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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Female-RHINO: A Real-Time Scanner-Integrated Framework for Automated Quantitative Uterine MRI Analysis and Structured Reporting

arXiv:2606.24390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized assessment of uterine MRI remains challenging due to anatomical variability, observer dependence, and the lack of workflow-integrated automated analysis tools. This work presents Female-RHINO: (R)eproductive (H)ealth (I)maging A(N)alysis T(O)ol, a real-time AI-assisted framework for automated quantitative uterine MRI analysis and structured reporting during image acquisition. We present an end-to-end system that integrates inline communication with the MRI scanner and deep learning-based analysis to derive quantitative uterine biomarkers from sagittal T2-weighted pelvic MRI. The framework combines segmentation and anatomical landmark detection models trained and evaluated on more than 500 multi-center datasets spanning diverse protocols, vendors, and patient populations. It performs volumetry, detects and quantifies common incidental findings such as fibroids and Nabothian cysts, and extracts six anatomical landmarks for biometric assessment. Results are compiled into a structured clinician-oriented report with integrated visualizations, without manual interaction. Evaluation on independent retrospective and prospective cohorts demonstrated robust performance across varying acquisition settings. Mean Dice similarity coefficients were 0.82 for the uterus and 0.80 for fibroids, with lower but consistent agreement for Nabothian cysts. Landmark detection achieved a mean radial error of 3.7 mm. End-to-end processing was completed in under 70 seconds, enabling availability of results during the ongoing scan. Prospective deployment yielded immediate, standardized, and reproducible analyses supported by inter-observer agreement. The proposed system enables real-time scanner-integrated AI for automated uterine MRI analysis and reporting, with potential to improve standardization, efficiency, and clinical workflow in pelvic imaging.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Evaluating and Preserving Lexical Stress in English-to-Chinese Speech-to-Speech Translation

Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems have achieved impressive progress in semantic accuracy and speech naturalness. However, the cross-lingual transfer of lexical stress, a vital cue for emphasis and speaker intent, remains heavily underexplored, compounded by a lack of reliable automatic evaluation metrics for tonal languages like Chinese. We investigate English-to-Chinese S2ST stress transfer by constructing a stress-annotated Chinese dataset and an XLS-R-based Mandarin stress detector. Integrating this with the English EmphAssess system, we propose a novel objective metric for cross-lingual stress evaluation. Furthermore, we fine-tune CosyVoice3 to build a stress-aware S2ST system. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed S2ST architecture significantly outperforms existing systems in stress translation capability while maintaining competitive translation quality. Furthermore, our evaluation metric exhibits a strong correlation with human subjective judgments.

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

Calibrating Decision Robustness via Inverse Conformal Risk Control

arXiv:2510.07750v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Robust optimization safeguards decisions against uncertainty by optimizing against worst-case scenarios, yet their effectiveness hinges on a prespecified robustness level that is often chosen ad hoc, leading to either insufficient protection or overly conservative and costly solutions. Recent approaches using conformal prediction construct data-driven uncertainty sets with finite-sample coverage guarantees, but they still fix coverage targets a priori and offer little guidance for selecting robustness levels. We propose a new framework that provides distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees on both miscoverage and regret for any family of robust predict-then-optimize policies. Our method constructs valid estimators that trace out the miscoverage–regret Pareto frontier, enabling decision-makers to reliably evaluate and calibrate robustness levels according to their cost–risk preferences. The framework is simple to implement, broadly applicable across classical optimization formulations, and achieves sharper finite-sample performance. This paper offers a principled data-driven methodology for guiding robustness selection and empowers practitioners to balance robustness and conservativeness in high-stakes decision-making.

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Diverse binding poses of agonistic neurotoxins on human Na<sub>v</sub>1.6

Authors:

Voltage-gated sodium (Nav) channels are key targets of various venomous toxins. Deciphering the binding poses and mechanisms of action of representative toxins will help to dissect the functional mechanism of the channels and facilitate therapeutic development targeting Nav channels1,2. Here we present cryo-electron microscopy&nbsp;(cryo-EM) structures of distinct binding poses of three agonistic peptide toxins on the human Nav1.6–β1 channel complex. The globular β-scorpion toxin Cn2 nestles between the extracellular segment of voltage-sensing domain (VSD)&nbsp;in the second repeat of the Nav1.6 core α-unit (VSDII) and the pore extracellular loops in the third repeat of the Nav1.6 core α-unit (ECLIII), where it is stabilized by interactions with both protein regions and the branched N1372-glycan. Cone&nbsp;snail ι-conotoxin RXIA adopts an elongated conformation, spanning VSDI and VSDIV to wrap around the shoulder of the pore domain (PD). The bullet&nbsp;ant-derived toxin δ-paraponeritoxin-Pc1a exists as a transmembrane helix that stands between VSDII and PDIII. Our findings, corroborated by functional characterizations, illustrate the diversity in peptide toxin binding poses and mechanisms of action, link stabilization of the up state of VSDI or VSDII to channel activation, and provide clues to the rational design of selective Nav channel modulators. Structures of the distinct binding poses of three agonistic peptide toxins—bullet-ant-derived toxin δ-paraponeritoxin-Pc1a, cone&nbsp;snail ι-conotoxin RXIA and the globular β-scorpion toxin Cn2—on the human Nav1.6–β1 channel complex illustrate a diversity in binding poses and mechanisms of action.

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

Leveraging systems' non-linearity to tackle the scarcity of data in the design of Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Systems

arXiv:2606.20323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep Transfer Learning (DTL) allows for the efficient building of Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Systems (IFDS). On the other hand, DTL methods still heavily rely on large amounts of labelled data. Obtaining such an amount of data can be challenging when dealing with machines or structures faults. This document proposes a novel approach to the design of vibration-based IFDS using DTL in condition of strong data scarcity. A periodic multi-excitation level procedure leveraging intrinsic non-linearities of real-world systems is used to produce images that can be conveniently analysed by pre-trained Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to diagnose faults. A new data visualization method and its augmentation technique are proposed in this paper to tackle the typical lack of data encountered during the design of IFDS. Experimental validation on a railway pantograph structure provides effective support for the proposed method.

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

Decentralized Autoregressive Generation

arXiv:2601.03184v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The decentralization of autoregressive generation has attracted considerable attention in recent years as a solution to scaling bottlenecks. However, despite promising empirical results, this paradigm currently lacks rigorous theoretical justification. In this work, we formally establish the theoretical equivalence between decentralized and centralized training. To achieve this, we adapt the Discrete Flow Matching framework for autoregressive generation, leveraging its inherent properties to demonstrate that global models naturally decompose into independent experts. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across diverse multimodal benchmarks, empirically validating that decentralized training maintains competitive parity with standard centralized architectures.

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

On the Adversarial Robustness of Multimodal LLM Judges

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges, e.g., for image quality and safety assessment. However, their adversarial robustness remains largely unexplored, threatening the fairness and reliability of automated judging. To bridge this gap, we introduce RobustMLLMJudge, the first general framework for evaluating the adversarial robustness of general-purpose MLLMs when functioning as judges. It covers diverse attacks against popular judge approaches across quality and safety evaluation scenarios. Using RobustMLLMJudge, we reveal that i) different MLLM judges are highly vulnerable to score-inflating adversarial attacks; and ii) although effective, these attack methods face a critical challenge due to unique constraints in the evaluation protocols of MLLM judges. We further propose MGSIA, namely Manifold-Guided Semantic Induction Attack, a novel method that bypasses these constraints to enable more effective and transferable attacks on MLLM judges. The core idea of MGSIA is to combine affirmative semantic induction with high-score manifold alignment: it maximizes the probability that judges yield affirmative responses (e.g., "Yes") to binary semantic queries, while regularizing adversarial representations toward high-score centers estimated from proxy protocols. Together, these objectives yield transferable score-inflating perturbations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority and generalizability of MGSIA in deceiving advanced MLLM judges under different evaluation scenarios, highlighting the need for robust MLLM judges. Code and data will be made available at https://github.com/mala-lab/RobustMLLMJudge.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Explaining a probabilistic prediction on the simplex with Shapley compositions

arXiv:2408.01382v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Originating in game theory, Shapley values are widely used for explaining a machine learning model's prediction by quantifying the contribution of each feature's value to the prediction. This requires a scalar prediction as in binary classification, whereas a multiclass probabilistic prediction is a discrete probability distribution, living on a multidimensional simplex. In such a multiclass setting the Shapley values are typically computed separately on each class in a one-vs-rest manner, ignoring the compositional nature of the output distribution. In this paper, we introduce Shapley compositions as a well-founded way to properly explain a multiclass probabilistic prediction, using the Aitchison geometry from compositional data analysis. We prove that the Shapley composition is the unique quantity satisfying linearity, symmetry and efficiency on the Aitchison simplex, extending the corresponding axiomatic properties of the standard Shapley value. We demonstrate this proper multiclass treatment in a range of scenarios.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

A random approach to the multibonacci sequence

arXiv:2606.14294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a random approach to the multibonacci sequence. We generalise the model introduced by Benjamin, Levin, Mahlburg, and Quinn, which is based on a random tiling method using dominoes and squares that leads to the Fibonacci sequence, and which was extended to the tribonacci case in a previous work by the authors. Our approach employs tiling with linear $k$-ominoes, $k=1,\ldots,s$, combined with specific colouring, to generate a weighted multibonacci sequence. For a natural random variable~$X$ defined by this model, we establish the distribution of $X$ in terms of multibonacci numbers and compute $\mathbb{E}[X] = 2^{s+1}-3$.

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

Zero-Shot Cross-City Generalization in End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Self-Supervised versus Supervised Representations

End-to-end autonomous driving models are typically trained on multi-city datasets using supervised ImageNet-pretrained backbones, yet their ability to generalize to unseen cities remains largely unexamined. When training and evaluation data are geographically mixed, models may implicitly rely on city-specific cues, masking failure modes that would occur under real-world domain shifts when generalizing to new locations. In this work, we formulate zero-shot cross-city transfer as a controlled representation-level stress test for end-to-end autonomous driving and ask how visual pretraining affects transfer behavior under geographic domain shift. We conduct a comprehensive study by integrating self-supervised backbones I-JEPA, DINOv2, and MAE into planning frameworks. We evaluate performance under strict geographic splits on nuScenes in the open-loop setting and on NAVSIM in the closed-loop evaluation protocol. Our experiments reveal a substantial generalization gap when transferring models across cities with different road topologies, traffic conventions, and visual environments. In open-loop evaluation, a supervised backbone exhibits severe degradation when transferring between cities, yet some domain-specific self-supervised methods can substantially reduce both displacement and collision degradation. In closed-loop evaluation, self-supervised pretraining improves average out-of-distribution PDMS in several single-city training settings. Our results provide empirical evidence that representation learning influences the robustness of cross-city planning and motivate zero-shot geographic transfer as an important stress test for evaluating end-to-end autonomous driving systems.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Spatial distribution of the proteome in the human body and in cancers

Authors:

A detailed, spatially resolved quantitative map of the human proteome is essential for a deeper understanding of human biology and disease1–4. Here we present a comprehensive human proteomic landscape, generated by profiling more than 13,000 proteins across 2,856 samples using data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry. The dataset spans 58 major tissue types, 251 specific tissue subtypes and 25 distinct carcinomas. This resource enables the depiction of spatially resolved proteome trajectories across tissue types and physiological states, including fetal, tumour, adjacent non-tumour and healthy adult tissue, thereby providing insight into both developmental processes and oncogenic progression. Furthermore, quantitative proteomics comparisons across diverse tissue types and states facilitate the indication of organ-specific toxicity, the identification of repurposable anticancer drug candidates and the prioritization of therapeutic targets for cancers. This study establishes a quantitative resource for navigating the proteome in the human body and in common cancers. A spatially resolved map of the human proteome across a variety of healthy tissues and cancers provides wide-ranging insights in developmental biology and oncology, and could aid the identification of therapeutic targets and development of treatments for cancer.

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

A Unified Causal-Origin Taxonomy of Distributional Shifts in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) systems often degrade when operating conditions differ from those previously encountered, reflecting distributional shifts in the underlying data-generating process. Such shifts may occur between training and evaluation, as in In-Distribution (ID) and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization, or within non-stationary settings where environment dynamics evolve over time. However, the formal relationship between these views remains unclear, and existing work mainly focuses on mitigation rather than the causal origin of shift within the agent-environment interaction. This work develops a unified causal-origin taxonomy that characterizes sources of distributional shift in RL and relates ID/OOD generalization to non-stationary settings. We transfer the classical dataset-shift principle from supervised learning to RL by reformulating distributional shift in terms of the generative interaction process. Using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), we decompose the interaction into structural components, including the state distribution, observation process, policy, reward, and transition dynamics, together with the shifted-time boundary. The proposed taxonomy distinguishes internal, agent-driven, and external, environment-driven, distributional shifts. The shifted-time boundary perspective further characterizes explicit, implicit, and hybrid shifts. This formulation unifies ID/OOD generalization and non-stationarity as structured changes in the underlying process. We also introduce an evaluation framework for measuring shift impact and adaptation through performance degradation and recovery metrics. By grounding distributional shift in the causal-origin structure of RL, this work supports systematic analysis of robustness under distributional shift.

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

HiLo-Token: Input-Adaptive High-Low Frequency Token Compression for Efficient Image Editing

Creative image editing tools, such as Photoshop's Remove or Generative Fill buttons, are central to everyday customer use and account for a major share of traffic in Photoshop and Lightroom. However, current generative AI models face significant latency challenges, which become even more pronounced when transitioning from convolution-based U-Nets to Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). In our evaluation on hundreds of representative image editing samples spanning a wide range of mask ratios, the DiT module alone accounts for an average of 73% of the total model latency, even after being distilled from 50 timesteps down to 8 timesteps. To tackle this challenge, we propose $HiLo-Token$, an input-adaptive token compression framework that allocates more token budget to high-frequency, rich-context regions while assigning fewer tokens to low-frequency areas. Specifically, for the editing region specified by the user mask, we retain all tokens within a dilated mask to preserve strong locality and contextual relevance. Outside the editing region, we introduce a simple yet effective high-frequency token selection strategy based on spatial frequency to capture important local details, while using tokens from a 16x downsampled image to represent low-frequency components and preserve the blurry but global structure. Extensive experiments on production-level evaluation data validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving 3.13x, 2.59x, and 1.67x DiT speedups on A100-80GB for image editing tasks across small, medium, and large mask ratio categories with average ratios of 6.38%, 15.92%, and 35.36%, respectively, without any regression in generation quality.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

MetaPilot: genome-aware adaptive search-space refinement for unified DDA and DIA metaproteomics

Metaproteomic peptide identification is constrained by the structure and size of the protein search space. Pooled gene catalogues provide coverage but obscure genome-level evidence, and current workflows for data-dependent (DDA) and data-independent (DIA) acquisition diverge in their database strategies. We present MetaPilot, a genome-aware workflow that uses conserved marker-protein evidence to rank candidate genomes from MGnify catalogues and construct adaptive, sample-specific search spaces. Applied to paired DDA/DIA datasets of defined mixtures and fecal samples, MetaPilot adapted genome selection to community complexity and reproduced published peptide evidence while expanding the detectable peptide space. In DDA-independent reanalysis of Orbitrap human gut DIA data, MetaPilot identified 24.4% more peptides than the published DDA-derived library and 2.06-fold more than the matched DDA-assisted DIA search. On timsTOF DIA-PASEF mouse intestinal data, it outperformed uMetaP by 41.8~119.7%, enabling genome-resolved functional interpretation without DDA-PASEF input.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Conditional channel entropy sets fundamental limits on thermodynamic quantum information processing

arXiv:2604.01217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The thermodynamic resourcefulness of quantum channels primarily depends on their underlying causal structure and their ability to generate quantum correlations. We quantify this interplay within the resource theory of athermality for bipartite quantum channels in the presence of a side channel acting as memory, referred to as the resource theory of conditional athermality. For channels with trivial output Hamiltonians, we characterize the optimal one-shot rates for distilling the identity gate from a given channel, as well as the cost of simulating the channel using the identity gate, under conditional Gibbs-preserving superchannels. We show that these rates have a direct trade-off relation with the conditional channel entropies, attributing operational significance to signaling in quantum processes. Furthermore, we establish an asymptotic equipartition property for the conditional channel min-entropy for classes of channels that are either tele-covariant or no-signaling from the non-conditioning input to the conditioning output. As a consequence, we demonstrate asymptotic reversibility of the resource theory for these channels. The asymptotic conditional athermality capacity of a tele-covariant channel is half the superdense coding capacity of its Choi state. Our work establishes the conditional channel entropy as a primitive information-theoretic concept for quantum processes, elucidating its potential for wider applications in quantum information science.

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

Distilling Examples into Task Instructions: Enhanced In-Context Learning for Real-World B2B Conversations

In-context learning (ICL) is the standard method for low-resource classification, yet its efficacy in specialized domains remains largely unexplored. We address the challenge of classifying semantically complex, multi-party B2B conversations, where traditional ICL encounters significant limitations, especially as context length increases due to the concatenation of multiple few-shot examples. We introduce the \texttt{Call Playbook} dataset, featuring five classification tasks derived from real-world B2B conversations targeting core sales concepts. To bridge the gap between performance and practical utility, we propose novel knowledge extraction methods that distill verbose examples into compact, interpretable representations of structured classification criteria and precise task descriptions. Our approach achieves a 99\% reduction in token usage and improves macro-averaged AUC by up to 7\% over traditional ICL. Notably, it remains robust as context grows, unlike advanced token compression baselines which degrade by over 9 F1 points. Importantly, our framework enables direct refinement of classification logic, addressing critical needs for transparency, efficiency, and user interaction in real-world NLP applications.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Scratched Lenses, Shifted Depth: Passive Camera-Side Optical Attacks

Physical adversarial attacks on vision systems are typically studied through scene manipulation, such as adversarial patches or projections, where the adversary controls what the camera observes. Camera-side attacks using stickers or auxiliary optics have also been explored, but they treat attacks as image-space perturbations from designed patterns. This misses how physical imperfections interact with scene-dependent lighting and optics. We identify a threat: passive lens-side damage that is persistent yet trigger-conditioned, producing optical artifacts that bias geometric inference under particular visual conditions. We instantiate this threat through Scratch-induced Lens Adversarial Streak Hijacking SLASH, a physical-world attack caused by small scratches on a camera lens or protective cover. Scratches interact with bright light sources and specular reflections to create structured streak artifacts that distort depth cues. Since the perturbation is fixed in the optical path but triggered by the scene, it is both persistent and selective. We formulate the attack in optical space, model the scratch pattern as a trigger-conditioned optical channel, and optimize one fixed configuration across diverse viewing conditions. We evaluate SLASH on monocular depth estimation and monocular 3D object detection in digital and real-world settings. Under the fixed-scratch constraint, directional depth shifts reach up to 32% relative error for monocular depth estimation, with consistent effects on monocular 3D object detection. Physical experiments confirm transfer to real camera recordings, inducing depth shifts above the model's natural prediction baseline. These findings reveal an attack surface where benign-looking hardware imperfections act as latent, scene-triggered adversarial mechanisms, challenging assumptions about physical robustness and motivating defenses for secure vision systems.

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

MLLP-VRAIN UPV system for the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation task

This work describes the participation of the MLLP-VRAIN research group in the shared task of the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation track. Our submission utilizes the recently released Parakeet and Qwen 3.5 models to create a robust, cascaded solution for long-form SimulST through the use of adaptive "black-box" policies. We explore relaxations of these policies to achieve better quality-latency trade-offs. Compared to last year, we participate on all language directions. In addition to this, for the En$\rightarrow${De, It, Zh} directions we also participate in this year's new context track employing a combination of ASR word-boosting and a RAG mechanism of offline pre-translated exemplars to guide generation and enrich our system with domain-specific context. Finally, we provide a detailed latency analysis of our system. Compared to last year, results on the MCIF En$\rightarrow$De test set shows a substantial quality improvement of +5.82 XCOMET-XL. Our context track processing further improves performance by +1.03.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Two-component exciton condensates in an electron–hole bilayer

Authors:

Macroscopic quantum coherence emerges when bosons condense into a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC)1–5. Excitons are a long-sought solid-state route to high-temperature BECs with strong interactions, electrical tunability and potentially multicomponent spinor order, but conclusive evidence for equilibrium condensation has remained elusive. Here we report evidence for two-component exciton BECs in MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers6–9 by probing the spin–valley susceptibility of constituent electrons and holes. This heterostructure hosts equilibrium exciton fluids with four spin–valley flavours. Magneto-optical spectroscopy in a dilution refrigerator reveals three exciton condensate phases with distinct flavour polarizations. At zero magnetic field, the many-body ground state is a coherent superposition of two condensed intravalley exciton flavours. Under a magnetic field, the intravalley exciton condensate first switches to a two-component intervalley condensate through a first-order quantum phase transition at a weak critical field and then turns into a fully polarized single-component condensate at high fields. The condensate signatures form a dome in density–temperature space, persisting up to approximately 1.8 K. Our results establish van der Waals electron–hole bilayers as a versatile platform for strongly interacting, multicomponent exciton BECs. Macroscopic quantum coherence arises in two-component exciton Bose–Einstein condensates within MoSe2/hBN/WSe2 electron–hole bilayers, exhibiting distinct spin–valley polarized phases, quantum phase transitions under magnetic fields and stable condensate behaviour up to approximately 1.8 K.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Online Learning for Supervisory Switching Control

arXiv:2603.14762v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study supervisory switching control for partially-observed linear dynamical systems. The objective is to identify and deploy a suitable controller for the unknown system by periodically selecting among a collection of $N$ candidate controllers, some of which may destabilize the underlying system. While classical estimator-based supervisory control guarantees asymptotic stability, it lacks quantitative finite-time performance bounds. Conversely, current non-asymptotic methods in both online learning and system identification require restrictive assumptions that are incompatible in a control setting, such as system stability, which preclude testing potentially unstable controllers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel, non-asymptotic analysis of supervisory control that adapts multi-armed bandit algorithms to a control-theoretic setting. The proposed data-driven algorithm evaluates candidate controllers via scoring criteria that leverage system observability to isolate the effects of state history, enabling both detection of destabilizing controllers and accurate system identification. We present two algorithmic variants with dimension-free, finite-time guarantees, where each identifies the matching controller in $O(N \log^2 N)$ steps, while simultaneously achieving finite $L_2$-gain with respect to system disturbances.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Token Factory: Efficiently Integrating Diverse Signals into Large Recommendation Models

arXiv:2606.19635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Recommendation Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in industry-scale recommendation tasks. However, holistically integrating traditional signals into these transformer-based architectures effectively and efficiently remains a major challenge. Conventional approaches that "textualize" these signals directly or create discrete item representations often lead to excessively long prompts, substantial memory footprints, and high computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose "Token Factory", a framework designed to transform traditional signals into "soft tokens" that can be directly processed by LRMs. This approach enables efficient integration and compression of heterogeneous input features, preventing prompt length explosion while enhancing model performance. We detail the architecture of Token Factory and present experimental results validating its effectiveness in a production-scale recommendation environment.

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

MVEB: Massive Video Embedding Benchmark

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

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent representations

Single-cell transcriptomics is typically modeled in low-dimensional latent representations that improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. Such representations underpin data integration, cell state discovery, and perturbation prediction, with applications ranging from large-scale organ atlases to latent trajectory modeling. Recent virtual cell approaches further leverage these representations to predict cellular responses as distributional shifts in latent space. Each of these applications ultimately requires faithful gene expression reconstruction from latent spaces for biological interpretation, enabling gene-level analysis of predicted perturbed or batch-corrected cells. Yet representation choice is typically treated as an implementation detail rather than a primary modeling decision, with no systematic evaluation of how well latent representations support gene expression reconstruction. Here, we introduce ReconEval, a benchmark for evaluating gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent spaces. We benchmark two classes of latent representations: end-to-end trained models such as PCA, autoencoders, and variational autoencoders, and pretrained single-cell foundation model embeddings coupled to newly trained decoders. Reconstruction is evaluated both directly and after latent-space perturbation prediction. Across perturbational and observational datasets totaling over 100 million cells, our metric suite quantifies statistical fidelity; biological signal preservation, including differential expression, coexpression, cell-cycle structure, cytokine response and pathway activity; and perturbation-specific effects. We find that autoencoders achieve the strongest stand-alone reconstruction at low dimensionality, while variational regularization does not improve generalization in reconstruction. Frozen foundation model embeddings retain recoverable gene-level information, with reconstruction quality depending strongly on decoder architecture and pretraining objective. In latent perturbation modeling, high-dimensional PCA matches foundation model embeddings, while low-dimensional AE embeddings are optimal for flow-based generative models. Overall, reconstruction depends critically on the interplay between representation and downstream model, and simpler representations can outperform complex alternatives given appropriate capacity. Our benchmark establishes reconstruction as a critical evaluation axis for single-cell foundation models. We envision it improving the biological interpretability of latent-space modeling, a prerequisite for future virtual cell models to be validated by domain experts and grounded in biology.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Structured Approximations of Measures

arXiv:2310.09149v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the approximation of probability measures in the Wasserstein-$p$ distance by structured classes of approximators, motivated by applications in imaging, machine learning, and physical measurement under sensor constraints. We obtain three sets of results. First, for measures with densities bounded away from zero on a bounded Lipschitz domain $\Omega$, we prove that any approximation scheme for functions in $\mathrm{L}_p(\Omega)$ transfers, with linear rate, to a corresponding approximation scheme for measures in $\mathrm{W}_p(\Omega)$. The argument applies a theorem of Bogovskii on regularity of solutions to the continuity equation in the Benamou-Brenier formulation of optimal transport. We exhibit concrete approximation schemes (polynomials, shift-invariant spaces, cardinal interpolation with radial basis functions, kernel density estimators, and piecewise approximations on nonuniform Voronoi partitions) that fit the framework. As a matter of independent interest, we prove a negative Sobolev lower bound that generalizes existing bounds from $p=2$ to all $p\in(1,\infty)$. We also consider deterministic bounds for discrete approximations to arbitrary measures in terms of the mesh norm of a quasi-uniform set of points. We specialize these bounds to show that compactly supported measures admit a deterministic $N$-term approximation $\mu_N$ such that $\mathrm{W}_p(\mu,\mu_N) = O(N^{-\frac{1}{d}})$ for all $d\geq 1$, which matches the asymptotic optimal quantizer rate. We also extend these results to non-compactly supported measures with appropriate tail decay.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ED3R: Energy-Aware Distributed Disaster Detection Enabled by Cooperative Robotic Agents

Robotics are expected to support environmental monitoring and natural disaster management, where decisions must be made under uncertainty, resource limitations, and strict operational constraints. In critical missions, such as wildfires, robotic agents must not only identify hazardous events with sufficient confidence, but also manage the energy cost and time until detection. This paper introduces ED3R, an energy-aware distributed framework for wildfire detection under uncertainty. ED3R enables hierarchical cooperative decision-making between a robot and a remote controller. The remote controller decides upon the robot's motion, while the robot senses the environment and decides where to execute the wildfire detection (onboard or remotely) and how. The common goal is to detect wildfires with a required confidence while minimizing the energy consumed by any robot operation. ED3R further integrates mechanisms to avoid nearby obstacles, prevent redundant exploration, enable adaptive early mission completion, and ensure feasibility through a custom penalty function. ED3R also introduces a forward-looking capability, enabled through distributed neural regression models that allow the agents to anticipate the future by evaluating candidate strategies before execution. The framework is evaluated through realistic robotics simulations, ablation studies, and baseline comparisons. Overall, ED3R achieves a mission success rate of up to 97.18%. Especially in the most demanding missions, it reduces energy consumption by up to 36.4% and detects wildfires up to 41% faster than baselines.