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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Scaling Enterprise Agent Routing: Degradation, Diagnosis, and Recovery

Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales? We study single-step routing on a 110-agent, 584-tool catalog from a deployed enterprise productivity assistant, evaluating three frontier models from 10 to 110 agents. Routing F1 on under-specified requests drops 16–23 percentage points across models. An oracle analysis decomposes the degradation into a retrieval gap (the model cannot surface the right tool) and a confusion gap (even with perfect retrieval, the oracle ceiling drops 10pp). Embedding-based shortlisting recovers +10–11pp F1 at full scale across all three models and two providers. A production annotation study (1,435 human-labeled utterances, three annotators) confirms the recovery on real traffic at +10–17pp despite 10–15pp lower absolute performance.

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

Optimizing LLM Inference: Fluid-Guided Online Scheduling with Memory Constraints

arXiv:2504.11320v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models now serve millions of users daily, with providers incurring costs exceeding $700,000 per day. Each request requires token-by-token inference, making GPU scheduling central to latency, capacity, and cost. The difficulty is endogenous memory growth: generated tokens expand the Key-Value (KV) cache, and overflow can evict in-progress requests and waste prior computation. We formulate inference as a multi-stage online scheduling problem with endogenous memory growth, linear iteration times, and GPU-resident KV-cache constraints. We introduce a fluid model that characterizes equilibrium batch composition, memory requirement, and stability region. Guided by the fluid model, we design WAIT (Waiting for Accumulated Inference Threshold), a threshold-based admission rule for known output lengths, and Nested WAIT, which extends the rule to unknown output lengths by regulating how requests advance across decode-stage segments. Both algorithms approximate the fluid benchmark asymptotically under the stated memory conditions. Nested WAIT uses an additional safety buffer of moderate scale to hedge against memory-overflow-induced evictions under unknown output lengths. In Vidur simulations configured for Llama-2-7B on an A100 GPU, with supplemental real-GPU validation reported in the appendix, the policies enlarge the empirically observed stable operating range relative to widely used baseline algorithms and reduce latency especially in near-overloaded and overloaded regimes.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SketchXplain: Intuitive Visual Explanations of Image Classifiers with Sketches

arXiv:2606.17646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Saliency map visualizations explain image-based AI predictions by pointing to regions, but these are often unintuitive and semantically unclear, leaving an interpretability gap. We argue that AI explanations should be intuitive – coherent to user knowledge, yet simple and selective to accelerate interpretation. Inspired by artistic drawings, we propose SketchXplain to generate sketch-based visual explanations for intuitive image-based explainable AI (XAI). Combining techniques in saliency maps, concept-bottleneck models, and sketch optimization, SketchXplain integrates saliency to select coherent observation artifacts, concepts for knowledge coherence, cues to represent them, and abstraction for simplicity. Evaluating on face expression recognition, modeling and user studies showed that SketchXplain supported quicker interpretation with more aligned visualizations than saliency maps or simple drawings. Further evaluation on skin lesion diagnosis found that SketchXplain more coherently visualized disease symptoms, better supporting lay diagnosis. Thus, this work illustrates the value of sketches for intuitive, simple, coherent, and quick image-based XAI visualizations.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DroneShield-AI: A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Framework for Real-Time Autonomous Drone Threat Detection, Behavioral Intent Classification, and Swarm Intelligence in Contested Airspace

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) threats have emerged as a defining security challenge of the 21st century. This paper presents DroneShield-AI, a unified open framework integrating six processing layers: RF signal classification, acoustic motor-signature detection, YOLOv8-based visual detection, evidence-weighted sensor fusion, a Behavioral Intent Classification Engine (BICE), and a Graph Neural Network Swarm Intelligence Module (GNN-SIM). BICE introduces the first systematic six-class threat taxonomy for drone flight patterns, enabling predictive operator alerts with a 30-second advance-warning horizon. GNN-SIM is the first open framework for adversarial multi-drone formation analysis using Graph Attention Networks. Evaluated on three publicly available real-world datasets, the fused pipeline achieves 96.1% detection accuracy, 3.2% false alarm rate, AUC-ROC: 0.981, and 142ms end-to-end latency on commodity CPU-class hardware at approximately $500-$780 USD total system cost. All code, model weights, and simulation datasets are publicly released at submission.

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

TAB-PO: Preference Optimization with a Token-Level Adaptive Barrier for Token-Critical Structured Generation

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective and widely adopted approach for offline alignment but is poorly matched to ontology-driven structured prediction, where preferred and rejected JSON objects often differ in only a few schema-defining tokens. In this low-edit-distance regime, sequence-level DPO spreads gradient mass across non-critical serialization tokens (gradient dilution) and can reduce likelihood on rare, under-confident preferred schema tokens (token erosion). To address these limitations, we first develop a confusion-aware preference-construction strategy that augments expert-curated ambiguity patterns with empirical structured-error modes estimated from validation-set SFT predictions, synthesizing minimally perturbed, schema-valid negatives that focus preference learning on realistic ontology-level decision errors. We then introduce Token-Adaptive Barrier Preference Optimization (TAB-PO), a post-SFT objective for token-critical structured generation. TAB-PO adds a confidence-gated token-level barrier that applies supervised anchoring to under-confident schema tokens. On the public SciERC scientific information extraction task, evaluated with Llama/Qwen models from 1.5B to 70B, TAB-PO improves ontology-critical semantic-label and relational-linking metrics over SFT by 11.59% on average, wins 100% of comparisons against the strongest token-level and sequence-level DPO variants on these metrics, and surpasses leading frontier models by 14.71%, while delivering strong gains in textual grounding.

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

Density estimation for Hellinger via minimum-distance estimators: mixtures of Gaussians, log-concave, and more

arXiv:2606.11469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the task of density estimation, where we hope to accurately estimate a probability density from $n$ samples. A textbook method for density estimation in total variation distance is the minimum-distance estimator approach, where we conclude both the algorithm and the analysis merely from bounding the VC dimension of a particular concept class (the so-called Yatracos class). While this technique has originally yielded sharp guarantees primarily for total variation distance, in this work we extend the minimum-distance estimator approach for learning within Hellinger distance. Our main observation is that we may produce an analogous recipe for Hellinger (where we only require bounding the VC dimension of a related concept class) by drawing connections to recent results yielding reverse data processing inequalities. This recipe is flexible enough to accommodate fast algorithms originally designed for total variation distance; by modifying the approach of Acharya et al. (2017) we conclude the first near-linear time algorithm for learning classes including univariate mixtures of log-concave densities and mixtures of Gaussians (with arbitrary variances), with near-optimal sample complexity.

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

JoyAI-VL-Interaction: Real-Time Vision-Language Interaction Intelligence

Many moments in the real world do not wait for a user to ask. A fire starts on a security monitor, an expression flickers across a video call, or a product a viewer wants flashes by in a livestream. Yet today's large models remain mostly turn-based by design: they answer only when addressed, and even video-call apps that appear interactive still operate as question-answer systems, reacting only when polled or prompted. We argue for a different paradigm: a model that is present in the world like a person. It continuously watches what is happening now, decides on its own whether to speak or stay silent, interacts in real time, and delegates to a background model when the problem is hard. To advance interaction models and their adoption across domains, we make two fully open-sourced contributions. First, we release JoyAI-VL-Interaction, an 8B-scale, vision-first VL-interaction model. The model makes the response decision internally, choosing each second to stay silent, respond, or delegate to a background model, and it excels at vision-triggered responsiveness and time awareness. We pair it with a transferable training recipe, from which capabilities we never trained for emerge, such as guiding a shopper through changing app screens or improvising a lecture from a slide deck. Second, we release a complete, deployable system built around that model. The system streams any ongoing video into the model, making it genuinely present in the world. All other components are pluggable, including ASR/TTS modules, memory, visualization UI, and a background brain that can connect to any API or agent. Across six real-world scenarios, human raters prefer JoyAI-VL-Interaction over the in-app video-call assistants of Doubao and Gemini by a wide margin. To our knowledge, this is the first open, vision-driven interaction model released together with its training recipe, data, and complete deployable system.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Robust Spoofed Speech Detection via Temporal Pyramid Modeling

Spoofed speech detection is increasingly challenged by realistic synthesis, voice conversion, and replay attacks, with cross-dataset generalization remaining a major limitation. This work we propose a Temporal Pyramid Adapter that utilize parallel temporal convolutions with varying receptive fields to capture multi-scale spoofing cues, ranging from local artifacts to global prosodic irregularities. We also integrated self-supervised XLS-R representations combined with front-end adapters, including Mel, Sinc, and a Temporal Pyramid design for multi-scale temporal modeling. The proposed model is evaluated cross multiple benchmark including ASVspoof 2017, ASVspoof 2021 (DF/LA), PartialSpoof, DiffSSD, and multilingual HQ-MPSD datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that Temporal Pyramid model obtained AUC of 99.24% and a EER of 3.87% on the PartialSpoof database, which is significantly outperforming the base model and several SOTA baseline such as LCNN-BLSTM (9.87% EER) and TRACE (8.08% EER). Additionally, multilingual evaluations confirm that while spoofing artifact are independent from language. While self-supervised representations improve robustness, performance degrades under domain and language shifts, highlighting the need for better adaptation and calibration strategies.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Slots, Transitions, Loops: Learning Composable World Models for ARC

ARC tests in-context rule induction: given a few input-output demonstrations, a model must infer the hidden rule and apply it to a new query. While many approaches express ARC rules through language, code, or symbolic programs, ARC itself is visual-symbolic: rules appear as grid transitions over objects, colors, shapes, and spatial relations. We introduce Loop-OWM, an object-centric world-modeling architecture that learns these rules as composable transitions over structured states. It combines color-prototype slots, demonstration-conditioned task summaries, and a looped transition model with dense propagation and slot-conditioned correction. On both ARC-1 and ARC-2, Loop-OWM outperforms non-looped and looped baselines with comparable or fewer parameters. These results suggest that ARC rules can be learned not only as language descriptions or searched programs, but also as transitions over visual-symbolic world states.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TWLA: Achieving Ternary Weights and Low-Bit Activations for LLMs via Post-Training Quantization

arXiv:2606.13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity. However, existing methods struggle with heavy-tailed activation distributions and therefore keep activations in high precision, fundamentally limiting end-to-end inference acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose TWLA, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that achieves 1.58-bit weight compression and 4-bit activation quantization while maintaining high accuracy. TWLA comprises three components: (1) Euclidean-to-Manifold Asymmetric Ternary Quantizer (E2M-ATQ) minimizes layer-output error under weight ternarization via a two-stage optimization from Euclidean initialization to manifold relocation; (2) Kronecker Orthogonal Tri-Modal Shaping (KOTMS) applies a Kronecker-structured orthogonal rotation to reshape weights into ternary-friendly tri-modal distributions, while the shared rotation statistically suppresses activation outliers; and (3) Inter-Layer Aware Activation Mixed Precision (ILA-AMP) explicitly introduces adjacent-layer second-order interaction costs in bit allocation and jointly optimizes for the layer-wise disparity of activation quantization gains induced by the shared orthogonal transform, preventing cascades triggered by a few weak layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TWLA maintains high accuracy under W1.58A4, while delivering significant inference acceleration. The code is available at .

12.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Mechanisms underlying spontaneous and evoked calcium responses in oligodendrocyte precursor cells: A modeling investigation

Authors:

by Martin Lardy, Leqi Wang, Claire Guerrier, Veronica T. Cheli, Pablo M. Paez, Anmar Khadra Calcium (Ca2+) signaling has emerged as a central regulator of activity-dependent myelination in oligodendrocytes. These Ca2+ signals encompass both the stimulus-independent spontaneous Ca2+ local transients (SCaLTs) generated intrinsically in a voltage-independent manner or facilitated by the membrane voltage, as well as evoked responses triggered by ATP and glutamate release. To investigate the regulatory mechanisms underlying this combined spiking activity, we developed a stochastic spatiotemporal flux-balance model of Ca2+ transients in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). The model incorporates all the relevant fluxes in these cells and integrates membrane voltage dynamics with a Ca2+-induced Ca2+-release (CICR) mechanism using parameters fitted to Ca2+ fluorescence recordings. The model reproduced the intrinsic and voltage-facilitated SCaLTs in OPCs in the absence of purinergic and glutamatergic receptors, and captured the three distinct patterns of evoked Ca2+ responses induced by prolonged ATP and glutamate stimulations identified using machine classifier. The model highlighted the role of ATP and glutamate in generating these clusters, and showed that the fast dynamics of CICR is key to producing these evoked responses. Further analysis of the model also revealed that voltage-gated L- and T-type Ca2+ channels slightly increase the frequency of SCaLTs, while stimulation with ATP and glutamate, using randomly distributed pulses mimicking in vivo conditions, leads to an increase in both the amplitudes of Ca2+ spikes (i.e., the combination of SCaLTs and evoked responses) and the prevalence of wide spikes, especially upon glutamate stimulation. Bifurcation analysis of the deterministic version of the model, in the absence of diffusion, demonstrated that ATP and glutamate stimulation can shift the system into an oscillatory regime, thereby increasing the deterministic component of SCaLT dynamics. This study thus offers a comprehensive representation of OPC Ca2+ transients linking recorded in vitro behaviors to in vivo dynamics.

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

ReGenHuman: Re-Generating Human Appearances for Realistic Full-Body Video Anonymization

Anonymizing human-centric video data is an understudied problem. Prior anonymization techniques either blur or redact pixels at the cost of realism and downstream utility, or generate frame-by-frame at the cost of temporal coherence. We introduce ReGenHuman, the first full-body video anonymization pipeline that is simultaneously realistic, temporally consistent, and anonymous by construction. Contrary to past approaches which redact or edit the inputs directly, we propose a regenerate, don't edit paradigm. Our approach composites 2D pose, segmentation, and monocular depth into two complementary conditioning streams - StructAll and StructHuman, which are used to fine-tune a video-to-video diffusion backbone on in-the-wild human videos, synthesizing the human regions entirely from identity-free structural cues. We evaluate our model on privacy, quality, and utility, and show that our ReGenHuman achieves the best tradeoff across all three axes against current baselines. We further show that our anonymized videos remain effective for downstream tasks, including video question answering.

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

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

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

Collision models for open quantum systems coupled to finite environments

arXiv:2606.14163v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a system qubit repeatedly interacting with the same environmental qubit, with a reservoir acting on the environment between collisions via a completely positive, trace-preserving map. We show that complete suppression of system–environment correlations uniquely requires a full environmental reset, recovering a semi group dynamics with a time-independent Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad generator, whereas a partial reset yields a continuous transition between Markovian and non-Markovian regimes governed by a single dimensionless relaxation parameter. For a resonant excitation-exchange interaction, we obtain exact closed-form expressions for the Bloch-vector dynamics for both a generalized depolarizing channel and a generalized amplitude-damping channel acting as the reservoir-induced map. Using the Breuer–Laine–Piilo measure and a Choi-matrix CP-divisibility witness, we identify three distinct dynamical regimes across the parameter space: CP-divisible Markovian dynamics, CP-indivisible but P-divisible dynamics, and non-P-divisible non-Markovian dynamics. The boundaries between these regimes, and the structural differences between uniform and anisotropic environmental relaxation, are characterized numerically.

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

ZIVARI-TLBO: A Zero-Cost Inter-Group Evaluated-Elite Relay Mechanism for Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization

arXiv:2606.17087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZIVARI-TLBO is a grouped Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) method that augments an existing population-state controller with a fixed inter-group evaluated-elite relay. At each scheduled event, every group offers its already evaluated elite to the next group in a fixed ring; the elite replaces the receiver's worst eligible learner only when its stored objective value is better. Because the exact relay copies an already evaluated solution and its stored fitness, it requires no additional objective-function calls. The frozen gts-v4-cm-fixed implementation is evaluated under equal 10,000-evaluation budgets on eight classical functions at dimensions 10, 30, 50, and 100, with 30 matched seeds, and on five constrained engineering problems. A direct ablation against the same grouped landscape-aware controller without relay records 728/11/221 wins/ties/losses and a rank-biserial effect size of 0.624 across dimensions. In an eight-method multidimensional comparison, WOA obtains the best average rank (2.914) and ZIVARI-TLBO ranks second (3.382); ZIVARI-TLBO significantly outperforms TLBO, MCTLBO, DE, PSO, and GWO, loses significantly to WOA, and is not significantly different from HHO after Holm adjustment. Feasibility-aware engineering results are mixed and sensitive to the current static-penalty formulation. The evidence supports a scoped relay contribution and budget-consistent information-sharing mechanism, but not universal state-of-the-art, global-convergence, engineering-dominance, or CEC superiority claims.

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

Ensuring Trustworthy Online A/B Testing: Addressing Five Key Questions on CUPED

arXiv:2606.18750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A/B testing has become the gold standard for data-driven decision-making in large-scale online experimentation, providing critical guidance for feature launch, pricing optimization, and user experience enhancement. To maximize statistical sensitivity, many technology companies routinely employ Controlled-experiment Using Pre-Experiment Data (CUPED), a technique that achieves substantial variance reduction while preserving the unbiasedness of estimating the average treatment effect. Despite its widespread adoption, several critical methodological and practical nuances of CUPED remain underexplored. This paper systematically addresses five frequently encountered yet overlooked questions regarding the application of CUPED. First, we provide a comparative analysis of various post-CUPED estimators to identify the optimal adjustment specification. Second, we evaluate the validity of regression-based adjustments and delineate robust variance estimation methods tailored for such frameworks. Finally, we extend our investigation to complex but common scenarios, including multi-arm experiments and two-stage sampling designs. Our findings reveal that in these settings, naive reliance on standard variance estimators can lead to severely misleading inferences. By offering rigorous theoretical insights and extensive experimental validation, this work deepens the conceptual understanding of CUPED. Notably, the recommended methodologies have been successfully deployed and integrated into ByteDance's experimentation platform.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Clinical-grade Cuffless Blood Pressure Monitoring via Deep-tissue Diffuse Speckle Pulsatile Flowmetry

Blood pressure (BP) is a vital sign which is measured to diagnose and manage hypertension. However, current methods to measure BP use inflatable cuffs which cause discomfort and limit the frequency at which measurements can be made, or intra-arterial catheters which are invasive and pose infection risks. Here, we propose and evaluate the use of Diffuse Speckle Pulsatile Flowmetry (DSPF) as a cuffless BP measurement method to address these limitations. DSPF is a laser speckle-based technique which simultaneously records blood flow rate and blood volume (i.e. photoplethysmography or PPG) signals from relatively deep vascular tissue. Using information from these signals, we studied DSPFs effectiveness in measuring systolic BP (SBP) and diastolic BP (DBP) through an outpatient study in which 133 patients were recruited, and in measuring beat-to-beat BP waveforms through an inpatient study in which two patients were recruited. In the outpatient study, the DSPF method was able to achieve mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 4.17 mmHg and 2.42 mmHg for SBP and DBP respectively compared to conventional cuff-based methods. It was also able to fulfil the requirements of the AAMI/ESH/ISO 81060-2:2018 standard for BP measurement devices and attain an "A" grade according to the British Hypertension Society grading scheme. For the inpatient study, it produced BP waveforms which had MAEs of 2.35 mmHg and 3.06 mmHg compared to arterial-line measurements for the two patients, respectively. Compared to PPG which has been studied more extensively as a cuffless BP measurement method, we found through ablation studies that DSPF was able to reach significantly lower MAEs and hence better accuracies. DSPF augments the performance of PPG-only methods by leveraging additional information from the blood flow rate signal, and we therefore find it to be a superior cuffless BP measurement method which can potentially be used in outpatient, inpatient, and remote settings.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

A mathematical study of the excess growth rate

arXiv:2510.25740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The excess growth rate, defined as the gap in Jensen's inequality for the logarithm, is a fundamental functional in portfolio theory. In this paper, we present a mathematical study motivated by information theory. We begin by establishing its properties and showing that it has rich connections with information theoretic concepts such as the Helmholtz free energy, L. Campbell's measure of average code length and large deviations. Our main results consist of three axiomatic characterization theorems of the excess growth rate, in terms of (i) the relative entropy, (ii) the gap in Jensen's inequality, and (iii) the logarithmic divergence that generalizes the Bregman divergence. Furthermore, we study maximization of the excess growth rate and compare it with the growth optimal portfolio. Our results not only provide theoretical justifications of the significance of the excess growth rate, but also establish new connections between information theory and quantitative finance.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Maternal BMI and Placental Transcriptomic Changes: A Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression at the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Objective: Maternal body mass index (BMI) is often used as a measure of metabolic status and increased or decreased maternal BMI is associated with a heightened risk of cardiometabolic diseases across generations. The placenta mediates these maternal metabolic cues; however, its genome wide transcriptional adaptations in response to maternal BMI remain incompletely defined. Methods: To delineate placental genes, pathways, and interaction clusters whose transcript abundance varies with maternal prepregnancy BMI through a genome wide meta analysis of human placental RNA sequencing datasets. Placental RNA seq reads from four publicly available cohorts (n=146) were mapped to the GRCh38 reference genome and differentially expressed genes were identified. An independent microarray cohort (n=19) was reanalysed separately to facilitate cross platform comparison. Functional enrichment employed GO, KEGG, and STRING protein interaction resources. Results: Meta-analysis of 146 RNA seq samples identified eight genes with genome-wide significance in placentae from underweight pregnancies including inflammatory signaling gene MAP4K1 and metabolic enzyme PSPH, while overweight and obese categories revealed nominally significant differential expression. KEGG analysis demonstrated significant downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation with increasing maternal BMI, and protein-protein interaction networks revealed inflammatory mediators as central nodes in overweight and obese groups. Independent microarray validation corroborated key findings, including consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation in obesity. Conclusion: Maternal BMI is associated with placental transcriptomic signatures involving inflammatory, metabolic, and hormonal pathways, with consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation across platforms. This genome-wide meta-analysis provides a reproducible catalogue of BMI-responsive placental transcripts that may contribute to developmental programming of offspring health.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

RoVE: Rotary Value Embeddings Attention for Relative Position-dependent Value Pathways

arXiv:2606.11275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) make attention scores position-relative but leave the value pathway position-blind: the message sent by a value token is the same regardless of its distance from the query. We propose RoVE, a parameter-free modification that makes values position-sensitive by rotating them simultaneously with keys, and show that it turns RoPE attention into attentive convolution. This new perspective unifies several independent formulations of the same operation across computer vision, robotics, and modern LLM architectures. Trained 124M and 354M GPT-2 models show consistent empirical gains over RoPE on few-shot in-context learning, out-of-distribution perplexity, and long-context retrieval, with the clearest improvements on tasks that require long-range aggregation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Tutorial on World Models and Physical AI

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12783v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World modeling is emerging as a central principle for building intelligent systems capable of prediction, reasoning, and decision making. A central distinction can be drawn between explicit world models, which learn structured dynamics for rollout-based reasoning and planning, and implicit world models, which encode predictive structure within scalable learned representations. These complementary paradigms provide a foundation for physical AI in domains such as robotics and autonomous driving, enabling intelligence beyond reactive control under real-world constraints. Recent foundation models further suggest a pathway toward unified systems integrating perception, prediction, and action. Despite rapid progress, major challenges remain in hierarchical reasoning, long-horizon planning, and autonomous goal formation, which are critical for advancing toward artificial general intelligence. This tutorial presents a coherent framework in which diverse world modeling approaches are unified through shared predictive structure and differentiated by how such structure is represented and exploited.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sticky CIR process with potential: invariant measure and exact sampling

Authors:

arXiv:2605.13648v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the sticky Cox–Ingersoll–Ross (CIR) process in one dimension, a diffusion on $[0,\infty)$ with a sticky boundary condition at the origin, arising as the marginal process in a sparse Bayesian inference framework based on Hadamard–Langevin dynamics. For the parameter range $\delta\in(1,2)$, in which the origin is accessible but not absorbing, we prove well-posedness of the process and uniqueness of its invariant measure, which is a mixture of a point mass at zero and a weighted gamma-type density on the interior. We derive an explicit Green's function for the resolvent in terms of confluent hypergeometric functions, and use this to construct an exact sampler for the invariant measure in the zero-potential case. For a non-trivial potential $G$, we establish existence and uniqueness of the tilted invariant measure via a Girsanov change of measure, and develop two sampling algorithms: a Metropolis–Hastings corrected sampler that targets the invariant measure exactly, and a cheaper, biased unadjusted Langevin algorithm (ULA) for a boundary-clamped variant of which we prove a first-order expansion of the stationary bias with an explicit constant: the leading error is a rank-one transfer of mass $K_\star h|\log h| $ onto the atom, so the total-variation bias is of exact order $h|\log h | $ – independent of $\delta$ – whenever the potential has nonzero boundary drift. Numerical experiments confirm the predicted behaviour: the Metropolis–Hastings sampler achieves the target invariant measure at all step sizes, while the ULA bias follows the proven first-order law, including its constant.