arXiv:2506.19565v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In infinite-horizon discrete-time linear-quadratic (LQ) dynamic games, computing feedback Nash equilibria (FNEs) remains computationally challenging. Motivated by this, we study a finite-horizon strategy for approximating one of the infinite-horizon FNEs. The finite-horizon strategy is as follows. Each player $i$ has an individual prediction horizon $T^i$. In the infinite-horizon game, at each stage, each player $i$ computes its control in the following way: player $i$ envisions an auxiliary $T^i$-stage game in which the same set of players play, computes the unique FNE of the auxiliary game using a standard method, and implements only the first-stage control. Our main result is, under suitable conditions, the total cost under these finite-horizon strategies converges to that under one of the infinite-horizon FNEs when all players' prediction horizons tend to infinity. Moreover, we derive an explicit cubic-polynomial upper bound on this cost gap with respect to the distance between the corresponding strategy matrices. This strategy is tractable and implementable, as it avoids the direct solution of the coupled algebraic Riccati equations (CARE) of infinite-horizon LQ games.
Science Journals
arXiv:2607.06101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI coding agents are rapidly reshaping how software is built, with developers increasingly delegating substantial coding tasks to autonomous agents in pursuit of higher productivity. While these gains are real, they come at the cost of incidental learning. Developers historically acquired informal knowledge through effortful problem-solving, and this has long shaped how software engineering expertise develops. However, with over-reliance on agentic coding, unpracticed skills could atrophy silently over time. As this learning pathway is short-circuited, developers risk silently accruing Knowledge Debt, a developer-level analogue of Technical Debt, where changes the agent executes that the developer cannot fully understand accrue over time. In this paper, we argue that incidental learning will not re-emerge on its own and must be consciously designed back into developer-agent interactions, and propose six design principles to guide such systems. We then present "SHIELD", a multi-agent system grounded in the notion of "agents that teach", that operationalizes these principles by leveraging the AI coding agent's own reasoning to surface contextual, out-of-band learning moments without disrupting developer flow. Through this work, we envision a path toward learning-aware development environments where productivity and learning are complementary, not competing.
arXiv:2607.06103v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient decentralized resource allocation remains a fundamental challenge in NR-V2X sidelink communications, where conventional Semi-Persistent Scheduling (SPS) and Dynamic Scheduling (DS) suffer from persistent collisions and limited adaptability under dynamic and dense conditions. This paper proposes Repeated Contention Scheduling (RCS), a novel resource allocation algorithm based on multi-round, feedback-driven contention that eliminates long-term reservations and enables fully distributed operation. Simulations demonstrate that RCS outperforms SPS and DS in terms of success probability, collision and loss reduction, and timeliness metrics such as Packet Inter-Reception Delay and Age of Information, particularly under high load. The practical feasibility of the approach is validated through an SDR-based experimental testbed, which confirms robust operation under realistic hardware impairments and closely matches theoretical and simulation results. These findings establish RCS as a viable and scalable solution for resource allocation in 5G NR sidelink and a promising candidate for future 6G vehicular communication systems.
arXiv:2607.06565v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unified 3D foundation models aspire to generate 3D assets and reason about them in language within a single backbone, but their text-3D interaction remains largely implicit. Existing methods concatenate text and 3D tokens into a flat sequence and rely on self-attention, collapsing coarse structural cues and fine geometric details into one undifferentiated representation. We introduce ELSA3D, a unified 3D model that addresses this with elastic semantic anchoring, structuring language and geometric reasoning jointly along matched abstraction scales. ELSA3D represents geometry with a scale-aware octree tokenizer and introduces Anchor Tokens, sparse cross-modal units that select semantic cues, route them to the most relevant 3D scale, retrieve scale-specific geometric evidence, and write the fused signal back into the unified representation, keeping interaction sparse yet precise. A lightweight per-block router makes both computation and reasoning elastic, choosing which text tokens instantiate anchors at which geometric scale so that cross-modal capacity concentrates where alignment is most needed. ELSA3D achieves state-of-the-art performance across image-to-3D generation, text-to-3D generation, and 3D captioning, outperforming the strongest unified baseline while roughly halving FLOPs and inference latency relative to the non-elastic version of the same model.
arXiv:2606.08048v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion language models (DLMs) offer substantial speed advantages through parallel decoding, but the lack of token dependencies limits generation quality compared to autoregressive (AR) models. Recent progress attempts to bridge the gap via importance sampling, with DLM being the proposal and AR being the target. However, due to the huge gap between their distributions, the sampling requires a large number of particles and is thus expensive to compute. In this paper, we introduce PoE-Bridge, a novel decoding framework that drastically improves generation speed and accuracy by introducing an intermediate distribution to bridge the gap. The distribution is constructed as a Product-of-Experts (PoE) of the DLM proposal and the AR target. With the intermediate distribution, we first use the DLM to draft multiple continuations in parallel, then apply rejection sampling to verify the drafted tokens and move the resulting candidates toward the PoE. We then use importance sampling to further correct the PoE-aligned candidates toward the AR target. We further propose several improved techniques, including mixed-temperature sampling for enhanced diversity and elastic rejection windows for reducing wasted verification. Empirically, PoE-Bridge achieves significantly improved accuracy with $5\times$ speedup over the standard DLM decoding approach, and recovers at least 95% of the target AR model's performance, efficiently advancing most of the quality gap on challenging mathematical reasoning and coding tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/juntongshi48/poe-bridge.
arXiv:2607.05705v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent motion prediction is essential for automated vehicles to understand the intentions of surrounding vehicles. However, previous prediction-based and anchor-based methods have limitations in mode diversity and prediction accuracy, respectively. These limitations may cause inadequate safety assessments and behavioral deviations in automated vehicles. To address this issue, a mode-world weighted regression loss is proposed to bridge the gap between these features. Specifically, this approach mitigates mode collapse while simultaneously improving world ranking and top-1 confidence. Furthermore, the proposed iterative decoder improves prediction accuracy by recurrently and segmentally generating trajectories. Experimental results show the proposed method ranks first in the Argoverse 2 multi-agent motion forecasting benchmark against other methods.
arXiv:2607.05709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cognitive therapies have been shown to enhance the quality of life and well-being of people living with dementia (PwDs). However, their use remains limited due to a shortage of trained professionals and the significant time and training required of informal caregivers. To address this gap, we developed and deployed a social robot capable of autonomously delivering cognitive stimulation therapy (CST) in the home. Nine PwDs participated in a one-week ($7$ days) study that involved daily robot-led sessions. Participants engaged positively with the system, completing nearly half of the scheduled sessions, an adherence rate higher than typically observed in caregiver-led CST. Our findings also highlight the crucial role of family members, who often supported session initiation and occasionally joined the activities, enriching the interactions. This work demonstrates the feasibility and potential of socially assistive robots to deliver in-home cognitive therapy, offering a scalable approach to extend access to dementia care.
arXiv:2607.06334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We give a concise description and an improved analysis of the Random-Action-Removal algorithm for solving 2-player, 0-sum, turn-based, possibly infinite duration, stochastic or non-stochastic games played on graphs, or on finite sets of states. More generally, the algorithm can be used to find the sink of an Acyclic Unique Sink Orientation (AUSO) of a non-binary hypercube. The families of games that can be solved by the algorithm include discounted and non-discounted stochastic games (SGs) and Mean Payoff Games (MPGs). The obtained algorithm is the fastest known randomized algorithm for solving such games, slightly improving on a much more complicated algorithm of Hansen and Zwick (STOC 2015). The Random-Action-Removal algorithm is an adaptation of the Random-Facet algorithm used to solve linear programming (LP) problems, or, more generally, LP-type problems. Two dual variants of the Random-Facet algorithm were developed independently by Kalai (STOC 1992) and by Matou{\v{s}}ek, Sharir and Welzl (SoCG 1992). For LP problems, the algorithm of Kalai is a primal \emph{simplex} algorithm, while the algorithm of Matou{\v{s}}ek, Sharir and Welzl is a dual \emph{simplex} algorithm. The Random-Action-Removal algorithm for games or AUSOs is an adaptation of the dual algorithm of Matou{\v{s}}ek, Sharir and Welzl, and is a randomized \emph{strategy iteration} algorithm. Our improved analysis shows that the Random-Action-Removal algorithm solves games with~$n$ states and $m\ge 2n$ actions in $e^{O(\sqrt{n\ln(m/n)})}$ time. This improves on a previous $e^{O(\sqrt{n\ln(m/\sqrt n)})}$ bound for the algorithm that follows from the analysis of Matou{\v{s}}ek, Sharir and Welzl (SoCG 1992). An $e^{O(\sqrt{n\ln(m/n)})}$ bound, with worse constant factors, was previously obtained using a much more complicated algorithm for solving LP and LP-type problems of Hansen and Zwick (STOC 2015).
arXiv:2607.05410v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present CANONIC: governed intelligence that compiles digital artifacts into an evidence ledger at scale. Large language models generate prose faster than anyone can check it, the failure Oxford Languages named 'slop', its 2025 Word of the Year. CANONIC governs whether content may enter a corpus the way a compiler decides whether a program is well-formed: mechanically, by a grammar, at the boundary of admission. Governance reduces to three axioms (Triad, Inheritance, Introspection) that map one-to-one onto compiler theory's syntax, scope-resolution, and type-system layers, and admission is a decidable, linear-time check. We then ask, with a pre-registered cross-provider benchmark across four regimes, whether structural admission keeps slop out. It does not: no prose-reading gate reliably separates reliable from unreliable content. Slop is not a property an algorithm computes. It is a verdict of domain expertise. So a governance layer does not decide slop; it keeps the record auditable -- every claim anchored to a definition, a commit, and an evidence window, reproducible and checkable end to end.
arXiv:2607.05832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Counting queries are ubiquitous in database systems, particularly for driving internal system optimization. Learned models for cardinality estimation rely heavily on large-scale training data, yet generating such data by executing massive batches of counting queries is expensive. We propose BaCon, an efficient algorithm for batch evaluation of counting queries on top of a database system, without modifying its internals. BaCon integrates the idea of factorized databases with a workload-aware domain quantization strategy, allowing it to evaluate batches of counting queries using compact data structures rather than materializing massive join results. BaCon's design is compatible with most database management system, and we have implemented it as a client-side application on PostgreSQL with a lightweight C-language UDF (user-defined function). This implementation delivers speedups between 2$\times$ and 178$\times$ over baselines and good performance across various workloads, making training and maintenance of learned cardinality estimation models significantly more practical.
arXiv:2507.01577v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider interpolation from the viewpoint of fully automated theorem proving in first-order logic as a general core technique for mechanized knowledge processing. For Craig interpolation, our focus is on the two-stage approach, where first an essentially propositional ground interpolant is calculated that is then lifted to a quantified first-order formula. We discuss two possibilities to obtain a ground interpolant from a proof: with clausal tableaux, and with resolution. Established preprocessing techniques for first-order proving can also be applied for Craig interpolation if they are restricted in specific ways. Equality encodings from automated reasoning justify strengthened variations of Craig interpolation. Contributions to Craig interpolation that emerged from automated reasoning include variations for logics used in databases and logic programming. As an approach to uniform interpolation we introduce second-order quantifier elimination with examples and describe the basic algorithms DLS and SCAN.
arXiv:2607.05596v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI/ML workloads increasingly run as containers, where a container image must be downloaded to the host before the workload can start. This cold image pull lands on the critical path whenever a training or inference job scales up or a host is updated, and for GPU workloads it has become the dominant component of startup time as AI/ML images reach 31--48~GiB compressed. We present Disk-Backed Parallel Pull (DBPP), an alternative to the in-memory ordered reassembly used by containerd~2.2, the upstream container runtime. containerd splits layers into chunks fetched concurrently over HTTP range requests, but chunks that arrive out of order accumulate in the runtime heap until a sequential consumer drains them in order. This backlog grows with image size, and on GPU nodes where host memory is shared with frameworks and model weights, it leads to out of memory (OOM) termination of the runtime itself. DBPP writes each chunk directly to its target byte offset on disk, eliminating the ordering dependency and bounding memory regardless of image size. Because each layer lands on disk as a complete, seekable file, DBPP runs SHA-256 digest verification and decompression simultaneously, two passes containerd must run one after the other. In controlled experiments across five production-scale images (up to 48.5~GiB), DBPP reduces peak daemon memory by 8.7--25.3$\times$ while maintaining comparable pull throughput. On a memory-constrained node, containerd~2.2 is OOM-killed pulling a 31.4~GiB image while DBPP completes the same pull. The underlying idea reaches past container images: any pipeline that buffers data in memory only to enforce ordering can move that buffer to disk once the backing store is fast enough, trading a scarce, contended resource for an abundant one.
arXiv:2607.05758v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated experimentation is moving from closed-loop optimization toward open decision-making, where human or AI planners must forecast the consequences of candidate actions before executing them. Such forecasts require a model of both sides of the experiment: how the sample is likely to respond and what the instrument is likely to detect. We therefore introduce a coupled digital-twin framework that separates these roles and then links them. In this framework, the sample twin encodes material state inferred from prior knowledge and measurements till the moment. The instrument twin captures signal formation, feedback dynamics, and operating constraints based on prior knowledge. When coupled, the two twins estimate expected outcomes, uncertainty, and risk for candidate microscope operations. For amplitude-modulation scanning probe microscopy, we realize this framework with a physics-informed encoder of force-distance curves, a deterministic scanner model of cantilever and feedback dynamics, and sparse learned residual corrections. The encoder first recovers scanner-driving descriptors with sub-nanometer accuracy. The calibrated scanner then reproduces typical traces within a few nanometers and identifies operating-point noise amplification as the main source of mismatch. Supplementary phase analysis localizes residual error to the phase channel, which clarifies where added physics is needed. Together, these results establish coupled sample and instrument twins as a practical foundation for predictive microscope operation and autonomous experimental planning.
arXiv:2607.05778v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using unprecedentedly long 2D particle-in-cell simulations, we study electron and ion acceleration in weakly magnetized quasi-parallel shocks, propagating at velocities ranging from transrelativistic to subrelativistic. At a fixed upstream magnetic field strength, low-velocity quasi-parallel shocks are dominated by the Bell instability, whereas high-velocity shocks are dominated by the Weibel instability. Both regimes accelerate ions with similar efficiency, with the Bell-dominated regime exhibiting faster growth in the maximum particle energy. The electron acceleration efficiency is strongly dependent on shock velocity. Weibel-dominated shocks have $\sim15\,\%$ of shock energy in nonthermal electrons, whereas in the Bell-dominated regime we attribute less than $\sim2\,\%$ of shock energy to nonthermal electrons. We discuss applications of our results to the bright X-ray emission from the late-stage afterglows of gamma-ray bursts, the radio emission from fast blue optical transients, and the X-ray variability in microquasars.
arXiv:2607.06082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study a generalization of the star coloring problem on hypergraphs. For a family of connected subhypergraphs $\mathcal{F}$, we define an $\mathcal{F}$-coloring of a hypergraph as a coloring avoiding monochromatic hyperedges and any 2-colored member of $\mathcal{F}$. We let $\chi^r_{\mathcal{F}}(d)$ be the maximum of the minimum number of colors needed for an $\mathcal{F}$-coloring of an $r$-uniform hypergraph with maximum degree $d.$ We show bounds for $\chi^r_{\mathcal{F}}(d)$, that also yield results on star and acyclic coloring problem on hypergraphs.
arXiv:2607.06040v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There are several possible ways to encode random variables in a quantum state. The basis encoding of bit strings has paramount importance because it allows to load the values of a random variable through the superposition of corresponding basis states, and to then exploit quantum parallelism in processing algorithms. The basis encoding offers a natural way to represent an unsigned integer random variable, and extends to signed integers, as well as to fixed-point and floating-point variables. Each quantum representation of fractional numbers, however, involves a trade-off between accuracy and depth of manipulation circuits. Here, an efficient hybrid quantum-classical representation of quantum floating points is introduced. It combines a quantum register containing the values, with a classical register storing global information about the variable, namely the range and approximation tolerances. The sum and product operations are defined, in such a way as to ensure they are performed without overflow. By taking advantage of the stored classical information, the precision degradation that occurs due to rounding after repeated data manipulations, can be significantly reduced compared to known strategies. Ad hoc examples show up to around $90\%$ reduction in approximation, compared to previous techniques, after repeated additions. The method finds application in many algorithms of practical relevance and constitutes a significant advance in the design of arithmetic circuits with low depth and high accuracy.
arXiv:2607.06177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We characterize the Tanner graph spectrum of hypergraph-product (HGP) / lifted-product (LP) codes and bivariate-bicycle (BB) codes, informing qubit routing for three-dimensional reconfigurable qubit architectures. Syndrome-extraction routing depth on HGP/LP Tanner graphs reduces to a single SVD on the base parity-check matrix, using a spectral ratio $\beta_\text{HGP} = (1 + \beta_\text{base})/2$ where $\beta_\text{base} = \sigma_2(H)/\sigma_1(H)$ for the base parity-check matrix, and a diameter identity $D_T = 2 D_\text{base}$ where $D_\text{base}$ is the base Tanner graph diameter. Fourier spectral reduction reveals that the BB Tanner graph spectrum equals the union, over the $l \times m$ grid of characters of $\mathbb{Z}_l \times \mathbb{Z}_m$, of the singular values of a single $2 \times 2$ symbol matrix built from the two defining polynomials. This reduces spectral analysis from an $O((lm)^3)$ diagonalization of the $4lm$-node Tanner graph to $lm$ independent $2 \times 2$ SVDs. These results compose into a multi-layer three-dimensional AOL routing protocol with one-time setup cost $T_\text{Valiant} = O(\log N)$ atom rearrangements amortizable over a memory experiment of $R$ rounds. For a Tanner graph chromatic index $\chi'$ and $L_\text{layers}$ stacked AOL planes, the per-syndrome-cycle depth is $\lceil \chi'/L_\text{layers} \rceil$ AOL pattern activations with no atom motion, an $8\times$ step-count reduction at $L_\text{layers} \geq \chi' = 8$. Contingent on multi-layer AOL hardware, this yields an estimated $\sim50-300\times$ per-cycle wall-clock advantage over a single-layer AOD baseline (degrading to $\sim5-100\times$ under AOD-crosstalk overhead), reducing to equality in the single-layer limit. This paper therefore presents a route toward practical routing improvement for future quantum hardware incorporating multi-layer reconfigurable qubit architectures.
arXiv:2308.16041v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Talking head generation has progressed rapidly from landmark- and GAN-based facial animation to diffusion models, neural rendering, 3D-aware avatars, and foundation-model-assisted systems. This progress has enabled increasingly realistic audio-, image-, and video-driven talking heads, but it has also made the field difficult to navigate because methods differ substantially in their inputs, assumptions, controllability, temporal stability, computational cost, and risks of misuse. This survey provides a critical review of talking head generation techniques, organizing the literature into four broad families: image-driven, audio-driven, video-driven, and 3D/neural-rendering-based approaches. For each family, we discuss the underlying technical ideas, representative methods, strengths, limitations, datasets, and evaluation practices. Beyond cataloguing prior work, we analyse the persistent gap between commonly reported quantitative metrics and perceptual quality, and compare publicly available models in terms of inference time, memory requirements, and human-rated visual quality. We also examine emerging trends, including diffusion-based generation, 3D-aware representation learning, controllable emotional expression, real-time deployment, and the growing importance of provenance, watermarking, and deepfake detection. Finally, we identify open challenges around robust evaluation, identity preservation, lip synchronisation, temporal consistency, demographic fairness, computational efficiency, and responsible use. This review aims to provide researchers and practitioners with a structured and up-to-date map of the talking head generation landscape, while highlighting the technical and societal questions that should shape future work.
arXiv:2607.05888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: i-EXAM is a planning-powered tool that helps system administrators to create security profiles of complex networks and perform what-if analyses to identify network hardening strategies. It leverages planning compilation that provides soundness and completeness guarantees to identify attack paths, evaluate security metrics, generate diverse hardening strategies, and explain these strategies in natural language using Large Language Models.
arXiv:2607.05773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) evolve into autonomous agents, traditional static evaluation fails to capture multi-step decision-making. We introduce AgenticAI-Supervisor, an API and UI-driven RL Gym environment that decouples environment creation from scalable execution. By moving to verifiable execution outcomes, the platform generates high-fidelity traces and applies multi-dimensional reward shaping. Critically, our framework mitigates reward hacking through rigorous internal state validation and testing. This work provides a first look at our platform's core capabilities through a Customer Support Agent case study demonstrating a consistent closed-loop feedback for model optimization. Future work will focus on advanced features such as Computer Use, Tool Use, automated "stumping", and edge-case generation.
arXiv:2607.05845v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soccer is widely popular for its simple rules and complex yet coordinated play that unfolds on the pitch. Nevertheless, the fundamental mechanisms governing such play are not well understood: what shapes player interactions on the pitch? What short-term goals guide players' decisions about their movements over the next few seconds? We address these questions by focusing on one-on-one settings in open play, in which the attacker, in possession of the ball and typically dribbling, faces a defender aiming to stop or delay the attacker's actions over a short period. Here we develop a mathematical model of attacker-defender interactions and analyze 306 professional soccer games. Synthesizing the large-scale dataset with an analysis of the model reveals a simple behavioral principle that may underlie these interactions: the defender seeks to minimize their future relative speed to the attacker, whereas the attacker initiates their movements to preempt the defender's objective. This principle, relative-speed minimization, provides a consistent and unified account of the empirical data. Since our framework depends little on soccer-specific details, this principle may govern diverse pursuit-evasion scenarios as well as other invasion team sports.
arXiv:2607.05891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Coreset selection aims to identify a small and highly representative subset of a massive dataset for efficient model training. The problem remains challenging even in the few-shot knowledge distillation (KD) setup, where a full-scale pre-trained teacher informs the student network. Typical sample selection strategies often struggle to surpass the random selection baseline. In this paper, we showcase few-medoids, an embarrassingly simple coreset selection strategy that chooses the samples closest to the centroid (average image) of each class. We present extensive KD experiments on four datasets, covering a wide range of image classification problems, and three teacher-student model pairs, comprising both convolutional and transformer networks. Although the proposed method is embarrassingly simple, our empirical results indicate that few-medoids is able to consistently surpass the random selection baseline, as well as the other coreset selection strategies. We therefore consider that few-medoids can be used as a drop-in replacement for commonly-used baselines (e.g. herding or k-center Greedy), in future research on coreset selection. To reproduce the reported results, we publicly release our code at https://github.com/CemilAndreiDilmac/Few-Shot-KD-Coreset.
arXiv:2607.06393v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We give faster exponential-time randomised approximation algorithms for counting problems where polynomial-time approximation is unavailable and exact exponential-time counting remains expensive. For general \(n\)-vertex graphs, our independent-set counter runs in \(O^{\ast}(1.1869^{n})\) time, improving the previous \(O^{\ast}(1.2041^{n})\) general-graph bound. For \(n\)-variable \#\textsc{2-SAT}, we obtain an \(O^{\ast}(1.2373^{n})\)-time approximation algorithm, narrowly below Wahlstr{\"o}m's currently cited \(O^{\ast}(1.2377^{n})\) variable-parameter exact bound. The new algorithmic point is to take the square root after decomposition. For a single bounded unweighted self-reduction with \(f(x)\) positive leaves and recursion-compatible upper bound \(b(x)\), an enumerate-or-sample estimator gives an \((\varepsilon,\delta)\)-approximation in \[ O^{\ast}\!\left(\sqrt{b(x)}\,\varepsilon^{-2}\log \tfrac1\delta\right) \] time. After preprocessing decomposes an input into many bounded cores, the combined estimator pays \[ O^{\ast}\!\left(\sqrt{\sum_i b_i(x_i)}\,\varepsilon^{-2}\log \tfrac1\delta\right), \] rather than estimating the cores separately at cost \(\sum_i \sqrt{b_i(x_i)}\). The same conversion improves the bases for counting maximal cliques, minimal separators, and perfect matchings in subcubic graphs. Bounded unweighted self-reductions provide the formal language; at the level of counting classes, the resulting unweighted formulation has the same Karp closure as TotP. With explicit recursion-tree access, the framework yields black-box quantum speed-ups.
arXiv:2604.03148v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The absorption of light is one of the most fundamental processes in condensed-matter physics and optics. Here we investigate under which conditions laser light is absorbed by a crystalline material as an electromagnetic wave with delocalized properties or rather as photons that cause discrete, localized, nanometer-sized consequences. We excite the first-order phase transition of vanadium dioxide with laser pulses of sufficient frequency to overcome the band gap but with insufficient pulse energy to overcome the latent heat. According to Maxwell's equations and Bloch theory, no transition should occur, because nowhere in the material is enough energy. Nevertheless, we observe with ultrafast electron diffraction a disordered crystal geometry with nanometer-sized spots of switched material that grow and diminish with time. The amount of localized spots matches approximately to the number of photons in the absorbed laser wave. Two optical experiments substantiate this phenomenon, and simulations reproduce all measurements results. We discuss whether crystals defects, temperature, or a genuine wavefunction collapse can explain the discovered phenomenon. Practically, the reported absorption mechanism enables local consequences at substantially higher energy than average and provides insight into symmetry breaks and non-thermal fluctuations within complex materials.
arXiv:2607.03018v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active Speaker Detection determines whether a visible person in a video is speaking at each moment. While recent audio-visual fusion methods perform well on clean data, they degrade under real-world corruptions such as background noise, occlusion, or simultaneous modality degradation. We attribute this limitation to the absence of explicit consistency constraints that promote robust, semantically aligned representations across modalities. Without such guidance, models tend to learn fragile modality-specific shortcuts that fail under corrupted conditions. We propose $C^3$ASD, a multi-level consistency-driven framework with three complementary constraints: embedding-level inter-modality consistency aligns audio-visual representations during speech; sequence-level intra-modality consistency separates speaking and non-speaking clusters via track-aware contrastive learning; and prediction-level consistency stabilizes fusion through knowledge distillation. Extensive experiments demonstrate significant improvements under diverse audio, visual and joint corruptions, while maintaining competitive performance on clean data.