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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Interpretable Concept-Guided Polynomial Tabular Kolmogorov-Arnold Network for EEG-Based Mild Cognitive Impairment Detection

arXiv:2606.25434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early and scalable detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) remains an unresolved clinical challenge. Existing EEG-based screening approaches are constrained by handcrafted feature pipelines that discard neurophysiologically meaningful domain structure and deep learning classifiers that sacrifice interpretability for performance. No existing work unifies physiologically organized concept encoders, cross-concept interaction modeling, and nonlinear tabular classification in a sleep EEG-based MCI detection framework. This study proposes Concept-guided Polynomial-transformed Tabular learning using Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (CPTabKAN), which maps heterogeneous EEG-derived features into domain-informed concept representations, expands them via degree-2 polynomial transformation to expose first- and second-order interactions, and applies a Fourier-parameterized TabKAN classifier to learn nonlinear decision boundaries. CPTabKAN was evaluated on the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures cohort (372 subjects, overnight polysomnography), using 1,379 features organized into ten physiologically motivated concept groups. Under 10-fold cross-validation, CPTabKAN-Second Order achieved a weighted F1-score of 0.9038 (SD 0.034), outperforming GradientBoosting by 5.65 percentage points (t(9)=1.934,p=0.043, one-sided paired test), with advantages persisting under SMOTE-based balancing. Ablation analysis confirmed independent contributions from each component. Concept importance analysis revealed that power spectral density, multi-scale entropy, and Hjorth parameters dominated first-order weights, while cross-concept interactions involving Lempel-Ziv-Welch complexity, statistics, demographics, and slow oscillations exceeded all first-order scores. These results demonstrate that concept-structured, interaction-aware tabular learning surfaces physiologically coherent reasoning, supporting clinical trust.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Smoothness-Based Derandomization of PAC-Bayes Bounds

arXiv:2606.19105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study PAC-Bayes derandomization for smooth loss functions. Our goal is to obtain generalization bounds that hold with high probability for deterministic predictors by exploiting smoothness properties of both the loss and the predictor class. We show that passing from the Gibbs predictor to the deterministic predictor at the posterior mean has a precise cost, given by the generalization gap of the Jensen gap class. We control this class through its Rademacher complexity, leading to bounds for deterministic predictors that involve flatness quantities expressed in terms of parameter Jacobians and Hessians of the score map. The framework applies to both bounded and unbounded smooth loss functions, and we specialize the results to linear predictors and smooth neural networks. Finally, the Jacobian and Hessian quantities appearing in the theory motivate a practical regularizer. For BatchNorm networks, we compute this regularizer with respect to effective BatchNorm weights obtained by folding the BatchNorm transformation into the adjacent affine weights. Experiments on CIFAR-10 illustrate the behavior of this regularizer under different batch sizes.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Minimal surfaces, Knots, and Neural Networks

arXiv:2605.26234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A recent conjecture by Joel Fine posits a relationship between the coefficients of the HOMFLY polynomial of a knot $K$ in the 3-sphere $S^3$, and the signed count of minimal surfaces in hyperbolic 4-space $\mathrm{H}^4$ meeting the sphere at infinity at $K$, with prescribed genus and self-intersection number. In this paper, we develop a novel machine learning framework based on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) to solve the minimal surface equation in hyperbolic space. We utilise this framework to test Fine's Conjecture by constructing near-minimal surfaces bounding various families of knots in $S^3$. Furthermore, we develop an algorithmic method to find self-intersections and compute their sign. For every knot analysed, the computationally discovered minimal surfaces and their self-intersection numbers perfectly align with the predictions of Fine's Conjecture, providing empirical evidence for it.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

EnerInfer: Energy-Aware On-Device LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.23001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-device LLM inference is increasingly attractive for privacy-preserving, reliable, and cost-effective deployment, yet its energy and thermal costs remain a critical bottleneck. Existing systems primarily optimize for decoding speed, implicitly assuming that faster execution is always preferable. We show instead that on-device LLM inference often has exploitable configuration slack: modestly lowering NPU and memory frequencies preserves quality of experience (QoE) while substantially improving energy efficiency and reducing heat. Realizing this opportunity in production is challenging. The most energy-efficient NPU/DDR setting varies with the model, inference engine, platform, and runtime conditions, with no stable ranking across configurations. Commercial devices further lack component-level power sensing, and shell temperature evolves with request arrivals, response lengths, and thermal history. To address these challenges, we propose EnerInfer, the first on-device LLM inference framework that jointly manages energy efficiency, throughput, and thermal comfort for LLM workloads. EnerInfer replaces per-model profiling and sensor-heavy control with disaggregated, model-structure-aware prediction and ranking-driven online feedback. It predicts throughput and power for unseen LLMs across NPU/DDR frequency settings, selects QoE-satisfying efficient configurations under runtime interference, and uses lightweight limited-horizon thermal prediction to dynamically switch between energy-optimized and thermally constrained inference. Evaluations on real-world LLMs show that EnerInfer improves energy efficiency by up to 65%, 12%, and 24% on phones, a laptop, and a development board, respectively, without QoE violation.

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

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

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

Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs

Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily as natural languages. We test this claim by training LMs to model impossible and typologically unattested languages. Unlike previous work, which has focused exclusively on English, we conduct experiments on 12 languages from 4 language families with two newly constructed parallel corpora. Our results show that while GPT-2 small can largely distinguish attested languages from their impossible counterparts, it does not achieve perfect separation between all the attested languages and all the impossible ones. We further test whether GPT-2 small distinguishes typologically attested from unattested languages with different NP orders by manipulating word order based on Greenberg's Universal 20. We find that the model's perplexity scores do not distinguish attested vs. unattested word orders, while its performance on the generalization test does. These findings suggest that LMs exhibit some human-like inductive biases, though these biases are weaker than those found in human learners.

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

End-to-End Radar and Communication Modulation Recognition with Neuromorphic Computing

arXiv:2606.24075v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although deep learning-based methods can achieve high accuracy in automatic modulation recognition (AMR) tasks, their high computational cost makes it difficult to strike a balance between accuracy and power consumption, thereby limiting their application on resource-constrained platforms. Neuromorphic architectures that perform spike-driven inference with modest energy budgets have recently been explored for vision and timeseries tasks. Motivated by these works, we propose EMRFormer, a novel end-to-end spiking nerural network (SNN) architecture that applies spike-driven transformer to the constraints of neuromorphic hardware for AMR. The model incorporates an adaptive spike encoder and Integer Leaky Integrate-and-Fire neurons to mitigate the degradation of effective information and enhance SNN representational capacity. By integrating spike-separable Convolution Neural Networks (SSCNN) into Spike-Driven Transformers (SpikeFormer), EMRFormer effectively extracts multi-scale temporal features from the raw IQ waveforms. We validate our approach across various mainstream datasets, the experimental results show that EMRFormer achieves state-of-the-art interms of accuracy, outperforming all the baselines. Furthermore, the model maintains strong performance in low signal-to-noise(SNR) environments and reduces theoretical energy consumption by over 90%. Finally, we evaluate our model on a KA200 neuromorphic chip. The results show that our model achieves up to 5 times reduction in power compared to running on a 3090 GPU or an Orin NX. This work demonstrates a promising pathway for AMR on resource-constrained devices.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Evidence-guided AI regularization for suicidal ideation prediction in pediatric bipolar disorder

Background: Suicide prediction models in psychiatry often rely on purely data-driven feature selection, which can produce unstable and clinically opaque predictor sets in modest-sized samples. We developed Evidence-Based AI LASSO (EBAL), an evidence-guided regularization framework that incorporates curated clinical evidence into feature-specific penalty factors for interpretable prediction. Methods: Baseline data from 136 youth with confirmed bipolar spectrum disorder in the Greater Houston Area Bipolar Registry were analyzed using 20 candidate clinical predictors. Forty higher-level evidence documents on suicidality and related predictor domains were curated through a structured evidence synthesis workflow and indexed as an auditable evidence corpus. An open-weight large language model assigned feature-specific penalty factors using a prespecified scoring rubric, and these penalties were used to fit a weighted LASSO model. EBAL was compared with a standard evidence-agnostic LASSO using nested leave-one-out cross-validation. Results: For suicidal ideation, EBAL achieved an AUROC of 0.768, balanced accuracy of 0.757, sensitivity of 0.758, and specificity of 0.757. The standard LASSO achieved an AUROC of 0.760 and balanced accuracy of 0.715. EBAL improved balanced accuracy (+0.042, p=0.010) and Matthews correlation coefficient (+0.079, p=0.010), while retaining fewer stable predictors than standard LASSO (11/20 vs 18/20). The strongest positive predictors were current depressed mood, duration of mood disorder illness, and comorbid generalized anxiety disorder. For suicidal behavior, both models performed near chance and retained all candidate predictors. Limitations: The study was cross-sectional, single-site, and modest in sample size, with no external validation cohort. Conclusions: EBAL produced a sparser and more clinically coherent model for suicidal ideation in pediatric bipolar disorder, but did not improve prediction of suicidal behavior. These findings support evidence-guided regularization as a transparent strategy for aligning psychiatric prediction models with prior clinical knowledge while preserving interpretability.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Agon: An Autonomous Large-Scale Omnidisciplinary Research System Built on Prompt Economy

Large language models are making research production scalable, shifting the bottleneck from producing artifacts to judging claims. We present \textsc{Agon}, a research orchestrator that validates what can be checked inside the workflow and leaves the remaining judgments to human scientists. \textsc{Agon} is built on six design principles: Prompt Economy, Future-Facing, Minimal Prompts, OmniDisciplinary, Massive Parallelism, and Zero-Code. We ran \textsc{Agon} across domains for 444 iterations of Prompt Economy loops, using only small starting topics and no human-written experimental code. These deployments demonstrate scalability while exposing new classes of failure. We organize these failures into a taxonomy along severity, fixability, visibility, and capability locus. The taxonomy separates failures the loops can see and fix from those that require human judgment. Together, these results show that \textsc{Agon} is pushing research toward a new paradigm: machine scales, human steers.

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

FoMoE: Breaking the Full-Replica Barrier with a Federation of MoEs

arXiv:2606.19025v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-training Large Language Models (LLMs) typically demands large-scale infrastructure with tightly coupled hardware accelerators. While increasing model and dataset scale remains the dominant driver of performance, Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) architectures have recently achieved state-of-the-art results by decoupling parameter count from computational cost. This efficiency enables training massive models on constrained compute budgets, yet it typically requires the high-speed interconnects of a single datacenter. To overcome these physical limits, recent approaches such as DiLoCo and Photon use low-communication data-parallel methods to enable scaling across geographically distributed, weakly connected data centers. However, these methods suffer from a fundamental inefficiency: they require full model replicas at every site, which imposes prohibitive memory constraints and communication overheads. In this work, we introduce FoMoE, a system that breaks the full-replica paradigm by partitioning expert layers across workers. We demonstrate that FoMoE: (I) reduces communication costs by up to 1.42x over efficient baselines and 45.44x over DDP via partial expert replication in the studied regimes; (II) achieves empirical throughput speedups of up to 1.4x through a novel skip-token mechanism; and (III) shows stable routing in the trained proxy regimes and projects the communication/memory benefits to 100B-scale configurations through system modelling.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Halo-Independent Quantum Sensor Probes of Low-Velocity Dark Matter

arXiv:2606.25129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a halo-independent framework for sub-GeV dark matter (DM) direct detection using quantum sensors with sub-eV energy thresholds. Such detectors enable access to low DM velocities and may be sensitive to departures from the Standard Halo Model that are challenging to probe with conventional direct DM detection experiments. The method expresses the DM scattering event rate in terms of a detector and particle model-dependent response function, and a universal halo function common to all experiments to be determined from data. This allows the local DM velocity distribution to be constrained. As representative implementations, we consider TES (Al) and MKID (TiN)-like sensors and show that their differing material responses probe complementary regimes of the DM velocity distribution. Applying the framework to mock data derived from several benchmark local halo models, we demonstrate how the assumed halo function could be reconstructed. This framework demonstrates the potential of quantum sensors as a new avenue for mapping the local DM velocity distribution.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Multiple Fault Analysis and Drug Therapy on Signaling Pathways Using Dynamic Bayesian Network-based Model

Cell growth is an intricate biological phenomenon that is closely regulated by the interplay between various growth factors and transcription factors. Signaling pathways are the main mediators in this event, which provide the driving force for mitosis or sometimes meiosis. However, when malfunctions occur within the biological network, they can cause uncontrolled cell division, regardless of external stimuli. By employing Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBNs), these malfunctions can be explicitly simulated, offering insights into their effects on cellular behavior and growth regulation. To a significant extent, the resultant outcomes can be mitigated through the use of reduced drug combinations. This study delves into the intricacies of signaling pathway behavior under the influence of concurrent malfunctions. Initially, we replicate the effects of these dysfunctions within DBNs. Subsequently, drug therapy is applied to alleviate their impact. Our methodology introduces a parameter known as efficiency_score, enabling the identification of optimized drug combinations without prior knowledge of specific dysfunctions. Particularly relevant in the context of realistic cancer conditions, these tailored drug inhibition points demonstrate enhanced efficacy compared to conventional treatments. Leveraging GPU acceleration throughout the modeling process accelerates the analysis of multiple faults within the biological networks, rendering our approach notably faster and more efficient.

14.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-09

Hybrid solid−liquid optics enable scalable, high-resolution light-sheet microscopy across diverse immersion media

Authors:

Many data-driven approaches rely on scalable and affordable three-dimensional (3D) imaging across subcellular to organ scales. Although advances in tissue clearing, expansion microscopy and light-sheet microscopy (LSM) have enabled high-resolution imaging of intact specimens, scalability in sample size, throughput and accessibility remains fundamentally limited by detection optics. Here we introduce hybrid solid−liquid optics (HySIL), a flexible refractive design framework in which a solid optical element and a refractive index (RI)-matched liquid function as a continuous optical system for wavefront correction and numerical aperture enhancement. We implement this framework as SCOPE and Super-SCOPE, enabling submicron-resolution, aberration-corrected LSM using long-working-distance air objectives. We demonstrate high-resolution volumetric imaging across diverse biological contexts, including cleared and expanded mouse, salamander and cavefish brains, human induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived brain organoids and large intact human tissues for 3D histopathology. By combining enhanced optical performance with low-cost, long-working-distance and multi-immersion compatibility, HySIL provides an accessible and scalable foundation for next-generation volumetric imaging and data-driven biological discovery. Hybrid solid–liquid optics improve light-sheet imaging of intact biological samples.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optional Stopping for Superhedging Supermartingales

arXiv:2606.17452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superhedging supermartingales, introduced by the authors in previous work, are non-probabilistic processes defined via subadditive outer integrals that carry a purely financial interpretation in terms of superhedging cost. Building on the Leinert-König theory of non-lattice integration, the present paper establishes several results that are classical in probability theory but whose non-probabilistic proofs require fundamentally new arguments: (i) a tower inequality for the conditional outer integral \overline{\sigma}_j applied at stopping times, reducing to equality when the integrand is conditionally integrable; (ii) three versions of Doob's optional stopping theorem, organised by the class of supermartingale and the range of the stopping times; and (iii) Dubins' upcrossing inequality in both finite- and infinite-time horizons. A key structural result, property (K)-a.e., identifies conditions under which the two superhedging operators \overline{\sigma}_j and \overline{I}_j coincide on non-negative functions, extending the scope of all preceding results to the positive operator \overline{I}_j. None of the proofs invoke classical measure-theoretic tools; in particular, (classical) integrability and measurability are not assumed. The analogues of classical stochastic results acquire a purely financial interpretation and, in this way, gain depth and generality by providing a context that is independent of any a priori probabilistic structure.

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

DuDi: Dual-Signal Distillation with Cross-Lingual Verbalizer

Small language models (SLMs) are efficient and scalable, but their multilingual capabilities degrade severely at sub-billion scales, especially for Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. We introduce DuDi, a dual-signal multilingual distillation framework that combines an online sequence-level signal with off-policy and on-policy token-level signals. DuDi further uses a cross-lingual verbalizer to refine teacher feedback and improve teacher-student transferability in multilingual settings. Experiments on SEA-HELM across multiple model families, scales, and teacher-student settings show that DuDi consistently outperforms competitive distillation baselines. Ablations and analyses confirm that sequence-level optimization, token-level supervision, and cross-lingual verbalization provide complementary and transferable learning signals for multilingual SLMs.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SC3-Eval: Evaluating Robot Foundation Models via Self-Consistent Video Generation

Evaluating generalist robot manipulation policies in the real world is expensive, slow, and difficult to scale. Action-conditioned video world models offer a scalable alternative by simulating policy rollouts. Autoregressive rollouts accumulate compounding errors, observations across multiple camera views must remain mutually consistent, and the evaluator must generalize to policies whose behaviors lie outside the training distribution. We address these challenges with SC3-Eval, a self-consistent video generation recipe that adapts a pre-trained video foundation model into an accurate policy evaluator by enforcing three complementary forms of consistency. First, forward-inverse dynamics consistency jointly trains the model to predict frames from actions and to recover actions from frames, anchoring generated rollouts to a physically plausible action manifold and counteracting the drift a forward-only model cannot penalize. Second, cross-view consistency trains the model to inpaint each camera view from the other, keeping the multi-camera observation coherent over long rollouts without any explicit memory mechanism. Third, test-time consistency reuses the inverse dynamics mode at inference as a per-action-chunk uncertainty signal that terminates rollouts whose generated frames drift away from the requested actions. We also demonstrate SC3-Eval rollouts reproduce the failure modes that policies exhibit in real-world rollouts, supporting fine-grained diagnostic comparison rather than aggregate ranking alone. Across seven real-world vision-language-action policies, SC3-Eval attains a closed-loop Pearson correlation of $0.929$ and MMRV of $0.119$, outperforming three strong prior video-model-based baselines, and generalizes to new tasks.

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

MaskWAM: Unifying Mask Prompting and Prediction for World-Action Models

World Action Models (WAMs) present a promising paradigm for robotic control via video prediction. However, current WAMs suffer from fundamental spatial bottlenecks: standard text inputs introduce referential ambiguity in cluttered scenes, while unstructured RGB predictions lack semantic grounding and remain biased by task-irrelevant backgrounds. To overcome these limitations, we introduce MaskWAM, an object-centric world-action model. By jointly integrating masks as both explicit inputs and predictions via a unified Mixture of Transformers (MoT), MaskWAM unlocks robust policy generalization. This design provides two key benefits: (1) predicting future masks yields object-centric semantic supervision that suppresses visual noise, significantly enhancing even standard text-conditioned WAMs; and (2) coupling this predictive supervision with first-frame visual prompts, such as target object masks, establishes a precise spatial anchor that substantially reduces language ambiguity. Crucially, as WAMs are inherently vision-driven architectures, direct mask conditioning yields substantially stronger guidance than text alone, establishing a precise and robust paradigm for manipulating unseen objects. Evaluations on LIBERO, RoboTwin, and real-world tasks demonstrate that MaskWAM significantly outperforms baselines in both language-clear and language-ambiguous tasks.

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

Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI

arXiv:2606.19769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets – Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. First, humanoid robot data is embodied interaction data, not a collection of isolated digital samples; a useful dataset must preserve the relationship among robot body, action, task, scene, execution trace, and outcome. Second, its value depends on physical coherence: multimodal streams are reusable only when timing, coordinate frames, calibration, kinematics, units, and synchronization assumptions remain inspectable. Third, the main bottleneck is not only data scarcity, but non-cumulative data caused by high collection costs, data silos, and inconsistent evaluation. We argue that humanoid robot data standards address these bottlenecks by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable. A general standard should provide horizontal infrastructure for lifecycle management, metadata, provenance, quality, versioning, and traceability, while capability-specific parts should define domain grammar for manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, cognition, and future humanoid capabilities. As AI moves from screens into bodies, data standards must evolve from organizing digital information to structuring physical interaction.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

AgentOdyssey: Open-Ended Long-Horizon Text Game Generation for Test-Time Continual Learning Agents

For agents to learn continuously from interaction with the world at test time, they must be able to explore effectively, acquire new world knowledge and skills, retain relevant episodic experiences, and plan over long horizons. To evaluate these key abilities of test-time continual learning agents, we introduce AgentOdyssey, a novel evaluation framework that procedurally generates open-ended text games with rich entities, world dynamics, and long-horizon tasks. Critically, AgentOdyssey goes beyond the conventional machine learning assumption that learning does not occur at test time by placing agents in a continuous, long-horizon setting that interleaves learning and inference throughout deployment. We further propose a multifaceted evaluation methodology that measures not only game progress but also offers diagnostic tests on world knowledge acquisition, episodic memory, object and action exploration, action diversity, and model cost. We evaluate diverse agent paradigms in the generated games. Our experimental results reveal critical limits in agents' key abilities, as well as factors that influence their meaningful horizon. Although performance scales with stronger base models, even the top agent remains far below human performance, leaving substantial headroom for improvement. Among agent mechanisms, we find that short-term memory benefits multiple agent paradigms and is an important component of agent test-time training.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Detecting AI Coding Agents in Open Source: A Validated Multi-Method Census of 180 Million Repositories

arXiv:2606.24429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI coding agents are entering the open-source supply chain, yet their diverse and often invisible traces leave their prevalence poorly understood. We introduce a multi-layered detection framework that integrates configuration-file scanning, commit-message analysis, author-identity matching, and bot-signature lookup across World of Code (180M+ Git repositories), classifying agent traces into four behavioral types. No single method captures more than a fraction of activity: multi-method detection identifies 850,157 Claude Code commits in one snapshot, of which bot-account lookup_the signal most adoption studies rely on_recovers only 28,154 (3.3%), a 30x relative-recall gap, so single-signal prevalence estimates are biased low by at least this factor. Every detection pattern is hand-validated (495 labels) with per-cell precision and Wilson confidence intervals. Across snapshots from December 2024 to April 2026, commit-attributed agents generate over 320,000 commits per month; Claude Code leads (886,122 commits across 17,295 projects) and dominates silent, configuration-file-only adoption (21,078 projects). Compared against an independent pull-request census (AIDev), the two channels capture nearly disjoint agent populations_a PR census misses 79% of commit-detected Claude Code adopters and essentially all Codex adopters_and different kinds of work: PR-deployed cloud agents (Codex, Cursor) surface as feature work, while commit-deployed in-editor agents (Claude Code, OpenHands, Aider) surface as maintenance. The observed work profile follows deployment and detection mode rather than the tool itself, so no single channel is representative.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Policy-driven Conformal Prediction for Trustworthy QoT Estimation

arXiv:2606.12501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Conformal QoT, a policy-driven framework that combines statistically guaranteed QoT estimation with operational decision policies, enabling reliable lightpath-feasibility predictions under domain shift and improving accuracy from 92\% to 99.6\% on open datasets.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Explaining RhythmFormer: A Systematic XAI Analysis of Periodic Sparse Attention for Remote Photoplethysmography

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) transformers achieve low heart-rate error on benchmarks, yet their decisions remain opaque–a growing concern as rPPG moves toward clinical heart rate estimation. Existing rPPG XAI is dominated by qualitative heatmap inspection without quantitative faithfulness metrics or physiology-grounded validation, leaving a gap between visual plausibility and auditable evidence. We address this gap. First, we adapt four attribution methods (raw attention, rollout, flow, Beyond Intuition) to RhythmFormer's bi-level routing attention with top-$k$ selection. Second, we introduce a skin coverage metric quantifying how much attribution mass falls on skin regions. Third, we adapt the SaCo faithfulness coefficient from its original classification setting to rPPG regression by using the MAE between original and perturbed predicted rPPG waveforms as the perturbation impact. Applying these tools, we quantify a multi-hop leakage effect under sparse top-$k$ routing: attention rollout and flow almost completely restores the connections that individual refined-attention layers explicitly set to zero. Beyond Intuition mitigates this via its value-projection-weighted rollout and gradient-supported mask, attaining the highest median refined skin coverage ($0.83$ vs. $0.57$ for vanilla rollout) and faithfulness ($F=0.92$) among the evaluated methods on UBFC-rPPG. Validation across diverse datasets and model variants is needed. A case study on a low-SaCo outlier further shows all four methods recovering consistently once an artefactual region is replaced, suggesting consistent SaCo behavior across attribution families in this illustrative case. Together, these metrics move XAI for rPPG toward auditable numerical evidence about spatial alignment and perturbation faithfulness, i.e. trustworthy rPPG XAI.

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

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

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

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.