Light-powered metabolism in the mammalian eye
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Although DINOv3 has demonstrated remarkable semantic discrimination in natural imagery, its direct application to volumetric medical segmentation is hindered by inherent dimension and domain disparities. To resolve these issues, we propose DINO-Med3D, a two-stage progressive framework that repurpose the pre-trained DINOv3 encoder for 3D medical tasks. In the first stage, we mitigate the dimension gap by introducing a multi-slice embedding module that incorporates pseudo-3D context, while simultaneously employing a segmentation proxy task to adapt representations learned from natural scenes to the medical domain. Subsequently, we further enhance volumetric understanding by adding lightweight 3D adapters into the frozen backbone to enforce global inter-slice continuity. Finally, to compensate for the spatial information loss inherent in the embedding process, we design a parallel detail recovery stream to explicitly preserve high-frequency boundary cues. Extensive experiments on five public datasets demonstrate that our approach successfully adapts DINOv3 to the medical domain and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
arXiv:2606.16025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Stochastic search processes in which searchers are continuously introduced to and removed from a target search domain are fundamental to a wide class of physical and artificial systems. The theory of such non-conservative search processes is, however, much less developed than for search processes with a fixed number of particles. Here we exploit a natural mapping between non-conservative stochastic search and queueing theory to derive the full time-dependent distribution of target arrivals under minimal assumptions on the underlying search process. Remarkably, we find that the steady-state inter-arrival time distribution is exactly exponential, regardless of the details of the search process, showing a robust universality that emerges directly from the queueing framework. Thus, counterintuitively, the arrival statistics of a non-conservative search process are much simpler than sequential search-and-capture processes involving a fixed number of searchers. This has major implications for target resource accumulation, where the delivery of resources is counter-balanced by their downstream consumption.
Understanding how neuronal morphology changes during aging and acute stress is essential for elucidating mechanisms of neurodegeneration. The highly branched PVD neuron of Caenorhabditis elegans provides a powerful model for studying dendritic remodeling and degeneration-associated phenotypes such as dendritic beading. However, the complexity of this arbor presents substantial challenges for automated segmentation and quantitative analysis. In this study, we adapted a convolutional neural network (CNN)-guided region growing framework for automated dendrite tracing, coupled with two topology-based algorithms for categorizing dendritic segments by branching degree. The segmentation algorithm achieved high accuracy relative to manual tracing, with a median Dice coefficient of 0.82, while reducing analysis time by approximately tenfold. Automated dendrite categorization demonstrated strong agreement with manual annotations across branching orders, though position-based mapping performance declined with age due to progressive morphological distortion. Leveraging this platform, we investigated mechanistic differences in dendritic beading patterns observed during aging and cold shock. Consistent with prior work, aging was associated with decreased inter-bead spacing, whereas cold shock produced increased bead dispersion with stress severity. Structural analysis revealed that these trends were not driven by dendritic pruning or reduced arbor complexity. Instead, while a traditional anatomically unflexible paradigm falsely implicated lower-degree dendrites as highly vulnerable, our branching-informed framework revealed that age-dependent beading is fundamentally dictated by a segments history of successive branching events. Conversely, acute cold shock triggered systemic beading that expanded across all dendritic orders in a severity-dependent manner. Together, these findings demonstrate that chronic aging and acute stress engage distinct degenerative pathways (compartment-specific lineage vulnerability versus global architectural collapse) rather than gross morphological loss, as well as highlighting the need for paradigms that enable reliable analysis of changing morphologies.
arXiv:2606.13150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretty Good Measurement (PGM) is a near-optimal strategy for quantum state discrimination, but its practical realization becomes unstable when the ensemble operator is singular or ill-conditioned. We introduce a numerically robust PGM formulation based on the Moore-Penrose pseudoinverse, replacing the standard inverse square root with a threshold-regularized variant that remains well-defined across different spectral regimes. We develop a hybrid classical-quantum framework that combines pseudoinverse-based spectral preprocessing with quantum circuit realizations using block-encoding and spectral-transformation techniques. The framework incorporates support awareness, yielding physically meaningful measurement operators even in rank-deficient cases, and employs oblivious amplitude amplification to improve circuit-level success probabilities. Extensive numerical and circuit-level simulations show close agreement between theoretical predictions and quantum circuit outputs. Experiments on synthetic and real datasets, including ill-conditioned and degenerate scenarios, demonstrate stable discrimination performance where standard PGM becomes numerically unstable. The results establish a practical hybrid classical-quantum framework for robust quantum state discrimination and extend previous circuit-based implementations of the PGM testing stage toward pseudoinverse-aware measurement design.
arXiv:2509.21886v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning to compute, the ability to model the functional behavior of a circuit graph, is a fundamental challenge for graph representation learning. Yet, the dominant paradigm is architecturally mismatched for this task. This flawed assumption, central to mainstream message passing neural networks (MPNNs) and their conventional Transformer-based counterparts, prevents models from capturing the position-aware, hierarchical nature of computation. To resolve this, we introduce TRACE, a new paradigm built on an architecturally sound backbone and a principled learning objective. First, TRACE employs a Hierarchical Transformer that mirrors the step-by-step flow of computation, providing a faithful architectural backbone that replaces the flawed permutation-invariant aggregation. Second, we introduce function shift learning, a novel objective that decouples the learning problem. Instead of predicting the complex global function directly, our model is trained to predict only the function shift, the discrepancy between the true global function and a simple local approximation that assumes input independence. We validate this paradigm on various circuits modalities, including Register Transfer Level graphs, And-Inverter Graphs and post-mapping netlists. Across a comprehensive suite of benchmarks, TRACE substantially outperforms all prior architectures. These results demonstrate that our architecturally-aligned backbone and decoupled learning objective form a more robust paradigm for the fundamental challenge of learning the functional behavior of a circuit graph.
Large model inference optimization serves as a key foundation for supporting the scalable, low-cost, and highly stable operation of large model services. Centered on token-oriented inference optimization technology, this paper proposes for the first time a four-layer technical architecture consisting of Multi-model Fusion, Model Optimization, Compute-Model Fusion, and Compute-Network-Model Fusion. It systematically reviews the key technologies and current industry status across these four levels and analyzes the application value of related technologies in real-world business scenarios. This paper provides a practical technical path for reducing token production costs, improving token service efficiency, ensuring the stability of token supply, and driving the transition of large model services from being merely callable to being operable.
arXiv:2603.15258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-Gaussian bosonic states are ubiquitous in interacting light–matter systems, many-body platforms, and relativistic quantum field settings, but their quantitative characterization is hindered by the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and by the poor scalability of Fock-space truncation methods. We introduce an exact finite-manifold encoding for states supported on a finite span of Gaussian branches, enabling the use of standard finite-dimensional quantum-information tools directly on an effective density matrix whose entries are determined by Gaussian overlaps. As demonstrations, we obtain closed-form and numerically stable evaluations of entropies and relative-entropy non-Gaussianity, and derive an analytic expression for the bipartite entanglement negativity of arbitrary multimode two-branch Gaussian superpositions, including a minimal which-branch dephasing model. Our framework provides a practical bridge between experimentally accessible continuous-variable resources (e.g., cat-like and measurement-conditioned states) and discrete-variable information measures, with immediate applications to benchmarking non-Gaussian resources in several quantum technology platforms.
Indoor visual relocalization plays a critical role in emerging spatial and embodied AI applications. However, prior research was predominantly devoted to low-level vision schemes, struggling to perceive scene semantics and compositions, which limits both interpretability and applicability. In this paper, we explore the issue of how to organize rich object information in a scene, including semantics, layout, and geometry, into a structured map representation, thereby utilizing object units exclusively to drive the camera relocalization task. To this end, we propose OpenReLoc, a camera relocalization system designed to provide scene understanding and accurate pose estimation capabilities. Leveraging recent foundation models, we first introduce a multi-modal mechanism to integrate open-vocabulary semantic knowledge for effective 2D-3D object matching. Additionally, we design object-oriented reference frames as position priors, paired with a reference frame selection strategy based on the Distance-IoU (DIOU), enabling extension to scalable scenes. Moreover, to ensure stable and accurate pose optimization, we also propose a dual-path 2D Iterative Closest Pixel loss guided by object shape. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenReLoc achieves superior relocalization recall and accuracy across various datasets. Our source code will be released upon acceptance.
Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents KeepLoRA++, balancing these objectives through a unified dual-dimensional knowledge retention mechanism. We analyze knowledge distribution of Transformer architecture from both inter-layer and intra-layer perspectives. The inter-layer perspective examines how retention is distributed across layers, while the intra-layer perspective focuses on the parameter space within each layer. Our analysis reveals a structural property: general transferable knowledge is mainly encoded in the shallow layers and the principal subspace of the parameters, while task-specific adaptations are localized in the deep layers and the residual subspace. Motivated by this insight, KeepLoRA++ introduces a layer-scaled residual gradient adaptation method. New tasks are learned by restricting LoRA parameter updates to the residual subspace, combined with a shallow-to-deep layer scaling, to prevent interference with previously acquired capabilities. Specifically, the gradient of a new task is projected onto a subspace orthogonal to both the principal subspace of the pre-trained model and the dominant directions of previous task features, while simultaneously assigning smaller update magnitudes to shallow layers and larger ones to deeper layers. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations confirm that KeepLoRA++ successfully balances these three competing objectives, consistently outperforming representative baselines across image classification, visual question answering, and video understanding tasks.
arXiv:2606.12441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The four dominant learning theories of behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism, and connectivism show significant conceptual limitations as generative artificial intelligence (AI) proliferates in educational settings. These frameworks were formulated before the emergence of AI systems capable of generating, synthesizing, and reasoning about knowledge. This article critically examines each learning theory and identifies assumptions challenged by generative AI's affordances. Drawing on research in distributed cognition, extended mind, human-AI collaboration, AI literacy, cognitive offloading, and metacognition, the article proposes Generativism as a learning theory for the generative AI age. Generativism posits that learning increasingly occurs through the iterative co-construction of knowledge between human learners and AI systems. The proposed framework is organized around four principles: epistemic partnership, distributed agency, generative literacy, and adaptive metacognition. The framework offers a foundation for rethinking instructional design, learning, assessment, and expertise development in contexts where generative AI plays an integral role in cognition.
Integrating transcriptomics and histopathology can improve cancer risk modelling, yet practical use is constrained by the limited availability of RNA profiling in routine settings. Here we introduce Mixture of Pathway Experts (MoPE), a knowledge-distillation framework that reframes multimodal learning as privileged distillation for histology-only inference. MoPE is motivated by the partial observability between RNA profiles and whole-slide images: histology can capture morphology-linked consequences of certain molecular programmes, but cannot be expected to reconstruct the full transcriptomic state. MoPE encodes RNA-derived pathways and transfers the molecular supervision to pathway-indexed pathology experts through memory-usage alignment. Across diverse public benchmarks and two independent breast cancer cohorts, MoPE consistently improved WSI-only inference performance relative to baseline methods. Pathway-usage analyses and human-audited visual inspection provide bounded inspection of model behaviour and candidate morphology-linked readouts. These results support pathway-structured privileged distillation as a promising route to using molecular information during training while preserving RNA-free inference.
arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.
Recovering complete 3D representations of objects from few casual image captures remains a significant challenge. Recent 3D generative models, particularly those based on Flow-Matching (FM), can synthesize high-quality textured assets; however, they often suffer from ''synthetic bias'' where learned priors override observational evidence, alongside a lack of alignment with the observed instance. Conversely, optimization-based methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provide high fidelity on visible surfaces but fail to reason about unobserved geometry. In this paper, we present FlowObject, a framework that reformulates sparse-view 3D reconstruction as a training-free, guided inverse problem. Our approach applies a dual-space guidance strategy to steer the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory of a flow-matching model, enabling the completion of unseen regions through learned generative priors while enforcing strict consistency with real-world observations. By integrating a 3DGS refinement stage, FlowObject further bridges the gap between ''synthetic-looking'' generative outputs and photorealistic reconstructions. Comprehensive benchmarks on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods often struggle to achieve geometric completeness and observational consistency simultaneously, especially under severe occlusions. In contrast, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models and optimization-based frameworks in both geometric completeness and view-dependent appearance fidelity.
arXiv:2606.18997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncovering the true informational architecture of real-world complex systems requires disentangling how their components uniquely store, redundantly share, and synergistically integrate information over time. Integrated Information Decomposition ($\Phi$ID) is a framework for decomposing the information dynamics of multivariate systems into sixteen non-overlapping atoms that characterize redundant, unique, and synergistic modes of information storage, transfer, and integration. Existing methods to compute $\Phi$ID are restricted to Gaussian or discrete systems, preventing its application to continuous non-Gaussian dynamical systems. We address this limitation by proposing DIPHINE (Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator), the first neural estimator that leverages score-based diffusion models to jointly estimate all the mutual information terms required by $\Phi$ID from a single amortized network, recovering the sixteen atoms through Möbius inversion. We provide a theoretical analysis of error propagation through the inversion, showing that the Jacobian of the mapping from mutual informations to atoms is integer-valued and that the synergy-to-synergy atom is provably the hardest to estimate. We demonstrate accurate recovery of ground-truth atoms on synthetic benchmarks, superior performance compared to established mutual information estimators, and the ability to extract physiologically interpretable information-dynamic structure on an application involving real data without any distributional assumptions.
arXiv:2606.14908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement distillation is a fundamental operation in quantum information processing used to obtain higher-fidelity entangled pairs from a supply of less entangled quantum states using local operations aided by classical communication (LOCC). In a physically relevant setting, where states with an initial fidelity of $f_0$, probabilistically generated over multiple, $m$, memory pairs distributed between two parties, Alice and Bob, are pairwise distilled, the optimal policy identifies the system-configuration dependent sequence of entanglement generation and distillation operations that need to be performed in order to minimize the expected time to reach some target fidelity $f_T>f_0$. Here, we formulate and systematically analyze this task as a Markov decision problem and using a value iteration algorithm, obtain optimal deterministic policies that minimize the expected waiting time required to reach a target fidelity. Our results show that the expected waiting time under the optimal policy decreases with increasing generation probability $p$ and number of quantum memories $m$ - as expected. In contrast, it exhibits non-monotonic behavior with respect to $f_0$ for a fixed fidelity gap, $(\Delta f = f_T-f_0)$. While the optimal policy consistently outperforms baseline policies such as the greedy, nested and entanglement pumping policies, its relative advantage is regime-dependent, being determined by the system parameters ($p,f_0,f_T,m$), and exhibits a nontrivial dependence on the fidelity gap $\Delta f$. Our results highlight the value of formulating entanglement distillation as a Markov decision problem, enabling the systematic design of policies that achieve target fidelity thresholds for quantum information tasks in realistic resource-constrained settings.
arXiv:2606.12410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the random variable that counts the number of specific arrangements of clustered consecutive numbers in permutations under the Mallows distribution. We provide an asymptotic expression for the expected value of this random variable. This result extends and tightens the previously known result by Pinsky (2022) concerning clustered consecutive numbers in Mallows permutations. Moreover, we identify a range of parameters for which the distribution of the number of arrangements of clustered consecutive numbers in Mallows permutations is close to a Poisson distribution.
arXiv:2606.17692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is critical for the reliable and economic operation of modern power systems, under non-stationarity arising from weather variability, calendar effects, and evolving consumption patterns. While deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers show promising performance, most existing studies focus on direct absolute load prediction without explicitly addressing target non-stationarity. Motivated by classical time-series differencing techniques in ARIMA models, this paper investigates a delta-based target reformulation for short-term electricity load forecasting using deep learning. Instead of directly predicting absolute load values, the proposed formulation trains models to predict the change in load between consecutive time steps, with final forecasts reconstructed using the last observed load. This aims to stabilize the learning target and reduce forecasting difficulty. Using multi-year, hourly real-world electricity load data from India, augmented with meteorological variables from the NASA POWER project and calendar features, this study evaluates LSTM and Transformer models under both formulations, benchmarking them against LightGBM. Experiments are conducted for hour-ahead and day-ahead horizons, assessing performance via Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Results show that delta-based reformulation consistently improves forecasting accuracy for hour-ahead prediction across all evaluated models, yielding MAPE reductions of over 50% compared to absolute formulations. For day-ahead forecasting, delta targets specifically benefit deep sequence models (LSTM and Transformer), while LightGBM remains competitive under the absolute formulation. These findings indicate that while delta reformulation is a powerful inductive bias for neural networks, its efficacy is model- and horizon-dependent.
arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.
arXiv:2606.19538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases – locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction – and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.
Large language models (LLMs) can make clinical decision support more accessible by interpreting free-text documentation, but their direct use as diagnostic engines is limited by sensitivity to prompts, information order, and plausible but incorrect outputs. Structured machine-learning models offer more stable risk prediction, yet they require tabular inputs that are difficult to integrate with narrative clinical workflows. We present ClaMPAPP (Clinical Language-assisted Machine-learning Pipeline for Appendicitis), a hybrid system that uses an LLM as an interface rather than as the final decision-maker. ClaMPAPP extracts schema-constrained clinical features from note-like narratives, applies deterministic plausibility checks, and passes validated features to an XGBoost classifier trained on clinical, laboratory, and ultrasound variables. We evaluated ClaMPAPP on two independent pediatric appendicitis cohorts from German hospitals and compared it with end-to-end LLM baselines, including open-source and proprietary models. To preserve ground truth while testing free-text input, narratives were generated from structured electronic health records through template rendering and constrained LLM rewriting, with additional sentence-order permutation to assess positional robustness. ClaMPAPP achieved the strongest overall diagnostic performance in both internal and external validation while minimizing missed appendicitis cases, the key safety concern in acute triage. End-to-end LLMs showed unstable sensitivity-specificity trade-offs and greater degradation under narrative reordering. These results support an LLM-as-interface, ML-as-predictor design that separates natural-language usability from predictive inference and provides a more auditable pathway for clinical decision support.
Whether attention maps from pathology foundation models capture genuine biology remains unknown, yet this question is critical for clinical trust and regulatory approval. We propose a spatial transcriptomics-based framework for orthogonal, hypothesis-free evaluation of attention and apply it to five pathology foundation models (CONCH v1.5, UNI v2, Virchow2, GigaPath, H-Optimus-1) and a ResNet50 baseline. Using attention-based multiple instance learning, we train single-task and multi-task models to predict five molecular alterations in glioblastoma on the CPTAC cohort, validate on an independent TCGA cohort, and evaluate biological coherence of attention maps against 87 transcriptional signatures using co-registered Visium spatial transcriptomics data from 18 samples. Internally, no single encoder dominates across all tasks, and external validation inverts internal performance rankings. Attention maps show a five-fold enrichment gradient from pathways (Cohen's d=0.329) to individual genes (d=0.055), indicating that attention captures emergent multi-gene transcriptional programs rather than individual molecular events. Spatially smooth attention maps do not imply biological coherence, and different encoders attend to distinct biological compartments. Our framework provides objective, quantitative assessment of what foundation models learn from histopathology, moving the field beyond qualitative saliency map review.
Dexterous interaction with articulated objects is important for household, assistive, and humanoid manipulation, where multi-finger hands can provide compliant contact patterns beyond parallel-jaw grasping. However, articulated-object manipulation differs from static-object manipulation: the target part cannot be directly actuated, and its motion must emerge through sustained physical hand–handle contact. This makes the transition from object-centric articulated generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction non-trivial, since geometric trajectory replay or open-loop execution does not model the contact dynamics required to move the articulated part. Moreover, policies trained only for task completion under fixed dynamics can overfit nominal contact loads, especially without tactile or force feedback, and may degrade when the contact load changes. To address these challenges, we present DragMesh-2, a contact-driven framework for dexterous interaction with articulated objects that extends articulated interaction from object-centric generation to hand-driven dexterous hand–object interaction, where articulated motion must arise through physical contact. We further propose PICA, a physically informed contact-aware training mechanism that injects physical signals into policy learning without tactile or force feedback, improving robustness and task success under changing contact loads. Finally, we conduct systematic evaluation across multiple damping conditions and articulated-object categories to study robustness under contact-load variation, and provide a pure-geometry dexterous interaction resource to support future loco-manipulation and humanoid hand–object interaction research. Across seven GAPartNet objects, DragMesh-2 achieves stronger robustness under contact-load variation than the compared methods while maintaining high task success across damping conditions.
arXiv:2606.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.
arXiv:2602.07883v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM-powered agentic systems excel at complex long-horizon tasks, but remain constrained by static configurations fixed before execution. Such rigidity forces a trade-off between domain-specific performance and cross-task generalization: strong priors and compact tool spaces aid specialization but weaken transfer, while task-agnostic workflows and broad action spaces expand coverage but dilute guidance. Existing pre-execution optimization, planner-worker orchestration, and configuration patching fall short of resolving this tension, as they decouple adaptation from execution, causing information loss, fragmented optimization, and ambiguous credit assignment. We propose ToolSelf, a tool-driven runtime self-reconfiguration paradigm that abstracts configuration updates as a standardized tool interface and unifies execution and adaptation within one policy's action space. The execution agent can dynamically update sub-goals, strategies, toolboxes, context, and context-management modes based on task progress and feedback. We further introduce Configuration-Aware Two-stage Training (CAT), which combines rejection sampling fine-tuning with trajectory-level KTO reinforcement learning to internalize self-reconfiguration. Across diverse benchmarks, zero-shot ToolSelf rivals task-specialized agents; after CAT training, ToolSelf gains 28.8 points over the static-configuration baseline on average, illuminating a path toward emergent adaptivity that obviates manually injected guidance. The code is available at https://github.com/lian-tian-mo-zun/ToolSelf.