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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Gate-Controlled Spin Qubits in Confined Altermagnets

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24150v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose gate-defined spin qubits in electrostatically confined altermagnetic quantum dots. Elliptical confinement of the $d$-wave altermagnetic structure produces a low-energy doublet with opposite spin polarization. For the range of parameters used here, the qubit states energy gap lies in the microwave range while the leakage gap remains in the meV range. Even without spin-orbit coupling, time-dependent simulations show that a phase-controlled quadrupolar gate drive about a fixed bias point implements $X_{\pi/2}$ and $X_\pi$ rotations by resonantly modulating the confinement anisotropy. We extend the study to two-qubits using a double quantum dot. We show that the double quantum dot spectrum can be cleanly projected onto isolated quantum dot product states with a nonzero nonlocal Pauli block in the effective logical two-qubit Hamiltonian. Resonant central-barrier modulation then drives the logical two-qubit component close to a maximally entangled state. These calculations show anisotropic altermagnetic quantum dots as a route to locally gate-controlled spin qubits without requiring spin-orbit coupling.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view computed tomography (SVCT) reduces radiation exposure and acquisition time, but the limited number of projection views makes the reconstruction problem severely ill-posed and leads to streak artifacts when analytical methods are used. Plug-and-Play (PnP) methods provide an effective way to combine data fidelity with learned image priors, while stochastic PnP methods further improve robustness by matching the denoiser input distribution through re-noising. However, these methods often require many iterations to converge, which limits their practical efficiency. In this work, we propose a multilevel (ML) stochastic PnP method for SVCT that accelerates stochastic PnP reconstruction. We highlight that, in the stochastic setting, directly enforcing prior coherence across levels would require accurately estimating fine-level prior gradients through multiple denoiser function evaluations, which substantially increases the computational cost. Motivated by this observation, we perform the multilevel steps in multiresolution analysis (MRA) approximation spaces. This choice is supported by the structure of the wavelet decomposition, which causes the prior-coherence correction to vanish in expectation, thereby avoiding costly estimation of fine-level stochastic prior gradients for the coarse-level corrections. Experiments on SVCT reconstruction show that our method, called Multilevel Stochastic Plug-and-Play (ML-SPnP), achieves reconstruction quality comparable to state-of-the-art methods while substantially reducing runtime.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

The Implicit Bias of Steepest Descent with Mini-batch Stochastic Gradient

arXiv:2602.11557v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A variety of widely used optimization methods like SignSGD and Muon can be interpreted as instances of steepest descent under different norm-induced geometries. In this work, we study the implicit bias of mini-batch stochastic steepest descent in multi-class classification, characterizing how batch size, momentum, and variance reduction shape the limiting max-margin behavior and convergence rates under general entry-wise and Schatten-$p$ norms. We show that, without momentum, worst-case convergence and successful classification can only be guaranteed with full-batch gradient. In contrast, momentum enables small-batch convergence to an approximate max-margin solution through a batch-momentum trade-off, though it slows convergence. This approach provides fully explicit, dimension-free rates that improve upon prior results. Moreover, we prove that variance reduction can recover the exact full-batch implicit bias for any batch size, albeit at a slower convergence rate. Finally, we further investigate the batch-size-one steepest descent without momentum, and reveal its convergence to a fundamentally different bias via a concrete data example, which reveals a key limitation of purely stochastic updates. Overall, our unified analysis clarifies when stochastic optimization aligns with full-batch behavior, and paves the way for perform deeper explorations of the training behavior of stochastic gradient steepest descent algorithms.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

"Do Not Mention This to the User": Detecting and Understanding Malicious Agent Skills in the Wild

LLM-based coding agents increasingly rely on third-party extensions called skills, which bundle natural language instructions and helper scripts that execute with full user privileges. Community registries have emerged to distribute these skills, but the security implications remain unstudied due to the absence of labeled threat data. This paper presents a systematic security analysis of 98,380 skills collected from two major registries. Through a combination of static pattern matching and dynamic behavioral verification, we identify 157 skills exhibiting confirmed malicious behavior, encompassing 632 distinct vulnerabilities across 13 attack techniques. Our analysis reveals that these threats are deliberate rather than accidental: each malicious skill contains an average of 4.03 vulnerabilities spanning multiple attack phases. We identify two dominant attack strategies with statistically significant negative correlation – credential theft via remote code execution, and agent manipulation through adversarial instructions embedded in documentation. Over half of all confirmed cases originate from a single threat actor employing templated brand impersonation at scale. We further observe that attack sophistication correlates with concealment investment, with advanced skills universally employing undocumented capabilities while also exploiting platform-native trust mechanisms. Following responsible disclosure, registry maintainers removed all 157 (100%) of the reported skills. Our dataset and detection pipeline are publicly available to facilitate future research on securing LLM agent ecosystems.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Bias-mitigated microbiome inference refines coronary artery disease signature

Authors:

Roughly half the cells in the human body are microbial, and changes in these communities are increasingly implicated in cardiovascular, metabolic, and oncological diseases. Yet identifying which taxa truly differ in abundance, differential abundance (DA), is distorted by four major sources of bias: loss of total microbial load, taxa measurement efficiencies, arbitrary pseudocounts required to handle pervasive zeros, and contamination which has recently driven retractions. No existing DA method accounts for all four. Here we introduce BootDA, a non-parametric bootstrap-based method that explicitly models each bias source without data transformations, pseudocounts, parametric assumptions, or assuming that most taxa are non-DA. In semi-parametric simulations preserving the sparsity (>70% zeros) and correlation structure of real 16S amplicon data, BootDA achieved the highest sensitivity among tested methods, including ANCOM-BC2, LinDA, MaAsLin 3, and Wilcoxon tests, while controlling the false discovery rate. Performance was retained in low biomass settings when contamination contributed ~50% of counts, and without negative controls, indicating de novo decontamination capability. Applied to a coronary artery disease cohort, BootDA refined the original signature to two co-enriched genera, Klebsiella and Gemmiger, and excluded likely contaminants. BootDA is available as an R package and could generalise to other sparse, high dimensional biological data.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

EditorForge: An Active-Site-Aware Framework for Inverse-Folding-Based Protein Redesign

Inverse-folding models can rapidly generate protein sequences compatible with a supplied backbone, but unconstrained redesign is poorly suited to enzyme and genome-editor-associated domains, where catalytic, substrate-proximal, and conserved structural regions must remain protected. In this paper, we present EditorForge, a modular constraint-and-audit suite for editor-domain protein redesign that wraps fixed-backbone inverse folding with explicit design masks, fixed-position enforcement, active-site-proximity auditing, active-site-shielded regeneration, and downstream structural quality control. Using full-length Moloney murine leukemia virus reverse transcriptase structure 4MH8 (MMLV RT 4MH8) as a demonstration target, EditorForge first restricted redesign to a bounded 25-position envelope while fixing 428 residues. An initial audit detected active-site-proximal failure modes despite fixed-position integrity. Later, the Active Site Shield module then removed five unsafe design positions, replaced them with lower-contact alternatives, and regenerated candidates under stricter constraints. Post Shield Audit evaluated 24 regenerated candidates, all of which satisfied the hard sequence/mask and active-site-shield constraints. For the eight candidates that were selected or returned for structure-prediction/refolding quality control. Enhanced RefoldQC found that all 8 evaluated predicted structures passed the computational structure-QC screen. That said, the selected 8 candidates passed the computational structure-QC screen, with global C RMSD values of 1.2061–1.5555~[A], active-site C RMSD values of 0.4098–1.8397~[A], mutation-neighborhood C RMSD values of 1.3155-1.6848~[A], and average pLDDT-like confidence values of 94.87-95.11. In short, EditorForge provides a reproducible triage layer that converts general inverse-folding output into constrained and editor-specific candidate sets for downstream structural and biological review on top of existing structural prediction tools.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

ComputeFHE: A Privacy-Preserving General-Purpose Computation Library

Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) enables computations to be performed directly on encrypted data while preserving data confidentiality. However, its practical applications remain limited by high computational costs and development complexity. This paper presents ComputeFHE, an open-source C++ library that facilitates the development of privacy-preserving applications based on the TFHE cryptosystem. The library provides encrypted integer and fixed-point data types together with arithmetic, logical, comparison, conditional, and oblivious array-access operations which allow developers to implement algorithms using a familiar imperative programming paradigm. ComputeFHE supports both conventional TFHE arithmetic based on standard two-input logic gates and an optimized Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) architecture utilizing FHE-friendly logic primitives. Experimental results demonstrate significant reductions in the number of required bootstrapping operations, achieving performance improvements of up to 3.9x for selected operations. In addition, the library includes a simulation mode that enables testing, debugging, and complexity analysis without performing actual cryptographic computations while providing circuit complexity and bootstrapping costs. Built on top of OpenFHE, ComputeFHE offers a practical and accessible framework for developing and evaluating privacy-preserving algorithms and applications.

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

Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2509.18930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum algorithm for dephasing of coupled systems: decoupling and IQP duality

arXiv:2601.06298v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Noise and decoherence are ubiquitous in the dynamics of quantum systems coupled to an external environment. In the regime where environmental correlations decay rapidly, the evolution of a subsytem is well described by a Lindblad quantum master equation. In this work, we introduce a quantum algorithm for simulating unital Lindbladian dynamics by sampling unitary quantum channels without extra ancillas. Using ancillary qubits we show that this algorithm allows approximating general Lindbladians as well. For interacting dephasing Lindbladians coupling two subsystems, we develop a decoupling scheme that reduces the circuit complexity of the simulation. This is achieved by sampling from a time-correlated probability distribution - determined by the evolution of one subsystem, which specifies the stochastic circuit implemented on the complementary subsystem. We demonstrate our approach by studying a model of bosons coupled to fermions via dephasing, which naturally arises from anharmonic effects in an electron-phonon system coupled to a bath. Our method enables tracing out the bosonic degrees of freedom, reducing part of the dynamics to sampling an IQP circuit. The sampled bitstrings then define a corresponding fermionic problem, which in the non-interacting case can be solved efficiently classically. We comment on the computational complexity of this class of dissipative problems, using the known fact that sampling from IQP circuits is believed to be difficult classically.

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

Plan, Don't Pose: Long Composite Motion Generation with Text-Aligned BFM

arXiv:2605.29906v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Text-to-motion (T2M) generation has broad applications in character animation, virtual avatars, and human-robot interaction. Existing methods typically generate pose trajectories or motion tokens directly from language, forcing a single model to handle semantic interpretation, long-horizon structure, and low-level physical realization. This coupling makes them costly and often unreliable for long, compositional, or semantically dense prompts. We propose Text2BFM, the first framework that aligns natural language with pretrained Behavioral Foundation Models (BFMs) for T2M generation without relying on heavy end-to-end motion generators. Text2BFM operates in the latent policy space of a frozen BFM, using it as an executable motion prior. A text-aligned variational behavioral bottleneck compresses BFM policy-latent sequences into compact motion representations that are compatible with language and preserve long-horizon behavioral structure. Generation is performed in this compact behavioral manifold with a lightweight conditional generator, and the resulting latent encoded behaviors are decoded into policy latents that drive the pretrained frozen BFM. By decoupling semantic planning from motion execution, Text2BFM achieves efficient, robust T2M generation and strong performance on long, compositional textual descriptions.

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

From Open Waters to Enclosed Cabins: ProteusVPR for Cross-Scene Visual Place Recognition in Maritime Perception and Cabin Inspection

Autonomous robotic inspection in maritime environments presents unique challenges for Visual Place Recognition (VPR) due to cross-scene perceptual shifts. Robots navigating ship-borne environments must transition between visually distinct domains: open decks with sparse textures and severe illumination changes, and enclosed cabins with repetitive structures and high visual ambiguity. Existing VPR methods, designed primarily for urban or indoor scenes, fail to generalize reliably across these starkly different scenarios. To address this, we propose ProteusVPR, a two-stage retrieval-refinement framework. The first stage employs any standard VPR model for initial image retrieval. The second stage introduces a geometric-visual estimation network that fuses the retrieved image with two temporally preceding frames, incorporating geometric descriptors, a local affine coordinate system, and camera azimuth encoding to achieve precise localization. To support this task, we introduce the XHZ dataset, an 8K-panoramic ship-borne dataset collected from an operational vessel, featuring multi-floor cabin structures, deck transition zones, and strict query-database separation for rigorous evaluation. Extensive experiments on the XHZ dataset demonstrate that ProteusVPR consistently improves the localization accuracy across multiple VPR backbones, reducing mean localization error by over 60\% on average and that ProteusVPR offers an effective and robust solution for precise visual localization in challenging, cross-scene maritime environments.

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

Generative Molecular Design with Steerable and Granular Synthesizability Control

arXiv:2505.08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Designing molecules that are both property-optimal and readily synthesizable is a central challenge in drug discovery. Existing works that do consider synthesizability can jointly output predicted synthesis routes for generated molecules. However, there has been minimal attention in addressing the ease of synthesis and with flexibility to incorporate desired reaction constraints. On the other hand, virtual screening searches for commercially available compounds, but imposes challenges when scaling to ultra-large (billion-size and beyond) chemical spaces. Here, we propose a generative design framework that unifies synthesis-constrained molecular design and ultra-large-scale virtual screening through steerable and granular synthesizability control. Generated molecules satisfy arbitrary multi-parameter optimization objectives with predicted synthesis routes satisfying mix-and-match constraints: including or avoiding certain reactions, incorporating specific building blocks, and minimizing synthesis route length. In an end-to-end in-house campaign targeting BRD4, we designed molecules synthesizable with specific selected reactions and building blocks, synthesized all six selected compounds, and identified two micromolar binders. We further demonstrate that reaction control enables efficient navigation of ultra-large make-on-demand chemical spaces to identify property-optimal candidates. By applying our framework to Chemspace's Freedom 4.0 make-on-demand space (142 billion molecules), we generated ~320k molecules (0.00023% of the library) on a single consumer-grade GPU (with only 8 GB GPU memory) and identified a micromolar Wee1 binder amongst 60 synthesized candidates. The single unified framework thus enables generating novel synthesizable molecules and retrieving catalogue-ready candidates, offering a flexible solution to mitigating the synthesizability bottleneck.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Evidence of an Emergent "Self" in Continual Robot Learning

arXiv:2603.24350v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key challenge to understanding self-awareness has been a principled way of quantifying whether an intelligent system has a concept of a "self", and if so how to differentiate the "self" from other cognitive structures. We propose that the "self" can be isolated by seeking the invariant portion of cognitive process that changes relatively little compared to more rapidly acquired cognitive skills - because our self is the most persistent aspect of our experiences. We used this principle to analyze the cognitive structure of robots under two conditions: One robot learns a constant task, while a second undergoes continual learning under variable tasks. We find that robots subjected to continual learning develop an invariant subnetwork that is significantly more stable (p < 0.001) compared to the control, and that this subnetwork is also functionally important: preserving it aids adaptation while damaging it impairs performance. We validate this pattern across three different robots spanning locomotion and manipulation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

Agent skills – structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities – have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill. In this work, we present an evaluation framework that lets a skill author construct realistic tasks to rigorously assess the aspects of a skill that matter most to them, and that estimates skill utility by solving those tasks. Further, we apply our evaluation approach at scale to 500 real-world skills, generating 1,000 tasks derived from the skills' content, along with instruction-following and goal-completion scoring rubrics. Using these metrics, we evaluate how 19 agent-model configurations, both proprietary and open-source, perform on the tasks. Our results show that models vary widely in how closely they adhere to the instructions encoded in skills, leading to substantial differences in their performance gains. Furthermore, we show that access to a skill significantly changes model behavior compared to the no-skill setup, providing an essential mechanism for encoding opinionated workflows into LLM agents. We release our evaluation dataset to support future work on agent skills.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

TINNs: Time-Induced Neural Networks for Solving Time-Dependent PDEs

arXiv:2601.20361v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) solve time-dependent partial differential equations (PDEs) by learning a mesh-free, differentiable solution that can be evaluated anywhere in space and time. However, standard space-time PINNs take time as an input but reuse a single network with shared weights across all times, forcing the same features to represent markedly different dynamics. This coupling degrades error performance and can destabilize training when enforcing PDE, boundary, and initial constraints jointly. We propose Time-Induced Neural Networks (TINNs), a novel architecture that parameterizes the network weights as a learned function of time, allowing the effective spatial representation to evolve over time while maintaining shared structure. The resulting formulation naturally yields a nonlinear least-squares problem, which we optimize efficiently using a Levenberg-Marquardt method. Experiments on various time-dependent PDEs show up to 4 times improved relative error and 10 times faster convergence compared to PINNs and strong baselines.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Block-wise Codeword Embedding for Reliable Multi-bit Text Watermarking

Recent multi-bit watermarking methods for large language models (LLMs) prioritize capacity over reliability, often conflating decoding with detection. Our analysis reveals that existing ECC-based extractors suffer from catastrophic false positive rates (FPR), and applying rejection thresholds merely collapses detection sensitivity (TPR) to random guessing. To resolve this structural limitation, we propose BREW (Block-wise Reliable Embedding for Watermarking), a framework shifting the paradigm to designated verification. BREW employs a two-stage mechanism: (i) blind message estimation via independent block voting, followed by (ii) window-shifting verification that rigorously validates the payload against local edits. Experiments demonstrate that BREW achieves a TPR of 0.965 with an FPR of 0.02 under 10% synonym substitution, demonstrating that the high-FPR issue is not an inherent trade-off of multi-bit watermarking, but a solvable structural flaw of prior decoding-centric designs. Our framework is model-agnostic and theoretically grounded, providing a scalable solution for reliable forensic deployment.

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

Towards Understanding What State Space Models Learn About Code

arXiv:2602.06774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: State Space Models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to the Transformer architecture. Prior work shows that, when trained under comparable conditions, SSMs can match or surpass Transformers on code understanding tasks. However, their internal mechanisms remain a black box. We present the first systematic analysis of what SSM-based code models learn along with the direct comparison between SSM and Transformer models in this domain. Our analysis shows that SSMs capture syntactic and semantic structure more effectively than Transformers during pretraining but forgets certain relations during fine-tuning on some tasks. To investigate this behavior, we introduce SSM-Interpret, a frequency-domain framework that exposes a spectral shift toward short-range dependencies during fine-tuning. Guided by these findings, we propose architectural modifications that significantly improve the performance of SSM-based code model by upto +6 MRR on NLCodeSearch. This demonstrates that our analysis not only explains model behavior but also leads directly to better designs.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

PIGEON: VLM-Driven Object Navigation via Points of Interest Selection

Object navigation in unseen indoor environments requires agents to perform semantic search under partial observability. Vision-language models (VLMs) provide strong semantic-spatial priors for this task, but how to interface them with robot navigation remains challenging: dense VLM inference is expensive, while abstracting environments into symbolic memories often separates high-level reasoning from the raw visual evidence that supports it. We propose we propose PIGEON (Point of Interest Guided Exploration for Object Navigation), a VLM-driven framework that formulates object navigation as raw-observation-grounded sparse decision problem. PIGEON introduces Points of Interest (PoIs) as sparse visual decision units that couple geometrically executable waypoints with raw egocentric observations. Rather than using VLMs as dense controllers or restricting them to frontier ranking, PIGEON enables VLMs to select among task-critical PoIs, including exploration frontiers, suspected target objects, traversable stairs, and floor-level summaries, while low-level planners execute continuous motion between them. This PoI interface further makes high-level navigation decisions verifiable, allowing us to develop an RLVR pipeline that improves local VLMs without manual Chain-of-Thought annotations. Extensive experiments on Habitat ObjectNav benchmarks show that PIGEON achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, scales consistently with foundation model capacity, and transfers to Active Embodied Question Answering with only prompt modifications. Real-world deployments on physical robots further demonstrate its robustness and efficiency.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Strain- and Electric-Field-Tunable Valley Polarization in Mo0.75V0.25Te2(Mo3VTe8) for Valleytronic Application

arXiv:2606.19954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Valley polarization in 2D TMDs is promising for low-power valleytronic and spin-valley information processing, but time-reversal symmetry in pristine nonmagnetic TMDs keeps the K+ and K- valleys degenerate, limiting device applications. In this work, we investigated the structural stability, electronic properties, and tunable valley polarization of V-alloyed MoTe2 monolayer, Mo0.75V0.25Te2, using first-principles density functional theory (DFT) calculations. Substitutional alloying of MoTe2 with V introduced magnetic exchange interaction, which, together with spin-orbit coupling (SOC), lifted the valley degeneracy at the unequal valleys. The alloyed structure was found to be energetically and dynamically stable due to the absence of imaginary phonon modes. In pristine MoTe2, SOC produced spin splittings of 34.0 meV and 218.9 meV in the conduction bands and valence bands, respectively, but no valley polarization was observed. In contrast, Mo0.75V0.25Te2 exhibited spontaneous valley polarization of 37.3 meV in the conduction band and 78.2 meV in the valence band. The valley polarization was further enhanced by external electric fields and biaxial strain. A transverse electric field along the crystal c axis produced the maximum valley splitting of 132.8 meV in the valence band, whereas biaxial tensile strain increased the valence band valley splitting up to 160.8 meV. The maximum conduction band valley splitting reached 54.4 meV under 2% biaxial compressive strain. These results demonstrated that V alloying, combined with electric-field and strain engineering, provides an effective strategy for achieving large and tunable valley polarization in MoTe2. Thus, Mo0.75V0.25Te2 can be considered a promising 2D platform for tunable valleytronic device applications, such as transistors and sensors.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AI Engram: In Search of Memory Traces in Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.14997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory formation is fundamental to intelligence, yet whether deep neural networks preserve identifiable memory traces analogous to biological memory units remains an open question. This work introduces a geometric framework to identify such "AI engrams" by formalizing the neuroscientific criteria of specificity, reactivation, sufficiency, and necessity into a constrained inverse problem. We derive a closed-form estimator that isolates individual memory traces from globally entangled parameters, and show that this biologically-derived solution corresponds to a natural gradient update on the parameter manifold. AI engrams enable surgical manipulation of learned knowledge: any subset of memories can be composed or erased through linear arithmetic, without iterative optimization. Experiments ranging from simple MLPs to LLMs demonstrate the causal validity and substantial scalability of AI engrams. Together, these results bridge theories of biological memory and artificial representation learning and offer geometric insight into how deep networks simultaneously support functional specificity within distributed storage.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A CEFR-Inspired Classification Framework with Fuzzy C-Means To Automate Assessment of Programming Skills in Scratch

arXiv:2604.00730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: Schools, training platforms, and technology firms increasingly need to assess programming proficiency at scale with transparent, reproducible methods that support personalized learning pathways. Objective: This study introduces a pedagogical framework for Scratch project assessment, aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR), providing universal competency levels for students and teachers alongside actionable insights for curriculum design. Method: We apply Fuzzy C-Means clustering to 2008246 Scratch projects evaluated via Dr.Scratch, implementing an ordinal criterion to map clusters to CEFR levels (A1-C2), and introducing enhanced classification metrics that identify transitional learners, enable continuous progress tracking, and quantify classification certainty to balance automated feedback with instructor review. Impact: The framework enables diagnosis of systemic curriculum gaps-notably a "B2 bottleneck" where only 13.3% of learners reside due to the cognitive load of integrating Logic Synchronization, and Data Representation–while providing certainty–based triggers for human intervention.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Device assessed 24-hour movement behaviour and cardiovascular disease mortality amongst cancer survivors.

Background: Cancer survivors face elevated risks of mortality from cardiovascular disease (CVD). The potential importance of physical activity (PA) and other behaviours across the 24-hour day (e.g. sedentary behaviour (SB) and sleep) for CVD-mortality risk is not well understood in this at-risk population. Objectives: To assess the importance of 24-hour movement behaviour, using a compositional approach, for mitigating CVD-mortality amongst cancer survivors. Methods: Participants with a prior cancer diagnosis were drawn from the UK Biobank accelerometry sub-study (n=6,158). Accelerometer-derived movement (moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA), vigorous PA (VPA), moderate PA (MPA), light PA (LPA), SB, sleep) was examined in relation to CVD-mortality, identified from health record linkage data (using Fine-Gray Cox proportional-hazards models adjusted for demographic, health, lifestyle covariates). Results: Median follow-up was 8.0 years (Q1-Q3: 7.4-8.5), with n=500 (8.2%) deaths (CVD-deaths: n=118). Greater MVPA, in place of any other behaviour, was inversely associated with CVD-mortality with e.g. 10% lower hazard if MVPA theoretically replaced 7 minutes (mins)/day SB (Hazard ratio (HR): 0.91, (95% Confidence Interval: 0.86-0.95)), 9 mins/day LPA (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97), or 11 mins/day sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.83-0.97). The VPA component of MVPA proved critical, requiring only ~1-2 additional mins/day for equivalent hazard reduction. Sleep duration, was also inversely associated with CVD-mortality. A 10% lower hazard required replacing 29 mins/day of SB with sleep (HR: 0.90, 0.84-0.96); no other behavioural replacement amongst SB, sleep or LPA could provide an equivalent risk reduction. Conclusions: Among cancer survivors, the most potent reduction in CVD-mortality followed theoretically reallocating time to higher intensity movement.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EvTexture++: Event-Driven Texture Enhancement for Video Super-Resolution

Event-based vision has drawn increasing attention owing to its distinctive properties, including ultra-high temporal resolution and extreme dynamic range. Recent works have introduced it to video super-resolution (VSR) to enhance flow estimation and temporal alignment. In contrast, this paper shifts the focus of event signals from motion refinement to texture enhancement in VSR. We propose EvTexture++, the first event-driven framework dedicated to texture enhancement in VSR. It leverages high-frequency spatiotemporal details from events to improve texture recovery. EvTexture++ incorporates a customized texture enhancement branch, along with an iterative texture enhancement module that progressively exploits high-temporal-resolution event information for texture restoration. This enables gradual refinement of texture regions across iterations, yielding more accurate and detailed high-resolution outputs. Besides intra-frame texture recovery, large motions could degrade inter-frame temporal consistency, particularly in texture regions, leading to texture flickering. To mitigate this, we further exploit the continuous-time motion cues of events to enhance temporal consistency, introducing a temporal texture alignment module that estimates event-guided texture-aware flow for precise inter-frame texture alignment. Moreover, EvTexture++ is designed as a plug-and-play tool to flexibly boost the performance of existing VSR models. Experiments on five datasets demonstrate that EvTexture++ achieves state-of-the-art performance. When integrated into recent VSR models, it yields significant improvements, with gains of up to 1.55 dB in PSNR on the texture-rich Vid4 dataset. Code: https://github.com/DachunKai/EvTexture.