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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

CrossPool: Efficient Multi-LLM Serving for Cold MoE Models through KV-Cache and Weight Disaggregation

arXiv:2606.24506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emerging LLM services increasingly host many sparse MoE models, yet most models receive sparse requests and remain cold. This creates a GPU memory problem: model weights are stable and model-determined, while KV-cache is transient and demand-determined. Because cold models rarely reach peak KV-cache demand at the same time, reserving worst-case KV capacity per model wastes memory; a shared KV-cache pool can instead provision aggregate active demand. However, KV-cache sharing is not sufficient when weights and KV-cache remain in a monolithic GPU memory pool. Static weights compete with dynamic KV-cache, and KV-head-limited attention under cold, low-concurrency traffic exposes only a fraction of replicated KV capacity, leading to low GPU memory utilization and weak long-context support. We present CrossPool, a serving engine for cold MoE models that separates FFN weights and KV-cache into two GPU memory pools: a weights pool that consolidates FFN weights across cold models, and a KV-cache pool that dynamically serves active requests while keeping attention local to KV-cache. CrossPool combines a KV-cache planner and virtualizer, a layer-wise pipeline scheduler that hides hidden-state transfers, and persistent kernels with control lowering to reduce CPU-GPU control overhead. With efficient GPU memory pooling, CrossPool underpins bursty long-context requests and outperforms the state-of-the-art kvcached-based multi-LLM serving system, reducing P99 TBT by up to $10.4\times$.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DeepSWIP: Quotient-WMC Counterfactuals for Neural Probabilistic Logic Programs

arXiv:2606.20526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic systems such as DeepProbLog combine neural perception with probabilistic logic, but standard inference is associational. Counterfactual reasoning additionally requires a causal semantics for interventions and evidence. We introduce DeepSWIP, a single-world counterfactual semantics for DeepProbLog programs. Using neural materialization, we reduce fixed-context neural predicates to ordinary ProbLog choices, apply Single World Intervention Programs (SWIPs), and compute counterfactuals by weighted model counting (WMC) over a single transformed program. Under finite grounding and unique-supported-model assumptions, DeepSWIP is exact relative to the learned materialized FCM. The standard quotient-WMC form of ProbLog conditionals identifies active neural probabilities and explains intervention cleaning, calibration sensitivity, and rare-evidence instability. Experiments on MPI3D confirm the transformation against a DeepTwin construction against 12,000 queries, as predicted and a 2.14$\times$ inference speedup from avoiding the Twin's endogenous duplication. A SUMO HOV experiment shows that neural calibration degradation biases plug-in estimates, while a correctly scoped randomized-policy AIPW estimator removes most first-order bias for population mean and ATE estimands. Code is at https://github.com/saibib/deep_SWIP.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Short-term relaxation after cervical rotatory manipulation is more closely associated with somatosensory input than cracking sound: a randomized controlled EEG study

Background Cervical rotatory manipulation is commonly used for neck-related symptoms and is often accompanied by a cracking sound. This sound is frequently regarded as a sign of successful manipulation, but whether it contributes substantially to the immediate relaxation response remains unclear. Objective This study examined whether short-term relaxation after cervical rotatory manipulation is more closely related to manipulation-associated sensory input than to the cracking sound cue alone. Methods In this single-session, three-arm, parallel randomized controlled study, 54 healthy volunteers were allocated to cervical rotatory manipulation, sham manipulation, or sham manipulation plus simulated cracking sound. Subjective outcomes were assessed before and after intervention, including positive affect, negative affect, comfort, and satisfaction. Eyes-closed resting-state electroencephalography was recorded before and after intervention. Prespecified neural outcomes included frontal alpha power, frontal alpha/beta ratio, occipital individual alpha frequency, and alpha-band fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal functional connectivity. Results Cervical rotatory manipulation produced greater improvements in positive affect, comfort, and satisfaction than sham manipulation or sham manipulation plus simulated cracking sound, whereas negative affect remained generally stable across groups. These subjective responses were accompanied by short-term electroencephalography changes, particularly in frontal alpha/beta and alpha-band fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal functional connectivity. Changes in frontal alpha/beta ratio were positively associated with changes in positive affect. In contrast, simulated cracking sound alone did not reproduce the full subjective or electroencephalography response observed after real manipulation. Conclusions The immediate relaxation response after cervical rotatory manipulation appears to be more closely related to manipulation-associated sensory input than to the cracking sound cue alone. These findings provide preliminary neurophysiological evidence for distinguishing real manipulation effects from sound-related contextual cues.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

ACT-JEPA: Novel Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Efficient Policy Representation Learning

arXiv:2501.14622v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning efficient representations for decision-making policies is a challenge in imitation learning (IL). Current IL methods require expert demonstrations, which are expensive to collect. Additionally, they are not explicitly trained to understand the environment. Consequently, they have underdeveloped world models. Self-supervised learning (SSL) offers an alternative, as it can learn a world model from diverse, unlabeled data. However, most SSL methods are inefficient because they operate in raw input space. In this work, we propose ACT-JEPA, a novel architecture that unifies IL and SSL to enhance policy representations. It is trained end-to-end to jointly predict 1) action sequences and 2) latent observation sequences. To learn in latent space, we utilize Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture, which allows the model to filter out irrelevant details and learn a robust world model. We evaluate ACT-JEPA in different environments and across multiple tasks. Our results show that it outperforms the strongest baseline in all environments. ACT-JEPA achieves up to 40% improvement in world model understanding and up to 10% higher task success rate. Finally, we show that predicting latent observation sequences effectively generalizes to predicting action sequences. This work demonstrates how integrating IL and SSL leads to efficient policy representation learning, an improved world model, and a higher task success rate.

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

SpaTeoGL: Spatiotemporal Graph Learning for Interpretable Seizure Onset Zone Analysis from Intracranial EEG

arXiv:2602.11801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate localization of the seizure onset zone (SOZ) from intracranial EEG (iEEG) is essential for epilepsy surgery but is challenged by complex spatiotemporal seizure dynamics. We propose SpaTeoGL, a spatiotemporal graph learning framework for interpretable seizure network analysis. SpaTeoGL jointly learns window-level spatial graphs capturing interactions among iEEG electrodes and a temporal graph linking time windows based on similarity of their spatial structure. The method is formulated within a smooth graph signal processing framework and solved via an alternating block coordinate descent algorithm with convergence guarantees. Experiments on a multicenter iEEG dataset with successful surgical outcomes show that SpaTeoGL is competitive with a baseline based on horizontal visibility graphs and logistic regression, while improving non-SOZ identification and providing interpretable insights into seizure onset and propagation dynamics.

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

DiffCold: A Diffusion-based Generative Model for Cold-Start Item Recommendation

arXiv:2606.12245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cold-start item recommendation remains a persistent challenge in real-world systems due to the absence of interaction histories. While prior models attempt to bridge this gap using item content features, they universally suffer from the seesaw dilemma: enhancing performance for cold items inevitably degrades performance for warm items, and vice versa. We identify that this dilemma stems from a fundamental distributional disparity: warm item embeddings occupy a complex ``behavioral manifold" shaped by rich interaction signals, whereas cold item embeddings are constrained to a ``semantic manifold" derived solely from auxiliary content. Existing methods often force a rigid mapping between these inconsistent spaces, causing the model to sacrifice the precision of warm representations to accommodate cold ones. To address this, we propose DiffCold, a diffusion-based generative model that unifies warm and cold representations. Unlike GANs or VAEs, DiffCold leverages conditional diffusion to reconstruct warm item embeddings from content, preserving the underlying manifold structure without degradation. We further tailor this paradigm with two specific designs: a Retrieval-enhanced Aggregator that initializes generation using semantically similar warm items to bypass inefficient noise, and a Simulation-based Representation Alignment module that enforces distribution consistency between generated and real embeddings via contrastive learning. Experiments on three benchmarks confirm that DiffCold resolves the seesaw dilemma, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art methods across all metrics.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Skill-to-LoRA: From Using Skills to Learning Behaviors for Token-Efficient LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.16769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly distributed as SKILL.md files: human-readable procedural documents that describe workflows, tools, resources, and domain conventions. While convenient for inspection and reuse, this design requires the same reusable procedure to be repeatedly injected into the runtime context. We propose Skill-to-LoRA(S2L), a behavior-centric skill representation that replaces runtime skill text with skill-specific LoRA adapters. Rather than compressing the skill document itself, S2L models the behavioral change induced by the skill text: offline, the complete SKILL.md is used to synthesize skill-guided demonstrations; online, the full document is omitted and the corresponding LoRA adapter is dynamically loaded to activate the learned skill behavior. We evaluate S2L with Qwen3.6-27B on a 21-skill subset of SWE-Skills-Bench. Compared with the no-skill and Full Skill Text baselines, S2L improves pass rate by 2.9 and 5.2 percentage points, respectively, while reducing per-step token cost by 6.6% relative to Full Skill Text prompting. S2L matches or improves Full Skill Text on 18/21 skills and the no-skill baseline on 15/21 skills. Control experiments further show that the gains depend on skill-specific adapter alignment: Wrong-LoRA and Shared-LoRA both reduce performance. These results suggest that many procedural agent skills can be converted from runtime instructions into trainable, dynamically loadable behavioral modules. Code will be released upon acceptance.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AerialClaw: An Open-Source Framework for LLM-Driven Autonomous Aerial Agents

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in inspection, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. However, most UAV applications still rely on pre-defined command sequences or task-specific pipelines, where developers manually connect perception, planning, flight control, simulation, logging, and safety modules. This limits the flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility of autonomous aerial systems. This paper presents AerialClaw, an open-source software framework that enables UAVs to operate as decision-making aerial agents rather than merely command-following platforms. Given a natural-language mission, AerialClaw allows an LLM-based agent to understand the task, maintain context, invoke executable aerial skills, observe perception and runtime feedback, and iteratively update its decisions in a closed loop. The framework adopts a modular brain-skill-runtime architecture, combining hard skills for atomic UAV operations, Markdown-based soft skills for reusable task strategies, document-driven agent state and capability boundaries, memory-driven reflection, safety-oriented runtime validation, and platform-agnostic execution adapters. AerialClaw supports lightweight mock execution, PX4 SITL with Gazebo, and AirSim-based simulation, together with a web console, pluggable model backends, example missions, simulation assets, and staged deployment scripts. By combining standardized aerial skills, document-driven agent state, memory, and closed-loop LLM decision-making, AerialClaw provides a reproducible and extensible open-source framework for building UAV systems that can interpret missions, make decisions, execute skills, and adapt their behavior from feedback.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

作者:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

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

Wavelength-Multiplexed 2D Beam Steering via a Passive Diffractive Network

We introduce a wavelength-addressable diffractive optical network that transforms illumination wavelength into a high-dimensional control parameter for arbitrarily programmable 2D beam steering. The proposed passive architecture comprises cascaded spatially optimized diffractive layers, jointly designed using deep learning, to rapidly map distinct wavelengths to predefined/desired output angles. Unlike conventional single-layer dispersive optical elements, which are physically restricted to 1D linear mapping, this framework harnesses complex wavefront transformations to utilize the illumination wavelength as an intrinsic addressing key for arbitrary 2D beam steering, eliminating the need for mechanical scanning or electronic phase control. We numerically demonstrate wavelength-controlled beam steering across 625 wavelength channels spanning 400-750 nm, realizing a 25 x 25 array of independently addressable beam positions with subwavelength positioning accuracy and high channel fidelity. Unlike conventional gratings, which constrain wavelength routing to a linear trajectory, the proposed diffractive network performs nonlocal wavefront transformations, enabling arbitrary wavelength-to-angle mappings across a 2D field of view. We further validate the proposed framework experimentally in both the terahertz and visible spectral regimes, demonstrating wavelength-multiplexed beam steering using 3D fabricated passive diffractive layers at terahertz frequencies and phase-only spatial light modulators in the visible spectrum. This wavelength-addressable diffractive architecture establishes a compact and scalable paradigm for high-speed programmable beam steering, with potential applications in optical communications, routing, imaging, sensing, and emerging photonic information-processing systems.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

A Quantum Encoding of Traveling Salesperson Tours via Route Generation, Cost Phases, and a Reversible Valid-Permutation Oracle

arXiv:2603.21283v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a traveling salesperson problem (TSP) of n cities, we present a compact quantum encoding based on a time-register representation of tours. A candidate route is represented as a sequence of n-1 city labels over discrete time steps, with one fixed start city and the remaining cities encoded in binary registers. We describe three ingredients of the construction: uniform route generation over the route register, a reversible validity oracle, and a phase oracle that encodes the total tour cost. The validity oracle checks both that the non-start city labels form a permutation and, for incomplete graphs, that every directed edge used by the route exists. The cost oracle then accumulates the start-edge, intermediate-transition, and return-edge costs into a tour-dependent phase for valid routes. This yields a coherent superposition of candidate routes with feasibility and tour-length information embedded directly in the quantum state. The complete construction uses O(n log n) qubits, while a naive implementation has worst-case elementary-gate complexity O(n^3 log n). The encoding is compatible with amplitude amplification or spectral filtering techniques such as the quantum singular value transform (QSVT) or Grover's algorithm. However, due to the exponentially small fraction of valid tours, the overall complexity remains exponential even when combined with amplitude amplification.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum Correlation Hierarchy and Teleportation in Dephased Hydrogen Hyperfine System

arXiv:2606.11731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of quantum correlations in the hydrogen hyperfine spin system subject to Markovian phase noise. Treating the electron and proton spin degrees of freedom as an open two-qubit system governed by an isotropic hyperfine Hamiltonian and local dephasing, we obtain the exact time-dependent density matrix and derive analytical expressions for the full X-state family. We compute concurrence($C$), trace-distance measurement-induced nonlocality (Trace MIN–$\mathcal{N}_1$), and average steering coherence (ASC) in closed form and establish their strict ordering $ C(t)\leq \mathcal{N}_1(t)\leq \mathrm{ASC}(t) $ at all times. Entanglement is identified as the most fragile resource, undergoing sudden death at a finite time. Trace MIN exhibits dephasing-immune freezing for states with nonzero population imbalance, while ASC is the most robust quantity, persisting longest in every scenario studied.We additionally demonstrate that the dephased thermal hyperfine state serves as a resource for quantum teleportation, deriving a closed-form expression for the average fidelity and establishing that the teleportation advantage window coincides exactly with the entanglement survival interval, $\mathcal{F}_A > 2/3 \Longleftrightarrow \mathcal{C} > 0$, for the full X-state family with maximally mixed marginals. We identify four distinct dynamical regimes and map all three correlation measures onto directly measurable Pauli spin correlators, enabling experimental reconstruction of the full hierarchy without full state tomography.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Disparate Impact in Synthetic Data Generation

arXiv:2606.13105v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We revisit the fairness notion of disparate impact for synthetic data generation (SDG), that assesses whether the utility of generated records is the same across sensitive groups. Our approach departs from existing work on fair SDG, that address the problem of correcting for undue biases in the observed distribution, hence redefining SDG as learning a distribution that is not that of the real data. By contrast, non-disparate impact is notably achieved when the synthetic and real distributions are the same. We expose reasons why SDG may fail to reach that solution and discuss why approximation and estimation errors occur and can be disparate across groups. We notably look into the expressive power of SDG methods relative to distribution complexity, sampling errors due to group proportions, and estimation errors induced by differential privacy mechanisms. We illustrate cases of disparate impact on both artificial and real-world data, focusing on SDG methods that rely on probabilistic graphical models. We also introduce a strategy of learning group-wise SDG models and illustrate how it can improve both the overall utility and its parity in many settings.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

IntElicit: Eliciting and Assessing Contextualized Creativity via Dialogue Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.12086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Contextualized assessment offers high ecological validity for evaluating creativity but introduces a critical challenge: observed performance may be confounded with cognitive proficiency (domain knowledge) and agency (willingness to engage). Meanwhile, in the age of generative AI, creative problem solving increasingly occurs in tool-mediated and human–AI interactive environments, making fully static assessment less aligned with contemporary creative practice. To address these issues, this paper proposes IntElicit, a framework for eliciting and assessing contextualized creativity via dialogue policy optimization. IntElicit functions as a constrained adaptive AI Interviewer: it provides non-directive knowledge and agency scaffolds in multi-turn interaction to reduce non-creative confounders, while preserving participants' responsibility for generating the creative content being evaluated. Specifically, to tackle sparse rewards and potential reward hacking (e.g., answer dictation) in open-ended educational dialogue, IntElicit introduces a decomposed process reward mechanism. This mechanism aligns the policy with pedagogical elicitation, rewarding prompts that draw out participant reasoning rather than producing optimal answers on their behalf. Extensive experiments, including participant simulation and a human subject study (N=64), show that IntElicit improves elicited creative outcomes over expert-designed baselines. Together, the results suggest that interactive elicitation can reveal creative potential that static FPSP-style assessment may miss, providing a formative and diagnostic lens for contextualized creativity assessment in AI-mediated learning contexts.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Hyper3D-lite: count-preserving representation auditing for long-read multi-contact genome data

作者:

Long-read and single-molecule sequencing technologies are rapidly increasing molecule-level data, with platforms such as Oxford Nanopore, PacBio HiFi, and Roche sequencing-by-expansion advancing at different technology readiness levels. In the specific context of Pore-C and HiPore-C multi-contact chromatin-conformation assays, long-read multi-contact 3D genome assays preserve molecule-level contact context, but common downstream pairwise projections can expand one multi-contact molecule into many pair records. This creates a representation problem: apparent contact evidence can increase through the counting frame before biological interpretation begins. Hyper3D-lite addresses this problem as a representation-first audit tool for read-to-fragment-style long-read multi-contact inputs. It compares all-pair projection with CPB, a count-preserving statistical accounting reference point, and separates broad software outputs from conservative higher-order candidate calls.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The most discriminable quantum states in the multicopy regime

arXiv:2604.26927v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work investigates which sets of quantum states give rise to the highest achievable success probability in minimum-error state discrimination if multiple copies of the unknown state are given. Specifically, we consider uniformly distributed ensembles of the form $\left\{\frac{1}{N},\rho_i^{\otimes k}\right\}_{i=1}^N$, where $N$ states in dimension $d$ are provided in $k$ identical copies, and derive universal limits in this scenario. For pure state ensembles, we prove that whenever $N$ is large enough to support a state $k$-design, these designs will exactly give rise to the maximally discriminable sets. We further show that when $N$ exceeds the size required for a $k$-design, mixed states can outperform all pure state ensembles. We then recognise that the problem of most discriminable classical states in the multi-copy regime is in one-to-one correspondence to the concept of the multiplicative Bayes capacity of independent uses of classical channels, a concept that emerges naturally in the context of classical information leakage. This connection allows us to completely solve the classical analogue of our problem when $N\geq \binom{d + k - 1}{k}$, and to prove that quantum systems offer a quadratic advantage (in number of copies $k$) over classical ones. Then, we prove that this classical over quantum advantage is strongly reduced when one is restricted to real quantum states, more precisely, when $N \geq k + 1$, pure real qubits only offer a constant advantage over classical bits. Finally, we introduce computational techniques to find sets of most discriminable ensembles and to obtain rigorous universal upper bounds on the maximal success probability for multi-copy state discrimination in cases that are analytically intractable.

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

Reducing the Complexity of Deep Learning Models for EEG Analysis on Wearable Devices

arXiv:2606.12742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable healthcare devices are the fastest-growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Many automated healthcare services rely on two crucial biological signals, namely ECG and EEG, which reflect the activity of the heart and brain, respectively. Although deep neural networks are considered the primary way to process and analyze these signals, the very tight energy and computational power constraints in wearable devices are far below the computational, energy, and memory bandwidth demands of DNN models, thereby impeding the deployment of deep learning in many practical wearable services. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying state-of-the-art DNN models in resource-constrained wearable devices. Notably, we explore the trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity of DNNs when parameter quantization and electrode reduction methods are used. Our investigation centers on several state-of-the-art DNN models designed for EEG signal analysis, specifically for detecting epileptic seizures. Our findings demonstrate that, when applied judiciously, these techniques can significantly reduce the complexity of the DNNs under consideration with minimal adverse effects on accuracy. These results reveal the explicit trade-offs between accuracy and complexity reduction encountered when adapting DNN-based online EEG analysis for wearable devices.

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

Person Identification from Contextual Motion

We consider the problem of identifying people based on their motion styles. We present a generative model describing the action instance creation process and derive a probabilistic identity inference scheme for two common person identification scenarios motivated by the surveillance and authentication applications. We introduce a novel, interactive, scenario for person identification from motion patterns. To this end, we formalize the identification process in the context of a sequential message exchange session between the subject and the system. The subject's behavior is modeled using a probabilistic generative model inspired by the Human Information Processing (HIP) paradigm. At each stage, the system presents a visual stimulus (a cue) to the subject and records their motion response. The cue is selected so as to maximize the mutual information of the expected response and the subject's identity. Once recorded, the response is used to update the a posteriori probability over possible subjects' identities. The process terminates once a sufficient classification confidence level is reached. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time person identification is addressed in such interactive setting. We report high recognition rates on five publicly available datasets and our own novel dataset consisting of 4,476 recordings of 22 test subjects responding to 15 cues.

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

VCG: A Multimodal Retrieval Framework for E-Commerce Video Feeds under Extreme Cold-Start Conditions

arXiv:2606.19627v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The digital commerce landscape is shifting from static, search-driven catalogs to dynamic, immersive video feeds. This transition introduces an ``extreme cold-start'' problem: unlike traditional items, new short-form videos lack the dense interaction history required for collaborative filtering. Furthermore, immersive feeds introduce strong position and duration biases that distort standard engagement signals. In this paper, we demonstrate the Video Candidate Generation (VCG) system, a scalable multimodal retrieval engine designed to solve these challenges in a large-scale e-commerce environment. By leveraging a domain-adapted vision-language model (based on CLIP), we map users and videos into a shared semantic space, enabling zero-shot retrieval based on visual content rather than behavioral history. We detail the system's architecture and present a rigorous evaluation comparing generative (LLM) vs. discriminative (CLIP) embeddings. Our results show that while generative models excel at attribute prediction, they suffer from embedding space collapse in retrieval tasks. Online A/B testing demonstrates that VCG effectively mitigates engagement biases, yielding a 50\% uplift in deep video completion. To showcase the system's capabilities, we present an interactive demonstration featuring three bi-directional retrieval scenarios: Product-to-Video, Video-to-Product, and Zero-Shot Semantic Search.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Calousel: Extrinsic Calibration of Non-overlapping Multi-camera Systems from Pure Rotation

Extrinsic calibration of multi-camera systems with non-overlapping FOVs has been a challenging problem in the robotics literature. Conventional target-based methods impose substantial target setup overhead, either deploying large calibration targets or requiring pre-measured multi-target poses. Motion-based approaches instead suffer from drift error, scale ambiguity, and motion degeneracy. Securing both accuracy and usability, we propose a novel calibration method that leverages pure rotational motion, requiring only a single static calibration board. The key idea is to make all cameras sequentially observe the same target under a shared geometric reference, even without overlapping views. To integrate these time-separated observations, we formulate the problem using a latent turntable frame and a 3D error on SE(3) within a global optimization framework. We validate the proposed method on both a controlled camera rig and a full-scale vehicle platform with heterogeneous cameras, and analyze robustness under non-ideal turntable motion. Extensive experiments show that our approach maintains competitive accuracy without specialized precision hardware, proving its strong suitability for realistic on-site deployments. Our code is publicly available here.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Quantum Optimal Control Using MAGICARP: Combining Pontryagin's Maximum Principle and Gradient Ascent

arXiv:2505.21203v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the MAGICARP algorithm, a numerical optimization method for quantum optimal control problems that combines the structure provided by Pontryagin's Maximum Principle (PMP) and the robustness of gradient ascent techniques, such as GRAPE. MAGICARP is formulated as a "shooting technique", aiming to determine the appropriate initial adjoint momentum to realize a target quantum gate. This method naturally incorporates time and energy optimal constraints through a PMP-informed pulse structure. We demonstrate MAGICARP's effectiveness through illustrative numerical examples, comparing its performance to GRAPE and highlighting its advantages in specific scenarios.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Consistency of sleep timing and duration are associated with more physical activity and favorable heart rate metrics in a naturalistic cohort

Background: Regularity of sleep patterns over time has increasingly gained traction as an important axis of sleep health. Since sleep habits are under some degree of behavioral control, understanding such patterns in naturalistic settings is particularly important. We quantified sleep variability and tested the hypothesis that regularity correlates with physical activity, resting heart rate (rHR), and heart rate variability (HRV). Methods: We analyzed real-world digital health data from over 81,000 participants (over 18 million nights) who provided informed consent to participate in the Apple Heart and Movement Study and elected to contribute sleep, activity, and heart rate data to the study. Variability was quantified using the standard deviation (SD) computed from total sleep time (TST), sleep start time (S-start), end time (S-end), and midpoint time (MP), as well as the Sleep Regularity Index (SRI). Results: The SD-based variability metrics correlated with one another (R values 0.74-0.92), and with the SRI metric (R values 0.62-0.64). More consistent sleep, by any metric, was associated with more activity and better rHR and HRV. The most consistent tertile for TST variability had higher median TST (6.9 vs 5.9 hours), more daily exercise (32.8 vs 20.4 minutes), lower rHR (62.4 vs 65.6 beats per minute), and higher HRV (40.6 vs 37.3), all p

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

Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

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

Trust the Right Teacher: Quality-Aware Self-Distillation for GUI Grounding

arXiv:2606.18101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graphical user interface (GUI) grounding requires vision-language models (VLMs) to identify small target elements in high-resolution screenshots and predict precise screen coordinates. On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) is a promising post-training approach for this coordinate-sensitive task, since it provides dense token-level teacher signals beyond hard coordinate labels. However, naive OPSD is not well suited to GUI grounding: OPSD evaluates the teacher on student-generated prefixes, the quality of coordinate-token teacher signals can degrade when the prefix has already deviated from the target coordinate, leading to unreliable teacher signal. To mitigate this, We propose quality-aware self-distillation for VLM-based GUI grounding, which improves coordinate-token teacher-signal quality through soft correctness-aware gating and teacher-probability scaling. The soft correctness-aware gate checks whether the teacher's current coordinate-token prediction can still be completed into the ground-truth box under the student-generated prefix. If not, the corresponding teacher signal is down-weighted. Teacher-probability scaling then uses the teacher's confidence as a lightweight factor to further calibrate the strength of the gated supervision. A key empirical finding is that neither component alone improves overall performance, whereas combining them consistently improves performance. This suggests that the two mechanisms play complementary roles: correctness-aware gating suppresses unreliable coordinate-token supervision, while teacher-probability scaling calibrates the strength of the remaining signals. Experiments across six GUI grounding benchmarks show that our method consistently improves the base model and outperforms strong baselines.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Pricing Excess-of-Loss Reinsurance and CAT Bonds under Climate Uncertainty: A Cox Process Framework with Temperature-Dependent Stochastic Intensity

arXiv:2606.14830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a climate-aware pricing framework for excess-of-loss (XL) reinsurance contracts and catastrophe (CAT) bonds under non-stationary catastrophe risk. Catastrophe arrivals are modeled as a Cox process whose stochastic intensity depends exponentially on a temperature-related climate index. To represent climate dynamics, the index is modeled as a mean-reverting Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process around a time-dependent warming trend. Within this setting, aggregate losses follow a compound Cox structure with lognormal severities. Pricing is performed under a reduced-form risk-adjusted measure, which provides a tractable valuation approach for XL reinsurance layers and binary zero-coupon CAT bond payoffs in an incomplete market setting. Because catastrophe losses are not dynamically replicable, the framework emphasizes scenario-based valuation rather than model-independent no-arbitrage bounds. A Monte Carlo valuation scheme is implemented to quantify the economic implications of climate-dependent catastrophe intensity. The numerical results show that climate dependence materially changes the loss-generation mechanism and affects the valuation of catastrophe-linked contracts. In the baseline calibration, the climate-aware model increases the excess-of-loss reinsurance premium and lowers the CAT bond price relative to the stationary benchmark. Furthermore, our analysis of the 99.5\% Tail Value-at-Risk (TVaR) indicates that stationary benchmarks may underestimate economic capital requirements by approximately 13.7\% compared to the climate-aware framework, highlighting the potential regulatory relevance of the proposed model. This finding highlights that benchmark design is critical for interpreting climate-pricing effects.