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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sub-Riemannian spectral distance

Authors:
Yuzuru Inahama↗

arXiv:2606.12804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study eigenvalues and eigenfunctions of the ``div-grad type" sub-Laplacian with respect to Popp's volume on a compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifold $M$. Since Popp's volume is canonically determined by the sub-Riemannian structure of $M$, the spetra of the sub-Laplacian carry geometric meanings. In this paper, we first embed $M$ into the Hilbert space of square-summable sequences using eigenfunctions and then define a spectral distance between two compact equiregular sub-Riemannian manifolds. Our result is a sub-Riemannian analogue of Berard-Besson-Gallot's classical work in the Riemannian case.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Learning ground state observables from quantum computing experiments

Authors:
Ben Jaderberg↗Freya Shah↗Minjun Jeon↗M. Emre Sahin↗Christa Zoufal↗Kunal Sharma↗

arXiv:2606.15983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent theoretical progress has established conditions under which machine learning models can efficiently predict ground-state properties of gapped local Hamiltonians when trained on quantum-generated data. Previous experimental demonstrations in this paradigm, however, have largely been limited to small systems or highly structured states, due to the difficulty of preparing many-body ground states on quantum processors. In this work, we demonstrate learning from experimental quantum data generated from approximate ground states of the two-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ model with system sizes up to 115 qubits. We construct a dataset of single-site expectation values, two-point correlations, and 12-body loop correlations across the antiferromagnetic phase. We then train neural networks on this data and show that they can accurately predict spatially resolved observables for previously unseen Hamiltonian parameters, both within the training distribution and in an out-of-distribution regime approaching the phase boundary. Our results demonstrate the practical realization of learning from quantum data for an interacting two-dimensional many-body system at scale, motivating a path toward regimes where quantum processors could provide training data beyond the reach of classical approximation methods.

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

FuseSampleAgg: One-Pass Neighborhood Estimation for Budgeted Knowledge-Graph Refresh and Validation

Authors:
Aleksandar Stankovi\'c↗Haoran Du↗Xinming Wang↗

arXiv:2511.13645v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Operational knowledge-graph (KG) pipelines in networking and cybersecurity increasingly need to refresh embeddings under strict time, memory, and audit budgets, especially as curated feeds and LLM-assisted extraction accelerate KG updates. A recurring per-step cost in mini-batch KG learning is neighborhood-context estimation: uniform neighbor sampling without replacement followed by mean aggregation. Common frameworks implement this estimator through sampled-subgraph materialization and intermediate feature gathers, adding kernel launches, allocator pressure, and transient memory spikes. We present One-Pass Neighborhood Estimation, a fused PyTorch CUDA operator that samples neighbors and directly emits the sampled-neighborhood mean, avoiding explicit block construction while preserving GraphSAGE-mean semantics for the same sampled neighbor IDs. It supports seed-controlled sampling and optional saved-index replay for reproducible validation and regression testing. Across large-graph mini-batch workloads, it improves FP32 end-to-end step latency by 2.24x-3.48x over tuned DGL baselines and reduces transient GPU memory by up to 160x in our measurements. On OGB KG completion benchmarks such as WikiKG2 and BioKG, it reduces step time and peak VRAM while matching ranking quality within seed variability, improving time-to-quality for budgeted KG refresh.

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

UBP2: Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Mohamed Nabail↗Leo Cheng↗Jingmin Wang↗Nicholas Rhinehart↗

arXiv:2606.19328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based RL provides an approach to learning reward models from pairwise comparisons of behaviors, bypassing the need for explicit reward design. However, existing methods typically rely on passive data collection and suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially during the early stages of learning. We introduce a model-based approach that actively directs exploration by jointly reasoning over uncertainties in the reward, dynamics, and value functions. Our method, Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning (UBP2), uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value function models to evaluate candidate trajectories according to a unified score that combines expected reward, terminal value, and epistemic uncertainty. Planning under this objective yields an explicit tradeoff between exploitation and information acquisition without requiring ad hoc exploration heuristics. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish sublinear regret guarantees for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings. Empirically, experiments on the Meta-World benchmark show UBP2 achieves substantially higher sample efficiency than model-free preference-based methods and non-optimistic model-based baselines.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates

Authors:
Yuan Wang↗Marcin Muszynski↗Avinash Dash↗Rishabh Kaurav↗Vinod M. Menon↗Oleksandr Kyriienko↗

arXiv:2606.15344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.

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

Diffusion Language Models: An Experimental Analysis

Authors:
Thomas Bertolani↗Davide Bucciarelli↗Leonardo Zini↗Marcella Cornia↗Lorenzo Baraldi↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized language modeling through autoregressive generation, enabling strong performance across a wide range of tasks. Recently, Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as an alternative paradigm that generates text through iterative denoising rather than next-token prediction, allowing parallel refinement of entire sequences. While numerous diffusion-based architectures have been proposed, differences in evaluation protocols, datasets, inference budgets, and generation hyperparameters make it difficult to compare their capabilities and understand the trade-offs they offer. In this work, we present a systematic experimental analysis of modern DLMs. Specifically, we evaluate eight state-of-the-art DLMs across eight benchmarks spanning reasoning, coding, translation, knowledge, and structured problem solving, while explicitly considering both generation quality and computational efficiency. Beyond downstream evaluation, we analyze the impact of key inference-time factors, including denoising steps, context length, block size, and parallel unmasking strategies, and complement large-scale experiments with controlled comparisons of smaller models trained under identical conditions. Our analysis highlights the strengths and limitations of diffusion-based language modeling across different tasks, architectures, and inference budgets. We show that the behavior of DLMs is strongly influenced by generation-time design choices, leading to distinct trade-offs between performance and computational efficiency. Overall, our study provides practical insights into the capabilities and deployment characteristics of contemporary DLMs.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Operator Boosting Produces Pareto-Efficient PDE Surrogates

Authors:
Lennon J. Shikhman↗

arXiv:2606.17460v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators are widely used as surrogate solution maps for partial differential equations (PDEs), but full-size models can be costly to store, deploy, and evaluate in many-query scientific workflows. This work introduces Operator Boosting, a stagewise residual-learning framework for constructing compact neural-operator surrogates directly, rather than training a large model and compressing it afterward. Starting from the empirical mean predictor in normalized output coordinates, the method trains a sequence of tiny same-family neural operators on residual fields and incorporates each correction through validation-selected shrinkage. We instantiate the framework with Fourier neural operators (FNOs), DeepONets, and convolutional neural operators (CNOs), and compare boosted tiny stacks against full-size monolithic baselines across one-, two-, and three-dimensional PDE benchmarks from PDEBench, APEBench, and The Well. Across 30 dataset-architecture pairs, 21 show positive mean accuracy gains and 17 have positive confidence intervals, while all boosted stacks reduce trainable parameter count by approximately 72-95%. Best-model comparisons show empirical Pareto improvements on 7 of 10 completed PDE benchmarks, including two-dimensional Navier-Stokes, shallow-water dynamics, Darcy flow, one-dimensional transport and reaction systems, and three-dimensional compressible Navier-Stokes. These results show that Operator Boosting often improves the empirical accuracy-parameter Pareto frontier of neural PDE surrogates, while also exposing PDE- and architecture-dependent regimes where residual boosting fails to offset compression.

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

Towards Verifiable Agentic Data Science: Solving Irregular TSQA Via Tool-Grounded Reasoning

Authors:
Sanhorn Chen↗Xiaoyang Chen↗Boyu Liu↗Roy Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.15107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series data in real-world deployments is overwhelmingly irregular. Observations are asynchronous, missing values are informative rather than random, and sampling frequencies vary across sensors and operational windows. However, existing Time Series Question Answering (TSQA) benchmarks mostly assume regularly sampled inputs, leaving a fundamental gap in understanding how large language models (LLMs) and AI agents perform under irregular conditions. To bridge this gap, we introduce IRTS-ToolBench, a benchmark of 1,700 questions spanning 10 task types across 13 domains. IRTS-ToolBench is designed to be used independently by any researcher working on LLM-based irregular time series analysis, providing standardized inputs and a reproducible evaluation protocol. Code can be found in https://github.com/SanhornC/IRTS-ToolBench.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Enhancing LLM Safety Through a Theoretical Minimax Game Lens

Authors:
Yihe Deng↗Yu Yang↗Junkai Zhang↗Wei Wang↗Bo Li↗

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) necessitates effective mechanisms to ensure their responsible deployment by accurately distinguishing unsafe content from benign content. While substantial safety datasets are available in English, multilingual safety modeling remains underexplored due to limited open-source safety datasets in other languages. Even within English datasets, safe yet sensitive corner-case content is scarce, leading to shortcut learning by models and non-trivial false-positive rates. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a novel minimax reinforcement learning (RL) framework wherein a data generator and a classifier model co-evolve, facilitating the production of high-quality synthetic multilingual safety data. We theoretically formalize this interaction as a minimax game and rigorously demonstrate convergence to a Nash equilibrium. Empirical evaluations confirm that our synthetic data generation method significantly enhances the classifier model performance, enabling a substantially smaller model to surpass the state-of-the-art by nearly 10% on English benchmarks while achieving 4.5x faster inference speed. These results establish a scalable and efficient methodology for synthetic data generation, advancing the development of safer and more robust multilingual LLM deployments.

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

AVA-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action models with Active Visual Attention

Authors:
Lei Xiao↗Jifeng Li↗Juntao Gao↗Feiyang Ye↗Yan Jin↗Jingjing Qian↗Jing Zhang↗Yong Wu↗Xiaoyuan Yu↗

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep. This history-agnostic design treats robot manipulation as a Markov Decision Process, even though real-world robotic control is inherently partially observable and requires reasoning over past interactions. To address this mismatch, we reformulate VLA policy learning from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process perspective and propose AVA-VLA, a framework that conditions action generation on a recurrent state that serves as a neural approximation to the agent's belief over task history. Built on this recurrent state, we introduce Active Visual Attention (AVA), which dynamically reweights visual tokens in the current observation to focus on regions most relevant given both the instruction and execution history. Extensive experiments show that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN, and transfers effectively to real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporally grounded active visual processing for improving VLA performance in robotic sequential decision-making. The project page is available at https://liauto-dsr.github.io/AVA-VLA-Page.

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

A Hybrid GNN-FEM Framework for Phase-Field Fracture Simulation. Physics-Preserving Hybridization for Generalizable Surrogate Modeling

Authors:
Hyeonbin Moon↗Yongjin Choi↗Seunghwa Ryu↗

arXiv:2606.19378v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scientific machine learning (SciML) has emerged as a promising approach for accelerating simulations of complex physical systems, yet achieving physically consistent and generalizable predictions for nonlinear, history-dependent problems remains a central challenge. In this study, we propose a hybrid GNN–FEM framework for efficient and generalizable phase-field fracture modeling. While phase-field approaches provide a robust variational framework for simulating complex crack evolution, their high computational cost limits practical applications because they require solving coupled, nonlinear, and history-dependent systems within an incremental finite element procedure. To address this challenge, a graph neural network surrogate is integrated into the conventional staggered scheme, replacing the phase-field update at each load increment while retaining the FEM-based displacement solver to enforce mechanical equilibrium and boundary conditions. By preserving the incremental solution structure, the framework remains consistent with history-dependent fracture evolution without requiring the surrogate to approximate the full solution trajectory. This selective surrogate strategy emphasizes the identification of a physically meaningful and incrementally structured learning target, rather than relying on brute-force data generation to learn the full fracture process. The proposed framework achieves strong generalization across varying geometries, loading conditions, material properties, and discretizations through dimensionless feature design, a graph-based formulation on mesh-based domains, and a physics-informed loss derived from the governing phase-field equation. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the hybrid approach reduces computational cost while maintaining accuracy compared with conventional FEM, and exhibits robust predictive performance across diverse problem settings.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Exploring the relationship between human-centric AI and firm idiosyncratic risks

Authors:
Zhen-Yuan Ralph Liu↗Yu-Ting Wang↗Jia-Jia Yan↗Shivam Gupta↗Mihalis Giannakis↗

arXiv:2606.24224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the extensive discussions of human-centric AI (HCAI) in Industry 5.0, its effects on firms' idiosyncratic risks (IR) remains underexplored. This is an imperative issue for firms navigate financial risks during the current technological revolution, as IR reflects investor reactions to corporate heterogeneous AI strategies and implementations by isolating firm-level stock volatility from systematic factors. Integrating situated AI theory with social-technical systems theory, we conceptualise HCAI as a situated AI strategy that reduces AI-related ethical risks and fosters AI-Human synergies in firms' business operations, ultimately reducing IR by aligning with stakeholders' diverse expectations. Moreover, socio-technical factors, namely digitalisation, operational efficiency, executive shareholding, and CEOs with IT background, may moderate the HCAI-IR relationship. Using a multi-source panel dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2023, we find that HCAI is associated with lower firm IR. Furthermore, digitalisation and executive shareholding strengthen this risk-reducing effect, whereas operational efficiency and CEOs with IT background surprisingly attenuate it. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and practical insights for both ethical AI governance and firm financial risk management in the AI era.

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

Adaptive Model-Predictive Control of a Soft Continuum Robot Using a Physics-Informed Neural Network Based on Cosserat Rod Theory

Authors:
Johann Licher↗Max Bartholdt↗Henrik Krauss↗Tim-Lukas Habich↗Thomas Seel↗Moritz Schappler↗

arXiv:2508.12681v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic control of soft continuum robots (SCRs) holds great potential for expanding their applications, but remains a challenging problem due to the high computational demands of accurate dynamic models. While data-driven approaches like Koopman-operator-based methods have been proposed, they typically lack adaptability and cannot reconstruct the full robot shape, limiting their applicability. This work introduces a real-time-capable nonlinear model-predictive control (MPC) framework for SCRs based on a domain-decoupled physics-informed neural network (DD-PINN) with adaptable bending stiffness. The DD-PINN serves as a surrogate for the dynamic Cosserat rod model with a speed-up factor of up to 44,000. It is also used within an unscented Kalman filter for estimating the model states and bending compliance from end-effector position measurements. We implement a nonlinear evolutionary MPC running at 70 Hz on the GPU. In simulation, it demonstrates accurate tracking of dynamic trajectories and setpoint control with end-effector position errors below 3 mm (2.3\% of the actuator's length). In real-world experiments, the controller achieves similar accuracy and accelerations up to 3.55 m/s2.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Algorithmic Constitutionalism

Authors:
Oren Perez↗Nurit Wimer↗

arXiv:2606.12437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing encroachment of artificial intelligence (AI) on social life raises significant risks for society, particularly within the infospheres created and controlled by companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. This article examines these risks through an in-depth analysis of Facebook's content moderation regime, which is already partially governed by algorithms. We argue that the idea of ethical engineering, often proposed in the literature as a solution to the governance challenges posed by AI, is inadequate for several reasons. In response, we develop an alternative framework, which we term "algorithmic constitutionalism." Our approach rests on three pillars: (a) a layered architecture consisting of two levels of code: (i) an operative or object level and (ii) a meta level designed to protect the system's core principles from algorithmically initiated change; (b) algorithmic meta-reasoning, which enables the system to operate simultaneously at both levels so that it can monitor, verify, and potentially correct in real time operations at the object level that depart from principles protected at the meta-code level; and (c) correction through deliberation. The article elaborates the concept of algorithmic constitutionalism and demonstrates how it may be applied to Facebook's content moderation regime. As part of this analysis, we examine the tension between societal constitutionalism and algorithmic constitutionalism. Paradoxically, attempts to subject AI systems to external deliberative control may also enable AI agents to intervene in that process, potentially undermining its purpose. The article concludes by considering the implications of this argument for the European Digital Services Act, which entered into force in October 2022.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

GEMS: Geometric Constraints Enable Multi-Semantic Superposition in LLMs

Authors:
Yu Deng↗

Activation steering controls model behavior by modifying intermediate hidden states at inference time without retraining. Existing methods handle only single-direction injection; when multiple semantic directions are superposed without constraints, the model collapses. We show that this collapse decomposes into two independently acting sources: distributional deviation, where additive perturbations accumulate in norm across layers and drive activations outside the training distribution, and directional interference, where non-orthogonal semantic vectors mutually dampen when superposed. These two sources define the design constraints that any training-free multi-directional intervention must address. As one instantiation of these principles, we propose GEMS, a training-free method that maps each source to a corresponding geometric constraint: norm-preserving weighted superposition and targeted attention-pathway injection for distributional deviation, and real-time orthogonalization for directional interference. On GSM8K, injecting three concurrent non-mathematical directions preserves accuracy at 98% (baseline 92%), while unconstrained addition collapses to 4%; on Wikitext-2, the same injection incurs only 2.2% PPL increase. Component ablation isolates the causal role of each constraint, and layer-level probes confirm that orthogonalized signals survive the FFN pathway and reach the output distribution with semantic specificity. Qualitative steering effects transfer across architectures from 3B to 31B.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

Authors:
Giovanni Affatato↗Sara Mandelli↗Edoardo Daniele Cannas↗Paolo Bestagini↗Stefano Tubaro↗

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, focal aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require to include a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features also for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, providing also substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.

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

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

Authors:
Julia Kostin↗Kasra Jalaldoust↗Elias Bareinboim↗Samory Kpotufe↗Fanny Yang↗

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

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

ActiveSAM: Image-Conditional Class Pruning for Fast and Accurate Open-Vocabulary Segmentation

Authors:
Tran Dinh Tien↗Zhiqiang Shen↗

Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM 3) provides a strong frozen backbone for concept-prompted segmentation, but applying it directly to open-vocabulary semantic segmentation (OVSS) is inefficient: full-resolution decoding is typically run over the entire dataset vocabulary, whereas each image contains only a small active subset of classes. We introduce ActiveSAM, a training-free, zero-shot inference framework that turns SAM 3 into an active-vocabulary segmenter. ActiveSAM first canonicalizes and expands class prompts, then estimates an image-conditioned active set from a low-resolution presence preview. Only the retained classes are decoded at full resolution, using bucketed prompt multiplexing with the frozen SAM 3 decoder. The preview stage uses only class-presence evidence and skips unnecessary segmentation-head computation, while the final stage applies margin-aware background calibration to suppress low-confidence pixels. ActiveSAM requires no target-dataset training, no weight updates, and no oracle class-presence labels. Across eight OVSS benchmarks, ActiveSAM improves the speed-accuracy tradeoff of training-free open-vocabulary semantic segmentation, outperforming the current state-of-the-art SegEarth-OV3 by approximately +1.4 mIoU on average while running up to 5.5x faster on large-vocabulary datasets. ActiveSAM also demonstrates the strongest robustness under image corruption that simulates real-world distribution shift, making it well-suited for deployment in noisy-input domains such as autonomous driving and embodied AI. Code is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ActiveSAM.

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

ResearchClawBench: A Benchmark for End-to-End Autonomous Scientific Research

Authors:
Wanghan Xu↗Shuo Li↗Tianlin Ye↗Qinglong Cao↗Yixin Chen↗Hengjian Gao↗Yiheng Wang↗Qi Li↗Kun Li↗Sheng Xu↗Shengdu Chai↗Fangchen Yu↗…

AI coding agents are increasingly used for scientific work, but their end-to-end autonomous research capability remains difficult to verify. We present ResearchClawBench, a benchmark for evaluating autonomous scientific research across 40 tasks from 10 scientific domains. Each task is grounded in a real published paper, provides related literature and raw data, and hides the target paper during evaluation. Expert-curated multimodal rubrics decompose the target scientific artifacts into weighted criteria, enabling evaluation of target-paper-level re-discovery while leaving room for new discovery. We evaluate seven autonomous research (auto-research) agents under a unified protocol and seventeen native LLMs through the lightweight ResearchHarness. Current systems remain far from reliable re-discovery: the strongest autonomous agent, Claude Code, averages 21.5, and the strongest ResearchHarness LLM, Claude-Opus-4.7, averages 20.7, with an LLM frontier mean of only 26.5. Error analysis shows that failures concentrate in experimental protocol mismatch, evidence mismatch, and missing scientific core. ResearchClawBench provides a reproducible evaluation frontier for measuring progress toward autonomous scientific research.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SPDA-SAM: A Self-prompted Depth-Aware Segment Anything Model for Instance Segmentation

Authors:
Yihan Shang↗Wei Wang↗Chao Huang↗Xinghui Dong↗

Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong generalizability in various instance segmentation tasks. However, its performance is severely dependent on the quality of manual prompts. In addition, the RGB images that instance segmentation methods normally use inherently lack depth information. As a result, the ability of these methods to perceive spatial structures and delineate object boundaries is hindered. To address these challenges, we propose a Self-prompted Depth-Aware SAM (SPDA-SAM) for instance segmentation. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Spatial Self-prompt Module (SSSPM) which extracts the semantic and spatial prompts from the image encoder and the mask decoder of SAM, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine RGB-D Fusion Module (C2FFM), in which the features extracted from a monocular RGB image and the depth map estimated from it are fused. In particular, the structural information in the depth map is used to provide coarse-grained guidance to feature fusion, while local variations in depth are encoded in order to fuse fine-grained feature representations. To our knowledge, SAM has not been explored in such self-prompted and depth-aware manners. Experimental results demonstrate that our SPDA-SAM outperforms its state-of-the-art counterparts across twelve different data sets. These promising results should be due to the guidance of the self-prompts and the compensation for the spatial information loss by the coarse-to-fine RGB-D fusion operation.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MSPL: Multi-Step Pseudo-Labeling for Open-Vocabulary Object Detection

Authors:
Hojun Choi↗Youngsun Lim↗Jaeyo Shin↗Hyunjung Shim↗

Open-vocabulary object detection (OVD) aims to recognize and localize object categories beyond the training set. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate pseudo-labels using image-text alignment, allowing detectors to generalize to unseen classes without explicit supervision. However, these methods depend heavily on single-step image-text matching, neglecting the intermediate reasoning steps crucial for interpreting semantically complex visual contexts, such as crowding or occlusion. In this paper, we introduce MSPL, a framework that incorporates multi-step visual reasoning into the pseudo-labeling process for OVD. It decomposes complex scene understanding into three interpretable steps-object localization, category recognition, and background grounding-where these intermediate reasoning states serve as rich supervision sources. Extensive experiments on standard OVD evaluation protocols demonstrate that MSPL achieves state-of-the-art performance with superior pseudo-labeling efficiency, outperforming the strong baseline by 9.4 AP50 for novel classes on OV-COCO and improving box and mask APr by 3.2 and 2.2, respectively, on OV-LVIS. Code and models are available at https://github.com/hchoi256/mspl.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Authors:
H\'ector Javier V\'azquez Mart\'inez↗

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Infections and suicide and self-harm: a population-based matched cohort study

Authors:
Fanjul Iglesias↗Gore-Langton↗G. R↗Cadogan↗S. L↗Mansfield↗K. E↗Douglas↗I. J↗Fazel↗Tazare↗Morton↗…

Background Infections have been associated with adverse mental health outcomes, including suicide, but evidence beyond severe or central nervous system infections is limited. We investigated associations between a range of acute infections and subsequent suicide/self-harm outcomes. Methods We conducted six infection-specific matched cohort studies using English primary care records from the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum (2007-2024), linked to hospital admissions and mortality data. Adults ([≥]18 years) with a primary care record of infection (gastroenteritis, lower respiratory tract [LRTI], skin/soft-tissue [SSTI], urinary tract [UTI], sepsis, meningitis/encephalitis [positive control]) were matched (age, sex, practice, calendar period) to up to five comparators without infection. We estimated hazard ratios (HRs) for suicide/self-harm outcomes using Cox regression, stratified by matched set and implicitly adjusting for matching factors, with additional adjustment for deprivation, lifestyle factors, and comorbidities. We examined whether associations varied over time, by infection severity, antimicrobial treatment, sex, and prior mental health conditions. Findings Cohorts ranged from 18,192 individuals with meningitis/encephalitis (matched to 90,915 without) to 398,099 with SSTI (matched to 1,743,747). After adjustment, individuals with infection had a higher hazard of suicide/self-harm outcomes than comparators across all cohorts: sepsis (HR 1.79, 95% CI 1.65-1.93), gastroenteritis (1.62, 1.55-1.70), meningitis/encephalitis (1.56, 1.32-1.84), UTI (1.41, 1.33-1.50), SSTI (1.37, 1.31-1.43), and LRTI (1.37, 1.31-1.44). Risk was highest in the year post-infection, attenuating over time, and was higher among severe infections and those without prior mental health conditions. Interpretation Common acute infections recorded in primary care are associated with increased risk of suicide and self-harm, particularly following severe infections and in the year post-infection. Findings support suicide risk monitoring following acute infection, particularly among individuals without prior mental health conditions, and highlight infection prevention as a potentially modifiable strategy in vulnerable populations. Funding Wellcome and La Caixa. Copyright This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Constructing Evaluation Datasets for Procedural Reasoning: Balancing Naturalness, Grounding, and Multi-Hop Coverage

Authors:
Sarah Elshabrawy↗Rahul K. Dass↗Ashok K. Goel↗

arXiv:2606.12767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating procedural reasoning in AI-supported learning systems requires question-answer datasets that are both learner-like and grounded in the instructional knowledge the system is expected to use. We study how TMK-based question generation strategies affect dataset quality for procedural and multi-hop reasoning. We compare three strategies: strict generation from Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) models, transcript-first generation with post-hoc TMK filtering, and TMK-aware generation that combines transcripts with structured guidance. To evaluate generated items, we introduce a grounding validation framework based on closed-set evidence units extracted from TMK models. The framework measures whether answers are supported by the underlying representation, whether questions are self-contained, and whether they target multi-hop procedural reasoning. Across 23 instructional topics and 690 generated question-answer pairs, strict TMK generation achieves the strongest overall quality, with 96.5% grounded questions and 92.6% usable questions. Transcript-first generation produces more learner-like questions but more context-dependent or weakly grounded items, while TMK-aware generation yields high raw multi-hop coverage but lower grounding. These results show that procedural richness and natural phrasing do not guarantee representational grounding, motivating explicit representation-aware validation for evaluation datasets in AI-supported learning.

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

Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM): Structural Prevention of Objective Interference Collapse via Heterogeneous External Grounding with Inward-Only Gradient Flow

Authors:
Akshay Hazare↗

arXiv:2606.18688v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) are a leading approach to world model representation learning. We identify a failure mode in JEPA-based world models grounded against two qualitatively distinct external signals: physical dynamics (sparse, high-magnitude, constraint-satisfying gradient corrections) and social-behavioral dynamics (diffuse, distribution-matching corrections). We term this Objective Interference Collapse (OIC): we argue that joint learning in a shared latent space causes the dominant channel to systematically collapse the subordinate channel's representational subspace, in a manner not resolvable by loss weighting alone. We propose Dual-Channel Grounded World Modeling (DCGWM), designed to structurally prevent OIC through a partitioned latent space (physical subspace Z_p, behavioral subspace Z_b) with inward-only gradient flow. A Physical Grounding Channel updates only Z_p via VICReg-style alignment to physical measurements; a Social-Behavioral Grounding Channel updates only Z_b via alignment to trajectories from an emergent multi-agent simulation. An Inter-Channel Interface Module couples the subspaces at the task level without cross-subspace gradients. An Asymmetric Grounding Adherence Loss penalizes rollout drift with a hard hinge for physical violations and a soft KL for behavioral divergence. A Generative Rendering Layer is architecturally isolated from the latent world model. We present three theoretical results: the partition removes the gradient-interference pathway implicated in OIC; each grounded subspace inherits anti-collapse guarantees from its alignment objective; and generative isolation is necessary under a stated assumption on the generative objective's geometry. This manuscript establishes the problem formulation and architecture; experimental validation is ongoing and will be reported in a future revision.

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