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

ZONOS2 Technical Report

Authors:
Gabriel Clark↗Sofian Mejjoute↗Mohamed Osman↗George Close↗Beren Millidge↗

arXiv:2606.24320v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present ZONOS2 8B, our latest TTS model, which achieves state-of-the-art naturalness, prosody, and voice cloning fidelity. We improve upon Zonos-v0.1 across scale, data, and training recipe. We scale the model from 1.6B to 8B total parameters (900M active) with a novel mixture-of-experts (MoE) backbone, improving inference latency and throughput. We expand our training corpus from 200K to over 6M hours using a new data processing pipeline, and we simplify our post-training and conditioning recipes to improve naturalness and voice cloning fidelity. We evaluate ZONOS2 8B on quality, speaker similarity, WER, and ZTTS1-Eval, our novel TTS benchmark, where it performs competitively with state-of-the-art systems while maintaining good streaming latency. We release our model weights and example inference code under an Apache 2.0 license on GitHub and Hugging Face.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

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

Authors:
Tengfei Ma↗Ruiqi Wu↗Chenran Zhang↗Ye Geng↗Na Su↗Xiangyuan Duanmu↗Tao Zhou↗Yi Zhou↗Wen Fan↗

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.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Reference-Driven Multi-Speaker Audio Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Priors

Authors:
Michael Finkelson↗Daniel Segal↗Eitan Richardson↗Shahar Armon↗Nani Goldring↗Poriya Panet↗Nir Zabari↗Benjamin Brazowski↗Or Patashnik↗Yoav HaCohen↗

Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings. These systems operate within speech-only pipelines that produce clean vocal sequences without the ambient texture of real conversations. We take a different approach. Our method, ScenA, conditions a text-to-audio flow-matching foundation model, pretrained on large-scale in-the-wild data, directly on multiple reference voices and a free-form natural language prompt that describes an entire multi-speaker audio scene. Leveraging such a foundational model allows us to inherit its capacity for natural, non-studio audio: background noise, room acoustics, overlapping dialogue, and spontaneous paralinguistic events, while adding multi-speaker control without any per-turn structure. Concretely, reference latents are concatenated into the model's token sequence and distinguished by lightweight identity-aware positional encodings. However, we identify a critical obstacle to this approach: the Reference Shortcut. During training under standard noise schedules, the model can identify the matching reference by acoustic similarity to the noisy target, bypassing the text prompt entirely. We address this with a high-noise-biased timestep distribution that forces the model to rely on the text prompt for speaker assignment. We evaluate ScenA on the CoVoMix2-Dialogue benchmark, showing that it outperforms existing multi-speaker systems on speaker-binding metrics while generating rich conversational audio with overlapping speech, emotional vocalizations, and ambient sound. Our results demonstrate the advantage of using a general-purpose audio model conditioned on a free-form scene description, rather than passing structured dialog scripts through a speech-only pipeline.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Attention Alignment Between Humans and Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Isaac R. Christian↗Udith Haputhanthrige↗Hanna Hornfeld↗Declan Campbell↗Samuel Nastase↗Taylor Webb↗Michael Graziano↗

Visual perception depends on top-down goals and bottom-up sensory mechanisms. Vision-language models implement both, allowing us to treat each component as a separable hypothesis about what drives where we look. We compared spatial attention maps from six vision-language models against human fixation heatmaps recorded on 200 images during two tasks (general description and social captioning). The six models spanned a 2$\times$2 factorial of CNN vs.\ ViT encoders crossed with LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders, plus Molmo 7B-D and Qwen3.5 9B. We found that both decoder and encoder architecture shaped alignment, but decoder choice dominated. LSTM vs.\ Transformer decoders increased alignment by 40–50 percentage points (80–87\% vs.\ 40–59\% of the human noise ceiling). In contrast, CNN vs.\ ViT encoders contributed a secondary 5–20 point advantage depending on decoder family, with CNN-LSTM the most aligned model overall (85–87\%). Despite their alignment advantage, LSTM-decoder attention maps were spatially diffuse and minimally task-differentiated; ViT-Transformer, the weakest in alignment, showed the sharpest spatial concentration and strongest task differentiation. A hemispatial-neglect simulation confirmed that ablating attention impacted LSTM decoders more than Transformer decoders. In an exploratory extension using TRIBE-simulated synthetic neural responses, fixation alignment and neural relevance dissociate: CNN-Transformer attention maps better predicted synthetic brain activity despite lower fixation alignment, with attention maps best predicting early visual cortex. Together, top-down and bottom-up components trade off what they predict in behavioral and synthetic neural data.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

A no-go theorem for privacy in distributed sensing using Gaussian states

Authors:
Jason L. Pereira↗Damian Markham↗

arXiv:2606.23796v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the discrete variable setting, entangled resource states allow a set of parties to learn a global function of a set of spatially separated systems, whilst keeping the local parameters of those systems completely private. In the continuous variable setting, distributed sensing has been carried out using Gaussian resource states, but without the same guarantees about privacy. Here, we show that perfect privacy is impossible to achieve for any distributed sensing protocol that uses Gaussian states as a resource. We also introduce a measure of relative privacy, bounding the degree to which any Gaussian distributed sensing protocol can keep local parameters hidden.

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

Sample from What You See: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Diffusion Bridge with Observation-Embedded Stochastic Differential Equation

Authors:
Zhaoyang Liu↗Mokai Pan↗Zhongyi Wang↗Kaizhen Zhu↗Haotao Lu↗Haipeng Zhang↗Jingya Wang↗Ye Shi↗

arXiv:2512.07212v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Imitation learning with diffusion models has advanced robotic control by capturing the multi-modal action distributions. However, existing methods typically treat observations only as high-level conditions to the denoising network, rather than integrating them into the stochastic dynamics of the diffusion process itself. As a result, the sampling is forced to begin from random noise, weakening the coupling between perception and control and often yielding suboptimal performance. We propose BridgePolicy, a generative visuomotor policy that directly integrates observations into the stochastic dynamics via a diffusion-bridge formulation. By constructing an observation-informed trajectory, BridgePolicy enables sampling to start from a rich and informative prior rather than random noise, substantially improving precision and reliability in control. A key difficulty is that diffusion bridge normally connects distributions of matched dimensionality, while robotic observations are heterogeneous and not naturally aligned with actions. To overcome this, we introduce a semantic aligner to unify the visual and state inputs and align the observations with action representations, making diffusion bridge applicable to heterogeneous robot data. Extensive experiments across 52 simulation tasks on three benchmarks and 5 real-world tasks demonstrate that BridgePolicy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative policies. Our code is available at https://jianghcsr.github.io/BridgePolicy_page/.

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07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

MOLAR: Learning Multimodal Molecular Representations from Noisy Labels

Authors:
Yingxu Wang↗Kunyu Zhang↗Nan Yin↗Yu Li↗Eran Segal↗

arXiv:2606.18390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivation: Noisy labels are a common challenge in molecular property prediction because molecular annotations are often obtained from assays, curated databases, or weak annotation pipelines rather than directly observed clean biological states. Treating recorded labels as reliable supervision can cause models to memorize corrupted observations and learn misleading molecular evidence. In multimodal molecular representation learning, this issue can be amplified by graph-text fusion or alignment, which may propagate label-induced errors across modalities. Results: We propose MOLAR, a noise-aware framework for learning multimodal molecular representations from noisy labels. MOLAR separates latent clean-property inference from recorded-label observation: graph and text views contribute residual evidence to a clean-property distribution, and a categorical label-observation channel maps this distribution to recorded labels for training. This formulation derives posterior label reliability and modality-specific molecular evidence from the model. Experiments on naturally noisy molecular benchmarks and controlled label-flipping benchmarks show that MOLAR consistently outperforms representative baselines. Visualization analyses further show that MOLAR provides interpretable reliability and modality-evidence diagnostics.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Infinitesimal Causality

Authors:
Sridhar Mahadevan↗

arXiv:2606.24621v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a categorical account of infinitesimal causality in Frobenius Markov categories equipped with tangent-bundle semantics. IDC captures the infinitesimal layer in which interventions act as tangent deformations of copy/discard structure. Two distinct Frobenius structures interact: (1) the categorical Frobenius algebra on classical variables encoding copying, comparing, and discarding; and (2) the geometric Frobenius integrability condition, namely involutive closure of the intervention distribution, distinct from the algebraic Frobenius structure. Categorical causal sufficiency is defined as the compatibility of these two notions. A key observation is that, for structural causal models, infinitesimal causality is most naturally formulated in the slice of deterministic mechanisms over exogenous variables, with visible stochastic kernels obtained only after pushforward. Interventions are tangent vectors that deform the Frobenius copy/discard operations; their Lie brackets measure whether this deformation preserves classical information-flow structure. Pearl's do-calculus is used as a guiding example of intervention identities: ignoring irrelevant interventions corresponds to counit invariance, action/observation exchange to coproduct compatibility with pushforward, and independence to involutive bracket closure of the visible intervention distribution.

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

Integrated Sensing and Communications for Real-time Avatar Control in XR over 5G

Authors:
Nabeel Nisar Bhat↗Javad Sameri↗Rreze Halili↗Rafael Berkvens↗Maria Torres Vega↗Jeroen Famaey↗

arXiv:2606.23771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extended Reality (XR) presents a challenging use case for 5G and 6G networks, requiring high data-rates and lowlatency communication to deliver a truly immersive experience. Moreover, in order to seamlessly translate physical actions to the virtual world, accurate gesture recognition and pose estimation are required. Current XR interaction solutions based on handheld controllers and cameras cannot easily capture full-body poses, inhibit the free use of hands, and require good visibility and a clear line of sight. In this work, we propose a multimodal sensing architecture for XR that combines 5G MillimeterWave (mmWave) Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and surface electromyography (sEMG) signals. 5G mmWave ISAC cannot only be used to deliver content wirelessly to the Head-mounted display (HMD), but also the same communication signals can be used to derive coarse body-level gestures and poses of the user, to support real-time avatar control. For fine-grained finger-level gestures, our architecture leverages lightweight sEMG sensors that capture forearm muscle activity. To illustrate the need of both modalities, we present evaluations of both sensing technologies. At the body level (5G), our architecture relies on power-per-beam-pair (PPBP), which can be computed from standard beam management or beam sweeping procedures of the 5G NR standard. PPBP-based sensing achieves 82.2$\pm$5.9% average accuracy when evaluated on users not seen during training. For fine-grained finger-level interactions, we show that surface electromyography (sEMG) carries strong discriminative information achieving consistent promising performance across different movement settings. Thus, combining the two modalities enables multi-scale gesture recognition, at the body level via existing 5G signals and finger level via lightweight sEMG sensors, forming a complete XR framework.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Reinforcement Twinning for Hybrid Control of Flapping-Wing Drones

Authors:
Romain Poletti↗Lorenzo Schena↗Lilla Koloszar↗Joris Degroote↗Miguel Alfonso Mendez↗

arXiv:2505.18201v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlling flapping-wing drones requires controllers that handle time-varying, nonlinear, underactuated dynamics from incomplete, noisy sensor data. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly reinforcement learning (RL), have opened new perspectives for addressing such complex control problems through data-driven policy optimization from interaction with the environment. Yet purely data-driven methods are sample-inefficient, demanding extensive, sometimes unsafe exploration, especially without guiding physical models. This motivates hybrid AI-physics frameworks. This article proposes a hybrid model-free/model-based flight-control approach using the reinforcement twinning algorithm. The model-based (MB) component uses an adjoint formulation and an adaptive digital twin continuously identified from live trajectories; the model-free (MF) component uses RL. The two agents share knowledge via transfer learning, imitation learning, and shared experience between the real environment and the digital twin, coordinated by a policy referee that selects which agent acts in reality based on digital-twin performance and a real-to-virtual consistency ratio. The framework is evaluated for the longitudinal control of a flapping-wing drone, modelled as a nonlinear time-varying system driven by quasi-steady aerodynamic forces. The hybrid strategy is tested under three adaptive-model initializations: (1) offline identification from existing data, (2) random initialization with fully online identification, and (3) offline pre-training with biased parameters followed by online adaptation. In all cases, the hybrid framework improves performance, robustness, and sample efficiency over purely model-free and purely model-based approaches.

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

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

Authors:
Vahid Shahverdi↗Giovanni Luca Marchetti↗Kathl\'en Kohn↗

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

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12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

A <i>Streptomyces</i> megacluster encodes synergistic biotin-targeting antibiotics

Authors:
R. Gordzevich↗

Natural products remain a major source of antibiotics, but discovery efforts have traditionally treated biosynthetic gene clusters as sources of individual bioactive molecules1–5. Increasing evidence has suggested that microorganisms can instead encode coordinated multi-metabolite systems, yet the genetic architectures and biological logic of such systems remain poorly understood6–12. Here we show that Streptomyces spp. encode a highly conserved biosynthetic megacluster that produces four structurally distinct natural product families—stravidins, acidomycin, dapamycins, and 2-methyl-7-keto-8-aminopelargonic acid (α-Me-KAPA)—alongside the biotin-binding protein streptavidin. These components converge on bacterial biotin metabolism through complementary mechanisms, including enzyme inhibition, prodrug activation, cofactor mimicry and biotin sequestration. The encoded metabolites are co-produced and act synergistically across Gram-negative and mycobacterial species, with stravidin S2 and α-Me-KAPA showing enhanced efficacy in combination in a mouse model of multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli infection. This megacluster reveals a genetically encoded chemical arsenal that functions as a naturally evolved combination therapy against a conserved metabolic pathway. More broadly, our findings suggest that higher-order biosynthetic architectures may represent an overlooked reservoir of antibiotic mechanisms and support a shift from discovering isolated natural products to reconstructing native synergistic systems. In Streptomyces spp., a conserved biosynthetic gene megacluster produces an arsenal of distinct antimicrobials that converge on bacterial biotin biosynthesis as a naturally evolved combination therapy.

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

Evaluation of AutoML Frameworks for IDS under Imbalanced Data Conditions of the NSL-KDD Dataset

Authors:
Wiliane Carolina Silva↗Evandro C\'esar Vilas Boas↗Felipe A. P. de Figueiredo↗

arXiv:2606.12611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work investigates the impact of severe class imbalance on the performance of automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks for multiclass network intrusion detection using the NSL-KDD dataset. Unlike previous studies that simplify the problem through binary classification or minority-class removal, we preserve the original five-class distribution, including highly underrepresented attacks such as R2L and U2R, enabling a realistic evaluation of imbalance-sensitive learning behavior. Nine open-source AutoML frameworks were analyzed under a unified and reproducible experimental protocol, considering differences in architectural design, ensemble strategies, validation procedures, hyperparameter optimization, and imbalance-handling mechanisms. The results demonstrate that frameworks incorporating ensemble learning and imbalance-aware optimization achieve better minority-class discrimination. PyCaret obtained the best overall performance, reaching 66\% macro-F1, followed by AutoGluon with 55\%, whereas frameworks lacking native balancing support exhibited significant degradation in minority-class detection capability. The analysis further shows that accuracy-oriented optimization alone is insufficient for highly imbalanced IDS scenarios, since high-weighted metrics may coexist with poor generalization on rare attack categories. As a contribution, this work establishes a standardized benchmark for AutoML-based intrusion detection under severe multiclass imbalance, highlighting current architectural limitations and the need for native integration of imbalance-aware optimization, resampling, and stratified evaluation strategies into automated learning pipelines. The source code is publicly available.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Creativity Reconsidered: Generative AI and the Problem of Intentional Agency

Authors:
James S. Pearson↗Matthew J. Dennis↗Marc Cheong↗

arXiv:2601.15797v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many theorists maintain that conscious intentional agency is a necessary condition of creativity. We argue that this requirement, which we call the Intentional Agency Condition (IAC), should be abandoned. We motivate this by highlighting the problems this criterion encounters in the face of recent advances in generative AI, which is ostensibly creative despite being incapable of intentional agency. We present two corpus analyses to illustrate the rapidly increasing tendency of people to predicate creativity to generative AI. In response to this predicament, theorists of creativity have proposed a range of conflicting solutions, which we critically evaluate. We find that none of these satisfyingly resolves the initial predicament, and we therefore propose a novel approach. Our claim is that ascriptions of creativity are dependent on what we call creative ability. This solution explains why intentional agency is important for judgements of creativity, without being a necessary condition. Our approach thereby accommodates AI creativity without dismissing the intuition that perceived intentions are of key importance for ascriptions of creativity.

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

From Sparse and Imperfect 2D Anchors to Consistent 3D Gaussian Street Scenes: Support-Aware Appearance

Authors:
Long Cao↗Zhongquan Wang↗Jie Li↗Yuhan Chen↗Kefei Qian↗Xiangfei Huang↗Guofa Li↗

Image priors can synthesize target conditions for 3D Gaussian street scenes, but independently edited views do not define a coherent 3D target. Direct fitting can propagate view-specific noise, while existing pipelines do not jointly handle imperfect sparse anchors and standard-rasterizer deployment. To address this gap, teacher-relative appearance residual distillation is introduced for appearance baking. A structured space for frequency decomposition, confidence estimation, and primitive-level lifting is formed by residuals between teacher anchors and original renders. The direct optimization signal is supplied by renderer-space matching, while primitive assignment is regularized by support-aware Gaussian-space aggregation. Supported detail is admitted and unsupported noise is suppressed through confidence-gated coarse-to-fine optimization, after which all residuals are baked into fixed-geometry spherical-harmonic coefficients. The teacher and auxiliary training modules are discarded at inference. Evaluation across Waymo street assets, Tanks and Temples scenes, and multiple target conditions shows a favorable overall balance of target alignment, content preservation, artifact suppression, and cross-view consistency over editing-based baselines. Ablations confirm the effectiveness of the main components. Code will be released at https://github.com/Cagares/Baking-for-3D-Gaussian.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Pembrolizumab, Temozolomide and HSPPC-96 Vaccine in Newly Diagnosed Glioblastoma Post-Chemoradiation: Results from a Multi-institutional, Phase 2, Randomized, Placebo-Controlled Trial

Authors:
Ozer↗B. H↗Lindhorst↗S. M↗Merrell↗R. T↗Trevino↗C. R↗Rudnick↗J. D↗Avgeropoulos↗N. G↗…

Background: GBM is one of the most common and most aggressive brain tumors in adults, and upfront standard of care treatment has limited efficacy. Immune checkpoint inhibitor strategies have significantly improved outcomes in various solid tumors but have not proven effective in GBM, suggesting other strategies may be needed to realize their full potential. Methods: GBM patients were treated with upfront standard of care chemoradiation with temozolomide and pembrolizumab, followed by adjuvant temozolomide and pembrolizumab for six nine-week cycles. Depending on production of sufficient vaccine, patients were randomized into HSPPC-96 vaccine or placebo group (q4 weeks) while those with failed vaccine production continued on study unblinded as an ancillary group. The primary objective was overall survival at one year, and secondary endpoints were progression-free survival at six months, overall and progression-free survival, radiographic response, and tolerability by patient-reported outcomes and adverse event documentation. Results: 90 patients were screened, 32 were treated (8 vaccine, 9 placebo, 15 ancillary), and 26 were evaluable for radiographic responses prior to accrual termination. The study did not meet its primary endpoint of overall survival at one year (65.5% in vaccine group, 75% in placebo). Progression-free endpoints were mildly improved in the vaccine group but were not significant, and response rates were not significantly different. The regimen was well-tolerated and safe. Conclusions: Though limited by early discontinuation, these findings do not support the combination of pembrolizumab and HSPPC-96 vaccine with standard of care therapy. Trials Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03018288

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Authors:
Ada Defne T\"ur↗Gaurav Kamath↗Joyce Chai↗Siva Reddy↗Benno Krojer↗

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

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

Schützen: Evaluating LLM Safety in Bulgarian and German Contexts

Authors:
Kiril Georgiev↗Yuxia Wang↗Dimitar Iliyanov Dimitrov↗Preslav Nakov↗Ivan Koychev↗

Large language models are increasingly deployed across professional domains, bringing hard-to-predict risks, including the generation of harmful or disrespectful content. Although substantial progress has been made in developing safety evaluation datasets, existing resources remain overwhelmingly English- and Chinese-centric. This limitation is particularly pronounced when evaluating languages that operate within shared sociocultural, legal, and ethical contexts. To address this gap, we introduce Sch\"{u}tzen: a German–Bulgarian safety dataset designed to assess model answerability under risk, covering both a low-resource language (Bulgarian) and a high-resource language (German). Experiments with multilingual and language-specific LLMs reveal pronounced cross-language differences in safety behavior, highlighting the necessity of tailored, region-specific evaluation resources to support the responsible deployment of LLMs in Germany and Bulgaria. Datasets and code are available at https://github.com/xnlp-lab/Schutzen. Warning: this paper contains examples that may be offensive, harmful, or biased.

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19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe as science superpower: what it will take to rival the US and China

Authors:
Elizabeth Gibney↗

Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain. Amid chaos in US science and geopolitical turmoil, Europe wants to position itself as a research haven — but questions about funding and innovation remain.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

EnrichViz: An Interactive R Shiny Application for Visualization of Pathway Enrichment Results from Omics Data

Authors:
Garcia-Milian↗

Pathway and functional enrichment analysis is a cornerstone of omics data interpretation, enabling researchers to map differentially expressed proteins or genes onto curated biological processes, signaling cascades, and molecular functions. While tools such as Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA), g:Profiler, and Enrichr are widely used to generate ranked enrichment results, translating these tabular outputs into clear, publication-ready figures remains a time-consuming step that typically requires custom scripting and familiarity with visualization libraries, a significant barrier for researchers without a computational background. Here we present EnrichViz, a self-contained, browser-based R Shiny application that enables interactive, code-free visualization of pathway and functional enrichment results from quantitative proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics experiments. EnrichViz accepts three standard CSV files as input, a normalized abundance matrix, a sample annotation or metadata file, and enrichment results from any platform that exports tabular output, and produces six complementary, publication-ready visualizations: bar and bubble plots for ranking enriched terms by significance, chord diagrams for exploring pathway-molecule connectivity, clustered heatmaps for displaying Z-score normalized expression patterns across experimental groups, and boxplots or violin plots for examining the abundance distribution of individual proteins, genes, or metabolites. The application supports both raw p-values and pre-transformed -log10(p) values through automatic detection, and all plot parameters are adjustable in real time through a graphical sidebar. Every figure can be exported as a high-resolution PNG file at 300 dpi. EnrichViz is implemented in R using the Shiny, ggplot2, pheatmap, and circlize packages, and is freely available at https://rgmilian.shinyapps.io/EnrichViz/

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

Does My Embedding Reflect That $A = B$? Evaluating Mathematical Equivalence in Embedding Models

Authors:
Jiaying Ye↗Samarth Rao↗Leo Carlin↗Kedar Chintalapati↗Saharsh Bhargava↗Rachit Jaiswal↗Michael Zhou↗Jared Darlington↗Jarod Alper↗Vasily Ilin↗Henry Kvinge↗

Because mathematics is highly abstract, a single statement can take very different forms depending on what subfield it is framed in. There are many examples where breakthroughs occurred after researchers discovered that a question had already been answered in a different field. At the same time, the growth of new resources related to formalization has increased the need for tools that enable efficient and reliable navigation between mathematical 'languages' (e.g., from Lean to natural language). In this paper, we investigate whether current embedding models capture mathematical equivalence. To do this, we introduce the Mathematically Equivalent but Lexically Different Pairs (MELD) Dataset, a collection of mathematically equivalent statements that are expressed in very different language. We show that current state-of-the-art embedding models tend to group statements by the terminology used to make them instead of the underlying math. Motivated by this, we propose a contrastive approach to learning embeddings of mathematical text that focuses on aligning informal statements with different formalizations. Our experiments demonstrate that this leads to improvements not only on informal-formal retrieval tasks but also on MELD, which only contains natural language statements.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Instrumental Activities of Daily Living in Older Adults with Epilepsy: A Cross-Sectional and Longitudinal Multicenter Study

Authors:
Zawar↗Reyes↗Arrotta↗Hermann↗B. P↗Busch↗R. M↗Quigg↗Kapur↗Struck↗A. F↗Punia↗…

Objective: Instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs) represent a critical but understudied measure of day-to-day function in persons with epilepsy(PWE). In the multicenter Brain Aging and Cognition in Epilepsy (BrACE) study of PWE aged greater than or equal to 55 years, we examined the proportion, clinical correlates, epilepsy-related predictors, and longitudinal trajectory of IADL impairment. Methods: IADLs were assessed using the Functional Activities Questionnaire (FAQ; range=0 to 30; higher=more impaired); a FAQ greater than or equal to 2 defines MCI-level impairment, and a FAQ greater than or equal to 5 defines dementia-level functional impairment. Multivariable logistic regression identified predictors of baseline function. Global cognition (Montreal Cognitive Assessment [MoCA]), individual cognitive measures, and quality of life (QOL) were compared between the impaired and unimpaired groups. Linear regression evaluated predictors of longitudinal functional decline. Results: Of 57 participants (mean age=66.6 years; female=52.6%), 38.6% (n=22) had MCI-level functional impairment and 17.5% (n=10) had dementia-level functional impairment. In univariate analyses, worse FAQ scores were associated with lower education, higher area deprivation index, early-onset epilepsy (EOE less than 60 years), antiseizure medication polytherapy, and epilepsy localization. In multivariable analysis, temporal lobe epilepsy (OR=4.46, 95% CI=1.09, 21.83,p=0.047), EOE(OR=7.14, 95% CI=1.16, 59.97, p=0.046), and lower education(OR=0.70,95% CI=0.49, 0.93, p=0.025) remained independently associated with baseline MCI-level functional-impairment. Lower education (OR=0.55,95% CI=0.29, 0.84, p=0.021) was the only factor associated with dementia-level IADL-impairment. IADL-impaired participants demonstrated lower verbal memory scores (adjusted p=0.041) and MoCA scores (adjusted p

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Configurable Holography: Towards Display and Scene Adaptation

Authors:
Yicheng Zhan↗Liang Shi↗Wojciech Matusik↗Qi Sun↗Kaan Ak\c{s}it↗

Rendering holograms for holographic displays is often an iterative and computationally costly process. Emerging learned holography methods have alleviated this bottleneck by enabling fast hologram rendering with improved reconstruction quality. However, existing methods still depend on fixed display hardware and scene parameters, requiring retraining for each new configuration. This limits rapid adaptation to different visual needs, including scene brightness, user focus preference, and hardware compatibility. We introduce Configurable Holography, a learned CGH framework in which a single model adapts to diverse display-scene parameters through explicit conditioning, eliminating the need for retraining. As a prototype, we present a configurable structure and derive a family of models that continuously adapt to propagation distance, volume depth, peak brightness, pixel pitch, and wavelength. To further improve efficiency, we incorporate auxiliary monocular depth estimation for depth-aware 3D hologram synthesis from RGB-only inputs and apply knowledge distillation for interactive inference. Our extensive simulation and hardware experiments on three holographic display prototypes with different combinations of configurations show on-par reconstruction quality with existing methods, offering up to 2x speed-up in fp32. Our work represents an initial step toward flexible, general-purpose learned holography systems that can seamlessly adapt across diverse hardware and user-specific visual requirements.

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

From AGI to ASI

Authors:
Tim Genewein↗Matija Franklin↗Alexander Lerchner↗Laurent Orseau↗Samuel Albanie↗Adam Bales↗Cole Wyeth↗Stephanie Chan↗Iason Gabriel↗Joel Z. Leibo↗Allan Dafoe↗Marcus Hutter↗…

arXiv:2606.12683v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Over the last decade, building human-level artificial general intelligence has moved from far-fetched speculation to being a concrete next-decade target for many of the largest AI organisations. Achieving this goal would have profound and far-reaching impacts on human society, which raises many complex questions for the decade ahead. This report investigates how AI itself might continue to develop in a post-AGI world along the continuum of machine intelligence. The endpoint of this continuum, Universal AI, is theoretically well understood, which provides some formal grounding for the main focus of this report: the transition from human-level AGI to artificial general superintelligence, which, intuitively, can be understood as a system that is more intelligent and cognitively capable than large organisations of humans. After characterizing ASI, the report discusses four potential pathways from AGI to ASI: scaling AGI, AI paradigm shifts, recursive improvement, and ASI emerging from large-scale multi-agent collectives. The report then discusses possible frictions and bottlenecks along these pathways. Determining whether the impact of these frictions will be negligible or substantial raises a number of concrete open research questions. Due to large uncertainties for predicting ASI progress, it cannot be ruled out that AI progress might continue to accelerate over the next years. This could imply that the image of a single transformative step change, caused by the introduction of human-level AGI into our society, could be inaccurate. More apt might be the prospect of a series of transformative societal changes caused by AI-enabled progress and breakthroughs across many areas of science and technology. Preparing for this prospect requires a massively interdisciplinary endeavour of global scope and interest.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Massive Open-Vocabulary Keyword Spotting

Authors:
Leonor Barreiros↗Raul Monteiro↗Afonso Mendes↗Gon\c{c}alo M. Correia↗

Automatic speech recognition systems have been shown to under-perform when it comes to transcribing words rarely seen in the training data, namely specialized terminology. Open-vocabulary keyword spotting, combined with contextual biasing, has been shown to mitigate this issue. However, existing systems can only handle glossaries of a few hundred terms without becoming an infeasible bottleneck. We propose a system that stores features with a memory footprint up to 128 times smaller than a comparable baseline and allows users to process massive databases while remaining open-vocabulary. Without fine-tuning the speech recognition model, our system achieves a comparable entity recall as uncompressed solutions, even in languages not seen during training.

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