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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GEASS: Gated Evidence-Adaptive Selective Caption Trust for Vision-Language Models

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) hallucinate objects that are not present, and a growing line of work tries to curb this by feeding the model its own generated caption as auxiliary evidence – assuming that a caption, once available, is something to consume. We show this fails: naively appending a caption can lower accuracy rather than raise it, dropping Qwen2.5-VL-3B$^\dagger$ on HallusionBench by nearly ten points. To understand why, we build GD-Probe, a diagnostic set that pairs a global and a detail question on the same image, so that any difference in caption effect is attributable to the question alone. Caption utility proves to be a per-query property: the same caption helps global questions and harms detail ones, through a single mechanism – an embedded caption competes with the image for attention and pulls the model's evidence onto its own text – whose sign is set by whether the caption covers the queried content. Crucially, this regime is readable from quantities the decoder already emits, with no attention access or grounding. We turn this into GEASS (Gated Evidence-Adaptive Selective Caption Trust), a training-free, logit-level module that decides per query how much of the caption to trust, gating it by the clean path's confidence, weighting it by the entropy reduction it induces, and raising the evidence bar when the two pathways disagree. Across four VLMs and two benchmarks (POPE and HallusionBench), GEASS improves over both vanilla inference and contrastive decoding under a single fixed setting, adding only two forward passes and no parameters.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Driven-dissipative entanglement of distant giant atoms

arXiv:2606.13375v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum interconnects distribute entanglement via controlled light-matter interactions for quantum computing and sensing applications. Many entanglement generation schemes use coherent, reversible interactions that require precisely calibrated pulses to execute. In contrast, driven-dissipative protocols use a continuous-wave drive in the presence of correlated dissipation to stabilize entanglement in protected (dark) states. However, the same dissipation that generates the entanglement also limits its utility once the stabilization protocol ends. Here, we engineer a superconducting system of two giant artificial atoms coupled sequentially to a waveguide, with tunable individual and correlated dissipation enabled by interference between coupling points. Continuously driving the atoms through the waveguide exploits correlated dissipation to generate remote entanglement. We then tune the qubit frequencies in situ to suppress individual dissipation and thereby preserve the entanglement, achieving a Bell-state fidelity F = 0.89 +/- 0.02. This demonstration indicates that the driven dissipation of giant atoms is a viable approach for distributing entanglement across quantum networks.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Uncertainty Decomposition for Clarification Seeking in LLM Agents

Recent position papers argue that the classical aleatoric/epistemic uncertainty framework is insufficient for interactive large language model (LLM) agents and call for underspecification-aware, decomposed, and communicable uncertainty representations that can unlock new agent capabilities such as proactive clarification seeking and shared mental-model building. Practical deployment constraints – black-box APIs, interactive latency budgets, and the absence of labeled trajectories – rule out logprob-based, multi-sampling, and training-based methods, leaving prompt-based estimation as the most viable family for surfacing such signals at deployment time. We answer this call with a simple prompt-based decomposition that separates action confidence from request uncertainty (u), enabling the agent to ask for clarification when the task specification is ambiguous. To evaluate it, we introduce two clarification-augmented benchmarks (WebShop-Clarification and ALFWorld-Clarification) in which 50% of tasks are deliberately underspecified, and systematically compare the proposed decomposition against ReAct+UE and Uncertainty-Aware Memory (UAM) across five LLM backbones (GPT-5.1, DeepSeek-v3.2-exp, GLM-4.7, Qwen3.5-35B, GPT-OSS-120B) on these variants together with the standard WebShop, ALFWorld, and REAL benchmarks for fault detection. Averaged across the five backbones, the proposed decomposition improves clarification F1 on ALFWorld-Clarification by 73% over ReAct+UE and by 36% over UAM, and leads clarification F1 on every backbone on WebShop-Clarification and on four of five backbones on ALFWorld-Clarification, indicating that the gains generalize beyond a single LLM.

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

Synchronization of Quasi-Particle Excitations in a Quantum Gas with Cavity-Mediated Interactions

arXiv:2504.17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Driven-dissipative quantum systems can undergo transitions from stationary to dynamical phases, reflecting the emergence of collective non-equilibrium behavior. We study such a transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity and develop a cavity-assisted Bragg spectroscopy technique to resolve its collective modes. We observe dissipation-induced synchronization at the quasiparticle level, where two roton-like modes coalesce at an exceptional point. This reveals how dissipation microscopically drives collective dynamics and signals a precursor to a dynamical phase transition.

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

MedAI: Evaluating TxAgent's Therapeutic Agentic Reasoning in the NeurIPS CURE-Bench Competition

arXiv:2512.11682v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Therapeutic decision-making in clinical medicine constitutes a high-stakes domain in which AI guidance interacts with complex interactions among patient characteristics, disease processes, and pharmacological agents. Tasks such as drug recommendation, treatment planning, and adverse-effect prediction demand robust, multi-step reasoning grounded in reliable biomedical knowledge. Agentic AI methods, exemplified by TxAgent, address these challenges through iterative retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). TxAgent employs a fine-tuned Llama-3.1-8B model that dynamically generates and executes function calls to a unified biomedical tool suite (ToolUniverse), integrating FDA Drug API, OpenTargets, and Monarch resources to ensure access to current therapeutic information. In contrast to general-purpose RAG systems, medical applications impose stringent safety constraints, rendering the accuracy of both the reasoning trace and the sequence of tool invocations critical. These considerations motivate evaluation protocols treating token-level reasoning and tool-usage behaviors as explicit supervision signals. This work presents insights derived from our participation in the CURE-Bench NeurIPS 2025 Challenge, which benchmarks therapeutic-reasoning systems using metrics that assess correctness, tool utilization, and reasoning quality. We analyze how retrieval quality for function (tool) calls influences overall model performance and demonstrate performance gains achieved through improved tool-retrieval strategies. Our work was awarded the Excellence Award in Open Science. Complete information can be found at https://curebench.ai/.

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

Certification of Machine Learning Models via Directional Sharpness

arXiv:2606.25004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In machine learning, model certification has been identified as an important method for gaining assurance about a model's trustworthiness and quality. A model's quality is largely determined by its ability to generalize, i.e., to perform well on data beyond what it was trained on. It is not possible to certify generalization directly, however, as it depends on unknown data and is not directly measurable. Proxies such as test accuracy can be misleading when the training process is perturbed (intentionally or accidentally), and metrics such as sharpness – which has an empirically supported link to generalization – are computationally expensive and can also serve as unreliable signals when training deviates from a prescribed procedure. In this work, we propose directional sharpness, a metric designed to efficiently and reliably indicate generalization despite potential training deviations. We provide empirical and analytical evidence that directional sharpness (1) correlates more strongly with generalization than existing metrics and (2) identifies models with poor generalization more reliably than existing metrics. Furthermore, directional sharpness is efficiently computable in model auditing settings, where the verifier has access to training data, and via zero-knowledge proofs that certify quality without revealing training data.

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

Evaluating the Robustness of Proof Autoformalization in Lean 4

Proof autoformalization aims to translate a mathematical informal proof written in natural language into a formal proof in a formal language such as Lean~4. Several works have developed LLM-based models for proof autoformalization. However, existing evaluations have typically focused on translating well-formed informal proofs from curated datasets. We argue that a robust proof autoformalizer must remain faithful even for informal proofs that diverge from these idealized ones, and we present the first study on the robustness of proof autoformalization models. We formulate two categories of perturbations and evaluate robustness under each: a global perturbation paraphrases the informal proof in a different style, under which the formalization should remain consistent; a local perturbation alters a value, symbol, or proof step, possibly in a counterfactual way, and a robust formalization should faithfully reflect the perturbation rather than reverting to the original one or inferring a different one on its own. We build a benchmark with both perturbations on miniF2F and MATH-500, and automatically measure how stable a proof autoformalization's correctness is under global perturbations and how faithfully its output reflects local perturbations. We evaluate seven recent models, all of which are sensitive to global perturbations and mostly fail to remain faithful under local perturbations. Code and data are available via https://github.com/ucr-rai/robust-proof-autoformalization.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

The 1/4-phenomenon of placement probabilities of tilings in the Aztec diamond

arXiv:2512.08377v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider domino tilings of the Aztec diamond. Using the Domino Shuffling algorithm introduced by Elkies, Kuperberg, Larsen, and Propp in arXiv:math/9201305, we are able to generate domino tilings uniformly at random. In this paper, we investigate the probability of finding a domino at a specific position in such a random tiling. We prove that this placement probability is always equal to $1/4$ plus a rational function, whose shape depends on the location of the domino, multiplied by a position-independent factor that involves only the size of the diamond. This result leads to significantly more compact explicit counting formulas compared to previous findings. As a direct application, we derive explicit counting formulas for the domino tilings of Aztec diamonds with $2\times 2$-square holes at arbitrary positions.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Privacy-Preserving Text Sanitization for Distributed Agents Collaboration via Disentangled Representations

When distributed agents exchange text across organizational boundaries, privacy leakage arises not only from explicit identifiers but also from distributional signatures such as formatting conventions, vocabulary choices, and syntactic patterns. We propose DiSan(Disentangled Sanitization), a privacy-preserving sanitization framework and a built-in component of Intern-Shannon for multi-agent collaboration. DiSan uses a two-stream encoder to factorize text into a source-invariant role subspace that preserves task semantics and a source-identifying style subspace that remains local. Federated proto-type alignment and adversarial regularization enable joint training without centralizing raw text. Experiments show that identifier-level masking is insufficient: masking 19.2% of tokens reduces TF-IDF stylometric attribution by only 18.6%. By contrast, DiSan reduces answer-level PII exposure by 20 times while maintaining 83% answer faithfulness on a distributed multi-agent RAG benchmark, and lowers Enron stylometric attribution by 73.2% under TF-IDF and 70.6% under a neural probe.

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

Environment-Grounded Automated Prompt Optimization for LLM Game Agents

LLM agents in interactive environments are highly sensitive to their prompts, yet prompt engineering remains a manual, task-specific process. We introduce an automated prompt optimization framework for LLM agents that decomposes the observation-to-action pipeline into a goal-conditioned descriptor agent and an action selection agent, and iteratively refines each module's prompt through an LLM-driven evolutionary loop guided by environment returns. We propose a behavior analyzer to attribute episode outcomes to specific prompt components, and a mutator to propose targeted revisions to the prompt, before validating them through environment rollouts. We evaluate on all five BabyAI tasks in the BALROG benchmark, comparing our pipeline against BALROG's RobustCoTAgent under both plain and guided prompt initializations. Optimization improves performance consistently across tasks and conditions, without requiring updates to the model weights. On PutNext, a multi-step coordination task where the RobustCoTAgent achieves 0% success, our framework reaches up to 72.5% success rate using the same underlying LLM with optimized prompts. These results suggest that a multi-agent framework, combined with automatic prompt optimization, enhances LLMs without the need for fine-tuning or extensive human supervision.

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

AI-Driven Predictive Maintenance with Environmental Context Integration for Connected Vehicles: Simulation, Benchmarking, and Field Validation

arXiv:2603.13343v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Predictive maintenance for connected vehicles offers the potential to reduce unexpected breakdowns and improve fleet reliability, but most existing systems rely exclusively on internal diagnostic signals and are validated on simulated or industrial benchmark data. This paper presents a contextual data fusion framework integrating vehicle-internal sensor streams with external environmental signals – road quality, weather, traffic density, and driver behaviour – acquired via V2X communication and third-party APIs, with inference at the vehicle edge. The framework is evaluated across four layers. A feature group ablation study on a physics-informed synthetic dataset shows contextual features contribute a 2.6-point F1 improvement; removing all context reduces macro F1 from 0.855 to 0.807. On the AI4I 2020 benchmark (10,000 samples), LightGBM achieves AUC-ROC 0.973 under 5-fold stratified cross-validation with SMOTE confined to training folds. A noise sensitivity analysis shows macro F1 remains above 0.88 at low noise and degrades to 0.74 at high noise. Most critically, the pipeline is validated on real-world telemetry from five vehicles across three countries (India, Germany, Brazil), comprising 992 trips and 11 evaluable service events identified from component wear resets in the trip logs. Across six wear-driven events spanning four vehicles, the model achieves 100% detection with mean MAE of 12.2 days. A fine-tuning ablation shows the base synthetic model already achieves 6/6 binary detection; per-vehicle adaptation reduces wear-driven MAE from 25.9 to 12.2 days. SHAP analysis confirms contextual and interaction features rank among the top 15 predictors. Edge-based inference reduces estimated latency from 3.5 seconds to under 1.0 second relative to cloud-only processing.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

KAN-MLP-Mixer: A comprehensive investigation of the usage of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) for improving IMU-based Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2605.19031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have demonstrated an exceptional ability to learn complex functions on clean, low-dimensional data but struggle to maintain performance on noisy and imperfect real-world datasets. In contrast, conventional multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) are far more tolerant to noise and computationally efficient. Replacing all MLP components with KANs in HAR models often degrades accuracy and computation efficiency, highlighting an open challenge: how to combine KANs' precision with MLPs' noise robustness and efficiency. To address this, we systematically explore various placements of KAN modules within deep HAR networks and propose a hybrid architecture that strategically synergizes the strengths of both paradigms, which uses a KAN-based input embedding layer, retains MLP layers for intermediate feature mixing, and introduces a specialized LarctanKAN module for final activity classification. Across eight public HAR datasets, the hybrid KAN-MLP model achieves an average macro F1 score relative improvement of 5.33\% compared pure-MLP model, significantly outperforming standalone KAN and MLP baselines. Furthermore, integrating this hybrid strategy into other state-of-the-art HAR architectures consistently boosts their performance. Our findings demonstrate that a carefully orchestrated combination of KAN, MLP, or other conventional neural components yields more robust and accurate HAR models for real-world wearable sensing environments.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Semiclassical limit of Polyakov-Liouville measure and Q-Curvature Uniformization on evev-dimensional manifolds

arXiv:2606.14443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the semiclassical limit of the Polyakov-Liouville measure $\boldsymbol{\nu}_\gamma$, which is a non-Gaussian measure on $H^{-\eps}(M)$ that has recently been extended from Riemann surfaces to general Riemannian manifolds $(M,g)$ of even dimension. We show that under an appropriate rescaling in the semiclassical limit as $\gamma\to0$, the normalized Polyakov-Liouville measure $\Q_\gamma$ concentrates on the unique smooth weight $u$ for which the conformal metric $e^{2u}g$ on $M$ has constant $Q$-curvature.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

A Leakage-Aware Comparative Benchmark of Machine Learning, Deep Learning, and Transformer Models for Reliable Leukemia Detection

Automated classification of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) from peripheral blood smear images has often reported near-perfect performance on the C-NMC 2019 dataset. We show that such results can be inflated by patient-level data leakage caused by random image-level partitioning, where cells from the same subject may appear in both training and test folds. We establish a leakage-aware benchmark under a strict subject-disjoint protocol, comparing LightGBM, RBF-SVM, EfficientNet-B0, EfficientNet-B1, and ViT-Tiny. Models are developed using three subject-disjoint folds from 73 subjects and evaluated on an external preliminary-phase test set of 1,867 images from 28 unseen subjects with zero patient overlap. Beyond discrimination, we assess calibration using expected calibration error, Brier score, and temperature scaling. Under honest evaluation, EfficientNet-B1 achieves the best performance, with AUROC 0.913, sensitivity 0.87, specificity 0.80, and calibrated ECE 0.024. Frozen-feature classifiers and ViT-Tiny show high sensitivity but poor specificity, indicating a tendency to over-predict the malignant class. A random-versus-subject-disjoint ablation shows that random splitting inflates AUROC by about 0.04 even in the conservative frozen-feature setting. These findings caution against image-level evaluation on C-NMC 2019 and provide a reproducible, calibration-aware benchmark for future work.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

SkyJEPA: Learning Long-Horizon World Models for Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Control of Quadrotors

arXiv:2606.23444v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate dynamics models are critical for informed decision-making in robotic systems, particularly for agile aerial vehicles operating under uncertainty. Neural network dynamics models are attractive for capturing complex nonlinear effects, but existing predictive approaches struggle with long-horizon forecasting because their autoregressive rollout mechanism amplifies errors over time. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a compelling alternative by modeling dynamics in latent space, yet prior JEPA-style methods for robot navigation have been studied primarily for kinematic-level planning, with limited investigation in high-frequency control. In this work, we introduce the JEPA-style model for real-time quadrotor control. The proposed approach combines a latent dynamics model with a novel physics-inspired prober that maps frozen latents to interpretable state, enabling physically grounded long-horizon prediction. Additionally, we combine the learned model with a sampling-based optimal control solution to take advantage of its predictive capabilities for real-time control on embedded hardware. Finally, to reduce the dependence on expensive and unsafe real-world data collection, we develop a structured pipeline for automated dataset generation. Extensive open-loop and outdoor closed-loop experiments demonstrate accurate prediction, robust zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, and strong generalization across diverse operating conditions.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Batteries as Work Sources for Phase-Locked Parametric Amplification

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20306v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum batteries have been proposed as locally precharged work sources for superconducting quantum technologies, suggesting a route to reduce continuously supplied microwave drives. Here we ask whether the pump tone of a quantum-limited parametric amplifier can be replaced, or strongly duty-cycled, by a finite bosonic quantum battery. Quantizing the pump of a nondegenerate parametric amplifier exposes a resource distinction hidden in the classical description: stored pump energy can generate signal-idler photons, but pump phase coherence is required to generate a phase-locked amplifier field. In a closed trilinear model, coherent and phase-randomized coherent pumps with the same photon-number distribution produce comparable pair numbers, yet only the coherent pump produces anomalous two-mode coherence and an EPR-squeezed interference dip. Including leakage, we collect the emitted fields into cascaded temporal modes. At matched collector bandwidth, the coherent pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=0.553\), whereas the phase-randomized pump gives \(I_{\min}^{(f)}=1.94\) at nearly identical collected energy. Weak amplitude squeezing slightly improves the dip by reducing finite-pump number fluctuations while preserving the coherent displacement. Thus battery-powered parametric amplification requires phase-coherent stored energy, possibly assisted by number-noise reduction, rather than stored energy alone.

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

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

How the zebrafish brain weaves recent experiences into future decisions

Authors: Unknown Author

Animals often use recent experience to guide future choices. Whole-brain imaging in larval zebrafish (Danio rerio) reveals a dedicated neural circuit that governs history-biased decisions: the thalamus maintains the most recent event as a stable pattern of neuronal activity, and the brainstem integrates recent experiences into a continuous signal that biases future action. Whole-brain calcium imaging in the zebrafish reveals how information about events in the recent past drives future behaviour.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From geometry to dynamics: Learning overdamped Langevin dynamics from sparse observations with geometric constraints

arXiv:2512.23566v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How can we learn the laws underlying the dynamics of stochastic systems when their trajectories are sampled sparsely in time? Existing methods either require temporally resolved high-frequency observations, or rely on geometric arguments that apply only to conservative systems, limiting the range of dynamics they can recover. Here, we present a new framework that reconciles these two perspectives by reformulating inference as a stochastic control problem. Our method uses geometry-driven path augmentation, guided by the geometry in the system's invariant density to reconstruct likely trajectories and infer the underlying dynamics without assuming specific parametric models. Applied to overdamped Langevin systems, our approach accurately recovers stochastic dynamics even from extremely undersampled data, outperforming existing methods in synthetic benchmarks. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of incorporating geometric inductive biases into stochastic system identification methods.

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

X-Tokenizer: A Multimodal Action Tokenizer for Vision-Language-Action Pretraining

Modern Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models must bridge pretrained vision-language reasoning and precise continuous robot control. Existing action tokenizers discretize actions primarily for reconstruction, producing codes that preserve motion geometry but provide only weak semantic supervision to the backbone. We therefore formulate action tokenization not as mere compression, but as semantic interface learning between multimodal reasoning and executable control. To this end, we introduce X-Tokenizer, a lightweight encoder-Semantic Residual Quantization (SRQ)-decoder architecture that provides a shared action interface across diverse robotic arm embodiments. Its key component, SRQ, imposes an asymmetric structure on residual vector quantization: the first level is trained with Masked Action Modeling (MAM) to form a discrete action language that captures coarse motion intent, while deeper levels remain reconstruction-oriented residuals that preserve fine-grained details. To further align action tokens with multimodal semantics, X-Tokenizer is pretrained with contrastive alignment to the representation space of a pretrained foundation model and with next-frame vision-language feature prediction. Pretrained on 2.4M trajectories (2.0B action frames), a single frozen X-Tokenizer plugs into a mixed discrete-continuous VLA as a representation-shaping supervision signal. X-Tokenizer achieves top real-world aggregate and strong RoboTwin 2.0 simulation results. Outperforming FAST in multimodal grounding (+13.5%) and long-horizon tasks (+8.25), it shows that action tokenizers serve as semantic interfaces for VLA pretraining beyond mere action compression.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

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

Sparse probes and murky physics: a case study of interpretability challenges in a foundation model for continuum dynamics

arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Differential COVID-19 Outcomes Across Lysosomal Disorders

Background Lysosomal disorders (LDs) are a heterogeneous group of rare inherited disorders characterized by multi-system involvement and high comorbidity burden, which raises concerns about severe COVID-19 outcomes. Conversely, because SARS-CoV-2 relies on endolysosomal pathways for cellular entry and replication, certain LDs may exert a protective effect against viral pathogenesis. Prior clinical evidence investigating LDs and severe SARS-CoV-2 infection has been limited by small sample sizes and inconsistent findings. Therefore, to resolve these conflicting biological hypotheses and estimate population-level outcomes, we conducted a large-scale retrospective cohort study using nationwide U.S. harmonized electronic health record data from the National Clinical Cohort Collaborative (N3C). This design utilized longitudinal records starting January 1, 2018, to evaluate COVID-19 infections captured between January 1, 2020, and July 11, 2024. Results The study included 16,380 individuals, comprising 5,460 patients with lysosomal disorders and 10,920 matched controls. Patients with LDs had significantly higher odds of COVID-19 hospitalization compared with controls (OR = 1.86, 95% CI: 1.70-2.04). Elevated odds were observed across the evaluated categories, but varied substantially. Notably, neurodegenerative LDs such as neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (OR = 9.32) and metachromatic leukodystrophy (OR = 2.33) remained associated with hospitalization after adjustment for comorbidities. Contrarily, the elevated odds for Fabry disease and Gaucher disease were no longer significant after adjustment. Mortality among hospitalized patients with LDs was comparable to that of matched controls (one-year survival: 82.1% vs 82.0%), suggesting that LD status does not independently worsen survival once hospitalization occurs. Conclusions Patients with LDs were at an increased odds of COVID-19 hospitalization, driven by a combination of elevated comorbidity burden and disorder-specific effects, which vary significantly across LD categories. This study clarifies that excess risk is concentrated in the transition to hospitalization. These patients may thus require personalized clinical care to mitigate the negative consequences of COVID-19.