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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Towards Data-Efficient Cross-Device Generalization of Grad-Shafranov Equilibria via Transfer Learning Neural Operator

arXiv:2606.15512v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-time reconstruction of magnetohydrodynamic equilibria is essential for plasma shaping, stability assessment and feedback control in magnetic confinement fusion. However, Grad-Shafranov equilibrium calculations remain largely device-specific and iterative, limiting their use in latency-constrained control settings. Existing neural approaches can accelerate individual equilibrium predictions, but they do not generally provide reusable models across changing plasma boundaries or tokamak geometries. Here we show that equilibrium reconstruction can be recast as a cross-device operator learning problem. We develop a domain-specific neural operator framework that maps geometry and profile parameters directly to the poloidal flux field, replacing repeated solve-on-demand computation with amortized operator inference. Using the analytically tractable Solov'ev family as a controlled Grad-Shafranov testbed, we generate equilibria across eight geometrically distinct tokamak-like configurations and benchmark five neural operator architectures under four transfer-learning strategies. Single-geometry pretraining gives poor transfer to unseen devices, whereas multi-geometry pretraining enables data-efficient adaptation. The Wavelet Neural Operator gives the strongest cross-geometry performance, reaching mean relative L2 errors below 4% with 100 labelled target equilibria and below 2% with full fine-tuning. The predicted magnetic fields satisfy the divergence-free constraint to numerical precision, and four architectures achieve millisecond or sub-millisecond inference. These results identify neural operator pretraining as a route towards reusable, real-time equilibrium inference across fusion device configurations.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

MakeupMirror: Improving Facial Attribute Preservation in Diffusion Models for Makeup Transfer

arXiv:2606.20094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Makeup transfer models enable fun augmented reality (AR) experiences as well as virtual try-on (VTO) for online makeup shopping. While recent state-of-the-art diffusion based solutions such as Stable-Makeup dramatically improve the accuracy and realism of makeup transfer, they still face limitations in identity and skin color preservation, making production-level VTO for makeup shopping unrealistic. In this work, we propose MakeupMirror, a diffusion-based approach to makeup transfer that makes significant progress towards preserving facial features and skin tone. We introduce several technical innovations over Stable-Makeup: (1) integration of facial geometry conditioning with ControlNets to maintain facial fidelity; (2) region-specific makeup transfer control to enable precise makeup application across facial regions such as skin, eyes and lips; (3) skin tone-based makeup transfer modulation that prevent skin tone alteration in cross-subject transfer scenarios; and (4) integration of a Levenberg-Marquardt Langevin sampler to speed up inference while maintaining generation quality. Our experiments on CPM-Real, Makeup Wild, and (herein newly collected, more diverse) MakeupSelfies datasets show that MakeupMirror improves relative facial recognition similarity by +60%, reduces relative skin tone difference by -50% over Stable-Makeup, with a latency of 0.7s, while achieving expert acceptance rate of 94% across core facial identity preservation criteria.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Many-body spectral transitions through the lens of the variable-range SYK2 model

arXiv:2412.14280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a cornerstone in the study of quantum chaos and holographic quantum matter. Real-world implementations, however, deviate from the idealized all-to-all connectivity, raising questions about the robustness of its chaotic properties. In this work, we investigate a quadratic SYK model with distance-dependent interactions governed by a power-law decay. By analytically and numerically studying the spectral form factor (SFF), we uncover how transitions present in the single-particle limit carry over to the many-body system. Non-trivial cancellations in the one-loop contributions lead to a robustness of the SFF under a considerable reduction of the interaction range. Further suppression leads to a breakdown of perturbation theory around the infinite-range path-integral saddle and the appearance of new spectral regimes, marked by a higher dip and the emergence of a secondary plateau. Our results highlight the interplay between single-particle criticality and many-body dynamics, offering new insights into the quantum chaos-to-localization transition and its reflection in spectral statistics.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Did You Forget What I Asked? Prospective Memory Failures in Large Language Models

作者:

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled paradigm that combines verifiable formatting constraints with benchmark tasks of increasing complexity. Across three model families and over 8,000 prompts, compliance drops by 2-21% under concurrent task load. Vulnerability is highly type-dependent: terminal constraints (requiring action at the response boundary) degrade most, with drops up to 50%, while avoidance constraints remain comparatively robust. A salience-enhanced format (explicit instruction framing plus a trailing reminder) recovers much of the lost compliance, restoring performance to 90-100% in many settings. Interference is bidirectional: formatting constraints can also reduce task accuracy, with one model's GSM8K accuracy dropping from 93% to 27%. In additional stacking experiments, joint compliance declines sharply as constraints accumulate. All results use deterministic programmatic checkers without an LLM-as-judge component on publicly available datasets.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve accuracy and reliability, but its effect on calibration is not fully understood. We show that this picture is incomplete: in some settings, increasing the reasoning budget beyond a task-specific threshold can cause models to become systematically overconfident, assigning high confidence to incorrect answers. We call this phenomenon Calibration Drift Under Reasoning (CDUR) and study it both theoretically and empirically. We define reasoning budget B and analyze conditions under which Expected Calibration Error ECE(B) follows a non-monotonic pattern: it first decreases as reasoning corrects errors, then increases as longer reasoning produces internally consistent but incorrect explanations. We propose a Hypothesis Lock-In model based on autoregressive generation to explain this behavior. We evaluate Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.3-70B on 47 reasoning-trap questions across four reasoning budgets and three seeds (1,368 API calls; 574 valid responses). The 8B model shows non-monotonic calibration behavior, while results for the 70B model are limited to baseline evaluation and are inconclusive for budget-dependent effects. We introduce CABStop, a calibration-aware stopping rule that halts reasoning when confidence diverges from an auxiliary accuracy estimate. These results suggest that increasing reasoning depth does not always improve reliability and should be monitored carefully.

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

Ensembles of Large Language Models for Identifying EQ-5D Studies in PubMed Based on Their Abstracts

The rapid increase in scientific publications leads to the fact that manual study screening in systematic literature reviews (SLRs) is increasingly resource consuming, inefficient, and inconsistent. Classifying studies that clearly report health-related quality-of-life results, such as EQ-5D data, requires a high level of clinical interpretation and poses challenges for human reviewers. This study investigates the use of Google's Gemini and Gemma large language models (LLMs) in automating EQ-5D detection in the PubMed biomedical database based only on published abstracts. A multi-phase framework is proposed that integrates few-shot prompting, weight ensembling aggregation, and a soft stacking meta-classifier. Nine LLMs are evaluated on a dataset of PubMed studies manually labeled by two experts regarding EQ-5D reporting. The weighted ensemble of gemini-2.5-pro, gemma-3-12b, and gemma-3-27b obtained a 0.74 weighted F1-score and 0.74 accuracy, exceeding individually attained results. The ensembling of top-performing models improved the balance between precision and recall compared to individual models, while the soft stacking approach provided greater reliability and interpretability. Feature analysis shows that the probability results from the models are important in guiding the final predictions. The findings suggest that an ensemble-based LLM setup is a reliable and scalable approach for automating screening in biomedical research.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.00343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies due to inconsistent measurement boundaries and heterogeneous reporting. We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon for explicit, phase-aware tasks (initialization, per-round training, evaluation, and idle/coordination). To capture non-compute effects, we additionally estimate communication emissions from transmitted model-update sizes under a network-configurable energy model. We validate the proposed approach on two representative workloads: CIFAR-10 image classification and retinal optic disk segmentation. In CIFAR-10, controlled client-efficiency scenarios show that system-level slowdowns and coordination effects can contribute meaningfully to carbon footprint under an otherwise fixed FL protocol, increasing total CO2e by 8.34x (medium) and 21.73x (low) relative to the high-efficiency baseline. In retinal segmentation, swapping GPU tiers (H100 vs.\ V100) yields a consistent 1.7x runtime gap (290 vs. 503 minutes) while producing non-uniform changes in total energy and CO2e across sites, underscoring the need for per-site and per-round reporting. Overall, our results support a standardized carbon accounting method that acts as a prerequisite for reproducible 'green' FL evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pediatric-Accelerated-Intelligence-Lab/carbon_footprint.

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

MASCOT-Android: A Curated Dataset and Automated Collection Pipeline for Android Malware Source Code Specimens

arXiv:2606.16072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compared with binaries and decompiled code, malware source code more directly reflects the attackers' original intent. However, the scarcity of source code and the high cost of manual review make such datasets difficult to build and maintain. We propose MASCOT-Android, a curated dataset of Android malware source code and an automated collection framework for scalable malware source code discovery on GitHub. A key finding of our work is that repository-level documentation alone provides a strong signal for malware source code collection. Our model extracts character-level TF-IDF features from 8,772 malware and 25,747 benign README documents and trains a LinearSVC classifier to distinguish malware repositories. This README-only model achieves an accuracy of 96.28\% and an FPR of 1.06\% in local evaluation. In addition, the model outputs confidence scores, allowing users to adjust the decision threshold to balance FPR and coverage, which is practical in real-world malware source code collection.

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

Tensor-based second-order causal discovery

arXiv:2606.18074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery seeks to uncover the causal dependencies among variables. For this purpose, we propose an algorithm called Tensor-based Second-order Causal Discovery (TSCD). Its input is a tensor obtained from the covariance matrices of observational and interventional data. Assuming the causal dependencies follow a linear structural equation model on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), TSCD outputs the DAG and the functions on its edges, requiring only that the noise variables are uncorrelated. We also implement a version of the approach for nonlinear models. Our focus on second-order statistics (via the covariance matrices) is motivated by their statistical and computational efficiency relative to higher-order moments, their identifiability relative to first-order statistics, and that they work regardless of whether the variables are Gaussian. We show that TSCD has identifiable causal order and parameters from a number of interventions that is logarithmic in the number of variables. Experiments show that TSCD is robust to noise, competitive with existing methods, and scales to hundreds of variables.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Federated Learning for Feature Generalization with Convex Constraints

arXiv:2606.14416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) often struggles with generalization due to heterogeneous client data. Local models are prone to overfitting their local data distributions, and even transferable features can be distorted during aggregation. To address these challenges, we propose FedCONST, an approach that adaptively modulates update magnitudes based on the parameter strength of the global model. This prevents over-emphasizing well-learned parameters while reinforcing underdeveloped ones. Specifically, FedCONST employs linear convex constraints to ensure training stability and preserve locally learned generalization capabilities during aggregation. A Gradient Signal to Noise Ratio (GSNR) analysis further validates the effectiveness of FedCONST in enhancing feature transferability and robustness. As a result, FedCONST effectively aligns local and global objectives, mitigating overfitting and promoting stronger generalization across diverse FL environments, achieving state-of-the-art performance.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Quantile-Free Uncertainty Quantification in Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.04847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in graph neural networks (GNNs) is crucial in high-stakes domains but remains a significant challenge. In graph settings, message passing often relies on strong assumptions such as exchangeability, which are rarely satisfied in practice, and achieving reliable UQ typically requires costly resampling or post-hoc calibration. To address these issues, we introduce Quantile-free Prediction Interval GNN (QpiGNN), a framework that builds on quantile regression (QR) to enable GNN-based UQ by directly optimizing coverage and interval width without requiring quantile inputs or post-processing. QpiGNN employs a dual-head architecture that decouples prediction and uncertainty, and is trained with label-only supervision through a quantile-free joint loss. This design allows efficient training and yields robust prediction intervals, with theoretical guarantees of asymptotic coverage and near-optimal width under mild assumptions. Experiments on 19 synthetic and real-world benchmarks show QpiGNN achieves average 22% higher coverage and 50% narrower intervals than baselines, while ensuring efficiency and robustness to noise and structural shifts.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Reward Supervision: Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation

Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Distillation often relies on chain-of-thought annotations that are expensive to obtain and may themselves be noisy, incomplete, or partially incorrect; even when the final solution is correct, an imperfect rationale can interfere with learning. Reinforcement learning with verified rewards, on the other hand, typically compresses evaluative feedback into a scalar signal, obscuring which aspects of a response should be improved. We propose Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation, a framework that incorporates rubrics as structured, fine-grained feedback for on-policy self-distillation. Our method conditions the teacher model on criterion-level rubrics and uses it to provide token-level guidance on the student's own sampled trajectories. This design avoids treating a single reference rationale as the sole supervision target. Instead, rubrics specify what a strong response should satisfy, enabling more fine-grained credit assignment over the reasoning process than scalar reward optimization. We instantiate this framework with a two-stage pipeline that first learns to generate task-specific rubrics and then trains a rubric-guided reasoner. We evaluate on a diverse suite of science reasoning benchmarks and results show that rubric-conditioned self-distillation effectively converts rubric-level criteria into token-level guidance over the reasoning process, surpassing GRPO by 1.0 points and OPSD by 0.9 points on average.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

<i>CHPO</i> coordinates chilling recovery and nitrogen use in rice

作者:

Global rice production faces mounting challenges from abnormal temperature fluctuations and nitrogen-fertilizer-driven environmental pollution1–7. Developing varieties that balance chilling resilience and nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) offers a promising solution, but the molecular networks coordinating these traits remain poorly understood. Here we identify CHILLING PHOENIX (CHPO), a major gene underlying the quantitative trait locus shared by both chilling tolerance and resilience. It encodes a MYB transcription factor that acts as a key regulator coordinating post-chilling recovery with nitrogen use in rice. Natural variation in a GCG-repeat-encoded polyalanine tract alters CHPO DNA-binding preference and redirects regulatory outputs between the japonica-type (CHPOjap) and indica-type (CHPOind), causing opposing effects on chilling tolerance and resilience. This allelic variation is shaped by domestication selection, with the CHPOjap allele probably derived from Chinese wild rice. CHPOjap directly targets OsTCP19 and OsNRT2.4 to fine-tune NUE, thereby enhancing chilling tolerance and resilience. These findings provide a mechanistic framework for a chilling-induced high-nitrogen-utilization module that alleviates the damage caused by chilling stress, and a potential molecular design&nbsp;strategy for breeding rice varieties with both chilling resilience and high NUE at the&nbsp;recovery stage. A rice gene, CHPO, links chilling resilience with nitrogen-use efficiency, revealing a domestication-shaped regulatory mechanism that could guide breeding of climate-resilient, sustainable rice varieties.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Certifying Macroscopic Quantum Mechanics via Hypothesis Testing with Finite Data

arXiv:2506.22092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We address the challenge of certifying quantum behavior with single macroscopic massive particles, subject to decoherence and finite data. We propose a hypothesis testing framework that distinguishes between classical and quantum mechanics based on position measurements. While interference pattern visibility in single-particle quantum superposition experiments has been commonly used as a sufficient criterion to falsify classical mechanics, we show that, from a hypothesis testing perspective, it is neither necessary nor efficient. Focusing on recent proposals to prepare macroscopic superposition states of levitated nanoparticles, we show that the likelihood ratio test – which leverages differences across the entire probability distribution – provides an exponential reduction in measurements needed to reach a given confidence level. These results generalize to a broad class of quantum states, and offer a principled, efficient method to falsify classical mechanics in interference experiments, relaxing the experimental constraints faced by current efforts to test quantum mechanics at the macroscopic scale.

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

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

16.
Science (Express) 2026-06-18

Indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells with tin oxide recombination layer and electrodes | Science

作者: 未知作者

Indium-based transparent conductive oxides are widely used as electrodes and recombination layers in perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells, yet their scalability is constrained by indium scarcity and sputtering-induced damage. Here we report high efficiency and stable indium-free perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells enabled by reactive plasma deposited tin oxide (RPD-SnO x ). For RPD-SnO x as the recombination layer, a certified efficiency of 33.6% is achieved. Fully indium-free tandems that used RPD-SnO x as both recombination layer and electrodes delivering a champion PCE of 33.2% (1 cm 2 ) and a mini-module with a certified efficiency of 31.0% (207.9 cm 2 ). Dense and uniform self-assembled monolayer anchoring enabled by RPD-SnO x suppressed non-radiative recombination and reduced halide migration. Indium-free mini-modules exhibited high thermal, damp-heat, and outdoor operational stability and retained 65% of their maximum initial efficiency after 105 days of outdoor operation.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Womens intentions and motivations towards health behaviour change before pregnancy: a cross-sectional survey of pregnant women in Australia

Introduction: The preconception period (i.e. the weeks and months before pregnancy) is a critical window during which parental health behaviours can influence pregnancy outcomes and the childs long-term health. Modifiable factors such as nutrition, physical activity, substance use, and environmental exposures play a key role, yet womens ability to adopt and sustain healthy behaviours is shaped by complex psychological, social and environmental influences. This study applies the Theory of Planned Behaviour to identify the beliefs underpinning womens preconception behaviours, with the aim of informing support for effective and sustained health behaviour change. Methods: An Australian national retrospective cross-sectional survey of pregnant women (18-49 years), recruited through social media platforms. The 92-item survey captured respondent socio-demographics, pregnancy status and health conditions, health behaviours, and beliefs regarding preconception health behaviours. Respondents level of pregnancy planning was categorised using the London Measure of Unplanned Pregnancy (LMUP). Items regarding preconception beliefs were structured in accordance with the Theory of Planned Behaviour, with a focus on regular exercise, healthy diet, and alcohol avoidance. These beliefs variables were analysed using structured equation modelling to identify paths between latent variables and the items used to estimate each concept. Results: The study was completed by 430 pregnant women of whom 72.7% had a planned pregnancy. Most had a partner, were university educated and in good health. Structural equation modelling showed intention strongly predicted exercise ({beta}=0.65), healthy diet ({beta}=0.54) and alcohol avoidance ({beta}=0.64). Perceived control and partner norms influenced intentions, whereas health professional norms had limited effect. Positive beliefs were associated with folate supplement use and smoking cessation. Conclusion: These findings highlight intention as a key driver of preconception health behaviours, with perceived control and partner influences playing a more significant role than individual beliefs or health professional input. Effective interventions should therefore address structural barriers and actively involve partners, while respecting womens autonomy. Overall, couples-focused, multi-level strategies are likely essential to support meaningful and sustained preconception health behaviour change.

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

Clay-CNN Hybrids: Leveraging Geo-Foundational Models as Auxiliary Context for Landslide Detection

Rapid post-event landslide mapping is essential for disaster response but remains difficult to automate due to extreme class imbalance. This study evaluates whether Clay v1.5, a Geo-Foundational Model (GFM), can improve pixel-level landslide segmentation on the Landslide4Sense (L4S) benchmark, which contains 3,799 training chips with 14 Sentinel-2 and terrain bands and approximately 2% positive pixels. We compare three strategies: Clay as the primary encoder with multi-scale residual terrain fusion, a U-Net backbone augmented with Clay semantic context at the bottleneck, and a standard U-Net baseline. The hybrid U-Net + Clay model with two-stage Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) achieved the best test F1 of 64.5 +/- 1.8% over three seeds, surpassing the Clay-only backbone (55.2 +/- 3.6%) and the U-Net baseline (59.9%). Clay as a standalone encoder underperformed the U-Net due to the absence of multi-scale skip connections, but its pretrained representations consistently improved performance when injected as auxiliary context. These findings suggest that GFMs are most effective for landslide detection when they complement spatially detailed convolutional architectures rather than replace them.

19.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-10

Dual-target gene therapy in Parkinson’s disease: a multicenter phase 1 trial

作者:

Restoring striatal dopamine synthesis is a promising gene therapy strategy for Parkinson’s disease. Previous adeno-associated virus-mediated aromatic L-amino acid decarboxylase (AADC) monotherapies remain dependent on exogenous levodopa, whereas multigene delivery is constrained by strict adeno-associated virus packaging limits. A ‘dual approach’ targeting the two rate-limiting enzymes, tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) and AADC, offers the potential for autonomous dopamine synthesis. We report the 12-month primary safety and tolerability outcomes of a multicenter, open-label, dose-escalation, phase 1 trial evaluating BBM-P002, a new adeno-associated virus vector—AAVT42—codelivering constitutively active TH and AADC. Ten participants with moderate-to-advanced Parkinson’s disease were enrolled and received bilateral intraputaminal infusions across doses of 4.0 × 1011 vg (Cohort 1; n = 1), 6.0 × 1011 vg (Cohort 2; n = 2), 1.0 × 1012 vg (Cohort 3; n = 2) and 1.2 × 1012 vg (Cohort 4; n = 5). The trial achieved its primary outcome, as BBM-P002 demonstrated a favorable safety and tolerability profile within 12 months post-treatment. No dose-limiting toxicities or drug-related serious adverse events occurred. A total of 23 adverse events were reported, all judged unrelated to BBM-P002 and primarily mild and transient. Systemic toxicity and clinically meaningful immunogenicity were absent. In conclusion, intraputaminal delivery of BBM-P002 was safe and well tolerated in this phase 1 trial, supporting continued clinical development. ClinicalTrials.gov registration: NCT05822739 . Phase 1 results reveal that BBM-P002, a dual-target gene therapy co-delivering TH and DDC, is safe and well tolerated in Parkinson’s disease, with 12-month motor improvements signaling therapeutic potential.

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

Quantized time in quantum walks under weak rank-K measurements

arXiv:2606.13552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Measurements can be used to monitor the evolution of quantum systems and may lead to a universally quantized time statistics. It is known that the mean return time is quantized for strong and indirect monitoring through the winding number of the return amplitude in a one-dimensional space. Here we discuss that under multi-channel strong or indirect monitoring, where the latter is achieved through ancilla coupling, the mean return time of a quantum walk in the projected subspace is also quantized. This reflects a universal time quantization for a higher dimensional evolution.

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

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

A Cycle Walk for Sampling Measures on Spanning Forests for Redistricting

arXiv:2509.08629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the Cycle Walk, a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method for sampling distributions on balanced graph partitions, motivated by applications in political redistricting. The method operates on spanning forests and combines two types of updates: local "cycle" moves within districts and global moves that exchange population between adjacent districts while preserving balance constraints. This construction enables efficient Metropolis–Hastings correction while allowing proposals at multiple spatial scales. We show that the Cycle Walk naturally interpolates between existing approaches based on local updates and a class of global update methods derived from recombination (RECOM). Through a range of numerical experiments on synthetic graphs and real-world precinct data, we demonstrate that the Cycle Walk exhibits improved empirical convergence diagnostics for distributions that place weaker weight on spanning-tree counts, a regime that is challenging for existing methods. In particular, the algorithm remains effective when incorporating alternative compactness measures that more closely reflect policy-relevant criteria. These results suggest that the Cycle Walk provides a flexible and computationally efficient framework for sampling from a broader class of redistricting distributions than previously accessible with MCMC techniques.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

What's Old is New Again: Classical Dimensionality Reduction for Efficient Saliency-Guided Biometric Attack Detection

Saliency-guided training is a paradigm in visual recognition that encourages models to focus on the most relevant image regions during learning. While its application in biometric presentation attack detection (PAD) has shown strong benefits in robustness and generalization, adoption is often limited by the high cost, domain specificity, and limited scalability of existing saliency acquisition methods, such as human annotations over a limited dataset. We present a novel, cost-efficient, and highly-scalable approach to saliency acquisition using maps inspired by classical dimensionality reduction techniques: PCA and LDA. Our proposed methods generate saliency maps directly from raw training data, requiring no human annotation nor domain knowledge. We contextualize the effectiveness of these saliency sources in three saliency-explored domains (iris PAD, synthetic face detection, fingerprint PAD) and demonstrate its scalability in two saliency-novel domains (fingerprint vein PAD and ID card PAD). Across all domains tested, models trained using dimensionality reduction-sourced saliency maps exceed baseline and sometimes SOTA saliency methods without any resource investment or domain-specific tooling. Our findings overcome an important yet unaddressed barrier to saliency-guided training for biometric attack detection and beyond.

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

LLMs Can Better Capture Human Judgments–With the Right Prompts

Are large language models (LLMs) bad at capturing human judgment? Two commonly stated limitations are that LLMs fail to capture full distributions of responses, and that their judgments are unstable across wording variations. We demonstrate simple prompting strategies that mitigate these limitations. Across two datasets–a U.S.-representative set of 144 moral scenarios and 38 moral beliefs from the International Social Survey Programme's Family and Changing Gender Roles module covering 32 countries–we show how simple elicitation techniques help improve AI-human alignment. First, prompting models to report standard deviations and response proportions recovers the full range of human responses better than common strategies. Second, ensuring scenarios are clear to human participants–as reflected in human confusion ratings–boosts model alignment, and LLMs can track human confusion ratings. At the same time, we find that LLMs' estimates of their own error are poorly calibrated, though they can predict human variability relatively well. These results suggest that asking better questions to LLMs can yield better answers.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Query-Efficient Video Adversarial Attack with Stylized Logo on Service Computing

In service computing, video classification has become fundamental to many intelligent applications. While Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have demonstrated excellent performance in recognizing video content, recent studies have shown that DNNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial examples. Thus, understanding adversarial attacks can better respond to emergency situations. In order to improve attack performance, many style-transfer-based attacks and patch-based attacks have been proposed. However, the global perturbation of the former will bring unnatural global colors, while the latter is difficult to achieve success in targeted attacks due to the limited perturbation space. Moreover, compared to a plethora of methods targeting image classifiers, video adversarial attacks remain relatively underexplored. Therefore, to generate adversarial examples with a low budget and to provide them with a higher verisimilitude, we propose a novel black-box video attack framework, called Stylized Logo Attack (SLA). SLA is conducted through three stages. The first stage involves building a style reference set for logos, which can not only make the generated examples more natural, but also carry more target class features in targeted attacks. Then, Reinforcement Learning is employed to determine the style reference and position parameters of the logo within the video, which ensures that the stylized logo is placed in the video with optimal attributes. Finally, perturbations are optimized in a step-by-step manner so as to improve the fooling rate. Experimental results indicate that SLA can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods and still maintain good deception effects when facing various defense methods. We believe SLA can raise awareness among the security community about the reliability and security of video classification systems and serve as a memorandum of possible attack methods.