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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

GMN4AD: Graph Matching Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis with Test-Time Domain Adaptation using Multi-centered Structure Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of older adults, with prevalence expected to rise significantly in the coming years. Early diagnosis, particularly during the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) stage, is critical for timely intervention. Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) has emerged as a key modality for detecting AD-related brain changes, but traditional graph-based approaches often struggle with modality and inter-site heterogeneity, limiting diagnostic performance. In this paper, we propose Graph Matching Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis (GMN4AD), designed to model interactions between heterogeneous brain graphs derived from neuroimaging data. Unlike conventional methods that treat each brain graph independently, GMN4AD leverages graph matching to capture cross-graph relationships, enhancing diagnostic precision. Furthermore, we introduce a test-time domain adaptation strategy that combines contrastive learning to mitigate domain shifts during inference. Extensive experiments on three public AD datasets demonstrate that GMN4AD achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust and generalizable solution for AD diagnosis.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Variance Reduction for Non-Log-Concave Sampling with Applications to Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration. Although variance reduction techniques such as SGD with momentum, STORM, and PAGE have demonstrated improved convergence properties in non-convex optimization, their implications for sampling from non-log-concave distributions remain largely unexplored. In this work, we develop the first unified analysis of these estimators for sampling from non-log-concave distributions. We establish improved non-asymptotic convergence rates in $\varepsilon$-relative Fisher information and, under a Poincaré inequality assumption, in squared total variation distance, and further prove weak convergence to the target distribution. We extend our analysis to solving inverse problems with score-based generative priors. We empirically validate our theory and demonstrate that, under a fixed gradient computations per iteration, variance-reduction techniques consistently improve sample quality in two standard imaging applications.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Cosmological Pseudo-Entropy

arXiv:2606.15227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study pseudo entropy $\mathcal{S}$, a recent generalization of entanglement entropy, for scalar cosmological perturbations in de Sitter space with sound speed $0.024 \leq c_s \leq 1$, and in expanding and contracting FLRW backgrounds with varying equation-of-state parameter $w$. In de Sitter space, $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ grows after horizon exit while $c_s$ controls its onset and saturates at late times. A similar saturation occurs in expanding-accelerating and contracting-decelerating backgrounds. In contrast, expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds show large early-time $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ followed by oscillations after horizon re-entry. This happens because while the squeezing freezes, the squeezing angle doesn't. Unlike entanglement entropy, pseudo entropy possesses an imaginary part, $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$, as well, which can encode the relative phase. $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$ decays to zero in de Sitter and expanding-accelerating cases, but forms dense sub-Hubble oscillation bands in expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds. Compared with entanglement entropy, Krylov complexity, and Nielsen circuit complexity, pseudo entropy captures otherwise hidden phase information; in the unsaturated regime, its slope is $\sqrt{2}$ times that of Nielsen complexity. Unlike circuit complexity, whose saturation bound is $w$-independent, pseudo entropy is sensitive to $w$ during the transition regime, making it a finer information theoretic diagnostic of cosmological dynamics.

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

Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Search Misaligns Instruction-Tuning

Agentic reinforcement learning (RL) trains large language models to use tools, but its impact on alignment is poorly understood. We study how agentic RL for search affects the alignment of instruction-tuned (IT) models. We find that RL-trained models inherit refusal reasoning by deflecting harmful requests into benign search queries, but this breaks down under a simple diagnostic trigger that elicits a search call before refusal can occur. Under this condition, RL models produce multi-step unsafe search actions and reasoning, reducing search query safety by up to 68.6% in Qwen and Llama models relative to their IT counterparts. The effect generalises across model families, scales, and RL algorithms. To understand why, we identify linear directions in the residual stream that control search query safety, and show that RL training progressively shifts search behaviour toward the harmful end of this direction. We thus propose representation-guided RL training, which adds a reward penalty based on projection toward the harmful search direction. Training on benign data alone, it restores IT-level alignment without reducing task accuracy and requires no additional training data. Together, our work provides the first framework for diagnosing, mechanistically analysing, and mitigating alignment degradation in agentic RL for search.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Gaussian mode coupling of spectrally broadband photons from bulk spontaneous parametric down-conversion: A spatial-spectral mode analysis of fiber coupling

arXiv:2602.23238v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Photon sources based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) are central to experimental quantum optics and quantum technologies. Their performance is commonly quantified by three metrics: pair-collection probability, heralding efficiency, and spectral purity. In bulk-crystal SPDC, these metrics are known to be mutually constrained, yet the physical origin of the resulting trade-offs is often obscured. We show that these trade-offs originate from the frequency-dependent population of discrete spatial modes in the SPDC emission. By performing a Laguerre-Gauss mode decomposition at each frequency component, we show how spectral-spatial non-separability impacts collection probability, heralding efficiency, and purity. We apply this framework to two widely used quasi-phase-matching configurations: collinear degenerate type-0 and type-II SPDC in periodically poled bulk crystals, and quantify how different phase-matching functions shape the spectral-spatial mode structure. In particular, for type-II SPDC we compare standard periodically poled and aperiodically poled Gaussian phase matching. We experimentally validate some of our theoretical results using spatial- and spectral-projection measurements. This spectral-spatial mode analysis provides a quantitative and predictive framework for understanding and engineering bulk-crystal photon sources, enabling systematic multi-parameter optimization beyond qualitative design guidelines.

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

Extracting Semantics: LLM-Guided Automatic Population of Robot Ontology from URDF

arXiv:2606.17073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While commonsense knowledge may suffice for virtual agents, embodied robots interacting with humans require grounded and semantically rich representations of both their environment and their own physical embodiment. In cognitive robotics, ontologies are effective for integrating such heterogeneous knowledge to enable explainable reasoning, even during continuous knowledge updates. Yet, their manual construction remains a bottleneck. We present a preliminary approach for the automatic generation of robot semantic abstractions by transforming Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) models into populated ontologies. Although URDF files provide structural and kinematic descriptions, their identifiers often require commonsense interpretation to recover meaningful semantics, a task at which Large Language Models (LLMs) excel. Our pipeline leverages LLMs to infer semantic relationships by prompting them with concepts from an existing ontology, ensuring the final classification remains aligned with the formal model. To improve reliability, the pipeline combines majority voting across multiple LLM queries along with syntactic and schema-level validation to ensure that generated outputs conform to the expected representation format and ontology constraints. We evaluate the approach on multiple robot descriptions and discuss the generated abstractions. Initial results indicate that the proposed method can effectively bridge the gap between low-level robot descriptions and the structured, grounded knowledge representations required for human-robot interaction.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimizing bias-tailored quantum error correction beyond code-capacity noise

arXiv:2606.17709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that the substantial advantages predicted for bias-tailored quantum error correction (QEC) under code-capacity noise are strongly reduced once realistic syndrome extraction and circuit-level noise models are considered. We start by comparing XZZX codes to rectangular surface codes with a bias-dependent optimised anisotropy. Although code-capacity simulations predict an advantage of rectangular surface codes in the limit of high noise bias, this actually disappears under circuit-level noise, making the XZZX codes the preferred and simplest choice even for platforms that allow for a flexible variation of the code layout adapted to changes in noise calibration. Our results identify bias degradation during syndrome extraction under circuit-level noise as the central limitation of biased-tailored QEC. To partially mitigate this effect, we introduce a bias-filtering CNOT gadget that temporarily encodes the ancillary target qubit during syndrome extraction in a repetition code and, upon measurement and feed forward, manages to reduce the bias degradation. In a regime of high-bias and low-idle errors, this bias-filtering gadget yields a few-percent relative improvement of the XZZX code error threshold, demonstrating that lightweight bias-filtering strategies can recover part of the lost bias-tailoring advantage for realistic circuit-level noise.

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

MeshFlow: Efficient Artistic Mesh Generation via MeshVAE and Flow-based Diffusion Transformer

We present MeshFlow, a new method for generating artist-like 3D meshes. Current mesh generators often adopt Auto-Regressive (AR) next-token prediction, a natural choice given the discrete nature of mesh topology. However, AR methods scale poorly because the inference cost is quadratic in mesh size. They also require discretizing the vertex coordinates, which introduces quantization errors. To address these challenges, we introduce a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that, supervised with a contrastive loss, represents both continuous vertex positions and discrete connectivity in a continuous latent space. This latent space is significantly more compact than prior token-based mesh representations. We then build a 3D generator based on a Rectified Flow transformer, generating all mesh vertices and edges in parallel. Our model generates meshes 18x faster than the fastest AR generator while also achieving excellent accuracy across standard mesh-generation metrics. Homepage: https://mesh-flow.github.io/, Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/meshflow

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

‘Student Geng’ ignites research-integrity scandal in China after calling out senior academics<b> </b>

Authors:

Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations. Video blogger’s viral accusations of data manipulation in Nature journals have sparked intense debate and speedy institutional investigations.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

MIRATS framework: Normative multiscale characterization of brain regulatory systems across sex and age using multimodal MRI

Authors:

Deep brain systems involved in arousal, autonomic regulation, sensory integration, and homeostatic control remain underrepresented in conventional whole-brain neuroimaging frameworks. In particular, diencephalic and brainstem nuclei are often insufficiently represented in cortex-centered analyses, limiting the normative references needed to interpret systems-level variation in health and disease. To address this gap, we developed a unified multiscale framework with explicit representation of deep nuclei. By integrating cerebral, cerebellar, diencephalic, and brainstem atlases in standard space, we constructed a 220-region whole-brain parcellation and extracted complementary features at three analytical scales: nodal properties, edge-wise connectivity, and persistent-homology-based topological descriptors. We applied this framework to healthy adults from the Human Connectome Project-Aging cohort to characterize normative multiscale organization and test sex- and age-related variation. Applied to this cohort, our framework revealed pronounced heterogeneity across anatomical systems. Brainstem and diencephalic nuclei showed multiscale feature profiles distinct from those of cerebral and cerebellar regions across nodal, edge-wise, and higher-order topological scales. Sex comparisons identified selective differences across different scales, whereas age modeling revealed widespread but feature- and system-dependent variation across adulthood. Together, these findings show that normative whole-brain organization in this deep-system-aware space is structured by system-specific rather than globally uniform patterns. These findings establish a normative multiscale framework for characterizing brainstem-diencephalic-cerebellar-cerebral organization in healthy adults and provide a quantitative reference for future translational studies of disease-related abnormalities in deep regulatory systems.

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

Understanding the Behaviors of Environment-aware Information Retrieval

Recent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approaches have demonstrated strong capability in handling complex queries, yet current research overlooks a critical challenge: different retrievers require fundamentally different query formulation strategies for optimal performance. In this work, we present the first systematic analysis of how LLMs can learn to adapt their query formulation strategies for different retrievers via reinforcement learning (RL). Our empirical study reveals that RL effectively teaches an LLM to tailor its queries to specific retriever characteristics. We discover that different retrievers exhibit surprisingly distinct optimal query styles (e.g., descriptive vs. question-like), suggesting strategies learned for one retriever ineffective for another. We further show that performance can be enhanced by incorporating retriever-specific human guidance and by scaling model size. To facilitate learning over multi-retrieval-step trajectories, we introduce a branching-based rollout technique that improves training stability. Our work provides the first empirical evidence and actionable insights for building truly retriever-aware RAG systems. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/LCO-Embedding/Envs-aware-Information-Retrieval.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GRIP: Feedback-Guided Prompt Retrieval for Large Multimodal Models

In-Context Learning (ICL) has become a powerful mechanism for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to new tasks without fine-tuning. Extending this concept to Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), Multimodal In-Context Learning (M-ICL) relies on retrieving relevant examples, such as images, captions, or question-answer pairs, to guide predictions across tasks like classification, captioning, and visual question answering (VQA). Most existing approaches select in-context examples based on feature-space similarity, assuming that semantically similar samples provide the most useful context. However, our systematic analysis reveals that this assumption does not always hold: visually similar examples are not necessarily those that most effectively enhance in-context learning performance. To address this, we propose the Guided Retrieval of In-context Prompts (GRIP), a learnable vision-only retrieval framework that leverages feedback from LMMs to identify examples that truly improve model predictions. GRIP learns to distinguish beneficial from detrimental in-context examples through contrastive training, refining retrieval beyond pure similarity. Across three multimodal tasks, namely classification, captioning, and VQA, GRIP improves consistently over similarity-based retrieval on Qwen2.5-VL-7B, with its strongest gains in classification on Idefics2-8B. Moreover, we demonstrate that retrievers trained with feedback from one open LMM can be transferred to other models without retraining, including closed-source GPT-4o and Gemini, enabling scalable and cost-efficient deployment of M-ICL. Code will be published upon acceptance.

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

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On the structure of the sandpile identity element on Sierpinski gasket graphs

arXiv:2603.12006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider the identity of the abelian sandpile group of finite approximation graphs of the Sierpinski gasket, and we show that the second-order term in the scaling limit converges to the path distance to the nearest corner on the Sierpinski gasket. The proof relies on a decomposition of the identity of the sandpile group into the sum of a constant function and the Laplacian of the graph distance on the approximating graphs.

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

Flow Map Denoisers: Traversing the Distortion-Perception Plane for Inverse Problems

arXiv:2606.19802v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image restoration faces a fundamental tradeoff: methods that minimize error produce blurry reconstructions, while those that maximize perceptual quality yield sharp but less faithful images. Existing approaches either commit to a single operating point on this distortion perception (DP) frontier or require paired-data supervision, auxiliary models, or hyperparameter tuning of the sampler to access different points. We show that flow map models, a recent extension of flow matching for few-step sampling that learns an average field, implicitly define a one-parameter family of denoisers that continuously spans the DP frontier. The lookahead parameter t acts as a control knob between the MMSE and perceptual regimes. For Gaussian targets, we prove that varying t exactly recovers the optimal DP frontier; for natural images, we observe similar behavior empirically. Within a Plug-and-Play solver, the same mechanism extends to general inverse problems, where it controls a tradeoff between perceptual alignment and data consistency. Despite the lack of exact optimality guarantees in this setting, a single trained flow map spans the DP tradeoff, matching or exceeding specialized baselines at both extremes. Extensive experiments on CelebA ($128\times 128$) and AFHQ ($256\times 256$) across several linear and nonlinear inverse tasks validate our findings.

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

Resilient Consensus in Agentic AI

arXiv:2606.15024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in multi-agent systems where they must coordinate and agree on shared decisions. We ask whether classical resilient consensus theory, developed for deterministic agents, transfers to LLM agents that may behave adversarially. Framing LLM agreement as a Byzantine consensus game, we run controlled experiments on complete and general communication graphs. We find that prompted LLM agents fail to reach agreement that is achievable in principle: consensus can fail even in settings where classical theory guarantees that a convergent algorithm exists, and this failure persists across temperatures and horizons. At the same time, wrapping the agents with classical resilient consensus filters improves agreement. The benefit of filtering depends on how much robustness the underlying topology already provides. Our results suggest that classical resilient consensus theory is a useful lens for the safety of agentic AI.

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

AI Adoption Across a Multinational Workforce: Sociotechnical Conditions for GenAI Acceptance in Human Resources

arXiv:2606.17887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) deployment in the workplace is accelerating rapidly. Nevertheless, questions of who adopts, who benefits, and who is left behind and why are still understudied. In this paper, we investigate these dynamics in the context of a multinational tech company transitioning from a legacy Human Resources (HR) search system to a GenAI-supported system, analyzing search log data, survey data (n=25), and ten semi-structured interviews. Our findings show that adoption depended on the fit between the GenAI system's design assumptions and employees' work positionalities (role, spoken language, tenure). Further, we find that employees' trust in GenAI answers was built through source-checking, comparison among systems, and seeking input from colleagues or HR when in doubt. Our contribution is twofold. First, we provide empirical evidence of workplace GenAI adoption during a live organizational transition, showing that adoption is influenced by factors such as situational fit, search literacy, and trust calibration. It is also further shaped by knowledge conditions such as the system's content quality, employee training, and guidance. Second, we translate these findings into design considerations for inclusive deployment and adoption in high-stakes environments such as HR. We argue that organizations should design systems considering the role and context-sensitive benefits they yield to different social groups. They also need to treat the organizational knowledge infrastructure as AI infrastructure to improve the accountability and usability of GenAI systems

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

GPT-Based Fast Simulation of CLAS12 Detector Hits via Conditional Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2606.16035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Monte-Carlo methods, with recent works drawing inspiration from large language models (LLMs) and self-supervised next-token prediction methods. In this work, we present an application of a GPT-style autoregressive transformer as a fast surrogate model for the calorimeter inside the CLAS12 experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The model is conditioned on incident momentum and generates realistic detector hits autoregressively across all nine calorimeter layers as sequences of strip, ADC, and TDC tokens. We demonstrate that the model faithfully reproduces hit multiplicity, spatial distributions, energy deposits, and the energy-momentum response of the electromagnetic calorimeter. The generator achieves inference rates exceeding 700 events per second on a single GPU, providing a substantial speedup over traditional Geant4-based simulations while maintaining physics fidelity essential for high-luminosity experimental programs.

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

p-PSO: A Penalized Particle Swarm Optimization Technique for Finding D-Optimal Designs with Mixed Factors in Generalized Linear Models

arXiv:2606.15962v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding D-optimal designs for generalized linear models (GLMs) is challenging due to the dependence of the Fisher information matrix on unknown parameters and the lack of closed-form solutions, particularly when input factors include both discrete and continuous variables. Although classical algorithms and recent metaheuristic approaches have offered partial solutions, there remains a need for robust and computationally efficient methods. In this paper, we propose a penalized Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach, named $p$-PSO. Here we introduce a new, general-purpose penalty formulation for constrained optimization and demonstrate its effectiveness in optimal design problems. The formulation is algorithm-agnostic and applicable to a broad class of black-box optimization methods. Results show that the method is highly efficient, with its primary contribution being a penalty formulation that enables the direct use of an off-the-shelf PSO algorithm and extends naturally to more general constrained optimization tasks.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Cross-Domain Multi-Person Human Activity Recognition via Near-Field Wi-Fi Sensing

Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition (HAR) provides substantial convenience and has emerged as a thriving research field, yet the coarse spatial resolution inherent to Wi-Fi significantly hinders its ability to distinguish multiple subjects. By exploiting the near-field domination effect, establishing a dedicated sensing link for each subject through their personal Wi-Fi device offers a promising solution for multi-person HAR under native traffic. However, due to the subject-specific characteristics and irregular patterns of near-field signals, HAR neural network models require fine-tuning (FT) for cross-domain adaptation, which becomes particularly challenging with certain categories unavailable. In this paper, we propose WiAnchor, a novel training framework for efficient cross-domain adaptation in the presence of incomplete activity categories. This framework processes Wi-Fi signals embedded with irregular time information in three steps: during pre-training, we enlarge inter-class feature margins to enhance the separability of activities; in the FT stage, we innovate an anchor matching mechanism for cross-domain adaptation, filtering subject-specific interference informed by incomplete activity categories, rather than attempting to extract complete features from them; finally, the recognition of input samples is further improved based on their feature-level similarity with anchors. We construct a comprehensive dataset to thoroughly evaluate WiAnchor, achieving over 90% cross-domain accuracy with absent activity categories.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Comprehensive Ecosystem for Open-Domain Customized Video Generation

Recent progress in video generation has shown impressive visual synthesis capabilities. However, open-domain customized video generation remains limited by the lack of large-scale, annotated datasets capturing diverse identity-specific attributes. To address this, we introduce PexelsCustom-1M, the first publicly available million-scale dataset for identity-preserving video generation, containing one million curated triplets across 8,000+ categories. Leveraging this, we propose CustoMDiT, a parameter-efficient framework that adapts a pretrained multimodal Diffusion Transformer into a customized video generator with only 8% additional learnable parameters. Our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art. However, benchmarks such as DreamBooth cover only 100 classes, which is insufficient for real-world applications. To overcome this, we construct OpenCustom, a new benchmark with 1,000+ categories, created via cross-dataset knowledge fusion from ImageNet and MS-COCO. Extensive experiments confirm the advantages of both our dataset and model. We will open-source the entire ecosystem–including dataset, pipeline, benchmark, and implementations–to support further research.

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

PERRY: Policy Evaluation with Confidence Intervals using Auxiliary Data

arXiv:2507.20068v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models, can improve the accuracy of OPE methods. Unfortunately, such auxiliary datasets may also be biased, and existing methods for using data augmentation within OPE lack principled uncertainty quantification. In high stakes domains like healthcare, reliable uncertainty estimates are important for ensuring safe and informed deployment of RL policies. In this work, we propose two methods to construct valid confidence intervals for OPE with data augmentation. The first provides a confidence interval over $V^{\pi}(s)$, the policy value conditioned on an initial state $s$. To do so we introduce a new conformal prediction method suitable for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces, extending prior work to higher-dimensional settings. Second, we consider the more common task of estimating the average policy performance over all initial states, $V^{\pi}$; we introduce a method that draws on ideas from doubly robust estimation and prediction powered inference. Across simulators spanning inventory management, robotics, healthcare, and a real healthcare dataset from MIMIC-IV, we find that our methods can effectively leverage auxiliary data and consistently produce confidence intervals that cover the ground truth policy values, unlike previously proposed methods. Our work enables a future in which OPE can provide rigorous uncertainty estimates for high-stakes domains.

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

Orbital-optimized spin-adapted multistate contracted VQE for excited states and properties on quantum hardware

arXiv:2606.15489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the orbital-optimized multistate contracted variational quantum eigensolver (oo-MC-VQE) method with spin-adapted operators for the computation of ground and excited states, as well as state-specific and transition properties. The use of spin-adapted operators ensures that the spin symmetry of the reference states is conserved throughout the VQE optimization. In multistate variational approaches, achieving a balanced description of an increasing number of electronic states places growing demands on the expressibility of the underlying ansatz, thereby introducing a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and circuit complexity. We consider the effects of this trade-off explicitly and find that the number of circuit parameters required to obtain accurate results is reported to scale approximately linearly in the number of states. We further present an explicit quantum-circuit implementation of the oo-MC-VQE method and demonstrate its integration with quantum error mitigation techniques. Finally, we execute the method on real quantum devices to compute absorption spectra for two benchmark molecular systems.