Artificial Intelligence
Papers
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All of arXiv
Tuesday 6 October
Conversational AI assistants with long-term memory extract facts from user messages into a store consulted in later conversations. A stated plan can enter that store as fact: a user who might move to Seattle may be recorded as already living there. We call this speculation contamination. Final-state memory benchmarks miss this error because they do not probe intermediate state and include few unresolved speculations. We present AgentMemGate, a write-time gate for profile-store memory that classifies extracted statements as speculation, completed event, correction, or other. Speculations remain outside memory, with conditions governing later promotion or deletion. We also contribute a dataset of multi-session conversations in which plans are confirmed, abandoned, or left unresolved. On our 147-conversation held-out set, Mem0 and Graphiti assert unresolved plans as current state for 35.2% and 27.3% of pending plans. On the core benchmark, AgentMemGate eliminates all observed contamination relative to the identical ungated pipeline (87.5% to zero for the most exposed extraction style) and raises task accuracy from 65% to 95%. On the harder held-out set, gated contamination is 3.4% to 5.7% and task accuracy rises by 9 to 13 percentage points. Our analysis identifies field matching as the main remaining bottleneck: realistic speculations often match no profile field and never reach the gate. We release our datasets, prompts, and evaluation code.
Machine Learning
WASD: Wasserstein-based Knowledge Distillation for Large Language Models
Autoregressive large language models (LLMs) have rapidly advanced in capability, but their increasing scale comes with substantial computational and memory costs at inference time. Knowledge distillation (KD) offers a practical solution by transferring knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model via alignment of discrete probability distributions. However, existing KD methods for LLMs primarily rely on divergences that evaluate discrepancies through probability values at each vocabulary index, without explicitly leveraging token-level semantic information. We propose Wasserstein-based knowledge distillation (WASD) for LLMs, which incorporates token-level semantic information via the Wasserstein-based distance with a cost matrix derived from token embeddings. To ensure computational tractability, we adopt the Sinkhorn divergence and derive a gradient-equivalent objective that can be efficiently optimized without introducing additional networks. Experiments across multiple LLM families and scales show that WASD consistently improves distillation performance on diverse tasks, including instruction following, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Our results highlight the importance of semantic information encoded in the token space for effective distribution alignment in LLM distillation. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/aailab-kaist/WASD .
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Computer Vision
What Frame-Level Labels Can and Cannot Do for Small-UAV Point Detection in Thermal Video
The growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has increased the importance of image-based UAV detection. Learning-based detectors are trained on imagery and annotations, with annotation type determining the information available during training. We focus on learning localization from frame-level target presence/absence labels when sensor or scene changes make spatial annotations for additional training burdensome. We analyze the detection capability, learning behavior, and potential applications of an existing architecture for point detection of small UAVs, trained with presence/absence labels and requiring no external detector. The architecture freezes spatial features learned through classification and trains a readout with the same frame labels to produce spatial score maps and point detections. On two thermal infrared datasets, CST Anti-UAV and Anti-UAV410, we evaluate localization hit rates and detection rates under false-alarm constraints, analyze the effects of training stages, label allocation, synthesis, and model configuration, and compare with bounding-box detectors. We also explore potential applications on Airborne Object Tracking (AOT) using its visible-light imagery and frame labels. Classification training strengthened target-related spatial responses, while readout training helped extract them consistently. Distributing similar label counts across more videos yielded higher localization hit rates, while synthesis effects varied by dataset and evaluation criterion. Higher localization hit rates did not always improve detection under false-alarm constraints, and failures remained when target signals were weak relative to background variation and under cross-dataset transfer. These findings provide guidance on label allocation, spatial representations and readouts, synthesis, and false-alarm control.
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Multiagent Systems
Independent Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Counterfactual Semantic-Social World Models
Fully decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), also referred to as independent learning, requires each agent to learn and act using only its local information and experience, without a centralized critic or inter-agent communication. Such a stringent information structure renders the conventional reward signal ambiguous. A poor return may result from an ineffective ego action, an incompatible teammate response, or an effective opponent response, yet scalar rewards alone do not reveal which explanation is responsible. We argue that agents can learn more effectively by prospectively comparing the consequences of candidate actions rather than diagnosing failures only from realized returns. We introduce CASTLE (Counterfactual Action-conditioned Semantic Tokens for Local Execution in Decentralized MARL), an offline-training, online-in-context guidance framework with two complementary world models. A Local Dynamics World Model, offline pre-trained over agents' local trajectories, summarizes the agent's local trajectory dynamics and partial observability, while a Semantic-Social World Model predicts compact short-horizon task and social consequences for each candidate ego action. The latter is trained from counterfactual simulator rollouts that expose plausible teammate and opponent responses to alternative actions taken from the same logged rollout state. During online learning and execution, both world models remain frozen and are queried by agents using only locally available information. Their prediction logits provide in-context guidance to an independent PPO policy. Across 30 matched seeds on Tag, Spread, and Adversary in the benchmark multi-particle environments, our proposed CASTLE achieves the highest mean final score among the evaluated methods, exceeding the strongest baseline on each task by 10.67, 6.46, and 0.33 normalized points, respectively.
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Fluid Dynamics
Airborne liquid marble: Evaporation dynamics of liquid marble in acoustic levitation
Liquid marbles (LMs), droplets encapsulated by hydrophobic particles, allow for non-wetting manipulation and containerless handling, making them well-suited for applications such as microreactors. When integrated with acoustic levitation, the LMs serve as contact-free reaction platforms. However, the complex behaviours associated with acoustic fields, including deformation, internal flow, and evaporation, remain insufficiently understood. This study investigates the evaporation dynamics of acoustically levitated LMs. Simultaneous visualisation of the droplet morphology and surrounding vapour concentration fields was achieved using backlighting and the Background-oriented Schlieren (BOS) method. At intermediate relative humidity (RH = 40%), the evaporation rates and vapour distributions of LMs closely resembled those of pure water droplets, indicating that the particle shell exerts minimal influence under these conditions. Conversely, significant differences were observed at high- and low-humidity, attributable to the evaporation resistance and interfacial properties introduced by the hydrophobic particle layers. Furthermore, although pure water droplets maintained a quasi-spherical shape, LMs demonstrated progressive flattening over time, suggesting mechanical constraints imposed by the particle shell. These findings provide new insights into the coupled evaporation and deformation behaviours of LMs in acoustic fields, informing the design of contamination-free microfluidic and microreactor systems.
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Quantum Physics
Demonstration of Parallel Multi-QPU Execution for Fragment-Based Quantum Chemistry Using On-Premises Hardware
Fragment molecular orbital (FMO) quantum chemistry offers a natural route to parallel quantum computing: large molecular calculations can be decomposed into smaller quantum subproblems that can, in principle, run concurrently. Their practical benefit on real quantum hardware, however, has remained unclear. We demonstrate parallel FMO calculations on three room-temperature diamond-based 'Quoll' quantum computers installed on-site at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. Helium clusters (He$_{n}$, $n=2,4,8,10,14$) served as a testbed for total energy calculations using the Quantum Wave Function Sampler (QWFS), a selected configuration interaction (SCI) approach. We compare two execution modes: synchronous shot-parallel execution, in which quantum processors jointly sample QWFS circuits and combine their SPAM-corrected counts into a single probability distribution; and asynchronous fragment-parallel execution, in which processors independently evaluate FMO fragments using device-specific optimized circuits. Both modes increase quantum sampling throughput without systematic loss of accuracy. The three-QPU shot-parallel workflow reaches a parallel efficiency of $93.60\%$, while the fragment-parallel workflow achieves a measured efficiency of $75.01\%$, increasing to $95.17\%$ when excluding the non-useful idle time associated with non-interruptible submitted jobs. In both cases, the assembled FMO-QWFS energies remain chemically accurate compared to the classical ideal. These results provide a proof-of-concept demonstration that parallel quantum execution can improve the practical throughput of quantum chemistry workflows on prototype hardware, motivating the development of future HPC environments with many fault-tolerant quantum processors operating as a distributed resource for molecular and materials simulation.
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Artificial Intelligence
On the Boundary of Admission Gates: An Injected-Truth Study of Falsification-First Selection in Quantitative Strategy Research
Strategy research conflates two problems: finding a profitable rule, and establishing that the finding is not search luck. The latter calls for admission gates – statistical criteria that must be satisfied before a conclusion is adopted – yet whether gates work, and at what cost, remains untested. We introduce an injected-truth protocol with a random-admission control that adopts at the same rate as the gate; only if the gate beats this control does it carry information rather than merely raise a threshold. Across synthetic and real-calibrated panels, gates eliminate false discoveries in the weak-signal regime but cut adoption to 1–7%, and add nothing when signals are strong. Most importantly, criteria computed on absolute rather than excess returns silently reject every candidate, including true signals. Keywords: multiple testing, backtest overfitting, strategy admission, injected-truth validation, excess returns, false discovery rate
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Computation and Language
Detecting LLM-Assisted Vietnamese Writing via Keystrokes under Behavioral Manipulation
We study the robustness of keystroke dynamics for detecting large language model (LLM)-assisted writing. We introduce a Vietnamese keystroke dataset capturing realistic writing modes, including bona fide composition, transcription, and paraphrasing. We also define a behaviorally grounded threat model in which users deliberately alter typing patterns. To implement the threat model, we create behaviorally manipulated variants of the data designed to evade keystroke-based detection. We evaluate four keystroke modeling approaches: temporal and rhythmic representations, and sequential representations modeled with a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1D-CNN) and TypeNet, under user-independent and context-independent settings. The results show that sequential models outperform feature-based approaches in most cases and that keystroke signals encode discriminative information about the writing process. However, detection is not uniformly robust: transcription is reliably identified, while paraphrasing and adversarially manipulated samples are frequently misclassified as bona fide when not explicitly modeled. To address this, we incorporate adversarial training using behaviorally manipulated data, which substantially improves separability and robustness. These results suggest that keystroke-based detection depends critically on exposure to diverse writing behaviors, and that strong performance under limited conditions does not generalize to realistic or adversarial settings without targeted modeling.
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Machine Learning
Improving Synthetic Data Generation for Argument Mining via Adversarial Reinforcement Learning
Argument Mining (AM) is fundamentally constrained by the scarcity of high-quality structure-annotated datasets. While LLMs have shown promise in synthetic data generation, producing synthetic AM data that is both structurally accurate and sufficiently diverse remains a challenging problem. To address this problem, we revisit synthetic data generation for AM from a new perspective and propose a novel adversarial reinforcement learning framework for data synthesis. The proposed framework jointly optimizes the generator and the discriminator in an adversarial loop, in which the generator produces structured AM instances, and the discriminator provides learning signals by distinguishing real data from synthetic candidates. This enables the generator to progressively improve both the structural accuracy of generated argument data while maintaining diversity through adversarial feedback. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently improves AM performance on three benchmark datasets in both full-data and low-resource settings, validating its effectiveness and scalability.
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Computer Vision
RBMatch: Dual-Level Class Rebalancing for Semi-Supervised Building Footprint Extraction
Accurate building footprint extraction from high-resolution remote sensing imagery is essential for urban planning, disaster response, and environmental monitoring. However, obtaining dense pixel-level annotations is costly, motivating the use of semi-supervised learning (SSL) to leverage unlabeled imagery. In remote sensing, severe foreground–background imbalance poses a particular challenge for self-training, as it can bias pseudo-label generation and the resulting unsupervised optimization toward the majority background class. We show that addressing this imbalance at only one stage is insufficient: balancing pseudo-label selection alone does not prevent background bias from re-emerging during unsupervised loss optimization, a failure mode we term imbalance leak. To address this issue, we propose RBMatch, a dual-level class-rebalancing framework that jointly regulates pseudo-label generation and unsupervised optimization. RBMatch combines a supervised learning pathway with a self-training module comprising three components: adaptive class-specific thresholding (ACT) for balanced pseudo-label selection, confidence-aware class-balanced reweighting (CACBR) for mitigating class bias in the unsupervised loss, and distribution alignment (DAL) for matching the predicted unlabeled-data distribution to the labeled-data prior. Experiments on the WHU, INRIA, and Massachusetts building footprint datasets across labeled ratios of 1%–10% show that RBMatch consistently achieves the best building IoU and F1-score among the evaluated methods. The improvement is most pronounced on the highly imbalanced Massachusetts dataset, where RBMatch improves IoU by 1.37 points over the strongest baseline at a 1% labeling ratio and is the only method to outperform the fully supervised baseline across all twelve dataset–ratio settings.
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Quantum Physics
When Expressivity Is Not Enough: Discrete Routing Geometry in Variational Quantum Circuits
Finding useful variational quantum circuits requires more than representational capacity: training must also have access to directions that improve the objective. We study how discrete CNOT routing shapes both capacity and local accessibility. For circuits built from CNOT and arbitrary one-qubit gates, we separate binary routing matrices from continuous rotations to relate global capacity to local tangent accessibility. An exact finite-field formula for the operator Schmidt rank of a CNOT block and cumulative multiblock bounds yield capacity constraints and a Bell-pair fidelity obstruction. Locally, routing propagates generators into a routing-dependent tangent space, so all parameter gradients can vanish even when the ambient objective gradient is nonzero; frame bounds distinguish loss of gradient coverage from poor conditioning. A routing-conditioned identity insertion preserves the current unitary, state, loss, and existing gradients while adding new tangent directions. Candidate-only and incremental projection scores provide local criteria for ranking insertions. Exact-statevector tests show strong short-horizon score-descent correlations on controlled Bell tasks and effective equal-cost selection on connected Heisenberg chains up to twelve qubits, with complementary TFIM selector controls. A broader TFIM routing ensemble exhibits routing-dependent near-stagnation. Together, these results connect representational capacity, local accessibility, and same-point repair through a common discrete routing description. An architecture need not remain fixed during training: task-dependent geometric information can guide the opening of new descent directions while preserving the learned circuit at insertion. This provides a concrete local approach to a broader problem: how useful quantum circuits can be discovered from the information a task supplies.
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Robotics
ESP: Energy-Score Policy for One-Step Multimodal Action Generation
Generative action models based on diffusion and flow matching have been increasingly adopted in vision-language-action (VLA) policies for their ability to capture diverse behaviors, including multiple valid action sequences under the same observation and instruction. Their iterative sampling procedures, however, require repeated network evaluations to generate each action chunk, increasing inference latency in closed-loop control. We propose ESP (Energy-Score Policy), a teacher-free approach that maps policy context and noise directly to an action chunk in a single network evaluation. ESP trains the action head with the energy score rather than mean squared error. Whereas squared-error regression targets the conditional mean, the energy score is strictly proper: its expected value is uniquely minimized by the target distribution. This provides a principled objective for learning multimodal action distributions without iterative sampling, with exact recovery at the population optimum when the model can represent the target distribution. Experiments on both simulation and real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate competitive task success with substantially lower action-generation latency than the flow matching baseline. These results support direct distributional learning as an efficient alternative to iterative generative robot policies.
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Logic in Computer Science
From Zero-Dimensional to Continuous Dualities: A Double-Categorical Account
We investigate how to systematically construct continuous dualities from zero-dimensional dualities, employing well-known methods from algebra, topology, category theory, and domain theory. While our method is general, this paper focusses on the move from Stone spaces to compact Hausdorff spaces and the move from Priestley spaces to compact ordered Hausdorff spaces. The engine of our approach is Stone duality for relations: on the space side quotienting by a preorder turns zero-dimensional spaces into continuous ones, while distributive lattices with a proximity relation are their algebraic duals. Our duality for relations is inherently order-enriched. Double categories organise both functional and relational morphism in the same structure. The move from zero-dimensional to continuous dualities is then a three-step construction: extend a duality from functional to relational morphism, split idempotents, restrict to maps.
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Computer Vision
Anchor-driven Multi-modal Multi-scale Expert Selection for Survival Prediction
The integrative analysis of histopathological Whole-Slide Images (WSIs) and transcriptomic profiles holds significant promise for cancer survival prediction. However, existing methods typically project multi-modal features directly into a shared latent space without explicit alignment, leading to the entanglement of mismatched morphological cues and molecular signals. Furthermore, current fusion strategies often treat the extreme spatial heterogeneity of WSIs uniformly, lacking mechanisms to adaptively prioritize clinically relevant tissue scales for individual patients. To address these limitations, we propose an Anchor-driven Multi-modal Multi-scale Expert Selection (AM$^2$ES) framework for survival prediction. Specifically, we present an Anchor-driven Multi-modal Fusion (AMF) module, which introduces learnable semantic anchors as cross-modal mediators to bridge the semantic gap by enforcing a structurally regularized alignment between transcriptomic features and multi-scale pathology representations. Built upon this aligned semantic space, we further design a Hierarchical Mixture-of-Experts (H-MoE) selection module to decouple the hierarchical prognostic selection process. Mimicking the pathologist's diagnostic workflow, H-MoE performs (i) Intra-scale Expert Filtering to discriminatively identify salient tumor regions within each magnification, and (ii) Inter-scale Hierarchy Routing to dynamically weight and select the most informative resolution levels. Extensive experiments on multiple TCGA cancer cohorts demonstrate that our AM$^2$ES achieves state-of-the-art performance while offering fine-grained interpretability by visualizing how specific molecular pathways drive the expert routing decisions across tissue scales. The code will be released at https://github.com/taozh2017/AM2ES.
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Mathematical Physics
Spontaneous symmetry breaking at any temperature in a local one-dimensional model
We present a one-dimensional classical statistical physics model on an infinite lattice with nearest-neighbor interactions and local state space $\mathbb{Z}^2$, with a “helical" symmetry group $\mathbb{Z}^2\rtimes \mathbb{Z}$ mixing flavor symmetry with spatial translation. For any $0<\beta<\infty$, we construct an uncountable infinity of DLR (Gibbs) states parameterized by $\mathbb{R}^2$, with a free $\mathbb{Z}^2$ flavor symmetry group action; as such, we interpret the model as exhibiting spontaneous symmetry breaking at any temperature. The most general DLR state we construct is interpreted as an infinite sequence of localized domain walls separating a pair of asymptotic “symmetry sectors". Although any normalizable Gibbs state necessarily breaks a countably infinite freely-acting symmetry group, a natural regularization of the problem to (arbitrarily) large but finite systems with periodic boundary conditions has measure concentration in disjoint and far-separated symmetry-related clusters in the (now unique) Gibbs state, which justifies our interpretation of spontaneous symmetry breaking on the infinite line. A modification of the model with local state space $\mathbb{R}^2$ must break a continuous helical symmetry at any temperature. This is not a contradiction with the Mermin-Wagner Theorem, because this continuous helical symmetry is non-compact and does not commute with translation.
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Robotics
ExoBridge: Learning a Bare Hand to Hand-Worn Exoskeleton Mapping through Human Limb Coupling
Human video offers a scalable source of experience for dexterous robot learning, but obtaining motion and tactile supervision while preserving bare hand interaction remains challenging. We present ExoBridge, a framework that leverages human limb coupling to learn a bridging function from bare hand video to the motion and tactile state of a sensorized exoskeleton. Our central idea is to use coordinated bimanual behavior to connect an uninstrumented visual source with a measured manipulation interface. During collection, one hand remains bare and provides visual observations, while the opposite hand wears the exoskeleton and supplies synchronized motion and tactile measurements. These paired demonstrations train a temporal visual model to predict fingertip contact, continuous tactile intensity, and relative encoder motion from bare hand video alone. The exoskeleton defines an intermediate state space whose motion coordinates are linked to a dexterous robot hand through existing calibration. Evaluation on 1,215 demonstrations across four manipulation tasks uses held out collection sessions and yields a pooled any contact AUROC of 0.916 and a Pearson correlation of 0.790 for tactile intensity. The learned bridge also predicts relative changes in exoskeleton configuration from bare hand video. These results demonstrate that human limb coupling can turn exoskeleton measurements into supervision for bare hand video, establishing a learned bridge between human visual demonstrations and a robot oriented manipulation interface.
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Cryptography and Security
PerSpectron: Detecting Invariant Footprints of Microarchitectural Attacks with Perceptron
Detecting microarchitectural attacks is critical given their proliferation in recent years. Many of these attacks exhibit intrinsic behaviors essential to the nature of their operation, such as creating contention or misspeculation. This study systematically investigates the microarchitectural footprints of hardware-based attacks and shows how they can be detected and classified using an efficient hardware predictor. We present a methodology to use correlated microarchitectural statistics to design a hardware-based neural predictor capable of detecting and classifying microarchitectural attacks before data is leaked. Once a potential attack is detected, it can be proactively mitigated by triggering appropriate countermeasures. Our hardware-based detector, PerSpectron, uses perceptron learning to identify and classify attacks. Perceptron-based prediction has been successfully used in branch prediction and other hardware-based applications. PerSpectron has minimal performance overhead. The statistics being monitored have similar overhead to already existing performance monitoring counters. Additionally, PerSpectron operates outside the processor's critical paths, offering security without added computation delay. Our system achieves a usable detection rate for detecting attacks such as SpectreV1, SpectreV2, SpectreRSB, Meltdown, breakingKSLR, Flush+Flush, Flush+Reload, Prime+Probe as well as cache-attack calibration programs. We also believe that the large number of diverse microarchitectural features offers both evasion resilience and interpretability—features not present in previous hardware security detectors. We detect these attacks early enough to avoid any data leakage, unlike previous work that triggers countermeasures only after data has been exposed.
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Data Structures and Algorithms
How to Fix a Broken Metric: A Linear Kernel, Tight Bounds, and Tree Metrics
Given a complete graph whose edge weights represent dissimilarities, Metric Violation Distance asks whether at most $k$ weights can be changed to form a metric. Motivated by metric repair for noisy data, the problem admits a polynomial-time $O(\log n)$-approximation due to Cohen-Addad, Fan, Lee and de Mesmay [SIAM J. Comput., 2025]. In the context of parameterized complexity, Fan, Gilbert, Raichel, Sonthalia and Van Buskirk [SWAT 2020] gave a $k^{O(k)}n^{O(1)}$-time algorithm. Fomin, Golovach and More [IPEC 2026] obtained an $O(k^2)$ kernel and a single-exponential algorithm for the ultrametric case. They asked whether general metrics admit a single-exponential algorithm and a polynomial kernel, and whether the tree-metric analogue is fixed-parameter tractable. We answer all three questions. We give a $2^{O(k)}n^{O(1)}$-time algorithm and prove that, unless ETH fails, no $2^{o(k)}n^{O(1)}$-time algorithm exists, even when all input distances lie in $\{1,2,3\}$. We also give a kernel with at most $6k$ vertices. The kernel supports solution lifting and can precede any approximation algorithm. Combined with the $O(\log n)$-approximation of Cohen-Addad, Fan, Lee and de Mesmay, it yields an $O(\log \mathrm{OPT})$-approximation at no asymptotic cost in running time. Both results extend to an interval generalization in which each edge $e$ has an observed value $M_e$ and an admissible range $[A_e,B_e]$ within which it may be reassigned; the kernel then has $7k$ vertices. Finally, Tree Metric Violation Distance is fixed-parameter tractable and solvable in $k^{O(k)}n^{O(1)}$ time.
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Computer Vision
Unlocking Fine-Grained Perception in CLIP via Structurally-Aware Latent Masked Modeling
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP excel in global semantic alignment but often lack fine-grained perceptual capabilities. This hinders dense prediction tasks and bottlenecks the visual potential of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Existing research has attempted to enhance CLIP's visual representations by incorporating geometric priors from vision-centric models. However, these strategies often struggle to achieve deep alignment for both local spatial structures and global semantics, potentially even distorting the original image-text space. To address these limitations, we propose SALM, an unsupervised embedding alignment framework based on structurally-aware latent mask modeling. SALM effectively synergizes local and global alignment via a dual-path design combining explicit and implicit mechanisms, without requiring any image-text pairs. First, we introduce a dual-matrix alignment strategy that explicitly calibrates intra-sample spatial correlations and activation intensities, thereby effectively injecting local geometric priors. Based on this, we further design a latent mask modeling mechanism to guide CLIP to restore the missing semantic details of the target model, thereby implicitly aggregating fine-grained structures into the global semantic space. Furthermore, driven by the empirical observations that CLIP's shallow features inherently possess strong spatial observational capabilities, we naturally extend SALM to a highly efficient self-distillation paradigm, SALM-Self. This unlocks CLIP's intrinsic fine-grained potential without relying on any external models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SALM not only significantly improves performance in dense prediction tasks but also boosts CLIP's zero-shot accuracy, effectively enhancing the fine-grained understanding capabilities of MLLMs. Project page at https://qzfm.github.io/salm_project_page/.
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Distributed Computing
FailBench: Evaluating Fault Tolerance Across Distributed Training Architectures
Distributed deep learning relies on data, pipeline, tensor, and hybrid parallelism, yet fault-tolerance mechanisms are typically evaluated only on the architecture for which they were designed. This leaves practitioners with little guidance when choosing mechanisms across architectures. FailBench provides a unified evaluation harness covering seven distributed training architectures, eight crash-fault-tolerance mechanisms and a no-FT baseline, and single, concurrent, and cascading fail-stop failures. We evaluate 142 (architecture, mechanism, trace) combinations on an 8xV100 cluster, with per-rank checkpoint states ranging from 205 MB to 2.7 GB. Three findings emerge. First, no mechanism is universally best: on A2, disk checkpointing has the lowest steady-state overhead (0.5%), in-memory replication restores fastest (~17 ms), and just-in-time checkpointing avoids periodic steady-state checkpoint cost but incurs ~0.9 s upon failure. When process-group re-formation takes seconds, mechanisms differ more in runtime overhead than restore speed. Second, gossip training increases sample throughput by 17.9% after losing a worker, yet shows no detectable improvement in loss progress over a matched no-fault baseline. Third, mechanism cost depends strongly on architecture: in-memory replication overhead ranges from 3.7% to 176%. We translate these findings into a decision framework for selecting fault-tolerance mechanisms and release FailBench as an open artifact.
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Differential Geometry
New Curvature Operator of the Second Kind Conditions for Rigidity
We establish Tachibana-type rigidity theorems with the aid of the curvature operator of the second kind (COSK). A sharp estimate that combines the symmetric and commutator actions on Weyl tensors leads to a constant $C_{n}$, with $\frac{C_{n}}{n}\to\frac{5}{4}$, such that a complete Einstein manifold of dimension $n\geq5$ with $C_{n}$-nonnegative COSK has constant nonnegative sectional curvature. We also explore shifted curvature operators of the second kind leading to similar rigidity results, offer an elegant Ricci-corrected Bochner identity for harmonic forms, and classify the complete simply connected locally symmetric Einstein manifolds in the resulting shifted cone. Explicit spaces establish the sharpness of the tensor estimates, and complete lists of the eigenvalues of the COSKs for symmetric spaces identify which of them are borderline cases.
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Artificial Intelligence
BluffJAX: Adversarial Imperfect Information Games in JAX
We introduce BluffJAX: an open-source suite of adversarial imperfect information games in JAX. We provide canonical implementations of games designed for high simulation throughputs and parallelization on GPU accelerators. Our suite consists of well-studied benchmarks such as Texas Hold'Em Poker and Kuhn Poker, as well as games that have not been previously studied in reinforcement learning research, such as Bluff, Stud Poker, and Kemps. We hope that implementing a variety of game mechanics and difficulties will introduce new challenges and foster novel research directions in game-theoretic methods for RL. We benchmark the throughput performance and memory usage of our environments in single and multi-GPU settings, demonstrating scaling of up to hundreds of millions of samples per second, and motivating the usage of BluffJAX over related GPU and CPU-based libraries. We benchmark reinforcement learning, tree search, and game-solving algorithms in JAX in order to provide users with baseline results and facilitate future comparisons.
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Hardware Architecture
CHiRP: Control-Flow History Reuse Prediction
Translation Lookaside Buffers (TLBs) play a critical role in hardware-supported memory virtualization. To speed up address translation and reduce costly page table walks, TLBs cache a small number of recently-used virtual-to-physical address translations. TLBs must make the best use of their limited capacities. Thus, TLB entries with low potential for reuse should be replaced by more useful entries. This paper contributes to an aspect of TLB management that has received little attention in the literature: replacement policy. We show how predictive replacement policies can be tailored toward TLBs to reduce miss rates and improve overall performance. We begin by applying recently proposed predictive cache replacement policies to the TLB. We show these policies do not work well without considering specific TLB behavior. Next, we introduce a novel TLB-focused predictive policy, Control-flow History Reuse Prediction (CHiRP). This policy uses a history signature and replacement algorithm that correlates to known TLB behavior, outperforming other policies. For a 1024-entry 8-way set-associative L2 TLB with a 4KB page size, we show that CHiRP reduces misses per 1000 instructions (MPKI) by an average 28.21% over the least-recently-used (LRU) policy, outperforming Static Re-reference Interval Prediction (SRRIP), Global History Reuse Policy (GHRP) and SHiP, which reduce MPKI by an average of 10.36%, 9.03% and 0.88%, respectively.
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Computer Vision
Disentangling Dual Image References in Frequency Aware Diffusion Models for Personalized Generation
Personalized image generation aims to synthesize text-driven images conditioned on reference images, while mainly casting the generation as image customization for foreground and style transfer for background. Previous arts of diffusion models suffers from the text misalignment with background for image customization and foreground for style transfer during the denoising process. Such facts, as we observed, rooted from the entanglement among hybrid frequency bands during the denoising process. To address such salient limitation, in this paper, we study personalized generation based on dual references - customization and color and style reference - and propose a paradigm to disentangle these Dual image references within Frequency-aware Diffusion Models, dubbed Dual-FDM, to simultaneously tackle two crucial personalized image generation tasks: customization style transfer and color style transfer, by disentangling different frequency bands via mask strategy within frequency domain. For customization style transfer, we replace the mid-frequency band of the background in the style reference with that from the foreground of the customized reference. For color style transfer, we substitute the low-frequency band of the background in the style reference with that from both the foreground and background of the color reference. Both the substituted frequency bands are used as the key and value to reconstruct the query foreground and background of the denoised personalized image.Extensive experiments validate the superiority of Dual-FDM over the state-of-the-art diffusion models for personalized image generation. Our code can be accessed from https://github.com/htyjers/Dual-FDM.
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Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
Sparse qubit operation in a 6$\times$6 quantum dot array
Fault-tolerant quantum computation requires increasing the qubit count while maintaining high performance and connectivity. Semiconductor qubits have demonstrated high-fidelity operation, but growing the system size at sufficient connectivity remains challenging, such that scaling mainly occurred in one spatial direction to preserve access for control lines in the other. Here, we realise an approach that relaxes the requirements on fabrication and demonstrate a 6$\times$6 quantum dot array, defined by a shared barrier gate and individual plunger gates. The quantum dots are tuned through coherent spin shuttling over distances up to 5.2um into a sparse configuration of 10 simultaneously operated qubits, leaving space for shuttling connections. We reduce crosstalk by 42$\times$ in this separated regime, enabling high-fidelity simultaneous single-qubit control, while control-Z operations can be implemented through shuttling and plunger-only control. These results promise high-connectivity quantum circuits, enabled by scaling to two-dimensional geometries and exploiting shuttling.
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Networking
Semantic Split Inference for Remote Modulation Recognition
Remote automatic modulation recognition balances sensing-node complexity, reporting cost and accuracy. To address this trade-off, we propose channel-aware semantic split inference: a sensing node sends a semantic report over a noisy link and the edge server completes recognition. In our model, split depth and report length are independent design variables, with end-to-end training through the channel. We compare the resulting design against basic split placements, which run inference at the edge server or at the sensing node, and against a state-of-the-art collaborative scheme. We assess sensing-node model size, computation, latency and energy against recognition accuracy. We show that intermediate splits give the best accuracy-cost trade-off.
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Robotics
EigenDEXplore: Structured Exploration for Dexterous Manipulation with Human Priors
Dexterous manipulation poses a challenging high-dimensional optimization problem, as useful behaviors require coordinated motion across many hand joints. In reinforcement learning (RL) and sampling-based trajectory optimization, exploration commonly relies on independent robot joint perturbations, making coordinated behaviors difficult to discover. Prior work reduces this search space for grasp learning using low-dimensional spaces of coordinated joint motions learned from human hand data, but this restricts the expressivity required for general manipulation. Some combine learned and joint-space actions to restore expressivity, but this increases dimensionality and introduces redundancy. We study these effects across diverse manipulation settings, varying action dimensionality, exploration strategy, and the source of human data. Our experiments suggest that human-motion priors are most effective when used to structure exploration rather than change the action representation. Motivated by this finding, we propose EigenDEXplore, which induces correlated exploration by adding perturbations along human-derived eigenvectors to independent joint-space noise, leaving the action space unchanged. Across multiple dexterous hands, EigenDEXplore consistently outperforms joint-space and learned action-space baselines in grasping, in-hand reorientation, and contact-rich manipulation. These gains span unstructured and reference-guided RL, trajectory optimization, and sim-to-real deployment, and are largest in settings with less reward shaping and curriculum design.
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Quantum Physics
Spectroscopy using dipole-phonon quantum logic
Dipole-phonon quantum logic (DPQL) offers novel approaches for state preparation, measurement, and control of quantum information in molecular ion qubits. Here we report the first experimental demonstration of DPQL as a spectroscopic tool using the shared motional mode of a CaO$^+$-Ca$^+$ ion chain to measure the frequency splitting of the ground $\Omega$-doublet of CaO$^+$. By comparing the dipole-phonon signal across three trap-frequency ramp ranges, we determine the splitting to be $\omega_{mol}=2\pi\times454\pm1$ kHz and place a lower bound on the effective dipole-phonon coupling. The rate of observation is limited by the low thermal population in the molecular ground rotational state.
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Numerical Analysis
Sampling discretization of the uniform norm for hyperbolic-cross trigonometric polynomials
We study sampling discretization of the uniform norm for trigonometric polynomials with frequencies in a hyperbolic cross of level $N$ on $\T^d$. For every $d,N\ge2$ and $\varepsilon\in(0,1)$, we construct an explicit norming set with at most $\bigl(C_1(1+\varepsilon^{-1})\bigr)^{d-1}N^{1+\varepsilon}$ points and norming constant at most $\bigl(C_2(1+\varepsilon^{-1})\bigr)^{d-1}$, where $C_1,C_2$ are absolute constants. We also prove that independent Haar-distributed points achieve the same exponent $1+\varepsilon$: a sample of size at least $C(d,\varepsilon)N^{1+\varepsilon}\log(2/\eta)$ norms the entire space simultaneously with probability at least $1-\eta$, with a norming constant bounded by $\exp(C_d\varepsilon^{-d})$ and independent of $N$. The deterministic construction combines uniformly stable de la Vallée Poussin sampling operators with a Smolyak-type combination identity. The random result follows from an abstract norming theorem for sums of spaces associated with commuting regular partitions, together with a multiscale approximation of hyperbolic-cross polynomials. Finally, we show that every norming set of constant $B>1$ for the trigonometric polynomials with frequencies in $\{-1,0,1\}^d$ has at least $\bigl(\pi d/(2e\log B)\bigr)^{d/2}$ points. This rules out quadratic bounds in the dimension of the polynomial space with a prefactor growing only polynomially in $d$ when the norming constant is fixed.
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Chemical Physics
Accurate Molecular Property Regression Using Simple Fusion of Complementary Classical and Graph Predictors
Accurate prediction of continuous molecular properties supports chemical discovery and design. Many recent approaches combine multiple molecular representations within increasingly complex neural architectures, aiming to achieve higher accuracy. However, classical machine-learning models remain competitive when trained on chemically meaningful molecular representations. We therefore constructed a chemistry-guided classical branch from Morgan fingerprints, RDKit molecular descriptors, and conformer-derived geometric features selected to provide complementary views of molecular structure. We combined four tree learners trained on these representations with a CoMPT graph predictor and integrated their out-of-fold predictions using Ridge regression. Across ESOL, FreeSolv, and Lipophilicity datasets, the fused model achieved lower mean root-mean-square error (RMSE) than Chemprop and competitive graph and multimodal methods, including CoMPT, MoleSG, KFLM2, and MCMPP. After retraining on the separately curated AqSolDB dataset, the same approach, without redesign or retuning, reduced mean absolute error (MAE) relative to the classical ensemble and achieved lower mean MAE than Chemprop. These results show that accurate and transferable molecular property regression does not necessarily require a complex joint multimodal architecture: classical learning remains competitive when chemical insight guides the choice of molecular representations, and a graph model can add complementary information through simple prediction-level fusion.