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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DataMagic: Transforming Tabular Data into Data Insight Video

arXiv:2606.20388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data videos integrate dynamic charts, voice narration, and synchronized animations to communicate data insights as temporal narratives, making them an effective medium for improving data consumption efficiency in the data management lifecycle. However, producing high-quality data videos requires expertise spanning data analysis, narrative design, and video production. Existing approaches fall short: static visualization tools (e.g., BI dashboards) lack narrative logic and animation; authoring tools require users to pre-prepare visualizations rather than working from raw data; pixel-level video generation models cannot guarantee data fidelity or provenance. We demonstrate DataMagic, an end-to-end interactive system that transforms raw tabular data and natural language queries into narrative data-insight videos. To ensure data fidelity, DataMagic introduces the declarative specification DVSpec, which binds visual and animation elements to underlying data fields through data-driven semantic references. To address the combinatorial explosion of the design space, DataMagic adopts a Generate-then-Orchestrate multi-agent architecture that generates candidate scenes in parallel and then optimizes narrative coherence through global orchestration. Leveraging DVSpec's decoupling of logic and rendering, the system further supports three interaction modes and structured provenance-based data Q&A, transforming one-way videos into explorable interactive data interfaces. Evaluation on 109 real-world samples validates the effectiveness of the DataMagic. Homepage: https://datamagic-home.github.io/

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

REPRODUCIBILITY OF 7T MRI MEASUREMENTS OF THE SUSCEPTIBILITY AND VOLUME OF HIPPOCAMPAL SUBFIELDS

PURPOSE: The UK7T travelling head dataset was used to characterise the reproducibility of 7T measurements of the susceptibility of the hippocampal subfields, focusing on the Cornu Ammonis (CA1, CA2 and CA3), dentate gyrus (DG), subiculum (SUB), tail of the hippocampus (TAIL) and entorhinal cortex (ERC). METHODS: Susceptibility maps were created from whole-brain 3D single-echo GRE data (TE=20 ms; 0.7 mm isotropic resolution) using Multi-Scale Dipole Inversion. Automatic Segmentation of Hippocampal Subfields (ASHS) was applied to high resolution T1- and T2-weighted images for segmentation. The mean magnetic susceptibility and volume of hippocampal subfields was evaluated in 50 data sets, comprising 5 repeat acquisitions on 10 healthy participants (age 32 + or -6 years; 3 female). RESULTS: Averaging over subjects, susceptibility values spanned an 18ppb range over the hippocampus (ranging from -13.3ppb in DG to 4.7ppb in ERC). Susceptibility values in the larger hippocampal subfields showed a consistent pattern of variation across subjects, being generally more positive in ERC and SUB than in CA1 and more positive in CA1 than in DG and TAIL. The standard deviation of subfield susceptibilities over subjects ranged from 8.2ppb in the TAIL to 1.7ppb in CA1, and the average standard deviation across repeated measurements, which ranges from 1.7 to 4 ppb, was less than half of the inter-participant standard deviation in all subfields. Susceptibility values in the smaller subfields (CA2 and CA3) were more variable, but ICC(2,k) values for all subfields were >0.82. CONCLUSION: The reported data characterises the variation and reproducibility of hippocampal subfield susceptibility measurements at 7T.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Transformer Geometry Observatory TGO-I: Spectral Geometry Observatory

Despite the widespread adoption of Vision Transformers (ViTs) and their success across numerous computer vision applications, the fundamental understanding of their dimensional and representational geometry remains relatively underexplored. To address this gap, we introduce Transformer Geometry Observatory (TGO), a systematic framework of experiments and analysis pipelines designed to investigate the representational geometry and dynamics of Vision Transformers. TGO-I, the first installment of the framework, focuses on the spectral geometry of ViT representations. Using a ViT-Small/16 model trained on ImageNet-100, we analyze Effective Rank, Stable Rank, Participation Ratio, Spectral Entropy, Spectral Flatness, Spectral Anisotropy, covariance structure, eigenspectra, and singular value spectra throughout training. Our results reveal a consistent increase in dimensional utilization, accompanied by decreasing anisotropy, increasing spectral entropy, increasing participation ratio, and progressively flatter eigenspectra. Contrary to the common intuition that training should concentrate information into a small number of dominant directions, we observe a progressive redistribution of variance across representational dimensions. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the final CLS token representation, which exhibits the highest effective dimensionality and lowest anisotropy within the network.

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

SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translation

Sign Language Translation (SLT) is typically evaluated with surface-form metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE, which reward lexical overlap but do not directly measure whether a translation preserves the meaning of the source sign sequence. This is in contrast with the final objective of integrating SLT in assistive technology. In this work, we shift the focus from Sign Language Translation (SLT) to Sign Language Understanding (SLU), with particular emphasis on semantic understanding. Specifically, we evaluate systems based on their ability to correctly recover, from the input video, key semantic aspects of the original sentence, such as actions taking place and facts about people and objects. To enable this evaluation systematically, we propose SLU-2K, a dataset of 2,350 closed-ended video question-answer pairs based on the popular PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily datasets. To obtain SLU-2K, we propose and extensively evaluate an automated data generation pipeline which produces questions across 7 categories, namely actions, locations, numbers, objects, people, time, and weather conditions. We show the potential of SLU-2K by evaluating popular Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and two representative state-of-the-art systems, MMSTL and SpaMo. Our results show that MLLMs reach near-random performance, highlighting the need for a more systematic integration of SLU in current AI systems. Furthermore, state-of-the-art translation systems carefully fine-tuned on in-domain data still exhibit a substantial semantic gap, with results ranging from 56.7% to 75.2%. These findings suggest that current SLT evaluation protocols overestimate true understanding and that future progress should be measured not only by fluency and n-gram overlap, but also by semantic correctness. Code, prompts, and benchmark files are available at https://github.com/ZenoTsT/SLU-2K

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Characterizing Brazilian Atlantic Forest Restoration Outcomes with Geospatial AlphaEarth Embeddings

Authors:

The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is a critical biodiversity hotspot, yet less than 12-15% of its original cover remains. Although monitoring forest restoration on a large scale is essential, traditional methods are limited by the impracticality of on-the-ground reporting on such a scale and by the saturation of remote-sensing indices such as NDVI. Furthermore, reforestation is a gradual process as opposed to the rapid spectral changes caused by deforestation. In this study, we examine 1,729 restoration sites in S\~ao Paulo, using satellite embeddings from the AlphaEarth Foundation's model to evaluate their effectiveness in characterising early restoration success. We introduce the concept of a 'Reference Trajectory Embedding', defining a metric of restoration success based on cosine similarity to reference sites of mature secondary forest. We observe distinct clusters in embedding space according to different land use and land cover (LULC) types, and we can identify sites with clear change vectors. However, the signal can be noisy, and embeddings may require further fine-tuning to capture and predict site metadata beyond LULC.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

Daily briefing: Deep-sea whale graveyard is a treasure trove of fossils

Authors:

Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better. Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better.

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

Policy Regret for Embedding Model Routing: Contextual Bandits with Low-Rank Experts

arXiv:2606.14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems increasingly rely on dynamically routing diverse queries to multiple embedding models. Despite its practical significance, this problem remains poorly understood under realistic conditions like adversarial queries, bandit feedback, and limited observability of models. We formalize embedding model routing as an adversarial contextual linear bandit with low-rank experts, where contexts are queries, actions are items, and experts are the embedding models working on low-rank latent representation spaces. We first establish that standard regret notions suffer from structural misspecification or statistical intractability, and we identify a log-quadratic policy class that is expressive enough to capture query-dependent model routing, yet structured enough to allow efficient online learning. Second, we propose a policy gradient algorithm called Hypentropy Policy Gradient (HPG). It provably adapts to the unknown low-rank structure under incomplete information and attains $\tilde{\mathcal O}(s\sqrt{M T})$ linearized policy regret – where $s, M$, and $T$ are the intrinsic rank of the experts, the number of models, and the number of rounds – thus avoiding a curse of dimensionality. Finally, we also provide an computationally efficient and parameter-free implementation of HPG.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Neural Tree Reconstruction for the Open Forest Observatory

The Open Forest Observatory (OFO) is a collaboration across universities and other partners to make low-cost forest mapping accessible to ecologists, land managers, and the general public. The OFO is building both a database of geospatial forest data as well as open-source methods and tools for forest mapping by uncrewed aerial vehicle. Such data are useful for a variety of climate applications including prioritizing reforestation efforts, informing wildfire hazard reduction, and monitoring carbon sequestration. In the current iteration of the OFO's forest map database, 3D tree maps are created using classical structure-from-motion techniques. This approach is prone to artifacts, lacks detail, and has particular difficulty on the forest floor where the input data (overhead imagery) has limited visibility. These reconstruction errors can potentially propagate to the downstream scientific tasks (e.g. a wildfire simulation.) Advances in 3D reconstruction, including methods like Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), produce higher quality results that are more robust to sparse views and support data-driven priors. We explore ways to incorporate NeRFs into the OFO dataset, outline future work to support even more state-of-the-art 3D vision models, and describe the importance of high-quality 3D reconstructions for forestry applications.

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

CheckMIABench: Firm Foundations For Membership Inference Attacks on Language Models

arXiv:2606.17464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Membership inference attacks (MIAs) are a canonical way to assess a machine learning model's privacy properties. Although several attempts have been made to evaluate MIAs on language models, the extant literature has suffered numerous difficulties in constructing clean evaluations to test new techniques. In particular, subtle distribution shifts between member and non-member sets can undermine the statistical validity of MIAs; recent work has underscored this by showing that "blind" methods with no access to the underlying model can perform far better than published methods on the same benchmarks. This paper constructs a benchmark for principled evaluation of MIAs against LLMs, by leveraging the insight that training data before and after a fixed point during training are drawn from the same distribution. Therefore, all open-source models with intermediate checkpoints and public training data can be converted into MIA testbeds. We apply our framework to a half-dozen published attacks on the Pythia and OLMo family of models, from 70M to 7B parameters. To facilitate further privacy research, we open-source a modular library for designing and implementing attacks in this setting: https://github.com/safr-ai-lab/pandora_llm.

10.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk

Authors:

Incidence of early-onset cancer is rising globally in recent generations, which underscores the need to elucidate the influence of emerging generational risk factors. Systemic and organ-specific aging reflects the cumulative impact of exposures and may provide an integrative and complementary approach to understand early-onset cancer risk. Here among 154,169 young adults from the United Kingdom Biobank, systemic aging measured by PhenoAge increased across birth cohorts, with 23% s.d. increase for those born 1965–1974 versus 1950–1954, and was associated with early-onset solid cancer risk (hazard ratio (HR)per s.d. 1.08; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.03–1.13), driven by lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers, independent of genetic risks of aging and cancer. Patterns were consistent using alternative systemic aging measures, including the Klemera–Doubal method-defined age gap and metabolomic-based age gap. These findings were validated partially among 10,262 participants in the United States All of Us Research Program. Proteomics-based organ-specific aging analyses linked immune aging with early-onset lung cancer (HRper s.d. 1.89; CI, 1.20–2.97) and adipose tissue aging to early-onset colorectal cancer (HR 1.60; CI, 1.11–2.32). Greater age gap, reflecting more advanced biological aging relative to chronological age, may serve as a driver associated with risk of early-onset solid cancers, highlighting the importance of uncovering underlying mechanisms to guide effective prevention strategies. Analyses of population cohorts found that young adults exhibited earlier systemic and organ-specific aging, which was associated with increased risk of early-onset cancer compared with older adults born decades earlier.

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

Towards Scalable Customization and Deployment of Multi-Agent Systems for Enterprise Applications

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems demonstrate strong performance on complex reasoning and task execution, enabling broad enterprise applications. However, production deployment remains challenging due to domain-specific customization requirements and high latency and inference costs in agentic workflows. We propose a unified framework for customization and efficient deployment of multi-agent systems in real-world settings. The first stage, Agentic Model Customization, combines continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and preference optimization to adapt a compact model to specialized domains while retaining strong agentic capabilities. The second stage, Inference Optimization, integrates speculative decoding and FP8 quantization with targeted calibration to enable cost-efficient serving with minimal quality loss. Across enterprise workloads, our framework enables rapid domain adaptation and achieves a 4.48x speedup in throughput while maintaining performance and improving robustness on long-tail scenarios.

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

Towards Personalized Federated Learning for Dysarthric Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13253v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech recognition is challenging for dysarthric speakers. While federated learning (FL)-based ASR can be an effective tool for protecting privacy, it suffers from heterogeneity issues caused by speaker variability. Forcing all speakers to share the same model components can be suboptimal under such heterogeneity, making personalization a promising direction; however, related research on dysarthric speech remains limited. To this end, this paper explores two aggregation strategies to achieve personalization, including the parameter-based averaging strategy and the embedding-based averaging strategy. Experiments on UASpeech and TORGO show that the proposed methods outperform the baseline regularized FedAvg by statistically significant WER reductions of up to 0.99% absolute (3.15% relative) on UASpeech and 0.56% absolute (4.73% relative) on TORGO, respectively.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Does Streaming Tool Use Help? Characterizing Tool-Intent Stabilization in Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Streaming RAG) reduces user-perceived latency by issuing tool queries in parallel with ongoing user input, before the utterance is complete. Reported gains are aggregate, yet the mechanism's benefit is fundamentally query-intrinsic: speculation can only help when the correct tool query becomes determinable before the user stops speaking or typing. We isolate and measure this property – tool-intent stabilization, the point in the input stream at which a speculative query's retrieval converges to the answer-bearing result. On the CRAG benchmark (1371 validation questions) we (i) measure the distribution of stabilization, (ii) derive a model-agnostic bound H on the portion of tool latency that can be hidden behind the user's remaining input, as a function of tool latency L and input cadence {\delta}, (iii) validate against a working streaming pipeline that realized savings meet or exceed this bound, and (iv) identify which query properties predict early versus late stabilization. The study requires no model training and runs on commodity CPU hardware. We find that at a realistic operating point (L=600ms, {\delta}=3w/s, {\theta}=0.8), 73.9% of queries across the full benchmark admit substantial latency hiding – a blended figure that mixes sufficiency stabilization on the 21.3% of questions where gold evidence is verbatim-present and BM25-retrievable (95.2% streamable on this favorable slice) with a grounding-free top-1-settling fallback on the remainder. On the favorable slice, {\phi}_suf is bracketed to [0.26, 0.281] by exact and relaxed grounding – both early. Question type produces a significant but coarse early/late split (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.017, epsilon^2=0.04), directly informing when a learned speculative trigger is worth its cost.

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

Two-Phase Bilevel Search for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles

arXiv:2606.18730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP) seeks a minimum cost trajectory for an agent that departs from a static depot, visits a set of moving targets, each within one of their assigned time windows, and returns to the depot. In this article, we study the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles (MT-TSP-MO), a generalization of the MT-TSP where the agent trajectory must avoid moving obstacles. We present a Mixed-Integer Conic Programming (MICP) formulation that can be solved using off-the-shelf solvers, as well as a fast and scalable Two-Phase Bilevel Search (TPBS) algorithm that computes high-quality feasible solutions for the problem. We evaluate our approaches against an existing baseline algorithm on a broad range of problem instances with up to 40 targets and 40 obstacles. The results demonstrate that both the proposed methods significantly outperform the baseline with respect to success rates, solution costs, and computation time.

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

Reasoning as Intersection: Consensus-Frame Alignment for Visual Focus in Video-MLLMs

Reinforcement learning has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, but applying outcome-only rewards to video multimodal large language models (Video-MLLMs) provides limited guidance on which visual evidence should support the answer. Inspired by multisensory integration, where consistent cues can enhance the salience and reliability of perceptual estimates, we introduce Consensus Frame GRPO (CF-GRPO), a temporal-annotation-free process-level reward framework for evidence-aware video reasoning. CF-GRPO constructs a consensus frame prior from intrinsic video cues, including temporal coverage, scene-transition cues, and query-conditioned visual relevance. It then computes a model-side frame-use score from visual and response representations and optimizes their agreement through the Consensus Frame Reward (CFR). With salience-aware sparse aggregation and distribution sharpening, CFR provides a high-contrast reward signal without requiring human temporal annotations. Experiments show that VideoCFR achieves competitive performance across complex video reasoning benchmarks and improves several metrics over representative Video-MLLM and RL baselines, while the consensus prior provides an interpretable view of the evidence frames emphasized during training. The implementation is available at https://github.com/1Pansy/VideoCFR.

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

Scaling Self-Play for End-to-End Driving

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on offline human-demonstration datasets that provide limited state coverage and often no closed-loop feedback, making them prone to compounding errors when deployed in closed-loop and brittle to long-tail agent interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose an alternative strategy for training end-to-end driving models: large-scale self-play directly from pixels in simulation. While prior self-play approaches have shown promising transfer to real-world driving, they typically assume vectorized Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) observations that are incompatible with end-to-end policies operating directly on sensor observations. To this end, we introduce Gigapixel, a high-throughput batched driving simulator with perspective rendering, enabling scalable self-play directly from pixel observations. Rather than targeting compute-costly photorealistic sensor simulation, Gigapixel renders a simplified bounding-box world that preserves essential scene structure while achieving throughput at 50k agent steps per second. Since direct pixel-space self-play RL is prohibitively sample-inefficient at end-to-end model scale, we propose self-play DAgger training: we train pixel-based policies in self-play via on-policy distillation from a privileged RL teacher. To bridge the sim-to-real gap, we subsequently transfer the self-play trained policies to real-world sensor data through lightweight perception adaptation. Policies trained in Gigapixel and adapted to real-world sensor data achieve competitive performance on the HUGSIM and NAVSIM-v2 benchmarks without human trajectory supervision. Moreover, scaling self-play training yields proportional gains in policy performance, establishing self-play as a practical and scalable strategy for training end-to-end models.

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

The Illusion of Improvement: Reject Inference Strategies in Credit Scoring

arXiv:2606.18479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reject inference methods are widely used to mitigate survival bias in credit scoring, yet their effectiveness remains poorly understood. We systematically evaluate several such methods and uncover a structural failure mode: in a natural retraining cycle, models whose accuracy improves while recall collapses create an illusion of improvement that leads practitioners to believe the system is getting better when, in fact, its rejection quality – the ability to correctly screen out defaulters – is deteriorating. We then propose a controlled exploration strategy that breaks the feedback loop without statistical assumptions: the lender deliberately approves a fraction of rejected applicants and observes their true outcomes. We show that accuracy and rejection quality give opposite recommendations on whether to explore: accuracy favors no exploration, while rejection quality improves with it, confirming that standard evaluation metrics are misleading under selection bias. Even minimal exploration rates (2–5\%) prove sufficient in our experiments to diagnose the severity of the feedback loop at near-zero cost. Our findings are consistent across two machine learning methods and three real-world datasets, and suggest that standard evaluation protocols are inadequate for assessing models trained under survival bias.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Real-Time Execution with Autoregressive Policies

arXiv:2606.13355v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time execution, enabled by asynchronous inference that ensures both smooth action trajectories and fast reactivity, is critical for realistic deployments of large-scale Vision-Language-Action models. However, recent work on real-time execution primarily focuses on variants of diffusion policies, even though it is more critical for autoregressive policies given their slower rollout speed in synchronous inference. In contrast, we demonstrate that autoregressive policies can achieve real-time execution by adjusting the tokenization horizon and applying constrained decoding, thereby guaranteeing strict latency bounds that enable multi-trajectory decoding to maximize performance. Across simulated and real-world environments, we find that the autoregressive policy consistently outperforms its equivalent-level flow-matching policy counterpart while achieving significantly improved task completion speeds from synchronous inference. Coupled with the inherent advantages of autoregressive policies, such as faster convergence and better generalizability in instruction-following, these results confirm that autoregressive policies can remain a competitive policy type supporting real-time execution.

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

Demultiplexing Generalized Information via Quantum Transmission Lines

arXiv:2606.17894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Demultiplexers are the fundamental primitives of network architecture, enabling perfect routing of an input classical signal to a designated one, among multiple output ports. Quantum transmission lines, having access to the quantum systems directly, are able to transmit both the classical and quantum information encoded in quantum systems. A natural question therefore emerges that whether the scrambled classical and quantum information in a quantum system can be perfectly demultiplexed in the designated classical and quantum output ports? Here we answer this question by introducing a quantum to quantum-classical device, namely the quantum demultiplexer (Q-DEMUX). We characterize the class of Q-DEMUXs enabling perfect routing of both the classical and the quantum information along with their simple circuit realizations. Our results highlight an explicit connection between the strength of a Q-DEMUX with the incompatibility of quantum instruments. Finally, we extend the notion in a stronger variant where the sender is oblivious regarding the nature of the data to be transmitted through the Q-DEMUX.

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

LLM-as-Code Agentic Programming for Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.15874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Every major LLM agent framework gives the LLM the role of orchestrator; the model decides what to do next, when to call tools, and when to stop. We argue that token explosion, control-flow hallucination, and unreliable completion are not implementation bugs but architectural consequences of assigning the deterministic work of looping, branching, and sequencing to a probabilistic system. A better prompt or a stronger model cannot guarantee the reliability of the LLM agent. We therefore propose Agentic Programming, in which the program governs all control flow, and the LLM is itself part of it, an adaptive component we call LLM-as-Code and invoke only where a task calls for reasoning or generation. Within each call the model keeps full flexibility, but it cannot alter the program's execution path. With control in the program, the LLM's context is built from the execution history's call tree and forms a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Each call's context length is then determined by its call depth rather than by accumulation over steps. A case study of computer-use agents shows that the design is practical, not just a theoretical stance, substantially improving the stability of long visual operation sequences.

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

Kairos: A Native World Model Stack for Physical AI

World models are transitioning from passive visual generators to foundational, operational infrastructure for Physical AI: they must natively acquire world knowledge from heterogeneous experience, maintain persistent states over long horizons, and execute efficiently within real deployment constraints. We introduce Kairos, a native world model stack designed around these requirements. (1) Kairos learns the world by pioneering a Native Pre-training Paradigm governed by a Cross-Embodiment Data Curriculum, which organizes open-world videos, human behavioral data, and robot interactions into a progressive developmental pathway. (2) Kairos maintains the world by unified world understanding, generation, and prediction within a Native Unified Architecture equipped with Hybrid Linear Temporal Attention, where sliding-window attention captures local dynamics, dilated sliding windows capture mid-range dependencies, and gated linear attention maintains persistent global memory. We establish formal theoretical bounds demonstrating that this temporal factorization strictly limits error accumulation, mathematically guaranteeing state propagation across extended horizons. (3) Kairos runs the world by incorporating a Deployment-Aware System Co-Design to support low-latency rollout generation on server and consumer-grade hardware for real-world observation-action-feedback loops. Experiments on embodied world-model, long-horizon, and action-policy benchmarks show that Kairos achieves top level performance while offering a strong efficiency-capability trade-off. Together, these results position Kairos as a cohesive operational foundation for future self-evolving physical intelligence.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Overcoming Labelled Data Scarcity for Defect Classification in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

arXiv:2506.01678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A vast whale necropolis has been found

In the Indian Ocean, a deep-sea area roughly 1,200 kilometres long and 7 kilometres deep was found to harbour an ecological landmark site of whale remains. In the Indian Ocean, a deep-sea area roughly 1,200 kilometres long and 7 kilometres deep was found to harbour an ecological landmark site of whale remains.