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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Chorus II: Cross-Request Sparsity Reuse for Efficient Image-to-Video Generation

Serving diffusion models for image-to-video generation is computationally expensive, posing significant challenges for large-scale deployment. Real I2V workloads often contain similar requests, such as repeated effect templates, related subjects, and recurring shot layouts. Existing cross-request acceleration methods mainly exploit this redundancy through feature reuse. We observe that similar I2V requests also share highly consistent sparse attention patterns, enabling historical sparse masks to serve as request-conditioned priors with almost no online mask-prediction overhead. We propose a cross-request reuse framework centered on sparsity reuse, with feature reuse as an optional extension safeguarded by a lightweight guidance enhancement. Our sparsity reuse is implemented as shared sparse mask reuse, which reuses high-quality sparse masks from similar historical requests to avoid per-request online mask prediction. Optional feature reuse applies downsampled computation to highly redundant spatiotemporal regions, mitigating boundary artifacts while preserving efficiency gains. Guidance enhancement reinforces image/text conditioning after reuse, mitigating semantic drift and condition-adherence issues. Experiments show that default sparsity reuse configuration preserves generation quality with a 2.16$\times$ speedup.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PACUTE: Phonology-, Affix-, and Character-level Understanding of Tokens for Filipino

Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation. This limitation is most acute for languages with non-concatenative morphology, where standard tokenizers systematically misalign token boundaries with morpheme boundaries. We introduce PACUTE, a diagnostic benchmark of 4,600 tasks designed to evaluate morphological understanding in Filipino, a language characterized by productive infixation, reduplication, and diacritic-driven lexical distinctions that are typically absent from written text. PACUTE includes a hierarchical diagnostic framework of six compositional levels that localizes where morphological understanding breaks down. Evaluating open-weight LLMs and frontier commercial models, we find that open-weight models perform near chance on morpheme decomposition regardless of scale. Frontier models perform much better, often recovering individual affixes under contains-match scoring, but remain far below their character-level ceilings on compositional tasks of morpheme transformations and syllabification. These results identify productive morphological composition, rather than character access alone, as the persistent bottleneck for Filipino word-structure understanding.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Pre-activity glycemic prediction prioritizes post-meal movement

Post-meal activity can attenuate glucose excursions; however, the exact magnitude of this effect remains unquantified, and guidance is rarely personalized to the meal occasion. We linked Human Phenotype Project diet logs, continuous glucose monitoring and wearable step counts to test whether glycemic risk estimated before activity occurs can prioritize post-meal movement. An activity-blind PPGR model trained on 391,214 PPGR-valid meals from 9,561 participants generated pre-activity meal scores. Among 55,949 step-linked meals from 1,627 adults without diabetes, higher 0-120-min post-meal steps were associated with lower within-participant PPGR (-53.0 mg/dL*min per 1 s.d. higher log steps; 95% CI, -64.2 to -41.7), with larger adjusted PPGR iAUC contrasts at 1,501-2,500 observed steps (-154.4 mg/dL*min versus 0-50 steps). Associations were stronger among participants with higher glycemic-adiposity burden and after meals with higher predicted PPGR. A held-out pre-activity step-response ranking concentrated larger inverse step-PPGR associations (-79.1 top versus -15.0 mg/dL*min bottom quintile), providing a testable strategy for prediction-guided, post-meal movement prompts.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation Sampler for Discrete Flow Matching

arXiv:2606.24140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Discrete flow matching (DFM) provides a principled framework for generative modeling on discrete state spaces via continuous-time Markov chain dynamics. In practice, sampling for DFM commonly employs discretizations such as $\tau$-leaping, yet efficient sampling methods under a limited number of function evaluations (NFE) remain less studied. To address this gap, we propose the Time-Reparameterized Cumulative Intensity Extrapolation (TR-CIE) sampler, which aims to improve sampling quality when function evaluations are restricted. TR-CIE consists of two components. First, a schedule-based time reparameterization rescales the time grid according to the noise schedule. Under standard factorized DFM rate parameterizations, this transformation of variables absorbs the schedule-dependent growth term and mitigates stiffness near the terminal sampling stage. Second, we introduce a cumulative-intensity extrapolation updating rule. By reusing cached model outputs from the previous step as a history term, this improves the approximation of stepwise cumulative intensities on the resulting non-uniform time grid. We provide a theoretical analysis that bounds the local approximation error of cumulative intensities and establishes convergence results. The resulting sampler requires one NFE per step and introduces no additional model evaluations compared to the standard $\tau$-leaping sampler. Extensive experiments on synthetic tasks, text generation, and text-to-image benchmarks demonstrate that our method improves sampling quality under limited NFE.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Entropy-Controlled Flow Matching

Modern vision generators transport a base distribution to data through time-indexed measures, implemented as deterministic flows (ODEs) or stochastic diffusions (SDEs). Despite strong empirical performance, standard flow-matching objectives do not directly control the information geometry of the trajectory, allowing low-entropy bottlenecks that can transiently deplete semantic modes. We propose Entropy-Controlled Flow Matching (ECFM): a constrained variational principle over continuity-equation paths enforcing a global entropy-rate budget d/dt H(mu_t) >= -lambda. ECFM is a convex optimization in Wasserstein space with a KKT/Pontryagin system, and admits a stochastic-control representation equivalent to a Schrodinger bridge with an explicit entropy multiplier. In the pure transport regime, ECFM recovers entropic OT geodesics and Gamma-converges to classical OT as lambda -> 0. We further obtain certificate-style mode-coverage and density-floor guarantees with Lipschitz stability, and construct near-optimal collapse counterexamples for unconstrained flow matching.

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

Human Universal Grasping

arXiv:2606.17054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Mapping abstraction and metacognition onto distinct transdiagnostic symptom profiles

Transdiagnostic psychiatric research on reward-guided learning has largely focused on simple associative processes, leaving it unclear whether or how higher-level processes are disrupted. Here, we studied how abstraction, the ability to extract relevant features from complex information, and metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate one's own mental processes, map onto specific transdiagnostic dimensions. Using an online sample (N = 249), we examined associations between these processes and three cross-culturally robust transdiagnostic dimensions derived from a large existing dataset (N = 19,505): Compulsive hypersensitivity, Social withdrawal, and Addictive behaviours. Computational modelling of an abstract representation learning task with confidence judgments revealed that Compulsive hypersensitivity was negatively associated with both abstraction ability (pboot = 0.003) and metacognitive sensitivity (pboot = 0.005), while Social withdrawal was positively associated with metacognitive sensitivity alone (pboot = 0.002). Moreover, transdiagnostic dimensions revealed more coherent associations with higher-order cognition than symptom-level analyses, highlighting the added value of examining psychopathology at the factor rather than the symptom level. These findings portray a hierarchical view of cognitive dysfunctions in psychopathology and point to representational and metacognitive processes as potential targets for transdiagnostic intervention.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Catastrophic Forgetting is Low-Rank: A Function-Space Theory for Continual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.18024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting in continual adaptation is usually studied through parameter drift, replay, or distillation, but these views do not identify which output-space directions are vulnerable. We give a function-space account in the NTK regime: new-task training induces old-task prediction drift through the cross-task kernel, yielding a closed-form predictor for the forgetting vector before any new-task gradient step. In frozen-backbone linear-head PEFT-CL, where the model is linear in the trainable parameters, the predictor is exact up to numerical precision; for nonlinear adapters/full fine-tuning, it is a local NTK approximation. The same expression reveals that forgetting concentrates in a small number of old-task NTK eigenmodes and under frozen linear heads gives a Kronecker scaling rule for the vulnerable rank. These results clarify the relation to prior NTK-overlap theory, explain why parameter-space regularizers can miss output-space interference, and motivate a targeted spectral regularizer.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ricci flow for the Bures–Helstrom qubit metric

arXiv:2606.19493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Bures–Helstrom metric is the minimal monotone Riemannian metric on the state space of a qubit. With the quantum Fisher normalization used here, it identifies the Bloch ball with a geodesic hemisphere of the unit round three–sphere. We describe its Ricci flow explicitly. In a general rotationally symmetric gauge the flow is a coupled system for the radial lapse and warping factor; a single scalar equation appears only after a Hamilton–DeTurck gauge choice. In the corresponding moving DeTurck frame the squared warping function $\Psi=\Phi^2$ satisfies the linear forced heat equation \begin{equation*} D_t\Psi=\Psi_{ss}-2, \end{equation*} while the fixed-lapse coordinate form contains the associated transport term. Since the Bures–Helstrom metric is Einstein, the geometric flow itself is the homothetic shrinker \begin{equation*} g(t)=(1-4t)g_{\mathrm{BH}}, \end{equation*} with scalar curvature $6/(1-4t)$ and extinction time $T=1/4$. Thus the metric remains inside the monotone cone for all $t

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ICA Lens: Interpreting Language Models Without Training Another Dictionary

Finding interpretable directions in language-model representations is critical for understanding and controlling model behavior. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have become the standard tool for this purpose, but using them as the default first lens often requires training, storing, and evaluating large overcomplete dictionaries. This bottleneck limits rapid exploration and raises a fundamental question: how much interpretable structure is already visible from activation geometry before training another neural dictionary? Our intuition is simple: many interpretable directions are selective on tokens, and these directions should look less Gaussian than random directions. We therefore revisit independent component analysis (ICA), a classical method for finding non-Gaussian directions, as a compact lens for language-model interpretability. We find that ICA has been underestimated for LLM interpretability, because prior uses often relied on off-the-shelf ICA implementations that are brittle on LLM activations and lacked systematic tools for inspecting and evaluating the recovered directions. To bridge these gaps, we introduce ICALens, the first practical workflow for stable, efficient, and auditable ICA analysis of LLM representations. It combines an optimized GPU-parallel FastICA pipeline with LLM-specific stability recipes and better fitting diagnostics, enabling efficient and reliable layer-wise analysis. Across GPT-2 Small, Gemma 2 2B, and Qwen 3.5 2B Base, ICALens efficiently recovers compact, human-interpretable directions without per-layer gradient-based dictionary training. On SAEBench, ICA is competitive with public SAEs in sparse probing and outperforms them in targeted probe perturbation under small-to-medium budgets. These results suggest that ICA should not be viewed as a weak baseline, but as an efficient and complementary first lens for exploring language-model representations.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Mamba-FSCIL: Dynamic Adaptation with Selective State Space Model for Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to incrementally learn novel classes from limited examples while preserving knowledge of previously learned classes. Existing methods face a critical dilemma: static architectures rely on a constant parameter space to learn from data that arrive sequentially, making them prone to overfitting to the current session, while dynamic architectures continually expand the parameter space, leading to increased complexity. In this study, we explore the potential of Selective State Space Models (SSMs) for FSCIL. Mamba leverages its input-dependent parameters to dynamically adjust its processing patterns and generate content-aware scan patterns without session-wise projector expansion. This enables it to configure distinct processing for base and novel classes, helping preserve existing knowledge while adapting to new ones. To leverage Mamba's potential for FSCIL, we design two key modules: First, we propose a dual selective SSM projector that generates input-conditioned state-space parameters from intermediate features for dynamic adaptation. The dual design structurally decouples base and novel-class processing, employing a frozen base branch to maintain stable base-class features and a dynamic incremental branch that adaptively learns distinctive feature shifts for novel classes. Second, we develop a class-sensitive selective scan mechanism to guide dynamic adaptation of the incremental branch. It reduces the disruption to base-class representations caused by training on novel data, and meanwhile, encourages the selective scan to perform in distinct patterns between base and novel classes. Extensive experiments on miniImageNet, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200 demonstrate that Mamba-FSCIL achieves state-of-the-art performance.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Wide-field NV magnetometry under simultaneous high-pressure and high-temperature conditions

arXiv:2606.25378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We demonstrate wide-field optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) under simultaneous high-pressure and high-temperature conditions using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. Although NV-center magnetometry has been widely used for spatially resolved magnetic-field imaging, its application to extreme environments combining pressure and temperature remains challenging. In this work, we show that ODMR can be observed at 5 GPa and 500 K, demonstrating the feasibility of NV spin readout under such combined extreme conditions. We further perform wide-field ODMR of iron at 7 GPa and 500 K, where the stray magnetic field from the sample is spatially visualized through the pressure cell. These results establish NV-center magnetometry as a promising platform for imaging magnetic phenomena in materials under high-pressure and high-temperature environments.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Efficient Test-time Inference for Generative Planning Models with OCL Search

arXiv:2606.00618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for AI planning, yet their performance remains constrained by the training data distribution. One approach is to improve generated solutions during inference by scaling test-time compute. A more efficient alternative is to optimize the inference process itself. In this paper, we show that a modified version of a classical Open-Closed List (OCL) search provides just such an efficient inference procedure. Our algorithm synergizes two learned components: a generative model that performs fast rollouts from intermediate states and a heuristic model that prioritizes among candidate reasoning paths. Key contributions include novel exploration control mechanisms and integration of learned models within the OCL framework. Across multiple combinatorial planning domains, our approach outperforms both neurosymbolic search baselines and classical solvers in computational efficiency and solution quality.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LineageMark: Multi-user White-box Watermarking for Contribution Tracing in Model Derivation Chains

arXiv:2606.17123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In open large language model (LLM) ecosystems, models are frequently adapted across multiple domains and applications, forming multi-stage derivation chains. Consequently, tracking and verifying historical contributions is essential for model provenance and intellectual property protection. However, existing watermarking methods are mainly designed for single-user, one-time embeddings, often fail under repeated model derivation and incremental updates. To address this problem, we propose LineageMark, a multi-user white-box watermarking framework for model derivation chains. The framework encodes watermarks in model parameters using a projection-based approach. Stable carriers are first selected to reduce sensitivity to model changes, each watermark bit is then represented as a projection statistic over these carriers. Additional watermark insertions introduce only bounded perturbations in the projection space, and margin constraints are used to maintain signal integrity. We evaluate the effectiveness of LineageMark in multi-stage model derivation chains. Experimental results show that LineageMark preserves contributor watermarks across multi-stage derivation and supports incremental multi-user watermark insertion. Furthermore, it exhibits robustness against perturbations such as re-watermarking, fine-tuning, quantization, and pruning.

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

Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation

arXiv:2605.14998v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation.

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

A Zero-shot Generalized Graph Anomaly Detection Framework via Node Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.12673v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cross-domain graph anomaly detection (GAD) aims to identify abnormal nodes in unseen target graphs, showing strong potential in real-world applications with heterogeneous graph data. However, existing methods often depend on dataset-specific feature semantics and structural patterns, which limits their ability to generalize across different domains. To address this challenge, we propose AlignGAD, a zero-shot generalized graph anomaly detection framework. Our framework is built upon three key components: a Global Unification Module that aligns heterogeneous node features and normalizes graph signals in the spectral domain; a Clustering Module that constructs cluster-aware graph views to capture group-level abnormal patterns; and a Node Discrepancy Scoring Module that measures reconstruction discrepancy and aggregates anomaly evidence from different graph views. Experiments on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AlignGAD under the zero-shot GAD setting.

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

Do LLM Attribution Metrics Transfer? Auditing Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation Across Datasets and Constructs

Practice often treats automatic metrics for attribution in LLM retrieval-augmented generation as interchangeable. We audit eight automatic scorers – lexical, embedding, and BERTScore baselines alongside entailment/grounding-trained models (clean and FEVER NLI, the checker MiniCheck) – across three evaluation constructs (provenance/topicality, generated-answer attribution, and fact-check entailment), asking whether any scorer transfers: stays within the 95% confidence interval of the best audited scorer on every dataset of a multi-dataset construct. In the construct with the most multi-dataset human-labeled coverage – generated-answer attribution (AttributionBench's four source datasets, n = 1,610, with independent HAGRID, n = 2,150) – none does: the per-dataset metric rankings invert (Kendall tau = -0.64, p = 0.031 on AttributedQA vs. LFQA), and an off-the-shelf NLI scorer that is best on short-claim AttributedQA (AUROC 0.90) collapses to AUROC 0.53 (chance) on long-form LFQA, where BERTScore wins (0.91); the flip is not a length or truncation artifact. This instability has a concrete decision cost: a naive "best-on-average" rule for choosing an evaluator fails leave-one-dataset-out (mean held-out regret 0.172 AUROC, worse than fixing one scorer), so metric choice must be validated on the target dataset rather than learned from others. A prompt-based LLM judge avoids the chance-level collapses the automatic scorers suffer (no LFQA collapse) but is not uniformly best, ~100x costlier, and non-deterministic – relocating, not removing, the validation burden.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Recursive Agent Harnesses

Recursive language models (RLMs) showed that recursion over model calls is an effective strategy for long-context reasoning, and production coding agents have begun to write code that spawns subagents at scale, most recently in Anthropic's dynamic workflows. We name and study the pattern between these two lines of work, where the recursive unit is a full agent harness with filesystem tools, code execution, and planning rather than a model call with no tools. We call this the Recursive Agent Harness (RAH) and frame it as harness recursion, the code-first extension to the model recursion of RLMs. A parent agent generates and runs an executable script that spawns subagent harnesses in parallel for fine-grained workloads and uses structured function calls for small subtasks. We provide a controlled evaluation on long-context reasoning. With the backbone held fixed at GPT-5 to match the published Codex and RLM baselines, RAH improves the Codex coding-agent baseline from 71.75% to 81.36% on Oolong-Synthetic (199 samples, 13 context-length buckets up to 4M tokens), a gain attributable to the harness rather than the model. With a stronger backbone, Claude Sonnet 4.5, the same design reaches 89.77%.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

A Poisson Process Life Expectancy framework for optimising patient lifetime during chemotherapy

Cancer therapy balances between two competing objectives - treatment efficacy against the tumour and the risk of treatment related severe adverse events, including patient death. Most existing optimal control theory (OCT) formulations rely on optimising heuristic cost functionals that lack direct clinical interpretability. In clinical practice treatment efficacy and patient tolerability are primarily assessed through survival metrics and adverse event rates. Here we introduce the Continuous Lifetime Payoff (CLP), a novel OCT objective functional that directly links treatment decisions to patient survival. It explicitly incorporates tumour dynamics, tumour eradication, and patient mortality from tumour progression, drug-related toxicity and age. We fit age-related mortality from life tables and infer parameters from simulated survival data. The CLP provides a clinically grounded framework for optimising chemotherapy regimens.

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

Neural Particle Automata: Learning Self-Organizing Particle Dynamics

We introduce Neural Particle Automata (NPA), a Lagrangian generalization of Neural Cellular Automata (NCA) from static lattices to dynamic particle systems. Unlike classical Eulerian NCA where cells are pinned to pixels or voxels, NPA model each cell as a particle with a continuous position and internal state, both updated by a shared, learnable neural rule. This particle-based formulation yields clear individuation of cells, allows heterogeneous dynamics, and concentrates computation only on regions where activity is present. At the same time, particle systems pose challenges: neighborhoods are dynamic, and a naive implementation of local interactions scale quadratically with the number of particles. We address these challenges by replacing grid-based neighborhood perception with differentiable Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) operators backed by memory-efficient, CUDA-accelerated kernels, enabling scalable end-to-end training. Across tasks including morphogenesis, point-cloud classification, and particle-based texture synthesis, we show that NPA retain key NCA behaviors such as robustness and self-regeneration, while enabling new behaviors specific to particle systems. Together, these results position NPA as a compact neural model for learning self-organizing particle dynamics.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

RubricRL: Simple Generalizable Rewards for Text-to-Image Generation

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising approach for aligning text-to-image generative models with human preferences. A key challenge, however, lies in designing effective and interpretable rewards. Existing methods often rely on either composite metrics (e.g., CLIP, OCR, and realism scores) with fixed weights or a single scalar reward distilled from human preference models, which can limit interpretability and flexibility. We propose RubricRL, a simple and general framework for rubric-based reward design that offers greater interpretability, composability, and user control. Instead of using a black-box scalar signal, RubricRL dynamically constructs a structured rubric for each prompt–a decomposable checklist of fine-grained visual criteria such as object correctness, attribute accuracy, OCR fidelity, and realism–tailored to the input text. Each criterion is independently evaluated by a multimodal judge (e.g., o4-mini), and a prompt-adaptive weighting mechanism emphasizes the most relevant dimensions. This design not only produces interpretable and modular supervision signals for policy optimization (e.g., GRPO or PPO), but also enables users to directly adjust which aspects to reward or penalize. Experiments with an autoregressive text-to-image model demonstrate that RubricRL improves prompt faithfulness, visual detail, and generalizability, while offering a flexible and extensible foundation for interpretable RL alignment across text-to-image architectures.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Authors:

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Superconductor-"Metal" Transition of One-dimensional Interacting Bosons with Ohmic Quantum Dissipation

arXiv:2605.30746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The phase diagram of a system of interacting bosons (Cooper pairs) hoping on a one-dimensional (1D) lattice with onsite phase dissipation describing the Josephson tunneling to a nearby diffusive normal-metal electrode is studied. Starting from the system at commensurate lattice filling, it is shown by a combination of analytical techniques that the phase diagram contains two quantum phases: A dissipative Bose-Einstein condensate (D-BEC) or superconductor with long-range phase coherence, and a dissipative Mott insulator (D-Mott) or "metal" with exponentially decaying phase correlations in space and local imaginary-time correlations decaying as the local pairing correlations of the electrode. The D-Mott/metal phase can be described as a 1D array of dissipative boson puddles, weakly coupled by Josephson tunneling. The puddle size roughly corresponds to the length scale beyond which phase slips suppress phase coherence. The dissipative time-dependent Ginsburg-Landau theory phenomenologically used by Sachdev, Werner, and Troyer [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 92} 237003 (2004)] for the superconductor-metal transition in quasi-1D wires is derived from this microscopic puddle picture. Thus, the criticality of the D-Mott/D-BEC transition is shown to belong to the Wilson-Fisher universality class with dynamical exponent $z\approx 2$. At small doping, the D-Mott/metal phase remains stable due to its finite compressibility, which is computed to leading order in a perturbation expansion of the dissipation strength and the inter-puddle Josephson coupling. At larger doping, using a mapping to a pseudospin chain combined with bosonization, the D-BEC/superconductor phase is the ground state for non-vanishing but arbitrarily small dissipation. Similarities and differences with deconfinement transition of an array 1D bosonic Mott insulators in anisotropic optical lattices are also discussed.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Power-Flexible AI Data Centers: A New Paradigm for Grid-Responsive Compute

arXiv:2606.25098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is driving unprecedented growth in electricity demand from data centers. Traditional power-system planning treats large computing facilities as inflexible peak loads, leading to costly infrastructure upgrades and long delays in grid interconnection. Recent work has shown that AI clusters can reduce electricity consumption during peak demand through software-based workload orchestration. This article explores how modern GPU-based AI data centers can operate as grid-interactive assets that respond dynamically to power system conditions. We describe an architecture integrating grid signals, workload scheduling, and power telemetry for fine-grained cluster power control. Experimental results from a real-world deployment on a 130 kW GPU cluster demonstrate multiple forms of flexibility, including rapid load reduction, sustained curtailment, and carbon-aware operation while preserving service levels for priority jobs. We further demonstrate performance-aware load shifting across geographically distributed clusters, enabling workloads to migrate toward regions with lower grid stress. Together, these capabilities transform AI infrastructure from static electricity consumers into flexible resources that support grid reliability, accelerate interconnection, and improve computing sustainability.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Mordal: Automated Pretrained Model Selection for Vision Language Models

Incorporating multiple modalities into large language models (LLMs) is a powerful way to enhance their understanding of non-textual data, enabling them to perform multimodal tasks. Vision language models (VLMs) form the fastest growing category of multimodal models because of their many practical use cases, including in healthcare, robotics, and accessibility. Unfortunately, even though different VLMs in the literature demonstrate impressive visual capabilities in different benchmarks, they are handcrafted by human experts; there is no automated framework to create task-specific multimodal models. We introduce Mordal, an automated multimodal model search framework that efficiently finds the best VLM for a user-defined task without manual intervention. Mordal achieves this both by reducing the number of candidates to consider during the search process and by minimizing the time required to evaluate each remaining candidate. Our evaluation shows that Mordal can find the best VLM for a given problem using $8.9\times$–$11.6\times$ lower GPU hours than grid search. We have also discovered that Mordal achieves about 69\% higher weighted Kendall's $\tau$ on average than the state-of-the-art model selection method across diverse tasks.