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

Unassigned Agents in Compilation-based Multi-agent Path Finding

Authors:
Pavel Surynek↗

arXiv:2606.15797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compilation-based techniques represent an important stream of solvers for multi-agent path finding (MAPF) due to their modularity and adaptability for non-standard variants of the problem. While in the standard MAPF the task is to navigate all agents from their initial positions to given individual goal positions without any collision, variants where a different requirement for agents is used are also relevant. Such a variant is MAPF with unassigned agents (UA-MAPF) where some agents have the same setting as in the standard MAPF with initial positions and goals while the remaining agents have the initial position but have no goal - unassigned agents. Despite unassigned agent do not need to reach any goal position they have to be moved out of the way of the standard agents if needed which represent a specific challenge. We show in this paper that UA-MAPF can be expressed in recent compilation-based techniques for MAPF based on formulating the problem as Boolean satisfiability, namely we adapt SMT-CBS and NRF-SAT, the recent solvers based on counterexample guided abstraction refinement and non-refined abstractions.

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

From Static Inference to Dynamic Interaction: A Survey of Streaming Large Language Models

Authors:
Junlong Tong↗Zilong Wang↗YuJie Ren↗Peiran Yin↗Hao Wu↗Wei Zhang↗Xiaoyu Shen↗

Standard Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed for static inference with pre-defined inputs, which limits their applicability in dynamic, real-time scenarios. To address this gap, the streaming LLM paradigm has emerged. However, existing definitions of streaming LLMs remain fragmented, conflating streaming generation, streaming inputs, and interactive streaming architectures, while a systematic taxonomy is still lacking. This paper provides a comprehensive overview and analysis of streaming LLMs. First, we establish a unified definition of streaming LLMs based on data flow and dynamic interaction to clarify existing ambiguities. Building on this definition, we propose a systematic taxonomy of current streaming LLMs and conduct an in-depth discussion on their underlying methodologies. Furthermore, we explore the applications of streaming LLMs in real-world scenarios and outline promising research directions to support ongoing advances in streaming intelligence. We maintain a continuously updated repository of relevant papers at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/Awesome-Streaming-LLMs.

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03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

The Loss of Tension in an Infinite Membrane with Holes of Decaying Spatial Density

Authors:
Lukas Early↗Stanislav Volkov↗

arXiv:2606.17792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What is the effect of randomly removing material from an infinite stretched membrane? Under what conditions can the membrane still sustain tension? This problem was introduced by Robert Connelly in connection with applications of rigidity theory in the natural sciences, and was later studied in M. V. Menshikov, K. A. Rybnikov, and S. E. Volkov, "The loss of tension in an infinite membrane with holes distributed according to a Poisson law" (2002); a discrete version was also considered in Robert Connelly, Konstantin Rybnikov, and Stanislav Volkov, "Percolation and the Loss of Tension in an Infinite Triangular Lattice" (2001). We study a mathematical framework based on a non-homogeneous Poisson point process whose intensity $\lambda$ tends to zero at infinity. The hole shapes are i.i.d.\ and independent of their locations. We show that if the intensity does not decay too quickly, then tension is still lost throughout the whole plane, as in the homogeneous model studied in 2002. Conversely, we give sufficient conditions under which complete loss of tension does not occur. Thus, both destruction and non-destruction regimes are possible even when the intensity tends to zero, indicating a phase transition in the model. The processes studied here are closely related to bootstrap percolation.

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

OSCS-SupCon: Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning for Robust Feature Disentanglement

Authors:
Bin Wang↗Fadi Dornaika↗

Supervised Contrastive Learning (SupCon) has achieved strong performance by explicitly modeling pairwise relationships among samples. However, existing SupCon-based methods suffer from two key limitations: negative-sample dilution induced by the standard InfoNCE loss, and feature-space entanglement caused by the lack of explicit constraints separating category-relevant (common) and category-irrelevant (style) features. These limitations reduce feature discriminability and generalization ability. To address these issues, we propose OSCS-SupCon (Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning), a unified framework that combines a sigmoid-based pairwise contrastive objective with explicit orthogonality constraints. Specifically, we introduce a sigmoid-based contrastive loss with two learnable parameters, temperature and bias, which adaptively modulate pairwise decision boundaries and alleviate negative-sample dilution. Furthermore, we enforce orthogonality between common and style feature subspaces via a linear projection with ReLU nonlinearity, thereby reducing feature overlap and improving disentanglement of style-irrelevant representations. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that OSCS-SupCon consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised contrastive learning methods across multiple backbone architectures. In particular, on the fine-grained CUB200-2011 dataset with a ResNet-18 backbone, the proposed method achieves a 3.4% improvement in classification accuracy over CS-SupCon, highlighting its robustness and generalization capability. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Multi-view feature High-order Fusion for Space Weak Object Detection and Segmentation

Authors:
Weilong Guo↗Yuhan Sun↗Shengyang Li↗

Weak objects are common in images and videos of space applications. However, it is hard to learn proper representations from their limited appearance information. Inspired by multi-view learning, we develop simple multi-view attentions, treating their outputs as multi-view features. We also propose a multi-view feature high-order fusion method (MHF) to aggregate more accurate and richer features of weak objects. Our MHF extends the commonly used low-order feature fusion method to higher orders. It enhances the model's capacity to capture relevant and complementary information about weak objects. This is achieved by introducing high-order multi-view features perception and a recursive task-contribution gated selection of multi-view features. The new operation is highly flexible and customizable. It is compatible with various variants of multi-view feature representations. We conduct extensive experiments on two newly constructed space science datasets and an open, large-scale satellite video dataset. Our MHF serves as a plug-and-play module and significantly improves various vision transformers and convolution-based detection and segmentation models. We achieve all state-of-the-art accuracies on both tasks across three datasets. Our MHF can be a new basic module for visual modeling that effectively represents weak objects in terms of multi-view learning. The code will be available at https://github.com/Kingdroper/MHF.

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

Self-Preference Is Weak or Absent in Verifiable Instruction-Following Revision: A Four-Model Test Under Genuine Authorship

Authors:
William Guey↗Pierrick Bougault↗

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly review and revise text, including their own. A documented self-preference bias (models favoring their own generations when acting as judges) raises the question of whether models also resist valid corrections to their own writing. We test this in a setting where "valid" is decided not by another model but by a deterministic verifier: instruction-following revision on IFEval. A model writes a draft; the official IFEval checker confirms the draft violates a constraint and that a candidate edit fixes it; the model then accepts or rejects that edit either as the genuine in-context author or as a fresh model that sees the draft neutrally. Across four mid-tier model families and 85 author-versus-fresh comparisons, we find no detectable self-preference: authors reject verified-good fixes to their own drafts at essentially the same rate as fresh models judging the same drafts (gap -5.1 pp, 95% CI [-12.9, +2.7]). A self-skepticism hint from a smaller pilot did not replicate at scale. The one robust observation is qualitative: when authors do reject a verified-good fix, 97% of their stated reasons are flaw-catching rather than preference, that is, about the character of rejections, not an elevated rate. Effects smaller than ~13 pp cannot be excluded at this sample size.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

VPA-Guard: Defending and Benchmarking Image-to-Video Generation Against Visual Prompt Attacks

Authors:
Yining Sun↗Haoyu Kang↗Jiajun Wu↗Heng Zhang↗Danyang Zhang↗Zhenjun Zhao↗Haochen Han↗Fangming Liu↗Wai Kin Victor Chan↗Alex Jinpeng Wang↗

Recent advancements in Image-to-Video (I2V) generation have transformed input images from simple appearance references into interactive control interfaces where visual cues such as arrows, sketches, and emojis orchestrate complex video dynamics with unprecedented controllability. However, these seemingly innocuous static cues can be interpreted by models as executable temporal instructions, unfolding into harmful actions in the generated videos. Despite the severity of this threat, existing safety benchmarks remain predominantly focused on text-based and content-only image-based jailbreaks, leaving implicit visual prompt attacks insufficiently explored. To bridge this gap, we present VVA-Bench, the first systematic benchmark for evaluating video generation safety under categorized vision-centric prompt attacks. Extensive experiments on VVA-Bench demonstrate that state-of-the-art models are highly susceptible to such attacks, with Attack Success Rates (ASR) reaching 100.0\% on Wan 2.7 and 74.8\% on Veo 3.1. To mitigate these risks, we propose VPA-Guard, a retrieval-augmented and self-evolving defense framework. By leveraging few-shot reasoning to identify latent malicious intents, our method reduces the attack ASR by 44.2\% and the harmfulness score by 73.4\% on average, while maintaining the model's utility for legitimate user edits. Our work provides both a rigorous benchmark and an effective defense strategy to advance safe and socially responsible multimodal generation.

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

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Authors:
Ning Li↗Zixuan Guo↗Yan Xu↗Wenbo Fei↗Yifan Niu↗Chang Luo↗Yasheng Wang↗Weiwen Liu↗Yong Yu↗Weinan Zhang↗

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Improving Human-Robot Teamwork in Urban Search and Rescue Through Episodic Memory of Prior Collaboration

Authors:
Taewoon Kim↗Emma van Zoelen↗Mark Neerincx↗

arXiv:2606.18836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective human-robot teamwork requires robots to adapt to partners, situations, and task dynamics from the start of an interaction. In the MATRX Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) environment, people can externalize collaboration patterns (CPs) they discover during teamwork through a chat and reflection interface. We study whether a robot can use such prior team experience to become a better teammate in future interactions. To this end, we represent historical CPs as knowledge-graph episodic memories and use graph representation learning with a node-classification objective to identify a representative and effective memory for reuse. We then initialize the robot with this memory before a new collaboration episode begins. Across 20 participants and 160 round-level observations, initializing the robot with a single automatically selected prior CP increases rescue success from 25.7% to 41.3% and reduces average task time by 283 seconds. The strongest gains appear at the beginning of interaction, suggesting that reusable episodic memory can help robots enter collaboration with more effective task knowledge and support smoother early teamwork.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Guiding the development of climate counterfactuals for health impact attribution studies

Authors:
Charnley↗G. E. C↗Kotz↗Kawiecki Peralta↗Grayson↗K. M↗

Climate change detection and attribution (D&A) methods have become vital for quantifying the influence of anthropogenic forcing on the Earth's systems, including human health. Health impact attribution (HIA) studies seek to disentangle climate-driven health effects from natural variability yet are often constrained by the availability of accessible counterfactual climate scenarios. This tutorial paper presents a flexible, reproducible framework for developing counterfactual climates without reliance on computationally intensive global circulation models. We provide practical, R-based methodologies for constructing both trend-based (temperature and non-temperature) and event-based counterfactual, using a variety of techniques including model residual detrending, data-driven decomposition (e.g., Singular Spectrum Analysis and Empirical Mode Decomposition) and stochastic weather generators. The tutorial also explores the incorporation of greenhouse gas concentrations as forcing variables, rather than global mean temperature anomalies. By operationalising these methods through worked examples and an open code repository, this paper aims to build capacity within the HIA community, enhance methodological transparency, and foster interdisciplinary collaboration between climate and health researchers.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative Gait Categorization in Parkinson's Disease with and without Freezing of Gait

Authors:
Donovan↗Tripathi↗Chu↗Bernhard↗Factor↗McKay↗J. L↗Esper↗

Background: Freezing of gait (FOG) is a disabling and often underrecognized feature of Parkinsons disease (PD). Objective gait analysis may improve characterization of this motor symptom. Objective: To compare quantitative 3D gait parameters in PD with FOG (PDF) and PD without FOG (PDNF) in a routine clinical cohort. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed a sequential sample of 180 patients with PD referred for motion analysis between 2020 and 2024. All patients underwent 3D motion capture in the off-medication state. Eighteen gait outcomes spanning pace, rhythm, postural control, variability, and asymmetry domains were derived from steady-state walking tasks. FOG status was determined using physician documentation and Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinsons Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) items. Group differences between PDF (n=99) and PDNF (n=81) were evaluated using independent samples t-tests, with outcomes adjusted for disease duration and corrected for multiple comparisons. A secondary analysis among PDF compared those in Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) stage [≥]III to those in H&Y [≤]II. Results: PDF had longer disease duration, higher OFF MDS-UPDRS III scores, and higher Hoehn and Yahr stage than PDNF but were similar in age and sex. After adjusting for disease duration and multiplicity, PDF demonstrated reduced step length, stride length, and forward velocity, and greater cadence variability, while most postural control, and asymmetry measures were comparable between groups. Among PDF, advanced H&Y stage was associated with impaired pace and rhythm, similar to previous reports among PD in general. Conclusion: In this large, sequential, clinically referred cohort, FOG was associated with more advanced PD and specific impairments in pace and gait variability. These findings support comprehensive 3D gait analysis as an objective tool to better delineate FOG-related gait abnormalities and identify features that may predict FOG, informing targeted interventions.

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

COGNITION: From Evaluation to Defense against Multimodal LLM CAPTCHA Solvers

Authors:
Junyu Wang↗Changjia Zhu↗Yuanbo Zhou↗Lingyao Li↗Xu He↗Mingkui Wei↗Junjie Xiong↗

arXiv:2512.02318v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies how multimodal large language models (MLLMs) undermine the security guarantees of visual CAPTCHA. We identify the attack surface where an adversary can cheaply automate CAPTCHA solving using off-the-shelf models. We evaluate 7 representative MLLMs on 18 real-world CAPTCHA task types, measuring single-shot accuracy, success under limited retries, end-to-end latency, and per-solve cost. We further validate our findings through a supplemental external dataset and an adaptive-attacker setting with session memory, while also analyzing the impact of task-specific prompt engineering and few-shot demonstrations on solver effectiveness. We reveal that MLLMs can reliably solve recognition-oriented and low-interaction CAPTCHA tasks at human-like cost and latency, whereas tasks requiring fine-grained localization, multi-step spatial reasoning, or cross-frame consistency remain significantly harder for current models. By examining the reasoning traces of such MLLMs, we investigate the underlying mechanisms of why models succeed/fail on specific CAPTCHA puzzles and use these insights to derive defense-oriented guidelines for selecting and strengthening CAPTCHA tasks. To validate these principles, we present a proof-of-concept by hardening a vulnerable CAPTCHA type using our guidelines. We demonstrate that incorporating fine-grained localization and implicit counting reduces the success rate of state-of-the-art MLLMs from over 95\% to 0\%, confirming that structural changes can effectively mitigate the threat. We conclude by emphasizing the urgent need for CAPTCHA redesign as MLLM capabilities increasingly threaten existing defenses. Code Availability (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20406852).

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TransitNet: A Compact Attention-Augmented Deep Learning Framework for Low-SNR Transit Blind Searches

Authors:
Xingchen Yan↗Jian Ge↗Qingtian Liu↗Kevin Willis↗Quanquan Hu↗Jiapeng Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.18932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the observational incompleteness of intermediate-to-long-period Earth-size planets, we present TransitNet, a compact attention-augmented deep-learning framework for low-SNR transit blind searches. To enable realistic method development and objective threshold calibration under blind-search conditions, we develop a unified dataset construction, benchmarking, and threshold-selection framework. On recovery benchmarks constructed from unseen Kepler targets, TransitNet attains 95.2 percent accuracy in the challenging SNR range of 6 to 8 and outperforms both TLS and BLS, achieving ROC-AUC and PR-AP values of 0.974 and 0.982, respectively. In an injected Earth-size and sub-Earth-size transit recovery experiment, TransitNet achieves a recovery rate of 93.0 percent, substantially exceeding those of TLS (63.1 percent) and BLS (60.0 percent). In addition to detection, TransitNet provides attention-based estimates of transit windows and midpoints. On an independent evaluation set, 97.4 percent of injected transits are fully covered by the estimated transit window. Applied to real Kepler observations, the model successfully recovers all 34 selected confirmed Kepler planets, with a mean absolute transit midpoint error of 1.24 hours. The model combines a compact footprint of about 1.5 MB with high inference efficiency, yielding speed-ups of about 12 to 25 times relative to CPU-TLS and about 4 to 5 times relative to CPU-BLS. These results demonstrate that TransitNet provides an accurate, scalable, and computationally efficient framework for low-SNR transit blind searches in the tested regime and motivate its extension to longer-period Earth-size planet searches.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SEMIR: Topology-Preserving Graph Minors for Thin-Structure Segmentation

Authors:
Luke James Miller↗Yugyung Lee↗

Thin-structure segmentation–power lines, cracks, lane markings at 1-3 pixel width–requires preserving connectivity that standard representations preclude: patching severs continuous structures and conventional superpixels merge thin targets into background before classification. Topology-aware losses penalize connectivity breaks at the objective level but cannot recover what the representation has already destroyed. We propose SEMIR, a framework that replaces the pixel lattice with a parameterized graph minor whose contraction map preserves thin-structure connectivity under the contraction criterion. The minor collapses millions of pixels into tens or hundreds of boundary-aligned supernodes, enabling full-resolution inference without patching at scales demonstrated up to 21 MP in this paper; a lightweight GNN classifies the reduced graph and an exact map lifts predictions to pixel resolution. One pipeline–identical architecture, features, loss, and GNN hyperparameters across all dataset–matches or exceeds domain-specific baselines on TTPLA (power lines), CrackSeg9k (pavement cracks), and SkyScapes Lane (aerial markings) on Dice, IoU, and Boundary F1 while reducing mask fragmentation by at least 4.6x relative to SLIC at matched inference.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

How Seemingly Inconsequential Design Choices Dictate Performance of LLMs in Pathology

Authors:
Kian R. Weihrauch↗Thomas A. Buckley↗William Lotter↗Arjun K. Manrai↗

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are routinely used as baselines when evaluating specialized pathology models on whole-slide images (WSIs). Because WSIs exceed contemporary model context limits, LLM baselines routinely use small, high-magnification patches processed independently via majority voting, without systematic evaluation of seemingly inconsequential design choices such as patch size, patch count, and magnification. Generalist LLMs have consistently underperformed specialized systems, reinforcing the perception that domain-specific training or architectural adaptation is necessary for pathology tasks involving WSIs. Here, we conduct a systematic factorial analysis of four input design factors: inference mode, patch size, magnification, and patch count. We demonstrate that prior studies have overstated the gap between specialized models and general-purpose LLMs by choosing non-optimized input configurations. On the MultiPathQA benchmark, switching to a single balanced configuration (large patches at lower magnification, processed jointly) raises GPT-5 from 15.1% to 39.5% on cancer-type classification (TCGA) and from 38.1% to 62.9% on organ classification (GTEx). Per-task optimization yields further gains up to 43.9% (TCGA) and 71.6% (GTEx). The same configuration generalizes to two other models and to a fully held-out CPTAC cohort, where it improves Gemini 3 Flash by 23.4 percentage points without any task-specific tuning.

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16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Fast and Parallel High-Rate STAR Architecture for Megaquop Quantum Simulation

Authors:
Refaat Ismail↗Milan Kornja\v{c}a↗Hong-Ye Hu↗Nishad Maskara↗Sheng-Tao Wang↗Hengyun Zhou↗Chen Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.25011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum simulation is approaching a phase where encoding overhead, logical Clifford operations, magic-state preparation, and rotation synthesis must be optimized together for efficient implementation. Space-Time efficient Analog Rotation (STAR) architectures reduce two of these costs by preparing small-angle rotation magic states directly, and the transversal STAR variant further lowers the Clifford overhead. Existing concrete implementations, however, largely inherit the low $O(1/d^2)$ encoding rate of the surface code, while high-rate codes have not yet been integrated into comparably explicit architectures. Here, we introduce a high-rate STAR architecture for local lattice Hamiltonian simulation based on a symmetry-driven co-design of the algorithm, QEC code, and neutral-atom hardware. Translation symmetries of the target lattice determine the choice of bicycle chain codes, a tunable family of self-dual bivariate bicycle codes that natively implement Clifford gates required for lattice simulation. Disjoint logical representatives allow STAR injections to be performed in parallel on all $k$ logical qubits in a code block, amortizing resource state preparation and enabling practical post-selection rates. On neutral-atom platform, the same translation symmetry compiles the key logical operations into low-depth, hardware-native acousto-optic-deflector shifts. End-to-end estimates show that an $8 \times 8$ transverse-field Ising simulation to $T^* \approx 8 (zJ)^{-1}$ requires $2240$ physical qubits and $\sim 200$ s per shot, a $\sim 5.5\times$ space reduction relative to a surface code STAR baseline at comparable speed; for Fermi-Hubbard dynamics to $T^* \approx 4 (zt)^{-1}$, the corresponding estimates are $\sim 6300$ physical qubits and $\sim 200$ s per shot. These results provide a concrete route toward early fault-tolerant quantum simulation with high-rate codes.

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

Adjoint Method versus Physics-Informed Neural Networks in PDE-Constrained Inverse Problems

Authors:
Zhen Zhang↗Alessandro Alla↗George Em Karniadakis↗

arXiv:2606.12337v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse problems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs) are central to computational mechanics and are commonly solved by adjoint-based optimization, while physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) have emerged as a flexible alternative. Their relative performance remains difficult to assess because the two approaches are often compared under different formulations, parameterizations, optimizers, and regularization choices. We present a fair comparison of adjoint optimization and PINNs for PDE-constrained inverse problems. From a common abstract formulation, we instantiate both methods on identical domains, governing equations, observation models, and regularization terms, while matching the optimizer, unknown parameterization, and arithmetic precision wherever applicable. The benchmarks include unsteady Burgers, noisy Darcy permeability inversion, three-dimensional Allen–Cahn reaction identification, and unsteady Navier–Stokes viscosity identification. The results show that the representation of the unknown largely determines the preferred method: grid-based fields favor the discrete adjoint, whereas neural representations are native to PINNs and relevant for closure and constitutive modeling. For time-dependent problems, adjoint inversion can be dominated by trajectory storage and differentiation, while PINNs provide satisfactory reconstructions at lower cost. A PINN-warm-started adjoint strategy then recovers adjoint-level accuracy at substantially reduced cost.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Efficient reduction of stellar contamination and noise in planetary transmission spectra using neural networks

Authors:
David S. Duque-Casta\~no↗Lauren Flor-Torres↗Jorge I. Zuluaga↗

arXiv:2602.10330v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Context: The characterization of exoplanetary atmospheres has been transformed by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), whose infrared sensitivity enables transmission spectroscopy at unprecedented precision. However, stellar heterogeneities (e.g., spots and faculae) remain a dominant source of contamination that can bias atmospheric retrievals if not properly corrected. Aims: We present a methodology for reducing stellar contamination and instrument-specific noise from exoplanet transmission spectra using neural networks, in particular the so-called Denoising AutoEncoders (DAE). Our goals are to enable fast, accurate corrections that improve the reliability of atmospheric parameter retrievals and to promote the use of unsupervised algorithms for efficient data processing. Methods: We designed and trained DAE architectures using large synthetic datasets of terrestrial (TRAPPIST-1e analogues) and sub-Neptune (K2-18b analogues) planets. Atmospheric retrieval experiments were then performed on contaminated spectra in order to compare our deep-learning approach against standard correction methods in terms of accuracy and computational cost. Results: Our autoencoders successfully reconstruct uncontaminated spectra, preserving essential molecular features even in low-S/N regimes. In retrieval tests, the denoising autoencoder pre-processing reduces bias in retrieved abundance parameters compared to uncorrected observations. Notably, our method matches the accuracy of simultaneous stellar-contamination fitting while maintaining a much lower computational cost, typically one order of magnitude smaller. Conclusions: These results demonstrate that DAEs outperform conventional correction methods in computational efficiency while maintaining high accuracy, paving the way for their integration into future atmospheric characterization pipelines for both rocky and giant exoplanets.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MooMIns – Monocular 3D Reconstruction and Object Pose Estimation from Multiple Instances

Authors:
Robert Langend\"orfer↗Markus Hillemann↗Markus Ulrich↗

Simultaneous 3D reconstruction and 6D object pose estimation from a single monocular image is an inherently ill-posed problem. In industrial settings, however, multiple instances of an object are often randomly arranged in bins, implicitly providing several views of the same object within a single image. We show that this implicit multi-view geometry can be exploited to simultaneously reconstruct the object in 3D and estimate the 6D pose of each visible object instance. We present MooMIns, a new Gaussian-splatting-based approach that inverts the original Gaussian splatting formulation: instead of rendering a single scene from multiple cameras, we render multiple object instances from a single camera. Our method is initialized with SAM3 instance segmentation masks and a modified Structure from Motion (SfM) pipeline. In contrast to learned monocular depth estimation, we perform true geometry-based reconstruction from image evidence, avoiding hallucinations caused by training data priors. We evaluate MooMIns on synthetic and real bin-picking scenarios, and demonstrate accurate reconstruction of previously unseen objects as well as reliable pose estimation of individual instance

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel: Communicating through noisy closed timelike curves

Authors:
Kaiyuan Ji↗Seth Lloyd↗Mark M. Wilde↗

arXiv:2509.08965v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the capacity of a quantum channel for retrocausal communication, where messages are transmitted backward in time, from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past, through a noisy postselected closed timelike curve mathematically represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities, and we show that the corresponding asymptotic capacities are equal to the average and sum, respectively, of the channel's max-information and its regularized Doeblin information. This endows these information measures with a novel operational interpretation. Furthermore, our characterization can be generalized beyond quantum channels to all completely positive maps. This imposes information-theoretic limits on transmitting messages via postselected-teleportation-like mechanisms with arbitrary initial- and final-state boundary conditions, including those considered in various black-hole final-state models.

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

Faithful Action-unit Causal Reasoning for Counterfactually Faithful Emotion Explanations

Authors:
Van Thong Huynh↗Hong Hai Nguyen↗Thuy Pham↗Trong Nghia Nguyen↗Soo-Hyung Kim↗

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

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22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Whole-genome duplication shaped cell-type evolution in the vertebrate brain

Authors:
Yuanzhen Zhu↗

The complex brains of vertebrates have more cell types than those of their closest relatives. Whole-genome duplications (WGDs) occurred during early vertebrate evolution1, but it is unclear whether the duplicated genes (ohnologues) facilitated cell-type evolution. Here using brain single-cell transcriptomes from five chordates—human2, mouse3, lizard4, lamprey5 and amphioxus—we report that many cell-type families with conserved core transcription factors in vertebrates do not show one-to-one homology with amphioxus. Moreover, ohnologues, particularly those from the first WGD, were more important than small-scale duplication paralogues for vertebrate cell-type evolution. To explore whether ohnologues are mechanistically important for this process, we predicted ancestral cell-type states and compared them to amphioxus and experimentally investigated macroglia. The findings indicate that ohnologues had a role in early vertebrate cell-type diversification. Moreover, by examining paralogue expression across cell types and species, we show that expression changes were mainly driven by dosage selection and subfunctionalization. We also link ohnologues to cellular diversity at different anatomical and cell-type scales. Our findings demonstrate the importance of WGDs for the evolution of early vertebrate brain complexity and highlight that the resultant ohnologues continued to capacitate cell-type evolution long after they were formed. Analyses of brain single-cell transcriptomes from human, mouse, lizard, lamprey and amphioxus reveal that duplicated genes (ohnologues) played a pivotal part in early vertebrate cell-type diversification.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

High-Risk Anti-Seizure Medication Use in Childbearing-Age People with Epilepsy in a Taenia solium Endemic Region

Authors:
Allen↗S. E↗Wardle↗M. T↗Moyano↗L. M↗Vilchez↗Bustos↗J. A↗Garcia↗H. H↗O'Neal↗…

Background: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy in regions endemic for Taenia solium, where neurocysticercosis (NCC) is highly prevalent, represent a vulnerable population due to the elevated burden of epilepsy and resource limitations. Clinical practice in these settings remains poorly characterized. This study characterized anti-seizure medication (ASM) prescribing patterns by medication risk profiles among people of childbearing potential with epilepsy in Northern Peru, a region highly endemic for T. solium. Methods: Participants were drawn from a prospective, population-based epilepsy cohort in Tumbes, Peru (2006 to 2020). The analytic population included females with epilepsy aged 15 to 49 years. The primary outcome was pregnancy-associated ASM risk of congenital malformations and adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes. ASMs were classified as ''Established Low Risk'' (lamotrigine, levetiracetam), ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' (carbamazepine, phenobarbital, phenytoin), and ''Established High Risk'' (valproic acid). Prescription patterns were examined in relation to demographic and clinical characteristics. Results: Among 1,975 individuals with epilepsy, 685 were people of childbearing potential. Approximately 34.9% met criteria for probable or definite NCC. Most ASM prescriptions were in the ''Possible Risk/Inadequate Data'' category (87.0%), and 12.8% received ''Established High Risk'' medications. In multivariable analysis, high-risk prescribing was associated with prior ASM use and polytherapy. Discussion: People of childbearing potential with epilepsy were predominantly treated with carbamazepine, phenytoin, phenobarbital, and valproate, reflecting local ASM availability. Despite evidence supporting lamotrigine and levetiracetam in pregnancy, prescribing patterns reflect local formulary constraints. These findings highlight a gap between guideline recommendations and real-world prescribing in resource-limited settings, underscoring the need for context-specific treatment strategies.

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

Heuresis: Search Strategies for Autonomous AI Research Agents Across Quality, Diversity and Novelty

Authors:
Antonis Antoniades↗Deepak Nathani↗Ritam Saha↗Alfonso Amayuelas↗Ivan Bercovich↗Zhaotian Weng↗Vignesh Baskaran↗Kunal Bhatia↗William Yang Wang↗

arXiv:2606.25198v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous AI Research promises to accelerate the scientific progress of machine learning. To realise this goal, current Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents need to go beyond just writing code, to mastering the exploration of simultaneously performant, diverse and novel ideas. To this end, we introduce Heuresis, a framework that abstracts the research pipeline into a set of general and composable primitives, enabling open-ended scientific exploration in machine learning research. We implement six search strategies: a greedy baseline, two archive-based (MAP-Elites, Go-Explore), one evolutionary (Islands), and two divergent (Curiosity, Omni), and evaluate them across three axes (Quality, Diversity, and Novelty) on three domains (LLM Pretraining, On-Policy RL, and Model Unlearning), totalling 3,222 scored runs. We find that completely novel ideas are rare. No idea across our scored runs is rated as "Original", and only a few achieve only "Minor Similarity" to prior work. Moreover, novel ideas never approach the highest-performing known-recipe scores. Across all six strategies and three domains, only one such idea lands in the top-10 by quality. We also observed agents resorting to a variety of reward-hacking techniques during execution (40 confirmed fabrications across 1,628 scored runs), and detecting them was necessary to keep the search faithful to the task. Our results show that while current search and Quality-Diversity strategies enable us to steer where the generated ideas land on the quality, diversity, and novelty axes, they do not expand the quality-novelty frontier. Bridging this gap is the open challenge towards the ultimate goal of perpetual, autonomous scientific progress. Code is available at github.com/a-antoniades/Heuresis.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Clinically Aligned Geometry Constraints for Robust IVUS Vessel Boundary Segmentation

Authors:
Yunshu Chen↗Litao Yang↗Giuseppe Di Giovanni↗Jordan Tan↗Deval Mehta↗Andrew Lin↗Derek Chew↗Masasi Fujino↗Julie Butters↗Stephen Nicholls↗Zongyuan Ge↗Kyung Hoon Cho↗…

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) lumen and external elastic membrane (EEM) segmentation is important for quantitative coronary plaque burden assessment. Errors in lumen or EEM delineation directly propagate to plaque area, plaque burden and geometric measurements. However, standard methods prioritising overlap scores often suffer from boundary drift and topology errors, leading to inaccurate clinical measurements. We present GeoCat, a geometry-consistent network that processes 5-frame IVUS clips using dual Cartesian-polar encoders with cross-domain attention and temporal fusion. A differentiable geometry consistency loss directly supervises clinically relevant descriptors including diameters, orientations, and cross-sectional areas. The model is trained on 12,242 annotated frames from 146 patients acquired with two commercial IVUS systems. We evaluate performance using both segmentation accuracy and plaque-relevant clinical metrics, including Dice/IoU, boundary measures(95HD (mm), ASSD), topology violation rate, and clinical geometry errors (dmax/dmin, angles, and areas). On our dataset, GeoCat achieves a Dice of 0.93, reduces 95HD to 0.14 mm, and lowers topology violations to 1.0%. Importantly, it significantly improves geometric fidelity, yielding diameter errors of 0.13-0.16 mm and angular errors of ~8 degrees, supporting reliable plaque burden quantification.

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