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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MapReason-OSM: Can Vision-Language Models Make Graph-Verifiable Mobility Decisions from Street Maps ?

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to read maps for logistics, delivery, and accessible navigation, where the output is an actionable decision (a route, a pin, a parking choice) that must respect the road network. Yet most map benchmarks grade free text or multiple-choice answers that cannot be verified against the underlying graph. We present MapReason-OSM, a benchmark and evaluation harness for graph-verifiable mobility decisions on self-rendered OpenStreetMap panels. We render fixed-style maps for ten U.S. downtowns at two aligned zoom scales, overlay a consistent marker grammar, and pair each panel with a hidden street graph and exact oracles, yielding 6,000 instances (12,000 panels across the two zooms) over 12 routing, facility-location, and visual disambiguation tasks. Models return structured decisions that we snap back to the graph and score for validity, legality, optimality, and constraint satisfaction, plus cross-zoom consistency. Across seven VLMs, models read maps and route simply but fail at graph cost reasoning (single-facility pin placement is near chance even for frontier reasoning models), and are frequently scale-inconsistent. We release the benchmark, harness, and deterministic generator. Code and data: https://github.com/Vi-Sri/mapreason-osm

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

A Unified Perspective on the Dynamics of Deep Transformers

arXiv:2501.18322v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers, which are state-of-the-art in most machine learning tasks, represent the data as sequences of vectors called tokens. This representation is then exploited by the attention function, which learns dependencies between tokens and is key to the success of Transformers. However, the iterative application of attention across layers induces complex dynamics that remain to be fully understood. To analyze these dynamics, we identify each input sequence with a probability measure and model its evolution as a Vlasov equation called Transformer PDE, whose velocity field is non-linear in the probability measure. Our first set of contributions focuses on compactly supported initial data. We show the Transformer PDE is well-posed and is the mean-field limit of an interacting particle system, thus generalizing and extending previous analysis to several variants of self-attention: multi-head attention, L2 attention, Sinkhorn attention, Sigmoid attention, and masked attention–leveraging a conditional Wasserstein framework. In a second set of contributions, we are the first to study non-compactly supported initial conditions, by focusing on Gaussian initial data. Again for different types of attention, we show that the Transformer PDE preserves the space of Gaussian measures, which allows us to analyze the Gaussian case theoretically and numerically to identify typical behaviors. This Gaussian analysis captures the evolution of data anisotropy through a deep Transformer. In particular, we highlight a clustering phenomenon that parallels previous results in the non-normalized discrete case.

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

The Value Axis: Language Models Encode Whether They're on the Right Track

We investigate whether language models internally track the value of their current trajectory, defined as the likelihood that their ongoing strategy will achieve their goals. Using synthetic, in-context reinforcement learning data, we construct a "value" axis for Qwen3-8B. We find that activations along this axis distinguish between high vs. low verbalized confidence, rollouts without and with backtracking, and correct vs. corrupted code. Steering towards high value causally suppresses self-correction and reduces explanatory verbosity, while steering towards low value induces backtracking and exploration. We demonstrate that direct preference optimization (DPO) can increase the internal value of rewarded behaviors (e.g. use a certain word), causing the model to act more confidently after exhibiting them. Finally, we apply the value axis to study in-the-wild settings. For example, we find that Qwen assigns low value to politically sensitive chat queries after post-training and that supervised fine-tuning increases internal confidence within the training domain. Our results suggest that language models linearly encode an estimate of expected goal success that modulates their confidence in pursuing a direction.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

An Explainable AI Assistant for Introductory Programming Education: Improving Feedback Reliability with Instructor-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.12425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active learning is widely recognized as an effective approach for improving learning outcomes in introductory programming courses. However, insufficient instructional support often limits students' access to timely, personalized feedback, which is crucial for mastering foundational programming concepts. Although recent advances in AI, particularly large language models, offer scalable opportunities for feedback, concerns about explainability and reliability remain. In this paper, we present an AI-driven classroom assistant that leverages an explainable AI model to analyze student code, map logical errors to instructor-identified misconceptions, and deliver instructor-authored feedback, thereby grounding reliability in instructor-defined pedagogical knowledge. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted an expert evaluation to examine its alignment with instructor-verified feedback and deployed the system in a classroom setting to assess students' perceptions of its usability. Results indicate that the assistant can provide accurate, instructor-verified feedback to students while fostering a positive experience.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SPHINX: First Explain, Then Explore

Generating adversarial driving scenarios is critical for evaluating and improving autonomous vehicle decision-making systems in simulation. Recent approaches, such as ChatScene and LLM-Attacker, rely primarily on the prior knowledge of Large Language Models and Vision-Language Models to generate driving scenarios procedurally. We argue that adversarial scenes should be generated based on the failure diagnosis (e.g., indecisiveness, multi-frame inconsistency) of the driving policy to specifically address the policy's weaknesses instead of relying on prior assumptions. In this paper, we propose SPHINX, a closed-loop framework for adversarial scenario synthesis guided by a simple principle: first explain, then explore. Beyond blindly exploring the scenario space, SPHINX leverages explainable artificial intelligence methods to analyze the policy, identifying key visual concepts and their influence on policy outputs, and the uncertainty of the decisions. Given the interpretable evidence extracted from the policy's own decision process, we use a vision language model to rationalize and criticize failure modes of the current policy. These critics are then used to generate targeted adversarial scenarios for policy retraining and improvement. We demonstrate that SPHINX can highlight an interpretable account of policy failures while other adversarial scene generation cannot. Across the evaluated benchmarks and test suites, SPHINX can be applied to diverse state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle architectures and yields consistent robustness improvements over existing scenario-generation methods.

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

Path integral control of open quantum systems

arXiv:2410.18635v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate open-loop quantum state preparation for a class of open quantum systems whose dynamics follow a Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) master equation that admits a trajectory-based stochastic representation. The deterministic control objective is reformulated as a stochastic optimal control problem – interpreting stochasticity as a methodological tool akin to stochastic Schrödinger equation unravelings – which situates the problem within the path integral control framework. For the class of GKLS generators under consideration, this reformulation leads to an explicit expression for the optimal control as a weighted average over stochastic quantum trajectories, thereby eliminating the need for gradient evaluations. Building on this theoretical result, we derive a control update rule for piecewise-constant control pulses and demonstrate that adaptive importance sampling progressively enhances the control estimator during optimization, culminating in the algorithm we term Path integral Quantum Control (PiQC). We further introduce an annealed variant of PiQC, wherein a synthetic noise schedule gradually steers open-system trajectories toward closed-system dynamics, enabling high-fidelity unitary state preparation. Numerical studies on a dissipative single-qubit system and a multi-qubit Nuclear Magnetic Resonance model verify that PiQC yields precise open-loop controls and displays robustness to Hamiltonian perturbations. We propose PiQC as a trajectory-based alternative to gradient-based approaches, which might offer a viable solution in quantum control problems where gradient computation is infeasible or computationally demanding.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Age-related changes in acoustic cue use for speech-in-speech perception

Acoustic cues such as pitch and spatial location allow listeners to attend to a target speaker and ignore competing talkers, aiding speech recognition in background noise. Diminished ability to utilize acoustic cues for speech stream segregation may thus contribute to older adults' challenges hearing in noise. Adults aged 18-74 completed a speech-in-speech identification task with three conditions containing 1) only pitch cues (fundamental frequency), 2) only spatial cues (interaural time differences; ITDs), and 3) both pitch and spatial cues for segregating a target talker from competing talkers. Hearing thresholds at standard and extended high frequencies (EHFs), auditory brainstem responses (ABRs), and digit span scores were acquired to examine the influence of sensory and cognitive factors on use of each acoustic cue for speech-in-speech recognition. Significant differences were observed between cue condition scores indicating that use of the available cue(s) drove performance. ABR metrics were not a significant predictor but digit span scores significantly predicted scores on all three cue conditions. Working memory abilities therefore set a baseline for participants' speech-in-speech recognition regardless of the acoustic content. Hearing thresholds at standard frequencies significantly predicted scores on the Pitch condition. EHF hearing thresholds better predicted Spatial and Both Cue condition performance, suggesting that EHF thresholds represent auditory processing important for coding ITDs. Age group analysis revealed that older adults (aged 40+) performed significantly more poorly on all cue conditions of the speech-in-speech recognition task relative to younger adults. Age-related changes in auditory sensory processing may therefore impair older adults' speech-in-noise perception by reducing their ability to use acoustic cues for segregating target and competing speech.

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

CisTransCell: Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction via Gene Function, Regulatory Control, and Cellular Context

arXiv:2606.13713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting cellular transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in single-cell biology, especially in the zero-shot setting where the perturbed gene or gene combination is unseen during training. A major difficulty is that perturbation effects are not determined by expression state alone: they depend on how the perturbed gene product influences other genes and proteins, how those downstream factors act on cis-regulatory elements, and which regulatory programs are active in the current cell state. To better capture this biological complexity, we propose CisTransCell, a cell-conditioned multi-modal framework for single-cell perturbation prediction that augments each gene with two complementary priors: a regulatory-sequence prior that captures how the gene is controlled, and a coding-sequence prior that captures what the gene product does. By integrating these priors with cellular expression state, CisTransCell models perturbation response as a cascade from gene function to regulatory control to downstream transcriptional change. Experiments on benchmark single-cell perturbation datasets show that CisTransCell achieves strong performance in zero-shot perturbation prediction.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

OQMD: Single-Qubit Rotation Control Improves Low-CNOT Multiclass Quantum Classification

arXiv:2606.14088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Near-term variational classifiers incur substantial error and latency from two-qubit gates, yet practitioners often assume that additional entangling depth is the default route to higher accuracy. This work studies Optimal Quantum Measurement Decoding (OQMD): optimizing how quantum outcomes are mapped to classical labels by training a readout layer before measurement, jointly with the variational circuit, without adding CNOTs. Experiments use trainable triple single-qubit rotations as one concrete, hardware-native realization of OQMD; other single-qubit parametrizations fit the same classical outer loop. On the Iris benchmark with a 30-point stratified test split, the best observed 0-CNOT configuration with OQMD reaches 83.33\% accuracy, with a 96\% at 9 CNOTs, exceeding the best 18-CNOT controls (56.67\%) and the best 18-CNOT configuration with OQMD (66.67\%) under a common protocol. A six-point CNOT-depth series from 0 to 18 (fixed optimizer, iteration budget, random-seed count, and ZXZ readout) shows that the highest raw scores need not occur at the largest template, so aggregate complexity is not summarized by CNOT count alone. Because run-level accuracies are discrete and non-Gaussian, we emphasize best-observed scores and, where a global comparison of pooled runs is required, Mann–Whitney $U$ tests rather than parametric tests on means. Across architectures, OQMD shows statistically consistent but magnitude-dependent gains: large peak lifts on minimal circuits coexist with a small pooled mean shift on complex 18-CNOT runs ($p\approx 0.03$) that is not ``universal'' in the sense of uniformly large practical effects.%

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

Rotational Symmetry based Object Pose Estimation from Point Clouds in the Absence of Known 3D Models

Object pose estimation is crucial to many industrial applications, with one example being automated spray painting using a robot. However, confidentiality concerns often limit access to high-quality 3D models, posing a significant challenge for point-cloud-based pose estimation. In such scenarios, rotational symmetry, a readily accessible characteristic of many industrial objects, can provide valuable prior information to facilitate pose estimation.In this paper, we propose a method that leverages the rotational symmetry commonly found in industrial objects to address the challenge caused by the absence of 3D models. The object pose is jointly estimated with point cloud refinement through an iterative optimization process. This optimization relies on a rotational symmetry constraint loss. To construct this loss, each 3D point is rotated according to the currently estimated pose, and multiple correspondences are identified using nearest-neighbor search by exploiting the rotational symmetry property. These correspondences are then used to compute the rotational symmetry constraint loss, which iteratively refines both the pose and the point cloud.By explicitly incorporating rotational symmetry into the optimization process, the proposed method achieves robust pose estimation and generalizes well across diverse object types. The proposed method is evaluated on a dataset specifically created for point clouds without known 3D models, consisting of four categories of synthetic objects and one real wheel hub collected from a production line. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves performance comparable to methods that rely on known 3D models.

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

iSAGE: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Remote Sensing Semantic Segmentation via Sparse Point Supervision

Semantic segmentation in remote sensing requires costly pixel-level annotations, and nearly every problem demands a new dataset since models rarely transfer across sensors, platforms, or geographies. Existing human-in-the-loop frameworks expand sparse clicks into dense supervision via auxiliary machinery (pseudo-labels, propagation, CRFs, foundation-model prompts, auxiliary heads), all operating on the model's predictive distribution. A confidently wrong pixel is indistinguishable from a confidently correct one in that distribution by construction, so no rule reading it can separate the two; the distinguishing signal is external to the model. This paper hypothesizes that expert clicks targeting confident model errors, not arbitrary pixels, suffice to match dense supervision, with no expansion machinery. iSAGE (Iterative Sparse Annotation Guided by Expert) realizes this hypothesis on an integrated open-source platform, where an error-weighted loss amplifies the gradient at each click and the annotation record itself is the dataset, extensible, correctable, and auditable. Experiments use a minimum-effort regime: at most one labeled pixel per class per frame. On BsB Aerial, iSAGE recovers 97.2% of dense supervision (74.79% mIoU on 0.040% of pixels) with contrasting class dynamics: amorphous classes (permeable areas) saturate from the seed, while small classes (cars) require late-iteration effort. On ISPRS Vaihingen (external benchmark), iSAGE reaches 76.78% mIoU with 0.011% of pixels, matching the dense baseline (76.65%) and exceeding all published methods. Under the same pipeline, four output-reading mechanisms (oracle entropy across budgets 1–100x, pseudo-labels across thresholds 0.90–0.99, CRF-based propagation, uniform random) plateau 7.4 to 14.5 pp below iSAGE. Across 31 surveyed methods, iSAGE is the only iterative human-in-the-loop framework operating without auxiliary machinery.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

EEG-FM-Bench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for the Systematic Evaluation and Diagnostic Analyses of EEG Foundation Models

arXiv:2508.17742v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electroencephalography foundation models (EEG-FMs) have advanced brain signal analysis, but the lack of standardized evaluation benchmarks impedes model comparison and scientific progress. Current evaluations rely on inconsistent protocols that render cross-model comparisons unreliable, while a lack of diagnostic analyses obscures the internal mechanisms driving transfer efficiency and scaling behaviors. To address this, we introduce EEG-FM-Bench, a unified system for the standardized evaluation of EEG-FMs. The benchmark integrates 14 datasets across 10 paradigms and incorporates diverse experimental settings, including multiple fine-tuning strategies, task organizations, and classifier configurations, supported by tools for gradient and representation analysis. Our experiments and analysis reveal several critical insights: (1) multi-task learning often acts as a useful regularizer that mitigates overfitting in data-scarce EEG contexts, although negative transfer can arise under specific task paradigms; (2) pre-training efficiency is currently limited by gradient conflicts between reconstruction objectives and downstream tasks; (3) under released checkpoints and a matched downstream protocol, model or data scale alone does not fully explain transfer performance, while objective alignment, adaptation compatibility, and EEG-specific design appear to be important factors. This benchmark enables fair comparison and reproducible analysis, providing a step toward fairer comparison and more interpretable analysis of EEG-FMs. Code is available at https://github.com/xw1216/EEG-FM-Bench.

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

GUMP-Net: An interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation

Pelvic segmentation is one of the most important and fundamental research problems in precise and intelligent diagnosis and treatment, as well as surgical planning and navigation for pelvic fractures. By combining an improved geodesic active contour model with deep neural networks, we propose GUMP-Net, an interpretable model-data-driven intelligent algorithm for multi-class pelvic segmentation, in which three network modules are designed to constitute the overall segmentation framework together: the object detection module for automatic level set initialization, the edge detector module for learning an anatomy-aware edge detector function and the iteration module for deep level set evolution. Leveraging the advantages of level set representation and deep learning, GUMP-Net shows more accurate, robust and consistent segmentation performance, especially in small training data situation, compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Extensive experiments on pelvic datasets demonstrate the rationality and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Further experiments extended to ankle dataset indicate broader applications to other anatomies. The proposed algorithm not only provides an efficient segmentation method for complex fracture reduction, but also gives an interpretable geometric perspective for understanding deep learning segmentation.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Toward Preference-aligned Large Language Models via Residual-based Model Steering

Preference alignment is a critical step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) useful and aligned with (human) preferences. Existing approaches such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback or Direct Preference Optimization typically require curated data and expensive optimization over billions of parameters, and eventually lead to persistent task-specific models. In this work, we introduce Preference alignment of Large Language Models via Residual Steering (PaLRS), a training-free method that exploits preference signals encoded in the residual streams of LLMs. From as few as one hundred preference pairs, PaLRS extracts lightweight, plug-and-play steering vectors that can be applied at inference time to push models toward preferred behaviors. We evaluate PaLRS on various small-to-medium-scale open-source LLMs, showing that PaLRS-aligned models achieve consistent gains on mathematical reasoning and code generation benchmarks while preserving baseline general-purpose performance. Moreover, when compared to models aligned with DPO and SimPO, they perform better with great time-savings. Our findings highlight that PaLRS offers an effective, much more efficient and flexible alternative to standard preference optimization pipelines, offering a training-free, plug-and-play mechanism for alignment with minimal data.

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

Would you still call this Dax? Novel Visual References in VLMs and Humans

Vision-language models (VLMs), like human learners, are frequently exposed to new visual concepts, but how they map novel visual references to language after exposure remains largely underexplored, particularly when those references contradict prior knowledge from pre-training. To study this, we present the Novel Visual References Dataset (NVRD): 19,176 images spanning 90 visual concepts across different levels of visual novelty, each with up to 20 increasingly perturbed versions of the original object to probe generalization. Unlike prior work on visual augmentations of familiar concepts, NVRD comprises entirely novel, open-ended stimuli constructed from scratch, mirroring how humans encounter genuinely new concepts. We evaluate 3 open- and 2 closed-source models alongside 2,400 human judgments for direct human-model comparison, and find that (i) models struggle to acquire novel concepts in-context when they contradict prior knowledge, and (ii) while models and humans show correlated sensitivity to visual perturbations, models significantly overgeneralize, extending learned labels to stimuli that humans reject. We contribute NVRD as a corpus and benchmark for research on visual concept learning in both humans and machines.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Efficient Test-time Inference for Generative Planning Models with OCL Search

arXiv:2606.00618v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Generative models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for AI planning, yet their performance remains constrained by the training data distribution. One approach is to improve generated solutions during inference by scaling test-time compute. A more efficient alternative is to optimize the inference process itself. In this paper, we show that a modified version of a classical Open-Closed List (OCL) search provides just such an efficient inference procedure. Our algorithm synergizes two learned components: a generative model that performs fast rollouts from intermediate states and a heuristic model that prioritizes among candidate reasoning paths. Key contributions include novel exploration control mechanisms and integration of learned models within the OCL framework. Across multiple combinatorial planning domains, our approach outperforms both neurosymbolic search baselines and classical solvers in computational efficiency and solution quality.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Geometry-Consistent Endoscopic Representations for Image-Guided Navigation via Structured Foundation Model Adaptation

Accurate vision-based navigation in monocular endoscopy is difficult due to limited depth cues, weak tissue texture, non-rigid deformation, and substantial appearance variation across domains, all of which complicate pose estimation, depth prediction, and image-to-anatomy alignment. Although recent vision foundation models have shown promise, their learned representations often remain insufficiently geometry-consistent, hindering stable feature correspondence and limiting their reliability for downstream navigation tasks. We propose a unified framework for learning geometry-consistent and domain-robust image representations for monocular endoscopy. The framework combines a synthetic data pipeline that provides accurate geometric supervision with Hierarchy-Aware Geometry-Semantic Adaptation, a structured alternative to standard LoRA that inserts low-rank adapters selectively across the transformer hierarchy and couples them with layer-wise training objectives to encourage geometric correspondence in intermediate features and semantic consistency in deeper features. Experiments on public and proprietary datasets show improved geometric and semantic representation quality, leading to better performance on downstream navigation tasks including pose estimation and monocular depth estimation. The learned representations show favorable synthetic-to-real transfer on clinical bronchoscopy and provide a useful initialization for adaptation to sinus endoscopy and colonoscopy under limited supervision. The framework also shows favorable scaling with model size and training data. These results support hierarchy-aware, geometry-guided adaptation as a practical approach for endoscopic representation learning.

19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

A zero-parameter first-principles gate framework for full-length TP53 missense variant interpretation

by Masamichi Iizumi Missense variant interpretation often achieves useful predictive performance but remains mechanistically opaque, particularly in proteins that combine structured domains with intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs). We developed Gate & Channel, a zero-parameter, first-principles framework for full-length TP53 missense variant analysis in which each prediction is generated by explicit IF-THEN gates derived from physicochemistry, geometry, structural constraints, and polymer physics rather than fitted weights. Variants are evaluated across independent channels representing distinct physical failure modes; a variant is predicted disruptive if any gate closes. A second hierarchical layer (“Geta”) encodes physically grounded post-closure exceptions, allowing sensitivity and specificity to be improved on disjoint variant populations. The v18 framework consists of 12 channels and 2 Getas spanning structured domains and IDRs, capturing DNA-contact disruption, Zn coordination, burial-dependent packing, secondary-structure compatibility, post-translational modification chemistry, short linear motif disruption (including a multi-partner coupled-folding face), proline-directed kinase recognition, and IDR-specific proline and glycine backbone constraints. Across 1,369 TP53 missense variants, the framework achieved 84.5% sensitivity and 89.1% positive predictive value, with 90.9% sensitivity preserved in the DNA-binding core and all 9/9 hotspot mutations captured. A post hoc audit of discordant IDR calls indicated that many apparent false positives had plausible molecular rationales, consistent with a distinction between molecular mechanism disruption and clinical penetrance. Applied to KRAS, TDP-43, and BRCA1, the same channels capture the dominant pathogenic mechanisms in each protein as a proof of principle, while residual missed variants name specific gates yet to be written. The framework is distributed as the open-source Python package pathogenicity-gates (v0.5.1, MIT). These results show that a substantial fraction of full-length TP53 missense variation can be resolved through explicit, auditable physical gates that carry meaning beyond TP53, with each remaining failure naming the next rule to be written.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Toward quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of optical nonlinearity in vacuum

arXiv:2602.10896v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum Electrodynamics predicts that the vacuum must behave as a nonlinear optical medium: the vacuum optical index should increase when it is stressed by intense electromagnetic fields. The DeLLight (Deflection of Light by Light) project aims to measure it by using intense and ultra-short laser pulses. The experiment uses a Sagnac interferometer to amplify the tiny deflection signal of a low-intensity probe pulse crossing the vacuum refractive-index gradient produced by an external high-intensity pump pulse. The measurement of the amplified signal by a CCD camera requires a high spatial resolution, which is limited by the ultimate quantum noise of the CCD. However, interferometric phase noise induced by the mechanical vibrations of the interferometer is also amplified and degrades spatial resolution. To overcome this, we propose a new method named High-Frequency Phase Noise Suppression (HFPNS), based on the addition of a delayed replica (5 ns) of the probe pulse. The delayed pulse, which is not affected by the pump but is subject to the same vibration noise, enables offline subtraction of correlated phase noise. In this work, we present an experimental proof-of-concept on a prototype interferometer operating with a limited amplification factor ($\mathcal{A}\simeq25$), about 10 times smaller than the required value of the final experiment. We have succeeded in reducing phase noise by a factor of 40, resulting in a residual noise level 2.3 times higher than the expected quantum noise. The residual noise is linked to delay-line instabilities and incident beam pointing fluctuations present during these tests. This result validates HFPNS as a robust method for future quantum-noise-limited interferometric measurements of vacuum optical nonlinearity, though additional stabilization and higher interferometric amplification are still needed.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

The New Social Image: How AI Competency and AI Proactivity Influence Self- and Peer-Perceptions in the Workplace

arXiv:2606.00182v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human-AI collaboration is considered the most promising way to incorporate AI in the workplace. What remains unexplored are the experiential consequences of this teaming. More specifically, in a team with AI, how humans perceive themselves (self-perception) and how they are perceived by their coworkers (peer perception) in terms of work ownership and job meaningfulness. In a 2x2x2 vignette study (n=50), participants rated perceptions of ownership, affect, job meaningfulness and satisfaction, and role dynamics across two levels (low/high) of AI proactivity and AI competency as within-subject factors, with point-of-view (self perception/peer perception) as between-subjects. Our results showed that AI with low competency or low proactivity generally improved feelings related to ownership, meaningfulness, satisfaction, and role dynamics, and also increased positive affect while reducing negative affect. However, these effects were often influenced by point-of-view. For instance, low AI proactivity resulted in higher job satisfaction from self-perception rather than peer perception. Based on our findings, we argue that designing AI for the future of work solely around performance metrics may not be adequate. Highly competent and proactive AI-driven systems can have undesirable impacts on perceptions of ownership, job identity, social image and team dynamics, and consequently, job meaningfulness.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics. An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.

23.
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.

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

MUSE: Agentic 3D Scene Authoring via Memory-Grounded Incremental Requirement Satisfaction

Text-driven 3D scene generation is a promising technique for digital content creation, embodied AI simulation, and interactive design, yet practical workflows often require refining, extending, or correcting existing scenes while preserving non-target content. Existing methods can produce realistic and structurally plausible scenes, but they generally lack editability with requirement-level state tracking, so part-level failures often lead to full-scene regeneration or manual intervention. To tackle this challenge, we formulate controllable 3D scene authoring as incremental requirement satisfaction, unifying construction and editing. In this paper, we present MUSE, a memory-grounded multi-agent framework in which an Architect compiles instructions into structured requirements, a Sculptor executes local scene operations, and an Inspector verifies each step while updating Working, Scene, and Skill Memory. To evaluate requirement-level controllability and preservation-aware editing, we introduce AuthorBench, offering 145 constrained construction cases and a 1,584-case preservation-aware editing pool paired with external structured checks. On full construction cases, MUSE improves All-Goal success from 37.9 to 80.7 and surface-constraint fulfillment from 35.0 to 92.6 over the strongest baseline. On a stratified 240-case editing test split, MUSE achieves 49.6 All-Goal success, 99.9 preservation rate, and only 0.6 unintended change rate. Beyond automated metrics, human evaluations on compared local-editing baselines support stronger alignment with user intent, and downstream navigation-proxy tests indicate stronger spatial stability. Combined with ablations validating our memory designs, these results establish MUSE as an effective framework for controllable 3D scene authoring.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP