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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Residual-Squeezing Mechanism of Mismatch in Inverse-Squeezing Kennedy Receivers

arXiv:2601.19093v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The discrimination of quantum states is fundamental to quantum information processing. Inverse-squeezing Kennedy (IS-Kennedy) receivers can outperform the coherent-state BPSK Helstrom benchmark at the same energy by converting transmitter-side squeezing into an effective coherent-state separation gain, without violating the Helstrom bound for the squeezed-state alphabet. This work investigates how squeezing mismatch degrades this mechanism. We show that imperfect inverse squeezing transforms the ideally nulled output into a residually squeezed state, thereby altering the photon-number statistics before detection. This residual-squeezing picture reveals a strong physical asymmetry between squeezing-magnitude and squeezing-phase mismatches. Magnitude mismatch produces an energy-independent error floor in the high-signal-energy regime, whereas phase mismatch generates a residual squeezing term that grows with signal energy. In the small-residual-squeezing regime, this leads to a polynomial growth of the leading error contribution and a rapid collapse of the SQL advantage. We also identify a parity-step effect in photon-number-resolving detection: because the nulled residual squeezed vacuum contains only even photon numbers, increasing detector resolution improves the high-energy robustness only when the effective saturation threshold crosses the next even photon number. These results identify phase locking as the dominant bottleneck for IS-Kennedy-type non-Gaussian receivers under unitary squeezing mismatch and provide design guidelines for robust squeezed-state quantum receivers.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Enhancing Generative Auto-bidding with Offline Reward Evaluation and Policy Search

arXiv:2509.15927v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Auto-bidding is a critical tool for advertisers to improve advertising performance. Recent progress has demonstrated that AI-Generated Bidding (AIGB), which learns a conditional generative planner from offline data, achieves superior performance compared to typical offline reinforcement learning (RL)-based auto-bidding methods. However, existing AIGB methods still face a performance bottleneck due to their inherent inability to explore beyond the static dataset with feedback. To address this, we propose AIGB-Pearl (Planning with \textbf{EvaluAtor via RL}), a novel method that integrates generative planning and policy optimization. The core of AIGB-Pearl lies in constructing a trajectory evaluator to assess the quality of generated scores and designing a provably sound KL-Lipschitz-constrained score-maximization scheme to ensure safe and efficient exploration beyond the offline dataset. A practical algorithm that incorporates the synchronous coupling technique is further developed to ensure the model regularity required by the proposed scheme. Extensive experiments on both simulated and real-world advertising systems demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MVG-KAN: Multi-View Geo-Wind Guided KAN for PM$_{2.5}$ Forecasting

arXiv:2606.24347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term PM$_{2.5}$ forecasting is important for public health protection, air-quality early warning, and urban environmental management. However, PM$_{2.5}$ variation is driven by multiple coupled factors, including stable periodic changes induced by human activities and meteorological regularity, station-specific short-term concentration evolution, and meteorology-driven pollutant dispersion among monitoring stations. Existing spatio-temporal forecasting methods may capture station relationships to some extent, but distance-only, correlation-based, or purely adaptive graphs are often insufficient to comprehensively represent these heterogeneous factors, especially wind-direction-dependent pollutant transport. To address this problem, we propose a Multi-View Geo-Wind Guided KAN model for PM$_{2.5}$ forecasting, named MVG-KAN, which models station-level PM$_{2.5}$ evolution from three complementary views: local periodic regularity, station-wise residual temporal dynamics, and meteorological-environment-guided spatial dispersion. Specifically, the periodic-residual forecasting backbone first separates stable daily and weekly patterns from non-periodic residual variations. A Geo-Wind Graph is constructed by combining geographic distance decay with wind-direction- and wind-speed-aware transport, providing a lightweight physically motivated directed spatial prior for residual propagation among stations. In addition, a temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold network (TKAN) residual head is then introduced to learn station-wise nonlinear autoregressive correction from de-periodized PM$_{2.5}$ residuals and historical multi-pollutant sequences, thereby enhancing the modeling of local residual inertia and pollutant co-variation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Training-free sparse attention based on cumulative energy filtering

Sparse attention accelerates Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) for video generation by computing only the important tokens while skipping the rest. The token selection strategy is key to balancing sparsity and accuracy. We formulate the token filtering process as a dual-goal optimization problem: maximizing sparsity and minimizing accuracy degradation. Existing algorithms cannot fulfill both objectives simultaneously. For example, Top-p only considers the accuracy constraint, while Top-k maintains a fixed computational budget but loosens the accuracy constraint. This paper demonstrates that maintaining a fixed recall rate is sufficient for ensuring accuracy, whereas a fixed threshold is suboptimal for reducing computational cost. Therefore, we propose a dynamic thresholding scheme to improve sparsity while maintaining the same level of accuracy. Furthermore, our algorithm is deeply integrated with Flash Attention (FA), eliminating the need for any additional masking computation overhead. Experimental results on Wan 2.2 validate that, compared to the BLASST algorithm which is also integrated with FA, our dynamic thresholding strategy enhances sparsity from 61.42\% to 82\% with a VBench metric drop of less than 5\%. This results in an approximate 15\% in attention computation and a $1.61\times$ increase in computational efficiency, which is 1.18x higher than that of BLASST.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Continuous Splatting meets Retinex: Continuous Gaussian Splatting and Implicit Reflectance Modeling for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Low-light image enhancement aims to recover clear images from low-illumination observations and is crucial for high-level downstream vision tasks. However, existing methods frequently encounter color distortion and structural artifacts when balancing global smooth illumination adjustment and local high-frequency detail recovery. To address these issues, we propose CGS-Retinex as the first low-light image enhancement framework based on explicit-implicit joint modeling. Our framework deeply integrates continuous Gaussian splatting with Retinex theory. Specifically, we represent the image grid as a continuous parameter field and propose a continuous Gaussian renderer to estimate the spatially continuous global illumination distribution. This approach fundamentally eliminates grid artifacts caused by discrete Gaussian sampling. Furthermore, we introduce an implicit neural representation to model reflectance independently. We leverage shallow high-frequency features to guide the network in accurately reconstructing degraded texture details. Within the Retinex framework, we incorporate physics-inspired brightness consistency constraints and illumination smoothness regularization to enable explicit illumination and implicit reflectance to maintain proper exposure and achieve high-fidelity recovery of high-frequency structures and colors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CGS-Retinex significantly suppresses dark-region noise and overexposure while achieving exceptional high-frequency structural fidelity and color restoration by precisely decoupling illumination and texture. This work establishes a novel continuous physical representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Unified Multimodal Model for Brain MRI Imputation and Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great potential for medicine, as they inherit knowledge from LLM and allow multiple data modalities to be integrated, analysed and interpreted in natural language. However, the field of medical MLLMs is constrained by non-trivial challenges, notably the scarcity of high-quality training data and the frequent occurrence of missing data in the real-world clinical setting. Here, we propose a novel unified multimodal model, UniBrain, for brain magnetic resonance image (MRI) analysis. To address potential missing brain MRI modalities, we employ a unified training strategy to perform joint imaging modality imputation and brain image understanding. During training, an interleaved and description-enriched data flow is constructed to train the model in an autoregressive manner, enabling medical reasoning with generated multimodal data. A self-alignment strategy is introduced to leverage dense image embeddings to learn fine-grained anatomical features without requiring detailed image captions. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic hidden state mechanism to alleviate the exposure bias during long-context multimodal inference. Extensive experiments on multi-disease brain MRI dataset demonstrate that UniBrain achieves high performance for brain image imputation, understanding, and disease diagnosis under various extents of modality incompleteness.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

PermDoRA – Understanding Adapter Interference in Language Models: Limits of Parameter-Space Geometry

arXiv:2606.11262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Access control in large language models (LLMs) requires modular mechanisms to enable domain-specific behavior without retraining or cross-domain interference. A common hypothesis is that interference during adapter composition arises from overlap in linear parameter updates, suggesting that enforcing orthogonality or directional independence should improve multi-domain performance. We test this hypothesis using DoRA-RBAC, a hierarchical adapter composition framework based on weight-decomposed low-rank adaptation. We compare conventional Euclidean merging with a geometry-aware Riemannian-inspired merging strategy that approximates the Frechet mean via normalized directional averaging across multiple QA benchmarks (GPQA, PubMedQA, SimpleQA, WMDP) on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B. Our results show that while single-domain performance matches LoRA, geometry-aware merging provides no consistent advantage over standard averaging in multi-domain settings.Diagnostic analysis further reveals that angular alignment and orthogonality of adapter updates are weak predictors of composition performance. These findings suggest that adapter interference is not governed primarily by parameter-space geometry, but is instead consistent with interactions in shared nonlinear representations.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Stream3D: Sequential Multi-View 3D Generation via Evidential Memory

View-conditioned 3D generators such as SAM 3D, TRELLIS, and Hunyuan3D produce high-quality object reconstructions from a single view, but real-world visual observation often arrives as long monocular streams. Naively applying these generators to each streaming frame independently leads to severe temporal inconsistency in the generated results. To address this problem, we propose Stream3D, the first training-free streaming mechanism that turns a frozen view-conditioned 3D generator into a streaming generator with constant cross-chunk memory. Stream3D achieves this by maintaining a compact evidential memory, which selectively caches the most informative historical frames based on a proposed evidence score mechanism. As the stream progresses, the memory dynamically updates to retain a fixed number of informative frames, preventing the memory footprint from growing linearly with sequence length. This also prevents degradation over long sequences and keeps the underlying generator completely unchanged without retraining, architectural modifications, or auxiliary losses. Evaluated on both realistic and synthetic streaming benchmarks, Stream3D outperforms latent-transport baselines, including KV-cache reuse and flow-based feature editing, across both photometric and geometric metrics. More details can be found at: https://stream-3d.github.io/stream3d.github.io/.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Skills for the future software profession: beyond agentic AI!

arXiv:2606.21894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As coding agents are rapidly changing software engineering, a natural question is: what are the core skills needed by future software engineers? To identify where software engineering is headed and thus what skills will be needed, we summarize the results of two round-tables with researchers and industrial practitioners, held in 2026 in New York and Singapore. One key finding is that verification and validation is increasing in importance as agents handle implementation, as highlighted by anecdotes from the events. From our observations, we identify the skills developers need in the agentic era of development, with implications for training and educating future software engineers in coming years.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Robust Spin Splitting and Strain-Controlled Optical Response in Monolayer CrC2N4 for Valleytronic and Optoelectronic Applications

arXiv:2606.17329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolayer CrC2N4 recently emerged as a promising two-dimensional semiconductor, yet its spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) physics and strain-tunable optical response remained largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the electronic, valley, charge-transfer, and optical properties of pristine and biaxially strained monolayer CrC2N4 using first-principles calculations. The monolayer exhibited a direct band gap at the K/K' valleys. SOC produced valley contrasting out-of-plane spin polarization, yielding a moderate valence band spin splitting of 51.9 meV and a small conduction band spin splitting of 1.7 meV. Orbital-resolved analysis showed that the edge states were mainly governed by Cr-d and N-p hybridization, while Bader analysis indicated polar-covalent bonding through charge transfer toward N atoms. Biaxial strain in the range of -4% to +4% tuned the band gap from 1.987 to 1.421 eV and drove an indirect-to-direct gap transition near -1% strain. Tensile strain enhanced the Berry curvature and red-shifted the optical response toward the visible-near-infrared region. These results suggested monolayer CrC2N4 as a promising platform for strain-engineered valleytronic and optoelectronic device applications.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FrequencyFormer: A Co-Designed Sensor-to-Processor Pipeline for Frequency-Domain Vision Transformer Inference

Deploying vision transformers (ViTs) on sensor-edge systems is limited not only by on-device compute, but also by the energy and bandwidth required to transmit high-dimensional image data from the sensor to the processor. While in-sensor and near-sensor computing reduce this cost through early feature extraction, existing methods often provide only modest compression. We observe that the frequency domain provides a naturally compact representation of visual information and can be exploited at the sensor level to reduce sensor-to-processor data movement. Building on this insight, we present FrequencyFormer, a co-designed sensor-to-processor pipeline for efficient ViT inference. FrequencyFormer includes: (1) a multi-scale DCT tokenizer that compresses a 224x224 image into compact frequency-domain tokens, achieving up to 128x reduction in off-chip data volume with modest accuracy loss; (2) a LUT-based near-sensor hardware implementation that leverages fixed DCT coefficients for multiplier-free, energy- and area-efficient tokenization; and (3) a modified MIPI-based low-power communication architecture that further reduces transfer energy. FrequencyFormer serves as a drop-in replacement for standard ViT patch embedding and remains compatible with pretrained backbones across classification, detection, and segmentation tasks. The pipeline achieves 28.8 TOPS/W, reduces communication energy by 230x, and lowers total sensor-side energy by 2.22x, demonstrating frequency-domain tokenization as a scalable foundation for in-sensor ViT deployment.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pseudo-Formalization for Automatic Proof Verification

arXiv:2605.20531v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reliable verification of proofs remains a bottleneck for training and evaluating AI systems on hard mathematical reasoning. Fully formal proofs, in languages like Lean, are easy to verify because they are unambiguous and modular. Most proofs, particularly those written by AI systems, have neither property, and translating them into formal languages remains challenging in many frontier math settings. We propose Pseudo-Formalization (PF), a proof format that captures the modularity and precision of formal proofs while retaining the flexibility of natural language. A Pseudo-Formal proof is decomposed into self-contained modules, each stating its premises, conclusion, and proof in natural language. To verify the correctness of a regular natural language proof, an LLM translates it to Pseudo-Formal and then verifies each module independently, an algorithm we call Block Verification (BV). We evaluate PF+BV on two benchmarks spanning olympiad and research-level mathematics, where it pareto-dominates LLM-as-judge baselines on error-finding precision and recall. To support future work, we release our research-level proof verification benchmark ArxivMathGradingBench.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NOVA: NOise-aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration for Robust Large Language Models in RAG Systems

Accurately assessing model confidence is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in mission-critical factual domains. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely adopted to improve grounding, confidence calibration in RAG settings remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic study across four benchmarks, revealing that LLMs exhibit poor calibration performance especially when noisy contexts are retrieved. Specifically, contradictory or irrelevant evidence tends to exacerbate the model's overconfidence issue. To address this, we propose NOVA Rules (NOise-Aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration Rules) to provide a principled foundation for resolving overconfidence under noise. We further design NOVA, a noise-aware calibration framework that synthesizes supervision from ~2K HotpotQA examples guided by these rules. By performing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with this data, NOVA equips models with intrinsic noise awareness without relying on stronger teacher models. Empirical results show that NOVA yields substantial gains, improving ECE scores by 10.9% in-domain and 8.0% out-of-domain. By bridging the gap between retrieval noise and verbal calibration, NOVA paves the way for both accurate and epistemically reliable LLMs.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DreamX-World 1.0: A General-Purpose Interactive World Model

DreamX-World 1.0 is a general-purpose interactive text/image-to-video world model for controllable long-horizon generation. It supports camera navigation, revisits to previously observed regions, and promptable events across photorealistic, game-style, and stylized domains. Our data engine combines camera-accurate Unreal Engine rendering, action-rich gameplay recordings, and real-world videos with recovered camera geometry. For camera control, we introduce E-PRoPE, a lightweight variant of projective positional encoding that retains PRoPE's projective camera geometry while applying camera-aware attention to spatially reduced tokens. We convert a bidirectional video generator into a few-step autoregressive world model using causal forcing, DMD-style distillation, and long-rollout training. Training on self-generated long-horizon contexts exposes the model to its own generated history and reduces the style and color drift that accumulates across autoregressive chunks. Memory-Conditioned Scene Persistence retrieves earlier views through camera-geometry-based retrieval, while residual recycling makes the conditioning path less sensitive to imperfect memory latents. Event Instruction Tuning adds composable event control, and reinforcement learning alignment recovers camera control and visual quality after distillation. With mixed-precision DiT execution, residual reuse, 75\%-pruned VAE decoding, and asynchronous pipeline parallelism, DreamX-World 1.0 reaches up to 16\,FPS on eight RTX\,5090 GPUs. On our 5-second basic evaluation, DreamX-World 1.0 achieves a camera-control score of 73.75 and an overall score of 84.76, outperforming HY-WorldPlay 1.5 and LingBot-World in overall score, which achieve 80.79 and 80.45, respectively.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Towards Fast and Effective Long Video Understanding of Multimodal Large Language Models via Adaptive Quasi-Gaussian Sampling

Long video understanding remains a daunting challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) due to the excessive computation and memory footprint. Thus, keyframe selection is often adopted to mitigate this shortcoming, which however still suffers from low flexibility and high noise due to its hard sampling principle. In this paper, we define video frame selection as a problem of Quasi-Gaussian Sampling, and propose an adaptive and training-free approach termed AdaQ. Inspired by the $3$-$\sigma$ rule of Gaussian distribution, the objective of AdaQ is to achieve the optimal $3$-$\sigma$ interval for different examples, i.e., a smaller $3$-$\sigma$ interval for the local query and a larger one for the global query, thereby facilitating robust and adaptive frame sampling. To validate AdaQ, we apply it to four MLLMs with three embedding models. The extensive experimental results not only show its obvious performance gains over the default MLLMs and the SOTA keyframe selection methods, e.g., helping Qwen3-VL-8B outperform GPT4o by 15.8\% on average by using only 64 frames, but also confirm its superior robustness and high efficiency for long-video understanding, e.g., only 1 hyper-parameter needs to be set. Our code project is given at \href{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}{https://github.com/Zkayovo-xmu/AdaQ}.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

High coverage, persistent gaps: quality of Antenatal Care and its determinants in Zambia based on the 2024 Demographic and Health Survey.

Abstract Background Evaluating antenatal care (ANC) quality is critical to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. In Zambia, despite high basic ANC attendance, comprehensive national evidence on the clinical content and quality of services remains limited. This study assessed the coverage of WHO-recommended ANC interventions and identified factors associated with care quality using the latest national data. Methods A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data from the 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey. The final analytic sample comprised 4,829 women aged 15-49 with a live birth in the preceding 5 years. A composite index of 15 selected, equally weighted WHO-recommended components evaluated clinical assessment, counseling/screening, preventive interventions, and utilization. Survey-weighted Poisson regression estimated adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRRs) for the count of ANC components received. Results The mean ANC quality score was 12.5 out of 15 (95% CI: 12.4-12.6), and 78.5% (95% CI: 77.0-80.0) of women achieved adequate ANC ([≥] 12/15 components). While individual clinical and counseling coverage generally exceeded 90%, only 47.2% (95% CI: 45.3-49.0) of women initiated care during the first trimester, and just 4.8% (95% CI: 4.1-5.6) achieved [≥] 8 ANC contacts. Maternal education was the strongest and most stable predictor of quality across all models. Compared to no education, higher education was associated with an 8.0% higher expected quality score (aIRR = 1.080, 95% CI: 1.051-1.110). Lower ANC quality was significantly associated with unwanted pregnancies (aIRR = 0.970, 95% CI: 0.956-0.993) and with residence in Western (aIRR = 0.923, 95% CI: 0.897-0.951) and North Western (aIRR = 0.966, 95% CI: 0.937-0.996) provinces. Absence of distance barriers and residence in Eastern, Luapula, and Copperbelt provinces were associated with higher quality scores. Conclusion While average ANC component coverage in Zambia is high, critical gaps persist in early initiation and total contact frequency. Care adequacy is strongly influenced by maternal education, relationship status, pregnancy intention, and regional inequities. These findings underscore the need for interventions targeted at uneducated women, preventing unintended pregnancies, and underserved regions such as Western and North Western Provinces. Keywords: Antenatal care quality, ANC content, Zambia, maternal education.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Beyond Scalar Distances: Semantic Attribute Gradients from Frozen MLLMs for Visual Embeddings

Vision encoders for retrieval are typically trained with class-label supervision: each training pair reduces to a scalar that uniformly pushes the embedding apart or pulls it together, as if every visual attribute either differed or matched. A multimodal large language model (MLLM), shown the same pair, can articulate those attributes and use them to predict whether the images share a class. We propose SAGA, a framework that turns this language-grounded, attribute-aware perception into a training signal for the encoder itself. Specifically, we use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) to reward the MLLM for correct predictions on the vision encoder's tokens. Since correct predictions require those tokens to expose the specific attributes that differ or match between the pair, the gradient pushes the encoder to encode them, replacing the uniform pair-level scalar with attribute-resolved supervision. An auxiliary attention-distillation loss anchors the encoder's embedding to tokens the MLLM attended to, and a standard metric-learning loss shapes the embedding geometry for nearest-neighbour retrieval. The MLLM is frozen throughout and discarded at inference, matching the deployment cost of a metric-learning baseline. SAGA improves Recall@1 by 3 to 6 points over state-of-the-art baselines on CUB-200-2011, Cars-196, FGVC-Aircraft, and iNaturalist Aves on zero-shot image retrieval.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Proper and improper mixed states serve as different prior beliefs for quantum state retrodiction

arXiv:2502.10030v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A mixed quantum state can be taken as capturing an unspecified form of ignorance; or as describing the lack of knowledge about the true pure state of the system ("proper mixture"); or as arising from entanglement with another system that has been disregarded ("improper mixture"). These different views yield identical density matrices and therefore identical predictions for future measurements. But when used as prior beliefs for inferring the past state from later observations ("retrodiction"), they lead to different updated beliefs. This is a purely quantum feature of Bayesian agency. Based on this observation, we establish a framework for retrodicting on any quantum belief and we prove a necessary and sufficient condition for the equivalence of beliefs. We also illustrate how these differences have operational consequences in quantum state recovery.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

OmniPath Metabo: chemical structures, interactions and mechanisms to study the metabolome

Mechanistic and functional analysis of omics data largely relies on the incorporation of prior knowledge; however, connecting metabolomics data and knowledge is a major methodological challenge. This is largely driven by the diverse prior knowledge being fragmented across many databases requiring the merging of different database records across chemical structures, identifiers, and varying levels of structural specificity. Hence, this limits mechanistic interpretation and functional characterisation of the metabolome. Here, we present OmniPath Metabo, a comprehensive, harmonized, metabolome-centric database covering metabolites, lipids, food-derived compounds, and small molecule drugs, along with their associated receptors, transporters, enzymes, reactions, allosteric regulators, and disease associations. OmniPath Metabo harmonizes attributes using controlled vocabularies and ontologies, structures and built-in cheminformatics to map identifiers and track ambiguity. OmniPath Metabo is built directly from 40+ original resources and is freely accessible via an interactive web app and API at metabo.omnipathdb.org. OmniPath Metabo enables dynamic, context-specific construction of subnetworks to serve dedicated purposes, such as cell-cell communication or integrated multi-omics metabolite-driven regulation, connecting reactions, allosteric regulation, metabolite-receptor and metabolite-transporter interactions. Combining it with the over 170 other resources in OmniPath, it can be used for integrated networks of signaling, gene regulation, and metabolism. We showcase the application of OmniPath Metabo by analysing publicly available metabolomics data of lung cancer cell lines and metabolic footprints to mutational patterns. In summary, OmniPath Metabo transforms fragmented resources into a harmonised prior knowledge framework for a mechanistic and functional analysis of the metabolome.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

ParallelBench: Understanding the Trade-offs of Parallel Decoding in Diffusion LLMs

arXiv:2510.04767v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While most autoregressive LLMs are constrained to one-by-one decoding, diffusion LLMs (dLLMs) have attracted growing interest for their potential to dramatically accelerate inference through parallel decoding. Despite this promise, the conditional independence assumption in dLLMs causes parallel decoding to ignore token dependencies, inevitably degrading generation quality when these dependencies are strong. However, existing works largely overlook these inherent challenges, and evaluations on standard benchmarks (e.g., math and coding) are not sufficient to capture the quality degradation caused by parallel decoding. To address this gap, we first provide an information-theoretic analysis of parallel decoding. We then conduct case studies on analytically tractable synthetic list operations from both data distribution and decoding strategy perspectives, offering quantitative insights that highlight the fundamental limitations of parallel decoding. Building on these insights, we propose ParallelBench, the first benchmark specifically designed for dLLMs, featuring realistic tasks that are trivial for humans and autoregressive LLMs yet exceptionally challenging for dLLMs under parallel decoding. Using ParallelBench, we systematically analyze both dLLMs and autoregressive LLMs, revealing that: (i) dLLMs under parallel decoding can suffer dramatic quality degradation in real-world scenarios, and (ii) current parallel decoding strategies struggle to adapt their degree of parallelism based on task difficulty, thus failing to achieve meaningful speedup without compromising quality. Our findings underscore the pressing need for innovative decoding methods that can overcome the current speed-quality trade-off. We release our benchmark to help accelerate the development of truly efficient dLLMs.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Real-Time Interactive Music Generation via Data-Free Streaming Consistency Distillation

arXiv:2606.24307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interactive music and live performance relies on real-time human expression, but modern generative music AI remains largely absent from this domain due to its prohibitive inference latency and offline rendering paradigm. To provide pioneer musicians with a novel medium for interactive composition, we should fundamentally change these static models into dynamic, playable instruments. In this paper, we propose a framework that bridges this gap. To achieve the low latency required for live interaction without sacrificing structural coherence, we formulate distillation within a streaming autoregressive latent space. Our approach gets rid of the need for expensive paired audio-latent datasets by utilizing prompt-only inputs to synthesize teacher-guided, chunk-wise trajectories on the fly. Because live instruments require high acoustic fidelity, we introduce music-aware consistency objectives, which combine latent, spectral, and temporal-difference losses, to preserve crucial qualities like timbre, transients, and rhythmic stability during accelerated single-step streaming generation. Implemented via parameter-efficient adaptation, our distillation reduces generation steps to achieve a low real-time factor. Crucially, by operating as a continuous autoregressive stream, the system can seamlessly assimilate dynamic human inputs on the fly, allowing users to instantly steer the musical trajectory without interrupting the audio flow. Ultimately, this work recontextualizes generative text-to-music models not as passive prompt-and-wait systems, but as responsive instruments, opening new frontiers for live human-AI musical co-creation.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Direct/adaptive-mixture phase-gradient learning for neural-network quantum states with complex phase structure

arXiv:2606.13912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural-network quantum states (NQS) are a leading variational tool for quantum many-body physics, yet their optimization is fragile whenever the ground state carries a non-trivial sign or complex phase structure, a situation generic to gauge fields, broken time-reversal symmetry, and fermionic statistics. We trace this fragility to the stochastic estimator of the phase gradient rather than to network expressiveness. The phase sector of the Monte Carlo energy gradient is a noisy score-function estimator; differentiating the local energy instead yields a direct estimator that is unbiased for the same phase force, has far lower variance, and requires only a separated amplitude–phase ansatz. Demonstrated on a 100-site flux ladder, a small network trained this way reaches $0.89\%$ median error, where tuned standard baselines plateau at $1.8\%$ and wider or deeper standard-gradient networks degrade from $8.4\%$ to $24.6\%$. The advantage carries over to chiral XXX chains: the direct estimator again converges to a markedly lower error than the standard one, across $\alpha$ and size; it grows with flux and vanishes in zero-flux controls. An adaptive-mixture of the two estimators is provably never worse in variance than the better endpoint at the optimal mixing coefficient, with seed-resolved diagnostics tracing much of the gain to eliminating failed runs. Estimator design thus emerges as a first-class lever for complex-valued neural quantum states.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GeoCFNet: Geometry-Aware Confidence Field Network for Robot-Assisted Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection

Advanced surgical robotics has made robot-assisted endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) a promising approach for the en-bloc resection of large lesions, with the potential to reduce recurrence and improve long-term outcomes. However, the technical complexity and risk of complications in ESD demand stable and precise visual guidance to maintain an accurate dissection corridor and a safe tissue margin. Dense confidence fields provide an effective representation for this purpose by describing both the preferred dissection region and its spatial transition to surrounding tissue. However, reliable confidence field estimation remains challenging in dynamic endoscopic scenes due to smoke, specular highlights, tissue deformation, weak texture, and the thin geometric structure of the target region. To address these challenges, we formulate dissection guidance as a geometry-aware confidence field estimation problem and propose GeoCFNet, a geometry-aware confidence field network built on a pretrained DINOv3 backbone. GeoCFNet integrates a Token-Differentiated Fusion module to aggregate class-token context with dense patch representations, a SegFormer decoder for confidence regression, and Geometry-Aware Spatial Regularization (GASR) to preserve spatial coherence and local geometric transitions. Experimental results show that GeoCFNet achieves RMSE 0.0480, PSNR 27.1995, SSIM 0.3397, and CC 0.2466, indicating accurate and geometrically stable confidence field estimation for robot-assisted ESD guidance.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Agents' Last Exam

Recent AI systems have achieved strong results on a wide range of benchmarks, yet these gains have not translated into economically meaningful deployment across many professional domains. We argue that this gap is largely an evaluation problem: widely used benchmarks lack sustained performance measurement on real and economically valuable workflows. This paper introduces Agents' Last Exam (ALE), a benchmark designed to evaluate AI agents on long horizon, economically valuable, real world tasks with verifiable outcomes. Developed in collaboration with 250+ industry experts, ALE covers non-physical industries defined with reference to O*NET / SOC 2018 (the U.S. federal occupational taxonomy). It is organized around a task taxonomy with 55 sub fields grouped into 13 industry clusters covering 1K+ tasks. Current results show that the hardest tier remains far from saturated: across mainstream harness and backbone configurations, the average full pass rate is below 1%. ALE is designed as a living benchmark: its task pool grows continuously as new workflows and industries are onboarded. More broadly, ALE is intended not merely as another leaderboard, but as an instrument for closing the gap between benchmark success and GDP relevant impact.