Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15461

ESBMC-PLC: Formal Verification of IEC 61131-3 Ladder Diagram Programs Using SMT-Based Model Checking

Authors:

Pierre Dantas ↗Lucas Cordeiro ↗Waldir Junior ↗

PLCs execute safety-critical programs across industrial sectors. The dominant PLC notation, ladder diagram (LD) per IEC 61131-3, remains absent from formal verification: SMT-based model checkers cannot process LD's rung-and-coil graphics. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC, the first open-source formal verifier with native LD support (PLCopen XML format), implemented as a new ESBMC frontend. ESBMC-PLC translates LD rungs to GOTO IR, models the PLC scan cycle as a while(true) loop with nondeterministic inputs, and checks safety properties via SMT-based bounded model checking or k-induction. A five-property YAML language (mutual_exclusion, invariant, absence, response, reachability) avoids temporal logic. A survey of 22 studies (2020-2026) identifies four research gaps; ESBMC-PLC closes two of them. Evaluation on 13 benchmarks (6 domains, 3 sources - including deployed CONTROLLINO PLCs and MathWorks Simulink PLC Coder) shows correct classification across 61 properties: all 9 author-constructed programs (Categories A/B) as expected, all 4 vendor programs (Category C) correctly unlabeled, with 8 bugs found (actionable counterexamples), 7 unbounded k-induction proofs, all runs under 60ms on Apple Silicon. Feature comparison with PLCverif shows that ESBMC-PLC is the only open-source tool that combines native LD, k-induction, and SMT bit-vector semantics.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2603.29924

Abstraction in Style: Beyond Texture and Color

Authors:

Min Lu ↗Yuanfeng He ↗Anthony Chen ↗Jianhuang He ↗Pu Wang ↗Daniel Cohen-Or ↗Hui Huang ↗

Artistic styles often embed abstraction beyond surface appearance, involving deliberate reinterpretation of structure rather than mere changes in texture or color. Conventional style transfer methods typically preserve the input geometry and therefore struggle to capture this deeper abstraction behavior, especially for illustrative and nonphotorealistic styles. In this work, we introduce Abstraction in Style (AiS), a generative framework that separates structural abstraction from visual stylization. Given a target image and a small set of style exemplars, AiS first derives an intermediate abstraction proxy that reinterprets the target's structure in accordance with the abstraction logic exhibited by the style. The proxy captures semantic structure while relaxing geometric fidelity, enabling subsequent stylization to operate on an abstracted representation rather than the original image. In a second stage, the abstraction proxy is rendered to produce the final stylized output, preserving visual coherence with the reference style. Both stages are implemented using a shared image space analogy, enabling transformations to be learned from visual exemplars without explicit geometric supervision. By decoupling abstraction from appearance and treating abstraction as an explicit, transferable process, AiS supports a wider range of stylistic transformations, improves controllability, and enables more expressive stylization.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12402

DIRECT: When and Where Should You Allocate Test-Time Compute in Embodied Planners?

Authors:

Jadelynn Dao ↗Milan Ganai ↗Yasmina Abukhadra ↗Ajay Sridhar ↗Mozhgan Nasr Azadani ↗Katie Luo ↗Clark Barrett ↗Jiajun Wu ↗Chelsea Finn ↗Marco Pavone ↗

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as high-level planners for embodied agents, with an emerging strategy of scaling test-time compute to improve capability. However, we observe that doing so increases latency, token usage, and FLOPs while yielding uneven, often diminishing gains in downstream success, limiting where embodied agents can be deployed. We argue that choosing when and where to spend test-time compute is central to bringing frontier performance to the real world. We introduce DIRECT, a routing framework that uses multimodal scene context to allocate compute per prompt, improving the success–cost Pareto frontier over fixed model selection. Across three dominant scaling axes, namely chain-of-thought depth, model size, and memory history, our experiments on VLABench and RoboMME show that test-time compute is not a uniform lever: different axes yield qualitatively distinct capability gains. We validate these insights on a physical Franka arm in a DROID setup spanning zero-shot manipulation and long-horizon chaining, where our router matches or exceeds a stronger model's success rate at up to 65% lower average latency. Ultimately, our results show that naively scaling test-time compute is wasteful, and that DIRECT can provide frontier-level embodied planning in robotic systems at a fraction of the cost. Project page can be found at jadee-dao.github.io/direct/.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2603.01250

The MAMA-MIA Challenge: Advancing Generalizability and Fairness in Breast MRI Tumor Segmentation and Treatment Response Prediction

Authors:

arXiv:2603.01250v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed malignancy among women worldwide and a leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Dynamic contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging plays a central role in tumor characterization and treatment monitoring, particularly in patients receiving neoadjuvant chemotherapy. However, existing artificial intelligence models for breast magnetic resonance imaging are typically developed and evaluated using heterogeneous datasets, study populations, and assessment protocols, making direct comparison difficult and limiting understanding of model robustness across institutions and clinically relevant patient subgroups. The MAMA-MIA Challenge was designed to address these challenges by providing a standardized benchmark for the joint evaluation of primary tumor segmentation and prediction of pathologic complete response using pre-treatment magnetic resonance imaging only. The training cohort comprised 1,506 patients from multiple institutions in the United States, while evaluation was conducted on an external test set of 574 patients from three independent European centers to assess cross-continental and cross-institutional generalization. A unified scoring framework combined predictive performance with subgroup consistency across age, menopausal status, and breast density. Twenty-six international teams participated in the final evaluation phase. Results demonstrate substantial performance variability under a common external evaluation framework and reveal trade-offs between overall accuracy and subgroup fairness. The challenge provides standardized datasets, evaluation protocols, and public resources to promote the development of robust and equitable artificial intelligence systems for breast cancer imaging.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11783

A Comprehensive Ecosystem for Open-Domain Customized Video Generation

Authors:

Jingxu Zhang ↗Yuqian Hong ↗Daneul Kim ↗Kai Qiu ↗Qi Dai ↗Jianmin Bao ↗Yifan Yang ↗Xiaoyan Sun ↗Chong Luo ↗

Recent progress in video generation has shown impressive visual synthesis capabilities. However, open-domain customized video generation remains limited by the lack of large-scale, annotated datasets capturing diverse identity-specific attributes. To address this, we introduce PexelsCustom-1M, the first publicly available million-scale dataset for identity-preserving video generation, containing one million curated triplets across 8,000+ categories. Leveraging this, we propose CustoMDiT, a parameter-efficient framework that adapts a pretrained multimodal Diffusion Transformer into a customized video generator with only 8% additional learnable parameters. Our method surpasses prior state-of-the-art. However, benchmarks such as DreamBooth cover only 100 classes, which is insufficient for real-world applications. To overcome this, we construct OpenCustom, a new benchmark with 1,000+ categories, created via cross-dataset knowledge fusion from ImageNet and MS-COCO. Extensive experiments confirm the advantages of both our dataset and model. We will open-source the entire ecosystem–including dataset, pipeline, benchmark, and implementations–to support further research.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.10136

iSAGE: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation via Sparse Point Supervision

Authors:

Osmar Luiz Ferreira de Carvalho ↗Osmar Abilio de Carvalho Junior ↗Anesmar Olino de Albuquerque ↗Daniel Guerreiro e Silva ↗

Semantic segmentation in remote sensing requires costly pixel-level annotations, and nearly every problem demands a new dataset since models rarely transfer across sensors, platforms, or geographies. Existing human-in-the-loop frameworks expand sparse clicks into dense supervision via auxiliary machinery (pseudo-labels, propagation, CRFs, foundation-model prompts, auxiliary heads), all operating on the model's predictive distribution. A confidently wrong pixel is indistinguishable from a confidently correct one in that distribution by construction, so no rule reading it can separate the two; the distinguishing signal is external to the model. This paper hypothesizes that expert clicks targeting confident model errors, not arbitrary pixels, suffice to match dense supervision, with no expansion machinery. iSAGE (Iterative Sparse Annotation Guided by Expert) realizes this hypothesis on an integrated open-source platform, where an error-weighted loss amplifies the gradient at each click and the annotation record itself is the dataset, extensible, correctable, and auditable. Experiments use a minimum-effort regime: at most one labeled pixel per class per frame. On BsB Aerial, iSAGE recovers 97.2% of dense supervision (74.79% mIoU on 0.040% of pixels) with contrasting class dynamics: amorphous classes (permeable areas) saturate from the seed, while small classes (cars) require late-iteration effort. On ISPRS Vaihingen (external benchmark), iSAGE reaches 76.78% mIoU with 0.011% of pixels, matching the dense baseline (76.65%) and exceeding all published methods. Under the same pipeline, four output-reading mechanisms (oracle entropy across budgets 1–100x, pseudo-labels across thresholds 0.90–0.99, CRF-based propagation, uniform random) plateau 7.4 to 14.5 pp below iSAGE. Across 31 surveyed methods, iSAGE is the only iterative human-in-the-loop framework operating without auxiliary machinery.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.08493

Querying Counterfactuals on Tissue Graphs with Supervised Disentanglement

Authors:

Abdul Moeed ↗Stefan Schrod ↗Martin Rohbeck ↗Marc Jan Bonder ↗Pavlo Lutsik ↗Oliver Stegle ↗Daniel Dimitrov ↗

arXiv:2606.08493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tissue graph counterfactuals ask how a cell's expression would change under altered spatial neighbor contexts. Such queries are central to predicting cell behavior in tissues, but lack a unified definition, with existing methods targeting specific intervention types or treating cells as i.i.d. In this work, we first formalize tissue graph counterfactuals as a class of spatial interventions that either rewire connections between cells (edge perturbation) or modify the expression of their neighbors (node perturbation). We then introduce Cellina (https://cellina.readthedocs.io) - a framework that uses supervised disentanglement to decompose a cell's intrinsic state from its spatial context, using the latter as a conditioning input for counterfactual predictions. Across benchmarks spanning over 2.5 million spatially-resolved cells in colorectal cancer and mouse brain, Cellina outperforms spatially-informed and non-spatial competitors in in-silico graph perturbations, disentanglement, and scalability. Additionally, we show that Cellina reveals biologically distinct cancer subdomains in an unsupervised manner and enables targeted neighbor perturbation simulations.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.02800

Cosmos 3: Omnimodal World Models for Physical AI

Authors:

NVIDIA ↗Aditi ↗Niket Agarwal ↗Arslan Ali ↗Jon Allen ↗Martin Antolini ↗Adeline Aubame ↗Alisson Azzolini ↗Junjie Bai ↗Maciej Bala ↗Yogesh Balaji ↗Josh Bapst ↗…

We introduce Cosmos 3, a family of omnimodal world models designed to jointly process and generate language, image, video, audio, and action sequences within a unified mixture-of-transformers architecture. By supporting highly flexible input-output configurations, Cosmos 3 seamlessly unifies critical modalities for Physical AI – effectively subsuming vision-language models, video generators, world simulators, and world-action models into a single framework. Our evaluation demonstrates that Cosmos 3 establishes a new state-of-the-art across a diverse suite of understanding and generation tasks, demonstrating omnimodal world models as scalable, general-purpose backbones for embodied agents. Our post-trained Cosmos 3 models were ranked as the best open-source Text-to-Image and Image-to-Video models by Artificial Analysis, and the best policy model by RoboArena at the time the technical report was written. To accelerate open research and deployment in Physical AI, we make our code, model checkpoints, curated synthetic datasets, and evaluation benchmark available under the Linux Foundation's OpenMDW-1.1 License at https://github.com/nvidia/cosmos and https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/cosmos3. The project website is available at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/cosmos-lab/cosmos3.

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09.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20246

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

Authors:

Gia-Binh Nguyen ↗Trong-Bao Ho ↗Thien-Loc Ha ↗Khoa Vo ↗Philip Lund M{\o}ller ↗Quang T. Nguyen ↗Long Dinh ↗Tuan Dam ↗Vu Duong ↗Tung M. Luu ↗Trung Le ↗Tran Nguyen Le ↗…

arXiv:2606.20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference. In this work, we reveal a highly non-trivial architectural characteristic of these continuous control foundation policies (e.g., pi_0, GR00T-N1.5): despite being trained on diverse physical trajectories, they exhibit severe layer-wise representational redundancy. To exploit this, we introduce a structural compression pipeline that is entirely training-free, bypassing the need of existing methods to load full-scale models to learn optimized token reductions or dynamic layer selectors. Instead, using only a single forward pass via Centered Kernel Alignment to identify redundant layer features, we remove twin layers to permanently compress the model depth by up to 50% across both the VLM backbone and the continuous control policy head. Downstream fine-tuning of this streamlined architecture yields a dual acceleration benefit: a 40-50% reduction in training time and up to 30% faster real-time inference, while matching or exceeding full-scale base model performance. We comprehensively validate our method across three simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, RoboCasa, SimplerEnv) and 10 diverse real-world manipulation tasks across 4 unique robotic embodiments. These results prove that advanced VLAs require significantly fewer layers than previously assumed, offering a highly compute-efficient paradigm for scalable robot learning.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17406

Graph Neural Networks for Semi-Supervised Image Classification with Multi-Feature Aggregation

Authors:

Marina Chagas Bulach Gapski ↗Vinicius Atsushi Sato Kawai ↗Gustavo Rosseto Leticio ↗Lucas Pascotti Valem ↗Daniel Carlos Guimar\~aes Pedronette ↗Mohand Said Allili ↗

Feature extraction involves the identification and extraction of salient characteristics or patterns, including edges, textures, shapes, and color attributes. Contemporary feature extractors predominantly leverage deep learning architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (VITs). The availability of diverse feature extractors in the literature provides a wide range of feature representations. Features extracted from an image depend on the specific application, the chosen extractor, and its configuration. Therefore, integrating complementary information by combining distinct extractors offers a promising way to enhance performance. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), particularly Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), have emerged as powerful and widely adopted approaches for semi-supervised image classification, as they effectively leverage both labeled and unlabeled data while exploiting the underlying graph structures that capture relationships among samples. This study proposes a novel approach for GNNs in scenarios where labeled data is scarce, by integrating diverse sets of feature and graph representations derived from various extractors in classification scenarios. Experimental investigations were conducted, encompassing combinations of distinct feature and graph extractors, as well as rank aggregation strategies. The primary contributions of this work are underscored by the experimental findings, which demonstrate that the strategic combination of feature and graph representations, coupled with the application of manifold learning for graph processing, leads to significant improvements in classification accuracy across the majority of experimental conditions. Furthermore, the utilization of rank aggregation techniques to integrate features from different extractors was shown to enhance classification accuracy.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13993

The Holistic Storage of Verb+Up Phrases in Text-based and Audio-based Language Models

Authors:

Zachary Nicholas Houghton ↗Yu Zhou ↗Dan Pluth ↗Vijay K. Gurbani ↗

A crucial aspect of linguistic capability is the ability to trade off between stored representations and abstract knowledge: one must retrieve learned representations, but also generate novel ones by applying productive rules. While recent work has examined abstract knowledge in language models, holistic storage of multi-word units has received far less attention. We probe internal representations in text-based LLMs and an ASR model, testing whether V+up phrasal verbs develop distinct representations as a function of frequency and predictability. All models show evidence of holistic storage driven by frequency and predictability, further supporting usage-based theories of language.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.19031

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

Authors:

Mengxi Liu ↗Sizhen Bian ↗Vitor Fortes ↗Francisco Calatrava Nicolas ↗Daniel Gei{\ss}ler ↗Maximilian Kiefer-Emmanouilidis ↗Bo Zhou ↗Paul Lukowicz ↗

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20487

Beyond Global Replanning: Hierarchical Recovery for Cross-Device Agent Systems

Authors:

Shu Yao ↗Yuhua Luo ↗Qian Long ↗Jingru Fan ↗Zhuoyuan Yu ↗Yuheng Wang ↗Lin Wu ↗Yufan Dang ↗Huatao Li ↗Chen Qian ↗

Real-world computer-use tasks often span multiple applications and devices, requiring agents to coordinate heterogeneous environments under dynamic runtime failures. Existing multi-device agent systems support task decomposition and cross-device assignment, but recovery remains largely coarse-grained: when execution fails, they typically retry the same strategy, reassign the subtask, or revise the global plan, without systematically modeling the device-local strategy space. This limits their ability to distinguish failures that can be repaired within the current device from those that require cross-device replanning. We propose H-RePlan, a hierarchical replanning framework for multi-device agents with unified API–CLI–GUI execution. H-RePlan equips each device with interchangeable execution strategies and separates device-local strategy recovery from orchestrator-level global replanning through a compact cross-layer failure abstraction. To evaluate this capability, we introduce HeraBench, a fault-injected benchmark that constructs cross-device workflows over Linux and Android devices and injects strategy- and device-level failures. Experiments show that H-RePlan substantially outperforms single-strategy and coarse-grained multi-device baselines, achieving higher completion, instruction adherence, and perfect-pass rates while reducing the token cost required for reliable end-to-end success. These results demonstrate that scope-aware hierarchical recovery is essential for robust multi-device agent execution.

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14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18535

Shrinkage priors for Bayesian Substitute Confounders

Authors:

Yordan P. Raykov ↗Hengrui Luo ↗Justin D. Strait ↗Wasiur R. KhudaBukhsh ↗

arXiv:2606.18535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-cause observational studies contain information about unmeasured confounding through the dependence structure among causes. However, literal imputation of the unobserved confounder is often more complex than learning a lower-dimensional substitute score that preserves the shared assignment variation needed for stable causal adjustment. The deconfounder (Wang and Blei, 2019) and related substitute confounder methods exploit this idea, but flexible assignment models can fit the joint distribution of the causes while producing scores that over-encode the treatment vector, collapse overlap, or capture single-cause variation. We develop a Bayesian factor assignment framework for learning sparse substitute confounders that retain coarse multi-cause dependence with shrinkage priors. The theory is stated at the level of posterior concentration, factor score contraction, and overlap-preserving assignment geometry and therefore does not rely on a particular shrinkage prior. Under these conditions, the proposed regression-adjusted estimators are consistent for mean potential outcomes when the corresponding latent variable identification assumptions hold. Shrinkage priors provide a natural tool for latent structural learning: they favour low-dimensional factors supported by multiple causes, discourage effectively single-cause factors, and induce an ordering of the latent factors through progressive shrinkage. Synthetic experiments illustrate the roles of signal strength, outcome validity, and geometry-aware regularization. In an Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline analysis, sparse substitute scores recover much of the adjustment obtained by directly conditioning on invasive cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers, while collapse diagnostics identify when fitted factors reduce to individual observed measurements.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18203

RubricsTree: Scalable and Evolving Open-Ended Evaluation of Personal Health Agents across Health Memory and Medical Skills

Authors:

Weizhi Zhang ↗Zechen Li ↗Hamid Palangi ↗Ben Graef ↗A. Ali Heydari ↗Simon A. Lee ↗Salman Rahman ↗Ray Luo ↗Zeinab Esmaeilpour ↗Erik Schenck ↗Chloe Zhang ↗Yamin Li ↗…

The LLM-empowered personal health agents with user health (sensor) metrics have offered a promising pathway to alleviate global disparities in healthcare access. However, large-scale clinical deployment remains constrained by an open-ended evaluation bottleneck: physician annotation is reliable but costly and unscalable, while LLM-as-a-judge evaluators are scalable but subjective, inconsistent, and sometimes clinically misaligned. We introduce RubricsTree, a scalable evaluation framework with an expert-aligned hierarchical taxonomy of over 100 atomic, clinically-verifiable Boolean rubrics, evolving from the insights of 4,000 real user queries through an iterative human-in-the-loop curation protocol with an expertise panel led by an experienced physician. A context-aware adaptive router activates only the relevant auto-weighted rubric subset per query, providing the throughput needed for scalable evaluation with expert-aligned quality. Through a systematic meta-evaluation, we show that RubricsTree (i) substantially exceeds a strong large-scale evaluation baseline in expert alignment on challenging open-ended queries; (ii) reliably penalizes contextually degraded responses; and (iii) when used as structured instructions, text feedback, or training rewards for performance optimization, yields up to ~66% relative gains on HealthBench for Gemini, GPT, and Qwen model families. RubricsTree thus provides a scalable, auditable, and evolving evaluation infrastructure required for the continuous optimization of product-level personal healthcare AI.

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16.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16055

Readout-Induced Leakage in Superconducting Circuits with Nonlinear Couplings

Authors:

Sumeru Hazra ↗Wei Dai ↗Daniel K. Weiss ↗Pranav D. Parakh ↗Luigi Frunzio ↗Michel H. Devoret ↗

arXiv:2606.16055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In superconducting circuits, drive-induced unwanted transitions limit the readout power, thereby constraining readout speed and fidelity. When such transitions excite the qubit into leakage states, they produce correlated errors that are particularly harmful for quantum error correction. Native nonlinear qubit-readout resonator coupling is a promising alternative to conventional linear hybridization because it provides intrinsic Purcell protection and stricter selection rules for multiphoton processes. In realistic devices, however, we show that such a coupling alone neither eliminates nor necessarily suppresses drive-induced transitions. Instead, if not appropriately engineered, these couplings often worsen the situation by introducing additional parasitic processes. Moreover, the rates of these unwanted transitions remain sensitive to the choice of readout frequency, regardless of the coupling mechanism. We demonstrate that readout-induced leakage can thus vary by orders of magnitude even when readout frequencies differ by less than ~7%. Our results establish that the benefits of native nonlinear couplings are realized only through informed device design, including the spectral placement of relevant auxiliary modes and elimination of parasitic ones.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20551

Benchmark of quantum algorithms for ground state preparation in the presence of noise

Authors:

Daniel Molpeceres ↗Sirui Lu ↗J. Ignacio Cirac ↗Barbara Kraus ↗

arXiv:2606.20551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We compare the performance of representative cooling, adiabatic, and optimization algorithms for ground-state preparation in the presence of noise. Using an exactly solvable family of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians subject to depolarizing noise, we derive the scaling of the achievable relative energy as a function of the noise rate and support these results with numerical simulations. The Hamiltonian exhibits two phases, separated by a quantum phase transition. As expected, the performance of the different algorithms depends on the phase: adiabatic evolution is favorable in the trivial phase, while a multi-frequency cooling algorithm, as proposed in [1], becomes competitive or superior in the topological phase, where gap-closing limits adiabatic protocols. We further present numerical results for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm [2], showing that it performs competitively with cooling in the trivial phase but is typically outperformed in the topological regime. Finally, we show that for this model the cooling protocol exhibits enhanced robustness to parameter imperfections, highlighting its potential advantage for realistic implementations of noisy quantum state preparation. The analytical approach developed here, in conjunction with numerical validation, establishes an extendable approach to benchmarking ground-state preparation algorithms.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2602.22959

Can Agents Distinguish Visually Hard-to-Separate Diseases in a Zero-Shot Setting? A Pilot Study

Authors:

Zihao Zhao ↗Frederik Hauke ↗Juliana De Castilhos ↗Sven Nebelung ↗Daniel Truhn ↗

The rapid progress of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has led to increasing interest in agent-based systems. While most prior work in medical imaging concentrates on automating routine clinical workflows, we study an underexplored yet clinically significant setting: distinguishing visually hard-to-separate diseases in a zero-shot setting. We benchmark representative agents on two imaging-only proxy diagnostic tasks, (1) melanoma vs. atypical nevus and (2) pulmonary edema vs. pneumonia, where visual features are highly confounded despite substantial differences in clinical management. We introduce a multi-agent framework based on contrastive adjudication. Experimental results show improved diagnostic performance (an 11-percentage-point gain in accuracy on dermoscopy data) and reduced unsupported claims on qualitative samples, although overall performance remains insufficient for clinical deployment. We acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in human annotations and the absence of clinical context, which further limit the translation to real-world settings. Within this controlled setting, this pilot study provides preliminary insights into zero-shot agent performance in visually confounded scenarios.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19781

Towards Engineering Scaling Laws with Pretraining Data Composition

Authors:

Jan-Lucas Uslu ↗Kevin Greif ↗Daniel Whiteson ↗Benjamin Nachman ↗

arXiv:2606.19781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how model performance improves as a power law in compute, model size, and dataset size. While well-established for large language models, these relationships are emerging for large models in particle physics. As with language, empirical studies show that the performance scales as a power law. However, unlike natural language or image domains, fundamental physics has high-fidelity simulators that produce synthetic data cheaply. This favors scaling regimes where additional data is cheaper than additional parameters, and allows the pretraining dataset itself to be engineered to influence the scaling. For the task of classifying hadronic jets produced in collisions of high-energy particle beams, we show that the scaling behavior can be engineered towards requiring more data rather than larger models by inclusion of pretraining data which is more diverse and better aligned with the downstream classification task.

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20.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2511.10223

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

Authors:

David F. Anderson ↗Aidan S. Howells ↗Diego Rojas La Luz ↗

arXiv:2511.10223v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic reaction networks with mass-action kinetics provide a useful framework for understanding processes – biochemical and otherwise – in homogeneous environments. However, cellular reactions are often compartmentalized, either at the cell level or within cells, and hence non-homogeneous. We investigate a model of compartmentalization in which the rate of fragmentation of a compartment depends on the abundance of some designated species inside that compartment. The particular model of study is part of a general framework for compartmentalized chemistry with dynamic compartments that was proposed in (Duso and Zechner, PNAS, 2020). This paper builds on (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) where the special case where the compartment dynamics do not depend on their contents was studied mathematically. In particular, we demonstrate that the explosivity characterization from (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) fails in this setting and provide new sufficient conditions for non-explosivity and positive recurrence, under the assumption that the underlying CRN admits a linear Lyapunov function. These results extend the theoretical foundation for modeling content-mediated compartment dynamics, with implications for systems such as cell division and intracellular transport.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18874

Externalizing Research Synthesis and Validation in AI Scientists through a Research Harness

Authors:

Zijian Wang ↗Hanqi Li ↗Ziyue Yang ↗Zijian Hu ↗Shenghan Zuo ↗Yunzhe Zhang ↗Da Ma ↗Danyu Luo ↗Chenrun Wang ↗Jing Peng ↗Tiancheng Huang ↗Sijia Guo ↗…

arXiv:2606.18874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems can increasingly automate scientific workflows, but the reasoning that links prior evidence, generated ideas, experiments and final claims often remains implicit inside model inference. Here we introduce Xcientist, a research harness that externalizes research synthesis and experimental validation into inspectable, contract-governed processes. Xcientist organizes literature evidence, idea states, implementation plans, ablation records and repair traces as persistent research artifacts, so that generated mechanisms can be grounded, executed, tested and revised without losing their evidential basis. We identify claim drift as a failure mode of automated research, where runnable artifacts no longer support the mechanism originally claimed. Across training-free memory systems, graph-structured traffic forecasting and multi-scale physics-informed neural networks, Xcientist preserves traceable trajectories from problem formulation to mechanism design, validation and bounded revision. These results suggest that AI scientists should be evaluated not only by their final artifacts, but by whether their synthesis and validation processes remain attributable, inspectable and scientifically accountable.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20560

How Transparent is DiffusionGemma?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM reasoning transparency is a critical affordance for understanding model decisions, mitigating misuse and misalignment, and debugging surprising model behaviors. However, DiffusionGemma performs a larger fraction of its computation in a continuous latent space; does this make its reasoning less transparent? We study this question by decomposing transparency into two components: variable transparency, whether we understand intermediate snapshots of a model's computational state; and algorithmic transparency, whether we can use these snapshots to reconstruct the process by which the model arrived at its outputs. Naively, DiffusionGemma has poor variable transparency: its opaque serial depth, the amount of serial computation that occurs in between interpretable model states, seems at first 28.6X higher than the corresponding autoregressive Gemma 4 model. However, we show that we can map the information flowing between denoising steps through an interpretable token bottleneck with no decrease in downstream performance. Treating these intermediate states as interpretable reduces the opaque serial depth to just 1.1X that of Gemma 4. Algorithmic transparency is harder for diffusion models than for autoregressive models because all token predictions in the canvas can change at every denoising step, giving the model the power to implement complicated distributed algorithms during the denoising process. To begin bridging this gap, we conduct a suite of interpretability case studies, uncovering initial evidence of novel diffusion-specific phenomena such as non-chronological reasoning, token and sequence smearing, and intermediate-context reasoning. Finally, we test monitorability, a key application of transparency that measures whether model outputs are useful for downstream tasks. We find that DiffusionGemma is similarly monitorable to Gemma 4.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15007

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

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We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14577

Trap-Quenched Matter-Wave Optics for Dual Species Lensing

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dual-species atom interferometry in space promises precise tests of the Universality of Free Fall (UFF), with a sensitivity that grows quadratically with the extended interrogation time accessible in weightlessness. These tests demand exquisite control over the expansion energies of both condensed sources as well as over their differential center-of-mass dynamics. We propose a trap-quenched collimation technique featuring in-trap excitations of collective modes compatible with state-of-the-art atom-chip setups. Using NASA's Cold Atom Laboratory aboard the International Space Station, we demonstrate it on a single-species $^{87}$Rb condensate. By controlling the center-of-mass release dynamics we observe free expansion times up to 700 ms and measure a two-dimensional expansion energy of $k_B \cdot 78\pm 9 \;\mathrm{pK}$ in the imaging plane. A detailed model of the magnetically-induced dynamics indicates that this corresponds to a two-dimensional expansion energy of about $k_B \cdot 15^{+12}_{-5}\; \mathrm{pK}$ along two of the condensate's eigenaxes. Finally, we theoretically study this trap-quenched collimation scheme for a $^{41}$K-$^{87}$Rb mixture, predicting a simultaneous collimation that meets the expansion energy requirements for a state-of-the-art UFF test at the $10^{-15}$ accuracy level.

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25.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11092

RoboNaldo: Accurate, Stable and Powerful Humanoid Soccer Shooting via Motion-Guided Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Yichao Zhong ↗Yidan Lu ↗Yuhang Lu ↗Tianyang Tang ↗Haoguang Mai ↗Yixuan Pan ↗Tianyu Li ↗Li Chen ↗Jingbo Wang ↗Zhongyu Li ↗Peng Lu ↗Hongyang Li ↗…

arXiv:2606.11092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Elite humanoid soccer shooting requires whole-body stability, high-impulse whole-body interactions, and accuracy to targets. Motion tracking-driven reinforcement learning (RL) provides stability in whole-body movement coordination, but a fixed reference makes it hard to adapt to varied ball positions and strike timings; in contrast, task reward-driven RL struggles to explore and discover valid kicks from scratch. We therefore introduce RoboNaldo, a three-stage motion-guided curriculum RL framework for high-impulse humanoid interaction. A single human-kick reference is used as a scaffold and progressively shifts optimization towards shooting performance. The curriculum first learns a stable whole-body kicking prior, then adapts the kick to free-kick settings where the ball is stationary at random positions, and finally extends it to moving-ball shooting through a locomotion-command and kick-trigger interface. A high-level heuristic planner controls this interface during training, while alternative high-level controllers can drive the same low-level policy at inference. In simulation, RoboNaldo demonstrates free-kick shot error 48.6% lower and shoot velocity 2.96x than prior work baselines. In real world on a Unitree G1 with onboard perception, RoboNaldo attains 0.73 m and 0.86 m average target shooting error from 3 m away in free-kick and moving-ball cases, accordingly. And the post-contact ball velocity reaches 13.10 m/s, which is 59-71% of reported professional open-play shot speed. Project page: https://opendrivelab.com/RoboNaldo.

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