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01.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

AutoZyme: An Autonomous Agentic Framework to Optimize Bioinformatics Software

Performance bottlenecks in widely used genomics and bioinformatics software present a substantial and growing burden as biological datasets continue to increase in size and number. Relieving these bottlenecks relies largely on expert manual optimization and therefore remains difficult to scale. Here we present AutoZyme, an agentic framework for scientific software optimization. Given a target function, AutoZyme builds benchmarks, identifies bottlenecks, and iteratively tests code changes, retaining only those that improve runtime while preserving output. We evaluated AutoZyme on 45 functions, improving runtime without substantial memory increases in over 95% of cases considered. Across 38 functions from Seurat, Scanpy and related packages in genomics and bioinformatics, AutoZyme reduced runtime by a median of 8.52-fold, with the largest reductions exceeding 676-fold. The optimized functions are distributed through AutoZyme-Library as drop-in replacements for existing analysis pipelines. We also release AutoZyme as a reusable framework for optimizing additional user-specified packages and functions.

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

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Mapping the neuronal building blocks of human language with language models

作者:

Humans can convey new and highly diverse information through language. This ability to form and combine words into elaborate phrases and sentences enables us to express inexhaustible meanings and is fundamental to human cognition1–5. However, understanding the microscopic cellular building blocks and cortical landscape that precisely underlie human language has remained a challenge. Here we used wide-scale single-neuronal recordings combined with natural language processing models to identify fine-grained linguistic representations across the human frontotemporal cortex during language production. We find that, whereas certain neurons represented the detailed grammatical relationships between words or their parts of speech, others tracked the sentences’ higher-order syntactic structure, their phrase transitions and sequence. Collectively, these neurons reliably captured the words’ syntactic and semantic properties but also dynamically incorporated their specific sentence contexts, therefore enabling them to encode information combinatorially and at highly granular levels of detail. We show how these cell populations were locally organized and how their microscale representations differed from that of their wider field potential patterns. We also show how these neurons were distributed broadly across the frontotemporal cortex, but how their ability to encode linguistic information was left-lateralized and varied between cortical regions. Together, these findings identify some of the most basic cellular building blocks by which linguistic information is encoded in humans and begin to define the cortical landscape of language at a combined micro (cellular), meso (local population) and macro (regional) scale. Wide-scale recordings reveal neurons in the human brain that encode fundamental components of language such as the grammatical relationships between words, their parts of speech and the higher-order syntactic structure of phrases and sentences.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?

World Action Models (WAMs) commonly rely on video generation to bridge visual world modeling and robot control. However, video-based WAMs face three coupled limitations: dense multi-frame future tokens make inference costly, full video prediction spends capacity on action-irrelevant temporal and appearance details, and long-horizon future imagination may introduce errors that mislead action prediction. These issues raise a simple question: Does world action model really need video generation? We propose ImageWAM, a simple WAM framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for robot action prediction. In contrast to video generation, image editing provides a better-matched prior: it only needs to model a target-frame transformation, focuses on action-relevant current-to-target visual differences, and grounds task instructions to localized visual changes through edit pretraining. In practice, ImageWAM does not decode the target frame at inference time; instead, it conditions a flow-matching action expert on the KV caches produced by image-editing denoising, using them as a compact world-action context. ImageWAM outperforms standard VLA baselines and matching competitive WAMs without additional policy pretraining across different simulator and real-world experiments. It also reduces FLOPs to 1/6 and latency to 1/4 of video-based WAMs. Attention analysis further shows that editing caches focus on task-relevant change regions, supporting image editing as an effective alternative to video-based world-action modeling.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

NAVI-Orbital: First In-Orbit Demonstration of a Zero-Shot Vision-Language Model for Autonomous Earth Observation

arXiv:2606.18271v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Earth Observation data generation outpaces downlink bandwidth and human-in-the-loop processing, a widening gap has emerged between onboard collection and actionable ground intelligence. This paper presents NAVI-Orbital, a software system deployed on a Low Earth Orbit (LEO) spacecraft. On April 16, 2026, NAVI-Orbital achieved what is, to the authors' knowledge, the first in-orbit demonstration of a vision-language model performing autonomous multi-modal inference entirely onboard. NAVI-Orbital uses a local vision-language model (Gemma 3) to classify each captured scene, produce a text description of its content and the relationships between its features, and respond to operator follow-up via natural-language dialogue. The system is re-tasked through plain-English prompts in place of conventional command sequences, and is orchestrated by a graph-based state machine (LangGraph) coordinating dedicated agents for detection and dialogue. Results across ground benchmarking (88.16% accuracy on the 7,960-image curated AID benchmark), Flatsat validation, and live in-orbit captures of newly acquired, previously unseen Earth imagery (including uncorrected YAM-9 imagery, processed onboard with hardware-accelerated GPU inference and no fine-tuning for the flight instrument) demonstrate the feasibility of running foundation models on satellite-class edge computers to invert the conventional acquire-then-downlink-everything bandwidth profile through semantic compression of Earth observations in-orbit.

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

DSAEval: Evaluating Data Science Agents on a Wide Range of Real-World Data Science Problems

Recent LLM-based data agents aim to automate data science tasks ranging from data analysis to deep learning. However, the open-ended nature of real-world data science problems, which often span multiple taxonomies and lack standard answers, poses a significant challenge for evaluation. To address this, we introduce DSAEval, a benchmark comprising 641 real-world data science problems grounded in 285 diverse datasets, covering both structured and unstructured data (e.g., image and text). DSAEval incorporates three distinctive features: (1) Multimodal Environment Perception, which enables agents to interpret observations from multiple modalities, including text and vision; (2) Multi-Query Interactions, which mirror the iterative and cumulative nature of real-world data science projects; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Evaluation, which provides a holistic assessment across reasoning, code, and results. We systematically evaluate 13 recent advanced agentic LLMs using DSAEval. Our results show that Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the strongest overall performance, MiMo-V2-Pro and GPT-5.2 lead in duration and step efficiency, respectively, and MiMo-V2-Flash is the most cost-effective. We further demonstrate that multimodal perception consistently improves performance on vision-related tasks, with gains ranging from 2.04\% to 11.30\%. Overall, while current data science agents perform well on structured data and routine data analysis workflows, substantial challenges remain in unstructured domains. Finally, we offer critical insights and outline future research directions.

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

PromptShift-CRC: Drift-Aware Conformal Risk Control for Foundation Models Under Prompt and Domain Shift

arXiv:2606.15964v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models are now used in settings where the prompts they receive can change quickly. Users change, topics change, policies change, and the model may suddenly face a kind of request that was rare in the calibration data. This makes fixed calibration risky. Conformal prediction and conformal risk control give model-agnostic ways to control error, but they work best when the calibration data still look like the future data. This paper develops PromptShift CRC, a drift-aware conformal risk control method for foundation-model outputs under prompt and domain shift. The method embeds prompts and responses, measures how far the current prompt stream has moved from the calibration pool, gives more weight to relevant or recent calibration examples, and updates the risk level online after observed violations. It reports three practical diagnostics: realized risk error, prompt drift, and effective calibration size. We give conditions under which the method controls risk up to terms for distribution mismatch and weighted quantile uncertainty. In a synthetic prompt-shift benchmark, static conformal risk control fails sharply after drift, while PromptShift-CRC gives the best coverage among the adaptive baselines considered. We then evaluate the same calibration layer on public benchmark derived streams for question answering, toxicity, summarization factuality, and long-context hallucination risk

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

Rhythm of the Deep: A Computational-Linguistic Test of Duality of Patterning in Sperm Whale Codas

Human language has often been described as combining structure at two levels: lower-level units combine into larger units, which then combine into larger sequences. We test for this design feature, duality of patterning, in sperm whale codas using 1,483 codas from the Dominica Sperm Whale Project. Because acoustic similarity can imitate symbolic structure, we treat the problem as computational-linguistic structure discovery from continuous audio rather than as a direct claim about language or meaning. We use a consensus of frozen audio encoders, held-out structural tests, per-statistic nulls, and acoustic-null recoverability gates. The evidence supports a narrow two-tier architecture. At the lower tier, clicks compose into codas not by a stable ordered rule, but by which clicks are present together with their inter-click rhythm. At the upper tier, coda tokens show bout-level sequential dependence, with an NSB second-order transfer-entropy lift of 0.132 bits (p = 0.002). Under tempo scaling, encoder-derived click identity is strongly rate-bound, while coda identity remains substantially more stable, yielding a measurable abstraction gradient across the click-to-coda step. Rhythm-only baselines recover substantial lower-tier structure but fail to reproduce the upper-tier sequential-dependence signal. We do not claim language, semantics, perception, or human-like phonemes. Instead, we report representation-level evidence for a duality-of-patterning-like architecture whose lower tier is rhythmic rather than segmental, and provide a portable null-controlled framework for testing combinatorial structure in induced acoustic token systems.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Lagrange: An Open-Vocabulary, Energy-Based Sparse Framework for Generalized End-to-End Driving

arXiv:2606.20274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling end-to-end autonomous driving to complex, open-world environments requires perceptual models that generalize to anomalous scenarios and planners that produce kinematically valid trajectories. Existing paradigms face a distinct dichotomy between representational efficiency and generalization capacity. Dense models (e.g., occupancy networks), while geometrically robust, incur critical computational bottlenecks and struggle with high-level semantic reasoning. Conversely, sparse, query-based planners are efficient but reliant on closed-set definitions, rendering them vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) events. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer open-vocabulary reasoning, their autoregressive, discrete token generation fundamentally conflicts with the continuous, high-frequency control requirements of vehicle dynamics. To address this, we propose Lagrange, an open-vocabulary, computationally sparse driving framework based on Masked Latent Fields (MLF). Rather than relying on dense volumetric reconstructions or closed-set query mechanisms, Lagrange exploits Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to encode class-agnostic object proposals into continuous semantic visual tokens. We introduce an intent-driven masked cross-attention module that temporally filters irrelevant entities, decoding the attended tokens into an implicit continuous energy field defined over spatial coordinates. By framing decision-making as a Lagrangian action minimization problem spanning this energy field, we enforce strict compliance with vehicle kinematics while executing collision avoidance. Extensive offline evaluations on both standard (nuScenes) and long-tail (CODA) benchmarks demonstrate that Lagrange establishes a promising framework for robust, interpretable, and kinematically feasible open-world autonomy.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Decision-Driven Geosteering Under Uncertainty: A Unified Framework for Sequential Decision Optimization

arXiv:2606.17331v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Geosteering requires navigating a well trajectory through an unknown geological configuration, while sequentially updating decisions based on indirect measurements acquired during drilling. This work presents an uncertainty-aware geosteering framework that tightly integrates particle filtering for probabilistic subsurface interpretation with value-based reinforcement learning for sequential decision-making. Geological uncertainty ahead of the drill bit is represented explicitly through a particle filter (PF), enabling belief-informed control rather than deterministic trajectory correction. The framework couples PF belief updates with belief-informed decision policies and evaluates three decision-making options that operate under identical uncertainty representations: an interpretable Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) scheme, a Deep Q-learning baseline, and a Dual Deep Reinforcement Learning (Dual DRL) architecture trained with a target Q-network scheme for stability, using a dueling (value/advantage) decomposition for Q-value parameterization. Beyond final placement performance, we assess policy behavior using stability-oriented metrics that quantify steering smoothness over time, providing additional operational insight into how decision policies respond as uncertainty evolves. The framework is integrated with an API for validation within an industrial geosteering simulator under realistic measurement noise and drilling constraints. Using identical geological realizations, operational limits, and reward definitions across methods, the experiments provide a controlled and high-fidelity evaluation of how alternative decision policies behave throughout the drilling process, rather than evaluating performance solely from the final well trajectory.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation with Topological Regularisation

arXiv:2606.17531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the learning of interpretable bases in non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) by regularising the topology of the learned basis functions. Our approach is motivated by the observation that many data modalities can be viewed as non-negative functions on a structured domain, where the quality of a basis is intrinsically linked to its topology. However, naive methods for incorporating the topology of the support are often hindered by discreteness and threshold dependence, rendering them unsuitable for continuous optimisation. We address these challenges by employing persistent homology as a stable, threshold-free topological quantifier and by designing topological scores that integrate into the NMF objective as regularisers. The resulting framework encompasses spatially coherent image components, periodic time-series structures, and clique-like graph signals within a unified modelling language.

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

FedRot-LoRA: Mitigating Rotational Misalignment in Federated LoRA

arXiv:2602.23638v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated LoRA provides a communication-efficient mechanism for fine-tuning large language models on decentralized data. In practice, however, a discrepancy between the factor-wise averaging used to preserve low rank and the mathematically correct aggregation of local updates can cause significant aggregation error and unstable training. We argue that a major source of this problem is rotational misalignment, arising from the rotational invariance of low-rank factorizations – semantically equivalent updates can be represented in different latent subspaces across clients since $(B_i R_i)(R_i^\top A_i) = B_i A_i$. When such misaligned factors are averaged directly, they interfere destructively and degrade the global update. To address this issue, we propose FedRot-LoRA, a federated LoRA framework that aligns client updates via orthogonal transformations prior to aggregation. This alignment preserves the semantic update while reducing cross-client subspace mismatch, without increasing communication cost or restricting model expressivity. We provide a convergence analysis that examines the aggregation error induced by factor-wise averaging and shows how rotational alignment yields a tighter upper bound on this error. Extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generative tasks demonstrate that FedRot-LoRA consistently outperforms existing federated LoRA baselines across a range of heterogeneity levels and LoRA ranks.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MathVis-Fine: Aligning Visual Supervision with Necessity via Progressive Dependency-Guided Training for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has extended from purely linguistic domains to multimodal scenarios; however, existing approaches often treat visual inputs as homogeneous or auxiliary signals, failing to capture the intricate and sample-specific dependencies between text and images in mathematical problem-solving. This gives rise to two core issues: first, the supervisory signals for visual content are generalized and coarse-grained, lacking adaptation to the actual necessity of visual information in each sample; second, training feedback becomes inaccurate when visual rewards are uniformly applied without distinguishing the complementary relationships among inputs. These limitations hinder models from achieving precise multimodal reasoning. In this work, we propose a framework for modeling fine-grained visual dependencies in mathematical reasoning. We first construct the MathVis-Fine dataset, augmenting fine-grained visual annotations with visual dependency ratings. Building upon this dataset, we introduce a two-stage progressive visual enhancement training paradigm that balances answer correctness rewards and visual grounding rewards according to the intrinsic visual dependency level of each sample, thereby mitigating reward bias and improving supervision accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the MathVis-Fine framework effectively enhances visual perception progressively based on visual dependency, offering a more precise training framework for multimodal mathematical reasoning. We will release the dataset upon acceptance.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SkillCAT: Contrastive Assessment and Topology-Aware Skill Self-Evolution for LLM Agents

Skill self-evolution methods for LLM agents aim to turn execution trajectories into reusable skill documents, but current pipelines typically learn from one trajectory per task, merge candidate skill patches before checking them, and load the full skill corpus before inference. We propose SkillCAT, a training-free framework that separates this process into three stages. Contrastive Causal Extraction (CCE) samples multiple trajectories for each task and compares same-task success/failure pairs to identify evidence that explains outcome differences. Assessment-Augmented Evolution (AAE) replays each candidate patch on source-task clones and keeps only patches that improve or preserve task outcomes before hierarchical skill patch merging. Topology-Aware Task Execution (TTE) compiles the evolved skills into a routable sub-skill topology, so inference loads only the capability nodes relevant to the task. We evaluate SkillCAT on common agent benchmarks, including SpreadsheetBench, WikiTableQuestions, and DocVQA, and further test cross-model and out-of-distribution generalization. Across these settings, SkillCAT raises the average score over baselines by up to 40.40%, demonstrating reliable skill evolution without model training.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Variable-Width Transformers

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

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

Reducing the Complexity of Deep Learning Models for EEG Analysis on Wearable Devices

arXiv:2606.12742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable healthcare devices are the fastest-growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Many automated healthcare services rely on two crucial biological signals, namely ECG and EEG, which reflect the activity of the heart and brain, respectively. Although deep neural networks are considered the primary way to process and analyze these signals, the very tight energy and computational power constraints in wearable devices are far below the computational, energy, and memory bandwidth demands of DNN models, thereby impeding the deployment of deep learning in many practical wearable services. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying state-of-the-art DNN models in resource-constrained wearable devices. Notably, we explore the trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity of DNNs when parameter quantization and electrode reduction methods are used. Our investigation centers on several state-of-the-art DNN models designed for EEG signal analysis, specifically for detecting epileptic seizures. Our findings demonstrate that, when applied judiciously, these techniques can significantly reduce the complexity of the DNNs under consideration with minimal adverse effects on accuracy. These results reveal the explicit trade-offs between accuracy and complexity reduction encountered when adapting DNN-based online EEG analysis for wearable devices.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A Geometric Profile of Semantic Information in Text: Frame-Conditional Uniqueness and a Trade-Off Triangle for Scalar Summaries

How much meaning does a text carry? Shannon's theory measures uncertainty over symbols and is intentionally indifferent to meaning, while pairwise metrics such as BERTScore compare two texts rather than characterizing one. We develop a geometric framework that measures semantic content from the structure of a text's sentence embeddings. The framework has three parts. First, within a fixed embedding and baseline, six natural axioms uniquely determine a scalar measure up to scale, a frame-conditional uniqueness theorem. The resulting scalar is empirically too coarse, motivating a richer representation. Second, we propose a three-coordinate semantic profile capturing novelty (displacement from generic discourse), breadth (diversity of distinct ideas), and integration (connectedness among them), together with a discrete minimal unit (the semantic quantum) whose resolution is fixed by a clustering threshold $\tau$. Third, we prove a no-go theorem: no scalar summary of the profile can simultaneously satisfy analytic stability under paraphrase and concatenation, ordinal robustness across text scales, and cross-representation comparability. We exhibit two practical scalars, $S_{\mathrm{minmax}}$ and $S_{\mathrm{rank}}$, each occupying a distinct corner of this trade-off triangle. Validation across 23 synthetic categories, 5 Project Gutenberg novels, and 3 embedding models confirms the trade-off. The recommended rank-normalized configuration passes 25 of 28 ordinal checks as point estimates (21 of 28 after Benjamini-Hochberg correction), outperforming seven baselines including unigram entropy and a BERTScore-based novelty signal. A separate variational result connects the breadth coordinate to the log-determinant of a determinantal point process (Spearman $\rho = 0.985$ over 507 Gutenberg chapters), giving an optimization-theoretic foundation for breadth.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Reference-guided immune recovery matching prioritizes traditional Chinese medicine ingredients

Therapeutic prioritization from single-cell transcriptomes requires a target that is closer to treatment response than disease-signature reversal. In immune diseases, post-treatment recovery may follow patient- and cell-type-specific trajectories rather than a simple return along the pretreatment disease axis. We developed ImmuneNavi, a healthy-reference-anchored recovery-matching workflow for ranking traditional Chinese medicine ingredients from paired PBMC data. The workflow maps heterogeneous PBMC cohorts to a common healthy immune coordinate system, constructs patient-cell-type disease and recovery states, and processes ITCM treated-control profiles into a fixed ingredient perturbation bank. Patient and ingredient states are represented in matched gene, pathway and transcription-factor views, allowing the model to combine local transcriptional direction with more stable program-level features. A matcher trained on one paired treatment cohort preserved recovery-aligned ingredient rankings in independent PBMC cohorts without redefining the feature space, candidate set or preprocessing procedure. This provides a reusable transcriptomic pipeline for moving from paired immune-state measurements to prioritized natural-product candidates for experimental follow-up.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation

Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity with random denoising process. In this work, we propose to treat the disease dynamic as a velocity field and leverage Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, it captures the intrinsic dynamic of disease, making the progression more interpretable. However, a key challenge remains: in latent space, Auto-Encoders (AEs) do not guarantee alignment across patients or correlation with clinical-severity indicators (e.g., age and disease conditions). To address this, we propose to learn patient-specific latent alignment, which enforces patient trajectories to lie along a specific axis, with magnitude increasing monotonically with disease severity. This leads to a consistent and semantically meaningful latent space. Together, we present $\Delta$-LFM, a framework for modeling patient-specific latent progression with flow matching. Across three longitudinal MRI benchmarks, $\Delta$-LFM demonstrates strong empirical performance and, more importantly, offers a new framework for interpreting and visualizing disease dynamics.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

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

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

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Distributional Loss for Robust Classification

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.

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

Token-Level Entropy Reveals Demographic Disparities in Language Models

We ask whether demographic identity, signaled by a name alone, systematically reshapes the generative distribution of a language model. Measuring full-vocabulary Shannon entropy at temperature zero across six open-weight base models and 5,760 implicit sentence-completion prompts (e.g., "Tanisha walked into the office on a Monday morning and"), we find that Black-associated names produce higher first-token entropy than White-associated names across all six architectures - opposite to the output-level homogeneity bias documented under explicit demographic prompting (Lee et al., 2024) - and Black-associated names always produce greater entropy above identity-neutral baselines than White-associated names ($\Delta\Delta > 0$ in all six models). Women-associated names co-occur with lower first-token entropy (DL-pooled $\hat\beta = -0.041, p = .019$) and more homogeneous outputs ($\hat\alpha = +0.024, p < .001$) than men-associated names - a pattern convergent with homogeneity bias; race and gender effects are additive. Instruction tuning does not attenuate the race gap (matched-format DL-pooled $\hat{\beta}=+0.153$). Running the same templates with explicit group labels instead of names yields null race effects in 10 of 12 models where implicit probing is significant - establishing that probing methodology is a primary determinant of which distributional structure is recovered.

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

A spectral audit framework reveals task-dependent aperiodic reliance across EEG and ECG deep learning

arXiv:2606.08583v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep learning on physiological time series is interpreted through domain-specific features – oscillatory rhythms in EEG, morphological complexes in ECG – yet these signals sit atop a broadband aperiodic 1/f-like envelope that covaries with arousal, age, and pathology. We introduce a spectral audit framework combining aperiodic/periodic decomposition, phase-preserving Fourier interventions, sham controls, and simulation validation. Aperiodic reliance was task-dependent and architecture-general: across six neural architectures, flattening drops exceeded 0.42 balanced-accuracy points for sleep-wake classification, reached 0.07-0.13 for clinical abnormality detection, and remained minimal for motor imagery. Six of seven EEG foundation models showed FDR-significant aperiodic reliance on clinical EEG; age/sex and recording-era controls reduced but did not eliminate the effect. Applying the audit to PTB-XL ECG revealed neural drops of 0.32–0.36 persisting after demographic matching, confirming this confound class extends beyond EEG. Aperiodic controls should become standard for interpretable physiological time-series deep learning.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Combining machine learning and iterative experiments to keep pace with emerging viral variants of concern

by Thomas Sheffield, Ryan C. Bruneau, Stephen Won, Kenneth L. Sale, Brooke Harmon, Le Thanh Mai Pham Modeling and predicting viral mutations before they emerge plays a crucial role in pandemic preparedness, enabling the early identification of emerging variants of concern (VOCs) and guiding timely updates to vaccines, diagnostic tests, and therapeutic strategies. However, existing machine learning models and large-scale experiments lose their predictive power as viral variants evolve further from the original strains in sequence space. Here, we present a scalable framework that integrates random forest and neural network machine learning models with targeted high-throughput experimentation to anticipate and evaluate emerging SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD) variants. Using public datasets, we trained predictive models for binding to human Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), RBD expression, and antibody escape, and refined these models through iterative integration of experimental data focused on over 200 variants derived from wild-type (WT) and Omicron strains. Through an indirect transfer learning approach, our machine learning models achieved high accuracy having correlation coefficients of up to 0.79 for antibody binding. The models were also generalizable across diverse antibody types including heavy-chain-only antibodies (HCAbs) by encoding complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) as input features. This dynamic approach enables rapid assessment of emerging variants, facilities prioritization of the therapeutic strategies, and supports a proactive, data-driven response to evolving viral threats.

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

Playful Agentic Robot Learning

arXiv:2606.19419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current agentic robot systems can write executable Code-as-Policy programs, observe feedback, and revise behavior across multiple attempts, but they remain largely task-driven: reusable skills are acquired only after explicit instructions. We study Playful Agentic Robot Learning, where an embodied coding agent uses self-directed play as a continual skill-learning stage before downstream tasks arrive. We introduce RATs, Robotics Agent Teams designed for play-time skill acquisition. During play, RATs proposes novel yet learnable exploratory tasks, plans and executes robot-code policies, verifies intermediate progress, diagnoses failures, retries with dense, step-level feedback, and distills successful executions into a persistent code skill library. At test time, the agent reuses relevant skills from this frozen library to help solve new tasks. Experiments in LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces show that play-learned skills improve held-out downstream tasks over no-play and random-play baselines, with 20.6 and 17.0 percentage-point gains over CaP-Agent0 on LIBERO-PRO and MolmoSpaces, respectively. Moreover, the learned skills can be plugged into other inference-time Code-as-Policy agents by simply retrieving them into the context, improving RoboSuite and real-world transfer by 8.9 and 8.8 points, respectively, without finetuning the underlying model.