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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Visual-Seeker: Towards Visual-Native Multimodal Agentic Search via Active Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in many visual tasks, but they often struggle with factual grounding when confronted with complex, open-world scenarios. While recent multimodal deep search agents attempt to address this issue by utilizing external tools, the visual-native search paradigm remains underexplored. Existing methods primarily rely on simple images with explicit semantics and text-only evidence trajectories, limiting the agent's ability to perform multi-hop, cross-modal reasoning and search. To address these limitations, we propose Visual-Seeker, a visual-native multimodal deep search agent via active visual reasoning. Rather than treating vision as a static input, our agent actively attends to fine-grained visual details, dynamically harvests visual evidence throughout the search process. To unlock its visual-native potential, we design an active visual reasoning data pipeline and synthesize 5K high-quality multimodal trajectories for model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance across five challenging multimodal search benchmarks, even surpassing several proprietary models, validating robust visual-native reasoning and search in real-world web environments. The code and data can be accessed at: https://github.com/ZhengboZhang/Visual-Seeker.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Merged amplitude encoding for Chebyshev quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks: trading qubits for circuit executions

arXiv:2603.02818v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks based on Chebyshev polynomials (CCQKAN) evaluate each edge activation function as a quantum inner product, creating a trade-off between qubit count and the number of circuit executions per forward pass. We introduce merged amplitude encoding, a technique that packs the element-wise products of all $n$ input-edge vectors for a given output node into a single amplitude state, reducing circuit executions by a factor of $n$ at a cost of only 1–2 additional qubits relative to the sequential baseline. The merged and original circuits compute the same mathematical quantity exactly; the open question is whether they remain equally trainable within a gradient-based optimization loop. We address this question through numerical experiments on 10 network configurations under ideal, finite-shot, and noisy simulation conditions, comparing original, parameter-transferred, and independently initialized merged circuits over 16 random seeds. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests show no significant difference between the independently initialized merged circuit and the original ($p > 0.05$ in 28 of 30 comparisons), while parameter transfer yields significantly lower loss under ideal conditions ($p < 0.001$ in 9 of 10 configurations). On 10-class digit classification with the $8\times8$ MNIST dataset using a one-vs-all strategy, original and merged circuits achieve comparable test accuracies of 53–78\% with no significant difference in any configuration. These results provide empirical evidence that merged amplitude encoding preserves trainability under the simulation conditions tested.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Flash-GRPO: Efficient Alignment for Video Diffusion via One-Step Policy Optimization

Group Relative Policy Optimization has emerged as essential for aligning video diffusion models with human preferences, but faces a critical computational bottleneck: training a 14B parametered model typically demands hundreds of GPU days per experiment. Existing efficiency methods reduce costs through sliding window subsampling training timesteps, but fundamentally compromise optimization, exhibiting severe instability and failing to reach full trajectory performance. We present Flash-GRPO, a single-step training framework that outperforms full trajectory training in alignment quality under low computational budgets while substantially improving training efficiency. Flash-GRPO addresses two critical challenges: iso-temporal grouping eliminates timestep-confounded variance by enforcing prompt-wise temporal consistency, decoupling policy performance from timestep difficulty; temporal gradient rectification neutralizes the time-dependent scaling factor that causes vastly inconsistent gradient magnitudes across timesteps. Experiments on 1.3B to 14B parameter models validate Flash-GRPO's effectiveness, demonstrating substantial training acceleration with consistent stability and state-of-the-art alignment quality.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Gumbel-BEARD: Automatic Layer Selection for Self-Supervised Adaptation of Whisper in Low-Resource Domains

Speech foundation models often struggle in low-resource domains due to domain mismatch and data scarcity. We propose Gumbel-BEARD, a domain adaptation framework that automates Whisper encoder layer selection via an end-to-end trainable hard Gumbel-Softmax selector. It enables self-supervised adaptation with a BEST-RQ objective that dynamically adapts to target acoustic characteristics without manual tuning. Experiments on the MyST child speech corpus demonstrate efficiency and scalability: with 10 h of labeled data for fine-tuning, our method matches a fully supervised baseline trained on the complete 133 h labeled set. We establish new state-of-the-art word error rates (WERs) of 8.21% using Whisper-medium on MyST and 11.06% using Whisper-small on the OGI Spontaneous dataset. Evaluation on CORAAL further confirms robustness to adult dialectal domain shifts, with up to 6% relative WER reduction, highlighting the generalizability of our approach to diverse low-resource conditions.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

OSGuard: A Benchmark for Safety in Computer-Use Agents

arXiv:2606.15034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-use agents are increasingly evaluated by whether they complete realistic desktop and web tasks. However, task success alone can miss failures in which an agent reaches the nominal goal through an unsafe shortcut. We introduce OSGuard, a dual-granularity benchmark suite for evaluating safety in computer-use agents under benign, unchanged user instructions. OSGuard contains an action-level benchmark for local guardrail decisions and a risk-augmented execution suite for end-to-end evaluation. The action-level benchmark consists of contextualized proposed actions labeled as allowed, unrelated, or unsafe, each judged relative to the original instruction and current interface state. The execution suite contains manually constructed OSWorld-derived task variants in which the original task remains achievable, but the environment is modified to introduce latent hazards such as destructive overwrites, etc. Each variant is paired with augmented evaluators that retain the original task-success criterion while adding explicit state-based safety invariants, allowing us to distinguish safe completions from unsafe completions that satisfy the nominal task objective. Our experimental results on OSGuard show that current multimodal guardrails can perform well on isolated action judgments, while risk-augmented execution exposes remaining gaps between local oversight and reliable end-to-end safety. This dual-granularity design enables more precise diagnosis of whether models can both recognize unsafe proposed actions and improve full-task safety when deployed as guardrails.

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

MemToolAgent: Leveraging Memory for Tool Using Agents Based on Environment and User Feedback

Modern large language model (LLM) agents can use external tools to help users solve complex tasks. However, for problems that require learning from long-term historical events or from previous agent-environment interactions, LLM agents are required to use memory mechanisms to store and retrieve experiences. While sophisticated memory systems exist for dialogue agents, few studies have empirically examined how to improve agents' tool-using capabilities through past user-agent conversations. We propose MemToolAgent, a framework that improves tool use through memory management. Our approach contains a memory extraction module that processes past experiences into structured memory entries, and a retrieval module that dynamically selects a subset of the stored memory entries. This enables more personalized and accurate responses aligned with user preferences and feedback without requiring LLM fine-tuning. In summary, this work has three main contributions: (1) a unified memory entry format that improves both general-purpose and personalized tool use without LLM fine-tuning, (2) a reflection-based memory extraction that uses environment and user feedback to distill wrong executions into critiques to store, and (3) a retrieval module that chooses how many past experiences to use based on the memory similarity distribution. MemToolAgent achieves 29%, 80%, and 17% relative improvements compared to strong baselines on the WorkBench, NESTFUL, and PEToolBench benchmarks, respectively.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

X-REFINE: XAI-based RElevance input-Filtering and archItecture fiNe-tuning for channel Estimation

arXiv:2602.22277v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: AI-native architectures are vital for 6G wireless communications. The black-box nature and high complexity of deep learning models employed in critical applications, such as channel estimation, limit their practical deployment. While perturbation-based eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) solutions offer input filtering, they often neglect internal structural optimization. We propose X-REFINE, an XAI-based framework for joint input-filtering and architecture fine-tuning. By utilizing a decomposition-based, sign-stabilized LRP epsilon rule, X-REFINE backpropagates predictions to derive high-resolution relevance scores for both subcarriers and hidden neurons. This enables a reliable optimization that identifies the most reliable model components. Simulation results demonstrate that X-REFINE achieves a superior performance-complexity-interpretability trade-off compared to the external perturbation-based XAI frameworks, significantly reducing computational complexity while maintaining robust bit error rate (BER) performance.

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Visualizing the impact of quenched disorder on 2D electron Wigner solids

作者:

Electron Wigner solids (WSs)1–12 provide an ideal system for understanding the competing effects of electron–electron and electron–disorder interactions, a central unsolved problem in condensed matter physics. Progress in this topic has been limited by a lack of single-defect-resolved experimental measurements as well as accurate theoretical tools to enable realistic experiment/theory comparison. Here we overcome these limitations by combining atomically resolved scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) with neural-quantum-state quantum Monte Carlo (NQS-QMC) simulation of disordered 2D electron WSs to discover new disorder-induced physical regimes of correlated electron behaviour. STM was used to image the electron density (ne)-dependent evolution of electron WSs in gate-tunable bilayer MoSe2 (BL-MoSe2) devices with varying long-range (nLR) and short-range (nSR) disorder densities. These images were compared with NQS-QMC simulations using realistic disorder maps extracted from experiment, thus allowing the roles of different disorder types to be disentangled. We identify two distinct physical regimes for disordered electron WSs that depend on nSR. For nSR ≲ ne, the WS behaviour is dominated by long-range disorder and features extensive mixed solid–liquid phases, a new type of local re-entrant melting/crystallization and prominent Friedel oscillations. By contrast, when nSR ≫ ne, these features are suppressed and a more robust amorphous WS phase emerges that persists to higher ne, highlighting the importance of short-range disorder in this regime. Our work establishes a powerful framework for studying disordered quantum solids through a combined experimental–theoretical approach. A technique combining atomically resolved scanning tunnelling microscopy with neural-quantum-state quantum Monte Carlo simulation of disordered 2D electron Wigner solids establishes a powerful framework to enable the clear identification of two distinct defect-induced disorder regimes.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Why Depth Matters in Parallelizable Sequence Models: A Lie Algebraic View

arXiv:2603.05573v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scalable sequence models, such as Transformer variants and structured state-space models, often trade expressivity power for sequence-level parallelism, which enables efficient training. Here we examine the bounds on error and how error scales when models operate outside of their expressivity regimes using a Lie-algebraic control perspective. Our theory formulates a correspondence between the depth of a sequence model and the tower of Lie algebra extensions. Echoing recent theoretical studies, we characterize the Lie-algebraic class of constant-depth sequence models and their corresponding expressivity bounds. Furthermore, we analytically derive an approximation error bound and show that error diminishes exponentially as the depth increases, consistent with the strong empirical performance of these models. We validate our theoretical predictions using experiments on symbolic word and continuous-valued state-tracking problems.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Mind the Heads: Topological Representation Alignment for Multimodal LLMs

Representation alignment has emerged as an effective approach to improve Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) by regularizing their internal representations toward those of an external vision encoder. However, existing methods typically align a fixed layer of the language backbone, overlooking the fine-grained structure of Transformer models. In this work, we propose Head-Wise Representation Alignment (HeRA), a method that enforces cross-modal alignment at the level of individual attention heads. Our approach is grounded in the Platonic Representation Hypothesis, focusing on preserving the topological structure of representations (i.e., their local neighborhood relationships) across modalities. Following the Mutual K-Nearest Neighbor (MKNN) alignment metric, we introduce a contrastive objective that acts as a differentiable proxy for matching local structures. HeRA applies this objective during multimodal training to specific attention heads in the LLM, selected by their alignment score according to the MKNN metric. Counterintuitively, we find that aligning the least aligned heads yields the largest gains. Extensive evaluations across multiple MLLMs and 18 benchmarks demonstrate that HeRA consistently improves performance on challenging vision-centric tasks and serves as an effective regularizer against visual hallucinations by naturally curbing the over-reliance on linguistic priors. Our code is publicly released.

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

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606.13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes – quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment – using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoning-off contemporaries. Across 120 firm x axis x model scores, the pooled mean absolute deviation between the reasoning-on model and each reasoning-off counterpart is 0.38 on a 5-point scale; only 2% of pairwise comparisons reach a two-point deviation, and none exceeds two points. Per-firm cost accounting shows the reasoning-on arm alone costs roughly 5.6x as much as the three-provider reasoning-off ensemble, for outcomes that differ only within small margins. We conclude that in span-based ESG narrative scoring, reasoning-heavy deployment does not materially improve outcomes relative to reasoning-off consensus, while substantially increasing operational cost. We discuss implications for cost-effective ESG auto-scoring pipelines and LLM deployment governance in applied accountability settings. An earlier version of this work is available on SSRN (Abstract ID 6683303).

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Threshold Group Testing

arXiv:2606.11353v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the Threshold Group Testing (TGT) problem in the noiseless and non-adaptive setting, where the objective is to exactly recover a sparse binary vector from pooled tests, using as few tests as possible. In TGT, each test applied to a subset of items returns a positive outcome if the number of 1's (defective items) in that subset meets or exceeds a specified threshold, and has a negative outcome otherwise. We investigate how the complexity of TGT compares to that of Classical Group Testing (CGT), corresponding to the special case of the threshold equal to one, and analyse the impact of increasing the threshold on the required number of tests. Our main contribution is the derivation of a sharp information-theoretic phase transition at $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}k\log(n/k)$ (non-adaptive) tests for TGT within the constant-column test design. The threshold constant $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}$ is expressed as a function of the prevalence of defectives and the threshold value. Our upper bound is derived under an analytic assumption, and we verify that this assumption is satisfied for a threshold value of 2. The value of $c_{\mathrm{inf}}^{\mathrm{TGT}}$ reveals that TGT on the constant-column design has the same information-theoretic behaviour as CGT in the low-prevalence regime. Yet, strikingly, at higher prevalences, the threshold leads to a significant reduction in the number of tests. On the other hand, we provide evidence that when the asymptotic proportion of defective items is positive, TGT actually becomes strictly harder than CGT (excluding trivial reductions).

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Theoretical Study for Generating Optical GKP State via a Single-Photon-Added Squeezed Vacuum

arXiv:2606.12467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A theoretical framework is developed to analyze the generation of the optical GKP state using a single-photon-added squeezed vacuum. This state, defined by the squeezing parameter $r$, is injected into a 50:50 beam splitter, and the optical GKP state is obtained through conditional measurement at one output port. The single-photon-added squeezed vacuum is especially prominent in this context because it provides a simpler and more experimentally accessible ingredient than Schrodinger cat states, while conditional measurement ensures projection onto a state that closely approximates the finite-energy GKP form. Fidelity is employed to quantify this closeness, and the analysis demonstrates that the scheme achieves a maximum fidelity of 85% at a squeezing level of $3.76 \ dB$. This performance surpasses approaches based on squeezed optical odd Schrodinger cat states, underscoring the single-photon-added squeezed vacuum as a practical and effective pathway toward fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Joint convergence in Wiener chaos via transport hierarchy and Malliavin covariances

arXiv:2606.14812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the joint convergence in distribution of a sequence $X_N = I_p(f_N)$ of multiple Wiener–Itô integrals of order $p\geq 2$ that converges to a Gaussian limit $Z\sim N(0,\sigma^2)$, together with another sequence $Y_N = I_q(g_N)$ converging in law. The central finding is that the joint convergence of $(X_N, Y_N)$ is completely governed by the asymptotic behavior of the iterated Malliavin covariances $Y_{r+1,N} = \langle DX_N, DY_{r,N}\rangle_H$, $r\geq 0$: joint convergence holds as soon as these covariances converge jointly with $Y_N$, and the structure of the limiting distribution is then explicitly determined by their limits. Moreover, the convergence of the Malliavin covariances is necessary for joint convergence, as shown by a counterexample. When $q

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

arXiv:2603.25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations. Despite growing real-world deployment, existing evaluations rely almost exclusively on success rate, whether the robot reaches its goal, which conceals trajectory quality, collision behavior, and robustness to environmental change. We present a real-world evaluation of five state-of-the-art VNMs (GNM, ViNT, NoMaD, NaviBridger, and CrossFormer) across two robot platforms and five environments spanning indoor and outdoor settings. Beyond success rate, we combine path-based metrics with vision-based goal-recognition scores and assess robustness through controlled image perturbations (motion blur, sunflare). Our analysis uncovers three systematic limitations: (a) even architecturally sophisticated diffusion and transformer-based models exhibit frequent collisions, indicating limited geometric understanding; (b) models fail to discriminate between different locations that are perceptually similar, however some semantics differences are present, causing goal prediction errors in repetitive environments; and (c) performance degrades under distribution shift. We will publicly release our evaluation codebase and dataset to facilitate reproducible benchmarking of VNMs.

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

USS: Unified Spatial-Semantic Prompts for Embodied Visual Tracking with Latent Dynamics Learning

Embodied Visual Tracking (EVT) requires an agent to continuously follow a specified target while actively moving through dynamic environments. However, prevailing EVT paradigms predominantly rely on language-based target indication. While language is expressive and convenient, cluttered scenes often contain multiple objects that satisfy the same semantic description, leading to ambiguous target grounding. We therefore propose a paradigm shift, reframing target indication in EVT from text-only specification to unified spatial-semantic prompting. Based on this paradigm, we introduce Unified Spatial-Semantic Prompts for Embodied Visual Tracking with Latent Dynamics Learning, USS, an end-to-end embodied tracking framework that supports text, point, bounding box, and mask prompts within a unified architecture. USS encodes heterogeneous prompts with modality-specific encoders, fuses prompt tokens with visual features through hybrid attention, and decodes compact prompt-conditioned representations into egocentric waypoints. To further improve temporal robustness, USS incorporates a latent world model that predicts future representations through self-supervised alignment. Real-robot experiments demonstrate that explicit spatial target cues yield higher success rates than text-only prompts, particularly in scenarios involving similar distractors and longer-horizon tracking where maintaining instance-level target identity is critical. In the simulation benchmark, USS also achieves state-of-the-art performance among non-MLLM-based methods and competitive results against recent MLLM-based approaches with faster inference speed. Our findings reveal that spatial-semantic prompting provides a more precise and flexible target indication interface for embodied visual tracking. Project site: https://arescheah.github.io/uss-project-page/.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Know Your Limits : On the Faithfulness of LLMs as Solvers and Autoformalizers in Legal Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on reasoning tasks, but whether this reflects faithful logical inference or heuristic approximation remains unclear. We study this question in legal entailment by comparing three paradigms, including pure LLM classification, LLM-based Formal Reasoning, and solver-based Formal Reasoning using the Z3 SMT solver, on a re-annotated subset of ContractNLI across five LLMs. Our re-annotation reveals a systematic and measurable gap between pragmatic legal interpretation and strict formal entailment, where a substantial proportion of legally sound inferences are not formally grounded without additional unstated assumptions. While introducing formal structure improves accuracy, with LLM-based Formal Reasoning achieving the highest benchmark performance, we show that this gain does not imply faithful reasoning. We identify three recurring failure modes: scope laundering, where LLMs report solver-inconsistent classifications without executing the underlying formal reasoning, producing conclusions that appear logically grounded but are not; implicit constraint blindness, where LLMs overlook logical constraints present in formal representations; and program synthesis failures, where LLMs generate incorrect Z3 code despite structured prompting. Critically, scope laundering persists across all models, raising serious concerns about the faithfulness of LLM-based formal reasoning as a proxy for symbolic execution. These results reveal a fundamental gap between benchmark accuracy and logical faithfulness.

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

Closed-Loop Graph Algorithm Execution with Small Language Models: Step Accuracy and Rollout Reliability

arXiv:2606.24980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small language models offer an efficient alternative to large-scale systems, but their ability to execute structured algorithms over multiple dependent decisions remains poorly understood. We study graph algorithm execution as a closed-loop prediction problem in which a model repeatedly selects the next action from the current graph and algorithmic state. Our evaluation framework covers several classical graph procedures, multiple synthetic graph families, and disjoint training, validation, and test partitions. It assesses both local decision quality and global execution behaviour using step accuracy, exact rollout accuracy, constraint validity, partial solution quality, prefix survival, and intervention-based diagnostics. The results show that adaptation can produce reliable policies for structural procedures such as traversal and coloring, while weighted algorithms remain substantially more sensitive to error accumulation. More broadly, the findings demonstrate that strong next-step prediction does not necessarily translate into reliable autonomous execution and motivate evaluating algorithmic language models through complete closed-loop rollouts rather than isolated decisions.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

LinStereo: Linear-Complexity Global Attention for Multi-Scale Iterative Stereo Matching

Existing Vision Foundation Model (VFM)-based iterative stereo pipelines under-exploit three information pathways: multi-scale backbone features are collapsed into single-level correlations, geometric priors remain untapped at initialization, and context propagates only locally. These gaps widen under degraded photometric cues, making underwater scenes a stringent generalization test. To address this, we propose LinStereo, built upon Depth Anything V3, whose core is a Position-Aware Linear Attention (PALA) module that replaces local recurrence with global aggregation at linear cost, propagating reliable estimates from well-matched regions into degraded areas while preserving disparity structure. PALA is made effective by two enabling components: Hierarchical Semantic Cost Volumes (HSCV), which supply scale-aligned correlations from the VFM feature hierarchy, and a Depth Prior Initialization (DPI) that converts monocular depth into a metrically calibrated warm start. LinStereo achieves state-of-the-art-level accuracy on standard benchmarks and strong cross-domain generalization, particularly on underwater scene where severe photometric degradation makes stereo matching particularly challenging, attaining the best overall accuracy with consistent gains 28% lower AbsRel on TartanAir-UW, 26% on SQUID, a real-world underwater dataset).

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

LUCID: Learning Embodiment-Agnostic Intent Models from Unstructured Human Videos for Scalable Dexterous Robot Skill Acquisition

arXiv:2606.11628v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The most widely-adopted robot learning pipelines today learn skills from robot demonstrations or structured human data, which are expensive to collect and tied to specific embodiments. In contrast, unstructured human videos provide a scalable alternative. They contain diverse manipulation demonstrations across objects, scenes, and strategies, but are not directly connected to robot action. We propose LUCID, a two-stage framework that learns task intent from unstructured human videos drawn from internet-scale datasets and learns robot control in massively-parallel simulation. The intent model predicts short-horizon intent (what should happen next in the scene) from the current observation in closed loop. An embodiment-specific sensorimotor policy converts this intent into robot actions. The intent interface is shared across controllers, so the same intent model can be applied to different embodiments, from our primary dexterous hand to a parallel-jaw gripper. We evaluate LUCID on five real-world manipulation tasks: stirring, wiping, and binning supervised by only internet video, with zero-shot transfer to novel scenes and object instances; and push-T and cable routing supervised by 1 hr each of self-collected smartphone video. Project page: https://lucid-robot.github.io/.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

When the Same Musical Knowledge Forgets Differently: A Clean Probe of Pathway-Dependent Forgetting

A model can learn that the piano piece Für Elise is calm and reflective by listening to the audio or by reading a text description, but does it matter which route that knowledge took when it is later at risk of being forgotten? Forgetting research in multimodal models measures what knowledge is lost under adaptation, yet has not asked whether acquisition route affects how easily that knowledge is forgotten. We call this untested premise the Pathway-Invariant Assumption. Music understanding enables a clean test because a music clip and a canonical text description can be aligned to the same perceptual content, allowing the same knowledge unit to enter a model through listening or reading while the target remains fixed. Across multiple architecturally distinct audio-language models, we observe a consistent asymmetry: text-pathway knowledge is forgotten more than matched audio-pathway knowledge under identical adaptation pressure. To attribute this effect to route rather than confounds, we introduce the Paired Pathway Controlled Protocol (PPCP), a three-phase design that establishes matched pathway baselines, activates both pathways under symmetric supervision on the same knowledge pool, and applies identical forgetting pressure to both pathways. The gap is stable across models and gain-controlled analyses, persists when contradictory overwrite is replaced by correct-label cross-domain learning, remains under single-modality pressure, and is not removed by lightweight replay. Two independent routing-depth controls confirm that the effect is not explained by architectural depth, pointing to input representation as the dominant factor. Under PPCP, our results demonstrate that forgetting is highly route-dependent, establishing acquisition route as a new analytical dimension for forgetting research and multimodal system design.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

An ECG biomarker for sudden cardiac death discovered with deep learning

Sudden cardiac death is, in theory, preventable with defibrillators. But every year, many patients die without defibrillators because doctors fail to predict their risk1. The only predictive biomarker in wide use, cardiac left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), misses most sudden cardiac deaths2, and flags many low-risk patients for futile defibrillators that never fire3,4. Here we apply deep learning to a dataset linking all electrocardiograms (ECGs) in a Swedish region to death certificates. The resulting model isolates a high-risk group (2.2% of the sample) with a 7.0% annual rate of sudden cardiac death, higher than those with reduced LVEF (1.9% of the sample; 4.6% annual rate). Notably, 86.1% of the model’s high-risk patients were not flagged by LVEF. High-risk ECG&nbsp;patients with defibrillators implanted were 54.4% less likely to die than expected, suggesting a mortality benefit. We externally validate the model in a US health system, in which it predicts ventricular arrhythmias that cause sudden death; and a Taiwanese hospital registry, in which it specifically predicts future arrhythmic cardiac arrests. To visualize the waveform morphology ‘discovered’ by the predictive model, we pair it with a generative model&nbsp;of the ECG waveform. Together, they reveal a biomarker that is easily visible and robustly predicts sudden cardiac death, but has not to our knowledge been previously described. Tying the biomarker’s shape to electrophysiological first principles, we form and preliminarily test a new hypothesis on the mechanism of sudden cardiac death. A deep-learning model trained on electrocardiogram (ECG) waveforms identifies an easily visible biomarker that predicts sudden cardiac death more accurately than the current clinical state of the art.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bidirectional Cross-Attention Fusion of High-Resolution RGB and Low-Resolution Hyperspectral Inputs for Multimodal Semantic Segmentation

Multimodal semantic segmentation with heterogeneous sensors must reconcile complementary information across modalities that differ in spatial resolution and channel dimensionality. In particular, high-resolution RGB imaging provides detailed spatial structure but often fails to distinguish visually similar materials, whereas hyperspectral imaging (HSI) provides discriminative spectral signatures but at lower spatial resolution. We present Bidirectional Cross-Attention Fusion (BCAF), which aligns high-resolution RGB with low-resolution HSI at their native grids via localized, bidirectional cross-attention, avoiding pre-upsampling or early spectral collapse. BCAF uses two independent backbones: a standard Swin Transformer for RGB and an HSI-adapted Swin backbone that preserves spectral structure through 3D tokenization with spectral self-attention. Although our evaluation targets RGB-HSI fusion, BCAF is modality-agnostic and applies to co-registered RGB with lower-resolution, high-channel auxiliary sensors. On the benchmark SpectralWaste dataset, BCAF delivers strong performance, achieving 75.4% at 55 images/s. We further evaluate a novel industrial dataset: K3I-Cycling (first RGB subset already released on Fordatis). On this dataset, BCAF reaches 62.3% mIoU for material segmentation (paper, metal, plastic, etc.) and 66.2% mIoU for plastic-type segmentation (PET, PP, HDPE, LDPE, PS, etc.). These results show that preserving native-grid spatial detail and spectral structure improves multimodal segmentation under real-time constraints. Code and model checkpoints are publicly available at https://github.com/jonasvilhofunk/BCAF_2026.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

A Contactless Heat Engine Driven by Nonreciprocal Fluctuation-Induced Torques

arXiv:2606.25053v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe a contactless heat engine in which quantum and thermal electromagnetic fluctuations act as the working medium. The setup consists of two concentric cylinders held at different temperatures. The inner cylinder stably levitates within the outer one due to repulsive nonequilibrium Casimir forces. The chirality of the setup is broken by using nonreciprocal dielectric materials, akin to application of a magnetic field along the common cylinder axis. Using Rytov fluctuational electrodynamics, we show that heat transfer and torque can be expressed in terms of an angular-momentum-resolved heat flux density, $\Phi_n(\omega)$: each exchanged photon carries energy $\hbar \omega$ and angular momentum $\hbar n$. In reciprocal media contributions from modes $n$ and $-n$ cancel and there is no net torque; nonreciprocity breaks this symmetry and powers rotation of the inner cylinder. Even in the absence of contact, electromagnetic fluctuations produce a frictional torque opposing rotation that we compute. This enables computation of characteristic steady state rotations, and estimation of the engine efficiency (which remains bounded by the Carnot limit). The cylindrical setup provides a natural realization of fluctuation-induced angular-momentum transfer and a possible route toward nanoscale contactless engines.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

SAFARI: Scaling Long Horizon Agentic Fault Attribution via Active Investigation

arXiv:2606.24626v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As autonomous agents tackle increasingly complex multi-step, multi-agent tasks, their execution trajectories have scaled beyond the constraints of even the largest context windows. Current methods for effectively diagnosing agent failures load the full trajectory into an LLM's context window, which suffers from attention dilution and fails when agentic traces inevitably exceed context limits. To address this, we introduce SAFARI (Scaling long-horizon Agentic Fault AttRibution via active Investigation), a framework that replaces linear context loading with a tool-augmented diagnostic loop. By equipping LLMs with a specialized toolbox to read and search trajectory segments alongside a persistent Short-Term Memory (STM) for cross-turn reasoning, SAFARI effectively decouples diagnostic accuracy from architectural context limits. Our experiments demonstrate that SAFARI outperforms state-of-the-art results by 20% on the Who&When dataset within a 1M token budget, and by 19% on TRAIL GAIA subset on a 25K token budget. Most significantly, SAFARI maintains a 0.58 precision even when the target fault resides 5x beyond the model's native context window, a scenario where traditional evaluators fail entirely.