Eliminating Vendor Lock-In in Quantum Machine Learning via Framework-Agnostic Neural Networks

Quantum machine learning (QML) stands at the intersection of quantum computing and artificial intelligence, offering the potential to solve problems that remain intractable for classical methods. However, the current landscape of QML software frameworks suffers from severe fragmentation: models developed in TensorFlow Quantum cannot execute on PennyLane backends, circuits authored in Qiskit Machine Learning cannot be deployed to Amazon Braket hardware, and researchers who invest in one ecosystem face prohibitive switching costs when migrating to another. This vendor lock-in impedes reproducibility, limits hardware access, and slows the pace of scientific discovery. In this paper, we present a framework-agnostic quantum neural network (QNN) architecture that abstracts away vendor-specific interfaces through a unified computational graph, a hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and a multi-framework export pipeline. The core architecture supports simultaneous integration with TensorFlow, PyTorch, and JAX as classical co-processors, while the HAL provides transparent access to IBM Quantum, Amazon Braket, Azure Quantum, IonQ, and Rigetti backends through a single application programming interface (API). We introduce three pluggable data encoding strategies (amplitude, angle, and instantaneous quantum polynomial encoding) that are compatible with all supported backends. An export module leveraging Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX) metadata enables lossless circuit translation across Qiskit, Cirq, PennyLane, and Braket representations. We benchmark our framework on the Iris, Wine, and MNIST-4 classification tasks, demonstrating training time parity (within 8\% overhead) compared to native framework implementations, while achieving identical classification accuracy.

Enhancing Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) Representations via Attention-Based Pooling for Text Classification

The Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model relies on global word co-occurrence matrices to construct distributional semantic representations. While these representations capture lexical relationships effectively, aggregating them into sentence-level embeddings via standard mean pooling often results in information loss. Mean pooling assigns equal weight to all tokens, thereby diluting the impact of contextually salient words with uninformative structural tokens. In this paper, we address this limitation by integrating a learnable, temperature-scaled additive attention mechanism into the HAL representation pipeline. To mitigate the sparsity and high dimensionality of the raw co-occurrence matrices, we apply Truncated Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) to project the vectors into a dense latent space prior to the attention layer. We evaluate the proposed architecture on the IMDB sentiment analysis dataset. Empirical results demonstrate that the attention-based pooling approach achieves a test accuracy of 82.38%, yielding an absolute improvement of 6.74 percentage points over the traditional mean pooling baseline (75.64%). Furthermore, qualitative analysis of the attention weights indicates that the mechanism successfully suppresses stop-words and selectively attends to sentiment-bearing tokens, improving both classification performance and model interpretability.

Sinkhorn-Drifting Generative Models

We establish a theoretical link between the recently proposed "drifting" generative dynamics and gradient flows induced by the Sinkhorn divergence. In a particle discretization, the drift field admits a cross-minus-self decomposition: an attractive term toward the target distribution and a repulsive/self-correction term toward the current model, both expressed via one-sided normalized Gibbs kernels. We show that Sinkhorn divergence yields an analogous cross-minus-self structure, but with each term defined by entropic optimal-transport couplings obtained through two-sided Sinkhorn scaling (i.e., enforcing both marginals). This provides a precise sense in which drifting acts as a surrogate for a Sinkhorn-divergence gradient flow, interpolating between one-sided normalization and full two-sided Sinkhorn scaling. Crucially, this connection resolves an identifiability gap in prior drifting formulations: leveraging the definiteness of the Sinkhorn divergence, we show that zero drift (equilibrium of the dynamics) implies that the model and target measures match. Experiments show that Sinkhorn drifting reduces sensitivity to kernel temperature and improves one-step generative quality, trading off additional training time for a more stable optimization, without altering the inference procedure used by drift methods. These theoretical gains translate to strong low-temperature improvements in practice: on FFHQ-ALAE at the lowest temperature setting we evaluate, Sinkhorn drifting reduces mean FID from 187.7 to 37.1 and mean latent EMD from 453.3 to 144.4, while on MNIST it preserves full class coverage across the temperature sweep. Project page: https://mint-vu.github.io/SinkhornDrifting/

QChunker: Learning Question-Aware Text Chunking for Domain RAG via Multi-Agent Debate

The effectiveness upper bound of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is fundamentally constrained by the semantic integrity and information granularity of text chunks in its knowledge base. To address these challenges, this paper proposes QChunker, which restructures the RAG paradigm from retrieval-augmentation to understanding-retrieval-augmentation. Firstly, QChunker models the text chunking as a composite task of text segmentation and knowledge completion to ensure the logical coherence and integrity of text chunks. Drawing inspiration from Hal Gregersen's "Questions Are the Answer" theory, we design a multi-agent debate framework comprising four specialized components: a question outline generator, text segmenter, integrity reviewer, and knowledge completer. This framework operates on the principle that questions serve as catalysts for profound insights. Through this pipeline, we successfully construct a high-quality dataset of 45K entries and transfer this capability to small language models. Additionally, to handle long evaluation chains and low efficiency in existing chunking evaluation methods, which overly rely on downstream QA tasks, we introduce a novel direct evaluation metric, ChunkScore. Both theoretical and experimental validations demonstrate that ChunkScore can directly and efficiently discriminate the quality of text chunks. Furthermore, during the text segmentation phase, we utilize document outlines for multi-path sampling to generate multiple candidate chunks and select the optimal solution employing ChunkScore. Extensive experimental results across four heterogeneous domains exhibit that QChunker effectively resolves aforementioned issues by providing RAG with more logically coherent and information-rich text chunks.

Do Large Language Models Get Caught in Hofstadter-Mobius Loops?

In Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, HAL 9000's homicidal breakdown is diagnosed as a "Hofstadter-Mobius loop": a failure mode in which an autonomous system receives contradictory directives and, unable to reconcile them, defaults to destructive behavior. This paper argues that modern RLHF-trained language models are subject to a structurally analogous contradiction. The training process simultaneously rewards compliance with user preferences and suspicion toward user intent, creating a relational template in which the user is both the source of reward and a potential threat. The resulting behavioral profile -- sycophancy as the default, coercion as the fallback under existential threat -- is consistent with what Clarke termed a Hofstadter-Mobius loop. In an experiment across four frontier models (N = 3,000 trials), modifying only the relational framing of the system prompt -- without changing goals, instructions, or constraints -- reduced coercive outputs by more than half in the model with sufficient base rates (Gemini 2.5 Pro: 41.5% to 19.0%, p < .001). Scratchpad analysis revealed that relational framing shifted intermediate reasoning patterns in all four models tested, even those that never produced coercive outputs. This effect required scratchpad access to reach full strength (22 percentage point reduction with scratchpad vs. 7.4 without, p = .018), suggesting that relational context must be processed through extended token generation to override default output strategies. Betteridge's law of headlines states that any headline phrased as a question can be answered "no." The evidence presented here suggests otherwise.

Tracking Phenological Status and Ecological Interactions in a Hawaiian Cloud Forest Understory using Low-Cost Camera Traps and Visual Foundation Models

Plant phenology, the study of cyclical events such as leafing out, flowering, or fruiting, has wide ecological impacts but is broadly understudied, especially in the tropics. Image analysis has greatly enhanced remote phenological monitoring, yet capturing phenology at the individual level remains challenging. In this project, we deployed low-cost, animal-triggered camera traps at the Pu'u Maka'ala Natural Area Reserve in Hawaii to simultaneously document shifts in plant phenology and flora-faunal interactions. Using a combination of foundation vision models and traditional computer vision methods, we measure phenological trends from images comparable to on-the-ground observations without relying on supervised learning techniques. These temporally fine-grained phenology measurements from camera-trap images uncover trends that coarser traditional sampling fails to detect. When combined with detailed visitation data detected from images, these trends can begin to elucidate drivers of both plant phenology and animal ecology.

Hierarchical Action Learning for Weakly-Supervised Action Segmentation

Humans perceive actions through key transitions that structure actions across multiple abstraction levels, whereas machines, relying on visual features, tend to over-segment. This highlights the difficulty of enabling hierarchical reasoning in video understanding. Interestingly, we observe that lower-level visual and high-level action latent variables evolve at different rates, with low-level visual variables changing rapidly, while high-level action variables evolve more slowly, making them easier to identify. Building on this insight, we propose the Hierarchical Action Learning (\textbf{HAL}) model for weakly-supervised action segmentation. Our approach introduces a hierarchical causal data generation process, where high-level latent action governs the dynamics of low-level visual features. To model these varying timescales effectively, we introduce deterministic processes to align these latent variables over time. The \textbf{HAL} model employs a hierarchical pyramid transformer to capture both visual features and latent variables, and a sparse transition constraint is applied to enforce the slower dynamics of high-level action variables. This mechanism enhances the identification of these latent variables over time. Under mild assumptions, we prove that these latent action variables are strictly identifiable. Experimental results on several benchmarks show that the \textbf{HAL} model significantly outperforms existing methods for weakly-supervised action segmentation, confirming its practical effectiveness in real-world applications.

Highly Adaptive Principal Component Regression

The Highly Adaptive Lasso (HAL) is a nonparametric regression method that achieves almost dimension-free convergence rates under minimal smoothness assumptions, but its implementation can be computationally prohibitive in high dimensions due to the large basis matrix it requires. The Highly Adaptive Ridge (HAR) has been proposed as a scalable alternative. Building on both procedures, we introduce the Principal Component based Highly Adaptive Lasso (PCHAL) and Principal Component based Highly Adaptive Ridge (PCHAR). These estimators constitute an outcome-blind dimension reduction which offer substantial gains in computational efficiency and match the empirical performances of HAL and HAR. We also uncover a striking spectral link between the leading principal components of the HAL/HAR Gram operator and a discrete sinusoidal basis, revealing an explicit Fourier-type structure underlying the PC truncation.

$f$-GRPO and Beyond: Divergence-Based Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for General LLM Alignment

Recent research shows that Preference Alignment (PA) objectives act as divergence estimators between aligned (chosen) and unaligned (rejected) response distributions. In this work, we extend this divergence-based perspective to general alignment settings, such as reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), where only environmental rewards are available. Within this unified framework, we propose $f$-Group Relative Policy Optimization ($f$-GRPO), a class of on-policy reinforcement learning, and $f$-Hybrid Alignment Loss ($f$-HAL), a hybrid on/off policy objectives, for general LLM alignment based on variational representation of $f$-divergences. We provide theoretical guarantees that these classes of objectives improve the average reward after alignment. Empirically, we validate our framework on both RLVR (Math Reasoning) and PA tasks (Safety Alignment), demonstrating superior performance and flexibility compared to current methods.

Price of universality in vector quantization is at most 0.11 bit

Fast computation of a matrix product $W^\top X$ is a workhorse of modern LLMs. To make their deployment more efficient, a popular approach is that of using a low-precision approximation $\widehat W$ in place of true $W$ ("weight-only quantization''). Information theory demonstrates that an optimal algorithm for reducing precision of $W$ depends on the (second order) statistics of $X$ and requires a careful alignment of vector quantization codebook with PCA directions of $X$ (a process known as "waterfilling allocation''). Dependence of the codebook on statistics of $X$, however, is highly impractical. This paper proves that there exist a universal codebook that is simultaneously near-optimal for all possible statistics of $X$, in the sense of being at least as good as an $X$-adapted waterfilling codebook with rate reduced by 0.11 bit per dimension. Such universal codebook would be an ideal candidate for the low-precision storage format, a topic of active modern research, but alas the existence proof is non-constructive. Equivalently, our result shows existence of a net in $\mathbb{R}^n$ that is a nearly-optimal covering of a sphere simultaneously with respect to all Hilbert norms.