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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MVEB: Massive Video Embedding Benchmark

We introduce the Massive Video Embedding Benchmark (MVEB), a 23-task benchmark for video embeddings spanning classification, zero-shot classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and video-centric question answering. We evaluate 33 models and find that no single model dominates: MLLM-based embeddings lead on classification, clustering, pair classification, and QA; multimodal binding leads on retrieval and zero-shot classification; generative MLLMs without contrastive adaptation collapse on cross-modal tasks. Paired video-only vs. audio+video evaluations show that audio's contribution depends on dataset annotation provenance: audio helps when labels were produced from both modalities and hurts when they were produced from visuals alone, a six-point gap consistent across model families. MVEB is derived from MVEB+, a 184-task pool, and is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost. It integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, audio, and video. We release MVEB and all 184 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

CIPHER: An end-to-end framework for designing optimized aggregated spatial transcriptomics experiments

by Zachary Hemminger, Haley De Ocampo, Fangming Xie, Zhiqian Zhai, Jingyi Jessica Li, Roy Wollman Motivation Most imaging-based spatial transcriptomics methods measure individual genes, which limits scalability and typically requires integration with scRNA-seq to recover full cellular states. Recent approaches such as CISI, FISHnCHIPs, and ATLAS address this limitation by measuring aggregate transcriptional signatures, where multiple genes are pooled into each channel to increase throughput. While aggregate measurements improve scalability, they shift the problem from gene selection to feature design. For effective integration with scRNA-seq, these signatures must be not only discriminative in transcriptional space but also straightforward to measure, with balanced signal, sufficient dynamic range, and robustness to experimental noise. By optimizing decoding accuracy in isolation, existing methods leave substantial performance on the table. Results We present CIPHER (Cell Identity Projection using Hybridization Encoding Rules), a neural-network framework that jointly optimizes the experimental encoding matrix, i.e., the way that genes are aggregated to signatures, and the downstream cell embedding. CIPHER integrates the physical limits of imaging assays directly into its loss function, shaping the latent space to maximize discriminability while maintaining robustness to measurement noise and signal constraints. Using a large-scale mouse brain scRNA-seq reference, we show that CIPHER-designed encodings yield latent spaces with improved cell-type separability, uniform signal utilization, and greater resilience to hybridization variability, resulting in higher decoding accuracy from both simulated and experimental data. Conclusion CIPHER formulates aggregate signature design as a joint optimization problem over decoding accuracy and experimental measurability. This enables systematic, scRNA-seq-aligned feature design for scalable spatial transcriptomics based on aggregate measurements. Availability Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/wollmanlab/Design/.

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

Correct Yourself, Keep My Trust: How Self-Correction and Social Connection Shape Credibility in Social Chatbots

arXiv:2606.19286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When social chatbots make mistakes, and they do, how they recover determines whether users trust them again. Social chatbots are increasingly integrated into everyday life, yet they remain prone to generating convincing but inaccurate information. The social connection they build with users makes such errors particularly consequential. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N=120) comparing three error correction strategies: a webpage retraction, self-correction by the same social chatbot, and correction by an expert chatbot. Our results reveal two key findings. First, all three strategies corrected the error equally well, but only self-correction did so without damaging the chatbot's credibility: participants rated self-correcting chatbots significantly higher in both trustworthiness and perceived expertise than chatbots whose errors were corrected by external sources. Second, the strength of the user's social connection with the chatbot, measured through social attraction and self-disclosure, significantly predicted the magnitude of belief change, but only when the chatbot corrected itself. Outsourcing corrections to an external source severed this link entirely. These findings suggest that social chatbots should correct their own mistakes rather than outsource corrections, and that investing in social connection is a functional mechanism that amplifies correction effectiveness, not merely a design feature. We discuss implications for designing chatbots that maintain long-term credibility while effectively addressing their own errors.

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

Identifying Structural Biases from Causal Mechanism Shifts

arXiv:2606.18834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal discovery methods commonly assume that all data is independently and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and that there are no unmeasured variables affecting the system. In practice, these assumptions are often violated, leading to inaccurate inference. In this paper, we study how to identify hidden confounding and selection biases from causal mechanism shifts. In particular, we show that structural biases lead to dependent mechanism shifts. That is, by considering for which variables the mechanisms change given data from different environments, we can tell which variables are unbiased, which are subject to hidden confounding, and which are undergoing selection bias. We formalize this into an empirically testable criterion based on mutual information, and show under which conditions it identifies structural biases. To tell which nodes are subject to what kind of bias, we introduce the StruBI algorithm. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data show that StruBI works well in practice, accurately recovering affected variable sets and types of biases, outperforming the state-of-the-art by a wide margin.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SmartFont: Dynamic Condition Allocation for Few-Shot Font Generation

Few-shot font generation simultaneously requires global structural completeness and fine-grained local style fidelity. Existing methods usually either rely on global content-style modeling, which is robust but imperfectly disentangled, or emphasize component/local modeling, which captures fine details but relies heavily on local priors and reference coverage. We argue that the key challenge is not merely to learn purer conditions, but to organize complementary yet biased global and local conditions through multi-level allocation during generation. To this end, we propose SmartFont, a diffusion-based few-shot font generation framework that combines global content-style generation with weakly supervised local corrective experts. The local branch performs semantic-spatial allocation by learning expert-wise local concepts and semantically meaningful spatial maps under weak component supervision, enabling fine-grained correction without requiring explicit component-conditioned inference. On top of this, a denoising-state condition allocation module adaptively weights global content, global style, and local corrective feature across timesteps and injection blocks. Extensive experiments show that SmartFont achieves better global-local balance, improves glyph quality and local detail fidelity.

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

Sequential Hiring of Contingent Workers Through Learning-Based Optimization

arXiv:2606.18438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we study a sequential workforce management problem in a contingent labor setting with uncertainty in both worker production and labor supply. A firm seeks to maximize cumulative profit by maintaining an active team of fixed size while learning worker productivity over time. We emphasize two critical operational frictions in this problem: replacing workers is costly, and workers may not be available immediately for hiring because of, for example, prior job commitments, scheduling constraints, or onboarding procedures. Thus, hiring decisions take effect only after a random delay. We formulate this problem as a stochastic multi-play bandit with costly switching and delayed actions, and develop a learning-based hiring policy, DR-UCB (DelayedReplacement-UCB), that makes replacement and hiring decisions sequentially through learning cycles. In each cycle, the policy uses real-time production data to determine when to initiate workforce changes and which workers to replace and hire. We show that the leading-order regret of the proposed policy matches its lower bound in its dependence on the time horizon. Our numerical experiments show that DR-UCB outperforms benchmark policies.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

The Loss of Tension in an Infinite Membrane with Holes of Decaying Spatial Density

arXiv:2606.17792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What is the effect of randomly removing material from an infinite stretched membrane? Under what conditions can the membrane still sustain tension? This problem was introduced by Robert Connelly in connection with applications of rigidity theory in the natural sciences, and was later studied in M. V. Menshikov, K. A. Rybnikov, and S. E. Volkov, "The loss of tension in an infinite membrane with holes distributed according to a Poisson law" (2002); a discrete version was also considered in Robert Connelly, Konstantin Rybnikov, and Stanislav Volkov, "Percolation and the Loss of Tension in an Infinite Triangular Lattice" (2001). We study a mathematical framework based on a non-homogeneous Poisson point process whose intensity $\lambda$ tends to zero at infinity. The hole shapes are i.i.d.\ and independent of their locations. We show that if the intensity does not decay too quickly, then tension is still lost throughout the whole plane, as in the homogeneous model studied in 2002. Conversely, we give sufficient conditions under which complete loss of tension does not occur. Thus, both destruction and non-destruction regimes are possible even when the intensity tends to zero, indicating a phase transition in the model. The processes studied here are closely related to bootstrap percolation.

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

Using Seismic Statistical Features and VQ-VAE to Improve Spatiotemporal Seismicity Predictability

arXiv:2606.10069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper we build upon a previous study in which we demonstrated, using XGBoost and earthquake catalogue data from Japan and Chile, that a set of 60 seismic statistical features (SSFs) had much greater predictive value than a set of 428 generic time series features from the tsfresh package. We here extend this previous work in two key ways, focusing on data from Japan as a large dataset is necessary in order to allow for the training of a deep learning (autoencoder) model. First, we move from whole-region prediction (considering, for each candidate event, the likelihood of an event M $\geq$ 5.0 anywhere in the region in the next 15 days) to localised predictions in which both the region of feature computation and the region of prediction are restricted to a circle of radius 24 km around the candidate event, and we show that performance remains excellent, similar to our previous whole-region study for the same area. Second, we here couple this proven set of SSFs, based on one-dimensional (catalogue) data, with a novel feature based on two-dimensional seismic maps, obtained by training a VQ-VAE model to reproduce such maps as output and identifying a measure of its error in doing so with a localised build-up of crustal stress. We show that while localised prediction based on SSFs can be effective alone, with test AUC values as high as those obtained in the case of Japan in our previous whole-region study, the inclusion of the new natively-spatial VQ-VAE-derived feature, top-ranked by SHAP analysis, can enhance performance and additionally appears to near-wholly replace the traditionally-computed $b$-value in terms of feature usage.

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

Improving and Evaluating Hand-Object Interaction Detection

Understanding hands and the objects they interact with, both directly and through tools, is a key step for tasks ranging from action perception to 3D reconstruction and robotics. Our paper provides several contributions to the Hand-Object Interaction (HOI) understanding literature: (1) HOI-DETR, a new framework that introduces hand-object and object-object interactions to the Co-DETR architecture to produce a state-of-the-art method; (2) a comprehensive HOI evaluation suite of 4 diverse datasets, including a video benchmark derived from the HD-EPIC dataset and fresh annotations that improve the Hands23 benchmark and (3) a trained checkpoint that significantly improves the state of the art across Hands23, HOIST, FineBio, and HD-EPIC, including mAP gains of over 20 percentage points on Hands23 and FineBio. Our ablations confirm the contributions of each model component.

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

We Need Explanation Cards to Connect Explanation Algorithms to the Real World

arXiv:2606.16786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Algorithmic explanations are intended to help stakeholders understand opaque algorithmic decisions, but in practice, they often fall short. First, the meaning of algorithmic explanations is often not what one might intuitively expect, so expert knowledge is required to interpret them correctly. Second, recent work has shown that popular explanation algorithms are uninformative about the behavior of complex decision functions. Together, these issues create a gap between what explanations appear to convey and what they actually provide. In this work, we propose Explanation Cards for Explanation Algorithms, which augment standard explanations with complementary information about robustness and validity, as well as clear instructions for interpretation. The complementary information can render otherwise uninformative explanations practically useful, while also helping to detect cases where they are not. Importantly, the interpretation instructions in explanation cards shift responsibility from users to providers: Rather than expecting users to recognize what can and cannot be concluded from an explanation, providers must make this explicit upfront. Using counterfactual explanations and SHAP as examples, we demonstrate how providers can construct explanation cards and that these cards provide users with the guidance needed for sound interpretation. We further argue that explanation cards offer a practical means of operationalising the explainability provisions of the EU AI Act. Overall, explanation cards are a significant step toward making explanation algorithms fit for real-world use cases.

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

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

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

XFlow: An Executable Protocol Programming System for Reliable Multi-Agent Workflows

arXiv:2606.14790v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems increasingly coordinate planning, reasoning, tool use, and human interaction, yet their reliability remains limited. A central source of this limitation is the underspecified prompt–harness boundary. Current systems lack a principled way to decide which workflow commitments should remain in prompts and which should become harness structure. We present XFlow, an executable protocol programming system for reliable multi-agent workflows, and XPF (XFlow Protocol Format), its domain-specific protocol programming language. XFlow occupies a middle position between prompt-only orchestration and markup-like workflow descriptions. XPF remains readable as a literate protocol, but it is compiled and executed as a program. Its design keeps informal semantic work inside actors while moving selected commitments into harness structure that can be checked, preserved, and enforced. At runtime, XFlow stages uncertainty through lifecycle-governed symbols, which are typed state cells with validation and commit states. Actor outputs are mediated before they become shared state, instead of spreading through prompts, transcripts, or implicit memory. Our experiments cover Constrained Interaction, Long-Context Reasoning, and Agentic Software Engineering. They show that XFlow improves reliability by making constraints, evidence handling, and process requirements explicit and enforceable.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Steering Emotional Dynamics for Art Therapy: Controllable Narrative Script Generation through Hierarchically Guided LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Art therapy plays a vital role in emotional healing, in which narrative creation acts as the primary vehicle for emotional expression. Given the inherently dynamic nature of emotions during healing, narratives with finely controlled emotional fluctuations enable individuals to safely project inner conflicts and achieve emotional catharsis. Recently, with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs), automated narrative generation technology has provided a new pathway to support such artistic designs. However, while existing methods can produce fluent texts, they struggle to generate narratives that adhere to specified affective trajectories, failing to meet the demands of emotion-oriented psychological healing. To address these issues, this paper proposes EC-Script, an LLM agent-based framework that enables hierarchical control of the affective trajectory in narrative generation for emotional healing. To ensure that the generated narratives strictly follow the given emotional patterns, EC-Script establishes overall narrative direction through Emotion-Trajectory Planning, propels scene-level plot development with Character-Driven Scene Generation, and regulates local emotional changes of characters via Emotion-Controlled Script Writing. Ultimately, it outputs scene-by-scene script content that remains highly consistent with the preset affective trajectory. Experimental results demonstrate that EC-Script significantly outperforms baseline methods in affective trajectory adherence, exhibiting excellent and reliable emotional controllability, thereby providing effective technical support for AI-assisted emotional healing scenarios.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Is Your Trajectory Displacement Safe in Long-tail?

arXiv:2606.16313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-tail scenarios remain a major bottleneck for autonomous driving evaluation, even as datasets grow by orders of magnitude. Existing evaluation pipelines are rarely human-aligned, safety-aware, verifiable, and explainable at the same time: closed-loop metrics often saturate among strong planners, while unstructured human ratings can be noisy without a carefully designed protocol. We formulate planning evaluation as additional-threat detection: given a planner trajectory and an expert reference, does the planner's displacement introduce new unsafe driving behavior? We propose FluidTest, an evaluation pipeline with three components: a pairwise WebUI protocol for reliable human annotation; a taxonomy of 32 semantic threats with evidence-grounded decision graphs; and a three-agent verification system with reflection for precision and auditability. Experiments on the WOD-E2E dataset show that FluidTest produces consistent labels among trained annotators and identifies additional threats in 65% of Poutine trajectories and 51% of RAP trajectories. These results show that state-of-the-art planners can still exhibit substantial safety-relevant failures despite high Rater Feedback Scores (RFS) and low Average Displacement Error (ADE). Additional details, guidance, and code are available at https://fluidtest.web.app.

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

TS-Memory: Plug-and-Play Memory for Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2602.11550v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) achieve strong zero-shot forecasting through large-scale pre-training, but adapting them to downstream domains under distribution shift remains challenging. Existing solutions face a trade-off: Parametric Adaptation can cause catastrophic forgetting and requires costly multi-domain maintenance, while Non-Parametric Retrieval improves forecasts but incurs high inference latency due to datastore search. We propose Parametric Memory Distillation and implement it as TS-Memory, a lightweight memory adapter that augments frozen TSFMs. TS-Memory is trained in two stages. First, we construct an offline, retrieval-leakage-safe kNN teacher that synthesizes confidence-aware quantile targets from retrieved futures. Second, we distill this retrieval-induced distributional correction into a lightweight memory adapter via confidence-gated supervision. During inference, TS-Memory fuses memory and backbone predictions with constant-time overhead, enabling retrieval-free deployment. Experiments across diverse TSFMs and benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both point and probabilistic forecasting over representative adaptation methods, with efficiency comparable to the frozen backbone. Code: https://github.com/sisuolv/TS-Memory.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Asymptotic behavior of some strongly critical decomposable 3-type Galton–Watson processes with immigration

arXiv:2406.09852v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of a critical decomposable 3-type Galton-Watson process with immigration when its offspring mean matrix is triangular with diagonal entries 1. It is proved that, under second or fourth order moment assumptions on the offspring and immigration distributions, a sequence of appropriately scaled random step processes formed from such a Galton-Watson process converges weakly. The limit process can be described using independent squared Bessel processes $({\mathcal X}_{t,1})_{t\geq0}$, $({\mathcal X}_{t,2})_{t\geq0}$, and $({\mathcal X}_{t,3})_{t\geq0}$, the linear combinations of the integral processes of $({\mathcal X}_{t,1})_{t\geq0}$ and $({\mathcal X}_{t,2})_{t\geq0}$, and possibly the 2-fold iterated integral process of $({\mathcal X}_{t,1})_{t\geq0}$. The presence of the 2-fold iterated integral process in the limit distribution is a new phenomenon in the description of asymptotic behavior of critical multi-type Galton-Watson processes with immigration. Our results complete and extend some results of Foster and Ney (1978) for some strongly critical decomposable 3-type Galton-Watson processes with immigration.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

HydraMPP: A lightweight library for distributed massive parallel processing in Python - threading at scale.

We now exist in the era of massive datasets from genomics, large language models, and all the known knowledge of humanity right at our fingertips. Much of this data is becoming more accessible; however, processing such data remains an ongoing issue across systems including high performance computing (HPC) infrastructures. Massively parallel computing (MPP) has solved this using a divide and conquer approach by splitting workloads across independent nodes (i.e., central processing units (CPU) allowing for higher scaling of data). The main engine for this in python is Ray; however, it has many issues including a large code space, security issues, debugging opacity, and memory management issues. Here, we present HydraMPP, a lightweight, ease of use and utilization, with high auditability, and with SLURM ergonomics.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Behavioral Audit of Machine Unlearning Has a Privacy Cost

arXiv:2606.14518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The removal of learned data from Machine Learning models through Machine Unlearning (MU) has been widely studied; however, there has yet to be an agreed-upon scheme for auditing MU. Existing work has shown that a dishonest model owner can falsify evidence to avoid executing MU, while curious auditors (and adversaries) can infer the privacy-sensitive properties of the model and its training data even with limited access. Yet auditing of MU under mutual distrust between the model owner and the auditor remains unexplored. We provide an information-theoretic proof for this scenario: for convex ML models, a generic audit scheme that relies solely on querying the model for behavioral signals cannot identify insufficiently unlearned models without revealing membership information of the retained set. Therefore, auditing MU under the assumption of a dishonest model owner and an honest-but-curious auditor faces an inherent privacy-audit tradeoff. Our empirical results on convex models strongly supports this result, while further experiments demonstrate that this privacy-audit tension persists in non-convex models. Our results call for a more careful consideration of the privacy-audit tension under a realistic auditor threat model, and serve as a foundation for more scrutiny of designs of privacy-preserving audit schemes for the MU pipeline. We also release our code implementation at https://github.com/LiouTang/Behavioral-Unlearn-Audit.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

T2S: A Rehearsal-Based Approach for Extraction-Resistant Model Watermarking

arXiv:2606.11698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model watermarking safeguards AI model intellectual property by embedding distinctive knowledge that induces unique behavioral signatures. The primary technical challenge lies in ensuring watermark robustness against various post-processing attacks on the watermarked model. Model extraction attacks emerge as the most severe threat, where adversaries exploit prediction outputs to train surrogate models that illegally replicate the original model's functionality. In this work, we propose a rehearsal-based watermark embedding framework to enhance the robustness of model watermarks against model extraction attacks. By simulating the extraction process, our method leverages the loss of a simulated stolen model on a trigger set as a training signal to fine-tune the watermark knowledge within the target model. This fine-tuning step encourages the watermark to be embedded in a way that boosts transferability, thereby increasing its chances of persisting and remaining detectable in stolen models. Comprehensive experiments conducted under diverse settings demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the robustness of model watermarks against both model extraction and subsequent watermark removal attacks.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

AnalogFed: Privacy-Preserving Discovery of Analog Circuits at Scale with Federated Generative AI

arXiv:2507.15104v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in generative AI (GenAI) have shown transformative potential for modern hardware design. However, existing GenAI-driven approaches fall short of enabling large-scale electronic design automation (EDA) due to the proprietary and siloed nature of hardware datasets, which cannot be centralized for model training. Achieving at-scale GenAI-driven EDA, therefore, requires a novel privacy-preserving framework that can leverage distributed data without compromising confidentiality. This work introduces AnalogFed, the first privacy-preserving framework for large-scale analog circuit topology discovery using federated learning (FedL) and GenAI. AnalogFed establishes the feasibility of collaborative analog topology design while addressing key security challenges: it mitigates membership inference attacks (MIAs) through a novel input perturbation strategy based on dummy token injection, and defends against model inversion attacks with customized, efficient homomorphic encryption. Extensive experiments demonstrate AnalogFed's effectiveness and efficiency, achieving strong privacy protection without degrading model utility. This framework lays the foundation for scalable, multi-party collaboration in next-generation hardware design automation with GenAI.

22.
Science (Express) 2026-04-16

Protein-templated synthesis of dinucleotide repeat DNA by an antiphage reverse transcriptase | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) are widespread bacterial anti-phage systems that use unconventional mechanisms of polynucleotide synthesis. We show that DRT3, which comprises two distinct RTs (Drt3a and Drt3b) and a noncoding RNA (ncRNA), synthesizes alternating poly(GT/AC) double-stranded DNA. Cryo–electron microscopy structures at 2.6 Å resolution reveal a D3-symmetric 6:6:6 complex of Drt3a, Drt3b, and ncRNA. Drt3a produces the poly(GT) strand using a conserved ACACAC template within the ncRNA. Notably, Drt3b synthesizes a complementary, protein-primed poly(AC) strand in the complete absence of a nucleic acid template, using conserved active site residues specific to Drt3b to enforce precise base alternation. These findings expand the functional landscape of nucleic acid polymerases, revealing a protein-templated mechanism for sequence-specific DNA synthesis.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Magic transfer in quantum spin chains

arXiv:2606.14855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum communication protocols based on spin chains have been extensively studied, yet their ability to transmit nonstabilizer resources has not been systematically addressed. We investigate the transport of quantum magic in spin chains through the natural dynamics of systems initialized in nonstabilizer states, and quantify the transported resource via the stabilizer norm. We analyze three experimentally feasible state-transfer protocols, ranging from noisy to (quasi-)perfect transfer, including one realizable in trapped-ion platforms. We find that the geometry of the injected state strongly influences transport: states in the lower Bloch hemisphere achieve higher transfer quality, whereas states in the upper hemisphere give rise to an efficient magic transport only beyond a threshold value of the parameter controlling the tendency towards perfect transfer. These features are robust across all protocols and identify the Hamiltonian and state properties that favor high-quality transfer. Moreover, we identify a parameter region, relevant to the initial state preparation, in which the transported magic exceeds the initial encoding, indicating that such spin systems can act as magic-amplification channels. Our results establish the conditions for efficient transport of nonstabilizer resources and demonstrate quantum magic as a sensitive probe of quantum transport beyond population dynamics.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Playful Agentic Robot Learning

arXiv:2606.19419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current agentic robot systems can write executable Code-as-Policy programs, observe feedback, and revise behavior across multiple attempts, but they remain largely task-driven: reusable skills are acquired only after explicit instructions. We study Playful Agentic Robot Learning, where an embodied coding agent uses self-directed play as a continual skill-learning stage before downstream tasks arrive. We introduce RATs, Robotics Agent Teams designed for play-time skill acquisition. During play, RATs proposes novel yet learnable exploratory tasks, plans and executes robot-code policies, verifies intermediate progress, diagnoses failures, retries with dense, step-level feedback, and distills successful executions into a persistent code skill library. At test time, the agent reuses relevant skills from this frozen library to help solve new tasks. Experiments in LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces show that play-learned skills improve held-out downstream tasks over no-play and random-play baselines, with 20.6 and 17.0 percentage-point gains over CaP-Agent0 on LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces, respectively. Moreover, the learned skills can be plugged into other inference-time Code-as-Policy agents by simply retrieving them into the context, improving RoboSuite and real-world transfer by 8.9 and 8.8 points, respectively, without finetuning the underlying model.

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

Adversarial Bandit Optimization with Globally Bounded Perturbations to Convex Losses

arXiv:2606.19891v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study adversarial bandit optimization in which the loss functions may be non-convex and non-smooth. In each round, the learner selects an action and observes only the loss incurred at that action. The loss consists of an underlying convex and $\beta$-smooth component and an adversarial perturbation that may be chosen after observing the learner's action. The perturbations are subject to a global budget controlling their cumulative magnitude over time. This framework extends the globally budgeted, post-action perturbation model from underlying linear losses to general convex and $\beta$-smooth losses. For this broader class, we establish expected regret guarantees that explicitly characterize the effect of the perturbation budget. To establish these guarantees, we modify a standard bandit optimization algorithm and develop an analysis that controls the additional regret caused by the perturbations. In the absence of perturbations, our results reduce to regret guarantees for the standard bandit convex optimization setting with $\beta$-smooth losses.