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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Daily Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) scoring reveals diet quality patterns masked by aggregation

The Healthy Eating Index (HEI-2020) is conventionally computed by aggregating intake across days before scoring. Digital food logging enables an alternative: scoring each day and averaging daily scores. These methods are not equivalent. The HEI's density-based structure and component caps cause aggregation to inflate adequacy scores when intake is irregular. Using Food & You data, we show daily HEI correlates more strongly with microbiome diversity, and recommend co-reporting both metrics.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

GitOfThoughts: Version-Controlled Reasoning and Agent Memory You Can Replay, Diff, and Merge

Large language model (LLM) reasoning is ephemeral: chains of thought vanish with the context window, pruned search branches leave no record, and memory buffers cannot be diffed, merged, or audited. Every other complex software process (code, infrastructure, data, experiments) is version-controlled; reasoning is not. We introduce GitOfThoughts, which stores an agent's reasoning tree as a git repository: every scored thought is a commit, scores are notes, outcomes are tags, and retrieval is "git log" over the agent's own history. This makes reasoning replayable, auditable, and mergeable across agents at near-zero engineering cost. We then ask the harder question: does memory, in any substrate, actually improve accuracy? Across five substrates (none, markdown, vector, graph, git), two benchmarks, two model scales, and pre-registered replications, the answer for novel problems is no. No memory format reliably helps, and a promising early result collapsed under its own pre-registered replication. Memory pays only above what we call the copyability threshold: when the retrieved case is a near-duplicate of the current problem (similarity >~ 0.8), accuracy jumps sharply; below it, nothing. The gain is answer retrieval, not method transfer: a 4.5x larger model doubles the near-duplicate payoff yet still cannot extract a transferable method from a worked example. The only general lever we find is test-time sampling. The case for git-as-substrate is therefore auditability, provenance, and mergeability at accuracy parity. We document a retracted result and a refuted hypothesis to model the evaluation standard we hold ourselves to.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Neural FOXP2 – Language Specific Neuron Steering for Targeted Language Improvement in LLMs

LLMs are multilingual by training, yet their lingua franca is often English, reflecting English language dominance in pretraining. Other languages remain in parametric memory but are systematically suppressed. We argue that language defaultness is governed by a sparse, low-rank control circuit, language neurons, that can be mechanistically isolated and safely steered. We introduce Neural FOXP2, that makes a chosen language (Hindi or Spanish) primary in a model by steering language-specific neurons. Neural FOXP2 proceeds in three stages: (i) Localize: We train per-layer SAEs so each activation decomposes into a small set of active feature components. For every feature, we quantify English vs. Hindi/Spanish selectivity overall logit-mass lift toward the target-language token set. Tracing the top-ranked features back to their strongest contributing units yields a compact language-neuron set. (ii) Steering directions: We localize controllable language-shift geometry via a spectral low-rank analysis. For each layer, we build English to target activation-difference matrices and perform layerwise SVD to extract the dominant singular directions governing language change. The eigengap and effective-rank spectra identify a compact steering subspace and an empirically chosen intervention window (where these directions are strongest and most stable). (iii) Steer: We apply a signed, sparse activation shift targeted to the language neurons. Concretely, within low to mid layers we add a positive steering along the target-language dominant directions and a compensating negative shift toward the null space for the English neurons, yielding controllable target-language defaultness.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Finite-Time Queue Peak Laws in Stochastic Networks: Logarithmic Scaling After Geometric Thresholds

arXiv:2606.18218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study finite-horizon queue peaks in generalized switches, a standard stochastic-network model in which many queues share constrained service resources. Arrivals may be dependent, time-varying, and adapted to the past; the standing load condition is uniform interior slack, meaning the conditional mean arrival vector stays in a fixed contraction of the capacity region. We show that this slack reshapes the finite-time peak law for drift-minimizing scheduling policies such as MaxWeight. The square-root envelope that is sharp without slack persists only up to a geometry-dependent threshold; beyond that threshold, the running maximum grows only logarithmically with the horizon, both with high probability and in expectation. The mechanism is self-normalization: in the current queue direction, the projected fluctuation scale is normalized by the stabilizing drift scale. This removes capacity geometry from the logarithmic coefficient, while geometry remains in the threshold. Matching lower bounds show that both the logarithmic term and a geometric threshold are unavoidable. When finite-time state-space collapse is available, the threshold can be sharpened using local bottleneck geometry. For generalized input-queued switches, we obtain finite-time peak bounds with tight logarithmic coefficients. Simulations illustrate the two-phase envelope, local geometric refinements, and variance-sensitive improvements predicted by the theory.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Correcting Sensor-Induced Distribution Drift with Wasserstein Adversarial Learning

arXiv:2606.18561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quality of recorded data depends on the stability of the sensor system that acquires it. Sensor motion and aging can degrade the performance and stability of downstream data-driven methods. We present a Wasserstein-GAN-inspired approach for unsupervised inference of physically interpretable transformation parameters that map a changed detector response distribution back to a nominal reference distribution. In contrast to standard generative modeling, the generator is used as a learnable calibration transformation whose trainable weights represent the sought parameters, while the critic provides a distributional distance signal via the Wasserstein objective. We validate the approach on a tracking-detector toy model with controlled layer shifts and demonstrate its application on high-granularity Geant4-simulated calorimeter data with cell-wise aging effects. The method recovers aging coefficients for individual cells with correlation to ground truth and improves agreement between calibrated and reference energy-sum distributions, while exhibiting the expected degradation at increasing channel-to-channel noise levels. These results indicate that adversarial distribution matching can serve as a data-driven component of calibration strategies in settings where direct labels for degradation parameters are unavailable.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A non-invasive liquid biopsy resolves the diagnostic blind spot in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease is a major global health burden, and its early detection is critical for delaying progression to kidney failure using recently developed targeted therapies. However, current diagnostic screening relies heavily on blood markers that are confounded by muscle mass, and on urine tests that frequently miss structural damage occurring without protein leakage. This creates a critical diagnostic blind spot that hinders timely intervention. Here we show a non-invasive liquid biopsy platform that quantifies a specific protein marker, MUC1, on urinary extracellular vesicles to accurately assess renal parenchymal integrity. By bypassing the systemic metabolic noise of traditional blood tests, our assay provides a remarkably stable, person-specific functional signature. Following extensive validation across diverse cohorts, our longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the discrepancy between this novel urine-based readout and standard blood tests unmasks hidden renal vulnerability, successfully predicting rapid functional decline. By comprehensively evaluating both tubular and glomerular integrity from a single spot urine sample, these findings establish a completely non-invasive, highly scalable prescreening tool that resolves the diagnostic blind spot, enabling broader early detection strategies and ushering in a new era of proactive risk management.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Permutation-Invariant N-body gates via Tavis-Cummings Hamiltonian

arXiv:2506.03453v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Global control provides a promising route to implementing multi-qubit gates without individual qubit addressing. This is especially appealing for permutation-invariant (PI) gates, whose symmetry is often broken when they are compiled into individually addressed one- and two-qubit gates. Important examples include SWAP, $\sqrt{iSWAP}$, and the n-qubit controlled-Z gate, which is equivalent, up to two single-qubit Hadamard gates, to the multi-qubit Toffoli gate. Motivated by this global-control perspective, we show that all PI unitaries on an arbitrary number of qubits can be realized using the Tavis-Cummings (TC) interaction, the multi-qubit version of the Jaynes-Cummings interaction, together with global uniform z and x fields. Here, the $n$ qubits are identically coupled to a single bosonic mode (oscillator), which is initialized in and returned to its vacuum state. A corollary is that all PI states, including GHZ and Dicke states, can be prepared using the same global control. For the case n=2 qubits, which is particularly important in quantum computing, we also find explicit pulse sequences for implementing all PI qubit unitaries that conserve angular momentum in the z direction, using only the TC interaction and global z fields. This includes controlled-Z, SWAP, and $\sqrt{iSWAP}$.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Intermittent time series forecasting: local vs global models

arXiv:2601.14031v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Forecasting intermittent time series, which contain zeros, is a crucial challenge in supply chains as inventory policies require probabilistic forecasts to establish safety levels. Intermittent time series are commonly forecast using local models, trained individually on each time series. In the last years global models, trained on a large collection of time series, have become popular for time series forecasting. Global models are often based on neural networks or gradient boosted trees. We carry out the first study comparing state-of-the-art probabilistic local and global models on intermittent time series. For global models we consider three different distribution heads suitable for intermittent time series: negative binomial, hurdle-shifted negative binomial and Tweedie. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first use of the latter two with neural networks. We perform experiments on five datasets comprising overall more than 40'000 real-world time series. Among global models, TiDE, a simple neural network architecture, achieves the best accuracy; it also consistently outperforms local models and has lower computational requirements. Large global models are instead much more computationally demanding and less accurate. Among the distribution heads, the Tweedie provides the best estimates of the highest quantiles.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

As You Wish: Mission Planning with Formal Verification using LLMs in Precision Agriculture

arXiv:2606.18519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Though robotic systems are now being commercialized and deployed in various industries, many of these systems are highly specialized and often require an advanced skill set to operate and ensure they perform as instructed. To mitigate this problem, we recently introduced a mission planner leveraging LLMs to synthesize mission plans in precision agriculture based on mission descriptions provided in natural language. While the system demonstrates impressive performance, it also suffers from the inherent ambiguities of natural language. In this paper, we extend our system to address this issue by introducing multiple feedback loops in the planning architecture that leverage linear temporal logic (LTL) to ensure the mission planning system meets the specifications formulated by the user while still using natural language. To mitigate potential bias, this is achieved by using two different commercial LLMs in charge of the specification and verification subtasks. Through extensive experiments, we highlight the strengths and limitations of integrating mission verification into a fully autonomous pipeline, particularly regarding an LLM's ability to generate valuable LTL formulas, and show how our proposed implementation addresses and solves these challenges.

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

Classification of Astronomical Spectra Using PCA-Compressed Flux and Inverse-Variance Features

arXiv:2606.13978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper evaluates a signal-processing and supervised-learning pipeline for classifying SDSS DR17 astronomical spectra into stars, galaxies, and quasars. Each spectrum is represented by its measured flux and inverse-variance information, combining spectral shape with a wavelength-dependent reliability profile. After resampling onto a common logarithmic wavelength grid, the flux and inverse-variance vectors are standardized and separately compressed using principal component analysis. The resulting components are concatenated and used to train several classifiers. The best performance was obtained with the LightGBM gradient-boosting classifier, reaching $94.6\%$ accuracy and $92.1\%$ balanced accuracy on the test set.

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

Grids Often Outperform Implicit Neural Representations at Compressing Dense Signals

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) have recently shown impressive results, but their fundamental capacity, implicit biases, and scaling behavior remain poorly understood. We investigate the performance of diverse INRs across a suite of 2D and 3D real and synthetic signals with varying effective bandwidth, as well as both overfitting and generalization tasks including tomography, super-resolution, and denoising. By stratifying performance according to model size as well as signal type and bandwidth, our results shed light on how different INR and grid representations allocate their capacity. We find that, for many tasks involving dense signals, a simple regularized grid with interpolation trains faster and to higher or comparable quality than any INR with the same number of parameters. We also find limited settings – namely fitting binary signals such as shape contours – where INRs outperform grids, to guide future development and use of INRs towards the most advantageous applications.

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

Policy-Embedded Graph Expansion: Networked HIV Testing with Diffusion-Driven Network Samples

arXiv:2601.16233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: HIV is a retrovirus that attacks the human immune system and can lead to death without proper treatment. In collaboration with the WHO and the University of Witwatersrand, we study how to improve the efficiency of HIV testing with the goal of eventual deployment, directly supporting progress toward UN Sustainable Development Goal 3.3. While prior work has demonstrated the promise of intelligent algorithms for sequential, network-based HIV testing, existing approaches rely on assumptions that are impractical in our real-world implementations. Here, we study sequential testing on incrementally revealed disease networks and introduce Policy-Embedded Graph Expansion (PEGE), a novel framework that directly embeds a generative distribution over graph expansions into the decision-making policy rather than attempting explicit topological reconstruction. We further propose Dynamics-Driven Branching (DDB), a diffusion-based graph expansion model that supports decision making in PEGE and is designed for data-limited settings where forest structures arise naturally, as in our real-world referral process. Experiments on real HIV transmission networks show that the combined approach (PEGE + DDB) consistently outperforms baselines (e.g., 17.3% improvement in discounted reward and 15.4% more HIV detections with 25% of the population tested) and explore key tradeoffs that drive solution quality.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

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

Calibrated Sampling-Free Uncertainty Estimation in Bayesian Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.

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

Rethinking Cross-Layer Information Routing in Diffusion Transformers

Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become a de facto backbone of modern visual generation, and nearly every major axis of their design – tokenization, attention, conditioning, objectives, and latent autoencoders – has been extensively revisited. The residual stream that governs how information accumulates across layers, however, has been directly inherited from the original Transformer. In this paper, we present a systematic empirical analysis of cross-layer information flow in DiTs, jointly along depth and denoising timestep, and identify three concrete symptoms of traditional residual addition, namely monotonic forward magnitude inflation, sharp backward gradient decay, and pronounced block-wise redundancy. Motivated by this diagnosis, we propose Diffusion-Adaptive Routing (\textsc{DAR}), a drop-in residual replacement that performs learnable, timestep-adaptive, and non-incremental aggregation over the history of sublayer outputs. Moreover, the proposed \textsc{DAR} is compatible with many modern Transformer enhancement methods, such as REPA. On ImageNet $256\times256$, \textsc{DAR} improves SiT-XL/2 by $2.11$ FID ($7.56$ vs.\ $9.67$) and matches the baseline's converged quality with $8.75\times$ fewer training iterations. Stacked on top of REPA, it yields a $2\times$ training acceleration in the early stage, suggesting cross-layer information routing as an underexplored design axis in diffusion modeling, one that operates orthogonally to existing representation-alignment objectives. Beyond pretraining, \textsc{DAR} can also be applied during the fine-tuning stage of large-scale T2I models and preserves high-frequency details during Distribution Matching Distillation.

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

StarOR: Synergizing Tree Search and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

arXiv:2606.15197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization modeling is inherently hierarchical, requiring a precise sequence of symbolic commitments. Traditional learning-based automated optimization modeling methods improve modeling policies through large-scale annotated or curated training data, but are costly to adapt to new problem distributions. Meanwhile, one-shot generation remains brittle in hierarchical modeling, where early symbolic errors can propagate into invalid formulations. Test-time scaling offers a promising alternative by enabling structural exploration with additional instance-level computation; however, existing search-based methods typically rely on a fixed policy, causing repeated rollouts to inherit similar modeling biases and providing limited credit assignment for intermediate decisions. To address these limitations, we propose StarOR, a synergistic search-and-adaptation framework that couples MCTS with Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for optimization modeling. StarOR decomposes the modeling process into four stages and updates a transient LoRA adapter via GRPO at each non-terminal node. By using MCTS-generated siblings as local comparison sets, StarOR transforms search-time exploration into instance-specific policy refinement. Moreover, an unsupervised multi-faceted reward system provides fine-grained feedback for intermediate formulation decisions without ground-truth labels. Experiments across five optimization benchmarks show that StarOR achieves state-of-the-art performance even with a 4B backbone, outperforming existing methods and the frontier LLMs.

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

Sign-Rank, Index, and List Replicability: Connections and Separations

arXiv:2606.18236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In learning theory, the sign rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Software Delegation Contracts: Measuring Reviewability in AI Coding-Agent Work

arXiv:2606.17099v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding agents increasingly accept assigned software tasks, modify repositories under bounded authority, and return work packages for review. Prior work proposed the software delegation contract, covering the task, authority, returned work package, and acceptance context, as the unit of analysis for delegated coding work, but did not measure its effects. This paper reports a controlled pilot study of explicit delegation contracts for coding agents. We built a dependency-free TypeScript API task environment with seeded defects and documentation gaps, authored ten tasks across five families, and ran 64 agent executions across two model tiers under three conditions: a realistic issue-style prompt, an explicit delegation contract, and a contract with a required evidence bundle. Each run was scored with hidden acceptance tests, mutation checks, and scope analysis, then reviewed by three independent condition-blinded model-based reviewers using a fixed rubric, for 192 reviews. Explicit contracts did not improve objective task outcomes: all 64 runs passed hidden acceptance checks, with zero scope violations. They did improve reviewability. Evidence sufficiency improved in 22 of 30 paired comparisons and worsened in none (+0.83 on a 5-point scale, p < 0.0001, Cliff's delta = 0.66); reviewer ambiguity decreased (p = 0.035); changed-file lists, known-limitations sections, residual-risk sections, and reviewer checklists appeared mostly or only when demanded by the contract. Contracts cost +13% agent tokens and +38% wall-clock time, with larger effects for the weaker model tier. On these small tasks, delegation contracts bought reviewability rather than correctness.

20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

BeetleAtlas 2: An enhanced <i>Tribolium castaneum</i> web resource for tissue and developmental transcriptomics allowing refinement of gene predictions

by David P. Leader, Muhammad T. Naseem, Janina L. Rinke, Kenneth Veland Halberg BeetleAtlas is an online resource for tissue- and stage-specific transcriptomics in the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. On updating from the original Tcas5.2 genome assembly to the more recent improved icTriCast1.1 genome assembly it became evident that there were major discrepancies between the gene models of the two genome annotations in use: the OGS3 and the NCBI gene sets. As neither was clearly superior we implemented a new design in BeetleAtlas 2 (beetleatlas.org) comprising two parallel ‘modes’ — one incorporating results using the NCBI gene models and a second incorporating those using the OGS3 gene models. This allows direct comparison where equivalent gene models exist: 50–57% of cases. To aid resolution of discrepancies between the two gene model sets and verification of results, gene models are linked to a custom visualization of RNA-seq read coverage of the genome in the UCSC Genome Browser. This displays reads from 22 tissues and life stages superimposed on the icTriCast1.1 genome assembly. Reference tracks show the NCBI gene models, the OGS3 gene models after translation of their coordinates from the Tcas5.2 assembly, and 1050 discontinued NCBI gene models from the previous assembly after a similar transfer of coordinates. We document various situations in which distinct patterns of expression of the tissues can be used to confirm and extend correlations between the two gene sets, resolve discrepancies between them, make corrections and identify putative genes or exons absent from the current gene sets. BeetleAtlas 2 allows those involved in Tribolium research to avoid the pitfalls inherent in incorrect gene models when planning experiments on specific genes and interpreting the results. It also demonstrates how BeetleAtlas 2 might play an important role in establishing a revised gene set for Tribolium castaneum in the future.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A matching decomposition algorithm for simulating quantum walk Hamiltonians

arXiv:2601.11418v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present a new algorithm for generating quantum circuits that efficiently implement continuous time quantum walks on arbitrary simple sparse graphs. The algorithm, called matching decomposition, works by decomposing a continuous-time quantum walk Hamiltonian into a collection of exactly implementable Hamiltonians corresponding to matchings in the underlying graph followed by a novel graph compression algorithm that merges edges in the graph. We develop a greedy matching heuristic and a compression-aware matching heuristic, both of which can be used in the quantum circuit algorithm. Lastly, we convert the walks to a circuit and Trotterize over these components. The dynamics of the walker on each edge in the matching can be implemented in the circuit model as sequences of CX and CRx gates. We do not use Pauli decomposition when implementing walks along each matching. Furthermore, we compare greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition to a standard Pauli-based simulation pipeline and find that greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition consistently yields substantial resource reductions, requiring up to 43$\%$ (70\%) fewer controlled gates and up to 54$\%$ (75\%) shallower circuits than Pauli decomposition across multiple graph families. Finally, we also present examples and theoretical results for when matching decomposition can exactly simulate a continuous-time quantum walk on a graph.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Vero: An Open RL Recipe for General Visual Reasoning

What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks? The strongest vision-language models (VLMs) suggest that broad visual reasoning is within reach, yet their closed data and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines make their gains difficult to study, reproduce, or extend. We introduce Vero, a family of fully open VLMs that match or exceed existing open-weight models across diverse visual reasoning tasks. We scale RL data and rewards across six broad task categories, constructing Vero-600K, a 600K-sample dataset from 59 datasets, and designing task-routed rewards that handle heterogeneous answers. Across VeroEval, our 30-benchmark suite, Vero-600K outperforms existing RL datasets under controlled comparisons. Applied to five starting models, Vero variants gain 2.9-5.4 points on average over their initial models. Notably, Vero-Qwen3I-8B, trained on the Instruct model, surpasses Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking by 3.8 points on average without additional distillation. Systematic ablations reveal that different task categories elicit distinct reasoning patterns and that broad gains depend on learning them jointly rather than in isolation. All data, code, and models are publicly available.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Culture Funnel: You Can't Align What isn't in the Data

Current cultural alignment approaches focus on inference-time interventions, assuming models already contain sufficient cultural knowledge. We argue modern LLM pipelines suffer from a cultural data funnel. Using a multidimensional tagging framework across pretraining, fine-tuning, alignment, and reasoning datasets, we show explicit cultural signals decline sharply during post-training, while geographically concentrated, task-specialized data dominates. Multilinguality enhances geographic diversity of cultural knowledge but does not ensure balanced representation. Our tags improve downstream cultural benchmark performance, demonstrating that advances require shifting focus in training data pipelines. To facilitate future research, we release our culturally tagged dataset with 5.6M samples at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereLabs/CultureMarkers.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Semantic Flip: Synthetic OOD Generation for Robust Refusal in Embodied Question Answering and Spatial Localization

Detecting unanswerable user queries remains essential for the reliable deployment of real-world embodied agents. However, modern vision-language models (VLMs) often generate overly confident answers even when the available visual memory cannot support the query. Such overconfidence poses various task-dependent risks. The agent may provide misleading information to the user in Embodied Question Answering and select an arbitrary coordinate and physically guide the user there in spatial reasoning for navigation. Despite these high stakes, only a few prior studies directly address when and how an embodied VLM should respond with "I do not know." This work proposes Semantic Flip, a simple yet effective framework that synthesizes auxiliary out-of-distribution (OOD) samples for embodied refusal without requiring external OOD annotations. The key idea is to independently transform the query and video memory to construct auxiliary OOD pairs that lack sufficient visual grounding. These synthesized pairs enable training a lightweight rejection module on top of a frozen pretrained VLM. The module attaches to any existing VLM-based pipeline without retraining the underlying model. Across two complementary benchmarks, Semantic Flip consistently outperforms strong prompting baselines. This work also introduces SpaceReject, a new refusal benchmark for spatial localization with deliberately unanswerable queries over long video memory, where Semantic Flip achieves an $F_1$ score of 0.9559. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/SemanticFlip.

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

Towards UAV Image Dehazing: A UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model, Benchmark, and Geometry-Aware Deep Unfolding Network

In UAV applications, haze significantly obscures distant details and weaken structural information, hindering the recovery of details. Current UAV scenarios still face two key challenges: (i) paired hazy/clean images from the real world are unobtainable, while the classical atmospheric scattering model is inadequate for modeling the spatially non-uniform haze in UAV imagery; (ii) existing dehazing methods struggle to remove the heavy haze accumulated in the upper regions of UAV images. To address these issues, we first propose a UAV Atmospheric Scattering Model (UASM), which explicitly incorporates flight altitude, viewing pitch, and extinction to characterize the non-uniform haze distribution in UAV imaging. Based on UASM, we develop a physics-driven dehazing framework, termed Geometry-aware Proximal Deep Unfolding Network (GP-DUN). Specifically, GP-DUN consists of three key modules: a Latent Geometry Estimator (LGE) that infers transmittance consistent with UAV imaging geometry, a Geometry-aware Gradient Descent Module (GeoGDM) that embeds UASM into the data-fidelity term and performs physics-consistent closed-form updates, and an Pooling-Expert Proximal Mapping Module (PE-PMM) that learns an implicit prior to restore textures and structures beyond the capability of explicit physical modeling. In addition, we further construct UASM-HazeSet, which provides controllable paired synthetic data together with 2,285 real UAV haze images for testing. Extensive experiments show that GP-DUN consistently outperforms existing methods on both UASM-HazeSet and real UAV haze benchmarks.