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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Weakly Supervised Segmentation as Semantic-Based Regularization

Weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) trains dense pixel-level segmentation models from partial or coarse annotations such as bounding boxes, scribbles, or image-level tags. While recent work leverages foundation models such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM) to generate pseudo-labels, these approaches typically depend on heuristic prompt choices and offer limited ways to incorporate prior knowledge or heterogeneous labels. We address this gap by taking a neurosymbolic perspective: integrating differentiable fuzzy logic with deep segmentation models. Weak annotations and domain-specific priors are unified as continuous logical constraints that fine-tune SAM under weak supervision. The refined foundation model then produces improved pseudo-labels, from which we train a second-stage prompt-free segmentation model. Experiments on Pascal VOC 2012 and the REFUGE2 optic disc/cup segmentation dataset show that our logic-guided fine-tuning yields higher-quality pseudo-labels, leading to state-of-the-art segmentation accuracy that often exceeds densely supervised baselines.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

What Must Generalist Agents Remember?

arXiv:2606.18746v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper develops a formal account of what generalist agents must store in memory in order to act near-optimally across multiple environments and goals. It shows that when two domains share an observational bottleneck but require incompatible optimal actions, any uniformly near-optimal policy must induce distinct memory distributions at that bottleneck. The result yields a separation theorem: sufficiently successful agents cannot rely only on current state observations, but must preserve domain-relevant information in memory. The paper further shows that if an agent's memory contains enough information to estimate values for related goals, then that memory can be used to approximately reconstruct the agent's local transition dynamics. Together, these results characterize memory as the substrate that supports domain disambiguation, transition-model reconstruction, and planning for generalist agents.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Flow Matching for Efficient and Scalable Data Assimilation

arXiv:2508.13313v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) estimates a dynamical system's state from noisy observations. Recent generative models like the ensemble score filter (EnSF) improve DA in high-dimensional nonlinear settings but are computationally expensive. We introduce the ensemble flow filter (EnFF), a training-free, flow matching (FM)-based framework that accelerates sampling and offers flexibility in flow design. EnFF uses Monte Carlo estimators for the marginal flow field, localized guidance for observation assimilation, and utilizes a novel flow path that exploits the Bayesian DA formulation. It generalizes classical filters such as the bootstrap particle filter and ensemble Kalman filter. Experiments on high-dimensional benchmarks demonstrate EnFF's improved cost-accuracy tradeoffs and scalability, highlighting FM's potential for efficient, scalable DA. Code is available at https://github.com/Utah-Math-Data-Science/Data-Assimilation-Flow-Matching.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LineageMark: Multi-user White-box Watermarking for Contribution Tracing in Model Derivation Chains

arXiv:2606.17123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In open large language model (LLM) ecosystems, models are frequently adapted across multiple domains and applications, forming multi-stage derivation chains. Consequently, tracking and verifying historical contributions is essential for model provenance and intellectual property protection. However, existing watermarking methods are mainly designed for single-user, one-time embeddings, often fail under repeated model derivation and incremental updates. To address this problem, we propose LineageMark, a multi-user white-box watermarking framework for model derivation chains. The framework encodes watermarks in model parameters using a projection-based approach. Stable carriers are first selected to reduce sensitivity to model changes, each watermark bit is then represented as a projection statistic over these carriers. Additional watermark insertions introduce only bounded perturbations in the projection space, and margin constraints are used to maintain signal integrity. We evaluate the effectiveness of LineageMark in multi-stage model derivation chains. Experimental results show that LineageMark preserves contributor watermarks across multi-stage derivation and supports incremental multi-user watermark insertion. Furthermore, it exhibits robustness against perturbations such as re-watermarking, fine-tuning, quantization, and pruning.

05.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Distributed control circuits across a brain-and-cord connectome

Just as genomes revolutionized molecular genetics, connectomes (maps of neurons and synapses) are transforming neuroscience. To date, the only organisms with complete connectomes are worms1–3, sea squirts4, and comb jellies5 (103–104 synapses). By contrast, the fruit fly is more complex (108 synaptic connections), with a brain that supports learning and spatial memory6,7 and an intricate ventral nerve cord analogous to the vertebrate spinal cord8–12. Here we report the first densely-reconstructed adult fly connectome that unites the brain and ventral nerve cord, and we leverage this resource to investigate principles of neural control. We show that effector neurons (motor neurons, endocrine cells, and efferent neurons targeting the viscera) are primarily influenced by sensory neurons in the same body part, forming local feedback loops. These local loops are linked by long-range circuits involving ascending and descending neurons organized into behavior-centric modules. Single ascending and descending neurons are often positioned to influence the voluntary movements of multiple body parts, together with the endocrine cells or visceral organs that support those movements. Brain regions involved in learning and navigation supervise these circuits. These results reveal an architecture that is distributed, parallelized, and embodied, reminiscent of distributed control architectures in engineered systems13,14.

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

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Single-Image Entanglement Verification with Spatially Encoded Measurement Contexts

arXiv:2606.15382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entangled photon pairs produced by spontaneous parametric down-conversion exhibit rich spatial entanglement structure that is often difficult to probe with conventional measurements. Here, we show that spin-orbit optical elements can convert this spatial structure into directly observable quantum interference patterns. Using a $q$-plate, we demonstrate that the relative wavefront curvature of biphoton states generated by a pair of nonlinear crystals can be retrieved from the spatial modulation of coincidence images. Building on this principle, we introduce a liquid-crystal metasurface that performs spatially multiplexed Bell measurements across the transverse profile of the photon field. The device, which we call a Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt (CHSH) plate, assigns different polarization projections to different azimuthal sectors of the beam, allowing the sixteen joint measurements required for a CHSH test to be realized simultaneously in a single acquisition. In this architecture, the spatial coordinate acts as a classical register selecting the measurement context, while photon pairs sample these contexts according to their emission directions. We further demonstrate that the same measurement concept can be implemented using a programmable spatial light modulator, providing a dynamically reconfigurable realization of the scheme. Our results show that spatially structured optical elements can transform Bell tests into parallel measurements distributed across the transverse plane, enabling rapid characterization of spatially varying entanglement. This approach opens new possibilities for structured-light quantum measurements, Bell-inequality-based imaging, and the study of spatially engineered entangled photon sources.

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

Self-Supervised Learning of Iterative Solvers for Constrained Optimization

arXiv:2409.08066v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The real-time solution of parametric optimization problems is critical for applications that demand high accuracy under tight real-time constraints, such as model predictive control. To this end, this work presents a learning-based iterative solver for constrained optimization, comprising a neural network predictor that generates initial primal-dual solution estimates, followed by a learned iterative solver that refines these estimates to reach high accuracy. We introduce a novel loss function based on Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) optimality conditions, enabling fully self-supervised training without pre-solved optimizer solutions. Theoretical guarantees ensure that the training loss function attains minima exclusively at KKT points. A convexification procedure enables application to nonconvex problems while preserving these guarantees. Experiments on two nonconvex case studies demonstrate speedups of up to one order of magnitude compared to state-of-the-art solvers such as IPOPT, while achieving orders of magnitude higher accuracy than competing learning-based approaches.

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

PAL-Bench: Evidence-Grounded Profile Reconstruction from Longitudinal Personal Albums

arXiv:2606.16175v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Longitudinal personal albums are weak-schema multimodal databases: noisy perceptual records whose key facts require joins across faces, text, timestamps, locations, and repeated events. Existing visual, video, document, and lifelog benchmarks test sub-problems, but not album-scale profile reconstruction with social identity binding and evidence citation. Benchmarking this task is difficult because the ground truth needed for evaluation–owner profiles, social graphs, face-name maps, and evidence provenance–is private state that real albums cannot safely release. We introduce PAL-Bench, a controlled benchmark for evidence-grounded reconstruction under a public-record contract. Its Evidence Compiler builds latent private worlds, programs target-level evidence paths, renders album pixels, re-measures them through perception pipelines, and exports audited public/private views. Agents receive only perception-derived public records; targets, identifier maps, and evidence paths remain hidden. PAL-Bench contains 50 synthetic users, 36,659 public photo records, and 2,799 targets over owner facts, identities, and relations. A privacy-preserving audit with 10 participants confirms that PAL-Bench evidence structures match real private albums, though equivalent releases remain privacy-prohibitive. Across seven systems and two compute-matched diagnostics, a seven-metric protocol reveals a gap between plausible profile summarization and faithful social reconstruction: systems recover some owner facts but struggle with recurring identities and evidence citation. PAL-TRACE, a reference framework that freezes identity bindings before owner-fact mining, performs best but leaves hard identity resolution far from solved. PAL-Bench provides a testbed for perceptual entity resolution, multimodal data integration, temporal evidence aggregation, and provenance-aware structured prediction.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Electrical signatures of divergent connectivity in the human subgenual cingulate cortex

Background: Major depressive disorder remains a leading cause of disability. While subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC) deep brain stimulation (DBS) shows promise for medically refractory depression, clinical outcomes have been heterogeneous, suggesting that individual differences in neural circuitry engagement may critically influence therapeutic efficacy. We aimed to define the electrophysiological signatures of sgCC efferent connectivity using single-pulse electrical stimulation (SPES) with intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) to inform rational targeting and physiological biomarkers for sgCC-DBS. Methods: In four patients undergoing clinically indicated sEEG for seizure mapping, SPES was delivered through sgCC pairs, while distributed brain stimulation-evoked potentials (BSEPs) were recorded across cortical and subcortical sites. Responses were characterized using Canonical Response Parameterization to extract reproducible waveforms and per-trial reliability. Results: sgCC stimulation elicited reproducible, spatially organized BSEPs across frontal, limbic, and paralimbic networks, aligning with known anatomical pathways. Frontal recruitment featured robust, lateralized orbitofrontal activation favoring the ipsilateral central, medial OFC and bilateral ventromedial prefrontal responses. Limbic effects demonstrated bilateral cingulate activation with stronger ipsilateral recruitment and lateralized amygdala and hippocampal responses. Paralimbic engagement included insular responses with subject-specific anterior predominance and bi-hemispheric temporal-polar slow-wave deflections. Conclusion: These findings provide direct electrophysiological evidence of distributed, lateralized sgCC divergent network connectivity in the human brain, offering physiologic confirmation of its role in affective circuitry. The observed topography and laterality have direct applications for sgCC-DBS targeting and implicate BSEP signatures as candidate biomarkers to guide patient-specific therapy.

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

Deontic Policies for Runtime Governance of Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.19464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agentic AI systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce a new class of security, privacy, and compliance challenges: an agent that can invoke tools, manipulate data, install software, and coordinate with peer agents across organizational boundaries must be constrained not just by authentication and access control, but by the full structure of enterprise governance. This includes specifying what agents are permitted and prohibited from doing, what they areobliged to do after certain actions (e.g., notify the CISO), under what conditions a standing obligation may be waived, and which rules take precedence when policies conflict. This governance problem exceeds what current policy engines provide. Systems such as XACML, Rego, and Cedar address only the permit/prohibit subset of this governance structure. They do not provide obligation lifecycle management, meta-policy conflict resolution, dispensations that waive obligations in specific circumstances, and ontological reasoning over domain class hierarchies commonly found in applications such as healthcare, cybersecurity, or data privacy. We propose AgenticRei, which realizes key governance requirements such as obligations, dispensations, policy conflict resolutions, and reasoning over policies, as well as the basic permit/prohibit constraints. We use a deontic policy language built on the Rei framework, expressed as OWL (Web Ontology Language) and evaluated at runtime by a high-performance logic engine entirely outside the LLM. The same pipeline governs both tool invocations by the agent and agent-to-agent messages. We show through examples that deontic policies capture governance constraints around security and privacy that mostly cannot be expressed in current production engines. Our approach composes naturally with industry-standard frameworks like A2AS.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

First, do NOHARM: towards clinically safe large language models

arXiv:2512.01241v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are routinely used by physicians and patients for medical advice, yet their clinical safety profiles remain poorly characterized. We present NOHARM (Numerous Options Harm Assessment for Risk in Medicine), a 1,100-task benchmark of primary care-to-specialist consultation cases to measure the frequency and severity of harm from LLM-generated medical recommendations. NOHARM covers 10 specialties, with 12,747 expert annotations for 4,249 clinical management options. Across 28 LLMs, recommendations carried the potential for severe harm in up to 22.6% of cases, with errors of omission accounting for more than 80% of severe errors. In a randomized trial of 101 generalist physicians, human benchmark performance significantly improved with AI assistance, yet physicians remained far from realizing the potential of AI tools, frequently ignoring essential advice surfaced by AI. Safety performance tracked general-intelligence and medical-knowledge benchmarks across the full range of models but decoupled at the frontier. Despite strong performance on existing evaluations, widely used AI models can produce medical advice with the potential for severe harm at non-trivial rates, highlighting the importance of explicit measurement of clinical safety.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Online Distributional Prediction via Latent Cluster Geometry Under Drift and Corruption

arXiv:2606.18778v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online learning in non-stationary streams is often formulated as tracking a point estimate, but many applications require predicting the full data-generating distribution. We study online distributional prediction under drift and adversarial corruption. Our approach represents each candidate law through a latent cluster geometry: a variable-size configuration of centers that organizes probability mass and induces a predictive distribution. A Gibbs quasi-posterior over these configurations yields an online predictor by posterior averaging, and the resulting variable-dimensional posterior can be sampled with reversible-jump MCMC. The method therefore avoids specifying a parametric streaming law while retaining a structured latent space for uncertainty, regularization, and comparison. We evaluate performance by cumulative Wasserstein-1 regret against the time-varying true law. The analysis separates two effects: corruption perturbs the loss-based posterior update, whereas drift makes long-horizon posterior memory stale. We address the latter with a restarted variant that temporally localizes the same quasi-Bayesian update. The resulting high-probability bounds decompose into a PAC-Bayesian complexity term, a corruption-sensitive posterior perturbation term, and a dynamic optimal-transport term driven by \(A_T^{\mathrm{OT}}=\sum_{t=2}^T W_2^2(p_{t-1}^*,p_t^*)\). Under bounded support, stable latent geometry, predictive-map regularity, oracle realizability, localized restart windows, sublinear transport action, and sublinear corruption budget, the restarted predictor achieves sublinear cumulative Wasserstein regret. These guarantees require no parametric model for the stream, drift mechanism, or corruption process.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

The Erdős-Hajnal High-Girth Subgraph Conjecture Holds in the Polynomial Chromatic-Sparsity Regime

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For a graph $G$ put $h_r(G)=\max{\chi(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r}.$ Erdős and Hajnal asked whether $h_r(G)\to\infty$ as $\chi(G)\to\infty$, for every fixed $r\ge4$. We prove this in every fixed polynomial edge-density regime: for all $r\ge4$, $k\ge2$, $P,C>0$, there is $M=M_{r,k}(P,C)$ such that $\chi(G)\ge M,\ e(G)\le C\chi(G)^P\Longrightarrow h_r(G)\ge k.$ Quantitatively, after replacing $P$ by $P\vee2$ and $C$ by $C\vee2$, $M_{r,k}(P,C)\le \exp!\left(O_{r,k}\bigl((P+2+\log(C\vee2))^2\bigr)\right),$ and consequently the same conclusion holds throughout the quasi-polynomial range $e(G)\le \exp\bigl(C_0(\log\chi(G))^a\bigr),\ 1 < a < 3/2,$ for all sufficiently large $\chi(G)$. In each fixed polynomial-density regime we also obtain $f_{P,C}(k,r)\le k^{O_{r,P,C}(1)}.$ The proof combines a chromatic-defect random extraction lemma, compact and near-quadratic sparse-core bases, and a peeling/thinning bootstrap increasing the admissible edge exponent by $1/(r-1)$. We also prove structural saturation results for possible counterexamples, including Moore-strength exact-cycle packings and quadratic saturation in projected colour-pair space. Finally, writing $h_r^{\mathrm f}(G)=\max{\chi_{\mathrm f}(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r},$ we develop a fractional random-extraction framework based on Mohar-Wu preservation. We prove sufficient cheap-cycle-killing criteria and verify them for several structured families, including clique-organised families, line graphs of incidence graphs of equal-order generalized quadrangles and generalized hexagons, and the Bohman-Keevash tracking-time triangle-free-process graph. We also isolate a density-free obstruction that any proof using this fractional surgery route must overcome.

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

AdaSTORM: Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2606.16328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable potential in dynamic graph reasoning, but suffer from a scaling bottleneck: current models can only handle graphs with tens of nodes, constrained by exponential reasoning overhead and finite context windows. While multi-agent systems (MAS) offer collective reasoning and topology-aware orchestration, capabilities naturally suited for graph-structured tasks, their application to dynamic graphs remains unexplored. This paper presents Scaling LLM Reasoning on Dynamic Graphs via Adaptive Spatio-Temporal Multi-Agent Collaboration (AdaSTORM), a framework that reformulates large-scale dynamic graph reasoning into two stages: (i) Adaptive Partitioning, partitioning large-scale dynamic graphs into subregions that match the model's reasoning capacity while minimizing inference cost; and (ii) Collaborative Reasoning, aligning graph partition topologies with a spatio-temporal decoupled multi-agent architecture. AdaSTORM is the first multi-agent framework tailored for dynamic graph reasoning. Extensive experiments show that AdaSTORM successfully breaks through the scaling bottleneck, scaling reasoning to thousand-node graphs with over 90% accuracy across several large-scale dynamic graph settings without external tools, significantly outperforms seven competitive baselines. Furthermore, it achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on existing benchmarks and generalizes robustly to real-world datasets. The source code is available at: https://github.com/irisorchid107/AdaSTORM/.

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

PrologMCP: A Standardized Prolog Tool Interface for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.14935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frontier reasoning-tuned language models still fail on deductive tasks at depth, and the cost of improved performance through extended internal reasoning scales poorly. Symbolic delegation offers a complementary route: a language model translates the problem, while a solver performs the inference. However, current autoformalization pipelines for logic programming are typically bespoke integrations tied to particular tasks or agents. We introduce PrologMCP, a task-agnostic, open-source server that exposes Prolog as a stateful tool through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Its compact tool interface, structured error reporting, and per-session isolation make the translate-run-inspect-repair loop a reusable primitive for MCP-capable agents. We evaluate a formalizer agent enhanced with PrologMCP against standard and reasoning LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4.6, GPT-4.1, and o4-mini) on two subsets of PARARULE-Plus: a general-purpose sample and a more challenging one targeting a specific failure mode of natural-language reasoning. On the general sample, the formalizer matches or exceeds reasoning LLMs (accuracy 1.00 vs.\ 1.00 / 0.998), with the largest gains over standard models (0.762 for GPT-4.1). On the challenging subset, the formalizer remains near-perfect (1.00 / 0.99) while reasoning LLMs drop to 0.95 / 0.94. These results suggest that delegating inference to Prolog via MCP is a robust and inspectable alternative to extended natural-language reasoning.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The biological clock of multimorbidity: temporal dynamics of disease co-occurrence in primary care

Multimorbidity is the dominant clinical reality of primary care, yet the temporal dynamics governing when and how persistent comorbidity associations emerge remain poorly characterised. Most large-scale comorbidity studies adopt a single observation window after an index diagnosis, implicitly assuming that associations detectable at one year are equally detectable at five. Using 11 years of electronic health records from 5,821,197 individuals in Catalan primary care, we applied a matched cohort design across nine complementary follow-up windows, five cumulative (0-1 to 0-5 years) and four conditional (1-2 to 4-5 years), to 1,315 index diseases, identifying 144,030 significant directed comorbidity associations in the five-year network. We found that 60.1% of these associations required at least three years of follow-up and were undetectable in shorter-window analyses, demonstrating that observation window length is a primary determinant of which comorbidities can be observed. To organise this temporal heterogeneity, we introduce the biological clock of multimorbidity: a two-dimensional framework that positions ICD-10 disease categories according to their rates of cumulative signal attenuation and the persistence of conditional risk. This framework identifies four reproducible temporal patterns (episodic, chronic stable, chronic progressive, and transient-persistent) that are robust under bootstrap resampling, leave-one-disease-out sensitivity analysis, and alternative clustering approaches. The biological clock is systematically modulated by sex, with Blood/Immune and Musculoskeletal disorders showing the largest sex differences in temporal dynamics. Network analysis identified 19 disease "initiators" that generate broad downstream comorbidity burdens and 21 "sinks" representing convergent endpoints of multiple disease trajectories. Comparison with hospital-based Danish data from 6,909,676 individuals showed that shared associations were 2.7-fold enriched over chance expectation (hypergeometric test, p

18.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Observation of quantum vortex core fractionalization and skyrmion formation in a superconductor | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Magnetic fields can penetrate a superconductor in the form of quantum vortices, which consist of a core singularity with circulating currents. London’s quantization implies that there is one core singularity per quantum of magnetic flux in single-component superconductors. Here, we report signatures of quantum vortex core fractionalization on the potassium-terminated surface of a multiband superconductor KFe 2 As 2 . The observed splitting of single integer-flux vortices into several fractional vortices results in a disparity between the numbers of flux quanta and vortex cores. These fractional vortices often arrange in chains, which calculations show are characterized by a ℂP 2 skyrmionic topological invariant; this constitutes a different type of topological defect: the chiral skyrmion. The disparate natures of integer and fractional vortices comprising skyrmions lead to distinct spectroscopic signatures.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Uncertainty Quantification for Flow-Based Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.18043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action models (VLAs) combine vision-language backbones with expressive generative action heads trained via flow matching on large-scale robotic datasets. Despite their strong empirical performance in robotic manipulation, VLAs lack mechanisms to quantify confidence in their predictions and to detect when their actions may be unreliable. This presents a critical limitation for real-world deployment in non-stationary environments, where models inevitably encounter scenarios outside their pretraining distribution and may fail without warning. To address this, we derive an efficient method for quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-matching models by leveraging velocity-field disagreement (VFD) across a small ensemble. We successfully use this uncertainty estimate for failure detection during deployment and active fine-tuning of flow-based VLAs. To this end, we propose SAVE, a framework for uncertainty-guided active multitask fine-tuning that reduces the number of costly expert demonstrations required to adapt VLAs to new tasks. Through extensive experiments on the LIBERO benchmark, we demonstrate that VFD yields better-calibrated uncertainty estimates predictive of downstream performance, that VFD achieves strong performance in detecting failures, and that uncertainty-guided data acquisition with SAVE requires at least 22% fewer samples than baselines. In summary, our work shows that quantifying epistemic uncertainty in flow-based VLAs improves both failure awareness and adaptation. Project website: tum-lsy.github.io/uq_vla/.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Hybrid refinery process turns plant material into industrially important chemical

An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals. An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

The impact of pre-stroke statin use on baseline corrected infarct volume and collateral perfusion

Stroke is a leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide, with ischaemic stroke the most prevalent type. Statins, used for cholesterol management, have demonstrated benefits in reducing stroke risk and improving outcomes in preclinical studies. However, the impact of pre-stroke statin use on stroke outcomes remain inconsistent. In this study, we aim to evaluate whether pre-stroke statin use is associated with greater volume of salvaged tissue and improved cerebral collateral perfusion. A retrospective analysis was conducted using data from 281 patients presenting with acute ischemic stroke to the John Hunter Hospital between May 2015 and May 2020. Patients were grouped based on pre-stroke statin use, and clinical variables, including infarct volume and collateral perfusion, were assessed. The primary outcome was salvage volume derived from baseline perfusion lesion volume minus infarct volume at follow-up. Collateral perfusion was measured by the hypoperfusion volume defined by delay time (DT)>6 seconds divided by the hypoperfusion volume defined by DT >2 seconds. Patients on statins at admission were significantly older and had more comorbidities. No significant association was found between pre-stroke statin use and salvage volume or collateral perfusion after adjusting for covariates. Larger initial infarct core was a significant predictor of salvage volume due to larger salvageable tissue volume at baseline. These findings indicate that pre-morbid statin use is not associated with larger salvage volume or improved cerebral collateral perfusion.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

AtomMem: Building Simple and Effective Memory System for LLM Agents via Atomic Facts

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges, we propose AtomMem, a long-term memory system designed for value-dense storage and stable memory evolution. AtomMem introduces a Fact Executor, which selectively extracts high value atomic facts from long form interactions to serve as highly efficient memory representations. Subsequently, AtomMem organizes these facts into hierarchical event structures and temporal profiles, capturing coherent episodic contexts and tracking dynamically evolving user attributes over time. During retrieval, the system activates an associative memory graph to connect fragmented memories. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark confirm that AtomMem achieves state-of-the-art performance across various reasoning tasks, offering a scalable and economically viable solution for deploying intelligent personalized agents.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Projection and Quantisation: A Unifying View of Learning to Hash, from Random Projections to the RAG Era

Authors:

Approximate nearest-neighbour search underpins large-scale retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, yet its methods are studied in communities that seldom read one another. We argue that they form one field with three design choices. We develop the projection-quantisation-organisation lens: every method places its projections, places its quantisation thresholds, and organises the resulting codes for search. We test the lens with a reproducible measurement, released as the open BitBudget benchmark, and report three findings. First, the quantisation axis delivers the largest memory savings: a one-bit code with full-precision re-ranking matches uncompressed quality for six of seven embedders, the scanned code one thirty-second of the float's size. Second, the orderings the lens anticipates, including a learned-embedding regime where binary codes overtake an inverted-file product quantiser at a matched byte budget, recur as the embedding is enlarged. Third, given class labels, an eight-byte supervised code more than doubles the retrieval quality of the two-kilobyte task-agnostic float it replaces. We also recast the semantic identifiers of generative retrieval as quantisation codes. The main contribution is a single, tested account of compact-code search, from random projections to the retrieval-augmented era.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Systematic Study of Dysarthric Speech Recognition: Spectral Features and Acoustic Models

arXiv:2606.19793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selections for each. The incorporation of Pitch features notably improved recognition performance, especially for sentence recognition tasks involving dysarthric speech. Through a systematic examination of the TORGO database, we have demonstrated the potential to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art Factorized Time Delay Neural Network (F-TDNN) model for recognizing dysarthric speech. Our methods, implemented with the F-TDNN model, resulted in a 4.65\% relative improvement in isolated word recognition and a 4.63\% relative improvement in sentence recognition for dysarthric speech, compared to previous research. This improvement effectively compensates for speech variability, attributable to our deliberate selection of the number of overlapping frames between consecutive training example chunks.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

The clinical utility of functional testing in fibroblasts to diagnose primary mitochondrial disease

Genome sequencing of the heterogeneous primary mitochondrial disorders (PMD) frequently reveals variants of uncertain significance that require functional tests for diagnosis, and does not identify variants in all patients. We analyzed mitochondrial enzyme assays, blue native polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis (BN-PAGE) with in-gel activity staining, complex I assembly blot, and select protein abundances in fibroblasts of a case series of 204 PMD patients divided into functional classes, in comparison to 51 controls and 53 differential diagnostic conditions. Overall, sensitivity and specificity for respiratory chain enzyme assays were 46% and 93% respectively, for BN-PAGE 40% and 98%, for complex I assembly assay 49% and 99%. The overall sensitivity of all tests was 76%, specificity 93%, with positive predictive value 96% and negative predictive value 67%. Categories with high sensitivity were isolated complex deficiencies, nuclear DNA-encoded mitochondrial protein synthesis defects, co-factor defects, and mitochondrial amino-acyl-tRNA synthetase conditions when aided by protein abundance. Mitochondrial DNA mutations and maintenance disorders showed poor sensitivities. Secondary dysfunctions were rare. A complete battery of functional tests showed strong diagnostic clinical utility in fibroblasts.