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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When to Skip Syndrome Extraction in Surface-GKP Codes

arXiv:2606.24469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fault-tolerant quantum error correction requires repeated syndrome extraction to address errors induced by the syndrome-extraction circuit itself. However, repeated syndrome extraction incurs significant overhead in terms of gate count and ancilla consumption (e.g., Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states). Moreover, noisy syndrome extraction can itself inject additional errors into the data qubits. To address these issues, we propose a concrete adaptive skipping scheme for the surface-GKP code, a representative GKP-concatenated architecture, that uses analog information naturally generated during inner GKP correction. At each round, the scheme selects one of four actions: measuring both Z-type and X-type surface-code stabilizers, measuring only one type, or skipping both types and reusing previous syndromes. The decision is based on a reliability comparison between reusing the previous syndrome value and performing a new noisy syndrome extraction. Using circuit-level simulations, we show that the adaptive skipping scheme can reduce the number of surface-code stabilizer measurements while maintaining logical error rates comparable to or lower than those of the full-measurement baseline. The improvement is most pronounced when gate and measurement noise are larger than idle noise, so that avoiding unnecessary syndrome extraction reduces the noise injected into the code. These results indicate that analog information from inner GKP correction can be used not only to improve decoding but also to reduce the measurement overhead of outer-code syndrome extraction.

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

Structure-Aware Text Recognition for Ancient Greek Critical Editions

Recent advances in visual language models (VLMs) have transformed end-to-end document understanding. However, their ability to interpret the complex layout semantics of historical scholarly texts remains limited. This paper investigates structure-aware text recognition for Ancient Greek critical editions, which have dense reference hierarchies and extensive marginal annotations. We introduce two novel resources: (i) a large-scale synthetic corpus of 185,000 page images generated from TEI/XML sources with controlled typographic and layout variation, and (ii) a curated benchmark of real scanned editions spanning more than a century of editorial and typographic practices. Using these datasets, we evaluate three state-of-the-art VLMs under both zero-shot and fine-tuning regimes. Our experiments reveal substantial limitations in current VLM architectures when confronted with highly structured historical documents. In zero-shot settings, most models significantly underperform compared to established off-the-shelf software. Nevertheless, the Qwen3VL-8B model achieves state-of-the-art performance, reaching a median Character Error Rate of 1.0\% on real scans. These results highlight both the current shortcomings and the future potential of VLMs for structure-aware recognition of complex scholarly documents.

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

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

arXiv:2606.15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information. We provide the first local convergence analysis of three such methods – Equilibrium Propagation (EP), Coupled Learning (CL), and a new method we call Adjoint Coupled Learning (AL) – for linear circuits, in the limit of small-nudging for both discrete and continuous time. EP and AL perform gradient descent on a natural loss function, while CL follows modified dynamics with an additional cubic correction. Assuming the existence of a solution, we identify a coercivity condition, expressed as a rank condition on a matrix built from the network's incidence structure, under which the training loss decays exponentially and the parameters converge to the solution manifold. We show that coercivity can fail by exhibiting a kite circuit in which a symmetry causes the coercivity constant to degenerate on the solution manifold, but prove using Sard's theorem that such degeneracies are non-generic: coercivity holds at every point of the solution manifold for almost every choice of desired output.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

People are turning to AI chatbots to plug gaps in health information

A systematic assessment of health-related queries to a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence highlights shortfalls in health-care provision and the responsibilities of AI companies. A systematic assessment of health-related queries to a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence highlights shortfalls in health-care provision and the responsibilities of AI companies.

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

ESBMC-PLC+: A Unified IEC~61131-3 Formal Verification Framework as a PLCverif Successor

PLCverif is the most mature open-source platform for PLC formal verification, developed at CERN and in production use since 2019. Yet it has two fundamental limitations: no support for Ladder Diagram (LD) programs, the dominant PLC notation, and reliance on CBMC as its primary backend, which restricts verification to bounded proofs. The PLCverif authors themselves identified ESBMC as the appropriate backend improvement. Prior work established ESBMC-PLC (a textual LD frontend with k-induction) and ESBMC-GraphPLC (graphical PLCopen XML support); together, they cover LD with unbounded proofs but not Structured Text (ST), and graphical LD with timer/counter function blocks remains unverifiable. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC+, a unified framework that closes both gaps: (1) an ST/SCL frontend via the MATIEC IEC 61131-3 compiler, routing C-compiled ST to ESBMC with nondeterministic input modeling and YAML property injection; (2) function block state semantics for graphical LD, extending the DFS resolver to model TON/TOF/TP timers, CTU/CTD counters, and R_TRIG/F_TRIG edge triggers as persistent scan-cycle state variables in the GOTO IR. ESBMC-PLC+ is the first open-source PLC verification framework to support all three major IEC 61131-3 input formats via a single ESBMC backend, enabling k-induction-unbounded safety proofs. A feature comparison with PLCverif and experimental evaluation on 8 benchmark programs, including programs with up to 8 integer timers, shows that ESBMC-PLC+ matches PLCverif's input coverage while providing stronger guarantees. Against nuXmv's BDD backend, ESBMC-PLC+ is 400-2,000x faster on timer programs and completes proofs where nuXmv BDD times out at 120s.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Efficient Adaptive Data Acquisition via Pretrained Belief Representations

arXiv:2606.25197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning effective policies for adaptive data acquisition remains challenging: posterior-based methods rely on surrogate models and posterior approximations that can be misspecified or biased, while direct policy-learning methods map from historical observations and fail to exploit available model representations, making learning harder. We introduce policy learning with belief representations (POLAR), based on the insight that optimal data acquisition depends on the observation history only through a sufficient belief state. Specifically, POLAR decouples representation learning from policy learning by leveraging pretrained predictive foundation models as belief-state encoders, training a policy head on top of their representations. This yields a simple, unified amortised policy learning framework for Bayesian experimental design, Bayesian optimisation, and active learning, differing only in the task-specific utility used to train the policy. Empirically, we find that POLAR outperforms state-of-the-art amortised methods across diverse tasks while requiring far fewer training samples, demonstrating a significant step in the scalability and efficiency of amortised data acquisition.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

OMIO: A policy-driven Python library for reproducible microscopy image I/O

Modern fluorescence and multiphoton microscopy workflows operate within a heterogeneous ecosystem of file formats, partially overlapping metadata standards, and reader-specific conventions. In practice, this frequently leads to silent axis misinterpretations, loss or corruption of physical voxel size information, and laboratory-specific glue code that is fragile, poorly documented, and difficult to reproduce. OMIO, short for Open Microscopy Image I/O, addresses these issues by providing a lightweight, policy-driven image I/O layer for Python that enforces a canonical, OME-compatible data representation at the API boundary. The central contribution of OMIO is the explicit separation of low-level format access from semantic normalization. Existing reader libraries are used as interchangeable backends for extracting pixel data and available metadata, while OMIO enforces axis conventions, metadata interpretation, and fallback decisions in a centralized and auditable policy layer. This design allows heterogeneous microscopy inputs to be converted into a stable representation without propagating backend-specific assumptions into downstream analysis code. The core design principles of OMIO include canonical axis semantics (TZCYX), robust metadata normalization with explicit and auditable fallbacks, memory-aware operation via optional Zarr-based backends, and workflow-level semantics that extend beyond individual files to folder stacks and BIDS-like project structures. This architecture allows OMIO to orchestrate existing reader libraries into a coherent and reproducible I/O pipeline without replacing or duplicating their functionality. OMIO is implemented as an open-source and community-oriented system in which support for additional file formats and metadata conventions can be added incrementally through modular reader backends. By encouraging the contribution of example datasets, backend extensions, and feature requests, OMIO is designed to evolve alongside emerging acquisition systems while preserving strict semantic guarantees at the interface level. The resulting standardized OME-TIFF outputs are immediately suitable for downstream quantitative analysis and interactive inspection in scientific Python workflows, including workflows based on ImageJ and Napari.

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

Aspect-Based Sentiment Evolution and its Correlation with Review Rounds in Multi-Round Peer Reviews: A Deep Learning Approach

Mining sentiment information from the textual content of peer review comments offers valuable insights into the scientific evaluation process. However, previous studies are often constrained by coarse-grained analysis and the lack of differentiation across review rounds. Notably, the dynamic shifts in reviewers' focus and sentiment tendencies throughout multiple review stages remain underexplored. To address this gap, the present study investigates the distribution and evolution of aspect-level sentiments and examines their correlation with the number of review rounds. We begin by segmenting the multi-round review comments of 11,063 accepted papers from Nature Communications and identifying fine-grained review aspect clusters. A manually annotated corpus of approximately 5,000 review sentences is then constructed. Using this dataset, we train a series of deep learning-based aspect sentiment classification models. Among them, the LCF-BERT-CDM model achieves the best performance, with a Macro-F1 score of 82.65%. Subsequent statistical analysis reveals a consistent trend: as the number of review rounds increases, the proportion of positive sentiments rises, while negative sentiments decline. Correlation analysis further indicates that aspect sentiment scores are negatively associated with the total number of review rounds. Key aspects exhibiting stronger correlations include "experiments", "research significance" and "result analysis".

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

TimeRouter: Efficient and Adaptive Routing of Time-Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.11625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly explored as predictive experts within emerging agentic time-series systems. However, TSFMs exhibit heterogeneous inductive biases, and no single model consistently dominates across forecasting regimes, making expert selection a critical challenge. Existing systems often delegate this decision to LLM-based controllers, incurring substantial inference overhead. We present TimeRouter, an efficient routing framework that leverages empirical complementarity across a pool of pretrained TSFMs through lightweight discriminative routing, selective gating, and ensemble fallback. Concretely, TimeRouter combines a learned routing head, a selective gate, and an ensemble fallback, enabling adaptive expert selection without invoking an LLM at inference time. TimeRouter achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GIFT-EVAL leaderboard, with an LB MASE of 0.6765. Beyond benchmark performance, our ablation studies provide empirical insights into TSFM routing design, highlighting the importance of pool composition and selective gating. Taken together, these results position TimeRouter as a modular and lightweight routing layer for future agentic time-series systems built upon foundation-model pools. Our code is available at https://github.com/UConn-DSIS/TimeRouter.

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

Driving, Fast or Slow? Neuro-Symbolic Guidance for Motion Prediction in Multi-Modal Ground Mobility

arXiv:2606.15251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate and interpretable motion prediction for heterogeneous traffic spaces, including pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and trucks, is essential for safe autonomous navigation. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art approaches remain predominantly black-box, lacking explicit encoding of the regulatory and behavioral constraints of real-world mobility. We propose Trajectory Compliance-Shaping (TraCS), a neuro-symbolic framework that augments existing black-box motion prediction backbones with interpretable and probabilistic first-order logic. To do so, TraCS employs an agentic code-generation pipeline to bridge the gap between natural-language descriptions of traffic regulations and probabilistic motion prediction. Furthermore, TraCS employs a reactive data-streaming inference engine that maintains and efficiently updates compliance landscapes as scenes evolve. To prevent TraCS from overconfidently steering the backbone's predictions in the wrong direction, we propose a neural confidence rating learned as a context-aware attenuation of the compliance signal. We demonstrate on the Argoverse 2 benchmark how TraCS consistently improves state-of-the-art prediction backbones, showing that probabilistic and symbolic compliance reasoning is a broadly applicable and computationally efficient complement to purely neural motion predictors.

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

OpenVTON-Bench: A Large-Scale High-Resolution Benchmark for Controllable Virtual Try-On Evaluation

Recent advances in diffusion models have significantly elevated the visual fidelity of Virtual Try-On (VTON) systems, yet reliable evaluation remains a persistent bottleneck. Traditional metrics struggle to quantify fine-grained texture details and semantic consistency, while existing datasets fail to meet commercial standards in scale and diversity. We present OpenVTON-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising approximately 100K high-resolution image pairs (up to $1536 \times 1536$). The dataset is constructed using DINOv3-based hierarchical clustering for semantically balanced sampling and Gemini-powered dense captioning, ensuring a uniform distribution across 20 fine-grained garment categories. To support reliable evaluation, we propose a multi-modal protocol that measures VTON quality along five interpretable dimensions: background consistency, identity fidelity, texture fidelity, shape plausibility, and overall realism. The protocol integrates VLM-based semantic reasoning with a novel Multi-Scale Representation Metric based on SAM3 segmentation and morphological erosion, enabling the separation of boundary alignment errors from internal texture artifacts. Experimental results show strong agreement with human judgments (Kendall's $\tau$ of 0.833 vs. 0.611 for SSIM), establishing a robust benchmark for VTON evaluation.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

ITNet: A Learnable Integral Transform That Subsumes Convolution, Attention, and Recurrence

arXiv:2606.19538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Convolutional networks, recurrent networks, and transformers each encode different inductive biases – locality, sequential memory, and content-dependent pairwise interaction – and have remained mathematically distinct since their inception. We show that this fragmentation reflects not a fundamental diversity in how signals should be processed, but rather incomplete views of a single underlying mathematical object: a learnable integral transform. We introduce the Integral Transform Network (ITNet), a unified architecture built around a learnable kernel that depends jointly on positions and features. This kernel is implemented as a small neural network, specifically an MLP, that models pairwise interactions, enabling the model to adapt its behavior from data. We show that convolution, self-attention (including multi-head), and autoregressive recurrence (including LSTM, GRU, S4, and Mamba) arise as special cases under appropriate parameterizations, and that ITNet is a universal approximator of continuous operators. To make this practical, we develop tiled kernel fusion, importance-weighted Monte Carlo integration, and learned low-rank factorization, enabling efficient and scalable computation. A single ITNet architecture with a shared operator and lightweight modality-specific encoders matches or exceeds specialized baselines on ImageNet-1K , GLUE, ModelNet40, VQA\,v2 and NLVR2. The results demonstrate that a single learned interaction mechanism can recover the behavior of all three architectural families from data.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Self-Evolving Visual Questioner

Vision-language models (VLMs) are typically trained as passive answerers, while their ability to actively ask diverse, non-trivial, visual-centric and grounded questions remains underexplored. Existing visual questioners' performance is bottlenecked by the availability of high-quality training data or the cost of curating them. We show that a VLM can continuously improve itself as a visual questioner without any external supervision. We propose a self-evolving framework that uses a VLM itself as both a proposer and a filter to produce harder, more informative, and visual-centric questions, while maintaining their exploration diversity to avoid training collapse. These questions are then used to train the VLM in both questioner and answerer modes. To evaluate the questioner, we introduce an agentic protocol that assesses questions along perception, reasoning, and diversity dimensions. Experiments across various backbone VLMs show that our method substantially enhances the quality and substantially expands the difficulty boundary of autonomous question generation. Under the same budget, our self-supervision is more effective than training on the static source data. Moreover, the self-evolving questioner remains a competitive or even better answerer.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Spectrally engineered collinear type-0 SPDC source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution

arXiv:2606.24036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon sources with high spectral brightness are important resources for photonic quantum information processing, particularly in quantum communication and quantum networking where usable photon flux of entangled photons is often constrained by channel loss and source inefficiency. Here, we demonstrate a spectrally engineered type-0 spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) source with enhanced spectral brightness for entanglement distribution. By pumping a 30-mm ppKTP crystal with an ultra-narrowband laser slightly detuned from degeneracy, photon-pair generation is concentrated into a narrow spectral bandwidth while retaining the strong nonlinear interaction of type-0 phase matching. The source produces a coincidence rate of 44.6 kHz corresponding to a detected spectral brightness of 0.507 MHz/mW/nm. We further integrate the source into a Sagnac interferometer to generate polarization-entangled photon pairs and demonstrate entanglement distribution through a 2.56 km free-space round-trip channel. Our results show that spectral engineering provides a practical route to compact, spectrally bright entangled-photon sources for quantum communication applications.

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

Scalable and Interpretable Representation Alignment with Ordinal Similarity

arXiv:2606.16379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating representation similarity is fundamental to representation learning. However, existing metrics suffer from significant limitations: they lack interpretability due to shifting baselines, lack robustness to outliers, and are computationally intractable for large datasets, forcing reliance on heuristic approximations. To address this, we develop an ordinal-similarity framework, instantiated by the Triplet (TSI) and Quadruplet (QSI) Similarity Indices, which measure alignment by quantifying the consistency of ordinal relationships. We theoretically demonstrate this formulation is inherently interpretable, robust to outliers, and computationally efficient. Finally, we establish a formal equivalence between TSI and local neighborhood alignment, measured by Mutual Nearest Neighbors. Empirically, we validate these properties and show that ordinal similarity offers a scalable approach to measuring alignment, enabling practitioners to better understand and design representations.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

On the jump of the cover time in random geometric graphs

arXiv:2501.02433v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we study the cover time of the simple random walk on the giant component of supercritical $d$-dimensional random geometric graphs on $\mathrm{Poi}(n)$ vertices. We show that the cover time undergoes a jump at the connectivity threshold radius $r_c$: with $r_g$ denoting the threshold for having a giant component, we show that if the radius $r$ satisfies $(1+\varepsilon)r_g \le r \le (1-\varepsilon)r_c$ for $\varepsilon > 0$ arbitrarily small, the cover time of the giant component is asymptotically almost surely $\Theta(n \log^2 n$). On the other hand, we show that for $r \ge (1+\varepsilon)r_c$, the cover time of the graph is asymptotically almost surely $\Theta(n \log n)$ (which was known for $d=2$ only for a radius larger by a constant factor). Our proofs also shed some light onto the behavior around $r_c$.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Web-based education on Metabolism and Obesity is associated with improved lifestyle and health behaviours among Brazilian school teachers

Background: Obesity is a major global public health challenge, and teachers play a critical role in school-based health promotion. This study examined the perceived impact of a web-based educational program on metabolism and obesity delivered to Brazilian school teachers. Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study included 217 teachers who responded to the evaluation questionnaire after attending the course between 2017 and 2022. Statistical analyses included logistic regression and chi-square tests. Findings: Course completion rate was 81.98%, substantially exceeding the 5-15% typical of global MOOCs. However, ethnic disparities were observed: White respondents were 4.95 times more likely to complete the course than Black respondents (p=0.00097) and Brown respondents were 3.05 times more likely (p=0.0268) than Black respondents. Among non-completers, lack of time (64.7%) was the primary barrier. Participation was concentrated in Sao Paulo (77%), with no respondents from three northern states. Perceived difficulty showed a non-significant trend (p=0.0893) where by Black respondents had the lowest predicted difficulty; the most challenging course material was Scientific Content/Reading papers (50%). Completion was strongly associated with applying learned activities in teaching (p

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

Optical Implementation of Equilibrium Propagation Using Spatial Photonic Ising Machines

arXiv:2606.13454v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Equilibrium Propagation offers a compelling alternative to traditional machine learning for training energy-based networks. Here we demonstrate a hybrid optical-digital implementation of EP using a Spatial Photonic Ising Machine (SPIM). The SPIM exploits the gauge transformation method to optically encode both continuous neuron states and rank-1 binary trainable patterns as phase modulations via a spatial light modulator, with inference realized using a finite difference scheme. The experimental system is evaluated on the Wine classification dataset. The potential of this approach, including the use of continuous couplings and structured coupling matrices, is evaluated numerically on the more complex MNIST dataset. Our work provides a concrete pathway toward energy-efficient physical implementations of Equilibrium Propagation.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Spectral Evolution-Guided Token Pruning in Multimodal Large Language Models

Reducing visual token redundancy is critical for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) without degrading cross-modal reasoning performance. Existing token pruning methods typically rely on single-layer signals, such as attention scores or token similarities, which overlook the cross-layer transformation of visual representations and may exhibit positional bias in multimodal token sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a training-free token pruning framework based on Cross-Layer Spectral Evolution (CLSE). Instead of measuring token importance from single-layer feature magnitudes, CLSE quantifies how token representations evolve across Transformer layers in the frequency domain. This evolution reflects the transition from high-frequency structural details to low-frequency semantic abstractions. We observe that tokens with stronger spectral redistribution across layers are more likely to be semantically active and should therefore be preserved. By modeling cross-layer token dynamics, CLSE provides a stable importance criterion that mitigates positional bias. Extensive experiments on both image and video benchmarks demonstrate that CLSE achieves a superior trade-off between efficiency and accuracy under aggressive token reduction. Across multiple MLLMs, CLSE reduces FLOPs, KV cache memory, and latency while maintaining competitive or improved performance.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

ConsistencyPlanner: Real-time Planning with Fast-Sampling Consistency Models

arXiv:2606.11569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Closed-loop planning in complex, real-world driving scenarios presents a critical challenge for autonomous driving systems. While traditional rule-based methods are interpretable, their predefined heuristics lack the adaptability for dynamic traffic environments. Learning-based approaches have shown considerable promise. Conversely, learning-based approaches, despite their promise, struggle to balance the modeling diverse and multimodal driving behaviors and real-time planning, often leading to indecisive or unsafe actions. To address this limitation, we propose Consistency Planner, a real-time planning framework with fast-sampling consistency models. Our approach is built upon two key technical contributions. Efficient Multimodal Sampling: We employ fast-sampling consistency models to generate a diverse set of plausible future trajectories. This enables efficient, real-time exploration of multimodal actions, overcoming the computational bottlenecks of previous iterative generative methods. Heterogeneous Feature Fusion: We introduce an attention-enhanced decoder that dynamically integrates heterogeneous input features (including scene feature and action token) into a cohesive representation for robust planning. Extensive evaluation in the Waymax simulator demonstrates superior performance in safety metrics compared to existing methods, with particularly strong results in challenging dynamic scenarios.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

To Intervene or Not: Guiding Inference-time Alignment with Probabilistic Model Blending

The wide deployment of LLMs has made model alignment necessary to make newly trained models safely and effectively respond to user instructions. Among different methods, inference-time alignment is often cheaper as it intervenes (i.e., offers guidances) only during output generation. Existing proposals apply guidances extracted from certain aligned models without properly assessing their reliability. Nonetheless, our systematic evaluation reveals that guidance effectiveness varies drastically across models; since ineffective guidances lead to further confusion and thus further interventions, the resulting excessive interventions typically indicate poor performance. To make interventions more effective and thus more efficient, we introduce BlendIn, an inference-time alignment framework that shifts from binary decisions to creating hybrid distributions integrating both models' knowledge. BlendIn stabilizes inference-time alignment by performing quality-aware alignment and proportionally weighting each model's contribution based on reliability. Compared with existing works, it preserves beneficial guidance while downweighting unreliable suggestions. BlendIn provides both diagnostic signals and mitigation strategies for misaligned guidance, achieving consistent and up to 50% performance improvement on challenging model pairs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/DecayingSeart/BlendIn.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

On a remark of de Gennes concerning three-dimensional polyelectrolytes

arXiv:2604.08389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work is inspired by a remark of de Gennes about polyelectrolytes, which are charged polymers. A common model for a polymer is a self-avoiding or self-repelling random walk or Brownian motion. For polyelectrolytes, the repelling potential is the Coulomb potential arising from pairs of charged particles. We show that in the continuous case of Brownian motion in three dimensions, the spread of the polymer, in particular the the radius of gyration of a polyelectrolyte of length $T$ grows linearly with $T$, up to logarithmic corrections.

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

Causal Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Context Saturation and Discourse-Marker Evidence

We address two persistent gaps in Emotion Recognition in Conversation: which modeling choices materially affect performance, and how recognition findings connect to interpretable discourse-level patterns. We study both through a systematic investigation on IEMOCAP with cross-dataset validation on MELD. For recognition, we run controlled ablations with 10 random seeds and paired significance tests with multiple-comparisons correction, yielding three findings. First, conversational context is the dominant factor, but performance saturates quickly: roughly 90% of the gain is captured within the most recent 10-30 preceding turns, depending on the label set. Second, hierarchical sentence representations help most in utterance-only settings and show a clear advantage on MELD, but their benefit disappears once turn-level context is available, suggesting that conversational history subsumes much of the intra-utterance structure. Third, integrating an external affective lexicon does not improve results, consistent with pretrained encoders already capturing most of the affective signal needed for ERC. Under a strictly causal setting, our simple models achieve strong performance (82.69% 4-way; 67.07% 6-way weighted F1), showing that competitive accuracy is achievable without future turns. For linguistic analysis, we examine 5,286 discourse-marker occurrences and find a reliable association between emotion and marker position (p < .0001). Sad utterances show reduced left-periphery marker usage (21.9%) relative to other emotions (28-32%), consistent with accounts linking left-periphery markers to active discourse management. This aligns with our recognition results, where Sad benefits most from conversational context (+22 percentage points), suggesting sadness may be more context-dependent than emotions with stronger local pragmatic cues.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry

arXiv:2606.14249v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agent performance depends critically on the runtime harness, comprising the prompts, tools, memory, and control flow that mediate how a model observes, reasons, and acts. Yet today's harnesses remain largely hand-crafted and static: each new model or task still demands bespoke scaffolding, and the rich traces produced during execution are rarely distilled back into systematic improvement. We introduce HarnessX, a foundry for composable, adaptive, and evolvable agent harnesses. HarnessX assembles typed harness primitives via a substitution algebra, adapts them through AEGIS, a trace-driven multi-agent evolution engine grounded in an operational mirror between symbolic adaptation and reinforcement learning, and closes the harness-model loop by turning trajectories into both harness updates and model training signal. Across five benchmarks (ALFWorld, GAIA, WebShop, tau^3-Bench, and SWE-bench Verified), HarnessX yields an average gain of +14.5% (up to +44.0%), with gains largest where baselines are lowest. These results suggest that agent progress need not come from model scaling alone: composing and evolving runtime interfaces from execution feedback is an actionable and complementary lever. The complete codebase will be open-sourced in a future release.