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

The Integrator Advantage: Controlled Agentic AI for Small and Medium-Sized Companies

arXiv:2606.16649v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI marks a new phase of enterprise automation. Unlike traditional automation or conversational AI, agentic systems can interpret goals, plan multi step tasks, access tools, interact with enterprise systems, and execute workflows with varying degrees of autonomy. For small and medium sized companies, this creates potential to reduce administrative burden, accelerate routine processes, and improve the use of organizational knowledge. This paper argues that the near term value of Agentic AI does not lie in full autonomy or workforce reduction, but in controlled partial autonomy for simple and medium complexity business processes. It proposes an integration framework covering use case suitability, autonomy levels, technical integration, governance, security, employee enablement, and measurable impact. The paper concludes that Agentic AI can become a productivity lever when implemented as a human centered capability with responsibility and accountability retained by people.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.13989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech (TTS) models formulate synthesis as a conditional infilling task, bypassing explicit duration predictors and external aligners. When speech is represented with neural codec tokens, the infilling problem becomes discrete, making Discrete Flow Matching (DFM), a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework for discrete generation, a natural fit. However, inference-time control for stable low-step conditional infilling remains underexplored. We propose Mask, Sample, Revise, an inference-time CTMC stack for alignment-free DFM-TTS. The stack combines predictor-free guidance to strengthen text conditioning, prompt-matched conditional coupling to align the probability path with the acoustic prompt, and SC-ReMask, a schedule-constrained remasking mechanism that introduces token-to-mask transitions so early de-masking decisions can be revised. These components require no post-hoc fine-tuning and operate in a single tau-leaping sampler. Controlled ablations show that this stack improves intelligibility and robustness in the low-NFE prompted setting, outperforming unguided and guidance-only samplers with substantially more steps.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Spatiotemporal downscaling and nowcasting of urban land surface temperatures with deep neural networks

arXiv:2605.13566v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Land Surface Temperature (LST) is a key variable for various applications, such as urban climate and ecology studies. Yet, existing satellite-derived LST products provide either high spatial or high temporal resolution, resulting in a fundamental trade-off between the two. To address this trade-off, we combine observations from a geostationary and a polar orbiting satellite and provide LST fields at high spatial and high temporal resolution (1 km at 15-min intervals). We demonstrate their application for intraday forecasting of LSTs. To estimate LST fields at high spatiotemporal resolution, a U-Net model is trained to map LST fields from SEVIRI/MSG (3 km and 15 min resolution) to LST fields from Terra/Aqua MODIS (1 km, 4 overpasses per day) that are collocated in space and time. The presented model has been trained on LSTs across large European cities with a population exceeding 1 million inhabitants, and achieves an RMSE = $1.92${\deg}C and near-zero bias MBE = $0.01${\deg}C on the hold-out test set. As a second step, we present an LST nowcasting model based on ConvLSTM architecture, trained across downscaled LST fields with forecast lead times of 15 to 75 minutes. The nowcasting model outperforms a persistence and a Climatological Rolling Median benchmarks, with RMSEs of $0.57$ to $1.15${\deg}C for the considered lead times and biases ranging from $-0.1$ to $0.14${\deg}C. An additional validation conducted against independent MODIS overpasses confirms robust performance. Our LST forecast model at high spatiotemporal resolution is directly applicable to operational satellite-based LST monitoring.

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

Hierarchical Multi-Modal Retrieval for Knowledge-Grounded News Image Captioning

Traditional image captioning methods often struggle to generate comprehensive, context-rich descriptions, especially for details not directly observable from visual cues. To overcome this, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented image captioning framework that generates captions with deeper insights, such as object attributes, event context, and underlying significance, by leveraging external knowledge. Our approach features a hierarchical multi-modal article retrieval mechanism that moves beyond monolithic text entities. This retrieval considers article structure-aware features, including weighted textual components (e.g., headlines, body sections) and visual placement patterns, alongside multi-faceted similarity computations (content–visual, visual–visual, and discourse positioning). A subsequent contextual relevance refinement stage further enhances the retrieved information. The retrieved articles then serve as the knowledge base for caption generation: first, a VLM generates a concise image description; second, we segment relevant information from the retrieved articles based on this description; and finally, an LLM utilizes both the description and extracted knowledge to generate a comprehensive, contextually detailed caption. We participated in the ACM Multimedia EVENTA 2025 Challenge and achieved 5th place with an overall score of 0.2824 on the private test set of the OpenEvent-V1 dataset. Source code is publicly released at https://github.com/mf0212/EVENTA-Challange.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Coping in Crisis: Computational Modeling of Coping Styles in Digital Crisis Discourse During the 2023 Turkiye Earthquake

How do people cope when disaster strikes and can we detect it at scale, in real time, from what they write? This study addresses that question using over one million Turkish-language tweets posted in the aftermath of the February 6, 2023 earthquake in Turkiye, which unfolded in a deeply polarized political context just months before a national election. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) coping theory, we develop a multi-label BERTurk classifier to detect three coping styles (problem-focused, emotion-focused, and meaning-making) across four theoretically motivated crisis phases. BERTurk achieves a macro F1 of 0.693, substantially outperforming a zero-shot mDeBERTa baseline (macro F1 = 0.324). Applied to the full corpus, the classifier reveals a clear temporal trajectory: problem-focused coping dominates the urgency phase and declines sharply, emotion-focused coping rises and stabilizes, and meaning-making increases monotonically. Anger correlates most strongly with meaning-making (Spearman r = 0.387), suggesting it functions as a mobilizing force toward blame attribution rather than practical action. These findings demonstrate that coping theory can be reliably operationalized in real-world digital crisis data and that doing so can help humanitarian organizations tailor their responses to where a population actually is.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Seasonality, source type, and women's water labor: A longitudinal mixed-methods study in Kenya and Honduras

Women shoulder the majority of water collection labor globally, yet how their water collection and water-related work experiences may change over time or by water source type remains insufficiently understood. We conducted a longitudinal, mixed-methods study in rural Kenya and Honduras to understand how women's experiences collecting water and performing water-related work varied between (a) two time points, (b) improved and unimproved water source types, and (c) water source location. Data were collected in 2023 and 2024 using interviews, observation, GPS-enabled watches, and scales to measure time and distance traveled, water weight and volume carried, and calories expended. 133 women participated in data collection (66 Kenya, 67 Honduras). We compared women's experience data by time point (2023 vs. 2024), source type (improved vs. unimproved), and source location (off-premises vs. on-premises) (t-test, Mann-Whitney U test). We also mapped participants' routes and activities to show which sources were visited, when, and for what activities. In Kenya, mean water collection time, distance, and caloric expenditure were significantly lower and water volume was significantly higher in 2024 when there were unexpected rains compared to 2023 when there was a persistent drought. When comparing source types during the 2023 drought, journeys to improved sources took significantly less time and energy and covered less distance than journeys to unimproved sources. These differences were not observed during the rainy conditions of 2024 when unimproved sources were closer and more accessible. In Honduras, water collection and water work burdens did not differ significantly by time point or source type. We found women with on-premises water access to still expend considerable time and caloric expenditure engaging in water work within their household compounds. Findings from Kenya suggest that water infrastructure improvements can reduce women's water collection burdens, though benefits may depend on and vary by season and source location. Findings from Honduras show that water labor does not end once water is in the household. Rather, substantial time and energy are expended carrying out water-related work even when sources are on premises, suggesting that efforts to assess water labor need to extend beyond collection alone. To meaningfully reduce burdens and ensure improved water sources are utilized during all seasons, initiatives need to consider source location, seasonal variability, and work beyond collection. Evaluations to assess infrastructure impacts on women's labor and well-being are needed and long overdue.

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

AutoMine Solution for AV2 2026 Scenario Mining Challenge

arXiv:2606.11874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the development of autonomous driving systems, mining high-value, safety-critical, and planning-relevant scenarios from large-scale driving logs has become essential for data-driven evaluation. In this paper, we propose AutoMine, a robust self-refining scenario mining method based on LLMs and VLMs. AutoMine uses semantics-preserving prompt augmentation to reduce LLM prompt sensitivity, combines robust trajectory atomic functions with VLM-based functions to handle perception noise and open-world visual cues, and refines generated code through execution feedback from real logs. In the Argoverse 2 Scenario Mining Competition at CVPR 2026, AutoMine achieves a HOTA-Temporal score of 36.38 and a Timestamp BA score of 77.21.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Provably Safe, Yet Scalable Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14536v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that optimize rewards while satisfying constraints. Predominant approaches rely on soft-constrained policy optimization, which has achieved empirical success but does not provide formal safety guarantees for the learned policy. In contrast, methods with strict guarantees typically rely on explicit certificate functions, whose construction requires the direct synthesis and verification of control-invariant sets, a process that scales poorly with state dimension and often yields overly conservative behavior. In this paper, we present the Provably Safe, yet Scalable RL (PS2-RL) framework, a novel two-phase architecture for learning provably safe policies in a scalable manner, designed to overcome the key bottlenecks of prior methods. Rather than explicitly computing invariant sets, PS2-RL leverages a learned backup policy to forward-integrate the system dynamics, generating an implicit control-invariant set online. In the first phase, the backup policy is trained with our proposed safe-arrival value function, which characterizes the optimal backup policy for invariant-set construction. In the second phase, an RL policy is trained end-to-end through a differentiable projection layer that strictly enforces the safety guarantees induced by the learned backup policy. By maximizing the volume of the implicit control-invariant set in the first phase, the resulting PS2 policy from the second phase is performant and scalable, while maintaining provable safety. Crucially, PS2-RL imposes no restrictions on the underlying RL algorithm and can be plugged into any existing training pipeline. We establish theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework and evaluate it on robotic control tasks with state dimensions up to 10, a regime in which prior provably safe RL methods struggle or become impractical.

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

Semantic DLM+: Improving Diffusion Language Models through Bias-variance Trade-off in Transition Kernel Design

arXiv:2606.15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of transition kernels, and poorly designed kernels can lead to issues like training instability, slow convergence, and biased sampling. In this paper, we study this sensitivity through a principled analysis of generalization error and identify three critical factors: asymptotic bias (difficulty in approximating the posterior distribution), exposure bias (error propagation during sampling), and optimization variance induced by kernel dispersion. We further compare different transition kernels: masking diffusion yields sparse and easier posterior-approximation targets, while uniform diffusion provides stronger sampling-side repair but induces harder approximation. Motivated by this trade-off, we revisit a previously overlooked variant, semantic DLM (SemDLM), where the transition kernel corrupts tokens to neighborhoods that are semantically similar. Our theory suggests that SemDLM can serve as a plausible middle ground by reducing the posterior approximation difficulty of uniform diffusion while retaining repair ability. However, we find that SemDLM suffers from a semantic basin problem, where sampling repeatedly stays within a semantic region and produces low-diversity text. To address this, we propose SemDLM+, which adds a global transition and a semantic-frequency penalty during sampling. Experiments on LM1B and OpenWebText show that SemDLM+ improves training dynamics and achieves competitive language modeling and generation quality with satisfactory diversity.

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

Reinforcement Learning Disrupts Gradient-Based Adversarial Optimization

arXiv:2606.12251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Gradient-based adversarial attacks remain a dominant threat to deep neural networks (DNNs), as they exploit gradient information to efficiently optimize adversarial perturbations. To address this, we investigate whether reinforcement learning (RL) training can disrupt the gradient structure used by attackers by training image classifiers with policy-gradient objectives and epsilon-greedy exploration. Through systematic experiments across CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet-100 with multiple architectures, we find that RL-trained classifiers significantly disrupt gradient-based adversarial optimization. To explain this, we conduct a comprehensive mechanism analysis using loss landscape visualization, static and dynamic gradient indicators, and predictive entropy. Our analysis reveals that RL acts as an implicit regularizer, producing models with highly unstable gradient directions and smaller gradient magnitudes. This combination makes each PGD step both unreliable in direction and limited in magnitude, causing gradient-based attacks to fail within practical iteration budgets. We further show that combining RL with adversarial training (RL-adv) provides a dual-layer defense operating at two complementary levels: RL degrades gradient information available to attackers (gradient-level defense), while adversarial training strengthens decision boundaries (boundary-level defense). RL-adv achieves the highest robustness across all major attack types evaluated, including gradient-based (PGD, AutoAttack), transfer-based, and query-based attacks, outperforming SL-adv by a significant margin. These findings identify RL-induced gradient disruption as a complementary robustness mechanism and motivate future research on hybrid SL-RL training schedules that combine SL's efficiency with RL's gradient-regularization properties.

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

Hierarchical Random Measures without Tables

arXiv:2505.02653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hierarchical Dirichlet process is the cornerstone of Bayesian nonparametric multilevel models. Its generative model can be described through a set of latent variables, commonly referred to as tables within the popular restaurant franchise metaphor. The latent tables simplify the expression of the posterior and allow for the implementation of Gibbs sampling algorithms to approximately draw posterior samples. However, managing their assignments can become computationally expensive, especially as the size of the dataset and the number of levels increase. In this work, we identify a prior for the concentration parameter of the hierarchical Dirichlet process that (i) induces a quasi-conjugate posterior distribution, and (ii) removes the need for tables, leading to more interpretable expressions for the posterior, with both a scalable and an exact algorithm to sample from it. Remarkably, this construction extends beyond the Dirichlet process, leading to a new framework for defining normalized hierarchical random measures and a new class of algorithms to sample from their posteriors. The key analytical tool is the independence of multivariate increments, that is, their representation as completely random vectors.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Expert-Driven Survival Machines: Improving Stratification and Interpretability in Multiple Clinical Cohorts

arXiv:2606.14608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Survival prediction plays a central role for healthcare providers and clinical researchers. Accurate risk stratification enables early intervention and improved patient management. Most existing deep survival models learn one common feature representation for all patients, which may hide important differences between patient subgroups. In contrast, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework allows different parts of the model to focus on different patient patterns, leading to more individualized representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a mixture-of-experts enhanced adaptive deep clustering survival framework (AdaCSM) for modeling such heterogeneous survival patterns. We introduce a routing-based expert mechanism that enables conditional specialization within a parametric survival modeling framework. The proposed architecture allocates patients to specialized risk predictors dynamically while preserving the patient survival and subtype clustering objectives. We compare our method with state-of-the-art survival and deep clustering models on multiple real-world longitudinal clinical cohorts spanning diverse disease domains. The proposed method demonstrates improved predictive performance and leads to interpretable results in survival analysis.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

AI Sovereignty as National Learning Capacity: A Human-Centered Learning Mechanics Viewpoint on France, the United States, and China

arXiv:2606.00729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in France is often discussed through separate dimensions such as investment, compute, regulation, employment, sovereignty, and education. This viewpoint paper proposes a unified interpretation: France can be analyzed as a national AI learning system. Building on Human-Centered Learning Mechanics (HCLM), we use HCLM not as a validated econometric model, but as a conceptual and diagnostic lens for interpreting national AI development as a balance between information injection, absorptive capacity, and institutional dissipation. Information injection includes compute, data, talent, research, capital, industrial deployment, and policy experimentation. Institutional dissipation refers to avoidable frictions such as administrative overload, coordination failures, energy constraints, regulatory uncertainty, talent mobility pressures, and weak industrial absorption. Regulation is not treated as mere friction: adaptive governance, trusted data spaces, and safety-oriented standards may increase long-term learning capacity by improving legitimacy, interoperability, and social trust. The central claim is not that a country follows neural-network equations, but that AI sovereignty depends on how effectively it converts distributed information into absorbed, coordinated, and socially legitimate capability. The paper connects HCLM with neural scaling laws, endogenous growth theory, creative destruction, absorptive capacity, and coordination mechanisms. It offers a formal heuristic, policy indicators, illustrative scenarios, and implications for France. The numerical results are diagnostic scenarios, not econometric estimates or official rankings. The proposed viewpoint reframes AI policy as the governance of an open, strategic, non-equilibrium learning system that should be tested with historical and cross-country data.

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

A fairness-aware extension of Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis for ranking

arXiv:2606.17756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness has become a central concern in ranking problems involving individuals or social groups, particularly under the Responsible Artificial Intelligence agenda. In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) provides a robust framework for handling uncertainty and incomplete preference information, but it does not explicitly address fairness in the resulting rankings. This paper proposes SMAA-Fair, a fairness-aware extension of SMAA for ranking problems. The approach reweights the simulated rankings generated by SMAA according to their level of group fairness, so that fairer rankings contribute more strongly to the acceptability indices and central weights vector. The framework is independent of the aggregation model and can incorporate different fairness metrics. In this study, Statistical Parity, normalized discounted Kullback–Leibler divergence (rKL) and normalized discounted cumulative Kullback–Leibler divergence (nDKL) are adopted. Rankings are derived from the fairness-adjusted acceptability matrix using expected ranking and maximum acceptability ranking. We also derive the central weight according to the degree of fairness in the obtained rankings. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data show that SMAA-Fair improves the representation of protected groups among favourable ranking positions, while preserving robustness to preference uncertainty.

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

MLLMs Get It Right, Then Get It Wrong: Tracing and Correcting Late-Layer Textual Bias

When vision contradicts text, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) consistently favor text, even when images provide clear evidence otherwise. This bias poses risks for applications requiring visual grounding, yet its cause remains unclear. In this paper, we uncover a surprising finding: models often get it right initially, forming correct vision-based predictions in their intermediate layers, before changing their minds and favoring text in the final output. We call this "late-layer textual override". The visual information is encoded, it simply does not survive to the output. More intriguingly, we find that how predictions change reveals whether they're correct: 85% of failures shift toward text, while 89% of successes shift toward vision. This directional signature enables a simple but powerful intervention: when we detect a confident visual prediction being suppressed, we restore it. We propose CALRD (Conflict-Aware Layer Reference Decoding), a training-free method that recovers overridden predictions at inference time. Experiments across five MLLMs of varying architectures demonstrate up to 9.4% absolute improvements on conflict benchmarks while largely preserving standard performance, without training or external knowledge. It recovers what the model already knew but failed to preserve.

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

A Three-Layer Framework for AI in Scientific Discovery

作者:

arXiv:2606.13566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current discussions of AI in scientific discovery are often dominated by two visible capabilities: search over existing knowledge and execution through optimization, simulation, and automation. Both are important, but neither fully captures the central act of discovery: the formation and evolution of models. This paper proposes a three-layer view of AI in discovery. Layer 1 is search and retrieval by large language models. Layer 2, as the main innovation of this paper, is model formation through qualitative reasoning: the capacity to recognize when a current framework is structurally inadequate and to understand the problem within a broader representational space, not through trial and error, but through structural insight into what is missing and where it can be found. Layer 3 is execution, optimization, and refinement. The main claim is that Layer 2 is both the most important and the least developed. Search without model formation remains confined to inherited frameworks, while execution without conceptual revision only amplifies an existing formulation. We illustrate Layer 2 reasoning through three case studies: S. S. Chern's intrinsic proof of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the resolution of the Nesterov Accelerated Gradient convergence problem via Lyapunov functions, and the autonomous disproof of the Erdos unit distance conjecture by OpenAI in 2026. Each case exhibits the same structural signature: a framework that had become inadequate, a missing conceptual object, and a resolution found in an unexpected neighboring field.

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

A Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization

arXiv:2606.20236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many decision-making problems in computing and networking systems can be naturally formulated as cost-minimization problems under performance constraints. In dynamic environments, reinforcement learning (RL) is often used to solve such problems at runtime by embedding both costs and constraint violations into a single scalar reward through weighted penalty terms, following a Lagrangian-inspired formulation. However, in this context the behavior of the learned policy critically depends on the choice of these weights, which are typically selected manually. This makes it difficult to identify an appropriate trade-off between optimizing the primary objective and effectively avoiding constraint violations, particularly in non-stationary environments where their relative importance may change. This paper presents MAMO (Multi-Agent system for Multi-Objective constrained optimization), an approach to tackle this balancing problem through multi-agent RL. MAMO decouples task execution from objective design by formulating the selection of reward weights as a learning problem, providing a !rst step towards more autonomous and robust RL-based solutions for constrained optimization problems in dynamic environments.

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

Superhuman Safe and Agile Racing through Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2605.22748v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous systems have achieved superhuman performance in isolation or simulation, yet they remain brittle in shared, dynamic real-world spaces. This failure stems from the dominant single-agent paradigm for physical applications, where other actors are ignored or treated as environmental noise, preventing effective coordination. Here we show that multi-agent reinforcement learning provides the essential safety scaffolding required for real-world interaction. Using high-speed quadrotor racing as a high-stakes testbed, we train agents to navigate complex aerodynamic interactions and strategic maneuvering with a variable number of racers. Through league-based self-play, agents evolve sophisticated anticipatory behaviors, including proactive collision avoidance, overtaking, and handling multi-agent physical interactions, including aerodynamic downwash. Our agents outperform a champion-level human pilot in multi-player races at speeds exceeding 22 m/s, while simultaneously reducing collision rates by 50 % compared to state-of-the-art single-agent baselines. Crucially, training with diverse artificial agents enables zero-shot generalization to safer human interaction. These results suggest that the path to robust robotic co-existence lies not in isolated safety constraints, but in the rigorous demands of multi-agent interaction. Multimedia materials are available at: https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/marl

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

XPASS-Vis: A Dataset for Cross-Domain Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment

Personalized image aesthetic assessment (PIAA) seeks to model, at the individual level, the subjective nature of aesthetic judgments toward artworks and photographs. Aesthetic preference is known to be both deeply personal and partially consistent across visual domains. Yet existing PIAA datasets and methods are largely confined to a single domain, or provide too few samples per annotator within each domain to enable personalization across domains. Consequently, the cross-domain generalization of personalized aesthetic preferences remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce XPASS-Vis, the first dataset explicitly designed for cross-domain PIAA. XPASS-Vis comprises 6,526 stimuli from three visual domains – art, fashion, and landscape – rated by 129 annotators, yielding 87,836 user-stimulus interactions, each annotated with an overall aesthetic score and nine aesthetic-emotion ratings. Notably, each annotator rated more than 200 stimuli per domain, providing sufficient per-domain coverage to support personalization both within and across domains. Moreover, we establish baseline models for cross-domain PIAA under unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where a model trained on a labeled source domain is transferred to an unlabeled target domain. A systematic evaluation of representative UDA approaches shows that the best-performing method recovers approximately 60\% (Spearman's $\rho$ = .28) of the supervised upper bound under a fully unsupervised setting. This provides encouraging evidence that personalized aesthetic preferences are, to a meaningful extent, transferable across visual domains. At the same time, a substantial gap remains, highlighting the need for PIAA-specific adaptation strategies. XPASS-Vis and the accompanying baselines provide a foundation for future research on cross-domain PIAA. All datasets and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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

Not All Skills Help: Measuring and Repairing Agent Knowledge

LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone. We argue that this conflates two distinct roles: generating a skill from experience is a creative act that judgment handles well, while deciding whether that skill actually helps requires empirical evidence across many tasks. Measuring per-skill causal contributions via randomized masking, we find that skill libraries exhibit pervasive causal heterogeneity: individual skills routinely help on some task types while hurting on others, yet their opposing effects cancel in aggregate, making them invisible to global curation methods. We propose ASSAY, a framework that separates generation from curation: it computes a per-skill causal attribution on a small development set, restructures the library offline, and suppresses skills with negative predicted effect for each test task. Across seven base models spanning four providers and two benchmarks (AppWorld and tau-bench), ASSAY consistently improves over prior skill-curation approaches. On AppWorld's hardest split, DeepSeek-V3 achieves 69.3% task-goal completion (47.4% relative improvement), a new state of the art among all published methods including weight-tuned approaches. On tau-bench retail, GPT-4.1 improves by 8.7% relative, advancing past o4-mini, o1, and GPT-4.5 on the public leaderboard without any weight modification. Ablation traces the dominant gain to per-task masking, confirming that the bottleneck is matching skills to tasks at inference time, not removing bad skills globally. Code is available at https://github.com/aiming-lab/assay.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TERMS-Bench: Diagnosing LLM Negotiation Agents Beyond Deal Rate

arXiv:2605.13909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Negotiation is a central mechanism of economic exchange, shaping markets, procurement, labor agreements, and resource allocation. It is also a canonical testbed for agentic language models, requiring multi-turn interaction under hidden preferences, strategic communication, and binding constraints. These properties make negotiation hard to evaluate: unlike math or code, it has no intrinsic verifier. Existing LLM negotiation evaluations rely on LLM-vs.-LLM interaction or aggregate outcomes such as deal rate, leaving failures opaque. We introduce Terms-Bench, short for Testbed for Economic Reasoning in Multi-turn Strategy, a Bayesian-game framework that makes the environment itself the verifier by specifying the counterpart's latent type, policy, and payoff structure. We instantiate it in bilateral price negotiation, where the counterpart's private state and simulator policy are hidden from the agent but observable to the evaluator. This turns the counterpart from a black-box opponent into a diagnostic instrument, enabling agent-attributable failure analysis and oracle-reference optimality gaps. Evaluating 13 LLM agents spanning frontier systems from major providers, Terms-Bench turns negotiation evaluation from aggregate ranking into actionable diagnosis: where agents fail, why they fail, and what to strengthen. Empirically, frontier models saturate deal rate yet diverge in surplus extraction, cue use, belief calibration, and compliance, revealing agent-specific bargaining bottlenecks masked by prior benchmarks.

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

Adaptable Method for Crystal Design across Diverse Constraints and Objectives with Pretrained Property Predictors

arXiv:2410.08562v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced crystal design can accelerate materials discovery across applications from photovoltaics to spintronics. Practical design must satisfy multiple properties and physical constraints, yet existing machine-learning-based approaches to such design often depend on large datasets, retraining, or task-specific generators. Here, we show that direct predictor-guided gradient optimization enables data-efficient, constraint-rich crystal design by combining off-the-shelf predictors with site-wise element masks, template initialization, and task-specific losses. In perovskites, it outperformed generative and Bayesian baselines under three targets – band gap, formation energy, and tolerance factor – and two hard constraints. DFT assessment further showed band-gap targeting competitive with a leading generative model despite using predictors trained on roughly one-tenth of the data. By flexibly combining pretrained predictors with application-oriented masks and custom losses, the same framework supported half-metal design. Such modularity could help researchers and engineers translate diverse application requirements directly into optimized candidate crystals with minimal computational cost.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

An integrated ultrahigh vacuum cluster tool for diamond surface science and single nitrogen-vacancy center measurements

arXiv:2606.13961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a custom-designed ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) cluster tool developed for studying shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, enabling in situ diamond surface preparation, characterization, and single NV center dynamics measurements within a single connected platform. The system combines a surface science chamber for controlled surface modification and analysis with a cryogenic confocal microscope chamber dedicated to NV spin and optical measurements. This integrated approach enables a direct correlation between diamond surface chemistry and the resulting NV spin and charge properties. The instrument provides a versatile platform for systematic studies of surface-induced decoherence mechanisms and charge dynamics for shallow NV centers, and establishes a pathway toward reproducible surface engineering for quantum sensing applications.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Optimal classical shadow estimation of unitary channels at Heisenberg limit

arXiv:2606.13638v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full tomography of an unknown quantum evolution is resource-intensive and often unnecessary when the goal is only to predict selected properties. This motivates the study of classical shadow estimation of unitary channels (CSEU), a task in which one queries an unknown $d$-dimensional unitary $U$ and stores classical data that can later be used to predict expectation values $\mathrm{tr}[O \cdot U\rho U^\dagger]$ up to additive error $\varepsilon$ for arbitrary input states $\rho$ and observables $O$. We propose a parallel, non-adaptive CSEU protocol using $\mathcal{O}(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ queries when the input states or observables have constant rank. This achieves Heisenberg scaling with respect to $\varepsilon$ and is query-optimal, as we prove a matching $\Omega(d\varepsilon^{-1})$ lower bound that remains valid even with stronger access to the unknown unitary. Our query-optimal CSEU protocol provides a versatile and powerful tool for quantum learning theory, pushing the performance limits of several fundamental learning tasks, including unitary channel tomography, Hamiltonian learning, boundary-regime quantum channel tomography, Pauli transfer matrix learning, inverse-free amplitude estimation, pure-state property estimation, and shallow-circuit learning. Remarkably, we show that optimal unitary channel tomography can be achieved using only parallel queries, closing the gap between the best achievable efficiency of parallel and sequential tomography protocols. Together, these applications establish our framework as a fundamental tool for learning properties of quantum processes, particularly for certain key tasks that require high precision.