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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HY-WU (Part I): An Extensible Functional Neural Memory Framework and An Instantiation in Text-Guided Image Editing

Foundation models are transitioning from offline predictors to deployed systems expected to operate over long time horizons. In real deployments, objectives are not fixed: domains drift, user preferences evolve, and new tasks appear after the model has shipped. This elevates continual learning and instant personalization from optional features to core architectural requirements. Yet most adaptation pipelines still follow a static weight paradigm: after training (or after any adaptation step), inference executes a single parameter vector regardless of user intent, domain, or instance-specific constraints. This treats the trained or adapted model as a single point in parameter space. In heterogeneous and continually evolving regimes, distinct objectives can induce separated feasible regions over parameters, forcing any single shared update into compromise, interference, or overspecialization. As a result, continual learning and personalization are often implemented as repeated overwriting of shared weights, risking degradation of previously learned behaviors. We propose HY-WU (Weight Unleashing), a memory-first adaptation framework that shifts adaptation pressure away from overwriting a single shared parameter point. HY-WU implements functional (operator-level) memory as a neural module: a generator that synthesizes weight updates on-the-fly from the instance condition, yielding instance-specific operators without test-time optimization.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Machine Learning for Biomedical Raman Spectroscopy: From Spectral Acquisition to Clinical Translation

arXiv:2606.14169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Raman spectroscopy provides label-free, chemically specific characterization of biological systems and has become an important tool for cancer diagnosis, molecular subtyping, microbiological identification, and intraoperative decision support. Biomedical Raman spectra are, however, high-dimensional, noisy, and affected by fluorescence background, acquisition variability, and biological heterogeneity, making robust computational analysis essential. This review examines the role of machine learning across the biomedical Raman spectroscopy pipeline, from preprocessing and signal correction to unsupervised structure discovery, supervised diagnosis and molecular stratification, representation and transfer learning, explainability, biomarker discovery, and multimodal integration with imaging, pathology, and molecular profiling. Emphasis is placed on the use of machine learning not only for diagnostic classification, but also for biologically interpretable and clinically actionable analysis. We also discuss the main barriers to clinical translation, including limited dataset sizes, inter-instrument variability, inconsistent preprocessing, insufficient external validation, reproducibility concerns, and limited sharing of software, data, and metadata. We argue that progress will require methodological advances together with standardization, robust validation, explainability, and deployment-ready analytical frameworks. By integrating methodological, biomedical, and translational perspectives, this review outlines key directions for developing reliable and clinically deployable Raman-AI systems.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The systole of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds

arXiv:2406.11783v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the systole of a model of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds introduced by Petri and Raimbault, answering a question posed in that same article. These are compact manifolds with boundary constructed by randomly gluing truncated tetrahedra along their faces. We prove that the limit, as the volume tends to infinity, of the expected value of their systole exists and we give a closed formula of it. Moreover, we compute a numerical approximation of this value.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

$S^{2}$-FracMix: Label-Preserving Self-Saliency Mixup Augmentation

Data augmentation is known to improve generalization of deep visual models. Recent methods favor mixup strategies that generate interpolated samples to improve model performance. However, these techniques not only incur significant computational overhead, they also lead to semantic disruption of augmentation data due to cross-sample mixing. We first propose Self-Saliency ($S^2$) Mixup, which constructs challenging yet label-consistent samples by extracting multi-scale salient patches and reinserting them into non-salient regions of the same image. This promotes scale-invariant feature learning while avoiding cross-sample interference. To further enhance model robustness, we introduce FracMix, a mixing scheme that injects self-similarity patterns into salient regions using adaptive ratios. Collectively, our unified framework, $S^{2}$-FracMix, enables simultaneous learning from fractal and non-fractal structures within a single image, yielding a targeted and structurally coherent augmentation strategy. We theoretically analyze the advantage of our technique, and empirically establish its superiority over the existing methods by achieving state-of-the-art performance in extensive evaluation with seven benchmarks across classification (coarse and fine-grained), robustness, calibration, object detection, and transfer learning tasks. Project page is available at \href{https://fracmix-data-augmentation.github.io/}{fracmix-data-augmentation.github.io}

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

Understanding Truncated Positional Encodings for Graph Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Positional encodings (PEs) enhance the power of graph neural networks (GNNs), both theoretically and empirically. Two of the most popular families of PEs - spectral (e.g., Laplacian eigenspaces, effective resistance) and walk-based (polynomials of the adjacency matrix) - are theoretically equivalent in expressive power, with expressivity between the 1-WL and 3-WL tests. However, this equivalence assumes the GNN uses the "complete" version of these PEs, which requires $O(n^3)$ time and space complexity. Instead, practitioners commonly use truncated variants of these encodings, such as the first $k$ eigenspaces or powers of the adjacency matrix. However, the theoretical properties of these truncated PEs are unknown. In this work, we initiate the study of these truncated PEs. Theoretically, we show that, under truncation, several families of PEs are fundamentally different in expressive power. As a corollary, we show that truncated spectral PEs are no longer stronger than the 1-WL test. We also study a family of spectral PEs, the $k$-harmonic distances, to highlight the differences in expressive power of even closely related truncated PEs. Finally, we experimentally show that a mix of truncated PEs is preferable to any single family on real-world datasets.

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

MemTrace: Probing What Final Accuracy Misses in Long-Term Memory

arXiv:2606.17328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents increasingly maintain long-term memory of user facts across sessions. Yet such memory is usually evaluated by aggregating accuracy over question rows or episodes. Because this approach scores question rows independently, even when several questions probe the same fact, it cannot show how that fact behaves as conditions change. We introduce MemTrace, a benchmark whose unit of measurement is the knowledge point: a single typed fact about the user, rather than an individual question. MemTrace probes each fact along three controlled dimensions: memory age, defined by how many sessions ago the fact appeared in the history; question type, covering current state, earlier state, and trajectory of change; and evidence condition, covering present, missing, and contradicted-by-false-premise settings. Evaluating 13 memory-system configurations across four paradigms, we find that similar pooled accuracy hides different failures: recovering a fact's current and earlier states does not imply tracking how it changed, and safe abstention does not imply correcting a false premise. The dominant bottleneck is evidence use, not retrieval: when systems fail, the evidence was retrievable 10 times more often than it was missing. These results suggest that improving long-term memory requires better use of reachable evidence, not simply more storage or retrieval.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Differentiable Thermodynamic Phase-Equilibria for Machine Learning

arXiv:2603.11249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate prediction of phase equilibria remains a central challenge in chemical engineering. Physics-consistent machine learning methods that incorporate thermodynamic structure into neural networks have recently shown strong performance for activity-coefficient modeling. However, extending such approaches to equilibrium data arising from an extremum principle, such as liquid-liquid equilibria, remains difficult. Here we present DISCOMAX, a differentiable algorithm for phase-equilibrium calculation that guarantees thermodynamic consistency at both training and inference, only subject to a user-specified discretization. The method combines discrete enumeration of feasible phase states with masked softmax aggregation in the backward pass, with the propagation of the true equilibrium state in the forward pass, using a straight-through gradient estimator to enable physics-consistent end-to-end learning of neural \gls{gE}-models. We show that this approach bears analogy to statistical thermodynamics, and we evaluate it on binary liquid-liquid equilibrium data where it outperforms existing surrogate-based methods, while offering a general framework for learning from different kinds of equilibrium data.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Universal Guideline-Driven Image Clustering via a Hybrid LLM Agent

Unifying image clustering across different clustering scenarios remains challenging due to fundamental gaps among tasks. We introduce a Guideline-Driven Image Clustering Agent, the first universal framework that bridges these gaps through textual guidelines. To incorporate complex guidelines without task-specific training, we propose Generative Concept Proxy Modeling, which generates guideline-aware embeddings via concept proxy extraction. For scenarios requiring automatic cluster discovery, we introduce LLM Traversal based on Minimum Spanning Tree that selectively applies LLM reasoning for complex semantic judgments. Our method generalizes across diverse clustering scenarios spanning from general to fine-grained categorization, from global to local criteria, and from balanced to long-tail distributions. Our framework consistently outperforms specialized methods across diverse clustering tasks.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

PCFootprint: A Large-Scale Dataset and Benchmark for Vectorized Building Footprint Extraction from Aerial LiDAR Point Clouds

Building footprint extraction is a fundamental task in photogrammetry, remote sensing, and computer vision. Recent image-based methods have achieved remarkable progress in extracting vectorized footprints from high-resolution optical imagery. However, optical imagery inherently susceptible to occlusions, perspective distortions, and residual relief displacement, yielding incomplete or misaligned footprint extraction. Furthermore, the lack of explicit elevation information limits its direct applicability to Level of Detail building modeling. In this paper, we present PCFootprint, the first large-scale public dataset for footprint extraction from airborne laser scanning point clouds. PCFootprint comprises \num{33000} tiles derived from the Estonian Land and Spatial Development Board, covering diverse urban and rural landscapes. Each tile spans \qtyproduct{128 x 128}{\m} with systematically aligned vectorized footprints aligned to point clouds. The dataset includes a \num{3000} tiles cross-domain test set for evaluating generalization across geographic regions. We establish comprehensive benchmarks by evaluating mainstream methods. Experimental results reveal significant challenges including high intra-class variance, data imbalance, and noise across complex geospatial environments. We believe PCFootprint will advance future research in building modeling, urban scene understanding, and geospatial analysis. The PCFootprint dataset is publicly available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/Haoyuan-Shen/PCFootprint}.

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

The embrace of open science: An analysis of a decade of AI research and 56 800 conference papers

arXiv:2606.16974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The reproducibility crisis has directed the AI research community toward improving documentation practices. Several studies have identified methodological issues, and in response, the most impactful venues in the field have introduced reproducibility checklists. We seek to understand whether documentation practices have changed over time by assessing all published papers at five leading AI conferences over the past decade. Seven reproducibility variables were identified, quality-assured and used to analyse 56 800 publications. Our analysis reveals that in the period 2014 to 2024, documentation practices have improved; papers sharing both code and data increased nearly sixfold, from 11% to 64% Building on empirical reproducibility rates from a prior study, we estimate - inferred from documentation practices, not direct testing - that reproducibility increased from 28% in 2014 to 64% in 2024. Improvements in documentation practices predate the introduction of reproducibility checklists, suggesting these changes reflect a broader movement toward open science rather than a direct response to formal requirements.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Disparate Impact in Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv:2606.13105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the fairness notion of disparate impact for synthetic data generation (SDG), that assesses whether the utility of generated records is the same across sensitive groups. Our approach departs from existing work on fair SDG, that address the problem of correcting for undue biases in the observed distribution, hence redefining SDG as learning a distribution that is not that of the real data. By contrast, non-disparate impact is notably achieved when the synthetic and real distributions are the same. We expose reasons why SDG may fail to reach that solution and discuss why approximation and estimation errors occur and can be disparate across groups. We notably look into the expressive power of SDG methods relative to distribution complexity, sampling errors due to group proportions, and estimation errors induced by differential privacy mechanisms. We illustrate cases of disparate impact on both artificial and real-world data, focusing on SDG methods that rely on probabilistic graphical models. We also introduce a strategy of learning group-wise SDG models and illustrate how it can improve both the overall utility and its parity in many settings.

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

M\"OVE: A Holistic LLM Benchmark for the German Public Sector

We present M\"OVE (Modelle für die \"Offentliche Verwaltung Evaluieren), a holistic benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) in the context of the German public sector. While LLMs are increasingly adopted in public administration, model selection remains largely ad hoc, and existing benchmarks offer limited guidance: they are predominantly English-centric, US-centric in content, and focus exclusively on task performance. M\"OVE addresses these gaps by evaluating 39 models across two complementary dimensions. Performance criteria cover summarization, question answering, and topic extraction. Governance criteria assess hallucination tendencies, energy consumption, provider transparency, and alignment with German constitutional values and knowledge about positions by German political parties. In total, we utilize ten German-language datasets, including gold- and silverstandard datasets that we constructed to reflect public-administration domains. We employ a multi-metric evaluation strategy combining classical NLP metrics, embedding-based methods, and LLM-as-a-judge approaches. Our results show that no single model dominates across all criteria: top performers differ between tasks, and model size alone is a poor predictor of quality. We further evaluate the benchmark itself, analyzing its statistical precision, LLM judge reliability, the impact of our private datasets on model rankings, the sensitivity of our results to prompt formulation, and the validity of our energy consumption estimates. M\"OVE is designed as a living benchmark under active development; results are publicly available at https://moeve.bundesdruckerei.de/.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Data-driven subsampling rates for diffusion parameter estimation of SDEs

arXiv:2606.13615v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of diffusion parameter estimation for stochastic differential equation (SDE) models in scenarios where data and model are compatible only on specific scales that have yet to be determined. We introduce a simple and efficient method for selecting suitable rates at which given time series data should be subsampled in order to ensure that the statistical structure of the subsampled data is consistent with the behavior of the SDE model on an infinitesimal scale. Our approach is based on analyzing the statistics of the lengths of monotonically increasing or decreasing segments in the subsampled data sequence, which we refer to as monotone runs. As an analytical foundation, we prove for a large class of SDEs with additive noise that the lengths of monotone runs at an infinitesimal scale are approximately geometrically distributed with success probability $1/2$. This universal characterization is employed to derive an automated method for selecting appropriate subsampling rates for given time series data that is directly applicable in real-world scenarios and does not rely on an asymptotic framework of multiscale diffusions. The approach is demonstrated using an application from industrial mathematics concerning surrogate models for fiber lay-down curves in production processes of nonwoven textiles.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Human Intuition vs. Computational Precision: Neurologists, Feature-based Models, and Deep Learning for Stroke Prognosis

Background: Prognostication in large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke remains challenging. Although several prognostic models exist, their comparison to clinician performance, human-model interaction, and specific sources of human bias remain poorly understood. Methods: Using pre-treatment clinical and CT data from the MR CLEAN trial (n=500), six neurologists predicted three-month modified Rankin Scale (mRS) scores for 40 patients, both unaided and assisted by a validated feature-based model (MR PREDICTS). Human performance was benchmarked against MR PREDICTS and a multimodal, interpretable deep learning (DL) approach using raw imaging data. We explicitly assessed neurologists? ability to estimate model-required imaging features and identified systematic human biases. Models were additionally validated in a larger MR CLEAN trial cohort (n=404). Results: For predicting the full mRS distribution, standalone models achieved good ordinal agreement (MR PREDICTS quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) 0.51 [0.24 to 0.70]; DL model 0.49 [0.25 to 0.67]), significantly outperforming unaided neurologists (QWK 0.27 [0.10, 0.42]). Neurologists showed systematic overoptimism, predicting lower mRS scores than observed. Furthermore, there was poor accuracy in extracting imaging features. Raters? ASPECTS predictions deviated by 3.4 points from the confirmed scores, and collateral score accuracy was 44.6%. However, for predicting binary mRS (0-2 vs. 3-6), accuracy was comparable between unaided neurologists (64.17% [55.42% to 72.92%]) and models (MR PREDICTS 67.50% [52.50% to 82.50%]; DL model 63.16% [47.37% to 78.95%]). Model-assistance modestly improved and harmonized neurologists? predictions (QWK 0.41 [0.22 to 0.55]; binary accuracy 68.75% [58.33% to 78.34%]. Model performance remained robust in the larger cohort. Conclusions: Multimodal prognostic models outperform clinicians in predicting the full range of mRS outcomes, while human error in imaging assessment and systematic optimism bias are primary drivers of prognostic inaccuracy. End-to-end DL models eliminate human-input variability and hold strong potential as an automated second opinion to support prognostication and decision-making in acute LVO stroke.

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

A Framework for Evaluating Agentic Skills at Scale

Agent skills – structured, reusable knowledge artifacts that augment LLM agent capabilities – have been rapidly adopted in industry, yet their cross-domain impact and use across commercial and open-source models remain under-studied, and no reusable methodology exists for evaluating an individual skill. In this work, we present an evaluation framework that lets a skill author construct realistic tasks to rigorously assess the aspects of a skill that matter most to them, and that estimates skill utility by solving those tasks. Further, we apply our evaluation approach at scale to 500 real-world skills, generating 1,000 tasks derived from the skills' content, along with instruction-following and goal-completion scoring rubrics. Using these metrics, we evaluate how 19 agent-model configurations, both proprietary and open-source, perform on the tasks. Our results show that models vary widely in how closely they adhere to the instructions encoded in skills, leading to substantial differences in their performance gains. Furthermore, we show that access to a skill significantly changes model behavior compared to the no-skill setup, providing an essential mechanism for encoding opinionated workflows into LLM agents. We release our evaluation dataset to support future work on agent skills.

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

V2P-Manip: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Monocular Human Videos

Achieving autonomous robotic dexterous manipulation requires precise, human-like action sequences at scale. As a scalable supplement to costly teleoperation data, extracting trajectories with both visual fidelity and physical plausibility from monocular videos represents a promising frontier in embodied AI. To this end, we introduce V2P-Manip, an efficient framework designed to learn dexterous manipulation policies directly from human demonstration videos. We establish an efficient, integrated pipeline encompassing 3D asset acquisition, trajectory estimation, and dexterous policy learning. To bridge the gap between visual perception and physical constraints, we introduce a two-stage refinement process to enforce spatial alignment and physical consistency. Evaluations on the TACO and OakInk benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in pose accuracy, adaptability to unstructured environments, and training efficiency. Ultimately, experimental results confirm an average success rate of over 75% across multiple synthetic manipulation tasks and validate the adaptability of the extracted manipulation priors across diverse dexterous hand embodiments.

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

A Survey on Deep Learning Architectures for Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation

Point cloud stands as the most widely adopted format for representing 3D shapes and scenes due to its simplicity and geometric fidelity. However, its inherent unordered and irregular nature, exacerbated by sensor noise and occlusions, introduces unique challenges for machine learning based methodologies. To combat these issues, diverse strategies have been developed, including converting to a format that has orderliness, extracting local geometry, and permutation-invariant or self-attention-based processing. In this paper, our focus is directed towards deep learning models for three fundamental tasks in 3D vision: point cloud classification, part segmentation, and semantic segmentation. We begin by formally defining point cloud data, followed by an in-depth discussion on its structural characteristics. Then, we categorize notable works based on their backbone structure and evaluate their performance on popular benchmarks. Beyond empirical comparison, we offer insights into architectural innovations and limitations. We also outline open challenges and promising future directions for 3D point cloud understanding.

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

Pepti-Agent: An AI Agent for Peptide Design and Optimization

Therapeutic peptides occupy a valuable design space between small molecules and biologics, but their development requires satisfying several competing constraints at once: solubility, hemolytic activity, and nonspecific surface fouling are governed by overlapping sequence features, so improving one property often degrades another. Computational design addresses this by pairing generative models with sequence-based property predictors, iteratively proposing and refining candidates. However, these components are typically wired together as monolithic scripts that are difficult to inspect, extend, or reuse, and they often refine sequences by natural-language reasoning rather than by tracking the evolving multi-property state of each candidate. We present Pepti-Agent, a closed-loop, peptide-specific framework that exposes generation, property prediction, and single-residue mutation as independently inspectable Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools. A large language model controller invokes these tools and consults live predictor output between calls, so refinement is guided by each sequence's current property profile rather than by language reasoning alone. Task-specific PeptideGPT models generate candidates, ProtBERT-based classifiers score solubility, hemolysis, and non-fouling, and two interchangeable mutation operators propose sequence edits. By recording a per-step trace of controller decisions, predictor outputs, and accepted mutations, Pepti-Agent offers a reproducible substrate for benchmarking multi-objective design strategies and for prioritizing candidates for experimental validation.

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

CoVEBench: Can Video Editing Models Handle Complex Instructions?

While recent text-guided video editing models excel at elementary tasks (e.g., style transfer, object insertion), real-world user requests are highly compositional. A single prompt often demands multiple coupled edits, such as modifying subjects, actions, and camera views, while strictly preserving unrelated spatiotemporal content. Existing benchmarks, heavily constrained by isolated edits and coarse global metrics, fail to diagnose how models handle such complex workflows. To address this gap, we introduce CoVEBench, a compositional video editing benchmark comprising 416 curated source videos, 626 multi-point editing instructions, and 9,990 fine-grained checklist items. Covering diverse editing dimensions, CoVEBench evaluates models via MLLM-judged instruction compliance and video fidelity, alongside automated metrics for video quality. Extensive experiments reveal that compositional editing remains a profound challenge: current models frequently omit edits, violate preservation constraints, or introduce artifacts when handling multiple operations simultaneously. CoVEBench provides a challenging, diagnostic testbed to advance video editing toward realistic user workflows.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PearlVLA: Progressive Embodied Action-Plan Refinement in Latent Space

arXiv:2606.17924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models face a trade-off between efficient action generation and explicit deliberation. Directly decoding actions from vision-language backbone representations enables low-latency control, whereas explicit reasoning through textual chains, pixel-level subgoals, or action search can improve planning but incurs substantial latency and computational cost. We propose PearlVLA, a VLA framework that moves deliberation into the latent space of a vision-language model (VLM). PearlVLA separates VLM meta-query representations into a fixed visual grounding branch and an iterative latent plan branch. At each refinement round, a plan-conditioned world query probes a lightweight frozen latent world model for an action-free future observation latent, which is fed back to guide plan refinement. A future-guided RefineNet then applies scheduled residual updates to progressively refine a coarse semantic draft into a fine-grained latent action plan. The refined plan after K rounds is then decoded in parallel into an action chunk for low-latency execution. We further introduce Causal Refinement-Grouped Process-Reward RL to optimize the latent refinement process with rewards from longer-horizon imagined futures induced by latent plan edits. Empirical evaluations on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate that PearlVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing methods.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Benchmarking cell type annotation in spatial transcriptomics: resolving cellular hierarchies, biological fidelity, and dynamic cell states

Spatial transcriptomics enables the quantification of gene expression within its native tissue context, providing unprecedented insight into tissue architecture, cellular ecosystems, and local cell-cell interactions at regional and single-cell resolution. Accurate cell type annotation is a critical prerequisite for interpreting these data and is often the first and most essential step in downstream analysis. Despite rapid advances in computational methods, cell type annotation remains challenging and frequently requires extensive expert-driven manual curation based on marker-gene expression, spatial context, and prior biological knowledge. While early approaches relied primarily on transcriptional similarity, newer methods increasingly incorporate spatial information, histological features, and multimodal data to improve annotation accuracy. Nevertheless, reliable annotation remains difficult when biological interpretation requires fine-grained subtype resolution, particularly for platforms with limited gene panels, tissues undergoing dynamic cellular state transitions, and studies in which reference and query datasets differ substantially in biological context or technical modality. Here, we present a systematic benchmark of 20 state-of-the-art cell type annotation methods across four spatial transcriptomics datasets spanning diverse technologies, experimental conditions, cell numbers, and gene panel sizes. Importantly, all benchmark datasets contain expert-curated cell type labels, including well-resolved cell populations and subtype annotations, providing high-quality biological ground truth for evaluation. The benchmark encompasses both reference-based and reference-free methods representing a broad range of computational frameworks. Performance was assessed using conventional classification metrics, including accuracy and F1-based measures, together with structure-aware metrics that evaluate both cell-level annotation accuracy and preservation of higher-order biological organization. Across datasets, annotation performance varied substantially according to tissue context, reference-query similarity, and annotation granularity. Fine-grained subtype annotation and recovery of rare cell populations remained challenging for many methods, particularly in datasets capturing injury, repair, developmental, and regenerative processes characterized by continuous cellular state transitions. Notably, high classification accuracy did not necessarily correspond to preservation of global cellular relationships or biologically coherent downstream pathway and gene-set enrichment analyses. Overall, scANVI, Seurat, and TACCO consistently ranked among the top-performing methods, although their relative advantages were context dependent. Together, our results provide a comprehensive assessment of current annotation strategies for spatial transcriptomics and offer practical guidance for selecting methods that best align with specific biological questions, dataset characteristics, and analytical priorities.

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

Global Ease of Living Index: a machine learning framework for longitudinal analysis of major economies

arXiv:2502.06866v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The drastic changes in the global economy, geopolitical conditions, and disruptions such as the COVID-19 pandemic have impacted the cost of living and quality of life. It is essential to comprehend the long-term implications of the cost of living and quality of life in major economies. A transparent and comprehensive living index must include multiple dimensions of living conditions. In this study, we present an approach to quantifying the quality of life through the Global Ease of Living Index that combines various socio-economic and infrastructural factors into a single composite score. Our index utilises economic indicators that define living standards, which could help in targeted interventions to improve specific areas. We present a machine learning framework to address missing data for certain economic indicators in specific countries. We then curate and update the data and use a dimensionality reduction approach (Principal Component Analysis and Factor Analysis) to create the Ease of Living Index for major economies since 1970. Our work significantly adds to the literature by offering a practical tool for policymakers to identify areas needing improvement, such as healthcare systems, employment opportunities, and public safety. Our approach with open data and code can be easily reproduced and applied to various contexts, providing transparency and accessibility for ongoing research and policy development in quality-of-life assessment.

25.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Multiplexed, precise genome engineering in monocots with twin prime editing systems

Authors:

Simultaneously introducing diverse genomic edits remains a challenge in crop genome engineering. Here we describe a twin prime editing-based knockout (TKO) system that installs stop codon clusters (SCCs) for precise translational termination with minimal in-frame mutations. TKO achieves knockout efficiencies of up to 70.5%, 58.6% and 75.1% in rice, maize and wheat protoplasts, respectively, and produces heritable knockout alleles in 96.8% of regenerated rice plants. In hexaploid wheat, TKO outperforms Cas9 4.2-fold in generating triple-homolog knockouts, largely by reducing in-frame mutations. Orthogonal TKO editors with sequence-divergent SCCs enable simultaneous knockout of up to ten genes without cross-interference. Integration of TKO with conventional prime editing establishes TRIM1 (TKO editor-enabled gene rupture and development of integrated multitype genome modification system) for simultaneous knockout and precise editing, achieving a 22.8% coediting of four genes in rice. TRIM2 extends this capacity to kilobase-scale modifications through a prime editor–recombinase system, enabling a 4.9-kb insertion (1.2% efficiency) and gene knockout (up to 79.8%) in protoplasts. Plant genome editing is multiplexed with twin prime editing.