arXiv:2604.23853v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Skill-distillation pipelines learn reusable rules from LLM agent trajectories, but they lack a key signal: how much each step costs. Without per-step cost, a pipeline cannot distinguish adding a missing step to fix a bug from removing an expensive step that never affected the outcome. We use the cost-attribution gap to ask whether the rule types inside a distilled skill transfer the same way to new tasks. ClawTrace records cost-attributed agent traces and compiles each session into a TraceCard; CostCraft reads TraceCards and writes three kinds of skill patches: preserve, prune, and repair. We find a pattern aggregate metrics hide. On 30 held-out SpreadsheetBench tasks across two seeds, removing prune patches roughly tripled the quality-regression count without lowering median cost. Across the full 84-task SkillsBench transfer, CostCraft saves no aggregate cost. All three quality regressions trace to the preserve lane, and both quality wins trace to the prune lane: prune patches act as quality guardrails while preserve patches drive regressions. We argue that reusable agent skills should be evaluated at the rule-type level, not as monolithic instruction packages. To support this, we release ClawTrace, the TraceCard schema, and the full set of typed skills.
Science Journals
arXiv:2604.27636v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Predicting stable and metastable structures is central to molecular and materials discovery, but remains limited by the cost of searching high-dimensional energy landscapes. Deep generative models offer efficient structure sampling, yet their outputs remain shaped by training data and can underexplore minima that are rare but physically relevant. We introduce generative structure search (GSS), a unified framework that formulates diffusion-based generation and random structure search (RSS) as limiting regimes of a common sampling process driven by learned score fields and physical forces. Coupling these drivers lets GSS use data priors to accelerate sampling while retaining energy-guided exploration of local minima. Across molecular and crystalline systems, GSS recovers diverse metastable structures with more than tenfold lower sampling cost than RSS for broad coverage and remains effective for compositions outside the training distribution. The results establish a physically grounded generative search strategy for discovering structures beyond the reach of data-driven sampling alone.
arXiv:2605.00419v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Model ensembling is a well-established technique for improving the performance of machine learning models. Conventionally, this involves averaging the output distributions of multiple models and selecting the most probable label. This idea has been naturally extended to large language models (LLMs), yielding improved performance but incurring substantial computational cost. This inefficiency stems from directly applying conventional ensemble implementation to LLMs, which require a separate forward pass for each model to explicitly compute the ensemble distribution. In this paper, we propose the Mixture-model-like Ensemble (ME). By reinterpreting the ensemble as a mixture model, ME stochastically selects a single model at each step to generate the next token, thereby avoiding the need to explicitly compute the full ensemble distribution. ME is mathematically equivalent to sampling from the ensemble distribution, but requires invoking only one model, making it 1.78x-2.68x faster than conventional ensembling. Furthermore, this perspective connects LLM ensembling and token-level routing methods, suggesting that LLM ensembling is a special case of routing methods. Our findings open new avenues for efficient LLM ensembling and motivate further exploration of token-level routing strategies for LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kamichanw/Mixture-model-like-Ensemble.
arXiv:2605.00817v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often achieve strong performance on reasoning benchmarks, but final-answer accuracy alone does not show whether they faithfully execute the procedure specified in a prompt. We introduce a controlled diagnostic benchmark for procedural execution, where models are given a step-wise arithmetic procedure and two numeric inputs, and must return the final computed value. Complexity is varied through procedure length and look-back dependencies over intermediate variables. Average first-answer accuracy drops from 63% on 5-step procedures to 20% on 95-step procedures. Generation-level analysis shows that failures often involve missing answers, premature answers, self-correction after an initial error and under-executed traces. These findings suggest that apparent reasoning ability can mask substantial weaknesses in faithful long-horizon procedural execution.
Evaluation of Convolutional and Transformer-Based Detectors for Weed Detection in Tomato Plantations
arXiv:2605.00908v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: This paper presents a comparative evaluation of convolutional and transformer-based object detection architectures for early weed detection in tomato plantations. Representative models from each paradigm are considered, including YOLOv26-nano, a recent variant of the YOLO family, and RT-DETR Large and RF-DETR Medium as transformer-based architectures. The evaluation was conducted on the GROUNDBASED_WEED dataset, considering six weed classes and an additional category corresponding to unidentified plants, which allowed for the assessment of performance in terms of detection accuracy and computational efficiency using metrics such as precision, recall, average precision, and inference speed, as well as non-parametric statistical tests. The results highlight a clear trade-off between efficiency and contextual modeling: CNN-based detectors achieve high performance at a lower computational cost, while transformer-based approaches offer better global context capture at the expense of higher resource demands. These results provide practical criteria for model selection in precision agriculture applications.
arXiv:2605.01017v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We introduce Xiaohongshu Social Comparison Reader Elicitation (XHS-SCoRE), a reader-grounded benchmark for detecting whether text-only Xiaohongshu (RedNote) posts elicit Upward, Downward, or Neutral/no clear social comparison from a first-person reader perspective. The task targets a socially meaningful relational, behaviorally real signal not reducible to sentiment. Across prompted LLM classifiers and supervised Chinese encoders, we find a consistent generation--detection mismatch: the signal is textually learnable in-domain, but not robustly accessible to prompt-based classification. Prompted LLM classifiers show stable failures, especially neutralization of comparison-eliciting posts and model-specific directional skew. A controlled pilot shows that LLM-generated Xiaohongshu-style posts can shift perceived standing and comparison-related affect even when prompt-based detection of the same construct remains fragile. XHS-SCoRE contributes a benchmark for reader-grounded comparison detection and a diagnostic framework for studying when socially meaningful relational cues remain only partially visible to prompt-based inference.
arXiv:2605.01284v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Iterative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (iRAG) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for answering complex multi-hop questions by progressively retrieving and reasoning over external documents. However, current systems predominantly operate on parsed text, which creates two critical bottlenecks: (1) \textit{Coarse-grained attribution}, where users are burdened with manually locating evidence within lengthy documents based on vague text-level citations; and (2) \textit{Visual semantic loss}, where the conversion of visually rich documents (e.g., slides, PDFs with charts) into text discards spatial logic and layout cues essential for reasoning. To bridge this gap, we present \textbf{Chain of Evidence (CoE)}, a retriever-agnostic visual attribution framework that leverages Vision-Language Models to reason directly over screenshots of retrieved document candidates. CoE eliminates format-specific parsing and outputs precise bounding boxes, visualizing the complete reasoning chain within the retrieved candidate set. We evaluate CoE on two distinct benchmarks: \textbf{Wiki-CoE}, a large-scale dataset of structured web pages derived from 2WikiMultiHopQA, and \textbf{SlideVQA}, a challenging dataset of presentation slides featuring complex diagrams and free-form layouts. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuned Qwen3-VL-8B-Instruct achieves robust performance, significantly outperforming text-based baselines in scenarios requiring visual layout understanding, while establishing a retriever-agnostic solution for pixel-level interpretable iRAG. Our code is available at https://github.com/PeiYangLiu/CoE.git.
arXiv:2605.01512v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Grounding traffic accidents in real CCTV footage is a rare-event problem where training on labeled accident video is often prohibited, yet accurate joint localization in time, space, and collision type is required. We present a no-fine-tuning pipeline that elicits this joint output from frozen vision-language models through two ideas. First, a coarse-to-fine two-pass decomposition: a full-video pass at 1 fps produces a coarse (t, x, y, c) tuple, then a second pass at 5 fps within a +/- 3 s window refines time and location, with two deterministic confidence gates that revert to the coarse estimate on boundary hedges or edge-clamped coordinates. Second, a specialist role assignment: Qwen3-VL-Plus handles grounding, Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite handles typing on a centered video clip. On the ACCIDENT@CVPR 2026 benchmark (2,027 real CCTV videos) we reach ACC^S = 0.539 (95% CI [0.525, 0.553]): +0.127 over the benchmark paper's best-of-baselines oracle (0.412), +0.143 over the strongest single-VLM baseline (Molmo-7B, 0.396), and +0.250 over the naive baseline (0.289). The VLM path uses up to three API calls per video (17% fall back to physics on API failures); the full run costs ~$20.
arXiv:2605.01633v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We consider an unregularized optimal control problem subject to the steady-state Navier-Stokes equations. We derive the existence of optimal solutions and prove first- and second-order optimality conditions. To approximate solutions to the optimal control problem, we consider the variational discretization scheme. We analyze convergence properties of the discretization and prove a priori error estimates for locally optimal controls that are nonsingular and which satisfy a growth condition which implies a bang-bang structure. We also propose a residual-type a posteriori error estimator that accounts for the discretization of the state and adjoint equations, and prove suitable reliability properties for such an error estimator.
arXiv:2605.02010v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: This position paper argues that reliable AI requires infrastructure for human validation of implicit knowledge. AI learns from both explicit knowledge (papers, documentation, structured databases) and implicit knowledge (reasoning patterns, debugging processes, intermediate steps). Implicit knowledge remains unexternalized because documentation cost exceeds perceived value -- yet AI learns from it indiscriminately, acquiring both beneficial patterns and harmful biases. Current reliability methods can only verify explicit knowledge against sources, creating a fundamental gap: the most valuable AI capabilities (reasoning, judgment, intuition) are precisely those we cannot verify. We propose Knowledge Objects (KOs) -- structured artifacts that externalize implicit knowledge into forms humans can inspect, verify, and endorse. KOs transform verification economics: what was previously too costly to verify becomes feasible, enabling accumulated human validation to improve reliability over time.
arXiv:2605.02037v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: We present VILAS, a fully low-cost, modular robotic manipulation platform designed to support end-to-end vision-language-action (VLA) policy learning and deployment on accessible hardware. The system integrates a Fairino FR5 collaborative arm, a Jodell RG52-50 electric gripper, and a dual-camera perception module, unified through a ZMQ-based communication architecture that seamlessly coordinates teleoperation, data collection, and policy deployment within a single framework. To enable safe manipulation of fragile objects without relying on explicit force sensing, we design a kirigami-based soft compliant gripper extension that induces predictable deformation under compressive loading, providing gentle and repeatable contact with delicate targets. We deploy and evaluate three state-of-the-art VLA models on the VILAS platform: pi_0, pi_0.5, and GR00T N1.6. All models are fine-tuned from publicly released pretrained checkpoints using an identical demonstration dataset collected via our teleoperation pipeline. Experiments on a grape grasping task validate the effectiveness of the proposed system, confirming that capable manipulation policies can be successfully trained and deployed on low-cost modular hardware. Our results further provide practical insights into the deployment characteristics of current VLA models in real-world settings.
arXiv:2508.13309v4 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Numerous techniques have been proposed for generating adversarial examples in white-box settings under strict Lp-norm constraints. However, such norm-bounded examples often fail to align well with human perception, and only a few methods specifically explore perceptually aligned adversarial examples. Moreover, it remains unclear whether insights from Lp-constrained attacks can be effectively leveraged to improve perceptual efficacy. In this paper, we introduce DASH, a fully differentiable meta-attack framework that generates effective and perceptually aligned adversarial examples by strategically composing existing Lp-based attack methods. DASH operates in a multi-stage fashion: at each stage, it aggregates candidate adversarial examples from multiple base attacks using learned, adaptive weights and propagates the result to the next stage. A novel meta-loss function guides this process by jointly minimizing misclassification loss and perceptual distortion, enabling the framework to dynamically modulate the contribution of each base attack throughout the stages. We evaluate DASH on adversarially trained models across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet. Despite relying solely on Lp-constrained based methods, DASH significantly outperforms state-of-the-art perceptual attacks such as AdvAD, achieving higher attack success rates (e.g., 20.63% improvement) and superior visual quality, as measured by SSIM, LPIPS, and FID (improvements $\approx$ of 11, 0.015, and 5.7, respectively). Furthermore, DASH generalizes well to unseen defenses, making it a practical and strong baseline for evaluating robustness without requiring handcrafted adaptive attacks for each new defense.
arXiv:2605.25038v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a clinical discipline whose documentation, teaching programs and multi-session behavioral logs, is formulaic and high-volume, yet real session data is HIPAA-protected and bound by professional confidentiality rules, blocking the release of a training corpus. We present TRACE (Taxonomy-Referenced ABA Clinical Examples), a 2,999-example synthetic instruction-tuning dataset covering two ABA tasks: teaching-program generation across Discrete Trial Training, Natural Environment Teaching, and Task Analysis; and multi-session behavioral interpretation across twelve trajectory patterns and thirteen target behaviors. Every example is produced by a deterministic taxonomy-driven generator grounded in the canonical ABA literature, and every example carries complete sampling provenance, the exact taxonomy cells that produced it. The dataset is released under CC BY-NC 4.0 for data and MIT for code, with stratified train (2,549), validation (149), test (281), and sanity (20) splits. TRACE is a research artifact and has not been clinically validated.
arXiv:2605.19846v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in general video understanding, yet they often struggle with the fine-grained comprehension crucial for real-world applications requiring nuanced interpretation of human actions and interactions. While some recent human-centric benchmarks evaluate aspects of model behaviour such as fairness/ethics, emotion perception, and broader human-centric metrics, they do not combine long-form videos, very dense QA coverage, and frame-level spatial/temporal grounding at scale. To bridge this gap, we introduce FineBench, a human-centric video question answering (VQA) benchmark specifically designed to assess fine-grained understanding. FineBench comprises 199,420 multiple-choice QA pairs densely annotated across 64 long-form videos (15 minutes each), focusing on detailed person movement, person interaction, and object manipulation, including compositional actions. Our extensive evaluation reveals that while proprietary models like GPT-5 achieve respectable performance, current open-source VLMs significantly underperform, struggling particularly with spatial reasoning in multi-person scenes and distinguishing subtle differences in human movements and interactions. To address these identified weaknesses, we propose FineAgent, a modular framework that enhances VLMs by leveraging a Localizer and a Descriptor. Experiments show that FineAgent consistently improves the performance of various open VLMs on FineBench. FineBench provides a rigorous testbed for future research into fine-grained human-centric video understanding, while FineAgent offers a practical approach to enhance such reasoning in current VLMs. Project page and code at https://joslefaure.github.io/assets/html/finebench.html.
arXiv:2605.25662v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Graph neural networks for node classification are typically trained by gradient descent over hundreds or thousands of epochs. Recent work has shown that, when properly tuned, classic GCN/SAGE/GAT architectures can match graph transformers on many node-classification benchmarks. We ask a complementary question: how much of this performance can be recovered by deterministic closed-form solvers, and what guarantees does this enable?
We introduce a routed closed-form framework selected by adjusted homophily. For assortative graphs, we use SGC-style propagation followed by Ridge regression; for heterophilous graphs, we introduce LCF-Net, a layer-wise closed-form graph feature-refinement network whose per-layer Ridge solves are capped by a Gaussian kernel-Ridge head. Across 14 benchmarks, including ogbn-arxiv and ogbn-proteins, our closed-form predictors match or beat the best vanilla 2-layer GCN/SAGE/GAT on 9 of 9 measured datasets, tie tuned deep recipes within one standard deviation on 9 of 12 small benchmarks, and exceed the OGB-leaderboard plain GCN on both large graphs. The remaining heterophilous gap closely tracks the gain from vanilla 2-layer to deep SAGE, suggesting that the residual difference is primarily architectural.
Because our predictors are explicit solutions of deterministic linear systems, modified graph inputs can be re-solved to obtain retrain-equivalent parameters. We formalize exact graph-object unlearning for label, feature, edge, node, and subgraph modifications, prove K-hop locality for Ridge components, and verify exactness across 109 configurations. On ogbn-arxiv, localized updates give $21$--$45\times$ speedups over full re-solving and roughly $10^{6}\times$ speedups over gradient retraining. Structural-inversion experiments further quantify the privacy floor of exact retraining and the additional leakage of approximate graph-unlearning methods.
arXiv:2605.25866v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Accurately predicting crystal properties is critical for accelerating materials discovery, but it is often limited by scarce labeled data and costly theoretical calculations. To alleviate this, we propose UNATE (Unsupervised Atomic Embedding), a framework that leverages structural information extracted from unlabeled crystal structures. UNATE integrates an unsupervised denoising autoencoder with self-supervised contrastive learning to learn robust atomic representations, which are then used as input features for downstream property prediction. Experimental results show that replacing raw atomic numbers with UNATE-pretrained node embeddings yields a 2.7\% improvement over the full-data baseline. Notably, the benefits become more pronounced in scenarios with limited labeled data, reaching improvements of up to 10\% when only 25\% of the labeled data is used.
arXiv:2605.24799v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of vision language tasks. However, when applied to large scale image classification, their performance degrades significantly as the label space expands a phenomenon we define as Performance Collapse in Long Sequence Recognition. Through an information theoretic analysis, we reveal that this collapse stems from a fundamental conflict between the escalating information entropy and the prominent attention dilution and decay within attention mechanisms, which impairs the model's ability to maintain a sufficient signal-to-noise ratio when processing extremely long prompts. To mitigate this, we propose Divide-and-Conquer Inference (DCI), a novel test-time scaling strategy for visual recognition with MLLMs. DCI recursively decomposes complex global classification tasks into multiple simpler, localized subproblems and employs a dynamic pruning mechanism to compress the search space. This method effectively improves the local signal to noise ratio and model accuracy by mitigating the inherent weight dilution issues in long-sequence inference. Moreover, while traditional self-attention incurs a prohibitive quadratic computational complexity, DCI achieves more favorable scaling behavior and substantially accelerates inference in large scale classification scenarios. Extensive experiments on benchmarks such as ImageNet-1K and ImageNet-21K demonstrate that DCI consistently improves classification accuracy. This enables lightweight open-source models to rival or even surpass frontier closed-source giants without any additional training or fine-tuning. As a model-agnostic, plug-and-play paradigm, DCI offers an efficient approach for scaling the inferential precision of MLLMs in large-scale scenarios.
arXiv:2511.04054v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: In this work, we consider the problem of executing multiple tasks encoded by value functions, each learned through Reinforcement Learning, using an optimization-based framework. Prior works develop this framework but did not address when learned value functions can be concurrently executed. This work's main contributions consist of theorems which provide necessary and sufficient conditions to concurrently execute sets of learned tasks within subsets of the state space using the previously proposed min-norm controller. These theorems provide insight into when learned control tasks can be made concurrently executable, when they may already be so, and when concurrent execution is not possible under the proposed framework. We also extend the proposed framework to account for value functions trained with a discount factor, making it more compatible with standard RL practices.
arXiv:2603.29897v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reranking is a critical component in many information retrieval pipelines. Despite remarkable progress in text-only settings, multimodal reranking remains challenging, particularly when the candidate set contains hybrid text and image items. A key difficulty is the modality gap: a text reranker is intrinsically closer to text candidates than to image candidates, leading to biased and suboptimal cross-modal ranking. Vision-language models (VLMs) mitigate this gap through strong cross-modal alignment and have recently been adopted to build multimodal rerankers. However, most VLM-based rerankers encode all candidates as images, and treating text as images introduces substantial computational overhead. Meanwhile, existing open-source multimodal rerankers are typically trained on general-domain data and often underperform in domain-specific scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose UniRank, a VLM-based reranking framework that natively scores and orders hybrid text-image candidates without any modality conversion. Building on this hybrid scoring interface, UniRank provides an end-to-end domain adaptation pipeline that includes: (1) an instruction-tuning stage that learns calibrated cross-modal relevance scoring by mapping label-token likelihoods to a unified scalar score; and (2) a hard-negative-driven preference alignment stage that constructs in-domain pairwise preferences and performs query-level policy optimization through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Extensive experiments on scientific literature retrieval and design patent search demonstrate that UniRank consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving Recall@1 by 8.9% and 7.3%, respectively.
arXiv:2511.04556v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Urban flooding triggered by intense rainfall is becoming increasingly frequent and widespread. While flood prediction and monitoring in high spatio-temporal resolution are desired, practical constraints in time, budget, and technology hinder its full implementation. How to monitor urban drainage networks and predict flow conditions under constrained resources is a major challenge. To address this, we introduced a data-driven sparse sensing (DSS) approach, demonstrated via a digital-twin of the Woodland catchment in Duluth, Minnesota. Specifically, we coupled EPA-SWMM with singular value decomposition and QR factorization-based sensor selection to optimize monitoring locations for system-level flow reconstruction. An ensemble of SWMM simulations, driven by diverse scenarios, provided the necessary hydraulic data to extract the reduced basis and identify informative sensor locations. Cross-event validation showed that three strategically placed sensors among 77 candidate nodes achieved a mean system-level Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) of 0.949 across observed storm events. The QR-selected sensor sets were benchmarked against reference sensor configurations obtained from exhaustive searches and Monte Carlo random-placements. This comparison further showed that flow reconstruction based on QR-selected sensors closely tracked the exhaustive optimum while substantially outperforming random placements. We further evaluated the framework's robustness by introducing multiplicative Gaussian noise and simulating individual sensor failures. While the model is relatively resilient to noise, the impact of sensor dropouts depends heavily on the number of sensors allocated and their specific locations.
arXiv:2602.02131v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) provide a cost-effective and scalable solution for large-scale antenna communications.However, efficient channel state information acquisition and phase shift optimization remain critical challenges. In this paper, we develop a unified framework of low-complexity algorithms for SIM-assisted communication systems to address these issues. Specifically, we propose a generalized two-step codebook construction (TSCC) method that leverages two-dimensional angular-domain decoupling to transform planar array beamformer design into two independent one-dimensional linear array beamformer design problems, efficiently solved via the Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm and our proposed majorization-minimization-based proximal distance (PDMM) algorithm. We further develop a two-stage coded-sliding beam training (TSCSBT) method for low-overhead and high-accuracy beam training, where error-correcting codes are embedded in the first-stage training to enhance robustness against noise, and sliding sampling is subsequently performed around the matched angular samples to improve angular resolution. The proposed framework is further extended to multi-path user channels. Finally, a variable decoupling-based block successive upper bound minimization (VD-BSUM) algorithm is proposed to directly solve the QoS-constrained sum-rate maximization problem through closed-form iterative updates with substantially reduced computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in achieving precise beam pattern realization, improved beam training accuracy and angular resolution, and enhanced sum-rate performance.
arXiv:2605.25813v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Embodied Question Answering (EQA) connects perception, reasoning, and interaction within embodied environments. However, existing datasets and benchmarks remain fragmented, each focusing on a limited subset of reasoning skills such as spatial understanding or procedural reasoning, without offering a unified large-scale framework for comprehensive evaluation. We present EQA-Decision, a large-scale embodied QA dataset that systematically covers four complementary dimensions of embodied reasoning: static scene construction, spatial understanding, task dynamics reasoning, and instant decision. The dataset contains over four million question-answer pairs with hierarchical annotations across diverse embodied scenarios. In addition, we develop RoboDecision, a strong baseline model aligned with the EQA-Decision Benchmark, providing a unified framework that jointly evaluates perception, reasoning, and action-level decision-making in embodied environments. Results demonstrate that EQA-Decision effectively benchmarks and enhances VLM capabilities in spatial and interaction reasoning, providing a solid foundation for advancing embodied intelligence research.
arXiv:2605.24182v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We introduce Quantum-Adaptive KS($\varphi$) ($K$ = kickback, $S$ = sandwich), a parameterized three-qubit gate family that structurally embeds the Toffoli (CCX) gate within two additional components: (1)a palindromic Hadamard sandwich on the first control qubit $q_0$ that conjugates $Z$-type errors to $X$-type in the CCX frame, providing simultaneous sensitivity to both error types without ancilla overhead; and (2)a controlled-phase (CP) gate whose quantum phase kickback propagates post-CCX target-state information into the control-qubit phase without measurement. The term Quantum- Adaptive refers to amplitude steering conditioned by the compile-time parameter $\varphi$ via a Quantum Neural Cellular Automaton (QNCA) majority-inspired bias rule; the gate does not self-modify at runtime. Two QA-KS($\pi$) gates chained on a shared control qubit $q_0$ produce outputs completely orthogonal to two sequential CCX gates on $q_0$=1 inputs (output fidelity F=0.000), while agreeing exactly on $q_0$=0 inputs (F=1.000). This subspace-dependent divergence is the direct computational signature of coherent phase retention across gate boundaries -- impossible for CCX-only circuits. On the $q_1$ = 0 subspace the gate acts deterministically (up to a relative phase), providing intrinsic error non-amplification. On the $q_1$ = 1 subspace it produces four-component entangled superpositions, making it a strictly distinct quantum-native primitive from CCX. We present the complete $8 \times 8$ unitary matrix, confirmed exact to $||U^{\dagger}U-I||_{\infty} < 10^{-15}$, and define two canonical variants: QA-KS$_{\pi/2}$ ($\varphi = \pi/2$, $S$ gate) and QA-KS$_{\pi}$ ($\varphi = \pi$, $Z$ gate). Qiskit depolarizing-noise simulation demonstrates near-unit fidelity at $p \leq 10^{-2}$ with an honest depth cost at higher error rates. The gate preserves the three-qubit footprint of CCX with no qubit overhead.
arXiv:2509.12194v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Differential diagnosis is an iterative process that integrates patient information with broader medical knowledge. Clinical case series such as the NEJM Clinicopathologic Conferences (CPCs), published continuously since 1923, feature expert physicians who demonstrate diagnostic reasoning to peers, and have been used for decades to evaluate AI. However, prior AI evaluations have largely focused on final diagnostic accuracy rather than nuanced clinical reasoning. Here, we introduce Dr. CaBot, an agentic AI system that emulates an expert diagnostician by generating written and narrated slide-based presentations from an initial case description alone. CaBot recently generated the first AI diagnosis published in the 100+ year history of the NEJM CPCs. In blinded evaluations, physicians misclassified the source of the differential (CaBot vs. physician-written) in 46/62 (74%) of trials and rated them favorably across quality dimensions. When tasked with solving cases for 72 patients with undiagnosed disease from the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Network, CaBot identified the working diagnosis in 50/72 (69%) of cases from referral notes alone. To promote transparency and research, we also developed CPC-Bench, a physician-validated benchmark based on 7,102 CPCs and 47,648 questions across 10 tasks. We show that CaBot outperforms frontier models on CPC-Bench, and release both CaBot and CPC-Bench publicly to foster progress in clinical AI.
arXiv:2409.19727v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are often over-parameterized for their tasks and can be compressed quite drastically by removing weights, a process called pruning. We investigate the impact of different pruning techniques on the classification performance and interpretability of GoogLeNet. We systematically apply unstructured and structured pruning, as well as connection sparsity (pruning of input weights) methods to the network and analyze the outcomes regarding the network's performance on the validation set of ImageNet. We also compare different retraining strategies, such as iterative pruning and one-shot pruning. We find that with sufficient retraining epochs, the performance of the networks can approximate the performance of the default GoogLeNet - and even surpass it in some cases. To assess interpretability, we employ the Mechanistic Interpretability Score (MIS) developed by Zimmermann et al. . Our experiments reveal that there is no significant relationship between interpretability and pruning rate when using MIS as a measure. Additionally, we observe that networks with extremely low accuracy can still achieve high MIS scores, suggesting that the MIS may not always align with intuitive notions of interpretability, such as understanding the basis of correct decisions.