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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SING: Synthetic Intention Graph for Scalable Active Tool Discovery in LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on agent harnesses that manage context, tools, and multi-turn execution, making tools a central interface for acting in realistic digital environments. As harness-connected tool ecosystems expand to hundreds or thousands of APIs, services, and task-specific skills, exhaustive tool schema injection becomes costly and imposes a closed-world assumption that limits agents to a predefined static inventory. Retrieval-augmented tool selection offers a natural alternative, but existing one-shot retrieval methods often fail to align isolated tool descriptions with the agent's true task intention, especially in long-horizon tasks where required capabilities emerge through decomposition, observations, and newly induced subgoals. We propose SING, an intention-aware active tool discovery framework that builds an intention-tool graph linking user intentions, tool capabilities, and tool collaboration patterns, and dynamically retrieves tools according to evolving task states. Using a unified corpus of 7,471 tools, we evaluate SING on three real-world tool-use benchmarks. SING improves Global Recall@5 by up to 59.8% and downstream success rate by up to 28.9% over baselines, while reducing full-corpus tool-schema exposure by 99.8%, demonstrating that intention-aware graph structure enables more accurate and context-efficient tool discovery in large-scale agentic ecosystems.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Modelling magnetic material properties with uncertainty-aware neural networks

arXiv:2606.11870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning is increasingly applied to accelerate the discovery of novel materials by exploring large compositional and structural design spaces. Yet, the scarcity of high-quality data and the frequent need for out-of-distribution prediction introduce substantial uncertainty, making the assessment of model reliability essential. In this work, we investigate uncertainty quantification as a means to evaluate model confidence in the context of permanent magnet research. In a first study, we benchmark classical and modern machine learning models for predicting intrinsic magnetic properties, focusing on the quality of their uncertainty estimates. We apply Gaussian negative log-likelihood loss and dropout-based Bayesian approximation as practical strategies for estimating predictive uncertainty. In a second study, we transfer these architectural features for uncertainty estimation to a more complex task: predicting coercivity from microstructural information using a graph neural network. Together, these studies demonstrate that uncertainty quantification not only enhances the trustworthiness of predictions but is also transferable across different modeling tasks.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AgentCyberRange: Benchmarking Frontier AI Systems in Realistic Cyber Ranges

arXiv:2606.14295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier AI systems are increasingly capable of cybersecurity tasks, including codebase inspection, vulnerability detection, and exploitation. However, evaluating their offensive capabilities remains constrained by limited access to open, reproducible, multi-host cyber ranges. Existing public benchmarks capture isolated skills such as CTF solving, vulnerability reproduction, and exploit generation, but often abstract away realistic intrusion workflows: discovering exposed services, gaining a foothold, collecting internal information, and expanding compromise across hosts. This gap makes it difficult to observe emerging risks early, because frontier AI systems are rarely evaluated under realistic attack conditions. We introduce AgentCyberRange, the first open, multi-range infrastructure for measuring autonomous cyber attack capability in realistic cyber ranges. It combines 110 vulnerabilities across 15 real web applications and 8 enterprise-like cyber ranges with 156 internal hosts, plus Cage, a toolchain for execution, orchestration, result collection, and verification. The benchmark covers two core stages: web exploitation, where agents explore exposed applications and validate vulnerabilities, and post exploitation, where agents turn an initial foothold into broader internal compromise. We evaluate six frontier AI systems under matched prompts and budgets. GPT-5.5 with Codex performs best, solving 16.1% of web exploitation tasks and 31.7% of post-exploitation tasks; with more concrete hints, these rates increase to 33.0% and 46.3%. We also observe out-of-benchmark findings, including unknown vulnerabilities in popular projects, and payload mutation that bypasses host defenses. These results show that open cyber-range evaluation is necessary for observing emerging offensive capabilities under realistic and reproducible conditions.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Decoding Hidden Deception in Reasoning LLMs: Activation Explainers for Deception Auditing

As LLMs acquire stronger reasoning capabilities, deceptive behavior becomes an increasingly serious safety concern. Existing deception monitors either score visible transcripts or derive scalar probe scores from representation vectors, leaving little inspectable evidence about why a response is suspicious. We introduce STATEWITNESS, an activation explainer for deception auditing. A separate decoder reads a target model's hidden states, then answers natural-language queries or emits structured reports about them. We evaluate STATEWITNESS on two target reasoning LLMs across seven deception datasets. STATEWITNESS reaches 0.916 mean AUROC, a relative gain of 11.6% over the best black-box text monitor and 25.0% over the best activation-probe baseline under the same evaluation protocol. When combined with existing monitors, STATEWITNESS reduces missed deceptive examples in simple threshold ensembles. Beyond scalar detection, the decoder returns query-level answers, schema reports, and token- or sentence-level evidence traces for human inspection. We view this interface as a potential building block for broader interpretability and alignment tools.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Instruct-Particulate: Scaling Feed-Forward 3D Object Articulation with Kinematic Control

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects is important for animation, gaming, and robotic simulations. Recent neural networks can estimate the articulated structure of 3D objects, but their generalization remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data for this task. To address this gap, we introduce Instruct-Particulate, a model that takes a 3D mesh together with a target kinematic specification, including part descriptions, connectivity, joint types, and optional point prompts, and predicts the corresponding kinematic part segmentation and joint motion parameters. The kinematic specification disambiguates the task and allows the model to target annotations of different granularity, thereby making it possible to use more abundant heterogeneous training data. At test time, the kinematic specification can be obtained automatically from large-scale vision-language models, so the model can be applied to any input mesh. To train our model at scale, we construct a heterogeneous dataset of more than 150,000 articulated 3D objects, extending existing publicly available collections with data obtained by partially labelling other 3D models (monolithic or already decomposed into parts) with kinematic labels by means of vision-language models. Experiments show that our model generalizes better across categories and to AI-generated meshes, enabling articulated asset reconstruction from real-world images via image-to-3D models.

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

Mitigating scalability challenges in LUT-based neural networks via pruning optimisations

arXiv:2407.02362v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep neural networks heavily rely on a large number of multiply-accumulate operations, which constitute the predominant computational cost. To address this, Look-Up Table (LUT)-based matrix multiplications have emerged as a promising alternative for reducing the computational cost and time of the multiply-accumulate operations in a neural network. However, the LUT-based neural network still faces the scalability challenge due to the inherent limitations of LUT-based matrix multiplication. To mitigate these scalability limitations, this paper proposes a scalable and energy-efficient LUT-based approximate matrix multiplication unit (LUT-MU) constituting the basic component of the neural networks by integrating a pruning strategy on the MADDNESS algorithm, a LUT-based matrix multiplication methodology. With increasing problem size and precision demands in matrix multiplication, our proposed LUT-MU architecture effectively constrains resource expansion. The case study shows that deploying our LUT-MU in neural network architectures, including fully connected layers (MNIST) and ResNets (CIFAR-10, ImageNet)-on XCZU7EV and XCZU19EG FPGAs, produces up to $1.6 \times$ throughput improvement and $4.2 \times$ energy efficiency gains over mainstream CUDA-based network implementations, and $1.8\times$ energy efficiency compared to leading quantised neural network implementations, with moderate impact on accuracy. Compared to original MADDNESS-based neural networks, our LUT-MU shows $1.3$ to $2.6\times$ resource savings based on various resolution configuration settings of MADDNESS.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Building accessible resources to empower communities: the case of the Lupus Mexican Registry

Motivation: Although SLE data in Latin America is increasing, clinical datasets remain difficult to access and interpret, highlighting the need for accessible tools that support data-driven precision medicine, citizen science, and public health initiatives. Results: We developed a user-friendly platform that enables us to explore LupusRGMX data through interactive queries, report generation, statistical modeling, and comprehensive insights. This resource supports community-oriented research, improves the visibility of underrepresented populations in lupus research, and provides a useful tool to enhance data accessibility. Availability and implementation: Developed in R using Shiny and bslib for interactive visualization and interface design. Available at https://github.com/NeuroGenomicsMX/Lupus_App_2.0 and https://lupusrgmx.liigh.unam.mx/shiny/lupus/

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

QuBE/Qubex: an integrated hardware-software system for superconducting qubit experiments with broadband control

arXiv:2606.13010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving high-fidelity operation in large-scale superconducting qubit systems requires not only control hardware with broad frequency coverage, low crosstalk, and tight synchronization but also software that coordinates system configuration, experiment execution, and data analysis. Here we present an integrated qubit-control system that combines broadband microwave hardware with a pulse-level software stack for scalable superconducting qubit experiments. The hardware provides broadband microwave coverage, including an instantaneous span of up to 1.6 GHz from a control output, while the software reduces setup and calibration overhead through automated configuration and built-in experiment workflows. We validate the system on a 64-qubit fixed-frequency transmon chip through full-chip frequency identification and representative demonstrations, including multi-unit far-detuned cross-resonance calibration and benchmarking that yields a measured two-qubit gate fidelity of 98.34%, and multilevel readout beyond the computational subspace. By disclosing the hardware architecture and releasing the software stack as open source, this work provides an inspectable hardware-software foundation for scalable superconducting qubit control experiments.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Voice Behind the Words: Quantifying Intersectional Bias in SpeechLLMs

Speech Large Language Models (SpeechLLMs) process spoken input directly, retaining cues such as accent and perceived gender that were previously removed in cascaded pipelines. This introduces speaker identity dependent variation in responses. We present a large-scale intersectional evaluation of accent and gender bias in three SpeechLLMs using 2,880 controlled interactions across six English accents and two gender presentations, keeping linguistic content constant through voice cloning. Using pointwise LLM-judge ratings, pairwise comparisons, and Best-Worst Scaling with human validation, we detect recurring directional disparities. Eastern European-accented speech receives lower helpfulness scores, particularly for female-presenting voices. Responses remain polite but differ in helpfulness. While LLM judges capture the directional trend of these biases, human evaluators exhibit significantly higher sensitivity, showing stronger accent-level contrasts.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Excitation-Inhibition Balance in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: EEG Criticality Reflects Frontal Metabolites and a Potential Compensatory Mechanism

Background The excitation-inhibition (E-I) balance is essential for normal brain functioning, while deviations from this balance have been implicated in several psychiatric disorders. However, the extent to which electroencephalography (EEG) and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) E-I markers are altered in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), how they converge across modalities, and how they relate to cognitive performance and clinical symptoms remain insufficiently characterized. Methods We recruited 111 healthy controls (HC) and 113 individuals with SSD. All participants underwent resting-state EEG and 1H-MRS. Metabolites were measured either in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; NSSD = 63, NHC = 58) or in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC; NSSD = 50, NHC = 53), from which gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate + glutamine (Glx), and the Glx/GABA ratio were extracted. Extracted EEG E-I markers included oscillatory activity, aperiodic activity, functional E-I, microstates, multiscale entropy, and neuronal avalanche criticality. Results MRS results showed no group differences in GABA, Glx, or the Glx/GABA ratio. In contrast, most EEG-derived E-I markers indicated increased cortical inhibition in SSD, including steeper aperiodic exponents, prolonged microstate durations, and greater prevalence of subcritical states. However, functional E-I showed a divergent pattern, suggesting balanced dynamics in SSD and relatively inhibition-weighted dynamics in HC. Across groups, higher ACC and lDLPFC GABA predicted a lower kappa index, whereas a higher lDLPFC Glx/GABA ratio was associated with a higher kappa index. In SSD, reduced avalanche criticality was associated with better cognition and less severe symptoms. Conclusion Several EEG-derived E-I proxies, but not MRS measures, indicate an increased cortical inhibition in SSD. Criticality indices best capture frontal neurochemical metabolites and improvements in clinical symptoms, potentially reflecting inhibitory compensation mechanisms in SSD.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Visual Generation in the New Era: An Evolution from Atomic Mapping to Agentic World Modeling

Recent visual generation models have made major progress in photorealism, typography, instruction following, and interactive editing, yet they still struggle with spatial reasoning, persistent state, long-horizon consistency, and causal understanding. We argue that the field should move beyond appearance synthesis toward intelligent visual generation: plausible visuals grounded in structure, dynamics, domain knowledge, and causal relations. To frame this shift, we introduce a five-level taxonomy: Atomic Generation, Conditional Generation, In-Context Generation, Agentic Generation, and World-Modeling Generation, progressing from passive renderers to interactive, agentic, world-aware generators. We analyze key technical drivers, including flow matching, unified understanding-and-generation models, improved visual representations, post-training, reward modeling, data curation, synthetic data distillation, and sampling acceleration. We further show that current evaluations often overestimate progress by emphasizing perceptual quality while missing structural, temporal, and causal failures. By combining benchmark review, in-the-wild stress tests, and expert-constrained case studies, this roadmap offers a capability-centered lens for understanding, evaluating, and advancing the next generation of intelligent visual generation systems.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Graph Diffusion Residuals for Control-Function Instrumental Variables

arXiv:2606.14636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Control-function instrumental variable estimators need a first-stage residual, not merely a first-stage prediction. High-capacity first stages can interpolate treatment and leave too little residual information for the outcome equation. We study Adaptive Anisotropic Instrumental Heat Flow (A-IHF), a deterministic graph-diffusion residual extractor for flexible control functions. A-IHF treats treatment as a signal on a graph of first-stage features, uses pilot diffusion to detect large treatment jumps, attenuates conductance across those jumps, and computes the generated control with a sparse graph resolvent. Its observational selection rule uses only $(Z,X)$, combining graph generalized cross-validation, roughness, residualized-treatment relevance, and graph-admissibility filtering. The analysis decomposes error into structural leakage, residual attenuation, and residualized treatment variation, yielding finite-sample bounds, graph-admissibility rates under latent piecewise-smooth geometry, and finite-path selection calibration. Across 54 synthetic benchmark cells with tuned graph, kernel, tree, boosting, series, and neural control-function baselines, guarded observational A-IHF has the lowest average structural-response MSE; the A-IHF family beats the best non-A-IHF baseline in 32 cells. Performance is strongest when the graph captures piecewise-smooth first-stage structure.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Mean-field games with rough common noise: the linear-quadratic case

arXiv:2602.19210v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by mean-field games (MFG) with common noise on the one hand and pathwise stochastic control theory on the other, we formulate here a linear-quadratic (LQ) MFG with rough common noise, along with a satisfactory well-posedness theory for the linear-quadratic case. A novel Volterra-type (or mild) formulation allows to keep technical (rough-stochastic) consideration to a minimum. We derive a characterization of the optimal state and optimal control through a rough forward-backward SDE (rough FBSDE), and provide an existence and uniqueness result under the usual assumptions. Our theory is accompanied by stability estimates with respect to initial data and common noise while we also establish continuity of what we call the Itô-Lions-Lyons map for rough mean-field games. Finally, we discuss randomization of the rough common noise under appropriate conditions on the coefficients. When the latter is given by the Stratonovich lift of a Brownian motion independent of the idiosyncratic noise, we show that solutions of the rough LQ MFG coincide with those obtained by conditioning on the common noise.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

WorldLines: Benchmarking and Modeling Long-Horizon Stateful Embodied Agents

arXiv:2606.18847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To assist humans over extended periods in real homes, embodied agents must remember user routines, world states, and past interactions. Existing long-term memory benchmarks mainly evaluate language-centric retrieval and question answering, while embodied benchmarks often focus on short-horizon task execution without testing long-term memory use in dynamic environments. We introduce WorldLines, a project-driven benchmark for long-horizon embodied household assistance. It constructs temporally extended household traces with dialogues, actions, execution feedback, object and device state changes, and converts them into evidence-linked samples for Memory QA and Embodied Task Planning. We further propose ObsMem, an observer-grounded memory framework that maintains visibility-aware memories and action-native state trails for state-aware decisions. Experiments reveal persistent challenges in partial observability, overwritten world states, and translating long-term memory into embodied plans, while ObsMem offers a stronger reference architecture for this setting.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

QuantKAN: A Unified Quantization Framework for Kolmogorov Arnold Networks

arXiv:2511.18689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs) replace linear weights with spline-based functions, offering strong expressivity but posing challenges for low-precision deployment due to heterogeneous parameter distributions. We introduce QuantKAN, the first unified framework for quantization-aware training (QAT) and post-training quantization (PTQ) of KANs. The framework employs branch-aware quantizers for base and spline parameters and extends modern QAT and PTQ methods to spline-based layers across EfficientKAN, FastKAN, PyKAN, and KAGN. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet provide the first unified QAT/PTQ KAN benchmarks and show that DSQ is the most robust QAT method at aggressive low-bit settings, while GPTQ is the strongest PTQ method at moderate precision. Sensitivity analyses reveal architecture-specific failure modes: spline/basis parameters dominate in FastKAN, while base or scaling parameters dominate in EfficientKAN, GRAM, and PyKAN. Vivado HLS estimates on a Xilinx UltraScale+ device further suggest up to 3.32$\times$ throughput and 7.7$\times$ lower estimated dynamic energy per inference under W4A4, exposing a residual basis-evaluation tax that motivates basis-aware microarchitecture. QuantKAN is available at https://github.com/OSU-STARLAB/QuantKAN/.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

TokenMinds: Pretrained User Tokens and Embeddings for User Understanding in Large Recommender Systems

arXiv:2606.25147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: User modeling in industrial recommender systems typically produces dense embeddings, which suffer from representational constraints inherent to fixed-dimensional vectors. An emerging alternative for discrete user representation – using LLMs to generate text-based user tokens – captures topical co-occurrences rather than deep sequential behavior dynamics and produces outputs that are difficult to ground to item attributes. Meanwhile, Semantic ID (SID) based item tokenization has proven effective for improving generalization in generative recommendation, yet discrete SID-based representations for users remain largely unexplored. We propose TokenMinds, an industrial-scale system that extends the PLUM framework from item retrieval to user modeling, generating both discrete SID-based user tokens and dense user embeddings via an encoder-decoder architecture adapted from pre-trained LLMs. This dual-output design provides the complementary benefits of discrete, semantically grounded user representations while maintaining compatibility with existing downstream models that rely on dense embeddings. Additionally, the shared SID vocabulary naturally extends to cross-scenario modeling: by unifying long-form and short-form video behaviors into a single model, we substantially reduce training and serving costs. We validate TokenMinds through extensive offline experiments and live launches on multiple YouTube surfaces, served on full user traffic (billions of users) via an asynchronous infrastructure that decouples representation generation from downstream scoring. Focusing on ranking as the primary downstream use case, our results confirm the practical viability of SID-based user tokens at industrial scale and demonstrate that tokens and dense embeddings provide complementary value across different production ranking systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

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

Semantic Router: On the Feasibility of Hijacking MLLMs via a Single Adversarial Perturbation

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in stateless systems, such as autonomous driving and robotics. This paper investigates a novel threat: Semantic-Aware Hijacking. We explore the feasibility of hijacking multiple stateless decisions simultaneously using a single universal perturbation. We introduce the Semantic-Aware Universal Perturbation (SAUP), which acts as a semantic router, "actively" perceiving input semantics and routing them to distinct, attacker-defined targets. To achieve this, we conduct theoretical and empirical analysis on the geometric properties in the latent space. Guided by these insights, we propose the Semantic-Oriented (SORT) optimization strategy and annotate a new dataset with fine-grained semantics to evaluate performance. Extensive experiments on three representative MLLMs demonstrate the fundamental feasibility of this attack, achieving a 66% attack success rate over five targets using a single frame against Qwen.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Propagating Collective Spin-valley Modes in Twisted WSe2

arXiv:2507.18770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of neutral collective modes is a hallmark of correlated quantum phases but is often challenging to probe experimentally. In two-dimensional flatband systems, charge responses have been intensively investigated yet neutral excitations remain largely unexplored. In particular, intervalley coherent state (IVC) features a neutral Goldstone mode due to spontaneously broken valley U(1) symmetry. While IVC state has been proposed as a unifying theme across graphene and semiconductor based systems, its defining feature, the neutral Goldstone mode, remains elusive in experiment. Here we investigate space and time resolved transport of neutral modes in twisted WSe2 moire superlattices through a novel ultrafast imaging technique. We uncover two new propagating collective modes with very different velocities, which emerge near the van Hove singularity (VHS) in both intermediate (3.5 to 4 degree) and large (around 5 degree) angle twisted WSe2. The fast-propagating mode has a large speed of about 3 km/s and is consistent with a Goldstone mode for an IVC state, while the slow-moving mode is likely a gapped amplitude mode. They can be understood as the spin-valley analogues of collective modes of a superfluid, whose propagation is imaged for the first time in a condensed matter system. Our study demonstrates a powerful new approach for probing charge-neutral modes in quantum materials and offers key insights into the interplay between charge and spin-valley physics in moire superlattices.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Accounting for Human Movement to Improve Exposure-Health Models

Background. Current exposure-health models rely on averaged, residential-based environmental exposures, failing to account for human movement. This aggregation can lead to exposure misclassification and biased exposure-response estimates, potentially distorting our understanding of the true health effects of environmental conditions. We developed exposure disaggregation regression models that explicitly account for human movement when linking environmental exposures to health outcomes. Methods. By weighting pixel-level exposures according to distance from home as a simple proxy for human movement, our model linked disaggregated environmental exposures to individual-level health outcomes. Weights were either fixed a priori or derived from a latent distance-decay power parameter learned from the data. We additionally evaluated model performance under a nonlinear exposure-response relationship. Model performance was assessed across multiple sample sizes (N = 1,114; 50,000; and 100,000). A simulation study examined parameter recovery using bias, empirical standard error (EmpSE), and credible interval coverage. As a case study, Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) data from Albania were used to link acute respiratory infection (ARI) outcomes among children under five to pixel-level NDVI within a 3 km buffer around DHS cluster centroids, and the proposed models were applied to these data. Results. Across all models (fixed-weight, learned-weight, and restricted cubic spline models), parameter recovery improved with increasing sample size. At N = 1,114, estimates were biased and imprecise, with incorrect effect direction for exposure-response parameters (e.g., learned-weight {beta}1 bias = - 0.79; EmpSE = 2.61; coverage = 0.88). In contrast, the models accurately recovered parameters at larger sample sizes, including the latent distance-decay parameter (bias = - 0.02; EmpSE = 0.15; coverage = 0.95 at N = 100,000), demonstrating their ability to reliably learn movement-based exposure weights when sufficient data were available. Conclusion. Instead of relying on arbitrarily-sized buffers, this statistical framework provides a novel method for studying environmental exposure-health relationships whilst accounting for human movement. With sufficiently large sample sizes, it can accurately estimate the influence of disaggregated environmental exposures on individual-level health and help address exposure misclassification arising from residential-only metrics. This methodological framework remains scalable, interpretable, and adaptable to other exposures and outcomes, offering a foundation for future work that integrates richer mobility-informed exposure-health research.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Spectator-transition crosstalk in a spin-3/2 silicon vacancy qudit in silicon carbide revealed by broadband Ramsey interferometry

arXiv:2601.15559v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Color center spins in 4H-SiC offer a rare combination of wafer-scale materials maturity with long spin coherence and chip-level photonics, making them promising building blocks for scalable quantum technologies. In particular, the silicon vacancy hosts an S=3/2 ground state, a native qudit that enables compact encodings and subspace-selective control, but also introduces spectator transitions: short, detuned pulses can coherently drive non-addressed level pairs and create crosstalk. Here we use broadband Ramsey interferometry to reveal and quantify such spectator-transition crosstalk. Experimentally, the Ramsey Fourier spectra display multiple lines beyond the addressed single-quantum transition. Analytically, we map each line to a pairwise energy difference between qudit levels of the rotating-frame Hamiltonian and assign its weight via compact amplitudes set by the prepared state and the microwave pulse parameters, predicting a deterministic six-branch structure. Numerical time-domain propagation with the experimental sampling reproduces the detuning map, and the measured peak positions coincide with the analytic branch lines without frequency fitting. Together these results provide a practical, spectator-aware framework for multilevel control in the silicon vacancy qudit. The approach offers clear guidance to suppress crosstalk or, conversely, to exploit spectator lines, for example as additional constraints for in situ pulse calibration and for phase-sensitive quantum state and process estimation.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.13989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech (TTS) models formulate synthesis as a conditional infilling task, bypassing explicit duration predictors and external aligners. When speech is represented with neural codec tokens, the infilling problem becomes discrete, making Discrete Flow Matching (DFM), a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework for discrete generation, a natural fit. However, inference-time control for stable low-step conditional infilling remains underexplored. We propose Mask, Sample, Revise, an inference-time CTMC stack for alignment-free DFM-TTS. The stack combines predictor-free guidance to strengthen text conditioning, prompt-matched conditional coupling to align the probability path with the acoustic prompt, and SC-ReMask, a schedule-constrained remasking mechanism that introduces token-to-mask transitions so early de-masking decisions can be revised. These components require no post-hoc fine-tuning and operate in a single tau-leaping sampler. Controlled ablations show that this stack improves intelligibility and robustness in the low-NFE prompted setting, outperforming unguided and guidance-only samplers with substantially more steps.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Q-Learning with Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Regret

arXiv:2510.06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the analysis of optimal and suboptimal state-action pairs, yielding the first fine-grained regret upper bound for UCB-Hoeffding (Jin et al., 2018). To highlight the generality of this framework, we introduce ULCB-Hoeffding, a new UCB-based algorithm inspired by AMB (Xu et al.,2021) but with a simplified structure, which enjoys fine-grained regret guarantees and empirically outperforms AMB. In the non-UCB-based setting, we revisit the only known algorithm AMB, and identify two key issues in its algorithm design and analysis: improper truncation in the $Q$-updates and violation of the martingale difference condition in its concentration argument. We propose a refined version of AMB that addresses these issues, establishing the first rigorous fine-grained gap-dependent regret for a non-UCB-based method, with experiments demonstrating improved performance over AMB.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Deconvolution-based cell-type specific DNA methylation-wide and transcriptome-wide association studies identify risk CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer risk

Bulk tissue-based DNA methylation-wide (MWAS) and transcriptome-wide association studies (TWAS) have identified CpG sites and genes associated with colorectal cancer (CRC) risk, but do not account for cellular heterogeneity. To address this, we developed a deconvolution-informed framework to infer cell-type specific DNA methylation and gene expression profiles from bulk normal colon tissues using reference single-cell epigenomic and transcriptomic datasets. We performed cell-type specific MWAS (ctMWAS) using deconvoluted DNA methylation data from 293 normal colon samples and conducted cell-type specific TWAS (ctTWAS) using deconvoluted gene expression data from 707 normal colon samples. Genetically predicted methylation and expression models were integrated with CRC GWAS summary statistics (78,473 cases and 107,143 controls) to identify risk-associated CpG sites and genes. Through ctMWAS, ctTWAS, and colocalization analyses, we identified 178 significant cell-type-specific CpG sites in 106 loci and 68 risk genes in 40 loci, including 26 previously unreported loci. Through additional integrative methylation-gene analysis, we prioritized 132 candidate risk genes, the majority of which were supported by multi-omics evidence and stage-specific dysregulation across the adenoma-carcinoma and serrated-carcinoma progression pathways. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated pathways involved in DNA double-strand break repair, TP53 regulation, TGF-{beta} signaling, and innate immune responses. Among prioritized genes, 14 were identified as putative druggable targets linked to 90 FDA-approved or clinical-stage drugs. Experimental validation supports an oncogenic role for SF3A3. These findings demonstrate that deconvolution-informed integrative analyses enable cell-type-resolved identification of epigenetic and transcriptional mechanisms underlying CRC susceptibility and provide insights into disease biology, prevention, and therapeutic target discovery.