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

2.5-D Decomposition for LLM-Based Spatial Construction

arXiv:2605.07066v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous systems that build structures from natural-language instructions need reliable spatial reasoning, yet large language models (LLMs) make systematic coordinate errors when generating three-dimensional block placements. We present a neuro-symbolic pipeline based on 2.5-D decomposition: the LLM plans in the two-dimensional horizontal plane while a deterministic executor computes all vertical placement from column occupancy, eliminating an entire class of errors. On the Build What I Mean benchmark (160 rounds), GPT-4o-mini with this pipeline achieves 94.6\% mean structural accuracy across 12 independent runs, within 3.0 percentage points of the 97.6\% ceiling imposed by architect-agent errors that no builder-side improvement can address. This outperforms both GPT-4o at 90.3\% and the best competing system at 76.3\%. A controlled ablation confirms that 2.5-D decomposition is the dominant contributor, accounting for 50.7 percentage points of accuracy. The pipeline transfers directly to edge hardware: Nemotron-3 120B running locally on an NVIDIA Jetson Thor AGX matches the cloud result at 94.5\% with no prompt modifications. The underlying principle, removing deterministic dimensions from the LLM's output space, applies to any autonomous construction or assembly task where gravity or other physical constraints fix one or more degrees of freedom. A transfer experiment on 500 IGLU collaborative building tasks confirm the effect generalizes beyond the primary benchmark.

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

Towards Efficient Large Language Reasoning Models via Extreme-Ratio Chain-of-Thought Compression

arXiv:2602.08324v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical loss of logical fidelity at high compression ratios, resulting in significant performance degradation. To achieve high-fidelity, fast reasoning, we propose a novel EXTreme-RAtio Chain-of-Thought Compression framework, termed Extra-CoT, which aggressively reduces the token budget while preserving answer accuracy. To generate reliable, high-fidelity supervision, we first train a dedicated semantically-preserved compressor on mathematical CoT data with fine-grained annotations. An LLM is then fine-tuned on these compressed pairs via a mixed-ratio supervised fine-tuning (SFT), teaching it to follow a spectrum of compression budgets and providing a stable initialization for reinforcement learning (RL). We further propose Constrained and Hierarchical Ratio Policy Optimization (CHRPO) to explicitly incentivize question-solving ability under lower budgets by a hierarchical reward. Experiments on three mathematical reasoning benchmarks show the superiority of Extra-CoT. For example, on MATH-500 using Qwen3-1.7B, Extra-CoT achieves over 73\% token reduction with an accuracy improvement of 0.6\%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Our source codes have been released at https://github.com/Mwie1024/Extra-CoT.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes

arXiv:2606.13200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes (ICDZM) in the generalized Creutz ladders using closed quench paths that pass through two critical points successively. By reading out the final zero-mode transfer probability, we find rich ICDZM interference patterns dependent on the quench path. In particular, when the closed path links two topologically nontrivial phases, the ICDZM pattern may either vanish or exhibit period doubling. Within the framework of WKB analysis, this phenomenon is well clarified by the interference phase accumulated in the quench procedure. We also demonstrate that the zero-mode transfer probability can be detected by the deviation of the boundary particle number from its initial fractional value, which arises from the blending of bulk modes in the critical dynamics. As an edge defect, the zero-mode transfer probability captures both the ICDZM oscillation and the known anomalous defect production in a non-closed quench path. These results identify ICDZM and the corresponding edge defect as probes for critical dynamics associated with topological zero modes.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GEAR-VLA: Learning Geometry-Aware Action Representations for Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv:2606.08530v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models achieve strong benchmark performance but still struggle in real-world deployment with unseen objects, background shifts, and different robot embodiments. We argue that this stems from the lack of a unified geometry-aware manipulation representation, leaving existing VLAs vulnerable to low-level trajectory supervision, misaligned 3D features, and embodiment differences. To address this, we propose GEAR-VLA, a VLA framework for learning unified geometry-aware action representations for generalizable robotic manipulation. GEAR-VLA adopts coarse-to-fine action learning, where multi-source embodied pretraining equips the VLM with embodied reasoning and discrete action understanding before latent action tokens connect action semantics to a gradient-decoupled DiT continuous action expert. It further performs semantic-aligned 3D integration by aligning a trainable 3D spatial backbone with the VLA representation while freezing the original VLM-aligned visual pathway. To share this representation across robots, GEAR-VLA uses embodiment canonicalization, where embodiment-aware states and embodiment-invariant actions confine robot differences to the low-level interface. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments demonstrate strong generalization: GEAR-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on LIBERO, zero-shot LIBERO-Plus, and RoboTwin 2.0, reaches 85.9% success on AgileX and 81.0% on the pretraining-unseen LDT-01 embodiment, and obtains 90.1% success on a 6,360-trial universal grasping benchmark with 212 unseen objects. Code and models will be released at https://github.com/babynabeauty/GEAR-VLA.

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

GraphInfer-Bench: Benchmarking LLM's Inference Capability on Graphs

Graph analysis underlies many applications whose answers cannot be looked up in a single record or retrieved along a path: laundering rings, drug repurposing, user preference, and scientific theme are all inferred from a node together with its neighbourhood. We introduce GraphInfer-Bench, a benchmark for whether LLMs can perform this graph inference: producing an open-ended answer that no single node supports and no path retrieves. Existing graph-QA protocols cannot test this capability: algorithm simulation, node classification, single-node description, KG-QA, and GraphRAG all admit answers retrievable from one node or along a path. GraphInfer-Bench defines five tasks along Description (what a region is) and Comparison (how regions differ), each constructed so the ground truth lives in no single node. The release contains 42,000 samples across six real-world graphs, produced automatically and screened by a four-layer quality-control protocol. We evaluate four method families against the same tasks: graph-token alignment models, zero-shot frontier closed-source LLMs, Graph2Text supervised fine-tuning, and plain GNNs as a structural reference. No method family closes the gap. Graph-token alignment partially handles description tasks (relational, theme) but collapses on comparison tasks. Frontier LLMs lead on outlier detection and community partition among LLM-based methods but lag on masked-node prediction. Graph2Text SFT is the strongest LLM-based method on the description side yet falls behind frontier LLMs on comparison. Across every task, plain GNNs match or beat the strongest LLM-based row, with the largest margin on community detection. GraphInfer-Bench surfaces graph inference as an open capability gap rather than a property of any one architecture.

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

Code-Augur: Agentic Vulnerability Detection via Specification Inference

arXiv:2606.18619v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The advent of agentic vulnerability detection is already becoming a watershed moment for software security. Audits conducted entirely by autonomous LLM agents are uncovering critical vulnerabilities in fundamental software underpinning digital society. Many of these vulnerabilities remained masked for years, surfacing only now with AI agents. Yet the reasoning behind these discoveries remains alarmingly opaque and unvalidated. What assumptions did the agent make about a function's inputs when it deemed that function to be secure? Failures in reasoning and incorrect assumptions can lead to missed vulnerabilities and reduce trust in agentic analysis. We propose a security-specification-first paradigm that (1) exposes the agent's tacit assumptions explicitly as security specifications and (2) continuously refines those specifications via runtime falsification. We realize our approach in Code-Augur, a novel harness for agentic vulnerability detection. Given a codebase, Code-Augur analyzes each component of the system for vulnerable code. When it deems a component to be secure, it commits the local invariants behind that judgment as in-source assertions. In parallel, Code-Augur leverages a guided fuzzer to attempt to falsify those assumptions. When the fuzzer triggers an assertion, this either reveals a genuine vulnerability or a flawed specification to refine. In both cases, this process grounds the agent's understanding, aligning its view of code intent with how the code actually behaves. On real-world subjects, Code-Augur effectively leverages security specifications to detect more vulnerabilities than other state-of-the-art agents. Additionally, Code-Augur found 22 new vulnerabilities in key open-source projects. Compared to curated specialized models like Claude Mythos, Code-Augur offers effective agentic vulnerability detection built on widely available LLMs like Sonnet and DeepSeek.

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

Majorana bound states in a hybrid Kitaev ladder with long-range pairing

arXiv:2606.19963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate an inter-leg coupled hybrid Kitaev ladder composed of two parallel superconducting chains with distinct pairing interactions. The upper chain of the ladder hosts conventional $p$-wave pairing, while the lower chain exhibits long-range pairing that decays algebraically with distance. We demonstrate that the mutual influence of long-range pairing exponent, chemical potential, and inter-leg coupling strength gives rise to a rich topological phase diagram characterized by multiple Majorana zero modes and massive Dirac modes. In particular, we show that the inter-leg coupling renormalizes the effective energy scales, leading to a systematic shift of the topological phase boundaries and enabling controlled tuning of the Majorana modes. Furthermore, we identify a transition from a two Majorana zero mode phase to a phase encapsulating four Majorana zero modes, as the long-range pairing exponent is varied. This transition is accompanied by a crossover regime in which Majorana zero modes coexist with massive Dirac modes, reflecting hybridization between edge and bulk excitations. This ladder thus provides a minimal and attractive platform for realizing the impact of a long-range pairing on topological phases. Our results highlight the potential of long-range hybrid systems for engineering tunable topological states relevant for quantum information applications.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Nickel-Driven Dynamics of Urease in Sporosarcina pasteurii: Integrated Computational and Experimental Insights

Urease is a nickel-dependent enzyme that plays an important role in urea hydrolysis and in a process named as microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP), which is widely used in sustainable environmental biotechnology. Despite its ecological importance, urease powers Biogrout (biocementation), a promising green technology for soil stabilization and infrastructure repair. Yet, the relationship between nickel availability, enzyme activation, and bacterial fitness remains poorly understood. In this study, we reveal a striking dual effect of nickel on Sporosarcina pasteurii: while high Ni2+ concentrations strongly inhibit growth (IC50 {approx} 637.7 {micro}M), they simultaneously boost specific urease activity up to six-fold. This uncoupling between biomass and enzymatic efficiency highlights a previously overlooked adaptive strategy under metal stress. Using structural bioinformatics and molecular docking, we show that Ure1–the catalytic subunit–exhibits the strongest nickel affinity (-4.3 kcal{middle dot}mol-1), supported by highly conserved active-site residues, whereas accessory proteins UreE and UreG display moderate and weak binding, consistent with their roles in metal delivery and GTP-dependent maturation. In addition, microscopic observations confirmed that calcium carbonate precipitation was most pronounced at intermediate nickel concentrations (approximately 400-1000 {micro}M), whereas higher concentrations ([≥]1000-1300 {micro}M) led to reduced mineral formation due to loss viable cells. Taken together, these results indicates that nickel availability controls both urease activation and bacterial fitness, and that an optimal balance is required to maximize biomenerilization efficiency in environmental applications, particularly in biocementation technology.

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

Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA: From Vision-Language-Action Models to a Real-World Robot Learning Stack

arXiv:2606.14409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this report, we present Hy-Embodied-0.5-VLA, abbreviated as HyVLA-0.5, an end-to-end system that spans the full robot learning stack: data collection, model design, continued pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, RL post-training, and real-world deployment. Each component serves a distinct role in this stack.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

When Does Routing Become Interpretable? Causal Probes on Block Attention Residuals

arXiv:2606.13168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Block Attention Residuals (Block AttnRes) by replace fixed additive residuals with a learned softmax over earlier depth-source representations, surfacing cross-layer routing as an inspectable tensor in the forward pass. This is a tempting interpretability target: information flow normally inferred indirectly is now directly observable. We ask whether such exposure suffices for mechanistic interpretation. We probe two same-scale ($0.6$B) Block AttnRes checkpoints under identical routing-ablation interventions: a vanilla Qwen3 inference-wrapped through a deterministic recency-bias schedule that the codebase admits as a routing-equivalent loading path, and a Block AttnRes Qwen3 trained from scratch with routing as part of optimisation. The wrapped baseline's routing weights are content-independent and reproduce the schedule's analytic prediction. The trained AttnRes checkpoint instead exhibits three localised routing motifs: an embedding-source pathway through early-layer MLP, a current-state pathway through early-layer attention and MLP, and an older-history pathway through late-layer attention. Beyond this stratification, we find a sharp dissociation between average routing mass and causal importance: in both sublayers, the largest mass slice is not the largest causal contribution, and one source family carries appreciable mass with no detectable causal role under intervention. Architectural exposure of routing is therefore necessary but not sufficient for mechanistic interpretation: structured depth routing emerges only when routing has been part of training, and even then, descriptive routing summaries should be treated as candidate hypotheses to be tested by causal interventions, not as evidence of mechanism in their own right.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Beyond the Autoregressive Horizon: A Comprehensive Survey of Diffusion Models, World Modelling, and State Space Models for Code

arXiv:2606.23690v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autoregressive (AR) language models have driven significant progress in automated software engineering, enabling powerful code generation and assistance systems. However, the next-token prediction paradigm introduces structural limitations for code reasoning, including restricted global planning, challenges in maintaining long-range dependencies, and limited grounding in program execution semantics. Noting the heavy skewness of existing literature towards AR models, we discuss emerging paradigms that could potentially overcome the logic and scaling bottlenecks of next-token prediction by unlocking next-generation architectural capabilities for code intelligence. Specifically, we discuss the potential of Diffusion Models, which generate code via holistic denoising that captures long-range syntactic constraints often missed by AR models. We also discuss Code World Models (CWMs), which simulate execution states to support reasoning, and State Space Models (SSMs), which provide linear-time efficiency for massive contexts. By connecting these developments with findings from cognitive neuroscience, we outline directions for developing "System 2" code generation agents.

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

Unlocking air traffic flow prediction through microscopic aircraft-state modeling

arXiv:2605.10083v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Short-term air traffic flow prediction in terminal airspace is essential for proactive air traffic management. Existing approaches predominantly model traffic flow as aggregated time series. However, traffic dynamics are governed by aircraft states and their interactions in continuous airspace. Such aggregation obscures fine-grained information, including aircraft kinematics, boundary interactions, and control intent. Here we present AeroSense, a state-to-flow modeling paradigm that predicts future traffic flow directly from instantaneous airspace situations represented as dynamic sets of aircraft states derived from ADS-B trajectories. By establishing an end-to-end mapping from microscopic aircraft states to future regional traffic flow, AeroSense preserves aircraft-level dynamics while naturally accommodating varying traffic density without relying on historical look-back windows. Experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset show that AeroSense exhibits admirable predictive accuracy and robustness over aggregation-based forecasting approaches, particularly during high-density traffic periods. These findings suggest that aircraft-state situation modeling provides a promising alternative to conventional time-series forecasting in air traffic flow management.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, focal aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require to include a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features also for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, providing also substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

SLEEPING-DISCO 9M: A large-scale pre-training dataset for generative music modeling

arXiv:2506.14293v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Sleeping-DISCO 9M, a large-scale pre-training dataset for music and song. To the best of our knowledge, there are no open-source high-quality dataset representing popular and well-known songs for generative music modeling tasks such as text-music, music-captioning, singing-voice synthesis, melody reconstruction and cross-model retrieval. Past contributions focused on isolated and constrained factors whose core perspective was to create synthetic or re-recorded music corpus (e.g. GTSinger, M4Singer) and arbitrarily large-scale audio datasets (e.g. DISCO-10M and LAIONDISCO-12M) had been another focus for the community. Unfortunately, adoption of these datasets has been below substantial in the generative music community as these datasets fail to reflect real-world music and its flavour. Our dataset changes this narrative and provides a dataset that is constructed using actual popular music and world-renowned artists.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

EPIG: Emotion-Based Prompting for Personalised Image Generation

arXiv:2606.13247v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-image diffusion models have achieved impressive results in synthesizing high-quality images from natural language prompts. However, commonly used prompting strategies remain relatively generic, limiting the model's ability to accurately express emotional intent and nuanced affective attributes. This work proposes EPIG, a method that enhances emotional expressiveness at the prompt level prior to image generation. Grounded in psychologically informed emotion representations (valence-arousal) and leveraging structured, role-aware prompt enrichment, EPIG enriches emotion-related components of prompts without modifying or retraining the image generation backbone. The resulting emotion-aware prompts guide the generative process toward more emotionally coherent visual outputs, with particular effectiveness in controlling arousal. EPIG is lightweight, training-free, and well suited for resource-constrained and personalized image generation scenarios. Experimental results on a benchmark of 10 diverse prompts show that EPIG reduces mean arousal error compared to strong baselines, including naive insertion and LLM-based prompt expansion, with reductions of 14% and 12%, respectively. These improvements are statistically significant. EPIG also preserves valence alignment and semantic consistency, as measured by CLIPScore and supported by ablation studies. The effect is more pronounced on prompts containing explicit subjects such as humans, children, or animals, where the reduction reaches 17%, highlighting the subject-sensitive behavior of the proposed method.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

DynaWM: Dynamics-Aware Distillation with World Model and Momentum Targets for Smooth Locomotion over Continuous Stairs

arXiv:2606.24089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in control have enabled bipedal-wheeled robots to traverse slopes and single-step obstacles, yet long staircase traversal remains challenging as current teacher-student frameworks suffer from weakened dynamics-aware representations and incomplete terrain geometry encoding. To bridge this gap, we propose DynaWM, a dynamics-aware representation learning framework. To enhance terrain encoding capability and enable transparent assessment, we introduce a world model as a regularizer to enforce forward-dynamics awareness, preserving comprehensive terrain geometry while facilitating hierarchical encoding visualization. To stabilize knowledge transfer, we employ a momentum target encoder to provide consistent distillation targets, preventing dimensional collapse from non-stationary teacher updates. Evaluation of the learned representations through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) visualization and quantitative metrics reveals that our encoder hierarchically captures terrain geometry with higher terrain encoding capability, leading to enhanced terrain adaptability and motion smoothness. Experimental results in simulation and real hardware demonstrate that our method achieves superior terrain adaptability and motion smoothness, enabling bipedal-wheeled robots to overcome diverse continuous stairs, as shown in Fig. 1.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Distilling latent electrostatics from foundation machine learning interatomic potentials

arXiv:2606.15001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation machine learning interatomic potentials (MLIPs) have enabled atomistic simulations across broad regions of chemical and materials space, but many remain computationally expensive and lack explicit electrostatics, limiting their use for systems governed by long-range interactions and electrical response. Previously, we introduced Latent Ewald Summation (LES), which learns latent atomic charges and long-range electrostatics from density functional theory (DFT) energy and force labels alone. Here, we use LES to extract electrostatics that are latent in foundation models: energies and forces predicted by a teacher model are used to train a lightweight LES-augmented student MLIP, with optional fine-tuning on additional DFT data. The resulting models reduce computational cost while providing access to Born effective charge tensors, and infrared spectra. We benchmark student models distilled from a broad set of foundation MLIPs, including UMA, MACE, Orb, eSEN, GemNet-OC, PET, and EquiformerV2-based models, against experimental infrared spectra for liquid water, concentrated hydrochloric acid, and the anatase TiO2(101)-water interface. Across these systems, electrostatic response can be extracted from most foundation MLIPs. The benchmark further shows that the underlying DFT level and dataset used to train the teacher model play a larger role than architecture in determining electrostatic and spectroscopic accuracy. For the TiO2-water interface, fine-tuning with a modest amount of higher-level DFT data improves structural and infrared predictions. LES-based distillation therefore provides a practical route for converting foundation MLIPs into efficient, electrically responsive models, while also testing the physical fidelity encoded in foundation models.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

OCOO-T : A SIMPLE AND SCALABLE VIRTUAL CELL MODEL FOR TRANSCRIPTIONAL PERTURBATION RESPONSE PREDICTION

Predicting single-cell transcriptional responses to genetic, chemical and cytokine perturbations is a fundamental challenge in computational biology and AI Virtual Cell (AIVC) modeling, with direct implications for drug discovery and the elucidation of gene regulatory networks. Existing approaches often rely on auxiliary cell-state encoders, hierarchical variational autoencoders, dedicated Transformer encoder-decoder modules, or gene-interaction priors to compress high-dimensional expression profiles into latent representations. While effective, these designs increase architectural complexity and may limit scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces OCOO-T, a minimalist flow-matching-based AIVC model for transcriptional perturbation response prediction. OCOO-T utilizes a vanilla Transformer stack that operates directly on continuous gene expression profiles and formulates perturbation response prediction as a continuous-time denoising process. Perturbation embeddings, dosage information, and cell-line/cell-type specificity are integrated through adaptive layer normalization and in-context tokens. Comprehensive evaluations on Tahoe100M, Replogle, and PBMC benchmarks demonstrate that OCOO-T achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse perturbations and cell types while effectively scaling to long transcriptional profiles through patching and depatching of cellular contexts. By leveraging the simplicity of Transformer-based denoising for single-cell omics, OCOO-T provides an effective and scalable framework for in-silico cellular simulation.

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

Neural Slack Variables for Shape Constraints

arXiv:2606.13803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enforcing functional inequality constraints such as monotonicity and convexity in neural networks is a fundamental challenge in many industrial and scientific applications. Classical one-sided penalty methods, along with primal-dual methods gated by complementary slackness, provide constraint gradients only at violated locations, resulting in fragile satisfaction. Architectures that guarantee feasibility by construction, on the other hand, remain largely limited to elementary cases and impose additional inductive biases. We introduce neural slack variables, a deep learning native primal-side approach that converts constraint enforcement into a regression problem by coupling the primary network with a jointly learned auxiliary network. The auxiliary network serves as a valid target for the primary network's constraint quantities, inducing feasibility and regularity. Neural slack variables achieve zero measured violations on dense-grid monotonicity and convexity test cases, where penalty and primal-dual baselines leave residual violations, and enable arbitrage-free learning of volatility surfaces, an open industrial challenge in quantitative finance.

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

GOOSE-M2F: Adapting Mask2Former for High-Fidelity, Long-Tailed Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation in Unstructured Outdoor Terrain

We present GOOSE-M2F, a task-specific adaptation of Mask2Former for the GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation (FGSS) Challenge at ICRA~2026. The GOOSE benchmark spans 64 fine-grained classes across unstructured outdoor terrain with a severely long-tailed distribution, where rare classes occupy fewer than 50 pixels per image. We extend the Swin-Large Mask2Former baseline with three targeted contributions: (1)200 Object Queries to eliminate representational saturation; (2)a Feature Refinement Module (FRM) combining ASPP-lite and CBAM dual-attention; and (3)an Auxiliary Supervision Head that delivers direct per-pixel gradients for rare classes. A multi-stage training strategy pairs Distribution-Balanced loss, Rare-Class Copy-Paste augmentation, dynamic IoU-aware re-weighting, and EMA. At inference, a dense sliding-window engine with 2D Gaussian kernel blending and 4-scale TTA adds +10.57\%. GOOSE-M2F achieves 70.08\% Official Composite mIoU (63.55\% fine, 76.61\% coarse), placing 3rd on the GOOSE 2D FGSS leaderboard. Code and trained models are publicly available at: \href{https://github.com/Aditya-Lingam-9000/GOOSE-M2F}{Github GOOSE-M2F Code} and \href{https://huggingface.co/XYZ9843/GOOSE-M2F}{Hugging Face GOOSE-M2F}.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Screen-Free Haptic Breathwork with HRV-Adaptive Control, Pilot Outcomes and System Design

Vayu is a mobile breathwork system comprising an iOS companion app and Apple Watch application that delivers slow, resonant breathing using screen-free haptic cues, HRV-adaptive pacing, and reflective journaling grounded in Patanjali's five states of mind. The watchOS component provides tactile phase guidance and real-time biometric sensing (heart rate, HRV), while the iOS interface supports analytics and personalized recommendations. In a 4-6-week naturalistic pilot involving 199 adults (ages 22-65) across Canada, the United States, and India, participants engaged in daily 5-10-minute sessions guided by on-wrist haptics. Average adherence was 4.1 +/- 2.3 sessions per week, with 71% of active users maintaining at least 3 sessions per week. By week four, perceived stress (PSS-10) decreased by 2.5 points, resting heart rate declined by 7.4 bpm, and HRV increased by a median of 28.6% relative to baseline, accompanied by mood improvements. No adverse events were reported. HRV metrics are derived from Apple Watch PPG-based proxies and interpreted as relative trends. These findings suggest Vayu is effective and well-tolerated, demonstrating strong engagement and early efficacy signals.

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

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

WeaveBench: A Long-Horizon, Real-World Benchmark for Computer-Use Agents with Hybrid Interfaces

arXiv:2606.09426v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Computer-use agents (CUAs) increasingly operate in runtimes that combine visual desktop control, command-line execution, code editing, browsers, and external tools. Existing benchmarks, however, often evaluate these interfaces as separable capabilities, leaving long-horizon cross-interface orchestration under-tested. Thus, we introduce WeaveBench, a long-horizon hybrid-interface benchmark with 114 tasks across 8 real-world work domains, grounded in real user requests and publicly verifiable artifacts. Each task requires agents to combine GUI observations/actions with CLI/code operations within a single trajectory. We evaluate these tasks on a real Ubuntu desktop inside deployed CLI-agent runtimes, augmented with a minimal desktop-control plugin. We also propose a companion trajectory-aware judge that inspects deliverables, files, screenshots, logs, and action traces, while detecting shortcut behaviors such as fabricated visual evidence or hard-coded metrics. Across frontier model-runtime pairings, the best PassRate reaches only 41.2%, showing the benchmark remains far from saturated. The trajectory-aware judge further reveals that outcome-only grading substantially overestimates agent performance. Overall, WeaveBench exposes a critical gap in CUA evaluation and provides an effective testbed to measure whether agents can orchestrate GUI, CLI, and code operations across long-horizon real-world tasks.

24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Immunological mechanisms of mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases

Nucleoside-modified mRNA–lipid-nanoparticle (mRNA–LNP) vaccines confer a high level of protection against severe COVID-19 and, since their first authorization for human use in 2020, have saved millions of lives. The efficacy of this vaccine platform relies on the induction of powerful and coordinated innate and adaptive immune responses. A deep understanding of the mechanisms of action by which mRNA–LNP vaccines drive protective immunity is crucial for advancing the development of next-generation mRNA vaccines with improved immunogenicity and tolerability. A flurry of recent studies has shed light on aspects of this vaccine modality’s modus operandi. Nonetheless, key gaps in knowledge remain, including understanding how LNPs are sensed by the immune system and exert their adjuvant activity, identifying the specific signals and cellular pathways critical for eliciting protective immune responses and determining whether it is feasible to uncouple vaccine immunogenicity and reactogenicity. Here we review the known and unknown features of the immunological mechanisms of mRNA–LNP vaccines for infectious diseases. Furthermore, we discuss how the components of this vaccine platform can be modified to fine-tune immune responses against challenging pathogens for which effective vaccines do not exist or need improvement. A Review of the immunological mechanisms of mRNA–lipid-nanoparticle vaccines for infectious diseases discusses how the components of this vaccine platform can be modified to fine-tune immune responses against challenging pathogens.

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

Gradient boosting for extremes: sampling theory and application to insurance

arXiv:2606.14268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a statistical learning theory for gradient boosting applied to the estimation of covariate-dependent Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions in the context of Peaks-over-Threshold modeling. After an orthogonal reparametrization of the GP likelihood that diagonalizes its Fisher information matrix, we cast the estimation problem within the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework and derive non-asymptotic error bounds for the boosting estimator. Our analysis accounts for three distinct sources of error in the process: statistical fluctuations, the approximation bias inherent to the asymptotic nature of the GP model-controlled under second-order regular variation-and the approximation error associated with the finite number of boosting iterates, making explicit the resulting bias-variance trade-off. We illustrate the practical benefits of the reparametrization through simulations, showing that it significantly reduces gradient correlation during training and improves convergence stability. The methodology is applied to a medical malpractice insurance dataset from the Texas Department of Insurance, comprising over 18 000 closed claims. The gradient boosting approach yields a good fit for the tail of settlement cost distributions and reveals that the number of days to settlement is the dominant predictor of tail heaviness, consistent with earlier findings in the reserving literature.