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

EM-NeSy: Expectation Maximization for Neurosymbolic Learning

Authors:
Annegret Seibt↗Luc De Raedt↗Giuseppe Marra↗

arXiv:2606.14463v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic (NeSy) models integrate neural networks and symbolic reasoning for robust and interpretable AI. State-of-the-art NeSy models require that the symbolic component is expressed in a differentiable way, often complicating the use of approximate inference. We propose EM-NeSy which casts probabilistic NeSy learning as an instance of the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm. In the expectation step, we compute the posterior over the neurally predicted symbols conditioned on the label via probabilistic inference. In the maximization step, we update the neural parameters based on this posterior using gradient descent only through the neural component. This formulation unlocks the full potential of the EM algorithm for NeSy learning. It allows NeSy to extend naturally to approximate reasoning without any additional modifications or differentiability requirements of the symbolic component. Furthermore, it recovers the standard end-to-end gradient-based NeSy setting under exact inference. Our experimental results demonstrate the scalability and computational efficiency of EM-NeSy.

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

Parallelizing Tool Execution and LLM Generation for Low-Latency Agent Serving

Authors:
Yifan Sui↗Han Zhao↗Rui Ma↗Zhiyuan He↗Hao Wang↗Jianxun Li↗Kaiqiang Xu↗Kai Chen↗Yuqing Yang↗

arXiv:2603.18897v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-powered agents execute tasks through a sequential loop of model generation and tool execution. Today's serving systems serialize this loop, leaving tool latency exposed on the task critical path. This paper presents PASTE, a tool-aware agent-serving system that predicts concrete future tool invocations from recurring agent patterns and executes them speculatively while the LLM is still generating. PASTE isolates speculative results until confirmed by the LLM and jointly schedules tool execution and returning LLM sessions to avoid shifting bottlenecks to the GPU. Across deep research, coding, and scientific-agent workloads, PASTE reduces average task completion time by 43.5% and lowers observed tool latency by 1.8x.

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

Individual Control Barrier Functions-Guided Diffusion Model for Safe Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Qingyun Guo↗Junyi Shi↗Jianuo Huang↗Tianyu Shi↗

arXiv:2606.12640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning allows control policies to be learned directly from data without online interaction, making it suitable for safety-critical tasks. Recent studies have applied diffusion models to offline reinforcement learning to leverage their strong capacity for modeling complex data distributions. However, existing approaches primarily focus on single-agent settings, leaving the safety challenges in multi-agent environments largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a safe offline multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that embeds neural individual control barrier functions into the diffusion model to enhance safety during trajectory generation, with control policies recovered through inverse dynamics. We evaluate our algorithm across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating substantial safety improvements while maintaining competitive rewards.

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05.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

On real-time calibrated prediction for complex model-based decision support in pandemics: Part 2

Authors:
Trevelyan J. McKinley↗

by Trevelyan J. McKinley, Daniel B. Williamson, Xiaoyu Xiong, James M. Salter, Robert Challen, Leon Danon, Ben Youngman, Doug McNeall Calibration of complex stochastic infectious disease models is challenging. These often have high-dimensional input and output spaces, with the models exhibiting complex, non-linear dynamics. Coupled with a paucity of necessary data, this results in a large number of non-ignorable hidden states that must be handled by the inference routine. Likelihood-based approaches to this missing data problem are very flexible, but challenging to scale, due to having to monitor and update these hidden states. Methods based on simulating the hidden states directly from the model-of-interest have an advantage that they are often more straightforward to code, and thus are easier to implement and adapt in real-time. However, these often require evaluating very large numbers of simulations, rendering them infeasible for many large-scale problems. We present a framework for using emulation-based methods to calibrate a large-scale, stochastic, age-structured, spatial meta-population model of COVID-19 transmission in England and Wales. By embedding a model discrepancy process into the simulation model, and combining this with particle filtering, we show that it is possible to calibrate complex models to high-dimensional data by emulating the log-likelihood surface instead of individual data points. The use of embedded model discrepancy also helps to alleviate other key challenges, such as the introduction of infection across space and time. We conclude with a discussion of major challenges remaining and key areas for future work.

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

Model Collapse Is Not a Bug but a Feature in Machine Unlearning for LLMs

Authors:
Yan Scholten↗Sophie Xhonneux↗Leo Schwinn↗Stephan G\"unnemann↗

arXiv:2507.04219v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Current unlearning methods for LLMs optimize on the private information they seek to remove by incorporating it into their fine-tuning data. We argue this not only risks reinforcing exposure to sensitive data, but also fundamentally contradicts the principle of minimizing its use. As a remedy, we propose a novel unlearning method-Partial Model Collapse (PMC), which does not require unlearning targets in the unlearning objective. Our approach is inspired by recent observations that training generative models on their own generations leads to distribution collapse, effectively removing information from model outputs. Our central insight is that model collapse can be leveraged for machine unlearning by deliberately triggering it for data we aim to remove. We theoretically analyze that our approach converges to the desired outcome, i.e. the model unlearns the data targeted for removal. We empirically demonstrate that PMC overcomes four key limitations of existing unlearning methods that explicitly optimize on unlearning targets, and more effectively removes private information from model outputs while preserving general model utility. Overall, our contributions represent an important step toward more comprehensive unlearning that better aligns with real-world privacy constraints. Code available at https://www.cs.cit.tum.de/daml/partial-model-collapse/.

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

PIVOT: Bridging Black-Scholes Implied-Volatility and Price Objectives via Differentiable Jäckel Operator

Authors:
Raeid Saqur↗Yannick Limmer↗Anastasis Kratsios↗Blanka Horvath↗Hans Buehler↗

arXiv:2606.17065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern option-learning systems operate in two coordinates: price space, where markets quote and no-arbitrage constraints are most naturally enforced, and implied volatility (IV) space, where volatility surfaces are smoothed, regularized, and evaluated. The bottleneck is interface, not approximation: Jäckel's seminal "Let's Be Rational" (LBR) solver already inverts the Black-Scholes price to machine precision efficiently. What is missing is a differentiable layer that preserves LBR in the forward pass and avoids backpropagating through its branch logic. Such a layer must also confront the unavoidable singularity of the inverse map in the low-vega regime, where the sensitivity 1/vega diverges as vega -> 0. We close this gap with PIVOT, the Price-Implied-Volatility Objective Translator. PIVOT keeps the LBR forward pass intact and supplies the backward pass by implicit differentiation through the smooth Black-Scholes/Black-76 price map, with an explicit gating contract: invalid domains return NaN, well-conditioned rows receive the exact 1/vega gradient, and low-vega rows are attenuated rather than silently regularized. On a single H100, a fused Triton kernel reaches 1.79e9 IV/s at machine precision (9.3e-14 max relative error vs. the reference C solver); end-to-end label generation sustains 48.9M/s on synthetic chains and 16.6M/s on SPX OptionMetrics. In a HyperIV-style one-day reproduction on SPX, PIVOT-augmented objectives Pareto-dominate the baselines, reducing held-out price MAE by up to 43.4% and the strongest three-seed gated objective improving price MAE by 38.8% and IV MAE by 21.3% jointly; cross-asset results on RUT, VIX, and NDX show directional price-MAE gains of 40.1%, 24.2%, and 16.7%, while an ungated IV-roundtrip control collapses to a degenerate near-zero surface, confirming the gate as a correctness contract rather than a tuning knob.

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

Medical world models: representing medical states, modelling clinical dynamics and guiding intervention policies

Authors:
Ke Liu↗Mengxuan Li↗Yanyi Bao↗Tianyun Zhang↗Chong Chu↗Jiajun Bu↗Haishuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.16721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Medical diagnosis and treatment are dynamic processes in which patient states evolve over time and clinical interventions alter future outcomes. Although current medical AI can detect disease, estimate risk and generate reports, many systems still return static labels or scores, offering limited insight into how illness may progress or how alternative interventions may reshape its trajectory. Medical world models adapt the world-model idea from artificial intelligence to healthcare by learning internal simulators of patient-state dynamics. Their long-term goal is to help clinicians anticipate deterioration, compare treatment-conditioned futures and tailor care to individual patients. Yet relevant work remains scattered across foundation models, longitudinal modelling, disease simulation, treatment-effect estimation, reinforcement learning and digital twins. To bridge this gap, this review outlines a roadmap for advancing medical AI from isolated diagnosis and prediction toward medical world models that simulate disease evolution and support intervention decisions. This roadmap is organized around three coupled capabilities: patient-state construction, clinical dynamics modelling and intervention decision support. Across representative systems, the comparison highlights what each capability contributes and how partial components can be integrated into more mature perception–dynamics–planning systems. Finally, we identify the challenges involved in turning plausible rollouts into clinically useful simulators. Related literature is available at https://github.com/1999kevin/awesome_medical_world_models.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

scLLM-DSC: LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering for Single-Cell RNA Sequencing

Authors:
Ping Xu↗Pengjiang Li↗Tian Du↗Zaitian Wang↗Jiawei Gu↗Ziyue Qiao↗Pengfei Wang↗Yuanchun Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.13007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Clustering is fundamental to scRNA-seq analysis, serving as a cornerstone for identifying cell populations and resolving tissue heterogeneity. However, existing methods focus on mining numerical statistical patterns, suffering from semantic agnosticism by neglecting the intrinsic biological functions encoded by genes. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising semantic capabilities, their direct adaptation to cell clustering is hindered by the structural mismatch between generative pre-training objectives and discriminative downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose scLLM-DSC, a novel LLM-Knowledge Enhanced Cross-Modal Deep Structural Clustering framework. Diverging from data-driven paradigms, scLLM-DSC establishes a semantically-grounded representation by synergizing two views: a Knowledge-Driven Semantic View derived from NCBI gene priors and contextualized Cell2Sentence embeddings, and a Structure-Aware Topological View extracted via a graph-guided encoder. Crucially, we introduce a cross-modal contrastive alignment mechanism to enforce consistency between biological semantics and transcriptomic features within a unified latent space. Extensive benchmarks demonstrate that scLLM-DSC significantly outperforms eleven state-of-the-art baselines in clustering accuracy.

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

Food4All: An Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Food Resource Navigation with Adaptive User Understanding

Authors:
Yiyang Li↗Weixiang Sun↗Tianyi Ma↗Kaiwen Shi↗Zheyuan Zhang↗Yanfang Ye↗

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling agents in constraint-sensitive food assistance referral under realistic user interaction challenges.

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

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

Authors:
Kaiyi Ji↗

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.

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

Which Directions Matter? Sparse Design for Affine Robust Optimization

Authors:
Pedro Chumpitaz-Flores↗My Duong↗Juan S. Borrero↗Kaixun Hua↗

arXiv:2606.14648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robust machine learning and optimization rely on the uncertainty model choice. We investigate which uncertainty directions a model must cover when defined by a finite dictionary and a budget constraint. Selecting a subset forms an atomic uncertainty set with a closed form support function, yielding tractable robust programs for affine objectives. We propose a data driven selection rule based on a coverage objective over evaluation directions, including gradients, adversarial perturbations, or shifts observed on held out data. We prove this objective is monotone and submodular, supporting a greedy method with a $(1-1/e)$ approximation guarantee and a matching hardness barrier. We also provide a certificate bounding the loss from the selected subset and a radius calibration rule with out of sample control.

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

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Mikoto Kudo↗Takumi Tanabe↗Akifumi Wachi↗Youhei Akimoto↗

arXiv:2603.14867v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.

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

PMOF: A Dataset and Benchmark for Passenger Monitoring Using Overhead Fisheye Cameras

Authors:
Stella Katharina Wermuth↗Qazi Arbab Ahmed↗Klaus Neumann↗Thorsten Jungeblut↗

Autonomous staff-free public transport requires reliable in-vehicle passenger monitoring. However, perception inside moving vehicles is challenged by confined spaces, variable illumination, motion-induced background variation, occlusion, and limited viewpoints. To mitigate these spatial constraints, ceiling-mounted fisheye cameras provide full-scene coverage from a single viewpoint. Yet existing public overhead fisheye datasets are recorded in static environments and do not capture the domain shift introduced by vehicle motion. To fill this gap, we introduce PMOF, Passenger Monitoring using Overhead Fisheye cameras, the first public dataset of top-view fisheye imagery captured inside a moving vehicle, comprising over 19k manually annotated frames. PMOF provides rotated bounding boxes, tracking identifiers, and action labels, supporting object detection, tracking, and action recognition. We benchmark PMOF using YOLO26m-obb models fine-tuned under multiple dataset configurations that combine PMOF with existing overhead fisheye datasets. Cross-domain fine-tuning with custom rotation-aware augmentation achieves 94.8% AP50 on PMOF and 96.5% AP50 on an unseen overhead fisheye dataset from a different domain. Our results highlight the domain gap between static and moving environments and show that incorporating PMOF improves detection performance and advances generalization beyond passenger monitoring to broader fisheye-based person detection tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://swermuth.github.io/pmof/.

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

Feature extraction for plant growth estimation

Authors:
Simbarashe Aldrin Ngorima↗Albert Helberg↗Marelie H. Davel↗

Precision agriculture requires the estimation of plant growth stages in real-time. When the plant growth stage is known, the wastage of resources in cultivation, such as nutrients and water, is reduced as only the required resources need to be supplied. Plants at different growth stages, however, have similar morphological features, which can make autonomous growth stage estimation difficult. This paper presents two feature extraction methods for growth stage estimation: one that uses a bank of Gabor filters and morphological operations, and the other that uses pre-trained convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and transfer learning. We test these methods on a publicly available plant growth stage dataset (``bccr-segset``) for two species, canola and radish, grown and captured under indoor conditions. The two proposed feature extraction methods are compared, using support vector machines and boosted trees as classifiers. We find that both methods are suitable for real-time applications, and that CNN features outperform the hand-crafted features, both with regard to speed and accuracy. The best system (VGG-19 features, classified with a radial basis function support vector machine) obtained an accuracy of 98.4% for both species, processing an image in 0.08 seconds.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

On Approximating the Dynamic Response of Synchronous Generators via Operator Learning: A Step Towards Building Deep Operator-based Power Grid Simulators

Authors:
Christian Moya↗Amirhossein Mollaali↗Guang Lin↗Meng Yue↗

arXiv:2301.12538v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops an Operator Learning framework for approximating the dynamic response of synchronous generators. The framework can be used to (i) build a neural network-based generator model that interacts with a power grid simulator or (ii) shadow the true generator's transient response. First, we develop a data-driven Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) to approximate the infinite-dimensional solution operator of the generators. Then, we design a numerical scheme based on DeepONet that simulates the generator's response over a given time horizon. The proposed scheme recursively employs the trained DeepONet to simulate the response for a given multi-dimensional input that describes the interaction between the generator and the power grid. In addition, we design a residual DeepONet numerical scheme that can incorporate information from existing mathematical models. We accompany this residual DeepONet scheme with an estimate for the prediction's cumulative error. Finally, we build a data aggregation (DAgger) strategy that allows fine-tuning of DeepONets using aggregated training data that the DeepONets will likely encounter during interactive simulations with other grid components. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that the proposed frameworks can effectively approximate the transient model of a synchronous generator.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Cardiac positronium lifetime in human PET: a reproducible right-left ventricular contrast that is not explained by blood oxygenation

Authors:
Zermeno↗E. D↗

Background. Ortho-positronium (o-Ps) lifetime, now measurable in vivo on long-axial-field-of-view (LAFOV) PET/CT, has been proposed as a biomarker of tissue oxygenation and hypoxia. Because o-Ps lifetime is dominated by tissue free-volume structure while the oxygen- specific contribution is small, whether an in-vivo lifetime contrast reflects oxygenation rather than anatomy is an open, identifiability-limited question. Aim. To test the oxygenation hypothesis directly using the heart's natural arterial/venous oxygenation contrast, with a built-in anatomical control. Methods. We re-analysed a public [82Rb]Cl human cardiac LAFOV PET/CT dataset (5.30 x 10^8 evaluated three-photon events). Per-compartment o-Ps lifetimes were extracted with a background-plus-two-component exponentially-modified-Gaussian (EMG) model. The list-mode to image mapping and right/left ventricle (RV/LV) identity were established lifetime-free (the mapping reproduces the provider's reconstructed image at block-correlation 0.998 and wins a joint multi-organ alignment panel). We applied a confound battery: registration stress test, blood-core vs wall, lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume, tissue density; and a structure/position-matched control (pulmonary artery, deoxygenated, vs aorta, oxygenated). An isotope-matched 82Rb uniform-quartz reference bounded the instrument's positional behaviour. All results were produced by two independent analysis pipelines. Results. RV o-Ps lifetime exceeded LV by delta tau = +0.304 ns (RV 1.700 +/- 0.172, LV 1.396 +/- 0.130 ns; about 1.4 sigma), in the oxygen-expected direction; the contrast was stable across +/-16 mm registration perturbation (sign preserved in 100% of 342 shifts) and resided in the blood core, not the wall. However, the matched-vessel control was null: pulmonary artery minus aorta = -0.011 +/- 0.344 ns. Lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume were disfavoured, and the effect fell within the isotope-matched 82Rb instrumental positional envelope (about 0.1-0.35 ns over 40 mm in uniform material). Conclusion. On this single subject, the cardiac o-Ps lifetime contrast does not provide a clean readout of blood oxygenation: an oxygenation effect of the observed (about 0.3 ns) magnitude is ruled out by the matched control, while a small physiological effect cannot be excluded. We provide a reusable confound-control battery for evaluating future in-vivo o-Ps oxygenation claims. Multi-subject replication with anatomy decoupled from oxygenation is required.

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18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

In situ nanocrystal confinement for efficient blue perovskite LEDs

Authors:
Shaocheng Liu↗

Metal halide perovskites have emerged as promising semiconductors for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) owing to their excellent luminescence properties1. However, their performance remains limited, primarily owing to the inherent contradiction between ‘high crystallinity’ and ‘small size’ in the in situ synthesis of perovskite nanocrystals on substrates. Here we report efficient blue perovskite LEDs (PeLEDs) achieved via in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement to synthesize perovskite films composed of high-quality nanocrystals. The in situ-formed polymer network imposes nanoscale spatial constraints during perovskite nanocrystal growth, enabling nanocrystals with small sizes and a high photoluminescence quantum yield of 83%. Furthermore, polymerizable monomers with sufficient coordination sites allow a prolonged lattice rearrangement of perovskite clusters, promoting the crystallinity of the nanocrystals. The synthesized perovskite nanocrystals are utilized in the fabrication of PeLEDs, resulting in an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% at 491 nm, which is among the highest performances in blue PeLEDs. This work simultaneously controls the thermal dynamics of perovskite crystallization and organic ligand reactions, which helps to advance understanding of the effect of ligand engineering on nanocrystal synthesis, benefiting the development of efficient PeLEDs and other optoelectronic technologies. Efficient blue perovskite light-emitting diodes with an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% are achieved through in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement.

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

FlowMaps: Modeling Long-Term Multimodal Object Dynamics with Flow Matching

Authors:
Francesco Argenziano↗Miguel Saavedra-Ruiz↗Sacha Morin↗Charlie Gauthier↗Daniele Nardi↗Liam Paull↗

arXiv:2606.20209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Joint spatial and temporal understanding of 3D scenes is a crucial requirement for robots deployed in everyday household environments. Such agents must not only comprehend and navigate spatial layouts, but also reason about how these spaces evolve over time. In particular, humans interact with objects daily, causing them to change position throughout the environment and making it difficult for robots to reliably associate current observations with previously seen objects. However, these interactions are not random: human habits and routines induce spatio-temporally consistent patterns in object locations, which robotic agents can potentially learn and then exploit for downstream tasks such as navigation. To this end, we introduce FlowMaps, a latent flow matching model for estimating multimodal distributions over the future locations of dynamic objects in a continuous 3D space. By learning the implicit dependencies among objects and their temporal evolution, FlowMaps predicts likely changes in object locations conditioned on past human interactions, while supporting generalization across previously unseen environments that share similar object routines. To demonstrate the utility of this method, we deploy FlowMaps in a downstream dynamic Object Navigation task in both simulated and real-world environments. Across more than 600 episodes, FlowMaps outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, showing that modeling object dynamics through continuous, multimodal spatio-temporal distributions improves robotic search and navigation in changing household environments. Code and additional material is available at https://fra-tsuna.github.io/flowmaps/.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Cross-Dataset Bloom Question Classification: Supervised Models and Prompted LLMs

Authors:
Abdolali Faraji↗Mohammadreza Molavi↗Zohreh Rasoulkhani↗Mohammadreza Tavakoli↗G\'abor Kismih\'ok↗

Automatic Bloom's taxonomy classification of assessment questions can substantially reduce instructor workload, but labeling is subjective and teacher-dependent. Prior machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) approaches reported strong within-dataset results, yet were rarely evaluated in cross-dataset settings, leaving real-world generalizability unclear; meanwhile, LLM effectiveness for Bloom question classification has not been systematically studied. We evaluated the cross-dataset generalization of existing ML/DL methods and assessed LLMs with multiple prompting strategies on five datasets; the best prompting strategy combined in-context examples with course-specific action verbs. Supervised ML/DL models degraded substantially on unseen datasets, whereas LLMs were more stable, suggesting a robust alternative across diverse educational contexts. Based on the best prompting strategy, we also presented a lightweight UI that supports instructors in automatically classifying large question banks; a usability study indicated low workload and high usability.

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21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Systematic functional annotation of thousands of BAHD acyltransferases in plant genomes using Protein Language Model and phylogenomic tools

Authors:
Smith↗Yuan↗Melissinos↗Satani↗Grissom↗Moghe↗G. D↗

The functional annotation of plant genes lags significantly behind their genomic annotation. Closing this gap requires thorough cataloging of reported protein activities alongside predictive methods that scale beyond sequence-similarity inference. Focusing on the BAHD acyltransferase enzyme family as a model, we assembled FuncZymeDB-BAHD, a large database of 2,705 LLM-retrieved and curated enzyme-acceptor-donor activities covering 336 BAHDs from 156 plant species, a 2-to-6-fold expansion over Swiss-Prot and prior compilations. We further developed FuncPred-OG, which maps queries to orthologous groups and previously characterized enzymes in FuncZymeDB-BAHD, returning hits with high evidence provenance. FuncPred-OG enabled functional prediction of over half of BAHDs across 85 plant proteomes, of which five novel predictions were validated via in vitro assays and recent studies. For the remaining BAHDs without FuncPred-OG annotation, we developed FuncPred-AI, where logistic-regression classifiers trained on protein language model embeddings achieved high Area-Under-the-Precision-Recall-curve (AUPR) scores and correct-hit rates up to 93%. FuncPred-AI yielded >1 probable donor/acceptor annotation for 99.9% (8894/8897) of BAHDs in our pan-plant dataset. Finally, the FuncPred workflow and datasets were deployed on a web portal for broader utilization, potentially reducing experimentalist efforts for selecting candidates from days to minutes. Overall, this framework provides a generalizable template for functional annotation of entire enzyme families.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A new class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation and their potential applications in optical memories

Authors:
Georgios N. Tsigaridas↗Aristides I. Kechriniotis↗Christos A. Tsonos↗Konstantinos K. Delibasis↗

arXiv:2606.14256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article, we present a novel class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation, corresponding to a wide variety of electromagnetic 4-potentials and fields, including both zero field and circularly polarized electromagnetic waves. An interesting property of these solutions is that the spin of the particles rotates in synchronization with the electric and magnetic fields of the electromagnetic waves. These results could be utilized for the development of optical memories based on materials supporting massless Dirac fermions, such as graphene.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

Authors:
Joshua A. McGinnis↗Xinbo Li↗Yoichiro Mori↗

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.

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

Minimalist Genetic Programming

Authors:
Leonardo Trujillo↗

arXiv:2606.10237v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Genetic programming (GP) is based on two important insights. First, that any learning task can fundamentally be posed as a program induction problem, where the goal is to construct a symbolic hierarchical model that is expressed as a syntax tree. Second, to pose this task as a search problem, and use evolution to locate the desired model. Since it was proposed, GP has produced notable results in a wide range of tasks and problem domains. This work presents an alternative view by modifying the second core insight of GP, posing the problem as a syntactic derivation task instead. In particular, this paper presents Minimalist Genetic Programming (MGP), an algorithm that like GP is biologically inspired, but instead of evolution it takes inspiration from the Minimalist Program to human language, in which syntax is understood as an optimal solution to the problem of linking two other mental systems. In minimalism, the core computational process is a binary set formation operator called $MERGE$, than can be used to incrementally construct complex syntactic structures using a simple Markovian process. MGP is able to discover the core building blocks of the symbolic expressions, and to incrementally combined them using $MERGE$. The proposed system is benchmarked on symbolic regression tasks that are known to be difficult to solve with standard GP systems because of the propensity for bloat. Results show that when a proper lexicon of atomic syntactic objects are chosen, MGP is able to consistently produce the exact ground truth model on a set of symbolic regression tasks where standard GP struggles to do the same. The insights provided by minimalism are shown to be relevant to the problem of program induction, and should be explored further based on the potential exhibited by MGP in this work.

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

Benchmarking Web Agent Safety under E-commerce Deceptive Interfaces

Authors:
Zijing Shi↗Meng Fang↗Ling Chen↗

As autonomous web agents are increasingly deployed to perform real-world tasks, ensuring their safety has become a critical concern. In this work, we study web agent behavior under realistic deceptive interfaces in the e-commerce domain. We introduce WebDecept, a lightweight and configurable plugin framework that enables controlled injection of deceptive interface patterns into existing web environments. Using WebDecept, we instantiate seven deceptive patterns commonly observed on the open web, including targeted advertisements, domain redirection, and shopping manipulation. By injecting these patterns into the frontend during task execution, we perform controlled evaluation of multiple multimodal web agents. Our results show that current web agents are highly susceptible to multiple classes of deceptive interfaces, and that prompt-based constraints are often insufficient to mitigate these failures. We further analyze how the design choices of deceptive patterns influence the success of such manipulations. These findings highlight safety challenges that should be addressed as web agents are scaled toward real-world deployment.

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