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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

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

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Modality-Aware Out-of-Distribution Detection for Multi-Modal Action Recognition

The incorporation of additional modalities into action recognition models increases their performance across a wide range of settings. However, how this additional information can contribute to making the models more robust remains underexplored, particularly for the case of multi-modal out-of-distribution (OOD) detection. While methods exist that regularize the multi-modal training process with OOD detection in mind, they still apply off-the-shelf OOD detectors designed for the uni-modal case during inference, discarding important information. Based on an interesting relationship we find between the multi-modal and uni-modal predictions, we propose to use this signal to build a post-hoc detector explicitly designed for the multi-modal scenario. We combine this new source of information with a feature-space score, which detects off-manifold samples in the multi-modal space, and normalize them by the multi-modal logits. In doing so, the proposed hybrid detector is compatible with existing training-time approaches and consistently improves performance. Experiments on a wide range of established datasets from the MultiOOD benchmark show that, on average, our approach outperforms the state of the art. Our results show the importance of explicitly considering the different modalities at inference time for multi-modal OOD detection.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ObsGraph: Hierarchical Observation Representation for Embodied Reasoning and Exploration

Embodied reasoning and exploration are increasingly considered crucial abilities for robots operating in complex and unfamiliar environments. To accomplish tasks in such settings, an agent must identify and acquire the information necessary for the task through exploration. We propose ObsGraph, an observation-centric hierarchical scene graph that unifies scene representation, retrieval, and exploration. It retains visual evidence and organizes it into room-view-object layers: rooms provide coarse semantic anchors, views preserve contextual object covisibility, and objects store fine-grained details. On top of this representation, we perform coarse-to-fine hierarchical retrieval under a bounded budget, and crucially use retrieval outcomes to structure the exploration candidate space–activating room-level exploration, view refinement, or frontier exploration–thereby tightly coupling representation, retrieval, and adaptive multi-scale exploration. Experiments across embodied reasoning and exploration benchmarks demonstrate improved success and efficiency, highlighting the benefits of structured scene representation and more targeted information gathering driven by identified evidence gaps.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Time-Frequency Grid States for Reconstruction and Correction of Channel-Induced Distortion in Entangled Photons

arXiv:2606.12216v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Characterization of time-frequency (TF) quantum states requires reliable reconstruction of their TF distributions. However, imperfect transmission or measurement channels can distort reconstructed joint spectral intensities (JSIs), especially when the underlying perturbation mechanism is unknown. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a reconstruction and correction framework that uses a TF grid state as an intrinsic frequency-domain reference. By analyzing the displacement of the grid points, a Gaussian process regression model is employed to reconstruct a correction mapping for the nonlinear coordinate deformation without assuming a prior physical model of the distortion. The learned mapping reduces the residual coordinate deviation of the TF grid state by approximately a factor of 11 and, when applied to an independent frequency-entangled test state, improves the Gaussian-shape fidelity from 76.2\% to 90.0\%. These results establish TF grid states as practical metrological resources for diagnosing and correcting distortions in TF quantum systems, providing a pathway toward distortion-resilient quantum communication and high-dimensional quantum information processing.

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

Bi-qutrit entangled edge states of positive partial transposes with largest ranks

arXiv:2606.16265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whenever $E$ is an eight dimensional subspace of the bi-qutrit quantum system whose orthogonal complement is spanned by a vector of Schmidt rank three, we show that there exist PPT entangled edge states with the range space $E$ whose partial transposes are of rank six, which is the largest possible rank. In this way, we exhibit a huge family of bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of type $(8,6)$. They make faces of the convex set of all PPT states, and we find bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of other types on the boundaries of such faces.

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

Physics in 2-Steps: Locking Motion Priors Before Visual Refinement Erases Them

Image-to-Video diffusion models leverage input images to generate visually stunning content, yet frequently produce motion that violates physical laws. We reveal a surprising finding: a 2-step generation often exhibits better physical consistency than a 50-step output from the same model. Through spectral analysis, we trace this to phase erosion during denoising; the phase degrades significantly (dropping by $\approx 18\%$ from step 2 to step 50), whereas the magnitude remains relatively stable. Building on this insight, we propose PhaseLock, a training-free framework that preserves the valid motion priors from few-step inference throughout the denoising trajectory. Rather than relying on full-step inference for physical consistency, PhaseLock extracts a motion prior from just 2 steps and enforces it onto high-fidelity generation via Latent Delta Guidance. Our approach effectively mitigates phase degradation, improving physical consistency by an average of 6.2 points across diverse models while largely maintaining visual fidelity, with negligible overhead ($1.06\times$ time, $1.02\times$ memory) and reduced reliance on expensive external guidance methods ($\sim5\times$ time). Project Page: https://dnwjddl.github.io/phaselock

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a major way for consumers to find products, but we do not yet understand how brands compete in this new channel. We study brand dynamics in LLM recommendations using skincare products – a category where consumers cannot easily judge quality before buying and must rely on brand reputation – across three commercial LLMs (GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet, Gemini 3 Flash), with a robustness check on search goods. In three experiments, we find: (1) a Conditional Monopoly where well-known brands get recommended 100% of the time (IAI = 10.0) when all products have the same specifications, but this dominance disappears with less than a +0.1-star rating advantage for a competitor; (2) authority-style marketing language, including fabricated clinical-evidence claims, breaks this monopoly at a Bias Surplus Value equal to +0.17 rating points, with each model responding differently; and (3) a social dilemma in multi-brand GEO competition: when all brands adopt the same optimization strategy, individual payoff falls from +0.802 to +0.007 in our payoff proxy, and non-participating brands receive zero recommendations in our tests. Our results suggest that generative engine optimization (GEO) should be studied not only as a security risk, but also as an emerging marketing practice that shapes market competition.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

BIM-Edit: Benchmarking Large Language Models for IFC-Based Building Information Modeling

arXiv:2606.20146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to computer-aided design (CAD) to generate design artifacts from textual instructions. In engineering practice, this requires more than creating new geometry, models must also understand existing scenes, edit them correctly, and preserve semantics and relations. However, many CAD benchmarks focus on creating new models rather than editing existing ones, and mostly evaluate geometric correctness. We introduce BIM-Edit, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on natural-language editing of Building Information Models (BIM) represented in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. BIM provides a challenging testbed because building models encode geometry together with semantic and relational structure. BIM-Edit contains 324 editing tasks spanning 11 realistic building models and 36 synthetic scenes. Tasks are expressed using three instruction categories - direct, spatial, and topological - covering both explicit and scene-grounded edits. We evaluate outputs along three dimensions: geometric accuracy, semantic validity, and topological consistency. Across evaluated LLMs, the best-performing model achieves only 49.5% average score across the three metrics, and no model fully solves more than 3.4% of tasks. These results demonstrate a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements of structured engineering design workflows.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Extreme Learning based on Gaussian Boson Sampling

arXiv:2606.15230v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reservoir models offer a hardware-efficient learning paradigm for noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices by exploiting untrained quantum dynamics as a fixed feature map and restricting optimization to a simple classical readout layer. We propose a quantum extreme learning machine implemented using gaussian boson sampling and an encoding strategy that achieves high classification accuracy while reducing optical resource requirements. Classical inputs are jointly encoded in the squeezing parameters and in the interferometer unitary, enabling sampling-based, highly nonlinear feature maps while leveraging large-scale GBS output statistics, which are conjectured to be classically intractable. We systematically compare multiple families of quantum features accessible in the same setup and find that photon-number sampling probabilities provide the best performance, consistent with their higher effective feature dimensionality. Finally, we benchmark against classical nonlinear baselines and analyse robustness under noisy scenarios, showing competitive performance with fewer trainable parameters and indicating practical promise for near-term photonic implementations.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Debate2Create: Robot Co-design via Multi-Agent LLM Debate

arXiv:2510.25850v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Debate2Create (D2C), a multi-agent LLM framework that formulates robot co-design as structured, iterative debate grounded in physics-based evaluation. A design agent and control agent engage in a thesis-antithesis-synthesis loop, while criterion-specific LLM judges provide multi-objective feedback to steer exploration. Across five MuJoCo locomotion benchmarks, D2C achieves the highest default-normalized score among the evaluated LLM-based and black-box baselines, with gains up to 3.2x on Ant and nearly 9x on Swimmer. Iterative debate yields 18-35% gains over compute-matched zero-shot generation, and D2C-generated rewards transfer to default morphologies in 4/5 tasks. These results suggest that structured, simulator-grounded multi-agent interaction is a useful mechanism for joint morphology-reward optimization under a fixed-topology, per-candidate-RL protocol. Project page: debate2create.github.io.

12.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-24

A new cancer progression model: From synthetic tumors to real data and back

by Daniela Volpatto, Sandro Gepiro Contaldo, Simone Pernice, Marco Beccuti, Francesca Cordero, Roberta Sirovich Intratumor heterogeneity (ITH) arises from the combined effects of genetic alterations, clonal interactions, and environmental constraints, and plays a central role in therapeutic resistance and disease progression. While ITH has been extensively documented in empirical tumor data, the scientific debate regarding the biological mechanisms underlying this heterogeneity remains complex, highlighting the need for cancer evolution models that are sufficiently flexible and sophisticated to reproduce the observed behaviors and to give insights on the unobserved ones. Here, we present a stochastic modelling framework for tumor evolution that integrates genotypic inheritance with phenotype driven functional traits and resource mediated competition. Mutational events are associated with functional capabilities such as altered proliferation, increased mutation rates, limit evasion potential or enhanced control over shared resources, allowing multiple genotypes to converge on similar phenotypes. The model explicitly tracks subclonal lineages while incorporating environmental constraints that modulate growth and competition. The framework is defined through a mathematically rigorous construction and is accompanied by an efficient simulation algorithm. To facilitate exploration and reproducibility, we provide an open-source graphical user interface that allows users to configure model parameters, run simulations, and inspect clonal genealogies and population dynamics without requiring direct interaction with the underlying code. Using this model, we illustrate how ecological feedbacks can shape clonal dynamics over time, supporting an interpretation in which early tumor growth is dominated by stochastic expansion, while later evolution increasingly reflects selection for traits that alleviate environmental constraints. Rather than constituting a new evolutionary paradigm, this behaviour demonstrates how well-documented biological patterns can emerge naturally from a unified stochastic and ecological description. Overall, our approach offers a flexible and extensible platform for investigating how chance, functional traits, and environmental interactions jointly govern tumor heterogeneity.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Language Model Circuits Are Sparse in the Neuron Basis

The high-level concepts that a neural network uses to perform computation need not be aligned to individual neurons (Smolensky, 1986). Language model interpretability research has thus turned to techniques which decompose the neuron basis into more interpretable units of model computation, such as sparse autoencoders (SAEs). However, not all neuron-based representations are uninterpretable. For the first time, we empirically show that MLP neurons are as sparse a feature basis as SAEs. We use this finding to develop an end-to-end gradient-based attribution pipeline for circuit tracing on the MLP neuron basis, which surfaces causally effective neurons on a variety of tasks. On a standard subject-verb agreement benchmark (Marks et al., 2025), a circuit of $\approx 10^2$ MLP neurons is enough to control model behaviour. On the multi-hop city-state-capital task from (Lindsey et al., 2025), we find a circuit in which small sets of neurons encode specific latent reasoning steps (e.g. mapping a city to its state), and can be steered to change the model's output. This work thus advances automated interpretability of language models without imposing additional training costs.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Maternal deaths associated factors in the Conflict-Affected North West Region of Cameroon. Lessons from a cross-sectional survey

Background Maternal mortality is a significant global public health crisis, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and conflict-affected regions. Cameroon's maternal mortality ratio is high at 406 deaths per 100,000 live births, while the ongoing Anglophone conflict has further exacerbated maternal healthcare delivery in the North West Region (NWR){middle dot} Despite the evidence-based interventions like partographs, obstetric kits, birth preparedness plans, and active management of the third stage of labour, implementation gaps persist across health facilities. Objective The study aimed to assess factors related to preventable maternal deaths in the NWR of Cameroon by exploring maternal health service usage, implementation of obstetric measures, demand-side challenges, accessibility barriers, and health system weaknesses. Methodology The study employed a quantitative descriptive cross-sectional survey design{middle dot} Data was collected with structured questionnaires from postpartum women and healthcare workers in selected health facilities and catchment communities in the NWR{middle dot} Also, a multistage sampling technique was adopted, and Cochran's formula generated a sample size of 109 respondents{middle dot} In addition, data were analysed using SPSS version 27 and Stata version 18, employing descriptive and inferential statistics. Results In this study, while 70{middle dot}64 percent of females attended at least 4 ANC visits, only 38{middle dot}53 percent met WHO ANC adequacy requirements. Facility delivery was 96{middle dot}33 percent, yet only 38{middle dot}46 percent received completed delivery plans. Conflict-related challenges affected access, with 44{middle dot}95 percent reporting insecurity-associated movement difficulties, while 44{middle dot}95 percent reported increased transportation expenses due to the conflict. Near-miss complications were reported among 27.52 percent of participants. Delivery record reviews indicated that obstetric kits were utilised in 81{middle dot}76 percent of deliveries, partographs were accessible in 86{middle dot}49 percent of records but correctly filled in just 60{middle dot}81 percent , while oxytocin administration was 95{middle dot}95 percent. Integrated Health Centres showed poorer adherence with intrapartum interventions compared with District and Regional Hospitals (p

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

SkillCAT: Contrastive Assessment and Topology-Aware Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents

Skill self-evolution methods for LLM agents aim to turn execution trajectories into reusable skill documents, but current pipelines typically learn from one trajectory per task, merge candidate skill patches before checking them, and load the full skill corpus before inference. We propose SkillCAT, a training-free framework that separates this process into three stages. Contrastive Causal Extraction (CCE) samples multiple trajectories for each task and compares same-task success/failure pairs to identify evidence that explains outcome differences. Assessment-Augmented Evolution (AAE) replays each candidate patch on source-task clones and keeps only patches that improve or preserve task outcomes before hierarchical skill patch merging. Topology-Aware Task Execution (TTE) compiles the evolved skills into a routable sub-skill topology, so inference loads only the capability nodes relevant to the task. We evaluate SkillCAT on common agent benchmarks, including SpreadsheetBench, WikiTableQuestions, and DocVQA, and further test cross-model and out-of-distribution generalization. Across these settings, SkillCAT raises the average score over baselines by up to 40.40%, demonstrating reliable skill evolution without model training.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Orion: Towards Lab Automation with Computer-Using Agents

Laboratory discovery increasingly depends on computational workflows that connect experimental data to analysis, interpretation and follow-up hypotheses. Yet these workflows remain constrained by labor-intensive use of specialized software, visual inspection through graphical user interfaces, and integration of knowledge across multiple sources. Here, we present Orion, a computer-using AI agent for biomedical image analysis and interpretation that moves towards lab automation by automating this computational layer of laboratory work. Orion combines large language models with terminal execution, GUI control and adaptive multi-step reasoning in a shared computing environment. It can inspect visual data, operate standard scientific software, mine web resources and conduct end-to-end analysis and interpretation workflows without requiring bespoke software integrations. Across benchmarks, Orion achieved over 90% accuracy on biomedical database and literature retrieval tasks, learned to use the popular tools CellProfiler and QuPath for quantitative analysis of cellular and tissue images, respectively, and facilitated autonomous discovery in experimental imaging data. In 100 hours of autonomous exploration of a large-scale perturbation imaging dataset, Orion generated 52 research reports, of which human scientist review prioritized 22 plausible mechanistic hypotheses. These results show that computer-using AI agents can substantially expand the reach of laboratory automation, providing a scalable and auditable route from experimental imaging data to quantitative analysis, reports and biologically grounded hypotheses.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Auto-Labelling-Based Domain Transfer for 3D Object Detection on a Bicycle-Mounted LiDAR Platform

Reliable 3D perception of vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as cyclists and pedestrians is essential for their safety in urban traffic and a core requirement for autonomous driving (AD). Alongside advances in vehicle-based perception, research increasingly equips bicycles with sensors to study traffic from a perspective native to VRUs. Such platforms still rely on LiDAR detectors originally trained on vehicle data, yet annotated 3D data from a cyclist's perspective is scarce. How well these detectors generalise to this setting has not been evaluated. We present a 3D object detection benchmark of 1,027 annotated LiDAR keyframes (over 18,000 3D bounding boxes) from the FUSE-Bike platform in urban Munich. We evaluate four nuScenes-pre-trained detectors against 1,854 human-verified ground-truth (GT) boxes both in their original form and after finetuning on training labels produced by a VRU-dedicated auto-labelling pipeline that requires no manual annotation. The zero-shot domain gap is concentrated on the VRU classes. Finetuning recovers most of it, improving mean average precision (mAP) by up to 23.4 points with the largest gains on pedestrians and cyclists, and the adapted detectors even surpass the quality of the auto-labels they were trained on. The benchmark provides a reproducible baseline for VRU-centric 3D detection and shows that auto-labels are a viable substitute for manual annotation when adapting vehicle-trained detectors to a cyclist platform.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

On Defining Erasure Harms for NLP

The deployment of NLP systems has raised concerns about harms they might produce, including representational harms. Recent literature has begun to conceptualize and measure one such harm, the harm of erasure. Nevertheless, the field lacks a clear and cohesive conceptual foundation for identifying and measuring erasure. Existing conceptualizations of erasure are often broad – making it difficult to identify what is needed to establish and measure erasure – or else specific to particular settings – facilitating measurement for those settings but potentially challenging to adapt to other settings. To address this gap, we develop and propose a structured definition of erasure that clarifies what components are necessary for establishing whether erasure has occurred, which practitioners need to explicitly articulate and operationalize in order to measure erasure.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

GetNetUPAM: Ecologically Informed Nested Cross-Validation and Noise-Robust Attention for Marine Bioacoustic Monitoring

Deploying reliable bioacoustic monitoring systems requires models that generalize under high-noise, low-SNR conditions and evaluation protocols that expose deployment-relevant failure modes, gaps largely unaddressed in current UPAM practice. Intrinsic noise, variable propagation, and mixed biological and anthropogenic sources induce distribution shifts that conventional models and single-split evaluations obscure, inflating performance and masking instability. We introduce GetNetUPAM, a hierarchical nested cross-validation framework that uses the nested stage to quantify model stability rather than tune for inflated hold-out scores. By partitioning data into site-year blocks, GetNetUPAM preserves ecological heterogeneity and forces each outer fold to represent a distinct environmental regime, preventing overfitting to localized noise or sensor artifacts. Inner stratified folds measure generalization across the full UPAM signal distribution, enforcing strict separation between model development and the outer held-out deployment condition. Using GetNetUPAM, we evaluate the Adaptive Resolution Pooling and Attention Network (ARPA-N), a CNN architecture for irregular spectrogram dimensions. ARPA-N integrates CBAM spatial attention as a learned noise suppressor, producing attention maps that localize true call structure and avoid the global, non-biological cues exploited by standard CNNs on long-window data. Under GetNetUPAM, ARPA-N generalizes robustly across diverse environmental regimes. In the zero-training support Balleny Islands region, it reduces false positives per hour by over an order of magnitude (approximately 10x) at fixed 90 percent recall, yielding consistently improved metrics across folds. These advances provide a reproducible benchmark and move UPAM toward scalable, deployment-reliable ecological monitoring.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Metadata-Aware Multi-Prompt Reasoning for Zero-Shot Accident Understanding

In this paper, we address the problem of zero-shot understanding of accidents from surveillance videos by identifying when an impact event occurs, what type of impact it is, and where in the frame it occurs using natural language. We propose a three-stage pipeline that decomposes the accident understanding into when, what, and where. The first stage extracts a short temporal window around the impact using vision-language similarity. In the second stage, we perform metadata-driven multi-prompt reasoning with five complementary views (baseline, motion, geometry, contrast, and tiebreaker) and resolve disagreement via an entropy-gated pairwise adjudicator. Finally, we localize the impact of an open-vocabulary detector queried on the predicted accident type and scene layout, and aggregate detections across keyframes using a score-weighted centroid. Our pipeline achieves a substantial improvement in the harmonic-mean score over a centre-of-frame baseline on the zero-shot ACCIDENT @ CVPR benchmark. We show that decomposing zero-shot video understanding into temporal localization, semantic classification, and spatial grounding enable more reliable reasoning with vision-language models than direct prompting alone.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Generative causal testing to bridge data-driven models and scientific theories in language neuroscience

Representations from large language models are highly effective at predicting BOLD fMRI responses to language stimuli. However, these representations are largely opaque: it is unclear what features of the language stimulus drive the response in each brain area. We present generative causal testing (GCT), a framework for generating concise explanations of language selectivity in the brain from predictive models and then testing those explanations in follow-up experiments using LLM-generated stimuli.This approach is successful at explaining selectivity both in individual voxels and cortical regions of interest (ROIs), including newly identified microROIs in prefrontal cortex. We show that explanatory accuracy is closely related to the predictive power and stability of the underlying predictive models. Finally, we show that GCT can dissect fine-grained differences between brain areas with similar functional selectivity. These results demonstrate that LLMs can be used to bridge the widening gap between data-driven models and formal scientific theories.

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

ATHENA: Agentic Team for Hierarchical Evolutionary Numerical Algorithms

arXiv:2512.03476v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Progress in computational science depends on complex numerical workflows that must faithfully encode physical laws, yet translating conceptual insight into reliable code remains a major bottleneck. Although large language models can generate isolated code fragments, they lack the structured reasoning required to design, verify, and iteratively refine complete scientific pipelines. Here we introduce ATHENA, an agentic framework explicitly designed to emulate scientific research modeled as a knowledge-driven contextual bandit process. Its core loop separates conceptual policy from numerical realization through expert-derived conceptual scaffolding, enabling principled diagnosis, reformulation, and repair of computational strategies. Across scientific computing and scientific machine learning tasks, ATHENA autonomously derives and correctly applies exact analytical solutions, constructs stable numerical solvers, diagnoses ill-posed formulations, and orchestrates hybrid symbolic-numeric workflows. Quantitatively, ATHENA matches and frequently surpasses the accuracy of expert-authored reference solutions reported in the literature on canonical benchmarks. By reframing computation as an object of agentic reasoning, our framework enables autonomous orchestration of heterogeneous algorithms across scientific domains.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Hybrid deep learning-based phase diversity method for wavefront reconstruction

The efficiency of high-power laser systems is limited by wavefront distortions in the beam, particularly non-common path aberrations, which reduce the peak intensity at the focal plane. Compensating for these aberrations requires the calibration of the adaptive optics system. Conventional calibration methods rely on a time-consuming iterative optimization that is highly sensitive to initial conditions. While deep learning-based models offer high speed, they often demonstrate insufficient accuracy. In this work, we present a hybrid wavefront reconstruction method that combines a convolutional neural network to generate an initial estimate of the wavefront distortions, with the L-BFGS (Limited-memory Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno) algorithm for its subsequent refinement. In numerical simulations, the method achieved an efficiency of $\sim 0.99$ in 80% of the cases for a root-mean-square (RMS) of wavefront distortions ranging from 0 to $1.3\lambda$. In a physical experiment, for initial wavefront distortions with RMS values from 0.15 to $0.6\lambda$, the method achieved an efficiency of $\sim 0.75$. As a result, focusing with a Strehl ratio of $0.96 \pm 0.02$ was attained within 2 to 4 iterations of the algorithm, confirming the applicability of the method for the fast and accurate calibration of adaptive optics systems under real experimental conditions.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot Reconstruction of Isotropic 3D Fluorescence Microscopy under Undersampled Acquisition

Three-dimensional (3D) imaging represents the development of next generation of fluorescence microscopy. However, routine axial down-sampling makes isotropic resolution unrealistic. Here, we propose DeepUI, a physical zero-shot framework designed to achieve isotropic 3D fluorescence images from a low axial sampling rate. DeepUI fully leverages the intrinsic characteristics of 3D images through physics-guided degradation, which incorporates spatial-frequency joint learning to generate a scaled optical transfer function, combined with noise degradation and an up-sampling branch. Typically requiring just 5 minutes for training and 0.5 minutes for high-throughput and fast prediction, we demonstrate the superior performance of DeepUI to get isotropic results, and the exclusivity to axial down-sampling conditions, even in more challenging conditions, including defocused background, noise, and resolution blur.