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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The brain builds a sentence neuron by neuron

Authors:

Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Diffusion Transformer World-Action Model for AV Scene Prediction

Action-conditioned world models let an autonomous vehicle predict future camera scenes from its own planned controls, enabling planning and simulation without real-world rollouts, but at compact, trainable scale the futures are ambiguous and the field's standard distortion metrics actively mislead: they reward a blurry regression mean over a realistic prediction. We confront this with a compact latent world model that, given the present front-camera latent and a sequence of ego-actions, predicts future scene latents a frozen decoder renders to $256 \times 256$ frames up to 8 seconds ahead, evaluated on 150 held-out nuScenes scenes. We first benchmark where to predict: across six frozen encoders spanning four representation families, V-JEPA2 with temporal context reduces steering RMSE by 40% over the best single-frame encoder. We then train a latent Diffusion Transformer (DiT) and, through a controlled diagnosis, identify the four ingredients it needs: spatial tokens, the $x_0$ objective, residual anchoring, and sampling matched to target uncertainty. In a Stable-Diffusion-VAE encode-predict-decode pipeline we expose the central tension: distortion metrics (cosine similarity, SSIM) favor the blurry mean, masking that the diffusion model is far closer to the real frame distribution. Inception-based FID and KID reveal a clean perception-distortion frontier: diffusion attains KID 0.078 versus 0.375 for regression ($4.8\times$ better), and a deployable train-derived calibration makes this practical without test-time ground truth. The model is genuinely action-controllable (steering drives scene displacement, Spearman $\rho = 0.81$, vs $-0.18$ for regression). We trace limited single-pass motion to a shared-present anchor and engineer a compact 1.7M-parameter "jump" model that recovers full ground-truth motion magnitude ($1.02\times$ GT), where single-pass models capture less than half.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Broadband High-Level Squeezed Light using Waveguide Optical Parametric Amplifiers with External Dispersion Compensation

arXiv:2606.17422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate broadband phase-sensitive amplification (PSA) measurement of squeezed light generated by a waveguide optical parametric amplifier (OPA) with external dispersion compensation. In broadband systems, group velocity dispersion (GVD) induces a frequency-dependent rotation of the squeezing axis, which limits the observable bandwidth in PSA measurements. To overcome this limitation, we introduce external dispersion compensation between two OPAs and suppress the quadrature rotation over a wide frequency range. As a result, we observe a maximum squeezing of 5.9 dB near the carrier frequency and more than 5 dB of squeezing up to a frequency offset of 4.5 THz from the carrier. Furthermore, squeezing below the shot-noise level is confirmed up to a frequency offset of 6 THz from the carrier, corresponding to the accessible phase-matching bandwidth of the waveguide OPA. Our results establish a practical method for broadband characterization of squeezed light and provide a key step toward ultrafast continuous-variable quantum information processing.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The t-Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond Model

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we consider an Aztec diamond model split into two unequal regions which are asymptotically fixed in size. Each region is weighted with a distinct two-periodic weighting. We refer to this model as the t-split two-periodic Aztec diamond, to signify its difference from the previous work title Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond, where the model was split into two equal regions. We derive an integral expression for the correlation kernel of the model and give a partial description of the scaling limit behavior, along with a conjecture for the remainder. We refer to the larger and smaller sides of the model as the dominant and non-dominant sides, and to the location of the weight change as the interface. The dominant side exhibits a limit shape that depends only on its own weighting and is identical to that of the two-periodic Aztec diamond, while the non-dominant side appears to have a novel limit shape that depends on both weightings and the location of the interface. Lastly, we consider the complete limit shape in the case where the dominant side two-periodic parameter goes to 0.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Reasoning as Intersection: Consensus-Frame Alignment for Visual Focus in Video-MLLMs

Reinforcement learning has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, but applying outcome-only rewards to video multimodal large language models (Video-MLLMs) provides limited guidance on which visual evidence should support the answer. Inspired by multisensory integration, where consistent cues can enhance the salience and reliability of perceptual estimates, we introduce Consensus Frame GRPO (CF-GRPO), a temporal-annotation-free process-level reward framework for evidence-aware video reasoning. CF-GRPO constructs a consensus frame prior from intrinsic video cues, including temporal coverage, scene-transition cues, and query-conditioned visual relevance. It then computes a model-side frame-use score from visual and response representations and optimizes their agreement through the Consensus Frame Reward (CFR). With salience-aware sparse aggregation and distribution sharpening, CFR provides a high-contrast reward signal without requiring human temporal annotations. Experiments show that VideoCFR achieves competitive performance across complex video reasoning benchmarks and improves several metrics over representative Video-MLLM and RL baselines, while the consensus prior provides an interpretable view of the evidence frames emphasized during training. The implementation is available at https://github.com/1Pansy/VideoCFR.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for Antibody Sequence-Structure Design

Antibodies specifically recognize antigens and play a central role in therapeutic discovery. Designing antibodies for a given antigen remains challenging because antigen-antibody complex data are limited, whereas the sequence and conformational spaces of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) are large. Retrieved CDR templates from databases or candidate libraries can narrow the design space and improve controllability, but retrieval for novel antigens is often sparse and imperfect; treating retrieved templates as hard conditions can bias the denoising process and cause negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for antibody sequence-structure design (NT-ABDiff), a joint diffusion framework that treats candidate CDR-only templates as optional and potentially unreliable conditions. NT-ABDiff uses reliability-aware template modulation to estimate the context-conditioned usefulness of each candidate and to adaptively reweight and fuse multiple templates during conditioning. We further train the model with mixed-quality and corrupted templates as conditional perturbation regularization, encouraging the denoiser to exploit informative templates while remaining stable when templates are uninformative. Experiments under controlled template shifts and a train-set retrieval evaluation show that NT-ABDiff improves CDR-H3 sequence recovery and structural accuracy over strong baselines, while retaining robustness to missing, mismatched, and corrupted templates. Under a stringent random-template CDR-H3 evaluation, NT-ABDiff improves amino-acid recovery (AAR) from 30.03% to 39.47% and reduces RMSD from 3.160 to 2.915A; with train-set retrieval candidates, it achieves 39.50% AAR and 2.76 {ring} A RMSD. Code, processed splits, {ring} configuration files, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ShiDeng7rz/NT-ABDiff.

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

PSyGenTAB: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Synthetic Clinical Tabular Data Generation via Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2606.18518v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The development of medical AI is constrained by limited access to high-quality clinical data due to institutional silos and strict privacy regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR. Synthetic data generation offers a potential solution, but existing methods lack principled mechanisms to explicitly manage the privacy-utility trade-off, often degrading clinically meaningful patterns or risking patient re-identification. We present PSyGenTAB, a privacy-preserving generative framework that formulates synthetic healthcare data generation as a constrained optimization problem solved using the Augmented Lagrangian Method. By embedding configurable privacy constraints directly into model training, PSyGenTAB enforces minimum privacy thresholds while maximizing clinical data utility. Across multiple clinically motivated benchmarks, PSyGenTAB preserves inter-feature clinical relationships and minority-class diagnostic patterns essential for reliable health AI. Downstream evaluation using Train-on-Synthetic, Test-on-Real and Train-on-Real, Test-on-Synthetic protocols shows that models trained on synthetic data achieve performance comparable to those trained on real patient records. Privacy auditing further demonstrates reduced exact record reproduction and strong resilience to membership inference attacks. These results establish PSyGenTAB as a principled framework for balancing privacy protection and clinical utility in synthetic healthcare data, supporting secure cross-institutional AI development.

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

Observable Patterns Are Not Explanations: A Causal-Geometric Analysis of Latent Reasoning Models

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) replace explicit chain-of-thought with continuous thoughts. Recent work treats observable latent-state patterns, such as BFS-like frontiers and decodable arithmetic computation, as evidence for internal reasoning mechanisms. Evaluating two LRMs (Coconut and CODI) against controls lacking the proposed recurrence or curriculum, we find these patterns also appear in the controls and do not always causally affect behavior. Causal interventions reveal that latent-thought utilization is not binary but graded, scaling with a thought's causal effect on model behavior. Geometric analyses reveal this effect concentrates in low-rank directions whose step-to-step geometry grows more structured as their behavioral influence increases. Latent thoughts should therefore be treated as hidden computation, not hidden explanation: decodability, attention, or static structure alone cannot establish mechanism. LRM interpretability thus requires matched controls and causal tests.

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

K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $K-Prism$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $semantic priors$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $in-context knowledge$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $interactive feedback$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $what$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $where$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

TEDD: Robust Detection of Unstable Temporal Features

arXiv:2606.12643v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When working with real-world temporal data, it is common to encounter features whose distribution is changing over time. The naive employment of Machine Learning models on this unstable data might lead to rapidly degrading performance, especially if the new distribution is much different from what was previously seen during training. In order to cope with this problem, it is critical to automatically identify features that are changing over time. With these features detected, data scientists and other practitioners will be able to mitigate the issue (for instance, by applying data transformations), deploying more robust models that retain high performance for longer periods of time. In this paper, we describe which temporal changes a feature should not suffer from, and propose TEDD, a technique to a) identify when a dataset might lead to an unstable Machine Learning model and b) automatically detect which features cause such lack of robustness. In order to achieve it, we leverage a regression model to highlight which features contribute to a good prediction of an instance's timestamp. We compare our approach to other methods in real and synthetic data, testing their detection capability on all simple change patterns. We show that our method: detects all types of basic changes, both for numerical and categorical features; can detect multivariate drifts; returns a comparable value measuring the amount of change of each feature; requires no parameter tuning; and is scalable both on number of features and instances of the dataset.

11.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

On real-time calibrated prediction for complex model-based decision support in pandemics: Part 2

by Trevelyan J. McKinley, Daniel B. Williamson, Xiaoyu Xiong, James M. Salter, Robert Challen, Leon Danon, Ben Youngman, Doug McNeall Calibration of complex stochastic infectious disease models is challenging. These often have high-dimensional input and output spaces, with the models exhibiting complex, non-linear dynamics. Coupled with a paucity of necessary data, this results in a large number of non-ignorable hidden states that must be handled by the inference routine. Likelihood-based approaches to this missing data problem are very flexible, but challenging to scale, due to having to monitor and update these hidden states. Methods based on simulating the hidden states directly from the model-of-interest have an advantage that they are often more straightforward to code, and thus are easier to implement and adapt in real-time. However, these often require evaluating very large numbers of simulations, rendering them infeasible for many large-scale problems. We present a framework for using emulation-based methods to calibrate a large-scale, stochastic, age-structured, spatial meta-population model of COVID-19 transmission in England and Wales. By embedding a model discrepancy process into the simulation model, and combining this with particle filtering, we show that it is possible to calibrate complex models to high-dimensional data by emulating the log-likelihood surface instead of individual data points. The use of embedded model discrepancy also helps to alleviate other key challenges, such as the introduction of infection across space and time. We conclude with a discussion of major challenges remaining and key areas for future work.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Automated Scoring of Arabic Text Using Large Language Models: A Literature Review

In modern educational systems, Automatic Text Scoring (ATS) plays a central role by enabling scalable and consistent evaluation of learner responses without human intervention. Recently, the increased accessibility of LLMs and Arabic-specific datasets has sparked renewed interest in this area. In this work, we investigate LLM-Based approaches for the automated evaluation of Arabic texts, focusing on both short answer grading (ASAG) and essay scoring (AES). We further introduce a structured taxonomy comprising five dimensions: application domain, feedback generation capability, LLM architecture deployed, alignment with competency referential frameworks, and prompt engineering strategy. By applying this taxonomy, we conduct a comparative analysis of existing studies, examining their methodological approaches, datasets, evaluation metrics, and reported performance. The findings highlight the need for sustained and pedagogically grounded research efforts in Arabic ATS, given its significance for improving educational quality across Arabic-speaking communities.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Generalisable tissue-wide molecular reconstruction from histology

Spatial transcriptomics technologies measure gene expression within intact tissues but remain difficult to scale across large tissue sections and patient cohorts. Consequently, many studies rely on tissue microarrays (TMAs) or sparse spatial profiling designs, where molecular measurements are available for only limited tissue regions and are often generated using heterogeneous gene panels. Existing H&E to spatial gene expression prediction methods remain challenged by sparse molecular measurements, partially overlapping gene panels and tissue-wide reconstruction across heterogeneous spatial datasets. Here, we present GHIST+, a framework for tissue-wide reconstruction of single-cell molecular states from H&E histology. GHIST+ integrates cellular morphology, local tissue context and shared tissue representations to extend sparse molecular measurements into tissue-wide molecular maps across heterogeneous spatial datasets. Across multiple cancer types and GTEx breast tissues, GHIST+ reconstructs biologically meaningful tissue-wide molecular organisation from sparse TMA-derived measurements while preserving spatial tissue structure, cell-type organisation and age-associated tissue states across cancer and non-cancer settings. GHIST+ establishes a scalable framework for transforming sparse spatial profiling experiments into tissue-wide molecular maps, enabling cohort-scale molecular reconstruction from routine histology under heterogeneous spatial transcriptomic settings.

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

Ontology Memory-Augmented ASR Correction for Long Text-Speech Interleaved Conversations

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) correction has traditionally focused on isolated utterances or short local contexts. However, as text and speech become increasingly interleaved in long interactions, ASR correction requires conversation-level contextual evidence. Existing ASR correction methods often rely on the current hypothesis or concatenate raw dialogue history. In such contexts, sparse correction evidence can be difficult to locate amid redundancy and noise. Addressing these challenges, we propose an ontology memory-augmented ASR correction framework for long text-speech interleaved conversations. The framework organizes preceding interaction history into a dynamically updatable ontology memory, where entities, terminology, surface variants, potential ASR confusions, and semantic relations are stored as retrievable nodes for context-grounded correction. To evaluate this setting, we construct RAMC-Corr, a dataset derived from MAGIC-RAMC for long-range ASR correction with grounded context. Experiments on RAMC-Corr show that our method improves over direct correction in 9 out of 10 paired backbone-setting combinations and encourages more selective and evidence-grounded corrections for context-dependent ASR errors.

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

UniMM: A Unified Mixture Model Framework for Multi-Agent Simulation

arXiv:2501.17015v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulation plays a crucial role in assessing autonomous driving systems, where the generation of realistic multi-agent behaviors is a key aspect. In multi-agent simulation, the primary challenges include behavioral multimodality and closed-loop distributional shifts. In this study, we formulate a unified mixture model (UniMM) framework for generating multimodal agent behaviors, which can cover the mainstream methods including regression-based mixture models and discrete NTP models. Furthermore, we introduce a closed-loop sample generation approach tailored for mixture models to mitigate distributional shifts. Within the UniMM framework, we recognize critical configurations from both the model and data perspectives. We conduct a systematic examination of various model configurations, and comprehensively characterize their effects. Moreover, our investigation into the data configuration highlights the pivotal role of closed-loop samples in achieving realistic simulations. To extend the benefits of closed-loop samples across a broader range of mixture models, we further introduce a temporal disentanglement-and-alignment mechanism to address the shortcut learning and off-policy learning issues. Leveraging insights from our exploration, the distinct variants proposed within the UniMM framework, including discrete, anchor-free, and anchor-based models, all achieve state-of-the-art performance on the WOSAC benchmark.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Compact graphs and quantum automorphisms

arXiv:2606.13928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact graphs are graphs for which the fractional automorphism polytope has no genuinely fractional vertices. This paper proposes a quantum analogue of this idea by evaluating the fundamental magic unitary of the quantum automorphism group on states, which we show to produce a closed convex set of doubly stochastic matrices sitting between the classical automorphism polytope and the full fractional automorphism polytope. Our main result is that the natural quantum analogue of compactness is classical, that is, a quantum compact graph is classically compact. We also relate this set to the quantum orbital algebra and obtain a hierarchy of classical and quantum compactness pseudo notions. The framework recovers familiar consequences of compactness through commutants and suggests quantum analogues of generous transitivity and distance-transitivity. We also isolate examples and open problems indicating where quantum symmetries may strictly refine the classical compactness theory.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

GenAutoML: An Agentic Framework for Dynamic Architecture Generation and Optimization in Time-Series Analysis

arXiv:2606.05860v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Designing neural architectures for time-series forecasting and anomaly detection remains a resource-intensive task that often requires substantial domain expertise. Traditional Automated Machine Learning (AutoML) systems typically rely on static, predefined search spaces, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse data characteristics. We present GenAutoML, an agentic framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) as neural architects to bridge natural-language requirements and executable PyTorch implementations. The framework incorporates a Sandboxed Reflection Loop for autonomous code refinement and a Signature-Aware Runtime that enforces architectural consistency and execution safety. To improve robustness under non-stationary conditions, we further introduce a Dynamic Reversible Instance Normalization (Dyn-RevIN) wrapper. Experiments on the ETTh1, ETTm1, and Weather benchmarks demonstrate that GenAutoML can dynamically generate task-specific neural architectures tailored to dataset characteristics. Among the generated models, WaveInterferenceNet achieves inference latency below 0.01 ms per sample while maintaining competitive predictive performance. By emphasizing computational efficiency, architectural adaptability, and stable optimization behavior, GenAutoML enables the creation of ultra-lightweight neural networks suitable for resource-constrained and latency-sensitive Edge AI deployments.

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

Calibration Without Comprehension: Diagnosing the Limits of Fine-Tuning LLMs for Vulnerability Detection in Systems Software

arXiv:2606.20502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whether LLMs scoring well on vulnerability benchmarks genuinely reason about security or merely pattern-match on contaminated data remains unresolved. We present CWE-Trace, a framework for LLM vulnerability detection built from 834 manually curated Linux kernel samples spanning 74 CWEs. The framework enforces a strict temporal split (pre-2025 historical set / post-cutoff leakage-free set), preserves context-aware vulnerable–patched pairs, and introduces two diagnostic metrics: the Directional Failure Index (DFI) and Hierarchical Distance and Direction (HDD). We evaluate eight vanilla LLMs and 15 LoRA fine-tuned variants across non-targeted detection, targeted detection, and CWE classification. Our analysis yields two key results. First, data contamination provides no measurable advantage. Function-level analysis shows that 84% of nominally contaminated samples carry no usable memorization signal: vulnerable functions are absent or cross-mapped across datasets, and ~31% of contaminated samples carry CWE misclassification. Second, backbone directional priors dominate fine-tuning. Models exhibit stable, systematic failure modes (DFI ranging from -85.5 to +94.8 pp) that persist from historical to post-cutoff data and resist correction. Fine-tuning shifts the output threshold without changing the decision policy. This is calibration without comprehension: output distributions adapt to training data while the underlying security reasoning remains absent. The weakest backbone at binary detection (DeepSeek-R1) gains the most in coarse CWE classification, revealing that detection and understanding are decoupled capabilities. The best detection score reaches only 52.1% (+2.1 pp above chance); exact CWE ranking remains below 1.3% Top-1 accuracy, confirming that current LLMs lack reliable security reasoning for systems software, regardless of fine-tuning strategy.

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

Combining Retrieval-Augmented Text Generation with LLMs for Reading Content Recommendations

arXiv:2606.14817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a system for generating personalized reading content using Large Language Models (LLMs) combined with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). The proposed architecture consists of four modules: Input, RAG, Generation, and Judging and enables users to specify both a question and a target reading content complexity. RAG is employed to retrieve relevant information from the Internet, enriching and grounding the content produced by three modern LLMs: Meta LLaMA 4 Scout, LLaMA 3.1 8B Instant, and Google Gemma2 9B. Reading materials are generated using three prompting strategies (Chain-of-Thought, zero-shot, and few-shot), and the LLM-as-a-Judge module automatically evaluates answer quality and alignment with the desired readability level. Experimental results show that RAG consistently improves system performance across all models and prompting techniques, increasing relevance and particularly groundedness by up to 26-35 percentage points. Overall, the findings demonstrate that the RAG-augmented architecture effectively produces reading content tailored to user queries and desired textual complexity.

20.
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.

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

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

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

Bounded Difference Concentration for Infinitely Exchangeable Sequences with Applications to AI Benchmark Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17426v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the concentration properties of functions of infinitely exchangeable random variables. By conditioning on the de Finetti directing measure, we show that the deviation of any function with bounded-difference constants $c_1, \dots, c_n$ decomposes into a conditional sampling fluctuation and a latent mixture fluctuation. When this latent mixture is $\sigma_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$-subgaussian, we establish a concentration inequality with an effective variance proxy of $\frac{1}{4}\sum_i c_i^2 + \sigma_{\mathrm{mix}}^2$. Crucially, we demonstrate that for zero-sum linear contrasts, such as the difference between a subsample mean and a full population mean, the latent mixture term cancels exactly. This cancellation yields a tight, mixture-free Hoeffding-type bound that provides a direct de Finetti mechanism for the infinite-extendibility limit of recent finite-exchangeable concentration results. We apply this framework to quantify uncertainty in composite AI benchmarks, such as MMLU, where question items naturally exhibit exchangeable dependence across domains. Our results provide both a domain-stratified hierarchical model for bounding the uncertainty of accuracy scores, and a distribution-free, cost-saving statistical guarantee for accurately estimating full benchmark scores from random subsets.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Metabolic cost of information processing in Poisson variational autoencoders

arXiv:2602.13421v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Computation in biological systems is fundamentally energy-constrained, yet standard theories of computation treat energy as freely available. Here, we argue that variational free energy minimization under a Poisson assumption offers a principled path toward an energy-aware theory of computation. Our key observation is that the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence term in the Poisson free energy objective becomes proportional to the prior firing rates of model neurons, yielding an emergent metabolic cost term that penalizes high baseline activity. This structure couples an abstract information-theoretic quantity – the *coding rate* – to a concrete biophysical variable – the *firing rate* – which enables a trade-off between coding fidelity and energy expenditure. Such a coupling arises naturally in the Poisson variational autoencoder (P-VAE) – a brain-inspired generative model that encodes inputs as discrete spike counts and recovers a spiking form of *sparse coding* as a special case – but is absent from standard Gaussian VAEs. To demonstrate that this metabolic cost structure is unique to the Poisson formulation, we compare the P-VAE against Grelu-VAE, a Gaussian VAE with ReLU rectification applied to latent samples, which controls for the non-negativity constraint. Across a systematic sweep of the KL term weighting coefficient $\beta$ and latent dimensionality, we find that increasing $\beta$ monotonically increases sparsity and reduces average spiking activity in the P-VAE. In contrast, Grelu-VAE representations remain unchanged, confirming that the effect is specific to Poisson statistics rather than a byproduct of non-negative representations. These results establish Poisson variational inference as a promising foundation for a resource-constrained theory of computation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

When Probing Accuracy Saturates, Fragility Resolves: A Complementary Metric for LLM Pre-Training Analysis

Standard linear probing declares a property "encoded" when a classifier on hidden states achieves high accuracy. The protocol works well on a snapshot but breaks across pre-training: probe accuracy saturates within the first few thousand steps, leaving most of training invisible to the instrument. We introduce fragility, a complementary per-layer metric defined as the activation-noise level at which probe accuracy collapses. Fragility is sensitive to both the margin of separability and the redundancy of representation, both of which keep evolving long after accuracy plateaus. Applied to open-checkpoint language models, fragility recovers structure that accuracy alone cannot see. Moralized representations emerge along a lexical $\to$ compositional gradient: lexical moral detection first, compositional moral encoding later. Because probe accuracy on its own tracks how lexically separable a dataset is, we establish the compositional encoding directly, by showing it transfers across construction types that share no contrast tokens. A layer-depth robustness gradient develops monotonically across training while accuracy stays flat. And matched fine-tuning corpora that produce identical probing accuracy leave distinct fragility fingerprints, showing that data curation reshapes probe robustness without changing probe accuracy. In every comparison we test, where probing accuracy returns a flat answer, fragility returns a structured one.