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01.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

<i>HoloBio</i>: A holographic microscopy tool for quantitative biological analysis

Authors:

by Waira Mona, Maria J. Gil-Herrera, Emanuel Mazo, Daniel Córdoba, Sofia Obando-Vasquez, Maria J. Lopera, Rene Restrepo, Carlos Trujillo, Ana Doblas, Raul Castaneda Holographic imaging in microscopy enables label-free quantitative information of biological specimens and has found applications across a wide range of biomedical studies, from cell morphology to particle dynamics; yet its widespread adoption is often limited by the lack of accessible and standardized analysis software. We present HoloBio, an open-source, Python-based graphical user interface developed to address this issue. This software offers two primary operational modes: a Real-Time mode that enables live processing of holograms at video frame rates, and an Offline mode designed for post-processing previously recorded holograms. HoloBio is compatible with holograms recorded using both lens-based and lensless systems, supporting off-axis architectures in telecentric and non-telecentric configurations, as well as slightly off-axis and in-line optical setups. The software incorporates tools for cell tracking, phase profiling, thickness estimation, and morphological analysis, including cell counting and object area quantification. HoloBio is designed to be accessible for users without coding expertise, offering a reproducible, high-throughput environment tailored for researchers in biology, biophotonics, and biomedical imaging.

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

Beyond NL2Code: A Structured Survey of Multimodal Code Intelligence

While LLMs have substantially advanced text-to-code synthesis, many real programming tasks specify intent through visual artifacts such as screenshots, charts, documents, vector drawings, videos, and interactive states. These tasks require models to connect visual perception to executable programs, because correctness depends not only on syntax but also on layout, geometry, data semantics, editability, interaction behavior, and domain-specific constraints that apply after execution. This survey examines Multimodal Code Intelligence, covering systems that generate, edit, refine, execute, or reason with code under visually grounded inputs and outputs. We first formulate the field by the role that code plays in each task, distinguishing code as a rendered artifact, an editable symbolic structure, a scientific representation, an intermediate reasoning trace, or an executable policy or tool interface. We then organize benchmarks and methods into four domains: Graphical User Interface, Scientific Visualization, Structured Graphics, and Frontier Tasks and Frameworks. This taxonomy connects mature artifact-generation problems to emerging agentic and unified settings and allows us to compare how different tasks treat evidence of correctness. Looking ahead, we argue that future research may benefit from four verification-centered directions. Multi-signal validation can combine complementary evidence of correctness, multi-state verification can test behavior across execution trajectories, cross-task transfer testing can probe reusable visual-code skills, and verifiable agent traces can reveal whether agent actions are grounded in visual evidence. Together, these directions may move multimodal code generation from single-output imitation toward evidence-grounded executable systems.

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

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

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

3D Vessel Reconstruction from Sparse-View Dynamic DSA Images via Vessel Probability Guided Attenuation Learning

Digital Subtraction Angiography (DSA) is one of the gold standards for vascular disease diagnosis. With the help of a contrast agent, time-resolved 2D DSA images deliver comprehensive blood flow information and can be utilized to reconstruct 3D vessel structures for medical assessment. Current commercial DSA systems typically require hundreds of scanning views to perform reconstruction, resulting in substantial radiation exposure. In this study, we propose a neural rendering-based optimization framework tailored for high-quality sparse-view DSA reconstruction to reduce radiation dosage. Our approach, termed vessel probability guided attenuation learning, represents DSA imaging as a complementary weighted combination of static and dynamic attenuation fields, with the weights derived from the time-independent vessel probability field. Functioning as a foreground mask, vessel probability provides proper gradients for both static and dynamic fields adaptive to different scene types. This mechanism enables self-supervised decomposition between static backgrounds and dynamic contrast agent flow, and significantly improves reconstruction quality. Our model is trained by minimizing the discrepancy between synthesized projections and real captured DSA images. We further employ two training strategies to improve reconstruction quality: (1) coarse-to-fine progressive training for better geometry and (2) temporal perturbed rendering loss for temporal consistency. Experimental results have demonstrated high-quality 3D vessel reconstruction and 2D DSA image synthesis.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

DeMix: Debugging Training Data with Mixed Data Error Types by Investigating Influence Vectors

arXiv:2606.11616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality training data is essential for the success of machine learning models. However, real-world datasets often contain mixed types of errors arising from systematic flaws in data preparation pipelines, including label errors, feature errors, and spurious correlations. Effective debugging of training data requires both detecting erroneous samples and identifying their specific error types to enable targeted repair, yet existing data cleaning and attribution methods fail to adequately address this dual requirement. In this paper, we propose DeMix, a novel framework that simultaneously diagnoses erroneous samples and their error types. Our key insight is that different error types produce distinct patterns on model behavior. DeMix captures such error-specific patterns by influence vectors that characterize how each training sample affects model predictions across all validation samples. We formulate training data debugging as a multi-label classification problem where a classifier is developed to predict error types directly from influence vectors. We further introduce an intervention-based learning strategy that guides the classifier to capture invariant rationales specific to each error type, ensuring the learned classifier generalizes effectively. Empirical evaluations on 11 tasks across tabular data prediction, recommendation systems, and LLM alignment demonstrate that DeMix significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving a 22.61% improvement in data debugging F1-score and a 9.32% gain in task model performance after data repair. Code is available at: https://github.com/SJTU-DMTai/DeMix.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

PhenoBIC: operator-free single-cell spatial phenotyping in multiplex imaging data using deep learning of cell staining patterns

Multiplex imaging is a valuable tool for spatially examining tissue microenvironments at the single-cell level to uncover biological and clinical insights. However, most multiplex image analysis workflows currently require manual intervention for cell phenotyping, which slows progress, demands human effort, and yields operator-dependent outputs. Here, we developed PhenoBIC, a pre-trained deep learning model for image classification of the multiplexed biomarker signals in a cell (Biomarker Imprint of a Cell) to classify cell phenotypes. We show that PhenoBIC (F1-score ~0.88) outperforms manual gating (widely used) and other machine learning-based computational approaches for cell marker expression classification. We validated this across multiple biomarkers, tissue sampling strategies (whole biopsies and tissue microarrays), multiplex panels, imaging platforms, and tissue types. We have released our in-house training and validation datasets of ~1.4 million manually curated cell expression ground truth labels. We have also open-sourced PhenoBIC and enabled its community-wide deployment via the QuPath interface.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Effect of Lowering the Drink-Driving Blood Alcohol Limit in Scotland on Road Traffic Crashes: a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences Study

Objective: To evaluate the road safety impact arising from Scotlands 2014 reduction in the legal blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit for drivers, and to assess whether the effect of the reform varied across different spatial contexts. Design: A quasi-experimental statistical longitudinal study using a Synthetic Difference-in-Differences (SDID) approach. Setting: Small-area panel data for Great Britain, with areas (Middle-layer Super Output Areas, MSOAs, in England and Wales and Intermediate Zones, IZs, in Scotland) classed into control and treatment groups according to whether they were exposed to Scotlands BAC reform. The control and treatment groups comprise 7088 spatial units in England and Wales and 852 spatial units in Scotland, respectively, observed over the period 2008-2019. Participants: The study primarily analyses police-reported road traffic collision data from the UK Department for Transports STATS19 system. Data were analysed at the MSOA/IZ level. This is a secondary dataset, and we therefore did not involve patients or the public in formulating the research question, determining outcome measures, or designing and conducting the study. Main Outcome Measures: The main outcome measures were log-transformed rates of total road traffic crashes, and (weekend) night-time crashes (22:00-04:00) per 100,000 population. The latter is used as a proxy measure for drunk driving. Results: Our results indicate that the reduction in the legal BAC limit led to statistically significant declines in road traffic crash rates. Aggregate estimates suggest reductions of 12.0% (95% confidence interval (CI): [-13.7%, -10.3%]) in total crashes, 15.6% (95% CI: [-20.7%, -10.2%]) in night-time crashes, and 12.4% (95% CI: [-16.7%, -7.9%]) in weekend night-time crashes. We also find substantial heterogeneity in treatment effects across spatial contexts. Effects were strongest in rural and less densely populated areas, where reductions exceeded 16% (95% CI: [-18.7%, -13.9%]) for total crashes and reached up to 29.6% (95% CI: [-35.8%, -22.8%]) for night-time and 21.4% (95% CI: [-28.3%, -13.9%]) for weekend night-time crashes. Moderate but statistically significant effects were also observed in dense urban areas, whereas effects in suburban and transitional areas were smaller and not statistically significant. Conclusions: Our analysis suggests that lowering the legal BAC limit in Scotland led to meaningful reductions in road traffic crashes, particularly during higher-risk periods and in rural areas. The findings further suggest that the effectiveness of BAC regulation may vary across local contexts, highlighting the importance of accounting for spatial heterogeneity when evaluating road safety policies.

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

Jolia: Concept-Level Vision-Language Alignment for 3D CT Contrastive Learning

Vision-language contrastive pretraining has become the dominant recipe for 3D medical foundation models, leveraging the large volumes of paired scans and reports produced in clinical practice. However, medical images usually span dozens of organs, and radiological reports are much longer than typical natural image captions and are composed of multiple structured sections. CLIP-style pretraining compresses this structure by encoding each modality into a single global token, at the risk of losing important details. We introduce ConQuer (Concept Queries), an image-text pretraining method that augments CLIP's global alignment with a set of localized alignments, one per concept. ConQuer splits the report into concept-specific sections and learns cross-attention queries that pool the matching image features without using any segmentation mask or spatial supervision. Contrastive learning is then applied independently for each concept. Concepts can be any unit of semantic localization; here, they are anatomical regions, one query per organ or gross body region. As a byproduct, each query learns attention maps focused on its concept, providing built-in spatial interpretability. We use ConQuer to train Jolia, a 3D CT foundation model on chest and abdominal CT. Jolia consistently outperforms a CLIP baseline on findings classification, report generation, and cross-center transfer, and sets a new state of the art across multiple public benchmarks. Jolia's weights will be released upon acceptance.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ProductConsistency: Improving Product Identity Preservation in Instruction-Based Image Editing via SFT and RL

Recent advances in instruction-based image editing have enabled models to perform complex visual edits from natural language instructions. However, in product-centric scenarios where preserving product features, branding, and textual elements are critical, current open and closed source models often struggle to maintain this fine-grained object identity. This issue is further compounded by the lack of datasets for instruction-based product image editing with text fidelity constraints, leaving it largely treated as an implicit capability of instruction-based image editing models. In this work, we introduce the ProductConsistency dataset which is designed to improve product-centric image editing. Our approach includes a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) dataset of 87k samples for product editing, a reinforcement learning (RL) dataset with 869 unique product images, and a new benchmark dataset, the ProductConsistency Benchmark, to allow rigorous and standardized evaluation of editing models. To guide RL training, we propose a Cyclic Consistency reward that enforces semantic preservation of product identity by using caption similarity between the original product description and captions generated from the edited image. We fine-tune both Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 and Flux.1-Kontext-dev using our dataset and demonstrate consistent improvements over baseline models in OCR and Perceptual metrics, and MLLM-based evaluations as well, indicating stronger product consistency, text rendering, and overall visual quality; with the Qwen-Image-Edit-2511 model achieving a 5x reduction in the character error rate. The code and pipeline is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/ProductConsistency-6FCC/README.md

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

A Neuromorphic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems

arXiv:2606.20031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic environmental changes, confined workspaces, and stringent real-time constraints make pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) a challenging problem for conventional search- and rule-based methods, which typically suffer from high computational complexity and long decision latency. While reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, deploying learned policies with extreme energy efficiency on resource-constrained hardware remains an open challenge. We present SDQN-RMFS, an end-to-end framework that achieves high-fidelity deployment of an RL-trained policy from a full-precision artificial neural network (ANN) through to a neuromorphic chip. By computing only when triggered by sparse events, this framework unlocks ultra-low-power RMFS pathfinding. Our full-stack pipeline operates as follows: an ANN policy is first efficiently trained via a collision-allowing strategy to densify informative trajectories, and then converted into a spiking neural network (SNN) via a hard-label knowledge distillation approach. This effectively addresses the output distribution mismatch, preserving policy capability across the ANN-to-SNN pipeline while substantially reducing inference latency. Hardware experiments demonstrate up to 11,281$\times$ energy savings and a nearly two-fold reduction in latency compared to a high-performance GPU baseline, while maintaining decision quality on par with the original trained policy. These results establish physical neuromorphic inference as a practical and energy-sustainable pathway for large-scale RMFS operations.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

An AI-Powered Trisomy 21 Research Assistant

Down syndrome, caused by trisomy 21, increases the risk of diverse co-occurring conditions. With more than 34,000 related publications indexed in PubMed as of early 2026, keeping pace with this expanding literature is challenging. While general-purpose large language models are widely used for information retrieval, they often rely on broad training data rather than specific evidence. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) improves rigor and reliability of responses by linking model outputs to source texts. In research, source texts are peer-reviewed articles. Standard implementations treat all manuscript sections equally, allowing background text to rank as highly as experimental results. To focus model outputs on experimentally supported responses, we developed the T21 Research Assistant, a section-aware RAG system that prioritizes Results sections to ground responses in primary experimental evidence. The system draws exclusively from 1,789 open-access Down syndrome publications from PubMed Central, including 327 NIH INCLUDE-funded studies, and uses a multistage pipeline for query validation, retrieval, reranking, synthesis, and citation verification. Built on NVIDIA Nemotron models, it generates structured, cited responses. Evaluation using expert-curated questions demonstrated strong performance, achieving a BERTScore F1 of 0.712 and recall of 0.758, comparable to or exceeding leading proprietary and open-source models. T21 Research Assistant is available at: https://bioinformatics.cuanschutz.edu/t21-res-assi/

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Stochastic Expectation Maximization for Robust State-Space Radio Interferometric Imaging

arXiv:2606.23944v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: State–space models provide a flexible framework for analyzing dynamical systems, yet they often rely on Gaussian assumptions that fail to capture heavy-tailed or outlier-prone measurement noise. We propose a robust estimation scheme for linear state–space models subject to compound-Gaussian noise, as encountered for instance in radio interferometry affected by radio-frequency interference (RFI). The method relies on a Stochastic Approximation Expectation–Maximization (SAEM) algorithm in which the standard E-step is replaced by Monte Carlo sampling of the latent states and noise texture through closed-form Gibbs updates, enabling tractable inference despite the heavy-tailed likelihood. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method significantly improves reconstruction fidelity and robustness to RFI, outperforming a Gaussian EM algorithm and even an oracle RTS smoother. These results highlight the benefits of heavy-tailed state–space modeling and SAEM-based inference in interference-dominated imaging scenarios.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

The Reward Was in Your Data All Along: Correcting Flow Matching with Discriminator-Guided RL

Score- and flow-matching models often rely on preference-based reinforcement learning for two purposes: aligning with subjective preferences and, surprisingly, recovering properties such as visual realism and coherent object structure that matching-based training is intended to learn from the data itself. We argue that this reflects a structural mismatch. Matching losses measure $\ell_2$ regression error on the velocity or score field under training-time marginals, a proxy poorly aligned with the visual and semantic properties that determine sample quality at inference. Given a reward aligned with these properties, RL sidesteps the mismatch by evaluating the model on its own samples and following the reward landscape directly. The challenge is to obtain such a reward without relying on human preferences, which are expensive and conflate data realism with annotator inclinations. We propose Discriminator-Guided RL (DRL). DRL trains a discriminator to separate data from base-model samples in a pretrained representation space and uses its logit as the reward in KL-regularized RL. The pretrained space restricts the discriminator to perceptually meaningful directions, and the logit estimates the log-likelihood ratio between data and model, which is the optimal reward for targeting the data distribution. Across SiT, JiT, REPA, and RAE, DRL reduces guidance-free FID (e.g., $9.38 \to 2.62$ on SiT) and semantic-space FD (e.g., $88.2 \to 19.3$ on DINOv3 for SiT), with consistent gains across all backbones, and improves human-preference rewards without training on them. It also yields a better Pareto frontier between preference reward and image fidelity under subsequent preference-based post-training, increasing alignment while reducing low-level artifacts such as oversaturation and excessive brightness.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Daily briefing: Human embryo genomes precisely altered

Authors:

The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future. The use of ‘base editing’ to precisely tweak human embryos has divided researchers. Plus, the number of lives saved by less-polluting cars in China and how to tip the world towards a sustainable future.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sure-almost-sure and Sure-limit-sure Window Mean Payoff in Markov Decision Processes

arXiv:2605.12191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given rationals $\alpha$ and $\beta$, the sure-almost-sure problem for a threshold Boolean objective $\varphi$ in a Markov decision process (MDP) asks if one can simultaneously ensure that all outcomes of the MDP have $\varphi$-value at least $\alpha$ (i.e. sure $\alpha$ satisfaction) and with probability $1$ the outcome has $\varphi$-value at least $\beta$ (i.e. almost-sure $\beta$ satisfaction). The sure-limit-sure problem asks if for all $\varepsilon > 0$ one can simultaneously ensure that all outcomes have $\varphi$-value at least $\alpha$ and with probability at least $1 - \varepsilon$ the outcome has $\varphi$-value at least $\beta$. Moreover, if simultaneous satisfaction of objectives is possible, then one would also like to construct a strategy (for sure-almost-sure) or a family of strategies (for sure-limit-sure) that achieves this. In this paper, we solve the sure-almost-sure and sure-limit-sure problems for window mean-payoff objectives. The window mean-payoff objective strengthens the standard mean-payoff objective by requiring that eventually, from every point in the infinite run, the average payoff becomes greater than a given threshold within a finite window length. We study two variants of window mean payoff: in the fixed variant, the window length $\ell$ is given, while in the bounded variant, the length is not given but is required to be bounded throughout the run. We show that the sure-almost-sure problem and the sure-limit-sure problem are both in P for the fixed variant (if $\ell$ is given in unary) and are both in NP $\cap$ coNP for the bounded variant, matching the computational complexity of sure satisfaction and almost-sure satisfaction when considered separately for these objectives. We also give bounds for the memory requirement of winning strategies for all considered problems.

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

Evolutionary Two-Stage Hyperparameter Optimization Strategies for Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20442v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) solve Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) by embedding physical laws into neural network training. However, their performance suffers from unstable convergence, training plateaus, and strong sensitivity to architectural and optimization hyperparameters due to the highly non-convex and multi-term structure of the physics-informed loss. In this setting, the outer-loop hyperparameter search is a noisy and black-box optimization problem over heterogeneous parameters, where classical local or gradient-based strategies are easily trapped in suboptimal regions. Evolutionary algorithms, with their population-based exploration and ability to handle mixed, non-differentiable search spaces, provide a more robust mechanism for discovering promising configurations. We propose and investigate a two-stage approach based on evolutionary algorithms that combines exploration and exploitation parts of PINNs training to improve solution accuracy and robustness under fixed computational budgets. In the first stage, we perform low-fidelity training runs with truncated epochs to rapidly screen candidate configurations, treating hyperparameter selection as a black-box outer-loop problem. In the second stage, only the most promising candidates are fully trained with standard gradient-based optimizers to refine the solution. Evaluated on three popular problems, namely Advection, Klein-Gordon and Helmholtz equations, our method consistently outperforms standard training and achieves significantly lower mean error within constrained computational resources.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Rule2Text: A Framework for Generating and Evaluating Natural Language Explanations of Knowledge Graph Rules

Knowledge graphs (KGs) can be enhanced through rule mining; however, the resulting logical rules are often difficult for humans to interpret due to their inherent complexity and the idiosyncratic labeling conventions of individual KGs. This work presents Rule2Text, a comprehensive framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate natural language explanations for mined logical rules, thereby improving KG accessibility and usability. We conduct extensive experiments using multiple datasets, including Freebase variants (FB-CVT-REV, FB+CVT-REV, and FB15k-237) as well as the ogbl-biokg dataset, with rules mined using AMIE 3.5.1. We systematically evaluate several LLMs across a comprehensive range of prompting strategies, including zero-shot, few-shot, variable type incorporation, and Chain-of-Thought reasoning. To systematically assess models' performance, we conduct a human evaluation of generated explanations on correctness and clarity. To address evaluation scalability, we develop and validate an LLM-as-a-judge framework that demonstrates strong agreement with human evaluators. Leveraging the best-performing model (Gemini 2.0 Flash), LLM judge, and human-in-the-loop feedback, we construct high-quality ground truth datasets, which we use to fine-tune the open-source Zephyr model. Our results demonstrate significant improvements in explanation quality after fine-tuning, with particularly strong gains in the domain-specific dataset. Additionally, we integrate a type inference module to support KGs lacking explicit type information. All code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/idirlab/KGRule2NL.

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

JustDiag!: A Diagnostic Justification Engine for Accountable Root Cause Analysis

arXiv:2606.19407v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models can produce fluent root cause analyses, but fluent final answers alone are insufficient evidence for accountability in high-stakes operations. In real incident response, engineers need to know what evidence supported a diagnosis, which alternatives were considered, where contradictions remained, and whether the system resolved the case or preserved uncertainty. We address this gap with JustDiag, a diagnostic justification engine for RCA that maintains an explicit process state over evidence, findings, competing hypotheses, conflicts, and next checks. We evaluated the system on 66 real-world incidents using a two-layer protocol that separately scores final-answer quality and process quality. Relative to a matched control without diagnostic justification, JustDiag achieved stronger outcome and process scores, while accepting slightly lower terminal completion due to more calibrated non-closure. These results suggest that accountable RCA requires explicit diagnostic justification artifacts and process-aware evaluation, not only fluent final answers.

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

Real-rootedness of the Poincaré polynomials of $\overline{\mathcal M}_{0,n}$: an AI-assisted proof

arXiv:2605.29151v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We prove real-rootedness for the Poincaré polynomial \[ P_n(t)=\sum_{i=0}^{n-3} \dim H^{2i}(\overline{\mathcal M}_{0,n};\mathbb{Q})t^i \] of the Deligne–Mumford moduli space $\overline{\mathcal M}_{0,n}$ of stable $n$-pointed rational curves, proving a conjecture of Aluffi–Chen–Marcolli. The proof starts from the Keel–Manin–Getzler recurrence, but its main new idea is a bivariate deformation $F_m(y,t)$ of the Poincaré polynomial. This deformation reveals a hidden interlacing structure not visible in the one-variable recurrence. For fixed $t

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

Organize then Retrieve: Hierarchical Memory Navigation for Efficient Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents struggle with long-horizon tasks due to their inherent statelessness, requiring all task-relevant information to be encoded in growing input contexts. The resulting degraded reasoning quality, increased inference cost, and higher latency necessitate efficient working memory mechanisms. However, existing approaches either rely on lossy compression or similarity-based retrieval, which often fail to capture temporal structure and causal dependencies required for multi-step agentic tasks. In this work, we present HORMA, a Hierarchical Organize-and-Retrieve Memory Agent that organizes experience into a file-system-like hierarchical structure, where summarized entities are linked to the corresponding raw trajectories, enabling efficient access without losing detailed information. HORMA decomposes working memory into two stages: structured memory construction and navigation-based retrieval. The construction module iteratively refines how experiences are structured by distinguishing between failures caused by missing information and those caused by misleading or overloaded context. The navigation module retrieves task-relevant context by traversing the hierarchy using a lightweight agent trained with reinforcement learning to select minimal yet sufficient context, thereby reducing latency along the critical execution path. Across ALFWorld, LoCoMo, and LongMemEval, HORMA improves task performance under constrained context budgets while requiring at most 22.17% of the baseline token usage in long conversation tasks. Compared to existing methods, it consistently achieves better efficiency-performance trade-offs and generalizes effectively to unseen tasks.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Positive Conserved Quantities in the Klein-Gordon Equation

Authors:

arXiv:2410.04666v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce an embedding of the Klein-Gordon equation into a pair of coupled equations that are first-order in time. The existence of such an embedding is based on a positivity property exhibited by the Klein-Gordon equation. These coupled equations provide a more satisfactory reduction of the Klein-Gordon equation to first-order differential equations in time than the Schrodinger equation. Using this embedding, we show that the ``negative probabilities" associated with the Klein-Gordon equation do not need to be resolved by introducing matrices as Dirac did with his eponymous equation. For the case of the massive Klein-Gordon equation, the coupled equations are equivalent to a forward Schrodinger equation in time and a backward Schrodinger equation in time, respectively, corresponding to a particle and its antiparticle. We show that there are two positive integrals that are conserved (constant in time) in the Klein-Gordon equation and thus provide a concrete resolution of the historical puzzle regarding the previously supposed lack of a probabilistic interpretation for the field governed by the Klein-Gordon equation. A significant consequence is that the Schrodinger equation is given a relativistic formulation, which does not require creation and annihilation operators, i.e. quantum fields. Physically, this corresponds to a theory in which the positive and negative energy parts do not directly interact, hence there will be no annihilation events–for example, particle-antiparticle collisions which do not result in photon emission. Thus, one practical consequence of this relativistically consistent theory is a simple explanation for dark matter.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Bacterial-Selective Membrane-Active Compounds Reveals Mechanistic Bias in Antibiotic Training Datasets

The rise of antibiotic resistance necessitates the discovery of antibacterial compounds with novel mechanisms of action (MoAs). Recent machine learning approaches have shown promise in antibacterial compound discovery, but often identify derivatives of known antibiotic classes rather than mechanistically novel compounds. Previous approaches applied Tanimoto similarity filters at the end of screening pipelines, but this method has substantial drawbacks: Tanimoto similarity can be misleading in chemical space, and post-hoc filtering does not influence what activity models learn to prioritize. Here, we present a machine learning pipeline that addresses chemical novelty upfront by employing an XGBoost-based MoA classifier to explicitly prioritize compounds predicted to have mechanisms distinct from known antibiotic classes, combined with graph neural networks for antibacterial activity and toxicity prediction. Applied to the Zinc20 database, our approach successfully identified non-toxic antibacterial compounds structurally distinct from known antibiotics. Notably, the majority of these hits exhibited membrane-targeting activity with selectivity for bacterial cells over mammalian cells, suggesting potential for next-generation membrane-active antibiotics. However, we did not identify compounds with novel protein targets. Systematic analysis revealed that this limitation stems from mechanistic bias in training data rather than model architecture. Specifically, our activity model learned to preferentially score compounds similar to specific groups in the training data, thus overrepresenting certain MoA classes including membrane-active compounds. Even substantial model architecture and training data enhancements did not overcome this constraint. Our findings demonstrate that the primary bottleneck for discovering mechanistically novel antibiotics is the scarcity of diverse, mechanistically-annotated training data. This work provides both a methodological framework for mechanism-aware screening and critical insights into data requirements for genuinely novel antibiotic discovery.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SPHINX: First Explain, Then Explore

Generating adversarial driving scenarios is critical for evaluating and improving autonomous vehicle decision-making systems in simulation. Recent approaches, such as ChatScene and LLM-Attacker, rely primarily on the prior knowledge of Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models to generate driving scenarios procedurally. We argue that adversarial scenes should be generated based on the failure diagnosis (e.g., indecisiveness, multi-frame inconsistency) of the driving policy to specifically address the policy's weaknesses instead of relying on prior assumptions. In this paper, we propose SPHINX, a closed-loop framework for adversarial scenario synthesis guided by a simple principle: first explain, then explore. Beyond blindly exploring the scenario space, SPHINX leverages explainable artificial intelligence methods to analyze the policy, identifying key visual concepts and their influence on policy outputs, and the uncertainty of the decisions. Given the interpretable evidence extracted from the policy's own decision process, we use a vision language model to rationalize and criticize failure modes of the current policy. These critics are then used to generate targeted adversarial scenarios for policy retraining and improvement. We demonstrate that SPHINX can highlight an interpretable account of policy failures while other adversarial scene generation cannot. Across the evaluated benchmarks and test suites, SPHINX can be applied to diverse state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle architectures and yields consistent robustness improvements over existing scenario-generation methods.

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

RIVET: Robust Idempotent Voice Attribute Editing

arXiv:2606.19629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice attribute editing models modify characteristics such as age and gender while preserving speaker identity. In large-scale speech datasets, however, attribute annotations are often noisy or inconsistent, which can cause conditional generative models to produce unstable edits. In this work, we show that idempotency provides an effective mechanism for improving robustness to noisy labels. An idempotent operator is one for which repeated application does not change the result, i.e., f(f(x)) = f(x). Enforcing this property acts as an implicit regularizer that reduces sensitivity to mislabeled examples. We introduce RIVET, a training framework that incorporates an idempotency objective to improve robustness to label noise. We evaluate RIVET under controlled label noise and on the GLOBE dataset with naturally noisy annotations. RIVET improves editing success and better preserves speaker identity than standard training, showing that idempotency improves robustness in voice editing models.

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arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Face versus Body Tracking for Human-Robot Interaction: An Egocentric Dataset

Meaningful human-robot interaction (HRI) requires a robot to continuously assess user engagement through persistent user tracking. However, state-of-the-art Multi-Object Tracking models are heavily optimized for surveillance or autonomous driving. A social robot faces distinct egocentric challenges, such as humans moving in unpredictable nonlinear patterns, obstructing each other, or leaving and reentering the scene. These dynamics trigger frequent identity switches (IDSW), causing the robot to lose its footing mid-conversation. To address this, we introduce a focused, custom-annotated egocentric dataset collected via the Furhat robot. We present a systematic evaluation isolating detection errors from tracking logic, comparing face versus body tracking, and assessing the impact of extended memory and appearance re-identification (ReID). Results indicate that increasing temporal memory mitigates prolonged occlusions but fails on complex dynamic events. Integrating ReID resolves complex switches but exhibits opposing effects: it substantially improves body tracking stability, yet causes facial IDSW to spike due to profile angle sensitivity. Ultimately, our optimized pipeline reduces IDSW by 49% compared to a standard tracking-by-detection baseline, effectively mitigating interaction breakdowns. As standard benchmarks lack dense, close-quarter occlusions, this work highlights the critical need for natively captured social dynamics to truly validate HRI perception models.