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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Super-Heisenberg Non-Equilibrium Quantum Sensing with Waveguide-Coupled Emitters

Authors:
Mohammad B. Arjmandi↗

arXiv:2606.11975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We explore an array of quantum emitters as non-equilibrium probes, coupled to a one-dimensional photonic waveguide, aiming to estimate its properties such as wave number which encodes the waveguide frequency and dispersive characteristics. By considering transient dynamics following initial excitation, we show that the quantum Fisher information (QFI) can be significantly enhanced through careful emitter positioning. For two-emitter probes, optimal spacing stabilizes populations and coherences in the single-excitation subspace, suppressing super radiant decay and extending both the magnitude and longevity of QFI. Randomized emitter configurations also reveal that vanishing waveguide-mediated cross decay maximizes both achievable sensitivity and the temporal duration over which information about the parameter remains accessible. Extending to multipartite probes, we demonstrate that the maximum QFI and its temporal integral scale with system size, exceeding the Heisenberg limit for all positioning strategies. Our results highlight the potential of waveguide-coupled emitter arrays as versatile quantum sensors, where collective radiative dynamics can be harnessed to achieve tunable, long-lived, and enhanced precision.

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

ToolChain-CRC: Conformal Risk Control for Agentic AI Under Retrieval and Tool-Use Drift

Authors:
Jeffery Opoku↗David Banahene↗

arXiv:2606.18467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern AI agents retrieve documents, call tools, check intermediate information, and then produce a final answer or action. This creates a risk-control problem that is not visible from the final answer alone. A final response may look acceptable even when the retrieval was weak, a tool output was wrong, or an earlier step was unsupported. We propose ToolChain-CRC, a conformal risk-control method for retrieval-augmented and tool-using agents under drift. The method treats each agent run as a full trajectory of actions, observations, and final output. It builds step-level risk scores, combines them into a trajectory risk score, calibrates an accept-or-intervene rule, and adds an anytime alarm that can stop risky runs before the final answer. We prove trajectory-level risk control under exchangeable calibration runs, give a drift-aware extension with auditable constants, and prove an anytime escalation rule through a supermartingale construction. Experiments cover synthetic tool-chain drift, RAG/tool-use stress tests, public SQuAD-derived retrieval tasks, an API-free agentic QA case study, ablations, target-risk sensitivity checks, 20-seed robustness checks, a drift-margin audit, and a live RAG/tool-use agent benchmark. Across these settings, final-answer-only calibration can miss retrieval and tool failures, while trajectory-level calibration keeps accepted-trajectory risk below the target.

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03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Model-independent upper bounds for the prices of Bermudan options with convex payoffs

Authors:
David Hobson↗Dominykas Norgilas↗

arXiv:2503.13328v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Suppose $\mu$ and $\nu$ are probability measures on $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $\mu \leq_{cx} \nu$. Let $a$ and $b$ be convex functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with $a \geq b \geq 0$. We are interested in finding $$\sup_{\mathbf{M}} \sup_{\tau} \mathbb{E}^{\mathbf{M}} \left[ a(X) I_{ \{ \tau = 1 \} } + b(Y) I_{ \{ \tau = 2 \} } \right] $$ where the first supremum is taken over consistent models $\mathbf{M}$ (i.e., filtered probability spaces $(\Omega, \mathbf{F}, \mathbb{F}, \mathbb{P})$ such that $Z=(z,Z_1,Z_2)=(\int_{\mathbb{R}} x \mu(dx) = \int_{\mathbb{R}} y \nu(dy), X, Y)$ is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$ martingale, where $X$ has law $\mu$ and $Y$ has law $\nu$ under $\mathbb{P}$) and $\tau$ in the second supremum is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$-stopping time taking values in $\{1,2\}$. Our contributions are first to characterise and simplify the dual problem, and second to completely solve the problem under some structural assumptions on the measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ (namely that $\mu$ and $\nu$ are absolutely continuous probability measures that satisfy the Dispersion Assumption). A key finding is that the canonical set-up in which the filtration is that generated by $Z$ is not rich enough to define an optimal model and additional randomisation is required. This holds even though the marginal laws $\mu$ and $\nu$ are atom-free. The problem has an interpretation of finding the robust, or model-free, no-arbitrage bound on the price of a Bermudan option with two possible exercise dates, given the prices of co-maturing European options.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Structure-Oriented Randomized Neural Networks for Poisson-Nernst-Planck and Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes Systems

Authors:
Yunlong Li↗Fei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.19912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a structure-oriented randomized neural network framework, termed SO-RaNN, for the Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) system and the Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes (PNP-NS) system. The decoupled linearized subproblems are solved iteratively by randomized neural networks in a space-time framework. For the concentration variables, a pointwise cut-off is used to enforce positivity at the value level, and discrete mass-scaling factors are computed at selected correction instants and interpolated in time, so as to ensure exact mass matching at those instants and to promote approximate mass preservation between them. To introduce an auxiliary discrete dissipation mechanism, we further employ an SAV-type post-processing correction, which yields monotonicity of the SAV auxiliary variable under the ideal SAV update. For the PNP-NS system, a structure-preserving randomized neural network (SP-RaNN) is used for the velocity field, so that the velocity approximation satisfies the incompressibility constraint pointwise by construction. On the theoretical side, we derive residual-based estimates for the raw, uncorrected RaNN solvers of the linearized subproblems, formulate a conditional local-in-time convergence result for the raw outer Picard iteration of the PNP system, and analyze the value-level positivity correction together with the mass-correction and SAV post-processing steps. For the PNP-NS system, we establish an approximation result for the SP-RaNN space and provide a conditional error statement for the corresponding linearized Oseen-type problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate approximation accuracy in the source-driven manufactured tests and illustrate the intended value-level positivity correction, selected-time mass matching, computed free-energy curves based on the final gauge-fixed potential, and divergence-free approximation in benchmark tests.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Grammar of the Wave: Towards Explainable Multivariate Time Series Event Detection via Neuro-Symbolic VLM Agents

Authors:
Sky Chenwei Wan↗Yifei Y. Wang↗Tianjun Hou↗Xiqing Chang↗Aymeric Jan↗

arXiv:2603.11479v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Event Detection (TSED) aims to localize semantically meaningful events in time series data, with critical applications in high-stakes domains. Unlike statistical anomalies, events are often defined by natural-language descriptions with internal temporal-logic structures across multiple physical channels. However, in real-world settings, dense event annotations are expensive to obtain, making purely supervised learning difficult. We introduce Language-guided TSED, a setting where a model is given textual event descriptions and must ground them to intervals in multivariate signals with little or no labeled data. To address this problem, we propose Event Logic Tree (ELT), a knowledge representation framework that converts linguistic descriptions into structured temporal logic over signal primitives. Building on ELT, we present SELA, a neuro-symbolic VLM agent framework that iteratively grounds primitives from signal visualizations and composes them under ELT constraints, producing both event intervals and faithful tree-structured explanations. We further release a real-world benchmark across energy and climate domains with expert knowledge and annotations. Experiments show that SELA improves over supervised fine-tuning and existing zero/few-shot time series reasoning baselines.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Factors associated with the uptake of intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine: The experiences of postpartum women attending child welfare clinics in three rural districts in the Western Region of Ghana.

Authors:
Amugi↗Agudey↗D. T↗Gyimah↗N. M↗Mensah↗Kwarkye↗Yengliereh↗G. Y. G↗Claude↗K. J↗Brookman-Eshun↗…

Background Intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy with sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (IPTp-SP) is a key preventive strategy. However, optimal uptake remains inconsistent despite high antenatal care (ANC) attendance. This study assessed factors associated with IPTp-SP uptake and explored the experiences of postpartum women in rural Ghana. Methods A mixed-method study was conducted among 1,155 postpartum women attending child welfare clinics in Jomoro, Prestea-Huni Valley and Ellembelle districts of the Western Region of Ghana. Quantitative data were collected using structured questionnaires and analysed using descriptive statistics and chi-square tests. Qualitative data from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions were analysed thematically to explore womens experiences and perceptions. Results Overall, 73.5% (812/1105) of respondents received at least three doses of SP during pregnancy, in line with WHO recommendations. The most common number of doses received was three doses (31.5%, 348/1105), followed by four doses (26.4%, 292/1105), while a smaller proportion (8.1%, 90/1105) received only one dose. Knowledge of malaria in pregnancy was generally high: 92.7% (1027/1155) of respondents correctly identified its mode of transmission, while 75.1% (830/1155) and 83.5% (923/1155) were aware of the effects of malaria on pregnancy and the foetus, respectively. Uptake was not significantly associated with socio-demographic characteristics, including age, education, occupation, marital status, gravidity, and parity (p > 0.05). However, number of ANC visits was significantly associated with uptake (p = 0.006). Although not statistically significant, lower uptake was observed among peri-urban residents and uninsured women. Qualitative findings indicated that while women recognized the benefits of IPTp-SP, side effects such as nausea, dizziness, and discomfort, as well as challenges with tablet formulation and dosing negatively influenced adherence. Conclusions IPTp-SP uptake was high and largely independent of socio-demographic factors but strongly influenced by ANC attendance. Addressing experiential barriers and strengthening patient-centered counselling during ANC may further improve uptake and adherence.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RSRCC: A Remote Sensing Regional Change Comprehension Benchmark Constructed via Retrieval-Augmented Best-of-N Ranking

Authors:
Roie Kazoom↗Yotam Gigi↗George Leifman↗Tomer Shekel↗Genady Beryozkin↗

Traditional change detection identifies where changes occur, but does not explain what changed in natural language. Existing remote sensing change captioning datasets typically describe overall image-level differences, leaving fine-grained localized semantic reasoning largely unexplored. To close this gap, we present RSRCC, a new benchmark for remote sensing change question-answering containing 126k questions, split into 87k training, 17.1k validation, and 22k test instances. Unlike prior datasets, RSRCC is built around localized, change-specific questions that require reasoning about a particular semantic change. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first remote sensing change question-answering benchmark designed explicitly for such fine-grained reasoning-based supervision. To construct RSRCC, we introduce a hierarchical semi-supervised curation pipeline that uses Best-of-N ranking as a critical final ambiguity-resolution stage. First, candidate change regions are extracted from semantic segmentation masks, then initially screened using an image-text embedding model, and finally validated through retrieval-augmented vision-language curation with Best-of-N ranking. This process enables scalable filtering of noisy and ambiguous candidates while preserving semantically meaningful changes. The dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/google/RSRCC.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

TIMI: Training-Free Image-to-3D Multi-Instance Generation with Spatial Fidelity

Authors:
Xiao Cai↗Pengpeng Zeng↗Ji Zhang↗Heng Tao Shen↗Jingkuan Song↗Lianli Gao↗

Precise spatial fidelity in Image-to-3D multi-instance generation is critical for downstream real-world applications. Recent work attempts to address this by fine-tuning pre-trained Image-to-3D (I23D) models on multi-instance datasets, which incurs substantial training overhead and struggles to guarantee spatial fidelity. In fact, we observe that pre-trained I23D models already possess meaningful spatial priors, which remain underutilized as evidenced by instance entanglement issues. Motivated by this, we propose TIMI, a novel Training-free framework for Image-to-3D Multi-Instance generation that achieves high spatial fidelity. Specifically, we first introduce an Instance-aware Separation Guidance (ISG) module, which facilitates instance disentanglement during the early denoising stage. Next, to stabilize the guidance introduced by ISG, we devise a Spatial-stabilized Geometry-adaptive Update (SGU) module that promotes the preservation of the geometric characteristics of instances while maintaining their relative relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method yields better performance in terms of both global layout and distinct local instances compared to existing multi-instance methods, without requiring additional training and with faster inference speed.

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

Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding

Authors:
Jingyuan Huang↗Zuming Huang↗Yucheng Shi↗Tianze Yang↗Xiaoming Zhai↗Wei Chu↗Ninghao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.18101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding requires vision-language models (VLMs) to identify small target elements in high-resolution screenshots and predict precise screen coordinates. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising post-training approach for this coordinate-sensitive task, since it provides dense token-level teacher signals beyond hard coordinate labels. However, naive OPSD is not well suited to GUI grounding: OPSD evaluates the teacher on student-generated prefixes, the quality of coordinate-token teacher signals can degrade when the prefix has already deviated from the target coordinate, leading to unreliable teacher signal. To mitigate this, We propose quality-aware self-distillation for VLM-based GUI grounding, which improves coordinate-token teacher-signal quality through soft correctness-aware gating and teacher-probability scaling. The soft correctness-aware gate checks whether the teacher's current coordinate-token prediction can still be completed into the ground-truth box under the student-generated prefix. If not, the corresponding teacher signal is down-weighted. Teacher-probability scaling then uses the teacher's confidence as a lightweight factor to further calibrate the strength of the gated supervision. A key empirical finding is that neither component alone improves overall performance, whereas combining them consistently improves performance. This suggests that the two mechanisms play complementary roles: correctness-aware gating suppresses unreliable coordinate-token supervision, while teacher-probability scaling calibrates the strength of the remaining signals. Experiments across six GUI grounding benchmarks show that our method consistently improves the base model and outperforms strong baselines.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Rounding Almost Commuting Hamiltonians

Authors:
Islam Faisal↗Anand Natarajan↗Alexander Poremba↗

arXiv:2605.26096v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Commuting Hamiltonians lie at the boundary between classical constraint satisfaction and quantum many-body physics, exhibiting rich quantum structure while remaining more tractable than general noncommuting models. In contrast, physical Hamiltonians are rarely exactly commuting, which naturally motivates the study of almost commuting Hamiltonians. Despite their relevance, the implications of approximate commutation are only poorly understood. In this work, we show how to efficiently approximate any almost commuting $2$-local qubit Hamiltonian by a commuting one: we give a new locality-preserving algorithmic rounding technique that maps any $2$-local Hamiltonian $H=\sum_{i=1}^m h_i$ with $\|[h_i,h_j]\| \leq \epsilon$ to a nearby Hamiltonian $\hat{H}$ whose terms pair-wise commute, and which is within overall distance $\|H-\hat{H}\| = O(m\,\epsilon^{1/6})$. As a consequence, we show that $\delta$-approximations to the ground energy for $\epsilon$-almost commuting $2$-local qubit Hamiltonians lie in $\mathsf{NP}$ when $\delta \gg m\epsilon^{1/6}$, extending the classical containment well beyond the commuting setting. Finally, we present two applications of our rounding framework: Gibbs sampling and fast Hamiltonian simulation for almost commuting systems.

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

From Mechanistic to Compositional Interpretability

Authors:
Ward Gauderis↗Thomas Dooms↗Steven T. Homer↗Kola Ayonrinde↗Geraint A. Wiggins↗

arXiv:2605.08934v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability aims to explain neural model behaviour by reverse-engineering learned computational structure into human-understandable components. Without a formal framework, however, mechanistic explanations cannot be objectively verified, compared, or composed. We introduce compositional interpretability, a category-theoretic framework grounded in the principles of compositionality and minimum description length. Compositional interpretations are pairs of syntactic and semantic mappings that must commute to enforce consistency between a model's decomposition and its observed behaviour. We deconstruct explanation quality into measures of faithfulness and complexity to cast interpretability as a constrained optimisation problem, and introduce compressive refinement to systematically restructure models into simpler parts without altering their function. Finally, we derive a parsimony criterion under which syntactic compression theoretically guarantees more concise, human-aligned explanations. Our framework situates prominent mechanistic methods as subclasses of refinement, and clarifies why their compressibility heuristics tend to align with human interpretability. Our work provides a measurable, optimisable blueprint for automating the discovery and evaluation of mechanistic explanations.

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

Avatar V: Scaling Video-Reference Avatar Video Generation

Authors:
Benjamin Liang↗Ce Chen↗Desmond Lin↗Ivan Somov↗Jiajun Zhao↗Jiewei Yuan↗Jingfeng Zhang↗Junhao Huang↗Nik Nolte↗Pedram Haqiqi↗Penghan Wang↗Rong Yan↗…

Generating avatar videos that are not merely visually similar to a target individual but behaviorally recognizable, faithfully reproducing their talking rhythm, gestural tendencies, and expression dynamics, remains an open challenge. Existing methods predominantly condition on single static images, which provide insufficient identity information and cannot capture dynamic motion traits, while standard pixel-level objectives underserve the perceptually critical facial regions that determine avatar fidelity. We present Avatar V, a production-scale framework that addresses these limitations through video-reference-conditioned identity modeling. Rather than compressing identity into fixed-size embeddings, the model conditions directly on the full token sequence of a reference video, learning to reproduce both static identity attributes (facial geometry, skin texture) and dynamic behavioral patterns (talking rhythm, micro-expressions) through attention over the reference context. We introduce Sparse Reference Attention, an asymmetric mechanism achieving linear-complexity conditioning on arbitrarily long references; a motion representation stream enabling closed-loop talking style transfer; and an identity-aware super-resolution refiner inheriting the full reference conditioning. These are supported by a data engine curating 100M+ training clips from 50M raw videos, and a five-stage training pipeline with flow matching pre-training, personality fine-tuning, two-phase distillation (>10x acceleration), and RLHF alignment, deployed across thousands of GPUs. Avatar V generates 1080p videos of unlimited duration, achieving state-of-the-art identity preservation, lip synchronization, and generation quality on our cross-scene benchmark, consistently outperforming leading systems including Seedance 2.0, Kling O3 Pro, Veo 3.1, and OmniHuman 1.5 in both automated metrics and human evaluation.

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

UOL@IDEM at BEA 2026 Shared Task 1: Neural Fusion and Feature-Rich Modeling for L1-Aware Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction

Authors:
Nouran Khallaf↗Serge Sharoff↗

This paper describes UOL@IDEM's closed-track submission to the BEA 2026 shared task on L1-aware vocabulary difficulty prediction. We model the task as regression and train separate systems for Spanish, German, and Mandarin Chinese\footnote{Below we use Chinese for brevity.}. Our system combines multilingual contextual representations with engineered features capturing frequency, surface form, retrieval evidence, semantic alignment, cognate similarity, and masked-language-model predictability. Development results show consistent gains over the official closed-track baselines, with sentence-embedding encoders such as BGE-M3, multilingual E5, and LaBSE performing best. Official submissions achieve RMSE scores of 1.132, 1.037, and 0.891 for Spanish, German, and Chinese, respectively. Feature analysis identifies frequency as the most stable predictor, while contextual predictability, form similarity, retrieval, and semantic features provide complementary L1-sensitive signals. Error analysis shows strong ranking performance but weaker calibration for the easiest items, which are often overpredicted. See https://github.com/Nouran-Khallaf/UoL-IDEM-BEA2026-Vocabulary-Difficulty-Prediction

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

VistaRef: Boosting Visual Spatial Orientation Awareness for Pointing-to-Object Detection

Authors:
Ling Li↗Zhizhen Cai↗Xinkun Wu↗Ziyu Zhu↗Jiaqing Lyu↗Bowen Liu↗Zhidong Deng↗

Grounding deictic gestures in natural images is fundamental to AR and human-robot collaboration, providing a basis for seamless spatial interaction. While Transformer-based visual models have achieved significant progress in general object detection, their global attention mechanisms often neglect micro-geometric relationships, degrading orientation accuracy. In pointing tasks, this deficiency manifests as an inability to accurately capture the pointing ray implied by finger poses, which results in pointing drift and localization ambiguity when dealing with distant or densely packed objects. To address this, we propose VistaRef, a framework designed to explicitly enhance spatial orientation awareness. First, we develop the Local Hand Entity Modeling (LHEM) module, which incorporates hand-pose embeddings to strengthen the model's capability to capture subtle finger deviations. Second, drawing inspiration from multi-view geometry, we construct the Geometric Ray Modeling (GRM) module to transform implicit orientation information into explicit spatial geometric features, guiding feature aggregation and deep fusion via attention mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Orientation-Consistent Alignment Loss (OCAL) to synergistically supervise hand presence and pointing consistency, ensuring that all architectural improvements collectively serve the core objective of spatial localization. Experimental results demonstrate that VistaRef significantly outperforms the baseline, achieving a 14-point absolute gain in grounding accuracy. Qualitative analysis further confirms that VistaRef effectively models the geometric correlation from hand to target, bridging the spatial perception gap inherent in traditional Transformers for complex scenarios. Code: https://github.com/lingli1724/VistaRef.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Speech Codec Probing from Semantic and Phonetic Perspectives

Authors:
Xuan Shi↗Chang Zeng↗Tiantian Feng↗Shih-Heng Wang↗Jianbo Ma↗Shrikanth Narayanan↗

Speech tokenizers are essential for connecting speech to large language models (LLMs) in multimodal systems. Speech tokenizers are expected to preserve both semantic and acoustic information for downstream understanding and generation tasks. However, emerging evidence suggests that the term "semantic" in speech processing does not align with linguistic lexical-semantic, leading to a mismatch between speech and text modality. In this paper, we systematically analyze the information encoded by several widely used speech tokenizers, evaluating their lexical-semantic and phonetic content through three tasks. Our results show that current tokenizers primarily capture phonetic rather than lexical-semantic structure, deriving practical implications for the design of next-generation speech tokenization methods. Code is released to public at https://github.com/Alexuan/codec_probing_release.

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16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DesignMaster: A Multi-Conditional Diffusion Framework for Rational PROTAC Design

Authors:
Shi↗Liu↗Pan↗Hao↗Isbel↗Roy↗M. J↗Ng↗A. P↗Shang↗Li↗

Motivation: Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) enable targeted protein degradation through ternary complex formation with E3 ubiquitin ligase. However, the rational design of PROTACs remains highly challenging due to limited structure-activity relationship data and the vast conformational diversity of linkers. Existing computational approaches can be broadly divided into structure-based ternary modelling methods and fragment-based linker generation models. Although these approaches have advanced PROTAC design, they typically neglect key physicochemical constraints and linker-length control during the generation process, causing the generated PROTACs to lack balanced structural properties required for effective ternary complex formation with drug-like characteristics. Results: To address these limitations, we propose DesignMaster, a diffusion-based generative framework that explicitly incorporates linker length and physicochemical properties as controllable conditioning signals. DesignMaster employs an E(3)-equivariant graph Transformer with a gated multi-condition fusion module to inject linker length and physicochemical constraints throughout the diffusion process, enabling fine-grained and constraint-aware molecular generation. Experiments on PROTAC-DB 2.0 and 3.0 demonstrate that DesignMaster outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with a 3.2% improvement in validity and a 34.4% improvement in recovery. The Case study shows DesignMaster achieves a 51.78% reduction in RMSD when predicting the linker of PROTAC BCPyr targeting 6W7O, highlighting its potential for practical structure-guided PROTAC design. Availability: The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ABILiLab/DesignMaster.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Cross-Modal Masked Compositional Concept Modeling for Enhancing Visio-Linguistic Compositionality

Authors:
Wei Li↗Zhen Huang↗Xinmei Tian↗

Contrastively trained vision-language models like CLIP, have made remarkable progress in learning joint image-text representations, but still face challenges in compositional understanding. They often exhibit a "bag-of-words" behavior–struggling to capture the object relations, attribute-object bindings, and word order dependencies. This limitation arises not only from the reliance on global, single-vector representations for optimization, but also from the insufficient exploitation and modeling of the rich compositional information inherently present in paired image text data. In this work, we propose MACCO (MAsked Compositional Concept MOdeling), a framework that masks compositional concepts in one modality and reconstructs them conditioned on the full contextual information from the other, enabling the model to capture and align cross-modal compositional structures more effectively. To facilitate this process, we introduce two auxiliary objectives that jointly align and regularize masked features both inter-modally and intra-modally. Extensive experiments on five compositional benchmarks, along with in-depth analyses, demonstrate that our approach not only significantly enhances compositionality in VLMs but also improves their ability to capture syntactic structure and linguistic information. Additionally, the improved compositionality also benefits text-to-image generation and multimodal large language model. Code is available at https://github.com/hiker-lw/MACCO.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

Authors:
Maciej Wozniak↗Jesper Ericsson↗Hariprasath Govindarajan↗Truls Nyberg↗Thomas Gustafsson↗Patric Jensfelt↗Olov Andersson↗

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Klein–Gordon Dynamics from Intrinsic Phase Periodicity

Authors:
Emiliano Puddu↗

arXiv:2606.25929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work develops a phase-based formulation of relativistic wave dynamics, demonstrating that the Klein–Gordon equation emerges naturally from the foundational assumption of intrinsic phase periodicity in material fields. Mapping the phase directly onto the classical action, we postulate that localized excitations possess an invariant rest-frame oscillation governed by a proper frequency $\omega_0$. This physical condition establishes an operational mass-frequency relation, $m = \hbar \omega_0 / c^2$, without requiring rest energy as an independent, axiomatic input. We show that the Klein–Gordon equation arises as the minimal local, linear, Lorentz-invariant field equation compatible with this internal phase structure. Within this framework, mass acts as an intrinsic frequency scale governing wave propagation, and relativistic kinematics is fully recovered as a structural consequence of phase coherence. This approach provides a unified wave-mechanical interpretation where particle dynamics maps onto the group velocity of dispersive wave packets, offering an intuitive account of free propagation, dispersion, and tunneling across potential barriers.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

Authors:
Phattharaporn Singkanipa↗Victor Kasatkin↗Daniel A. Lidar↗

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

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21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Daily briefing: First-ever ‘nuclear’ clocks put atomic clocks in the shade

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change. Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Constrained hybrid modelling to predict microbial dynamics and organic matter turnover in soil systems

Authors:
Paul Collart↗Juergen Gall↗Andrea Schnepf↗Holger Pagel↗Lars Doorenbos↗

arXiv:2606.20329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Soil microorganisms control organic matter cycling and largely determine how soil systems can cope with and mitigate climate change and environmental threats. Representing microbial dynamics in process-based soil models is therefore critical to predict carbon cycling in soils, albeit highly challenging to inform from data. One promising approach to improve their parametrisation is the integration of genomic data, yet modelling the complex and unknown relationship between genomes and the processes the microbes are driving is an unsolved problem. In this work, we present the first hybrid modeling framework for deriving biokinetic parameter values of a process-based soil organic matter turnover model from metagenome-inferred functional traits based on DNA sequencing data. Our model predicts biokinetic parameters of the process-based model from genomic trait data with a neural network and integrates constraints from ecological theory and literature to ensure realistic behavior, even of non-observed state variables. We evaluate our method on synthetic genomic trait datasets of varying complexity and on real data, showing that our approach improves performance over multiple baselines and learns the dynamics of unmeasurable components of the process-based model effectively, even for small training datasets.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

SignNet-1M: Large-Scale Multilingual Sign Language Video Dataset with Downstream Benchmarks

Authors:
Zhewen He↗Junyi Hu↗Haomian Huang↗Zhenhua Li↗Yu-Shen Liu↗Yi Fang↗

Sign language models are typically trained on datasets captured under constrained conditions, with limited viewpoint, background, and signer-identity diversity, leading to poor robustness under real-world distribution shifts. We introduce SignNet-1M, a large-scale augmented dataset spanning ASL, CSL, and German Sign Language (DGS). SignNet-1M synthesizes realistic variations along three axes: (i) novel-view rendering (rotation and zoom) via 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), (ii) scene/identity editing via diffusion models for background replacement and signer substitution while preserving sign motion and linguistic content, and (iii) post-rendering augmentations that emulate capture and compression artifacts (e.g., pose/temporal perturbations and video-level corruptions) to better match in-the-wild recordings. Beyond data release, we provide a unified benchmark suite across downstream tasks (e.g., translation and recognition) and ablations that isolate each augmentation component. Experiments across backbones show that training with SignNet-1M consistently improves generalization under cross-view, cross-background, cross-identity, and post-rendering shifts, while maintaining strong in-distribution performance. The dataset, full augmentation pipeline, and benchmark are available at https://signnet.chatsign.ai/.

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

Few-Shot Resampling for Scalable Statistically-Sound Data Mining

Authors:
Leonardo Pellegrina↗Fabio Vandin↗

arXiv:2606.11235v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A key step in knowledge discovery is the evaluation of data mining results. In several applications, including pattern mining, graph analysis, and others, this step includes the evaluation of the statistical significance of the results, to avoid spurious discoveries due only to noise or random fluctuations in the data. While specialized procedures have been developed for some specific applications, resampling-based approaches are widely used, in particular for complex analyses where analytical results cannot be derived. However, current resampling-based approaches require the generation and analysis of thousands of resampled datasets, and are therefore impractical for large datasets or computationally intensive analyses. In this paper, we introduce FewRS, a simple and effective resampling-based approach to assess the statistical significance of data mining results with rigorous guarantees on the probability of false discoveries. Our approach can be used in every situation where resampling-based approaches are applied. FewRS builds on our derivation of a novel bound to the supremum deviation of test statistics representing the quality of data mining results. We prove that FewRS needs to generate and analyze an extremely small number of resampled datasets, leading to a highly scalable approach with wide applicability. We test our approach on common tasks such as pattern mining and network analysis. In all cases, our approach results in a reduction of up to two orders of magnitude in running time compared to the state of the art, while preserving high statistical power, enabling the statistical validation of data mining results on large-scale real-world datasets.

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

MapDream: Task-Driven Map Learning for Vision-Language Navigation

Authors:
Guoxin Lian↗Shuo Wang↗Yucheng Wang↗Yongcai Wang↗Maiyue Chen↗Kaihui Wang↗Bo Zhang↗Zhizhong Su↗Deying Li↗Zhaoxin Fan↗

Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) requires agents to follow natural language instructions in partially observed 3D environments, motivating map representations that aggregate spatial context beyond local perception. However, most existing approaches rely on hand-crafted maps constructed independently of the navigation policy. We argue that maps should instead be learned representations shaped directly by navigation objectives rather than exhaustive reconstructions. Based on this insight, we propose MapDream, a map-in-the-loop framework that formulates map construction as autoregressive bird's-eye-view (BEV) image synthesis. The framework jointly learns map generation and action prediction, distilling environmental context into a compact three-channel BEV map that preserves only navigation-critical affordances. Supervised pre-training bootstraps a reliable mapping-to-control interface, while the autoregressive design enables end-to-end joint optimization through reinforcement fine-tuning. Experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE achieve state-of-the-art monocular performance, validating task-driven generative map learning.

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