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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SpeechDx: A Multi-Task Benchmark for Clinical Speech AI

Speech offers a uniquely informative window into health by simultaneously engaging neurological, motor, respiratory, and vocal systems. Current clinical speech AI methods have largely progressed through isolated condition-specific studies, making results difficult to compare and generalization difficult to assess. We introduce SpeechDx, a large-scale benchmark for clinical speech AI spanning 12 datasets and 27 tasks across diverse health conditions. To enable evaluation across shared clinical mechanisms, SpeechDx structures tasks by the stage of speech production they disrupt: conceptualization, formulation, and articulation. The benchmark tests generalization by including tasks with limited labeled data and evaluating the same health condition across multiple datasets, distinguishing clinically meaningful patterns from dataset artefacts. We systematically evaluate 12 state-of-the-art audio encoders across all tasks and under zero-shot cross-condition transfer. Results show that large-scale speech models represent the strongest overall baselines, domain-specific models improve performance only on closely matched tasks, and no current representation generalizes reliably across the clinical speech landscape. SpeechDx establishes a shared evaluation framework for tracking progress toward general-purpose clinical speech representations

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Stochastic Inflation

arXiv:2606.12636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We formulate stochastic inflation in an open quantum system framework. The field coarse-grained in a patch of fixed physical size, and the total momentum of that patch, form a canonical pair and act on a one-mode Fock space which we identify as the "bulk". At each time step, new comoving modes join the coarse-grained patch and the bulk has to be redefined. This redefinition produces an entangled mode that is traced over, yielding a non-unitary evolution equation for the bulk's density matrix. For a free test field in de Sitter, one obtains GKLS dynamics, generated by an effective Hamiltonian and a single non-Hermitian Lindblad operator, hence diffusion and Hubble friction originate from the same quantum channel. The Wigner-Weyl transform of the GKLS equation leads to a Fokker-Planck equation for the Wigner function, which matches the one that applies to the classical phase-space distribution of stochastic inflation. We also provide several schemes under which one can unravel the GKLS dynamics into stochastic Schrodinger equations when continuous measurements of the decoupled mode are performed, making contact with Langevin formulations of stochastic inflation. In the light-field regime, an additional overdamped reduction can be performed by integrating out the momentum variable in the Wigner distribution, leading to Starobinsky's slow-roll Fokker-Planck equation. In that regime, the purity of the patch is strongly suppressed. In contrast, for heavy fields, field diffusion is suppressed and the coarse-grained patch remains close to a pure underdamped oscillator, which prevents a classical stochastic treatment.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HiRo: A Compact Four-Directional Hierarchical Reservoir Token-Mixer for Efficient Image Classification

Recent image classification models must balance local feature modeling, cross-window interaction, and parameter efficiency. Many high-performing architectures rely on fully trainable token-mixers, which improve representation learning but increase parameter count, optimization complexity and computational cost. We propose a parameter-efficient image classification model called HiRo that integrates shifted-window partitioning with multi-directional hierarchical reservoir computing. Images are divided into non-overlapping patches (treated as tokens), linearly projected, normalized, and enriched with 2D sinusoidal positional encodings, then processed within local windows. Inside each window, tokens are scanned in four directions and passed through a two-stage slice-and-mix reservoir module. In the first stage, directional sequences are split into contiguous slices, each processed by its own fixed reservoir with a trainable closed-loop readout. The resulting slice outputs are summarized using the start, end, and mean representations, and then mixed by a second-stage fixed reservoir for each direction. The mixed slice representations are expanded back to the token level and fused with the first-stage outputs, after which the four directional outputs are realigned and averaged. Consecutive blocks alternate between regular and shifted windows to enable cross-window interaction, followed by layer normalization, a residual feed-forward network, and global pooling for classification. This design combines regular and shifted window partitioning with hierarchical multi-directional reservoirs to make an efficient local-to-cross-window token-mixing framework for image classification. Despite using under 1M trainable parameters and significantly lower memory and time than transformer-style baselines, HiRo also achieves 99.46%, 85.57%, and 59.10% accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, respectively.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Benchmark of quantum algorithms for ground state preparation in the presence of noise

arXiv:2606.20551v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We compare the performance of representative cooling, adiabatic, and optimization algorithms for ground-state preparation in the presence of noise. Using an exactly solvable family of quadratic fermionic Hamiltonians subject to depolarizing noise, we derive the scaling of the achievable relative energy as a function of the noise rate and support these results with numerical simulations. The Hamiltonian exhibits two phases, separated by a quantum phase transition. As expected, the performance of the different algorithms depends on the phase: adiabatic evolution is favorable in the trivial phase, while a multi-frequency cooling algorithm, as proposed in [1], becomes competitive or superior in the topological phase, where gap-closing limits adiabatic protocols. We further present numerical results for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm [2], showing that it performs competitively with cooling in the trivial phase but is typically outperformed in the topological regime. Finally, we show that for this model the cooling protocol exhibits enhanced robustness to parameter imperfections, highlighting its potential advantage for realistic implementations of noisy quantum state preparation. The analytical approach developed here, in conjunction with numerical validation, establishes an extendable approach to benchmarking ground-state preparation algorithms.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Gaze Heads: How VLMs Look at What They Describe

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

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

4DSloMo: 4D Reconstruction for High Speed Scene with Asynchronous Capture

Reconstructing fast-dynamic scenes from multi-view videos is crucial for high-speed motion analysis and realistic 4D reconstruction. However, the majority of 4D capture systems are limited to frame rates below 30 FPS (frames per second), and a direct 4D reconstruction of high-speed motion from low FPS input may lead to undesirable results. In this work, we propose a high-speed 4D capturing system only using low FPS cameras, through novel capturing and processing modules. On the capturing side, we propose an asynchronous capture scheme that increases the effective frame rate by staggering the start times of cameras. By grouping cameras and leveraging a base frame rate of 25 FPS, our method achieves an equivalent frame rate of 100-200 FPS without requiring specialized high-speed cameras. On processing side, we also propose a novel generative model to fix artifacts caused by 4D sparse-view reconstruction, as asynchrony reduces the number of viewpoints at each timestamp. Specifically, we propose to train a video-diffusion-based artifact-fix model for sparse 4D reconstruction, which refines missing details, maintains temporal consistency, and improves overall reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances high-speed 4D reconstruction compared to synchronous capture.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

novelBGC: An interactive dual-score framework for biosynthetic gene cluster novelty assessment and candidate prioritisation

Genome mining now yields tens of thousands of putative biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) per project, yet, separating genuinely novel candidates from rediscoveries of known compounds remains the rate-limiting step before experimental validation. Single-axis prioritisation tools, antiSMASH similarity, BiG-FAM GCF distance, and self-resistance-enzyme (SRE) filters such as ARTS, each surface a different facet of evidence, yet their isolated use systematically over-ranks rediscovery-prone BGCs and overlooks genuinely orphan clusters. We present novelBGC, a web-hosted framework that converts these disparate outputs into two deliberately non-inverse continuous metrics per BGC, a Novelty (N) and a Reference Similarity (RS) score which together define a 2D decision plane that resolves rediscoveries, divergent family members, contig-edge artefacts, and uncharted chemistry with interactive visualisations, with all component weights user-tuneable at submission. Retrospective validation across three independent experimental datasets demonstrates the utility of the framework for candidate prioritization. Within the first 186-BGC SRE-guided cloning study, every confirmed bioactive product fell within the low-to-mid N band whereas 55 high-N (N [≥] 0.50) BGCs were never selected. Moreover, in the other two studies, it correctly prioritised the fully orphan lariocidin BGC of Paenibacillus sp. M2 and the divergent within-family indanopyrrole-A idp BGC of Streptomyces sp. CNX-425. Together, these case studies demonstrate that the joint (N, RS) space facilitates prioritization decisions that are difficult to achieve using any single criterion alone. from identical input data. novelBGC requires no command-line expertise, no local tool installation, and no manual integration of intermediate output formats, addressing a well-documented accessibility barrier for wet-laboratory researchers engaging with genome-mining workflows. novelBGC is freely available at https://project.iith.ac.in/sharmaglab/novelbgc/.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

SteerAF: Distogram-based Steering of AlphaFold2 toward Alternative Conformations

End-to-end structure predictors, such as AlphaFold2, typically output only the dominant conformational state of a given protein, which is biased by the training data set. Existing strategies for recovering alternative conformations are often computationally expensive and offer limited biological interpretability. Here, we present SteerAF, an inference-time optimization framework based on AlphaFold2 that leverages information encoded in the distogram derived from deep multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) to predict alternative protein conformations. Across four benchmark datasets, SteerAF matches or surpasses existing methods in predicting alternative conformations for the majority of systems. Sparse MSA-feature modifications generated via block gradient ascent exhibit a strong correlation with experimentally characterized functional residues, recovering them with approximately 50% precision in the tested proteins. Furthermore, SteerAF enables effective decoy selection in the absence of experimental structures, and its predictions can serve as seed structures for molecular dynamics simulations to map conformational landscapes. Thus, SteerAF provides an efficient and interpretable approach for predicting alternative conformations, offering a framework that can be extended to other similar predictors and problems.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A simple approach to the L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy for absolutely continuous dividend strategies

arXiv:2604.13302v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We revisit the optimization problem solved in L{\o}kka & Zervos (2008), i.e., the maximization of dividends, in a Brownian risk model, with the possibility (not the obligation) of making capital injections. Following the approach introduced in Alvarez & Shepp (1998), Renaud & Simard (2021), Renaud et al. (2023), we consider instead absolutely continuous (AC) dividend strategies with an affine bound on the payment rates, while singular capital injections are still allowed. In addition, we incorporate a parameter for the cost of ruin or, said differently, a penalty at ruin in the performance function. We show that the solution is a so-called L{\o}kka-Zervos dichotomy: the surplus is never ruined by making bail-out payments, or no capital is injected and bankruptcy can occur; in either case, dividends are paid at full rate when the surplus is above a threshold. Our framework allows us to provide explicit conditions to express the dichotomy, either using the cost of capital injections or the cost of ruin as a criterion, which also exposes the underlying structure of the solution. In particular, for some values of the parameters, we show that it is optimal to liquidate. Moreover, we perform a numerical analysis highlighting the range of values generated under this AC affine-bound structure.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Link-Free Multi-Node Timing Synchronization for Scalable Quantum Networking

arXiv:2606.14077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precise timing synchronization is essential for distributed quantum networking, enabling entanglement distribution, quantum teleportation, and entanglement swapping across remote nodes. Existing synchronization architectures rely on dedicated timing-distribution infrastructure, most notably White Rabbit networks, which constrain topology, scalability, and deployment in free-space and satellite environments. Here we demonstrate link-free synchronization of quantum network nodes using independently operating miniature rubidium atomic clocks and computational post-processing. We validate the approach on a deployed metropolitan-scale telecom fiber network spanning three geographically separated nodes. Following drift correction, atomic-clock-based synchronization achieves timing performance approaching that of a White Rabbit benchmark and remains stable over continuous 8-hour operation. As a stringent test of quantum-network functionality, we observe Hong-Ou-Mandel interference across spatially separated nodes with visibility exceeding 70%, statistically equivalent to that obtained using dedicated White Rabbit timing links. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first observation of quantum interference across a deployed metropolitan-scale telecom fiber network synchronized entirely without dedicated timing-transfer infrastructure. These results establish atomic-clock-based synchronization as a scalable, topology-independent alternative to conventional timing-distribution architectures and a practical pathway toward terrestrial, airborne, and space-based quantum networks where dedicated timing links are unavailable.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Markovianity-based ultrasensitive parameter estimation

Authors:

arXiv:2211.05142v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate parameter estimation is a central task in quantum metrology and sensing, where quantum resources can provide precision beyond classical limits. In realistic settings, however, system-environment interactions lead to decoherence, reducing these strategies to their classical counterparts. Noise is typically classified as Markovian or non-Markovian, with the latter often preserving quantum coherence longer and thus supporting better metrological performance. Still, the absence of noise is generally considered ideal. In this work, we uncover a striking reversal: certain non-Markovian environments not only outperform Markovian ones - including their quantum Cramér-Rao bounds - but can also surpass the entirely noiseless case. We demonstrate these findings numerically for an all-optical setup, which is experimentally feasible and can be extended to other physical platforms. In general, our results open new avenues for noise-assisted quantum metrology beyond conventional limits.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A prototype differential atom interferometer for fundamental physics

Gravitational waves and ultralight dark matter are among the most compelling frontiers in fundamental physics, motivating proposals for very-long-baseline atom interferometerssuch as AION1, MAGIS2, AICE3 and AEDGE4 that aim to detect at frequencies at which ground-based5 and space-borne6 laser interferometers lose sensitivity. Very-long-baseline atom interferometers look for signals by comparing the quantum phase evolution of widely separated atomic ensembles interrogated by a common laser. However, their performance depends critically on suppressing noise sources, particularly laser phase noise. The experimental validation of such noise rejection remains an important challenge. Here we demonstrate a prototype differential atom interferometer based on the single-photon clock transition of fermionic 87Sr. Thus, we obtain a gradiometer configuration with a species intrinsically suited to kilometre-scale and space-baseline operation. The instrument operates at the standard quantum limit7 with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise. The differential configuration maintains quantum-limited sensitivity in the presence of several radians of artificially injected laser phase noise per shot, which emulates the conditions expected in a very-long-baseline atom interferometer. We also demonstrate the recovery of coherent oscillatory signals across a broad frequency range under fully phase-randomized conditions, a capability that is inaccessible to a single interferometer operating in the same regime. These results provide an experimental validation of the noise-immune measurement principle underlying very-long-baseline atom interferometers and mark an important step towards next-generation quantum sensors for gravitational-wave detection and searches for ultralight dark matter8,9. A prototype differential atom interferometer operates at the standard quantum limit with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise, achieving performance in line with the specifications for future long-baseline atom interferometers.

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

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception. Understanding the causes of these failures remains challenging as existing benchmarks report performance gaps without probing underlying mechanisms. To address this, we introduce a benchmark with 1,657 questions across three foundational tasks designed specifically for mechanistic analysis. Examining model outputs across varying input settings (behavioral analysis) reveals that models often under-utilize audio when textual cues are available. We also provide the first causal mechanistic analysis of temporal reasoning failures in LALMs. Comparing attention upweighting against scaling, we find that redistributing attention across audio tokens is more effective than increasing audio attention. Targeting task-relevant tokens yields further gains. These findings suggest that modality imbalance alone cannot explain failures. Attention scaling at bottleneck layers improves accuracy from 55.9% to 59.1% without fine-tuning, demonstrating a promising direction for future work.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Nickel and Dimed: How a Common Earth Element is Short-Changing Our Health

Nickel has been studied for a long time as an environmental contaminant but less so in its connection to population health. It does not announce itself as loudly as its transition metal brethren like mercury and cadmium, but its chemical properties permit it to be deleterious as a low-dose, chronic exposure, particularly among those with immune systems sensitized to it. There is a growing evidence base and vocabulary to discuss nickel's affect on health. However, in the U.S., there are not recent, reliable estimates of the share of the population with a nickel allergy, let alone how much nickel Americans are exposed to through their diet. This paper seeks to close this evidence gap by creating a new dataset of dietary nickel and other heavy metal exposure and assessing how high levels of dietary nickel exposure shape local demand for health care services. We use soil data from the U.S. Geological Survey and data on agricultural product transport from FoodFlows.org to create a county-level dietary nickel exposure index. We then use a large electronic health record database and double machine learning to estimate how demand for primary care services varies across levels of dietary nickel exposure. We find that counties with high nickel exposure experience an increase in the share of primary care office visits for symptoms highly suggestive of nickel poisoning. This result survives multiple hypothesis test corrections and placebo tests. Our research suggests that nickel has harmful effects on individual health whose exposure can be measured at a population level, and is shaping primary care across the U.S.

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

PhononBench:A Large-Scale Phonon-Based Benchmark for Dynamical Stability in Crystal Generation

arXiv:2512.21227v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In recent years, generative artificial intelligence has made significant advances in the design of crystalline materials, giving rise to approaches based on graph neural networks, diffusion models, and large language models. Existing evaluations commonly follow the stability-uniqueness-novelty (S.U.N.) framework, where stability is primarily assessed using thermodynamic criteria, which do not fully capture the dynamical stability essential for a material's practical existence. Dynamical stability is a key determinant of whether a material can be synthesized and persist, with phonon spectrum calculations serving as the standard for its evaluation. However, the high computational cost of such calculations has prevented large-scale assessment of dynamical stability in generated crystals. In this work, we introduce PhononBench, the first large-scale benchmark for dynamical stability in AI-generated crystals. Leveraging the recently developed MatterSim interatomic potential, which achieves density-functional-theory (DFT)-level accuracy in phonon predictions across more than 10,000 materials, PhononBench enables efficient phonon calculations and dynamical-stability analysis for 133,838 crystal structures generated by 7 leading crystal generation models. PhononBench reveals a widespread limitation of current generative models: unless otherwise specified, all reported dynamical-stability metrics are evaluated at a phonon-frequency threshold of -0.1 THz, with the average dynamical-stability rate across all generated structures being only 32.15%, and the top-performing model, MatterGen, reaching just 45.05%.In addition, we identify 32,995 crystal structures that are phonon-stable across the entire Brillouin zone under a strict threshold of -0.001 THz. In addition, a web-based service is accessible at http://phononbench.cn/, enabling minute-level ultra-fast phonon predictions.

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

XPASS-Vis: A Dataset for Cross-Domain Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment

Personalized image aesthetic assessment (PIAA) seeks to model, at the individual level, the subjective nature of aesthetic judgments toward artworks and photographs. Aesthetic preference is known to be both deeply personal and partially consistent across visual domains. Yet existing PIAA datasets and methods are largely confined to a single domain, or provide too few samples per annotator within each domain to enable personalization across domains. Consequently, the cross-domain generalization of personalized aesthetic preferences remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce XPASS-Vis, the first dataset explicitly designed for cross-domain PIAA. XPASS-Vis comprises 6,526 stimuli from three visual domains – art, fashion, and landscape – rated by 129 annotators, yielding 87,836 user-stimulus interactions, each annotated with an overall aesthetic score and nine aesthetic-emotion ratings. Notably, each annotator rated more than 200 stimuli per domain, providing sufficient per-domain coverage to support personalization both within and across domains. Moreover, we establish baseline models for cross-domain PIAA under unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where a model trained on a labeled source domain is transferred to an unlabeled target domain. A systematic evaluation of representative UDA approaches shows that the best-performing method recovers approximately 60\% (Spearman's $\rho$ = .28) of the supervised upper bound under a fully unsupervised setting. This provides encouraging evidence that personalized aesthetic preferences are, to a meaningful extent, transferable across visual domains. At the same time, a substantial gap remains, highlighting the need for PIAA-specific adaptation strategies. XPASS-Vis and the accompanying baselines provide a foundation for future research on cross-domain PIAA. All datasets and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

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

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

arXiv:2606.20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution. The standard remedy is to collect multi-view teleoperation data for every failure case, but this scales poorly in both cost and time. We introduce Pose6DAug, a failure-driven data augmentation framework that turns a policy's own successful episodes into targeted demonstrations for its failure modes, without any new data collection. Our key insight is that each successful episode already encodes a physically valid action trajectory together with calibrated multi-view observations. By swapping only the manipulated object while preserving this trajectory, we obtain new and physically grounded demonstrations. However, naive 2D video editing breaks multi-view consistency and physical plausibility, particularly under heavy occlusion and egocentric viewpoints. Our method instead operates directly in 3D, anchoring the target object with an explicit mesh driven by a temporally coherent 6D pose trajectory, ensuring geometrically consistent renderings across all camera views. Fine-tuning a VLA on data augmented by our method improves success rates by 16.5% relative to the state-of-the-art baseline on novel objects, while preserving in-distribution performance. These results show that multi-view and physically consistent augmentation is a practical path to scalable VLA generalization.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FastMix: Fast Data Mixture Optimization via Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.14971v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While large and diverse datasets have driven recent advances in large models, identifying the optimal data mixture for pre-training and post-training remains a significant open problem. We address this challenge with FASTMIX, a novel framework that automates data mixture discovery while training only a single proxy model. Instead of relying on predefined heuristics or resource-intensive simulations, FASTMIX jointly optimizes mixture coefficients and model parameters, substantially improving efficiency and scalability over prior approaches. At the core of FASTMIX is a reformulation of mixture selection as a bilevel optimization problem. Under this reformulation, we show that optimizing mixture ratios is mathematically equivalent to assigning per-source loss weights under uniform source sampling. This embeds the mixture coefficients directly into the differentiable iterative optimization objective, enabling efficient, gradient-based optimization of both mixture and model. To solve the optimization problem, FASTMIX implements an approximate iterative optimization procedure, alternating between (i) updating model parameters on data sampled according to current mixture ratios (inner loop) and (ii) updating mixture ratios based on validation feedback (outer loop). Across pre- and post-training, FASTMIX outperforms baselines while drastically reducing search cost. Code (https://github.com/hrtan/fastmix)

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

Detecting Hate and Inflammatory Content in Bengali Memes: A New Multimodal Dataset and Co-Attention Framework

Internet memes have become a dominant form of expression on social media, including within the Bengali speaking community. While often humorous, memes can also be exploited to spread offensive, harmful, and inflammatory content targeting individuals and groups. Detecting this type of content is exceptionally challenging due to its satirical, subtle, and culturally specific nature. This problem is magnified for low-resource languages like Bengali, as existing research predominantly focuses on high-resource languages. To address this critical research gap, we introduce Bn-HIB (Bangla Hate Inflammatory Benign), a novel dataset containing 3,247 manually annotated Bengali memes categorized as Benign, Hate, or Inflammatory. Significantly, Bn- HIB is the first dataset to distinguish inflammatory content from direct hate speech in Bengali memes. Furthermore, we propose the MCFM (Multi-Modal Co-Attention Fusion Model), a simple yet effective architecture that mutually analyses both the visual and textual elements of a meme. MCFM employs a co-attention mechanism to identify and fuse the most critical features from each modality, leading to a more accurate classification. Our experiments show that MCFM significantly outperforms several state-of-the-art models on the Bn-HIB dataset, demonstrating its effectiveness in this nuanced task. To facilitate reproducibility and future research, the Bn-HIB dataset has been made publicly available through Mendeley Data. Warning: This work contains material that may be disturbing to some audience members. Viewer discretion is advised

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Perceive, Interact, Reason: Building Tool-Augmented Visual Agents for Spatial Reasoning

While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding, they remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require active evidence acquisition and multi-step visual interaction. This limitation suggests that relying solely on implicit visual representations from vision encoders is insufficient for recovering fine-grained spatial evidence. We introduce PERception-Interaction-reason Agent (PERIA), a tool-augmented visual agent for spatial reasoning tasks across map reasoning, visual probing, and vision reconstruction. PERIA uses two lightweight tool families: vision perception tools for exposing textual, symbolic, and spatial evidence, and vision interaction tools for manipulating visual context, tracing paths, and verifying spatial relations. To train PERIA, we develop a unified recipe that combines supervised tool-use trajectory synthesis, composite rewards, and Observation-Relaxed Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (OR-GIGPO) for effective multi-tool behavior. Experiments on 13 benchmarks from 8 datasets show that PERIA-8B improves over the Qwen3-8B backbone by 10.0% on in-distribution benchmarks and 4.4% on out-of-distribution benchmarks, while outperforming previous state-of-the-art baselines of similar size by 7.0%-14.8%. It also achieves performance comparable to much larger models such as Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking and GPT-5, demonstrating the effectiveness of PERIA in enhancing spatial reasoning capabilities.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RetailBench: Benchmarking long horizon reasoning and coherent decision making of LLM agents in realistic retail environments

arXiv:2606.15862v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents have made rapid progress on short-horizon, well-scoped tasks, yet their ability to sustain coherent decisions in dynamic long-horizon environments remains uncertain. We introduce RetailBench, a data-grounded simulation benchmark for evaluating tool-using LLM agents in single-store supermarket operation. RetailBench models retail management as a partially observable decision process and is designed to support thousand-day-scale simulations. In this environment, agents must manage pricing, replenishment, supplier selection, shelf assortment, inventory aging, customer feedback, external events, and cash-flow constraints. We evaluate seven contemporary LLMs under representative agent frameworks over a 180-day evaluation horizon and compare them with a privileged oracle policy. Results show substantial variation across models: only a small subset survives the full evaluation horizon, and even the strongest LLM runs remain substantially behind the oracle policy in final net worth and sales outcomes. Behavioral analysis attributes these gaps to incomplete evidence acquisition, surface-level decision making, and the lack of a consistent long-horizon policy. RetailBench provides a controlled testbed for studying reliable autonomy in economically grounded long-horizon decision-making.

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arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Energy Use of AI Inference, Efficiency Pathways, and Test-Time Scaling

arXiv:2509.20241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As AI inference scales to billions of queries, estimates of per-query energy use are increasingly important for capacity planning, efficiency interventions, and policy. Yet many public estimates assume non-production settings, leading to systematic overestimation. We introduce a bottom-up framework estimating inference energy from token throughput, node power, and overhead under large-scale deployment assumptions. For frontier-scale models (>200B parameters) on H100 nodes, we estimate a median energy of 0.31 Wh/query (IQR 0.16-0.60), indicating widely cited estimates are overstated by 4-20x. In test-time scaling scenarios 15x longer than typical queries, the median energy rises 13x to 3.91 Wh (IQR 2.15-7.05). Across models, serving systems, and hardware, we estimate 8-20x line-of-sight energy reductions. At datacenter scale, serving 1 billion queries/day requires 0.7 GWh; if 10% are long queries, demand rises to 1.7 GWh/day. With efficiency interventions, it falls to 0.8 GWh/day, mitigating the energy impact of test-time scaling.