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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

NTIRE 2025 Challenge on Image Super-Resolution (x4): Methods and Results

This paper presents the NTIRE 2025 image super-resolution ($\times$4) challenge, one of the associated competitions of the 10th NTIRE Workshop at CVPR 2025. The challenge aims to recover high-resolution (HR) images from low-resolution (LR) counterparts generated through bicubic downsampling with a $\times$4 scaling factor. The objective is to develop effective network designs or solutions that achieve state-of-the-art SR performance. To reflect the dual objectives of image SR research, the challenge includes two sub-tracks: (1) a restoration track, emphasizes pixel-wise accuracy and ranks submissions based on PSNR; (2) a perceptual track, focuses on visual realism and ranks results by a perceptual score. A total of 286 participants registered for the competition, with 25 teams submitting valid entries. This report summarizes the challenge design, datasets, evaluation protocol, the main results, and methods of each team. The challenge serves as a benchmark to advance the state of the art and foster progress in image SR.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Multi-objective design of photon blockade for bright single-photon sources

arXiv:2606.20160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality single-photon sources, realized through saturable emitters, photon blockade, or heralded pair generation, are indispensable building blocks for photonic quantum platforms. Although these mechanisms suppress multiphoton emission through distinct principles typically captured by analytical models, their practical implementation is constrained by conflicting requirements for purity, brightness, and indistinguishability, which must be balanced within high-dimensional design landscapes. Here, we propose a computational framework for optimizing competing metrics of single-photon sources. Building on a Liouville-space adjoint formulation that efficiently evaluates multiple objectives in Markovian open quantum systems, we develop a Jacobian-based update, which ensures first-order monotonic reduction of multi-objective costs. By incorporating simulated annealing to escape gradient-vanishing plateaus, our framework achieves a design success rate of nearly 60 % for photon blockade with g2(0) smaller than 0.1 and theoretically bounded brightness across a broad parameter space, without any analytical guidance. This framework provides a general recipe for multi-objective design of open quantum systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

An Adaptive Data cleaning Framework for Noisy Label Detection

Deep neural networks (DNNs) excel in computer vision tasks given large annotated datasets. In real-world applications, however, labels are often corrupted by ambiguity, human error, or dynamic environments. Over-parameterized DNNs easily memorize these noisy labels during training, degrading model accuracy and generalization. Existing data-cleaning and sample-selection strategies often rely on manually specified thresholds, prior knowledge of the noise ratio, or a single metric (either learning dynamics or geometric structure), making them unstable in complex data regimes. This paper proposes a self-adaptive data-cleaning framework that integrates local, global, and learning dynamics cues for robust noisy-label detection. Samples are mapped into a unified low-dimensional feature space through a modular feature concatenation paradigm. We provide two instantiations: a 2D metric integrating class-adaptive KNN-based local disagreement with k-means-based global centroid distance, and a 3D multi-metric that additionally incorporates a z-normalized score. Unlike conventional 1D Gaussian Mixture Models applied to a single scalar metric, our framework performs multi-metric clustering on the feature space to adaptively partition samples into clean-dominant and noise-dominant components without requiring manual thresholds or noise priors. Experiments on CIFAR-10, MNIST, and ImageNet-100 with 5% to 40% symmetric label noise show high recall across settings, including near-perfect recall (>=98%) on ImageNet-100 at 40% noise. Subsequent training yields accuracy gains across evaluated settings, especially under severe corruption on ImageNet-100. These findings suggest that multi-metric integration provides a threshold-free, practical, and low-tuning strategy for noisy label detection.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ultrafast nonadiabatic dynamics of tetraphenylsubstituted nitrogen-based heterocycles

arXiv:2604.16897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tetraphenylpyrazine (TPP) and 2,3,4,5-tetraphenyl-1H-pyrrole (TePP) are closely related heterocycles bearing four phenyl substituents, whose structural similarity makes them a useful pair for comparing how intramolecular flexibility influences excited-state relaxation and emission in the gas phase and in the solid state. TPP is a prototypical solid-state luminescence enhancement (SLE) emitter, exhibiting a markedly increased quantum yield upon molecular aggregation. In contrast, TePP displays similar quantum yields in solution and solid state, characteristic of dual-state emission (DSE). This behaviour indicates that intramolecular rotations are already significantly hindered in the isolated-molecule regime, consistent with our previous observations for TPP and other solid-state emitters (Hernández-Rodríguez et al., ChemPhysChem, 2024, 25, e202400563). To unravel the excited-state dynamics underlying this contrasting behaviour, we performed mixed quantum-classical trajectory simulations on a single molecule of TPP and TePP employing the surface-hopping method. Twelve singlet states were included at the TD-B3LYP-D3/def2-SVP level, which were previously benchmarked against coupled cluster methods. Simulated observables such as gas phase ultrafast electron diffraction (GUED) and time-resolved fluorescence (TR-FL) signals allow us to dissect the distinct deactivation pathways operating in both systems in the gas phase, while also providing mechanistic insight into how these pathways are expected to evolve in solution and solid-state environments.

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

Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots. Yet methods that perform well in simulation often degrade in cluttered real-world scenes with severe occlusion and latent hazards, where large unseen regions make single-scene inference brittle and unsafe. We propose Schrödinger's Navigator, a belief-aware framework that reasons at inference time over multiple trajectory-conditioned imagined 3D futures. Given candidate paths, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model predicts hypothetical observations and maintains a superposition of plausible scene realizations rather than committing to one map. An adaptive occluder-aware sampler directs imagination to uncertainty-critical regions, while a Future-Aware Value Map (FAVM) aggregates imagined futures for robust, proactive action selection. Experiments in simulation and on a physical Go2 quadruped show that Schrödinger's Navigator outperforms strong ZSON baselines, improving hidden-target discovery and risk-aware waypoint selection in occlusion-heavy navigation scenarios. These results highlight imagined 3D futures as a scalable and generalizable strategy for zero-shot navigation in uncertain real-world environments.

06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-Adaptive Predictive Dynamical Decoupling

arXiv:2606.15769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protecting quantum coherence against realistic environmental noise remains one of the fundamental obstacles to scalable quantum technologies. We develop a noise-adaptive dynamical decoupling framework that combines analytical open-quantum-system modeling with machine-learning-based forecasting for a qubit interacting with random telegraph noise. Unlike conventional dynamical decoupling protocols based on fixed pulse schedules, the proposed approach continuously forecasts short-time coherence evolution and adaptively applies control pulses according to the instantaneous noise dynamics. We investigate stationary and non-stationary environments spanning both Markovian and non-Markovian regimes. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the machine-learning-assisted adaptive control strategy substantially outperforms conventional periodic dynamical decoupling while using a comparable number of control pulses. The improvement becomes particularly pronounced in non-Markovian and non-stationary regimes, where memory effects, coherence revivals, and temporally evolving noise strongly limit the effectiveness of static pulse protocols. These results establish predictive machine-learning-assisted dynamical decoupling as a promising and scalable framework for adaptive quantum control in realistic noisy quantum devices.

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

Running the Gauntlet: Re-evaluating the Capabilities of Agents Beyond Familiar Environments

arXiv:2606.14397v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As agentic systems continue to evolve and are widely deployed in real-world scenarios, there is a growing demand to faithfully evaluate their capabilities. However, current benchmarks are typically built on popular applications with relatively simple tasks and focus on a narrow set of capabilities while overlooking broader dimensions, resulting in saturated performance on modern agents and failing to probe their limitations. To this end, we introduce GauntletBench, a web-based benchmark for evaluating agent generalisation in challenging scenarios, focusing on three underexplored capabilities (temporal perception, graphical understanding, and 3D reasoning), across five less-covered professional applications (Video Editor, Workflow Builder, 3D Modeller, Flight Analyser, and Circuit Designer), each with 20 vision-intensive tasks (100 in total). Our benchmark provides a modular pipeline that comprises an environment compatible with both open- and closed-source agent frameworks, a controlled web-based application, a well-structured task suite, and an automated evaluation engine with diverse metrics. Contrary to widespread expectations, our empirical results reveal that frontier agentic systems remain far from achieving human-level performance. Even the state-of-the-art agent achieves only a 19.1% success rate on our GauntletBench, highlighting the limitations in these overlooked capabilities and generalisation. By comparison, non-expert human annotators achieve over 80% success on our challenging yet feasible tasks, revealing the substantial gap between current agent capabilities and those required for complex real-world scenarios.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

FoundCause: Causal Discovery with Latent Confounders from Observational Data

arXiv:2606.17516v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery from observational data remains challenging due to the need to recover directed structure and latent confounding without interventions. We propose FoundCause, an amortized causal discovery model trained entirely on synthetic data that maps datasets directly to causal graphs in a single forward pass. By learning from large collections of simulated structural causal models, FoundCause captures transferable statistical patterns that generalize beyond individual datasets. The architecture incorporates several key inductive biases for causal discovery. It uses a permutation-invariant transformer encoder with alternating attention over samples and variables to jointly model cross-variable dependence and per-variable distributions. Pairwise statistical features derived from classical asymmetry measures are injected through statistics-conditioned attention, guiding the model toward known causal signals. A factorized decoder separates edge existence from direction, while a triangular refinement module enables reasoning over higher-order causal motifs such as chains and colliders. In addition, a dedicated confounder module based on learnable latent tokens explicitly models hidden common causes, and the model explicitly handles missing data via its masked input representation. To our knowledge, FoundCause is the first amortized causal discovery approach to explicitly model latent confounding. FoundCause outperforms 11 classical non-amortized methods (e.g., PC, GES, NOTEARS-style optimization) and 4 amortized causal discovery methods on 15 real-world datasets, achieving +9.6% improvement in $F_1$, +1.2% in AUROC, and an 18.9% reduction in structural Hamming distance relative to the strongest non-amortized methods, while performing inference in a single forward pass.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

World Engine: Towards the Era of Post-Training for Autonomous Driving

Autonomous vehicles must operate safely in the real world, where errors can have severe consequences. Although modern end-to-end driving policies excel in routine scenarios, their reliability is limited by the scarcity of safety-critical ``long-tail'' events in real driving datasets. These rare interactions define the practical safety boundary of the learned policy, yet they are difficult to collect at scale in the real world. Here we show that this fundamental limitation can be addressed by post-training pre-trained driving models on synthesized high-stakes interactions. We introduce World Engine, a generative framework that reconstructs high-fidelity interactive environments from real-world logs and systematically extrapolates them into realistic safety-critical variations. This paradigm enables reinforcement-based post-training to align policies with safety constraints, circumventing the physical risks inherent in real-world exploration. On a public benchmark built on nuPlan, World Engine substantially reduces failures in rare safety-critical scenarios and yields significantly larger gains than scaling pre-training data alone. Furthermore, when deployed on a production-scale autonomous driving system, the resulting policy reduces simulated collisions and demonstrates measurable improvements in on-road testing, showing that post-training on synthesized, safety-critical interactions offers a scalable and effective pathway to safer autonomous driving. The full codebase suite, including training, is released to the public.

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

MedRLM: Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence for Long-Context Clinical Reasoning, Sensor-Guided Screening, Evidence-Grounded Decision Support, and Community-to-Tertiary Referral Optimization

Real-world clinical decision support requires reasoning over heterogeneous and longitudinal patient information rather than answering isolated medical questions. However, current medical large language models and retrieval-augmented generation systems often rely on single-step prompting or retrieval, which can be fragile when clinical evidence is distributed across long electronic health records, medical images, sensor streams, guidelines, and referral constraints. This paper proposes MedRLM, a Recursive Multimodal Health Intelligence framework for long-context clinical reasoning, sensor-guided screening, and community-to-tertiary referral support. Instead of compressing all patient information into one prompt, MedRLM treats the patient case as an external clinical environment that can be recursively inspected, decomposed, retrieved, verified, and synthesized. The framework coordinates specialized agents for clinical text, longitudinal EHR, medical imaging, physiological sensor signals, guideline retrieval, uncertainty auditing, and referral planning. It further introduces a Clinical Evidence Graph Memory to connect patient-specific observations with retrieved evidence, standardized definitions, sensor-derived biomarkers, and referral criteria. A sensor-guided recursive triggering mechanism activates deeper reasoning when abnormal physiological or behavioral patterns are detected, while uncertainty-gated refinement supports clinician review for high-risk or low-confidence cases. We also outline a real-data evaluation design using public and credentialed clinical datasets spanning EHR, radiology, ECG, ICU time series, and referral-proxy outcomes. MedRLM aims to move medical AI from static question answering toward auditable, multimodal, and workflow-aware clinical decision support.

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

Denoising Implicit Feedback for Cold-start Recommendation

arXiv:2606.19658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Implicit feedback is widely used in recommender systems due to its accessibility and generality, yet it usually presents noisy samples (e.g., clickbait, position bias). Meanwhile, recommenders inevitably face the item cold-start problem due to the continuous influx of new items. We identify that cold items are more prone to noisy samples due to the aforementioned factors, and researchers often overlook the significance of denoising implicit feedback for cold items. Previous denoising studies usually identify noisy samples based on heuristic patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate noise through sample selection or re-weighting. However, these methods have limited adaptability and are ineffective in cold-start scenarios. To achieve denoising implicit feedback for cold-start recommendation, we propose a model-agnostic denoising method called DIF. First, user preferences for content remain stable, which allows us to infer pseudo-labels indicating whether a user is interested in a cold item through content-similar warm items. Furthermore, to improve pseudo-label accuracy, we model the confidence of pseudo-labels based on the content similarity between the cold item and warm items, and then aggregate multiple pseudo-labels for each sample. Finally, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of the noisy sample label by considering its relative entropy and the cold-start status of the item, which adaptively guides the role of pseudo-labels to correct the noisy labels at the sample level. DIF's superiority is supported by both theoretical justification and extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The method has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application Kuaishou and has significantly improved various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

XPR: An Extensible Cross-Platform Point-Based Differentiable Renderer

Point-based differentiable rendering underpins modern 3D reconstruction, novel-view synthesis, and learning-based graphics pipelines, but developing new rendering methods often requires extensive low-level implementation, hardware-specific kernels, and manually written backward passes. This limits rapid prototyping, reproducibility, exploration, and deployment, especially across diverse hardware platforms. This paper presents XPR, an extensible cross-platform framework for point-based differentiable rendering. XPR introduces a high-level programming interface that separates method-specific logic from the shared rendering pipeline, allowing users to implement new methods in a few lines of code. Its pipeline decomposes rendering into modular, statically shaped parallel operations that can be lowered by a cross-platform compiler to GPUs, TPUs, CPUs, and other ML accelerators. We demonstrate implementations of 3DGS, 3DGUT, and LinPrim, with only a few 100s lines of Python code, each of which can be compiled to a range of hardware platforms with the XLA compiler. These results show that XPR enables fast experimentation and portable execution for emerging point-based differentiable rendering systems.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Rare loss-of-function variants in POLD1, PMS1 and FAN1 modify age at onset of motor symptoms in Huntington's disease

Huntington's disease is a rare neurodegenerative disease whose primary risk factors are inherited expansions of a CAG repeat tract in the HTT gene. Somatic expansion of these tracts leads to neuronal toxicity, neuronal death and clinical disease progression. To identify genetic factors with a major impact on disease onset and progression, we genome sequenced 18,825 individuals for the ENROLL-HD study. Our results show rare inactivating mutations in three genes, all involved in DNA damage repair, are major determinants of age of onset for motor symptoms (n=10,610) and other clinical manifestations. Heterozygote carriers of predicted loss-of-function (pLoF) variants in POLD1 and PMS1 developed motor symptoms an average 20 years (n=3; P=1x10-5) and 7 years (n=6; P=2x10-3) later than non-carriers, respectively. Conversely, heterozygote carriers of pLoF variants in FAN1 (n=30) developed symptoms 10 years earlier (P=2x10-10). Our findings highlight therapeutic strategies and help predict age of onset for at-risk individuals.

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

Layer-Resolved Optimal Transport for Hallucination Detection in NMT and Abstractive Summarization

Optimal transport (OT) has been shown to detect hallucinations in neural machine translation (NMT) by measuring the geometric distance between cross-attention distributions and a reference distribution, without any supervision. We extend this analysis to all six decoder layers of the Fairseq DE-EN model ($N=3{,}414$), showing that Wass-to-Unif and Wass-to-Data are complementary detectors specialised across hallucination types, that detection is concentrated in layers L1–L4 with L5 anti-predictive for subtler types, and that hallucinated translations lack the exploratory attention phase present in correct translations from the first decoding step. We further evaluate whether the geometric signal transfers to abstractive summarization faithfulness detection: our unsupervised OT detector on AggreFact ($N=1{,}116$) achieves $57.2\%$/$57.6\%$ balanced accuracy on CNN/XSum – above chance but substantially below supervised MiniCheck-Flan-T5-L($69.9\%$/$74.3\%$). This gap is principled: unlike NMT hallucinations, unfaithful summaries can attend correctly to source tokens while misrepresenting their content, a failure mode invisible to concentration-based OT metrics by construction. Structural experiments on T5-base confirm consistent decoder organisation across depth, with Layer~3 showing peak concentration and Layer~12 being most critical for generation quality. Together, the results establish OT on cross-attention as a reliable detector when the failure mode is source disengagement, a principled interpretability tool regardless of task, and fundamentally limited when faithfulness failures occur downstream of attention.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Is It You or Your Environment? A Bayesian Inference Framework for Genomically-Anchored Personalized Physiological Interpretation

arXiv:2606.13556v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalized health AI systems face a fundamental cold-start problem: machine learning models for physiological interpretation require weeks of individual behavioral data before they can distinguish constitutional variation from environmentally driven deviation. We propose a solution grounded in causal inference and Bayesian prior design. An individual's genomic profile serves as an exogenous genetic anchor – a domain-informed, personalized prior that is fixed at conception, immune to reverse causation, and available before a single behavioral observation is collected. The anchor initializes a Bayesian belief state over an individual's physiological set point G-hat = mu + sum(beta_i * g_i), where beta_i are GWAS-derived effect sizes and g_i are risk-allele counts. Each incoming physiological measurement P produces a non-constitutional deviation delta = P - G-hat that separates the signal attributable to environment and state from the constitutionally fixed baseline. As behavioral data accrue, the prior decays according to G-hat_t = w(t)*G-hat_genomic + [1-w(t)]*P-bar_t, transitioning from genome-dominated to empirical-baseline-dominated inference. The same observed HRV of 55 ms generates a suppression hypothesis for a person whose prior predicts 80 ms, and an enhancement hypothesis for a person whose prior predicts 30 ms – a reversal impossible without a personalized anchor. We develop this architecture across six physiological domains, grading genomic priors by evidence strength, distinguishing robustly replicated anchors (FTO, FADS1/2, FKBP5) from contested candidate genes (SLC6A4, MAOA, DRD2). We address the inference boundary between association, Mendelian randomization, and individual token causation, and define four constraints for deployment: evidence-graded priors, dynamic decay, ancestry-matched effect sizes, and attribution rather than deterministic output.

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

Fusing Stylometric and Embedding Systems to Estimate Authorship Likelihood Ratios in Japanese

The likelihood ratio framework is widely recognized as the logically and legally sound basis for evidential analysis across forensic sciences, and its importance is increasingly acknowledged in analyses of authorship in textual evidence. To date, however, its application has been confined to English-language texts. Meanwhile, authorship attribution has traditionally relied on a diverse array of stylometric features, even as the rise of pre-trained large language models enables new contextual-embedding approaches. Combining these diverse approaches through fusion promises enhanced performance, yet it has not been applied to integrate stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems within the likelihood ratio paradigm. This study is the first to apply likelihood ratio-based forensic text comparison to Japanese digital texts, using ~1,000-character excerpts from blogs, to 1) evaluate system performance and likelihood ratio magnitudes and 2) assess the impact of fusing stylometric-feature systems with embedding-based systems. The results demonstrate that the fused system maintains excellent calibration while 1) increasing consistent-with-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes; 2) decreasing contrary-to-fact likelihood ratio magnitudes and 3) improving overall discriminability. The best-performing fusion achieved a log-likelihood-ratio cost of 0.32484, illustrating both the feasibility of likelihood ratio framework for Japanese and the benefits of fusion across heterogeneous systems.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A multi-agent system for spine MRI report generation from multi-sequence imaging

Spinal pathology is a leading cause of pain and disability worldwide. Spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is central to clinical evaluation, yet its interpretation remains complex and time-consuming, requiring integration of information across multiple imaging sequences and anatomical regions. Despite recent advances in automated MRI analysis, effectively combining multi-sequence data while preserving sequence-specific diagnostic information remains an open challenge. Here we present SpineAgent, a multi-agent framework for spine MRI report generation built upon a multi-sequence foundation model trained on routine clinical data from 32,047 patients and 453,683 MRI series, comprising a total of 13,441,191 MRI slices. To accommodate diverse modalities of sequences, we first pre-train two DINOv3-based encoders separately on T1- and T2-weighted sequences. We then introduce a continual training strategy that learns a synthesizer to embed images of other sequences using the T1 and T2 encoders, producing patient-level embedding that integrates various signals across MRI sequences. Using these embeddings, SpineAgent achieves state-of-the-art performance, with mean 10.8% AUROC improvement across 17 spinal condition-prediction tasks compared to the best competing method, and demonstrates strong generalizability under cross-manufacturer and cross-cohort evaluation. Beyond classification, SpineAgent enables pathology localization by identifying findings-relevant slices and segmenting pathological regions. It also supports multimodal image-report retrieval, providing a solid foundation for scalable and explainable MRI report generation. We further integrate these validated capabilities of SpineAgent into 37 specialized agents for condition diagnosis, pathological-region localization, and clinically-similar-cases retrieval. Finally, we incorporate their outputs as structured tokens within a Medical Report Agent trained end-to-end for report generation. Through both automated metrics and expert evaluation by five radiologists, SpineAgent achieves leading performance in spine MRI report generation. Together, SpineAgent introduces a continual training approach for multi-sequence spine MRI understanding. By decomposing report generation into clinically grounded subtasks addressed by specialized agents, the SpineAgent framework enables accurate, interpretable and generalizable spine MRI reporting across diverse imaging sequences and anatomical regions.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When AI Meets Finance (StockAgent): Large Language Model-based Stock Trading in Simulated Real-world Environments

arXiv:2407.18957v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can AI Agents simulate real-world trading environments to investigate the impact of external factors on stock trading activities (e.g., macroeconomics, policy changes, company fundamentals, and global events)? These factors, which frequently influence trading behaviors, are critical elements in the quest for maximizing investors' profits. Our work attempts to solve this problem through large language model based agents. We have developed a multi-agent AI system called StockAgent, driven by LLMs, designed to simulate investors' trading behaviors in response to the real stock market. The StockAgent allows users to evaluate the impact of different external factors on investor trading and to analyze trading behavior and profitability effects. Additionally, StockAgent avoids the test set leakage issue present in existing trading simulation systems based on AI Agents. Specifically, it prevents the model from leveraging prior knowledge it may have acquired related to the test data. We evaluate different LLMs under the framework of StockAgent in a stock trading environment that closely resembles real-world conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the impact of key external factors on stock market trading, including trading behavior and stock price fluctuation rules. This research explores the study of agents' free trading gaps in the context of no prior knowledge related to market data. The patterns identified through StockAgent simulations provide valuable insights for LLM-based investment advice and stock recommendation. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Stockagent.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Picosecond Schrödinger cat states for ultrafast optical quantum processing

arXiv:2606.24002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-Gaussian states are essential resources for universal, fault-tolerant optical quantum computing, but their generation rate remains limited by low heralding probabilities and operation in nanosecond temporal modes. Here, we demonstrate multi-photon generalized photon subtraction in picosecond optical wave packets, establishing the state-generation capability required for high-rate operation by addressing the temporal-mode bottleneck that has constrained the achievable rate. Two interfering ultrashort squeezed vacua are heralded by photon-number-resolving detection with a high-speed transition-edge sensor and characterized by pulsed homodyne detection matched to 10-ps temporal modes at a 5-MHz pump repetition rate. We reconstruct Wigner functions without loss correction that exhibit up to four distinct negative regions for four-photon heralding, together with an effective cat-state amplitude of $\alpha_{\mathrm{eff}} = 1.69$. This amplitude approaches the range of practical relevance for fault-tolerant cat-code architectures and for adaptive breeding toward logical-qubit generation, while the picosecond temporal mode establishes a platform compatible with high-rate, scalable time-multiplexed photonic architectures.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

FlexLAM: Resolving the Bottleneck Trade-off in Latent Action Learning

arXiv:2606.19408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent actions provide a compact interface between action-free video and downstream decision-making, yet existing Latent Action Models (LAMs) force every transition through a fixed-capacity bottleneck. We identify a bottleneck trade-off: overly tight codes can discard transition cues needed for action alignment, while overly loose codes preserve additional transition variation that must be resolved when alignment labels are scarce or narrowly distributed. FlexLAM replaces this fixed capacity with variable-length latent actions trained by nested dropout, yielding prefix-valid codes that capture compact transition structure first and add detail only when needed, without new architectures or losses. A single FlexLAM matches or surpasses separately trained fixed-capacity LAMs at every evaluated token budget under standard scarce-label supervision and under a low-return single-task alignment stress test, indicating that FlexLAM is not merely adjustable at inference time but learns a better latent-action interface at the same token budgets. The same model supports inference-time token-budget adjustment without retraining, and FlexLAM improves Ego4D transition reconstruction. These results suggest that variable-length latent actions are an architecture-free, drop-in upgrade to the fixed-capacity bottleneck in latent action models, latent-action world models, and video-pretrained action interfaces.

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

Decoupling Search from Reasoning: A Vendor-Agnostic Grounding Architecture for LLM Agents

Production LLM agents increasingly depend on real-time search, yet native search grounding bundles retrieval policy, provider choice, evidence injection, cost, latency, and generation behavior behind a single model-provider boundary. This coupling makes grounding hard to inspect, tune, reuse, or port, and can trigger Search-Induced Verbosity that breaks strict output contracts. We present Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG), a vendor-agnostic boundary that moves grounding outside the reasoning model through an MCP-compatible gateway, exposing provider routing, source-aware context rendering, configured fallback, retrieval-depth control, and exact plus semantic caching as first-class controls. Across five frontier models on SimpleQA, FreshQA, and HotpotQA, native search leads on recency-sensitive FreshQA, but DSG exposes a stronger frontier when control matters: on SimpleQA it nearly matches native accuracy (86.1% vs. 87.7%) at 91% lower search cost, preserves concise answer contracts, and reaches a 99.4% warm-cache hit rate with 68% lower latency. Deployed as a shared production grounding layer for large-scale agentic workloads with interchangeable models, DSG matches or slightly exceeds native-search accuracy on an e-commerce query-understanding (QIU) workload while cutting search cost by over 98%. Real-time grounding is best treated as an optimizable interface boundary, not a fixed model feature.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NAMESAKES: Probing Identity Memorization in Text-to-Image Models

Text-to-image (T2I) models generate realistic likenesses of some individuals when prompted with their names, raising privacy concerns. However, distinguishing whether a generated face is memorized or fabricated currently requires ground-truth photos, access to training data, or white-box access to model internals, limiting applicability. We introduce a fully black-box behavioral probe that distinguishes between these regimes while requiring no reference photos or prior knowledge of training data. To benchmark this task, we present the NAMESAKES dataset of over one thousand names and faces of public figures spanning a wide range of fame levels, along with perturbed, less famous names. Experiments on state-of-the-art T2I models show that our probe substantially predicts identity memorization and separates memorized from unrecognized names, with further insights into differences across model families.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genome-wide association and multi-omics functional screens reveal the genetic architecture of foveal development

Foveal hypoplasia causes visual impairment across congenital eye disorders, yet the genetic programmes governing foveal development remain poorly characterised and no tractable model exists for foveal disease. In the first genome-wide association study of foveal hypoplasia, we identified 42 sentinel variants mapping to 54 effector genes supported by >= 2 criteria from a variant-to-gene framework incorporating developmental multi-omics. Disruption of six effector genes using mutant lines and CRISPR knockouts in the zebrafish high acuity zone recapitulates structural, functional, and ultrastructural hallmarks of foveal hypoplasia, establishing the first vertebrate disease model. Integration with human foetal single-cell and spatial transcriptomics reveals two temporal waves of effector gene expression and identifies Muller glia as critical mediators of foveal patterning. Phenome-wide analyses reveal foveal variants are pleiotropic with refractive, lenticular, and metabolic traits, connecting foveal development to anterior segment and systemic disease biology. These findings should inform mechanistic studies of macular disease.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.