Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:069862f3d761b178dc6280137b3fcb3e

These ‘master’ proteins protect us from deadly mutations — and could inspire new drugs

Authors:

Philip Ball↗

Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it. Biology has clever ways to mask the effects of potentially harmful gene mutations. Scientists are investigating how this ‘buffering’ works — and how to exploit it.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2511.14427

Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Rickmer Krohn↗Vignesh Prasad↗Gabriele Tiboni↗Georgia Chalvatzaki↗

arXiv:2511.14427v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective contact-rich manipulation requires robots to synergistically leverage vision, force, and proprioception. However, Reinforcement Learning agents struggle to learn in such multisensory settings, especially amidst sensory noise and dynamic changes. We propose MultiSensory Dynamic Pretraining (MSDP), a novel framework for learning expressive multisensory representations tailored for task-oriented policy learning. MSDP is based on masked autoencoding and trains a transformer-based encoder by reconstructing multisensory observations from only a subset of sensor embeddings, leading to cross-modal prediction and sensor fusion. For downstream policy learning, we introduce a novel asymmetric architecture, where a cross-attention mechanism allows the critic to extract dynamic, task-specific features from the frozen embeddings, while the actor receives a stable pooled representation to guide its actions. Our method demonstrates accelerated learning and robust performance under diverse perturbations, including sensor noise, and changes in object dynamics. Evaluations in multiple challenging, contact-rich robot manipulation tasks in simulation and the real world showcase the effectiveness of MSDP. Our approach exhibits strong robustness to perturbations and achieves high success rates on the real robot with as few as 6,000 online interactions, offering a simple yet powerful solution for complex multisensory robotic control. Website: https://msdp-pearl.github.io/

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03.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2512.19413

Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume: Complementary Scalable Benchmarks for Quantum Computers

Authors:

Attila Portik↗Orsolya K\'alm\'an↗Thomas Monz↗Zolt\'an Zimbor\'as↗

arXiv:2512.19413v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing advances toward the late-NISQ and early fault-tolerant eras, scalable and platform-independent benchmarks are essential for quantifying computational capacity in a classically verifiable manner. We introduce two volumetric benchmarks, Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume, that assess quantum hardware by testing the execution of random Clifford and free fermion operations. These two groups of unitaries possess a combination of properties that make them ideal for benchmarking: (i) each is individually efficient to simulate classically, enabling verification at scale; (ii) together they form a universal gate set; (iii) they serve as essential algorithmic primitives in practical applications (including shadow tomography and quantum chemistry); and (iv) their definitions are formulated abstractly, without explicit reference to hardware-specific features such as qubit connectivity or native gate sets. This framework thus enables scalable and fair cross-platform comparisons and tracks meaningful computational advancement. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of these benchmarks through extensive numerical simulations across realistic noise parameters and through experimental validation on Quantinuum's H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer, which achieves a Clifford Volume of 34.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.26557

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

Authors:

Joris K\"oster↗Zixuan Liu↗Siavash Khajavi↗Zizhan Zheng↗

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.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12852

WISE: A Long-Horizon Agent in Minecraft with Why-Which Reasoning

Authors:

Renmin Cheng↗Changhao Chen↗

arXiv:2606.12852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is not only the lack of episodic memory, but also the decoupling of what-where-when memory from which-why reasoning. To address this, we propose WISE (Which-Why Informed Semantic Explorer), a long-horizon agent framework with an enhanced low-level controller equipped with a Causal Event Graph that augments episodic memory with explicit causal structure linking observations to task relevance. Unlike prior work such as MrSteve, which relies on feature similarity for retrieval, WISE enables robust recall under viewpoint changes and supports opportunistic task reordering through causal reasoning. Building on this memory, we propose an Opportunistic Task Scheduler that dynamically re-prioritizes subtasks when causally relevant opportunities are detected. We further equip WISE with a multi-scale progressive exploration strategy to provide spatially comprehensive observations for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that WISE largely improves task success and efficiency on long-horizon sparse tasks, particularly in settings requiring adaptive decision-making.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16710

Misinformation Propagation in Benign Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:

Jonas Becker↗Jan Philip Wahle↗Terry Ruas↗Bela Gipp↗

Multi-agent systems, in which multiple large language model agents solve problems through turn-based interaction, are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as medical diagnosis, legal analysis, and forensic decision-making. Their reliability can be at risk when single agents reason from incorrect or misleading context, e.g., from tool calls, since errors may propagate through agent interactions. This work studies this risk by injecting intent-based misinformation into benign single-agent and multi-agent systems across reasoning, knowledge, and alignment tasks. We find that misinformation can degrade single-agent performance and persists across multi-agent debate, with agents often retaining answers introduced by misinformed peers. Nevertheless, multi-agent debate reduces the resulting performance degradation compared to single-agent prompting, especially when most agents are not exposed to misinformation. Robustness depends on group composition and decision protocol. Consensus can be more stable than voting under peer pressure, while majorities can often steer misinformed agents back toward correct answers. Our results show that misinformation robustness in multi-agent systems depends on the underlying model and also on how agents exchange information and aggregate decisions.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2405.03063

Stability of a Generalized Debiased Lasso with Applications to Resampling-Based Variable Selection

Authors:

Jingbo Liu↗

arXiv:2405.03063v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a generalized debiased Lasso estimator based on a stability principle. When a single column of the design matrix is perturbed, the estimator admits a simple update formula that can be computed from the original solution. Under sub-Gaussian designs with well-conditioned covariance, this approximation is asymptotically accurate for all but a vanishing fraction of coordinates in the proportional growth regime. The proof relies on concentration and anti-concentration arguments to control error terms and sign changes. In contrast, establishing comparable distributional limits (e.g., Gaussianity) under similar assumptions remains open. As an application, we show that the approximation significantly reduces the computational cost of resampling-based variable selection procedures, including the conditional randomization test and a local knockoff filter.

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08.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17956

Fabless Quantum Chip Design and Commercial Production

Authors:

Cai↗Ling Qiao↗Bin Yang↗Fumin Luo↗WeiGui Guo↗GuoRong Zhang↗XueFei Liu↗Qinglang Guo↗Bin Wu↗

arXiv:2606.17956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a fabless quantum-chip design and production architecture for superconducting quantum computing, centered on the SPICE-Q multiphysics simulation framework. The proposed ecosystem connects process-certified quantum PDKs, parameterized device cells, traceable model cards, SPICE-Q physical modeling languages, unified Q-EDA flows, foundry sign-off rules, cryogenic test feedback, and reusable quantum IP. In this model, design firms do not merely outsource fabrication; they prepare verified tape-outs under standardized process constraints and calibrated physical models. Its economic value lies in reducing repetitive device debugging, process exploration, and low-level layout effort, while its feasibility depends on PDK maturity, foundry yield, cryogenic test throughput, model-prediction accuracy, data-feedback mechanisms, and IP licensing boundaries. We argue that superconducting quantum chips can move from the current largely vertically integrated development model toward a fabless-foundry ecosystem only when hardware design is supported by standardized, verifiable, and reusable software and process interfaces. The required pillars are certified PDKs, PCell-based parameterized design, SPICE-Q cross-physics simulation, end-to-end Q-EDA automation, and a tradable quantum-IP market. By adapting lessons from the classical semiconductor industry to quantum hardware, this framework defines a path toward scalable, manufacturable, and commercially reusable superconducting quantum-chip design.

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09.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:00e9390c6acfc58469a0d7038322c59e

Social networks and their association with quality of life among older adults in rural Burkina Faso

Authors:

Welgama↗Goodman-Palmer↗Harling↗G. P↗Agyapong-Badu↗Greig↗Inghels↗Witham↗Ouermi↗Coulibaly↗HIrschhorn↗L. R↗…

Objective: This study aimed to identify the types of social networks present among older adults in a rural, low-income country setting and describe their association with quality of life (QoL). Methods: A population-representative, cross-sectional survey was conducted in 60 villages around Nouna in Burkina Faso from July to August 2021. Data were collected from resident adults aged 40 years and older. Variables captured were sociodemographic status; social network characteristics (using the Practitioner Assessment of Network Typology (PANT)); quality of life (using the EuroHIS-8 tool); presence of non-communicable diseases, mental health conditions, and disability. Additionally, social networks were broadly categorised as aggregated integrated and aggregated less-integrated groups. Social network types and the groups were described separately, and a multivariable linear regression model was used to understand the association between social network types and QoL, adjusted for sociodemographic and morbidity factors. Results: Among the 2390 respondents, median age was 55 yrs (IQR: 47-64 yrs) and 55.8% were female. Locally Integrated (35.4%) or Family Dependent (30.3%) were the most common PANT social network types, followed by a mixed group (having characteristics of two or more social network types) (30.5%). Private Restricted (2.1%), Locally Self-Contained (1.2%), and Wider Community-Focussed (0.4%) types were uncommon. Adults with aggregated integrated network groups (36.1%) and aggregated less-integrated group (36.0%) were near equal, while others were non-aggregable. Although Wider Community-Focused type showed a significantly better QoL ({beta}= 8.69, 95%CI: 4.10 to 13.27), the association between social networks and QoL were subdued when controlled for morbidity factors, and hence no significant associations were observed between other types or the aggregated groups. Conclusion: Although having integrated social networks lead to a better QoL, morbidity has a greater effect on the QoL among older adults in Nouna and hence, investing more on improving the physical and mental health needs appears more beneficial.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2507.15453

Entanglement preservation and Clauser-Horne nonlocality in electromagnetically induced transparency quantum memories

Authors:

Po-Han Tseng↗Yong-Fan Chen↗

arXiv:2507.15453v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement preservation in noisy quantum memories represents a central challenge in quantum information science. While experiments have shown that electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) memories can store entangled photons, a quantitative theoretical analysis of whether nonlocal quantum correlations can survive storage loss induced by ground-state decoherence remains limited. Here we combine the dark-state polariton formalism with a reduced density-operator treatment to derive an EIT-specific effective pure-loss description for the retrieved photonic state in the ground-state-decoherence-limited regime. The analysis reveals that decoherence transforms an initially pure Bell state into a mixed state with a vacuum component and predicts a protocol-dependent storage-efficiency benchmark of 89.7% for violating the chosen unconditional Clauser-Horne (CH) inequality. Above this benchmark, the retrieved photonic state violates the CH inequality without post-selection, whereas below it, this unconditional CH violation is no longer obtained. This framework provides a quantitative theoretical description of entanglement retention, retrieved photonic density operators, and protocol-dependent Bell-test benchmarks in EIT quantum memories.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18236

Sign-Rank, Index, and List Replicability: Connections and Separations

Authors:

Ari Blondal↗Hamed Hatami↗Pooya Hatami↗Chavdar Lalov↗Sivan Tretiak↗

arXiv:2606.18236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In learning theory, the sign rank of a binary concept class captures the smallest dimension in which it can be represented by points and halfspaces. Despite tremendous interest, lower bounds on sign rank are notoriously difficult to come by. Two recent approaches to the problem establish lower bounds on sign rank by measures that are easier to analyze: the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index and the list replicability number. We order these measures, showing that the $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index is upper-bounded by a linear function of the list replicability number. As a main consequence, we obtain a strong separation between sign rank and $\mathbb{Z}_2$-index, thereby resolving a question of Frick, Hosseini, and Vasileuski. This motivates a thorough study of list replicability, the stronger of the two lower-bounding measures. We establish upper bounds on the list replicability number by two combinatorial measures: height and minimum star number. We also prove a fundamental composition result, showing that the product of two concept classes has list replicability number bounded by the sum of the list replicability numbers of the two classes.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13977

Creative Integration: A Decidable Criterion of Creativity

Authors:

Yoshinori Nomura↗

"Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration – one that makes the world cheaper to describe – from a tidy re-description. Building on the lineage that treats creativity and intelligence as compression, we give such a criterion for creative integration (CI): the resolution of a real conflict between A and B is CI if and only if, under a fixed description language, the description length strictly shrinks (C = L_pre/L_post > 1), with the reduction located in the conflict itself. We make the judgment decidable through four binary, conjunctive gates, and we fix its extension through a taxonomy of pseudo-integration that names and rejects the look-alikes. We back the criterion with a curated, multi-domain corpus and – crucially – validate it not by human inter-rater agreement but by four falsifiable tests it could fail: an independent computational check, discrimination against hard negatives, out-of-sample prediction, and description-language robustness; all pass with margin. The contribution is not "creativity is compression" but its decidability, discrimination, and corpus: on this account, what makes a move genuinely creative – rather than merely novel – is that it compresses a conflict, with novelty and value as downstream symptoms; whether all creativity is so constituted we state as an explicit conjecture. We claim only the sign of C-1; we judge, not generate. The result is a citable primitive for a broader program.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2510.21978

Beyond Reasoning Gains: Mitigating General-Capability Forgetting in Large Reasoning Models

Authors:

Hoang Phan↗Xianjun Yang↗Yuanshun Yao↗Jingyu Zhang↗Shengjie Bi↗Xiaocheng Tang↗Madian Khabsa↗Lijuan Liu↗Deren Lei↗

arXiv:2510.21978v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has delivered impressive gains in mathematical and multimodal reasoning and has become a standard post-training paradigm for contemporary language and vision-language models. However, the RLVR recipe introduces a significant risk of capability regression, in which models forget foundational skills after prolonged training without employing regularization strategies. We empirically confirm this concern, observing that open-source reasoning models suffer performance degradation on core capabilities such as perception and faithfulness. While imposing regularization terms like KL divergence can help prevent deviation from the base model, these terms are computed on the current task and therefore do not guarantee preservation of broader knowledge. Meanwhile, commonly used experience replay across heterogeneous domains makes it nontrivial to decide how much training emphasis each objective should receive. To address this, we propose RECAP-a replay strategy with dynamic objective reweighting for general knowledge preservation. Our reweighting mechanism adapts online using short-horizon signals of convergence and instability, shifting the post-training focus away from saturated objectives and toward underperforming or volatile ones. Our method is end-to-end and readily applicable to existing RLVR pipelines without training additional models or heavy tuning. Extensive experiments on benchmarks using Qwen2.5-VL-3B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, which not only preserves general capabilities but also improves reasoning by enabling more flexible trade-offs among in-task rewards.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12882

HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness

Authors:

Xiaoxuan Wang↗Haixin Wang↗Alexander Taylor↗Jason Cong↗Yizhou Sun↗Wei Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent–environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness can be generated by a learnable plug-in module that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness controller that parameterizes the agent–environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench~2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models.

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15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23754

Verifiable Foundation Models for Robot Safety

Authors:

Davide Corsi↗Kyungmin Kim↗Roy Fox↗

arXiv:2606.23754v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying foundation models for robot control raises a central challenge: the expressive power that enables rich, multimodal perception also makes these models opaque and difficult to analyze formally, rendering them intractable for existing verification tools. In this paper, we present FEARL (Foundation-Enabled Assured Robot Learning), a framework that addresses this tension through a modular architectural decomposition. FEARL separates the policy into a large Controller (C) responsible for high-dimensional perception and task reasoning, and a small Safety module (S) that receives low-dimensional observations from dedicated safety sensors together with a bounded context embedding from C and produces the final action. Since many robot safety requirements, such as collision avoidance and workspace boundary constraints, can be expressed over these safety sensor observations, formal verification can be applied to S rather than to the full foundation-model backbone. This makes formal analysis tractable with existing tools while preserving the Controller's expressive power for task reasoning. To show that the decomposed policy remains capable of solving diverse tasks, we evaluate FEARL on three simulated robotic domains using multiple Controller backbones and training procedures, including pretrained off-the-shelf vision-language-action models. We further transfer the learned policy from one of our simulated tasks to a physical robot, suggesting that the low-dimensional safety interface supports practical sim-to-real transfer.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18273

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Authors:

Gyojin Han↗Dong-Jae Lee↗Changho Choi↗Jongsuk Kim↗Junmo Kim↗

Large audio language models (LALMs) have shown impressive capabilities on diverse audio understanding tasks, ranging from speech transcription to music analysis. However, because LALMs are typically trained to produce text-aligned responses, their hidden states are progressively shaped for text generation rather than for preserving acoustic information. As a result, the diverse acoustic content that audio carries, such as phonetic detail, prosody, sound events, affect, and pitch, is lost along the way and difficult to leverage in the response. We introduce Continuous Audio Thinking (CoAT), a framework that equips audio language models with a continuous latent workspace for organizing acoustic information prior to response generation, grounded by distillation from audio experts. Within the thinking space, the model can utilize the rich acoustic information provided by expert distillation when generating its response. Furthermore, the proposed continuous thinking block can be processed in a single prefill, so CoAT does not require additional autoregressive decoding cost over the baseline. Across three LALMs, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Audio Flamingo~3, performance gains on a broad benchmark suite spanning audio reasoning, audio understanding, music classification, speech emotion, and speech transcription demonstrate the effectiveness of CoAT. Further analysis confirms that the auxiliary supervision propagates from the thinking positions to the model's textual responses.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20556

Thinking in Boxes: 3D Editing in Real Images Made Easy

Authors:

Pradhaan S Bhat↗Naveen Chandra R↗Rishubh Parihar↗Vaibhav Vavilala↗R. Venkatesh Babu↗D. A. Forsyth↗Anand Bhattad↗

Text and 2D-conditioning interfaces provide weak, ambiguous control over spatial transformations in image editing – particularly under large object motions and camera changes. Prior work has used 3D primitives such as boxes, but only as loose conditioning signals indicating approximate object location rather than specifying the transformation. We instead use 3D boxes as structured specifications: the user provides the input and output boxes of the edit, casting editing as a well-posed geometry problem. This ``thinking in boxes'' interface, where each box face is color-coded to convey 3D orientation, gives precise control over translation, rotation, scaling, and viewpoint changes in real images while preserving scene and object identity, and recovering previously unseen object regions. To ground transformations in scene appearance, we introduce a depth-aligned planar floor as a global reference frame, shaded with depth-aware cues. Conditioned on this structure, an image generator produces consistent results under large transformations. Trained in two stages – on synthetic multi-object scenes and a small set of real-world videos from Objectron – the system generalizes to complex, in-the-wild real images. Our method operates directly on real photographs and substantially outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods on large 3D edits.

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18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2601.21542

Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver for Accelerating Generative Modeling

Authors:

Hongxu Chen↗Hongxiang Li↗Zhen Wang↗Long Chen↗

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision ``anchors'' and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large interval sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256^2 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2509.00064

OpenTie: Open-vocabulary Sequential Rebar Tying System

Authors:

Sai Fan↗Mingze Liu↗Haozhen Li↗Haobo Liang↗Yixing Yuan↗Yanke Wang↗

Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackling complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on the collection of large amounts of data with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary rebar detection on the real-world test. We implement the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantee a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our proposed post-processing procedure for the image-to-point-cloud generation framework. Our pipeline requires no training efforts and outperforms the training-based object detection, i.e., YOLO-based method, with the verification on the real-world sequential rebar tying test. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and holds the potential application to the real construction site with possibility of commercialization.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2512.10244

Solving Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Learning from an Auto-Annotation Perspective

Authors:

Tian Liu↗Anwesha Basu↗James Caverlee↗Shu Kong↗

Semi-supervised few-shot learning (SSFSL) resembles real-world applications such as auto-annotation, as it aims to learn a model from a few labeled and abundant unlabeled task-specific examples to annotate the unlabeled ones. Despite the availability of powerful open-source Vision-Language Models (VLMs) and open-world data, existing SSFSL literature largely neglects these resources. In contrast, the related area few-shot learning (FSL) has already exploited them to boost performance. Arguably, to solve real-world auto-annotation, SSFSL should leverage such open resources. To bridge this gap, we explore established SSL methods to finetune a VLM. Unexpectedly, they significantly underperform FSL baselines that do not use unlabeled data. Our in-depth analysis reveals the root cause of failure: VLMs produce flat distributions of softmax probabilities, resulting in zero utilization of unlabeled data and weak supervision signals. To address this challenge, we propose an embarrassingly simple solution that uses temperatures to sharpen the softmax output, which not only increases the confidence scores of pseudo-labels to improve the utilization of unlabeled data, but also strengthens training supervision for effective finetuning. Furthermore, we exploit task-relevant open data, e.g., those retrieved from VLMs' publicly available pretraining set. To mitigate the imbalance and domain gaps in retrieved data, we employ a stage-wise training strategy. Building on the successful finetuning of VLMs and the exploitation of open data, we present a simple yet effective SSFSL method, Stage-Wise Finetuning with Temperatures (SWIFT). Across five benchmarks, SWIFT outperforms recent FSL and SSL methods by $\sim$5 accuracy points. SWIFT even rivals supervised learning, which finetunes a VLM assuming unlabeled data having ground-truth labels!

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21.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.05299

WavSLM: Single-Stream Speech Language Modeling via WavLM Distillation

Authors:

Luca Della Libera↗Cem Subakan↗Mirco Ravanelli↗

Large language models show that simple autoregressive training can yield scalable and coherent generation, but extending this paradigm to speech remains challenging due to the entanglement of semantic and acoustic information. Most existing speech language models rely on text supervision, hierarchical token streams, or complex hybrid architectures, departing from the single-stream generative pretraining paradigm that has proven effective in text. In this work, we introduce WavSLM, a speech language model trained by quantizing and distilling self-supervised WavLM representations into a single codebook and optimizing an autoregressive next-chunk prediction objective. WavSLM jointly models semantic and acoustic information within a single token stream without text supervision or text pretraining. Despite its simplicity, it achieves competitive performance on consistency benchmarks and speech generation while using fewer parameters, less training data, and supporting streaming inference.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16590

Infant Spontaneous Movement Noise Improves Exploration in Deep RL

Authors:

Francisco M. L\'opez↗Markus R. Ernst↗Francisco Cruz↗Matej Hoffmann↗and Jochen Triesch↗

arXiv:2606.16590v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Exploration in deep reinforcement learning (RL) is commonly implemented as temporally uncorrelated white noise. However, recent works show that temporally correlated colored noise can improve exploration efficiency by producing smooth trajectories with better coverage of the state space. We inquire whether action noise inspired by infant spontaneous movements can also improve exploration in deep RL. We find that the power spectral densities of babies' end-effector velocities follow a colored noise process where the spectral exponent increases with age. Inspired by this developmental pattern, we introduce a mechanism that progressively increases the temporal auto-correlation of exploration noise during RL training, matching the infant statistics. Experiments across several RL environments show that infant-inspired noise produces structured exploratory behavior and can improve learning efficiency compared to conventional exploration strategies. These findings suggest that human motor and cognitive development can provide useful guidance for designing learning mechanisms in artificial agents. Our code is available at https://github.com/trieschlab/baby-noise-rl.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2601.10774

Analytic Bijections for Smooth and Interpretable Normalizing Flows

Authors:

Mathis Gerdes↗Miranda C. N. Cheng↗

arXiv:2601.10774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A key challenge in normalizing flows is finding expressive invertible scalar bijections. Existing approaches face trade-offs: affine transformations are smooth and analytically invertible but lack expressivity; monotonic splines offer local control but are only piecewise smooth and act on bounded domains; residual flows achieve smoothness but need numerical inversion. We introduce three families of analytic bijections that are globally smooth ($C^\infty$), defined on all of $\mathbb{R}$, and analytically invertible in closed form, combining the favorable properties of prior approaches. Beyond serving as drop-in replacements in coupling flows, where they match or exceed spline performance, we develop radial flows: a novel architecture using direct parametrization that transforms the radial coordinate while preserving angular direction. Radial flows exhibit exceptional training stability, produce geometrically interpretable transformations, and on targets with radial structure can achieve comparable quality to coupling flows with $1000\times$ fewer parameters. We provide comprehensive evaluation on 1D and 2D benchmarks, and demonstrate applicability to higher-dimensional physics problems through experiments on $\phi^4$ lattice field theory, where our bijections outperform affine baselines and enable problem-specific designs that address mode collapse.

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24.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24190

Dynamical low-rank methods for the Wigner equation I: separable difference potential

Authors:

Sihong Shao↗Yuehan Shao↗

arXiv:2606.24190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in dynamical low-rank approximation (DLRA) have demonstrated its effectiveness in high-dimensional simulations. However, existing DLRA algorithms still face significant challenges when handling systems that involve complex collision terms, including the pseudo-differential operator ($\Psi$) in the Wigner equation, a representative operator characterized by nonlocality. It is deserving to carry out a series of works to develop the DLRA algorithms for solving the Wigner equation. As the first step in this series of works, we propose an efficient DLRA algorithm for the Wigner equation, using a separable decomposition of the difference potential. We combine this separable assumption with two often-used truncations of $\Psi$, namely $\mathcal{K}$-truncation and $\mathcal{Y}$-truncation, to obtain a kind of separated representation of $\Psi$. Complexity analysis and several challenging experiments, including harmonic oscillators, Gaussian barrier scattering, electron-electron scattering, and a Helium-like system, all of which satisfy the separable assumption, confirm that the proposed DLRA algorithm has significant advantages, achieving a reduction in computational effort by one to two orders of magnitude in both runtime and memory requirements compared to the full-grid approach. It is worth noting that, even in the absence of a predetermined low-rank structure for the solution, DLRA can still serve as a numerical scheme that balances efficiency and accuracy.

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25.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11432

Additive Noise, Shift Recovery, and Signed Signals in the Cumulative Distribution Transform

Authors:

Harbir Antil↗Ratna Khatri↗Aryan Saxena↗

arXiv:2606.11432v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The cumulative distribution transform (CDT) is a quantile-based transport representation that exactly linearizes one-dimensional translations of positive densities. We study how this structure behaves under additive perturbations and how it can be exploited for shift recovery. Under a local nondegeneracy condition, we derive a first-order expansion showing that additive noise in physical space induces a nonlocal perturbation in CDT space through the primitive of the noise, weighted by the reciprocal density. This yields an explicit description of transform-domain sensitivity and shows, in particular, that perturbations are amplified in low-density regions. When the physical-space perturbation is modeled as a centered Gaussian random field, the induced first-order CDT perturbation is again Gaussian, with an explicit covariance kernel. We then use this structure to study recovery in CDT coordinates. In the known-template setting, the transport shift is obtained by projection onto the constant mode, giving an explicit estimator together with exactness in the noiseless case and a stability bound under perturbations. In the unknown-template setting, multiple observations permit joint recovery of the shifts and a common template up to the natural constant-mode gauge, leading to a simple de-shift–and–average procedure. We also consider a signed-signal analogue based on the signed cumulative distribution transform (SCDT), where shifts are estimated numerically by feature matching and unknown templates are recovered by alternating alignment and averaging. Numerical experiments validate the perturbation analysis and illustrate effective recovery for both density-valued and signed signals.

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