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01.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-08

Single-cell spatial pharmacobiology for imaging antibody-based therapies in solid tumors

Authors: Unknown Author

We have developed single-cell spatial pharmacobiology (SSP), which combines in situ imaging of a systemically infused fluorescent therapeutic antibody with high-plex spatial proteomics. Applied to head and neck and pancreatic tumors from patients treated in phase 1 trials, SSP revealed marked spatial heterogeneity in antibody delivery and target engagement, which was shaped by conserved stromal barriers.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Robust Spin Splitting and Strain-Controlled Optical Response in Monolayer CrC2N4 for Valleytronic and Optoelectronic Applications

Authors:
Md. Samrat↗Vivek Chowdhury↗Sake Wang↗Ahmed Zubair↗

arXiv:2606.17329v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Monolayer CrC2N4 recently emerged as a promising two-dimensional semiconductor, yet its spin-orbit-coupled (SOC) physics and strain-tunable optical response remained largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the electronic, valley, charge-transfer, and optical properties of pristine and biaxially strained monolayer CrC2N4 using first-principles calculations. The monolayer exhibited a direct band gap at the K/K' valleys. SOC produced valley contrasting out-of-plane spin polarization, yielding a moderate valence band spin splitting of 51.9 meV and a small conduction band spin splitting of 1.7 meV. Orbital-resolved analysis showed that the edge states were mainly governed by Cr-d and N-p hybridization, while Bader analysis indicated polar-covalent bonding through charge transfer toward N atoms. Biaxial strain in the range of -4% to +4% tuned the band gap from 1.987 to 1.421 eV and drove an indirect-to-direct gap transition near -1% strain. Tensile strain enhanced the Berry curvature and red-shifted the optical response toward the visible-near-infrared region. These results suggested monolayer CrC2N4 as a promising platform for strain-engineered valleytronic and optoelectronic device applications.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

XRDiff: Crystal Structure Prediction from Powder X-Ray Diffraction Data Using Diffusion Models

Authors:
Nofit Segal↗Mingda Li↗Benjamin Kurt Miller↗Rafael G\'omez-Bombarelli↗

arXiv:2606.14003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the crystal structure of a material from its powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) pattern is a central challenge in materials science. PXRD is an accessible and widely used characterization technique, yet recovering the atomic structure from diffraction data requires solving an underdetermined inverse problem due to the loss of phase information. Generative modeling can provide a prior over atomic structure and learn the mapping from PXRD patterns to crystal structures via simulated structure-spectrum pairs. We present XRDiff, a diffusion model that recovers crystal structures from PXRD given either the stoichiometry or, in a more challenging setting, the elemental constituents and total number of atoms in the unit cell. We evaluate on datasets where each stoichiometry has multiple polymorphs and all polymorphs of a given composition are held out together, ensuring that high performance reflects genuine use of the diffraction signal. XRDiff achieves strong structure recovery rates on simulated benchmarks, indicating that the model learns a spectrum-to-structure mapping precise enough to differentiate between polymorphs. To address generalization to experimental data, we compare a full-spectrum encoding against an encoding based on peak descriptors. The peak-based encoding generalizes substantially better, outperforming even a model trained on full spectra with augmentations fitted to the experimental noise distribution. These results demonstrate that representations robust to the noise and artifacts present in real-world PXRD offer a practical and scalable path toward closing the simulation-to-experiment gap, enabling zero-shot crystal structure solution from experimental PXRD with full or partial chemical composition input.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An Analysis of the Coordination Gap between Joint and Modular Learning for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation Resources

Authors:
Moritz Link↗Jonathan Hoss↗Noah Klarmann↗

arXiv:2604.24117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing. With the rise of "decentralized factories", multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach for the combined scheduling of production and transportation tasks. Prior work has largely focused on developing novel cooperative architectures while overlooking the question of when joint training is necessary. Joint training denotes the simultaneous training of job and automatic guided vehicle scheduling agents, whereas modular training involves independently training each agent followed by post-hoc integration. In this study, we systematically investigate the conditions under which joint training is essential for optimal performance in the job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. Through a rigorous sensitivity analysis of resource scarcity and temporal dominance, we quantify the coordination gap – the performance difference between these two training modalities. In our evaluation, joint training outperforms the majority of dispatching rule combinations and modular training approaches. However, the coordination gap advantage diminishes in bottleneck environments, particularly under severe transport and processing constraints. These findings indicate that modular training represents a viable alternative in environments where a single scheduling task dominates. Overall, our work provides practical guidance for selecting between training modalities based on environmental conditions, enabling decision-makers to optimize reinforcement learning-based scheduling performance.

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

The table maker's quantum search

Authors:
Benjamin C. A. Morrison↗Stefanos Kourtis↗

arXiv:2601.13306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that quantum search can be used to compute the hardness to round an elementary function, that is, to determine the minimum working precision required to compute the values of an elementary function correctly rounded to a target precision of $n$ digits for all possible precision-$n$ floating-point inputs in a given interval. For elementary functions $f$ related to the exponential function, quantum search takes time $\tilde O(2^{n/2} \log (1/\delta))$ to return, with probability $1-\delta$, the hardness to round $f$ over all $n$-bit floating-point inputs in a given binade. For periodic elementary functions in large binades, standalone quantum search yields an asymptotic speedup over the best known classical algorithms and heuristics. We then estimate the resources required for a fault-tolerant implementation of the proposed algorithm for the $\sin$ and $\cos$ functions in double precision. We find that, although the algorithm can in principle compete with the fastest known practical method for computing the hardness to round over all binades in the format, it requires qubit coherence times that are unrealistically long for present technology.

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

Discriminative Span as a Predictor of Synthetic Data Utility via Classifier Reconstruction

Authors:
Radhika Amar Desai↗Modigari Narendra↗

In many real-world computer vision applications, including medical imaging and industrial inspection, binary classification tasks are characterized by a severe scarcity of positive samples. A widely adopted solution is to generate synthetic positive data using image-to-image transformations applied to negative samples. However, a fundamental challenge remains: how can we reliably assess whether such synthetic data will improve downstream model performance? In this work, we propose a geometry-driven metric that predicts the utility of synthetic data without requiring model training. Our approach operates in the embedding space of a pre-trained foundation model and represents the dataset through difference vectors between samples. We evaluate whether the weight vector of a linear classifier can be expressed within the subspace spanned by these variations by measuring the relative projection error. Intuitively, if the variations induced by synthetic data capture task-relevant directions, their span can approximate the classifier, resulting in low projection error. Conversely, poor synthetic data fails to span these directions, leading to higher error. Across multiple datasets and architectures, we show that this metric exhibits strong correlation with downstream classification performance of CNNs trained on mixtures of real negative and synthetic positive data. These findings suggest that the proposed metric serves as a practical and informative tool for evaluating synthetic data quality in data-scarce settings.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

An interpretable unsupervised representation learning for high precision measurement in particle physics

Authors:
Xing-Jian Lv↗De-Xing Miao↗Zi-Jun Xu↗Jian-Chun Wang↗

arXiv:2511.22246v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised learning has been widely applied to various tasks in particle physics. However, existing models lack precise control over their learned representations, limiting physical interpretability and hindering their use for accurate measurements. We propose the Histogram AutoEncoder (HistoAE), an unsupervised representation learning network featuring a custom histogram-based loss that enforces a physically structured latent space. Applied to silicon microstrip detectors, HistoAE learns an interpretable two-dimensional latent space corresponding to the particle's charge and impact position. After simple post-processing, it achieves a charge resolution of $0.25\,e$ and a position resolution of $3\,\mu\mathrm{m}$ on beam-test data, comparable to the conventional approach. These results demonstrate that unsupervised deep learning models can enable physically meaningful and quantitatively precise measurements. Moreover, the generative capacity of HistoAE enables straightforward extensions to fast detector simulations.

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

Connecting Speech to Words through Images

Authors:
Gabriel Pirlogeanu↗Dan Oneata↗Horia Cucu↗Herman Kamper↗

How can we learn the mapping between written words and their spoken counterparts in the absence of explicit textual supervision? We present a visually grounded method for building a vocabulary of spoken words using only images and their spoken descriptions. First, image captioning systems are used to build a vocabulary of written words representing salient visual concepts in the images. For each word, we then find utterances whose image captions contain that word. Then we use an unsupervised word discovery technique to align these utterances to locate instances of the target word. The result is spoken word segments that are linked to written words – all accomplished without any text supervision. In spoken word retrieval and keyword spotting experiments, the proposed approach outperforms a strong neural baseline while being more interpretable. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in English and motivate future work on low-resource languages without transcripts.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Sub-Semantic Image Segmentation

Authors:
Aviad Cohen Zada↗Nadav Orenstein↗Shai Avidan↗Gal Oren↗

Images can be segmented based on visual cues (i.e., texture segmentation) or into objects (i.e., semantic segmentation). We propose a new category of sub-semantic image segmentation that blurs the line between the two. In sub-semantic image segmentation, language is not used to name whole objects. Instead, it is used to partition an image into stable appearance patterns that can be described by language. To do that, we couple a general-purpose vision-language model to SAM 3, a promptable segmentation backbone whose native text pathway can ground rich descriptions into masks. Simple coupling fails for a number of reasons that we identify in the paper, and we overcome them by introducing DETECTURE that resolves three concrete failure modes – language leakage between texture regions, prompt competition inside the segmentation backbone, and semantic distortion at the language-to-mask interface. Since there is no dataset of sub-semantic image segmentation, we introduce one, termed TextureADE. The new dataset is derived from the ADE20K dataset using a system we designed. We compare DETECTURE to a number of baselines and find that it achieves the strongest performance on several datasets using different metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab/TextureDetecture.

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

Why Depth Matters in Parallelizable Sequence Models: A Lie Algebraic View

Authors:
Gyuryang Heo↗Timothy Ngotiaoco↗Kazuki Irie↗Samuel J. Gershman↗Bernardo L. Sabatini↗

arXiv:2603.05573v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scalable sequence models, such as Transformer variants and structured state-space models, often trade expressivity power for sequence-level parallelism, which enables efficient training. Here we examine the bounds on error and how error scales when models operate outside of their expressivity regimes using a Lie-algebraic control perspective. Our theory formulates a correspondence between the depth of a sequence model and the tower of Lie algebra extensions. Echoing recent theoretical studies, we characterize the Lie-algebraic class of constant-depth sequence models and their corresponding expressivity bounds. Furthermore, we analytically derive an approximation error bound and show that error diminishes exponentially as the depth increases, consistent with the strong empirical performance of these models. We validate our theoretical predictions using experiments on symbolic word and continuous-valued state-tracking problems.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

Authors:
Zhuofan Josh Ying↗Peter Hase↗Nikolaus Kriegeskorte↗

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

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13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Sanjeevani: A manually curated anti-cancerous phytochemical database integrated with downstream analysis tools.

Authors:
Jha↗Shukla↗Shingan↗Das↗

Background: Cancer continues to pose a massive global health burden. While plant-derived phytochemicals offer promising therapeutic leads, existing natural product databases often lack cancer specificity, dataset downloadability, and integrated screening tools. Methods: We developed Sanjeevani, an integrative web platform cataloguing 4,823 curated anticancer phytochemicals. Using a balanced dataset of 9,646 molecules, we trained Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, and K-Nearest Neighbours classifiers using a hybrid feature representation of RDKit descriptors and 2048-bit ECFP4 fingerprints. The platform also integrates AutoDock Vina for web-based molecular docking for binding affinity, poses prediction and ADMET-AI for pharmacokinetics estimation. Results: The SVM model demonstrated the strongest predictive capability, achieving a top test accuracy of 0.966 and a ROC-AUC of 0.992. Benchmarking across five docking tools confirmed that AutoDock Vina successfully balanced computational automation with literature-consistent binding affinity replication. The final architecture provides rapid interactive 2D/3D visualizations integrated with downstream analysis tools. Conclusion: Sanjeevani provides an open-access, one-stop pipeline that bridges the gap between raw natural product data and actionable computational screening, accelerating natural product-based oncology drug discovery.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Analyzing Error Propagation in Korean Spoken QA with ASR-LLM Cascades

Authors:
Donghyuk Jung↗Youngwon Choi↗

We analyze how automatic speech recognition (ASR) errors propagate through ASR-LLM cascades in Korean spoken question answering (SQA), focusing on downstream semantic failures that conventional ASR metrics cannot fully capture. Our analysis shows that the relative downstream degradation caused by ASR errors is consistent across LLMs with different absolute performance, suggesting that cascade degradation largely tracks ASR-stage information loss. We further identify single-character Korean ASR errors as a Korean-specific loss channel, where even a minimal transcription difference can change the intended question and degrade downstream QA performance. Finally, an auxiliary comparison shows that a large audio language model outperforms an ASR-LLM cascade with an approximately matched language backbone in noisy Korean SQA, indicating the potential of direct audio input to mitigate transcript-induced information loss.

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

HSQ-VLM: A Novel Spatially-Constrained Quadrant Segmentation VLM Model for Explainability in Diabetic Retinopathy

Authors:
Shivum Telang↗

Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is an aggressive retinal disease and a leading cause of global blindness, yet its clinical management is currently hindered by the black-box nature of diagnostic AI. While deep learning models achieve high classification accuracy, there is a critical lack of explainability methods capable of detailing the exact anatomical landmarks and lesion distributions that lead to a clinical decision for DR. Therefore, we propose HSQ-VLM, a novel quadrant segmentation pipeline on fundus images that utilizes a Landmark-Anchored Cartesian Cross-Attention mechanism to unify visual feature extraction with structured clinical reasoning. Unlike traditional methods that rely on arbitrary image partitioning, our pipeline implements 4-quadrant Topological Latent Partitioning (TLP) to dynamically align retinal features with a fovea-centered coordinate system. This allows the Vision-Language Model to generate natural language reports that quantify pathology with anatomical precision. On a dataset of 3,500 high-resolution fundus images, this innovative methodology achieved a lesion detection sensitivity of 99.6% for hemorrhages and 96.4% for microaneurysms, while demonstrating a significant reduction in boundary-ambiguity errors compared to standard segmentation baselines.

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16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Probabilistic representation and classical solutions of wave equations with complex polynomial nonlinearities

Authors:
Joshua J. Y. Chan↗Nicolas Privault↗

arXiv:2606.18919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review the probabilistic representation of solutions of wave equations with polynomial nonlinearities in spatial dimensions d=1,2,3 using stochastic branching processes. Under regularity assumptions on the initial data, we derive conditions ensuring the integrability of the corresponding Monte Carlo estimator, and the existence and smoothness of mild and classical solutions. We also present numerical results and comparisons with grid-based algorithms for the solution of nonlinear wave equations.

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

Conformal calibration and look-elsewhere effect in anomaly detection for new-physics searches

Authors:
Jack Y. Araz↗Michael Spannowsky↗

arXiv:2606.13780v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine-learned anomaly detection is reshaping searches for new physics, but it has outrun the statistics used to interpret it. A raw anomaly score has no calibrated meaning, a model that scans many regions inflates the look-elsewhere effect, and the asymptotic significances the field relies on are blind to the background mismodelling that anomaly detectors are especially prone to. We propose a calibration layer, built on conformal prediction, that turns any anomaly score into a defensible significance with distribution-free, finite-sample guarantees. Conformal prediction converts scores into valid local p-values, weighted and Mondrian variants repair the sideband-to-signal-region exchangeability failures that resonant searches suffer, and a Gross-Vitells step carries the result through to a look-elsewhere-aware global significance. The layer does two things at once. It exposes miscalibration that the standard pipeline cannot see, and it corrects it without retraining the detector. On public LHC Olympics data, a classifier develops a substructure-mass correlation that makes sideband-calibrated background p-values anti-conservative. Taken at face value, this manufactures a $\sim 46\sigma$ excess from background sculpting alone, which the label-free weighted correction removes, restoring an honest null. When run as a blind wide-mass bump hunt, the standard asymptotic and unweighted procedures fabricate $\gtrsim10\sigma$ excesses and $\approx5\sigma$ excesses even in signal-free windows, while the conformal layer raises no false alarms and its global false-positive rate is verified on background-only pseudoexperiments. The result is an auditable, detector-agnostic path from an uncalibrated score to a trials-factor-aware significance, ready to be folded into experimental anomaly searches.

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

CMIP-Forge: An Agentic System that Retrieves, Computes, and Self-Reviews Climate Science

Authors:
Dmitrii Pantiukhin↗Boris Shapkin↗Ivan Kuznetsov↗Thomas Jung↗Nikolay Koldunov↗

arXiv:2606.17076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) has generated thousands of peer-reviewed publications documenting model configurations, evaluation procedures, emergent constraints, and projection uncertainties. As the community transitions toward CMIP7, efficiently extracting and operationalizing this unstructured knowledge alongside live data analysis represents a critical bottleneck. Here we present CMIP-Forge, a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and autonomous analysis system that bridges the gap between scientific literature and Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data archives. The system pairs a curated corpus of 6,581 CMIP6-related open-access publications (101,828 indexed chunks) with an agentic pipeline in which a tool-augmented worker plans and executes Python workflows over live climate data, while a panel of independent reviewer models audits its methodology end to end. CMIP-Forge introduces a multi-layered Defense-in-Depth architecture that enforces physical and methodological invariants through executable mechanisms: Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) static analysis, audited scientific primitives, and an autonomous adversarial peer-review protocol. We demonstrate the system's capabilities through end-to-end autonomous research pipelines spanning atmospheric teleconnections, ocean dynamics, regional extremes, and global warming projections. An agentic analysis system grounded in peer-reviewed literature, constrained by automated code guardrails, and audited by an independent adversarial review loop can complete complex climate-research workflows autonomously. The same experiments expose concrete failure modes of the review loop (sycophantic regression, REVISE verdicts that are never resolved, and the submission of stub code for review), each diagnosable from the immutable telemetry and provenance record released with the article.

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

Dynamic Free-Rider Detection in Federated Learning via Simulated Attack Patterns

Authors:
Motoki Nakamura↗

arXiv:2604.04611v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables multiple clients to collaboratively train a global model by aggregating local updates without sharing private data. However, FL often faces the challenge of free-riders, clients who submit fake model parameters without performing actual training to obtain the global model without contributing. Chen et al. proposed a free-rider detection method based on the weight evolving frequency (WEF) of model parameters. This detection approach is a leading candidate for practical free-rider detection methods, as it requires neither a proxy dataset nor pre-training. Nevertheless, it struggles to detect ``dynamic'' free-riders who behave honestly in early rounds and later switch to free-riding, particularly under global-model-mimicking attacks such as the delta weight attack and our newly proposed adaptive WEF-camouflage attack. In this paper, we propose a novel detection method S2-WEF that simulates the WEF patterns of potential global-model-based attacks on the server side using previously broadcasted global models, and identifies clients whose submitted WEF patterns resemble the simulated ones. To handle a variety of free-rider attack strategies, S2-WEF further combines this simulation-based similarity score with a deviation score computed from mutual comparisons among submitted WEFs, and separates benign and free-rider clients by two-dimensional clustering and per-score classification. This method enables dynamic detection of clients that transition into free-riders during training without proxy datasets or pre-training. We conduct extensive experiments across three datasets and five attack types, demonstrating that S2-WEF achieves higher robustness than existing approaches.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope

Authors:
Jeremy Yang↗Kate Zyskowski↗Noah Yonack↗Jerry Ma↗

arXiv:2606.07489v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end. Using production data from Perplexity's Search and Computer products, we study this transition by examining how AI agents accelerate and reshape knowledge work. Three key empirical findings emerge. First, using sessions with near-identical initial query pairs as natural experiments for the same underlying task attempted with both products, Computer performs 26 minutes of autonomous work per user session, versus 33 seconds for Search. Computer automates task decomposition and execution that Search users might otherwise manually orchestrate and implement. As a result, Computer shifts follow-up query distribution toward higher-order work such as verification and extension. Autonomy also increases execution quality, with per-query dissatisfaction rates 55% lower on Computer than on Search. Second, due to its autonomy advantage, Computer reduces completion time from 269 to 36 minutes on matched tasks, lowering estimated time and cost by 87% and 94%, respectively, compared to humans equipped with Search alone. Third, Computer changes the scope of work that users attempt: Computer queries more often cross occupational boundaries, require higher-order cognition, draw on broader expertise, take the form of composite tasks that bundle interdependent subtasks into a single query, and unlock work activities that are essentially absent from Search usage among the same users. Together, the evidence indicates that AI agents accelerate workflows, enhance output quality, reduce costs, and expand the breadth and depth of automated work.

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

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

Authors:
Jisung Hwang↗Yunhong Min↗Jaihoon Kim↗I-Chao Shen↗Minhyuk Sung↗

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

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

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

Authors:
Ben Rachmut↗Luise Ge↗William Yeoh↗Ning Zhang↗Yevgeniy Vorobeychik↗

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genomic wastewater surveillance of seasonal and zoonotic influenza A viruses in California during the 2024-2025 flu season

Authors:
Wang↗A. L.-W↗Lamtyugina↗Jiang↗Yu↗A. T↗Lu↗Wadford↗Burnor↗Pipes↗Kantor↗Nelson↗…

Wastewater genomic surveillance provides an opportunity to detect human and animal influenza A virus (IAV). We aimed to implement an IAV genomic surveillance framework agnostic to subtype, which enables recovery of IAV from multiple hosts and estimation of proportions across subtypes. We conducted IAV genomic surveillance in wastewater during the 2024-2025 flu season at multiple sites in California and compared these data with available human clinical IAV sequences and test positivity. We applied a custom whole-genome, multi-host IAV probe enrichment panel and adapted our custom expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to deconvolute IAV mixtures in wastewater and infer subtype relative abundances. Absolute IAV concentrations were quantified using RT-PCR-based assays. H5N1 wastewater and clinical sequences were further characterized by constructing a whole-genome maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree. Finally, we performed variant analysis to examine amino acid substitutions detected in wastewater. Our IAV probe enrichment method and EM algorithm successfully enriched all eight segments of three circulating IAV subtypes and accurately estimated subclade relative abundances for mixed IAV samples. Seasonal human H1N1pdm09 and H3N2 were detected throughout the study period from both wastewater and clinical sequencing data, with H1N1 subclades 6B.1A.5a.2a.1 and 6B.1A.5a.2a co-circulating, and H3N2 dominated by subclade 3C.2a1b.2a.2a.3a.1. Wastewater surveillance consistently detected H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b across three monitored wastewater sites, while clinical H5N1 detections, from anywhere in CA, were sporadic and rare. Whole-genome phylogenetic analysis revealed that wastewater H5N1 sequences clustered with reference sequences associated with dairy cow and avian infections, while all human clinical H5N1 sequences clustered exclusively with reference sequences associated with dairy cow infections. Amino acid substitutions were identified across viral segments, and no mutations associated with mammalian adaptation were observed from wastewater samples.

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

NightFeats @ MMU-RAGent NeurIPS 2025: A Context-Optimized Multi-Agent RAG System for the Text-to-Text Track

Authors:
Quentin Fever↗Naziha Aslam↗

We present NightFeats, a structured multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system submitted to the MMU-RAGent competition at NeurIPS 2025, where it was awarded Best Dynamic Evaluation in the text-to-text track. Rather than targeting benchmark maximization, this work proposes a principled pipeline that decomposes knowledge synthesis into three coordinated phases: retrieval, curation, and composition, each governed by explicit intermediate representations and handoff contracts. Inspired by Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the system introduces temporal-semantic reranking, bounded contradiction reconciliation, and citation-preserving composition as core architectural primitives. Competition results show that NightFeats surpasses proprietary baselines including Claude-SonnetV2 and Nova-Pro on LLM-as-a-Judge and Human Likert evaluations, confirming that architectural transparency and verifiable evidence grounding are better aligned with human preferences than systems optimizing narrowly for automatic similarity metrics.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Equivariant Representation Learning via Class-Pose Decomposition

Authors:
Giovanni Luca Marchetti↗Gustaf Tegn\'er↗Anastasiia Varava↗Danica Kragic↗

arXiv:2207.03116v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a general method for learning representations that are equivariant to symmetries of data. Our central idea is to decompose the latent space into an invariant factor and the symmetry group itself. The components semantically correspond to intrinsic data classes and poses respectively. The learner is trained on a loss encouraging equivariance based on supervision from relative symmetry information. The approach is motivated by theoretical results from group theory and guarantees representations that are lossless, interpretable and disentangled. We provide an empirical investigation via experiments involving datasets with a variety of symmetries. Results show that our representations capture the geometry of data and outperform other equivariant representation learning frameworks.

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