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

Quantum geometrical description of hole spin qubits far away from the $\Gamma$-point

arXiv:2606.14683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hole spin qubits provide one of the leading platforms for spin-based quantum computing due to their large intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which enables fast electrical manipulation. The SOI of planar quantum dots has mostly been investigated in theoretical studies by examining the SOI already present in the two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG). Here, we study the SOI created by the in-plane confinement by deriving non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians numerically for hole spin qubits. We find that the quantum geometry of the 2DHG naturally emerges, leading to a meaningful non-perturbative definition of pseudospin valid far away from the $\Gamma$-point. The SOI of the 2DHG and of the in-plane confinement have different forms; therefore, they cannot be turned off simultaneously, ruining the perfect spin-orbit switch functionality of spin qubits. We construct effective Hamiltonians using the symmetry approach for various low-dimensional hole systems: (i) a heavy-hole confined in a SiGe/Ge/SiGe heterostructure, (ii) a light-hole confined in SnGe/Ge, (iii) a gate-defined nanowire in SiGe/Ge/SiGe, and (iv) a hole confined in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire. The non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians provide results with excellent agreement with the full Hamiltonians.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adiabatic preparation of a fractional quantum Hall fluid by coherently pumping atoms from a Bose-Einstein condensate

arXiv:2606.15951v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a protocol to adiabatically prepare a many-particle fractional quantum Hall fluid of bosonic ultracold atoms exploiting a time-dependent coherent coupling of a strongly interacting atomic state with a large dilute Bose-Einstein condensate. Starting from an empty cloud, atoms with well-defined angular momentum are coherently pumped into the fluid by Raman beams with a Laguerre-Gauss profile. Compared to number-conserving schemes which rely on finite-size-induced topological gaps, we identify an adiabatic path in the Fock space which avoids crossing topological phase transitions and thus maintains a sizable adiabatic gap open at all times. The efficiency of our preparation protocol is numerically assessed for typical experimental parameters up to particle numbers that largely exceed the experimental state-of-the-art. The crucial advantage of including an anharmonic confinement is finally highlighted.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

On Subquadratic Architectures: From Applications to Principles

arXiv:2606.12364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformers dominate modern sequence modeling, but their quadratic attention incurs substantial computational cost. Subquadratic architectures offer a scalable alternative. However, it remains unclear which designs yield the most effective sequence models. We compare three leading approaches: xLSTM, Mamba-2, and Gated DeltaNet. We evaluate these models on tasks with complex dependencies: (1) code-model pre-training, (2) distillation of code models from large language models, and (3) pre-training of time-series foundation models. Across these settings, xLSTM delivers the strongest overall performance. To explain xLSTM's advantage, we present a unified formulation and analyze the underlying architectural mechanisms, focusing on state tracking and memory dynamics. Our results show that xLSTM enables more flexible and stable memory correction via its gating scheme. We corroborate these findings on controlled synthetic length-generalization tasks. Overall, our findings indicate that xLSTM's gains on complex tasks stem from robust state tracking and accumulation.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A random recursive tree model with doubling events

arXiv:2501.18466v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new model of random tree that grows like a random recursive tree, except at some exceptional "doubling events" when the tree is replaced by two copies of itself attached to a new root. We prove asymptotic results for the size of this tree at large times, its degree distribution, and its height profile. We also prove a lower bound for its height. Because of the doubling events that affect the tree globally, the proofs are all much more intricate than in the case of the random recursive tree in which the growing operation is always local.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

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

VCG: A Multimodal Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds under Extreme Cold-Start Conditions

arXiv:2606.19627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The digital commerce landscape is shifting from static, search-driven catalogs to dynamic, immersive video feeds. This transition introduces an ``extreme cold-start'' problem: unlike traditional items, new short-form videos lack the dense interaction history required for collaborative filtering. Furthermore, immersive feeds introduce strong position and duration biases that distort standard engagement signals. In this paper, we demonstrate the Video Candidate Generation (VCG) system, a scalable multimodal retrieval engine designed to solve these challenges in a large-scale e-commerce environment. By leveraging a domain-adapted vision-language model (based on CLIP), we map users and videos into a shared semantic space, enabling zero-shot retrieval based on visual content rather than behavioral history. We detail the system's architecture and present a rigorous evaluation comparing generative (LLM) vs. discriminative (CLIP) embeddings. Our results show that while generative models excel at attribute prediction, they suffer from embedding space collapse in retrieval tasks. Online A/B testing demonstrates that VCG effectively mitigates engagement biases, yielding a 50\% uplift in deep video completion. To showcase the system's capabilities, we present an interactive demonstration featuring three bi-directional retrieval scenarios: Product-to-Video, Video-to-Product, and Zero-Shot Semantic Search.

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

MVEB: Massive Video Embedding Benchmark

We introduce the Massive Video Embedding Benchmark (MVEB), a 23-task benchmark for video embeddings spanning classification, zero-shot classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and video-centric question answering. We evaluate 33 models and find that no single model dominates: MLLM-based embeddings lead on classification, clustering, pair classification, and QA; multimodal binding leads on retrieval and zero-shot classification; generative MLLMs without contrastive adaptation collapse on cross-modal tasks. Paired video-only vs. audio+video evaluations show that audio's contribution depends on dataset annotation provenance: audio helps when labels were produced from both modalities and hurts when they were produced from visuals alone, a six-point gap consistent across model families. MVEB is derived from MVEB+, a 184-task pool, and is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost. It integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, audio, and video. We release MVEB and all 184 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Which Speech Representation Better Matches Text-Native Reasoning? A Study of Speech-Text Alignment on Frame Rate and Representation

Spoken dialogue models typically start from text LLM backbones, yet reasoning often degrades when conditioning on speech instead of text. We attribute part of this modality gap to a temporal-granularity mismatch: speech tokens are temporally redundant and far longer than text under matched semantics, diluting per-token semantic density and weakening text-native reasoning dynamics. We study speech token design as a representation selection problem and sweep frame rates under a frozen LLM backbone with a fixed information rate. To make low frame rates feasible, we introduce factorized FSQ and a lightweight non-autoregressive audio LM head, scaling capacity to nearly 300\,bits/frame without sacrificing efficient prediction. With the bottleneck removed, we sweep frame rates (50$\rightarrow$2.08\,Hz) and alignment depth, and observe a consistent best regime for speech QA at 4.17\,Hz with intermediate-layer representation alignment.

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

Biomazon: A Multimodal Dataset for 3D Forest Structure and Biomass Modeling in the Amazon Basin

Accurate, spatially explicit characterization of tropical forest structure is essential for carbon accounting and ecosystem monitoring, yet most ML pipelines predict canopy-top height proxies (e.g., RH95/RH98) or AGBD as separate scalar targets, rather than learning the forest vertical structure as an ordered profile. The community lacks a ML-ready multimodal benchmark for predicting the entire GEDI RH profile jointly with AGBD, or for evaluating methods that enforce physically consistent ordering across RH percentiles. We address this with Biomazon, a 20 m multimodal benchmark dataset over the Amazon Basin that pairs GEDI RH and AGBD targets with multi-sensor predictors (Sentinel-1/2, ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, Copernicus DEM, Dynamic World LULC, and AlphaEarth embeddings) under standardized spatial splits and evaluation protocols. Using a shared encoder-decoder with task-specific heads as a baseline framework, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study of (i) backbone/model scale, (ii) modality contributions, and (iii) the use of auxiliary embeddings under standalone and fusion settings, and we report both single-target and joint-target results to quantify tradeoffs under a unified training protocol. Finally, we contextualize baseline performance through regionally aligned comparisons against existing gridded products, including GEDI L4D RH10-RH98 and AGBD, at matching temporal scale. Biomazon, together with the accompanying protocols and baseline results, establishes a reference benchmark for future work on structurally consistent RH-profile prediction and structure-biomass modeling in tropical forests.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Reward Supervision: Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation

Post-training of reasoning language models is commonly driven by supervised distillation and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Distillation often relies on chain-of-thought annotations that are expensive to obtain and may themselves be noisy, incomplete, or partially incorrect; even when the final solution is correct, an imperfect rationale can interfere with learning. Reinforcement learning with verified rewards, on the other hand, typically compresses evaluative feedback into a scalar signal, obscuring which aspects of a response should be improved. We propose Rubric-Conditioned Self-Distillation, a framework that incorporates rubrics as structured, fine-grained feedback for on-policy self-distillation. Our method conditions the teacher model on criterion-level rubrics and uses it to provide token-level guidance on the student's own sampled trajectories. This design avoids treating a single reference rationale as the sole supervision target. Instead, rubrics specify what a strong response should satisfy, enabling more fine-grained credit assignment over the reasoning process than scalar reward optimization. We instantiate this framework with a two-stage pipeline that first learns to generate task-specific rubrics and then trains a rubric-guided reasoner. We evaluate on a diverse suite of science reasoning benchmarks and results show that rubric-conditioned self-distillation effectively converts rubric-level criteria into token-level guidance over the reasoning process, surpassing GRPO by 1.0 points and OPSD by 0.9 points on average.

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

A Geometric Family of Correlations Containing the Quantum Singlet

arXiv:2606.12045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a geometrically constrained hidden-variable framework that generates a family of correlations parametrized by a boundary function, within which the quantum singlet correlation appears as a particular member. Exact expressions for the correlation function are derived. Several structural results are established, including admissibility conditions, symmetry properties, a universal stationary point of the associated CHSH function, and an exact relation between the CHSH value at $\nu=\pi/4$ and a geometric contrast measure defined on the underlying hidden-variable distributions. Rather than treating the quantum singlet correlation as an isolated target to be reproduced, the present framework places it within a broader geometric structure of correlations. These results suggest the existence of a nontrivial geometric structure underlying the family of correlations and motivate the search for a principle capable of selecting the quantum singlet solution from within that family.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Repeat expansions in Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism across ancestries: insights from a global genetic cohort

Expanded short tandem repeats contribute to a broad spectrum of neurodegenerative diseases, yet their roles in Parkinson's disease (PD) and parkinsonism remain incompletely characterized, especially across diverse ancestries. We analyzed short-read whole-genome (WGS) and clinical exome sequencing (CES) data from 38,365 individuals (28,861 WGS; 9,504 CES), encompassing 23,242 patients with PD, 4,729 patients with atypical parkinsonism and 10,394 healthy controls from 11 genetic ancestries. To determine carrier frequencies and characterize repeat structures across diverse ancestries, we genotyped 12 established pathogenic loci where normal, intermediate, and pathogenic alleles can be reliably differentiated using short-read sequencing data. Additionally, we conducted threshold-based associations to determine the minimum threshold associated with increased PD risk in 15,995 individuals (8,591 PD, 7,404 controls) of European ancestry. Pathogenic repeat expansions were detected in 62 patients (56 PD and 6 atypical parkinsonism) and 5 controls across seven loci (AR, ATXN1, ATXN2, ATXN3, CACNA1A, HTT and THAP11), spanning seven ancestries. Among these, ATXN2 expansions were the most frequently observed in PD and were present in African, East Asian, European and Middle Eastern ancestries. Additionally, intermediate ATXN2 repeat expansions exhibited a strong, length-dependent association with PD risk in the European population, with individuals with [≥]32 repeats having a more than four-fold increased risk (odds ratio 4.25, 95% confidence interval 1.80-12.05). Overall, >92% of expanded alleles harbor CAA interruptions within the CAG tract. Pathogenic expansions at other loci, such as ATXN3 and THAP11, showed more ancestry-specific distributions. Clinically, individuals with pathogenic ATXN2 and ATXN3 expansions most often presented with typical PD features but frequently showed earlier disease onset and a strong family history of PD. This large-scale, multi-ancestry study comprehensively maps the genetic landscape of pathogenic and intermediate repeat expansions in PD. Our findings confirm a length- and structure-dependent risk association for ATXN2 with PD in the European population, and highlight the pleiotropic effects of repeat expansions across the parkinsonian spectrum.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

AdaSR: Adaptive Streaming Reasoning with Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization

Large reasoning models typically follow a read-then-think paradigm: they observe the complete input, reason over a static context, and then produce the answer. Yet many real-world scenarios are inherently dynamic, such as audio and video stream, where information arrives as a continuous stream and models must reason, update, and respond under partial observations. Recent streaming reasoning methods allow models to think while reading, but they largely rely on supervised imitation of pre-constructed trajectories, which limits their flexibility. In this paper, we propose AdaSR, an adaptive streaming reasoning framework that enables models to reason during input streaming and perform final deliberation once the stream is complete, learning when to think, and how much computation to allocate across different stages. To optimize this hierarchical reasoning process, we introduce Hierarchical Relative Policy Optimization (HRPO), which decomposes policy optimization into streaming reasoning and deep reasoning phases, providing more fine-grained advantage assignment instead of uniformly distributing a single sequence-level advantage over all tokens. HRPO integrates format, accuracy, and adaptive thinking rewards to enforce valid reasoning protocols, preserve final task performance, and encourage latency-aware computation allocation. Experiments show that AdaSR achieves a better balance among reasoning accuracy, computational efficiency, and streaming latency compared with supervised fine-tuning baseline. We release our code at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/StreamingLLM/tree/main/AdaSR.

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

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.

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

CAPRA: Scaling Feedback on Software Architecture Deliverables with a Multi-Agent LLM System

arXiv:2606.18976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated assessment in software engineering education has advanced significantly for code grading and essay scoring. However, reviewing software architecture deliverables, which requires analyzing structural completeness and requirements traceability, has not yet been fully automated. Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task requires robust architectures to ensure technical feedback is accurate and reliable for students. This paper presents CAPRA (Configurable Architecture Proficiency Report Assessment), a multi-agent LLM system that analyzes software architecture deliverables to generate personalized, template-compliant LaTeX feedback. As a core design choice, CAPRA coordinates multiple specialized agents and employs a Python-based microservice for multi-modal document extraction, utilizing PyMuPDF and vision-enabled LLMs (specifically gpt-4o) to parse text and UML diagrams. To ensure educational reliability and mitigate hallucinations, CAPRA introduces a deterministic Evidence Anchoring step using fuzzy matching via normalized Levenshtein distance, along with a ConsistencyManager agent that cross-verifies, deduplicates, and merges findings. System performance is assessed using a structured eight-criterion binary evaluation taxonomy covering: (i) extraction completeness, (ii) feature validation, (iii) issue grounding and severity detection, (iv) recommendation specificity and traceability, and (v) template and tone compliance. A preliminary empirical evaluation on 10 student reports shows that CAPRA satisfied 88.8% of the evaluated criteria under a strict two-rater aggregation rule, achieved moderate inter-rater agreement with human evaluators (kappa = 0.582), and processed each report in slightly over 4 minutes. While these results support the viability of LLM-supported architectural feedback, human oversight remains essential for subjective assessment dimensions.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Deep Learning of Solver-Aware Turbulence Closures from Nudged LES Dynamics

arXiv:2604.23874v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The differentiable physics paradigm may be leveraged as an a-posteriori approach for discovering turbulence closure models by embedding a neural network parameterization directly inside the solver and optimizing it given potentially sparse target data. This addresses a key limitation of a-priori learning where direct numerical simulation (DNS) data is used to approximate the subgrid stress with the assumption of a low-pass filter. Closures trained in this a-priori manner frequently lead to unstable deployments due to the mismatch between the assumed filter and the effect of numerical discretizations and coarse-graining. In comparison, while typically stable during deployment, a-posteriori learning incurs high computational costs due to the need to backpropagate through a large eddy simulation (LES) solver. Furthermore, a-posteriori methods are challenging to apply broadly since they require significant modification of existing solvers. Finally, both approaches are limited when generalization is desired across different numerical schemes with their implicit filtering characteristics. In this work, we present a deep-learning approach for turbulence closure modeling built on the continuous data assimilation framework. Our approach enables the a-priori training of closures using sparsely observed DNS data without modifying or differentiating through the LES solver, while preserving stability during deployment for the recovery of invariant statistics. We focus on the model's ability to adapt to different discretizations by explicitly conditioning it on the numerical scheme. We use two- and three-dimensional canonical cases to test our framework and show that the learned correction systematically tracks the discretization error of the coarse solver.

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

CEO-Bench: Can Agents Play the Long Game?

Language model agents are becoming proficient executors at isolated, short-horizon tasks such as software engineering and customer service. Yet real-world challenges require a combination of sophisticated skills that remain largely untested in agents: (1) navigating long horizons amid uncertainty; (2) acquiring information in noisy environments; (3) adapting to a changing world; (4) orchestrating multiple moving parts toward a coherent goal. We introduce CEO-Bench, which evaluates these capabilities together by simulating a representative real-world task: operating a startup for 500 days. An agent manages pricing, marketing, budgeting, and many other aspects of a fictional company through a programmable Python interface, operating in the same environment and facing the same challenges as a human CEO. Success demands analyzing noisy, interconnected business databases, translating signals into sound strategy, and coordinating many decisions with programming. The strongest agents write sophisticated code that simulates customer cohorts to forecast future cash and mines negotiation history to uncover hidden customer preferences. Even so, most state-of-the-art models struggle in this environment. Only Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 finish above the $1M starting balance, and neither consistently turns a profit. CEO-Bench takes a first step toward measuring the intelligence required to drive sustained, adaptive progress over time.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CoffeeBench: Benchmarking Long-Horizon LLM Agents in Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Economies

arXiv:2606.16613v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents become capable of increasingly long-horizon tasks, evaluating their performance in economic systems is becoming increasingly important. Unlike existing benchmarks that primarily evaluate a single agent interacting with a passive environment, economic systems are inherently multi-agent, requiring autonomous agents to communicate, negotiate, and transact while pursuing their own objectives over extended periods. We introduce CoffeeBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM agents in a long-horizon multi-agent economy composed of heterogeneous firms. In CoffeeBench, two farmers, two roasters, and two retailers autonomously operate their businesses over a 90-day simulation, each seeking to maximize cumulative net income through communication and transactions while managing cash, inventory, and pricing. The evaluated model controls one coffee roaster, while the remaining firms are controlled by fixed reference agents. Across several recent open-weight and proprietary LLMs, all models outperform a passive baseline that takes no actions, with most achieving positive net income. Analysis of agent behavior reveals substantial differences in long-horizon economic interaction: higher-performing models communicate more actively with other firms, whereas Claude~Haiku~4.5 exhibits an idle-drift failure mode, repeatedly choosing inaction despite producing coherent assessments and plans. We release our code and agent trajectories to support future research.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Toward less intrusive pubertal assessment: longitudinal evaluation of tanner and non-tanner metrics in East African adolescents

Background: Accurate pubertal assessment is essential in pediatric endocrinology and adolescent health research. While Tanner staging remains the gold standard, its subjective nature and invasive genital examination limit feasibility and acceptability, especially in longitudinal studies and culturally sensitive settings. This study evaluated less intrusive pubertal assessment combinations that maintain discriminative accuracy. Methods: We conducted a longitudinal study among 200 uncircumcised, sexually naive males aged 15-17 years in Southwestern Uganda, with quarterly follow-up over three years. Clinicians assessed Tanner staging metrics (pubic hair, testicular volume, penile length, scrotal color), axillary hair, and serum testosterone. Markov transition models estimated Tanner stage progression. Ordinal logistic regression and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) analyses quantified discriminative performance of individual and combined metrics. Results: At baseline, participants were distributed across Tanner stages II (6.0%), III (13.5%), IV (55.0%), and V (25.5%). Among individual metrics, pubic hair distribution best predicted overall Tanner stage (AUC=0.867), while penile length was least predictive (AUC=0.833). The full four-metric Tanner model achieved high discrimination (AUC=0.993). However, a less intrusive combination of pubic hair and scrotal color achieved comparable discrimination (AUC=0.942), improving to AUC=0.953 with axillary hair and age. Markov modeling demonstrated frequent bidirectional transitions between Tanner stages IV and V, reflecting variability in longitudinal staging. Conclusions: A minimally intrusive assessment combining pubic hair, scrotal color, axillary hair, and age reliably predicts pubertal stage, offering an acceptable alternative to traditional Tanner staging for research and surveillance contexts where genital manipulation is impractical or unethical.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

EgoPhys: Learning Generalizable Physics Models of Deformable Objects from Egocentric Video

Humans naturally understand object physics through everyday interactions, but faithfully predicting complex deformable dynamics, such as elastic materials and fabrics, remains a major challenge for computer vision and robotics. We present EgoPhys, a framework that constructs deformable physical digital twins from egocentric RGB-only video using generalizable priors. EgoPhys overcomes the limitations of existing methods to enable controllable deformable digital twin generation from egocentric videos by distilling per-object inverse-physics solutions into a compact codebook, enabling prediction of dense spring stiffness fields for unseen objects without per-spring test-time optimization. Trained with generalizable priors from diverse egocentric interactions, EgoPhys outperforms baselines in reconstruction, future prediction, and zero-shot generalization. To support training and evaluation, we curate an egocentric interaction dataset covering diverse deformable objects, scenes, and manipulation styles. We deploy EgoPhys on a real xArm6 robot, demonstrating that a digital twin initialized from a single egocentric human play video can serve as an internal world representation to aid in deformable-object planning, highlighting egocentric RGB observations as a scalable path toward real-to-sim pipelines.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Link between Shock-wave Theory and Symmetry-reduced Stochastic Gradient Descent for Artificial Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a mathematically explicit link between shock-wave theory and the symmetry-quotiented learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent, drawing on differential geometry, Lie group theory, and fluid mechanics. Specifically, after quotienting parameter symmetries and applying local-entropy coarse-graining, the effective dynamics satisfy a viscous Hamilton–Jacobi equation on the quotient manifold. Moreover, under the assumption that the raw parameter dynamics can be summarized by a gradient field on the quotiented space, the gradient of the coarse-grained loss function obeys a Burgers-type equation, and shock formation can be established rigorously. We apply our theory to multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, Transformers, and mean-field networks, and show that they obey the Hamilton–Jacobi or Burgers-type equations. We conjecture that this framework also yields practical diagnostics for deep learning. In architectures such as Transformers, raw parameter norms are often distorted by symmetry redundancy and may therefore be misleading, whereas symmetry-corrected quotient observables provide a principled basis for monitoring, forecasting, and controlling training-phase transitions.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe must seize the moment to lead on free and open science

Authors: Unknown Author

An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent. An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Multi-View In-Cabin Monitoring System for Public Transport Vehicles

We introduce a multi-view in-cabin monitoring dataset for public transportation with synchronized RGB and depth images from four inward-facing cameras and a rotating LiDAR covering the vehicle interior of a digitalized and partly automated German city bus. The dataset contains 9.136 synchronized samples with annotations and is accompanied by a calibration and pseudo-labeling pipeline that generates 3D human pose estimates and oriented 3D bounding boxes for occupants. We further provide a nuScenes-format conversion and benchmark representative multi-view 3D detection models (e.g., Lift-Splat-Shoot and BEVFusion), supporting comparative evaluation and small-scale training of multi-view in-cabin perception models. The dataset and tools are available at https://github.com/EvgenyGorelik/multiview_incabin_dataset.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Symmetry Breaking through Superselection by Boundary Conditions

arXiv:2606.15272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is central to modern physics but is conventionally defined only for infinite systems, raising challenges for its interpretation in finite, real-world setups. This paper argues that the key to resolving this issue lies in the underappreciated role of boundary conditions in quantum systems. Inspired by both the relational approach to symmetries and the physical mechanism behind symmetry breaking, we formulate a relational interpretation of SSB: a finite system exhibits SSB relative to a reference environment which can induce perturbations across the boundary. This eliminates the need for the thermodynamic limit, offering a more physical picture of SSB that emphasizes the observable consequences of the interactions that real-life systems inevitably have with their environment. We show how, in this relational interpretation, SSB for both lattice systems and (gauge) field theories should be understood as subtle, rather than spontaneous, symmetry breaking, still in contrast to explicit symmetry breaking. We also explain how algebraic definitions of SSB for infinite systems relate to the intuitive picture of SSB in finite systems and illustrate how asymptotic boundary conditions push the environment "to infinity". In this way, our relational interpretation of SSB provides a unified conceptual framework applicable to symmetry-breaking in systems of any size.