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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI-Driven Assessment of Human Tutors: Linking Training Performance to Real-Life Practice

arXiv:2606.18617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: There exist numerous tutor training platforms. However, few provide AI-driven training and evaluation for human tutors based on real-life performance. We present an AI-driven system that assesses both open responses during training and authentic real-life tutoring. Unlike platforms that only assess learning through online training or simulations, our system utilizes Generative AI (Gemini-2.5-pro) to analyze transcriptions of authentic tutoring, measuring the transfer of tutor skills to real-life application. Human tutors instructing students remotely in math (N=86) completed six scenario-based lessons, averaging a significant 7.4% learning gain. Using mixed-effects models across 405 session-to-lesson pairs, we found that training performance significantly predicted real-life transcript scores with an effect size of 0.25 SD. Model comparison (AIC/BIC) indicated averaging open response and multiple choice performance during training predicted real-life tutor performance best, although open responses were comparatively more predictive. Exploratory analysis showed that after training, tutors were significantly more likely to encounter pedagogical opportunities to apply their skills (61.1% to 68.9%) and demonstrated higher execution quality within those opportunities (65.5% to 68.1%). Interrupted time series analysis suggested that these tutor improvements were part of a gradual trend over time rather than an immediate intervention effect of training. We illustrate an AI-driven method to link tutor training with real-life assessment. In doing so, we contribute open datasets, AI prompts, and scoring rubrics to support transparency and reproducibility.

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

Objects Before Words: Object-First Inductive Biases for Grounding Language in Child-View Video

Learning grounded word meaning from natural experience requires resolving two ambiguities in infant-view recordings: when the named referent appears and where it is in a cluttered frame. In SAYCam-style data, caregiver speech is sparse and weakly synchronized with egocentric video, so single-frame contrastive pairing yields noisy positives in which the intended object is absent or entangled with distractors. We propose BabyMind, an object-first bias for child-view contrastive learning under sparse, noisy supervision. BabyMind extracts candidate object embeddings using an offline mask-based region interface, links candidates across a short utterance-centered window into lightweight object files via tracking, and aligns utterances to bags of object files with a prototype-space multiple-instance contrastive objective. Track-coherence and global-object agreement regularizers stabilize learning and transfer object-file structure into the global frame embedding used at evaluation. On SAYCam-S, BabyMind improves Labeled-S 15 forced-choice accuracy by +2.6 points over CVCL and yields consistent gains on in-vocabulary out-of-distribution benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/sathiiii/BabyMind.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Maestro Order: A Model-Agnostic Orchestration Harness

Authors:

arXiv:2606.23983v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A single forward pass of a capable model is a fast, fluent, and unreliable problem-solver: it is right often enough to be useful and wrong often enough to be dangerous; in language models, such confident errors are known as hallucinations. We present Maestro Order, a model-agnostic orchestration harness that turns unreliable solvers into reliable problem-solving systems by composing them according to four structural primitives (decompose, ensemble, verify, and recurse) and a budget-aware controller that decides where to spend compute. The harness treats any model as a black-box base solver behind a uniform interface, layers a verifier ensemble whose discrimination is measured online, and allocates verification and voting to the stages with the highest marginal reliability per unit cost. We give the architecture, the message and state schema, the controller algorithm, and the engineering that makes it deterministic, observable, and fault-tolerant. We then specify an evaluation methodology (reliability at fixed cost, coverage, calibration, and ablations) and report results from a faithful Monte Carlo simulation of the harness over a parameterized solver/verifier model. The simulation reproduces the predicted laws quantitatively: verification amplifies reliability geometrically (e.g. $0.55\to0.98$ with two gates, $\to0.999$ with four), voting helps only above chance and is limited by shared errors, and a budget-aware controller reaches a target reliability at a small fraction of the cost of voting alone by selecting the cheapest mechanism for each regime. We close with failure modes (verifier gaming, correlated errors, and decomposition error compounding) and concrete guidance: build robust checkers, diversify solvers, and let the controller put compute where the information is.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reliable quantification of renal function from frozen blood samples

BACKGROUND: Differences in renal function may affect Alzheimer disease (AD) blood biomarker levels independent of AD pathology. Although renal function was unaccounted for in foundational AD blood biomarker studies, there is potential to address this through quantification of estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from frozen serum and plasma samples. However, the validity of eGFR evaluation from long-term frozen blood samples is unknown. METHODS: Adults aged 50-85 with at least 2 vascular risk factors were recruited from vascular surgery or cardiology clinics in Tucson, Arizona from 2022-2025. Individuals with creatinine assessments in point-of-care whole blood (POC-WB) and frozen serum and plasma samples using the iSTAT (Abbott) were included. eGFR was calculated using the 2021 CKD-EPI creatinine equation without race. Agreement between POC-WB and frozen blood samples was assessed using Cohen's kappa with linear weights. RESULTS: 134 participants (mean [SD] age: 72.6 [7.5] years, 39.6% female, 23.1% chronic kidney disease) had POC-WB eGFR available. Frozen serum and plasma samples had strong agreement with POC-WB for eGFR (Kw= 0.90-0.95, P

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MooMIns – Monocular 3D Reconstruction and Object Pose Estimation from Multiple Instances

Simultaneous 3D reconstruction and 6D object pose estimation from a single monocular image is an inherently ill-posed problem. In industrial settings, however, multiple instances of an object are often randomly arranged in bins, implicitly providing several views of the same object within a single image. We show that this implicit multi-view geometry can be exploited to simultaneously reconstruct the object in 3D and estimate the 6D pose of each visible object instance. We present MooMIns, a new Gaussian-splatting-based approach that inverts the original Gaussian splatting formulation: instead of rendering a single scene from multiple cameras, we render multiple object instances from a single camera. Our method is initialized with SAM3 instance segmentation masks and a modified Structure from Motion (SfM) pipeline. In contrast to learned monocular depth estimation, we perform true geometry-based reconstruction from image evidence, avoiding hallucinations caused by training data priors. We evaluate MooMIns on synthetic and real bin-picking scenarios, and demonstrate accurate reconstruction of previously unseen objects as well as reliable pose estimation of individual instance

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

Quantifying the Impact of Lossy Compression on Neural Generative Surrogate Modeling

arXiv:2606.15959v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural networks are used as generative surrogate models for scientific discovery, which are trainable approximations of scientific simulations. These models enable users to replace time-consuming numerical simulations with learned alternatives, providing quick solutions. However, high-fidelity generative surrogate models require massive training datasets, which can create storage and I/O challenges. Lossy compression is a promising way to reduce this burden, but compression errors may affect the model quality in subtle ways, making it challenging to quantify their impact. In this work, we examine how lossy compression of training data impacts the quality of generative surrogate models. We begin by characterizing the uncertainty inherent in training neural networks, showing that identical training configurations can produce different models. By exploiting this variability, we propose a method to estimate how much compression-induced error a surrogate model can tolerate without affecting its accuracy. Evaluation of two application simulations demonstrates that our approach significantly reduces memory/storage requirements and speeds up training while producing high-quality surrogate models. These results show that lossy compression saves data storage up to 23.7x and 39x with negligible impact on the quality of the surrogate model. Meanwhile, reducing the size of the training data set also enhances the data loading speed and reduces the training time by up to 3x.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Self-Prompting Small Language Models for Privacy-Sensitive Clinical Information Extraction

Clinical named entity recognition from dental progress notes is challenging because documentation is highly unstructured, domain-specific, and often privacy-sensitive. We developed a locally deployable framework that enables small language models to self-generate, verify, refine, and evaluate entity-specific prompts for extracting multiple clinical entities from dental notes. Using 1,200 annotated notes, we evaluated candidate open-weight models with multi-prompt ensemble inference and further adapted selected models using QLoRA-based supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Model performance varied substantially, highlighting the need for task-specific evaluation rather than reliance on generic benchmarks. Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct achieved the strongest baseline performance. After DPO, Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct achieved micro/macro F1 scores of 0.864/0.837 and 0.806/0.797, respectively. These findings suggest that automated prompt optimization combined with lightweight preference-based post-training can support scalable clinical information extraction using locally deployed small language models.

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

IPO Finance Agent: Evaluation of LLM Financial Analysts beyond Finance Agent v2, with Automated Rubric Generation – the Case of the SpaceX (SPCX) IPO

arXiv:2606.23032v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Finance Agent v2 (by Vals AI) has emerged as the reference benchmark for evaluating both Anthropic Claude and OpenAI ChatGPT frontier language models on financial tasks. However, it narrowly deals with periodic reporting from publicly traded companies (SEC 10-K and 10-Q filings), and its agentic harness relies on naive, unenriched chunk retrieval. Neither the task design nor the retrieval approach addresses the distinct challenges of IPO due diligence. SEC S-1 filings combine historical financial statements, governance structures, pro forma and common-control accounting treatments, capital-formation narratives, and underwriting-sensitive risk disclosures within substantially longer documents than typical periodic filings. That is why we introduce IPO Finance Agent, which extends the Finance Agent v2 framework along two directions: task domain and retrieval architecture. During our experiments, the original Finance Agent v2 harness basically failed to deliver any output related to the SpaceX S-1 filing, due to document length. We therefore had to improve the agentic harness with contextual retrieval, a more realistic and industry-standard approach for long documents. We also built a dataset of 1,000 IPO-diligence questions, and publicly release 70 questions on the SpaceX (SPCX) S-1 filing to support reproducibility, while the remainder are held private to guard against benchmark contamination. In addition, we introduce an evaluator-optimizer pipeline to automatically generate evaluation rubrics for the benchmark: candidate facts are extracted from model answers, consolidated into draft criteria, then automatically audited for omissions, hallucinations, mistiered items, and redundancy, with LLM feedback driving iterative repair, targeted enrichment, and deduplication. Human experts only review final rubrics before deployment. Results show that the best-performing evaluated model, Alibaba Qwen 3.7 Max, reaches 79.4% accuracy at 0.30 USD per query, and the most cost-efficient model on the resulting Pareto frontier, Xiaomi MiMo-2.5 Pro, reaches slightly lower accuracy (76.8%) at 0.05 USD per query. Both exceed the current Finance Agent v2 leaderboard ceiling-Google Gemini 3.5 Flash at 57.9% for 2.51 USD per querywhile undercutting even FABv2's cheapest entry (MiniMax M3: 48.3% at 0.32 USD) on cost-efficiency. Code and data are released on GitHub: https://github.com/benstaf/ipoagent

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Non-Parametric Ancestry Adjustment for Polygenic Scores

Modern polygenic risk scores (PRS) exhibit shifts correlated with ancestry, leading to erroneous predictions for non-European individuals when models are trained on predominantly European cohorts. Such shifts arise from, among other factors, (1) algorithmic limitations in the ability of PRS model training to detect causal variants, rather than nearby variants with ancestry-dependent correlations to the causal one, (2) under-representation of alleles with higher prevalence in non-European populations in the association study training, and (3) gene-by-environment interactions where the environment is correlated with genetic ancestry. Current ancestry-adjustment methodologies often discretize individuals into population categories and apply a simple affine mapping to reduce these genetic ancestry biases. However, such approaches provide suboptimal adjustments, particularly for admixed individuals. In this work, we introduce a detailed theoretical characterization of ancestry-dependent biases and propose novel methods based on non-parametric neighborhood techniques that provide more accurate empirical results and admit statistical consistency guarantees. Extensive experiments using the UK Biobank demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learned Radius Estimation for UDF-Based Point Cloud Reconstruction

Surface reconstruction from point clouds is important for consumer-grade 3D capture, including AR/VR and indoor scanning. Local-patch Unsigned Distance Field (UDF) methods are lightweight and generalizable, but their accuracy depends on the support radius, traditionally fixed or selected by a one-dimensional curvature heuristic that cannot capture heterogeneous local geometry. We propose a learned per-query radius selector that predicts a continuous support radius and plugs into a frozen LoSF-UDF backbone. The selector is trained using off-grid target radii obtained by parabolic interpolation of cached UDF error curves. Experiments show improved fine-scale reconstruction accuracy.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

ORCA: A Platform for Open-Source Dexterity Research

arXiv:2606.14561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning – closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video – yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and accessible hand hardware exists, the software for control, simulation, teleoperation, and retargeting is scattered in one-off code bases, and largely disconnected from the robot-learning ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the \orca~learning stack, an open-source research stack for dexterity as a first-class robot learning domain. Our \orca~stack unifies low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from a range of consumer platforms, and hand retargeting, behind a single interface, and integrates natively with popular robot-learning frameworks such as \lerobot, so dexterous hand researchers can leverage the same data, training, and evaluation pipelines used for non-dexterous robot learning. We demonstrate a complete end-to-end workflow, collecting expert demonstrations of an in-hand reorientation task by teleoperation with a consumer-grade VR headset, training an autonomous policy with \lerobot, and evaluating the learned policy in a fully reproducible and observable setup. We open-source the entire stack as a shared, reproducible foundation for dexterous-manipulation research.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Learning interpretable structural similarity from tandem mass spectra for small molecule analog discovery

Analog discovery remains a central bottleneck in mass spectrometry-based untargeted metabolomics, as conventional spectral similarity scores poorly reflect molecular structure. We introduce SIMBA, a transformer-based model that infers two interpretable graph-based distances, maximum common edge subgraph and substructure edit distance, directly from tandem mass spectra. SIMBA consistently retrieves structurally closer analogs than existing methods, enabling structure-aware small molecule identification beyond exact spectral matching.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Disease-Centric Vision-Language Pretraining with Hybrid Visual Encoding for 3D Computed Tomography

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) holds great promise for general-purpose medical AI by leveraging radiology reports as rich textual supervision, yet existing methods struggle with 3D CT imaging due to inefficient visual backbones and coarse semantic alignment. To address these issues, we propose a tailored VLP framework featuring three key components: (1) a CNN-ViT hybrid encoder that replaces ViT's patch embedding with a 3D CNN backbone to efficiently capture local anatomical details while preserving global attention and compatibility with pre-trained cross-modal priors; (2) a disease-level contrastive learning mechanism using learnable query tokens to dynamically extract disease-specific semantics from full reports and align them with corresponding visual features, thereby disentangling distinct diseases within the same anatomical region; and (3) a diagnosis-aware prompt strategy that employs real clinical phrases and aggregated disease prototypes to bridge the pre-training-inference gap and enhance zero-shot diagnostic reliability. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on CT-RATE (84.4% AUC, +5.1%) and Rad-ChestCT (75.4% AUC, +5.4%), with even larger gains (+9.8% AUC) on a challenging 60-disease benchmark, and demonstrates strong transferability to radiology report generation, underscoring the generality and clinical utility of our approach.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Hölder++: Improving the Quality-Coherence Trade-off in Multimodal VAEs

arXiv:2606.13381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing approaches for multimodal variational autoencoders (VAEs) face a trade-off between generative quality and coherence-i.e., they struggle to generate realistic and diverse samples that, at the same time, are semantically consistent across modalities. A recent work shows that using a simple approximation to Hölder pooling as an aggregation method improves coherence over the SOTA MMVAE+, despite assuming a single shared representation across all modalities. Yet, it slightly compromises sample diversity. Inspired by this insight, we propose Hölder++, a novel multimodal VAE that improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off through: (i) the first implementation of Hölder pooling without any approximation for multimodal VAEs; (ii) an extended architecture that models distinct shared and private (i.e., modality-specific) representations (Hölder+); and (iii) hierarchical inference that further enhances the disentanglement between the shared and private representations (Hölder++). Our experiments corroborate that Hölder++ consistently improves the generative quality-coherence trade-off, yields more structured latent spaces, and learns shared representations that are informative for downstream tasks.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Knowledge Cascade: Reverse Knowledge Distillation on Nonparametric Multivariate Functional Estimation

arXiv:2606.25927v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As machine learning models and datasets continue to grow, developing complex models has become increasingly computationally demanding. Knowledge distillation reduces deployment cost by compressing a large, well-trained teacher model into a compact student model, but it does not address settings where constructing the teacher itself is the bottleneck. Motivated by this challenge, we introduce Knowledge Cascade (KCas), a reverse knowledge distillation framework that uses information from a small, inexpensive student model to guide the development of a more complex teacher model. Although this direction is counterintuitive because the teacher typically has greater representational capacity, we show that student-to-teacher transfer can be principled when supported by statistical scaling relationships. We first develop KCas for nonparametric multivariate functional estimation in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces via smoothing splines, where selecting multiple smoothing parameters is a major computational bottleneck. KCas transfers student-selected smoothing parameters to the full-sample regime through asymptotic scaling laws, substantially reducing computational cost for high-dimensional and large-scale datasets while retaining theoretical guarantees. Beyond smoothing splines, we illustrate the same principle through kernel density estimation and deep learning hyperparameter transfer. Simulations and real-data experiments show that KCas achieves substantial computational savings while maintaining strong statistical performance, and can sometimes outperform the corresponding full-sample procedure.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Memory Makes the Difference: Evaluating How Different Memory Roles Shape Conversational Agents

Prior research on memory mechanism in RAG-based conversational system has emphasized how memory is stored and retrieved. However, far less is known about how memories with different functional roles influence response quality. Specifically, how they shape an agent's responses under varying conversational contexts and whether they lead to substantively different response behaviors. Existing evaluations in conversational system are also largely reference-based, insufficiently capturing the nuances in responses that may address users' preferences differently. In this work, we probe the impact of different memory types in shaping agents' responses. We present a fine-grained taxonomy of conversational memory, classify retrieved memories into different role types, and design a user-centric evaluation framework that simulates user perspectives. Through comparative experiments on long-term datasets and frontier LLMs, our analysis reveal many differentiated effects of memories: e.g., clarifying memory improves responses' factual accuracy and constraint awareness, making them more correct and personalized; irrelevant memory reduces topic relevance and degrades constraint awareness. Despite the power of frontier LLMs, these findings shed light on how different memory types can be leveraged to produce more personalized responses and inspire further research in this direction.

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

NetCause: Counterfactual Learning for Root Cause Analysis in Large-Scale Networks

arXiv:2606.13543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a learned model capture how faults propagate through a large-scale network and use this knowledge to causally attribute customer impact to its underlying root cause? Existing root cause analysis techniques often rely on static rules, correlation heuristics, or topology-local reasoning, which struggle to generalize in dynamic environments where faults propagate across complex physical and logical dependencies. We present NetCause, a self-supervised learning-based framework that models network incidents as graph-temporal processes and uses counterfactual simulation to rank candidate root causes. This approach produces an interpretable ranking of root cause hypotheses and integrates naturally with operator-defined mitigation and remediation actions. We train the model on over 1,500 incidents collected over six months from a leading cloud provider's production network and evaluate it on 31 expert-labeled incidents. NetCause consistently improves root cause ranking quality in the regime most relevant to operational decision-making, achieving a 16.1% accuracy improvement over a rule-based heuristic baseline. While training is computationally intensive, inference is lightweight, requiring only seconds of GPU runtime per incident (well below typical telemetry collection latencies).

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

EPMF: Efficient Perception-aware Multi-sensor Fusion for 3D Semantic Segmentation

We study multi-sensor fusion for 3D semantic segmentation that is important to scene understanding for many applications, such as autonomous driving and robotics. Existing fusion-based methods, however, may not achieve promising performance due to the vast difference between the two modalities. In this work, we investigate a collaborative fusion scheme called perception-aware multi-sensor fusion (PMF) to effectively exploit perceptual information from two modalities, namely, appearance information from RGB images and spatio-depth information from point clouds. To this end, we project point clouds to the camera coordinate using perspective projection, and process both inputs from LiDAR and cameras in 2D space while preventing the information loss of RGB images. Then, we propose a two-stream network to extract features from the two modalities, separately. The extracted features are fused by effective residual-based fusion modules. Moreover, we introduce additional perception-aware losses to measure the perceptual difference between the two modalities. Last, we propose an improved version of PMF, i.e., EPMF, which is more efficient and effective by optimizing data pre-processing and network architecture under perspective projection. Specifically, we propose cross-modal alignment and cropping to obtain tight inputs and reduce unnecessary computational costs. We then explore more efficient contextual modules under perspective projection and fuse the LiDAR features into the camera stream to boost the performance of the two-stream network. Extensive experiments on benchmark data sets show the superiority of our method. For example, on nuScenes test set, our EPMF outperforms the state-of-the-art method, i.e., RangeFormer, by 0.9% in mIoU. Our source code is available at https://github.com/ICEORY/PMF.

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

Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference for Dependent Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.15458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) is a core engine of modern AI, enabling scalable approximate Bayesian learning and uncertainty-aware training of large probabilistic and generative models. In this paper, we propose Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference (SN-VI), a novel framework for modeling complex dependencies among latent variables in posterior approximation, leveraging multivariate spline techniques. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the mean-field assumption, SN-VI preserves intricate latent variable dependencies, providing a flexible and accurate approximation of posteriors with arbitrary shapes. We establish rigorous theoretical guarantees, including the derivation of the lower bound for the variational objective and proof of asymptotic consistency in posterior estimation. To facilitate practical implementation, we develop an algorithm that automatically identifies dependent latent variables and their underlying dependence structure, without requiring manual specification. Simulation studies validate the effectiveness of SN-VI in approximating posterior distributions with bounded support and complex dependencies. The proposed method has been successfully applied to high-dimensional structured data, including computer vision datasets and spatial transcriptomics. In these applications, SN-VI demonstrates improved generative model performance and effectively uncovers coupled biological signals through the learned dependency structure.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lyapunov-Based Sample Complexity Analysis for Weakly-Coupled MDPs

arXiv:2606.14095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the sample complexity of learning in average-reward weakly-coupled Markov decision processes (WCMDPs) and Restless Bandits (RBs) under a generative model. Naive reduction to a tabular MDP leads to high complexity bounds as the state-action space is exponentially large in the number of arms $N$. By exploiting the weakly coupled structure, we show that near-optimal policies can be learned with sample and computational complexities that are polynomial in $N$. Specifically, we analyze the plug-in approach, which applies an efficient planning algorithm to an empirical model estimated from data. For fully heterogeneous WCMDPs, we establish the first finite-sample PAC guarantee with polynomial complexity and an $O(1/\sqrt{N})$ optimality gap. For homogeneous RBs, we further prove that a smaller optimality gap is achievable under mild structural assumptions. A primary technical contribution of our work is a novel Lyapunov-based analysis framework. Unlike classical approaches that rely on the difficult-to-control bias function, our framework uses an explicitly constructed Lyapunov function along with a drift transfer technique between the true and empirical models. A key step of independent interest in our framework is a fine-grained perturbation analysis for the underlying linear programming (LP) relaxation, which provides a general tool for analyzing LP-based policies and weakly-coupled systems.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Tac-DINO: Learning Vision-Tactile Features with Patch Alignment

Touch is the primary medium through which humans interact with the environment. Currently, tactile learning mainly focuses on image-level pretraining or alignment. However, tactile signals correspond to local object contact, while research into scale alignment and holographic matching remains limited and proper datasets and benchmarks also lack. To bridge this gap, we first construct a data collection system to acquire a large-scale tactile dataset, with over 20 K tactile contacts from 505 real-world objects. Building on this dataset, we design a Vis-Tac Holographic Matching Benchmark to evaluate vision-tactile local-to-global alignment ability. Then we propose Vision-Tactile Patch Alignment (VTPA) methods for vision-tactile representation learning. Experiments demonstrate that these exceed the performance of methods without alignment and align with whole-object images.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Efficient Graph State Purification with Factorized Graph-Preserving Operations across Local Clifford Orbits

arXiv:2606.23809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph states form a broad class of multipartite entangled states underlying measurement-based quantum computation, quantum networks, and stabilizer codes. However, systematic entanglement distillation for arbitrary graph states remains challenging because the circuit design space grows rapidly with the number of parties. We introduce a group of Clifford operations that we call "factorized graph-preserving". It enables us to efficiently enumerate and optimize graph-state purification circuits at finite size for realistic noisy hardware. These operations map products of graph-basis states to products of graph-basis states, so their action can be represented as permutations of graph-basis labels. Moreover, this useful gate set admits a compact factorized description determined by simple graph-theoretic features. This structure also allows, after some initial cached precomputation, drastically lower computational complexity for simulating a gate. We further organize these operations over local-complementation (LC) orbits using minimum-edge representatives (MERs), which let us design purification circuits that apply to all locally equivalent graph states (up to a basis change). Using this framework, we optimize noisy finite-size multipartite distillation circuits for several graph-state families. Numerical results show that the resulting graph-preserving circuits can outperform standard recurrence-based purification protocols under realistic gate and measurement noise. Our results establish LC-orbit structure and factorized graph-preserving operations as practical tools for scalable, topology-aware and hardware-constrained graph-state distillation protocol design. Our work can also be interpreted as a graph-based heuristic for finding transversal gates.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

GEOAgent: An AI-driven Autonomous Framework for Intelligent GEO Data Retrieval and Standardized Preprocessing

Datasets in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) remain difficult to reuse at scale because sample annotations are heterogeneous and raw sequencing data require assay-specific preprocessing. We present GEOAgent, an AI-driven autonomous framework designed for intelligent dataset retrieval and standardized preprocessing by coupling autonomous semantic governance with an automated Nextflow pipeline named bioStream. Metadata from 181,760 sequencing series and 84,756 associated PubMed records were organized in a relational database and semantic index to support natural-language dataset retrieval. The framework automatically determines assay modalities, resolves experimental design pairings, and standardizes sample naming to minimize manual curation overhead. Based on these parsed attributes, the framework generates deployment-ready manifests to automatically execute containerized workflows across bulk and single-cell omics modalities. In expert-curated benchmarks, the workflow achieved 96% retrieval precision alongside 100% accuracy in assay classification and sample relationship resolution. The web platform is publicly accessible, while the source code and associated databases are openly available via GitHub and Zenodo.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FOSC-X: An Extended Framework for Optimal Local Cuts and Non-Horizontal Cluster Selection from Clustering Hierarchies

arXiv:2606.18972v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting a flat clustering solution from a hierarchy is a common task in practical cluster analysis and can be formulated as an optimisation problem. Existing approaches focus on finding a single optimal solution. We introduce FOSC-X, a framework for extracting the top-M globally optimal flat clusterings from local, non-horizontal cuts of a hierarchical cluster tree, while optionally enforcing constraints on the number of clusters. This enables automatic identification of multiple high-quality alternative clusterings that capture different aspects of the hierarchical structure. Without constraints, the top-M problem can be solved in polynomial time using dynamic programming, exploiting the property that locally optimal partial candidates within subtrees can be combined to form globally optimal solutions while automatically determining the number of clusters. However, this can lead to solutions with numbers of clusters that are ultimately undesirable – e.g., too large to be meaningful or practically analysed within a particular application domain. Imposing cluster-count constraints breaks the optimality property underlying the unconstrained dynamic programming approach, since locally optimal partial candidates may no longer combine into feasible globally optimal solutions. FOSC-X addresses this challenge through a dynamic programming strategy that maintains compact sets of feasible candidates using lower and upper feasibility bounds while pruning infeasible or dominated combinations. The resulting method guarantees optimal rankings of the top-M solutions with linear-time complexity in the number of cluster nodes and dataset size, both with and without cluster-count constraints. Experiments show that FOSC-X efficiently reveals alternative clustering structures overlooked by single-solution extraction methods.