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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cross-Device Adaptation of Mirai for Mammography-Based Breast Cancer Risk Prediction

Fine-tuning can adapt pretrained medical imaging models to new clinical datasets, but device-specific domain shifts may limit generalizability. We evaluated Mirai, a mammography-based deep learning model for breast cancer risk prediction, in a large screening cohort containing Hologic and General Electric (GE) full-field digital mammography systems, including GE Premium View (GE PV) and Tissue Equalization (GE TE) post-processing software. Native Mirai showed lower performance on TE images than on Hologic or PV images. Fine-tuning on TE images improved TE performance, particularly for short-term risk prediction, but substantially reduced performance on Hologic images, consistent with catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate this effect, we developed a device-invariant model using interleaved multi-device sampling and conditional adversarial training. This approach largely restored Hologic performance while maintaining improved TE performance, providing better robustness across heterogeneous imaging platforms. Comparison of cumulative and annual risk AUCs over a five-year time horizon further showed that performance gains were driven mainly by short- and intermediate-term predictions. These findings highlight both the value and dangers of device-specific fine-tuning and support balanced domain-adaptation strategies for deploying mammography-based risk models across diverse clinical imaging environments.

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

A BART-based approach with hierarchical strategy for Vietnamese abstractive multi-document summarization

In this technical report, we focus on solving the challenge of Vietnamese multi-document abstractive summarization, introduced in the International Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) 2022. We choose to follow the popular hierarchical approach, i.e. condensing each document followed by aggregation and summarization. We propose a novel yet simple strategy to shorten documents that is driven by the golden summary, thus ensuring high correlation between stages of the hierarchical approach. Our method achieves a ROUGE2-F1 score of 0.2468 on the VLSP's public test set, and can produce fluent and concise summaries. Additionally, we utilize external sources for extra data, which greatly enhances the quantity of data for Vietnamese multi-document summarization. The additional data is made available for the community.

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

Disentangling Perception and Reasoning in Multimodal LLMs via Reward Design

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has driven major gains in LLM reasoning, and it is intuitive to assume this recipe will transfer well to multimodal models. However, multimodal models do two things: first, perceive what is in an image, then reason about what it implies. Because these stages are graded jointly, it is hard to tell how much room reasoning alone has to grow. We study this on algorithmic visual puzzles, where both components are necessary and show that perception, not reasoning, is the binding constraint. Replacing images with simple textual descriptions raises performance by over 20 points on average for Claude models. We then evaluate six reward designs aimed at inducing visual grounding during reasoning without chain-of-thought supervision. Training Qwen-2.5-VL-7B with GRPO, reward design induces long, structured reasoning with self-reflection and visual references, yielding a 5.56-point gain over the base model. These gains are, however, uneven; no single reward improves all categories, and rewards with verifiable accuracy signals trade out-of-domain transfer for in-domain accuracy. These results point to perception-aware reward design as a path forward, so that signals correct perception at its source rather than the reasoning that inherits its errors.

04.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A major obstacle confronting HIV-1 vaccine and cure research is the lack of an outbred animal model for rapid and consistent induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). We designed an epitope-focused simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV.5MUT) that elicited broad and potent V3-glycan-targeted antibodies within a year of infection in 14 of 22 macaques compared with 0 of 14 control animals. SHIV.5MUT elicited bNAbs by a two-step mechanism, inducing an initial wave of V1-directed antibodies that selected for Envs with shortened, hypoglycosylated V1 loops, which in turn primed V3-glycan bNAb precursors. Rhesus bNAbs were immunogenetically and structurally diverse, closely resembling human V3-glycan bNAbs. Env-bNAb coevolution revealed a diverse repertoire of bNAb precursors and the Env variants that matured them, yielding a molecular blueprint for vaccine design.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Simulating Universal Quantum Gate Sets on Photonic OAM Qubits: Single-Qubit and Multi-Qubit Operations via Spatial Light Modulator Phase Holography

arXiv:2606.26088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial light modulators (SLMs) have emerged as reconfigurable platforms for photonic quantum information processing, offering software-defined control over the orbital angular momentum (OAM) of light encoded in Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams. This paper presents a comprehensive simulation and hardware-grounded fidelity analysis of quantum gate operations implemented on the HOLOEYE LC 2012 transmissive SLM. A realistic three-channel noise model comprising 8-bit quantisation noise, twisted-nematic (TN) electronic and thermal noise, and phase-wrap clipping error is obtained from the manufacturer's datasheet without free-parameter fitting, yielding a total noise of $\sigma_{total} = 92.4mrad$. The complete universal single-qubit gate set $\{X, Y, Z, S, T, H\}$ and two-qubit entangling gates $\{CNOT, CZ, SWAP\}$ are simulated on a $512 \times 512$ computational grid. Results show that predicted gate fidelity are in the range of $F = 0.9914–0.9936$, with fork grating gates limited primarily by TN noise and phase gates achieving higher fidelity owing to zero phase-wrap clipping error. In addition, Bell state preparation via the H-CNOT circuit achieves $F(\Phi^+) = 0.9914$ after two SLM interactions. We benchmark our obtained results against six published experimental studies spanning the 78%–99.6% fidelity range. Finally, a wavelength-dependent analysis identifies 450–532 nm operation as the optimal regime for this device.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Wide-field NV magnetometry under simultaneous high-pressure and high-temperature conditions

arXiv:2606.25378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We demonstrate wide-field optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) under simultaneous high-pressure and high-temperature conditions using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. Although NV-center magnetometry has been widely used for spatially resolved magnetic-field imaging, its application to extreme environments combining pressure and temperature remains challenging. In this work, we show that ODMR can be observed at 5 GPa and 500 K, demonstrating the feasibility of NV spin readout under such combined extreme conditions. We further perform wide-field ODMR of iron at 7 GPa and 500 K, where the stray magnetic field from the sample is spatially visualized through the pressure cell. These results establish NV-center magnetometry as a promising platform for imaging magnetic phenomena in materials under high-pressure and high-temperature environments.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Probing Many-Body Phenomena with Atomically Thin Nuclear Spin Layers in Diamond

arXiv:2510.27374v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum simulation aims to recreate complex many-body phenomena in controlled environments, offering insights into dynamics that are otherwise difficult to model. Existing platforms, however, are often complex and costly to scale, typically requiring ultra pure vacuum or low temperatures. Here, we introduce a platform based on a thin, strongly interacting ${}^{13}C$ nuclear spin layer in diamond that allows controlled exploration of many-body dynamics at room temperature. Nearby nitrogen-vacancy centers enable polarization, readout, and, combined with radio-frequency fields, coherent control of the nuclear spins. We demonstrate strong, tunable interactions among the nuclear spins and use the system to probe discrete time-crystalline order across varying interaction ranges. By combining ease of use with operation at ambient temperatures, our work opens new opportunities for investigating strongly correlated many-body effects.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Design Methodology and Performance Trade-offs Management for Distributed and Compound AI Systems

arXiv:2606.14350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems must typically satisfy service-level objectives including accuracy, latency, and cost. The prevailing model-centric approaches select a monolithic model at design time and apply identical computation regardless of input difficulty, cannot decompose tasks across specialized components, and have knowledge that is fixed at training time. During runtime, this can lead to performance degradation and increasing costs. Because the model is the main design variable, it determines the majority of system behavior, coupling operational objectives to a single design-time choice. Addressing these limitations requires shifting from model-centric to system-centric design. Compound AI systems realize this shift by orchestrating multiple models, algorithms, and tools as distributed AI systems through explicit control logic. The performance of such systems depends on their workflow topology, the models assigned to each task, and the parameters governing runtime behavior. We present a design methodology that organizes this space along two dimensions, workflow topology and configuration selection, and identifies eight design patterns, each consolidating techniques to address a specific limitation of monolithic deployment. We validate our methodology through three case studies. Across our case studies, Compound AI configurations approach accuracy of monolithic models within 2.5 to 4 percentage points while reducing latency by up to 60% and cost by up to 71%. We show that model selection and parameter configuration jointly determine system performance, but the resulting design space grows combinatorially, as workflows compose more patterns and components. Thus, we identify five open challenges that define a roadmap from manually configured prototypes towards systems that automatically discover and maintain SLO-compliance in Compound and Distributed AI systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Prompts to Tokens: Internalizing Causal Supervision in Vision-Language Model for Multi-Image Causal Reasoning

Visual causal reasoning is essential for understanding and intervening in the physical world, requiring identification of causal variables from visual inputs and reasoning over intervention effects. Despite recent progress, large vision–language models (VLMs) remain brittle at such tasks, especially for interventional and counterfactual queries over multi-image inputs. Most existing explorations inject causal knowledge via textual prompts, leaving causal mechanisms external to model execution and limiting reliable control during inference. To address this problem, we propose BridgeVLM, which internalizes visual causal reasoning by inducing a causal graph from multi-image inputs and converting it into structured Causal Tokens executed by RAMP layers injected into the LLM decoder for causal message passing. We further introduce a unified training interface M3S for fine-grained causal supervision from different granularities (local/global level). BridgeVLM achieves 54.4% accuracy on intervention tasks on CausalVLBench (vs. 33.2% with prompt-level supervision), improves results on Causal3D from 43.6% to 49.0%, and substantially improves causal structure learning on CausalVLBench ($F_1$: 33.4% $\rightarrow$ 75.1%).

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Machine Learning Approach to Moment Closure Relations for Plasma: A Review

arXiv:2511.22486v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The requirement for large-scale global simulations of plasma is an ongoing challenge in both space and laboratory plasma physics. Any simulation based on a fluid model inherently requires a closure relation for the high order plasma moments. This review compiles and analyses the recent surge of machine learning approaches developing improved plasma closure models capable of capturing kinetic phenomena within plasma fluid models. We survey two methodological families: neural-network surrogates (from multilayer perceptrons to Fourier neural operators, the latter recently reproducing both linear and non-linear Landau damping online within a fluid solver) and equation-discovery methods such as sparse regression; and organise the studies by whether they are tested offline against reference data or online within a time-evolving solver. We outline the challenges associated with machine-learning closures, including off-diagonal pressure-tensor accuracy, generalisation beyond the training distribution, and stable integration into large-scale simulations, and the directions future research might take to address them.

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

CASHEW: Stabilizing Multimodal Reasoning via Iterative Trajectory Aggregation

Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoning remains unstable. Repeated sampling over the same input often produces divergent reasoning trajectories and inconsistent final predictions. To address this, we introduce two complementary approaches inspired by test-time scaling: (1) CASHEW, an inference-time framework that stabilizes reasoning by iteratively aggregating multiple candidate trajectories into higher-quality reasoning traces, with explicit visual verification filtering hallucinated steps and grounding reasoning in visual evidence, and (2) CASHEW-RL, a learned variant that internalizes this aggregation behavior within a single model. CASHEW-RL is trained using Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) with a composite reward that encourages correct answers grounded in minimal yet sufficient visual evidence, while adaptively allocating reasoning effort based on task difficulty. This training objective enables robust self-aggregation at inference. Extensive experiments on 13 image understanding, video understanding, and video reasoning benchmarks show significant performance improvements, including gains of up to +26.2 percentage points on ScienceQA and +9.1 percentage points on EgoSchema.

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

Learning What to Remember: Observability-Safe Memory Retention via Constrained Optimization for Long-Horizon Language Agents

arXiv:2606.10616v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-horizon language agents accumulate observations, reasoning traces, and retrieved facts that exceed their finite context windows, making memory retention a fundamental resource-allocation problem. Existing memory systems improve management through heuristic scoring, retrieval optimization, or learned compression, but largely treat retention as a local decision problem and do not explicitly model its long-term consequences under realistic observability constraints. To fill this gap, we formulate memory retention as a constrained stochastic optimization problem with explicit budget feasibility, evidence utility, and delayed costs including miss penalties, reacquisition delays, and stale-information risk. We then propose OSL-MR (Observability-Safe Learning for Memory Retention), a novel framework that enforces a strict separation between online-observable features and offline-available supervision (OAS). OSL-MR combines an evidence learner trained from realized evidence supervision with a Mixed-Score heuristic that serves both as a deployable online-safe baseline and as a structured inductive prior for learning. The resulting policy learns query-conditioned evidence value directly from interaction data while remaining deployable under the same observability constraints. Experiments on LOCOMO and LongMemEval show that OSL-MR consistently outperforms recency-based methods, Generative Agents-style scoring, and other heuristic baselines, particularly under tight memory budgets. The Mixed-Score prior further improves precision while preserving recall, and sensitivity analysis demonstrates robustness across a wide range of cost configurations.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

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

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.

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

Multi-Variable Stellar Parameter Estimation Using Residual Multitask Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an end-to-end pipeline for estimating stellar parameters from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 spectra using a fully connected multitask neural network with residual blocks, whose hyperparameters are tuned via Bayesian optimization. The preprocessing pipeline includes per-spectrum standardization, RobustScaler normalization of the target variables – effective temperature $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, metallicity $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and surface gravity $\log g$ – and data augmentation via Gaussian noise injection. On a held-out test set, the model achieved Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) of $59.76~\mathrm{K}$ for $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, $0.103~\mathrm{dex}$ for $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and $0.130~\mathrm{dex}$ for $\log g$. Normalized against the full-scale range of each parameter, these results represent range-normalized errors between $1\%$ and $3\%$, achieved with a highly efficient model complexity of approximately 540,000 trainable parameters. These results demonstrate that a compact residual multitask architecture, combined with principled signal preprocessing, provides a parameter-efficient solution for nonlinear parameter estimation in large-scale spectral datasets. In particular, the proposed model achieves competitive performance with substantially lower complexity than deeper neural network baselines.

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

AI4SLT: Empirical Processes in Lean 4 for Formal Statistical Learning Theory

We present the first comprehensive Lean 4 formalization of statistical learning theory (SLT) grounded in empirical process theory. Our en-to-end formal infrastructure implement the missing contents in latest Lean library, including a complete development of Gaussian Lipschitz concentration, Dudley's entropy integral theorem for sub-Gaussian processes, and an application to least-squares (sparse) regression with a sharp rate. The project was carried out using a human-AI collaborative workflow, in which humans design proof strategies and AI agents execute tactical proof construction, leading to the human-verified Lean 4 toolbox for SLT. Beyond implementation, the formalization process exposes and resolves implicit assumptions and missing details in standard SLT textbooks, enforcing a granular, line-by-line understanding of the theory. This work establishes a reusable formal foundation and opens the door for future developments in machine learning theory. The code is provided in https://github.com/YuanheZ/lean-stat-learning-theory.

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

A Multi-level Analysis of Factors Associated with Student Performance: A Machine Learning Approach to the SAEB Microdata

arXiv:2510.22266v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the factors that influence student performance in basic education is a central challenge for formulating effective public policies in Brazil. This study introduces a multi-level machine learning approach to classify the proficiency of 9th-grade and high school students using microdata from the System of Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB). Our model uniquely integrates four data sources: student socioeconomic characteristics, teacher professional profiles, school indicators, and principal management profiles. A comparative analysis of four ensemble algorithms confirmed the superiority of a Random Forest model, which achieved 90.2% accuracy and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 96.7%. To move beyond prediction, we applied Explainable AI (XAI) using SHAP, which revealed that the school's average socioeconomic level is the most dominant predictor, demonstrating that systemic factors have a greater impact than individual characteristics in isolation. The primary conclusion is that academic performance is a systemic phenomenon deeply tied to the school's ecosystem. This study provides a data-driven, interpretable tool to inform policies aimed at promoting educational equity by addressing disparities between schools.

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

Point-Voxel Absorbing Graph Representation Learning for Event Stream based Recognition

Sampled point and voxel methods are usually employed to downsample the dense events into sparse ones. After that, one popular way is to leverage a graph model which treats the sparse points/voxels as nodes and adopts graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn the representation of event data. Although good performance can be obtained, however, their results are still limited mainly due to two issues. (1) Existing event GNNs generally adopt the additional max (or mean) pooling layer to summarize all node embeddings into a single graph-level representation for the whole event data representation. However, this approach fails to capture the importance of graph nodes and also fails to be fully aware of the node representations. (2) Existing methods generally employ either a sparse point or voxel graph representation model which thus lacks consideration of the complementary between these two types of representation models. To address these issues, we propose a novel dual point-voxel absorbing graph representation learning for event stream data representation. To be specific, given the input event stream, we first transform it into the sparse event cloud and voxel grids and build dual absorbing graph models for them respectively. Then, we design a novel absorbing graph convolutional network (AGCN) for our dual absorbing graph representation and learning. The key aspect of the proposed AGCN is its ability to effectively capture the importance of nodes and thus be fully aware of node representations in summarizing all node representations through the introduced absorbing nodes. Extensive experiments on multiple event-based classification benchmark datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our framework.

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

libhmm: A Modern C++20 Library for Hidden Markov Models with Correct MLE Emission M-Steps

Authors:

arXiv:2605.29208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We describe libhmm, a C++20 library for Hidden Markov Model parameter estimation, sequence decoding, and model selection. libhmm addresses two gaps in existing software: the absence of a well-maintained, zero-dependency C++ HMM library suitable for embedding in production systems, and the widespread use of method-of-moments (MOM) approximations in the emission distribution M-step of the Baum-Welch algorithm. The library implements correct maximum likelihood estimators for sixteen scalar emission distributions, including an ECME algorithm for the location-scale Student-t distribution, Newton-Raphson maximization for Gamma, Beta, Weibull, and Negative Binomial distributions, and the von Mises distribution for circular data. All forward-backward and Viterbi calculations operate in full log-space. SIMD acceleration is provided for AVX-512, AVX2, SSE2, and ARM NEON via compile-time dispatch with scalar fallback. Version 4 adds multivariate observation support via the BasicHmm template, with three multivariate emission families (diagonal Gaussian, full-covariance Gaussian, and independent components) each with correct weighted MLE M-steps. Python bindings are available via the companion package pylibhmm. We compare libhmm against established C and C++ HMM libraries and against published R reference packages on seven real-data benchmarks, and discuss the architectural tradeoffs made in the design.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Intermediate State Formation of Topologically Associated Chromatin Domains using Quantum Annealing

arXiv:2505.23289v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topologically Associating Chromatin Domains are spatially distinct chromatin regions that regulate transcription by segregating active and inactive genomic elements. Empirical studies show that their formation correlates with local patterns of epigenetic markers, yet the precise mechanisms linking 1D epigenetic landscapes to 3D chromatin folding remain unclear. Recent models represent chromatin as a spin system, where nucleosomes are treated as discrete-state variables coupled by interaction strengths derived from genomic and epigenetic data. Classical samplers struggle with these models due to high frustration and dense couplings. Here, we present a quantum annealing (QA) approach to efficiently sample chromatin states, embedding an epigenetic Ising model into the topology of D-Wave quantum processors. Rather than reconstructing exact TAD size distributions or insulation scores, our method reproduces statistical features, such as mean marker incidences and intra-/inter-nucleosome correlations, while generating configurations that exhibit TAD-like structural motifs. These results demonstrate QA as an alternative to explore the chromatin architecture and provide a foundation in epigenetic modeling.

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

Bayesian Inference and Decision Audits for Public Archives of Frontier AI Evaluations

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Public AI evaluations are often read as terminal leaderboards, yet the underlying evidence is a selective time series shaped by reporting rules, benchmark revisions, and missingness. Repeated public archives for LiveBench and Open LLM Leaderboard v2 serve as the primary longitudinal record; LMArena provides a preference stress test; and GAIA and tau-bench contribute limited agentic pilots. Together, these archives instantiate a Bayesian inference problem: under a fixed reporting convention, one constructed terminal-only example over $1{,}000$ systems is compatible with two pre-terminal histories, yielding times of $23.03$ or $75.13$ to reach within $0.05$ of the ceiling under the same terminal-tail model. In synthetic posterior comparisons, action-facing diagnostics differ across observation regimes. The candidate selection-aware frontier model fails synthetic recovery, objective-archive prediction, preference transfer, and uncertainty calibration; correspondingly, fixed audit gates reject its stronger claims. An archive-and-adjudication protocol reconstructs public evaluation histories, isolates a verified timing boundary, and falsifies unsupported frontier claims.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Dziri Voicebot: An End-to-End Low-Resource Speech-to-Speech Conversational System for Algerian Dialect

Automatic speech and language technologies are still heavily biased toward high-resource languages, limiting their applicability to dialectal and low-resource settings such as Algerian Dialect. This language presents additional challenges including lack of standardized orthography, frequent codeswitching with French, and scarcity of annotated speech resources. This paper addresses the problem of building a complete speech-to-speech conversational system for Algerian Dialect. We propose a modular pipeline integrating automatic speech recognition, natural language understanding, retrieval-augmented generation, and text-to-speech synthesis within a unified architecture. This work is the continuation of our previous work on Algerian dialectal conversational systems Bechiri and Lanasri [2026], extending it from text-based dialogue modeling to full speech-based interaction. We constructed dedicated datasets for ASR, NLU, and TTS in the telecom domain and fine-tune pretrained models for each component. The ASR system is built on Whisper-based adaptation, while the NLU module combines transformer-based embeddings with a task-oriented dialogue framework. A neural TTS system is trained on a newly collected dialectal corpus to enable spoken response generation. Experimental results show strong performance across all components, including low word error rate for ASR, high intent classification and entity recognition scores for NLU, and stable speech synthesis quality. The proposed system provides a reproducible baseline for end-to-end conversational modeling in Algerian Dialect.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Building user-driven climate adaptation products

Climate adaptation products have traditionally been developed using a supply-driven model reliant on available climate information, leading to usability gaps1–4. To better meet user needs, the climate services field has recognized a need to shift towards a demand-driven model emphasizing co-production, that is, user-driven, scientifically informed products created through shared knowledge practices1–5. However, co-production can be challenging, especially for researchers unfamiliar with the approach or for digital and software-based products with complex user needs2,5–8. User-centred design, from the human–computer interaction field, offers a process that could complement co-production approaches to product development, yet its potential remains underexplored2. Here we show how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products. Through a systematic review of the co-production and user-centred design literature, we identify key processes, mechanisms and best practices for both approaches. Our findings offer practical guidance for researchers and propose an integrated approach for developing climate adaptation products that are useful, usable and used. A systematic review and analysis shows how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Self-Evolving Vision-Language Models for Image Quality Assessment via Voting and Ranking

Improving vision-language models (VLMs) in the post-training stage typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning, methods that necessitate costly, human-annotated data. While self-supervised techniques have proven effective for enhancing reasoning capabilities, their application to perceptual domains such as image quality assessment (IQA) remains largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce EvoQuality, a novel framework that enables a VLM to autonomously refine its quality perception capabilities without any ground-truth labels. EvoQuality adapts the principle of self-consistency to the ranking-based nature of IQA. It generates pseudo-labels by performing pairwise majority voting on the VLM's own outputs to establish a consensus on relative quality. These pseudo-rankings are then formulated into a fidelity reward that guides the model's iterative evolution through group relative policy optimization (GRPO). By iteratively leveraging its own predictions, EvoQuality progressively refines the VLM's perceptual capability. Extensive experiments show that EvoQuality boosts the base VLM's zero-shot performance by 31.8% on PLCC across diverse IQA benchmarks. Remarkably, despite being entirely self-supervised, EvoQuality achieves performance that is competitive with, or even surpasses, state-of-the-art supervised VLM-based IQA models, outperforming these models on 5 out of 7 IQA benchmarks. Furthermore, the framework demonstrates significant flexibility, allowing it to be stacked with pre-trained IQA models to bolster generalization on unseen datasets. Codes and checkpoints will be available at https://github.com/bytedance/EvoQuality.

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

Reinforcement Learning to Disentangle Multiqubit Quantum States from Partial Observations

arXiv:2406.07884v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using partial knowledge of a quantum state to control multiqubit entanglement is a largely unexplored paradigm in the emerging field of quantum interactive dynamics with the potential to address outstanding challenges in quantum state preparation and compression, quantum control, and quantum complexity. We present a deep reinforcement learning (RL) approach using an actor-critic algorithm for constructing short disentangling circuits for states with up to 16 qubits. With access to only two-qubit reduced density matrices, our agent decides which pairs of qubits to apply two-qubit gates on; requiring only local information makes it directly applicable on modern NISQ devices, as we demonstrated experimentally on a trapped-ion quantum computer. Utilizing a permutation-equivariant transformer architecture, the agent can autonomously identify qubit permutations within the state, and adjusts the disentangling protocol accordingly. Once trained, it provides circuits from different initial states without further optimization. We demonstrate the agent's ability to identify and exploit the entanglement structure of multi-qubit states. We analyze the disentangling circuits constructed by the agent for 4- and 5-qubit Haar-random states, and observe strong correlations between consecutive gates and among the qubits involved. Through extensive benchmarking, we show the efficacy of the RL approach to find disentangling protocols with minimal gate resources. We explore the resilience of our trained agents to noise, highlighting their potential for real-world quantum computing applications. Analyzing optimal disentangling protocols, we report a general circuit to prepare an arbitrary 4-qubit state using at most 5 two-qubit (10 CNOT) gates.

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

MemToolAgent: Leveraging Memory for Tool Using Agents Based on Environment and User Feedback

Modern large language model (LLM) agents can use external tools to help users solve complex tasks. However, for problems that require learning from long-term historical events or from previous agent-environment interactions, LLM agents are required to use memory mechanisms to store and retrieve experiences. While sophisticated memory systems exist for dialogue agents, few studies have empirically examined how to improve agents' tool-using capabilities through past user-agent conversations. We propose MemToolAgent, a framework that improves tool use through memory management. Our approach contains a memory extraction module that processes past experiences into structured memory entries, and a retrieval module that dynamically selects a subset of the stored memory entries. This enables more personalized and accurate responses aligned with user preferences and feedback without requiring LLM fine-tuning. In summary, this work has three main contributions: (1) a unified memory entry format that improves both general-purpose and personalized tool use without LLM fine-tuning, (2) a reflection-based memory extraction that uses environment and user feedback to distill wrong executions into critiques to store, and (3) a retrieval module that chooses how many past experiences to use based on the memory similarity distribution. MemToolAgent achieves 29%, 80%, and 17% relative improvements compared to strong baselines on the WorkBench, NESTFUL, and PEToolBench benchmarks, respectively.