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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Extending Covariant Fluctuation Theorems into Quantum Regime through Quasiprobability Approach

arXiv:2606.14519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The covariant formulation of stochastic thermodynamics requires treating the stochastic work as a 4-vector, posing significant challenges for quantum systems due to the non-commutativity. We introduce a new quasiprobability distribution for the work 4-vector, which combines the Wigner and Margenau-Hill quasiprobabilities. This extends the covariant fluctuation theorems from classical to quantum regime. We illustrate our findings with a scalar field driven by classical particles with a generalized version of trace formula. Our work establishes a quasiprobability approach to studying relativistic quantum thermodynamics in a covariant way.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The ACUTE Protocol: Operationalizing Language Model Activations for Better Calibration, Utility, and Trust

As language models improve and become increasingly deployed to solve a variety of tasks, trustworthiness becomes essential. Calibration is a good proxy for trust: well-calibrated confidence estimates help inform the risk versus reward tradeoff when trusting a specific model output. Unfortunately, even as models improve, they remain poorly calibrated, often biasing towards overconfidence. Additionally, calibration can be gamed: a policy that always predicts the base rate is perfectly calibrated, but completely uninformative. To resolve this, we develop a new metric, expected utility renormalized by the oracle (EURO), that balances calibration and informativeness. We also propose a general-purpose activation-based confidence, utility, and trust estimation protocol (ACUTE) to appropriately adjudicate uncertainty. The ACUTE protocol provides flexible, sample-efficient, and compute-efficient confidence estimators for 3 tasks including multiple choice question answering, tool-calling, and scientific document summarization across 6 models from 4 model families. ACUTE outperforms strong baselines on EURO, while maintaining low calibration error. Taken together, our work shows that equipping LLMs with the ACUTE protocol can improve calibration, utility, and trustworthiness in numerous settings.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Impact of Hand Impairment and Occlusions on Hand Pose Estimation Accuracy in Augmented Reality Applications

Mixed reality applications can be designed for hand rehabilitation. Augmented reality (AR) head mounted displays (HMDs) specifically allow for ecologically valid tasks because individuals can see their real environment and interact with real objects while receiving additional cues on the HMD. While these applications rely on accurate hand pose estimation, there is a gap in investigating the influence of hand impairment or occlusion from real-object interactions on pose estimation accuracy. Further, comparisons between AR HMD predictions and state-of-the-art pose estimation methods have not been established. The current study assessed pose estimation accuracy of the HoloLens 2 HMD and state-of-the-art pose estimation algorithms (WiLoR, HaMeR, WildHands, and MediaPipe) while individuals with cervical spinal cord injury (cSCI; n = 13, Neurological Level of Injury: C3-C6; American Spinal Injury Association Impairment Scale: A-D) and 15 uninjured controls interacted with clear and opaque objects. Ground truth estimates of 3D joint positions were generated via triangulation from a multi-camera setup. Pose estimation accuracy did not differ between the cSCI and uninjured control groups suggesting that 3D joint predictions from the HoloLens 2 and pose estimation algorithms can generalize to populations with hand impairment. Further, clear objects provided a small accuracy advantage over opaque objects (0.1 mm) and predictions from both WiLoR and HaMeR were slightly more accurate than the HoloLens 2 (2 mm). Overall, these results suggest that the HoloLens 2 may be viable for hand rehabilitation applications and the dataset generated can be used to refine pose estimation methods for hand-impaired populations.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Beyond AHI: An Interpretable Causal-Discovery-Guided Framework for Sleep Recovery in Connected Health

arXiv:2606.18506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Objective sleep assessment relies on polysomnography (PSG), yet clinical impact is often better reflected in patient-reported outcomes (PROs) such as sleepiness and fatigue. Existing summary indices, including the Apnea-Hypopnea Index (AHI), provide limited insight into the multidomain physiology underlying functional recovery. We propose an interpretable, causal-discovery–guided framework for deriving a hierarchical Sleep Recovery Score (SRS) from multimodal PSG. Using two large population cohorts (MESA: n=1540; MrOS: n=825), we apply directed acyclic graph (DAG) learning to identify candidate physiological drivers spanning respiratory burden, hypoxic burden, sleep fragmentation, sleep architecture, and autonomic regulation. Although derived from clinical PSG, these domains map naturally to sensing streams increasingly available in connected health technologies, including wearable ECG, oximetry, and sleep-stage estimation devices. To preserve mechanistic plausibility, we introduce a two-stage screening process that combines physiology-based constraints with constrained LLM-assisted auditing to identify and remove structural confounders and construct-overlapping variables. Across cohorts, these five domains emerge as recurrent physiological domains associated with recovery, and the resulting SRS shows up to 2.5$\times$ stronger alignment with perceived recovery than AHI. By linking multimodal sleep physiology to patient-centered outcomes through an interpretable, bias-aware, and domain structured framework, this work provides a practical foundation for recovery modeling across both clinical sleep studies and emerging smart and connected health settings.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

BiWM: Advancing Open-Source Interactive Video World Models with Bidirectional Autoregression

Transitioning bidirectional video diffusion models into an autoregressive paradigm improves the interactivity of video world models, but existing causal pipelines need many stages (control fine-tuning, autoregressive training, causal initialization, few-step distillation) and still trail bidirectional models in quality due to error accumulation. Recent world models such as Yume-1.5 and Matrix-Game-3.0 instead adopt a bidirectional autoregressive approach, gaining fidelity and stable long-horizon rollout from self-correcting error propagation, yet open-source frameworks (e.g., minWM) support only causal models. We present BiWM, the first full-stack framework for interactive video world models under the bidirectional autoregressive paradigm, jointly optimizing generation quality and inference speed. From a pretrained video backbone, BiWM injects camera control by fine-tuning, then runs a few-step Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) stage that turns the backbone into an action/camera-controllable world model: just two training stages instead of four in minWM, converging in a few hundred steps on 8xH200 GPUs. A single recipe spans Wan2.1-1.3B, Wan2.2-5B, HunyuanVideo-1.5-8B, and LTX-2.3-22B, and also supports secondary fine-tuning of existing bidirectional models. BiWM enables real-world camera control where minWM loses controllability, integrates pluggable history compression (FramePack-style and PackForcing-style) for long rollouts, and offers an optional NVFP4 4-bit training/inference pipeline. To counter DMD's mode-seeking degradation, we add GAN and mass-covering forward-KL objectives that preserve scene dynamics. We open-source BiWM for resource-constrained research and high-fidelity environment simulation.

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

ISE: An Execution-Grounded Recipe for Multi-Turn OS-Agent Trajectories

Training capable OS agents requires data that simultaneously captures structured user intents, multi-turn task delegation, and grounded tool execution–properties absent from existing datasets. We propose ISE (Intent -> Simulate -> Execute), a three-stage synthesis paradigm that addresses these gaps jointly. Stage 1 constructs roughly 50000 structured intents via a 4D framework (Persona x Domain x Task x Complexity); after deduplication the pool contains 43956 unique intents and attains a Vendi Score of 61.57 over the entire pool on mpnet-base-v2 embeddings (cosine kernel, q=1). Stage 2 drives multi-turn user-agent interaction through a role-locked user simulator that grounds each user turn in actual execution outcomes, producing 23132 complete trajectories averaging 8.12 user turns and 68.24 total dialogue turns. Stage 3 runs every tool call inside a live, isolated OS workspace, generating authentic failure-recovery dynamics instead of simulated responses. Fine-tuning on ISETrace improves ClawEval pass@1 from 19.3 to 37.7 using Qwen3-8B on agent tool-use tasks with a standard protocol. This result outperforms zero-shot GPT-4o and the larger Qwen3-32B base model which is four times bigger. An ablation on Stage 2 proves multi-turn simulation brings a large portion of the performance gain. We release all source code and dataset at https://github.com/Valiere01/ISE-Trace.

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

Toward Controllable Catalyst Inverse Design via Large-Scale Autoregressive Pretraining

arXiv:2606.17445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse design of heterogeneous catalysts remains challenging because catalyst surfaces exhibit substantial structural complexity with coupled surface-adsorbate interactions across a vast chemical space that is difficult to explore efficiently through conventional screening alone. Although machine learning-based high-throughput screening has accelerated catalyst discovery, its efficiency inevitably declines as the search space grows, motivating the development of generative models that can directly construct catalysts with target properties. Here, we present a conditional catalyst generative model based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer architecture with a numerical embedding layer that enables the generation of catalyst structures conditioned on both categorical and continuous properties within a single autoregressive framework. The model was pretrained on 133 million catalyst structures and subsequently fine-tuned on approximately 460,000 optimized structures with associated categorical properties and binding energies for conditional generation. The resulting model achieved 98% structural validity, 95% optimization validity, and high categorical condition fidelity, with a 93 % joint match rate for adsorbate type and composition. For binding energy conditioning, the match rate of approximately 20% represents a four-fold improvement over the baseline training distribution, and the generated distributions shift systematically toward the target values, enabling a 1.5 to 4-fold improvement in screening efficiency for reaction-targeted catalyst discovery without additional fine-tuning. These results show that large-scale autoregressive pre-training, combined with explicit property conditioning, provides a practical route toward controllable catalyst generation and accelerated catalysts discovery.

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

JE-IRT: A Geometric Lens on LLM Abilities through Joint Embedding Item Response Theory

Standard LLM evaluation practices compress diverse abilities into single scores, obscuring their inherently multidimensional nature. We present JE-IRT, a geometric item-response framework that embeds both LLMs and questions in a shared space. For question embeddings, the direction encodes semantics and the norm encodes difficulty, while correctness on each question is determined by the geometric interaction between the model and question embeddings. This geometry replaces a global ranking of LLMs with topical specialization and enables smooth variation across related questions. Building on this framework, our experimental results reveal that out-of-distribution behavior can be explained through directional alignment, and that larger norms consistently indicate harder questions. Moreover, JE-IRT naturally supports generalization: once the space is learned, new LLMs are added by fitting a single embedding. The learned space further reveals an LLM-internal taxonomy that only partially aligns with human-defined subject categories. We also show that simple linear probes of the embedding space recover cross-subject ability directions, such as an arithmetic axis that highlights quantitatively demanding questions in seemingly distant subjects like virology and global facts. JE-IRT thus establishes a unified and interpretable geometric lens that connects LLM abilities with the structure of questions, offering a distinctive perspective on model evaluation and generalization.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MMDiff: Extending Diffusion Transformers for Multi-Modal Generation

Diffusion transformers have demonstrated remarkable generative capabilities, yet the rich perceptual representations computed across their denoising trajectory are discarded once the content is rendered. We present MMDiff, a framework that transforms a frozen diffusion transformer into a multi-modal generative system that jointly produces images alongside any combination of dense perceptual modalities using lightweight decoder heads. Our central finding is that perceptual information is temporally distributed along the denoising trajectory, and that multi-timestep feature fusion with spatially varying aggregation weights is essential, improving semantic segmentation results by up to 28.7% mIoU over single-timestep extraction. We further adopt concept-driven attention extraction for interpretable spatial guidance, and show that frozen diffusion features are competitive with and complementary to state-of-the-art encoders such as DINOv3. By training only lightweight decoder heads on a frozen backbone, we achieve strong performance in semantic segmentation, salient object detection, and depth estimation, and demonstrate that this framework enables effective synthetic data generation at scale.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exploiting More Than Symmetry in Variational Quantum Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.20316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of variational quantum learning models crucially depends on choosing parametrizations that reflect the structure of the problem at hand. Symmetries provide one of the clearest such structures: whenever transformations of the input leave the desired outcome unchanged, this invariance should be built into the model rather than discovered during training. However, imposing a symmetry does not by itself determine a useful ansatz. Even within the symmetry-preserving space, one must decide where the trainable degrees of freedom should be placed. In this work, we study this remaining design freedom in equivariant variational quantum circuits. Building on symmetry-based parameter sharing, we disentangle two architectural choices: how much symmetry should be enforced, and which symmetry-respecting interactions should be trainable. Using Tic-Tac-Toe as a fully enumerable and structurally transparent test case, we find that suitable subgroups preserve most of the generalization benefit. By contrast, the dominant gains arise from gates acting directly on decisive task motifs. Thus, symmetry defines the admissible design space, while effective ansatze require an additional task-informed choice of trainable interactions.

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

Towards Global AI-Driven Cervical Cancer Screening

The global elimination of cervical cancer is a key public health goal set by the World Health Organization (WHO), with screening programs reducing mortality by up to 80%. However, access to experts and biopsy services is limited in low- to middle-income countries (LMICs). Deep learning (DL)-based algorithms offer promising support for screening, but most existing approaches have been developed and validated on private datasets from single countries. We present the first DL-based approach to cervical cancer screening validated on data from multiple countries. Technically, we phrase the problem of detecting and classifying lesions in colposcopy images as a multi-task learning problem, in which we simultaneously perform image-level classification and lesion segmentation. Our model was trained on a private data set of acid stain colposcopy images with manually generated lesion segmentation masks and corresponding histopathological results, employing extensive data augmentation to address image variability. In an in-distribution validation with pathology results serving as ground truth, our algorithm outperformed medical experts (Balanced Accuracy: 0.68 vs 0.64) in CIN1- (Cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 1 or lower) versus CIN2+ (grade 2 or higher) classification. External validation on four colposcopy data sets from four countries featuring radical differences in prevalence and patient characteristics yielded superior performance of our method compared to baseline methods. Performance variability across countries was high with AUC values ranging from 0.54 - 0.80. Overall, algorithm performance varied with age, transformation zone (cervical area most prone to lesion development), presence of comorbidities and pathognomonic signs, with comorbidities having by far the largest negative effect. Future work should focus on improving model robustness and generalizability.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

High coverage, persistent gaps: quality of Antenatal Care and its determinants in Zambia based on the 2024 Demographic and Health Survey.

Abstract Background Evaluating antenatal care (ANC) quality is critical to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. In Zambia, despite high basic ANC attendance, comprehensive national evidence on the clinical content and quality of services remains limited. This study assessed the coverage of WHO-recommended ANC interventions and identified factors associated with care quality using the latest national data. Methods A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data from the 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey. The final analytic sample comprised 4,829 women aged 15-49 with a live birth in the preceding 5 years. A composite index of 15 selected, equally weighted WHO-recommended components evaluated clinical assessment, counseling/screening, preventive interventions, and utilization. Survey-weighted Poisson regression estimated adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRRs) for the count of ANC components received. Results The mean ANC quality score was 12.5 out of 15 (95% CI: 12.4-12.6), and 78.5% (95% CI: 77.0-80.0) of women achieved adequate ANC ([≥] 12/15 components). While individual clinical and counseling coverage generally exceeded 90%, only 47.2% (95% CI: 45.3-49.0) of women initiated care during the first trimester, and just 4.8% (95% CI: 4.1-5.6) achieved [≥] 8 ANC contacts. Maternal education was the strongest and most stable predictor of quality across all models. Compared to no education, higher education was associated with an 8.0% higher expected quality score (aIRR = 1.080, 95% CI: 1.051-1.110). Lower ANC quality was significantly associated with unwanted pregnancies (aIRR = 0.970, 95% CI: 0.956-0.993) and with residence in Western (aIRR = 0.923, 95% CI: 0.897-0.951) and North Western (aIRR = 0.966, 95% CI: 0.937-0.996) provinces. Absence of distance barriers and residence in Eastern, Luapula, and Copperbelt provinces were associated with higher quality scores. Conclusion While average ANC component coverage in Zambia is high, critical gaps persist in early initiation and total contact frequency. Care adequacy is strongly influenced by maternal education, relationship status, pregnancy intention, and regional inequities. These findings underscore the need for interventions targeted at uneducated women, preventing unintended pregnancies, and underserved regions such as Western and North Western Provinces. Keywords: Antenatal care quality, ANC content, Zambia, maternal education.

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

Real-space spectral functions of three-dimensional billion-size topological non-Hermitian matter with tensor networks

arXiv:2606.16424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems host a wide range of unconventional topological phenomena while large-scale simulations in finite three dimensional systems remain challenging because of the rapidly growing number of sites. In particular, higher-order topological corner modes are often studied only in small lattices, where strong finite-size effects can mask their intrinsic behavior. Here, we develop a tensor-network framework that combines quantics tensor cross interpolation with the kernel polynomial method, enabling compact representations of large non-Hermitian tight-binding Hamiltonians and direct calculations of real-space spectral functions for systems exceeding one billion lattice sites. Using this approach, we investigate three-dimensional non-Hermitian higher-order topological insulators with with structured real-space geometries. The unprecedented system size enables direct access to the macroscopic regime and allows corner-mode spectral responses to be resolved in genuinely three-dimensional systems.By tuning the loss strength, we identify distinct in-gap corner modes across weak- and strong-loss regimes.Our results establish tensor-network algorithms as a powerful strategy to perform real-space spectral calculations in exceptionally large non-Hermitian systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China

Authors:

arXiv:2606.00729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injection, absorptive capacity, and institutional dissipation. Information injection includes compute, data, talent, research, capital, industrial deployment, and policy experimentation. Institutional dissipation refers to avoidable frictions such as administrative overload, coordination failures, energy constraints, regulatory uncertainty, talent mobility pressures, and weak industrial absorption. Regulation is not treated as mere friction: adaptive governance, trusted data spaces, and safety-oriented standards may increase long-term learning capacity by improving legitimacy, interoperability, and social trust. The central claim is not that a country follows neural-network equations, but that AI sovereignty depends on how effectively it converts distributed information into absorbed, coordinated, and socially legitimate capability. The paper connects HCLM with neural scaling laws, endogenous growth theory, creative destruction, absorptive capacity, and coordination mechanisms. It offers a formal heuristic, policy indicators, illustrative scenarios, and implications for France. The numerical results are diagnostic scenarios, not econometric estimates or official rankings. The proposed viewpoint reframes AI policy as the governance of an open, strategic, non-equilibrium learning system that should be tested with historical and cross-country data.

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

Towards Anomaly Detection on Relational Data

arXiv:2606.18621v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Relational databases are widely used for managing structured data in real-world systems. Detecting anomalies from such relational data is crucial for identifying fraud, risks, and abnormal behaviors, yet remains under-explored. The key challenges lie in the intrinsic complexity of relational data: multi-table attributes are high-dimensional and heterogeneous, making sparse abnormal clues easy to overwhelm by normal or irrelevant information; and anomalies may further manifest as abnormal connection patterns across different foreign-key relations, which existing tabular and graph anomaly detection methods are ill-suited to capture. To address them, we propose RelAD, a reconstruction-based framework that captures anomalies from both attribute and relational edge reconstruction. RelAD contains two core modules: conditional sparse-gated attribute reconstruction, which suppresses redundant multi-table attributes and emphasizes abnormal semantic blocks, and dual-view multi-relational edge reconstruction, which detects relation-specific abnormal connections from both intrinsic and behavioral entity profiles. The resulting attribute and relational signals are integrated through a lightweight fusion module to produce the final anomaly score. We further construct 6 benchmark datasets with systematic anomalies, on which extensive experiments show that RelAD consistently outperforms other baselines while achieving competitive efficiency.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Personalizing Suicide Risk Assessment: Machine Learning Extraction of Cross-Modal Interactions Between Psychosocial and Demographic Factors in Veterans

Background: Veterans face an elevated risk of suicide compared to the general population, motivating national efforts to develop predictive models that can guide proactive care. Current models used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) rely primarily on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, though clinical notes contain rich contextual information that can be quantified using natural language processing (NLP) to derive psychosocial variables that may improve risk detection. Machine learning methods, particularly classification and regression trees (CART), can also uncover interactions between clinical and psychosocial variables, enabling identification of patient characteristics that modify suicide risk factors. However, integrating structured and unstructured data presents challenges because NLP features often greatly outnumber traditional clinical variables, potentially biasing interaction discovery. In prior work, we addressed this imbalance by introducing a weighted CART framework that balances structured variables with NLP-derived psychosocial features from semantic lexicons (SEANCE). While effective, semantic approaches summarize language into predefined constructs and may overlook important lexical variation present in clinical narratives. Methods: In this study, we extend that framework by replacing semantic features with a high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representation of clinical notes and by evaluating models across cohorts defined by structured suicide risk stratification (low, medium, high) and varying temporal lookback windows. Using a cohort of 27,241 veterans, we analyzed clinical documentation collected up to 30, 90, or 270 days prior to death (or a matched index date for controls), enabling temporally flexible risk modeling. XGBoost models were trained to balance structured and unstructured features and identify cross-modal interactions between textual and clinical variables. Results: When incorporated into generalized linear models, these interactions improved predictive performance, particularly among low- and medium-risk patients, and substantially reduced the performance gap between interpretable and more complex models. Notably, the BoW representation outperformed our prior semantic index-based approach. Discussion and Conclusions: Together, these findings demonstrate the utility of interpretable NLP methods for uncovering clinically meaningful interactions between psychosocial and demographic factors in suicide risk and establish a strong benchmark for future deep learning approaches aimed at capturing richer contextual and temporal information from clinical narratives.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum charge pumping in helical systems: A comparative study of short- and long-range hopping

arXiv:2606.12914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Using the Keldysh non-equilibrium Green's function approach, we investigate charge pumping through a single-stranded helical structure described by a tight-binding model that includes either short-range hopping (SRH) or long-range hopping (LRH). While quantum pumping has been studied in various low-dimensional systems, the detailed behavior of the spectral current and the pumped dc current in helical geometries in the presence of higher-order electron hopping (beyond nearest neighbors) has not yet been systematically explored. Here, we focus on the interplay between helicity and extended hopping ranges, analyzing how they jointly control the energy-resolved and dc pumped currents under time-periodic end potentials. For LRH, the pumped dc current exhibits pronounced plateau-like regions as a function of chemical potential when energy levels are sparsely spaced – consistent with adiabatic transport – whereas SRH yields more parameter-sensitive currents without clear plateaus. The plateau stability is controlled by the drive frequency: at higher frequencies, Floquet side-band mixing destroys the plateaus, leading to oscillatory currents. The phase dependence remains nearly sinusoidal, and the current vanishes at zero phase lag, confirming the necessity of out-of-phase potentials. Crucially, in helical systems, the decay exponent $(\ell_c)$ acts as an effective structural parameter that can tune both the magnitude and sign of the pumped current, offering a geometric knob for controlling quantum pumping. Our findings not only fill a gap in the understanding of spectral and pumped currents in helical systems with extended hopping but also provide tools that can be applied to analyze similar phenomena in other chiral or quasi-one-dimensional systems.

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

Learn from Your Mistakes: Self-Correcting Masked Diffusion Models

arXiv:2602.11590v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models, enabling parallel token generation while achieving competitive performance. Despite these advantages, MDMs face a fundamental limitation: once tokens are unmasked, they remain fixed, leading to error accumulation and ultimately degrading sample quality. We address this by proposing a framework that trains a model to perform both unmasking and correction. By reusing outputs from the MDM denoising network as inputs for corrector training, we train a model to recover from potential mistakes. During generation we apply additional corrective refinement steps between unmasking ones in order to change decoded tokens and improve outputs. We name our training and sampling method Progressive Self-Correction (ProSeCo) for its unique ability to iteratively refine an entire sequence, including already generated tokens. We conduct extensive experimental validation across multiple conditional and unconditional tasks, demonstrating that \method~yields better quality-efficiency trade-offs (up to ~4x faster sampling) and enables inference-time compute scaling to further increase sample quality beyond standard MDMs (up to ~1.2x improvement on benchmarks).

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

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.05172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/

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

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Nanocrystal-tailored recombination for all-perovskite tandem solar modules

Authors:

The commercialization of all-perovskite tandem solar modules is hindered by the reliance on the conventional gold-based tunnel recombination junction (TRJ)1,2. Specifically, this TRJ introduces substantial near-infrared parasitic absorption3 and suffers from interfacial instability4, limiting both photocurrent generation and operational durability. Here, we develop a solution-processed interconnecting layer based on surface-engineered indium oxide (In2O3) nanocrystals featuring high optical transparency, wherein controlled nanocrystal morphology and tailored ligand chemistry enable smooth interfacial contact and favorable energy level alignment. Critically, we introduce a phosphonic acid additive into the lead–tin (Pb–Sn) perovskite precursor, which synergistically improves the electronic contact with the In2O3 recombination layer, thereby enhancing hole extraction. In addition, the additive regulates perovskite crystallization to mitigate residual strain during film formation, ensuring high-quality large-area deposits. This coordinated interfacial and crystallization engineering strategy simultaneously enhances carrier recombination efficiency at the interconnection layer, improves carrier extraction, and promotes large-area film uniformity in all-perovskite tandems. As a result, a 65-cm2 all-perovskite tandem solar module achieves a certified power conversion efficiency of 26.2%5, with an open-circuit voltage of 2.182 V, a fill factor of 77.4%, and a short-circuit current density of 15.6 mA cm-2 in terms of averaged subcell performance, measured by Japan Electrical Safety and Environment Technology Laboratories (JET). This marks a significant advance toward scalable perovskite tandem photovoltaics.

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

S3OD: Towards Generalizable Salient Object Detection with Synthetic Data

Salient object detection exemplifies data-bounded tasks where expensive pixel-precise annotations force separate model training for related subtasks like DIS and HR-SOD. We present a method that dramatically improves generalization through large-scale synthetic data generation and ambiguity-aware architecture. We introduce S3OD, a dataset of over 139,000 high-resolution images created through our multi-modal diffusion pipeline that extracts labels from diffusion and DINO-v3 features. The iterative generation framework prioritizes challenging categories based on model performance. We propose a streamlined multi-mask decoder that handles the inherent ambiguity in salient object detection by predicting multiple valid interpretations. Models trained only on synthetic data achieve 20-50% error reduction in cross-dataset generalization, while fine-tuned versions reach state-of-the-art performance across DIS and HR-SOD benchmarks.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

SPADE: Split-and-Delay Embeddings for Autoregressive High-Granularity Calorimeter Simulation

arXiv:2606.11304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce SPADE (SPlit And Delay Embeddings), an autoregressive transformer for sequences whose tokens carry multiple features. Rather than embedding these features jointly, SPADE embeds them independently. Delaying each feature stream relative to the previous one allows intra-token correlations to be learned by the standard self-attention mechanism. Applied to point-cloud calorimeter shower generation in the highly granular ILD detector, SPADE is competitive with the state of the art AllShowers model on photon showers, and substantially outperforms its VQ-VAE-based predecessor OmniJet-$\alpha_C$. The mechanism is applicable to any generative task with multi-feature tokens, enabling LLM-style pretraining workflows for higher-dimensional data.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Informative Missingness to Generate Irregular Clinical Time Series

arXiv:2606.17106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laboratory tests in electronic health records are collected irregularly, and the absence of a test order can be as informative as the measurement itself. Such missingness reflects clinicians' decisions and patient physiology, making it important to model it directly rather than treat it as a preprocessing artifact. Here we present a diffusion-based approach for generating clinical time series that jointly models laboratory values and their observation patterns using the public Data Analytics Challenge on Missing Data Imputation (DACMI) benchmark derived from MIMIC-III. To preserve realistic sampling, we align chart times into 4-hour intervals and segment admissions into 7-day windows, producing trajectories that pair each lab value with a corresponding observation indicator. Standard transformations and normalization are applied to stabilize training. Our method extends the TimeDiff framework to learn continuous lab values and discrete missingness patterns through complementary diffusion objectives. Experiments show that the generated data closely match real patient trajectories across individual lab distributions and joint value-missingness embeddings, demonstrating that diffusion models can capture clinically meaningful dependencies between patient physiology and clinicians' testing behavior under MNAR-like (missing-not-at-random) missingness. These preliminary results indicate that our model can serve as an initial component toward developing clinical foundation models. By producing synthetic priors that preserve key physiology-missingness relationships, this work motivates the subsequent training of Prior-Data Fitted Networks capable of leveraging informative missingness, which we will investigate in the extended work.

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

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.