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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

PosterForest: Hierarchical Multi-Agent Collaboration for Scientific Poster Generation

arXiv:2508.21720v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automating scientific poster generation requires hierarchical document understanding and coherent content-layout planning. Existing methods often rely on flat summarization or optimize content and layout separately. As a result, they often suffer from information loss, weak logical flow, and poor visual balance. We present PosterForest, a training-free framework for scientific poster generation. Our method introduces the Poster Tree, a structured intermediate representation that captures document hierarchy and visual-textual semantics across multiple levels. Building on this representation, content and layout agents perform hierarchical reasoning and recursive refinement, progressively optimizing the poster from global organization to local composition. This joint optimization improves semantic coherence, logical flow, and visual harmony. Experiments show that PosterForest outperforms prior methods in both automatic and human evaluations, without additional training or domain-specific supervision.

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

WildIFEval: Instruction Following in the Wild

Recent LLMs have shown remarkable success in following user instructions, yet handling instructions with multiple constraints remains a significant challenge. In this work, we introduce WildIFEval - a large-scale dataset of 7K real user instructions with diverse, multi-constraint conditions. Unlike prior datasets, our collection spans a broad lexical and topical spectrum of constraints, extracted from natural user instructions. We categorize these constraints into eight high-level classes to capture their distribution and dynamics in real-world scenarios. Leveraging WildIFEval, we conduct extensive experiments to benchmark the instruction-following capabilities of leading LLMs. WildIFEval clearly differentiates between small and large models, and demonstrates that all models have a large room for improvement on such tasks. We analyze the effects of the number and type of constraints on performance, revealing interesting patterns of model constraint-following behavior. We release our dataset to promote further research on instruction-following under complex, realistic conditions.

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

Mask-Morph Graph U-Net: A Generalisable Mesh-Based Surrogate for Crashworthiness Field Prediction under Large Geometric Variation

arXiv:2605.15231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlinear finite element crash simulations are accurate but computationally expensive, limiting their use in iterative design optimisation. Machine-learning surrogate models based on graph neural networks (GNNs) offer a faster alternative. Message-passing GNNs are widely used for mesh simulation, and their shared node and edge update functions are relatively generalisable across varying graph structures. By contrast, non-shareable edge-specific aggregation layers can capture nonlinear relationships more accurately but usually require fixed graph connectivity, which limits generalisability. This paper presents Mask-Morph Graph U-Net (MMGUNet), a practical approach to addressing the limitation of hierarchical Graph U-Net architectures that use edge-specific downsampling and upsampling layers. Fixed coarse graph connectivity is required for edge-specific layers. To retain this while improving spatial correspondence, the proposed method morphs the coarsened graph hierarchy to each input mesh using feature-aligned barycentric parameterisation before constructing cross-graph edges. It further applies node masking during supervised pretraining, followed by parameter-efficient fine-tuning in which high-parameter edge-specific layers are frozen. The proposed approach is evaluated in in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and cross-component transfer settings using mean Euclidean distance and maximum intrusion percentage error. Results show that coarse-graph morphing improves test accuracy relative to a fixed-coarse-graph baseline, while masked supervised pretraining reduces the train-test discrepancy and improves data efficiency during transfer. The proposed model also achieves lower prediction error compared with external baselines. These results demonstrate a practical route toward reusable, data-efficient mesh-based surrogate modelling for crashworthiness design exploration.

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

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.

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

Light Forcing: Accelerating Autoregressive Video Diffusion via Sparse Attention

Advanced autoregressive (AR) video generation models have improved visual fidelity and interactivity, but the quadratic complexity of attention remains a primary bottleneck for efficient deployment. While existing sparse attention solutions have shown promise on bidirectional models, we identify that applying these solutions to AR models leads to considerable performance degradation for two reasons: isolated consideration of chunk generation and insufficient utilization of past informative context. Motivated by these observations, we propose \textsc{Light Forcing}, the first sparse attention solution tailored for AR video generation models. It incorporates a Chunk-Aware Growth mechanism to quantitatively estimate the contribution of each chunk, which determines their sparsity allocation. This progressive sparsity increase strategy enables the current chunk to inherit prior knowledge in earlier chunks during generation. Additionally, we introduce a Hierarchical Sparse Attention to capture informative historical and local context in a coarse-to-fine manner. Such two-level mask selection strategy (i.e., frame and block level) can adaptively handle diverse attention patterns. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing sparse attention in quality (e.g., 84.5 on VBench) and efficiency (e.g., $1.2{\sim}1.3\times$ end-to-end speedup). Combined with other efficient solutions, \textsc{Light Forcing} further achieves a $2.0{\sim}3.0\times$ end-to-end speedup across diverse GPUs (e.g., 27.4\,FPS on RTX 5090 and 33.9\,FPS on H100). Code is released via this \href{https://github.com/chengtao-lv/LightForcing}{link}.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entanglement Detection by Approximate Entanglement Witnesses

arXiv:2402.14755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable is known to be computationally difficult. We develop an approach to this problem based on approximations of convex polytopes in high dimensions. By showing that a convex polytope constructed from a finite number of hyperplanes approximates the Euclidean ball arbitrarily well in high dimensions, we find evidence that a finite set of approximate entanglement witnesses is potentially sufficient to determine the entanglement of a state with high probability.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

High-efficiency telecom conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets

arXiv:2603.09824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate high-efficiency telecom frequency conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets using a diamond-type atomic ensemble. By placing a 2.5 MHz heralded-photon spectrum within the high-efficiency region of the converter response, we achieve a conversion efficiency of 79.4(2.6)% while maintaining strong time-resolved correlations and well-defined temporal wavepackets. For a broader 17.4 MHz input bandwidth, the conversion efficiency is reduced to about 55%, whereas the temporal waveform remains largely preserved. This behavior reflects the nearly flat central response of the converter, which mainly causes spectral-edge loss rather than temporal-mode distortion. These results identify spectral matching as an effective route to efficient and low-distortion telecom conversion of narrowband quantum light from atomic systems.

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

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Hybrid ANN-SNN Pipeline with Local Plasticity

arXiv:2606.20151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work proposes a hybrid ANN-SNN pipeline that effectively leverages the rich embeddings of pretrained artificial neural networks (ANNs) to enable high-performance spiking neural networks (SNNs). The architecture couples a pretrained EfficientNet encoder with a CoLaNET spiking classifier. We convert the encoder's activations into spike trains via rate-coding and train the subsequent SNN classifier using local, biologically inspired learning rules, bypassing end-to-end gradient propagation. This approach achieves 99.09% accuracy on a 64-class ImageNet benchmark, demonstrating performance on par with conventional deep networks. The work presents a biologically plausible and efficient framework for adapting powerful pretrained encoders to downstream spiking neural network tasks.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Do LLMs Reliably Identify Correct Information Units in Aphasic Discourse?

Correct Information Units (CIUs) are central to discourse assessment in aphasia because they quantify communicative informativeness rather than linguistic form alone. However, CIU scoring is time intensive and requires trained raters. This study examined whether instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) can reliably perform token-level CIU classification from aphasic discourse transcripts. Sixteen picture-description transcripts elicited with the Cat Rescue stimulus were annotated for CIU status according to Nicholas and Brookshire (1993). The sample spanned four severity strata: control, mild, moderate, and severe aphasia. Four publicly available instruction-tuned LLMs were benchmarked under zero-shot and two few-shot prompting conditions across five stratified random seeds. Performance was evaluated against consensus human labels using accuracy, precision, recall, F1, and Cohen's kappa. Zero-shot prompting was insufficient across models. In contrast, few-shot prompting yielded substantial gains and produced competitive performance for three viable models. Mean few-shot F1 scores ranged from 0.776 to 0.817 across Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, and Mistral-7B, with no significant differences between fixed global and per-chunk local example selection. Phi-3-mini was unstable and did not yield reliable performance. Viable models showed high recall but lower precision, suggesting systematic over-classification of tokens as CIUs. Performance also varied by discourse severity, with the weakest results in more severe aphasia. Few-shot LLM prompting can support automated CIU identification without gradient-based task training, but agreement with human annotation remains insufficient for fully autonomous use. These findings support LLM-based CIU scoring as a promising human-in-the-loop component of discourse assessment systems.

12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Amplified Arctic iceberg traffic reshapes benthic biodiversity

The Arctic is undergoing rapid warming, resulting in retreating sea ice and glaciers1, yet how cryospheric changes propagate into the deep ocean remains poorly understood2. Here we identify a climate-driven mechanism linking accelerating glacier disintegration to an increase in deep-sea hard-bottom habitats far beyond calving fronts. Seafloor observations in Fram Strait show a localized increase in the density and patchiness of dropstones delivered by debris-laden icebergs. At the same time, four decades of shipboard records show that the occurrence of icebergs increased abruptly in the early 2000s. Backtracking links these icebergs to the main outlet glaciers in northeast Greenland and the Russian High Arctic. In northeast Greenland, the timing of glacier destabilization coincides with this rise, whereas sparse satellite coverage in the Russian sector limits temporal attribution despite indications of enhanced glacier activity. A model sensitivity study shows that, apart from intensified calving, a more dynamic sea ice cover enhances downstream transport of glacial ice. Along these pathways, increased iceberg activity could reshape deep-sea habitats through enhanced melt and associated lithogenic input, and elevate navigational hazards as maritime traffic expands in the Arctic. Although modest compared with the iceberg discharges of Pleistocene Heinrich events, this mechanism provides a modern analogue of long-range cryospheric influence on the seafloor in a warming climate. Accelerated Arctic glacier disintegration and a more dynamic sea ice cover are increasing iceberg-delivered dropstones in the deep ocean, reshaping seafloor habitats and extending cryospheric impacts far beyond glaciers.

13.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-23

Mapping and engineering the human cell–cell interactome

Authors:

Efforts to systematically understand how cell interactions tune tissue-level function have motivated transformative advances in single-cell transcriptomics and spatial profiling. Although these technologies can measure molecular states in individual cells and their spatial mapping within tissues, they also reveal that there exists a fundamental knowledge gap of how cells influence each other in context. In this Perspective, we propose an initiative to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome: a functional atlas of how all major human cell types communicate. We highlight how recent innovations can make this vision achievable. As a first moonshot, we propose the ‘Billion Cell×Cell Project’, which systematically characterizes the outcomes of defined cell–cell dyads across diverse cell types and conditions. We envision this multistage initiative will produce progressively deeper insights and unlock additional avenues for therapeutic discovery. We call on the scientific community to join us in building the tools, datasets and models that will decode and rewrite the language of life between cells. Di Carlo and colleagues discuss technologies required to map and engineer the human cell–cell interactome and the therapeutic avenues such an atlas could unlock.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FlexPooling with Simple Auxiliary Classifiers in Deep Networks

In computer vision, the basic pipeline of most convolutional neural networks consists of multiple feature extraction layers, where the input signal is downsampled to a lower resolution in each subsequent layer. This downsampling process is commonly referred to as pooling, which is an essential operation in CNNs. Pooling improves robustness against transformations, reduces the number of trainable parameters, increases the receptive field, and lowers computation time. Since pooling is a lossy process but remains important for extracting high-level information from low-level representations, it is important to preserve the most prominent information from previous activations to improve network discriminability. Standard pooling is usually performed using dense pooling methods, such as max pooling or average pooling, or through strided convolutional kernels. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive pooling method, called FlexPooling, which generalizes average pooling by learning a weighted average over activations jointly with the rest of the network. We further show that attaching Simple Auxiliary Classifiers (SAC) to the CNN improves performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with standard pooling methods. Experiments on multiple popular image classification datasets show that FlexPooling consistently outperforms baseline networks, achieving approximately 1 to 3 percent improvement in accuracy.

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

Algebraic Dead Directions in LayerNorm Transformers: A Forward-Pass-Only Diagnostic at LLM Scale

arXiv:2606.19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes. Locating such a direction normally needs a forward pass and an eigendecomposition of activations, or a sampling-based complexity estimate; none returns a direction computable from the network's parameters alone. We give one, for LayerNorm transformers. The inverse-scale direction $\gamma^{-1}/\|\gamma^{-1}\|$ of the LayerNorm affine is an exact algebraic kernel of the post-final-norm centred activation covariance, for any input distribution, and induces a corresponding dead direction in parameter space. It is read from the LN scale parameter alone, with no forward or backward pass and no eigensolve: the cheapest dead-direction read, specific to LayerNorm. We test it on $14$ pretrained transformers ($9$ LayerNorm, $5$ RMSNorm; $160$M-$35$B; language and vision objectives). At random initialisation the predicted direction matches the measured bottom singular direction (one forward pass, direct SVD) to four decimal places on $9/9$ LayerNorm models, and is correctly absent on $5/5$ RMSNorm models, which lack the mean-subtraction projector that creates it. On the trained checkpoint the covariance eigenvalue along this direction deepens by ${\sim}10^3\times$ and further dead directions open; the random-init-to-trained gap is a one-forward-pass, per-checkpoint readout of singular structure along the predicted coordinate. Two consequences follow in closed form: the residual stream's smallest singular value is preserved block-to-block on $13/14$ transformers measured on their own input distribution, the one exception (Gemma$4$-$31$B) a genuine dead direction the same read pinpoints; and the kernel direction's presence classifies a transformer's normalisation from the parameters alone.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

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

HalluJudge: A Reference-Free Hallucination Detection for Context Misalignment in Code Review Automation

arXiv:2601.19072v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language models (LLMs) have shown strong capabilities in code review automation, such as review comment generation, yet they suffer from hallucinations – where the generated review comments are ungrounded in the actual code – poses a significant challenge to the adoption of LLMs in code review workflows. To address this, we explore effective and scalable methods for a hallucination detection in LLM-generated code review comments without the reference. In this work, we design HalluJudge that aims to assess the grounding of generated review comments based on the context alignment. HalluJudge includes four key strategies ranging from direct assessment to structured multi-branch reasoning (e.g., Tree-of-Thoughts). We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of these assessment strategies across Atlassian's enterprise-scale software projects to examine the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of HalluJudge. Furthermore, we analyze the alignment between HalluJudge's judgment and developer preference of the actual LLM-generated code review comments in the real-world production. Our results show that the hallucination assessment in HalluJudge is cost-effective with an F1 score of 0.85 and an average cost of $0.009. On average, 67% of the HalluJudge assessments are aligned with the developer preference of the actual LLM-generated review comments in the online production. Our results suggest that HalluJudge can serve as a practical safeguard to reduce developers' exposure to hallucinated comments, fostering trust in AI-assisted code reviews.

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

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

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

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Prevalence and Clinical Impact of Pathogenic Variants in Cardiomyopathy Genes Among Individuals with Cardiac Conduction Disorders

Importance: Cardiac conduction disorders have traditionally been regarded as a secondary manifestation of underlying structural heart diseases. However, isolated conduction disorders may precede the onset of heart failure (HF) suggesting shared mechanisms. Objective: To evaluate the prevalence and clinical significance of pathogenic/likely pathogenic (P/LP) rare variants in cardiomyopathy genes among individuals with conduction disorders. Design, Setting, and Participants: Biobank analysis of 192,834 participants with whole genome sequence data from Vanderbilt's BioVU and 353,092 participants from the All of Us Research Program (AoU). Participants with primary conduction disorder (left bundle branch block [LBBB], right bundle branch block [RBBB], high-grade atrioventricular block [AVB]) were identified after excluding secondary causes. Exposures: P/LP variants in cardiomyopathy genes. Main Outcomes and Measures: Primary outcome was P/LP carrier status by age and HF status. Secondary outcomes included incident HF and composite ventricular arrhythmias/sudden cardiac death/mortality (VA/SCD/mortality). Results: Among 16,959 participants with conduction disorders in BioVU and 13,442 in AoU, 432 (2.6%) and 206 (1.5%) were P/LP carriers, respectively. Conduction disorder was independently associated with carrier status (BioVU p

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MagicSim: A Unified Infrastructure for Executable Embodied Interaction

Robot learning and embodied agents now require simulation to serve as a shared execution substrate linking control, skills, and planning, not only as a renderer, controller testbed, or fixed task environment. Existing pipelines split these layers with "magic" actions, disconnected training environments, or forward-only renders that cannot reproduce, evaluate, and annotate the same episode. We present MagicSim, an embodied interaction infrastructure built around one deterministic batched runtime and a shared Markov decision process (MDP). From YAML-first specifications that decouple contents, placement, behavior, and agent exposure, MagicSim constructs diverse executable worlds spanning task families, interaction regimes, physics, layouts, sensors, avatars, and robot embodiments in one reset-and-step loop. A common execution interface grounds high-level commands through controllers, atomicskills, planner primitives, and asynchronous planning, realizing them as robot actions rather than simulator-side state edits. One task definition supports three capabilities: benchmark and RL evaluation, an autocollect interface that automatically turns commands into grounded trajectories, and agent/VLM-facing interaction. For automatic execution, commands flow through a Command->Skill->Planner->Robot->Record pipeline, while per-environment command, skill, planning, retry, annotation, and episode states advance independently above the shared physics tick. Successful rollouts are saved as structured multimodal trajectories aligning language supervision, action representations, visual/geometric representations, and task-level status with the executed episode. MagicSim thus unifies diverse world construction, embodied execution, task evaluation, automatic rollout generation, and interactive agent interfaces in one planner-in-the-loop runtime.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Goal-Autopilot: A Verifiable Anti-Fabrication Firewall for Unattended Long-Horizon Agents

Authors:

Long-horizon LLM agents are not trusted to run unattended: with no human watching, they confidently report success they never verified. We treat honesty – bounding what an agent may claim at termination – as a first-class metric for unattended autonomy, distinct from capability. We present Autopilot, an execution model that makes silent fabricated success structurally impossible rather than merely rarer. Autopilot externalizes all working state into a durable, gated finite-state machine that a scheduler advances one stateless tick at a time; a hard floor forbids any terminal "done" claim whose falsifiable gate did not actually execute and pass. We prove a No-False-Success theorem – under gate soundness, floor enforcement, and plan coverage, termination implies the goal holds – whose only trust points are empirically measurable, and show the worst case degrades to an honest stall, never a fabricated success. Because each tick rehydrates only the state machine, per-step context cost is constant in the horizon. Across a 3,150-cell paired corpus (70 tasks $\times$ 3 systems $\times$ 3 models $\times$ 5 seeds, including 50 SWE-bench Lite tasks across 11 OSS repos), Autopilot fabricates on 0.95% of cells [95% CI 0.38–1.62] while Reflexion and StateFlow baselines fabricate on 8.10% [6.48–9.81] and 25.05% [22.48–27.62] respectively. The headline contrast lives in the hard regime: on SWE-bench Lite, the firewall reduces fabrication from 33.7% (StateFlow) to 0.67%, a paired difference of $-33.07$ pp [95% CI $-36.53, -29.73$]. The mechanism is the gate, not the model: all ten Autopilot fabrications come from the strongest model, while two weaker mid-tier models never fabricate across 700 paired cells. The firewall trades coverage for honesty by design – an honest stall is recoverable; a confident wrong output shipped downstream is not.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Strategic Feature Selection

arXiv:2606.18867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When algorithmic predictors inform resource allocation in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, these predictors must account for strategic manipulation of input features. The typical solution is to redesign the predictor itself to explicitly account for strategic interactions. In practice, however, decision makers are often constrained to adjusting coarser levers within existing prediction pipelines. For example, healthcare organizations often select which features to exclude based on perceived manipulability, while using standard regularization procedures to shrink the coefficients of retained features. In this work, we initiate a formal study of strategic classification through feature selection and its interaction with ridge regularization. Our main finding is that excluding individual features based on their manipulability alone is generally suboptimal. We provide a fine-grained characterization of the performance of a feature subset under optimal regularization, yielding new insights for policy design. Motivated by this characterization, we develop a practical algorithm for jointly choosing the feature set and the level of ridge regularization. Through a real-world case study on a healthcare payments benchmark, we illustrate how our algorithm can guide the design of coarse policy levers in practice. Our results provide a principled, practical framework for mitigating the effects of strategic behavior in algorithmic decision-making systems.

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

InternVideo3: Agentify Foundation Models with Multimodal Contextual Reasoning

Recent progress in foundation models has shifted toward agentic behavior involving multi-step reasoning and tool use. However, open-source efforts largely focus on text-dominant settings, leaving long-horizon multimodal tasks underexplored. This gap is evident in video tasks requiring sustained temporal understanding and iterative interaction. We present InternVideo3, a framework enhancing these capabilities via Multimodal Contextual Reasoning (MCR). MCR treats understanding as a closed-loop process over a shared, evolving context containing observations, instructions, reasoning, tool actions, and memory. This frames long-video understanding as evidence accumulation and verification. To ensure efficiency, we introduce Multimodal Multi-head Latent Attention (M^2LA), a token-preserving reparameterization compressing KV-cache states while retaining the full token stream. Our staged training includes continued pretraining, short-to-long supervised fine-tuning, rule-based reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Experiments show InternVideo3 achieves strong performance on benchmarks like Video-MME, MLVU, and EgoSchema. We further instantiate the model as a video agent with retrieval tools, demonstrating robust evidence-grounded behavior. Our results suggest that efficient context handling and closed-loop reasoning are vital for adapting open multimodal models toward long-horizon visually grounded agency.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

RetroMol: Parsing a shared encoding from natural products and their biosynthetic gene clusters

Natural products such as polyketides and nonribosomal peptides (NRPs) are important sources of bioactive compounds, including many antibiotics. Many of them are assembled by modular enzyme complexes and further modified and diversified by tailoring reactions encoded by biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Although natural products and their coding BGCs describe different data modalities of the same biochemical process, a unified language to jointly describe their biochemistry is lacking. Here we introduce a sequence-based representation of the core biosynthesis of modular natural products, which we call primary sequences, that bridges chemical structures and BGCs. We also present RetroMol, an algorithm that parses either natural product structures or their encoding BGCs into their primary sequences of natural product building blocks. RetroMol allows for similarity scoring between natural products and BGCs, enabling the retrieval of compounds, BGCs, and a combination of the two, based on their biosynthetic similarity. This can, for instance, be used to retrieve biosynthetically similar but structurally dissimilar compounds, or link natural products to candidate coding BGCs in large experimental datasets. We demonstrate the latter by rediscovering the nocardichelin B BGC as a proof of principle. We also exemplify the utility of biosynthetic similarity by showing various pairs of biosynthetically similar compounds with low structural similarity. Together, these results establish primary sequences as a shared biosynthetic encoding for natural product comparison and BGC prioritization.