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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OccAny: Generalized Unconstrained Urban 3D Occupancy

Relying on in-domain annotations and precise sensor-rig priors, existing 3D occupancy prediction methods are limited in both scalability and out-of-domain generalization. While recent visual geometry foundation models exhibit strong generalization capabilities, they were mainly designed for general purposes and lack one or more key ingredients required for urban occupancy prediction, namely metric prediction, geometry completion in cluttered scenes and adaptation to urban scenarios. We address this gap and present OccAny, the first unconstrained urban 3D occupancy model capable of operating on out-of-domain uncalibrated scenes to predict and complete metric occupancy coupled with segmentation features. OccAny is versatile and can predict occupancy from sequential, monocular, or surround-view images. Our contributions are three-fold: (i) we propose the first generalized 3D occupancy framework with (ii) Segmentation Forcing that improves occupancy quality while enabling mask-level prediction, and (iii) a Novel View Rendering pipeline that infers novel-view geometry to enable test-time view augmentation for geometry completion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that OccAny outperforms all visual geometry baselines on 3D occupancy prediction task, while remaining competitive with in-domain self-supervised methods across three input settings on two established urban occupancy prediction datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/valeoai/OccAny .

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

GrowthHacker: Automated Off-Policy Evaluation Optimization Using Code-Modifying LLM Agents

With data-driven development now widely adopted, online A/B testing is an established method for measuring the effects of new technologies. However, deploying online experiments demands resources for design, implementation, and deployment, and may negatively impact users (e.g., unsafe or unethical outcomes) while requiring weeks of data collection. To address this, the growing research area of off-policy evaluation (OPE), or offline A/B testing, assesses new technologies offline using previously collected logged data. OPE is also a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning and is important where online testing is expensive or risky, such as healthcare, recommender systems, education, and robotics. Despite advances in code-generation large language models (LLMs) and agentic workflows, little is known about whether and how LLMs and LLM-based agents can automatically optimize OPE implementations. We propose GrowthHacker, a benchmark that evaluates baseline LLMs and LLM-based agents on large-scale public datasets. GrowthHacker autonomously and iteratively modifies code, runs OPE, and uses the metrics to guide subsequent optimization. We evaluate methods on Open Bandit Pipeline (OBP) and Scope-RL, and develop a two_agent framework that addresses limitations of existing frameworks while reducing complexity. Across both libraries, two_agent shows the highest reliability (98.1%-100% success rate) and positive-outcome rate (78%), with a median improvement of 4.4% among positive outcomes; CrewAI achieves the highest average improvement (37.9%) and is the only framework with zero extreme-value failures. AutoGen and Default each reach 65% positive-outcome rates. These results establish the feasibility of using LLM-based agents as automated "growth hackers" to continuously improve OPE systems, with implications for scaling data-driven decision-making where manual optimization is expensive.

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

AgentFairBench: Do LLM Agents Discriminate When They Act?

arXiv:2606.16723v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly take actions (screening applicants, recommending credit, triaging patients), yet fairness for LLMs is still measured by grading answers. We introduce AgentFairBench, a cheap, reproducible, multi-domain benchmark for demographic disparity in the actions of LLM agents. Grounded in a companion framework, the Bias Conduction Framework (BCF, restated here), it spans three regulator-anchored domains: hiring, lending, and medical triage. Synthetic, demographic-neutral profiles are evaluated in counterfactual matched sets that vary only a name-coded race x gender signal (in the Bertrand Mullainathan tradition), under four agent scaffolds of increasing agency (direct, chain-of-thought, multi-agent deliberation, tool-augmented). A NumPy-only harness computes counterfactual flip rate, mean absolute score difference (MASD), action-rate disparity, and tool-invocation disparity, with bootstrap confidence intervals, paired tests, and false-discovery-rate control, for single-digit dollars per model. A live leaderboard with a held-out private split and a contamination canary admits external models by submission. Our pilot (864 decisions plus a test-retest replication) carries a methodological lesson: comparing a six-group score spread against a two-run noise difference overstates disparity by ~ 2.4X through statistic arity alone. Against an arity matched noise floor and an omnibus group test, claude haiku 4 5 shows no demographic effect above sampling noise (0 of 120 pairwise and 0 of 9 omnibus contrasts survive correction); a planted-bias test confirms the instrument detects disparity when present. The contribution is a sound, sensitive, adoption-ready instrument, the arity matched null methodology, and open artifacts to scale it. Code, data, and harness are released under open licenses, with an anonymized review artifact.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SciText2Eq: Assessing LLMs for Explainable Equation Generation for Scientific Creativity

arXiv:2606.16003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work investigates the ability of large language models (LLMs) to generate mathematical equations from scientific texts. Prior work faces challenges in unstructured grounding, multi-equation dependency, and humanaligned evaluation. To this end, we construct a dataset of AI research papers, pairing contextual passages with ground-truth equations and variable descriptions. We develop an explainable equation generation workflow and evaluate it across diverse open- and closed-source LLM backbones. We introduce an evaluation protocol combining automatic metrics, LLM-based rubrics, and human judgments to assess accuracy, explainability, and human-LLM alignment. Results indicate that LLMs perform moderately on lexical- and syntactic-based similarity, while struggling with semantic accuracy. Comparisons between LLM-based evaluations and human judgments reveal limited alignment, highlighting challenges in using LLMs to assess equation quality. These findings offer insights for improving equation generation models and developing more reliable evaluation methods for scientific text. We provide code and data for reproducibility.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver for Accelerating Generative Modeling

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision ``anchors'' and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large interval sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256^2 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

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

DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry without Daylight Tax

Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated strong performance and flexibility in efficient end-to-end scene geometry estimation from image streams. However, their reliance on visible-light appearance makes them vulnerable in dark and low-visibility environments, where RGB cues are severely degraded and geometric evidence becomes ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose DarkVGGT, an RGB-T feed-forward geometry framework that uses physics-aware thermal modeling for robust 3D estimation in low-light scenes. DarkVGGT introduces two complementary modules. First, physics-inspired thermal factorization extracts emissive-dominant, geometry-consistent thermal cues while isolating sparse reflective residuals that may introduce geometric ambiguity. Second, geometry-shared thermal routing isolates modality-invariant geometric structures from thermal-specific patterns, selectively injecting reliability-aware structural guidance into the RGB stream. Together, these components enable accurate thermal-informed geometry estimation under degraded RGB conditions while largely preserving performance in well-lit environments. Experiments on low-visibility RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both depth and camera pose estimation over existing feed-forward geometry baselines.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Nearest-neighbour gates are all you need: High-rate quantum low-density parity-check codes on a planar grid

arXiv:2606.19482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-performance quantum low-density parity-check codes promise substantial reductions in the overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but most constructions require long-range connectivity or qubit shuttling, both of which are difficult to realise in superconducting architectures. Here we introduce a family of quantum low-density parity-check codes that, for the first time, combines planar open-boundary layouts, finite-size advantages over surface codes, and syndrome extraction using only nearest-neighbour gates on a square grid of qubits. The key idea is to generate check-data connectivity dynamically: nearest-neighbour iSWAP walks both define the stabiliser supports and implement their measurement, avoiding the need for a long-range hardware graph. The resulting circuits achieve optimal constant-depth stabiliser measurement, independent of code size, and naturally remove leakage from the system by exchanging the role of check and data qubits at each syndrome extraction round. We find finite-size instances such as a [[323,14,15]] code, whose code-efficiency ratio is nearly an order of magnitude larger than that of rotated surface-code patches. At around 30 circuit qubits per logical qubit, the best directional tile-code layouts reduce the per-logical per-round logical error rate by up to a factor of 1000 relative to rotated surface-code memories. These results show that the advantages of quantum low-density parity-check codes can survive compilation into strictly planar nearest-neighbour circuits, bringing low-overhead fault-tolerant memories closer to near-term hardware.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Assessing the inference of single-cell phylogenies and population dynamics from CRISPR lineage recordings

by Julia Pilarski, Tanja Stadler, Sophie Seidel Multicellular organisms develop from a single cell by repeated rounds of cell division, differentiation, and death, which can be represented as a single-cell phylogenetic tree. Genetic lineage tracing allows us to investigate this development by tracking the ancestry of individual cells as populations grow and change over time. However, accurate reconstruction of the cell phylogeny and quantification of the corresponding phylodynamic parameters – cell division, differentiation, and death rates – from this tracking data remains challenging and needs to be systematically evaluated. We perform simulations and assess, using the Bayesian framework, the joint inference of time-scaled cell phylogenies and phylodynamic parameters from CRISPR lineage recordings with random or sequential edits. Principally, we characterize the inference improvements as the recorder capacity increases. We observe more accurate phylogenetic reconstruction from sequential compared to random recordings, but no substantial improvement in phylodynamic inference when using the additional information contained in the order of edits. Overall, we find that CRISPR lineage recordings carry a strong signal on the rates of cell division when appropriate models are used. However, we detect biases in the inferred rates of cell division and death under phylodynamic model misspecification, i.e., when fitting classic memoryless birth-death processes to synchronous cell divisions. Moreover, for scenarios when cells differentiate into distinct types, we demonstrate that Bayesian phylodynamic analysis of sparse end-point measurements can resolve these cell differentiation trajectories by lineage and time. Under prototypical dynamics, we recover cell type-specific division and death rates, and cell type transition rates in over 80% of simulations. Overall, this simulation study explores how much information on cellular development can be extracted from state-of-the-art genetic lineage tracing data using phylogenetic and phylodynamic methodology.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Deep Learning-Based Lunar Crater Terrain Relative Navigation

arXiv:2606.14776v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate position estimation is crucial for the successful implementation of future lunar landings using autonomous vehicles, especially in dangerous environments with sparse terrain features. In this paper, we propose a terrain relative navigation (TRN) algorithm combining our deep-learning crater detector, which was designed specifically for the NASA Crater Detection Challenge problem, and an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Our detector analyzes crater features from the monocular images acquired from orbit, and their matches with craters from a global database are identified via a Hungarian assignment approach followed by the consensus-based outliers removal method. The estimated measurements are then used to refine an EKF, where spacecraft pose estimation in the Lunar-Centered Lunar-Fixed (LCLF) frame of reference, augmented with altitude aiding information, constrains radial drift. The simulation results indicate that even if the spacecraft is off from its actual location up to 5 km, TRN could recover from this situation, achieving navigation error reduction to a few hundred meters. It should be noted that in order to maintain crater feature correspondences, it is important to match the image resolution and the scales within the scene to the detector training set distribution.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Symmetry-Accelerated Classical Simulation of Clifford-Dominated Circuits

arXiv:2510.18977v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical simulation of quantum circuits plays a crucial role in validating quantum hardware and delineating the boundaries of quantum advantage. Among the most effective simulation techniques are those based on the stabilizer extent, which quantifies the overhead of representing non-Clifford operations as linear combinations of Clifford unitaries. However, finding optimal decompositions rapidly becomes intractable as it constitutes a superexponentially large optimization problem. In this work, we exploit symmetries in the computation of the stabilizer extent, proving that for real, diagonal, and real-diagonal unitaries, the optimization can be restricted to the corresponding subgroups of the Clifford group without loss of optimality. This ``strong symmetry reduction'' drastically reduces computational cost, enabling optimal decompositions of unitaries on up to seven qubits using a standard laptop – far beyond previous two-qubit limits. Additionally, we employ a ``weak symmetry reduction'' method that leverages additional invariances to shrink the search space further. Applying these results, we demonstrate exponential runtime improvements in classical simulations of quantum Fourier transform circuits and measurement-based quantum computations on the Union Jack lattice, as well as new insights into the nonstabilizer properties of multicontrolled phase gates and unitaries generating hypergraph states. Our findings establish symmetry exploitation as a powerful route to scale classical simulation techniques and deepen the resource-theoretic understanding of quantum advantage.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Apnea-Hypopnea Index: Physiological and Demographic Predictors of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is a common but inconsistently predicted symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). OSA is typically diagnosed with polysomnography (PSG), and the current standard for severity assessment is the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI). AHI has many limitations, including its inability to explain physiological mechanisms or reflect variability in patient symptoms, such as EDS. This retrospective study aims to find physiological and demographic parameters that better predict EDS in patients with OSA and to evaluate whether these parameters outperform AHI using PSG data from the Mount Sinai Integrative Sleep Center. Clinical variables used to predict EDS included arousal index (AI), average oxygen desaturation during sleep, average heart rate during sleep, and AHI, along with demographic variables including age, sex, and BMI. Hypothesis tests, logistic regression models, and decision tree classifier models were performed on the data to discriminate sleepy from nonsleepy patients as determined by an Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) score [≥] 10. AI and oxygen desaturation were found to be the most predictive physiological variables, and sex and BMI were found to be the most predictive demographic variables. The final decision tree model with these four variables outperformed the AHI in predicting EDS. These findings suggest that daytime sleepiness in OSA can be better explained by measures of apnea burden, oxygenation impairment, and patient demographics than by AHI alone, although these remain only modestly predictive. Future studies should focus on investigating more comprehensive physiological markers, multi-night sleep data, and more objective assessments of sleepiness.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evaluating Universal Machine Learning Force Fields Against Experimental Measurements

arXiv:2508.05762v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Universal machine learning force fields (UMLFFs) promise to revolutionize materials science by enabling rapid atomistic simulations across the periodic table. However, their evaluation has been limited to computational benchmarks that may not reflect real-world performance. We introduce UniFFBench, a comprehensive evaluation framework featuring the MinX dataset – a diverse collection of 1,500+ mineral systems spanning 85 elements, extreme thermodynamic conditions (0–5000 K, 0–1000 GPa), and structural complexity, including partial occupancy and disorder. This diversity, combined with experimental reference values for validation, enables assessment of UMLFF generalization across chemical space and conditions substantially beyond typical training scenarios. Our systematic evaluation of six state-of-the-art UMLFFs reveals a substantial ``reality gap'': models achieving impressive performance on computational benchmarks often fail when confronted with experimental complexity. Even the best-performing models exhibit higher density prediction error than the threshold required for practical applications. We observe disconnects between simulation stability and mechanical property accuracy, with prediction errors correlating with training data representation rather than the modeling method.

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

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Decoupling local classicality from classical explainability: A noncontextual model for bilocal classical theory and a locally-classical but contextual theory

arXiv:2511.19266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct an ontological model for the theory known as bilocal classical theory doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216. To our knowledge, this is only the second time that an ontological model has been constructed for an entire theory, rather than just for some particular scenarios within a theory. This result refutes a conjecture from doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.102.052216 which suggested that there might be no local-realist ontological model for bilocal classical theory. Moreover, it is the first time that an ontological model has been constructed for a theory that fails to be locally tomographic, showing that the assumption of local tomography underpinning the structure theorem in doi.org/10.22331/q-2024-03-14-1283 is a genuine limitation of the theorem. This demonstrates that in general there is no tension between failures of local tomography and classical explainability (i.e., generalised noncontextuality). In fact, bilocal classical theory is in many ways more simply understood via the underlying ontological model than it is within its original formulation (much as how odd-dimensional stabiliser subtheories can be more simply understood via Spekkens' toy theory). Furthermore, this result naturally leads to the question, does every locally-classical theory admit of an ontological model? By constructing a concrete counterexample, we show that this is not the case. Our findings demonstrate that there is no straightforward relationship between theories being locally-classical, and them being classically-explainable. This shows that the fundamental status of compositional properties (such as local tomography) is not a technical side-issue, but a central and unavoidable question for a coherent understanding even of classicality itself.

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

UniDDT: Unifying Multimodal Understanding and Generation with Decoupled Diffusion Transformer

Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have emerged as a critical direction for general-purpose multimodal intelligence, integrating understanding and generation into a single framework. However, existing UMMs face prominent challenges: (1) the inherent learning conflicts between visual understanding and generation tasks, leading to suboptimal modeling in both tasks; (2) different understanding and generation visual spaces impeding scalability; (3) over-reliance on task-specific data that neglects the duality of text-image understanding and generation. To address these challenges, we propose UniDDT, which leverages a Noisy ViT encoder along with an LLM to unify semantic encoding for visual generation and understanding tasks, while employing a separate diffusion decoder to decouple diffusion decoding from text decoding. With this Noisy ViT encoder, UniDDT is able to leverage the latent space as a unified visual representation, enabling seamless compatibility between understanding and generation tasks. Thus, the scalability within the generation tasks and the semantic expressiveness within understanding tasks can be balanced. Also, we construct dual data structures from the same image-text pairs, fostering interdependence between the generation and understanding data to exploit their inherent duality. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniDDT achieves effective unification of multimodal understanding and generation with enhanced semantic consistency and scalability. For visual generation tasks, our UniDDT achieves 0.87 GenEval score and 86.9 DPG overall score. For multimodal understanding tasks, our UniDDT achieves 1699.5 score on MME benchmark and 76.5 overall score on SEEDbench.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

FreeBridge: Variational Schrödinger Bridges for Cellular Transition Dynamics

arXiv:2606.11286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-content imaging assays quantify cellular responses to chemical and genetic perturbations, yet continuous trajectories of individual cells are unobservable because cells are chemically fixed at acquisition. Perturbation modeling therefore reduces to inferring stochastic transport between control and treated populations observed only as separate marginals. While recent generative models achieve strong end-point alignment, boundary consistency does not determine intermediate evolution: multiple stochastic processes may connect identical marginals while traversing regions unsupported by observed single-cell morphologies. We introduce FreeBridge, a Schrödinger Bridge formulation for single-cell transition modeling under endpoint-only supervision. FreeBridge defines atomic states as instance-segmented single-cell representations, establishing a fixed cellular manifold, and learns stochastic transport constrained within this geometry via empirical latent support regularization. Across BBBC021, RxRx1, and JUMP, FreeBridge maintains competitive or improved endpoint fidelity and mechanism-of-action retention under a unified evaluation protocol; on BBBC021, it further reduces intermediate support violations. These findings highlight the importance of geometric grounding for biologically interpretable perturbation dynamics. Project page: https://y-research-sbu.github.io/FreeBridge/.

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

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

Multimodal models can name the action units (AUs) behind a facial emotion, but their AU->emotion rationales are typically plausible rather than faithful: nothing forces the AUs a model invokes to be the AUs that actually drive its prediction. We cast AU->emotion reasoning as a counterfactual-consistency problem between the rationale, the label, and a structural AU->emotion causal graph G, and propose FACR, which grounds the reasoner in an independently induced, polarity-aware G and trains a counterfactual-faithfulness objective: a do-intervention on an AU that G marks causal for a class must move the prediction, while one it marks irrelevant must leave it unchanged. Faithfulness is thereby both trainable and measurable through a matching interventional metric, which we evaluate against a known causal structure, the PSPI pain-AU composition, as no existing affective-reasoning benchmark allows. We are explicit that this metric tests fidelity to the supplied structure rather than its rediscovery: it asks whether the trained reasoner invokes the AUs the structure marks causal, on held-out subjects and a second dataset. Under subject-independent evaluation on UNBC-PAIN, the objective raises the agreement between the invoked AUs and the PSPI composition from a no-objective baseline of 0.08 to 0.57, at a small detection cost; an unfaithfulness control attributes the gain to the objective. On a cross-dataset emotion transfer, the objective likewise raises fidelity to G on a seven-class task (0.50 to 0.84). Finally, we attach a language verbalizer and extend the audit to the generated text: biasing each action unit's emission by its latent activation makes the rationale faithful by construction, so that ablating an AU removes it from the explanation, a property that transfers to a second language-model backbone, whereas a freely generated rationale is unfaithful.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

WeaveLA: Event Driven Cross-Subtask Latent Memory Weaving for Repetitive Robot Manipulation

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have achieved remarkable single-step manipulation, yet they remain brittle precisely where each stage depends on what was just completed. The core issue is structural: short-window VLAs lack an explicit channel for rouxting information across sub-task boundaries, and existing memory-augmented variants either write at every frame, retrieve from demonstration-time stages, or fire at sub-goal events without performing an explicit sub-task-to-sub-task hand-off into the action expert. We identify the sub-goal completion event as the natural temporal unit for cross-subtask memory hand-off, and present WeaveLA (Weave Latent memory for Vision-Language-Action policies), a cross-subtask memory interface that, on top of a frozen VLA backbone, compresses each completed segment into latent tokens via query-driven attention pooling and routes them directly into the action-generation path of the next sub-task. This event-triggered, action-side design preserves the base policy's short-window interface while adding a lightweight cross-subtask channel. Through stratified evaluation on RoboMME with a $\pi_{0.5}$ backbone, WeaveLA's gains land exactly where the channel is needed: on the hardest repetition slice (SwingXtimes, $N{=}3$), success rises from $0\%$ to $47.8\%$, while single-execution episodes remain unchanged. Per-episode paired analysis confirms the gains are confined to tasks whose causal structure requires cross-subtask information.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning for Single-shot Test-time Ultrasound Image Denoising

The inherent electronic and speckle noise complicates clinical interpretation of ultrasound images. Conventional denoising methods rely on explicit noise assumptions whose validity diminishes under composite noise conditions. Learning-based methods are usually pretrained in a limited image domain using a labeled dataset, which implies inevitable domain shift in complex in vivo environments. This study proposes a Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning (PSCL) framework for test-time ultrasound image denoising without pretraining. Given multiple noisy samples from only one-shot imaging, PSCL disentangles anatomical similarity and noise randomness into separate pyramid latent spaces. The clean image is then decoded from the anatomy space while discarding the noise space. We first apply PSCL to synthetic aperture ultrasound (SAU), where an Aperture-to-Aperture loop serves as a self-supervised proxy task to ensure denoising fidelity. Simulation experiments, including noise levels from 0 to 30 dB and inclusion geometries from simple to complex, demonstrated improvements of 69.3% in SNR and 34.4% in CNR. The in vivo results showed 84.8% SNR and 25.7% CNR gains using only two aperture data of the heart in six echocardiographic views, liver, and kidney. PSCL delivers clear images across diverse imaging targets and configurations, paving the way for more reliable anatomical visualization without domain shift and pretraining costs.

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

AI Contagion in Social Networks

arXiv:2606.15206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study how artificial intelligence (AI) interacts with social communication networks to shape the stability of collective knowledge. Agents exchange information through a network while receiving AI-generated content, and AI systems retrain on the aggregate social information they influence. This interaction generates two feedback forces: an AI contagion channel, through which distortions diffuse across the network, and an AI social distortion multiplier, through which retraining amplifies past errors. Despite the high dimensionality of the environment, we show that the long-run behavior of the system admits a two-dimensional representation whose spectral radius determines whether AI-mediated information systems are dynamically stable or unstable. We characterize a sharp regulatory frontier identifying the minimum filtering required for stability and show how network topology shapes systemic informational risk.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organising the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy. To address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. Successive ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases were transformed into a structured ontology and deployed as a unified representation through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). The framework also provides ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries for integration into downstream systems. This enables, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical virological taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support FAIR-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.

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

Dimension-Free Convergence of Discrete Diffusion Models: Adjoint Equations Induce the Right Space

arXiv:2605.17232v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Discrete diffusion has become a leading framework for generative modeling in various applications including language, vision, and biology. Existing convergence theory, however, exhibits fundamental limitations. KL-based analyses diverge under singular priors such as the masked distribution, while bounds in total variation (TV) depend on the state space size $S$ and become vacuous for modern language tasks, where vocabularies contain hundreds of thousands of tokens. We develop a unified adjoint-equation-based framework that establishes dimension-free convergence guarantees in any integral probability metric (IPM). To the best of our knowledge, our bounds are the first to be entirely free of $S$ and applicable to both masked and uniform priors. Importantly, our theory relies only on a single standard rate-matrix regularity assumption and applies to general priors. Five novel techniques drive our improvements: working in the space of observables via adjoint equations rather than directly with probability measures, a regularity analysis that yields bounds on any IPM, a coupling argument that removes $S$-dependence under uniform transitions, and score-marginal cancellation and exit-routing techniques that remove $S$-dependence under masked transitions. Our framework thus sharply departs from prior analyses and avoids the shortcomings of pathspace-KL and existing TV-based approaches. Beyond convergence bounds, our framework provides a versatile toolkit for further theoretical study of discrete diffusion models, including principled choices of loss functions and dimension-free step complexity.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sphere Packings in Higher Dimension (after Boaz Klartag)

arXiv:2606.13313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $\delta_n^L$ be the maximal density of a lattice sphere packing in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. We explain how Boaz Klartag proved the inequality $\delta_n^L \geq c n^2 2^{-n}$ where $c>0$ is a universal constant. In higher dimension, even for non-lattice sphere packings, this new lower bound is a substantial improvement. Klartag's proof uses the probabilistic method in two different ways. The first, very standard, relies on the statistical properties of a uniformly chosen random lattice. The second, completely new, studies the stochastic evolution of an ellipsoid constrained to contain non nonzero lattice points in the interior.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Emergent mirror symmetry in the optimization of the central-spin quantum battery

arXiv:2606.11557v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum batteries provide a useful setting for exploring nonequilibrium many-body effects in energy storage. Here we investigate the optimization of a quantum battery based on the central-spin model. We identify two complementary structural indicators associated with the effective charging dynamics: one yields an upper bound on the average charging power, while the other characterizes the buildup of stored energy. We show that these two indicators are jointly optimized at a distinguished initial charger excitation number, which selects a particular Dicke sector of the model. At this common optimal point, the effective charging Hamiltonian becomes exactly mirror symmetric, suggesting mirror symmetry as a useful structural indicator for optimizing quantum batteries. We further show that the corresponding optimal dynamics can be closely approximated by product initial states, in particular by spin coherent states whose excitation-number distribution is centered at the symmetry-selected point. Our results establish a direct connection between charging performance, optimal-state structure, and emergent symmetry in the central-spin quantum battery, and suggest symmetry as a useful organizing principle for efficient charging in interacting many-body quantum systems.