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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Electric Field Distortions in Surface Ion Traps with Integrated Nanophotonics

arXiv:2503.20387v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of photonic components into surface ion traps provides a scalable approach for trapped-ion quantum computing, sensing, and metrology, enabling compact systems with enhanced stability and precision. However, the introduction of optical apertures in the trap electrodes can distort the trapping electric field. This can lead to excess micromotion (EMM) and ion displacement which degrade the performance of quantum logic operations and optical clocks. In this work, we systematically investigate the electric field distortion in a surface ion trap with integrated waveguides and grating couplers using Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations. We analyze methods to reduce these distortions by exploiting symmetries and transparent conductive oxide materials.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

HoloCell: A Generative Foundation Model for Holistic Cellular Modeling

Single-cell multi-omics technologies have recently advanced to enable the profiling of epigenomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic layers within individual cells, offering new opportunities to characterize cellular states as integrated biological systems. However, developing a unified framework that can seamlessly integrate diverse omics modalities and remain robust to heterogeneous modality missingness remains challenging. Here we present HoloCell, to our knowledge the first generative foundation model for joint representation learning and generative modeling across all three major single-cell omics modalities, i.e., epigenomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics. HoloCell contains over 860 million parameters and is pretrained on the Human-Multi-Omics-Corpus, which comprises approximately 468 million single-cell profiles across these three omics layers, corresponding to over 425 billion tokens. HoloCell introduces a simple yet biologically grounded hierarchical tokenization strategy that encodes cis-regulatory elements, genes, and proteins as structured tokens within a shared modeling framework. We evaluated HoloCell across single-omics representation learning, paired multi-omics integration, unpaired multi-omics alignment, and cross-modal generation via iterative diffusion and remasking, demonstrating its superior performance and flexibility across diverse omics tasks. From a representation perspective, HoloCell provides a unified digital mapping of cellular states across multiple omics layers, capturing cell heterogeneity as an integrated system. From a generation perspective, its iterative diffusion and remasking framework accounts for the inherently unordered nature of biological features, enabling in silico simulation of multi-omics information flow. Together, these capabilities position HoloCell as a versatile foundation model toward the emerging concept of a virtual cell, offering both systematic characterization and generative simulation of cellular systems within a unified framework.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Output Type Before Quality: A Standards-Derived XAI Admissibility Rubric for Autonomous-Driving Safety

arXiv:2606.05461v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety standards for ML-based autonomous driving specify the kind of evidence an assurance case must contain (directed cause-and-effect chains, quantified interventional effects, named root-cause variables), yet the XAI literature is organised by output type and technique family (saliency maps, feature attribution, counterfactuals, causal graphs, language traces). SHAP, the most-recommended ADS XAI method, returns a ranked feature list that no implementation effort can convert into a directed chain (Fig.1). We name this mismatch the evidence-type gap. From AMLAS, ISO 26262, ISO21448, ISO/PAS 8800 we derive 19 testable evidentiary criteria across 7 lifecycle stages with representative clause-cited derivations and score six XAI method classes structurally. Causal XAI emerges as structurally required to satisfy the derived criteria at three stages: hazard identification (+62% rubric gap), incident investigation (+50%), and data management (+50%); the verdict set is stable across thresholds T in (0%, 50%]$ and survives a worst-case single-cell flip down to T = 25%. At the remaining four stages, correlational or language-based methods are comparable or sufficient. The rubric identifies structural admissibility (necessary but not sufficient for compliance): an admissible method's specific output content may still be wrong, and validating that fidelity (the edges a fitted SCM produces, the cause a trace names) is the open assurance challenge. A single-VLA proof of concept on 1,996 real-world driving clips (79,840 rows, ten splits) is consistent with each method's observed output type matching its rubric prediction. XAI method selection for ADS safety assurance should be driven by lifecycle-stage evidence demand, not by method popularity.

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

Automated reproducibility assessments in the social and behavioral sciences using large language models

arXiv:2606.13670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reproducibility in the social and behavioral sciences is typically evaluated by independent researchers who reanalyze the original data to assess whether the published findings can be recovered. However, such approaches are resource-intensive and difficult to scale. Here, we show that large language models (LLMs) can automate reproducibility assessments. Using N=76 published studies with predefined claims from the behavioral and social sciences, we compare LLM-generated analysis with the original findings and human reanalysis. For 7 studies, the LLM could not produce a viable effect size estimate. For the remaining studies, our LLM pipeline recovered the original effect sizes in 41% of studies using a +/-0.05 tolerance in Cohen's d. Further, our LLM pipeline reached the same qualitative conclusion as the original study in 96% of cases, where conclusions indicate whether the reanalysis supports the original claim. For comparison, human reanalysts recovered the original effect sizes in 34% of studies and reached the same qualitative conclusion in 74% of cases. Together, these results show that LLMs can serve as a scalable tool for automated reproducibility assessment and provide a foundation for systematic auditing of empirical results in the social and behavioral sciences.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Composite Activation Function for Learning Stable Binary Representations

arXiv:2605.11558v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation functions play a central role in neural networks by shaping internal representations. Recently, learning binary activation representations has attracted significant attention due to their advantages in computational and memory efficiency, as well as interpretability. However, training neural networks with Heaviside activations remains challenging, as their non-differentiability obstructs standard gradient-based optimization. In this paper, we propose Heavy Tailed Activation Function (HTAF), a smooth approximation to the Heaviside function that enables stable training with gradient-based optimization. We construct HTAF as a sigmoid hyperbolic tangent composite function and theoretically show that it maintains a large gradient mass around zero inputs while exhibiting slower gradient decay in the tail regions. We show that Spiking Neural Networks, Binary Neural Networks and Deep Heaviside neural Networks can be trained stably using HTAF with gradient-based optimization. Finally, we introduce Implicit Concept Bottleneck Models (ICBMs), an interpretable image model that leverages HTAF to induce discrete feature representations. Extensive experiments across various architectures and image datasets demonstrate that ICBM enables stable discretization while achieving prediction performance comparable to or better than standard models.

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

Online Dynamic Batching with Formal Guarantees for LLM Training

arXiv:2606.19989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLM training breaks a core assumption behind offline batch samplers: the true training cost of a sample is only observable after preprocessing, augmentation, templating, tokenization, and multimodal visual-token expansion. Unless one pays for a preprocessing- and augmentation-dependent length cache, batch construction is therefore blind to the quantity that determines padding, memory use, and GPU saturation. We introduce Online Dynamic Batching (ODB), a DataLoader-side drop-in system that moves batch formation to this point of accurate observability while preserving DDP step alignment. We formalize this synchronization requirement as the Distributed Group Alignment Problem and prove deadlock-free bounded termination with default join-mode identity coverage and opt-in non-join sample-quota closure. ODB requires no model, optimizer, or attention-kernel changes and is released as online-dynamic-batching with lightweight trainer adapters. Across public 2B/8B Qwen3-VL runs on UltraChat/LLaVA/ShareGPT4o, ODB improves literal emitted-sample throughput vs. fixed-batch Standard by 1.58-2.51x on single-node Full FT/LoRA and 1.71-3.78x on two-node Full FT, with Standard-comparable quality; production MM-Mix reaches 4.43x. Against GMT/BMT offline token-budget oracles, ODB is within 15% on UltraChat/LLaVA and faster on high-CV ShareGPT4o: 2.24-2.39x single-node Full FT/LoRA and 3.06-3.69x two-node Full FT. Together, ODB occupies the online/drop-in regime for high-heterogeneity LLM fine-tuning: large throughput gains at Standard-comparable quality, formal DGAP guarantees, and no length-cache precompute or kernel rewrites.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DN-Hypo-Pipeline: An AI-Driven Workflow for Hypothesis Generation via Large Language Models and Scientific Explanations

arXiv:2606.08532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A scientific hypothesis is the first step in research and undergoes experimental validation, yet it also reflects a deep understanding of and reasoning about scientific phenomena. We introduce DN-Hypo-Pipeline, an AI-powered workflow based on large language models, designed to support structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation by leveraging scientific explanations as prior knowledge. This pipeline assists researchers in deriving novel hypotheses from existing literature. Given the explanandum (i.e., the conclusion) of a research paper, it identifies underlying laws, theories, and principles, and reconstructs a new, yet-to-be-verified explanation for the observed phenomenon. We evaluated DN-Hypo-Pipeline in the field of data science modeling using three highly cited papers. Statistical inference, supported by both LLM-as-judge assessment and human expert evaluation, demonstrates that our pipeline is more effective than direct generation methods. Additionally, we validated the two highest-scoring generated hypotheses by developing corresponding novel algorithms, which outperformed the baseline models presented in the original papers. Beyond application in data science, DN-Hypo-Pipeline provides a theoretical framework that not only encompasses theory-guided data science modeling methods but also reveals a more fundamental structure of the modeling process. Moreover, this approach is essentially a generalization of theory-guided modeling, offering potential for extension to other domains and across a broader range of scientific disciplines.

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

Scaling Human and G2P Supervision for Robust Phonetic Transcription

Expert phonetic annotation is costly, especially for non-standard dialects and atypical speech. A common alternative is using Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) models to auto-generate phonetic labels from text transcripts at scale. We study how automatic phonetic transcription performance scales with human and G2P supervision in English. Using a curated 80-hour benchmark spanning native, non-native and post-stroke speech, we identify a supervision quality threshold: G2P supervision helps only when fewer than 20-30 hours of human annotation are available. Beyond this threshold, it provides no significant benefit and can reduce cross-dialect robustness. What is effective after this threshold is ASR pretraining which we use to achieve a 2.3x reduction in weighted phone feature error rate over prior systems, with strong gains on non-native and aphasic speech. These results suggest that quantity-driven G2P scaling may yield diminishing returns for robust generalization.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Risk Stratification for ICU Delirium using Pervasive Ambient Sensing Information

arXiv:2606.19292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Delirium is a common and serious complication in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), associated with increased morbidity, prolonged hospital stays, and higher healthcare costs. Despite its prevalence, early prediction and prevention remain challenging. Environmental factors such as ambient sound and light may influence the onset of delirium, yet they are often overlooked in risk assessments. In this study, we examined whether light intensity and sound pressure levels can independently predict delirium across multiple prediction horizons. We evaluated four efficient sequential neural network models on data collected from 9 ICUs across 309 patients to predict delirium for 10 prediction-window sizes. We reported feature importance and direction of influence using Shapley Additive Explanations analysis. The convolutional model achieved the strongest discrimination, with AUC = 0.80 on sound data and on combined data. Sound features were the dominant predictors overall. Integrating sound with light improved short-term ($

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Instruct-Particulate: Scaling Feed-Forward 3D Object Articulation with Kinematic Control

Reconstructing articulated 3D objects is important for animation, gaming, and robotic simulations. Recent neural networks can estimate the articulated structure of 3D objects, but their generalization remains limited by the scarcity of annotated data for this task. To address this gap, we introduce Instruct-Particulate, a model that takes a 3D mesh together with a target kinematic specification, including part descriptions, connectivity, joint types, and optional point prompts, and predicts the corresponding kinematic part segmentation and joint motion parameters. The kinematic specification disambiguates the task and allows the model to target annotations of different granularity, thereby making it possible to use more abundant heterogeneous training data. At test time, the kinematic specification can be obtained automatically from large-scale vision-language models, so the model can be applied to any input mesh. To train our model at scale, we construct a heterogeneous dataset of more than 150,000 articulated 3D objects, extending existing publicly available collections with data obtained by partially labelling other 3D models (monolithic or already decomposed into parts) with kinematic labels by means of vision-language models. Experiments show that our model generalizes better across categories and to AI-generated meshes, enabling articulated asset reconstruction from real-world images via image-to-3D models.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

TransLaw: A Large-Scale Dataset and Multi-Agent Benchmark Simulating Professional Translation of Hong Kong Case Law

Translating Hong Kong Court Judgments from English to Traditional Chinese is mandated by Articles 8-9 of the Basic Law, yet remains constrained by a shortage of parallel resources and rigorous demands on legal terminology, citation format, and judicial style. We introduce HKCFA Judgment 97-22, the first large-scale sentence-aligned parallel corpus for HK case law, comprising 344 professionally translated judgments (11,099 sentence pairs; 2.1M tokens) spanning 1997-2022. Building on this resource, we propose TransLaw, a multi-agent framework that decomposes translation into word-level expression, sentence-level translation, and multidimensional review, integrating a specialized Hong Kong legal glossary database, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, and iterative feedback, with four-dimensional expert review covering semantic alignment, terminology, citation, and style. Benchmarking 13 open-source and commercial LLMs, we demonstrate that TransLaw significantly outperforms single-agent baselines across all evaluated models, with convergence within 3 iterations. Human evaluation by 10 certified legal translators using our proposed Legal ACS metric confirms gains in legal-semantic accuracy, while showing that TransLaw still trails human experts in stylistic naturalness. The dataset and benchmark code are available at https://github.com/xuanxixi/TransLaw.

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

Trustworthy Multi-Agent Systems: Mitigating Semantic Drift with the Argent Signaling Protocol

When multi-agent LLM systems produce bad answers, not all failures are equal: some answers are grounded in the right material but incomplete, while others are simply ungrounded and should be stopped. Current retry strategies treat both cases identically (try again and hope for the best), leaving human supervisors unable to tell whether a retry was warranted or whether the system should have halted instead. We introduce the Argent Signaling Protocol (ASP), a compact machine-readable header that accompanies every AI-generated response with structured quality signals: certainty (@C), grounding (@G), stochasticity (@S), and an assumption index that classifies the evidentiary basis of each claim. These signals enable a controller to distinguish repairable failures from containment failures and route each case differently. We evaluate ASP in two modes. In standalone mode, a 27-question document-grounded QA benchmark over the Array BioPharma/Ono license agreement compares baseline prompts against ASP-instrumented controller actions across three local GGUF models. On Qwen~(0.8B), ASP improves pass rate from 11.1% to 33.3% and mean term coverage from 36.7% to 65.4%; on Dobby~(8B), ASP produces 4 fail-to-pass recoveries, raising pass rate from 33.3% to 44.4%; on SmolLM3~(3B), ASP alternates between repair and containment per question. Aggregate improvement is meaningful (12/81 to 21/81 passes). In multi-agent mode, an ASP sidecar sits between a retrieval agent and a downstream decision agent; the sidecar blocks 100% of ungrounded upstream outputs from reaching the downstream agent (24/27 blocked, 0 ungrounded propagations).

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

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Interaction geometry and ground-state properties of sparse quantum lattice models

arXiv:2606.20387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how interaction geometry shapes the low-energy phases of sparse tunable long-range quantum models. We focus on a class of graphs whose degree grows logarithmically with system size, and show how symmetry and frustration in graph connectivity can drive, suppress, and reshape ground-state phase transitions. The central examples are power-of-$p$ graphs, where even and odd values of $p$ exhibit qualitatively distinct behaviour: even-$p$ graphs inherit the rich phase structure of the power-of-two model, while odd-$p$ graphs are governed by geometric frustration. Fibonacci graphs provide a contrasting case, lacking the discrete self-similarity of the power-of-$p$ family but exhibiting a direct geometric mapping between the short- and long-range limits. Across our models, we find that phase structure and criticality are governed by the same effective-geometry principle, unifying our framework for experimentally motivated long-range quantum systems.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Global population frequencies of NAT2 star alleles observed in three large biobanks

NAT2 is an important pharmacogene which encodes the N-acetyltransferase 2 enzyme that is involved in the metabolism of multiple medications, and variants in this gene can affect patient response to these medications. CPIC has published a clinical guideline for prescribing hydralazine using NAT2 genotypes. Just prior to the guideline, updated NAT2 star allele numbering and definitions were released, differing somewhat from the historical nomenclature. Clinical pharmacogenomic testing panels often test for the most common star alleles, so knowledge of the most common updated NAT2 star alleles is critical for the implementation of the CPIC NAT2/hydralazine guideline. We first determine NAT2 diplotype frequencies from UK Biobank (UKBB) 200k phased genomes, then analyzed allele, diplotype, and phenotype population frequencies from the All of Us Research program, PennMedicine BioBank (PMBB) and UKBB 500k datasets. We found that analyzing NAT2 diplotypes from phased data provides critical information for algorithms designed to predict diplotypes from unphased data. We observed that NAT2*5, *6, and *4 were the most common star alleles in that order, and the top 11 most frequent NAT2 star alleles were the same across all biobanks. However, differences in star allele frequencies across biogeographical populations were observed. The largest difference led to a higher frequency of NAT2 poor metabolizer phenotypes as compared to rapid and intermediate metabolizer phenotypes in all global populations except in the EAS population, where NAT2 poor metabolizers were in the minority.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Entanglement dynamics for atoms near a reflecting boundary: Enhancement and suppression by environment-induced interactions

arXiv:2602.23773v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate how environment-induced interactions influence the entanglement dynamics of two atoms held at fixed positions near a perfectly reflecting boundary. Within the framework of open quantum systems, we explicitly incorporate the environment-induced energy shifts, including both atom-boundary contributions and an environment-induced atom-atom interaction, which are often neglected in previous studies. We show that, for any initial two-atom state, these energy-shift effects qualitatively and quantitatively modify the entanglement dynamics relative to treatments that omit them. Depending on the geometry and parameter regime, the environment-induced interactions can either enhance entanglement generation – yielding a larger maximum concurrence and a longer entanglement lifetime – or suppress it, reducing both the peak concurrence and the survival time. This behavior contrasts sharply with the free-space case, where the environment-induced atom-atom interaction affects entanglement generation only for a restricted class of initial states and does so in an exclusively assisting manner.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

"Us with them": Co-designing a caesarean section consent and debriefing intervention in West Cameroon

Background Women-centred maternity care is a rights issue that determines the use of services. Such care ensures responsiveness to womens needs which is enacted through shared decision-making, review and response. In the West Region of Cameroon, informed consent (IC) and Debriefing for caesarean section (c-section) have been shown to be suboptimal or absent. This paper describes the participatory design of a quality-improvement hospital-based intervention. Methods From February to May 2025, we conducted a co-design process with three groups of stakeholders: 59 post c-section women and community representatives, 78 frontline c-section providers, and 29 directors of public and private hospitals. We followed four phases: planning, conducting, evaluating, and reporting. The conduct phase comprised five all-day workshops with post c-section women and community representatives, followed by five all-day workshops with the c-section providers. Finally, we held an 11th workshop with the hospital directors to scrutinize suggested interventions, evaluate their feasibility, and establish a consensus on their components. We described the intervention using the TIDieR (Template for Intervention Description and Replication) checklist. We documented the co-design process, using open-ended narratives to delineate interventions, and carried out real-time synthesis on visual aids (whiteboards and flipcharts). Intervention feasibility was quantified using a structured ad hoc matrix, while insights on facilitators and barriers were captured through qualitative free-text entries. We coupled data collection with constant comparison and triangulation through contemporaneous field notes, photographic documentation, and thematic mapping of stakeholders perceptions and interactive dynamics. Results Participants perspectives on the co-design were positive, and their motivation were very high although less than 50% reported previous involvement in co-design processes. More than 80% of participants found rated the co-design process as either good or very good. The final intervention comprised four components: (i) an in-service training; (ii) a standard operating procedure including a harmonised consent form and debriefing checklist; (ii) systematic supportive supervision, monitoring & evaluation; and (iv) a routine clinical audit. Each group of stakeholders upheld specific dimensions of the consent and debrief intervention. Post c-section women and community members emphasized emotional support, written discharge advice after debriefing, and zero tolerance of suboptimal consent and debriefing practices. Frontline c-section providers insisted on robust documentation for medico-legal protection. Hospitals Directors emphasized capacity-building and cultural friendliness. All the groups supported womans autonomous decision making. The intervention feasibility was rated high or very high by hospital directors except for the financial, infrastructural and technical domains. Conclusion This co-design process yielded a context-specific, multi-component intervention that was well accepted and deemed feasible across stakeholders. It provides a methodological approach to strengthening informed consent and debriefing as core elements of women-centred, accountable maternity care, and warrants implementation.

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

FreeSonic: Training-Free Temporal-Aware Decoupled Attention for Precise Audio Editing

arXiv:2606.15186v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Text-to-audio (TTA) generation has made significant strides, yet achieving precise and consistent audio editing remains a major challenge. However, existing methods struggle to balance temporal consistency with background preservation. In this paper, we propose FreeSonic, a training-free framework leveraging the state-of-the-art Rectified Flow-based TangoFlux model. FreeSonic utilizes an optimized inversion-reverse process and joint text-audio attention maps for precise target segment extraction. For content editing, a novel scheduled attention decoupling confines modifications to target regions while preserving original acoustic context. Furthermore, task-oriented noise injection enhances versatility for tasks such as audio removal and non-rigid replacement. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FreeSonic achieves a superior balance by providing a high-fidelity and efficient solution for precise and consistent audio editing. Project and demos: https://free-sonic.github.io/

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

FENNEC: Fine-Tuned Ensemble Neural Networks Accelerate Chemically Modified siRNA Design and Screening

Small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) are a clinically validated therapeutic modality, yet designing potent chemically modified siRNAs remains a costly and iterative process, limited by scarce public data. Computational prediction of siRNA efficacy is therefore essential for rational design and accelerated preclinical development. However, despite the critical role of chemical modifications in therapeutic performance, current state-of-the-art machine learning methods either are not designed to model the chemical diversity of therapeutic siRNAs, or exhibit poor generalization performance. Here, we present FENNEC (Fine-Tuned Ensemble of Neural Networks for siRNA Efficiency Characterization), a machine-learning framework for predicting siRNA activity across chemically diverse design spaces. To support this effort, we curated the largest patent-derived dataset to date of chemically modified siRNAs from 42 patents using OCR-based table extraction and stringent filtering. FENNEC combines temporal convolutional networks with thermodynamic descriptors, experimental covariates, and embeddings from RNA foundation models to capture both local chemical determinants and broader target-context information. Importantly, we show that language-model-derived embeddings provide meaningful higher-order representations of target transcripts, particularly in data-scarce settings. FENNEC achieved robust predictive performance across both gene-level and scaffold-level validation settings, with additional experimental validation on a novel AHSA1-targeting dataset further supporting its generalizability across chemically modified siRNAs. In benchmarking, FENNEC outperformed classical machine-learning and state-of-the-art deep learning models, demonstrating generalization to unseen chemistry. Model interpretation recovered established design principles, including position-specific effects of glycol nucleic acid, 2'-fluoro modifications, and phosphorothioate backbones. Furthermore, in silico perturbation analyses suggest that FENNEC can serve not only as a predictive model, but also as an oracle for the design and optimization of chemically modified siRNAs. Together, our work addresses a key gap in the field by enabling chemically aware deep learning for siRNA design, supported by a large and diverse collection of chemically modified siRNA measurements.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Taming I2V models for Image HOI Editing: A Cognitive Benchmark and Agentic Self-Correcting Framework

Current image editing methods excel at static attributes but fail at complex Human-Object Interactions (HOI), a critical challenge unaddressed by existing benchmarks that conflate HOI with static attributes, relying on global metrics incapable of simultaneously assessing dynamic interaction validity and entangled human-object pair preservation. Thus, we first introduce HOI-Edit, a comprehensive benchmark with three progressive cognitive levels, which features an automated metric HOI-Eval that reliably evaluates instance-level interaction by letting VLM Q&A after thinking with images containing grounded Human-Object pairs. Considering the task's essence of remodeling dynamic relationships, we benchmark Image-to-Video (I2V) models, finding them inherently suited for dynamic editing due to their temporal generation capabilities. Crucially, beyond superior performance, this capability provides a "replay of the failure process," offering unique diagnosability into why errors occur. We thus propose SCPE (Self-Correcting Process Editing), a novel, agentic self-correcting framework that constrains the generation of I2V models through iteratively refined prompts, enabling the generated videos to more accurately present the target HOI. Extracted frames from these videos are the final editing results. On HOI-Edit, SCPE achieves performance competitive with state-of-the-art (SOTA) editing models like Nano Banana on interaction. Code is available at https://github.com/oceanflowlab/HOI-Edit.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Beyond-Third-Order Quantum Coherence in Two-Dimensional Spectroscopy via Order-Selective Isolation

arXiv:2606.12794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central challenge in nonlinear spectroscopy is the order-selective readout of weak higher-order responses that spectrally overlap with dominant lower-order signals. This bottleneck is particularly severe in two-dimensional (2D) spectroscopy, where extending conventional phase-cycling schemes to higher orders rapidly increases measurement and analysis complexity. Here we introduce a computation-assisted strategy that combines rotating-frame acquisition with a frame-shift tracking algorithm to separate signals by their frame-dependent spectral shifts. In a rubidium vapor experiment, we use this approach to isolate a 7th-order nonlinear contribution from coexisting 3rd-order components, enabling direct access to higher-order quantum-coherence dynamics without sacrificing operation at comparatively high pulse intensities. The method is broadly compatible with multidimensional spectroscopy platforms and provides a practical route to probing many-body and collective ultrafast dynamics beyond third order.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

From Memorization to Creation: Evaluating the Cognitive Depth of LLM-Generated Educational Questions

arXiv:2606.18257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LLMs show promise in automating educational content creation, their ability to generate questions that stimulate higher-order thinking remains understudied. This work evaluates six widely-used LLMs through a Bloom's Taxonomy lens, focusing on their capacity to transcend rote memorization and achieve cognitive leaps. Using a hybrid human–AI evaluation protocol, we generate and analyze 20{,}700 questions across computer science, K–12 math, and social-science domains. Key contributions include: (1) a fine-grained prompting strategy that reduces question repetitiveness by 24.45\% for Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and increases the proportion of higher-order cognitive level outputs by 11.53\% for InternLM3-8B-Instruct; (2) quantitative metrics for cognitive shift intensity (CogShift) and category drift, revealing InternLM3's superior performance in multi-level transitions; (3) an interpretability analysis revealing metric-level correlations that enhance the transparency of Chain-of-Thought prompting. Our findings highlight the importance of cognitive-aware prompt design and provide benchmarks for deploying LLMs in personalized learning systems.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

arXiv:2606.04935v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Reasoning in Computer Vision: Taxonomy, Models, Tasks, and Methodologies

Visual reasoning matters for many computer vision tasks that go beyond surface-level object detection and classification. Despite progress in relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense reasoning, existing surveys typically cover only one part of the problem, such as visual question answering, scene-graph generation, neuro-symbolic AI, or multimodal chain-of-thought, and rarely analyze reasoning types, methodologies, and evaluation protocols together. This survey addresses that gap. Following a structured literature review, we group visual reasoning into five major types (relational, symbolic, temporal, causal, and commonsense) and examine how each is implemented across methods that range from graph-based models, memory networks, attention mechanisms, and neuro-symbolic systems to reasoning with vision-language models (VLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs), including visual chain-of-thought, visual programming, and tool-augmented and test-time reasoning. We then review evaluation protocols for functional correctness, structural consistency, and causal validity, and we analyze their limits in generalizability, reproducibility, faithfulness, and explanatory power. We also identify open challenges: scaling to complex scenes, integrating symbolic and neural paradigms more deeply, the shortage of comprehensive benchmarks, language-prior shortcuts and hallucination in foundation models, and reasoning under weak supervision. Finally, we set out a research agenda for vision systems and argue that connecting perception and reasoning is necessary for transparent, trustworthy, and cross-domain models, especially in high-stakes settings such as autonomous driving and medical diagnostics.