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02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Histology-informed spatial domain identification through multi-view graph convolutional networks

Authors:
Huihui Zhang↗

by Huihui Zhang, Jiaxing Chang, Zirong Li, Yue Sun, Pinli Hu, Haoxiu Wang, Hang Yang, Yonglin Ren, Xingtan Zhang, Zehua Chen, Kok Wai Wong, Haojing Shao Identifying spatial domains is crucial in spatial transcriptomics, yet effectively integrating gene expression, spatial location, and histology remains challenging. We present STESH, a Spatial Transcriptomics clustering method that combines Expression, Spatial information and Histology. STESH extracts histological features using a convolutional neural network and generates expression, histology, spatial, and collaborative convolution modules for a multi-view graph convolutional network with a decoder and attention mechanism. We evaluated STESH on multiple tissue types and technology platforms. STESH consistently outperformed ten state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior clustering accuracy with the highest scores in adjusted Rand index, normalized mutual information, and Fowlkes-Mallows index.

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03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Authors:
Xiaotong Peng↗

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Your Agent Has a Genome: Sequence-Level Behavioral Analysis and Runtime Governance of LLM-Powered Autonomous Agents

Authors:
Sidi Deng↗

arXiv:2606.15579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose Base Sequence Analysis, a framework that encodes the runtime behavior of LLM-powered autonomous agents into compact symbolic sequences using a four-letter alphabet: X (Explore), E (Execute), P (Plan), and V (Verify). Drawing an analogy to genomic sequence analysis, we apply n-gram pattern mining, Markov transition matrices, and point-biserial correlation to 347 real-world execution traces collected from a production ReAct agent system over 8 days. Our analysis reveals that (1) the trigram P-X-P is the only statistically significant high-risk pattern, lowering success rate by 10.4%; (2) P-ratio is the strongest negative predictor of success (r=-0.256, pV transition probability is only 2.1%, indicating a systemic verification deficit. Based on these findings, we design Governor, a three-layer runtime intervention system comprising a rule engine, a statistical accumulator, and a chi-square-based threshold adaptor. In a natural before/after deployment evaluation (N=101 vs. N=246), Governor achieves a +6.2% absolute increase in task success rate while simultaneously reducing average token consumption by 44%. To validate cross-system generality, we apply the XEPV encoding to 2,000 public SWE-agent trajectories on SWE-bench, confirming that exploration spirals and the E->V verification deficit replicate in an independent system. We outline six research directions including base sequence language models, cross-agent behavioral fingerprinting, and reward shaping, and release an open-source toolkit for reproducibility.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition

Authors:
Haoran Zhang↗Haokun Zhang↗Pengyu Liu↗Yujia Zhang↗Weibao Xue↗Yanbin Hao↗

Micro-gestures (MGs) are spontaneous and subtle body movements that frequently convey hidden human emotions. Recognizing MGs in untrimmed videos remains highly challenging due to their extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, severe long-tailed class distribution, and the inherent domain shift encountered in cross-subject evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multi-modal framework for Track 1 of the 4th MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. To capture fine-grained representations, we design a saliency-guided multi-modal extraction pipeline integrating 68-keypoint skeleton joint coordinates, 3D heatmap volumes, and high-resolution RGB visual features. We introduce a gentle square-root smoothed weighting mechanism paired with an Orthogonal Semantic Embedding Loss to protect tail classes without compromising overall recognition capabilities. More importantly, to bridge the cross-subject generalization gap, we propose a Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling (CMPL) strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation, which significantly boosts single-modal robustness. A temperature-scaled soft-voting mechanism is finally utilized to alleviate overconfidence during late fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a competitive F1-score of 68.13\%, securing the 4th place.

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06.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Molecular Tumor Boards clinical impact on patient care and structural features: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Authors:
Luigi Russo↗

by Luigi Russo, Erika Giacobini, Nicolò Lentini, Tommaso Osti, Maud Kamal, Stefania Boccia, Roberta Pastorino Background Molecular Tumor Boards (MTBs) bring together multidisciplinary experts to translate genomic data into clinical decisions in oncology, however, their overall clinical impact remains unclear. The aim of this systematic review is to assess the clinical impact of MTB-recommended therapies on patients with cancer outcomes. Methods and findings In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and CENTRAL up to July 2025. We included studies of any design, both single-arm studies and studies with a comparator group, that reported the clinical impact of MTBs in patients who received MTB-guided therapy. Meta-analyses were performed separately by study design, using hazard ratios (HRs) for overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS), relative risks (RRs) for objective response rate (ORR) and disease control rate (DCR), and pooled proportions for PFS ratio ≥1.3. All meta-analyses were conducted using random-effects models based on the inverse variance method. We evaluated the risk of bias using the RoB 2.0 for RCTs and ROBINS-I for non-randomized studies.From 6,846 records, 78 studies (9,195 patients; 4,569 treated per MTB recommendations) were included. MTB-guided therapies were associated with reduced risk of death (HR 0.87; 95% CI [0.76, 1.01]; p = 0.069; I2 = 0.0% in RCTs; 0.62 in retrospective studies) and disease progression (HR 0.73; 95% CI [0.64, 0.84]; p 

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SPARC: Reliable Spatial Annotations from Robot Demonstrations at Scale

Authors:
Nils Blank↗Paul Mattes↗Maximilian Xiling Li↗Jakub Suliga↗Thomas Roth↗Moritz Reuss↗Pankhuri Vanjani↗Rudolf Lioutikov↗

This work introduces Spatial Annotations from Robot Demonstrations with Reliability Calibration (SPARC), a risk-aware framework that automatically labels robot demonstrations with structured spatial annotations and assigns each annotation a reliability score. Structured spatial annotations, such as bounding boxes, object trajectories, and manipulation phase labels, benefit a broad range of robotics applications from training grounded robot policies and embodied foundation models to motion planning and hierarchical task composition. Existing automated pipelines generate such annotations at scale but provide no reliable quality signal: detector confidence is poorly calibrated for annotation correctness, forcing a choice between accepting noisy labels or discarding useful samples. In contrast to existing automated pipelines, SPARC leverages the spatio-temporal structure inherent to robot tasks to generate a reliability signal, reducing noisy labels and retaining more useful samples. We further introduce Interaction-Aware Bench (IA-Bench), a benchmark that measures model accuracy in grounding the locations of interacted objects in robot demonstrations. On 1.7k human-annotated demonstrations spanning diverse embodiments and scenarios, SPARC significantly outperforms detection-only baselines in localization accuracy while retaining three times more samples at high-precision operating points. Our experiments demonstrate that models finetuned on our annotations achieve state-of-the-art results on object-grounding and pointing benchmarks among similarly sized models, while remaining competitive on broader spatial-reasoning suites without manually verified or annotated training data. Furthermore, policies trained on SPARC-generated annotations outperform baselines in cluttered, visually ambiguous real-world scenes. Code, data, and models are available at intuitive-robots.github.io/sparc-labeling.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Authors:
Xiaoyan Xing↗Xiao Zhang↗Sezer Karaoglu↗Theo Gevers↗Anand Bhattad↗

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bridging Spatial And Frequency Views For Disaster Assessment: Benefits And Limitations

Authors:
Shikha V. Chandel↗Yadav Raj Ghimire↗Timothy Agboada↗Leila Hashemi-Beni↗

Rapid assessment of building damage from satellite imagery is essential for effective disaster response and recovery. While most deep learning methods rely on spatial-domain features, frequency-domain representations can capture complementary structural cues such as debris patterns and collapse-induced textures. This study presents a controlled comparison of spatial-domain, frequency-domain, and dual-domain deep learning approaches for multi-class building damage classification using post-disaster imagery from the xView2 (xBD) dataset. To ensure fairness, all models are built on an EfficientNet-B0 backbone and trained under identical settings, differing only in their input representations and fusion strategies. Performance is evaluated using accuracy, macro F1-score, per-class metrics, and confusion matrices. Results show that dual-domain models provide measurable improvements over single-domain approaches. The dual spatial configuration achieves the highest test accuracy (0.4688) and lowest loss, while the spatial-only model attains the best macro F1-score (0.4254), indicating more balanced class performance. In contrast, frequency-only models perform worst and exhibit overfitting, suggesting limited generalization. Despite these gains, all models struggle to detect subtle damage levels, particularly the Minor class, due to class imbalance and fine-grained visual ambiguity. While dual-domain approaches improve detection of severe damage, challenges remain. These findings highlight the benefits and limitations of hybrid representations and motivate future work on data balancing, advanced fusion, and regularization.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Entanglement generation between field modes mediated by a fluctuating conducting wall

Authors:
Luca Giovanni Cammarata↗Tommaso Fazio↗Roberto Passante↗Lucia Rizzuto↗

arXiv:2606.12338v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider a movable conducting plate of finite mass, between two fixed ones, whose mechanical degrees of freedom are treated quantum-mechanically and bound to its equilibrium position by a harmonic potential. The movable wall is thus subjected to quantum fluctuations of its position. This creates a system of two sub-cavities separated by the movable fluctuating plate, and two massless one-dimensional scalar fields, one in each sub-cavity. This system is described by an appropriate generalization of the Law Hamiltonian. The presence of the movable wall yields an effective plate-fields interaction, as well as an effective interaction between the field modes. We obtain, at the second order in perturbation theory, the ground state of the interacting system and the reduced density operator of the fields in each sub-cavity by tracing out the wall's degrees of freedom. We calculate the entanglement between two field modes, one in each cavity, by evaluating analytically the negativity; we then evaluate numerically also the total multimode negativity. Our results show that in both cases the fields in the two sub-cavities are entangled, in contrast to the case in which the wall is fixed in space. We discuss the amount of the field entanglement present as a function of relevant physical parameters of the system such as the mass and oscillation frequency of the movable wall, its distance from the fixed walls and the frequencies of the field modes considered.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

STAR: SpatioTemporal Adaptive Reward Allocation for Text-to-Image RL Post-Training

Authors:
Jinjie Shen↗Wei Deng↗Xian Hu↗Daiguo Zhou↗Jian Luan↗

arXiv:2606.17979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing RL post-training methods for text-to-image generation usually convert the final-image reward into a single scalar advantage and apply it with the same strength to the entire generative trajectory. However, text-to-image generation naturally has temporal and spatial structure: different denoising steps are responsible for different generation stages, and the content that truly determines text alignment often appears only in part of the image. This granularity mismatch makes it difficult for policy updates to focus on the generative components that actually affect the reward. To address this issue, we propose SpatioTemporal Adaptive Reward (STAR) Allocation for RL post-training of text-to-image diffusion and flow models. STAR uses text-image attention inside the generative model and starts from the core content that the user truly cares about in the prompt. It constructs spatial allocation maps that dynamically vary across denoising steps and rollouts, and allocates the same group-relative advantage to more relevant latent regions with almost no additional computational overhead. STAR then applies stronger policy updates to these regions through a spatially resolved policy objective. We use Stable Diffusion 3.5 Medium as the base model and evaluate on three tasks: GenEval, OCR text rendering, and PickScore. Experimental results show that STAR improves compositional semantic alignment, text rendering, and preference optimization without changing the external reward source, achieving $\mathbf{0.9759}$, $\mathbf{0.9757}$, and $\mathbf{23.60}$ on GenEval, OCR, and PickScore, respectively.

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

Generating Natural and Expressive Robot Gestures through Iterative Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback using LLMs

Authors:
Chris Lee↗Flora Salim↗Benjamin Tag↗Francisco Cruz↗

arXiv:2606.18747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive gestures are essential for natural and effective communication, complementing speech when verbal cues alone are insufficient (e.g., pointing). For social robots such as the humanoid Pepper, producing natural and expressive movements is critical for improving human-robot interaction (HRI) and long-term acceptance. However, generating gestures remains challenging due to reliance on expert-authored animations, resulting in rigid behaviors that are impractical for dynamic and diverse environments. Alternatively, machine learning approaches often struggle to capture perceived naturalness, becoming increasingly challenging with more degrees of freedom. Consequently, producing expressive robot gestures requires a system that can adapt to the environment while adhering to social norms and physical constraints. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable dynamic code generation, offering new opportunities for runtime gesture synthesis from natural language. In this paper, we integrate ChatGPT into the humanoid robot Pepper to generate co-speech gestures aligned with conversational output. While this baseline enables flexible gesture generation, the resulting motions are often perceived as stiff and unnatural. To address this limitation, we introduce an iterative reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) system that finetunes gesture generation based on user evaluations, leveraging an iterative user study to compare Pepper's generated gestures. Our results show that RLHF improved the LLM's co-speech generative capabilities, producing more expressive, relevant and fluid movements.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Authors:
Tahar Chettaoui↗Guray Ozgur↗Eduarda Caldeira↗Naser Damer↗Fadi Boutros↗

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Trainable Quantum Channels as Computational Primitives for Quantum Learning

Authors:
Jingwei Wen↗Ling Qian↗Shijie Wei↗Guilu Long↗

arXiv:2606.15808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum learning is traditionally constrained to unitary dynamics, often treating quantum channels as detrimental noise. In this work, we reformulate the quantum channels as trainable computational primitives and establish a non-unitary quantum machine learning framework grounded in open-system dynamics. We demonstrate that the outputs of channel-enhanced quantum models form a structured superposition of multiple functional components. Each component is governed by an effective observable whose spectrum can be adaptively modulated during training, a significant departure from the spectral invariance in unitary transformations. Moreover, the proposed framework generalizes conventional unitary quantum models by retaining them as a special case while introducing additional non-unitary degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we reveal that trainable quantum channels enrich the optimization geometry through ensemble-averaged gradient and additional optimization directions induced by the Kraus operators. Empirical evaluations on classification tasks using trainable amplitude-damping and phase-damping channels confirm enhanced optimization dynamics and predictive performance. Our work provides a principled approach for leveraging quantum channels as trainable resources and advances the design of high-performance quantum learning architectures.

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

Denoising Implicit Feedback for Cold-start Recommendation

Authors:
Gaode Chen↗Shicheng Wang↗Shikun Li↗Rui Huang↗Xinghua Zhang↗Yunze Luo↗Shipeng Li↗Shiming Ge↗Ruina Sun↗Yinjie Jiang↗Jun Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Implicit feedback is widely used in recommender systems due to its accessibility and generality, yet it usually presents noisy samples (e.g., clickbait, position bias). Meanwhile, recommenders inevitably face the item cold-start problem due to the continuous influx of new items. We identify that cold items are more prone to noisy samples due to the aforementioned factors, and researchers often overlook the significance of denoising implicit feedback for cold items. Previous denoising studies usually identify noisy samples based on heuristic patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate noise through sample selection or re-weighting. However, these methods have limited adaptability and are ineffective in cold-start scenarios. To achieve denoising implicit feedback for cold-start recommendation, we propose a model-agnostic denoising method called DIF. First, user preferences for content remain stable, which allows us to infer pseudo-labels indicating whether a user is interested in a cold item through content-similar warm items. Furthermore, to improve pseudo-label accuracy, we model the confidence of pseudo-labels based on the content similarity between the cold item and warm items, and then aggregate multiple pseudo-labels for each sample. Finally, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of the noisy sample label by considering its relative entropy and the cold-start status of the item, which adaptively guides the role of pseudo-labels to correct the noisy labels at the sample level. DIF's superiority is supported by both theoretical justification and extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The method has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application Kuaishou and has significantly improved various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

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

An Integrated System for Real-Time Student Assessment and Career Guidance Using Neural Networks in Computing Disciplines

Authors:
Sakir Hossain Faruque↗Md. Jubair Hossain↗Sharun Akter Khushbu↗

arXiv:2606.15831v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many undergraduate students in Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SWE) struggle to identify suitable career paths, particularly when their academic performance, abilities, and interests do not fully align. To address this issue, this study proposes an AI-driven Student Assessment and Career Prediction System that integrates a Career Guidance Expert (CGE) system with a Web-Based Student Assessment (WBSA) platform. Within the integrated framework, CGE enhances personalized career recommendations using AI while also assisting students after graduation in identifying suitable jobs, research domains, and higher study opportunities aligned with their skills and interests. The WBSA platform further strengthens interaction between students and faculty through assessments, personalized tasks, mentorship activities, and a secure real-time chat application. The CGE system employs a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) model trained on real-world academic and extracurricular data collected using the snowball sampling method from the students of universities, achieving a validation accuracy of 94.71% in predicting personalized career paths. A pre-survey was conducted across universities to evaluate the proposed model before deployment. The WBSA system was developed as a modern web application using technologies such as Node.js, Next.js, and PostgreSQL to ensure scalability, responsiveness, and secure data management. The overall system is supported by a secure cloud-based infrastructure, the platform provides reliable performance while assisting graduates to select suitable career path in IT sector. In addition, a post-survey involving both students and faculty was conducted to gather feedback and further improve the overall effectiveness and usability of the system.

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

EM-NeSy: Expectation Maximization for Neurosymbolic Learning

Authors:
Annegret Seibt↗Luc De Raedt↗Giuseppe Marra↗

arXiv:2606.14463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic (NeSy) models integrate neural networks and symbolic reasoning for robust and interpretable AI. State-of-the-art NeSy models require that the symbolic component is expressed in a differentiable way, often complicating the use of approximate inference. We propose EM-NeSy which casts probabilistic NeSy learning as an instance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the expectation step, we compute the posterior over the neurally predicted symbols conditioned on the label via probabilistic inference. In the maximization step, we update the neural parameters based on this posterior using gradient descent only through the neural component. This formulation unlocks the full potential of the EM algorithm for NeSy learning. It allows NeSy to extend naturally to approximate reasoning without any additional modifications or differentiability requirements of the symbolic component. Furthermore, it recovers the standard end-to-end gradient-based NeSy setting under exact inference. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability and computational efficiency of EM-NeSy.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

Authors:
Richard Yi Da Xu↗

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

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

The Program Is Still There: A Conservation Law for Program Discovery

Authors:
Jorge Miguel Silva↗

arXiv:2606.13799v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finding the shortest program that generates a sequence is uncomputable, and for six decades that fact has been mistaken for a wall around finding any generating program. It is not a wall but a price, and this paper measures it. For every algorithm that learns about a candidate program only through its score, a class spanning Levin search, evolutionary methods, simulated annealing, and the cross-entropy method, we define the coupling width of a search problem and prove an unconditional worst-case lower bound, exponential in that width with base one less than the domain size. From it follows a conservation law: structural knowledge injected into a search trades one for one against the search it removes, and their sum can never fall below the length of the program sought. Levin's 1973 upper bound and the lower bound proved here are the two ends of one conserved quantity, closing on each other as the instruction set grows. The only escape is to read a candidate's structure rather than its score, and its price, which we prove for generic targets, is incompleteness. A deterministic engine built on this theory recovers a generating program, certified by compressing its data and predicting an unseen continuation, for 2,383 of 3,914 sequences across four independent populations, including 244 of the 256 elementary cellular automata, with measured discovery cost rising along program length more than an order of magnitude inside the score-oracle worst case.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Ekasit Usaratniwart↗Xilin Gao↗Marc Ong↗Youhei Akimoto↗

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

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

Lighting-aware Unified Model for Instance Segmentation

Authors:
Qisai Liu↗Alloy Das↗Zhanhong Jiang↗Joshua R. Waite↗Aditya Balu↗Adarsh Krishnamurthy↗Soumik Sarkar↗

Foundation models like the Segment Anything Model (SAM) demonstrate impressive zero-shot generalization but frequently degrade under diverse real-world illumination, particularly for instance segmentation. In this work, we address this limitation by developing Lighting Convolutional-Attention (\lca{)}, an adapter module that enhances segmentation robustness without fine-tuning the heavy backbone. \lca{} employs a dual-branch architecture to process RGB features alongside contrast maps, enabling physically motivated sensitivity to structural changes rather than illumination artifacts. We optimize \lca{} through a pairwise training strategy, introducing a targeted loss term that explicitly penalizes discrepancies between clean images and their corresponding illumination variants. To evaluate and support this architecture, we conduct a comprehensive empirical study across multiple existing benchmarks and present a novel Unity-based synthetic dataset specifically designed to accurately replicate complex real-world lighting conditions. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our approach successfully bridges the domain gap, delivering superior lighting-robust segmentation.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Microbial etiology, antibiotic susceptibility profiles, and multidrug resistance of urinary tract infections at a secondary healthcare facility in Ghana

Authors:
Agyapong↗J. K↗Damalie↗Dombawel↗Noah↗Balo↗Acheampong↗Kudzordzi↗P.-C↗Nyarko↗Ofori↗D. K↗…

Background: Rising antibiotic resistance challenges empirical therapies for urinary tract infections (UTIs). This study evaluated the microbial etiology, susceptibility profiles, and multidrug resistance (MDR) patterns of uropathogens among outpatients at the Berekum Holy Family Hospital, Ghana. Methods: This cross-sectional study (February to August 2021) screened 263 symptomatic outpatients. Mid-stream urine samples underwent quantitative culture, biochemical identification, and antimicrobial susceptibility testing via the Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion method following the 2021 CLSI guidelines. Results: Significant bacteriuria prevalence was 22.8% (60/263). UTIs predominated in females (78.3%, 47/60; p = 0.1501) and individuals [≥]45 years (33.3%, 20/60). Gram-negative rods accounted for 90.0% of isolates, primarily Escherichia coli (26.7%), Citrobacter spp. (25.0%), and Enterobacter spp. (21.7%); Staphylococcus aureus (10.0%) was the only Gram-positive pathogen. Extreme phenotypic resistance was observed against piperacillin/tazobactam (98.3%), cefotaxime (93.3%), tetracycline (88.3%), and cefoperazone (85.0%). Conversely, highest therapeutic susceptibilities were retained by amikacin (78.3%), levofloxacin (61.7%), and gentamicin (58.3%). Conclusion: The high prevalence of MDR uropathogens against advanced beta-lactamase inhibitor combinations and cephalosporins necessitates an immediate re-evaluation of regional empirical protocols. Amikacin, levofloxacin, and gentamicin remain viable options prior to culture confirmation. These findings establish a crucial phenotypic baseline to guide localized prescribing policies and regional antimicrobial resistance tracking strategies.

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

ADORE: Iterative Query Expansion with Retrieval-Grounded Relevance Feedback

Authors:
Amin Bigdeli↗Negar Arabzadeh↗Radin Hamidi Rad↗Sajad Ebrahimi↗Charles L. A. Clarke↗Ebrahim Bagheri↗

LLM-based query expansion improves retrieval by enriching the original query with additional context. Yet most methods remain generation-driven, producing plausible pseudo-documents or expansions without checking how the target corpus responds. This can introduce retrieval drift, amplify misleading vocabulary, or miss terms that distinguish relevant from non-relevant documents. We argue that effective expansion requires retrieval-grounded feedback, not just single-pass generation or unverified iteration. We introduce ADORE (ADapt, Observe, Relevance Evaluate), an iterative framework that turns retrieval outcomes into feedback for the next expansion. At each round, an LLM generates pseudo-passages, a retriever exposes the corpus response, and a relevance assessor evaluates retrieved documents against the original query. These judgments identify what to reinforce, what remains undercovered, and what to suppress. Across TREC Deep Learning, BEIR, and BRIGHT, ADORE consistently outperforms strong query expansion baselines with notable improvements across nearly all evaluation settings, improving average nDCG@10 by 24.5% over BM25 and 3.6% over the strongest prior query expansion method on BEIR, and by 122.9% over BM25 and 9.2% over the best query expansion baseline on BRIGHT. Our code and data are publicly available.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

EARS: Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling in Large-scale Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:
Shuang Xie↗Yunan Lu↗Han Li↗Lingyun Wang↗

In large-scale enterprise settings, centralized multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted, in which a coordinator delegates user requests to lightweight, domain-specialized sub-agents. While this architecture improves modularity, scalability, and cost efficiency, its reliability depends not only on accurate routing but also on sub-agents' ability to calibrate their responses to capability constraints. In particular, sub-agents built on smaller fine-tuned models often struggle with such calibration, leading them to over-answer ambiguous, underspecified, misrouted, or unsupported requests and produce hallucinated outputs instead of actionable feedback. To address this challenge, we present EARS (Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling), a production-oriented framework that reframes sub-agent abstention as an inter-agent communication protocol: a sub-agent does not merely abstain, but exposes an actionable failure state to the coordinator. EARS curates human-agent interaction data using an ensemble of calibrated LLM-as-a-Judge models, producing structured abstention labels and rationales under a taxonomy of sub-agent failure modes. These data are used to fine-tune sub-agents to detect failure conditions and return rationales for coordinator-level clarification, rerouting, or fallback. We evaluate EARS in a large-scale production e-commerce assistant supporting enterprise business intelligence workflows. EARS improves the overall response pass rate from 68.5% to 78.9%, demonstrating that sub-agent-side explanatory abstention improves MAS reliability.

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25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

Authors:
Mengjian Fan↗

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

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