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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Unassigned Agents in Compilation-based Multi-agent Path Finding

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compilation-based techniques represent an important stream of solvers for multi-agent path finding (MAPF) due to their modularity and adaptability for non-standard variants of the problem. While in the standard MAPF the task is to navigate all agents from their initial positions to given individual goal positions without any collision, variants where a different requirement for agents is used are also relevant. Such a variant is MAPF with unassigned agents (UA-MAPF) where some agents have the same setting as in the standard MAPF with initial positions and goals while the remaining agents have the initial position but have no goal - unassigned agents. Despite unassigned agent do not need to reach any goal position they have to be moved out of the way of the standard agents if needed which represent a specific challenge. We show in this paper that UA-MAPF can be expressed in recent compilation-based techniques for MAPF based on formulating the problem as Boolean satisfiability, namely we adapt SMT-CBS and NRF-SAT, the recent solvers based on counterexample guided abstraction refinement and non-refined abstractions.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

HTS-Oracle X: AI-Guided Prospective Discovery of Small Molecule Immune Checkpoint Binders

Targeting immune checkpoint protein-protein interactions (PPIs) using small molecules remains limited by the shallow, featureless binding surfaces of co-stimulatory and co-inhibitory receptors and the characteristically low hit rates of conventional high-throughput screening against these interfaces. Here we report HTS-Oracle X, a multimodal deep learning platform that integrates bidirectional cross-attention fusion of ChemBERTa SMILES embeddings with extended RDKit descriptors, trains on continuous biophysical binding signals rather than binary labels, and employs Monte Carlo Dropout uncertainty quantification for uncertainty-adjusted compound selection. Trained on 45,760 Dianthus TRIC-screened compounds per target under scaffold-aware cross-validation, HTS-Oracle X was applied prospectively to a 100,160-compound Enamine library against CD28, TIM-3, and VISTA. From 150 model-selected compounds, 45 dose-response confirmed binders were identified (30.0% overall hit rate), yielding enrichment factors of 234-408x over experimentally established random prospective baselines and 16 sub-micromolar hits. The top hits, HX-CD28-1 (KD = 233 nM), HX-TIM3-1 (KD = 249 nM), and HX-VISTA-1 (KD = 345 nM), demonstrated on-target functional activity in immune cell and tumor co-culture assays. HTS-Oracle X represents a scalable AI-guided framework for small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Resilient Solution for Sewer Overflow Monitoring across Cloud and Edge

arXiv:2605.10592v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Aging combined sewer systems in many historical cities are increasingly stressed by extreme rainfall events, which can trigger combined sewer overflows (CSO) with significant environmental and public health impacts. Forecasting the filling dynamics of overflow basins is critical for anticipating capacity exceedance and enabling timely preventive actions for CSO. We present a web-based demonstrator that integrates Deep Learning forecasting methods in both cloud and edge settings into an interactive monitoring dashboard for overflow monitoring, resilient to network outages. A video showcase is available online (https://cloud.bht-berlin.de/index.php/s/b9xt4T3SdiLBiFZ).

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

A unified complexity bound for logconcave sampling

arXiv:2606.12694v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We give a simple, unified, and nearly tight bound for sampling arbitrary logconcave distributions from a warm start using the In-and-Out algorithm along with exponential lifting. The main new ingredient in the analysis is an improved bound on the Poincaré constant of a lifted distribution. As a consequence, the resulting convergence rate is nearly tight for both constrained settings (e.g., Gaussian restricted to a convex body) and well-conditioned settings (e.g., strongly logconcave and smooth densities).

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Optimization for Learning Nonlinear MPC in Autonomous Agent Navigation

arXiv:2606.14763v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time autonomous navigation in dynamic, unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge for mobile robotics. We propose a map-free framework that tightly integrates reactive rolling-horizon planning with nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC). At each control cycle, a LiDAR-based Gaussian occupancy representation is constructed and used to generate collision-free trajectories via A* search, which are then tracked by a CasADi/IPOPT MPC formulation incorporating a smooth sigmoid obstacle barrier. To improve robustness to parameter sensitivity, we adopt an offline Bayesian optimization scheme based on Tree-structured Parzen Estimators (TPE), which identifies near-optimal controller parameters with respect to a composite navigation objective. In addition, a Gaussian Process surrogate is used to analyze parameter sensitivity and provide insight into the optimization landscape. The proposed framework is robot-agnostic and is evaluated on the Unitree Go2 quadruped in simulation using Gazebo, followed by deployment on the physical robot. Experimental results show that parameters tuned in simulation transfer effectively to hardware, maintaining comparable performance without additional tuning. The full system achieves up to a 90.0\% navigation success rate when deployed, along with a 38.9\% average improvement in the evaluation metrics across simulated environments.

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

The Quality-Utility Paradox: Why High-Reward Data Impairs Small Model Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge distillation from powerful reasoning models is widely used to improve Small Language Models (SLMs) on mathematical reasoning, often assuming that traces with higher reward model scores provide more useful supervision. We identify a counterintuitive Quality-Utility Paradox in mathematical reasoning distillation. Data refined or synthesized by a stronger Oracle obtains higher perceived quality according to reward models, yet consistently underperforms traces generated by the SLM itself and selected through rejection sampling across Qwen2.5, LLaMA-3, and DeepSeek families. Our analysis shows that Oracle refinement couples logical repair with distributional drift away from the SLM's native reasoning distribution. This drift increases the learner's adaptation cost and can outweigh the benefit of improved reasoning logic. To test this mechanism, we introduce Style-Aligned Refinement, which preserves the native trajectory of the SLM while retaining logical repair from the Oracle. This intervention lowers adaptation cost and restores downstream utility. These findings suggest that effective mathematical reasoning distillation should jointly optimize perceived solution quality and learner-data compatibility, rather than relying solely on reward-model scores. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/Dracoqhl/Quality-Utility-Paradox.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Free-Space CV-QKD with Single-Mode Fiber Reception: Effective Coupling Statistics and Protocol-Dependent Reference Noise

arXiv:2606.24431v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study free-space continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) with single-mode fiber (SMF) reception under atmospheric turbulence. The optical channel is modeled by split-step propagation through random phase screens, followed by finite-aperture collection and projection onto the guided receiving mode. We first examine the standard GG02 setting and ask which receiver-side observable is sufficient for effective key-rate prediction. We show that a mean-loss description is generally too optimistic, whereas a scalar effective law for the SMF coupling efficiency provides an accurate downstream Gaussian-channel description within the effective model considered here. We then extend the optical model to a pilot-assisted architecture in which the signal and pilot propagate through correlated but non-identical turbulent realizations generated by a frozen-flow construction. In this case, the signal coupling law alone is no longer sufficient: signal–pilot phase mismatch and loss of post-coupling coherence produce an additional protocol-dependent reference-noise penalty. The results distinguish two regimes: a scalar coupling description is largely adequate for GG02, while transmitted-reference architectures require an additional differential reference observable beyond the signal coupling statistics.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

REDI-Match: Rotation-Equivariant Distillation for Efficient and Robust Dense Matching

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) have significantly advanced dense feature matching, yet severe in-plane rotation remains a critical challenge. Existing solutions face a fundamental dilemma: data-driven methods require inefficient parameter scaling to implicitly learn rotations, whereas strictly equivariant networks lack the semantic capacity of modern VFMs. Consequently, current frameworks typically freeze VFMs and shift the entire burden of rotation generalization to the downstream decoder. To break this architectural bottleneck, we propose REDI-Match, an efficient framework driven by a novel Rotation-Equivariant Distillation (REDI) paradigm. Instead of relying on rotation data augmentation to establish rotational correspondences, REDI distills the non-equivariant semantic representations of a VFM into a lightweight, strictly rotation-equivariant encoder, leveraging an equivariant geometric architecture to constrain robust high-dimensional semantics. To fully exploit these features, we equip the decoder with an entropy-driven spatial alignment module. By evaluating discrete rotation hypotheses, this mechanism explicitly locks onto the canonical coordinate system, eliminating global ambiguity before continuous refinement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that REDI-Match establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) across multiple benchmarks. Notably, it achieves a 13.89% absolute pose accuracy improvement on the highly challenging SatAst dataset while operating 1.9x faster than the current SOTA (RoMa v2), enabling real-time inference (~41 FPS) on a single RTX 4090 GPU. Code: https://github.com/YinjiGe/REDI-Match.

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

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Interpretable Factor Decomposition for Decision Intelligence in Large-Scale Financial Markets: Evidence from China's A-Share Market

arXiv:2606.12843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an interpretable machine learning pipeline to decompose Cross-Sectional Equity Return Predictability into auditable factor contribution. We apply an XGBoost model with TreeSHAP attribution and conduct stress testing on 3632 Chinese A-share stocks from 2009 until 2019. Using 60-month, rolling windows over 55 months of out-of-sample data, XGBoost obtains a mean AUC of 0.547 and +2.38%/month (Newey-West t = 5.94; Annualized Sharpe 2.23) long-short spread for the top vs bottom quintiles. This alpha is persistent after adjusting for the Carhart four-factor model (+2.31%/month; t = 7.48). SHAP Decomposition indicates that behavioral signals (turnover and momentum) account for 58.2% of predictive attribution compared to 10.7% for valuation ratios, on average, across 55 industry groups. Ablation analysis serves to cross-validate this ranking and provides evidence that SHAP and ablation diverge in a manner that highlights feature substitutability structure that is largely invisible to either method used in isolation.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Food additive exposure associated with reduction in gut microbiota diversity

Consumption of ultra-processed foods is rising globally and has been implicated in inflammation and metabolic dysfunction, yet the impact of specific food additives on the human gut microbiota remains poorly understood. Using dietary data from the Food & You study (approximately 1000 participants in Switzerland), we identified 257 unique additives from 4,119 unique packaged products to quantify each participant's daily additive exposure. Higher exposure to a combination of high intensity sweeteners and sugar polyols, commonly found in low calorie products, was independently associated with reduced gut microbial Shannon diversity (beta = -0.39, p < 0.001), after adjustment for demographics, diet quality, BMI and bowel movement frequency. At a broader level, total additive exposure and fast food consumption were each negatively associated with gut microbial diversity; however, additive exposure remained independently associated and also specifically attenuated the diversity benefits of vegetable rich diets. Furthermore, microbial log ratio signatures linked to additive exposure showed strong negative correlations with Shannon diversity, including emulsifiers and thickeners (r = -0.66) and preservatives and antioxidants (r = -0.56). Integrating additive exposure with healthy dietary components such as HEI, fruits, or vegetables strengthened associations with gut microbial diversity; for example, vegetable linked correlations with Shannon diversity increased from r = 0.52 to r = 0.65 when contrasted against preservative-antioxidant exposure. Concordantly, microbial signatures associated with the sweeteners and sugar polyols additive combination showed depletion of fiber associated commensal taxa, and enrichment of pathways involved in polyol and aromatic compound metabolism. Notably, these associations emerged despite packaged foods representing only approximately 15% of logged dietary intake, underscoring the sensitivity of gut microbial diversity to limited exposure, and demonstrating that without integrating additive and processed-food metrics, one of the largest effect-size phenomena in human gut microbiota diversity would remain undetected.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Linear algebra at exponential scale via tensor network dimension reduction

arXiv:2606.15350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many problems in modern scientific computing are challenging because of a curse of dimension, where their mathematical formulation involves objects whose dimension is exponential in the nominal "size" of the problem. Tensor networks can provide a compact representation for exponentially large vectors and matrices that arise in applications, but these representations do not always lead to reliable algorithms. This paper develops and analyzes techniques for randomized dimension reduction of tensor network data. These techniques support a suite of efficient algorithms for provably solving exponential-scale linear algebra problems, including trace estimation and eigenvalue approximation. The paper includes several stylized illustrations from quantum many-body physics with ambient dimension up to $2^{200}$.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Trivariate Hypergeometric Series Formulas for Pure Partition Functions of Multiple $3$-SLE$_\kappa$

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pure partition functions of multiple SLE are characterized by null-state partial differential equations, Möbius covariance, and boundary asymptotics. After quotienting by Möbius covariance, the case of three curves is the first genuinely multivariable one: the moduli space has three independent variables, naturally represented by the three unoriented cross-ratios of the three pairs of links. We solve this Möbius-normalized three-variable problem for the two basic link-pattern types of multiple \(3\)-SLE\(_\kappa\), namely the rainbow and neighbor patterns. Writing \(\beta=4/\kappa\), we construct explicit trivariate hypergeometric-series normal forms and identify them with the corresponding pure partition functions for all \(\beta>1/2\) in the rainbow case and all \(\beta\ge2/3\) in the neighbor case. Equivalently, these ranges are \(\kappa\in(0,8)\) and \(\kappa\in(0,6]\), respectively. The proof is analytic. The null-state PDEs and Möbius covariance yield recursion relations for the trivariate coefficient arrays. In the rainbow case, coefficient estimates give convergence and boundary regularity on the closed cube. In the neighbor case, Pfaff systems continue the local power series to a neighborhood of \([0,1)^3\), while side-face equations, regular normal estimates, and corner propagation give continuity on \([0,1]^3\) for \(\beta\ge2/3\). The endpoint \(\beta=2/3\), corresponding to \(\kappa=6\), requires a logarithmic normal term. The two-dimensional boundary degenerations are classical Appell \(F_1\) and Horn \(G_2\) functions. The probabilistic identification uses SLE martingale arguments and Itô calculus, together with positivity and boundary regularity. We also discuss boundary degenerations, including heuristic connections with boundary Green's functions.

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Analyzing the Narration Gap in LLM-Solver Loops

arXiv:2606.19588v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal tools such as SAT and SMT solvers are increasingly embedded in language model reasoning pipelines when a safety or security critical question can be formulated in logic. Unlike chain of thought whose steps are sampled from the model distribution without formal guarantee, a solver produces a sound and independently verifiable answer. However, the soundness guarantee can be lost in the interaction between the solver and the model. The hybrid pipeline has three components: formalizing the question, deciding it, and narrating the result. Prior work has studied the formalization and decision, but not narration, which is the step that turns a formal tool's output into the user answer. To fill the narration gap, we first model the LLM-solver loop as a verified decision procedure. We further evaluate five open-sourced models under prompt injection, and we find certificate gating makes the solver verdict sound, while an adversary can invert a verified conclusion across phrasings and channels. We study the mitigation through hardened prompt that reduces injection significantly but cannot eliminate it and still suffers under adaptive attack. Combining the formal analysis and empirical studies, we show in the LLM-solver loop, robustness does not reach to the answer that the user finally reads.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Clarify Before You Draw: Proactive Agents for Robust Text-to-CAD Generation

arXiv:2602.03045v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models have recently enabled text-to-CAD systems that synthesize parametric CAD programs (e.g., CadQuery) from natural-language prompts. In practice, however, geometric descriptions can be under-specified or internally inconsistent: critical dimensions may be missing and constraints may conflict. However, existing fine-tuned models tend to reactively follow the user instructions and hallucinate dimensions when the text is ambiguous. To address this, we propose a proactive agentic framework for text-to-CadQuery generation, named as ProCAD, that resolves specification issues before code synthesis. Our framework pairs a proactive clarifying agent, which audits the prompt and asks targeted clarification questions only when necessary to produce a self-consistent specification, with a CAD coding agent that translates the specification into an executable CadQuery program. We fine-tune the coding agent based on a curated high-quality text-to-CadQuery dataset and train the clarifying agent via agentic SFT on clarification trajectories. Experiments show that proactive clarification significantly improves robustness to ambiguous prompts while keeping interaction overhead low. ProCAD outperforms frontier closed-source models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, reducing the mean Chamfer distance by 79.9% and lowering the invalidity ratio from 4.8% to 0.9%. Our code and datasets are made publicly available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/Pro-CAD.

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

Rotation-Invariant Spherical Watermarking via Third-Order SO(3) Representation Coupling

Reliable watermarking of panoramic imagery is fundamentally challenged by arbitrary 3D rotations. As panoramas are defined on the sphere, they naturally transform under the action of $SO(3)$, rendering conventional planar representations and augmentation-based robustness strategies inadequate and devoid of theoretical guarantees. To address this, we formulate panoramas as spherical signals and leverage $SO(3)$ representation theory to derive provably rotation-invariant descriptors. While spherical harmonic coefficients transform equivariantly under rotations, the natural invariant constructions are typically limited to zeroth-order statistics which eliminate directional information and severely constrain embedding capacity. In this work, we introduce a principled third-order invariant construction by coupling higher-order $SO(3)$ irreducible representations via tensor products and projecting onto the trivial representation. This yields a spherical invariant bispectrum that preserves phase information while remaining strictly rotation-invariant. Leveraging this property, we embed watermarks into higher-order spherical harmonic coefficients and recover them from invariant bispectral scalars, enabling reliable extraction under arbitrary 3D rotations. We provide a theoretical proof of $SO(3)$ invariance for it and demonstrate experimentally its near-perfect robustness to continuous rotations while maintaining high visual fidelity.

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

Deep-Learning-Based Pixelated Microwave Filter Design and Characterization using Electro-Optical Electric-Field Measurements

arXiv:2606.18402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional microwave filter design typically relies on iterative parameter tuning and predefined topologies, which limits design space and increases development time. This study uses a deep learning approach combining convolutional neural networks with genetic algorithms to automate pixelated microwave filter synthesis. To validate the approach experimentally, both S-parameter and spatial electric-field measurements were analyzed. The synthesized low-pass filter demonstrated excellent agreement between simulated and measured performance, achieving a 7 GHz passband with over 20 dB suppression beyond 9.5 GHz. Electro-optical measurements, for the first time, revealed electric field patterns that resemble coupled transmission-lines or stub structures, providing insight into the emergent characteristics of AI-generated designs.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

IsabeLLM: Automated Theorem Proving Applied to Formally Verifying Consensus

arXiv:2606.18098v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have led AI for Theorem Proving to become a promising means of formally verifying computer systems. Whilst formal verification is traditionally reserved for safety-critical systems due to the required amount of expertise and effort, AI can help to automate a large amount of this workload and make it far more accessible. Blockchain-based systems are becoming increasingly popular and are frequently targeted by malicious actors, often resulting in huge financial losses, highlighting the need to better verify these systems and mitigate vulnerabilities. Arguably the most important component of these systems is the consensus protocol, which allows nodes to agree on decisions in a potentially adversarial environment. In this paper, we improve upon IsabeLLM, the automated theorem proving tool in Isabelle. Namely, we implement a Retrieval-Augmented Generation framework, Error tracing and counterexample generation for improved context supplied to the Large Language Model. Compatibility with the latest version of Isabelle and Sledgehammer is also implemented for improved efficiency. We compare the performance of the two versions of IsabeLLM in their ability to complete the verification of Bitcoin's Proof of Work consensus.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

An Ethical eValuation Agent (EeVA): Results of a Proof-of-Concept Test on a Prototype Agentic-like Workflow to Assist Ethical Deliberations

arXiv:2606.11218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ethical deliberation is often misunderstood as a search for single right or wrong answers, creating difficulties for non-ethically trained personnel who must address ethically laden challenges. We developed EeVA, an agentic-like LLM-based workflow designed to support comparative ethical reflection rather than deliver definitive ethical answers. EeVA was programmed in n8n using three interconnected workflows: starter, worker, and emitter. It evaluated uploaded use cases against 10 ethical frameworks through evaluator and synthesis prompts. Proof-of-concept testing used three published cases from urban mobility, peer-to-peer energy trading, and social-service resource allocation. Across all cases, EeVA produced consistently structured framework-specific evaluations and integrated syntheses. Outputs differentiated between frameworks, identified convergences and divergences, recommended modifications to increase alignment, and highlighted persistent ethical tensions. Syntheses were readable for non-specialists and shifted attention away from simplistic answers toward design conditions, safeguards, and areas where full cross-framework agreement was unlikely. The findings suggest that LLMs can be organised into usable workflows that preserve ethical plurality while helping bridge the communicative gap between ethicists and non-ethically trained personnel. EeVA's value lies not in replacing ethicists or resolving moral disagreement, but in scaffolding structured ethical deliberation. EeVA offers a promising proof of concept for supporting ethical reflection where access to ethics expertise is limited. Further work is needed on reproducibility, human evaluation, user testing, and efficiency before it can be considered a mature tool.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning Urban Access Costs from Origin-Destination Flows via Inverse Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.14157v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cities deliver basic services through mixed public-private facility networks, including schools, clinics, transit providers, and subsidized service points. In these systems, planners often observe where households go, but not the latent cost function through which they trade off factors such as distance, price, and institutional access. We study this urban problem through school choice in the Philippines, where the country's largest national education subsidy is intended to redirect learners from congested public schools to participating private schools. Treating school-to-school enrollment flows as an entropic optimal transport plan, we recover latent choice costs using two complementary inverse optimal transport models: an interpretable distance-banded model with a subsidy term, and a neural cost model trained through a differentiable Sinkhorn forward pass. Applied to 283{,}016 learner trips across 23{,}820 observed flows in the most populated region, the framework estimates a subsidy-equivalent distance, $\lambda^{(k)}$, interpreted as the kilometers of perceived travel cost offset by the subsidy. The case demonstrates how administrative origin-destination data can be transformed into interpretable planning metrics for accessibility-aware subsidy design, facility siting, and urban service allocation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AnnotateAnything: Automatic Annotation of 3D Assets for Robot Manipulation

Simulation enables scalable robot data collection, but raw 3D assets provide only geometry, lacking the semantic, interactive, and physical knowledge needed to specify where and how robots should act. In this work, we present AnnotateAnything, a general automatic annotation framework that converts passive 3D assets into manipulation-ready assets with structured, diverse, and executable manipulation labels. AnnotateAnything is built around two complementary pipelines. First, a unified visual-language annotation pipeline using vision-language reasoning to infer object semantics, interaction constraints, and 3D-grounded cues, providing human-prior guidance for identifying meaningful interaction regions. Second, a fully automatic and massively parallel physics annotation pipeline grounds these priors in each asset's geometry and physical constraints through candidate generation, geometry optimization and trajectory generation. This pipeline produces diverse and executable action annotations, including grasp poses, dexterous contacts, articulation waypoints, insertion directions, hanging affordances, and navigation targets. Using the generated annotations, we further build an asynchronous parallel simulation data-collection system across diverse objects, tasks, and robot embodiments. Experiments demonstrate that AnnotateAnything achieves superior annotation efficiency, data-collection efficiency, and task success rates over existing annotation and data-generation pipelines, while also supporting downstream tasks such as affordance detection, robotic VQA, and visual instruction finetuning. We provide project materials on the project page and plan to release the full code, annotations, and benchmark to facilitate future research. Videos, code, demo assets, and annotations are provided in supplementary materials Project page: https://tourmaline-caramel-169490.netlify.app.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Chiral laser gyroscopes breaking the lock-in limit

Authors:

Ring laser gyroscopes (RLGs) measure rotation via the Sagnac effect: a slight difference in the frequency of the two counter-propagating beams within the resonator. However, at low rotation rates, an intrinsic limitation in RLGs, known as the lock-in phenomenon, counteracts this effect, precluding the widespread adoption of RLGs as motion sensors. Past efforts to avoid this phenomenon include mechanical dithering1 and magneto-optic non-reciprocity techniques2. Such techniques require external components that limit the miniaturization of RLGs. Here we present a self-biased method that overcomes this limitation through chiral spontaneous symmetry breaking and nonlinear frequency pulling in a He–20Ne RLG without inserted elements. Supported by a theoretical model that reveals phase transition conditions with spontaneous symmetry breaking and the dynamics of bistable chiral states, our experiments demonstrate deterministic chirality switching synchronized with rotation direction. Remarkably, the chiral RLG has a linear frequency response at near-zero rotation rates, achieving an open-loop bias instability of 2.2 × 10−2 degrees per hour at a 10 s integration time. Our work presents a strategy for the development of all-solid-state, high-precision and miniaturized laser gyroscopes, which could be used for the exploration of the interplay of nonlinear dynamics and spontaneous symmetry breaking in photonic systems. Ring laser gyroscope lock-in has been&nbsp;eliminated&nbsp;using spontaneous symmetry breaking in a He–Ne laser, enabling accurate near-zero rotation sensing without external components, improving miniaturization and precision.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

TextHOI-3D: Text-to-3D Hand-Object Interaction via Discrete Multi-View Generation and Joint Mesh Optimization

Text-conditioned 3D generation has progressed rapidly for images and isolated objects, but producing a hand-object mesh remains challenging: the output must preserve language semantics, cross-view consistency, object geometry, articulated hand shape, and physically plausible contact. We present TextHOI-3D, a staged framework that uses generated multi-view observations as an explicit interface between text-conditioned visual generation and geometry-aware hand-object recovery. TextHOI-3D learns a compact VQ token space for fixed-camera hand-object observations, predicts multi-view visual tokens from text with a CLIP-conditioned visual autoregressive model, and recovers a unified hand-object mesh through prior initialization, multi-view joint optimization, and anti-penetration refinement. The design separates semantic generation from geometric recovery while keeping both stages connected by a discrete multi-view representation. On HO3D-derived evaluations, the multi-view setting reduces object CD from 17.26 mm to 4.92 mm and penetration volume from 5.3721 cm^3 to 0.2193 cm^3 compared with a single-view counterpart, while improving hand errors and surface F-scores. These results support multi-view visual tokens as an effective intermediate representation for text-driven 3D hand-object mesh creation.