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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

Authors:
Ricardo Hidalgo-Arag\'on↗Jes\'us M. Gonz\'alez-Barahona↗Gregorio Robles↗

arXiv:2604.00730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation–while providing certainty–based triggers for human intervention.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

From Theory to Application: A Practical Introduction to Neural Operators in Scientific Computing

Authors:
Prashant K. Jha↗

arXiv:2503.05598v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This review examines neural operator architectures for learning solution operators of parametric partial differential equations (PDEs), with an emphasis on conceptual clarity and practical implementation. The work analyzes key models, including DeepONet, PCANet, and the Fourier Neural Operator, highlighting their underlying representations, computational structures, and comparative performance. These architectures are demonstrated on three canonical PDE problems: the Poisson equation, a linear elasticity problem, and a hyperelasticity problem. To make the presentation self-contained, key foundational topics are introduced, including finite-dimensional representations of function spaces, singular-value decomposition, and sampling from infinite-dimensional function spaces. Beyond forward modeling, the review discusses the use of neural operators as surrogate models within a Bayesian inverse-problem framework, including prior specification, forward-map approximation, and posterior computation. The performance of the three neural-operator architectures is evaluated on in-distribution samples, out-of-distribution samples, and Bayesian inference tasks. The review also discusses challenges related to prediction accuracy and generalization, outlining emerging strategies such as residual-based error correction and multi-level training. The review concludes by positioning neural operators within broader scientific-computing workflows and by identifying directions for reliable, scalable operator learning.

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

SkillVetBench: LLM-as-Judge for Multi-Dimensional Security Risk Evaluation in Open-Source LLM Agent Skills

Authors:
Ismail Hossain↗Sai Puppala↗Md Jahangir Alam↗Tanzim Ahad↗Sajedul Talukder↗

arXiv:2606.15899v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-source LLM agent ecosystems are growing rapidly, yet the security of community-contributed skills - modular tool definitions that extend agent capabilities - remains largely unvetted. The gap we fill: existing scanners operate at the code layer and are structurally blind to instruction-layer and multi-agent risk - natural-language directives that hijack an agent, exfiltrate data through encoded side channels, or chain harm across pipelines - so what is needed is a semantic, multi-dimensional vetting system rather than another signature matcher. We present SKILLVETBENCH, a live public leaderboard on Hugging Face that uses an LLM-as-Judge to vet agent skills. What is new: SARS (Skill Agentic Risk Score), a five-dimensional agentic-risk metric with a principled weighted formula for instruction-following systems. What is integrated: full CVSS v4.0 vector decomposition and a ClawHub dual-view that places our LLM-generated review beside the official marketplace verdict. What is demonstrated: drawing on our companion benchmark paper [ 1], the LLM-as-Judge stage achieves zero false negatives across 78 confirmed-malicious skills and zero false positives across 22 benign controls, while the best static baseline (SKILLSIEVE) still misses 15%; for instruction-layer categories such as Prompt Injection and Memory Poisoning, conventional tools miss between 89% and 100% of threats (e.g., CODEBERT detects none of nine memory-poisoning skills). Detection rates vary from 35% to 95% across four LLM evaluators, motivating ensemble scoring in production deployments.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Scaling Adaptive Depth with Norm-Agnostic Residual Networks

Authors:
Tom\'as Figliolia↗Beren Millidge↗

arXiv:2606.16112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Residual architectures are ubiquitous in deep learning, but they suffer from a subtle structural limitation: the norm of the residual stream can grow rapidly with depth. As a result, updates from later layers become small relative to the accumulated residual state. This reduces their impact on the representation and limits the benefits of scaling models in depth. To address this, we introduce NAG, a norm-agnostic residual architecture that separates magnitude from directional information in the residual stream, preserving meaningful layer contributions throughout depth and preventing later updates from being systematically suppressed by residual-norm growth. Importantly, NAG introduces only a negligible number of additional parameters and relies on simple operations that are easily kernel-fusible, preserving training efficiency in practice. We show that this architecture outperforms baseline Transformers, with gains that increase substantially as depth grows, enabling effective training of much deeper models. The norm-agnostic formulation also leads to an interpretable Mixture-of-Depths (MoD) mechanism that adaptively skips both attention and MLP layers. Beyond serving as a post-training accuracy-compute tradeoff, this mechanism can be used as a pretraining-time scaling strategy: under iso-FLOP training, compute saved by reducing per-token forward-pass cost can be reinvested into training on more tokens while keeping the total parameter count and KV-cache budget fixed. In our experiments, moderate Mixture-of-Depths rates of approximately 20%-25% match full-depth baseline performance under equal training compute while substantially reducing the number of executed layer parameters and forward-pass FLOPs. These results identify sparsity in depth as a new scaling axis for fixed-compute training, enabling very deep yet FLOP-efficient models.

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

E-VAds: An E-commerce Short Videos Understanding Benchmark for MLLMs

Authors:
Xianjie Liu↗Yiman Hu↗Liang Wu↗Ping Hu↗Yixiong Zou↗Jian Xu↗Bo Zheng↗

E-commerce short videos represent a high-revenue segment of the online video industry characterized by a goal-driven format and dense multi-modal signals. Current models often struggle with these videos because existing benchmarks focus primarily on general-purpose tasks and neglect the reasoning of commercial intent. In this work, we first propose a multi-modal information density assessment framework to quantify the complexity of this domain. Our evaluation reveals that e-commerce content exhibits substantially higher density across visual, audio, and textual modalities compared to mainstream datasets, establishing a more challenging frontier for video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce E-commerce Video Ads Benchmark, which is the first benchmark specifically designed for e-commerce short video understanding. We curated 3,961 high-quality videos from Taobao covering a wide range of product categories and used a multi-agent system to generate 19,785 open-ended Q&A pairs, which consist of five distinct tasks. Finally, we develop E-VAds-R1, an RL-based reasoning model featuring a multi-grained reward design called MG-GRPO. This strategy provides smooth guidance for early exploration while creating a non-linear incentive for expert-level precision. Experimental results demonstrate that E-VAds-R1 achieves a 109.2% performance gain in commercial intent reasoning with only a few hundred training samples. Data is available at https://github.com/TaobaoTmall-AlgorithmProducts/E-VAds_Benchmark.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Heterogeneity of Treatment Effect of Aspirin and Clinically Significant Bleeding in Older Adults

Authors:
Tzimas↗Tchoua↗R. B↗Vanghelof↗J. C↗Wolfe↗R. C↗Cloud↗Mahady↗Du↗Ernst↗M. E↗…

Aim: The global population of older adults is growing, and older age is linked to higher bleeding risk. Although guidelines discourage aspirin for primary prevention in healthy older adults due to bleeding harms outweighing benefits, many continue taking it without a clear indication. It remains unclear whether all older adults face uniform aspirin-related bleeding risk or if certain subgroups are more vulnerable. Methods: We analyzed data from 19,114 ASPREE trial participants to develop machine learning models using 116 baseline variables. Random forest (RF) and random survival forest (RSF) models predicted 5-year bleeding risk, and participants were stratified into low, intermediate, and high-risk groups based on the 20th and 80th percentiles of predicted risk. We assessed heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE) by testing treatment-by-risk group interactions on the relative scale using Fine-Gray models, and on the absolute scale using observed 5-year cumulative incidence rates. Results: Over a median follow-up of 4.7 years, 626 major bleeding events occurred. The RF model had moderate discrimination (AUC = 0.65, 95% CI: 0.63-0.67) and good calibration (Brier = 0.032, 95% CI: 0.029-0.034). Statistically significant HTE was observed on the relative scale, with the greatest relative increase in bleeding risk seen in the low-risk group (subdistribution hazard ratio = 2.26, 95% CI: 1.27-4.01). On the absolute scale, low-risk participants experienced higher bleeding with aspirin (absolute risk difference (ARD) = 1.17%, 95% CI: 0.37-1.95), but heterogeneity in ARDs was not statistically significant (Cochran's Q p > 0.45). Similar findings were observed when using the RSF model. Conclusion: Participants at lowest baseline bleeding risk experienced the greatest relative increase in bleeding risk with aspirin therapy. We found statistically significant heterogeneity in treatment effects on the relative but not absolute scale. These findings support an individualized, risk-based approach to aspirin therapy decision-making in older adults.

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

Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Authors:
Duc T. Nguyen↗Hoang-Long Nguyen↗Thanh-Ha DO↗Huy-Hieu Pham↗

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/trongduc-nguyen/SSHR

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Asymptotically Optimal Circuit Depth for Diagonal Unitary Synthesis and Compilation on Two-Dimensional Grids

Authors:
Chengzhuo Xu↗Xiao Chen↗Zhihao Liu↗Zhigang Li↗

arXiv:2606.17589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diagonal unitaries are a fundamental but resource-intensive class of quantum operations, arising as the phase separators of QAOA and the time-evolution blocks of Hamiltonian simulation. Under all-to-all connectivity their optimal depth is established, but on nearest-neighbor hardware general-purpose compilers fall back on heuristic search, which yields no analyzable cost bound and becomes intractable at the very sizes where depth is the bottleneck. We address synthesis and compilation jointly. On the synthesis side, we develop a Gray-Path Framework (GPF) that realizes any $n$-qubit diagonal unitary in asymptotically optimal $R_z$ and CNOT depth $O(2^n/n)$ without ancillas. Our main result is that compiling GPF onto a two-dimensional nearest-neighbor grid preserves this optimality: routing adds depth $\Theta(2^n/n)$ and gate count $\Theta(2^n)$. Because GPF fixes its entire interaction structure in advance, routing reduces to scheduling a known sequence, with no heuristic search. We give the construction both with and without ancillas: the ancilla-free, cost-optimized layout is a two-row grid, and a $2k$-row layout introduces a space–time tradeoff that cuts depth by $1/k$ while remaining asymptotically optimal for the enlarged register; both are deterministic and analyzed in closed form. The same complexity is also attained on a linear nearest-neighbor chain, so the preservation is topology-independent, holding on any architecture that contains such a chain. All routing bounds are closed-form, giving the concrete resource estimates that heuristic compilers cannot provide at scale.

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

Can LLM Coding Agents Reason About Time Series?

Authors:
Filip Rechtor\'ik↗Ond\v{r}ej Du\v{s}ek↗Zden\v{e}k Kasner↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for automated decision-making systems in finance, healthcare, or environmental monitoring. Time series data are ubiquitous in these fields, yet hard to process automatically. Can time series be analyzed by LLM agents? We examine three approaches: providing the agent with raw numerical data, using the LLM as a coding agent, or a combination of both. In the coding agent setup, the model iteratively queries the data using Python code. Using two time series understanding benchmarks, we show that agents with code access can outperform models processing raw data by up to 10%. However, even the best performing agent still answers about 22-34% of the questions incorrectly. To get insights into models' strategies and reasoning gaps, we analyze the model outputs with a strong LLM judge. Our analysis reveals that coding agents can select appropriate statistical tests, but often miss important nuances. Meanwhile, models with access to raw data can reach the right conclusions using back-of-the-envelope calculations.

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10.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

General-purpose chatbots outperform clinical AI tools on physicians’ real-world questions

Authors: Unknown Author

Specialized clinical AI tools are entering medical practice with little independent testing. In a head-to-head evaluation across two public benchmarks and real questions from physicians, three general-purpose frontier large language models outperformed two leading clinical AI tools, which performed no better than Google search AI overview.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Making Foresight Actionable: Repurposing Representation Alignment in World Action Models

Authors:
Lu Qiu↗Yizhuo Li↗Yi Chen↗Yuying Ge↗Yixiao Ge↗Xihui Liu↗

World Action Models (WAMs) offer a promising route for robot manipulation by using video generation models to model future scene evolution before producing control actions. However, our empirical observations reveal a phenomenon: generating plausible visual futures does not always guarantee the extraction of accurate actions. To diagnose this failure, we conduct action-head attention analysis and causal interventions. We find that the action decoder fails to focus on task-relevant interaction regions and remains sensitive to perturbations in task-irrelevant areas. This reveals a representation mismatch: hidden states optimized for visual reconstruction are not inherently organized in a form useful for low-level action control. In this paper, we propose AGRA, an Action-Grounded Representation Alignment objective that regularizes the world-action interface by aligning intermediate video diffusion features with spatially coherent semantic representations from a foundation visual encoder. We evaluate AGRA on real-world manipulation tasks. Experiments show that AGRA makes world model representations more action-grounded: by focusing the action decoder on the correct interaction regions, it improves object localization accuracy and affordance understanding, and makes the policy more robust to perturbations in task-irrelevant regions. As a result, AGRA consistently improves both in-distribution performance and out-of-distribution generalization over the baseline world action model.

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

Representation Forcing for Bottleneck-Free Unified Multimodal Models

Authors:
Yuqing Wang↗Zhijie Lin↗Ceyuan Yang↗Yang Zhao↗Fei Xiao↗Hao He↗Qi Zhao↗Zihan Ding↗Fuyun Wang↗Shuai Wang↗Youliang Zhang↗Haoqi Fan↗…

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) aim to handle perception and generation in a single model. Yet existing UMMs still rely on a frozen, separately pretrained VAE for image generation, imposing a structural bottleneck. Naively removing it introduces a quality gap, as the model must learn both high-level structure and low-level details from raw pixels. In this paper, we propose Representation Forcing (RF), a technique that closes this gap by making representation prediction a native capability of the model. Concretely, RF forces the decoder to autoregressively predict visual representations as intermediate tokens before pixels; these tokens then stay in context to guide pixel diffusion within the same backbone. By turning representations from perception outputs into generation targets, RF eliminates the need for any external generative latent space. We find that RF benefits both understanding and generation. On image generation, our pixel-space model with RF matches state-of-the-art VAE-based unified models. On image understanding, pixel-space RF generally outperforms its VAE-based variant. Together, these results offer an effective step toward end-to-end, bottleneck-free UMMs.

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

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Authors:
Daniel Ben-Levi↗Judah Goldfeder↗Weiliang Zhao↗Raz Lapid↗Amit LeVi↗Allen G. Roush↗Ravid Shwartz-Ziv↗Hod Lipson↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.

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

Diffusing to Coordinate: Efficient Online Multi-Agent Diffusion Policies

Authors:
Zhuoran Li↗Hai Zhong↗Xun Wang↗Qingxin Xia↗Lihua Zhang↗Longbo Huang↗

arXiv:2602.18291v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a prominent framework for efficient agent coordination. Crucially, enhancing policy expressiveness is pivotal for achieving superior performance. Diffusion-based generative models are well-positioned to meet this demand, having demonstrated remarkable expressiveness and multimodal representation in image generation and offline settings. Yet, their potential in online MARL remains largely under-explored. A major obstacle is that the intractable likelihoods of diffusion models impede entropy-based exploration and coordination. To tackle this challenge, we propose among the first \underline{O}nline off-policy \underline{MA}RL framework using \underline{D}iffusion policies (OMAD) to orchestrate coordination. Our key innovation is a relaxed policy objective that maximizes scaled joint entropy, facilitating effective exploration without relying on tractable likelihood. Complementing this, within the centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, we employ a joint distributional value function to optimize decentralized diffusion policies. It leverages tractable entropy-augmented targets to guide the simultaneous updates of diffusion policies, thereby ensuring stable coordination. Extensive evaluations on MPE and MAMuJoCo establish our method as the new state-of-the-art across $10$ diverse tasks, demonstrating a remarkable $2.5\times$ to $5\times$ improvement in sample efficiency.

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

Multi-Granular Node Pruning for Causal Circuit Discovery

Authors:
Muhammad Umair Haider↗Hammad Rizwan↗Hassan Sajjad↗A. B. Siddique↗

arXiv:2512.10903v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Circuit discovery aims to identify minimal subnetworks that are responsible for specific behaviors in large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches primarily rely on iterative edge pruning, which is computationally expensive and limited to coarse-grained units such as attention heads or MLP blocks, overlooking finer structures like individual neurons. We propose a node-level pruning framework for circuit discovery that addresses both scalability and granularity limitations. Our method introduces learnable masks across multiple levels of granularity, from entire blocks to individual neurons, within a unified optimization objective. Granularity-specific sparsity penalties guide the pruning process, allowing a comprehensive compression in a single fine-tuning run. Empirically, our approach identifies circuits that are smaller in nodes than those discovered by prior methods; moreover, we demonstrate that many neurons deemed important by coarse methods are actually irrelevant, while still maintaining task performance. Furthermore, our method has a significantly lower memory footprint, 5-10x, as it does not require keeping intermediate activations in the memory to work.

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16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

fuzzyfold: a high-performance framework for stochastic RNA folding kinetics

Authors:
Badelt↗

The analysis of nucleic acid secondary structures is overwhelmingly dominated by methods that analyze the thermodynamic equilibrium distribution and which ignore all dynamic aspects of nucleic acid folding. Yet, there are numerous popular examples of nucleic acid folding that rely on kinetic models, such as RNA riboswitches or DNA strand displacement systems. Here, I am presenting fuzzyfold, a Rust-based software package for nucleic acid secondary structure analysis with an explicit focus on stochastic modeling. The framework introduces three-way and four-way shift moves with a biophysically motivated rate-model parameterization, and it is developed with an emphasis on both model flexibility and performance, e.g. allowing for the generation of single co-transcriptional trajectories for thousand-nucleotide long RNA molecules in just a few minutes. The main strength of the fuzzyfold package, however, is its focus on user and developer interfaces for long-term development. It provides easily installable command-line interfaces, e.g. for aggregating data from multiple parallel trajectories efficiently into an ensemble-level dynamic analysis. For developers, the code-base supports straight-forward substitution of thermodynamic and kinetic free-energy models, and a flexible library interface with Python bindings, enabling integration of individual components into custom computational workflows.

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

Symmetry-Accelerated Classical Simulation of Clifford-Dominated Circuits

Authors:
Giulio Camillo↗Filipa C. R. Peres↗Markus Heinrich↗Juani Bermejo-Vega↗

arXiv:2510.18977v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical simulation of quantum circuits plays a crucial role in validating quantum hardware and delineating the boundaries of quantum advantage. Among the most effective simulation techniques are those based on the stabilizer extent, which quantifies the overhead of representing non-Clifford operations as linear combinations of Clifford unitaries. However, finding optimal decompositions rapidly becomes intractable as it constitutes a superexponentially large optimization problem. In this work, we exploit symmetries in the computation of the stabilizer extent, proving that for real, diagonal, and real-diagonal unitaries, the optimization can be restricted to the corresponding subgroups of the Clifford group without loss of optimality. This ``strong symmetry reduction'' drastically reduces computational cost, enabling optimal decompositions of unitaries on up to seven qubits using a standard laptop – far beyond previous two-qubit limits. Additionally, we employ a ``weak symmetry reduction'' method that leverages additional invariances to shrink the search space further. Applying these results, we demonstrate exponential runtime improvements in classical simulations of quantum Fourier transform circuits and measurement-based quantum computations on the Union Jack lattice, as well as new insights into the nonstabilizer properties of multicontrolled phase gates and unitaries generating hypergraph states. Our findings establish symmetry exploitation as a powerful route to scale classical simulation techniques and deepen the resource-theoretic understanding of quantum advantage.

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

Efficient Stochastic Optimisation via Sequential Monte Carlo

Authors:
James Cuin↗Davide Carbone↗Yanbo Tang↗O. Deniz Akyildiz↗

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

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

WorkflowPerturb: Calibrated Stress Tests for Evaluating Multi-Agent Workflow Metrics

Authors:
Madhav Kanda↗Sharad Agarwal↗Rodrigo Fonseca↗Alok Gautam Kumbhare↗Pedro Las-Casas↗

arXiv:2602.17990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems that generate structured workflows from natural-language requests are now deployed in production across cloud automation, DevOps, and enterprise process orchestration. Operating such systems exposes a recurring change-management problem. Routine updates, such as re-running the same input, swapping the underlying LLM, or refactoring an agent's prompt or orchestration code, frequently produce workflows that differ substantially from previously validated references. Engineers are then left without a principled way to decide whether a change is safe to ship. Automatic workflow evaluation is the natural tool for answering this question. In practice, however, metric scores are poorly calibrated, and a numeric change rarely communicates the severity of the underlying degradation. We introduce WorkflowPerturb, a controlled benchmark for studying workflow evaluation metrics by applying realistic, graded perturbations to golden workflows. WorkflowPerturb contains 4,973 golden workflows and 44,757 perturbed variants across three perturbation types (Missing Steps, Compressed Steps, and Description Changes), each applied at severity levels of 10%, 30%, and 50%. We benchmark multiple metric families and analyze their sensitivity and calibration using expected score trajectories and residuals. Our results characterize systematic differences across metric families and support severity-aware interpretation of workflow evaluation scores in change-management settings. Our dataset will be released upon acceptance.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Correctness: Enhancing Architectural Reasoning in Code LLMs via Scalable Labeling with Agentic Judgment

Authors:
Kirill Vasilevski↗Ximing Dong↗Benjamin Rombaut↗Ruochen Deng↗Jiahuei Lin↗Arthur Leung↗Dayi Lin↗Boyuan Chen↗Shaowei Wang↗Ahmed E. Hassan↗

arXiv:2606.14948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have substantially improved software engineering yet real-world development requires architectural understanding. Such understanding is prohibitively expensive to label manually and impossible to verify through tests alone. We propose an agentic judging pipeline using a strong LLM as a scalable proxy for expert architectural evaluation, comprising two judges: the Architecture Complexity Judge (ACJ), which estimates codebase-specific architectural understanding a task demands, and the Architecture Quality Judge (AQJ), which evaluates patch conformance to repository-specific architectural conventions via source-grounded rubrics. Fine-tuning Qwen3-8B/14B/32B on 3,360 curated instances achieves resolved rates of up to 27.2% on SWE-bench Verified - up to 540% over the base model and 256% over unfiltered fine-tuning. Meanwhile, the trained models achieve strong cross-language generalization and consistent improvements in architectural patch quality.

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

CacheWeaver: Cache-Aware Evidence Ordering for Efficient Grounded RAG Inference

Authors:
Kaizhen Tan↗Rong Gu↗Mingyuan Li↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) improves factual grounding, but it also lengthens prompts and raises prefill cost. Prefix caching in serving engines such as vLLM reduces this cost only when requests share the same token prefix. In grounded generation, however, adjacent queries may retrieve overlapping evidence in different orders, so set overlap does not become reusable prefix overlap. We present CacheWeaver, a lightweight prompt-layer method for cache-aware evidence ordering. The method keeps a prefix tree over recently served evidence sequences and uses a greedy walk to place the most reusable prefix first, while leaving the serving engine and retrieved evidence set unchanged. Across three vLLM configurations, the method lowers median time-to-first-token (TTFT) by about 20-33 percent relative to retrieval-order prefix caching, without hurting answer quality in our QA tests. The greedy policy reaches 97.5 percent of the median TTFT gain from oracle ordering, indicating that most reusable prefix locality can be recovered by a simple scheduling layer between retrieval and inference.

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

Intrinsic preservation of plasticity in continual quantum learning

Authors:
Yu-Qin Chen↗Shi-Xin Zhang↗

arXiv:2511.17228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments requires the capacity for continual learning. However, standard deep learning suffers from a fundamental issue: loss of plasticity, in which networks gradually lose their ability to learn from new data. Here we show that quantum learning models naturally overcome this limitation, preserving plasticity over long timescales. We demonstrate this advantage systematically across a broad spectrum of tasks from multiple learning paradigms, including supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and diverse data modalities, from classical high-dimensional images to quantum-native datasets. Although classical models exhibit performance degradation correlated with unbounded weight and gradient growth, quantum neural networks maintain consistent learning capabilities regardless of the data or task. We identify the origin of the advantage as the intrinsic physical constraints of quantum models. Unlike classical networks where unbounded weight growth leads to landscape ruggedness or saturation, the unitary constraints confine the optimization to a compact manifold. Our results suggest that the utility of quantum computing in machine learning extends beyond potential speedups, offering a robust pathway for building adaptive artificial intelligence and lifelong learners.

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

Manga109-v2026: Revisiting Manga109 Annotations for Modern Manga Understanding

Authors:
Jeonghun Baek↗Atsuyuki Miyai↗Shota Onohara↗Hikaru Ikuta↗Kiyoharu Aizawa↗

Manga is a culturally distinctive multimodal medium and one of the most influential forms of Japanese popular culture. As AI systems increasingly target manga understanding, OCR, and translation, Manga109 has become a foundational dataset for manga-related AI research. However, the current Manga109 dataset contains inaccurate transcriptions and coarse annotations, which do not align well with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding tasks. In this work, we revisit the dialogue text annotations of Manga109 and identify five categories of annotation issues, including inaccurate transcriptions, missing text regions, overlapping dialogue and onomatopoeia, and under-segmented speech balloons. To address these issues, we combine OCR-based issue detection and manual revision to construct Manga109-v2026, revising approximately 29,000 dialogue annotations. Our revisions better align Manga109 with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding systems while preserving expressive structures characteristic of manga.

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

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

Authors:
Davide Ferre'↗Fr\'ed\'eric Giroire↗Frederik Mallmann-Trenn↗Emanuele Natale↗

arXiv:2603.02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient. Pruning methods are typically classified as unstructured, where individual weights can be removed from the network, and structured, where parameters are removed according to specific patterns, as in neuron pruning. Existing theoretical results supporting the SLTH rely almost exclusively on unstructured pruning, showing that logarithmic overparameterization suffices to approximate simple target networks. In contrast, neuron pruning has received limited theoretical attention, despite its practical appeal for direct hardware speedups. In this work, we consider the problem of approximating a single bias-free ReLU neuron by pruning hidden units of a randomly initialized two-layer ReLU network, effectively isolating the intrinsic limitations of neuron pruning. We show that achieving an $\varepsilon$-approximation requires a starting network size of $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ for neuron pruning, whereas weight pruning succeeds with only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ hidden units, revealing an exponential separation between the two approaches.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sustainability assessment using multimodal AI agents

Authors:
Zhihan Zhang↗Alexander Metzger↗Yuxuan Mei↗Felix H\"ahnlein↗Zachary Englhardt↗Tingyu Cheng↗Gregory D. Abowd↗Shwetak Patel↗Adriana Schulz↗Vikram Iyer↗

arXiv:2507.17012v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reducing the rapidly growing environmental impact of the computing industry requires assessing the emissions of electronics at scale. However, a traditional life cycle assessment (LCA) of an electronic device, which maps materials and processes to environmental impacts, often requires proprietary or unavailable data. Here, we reimagine conventional sustainability assessment by introducing a multimodal multi-agent AI system that emulates the collaborative process between LCA professionals and stakeholders (such as product managers and engineers) to automatically estimate the carbon footprint of electronic devices. The agents iteratively construct a complete life-cycle inventory by leveraging a structured data abstraction and software tools that mine information from the public internet, including repair communities and government regulatory databases. This reduces data gaps and data collection from weeks or months of expert time to under one minute. The system can calculate carbon footprint within 19% of expert LCAs with zero proprietary data (typical of the variation between human LCAs). We also show that by encoding domain-specific knowledge, environmental impact estimation can be reframed as a data-driven prediction task, in which both unknown products and emission factors are represented as weighted combinations of similar ones with known emissions.

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