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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Point Cloud Diffusion with Global and Local Reconstruction for Instance-Level 3D Anomaly Detection

3D anomaly detection in point clouds is critical for high-precision industrial manufacturing. Reconstruction-based methods have laid a strong foundation by detecting 3D anomalies through comparisons between defective inputs and their reconstructed normal counterparts. However, existing methods still suffer from two challenges: 1) the foreground weak defective regions such as scratches are hard to reconstruct and detect, where the anomaly deviations in normalized point clouds can be as small as $10^{-3}$; 2) the background non-defective regions are prone to get positional bias in reconstruction, which leads to false positives. To address these challenges, we propose PCDiff, a point cloud diffusion framework for instance-level 3D anomaly generation and detection. In the generation phase, an instance-level multi-modal attention is embedded into the generation framework, where anomalies are conditioned with texture gradient, image patch, text and mask. The instance-level condition enables the high-quality generation of weak-defective anomalies. In the detection phase, a joint local-global reconstruction algorithm is introduced to ensure local anomaly restoration and global geometric consistency, which preserves background normal structure while restoring the foreground defect. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed PCDiff significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both 3D anomaly generation fidelity and reconstruction quality, leading to substantial improvements in anomaly detection accuracy.

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

Scaling Enterprise Agent Routing: Degradation, Diagnosis, and Recovery

Production LLM assistants route user requests to growing libraries of specialized tools, but how does routing accuracy degrade as the catalog scales? We study single-step routing on a 110-agent, 584-tool catalog from a deployed enterprise productivity assistant, evaluating three frontier models from 10 to 110 agents. Routing F1 on under-specified requests drops 16–23 percentage points across models. An oracle analysis decomposes the degradation into a retrieval gap (the model cannot surface the right tool) and a confusion gap (even with perfect retrieval, the oracle ceiling drops 10pp). Embedding-based shortlisting recovers +10–11pp F1 at full scale across all three models and two providers. A production annotation study (1,435 human-labeled utterances, three annotators) confirms the recovery on real traffic at +10–17pp despite 10–15pp lower absolute performance.

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

DiRecT: Safe Diffusion-Based Planning via Receding-Horizon Denoising

arXiv:2606.15359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for planning and control by learning multimodal distributions over actions and trajectories. Yet reliable inference-time safety enforcement remains a key barrier to their deployment in safety-critical tasks. Existing approaches typically project each denoising iterate onto the feasible set, even though constraints are defined only on the final clean trajectory. Enforcing feasibility on noisy intermediate samples can therefore overconstrain the sampling dynamics, substantially degrading sample quality. To address this limitation, we introduce DiRecT (Diffusion-based planning via Receding-horizon denoising with Terminal constraints), a training-free algorithm for constrained sampling from diffusion models via stochastic optimal control (SOC). DiRecT enforces constraints only on the final clean sample, avoiding unnecessary restrictions on the intermediate denoising dynamics. Inspired by model predictive control, we derive a principled receding-horizon surrogate for the otherwise intractable constrained SOC formulation, yielding an efficient algorithm that cleanly separates stochastic denoising from constraint satisfaction, progressively steering samples toward feasible final trajectories without distorting the learned diffusion dynamics. Furthermore, DiRecT is highly flexible: it can leverage off-the-shelf or domain-specific optimizers, incorporate priors over environment dynamics, and optimize additional soft rewards. Extensive experiments on safe planning benchmarks demonstrate that DiRecT substantially improves deployment safety and task performance over existing diffusion-based planning baselines.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

An integrated ultrahigh vacuum cluster tool for diamond surface science and single nitrogen-vacancy center measurements

arXiv:2606.13961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a custom-designed ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) cluster tool developed for studying shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, enabling in situ diamond surface preparation, characterization, and single NV center dynamics measurements within a single connected platform. The system combines a surface science chamber for controlled surface modification and analysis with a cryogenic confocal microscope chamber dedicated to NV spin and optical measurements. This integrated approach enables a direct correlation between diamond surface chemistry and the resulting NV spin and charge properties. The instrument provides a versatile platform for systematic studies of surface-induced decoherence mechanisms and charge dynamics for shallow NV centers, and establishes a pathway toward reproducible surface engineering for quantum sensing applications.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A blastoporal organizer in a ctenophore

In an iconic experiment in 1924, Hilde Mangold and Hans Spemann established that the dorsal blastopore lip of amphibian embryos functions as an organizer and induces a secondary body axis when transplanted into a host embryo1. This discovery demonstrated that specific embryonic regions can regulate embryonic patterning and lead to the establishment of an entire body axis. Subsequent studies have revealed that cnidarians, the sister group to Bilateria, also possess a blastoporal embryonic organizer2,3. However, the evolutionary origin of the organizer remains unclear. Here we report that the blastopore lip of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, a member of the evolutionary sister group to all other metazoans4,5, exhibits organizer activity. We show that transplanted fragments of blastopore lip tissue from M. leidyi gastrula induce secondary pharynx and mouth formation. Moreover, transphyletic transplantation experiments show that the blastopore lip of M. leidyi leads to the generation of a secondary body axis in embryos of the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis. Organizer function in M. leidyi requires both β-catenin and TGFβ signalling, and the TGFβ-family ligands probably provide this inductive capacity. These findings reveal the deep homology of the blastoporal organizer in ctenophores, cnidarians and vertebrates, implying the ancestral organizer role of the blastopore lip. We propose that the emergence of the organizer was an essential innovation that facilitated the change from the temporal cell differentiation of unicellular relatives to the spatial cell differentiation of the first multicellular embryo. Experiments using the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi and the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveal that the emergence of a core signalling pathway may have been a key innovation enabling the transition to multicellularity in animals.

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

Extended pseudo-spectral physics-informed neural networks for phase-field models

arXiv:2606.24660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Phase-field models play a central role in the continuum description of phase separation, in which the bulk free-energy density and the interfacial thickness parameter determine pattern formation and microstructural evolution. In practice, these constitutive quantities are rarely known a priori and must be inferred from limited dynamical observations. In this work, an extended pseudo-spectral physics-informed neural network (ESPINN) framework is developed for the inverse identification of phase-field models from transient snapshot data. It enables the simultaneous recovery of both the bulk chemical potential and unknown gradient coefficients. Numerical experiments on the one-dimensional Cahn-Hilliard equation demonstrate accurate and statistically stable reconstruction in the noiseless regime, with substantial constitutive information recoverable from even a single snapshot pair. In the presence of noise, reconstruction accuracy degrades gracefully, and increasing the number of snapshots improves robustness by reducing variance across runs. These results establish ESPINN as a data-efficient and physically consistent approach for learning free-energy structure in continuum models of phase separation.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Synthetic Resonance: A Framework for Growth-Oriented Human-AI Relationships

arXiv:2606.18265v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As human relationships with artificial intelligence systems become increasingly frequent and sustained, existing language and theory fail to accurately capture the nature of these affiliations. Common descriptors such as mutual understanding, connection, or friendship risk anthropomorphizing systems that lack subjective experience, while dominant frameworks tend to reduce AI to either a tool or a threat. In this paper, I introduce the concept of synthetic resonance as an integrative framework for understanding human-AI relationships. Synthetic resonance describes how relationships humans define as meaningful can emerge between a human and an AI system without the need to attribute shared feelings or mutual awareness. I argue that synthetic resonance is best understood as a structured, dynamic pattern of interaction that can produce a sense of relationship without the presence of a second experiencing subject. By clarifying this distinction, the concept of synthetic resonance offers a more precise way of conceptualizing human-AI relationships and highlights their potential value and ethical implications. I also call for more research that tests the processes and outcomes of synthetic resonance.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Development and External Validation of a Machine Learning Model for 10-Year Ischemic Stroke Risk Prediction in Diverse Populations

Importance: Machine-learning models for ischemic stroke risk prediction are rarely validated across ancestrally distinct cohorts, and the contributions of polygenic risk scores (PRS) and self-reported race in such models remain unclear. Objective: To develop and externally validate a 10-year ischemic stroke risk model and quantify the incremental contributions of laboratory trajectories, PRS, and self-reported race and ethnicity across populations. Design, Setting, and Participants: Retrospective cohort study with model development in the All of Us (AoU) Research Program (n = 34,987; 1,920 incident strokes) and external validation in the BioMe Biobank at Mount Sinai (n = 10,693; 107 incident strokes). Adults aged 45 years or older with at least 1 year of pre-baseline electronic health record data were anchored to a January 2010 baseline with 10-year follow-up. Exposures: Three XGBoost model tiers added laboratory feature trajectories (M2) and 20 PRS (M3) to clinical baseline features (M1); evaluated under race-blind and race-aware specifications. Main Outcomes and Measures: First inpatient ischemic stroke within 10 years; discrimination (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve [AUROC]) and calibration (observed-to-expected [O/E] ratio). Results: In the AoU test partition (n = 6,998; 384 cases), M3 achieved an AUROC of 0.813 (95% CI, 0.788-0.837), outperforming the Revised Framingham Stroke Risk Profile (AUROC difference, 0.164) and Pooled Cohort Equations (AUROC difference, 0.181; both P < 0.001). Discrimination transferred to BioMe (AUROC, 0.745), but predictions were systematically high (aggregate O/E ratio, 0.12 vs 1.00 in AoU), consistent with intercept-shift miscalibration; BioMe-fitted intercept recalibration restored calibration in African American and Hispanic participants but not European American participants. The PRS contribution was significant only among Hispanic participants in BioMe (AUROC difference, 0.042; P = 0.003), with no significant within-stratum gain in the other 5 cohort-by-race combinations. Adding self-reported race produced small gains when combined with PRS (BioMe AUROC difference, 0.022; P = 0.034; AoU AUROC difference, 0.006; P = 0.052) but not when added without PRS. Conclusions and Relevance: A machine-learning ensemble combining clinical, laboratory, and polygenic features outperformed traditional risk scores by 0.16 to 0.18 AUROC and retained discriminative validity in an ancestrally distinct external cohort but required site-specific recalibration of absolute risk. The marginal contribution of self-reported race overlapped with polygenic signal, supporting per-ancestry calibration over universal race-aware model deployment.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Graph Alignment for Benchmarking Graph Neural Networks and Learning Positional Encodings

arXiv:2505.13087v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a novel benchmarking methodology for graph neural networks (GNNs) based on the graph alignment problem, a combinatorial optimization task that generalizes graph isomorphism by aligning two unlabeled graphs to maximize overlapping edges. We frame this problem as a self-supervised learning task and present several methods to generate graph alignment datasets using synthetic random graphs and real-world graph datasets from multiple domains. For a given graph dataset, we generate a family of graph alignment datasets with increasing difficulty, allowing us to rank the performance of various architectures. Our experiments prove that there is an optimal task difficulty for having a statistically relevant ranking of different models and that, even on a structure-only task, anisotropic models perform better compared to isotropic ones. To further prove that our synthetic task capture meaningful information, we show its effectiveness for self-supervised GNN pre-training: the learned node embeddings can be leveraged as positional encodings by transformers for graph regression or can be used to reconstruct the full structure of the graph with $98\%$ accuracy. To support reproducibility and further research, we provide an open-source Python package to generate graph alignment datasets and benchmark new GNN architectures. The source code is available at https://github.com/adrien-lagesse/graph-alignment-benchmark.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Daily briefing: First-ever ‘nuclear’ clocks put atomic clocks in the shade

Authors:

Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change. Two research teams have created a new, long-awaited type of timekeeper. Plus, how backlash has saved an ocean-monitoring network targeted by Trump and how our cultural heritage is put at risk by climate change.

11.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

Daily briefing: How Venus flytraps snap shut

Authors:

Softening cells enable flytraps to shut with astonishing speed. Plus, the cutting-edge science happening at the World Cup and why scientists shouldn’t ignore the Pope’s AI message. Softening cells enable flytraps to shut with astonishing speed. Plus, the cutting-edge science happening at the World Cup and why scientists shouldn’t ignore the Pope’s AI message.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

OmicOS: A Comprehensive Omics Ecosystem Infrastructure and Agent System for the AI Era

Biology has accumulated a vast ecosystem of omics methods, but much of this ecosystem remains built for expert humans rather than scientific agents. Methods are scattered across Python packages, R/Bioconductor and CRAN workflows, command-line tools, incompatible data containers and implicit object states, making even routine analyses difficult for an AI system to choose, execute and verify reliably. Here we introduce OmicOS, a comprehensive omics ecosystem infrastructure and agent system that turns OmicVerse V2, an open-source omics community, into an executable foundation for agentic biology. OmicVerse V2 provides the community substrate: scalable AnnDataOOM-compatible rust backends, agent-friendly Python algorithms for single-cell, spatial, bulk and multi-omics analysis, interfaces to single-cell foundation models, and Python-native reconstructions of historically R-centred Bioconductor/CRAN-style workflows. OmicOS makes this substrate actionable by registering analytical functions as state-aware capability contracts, allowing agents to inspect live data objects, select valid methods, execute controlled workflows and record provenance. The result is not a fixed pipeline, but a programmable omics environment in which agents compose real analyses from verified community methods rather than inventing tools. Across external and purpose-built benchmarks, OmicOS ranked first among the evaluated systems, reaching 81.2% on BiomniBench. Adding OmicVerse to a minimal agent improved task completion by up to 34.2 percentage points with qwen-3.6-35b, and controlled ablations showed that the gains came from registry-grounded execution rather than from larger models, documentation retrieval or unrestricted tool exposure. The same infrastructure scaled to atlas-sized data, reproduced R-centred workflows in Python and converted external pathology software into agent-usable skills. In a discovery task starting from a whole-body spatial map and the term Alzheimer disease, OmicOS composed a non-canonical workflow that integrated spatial expression, genetic association, eQTL and colocalization evidence to nominate a colon epithelial risk axis centred on PICALM, CD2AP and CR1. Together, OmicVerse and OmicOS define an open foundation for AI-era omics, showing how a community of biological methods can be transformed into a reliable, extensible and agent-operable system for discovery.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Uncertainty-aware reinforcement learning for chemical language models

arXiv:2606.24990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a powerful paradigm for de novo molecular design, enabling Chemical Language Models (CLMs) to navigate and explore the chemical space while optimizing specific desired properties. However, the existing RL frameworks treat all scoring functions as deterministic oracles, neglecting the inherent uncertainty attached to the predictions of the different molecular properties. This can lead to the exploration of highly-uncertain regions of the chemical space, focusing on the generation of highly scored molecules which are poorly supported by the training data. This can destabilize the optimization process, yielding predictions that are far from their true values. We propose and compare two complementary ways of incorporating predictive uncertainty into RL. In the first one, uncertainty is treated as an additional optimization objective and incorporated along with the rest of the scoring functions, allowing the policy to trade off exploitation against reliability. Secondly, uncertainty is used to modulate policy updates, reducing the influence of molecules whose properties lie far outside the scoring function confidence domain. Both approaches were evaluated across three different settings: (i) a controlled model system, in which the prediction error is modeled as a Gaussian distribution, with a variance proportional to the distance to the training data; and two real-world tasks, making use of (ii) ChemProp models and (iii) a Conformal Prediction wrapper applied to a Random forest classifier. We show that uncertainty-aware RL enables CLMs to explore chemical space more robustly by favoring lower-uncertainty regions. This leads to more reliable hit discovery without compromising molecular score, increasing the true hit rate by 0.25 (from 0.5 to 0.75), and nearly doubling the total number of true hits.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A More-Than-Human Approach to Designing for Mental Health: Remixing Prototypes for the Contexts of Complex Healthcare Infrastructures

Digital mental health tools (DMHTs) often fail to be successfully implemented in clinical settings. While user- and human-centred design frameworks are frequently proposed for developing effective tools, they are insufficient to address the sociotechnical complexity of healthcare environments. This paper addresses this limitation by detailing the application of a more-than-human design framework to incorporate wider contextual factors into design decisions. To demonstrate the application of this more-than-human design framework, we present a case study showcasing the design of one specific feature within a DMHT intended to support Health Improvement Practitioners (HIPs) in New Zealand's Integrated Primary Mental Health and Addictions (IPMHA) service. Our process blends usage-context storyboards with interface prototypes, using think-aloud interviews to test the contextual fit of our prototypes. The initial design concept failed due to contextual factors such as inconsistent wait times and the administrative burden on clients and clinic staff. This led to a pivot to a more context-appropriate, practitioner-focused, in-session concept for digital psychometric administration and automated scoring. This case study demonstrates that for DMHTs to be viable within complex healthcare environments, design must focus on more than the needs of a single user, incorporating multiple stakeholders and contextual variables across the wider service-delivery context.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Nonlocal Games on Graph Ensembles

arXiv:2606.16784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is one of the most striking discoveries in all of science. This effect allows, for instance, two spatially separated agents to coordinate their actions, without communication, to an extent that is both counter-intuitive, and provably impossible by any other physical means. A recently discovered example is that of mobile agents (players) performing spatial coordination tasks such as rendezvous, where the agents aim to meet on a network without communication. Until now, demonstrations of this advantage have relied on highly idealized conditions: agents are assumed to have complete knowledge of the topography, and experiments have been restricted to simulations using data generated by qubits within a single quantum processor. Here we address both limitations by developing a theory for graph ensembles that capture topographical uncertainty and by experimentally demonstrating the advantage in rendezvous scenarios between physically separated ion-trap systems with access to remote entanglement. Moreover, we simulate a broader set of problems on superconducting hardware. Surprisingly, when players are given the ability to gather more local information the quantum advantage increases – a feat impossible by classical means. Our findings establish a concrete route toward practical quantum advantages in motion coordination problems. More broadly, they point to a new way of using portable quantum devices to enhance collective decision-making in uncertain environments.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Dual-Anchoring: Addressing State Drift in Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv:2604.17473v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation(VLN) requires an agent to navigate through 3D environments by following natural language instructions. While recent Video Large Language Models(Video-LLMs) have largely advanced VLN, they remain highly susceptible to State Drift in long scenarios. In these cases, the agent's internal state drifts away from the true task execution state, leading to aimless wandering and failure to execute essential maneuvers in the instruction. We attribute this failure to two distinct cognitive deficits: Progress Drift, where the agent fails to distinguish completed sub-goals from remaining ones, and Memory Drift, where the agent's history representations degrade, making it lose track of visited landmarks. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Anchoring Framework that explicitly anchors the instruction progress and history representations. First, to address progress drift, we introduce Instruction Progress Anchoring, which supervises the agent to generate structured text tokens that delineate completed versus remaining sub-goals. Second, to mitigate memory drift, we propose Memory Landmark Anchoring, which utilizes a Landmark-Centric World Model to retrospectively predict object-centric embeddings extracted by the Segment Anything Model, compelling the agent to explicitly verify past observations and preserve distinct representations of visited landmarks. Facilitating this framework, we curate two extensive datasets: 3.6 million samples with explicit progress descriptions, and 937k grounded landmark data for retrospective verification. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a 15.2% improvement in Success Rate and a remarkable 24.7% gain on long-horizon trajectories. To facilitate further research, we will release our code, data generation pipelines, and the collected datasets.

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

Towards Direct Latent-Space Synthesis for Parallel Branches in LLM-Agent Workflows

Large language models increasingly serve as execution engines for agentic systems, yet they still consume context through a sequential text interface. This creates a mismatch with modern structured agent workflows, in which independent branches explore subtasks, retrieve evidence, or generate candidate solutions before a final synthesis step. Existing systems typically merge these branches by concatenating their textual outputs, which discards the parallel structure and incurs redundant prefill computation. In this work, we introduce Parallel-Synthesis, a plug-and-play framework that enables a synthesizer to directly consume the KV caches produced by parallel worker agents. Parallel-Synthesis combines a cache mapper that calibrates independently generated branch caches with a fine-tuned synthesizer adapter that enables generation from this non-sequential cache interface. We train Parallel-Synthesis using data that exposes the synthesizer to parallel cache contexts, teaches aggregation across cached branches, and distills reasoning behavior from standard text-concatenation-based synthesis. Across nine downstream datasets spanning math, science QA, code generation, GAIA, and multi-agent database diagnosis, Parallel-Synthesis matches or outperforms text-based synthesis on seven datasets and remains close on the other two. It also reduces time-to-first-token by 2.5x-11x, suggesting that direct cache-based synthesis is a promising interface for more native and efficient synthesis over parallel agent branches.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

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

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

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

BusterX++: Towards Unified Cross-Modal AI-Generated Content Detection and Explanation with MLLM

The rapid advancement of generative AI has substantially improved image and video synthesis, amplifying the risk of multimodal visual misinformation. Recent MLLMs have shown promise for transparent AI-generated content detection through reasoning and explanation, yet existing approaches largely treat image and video forensics as isolated tasks, leaving cross-modal synergies underexplored. To address this, we present BusterX++, a unified MLLM for joint image and video detection with interpretable reasoning. We also introduce GenBuster-Bench++, a meticulously curated, difficulty-aligned benchmark containing balanced image and video samples spanning recent generation models and diverse real-world scenarios. Using this controlled setting, we revisit the widely adopted $SFT \rightarrow RL$ post-training paradigm. Notably, our findings demonstrate that a single-stage, pure RL strategy driven strictly by sparse outcome rewards consistently matches or surpasses a strong SFT+RL baseline across both unified and single-modality settings. Our key insight reveals that SFT imposes lower policy entropy, which restricts the policy search space and dampens exploratory freedom. In contrast, single-stage pure RL maintains higher policy entropy throughout training, effectively unlocking the spontaneous emergence of cross-modal capability transfer between image and video forensics. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BusterX++ achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting the powerful potential of RL for unified cross-modal visual reasoning.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Minimax PAC Bounds for Learning in Exogenous Contextual MDPs

arXiv:2606.25170v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study PAC learning in tabular discounted Markov decision processes with exogenous i.i.d. contexts, with discount factor $\gamma$, finite state space $\mathcal X$, action space $\mathcal A$, and context space $\mathcal Z$. At each time step, a context is drawn independently from an unknown distribution $\mu$ and revealed before the agent acts. This context may affect both rewards and transitions, while remaining uncontrolled by the agent. Depending on the regime, the learner has access either to a sampling oracle for $\mu$, to a sampling oracle for the transition kernel conditioned on state-context-action tuples, or to both. Oracles can be accessed before and during policy execution. The sample complexity is measured by a couple $(n,m)$, where $n$ is the number of calls to the sampling oracles before execution and $m$ is the number of calls to the sampling oracles during execution. When rewards and transitions are known and only the context distribution $\mu$ is sampled, we give a variance-reduced algorithm that solves policy evaluation (PE), best-value estimation (BVE), and best-policy extraction (BPE) with $\left(\widetilde O\left(1/((1-\gamma)^3\varepsilon^2)\right), 0 \right) $ sample complexity. The rate is independent of $|\mathcal Z|$ and minimax optimal up to logarithmic factors. As a corollary, we also obtain tight rates in the case of one-step perfect look-ahead, improving upon the existing guarantees. In the fully unknown regime, where both $\mu$ and P must be learned, we show that PE remains $|\mathcal Z|$-free, with matching upper and lower bounds $\bigl(\widetilde O(|\mathcal X|/((1-\gamma)^3\varepsilon^2)),\, \widetilde O(1/((1-\gamma)^2\varepsilon^2))\bigr)$.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

The Culture Funnel: You Can't Align What isn't in the Data

Current cultural alignment approaches focus on inference-time interventions, assuming models already contain sufficient cultural knowledge. We argue modern LLM pipelines suffer from a cultural data funnel. Using a multidimensional tagging framework across pretraining, fine-tuning, alignment, and reasoning datasets, we show explicit cultural signals decline sharply during post-training, while geographically concentrated, task-specialized data dominates. Multilinguality enhances geographic diversity of cultural knowledge but does not ensure balanced representation. Our tags improve downstream cultural benchmark performance, demonstrating that advances require shifting focus in training data pipelines. To facilitate future research, we release our culturally tagged dataset with 5.6M samples at https://huggingface.co/datasets/CohereLabs/CultureMarkers.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

High-sensitivity and high-resolution collaborative determination of birefringence coefficient using weak measurement

arXiv:2504.15571v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Precise nanofilm birefringence characterization is essential for high-sensitivity polarization response and strong anti-interference detection in photodetectors. We present a high-sensitivity and high-resolution birefringence coefficient determination system for nm-level membranes based on weak measurement, addressing the sensitivity-resolution trade-off. A tunable bandwidth light source is exploited to achieve simultaneous and complementary measurements of momentum (P-pointer) and intensity (I-pointer), enabling calibration-free operation across various bandwidths, and to realize high-precision phase difference monitoring of the measured membranes. This method maps the birefringence effect to a weak-value amplified signal of spectral shift and light intensity. The optimal resolution, achieved at a spectral width of 6 nm, is $1.12 \times 10^{-8}$ RIU, while the optimal sensitivity is achieved when the light source is a narrow-linewidth coherent laser, reaching 4710 mV/RIU. The linear range of the system covers a broad birefringence coefficient range for crystals, from $10^{-6}$ to 0.1. Furthermore, the auxiliary optical path eliminates substrate interference, achieving a detection limit of birefringence coefficient as low as $10^{-8}$ RIU. This approach, characterized by high precision, high sensitivity, and strong robustness, provides an effective solution for the detection of optical nano-thin membrane parameters.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Evaluating the Interpretability of Sparse Autoencoders with Concept Annotations

arXiv:2606.24716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are increasingly used to extract interpretable concepts from vision and vision language models, yet existing evaluation methods largely rely on proxy metrics or qualitative inspection rather than measuring semantic correspondence. We present a human-grounded evaluation framework that quantifies alignment between SAE latents and human-annotated concepts, without requiring user studies, and validate this matching through targeted attribute perturbations. To enable this intervention-style evaluation in vision, we construct synCUB and synCOCO, synthetic benchmarks of paired images that differ in exactly one attribute. We introduce Fully-Binary Matching Pursuit (FBMP), a coalition-based matching procedure that supports many-to-one mappings between SAE latents and annotated concepts, and consistently outperforms one-to-one baselines. For functional validation, we propose a Targeted Attribute Perturbation Alignment Score (TAPAScore), which tests whether matched concepts respond selectively and in the expected direction under targeted image-level attribute perturbations. Under sanity checks, our matching and TAPAScore are the only evaluated metrics that reliably distinguish trained SAEs from untrained ones. Across SAEs trained on CLIP and DINOv2 embeddings, we find that increased overcompleteness can reduce perturbation alignment, indicating a reduction in interpretability. Our evaluation framework suggests that moderate dictionary sizes provide the best trade-off, yielding the most interpretable SAEs. Code and datasets are available at https://github.com/JonasKlotz/sae-concept-eval.

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Minimum Zero-Forcing Sets

arXiv:2606.18106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper explores the problem of finding the minimum zero-forcing set on undirected graphs and proposes an adapted machine-learning framework to solve the problem. The minimum zero-forcing set problem is a graph coloring problem where the color of an initial set of nodes propagates throughout a network. The set of nodes is zero-forcing if it forces all uncolored nodes to change color under the constraint of the color-change rule. There are several applications to this problem across different domains such as network science, network control, and designing logical circuits. Finding the minimum zero-forcing set is shown to be NP-hard. We propose a reinforcement learning framework, SD-ZFS, that adapts the S2V-DQN architecture to the ZFS problem. We train several models on this adapted framework and analyze the performance across graph datasets that have varying structures. We evaluate how the models trained on the framework generalize, scale, and transfer to different network types. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework when compared against the optimal solution and greedy heuristic. We provide further insight into how the ZFS problem can be solved through machine-learning and the influence of network structure on the problem.