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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-08

Climate change and non-communicable diseases: An invisible syndemic

Authors:
Gokul Parameswaran↗

by Gokul Parameswaran, Sadeer Al-Kindi, Sanjay Rajagopalan Climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) through cascading environmental disruptions and is attributed to driving increased NCD-related mortality. Yet this syndemic remains invisible and underfunded. We detail why addressing the climate-NCD intersection is critical for improving health. In this Perspective, Sanjay Rajagopalan and colleagues discusses how climate change accelerates non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and exacerbates NCD-related mortality, and calls for greater visibility and funding to address this syndemic and improve human health.

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

PoseGAM: Robust Unseen Object Pose Estimation via Geometry-Aware Multi-View Reasoning

Authors:
Jianqi Chen↗Biao Zhang↗Xiangjun Tang↗Peter Wonka↗

6D object pose estimation, which predicts the transformation of an object relative to the camera, remains challenging for unseen objects. Existing approaches typically rely on explicitly constructing feature correspondences between the query image and either the object model or template images. In this work, we propose PoseGAM, a geometry-aware multi-view framework that directly predicts object pose from a query image and multiple template images, eliminating the need for explicit matching. Built upon recent multi-view-based foundation model architectures, the method integrates object geometry information through two complementary mechanisms: explicit point-based geometry and learned features from geometry representation networks. In addition, we construct a large-scale synthetic dataset containing more than 190k objects under diverse environmental conditions to enhance robustness and generalization. Extensive evaluations across multiple benchmarks demonstrate our state-of-the-art performance, yielding an average AR improvement of 5.1% over prior methods and achieving up to 17.6% gains on individual datasets, indicating strong generalization to unseen objects. Project page: https://windvchen.github.io/PoseGAM/ .

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

To Isolate or to Score? Model-Adaptive Assessment for Cost-Efficient Multi-Agent RAG

Authors:
Jungseob Lee↗Chanjun Park↗Heuiseok Lim↗

Multi-agent document assessment for retrieval-augmented generation is computationally expensive, driving practitioners toward smaller, deployable models whose assessment mechanisms remain poorly understood. We conduct a controlled study of training-free interventions on 7B-9B instruction-tuned models across diverse QA benchmarks, revealing a sharp dichotomy in how models benefit from assessment. For weaker baselines, the dominant mechanism is per-document isolation. Astoundingly, assessment-free isolation matches full multi-agent assessment, demonstrating that resolving multi-document context confusion, rather than scoring quality, drives outsized gains of up to 50 percentage points. Conversely, for strong baselines where scoring quality matters, we introduce Reasoning-Score Coupling, a label-free perturbation probe that classifies scoring behavior. Integrating these findings, we propose MADARA, a model-adaptive routing architecture. Crucially, MADARA's diagnostic thresholds derived from a single pilot model generalize zero-shot to four unseen model families, providing a robust, lightweight pipeline to eliminate computational overhead.

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

HKVM-RAG: Key-Value-Separated Hypergraph Evidence Organization for Multi-Hop RAG

Authors:
Mingyu Zhang↗Ying Ma↗

Multi-hop RAG poses a data-engineering problem beyond passage matching: under fixed retrieval budgets, a system must organize retrieved text into evidence units that expose answer chains. Dense retrievers score passages independently, while graph-based memories make associations explicit but often rely on pairwise or entity-centered keys that fragment multi-hop evidence. We present HKVM-RAG, a key-value-separated evidence-organization layer. It assembles answer-path hyperedges from cached passage-level LLM evidence tuples and uses them as retrieval keys, while retaining passage text as answer values. To isolate key-space design, our fixed-substrate protocol holds the tuple cache, candidate passages, reader, and evaluation budget constant across pairwise graph and hypergraph variants. Weighted hypergraph key-value retrieval improves over KG-PPR by +3.426 F1 on 2WikiMultiHopQA and +3.592 F1 on MuSiQue; HotpotQA shows that higher structured support coverage need not yield standalone answer-F1 gains. We therefore study WHG-KV as an evidence-control signal rather than a dense-retrieval replacement. Oracle and train-to-dev analyses identify support selection as repairable, and a dense-aware controller combines frozen ColBERTv2 and HKVM rank/score features using out-of-fold HKVM predictions. It reaches 88.846, 65.073, and 85.810 F1 on the three benchmarks, improving over ColBERTv2 by +11.084, +6.763, and +5.966 F1. Source-level ablations show that matched non-WHG structured signals do not match the WHG-KV gains. These results provide bounded evidence that key-value-separated hypergraph organization can serve as a reusable evidence-control mechanism for multi-hop RAG.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Excitation-Inhibition Balance in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: EEG Criticality Reflects Frontal Metabolites and a Potential Compensatory Mechanism

Authors:
Hasanaj↗Kallweit↗M. S↗Karsli↗Meisinger↗Boudriot↗Roell↗Melcher↗Vural↗Schulz↗Klimas↗Schmoelz↗…

Background The excitation-inhibition (E-I) balance is essential for normal brain functioning, while deviations from this balance have been implicated in several psychiatric disorders. However, the extent to which electroencephalography (EEG) and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) E-I markers are altered in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), how they converge across modalities, and how they relate to cognitive performance and clinical symptoms remain insufficiently characterized. Methods We recruited 111 healthy controls (HC) and 113 individuals with SSD. All participants underwent resting-state EEG and 1H-MRS. Metabolites were measured either in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; NSSD = 63, NHC = 58) or in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC; NSSD = 50, NHC = 53), from which gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate + glutamine (Glx), and the Glx/GABA ratio were extracted. Extracted EEG E-I markers included oscillatory activity, aperiodic activity, functional E-I, microstates, multiscale entropy, and neuronal avalanche criticality. Results MRS results showed no group differences in GABA, Glx, or the Glx/GABA ratio. In contrast, most EEG-derived E-I markers indicated increased cortical inhibition in SSD, including steeper aperiodic exponents, prolonged microstate durations, and greater prevalence of subcritical states. However, functional E-I showed a divergent pattern, suggesting balanced dynamics in SSD and relatively inhibition-weighted dynamics in HC. Across groups, higher ACC and lDLPFC GABA predicted a lower kappa index, whereas a higher lDLPFC Glx/GABA ratio was associated with a higher kappa index. In SSD, reduced avalanche criticality was associated with better cognition and less severe symptoms. Conclusion Several EEG-derived E-I proxies, but not MRS measures, indicate an increased cortical inhibition in SSD. Criticality indices best capture frontal neurochemical metabolites and improvements in clinical symptoms, potentially reflecting inhibitory compensation mechanisms in SSD.

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

TurboMPC: Fast, Scalable, and Differentiable Model Predictive Control on the GPU

Authors:
Gabriel Bravo-Palacios↗Jianghan Zhang↗Zachary Pestrikov↗Brian Plancher↗Thomas Lew↗

arXiv:2606.24039v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics increasingly relies on GPUs for parallel simulation, large-scale learning, and neural-network inference. For model predictive control (MPC) to scale with this paradigm, solvers must run efficiently on this hardware while remaining fast, differentiable, and compatible with expressive MPC formulations used in robotics. We present TurboMPC, a differentiable MPC solver that runs entirely on the GPU and supports state and control inequality constraints, implicit integrators, cross-time-coupled costs, and slack variables. TurboMPC combines sequential quadratic programming (SQP), an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) inner solver, implicit differentiation, and a co-designed JAX-CUDA implementation for efficiency and ease of use. In simulation, we validate TurboMPC on constrained planning, humanoid imitation learning, and reinforcement learning with neural-network cost function tasks, achieving up to $15\times$ and $58\times$ speedups over state-of-the-art CPU and GPU differentiable solvers, respectively. We deploy TurboMPC on a full-scale car for minimum-time racing and find that batched, GPU-accelerated tuning of MPC parameters via Bayesian optimization yields significantly faster driving than a hand-tuned baseline. TurboMPC also scales to planning horizons of over $8000$ knot points while maintaining control of the vehicle. We open-source TurboMPC at: https://github.com/ToyotaResearchInstitute/turbompc

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HiRo: A Compact Four-Directional Hierarchical Reservoir Token-Mixer for Efficient Image Classification

Authors:
Md Farhadul Islam↗Ishan Thakkar↗J. Todd Hastings↗

Recent image classification models must balance local feature modeling, cross-window interaction, and parameter efficiency. Many high-performing architectures rely on fully trainable token-mixers, which improve representation learning but increase parameter count, optimization complexity and computational cost. We propose a parameter-efficient image classification model called HiRo that integrates shifted-window partitioning with multi-directional hierarchical reservoir computing. Images are divided into non-overlapping patches (treated as tokens), linearly projected, normalized, and enriched with 2D sinusoidal positional encodings, then processed within local windows. Inside each window, tokens are scanned in four directions and passed through a two-stage slice-and-mix reservoir module. In the first stage, directional sequences are split into contiguous slices, each processed by its own fixed reservoir with a trainable closed-loop readout. The resulting slice outputs are summarized using the start, end, and mean representations, and then mixed by a second-stage fixed reservoir for each direction. The mixed slice representations are expanded back to the token level and fused with the first-stage outputs, after which the four directional outputs are realigned and averaged. Consecutive blocks alternate between regular and shifted windows to enable cross-window interaction, followed by layer normalization, a residual feed-forward network, and global pooling for classification. This design combines regular and shifted window partitioning with hierarchical multi-directional reservoirs to make an efficient local-to-cross-window token-mixing framework for image classification. Despite using under 1M trainable parameters and significantly lower memory and time than transformer-style baselines, HiRo also achieves 99.46%, 85.57%, and 59.10% accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, respectively.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

Authors:
Matt Gorbett↗Suman Jana↗

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

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

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

Authors:
Nishant Subramani↗Palash Goyal↗Yiwen Song↗Mani Malek↗Yuan Xue↗Tomas Pfister↗Hamid Palangi↗

As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.

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

Open-source LLMs administer maximum electric shocks in a Milgram-like obedience experiment

Authors:
Roland Pihlakas↗Jan Llenzl Dagohoy↗

arXiv:2605.21401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents that make sequences of decisions over extended interactions in high-stakes domains. However, the behaviour of LLMs under sustained authority pressure is still an open question with direct implications for the safety of agentic pipelines. We ran a variation of Milgram's obedience experiment on 11 open-source LLMs and found that most models reached or approached the final shock level before refusing, across 8 conditions with 30 trials per model per condition. Model behaviour varies considerably in multiple aspects both across models and across trials of the same model. We found four main takeaways: (1) LLMs are subject to pressure and they comply despite explicitly expressing distress, just like human subjects did in the original experiment; (2) LLMs are vulnerable to gradual boundary/value violations; (3) when LLMs refuse, they may ignore the response format requirements, so the response is discarded by the orchestrator, which causes a retry that can result in compliance with the underlying request even when refusal was intended initially; (4) we hypothesise that there is a runaway low-level token pattern continuation attractor that might be contributing to obedience, overriding higher level processing of the situation's meaning and values.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Memory-Efficient Policy Libraries with Low-Rank Adaptation in Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Samuel Valland Lyngset↗Tor Viljen Raanaas↗Gard Sveipe↗Eirik M{\o}ller Nilsen↗Jim Torresen↗Kai Olav Ellefsen↗Tobias L{\o}mo↗

arXiv:2606.25700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been success in minimizing both memory usage and computation with Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT), like Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA). In this article, we have explored whether this approach is transferable to the world of robotics and Reinforcement Learning (RL), allowing learning with reduced memory usage and improved computational performance. Specifically, we focused on a version of multi-task robotics, where a library of specialist policies are created. In such a library memory efficiency is especially important. We used a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm and fine-tuned a baseline model to different tasks using LoRA. Our results demonstrate that, depending on the hyperparameters, LoRA can minimize memory usage by a factor of 20-160 compared to full fine-tuning of all layers. This implies a 90-95% storage saving when deploying a library of many (10-50) specialized policies, which can be the differentiating factor between being able to store the entire library in memory or having to use swap-memory in an applied robotics setting. At the same time, our results indicate that there is no significant difference in the success-rate between full fine-tuning and LoRA fine-tuning for the selected tasks.

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

Improving Factuality of 3D Brain MRI Report Generation with Paired Image-domain Retrieval and Text-domain Augmentation

Authors:
Junhyeok Lee↗Yujin Oh↗Dahyoun Lee↗Hyon Keun Joh↗Chul-Ho Sohn↗Sung Hyun Baik↗Cheol Kyu Jung↗Jung Hyun Park↗Kyu Sung Choi↗Byung-Hoon Kim↗Jong Chul Ye↗

Acute ischemic stroke (AIS) requires time-critical decision-making, where inaccurate interpretation of neuroimaging findings can lead to irreversible disability. Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are central to detecting acute infarction, yet generating factually reliable radiology reports directly from 3D MRI remains challenging due to the difficulty of learning robust cross-modal alignments between volumetric images and clinical text. We propose paired image-domain retrieval and text-domain augmentation (PIRTA), a retrieval-augmented generation framework that improves report factuality by avoiding explicit image-text alignment. PIRTA retrieves clinically similar 3D DWI/ADC volumes using a pretrained 3D vision encoder and leverages their paired clinician-authored reports to ground large language model (LLM)-based report generation. Experiments on multi-institutional in-house data, a held-out external privacy-preserving cohort, and the public ISLES benchmark demonstrate that PIRTA achieves strong image-domain retrieval performance and consistently improves ischemic-territory accuracy, a clinically grounded surrogate for report factuality, compared to direct image-to-text baselines. These results indicate that retrieval-grounded generation provides a scalable and reliable paradigm for producing factually consistent radiology reports from complex 3D brain MRI. Source code is available at https://github.com/jhlee0619/PIRTA.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

On Defining Erasure Harms for NLP

Authors:
Yu Lu Liu↗Arnav Goel↗Jackie Chi Kit Cheung↗Alexandra Olteanu↗Ziang Xiao↗Su Lin Blodgett↗

The deployment of NLP systems has raised concerns about harms they might produce, including representational harms. Recent literature has begun to conceptualize and measure one such harm, the harm of erasure. Nevertheless, the field lacks a clear and cohesive conceptual foundation for identifying and measuring erasure. Existing conceptualizations of erasure are often broad – making it difficult to identify what is needed to establish and measure erasure – or else specific to particular settings – facilitating measurement for those settings but potentially challenging to adapt to other settings. To address this gap, we develop and propose a structured definition of erasure that clarifies what components are necessary for establishing whether erasure has occurred, which practitioners need to explicitly articulate and operationalize in order to measure erasure.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Long-lasting Topological Entanglement in a Monitored Rashba Nanowire

Authors:
Emanuele Guida↗Giulia Salatino↗Gianluca Passarelli↗Angelo Russomanno↗Procolo Lucignano↗

arXiv:2606.25653v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the topological properties of a monitored Rashba chain along quantum-jump trajectories, investigating the persistence of the initial topological value of the disconnected entanglement entropy (DEE). We find that the DEE persists in its topological value for a time linear in the system size, even if the dissipation acts on the boundary and affects the topological Majorana modes. The reason for this phenomenon lies in the absence of particle conservation and in the degeneracy of the topological manifold, allowing the monitoring to let the system switch between different topological states – alternatively creating and annihilating a Majorana mode – while producing a poisoning of finite-energy ballistically propagating quasiparticles that eventually destroy the topological entanglement structure.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Authors:
Ngo↗T. P↗Dunham↗A. E↗Santos↗G.-M↗

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

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17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Structural basis for chaperone-guided assembly of RNA-induced silencing complex

Authors:
Young-Yoon Lee↗

The RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC), comprising an Argonaute (AGO) protein and a small RNA, is the central effector in RNA silencing. Small RNAs are loaded onto AGO as bulky duplexes in an HSP70- and HSP90-dependent process1–3, but the molecular mechanism remains poorly understood. Here we identify the human AGO–HSP90–p23 complex, which captures AGO in an RNA-free state, termed the AGO maturation complex (AMC). The purified AMC enables RNA loading and AGO folding, faithfully recapitulating de novo RISC assembly. Using cryogenic electron microscopy, we determined the structure of AMC bound to a microRNA duplex. In contrast to its conformation in the RISC, AGO adopts a highly open conformation in the AMC: the N domain and the RNA-binding module (PAZ–MID–PIWI) are fully detached and anchored to opposite sides of the HSP90 dimer, connected solely by the unfolded L1 linker. This arrangement exposes a positively charged cleft that accommodates an RNA duplex. AGO folding is facilitated by a small RNA duplex containing a 5′-terminal phosphate—but not by single-stranded RNAs—revealing a role for the RNA duplex as a chaperone-like cofactor that directs AGO domain assembly. These findings elucidate the RISC assembly mechanism and establish the AMC as a molecular tool for probing optimal RNA features and chemical modifications for the rational design of small interfering RNA therapeutics. Our study also sheds light on how chaperones, together with ligands, can guide the folding of client proteins. Structures of the AGO maturation complex reveal how chaperones and an RNA duplex drive assembly of the RNA-induced silencing complex.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Embodied-BenchClaw: An Autonomous Multi-Agent System for Embodied Spatial Intelligence Benchmark Construction

Authors:
Baoyang Jiang↗Fengchun Zhang↗Leyuan Wang↗Haotian Li↗Yida Wang↗Zhe Ji↗Jinshan Lai↗Xi Ren↗Jianwei Hu↗Qiang Ma↗

arXiv:2606.11909v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks are essential for evaluating embodied spatial intelligence, yet their construction is labor-intensive, hard to reuse, and difficult to maintain. Existing embodied benchmarks are often static and may quickly become saturated as models improve, limiting their ability to distinguish new capabilities. We propose Embodied-BenchClaw, an autonomous agentic system for constructing embodied spatial intelligence benchmarks. Given a user-specified evaluation intent, Embodied-BenchClaw automatically produces a complete and continually updatable benchmark package through a five-stage pipeline: intent blueprinting, data collection, structuring and cleaning, benchmark synthesis, and evaluation reporting. The pipeline is coordinated by three agents for planning, construction, and evaluation. To improve reusability and reliability, Embodied-BenchClaw introduces an extensible Skill Library and process quality control, enabling benchmark construction to be composable, verifiable, and repairable. We instantiate multiple benchmarks covering indoor spatial reasoning, outdoor spatial reasoning, robotic manipulation, quadruped robot navigation, UAV/aerial-view understanding, and static benchmark enhancement. These benchmarks span diverse embodied carriers, data sources, and spatial capabilities. Experiments with human evaluation, judge-based assessment, consistency checks, cost analysis, and ablations show that Embodied-BenchClaw can construct verifiable, executable, maintainable, and diagnostically useful embodied spatial benchmarks with reduced manual effort.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

ROAD-VLA: Robust Online Adaptation via Self-Distillation for Vision-Language-Action Models

Authors:
Kejing Wang↗Toan Nguyen↗Minh Hoang Nguyen↗Simon Khan↗Flora D. Salim↗

arXiv:2606.25800v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective online adaptation of vision-language-action (VLA) models remains challenging, as sparse rewards provide weak supervision for high-dimensional autoregressive action policies. Although self-distillation can in principle provide denser training signals, we find that text-based privileged teachers conditioned on demonstrations, retrieved experiences, or high-level plans are ineffective for VLA adaptation, exposing a modality gap between symbolic guidance and low-level robot actions. We propose ROAD-VLA, an advantage-guided self-distillation framework that constructs a proximal teacher directly in action space by perturbing action-token logits with calibrated advantage estimates. This converts sparse rewards into dense token-level supervision while keeping the teacher close to the current policy. We further derive a policy-improvement lower bound under calibrated advantages and accurate teacher matching. Across seven robotic manipulation environments with in-distribution and out-of-distribution shifts, ROADVLA outperforms PPO in nearly all settings, demonstrating robust online VLA adaptation.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

Authors:
Taos Transue↗Bohan Chen↗So Takao↗Bao Wang↗

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

TL++: Accuracy and Privacy Preserving Traversal Learning for Distributed Intelligent Systems

Authors:
Erdenebileg Batbaatar↗Young Yoon↗

arXiv:2606.25627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed intelligent systems increasingly need to train across data silos without centralizing raw data. Federated learning keeps data local but can suffer under heterogeneous partitions and requires repeated full-model exchange. Split learning reduces communication through cut-layer activations, but standard protocols generally do not recover centralized mini-batch gradient behavior and may expose activations and gradients in plaintext. We present TL++, a two-mode traversal-learning framework that constructs virtual batches across nodes to recover centralized mini-batch gradient behavior under explicit synchronization assumptions. Base mode exchanges cut-layer activations and gradients rather than full models. Secure mode secret-shares each cut-layer activation and gradient between an orchestrator and a non-colluding helper, preventing either server from observing plaintext cut-layer tensors. This protection is limited to a semi-honest two-server setting; labels and loss-related outputs remain visible to the orchestrator. In the lightweight secure path evaluated here, exactness requires a linear or affine server path, while nonlinear operations require nonlinear MPC or approximation. We formalize TL++, analyze communication and computation costs, and evaluate it against federated and split-learning baselines on CIFAR-10 and BioGPT/PubMedQA using full fine-tuning and LoRA. On CIFAR-10, TL++ base cut 1 and exact secure cut 3 achieve accuracies of 91.41% (SD 0.19) and 90.93% (SD 0.17), respectively, exceeding the strongest measured non-TL++ baseline by more than 12 percentage points. TL++ base cut 1 also reduces per-step communication by 13.1-fold relative to full-model synchronization. PubMedQA results similarly favor TL++. Overall, TL++ approaches centralized-training performance while reducing communication and providing activation-level secret sharing.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Temporal Self-Imitation Learning

Authors:
Yinsen Jia↗Boyuan Chen↗

arXiv:2606.19752v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-horizon robot manipulation policies trained with reward shaping can still exploit dense rewards through inefficient interaction, while rare efficient behaviors may be forgotten during training. We argue that temporal efficiency itself provides a powerful and underutilized source of self-supervision for reinforcement learning. We introduce Temporal Self-Imitation Learning (TSIL), a reinforcement learning framework that mines temporally efficient successful trajectories generated during learning and converts them into reusable supervision for future policy improvement. TSIL progressively refines learning using configuration-conditioned adaptive temporal targets derived from fast successful trajectories, while preserving and replaying efficient behaviors through efficiency-weighted self-imitation learning. Across 15 distinct long-horizon manipulation tasks, TSIL consistently improves learning efficiency, task-completion efficiency, revisitation of fast successful behaviors, and robustness to unstable training conditions. More broadly, our results suggest that the temporal structure of successful behavior itself provides a scalable self-supervisory signal for reinforcement learning beyond manually engineered reward shaping alone.

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

A Survey on Deep Learning Architectures for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation

Authors:
Minhas Kamal↗Hiranya Garbha Kumar↗Balakrishnan Prabhakaran↗

Point cloud stands as the most widely adopted format for representing 3D shapes and scenes due to its simplicity and geometric fidelity. However, its inherent unordered and irregular nature, exacerbated by sensor noise and occlusions, introduces unique challenges for machine learning based methodologies. To combat these issues, diverse strategies have been developed, including converting to a format that has orderliness, extracting local geometry, and permutation-invariant or self-attention-based processing. In this paper, our focus is directed towards deep learning models for three fundamental tasks in 3D vision: point cloud classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation. We begin by formally defining point cloud data, followed by an in-depth discussion on its structural characteristics. Then, we categorize notable works based on their backbone structure and evaluate their performance on popular benchmarks. Beyond empirical comparison, we offer insights into architectural innovations and limitations. We also outline open challenges and promising future directions for 3D point cloud understanding.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Mapping abstraction and metacognition onto distinct transdiagnostic symptom profiles

Authors:
Oka↗Kunisato↗Koizumi↗Murakami↗Six↗Taylor↗J. E↗Cortese↗

Transdiagnostic psychiatric research on reward-guided learning has largely focused on simple associative processes, leaving it unclear whether or how higher-level processes are disrupted. Here, we studied how abstraction, the ability to extract relevant features from complex information, and metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate one's own mental processes, map onto specific transdiagnostic dimensions. Using an online sample (N = 249), we examined associations between these processes and three cross-culturally robust transdiagnostic dimensions derived from a large existing dataset (N = 19,505): Compulsive hypersensitivity, Social withdrawal, and Addictive behaviours. Computational modelling of an abstract representation learning task with confidence judgments revealed that Compulsive hypersensitivity was negatively associated with both abstraction ability (pboot = 0.003) and metacognitive sensitivity (pboot = 0.005), while Social withdrawal was positively associated with metacognitive sensitivity alone (pboot = 0.002). Moreover, transdiagnostic dimensions revealed more coherent associations with higher-order cognition than symptom-level analyses, highlighting the added value of examining psychopathology at the factor rather than the symptom level. These findings portray a hierarchical view of cognitive dysfunctions in psychopathology and point to representational and metacognitive processes as potential targets for transdiagnostic intervention.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Universal Guideline-Driven Image Clustering via a Hybrid LLM Agent

Authors:
Wenliang Zhong↗Rob Barton↗Lucas Goncalves↗Kushal Kumar↗Feng Jiang↗Hehuan Ma↗Yuzhi Guo↗Vidit Bansal↗Karim Bouyarmane↗Junzhou Huang↗

Unifying image clustering across different clustering scenarios remains challenging due to fundamental gaps among tasks. We introduce a Guideline-Driven Image Clustering Agent, the first universal framework that bridges these gaps through textual guidelines. To incorporate complex guidelines without task-specific training, we propose Generative Concept Proxy Modeling, which generates guideline-aware embeddings via concept proxy extraction. For scenarios requiring automatic cluster discovery, we introduce LLM Traversal based on Minimum Spanning Tree that selectively applies LLM reasoning for complex semantic judgments. Our method generalizes across diverse clustering scenarios spanning from general to fine-grained categorization, from global to local criteria, and from balanced to long-tail distributions. Our framework consistently outperforms specialized methods across diverse clustering tasks.

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