Quantum LEGO Learning: A Modular Design Principle for Hybrid Artificial Intelligence

Hybrid quantum-classical learning models increasingly integrate neural networks with variational quantum circuits (VQCs) to exploit complementary inductive biases. However, many existing approaches rely on tightly coupled architectures or task-specific encoders, limiting conceptual clarity, generality, and transferability across learning settings. In this work, we introduce Quantum LEGO Learning, a modular and architecture-agnostic learning framework that treats classical and quantum components as reusable, composable learning blocks with well-defined roles. Within this framework, a pre-trained classical neural network serves as a frozen feature block, while a VQC acts as a trainable adaptive module that operates on structured representations rather than raw inputs. This separation enables efficient learning under constrained quantum resources and provides a principled abstraction for analyzing hybrid models. We develop a block-wise generalization theory that decomposes learning error into approximation and estimation components, explicitly characterizing how the complexity and training status of each block influence overall performance. Our analysis generalizes prior tensor-network-specific results and identifies conditions under which quantum modules provide representational advantages over comparably sized classical heads. Empirically, we validate the framework through systematic block-swap experiments across frozen feature extractors and both quantum and classical adaptive heads. Experiments on quantum dot classification demonstrate stable optimization, reduced sensitivity to qubit count, and robustness to realistic noise.

PRiSM: Benchmarking Phone Realization in Speech Models

Phone recognition (PR) serves as the atomic interface for language-agnostic modeling for cross-lingual speech processing and phonetic analysis. Despite prolonged efforts in developing PR systems, current evaluations only measure surface-level transcription accuracy. We introduce PRiSM, the first open-source benchmark designed to expose blind spots in phonetic perception through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation of PR systems. PRiSM standardizes transcription-based evaluation and assesses downstream utility in clinical, educational, and multilingual settings with transcription and representation probes. We find that diverse language exposure during training is key to PR performance, encoder-CTC models are the most stable, and specialized PR models still outperform Large Audio Language Models. PRiSM releases code, recipes, and datasets to move the field toward multilingual speech models with robust phonetic ability: https://github.com/changelinglab/prism.

Speech-Hands: A Self-Reflection Voice Agentic Approach to Speech Recognition and Audio Reasoning with Omni Perception

We introduce a voice-agentic framework that learns one critical omni-understanding skill: knowing when to trust itself versus when to consult external audio perception. Our work is motivated by a crucial yet counterintuitive finding: naively fine-tuning an omni-model on both speech recognition and external sound understanding tasks often degrades performance, as the model can be easily misled by noisy hypotheses. To address this, our framework, Speech-Hands, recasts the problem as an explicit self-reflection decision. This learnable reflection primitive proves effective in preventing the model from being derailed by flawed external candidates. We show that this agentic action mechanism generalizes naturally from speech recognition to complex, multiple-choice audio reasoning. Across the OpenASR leaderboard, Speech-Hands consistently outperforms strong baselines by 12.1% WER on seven benchmarks. The model also achieves 77.37% accuracy and high F1 on audio QA decisions, showing robust generalization and reliability across diverse audio question answering datasets. By unifying perception and decision-making, our work offers a practical path toward more reliable and resilient audio intelligence.

Continual Quantum Architecture Search with Tensor-Train Encoding: Theory and Applications to Signal Processing

We introduce CL-QAS, a continual quantum architecture search framework that mitigates the challenges of costly amplitude encoding and catastrophic forgetting in variational quantum circuits. The method uses Tensor-Train encoding to efficiently compress high-dimensional stochastic signals into low-rank quantum feature representations. A bi-loop learning strategy separates circuit parameter optimization from architecture exploration, while an Elastic Weight Consolidation regularization ensures stability across sequential tasks. We derive theoretical upper bounds on approximation, generalization, and robustness under quantum noise, demonstrating that CL-QAS achieves controllable expressivity, sample-efficient generalization, and smooth convergence without barren plateaus. Empirical evaluations on electrocardiogram (ECG)-based signal classification and financial time-series forecasting confirm substantial improvements in accuracy, balanced accuracy, F1 score, and reward. CL-QAS maintains strong forward and backward transfer and exhibits bounded degradation under depolarizing and readout noise, highlighting its potential for adaptive, noise-resilient quantum learning on near-term devices.

Random-Matrix-Induced Simplicity Bias in Over-parameterized Variational Quantum Circuits

Over-parameterization is commonly used to increase the expressivity of variational quantum circuits (VQCs), yet deeper and more highly parameterized circuits often exhibit poor trainability and limited generalization. In this work, we provide a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon from a function-class perspective. We show that sufficiently expressive, unstructured variational ansatze enter a Haar-like universality class in which both observable expectation values and parameter gradients concentrate exponentially with system size. As a consequence, the hypothesis class induced by such circuits collapses with high probability to a narrow family of near-constant functions, a phenomenon we term simplicity bias, with barren plateaus arising as a consequence rather than the root cause. Using tools from random matrix theory and concentration of measure, we rigorously characterize this universality class and establish uniform hypothesis-class collapse over finite datasets. We further show that this collapse is not unavoidable: tensor-structured VQCs, including tensor-network-based and tensor-hypernetwork parameterizations, lie outside the Haar-like universality class. By restricting the accessible unitary ensemble through bounded tensor rank or bond dimension, these architectures prevent concentration of measure, preserve output variability for local observables, and retain non-degenerate gradient signals even in over-parameterized regimes. Together, our results unify barren plateaus, expressivity limits, and generalization collapse under a single structural mechanism rooted in random-matrix universality, highlighting the central role of architectural inductive bias in variational quantum algorithms.

Long Grounded Thoughts: Distilling Compositional Visual Reasoning Chains at Scale

Recent progress in multimodal reasoning has been driven largely by undisclosed datasets and proprietary data synthesis recipes, leaving open questions about how to systematically build large-scale, vision-centric reasoning datasets, particularly for tasks that go beyond visual math. In this work, we introduce a new reasoning data generation framework spanning diverse skills and levels of complexity with over 1M high-quality synthetic vision-centric questions. The dataset also includes preference data and instruction prompts supporting both offline and online RL. Our synthesis framework proceeds in two stages: (1) scale; and (2) complexity. Reasoning traces are then synthesized through a two-stage process that leverages VLMs and reasoning LLMs, producing CoT traces for VLMs that capture the richness and diverse cognitive behaviors found in frontier reasoning models. Remarkably, we show that finetuning Qwen2.5-VL-7B on our data outperforms all open-data baselines across all evaluated vision-centric benchmarks, and even surpasses strong closed-data models such as MiMo-VL-7B-RL on V* Bench, CV-Bench and MMStar-V. Perhaps most surprising, despite being entirely vision-centric, our data transfers positively to text-only reasoning (MMLU-Pro) and audio reasoning (MMAU), demonstrating its effectiveness. Similarly, despite not containing videos or embodied visual data, we observe notable gains when evaluating on a single-evidence embodied QA benchmark (NiEH). Finally, we use our data to analyze the entire VLM post-training pipeline. Our empirical analysis highlights that (i) SFT on high-quality data with non-linear reasoning traces is essential for effective online RL, (ii) staged offline RL matches online RL's performance while reducing compute demands, and (iii) careful SFT on high quality data can substantially improve out-of-domain, cross-modality transfer.

Bias in Gender Bias Benchmarks: How Spurious Features Distort Evaluation

Gender bias in vision-language foundation models (VLMs) raises concerns about their safe deployment and is typically evaluated using benchmarks with gender annotations on real-world images. However, as these benchmarks often contain spurious correlations between gender and non-gender features, such as objects and backgrounds, we identify a critical oversight in gender bias evaluation: Do spurious features distort gender bias evaluation? To address this question, we systematically perturb non-gender features across four widely used benchmarks (COCO-gender, FACET, MIAP, and PHASE) and various VLMs to quantify their impact on bias evaluation. Our findings reveal that even minimal perturbations, such as masking just 10% of objects or weakly blurring backgrounds, can dramatically alter bias scores, shifting metrics by up to 175% in generative VLMs and 43% in CLIP variants. This suggests that current bias evaluations often reflect model responses to spurious features rather than gender bias, undermining their reliability. Since creating spurious feature-free benchmarks is fundamentally challenging, we recommend reporting bias metrics alongside feature-sensitivity measurements to enable a more reliable bias assessment.

WoW-Bench: Evaluating Fine-Grained Acoustic Perception in Audio-Language Models via Marine Mammal Vocalizations

Large audio language models (LALMs) extend language understanding into the auditory domain, yet their ability to perform low-level listening, such as pitch and duration detection, remains underexplored. However, low-level listening is critical for real-world, out-of-distribution tasks where models must reason about unfamiliar sounds based on fine-grained acoustic cues. To address this gap, we introduce the World-of-Whale benchmark (WoW-Bench) to evaluate low-level auditory perception and cognition using marine mammal vocalizations. WoW-bench is composed of a Perception benchmark for categorizing novel sounds and a Cognition benchmark, inspired by Bloom's taxonomy, to assess the abilities to remember, understand, apply, and analyze sound events. For the Cognition benchmark, we additionally introduce distractor questions to evaluate whether models are truly solving problems through listening rather than relying on other heuristics. Experiments with state-of-the-art LALMs show performance far below human levels, indicating a need for stronger auditory grounding in LALMs.

Test-Time Scaling Strategies for Generative Retrieval in Multimodal Conversational Recommendations

The rapid evolution of e-commerce has exposed the limitations of traditional product retrieval systems in managing complex, multi-turn user interactions. Recent advances in multimodal generative retrieval -- particularly those leveraging multimodal large language models (MLLMs) as retrievers -- have shown promise. However, most existing methods are tailored to single-turn scenarios and struggle to model the evolving intent and iterative nature of multi-turn dialogues when applied naively. Concurrently, test-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving large language model (LLM) performance through iterative inference-time refinement. Yet, its effectiveness typically relies on two conditions: (1) a well-defined problem space (e.g., mathematical reasoning), and (2) the model's ability to self-correct -- conditions that are rarely met in conversational product search. In this setting, user queries are often ambiguous and evolving, and MLLMs alone have difficulty grounding responses in a fixed product corpus. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a novel framework that introduces test-time scaling into conversational multimodal product retrieval. Our approach builds on a generative retriever, further augmented with a test-time reranking (TTR) mechanism that improves retrieval accuracy and better aligns results with evolving user intent throughout the dialogue. Experiments across multiple benchmarks show consistent improvements, with average gains of 14.5 points in MRR and 10.6 points in nDCG@1.

DeSTA2.5-Audio: Toward General-Purpose Large Audio Language Model with Self-Generated Cross-Modal Alignment

We introduce DeSTA2.5-Audio, a general-purpose Large Audio Language Model (LALM) designed for robust auditory perception and instruction-following, without requiring task-specific audio instruction-tuning. Recent LALMs typically augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with auditory capabilities by training on large-scale, manually curated or LLM-synthesized audio-instruction datasets. However, these approaches have often suffered from the catastrophic forgetting of the LLM's original language abilities. To address this, we revisit the data construction pipeline and propose DeSTA, a self-generated cross-modal alignment strategy in which the backbone LLM generates its own training targets. This approach preserves the LLM's native language proficiency while establishing effective audio-text alignment, thereby enabling zero-shot generalization without task-specific tuning. Using DeSTA, we construct DeSTA-AQA5M, a large-scale, task-agnostic dataset containing 5 million training samples derived from 7,000 hours of audio spanning 50 diverse datasets, including speech, environmental sounds, and music. DeSTA2.5-Audio achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance across a wide range of audio-language benchmarks, including Dynamic-SUPERB, MMAU, SAKURA, Speech-IFEval, and VoiceBench. Comprehensive comparative studies demonstrate that our self-generated strategy outperforms widely adopted data construction and training strategies in both auditory perception and instruction-following capabilities. Our findings underscore the importance of carefully designed data construction in LALM development and offer practical insights for building robust, general-purpose LALMs.