp (A N D) motif. The surface spikes comprise dense O-glycans coating PSXX tetrapeptide repeats, with two glycans linked on trihydroxylated proline and one on serine per repeat. In addition to various types of sugars and their covalent modifiers, water molecules (>10% of resolved volume) and cations are clearly resolved and mediate the structural assembly. Our study establishes a framework for investigating glycan folding in high-order biological assemblies.

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

Net-Ev$^2$: A Generative Simulator for Network Event Evolution

arXiv:2606.12494v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reducing real-world trial and error has long been a central goal of decision making, and generative simulators advance this goal by modeling the evolution of future states. An even more challenging yet meaningful task is simulating how disturbance events (e.g., accidents) propagate their impacts across real-world networks. The existing approaches fall short of modeling both structured attributes and unstructured semantics of events, and capturing topological structures in simulating network event evolution. Therefore, we are motivated to propose Net-Ev$^2$ ($\underline{Net}$work $\underline{Ev}$ent $\underline{Ev}$olution), a novel generative simulator that jointly leverages event cues while preserving network topology in simulations. Specifically, the framework consists of two stages, namely structure-guided masked pre-training and topology-aware diffusion process, which is achieved by U-Net-like graph downsampling and upsampling during denoising. At inference time, Net-Ev$^2$ can generate simulations using natural-language event input only, with greater flexibility for practical usage. Furthermore, we introduce Net-Ev$^2$-6.5M, a multimodal benchmark of aligned event and network traffic data across four large-scale road networks, as well as a new topology-aware metric, namely JL-MMD, to evaluate topological fidelity in generated network dynamics. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance and strong generalization ability of Net-Ev$^2$. Code is made available at https://github.com/Guangyu4/Net-Ev-2.

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

Quantum speedup from nonclassical polarization

arXiv:2603.23124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a framework for identifying nonclassical speedups in systems with polarization, likewise spin degrees of freedom. By confining the dynamics to the manifold of angular momentum coherent states, which act as the classical reference in this case, we compute the speed limit that bounds the rate of change of the state achievable without generating quantum coherence. A comparison with the unrestricted quantum speed limit enables the quantitative identification of speedups arising from polarization nonclassicality. We apply this framework to the cross-Kerr interaction, demonstrating a persistent speedup scaling as $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{N})$ with the photon number $N$ with a parity effect in favour of even photon numbers. The results establish polarization nonclassicality as a genuine dynamical resource, linking quantum coherence to quantum-enhanced evolution speeds in nonlinear photonic systems.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do as the Romans Do: Learning Universal Behaviors from Heterogeneous Agents

arXiv:2606.18537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans often acquire new skills by observing others, since observed behaviors implicitly reveal how to act in an environment. However, observations drawn from a heterogeneous population introduce conflicting behavioral signals, making it difficult to determine which behaviors are worth imitating. We address this challenge with General Reward Inference and Disentanglement (GRID), a social learning method that extracts universally useful behaviors from a heterogeneous population of demonstrators pursuing different goals. GRID decomposes per-agent reward functions into a general reward, capturing behaviors shared across all agents, and specific rewards, capturing individual preferences and objectives. Training exclusively on the general reward provides a new paradigm of generalist pretraining. It yields a generalist agent that internalizes universal environmental competencies, such as safety and basic task proficiency, without the mode-averaging bias that afflicts standard learning from demonstration techniques. This generalist serves as a superior prior for fine-tuning to downstream tasks, including preferences unseen during training. Experiments across a synthetic basis function decomposition, multi-agent Craftax, and a continuous autonomous driving simulator (Highway-Env) confirm that GRID successfully disentangles reward structure in a semantically meaningful way, outperforms standard learning from demonstration baselines, and enables more efficient and stable specialization.

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

Cluster LOCO: Feature Importance For Interpreting Clusters

arXiv:2606.14592v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is widely used for exploratory analysis and scientific discovery, driving insights from market segmentation to biological data analysis, but its outputs can be difficult to interpret, audit, and reproduce as modern datasets become increasingly large and complex. Reliable use of clustering requires understanding which features drive the discovered structure, yet feature-level explanations for clustering remain scarce compared with methods in supervised learning. Furthermore, existing clustering feature importance scores are often tied to specific algorithms and data assumptions. To address these challenges, we propose Cluster LOCO (Leave-One-Covariate-Out), a family of model-agnostic feature importance scores for clustering. Cluster LOCO is built on feature occlusion and clustering generalizability, defined as whether cluster labels learned on one subset of the data can be accurately predicted on held-out samples. For any chosen clustering algorithm, Cluster LOCO quantifies a feature's importance by measuring how much its removal degrades generalizability. We first introduce Cluster LOCO-Split, which relies on data splitting, and then extend it to Cluster LOCO-MP, a minipatch ensemble-based version designed for large-scale data. Across synthetic simulations and an application to cell-type discovery in single-cell transcriptomics, we show that Cluster LOCO more reliably recovers informative features than existing clustering feature importance methods.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Diagonal-Budgeted Trotterization for Efficient Quantum Hamiltonian Simulation

arXiv:2606.16959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient classical simulation of quantum Hamiltonian dynamics is often bottlenecked by exponential state growth and the overhead of generic sparse linear algebra. We introduce diagonal-budgeted Trotterization, a structure-aware strategy that decomposes Hamiltonians into factors preserving diagonal sparsity while tightly controlling fidelity loss. Our implementation, HamSim, utilizes a compact diagonal-sparse data layout and specialized C++/CUDA kernels to bypass the overheads of generic formats like CSR. By leveraging SIMD vectorization, multithreading, and GPU acceleration, HamSim achieves high performance across heterogeneous architectures. Benchmarks on the HamLib suite show that HamSim significantly outperforms Qiskit-Aer. On CPUs, HamSim attains speedups of $182$–$1,269\times$ on optimization instances (TSP, MaxCut) and $4.8$–$841\times$ on physical models (TFIM, Heisenberg). On GPUs, it achieves up to $178\times$ speedup for $12$–$16$ qubit problems. Unlike traditional Trotterization, HamSim maintains near-perfect fidelity without requiring exponential steps. This demonstrates that diagonal-aware numerical kernels provide a scalable foundation for high-fidelity classical Hamiltonian simulation.