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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

UXBench: Measuring the Actionability of LLM-Generated UX Critiques

arXiv:2606.16262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as UX judges that inspect interfaces, diagnose usability problems, and propose repairs. Yet no controlled benchmark measures whether the resulting critiques are reliable and actionable across heterogeneous product surfaces. We introduce UXBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs as interaction-grounded UX judges. UXBench comprises local-first runnable web fixtures spanning ten product-surface families, paired with coverage-gated browser exploration that forces models to collect interaction evidence before reporting. Each judge model produces a structured UX report over seven rubric dimensions; report quality is measured by whether a fixed downstream repair agent can improve the interface based on the critique. We evaluate eight frontier models under both an automated repair-lift protocol and a blind human validation study. Results show that UX judging is neither saturated nor one dimensional: models differ meaningfully in report actionability, exhibit distinct rubric-level repair signatures, vary in fixture-level reliability, and trade leadership across surface categories

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

BayLing-Duplex: Native Full-Duplex Speech Dialogue with a Single Autoregressive LLM

Real-time, full-duplex speech interaction is a key feature of next-generation spoken chatbots, allowing the model to listen and speak at the same time and to handle natural phenomena such as overlap, hesitation, and barge-in. Existing speech language models (SpeechLMs) such as LLaMA-Omni and GLM-4-Voice are still turn-based and rely on an external Voice Activity Detection (VAD) module to mark the end of the user's turn, which fundamentally limits their interactive ability. In this paper, we introduce BayLing-Duplex, a native full-duplex SpeechLM where a single autoregressive LLM decides when to listen, when to speak, and when to stop, with no auxiliary turn-taking module. The design adds only a few special tokens to the standard vocabulary, so it transfers across LLMs and reuses existing training and serving stacks with no architectural adaptation. Starting from the public GLM-4-Voice checkpoint and using only 400K full-duplex samples for fine-tuning followed by a lightweight DPO stage, BayLing-Duplex reaches 92% turn-taking success and 100% interruption success on InstructS2S-Eval, while improving the speech-response score from 2.17 to 3.39 over Moshi. BayLing-Duplex also matches or surpasses its turn-based counterpart on Llama Questions, Web Questions, and Alpaca-Eval, showing that simultaneous listen-and-speak modeling does not sacrifice response quality.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Weak continuous measurements require more work than strong ones

arXiv:2502.09732v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the energy cost of quantum measurement process and its connection to the measurement performance faces the challenge of modeling the objectification process. The latter, turns the measurement result into an objective fact, available to independent observers, and is responsible for the measurement irreversibility. To address this issue, we propose and analyze a dynamical model of quantum measurement, able to capture nonideal (weak and inefficient) measurements. In this model, the objectification is induced by a contact with a macroscopic reservoir at equilibrium which is responsible for the redundant broadcast of the measurement outcome (producing a Spectrum Broadcast Structure (SBS) state) while inducing decoherence in the pointer basis, in the line of the theory of quantum Darwinism. We analyze the performance of the obtained measurement process by introducing figures of merit to quantify the strength of the measurement and its efficiency. We also derive and a lower bound on the measurement work cost that we can relate to the measurement quality. We take as an illustration the readout of a qubit via its coupling to a harmonic oscillator. We investigate the long sequences of extremely short and weak measurements (a.k.a continuous measurements), to find under which conditions they converge to an ideal (projective) measurement and analyze their work cost. Surprisingly, we find that a sequence converging to projective measurement has a much larger work cost than an equivalent strong measurement obtained from a single intense interaction with the apparatus. We extend this result to a large class of models owing to scaling arguments. Our analysis offers new insights into the trade-offs between measurement strength, energy consumption, and information extraction in quantum measurement protocols.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Stubborn: A Streamlined and Unified Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Motion Tracking and Fall Recovery for Humanoids

arXiv:2606.12814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning approaches have shown great promise in improving humanoid motion tracking performance and achieving fall recovery under disturbances. However, most existing works treat motion tracking and fall recovery as different tasks and require multi-stage training with specialized recovery rewards and/or separate recovery policies. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning-based methods often terminate training episodes immediately after severe tracking failures, limiting recovery-oriented exploration in unstable or fallen states. To address the above issues, we propose Stubborn, a streamlined and unified reinforcement learning framework to achieve robust humanoid motion tracking and fall recovery. Specifically, Stubborn uses an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture and consists of three major components. First, a yaw-aligned tracking representation is adopted to reduce sensitivity to global drift and heading disturbances while preserving gravity-related balance information. Second, we introduce a Bernoulli-based probabilistic termination mechanism that enables the policy to encourage exploration of fall-recovery behaviors under varying failure modes. Third, we propose a probabilistic termination and tracking-error-driven strategy that dynamically reshapes the sampling distribution based on tracking performance, increasing the training efficiency for difficult motion segments and unstable states. Extensive comparisons with SOTA methods and ablation studies show that Stubborn achieved competitive performance, and the proposed probabilistic termination mechanism and adaptive sampling strategy contributed to the performance and robustness gains. For real-world demonstrations, please refer to https://aislab-sustech.github.io/Stubborn/.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimized Quantum States for Sensing in the Presence of Loss and Phase Noise

arXiv:2606.19649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Squeezed vacuum lets gravitational-wave detectors and other quantum sensors surpass the standard quantum limit, and is optimal in the loss-limited regime; phase noise breaks this optimality. Numerically optimizing the quantum Fisher information across the loss and phase-noise landscape, we identify non-Gaussian states that outperform any Gaussian state. These fall into three classes: Fock-like, cubic-phase-like, and states with discrete rotational symmetry. Limiting the average number of photons in the input state to $\bar{n}=5$, with $1-\eta = 5\%$ photon loss and 200 mrad phase noise, the non-Gaussian advantage reaches up to 2.2 dB. Furthermore, we observe that the non-Gaussian advantage can persist even when the measurement strategy is homodyne detection.

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

GSPan: A Continuous Gaussian Primitive Representation for Arbitrary-Scale Pansharpening

Pansharpening aims to generate high-resolution multispectral (HRMS) images by fusing low-resolution multispectral (LRMS) and panchromatic (PAN) observations. Most existing deep learning methods treat pansharpening as fixed-grid prediction, which limits scale adaptation. To address this, we propose GSPan, a framework that introduces 2D Gaussian Splatting (GS) into pansharpening. Instead of directly predicting pixels, GSPan represents band-wise residual details as continuous and learnable 2D Gaussian primitives. We design a Dual-Stream Hierarchical Interaction (DSHI) architecture with a Spatial-Spectral Interactive Attention (SSIA) module to estimate these primitives from complementary PAN and MS observations. The predicted primitives are rendered as a residual detail field and injected into the upsampled MS image. This continuous representation allows GSPan to render fused images on arbitrary target sampling grids without scale-specific retraining. It further enables a Scale-Decoupled Asymmetric Inference (SDAI) strategy, which estimates primitives at a reduced resolution and renders the fused image at the target resolution for efficient large-scene pansharpening. Experiments on QuickBird, GaoFen-2, WorldView-3, and WorldView-3-4K datasets show that GSPan delivers state-of-the-art fusion performance. Moreover, SDAI markedly accelerates inference, achieving a favorable trade-off between computational efficiency and fusion quality. Our results demonstrate the potential of continuous Gaussian residual representations as a flexible and scale-decoupled alternative to fixed-grid prediction.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Concept Flow Models: Anchoring Concept-Based Reasoning with Hierarchical Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) enhance interpretability by projecting learned features into a human-understandable concept space. Recent approaches leverage vision-language models to generate concept embeddings, reducing the need for manual concept annotations. However, these models suffer from a critical limitation: as the number of concepts approaches the embedding dimension, information leakage increases, enabling the model to exploit spurious or semantically irrelevant correlations and undermining interpretability. In this work, we propose Concept Flow Models (CFMs), which replace the flat bottleneck with a hierarchical, concept-driven decision tree. Each internal node in the hierarchy focuses on a localized subset of discriminative concepts, progressively narrowing the prediction scope. Our framework constructs decision hierarchies from visual embeddings, distributes semantic concepts at each hierarchy level, and trains differentiable concept weights through probabilistic tree traversal. Extensive experiments on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that CFMs match the predictive performance of flat CBMs, while substantially mitigating information leakage by reducing effective concept usage. Furthermore, CFMs yield stepwise decision flows that enable transparent and auditable model reasoning with hierarchical class structures.

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

Causal-Privacy Audit Workflow for Synthetic and Distilled Data in Dropout Support

arXiv:2606.15940v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic and distilled student data are increasingly used to enable privacy-conscious learning analytics, yet their suitability for decision-facing institutional support remains uncertain. In dropout support, generated data must preserve not only predictive utility or distributional resemblance, but also the financial-status evidence used to guide advising, payment-plan assistance, and scholarship-related decisions. Method: This study introduces CaP-Eval, a decision-facing causal-privacy audit workflow for evaluating generated student data under a fixed estimand, timing-aware adjustment design, estimator set, and empirical privacy-governance screen. The workflow compares original, distilled, adversarial synthetic, statistical synthetic, and DPGNet privacy-oriented generated data on predictive utility, treatment-effect fidelity, robustness to alternative estimators, and local training-record proximity. Results: DPGNet and distilled data preserved the original financial-status treatment-effect structure more reliably than the adversarial and Gaussian Copula baselines. DPGNet preserved full direction and rank agreement across epsilon levels; epsilon = 10 produced the smallest non-original IPW and DML deviations, while epsilon = 1 and epsilon = 5 amplified several financial-status contrasts. Distilled data remained highly faithful but retained the strongest local training-record proximity signal. TabularGNet preserved qualitative directions with moderate attenuation, and Gaussian Copula compressed effect magnitudes. Conclusions: Predictive utility, privacy orientation, empirical disclosure signals, and causal fidelity diverged; generated student data require joint audits of direction, magnitude, overlap, and release-governance risk before decision use.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Building accessible resources to empower communities: the case of the Lupus Mexican Registry

Motivation: Although SLE data in Latin America is increasing, clinical datasets remain difficult to access and interpret, highlighting the need for accessible tools that support data-driven precision medicine, citizen science, and public health initiatives. Results: We developed a user-friendly platform that enables us to explore LupusRGMX data through interactive queries, report generation, statistical modeling, and comprehensive insights. This resource supports community-oriented research, improves the visibility of underrepresented populations in lupus research, and provides a useful tool to enhance data accessibility. Availability and implementation: Developed in R using Shiny and bslib for interactive visualization and interface design. Available at https://github.com/NeuroGenomicsMX/Lupus_App_2.0 and https://lupusrgmx.liigh.unam.mx/shiny/lupus/

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

A Multifaceted Analysis of Social Biases in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have rapidly become indispensable tools for acquiring information and supporting human decision-making. However, ensuring that these models uphold fairness across varied contexts is critical to their safe and responsible deployment. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive examination of four widely adopted LLMs, probing their underlying biases and inclinations across the dimensions of politics, ideology, alliance, language, and gender. Through a series of carefully designed experiments, we investigate their political neutrality using news summarization, ideological biases through news stance classification, tendencies toward specific geopolitical alliances via United Nations voting patterns, language bias in the context of multilingual story completion, and gender-related affinities as revealed by responses to the World Values Survey. Results indicate that while the LLMs are aligned to be neutral and impartial, they still show biases and affinities of different types.

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

When to Align, When to Predict: A Phase Diagram for Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.11190v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cross-modal alignment (CA) and cross-modal prediction (CP) are the dominant paradigms for multimodal representation learning, yet there is no systematic understanding of when each succeeds, when each fails, and when cross-modal training helps at all – a gap that leaves practitioners, especially in scientific domains like biomedicine or astrophysics, with heterogeneous instruments and multiple levels of organization and measurement, unable to diagnose why standard methods underperform the best single modality. We develop a unified linear framework that addresses both questions. Under a spiked signal-plus-noise model with structured cross-modal nuisance correlation, we derive separation ratios for both objectives that expose complementary failure modes: alignment whitens each modality and fails when nuisance is strongly correlated across views; prediction encodes whatever is cross-predictable through a one-sided whitening, with recovery governed by source-modality quality. The resulting phase diagram partitions multimodal problems into four regimes: Both, CA only, CP only, and Neither. We present a data-driven procedure to locate real-world datasets in this diagram using a small labeled subsample, identifying the preferred objective and prediction direction before any cross-modal training. Experiments on synthetic data, stereo-vision benchmarks, image-caption pairs, and real astrophysical data validate the predictions in the nonlinear regime, including the Neither regime where cross-modal training is actively harmful. Our framework lets practitioners diagnose their multimodal problem and choose the right objective before committing to training. Code to reproduce the results is available at https://github.com/IlayMalinyak/mm_align_vs_pred.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

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

The Tone of Awareness: Topic, Sentiment, and Toxicity Maps During Mental Health Month on TikTok

Despite raising concerns about the mental health effects associated with the usage of TikTok, little is known about how related content is framed by creators and received by audiences. We collect the content of 28,341 TikTok videos and 80,130 comments from Mental Health Awareness Month (May) in 2023 and 2024 via the TikTok Research API, and study how the tone of awareness varies across topics and years. We characterize "tone" as the emotional and interpersonal framing of mental health discourse, operationalized through sentiment and toxicity measures. We extract topics from video text using BERTopic and log-odds keywords, then quantify topic-conditioned sentiment (XLM-T) and toxicity (Detoxify) separately for video transcriptions and comments. Sentiment captures the affective valence of content, while toxicity reflects the presence of harmful or abusive language. We find a stable set of recurring themes across years, spanning clinical conditions, emotional disclosure, self-care, and campaign-oriented content, with engagement highly skewed toward a small subset of topics. All sentiment and toxicity analyses are computed separately for video content and comments, allowing us to distinguish between content production and audience reception. Sentiment in videos is often negative for emotionally charged topics, while comments tend to shift toward more mixed or positive polarity, especially for suicide prevention. Toxicity is low in median overall, but exhibits longer-tailed outliers in comments than in videos that are more pronounced in comments and concentrated in specific topics (e.g., "Duet", "Suicide Prevention", and "Psychisch"). Overall, our results provide a topic-level decomposition of mental health discourse on TikTok during awareness-month campaigns.

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

Free-Placement Optimization of Ground Station Locations for Low-Earth Orbit Satellites

arXiv:2606.12667v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rapidly expanding low Earth orbit satellite constellations are placing increasing demands on terrestrial ground networks, motivating the development of more efficient ground station network designs. Current approaches select sites from predefined locations, limiting optimization to existing infrastructure and constraining performance. In contrast, free-placement optimization operates over a continuous spatial domain on Earth, broadening the search space and allowing higher-throughput configurations at the cost of potentially requiring new infrastructure deployment. In this work, we introduce SCORE (Sequential Cyclic Optimization via Refinement & Evaluation), a two-stage free-placement method for ground station design. SCORE combines sequential coordinate selection with cyclic refinement to manage high-dimensionality, non-convexity, and local minima that challenge global optimizers. We benchmark SCORE against one-shot methods such as differential evolution (DE) and integer programming approaches using locations from Kongsberg Satellite Services and the World Teleport Association. Tests across two commercial Earth observation constellations (Capella Space and ICEYE) and one synthetic Walker-Star constellation show that SCORE requires up to 5x fewer function evaluations to converge relative to DE while improving downlink throughput by up to 13%. Compared to fixed-site methods, unconstrained SCORE achieves up to 15% greater total downlink, establishing a strong empirical performance benchmark for flexible placement; infrastructure-constrained SCORE retains over 92% of this gain while restricting placement to within proximity of existing fiber and power infrastructure. We also explore trade-offs between expanding existing stations and deploying new sites, informing future ground network design for operational constellations.

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

Visuals Lie, Consistency Speaks: Disentangling Spatial Attention from Reliability in Vision-Language Models

Multimodal Foundation Models are increasingly used as reasoning agents, making reliability, knowing when a model may hallucinate, critical. A common intuition, which we call the Attention-Confidence Assumption, holds that reliability follows from "structural" visual perception: tight attention on relevant regions should signal a trustworthy answer, while scattered attention signals confusion. We challenge this through the VLM Reliability Probe (VRP), a systematic cross-family study of reliability signals in contemporary Vision-Language Models (VLMs). We introduce structural-attention metrics, cluster counts (C_k) and spatial entropy (H_s), to quantify the visual encoder's gaze, and track its evolution (Delta H_s) across layers. This reveals a "Symbolic Detachment": models often "Early Lock" visual features only to diffuse attention later, severing early perception from final generation. Contrary to the grounding hypothesis, we find a "Cluster Failure": spatial attention has near-zero correlation (R approx 0.001) with accuracy. Instead, reliability is a phenomenon of generation dynamics and internal-state distributions. Self-Consistency, the agreement rate across sampled reasoning paths, is the dominant predictor of truth (R = 0.429). Scaling causal interventions exposes a sharp architectural divergence: LLaVA locks its prediction in a fragile late-stage bottleneck, whereas PaliGemma and Qwen2-VL distribute reliability globally, staying resilient even when ~50% or more of their most predictive layer is destroyed. For current VLMs, reliability signals are detached from visual grounding maps and are best inferred from generation-time dynamics and hidden-state probes.

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

Reinforcing Dual-Path Reasoning in Spatial Vision Language Models

Spatial VLMs have made substantial progress in geometric perception, yet complex spatial reasoning requiring multi-step inference over depth, distance, and scene relations remains challenging. Moreover, different spatial queries call for fundamentally different strategies: some are best addressed through purely linguistic, step-by-step deduction, while others require explicit 3D grounding before quantitative inference. We present Dual-Path Spatial Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning for Spatial VLMs (SR-REAL), a unified framework that equips a spatial VLM with two complementary reasoning paths: Language-Only Reasoning (LOR), which performs step-by-step linguistic deduction, and Detect-Then-Reason (DTR), which detects 3D geometric cues (e.g., centers or bounding boxes) via region tokens before explicit geometric inference. SR-REAL begins with a cold-start supervised fine-tuning stage that constructs LOR and DTR chain-of-thought supervision and exposes a region-to-3D interface, followed by RL that optimizes the policy model with accuracy and format rewards; for DTR, a discrete center-based detection reward further refines geometric alignment. Across diverse spatial benchmarks, SR-REAL significantly outperforms spatial VLM baselines: (i) a single RL-trained model supports both reasoning paths, with DTR excelling in region-aware tasks through precise 3D localization and LOR enhancing general spatial reasoning; (ii) jointly training both paths fosters mutual reinforcement; (iii) high-quality, blended cold-start data is crucial for stable RL optimization; and (iv) the model generalizes across datasets and domains without per-task tuning, demonstrating positive transfer between LOR and DTR.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cortical development dynamics across autism spectrum disorder mouse models

Despite the functional diversity of over 100 causal genes1–3, phenotypic convergence across models may reveal common neurobiological processes in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we profiled 251 samples from 11 monogenic mouse models of ASD using single-nucleus multi-omic sequencing across three developmental stages, both sexes and two brain regions. Despite genetic heterogeneity, ASD-linked mutations converged on perturbations of the radial glial cell lineage. These alterations reflect a transient developmental delay rather than lasting lineage misspecification and resolve by postnatal stages. Molecularly, the largest transcriptional differences emerged in neurons at early postnatal stages. These changes included downregulation of synaptic and ion channel-related genes, consistent with homeostatic adaptation or delayed maturation. Network analysis showed molecular convergence across models within each developmental stage, suggesting that diverse mutations linked to ASD impinge on common, stage-specific processes. Convergence becomes less pronounced by postnatal day 14, highlighting the dynamic nature of ASD-associated changes. Cross-genotype heterogeneity is superimposed on stage-specific effects. Electrophysiology corroborated this pattern: mutants generally showed altered neuronal excitability and synaptic properties with model-specific nuances. Our study also highlighted sex-specific gene expression alterations, with female mice often displaying larger effect sizes than male mice. Together, our findings provide a comprehensive view of developmental cellular and molecular dynamics across models of ASD. Using single-nucleus multi-omic sequencing, diverse autism spectrum disorder-linked gene mutations converge on transient, stage-specific disruptions in early brain development, and highlight sex-specific gene expression alterations.

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

Advances in 4D Representation: Geometry, Motion, and Interaction

We present a survey on 4D generation and reconstruction, a fast-evolving subfield of computer graphics whose developments have been propelled by recent advances in neural fields, geometric and motion deep learning, as well as 3D generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). While our survey is not the first of its kind, we build our coverage of the domain from a unique and distinctive perspective of 4D representations, to model 3D geometry evolving over time while exhibiting motion and interaction. Specifically, instead of offering an exhaustive enumeration of many works, we take a more selective approach by focusing on representative works to highlight both the desirable properties and ensuing challenges of each representation under different computation, application, and data scenarios. The main take-away message we aim to convey to the readers is on how to select and then customize the appropriate 4D representations for their tasks. Organizationally, we separate the 4D representations based on three key pillars: geometry, motion, and interaction. Our discourse will not only encompass the most popular representations of today, such as neural radiance fields (NeRFs) and 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), but also bring attention to relatively under-explored representations in the 4D context, such as structured models and long-range motions. Throughout our survey, we will reprise the role of large language models (LLMs) and video foundational models (VFMs) in a variety of 4D applications, while steering our discussion towards their current limitations and how they can be addressed. We also provide a dedicated coverage on what 4D datasets are currently available, as well as what is lacking, in driving the subfield forward. Project page:https://mingrui-zhao.github.io/4DRep-GMI/

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

Propagating Structural Guidance: Synthesizing Fluorescein Angiography from Fundus Images and Sparse OCT Scans

Fundus fluorescein angiography (FFA) is critical for assessing retinal vascular abnormalities, but its acquisition is invasive and not always feasible. In contrast, color fundus photography (CFP) is non-invasive and widely accessible, which has motivated studies on CFP-to-FFA synthesis. However, prior works rely solely on CFP surface texture, fundamentally limiting the ability to reconstruct functional vascular information and subtle pathological changes. To address this, we propose a novel framework that synthesizes FFA from CFP with structural guidance provided by optical coherence tomography (OCT). We construct a multi-modal retinal imaging dataset with paired CFP, FFA, and OCT from 3,676 patient eyes–the first tri-modally aligned dataset in retinal imaging. To bridge the spatial gap between OCT and fundus modalities, we propose a Spatially Aligned Cross-Modal Fusion (SACMF) module that projects depth-resolved OCT features onto the fundus plane and injects them into the CFP encoder via adaptive layer normalization. Beyond feature fusion, we further introduce Token-wise Cross-Modality Alignment (TCMA), a token-level contrastive learning strategy that explicitly aligns CFP and FFA representations at corresponding spatial positions. Our method achieves superior synthesis performance compared to state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, extensive experiments demonstrate that the FFA images synthesized by our approach bring greater improvements in downstream disease diagnosis performance than existing methods, highlighting the clinical potential of our approach as a non-invasive decision-support tool in routine workflows. The code is available at https://github.com/while-plus/OCT-guide-FFA-Syn.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Boson Sampling as a Probe of Chaotic and Integrable Quantum Dynamics in a Photonic Chip

arXiv:2605.25398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum chaos plays a key role in understanding complex quantum dynamics, while integrated photonics offers unique advantages for quantum applications, including high-speed operation, scalability, and programmable unitary transformations. However, integrated photonic approaches to probing quantum chaos remain largely unexplored, owing to the absence of a clear connection between programmable photonic dynamics and established chaos diagnostics. In this work, we establish Fock-state boson sampling as a practical probe of quantum chaos by exploiting the sensitivity of multiphoton interference to the random-matrix properties of underlying single-particle unitary dynamics. More importantly, we design and fabricate a programmable quantum photonic chip to experimentally implement this framework, achieving the first integrated-photonic demonstration of quantum-chaos probes based on boson sampling. Experimental results show that the three complementary probes proposed in this work, namely the distance to Porter–Thomas statistics, Shannon entropy, and Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator-equivalent observables, exhibit close agreement with theoretical predictions and consistently distinguish chaotic and integrable dynamics. Our work provides a scalable route for investigating complex quantum dynamics on programmable photonic platforms while leveraging the intrinsic advantages of boson sampling through multiphoton interference and complex output statistics.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

NEST3D: A High-Resolution Multimodal Dataset of Sociable Weaver Tree Nests

Sociable weaver nests function as complex ecological structures offering thermoregulatory microhabitats and sustaining diverse species; however, datasets used in prior studies lack fine-grained 3D structural detail. Producing usable and accurate 3D weaver nest data is challenging due to their irregular geometry and integration with complex host vegetation. We bridge this gap with an open-access, 1.4 TB multimodal drone dataset of 104 nest-bearing trees, comprising 27,945 RGB images, 111,780 multispectral images, approximately 781 million 3D points, and expert-annotated semantic segmentation labels. We benchmark semantic segmentation using KPConv, RandLA-Net, and Point Transformer V3, with PT-v3 achieving an mIoU of 86.35% on the test set. While the results demonstrate strong performance for transformer-based and point-wise methods, they also highlight architecture-dependent challenges, particularly for convolution-based approaches such as KPConv. By uniquely combining spectral, spatial, and structural information, the presented dataset advances 3D reconstruction, segmentation, and classification algorithms, enabling ecological applications from nest volume estimation to species conservation, and serves as a demanding benchmark that exposes architecture-dependent performance under extreme class imbalance.

23.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Assessing the inference of single-cell phylogenies and population dynamics from CRISPR lineage recordings

by Julia Pilarski, Tanja Stadler, Sophie Seidel Multicellular organisms develop from a single cell by repeated rounds of cell division, differentiation, and death, which can be represented as a single-cell phylogenetic tree. Genetic lineage tracing allows us to investigate this development by tracking the ancestry of individual cells as populations grow and change over time. However, accurate reconstruction of the cell phylogeny and quantification of the corresponding phylodynamic parameters – cell division, differentiation, and death rates – from this tracking data remains challenging and needs to be systematically evaluated. We perform simulations and assess, using the Bayesian framework, the joint inference of time-scaled cell phylogenies and phylodynamic parameters from CRISPR lineage recordings with random or sequential edits. Principally, we characterize the inference improvements as the recorder capacity increases. We observe more accurate phylogenetic reconstruction from sequential compared to random recordings, but no substantial improvement in phylodynamic inference when using the additional information contained in the order of edits. Overall, we find that CRISPR lineage recordings carry a strong signal on the rates of cell division when appropriate models are used. However, we detect biases in the inferred rates of cell division and death under phylodynamic model misspecification, i.e., when fitting classic memoryless birth-death processes to synchronous cell divisions. Moreover, for scenarios when cells differentiate into distinct types, we demonstrate that Bayesian phylodynamic analysis of sparse end-point measurements can resolve these cell differentiation trajectories by lineage and time. Under prototypical dynamics, we recover cell type-specific division and death rates, and cell type transition rates in over 80% of simulations. Overall, this simulation study explores how much information on cellular development can be extracted from state-of-the-art genetic lineage tracing data using phylogenetic and phylodynamic methodology.

24.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

General-purpose large language models outperform specialized clinical AI tools on medical benchmarks

Specialized clinical artificial intelligence (AI) tools are entering medical practice despite scarce independent evaluation. We quantitatively evaluate two clinical AI tools, OpenEvidence and UpToDate Expert AI, built on large language models (LLMs) against three frontier LLMs: GPT-5.2, Gemini 3.1 Pro and Claude Opus 4.6. Our evaluation has three stages: (1) 500 MedQA questions testing medical knowledge, (2) 500 HealthBench items measuring alignment with clinicians and (3) the real clinical queries (RCQ) benchmark, built from 100 de-identified queries from physicians to a general-purpose language model in a live clinical environment. For the RCQ benchmark, 12 US clinicians performed randomized, blinded review of model outputs, producing 1,800 model–question annotations. Frontier LLMs outperformed clinical AI tools in all three evaluations. Clinical AI tools performed comparably to auto-enabled Google Search AI Overview on the RCQ. These findings highlight the need for independent, real-world evaluation of AI tools before they enter clinical settings. In an independent evaluation, frontier large language models outperformed specialized clinical artificial intelligence tools on medical knowledge, clinician alignment and real-world clinical queries.

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

Guiding Federated Graph Recommendation with LLM-encoded knowledge

arXiv:2606.15277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based recommender systems are highly effective at extracting collaborative signals from user–item interactions, and federated learning (FL) allows these models to be trained while preserving user privacy. However, aggregating graph representations across distributed, non-IID clients remains a challenge; structural embeddings learned locally often misalign, and naive averaging fails to capture meaningful cross-client relationships. Most existing federated graph methods rely exclusively on structural aggregation, neglecting the rich, global semantic context available in large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we propose a novel framework that uses LLM-encoded knowledge to guide federated graph recommendation. Specifically, clients learn structural representations from local graphs while simultaneously summarizing their typical interaction patterns into compact semantic vectors via a frozen LLM. The central server then uses these LLM-encoded semantic signals to discover related preference patterns across clients, guiding the selective aggregation of their structural representations. This enables semantically informed cross-client collaboration without exposing raw data. Extensive experiments on standard benchmarks show that guiding structural alignment with LLM-encoded knowledge consistently improves recommendation accuracy over existing federated graph baselines.