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

Sensory Restoration via Brain-Computer Interfaces: A Unified 2 x 2 Framework and Convergence Roadmap

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15091v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Millions of individuals worldwide suffer from sensory and communication deficits caused by neurodegenerative diseases, stroke, or trauma. Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) offer a promising avenue for sensory and motor restoration. However, the scientific literature remains highly fragmented between invasive neuroprosthetics and non-invasive electrophysiological decoders, with a lack of consistent terminology and comparison metrics. This chapter proposes a unified 2 x 2 framework categorizing BCIs along two axes: degree of invasiveness (invasive vs. non-invasive) and signal direction (afferent sensory-IN vs. efferent sensory-OUT). We define and distinguish the paradigms of restoration, substitution, and augmentation. Furthermore, we outline a structural roadmap for the convergence of these modalities over near-, medium-, and long-term horizons, focusing on physical limits and the integrative role of machine learning foundation models.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Existence Precedes Value: Joint Modeling of Observational Existence and Evolving States in Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.13571v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world time series are often highly incomplete and irregular due to sensor dormancy, transmission delays, and event-driven sampling, making reliable forecasting fundamentally challenging. Existing methods have evolved from impute-then-forecast pipelines to continuous-time models such as Neural ODEs and continuous-time graph networks. While these approaches improve the modeling of historical irregularity, they still rely on an implicit oracle assumption at inference time: the timestamps of future valid observations are presumed to be known in advance. This assumption limits practical relevance, since in many real systems the more fundamental question is not only what the future value will be, but also whether a valid observation will occur at all. In this paper, we propose Timeflies, a unified framework that reformulates forecasting as a joint problem of future observability inference and value estimation. To explicitly model the interaction between observation dynamics and state evolution, Timeflies adopts an observation stream and a value stream, coupled through three dedicated modules for reliability-aware embedding, observation-guided dependency modeling, and joint prediction. We further construct Shadow, a benchmark that combines natural missingness from public datasets with real-world industrial data, and introduce the Observation-Value Joint Entropy (OVJE) metric to comprehensively evaluate this coupled predictability. Extensive experiments show that Timeflies consistently outperforms existing methods, highlighting the importance of explicitly modeling future observability in time series forecasting with missing values. Code and dataset are available in https://github.com/ant-intl/Timeflies.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Beyond Artifacts: Towards Generalizable Synthetic Song Detection via Music-Intrinsic Features

arXiv:2606.16612v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of AI music generators highlights the urgent need for reliable Synthetic Song Detection (SSD). Existing SSD methods often rely on low-level artifacts or fixed feature assumptions, struggling to capture generator-agnostic cues. To address this, we propose Sofia (Synthetic-song detection framework via music features), a flexible framework that models music-intrinsic attributes via feature-specific experts and an adaptive Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) module. By configuring Sofia with representative Vocal, Audio-effect, Global structure features, and their combinations, we present their individual and complementary contributions. To comprehensively evaluate our framework, we further construct MUSIC8K, a challenging benchmark featuring lastest emerging generators and realistic audio perturbations. Experiments show that Sofia learns generator-agnostic representations from music-intrinsic features, improving the F1 score by 18.5 points over the strongest baseline on MUSIC8K-O while maintaining strong robustness.

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

Communication-Efficient Neural Tangent Kernels for Heterogeneous Decentralized Federated Learning

Authors:

arXiv:2512.12737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decentralized federated learning (DFL) enables collaborative model training without a central server, but converges slowly under statistical heterogeneity. Recent work has shown that neural tangent kernel (NTK) methods achieve faster convergence than gradient-based updates in DFL, while momentum has proven effective for accelerating gradient-based FL. However, applying momentum to NTK updates can destabilize training under heterogeneous data. We propose SPARK, which addresses this instability with a stage-wise annealed soft-label regularizer evaluated on neighborhood-aggregated data, so that momentum can accelerate NTK updates stably. Under high heterogeneity, SPARK converges about 3$\times$ faster than baselines and lowers the total communication to a target accuracy by up to about 70\%, and it attains higher accuracy across heterogeneity levels. We further study random projection as an optional Jacobian-compression strategy for bandwidth-constrained settings. We validate the approach across multiple datasets, network topologies, and heterogeneity levels.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

General circuit mapping algorithm for neutral atom quantum computers

arXiv:2606.20503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neutral atom quantum computers (NAQC) are emerging as a promising, scalable quantum computing platform because of their long qubit coherence, flexible qubit arrangement, and multiqubit gate capabilities. However, circuit execution often requires physically moving qubits, making compilation a critical optimization challenge. We propose a circuit independent mathematical framework built on graph-theoretic combinatorial optimization that determines the minimal number of required qubit transfers. This model captures spatial constraints specific to NAQC platforms with zone-limited gate operations and multi-qubit gates. From this framework, we encode the qubit mapping problem as a nonlinear integer program and solve it using a genetic algorithm, enabling trade-offs between minimizing the total traveled distance and the number of parallel transfer operations. Compared to the state-of-the-art scalable compiler for zoned architectures, our approach consistently finds fewer transfers. Depending on the optimization focus, our method produces shorter traveled distances or fewer parallel transfer operations. This work provides both theoretical guaranties and a practical tool for efficient, architecture-aware quantum circuit compilation. As a result, practitioners can generate hardware-aware mappings that reduce movement-induced errors and better exploit atom transfer parallelism, directly improving execution efficiency on NAQC devices.

06.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Deciphering cell type-specific causal genetic effects on brain imaging-derived phenotypes and disorders with single-cell Mendelian randomization

Authors:

by Anyi Yang, Xingzhong Zhao, Xing-Ming Zhao, Yucheng T. Yang Reconstructing causality routes from genetic effects to complex phenotypes in particular cell types is crucial for understanding biological mechanisms underlying the brain-associated phenotypes including imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs), and brain disorders and behaviors (DBs). Here, we develop a single-cell Mendelian randomization framework to infer cell type-specific causal relationships between gene expression and diverse brain-associated complex phenotypes by integrating single-cell expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTLs) and genome-wide association study findings. We identifiy a set of 254 and 217 cis-eQTL target genes (eGenes) that may have causal effects on 112 IDPs and 26 DBs in eight cell types, respectively. These causal eGenes exhibit strong cell type specificity and varied pleiotropy among different types of brain-associated phenotypes. Further integrative analysis reveals putative causality routes among cell type-specific causal eGenes and brain-associated complex phenotypes. Finally, we characterize the spatiotemporal expression patterns of these causal eGenes, and highlight the coordinated associations of the brain-associated phenotypes based on the expression of their causal eGenes. Overall, our study presents a large-scale analysis of the genetic effects of brain structures, disorders and behaviors, providing a catalog of cell type-specific causal eGenes.

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

DC-Motion: Decoupling Semantics and Details via Discrete-Continuous Tokens for Human Motion Generation

Text-to-motion generation requires synthesizing physically realistic dynamics that strictly follow complex and long-horizon textual instructions. Existing approaches rely on homogeneous representation spaces that may fail to capture the hierarchical nature of human motion, with diffusion models struggling at compositional semantic reasoning and AR models sacrificing fine-grained physical details due to quantization. To solve it, we introduce DC-Motion, a factorized generative framework designed to explicitly decouple semantics and details via discrete-continuous tokens. A Discrete-Continuous VAE (DC-VAE) first decomposes motion into discrete tokens for semantics and continuous residuals for fine-grained dynamics. Then, a masked AR model predicts the discrete structure from text, and a lightweight residual diffusion model recovers the continuous physical details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DC-Motion effectively improves the capability to follow complex instructions. By effectively balancing semantic controllability and physical realism, our approach offers a highly adaptable modeling paradigm for human motion generation. On both HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets, DC-Motion achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering the best FID for motion realism and R-precision for text alignment.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Efficient upsampling for tensor-network and quantum-state encoded functions

arXiv:2601.03885v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Both tensor trains (TTs) and quantum states provide compressed representations of grid-structured data with potentially exponential compression power. We present a unified framework for upsampling data encoded in vector amplitudes, with efficient realizations in both classical TT and quantum settings. Starting from an \(n\)-core TT or an \(n\)-qubit state on a coarse grid with \(2^n\) points, the construction produces an \((n+m)\)-core TT or \((n+m)\)-qubit state on a finer grid with \(2^{n+m}\) points. In the TT setting, it supports interpolation, quasi-interpolation, augmentation, and synthesis through efficient low-rank contractions, with the added \(m\) cores retaining constant rank. For function-value encodings, the resulting interpolation satisfies an \(\ell^2\)-error bound independent of the number of added grid points, achieves exponential compression at fixed accuracy, and has a logarithmic complexity in the number of grid points. In the quantum setting, the refined state is prepared by a \(\mathrm{poly}(n,m)\)-size circuit using \(\log(p+1)\) ancillas, where \(p\) controls the smoothness of the quasi-interpolant; the corresponding error scales quadratically with the initial grid spacing. We validate our framework for tensor networks in one-, two-, and three-dimensional examples, including functions, derivatives, airfoil masks, and synthetic random fields such as three-dimensional turbulence. In particular, fractal fields can be generated directly in TT format with logarithmic memory and runtime. These results open a practical route to multiscale solvers, generative models, and geometry-aware algorithms on tensor-network and quantum platforms, with potential applications in scientific simulation, imaging, and real-time graphics.

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

AudioDER: A Deduplication-Enhanced Reasoning Dataset for Post-Training Large Audio-Language Models

arXiv:2606.14591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have shown strong performance on a wide range of audio understanding tasks, yet they still struggle with complex audio reasoning. A practical way to improve such capabilities is post-training, whose effectiveness critically depends on the quality and diversity of training data. However, existing audio-language datasets often contain substantial redundancy, where many samples are highly similar in acoustic content and thus provide overlapping supervisory signals. Such redundancy not only increases annotation cost, but also limits corpus diversity and reduces the effectiveness of post-training. To address this issue, we propose a redundancy-aware data construction pipeline for building reasoning-oriented supervision for LALMs. Specifically, we first perform acoustic similarity-based deduplication across raw audio datasets to improve corpus diversity. We then integrate existing audio captions and question-answer pairs into a unified multiple-choice format. Based on these unified annotations, we leverage Qwen3-30B to generate chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales for reasoning-oriented supervision. Based on this pipeline, we construct AudioDER, a reasoning-oriented post-training dataset containing approximately 191k samples spanning sound, speech, and music. Each sample consists of an audio clip, a multiple-choice question, four answer candidates, an audio caption, and a CoT rationale. Extensive experiments show that post-training on AudioDER consistently improves the performance of Qwen2-Audio-7B-Instruct on multiple audio reasoning benchmarks, including MMAU-mini, MMSU, and MMAR. We hope AudioDER can serve as a valuable resource for advancing audio reasoning research and the development of more capable LALMs.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Environment-Adaptive Covariate Selection: Learning When to Use Spurious Correlations for Out-of-Distribution Prediction

arXiv:2601.02322v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A common approach to out-of-distribution prediction restricts models to causal or invariant covariates to avoid spurious associations that may change across environments. Despite its theoretical appeal, this strategy can underperform empirical risk minimization when only a subset of the causal parents of the outcome is observed. In such settings, non-causal covariates can serve as proxies for unobserved causal parents and improve prediction when the proxy relationship is stable, but they can hurt when shifts disrupt that relationship. Thus, the optimal covariate set can depend on the specific shift encountered. Because different shifts leave signatures in the unlabeled covariate distribution, we propose an environment-adaptive covariate selection algorithm that maps environment-level summaries to environment-specific covariate sets. These summaries may be hand-crafted or learned from multi-environment data, and prior causal knowledge can be incorporated as constraints. Across simulations and applied datasets, the proposed method improves over static causal, invariant, and other non-adaptive rules under diverse shifts.

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

Reverse Flow Matching: A Unified Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion and Flow Policies

arXiv:2601.08136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion and flow policies are gaining prominence in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressive power, yet training them efficiently remains a critical challenge. A fundamental difficulty that distinguishes online RL from standard generative modeling is the lack of direct samples from the target Boltzmann distribution defined by the Q-function. To address this, two seemingly distinct families of methods have been proposed for diffusion policies: a noise-expectation family, which uses a weighted average of noise as the training target, and a gradient-expectation family, which employs a weighted average of Q-function gradients. However, it remains unclear how these objectives are formally related, or whether they can be synthesized into a more general formulation. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, reverse flow matching (RFM), which rigorously addresses the problem of training diffusion and flow models without direct target samples. By adopting a reverse inferential perspective, we formulate the training target as a posterior mean estimation problem given an intermediate noisy sample. Crucially, we introduce Langevin Stein operators to construct zero-mean control variates, deriving a general class of estimators that share the same expectation. We show that existing noise-expectation and gradient-expectation methods are simply two specific instances within this broader class. This unified view yields two key advancements: it extends the capability of targeting Boltzmann distributions from diffusion to flow policies, and it enables the principled combination of Q-value and Q-gradient information to form an effective estimator, thereby improving training efficiency and stability. We instantiate RFM to train a flow policy in online RL and demonstrate improved performance on continuous-control benchmarks compared to diffusion policy baselines.

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

Smarter Saboteurs, Better Fixers: Scaling & Security in Linear Multi-Agent Workflows

arXiv:2606.12709v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) are deployed in the wild, the resilience of their collaboration structures against adversarial compromise becomes a critical safety concern. Attackers may leverage prompt-injection or jailbreaking to sabotage individual agents within MAS workflows, but the interaction between model scaling and system-level resilience remains poorly understood. This paper investigates how model scale affects the security of linear multi-agent workflows. Our experiments across scales of two open-weight model families on the HumanEval benchmark reveal a compliance-correction symmetry: larger models are far more likely to faithfully execute malicious instructions, with the control-to-malicious performance drop reaching 53.7pp at 27B in uncorrected pipelines. However, appending a lightweight terminal Fixer stage collapses this to 0.6pp and restores statistical parity with control-level performance, demonstrating that strictly linear collaboration structures can be viable and resilient to adversaries at this scale, and suggesting that the brittleness previously attributed to linear topology may stem from a lack of correction.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Spatial Analysis and Multilevel Determinants of Hypertension in Zambia: Analysis of the 2017 WHO STEPS Survey

Background: Hypertension is the leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor globally, with the fastest-growing burden in low- and middle-income countries. This study aimed to estimate national hypertension prevalence, map provincial patterns, assess spatial clustering, and identify individual and community-level determinants among Zambian adults using the 2017 WHO STEPS survey. Methods: This cross-sectional study used data from the 2017 WHO STEPS survey, a nationally representative sample of 4,301 adults aged 18-69 years. Hypertension was defined as systolic BP [&ge;]140 mmHg, diastolic BP [&ge;]90 mmHg, or current antihypertensive use. Spatial autocorrelation was assessed via Moran's I and LISA. Four nested generalised linear mixed models with PSU-level random intercepts identified individual and community-level determinants. Results: Overall weighted hypertension prevalence was 24.0%. Lusaka recorded the highest prevalence (30.2%), followed by Southern (29.9%) and Muchinga (28.3%) provinces; Western Province had the lowest (12.4%). Spatial clustering was statistically significant but modest (Moran's I = 0.0247, p < 0.001). Between-cluster variation reduced from ICC = 5.9% to 1.8% in the full model, indicating geographic differences were largely explained by individual characteristics. Age was the strongest predictor; adults aged 60-69 had nearly sevenfold higher odds than those aged 18-29 (AOR 6.92, 95% CI: 4.95-9.66). Women had lower odds than men (AOR 0.64, 95% CI: 0.52-0.79). Obesity (AOR 2.34), overweight (AOR 1.65), high cholesterol (AOR 1.40), diabetes (AOR 1.35), and single marital status (AOR 1.34) were independently significant. Western Province showed consistently lower odds than Central Province (AOR 0.48). Conclusion: Hypertension affects one in four Zambian adults, driven primarily by age, sex, obesity, dyslipidaemia, and diabetes. Geographically prioritised interventions, including community health worker-led screening programmes in Lusaka and Southern Province, would maximise population-level impact. Population-level salt reduction and alcohol policies represent cost-effective complementary strategies. Longitudinal studies with finer spatial resolution are needed to clarify causal pathways underlying observed geographic clustering and inform SDG Target 3.4 progress.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

ProCUA-SFT Technical Report

Training computer-use agents (CUAs) – models that interact with graphical desktops through screenshots and keyboard/mouse actions – requires large-scale, diverse trajectory data collected in full desktop environments. The largest public resource, AgentNet (22.5K human trajectories), leads to negative transfer when used for supervised fine-tuning (SFT): continuing training UI-TARS 7B on AgentNet causes OSWorld success rate to fall from 26.3% to 8-10%. We present ProCUA-SFT, a dataset of 3.1M step-level SFT samples distilled from 93K synthetic trajectories across 2,484 application combinations. The dataset is produced by a fully automated pipeline that (i) synthesizes grounded tasks on live desktops seeded with real-world content – 912 spreadsheets from SpreadsheetBench, approximately 10K permissively-licensed presentations from Zenodo10K, and multi-application OSWorld configs – and (ii) verifies each task's feasibility through binary precondition checking before rollout. A single VLM (Kimi-K2.5) serves as goal generator, precondition judge, and trajectory executor, eliminating planner-actor capability gaps. Each trajectory is expanded into step-prefix samples that exactly reproduce the context layout seen at inference time. Fine-tuning UI-TARS 7B on ProCUA-SFT for one epoch yields 45.0% on OSWorld – an 18.7 percentage-point improvement over the base model and over 35% above AgentNet-trained counterparts. A subset of ProCUA was incorporated into the training data for the Nemotron 3 Nano Omni model, contributing to its computer-use capabilities.

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

Rethinking RAG in Long Videos: What to Retrieve and How to Use It?

arXiv:2606.13141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation is moving beyond text into long, egocentric video, where systems must select query-relevant chunks across multiple modalities and temporal granularities. Yet progress in VideoRAG is limited by two gaps: existing benchmarks allow queries to be answered without the video, obscuring retrieval errors, and prior methods apply a single modality-granularity configuration per query, ignoring chunk-level variability. We address both by introducing V-RAGBench, a benchmark of $\langle$query, evidence chunk, answer$\rangle$ triplets that enables faithful, decoupled evaluation of retrieval and generation, and CARVE, a simple method that runs parallel retrievers across configurations and employs chunk-adaptive reranking to identify the winning configuration for each chunk. Each chunk then enters the generator under its winning configuration selected during retrieval, yielding an interleaved evidence form where the chunk-level decision propagates across both stages. CARVE outperforms eight recent VideoRAG baselines, with the chunks supplied to the generator interleaving multiple configurations rather than sharing a single one, a behavior unattainable by query-level methods.

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

UI2Code^N: UI-to-Code Generation as Interactive Visual Optimization

UI-to-code aims to translate UI screenshots into executable front-end code. Despite progress with vision-language models (VLMs), most existing methods formulate UI-to-code as a single-pass generation, which mismatches real-world UI development that is inherently iterative and feedback-driven. We reformulate UI-to-code as an interactive visual optimization problem, where code generation is embedded in a closed-loop process of execution, visual inspection, and iterative refinement driven by rendered visual feedback. To address the non-differentiability of visual objectives and the noise of absolute visual evaluators, we propose Relative Visual Policy Optimization (RVPO), a preference-based reinforcement learning method that optimizes relative visual rankings among rendered candidates under execution feedback. We instantiate this paradigm in UI2Code^N, an open-source 9B model trained via continual pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on UI drafting, UI polishing, and UI editing benchmarks, even outperforming larger models, with performance consistently improving through iterative visual optimization. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/zai-org/UI2Code_N.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

State-Grounded Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Tool-Augmented LLMs

Training tool-augmented LLM agents requires large corpora of multi-turn, tool-grounded conversational data that is expensive to annotate, privacy-constrained in production settings, and largely absent from public datasets. We present StateGen, a synthetic data generation platform that produces scored, reasoning-trace-rich training conversations by orchestrating a four-role LLM loop: a persona-conditioned user simulator, an agent under test, a state-grounded tool simulator, and a multi-axis LLM judge. The key architectural contribution is an authoritative state manager that maintains a structured world-state object across turns, enforcing a backend-is-truth invariant that eliminates the dominant class of tool-call hallucinations by construction. StateGen extends naturally to hierarchical multi-agent settings by declaring sub-agents as tools, all sharing a single state object. We report results on 64,698 evaluated conversations across three production corpora: tool-call hallucination scores reach 9.66/10, the system supports persona-driven variation via a 23-dimensional trait vector, and a cleanly separated train and golden evaluation set split confirms the data is not memorization bait (per-criterion gap analysis). Comparison with eight external systems shows that no single publicly available platform combines multi-turn generation, state-grounded tool simulation, hierarchical multi-agent support, and built-in judge scoring.

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

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

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606.11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks. We present TacCoRL, a scalable framework that injects Tactile feedback into VLA policies and improves them through sim-real Co-training and simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL), without requiring large-scale tactile pretraining or extensive real-world contact exploration. The key idea is not only adding touch as an input, but learning how contact readings should modulate action responses in near-failure states that are rare in demonstrations and risky to collect on hardware. We use a real-aligned simulator as a closed-loop training environment for contact interaction. Mixed simulated and real trajectories first warm-start tactile-conditioned actions in the pretrained policy. Reinforcement learning with verifiable task rewards then optimizes the policy using simulated contact rollouts. It reinforces tactile-conditioned actions that lead to task completion, while a supervised objective on real trajectories keeps the refined policy anchored to deployment visual, tactile, and action distributions. The resulting policy transfers directly to the real robot without privileged simulation state or online real-world RL. Across four bimanual contact-rich tasks, the final visuo-tactile policy achieves an average success rate of 72.5%, compared to baseline of 50.0%. Result videos and more details are available at https://tac-corl.github.io/

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Execution-State Capsules: Graph-Bound Execution-State Checkpoint and Restore for Low-Latency, Small-Batch, On-Device Physical-AI Serving

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mainstream LLM serving systems reuse prefix work mainly through paged or radix key-value (KV) caches. This is highly effective for high-throughput, high-concurrency serving, but it manages only one positional fragment of execution state: the KV cache. We study the opposite regime: low-latency, small-batch, on-device physical-AI serving, where interactive LLM agents, speech systems, and robot policies repeatedly branch, reset, interrupt, and re-enter under tight responsiveness budgets. We introduce execution-state capsules, a graph-bound checkpoint and restore mechanism for the complete restorable state at a committed boundary. FlashRT is a white-box, backend-facing kernel runtime whose evaluated NVIDIA CUDA backend runs captured graph plans over contiguous static buffers with no block-table indirection. Because the live state is a closed set of named buffers, a capsule can snapshot, restore, fork, or roll back the whole execution boundary, including KV, recurrent state, convolution state, MTP state, and metadata. This moves reuse from token-addressed KV fragments to graph-bound execution-state boundaries. On an RTX 5090, capsule restore is byte-exact at the stored-state level and token-identical under greedy decode. A KV-only ablation diverges, showing that recurrent state is load-bearing. GPU-resident snapshot and restore are sub-millisecond, and TTFT speedup over cold prefill grows from 3.9x at 2k tokens to 27x at 16k tokens. On Jetson AGX Thor and DGX Spark, the same correctness and structural properties hold. Capsules are not a replacement for high-throughput KV-cache serving; they define a complementary latency-first serving point for explicit execution-state reuse.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Critical Percolation as a Synthetic Data Model for Interpretability

arXiv:2606.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks learn features that reflect the hierarchical, multi-scale structure of natural data. Synthetic datasets used to evaluate interpretability methods typically lack this structure, limiting their value as realistic toy models. To close this gap, we introduce a family of synthetic datasets consisting of hierarchical functions defined on critical mean-field percolation clusters embedded in a high-dimensional data space. The percolation data consists of sparse, low-dimensional fractal clusters with a power-law size distribution. Latent variables modeling a taxonomic hierarchy generate each data point's target value. The data model is analytically tractable with known critical exponents that fix its properties without requiring hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a mapping between percolation clusters, random trees, and additive coalescence to propose an almost linear-time algorithm to jointly sample a random tree and its hierarchical latent decomposition, enabling data generation at arbitrary scale. Using probing experiments, we find that the model's ground-truth latent variables can be linearly decoded from neural network activations. Together, sparsity, self-similarity, power-law statistics, and analytical tractability make critical percolation a principled testbed for interpretability research.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimizing bias-tailored quantum error correction beyond code-capacity noise

arXiv:2606.17709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that the substantial advantages predicted for bias-tailored quantum error correction (QEC) under code-capacity noise are strongly reduced once realistic syndrome extraction and circuit-level noise models are considered. We start by comparing XZZX codes to rectangular surface codes with a bias-dependent optimised anisotropy. Although code-capacity simulations predict an advantage of rectangular surface codes in the limit of high noise bias, this actually disappears under circuit-level noise, making the XZZX codes the preferred and simplest choice even for platforms that allow for a flexible variation of the code layout adapted to changes in noise calibration. Our results identify bias degradation during syndrome extraction under circuit-level noise as the central limitation of biased-tailored QEC. To partially mitigate this effect, we introduce a bias-filtering CNOT gadget that temporarily encodes the ancillary target qubit during syndrome extraction in a repetition code and, upon measurement and feed forward, manages to reduce the bias degradation. In a regime of high-bias and low-idle errors, this bias-filtering gadget yields a few-percent relative improvement of the XZZX code error threshold, demonstrating that lightweight bias-filtering strategies can recover part of the lost bias-tailoring advantage for realistic circuit-level noise.

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

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Agentic AI-based Framework for Mitigating Premature Diagnostic Handoff and Silent Hallucination in Healthcare Applications

arXiv:2606.18068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have driven the rise of Agentic AI, showing promise for medical reasoning. However, open-ended conversational agents remain prone to two critical failure modes: premature diagnostic handoff and silent clinical hallucinations that may go undetected before reaching the patient. In this work, we propose a multi-agent framework that addresses both issues by replacing ``LLM-as-a-judge'' routing with deterministic orchestration constraints. The framework incorporates two safety mechanisms. First, a neuro-symbolic state-tracking gate enforces completeness of the OLDCARTS clinical protocol (Onset, Location, Duration, Character, Aggravating/Alleviating factors, Radiation, Timing, and Severity) by blocking diagnostic transitions until all required dimensions are collected. Second, an epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) gate computes semantic entropy (H) across K=5 independent diagnostic samples to identify and intercept divergent outputs before delivery. We evaluate the system using simulated patient agents powered by the llama-3.1-70b-instruct model on 150 test cases. The full architecture achieves 49.3% diagnostic precision, representing an absolute improvement of 11.3 percentage points over an unconstrained baseline. Additionally, we observe a statistically significant negative correlation (r = -0.181, p < 0.05) between OLDCARTS completeness (\sigma) and semantic entropy (H), suggesting that structured information gathering is associated with reduced diagnostic uncertainty.

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

Achieving Heisenberg limit under noisy conditions with quantum Zeno dynamics and dynamical decoupling

arXiv:2606.13205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum Zeno dynamics (QZD) and dynamical decoupling (DD) are useful tools that enable the effective suppression of noise in quantum systems. We consider the problem of when (i) noise can be suppressed and (ii) Heisenberg limit (HL) can be achieved in quantum metrology, and prove necessary and sufficient conditions for when QZD and DD are useful for achieving these two goals. We also show that in the Markovian regime, there are scenarios where preventing errors using QZD/DD may enable HL to be achieved where current QEC methods may not. Finally, we demonstrate that the combination of both techniques can allow individually imperfect QZD and DD strategies to saturate HL.