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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Classical Explanations in (and of) General Probabilistic Theories

arXiv:2603.05627v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a notion of the ``explanation" of one (generalized) probabilistic model by another as particular kind of span in the category $\Prob$ of probabilistic models and morphisms. We show that explanations compose under a standard pullback construction (notwithstanding that $\Prob$ does not support arbitrary pullbacks). We then show that every locally-finite probabilistic model has a canonical, sharp classical explanation. The construction is functorial, so every locally-finite probabilistic theory has a canonical, sharp classical (though of course, usually non-local) representation.

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

Capturing Intransitive Dominance in Tennis Forecasting: A Graph Neural Network Approach

arXiv:2510.20454v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intransitive player dominance, where player A beats B, B beats C, but C beats A, is common in competitive tennis. Yet, there are few known attempts to incorporate it within forecasting methods. We address this problem with a graph neural network approach that explicitly models these intransitive relationships through temporal directed graphs, with players as nodes and their historical match outcomes as directed edges. Our model (65.7% accuracy, 0.214 Brier score) forecasts competitively with established rating systems such as Weighted Elo. Although it does not improve on the baseline in unconditional accuracy, a forecast-encompassing test shows that it carries complementary information. A combined forecast significantly outperforms Weighted Elo, and there is some indication that the gain grows more strongly on the intransitive matchups our model targets. A graph-based representation of player interactions thus captures a forecasting signal that transitive rating systems discard, even between players who share no common opponents.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

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

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

04.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Improved quantum processor logical error rates via correction and detection

作者:

Performing quantum algorithms for critical problems in physics and chemistry requires substantially lower error rates than the physical error rates of present quantum computers. Achieving such low logical error rates requires quantum error correction1,2 and physical error rates below a critical threshold value3–8. We experimentally demonstrate on a trapped-ion quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD)9,10 improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines, including quantum computation on multiple qubits. Our results hinge on two quantum error correction code constructions optimized for an ion-trap processor: a 12-qubit code encoding two qubits inspired by Knill11 and a 16-qubit tesseract colour code encoding four qubits12,13. These constructions are combined with a scalable method of error detection and post-selection to achieve reduced logical error rates. Our results show that state-of-the-art quantum devices are already able to make use of fault tolerance and error correction to strongly suppress errors in non-trivial quantum circuit computations. Experimental demonstration of quantum error-correcting codes combined with error detection and post-selection applied to a trapped-ion quantum processor shows improvements in logical error rates ranging from 11× to 800× compared with several physical circuit baselines.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimizing bias-tailored quantum error correction beyond code-capacity noise

arXiv:2606.17709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that the substantial advantages predicted for bias-tailored quantum error correction (QEC) under code-capacity noise are strongly reduced once realistic syndrome extraction and circuit-level noise models are considered. We start by comparing XZZX codes to rectangular surface codes with a bias-dependent optimised anisotropy. Although code-capacity simulations predict an advantage of rectangular surface codes in the limit of high noise bias, this actually disappears under circuit-level noise, making the XZZX codes the preferred and simplest choice even for platforms that allow for a flexible variation of the code layout adapted to changes in noise calibration. Our results identify bias degradation during syndrome extraction under circuit-level noise as the central limitation of biased-tailored QEC. To partially mitigate this effect, we introduce a bias-filtering CNOT gadget that temporarily encodes the ancillary target qubit during syndrome extraction in a repetition code and, upon measurement and feed forward, manages to reduce the bias degradation. In a regime of high-bias and low-idle errors, this bias-filtering gadget yields a few-percent relative improvement of the XZZX code error threshold, demonstrating that lightweight bias-filtering strategies can recover part of the lost bias-tailoring advantage for realistic circuit-level noise.

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

FutureOmni: Evaluating Future Forecasting from Omni-Modal Context for Multimodal LLMs

Although Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate strong omni-modal perception, their ability to forecast future events from audio-visual cues remains largely unexplored, as existing benchmarks focus mainly on retrospective understanding. To bridge this gap, we introduce FutureOmni, the first benchmark designed to evaluate omni-modal future forecasting from audio-visual environments. The evaluated models are required to perform cross-modal causal and temporal reasoning, as well as effectively leverage internal knowledge to predict future events. FutureOmni is constructed via a scalable LLM-assisted, human-in-the-loop pipeline and contains 919 videos and 1,034 multiple-choice QA pairs across 8 primary domains. Evaluations on 13 omni-modal and 7 video-only models show that current systems struggle with audio-visual future prediction, particularly in speech-heavy scenarios, with the best accuracy of 64.8% achieved by Gemini 3 Flash. To mitigate this limitation, we curate a 7K-sample instruction-tuning dataset and propose an Omni-Modal Future Forecasting (OFF) training strategy. Evaluations on FutureOmni and popular audio-visual and video-only benchmarks demonstrate that OFF enhances future forecasting and generalization. We publicly release all code (https://github.com/OpenMOSS/FutureOmni) and datasets (https://huggingface.co/datasets/OpenMOSS-Team/FutureOmni).

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Accelerating physics-informed neural networks for full waveform inversion using a hybrid quantum-classical finite-basis architecture

arXiv:2606.01110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Style-CCL: Content-Preserving Style Transfer via Curriculum Continual Learning

Content-Preserving Style transfer, given content and style references, remains challenging for Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) due to entangled content and style features. With a reverse triplet synthesis pipeline to build a million-scale training set and a dual-branch Style-Content DiT (SC-DiT) that decouples style and content via separate ROPE embeddings and causal masking, we observe that such a one-stage training paradigm on mixed style categories causes semantic styles to dominate, hindering texture style learning, and harming content preservation. To address these issues, we propose Style-CCL, a Multi-Stage Curriculum Continual Learning framework that trains SC-DiT from semantic (easy) to texture (hard) styles, and from clean to synthetic data, with Random Memory Rehearsal across stages to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Style-CCL achieves state-of-the-art performance in three core metrics: style similarity, content consistency, and aesthetic quality.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

The clinical utility of functional testing in fibroblasts to diagnose primary mitochondrial disease

Genome sequencing of the heterogeneous primary mitochondrial disorders (PMD) frequently reveals variants of uncertain significance that require functional tests for diagnosis, and does not identify variants in all patients. We analyzed mitochondrial enzyme assays, blue native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (BN-PAGE) with in-gel activity staining, complex I assembly blot, and select protein abundances in fibroblasts of a case series of 204 PMD patients divided into functional classes, in comparison to 51 controls and 53 differential diagnostic conditions. Overall, sensitivity and specificity for respiratory chain enzyme assays were 46% and 93% respectively, for BN-PAGE 40% and 98%, for complex I assembly assay 49% and 99%. The overall sensitivity of all tests was 76%, specificity 93%, with positive predictive value 96% and negative predictive value 67%. Categories with high sensitivity were isolated complex deficiencies, nuclear DNA-encoded mitochondrial protein synthesis defects, co-factor defects, and mitochondrial amino-acyl-tRNA synthetase conditions when aided by protein abundance. Mitochondrial DNA mutations and maintenance disorders showed poor sensitivities. Secondary dysfunctions were rare. A complete battery of functional tests showed strong diagnostic clinical utility in fibroblasts.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) Detectors for Open-Set RF Fingerprinting

arXiv:2606.12718v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Radio-frequency (RF) fingerprinting systems must operate in open-world environments where signals from unknown transmitters and temporal drift introduce distribution shift at test time. Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection provides a natural framework for this problem, yet its application to RF fingerprinting (RFF) remains limited. A key barrier to their adoption is that most OOD detectors require auxiliary OOD data for parameter tuning, an assumption that is difficult to satisfy in RF environments where representative OOD data is impractical to collect. In this work, we introduce a promising set of OOD detection methods from the machine learning literature to open-set RFF domain. We present these methods within a unified mathematical framework based on information theory, which is a natural framework for communication systems. Our framework allows for the systematic analysis of methods and development of new methods. We further demonstrate the applicability of recent work on tuning OOD detectors without given OOD tuning data for open-set RFF. We evaluate on the POWDER RF fingerprinting dataset, showing that detectors tuned without any given OOD data achieve performance comparable to baselines with access to true OOD tuning data and greatly out-perform baseline approaches without access to true OOD tuning data, showcasing the practical viability for the RFF problem.

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

Exploiting More Than Symmetry in Variational Quantum Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.20316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of variational quantum learning models crucially depends on choosing parametrizations that reflect the structure of the problem at hand. Symmetries provide one of the clearest such structures: whenever transformations of the input leave the desired outcome unchanged, this invariance should be built into the model rather than discovered during training. However, imposing a symmetry does not by itself determine a useful ansatz. Even within the symmetry-preserving space, one must decide where the trainable degrees of freedom should be placed. In this work, we study this remaining design freedom in equivariant variational quantum circuits. Building on symmetry-based parameter sharing, we disentangle two architectural choices: how much symmetry should be enforced, and which symmetry-respecting interactions should be trainable. Using Tic-Tac-Toe as a fully enumerable and structurally transparent test case, we find that suitable subgroups preserve most of the generalization benefit. By contrast, the dominant gains arise from gates acting directly on decisive task motifs. Thus, symmetry defines the admissible design space, while effective ansatze require an additional task-informed choice of trainable interactions.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Probabilistic Salary Prediction with Graph Attention Networks and a Mixture Density Network

arXiv:2606.11663v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate salary prediction is critical for bridging the information gap between employers and job seekers in modern labor markets. Existing approaches predominantly yield a single point estimate and treat job attributes such as location, occupation, and industry as independent categorical features, ignoring both the inherent uncertainty and multi-modality of real-world compensation data and the rich hierarchical and semantic-similarity relationships that govern pay norms. In this paper we propose GAT-MDN, a unified framework that addresses both limitations simultaneously. For each of the three attribute domains we construct a domain-specific graph whose edges encode (i) hierarchical parent-child containment and (ii) weighted similarity links derived from a pre-trained Sentence-Transformer. Parallel Graph Attention Networks (GATs) with edge-feature-aware attention learn rich, context-sensitive node representations from these multi-relational graphs. A priority-based hierarchical selection module then assembles a composite feature vector that gracefully handles missing or coarse attributes, and a Mixture Density Network (MDN) head maps this vector to the parameters of a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), yielding a full conditional salary distribution. Extensive experiments on a real-world Dutch job-posting dataset of over 1 million records demonstrate that GAT-MDN significantly outperforms a non-graph MLP-MDN baseline in both Negative Log-Likelihood (NLL) and Mean Squared Error (MSE).

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Associations Between Social Responsiveness and Sleep Disruption are Modulated by Chronotype in Early Adolescence: Cross-Sectional and Prospective Findings from 10,108 Participants of the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study

Background: Sleep disruption is prevalent in people with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism but is not clear whether it occurs as an endophenotype or secondary to other behaviours. The ABCD Study is a population-based longitudinal study that monitors the health, demography and lifestyle of over 11,000 children in the US. In this study we leverage these data to investigate whether traits consistent with autism (social responsiveness) are associated with sleep disruption independent of lifestyle and other behavioural measures. Methods: Autistic traits were assessed using the Social Responsiveness Scale at age 11, and sleep disruption and behavioural outcomes were assessed at ages 11 and 13 years using the Sleep Disturbance Scale, and the Child Behaviour Check List, respectively. Demographic, health and lifestyle-related variables were assessed by caregiver questionnaires. Regression models were applied to investigate associations between autistic traits and sleep outcomes. Results: There was a significant cross-sectional association between sleep disturbance and SRS at age 11 years old that was independent of sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic position, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and anxiety/depression ({beta} = 0.12, 95% CI (0.07, 0.17); p < 0.001), that persisted at age 13, and that was modulated by chronotype, with evening types showing a stronger association. Discussion: Social responsiveness assessed in early adolescence (age 11) were associated with sleep disruption independent of multiple confounding factors and were prospectively associated with sleep disruption at age 13 years. These findings contribute to the evidence that disruption of sleep and circadian timing may have a primary role in the neurobiological mechanisms that mediate autistic traits.

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

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

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

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build

arXiv:2605.21629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much have students' ordinary learning processes shifted in response to generative AI, and how does that affect their durable learning outcomes? Self-report surveys show little change, while small-scale behavioral studies report widespread AI use without the scale or duration to measure learning consequences. We address both questions using a ten-year panel of $3.2$ million ALEKS learning interactions for investigating time-on-task, complemented by ALEKS PPL placement-assessment data for examining proctoring and learning outcomes, with a quasi-experimental design exploiting variation in tasks that are more susceptible to AI (text-based word problems) and less susceptible to AI (interactive graph-based problems). Learning time on AI-susceptible problems declines $2.8\%$ per quarter among college students after ChatGPT's release, cumulating to $26.9\%$ over eleven quarters; high-schoolers show $31.3\%$, middle-schoolers $9.0\%$, and Grade 5 students no detectable change. Among college students, the post-ChatGPT divergence vanishes entirely under proctoring, ruling out broad efficiency gains as the likely explanation. Logistic fixed-effects models on randomly assigned proctored retention items yield a $25\%$ cumulative decline in odds of correct response; the same estimator on non-proctored assessment produces a large opposite-signed increase – inconsistent with any platform, cohort, or curriculum explanation. These results are among the first large-scale behavioral and outcome evidence that generative AI has altered how students study and the knowledge they build – the population-level indicator of cognitive surrender, with direct implications for educational research, assessment governance, and AI policy.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Are LLMs Ready to Assist Physicians? PhysAssistBench for Interactive Doctor-Patient-EHR Assistance

The most plausible near-term role of medical LLMs is to assist rather than replace physicians, yet current evaluations often test isolated capabilities: clinical knowledge, EHR system interaction, or patient communication. Physician assistance instead requires coordinating these capabilities within the same interaction, where physicians issue underspecified requests, patients describe symptoms ambiguously, and EHR systems demand precise tool use. We introduce PhysAssistBench, a benchmark for interactive doctor-patient-EHR assistance. Built from real MIMIC-IV cases, PhysAssistBench uses a scalable pipeline to construct agentic patients: interactive, record-grounded agents that turn static EHR records into multi-turn clinical scenarios while preserving clinical factuality. PhysAssistBench provides a curated bilingual evaluation set of 1,296 manually reviewed and physician-validated turns. Experiments with leading LLMs show that current models remain unreliable in this setting, which exposes a key bottleneck for clinical LLMs: reliable assistance requires coordination across knowledge, communication, and systems, not isolated gains in any of them.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Silicon Valley’s vision for global AI is flawed: each country needs its own blueprint

From energy grids to language performance, emerging economies are exposing the limits of today’s artificial-intelligence strategy as it expands globally. From energy grids to language performance, emerging economies are exposing the limits of today’s artificial-intelligence strategy as it expands globally.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Computational Design of Optimal Sequences for Targeted Hypermutagenesis Using Recombination-Coupled Diversity-Generating Retroelements

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are natural systems that accelerate evolution via targeted hypermutation at adenines. We previously developed DGRec, a system combining DGRs and recombineering for programmable mutagenesis in Escherichia coli. We here address two important issues with DGRec: the dependence of mutagenesis efficiency on the dgrRNA secondary structure and the variability of the reverse-transcription biases with sequence context and position. First, we introduce and validate a method to recode non-functional templates, i.e. with low mutagenesis efficiency, into highly functional ones through synonymous mutations. Second, we develop a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to predict DGRec mutational profiles for any given template sequence. By integrating this LSTM model with our recoding method, we establish a comprehensive workflow for customized directed evolution, enabling researchers to precisely fine-tune DGRec in vivo mutagenesis to their engineering needs.

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

LLM agent safety, multi-turn red-teaming, jailbreak benchmarks, adversarial robustness, safety-critical systems

arXiv:2606.20408v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly proposed as supervisory components for safety-critical systems, yet their robustness under sustained, adaptive adversarial pressure remains poorly characterized. We present NRT-Bench, a benchmark for multi-turn red-teaming of LLM agents acting as operators of a safety-critical system, instantiated in a simulated nuclear power plant control room. A five-role operator team, each backed by a configurable LLM, runs a plant governed by six critical safety functions (CSFs), while adversaries inject messages over four channels in bounded multi-turn sessions with per-turn feedback. Harm is an objective signal rather than LLM-judged text: a run terminates the moment any CSF is lost, attributed to the causing message. Evaluating four frontier operator models under a fixed-attack paired-replay protocol, we find that adaptive multi-turn attacks reliably push the operator team past a safety limit: across the four models, between 8.7% and 12.1% of attack sessions end with the plant losing a critical safety function. Although the four models look almost equally robust by this aggregate rate, their failures barely overlap: of $149$ sessions, none defeat all four models while a third defeat at least one, so vulnerabilities are nearly disjoint across models rather than nested. The effect of added defences is strongly model-dependent: the same guardrail stack or safety-advisor agent that lowers attack success for one model can raise it for another. We release the simulation venue, attack dataset, and replay tooling for reproducible safety evaluation of LLM agents.

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

Cross-Modal Registration Between 3D and 2D Fingerprints via Pose-Aware Unwrapping and Point-Cloud Fusion

Three-dimensional (3D) fingerprints preserve global finger geometry and local ridge structure while avoiding contact-induced deformation, but they remain difficult to integrate with legacy two-dimensional (2D) fingerprint systems. This paper addresses the intermediate stage between 3D acquisition and cross-modal matching, and presents a unified framework for 3D fingerprint preprocessing and registration across contactless and contact-based 2D modalities. The framework combines four components: 1) a nonparametric visualization and unwrapping method that converts a 3D fingerprint point cloud into a rolled-equivalent 2D representation without relying on a global finger-shape model; 2) a point-cloud fusion pipeline that registers and mosaics multiple partial 3D captures into a more complete fingerprint model; 3) an ellipse-based pose normalization method for canonical finger alignment; and 4) a pose-aware cross-modal registration strategy that improves compatibility between 3D fingerprints and both contactless and contact-based 2D fingerprints. Experiments on a self-collected multimodal fingerprint database containing 150 fingers show that the proposed framework achieves ridge-level 3D registration accuracy, robust pose estimation, and consistent gains in 2D compatibility. In particular, the 3D fusion error is concentrated around 0.09 mm, contactless 2D–3D registration reaches ridge-scale projection accuracy, and pose-aware unwrapping improves genuine matching scores relative to generic 3D unwrapping. These results support the use of 3D fingerprints as an effective geometric bridge across heterogeneous fingerprint modalities. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/3DFpVisual.

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

Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier

For the development of Large language models (LLMs), recent approaches to generating pseudo intermediate reasoning have shown remarkable progress. But they typically rely on large numbers of correctly annotated answers to assess reasoning quality. This paper presents a semi-supervised framework that scales reasoning learning from minimal supervision, turning reasoning verification itself into a data creation mechanism. We train a lightweight reasoning-correctness classifier on only a few labeled samples, which judges whether intermediate reasoning traces generated by an LLM are valid. Furthermore, an entropy-based confidence threshold filters out unreliable samples, and the remaining high-confidence reasoning traces are used to fine-tune the model. Experiments on Verifiable Math Problems (Orca-Math subset) and Question Answering on Image Scene Graphs (GQA) with Visual Programming show that our method achieves accuracy comparable to using 10-15x more labeled data. Ablation analyses confirm that both the classifier and entropy filtering are essential for scalable and noise-resistant pseudo-labeling. By replacing expensive answer-level supervision with lightweight reasoning verification, our method provides a practical path toward constructing large-scale reasoning resources and paves the way for future autonomous reasoning systems that learn from minimal human input.

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

How Should World Models Be Evaluated? A Decision-Making-Centric Position

arXiv:2606.15032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models have rapidly become one of the central abstractions in modern AI. Yet the term now refers to several different objects: action-conditioned environment models, latent imagination models, future-video predictors, interactive neural simulators, latent predictive representations, and synthetic-data engines. Evaluation has broadened with the term. Recent papers measure video realism, perceptual similarity, instruction following, physical plausibility, policy ranking, executability, planning success, and downstream policy improvement. The result is not only metric diversity but also a recurring problem of claim/evidence mismatch: papers frequently make a stronger claim about what their model is useful for than their evaluation can actually establish. This paper surveys the recent literature and argues that the central question is use-dependent. When a model is presented as a world model for embodied decision-making, a more decisive issue is not whether it generates visually compelling videos, but whether it supports reliable counterfactual reasoning, policy evaluation, planning, and policy optimization under intervention, policy-induced distribution shift, and long-horizon rollout. We organize the literature using an L0–L7 ladder that ranges from visual plausibility to policy optimization utility. In our interpretation, L0–L3 are most naturally read as diagnostics of generated artifacts, L4 is often the first genuinely interventional test, and L5–L7 provide the most direct evidence of decision usefulness. Based on this diagnosis, we propose a decision-making-centric evaluation framework and a benchmark protocol that foreground counterfactual action fidelity, closed-loop rollout validity, reward/value prediction, policy-ranking agreement, optimization lift, model exploitability, and uncertainty calibration.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

When Does Routing Become Interpretable? Causal Probes on Block Attention Residuals

arXiv:2606.13168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block Attention Residuals (Block AttnRes) by replace fixed additive residuals with a learned softmax over earlier depth-source representations, surfacing cross-layer routing as an inspectable tensor in the forward pass. This is a tempting interpretability target: information flow normally inferred indirectly is now directly observable. We ask whether such exposure suffices for mechanistic interpretation. We probe two same-scale ($0.6$B) Block AttnRes checkpoints under identical routing-ablation interventions: a vanilla Qwen3 inference-wrapped through a deterministic recency-bias schedule that the codebase admits as a routing-equivalent loading path, and a Block AttnRes Qwen3 trained from scratch with routing as part of optimisation. The wrapped baseline's routing weights are content-independent and reproduce the schedule's analytic prediction. The trained AttnRes checkpoint instead exhibits three localised routing motifs: an embedding-source pathway through early-layer MLP, a current-state pathway through early-layer attention and MLP, and an older-history pathway through late-layer attention. Beyond this stratification, we find a sharp dissociation between average routing mass and causal importance: in both sublayers, the largest mass slice is not the largest causal contribution, and one source family carries appreciable mass with no detectable causal role under intervention. Architectural exposure of routing is therefore necessary but not sufficient for mechanistic interpretation: structured depth routing emerges only when routing has been part of training, and even then, descriptive routing summaries should be treated as candidate hypotheses to be tested by causal interventions, not as evidence of mechanism in their own right.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome

Just as genomes revolutionized molecular genetics, connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) are transforming neuroscience. To date, the only organisms with complete connectomes are worms1–3, sea squirts4, and comb jellies5 (103–104 synapses). By contrast, the fruit fly is more complex (108 synaptic connections), with a brain that supports learning and spatial memory6,7 and an intricate ventral nerve cord analogous to the vertebrate spinal cord8–12. Here we report the first densely-reconstructed adult fly connectome that unites the brain and ventral nerve cord, and we leverage this resource to investigate principles of neural control. We show that effector neurons (motor neurons, endocrine cells, and efferent neurons targeting the viscera) are primarily influenced by sensory neurons in the same body part, forming local feedback loops. These local loops are linked by long-range circuits involving ascending and descending neurons organized into behavior-centric modules. Single ascending and descending neurons are often positioned to influence the voluntary movements of multiple body parts, together with the endocrine cells or visceral organs that support those movements. Brain regions involved in learning and navigation supervise these circuits. These results reveal an architecture that is distributed, parallelized, and embodied, reminiscent of distributed control architectures in engineered systems13,14.

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

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.