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

Co-Scraper: query-aware DOM Pruning and Reusable Scraper Synthesis for Lightweight Web Data Extraction

arXiv:2606.14821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The abundant and heterogeneous nature of web content necessitates automated information extraction, and generating scrapers that can be reused across similar web pages offers an effective solution for scalable data extraction. In this work, we propose Co-Scraper, a two-stage framework capable of handling the hierarchical complexity of long HTML documents. By integrating a query-aware DOM pruning mechanism with stable extraction strategy induction, Co-Scraper can effectively transforms web content into executable programmatic wrappers using a fine-tuned Qwen3-8B model. On the test set of SWDE, Co-Scraper achieves state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 94.78% and a reuse success rate of 90.39%. This framework significantly enhances the accuracy and resilience of data extraction, providing a highly efficient approach for web data acquisition tasks.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Space-time duality approach to (inhomogeneous) integrable quenches

arXiv:2606.20445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterising the universal aspects of non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics is one of the key goals of this century's physics research. Progress, however, is hindered by the lack of general theoretical frameworks for studying interacting quantum matter far from equilibrium. A recent breakthrough has been the realization that several key non-equilibrium quantities, such as the rate of growth of entanglement or the fluctuations of conserved charges within finite subsystems, can be related to equilibrium properties through a space-time duality that effectively exchanges the roles of space and time. This observation effectively enables the study of non-equilibrium phenomena using tools and concepts borrowed from equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. A first proof of principle of this framework, dubbed space-time duality approach (SDA), was provided by interacting integrable systems, where thermodynamic properties can often be characterized exactly, while dynamical quantities typically remain beyond analytical reach. Subsequent developments, however, revealed that the SDA suffered from an intrinsic ambiguity, restricting its applicability to homogeneous quenches and to charge fluctuations arising from symmetric initial states. Here we resolve this ambiguity from first principles and derive closed-form predictions for entanglement growth and charge fluctuations after general quantum quenches. We benchmark our results against the exact analytical solution of the Rule 54 quantum cellular automaton and extensive TEBD simulations of the XXZ chain. Moreover we show that, when specialised to the entanglement entropy, our framework naturally reproduces the predictions of the quasiparticle picture.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Large-Language-Model Discovery of Quantum LDPC Codes through Structured Concept Evolution

arXiv:2606.24808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computers could outperform classical machines on important problems, but only if the errors that pervade quantum hardware can be corrected at scale. Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes offer a promising route to this goal by combining sparse parity checks with finite encoding rate and growing distance, but their construction remains a challenging discrete design problem. Here we introduce structured concept evolution (SCE), a search framework that pairs a large language model with a structured algebraic mutation grammar to discover lifted-product code families, a class of CSS qLDPC codes. Instead of asking the LLM to design codes from first principles, SCE evolves structured concepts consisting of algebraic specifications paired with executable programs that realize them, using hierarchical mutations that modify the group algebra, protograph geometry, or base space. Running SCE, we discover a diverse set of competitive code families, ranging from abelian constructions to families over non-abelian groups beyond those underlying standard designs such as bivariate-bicycle codes, and characterize them under code-capacity depolarizing noise with BP+OSD decoding. These results are obtained with lightweight models (GPT-5.4-mini and GPT-5.4-nano).

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

FlowObject: Flow Steering for Bridging Generative Priors and Reconstruction Fidelity

Recovering complete 3D representations of objects from few casual image captures remains a significant challenge. Recent 3D generative models, particularly those based on Flow-Matching (FM), can synthesize high-quality textured assets; however, they often suffer from ''synthetic bias'' where learned priors override observational evidence, alongside a lack of alignment with the observed instance. Conversely, optimization-based methods like 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) provide high fidelity on visible surfaces but fail to reason about unobserved geometry. In this paper, we present FlowObject, a framework that reformulates sparse-view 3D reconstruction as a training-free, guided inverse problem. Our approach applies a dual-space guidance strategy to steer the Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) trajectory of a flow-matching model, enabling the completion of unseen regions through learned generative priors while enforcing strict consistency with real-world observations. By integrating a 3DGS refinement stage, FlowObject further bridges the gap between ''synthetic-looking'' generative outputs and photorealistic reconstructions. Comprehensive benchmarks on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that current state-of-the-art methods often struggle to achieve geometric completeness and observational consistency simultaneously, especially under severe occlusions. In contrast, our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art generative models and optimization-based frameworks in both geometric completeness and view-dependent appearance fidelity.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents

As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring risk patterns, we find that over-privileged tool selection is common among mainstream LLM agents and is further amplified by transient failures. We further find that general safety alignment does not reliably transfer to least-privilege tool choice, while prompt-level controls provide only limited mitigation under transient failures. We therefore introduce a privilege-aware post-training defense that teaches agents to prefer sufficient lower-privilege tools and escalate only when necessary. Our mitigation experiments show that this defense substantially reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while preserving general capabilities.

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

OmniSapiens: A Foundation Model for Social Behavior Processing via Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization

arXiv:2602.10635v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Socially intelligent AI systems must reason across diverse human behavioral tasks and generalize to new social contexts. However, behavioral data is inherently heterogeneous, comprising diverse modalities and prediction targets that produce uneven training signals across samples, creating imbalanced learning dynamics that challenge existing AI models. To address this, we develop Omnisapiens-7B 2.0, a foundation model for social behavior processing that explicitly addresses learning from heterogeneous behavioral data. This is enabled through Heterogeneity-Aware Relative Policy Optimization, a new RL method that rebalances learning signals across samples by approximating each sample's contribution to the policy update and using these estimates to drive geometrically centered, inertially smoothed advantage modulation for stable training. Omnisapiens-7B 2.0 achieves the best and most consistent performance across 10 behavioral tasks, while also attaining the best performance on all five held-out benchmarks, with gains of up to +12.02% and +9.37% respectively. Furthermore, it demonstrates more consistent and interpretable reasoning traces, supporting reliable real-world behavioral applications. Our model is available at https://github.com/MIT-MI/human_behavior_atlas.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Loss Landscape Diagnosis for Gradient-Based Gray-Scott System Inversion: Disentangling the Roles of PINN Components

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gradient-based inversion of reaction-diffusion systems is typically approached via surrogate models or physics-informed neural networks (PINNs), while the most direct route, backpropagation through the PDE's structure itself, has largely been avoided. We pursue this direct route as a diagnostic probe, backpropagating a steady-state loss through unrolled Gray-Scott simulation to recover its parameters, with no surrogate or neural-network augmentation. Optimization fails to converge, and plotting the landscape directly locates the failure in its geometry – flat plateaus with no gradient signal, bounded by sharp cliffs that align with bifurcation boundaries – a structure that recurs across loss functions and is inherited however the gradients are routed to parameters. Reading this minimal setup as an ablation of PINN, we disentangle each component's role: with the neural network fixed, the residual loss is quadratic in the PDE parameters and yields a smooth landscape, so it alone already avoids the pathology, by implicitly encoding the full PDE dynamics across all initial conditions. The neural network, for its part, cannot repair an ill-posed parameter subspace, and so serves only to complete the observed data – a division of labor not previously made explicit. These findings carry concrete design implications for PINN-type methods and a broader heuristic on when added dimensions actually help.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Toward Simultaneously Optimal Regret in U-Calibration

arXiv:2606.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: U-calibration studies online forecasting algorithms whose predictions can be consumed by any unknown downstream agent, guaranteeing sublinear regret simultaneously for all proper loss functions. Existing U-calibration algorithms achieve worst-case optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss, but they fail to adapt to easier losses: as we show, even for smooth losses such as squared loss, they incur $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret instead of the optimal $O(\log T)$ regret. In this work, we show that this limitation is not inherent. Specifically, we design a single forecast algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss and $O(\log T)$ regret for every bounded smooth proper loss. More generally, our algorithm also attains logarithmic regret for losses that are smooth relative to the log-barrier, which include several non-Lipschitz examples. Our approach is based on a novel variant of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) in which perturbations are applied directly in the prediction space using self-concordant noise. The resulting analysis also departs substantially from prior FTPL analyses due to the complex nature of this noise and may be of independent interest.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

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

Agentomics: Economic Foundations for the Valuation, Attribution, and Pricing of AI Agents in Human-AI Workflows

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being deployed as productive resources in organizational workflows, yet existing evaluation methods primarily measure isolated technical performance rather than economic contribution. This paper introduces Agentomics, a workflow-based framework for valuing, attributing, and pricing human and artificial agents. The framework models a workflow as a configuration of heterogeneous agents whose collective performance determines gross value, deployment cost, reliability, and expected failure loss. Workflow value is treated as a team-level quantity that may include complementarities, substitution effects, bottlenecks, and nonlinear production; additive stage-level value is only a special case. Building on this workflow model, the paper formulates AI deployment as a coalition-formation problem and defines coalition value as the incremental net surplus generated relative to a benchmark human workflow. The Shapley value is then used to attribute economic surplus among participating AI agents, yielding a principled connection among valuation, accountability, and market pricing. The resulting Shapley pricing equilibrium provides a normative benchmark for assessing whether agent prices reflect expected marginal contribution. A security-operations case study illustrates how the framework accounts for productivity gains, deployment costs, reliability losses, and coalition-level complementarities in hybrid human–AI workflows.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

An Information Theoretic Framework for Graph Novelty Generation via Latent Mixture Modeling

arXiv:2606.19770v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose an information-theoretic framework for graph novelty generation, which aims to generate data that are distinct from existing patterns while preserving global structural consistency. Our approach embeds data into a latent space, models the latent distribution using finite mixture models, and generates novel samples by imposing explicit novelty and reliability conditions formulated in terms of description length. Specifically, novelty is enforced by requiring generated samples to be poorly explained by all existing mixture components, while reliability constrains their impact on the overall mixture structure under the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that, with appropriate threshold choices, the probabilities of misclassifying non-novel or unreliable samples converge to zero with explicit rates. Experiments on synthetic and benchmark graph datasets demonstrate that the proposed method enables principled novelty generation with quantifiable risk.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Scalable Production Scheduling: Linear Complexity via Unified Homogeneous Graphs

arXiv:2604.23841v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Job Shop Scheduling Problem in real-world industrial applications requires policies that are both computationally lean and topologically robust. While Reinforcement Learning has shown potential in automating dispatching rules, existing models often struggle with a scalability bottleneck caused by quadratic graph complexity or the architectural overhead of heterogeneous layers. We introduce a unified graph framework that employs feature-based homogenization to project distinct node roles into a shared latent space. This allows a standard homogeneous Graph Isomorphism Network to capture complex resource contention with linear complexity, ensuring low-latency inference for large-scale industrial applications. Our empirical results demonstrate that our framework achieves state-of-the-art performance while exhibiting consistent zero-shot generalization. We identify the job-to-machine ratio as the primary driver of policy effectiveness, rather than absolute problem size. Based on this, we propose a hypothesis of structural saturation, demonstrating that policies trained on critically congested instances ($\mathcal{J} \approx \mathcal{M}$) learn scale-invariant resolution strategies. Agents trained at this saturation point internalize invariant conflict-resolution logic, allowing them to treat massive rectangular instances as a sequential concatenation of saturated sub-problems. This approach eliminates the need for expensive scale-specific retraining and prevents overfitting to statistical shortcuts, providing a robust and efficient pathway for deploying RL solutions in dynamic production environments.

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

Wild3R: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting from Unconstrained Sparse Photo Collection

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) removes the need for time-consuming per-scene optimization required by traditional 3DGS. However, existing feed-forward approaches struggle with real-world photo collections that include diverse lighting conditions and transient objects. In this paper, we present Wild3R, a feed-forward approach for unconstrained sparse photo collections. The main bottleneck is the lack of training data that provides multiple viewpoints, a variety of illuminations, and transient variations necessary for learning robust scene representations. To address this, we introduce the WildCity dataset, which comprises 200 scenes, 170 lighting conditions, and transient objects, resulting in 337,500 images in total. By leveraging the dataset, our model learns appearance consistency across viewpoints conditioned on reference views, while removing transient content. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing feed-forward approaches and achieves results competitive with prior per-scene optimization-based methods.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

AerialFusionMapNet: Online HD Map Construction with Aerial-Onboard BEV Fusion

High-resolution aerial imagery has recently emerged as a complementary modality for automated driving perception and has shown potential to improve birds-eye-view (BEV) scene understanding when fused with onboard sensors. Prior work demonstrated performance gains for online high-definition (HD) map construction through aerial-onboard fusion; however, conventional end-to-end fusion does not fully exploit the structural information contained in aerial representations. In this work, we introduce AerialFusionMapNet, a fusion-based mapping framework with a structured two-stage training strategy that explicitly enhances the contribution of aerial features within a unified pipeline. The proposed training scheme enables more effective integration of structural aerial priors. On the nuScenes geographic split, AerialFusionMapNet achieves up to 54.7 mAP, improving over prior aerial-onboard fusion baselines from 48.8 mAP by +5.9 absolute and +12.1% relative. The results suggest that structured training design, rather than increased architectural complexity, plays a more decisive role in unlocking the full potential of aerial imagery for online HD map construction. Code and trained models are available at https://github.com/DriverlessMobility/AerialFusionMapNet.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Asymptotic Compression of Interactive Quantum Communication using Type-Constrained de Finetti Reduction

arXiv:2606.24746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For many information processing tasks, de Finetti-style theorems can often simplify the analysis in worst-case input scenarios for which the task exhibits some permutation-invariance symmetry, as they can allow for a reduction from an analysis on worst-case inputs to that of i.i.d. inputs. If further information is available on the inputs, it might be advantageous to reflect this information in the de Finetti reduction. In our work, we focus on a form of such constraint, based on the type of the input. This allows us to obtain a conceptually simple proof of a new de Finetti reduction for classical probability distributions, derived from elementary properties from the method of types. We apply our constrained de Finetti reduction to the compression of quantum interactive communication protocols with classical inputs, and prove that the prior-free quantum information cost equals the worst-case input amortized quantum communication cost.

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

Behavioral Audit of Machine Unlearning Has a Privacy Cost

arXiv:2606.14518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The removal of learned data from Machine Learning models through Machine Unlearning (MU) has been widely studied; however, there has yet to be an agreed-upon scheme for auditing MU. Existing work has shown that a dishonest model owner can falsify evidence to avoid executing MU, while curious auditors (and adversaries) can infer the privacy-sensitive properties of the model and its training data even with limited access. Yet auditing of MU under mutual distrust between the model owner and the auditor remains unexplored. We provide an information-theoretic proof for this scenario: for convex ML models, a generic audit scheme that relies solely on querying the model for behavioral signals cannot identify insufficiently unlearned models without revealing membership information of the retained set. Therefore, auditing MU under the assumption of a dishonest model owner and an honest-but-curious auditor faces an inherent privacy-audit tradeoff. Our empirical results on convex models strongly supports this result, while further experiments demonstrate that this privacy-audit tension persists in non-convex models. Our results call for a more careful consideration of the privacy-audit tension under a realistic auditor threat model, and serve as a foundation for more scrutiny of designs of privacy-preserving audit schemes for the MU pipeline. We also release our code implementation at https://github.com/LiouTang/Behavioral-Unlearn-Audit.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Decoupled Motion Representation Learning for Moving Infrared Small Target Detection

Infrared small target detection in dynamic scenes remains challenging due to the highly coupled motions among targets, imaging platforms, and dynamic backgrounds. Existing multi-frame methods usually perform implicit temporal modeling, where coherent background dynamics dominate motion correspondence learning, leading to an inherent trade-off between detection and false alarms. In this work, we observe that background motions exhibit strong global coherence, whereas small targets mainly correspond to sparse local motion anomalies. Moreover, many false-alarm responses maintain high consistency with globally coherent motion patterns, indicating that they mainly originate from coherent background dynamics rather than genuine target motions. Based on these observations, we propose a decoupled motion representation learning framework for moving infrared small target detection. Specifically, an explicit motion branch is introduced to model globally coherent motion dynamics using pretrained optical flow priors, together with a structure-preserving self-supervised adaptation strategy for infrared motion correspondence learning. Meanwhile, an implicit motion branch based on deformable feature alignment is designed to capture target-sensitive local motion anomalies under coherent motion guidance. Furthermore, a coherent-motion-guided local anomaly reasoning module is proposed to identify and suppress coherent-motion-induced false responses during localized motion modeling. Extensive experiments on two challenging infrared small target detection benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches, particularly in dynamic scenes with complex motions, while maintaining favorable inference efficiency.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Genealogical processes of sequential Monte Carlo methods and other non-neutral population models under rapid mutation

arXiv:2406.16465v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that genealogical trees arising from a broad class of non-neutral models of population evolution converge to the Kingman coalescent under a suitable rescaling of time. As well as non-neutral biological evolution, our results apply to genetic algorithms encompassing the prominent class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. The time rescaling we need differs slightly from that used in classical results for convergence to the Kingman coalescent, which has implications for the performance of different resampling schemes in SMC algorithms. In addition, our work substantially simplifies earlier proofs of convergence to the Kingman coalescent, and corrects an error common to several earlier results.

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

Information-Theoretic Measures in AI: A Practical Decision Guide

arXiv:2604.23716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-theoretic (IT) measures are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence: entropy drives decision-tree splits and uncertainty quantification, cross-entropy is the default classification loss, mutual information underpins representation learning and feature selection, and transfer entropy reveals directed influence in dynamical systems. A second, less consolidated family of measures, integrated information (Phi), effective information (EI), and autonomy, has emerged for characterizing agent complexity. Despite wide adoption, measure selection is often decoupled from estimator assumptions, failure modes, and safe inferential claims. This paper provides a practical decision framework for all seven measures, organized around three prescriptive questions for each: (i) what question does the measure answer and in which AI context; (ii) which estimator is appropriate for the data type and dimensionality; and (iii) what is the most dangerous misuse. The framework is operationalized in two complementary artifacts: a measure-selection flowchart and a master decision table. We cover both AI/ML and decision-making agent application domains per measure, with standardized Bridge Boxes linking IT quantities to cognitive constructs. Three worked examples illustrate the framework on concrete practitioner scenarios spanning representation learning, temporal influence analysis, and evolved agent complexity.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

MUFASA: A Multi-Layer Framework for Slot Attention

Unsupervised object-centric learning (OCL) decomposes visual scenes into distinct entities. Slot attention is a popular approach that represents individual objects as latent vectors, called slots. Current methods obtain these slot representations solely from the last layer of a pre-trained vision transformer (ViT), ignoring valuable, semantically rich information encoded across the other layers. To better utilize this latent semantic information, we introduce MUFASA, a lightweight plug-and-play framework for slot-attention-based approaches to unsupervised object segmentation. Our model computes slot attention across multiple feature layers of the ViT encoder, fully leveraging their semantic richness. We propose a fusion strategy to aggregate slots obtained on multiple layers into a unified object-centric representation. Integrating MUFASA into existing OCL methods improves their segmentation results across multiple datasets, setting a new state of the art while simultaneously improving training convergence with only minor inference overhead.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Propagating Collective Spin-valley Modes in Twisted WSe2

arXiv:2507.18770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of neutral collective modes is a hallmark of correlated quantum phases but is often challenging to probe experimentally. In two-dimensional flatband systems, charge responses have been intensively investigated yet neutral excitations remain largely unexplored. In particular, intervalley coherent state (IVC) features a neutral Goldstone mode due to spontaneously broken valley U(1) symmetry. While IVC state has been proposed as a unifying theme across graphene and semiconductor based systems, its defining feature, the neutral Goldstone mode, remains elusive in experiment. Here we investigate space and time resolved transport of neutral modes in twisted WSe2 moire superlattices through a novel ultrafast imaging technique. We uncover two new propagating collective modes with very different velocities, which emerge near the van Hove singularity (VHS) in both intermediate (3.5 to 4 degree) and large (around 5 degree) angle twisted WSe2. The fast-propagating mode has a large speed of about 3 km/s and is consistent with a Goldstone mode for an IVC state, while the slow-moving mode is likely a gapped amplitude mode. They can be understood as the spin-valley analogues of collective modes of a superfluid, whose propagation is imaged for the first time in a condensed matter system. Our study demonstrates a powerful new approach for probing charge-neutral modes in quantum materials and offers key insights into the interplay between charge and spin-valley physics in moire superlattices.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

The Amazon can be saved — with concerted action inside and outside Brazil

Authors: Unknown Author

As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down. As deforestation in the Amazon falls, fresh evidence shows that the rainforest can withstand global warming, but only if there is a worldwide effort to stop cutting it down.

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

EG-VQA: Benchmarking Verifiable Video Question Answering with Grounded Temporal Evidence

arXiv:2606.24797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on video question answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the grounding of predictions in relevant video evidence remains largely unexamined. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence understanding motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), an open-ended evaluation protocol in which each QA pair is explicitly annotated with supporting temporal evidence, thereby requiring joint reasoning and precise evidence localization. EG-VQA is comprised of 2,067 videos and 11,838 QA pairs with fine-grained evidence annotations. To evaluate predicted evidence, Evidence-Grounded F1 (EG-F1) is introduced as a unified metric in which temporal alignment and semantic consistency against ground-truth evidence are jointly measured. Experimental evaluation reveals that even strong proprietary models struggle to accurately ground their predictions, exposing a fundamental discrepancy between answer correctness and faithful evidence localization. To bridge this gap, EG-Reasoner, an evidence-grounded reasoning model trained with explicit supervision, is proposed. State-of-the-art performance is achieved among open-source models, with results competitive against proprietary systems, particularly pronounced gains are observed on reasoning-intensive tasks such as counterfactual questions. These findings demonstrate that scaling alone is insufficient for robust video understanding and that structured evidence supervision is essential for the development of more reliable and interpretable VideoQA systems.

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

Soft-Prompt Tuning for Fair and Efficient LLM Benchmark Evaluation

Benchmark scores often misrepresent a large language model's (LLM's) knowledge, because they rely, e.g., on the model's ability to follow specific formatting requirements. This especially penalizes base models that may know the correct answers but lack the ability – typically introduced in post-training – to structure them as instructed. To overcome this, we propose soft-prompt tuning, an efficient, fair, and architecture-agnostic model evaluation. By optimizing only 10 soft-prompt vectors (roughly 0.0006% parameters for a 7B model) over a short tuning period, we adapt models to specific benchmark formats, closing gaps in format-following and ensuring that underlying knowledge is accurately reflected in benchmark scores. This allows one to fairly compare different base models – trained with various pre-training recipes – on benchmarks without the need for full post-training. We evaluated soft-prompt tuning across 7 models and 7 datasets. The results show that (a) soft-prompt tuning saturates format-following within 80 steps (~640 samples) making it highly efficient, (b) soft-prompt tuning significantly outperforms zero- and few-shot prompting, surfacing base model knowledge that standard prompting misses, that (c) even post-trained models can benefit from soft-prompts to maximize format compliance, and that (d) soft-prompted base model performance predicts post-trained model rankings more reliably than zero- and few-shot baselines, offering a low-cost proxy for downstream model quality. Our contributions include (1) metrics which disentangle format-following and knowledge accuracy, (2) a fairer benchmarking protocol of LLM knowledge, and (3) a cost- and memory-effective recipe to identify optimal pre-training strategies early in LLM development.