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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Internet of Agentic AI: Communication, Coordination, and Collective Intelligence at Scale

作者:

arXiv:2606.12835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents is transforming artificial intelligence from isolated model inference into distributed systems of reasoning, communication, and action. This paper develops the vision of the Internet of Agentic AI (IoAI): an open ecosystem in which heterogeneous agents discover one another, negotiate responsibilities, exchange context, invoke tools, and execute workflows across cloud, edge, device, organizational, and cyber-physical environments. We synthesize foundations from single-agent agentic AI, multi-agent systems, distributed computing, communication networks, game theory, and security engineering to characterize the architectures and mechanisms required for scalable agent ecosystems. The paper examines agent deployment models, workflow lifecycles, communication protocols, interoperability layers, resource-management challenges, and trust architectures, with case studies in adaptive manufacturing and distributed operational coordination. The resulting framework highlights the central research challenges of controlled emergence, semantic interoperability, secure identity, incentive-compatible coordination, resource-aware orchestration, and governance for large-scale networks of autonomous agents.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Uncertain Judgments to Calibrated Rankings: Conformal Elo Estimation for LLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.13221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale. LLM-as-a-judge offers a cheaper alternative, but judge scores carry systematic errors - such as position bias, self-preference, or intransitivity - that can strongly miscalibrate the resulting rankings. We quantify the resulting judge-human disagreement at two complementary levels. At the local level, we estimate per-battle uncertainty from the judge's own score differences by propagating calibrated win probabilities rather than hard labels into the Bradley-Terry procedure. This alone provides a drastic improvement to Elo estimation accuracy, bringing LLM-derived ratings within 17.9 Elo MAE of human-derived ones when averaged over 55 held-out models on LMArena. At the global level, we apply split conformal prediction to the residual gap between LLM-derived and human-derived Elo ratings across held-out models, producing prediction intervals with distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees that account for irreducible LLM-human disagreement. Together, these two layers yield a low-cost evaluation tool that provides developers with calibrated Elo estimates and honest uncertainty bounds, without access to large-scale human annotations.To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code at https://github.com/kargibora/SoftElo .

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

fARfetch: Enabling Collocated AR-HRC in Large Visually Diverse Environments with VLM-Driven AR Content Adaptation

Augmented Reality (AR) can improve collocated human-robot collaboration by making robot state and intent visible and enabling intuitive control, yet large, visually diverse environments like the outdoors challenge both interaction and content legibility, especially at long distances and beyond visual line of sight. We present fARfetch, an AR-HRC system that integrates (i) shared semantic environment mapping across an AR headset and robot that visualizes detected landmarks in AR to support landmark-grounded go-to commands, (ii) a context-aware world-in-miniature representation of the shared environment for fine-grained path authoring, and (iii) vision-language-model driven AR view management that jointly adapts virtual content color, size, and orientation to maintain legibility in large visually diverse environments. We implement fARfetch with a Meta Quest 3 headset and Unitree Go2 quadruped robot, and conduct a within-subjects user study (N=13) on a real-world large-scale (30.5m) outdoor inspection task. fARfetch yielded significantly faster completion times than a non-AR baseline (66%) and significantly lower workload in mental demand (-43%), temporal demand (-34%), and frustration (-66%). A custom legibility survey indicated fARfetch effectively maintained virtual content legibility in the large outdoor environment.

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

On the QUEST for Uncertainty Quantification via Highest Density Regions

arXiv:2606.19569v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) is essential for reliable decision-making in safety-critical applications in probabilistic machine learning. For regression problems, dominant scalar UQ approaches - notably, those based on proper scoring rules - measure uncertainty via pointwise predictive risk. This can lead to counterintuitive results when the target statistic is not the conditional expectation. We propose an alternative framework, in which uncertainty is characterised by the volume of the most probable subset of a distribution's support. QUEST (Quantifying Uncertainty via highest dEnSiTy regions) is a novel approach to UQ based on the concentration of Lebesgue measure at a distribution's peak(s), evaluated at one or more values of a robustness parameter $\alpha$. We establish connections between our measures and classical statistics from information theory and economics. We show that, unlike popular alternatives based on proper scoring rules, QUEST measures of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty satisfy a set of axioms adapted from the UQ literature, including monotonicity under distributional spread and invariance to location shifts. Selective prediction benchmarks confirm that QUEST performs favourably against standard measures such as variance and differential entropy.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Breaking Shortcut Learning for Cross-Trial EEG-Guided Target Speech Extraction via Two-Stage Training

arXiv:2606.24164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent end-to-end models for EEG-guided target speech extraction report impressive results, underscoring potential for neuro-steered hearing technologies. However, our analysis reveals that high within-trial performance can be driven by trial-specific EEG structure that acts as shortcuts for target selection, leading to poor generalization on unseen trials. To overcome this gap, we propose TRUST-TSE, a two-stage framework to mitigate shortcut learning. By introducing contrastive pretraining with attended-speaker negative sampling, we encourage the EEG encoder to capture fine-grained EEG–speech alignment while suppressing trial-identity cues. We also employ a confidence-weighted extraction objective based on EEG–source similarity to guide extraction using the learned representations. Experiments on KUL and DTU datasets show that TRUST-TSE outperforms end-to-end baselines under strict cross-trial protocols, addressing a key reliability bottleneck of existing approaches.

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

Structural Kolmogorov-Arnold Convolutions: Learnable Function on the Values or the Filter Shape as Parameter-Efficient Alternative to Per-Edge Convolutional KANs

arXiv:2606.24371v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Convolutional Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs) replace the fixed weights of a convolutional kernel with learnable univariate functions. The dominant formulation attaches one such function to every kernel entry and lets it act on pixel values, expressive but parameter-heavy and prone to overfitting. We argue that the learnable functions are better placed in the structure of the convolution than on each edge, and we organise the design space along a single axis: whether the function acts on the pixel values or on the filter shape. We study three realisations. SV-KAN applies one shared univariate function to the values and leaves the spatial filter free and static, aa classical convolution with a single learnable shared activation. AG-KAN keeps the shared value function but supplies the spatial structure through a content-adaptive Gaussian gate. RF-KAN instead moves the learnable functions onto the filter shape, building each filter from oriented ridge profiles expanded in a localised oscillatory (Morlet) wavelet basis with content-adaptive amplitudes. Under a matched four-layer protocol with in-run references and three seeds, RF-KAN and SV-KAN reach $88.47\pm0.10\%$ and $88.20\pm0.31\%$ on CIFAR-10 and $64.40\pm0.19\%$ and $64.57\pm0.30\%$ on CIFAR-100, at about $0.4$M parameters. At this matched scale the shape model and the simplest value model meet at the top, both above a plain convolution and every per-edge KAN we tested, including the official Gram variant, at roughly a fifth of the parameters. A controlled study attributes the RF-KAN gain to an intrinsically localised oscillatory basis and to content adaptivity, and an ablation that removes the learned shape entirely, leaving only the shared value function, collapses accuracy by over forty points, identifying the learned shape as the load-bearing ingredient at this scale.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Power-Budgeted Underwater Vehicle Control via Constrained Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.25680v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Underwater vehicles operate from a fixed onboard energy budget that propulsion rapidly depletes, so a controller that completes its task while drawing less thruster power directly extends mission range and endurance. Reinforcement learning yields capable model-free controllers for station-keeping and trajectory tracking, but optimizing task accuracy alone drives the policy toward oscillatory, energy-wasting actuation. The established remedy subtracts an energy penalty from the reward, yet this sets the task-power trade-off through a single weight with no physical units: a target power level cannot be specified, the weight must be re-tuned for every vehicle and task, and a mismatched weight can even raise power. This paper instead formulates energy-efficient underwater control as a constrained Markov decision process in which average thruster power is subject to an explicit budget, solved with a PPO-Lagrangian algorithm. The power level is set by declaring a budget in physical units, and a single dual variable is updated online to meet it for each vehicle and task, without manual weight search. Across three vehicles and four tasks in the MarineGym simulator, the energy-constrained policy draws the least power in all twelve settings, reducing it by 14–65\% (up to 64.9\%) over a task-only baseline and below an energy-reward baseline everywhere, while remaining the smoothest in ten settings and preserving task accuracy except in one deliberately power-limited regime. Imposing energy as an explicit constraint thus offers a tuning-free route to energy-efficient underwater control that needs no per-vehicle, per-task weight search.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MILE: A Mechanically Isomorphic Hand Exoskeleton and Visuotactile Robotic Hand for Data Collection in Dexterous Manipulation

Dexterous robotic hands are expected to perform complex, contact-rich object manipulation, but learning such skills remains challenging because high-dimensional hands require high-fidelity demonstrations. Imitation learning provides a practical route for acquiring dexterous manipulation skills from human demonstrations, yet collecting synchronized multimodal demonstrations with accurate hand actions and tactile observations remains a key bottleneck. We present MILE, a teleoperation-based data-collection system comprising the human-first MILE exoskeleton and the mechanically corresponding MILE-Tac robotic hand. The system integrates custom-designed and fabricated modular joint encoders and compact MILE fingertip visuotactile sensor modules. The exoskeleton is informed by human-hand anatomy and ergonomic constraints, while the robotic hand is co-designed to preserve the selected four-finger kinematic topology. This correspondence enables joint-space command transfer and reduces reliance on task-space IK-based retargeting. The system synchronously records task-specific visual observations, four fingertip visuotactile streams, robot-hand proprioception, and exoskeleton-derived action commands. We evaluate MILE through a four-task teleoperation benchmark against representative glove-based and vision-based interfaces, and through imitation-learning experiments that compare policies trained with and without fingertip tactile input. The project page is available at https://sites.google.com/view/mile-system.

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

Fusion is not one-size-fits-all: Cross-Modal Representation Alignment for Time-to-Event Modeling

arXiv:2606.15038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate time-to-event (TTE) prediction from multimodal clinical data remains challenging due to modality imbalance and distribution shift. We introduce a foundation model-driven framework for cross-modal representation alignment between CT imaging and longitudinal EHR data, designed to generalize across tasks and institutions. CT and EHR modalities are encoded independently using domain-specific foundation models and aligned in a shared latent space through four principled fusion strategies: late fusion, contrastive alignment, cross-attention, and co-attention. We evaluate two clinically distinct TTE tasks: pulmonary embolism (PE) mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes, on large-scale multi-institutional cohorts (PE: N=3,099 train; 1,098 internal; 435 external; CVD: N=2,951 train; 837 internal; 682 external). Fusion consistently improves concordance index by 1.5-5.4% over unimodal baselines when modalities contribute comparably. Overall, contrastive multimodal fusion, particularly with CLMBR representations, provided the most consistent and statistically robust improvements, especially for PE mortality prediction. For MACE, cross-attention (one-hot) achieved the highest internal performance and image-guided co-attention achieved the best external performance. We therefore introduce a generalizable foundation model-based cross-modal alignment framework and provide the first systematic analysis of fusion behavior under modality imbalance in TTE prediction. Our results establish task-aware multimodal alignment as a necessary design principle for robust generalization and scalable clinical deployment.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Agentic Discovery of Non-Canonical Antimicrobial Peptides with AMPGAN v3

arXiv:2606.17127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Antimicrobial resistance causes to over a million deaths annually. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are a promising solution, but generative AMP models are not yet ready to design peptides with non-natural amino acids and/or chemical modifications, which are essential for real-world peptide drugs. We present AMPGAN v3, a multi-objective conditional GAN that expands the generative vocabulary to D-amino acids and N/C-terminus modifications such as amidation. By separating adversarial and activity-aware supervision across two specialized discriminators, AMPGAN v3 substantially improves training stability and outperforms prior generative AMP models on external classifiers. We validated five candidates spanning three structural classes in vitro; two showed activity against Gram-positive strains, with the best candidate reaching MIC 8 {\mu}g/mL against B. subtilis. To support downstream curation, we further present PepCraft, a multi-agent framework for end-to-end AMP discovery in which a Planning Agent orchestrates specialized executors for generation, filtering, and verification. Its prioritization recommendations align with our in vitro outcomes. Together, these contributions let us examine, on a small but real scale, how generative and agentic AI compose in therapeutic peptide discovery. Code: https://github.com/marszzibros/AMPGANv3

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

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606.18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort. Pre-Large Language Model (LLM) automation sped up this process, but could not resolve the complex language and multi-step attack patterns found in unstructured CTI reports. LLMs addressed previous limitations by using contextual reasoning to understand unstructured text. However, current evaluations rely on simplified, single-technique sentences that ignore the complexity of real-world CTI reports, which often leads to inflated performance results. Consequently, the baseline performance of open-source LLMs on complex unstructured CTI reports remains unevaluated. To address this gap, we constructed a ground-truth dataset of 2,076 human-annotated sentences (1,281 technique-positive, 795 negative) from 83 complex unstructured CTI reports. These sentences were mapped to 114 unique ATT&CK techniques using a six-phase annotation process, achieving \k{appa} = 0.68 inter-annotator agreement. Using this dataset, we evaluated seven open-source LLMs ranging from 8B to 236B parameters across prompt strategy and temperature configurations. The highest-performing LLM achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.22, establishing the empirical baseline for multi-label ATT&CK classification on complex unstructured CTI. Parameter size showed a statistically significant positive correlation with F1 score. Prompt strategy and temperature produced no statistically significant gains across model configurations. These results indicate that current open-source LLMs are insufficient for production-grade ATT&CK classification. The dataset, benchmark, and findings provide a reproducible foundation for future CTI research.

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

Quantized Stochastic Primal-Dual Methods for Distributed Optimization under Relaxed Global Geometry

arXiv:2606.11339v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study distributed optimization with stochastic gradients and finite-bit communication modeled by random (unbiased) quantization. We propose q-PDGD, a quantized stochastic primal-dual method, and analyze it under relaxed global geometry. Under restricted secant inequality (RSI), a constant step-size yields linear contraction to an explicit neighborhood determined by gradient noise, quantization distortion, and network connectivity, while a diminishing step-size achieves O(1/k) convergence without shared-minimizer assumptions. Under Polyak-Lojasiewicz (PL) inequality, we obtain linear-to-neighborhood convergence in the same stochastic quantized setting. Our results match the best-known centralized stochastic rates in oracle complexity, and are supported by experiments demonstrating the predicted tradeoffs between quantization level, step-size choice, and graph structure.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Independent Chiral Control in Theory-Space Models:A Rank-Preserving Framework and Its Application to Neutrino Mass Generation

arXiv:2409.09033v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a general framework of rank-preserving, element-wise matrix transformations for engineering fermion mass hierarchies in theory-space constructions. We prove that preservation of massless modes requires the transformation function to be separable, $g_f(i,j)=g^{(L)}_f(i)g^{(R)}_f(j)$, which in turn enables independent control of left- and right-chiral zero-mode profiles directly at the level of the theory-space mass matrix. This formalism unifies and extends the clockwork mechanism, permits controlled deformation of Kaluza–Klein spectra, and enhances hierarchy generation in GIM-like fine-cancellation scenarios. As a concrete application, we show that in theory-space models for neutrino masses, suitable transformations allow sub-eV light neutrinos to arise from TeV-scale new physics with only $\mathcal{O}(40)$ additional fermionic sites, while remaining consistent with charged-lepton flavor-violation bounds. In contrast, the corresponding untransformed models asymptote at the MeV scale and cannot access the phenomenologically required regime without extreme field multiplicities or hierarchical parameters.

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

SCOPE-FL: A Strategy-proof Chain-based Optimal pareto efficient Federated Learning System

arXiv:2606.18384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hierarchical Federated Learning (HFL) enables scalable collaborative model training across distributed devices while preserving data privacy. However, existing HFL client selection mechanisms suffer from a fundamental strategic inefficiency. By prioritizing stability over Pareto efficiency (PE), they produce suboptimal resource allocations, and without strategy proofness (SP), participants are incentivized to misrepresent their true preferences, both failures degrading system overall welfare in the Pareto sense in practice. To address it, we propose SCOPE-FL (Strategy-proof Chain-based Optimal pareto efficient Federated Learning), a synchronous HFL framework that formulates client selection as a two-sided school choice problem solved through the Top Trading Cycle (TTC) algorithm that simultaneously guarantees PE and SP. For reward distribution, SCOPE-FL employs a scalable Shapley value approximation based on One-Round Reconstruction (OR), ensuring compensation proportional to each client's contribution. The entire mechanism executes via blockchain smart contracts, providing the tamper-proof environment required for the SP guarantees to hold in practice. A comprehensive evaluation on MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and CIFAR-10 demonstrates that SCOPE-FL outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, including DA, IAS, and other methods across model accuracy, convergence rate, and reward efficiency, while achieving communication latency comparable to DA and blockchain overhead significantly lower than DA at scale.

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

VERITAS: Verifier-Guided Proof Search for Zero-Shot Formal Theorem Proving

arXiv:2606.19399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based formal provers often collapse rich verifier signals (syntax errors, type mismatches, partial goal progress) into a binary pass/fail bit. We present VERITAS, a zero-shot framework that routes every verifier signal back into proof search through a two-phase protocol: Best-of-N sampling first, then a critic-guided MCTS pass that ingests Phase 1 failures as explicit negative examples. The protocol preserves every theorem solved by its own Phase 1 sweep, so Phase 2's additional solves are attributable to feedback-driven exploration. VERITAS reaches 40.6% on miniF2F (vs. an independently run Best-of-5 at 36.9%, Portfolio 26.2%) and 7.3% on VERITAS-CombiBench, a 55-theorem combinatorics benchmark we release on which Best-of-5 (1.8%) falls below Portfolio (3.6%), exposing that unguided sampling hurts when correct lemma names must be recovered iteratively from verifier feedback. Artifacts are available on GitHub.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

TSPO PET binding in vivo reflects increased phagocytic microglia at post mortem in people with frontotemporal dementia

Brain inflammation is a key feature of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). TSPO PET is widely used as an in vivo proxy for neuroinflammation, but whether the elevated signal reflects microglial, astrocytic, or vascular pathology is controversial. We paired ante mortem [11C]PK11195 TSPO PET with post mortem neuropathology in 10 individuals with FTD (5 FTLD-tau, 5 FTLD-TDP) and 5 controls, combining CD68 immunohistochemistry across 17 regions, multiplex immunofluorescence pairing TSPO with microglial/macrophagic (IBA1, CD68), astrocytic (GFAP) and endothelial (CD31) markers, and three-dimensional single-cell reconstruction. CD68 burden was elevated in FTD, concentrated in white matter, and correlated with regional TSPO PET binding across pathologies ({beta} = 8.40, P < 0.001). Only the CD68-TSPO co-localised fraction tracked the PET signal, with no TSPO upregulation per-cell. The elevated TSPO PET signal in FTD likely reflects an increased burden of lysosome-enriched CD68+ microglia, supporting TSPO PET as a microglial-burden biomarker in both FTLD-tau and FTLD-TDP.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

作者:

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Lightweight Test-Time Adaptation for EMG-Based Gesture Recognition

arXiv:2601.04181v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reliable long-term decoding of gestures from surface electromyography (EMG) is hindered by signal drift caused by electrode displacement, muscle fatigue, and/or posture changes. Although modern models achieve high intra-session accuracy, their performance often degrades substantially across recording sessions. Existing approaches to mitigate this problem typically rely on large training datasets or computationally intensive pipelines that are unsuitable for energy-efficient wearable devices. We propose a lightweight test-time adaptation framework for EMG decoding. The framework includes three complementary adaptation strategies: (i) causal adaptive batch normalization for online statistical alignment, (ii) Gaussian Mixture Model alignment with experience replay to mitigate forgetting, and (iii) meta-learning for rapid few-shot calibration. We evaluate these methods on the multi-session NinaPro DB6 dataset. All approaches substantially improve inter-session robustness relative to a non-adaptive baseline while maintaining low computational overhead. Replay-regularized statistical alignment provides the most stable adaptation under limited data, while meta-learning achieves the highest accuracy when sparse calibration labels are available. Overall, our self-supervised test-time adaptation methods reach up to 82% inter-session accuracy, significantly improving upon prior approaches while maintaining resource-efficient operation. These results demonstrate that lightweight test-time adaptation can enable robust, long-term EMG decoding for wearable or prosthetic applications.

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

Can In-Context Learning Support Intrinsic Curiosity?

arXiv:2606.19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect. While large sequence models have revolutionized data modeling, the problem of automated data selection, or "intrinsic curiosity", remains a significant challenge. Classic approaches incentivize exploration by rewarding an agent based on its "learning progress", which measures how much a newly acquired observation improves a world model's predictive ability. However, evaluating these rewards traditionally requires expensive inner loops of gradient descent updates within each trajectory, rendering them computationally impractical at scale. In this work, we investigate whether the emergent in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of sequence models can eliminate this bottleneck by serving as immediate, update-free world models. Specifically, we evaluate whether an exploration policy can be trained to maximize learning progress, using solely the prediction errors and counterfactual context manipulations of an in-context learner. We first prove that in general Markov decision processes, this is in fact impossible in an unbiased way: the resulting intrinsic rewards either suffer from nuisance terms that bias their estimation of true learning progress, or they cannot be implemented using an in-context learner's prediction errors. Conversely, we prove a positive result for a broad subclass of non-temporal settings, encompassing active learning and Bayesian Experimental Design: here, ICL-derived rewards successfully bound and asymptotically converge to the true learning progress. We corroborate our theory with controlled experiments across continuous and symbolic environments, demonstrating that our ICL-driven framework successfully trains curious data-collection policies that explore optimally.

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

The Missing Knowledge Layer in Cognitive Architectures for AI Agents

arXiv:2604.11364v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The two most influential cognitive architecture frameworks for AI agents, CoALA [21] and JEPA [12], both lack an explicit Knowledge layer with its own persistence semantics. This gap produces a category error: systems apply cognitive decay to factual claims, or treat facts and experiences with identical update mechanics. We survey persistence semantics across existing memory systems and identify eight convergence points, from Karpathy's LLM Knowledge Base [10] to the BEAM benchmark's near-zero contradiction-resolution scores [22], all pointing to related architectural gaps. We propose a four-layer decom position (Knowledge, Memory, Wisdom, Intelligence) where each layer has fundamentally different persistence semantics: indefinite supersession, Ebbinghaus decay, evidence-gated revision, and ephemeral inference respectively. Companion implementations in Python and Rust demonstrate the architectural separation is feasible. We borrow terminology from cognitive science as a useful analogy (the Knowledge/Memory distinction echoes Tulving's trichotomy), but our layers are engineering constructs justified by persistence-semantics requirements, not by neural architecture. We argue that these distinctions demand distinct persistence semantics in engineering implementations, and that no current framework or system provides this.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Adverse Childhood Experiences Reorganise the Brain-Personality Network Across the Psychosis Spectrum

Exposure to adverse childhood experiences is a pervasive risk factor for psychosis, exhibiting a linear relationship across the psychosis spectrum from subclinical schizotypal traits to schizophrenia spectrum disorders. While this association is often conceptualised within the vulnerability-stress framework, the systemic mechanisms through which childhood trauma reconfigures the brain-personality interactome remain poorly understood. We examined clinical, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging data from a sample of low- and high-schizotypy individuals, and patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia spectrum disorder (N=120). Our aim was to map how trauma reconfigures interactions between neurobiology and schizotypal phenomenology. We adopted a mixed graphical model approach to jointly estimate conditional dependencies between childhood trauma, regional brain morphometry, and schizotypal traits across the psychosis spectrum. Our results show that childhood trauma reconfigures the brain-personality network, shifting it from a state driven by cognitive processes to one anchored in emotional (limbic) reactivity. This transition is marked by the increased influence of impulsive traits and a significant strengthening of connections within the salience network. These changes converge with a reduced thickness of the frontal executive regions, the brain's control centres, identified in our models. Collectively, our results suggest a structural phenomenological decoupling, where trauma conditioned affective circuits may bypass weakened top-down regulatory controls. These findings highlight the necessity of using integrative frameworks to capture how trauma fundamentally reshapes the relationship between the brain and schizotypal personality.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

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

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

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

Where Should Action Generation Begin? A Learnable Source Prior for Generative Robot Policies

Generative robot policies typically begin action generation from an observation-independent standard Gaussian distribution, leaving the choice of source distribution underexplored. This work asks a simple question: where should action generation begin? We propose LeaP, a Learnable source Prior that replaces the standard Gaussian with a proprioception-conditioned diagonal Gaussian over action chunks. Parameterized by a lightweight MLP, LeaP jointly predicts the mean and state-adaptive variance of the source distribution, while keeping the downstream generator architecture and inference solver unchanged. This design provides an observation-informed yet stochastic initialization, allowing the generator to focus on precise action refinement rather than transporting samples from an uninformed noise source. On 15 RoboTwin manipulation tasks, LeaP achieves an average success rate of 81.6%, outperforming four representative baselines – including deterministic-source methods, a no-prior counterpart, and a diffusion-bridge policy – by 6.5 to 25.5 percentage points. The same prior consistently improves both flow-matching and diffusion-bridge generators, while using fewer parameters and converging faster. The advantage carries over to real-world deployment, where LeaP attains the best performance. These results suggest that the source distribution is an independent and reusable design axis for generative robot policies, complementary to the choice of generative dynamics.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Hermite trace polynomials and chaos decompositions for the Hermitian Brownian motion

arXiv:2207.13180v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: For a non-zero parameter $q$, we define Hermite trace polynomials, which are multivariate polynomials indexed by permutations. We prove several combinatorial properties for them, such as expansions and product formulas. The linear functional determined by these trace polynomials is a state for $q = \frac{1}{N}$ for $N$ a non-zero integer. For such $q$, Hermite trace polynomials of different degrees are orthogonal. The product formulas extend to the closure with respect to the state. The state can be identified with the expectation induced by the $N \times N$ Hermitian Brownian motion. Hermite trace polynomials are martingales for this Brownian motion, while the elements in the closure can be interpreted as stochastic integrals with respect to it. Using the grading on the algebra, we prove several chaos decompositions for such integrals, as well as analyze corresponding creation and annihilation operators. In the univariate, pure trace polynomial case, trace Hermite polynomials can be identified with the Hermite polynomials of matrix argument.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Symmetry Breaking through Superselection by Boundary Conditions

arXiv:2606.15272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) is central to modern physics but is conventionally defined only for infinite systems, raising challenges for its interpretation in finite, real-world setups. This paper argues that the key to resolving this issue lies in the underappreciated role of boundary conditions in quantum systems. Inspired by both the relational approach to symmetries and the physical mechanism behind symmetry breaking, we formulate a relational interpretation of SSB: a finite system exhibits SSB relative to a reference environment which can induce perturbations across the boundary. This eliminates the need for the thermodynamic limit, offering a more physical picture of SSB that emphasizes the observable consequences of the interactions that real-life systems inevitably have with their environment. We show how, in this relational interpretation, SSB for both lattice systems and (gauge) field theories should be understood as subtle, rather than spontaneous, symmetry breaking, still in contrast to explicit symmetry breaking. We also explain how algebraic definitions of SSB for infinite systems relate to the intuitive picture of SSB in finite systems and illustrate how asymptotic boundary conditions push the environment "to infinity". In this way, our relational interpretation of SSB provides a unified conceptual framework applicable to symmetry-breaking in systems of any size.