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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Nonlocal continuous-variable gates by amplified optical connections

arXiv:2603.12866v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlocal quantum gates, coupling quantum systems located at a distance, are crucial for distributed quantum computing. To this aim, high-capacity optical noiseless connections between different processing units are essential for transmitting large amounts of information per mode. Simultaneously, optical quantum computing offers future high-speed multimode quantum processors. We propose a library of feasible protocols to implement a necessary nonlocal continuous-variable (CV) quantum nondemolition (QND) gate between two distant users sharing a quantum channel and exploiting classical communication. The users are endowed with a newly achieved high-fidelity and large-bandwith element - single-pass phase-sensitive optical parametric amplifier (OPA), that allows for both online squeezing and channel-loss compensation. The use of OPAs enhances quality of the resulting gate in terms of both excess noise and entangling capability. The proposed schemes are also applicable to CV cluster state fusion, providing a first step towards development of distributed CV measurement-based quantum computation.

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

Lagrange: An Open-Vocabulary, Energy-Based Sparse Framework for Generalized End-to-End Driving

arXiv:2606.20274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling end-to-end autonomous driving to complex, open-world environments requires perceptual models that generalize to anomalous scenarios and planners that produce kinematically valid trajectories. Existing paradigms face a distinct dichotomy between representational efficiency and generalization capacity. Dense models (e.g., occupancy networks), while geometrically robust, incur critical computational bottlenecks and struggle with high-level semantic reasoning. Conversely, sparse, query-based planners are efficient but reliant on closed-set definitions, rendering them vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) events. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer open-vocabulary reasoning, their autoregressive, discrete token generation fundamentally conflicts with the continuous, high-frequency control requirements of vehicle dynamics. To address this, we propose Lagrange, an open-vocabulary, computationally sparse driving framework based on Masked Latent Fields (MLF). Rather than relying on dense volumetric reconstructions or closed-set query mechanisms, Lagrange exploits Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to encode class-agnostic object proposals into continuous semantic visual tokens. We introduce an intent-driven masked cross-attention module that temporally filters irrelevant entities, decoding the attended tokens into an implicit continuous energy field defined over spatial coordinates. By framing decision-making as a Lagrangian action minimization problem spanning this energy field, we enforce strict compliance with vehicle kinematics while executing collision avoidance. Extensive offline evaluations on both standard (nuScenes) and long-tail (CODA) benchmarks demonstrate that Lagrange establishes a promising framework for robust, interpretable, and kinematically feasible open-world autonomy.

03.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Optimized R2 retroelement complexes for DNA insertion into plant genomes

Traditional approaches for DNA insertion into plant genomes using Agrobacterium tumefaciens result in random integration. Newer genetic engineering methods based on nucleases, prime editors, transposases and recombinases extend capabilities but remain constrained with low efficiencies, off-target integration or limited payload size. Here we adapt the avian Taeniopygia guttata R2 protein (R2Tg) for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes by engineering R2Tg expression cassettes and RNA payloads carrying intron-disrupted reporters, with optimized ribosomal DNA homology arms and untranslated regions. In Arabidopsis thaliana protoplasts, Nicotiana benthamiana leaves and Solanum lycopersicum seedlings, our R2Tg editor system achieves targeted insertion of full-length payloads ranging from 2.2 kb to 5 kb. In Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, integration occurs, on average, at 1 copy per genome, which is 30 times more efficient than that achieved by Cas9 homology-directed repair. This work establishes an R2Tg ribonucleoprotein platform for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes, using a multicopy genomic safe-harbor site to enable efficient addition of multikilobase genes. R2 retrotransposons are used to integrate DNA into plant and crop 25S ribosomal DNA sites.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Stronger Entanglement Dies Faster: Quantum Mpemba Effect in Dissipative Qubits

arXiv:2605.23197v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical thermodynamics, the Mpemba effect refers to the counterintuitive observation that hot water can freeze faster than cold water, manifesting as an anomalous crossing of dynamical trajectories. While analogues of this phenomenon have been explored in open quantum systems and spin-chain entanglement asymmetry, its connection to the finite-time decoupling of quantum correlations remains elusive. In this work, we report a distinct Mpemba effect for quantum entanglement in a dissipative quantum system associated with entanglement sudden death (ESD). By analyzing two qubits interacting with local amplitude damping reservoirs, we demonstrate that a more strongly entangled initial state can experience a faster collapse into a separable state than a more weakly entangled state. This anomalous decay stems from the competition between initial coherence and excited-state population, where the latter acts as a catalyst for ESD. We provide exact analytical derivations for the trajectory crossover and ESD time, and map the phase diagram to precisely identify the parameter regime where the effect occurs. Our results offer a new strategy for controlling the lifetime of quantum resources in dissipative environments.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Logarithmic Large Deviations for Heavy-Tailed Sums

arXiv:2606.16487v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish logarithmic large-deviation bounds for sums of independent nonnegative random variables with regularly varying tails. The normalization is chosen at the extreme-value scale and the speed is $\log n$. In contrast with Cramér's theorem, the resulting rate function is determined only by the tail index. The proof transfers a maximum large-deviation principle to sums in the one-big-jump region.

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

FBSDiff++: Improved Frequency Band Substitution of Diffusion Features for Efficient and Highly Controllable Text-Driven Image-to-Image Translation

With large-scale text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieving significant advancements in open-domain image creation, increasing attention has been focused on their natural extension to the realm of text-driven image-to-image (I2I) translation, where a source image acts as visual guidance to the generated image in addition to the textual guidance provided by the text prompt. We propose FBSDiff, a novel framework adapting off-the-shelf T2I diffusion model into the I2I paradigm from a fresh frequency-domain perspective. Through dynamic frequency band substitution of diffusion features, FBSDiff realizes versatile and highly controllable text-driven I2I in a plug-and-play manner (without need for model training, fine-tuning, or online optimization), allowing appearance-guided, layout-guided, and contour-guided I2I translation by progressively substituting low-frequency band, mid-frequency band, and high-frequency band of latent diffusion features, respectively. In addition, FBSDiff flexibly enables continuous control over I2I correlation intensity simply by tuning the bandwidth of the substituted frequency band. To further promote image translation efficiency, flexibility, and functionality, we propose FBSDiff++ which improves upon FBSDiff mainly in three aspects: (1) accelerate inference speed by a large margin (8.9$\times$ speedup in inference) with refined model architecture; (2) improve the Frequency Band Substitution module to allow for input source images of arbitrary resolution and aspect ratio; (3) extend model functionality to enable localized image manipulation and style-specific content creation with only subtle adjustments to the core method. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments verify superiority of FBSDiff++ in I2I translation visual quality, efficiency, versatility, and controllability compared to related advanced approaches.

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

Multi-Modal Agents for Power Distribution Defect Detection: An Evaluation of Foundation Models

作者:

arXiv:2606.12969v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The power distribution network is critical to reliable electricity delivery, yet traditional inspection methods face limitations in semantic understanding, generalization, and closed-loop automation. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Multi-Modal Agent framework specifically for power distribution defect detection. Central to this study is the systematic evaluation of multimodal foundation models as unified cognitive engines. We rigorously assess their integrated performance across three critical capabilities: (1) Perception, where the model must accurately identify equipment and generate expert-level descriptions of defects; (2) Reasoning, where the model interprets visual findings to diagnose causes, assess severity, and plan maintenance strategies based on domain knowledge; and (3) Tool Usage, where the model acts as an autonomous operator to execute actions – such as querying knowledge bases or generating work orders – to achieve closed-loop maintenance. To support this evaluation, a domain-specific evaluation dataset and a comprehensive benchmark are developed. Experimental results demonstrate the strengths and limitations of current foundation models in these three dimensions, providing empirical evidence for deploying autonomous agents in high-stakes industrial environments.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages

Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP. We aim to bridge this gap by introducing AfriSUD, the first large-scale collection of syntactically annotated treebanks for nine diverse African languages spanning major language families and regions across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies (SUD) framework, our community-led effort provides high-quality, native-speaker verified data that capture typological key features such as agglutination and tone. We evaluate a range of models on AfriSUD for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing including non-transformer baselines, multilingual pretrained encoders, and LLMs. Our results reveal a significant syntax gap, where models still show clear limitations across the nine languages, suggesting that existing architectures may not fully capture the structural diversity of African-language syntax.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

ECG-Guided Pre-Screening of Family Members for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Background: Current clinical guidelines recommend serial ECG and echocardiographic surveillance for first-degree relatives of probands with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). Objectives: To evaluate the accuracy and validity of ECG alone as a pre-screening tool for the diagnosis of HCM and to develop a random forest (RF) model for HCM phenotype prediction. Method: Pediatric relatives of primary HCM probands attending the cardiomyopathy screening program at The Hospital for Sick Children were included from 1993 to 2025. Subjects were followed until the last follow-up, censored at phenotype conversion. ECGs were classified as normal or abnormal based on predefined parameters. Associations between binary ECG variables and HCM phenotype were assessed using Phi ({varphi}) coefficient. A Random Forest classifier was developed using significant ECG variables (70:30 training: test split) and evaluated using precision, recall, specificity, negative predictive value, F1 score and AUROC. Feature importance was assessed using SHAP analysis. Variables with an impact of >5% were included in a simplified model, which was evaluated by repeating performance metrics and externally validated in a healthy cohort. Results: 350 screened relatives (44% female, mean follow-up 6.8 +- 4.8 years) were included. At baseline, 13% (46350) were phenotype-positive for HCM. 9 subjects converted during the surveillance. Thirteen ECG variables were significantly associated with phenotype-positive HCM and were included in the full random forest model. Four variables had >5% impact (Left ventricular hypertrophy, right ventricular hypertrophy, T-wave inversion and ST-segment depression) and were included in a simplified model, which maintained high specificity (93% vs 97%), negative predictive value (97% vs 93%) and AUROC (90% vs 96%). The simplified model classified 83% subjects as phenotype-negative, with eight being false-negative, all of whom developed an abnormal ECG in a mean of 1 year, and none had an interim adverse cardiac event. The simplified model was evaluated in an independent healthy cohort of 153 school-age subjects and correctly identified 98% as phenotype-negative with 100% NPV. Conclusion: ECG abnormalities were strongly associated with phenotype-positive status. A simplified ECG-based random forest model using four ECG variables demonstrated high specificity and negative predictive value for identifying phenotype-negative subjects. If prospectively validated, this could reduce the need for concurrent echocardiographic screening by up to 83% per encounter, lowering screening burden and cost.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

A Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization

arXiv:2606.20236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many decision-making problems in computing and networking systems can be naturally formulated as cost-minimization problems under performance constraints. In dynamic environments, reinforcement learning (RL) is often used to solve such problems at runtime by embedding both costs and constraint violations into a single scalar reward through weighted penalty terms, following a Lagrangian-inspired formulation. However, in this context the behavior of the learned policy critically depends on the choice of these weights, which are typically selected manually. This makes it difficult to identify an appropriate trade-off between optimizing the primary objective and effectively avoiding constraint violations, particularly in non-stationary environments where their relative importance may change. This paper presents MAMO (Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization), an approach to tackle this balancing problem through multi-agent RL. MAMO decouples task execution from objective design by formulating the selection of reward weights as a learning problem, providing a !rst step towards more autonomous and robust RL-based solutions for constrained optimization problems in dynamic environments.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Partitioned Iterative Quantum Scheduling of Satellites for Urgent Disaster Response: Case study of Wildfire

arXiv:2606.12310v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The standard in Earth-observation tasks today is having near real-time access to surface images in response to changing conditions. For instance, as urban environments interface more with wildlands and wildfires become less predictable, their tracking with satellite resources becomes essential. This requires the coordination of increasingly large constellations of satellites, giving rise to challenging computational problems. With wildfire detection and tracking as a backdrop, we investigate the power of special purpose and novel computing paradigms to tackle the ensuing satellite scheduling problems, making a compelling case for quantum algorithms. We bring quantum scheduling algorithms closer to implementation by examining both the emerging iterative quantum algorithm framework, which comes with analytic guarantees compared to some classical algorithms, and distributed quantum computing methods whose relevance is on the rise as utility-scale problems begin to get solved with quantum computers. Drawing strength from several computing fronts, we develop a distributed/parallelization scheme in conjunction with the quantum algorithm design and apply these techniques to real-world datasets for wildfire detection. While our quantum subprocesses are currently too small to see significant quantum advantage, our results validate the utility of these techniques, and continue forging the path toward distributed quantum computing.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Language You Ask In: Language-Conditioned Ideological Divergence in LLM Analysis of Contested Political Documents

作者:

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as analytical tools across multilingual contexts, yet their outputs may carry systematic biases conditioned by the language of the prompt. This study presents an experimental comparison of LLM-generated political analyses of a Ukrainian civil society document, using semantically equivalent prompts in Russian and Ukrainian administered to two frontier models from different developers, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5. Despite identical source material and parallel query structures, both models diverged along the same axis: Russian-language outputs leaned toward delegitimizing framings, characterizing civil society actors as externally funded elites constraining a democratic mandate, while Ukrainian-language outputs treated the same actors as legitimate stakeholders in democratic contestation. The magnitude of this divergence, however, was model-dependent. ChatGPT's Russian output reproduced vocabulary characteristic of Russian state discourse; Claude Opus's stayed in a mainstream critical idiom and hedged its judgments in both languages. These findings demonstrate that prompt language alone can systematically shift the ideological orientation of an unchanged model analyzing identical content. The shift is a general property of multilingual LLMs whose severity, and whose alignment with propaganda narratives, varies across systems. The implications reach AI deployment in polarized information environments, cross-lingual research, and AI governance in multilingual societies.

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

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Guided Agentic AI for Multimodal Clinical Prediction: Lessons from the AgentDS Healthcare Benchmark

arXiv:2602.19502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of autonomous data science workflows, yet clinical prediction tasks demand domain expertise that purely automated approaches struggle to provide. We investigate how human guidance of agentic AI can improve multimodal clinical prediction, presenting our approach to all three AgentDS Healthcare benchmark challenges: 30-day hospital readmission prediction (Macro-F1 = 0.8986), emergency department cost forecasting (MAE = $465.13), and discharge readiness assessment (Macro-F1 = 0.7939). Across these tasks, human analysts directed the agentic workflow at key decision points, multimodal feature engineering from clinical notes, scanned PDF billing receipts, and time-series vital signs; task-appropriate model selection; and clinically informed validation strategies. Our approach ranked 5th overall in the healthcare domain, with a 3rd-place finish on the discharge readiness task. Ablation studies reveal that human-guided decisions compounded to a cumulative gain of +0.065 F1 over automated baselines, with multimodal feature extraction contributing the largest single improvement (+0.041 F1). We distill three generalizable lessons: (1) domain-informed feature engineering at each pipeline stage yields compounding gains that outperform extensive automated search; (2) multimodal data integration requires task-specific human judgment that no single extraction strategy generalizes across clinical text, PDFs, and time-series; and (3) deliberate ensemble diversity with clinically motivated model configurations outperforms random hyperparameter search. These findings offer practical guidance for teams deploying agentic AI in healthcare settings where interpretability, reproducibility, and clinical validity are essential.

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

Vision-Encoder Behavioral Fingerprints of Image-to-Image Generative Models: A Training-Paradigm-Driven Taxonomy of Six Commercial APIs

作者:

We study six production image-to-image AI systems (gpt-image-1, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Flux Kontext, SDXL img2img, SD3 img2img, and Qwen Image Edit) under a content-adaptive sub-JND adversarial perturbation pipeline, scoring all outputs by frozen DINOv2 ViT-B/14 token distances against clean references. Across a 3,588-call corpus spanning COCO photographs, CelebA-HQ portraits, and AI-generated inputs, the six systems partition into two image-invariant behavioral bands on a 2D (patch_mean, ssim_clean) plane: edit-trained models (Flux Kontext, Qwen Edit, Gemini) cluster in a tight band, while T2I-base models adapted at sampling time (SDXL, SD3, gpt-image-1) cluster in a drift band.

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

Transformer Geometry Observatory TGO-I: Spectral Geometry Observatory

Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers. TGO-I, the first installment of the framework, focuses on the spectral geometry of ViT representations. Using a ViT-Small/16 model trained on ImageNet-100, we analyze Effective Rank, Stable Rank, Participation Ratio, Spectral Entropy, Spectral Flatness, Spectral Anisotropy, covariance structure, eigenspectra, and singular value spectra throughout training. Our results reveal a consistent increase in dimensional utilization, accompanied by decreasing anisotropy, increasing spectral entropy, increasing participation ratio, and progressively flatter eigenspectra. Contrary to the common intuition that training should concentrate information into a small number of dominant directions, we observe a progressive redistribution of variance across representational dimensions. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the final CLS token representation, which exhibits the highest effective dimensionality and lowest anisotropy within the network.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Position: The Systemic Lack of Agency in Visual Reasoning

This paper argues that a systemic lack of Agency constrains the implicit reasoning capabilities of current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Implicit reasoning refers to the ability to autonomously discover and utilize hidden visual evidence to bridge information gaps, rather than merely relying on explicitly specified targets. This capacity underlies human visual understanding and everyday reasoning. We argue that this limitation arises from a tendency to approach visual reasoning primarily as passive semantic retrieval, rather than as active, situated reasoning that depends on autonomous visual exploration. As a result, most existing benchmarks primarily assess Passive Capacity, leaving this aspect of reasoning largely unmeasured. To address this gap, we introduce the Visual Implicit Reasoning Diagnosing Benchmark (V-IRD), which targets this missing quadrant by requiring models to derive answers strictly through autonomous visual analysis. Our results show that, despite strong retrieval abilities, prominent VLMs struggle to utilize reference objects and to attend to visual evidence that requires self-directed inquiry. Simply put, strong semantic recognition does not equate to active visual exploration, revealing a critical gap in current VLMs. More information can be found at https://haoychen.github.io/Implicit-Reasoning/

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions

arXiv:2512.17473v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonlinear matrix decompositions (NMD). Given an input matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ and a factorization rank $r \ll \min(m, n)$, NMD seeks matrices $W \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $H \in \mathbb{R}^{r \times n}$ such that $X \approx f(WH)$, where $f$ is an element-wise nonlinear function. We evaluate our method on several representative nonlinear models: the rectified linear unit activation $f(x) = \max(0, x)$, suitable for nonnegative sparse data approximation, the component-wise square $f(x) = x^2$, applicable to probabilistic circuit representation, and the MinMax transform $f(x) = \min(b, \max(a, x))$, relevant for recommender systems. The proposed framework flexibly supports diverse loss functions, including least squares, $\ell_1$ norm, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and can be readily extended to other nonlinearities and metrics. We illustrate the applicability, efficiency, and adaptability of the approach on real-world datasets, highlighting its potential for a broad range of applications.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where other actors are ignored or treated as environmental noise, preventing effective coordination. Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines. Crucially, training with diverse artificial agents enables zero-shot generalization to safer human interaction. These results suggest that the path to robust robotic co-existence lies not in isolated safety constraints, but in the rigorous demands of multi-agent interaction. Multimedia materials are available at: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/marl

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Otto engine powered by an anisotropic Heisenberg XYZ model under independent local magnetic fields

arXiv:2606.12877v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a quantum Otto heat engine whose working substance is an anisotropic two-qubit Heisenberg XYZ model. Independent local magnetic fields are used to control each spin individually. The influence of the longitudinal coupling, anisotropy, transverse coupling, and local fields on the net work output and efficiency is systematically examined. Reducing the longitudinal coupling is found to markedly improve both the maximum work and the peak efficiency. The engine performance reaches an optimum at a particular value of the anisotropy parameter. A local work analysis clarifies how work is produced during the cycle. Because of the asymmetric local fields and the intrinsic spin-spin interaction, the two qubits play markedly different thermodynamic roles; the interaction term itself contributes crucially to the total work. We further analyze the variation of quantum entanglement, quantified by concurrence, along the cycle. The results indicate that a pronounced change in entanglement between the hot and cold isomagnetic strokes is closely correlated with the efficiency enhancement. This work offers new insight into the operating principles and control of quantum Otto heat engines.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates

arXiv:2606.15344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.

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

Navigating Gigapixel Pathology Images with Large Multimodal Models

Recent advances in large multimodal models have allowed for the development of interactive chat models that can converse and reason about pathology whole-slide images (WSIs). However, existing slide-level chat systems are often highly specialized, typically compressing WSIs into fixed slide-level embeddings or relying on multi-component pipelines, which can lose multi-scale detail and limit generalizability beyond the target task. We present GIANT (Gigapixel Image Agent for Navigating Tissue), a simple, training-free approach that lets general-purpose multimodal models navigate WSIs on their own, iteratively selecting multi-magnification crops and aggregating evidence over time. To evaluate generalizability in WSI question answering and to promote reproducibility, we introduce MultiPathQA, a benchmark suite spanning five clinical challenges and 934 questions over 868 unique WSIs. This includes a new set of 128 pathologist-authored multiple-choice questions designed to mirror real diagnostic search and multi-scale reasoning. Using GPT-5, GIANT outperforms models specialized for pathology question answering, achieving state-of-the-art performance on four out of five benchmarks.