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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Universal Extraction of Quantum Critical Exponents and Phase Transitions via Tailored Hilbert Space

作者:

arXiv:2606.24312v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Finite-size scaling and the renormalization group form the central toolkit for analyzing quantum phase transitions (QPTs). In this Letter, we introduce a novel Hilbert-space tailoring scheme to probe quantum critical phenomena. Applied to the second-order QPT of the one-dimensional (1D) XY model, our method yields precise critical points and exponents on lattices containing merely 50 unit cells. We further establish the universal applicability of this framework via investigations of the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transition in the 1D XXZ chain: critical parameters are recovered with as few as 12 lattice sites. This technique may open an alternative, efficient route to universally characterize QPT across many-body lattice systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fundamental Limitations of QAOA on Constrained Problems and a Route to Exponential Enhancement

arXiv:2511.17259v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study fundamental limitations of the generic Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on constrained problems where valid solutions form a low dimensional manifold inside the Boolean hypercube, and we present a provable route to exponential improvements via constraint embedding. Focusing on permutation constrained objectives, we show that the standard generic QAOA ansatz, with a transverse field mixer and diagonal r local cost, faces an intrinsic feasibility bottleneck: even after angle optimization, circuits whose depth grows at most sublinearly with n cannot raise the total probability mass on the feasible manifold much above the uniform baseline suppressed by the size of the full Hilber space. Against this envelope we introduce a minimal constraint enhanced kernel (CE QAOA) that operates directly inside a product one hot subspace and mixes with a block local XY Hamiltonian. For permutation constrained problems, we prove an angle robust, depth matched exponential enhancement where the ratio between the feasible mass from CE QAOA and generic QAOA grows exponentially in $n^2$ for all depths up to a linear fraction of n, under a mild polynomial growth condition on the interaction hypergraph. Thanks to the problem algorithm co design in the kernel construction, the techniques and guarantees extend beyond permutations to a broad class of NP-Hard constrained optimization problems.

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

DroneShield-AI: A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Framework for Real-Time Autonomous Drone Threat Detection, Behavioral Intent Classification, and Swarm Intelligence in Contested Airspace

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) threats have emerged as a defining security challenge of the 21st century. This paper presents DroneShield-AI, a unified open framework integrating six processing layers: RF signal classification, acoustic motor-signature detection, YOLOv8-based visual detection, evidence-weighted sensor fusion, a Behavioral Intent Classification Engine (BICE), and a Graph Neural Network Swarm Intelligence Module (GNN-SIM). BICE introduces the first systematic six-class threat taxonomy for drone flight patterns, enabling predictive operator alerts with a 30-second advance-warning horizon. GNN-SIM is the first open framework for adversarial multi-drone formation analysis using Graph Attention Networks. Evaluated on three publicly available real-world datasets, the fused pipeline achieves 96.1% detection accuracy, 3.2% false alarm rate, AUC-ROC: 0.981, and 142ms end-to-end latency on commodity CPU-class hardware at approximately $500-$780 USD total system cost. All code, model weights, and simulation datasets are publicly released at submission.

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

Diffusion Models for Adaptive Sequential Data Generation

arXiv:2606.06007v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generating realistic synthetic sequential data is critical in real-world applications across operations research, finance, healthcare, energy systems, and scientific computing, where time-indexed observations are used for prediction, simulation, risk assessment, and data-driven decision-making. While diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in generating static data, their direct extensions to sequential settings often fail to capture temporal dependence and information structure. Designing diffusion models that can simulate sequential data in an adapted manner, and hence without anticipation of future information, therefore remains an open challenge. In this work, we propose a sequential forward-backward diffusion framework for adapted time series generation. Our approach progressively injects and removes noise along the sequence, conditioning on the previously generated history to ensure adaptiveness. A novel score-matching objective is introduced for efficient parallel training. We derive rigorous statistical guarantees under a generic framework, then establish score approximation, score estimation, and distribution estimation results with ReLU networks serving as a concrete instance. Empirically, we validate our method on synthetic data, including ARMA models and Gaussian processes, and demonstrate its effectiveness in constructing mean-variance optimal portfolios.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

A Finite-Volume Scheme for the Continuum Extrapolation of Lattice Step-Scaling in (2+1)D Hamiltonian U(1) Gauge Theory

arXiv:2606.20029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a finite-volume scheme to perform controlled continuum extrapolations of the lattice step-scaling function, a key ingredient for determining the running coupling in a Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory in small volumes. As a testbed, we employ a dual Hamiltonian formulation of pure U(1) gauge theory in (2+1) dimensions and an operator basis that remains efficient toward weak coupling. We describe the implementation of static external charges on the spatial lattice and study, using matrix product states, the resulting confining string, from which we extract the static potential and a force-based renormalized coupling. Using the proposed finite-volume scheme, we demonstrate a stable continuum limit of the step-scaling function on the lattice sizes accessible to present Hamiltonian simulations. The method is readily extendable to other gauge groups and dimensions, providing a pathway toward Hamiltonian step-scaling studies in other theories.

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

FORT-Searcher: Synthesizing Shortcut-Resistant Search Tasks for Training Deep Search Agents

Training deep search agents requires verifiable questions whose answers remain unavailable until sufficient evidence has been acquired through search. Existing synthesis methods often increase apparent difficulty by enriching graph structures, but structural complexity alone does not guarantee realized search difficulty: the intended search process can collapse through a cheaper identifying route. We formalize this gap with a shortcut-aware difficulty framework and identify four actionable shortcut risks: evidence co-coverage, single-clue selectivity, exposed constants, and prior-knowledge binding. To diagnose their realized effects, we use trajectory signatures including solving cost, answer hit time, and prior-shortcut rate. Guided by this framework, we introduce FORT, a Framework of Shortcut-Resistant Training-Data Synthesis. FORT constructs shortcut-resistant training data by controlling shortcut risks across entity selection, evidence graph construction, question formulation, and adversarial refinement. Experiments show that FORT induces longer pre-answer search and fewer shortcut patterns than existing open-source deep search datasets. Using the resulting trajectories, we train FORT-Searcher with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) only, and it achieves the best overall performance among comparable-size open-source search agents on challenging deep search benchmarks. Relevant resources will be made available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/FORT-Searcher.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LLM-based Visual Code Completion for Aerospace Geometric Design

Recent advances in both Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) have seen a step change in their ability to perform visual code completion, but the aerospace industry, which prioritizes safety and explainabilty over rapid LLM adoption, currently has no publicly announced LLM-based geometric design copilot systems in commercial use by aerospace Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs). This paper presents a LLM-based visual programming copilot application for aerospace engineering design tasks, using a visual programming variant of the ReAct methodology and GPT 5.4. In addition to the copilot, we describe Wingbuilder, a new Grasshopper plugin library with custom components for aerospace-specific geometry abstraction, and an associated Aerospace Visual Programming Dataset (AVPD) with 18 aerospace expert designed tasks at different levels of difficulty alongside ground truth solutions. We evaluate our copilot application with a user trial involving two experienced aerospace engineers from a large aircraft manufacturing company. We find our copilot visual programming ReAct methodology was successful in generating suggestions that participants found helpful, but slow ReAct inference times limit its usefulness to more complex time-consuming tasks where waiting for good copilot solution suggestion was worthwhile. Participants reported they liked the tool and would be willing to use it in the future.

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

ML Inference Scheduling with Predictable Latency

arXiv:2512.18725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine learning (ML) inference serving systems can schedule requests to improve GPU utilization and to meet service level objectives (SLOs) or deadlines. However, improving GPU utilization may compromise latency-sensitive scheduling, as concurrent tasks contend for GPU resources and thereby introduce interference. Given that interference effects introduce unpredictability in scheduling, neglecting them may compromise SLO or deadline satisfaction. Nevertheless, existing interference prediction approaches remain limited in several respects, which may restrict their usefulness for scheduling. First, they are often coarse-grained, which ignores runtime co-location dynamics and thus restricts their accuracy in interference prediction. Second, they tend to use a static prediction model, which may not effectively cope with different workload characteristics. In this paper, we evaluate the potential limitations of existing interference prediction approaches, finding that coarse-grained methods can lead to noticeable deviations in prediction accuracy and that static models degrade considerably under changing workloads.

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

Green SARC: Predictive Cost and Carbon Governance for Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15954v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act through tools and sub-agents, yet the controls meant to bound their financial and environmental cost still sit on dashboards evaluated beside or after execution. Green SARC applies the SARC governance-by-architecture framework – four enforcement sites in the agent loop – to FinOps and GreenOps, contributing the theory of what to enforce and how to predict it. We report four policy-independent results. (i) The unconstrained "State Snowball" is $\Theta(n^2)$ in loop depth; on 3,000 real multi-step plans (SWE-rebench) it holds on 100%, with median curvature $\hat{c}_2=216$ exceeding the linear-accretion prediction $p/2=134$ – real plans accrete faster than the model. (ii) On real residuals the Normal-$\sigma$ gate under-covers (92% at nominal 95%); split-conformal calibration holds (95.2%). (iii) A soft Lagrangian penalty tuned to the budget in expectation breaches it on 91.5% of seeds; the architectural gate breaches 0%. (iv) Under binding budgets the gate's over-budget incidence is 0% on synthetic and real (BurstGPT) arrivals. End-to-end token/USD/carbon savings (47–55%) are real but policy-dependent in magnitude – set by a scope-cap knob, not by gate rejections. The library is open-source, dependency-free, and ships a regeneration script for every cited number.

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

MOLAR: Learning Multimodal Molecular Representations from Noisy Labels

arXiv:2606.18390v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivation: Noisy labels are a common challenge in molecular property prediction because molecular annotations are often obtained from assays, curated databases, or weak annotation pipelines rather than directly observed clean biological states. Treating recorded labels as reliable supervision can cause models to memorize corrupted observations and learn misleading molecular evidence. In multimodal molecular representation learning, this issue can be amplified by graph-text fusion or alignment, which may propagate label-induced errors across modalities. Results: We propose MOLAR, a noise-aware framework for learning multimodal molecular representations from noisy labels. MOLAR separates latent clean-property inference from recorded-label observation: graph and text views contribute residual evidence to a clean-property distribution, and a categorical label-observation channel maps this distribution to recorded labels for training. This formulation derives posterior label reliability and modality-specific molecular evidence from the model. Experiments on naturally noisy molecular benchmarks and controlled label-flipping benchmarks show that MOLAR consistently outperforms representative baselines. Visualization analyses further show that MOLAR provides interpretable reliability and modality-evidence diagnostics.

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

ViT-Up: Faithful Feature Upsampling for Vision Transformers

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become a dominant architecture for visual representation learning, providing exceptionally strong and broadly reusable backbone features. However, ViTs are commonly operated on relatively small patch-token grids due to the quadratic cost of global self-attention, which creates a persistent bottleneck for dense prediction tasks such as semantic segmentation and depth estimation. This has motivated the development of task-agnostic feature upsamplers. While recent state-of-the-art methods produce visually sharp dense representations, their reliance on shallow image encoders for guided upsampling can introduce feature leakage, fragmentation, and blur. We introduce ViT-Up, an implicit feature upsampling framework that replaces external image guidance with layer-wise query construction from intermediate ViT hidden states. This enables feature prediction at arbitrary continuous image coordinates while preserving alignment with the backbone feature space. Experiments demonstrate that ViT-Up consistently outperforms state-of-the-art image-guided upsamplers across dense prediction and semantic correspondence. On DINOv3-S+, ViT-Up improves over prior methods by up to +2.07 mIoU on Cityscapes and +4.17 PCK@0.10 on SPair-71k. With the larger DINOv3-B backbone, these gains increase to +3.36 mIoU and +8.09 PCK@0.10, demonstrating that ViT-Up scales favorably with backbone capacity.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Latent Space Reinforcement Learning for Inverse Material Estimation in Food Fracture Simulation

Realistic visual simulation of food manipulation requires accurate material parameters, yet these are difficult to measure directly and vary across the heterogeneous regions of a single food item. We address the inverse problem of estimating material parameters from a target description of fracture behavior in a non-differentiable continuum damage mechanics simulator. Using orange peeling as a test case, we train a neural surrogate on 2,000 forward simulations and compare Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES, a gradient-free evolutionary optimizer) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm) across the original 9-dimensional parameter space and two learned 4-dimensional latent representations. Since different oranges have different material properties, a practical inverse system must handle arbitrary targets without retraining. We train a goal-conditioned PPO policy that learns a general inverse mapping: given any target description of peeling behavior, the policy produces a material parameter estimate in a single forward pass (8 surrogate evaluations, approximately 10ms). Operating in a normalizing flow latent space with a shared surrogate evaluator, the goal-conditioned policy achieves 0.642 actual recovery when validated through the simulator, outperforming the original parameter space by 23%. A warm-start extension that initializes CMA-ES refinement from the policy's output further improves recovery to 0.828 with 540 evaluations. These findings provide a practical framework for inverse food physics and lay groundwork for vision-driven material identification from video observations of food manipulation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Spectral Query-Key Product Weight Steering for Training-Free VLM Hallucination Mitigation

Vision-language models (VLMs) often generate fluent but visually unsupported descriptions, especially by mentioning objects absent from the image. We propose QK Product Steering, a data-free, training-free, and zero-inference-cost weight edit for reducing object hallucination. The method directly edits the per-head query-key product, the operator that produces pre-softmax attention logits, by suppressing a small number of dominant singular modes in selected middle layers. The edited product is then mapped back to the query weights through a closed-form query-only update while keeping shared key weights fixed, making the edit compatible with grouped-query attention. We further decompose the QK product into symmetric and antisymmetric components to distinguish mutual content-similarity patterns from directional attention patterns. Across three GQA-based VLMs, QK Product Steering achieves an average relative CHAIR$_s$ reduction of $4.0\%$, while matched random-mode controls show negligible change. Interpretability ablations show that the hallucination signal is specific to dominant QK modes and is primarily localized to the symmetric mutual-attention channel. Overall, QK Product Steering offers a simple alternative to decoding-time mitigation, requiring no additional data, fine-tuning, or inference-time overhead while largely preserving general multimodal capability.

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

X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs

While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts. The standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) training methods fail to close this gap. To address this, we propose X-OPD, a novel Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation framework designed to systematically align the capabilities of Speech LLMs to their text-based counterparts. X-OPD enables the Speech LLM to explore its own distribution via on-policy rollouts, where a text-based teacher model evaluates these trajectories and provides token-level feedback, effectively distilling teacher's capabilities into student's multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that X-OPD significantly narrows the gap in complex tasks while preserving the model's inherent capabilities.

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

Modelling magnetic material properties with uncertainty-aware neural networks

arXiv:2606.11870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Machine learning is increasingly applied to accelerate the discovery of novel materials by exploring large compositional and structural design spaces. Yet, the scarcity of high-quality data and the frequent need for out-of-distribution prediction introduce substantial uncertainty, making the assessment of model reliability essential. In this work, we investigate uncertainty quantification as a means to evaluate model confidence in the context of permanent magnet research. In a first study, we benchmark classical and modern machine learning models for predicting intrinsic magnetic properties, focusing on the quality of their uncertainty estimates. We apply Gaussian negative log-likelihood loss and dropout-based Bayesian approximation as practical strategies for estimating predictive uncertainty. In a second study, we transfer these architectural features for uncertainty estimation to a more complex task: predicting coercivity from microstructural information using a graph neural network. Together, these studies demonstrate that uncertainty quantification not only enhances the trustworthiness of predictions but is also transferable across different modeling tasks.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

C-glycoside synthesis via radical cross-coupling of glycohydrazides

作者:

Carbohydrates are among the most abundant and structurally diverse biomolecules in nature, playing central roles in energy storage, molecular recognition, and cell signaling. Within this domain, C-glycosides1-3, in which the oxygen atom of the glycosidic bond in O-glycosides is replaced by carbon, have emerged as valuable motifs in medicinal chemistry due to their resistance to enzymatic hydrolysis2,4. Of particular importance are C-aryl glycosides, exemplified by the SGLT2 inhibitors dapagliflozin, canagliflozin, and empagliflozin, which are frontline therapies for type 2 diabetes5-7. However, scalable syntheses of C-aryl glycosides have traditionally relied on protected sugar derivatives, lengthy sequences, or conventional cross-couplings that often suffer from poor selectivity, limited scope, and extensive protecting-group manipulation6. Herein, we report a practical approach to C-aryl glycosides using glycosyl sulfonyl hydrazides as redox-neutral radical precursors for cross-coupling. Prepared directly from unprotected native sugars, these reagents generate glycosyl radicals under mild conditions and enable efficient access to diverse C-aryl glycosides, including all approved SGLT2 inhibitors, natural products such as salmochelins and neopetrosins, and medicinally relevant probes. Beyond anomeric functionalization, this platform enables C–C bond formation at multiple positions on carbohydrate scaffolds and supports stereoretentive radical coupling that can override inherent stereochemical biases, expanding practical access to carbohydrate-derived therapeutics and chemical tools.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Hybrid Event Frame Sensors: Modeling, Calibration, and Simulation

Hybrid event-frame sensors integrate an Event Vision Sensor (EVS) and an Active Pixel Sensor (APS) within a single chip, combining the high dynamic range and low latency of the EVS with the rich spatial intensity information from the APS. While this tight integration offers compact and temporally precise imaging, the complex circuit architecture introduces nontrivial noise patterns that remain poorly understood and unmodeled. In this work, we present the first unified statistics-based imaging noise model that jointly describes the noise behavior of APS and EVS pixels. Our formulation explicitly incorporates photon shot noise, dark current noise, fixed-pattern noise, and quantization noise, and links EVS noise to illumination level and dark current. Based on this formulation, we further develop a calibration pipeline to estimate noise parameters from real data and provide a detailed analysis of both APS and EVS noise behaviors. Finally, we propose H-ESIM, a statistically grounded simulator that generates RAW frames and events under realistic jointly calibrated noise statistics. Experiments on two hybrid sensors validate our model across multiple imaging tasks, including video frame interpolation and deblurring, demonstrating strong transfer from simulation to real data.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

EnrichViz: An Interactive R Shiny Application for Visualization of Pathway Enrichment Results from Omics Data

Pathway and functional enrichment analysis is a cornerstone of omics data interpretation, enabling researchers to map differentially expressed proteins or genes onto curated biological processes, signaling cascades, and molecular functions. While tools such as Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA), g:Profiler, and Enrichr are widely used to generate ranked enrichment results, translating these tabular outputs into clear, publication-ready figures remains a time-consuming step that typically requires custom scripting and familiarity with visualization libraries, a significant barrier for researchers without a computational background. Here we present EnrichViz, a self-contained, browser-based R Shiny application that enables interactive, code-free visualization of pathway and functional enrichment results from quantitative proteomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics experiments. EnrichViz accepts three standard CSV files as input, a normalized abundance matrix, a sample annotation or metadata file, and enrichment results from any platform that exports tabular output, and produces six complementary, publication-ready visualizations: bar and bubble plots for ranking enriched terms by significance, chord diagrams for exploring pathway-molecule connectivity, clustered heatmaps for displaying Z-score normalized expression patterns across experimental groups, and boxplots or violin plots for examining the abundance distribution of individual proteins, genes, or metabolites. The application supports both raw p-values and pre-transformed -log10(p) values through automatic detection, and all plot parameters are adjustable in real time through a graphical sidebar. Every figure can be exported as a high-resolution PNG file at 300 dpi. EnrichViz is implemented in R using the Shiny, ggplot2, pheatmap, and circlize packages, and is freely available at https://rgmilian.shinyapps.io/EnrichViz/

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

An Attention Mechanism for Robust Multimodal Integration in a Global Workspace Architecture

arXiv:2602.08597v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Robust multimodal systems must remain effective when some modalities are noisy, degraded, or unreliable. Existing multimodal fusion methods often learn modality selection jointly with representation learning, making it difficult to determine whether robustness comes from the selector itself or from full end-to-end co-adaptation. Motivated by Global Workspace Theory (GWT), we study this question using a lightweight top-down modality selector operating on top of a frozen multimodal global workspace. We evaluate our method on two multimodal datasets of increasing complexity: Simple Shapes and MM-IMDb 1.0, under structured modality corruptions. The selector improves robustness while using far fewer trainable parameters than end-to-end attention baselines, and the learned selection strategy transfers better across downstream tasks, corruption regimes, and even to a previously unseen modality. Beyond explicit corruption settings, on the MM-IMDb 1.0 benchmark, we show that the same mechanism improves the global workspace over its no-attention counterpart and yields decent benchmark performance.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CausalDrive: Real-time Causal World Models for Autonomous Driving

World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for scaling autonomous driving (AD) data, yet existing video generative models fall short as interactive simulators. Layout-conditioned renderers rely on "oracle" future trajectories of all background agents, rendering them strictly non-reactive. Conversely, pure action-conditioned predictors lack semantic control over complex interactions and suffer from prohibitive diffusion latencies, hindering closed-loop policy learning. To bridge this gap, we present CausalDrive, a controllable, real-time foundation driving world renderer. CausalDrive operates solely on the initial front-view frame, the ego-vehicle's trajectory, and a macroscopic text prompt. By excluding future NPC layouts, we compel the model to intrinsically predict causal interactions, enabling text-driven control over Driving Sociology, allowing users to dynamically orchestrate diverse counterfactual reactions to identical ego-actions. To overcome the efficiency bottleneck and address the covariate shift in autoregressive generation, we propose a novel Context-Forced DMD architecture. This combines continuous flow-matching with a self-correcting distillation objective, achieving interactive speeds of 12 FPS. This breakthrough transforms the passive video generator into a playable neural simulator. We demonstrate its versatility across three downstream applications: (1) generative closed-loop evaluation with significantly mitigated collision artifacts, (2) large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training driven by a Video2Reward module, and (3) real-time human-in-the-loop simulation. Extensive experiments validate that policies trained within CausalDrive's reactive scenarios exhibit superior interaction capabilities in the real world.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Vanishing Depth: Training Generalized Depth Adapters with Sinusoidal Depth Preprocessing for Pretrained RGB Encoders

Generalized metric depth understanding is critical for precise vision-guided robotics, which current state-of-the-art (SOTA) vision-encoders do not support. To address this, we propose a self-supervised training approach that extends pretrained RGB encoders with a depth adapter to incorporate and align metric depth into a combined latent space without interfering with the pretrained RGB feature extraction. In combination with our sinusoidal depth encoding, the depth adapter enables generalized and robust depth density and distribution invariant feature extraction. Our depth adapters improve a wide set of generalized RGB baselines across a spectrum of relevant RGBD downstream tasks in segmentation, pose estimation, and depth completion – without the necessity of finetuning. Most importantly, we achieve 56.05 mIoU in the SUN-RGBD segmentation, while outperforming SOTA depth-aware and multi-modal encoders in our experiments. When no depth is present, one can activate our depth adapter with an empty map, use single pixel depth clues, or monocular depth estimation to include the depth aware feature extraction into subsequent downstream tasks.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genomic wastewater surveillance of seasonal and zoonotic influenza A viruses in California during the 2024-2025 flu season

Wastewater genomic surveillance provides an opportunity to detect human and animal influenza A virus (IAV). We aimed to implement an IAV genomic surveillance framework agnostic to subtype, which enables recovery of IAV from multiple hosts and estimation of proportions across subtypes. We conducted IAV genomic surveillance in wastewater during the 2024-2025 flu season at multiple sites in California and compared these data with available human clinical IAV sequences and test positivity. We applied a custom whole-genome, multi-host IAV probe enrichment panel and adapted our custom expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to deconvolute IAV mixtures in wastewater and infer subtype relative abundances. Absolute IAV concentrations were quantified using RT-PCR-based assays. H5N1 wastewater and clinical sequences were further characterized by constructing a whole-genome maximum-likelihood phylogenetic tree. Finally, we performed variant analysis to examine amino acid substitutions detected in wastewater. Our IAV probe enrichment method and EM algorithm successfully enriched all eight segments of three circulating IAV subtypes and accurately estimated subclade relative abundances for mixed IAV samples. Seasonal human H1N1pdm09 and H3N2 were detected throughout the study period from both wastewater and clinical sequencing data, with H1N1 subclades 6B.1A.5a.2a.1 and 6B.1A.5a.2a co-circulating, and H3N2 dominated by subclade 3C.2a1b.2a.2a.3a.1. Wastewater surveillance consistently detected H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b across three monitored wastewater sites, while clinical H5N1 detections, from anywhere in CA, were sporadic and rare. Whole-genome phylogenetic analysis revealed that wastewater H5N1 sequences clustered with reference sequences associated with dairy cow and avian infections, while all human clinical H5N1 sequences clustered exclusively with reference sequences associated with dairy cow infections. Amino acid substitutions were identified across viral segments, and no mutations associated with mammalian adaptation were observed from wastewater samples.