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

Future Dynamic 3D Reconstruction: A 3D World Model with Disentangled Ego-Motion

Authors:
Nils Morbitzer↗Jonathan Evers↗Artem Savkin↗Thomas Stauner↗Nassir Navab↗Federico Tombari↗Stefano Gasperini↗

Forecasting the evolution of dynamic environments is crucial for autonomous agents. While generative world models have recently achieved high photorealism in 2D video synthesis by mixing ego-motion and environmental dynamics within the image plane, they exhibit physical inconsistencies, such as morphing or vanishing objects, especially over long time horizons. In this paper, we propose FR3D, a world model that predicts a persistent 3D latent representation for future dynamic 3D reconstruction. Unlike prior works that treat the world as a sequence of image-based features, FR3D explicitly decouples the 3D evolution of the scene from the agent's trajectory, treating the inferred ego-motion as a latent proxy for action. This disentanglement resolves the ambiguities between self-motion and world-motion, ensuring geometric consistency into the future. Furthermore, we introduce a teacher-student distillation strategy that leverages the spatial "common sense" of off-the-shelf foundation models, leading to robust zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments demonstrate FR3D's strong performance for future dynamic 3D reconstruction from monocular observations across multiple datasets, even 2 seconds into the future. Project page: https://fr3d-wm.github.io.

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

The N-Body Problem: Parallel Execution from Single-Person Egocentric Video

Authors:
Zhifan Zhu↗Yifei Huang↗Yoichi Sato↗Dima Damen↗

Humans can intuitively parallelise complex activities, but can a model predict this from observing a single person? Given one egocentric video, we introduce the N-Body Problem: predicting how N individuals, can hypothetically perform the same set of tasks. The goal is to maximise speed-up, but naive assignment of video segments to individuals often violates real-world constraints, leading to physically impossible scenarios like two people using the same object or occupying the same space. To quantify this, we formalise the N-Body Problem and propose a suite of metrics to evaluate both performance (speed-up, task coverage) and feasibility (spatial collisions, object conflicts and causal constraints). As a proof of concept, we introduce a structured prompting strategy that guides a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to reason about the 3D environment, object usage, and temporal dependencies, producing a viable parallel execution. On 100 videos from EPIC-Kitchens and HD-EPIC, for $N = 2$, our structured prompt improves action coverage by 45% over a baseline prompt for Gemini 2.5 Pro, while simultaneously slashing collision rates, object and causal conflicts by 51%, 52% and 55% respectively.

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04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Looking beyond stereotyped neuron structures reveals links between beading and morphological rearrangements in aging phenotypes.

Authors:
Gomez↗Nguyen↗Lagergren↗Flores↗San Miguel↗

Understanding how neuronal morphology changes during aging and acute stress is essential for elucidating mechanisms of neurodegeneration. The highly branched PVD neuron of Caenorhabditis elegans provides a powerful model for studying dendritic remodeling and degeneration-associated phenotypes such as dendritic beading. However, the complexity of this arbor presents substantial challenges for automated segmentation and quantitative analysis. In this study, we adapted a convolutional neural network (CNN)-guided region growing framework for automated dendrite tracing, coupled with two topology-based algorithms for categorizing dendritic segments by branching degree. The segmentation algorithm achieved high accuracy relative to manual tracing, with a median Dice coefficient of 0.82, while reducing analysis time by approximately tenfold. Automated dendrite categorization demonstrated strong agreement with manual annotations across branching orders, though position-based mapping performance declined with age due to progressive morphological distortion. Leveraging this platform, we investigated mechanistic differences in dendritic beading patterns observed during aging and cold shock. Consistent with prior work, aging was associated with decreased inter-bead spacing, whereas cold shock produced increased bead dispersion with stress severity. Structural analysis revealed that these trends were not driven by dendritic pruning or reduced arbor complexity. Instead, while a traditional anatomically unflexible paradigm falsely implicated lower-degree dendrites as highly vulnerable, our branching-informed framework revealed that age-dependent beading is fundamentally dictated by a segments history of successive branching events. Conversely, acute cold shock triggered systemic beading that expanded across all dendritic orders in a severity-dependent manner. Together, these findings demonstrate that chronic aging and acute stress engage distinct degenerative pathways (compartment-specific lineage vulnerability versus global architectural collapse) rather than gross morphological loss, as well as highlighting the need for paradigms that enable reliable analysis of changing morphologies.

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Guided Agentic AI for Multimodal Clinical Prediction: Lessons from the AgentDS Healthcare Benchmark

Authors:
Lalitha Pranathi Pulavarthy↗Raajitha Muthyala↗Aravind V Kuruvikkattil↗Zhenan Yin↗Rashmita Kudamala↗Saptarshi Purkayastha↗

arXiv:2602.19502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of autonomous data science workflows, yet clinical prediction tasks demand domain expertise that purely automated approaches struggle to provide. We investigate how human guidance of agentic AI can improve multimodal clinical prediction, presenting our approach to all three AgentDS Healthcare benchmark challenges: 30-day hospital readmission prediction (Macro-F1 = 0.8986), emergency department cost forecasting (MAE = $465.13), and discharge readiness assessment (Macro-F1 = 0.7939). Across these tasks, human analysts directed the agentic workflow at key decision points, multimodal feature engineering from clinical notes, scanned PDF billing receipts, and time-series vital signs; task-appropriate model selection; and clinically informed validation strategies. Our approach ranked 5th overall in the healthcare domain, with a 3rd-place finish on the discharge readiness task. Ablation studies reveal that human-guided decisions compounded to a cumulative gain of +0.065 F1 over automated baselines, with multimodal feature extraction contributing the largest single improvement (+0.041 F1). We distill three generalizable lessons: (1) domain-informed feature engineering at each pipeline stage yields compounding gains that outperform extensive automated search; (2) multimodal data integration requires task-specific human judgment that no single extraction strategy generalizes across clinical text, PDFs, and time-series; and (3) deliberate ensemble diversity with clinically motivated model configurations outperforms random hyperparameter search. These findings offer practical guidance for teams deploying agentic AI in healthcare settings where interpretability, reproducibility, and clinical validity are essential.

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

Training and Evaluating Diffusion Policies with Long Context Lengths

Authors:
Abhinav Agarwal↗Adam Wei↗Taylan Kargin↗Michael Zeng↗Cole Becker↗Arif Kerem Dayi↗Pablo Parrilo↗Asuman Ozdaglar↗Russ Tedrake↗

arXiv:2606.16447v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Imitation learning has enabled highly-dexterous robotic manipulation from RGB observations. Policies trained with these methods, however, typically condition robot actions on only a short history of observations. These policies cannot solve tasks that require memory and can get stuck repeatedly executing the same failing motions. In this work, we first benchmark policy performance as context length is incrementally increased from short to long, across a spectrum of tasks with varying local stability and memory requirements, and in multiple data regimes. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate context length in imitation learning at this level of detail. Our results challenge prior claims: naively scaling context length is not as brittle as advertised in literature. With an appropriate conditioning method and denoising backbone (UNet+Cross-Attention), single-task policies achieve high success rates on many tasks in the usual data regime even with naive scaling. Next, we propose a training algorithm to jointly train policies at multiple context lengths, further reducing the sample complexity of long-context learning. Finally, we apply our findings to re-evaluate some previously proposed solutions to long-context imitation learning.

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07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Filum Terminale Diameter on Routine Pediatric MRI: A Large-Cohort Clinical Reference in 3,406 Children and the Age-Dependent Meaning of the 2-mm Thickened-Filum Threshold

Authors:
Tang↗Dong↗Chen↗Yang↗Huang↗Yu↗Zhu↗Shen↗

Background. A filum diameter >2 mm is the conventional MRI threshold for a thickened filum, but it derives from small, mostly adult series showing no age dependence; whether one cutoff suits all of childhood is untested. Objective. To build an age-specific filum-diameter reference on routine pediatric MRI and test, adjusting for image resolution, whether the 2-mm threshold is age-stationary. Materials and methods. In this retrospective study an nnU-Net tracer measured the maximal filum diameter on consecutive lumbosacral MRI; versus manual tracing it showed negligible bias but moderate single-measure agreement. After excluding report-confirmed fatty filum, lipoma, or tethered cord, the proportion >2 mm was analysed within one acquisition protocol and by logistic regression adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness. Results. Of 7,245 examinations, 3,869 (53%) were traceable; untraced ones were younger (median 0.75 vs 2.0 years). The presumed-normal cohort had median diameter 1.48 mm. At matched resolution, 2 mm marked the 94th percentile in infants (5.6% exceeded it) but the 83rd by 3-6 years (17.4%); the age effect persisted after adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness (3-6 years vs infants, adjusted OR 4.7; P < .001). Conclusion. Filum diameter clusters near 1.5 mm, and the fixed 2-mm cutoff flags ~5% of infants but ~17% of preschoolers. Caliber should be judged against an age-specific clinical reference, not one fixed cutoff; a thick filum is not itself a diagnosis of tethered cord.

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09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Evaluating cell type annotations in single-cell omics in the absence of ground truth

Authors:
Garnica↗Andreatta↗Carmona↗S. J↗

Accurate cell type annotation is essential for single-cell transcriptomics, directly shaping downstream analyses and biological interpretations. Yet, objective evaluation of annotation quality remains a major challenge. Here, we argue that a cell type or cell state label has practical utility only if it captures a molecular pattern that is reproducible across biological replicates. Based on this principle, we introduce inter-sample consistency (ISC), a quantitative framework to assess annotation quality in single-cell RNA-seq datasets. Unlike existing cluster validation approaches, ISC distinguishes annotations that generalize across samples and individuals from those driven by technical or unwanted variation, thereby providing principled criteria for annotation quality and transferability. When applied to published single-cell atlases, ISC reveals widespread reproducibility gaps and provides actionable guidance for repairing inconsistent annotations. Notably, ISC enables benchmarking of automated cell type annotation tools even when ground-truth labels are unavailable, providing interpretable metrics to guide their development and evaluation. Implemented as the scTypeEval Bioconductor package, this framework offers a broadly applicable resource for evaluating and improving cell type annotations in single-cell RNA-seq experiments.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

FAConformer: Frequency-Aware Convolutional Transformer for Auditory Attention Decoding

Authors:
Ziwei Wang↗Xingyi He↗Tianwang Jia↗Hongbin Wang↗Dongrui Wu↗

arXiv:2606.14120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auditory attention decoding (AAD) aims to infer the attended speaker from neural responses in multi-speaker acoustic environments and is a key problem for neuro-steered hearing systems. Although recent studies have achieved encouraging progress, existing AAD models still do not fully exploit frequency domain electroencephalography (EEG) information. In particular, most approaches introduce multi-band information through handcrafted feature extraction or direct cross-band feature concatenation, which mainly exploit frequency information at a shallow level and may overlook band-specific patterns and cross-band interactions. To address these limitations, this paper proposes FAConformer, a frequency-aware CNN-Transformer framework for AAD that explicitly integrates band-specific encoding and adaptive cross-band interaction. Specifically, FAConformer first decomposes EEG signals into multiple frequency bands and assigns each band to an independent CNN-Transformer encoder for band-specific modeling. The resulting band-wise features are then adaptively fused by a carefully designed frequency-aware attention (FAA) module that models cross-band dependencies by treating band-wise features as tokens. Further, band-wise auxiliary supervision (BAS) is introduced to prevent weakly contributing branches from being under-optimized during joint training. In this way, FAConformer performs frequency-aware modeling that more effectively exploits frequency domain information. Extensive experiments on two public AAD datasets with three decision-window lengths demonstrated that FAConformer consistently outperformed 12 competitive baselines, surpassing the current state-of-the-art model by 4.9%. Further analyses of band importance, ablation, and parameter sensitivity verify the effectiveness, robustness, and interpretability of the proposed framework. Code is available at https://github.com/wzwvv/FAConformer.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Deep Doubly Debiased Longitudinal Effect Estimation with ICE G-Computation

Authors:
Wenxin Chen↗Weishen Pan↗Kyra Gan↗Fei Wang↗

arXiv:2602.12379v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating longitudinal treatment effects is essential for sequential decision-making but is challenging due to treatment-confounder feedback. While Iterative Conditional Expectation (ICE) G-computation offers a principled approach, its recursive structure suffers from error propagation, corrupting the learned outcome regression models. We propose D3-Net, a framework that mitigates error propagation in ICE training and then applies a robust final correction. First, to interrupt error propagation during learning, we train the ICE sequence using Sequential Doubly Robust (SDR) pseudo-outcomes, which provide bias-corrected targets for each regression. Second, we employ a multi-task transformer with a covariate simulator head for auxiliary supervision, regularizing representation learning, and a target network to stabilize training dynamics. For the final estimate, we discard the SDR correction and instead use the uncorrected nuisance models to perform Longitudinal Targeted Minimum Loss-Based Estimation (LTMLE) on the original outcomes. This second-stage, targeted debiasing ensures robustness and optimal finite-sample properties. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our model, D3-Net, robustly reduces bias and variance across different horizons, counterfactuals, and time-varying confoundings, compared to existing state-of-the-art ICE-based estimators.

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

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detectors for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting

Authors:
Sudeepta Mondal↗Ganesh Sundaramoorthi↗

arXiv:2606.12718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting systems must operate in open-world environments where signals from unknown transmitters and temporal drift introduce distribution shift at test time. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection provides a natural framework for this problem, yet its application to RF fingerprinting (RFF) remains limited. A key barrier to their adoption is that most OOD detectors require auxiliary OOD data for parameter tuning, an assumption that is difficult to satisfy in RF environments where representative OOD data is impractical to collect. In this work, we introduce a promising set of OOD detection methods from the machine learning literature to open-set RFF domain. We present these methods within a unified mathematical framework based on information theory, which is a natural framework for communication systems. Our framework allows for the systematic analysis of methods and development of new methods. We further demonstrate the applicability of recent work on tuning OOD detectors without given OOD tuning data for open-set RFF. We evaluate on the POWDER RF fingerprinting dataset, showing that detectors tuned without any given OOD data achieve performance comparable to baselines with access to true OOD tuning data and greatly out-perform baseline approaches without access to true OOD tuning data, showcasing the practical viability for the RFF problem.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Contrastive Geometric Learning Unlocks Unified Structure- and Ligand-Based Drug Design

Authors:
Lisa Schneckenreiter↗Sohvi Luukkonen↗Lukas Friedrich↗Daniel Kuhn↗G\"unter Klambauer↗

arXiv:2601.09693v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Structure-based and ligand-based computational drug design have traditionally relied on disjoint data sources and modeling assumptions, limiting their joint use at scale. In this work, we introduce Contrastive Geometric Learning for Unified Computational Drug Design (ConGLUDe), a single contrastive geometric model that unifies structure- and ligand-based training. ConGLUDe couples a geometric protein encoder that produces whole-protein representations and implicit embeddings of predicted binding sites with a fast ligand encoder, removing the need for predefined pockets. By aligning ligands with both global protein representations and multiple candidate binding sites through contrastive learning, ConGLUDe supports ligand-conditioned pocket prediction in addition to virtual screening and target fishing, while being trained jointly on protein-ligand complexes and large-scale bioactivity data. Across diverse benchmarks, ConGLUDe achieves competitive zero-shot virtual screening performance, substantially outperforms existing methods on a challenging target fishing task, and demonstrates state-of-the-art ligand-conditioned pocket selection. These results highlight the advantages of unified structure-ligand training and position ConGLUDe as a step toward general-purpose foundation models for drug discovery.

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15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Revealing competitive interfacial reactions in high-energy Li–S batteries

Authors:
Shiyuan Zhou↗

Charge transfer at solid–liquid interfaces plays a critical role in various energy-storage systems1, particularly under dynamically varying reactant concentrations. Deciphering these intricate reaction pathways remains a substantial challenge, notably in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries, in which achieving high energy density requires efficient conversion of highly concentrated lithium polysulfides (LiPSs)2,3. However, the mechanisms governing lithium sulfide (Li2S) deposition and dissolution under lean electrolyte conditions remain poorly understood. Here, using in situ liquid-cell electron microscopy, we directly visualize concentration-driven phase segregation at the electrode–electrolyte interface. Within these high-concentration interfacial layers (HCILs), competitive surface and solution dictate the charge-transfer dynamics and ultimately govern Li2S deposition at different phase boundaries. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the aggregation of LiPSs alters molecular geometry, electronic properties and orbital hybridization, collectively facilitating charge transfer through highly concentrated LiPSs clusters. Guided by these insights, we design optimized electrodes that balance interfacial reaction pathways, enabling fast charging (4 C, 26.8 mA cm−2) and achieving high energy densities exceeding 400 Wh kg−1. These findings provide mechanistic understanding of interfacial reactions under practical working conditions and offer a design strategy to advance Li–S batteries. Visualization of concentration-driven phase segregation within high-concentration interfacial layers in the context of high-energy lithium–sulfur batteries using liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy reveals competitive interfacial reactions under lean electrolyte conditions at different phase boundaries.

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

Charging Quantum Batteries with Chiral Squeezing

Authors:
Borhan Ahmadi↗Andr\'e H. A. Malavazi↗Janine Splettstoesser↗Pawe{\l} Horodecki↗Lei Du↗

arXiv:2606.16764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a quantum-battery charger based on a driven bosonic Kitaev chain (BKC), where chiral squeezing converts passive input fluctuations into ordered, non-passive battery states. While a coherent input pulse exhibits phase-sensitive chiral transport, the charging dynamics is dominated by bidirectionally propagating fluctuations that are amplified and squeezed into orthogonal quadratures at opposite chain ends. In contrast to conventional phase-preserving amplifiers, our scheme stores largely extractable energy and achieves a work-like signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) near unity, even in the presence of thermal noise and moderate symmetry-preserving disorder.

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

Hyperdimensional computing for structured querying on tabular data embeddings

Authors:
Sebasti\'an Bugedo↗Stijn Vansummeren↗

arXiv:2606.13871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tabular data embeddings have become a cornerstone of data profiling and data integration pipelines, enabling tasks such as entity annotation and resolution; schema matching; column type detection; and table search, among others. Existing approaches embed rows, columns, or entire tables into a vector space and rely on nearest-neighbor search to retrieve candidate matches. A fundamental limitation of current embedding methods is the lack of interpretable similarity scores: the concrete similarity value between a query and its nearest neighbour carries no intrinsic meaning, making it impossible to determine whether that neighbour is a true match or simply the least-dissimilar item in a corpus that contains no valid answer. This inability to set principled thresholds for retrieval undermines practical deployment, particularly for zero-match detection. We investigate the use of HyperDimensional Computing (HDC), specifically the Holographic Reduced Representations (HRR) model, as a framework for tabular row embeddings when the retrieval task corresponds to answering structured select-project queries in vector space. Exploiting the algebraic properties of HDC operations, we derive closed-form expected similarity values for both equality and non-equality retrieval predicates, which converge to interpretable values as dimensionality increases, and use these to identify suitable retrieval thresholds. We evaluate HDC against EmbDI, a graph-based baseline, on two real-world datasets across varying table sizes and predicate lengths. Our results show that HDC matches or outperforms EmbDI for row retrieval across all configurations, handles non-equality predicates more robustly, and achieves perfect attribute projection accuracy at sufficient dimensionality – while uniquely enabling reliable identification of zero-match predicates through its principled thresholds.

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

Real-Time Neural Hair Denoising

Authors:
Chenghao Wu↗Yuefan Shen↗Tao Huang↗Kai Yan↗Zahra Montazeri↗Kui Wu↗

We propose a lightweight real-time method for reconstructing strand-based hair G-Buffers from severely undersampled rasterized inputs. Our pipeline first applies neural spatial reconstruction and temporal accumulation to recover hair coverage, i.e., fractional hair visibility within a pixel, and tangent. It then uses a tangent-guided reconstruction step to complete the position, which is subsequently used for physically based deferred hair shading. We evaluate our method across a diverse set of hairstyles, including straight, wavy, afro, and ponytail styles, under both static and dynamic scenarios. Our method achieves higher hair reconstruction quality than existing hair-specific denoising techniques and general industrial neural reconstruction solutions such as DLSS and FSR.

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

Understanding Truncated Positional Encodings for Graph Neural Networks

Authors:
James Flora↗Mitchell Black↗Weng-Keen Wong↗Amir Nayyeri↗

arXiv:2606.13671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) enhance the power of graph neural networks (GNNs), both theoretically and empirically. Two of the most popular families of PEs - spectral (e.g., Laplacian eigenspaces, effective resistance) and walk-based (polynomials of the adjacency matrix) - are theoretically equivalent in expressive power, with expressivity between the 1-WL and 3-WL tests. However, this equivalence assumes the GNN uses the "complete" version of these PEs, which requires $O(n^3)$ time and space complexity. Instead, practitioners commonly use truncated variants of these encodings, such as the first $k$ eigenspaces or powers of the adjacency matrix. However, the theoretical properties of these truncated PEs are unknown. In this work, we initiate the study of these truncated PEs. Theoretically, we show that, under truncation, several families of PEs are fundamentally different in expressive power. As a corollary, we show that truncated spectral PEs are no longer stronger than the 1-WL test. We also study a family of spectral PEs, the $k$-harmonic distances, to highlight the differences in expressive power of even closely related truncated PEs. Finally, we experimentally show that a mix of truncated PEs is preferable to any single family on real-world datasets.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

HeatKV: Head-tuned KV-cache Compression for Visual Autoregressive Modeling

Authors:
Jonathan Cederlund↗Axel Berg↗William Isaksson↗Durmus Alp Emre Acar↗Chuteng Zhou↗Pontus Giselsson↗

Visual Autoregressive (VAR) models have recently demonstrated impressive image generation quality while maintaining low latency. However, they suffer from severe KV-cache memory constraints, often requiring gigabytes of memory per generated image. We introduce HeatKV, a novel compression method that adapts cache allocation in each head based on its attention to previously generated scales. Using a small offline calibration set, the attention heads are ranked according to their attention scores over prior scales. Based on this ranking, we construct a static pruning schedule tailored to a given memory budget. Applied to the Infinity-2B model, HeatKV achieves $2 \times$ higher compression ratio in memory allocation for KV cache compared to existing methods, while maintaining similar or better image fidelity, prompt alignment and human perception score. Our method achieves a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for VAR model KV-cache compression, showcasing the effectiveness of fine-grained, head-specific cache allocation. Code and calibration script available at https://github.com/arm-research/heatkv.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

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

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

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

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Fanconi Anemia as a Window into Premalignant Field Cancerization of the Oral Mucosa

Authors:
Berger↗Donovan↗F. X↗Lin↗Y.-C↗Soma↗May↗Bhadresha↗Krieg↗Giri↗McReynolds↗L. J↗…

Head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) evolves through stepwise clonal expansion within genetically altered mucosa fields, yet actionable biomarkers remain undefined. Leveraging Fanconi anemia (FA), a cancer predisposition syndrome with extreme HNSCC risk due to defective DNA interstrand crosslink repair, we profiled premalignant changes in the oral cavity using noninvasive brush biopsies. Consistent with our prior demonstration of genomic instability in FA-associated SCCs, we detected pathogenic TP53 variants in 26% and copy number alterations in 60.5% in clinically normal-appearing oral mucosa of individuals with FA. These subclinical clonal expansions define candidate biomarkers of early clonal evolution amenable to serial sampling for risk stratification and prevention studies. Since FA-associated SCCs share genomic features with sporadic HNSCC, these findings may extend to the broader population. We also identify somatic reversion of a pathogenic FANCB variant, providing evidence of genomic self-correction and suggesting a potential avenue for gene-based cancer prevention in FA.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

daVinci-kernel: Co-Evolving Skill Selection, Summarization, and Utilization via RL for GPU Kernel Optimization

Authors:
Dayuan Fu↗Mohan Jiang↗Tongyu Wang↗Dian Yang↗Jiarui Hu↗Liming Liu↗Jinlong Hou↗Pengfei Li↗

GPU kernel optimization represents a paradigm where functional correctness is assumed and execution efficiency is the objective. We present daVinci-kernel, a reinforcement learning framework that couples skill discovery with skill exploitation through a dynamically evolving skill library. daVinci-kernel jointly trains three agents sharing one LLM backbone: a Skill Selection Agent that retrieves relevant techniques via BM25 and LLM reranking, a Policy Agent that generates multi-turn CUDA/Triton kernels conditioned on selected skills, and a Skill Summary Agent that distills successful rollouts into reusable skills. Candidate skills are added only after execution-based verification confirms reproducible speedups. All three agents share a single LLM backbone, are initialized via a structured SFT cold start on diversity-filtered data, and are then jointly optimized end-to-end with multi-turn REINFORCE and per-agent advantage estimation. On KernelBench, daVinci-kernel-14B achieves 37.2%, 70.6%, and 32.2% on Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 under the Fast$_1$ threshold, outperforming the strongest prior RL-trained model, Dr.Kernel-14B.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CRAX: Fast Safe Reinforcement Learning Benchmarking

Authors:
Tristan Tomilin↗Mourad Boustani↗Mickey Beurskens↗Thiago D. Sim\~ao↗

arXiv:2606.20376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety is a core concern for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) agents in real-world domains such as robotics and autonomous driving. While benchmarks have been central to progress in RL, existing safety benchmarks with high-fidelity 3D physics remain computationally slow, limiting large-scale experimentation and rapid prototyping. To address this gap, we propose CRAX (Constrained RL Accelerated with JAX). Built on top of the MuJoCo XLA (MJX) physics engine with realistic 3D dynamics, CRAX leverages vectorized operations and hardware acceleration, yielding up to ~100x speedups over comparable CPU-based safety benchmarks. The benchmark features six environment suites and three agent-specific tasks, each spanning three difficulty levels. Evaluating six popular safe RL methods shows that no single approach dominates across all tasks, and reveals the trade-offs between performance and safety. We find that curriculum learning across difficulty levels and safety transfer can improve performance over direct training in harder settings.

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

The Art of Interrogation: Consistency Amplifies Factuality in Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Theo Uscidda↗Marta Tintore Gazulla↗Maks Ovsjanikov↗Federico Tombari↗Leonidas Guibas↗

arXiv:2606.11918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) exhibit remarkable general capabilities but significantly underperform in spatial reasoning tasks. Existing approaches treat this gap as a knowledge deficit, relying on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to ingest labeled spatial data from external vision sources or synthetic engines. In contrast, we argue that for many tasks, spatial reasoning capabilities are already present in pre-trained LRMs but require alignment through logical coherence under geometric 2D and 3D constraints. In this work, we propose a self-supervised reinforcement learning (RL) framework that targets the internal reasoning process without requiring ground-truth annotations. By formalizing the notion of consistency verifiers – reward functions that check for geometric and semantic consistency under transformations – we demonstrate that models can improve their spatial reasoning abilities. We use both image transformations, like flipping, and textual transformations, like swapping the order of objects in the question, and propose a new optimal transport-based RL strategy, OT-GRPO, which is a minimal-matching variant of group relative policy optimization tailored to pairwise verifiers. We show that this label-free consistency training approaches the accuracy of models trained with ground-truth supervision and achieves similar generalization across diverse tasks and data domains.

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