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

Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

Authors:
Xingyu Dang↗Rohit Agarwal↗Rodrigo Porto↗Anirudh Goyal↗Liam H Fowl↗Sanjeev Arora↗

arXiv:2602.16793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.

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

Convergence Rate Analysis of the AdamW-style Shampoo: Unifying One-Sided and Two-Sided Preconditioning

Authors:
Huan Li↗Yiming Dong↗Zhouchen Lin↗

arXiv:2601.07326v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies AdamW-style Shampoo, an effective variant of the classical Shampoo that won the external tuning track of the AlgoPerf neural network training competition. Our analysis unifies one-sided and two-sided preconditioning. When the exponents of the two preconditioners sum to $1/2$, we establish the convergence rate $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_*\right]\leq O(\frac{\sqrt{m+n}C}{K^{1/4}})$, where $K$ represents the number of iterations, $(m,n)$ denotes the dimensions of the matrix-valued parameters, and $C$ matches the constant appearing in the optimal convergence rate of SGD. Theoretically, the nuclear norm and Frobenius norm satisfy $||\nabla f(X)||_F\leq ||\nabla f(X)||_*\leq \sqrt{\min\{m,n\}}||\nabla f(X)||_F$, which suggests that our convergence rate is analogous to the optimal $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_F\right]\leq O(\frac{C}{K^{1/4}})$ convergence rate of SGD in the ideal case where $||\nabla f(X)||_*= \Theta(\sqrt{\min\{m,n\}})||\nabla f(X)||_F$ and $m$ and $n$ are of comparable magnitude. Then, we extend our analysis to settings where the preconditioning exponents do not sum to 1/2, and establish convergence with an explicit but more involved rate.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optical Creation of Synthetic Microgravity for Quantum Degenerate Gases

Authors:
Catie LeDesma↗Kendall Mehling↗Tristan Rojo↗Murray Holland↗

arXiv:2606.14985v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Microgravity environments provide unique opportunities for ultracold-atom experiments by enabling long interrogation times and reduced acceleration-induced dynamics. However, their realization has largely been restricted to specialized facilities such as drop towers, sounding rockets, and space-based laboratories. Here we realize synthetic microgravity for quantum degenerate gases using optically engineered force landscapes that compensate Earth's gravity to the milli-g level while maintaining continuous confinement of the atomic ensemble. These force landscapes are generated by dynamically painted optical dipole potentials and calibrated in situ through Bloch oscillations in a vertical optical lattice, enabling precise control of the residual acceleration. We use this capability to demonstrate matter-wave beam splitting with arm separations of several hundred microns. We further implement a Bloch-band atom interferometer in which interaction-induced dephasing is strongly suppressed through controlled three-dimensional expansion in the synthetic microgravity potential. This reduction of mean-field effects restores near-$\sqrt{N}$ scaling of interferometric sensitivity for large quantum degenerate ensembles. Our results establish a versatile platform for realizing synthetic microgravity with trapped quantum gases in terrestrial laboratories, bringing the advantages of microgravity experiments to continuously operating systems and opening new opportunities for quantum sensing, matter-wave interferometry, and precision measurements.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental Observation of Dynamical Phase Transitions in a Dephased Photonic Quantum Walk

Authors:
Xiaojian Huang↗Lei Xiao↗Bingzi Huo↗Xiaowei Wang↗Stefano Longhi↗Peng Xue↗

arXiv:2606.15935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dynamical phase transitions in open quantum systems govern how non-equilibrium states relax toward a stationary state. We study these transitions experimentally using a discrete-time photonic quantum walk on a three-node graph. A tunable synthetic gauge flux and calibrated dephasing allow us to control time-reversal symmetry and the detailed balance properties of the effective Markovian dynamics. With detailed balance, we observe a first-order dynamical phase transition marked by a crossing of real Liouvillian eigenvalues. When detailed balance is broken, we observe a second-order dynamical phase transition at an exceptional point where eigenvalues and eigenvectors coalesce. By progressively reducing the dephasing strength, we track the crossover toward the quantum-coherent regime and determine that the transitions persist down to a finite threshold. Our results link Liouvillian spectral topology to relaxation criticality and demonstrate a controllable platform for engineered dissipative dynamics.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Longitudinal multi-omics characterization of the malignant evolution in multirelapsing glioblastoma

Authors:
Lackman↗M. H↗Wardell↗Darrigues↗De Loose↗Lyle↗G. A↗Xue↗Learned↗Cheney↗Vaske↗O. M↗…

Linking glioblastoma (GBM) evolution to clinical progression is challenged by multiple factors, including tumor location for repeated sample collection, and short patient survival. In a single individual, we collected and analysed samples from 11 operations distributed across 31 months of multi-relapsing and multifocal GBM, including terminal leptomeningeal progression. All samples shared genomic ancestry of the retinoblastoma protein 1 (RB1) and neurofibromin 1 (NF1) mutations while advanced progression and extracranial metastases featured mutations of tuberous sclerosis complex 2 (TSC2), PBRM1, CD22 and Fanconi anemia supplementation group I (FANCI), correlated with clinical resistance to immunotherapies and DNA-damaging agents. Single-cell analytics revealed distinct yet reversible shifts in response to the precision medicine arsenal. GBM parenchymal dissemination and extracranial progression were associated with strengthening of neuron-like cell phenotypes. Our multidimensional study describes GBM evolution over a rarely reported time scale, and provides a valuable resource linking genetic, molecular, cellular and clinical progressions.

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

Learning a Maximum Entropy Model for Visual Textures using Diffusion

Authors:
Xinyuan Zhao↗Eero P. Simoncelli↗

Visual textures – spatially homogeneous image regions containing repeated elements (e.g. a field of grass, the bark of a tree) – are ubiquitous in visual scenes and provide important cues for recognizing and analyzing materials and objects. A number of existing texture models extract essential statistics from a single texture image, and can then generate high-quality samples that are visually similar to the original by matching these statistics. However, their statistics are either hand-designed or based on a network pretrained for another purpose (e.g., object recognition). Here, we develop the first principled method for unsupervised learning of a set of statistics that are used to constrain a maximum entropy probability model. We leverage methods developed for generative diffusion models to derive training and sampling procedures, and compare these to the traditional method of sampling via matching the statistics. Despite the compactness of our trained model (512 statistics), it generates texture images whose quality is as good as or better than the current state-of-the-art model (~177k statistics). A more direct comparison of the two models, obtained by synthesizing images that are indistinguishable for one model but maximally different for the other, reveals their relative strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we show that unlike previous statistical texture models, a straight trajectory in the representation space of our model generates homogeneous texture samples that interpolate smoothly between the features of the two end points.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Small LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification: Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning, Structural Dataset Shortcuts, and Cross-Domain Generalization

Authors:
Gaurav Kumar↗

Large Language Models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5 achieve strong zero-shot performance on biomedical claim verification, but cost and opacity limit scalable use. We fine-tune three small LLMs: Phi-3-mini (3.8B), Qwen2.5-3B, and Mistral-7B, via QLoRA on SciFact and HealthVer, providing the first study of QLoRA models against GPT-4o and fine-tuned BioLinkBERT encoders. Mistral-7B QLoRA surpasses both GPT-4o and GPT-5 (up to 12% F1 gain) at a fractional cost using just 1,008 training examples. We conduct extensive in-domain and cross-domain evaluation: models trained on SciFact tested on HealthVer and vice versa, at matched sizes to isolate dataset structure from data quantity. We identify a previously unreported structural artifact in SciFact that inflates in-domain scores, and show through bidirectional out-of-domain evaluation that training on structurally sound data enables robust cross-domain transfer. We plan to release all code and adapter checkpoints.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Small Initialization Matters for Large Language Models

Authors:
Liangkai Hang↗Junjie Yao↗Zhiyu Li↗Feiyu Xiong↗Hongkang Yang↗Zhi-Qin John Xu↗

arXiv:2606.17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered. Although progress is usually attributed to scale, data and architecture, we show that parameter initialization is a gene-like determinant of training and, in particular, of model capacity. Reducing the initialization scale consistently improves pretraining, with the largest gains on reasoning-demanding tasks. We identify two widely used empirical settings that restrain the advantage of small initialization, and show how relaxing them restores favorable scaling. We further uncover a critical initialization that balances the reasoning and training. Mechanistically, small initialization drives a distinct developmental trajectory: parameters first condense into low-complexity structures and later expand into richer representations, giving concrete form to the idea that compression is intelligence. Token-level analyses show that the gains concentrate on non-trivial, context-constrained predictions rather than all tokens uniformly. These results motivate a simple $\gamma$-initialization rule: expose initialization rage as an explicit knob and use small initialization by default, an almost cost-free intervention that improves pretraining and strengthens reasoning across model scales.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quest for quantum advantage: Monte Carlo wave-function simulations of the Coherent Ising Machine

Authors:
Manushan Thenabadu↗Run Yan Teh↗Jia Wang↗Simon Kiesewetter↗Margaret D Reid↗Peter D Drummond↗

arXiv:2501.02681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Coherent Ising Machine (CIM) is a quantum network of optical parametric oscillators (OPOs) intended to find ground states of the Ising model. This is an NP-hard problem, related to several important minimization problems, including the max-cut graph problem. In order to enhance its potential performance, we analyze the coherent coupling strategy for the CIM in a highly quantum regime. To explore this limit, without assuming gaussianity, we employ accurate numerical simulations. Due to the inherent complexity of the system, the maximum network size is limited. While master equation methods can be used, their scalability diminishes rapidly for larger systems. Instead, we use Monte Carlo wave-function methods, which scale as the wave-function dimension, and use large numbers of samples. These simulations involve Hilbert spaces exceeding $10^{7}$ dimensions. To evaluate success probabilities, we use quadrature probabilities. We demonstrate the potential for quantum computational advantage by reducing the time required to reach maximum success probability in a low-dissipation regime enabled by initial quantum superpositions and entanglement. Furthermore, we demonstrate that tailored time-dependent couplings can amplify these quantum effects. Comparisons with classical CIM models give evidence that quantum tunneling effects in this strong coupling limit can overcome trapping in false minima. This can greatly increase success rates, indicating a potential for quantum advantage. Finally, we perform a coherence analysis based on the state purity to examine the role of quantum coherence in CIM performance and to determine how state purity correlates with improved optimization outcomes.

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

Large Language Model Agents Are Not Always Faithful Self-Evolvers

Authors:
Weixiang Zhao↗Yingshuo Wang↗Yichen Zhang↗Yang Deng↗Yanyan Zhao↗Wanxiang Che↗Bing Qin↗Ting Liu↗

Self-evolving large language model (LLM) agents continually improve by accumulating and reusing past experience, yet it remains unclear whether they faithfully rely on that experience to guide their behavior. We present the first systematic investigation of experience faithfulness, the causal dependence of an agent's decisions on the experience it is given, in self-evolving LLM agents. Using controlled causal interventions on both raw and condensed forms of experience, we comprehensively evaluate four representative frameworks across 13 LLM backbones and 9 environments. Our analysis uncovers a striking asymmetry: while agents consistently depend on raw experience, they often disregard or misinterpret condensed experience, even when it is the only experience provided. This gap persists across single- and multi-agent configurations and across backbone scales. We trace its underlying causes to three factors: the semantic limitations of condensed content, internal processing biases that suppress experience, and task regimes where pretrained priors already suffice. These findings challenge prevailing assumptions about self-evolving methods and underscore the need for more faithful and reliable approaches to experience integration.

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

Machine Learning-Driven Chemical Reactor Network Modeling of the Sandia-D Flame

Authors:
Nicolas J. Tricard↗Benjamin C. Koenig↗Sili Deng↗

arXiv:2606.14729v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Turbulent combustion simulations are crucial for many scientific and engineering systems. However, the high cost to fully resolve the complex multiscale and multiphysics behavior makes direct simulation typically infeasible. The equivalent reactor network (ERN) approach attempts to improve computational efficiency by replacing a multidimensional turbulent simulation with a series of much cheaper 0-D and 1-D chemical reactors, providing a surrogate model that retains detailed chemistry at the cost of simplified flow physics. However, their development remains a challenge, often requiring either expert analysis, or automated approaches that sacrifice accuracy. In this work, we develop an automated machine-learning-assisted framework for constructing ERNs of the Sandia-D turbulent methane/air flame. Principal component analysis is first used to reduce high-dimensional thermochemical computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data to a low-dimensional latent space, where k-means clustering identifies physically interpretable flame regions used to initialize a reactor-network graph. This initialization is then refined using finite-difference gradient descent wrapped around non-differentiable Cantera reactor simulations. Across 30 RANS simulations spanning a range of pilot temperatures and inlet methane compositions, the optimized 7-reactor ERN achieves a maximum-temperature $R^2$ score of 0.7945 while preserving a $\sim6000\times$ speedup over the CFD solver. Outlet CO prediction remains more challenging, with a final $R^2$ score of $-0.4183$, but improves substantially from the unoptimized clustering initialization. These results show that unsupervised thermochemical feature extraction can provide effective physics-informed initializations for ERN construction, while gradient-based refinement can significantly improve predictive accuracy without manual reactor-network design.

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

VOID: Defeating Unauthorized Mimicry in Latent Diffusion Models

Authors:
Chunlin Qiu↗Ang Li↗Tianxiao Huang↗Ruilin Gan↗Yunjie Ge↗Shenyi Zhang↗Huayi Duan↗Lingchen Zhao↗Chao Shen↗Qian Wang↗

While Latent Diffusion Models (LDMs) have revolutionized visual synthesis, they are increasingly exploited for unauthorized mimicry of individuals. Existing defenses inject deceptive perturbations to steer the generated images toward irrelevant targets. However, this approach hinges on an ungrounded assumption: subtle perturbations can maintain their deceptive efficacy throughout an LDM's extensive generation process. In reality, the model's innate restoration mechanism will remove such perturbations and cause individual identities to re-emerge in the images generated. We propose VOID, a defense framework that overcomes this conundrum by manipulating an LDM's intrinsic stochasticity. VOID perturbs the diffusion pipeline in two novel ways: 1) amplifying the latent encoding errors to shatter an image's semantic structure, and 2) counteracting the target guidance signals to suppress the model's restoration capabilities. This results in a semantic corruption that thwarts any unauthorized mimicry. Notably, the security gain does not come at the price of visual utility, as VOID simultaneously manages to confine perturbations to human-imperceptible regions of protected images. Our comprehensive evaluation of 24 state-of-the-art defenses against 10 mimicry attacks on 5 datasets demonstrates VOID's unprecedented protection power: it increases the average Frechet Inception Distance (FID) from 113 to 365, a 223% improvement over the strongest defense to date.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Numerical simulations of the spread from the mean of the SLE and Multiple SLE dynamics

Authors:
Phillip Kim↗Vlad Margarint↗

arXiv:2606.11254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Schramm-Loewner Evolution (SLE) describes a family of fractal curves that arise in the study of the scaling limits of many planar Statistical Physics models. These curves are modeled using the Loewner Differential Equation for the conformal maps $g_t(z)$ with a Brownian motion driver. Using Euler's Method, in the current work we performed numerical experiments to study at a fixed time the quantities $|g_t(z) - \overline{g_t(z)}|$ and $Re(g_t(z)) - Re(\overline{g_t(z)})$, where $Re$ denotes the real part and $\overline{g_t(z)}$ refers to the sample average. These random variables measure the 'spread' of the dynamics from the average behavior at fixed time. One of the scopes of this work is to give numerical predictions for future theoretical investigations on these quantities. When investigating these quantities in the SLE case our experiments predict that the distribution is bimodal when the dynamics started close to the origin, and it can become bell-shaped if the dynamics is started further from the origin. In the second part, we performed experiments for a Multiple SLE model whose driver is Dyson Brownian Motion. Due to singularity in the dynamics of the drivers and the many data points needed, this part is challenging from a computational perspective. In the multiple SLE case, our experiments predict that the distribution is bell-shaped in all cases. In addition, we check the changes in the distributions as we vary the parameter $\kappa$ in the SLE case and $\beta$ in the Multiple SLE case.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Measurement noise limits the advantage of nonlinear models over linear models in biomedical prediction

Authors:
Marc-Andre Schulz↗Kerstin Ritter↗

arXiv:2606.18420v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On biomedical tabular data, flexible models such as deep networks, gradient-boosted trees, and kernel methods are repeatedly matched or beaten by linear and logistic regression given the same features. The usual reaction is to treat this as a model-side shortfall, to be fixed with more data, a better architecture, or tuning, on the assumption that the nonlinear structure is there and the model has failed to capture it. We argue that these fixes cannot help when the binding limit is the measurement rather than the model, as it frequently is in biomedicine. Additive noise blurs the population-optimal predictor, and because blurring removes a function's fine, rapidly varying detail before its broad shape, it erases nonlinear structure faster than linear structure. A degree-$k$ interaction is attenuated by the $k$-th power of feature reliability, while the linear part is attenuated only once. At the reliabilities typical of biomedical measurement, the nonlinear advantage can vanish even when the underlying biology is strongly nonlinear, and what the noise removes cannot be recovered by a larger cohort or a more flexible model, only by better measurement. The nonlinearity is hidden, not absent, and a tie between linear and flexible models is not by itself a verdict on the biology. These pieces are classical, drawn from measurement-error statistics, psychometrics, and Gaussian analysis, and we assemble them into an exact excess-risk identity. Measurement reliability is one of three conditions, alongside sample size and feature representation, that must align for a flexible model to help, and together they leave only a narrow window that most biomedical tasks fall outside. Across 140 UK Biobank tasks, the gap between flexible and linear models, where it exists, carries the predicted noise signature, and the three conditions can be separated by intervention but not by a benchmark alone.

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16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

An alternative approach to well-posedness of McKean-Vlasov equations arising in Consensus-Based Optimization

Authors:
Alessandro Baldi↗

arXiv:2512.19446v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this work we study the mean-field description of Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO), a derivative-free particle optimization method. Such a description is provided by a non-local SDE of McKean-Vlasov type, whose fields lack of global Lipschitz continuity. We propose a novel approach to prove the well-posedness of the mean-field CBO equation based on a truncation argument. The latter is performed through the introduction of a cut-off function, defined on the space of probability measures, acting on the fields. This procedure allows us to study the well-posedness problem in the classical framework of Sznitman. Through this argument, we recover the established result on the existence of strong solutions, and we extend the class of solutions for which pathwise uniqueness holds.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validating an Early Pregnancy HbA1c as the Screening Test for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Findings from PRISMA Pakistan Cohort

Authors:
Naz↗Yazdani↗Hoodbhoy↗Ghebremihael-Weldeselassie↗Mazhar↗Hotwani↗Jehan↗Nisar↗M. I↗Iqbal↗

Background: Early identification of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is critical to improving maternal and neonatal outcomes, particularly in resource-constrained settings where universal oral glucose tolerance testing (OGTT) is burdensome. We assessed whether early-pregnancy HbA1c alone or combined with common risk factors can predict GDM and reduce the burden of OGTT requirements in a peri-urban cohort in Karachi, Pakistan. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Risk Infant Surveillance and Measurement Alliance (PRISMA) Pakistan cohort. Women enrolled before 20 weeks' gestation with available early-pregnancy HbA1c and a 2-hour 75g OGTT at 24 to 28 weeks were included. We externally validated GDM prediction models originally developed in the STRiDE-India cohort. Model performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the curve (AUC). We assessed four models: HbA1c alone (Model 1a); age, BMI, and family history of diabetes mellitus (FH DM) (Model 1b); HbA1c combined with age, BMI, and FH DM (Model 2); and an extended model, i.e., Model 2 combined with socioeconomic status, gestational age, parity, systolic and diastolic blood pressure (Model 3). A dual-threshold approach was applied to assess rule-in and rule-out performance. Results: Among 2,489 women, GDM incidence was 7.5% (n=186). Models with a broader set of predictors demonstrated higher AUC values, with Model 2 achieving an AUC of 0.61 (95% CI: 0.57, 0.66). Including additional factors (Model 3) did not further improve predictive ability (AUC: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.58, 0.66). In addition, at predefined thresholds, Model 2 achieved sensitivity of 73.7% (rule-out) and specificity of 83.5% (rule-in), with the potential to reduce OGTT requirements (58.5%). Conclusions: Early-pregnancy risk stratification using HbA1c combined with simple clinical predictors offers a pragmatic approach to streamline GDM screening among high-risk pregnant women. A dual-threshold strategy using Model 2 could reduce reliance on universal OGTT while prioritizing high-risk women for confirmatory testing.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Last But Not Least: Boundary Attention CalibratiON for Multimodal KV Cache Compression

Authors:
Tianhao Chen↗Yuheng Wu↗Kelu Yao↗Xiaogang Xu↗Xiaobin Hu↗Dongman Lee↗

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong vision-language reasoning, but long visual contexts enlarge the KV cache and increase decoding latency. Existing compression methods rely on observation window attention for stable token-importance estimation, yet this aggregation can dilute sparse visual evidence and discard answer-critical tokens under aggressive compression. Therefore, we identify last-query attention as a complementary source for recovering such evidence, but its answer-irrelevant signals can mislead retention. We propose BACON, a plug-and-play method that calibrates observation window attention with last-query evidence and suppresses isolated noise via intra-layer coherence and inter-layer persistence. Across diverse benchmarks, models, budgets, and compression methods, BACON improves multimodal KV compression by 7.5% on average under the most aggressive budget, with gains up to 30.9%.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

EffiNav: Fusing Depth and Vision-Language for Efficient Object Goal Navigation

Authors:
Zecheng Yin↗Benedict Jun Ma↗

arXiv:2606.18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots. A simplified version of such task is Object Goal Navigation (ObjNav). In ObjNav, successful arrival at the target object provides a basic measure of performance; however, the efficiency of the navigation trajectory is equally important, as it indicates how intelligently the agent explores and how much time remains for subsequent tasks. In unknown environments, the key to efficient navigation lies in deciding where to explore next. While many prior works aim to address this core challenge and achieved promising performance in certain settings, recent training-based models and non-training frameworks still suffer from generalization and efficiency issues respectively, which in the worst cases can lead to excessive exploration of already-visited areas or redundant back-and-forth motion. We evaluate EffiNav on two widely used simulation benchmarks Habitat Matterport 3D (HM3D) and Open-Vocabulary Object goal Navigation (OVON), and further validate its effectiveness on physical robots in real-world settings. We conduct failure analysis on massive simulation episodes. With minimal modification, we also extend EffiNav to a memory-augmented ObjNav task on the GOAT-BENCH dataset, demonstrating its adaptability beyond standard ObjNav settings. Across two standard metrics–Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL), EffiNav matches or outperforms recent baselines, reflecting its efficiency, robustness, and practical applicability. Recognizing the different emphases of the two datasets, the performances reveals this framework is more balanced and generalizable for efficient ObjNav.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Interactive Pareto navigation for deep multi-task learning

Authors:
Augustina C. Amakor↗Konstantin Sonntag↗Sebastian Peitz↗

arXiv:2606.19521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-task learning, handling an increasing number of objectives can quickly become challenging, both in terms of the computational resources and the decision maker's capacity to choose appropriate trade-offs. A widely used approach is thus to aggregate the individual losses in a single loss function by a weighted sum. This often fails to capture either the decision maker's preferences as a result of the shape of the Pareto front, or requires multiple adjustments and computations which becomes prohibitively expensive in deep learning applications. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework, Preference Pareto Exploration (PPE), which enforces the decision maker's preferences while accounting for the geometry of the Pareto set in an interactive exploration process. PPE is based on a predictor-corrector method that performs predictor steps tangential to the manifold of Pareto-optimal solutions, following the decision maker's preference. The subsequent corrector step results in a new trade-off reflecting this preference. To avoid explicit Hessian computations when characterizing the tangent space of the manifold, we employ a Krylov subspace method that relies solely on matrix-vector products. These products can be efficiently obtained via automatic differentiation, ensuring both efficiency and robustness throughout the optimization process. The method's functionality and performance are demonstrated using both toy problems and examples from deep learning.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CausalDrive: Real-time Causal World Models for Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Tianyi Yan↗Huan Zheng↗Dubing Chen↗Meizhi Qu↗Yingying Shen↗Lijun Zhou↗Mingfei Tu↗Bing Wang↗Guang Chen↗Hangjun Ye↗Haiyang Sun↗Cheng-zhong Xu↗…

World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for scaling autonomous driving (AD) data, yet existing video generative models fall short as interactive simulators. Layout-conditioned renderers rely on "oracle" future trajectories of all background agents, rendering them strictly non-reactive. Conversely, pure action-conditioned predictors lack semantic control over complex interactions and suffer from prohibitive diffusion latencies, hindering closed-loop policy learning. To bridge this gap, we present CausalDrive, a controllable, real-time foundation driving world renderer. CausalDrive operates solely on the initial front-view frame, the ego-vehicle's trajectory, and a macroscopic text prompt. By excluding future NPC layouts, we compel the model to intrinsically predict causal interactions, enabling text-driven control over Driving Sociology, allowing users to dynamically orchestrate diverse counterfactual reactions to identical ego-actions. To overcome the efficiency bottleneck and address the covariate shift in autoregressive generation, we propose a novel Context-Forced DMD architecture. This combines continuous flow-matching with a self-correcting distillation objective, achieving interactive speeds of 12 FPS. This breakthrough transforms the passive video generator into a playable neural simulator. We demonstrate its versatility across three downstream applications: (1) generative closed-loop evaluation with significantly mitigated collision artifacts, (2) large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training driven by a Video2Reward module, and (3) real-time human-in-the-loop simulation. Extensive experiments validate that policies trained within CausalDrive's reactive scenarios exhibit superior interaction capabilities in the real world.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ThousandWorlds: A benchmark for climate emulation of potentially habitable exoplanets

Authors:
Edward T. Stevenson↗Mei Ting Mak↗Eric Wolf↗Denis E. Sergeev↗Tobi Hammond↗N. J. Mayne↗Miles Cranmer↗

arXiv:2606.18338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The search for life beyond Earth will depend on detecting faint signatures in the atmospheres of potentially habitable exoplanets. Interpreting those signatures requires understanding the host planet's climate: the same molecule may signal life on one planet and abiotic chemistry on another. Global climate models (GCMs) provide this understanding, but individual runs can require up to millions of core-hours and substantial domain expert time. Machine-learning emulators could remove this bottleneck, but progress has been limited by the absence of a curated, multi-model exoclimate dataset. We introduce ThousandWorlds, an ML-ready benchmark for exoclimate emulation and for the broader regime of low-data, multi-simulator, parameter-to-field regression. The dataset contains approximately 1800 simulations from five GCMs, mapping eight planet parameters to 3D atmospheric fields including temperature, humidity, winds, clouds, and radiation. Three nested subsets define progressively harder challenges: single-simulator regression, multi-simulator regression with complete observations, and multi-simulator regression with structured missingness. We propose two evaluation protocols: one for ranking methods, and one that measures performance relative to the disagreement between GCMs themselves. We evaluate seven baselines spanning simple methods, deep learning, and Gaussian processes. GP-based methods perform best, suggesting that ThousandWorlds exposes a regime where off-the-shelf deep learning does not yet succeed. Data: https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/8695. Code: https://github.com/edstevenson/ThousandWorlds.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

KANLib – An Modular, Extensible and Fast Kolmogorov-Arnold Network Implementation

Authors:
Julian Hoever↗Gregor Schiele↗

arXiv:2606.17927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional multilayer perceptrons by replacing linear weights with learnable univariate functions. Despite their theoretical advantages in interpretability and expressiveness, practical research of KANs remains difficult due to high computational costs and inconsistent feature support across existing frameworks. This paper introduces KANLib, a modular, extensible, and computationally efficient framework for developing and evaluating KAN architectures. KANLib unifies core concepts from existing implementations, including PyKAN, EfficientKAN, and FastKAN, within a consistent software architecture that emphasizes flexibility, feature parity, and high performance. The framework supports two basis function types, adaptive grid rescaling, grid extension, and fine-grained architectural customization while maintaining compatibility with standard PyTorch workflows. Experimental evaluation on the California Housing benchmark demonstrates that KANLib reproduces the predictive behavior of established reference KAN implementations while achieving competitive computational efficiency. Furthermore, the framework enables the exploration of architectural variations beyond standard KAN formulations with only minor impacts on predictive performance. Overall, KANLib provides a robust foundation for future research on scalable and extensible KAN architectures.

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

Can Factual Opinions Be Edited (Manipulated) in Large Language Models?

Authors:
Yuanpu Cao↗Ziyi Yin↗Fenglong Ma↗Jinghui Chen↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into various domains, making knowledge editing techniques crucial yet potentially hazardous. Current editing methods primarily target atomic facts, overlooking the significant risks associated with manipulating factual opinions, e.g., documented stances of public figures on societal issues. Such manipulation could reshape public images, influence elections, and alter societal views. To systematically assess this threat, we introduce the Factual Opinion Editing with Evidence (FOE) benchmark, which encompasses 261 public figures, 19 issue categories, and 2,178 complete opinion records. Our evaluations demonstrate that current editing techniques struggle significantly with factual opinions, often achieving only superficial changes while failing to preserve consistency between the edited opinion and the supporting evidence generated by the model. To address this limitation, we further propose a simple yet effective Self-Generated Evidence-Aligned method that achieves opinion-evidence alignment without relying on explicit instructions. Together, our benchmark and method provide a foundation for understanding the emerging security implications of factual opinion editing in LLMs.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Data Standards for Humanoid Robotics: The Missing Infrastructure for Physical AI

Authors:
Shaoshan Liu↗Xiugong Qin↗Xuan Wu↗Xuan Xia↗Ning Ding↗Jialu Liu↗Jie Tang↗

arXiv:2606.19769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The scalability of humanoid robots will depend not only on models and hardware, but also on whether physical experience can accumulate across robots, tasks, organizations, and time. Drawing on the authors' work in developing ISO/WD 26264-1, Humanoid robot datasets – Part 1: General requirements, within ISO/TC 299/WG 16, this article argues that data standards are becoming foundational infrastructure for Physical AI. We develop three insights. First, humanoid robot data is embodied interaction data, not a collection of isolated digital samples; a useful dataset must preserve the relationship among robot body, action, task, scene, execution trace, and outcome. Second, its value depends on physical coherence: multimodal streams are reusable only when timing, coordinate frames, calibration, kinematics, units, and synchronization assumptions remain inspectable. Third, the main bottleneck is not only data scarcity, but non-cumulative data caused by high collection costs, data silos, and inconsistent evaluation. We argue that humanoid robot data standards address these bottlenecks by making embodied experience interpretable, shareable, traceable, and reusable. A general standard should provide horizontal infrastructure for lifecycle management, metadata, provenance, quality, versioning, and traceability, while capability-specific parts should define domain grammar for manipulation, locomotion, human-robot interaction, cognition, and future humanoid capabilities. As AI moves from screens into bodies, data standards must evolve from organizing digital information to structuring physical interaction.

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