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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TriFlow: Generating Artist-Like 3D Mesh Topology via Nearest-Vertex Vector Fields

We present TriFlow, a new generative approach for producing compact 3D meshes with artist-like triangle topology directly from input geometry conditions such as signed distance fields. Our key insight is to represent mesh topology as a nearest-vertex vector field (NVF) defined over the surface, where each point encodes its association to the nearest triangle vertex in the local barycentric frame. We train a latent flow-matching model to synthesize this field, enabling topology generation conditioned on the input geometry. To extract a coherent mesh, we cluster surface regions using the generated NVF and guide a constrained quadric error metric (QEM) mesh simplification with topology-aware optimization. This yields output meshes that closely match the input geometry while exhibiting structured, artist-like connectivity. Experiments demonstrate that TriFlow achieves stronger generalization and significantly improved topology quality compared to state-of-the-art learning-based approaches, alongside 90% lower Chamfer Distance and an 8x speedup.

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

ZipSplat: Fewer Gaussians, Better Splats

Feed-forward 3D Gaussian Splatting methods reconstruct a scene from posed or pose-free images in a single forward pass, yet current approaches predict one Gaussian per input pixel, tying the representation budget to camera resolution rather than scene complexity. A flat wall and a richly textured object thus produce equally many Gaussians despite very different geometric needs. We propose ZipSplat, a token-based feed-forward model that decouples Gaussian placement from the pixel grid. A multi-view backbone extracts dense visual tokens, and k-means clustering compresses them into a compact set of scene tokens. Cross- and self-attention refine these tokens, and a lightweight MLP decodes each into a group of Gaussians with unconstrained 3D positions. Because clustering is applied at inference, a single trained model spans the quality-efficiency curve without retraining. ZipSplat operates without ground-truth poses or intrinsics, yet sets a new state of the art on DL3DV and RealEstate10K with ${\sim}6{\times}$ fewer Gaussians than pixel-aligned methods, surpassing the best pose-free baseline by 2.1dB and 1.2dB PSNR, respectively. It further generalizes zero-shot to Mip-NeRF360 and ScanNet++, outperforming all comparable baselines. Our project page is at https://veichta.com/zipsplat.

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

Learning Directional Semantic Transitions for Longitudinal Chest X-ray Analysis

Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation often requires longitudinal comparison to assess disease progression. Existing approaches typically rely on temporal feature fusion or inter-study discrepancy modeling, yet remain limited in capturing subtle progression semantics and overlook the inherently directional nature of disease trajectories. In this paper, we propose ProTrans, a novel vision-language pretraining framework that formulates disease progression as a directional semantic transition between paired CXR studies. ProTrans leverages radiology reports to anchor individual CXR representations within interpretable disease states, and introduces a learnable progression feature map to explicitly encode semantic shifts between states, aligned with report-derived progression descriptions. To enforce direction-aware perception, ProTrans incorporates a reversed temporal modeling process and imposes bidirectional reconstruction consistency across states and transitions, thereby disentangling directional semantics and promoting coherent trajectory modeling. Extensive experiments on longitudinal downstream tasks, including disease progression classification and progression captioning, demonstrate that ProTrans consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing a unified pretraining framework for longitudinal CXR understanding. https://github.com/RPIDIAL/ProTrans

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Measure of Intelligence

arXiv:2606.20231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can intelligence be measured? We propose that intelligence can be defined as the lawful amplification of rare but valid futures: a system increases the probability of outcomes that would be unlikely under passive dynamics but remain admissible under the constraints of the domain. We start with the premise that an intelligent system must model the world and its own place within it. Because the system is part of the world it models, this leads naturally to recursive self-simulation: the system represents futures in which its own actions are part of the trajectory. Our central results give a necessity statement and a conditional near-sufficiency statement connecting this architecture to a precise thermodynamic measure of lawful amplification of rare-valid futures: high rare-valid lift is impossible unless the internal simulation identifies rare-valid futures with high fidelity; conversely, when rare-valid fidelity is high and the simulation contains an effective policy, the achievable lift approaches the actuation-limited optimum. Thus recursive self-simulation is not merely a plausible feature of intelligence but, under the stated assumptions, is necessary and nearly sufficient for high thermodynamic intelligence. The resulting framework makes intelligence measurable on a universal scale, from passive matter and feedback controllers, large language models, and humans as text generators to Maxwell-demon-like information engines.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

InstantForget: Update-Free Backdoor Unlearning with Inference-Time Feature Reset

作者:

arXiv:2606.15730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backdoor unlearning aims to remove a malicious trigger behavior from a deployed model while preserving clean utility. We study the update-free inference-time setting, where model parameters remain frozen. First, we audit a common projection assumption under oracle paired clean and triggered features. Projection succeeds mainly on BadNets and leaves WaNet, Blended, and SIG at 0.683, 0.888, and 0.941 ASR on CIFAR-10 ResNet-18. This failure is not explained by spectral compactness, spatial locality, or subspace misalignment. It is predicted by a logit-triplet gap involving the target margin, target-logit drop, and non-target logit rise. We then introduce InstantForget, a clean-calibrated gated reset that flags anomalous features with a Mahalanobis score and moves only flagged features toward a neutral non-target representation. With one fixed operating point selected on held-out triggered validation, InstantForget reduces average ASR to 0.071 across four non-adaptive CIFAR-10 triggers without triggered samples or parameter updates at deployment. It also reaches 0.981 detection AUROC and transfers to six of eight tested backbones. Reported failures under WaNet, ModelNet10 point blend, two backbone geometries, and adaptive feature-compactness attacks define the method's scope.

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

Cross-Model Disagreement as a Label-Free Correctness Signal

arXiv:2603.25450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting when a language model is wrong without ground truth labels is a fundamental challenge for safe deployment. Existing approaches rely on a model's own uncertainty – such as token entropy or confidence scores – but these signals fail critically on the most dangerous failure mode: confident errors, where a model is wrong but certain. In this work we introduce cross-model disagreement as a correctness indicator – a simple, training-free signal that can be dropped into existing production systems, routing pipelines, and deployment monitoring infrastructure without modification. Given a model's generated answer, cross-model disagreement computes how surprised or uncertain a second verifier model is when reading that answer via a single forward pass. No generation from the verifying model is required, and no correctness labels are needed. We instantiate this principle as Cross-Model Perplexity (CMP), which measures the verifying model's surprise at the generating model's answer tokens, and Cross-Model Entropy (CME), which measures the verifying model's uncertainty at those positions. Both CMP and CME outperform within-model uncertainty baselines across benchmarks spanning reasoning, retrieval, and mathematical problem solving (MMLU, TriviaQA, and GSM8K). On MMLU, CMP achieves a mean AUROC of 0.75 against a within-model entropy baseline of 0.59. These results establish cross-model disagreement as a practical, training-free approach to label-free correctness estimation, with direct applications in deployment monitoring, model routing, selective prediction, data filtering, and scalable oversight of production language model systems.

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

PCA-Enhanced Adaptive NVAR Framework for High-Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting in the East Sea

arXiv:2606.12141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of sea surface temperature (SST) in regional seas such as the East Sea is crucial for monitoring marine ecosystems, assessing climate risks, managing fisheries, and conducting naval operations. Traditional numerical ocean models provide reliable predictions but are computationally expensive and often unsuitable for real-time forecasting. Many deep learning methods also struggle with high-dimensional spatiotemporal ocean data and experience error accumulation over longer forecasting periods. This study builds on our previously proposed Adaptive Next-Generation Reservoir Computing (Adaptive NVAR) framework, initially introduced and tested on synthetic dynamical systems, and extends it to ocean forecasting. We present a reduced-order forecasting framework that combines Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with Adaptive NVAR to predict SST dynamics in the East Sea. SST fields are compressed into a low-dimensional representation using SVD, which extracts dominant modes of ocean variability. Adaptive NVAR models the temporal evolution of these latent states, and the predicted states are reconstructed into SST forecasts. We evaluate the framework using regional ocean datasets and compare it with the standard NG-RC/NVAR. Results show that Adaptive NVAR consistently achieves lower forecasting errors across multiple prediction horizons. In addition, SVD reduces computational complexity, resulting in a fast and scalable framework suitable for real-time ocean forecasting.

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

Toward Vibe Medicine: A Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Framework for Clinical Decision Support

arXiv:2606.15504v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the advances of large language models and autonomous agents have revolutionized the healthcare field, facilitating diagnosis and improving treatment results. However, most existing AI systems rely on pre-trained knowledge and predefined pipelines, which struggle to learn dynamically from the interactive chat session history that contains patient outcomes and past failures. To address this limitation, we propose VIBEMed, a multi-agent framework with a built-in self-evolution mechanism and architecture-level safety sandbox for robust clinical decision support. The system integrates three specialized agents, including a Clinical Diagnostic Agent (CDA) for hypothesis generation, a Therapeutic Execution Agent (TEA) for treatment planning, and a Clinical Evolution Manager Agent (CEMA) that distills longitudinal clinical feedback into reusable knowledge, transforming multimodal patient information into personalized medical decisions. Through self-evolution mechanism, the framework enables iterative updates across memory, model behavior, and decision strategies, allowing the system to improve over time. Experimental results show that VIBEMed demonstrates superior performance through its evolving mechanism in complex clinical cases, particularly in tasks that require integrated decision-making and longitudinal planning. The framework also supports reliable end-to-end decisions in challenging scenarios such as oncology treatment planning, highlighting its feasibility in real-world clinical contexts. Overall, VIBEMed provides a practical path beyond static AI systems toward adaptive, experience-driven clinical decision support, demonstrating the value of combining multi-agent collaboration with continuous evolution for advancing precision medicine.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Locally Acting Grover Mixers for Constraint-Preserving QAOA

arXiv:2606.11530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Grover mixer quantum alternating operator ansatz (GM-QAOA) employs the Grover mixer to confine the quantum evolution to the feasible subspace defined by the problem. Its mixing unitary, however, requires a global multi-controlled phase-shift gate acting on all qubits, resulting in substantial circuit overhead on near-term quantum devices. In this work, we propose locally acting Grover mixers tailored to initial states that admit a product structure over disjoint qubit subsystems, which may be obtained by encoding only a subset of problem constraints into the initial state preparation. The proposed method preserves the search space defined by the initial state while significantly lowering implementation cost, as the global multi-controlled phase-shift gate is replaced with local operations on disjoint subsystems. Numerical simulations on the exact-cover problem and the traveling salesman problem (TSP) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves convergence behavior comparable to that of the original GM-QAOA, while using shallower circuits with fewer gates. We further compare two constraint encoding strategies for the TSP, encoding only a subset of constraints versus all constraints into the initial state preparation, and show that the former combined with the proposed mixer yields markedly more compact circuits at the point where comparable solution quality is achieved.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

The Illusion of Improvement: Reject Inference Strategies in Credit Scoring

arXiv:2606.18479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reject inference methods are widely used to mitigate survival bias in credit scoring, yet their effectiveness remains poorly understood. We systematically evaluate several such methods and uncover a structural failure mode: in a natural retraining cycle, models whose accuracy improves while recall collapses create an illusion of improvement that leads practitioners to believe the system is getting better when, in fact, its rejection quality – the ability to correctly screen out defaulters – is deteriorating. We then propose a controlled exploration strategy that breaks the feedback loop without statistical assumptions: the lender deliberately approves a fraction of rejected applicants and observes their true outcomes. We show that accuracy and rejection quality give opposite recommendations on whether to explore: accuracy favors no exploration, while rejection quality improves with it, confirming that standard evaluation metrics are misleading under selection bias. Even minimal exploration rates (2–5\%) prove sufficient in our experiments to diagnose the severity of the feedback loop at near-zero cost. Our findings are consistent across two machine learning methods and three real-world datasets, and suggest that standard evaluation protocols are inadequate for assessing models trained under survival bias.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Interactive Pareto navigation for deep multi-task learning

arXiv:2606.19521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In multi-task learning, handling an increasing number of objectives can quickly become challenging, both in terms of the computational resources and the decision maker's capacity to choose appropriate trade-offs. A widely used approach is thus to aggregate the individual losses in a single loss function by a weighted sum. This often fails to capture either the decision maker's preferences as a result of the shape of the Pareto front, or requires multiple adjustments and computations which becomes prohibitively expensive in deep learning applications. To address these issues, we introduce a novel framework, Preference Pareto Exploration (PPE), which enforces the decision maker's preferences while accounting for the geometry of the Pareto set in an interactive exploration process. PPE is based on a predictor-corrector method that performs predictor steps tangential to the manifold of Pareto-optimal solutions, following the decision maker's preference. The subsequent corrector step results in a new trade-off reflecting this preference. To avoid explicit Hessian computations when characterizing the tangent space of the manifold, we employ a Krylov subspace method that relies solely on matrix-vector products. These products can be efficiently obtained via automatic differentiation, ensuring both efficiency and robustness throughout the optimization process. The method's functionality and performance are demonstrated using both toy problems and examples from deep learning.

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

Learning the Context of Errors: Black-Box Online Adaptation of Time Series Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.14222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid evolution of Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) has advanced zero-shot forecasting across diverse domains. Inspired by the current form of Large Language Models, future TSFMs may be offered as commercialized, closed-source API services. However, many existing online adaptation methods still rely on white-box access for parameter fine-tuning or gradient backpropagation. This paradigm mismatch raises a question: In black-box online adaptation for TSFMs, what should we learn? We answer this with an insight: the predictive errors of the base model are conditioned on both the input and output of the base model (i.e., the context of errors). To validate this insight, we propose ORCA (Online Residual Contextual Adaptation). We conduct extensive experiments across 5 state-of-the-art TSFMs and 8 datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Furthermore, through ablation studies, we quantitatively analyze the impact of different adapter learning hypotheses on the final adaptation performance in black-box online adaptation. Code available at https://github.com/Fifthky/ORCA.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

How ice forms is a mystery — now scientists are cracking the case

Theories about how ice crystals grow in cooling liquids are wildly inaccurate when compared with experimental data, but studies are starting to illuminate the earliest moments in freezing. Theories about how ice crystals grow in cooling liquids are wildly inaccurate when compared with experimental data, but studies are starting to illuminate the earliest moments in freezing.

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

Simplifying the Modeling of Arbitrary Conditionals in Natural Language

Causal Transformers model sequences through an autoregressive factorization of the joint distribution, which enables efficient left-to-right decoding and conditional likelihood computation. However, they cannot tractably sample from or evaluate arbitrary conditionals – e.g., a block of text conditioned on past and future tokens. Recent work aims to solve this problem through novel architectures, but they often lead to sub-optimal modeling of such conditionals and degraded generations. We propose Arbitrary Conditionals GPT (AC-GPT) which introduces a simple modification to standard causal Transformers to enable evaluating and sampling from arbitrary conditionals – including past, future, and mixed contexts – within a single forward pass. Unlike prior approaches, our method preserves the standard left-to-right ordering and next-token prediction objective essential for both strong performance and efficient training on natural language. Crucially, this compatibility allows existing LLMs to be fine-tuned for arbitrary conditioning. Our empirical results indicate that our method outperforms baselines on modeling arbitrary conditionals, without degrading standard left-to-right performance.

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

ToaSt: Token Channel Selection and Structured Pruning for Efficient ViT

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success across various vision tasks, yet their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational costs. While structured weight pruning and token compression have emerged as promising solutions, they suffer from prolonged retraining and inter-layer dependencies that complicate optimization, respectively. We propose ToaSt, a decoupled framework applying specialized strategies to distinct ViT components. We apply coupled head-wise structured pruning to Multi-Head Self-Attention modules, leveraging attention operation characteristics to enhance robustness. For Feed-Forward Networks (over 60% of FLOPs), we introduce Token Channel Selection (TCS), a training-free method that filters redundant noise channels at inference time. Extensive evaluations across nine diverse models, including DeiT, ViT-MAE, and Swin Transformer, demonstrate that ToaSt achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, consistently outperforming existing baselines. On ViT-MAE-Huge, ToaSt achieves 88.52% accuracy (+1.64%p) with 39.4% FLOPs reduction. ToaSt also transfers effectively to diverse downstream tasks (COCO detection, ADE20K segmentation, CIFAR-100 classification), achieving 52.2 versus 51.9 mAP on COCO. Code: github.com/SHANNonLab-HUFS/ToaSt

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

Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model for Standard View Classification of Echocardiographic Videos

Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

LapidaryEngine: Fully Conversational Crystal Generation

arXiv:2606.14215v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inspired the vision of generating bespoke crystal materials directly from natural-language instructions, enabling users to design materials through intuitive, conversational interaction. Existing text-to-crystal generative models represent important early steps toward this goal, but they suffer from two critical limitations: (i) restricted input formats that require highly structured descriptions (e.g., chemical formulas), and (ii) one-directional generation, where models can map text to crystal but cannot perform the inverse. These limitations prevent fully conversational workflows and hinder alignment with users' inherently ambiguous and evolving desiderata. We address these challenges with LapidaryEngine, the first model to support fully conversational crystal generation. LapidaryEngine accepts free-form natural-language requests and performs iterative refinement and editing in a dialogue-like manner. The key innovation is a pivot representation, a third, intermediate form that enables bidirectional translation between text and crystal structures despite the absence of direct paired datasets. Leveraging this pivot allows robust interpretation of user feedback and precise structural control. We demonstrate LapidaryEngine across diverse tasks, including insulator discovery, stability optimization, compositional modification, and structural editing, showcasing its ability to align generated materials with user intent in an interactive manner.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

PolyAlign: Conditional Human-Distribution Alignment

Post-training methods such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and preference optimization typically align language models toward a single global assistant behavior. While effective for improving average helpfulness, this can suppress the natural variation of human responses across languages, tasks, and dialogue settings. We study this problem as conditional human-distribution alignment: models should match the human response distribution appropriate to the current interaction context, rather than a universal response style. We introduce PolyAlign, a distribution-aware alignment framework that organizes bilingual interaction data into bucket-specific human reference distributions defined by language, interaction track, response family, and length. PolyAlign combines Bucket-Aware SFT, which balances optimization across heterogeneous buckets, with Human-Distribution Preference Optimization (HDPO), which regularizes preference learning using critic-estimated distance to bucket-specific human support. Across a bilingual evaluation suite covering English and Chinese single- and multi-turn settings, PolyAlign improves conditional naturalness and distributional faithfulness while preserving competitive task utility. The results suggest that post-training should move beyond global alignment objectives toward interaction-aware alignment with human response distributions.

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

Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.15743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the missing-modality challenge in multi-modal learning by introducing Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multi-Modal Learning (UL4M4), a flexible framework that imputes missing feature embeddings in a task-independent manner before supervised prediction. We propose modality-specific normalization and a novel partial-modality distance metric to enable fair clustering of incomplete observations, capturing cross-modal structures while preserving scale-invariance across varying dimensionalities and modality counts. Cluster centers from this unsupervised stage guide an iterative greedy imputation process for any missing modalities during training or inference, supporting arbitrary numbers of modalities and arbitrary missing patterns per sample. The imputation module is lightweight, uses frozen encoders, and decouples from the downstream task, allowing easy integration with any fusion/prediction architecture. Extensive experiments under diverse and highly incomplete regimes demonstrate UL4M4's robustness, achieving, to the best of our knowledge, the first consistent F1-Micro scores above 0.7 on challenging missing configurations even when more than 50\% of modality slots are missing. Results are also stable across cluster sizes and significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available here: https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Multimodal-Learning-with-Missing-Modalities-via-Unsupervised-Learning.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Mapping AI Programs in the U.S: A Status Report from Early 2026 and an Analysis of AI Majors and Minors

arXiv:2606.12428v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a report on the status of undergraduate Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs in the United States in Spring 2026. In so doing, we 1) describe our scraping and mapping tools, which dynamically update to track the state of AI education in the U.S., and 2) create a historic record at a time of great upheaval. The tool we developed, available at https://cicmap.ai, detects, scrapes, and displays data from more than 350 undergraduate AI programs–majors, minors, concentrations, and certificates–at 4-year universities. Our tool searched over 560 institutions to locate these programs, a sample that represents 86\% of all undergraduate Computer Science (CS) graduates in the U.S. This tool allows prospective students, guidance counselors, administrators, and faculty to easily access AI program requirements and is designed to continually update as new programs emerge. To the best of our knowledge, this survey represents the most comprehensive snapshot of the state of AI programs in the U.S. to date. With this work we offer three important contributions: 1) a record of AI programs in the U.S. at a time of great upheaval; 2) a tool to explore AI programs and their requirements; and 3) an analysis of the courses required for 66 AI majors and 87 AI minors. Our analysis of majors and minors shows great variability in the size and the requirements of these degrees, but we note two takeaways. First, not all majors require a general AI course, but if they don't, they do require a Machine Learning (ML) course. Second, while more than a third of majors require an Ethics in AI course, just under a quarter of AI minors do.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Improving Alignment Between Human and Machine Codes: An Empirical Assessment of Prompt Engineering for Construct Identification in Psychology

Due to their architecture and vast pre-training data, large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong text classification performance. However, LLM output - here, the category assigned to a text - depends heavily on the wording of the prompt. While literature on prompt engineering is expanding, few studies focus on classification tasks, and even fewer address domains like psychology, where constructs have precise, theory-driven definitions that may not be well represented in pre-training data. We present an empirical framework for optimizing LLM performance for identifying constructs in texts via prompt engineering. We experimentally evaluate five prompting strategies – codebook-guided empirical prompt selection, automatic prompt engineering, persona prompting, chain-of-thought reasoning, and explanatory prompting - with zero-shot and few-shot classification. We find that persona, chain-of-thought, and explanations do not fully address performance loss accompanying a badly worded prompt. Instead, the most influential features of a prompt are the construct definition, task framing, and, to a lesser extent, the examples provided. Across three constructs and two models, the classifications most aligned with expert judgments resulted from a few-shot prompt combining codebook-guided empirical prompt selection with automatic prompt engineering. Based on our findings, we recommend that researchers generate and evaluate as many prompt variants as feasible, whether human-crafted, automatically generated, or ideally both, and select prompts and examples based on empirical performance in a training dataset, validating the final approach in a holdout set. This procedure offers a practical, systematic, and theory-driven method for optimizing LLM prompts in settings where alignment with expert judgment is critical.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Magneto-Optical Trapping of a Metal Hydride Molecule

arXiv:2512.22350v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We demonstrate a three-dimensional magneto-optical trap (MOT) of a metal hydride molecule, CaH. We are able to scatter $\sim$$10^{4}$ photons with vibrational loss covered up to vibrational quantum number $\nu=2$. This allows us to laser slow the molecular beam near zero velocity with a "white-light" technique and subsequently load it into a radio-frequency MOT. The MOT contains $230(40)$ molecules, limited by beam source characteristics and predissociative loss of CaH. The temperature of the MOT is below one millikelvin. The predissociative loss mechanism could, in turn, facilitate controlled dissociation of the molecule, offering a possible route to optical trapping of hydrogen atoms for precision spectroscopy.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

HalluDesign-NA: Extending HalluDesign for De Novo Nucleic Acid Design

AlphaFold3 has revolutionized the prediction of biomolecular structures and interactions, including atomic-level modeling of nucleic acids. However, the de novo design of structured and functional nucleic acids remains a significant challenge. Here, we extend our HalluDesign framework to nucleic acid design by integrating NA-MPNN for nucleic acid sequence optimization and design. This new framework, HalluDesign-NA, enables iterative sequence-structure co-optimization, facilitating the de novo design of nucleic acids. Computational benchmarking across ssDNA, ssRNA, and aptamer design tasks demonstrates consistent improvements in confidence scores (pLDDT, ipTM), supporting the feasibility of de novo nucleic acid design under various constraints, such as sequence length, symmetry, and protein structure context. We anticipate that HalluDesign-NA will accelerate the de novo design of functional nucleic acids for applications in biotechnology and medicine. The source code for HalluDesign-NA is available at https://github.com/MinchaoFang/HalluDesign_NA.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Where Black-box Drug-Target Interaction Prediction Models Look: Cross-Method Explainability

arXiv:2606.14245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Drug-target interaction (DTI) and affinity (DTA) predictors increasingly achieve strong benchmark scores, yet their internal use of sequence, fingerprint, and graph features often remains opaque. We present an interpretability audit of BridgeDPI architecture on three different datasets including Gao, Human, and C.elegans. This study combines gradient-based attributions – integrated gradients, saliency, layer-wise relevance propagation, SmoothGrad, and SmoothGrad-IG – with feature-wise occlusion ablation and strict intersection consensus across methods to reduce single-explainer bias. We summarize sensitivity and signed effects at raw inputs, at the bridge similarity scaffold, and through the graph convolution, including edge-level sensitivities and targeted edge removals. The results show that explainability is most informative when treated as model criticism: it reveals modality dominance, padding and special-token artifacts, dataset-dependent cooperative versus suppressive effects across layers, and chemistry-consistent fragment and composition motifs where methods agree. These analyses do not substitute for structural or experimental ground truth, yet they can provide testable hypotheses for downstream validation in computational drug discovery pipelines. More broadly, applying modern XAI to contemporary DTI/DTA models is still an early pass over the rich structure implicit in trained weights and data – yet even this first layer of scrutiny already helps researchers relate predictions to drug- and target-side representations and to prioritize external validation.