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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

Authors:

Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools. Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Multi-Source Cybersecurity Logs: An ATT&CK-Labeled Dataset and SLM Evaluation

arXiv:2606.18190v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-stage cyberattacks span system, network, and browser logs. Detecting them requires correlating events across all three sources. Machine learning methods can learn these cross-source patterns, but they need labeled multi-source data. Existing public datasets fall short. Network-only datasets such as CICIDS and UNSW-NB15 miss host and browser activity. Host-focused datasets such as LMDG and CICAPT-IIoT lack browser telemetry. ATLAS includes all three sources but labels events only as malicious or benign, without MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) technique granularity. No public dataset combines all three sources with per-entry ATT&CK technique labels. We close the gap by building a multi-source log dataset of 870 sessions (70 attack, 800 benign) and approximately 2.3 million events. We captured system, network, and browser activity simultaneously on Windows endpoints. We labeled malicious events with ATT&CK technique IDs, covering 12 tactics and 53 techniques. We generated all attack data using real tools, including Remote Access Trojan (RAT), Command and Control (C2) tunnels, and cloud exfiltration. To demonstrate learnability, we fine-tuned three Small Language Models (SLMs) (Qwen2.5-1.5B, Llama-3.2-3B, Phi-4-Mini) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We compared each against its base variant across ten metrics on two tasks: chunk classification and ATT&CK technique identification. Fine-tuning improved every model on every metric. Chunk classification accuracy rose from approximately 8% in the base variants to between 90% and 97% after fine-tuning. Technique identification remained challenging, with the best exact-match accuracy at 42%, although high partial-match scores show the models captured most of the underlying reasoning.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Emergent Bell Phase in an Electro-Nanomechanical Quantum Simulator

arXiv:2511.02613v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Suspended carbon nanotubes hosting electrostatically defined quantum dots allow for exceptionally strong and tunable electromechanical coupling as well as mechanical modes that can reach the quantum ground state of motion simply by cryogenic cooling. This makes them a unique platform for quantum simulation of electron-phonon coupling. Here, we propose an experimentally realisable setup with two such carbon nanotubes in parallel, each hosting four quantum dots. Our system not only exhibits phonon-mediated electron-electron attraction, but also supports a robust, maximally entangled Bell phase at mesoscopic scales shared across the subsystems. These features highlight its potential as a simulator of strongly correlated quantum systems.

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

DynaTok: Token-Based 4D Reconstruction from Partial Point Clouds

We address 4D reconstruction from partial point cloud sequences, where depth-sensor observations are incomplete, unordered, and lack explicit temporal correspondences. This geometry-only setting is challenging due to missing observations and ambiguous dynamics. While recent progress has largely relied on image-based methods, existing point-based approaches typically focus on single objects, assume relatively complete inputs, or require explicit correspondences. To address these limitations, we propose DynaTok, a point-based framework for correspondence-free 4D reconstruction from partial point cloud sequences without images. DynaTok encodes frames into compact latent tokens, aggregates incomplete observations over time with a Transformer-based spatiotemporal encoder, and decouples geometry and motion through residual tokens in a unified model. A flow-matching decoder then reconstructs complete, temporally consistent 4D point-cloud sequences conditioned on the latent tokens. Experiments on object- and scene-level benchmarks demonstrate improved reconstruction quality and temporal coherence from partial point cloud observations. Project page: https://wrchen530.github.io/dynatok/.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Editorial Alignment: A Participatory Approach to Engaging Editorial Expertise in LLM-mediated Knowledge Dissemination

arXiv:2606.20258v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The emergence of LLM-driven information services is reshaping the conditions under which public knowledge institutions operate, threatening to absorb the editorial function these institutions exist to exercise. While LLMs offer powerful new affordances for knowledge dissemination, editorial authority is challenged by pretrained LLMs that arrive already aligned with the values and dissemination strategies of their commercial developers. This paper investigates editor participation in re-aligning LLM interfaces to editorial standards through design workshops, in a case study where we design and implement an LLM-enabled encyclopedia interface with a Nordic public knowledge institution. We introduce editorial alignment as a design practice within Participatory AI, framing AI alignment as a design process and positioning the editorial standard as a design artefact that translates editorial practice and values into alignment objectives for technical implementation. Last, we discuss how editorial alignment can create space for ongoing participation and give editors agency in LLM-mediated knowledge dissemination.

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

Want Better Synthetic Data? Steer It: Activation Steering for Low-Resource Language Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have become an effective tool for synthetic data generation, including for low-resource languages, where generated data can improve downstream task performance. Current best-performing approaches typically rely on few-shot prompting with target-language examples, which increases inference costs and may reduce diversity through lexical anchoring. In this work, we investigate activation steering as an alternative for low-resource synthetic data generation. We study two steering strategies: Language Steering, which targets the linguistic identity of a language, and Quality Steering, which captures well-formedness by contrasting human-written and backtranslated text representations. We evaluate these methods across four open-source LLMs, multiple layers, and 11 typologically diverse languages by generating sentiment and topic classification data and finetuning smaller classifiers. Steering is applied in both zero-shot and few-shot prompting settings and compared against non-steered counterparts. Our results show that steering on early layers consistently improves the diversity of generated data while often yielding stronger downstream model performance, particularly for low-resource languages.

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

One-Shot Novel View and Pose Human Image Synthesis via 3D Prior Guided Diffusion Model

This paper addresses the challenge of one-shot novel view and pose human image synthesis. The existing methods transfer the reference human image to a target pose using a set of 2D pose keypoints or synthesize human images based on generalizable human NeRF which uses human model priors to extract point-wise features. However, pose transfer based methods can not handle complex human pose using ambiguous 2D pose as the condition, while generalizable human NeRFs may be inaccurate to recover occluded/invisiable human parts without extracted reliable features. To solve these problems, we propose a novel approach for novel view and pose synthesis from a singe human image via conditional denoising diffusion model. Our diffusion model divides the novel view and pose synthesis problem into a sequence of conditional denoising steps. Specifically, to generate humans with complex and arbitrary poses, we introduce 3D human priors, i.e., 3D normal map and color prompt, as geometry and color conditions into the generation process. By transferring the reference human into the target human with a series of diffusion steps, our diffusion model enables high-quality synthesis including the occluded/invisible parts. Further, we propose a self-reconstruction based customized refinement to enhance fine details when tested on novel persons.Experimental results on different public datasets demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods and also shows better generalization ability across datasets. The code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/Yankeegsj/3DPGDM.

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

MAMVI: 3D Test-Time Adaptation via Masked Multi-View Point Clouds

3D point cloud models suffer significant performance degradation under distribution shifts caused by sensor noise, occlusions, and environmental changes. Test-time adaptation (TTA) has emerged as a practical paradigm for mitigating this issue during inference. Recently, leveraging multi-view augmentation has shown promise in improving 3D TTA performance. However, existing multi-view approaches are often constrained by sequential optimization that treats each view independently. This sequential optimization leads to substantial inference latency due to repetitive optimization steps, making real-time adaptation impractical. To address this, we propose Masked Multi-View Test-Time Adaptation (MAMVI), which replaces sequential optimization with a unified single-step adaptation. Specifically, MAMVI utilizes a hybrid masking strategy that combines fixed ratios for stability with Beta-distributed sampling for diversity. By aggregating losses across multiple views, MAMVI performs adaptation through a single backward pass based on multi-view consensus. Additionally, a confidence-based adaptive learning rate is used to dynamically adjust the adaptation intensity for each sample. Extensive experiments on ModelNet-40C, ShapeNet-C, and ScanObjectNN-C demonstrate that MAMVI achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on ShapeNet-C and ScanObjectNN-C. Moreover, it remains competitive on ModelNet-40C while delivering 4.9-8.9 times faster inference, making it highly suitable for real-time applications. Our code is available at https://github.com/Inseok-kong/MAMVI

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Evaluation Sovereignty in Metadata-Driven Classification: A Multi-Track Framework for Weakly Supervised Information Systems

arXiv:2606.13436v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation in machine learning is typically treated as a neutral measurement process. However, in operational information systems, evaluation outcomes are often conditioned by the processes used to generate labels. This paper does not seek to improve classification performance. Instead, it examines the validity of performance measurement under differing label-authority regimes. This issue is particularly relevant in large-scale metadata-driven systems, where labels are often incomplete, inconsistent, or weakly supervised. We introduce evaluation sovereignty, defined as the degree to which performance metrics are independent of label authority and supervision regime, and propose a multi-track evaluation framework that systematically varies training and evaluation label sources. Using hierarchical multi-label classification on large-scale scientific metadata, we demonstrate that models exhibiting strong performance under operational ("silver") evaluation degrade substantially under independent ("gold") evaluation, particularly for fine-grained classification. For example, Micro-F1 decreases from approximately 0.54 to 0.03. Notably, ranking-based metrics remain above baseline, revealing a divergence between latent model signal and classification validity. These findings suggest that commonly reported performance metrics may reflect alignment with labeling processes rather than true predictive capability. We therefore reconceptualize evaluation validity as a system-level property shaped by label governance and provide a practical methodology for auditing intelligent systems operating under weak supervision.

12.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-06

Pathways of emergency care for severely ill children in Nigerian and Ugandan hospitals: A process mapping study

Authors:

by Rami Subhi, Abiodun Sogbesan, Dan Muramuzi, Mikael Burhin, Ayobami A. Bakare, Adegoke G. Falade, Freddy E. Kitutu, Freddie Ssengooba, Carina King, Sumit Kane, Belinda Dawson-McClaren, Hamish R. Graham, the MOXY-Implementation Research Collaboration Background Child mortality remains high in countries with weak emergency care systems. Facility organisation for paediatric emergency care is heterogeneous and under-described. We examined how hospitals in Uganda and Nigeria are organised to deliver emergency care for neonates and children. Methods and findings We conducted a qualitative, multi-method study in 26 purposively selected secondary and tertiary facilities in Uganda and Nigeria from October 2023 to December 2024. Embedded researchers documented patient pathways, resources for care, and care processes for severely ill children (

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Natural Language Processing Based Solution for Labeling Brain Metastasis Identified in Radiology Reports

Abstract Purpose: Brain metastases (BM) far exceed primary CNS tumours and constitute the majority workload for neuro-oncology care providers. Currently, the cancer registries only capture synchronous BMs, which is only a small proportion of all BMs. We aim to develop and validate a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that identifies brain metastases in radiology reports, enabling scalable surveillance of asynchronous BMs. Methods: Using population-based cancer registry data in Alberta, Canada, we identified a cancer cohort diagnosed between 2012–2019 with follow-up to 2022. All brain/head radiology reports at and post-cancer diagnosis were identified. Reports were sampled through a multi-phase approach and manually labeled for BM presence. We trained two Bio_ClinicalBERT models on the "Findings" and "Impressions" sections, respectively, and took the maximum predicted probability as the report-level prediction. Internal and external validation used reports from the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Ontario, and British Columbia. Results: The models were trained on 1,879 samples. For internal validation, 1,833 reports from 357 patients were tested. At a probability threshold of 0.4, the model achieved a sensitivity of 0.888 and precision of 0.499. The ensemble substantially outperformed single-section models, which achieved sensitivities of only 67.8% (Findings) and 74.2% (Impressions). On external validation, sensitivity was 0.918 in Ontario and 0.726 in British Columbia, demonstrating robustness across diverse data distributions. Conclusions: An NLP-based pipeline processing both Findings and Impressions sections has been developed and validated in three Canadian provinces. It meets cancer registry operational requirements and to be implemented into the surveillance workflow in Alberta and British Columbia, providing a foundation for population-level BM surveillance.

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

Dual-Network PINNs for Optimal Control: A Reproducible Benchmark on the Mass-Spring-Damper System

arXiv:2606.15271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a transparent and reproducible benchmark study of a direct dual-network Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) formulation for the optimal control of a mass-spring-damper system. The classical linear-quadratic optimal control problem is solved by two independent classical methods – Pontryagin's Minimum Principle with single shooting, and direct transcription through trapezoidal collocation – and recast as a constrained optimization problem solved by two feedforward neural networks: a state network whose boundary conditions are enforced exactly through a composite cubic-and-mask ansatz, and an unconstrained control network. The composite loss combines the physics residual at the collocation points with a trapezoidal approximation of the cost functional, weighted by a single scalar hyperparameter. On the benchmark considered, the PINN reproduces the classical optimal cost to four significant digits, satisfies the terminal state constraints exactly by construction, and produces pointwise state and control errors that fall within the spread of the two classical references. Training is approximately two orders of magnitude slower than classical shooting on this benchmark, which is honestly reported. The contribution is methodological clarity rather than methodological novelty: the formulation and the accompanying Google Colab implementation are intended to lower the barrier to entry for practitioners exploring PINN-based optimal control without prior exposure to adjoint methods or two-point boundary value problems.

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

Learning What to Predict: Downstream-Guided Task Design for Continued Pretraining

arXiv:2601.22108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continued pretraining is optimized with fixed self-supervised tasks but selected by downstream performance, creating a coarse feedback loop in which practitioners evaluate checkpoints, change data mixtures or objectives, and restart runs, while individual updates remain blind to target capabilities. We ask whether a small set of verifiable downstream examples can provide step-level feedback without directly supervising the learner. We introduce V-pretraining, which decouples a learner trained only with a self-supervised loss from a lightweight task designer that constructs targets or views for unlabeled batches. Given the current learner and batch, V-pretraining scores a candidate construction by predicting the first-order reduction in downstream loss after the induced self-supervised update. The designer maximizes this value; the learner then applies the update with targets or views detached, so downstream labels never update learner parameters. We instantiate V-pretraining as adaptive top-K soft targets for language modeling and learned views or masks for self-supervised vision. Across both modalities, V-pretraining improves target capabilities without degrading generalization. Under wall-clock-matched continued pretraining, it improves GSM8K Pass@1 for Qwen models using 1,024 GSM8K examples only as feedback, including a +7.4 point single-run gain for Qwen2.5-0.5B. In vision, it improves DINOv3 transfer to ADE20K semantic segmentation and NYUv2 depth estimation while preserving ImageNet linear accuracy, suggesting that feedback-guided task construction can improve target capabilities without collapsing general-purpose representations.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Semi-Device-Independent Certification for Nonlocality without Entanglement

arXiv:2606.13667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we investigate maximum-confidence discrimination, which encompasses minimum-error and unambiguous discrimination, for ensembles of separable states by considering global and separable measurements. We demonstrate that global measurements outperform separable ones, thereby establishing nonlocality without entanglement (NLWE) in terms of confidence in a detection event, a fine-grained state-identification strategy that maximizes the probability of a correct guess given a measurement outcome. Conversely, verifying achievable confidence in measurement outcomes can certify global measurements, namely, semi-device-independent certification of NLWE. Our results make it feasible to experimentally demonstrate NLWE using present-day quantum measurement devices, even with non-unit detection efficiencies, since maximum-confidence measurements rely only on detected measurement outcomes.

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

Graph neural networks at war: integrating cybersecurity and drone intelligence in the Israeli-Iranian conflict

arXiv:2606.17119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical cyber systems have brought about new threats and challenges in detection and immediate response. This study examines how Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) can be used to aid cybersecurity and drone management in a physical cyber system comprising of cyber intrusions and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). By providing a bridge between structural understanding of graphical neural networks, this work has provided an integrated procedure that allows intrusion detection systems to educate on underlying network structures, identify malicious activity, and facilitates drone response measures. Based on an emulation-based case study, cyberattacks models were created to provoke the responses of the drones, which proved that graph-based learning can assist with the situational awareness, swarm coordination, and adaptive maneuver. According to the performance valuation, this method has a detection rate of 94.2, average area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) of 0.955 and an average response time of 1.4 seconds. Comparative experiments reveal that proposed GraphSAGE network is more effective than the Graphical Convolutional Networks (GCNs) and Graphical Attention Networks (GATs) in the identical situation. Such findings prove that graphical neural networks can be used to avert intrusion and response of dynamic cyber-physical systems.

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

Minimal Oversight: Uncertainty-Aware Governance for Delegated AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly delegate decisions to specialized models, evaluators, tools, and supervisory controllers. The central AI problem is no longer only model accuracy, but uncertainty-aware governance: how much autonomy to grant, which evidence should calibrate trust, what performance ceiling a delegated AI system can sustain, and when human intervention becomes necessary. We propose the Minimum Sufficient Oversight Principle (MSO), a variational principle for principled autonomy delegation: minimize governance burden on the Fisher information manifold subject to a delivery constraint. The resulting Euler-Lagrange solution yields a water-filling allocation of governed delegation across the task space. Building on a revealed-action governed delegation channel model, we prove a capacity theorem for stationary symbolwise review policies, derive a local first-order approximation relating workflow complexity to quality degradation, and give a drift-dominated autonomy-time scaling law linking intervention timing to effective capacity, complexity, and drift. Within this framework, masking appears as a structural AI-governance pathology: corrected performance can hide the competence signal needed to calibrate trust. Synthetic simulations and a semi-real reconstructed workflow support design prescriptions including upstream-first correction, sensitivity-based intervention, and explicit feasibility checks before autonomy is expanded. The result is a computable framework for uncertainty, planning, and oversight in delegated AI systems. A companion Python package is available at https://github.com/crbazevedo/delegation-lab.

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

LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies

arXiv:2606.15768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core of LaWAM is a latent-action-conditioned Latent World Model (LaWM). We obtain LaWM by training a latent action model in the latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model and repurposing its forward decoder to predict future observation features for scene evolution. LaWAM then conditions action generation on these predicted latent visual subgoals to enable dynamics-aware robot control. LaWAM achieves state-of-the-art or competitive success rates (SRs) across LIBERO (98.6% SR), RoboTwin (91.22% SR), and real-world manipulation tasks while retaining low-latency inference. LaWAM runs in 187 ms per action-chunk prediction and achieves up to 24x lower wall-clock latency than pixel-space WAMs.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

An iterative Ising decoder for quantum error correction codes

arXiv:2606.12301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Ising framework maps the decoding problem in quantum error correction onto ground-state optimization of a classical Hamiltonian, in which $X$-$Z$ error correlations enter as cross terms. Under phenomenological depolarizing noise, the exact joint formulation contains up to 8-body interactions for the toric code and 10-body for the $6.6.6$ color code. These high-order terms degrade solver convergence, inflate runtime, and raise the auxiliary spin overhead when embedding into native 2-body Ising hardware. In this work, we propose the iterative low-order decoding (ILOD) algorithm, which alternates between $X$- and $Z$-type sub-Hamiltonians, approximating cross-type correlations through Bayesian priors that reweight each type's couplings using the other type's inferred error configuration. This halves the maximum body count of interaction terms in the Hamiltonian, accelerating the solver, restoring convergence at larger code distances, and reducing the total spin count for 2-body embedding by a factor of $2.5$. For the toric code, ILOD attains a threshold of $4.73%$ versus $4.83%$ for the joint formulation, with the empirical runtime ratio scaling as $(0.81)^d$. For the $6.6.6$ color code, their thresholds agree within statistical uncertainty for small code distances, and ILOD remains convergent for larger distances where the joint formulation fails to converge despite a larger annealing budget.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

MagpieTTS-LF: Inference-Time Long-Form Speech Generation Without Training on Long-Form data

arXiv:2606.18485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems achieve remarkable quality on short utterances but long-form speech generation shows prosodic drift, speaker inconsistencies and sentence boundary artifacts. Existing approaches either compress sequences, increase context length or naively concatenate independently synthesized chunks. We present an inference-time approach called MagpieTTS-LF that enables MagpieTTS to produce coherent long-form speech without model retraining. Our method introduces three key innovations: (1) soft attention priors to guide monotonic alignment while preserving past and future context; (2) a stateful inference algorithm that maintains context across sentence chunks, ensuring prosodic continuity; (3) history-aware text encoding that uses past text for discourse-level prosodic planning. Experiments on long texts show significant improvements in long-range intelligibility, prosodic coherence, speaker consistency, and boundary naturalness compared to other baselines.

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

DynFS-MoE: Dynamic Functional-Structural Mixture-of-Experts for Post-Traumatic Epilepsy Diagnosis

Post-traumatic epilepsy (PTE) is a severe complication of traumatic brain injury (TBI), yet early identification remains challenging due to the complex structural and functional alterations it induces in the brain. To address this, we propose a dynamic multimodal Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that integrates functional and structural MRI through time-aware functional-structural encoding and class-conditioned expert routing. Within this framework, modality-specific and cross-modal experts learn complementary representations, while a Modality-Class MoE (MCoE) module dynamically dispatches expert weights according to each classification objective. Experimental results across three binary classification tasks demonstrate that the framework consistently outperforms static fusion baselines, and high-interpretability analyses further reveal meaningful region-of-interest (ROI) interactions. This dynamic multimodal expert framework effectively captures class-dependent brain interaction patterns and provides an interpretable approach for PTE diagnosis and risk stratification.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

How AI Agents Reshape Knowledge Work: Autonomy, Efficiency, and Scope

arXiv:2606.07489v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Frontier AI systems are bridging the gap between intelligence and utility by shifting from conversational assistants to autonomous agents that execute tasks end to end. Using production data from Perplexity's Search and Computer products, we study this transition by examining how AI agents accelerate and reshape knowledge work. Three key empirical findings emerge. First, using sessions with near-identical initial query pairs as natural experiments for the same underlying task attempted with both products, Computer performs 26 minutes of autonomous work per user session, versus 33 seconds for Search. Computer automates task decomposition and execution that Search users might otherwise manually orchestrate and implement. As a result, Computer shifts follow-up query distribution toward higher-order work such as verification and extension. Autonomy also increases execution quality, with per-query dissatisfaction rates 55% lower on Computer than on Search. Second, due to its autonomy advantage, Computer reduces completion time from 269 to 36 minutes on matched tasks, lowering estimated time and cost by 87% and 94%, respectively, compared to humans equipped with Search alone. Third, Computer changes the scope of work that users attempt: Computer queries more often cross occupational boundaries, require higher-order cognition, draw on broader expertise, take the form of composite tasks that bundle interdependent subtasks into a single query, and unlock work activities that are essentially absent from Search usage among the same users. Together, the evidence indicates that AI agents accelerate workflows, enhance output quality, reduce costs, and expand the breadth and depth of automated work.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Rigidity of infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian marginals

arXiv:2606.18654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study infinite exchangeable sequences with Gaussian one-dimensional marginals. We formulate the conjecture that joint Gaussianity of a single pair of coordinates forces the entire sequence to be a Gaussian process. Although this conjecture remains open, we prove that joint Gaussianity of the first four coordinates is sufficient. We also establish the corresponding two-point criterion under the additional assumption that the directing measure is almost surely infinitely divisible.

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

CaricHarmony: Contrastive Diffusion Paths for Identity-Preserving Caricature Synthesis

Sketch-based caricature synthesis suffers from a fundamental failure mode: when identity and shape conditions are combined in diffusion models, they create destructive interference that causes inevitable collapse toward either bland portraits or unrecognizable distortions. We identify the root cause as condition signal contamination – competing probability distributions in the denoising trajectory that make balanced generation impossible. We present CaricHarmony, the first training-free method that explicitly resolves this contamination through parallel uncontaminated diffusion paths. During inference, we maintain three paths: $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i}}$ (pure identity), $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{s}}$ (pure shape), and $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ (harmonized output). Novel energy functions operating on cross-attention features provide gradient guidance that steers $\mathcal{P}^{\mathrm{i+s}}$ toward optimal balance: $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{shape}}$ ensures sketch fidelity through layout and semantic alignment, while $\mathcal{E}_{\mathrm{id}}$ employs token-level correspondence matching robust to extreme distortions. Unlike DemoCaricature requiring 70 seconds per-identity fine-tuning or CaricatureBooth constrained to Bezier curves, CaricHarmony accepts any sketch format and generates in under 16 seconds. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance: 0.8615 shape CLIP score (vs. 0.8450) under comparable identity consistency score, with 7.81 overall user preference score (vs. 6.06). Our method fundamentally reconceptualizes the ID-shape conflict as conditioning signal contamination for diffusion models, enabling unprecedented creative control while preserving recognition.