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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

How should I respond to race-based exclusion in my lab?

作者:

A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position? A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position?

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Electrical Noise Produced by Micron-Sized Particles above a Surface Paul Trap

arXiv:2606.19585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electric field noise produced by the surface of ion trap electrodes reduces the fidelity of quantum computing operations. Despite decades of investigation its microscopic origins remain unclear. Here, we measure electric field noise at trapping locations along the symmetry axis of a linear surface Paul trap. We find that noise levels vary by three orders-of-magnitude in one 600$\,\mu$m section of the trap. Optical and scanning electron microscope images show micron-sized particles close to the trapping locations with the highest noise levels. We find that modeling the particles as a lossy dielectric with a effective loss tangent $\tan\theta=0.33(0.06)$ describes the magnitude of the noise, as well as its spatial and frequency dependence. Our observations may explain the large variation of reported noise levels in literature.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

RGB-S: Image-Aligned Tactile Saliency for Robust Dexterous Manipulation

Effective visuo-tactile integration is critical for robotic dexterous manipulation, especially when visual observations are unreliable or occluded. However, robustly aligning sparse, heterogeneous tactile measurements with dense visual representations remains a fundamental challenge. Most existing approaches require policies to learn cross-modal correspondences implicitly from limited demonstrations, without leveraging geometric priors. As a result, they are often data-inefficient and generalize poorly when visual observations are degraded. To address this limitation, we propose a framework that explicitly grounds physical contacts in the image domain. Using robot forward kinematics and camera calibration, we project tactile sensor locations directly onto the RGB image plane. We then render force-modulated Gaussian saliency maps to model spatial uncertainty arising from kinematic and calibration errors. By integrating these 2D spatial anchors through a zero-initialized conditioning architecture, our method injects physical contact priors into standard visual backbones while preserving pre-trained visual representations. We evaluate our method on six dexterous manipulation tasks in both simulation and the real world under severe visual occlusions. Real-world experiments show that explicit RGB-S grounding in the image domain improves real-world occluded manipulation success rates by $26.7$ percentage points over the strongest implicit visuo-tactile baseline, suggesting its improved spatial reasoning and robustness to occlusion. Project page: touch-as-saliency.github.io

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Distributional Statistical Models: Weak Moments, Cumulants, and a Central Limit Theorem

作者:

arXiv:2604.20634v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many important statistical models fall outside classical moment-based methods due to the non-existence of moments or moment generating functions. We propose a generalised probabilistic framework in which a probability law is represented by a tempered distribution $T \in \mathcal{S}'$, on the same footing as a density, a distribution function, or a characteristic function. Information about the law is extracted by evaluating $T$ on test functions regularised by a given positive Schwartz kernel $\varphi \in \mathcal{S}$ – the kernel serving as a probe, not as part of the law. Expectations are defined via the action of distributions on regularised test functions, yielding well-defined weak moments, weak characteristic functions, and weak cumulants of all orders. These extend classical quantities and retain key algebraic properties such as additivity under independence and natural affine transformation rules. The main results are: (i) a systematic algebra of weak cumulants; (ii) a weak moment problem where existence of all moments holds unconditionally and uniqueness depends on the kernel, with uniqueness results under Gaussian kernels (via Hermite completeness), positive Schwartz kernels with an exponential tail bound and square-integrable densities (via a Carleman-type criterion), and kernels with exponential decay (via Denjoy-Carleman quasi-analyticity); and (iii) a weak central limit theorem formulated as convergence of weak characteristic functions to a Gaussian limit, covering cases where the classical theorem fails. The framework is illustrated with Student's $t$, stable, and hyperbolic distributions. As a statistical consequence, the weak first moment yields a consistent estimator of the location parameter in the Cauchy model, where no classical moment-based estimator exists. A full statistical treatment is given in a companion paper.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS

Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation1−3. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141–191 for CO2 and 123–172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures  ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.

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

Performance Analysis and Optimization of 3D Generative Diffusion Models across GPU Architectures

arXiv:2606.19365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have become essential for high-fidelity 3D MRI synthesis, yet their deployment remains constrained by substantial GPU resource demands arising from hundreds of U-Net evaluations per sample and a highly heterogeneous kernel behavior. This paper performs a comprehensive performance analysis of the state-of-the-art medical diffusion model, Med-DDPM, across three generations of NVIDIA architectures to study kernel-level runtime breakdowns, instruction-mix characteristics, memory system utilization, warp-level activities, and profiler priority-score estimates. We show that training is overwhelmingly dominated by cuDNN convolution and implicit-GEMM kernels, with inefficiencies arising from memory-access patterns, tensor-layout conversions, and limited Tensor Core utilization. Guided by these insights, we evaluate two architecture-aware optimizations TF32 Tensor Core activation and a 3D channels-last layout and demonstrate that they reduce SM cycles by up to 100x, cut dynamic instructions by 100x, raise Tensor Core utilization from 1.45 to 9.98x, and increase IPC by 7% on A100, all without degrading synthesis quality.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Testing quantum-like markers in neural dynamics

arXiv:2508.21490v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose two experiments for identifying quantum markers in neural data based on quantum variants of well-known equations for neural activity that describe electrical signal propagation on axonal arbors and dendrites. These include (i) testing if power spectra from subthreshold oscillations in neuronal cultures follow the classical Fitzgugh-Nagumo equations or a recently introduced quantum variant of them and (ii) testing if propagation statistics of electrical activity in axons follow the classical diffusive cable equation or a quantum variant of it.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Thermodynamics of quantum processes: An operational framework for free energy and reversible athermality

arXiv:2510.12790v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explore the thermodynamics of quantum processes (quantum channels) by axiomatically introducing the free energy for channels, defined via the quantum relative entropy with an absolutely thermal channel whose fixed output is in equilibrium with a thermal reservoir. This definition finds strong support through its operational interpretations in designated quantum information and thermodynamic tasks. We construct a resource theory of athermality for quantum processes, where free operations are Gibbs preserving superchannels and golden units are unitary channels with respect to absolutely thermal channel having fully degenerate output Hamiltonian. We exactly characterize the one-shot distillation and formation of quantum channels using hypothesis-testing and max-relative entropy with respect to the absolutely thermal channel. These rates converge asymptotically to the channel free energy (up to a multiplicative factor of half the inverse temperature), establishing its operational meaning and proving the asymptotic reversibility of the athermality. We show the direct relation between the resource theory of athermality and quantum information tasks such as private randomness and purity distillation, and thermodynamic tasks of erasure and work extraction. Our work connects the core thermodynamic concepts of free energy, energy, entropy, and maximal extractable work of quantum processes to their information processing capabilities.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

GB-LSR: A Fast Local Spectral Image Representation with a Single Global Bandwidth for Continuous Reconstruction and Super-Resolution

arXiv:2606.19617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present GB-LSR (Global-Bandwidth Local Spectral Representation), a fixed-grid local spectral representation for continuous image reconstruction. The image domain is partitioned into non-overlapping square patches, each carrying coefficients for a truncated Fourier basis predicted from shared convolutional-encoder features. A single trainable scalar bandwidth is shared globally across all patches and images, and reconstruction at any continuous coordinate is a fixed-size basis contraction whose cost is independent of image size. We study three bandwidth-handling variants: a trainable global scalar (main), a fixed global scalar, and a per-patch bandwidth field. On a standardized native-reconstruction benchmark across Kodak, Set14, and Urban100, the main variant outperforms matched-budget amortized LIIF / LTE / WIRE re-implementations by 2.8-3.6 dB PSNR and 0.11-0.15 LPIPS, while running at roughly one-quarter of the slowest baseline's inference cost. The single global scalar suffices empirically: per-patch adaptive-bandwidth alternatives do not improve over it on either a closed-form locality diagnostic or an end-to-end ablation. In a separate arbitrary-scale super-resolution (ASR) extension, GB-LSR achieves competitive PSNR-Y under a canonical-style SR protocol and runs 1.44x faster than LIIF-RDN and 3.25x faster than LTE-SwinIR at x4; within the same extension, a variant trained and evaluated without 4-corner local-ensemble averaging gives a 1.77x speedup with 35% lower peak memory and negligible PSNR change, while additionally widening the RDN encoder from 64 to 96 channels gives a small positive PSNR shift with a 1.58x speedup and 31% lower peak memory. Native-reconstruction claims are scoped to the matched-budget amortized protocol, and ASR claims are scoped to a separate canonical-style SR protocol.

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

Learning Coordinated Preference for Multi-Objective Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.14693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperative multi-objective multi-agent reinforcement learning (MOMARL) models team decision making under multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. In this setting, conflicts arise not only across objectives but also across agents with different observations, roles, and contributions. We propose Preference Coordinated Multi-agent Policy Optimization (PCMA), which learns coordinated agent-specific preferences to enable complementary trade-offs among agents. Theoretically, we formulate cooperative MOMARL as a team-optimal game and show that, under suitable conditions, preference diversity can induce team improvement through a first-order improvement decomposition. Experiments on multiple cooperative MOMA environments and a practical traffic-control scenario show that PCMA improves both performance and trade-off coordination.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Using AI in engineering education: a balancing act, driven by clear purpose

作者:

arXiv:2606.16626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Based on a questionnaire of 100 higher-education students, predominantly from engineering-related fields, and a critical review of recent literature, this chapter examines how students use and perceive Large Language Models (LLMs) in engineering education. Students primarily value LLMs for writing support, conceptual clarification, coding assistance, and brainstorming, while simultaneously expressing concerns about inaccuracies, bias, overreliance, academic integrity, and the burden of verification. Through an analysis of two dominant metaphors, namely LLMs as an "oracle" and as a "tutor," the chapter shows how these systems cultivate expectations of authority, expertise, and personalized learning that often exceed their actual capabilities. The chapter further argues that students' attachment to the promises of efficiency and personalized support reflects a form of "cruel optimism," where the perceived benefits of LLMs often depend on the very skills, vigilance, and expertise that students are still developing. Overall, the chapter argues for a purpose-driven and context-sensitive approach to AI integration in engineering education, emphasizing critical AI literacy, reflective assessment design, pedagogical caution, and consideration of broader ethical and environmental impacts.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Causal Inference with Generative Artificial Intelligence: Application to Texts as Treatments

In this paper, we demonstrate how to enhance the validity of causal inference with unstructured high-dimensional treatments like texts, by leveraging the power of generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). Specifically, we propose to use a deep generative model such as large language models (LLMs) to efficiently generate treatments and use their internal representation for subsequent causal effect estimation. We show that the knowledge of this true internal representation helps disentangle the treatment features of interest, such as specific sentiments and certain topics, from other possibly unknown confounding features. Unlike existing methods, the proposed GenAI-Powered Inference (GPI) methodology eliminates the need to learn causal representation from the data, and hence produces more accurate and efficient estimates. We formally establish the conditions required for the nonparametric identification of the average treatment effect, propose an estimation strategy that avoids the violation of the overlap assumption, and derive the asymptotic properties of the proposed estimator through the application of double machine learning. Finally, using an instrumental variables approach, we extend the proposed GPI methodology to the settings in which the treatment feature is based on human perception. The GPI is also applicable to text reuse where an LLM is used to regenerate existing texts. We conduct simulation and empirical studies, using the generated text data from an open-source LLM, Llama 3, to illustrate the advantages of our estimator over state-of-the-art causal representation learning algorithms.

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

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

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

AthDGC: An Open Diachronic Greek Treebank with Indo-European Parallels

AthDGC ("Athens-PROIEL") is an open, end-to-end workflow and dataset. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first openly licensed dependency-parsed treebank of Greek that spans eight diachronic periods, namely Archaic, Classical, Koine, Late Antique, Byzantine, Late Byzantine, Early Modern, and Modern Greek, under a single PROIEL XML 2.0 schema, with verse-level cross-alignment of the New Testament to Latin (Vulgate), Gothic (Wulfila), Old Church Slavonic (Marianus), and Classical Armenian. AthDGC builds on the PROIEL Treebank Family (Haug and Johndal 2008; Eckhoff et al. 2018), which established the schema and the Koine-Greek reference set for the project. Annotation uses the Stanford Stanza PROIEL-trained workflow; sentence-level alignment uses LaBSE, a multilingual sentence-embedding model; word-level alignment uses multilingual-BERT attention through the AwesomeAlign procedure. The v0.4 release provides curated samples and the open-source toolkit; the full annotated corpus partitions remain under v0.5 audit on the Greek national HPC. Quantitative scale, per-witness verse counts, and per-period annotated-row counts are reported in the v0.5 release notes, after the audit pass completes. Concept DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20439182.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Efficient upsampling for tensor-network and quantum-state encoded functions

arXiv:2601.03885v2 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Both tensor trains (TTs) and quantum states provide compressed representations of grid-structured data with potentially exponential compression power. We present a unified framework for upsampling data encoded in vector amplitudes, with efficient realizations in both classical TT and quantum settings. Starting from an \(n\)-core TT or an \(n\)-qubit state on a coarse grid with \(2^n\) points, the construction produces an \((n+m)\)-core TT or \((n+m)\)-qubit state on a finer grid with \(2^{n+m}\) points. In the TT setting, it supports interpolation, quasi-interpolation, augmentation, and synthesis through efficient low-rank contractions, with the added \(m\) cores retaining constant rank. For function-value encodings, the resulting interpolation satisfies an \(\ell^2\)-error bound independent of the number of added grid points, achieves exponential compression at fixed accuracy, and has a logarithmic complexity in the number of grid points. In the quantum setting, the refined state is prepared by a \(\mathrm{poly}(n,m)\)-size circuit using \(\log(p+1)\) ancillas, where \(p\) controls the smoothness of the quasi-interpolant; the corresponding error scales quadratically with the initial grid spacing. We validate our framework for tensor networks in one-, two-, and three-dimensional examples, including functions, derivatives, airfoil masks, and synthetic random fields such as three-dimensional turbulence. In particular, fractal fields can be generated directly in TT format with logarithmic memory and runtime. These results open a practical route to multiscale solvers, generative models, and geometry-aware algorithms on tensor-network and quantum platforms, with potential applications in scientific simulation, imaging, and real-time graphics.

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

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

The Magic Barrier before Thermalization

arXiv:2510.11681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the time dependence of anti-flatness in the entanglement spectrum, a measure for non-stabilizerness and lower bound for non-local quantum magic resource, on a subsystem of a linear SU(2) plaquette chain during thermalization. Tracing the time evolution of a large number of initial states, we find that the anti-flatness exhibits a barrier-like maximum during the time period when the entanglement entropy of the subsystem grows rapidly from the initial value to the microcanonical entropy. The location of the peak is strongly correlated with the time when the entanglement exhibits the strongest growth. This behavior is found for generic highly excited initial computational basis states and persists for coupling constants across the ergodic regime, revealing a universal structure of the entanglement spectrum during thermalization. We conclude that quantitative simulations of thermalization for nonabelian gauge theories require quantum computing. We speculate that this property generalizes to other quantum chaotic systems, a conjecture supported by analogous behavior observed in real-time simulations of the mixed-field Ising model.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Scalable Circuit Learning for Interpreting Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16939v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A prominent research direction in mechanistic interpretability is learning sparse circuits over LLM components to reveal how they jointly produce model behavior. However, raw neurons are polysemantic, making learned circuits hard to interpret. Sparse autoencoder (SAE) features alleviate this, but their high dimensionality makes existing intervention-based circuit learning methods computationally prohibitive. We propose CircuitLasso, a scalable circuit-learning approach based on sparse linear regression. CircuitLasso recovers circuits whose structural accuracy matches that of state-of-the-art intervention-based methods on the benchmark data, at a fraction of the computational cost. For interpretability, CircuitLasso efficiently uncovers relationships among SAE features, showing how human-interpretable semantic features propagate through the model and influence its predictions. Finally, we validate the utility of our learned circuits by leveraging their insights to achieve comparable performance at substantially lower cost on a domain-generalization task.

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

Dual-Anchoring: Addressing State Drift in Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv:2604.17473v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation(VLN) requires an agent to navigate through 3D environments by following natural language instructions. While recent Video Large Language Models(Video-LLMs) have largely advanced VLN, they remain highly susceptible to State Drift in long scenarios. In these cases, the agent's internal state drifts away from the true task execution state, leading to aimless wandering and failure to execute essential maneuvers in the instruction. We attribute this failure to two distinct cognitive deficits: Progress Drift, where the agent fails to distinguish completed sub-goals from remaining ones, and Memory Drift, where the agent's history representations degrade, making it lose track of visited landmarks. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Anchoring Framework that explicitly anchors the instruction progress and history representations. First, to address progress drift, we introduce Instruction Progress Anchoring, which supervises the agent to generate structured text tokens that delineate completed versus remaining sub-goals. Second, to mitigate memory drift, we propose Memory Landmark Anchoring, which utilizes a Landmark-Centric World Model to retrospectively predict object-centric embeddings extracted by the Segment Anything Model, compelling the agent to explicitly verify past observations and preserve distinct representations of visited landmarks. Facilitating this framework, we curate two extensive datasets: 3.6 million samples with explicit progress descriptions, and 937k grounded landmark data for retrospective verification. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a 15.2% improvement in Success Rate and a remarkable 24.7% gain on long-horizon trajectories. To facilitate further research, we will release our code, data generation pipelines, and the collected datasets.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Multicluster measles outbreak with a substantial proportion of modified cases in Tokyo, Japan, January-May 2026

Tokyo experienced a measles outbreak (260 cases) in early 2026 despite elimination status. Adults aged 20-39 years were most affected, and 38% of cases were modified measles, increasing with prior vaccination. Although incidence rose until April, the effective reproduction number; R(t) fell below 1, consistent with outbreak control. Multiple clusters were identified, but many cases lacked epidemiological links, suggesting that modified measles is less likely to be considered in differential diagnosis. Intensive contact tracing and surveillance contributed to limiting transmission.

22.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Statistical and Numerical Convergence in Stochastic Equilibrium

arXiv:2606.07469v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper sets out the most general computational and econometric implications of the rigorous stochastic equilibrium theory from SELCKE (Staines (2024a)) arXiv:2312.16214. The analytical backbone is the discovery that the system converges geometrically to long-run equilibrium, at a rate given by the greater of the eigenvalue or inverse eigenvalue (from outside) closest to the unit circle and the maximum shock persistence. High-order shocks converge faster. I develop a simulation procedure to test, with asymptotic power, whether stochastic equilibrium exists for a particular model. The fundamental approximation result asserts that, whatever the order of expansion or loss function, the stochastic steady state delivers the most accurate perturbation solution. I also show that super-consistent parameter estimators $O(1/T)$ arise whenever second-order terms vanish. Besides Calvo, I study stochastic equilibrium in two alternative pricing models. Dynamics simplify considerably. I bound the time the impulse response peaks, by the maximum lag in the errors. This lends empirical support to Taylor contracts, although there are issues surrounding unit roots and the strong cost-channel. For menu costs, I demonstrate that the initial price distribution decays away super-exponentially, producing a system equivalent to Calvo with an endogenous reset probability. The impact of idiosyncratic disturbances appears as an additional wedge between actual and efficient output. Blow-up of the objective function at the boundary is proven, with the help of new distributional arguments, so the model meets existing eigenvalue existence conditions for the recursive equilibrium. Along the way, new light is shone on existing theoretical models and statistical procedures.

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

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

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

Do as I Do: Dexterous Manipulation Data from Everyday Human Videos

How can we scalably generate data for robotic manipulation, especially on human-like platforms such as dexterous multi-fingered hands? Learning from human videos has recently emerged as a likely answer to this question. However, difficulties in estimating hand-object interaction and crossing the human-to-robot embodiment gap have hindered the adoption of abundant monocular RGB-only human videos as the primary source of robot manipulation data. In this work, we present DO AS I DO, an algorithm to reconstruct and retarget monocular RGB human videos to multi-fingered dexterous robotic hands. DO AS I DO reconstructs hand-object interactions from various egocentric and exocentric in-the-wild video sources. The algorithm then retargets these hand-object interaction estimates into a sequence of actions executable in the real world, yielding robot-complete manipulation data from disparate human videos. Overall, DO AS I DO outperforms previous state of the art in estimating hand-object interactions and extracting dexterous manipulation trajectories from RGB videos, as we show in experiments on datasets with ground truths and on a dataset of video clips collected online. Our experiments enable us to propose an efficacy playbook for practitioners collecting human data for manipulation.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Inside the Latent Flow: Causal Deciphering of Attention Dynamics in Audio Separation Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.10046v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow-matching transformers achieve strong audio separation, yet their attention dynamics are opaque. We adapt established causal-intervention principles into a deterministic, inference-time probing protocol for SAM Audio. Orthogonal probing uncovers a dual-pathway text-conditioning mechanism: additive injections control semantic identity, while cross-attention refines acoustic structure. We observe an asynchronous layerwise convergence: stable layers build temporal scaffolds early, whereas fast layers continue resolving artifacts during sampling. The model also attenuates temporal segmentation cues to maintain continuous-flow stability. Using these insights, we propose Layer-Selective Attention Caching (LSAC), a training-free acceleration method that caches attention in stable layers. Across acoustic complexities, LSAC cuts self-attention computation by about ~25% with negligible quality loss and yields up to 6.7x higher quality retention than naive step reduction.