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

CrossMaps: Confidence-Aware Open-Vocabulary Semantic Mapping for Rover Navigation

Authors:
Jan-Niklas Klein↗Sona Ghahremani↗Christian Medeiros Adriano↗Holger Giese↗

arXiv:2606.16935v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rovers rely on perception to maintain spatial maps that encode both objects and sensor quality (e.g., range reliability, lighting artifacts, data density), guiding data fusion, embedding updates, and navigation under partial observability. To study these coupled perception-navigation processes, we present CrossMaps, a real-time confidence-aware open-vocabulary semantic mapping pipeline that constructs language-queryable maps from RGB-D data. Building on VLMaps-style approaches, CrossMaps integrates multi-scale CLIP embeddings with confidence-aware fusion and a dual-memory architecture consisting of Short-Term Memory (STM) and Long-Term Memory (LTM). The STM aggregates noisy visual observations using geometric, semantic, and temporal confidence cues, while confident and coherent cells are promoted to the LTM as persistent semantic landmarks. Designed for deployment with a Jetson Orin-powered UGV alongside SLAM, CrossMaps runs in real time and produces semantic heatmaps that can be queried with natural language to guide rover navigation.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reward hacking in physical reinforcement learning revealed by turbulent drag reduction

Authors:
Giorgio Maria Cavallazzi↗Miguel P\'erez-Cuadrado↗Alfredo Pinelli↗

arXiv:2606.06227v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A reinforcement-learning agent maximises its reward, which can diverge from the outcome its designer intended. In physical control the reward rarely closes that gap, and drag reduction in wall turbulence makes it concrete. A mass-conservation projection couples agents' outputs and erases the per-agent credit the policy gradient needs; a memoryless policy cannot resolve the slow near-wall cycle it acts on; and a pressure-gradient reward pays for nominal drag reduction by pumping power through the wall. Two degenerate controllers achieve large drag reductions while total dissipation rises, so the reported figure can mask a more wasteful flow. We trace each fault to its cause and fix it: a differentiable projection that restores credit, a recurrent policy with a widened sensing stencil, and a reward scored on the true wall power. The corrected controller acts on the flow within a closed energy budget, earning a conservative $17\%$ under honest accounting.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

What's Old is New Again: Classical Dimensionality Reduction for Efficient Saliency-Guided Biometric Attack Detection

Authors:
Samuel Webster↗Walter Scheirer↗

Saliency-guided training is a paradigm in visual recognition that encourages models to focus on the most relevant image regions during learning. While its application in biometric presentation attack detection (PAD) has shown strong benefits in robustness and generalization, adoption is often limited by the high cost, domain specificity, and limited scalability of existing saliency acquisition methods, such as human annotations over a limited dataset. We present a novel, cost-efficient, and highly-scalable approach to saliency acquisition using maps inspired by classical dimensionality reduction techniques: PCA and LDA. Our proposed methods generate saliency maps directly from raw training data, requiring no human annotation nor domain knowledge. We contextualize the effectiveness of these saliency sources in three saliency-explored domains (iris PAD, synthetic face detection, fingerprint PAD) and demonstrate its scalability in two saliency-novel domains (fingerprint vein PAD and ID card PAD). Across all domains tested, models trained using dimensionality reduction-sourced saliency maps exceed baseline and sometimes SOTA saliency methods without any resource investment or domain-specific tooling. Our findings overcome an important yet unaddressed barrier to saliency-guided training for biometric attack detection and beyond.

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

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

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

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

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Merged amplitude encoding for Chebyshev quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks: trading qubits for circuit executions

Authors:
Hikaru Wakaura↗

arXiv:2603.02818v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks based on Chebyshev polynomials (CCQKAN) evaluate each edge activation function as a quantum inner product, creating a trade-off between qubit count and the number of circuit executions per forward pass. We introduce merged amplitude encoding, a technique that packs the element-wise products of all $n$ input-edge vectors for a given output node into a single amplitude state, reducing circuit executions by a factor of $n$ at a cost of only 1–2 additional qubits relative to the sequential baseline. The merged and original circuits compute the same mathematical quantity exactly; the open question is whether they remain equally trainable within a gradient-based optimization loop. We address this question through numerical experiments on 10 network configurations under ideal, finite-shot, and noisy simulation conditions, comparing original, parameter-transferred, and independently initialized merged circuits over 16 random seeds. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests show no significant difference between the independently initialized merged circuit and the original ($p > 0.05$ in 28 of 30 comparisons), while parameter transfer yields significantly lower loss under ideal conditions ($p < 0.001$ in 9 of 10 configurations). On 10-class digit classification with the $8\times8$ MNIST dataset using a one-vs-all strategy, original and merged circuits achieve comparable test accuracies of 53–78\% with no significant difference in any configuration. These results provide empirical evidence that merged amplitude encoding preserves trainability under the simulation conditions tested.

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

Timestep Rescheduling in Diffusion Inversion

Authors:
Shangquan Sun↗Ting Gong↗Zhirui Liu↗Jiamin Wu↗Runkai Zhao↗Mianxin Liu↗Wenqi Ren↗Xiaochun Cao↗

Diffusion inversion, which maps images back to the Gaussian latent space of a diffusion model, is a critical task for image reconstruction and editing. While DDIM enables fast deterministic inversion, it inherently introduces deviations that accumulate into noticeable inversion errors. Existing methods often address this by solving a fixed-point problem but largely overlook how the selection of the diffusion timestep in the noise scheduler influences inversion fidelity. In this work, we reveal that the deviation scale in diffusion inversion is strongly dependent on the timestep size, and exhibits a parabolic trend, with larger errors concentrated at both small and large timesteps. Based on this finding, we propose a simple yet effective nonuniform timestep scheduler that integrates a global rescaling with a local dynamic programming based rescheduling, enabling a strategic allocation of computational effort that minimizes the overall inversion error and preserves higher inversion accuracy. Our method serves as an off-the-shelf enhancement for existing inversion techniques and requires no extra parameters or computational overhead. Through extensive experiments, we verify that integrating our scheduler consistently boosts the performance of existing inversion methods, achieving superior results in image reconstruction and editing.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

Authors:
Taos Transue↗Bohan Chen↗So Takao↗Bao Wang↗

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

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08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Order statistics for edge eigenvectors of Wigner matrices

Authors:
Zhigang Bao↗Teodor Bucht↗Kevin Schnelli↗

arXiv:2606.17425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we establish a general comparison theorem for the order statistics of the edge eigenvectors for generalized Wigner matrices. Consequently, we derive the Gumbel law for the maximal edge eigenvector component and prove the universality of the Gaussian fluctuations of the order statistics in an intermediate regime close to the maximum. In addition, our comparison result also implies a quantitative first order estimate for moderately small order statistics.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FairGen: Preference-Aligned Diffusion for Demographically Equitable Medical Image Synthesis

Authors:
Zhimin Li↗Ruichen Zhang↗Zhen Tan↗Howard J Aizenstein↗Jingtong Hu↗Tianlong Chen↗

Medical imaging is central to modern diagnostics, and artificial intelligence (AI) systems are increasingly used to support image-based analysis by improving efficiency, accuracy, and access to care. However, inequities in healthcare access and differential disease prevalence create severe demographic imbalances in clinical image data. Such imbalances are compounded by the fact that diseases can manifest with distinct features across demographic groups, rendering certain phenotypic presentations naturally rare. AI models trained on such imbalanced data risk perpetuating diagnostic bias and widening healthcare disparities. Here we introduce FairGen, a fairness-aware diffusion framework that synthesizes demographically balanced medical images while preserving pathology-relevant visual features. By embedding physician-aligned preferences into the generation process, FairGen improves subgroup coverage during synthesis and downstream classification. Applied to dermatology, radiology, and neuroimaging benchmark tasks, FairGen achieves fairness improvements of 95.9% for skin images, 80.0% for chest radiography, and 35.2% for brain MRI, while maintaining competitive diagnostic accuracy relative to models trained on original clinical data. Clinician-facing expert review and external validation on independent cohorts further support that these gains extend beyond standard fidelity metrics and are not confined to the original in-distribution datasets.

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

Shrinkage priors for Bayesian Substitute Confounders

Authors:
Yordan P. Raykov↗Hengrui Luo↗Justin D. Strait↗Wasiur R. KhudaBukhsh↗

arXiv:2606.18535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-cause observational studies contain information about unmeasured confounding through the dependence structure among causes. However, literal imputation of the unobserved confounder is often more complex than learning a lower-dimensional substitute score that preserves the shared assignment variation needed for stable causal adjustment. The deconfounder (Wang and Blei, 2019) and related substitute confounder methods exploit this idea, but flexible assignment models can fit the joint distribution of the causes while producing scores that over-encode the treatment vector, collapse overlap, or capture single-cause variation. We develop a Bayesian factor assignment framework for learning sparse substitute confounders that retain coarse multi-cause dependence with shrinkage priors. The theory is stated at the level of posterior concentration, factor score contraction, and overlap-preserving assignment geometry and therefore does not rely on a particular shrinkage prior. Under these conditions, the proposed regression-adjusted estimators are consistent for mean potential outcomes when the corresponding latent variable identification assumptions hold. Shrinkage priors provide a natural tool for latent structural learning: they favour low-dimensional factors supported by multiple causes, discourage effectively single-cause factors, and induce an ordering of the latent factors through progressive shrinkage. Synthetic experiments illustrate the roles of signal strength, outcome validity, and geometry-aware regularization. In an Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline analysis, sparse substitute scores recover much of the adjustment obtained by directly conditioning on invasive cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers, while collapse diagnostics identify when fitted factors reduce to individual observed measurements.

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11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Good recycling starts at home — and benefits the world

Authors: Unknown Author

New research supports the value of household-level waste separation. But policies must also carefully consider consumer behaviours to maximize the quality of material collected. New research supports the value of household-level waste separation. But policies must also carefully consider consumer behaviours to maximize the quality of material collected.

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

BRITE: A Benchmark for Reliable and Interpretable T2V Evaluation on Implausible Scenarios

Authors:
Advait Tilak↗Jiwon Choi↗Nazifa Mouli↗Wei Le↗

The rapid advancement of photorealistic Text-to-Video (T2V) generation brings in an urgent need for up-to-date evaluation methods. Existing benchmarks largely overlooked implausible scenarios and do not measure audio-visual alignment. We introduce BRITE, the first framework that unifies (1) implausible prompting, (2) fine-grained assessment of audio-visual consistency, and (3) QA-based interpretable evaluation into a comprehensive T2V benchmark. Unlike fully automated Multimodal LLM-based pipelines, which are prone to hallucination and prompt ambiguity, BRITE guarantees reliability through a rigorous human-in-the-loop protocol for benchmark creation. Evaluating five state-of-the-art models (Sora 2, Veo 3.1, Runway Gen4.5, Pixverse V5.5, and Qwen3Max), we reveal a critical performance gap: while models excel at static object composition, they exhibit significant degradation in object-action binding and audio-visual synchronization. Our framework offers the community a reliable, interpretable benchmark and evaluation framework that can detect and locate limitations in the next generation of T2V models, especially for off-manifold prompts

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

SAAS: Self-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Over-Search Mitigation in Agentic Search

Authors:
Yunbo Tang↗Chengyi Yang↗Shiyu Liu↗Zhishang Xiang↗Zerui Chen↗Qinggang Zhang↗Jinsong Su↗

Agentic search enables LLMs to solve complex multi-hop questions through iterative reasoning and external search. Despite the effectiveness, these systems often suffer from a critical limitation in practice: agents fail to recognize their own knowledge boundaries, blindly triggering searches when internal knowledge suffices and failing to terminate search even when adequate evidence has been collected. The lack of self-awareness leads to severe over-search, incurring substantial inference latency and prohibitive computational cost. To this end, we propose SAAS, a novel RL framework designed to cultivate dynamic self-awareness that precisely regulates search behavior without compromising accuracy. SAAS introduces three key components: (i) a search boundary modeling mechanism, which identifies the search boundary under the evolving policy by contrasting search-disabled and search-enabled rollouts; (ii) a boundary-aware reward module, which translates this boundary awareness into trajectory-level penalties, suppressing unnecessary and redundant searches; and (iii) a stage-wise optimization strategy, which leverages a sequential curriculum to prioritize reasoning over search regularization, thereby avoiding reward hacking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SAAS substantially reduces over-search, while maintaining accuracy. Our code and implementation details are released at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/SAAS.

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

R2RDreamer: 3D-aware Data Augmentation for Spatially-generalized 2D Manipulation Policies

Authors:
Xiuwei Xu↗Haowen Sun↗Angyuan Ma↗Yiwei Zhang↗Zhenyu Wu↗Xiaofeng Wang↗Bingyao Yu↗Zheng Zhu↗Jie Zhou↗Jiwen Lu↗

Spatial generalization is critical for imitation-learned manipulation policies, but achieving it typically requires scaling demonstrations across diverse object poses, robot configurations, and camera viewpoints. Data augmentation from a few source demonstrations offers a practical alternative to costly real-world collection. Simulation-based augmentation can create controllable variation, but requires complex environment and object setup and may introduce a sim-to-real gap. Recent real-to-real methods avoid these issues by jointly editing 3D observations and action trajectories from real demonstrations, yet they still rely on strong 3D scene parsing and geometry completion, and often produce observations tailored to 3D pointcloud policies rather than RGB-based 2D policies. We propose R2RDreamer, a real-to-real demonstration augmentation framework that preserves the geometric consistency of 3D action-observation editing while moving visual completion to 2D video space. Specifically, R2RDreamer first performs lightweight 3D augmentation by editing incomplete object pointclouds and end-effector trajectories in a shared 3D frame; it then projects the edited scene into masked image-space control videos with occlusion-aware reasoning and uses a dense-control image-to-video model to complete temporally coherent RGB observations. Experiments on spatially shifted manipulation tasks with both 2D diffusion-style policies and vision-language-action policies show that R2RDreamer improves spatial generalization from limited source demonstrations, with analyses validating the contributions of 3D editing, occlusion-aware projection, and video completion.

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15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Metrics for Evaluating Biological AI Model Predictive Accuracy at the Data-Substrate Level

Authors:
Ewing↗M. A↗

Reports in the biological literature disagree on whether a given model can predict a biological outcome from a given data sample — one study finding a model capable, another, on the same kind of data, finding it is not. This is particularly a challenge in relation to LLMs–where the models are large and opaque, with weights and training data inaccessible.textbf{ }Such disagreements cannot be settled by directly inspecting the model. To address this challenge, we considertextbf{ }an alternative approach: assessing whether the data sample is adequate to support the prediction asserted. For a given dataset, its substrate — the underlying structure of the data — determines what any model can recover, independent of architecture or capacity. At the same time, predicting the present state of a biological process and predicting the direction of its future change are different tasks; the second is supportable among AI models only where the data encode direction as determinable from the state — a property we call encoding — and is unsupportable where the same observed state precedes change in opposite directions — a property we call non-identifiability, in the informational rather than the statistical sense. We introduce two generic metrics, Predictive Blindness Risk (PBR) and Prediction Indeterminacy Measure (PIM), that evaluate a data substrate for predictive accuracy directly — without access to model weights, architecture, or training data — and locate the regions of a data substrate where a predictive claim can be supported and where it cannot. Using human biological subjects, we employ the Yale Brain Metastases Longitudinal Data (1,430 human subjects; 11,892 MRI studies; four sequences) and show that direction of change was non-identifiable across regions encompassing the majority of transitions; a nonlinear AI model gained essentially nothing over majority-direction prediction there while recovering direction near-perfectly where the state encoded it; and model accuracy tracked data-substrate resolvability continuously (Spearman {rho} = -0.95 to -1.00). The metrics adjudicate, before any model is trusted and from the data alone, where claims of predictive accuracy — of state, or of the law of change — can be supported.

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16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-14

Antibody fine specificity correlates with protection from malaria for the RTS,S vaccine in young African children: A post hoc analysis of a phase IIb randomised controlled trial

Authors:
Alessia Hysa↗

by Alessia Hysa, D. Herbert Opi, Joshua Waterhouse, Sandra Chishimba, Jessica L. Horton, Natalie Kingston, Hans J. Netter, David Wetzel, Michael Piontek, Gaoqian Feng, Jahit Sacarlal, Carlota Dobaño, Liriye Kurtovic, James G. Beeson Background The RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine was recently approved for implementation in children, but only provides modest and short-lived efficacy against malaria. RTS,S targets a portion of the Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) circumsporozoite protein (CSP), comprising the central NANP-repeat region and C-terminal domain. Mechanisms of immunity and correlates of protection for the RTS,S vaccine are not well defined, hindering progress towards generating highly effective CSP-based vaccines. Methods and findings We investigated epitope specificity and cross-reactivity of vaccine-induced antibodies to six peptides representing CSP epitopes in the N-terminal and central NANP-repeat region. We evaluated antibody reactivity in preclinical mouse vaccine studies, among CSP-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and in a large RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial in young children 1–4 years old (n = 735).The preclinical mouse vaccine studies and CSP-specific mAbs were used to initially evaluate IgG responses to the six peptides. Mice immunised with the central NANP-repeat region had IgG with cross-reactivity to an epitope in the N-terminal region. Additionally, we demonstrated that a single CSP-specific mAb could display cross-reactivity to several CSP epitopes. Through post hoc quantification and analysis of antibody responses in the RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial, we found that a subset of children generated IgG with specificity for a short NANP-repeat epitope (NANP2; amino acid sequence: NANPNANP) and cross-reactivity to an N-terminal epitope (J1; amino acid sequence: KQPADGNPDPNANPN). Notably, children with high IgG responses to NANP2 and J1 had a significantly reduced risk of clinical malaria, compared to children with low responses (IgG to NANP2 (aHR: 0.838 (95% CI [0.716, 0.981]; p = 0.028)) and J1 (aHR: 0.718 (95% CI [0.611, 0.844]; p 

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

Variance Reduction for Non-Log-Concave Sampling with Applications to Inverse Problems

Authors:
M. Berk Sahin↗Ahmet Ege Tanriverdi↗Behzad Sharif↗Abolfazl Hashemi↗

arXiv:2606.16257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sampling from high-dimensional, non-log-concave distributions with unnormalized densities is a fundamental challenge in machine learning, particularly when the exact gradient of the potential is unavailable and must be approximated via stochastic gradients that exhibit high variance under a fixed budget of gradient computations per iteration. Although variance reduction techniques such as SGD with momentum, STORM, and PAGE have demonstrated improved convergence properties in non-convex optimization, their implications for sampling from non-log-concave distributions remain largely unexplored. In this work, we develop the first unified analysis of these estimators for sampling from non-log-concave distributions. We establish improved non-asymptotic convergence rates in $\varepsilon$-relative Fisher information and, under a Poincaré inequality assumption, in squared total variation distance, and further prove weak convergence to the target distribution. We extend our analysis to solving inverse problems with score-based generative priors. We empirically validate our theory and demonstrate that, under a fixed gradient computations per iteration, variance-reduction techniques consistently improve sample quality in two standard imaging applications.

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

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

Authors:
Dake Bu↗Wei Huang↗Andi Han↗Hau-San Wong↗Qingfu Zhang↗Taiji Suzuki↗Atsushi Nitanda↗

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

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

Direction-Conditioned Policies via Compositional Subgoal Scoring for Online Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Swaminathan S K↗Damiya Gondha↗Theyanesh Eswaramoorthy Rajahkrishnan↗Aritra Hazra↗

arXiv:2606.16515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory implies that the optimal goal-conditioned action depends on the goal only through the gradient of the goal-reaching distance at the current state, yet standard online GCRL still conditions the actor on the raw goal – a signal that is geometrically uninformative when the goal is far from the data distribution. We propose Direction-Conditioned Policies (DCP), a fully online method that decomposes goal-reaching into two components sharing one InfoNCE representation $\psi$: a subgoal-scoring step that selects a visited state $z_t$ aligned with the final goal $g$ in $\psi_g$, and a direction-conditioned actor that consumes the unit direction $d_t$ and magnitude $r_t$ from $\psi(s_t)$ to $\psi(z_t)$. The two components train jointly, factor cleanly at deployment (subgoal scoring is removed, while direction conditioning remains with $g$ in place of $z_t$), and admit independent modification at the same $(d_t,r_t)$ interface. We prove three results. First, direction sufficiency under HJB: the optimal action under control-affine dynamics depends on the goal only through the value gradient. Second, a quantitative bound showing that, under mild conditions on the learned representation and assuming the scoring rule returns an on-path $z_t$, the actor's conditioning input at training and at deployment coincide up to representation error and geodesic slack. Third, a controllable-subspace characterization of when directional conditioning fails. Across nine environments, DCP improves over Contrastive RL on most final metrics, with the largest gains on manipulation and obstacle-interaction tasks; a qualitative analysis of the learned $\psi$-distance landscape shows the contrastive representation behaves as an online quasimetric encoding environment topology, and the single failure case (AntSoccer) localizes to a learned-gradient pathology that the theory anticipates.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

AlphaGenome identifies a deep intronic variant in a family with PLA2G6-associated neurodegeneration: Closing the diagnostic gap in rare genetic diseases

Authors:
Eger↗S. J↗Lopez↗Gomez Navarro↗L. F↗Pena-Tauber↗Cochran↗J. N↗Hiatt↗S. M↗Gelvez↗Garcia-Garcia↗…

A molecular diagnosis remains out of reach for a substantial subset of patients with clinically recognizable Mendelian disorders, even after comprehensive next-generation sequencing. Causal variants in non-coding regions are difficult to detect and interpret using standard pipelines. Deep intronic variants that disrupt splicing are a known but underexplored source of pathogenic alleles, and systematic tools to evaluate them at scale have only recently emerged. We aimed to resolve an incomplete genetic diagnosis in two siblings with early-onset parkinsonism, prominent neuropsychiatric features, and autonomic dysfunction consistent with PLA2G6-associated neurodegeneration (PLAN), an autosomal recessive condition. Prior clinical exome sequencing, genome sequencing, Multiplex Ligation-dependent Probe Amplification (MLPA), and long-read sequencing had identified only a single heterozygous PLA2G6 missense variant, c.2132C>G (p.Pro711Arg). We used AlphaGenome to score 91 non-coding variants shared among the affected siblings and their father within 1 megabase of the PLA2G6 locus. The deep-learning model identified an intronic variant (c.2034+355G>A) that was predicted to create a cryptic splice acceptor site that could result in inclusion of a 160-bp cryptic exon. Tissue-specific predictions indicated the aberrant splicing would be detectable in blood, confirmed by junction-spanning RNA-seq reads from an unrelated carrier. This analysis completed a compound heterozygous PLAN diagnosis nearly two decades after symptom onset and demonstrates the utility of sequence-to-function models. Systematic integration of tools like AlphaGenome into rare disease workflows offers a practical, low-barrier route to closing the diagnostic gap for patients with compelling Mendelian phenotypes and incomplete genetic diagnoses.

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21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Gen Z scepticism towards AI is a wake-up call — universities must take it seriously

Authors:
Mim Rahimi↗

The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust. The challenge for universities is not adopting artificial intelligence, but doing so in ways that the current generation of students can trust.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward Entanglement Bootstrap for Conformal Field Theory in Any Dimension

Authors:
Rolando Ramirez Camasca↗Xiang Li↗Ting-Chun Lin↗John McGreevy↗

arXiv:2606.12540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given a quantum critical wavefunction in any dimension, we propose a reconstructed Hamiltonian, analogous to the ones previously found for 1+1d CFT and for 2+1d bosonic liquid topologically-ordered states. We test numerically that, for known regularized approximate CFT groundstates (on the icosahedron and the fuzzy sphere), (1) they are close to the groundstate of their reconstructed Hamiltonian, and (2) the spectrum of their reconstructed Hamiltonian on the unit sphere has CFT properties (integer spacing of descendants) and matches known low-lying energies. We show that this provides an automated method to improve the finite-size effects in a fixed Hilbert space.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Authors:
Yogesh Agrawal↗Aniruddha Dutta↗Md Mahadi Hasan↗Santu Karmaker↗Aritra Dutta↗

Real-world financial decision-making is a challenging problem that requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals derived from regulatory filings and trading signals computed from price dynamics. Recently, with advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), financial analysts have begun to use them for financial decision-making tasks. However, existing financial question-answering benchmarks for testing these models primarily focus on company balance sheet data and rarely evaluate reasoning about how company stocks trade in the market or their interactions with fundamentals. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning that integrates company fundamentals and trading signals. FinTradeBench contains 1,400 questions grounded in NASDAQ-100 companies over a ten-year historical window. The benchmark is organized into three reasoning categories: fundamentals-focused, trading-signal-focused, and hybrid questions requiring cross-signal reasoning. To ensure reliability at scale, we adopt a calibration-then-scaling framework that combines expert seed questions, multi-model response generation, intra-model self-filtering, numerical auditing, and human-LLM judge alignment. We evaluate 14 LLMs under zero-shot prompting and retrieval-augmented settings and witness a clear performance gap. Retrieval substantially improves reasoning over textual fundamentals, but provides limited benefit for trading-signal reasoning. These findings highlight fundamental challenges in the numerical and time-series reasoning for current LLMs and motivate future research in financial intelligence.

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

Judging Against the Reference: Uncovering Knowledge-Driven Failures in LLM-Judges on QA Evaluation

Authors:
Dongryeol Lee↗Yerin Hwang↗Taegwan Kang↗Minwoo Lee↗Younhyung Chae↗Kyomin Jung↗

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for question answering (QA) and other reference-conditioned evaluation tasks, little is known about their ability to adhere to a provided reference. We identify a critical failure mode of such reference-based LLM QA evaluation: when the provided reference conflicts with the judge model's parametric knowledge, the resulting scores become unreliable, substantially degrading evaluation fidelity. To study this phenomenon systematically, we introduce a controlled swapped-reference QA framework that induces reference-belief conflicts. Specifically, we replace the reference answer with an incorrect entity and construct diverse pairings of original and swapped references with correspondingly aligned candidate answers. Surprisingly, grading reliability drops sharply under swapped references across a broad set of judge models. We empirically show that this vulnerability is driven by judges' over-reliance on parametric knowledge, leading judges to disregard the given reference under conflict. Finally, we find that this failure persists under common prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting a fundamental limitation of LLM-as-a-judge evaluation and motivating reference-based protocols that enforce stronger adherence to the provided reference.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Learning Instance-Adaptive Low-Rank Orthogonal Subspaces for Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification

Authors:
Dong-Woo Kim↗Tae-Kyun Kim↗

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.

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