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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Helical Dirac Current with Local Coupling to a Chiral Potential

Authors:
Ju Gao↗Fang Shen↗

arXiv:2606.17618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that exact Dirac eigenstates in cylindrical confinement carry a definite helical conserved-current texture even in the zero orbital angular momentum channel l = 0. For the lowest confined mode, the Dirac current contains a nonvanishing azimuthal component together with longitudinal transport and exhibits opposite handedness in the two spin-resolved sectors. The structure also persists into the evanescent region. We further derive the channel-resolved matrix-element kernel generated by a static chiral scalar potential acting on the confined l = 0 Dirac modes. The resulting spin-selective coupling arises from the Dirac current texture and the scalar chiral potential, and yields a geometric selection rule in which diagonal channels vanish while off-diagonal conversion channels survive. The coupling strength is governed by an internal sampled-current overlap Jchi(k), defined as the integral from 0 to R of f(rho) times jphi_up(rho, k) times rho d rho. This quantity measures the spatial overlap between the chiral radial profile and the spin-up azimuthal Dirac-current density. The mechanism is fully local and texture-based, without external magnetic fields or spin-orbit coupling. Within standard Dirac theory, this work identifies the minimal static Dirac-geometric kernel underlying spin-selective response, establishing a baseline structure from which dynamical-medium, scattering, and transport formalisms can be systematically developed toward a complete description of spin-polarization phenomena such as CISS.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coarse-grained quantum thermodynamics: Observation-dependent quantities, observation-independent laws

Authors:
Giulia Rubino↗\v{C}aslav Brukner↗Gonzalo Manzano↗

arXiv:2507.15918v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In both classical and quantum thermodynamics, physical quantities are typically assigned objective values defined independently of our observations. We then refer to the 'work performed by a gas', or the 'entropy of the gas', regardless of how they are evaluated. Here, we question this conception in the context of quantum thermodynamics, estimating how the definition of pivotal thermodynamic quantities is affected by experimental instruments of limited precision. We find that the coarse-grained thermodynamic quantities frequently lead to different conclusions from those drawn in fine-grained scenarios. For instance, the irreversibility of a process, or its work payoff, can significantly vary with the instrument precision. We show nonetheless that coarse-grained thermodynamic quantities satisfy the same relations (i.e., the second law inequality, the relation between dissipation and distinguishability of a process from its time-reverse, and the quantum work fluctuation theorems) as their fine-grained counterparts. These results highlight the observation-independence of relations linking thermodynamic quantities which are themselves observation-dependent.

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

AVOC: Enhancing Hour-Level Audio-Video Understanding in Omni-Modal LLMs via Retrieval-Inspired Token Compression

Authors:
Yijing Chen↗Wenhui Tan↗Xiaoyi Yu↗Yuyue Wang↗Xin Cheng↗Kaisi Guan↗Hao Jiang↗Xiangyang Li↗Guojie Zhu↗Ruihua Song↗

Multimodal Large Language Models have achieved remarkable progress in short-form audio-video understanding, yet long-form audio-video comprehension remains challenged by limited context windows and severe information redundancy. To address these bottlenecks, we propose AVOC, a framework for long-form audio-video understanding in Omni-modal Large Language Models. AVOC introduces a learnable token compression module between the modality encoders and the LLM backbone. We reframe multimodal token compression as a top-$K$ retrieval problem: given a fixed context budget, the module must retrieve a compact subset of tokens that best supports answering the user query. We draw inspiration from three classical Information Retrieval criteria for selecting informative units from a large candidate pool: relevance, importance, and diversity. AVOC instantiates each criterion as a tailored mechanism for audio-video understanding, and integrates them into a unified retrieval-style compression pipeline. Experiments show that AVOC achieves state-of-the-art performance on long-form audio-video benchmarks, surpassing the second-best model by 4.9 and 5.5 points in average accuracy on OmniVideoBench and LVOmniBench, respectively. Moreover, AVOC maintains robust performance on Audio-Video Needle-in-a-Haystack task at durations up to one hour.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Agentic Collaborative Cognition for Zero-Shot 3D Understanding

Authors:
Wenxin Wang↗Bo Zhang↗Feng Chen↗Zixuan Wang↗Wen Li↗Changsheng Li↗Yinjie Lei↗

Recent advancements have explored agentic zero-shot 3D understanding by reformulating it as video keyframe understanding with Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, existing methods face an intrinsic bottleneck due to the finite observation perspectives inherent in videos and the implicit perception of 3D scenes. In this paper, we propose a collaborative multi-agent framework that assigns a Planning Agent to handle high-level viewpoint planning and supplement novel perspectives, and a Perception Agent to explicitly summarize the 3D scene into a structured holistic cognitive map. Specifically, Planning Agent first analyzes this cognitive map to determine query-relevant viewpoints and supplements missing critical perspectives to ensure comprehensive observation. Subsequently, Perception Agent documents object-level attributes from these views by assigning consistent instance identifiers across viewpoints, thereby integrating fragmented observations into the holistic cognitive map. In parallel, it provides feedback to filter out mismatched candidate objects and guide subsequent viewpoint planning. Through this closed-loop iterative process, two agents collaboratively figure out candidates until Perception Agent determines that sufficient information has been captured to complete the task. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on 6 benchmarks, with improvements of 11.1\% Acc@0.5 on ScanRefer, 14.6 BLEU-1 on 3D-assisted dialog, and 2.1 EM on SQA3D.

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

From Prompts to Tokens: Internalizing Causal Supervision in Vision-Language Model for Multi-Image Causal Reasoning

Authors:
Haoping Yu↗Yuanxi Li↗Jing Ma↗

Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects. Despite recent progress, large vision–language models (VLMs) remain brittle at such tasks, especially for interventional and counterfactual queries over multi-image inputs. Most existing explorations inject causal knowledge via textual prompts, leaving causal mechanisms external to model execution and limiting reliable control during inference. To address this problem, we propose BridgeVLM, which internalizes visual causal reasoning by inducing a causal graph from multi-image inputs and converting it into structured Causal Tokens executed by RAMP layers injected into the LLM decoder for causal message passing. We further introduce a unified training interface M3S for fine-grained causal supervision from different granularities (local/global level). BridgeVLM achieves 54.4% accuracy on intervention tasks on CausalVLBench (vs. 33.2% with prompt-level supervision), improves results on Causal3D from 43.6% to 49.0%, and substantially improves causal structure learning on CausalVLBench ($F_1$: 33.4% $\rightarrow$ 75.1%).

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

Introduction to matrix-product states and tensor networks

Authors:
Gr\'egoire Misguich↗

arXiv:2606.24803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: These notes provide an introduction to tensor-network methods in quantum many-body physics, with an emphasis on matrix-product states (MPS). They develop the basic tensor-network language, including graphical notation, virtual indices, bond dimensions, gauge freedom, canonical forms, QR and singular-value decompositions, and the role of entanglement in controlling the efficiency of the representation. The main MPS algorithms are then introduced, including contractions, correlation functions, matrix-product operators, DMRG, and time-evolution methods. The notes also briefly discuss projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) as a higher-dimensional generalization of MPS, together with the basic ideas behind approximate PEPS contraction. Finally, tensor-network representations of mixed states, quantum channels, and Lindblad dynamics are presented, with applications to thermal states and open quantum systems. The presentation is accompanied by short Julia code examples based on ITensor, ITensorMPS, and TensorMixedStates. These notes were written for the 9th Les Houches Summer School on Computational Physics: Open Quantum Systems, held in June 2026.

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

Scalable Circuit Learning for Interpreting Large Language Models

Authors:
Naiyu Yin↗Dennis Wei↗Tian Gao↗Amit Dhurandhar↗Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy↗Yue Yu↗

arXiv:2606.16939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit-learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

When to use what Schatten-$p$ norm in deep learning?

Authors:
Thomas Pethick↗

arXiv:2606.15268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Schatten-$\infty$ based optimizers such as Muon have shown promising empirical performance, but there remains seemingly conflicting observations regarding whether they are beneficial. We resolve this conflict by showing that the conclusion is regime dependent. Even when the objective is smooth in the Schatten-$\infty$ geometry, smaller Schatten-$p$ geometries can be optimal, specifically in the low-dimensional regime, which we show includes Chinchilla scaling. This conclusion follows from a new noise-robust acceleration result for the SODA framework for $p>2$. The same analysis explains why Muon-like methods do not require warmup, why they naturally favor large batches, and yields a batch size scaling rule for arbitrary $p$.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

TENSO: Software Package for Numerically Exact Open Quantum Dynamics Based on Efficient Tree Tensor Network Decomposition of the Hierarchical Equations of Motion

Authors:
Juan C. Rodriguez-Betancourt↗Michelle C. Anderson↗Luchang Niu↗Xinxian Chen↗Ignacio Franco↗

arXiv:2603.17711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TENSO is a versatile and powerful open-source software package for numerically exact simulations of the dynamics of quantum systems immersed in structured thermal environments. It is based on a tree tensor network decomposition of the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) that efficiently curbs its curse of dimensionality with bath complexity. As such, TENSO enables exact non-Markovian open quantum dynamics simulations even with complex environments typical of chemistry and quantum information science. TENSO allows for time-dependent drive in the system, and for non-commuting fluctuations. More generally, TENSO efficiently propagates the dynamics for any method with a generator of the dynamics that can be expressed in a sum-of-products form, including the HEOM and multi-layer multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree methods. TENSO enables simulations using tensor trees and trains of arbitrary order, and implements three propagation strategies for the coupled master equations; two fixed-rank methods that require a constant memory footprint during the dynamics and one adaptive rank method with a variable memory footprint controlled by the target level of computational error. In contrast to the accompanying theory and algorithmic paper [J. Chem. Phys. 163, 104109 (2025)] the focus here is on the practical usage and applications of TENSO with underlying theoretical concepts introduced only as needed.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Learning-Based Decision Making for Combustion Phasing Control in Multi-Fuel CI Engines with Latent Fuel Reactivity Estimation

Authors:
Rajasree Sarkar↗Aditya Satish Patil↗Arunava Banerjee↗Ihsan Berk Altiner↗Zongxuan Sun↗Kenneth Kim↗Chol-Bum Mike Keown↗

arXiv:2606.18393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control. This work formulates CA50 regulation under latent CN variation as a partially observable sequential decision problem and systematically evaluates controllers with increasing temporal and representational capacity, including LinUCB, history-augmented contextual bandits, observation-only DDPG, recurrent DDPG, and a proposed GRU-guided RL framework. A Gaussian-process surrogate trained on experimental multi-fuel engine data provides a controlled and reproducible evaluation environment. Results show that myopic and fixed-history bandit methods degrade under CN variation, observation-only RL suffers from latent-state aliasing, and generic recurrence is insufficient when CN evolves rapidly. The proposed framework learns a compact GRU-based representation of fuel reactivity from combustion history and conditions both actor and critic on this estimated signal rather than oracle CN. By training the policy on the same imperfect fuel-reactivity information available at deployment, the controller avoids train-deploy inconsistency in conventional online estimate-then-control pipelines. Across unseen CN trajectories, the policy achieves stable CA50 regulation with mean absolute tracking error below 0.25{\deg} CA at the training setpoint, while producing smooth, physically consistent SOI and glow-plug-power actuation. These results show that combustion control under latent, continuously evolving fuel dynamics requires more than standalone estimation or generic recurrence. By aligning fuel-reactivity inference with control policy learning, the proposed framework enables reactivity-aware decision-making using the same estimated state available during deployment.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

CrossPool: Efficient Multi-LLM Serving for Cold MoE Models through KV-Cache and Weight Disaggregation

Authors:
Zhuoren Ye↗Tianyu Wo↗Dinghao Xue↗Mingming Zhang↗Yuchen Teng↗Chunming Hu↗Renyu Yang↗

arXiv:2606.24506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emerging LLM services increasingly host many sparse MoE models, yet most models receive sparse requests and remain cold. This creates a GPU memory problem: model weights are stable and model-determined, while KV-cache is transient and demand-determined. Because cold models rarely reach peak KV-cache demand at the same time, reserving worst-case KV capacity per model wastes memory; a shared KV-cache pool can instead provision aggregate active demand. However, KV-cache sharing is not sufficient when weights and KV-cache remain in a monolithic GPU memory pool. Static weights compete with dynamic KV-cache, and KV-head-limited attention under cold, low-concurrency traffic exposes only a fraction of replicated KV capacity, leading to low GPU memory utilization and weak long-context support. We present CrossPool, a serving engine for cold MoE models that separates FFN weights and KV-cache into two GPU memory pools: a weights pool that consolidates FFN weights across cold models, and a KV-cache pool that dynamically serves active requests while keeping attention local to KV-cache. CrossPool combines a KV-cache planner and virtualizer, a layer-wise pipeline scheduler that hides hidden-state transfers, and persistent kernels with control lowering to reduce CPU-GPU control overhead. With efficient GPU memory pooling, CrossPool underpins bursty long-context requests and outperforms the state-of-the-art kvcached-based multi-LLM serving system, reducing P99 TBT by up to $10.4\times$.

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

Patcher: Post-Hoc Patching of Backdoored Large Language Models

Authors:
Anjun Gao↗Yueyang Quan↗Yufei Xia↗Zhuqing Liu↗Minghong Fang↗

arXiv:2606.02995v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak backdoor attacks, where adversaries poison safety alignment data to embed hidden triggers that bypass safety mechanisms. Existing defenses often require comprehensive attack information or multiple triggered examples, making them impractical when defenders only observe a single reported failure case without knowing whether it stems from a backdoor attack or a natural alignment bug. This paper presents Patcher, a post-hoc defense framework that repairs backdoored language models using only a single reported failure case and the model parameters. Patcher operates in two stages. First, it localizes backdoor triggers by computing response-conditioned gradient-based saliency scores and applying adaptive clustering to separate triggers from benign context. Second, it patches the model through a constrained fine-tuning objective that breaks the trigger-response association while preserving benign-task utility and robustness to non-triggered jailbreak attacks through KL-divergence constraints. We conduct extensive evaluations across multiple backdoor attack strategies and demonstrate that Patcher successfully localizes triggers and neutralizes backdoors while maintaining model utility. We further show robustness against adaptive attacks designed to evade our defense. This work represents a significant step toward practical defenses against training-time attacks in deployed language models.

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

FlowBank: Query-Adaptive Agentic Workflows Optimization through Precompute-and-Reuse

Authors:
Lingzhi Yuan↗Chenghao Deng↗Fangxu Yu↗Souradip Chakraborty↗Mohammad Rostami↗Furong Huang↗

Large Language Model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems are increasingly powerful, but current agentic workflow optimization paradigms make an unsatisfying trade-off. Task-level methods spend substantial offline compute yet deploy only a single workflow, leaving complementary candidates unused, while query-level methods synthesize a new workflow per query at substantial inference cost. Our motivating analysis shows these paradigms are more complementary than competing: workflows discovered during offline search often solve different subsets of queries, and many queries handled by expensive query-level generation can already be solved by cheaper precomputed workflows. This suggests a different objective: rather than searching for one universally best workflow or regenerating one per instance, we should build a compact bank of reusable, complementary workflows and select among them adaptively at inference time. Doing so requires solving three coupled problems: generating complementary rather than redundant candidates, compressing them into a small deployable portfolio, and assigning each query to the right workflow under a performance-cost trade-off. To this end, we present FlowBank, a three-stage framework for portfolio-based agentic workflow optimization. Diversifying proposes DiverseFlow to steer search toward under-covered queries and produce a high-coverage candidate pool. Curating proposes CuraFlow to compress this pool into a compact portfolio with minimal redundancy. Matching casts deployment as edge-value prediction on a query-workflow bipartite graph and routes each incoming query to the portfolio member with the best predicted utility. Across five benchmarks, FlowBank achieves the highest average score among the evaluated methods while remaining cost-competitive, improving over the strongest automated and handcrafted baselines by 4.26% and 14.92% relative, respectively.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Exploring Adaptive Masked Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Authors:
Shengkai Sun↗Zhiyong Cheng↗Zefan Zhang↗Jianfeng Dong↗Zhihui Li↗Meng Wang↗

Recently, masked skeleton reconstruction models have emerged as strong action representation learners, driving significant progress in self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing state-of-the-art methods must predict an exceedingly large number of spatiotemporal patches, significantly prolonging training time. Besides, by treating all spatiotemporal regions equally during reconstruction, these models are distracted from learning the critical motion patterns that underlie action semantics. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Masked Reconstruction (AMR), a faster and stronger pre-training framework. We first decouple the decoder from the encoder, enabling flexible prediction of larger spatiotemporal patches and dramatically reducing reconstruction complexity. Given that larger patches contain more complex information, which is challenging to predict and consequently degrades performance, we accordingly introduce an adaptive guidance module. This module identifies regions of high motion informativeness, guiding the model to focus on the most discriminative parts of each patch and alleviating reconstruction difficulty. Experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that AMR not only accelerates pre-training substantially but also improves downstream recognition accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art approaches.

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

PROJECTMEM: A Local-First, Event-Sourced Memory and Judgment Layer for AI Coding Agents

Authors:
Ripon Chandra Malo↗Tong Qiu↗

arXiv:2606.12329v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI coding assistants now support a growing share of software work, from quick scripts to production applications. Yet these agents remain largely stateless: each new session re-reads project files, re-derives prior decisions, and - most costly - may repeat debugging attempts that already failed. Reconstructing this context can consume an estimated 5,000-20,000 tokens per session; the bottleneck is often not model capability but missing project memory. We present projectmem, an open-source, local-first memory and judgment layer for AI coding agents. projectmem records development as an append-only, plain-text event log of typed events - issues, attempts, fixes, decisions, and notes - and deterministically projects that log into compact, AI-readable summaries served through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Beyond storage, projectmem adds a deterministic pre-action gate that warns an agent before it repeats a previously failed fix or edits a known-fragile file. We frame this as Memory-as-Governance: memory that does not merely answer the agent but acts on its next action. The system runs fully offline with no telemetry; its immutable log also serves as a provenance trail for reproducible, auditable AI-assisted development. projectmem ships as a three-dependency Python package (14 MCP tools, 19 CLI commands, 37 automated tests) and is evaluated through a two-month self-study across 10 projects comprising 207 logged events. Source code: https://github.com/riponcm/projectmem.

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

Estimating Mutual Information between Time Series and Temporal Event Sequences Across Diverse Analysis Tasks

Authors:
Haoji Hu↗Huaqing Mao↗Yijun Lin↗Xiaowei Jia↗Jinwei Zhou↗Minoh Jeong↗Yao-Yi Chiang↗

arXiv:2606.01602v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise dependence measures such as correlation and causality are fundamental to temporal data mining, yet there is still no principled and robust way to quantify dependence between heterogeneous data types, especially between continuous time series and discrete temporal event sequences. Existing approaches rely on ad hoc transformations or mutual-information estimators that are highly sensitive to quantization, repeated values, and event redundancy, leading to biased or unstable results in practice. We propose a nonparametric mutual information estimator that directly measures the dependence between time series and event sequences without data transformation, learning, or ad hoc discretization. Our method models the continuous-discrete duality of real-world time series to handle quantization and repeated-value artifacts and introduces a latent event clustering strategy to mitigate bias from event co-occurrence and redundancy. Together, these yield a robust and unified framework that bridges discrete and continuous mutual information. We evaluate the proposed estimator on four representative tasks: discrete-continuous time-delayed mutual information for causality analysis, global and local temporal repetition discovery, discrete covariate selection for time series forecasting, and continuous feature selection for classification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets show consistent improvements over existing methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability, positioning our approach as a general-purpose dependence operator for heterogeneous temporal data, similar to Pearson correlation for homogeneous time series. Code available at: https://github.com/HaojiHu/Multimodal-Temporal-Data-Quantification

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Lightweight and Interpretable Transformer via Mixed Graph Algorithm Unrolling for Traffic Forecast

Authors:
Ji Qi↗Tam Thuc Do↗Mingxiao Liu↗Zhuoshi Pan↗Yuzhe Li↗Gene Cheung↗H. Vicky Zhao↗

arXiv:2505.13102v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unlike conventional "black-box" transformers with classical self-attention mechanism, we build a lightweight and interpretable transformer-like neural net by unrolling a mixed-graph-based optimization algorithm to forecast traffic with spatial and temporal dimensions. We construct two graphs: an undirected graph $\mathcal{G}^u$ capturing spatial correlations across geography, and a directed graph $\mathcal{G}^d$ capturing sequential relationships over time. We predict future samples of signal $\mathbf{x}$, assuming it is "smooth" with respect to both $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathcal{G}^d$, where we design new $\ell_2$ and $\ell_1$-norm variational terms to quantify and promote signal smoothness (low-frequency reconstruction) on a directed graph. We design an iterative algorithm based on alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), and unroll it into a feed-forward network for data-driven parameter learning. We periodically insert graph learning modules for $\mathcal{G}^u$ and $\mathcal{G}^d$ that play the role of self-attention. Experiments show that our unrolled networks achieve competitive traffic forecast performance as state-of-the-art prediction schemes, while reducing parameter counts drastically.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Vaccine introductions in the WHO African Region, 2023-26: a country-level ecological analysis by Gavi eligibility and conflict-affected status

Authors:
Amani↗Mitula↗Bekele↗A. T↗Danwang↗Ngossaki↗H. D↗Masembe↗Y. V↗Agbenu↗A. E↗Achille↗…

Background. The Immunization Agenda 2030 (IA2030) tracks new and underused vaccine introduction as an access metric, and its mid-term review calls for stronger country ownership, prioritisation, data use and tailored support in conflict-affected and resource-constrained settings; however, national launch status does not measure recurrent financing, implementation, safety or equity. We examined how recent vaccine-introduction activity was distributed across the WHO African Region. Methods. We conducted a descriptive country-level ecological analysis of all 47 Member States from January 2023 to June 2026. The country was the unit of analysis and contributed one cumulative, unweighted count of nationally endorsed vaccine-introduction and programme-change events. Counts were linked to Gavi eligibility, World Bank FY26 conflict-affected status, broader fragile and conflict-affected situation status in sensitivity analysis, and concurrent system-performance indicators, and modelled with Poisson regression using HC1 robust standard errors. Two Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) manager survey waves were summarised at country level. Reporting followed STROBE and RECORD. Results. Seventy-two events were recorded across 38 of 47 Member States: 48 new-antigen introductions, 20 dose or schedule expansions and four combination-vaccine introductions; malaria vaccines accounted for 21. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected countries averaged 2.50 events per country versus 1.27 in both comparison groups. Gavi-eligible conflict-affected status was associated with a higher count (incidence rate ratio [IRR] 1.97, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.38-2.81; p

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

Similarity of Neural Network Representations in Superposition

Authors:
Sunny Liu↗Habon Issa↗Andr\'e Longon↗Liv Gorton↗Meenakshi Khosla↗Alex Williams↗David Klindt↗

arXiv:2604.00208v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Comparing internal representations is a central goal in neuroscience and machine learning, but standard linear alignment metrics (Representational Similarity Analysis, Centered Kernel Alignment, and linear regression) are frequently applied to neural activity coordinates rather than on the underlying features. We show this matters when neural systems operate in superposition, encoding more features than they have neurons via linear compression. Closed-form derivations prove that these metrics depend on the Gram matrices of each system's projection, not on the latent features themselves: alignment thus combines what a system represents with how it is encoded. For those interested in what features two systems share, this is a problem: Two networks can have identical feature content yet appear more dissimilar than networks exhibiting partial feature overlap. This apparent misalignment need not reflect lost information as compressed sensing guarantees sparse features remain recoverable from the compressed activity. We confirm this by training supervised TopK sparse autoencoders that realize solvable compressed sensing by construction, finding alignment on recovered latents restored even when raw-activation alignment remains deflated. We extend the result to unsupervised SAEs trained without ground-truth latents, and to pretrained vision and language model SAEs, where SAE-latent alignment exceeds raw-activation alignment, consistent with superposition in real systems.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

IterCAD: An Iterative Multimodal Agent for Visually-Grounded CAD Generation and Editing

Authors:
Tao Hu↗Jiaxin Ai↗Licheng Wen↗Xueheng Li↗Shu Zou↗Siqi Li↗Nianchen Deng↗Xinyu Cai↗Hongbin Zhou↗Pinlong Cai↗Daocheng Fu↗Yu Yang↗…

Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VisualClaw: A Real-Time, Personalized Agent for the Physical World

Authors:
Haoqin Tu↗Jianwen Chen↗Zijun Wang↗Siwei Han↗Juncheng Wu↗Hardy Chen↗Haonian Ji↗Kaiwen Xiong↗Jiaqi Liu↗Peng Xia↗Jieru Mei↗Hongliang Fei↗…

Vision language models are serving as general-purpose interfaces for complex multimodal tasks. However, deployment still faces three gaps: VLMs typically incur high latency and cost when processing dense video frames and long prompts, the agent scaffold remains static after deployment, and standard video-QA benchmarks do not test whether agents can use visual evidence inside tool-using workspaces. We present VisualClaw, a self-evolving multimodal agent built around two principles. First, hybrid encoding reduces deployment cost by filtering less informative streaming frames with a cascaded gate and compressing the text skill bank through hot/cold top-k injection. Second, skill evolution lets the agent learn from failures: retrieved memories condition an evolver as direct concatenated context or as guided evidence, producing skill-bank updates that help future questions. Across 4 video-QA benchmarks with 2 VLMs, VisualClaw cuts per-question API cost by an average -98% versus full-frame upload and by -25.9% over the offline uniform 8 frame baseline, while boosting accuracy in most settings, e.g., an average +3.85% and a peak +15.80% on EgoSchema with Gemini 3 Flash. To address the gap, we curate VisualClawArena, a 200-scenario multimodal agentic benchmark built through a strict five-stage pipeline; models must use video evidence, documents, dynamic updates, and executable checks inside a workspace. On VisualClawArena, the same framework with computer-use agent backends improves macro accuracy by +2.9% for Codex (GPT-5.5) and +3.2% for Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6) over no-evolution baselines, with a -9.5% cost reduction compared to the uniform-sampled baseline. These properties make VisualClaw a natural fit for edge applications, where the cascade reduces a 1-hour streaming session from ~3,600 API uploads down to only 5-20 calls and the self-evolution makes it a perfect personalized assistant.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Uptake of minimal intervention dentistry among Romanian dental professionals and trainees: an exploratory cluster and network analysis

Authors:
Simionescu↗D. P↗Sfeatcu↗Vinereanu↗

Background Minimal intervention dentistry (MID) is promoted as a prevention-oriented approach to caries management, but its integration into routine practice remains uneven. Existing research often examines MID-related knowledge, attitudes, or practices separately, offering limited insight into how these dimensions co-occur within individuals or are conditionally associated. Methods This exploratory cross-sectional survey examined multidimensional MID uptake among 327 Romanian dental students, residents, and specialists from five university centers. Ten MID-related scores were analyzed, including nine formative composites and one single-item peer-norm indicator. K-means clustering examined uptake profiles, and Gaussian graphical model network analysis with stepwise BIC selection examined conditional associations among constructs. Results A two-cluster solution was highly reproducible but modestly separated (n = 144 vs n = 183; average silhouette width = 0.13; mean Jaccard similarities = 0.92 and 0.94). The profiles reflected broadly lower versus higher uptake across knowledge-, belief-, and practice-related dimensions, while perceived peer norms for hygiene instruction showed the opposite pattern. Profile membership was not clearly patterned by gender, age band, professional status, or clinical experience. The primary network included 14 non-zero edges out of 36 possible edges, all positive; the strongest partial association linked diagnostic knowledge to diagnostic methods used in practice (partial r = .22). Familiarity, diagnostic knowledge, and general practices occupied more interconnected positions descriptively, but limited centrality stability precluded interpreting them as intervention targets. Conclusions MID uptake in this sample was better represented as a continuum of modestly differentiated profiles than as sharply separated participant types. The findings provide an exploratory map of multidimensional MID uptake and may inform future survey validation, implementation research, and dental education studies. Because the study was cross-sectional, convenience-sampled, and based on self-report, findings should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating rather than causal or population-representative.

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

LoComposition: Terrain-Adaptive Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion without Gait Priors

Authors:
Loukas Kordos↗Leonard T. Franz↗Simon Rappenecker↗Oliver Hausdoerfer↗Angela P. Schoellig↗Pavel Kolev↗Georg Martius↗

arXiv:2606.15896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based quadrupedal locomotion typically relies on complex reward formulations that entangle task specification, operational limits, gait preference, and terrain adaptation within a single optimization objective. We instead treat these functions through distinct mechanisms: rewards for task specification, constraints for operational limits, energy minimization for gait preference, and exteroceptive perception for adapting energy use to terrain difficulty. We show that these components jointly enable efficient, terrain-adaptive locomotion, and that removing each component exposes a distinct failure mode. Our formulation removes explicit gait priors (including air-time, contact-count, and foot-clearance targets) in favor of emergent behavior. Compared to a conventional complex-reward baseline, our formulation achieves comparable terrain traversal while reducing cost of transport by 56% and operational-limit violations by 96%. The resulting policies transfer zero-shot to a physical Unitree Go2 using LiDAR-based elevation mapping. Project website with videos: https://tinyurl.com/locomposition.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

The Long Delay to Arithmetic Generalization: When Learned Representations Outrun Behavior

Authors:
Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez↗

arXiv:2604.13082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Grokking in transformers trained on algorithmic tasks is characterized by a long delay between training-set fit and abrupt generalization, but the source of that delay remains poorly understood. In encoder-decoder arithmetic models, we argue that this delay reflects limited access to already learned structure rather than failure to acquire that structure in the first place. We study one-step Collatz prediction and find that the encoder organizes parity and residue structure within the first few thousand training steps, while output accuracy remains near chance for tens of thousands more. Causal interventions support the decoder bottleneck hypothesis. Transplanting a trained encoder into a fresh model accelerates grokking by 2.75 times, while transplanting a trained decoder actively hurts. Freezing a converged encoder and retraining only the decoder eliminates the plateau entirely and yields 97.6% accuracy, compared to 86.1% for joint training. What makes the decoder's job harder or easier depends on numeral representation. Across 15 bases, those whose factorization aligns with the Collatz map's arithmetic (e.g., base 24) reach 99.8% accuracy, while binary fails completely because its representations collapse and never recover. The choice of base acts as an inductive bias that controls how much local digit structure the decoder can exploit, producing large differences in learnability from the same underlying task.

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