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01.
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.

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

Benchmarking Counterfactual Prediction in Epidemic Time Series with Time-Varying Interventions

arXiv:2606.05692v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has enabled significant advances in time-series causal inference, yet progress remains constrained by the lack of realistic benchmarks with observable counterfactual outcomes. Existing datasets either rely on real-world observations without ground-truth counterfactuals or on simplified simulations that fail to capture complex causal dynamics. To address this gap, we develop a large-scale benchmark for counterfactual prediction in epidemic time series under dynamic interventions. Unlike existing benchmarks, it supports static and time-varying treatments, as well as both single-policy and multi-policy intervention settings, enabling evaluation of causal inference methods across a broad range of causal inference scenarios. Leveraging a calibrated agent-based model grounded in real-world demographic, mobility, epidemiological, and policy data, we generate realistic counterfactual trajectories across more than 150 U.S. counties. Using this benchmark, we evaluate widely used and state-of-the-art causal inference methods, revealing substantial performance differences and highlighting the challenges of realistic time-series causal reasoning.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Role of Computation in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.05999v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How does the amount of compute available to a reinforcement learning (RL) policy affect its learning? Can policies using a fixed amount of parameters, still benefit from additional compute? The standard RL framework does not provide a language to answer these questions formally. Empirically, deep RL policies are often parameterized as neural networks with static architectures, conflating the amount of compute and the number of parameters. In this paper, we formalize compute bounded policies and prove that policies which use more compute can solve problems and generalize to longer-horizon tasks that are outside the scope of policies with less compute. Building on prior work in algorithmic learning and model-free planning, we propose a minimal architecture that can use a variable amount of compute. Our experiments complement our theory. On a set 31 different tasks spanning online and offline RL, we show that $(1)$ this architecture achieves stronger performance simply by using more compute, and $(2)$ stronger generalization on longer-horizon test tasks compared to standard feedforward networks or deep residual network using up to 5 times more parameters.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Co-occurring associated retained concepts in Diffusion Unlearning

Unlearning has emerged as a key technique to mitigate harmful content generation in diffusion models. However, existing methods often remove not only the target concept, but also benign co-occurring concepts. As illustrated in Fig.1, unlearning nudity can unintentionally suppress the concept of person, preventing a model from generating images with person. We define these undesirably suppressed co-occurring concepts that must be preserved CARE (Co-occurring Associated REtained concepts). Then, we introduce the CARE score, a general metric that directly quantifies their preservation across unlearning tasks. With this foundation, we propose ReCARE (Robust erasure for CARE), a framework that explicitly safeguards CARE while erasing only the target concept. ReCARE automatically constructs the CARE-set, a curated vocabulary of benign co-occurring tokens extracted from target images, and leverages this vocabulary during training for stable unlearning. Extensive experiments across various target concepts (Nudity, Van Gogh style, and Tench object) demonstrate that ReCARE achieves overall state-of-the-art performance in balancing robust concept erasure, overall utility, and CARE preservation.

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

Towards an Agent-First Web: Redesigning the Web for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.19116v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The World Wide Web was built on an assumption held for three decades: the primary consumer of web content is a human being. This permeates every layer; its access model presumes human visitors, its economics rest on human attention, and its content targets human perception. The rapid emergence of AI agents as intermediaries between humans and web content invalidates this assumption. Yet the web resists agents through blanket blocking, CAPTCHA-based exclusion, and economic models that treat agent access as extraction rather than legitimate interaction. This paper proposes a principled redesign across three layers. At the access layer, agents acting for humans should inherit equivalent access rights, governed by rate limiting and agent identification metadata in HTTP requests, analogous to browser headers, alongside a dual-layer architecture serving human-readable and agent-optimized content from the same domain. At the economic layer, we propose an intent-based tier framework grounded in the agent-as-human-proxy principle: an agent's economic obligation mirrors that of the human it represents. A token-based subscription model meters content in tokens rather than pageviews, alongside a commissioned content economy anchoring AI content production in human intentionality. At the content layer, we identify epistemic recursion, the self-referential loop in which AI-generated content is consumed by agents to produce further content, progressively detaching web knowledge from human ground truth. We propose the Agent Text Markup Language (ATML), a four-level human supervision tier model, and a cryptographic provenance chain to counter this threat. Together these constitute ten design principles for an agent-first internet, one in which agents are first-class citizens whose integration requires renegotiating the web's foundational social contract across access, economics, and content.

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

Breaking the Mirror: Activation-Based Mitigation of Self-Preference in LLM Evaluators

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in evaluation pipelines, particularly for tasks like preference tuning and model routing. We investigate whether lightweight steering vectors can mitigate this problem at inference time without retraining. We introduce a curated dataset that distinguishes self-preference bias into justified examples of self-preference and unjustified examples of self-preference, and we construct steering vectors using two methods: Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA) and an optimization-based approach. Our results show that steering vectors can reduce unjustified self-preference bias by up to 97\%, substantially outperforming prompting and direct preference optimization baselines. Yet steering vectors are unstable on legitimate self-preference and unbiased agreement, implying self-preference spans multiple or nonlinear directions. This underscores both their promise and limits as safeguards for LLM-as-judges and motivates more robust interventions.

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

AsFT: Anchoring Safety During LLM Fine-Tuning Within Narrow Safety Basin

arXiv:2506.08473v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment direction - defined by weight differences between aligned (safe) and unaligned models - rapidly compromise model safety. In contrast, updates along the alignment direction largely preserve it, revealing the parameter space as a "narrow safety basin". To address this, we propose AsFT (Anchoring Safety in Fine-Tuning) to maintain safety by explicitly constraining update directions during fine-tuning. By penalizing updates orthogonal to the alignment direction, AsFT effectively constrains the model within the "narrow safety basin," thus preserving its inherent safety. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets and models show that AsFT reduces harmful behaviors by up to 7.60%, improves task performance by 3.44%, and consistently outperforms existing methods across multiple tasks.

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

Compact Object-Level Representations with Open-Vocabulary Understanding for Indoor Visual Relocalization

Indoor visual relocalization plays a critical role in emerging spatial and embodied AI applications. However, prior research was predominantly devoted to low-level vision schemes, struggling to perceive scene semantics and compositions, which limits both interpretability and applicability. In this paper, we explore the issue of how to organize rich object information in a scene, including semantics, layout, and geometry, into a structured map representation, thereby utilizing object units exclusively to drive the camera relocalization task. To this end, we propose OpenReLoc, a camera relocalization system designed to provide scene understanding and accurate pose estimation capabilities. Leveraging recent foundation models, we first introduce a multi-modal mechanism to integrate open-vocabulary semantic knowledge for effective 2D-3D object matching. Additionally, we design object-oriented reference frames as position priors, paired with a reference frame selection strategy based on the Distance-IoU (DIOU), enabling extension to scalable scenes. Moreover, to ensure stable and accurate pose optimization, we also propose a dual-path 2D Iterative Closest Pixel loss guided by object shape. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenReLoc achieves superior relocalization recall and accuracy across various datasets. Our source code will be released upon acceptance.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Sequence-Based Therapeutic Peptide Classification with Augmented Negative Sampling

Therapeutic peptides offer high target specificity, low toxicity, and the ability to modulate protein-protein interactions, yet experimental functional characterization remains costly and slow. Computational prediction of therapeutic function directly from sequence could accelerate peptide screening and enable generative design pipelines, but requires reliable discrimination between therapeutic and non-therapeutic peptides. Existing multi-label predictors cover few functions, rely on limited datasets, and exhibit high glspl{fpr}, limiting their practical utility. We present a lightweight CNN classifier trained on the most comprehensive therapeutic peptide database to date (54,655 peptides, 48 functional categories). A key contribution is a statistically motivated negative sampling strategy using Markov models to generate diverse synthetic decoys at multiple difficulty levels. When evaluated on this controlled decoy benchmark, the FRP is reduced from over 60% for previous models to 2.1% for our approach. Our fine-tuned five-model ensemble achieves 78.9% Micro F1 and 54.6% Macro F1 while requiring only amino acid sequences as inputs. Analysis using a sparse L1-constrained variant of our model shows that convolutional filters capture conserved functional motifs and statistically improbable non-therapeutic patterns, with downstream layers combining these signals, providing mechanistic evidence that the network learns biologically meaningful structure. In a generalization task on the TPpred-LE benchmark, our model achieves 55.3% Micro F1 and 38.6% Macro F1, comparable to TPpred-LE trained on its native dataset (57.9%/38.1%) while predicting four times more therapeutic functions with four times fewer parameters. Code and models will be made available at https://github.com/terra-quantum-public/tq-therapep-ai.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Spectral Adaptive Conformal Prediction for Structured Non-Exchangeable Data

arXiv:2606.15950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal prediction gives prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage when the data are exchangeable. Many time-indexed datasets are not exchangeable. They have seasons, recurring regimes, changing frequencies, or other forms of structured dependence. This paper studies a simple way to use that structure. We propose spectral adaptive conformal prediction, a method that forms weighted conformal quantiles using local spectral similarity and then updates the target miscoverage level online. The spectral weights choose calibration residuals that look relevant to the current test point. The adaptive update corrects the long-run miss rate when uncertainty changes over time. We give an approximate coverage result for the fixed spectral weighted quantile and a deterministic long-run calibration result for the adaptive update. Simulations with recurring regimes and slowly changing frequencies, together with three U.S. real-data examples, show that the hybrid method can improve on fixed spectral weighting, while also showing that spectral weighting must be monitored through effective sample size diagnostics.

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

Q-Net: Queue Length Estimation via Kalman-based Neural Networks

arXiv:2509.24725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Estimating queue lengths at signalized intersections is a long-standing challenge in traffic management. Partial observability of vehicle flows complicates this task despite the availability of two privacy-preserving data sources: (i) aggregated vehicle counts from loop detectors near stop lines, and (ii) aggregated floating car data (aFCD) that provide segment-wise average speed measurements. However, how to integrate these sources with differing spatial and temporal resolutions for queue length estimation is rather unclear. Addressing this question, we present Q-Net: a queue estimation framework built upon a state-space formulation. This design addresses key challenges in queue modeling, such as violations of traffic conservation assumptions. Q-Net follows the Kalman predict-update structure and maintains physical interpretability in both the state evolution and measurement models. Q-Net uses an AI-augmented Kalman filter to learn time-varying gain dynamics from data. The framework supports real-time implementation and improves spatial transferability by grouping aFCD measurements into fixed-size local groups, making the number of learnable parameters independent of section length. Evaluations on urban main roads in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, show that Q-Net outperforms baseline methods, tracks queue formation and dissipation accurately, and mitigates aFCD-induced delays. By combining data efficiency, interpretability, real-time applicability, and spatial transferability, Q-Net makes accurate queue length estimation possible without costly sensing infrastructure like cameras or radar.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Loss Landscape Poisoning: Targeted Extraction of Unseen Training Data from LLMs

arXiv:2606.17110v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models are increasingly trained on proprietary or sensitive data, from private healthcare and financial records to user conversations containing secrets. Ensuring the privacy of such data against extraction attacks has become a central concern. In this paper, we ask whether an attacker who can poison a portion of the training data can facilitate the leakage of a separate target record they have no access to. We answer in the affirmative and show that such leakage can be induced by a poisoning mechanism that reshapes the model's local loss landscape around the target completion. Our key insight is that poisoning to create a sharp loss minimum at the target, surrounded by elevated loss on nearby alternatives, forces the model to memorize the target as the unique low-loss solution in its neighborhood. The attack requires no architectural changes, and generalizes across centralized and federated learning settings. We demonstrate that the attack amplifies privacy leakage across language (up to 100% successful extraction), and vision-language models (up 90% successful extraction). We show that the attack is thwarted when the model is trained to be differentially private. However, we introduce a new attack that directly probes the loss landscape bypassing even differential privacy defenses.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

video-SALMONN-R$^3$: Learning to ReWatch, ReAsk, and ReAnswer for Efficient Video Understanding

arXiv:2606.24477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video large language models (LLMs) are often constrained by computation and memory budgets, leading them to use reduced frame rates and spatial resolutions, which may cause them to miss critical information for question answering (QA). A practical and efficient solution is a two-stage paradigm: first perform coarse video understanding to localize relevant segments, and then re-watch these segments at higher temporal or spatial fidelity. In this paper, we present video-SALMONN-R$^3$, the first end-to-end video-LLM that enables re-watch through reinforcement learning without relying on chain-of-thought (CoT) cold-start. This design removes the need for costly CoT data annotations and avoids CoT-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which can otherwise degrade the pretrained video understanding abilities. To address the mismatch between the reasoning-first behavior induced by re-watch and the answer-first tendency of pretrained video-LLMs, we propose a re-answer strategy, in which the model first produces a direct answer in the first watch and then refines it after re-watching. Finally, to improve question adherence during re-watching, we propose a re-ask mechanism that re-injects the query when revisiting localized segments. Experimental results show that video-SALMONN-R$^3$ consistently outperforms both the base model and the QA-SFT baseline, while surpassing prior re-watch-based approaches with significantly lower computational cost. Code, models, and data will be publicly released upon acceptance.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Antibodies against influenza A/H1N1pdm2009 and B/Victoria strains but not A/H3N2 are increased in recent onset type 1 narcolepsy versus matched controls

Study Objectives: Onsets of Narcolepsy type-1 (NT1) increased following A/H1N1 vaccination with PandemrixTM in Europe and with A/H1N1pdm2009 infections in China and other countries. To test if other strains could trigger narcolepsy, we measured strain-specific antibodies in patients with recent onset NT1 compared to controls. Methods: Antibodies against hemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA) were tested in 62 patients with very recent onset (onset and blood collection following a single flu season, mean +/- SEM: 0.44 +/- 0.06 years since onset) and 100 controls matched by age, sex, season and year of collection (2000-2025). Results were next extended to 181 recent onset patients (mean +/- SEM: 1.00 +/- 0.05 years) versus 260 controls, matched by sex, season and year, but having a slightly higher mean age. HA inhibition (HAI) and NA inhibition (NAI) assays were conducted using flu strains known to circulate during the corresponding flu seasons. HAI results are shown as % positive (titers >= 40) and NAI results as geometric mean titers. Odds ratio (OR) and coefficient were used to compare antibody titers in NT1 versus controls. The contribution of each assay to prediction was finally quantified in the larger sample set using Shapley decomposition. Results: NT1 patients had increased anti-HA and anti-NA antibodies against A/H1N1pdm2009 (anti-HA OR = 3.86, anti-NA coefficient = 0.35) and B/Victoria (anti-HA OR =1.90, anti-NA coefficient = 0.22), but not A/H1N1pre2009, A/H3N2, or B/Yamagata, independent of HLA-DQB1*06:02 status, age, sex, and flu season. Correlations between anti-HA and anti-NA antibodies titers were weak to moderate but significant (r2=-0.10 to 0.34). Multivariable model outperformed age-only baseline (McFadden R2 = 0.19 vs. 0.03; AUC = 0.79 vs. 0.64; likelihood-ratio test X2 = 51, p

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

NVMOS: Non-Verbal Vocalization Quality Assessment in Speech

arXiv:2606.15888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-verbal vocalizations (NVs), such as laughter, sighs, and coughs, are important acoustic cues for emotion and intent. Existing speech quality assessment methods typically focus on overall naturalness, while non-verbal TTS evaluations mainly examine whether a target NV appears with the correct type and position. However, the perceptual quality of NV events themselves remains underexplored. To address this gap, we construct an NV-MOS dataset containing outputs from multiple NV-TTS systems and naturally occurring NV samples, with ratings collected from three acoustic experts on a perceptual quality scale. We further analyze audio-capable multimodal large language models such as Gemini and find clear inconsistencies between their scores and expert ratings. These results suggest that general-purpose multimodal models cannot reliably replace human judgments for NV quality assessment. We then propose NVMOS, to our knowledge the first model that can reliably predict the perceptual quality of NV events in speech. Experimental results show that, with a local NV-event focusing module, NVMOS reaches expert-level or stronger agreement with human MOS.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

A Scalable PyTorch Abstraction for Multi-GPU Gaussian Splatting

Gaussian splatting methods have become increasingly popular for neural reconstruction of the real world. However, they are often limited in scale and resolution due to compute and memory constraints. We present a multi-GPU Gaussian splatting approach that scales reconstruction to higher resolutions and larger scenes while abstracting away the code complexity typically associated with distributing a model. To accomplish this, we propose a PyTorch backend that distributes the Gaussian parameters and splatting operators across GPUs via CUDA unified memory and NVLink. Because distribution occurs at the operator level, the model code requires no explicit cross-device communication. More broadly, the backend exposes multiple GPUs as an aggregate PyTorch device and supports other PyTorch operators. We demonstrate city-scale reconstructions with street-level detail consisting of over 1 billion Gaussian splats, more than 25 times as many as the current state of the art.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

A scaling limit theorem for controlled branching processes with a size-divisible term

arXiv:2508.17116v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper establishes general sufficient conditions for a sequence of controlled branching processes to converge weakly on the Skorokhod space. We focus on a class of control mechanisms that extend previous results by decomposing those random variables into the sum of two independent components: an immigration term, which depends on the current population size, and a size-divisible term, which can be expressed as the sum of random contributions from each individual. This extension allows us to capture a broad range of control functions including Poisson, binomial, and negative binomial distributions, commonly used in the literature. The assumptions are formulated in terms of probability generating functions of the offspring and control laws, distinguishing in this latter between the immigration and the size-divisible parts. The limit process is shown to be a continuous-state branching process with dependent immigration. The proof essentially relies on tightness arguments and the identification of a martingale problem. We also identify the special case in which the limit reduces to a classical Feller branching diffusion with immigration.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Large Language Models Do Not Always Need Readable Language

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly prompted and interfaced with human-readable natural language, even when the intended reader is another model. This paper investigates whether semantic information can be encoded in compact, non-standard textual forms that sacrifice human readability while remaining recoverable by LLMs. We refer to this class of model-centric textual representations as BabelTele, approached here not as a fixed protocol but as an empirical probe into LLMs' capacity to generate and interpret such representations. Through readability diagnostics, model likelihood measures, human questionnaires, and downstream task evaluations, we find that BabelTele can substantially depart from ordinary natural language while preserving core semantics for instruction-tuned LLMs. As a task-agnostic representational paradigm, BabelTele demonstrates high information density, maintaining 99.5% semantic fidelity even when the text volume is condensed to 27.9% of its original length. We further evaluate its semantic robustness in cross-model transfer, agent memory, and multi-agent communication. Results suggest that BabelTele can reduce context overhead while generally maintaining reliable downstream performance, although its effectiveness depends on the compressor-reader pair and task setting. These findings indicate that human readability, natural-language typicality, and model-side semantic recoverability can be partially decoupled, opening a path toward model-native representations in future exploration of LLM systems.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the Limits of Stretching Quantum Pseudorandomness

arXiv:2606.24736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pseudorandom states, introduced by Ji, Liu, and Song (CRYPTO '18), are quantum analogues of classical pseudorandom generators. A fundamental property of classical pseudorandom generators is that their output can be stretched to arbitrary polynomial length. Whether an analogous stretching property holds for quantum pseudorandom states remains unclear. In this work, we prove the first black-box separation between single-copy secure pseudorandom states ($\mathsf{1PRS}$) with different output lengths. Specifically, we construct a quantum oracle relative to which $\mathsf{1PRS}$ with output length $m(n)=1.1n$ exist, but $\mathsf{1PRS}$ with output length $m(n)=\Omega(n^{2+\epsilon})$ do not, for any $\epsilon>0$. Our proof leverages the Common Haar Random State (CHRS) model introduced by Chen, Coladangelo, and Sattath (EUROCRYPT '25), and introduces a technique to bound the effective number of resource CHRS states utilized by any $\mathsf{1PRS}$ generator in this model.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Towards Distributed Inference of LLMs on a P2P Network

arXiv:2606.17059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prefix caching can reduce LLM inference latency by reusing KV caches across requests with shared prompts, but cluster-scale reuse is challenging because caches are partitioned across nodes. We propose a decentralized, prefix-cache-aware routing scheme for peer-to-peer LLM serving. Each node maintains a local radix tree of its own cached prefixes and asynchronously refreshed estimates of peer caches using periodic anti-entropy. Requests are routed to the node with the longest estimated prefix match, without centralized coordination or KV-cache transfer. Stale metadata only causes cache misses, not incorrect outputs, making weak consistency sufficient for correctness. Evaluation on simulated MMLU workloads show that decentralized routing improves latency under low communication delay and skewed prefix distributions, while high network latency and affinity-induced hotspots limit its benefits.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Note About Koopman-von Neumann Theory and Density Matrix

作者:

arXiv:2606.25085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this short note we study Koopman-von Neumann theory for N-particle system. We argue that it is natural to identify classical N-particle distribution function as diagonal form of density matrix operator in coordinate representation. We also determine generalized BBGKY hierarchy for reduced density matrix in coordinate representation.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HumanScale: Egocentric Human Video Can Outperform Real-Robot Data for Embodied Pretraining

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

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

Testing quantum-like markers in neural dynamics

arXiv:2508.21490v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose two experiments for identifying quantum markers in neural data based on quantum variants of well-known equations for neural activity that describe electrical signal propagation on axonal arbors and dendrites. These include (i) testing if power spectra from subthreshold oscillations in neuronal cultures follow the classical Fitzgugh-Nagumo equations or a recently introduced quantum variant of them and (ii) testing if propagation statistics of electrical activity in axons follow the classical diffusive cable equation or a quantum variant of it.

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

Relatively Smart: A New Approach for Instance-Optimal Learning

arXiv:2603.01346v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We revisit the framework of Smart PAC learning, which seeks supervised learners which compete with semi-supervised learners that are provided full knowledge of the marginal distribution on unlabeled data. Prior work has shown that such marginal-by-marginal guarantees are possible for "most" marginals, with respect to an arbitrary fixed and known measure, but not more generally. We discover that this failure can be attributed to an "indistinguishability" phenomenon: There are marginals which cannot be statistically distinguished from other marginals that require different learning approaches. In such settings, semi-supervised learning cannot certify its guarantees from unlabeled data, rendering them arguably non-actionable. We propose relatively smart learning, a new framework which demands that a supervised learner compete only with the best "certifiable" semi-supervised guarantee. We show that such modest relaxation suffices to bypass the impossibility results from prior work. In the distribution-free setting, we show that the One-Inclusion Graph learner is relatively smart up to squaring the sample complexity, and show that no supervised learning algorithm can do better. For distribution-family settings, we show that relatively smart learning can be impossible or can require idiosyncratic learning approaches, and its difficulty can be non-monotone in the inclusion order on distribution families.