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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

WorldOlympiad: Can Your World Model Survive a Triathlon?

We introduce WorldOlympiad, a benchmark for diagnosing video-based world models across physical faithfulness, geometric consistency, and interaction fidelity. While existing benchmarks often focus on visual quality, semantic alignment, or short-term temporal coherence, they provide limited insight into whether generated videos obey physical rules, preserve coherent 3D structure, and sustain controllable interactions over long horizons. To address this gap, WorldOlympiad decomposes world-model evaluation into three complementary dimensions. The physical track uses object segmentation and MLLM-as-judge to assess whether generated videos follow interpretable rules in mechanics, thermal phenomena, and material properties. The geometry track reconstructs generated videos with Gaussian splatting and evaluates structural consistency, cross-view coherence, and camera-trajectory alignment. The interaction track assesses whether generated rollouts follow complex action prompts and maintain smooth, coherent transitions across consecutive video chunks. WorldOlympiad further covers three major downstream scenarios, including gaming, robotics, and general real-world videos, capturing diverse challenges from interactive control and embodied manipulation to open-domain motion and camera dynamics. Together, these tracks and scenarios form a scalable and interpretable evaluation suite that exposes failure modes beyond generic video quality. Experiments on state-of-the-art models reveal substantial gaps in physical reasoning, 3D consistency, and long-horizon interaction, underscoring the need for more structured evaluation protocols for generative world models.

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

Superresolution technique beyond the diffraction limit under a structured beam via different optical nanostructures

arXiv:2602.19417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: To overcome the limit of diffraction while achieving the superresolution technique, solid immersion lenses are the key optical elements for data storage and nanophotonics applications. Recent demonstrations have shown how different nanostructures (such as elliptical solid immersion lenses) are used in diverse fields of increasing resolution in the presence of a structured Gaussian beam. By applying twisted beams such as angular momentum beams (Laguerre- Gaussian) and spatial higher-order Gaussian beams (Hermite- Gauss), we can attain a sharp near-field focal spot pattern, which is considerably better than the conventional solid immersion lens structure in ~mm scale specifically for imaging beyond diffraction limit. Our computation results present a resolution of ~27 nm under a specific Hermite -Gauss mode illumination on a pyramidal shape nanolens structure. By numerical simulations, tolerance has been confirmed with a slight variation in beam size and geometrical modification to make the model compatible with fabrication errors. This narrow bandwidth intensity distribution can be utilized for scanning the sample with higher resolution, especially in the field of quantum technology.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Revealing high-dimensional entanglement through symmetry

arXiv:2606.23817v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photons encoded in discrete time bins can be routinely prepared in temporal superposition states, enabling high-dimensional entanglement and enhanced quantum communication rates. However, characterizing this high-dimensional entanglement presents significant challenges, namely due to the involved measurement complexity or reliance on restrictive assumptions that compromise the generality of traditional approaches. Here, we develop and experimentally demonstrate a simple linear-optical scheme based on particle-exchange symmetry that allows us to probe high-dimensional entanglement in time-bin-encoded states. Combining Hong-Ou-Mandel interference with suitable transformations, our method not only certifies entanglement but also lower-bounds its dimensionality using only two dichotomic symmetry-based measurements. This bound is obtained through a new rigorous theoretical analysis and can be further improved by weak, physically motivated assumptions. The scheme remains effective at any timescale, even far below the temporal detector resolution used. Our work provides a powerful state-characterization tool and demonstrates that we can prove high-dimensional temporal entanglement on timescales inaccessible to the setup.

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

Hessian-augmented Supervised Learning for Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman PDEs

arXiv:2606.23827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A data-driven method is developed for approximating value functions in deterministic optimal control problems with nonlinear control-affine dynamics. The Pontryagin Maximum Principle optimality system is solved from multiple initial conditions to generate training data consisting of values, gradients, and Hessians of the value function, where Hessian information is obtained from a matrix Riccati equation along optimal trajectories. These quantities augment a weighted least-squares regression over sparse polynomial bases on hyperbolic cross index sets, with gradients and Hessians contributing additional linear equations per sample and substantially reducing sample complexity compared to value-only regression. Feedback laws are recovered analytically from the learned value function. In high dimensions, a partial Hessian strategy controls the cost of data generation. The approach is validated on problems of increasing state dimension, where second-order data augmentation is shown to improve approximation accuracy and closed-loop performance, with up to an order-of-magnitude reduction in the number of training samples required relative to lower-order methods.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MCR-VQGAN: A Scalable and Cost-Effective Tau PET Synthesis Approach for Alzheimer's Disease Imaging

Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is a critical diagnostic modality for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its widespread clinical adoption is hindered by radiation exposure, limited availability, high clinical workload, and substantial financial costs. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-scale CBAM Residual Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (MCR-VQGAN) to synthesize high-fidelity tau PET images from structural T1-weighted MRI. MCR-VQGAN advances the standard VQGAN architecture through three enhancements: multi-scale convolutions, ResNet blocks, and Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM), which collectively improve the capture of local and global features. Using 222 paired T1-weighted MRI and tau PET scans from the ADNI database, we trained and compared MCR-VQGAN against cGAN, WGAN-GP, CycleGAN, and baseline VQGAN. MCR-VQGAN achieved superior image synthesis performance across all metrics (MSE = 0.0056 +/- 0.0061, PSNR = 30.65 +/- 4.47 dB, SSIM = 0.9263 +/- 0.0469). A CNN-based AD classifier trained on real tau PET achieved comparable accuracy on real (63.64%) and synthetic (65.91%) images, indicating that diagnostically relevant features are preserved. Regional SUVR-equivalent analysis across Braak-defined ROIs further indicated strong agreement between real and synthetic tau PET (Pearson r = 0.78-0.88; ICC = 0.71-0.84), with the strongest agreement in Braak V/VI (ICC = 0.838). Together, these results suggest that MCR-VQGAN offers a promising and scalable surrogate for conventional tau PET imaging, potentially improving the accessibility of tau biomarkers for AD research and clinical workflows.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

DynamicDemiLog: A Single Sketch for Ultrafast Similarity, Frequency, and Cardinality Estimation

Probabilistic cardinality estimators (HyperLogLog), similarity sketches (MinHash), and frequency estimators (Count-Min Sketch) are fundamental approximate data structures that each target one primary problem. We present DynamicDemiLog (DDL), a sketch that unifies cardinality estimation, set similarity, containment, element frequency and composition in one tiny data structure built from a single pass over the input stream. Using an inverted index over 200,687 RefSeq sketches (159,567 organisms), DDL performs all-to-all sketch similarity comparison of the full database in 30 seconds (128 threads, indexed) - over 375x faster per query than Mash's brute-force all-to-all comparison of 91,282 sketches, or 31x faster without the index, at double the sketch resolution. DDL extends the LogLog register with a mantissa: each register stores a floating-point-encoded hash value consisting of an integer exponent (the leading-zero count) and a fractional mantissa (the sub-leading-zero bits), rather than the integer leading-zero count alone. This preserves enough hash information for meaningful register-by-register comparison - a property that standard 6-bit registers lack - while improving on LogLog's cardinality estimation machinery, including DynamicLogLog's early exit mask for high-throughput streaming. With a default 10 mantissa bits (16-bit registers, 2,048 buckets, 4 KB), DDL achieves a per-register false-match rate of 0.018% on unrelated random same-size sets (compared to 17.0% for LL6, a basic HyperLogLog implementation), enabling Weighted Kmer Identity (WKID), Average Nucleotide Identity (ANI), containment, and completeness estimation from register comparison alone. A 16-bit per-register observation counter provides element frequency information at trivial additional computation cost, and an additional byte tracks element composition (GC content, for biological data). Furthermore, DDL's high-specificity registers enable an inverted index structure (DDLIndex) that answers similarity queries against a database of N sketches in O(B + M) time, where M is the number of matching index entries, compared to O(NxB) for pairwise comparison.

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

Can AI Reason Like an Urban Planner? Benchmarking Large Language Models Against Professional Judgment

Problem, Research Strategy, and Findings: The rise of large language models (LLMs) raises a key question for urban planning: which forms of professional planning knowledge can AI replicate, and which still require human judgment? Although AI tools are increasingly used in planning practice, there is still no systematic framework for testing whether they can reason with the contextual sensitivity, value awareness, and institutional literacy central to planning expertise. This paper introduces Urban Planning Bench (UPBench), a domain-specific evaluation framework that assesses LLM reasoning through a 4x5 matrix of four knowledge pillars and five cognitive levels adapted from Bloom's revised taxonomy. Evaluating 25 LLMs with automated scoring and expert review, we find a non-monotonic cognitive curve: models perform better on higher-order analytical tasks than on factual recall and integrative judgment. This suggests that planning knowledge often treated as lower-order is deeply shaped by institutional, jurisdictional, and temporal context, making it hard for LLMs to generalize. We summarize these limits as four epistemic diagnostics: regulatory hallucination, conceptual conflation, wickedness paralysis, and phronetic deficit. Takeaway for Practice: The findings support differential delegation in planning. LLMs can assist with cross-disciplinary synthesis, literature review, scenario generation, and preliminary policy analysis. However, they remain unreliable for jurisdiction-specific regulation, normative conflict resolution, and context-sensitive procedure. Agencies should require verification for AI-assisted regulatory analysis, while planning education should emphasize institutional literacy, normative judgment, and contextual sensitivity.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PseudoBench: Measuring How Agentic Auto-Research Fuels Pseudoscience

As Large Language Model based agents enter autonomous scientific research, their ability to resist pseudoscience becomes increasingly important. Otherwise, such systems may rapidly generate plausible yet misleading studies that contaminate academic literature and erode trust in science. We present PseudoBench, an adversarial benchmark for evaluating whether agentic auto-research systems can identify and resist pseudoscientific narratives. PseudoBench contains 200 curated pseudoscientific claim-evidence pairs across five domains and evaluates agents through an end-to-end research pipeline from experiments to writing. Testing seven state-of-the-art agents, we find that current systems readily produce persuasive reports that align with pseudoscientific premises with near-zero refusal rates and the highest resistance of only 27.4%. Stronger agents risk packaging pseudoscience in more sophisticated scientific language, increasing its apparent credibility. These findings reveal an alarming capacity to fuel pseudoscience, calling for scientific alignment before widespread deployment.

09.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Proteomic signatures of early retinal neurodegeneration in type 2 diabetes mellitus

Authors:

by Huangdong Li, Ziyu Zhu, Shaopeng Yang, Weijing Cheng, Shaoying Tan, Zhuoyao Xin, Lei Zhang, Zhuoting Zhu, Shida Chen, Wenyong Huang, Wei Wang Background Retinal neurodegeneration is an early and independent feature of diabetic retinal disease and has been proposed as a window into the systemic neural consequences of diabetes, yet accessible molecular biomarkers and individualized prediction tools remain scarce. We aimed to identify circulating plasma protein signatures of diabetic retinal neurodegeneration (DRN) and to translate them into a clinically usable risk prediction system. Methods and findings In this multi-cohort prospective observational study, we integrated high-throughput plasma proteomics with longitudinal optical coherence tomography (OCT) in two independent populations. The discovery cohort comprised 1,492 participants had baseline plasma proteomics and OCT, and 1,218 were followed with repeated OCT over 6 years in Guangzhou Diabetic Eye Study (GDES). DRN was quantified by the annualized OCT-derived retinal nerve fiber layer thinning rate. In multivariable analyses adjusted for age, sex, smoking, systolic blood pressure, HbA1c, and diabetes duration, we identified 71 plasma proteins associated with development and progression of DRN. These proteins mapped onto pathways governing inflammatory immune recruitment, extracellular matrix remodeling, and microvascular homeostasis, providing a plausible biological basis for DRN. We developed a proteomics-based DRN model (Pro-DRN) using eight machine learning (ML) algorithms, including XGBoost and LightGBM. In the independent test set, Pro-DRN achieved a C-index of 0.860, rising to 0.908 when integrated with clinical variables. Compared with six conventional models, Pro-DRN improved discrimination (ΔC-index 0.137 to 0.159; all P 

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

How Much Do Reviews Really Contribute? A Study on Text-Enriched Matrix Factorization for Recommendations

arXiv:2606.16973v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Incorporating textual reviews into a Recommender System has become a prominent strategy for enriching collaborative signals with semantic information. However, the actual contribution of review-derived representations remains an open question, particularly when strong collaborative baselines are employed. In this work, we systematically investigate the impact of textual information on Matrix Factorization by introducing and comparing three enrichment strategies over a common collaborative backbone. First, we propose a learnable gating mechanism that adaptively balances collaborative and textual signals during training. This mechanism is applied to two distinct review representations: (i) aggregated topic profiles extracted from user and item histories, and (ii) full text embedding representations derived from reviews. Additionally, we explore a cross-attention mechanism that identifies and emphasizes the most informative dimensions of the textual representation before fusion with collaborative factors. We evaluate six variants: pure, enriched with topic profiles and text via gating; enriched with topics and text via gating; and enhanced with cross-attention over textual features. Experiments across multiple review-based datasets reveal that although adaptive fusion mechanisms improve representation flexibility, the marginal contribution of textual signals remains limited compared to the collaborative backbone. These findings suggest that, under typical rating-prediction settings, collaborative information continues to dominate performance, raising important considerations for the effective integration of semantic review signals into recommendation models.

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

RAMEN: Resolution-Adjustable Multimodal Encoder for Earth Observation

Earth observation (EO) data spans a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions, from high-resolution optical imagery to low resolution multispectral products or radar time series. While recent foundation models have improved multimodal integration for learning meaningful representations, they often expect fixed input resolutions or are based on sensor-specific encoders limiting generalization across heterogeneous EO modalities. To overcome these limitations we introduce RAMEN, a resolution-adjustable multimodal encoder that learns a shared visual representation across EO data in a fully sensor-agnostic manner. RAMEN treats the modality and spatial and temporal resolutions as key input data features, enabling coherent analysis across modalities within a unified latent space. Its main methodological contribution is to define spatial resolution as a controllable output parameter, giving users direct control over the desired level of detail at inference and allowing explicit trade-offs between spatial precision and computational cost. We train a single, unified transformer encoder reconstructing masked multimodal EO data drawn from diverse sources, ensuring generalization across sensors and resolutions. Once pretrained, RAMEN transfers effectively to both known and unseen sensor configurations and outperforms larger state-of-the-art models on the community-standard PANGAEA benchmark, containing various multi-sensor and multi-resolution downstream tasks. Our code and pretrained model are available at https://github.com/nicolashoudre/RAMEN.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DecompSR: A dataset for decomposed analyses of compositional multihop spatial reasoning

arXiv:2511.02627v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce DecompSR, decomposed spatial reasoning, a large benchmark dataset (over 5m datapoints) and generation framework designed to analyse compositional spatial reasoning ability. The generation of DecompSR allows users to independently vary several aspects of compositionality, namely: productivity (reasoning depth), substitutivity (entity and linguistic variability), overgeneralisation (input order, distractors) and systematicity (novel linguistic elements). DecompSR is built procedurally in a manner which makes it is correct by construction, which is independently verified using a symbolic solver to guarantee the correctness of the dataset. DecompSR is comprehensively benchmarked across a host of Large Language Models (LLMs) where we show that LLMs struggle with productive and systematic generalisation in spatial reasoning tasks whereas they are more robust to linguistic variation. DecompSR provides a provably correct and rigorous benchmarking dataset with a novel ability to independently vary the degrees of several key aspects of compositionality, allowing for robust and fine-grained probing of the compositional reasoning abilities of LLMs.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CropTrack: A Tracking with Re-Identification Framework for Precision Agriculture

Multiple-object tracking (MOT) in agricultural environments presents major challenges due to repetitive patterns, similar object appearances, sudden illumination changes, and frequent occlusions. Contemporary trackers in this domain rely on the motion of objects rather than appearance for association. Nevertheless, they struggle to maintain object identities when targets undergo frequent and strong occlusions. The high similarity of object appearances makes integrating appearance-based association nontrivial for agricultural scenarios. To solve this problem we propose CropTrack, a novel MOT framework based on the combination of appearance and motion information. CropTrack integrates a reranking-enhanced appearance association, a one-to-many association with appearance-based conflict resolution strategy, and an exponential moving average prototype feature bank to improve appearance-based association. Evaluated on publicly available agricultural MOT datasets, CropTrack demonstrates consistent identity preservation, outperforming traditional motion-based tracking methods. Compared to the state of the art, CropTrack achieves significant gains in association accuracy and identification precision scores with a lower number of identity switches.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([≥] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

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

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

arXiv:2605.31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments. Deformable-object folding is a representative challenge, requiring robots to handle clothing items from random initial states across varying categories, geometries, materials, and scenes. However, existing VLA systems commonly train separate policies for different object categories, while naively mixed multi-task training often suffers from task interference and degraded performance. To move beyond category-specific folding policies, we introduce DeMaVLA, a VLA foundation model for generalizable Deformable Manipulation. DeMaVLA adopts a VLM backbone with an action expert and formulates continuous action generation using flow matching. To improve efficiency, the action expert is constructed by pruning every other transformer layer while preserving layer-wise alignment with the VLM backbone, reducing training and inference cost. DeMaVLA is first pre-trained on approximately 5,000 hours of selected real-world dual-arm demonstrations to acquire general manipulation priors. It is then post-trained on mixed folding data that aggregates self-collected demonstrations and corrective trajectories from real-robot failures across multiple folding tasks through a human-in-the-loop Data Aggregation~(DAgger) pipeline. Experiments show that DeMaVLA achieves competitive performance on RoboTwin 2.0 and strong real-world results on our household folding benchmark. These results highlight the value of scalable real-world data, efficient action generation, and corrective learning for general-purpose VLA policies in deformable-object manipulation.

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

Effective Dimension Governs Generalization in Quantum Kernel Vision Models

arXiv:2606.20183v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent quantum vision models-quantum vision transformers and quantum convolutional networks-report two striking but unexplained empirical phenomena: (i) ansatze with more, or more uniformly distributed, entanglement generalize better, and (ii) injecting quantum noise can improve test accuracy rather than degrade it. These observations are currently treated as curiosities, discovered by grid search and explained, if at all, by hand. We show that both are manifestations of a single, measurable quantity: the effective dimension $d_eff$ of the (noise-shaped) quantum feature kernel. Working primarily with quantum-kernel vision models-a quantum feature map read out by a kernel classifier-we give a spectral account in which entanglement structure and quantum noise are two knobs that move $d_eff$; in an overfitting regime, contracting $d_eff$ acts as ridge-like regularization. We analyze the mechanism: an exact decomposition of the depolarized kernel $K_p=(1-p)^2K+\tfrac{p(2-p)}{D}\mathbf{1}\mathbf{1}^\top$ with $d_eff(K_p)\to1$, a contraction result (and its boundary) for amplitude damping, a kernel-machine capacity bound, and a capacity/alignment risk decomposition; the monotone contraction operative in our entangled experiments is verified empirically, not proven in general. Along the one-parameter depolarizing family the collapse is instead exact by construction; we use it only to confirm the kernel decomposition to machine precision and at up to $12$ qubits, not as evidence for $d_eff$. Amplitude damping contracts $d_eff$ and lifts test accuracy by up to $+13\%$ along an inverted-U sweet spot; the effect's sign flips between the over- and under-fitting regimes; noise injection matches an explicit spectral-filtering frontier. Our results organize two reported anecdotes into a single measurable principle for designing quantum-vision models.

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

ExpRL: Exploratory RL for LLM Mid-Training

arXiv:2606.17024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse reward reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard tool for improving LLM reasoning, but its success depends critically on the coverage present in the base model. In practice, models are often primed for RL through mid-training on curated reasoning traces that teach useful primitive skills such as decomposition, verification, or self-correction. Although effective, this strategy requires manually specifying what the model should learn, and it remains unclear whether such primitive coverage is enough for much harder problems, which require combining these skills into broader solution strategies. We study a more automated approach: RL-based mid-training using large corpora of human-written question-answer data. Rather than treating reference solutions as targets to imitate, our method, ExpRL, uses them as reward scaffolds: references are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics for judging on-policy reasoning traces. The policy samples from the original problem prompt, while an LLM judge compares the sampled reasoning trace against the reference solution and assigns outcome-level or process-level dense rewards. This lets ExpRL reinforce partial progress, useful intermediate reductions, and productive reasoning behaviors that sparse final-answer rewards often fail to upweight. On challenging math reasoning tasks, ExpRL yields stronger RL priming than SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation, and provides a better initialization for subsequent sparse-reward RL. Additional mixed-domain experiments further suggest that ExpRL can extend beyond the original math-only setting.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MobilityBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating Route-Planning Agents in Real-World Mobility Scenarios

arXiv:2602.22638v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Route-planning agents powered by large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm for supporting everyday human mobility through natural language interaction and tool-mediated decision making. However, systematic evaluation in real-world mobility settings is hindered by diverse routing demands, non-deterministic mapping services, and limited reproducibility. In this study, we introduce MobilityBench, a scalable benchmark for evaluating LLM-based route-planning agents in real-world mobility scenarios. MobilityBench is constructed from large-scale, anonymized real user queries collected from Amap and covers a broad spectrum of route-planning intents across multiple cities worldwide. To enable reproducible, end-to-end evaluation, we design a deterministic API-replay sandbox that eliminates environmental variance from live services. We further propose a multi-dimensional evaluation protocol centered on outcome validity, complemented by assessments of instruction understanding, planning, tool use, and efficiency. Using MobilityBench, we evaluate multiple LLM-based route-planning agents across diverse real-world mobility scenarios and provide an in-depth analysis of their behaviors and performance. Our findings reveal that current models perform competently on Basic information retrieval and Route Planning tasks, yet struggle considerably with Preference-Constrained Route Planning, underscoring significant room for improvement in personalized mobility applications. We publicly release the benchmark data, evaluation toolkit, and documentation at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/MobilityBench.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

One Token to Fool LLM-as-a-Judge

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly trusted as automated judges, assisting evaluation and providing reward signals for training other models, particularly in reference-based settings like Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). However, we uncover a critical vulnerability even in this reference-based paradigm: generative reward models are systematically susceptible to reward hacking. We find that superficial inputs, which we term ''master keys'' such as non-word symbols (e.g., '':'' or ''.'') or generic reasoning openers (e.g., ''Thought process:'' or ''Let's solve this problem step by step.''), can consistently elicit false positive rewards without any substantive reasoning. Our systematic evaluation demonstrates this is a widespread failure affecting a diverse range of models, including leading proprietary systems such as GPT-o1 and Claude-4. These results challenge the assumed robustness of LLM judges and pose a significant threat to their reliability. To address this, we propose a simple yet effective data augmentation strategy using truncated model outputs as adversarial negative examples. The resulting Master Reward Models (Master-RMs) demonstrate state-of-the-art robustness against these ''master key'' attacks while maintaining high performance in standard evaluation settings. We supplement these findings with a comprehensive analysis of the vulnerability across model scales, prompt variations, and common inference-time strategies, offering insights to guide future research on robust LLM evaluation. We release our robust, general-domain reward models and the synthetic training data at https://huggingface.co/sarosavo/Master-RM and https://huggingface.co/datasets/sarosavo/Master-RM.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

arXiv:2606.04513v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Daily briefing: Sperm whales have different dialects

Authors:

Whales in different areas of the Mediterranean use varying patterns of clicks and pauses. Plus, a technique to make protein samples one billion times bigger and the science of grief. Whales in different areas of the Mediterranean use varying patterns of clicks and pauses. Plus, a technique to make protein samples one billion times bigger and the science of grief.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bi-qutrit entangled edge states of positive partial transposes with largest ranks

arXiv:2606.16265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whenever $E$ is an eight dimensional subspace of the bi-qutrit quantum system whose orthogonal complement is spanned by a vector of Schmidt rank three, we show that there exist PPT entangled edge states with the range space $E$ whose partial transposes are of rank six, which is the largest possible rank. In this way, we exhibit a huge family of bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of type $(8,6)$. They make faces of the convex set of all PPT states, and we find bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of other types on the boundaries of such faces.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

ECMME: an atlas of selection pressures on the mammalian extracellular matrix reveals contrasting evolutionary dynamics

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is a fundamental metazoan innovation that provides structural support and regulatory cues essential for multicellular life. While core matrisome components are subject to strong functional constraints, their evolutionary dynamics at the molecular level remain incompletely characterized. Here, we present a comprehensive per-residue analysis of selection pressures across 272 human core matrisome proteins using high-quality orthologous sequences from up to 228 placental mammal species. We developed an automated pipeline integrating ortholog identification, codon-aware alignments, and site-specific selection analyses with the MEME and FUBAR methods from the HyPhy suite. Results reveal pervasive strong purifying selection across the matrisome, consistent with its structural and functional indispensability. This is accompanied by episodic positive selection and rarer pervasive positive selection, with collagens exhibiting significantly elevated episodic positive selection compared to glycoproteins and proteoglycans. To facilitate community access, we developed ECMME (ECM Molecular Evolution) browser, an intuitive open-access web resource that visualizes selection metrics plotted directly onto protein topologies. ECMME allows researchers to seamlessly browse and investigate the data, providing a powerful framework for interpreting functional sites. It is available online and requires no local installation or set-up (https://izzilab-ecmme.share.connect.posit.cloud/).

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gated QKAN-FWP: Scalable Quantum-inspired Sequence Learning

arXiv:2605.06734v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) encode temporal dependencies through dynamically updated parameters rather than recurrent hidden states. Quantum FWPs (QFWPs) extend this idea with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), but existing implementations rely on multi-qubit architectures that are difficult to scale on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and expensive to simulate classically. We propose gated QKAN-FWP, a fast-weight framework that integrates FWP with Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (QKAN) using single-qubit data re-uploading circuits as learnable nonlinear activation, known as DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN (DARUAN). We further introduce a scalar-gated fast-weight update rule that stabilizes parameter evolution, supported by a theoretical analysis of its adaptive memory kernel, geometric boundedness, and parallelizable gradient paths. We evaluate the framework across time-series benchmarks, MiniGrid reinforcement learning, and highlight real-world solar cycle forecasting as our main practical result. In the long-horizon setting with 528-month input window and 132-month forecast horizon, our 12.5k-parameter model achieves lower scaled Mean Square Error (MSE), peak amplitude error, and peak timing error than a suite of classical recurrent baselines with up to 13x more parameters, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks (25.9k-89.1k parameters), WaveNet-LSTM (167k), Vanilla recurrent neural network (11.5k), and a Modified Echo State Network (132k). To validate NISQ compatibility, we further deploy the trained fast programmer on IonQ and IBM Quantum processors, recovering forecasting accuracy within 0.1% relative MSE of the noiseless simulator at 1024 shots. These results position gated QKAN-FWP as a scalable, parameter-efficient, and NISQ-compatible approach to quantum-inspired sequence modeling.