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

FreeSonic: Training-Free Temporal-Aware Decoupled Attention for Precise Audio Editing

arXiv:2606.15186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-audio (TTA) generation has made significant strides, yet achieving precise and consistent audio editing remains a major challenge. However, existing methods struggle to balance temporal consistency with background preservation. In this paper, we propose FreeSonic, a training-free framework leveraging the state-of-the-art Rectified Flow-based TangoFlux model. FreeSonic utilizes an optimized inversion-reverse process and joint text-audio attention maps for precise target segment extraction. For content editing, a novel scheduled attention decoupling confines modifications to target regions while preserving original acoustic context. Furthermore, task-oriented noise injection enhances versatility for tasks such as audio removal and non-rigid replacement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FreeSonic achieves a superior balance by providing a high-fidelity and efficient solution for precise and consistent audio editing. Project and demos: https://free-sonic.github.io/

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

Honeypot Protocol

Authors:

arXiv:2604.13301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Trusted monitoring, the standard defense in AI control, is vulnerable to adaptive attacks, collusion, and strategic attack selection. All of these exploit the fact that monitoring is passive: it observes model behavior but never probes whether the model would behave differently under different perceived conditions. We introduce the honeypot protocol, which tests for context-dependent behavior by varying only the system prompt across three conditions (evaluation, synthetic deployment, explicit no-monitoring) while holding the task, environment, and scoring identical. We evaluate Claude Opus 4.6 in BashArena across all three conditions in both honest and attack modes. The model achieved 100% main task success and triggered zero side tasks uniformly across conditions, providing a baseline for future comparisons with stronger attack policies and additional models.

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

VigilFormer: Deformable Attention for Video Anomaly Detection with Causal Risk Inference

Authors:

Video anomaly detection in surveillance settings must balance detection accuracy against real-time throughput, a tension that existing methods address either through stronger feature extractors or more efficient architectures, but rarely both. We present VigilFormer, a unified framework that combines deformable spatio-temporal attention with causal temporal modeling to detect anomalies in untrimmed surveillance video. The proposed Deformable Spatio-Temporal Encoder (DSTE) attends to a sparse set of informative locations across frames, avoiding the quadratic cost of dense attention while retaining the ability to capture irregular motion patterns. A Causal Anomaly Classifier (CAC) applies dilated causal convolutions over snippet-level features and optimizes a contrastive multiple-instance learning objective that separates anomalous and normal representations without frame-level labels. To meet deployment constraints, an Adaptive Confidence Scheduler (ACS) dynamically skips low-information frames at inference time, reducing redundant computation in static scenes. Evaluated on UCF-Crime, ShanghaiTech, and CUHK Avenue, VigilFormer achieves AUC scores of 87.83%, 97.21%, and 89.74% respectively, at 41.5 FPS on a single GPU, outperforming recent weakly-supervised methods in both accuracy and speed.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

FlexLAM: Resolving the Bottleneck Trade-off in Latent Action Learning

arXiv:2606.19408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent actions provide a compact interface between action-free video and downstream decision-making, yet existing Latent Action Models (LAMs) force every transition through a fixed-capacity bottleneck. We identify a bottleneck trade-off: overly tight codes can discard transition cues needed for action alignment, while overly loose codes preserve additional transition variation that must be resolved when alignment labels are scarce or narrowly distributed. FlexLAM replaces this fixed capacity with variable-length latent actions trained by nested dropout, yielding prefix-valid codes that capture compact transition structure first and add detail only when needed, without new architectures or losses. A single FlexLAM matches or surpasses separately trained fixed-capacity LAMs at every evaluated token budget under standard scarce-label supervision and under a low-return single-task alignment stress test, indicating that FlexLAM is not merely adjustable at inference time but learns a better latent-action interface at the same token budgets. The same model supports inference-time token-budget adjustment without retraining, and FlexLAM improves Ego4D transition reconstruction. These results suggest that variable-length latent actions are an architecture-free, drop-in upgrade to the fixed-capacity bottleneck in latent action models, latent-action world models, and video-pretrained action interfaces.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Token Factory: Efficiently Integrating Diverse Signals into Large Recommendation Models

arXiv:2606.19635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Recommendation Models (LRMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in industry-scale recommendation tasks. However, holistically integrating traditional signals into these transformer-based architectures effectively and efficiently remains a major challenge. Conventional approaches that "textualize" these signals directly or create discrete item representations often lead to excessively long prompts, substantial memory footprints, and high computational overhead. To overcome these limitations, we propose "Token Factory", a framework designed to transform traditional signals into "soft tokens" that can be directly processed by LRMs. This approach enables efficient integration and compression of heterogeneous input features, preventing prompt length explosion while enhancing model performance. We detail the architecture of Token Factory and present experimental results validating its effectiveness in a production-scale recommendation environment.

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

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Can In-Context Learning Support Intrinsic Curiosity?

arXiv:2606.19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect. While large sequence models have revolutionized data modeling, the problem of automated data selection, or "intrinsic curiosity", remains a significant challenge. Classic approaches incentivize exploration by rewarding an agent based on its "learning progress", which measures how much a newly acquired observation improves a world model's predictive ability. However, evaluating these rewards traditionally requires expensive inner loops of gradient descent updates within each trajectory, rendering them computationally impractical at scale. In this work, we investigate whether the emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of sequence models can eliminate this bottleneck by serving as immediate, update-free world models. Specifically, we evaluate whether an exploration policy can be trained to maximize learning progress, using solely the prediction errors and counterfactual context manipulations of an in-context learner. We first prove that in general Markov decision processes, this is in fact impossible in an unbiased way: the resulting intrinsic rewards either suffer from nuisance terms that bias their estimation of true learning progress, or they cannot be implemented using an in-context learner's prediction errors. Conversely, we prove a positive result for a broad subclass of non-temporal settings, encompassing active learning and Bayesian Experimental Design: here, ICL-derived rewards successfully bound and asymptotically converge to the true learning progress. We corroborate our theory with controlled experiments across continuous and symbolic environments, demonstrating that our ICL-driven framework successfully trains curious data-collection policies that explore optimally.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Confidence Calibration for Multimodal LLMs: An Empirical Study through Medical VQA

arXiv:2606.19950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) show great potential in medical tasks, but their elicited confidence often misaligns with actual accuracy, potentially leading to misdiagnosis or overlooking correct advice. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of the relationship between accuracy and confidence in medical MLLMs. It proposes a novel method that combines Multi-Strategy Fusion-Based Interrogation (MS-FBI) with auxiliary expert LLM assessment, aiming to improve confidence calibration in Medical Visual Question Answering (VQA). Experiments demonstrate that our method reduces the Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by an average of 40\% across three Medical VQA datasets, significantly enhancing MLLMs' reliability. The findings highlight the importance of domain-specific calibration for MLLMs in healthcare, offering a more trustworthy solution for AI-assisted diagnosis.

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

Bridging the Morphology Gap: Adapting VLA Models to Dexterous Manipulation via Intent-Conditioned Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2606.12109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization in robotic manipulation, yet the vast majority of pre-trained pipelines remain strictly confined to low-DoF parallel grippers. Adapting these rich semantic priors to high-DoF dexterous hands introduces a severe morphology gap, direct end-to-end joint fine-tuning inherently causes catastrophic forgetting of spatial reasoning and acute action manifold collapse due to data scarcity. In this paper, we present InDex, a novel, data-efficient adaptation framework rooted in cross-morphology semantic inheritance. Rather than discarding the pre-trained 1-DoF parallel grasp output, we repurpose it as a continuous, macroscopic virtual grasp intent proxy to sequentialize the control topology. We implement a two-stage decoupled learning architecture: the first stage parameter-efficiently aligns the VLA backbone to predict continuous arm trajectories and the scalar grasp intent; the second stage freezes this spatial backbone and leverages an intent-conditioned denoising diffusion head to decode fine-grained joint articulations for multi-fingered end-effectors. Extensive simulation benchmarks across a suite of multi-stage, contact-rich dexterous manipulation tasks demonstrate that InDex effectively masters intricate skills with minimal demonstration data, substantially outperforming monolithic baselines while preserving the robust spatial generalizability of the original VLA prior.

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

Graph Learning Should Move Beyond Restrictive Views of Spectral and Message-Passing GNNs

arXiv:2602.10031v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Graph neural networks (GNNs) are commonly divided into message-passing neural networks (MPNNs) and spectral GNNs, reflecting two largely separate research traditions in machine learning and signal processing. While MPNNs have a precise definition, there is no widely accepted criterion for what makes a mapping a spectral GNN. Most existing work restricts spectral GNNs to layered architectures based on linear spectral filters. Under this restriction, we show that spectral and spatial GNNs have largely equivalent expressive power. To promote progress in the field, we propose a precise definition of spectral GNNs based on eigenbasis symmetries, in contrast to the definition of MPNNs via neighborhood permutation symmetries. We further argue that the two perspectives offer complementary strengths. MPNNs provide a natural language for discrete structure and expressivity analysis through tools from logic and graph isomorphism, while the spectral perspective offers principled tools for understanding smoothing, bottlenecks, stability, and community structure. Overall, we argue that progress in graph learning will be accelerated by clarifying the similarities and differences between these perspectives and by moving toward a unified theoretical framework.

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

MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.

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

Strategic PAC Learnability via Geometric Definability

arXiv:2605.13426v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Strategic classification studies learning settings in which individuals can modify their features, at a cost, in order to influence the classifier's decision. A central question is how the sample complexity of the induced (strategic) hypothesis class depends on the complexities of the underlying hypothesis class and the cost structure governing feasible manipulations. Prior work has shown that in several natural settings, such as linear classifiers with norm costs, the induced complexity can be controlled. We begin by showing that such guarantees fail in general - even in simple cases: there exist hypothesis classes of VC dimension $1$ on the real line such that, even under the simplest interval neighborhoods, the induced class has infinite VC dimension. Thus, strategic behavior can turn an easy learning problem into a non-learnable one. To overcome this, we introduce structure via a geometric definability assumption: both the hypothesis class and the cost-induced neighborhood relation can be defined by first-order formulas over $\mathbb{R}_{\mathtt{exp}}$. Intuitively, this means that hypotheses and costs can be described using arithmetic operations, exponentiation, logarithms, and comparisons. This captures a broad range of natural classes and cost functions, including $\ell_p$ distances, Wasserstein distance, and information-theoretic divergences. Under this assumption, we prove that learnability is preserved, with sample complexity controlled by the complexity of the defining formulas.

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

Momentum LMS Theory beyond Stationarity: Stability, Tracking, and Regret

arXiv:2602.11995v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In large-scale data processing scenarios, data often arrive in sequential streams generated by complex systems that exhibit drifting distributions and time-varying system parameters. This nonstationarity challenges theoretical analysis, as it violates classical assumptions of i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) samples, necessitating algorithms capable of real-time updates without expensive retraining. An effective approach should process each sample in a single pass, while maintaining computational and memory complexities independent of the data stream length. Motivated by these challenges, this paper investigates the Momentum Least Mean Squares (MLMS) algorithm as an adaptive identification tool, leveraging its computational simplicity and online processing capabilities. Theoretically, we derive tracking performance and regret bounds for the MLMS in time-varying stochastic linear systems under various practical conditions. Unlike classical LMS, whose stability can be characterized by first-order random vector difference equations, MLMS introduces an additional dynamical state due to momentum, leading to second-order time-varying random vector difference equations whose stability analysis hinges on more complicated products of random matrices, which poses a substantially challenging problem to resolve. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data streams demonstrate that MLMS achieves rapid adaptation and robust tracking, in agreement with our theoretical results especially in nonstationary settings, highlighting its promise for modern streaming and online learning applications.

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

Evaluating Pluralism in LLMs through Latent Perspectives

The growing need to represent diverse perspectives has increased interest in pluralistic LLM generation. Although difficult to operationalize, identifying perspectives expressed in text would provide clear guidance on pluralistic alignment and more clearly articulate the pluralistic gap in LLM generation. While models have been shown to reduce the diversity of training data and generate homogeneously, this has been demonstrated primarily on multiple-choice questionnaires or using high-level characteristics of free-form text. In this paper, we introduce and implement a domain-agnostic multi-layered framework for unsupervised extraction of perspectives suitable for identifying the pluralistic gap in LLM-generated text. We evaluate our framework on book reviews, a highly opinionated dataset representing diverse perspectives, and compare various prompts and models. Our results show that while some models and prompting techniques come close to covering a broad spectrum of perspectives, rarer perspectives remain disproportionately underrepresented, resulting in distributions that diverge from human text.

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

ELVA: Exploring Ranking-Driven Universal Multimodal Retrieval

arXiv:2606.20280v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) via contrastive learning has become a mainstream paradigm for improving the performance of Universal Multimodal Retrieval (UMR). However, previous works have ignored the grain blindness when adapting the contrastive paradigm into retrieval tasks. Grain blindness refers to the tendency of the model to overlook grain-level information contained in the query, which is crucial for effectively handling complex queries. This stems from contrastive learning treating samples as a binary classification (positive/negative), while ignoring the different information carried by each negative sample. To address this, we argue that negatives should be treated differently according to their similarity to the positive sample, enabling the model to learn distinct grain information from each negative. In this paper, we introduce a simple but effective framework, called ELVA, a novel rule-based RL framework that mitigates grain blindness through ranking-driven MLLMs. 1) Instead of relying on reward models, we extend Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to retrieval tasks, allowing the model to explore new ranking behaviors without explicit ranking labels. 2) By utilizing rule-based rewards, our approach jointly optimizes the ranking of negative samples while enlarging the similarity gap between positive and negative. To more precisely measure grain blindness, we further introduce MRBench, a new benchmark specifically designed for multi-grain query scenarios. ELVA achieves state-of-the-art results across standard retrieval benchmarks, and its notable 13.1% improvement on MRBench further demonstrates its effectiveness in alleviating grain blindness.

16.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesis

by Dominic K. Devlin, Austen R. D. Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we ask how this reproducibility is achieved by evolving complex morphologies in a multi-scale, computational model. Each morphology consists of a population of cells on a two-dimensional grid using the Cellular Potts Model framework. Each cell contains a genome that encodes a gene regulatory network, morphogens for cell-cell signalling, and proteins that determine cell behaviours. By repeatedly simulating our model with different initial conditions under selection for shape complexity, we obtained a “zoo” of evolved morphologies. We find that these evolved, complex morphologies are reproducible in a sizeable fraction of simulations, despite no direct selection for reproducibility. We show that high reproducibility is caused by spatially segregating moving cells that “shape” morphologies from stationary cells that “maintain” morphologies during morphogenesis. Strikingly, most highly reproducible morphologies also evolved cell differentiation, where proliferative, moving progenitor cells irreversibly differentiate into non-dividing, stationary differentiated cells at tissue boundaries. These results suggest that cell differentiation observed in natural development plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis in addition to the production of specialised cell types. This previously unrecognised role of cell differentiation has major implications for our understanding of how morphologies are generated and regenerated.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

arXiv:2604.05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive, and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost-performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embeddings to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases.

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

Entropy Estimation in Multi-Qutrit Systems via Variational and Classical Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a systematic study of von Neumann entropy estimation in multi-qutrit quantum systems using two complementary approaches: variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) and classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs), evaluated using an ideal (noise-free) quantum simulator. For systems up to three qutrits, we construct and evaluate 11 hardware-efficient SU(3)-inspired ansatzes. A parameter sweep shows that estimation accuracy is primarily determined by the number of trainable parameters, provided sufficient entanglement is present. Based on this study, we fix the parameter count to approximately 120 for subsequent experiments, observing that increasing entangling-gate counts beyond a threshold yields only marginal improvements. For larger systems (two to five qutrits), we use a CNN trained on measurement outcomes from tensor-product mutually unbiased bases. The model achieves accurate and stable predictions and exhibits a systematic improvement in performance with system size, with the highest errors for two-qutrit systems and the lowest for five-qutrit systems. Notably, using only 12.5% of the measurements required for full state tomography is sufficient to reach 90th-percentile absolute errors of approximately 0.13-0.16 nats for both four- and five-qutrit systems. The CNN model is also robust to shot noise and generalizes well to out-of-distribution states. Overall, within the simulated settings studied here, our results indicate a transition in practical methods: VQAs are effective for small systems, while CNN-based estimators offer improved scalability and robustness for larger qutrit systems.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Grammar of the Wave: Towards Explainable Multivariate Time Series Event Detection via Neuro-Symbolic VLM Agents

arXiv:2603.11479v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time Series Event Detection (TSED) aims to localize semantically meaningful events in time series data, with critical applications in high-stakes domains. Unlike statistical anomalies, events are often defined by natural-language descriptions with internal temporal-logic structures across multiple physical channels. However, in real-world settings, dense event annotations are expensive to obtain, making purely supervised learning difficult. We introduce Language-guided TSED, a setting where a model is given textual event descriptions and must ground them to intervals in multivariate signals with little or no labeled data. To address this problem, we propose Event Logic Tree (ELT), a knowledge representation framework that converts linguistic descriptions into structured temporal logic over signal primitives. Building on ELT, we present SELA, a neuro-symbolic VLM agent framework that iteratively grounds primitives from signal visualizations and composes them under ELT constraints, producing both event intervals and faithful tree-structured explanations. We further release a real-world benchmark across energy and climate domains with expert knowledge and annotations. Experiments show that SELA improves over supervised fine-tuning and existing zero/few-shot time series reasoning baselines.

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

Comparing Commercial Depth Sensor Accuracy for Medical Applications

Depth estimation has numerous medical and surgical applications. We benchmark four depth sensors on a porcine bone specimen, a porcine belly specimen, and a silicone kidney phantom using stylus-sampled references. These objects contain several real-world challenges, including homogeneous surfaces, specular surfaces, and subsurface scattering. The comparison includes stereo, structured-light, and time-of-flight sensors at a distance of approximately 50 cm. Specifically, the Intel RealSense D405 (Intel RealSense, United States), PMD Flexx2 (pmdtechnologies, Germany), Stereolabs ZED 2i (Stereolabs, France), and Zivid 2M+ 60 (Zivid, Norway) are compared. The Zivid 2M+ 60 performed best across all objects and metrics considered in this work. The ZED ranked second for real tissue, but last on the phantom.

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

Illumination-Robust Camera-Based Heart-Rate Estimation for Physiological Sensing in Robots

Physiological awareness is important for service, social, and assistive robots that interact with humans in everyday environments. Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) enables non-contact heart-rate (HR) estimation from an RGB camera, making it a promising sensing modality for robot-mounted vision systems. However, illumination variation remains a major barrier to robust deployment. This paper presents an end-to-end spatial-temporal transformer framework for remote HR estimation on a new dataset with varied illumination. Our estimator integrates PRNet-based 3D face alignment, clip-level illumination augmentation, the Residual Temporal Standardization Module, and controlled hybrid temporal-frequency supervision. The training objective combines a Soft-Shifted Pearson waveform loss with a spectral Kullback-Leibler divergence loss, where a tuned weight ($\mathbf{\beta}$) controls the contribution of frequency-domain heart-rate guidance. Experiments on a static all-level mix protocol covering three illumination levels show that $\mathbf{\beta}=5$ provides the strongest result among the tested beta settings, achieving a best-run HR mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.79 bpm and an HR correlation of 0.982. Compared with the PhysFormer baseline evaluated on our dataset, our estimator reduces HR MAE by 93.6 %, while increasing HR correlation from 0.088 to 0.982, making it usable when illumination varies.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Chatbot to Digital Colleague: The Paradigm Shift Toward Persistent Autonomous AI

arXiv:2606.14502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are undergoing a fundamental transformation from conversational generators into integrated AI systems capable of reasoning, action, memory, and self-improvement. We conceptualize this transition as a shift from Chatbot to Digital Colleague: from conversational answers to persistent work. We organize this transition along two tightly coupled dimensions. First, at the cognitive core level, LLMs are advancing from Chatbot-era "fast thinking" systems driven by next-token prediction toward Thinking LLMs that leverage inference-time computation, Chain-of-Thought reasoning, reflection, process supervision, and reinforcement learning to support more deliberate and reliable cognition. Second, at the tool-augmented task execution level, LLMs are progressing from tool-calling Agents that invoke external resources in an ad hoc manner toward OpenClaw-style workstation systems (OpenClaw) equipped with persistent Workspaces, skills, verification loops, and governance. The "Workspace + Skill" paradigm makes episodic tool use colleague-like via state persistence, reusable procedures, task closure, and experience reuse. We examine data construction shifts from instruction-response pairs to State-Action-Observation trajectories and evaluation from static benchmarks to sandboxed, auditable, self-evolving AI ecosystems.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

ContinuumCellAgent: A Framework-Guided Agent for Long-Horizon Scientific Research

AI-scientist systems are beginning to automate parts of scientific research. We present ContinuumCellAgent, an autonomous agent that executes literature review, hypothesis formation, computational experimentation, manuscript drafting, and adversarial peer review as a single unattended run. Existing AI scientist systems remain difficult to diagnose because they lack modularity, systematic prompt grounding, and observability into long-running behavior. ContinuumCellAgent addresses these gaps with a modular supernode architecture for stage-wise backend swapping, protocols grounded in curated research-method checklists that also define reviewer rubrics, and a diagnostics layer that records file-based artifacts, message traces, and state transitions. We evaluate the system on open-domain QA benchmarks and biomedical/longevity case studies, showing that it can produce checkable research artifacts while exposing pipeline dynamics for rigorous AI co-scientist research.

24.
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.

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

Direct/adaptive-mixture phase-gradient learning for neural-network quantum states with complex phase structure

arXiv:2606.13912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural-network quantum states (NQS) are a leading variational tool for quantum many-body physics, yet their optimization is fragile whenever the ground state carries a non-trivial sign or complex phase structure, a situation generic to gauge fields, broken time-reversal symmetry, and fermionic statistics. We trace this fragility to the stochastic estimator of the phase gradient rather than to network expressiveness. The phase sector of the Monte Carlo energy gradient is a noisy score-function estimator; differentiating the local energy instead yields a direct estimator that is unbiased for the same phase force, has far lower variance, and requires only a separated amplitude–phase ansatz. Demonstrated on a 100-site flux ladder, a small network trained this way reaches $0.89\%$ median error, where tuned standard baselines plateau at $1.8\%$ and wider or deeper standard-gradient networks degrade from $8.4\%$ to $24.6\%$. The advantage carries over to chiral XXX chains: the direct estimator again converges to a markedly lower error than the standard one, across $\alpha$ and size; it grows with flux and vanishes in zero-flux controls. An adaptive-mixture of the two estimators is provably never worse in variance than the better endpoint at the optimal mixing coefficient, with seed-resolved diagnostics tracing much of the gain to eliminating failed runs. Estimator design thus emerges as a first-class lever for complex-valued neural quantum states.