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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Fantastic Pretraining Optimizers and Where to Find Them II: Hyperball Optimization

Authors:
Kaiyue Wen↗Xingyu Dang↗Kaifeng Lyu↗Tengyu Ma↗Percy Liang↗

arXiv:2606.16899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Matrix based optimizers such as Muon can substantially speed up language model pretraining, but their gains over AdamW are observed to shrink as model size and data scale grow when using standard constant decoupled weight decay. We propose Hyperball, a simple optimizer wrapper that addresses this issue. Given a base optimizer such as Adam or Muon, Hyperball sets the Frobenius norms of weight matrices and their corresponding optimizer updates to fixed constants. On Qwen3 style models up to 1.2B parameters, Muon Hyperball achieves 20–30% token equivalent speedup over weight decay baselines. Hyperball also improves learning rate transfer across widths and depths compared to decoupled weight decay. This method is motivated by prior theory showing that training with weight decay leads to an equilibrium weight norm that only depends on the training hyperparameters. Through this mechanism, the weight decay then decides the angular learning rate, i.e. how fast the direction of the weight matrix changes.

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02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Better data, better trees: GenBank-GISAID deduplication and source-specific artifact masking in viral genomics

Authors:
de Moraes↗de Alencar↗A. L↗Brusselmans↗Candido↗D. d. S↗Faria↗N. R↗Dellicour↗Lemey↗Khouri↗

GenBank and GISAID are the primary repositories for viral genomic data, but integrating records across them remains a challenge. The same sequence could be made available in both databases without any cross-reference linking the two entries. Consequently, there is no systematic way to identify this redundancy, which compromises the compilation of representative, non-redundant large-scale datasets. In parallel, the growth of viral genomic data has increased the risk of systematic technical artifacts introduced during sequencing or assembly. These artifacts can inflate substitution rate estimates and degrade temporal signal, biasing evolutionary rate estimates. To address both challenges, here we present a formal, reproducible workflow integrating two newly developed complementary tools: G2G matcher for cross-repository harmonization and Lab-Specific Bias FILTer (LSBFILT) for masking of laboratory-specific artifacts. Using the Eastern/Central/South African (ECSA) chikungunya virus lineage as a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate that our integrated workflow restores temporal signal and provides a robust, curated dataset for downstream phylodynamic analyses. Critically, restricting masking of homoplastic sites to specific sequences reduces the substitution rate estimate from an inflated 8.517 x 10e-4; to 5.078 x 10e-4; substitutions/site/year and increases the coefficient of determination (R2) of the root-to-tip regression analysis from 0.353 to 0.677. By enabling systematic cross-repository harmonization and source-specific artifact masking, we provide the molecular epidemiological community with scalable tools to reconcile fragmented genomic data and reduce technical biases, fostering more accurate and reproducible phylogenetic analysis. G2G matcher is available at https://github.com/andrezaleite/G2G-Matcher, and LSBFILT at https://github.com/khourious/LSBFILT.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI

Authors:
Yongheng Zhang↗Ziang Liu↗Jiaxuan Zhu↗Shuai Wang↗Xiangqi Chen↗Haojing Huang↗Jiayi Kuang↗Siyu Chen↗Ao Shen↗Hao Wu↗Qiufeng Wang↗Qian-Wen Zhang↗…

arXiv:2606.14502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Towards Geostrategic Critical Minerals and Materials Resilience: Secure Supply-Chain and Criticality Analyses for Quantum Technologies in Arctic and Space Environments

Authors:
Min-Ha Lee↗Alan J. Hurd↗Jolante Wieke Van Wijk↗Mauritz Kop↗

arXiv:2605.02926v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This manuscript maps secure-supply and criticality risks for quantum technologies deployed in extreme environments, linking upstream critical minerals and materials (CMMs) to downstream system performance, continuity of security, and mission assurance. It adopts a reproducible "Critical Level I" screening method to identify materials whose supply concentration, essentiality, and limited mitigatability can create bottlenecks for quantum deployment. The analysis is structured around two use cases: (i) niobium as a key input for superconducting quantum computing and related manufacturing and toolchain dependencies; and (ii) space-qualified superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs), alongside adjacent single-photon detector platforms such as SPADs, where radiation, thermal cycling, vibration, and electromagnetic interference can degrade device metrics and, in communications settings, threaten continuity of security. The manuscript further situates these dependencies within U.S.-China strategic competition over critical materials, refining capacity, export controls, and overseas mineral acquisitions, while also connecting them to standards-first governance, post-quantum cryptography migration, and the emerging security logic of quantum networking. It argues that static national critical-minerals lists are insufficient for mission-relevant quantum technology and proposes a dedicated Quantum Criticality and Critical Minerals (QCCM) dashboard as a living decision-support tool for tracking concentration, substitutability, qualification bottlenecks, stockpiling gaps, and geopolitical stress signals across quantum platforms. The paper concludes with implications for substitution, diversification, stockpiling, shielding, qualification-by-design, and standards-aligned governance to support secure, sustained, and mission-relevant quantum deployment.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

MAStrike: Shapley-Guided Collusive Red-Teaming on Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:
Chejian Xu↗Zhaorun Chen↗Jingyang Zhang↗Freddy Lecue↗Avni Kothari↗Sarah Tan↗Wenbo Guo↗Bo Li↗

arXiv:2606.12918v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hierarchical multi-agent systems (MAS) are rapidly being deployed in high-stakes workflows across domains such as finance and software engineering. In these systems, safety and security are inherently distributed across role-specialized agents, significantly expanding the attack surface, particularly under coordinated adversarial behaviors such as privilege escalation and cross-agent collusion. Existing red-teaming approaches for MAS remain limited: they rely on heuristic selection of target agents and perturb isolated message streams, leaving critical questions unanswered as which agents are most responsible for system safety, and how compromised agents can coordinate to bypass defenses. We propose MAStrike, a closed-loop framework for collusive red-teaming in hierarchical MAS. We propose the first agent-level Shapley value analysis for MAS, quantifying each agent's marginal contribution to system robustness under task-specific distributions. GGuided by this attribution, MAStrike identifies vulnerable agent coalitions and generates coordinated, role-aware adversarial manipulations. These attacks are iteratively refined through structured causal diagnosis, attributing failure cases to uncompromised agents that block adversarial attempts. We further build a comprehensive MAS red-teaming benchmark and controllable environments spanning diverse hierarchical topologies and domains, including finance, software engineering, and CRM. Extensive experiments across MAS built on multiple frontier models show that MAStrike substantially outperforms heuristic baselines. Our analysis further uncovers non-trivial Shapley value distributions and higher-order interaction structures among agents, revealing critical vulnerabilities and coordination patterns that are overlooked by prior single-agent or template-based methods.

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

PT-WNO: Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operator for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Authors:
Nhut Le↗Maryam Rahnemoonfar↗

Point cloud semantic segmentation requires architectures that capture both fine-grained local geometry and broad global scene structure. Transformer-based networks have demonstrated strong performance by focusing on detailed local feature aggregation; however, global context is conveyed primarily through skip connections across encoder-decoder stages, which we argue is insufficient for full scene understanding. We hypothesize that augmenting skip connections with a learnable global feature extraction module allows the network to acquire scene-level knowledge before descending into local detail, leading to richer and more contextually grounded representations. To this end, we propose Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operato (PT-WNO), which integrates a shared Wavelet Neural Operator (WNO) branch alongside the skip connections of a point cloud transformer backbone. At each encoder-decoder transition, point features are projected onto a dense 3D volumetric grid where the WNO captures multi-scale global spectral context through learnable wavelet decomposition and reconstruction. These global features are fused back into the network via lightweight adapters, complementing rather than replacing the existing skip connections. Experiments on four large-scale 3D point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PT-WNO. On S3DIS (Area 5), PT-WNO achieves 71.59% mIoU, outperforming the Point Transformer v3 (PTv3) baseline by +1.03 points. On DALES it achieves 81.05% mIoU (+1.47 over the baseline). On ScanNet~v2, PT-WNO obtains 76.19% mIoU, remaining competitive with the baseline (76.36%).

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

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

Authors:
Yaoting Huang↗Yifu Yuan↗Linqi Han↗Chengwen Li↗Shuoheng Zhang↗Xianze Yao↗Hongyao Tang↗Yan Zheng↗Jianye Hao↗

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bi-qutrit entangled edge states of positive partial transposes with largest ranks

Authors:
Kyung Hoon Han↗Seung-Hyeok Kye↗

arXiv:2606.16265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whenever $E$ is an eight dimensional subspace of the bi-qutrit quantum system whose orthogonal complement is spanned by a vector of Schmidt rank three, we show that there exist PPT entangled edge states with the range space $E$ whose partial transposes are of rank six, which is the largest possible rank. In this way, we exhibit a huge family of bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of type $(8,6)$. They make faces of the convex set of all PPT states, and we find bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of other types on the boundaries of such faces.

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09.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study

Authors:
Jelisaveta Džigurski↗

by Jelisaveta Džigurski, Märt Möls, Kristi Läll, Hannah Currant, Mall Eltermaa, Estonian Biobank Research Team , Reedik Mägi, Lili Milani, Triin Laisk Background Hormonal contraceptives (HCs) are widely used and have well-documented population-level statistics. Previous studies with short follow-ups have focussed on individual HC use and side effects. However, the same aspects over longer periods, HC formulation switching, and the impact of genetic factors on HC side effects remain understudied due to the limited availability of suitable datasets. We investigated whether the Estonian Biobank (EstBB) is suitable for studying genetic risk for HC side effects. Methods and findings This is a longitudinal descriptive study combining prescribed HC purchase data collected from 2004 to 2022 with genetic and health data from 73,071 female EstBB HC users aged 15–55 at the time of purchase. HC usage was defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes G02B, G03A, and G03HB01. Methods included calculating age-stratified annual user prevalence, inferring usage periods from purchases, assessing formulation switching, identifying the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10)-based side effect-related diagnoses and thromboembolism risk factors, and assessing carrier status for Factor V Leiden (FVL, rs6025) and prothrombin G20210A (PTM, rs1799963) genetic variants as proof-of-concept. Over 19 years, 20 HC formulations with five administration routes (oral pills, transdermal patches, vaginal rings, subdermal implants, intrauterine devices) were used. In the EstBB, combined HCs were the most commonly used among users aged 15–29, while progestin-only HC use increased with age and over time, comparable to the Estonian population. Overall, 64.2% (n = 46,920) of users switched formulations at least once, with 17.7% (n = 12,929) being rapid switchers. Side effect-related diagnoses were observed in 23.1% (n = 2,982) of rapid switchers, with excessive/irregular menstrual bleeding being the most common. Genetic analysis revealed that 5.3% (n = 3,886) of users carried at least one variant previously associated with increased thrombosis risk (3.5% (n = 2,556) carried FVL only, 1.8% (n = 1,276) PTM only, and 0.07% (n = 54) both). Carriers of thrombosis-associated variants had a significantly higher percentage of thrombosis (6.5%) than non-carriers (4.2%; OR = 1.61, 95% CI [1.40, 1.84], p 

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

Modeling Sarcastic Speech: Semantic and Prosodic Cues in a Speech Synthesis Framework

Authors:
Zhu Li↗Yuqing Zhang↗Xiyuan Gao↗Shekhar Nayak↗Matt Coler↗

Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of sarcasm remains poorly understood. We propose a computational framework that models sarcasm as the integration of semantic interpretation and prosodic realization. Semantic cues are derived from an LLaMA 3 model fine-tuned to capture discourse-level markers of sarcastic intent, while prosodic cues are extracted through semantically aligned utterances drawn from a database of sarcastic speech, providing prosodic exemplars of sarcastic delivery. Using a speech synthesis testbed, perceptual evaluations show that semantic and prosodic cues enhance perceived sarcasm, with the combined system achieving the best downstream F1 while maintaining high subjective sarcasm ratings. These findings highlight the complementary roles of semantics and prosody in pragmatic interpretation and illustrate how modeling can shed light on the mechanisms underlying sarcastic communication.

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11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A first-in-class pulsatile FXR agonist for bile-acid-related liver diseases

Authors:
Yi Zang↗

Nuclear receptors are central regulators of metabolism1, yet therapeutic strategies that enforce continuous receptor activation frequently lead to reduced efficacy and unacceptable toxicity. Here we report a first-principles drug design strategy that aligns pharmacokinetics with physiological signalling cycles. We developed linafexor, a potent non-bile-acid agonist of the farnesoid X receptor (FXR)2; it is engineered for rapid systemic clearance, which enables pulsatile receptor activation that mirrors endogenous bile acid dynamics3–5. Linafexor has robust efficacy across multiple preclinical models of metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis6, liver fibrosis7, primary biliary cholangitis and primary sclerosing cholangitis8,9. Transcriptomic analyses reveal that, unlike long-acting FXR agonists10,11, linafexor preserves cyclic FXR signalling, avoids receptor downregulation and prevents broad transcriptional dysregulation. Direct manipulation of delivery patterns demonstrates that sustained FXR activation—independent of compound identity—induces severe toxicity, establishing activation duration as a determinant of therapeutic index. In phase 1 clinical studies (ClinicalTrials.gov; NCT05082779), linafexor administered once daily produces transient FXR pathway engagement, marked by (1) induction of FGF1912–14, a key endocrine mediator of bile acid feedback regulation; and (2) suppression of C415, an intermediate reflecting hepatic bile acid synthesis, with no treatment-related adverse events. Together, these findings identify pulsatile FXR activation as a mechanistically grounded and clinically translatable strategy, and establish linafexor as a first-in-class therapeutic for bile acid–related liver diseases. Linafexor is a rapidly cleared FXR agonist designed to mimic natural bile acid signalling, achieving transient receptor activation with strong efficacy and reduced toxicity in preclinical and early clinical studies.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MoonSplat: Monocular Online Gaussian Splatting with Sim(3) Global Optimization

Authors:
Guo Pu↗Yixuan Han↗Haofeng Li↗Yao Zhang↗Hui Zhou↗Zhouhui Lian↗

Online 3D reconstruction from monocular image sequences is a challenging and ongoing research topic. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), leveraging its high-quality real-time rendering capability, empowers online 3D reconstruction to represent dense scenes with enhanced expressiveness, and thus holds great promise for a wide range of applications such as robotics and AR/VR. However, existing online 3DGS methods still suffer from some key challenges: fragile camera pose estimation due to the lack of global optimization, and low optimization efficiency in large-scale or long-sequence scenarios. To address these issues, we propose a robust and efficient online voxelized 3DGS reconstruction framework integrated with global $Sim(3)$ optimization, which enables reliable camera tracking and efficient global loop closure for both camera poses and voxelized 3DGS. To accelerate the convergence of the voxelized 3DGS, we further introduce a color residual learning strategy, which not only boosts optimization speed but also enhances rendering quality. Extensive experiments on diverse indoor and outdoor datasets demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in both camera pose estimation accuracy and rendering quality, while retaining real-time efficiency. Additionally, we develop and deploy a real-world UAV-based active reconstruction system grounded on our proposed method, validating its robustness and generalizability for practical online 3D reconstruction tasks. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/TrickyGo/MoonSplat.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

Authors:
Jiale Deng↗Yanyan Shen↗Xiaogang Shi↗Chai Junjun↗

arXiv:2606.11616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope

Authors:
Jeremy Yang↗Kate Zyskowski↗Noah Yonack↗Jerry Ma↗

arXiv:2606.07489v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end. Using production data from Perplexity's Search and Computer products, we study this transition by examining how AI agents accelerate and reshape knowledge work. Three key empirical findings emerge. First, using sessions with near-identical initial query pairs as natural experiments for the same underlying task attempted with both products, Computer performs 26 minutes of autonomous work per user session, versus 33 seconds for Search. Computer automates task decomposition and execution that Search users might otherwise manually orchestrate and implement. As a result, Computer shifts follow-up query distribution toward higher-order work such as verification and extension. Autonomy also increases execution quality, with per-query dissatisfaction rates 55% lower on Computer than on Search. Second, due to its autonomy advantage, Computer reduces completion time from 269 to 36 minutes on matched tasks, lowering estimated time and cost by 87% and 94%, respectively, compared to humans equipped with Search alone. Third, Computer changes the scope of work that users attempt: Computer queries more often cross occupational boundaries, require higher-order cognition, draw on broader expertise, take the form of composite tasks that bundle interdependent subtasks into a single query, and unlock work activities that are essentially absent from Search usage among the same users. Together, the evidence indicates that AI agents accelerate workflows, enhance output quality, reduce costs, and expand the breadth and depth of automated work.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

LLM-as-an-Investigator: Evidence-First Reasoning for Robust Interactive Problem Diagnosis

Authors:
Fabrizio Marozzo↗Pietro Li\`o↗

arXiv:2606.13220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as interactive assistants for technical problem solving. However, when users provide incomplete descriptions or plausible but unverified explanations, LLMs may prematurely align with these assumptions and propose solutions before collecting sufficient evidence. We refer to this behavior as user-driven sycophancy: the tendency of an LLM to reinforce a user-provided hypothesis instead of testing alternative explanations. This paper introduces LLM-as-an-Investigator, an evidence-first agentic AI methodology for robust problem diagnosis. The approach is implemented through a Solution Investigator Agent, which estimates the ambiguity of an initial problem description, generates candidate hypotheses, asks targeted clarification questions, and updates hypothesis probabilities after each answer. Rather than producing an immediate response, the agent continues the investigation until the evidence makes one candidate explanation stronger than the alternatives. To evaluate the approach, we build a benchmark from solved technical forum threads in mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic domains. We use a three-agent evaluation pipeline in which a Problem-Solution Extractor Agent converts solved threads into structured cases, a Ground-Truth Evaluator Agent simulates the user while hiding the known solution, and the tested assistant attempts to recover the solution through dialogue. The experiments compare standard assistants, reasoning-oriented LLMs, and the proposed investigator-based model across LLM backbones. In addition to diagnostic accuracy, we analyze how standard assistants follow misleading user hypotheses in diagnostic cases. The results show that the proposed approach identifies the problem more accurately than direct prompting and reasoning-only baselines, while its evidence-first protocol helps reduce user-induced conversational bias.

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

Toward quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of optical nonlinearity in vacuum

Authors:
Ali Aras↗Adrien E. Kraych↗Xavier Sarazin↗Elsa Baynard↗Fran\c{c}ois Couchot↗Moana Pittman↗

arXiv:2602.10896v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum Electrodynamics predicts that the vacuum must behave as a nonlinear optical medium: the vacuum optical index should increase when it is stressed by intense electromagnetic fields. The DeLLight (Deflection of Light by Light) project aims to measure it by using intense and ultra-short laser pulses. The experiment uses a Sagnac interferometer to amplify the tiny deflection signal of a low-intensity probe pulse crossing the vacuum refractive-index gradient produced by an external high-intensity pump pulse. The measurement of the amplified signal by a CCD camera requires a high spatial resolution, which is limited by the ultimate quantum noise of the CCD. However, interferometric phase noise induced by the mechanical vibrations of the interferometer is also amplified and degrades spatial resolution. To overcome this, we propose a new method named High-Frequency Phase Noise Suppression (HFPNS), based on the addition of a delayed replica (5 ns) of the probe pulse. The delayed pulse, which is not affected by the pump but is subject to the same vibration noise, enables offline subtraction of correlated phase noise. In this work, we present an experimental proof-of-concept on a prototype interferometer operating with a limited amplification factor ($\mathcal{A}\simeq25$), about 10 times smaller than the required value of the final experiment. We have succeeded in reducing phase noise by a factor of 40, resulting in a residual noise level 2.3 times higher than the expected quantum noise. The residual noise is linked to delay-line instabilities and incident beam pointing fluctuations present during these tests. This result validates HFPNS as a robust method for future quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of vacuum optical nonlinearity, though additional stabilization and higher interferometric amplification are still needed.

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

Explainable deep learning improves human mental models of self-driving cars

Authors:
Eoin M. Kenny↗Akshay Dharmavaram↗Sang Uk Lee↗Tung Phan-Minh↗Shreyas Rajesh↗Yunqing Hu↗Laura Major↗Momchil S. Tomov↗Julie A. Shah↗

arXiv:2411.18714v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-driving cars increasingly rely on deep neural networks to achieve human-like driving. The opacity of such black-box planners makes it challenging to accurately anticipate when they will fail, with potentially catastrophic consequences. While research into interpreting these systems has surged, most of it is confined to simulations or toy setups due to the difficulty of real-world deployment, leaving the practical utility of such techniques unknown. Here, we introduce the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), a method for faithfully explaining the behavior of machine-learning-based planners that causally grounds their reasoning in human-interpretable concepts without sacrificing performance. We deploy CW-Net on a real self-driving car and show that the resulting explanations improve the human driver's mental model of the vehicle, allowing them to better predict its behavior, particularly in surprising situations. This demonstrates that explainable deep learning integrated into self-driving cars can be both understandable and useful in a realistic deployment setting. We anticipate our method could be applied to other safety-critical systems, such as autonomous drones and robotic surgeons, as well as to other architectures, such as end-to-end learning systems and vision-language-action models. Overall, our study establishes a deployment-validated pathway to interpretability for autonomous agents, which could help make them more transparent and safe.

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

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Lakshita Dodeja↗Ondrej Biza↗Shivam Vats↗Stephen Hart↗Stefanie Tellex↗Robin Walters↗Karl Schmeckpeper↗Thomas Weng↗

arXiv:2605.05172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/

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

SP$^3$: Spherical Priors for Plug-and-Play Restoration

Authors:
Sean Man↗Ron Raphaeli↗Matan Kleiner↗Or Ronai↗

In this paper, we introduce SP$^3$, a novel Plug-and-Play algorithm that accelerates maximum a posteriori image restoration by replacing denoisers with Spherical Encoders (SE) as generative priors. SP$^3$ approximates the intractable proximal prior step by utilizing the SE tightly structured latent space as a robust projection onto the natural image manifold. Alternating this projection with a closed-form data-consistency step, via Half-Quadratic Splitting, achieves stable convergence without requiring gradient computation during inference. This unique formulation unlocks "anytime" restoration capabilities, producing sharp, plausible images from the first iteration. Evaluations across a variety of image restoration tasks demonstrate that SP$^3$ achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot diffusion and flow methods while being $3$-$630\times$ faster.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

DNA Compression with Genomic Language Models: Tokenization, Benchmarking, and an Information-Content Map

Authors:
Macala↗Simecek↗

Lossless compression and probabilistic sequence modeling are two faces of the same coin: a model that assigns high probability to a sequence can encode it in few bits via arithmetic coding. We exploit this duality to evaluate genomic language models as compressors of DNA, using compression primarily as an objective probe of generative sequence modeling rather than as a deployable storage system. We release DNAGPT2, a family of ten GPT-2-small models pretrained for one epoch on a single A40 using the DNABERT2 multi-species corpus that differ only in byte-pair encoding vocabulary size. Coupled with arithmetic coding, the best model reaches 1.47 bits per base (bpb) on the T2T human genome, fourth in the Cobilab compression benchmark and ahead of every general-purpose compressor. Our results suggest that NLP-style tokenization choices may be suboptimal for DNA: a 32-token BPE vocabulary compresses better than larger vocabularies. We also find that, in this benchmark, published long-context genomic LMs underperform a much shorter-context BPE GPT-2; we discuss in Section 5 that this is not a controlled context-length ablation, since the compared models also differ in architecture, training data, parameter count, and tokenization. Finally, we compute a per-nucleotide information-content map of the human genome and show that exons, introns, intergenic regions, and Alu repeats have statistically distinct information profiles.

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

Cross-modal Identity Mapping: Minimizing Information Loss in Modality Conversion via Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Haonan Jia↗Shichao Dong↗Xin Dong↗Zenghui Sun↗Jin Wang↗Jinsong Lan↗Xiaoyong Zhu↗Bo Zheng↗Kaifu Zhang↗

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often omit or misrepresent critical visual content in generated image captions. Minimizing such information loss will force LVLMs to focus on image details to generate precise descriptions. However, measuring information loss during modality conversion is inherently challenging due to the modal gap between visual content and text output. In this paper, we argue that the quality of an image caption is positively correlated with the similarity between images retrieved via text search using that caption. Based on this insight, we further propose Cross-modal Identity Mapping (CIM), a reinforcement learning framework that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Specifically, the method quantitatively evaluates the information loss from two perspectives: Gallery Representation Consistency and Query-gallery Image Relevance. Supervised under these metrics, LVLM minimizes information loss and aims to achieve identity mapping from images to captions. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method in image captioning, even when compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Particularly, on the COCO-LN500 benchmark, CIM achieves a 20% improvement in relation reasoning on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Shuttling Compiler for Trapped-Ion Quantum Computers Based on Large Language Models

Authors:
Fabian Kreppel↗Reza Salkhordeh↗Ferdinand Schmidt-Kaler↗Andr\'e Brinkmann↗

arXiv:2512.18021v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present the first shuttling compiler based on large language models (LLMs) for trapped-ion quantum computers, where qubits are shuttled between segments for gate execution and qubit storage. We fine-tune pre-trained LLMs on examples from linear and branched one-dimensional shuttling architectures. Thus, we obtain a layout-independent compilation strategy that learns the required shuttling operations directly from data. Using benchmark circuits with up to 16 qubits, such fine-tuned LLMs can now generate valid schedules for shuttling architectures. Notably, we also obtain a valid schedule for a previously unseen four-way junction layout. This demonstrates that trained LLMs can generalize to layouts not encountered during training. For various architectures, LLM-based schedules improve upon state-of-the-art baseline compiler results, reducing the shuttling effort by up to 15%.

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

Measuring language complexity from hierarchical reuse of recurring patterns

Authors:
Junyi Zhou↗Rui Liu↗Pengyu Liu↗Yu Liu↗

We introduce the ladderpath index as a measure of language complexity grounded in algorithmic information theory. It counts the minimum steps needed to reconstruct a sequence through hierarchical reuse of repeated substructures, capturing an exactly computable but constrained form of algorithmic compressibility related to, but distinct from, Kolmogorov complexity. We apply the ladderpath approach to 21 parallel corpora from the Parallel Universal Dependencies dataset. The ladderpath index is approximately invariant across the languages, and varies much less than the corpus length. This is more pronounced when all corpora are mapped to a unified binary representation, providing evidence for the equi-complexity hypothesis from a representation-independent perspective. We also observe trade-offs between character inventory size and corpus length, and between vocabulary-level and corpus-level reconstruction complexity, supporting the trade-off hypothesis that total complexity is conserved and redistributed across linguistic levels. The reusable substructures identified by the ladderpath approach, without any linguistic input, overlap with words and morphological components attested in the natural vocabulary. The hierarchical reuse captured by the ladderpath approach parallels the chunking mechanisms proposed in cognitive science, where the human cognitive system compresses linguistic input into nested, reusable units under shared memory and processing constraints. This connection between cognitive chunking and the ladderpath approach provides a new interpretation for the equi-complexity and trade-off hypotheses, grounding both in the shared cognitive architecture that underlies language processing across human languages.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

When, Where, and How: Adaptive Binning for Tabular Self-Supervised Learning

Authors:
Daehwan Kim↗Haejun Chung↗Ikbeom Jang↗

arXiv:2606.19827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical tabular data are ubiquitous in clinical research, but deep learning for tables remains underexplored because reliable labels often require costly expert adjudication, even though structured clinical variables are routinely available in tabular form. Self-supervised learning can leverage these unlabeled tables, and recent binning-based pretexts offer a promising inductive bias, but existing objectives fix a single global quantile discretization and apply feature-agnostic supervision. We propose Adaptive Binning, a training-adaptive discretization pretext for tabular SSL that couples discretization to learning through a feature-wise coarse-to-fine curriculum. Motivated by the spectral bias of neural networks and the principles of curriculum learning, our method progressively refines discretization per feature upon plateau detection and selects representation-aware splits to jointly improve value-space concentration and representation-space coherence. A heterogeneity-aware objective unifies categorical reconstruction with ordinal supervision for numerical features, and experiments on public medical tabular datasets under unified evaluation protocols show consistent gains for linear probing and fine-tuning without dataset-specific discretization tuning. We further introduce a medical tabular SSL benchmark with standardized protocols to support reproducible progress in this underexplored domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/Adaptive-Binning.

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