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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Reconstruction of detector error model for quantum error correction

arXiv:2606.16288v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum computing fundamentally relies on the accurate characterization of circuit-level noise to optimize decoding algorithms. However, extracting complex multi-body error correlations remains challenging. Contemporary greedy inference algorithms can suffer from statistical distortion, discarding true physical mechanisms while introducing many unphysical false positives. Here, we introduce the Correlation-Analysis-based Hypergraph Reconstruction (CAHR) algorithm, a globally consistent framework to invert experimental syndrome statistics directly into discrete physical hypergraphs. By coupling exact algebraic correlation equations with a top-down concurrent-pruning strategy, CAHR recovers the fault topology without false positives for both $d=5$ rotated surface codes and dense 8-body 2D color codes in our benchmark settings. Furthermore, we show that exact continuous parameter extraction in dense codes is limited by a variance cascade, where absolute statistical variance accumulates linearly from high- to low-degree mechanisms. This motivates a two-stage inference paradigm: utilizing CAHR to extract the fault topology, followed by continuous probability optimization. This provides a practical approach for characterizing and decoding highly correlated noise in realistic quantum hardware.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Generative Artificial Intelligence in Psychotherapy Practice: A Global Online Survey of Mental Health Professionals' Adoption

Background: Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools, including large language model (LLM)-based platforms such as ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot, are being adopted across healthcare settings with increasing speed. Despite the increasing popularity of GenAI, empirical data on the extent and nature of adoption by mental health clinicians in routine psychotherapy practice globally remain scarce. Objective: This study aimed to characterize current use patterns of GenAI tools among a global sample of practicing mental health professionals, including prevalence of use, specific tools employed, clinical and administrative purposes served, perceived effect on workload, and the institutional context shaping adoption (e.g., encouragement, prohibition, and training). Methods: We administered a cross-sectional online survey to a global convenience sample of licensed mental health professionals who provide psychotherapy as part of the scope of their practice (i.e., psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, nurses, and psychiatrists). Participants were recruited via professional networks, purposely avoiding the use of social media platforms. Within the survey, we captured GenAI use behaviors in psychotherapy contexts, and demographic and professional background data. Descriptive statistics were analyzed for all variables. Multivariate logistic regression was used to examine demographic and professional predictors of GenAI use. Results: A total of 766 mental health professionals who provide psychotherapy from 30 countries completed the survey. Of these, 54.6% (n=418) reported having purposely used at least one GenAI tool in psychotherapy clinical practice. ChatGPT was the most frequently used tool (354/418, 84.7%). The most commonly reported clinical purpose was assisting with treatment planning (175/418, 41.9%), followed by managing administrative tasks (173/418, 41.4%) and generating psychoeducational materials for clients (166/418, 39.7%). 82.8% of AI users reported that these tools reduced their overall work burden. Only 18.1% (139/766) of respondents reported institutional encouragement to use AI tools, while 81.1% (621/766) reported not having received any professional training on AI use. Predictors of AI adoption included younger age and rural practice setting. Conclusions: In this global convenience sample survey, GenAI use among mental health professionals in psychotherapy settings is widespread, concentrated in a wide variety of clinical and administrative tasks. Formal training and institutional guidance substantially lag behind current adoption patterns. These findings highlight an urgent need for evidence-based competency frameworks, regulatory clarity, and professional education to support safe and ethically informed integration of AI into clinical mental health practice.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

A mathematical study of the excess growth rate

arXiv:2510.25740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The excess growth rate, defined as the gap in Jensen's inequality for the logarithm, is a fundamental functional in portfolio theory. In this paper, we present a mathematical study motivated by information theory. We begin by establishing its properties and showing that it has rich connections with information theoretic concepts such as the Helmholtz free energy, L. Campbell's measure of average code length and large deviations. Our main results consist of three axiomatic characterization theorems of the excess growth rate, in terms of (i) the relative entropy, (ii) the gap in Jensen's inequality, and (iii) the logarithmic divergence that generalizes the Bregman divergence. Furthermore, we study maximization of the excess growth rate and compare it with the growth optimal portfolio. Our results not only provide theoretical justifications of the significance of the excess growth rate, but also establish new connections between information theory and quantitative finance.

04.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Optimal minimal residual disease threshold in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia: A retrospective cohort study based on the TARGET database

Authors:

by Xiong-yu Liao, Hong Zheng, Jian-pei Fang, Dun-hua Zhou, Kun-yin Qiu Background Minimal residual disease (MRD) monitoring is a cornerstone of risk stratification in pediatric acute myeloid leukemia (AML), with a threshold of 0.1% conventionally defining positivity by flow cytometry. Advances in flow cytometric technologies, enabling detection of leukemic cells with higher sensitivity and specificity, warrant a reevaluation of whether a lower threshold improves prognostic accuracy. Methods and findings We conducted a retrospective cohort study using data from the Therapeutically Applicable Research to Generate Effective Treatments (TARGET)-AML initiative. The study population comprised 1,205 pediatric patients with de novo AML treated across Children’s Oncology Group (COG) clinical trial centers. Patients were enrolled between September 1996 and December 2016, with a median follow-up of 6.2 years (range: 0.5–20.1 years). The primary objective was to compare the prognostic performance of the traditional MRD threshold (≥0.1%) with a lower threshold (≥0.05%) after induction courses 1 and 2. The main outcome measure was 5-year event-free survival (EFS). Analyses included Kaplan−Meier survival estimates, Cox proportional hazards models to calculate hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves, and net reclassification improvement (NRI). The optimal threshold for predicting 5-year EFS, determined by ROC analysis, was 0.05% after both induction course 1 (AUC: 0.840, 95%CI[0.76,0.88]) and course 2 (AUC: 0.854, 95%CI[0.78,0.89]). The 0.05% threshold demonstrated higher HR for the first event than the 0.1% threshold (after course 1: HR = 2.8, 95%CI[2.3,3.3]; P 

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Systematic Evaluation of Feature Representations for Cancer-Associated sORF Prediction in Non-coding RNA

Short open reading frames (sORFs) within non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) have arisen as a hidden layer of gene regulation, encoding small peptides that represent a new class of cancer regulators with diagnostic and therapeutic potential. However, inferring associations between sORFs to specific cancer types remains challenging and requires computational approaches for accurate prediction. Recently, the CoraL framework introduced the first computational approach for predicting cancer-associated peptides, focusing primarily on model architecture while overlooking how feature extraction strategies influence predictive accuracy. We present a systematic evaluation of machine learning models and feature extraction approaches to predict cancer-associated sORFs across 15 cancer types. We benchmarked seven traditional machine learning algorithms combined with three feature extraction methods: k-mer frequency, Word2Vec embeddings, and genomic language model (gLM)-based embeddings. To our knowledge, this is the first study applying gLM-derived embeddings to the prediction of cancer-associated sORFs in ncRNA. Our results show that traditional machine learning models with appropriate feature extraction outperform the CoraL baseline across all cancer types, achieving up to 10% higher accuracy in some of the 15 evaluated datasets. Interestingly, k-mer features consistently outperformed gLM embeddings without fine-tuning, suggesting that local sequence composition may provide more discriminative information for this task and that pre-trained genomic representations may require task-specific adaptation to fully capture these patterns. Additionally, we observed that the way sequences are tokenized, such as the k-mer length, can affect performance: longer fragments (e.g., k=7) sometimes reduced accuracy for Random Forest but had a smaller effect on MLP. Our findings suggest that appropriate feature engineering can provide greater improvements than increasing model complexity.

06.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Structural motif search across the protein universe with Folddisco

Authors:

Detecting similar protein structural motifs in large structure collections is computationally expensive. We developed Folddisco, a fast structural motif search tool that uses an index of position-independent geometric features, including side-chain orientation, combined with a rarity-based scoring system. Folddisco is 20-fold faster in querying and fourfold more storage-efficient than existing methods while improving accuracy. Folddisco is freely available online ( https://folddisco.foldseek.com ), along with a webserver ( https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco ). Folddisco enables protein structural motif search in million scale databases.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Enhanced Tantalum Superconducting Resonator Performance via All-Surface Organic Monolayer Passivation

arXiv:2604.22112v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tantalum is a promising platform for superconducting quantum circuits, yet coherence times remain limited by dielectric losses from interfacial two-level systems (TLS), exacerbated by native oxide regrowth. Here, we implement molecular surface passivation using self-assembled organic monolayers on freshly etched tantalum and silicon in coplanar waveguide resonators. Surface characterization by contact angle, XPS, FTIR and TEM confirm the formation of ordered, nanometer-thick films that suppress oxide formation. Microwave measurements in the ~5-9 GHz range reveal internal quality factors up to 1.8x10^6 in the single-photon regime at 100 mK, representing a ~140% improvement over untreated devices with native oxide. Power and temperature dependent measurements attribute this enhancement to reduced TLS-induced losses. These results demonstrate that molecular passivation effectively engineers low-loss interfaces and provides a scalable route toward high-coherence superconducting quantum devices.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sovereign Assurance Boundary: Certificate-Bound Admission for Agentic Infrastructure

arXiv:2606.11632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic infrastructure introduces a critical control-plane authorization problem: non-deterministic reasoning systems can propose high-stakes mutations to production resources, yet existing security mechanisms – such as identity and access management (IAM), policy engines, consensus protocols, and audit logs – either enforce static, context-unaware permissions or merely record actions post-execution. This paper introduces the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), a certificate-bound runtime admission layer for autonomous execution authority. SAB intercepts agent proposals at an assurance airlock, compiles them into typed execution contracts $C$, and binds these contracts to cryptographic evidence digests $H(E)$ and policy versions. The contracts are then routed through consequence-aware certification paths. Upon successful admission, the system emits a signed Sovereign Assurance Certificate ($\Omega$) that is strictly scoped to a specific execution identity, revocation epoch, and validity window. Finally, a sovereign execution broker verifies $\Omega$ and performs fresh pre-execution revocation and drift checks before invoking infrastructure APIs. We detail the airlock-broker architecture, formalize its admission and revocation invariants, and report preliminary feasibility measurements from a Go prototype evaluated over 2,500 admission attempts. Ultimately, this broker-enforced model prevents autonomous reasoning from directly mutating state, transforming delegated execution authority into a cryptographically verifiable, evidence-bound, revocable, and replayable runtime artifact.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

No Accidental Software Agent First Canonical Code for Human Code Entropy Reduction and 30 to 500 times Lower Frontier Model Requirements

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier coding models may spend substantial capacity learning not only program behavior, but also accidental entropy in human repositories. Such repositories contain valuable signals: tests, incidents, migrations, edge cases, product judgment, and operational history. These signals are entangled with framework churn, naming drift, generated-source ambiguity, dependency rituals, CI dialects, weak proof routes, and human-oriented review customs. We propose agent-first canonical code, a proof-carrying substrate that rewrites routine product software into canonical behavior profiles, typed change algebra, proof lanes, constrained edit grammars, semantic patch cells, runtime negative memory, and proof-carrying change objects. The core hypothesis is that quotienting software by behavior equivalence under a declared oracle can collapse equivalent encodings into governed representatives with explicit evidence and proof obligations. The endpoint is amortized cost per verified correct change, including source, context, reasoning, tools, verification, security, provenance, review, failed loops, defects, and foundry cost under a common oracle. Reported reduction bands are hypotheses, not measured frontier results. The proposed limit is a No-Accident Horizon: removable accident decreases until residual novelty, evidence, governance, risk, and future optionality dominate. For supported routine-product distributions, this gives a defensible planning target near 100-fold all-in cost reduction, not a guarantee for all software. Preliminary QLoRA experiments on Qwen2.5-Coder-14B show that 64,088 canonical trajectories are learnable and suppress tested forbidden-language markers, but do not establish behavior preservation, scaling economics, or verified-change cost. The contribution is a falsifiable program centered on minimum functional description length and verified-change cost.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MaskWAM: Unifying Mask Prompting and Prediction for World-Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) present a promising paradigm for robotic control via video prediction. However, current WAMs suffer from fundamental spatial bottlenecks: standard text inputs introduce referential ambiguity in cluttered scenes, while unstructured RGB predictions lack semantic grounding and remain biased by task-irrelevant backgrounds. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MaskWAM, an object-centric world-action model. By jointly integrating masks as both explicit inputs and predictions via a unified Mixture of Transformers (MoT), MaskWAM unlocks robust policy generalization. This design provides two key benefits: (1) predicting future masks yields object-centric semantic supervision that suppresses visual noise, significantly enhancing even standard text-conditioned WAMs; and (2) coupling this predictive supervision with first-frame visual prompts, such as target object masks, establishes a precise spatial anchor that substantially reduces language ambiguity. Crucially, as WAMs are inherently vision-driven architectures, direct mask conditioning yields substantially stronger guidance than text alone, establishing a precise and robust paradigm for manipulating unseen objects. Evaluations on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and real-world tasks demonstrate that MaskWAM significantly outperforms baselines in both language-clear and language-ambiguous tasks.

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

Hierarchical Spatial and Channel Aggregation for Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation

Cross-domain Few-shot Segmentation (CD-FSS) aims to learn generalizable segmentation capability from abundant annotated samples in the source domain, enabling accurate segmentation of novel classes in the target domain with only a few annotated samples. Existing CD-FSS methods mainly focus on mitigating feature distribution shifts caused by style gaps while ignoring significant differences in class semantic granularity and discriminative attributes across domains, leading to two key degradations in support-query matching: semantic over-alignment and attribute over-alignment. To this end, we propose the Dual Hierarchical Aggregation Network (DHANet), which comprises three key modules. First, the Hierarchical Spatial Aggregation (HSA) module performs multi-scale region aggregation of pixel features along the spatial dimension, generating hierarchical semantic-enhanced features to alleviate semantic over-alignment. Additionally, the HCA module conducts multi-scale attribute aggregation along the channel dimension, generating hierarchical attribute-enhanced features to mitigate attribute over-alignment. Finally, we propose the Online Probabilistic Semantic Bank (OPSB), which progressively constructs and updates class probability distributions from query predictions during inference, and samples multiple pseudo-prototypes as additional support information to mitigate insufficient support. Extensive experiments on four target-domain datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Agentic Symbolic Search: Characterizing PDEs Beyond Hand-crafted Expressions, Meshes, and Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mathematicians understand a PDE solution through mathematical structures rather than tables of computed values. Historically, this has been the product of mathematical analysis, carried out by hand for each problem individually. Neither numerical simulation nor neural networks produce those structures directly. We propose Agentic Symbolic Search (ASYS), a prior-guided framework in which an agent translates PDE theory, public problem constraints, and accumulated search experience into testable differentiable symbolic programs. The mathematical forms are refined under evolutionary search, while their continuous parameters are fit by gradient-based optimization. This makes the search an automated form of inductive-bias injection rather than blind symbolic regression. For problems with known analytical forms, ASYS recovers these forms naturally; for other problems, ASYS constructs analytical approximations which can guide mathematicians toward further analysis. In our experiments, across five problems spanning bounded dynamics, finite-time blow-up, and free-boundary focusing, ASYS produces interpretable representations, including a geometric interface formula for Allen-Cahn 2D dynamics and a nine-parameter contraction law for Keller-Segel chemotactic blow-up, in settings where no closed-form description was previously available. ASYS shows the possibility of a new paradigm for characterizing PDE solutions, beyond handcrafted analytical solutions, mesh-based numerical solutions, and neural network approximations.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves student models by training them on trajectories induced by their own policy, making it a promising approach for mitigating exposure bias in agent training. However, most OPD studies focus on single-turn settings, while realistic LLM agents interact with environments over multiple turns. In this regime, early errors can alter future observations and compound across the trajectory, and standard dense token-level OPD becomes brittle, as it may over-penalize semantically valid alternatives, reinforce local degeneracies such as repeated actions, and propagate unreliable teacher supervision on off-distribution histories. We propose SAGE-OPD, a verifier-free selective intervention framework specifically designed for multi-turn OPD. Instead of applying teacher supervision uniformly across all turns, SAGE-OPD first observes environment feedback and uses teacher judgment to decide whether each student response should be skipped or intervened on. To further address compounding errors, SAGE-OPD weights token-level distillation by teacher confidence, reducing the influence of uncertain teacher distributions on corrupted or ambiguous histories. Finally, SAGE-OPD applies loss normalization to preserve the overall loss scale of standard OPD while retaining selective turn-level weighting. Experiments on agent tasks show that SAGE-OPD consistently improves over baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% relative improvement in ALFWorld unseen success rate over standard OPD. Ablation studies further demonstrate that turn-level intervention, teacher confidence weighting, and loss normalization provide complementary benefits. Our results suggest that effective multi-turn OPD should remain on-policy, but teacher supervision should be selectively allocated to turns where intervention is necessary and reliable.

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

Sum-of-Squares Degree Barriers for the Reweighted-Hinge Method in Robust Halfspace Learning: A Christoffel-Function Characterization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A certificate that removes outliers sees the data only through its low-degree moments, and an adversary exploits exactly this, hiding corruption where the clean data already looks typical, in the blind spot no bounded-degree test resolves. That blind spot turns out to have an exact size: the Christoffel function of the clean marginal, the very quantity modern data analysis thresholds to detect outliers, here read from the adversary's side as the corruption a bounded-degree certificate cannot remove. We turn this inversion into the organizing principle of the reweighted-hinge approach to robustly learning $\gamma$-margin halfspaces under malicious noise (Shen, 2025; Zeng and Shen, 2025): the governing resource is the Sum-of-Squares degree of the outlier-removal certificate, and the resolution principle states that the maximal corruption mass which can hide at a center $c$ from a degree-$2t$ certificate is exactly the Christoffel function $\lambda_{t+1}(c)$ of the clean marginal. Three consequences follow, all against the certificate method (not information-theoretic). A margin-degree tradeoff: certifying the dense pancake to error $\epsilon$ costs SoS degree $\Omega(\log(1/\epsilon))$ or margin $\Omega(\sqrt{\log(1/\epsilon)}/\sqrt{d})$, explaining why the $\log(1/\epsilon)$ margin Shen (2025) records is forced, with a weighted-Chebyshev reduction making the threshold $2t=\Theta((|c|/s)^2)$ tight modulo one classical weighted-extremal estimate. A degree-$2$ outlier barrier: the resolution principle realized as an explicit instance on which degree $2$ is stuck at $\eta^{1/2}$ while degree $4$ escapes, locating the method's small breakdown rate in the degree, not the analysis. And a degree-$2t$ algorithm tracing the frontier $\eta^{1-1/2t}$ (recovering Shen (2025) at $t=1$), whose gain is an explicit constant, capped by the pancake density and shown unimprovable by the degree-$2$ barrier.

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

EiCAP: Beyond Fluency, Probing and Improving Emotional Intelligence in LLMs via Psychologically Grounded Multi-Turn Dialogue

Large Language Models increasingly serve in emotionally sensitive roles, including mental health support, education, and crisis response, yet they lack a principled framework for assessing or improving Emotional Intelligence (EI). We introduce EiCAP, a unified, psychologically grounded six-layer EI taxonomy operationalized into two complementary resources. EiCAP-Bench is a multi-turn, one-vs-three forced-choice evaluation suite with 3,174 probes across 24 subcategories and cross-turn dependencies that reflect real conversational EI demands. EiCAP-SFT is a 152,820-dialogue supervision corpus aligned to the same taxonomy, enabling controlled, interpretable fine-tuning. Two key findings emerge. First, generic conversational supervised fine-tuning does not confer EI: fine-tuning on UltraChat yields no significant gain in any of the 24 subcategories, with a macro score of 24.6%, near the chance level of 25%. Second, applying EI-grounded LoRA, using approximately 0.8% of parameters, directly to Qwen-2.5-7B-Base achieves significant gains in all 24 subcategories, reaching a macro score of 75.33%, a gain of 51.7 percentage points over Base and 37.1 percentage points over Instruct. Crucially, an ablation shows that the UltraChat pre-stage is counterproductive, reducing performance by 21.4 percentage points: direct EI-grounded training is both necessary and sufficient.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DynFS-MoE: Dynamic Functional-Structural Mixture-of-Experts for Post-Traumatic Epilepsy Diagnosis

Post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) is a severe complication of traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet early identification remains challenging due to the complex structural and functional alterations it induces in the brain. To address this, we propose a dynamic multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that integrates functional and structural MRI through time-aware functional-structural encoding and class-conditioned expert routing. Within this framework, modality-specific and cross-modal experts learn complementary representations, while a Modality-Class MoE (MCoE) module dynamically dispatches expert weights according to each classification objective. Experimental results across three binary classification tasks demonstrate that the framework consistently outperforms static fusion baselines, and high-interpretability analyses further reveal meaningful region-of-interest (ROI) interactions. This dynamic multimodal expert framework effectively captures class-dependent brain interaction patterns and provides an interpretable approach for PTE diagnosis and risk stratification.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

OmniTraffic: A Controllable Generation Pipeline and Benchmark for Spatio-Temporal Traffic Reasoning

Traffic scene understanding requires models to reason beyond object recognition, including lane topology, multi-view geometry, temporal evolution, and signal-phase semantics. However, existing traffic-oriented multimodal benchmarks largely emphasize passive visual recognition or isolated video understanding, offering limited support for evaluating structure-aware traffic reasoning under controlled conditions. We introduce OmniTraffic, a controllable generation pipeline and benchmark for spatio-temporal traffic reasoning. Built around 12 real-world intersections reconstructed into editable 3D traffic environments and complemented by surveillance footage from two countries, OmniTraffic supports both controlled and natural-condition evaluation. It defines a three-level task hierarchy spanning scene perception, multi-view and temporal reasoning, and decision support. Using structured traffic metadata, OmniTraffic generates synchronized multi-view VQA samples covering vehicle states, lane functions, view–BEV correspondence, temporal dynamics, and signal-phase analysis, resulting in 8M VQA samples and a 3K human-verified test set. Evaluation of eleven frontier MLLMs reveals a large human–model gap, with the most pronounced failures in topology-grounded and spatio-temporal reasoning tasks. Fine-tuning a lightweight MLLM on simulated OmniTraffic data further improves performance on real-world traffic scenes, demonstrating the value of simulation-generated supervision for traffic-specific multimodal reasoning. Beyond a fixed dataset, OmniTraffic provides an extensible pipeline with configurable intersections, camera views, traffic demands, signal phases, visual conditions, and rare events.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Pre-Deployment Robustness Stress Testing for CT Segmentation Systems Using Clinically Motivated Multi-Corruption Augmentation

Deep learning-based CT segmentation systems often achieve high accuracy on clean benchmark images, but their performance may degrade under heterogeneous clinical imaging conditions such as noise, resolution loss, contrast variation, intensity shift, and artifacts. This instability can limit reliable deployment in real-world medical imaging workflows. We propose Robustness via Augmented Multi-corruption Pipeline (RAMP), a robustness-oriented augmentation framework for CT segmentation. RAMP combines anatomically constrained spatial perturbations, CT intensity transformations, and stochastic multi-corruption composition to expose models to clinically plausible image degradation during training. Across two CT segmentation evaluation settings, RAMP achieved the strongest corrupted-image performance and the smallest clean-to-corrupted robustness gap. In the five-organ noisy evaluation benchmark, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.610 to 0.753 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.264 to 0.064 compared with the nnU-Net baseline. In Abdomen1K, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.633 to 0.789 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.290 to 0.070. Although RAMP did not achieve the highest clean-image Dice, it substantially mitigated worst-case segmentation collapse under severe image degradation. These results suggest that multi-corruption augmentation can serve as a practical pre-deployment strategy for improving the reliability of CT segmentation systems in heterogeneous clinical environments.

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

2.5-D Decomposition for LLM-Based Spatial Construction

arXiv:2605.07066v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous systems that build structures from natural-language instructions need reliable spatial reasoning, yet large language models (LLMs) make systematic coordinate errors when generating three-dimensional block placements. We present a neuro-symbolic pipeline based on 2.5-D decomposition: the LLM plans in the two-dimensional horizontal plane while a deterministic executor computes all vertical placement from column occupancy, eliminating an entire class of errors. On the Build What I Mean benchmark (160 rounds), GPT-4o-mini with this pipeline achieves 94.6\% mean structural accuracy across 12 independent runs, within 3.0 percentage points of the 97.6\% ceiling imposed by architect-agent errors that no builder-side improvement can address. This outperforms both GPT-4o at 90.3\% and the best competing system at 76.3\%. A controlled ablation confirms that 2.5-D decomposition is the dominant contributor, accounting for 50.7 percentage points of accuracy. The pipeline transfers directly to edge hardware: Nemotron-3 120B running locally on an NVIDIA Jetson Thor AGX matches the cloud result at 94.5\% with no prompt modifications. The underlying principle, removing deterministic dimensions from the LLM's output space, applies to any autonomous construction or assembly task where gravity or other physical constraints fix one or more degrees of freedom. A transfer experiment on 500 IGLU collaborative building tasks confirm the effect generalizes beyond the primary benchmark.

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

Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage

Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A small noise approximation for Muller's Ratchet

arXiv:2606.15842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider an infinite system of SDEs with Fleming-Viot noise indexed by $k=0,1,2,\dots$, whose parameters $\alpha,\lambda$, and $\nu$ are the (deleterious) selection coefficient, the (uni-directional) mutation rate, and a quantity which determines the size of the system's fluctuations. The SDE's unique weak solution $X(t) = (X_k(t))_{k=0,1,2,...}$ models what is known in population genetics as Muller's ratchet. Here, $X_k(t)$ stands for the frequency of individuals carrying $k$ deleterious mutations. Since the mutation process is uni-directional, $t\mapsto \inf\{k: X_k(t)> 0\}$ is non-decreasing for almost every path of $X$, and we refer to an increase as a click of Muller's ratchet. A long standing question concerns the clicking rate of Muller's ratchet. Using Duhamel's principle for semigroups, we give a partial answer by approximating $E(\sum_{k=1}^\infty kX_k(t) )$ and $E\big(X_0(t)\big)$ up to $O(1/\nu^2)$ for fixed $\alpha$, $\lambda$ and $t>0$. Our results suggest that $\psi:=\nu \alpha e^{-\lambda/\alpha}$ is a crucial quantity also when the mutation/selection ratio $\theta = \lambda/\alpha$ is moderately large: for large $\nu \alpha$, clicking of the ratchet on the time scale $\frac 1\alpha \log \theta$ becomes rare as soon as $\psi$ becomes large.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

These ‘master’ proteins protect us from deadly mutations — and could inspire new drugs

Authors:

Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it. Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Experimental Analysis of Neural Network-Based Image Classification on the CIFAR-10 Dataset

An experimental investigation of neural image classification on the CIFAR-10 benchmark is presented through fully connected and convolutional network formulations. The analysis emphasizes the complete learning pipeline: image vectorization, normalization, one-hot class encoding, supervised loss minimization, learning-rate selection, mini-batch training, convolutional feature extraction, max-pooling, and validation-based generalization assessment. A convolutional architecture with six convolutional layers and three max-pooling stages is evaluated for ten training epochs using a batch size of 128 and an Adam optimizer with a learning rate of 0.001. The validation accuracy reaches approximately 74.77%, while the validation loss begins to increase after the middle of training despite continued reduction in training loss. The resulting behavior illustrates the practical difference between representation learning and memorization, and it provides a compact experimental baseline for future studies on regularization, data augmentation, deeper architectures, and reproducible image-classification education.