arXiv:2605.15426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Entanglement in continuous-variable Gaussian systems is a key resource, and common reservoirs can both suppress and generate correlations. Existing work focused on pre-entangled states or Markovian baths, leaving open whether separable squeezed inputs entangle in structured environments or under modulation. We study two bosonic modes coupled to a common reservoir, each initialized in a separable squeezed vacuum. Dynamics are analyzed utilizing Gaussian covariance methods, evolved under approximate Non-Markovian quantum state diffusion (QSD), finite-temperature pseudomode embeddings, and Bures-based non-Markovian diagnostics. We identify three mechanisms absent in Markovian dynamics: (1) A detuning condition that freezes entanglement trajectories across reservoir correlation times; (2) birth, death, and revival of entanglement from orthogonal inputs; and (3) integer-locked beating with square-wave oscillations produced by periodic detuning. All mechanisms persist at finite temperature, with deviations bounded within 5% in cryogenic regimes and 20% at moderate occupations. These deviation bounds align with cryogenic cavity, phononic, and optomechanical platforms, where structured spectral densities and detuning modulation are already accessible. Structured reservoirs are shown to emerge as tunable entanglement resources for continuous-variable quantum technologies.
Science Journals
arXiv:2605.16070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Antibody-based therapeutics-including antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), bispecific antibodies, and novel formats-are reshaping oncology, yet key determinants of efficacy, safety, and manufacturability frequently emerge after conjugation and formulation. We argue that computational biophysics provides an underexploited framework to address this gap by connecting molecular interactions to biological outcomes. We highlight how molecular dynamics, coarse-grained simulations, and free energy calculations reveal how conjugation site, linker chemistry, and drug-antibody ratio reshape conformational landscapes. We emphasize structural coupling between antibody, linker, and payload, with implications for antigen binding, internalization, and developability. We propose that integrating physics-based modeling into development pipelines-alongside experimental validation-can reduce empirical iteration and de-risk translation. As force fields, and hybrid physics-machine-learning methods improve, this field is poised to become a central driver of next-generation ADC design.
arXiv:2605.15411v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study contextual dynamic pricing in a semiparametric scalar-index valuation model where the latent value is $v_t=\mu_\ast(\mathsf c_t)+\xi_t$, with an unknown utility map $\mu_\ast$ and an unknown additive noise distribution. The key decision object is the one-dimensional oracle price map $u\mapsto p^\ast(u)$ induced by the scalar index $u=\mu_\ast(\mathsf c)$ and the noise tail. Under the $\beta$-H\"older smoothness of the tail function for $\beta\geq 2$ and a revenue-geometry condition that gives a unique, stable, interior maximizer, this oracle map is itself $(\beta-1)$-smooth. We exploit such structure through $\mathsf{ORBIT}$, a modular coarse-to-fine policy that takes a scalar pilot index as input, localizes a benchmark price in each active bin, and learns a local polynomial approximation of the oracle map inside a trust region via bandit convex optimization. For the baseline linear utility model $\mu_\ast(\mathsf c)=\mathsf c^\top\theta_\ast$, an adaptive elliptical exploration scheme constructs the required scalar pilot online without distributional assumptions on the contexts. The resulting policy achieves regret $\widetilde{O}\big(T^{\frac{2\beta-1}{4\beta-3}}+\sqrt{dT}\big)$. For fixed $d$, we establish a matching lower bound in the horizon dependence, unveiling that the nonparametric oracle-map learning term is minimax sharp. The same scalar-pilot interface also yields extensions to sparse high-dimensional linear utility and nonparametric H\"older utility.
arXiv:2605.15389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) reflectometry is widely used for high-bandwidth readout of semiconductor quantum devices at cryogenic temperatures, but its application has mainly been limited to nanoscale structures with relatively small capacitances. Here, we investigate RF readout in a different regime by applying gate-based reflectometry to a large-area silicon carbide transistor with parasitic capacitances orders of magnitude larger than those of typical quantum devices, conditions normally expected to hinder RF readout. We observe a gate-dependent RF response which degrades and eventually vanishes as temperature is lowered, although MOSFET operation in DC transport is maintained down to deep cryogenic temperatures. We attribute this behaviour to impedance changes introduced by carrier freeze-out in the transistor drift region, and propose a modified circuit configuration designed to restore sensitivity under these conditions. These results establish how parasitic pathways and device geometry can limit RF readout, providing insight into the design of scalable cryogenic-CMOS quantum systems.
arXiv:2605.08401v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, largely stimulated by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, existing RL algorithms face a fundamental limitation: their exploration remains largely constrained by the inherent capability boundary of the policy model. Although recent methods introduce external expert demonstrations to extend this boundary, they typically rely on complete trajectory-level guidance, which is sample-inefficient, information-sparse, and may confine exploration to a static guidance space. Inspired by the potential of multi-agent systems, we propose $\textbf{AIPO}$, an enhanced reinforcement learning framework that improves LLM reasoning through active multi-agent interaction during exploration. Specifically, AIPO enables the policy model to proactively consult three functional collaborative agents, $\textit{Verify Agent}$, $\textit{Knowledge Agent}$, and $\textit{Reasoning Agent}$, when encountering reasoning bottlenecks, thereby receiving fine-grained and targeted guidance to actively expand its capability boundary during training. We further introduce a tailored importance sampling coefficient together with a clipping strategy to mitigate the off-policy bias and gradient vanishing issues that arise when learning from agent-provided feedback. After training, the policy model performs reasoning independently without relying on collaborative agents. Extensive experiments on diverse reasoning benchmarks, including AIME, MATH500, GPQA-Diamond, and LiveCodeBench, show that AIPO consistently improves reasoning performance, generalizes robustly across different policy models and RLVR algorithms, and effectively expands the reasoning capability boundary of the policy model.
arXiv:2605.16227v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are high-value intellectual property (IP), yet deploying them to edge environments exposes them to \textbf{unrestricted oracle access}, rendering them vulnerable to model extraction and inversion attacks. Existing defenses fail to address this practically: passive watermarking only offers post-hoc provenance, while active defenses impose prohibitive latency or require persistent access to sensitive training data. To bridge this gap, we propose \textit{LymphNode}, a novel post-hoc defense framework that acts as an intrinsic ``immune system" within the model. \textit{LymphNode} enforces a strict ``default-deny'' policy: it actively neutralizes model utility for unauthorized queries via \textbf{Generalized Sparse Universal Adversarial Perturbations (GSUAP)} injected into the feature space, effectively blocking gradient estimation and data inference. Utility is selectively restored only for authorized inputs carrying a stealthy feature-domain credential. Our framework is highly practical: it is \textbf{data-efficient}, establishing robust protection with fewer than 100 samples ($<1\%$ of training data), and \textbf{cross-dataset adaptable}, enabling protection using public surrogate datasets. \textit{LymphNode} thus provides a lightweight, immediately deployable defense for high-stakes scenarios where original training data is restricted or unavailable.
arXiv:2605.15996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of testing properties of graphs underlying high-dimensional graphical models. We adopt the model of covariance queries introduced by Lugosi, Truszkowski, Velona, and Zwiernik (2021). We study the case when the underlying graph is a tree. The main results of the paper show that, while reconstructing the entire tree may be costly, certain global structural properties can be tested efficiently. In particular, we design randomized tests for global structural properties that use a sub-quadratic number of queries. We develop testing procedures for several fundamental properties, including the number of leaves, the maximum degree, the typical distance, and the diameter of the tree. For each property, we obtain explicit query complexity bounds that depend on the target threshold and tolerance parameters.
arXiv:2505.24573v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we introduce maximally recoverable codes with locality and availability. We consider locally repairable codes (LRCs) where certain subsets of $ t $ symbols belong each to $ N $ local repair sets, which are pairwise disjoint after removing the $ t $ symbols, and which are of size $ r+\delta-1 $ and can correct $ \delta-1 $ erasures locally. Classical LRCs with $ N $ disjoint repair sets and LRCs with $ N $-availability are recovered when setting $ t = 1 $ and $ t=\delta-1=1 $, respectively. Allowing $ t > 1 $ enables our codes to reduce the storage overhead for the same locality and availability. In this setting, we define maximally recoverable LRCs (MR-LRCs) as those that can correct any globally correctable erasure pattern given the locality and availability constraints. We then identify a large class of global erasure patterns that can be corrected by such MR-LRCs and prove that they are all the correctable patterns when $ t=1 $. We provide three explicit constructions of LRCs that can correct such erasure patterns (thus MR-LRCs for $ t=1 $), based on MSRD codes, each attaining the smallest finite-field sizes for some parameter regime. Finally, we extend the known lower bound on finite-field sizes from classical MR-LRCs to our setting (for any value of $ t $).
arXiv:2605.12715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As language models scale, the amount of data they require grows -- yet many target data sources, such as low-resource languages or specialized domains, are inherently limited in size. A common strategy is to mix this scarce but valuable target data with abundant generic data, which presents a fundamental trade-off: too little target data in the mixture underexposes the model to the target domain, while too much target data repeats the same examples excessively, yielding diminishing returns and eventual overfitting. We study this trade-off across more than 2,000 language-model training runs spanning multiple model and target dataset sizes, as well as several data types, including multilingual, domain-specific, and quality-filtered mixtures. Across all settings, we find that repetition is a central driver of target-domain performance, and that mixture training tolerates much higher repetition than single-source training: scarce target corpora can be reused 15-20 times, with the optimal number of repetitions depending on the target data size, compute budget, and model scale. Next, we introduce a repetition-aware mixture scaling law that accounts for the decreasing value of repeated target tokens and the regularizing role of generic data. Optimizing the scaling law provides a principled way to compute effective mixture configurations, yielding practical mixture recommendations for pretraining under data constraints.
arXiv:2504.00289v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The release of top-performing open-weight LLMs has cemented China's role as a leading force in AI development. Do these models support languages spoken in China? Or do they support the same languages as models developed in the United States or in Europe? Comparing multilingual capabilities is important for two reasons. First, language ability provides insights into pre-training data curation, and thus into resource allocation and development priorities. Second, Chinese model developers need to navigate the tension between serving a linguistically diverse population domestically, and optimizing for globally visible benchmarks that are predominantly English. We investigate Chinese model developers' priorities through a comparative study of Chinese-developed and Western-developed open-weight LLMs, on 21 language variants including Asian regional, Chinese, and European languages. Our experiments on Information Parity and reading comprehension show Chinese models' performance across these languages correlates strongly (r=0.93) with their Western counterparts, with the sole exception being better Mandarin. Chinese-developed models are good at French and German, but they sometimes cannot identify languages spoken by Chinese minorities such as Kazakh and Uyghur. Overall, all open-weight LLMs we study have a similar multilingual performance profile, despite the diverse linguistic and cultural contexts the model developers operated within. We interpret the homogenization as consistent with the influence of global benchmarking practices and shared training resources. Rather than treating current language support as inevitable, our results highlight multilingual development as a space of prioritization and trade-offs, with implications for model developers, policymakers, and users.
arXiv:2605.15667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On a finite outcome space, the canonical Gibbs distribution is usually obtained by maximizing Shannon entropy at fixed mean of an externally supplied energy functional. This paper studies the finite-state consequences of a ratio-cost construction instead: after adopting the normalized d'Alembert degree-two closure called the Recognition Composition Law (RCL), with unit log-curvature calibration at the reference ratio, the continuous nontrivial positive branch is $J(x)=\tfrac12(x+x^{-1})-1=\cosh(\log x)-1$. Given the induced cost vector $X_\omega=J(r_\omega)$, multinomial counting and convex duality recover the finite-state Gibbs weights and the identity $F_{\mathrm{R}}(q)-F_{\mathrm{R}}(p)=T_{\mathrm{R}}\,D_{\mathrm{KL}}(q\Vert p)$; the entropy-maximization steps are classical once the cost is fixed. New technical content includes a non-asymptotic Stirling bound and soft-shell constrained-type theorems for real-valued costs. A three-state example compares the Gibbs law to squared-log, affinity-as-energy, and Tsallis alternatives at the same cost vector and mean-cost constraint, with sample-size power calculations at fixed RCL ground truth. The framework is conditional on axioms (A1)--(A3) and restricted to finite outcome spaces with strictly positive weights; it does not derive the composition law from a more primitive principle.
arXiv:2605.15985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce thermodynamic networks, a general framework for autonomous, physics-based computation using non-equilibrium steady states. These networks are modeled as a collection of finite-size reservoirs that exchange conserved quantities--such as electric charge or molecular number--while relaxing to a non-equilibrium steady state, which encodes the solution of a computational problem. We identify Negative Differential Conductance (NDC) as the critical physical property governing the computational expressivity of the thermodynamic network. While networks lacking NDC are restricted to computing monotonic functions, the presence of NDC enables universal function approximation. For the training of the network, we use protocols that take advantage of the natural tendency of the system to equilibrate. We illustrate the versatility of our approach via two different platforms: quantum dot networks and enzymatic reaction networks. Both systems can be engineered to have NDC, enabling high performance in standard benchmarks, including sine function approximation and MNIST digit classification. Overall, our work establishes a rigorous link between non-equilibrium steady states and computational expressivity.
arXiv:2507.02032v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the forthcoming major challenges in particle physics is the experimental determination of the Higgs trilinear self-coupling. While efforts have largely focused on on-shell double- and single-Higgs production in proton-proton collisions, off-shell Higgs production has also been proposed as a valuable complementary probe. In this article, we design a hybrid neural simulation-based inference (NSBI) approach to construct a likelihood of the Higgs signal incorporating modifications from the Standard Model effective field theory (SMEFT), relevant background processes, and quantum interference effects. It leverages the training efficiency of matrix-element-enhanced techniques, which are vital for robust SMEFT applications, while also incorporating the practical advantages of classification-based methods for effective background estimates. We demonstrate that our NSBI approach achieves sensitivity close to the theoretical optimum and provide expected constraints for the high-luminosity upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider. While we primarily concentrate on the Higgs trilinear self-coupling, we also consider constraints on other SMEFT operators that affect off-shell Higgs production.
arXiv:2502.12187v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Hallucinations, a phenomenon where a language model (LM) generates nonfactual content, pose a significant challenge to the practical deployment of LMs. While many empirical methods have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations, recent studies established a computability-theoretic result showing that any LM will inevitably generate hallucinations on an infinite set of inputs, regardless of the quality and quantity of training datasets and the choice of the language model architecture and training and inference algorithms. Although the computability-theoretic result may seem pessimistic, its significance in practical viewpoints has remained unclear. This paper claims that those "innate" inevitability results from computability theory and diagonal argument, in principle, cannot explain practical issues of LLMs. We demonstrate this claim by presenting a positive theoretical result from a probabilistic perspective. Specifically, we prove that hallucinations can be made statistically negligible, provided that the quality and quantity of the training data are sufficient. Interestingly, our positive result coexists with the computability-theoretic result, implying that while hallucinations on an infinite set of inputs cannot be entirely eliminated, their probability can always be reduced by improving algorithms and training data. By evaluating the two seemingly contradictory results through the lens of information theory, we argue that our probability-theoretic positive result better reflects practical considerations than the computability-theoretic negative result.
arXiv:2605.15370v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate salt-body delineation is essential for seismic interpretation because salt structures distort wave propagation, complicate velocity-model building, obscure reservoir geometry, and increase uncertainty in exploration and drilling decisions. Although hybrid quantum-classical models have shown competitive performance on small-scale image-classification tasks, their value for dense, pixel-level geophysical prediction remains largely untested. This work introduces quantum feature gating, a hybrid segmentation architecture that embeds a parameterized quantum circuit (PQC) at feature-fusion points within an encoder-decoder pipeline. A 4-qubit, 2-layer PQC with data re-uploading computes a learned convex combination of lateral and top-down features at each Feature Pyramid Network merge point. A global-average-pooling layer maps encoder features to a fixed 4-dimensional quantum input, decoupling the 72-parameter quantum budget from backbone size and image resolution. The method is evaluated on the 2018 TGS Salt Identification Challenge using 4,000 seismic images at 101 x 101 resolution, across two integration topologies, eight circuit variants, and six encoders with 8M to 118M parameters under five-fold cross-validation. In a controlled EfficientNetV2-L ablation at 256 x 256 resolution, replacing the three Quantum FPN Gates with element-wise addition while holding the encoder, loss schedule, splits, and threshold search fixed reduces mean IoU from 0.9389 to 0.8404, a 9.85 percentage-point gap. Inserting the same circuit as skip-connection attention in a custom U-Net improves IoU by 0.88 points over the SolidUNet baseline, showing that the PQC contribution depends on where and what it gates. These results provide controlled evidence that quantum feature fusion can improve dense seismic segmentation.
arXiv:2511.18719v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a powerful tool for post-training visual generative models, with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) increasingly used to align generators with human preferences. However, existing GRPO pipelines rely on a single scalar reward per sample, treating each image or video as a holistic entity and ignoring the rich spatial and temporal structure of visual content. This coarse supervision hinders the correction of localized artifacts and the modeling of fine-grained perceptual cues. We introduce Visual Preference Policy Optimization (ViPO), a GRPO variant that lifts scalar feedback into structured, pixel-level advantages. ViPO employs a Perceptual Structuring Module that uses pretrained vision backbones to construct spatially and temporally aware advantage maps, redistributing optimization pressure toward perceptually important regions while preserving the stability of standard GRPO. Across both image and video benchmarks, ViPO consistently outperforms vanilla GRPO, improving in-domain alignment with human-preference rewards and enhancing generalization on out-of-domain evaluations. The method is architecture-agnostic, lightweight, and fully compatible with existing GRPO training pipelines, providing a more expressive and informative learning signal for visual generation.
arXiv:2605.15456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Solving imaging inverse problems has usually been addressed by designing proper prior models of the underlying signal. However, minimizing the data fidelity term poses significant challenges due to the ill-conditioned sensing matrix caused by physical constraints in the acquisition system. Thus, preconditioning techniques have been adopted in classical optimization theory to address ill-conditioned data-fidelity minimization by transforming the algorithm gradient step to achieve faster convergence and better numerical stability. We extend the preconditioning concept beyond convergence acceleration and use it to improve reconstruction quality. We introduce DIPA: Distilled Preconditioned Algorithms, where a preconditioning operator (PO) is optimized using teacher-guided distillation criteria. Unlike standard model-compression KD, the teacher and student differ by the sensing operators available during reconstruction: the teacher uses a simulated, better-conditioned, and more informative sensing matrix, whereas the student uses the physically feasible sensing matrix. We design different distillation loss functions to transfer different properties of the teacher algorithm to the preconditioned student. The PO can be linear (L-DIPA), allowing interpretability, or non-linear (N-DIPA), parametrized by a neural network, offering better scalability. We validate the proposed PO design across several imaging modalities, including magnetic resonance imaging, compressed sensing, and super-resolution imaging.
arXiv:2602.06239v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce PEPO (Pessimistic Ensemble based Preference Optimization), a single-step Direct Preference Optimization (DPO)-like algorithm to mitigate the well-known over-optimization issue in preference learning without requiring the knowledge of the data-generating distribution or learning an explicit reward model. PEPO achieves pessimism via an ensemble of preference-optimized policies trained on disjoint data subsets and then aggregates them through a worst case construction that favors the agreement across models. In the tabular setting, PEPO achieves sample complexity guarantees depending only on a single-policy concentrability coefficient, thus avoiding the all-policy concentrability which affects the guarantees of algorithms prone to over-optimization, such as DPO. The theoretical findings are corroborated by a convincing practical performance, while retaining the simplicity and the practicality of DPO-style training.
arXiv:2512.07728v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The continuous Frechet distance between two polygonal curves is classically computed by exploring their free space diagram. Recently, Har-Peled, Raichel, and Robson [SoCG'25] proposed a radically different approach: instead of directly traversing the continuous free space, they approximate the distance by computing paths in a discrete graph derived from the discrete free space, recursively bisecting edges until the discrete distance converges to the continuous Frechet distance. They implement this so-called frog-based technique and report substantial practical speedups over the state of the art. We revisit the frog-based approach and address three of its limitations. First, the method does not compute the Frechet distance exactly. Second, the recursive bisection procedure only introduces the monotonicity events required to realise the Frechet distance asymptotically, that is, only in the limit. Third, the applied simplification technique is heuristic. Motivated by theoretical considerations, we develop new techniques that guarantee exactness, polynomial-time convergence, and near-optimal lossless simplifications. We provide an open-source C++ implementation of our variant. Our primary contribution is an extensive empirical evaluation. As expected, exact computation introduces overhead and increases the median running time. Yet, our method is often faster in the worst case, the slowest ten percent of instances, or even on average due to its convergence guarantees. More surprisingly, in our experiments, the implementation of Bringmann, Kuennemann, and Nusser [SoCG'19] consistently outperforms all frog-based approaches in practice. This appears to contrast published claims of the efficiency of the frog-based techniques. These results thereby provide nuanced perspective on frogs: highlighting both the theoretical appeal, but also the practical limitations.
arXiv:2605.12309v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The development of separate-encoder Unified multimodal models (UMMs) comes with a rapidly growing inference cost due to dense visual token processing. In this paper, we focus on understanding-side visual token reduction for improving the efficiency of separate-encoder UMMs. While this topic has been widely studied for MLLMs, existing methods typically rely on attention scores, text-image similarity and so on, implicitly assuming that the final objective is discriminative reasoning. This assumption does not hold for UMMs, where understanding-side visual tokens must also preserve the model's capabilities for editing images. We propose G$^2$TR, a generation-guided visual token reduction framework for separate-encoder UMMs. Our key insight is that the generation branch provides a task-agnostic signal for identifying understanding-side visual tokens that are not only semantically relevant but also important for latent-space image reconstruction and generation. G$^2$TR estimates token importance from consistency with VAE latent, performs balanced token selection, and merges redundant tokens into retained representatives to reduce information loss. The method is training-free, plug-and-play, and applied only after the understanding encoding stage, making it compatible with existing UMM inference pipelines. Experiments on image understanding and editing benchmarks show that G$^2$TR substantially reduces visual tokens and prefill computation by 1.94x while maintaining both reasoning accuracy and editing quality, outperforming baselines on almost all benchmarks. Code is at: https://github.com/lijunxian111/G2TR.
arXiv:2605.02960v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Production LLM workloads increasingly serve discriminative tasks, such as classification, recommendation, and verification, whose answers are read from the logits of a single prefill pass with no autoregressive decoding. Serving these prefill-only workloads on mixture-of-experts (MoE) models is bottlenecked not by compute but by the distributed execution required to fit the model: existing parallel strategies (tensor, expert, and pipeline parallelism) trade memory pressure for redundant computation, communication, and synchronization, severely degrading MoE prefill serving efficiency. We observe that these overheads stem from coupling expert placement with synchronous activation routing -- a design inherited from the decoding era. The long, compute-bound forward passes of large-batch prefill open a per-layer window wide enough to stream expert weights in the background, replacing per-layer activation AllToAll with asynchronous weight AllGather fully overlapped with computation. We propose MoE-Prefill, a prefill-only serving system whose backend, AsyncEP (Asynchronous Expert Parallelism), gathers experts by weight rather than routing them by activation, and whose frontend co-enforces a physically-derived saturation threshold through prefix-aware routing and true-FLOPs load tracking. On Qwen3-235B-A22B across four hardware/precision configurations, MoE-Prefill delivers 1.35-1.37x throughput over the strongest distributed baseline on real-world workloads and up to 1.59x on long-context synthetic workloads, sustaining 29.8-36.2% per-GPU model FLOPs utilization.
arXiv:2605.16257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving human-level manipulation requires dexterous robotic hands capable of complex object interactions. Advancing such capabilities further demands standardized benchmarks for systematic evaluation. However, existing dexterous benchmarks lack tasks that reflect the unique manipulation capabilities of dexterous hands over parallel grippers, as well as comprehensive evaluation pipelines. In this paper, we present DexJoCo, a benchmark and toolkit for task-oriented dexterous manipulation, comprising 11 functionally grounded tasks that evaluate tool-use, bimanual coordination, long-horizon execution, and reasoning. We develop a low-cost data collection system and collect 1.1K trajectories across these tasks, with support for domain randomization to assess robustness. We benchmark modern models under diverse settings, including visual and dynamics randomization, multi-task training, and action-head adaptation. Through extensive empirical analysis, we identify several important insights and common limitations of current policies in dexterous manipulation, highlighting key challenges for future research in dexterous hand robot learning. Project page available at: https://dexjoco.github.io
arXiv:2605.15366v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present hybrid quantum-classical pipelines for solving the Duffing equation that leverage Carleman linearization and the Variational Quantum Linear Solver (VQLS). First, we demonstrate that Carleman linearization accurately approximates the weakly nonlinear Duffing equation, with errors diminishing as the truncation order increases. Next, across IBM and Xanadu platforms, we deploy VQLS with symmetry-grouped Hadamard Test evaluations under both global and local cost formulations, compare distinct Hermitianization within a common cost framework, and benchmark hardware-efficient ansatz architectures under a fixed Hermitianization. Across block-banded test cases, each method achieves near-unity fidelity and vanishing relative residuals. These results show that topology-agnostic ansatz, optimized Hermitianization, and efficient cost formulation enable VQLS to recover quantum states proportional to classical solutions for Carleman-structured systems, providing a portable recipe for quantum-in-the-loop simulation of nonlinear dynamics.
arXiv:2605.08464v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The manifold hypothesis (MH) is often used to explain how machine learning can overcome the curse of dimensionality. However, the MH is only applicable in regimes where the training data provides a sufficiently dense sample of the underlying low-dimensional data manifold, or where such a low-dimensional manifold is conceivably present. We describe the regimes where the MH is not applicable as sparse. In this paper, we demonstrate that models succeed in the sparse regime by exploiting a highly structured local geometry, a property we formalize as normal alignment. We prove that normal-aligned classifiers -- whose input-output Jacobians are rank-one and align perfectly with the training data -- minimize the training objective under norm constraints and achieve maximal local robustness under a non-zero Jacobian constraint. For continuous piecewise-affine deep networks, normal alignment manifests geometrically as centroid alignment within the network's induced power diagram partition and results from the feature-learning regime. Motivated by these theoretical insights, we introduce GrokAlign, a regularization strategy that actively induces normal alignment. We demonstrate that GrokAlign significantly accelerates the training dynamics of deep networks relevant to the grokking phenomenon. Furthermore, we apply the principle of normal alignment to Recursive Feature Machines (RFMs) to introduce Recursive Feature Alignment Machines (RFAMs). We show that RFAMs exhibit greater adversarial robustness compared to RFMs when trained on tabular data.
arXiv:2605.15350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic compositional optimization minimizes objectives of the form $\min_{\bm{x} \in \mathcal{X}} F(\bm{f}(\bm{x}), \bm{x})$, where $\bm{f}$ is accessible only through noisy stochastic queries. Existing methods for this problem assume that the outer function $F$ is continuously differentiable, which excludes many practically important applications such as robust max-of-losses, Conditional Value-at-Risk, and norm regularizers. We propose the Hybrid Momentum Stochastic Frank--Wolfe algorithm, which drops the smoothness assumption on $F$. By combining a momentum-based Jacobian tracker with a Taylor-corrected function tracker, the algorithm feeds an entire stochastic linearization -- rather than a single gradient -- into a generalized linear minimization oracle. We establish an $\mathcal{O}(K^{-1/4})$ convergence rate in the generalized Frank--Wolfe gap for non-convex objectives with $L_F$-Lipschitz outer functions, matching the optimal complexity for projection-free single-sample stochastic methods under expected smoothness. The analysis extends to heavy-tailed noise oracles with bounded $r$-th moments for $r \in (1, 2]$ and recovers the deterministic rates of Vladarean et al (2023) as the noise vanishes.