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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Candidate overtone shear horizontal SAW resonators in thin-film lithium niobate for intermodal acousto-optic modulation

arXiv:2606.12853v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The merits of thin-film surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are pivotal to develop the high-performance intermodal acousto-optic modulators. In this work, we have proposed shear-horizontal (SH) SAW resonators for anticipated intermodal acousto-optic modulation on the thin-film lithium niobate platform. Through optimization of the cut angle of LN films, the SAW wavelength, and the thickness of interdigital transducer (IDT) electrodes, the calculated acousto-optic overlap factors utilizing SH0 modes are improved by more than an order of magnitude compared with those of Rayleigh modes. Furthermore, we have fabricated and characterized three kinds of proof-of-principle SH0 mode devices without/with grating reflectors. The electromechanical coupling coefficients (keff^2) and quality factors (Q) in the overtone resonators with grating reflectors are systematically evaluated, featuring the highest Q of 843 with the compromised keff^2 of 0.96%-4.72%. The results reveal that the temperature coefficients of frequency (TCF) of Rayleigh modes vary across various overtones, whereas the SH0 modes exhibit TCFs in the range of 32.3-68.9 ppm/C. Our fabricated SH0-mode overtone resonators demonstrate the capability of operating at power levels up to 29 dBm without electrode damage, offering a promising paradigm for robust and high-efficiency intermodal acousto-optic modulators with potential applications in integrated optical signal processing, microwave photonics,and quantum information technologies.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Determinants of non-utilization of insecticide-treated nets among children under five in Rwanda: analyses of the 2024 Rwanda malaria indicator survey

Background Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are effective for preventing malaria among children under five years, who bear a disproportionate burden of malaria. This study assessed the prevalence and determinants of ITN non-utilization among children under five in Rwanda using data from the 2024 Rwanda Malaria Indicator Survey (RMIS).Methodology This cross-sectional study utilized nationally representative data from the 2024 RMIS. Analyses were restricted to children under five residing in households that owned at least one ITN. The outcome was non-utilization of ITN, defined as not sleeping under an ITN the night preceding the survey. Survey-weighted descriptive statistics were used to estimate the prevalence of ITN non-utilization. Factors associated with non-utilization were identified using a survey-weighted Poisson regression model. Adjusted prevalence ratios (aPRs), 95% confidence intervals and p-values were reported.Results A total of 1,979 children were included in the study. The weighted prevalence of ITN non-utilization among children under five years was 20.11% (95% CI: 17.81 - 22.63). After adjusting for other factors, children aged 2 - 3 years were associated with an 83% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those aged [&le;]1 year (aPR = 1.83, 95% CI: 1.423 - 2.352, p < 0.001). Compared with households that owned only one ITN, children in households with three or more ITNs were associated with a 76% lower prevalence of ITN non-utilization (aPR = 0.24, 95% CI: 0.171 - 0.332, p < 0.001). Children living in households with 5 - 7 members were associated with an 87% higher prevalence of ITN non-utilization compared with those in households with 1 - 4 members (aPR = 1.87, 95% CI: 1.476 - 2.358, p < 0.001).Conclusion The findings suggest that ITN utilization among children is influenced not only by household access to nets but also by household composition and dynamics that shape the allocation and use of available preventive resources.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Starter-Iterator Neural Operator: A Unified Architecture for High-Fidelity Forward and Inverse PDE Problems

arXiv:2606.18305v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Operator learning is an emerging interdisciplinary field that integrates machine learning with scientific computing. By mapping infinite-dimensional function spaces, this approach provides an efficient surrogate modeling framework for high-dimensional partial differential equations (PDEs). Compared to traditional numerical solvers, it achieves a superior trade-off between computational complexity and approximation accuracy, demonstrating significant advantages in many-query tasks such as real-time prediction and parameter sweeps. Given the stringent accuracy requirements of both forward simulation and inverse inference, as well as the precision bottlenecks of existing operator learning methods in handling complex boundaries or long-term evolution, we propose the Starter-Iterator Neural Operator (SINO). Our framework reinterprets the initialization strategies and iterative formats of traditional iterative methods through neural networks, establishing an efficient approach for spectral-spatiotemporal collaborative modeling. Specifically, the frequency-domain initialization module captures globally stable low-frequency features, while the time-domain learning module focuses on optimizing local solution residuals, thereby effectively overcoming the inherent limitations of conventional single-domain modeling approaches. Extensive experiments on typical dynamical systems such as the Navier-Stokes equations and acoustic wave equations, as well as practical applications including super-resolution imaging and weather forecasting, demonstrate that SINO achieves outstanding performance in numerical accuracy, generalization capability, and robustness.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Bag of Dims: Training-Free Mechanistic Interpretability via Dimension-Level Sign Patterns

arXiv:2606.12629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that the standard basis of transformer hidden states already provides a training-free, architecture-general feature basis. Individual dimensions encode semantic content via their signs and confidence via their magnitudes, functioning as independent binary registers. We validate this Bag of Dims framework across three model families (Qwen 3.5-4B, Gemma 3-4B, Mistral 7B) through four progressive experiments. Sign patterns alone carry predictive content: replacing all magnitudes with unity achieves 72-93% top-5 next-token accuracy through the LM head, and pure Hamming scoring without any decoder reaches 80-90% top-4096. These sign patterns organize into semantic features: using a single-token type cache (one forward pass per vocabulary token, no context), we discover 175 categories via per-dimension sign consistency (mean AUC 0.80) from 50 anchors with zero training. A trained probe adds only +0.018 AUC and converges to axis-aligned weights, confirming negligible cross-dimension structure. This structure extends to attention: all 175 categories remain discoverable in K and V projections. On the write side, static FFN weight inspection links 20% of features to individual writer neurons (>0.70 agreement; random controls: 0%), with top-200 neuron coalitions achieving >0.70 agreement on 99.9% of prototypes via majority vote. Fully unsupervised discovery (random seeds, no labels) scales to 1500 features at 100% yield and 99% sparsity across all three models, with pairwise MI of 0.0014 bits confirming low inter-dimension coupling. These results establish that the standard basis already suffices for feature reading throughout the transformer compute pathway, requiring no training, no optimization, and no GPU-days beyond a single forward pass per vocabulary token.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Transposable elements as evolutionary substrates of proteindisorder in the human proteome

Intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) are central contributors to protein function, evolution and human disease, yet the evolutionary routes that seed new disordered segments within pre-existing proteins are still poorly understood. Sequence insertions provide a powerful mechanism for disorder expansion, but the genomic donors of inserted IDR and its long-term conformational fate remain largely unknown. Transposable elements (TEs), abundant mobile genetic elements with distinctive compositional biases, represent compelling candidates for generating disorder within proteins. Here, we systematically mapped TE-derived segments across human proteins and isoforms, and we found that these insertions are strongly enriched in intrinsic disorder. The structural consequences of their insertion are shaped by TE class and family, reflecting the sequence biases of the elements from which they originate. Recent, Primate specific insertions preferentially generate disordered segments, whereas older insertions more frequently occupy ordered structural contexts, revealing an age-dependent transition in the conformational state of TE-derived sequences. TE-containing isoforms are expressed at lower levels than TE-free isoforms, particularly when insertions are young and disorder-rich, suggesting that intrinsic disorder may constrain the cellular tolerance of newly exonized sequences. These findings identify TEs as a major evolutionary mechanism linking genome mobility to the emergence of new disordered conformational ensembles in the human proteome.

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

Maximin Relative Improvement: Fair Learning as a Bargaining Problem

arXiv:2602.04155v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: When deploying a single predictor across multiple subpopulations, we propose a fundamentally different approach: interpreting group fairness as a bargaining problem among subpopulations. This game-theoretic perspective reveals that existing robust optimization methods such as minimizing worst-group loss or regret correspond to classical bargaining solutions and embody different fairness principles. We propose relative improvement, the ratio of actual risk reduction to potential reduction from a baseline predictor, which recovers the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution. Unlike absolute-scale methods that may not be comparable when groups have different potential predictability, relative improvement provides axiomatic justification including scale invariance and individual monotonicity. We establish finite-sample convergence guarantees under mild conditions.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OmniDirector: General Multi-Shot Camera Cloning without Cross-Paired Data

Cloning camera motion from reference videos is an important task in video generation, as videos provide intuitive and precise control. Existing methods either directly use parametric representations that fail to handle multi-shot generation or synthesize cross-paired data, which suffer from data scarcity, resulting in poor performance in complicated camera motion cloning. To address these issues, we introduce a general camera motion representation that encodes cameras as grid motion videos. This camera grid represents the camera parameters visually and supports the integration of diverse trajectories for multi-shot video generation. Building upon this, we propose OmniDirector, a unified framework trained on a million-scale camera grid-video pairs that coordinates characters, actions, and cameras to provide director-level control for multimodal diffusion transformers. Furthermore, we design a novel hierarchical prompt expansion agent that harmoniously integrates different control signals by systematically describing camera motion and visual content through understanding signal relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance and outstanding controllability of our framework. Project page: https://ymlinfeng.github.io/OmniDirector.github.io/

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Comparative Evaluation of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Models for Early Prediction of Severe Acute Pancreatitis: A Multi-Model Study Using the 2012 Revised Atlanta Classification

Authors:

**Background:** Acute pancreatitis (AP) is a common gastrointestinal emergency with a subset of patients progressing to severe acute pancreatitis (SAP), which carries substantial morbidity and mortality. Current clinical severity scores such as BISAP, APACHE II, Ranson, and the Modified CT Severity Index require upon 48 hours of observation before reliable assessment is possible, limiting early triage. Machine learning (ML) approaches using routine admission laboratory values may enable earlier, more accurate prediction. **Methods:** We evaluated 11 models spanning three architectural families classical ML (Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Gradient Boosting), feedforward deep learning (MLP, Residual MLP, Attention MLP), and recurrent deep learning (LSTM, Stacked LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM, LSTM+Attention, CNN-LSTM) on a Chinese AP cohort of 722 patients (585 severe, 137 mild) labelled according to the 2012 Revised Atlanta Classification. Performance was assessed via 5-fold stratified cross-validation using AUC-ROC, F1 score, sensitivity, specificity, and PPV, with decision thresholds optimised for maximal F1. **Results:** Random Forest achieved the highest AUC of 0.877 (F1=0.917, sensitivity=96.8%, PPV=87.1%), followed closely by Gradient Boosting (AUC=0.874, F1=0.918). Classical ML models consistently outperformed deep learning counterparts. CNN-LSTM was the best recurrent model (AUC=0.777) but remained inferior to all classical approaches. LSTM-family models produced AUC values of 0.684-0.777, reflecting the cross-sectional tabular nature of the data. **Conclusions:** Random Forest provides robust, high-sensitivity early prediction of SAP severity using routine admission data. External prospective validation is required before clinical deployment. **Keywords:** acute pancreatitis; severity prediction; machine learning; random forest; deep learning; LSTM; Revised Atlanta Classification; early triage

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

Sparsity Curse: Understanding RLVR Model Parameter Space from Model Merging

arXiv:2606.18521v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm that surpasses Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) in eliciting reasoning intelligence and resisting catastrophic forgetting. Recent studies further reveal that RLVR induces highly sparse and off-principal parameter updates compared to SFT. This naturally raises the question: does such sparsity make RLVR models more amenable to model merging? If so, model merging would offer a scalable, training-free path to aggregate diverse reasoning capabilities from independently trained RLVR models. Surprisingly, we find the opposite, uncovering a sparsity curse: the sparse RLVR updates are spread farther apart in parameter space, forming near-orthogonal shortcuts that make aggregation inherently fragile. This is likely rooted in the stochasticity of RL optimization and the diversity of emergent reasoning patterns. Unlike SFT models that converge to shared, flat basins and merge naturally, RLVR models suffer severe degradation under standard merging methods. Through systematic empirical analysis of the update geometry, we characterize the mechanisms behind this failure and propose Sensitivity-aware Resolving Merging (SAR-Merging), a merging recipe tailored for the unique structure of RLVR parameter spaces. SAR-Merging resolves conflicts in overlapping update regions via Fisher Information-based sensitivity arbitration, followed by magnitude-aware sparsification and rescaling to preserve fragile reasoning pathways. Experiments on mathematical and coding benchmarks demonstrate that SAR-Merging substantially outperforms existing merging methods on RLVR models, enabling both single-task enhancement and multi-capability fusion.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

EnrichViz: An Interactive R Shiny Application for Visualization of Pathway Enrichment Results from Omics Data

Authors:

Pathway and functional enrichment analysis is a cornerstone of omics data interpretation, enabling researchers to map differentially expressed proteins or genes onto curated biological processes, signaling cascades, and molecular functions. While tools such as Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA), g:Profiler, and Enrichr are widely used to generate ranked enrichment results, translating these tabular outputs into clear, publication-ready figures remains a time-consuming step that typically requires custom scripting and familiarity with visualization libraries, a significant barrier for researchers without a computational background. Here we present EnrichViz, a self-contained, browser-based R Shiny application that enables interactive, code-free visualization of pathway and functional enrichment results from quantitative proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics experiments. EnrichViz accepts three standard CSV files as input, a normalized abundance matrix, a sample annotation or metadata file, and enrichment results from any platform that exports tabular output, and produces six complementary, publication-ready visualizations: bar and bubble plots for ranking enriched terms by significance, chord diagrams for exploring pathway-molecule connectivity, clustered heatmaps for displaying Z-score normalized expression patterns across experimental groups, and boxplots or violin plots for examining the abundance distribution of individual proteins, genes, or metabolites. The application supports both raw p-values and pre-transformed -log10(p) values through automatic detection, and all plot parameters are adjustable in real time through a graphical sidebar. Every figure can be exported as a high-resolution PNG file at 300 dpi. EnrichViz is implemented in R using the Shiny, ggplot2, pheatmap, and circlize packages, and is freely available at https://rgmilian.shinyapps.io/EnrichViz/

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

The Language You Ask In: Language-Conditioned Ideological Divergence in LLM Analysis of Contested Political Documents

Authors:

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as analytical tools across multilingual contexts, yet their outputs may carry systematic biases conditioned by the language of the prompt. This study presents an experimental comparison of LLM-generated political analyses of a Ukrainian civil society document, using semantically equivalent prompts in Russian and Ukrainian administered to two frontier models from different developers, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude Opus 4.5. Despite identical source material and parallel query structures, both models diverged along the same axis: Russian-language outputs leaned toward delegitimizing framings, characterizing civil society actors as externally funded elites constraining a democratic mandate, while Ukrainian-language outputs treated the same actors as legitimate stakeholders in democratic contestation. The magnitude of this divergence, however, was model-dependent. ChatGPT's Russian output reproduced vocabulary characteristic of Russian state discourse; Claude Opus's stayed in a mainstream critical idiom and hedged its judgments in both languages. These findings demonstrate that prompt language alone can systematically shift the ideological orientation of an unchanged model analyzing identical content. The shift is a general property of multilingual LLMs whose severity, and whose alignment with propaganda narratives, varies across systems. The implications reach AI deployment in polarized information environments, cross-lingual research, and AI governance in multilingual societies.

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

An Exploratory Study of Blood Glucose Estimation from Photoplethysmography Signals using Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.15927v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diabetes and extreme blood sugar levels are some of the major health problems faced by humans today across the world. While Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) has emerged as an effective technology for management of diabetes as well as for monitoring blood sugar levels, this technology has traditionally been invasive (that is, requiring the piercing of the skin) and carries the risk of irritation, induration, etc. This highlights the need for accurate and non-invasive CGM methods that can be deployed at scale. With the emergence of various sensing technologies and their integration in wearables like the smart-watch, we now have the capability to continuously monitor body signals like the Photoplethysmogram (PPG) in a non-invasive manner. Having the ability to continuously monitor blood glucose through CGMs and continuously monitor PPG signals through a smart-watch offers an opportunity to get dense data on these two, opening the possibility of building machine learning and deep learning based models to estimate blood glucose level from PPG signals. In this work, we first present a paired dataset comprising continuous PPG signals from a smartwatch along with glucose values recorded using a CGM device. We also present the results of some preliminary experimental explorations performed on our dataset. These preliminary results suggest that some predictive signals may exist, though more exploration is needed with more data from a larger number of individuals. The dataset can be accessed at https://zenodo.org/records/20577959

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Loss-Shift Transfer via Bayes Quotients

arXiv:2606.13178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer learning is usually studied as a consequence of distribution shift. This paper identifies an orthogonal failure mode in which the data distribution is fixed and the loss changes. This setting is called loss shift. A loss determines which information in \(X\) is Bayes-relevant, and two losses may therefore require different representations even under the same joint law \(P(X,Y)\). The idea is formalized using Bayes quotients, which allow losses to be ordered by refinement. In the Bayes-quotient formulation, strict refinement gives an immediate qualitative obstruction. A source-minimal representation for a coarser loss is insufficient for a strictly finer target loss. For finite-output log loss, this obstruction becomes an exact quantitative identity. The excess risk is the conditional information about \(Y\) discarded by the representation. Experiments in controlled, learned, synthetic-image, and real-image settings show the predicted effect, i.e., classification-equivalent representations can have different optimal log-loss performance under a fixed data distribution.

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

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

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

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation. We first revisit the definition of enthymemes and propose annotation guidelines anchored in Walton's argumentation schemes, offering a structured and constrained approach that nonetheless preserves room for the interpretive nature of the task. This contrasts with past resources, which tend to eliminate disagreement, obscuring its sources and preventing investigation of its potential benefits for model performance. We further propose a complexity analysis of the task, identifying where annotation imposes high cognitive load and may give rise to inconsistent annotation. Our preliminary experiments show that models trained on annotator disagreement outperform models trained on hard majority-vote labels. We close by reflecting on how structural openness in enthymeme definitions and guidelines enables the study of variation in subjective inferential processes for future resources and downstream NLP applications concerned with human inference.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Performance Gap Analysis between Latin and Arabic Scripts HTR

Recent studies have shown that handwritten text recognition (HTR) systems perform worse on Arabic-script datasets than on Latin-script data. However, the reasons for this gap are still not well understood due to the lack of controlled comparisons. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of Arabic and Latin scripts HTR using a unified CRNN model for line-level HTR across nine datasets (including KHATT (Arabic), Muharaf (Arabic), NUST-UHWR (Urdu), PHTD (Persian), IAM (English), READ-2016 (German), and others) and di ferent training sizes (K in {100, 500, 1000, 2000, ..., Kfull}). Our results show the performance gap remains: it is large in low-resource settings, decreases with more data, but remains even at full scale, with a consistent difference of 5-7 CER points. We show that annotation quality matters, as many datasets contain labeling errors. Cleaning reduces error rates and narrows the gap, but does not eliminate it. In addition, we find that a fixed number of training samples provides less effective coverage in Arabic due to higher visual variability, requiring more data to learn similar representations. We compare recognition across datasets in terms of the number of text lines and the number of characters, showing an equivalence trade-off. We compare character frequency distributions across scripts and show that Arabic is significantly more heavy-tailed than Latin. Our error analysis reveals that around 30 percent of substitution errors in Arabic datasets (e.g., KHATT) are caused by confusion between visually similar characters, compared to about 15 percent in Latin-script datasets such as IAM.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

TelcoAgent: A Scalable 5G Multi-KPM Forecasting With 3GPP-Grounded Explainability

arXiv:2606.19821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Key Performance Measurement (KPM) forecasting is essential for proactive network management of 5G and next-generation telecom networks. However, existing machine learning (ML) approaches face significant limitations in scalability and explainability, restricting their effectiveness in real-world deployments. We propose TelcoAgent, a foundation model-based framework that enables accurate, scalable, and explainable forecasting of multiple KPMs across diverse network cells without the need for site-specific training. Specifically, the framework comprises three key components: (i) an automated three-agent pipeline that constructs a 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) knowledge graph directly from specification documents, (ii) a scalable, time-series foundation model (TSFM)-based prediction pipeline to deliver accurate, zero-shot forecasting, and finally (iii) a reasoning and explanation pipeline that provides actionable, domain-grounded diagnostics. Evaluated using a 3-month, real-world, city-scale 5G KPM dataset from a U.S.-based network operator, TelcoAgent demonstrates high forecasting accuracy for all 7 considered KPMs per cell across 200 cells, while delivering explainable insights and actionable instructions to address network degradations.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Authors:

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

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

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.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

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

Context-Aware RL for Agentic and Multimodal LLMs

Large language models (LLMs) often fail when answering requires identifying a small but decisive piece of evidence within a long or complex context, such as a single line in a tool trace or a subtle detail in an image. We propose ContextRL, a context-aware reinforcement learning (RL) method that improves long-horizon reasoning and multimodal performance through an indirect auxiliary objective. Instead of supervising only the final answer, ContextRL presents the model with a query, an answer, and two highly similar contexts, and rewards it for selecting the context that supports the query–answer pair, thereby encouraging fine-grained grounding. We construct contrastive context data in two domains: for coding agents, trajectories serve as contexts, yielding 1k pairs built via condition filtering; for multimodal reasoning, images serve as contexts, yielding 7K pairs built via generative editing and similarity search. ContextRL achieves average gains of +2.2% over standard GRPO on 5 long-horizon benchmarks, and +1.8% across 12 diverse visual question answering benchmarks. To disentangle the effect of the proposed objective from that of additional data, we compare against data-augmentation baselines that repurpose the same contrastive contexts as standard query–context–answer examples. These baselines provide little to no improvement, showing that the gains arise from the proposed context-selection objective rather than from the contrastive data alone.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mutation-dependent responses to sleep and exercise in clonal haematopoiesis

Clonal haematopoiesis (CH) activates inflammation and increases the risk of atherosclerosis1,2. Whether lifestyle alters CH clone expansion or the phenotypic programming of CH mutant cells, thereby affecting atherosclerosis, is unknown. Here, in humans and mice and across mutations in Jak2, Tet2, Trp53 and Dnmt3a, we demonstrate mutation-dependent responses to sleep and exercise in CH and show that mutant cells are uniquely sensitive to lifestyle. In two human datasets, moderate-to-vigorous physical activity was associated with lower prevalence of non-DNMT3A-driven CH. In atherogenic mice with Jak2V617F or Tet2 loss of function (LOF), but not Trp53 LOF or Dnmt3aR878H CH, uninterrupted sleep or exercise curtails clone expansion. In CH with the Jak2V617F mutation, sleep and exercise reduces clone expansion by selectively reprogramming mutant, but not cohabitant wild type, haematopoietic progenitor cells towards antiproliferative and metabolically healthy phenotypes by tempering bone marrow macrophage–haematopoietic progenitor cell IL-1β signalling. Sleep or exercise also lessens Jak2V617F-driven, Tet2 LOF-driven and Trp53 LOF-driven, but not Dnmt3aR878H-driven, atherosclerosis by locally reprogramming mutant vascular macrophages, independent of peripheral clone dynamics. In Jak2V617F, but not adjacent wild type, aortic macrophages, uninterrupted sleep blunts CLEC4E-dependent inflammasome activation, consequently diminishing lesions. Exercise, meanwhile, activates PAC1+ neurons in the locus coeruleus, raising the levels of peripheral noradrenaline, which signals through adrenergic receptor β2 (ADRβ2) whose expression is preserved by exercise in Jak2V617F, but not cohabitant wild type, aortic macrophages, selectively repressing their inflammatory programming and atherosclerosis. Our findings establish that healthy lifestyles gene-specifically diminish CH and selectively reprogram mutant haematopoietic progenitor cells and macrophages to maintain cardiovascular health. Sleep and exercise can slow clonal haematopoiesis and limit mutant cell-driven atherosclerosis.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Clifford disentanglers for entanglement reduction in molecular electronic structure simulations

arXiv:2606.12056v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is a key bottleneck limiting the efficiency of tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structures. Here, we systematically assess and extend Clifford disentanglers as a structure-preserving approach to entanglement reduction: they can modify the entanglement structure of qubit wavefunctions while retaining the Pauli-string form of qubit Hamiltonians. To enable a practical search over Clifford transformations, we classify Clifford operators by their action on the Schmidt spectrum across a bipartition, reducing the two- and four-qubit search spaces to 20 and 91392 representatives, respectively. Embedded in an iterative Clifford-augmented matrix product state framework, these transformations reduce the energy errors at fixed bond dimension for the molecular test cases studied and mitigate the dependence on orbital orderings and fermion-to-qubit mappings. We further show that Clifford disentanglers can also benefit quantum simulations such as the shallow-circuit variational quantum eigensolver calculations. Together, these results establish Clifford disentanglers as a useful structure-preserving entanglement-engineering tool for tensor-network and quantum simulations of molecular electronic structure, while also clarifying their correlation dependence and motivating future developments.

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arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Perceive, Interact, Reason: Building Tool-Augmented Visual Agents for Spatial Reasoning

While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal understanding, they remain limited in spatial reasoning tasks that require active evidence acquisition and multi-step visual interaction. This limitation suggests that relying solely on implicit visual representations from vision encoders is insufficient for recovering fine-grained spatial evidence. We introduce PERception-Interaction-reason Agent (PERIA), a tool-augmented visual agent for spatial reasoning tasks across map reasoning, visual probing, and vision reconstruction. PERIA uses two lightweight tool families: vision perception tools for exposing textual, symbolic, and spatial evidence, and vision interaction tools for manipulating visual context, tracing paths, and verifying spatial relations. To train PERIA, we develop a unified recipe that combines supervised tool-use trajectory synthesis, composite rewards, and Observation-Relaxed Group-in-Group Policy Optimization (OR-GIGPO) for effective multi-tool behavior. Experiments on 13 benchmarks from 8 datasets show that PERIA-8B improves over the Qwen3-8B backbone by 10.0% on in-distribution benchmarks and 4.4% on out-of-distribution benchmarks, while outperforming previous state-of-the-art baselines of similar size by 7.0%-14.8%. It also achieves performance comparable to much larger models such as Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B-Thinking and GPT-5, demonstrating the effectiveness of PERIA in enhancing spatial reasoning capabilities.