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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Cardiometabolic multimorbidity and care experiences in primary healthcare among Brazilian adults aged 50 and over (ELSI-Brazil)

Authors:
Souza↗F. H. A. d↗Delpino↗F. M↗Batista↗S. R. R↗

Background: Population aging and the rising burden of non-communicable diseases have increased the prevalence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity (CM-MM) among older adults. Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) are recognized as essential components of healthcare quality assessment, yet evidence on primary care experiences among individuals with CM-MM remains scarce. Objective: To analyze primary care experiences according to the presence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity among Brazilians aged 50 years and older. Methods: Cross-sectional study using data from the second wave of the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSI-Brazil, 2019-2021; n = 9,949). CM-MM was defined as the self-reported coexistence of two or more of the following conditions: hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, acute myocardial infarction, and stroke. Primary care experiences were assessed using a validated 12-item instrument organized into four domains: first-contact access, longitudinality, communication, and care coordination. Associations were estimated using Poisson regression adjusted for sociodemographic, health conditions, and healthcare utilization variables, with stratified analysis by Family Health Strategy (FHS) coverage. Results: CM-MM prevalence was 25.5%, with a progressive increase by age and an inverse gradient by education. Individuals with CM-MM reported significantly more positive experiences in longitudinality (mean index 2.53 vs. 2.34; adjusted PR = 1.22; 95%CI 1.12-1.33; p < 0.001) and, to a lesser extent, in communication (mean index 2.68 vs. 2.58; adjusted PR = 1.10; 95%CI 1.00-1.20; p = 0.041). No statistically significant differences were found in first-contact access or care coordination. After stratified by FHS coverage, the observed differences in longitudinality and communication were no longer statistically significant. Conclusions: CM-MM was associated with more positive primary care experiences in longitudinality and communication. The absence of differentiated experiences in first-contact access and coordination highlights structural gaps in primary care responsiveness to individuals with greater clinical complexity. Keywords: Multimorbidity; Cardiometabolic diseases; Primary Care; Patient-reported experience measures; Older adults; ELSI-Brazil.

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

Retrieve, Don't Retrain: Extending Vision Language Action Models to New Tasks at Test Time

Authors:
Jeongeun Park↗Juhan Park↗Taekyung Kim↗Sungjoon Choi↗Dongyoon Han↗Sangdoo Yun↗

arXiv:2606.15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute. In this paper, we show that this target-side per-task adaptation cost can be replaced by retrieval. Our retrieval-augmented policy is trained once on paired demonstrations from the target embodiment (query) and a cheaper embodiment (pool, e.g., human-hand video), then frozen. New tasks are added at deployment by appending pool-side demonstrations to a retrieval pool. The frozen policy conditions on retrieved trajectories at every control step, so new tasks are absorbed by indexing data rather than updating parameters. Fine-tuning is needed only to take on a new, unseen embodiment, not for each new task. We show that retrieval improves policies beyond a specific backbone, including standard VLA policies, but its effect is especially pronounced in Cosmos Policy, a video-generation-based world-action model (WAM). In this setting, retrieval supplies coarse task progression, while the WAM's future-image objective provides an additional visual consistency signal that strengthens the retrieval-conditioned actions. On PushT, we study how retrieval provides a reusable high-level motion prior for cross-embodiment generalization to unseen goal angles, while on RoboTwin 2.0 our method outperforms cross-embodiment baselines on unseen tasks, and we additionally demonstrate the method on a real robot.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CoMo: Learning Continuous Latent Motion from Internet Videos for Scalable Robot Learning

Authors:
Jiange Yang↗Yansong Shi↗Haoyi Zhu↗Mingyu Liu↗Kaijing Ma↗Yating Wang↗Gangshan Wu↗Tong He↗Limin Wang↗

Unsupervised learning of latent motion from Internet videos is crucial for robot learning. Existing discrete methods generally mitigate the shortcut learning caused by extracting excessive static backgrounds through vector quantization with a small codebook size. However, they suffer from information loss and struggle to capture more complex and fine-grained dynamics. Moreover, there is an inherent gap between the distribution of discrete latent motion and continuous robot action, which hinders the joint learning of a unified policy. We propose CoMo, which aims to learn more precise continuous latent motion from internet-scale videos. CoMo employs an early temporal difference (Td) mechanism to increase the shortcut learning difficulty and explicitly enhance motion cues. Additionally, to ensure latent motion better captures meaningful foregrounds, we further propose a temporal contrastive learning (Tcl) scheme. Specifically, positive pairs are constructed with a small future frame temporal offset, while negative pairs are formed by directly reversing the temporal direction. The proposed Td and Tcl work synergistically and effectively ensure that the latent motion focuses better on the foreground and reinforces motion cues. Critically, CoMo exhibits strong zeroshot generalization, enabling it to generate effective pseudo action labels for unseen videos. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments show that policies co-trained with CoMo pseudo action labels achieve superior performance with both diffusion and auto-regressive architectures.

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

Safe Exploration via Policy Priors

Authors:
Manuel Wendl↗Yarden As↗Manish Prajapat↗Anton Pollak↗Stelian Coros↗Andreas Krause↗

arXiv:2601.19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative policies (e.g., obtained from offline data or simulators) as priors. Our approach, SOOPER, uses probabilistic dynamics models to optimistically explore, yet pessimistically fall back to the conservative policy prior if needed. We prove that SOOPER guarantees safety throughout learning, and establish convergence to an optimal policy by bounding its cumulative regret. Extensive experiments on key safe RL benchmarks and real-world hardware demonstrate that SOOPER is scalable, outperforms the state-of-the-art and validate our theoretical guarantees in practice.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Dressed Floquet scars from protected zero modes in a Rydberg chain

Authors:
Saptadip Roy↗Bhaskar Mukherjee↗K. Sengupta↗Arnab Sen↗

arXiv:2606.15605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this Letter, we present an approximate analytic construction of two zero quasienergy quantum many-body scars in a periodically driven model of Rydberg atoms on a ring, which persist over a range of driving amplitudes and frequencies for finite sizes. An index theorem protects an exponentially large number (in system size) of exact zero energy modes of the Floquet Hamiltonian in this setting. Unlike most of these zero modes which continuously change with drive parameters, these two quantum many-body scars retain the memory of particular states. They can be expressed as {\it dressed versions} of two contrasting states, the Rydberg vacuum and a unitarily rotated variant of a volume-law scar [Ivanov and Motrunich, Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 134}, 050403 (2025)], respectively. We provide an analytic understanding of their existence using a Floquet perturbation theory and show their resilience beyond the perturbative regime using exact diagonalization in finite systems. Our study provides insight into the structure of protected zero modes in interacting Floquet settings.

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

Female-RHINO: A Real-Time Scanner-Integrated Framework for Automated Quantitative Uterine MRI Analysis and Structured Reporting

Authors:
Deepak Bhatia↗Saad Ahmad↗Smiti Tripathy↗Maria Camila Bustos Vivas↗Lieselotte Kratzsch↗Anika Knupfer↗Jordina Aviles Verdera↗Susanne Schulz-Heise↗Matthias May↗Jana Hutter↗

arXiv:2606.24390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized assessment of uterine MRI remains challenging due to anatomical variability, observer dependence, and the lack of workflow-integrated automated analysis tools. This work presents Female-RHINO: (R)eproductive (H)ealth (I)maging A(N)alysis T(O)ol, a real-time AI-assisted framework for automated quantitative uterine MRI analysis and structured reporting during image acquisition. We present an end-to-end system that integrates inline communication with the MRI scanner and deep learning-based analysis to derive quantitative uterine biomarkers from sagittal T2-weighted pelvic MRI. The framework combines segmentation and anatomical landmark detection models trained and evaluated on more than 500 multi-center datasets spanning diverse protocols, vendors, and patient populations. It performs volumetry, detects and quantifies common incidental findings such as fibroids and Nabothian cysts, and extracts six anatomical landmarks for biometric assessment. Results are compiled into a structured clinician-oriented report with integrated visualizations, without manual interaction. Evaluation on independent retrospective and prospective cohorts demonstrated robust performance across varying acquisition settings. Mean Dice similarity coefficients were 0.82 for the uterus and 0.80 for fibroids, with lower but consistent agreement for Nabothian cysts. Landmark detection achieved a mean radial error of 3.7 mm. End-to-end processing was completed in under 70 seconds, enabling availability of results during the ongoing scan. Prospective deployment yielded immediate, standardized, and reproducible analyses supported by inter-observer agreement. The proposed system enables real-time scanner-integrated AI for automated uterine MRI analysis and reporting, with potential to improve standardization, efficiency, and clinical workflow in pelvic imaging.

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07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Conditional means, vector pricings, amenability and fixed points in cones

Authors:
Nicolas Monod↗

arXiv:2512.13829v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We develop a generalization of conditional probability for arbitrary ordered vector spaces. A related problem is that of assigning a numerical value to one vector relative to another. We characterize the groups for which these generalized probabilities can be stationary, respectively invariant. Our results deviate from the setting of classical probability and lead to a new criterion for amenability and for fixed points in cones.

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08.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

Efficacy and target engagement of dopamine agonist pramipexole for anhedonic depression: a randomized placebo-controlled trial

Authors:
Filip Ventorp↗

Anhedonia is a core and disabling symptom of mood disorders with limited treatment options. We evaluated the efficacy and safety of the dopamine agonist pramipexole in patients with mood disorders characterized by clinically significant anhedonia. In this single-center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, adults with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression and elevated Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS) scores were assigned (1:1) to flexible dose, once-daily oral pramipexole as add-on treatment or placebo for 9 weeks. The primary outcome was change in SHAPS score from baseline to week 9. Analyses were conducted in the modified intention-to-treat population. Eighty-five participants were randomized, and 82 were included in the analysis. The primary outcome was met: pramipexole was associated with a greater reduction in SHAPS scores compared to placebo (mean difference: −4.04, 95% confidence interval: −6.89 to −1.18, P = 0.006, Hedges’ g = 0.62). Exploratory analyses indicated that pramipexole was associated with increased light physical activity and relative preservation of reward-related ventral striatal activation. Improvements in anhedonia were sustained during a 6-month open-label extension. Pramipexole was generally well tolerated compared to placebo. Pramipexole significantly improved anhedonia and showed a favorable safety profile, supporting its potential as an augmentation strategy in mood disorders. ClinicalTrials.gov identifiers: NCT05355337 and NCT05825235 . Pramipexole, in patients with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression, reduced Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale scores significantly compared to placebo.

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09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-05-29

A prototype-augmented graph representation learning framework for identifying brain disorder-associated genes and facilitating drug repurposing

Authors:
Jiafang Li↗

by Jiafang Li, Yifei Li, Siying Lin, Jiahua Rao, Huiying Zhao Many genetic loci were identified as associated with neuropsychiatric disorders and neurodegenerative disorders by Genome-wide association studies (GWAS). How these loci impact these diseases is unclear. Advances in deep-learning approaches and multi-omics data have the potential to link GWAS findings with disease mechanisms. Here, we proposed the Multi-omics Graph Transformer Network (MOGT), a semi-supervised graph neural network that leverages graph representation learning to model biological networks derived from multi-omics data to predict disease-associated genes. MOGT outperforms the current approaches in disease gene prediction for two psychiatric disorders and three neurodegenerative/neurological diseases. High-risk genes (HRGs) for Parkinson’s disease (PD) predicted by MOGT were used to drug discovery by integrating with the CMAP database. Finally, 10 drugs were identified as potential candidates. Among them, the effect of drug UK-356618 was experimentally verified in a primary neuron model, showing that UK-356618 reversed the abnormal expression of PD-associated genes and improved the cell-level phenotypes of PD. Together, these results indicate that MOGT can be used to identify HRGs for brain disorders, and these predicted HRGs provide high-level insights into the mechanisms and treatments of brain disorders.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When More Documents Hurt RAG: Mitigating Vector Search Dilution with Domain-Scoped, Model-Agnostic Retrieval

Authors:
Nabaraj Subedi↗Ahmed Abdelaty↗Shivanand Venkanna Sheshappanavar↗

Retrieval-augmented generation degrades when scaled to large, heterogeneous document collections, where dense similarity loses discriminative power, and top-k retrieval increasingly returns semantically similar but contextually incorrect chunks. We refer to this failure mode as vector search dilution. Even when using hybrid dense+sparse retrieval, we observed this firsthand in a deployed Wyoming Department of Transportation corpus, where scaling from 54 to 1,128 documents (88,907 chunks) reduced accuracy from 75% to below 40%. To address this dilution, we propose MASDR-RAG ( Multi-Agent Scoped Domain Retrieval for RAG) and evaluate it on 200 expert-validated queries across five LLM backbones, six corpora, and two index stacks. Our results indicate that domain scoping using organizational metadata is the key fix, significantly improving P@10 from 0.77 to 0.86 ($p < 0.05$). Furthermore, our investigation of multi-agent orchestration revealed that a high degree of configuration dependence results –creating what we call the precision-faithfulness paradox. Based on these varied outcomes, our practical recommendation is simple: scope first, then perform a single synthesis call, reserving full multi-agent orchestration for genuinely multi-domain corpora paired with native-tool-call backbones. Code and Data will be made public upon acceptance.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Impossibility of superluminal signalling rules out causal loops in conical spacetimes

Authors:
Maarten Grothus↗V. Vilasini↗

arXiv:2606.20476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In PRL 129, 110401 it was shown that it is theoretically possible to have operationally detectable causal loops without violating the principle of no superluminal signalling (NSS) in (1+1)-Minkowski spacetime. Whether or not such causal loops are also possible in $d > 1$ spatial dimensions, has remained a key open question. We resolve this question by showing that in a wide class of "conical" spacetimes, including Minkowski with d > 1, NSS does rule out all operationally detectable causal loops, in classical, quantum and post-quantum theories. This establishes that the relationship between the relativistic principles of NSS and no causal loops depends inherently on the geometry of spacetime.

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

QC-SMOTE: Quality-Controlled SMOTE for Imbalanced Classification

Authors:
Parth Upman↗Shreyank N Gowda↗

arXiv:2606.24625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Class imbalance poses a significant challenge in classification, where existing methods such as SMOTE often generate low-quality synthetic samples in regions with noise or class overlap. We propose QC-SMOTE, a quality-controlled oversampling framework that estimates minority sample reliability using a composite neighbourhood trustworthiness score combining local density, safe-level, and isolation from the majority class. Synthetic candidates are generated using an IPQ-guided best-of-K strategy that evaluates midpoint purity and, when required, majority clearance, with allocation guided by sample reliability and boundary informativeness. Generation behaviour adapts across overlap–imbalance regimes, adjusting interpolation range and selection criteria to match local data geometry. Low-quality synthetic samples are replaced with original minority duplicates when neighbourhood purity falls below an adaptive threshold, providing graceful degradation by reverting to duplication in severely noisy regions. Experiments on 30 imbalanced datasets using repeated stratified cross-validation show that QC-SMOTE achieves the strongest average AUC-ROC and Macro F1 among the compared oversampling methods, with particularly clear gains under moderate and severe imbalance. These results demonstrate the importance of quality-aware, geometry-adaptive synthetic sampling for robust imbalanced classification.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

A Controlled Study of CLIP-Based Body-Scene Fusion for Emotion Recognition in Context

Authors:
Zubair Abbas↗Muhammad Umair↗Muqaddas Hameed↗

Apparent emotion in natural images is often not visible from the face alone. The face may be small, hidden, or neutral, while posture and scene context carry much of the evidence. This work studies context-aware emotion recognition on EMOTIC with an image-only two-stream model. A ResNet-18 body stream encodes the target-person crop, and a CLIP ViT-B/16 scene stream encodes the full image. The fused feature predicts 26 categorical emotion labels and the continuous valence, arousal, and dominance values. This study examines whether small context-debiasing or rare-class training changes still help after adding a CLIP scene encoder. The clean two-stream model is compared with simplified CCIM-style intervention, CLEF-lite context-bias subtraction, ASL tuning, and class-balanced sampling under the same implementation pipeline. No tested variant improves over the clean two-stream model, which achieves 34.52% mAP on the EMOTIC test split. CLIP gives the model broad scene semantics, but the simplified causal, counterfactual, and rare-class changes do not automatically improve performance. Most remaining errors are in rare and subtle emotion categories, so the next step should focus on label relationships and finer subject-context interaction.

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

The Query Channel: Information-Theoretic Limits of Masking-Based Explanations

Authors:
Erciyes Karakaya↗Ozgur Ercetin↗

arXiv:2604.16689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masking-based post-hoc explanation methods, such as KernelSHAP and LIME, estimate local feature importance by querying a black-box model under randomized perturbations. This paper formulates this procedure as communication over a query channel, where the latent explanation acts as a message and each masked evaluation is a channel use. Within this framework, the complexity of the explanation is captured by the entropy of the hypothesis class, while the query interface supplies information at a rate determined by an identification capacity per query. We derive a strong converse showing that, if the explanation rate exceeds this capacity, the probability of exact recovery necessarily converges to one in error for any sequence of explainers and decoders. We also prove an achievability result establishing that a sparse maximum-likelihood decoder attains reliable recovery when the rate lies below capacity. A Monte Carlo estimator of mutual information yields a non-asymptotic query benchmark that we use to compare optimal decoding with Lasso- and OLS-based procedures that mirror LIME and KernelSHAP. Experiments reveal a range of query budgets where information theory permits reliable explanations but standard convex surrogates still fail. Finally, we interpret super-pixel resolution and tokenization for neural language models as a source-coding choice that sets the entropy of the explanation and show how Gaussian noise and nonlinear curvature degrade the query channel, induce waterfall and error-floor behavior, and render high-resolution explanations unattainable.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Revealing high-dimensional entanglement through symmetry

Authors:
Jayden Webster↗Florian Kanitschar↗Emanuele Polino↗Simon J. U. White↗Sven Rogge↗Farzad Ghafari↗Marcus Huber↗Nora Tischler↗

arXiv:2606.23817v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photons encoded in discrete time bins can be routinely prepared in temporal superposition states, enabling high-dimensional entanglement and enhanced quantum communication rates. However, characterizing this high-dimensional entanglement presents significant challenges, namely due to the involved measurement complexity or reliance on restrictive assumptions that compromise the generality of traditional approaches. Here, we develop and experimentally demonstrate a simple linear-optical scheme based on particle-exchange symmetry that allows us to probe high-dimensional entanglement in time-bin-encoded states. Combining Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with suitable transformations, our method not only certifies entanglement but also lower-bounds its dimensionality using only two dichotomic symmetry-based measurements. This bound is obtained through a new rigorous theoretical analysis and can be further improved by weak, physically motivated assumptions. The scheme remains effective at any timescale, even far below the temporal detector resolution used. Our work provides a powerful state-characterization tool and demonstrates that we can prove high-dimensional temporal entanglement on timescales inaccessible to the setup.

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16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology

Authors:
Michael P. H. Stumpf↗

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics. An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.

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

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

Authors:
Manon Reusens↗Sofie Goethals↗Toon Calders↗David Martens↗

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists. We study LLM decision-making in a travel-assistant context by presenting models with choice dilemmas and analyzing their responses using multinomial logit models to derive implied willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. These WTP values are subsequently compared to human benchmark values from the economics literature. In addition to a baseline setting, we examine how model behavior changes under more realistic conditions, including the provision of information about users' past choices and persona-based prompting. Our results show that while meaningful WTP values can be derived for larger LLMs, they also display systematic deviations at the attribute level. Additionally, they tend to overestimate human WTP overall, particularly when expensive options or business-oriented personas are introduced. Conditioning models on prior preferences for cheaper options yields valuations that are closer to human benchmarks. Overall, our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of using LLMs for subjective decision support and underscore the importance of careful model selection, prompt design, and user representation when deploying such systems in practice.

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

Boosting Text-Driven Video Segmentation via Geometry-Aware Distillation

Authors:
Tianyu Zhu↗Yingping Liang↗Hesong Li↗Ying Fu↗

Text-driven Referring Video Object Segmentation (RVOS) aims to locate and segment target objects in videos given natural language. However, existing models are typically trained on 2D image or video datasets with naive segmentation losses, which overlooks the geometric consistency across frames and leads to weak spatial understanding. In this paper, we propose Geometry-enhanced Language-guided Video segmentation (GeoLaV), a two-stage framework that distills 3D geometric knowledge from images to enhance text-driven video segmentation. In the first stage, we perform monocular geometry pretraining with monocular novel-view synthesis, enabling the model to acquire geometry-consistent visual representations via spatial alignment on large-scale single-image datasets. In the second stage, we introduce geometry-aware distillation and fine-tune the model on video segmentation datasets, transferring 3D structural knowledge from a general 3D prior model. This process reinforces 3D awareness and improves both spatiotemporal coherence and language grounding in segmentation. Extensive experiments show that our method using only image segmentation data already provides notable zero-shot generalization in RVOS. When combined with geometry-aware distillation for fine-tuning on videos, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple RVOS benchmarks. The code is available at https://github.com/Tony1882880/GeoLaV.

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

Imitating What Works: Simulation-Filtered Modular Policy Learning from Human Videos

Authors:
Albert J. Zhai↗Kuo-Hao Zeng↗Jiasen Lu↗Ali Farhadi↗Shenlong Wang↗Wei-Chiu Ma↗

The ability to learn manipulation skills by watching videos of humans has the potential to unlock a new source of highly scalable data for robot learning. Here, we tackle prehensile manipulation, in which tasks involve grasping an object before performing various post-grasp motions. Human videos offer strong signals for learning the post-grasp motions, but they are less useful for learning the prerequisite grasping behaviors, especially for robots without human-like hands. A promising way forward is to use a modular policy design, leveraging a dedicated grasp generator to produce stable grasps. However, arbitrary stable grasps are often not task-compatible, hindering the robot's ability to perform the desired downstream motion. To address this challenge, we present Perceive-Simulate-Imitate (PSI), a framework for training a modular manipulation policy using human video motion data processed by paired grasp-trajectory filtering in simulation. This simulation step extends the trajectory data with grasp suitability labels, which allows for supervised learning of task-oriented grasping capabilities. We show through real-world experiments that our framework can be used to learn precise manipulation skills efficiently without any robot data, resulting in significantly more robust performance than using a grasp generator naively.

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

Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge

Authors:
Yixuan Wang↗Yiyang Zhou↗Yiming Liang↗Congyu Zhang↗Fuxiao Liu↗Jiawei Zhou↗Huaxiu Yao↗

LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.

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

AgentSpec: Understanding Embodied Agent Scaffolds Through Controlled Composition

Authors:
Jixuan Chen↗Jianzhi Shen↗Haoqiang Kang↗Zhi Hong↗Qingyi Jiang↗Soham Bose↗Yiming Zhang↗Leon Leng↗Amit Vyas↗Lingjun Mao↗Siru Ouyang↗Kun Zhou↗…

LLM agents are increasingly built not as single model calls, but as scaffolded systems that combine reasoning, memory, reflection, action execution, and learning. While such scaffolds often improve performance, they are often embedded in tightly coupled pipelines, making it difficult to isolate component contributions, compare alternative designs, or understand how module interactions shape agent behavior. We introduce AgentSpec, a modular specification framework that represents embodied agents as typed compositions of reusable policy components with standardized interfaces. AgentSpec standardizes the interfaces among perception, memory, reasoning, reflection, action, and optional learning, enabling components to be swapped and recombined under controlled conditions. We instantiate this framework across DeliveryBench, ALFRED, MiniGrid, and RoboTHOR, and analyze reasoning, memory, reflection, and reinforcement-learning modules across model backbones. Our results show that agent performance is governed by scaffold compatibility and interaction effects rather than isolated module strength. In particular, structured multi-granularity memory improves long-horizon state tracking, reasoning and memory interact non-uniformly across environments, reflection trades off correction and cost, and RL-trained policies compose best when optimized with deployment-time scaffold structure. AgentSpec provides a controlled foundation for studying, comparing, and designing composable LLM agents. Our code, baselines and interactive playground are publicly available at https://agentspec-embodied.github.io.

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22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Mathematicians are developing rules for AI use — other fields should follow

Authors: Unknown Author

The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach. The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Information Processing: A brief overview on Quantum Teleportation

Authors:
Sovik Roy↗

arXiv:1604.00852v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Information Processing (QIP) exploits the principles of quantum mechanics to perform information storage, communication, and computation in ways that are fundamentally impossible within classical frameworks. This article presents a pedagogical overview of the mathematical foundations of quantum information theory, including qubits, Hilbert spaces, linear operators, quantum measurements, tensor products, density operators, and quantum entanglement. Building upon these concepts, we provide a detailed introduction to quantum teleportation, one of the most remarkable protocols in quantum communication. The discussion covers the no cloning theorem, the original teleportation protocol by Bennett et al., experimental realisations of quantum teleportation, and extensions involving probabilistic and multiqubit teleportation schemes. Particular emphasis is placed on the role of entanglement as a communication resource, together with the study of teleportation channels based on bipartite and multipartite quantum states. Various quantitative measures of entanglement, including concurrence, negativity, entanglement of formation, and relative entropy of entanglement, are reviewed alongside teleportation fidelity as a performance metric. Furthermore, the interplay between Bell nonlocality, mixed state entanglement, and teleportation efficiency is examined, followed by a survey of advanced developments such as controlled teleportation, bidirectional teleportation, cluster state teleportation, and recent advances in the Quantum 2.0 era. This review aims to provide students, researchers, and engineers with a coherent introduction to the theoretical foundations and practical significance of quantum teleportation in emerging quantum technologies.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Small LLMs: Pruning vs. Training from Scratch

Authors:
Yufeng Xu↗Taiming Lu↗Kunjun Li↗Jiachen Zhu↗Mingjie Sun↗Zhuang Liu↗

Pruning promises a shortcut to strong small language models. In this work, we examine this promise by pruning Llama-3.1-8B at pruning ratios of 0.5–0.8 with six methods spanning depth, width, and sparse granularities, under two controlled token-matched settings. (1) With the same training token budget, pruned initialization consistently outperforms random initialization. This shows that the parent model provides a strong starting point, although the advantage narrows as the training token budget grows and as the pruning ratio rises, nearly vanishing at the highest pruning ratio we study. (2) When training from scratch is instead given the full token budget consumed by the whole pipeline, pruning at finer granularities still retains an advantage, while coarser structured pruning can be matched or surpassed. This suggests that the parent model transfers knowledge that additional training tokens alone cannot fully recover, but only at fine granularity. Taken together, our results yield a clear recommendation: with a large pretrained model in hand and a limited training token budget, pruning is better than training from scratch; when the training budget is not limited, training from scratch can be competitive for coarser pruning, so a large pretrained parent is not always necessary.

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

Single-Image Entanglement Verification with Spatially Encoded Measurement Contexts

Authors:
Nazanin Dehghan↗Alessio D'Errico↗Yingwen Zhang↗Hugo Defienne↗Daniele Faccio↗Ebrahim Karimi↗

arXiv:2606.15382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion exhibit rich spatial entanglement structure that is often difficult to probe with conventional measurements. Here, we show that spin-orbit optical elements can convert this spatial structure into directly observable quantum interference patterns. Using a $q$-plate, we demonstrate that the relative wavefront curvature of biphoton states generated by a pair of nonlinear crystals can be retrieved from the spatial modulation of coincidence images. Building on this principle, we introduce a liquid-crystal metasurface that performs spatially multiplexed Bell measurements across the transverse profile of the photon field. The device, which we call a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) plate, assigns different polarization projections to different azimuthal sectors of the beam, allowing the sixteen joint measurements required for a CHSH test to be realized simultaneously in a single acquisition. In this architecture, the spatial coordinate acts as a classical register selecting the measurement context, while photon pairs sample these contexts according to their emission directions. We further demonstrate that the same measurement concept can be implemented using a programmable spatial light modulator, providing a dynamically reconfigurable realization of the scheme. Our results show that spatially structured optical elements can transform Bell tests into parallel measurements distributed across the transverse plane, enabling rapid characterization of spatially varying entanglement. This approach opens new possibilities for structured-light quantum measurements, Bell-inequality-based imaging, and the study of spatially engineered entangled photon sources.

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