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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier for Phase Detection in Strongly Correlated Matter

arXiv:2606.14489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The characterisation of quantum phases in strongly correlated systems is a crucial milestone for the deployment of quantum sensors. In this work, we present a Physics-Informed Variational Quantum Classifier (VQC) designed to detect the topological phase transition between the Fermi polaron quasiparticle and the molecular bound state. Unlike conventional Machine Learning approaches, our quantum architecture is constructed via the Trotterised time-evolution of an effective Hamiltonian, ensuring that the learnable parameters correspond to interpretable physical quantities. We show that the VQC efficiently discovers the optimal interferometric protocol, specifically the evolution time and effective bath interactions required to maximise the visibility of Ramsey fringes, thereby clearly distinguishing the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) and Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer (BCS) regimes. Furthermore, we report the validation of this classifier on the QRed superconducting quantum processor (BSC-CNS). Despite the intrinsic hardware noise and decoherence, the VQC preserves the relative ordering of the topological phases. We demonstrate that the physics-informed architecture achieves a linear gate complexity $\mathcal{O}(N)$, bypassing the exponential memory wall of classical simulation and ensuring scalability to many-body regimes.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

RODS: Reward-Driven Online Data Synthesis for Multi-Turn Tool-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.19047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn tool-use RL is bottlenecked by the rapid depletion of informative samples in static datasets. We observe that the gradient signal in GRPO concentrates on tasks with the highest rollout reward variance, a consequence of the Popoviciu upper bound. Consequently, samples near the agent's capability boundary – where successes and failures are roughly balanced – contribute disproportionately large policy gradients. As training progresses, this boundary continuously shifts, which gradually depletes the pool of informative samples in a static dataset. We propose RODS (Reward-driven Online Data Synthesis) to resolve this depletion. RODS closes the loop between RL training and data generation by repurposing the progress reward variance as a practical, zero-cost boundary detector that requires no extra inference beyond the rollouts already computed for training. It continuously identifies such boundary samples, synthesizes new multi-turn variants matching their structural complexity (e.g., API topology and dependency depth) via a skill-aligned resampling pipeline, and manages a dynamic replay buffer that co-evolves with the policy. Starting from 400 human seeds and maintaining an active training pool of ~800 samples, RODS achieves comparable performance to a 17K-sample offline pipeline while requiring roughly 20x fewer trajectories, and improves over fixed-data RL and environment augmentation in our controlled setting.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

EPM-JEPA: Operator-Side Experience Modulation in JEPA-Family World Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: JEPA-family world models use a static predictor whose weights do not adapt when test-time dynamics diverge from training. We compare two mechanisms for incorporating accumulated experience into a JEPA predictor under distribution shift: operand-side injection, where a compressed experience representation is added as a residual to the predictor's hidden state (EI-JEPA), and operator-side modulation, where the same representation generates low-rank weight deltas via LoRA applied to the predictor's weights (EPM-JEPA). On a pre-registered comparison (Moving MNIST, gravity shift), EPM-JEPA (D_shift^{n=50} = 0.7848 +/- 0.0078, three seeds) differs from EI-JEPA (0.8238) by delta = 4.74% - Outcome C: a null result - by our stated criterion, a valid outcome. As a secondary, non-pre-registered observation, EPM-JEPA improves 1.90% over a no-memory baseline (0.8000), consistently across seeds, while EI-JEPA underperforms the baseline, indicating the benefit is specific to weight-level modulation. Our primary contribution is a mechanism analysis: the D_shift^{n=50} trajectory reflects three independent dynamical processes - buffer cycling, EMA target drift, and an intrinsic LoRA settling transient of +0.021 - rather than convergence to equilibrium. These findings motivate PEM-JEPA, a physics-grounded successor addressing this dynamical-peak limitation.

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

FLAT: Feedforward Latent Triangle Splatting for Geometrically Accurate Scene Generation

Generating explorable 3D scenes from a single image requires strong generative priors and accurate geometric representations suitable for downstream use. Current video diffusion models offer high-quality generation and implicitly encode multi-view geometric structure in latent space. However, existing feedforward latent scene decoders typically output volumetric 3D Gaussians that lack a well-defined surface, limiting their use in simulation or standard graphics pipelines. This motivates decoding surface-aligned primitives that are not only renderable but also closer to explicit geometric assets. We ask whether compressed video diffusion latents can be mapped directly to explicit surface primitives in a single pass. To this end, we introduce FLAT and, for the first time, show that triangle splats can be decoded directly from video diffusion latents. Compared with decoding 3D Gaussians, predicting flat primitives is notoriously more challenging due to high sensitivity to primitive orientations, oftentimes leading to poor gradient flow. FLAT solves with two key ingredients: a ray-centered rotation parameterization for triangle regression and a novel product window function that improves gradient flow during differentiable triangle rendering. On standard benchmarks, FLAT achieves significantly better geometric accuracy while maintaining competitive visual quality compared to state-of-the-art feedforward baselines. We further show that a lightweight test-time refinement step converts the predicted triangle soup into a fully opaque, game-engine-ready representation that supports real-time rendering. By evaluating 3DGS, 2DGS, and triangle splatting variants under an identical training setup, we provide the first systematic analysis of representation tradeoffs in feedforward scene generation. The project page is available at https://flat-splat.github.io

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A saturation-absorption rubidium magnetometer with multilevel optical Bloch-equation modeling for intermediate-to-high fields

arXiv:2601.09115v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SASHMAG (Saturated Absorption Spectroscopy High-field MAGnetometer), an atomic sensor designed for precision magnetic-field measurements in the intermediate-to-high field regime ($>0.2\,T$) using Rubidium-87 ($^{87}Rb$). The sensor operates in the hyperfine Paschen-Back regime, where the hyperfine and Zeeman interactions decouple, and utilizes counter-propagating pump-probe configuration in Faraday geometry to resolve isolated, Doppler-free Zeeman transitions. To interpret the resulting spectra in this strongly field-dependent regime, we developed a comprehensive multilevel optical Bloch-equation model solved explicitly in the uncoupled $\ket{m_I, m_J}$ basis, capturing state mixing and nonlinear saturation dynamics. This model reproduces measured spectra at sub-Doppler resolution and is consistent with analytical expectations for power broadening and thermal Doppler scaling. Magnetic field estimation is performed using a physics-constrained optimization routine that infers the magnetic field by minimizing the residual between experimentally extracted line centers and calculated transition frequencies from the field-dependent Hamiltonian. We demonstrate magnetic field retrieval from $0.2\,T$ to $0.4\,T$ with a precision of $\pm 0.0017 \,T$). Furthermore, the validated simulation establishes a foundation for generating synthetic training datasets, paving the way for autonomous, Machine Learning-enhanced magnetometry in applications ranging from MRI to fusion reactors.

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

Family-Aware Residual Architecture for Predicting Quantum Circuit Simulation Performance

arXiv:2606.11620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Approximate tensor-network simulators enable classical simulation of quantum circuits beyond the reach of exact methods, but selecting optimal approximation parameters – such as bond dimension thresholds – remains a costly trial-and-error process. We present a family-aware neural architecture that predicts both the minimum approximation threshold required to achieve target fidelity and the expected wall-clock runtime for quantum circuit simulation, given only the circuit's OpenQASM description and execution context. Our key insight is that quantum circuits from different algorithmic families (e.g., QFT, Grover, VQE) exhibit fundamentally distinct simulation cost profiles due to their differing entanglement structures. We employ family-conditioned residual corrections – additive, family-specific adjustments atop a shared backbone, drawing on established conditional computation techniques – enabling the model to capture both universal circuit properties and algorithmic nuances. The architecture incorporates a pretrained family classifier (97.5% accuracy) and domain-informed algorithm fingerprint features derived from gate-composition heuristics. Evaluated on circuits spanning 7–130 qubits across 10 algorithm families, our system achieves 79.5% exact threshold accuracy (91.2% within one rung) and $R^2 = 0.82$ runtime correlation, with inference completing in approximately 50 ms – replacing trial-and-error simulation runs that may take minutes to hours. Ablation studies confirm that family-aware modeling provides the single largest performance improvement (+3.2 percentage points), validating the hypothesis that algorithm family is a first-class feature for simulation cost prediction.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Percolation phase transition on planar spin systems

arXiv:2105.13314v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article we study the continuity and sharpness of the phase transition for percolation models defined on top of planar spin systems. The two examples that we treat in detail concern the Glauber dynamics for the Ising model and a Dynamic Bootstrap process. For both of these models we prove that their phase transition is continuous and sharp, providing also quantitative estimates on the two point connectivity. The techniques that we develop in this work can be applied to a variety of different percolation models based on spin-flip dynamics. We also discuss some of the problems that can be tackled in a similar fashion.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales

arXiv:2606.12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks for AI agents rarely capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and extended reasoning required by scientific work, whereas benchmarks for scientific tasks often reduce research to static, direct problems and provide limited support for interactive evaluation. Here, we introduce SciAgentArena, a systematic benchmark for evaluating AI agents in real-world scientific research scenarios drawn from emerging needs across multiple domains. SciAgentArena comprises approximately 200 tasks with stepwise verification and an interactive, agent-agnostic environment for assessing diverse AI agents. Using this benchmark, we find that current agents can contribute effectively to well-specified data-analysis workflows, particularly when the task structure and evaluation criteria are clear. However, their performance remains uneven across scientific contexts: agents struggle to generate genuinely novel insights, sustain self-directed exploration, and formulate robust solutions for open-ended research questions. We further characterize common failure modes across agents and identify opportunities for improving their reliability, autonomy, and scientific reasoning. Together, SciAgentArena provides a practical framework for measuring progress in AI agents for science and for guiding the design of future agents capable of addressing complex scientific challenges. Full codes, tasks, and datasets can be accessed via this link: https://sciagentarena.github.io/.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SWE-Future: Forecast-Conditioned Data Synthesis for Future-Oriented Software Engineering Agents

arXiv:2606.18733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Realistic coding-agent benchmarks often replay public GitHub issues and pull requests, making them vulnerable to overlap with model pretraining, fine-tuning, synthetic-data generation, or benchmark-driven model selection. Fully synthetic tasks avoid direct historical replay, but can drift away from real repository needs. We propose SWE-Future, a forecast-conditioned data synthesis method for future-oriented coding tasks. Given a forecast snapshot at time $T_0$, the method uses only pre-$T_0$ repository evidence to forecast future feature implementation/enhancement, bugfix, and refactor task families. We first validate this forecasting step retrospectively: after forecasts are fixed, later pull requests are used only to measure whether the predicted task families match future repository work. In an 80-repository study, the forecaster achieves 58.1\% future-work relevance under the main semantic matching metric. We then use validated forecast families as conditioning signals to synthesize a 200-task coding-agent dataset across 61 repositories from a task-generation snapshot, rather than replaying the later pull requests used for validation. SWE-Future shows that repository-evolution forecasts can guide realistic, future-oriented coding-task synthesis while reducing direct dependence on historical pull-request replay.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Prefill Awareness in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.12747v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-relevant studies of language models, including alignment and jailbreaking evaluations and AI control protocols, often rely on prefilling model outputs. If AI models can recognize and act on the fact their prior assistant messages have been inserted or edited, the effectiveness and validity of these methods could be compromised. We investigate whether frontier language models can distinguish between tampered and untampered assistant-side context, a capability we call prefill awareness. To do so, we construct a binary preference benchmark across three prefill mechanisms, filtering for cases where models show consistent stances. We find that frontier models show substantial prefill awareness: Claude Opus 4.5 detects prefills opposing its preferences in 9-35% of cases with a 0% false positive rate when prompted; additionally, models often revert towards baseline behavior without explicitly reporting that the prefill was foreign. Controlled ablations later also show that detection and resistance rely on different cues, where stylistic mismatch mainly affects whether models flag a prefill as foreign, while preference mismatch mainly affects whether they revert toward their baseline answer. We also examine more realistic agentic settings such as misalignment-continuation evaluations and SWE-bench trajectories, where frontier models sometimes disavow prefilled assistant turns in ways that depend strongly on dataset, task success, and hidden formatting artifacts. Our results indicate that prefill awareness is already a substantial confound for some prefill-based methods. We recommend that model developers track this capability in frontier systems.

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

Rarity-Gated Context Conditioning for Offline Imitation Learning-Based Maritime Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2606.13311v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contextual anomaly detection aims to identify abnormal behavior conditional on context variables, but practical deployments often face highly imbalanced context distributions where rare regimes can be critical information. Under such frequency bias, context-conditioned models can produce unstable decisions and excessive false alarms in rare contexts. We propose Rarity-Gated Feature-wise Linear Modulation (RGFiLM), a rarity-aware conditioning module that combines feature-wise modulation (i.e., context-conditioned scaling and shifting of hidden features) with a gate controlled by a data-driven rarity score. The rarity score is estimated from the empirical distribution of context variables and regulates how strongly context modulates intermediate representations: the gate becomes more decisive under rare contexts while remaining conservative under frequent contexts. We evaluate RGFiLM on maritime trajectory anomaly detection using AIS motion sequences with ERA5 environmental context in an environment-sensitive detour scenario. When instantiated in a sequential anomaly scoring pipeline, RGFiLM achieves the best mean F1–False Positive Rate (FPR) trade-off among the compared context-agnostic and context-conditioned methods. These results suggest that explicitly accounting for context rarity is an effective approach for reducing false alarms in context-sensitive anomaly detection.

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

Topological Neural Dynamics: A Neuron-wise Framework for Sequence Modeling

arXiv:2606.21295v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing sequence models, including RNNs, LSTMs, continuous-time networks, and Transformers, share a common structural principle: layer-wise dynamics, where all neurons in the same layer co-evolve through a shared parameterized operator, leaving individual neurons no freedom to evolve independently. Yet in many complex dynamical systems, rich global behavior emerges precisely from locally evolving units interacting through structured connectivity. Inspired by this principle, we introduce Topological Neural Dynamics (TND), a sequence modeling framework that shifts computation from layer-wise to neuron-wise dynamics. TND represents a neural system as a directed neuron graph, an interaction operator, and a local dynamics function, where each neuron evolves independently and collective computation emerges from interactions through the explicit graph topology. We instantiate TND as a discrete-time graph-coupled dynamical system and evaluate it as a case study on a behavior cloning task in single-player Pong. Compared with Vanilla RNN, Sparse RNN, LSTM, Closed-form continuous-time neural network (CfC), and Transformer baselines, TND achieves the best catch rate and a mean of 17.47 consecutive catches per round, more than three times that of the strongest baseline. These results suggest that shifting from layer-wise to neuron-wise dynamics provides an effective inductive bias for sequence modeling.

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

A prior-free blind detection of information leakage from model predictions

arXiv:2606.11267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data leakage – contamination of a model with information unavailable at baseline – is the dominant reproducibility failure in machine-learning-based science, yet detection tools require training code, external data, or domain expertise. None operates on the artifact an auditor most often holds: the model's output. We ask what can be decided about leakage from predictions and outcomes alone. We give a decision-theoretic framework in which leakage diagnostics are functionals of the predicted-risk/outcome law, parameterized by a threshold-weighting linked to proper scoring rules and decision-curve analysis. We prove a sharp impossibility: a recalibrated leak matching an honest model's calibration and discrimination is indistinguishable from honest performance by any function of the predictions, so the broad class is detectable only against an externally supplied ceiling on achievable discrimination. We then prove what leakage cannot hide: a near-deterministic subgroup – the signature of a near-label leak – produces a sustained unit-purity head that no legitimate predictor of a non-deterministic outcome can manufacture, yielding a prior-free test. These results organize leakage into a trichotomy – miscalibrated, broad-calibrated, and deterministic – each with a matched detector and failure mode. We validate on UK Biobank using time-windowed comorbidity leakage with known, graded severity, measuring a detection floor of $\Delta\cstar \approx 0.007$ on this endpoint, below which residual leakage is undetectable from output and too small to alter conclusions. The numerical floor is cohort- and endpoint-specific; the structural lesson is general: output-only detection fails where residual leakage is indistinguishable from an honestly stronger predictor. The test returns a verdict on a prediction vector in under a second on commodity hardware.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Non-invasive intracranial pressure waveform reconstruction with deep learning

Purpose: Continuous intracranial pressure (ICP) monitoring requires invasive instrumentation, reaching only a narrow subset of critically ill patients. We tested whether deep learning models trained on routinely acquired extracranial signals can reconstruct continuous ICP waveforms at clinically relevant accuracy in an independent external cohort. Methods: In adults admitted to the ICU at a single quaternary health system, five deep learning architectures were trained on high-frequency arterial blood pressure (ABP), photoplethysmography (PPG), and electrocardiography (ECG) waveforms, using invasive (intraparenchymal) ICP as ground truth. Two fusion strategies (early and late) and three training objectives (waveform-morphology, baseline robust regression, and weighted robust regression) were evaluated. Models were externally validated on the held-out MIMIC-III Waveform Database. Performance was assessed by mean absolute error (MAE) and waveform similarity by Pearson correlation (r). Results: We analyzed data from 158 critically ill adults (~5,322 hours) across two quaternary health systems (Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston). Validation MAE ranged from 4.276 mmHg [95% CI 4.269, 4.283] (gated recurrent, late fusion) to 4.946 mmHg [95% CI 4.938, 4.956] (attention-based, early fusion), with Pearson r ranging from 0.599 [95% CI 0.599, 0.600] to 0.722 [95% CI 0.722, 0.723]. The multiscale encoder-decoder model demonstrated the most favorable MAE-correlation tradeoff. Conclusion: This is the first demonstration that continuous ICP waveform reconstruction from bedside signals generalizes across institutions at clinically relevant accuracy, establishing a foundation for non-invasive ICP monitoring and motivating validation across broader populations and ICP ranges.

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

PerceptionDLM: Parallel Region Perception with Multimodal Diffusion Language Models

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual understanding tasks. However, most existing MLLMs rely on autoregressive generation, which limits their efficiency for perception tasks that require captioning multiple regions. In this work, we propose PerceptionDLM, a multimodal diffusion language model optimized for efficient parallel region perception. Built upon PerceptionDLM-Base, a strong foundational baseline that achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source diffusion MLLMs, our architecture fully leverages the parallel decoding nature of DLMs. Specifically, we introduce efficient prompting and structured attention masking to enable simultaneous perception of multiple masked regions, allowing the model to generate region descriptions in parallel at both the sequence and token levels. This design significantly improves inference efficiency compared with existing approaches that process regions sequentially. To systematically evaluate the parallelism property of visual perception capability for DLMs, we construct a new Parallel Detailed Localized Captioning Benchmark (ParaDLC-Bench) by scaling the DLC-Bench to include multiple region masks per image, enabling joint evaluation of both caption quality and inference efficiency. Experiments demonstrate that PerceptionDLM maintains competitive performance in region captioning while achieving substantial speed improvements for multi-region perception tasks. Our results highlight the potential of multimodal diffusion language models for efficient, parallel visual perception. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to achieve parallel region caption and perception by leveraging the advantages of diffusion language models. Code, models, and datasets are released.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Electrical-Circuit Simulation of the Uhlmann Phase

arXiv:2606.24559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Uhlmann phase extends the concept of geometric phases to mixed quantum states through a parallel-transport condition on purification amplitudes, but its experimental realization has so far required sophisticated quantum platforms with carefully engineered auxiliary degrees of freedom. In this work, we reformulate the Uhlmann parallel-transport condition as a linear matrix differential equation and vectorize it to obtain an effective dynamical generator. This generator can be directly mapped onto the admittance matrix of a classical RC circuit, thereby translating the Uhlmann dynamics into the evolution of circuit node voltages. We illustrate the mapping using the equatorial-loop model and, via a rotating-frame transformation followed by a real decomposition, derive a time-independent, real-valued dynamical system suitable for analog implementation. LTspice simulations of the resulting active RC network faithfully reproduce the Uhlmann geometric phase and its topological transition at the critical purity, demonstrating that classical electrical circuits offer a simple and accessible platform for probing mixed-state geometric phases.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Learning Instance-Adaptive Low-Rank Orthogonal Subspaces for Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

Ribosomes are covered by a coat of flexible protein fragments

Ribosomal proteins contain flexible terminal regions that are averaged out during electron density reconstructions, rendering them absent from experimental models derived by X-ray crystallography or cryogenic electron microscopy. These flexible protein fragments (FPFs) collectively form an invisible coat on the ribosome surface whose presence has been systematically overlooked. Here we analysed FPFs from 36 ribosomes spanning bacteria, eukaryotes, and mitochondria. We found that mitoribosomes harbour the most numerous and longest FPFs. Structural predictions confirmed that FPFs are predominantly disordered across all ribosome classes. Comparison of FPF amino acid composition against proteome-wide background frequencies revealed strong and domain-specific compositional biases. The balance between arginine and lysine content tracks the cardiolipin content of the membrane each ribosome class contacts. The arginine enrichment in mitoribosomal FPFs may additionally reflect selection arising from the RNA-rich environment of mitochondrial RNA granules, membraneless condensates where mitoribosomes are assembled. FPFs are uniformly depleted in aromatic residues, arguing against protein-driven liquid–liquid phase separation propensity. Our findings suggest that the flexibly tethered coat is a highly functional intrinsic part of all ribosomes.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Heterogeneous LiDAR Early Fusion and Learned Re-Ranking Strategy for Robust Long-Term Place Recognition in Unstructured Environments

Robust localization in unstructured environments, such as agricultural fields, is a critical challenge for autonomous systems. LiDAR sensors provide detailed 3D information about the environment and are invariant to lighting conditions. For this reason, LiDAR-based place recognition methods have gained significant attention. In this paper, we propose MinkUNeXt-VINE++, a novel approach that combines early fusion of heterogeneous LiDAR data from two sensors (Livox Mid-360 and Velodyne VLP-16) and a learned re-ranking strategy in inference time. This fusion leverages the strengths of each sensor to provide a more comprehensive representation of the environment. Additionally, the re-ranking approach is particularly important in repetitive environments, such as vineyards, as finding true positives is a major challenge. We evaluated our approach using the TEMPO-VINE dataset, which provides heterogeneous LiDAR data in vineyard environments across different phenological stages. Our results demonstrate that MinkUNeXt-VINE++ significantly improves place recognition performance compared to single-sensor approaches and state-of-the-art methods. MinkUNeXt-VINE++ achieves a 20% improvement in the Recall@1 metric compared to single-sensor approaches, and +30% including re-ranking. The code of our method is publicly available for reproduction.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cognitive-emotional responses to ultrasonic neuromodulation of anterior cingulate cortex

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is a key brain center involved in cognitive and emotional processing that is implicated in a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders including chronic pain and depression. Circuit-targeted diagnosis and treatment of these disorders will require the capacity to precisely modulate ACC subregions. Toward that end, we recently developed and validated a novel low-intensity transcranial focused ultrasound device that can noninvasively and directly modulate ACC subdivisions in humans with millimeter precision. Here we describe the subjective reports of 36 individuals diagnosed with either chronic pain or major depression who received repeated brief stimulation trials (807 active, 797 sham; duration 30s-3min) spanning the dorsoventral extent of the ACC. Sonication immediately altered cognitive-emotional states (odds ratio 5.6, active versus sham), eliciting a positive-valence experience more often than negative (29% versus 8%) in both diagnostic groups. Sham-adjusted response rate varied across ACC targets, with the largest effects (Cohen's d ~ 0.8) observed in pregenual and subgenual ACC in subjects with chronic pain and depression, respectively. These rapid trial-by-trial responses to ACC stimulation predicted subsequent improvements in pain and depression severity at 24 hours. Collectively, these findings reveal that transcranial ultrasound can robustly evoke immediate, target-specific, clinically meaningful changes in cognitive-emotional state, demonstrating the potential of ultrasonic neuromodulation as a tool for individualized probing of circuit function and dysfunction.

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

Timage: A Generative Text-in-Image Paradigm for Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) often lose track of the right image regions during fine-grained spatial reasoning, because a textual query rarely carries any explicit geometric anchor into the pixel domain. Prevailing remedies either rewire the model's weights or pad the prompt with verbose instructions, yet neither reliably pins the language to the correct visual coordinates without eroding the backbone's general competence. We introduce Timage, a paradigm that recasts multimodal understanding as an alignment problem solved at the input: the query is drawn, as a typeset overlay, onto the image itself. The placement and appearance of this overlay are produced by a Constrained Schrödinger Bridge (cSB), an entropic optimal-transport sampler that factorizes layout synthesis into two coupled stochastic stages. The first stage, Region Search, transports noise toward query-aligned image zones while obeying a hard occlusion barrier that protects salient foreground content; the second stage, Appearance Shaping, sizes the glyphs through an ``ink-budget'' regularizer so that the rendered text stays legible and visually balanced. The resulting overlay behaves as an explicit attention beacon that channels the model's focus along spatial semantics. On the VMCBench suite, Timage paired with a modest 7B backbone clearly overtakes far larger proprietary systems as well as parameter-tuned baselines. The study positions deliberate input reconstruction as a powerful, architecture-neutral lever for strengthening multimodal reasoning.

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

ShoppingBench: A Real-World Intent-Grounded Shopping Benchmark for LLM-based Agents

Existing benchmarks in e-commerce primarily focus on basic user intents, such as finding or purchasing products. However, real-world users often pursue more complex goals, such as applying vouchers, managing budgets, and finding multi-products seller. To bridge this gap, we propose ShoppingBench, a novel end-to-end shopping benchmark designed to encompass increasingly challenging levels of grounded intent. Specifically, we propose a scalable framework to simulate user instructions based on various intents derived from sampled real-world products. To facilitate consistent and reliable evaluations, we provide a large-scale shopping sandbox that serves as an interactive simulated environment, incorporating over 2.5 million real-world products. Experimental results demonstrate that even state-of-the-art language agents (such as GPT-4.1) achieve absolute success rates under 50% on our benchmark tasks, highlighting the significant challenges posed by our ShoppingBench. In addition, we propose a trajectory distillation strategy and leverage supervised fine-tuning, along with reinforcement learning on synthetic trajectories, to distill the capabilities of a large language agent into a smaller one. As a result, our trained agent achieves competitive performance compared to GPT-4.1.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Off-Policy Evaluation for Missingness-Aware Policies in MDPs with Rewards Missing Not at Random

arXiv:2606.20206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In offline Reinforcement Learning, immediate rewards in logged batch data are often unobserved due to sparse or irregular record-keeping, or censored beyond certain reward values. This issue arises in practical settings, including health care and marketing. We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE) in finite-horizon Markov decision processes when rewards are missing not at random (MNAR), which breaks ignorability and induces selection bias even after conditioning on states and actions. To address this, we formalize a reward-dependent propensity model and use future states as shadow variables to identify the full-data conditional mean reward. We further introduce a bridge function that recovers the conditional mean reward without explicitly modeling the MNAR mechanism, and estimate it via a min-max procedure to avoid double sampling. Building upon these identification results, we propose an Fitted-Q-Evaluation-style estimator that propagates the recovered rewards while allowing target policies to depend on past missingness indicators. Finally, we establish consistency and finite-sample error bounds for our OPE estimator, and show through experiments the strong performance of our method compared to existing methods on simulated and MIMIC-III Sepsis data.