Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

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

ISE: An Execution-Grounded Recipe for Multi-Turn OS-Agent Trajectories

Training capable OS agents requires data that simultaneously captures structured user intents, multi-turn task delegation, and grounded tool execution–properties absent from existing datasets. We propose ISE (Intent -> Simulate -> Execute), a three-stage synthesis paradigm that addresses these gaps jointly. Stage 1 constructs roughly 50000 structured intents via a 4D framework (Persona x Domain x Task x Complexity); after deduplication the pool contains 43956 unique intents and attains a Vendi Score of 61.57 over the entire pool on mpnet-base-v2 embeddings (cosine kernel, q=1). Stage 2 drives multi-turn user-agent interaction through a role-locked user simulator that grounds each user turn in actual execution outcomes, producing 23132 complete trajectories averaging 8.12 user turns and 68.24 total dialogue turns. Stage 3 runs every tool call inside a live, isolated OS workspace, generating authentic failure-recovery dynamics instead of simulated responses. Fine-tuning on ISETrace improves ClawEval pass@1 from 19.3 to 37.7 using Qwen3-8B on agent tool-use tasks with a standard protocol. This result outperforms zero-shot GPT-4o and the larger Qwen3-32B base model which is four times bigger. An ablation on Stage 2 proves multi-turn simulation brings a large portion of the performance gain. We release all source code and dataset at https://github.com/Valiere01/ISE-Trace.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Planning with Unified Multimodal Models

With the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), many recent works have explored using them for decision-making. However, most of these approaches rely solely on language-based reasoning, which limits their ability to reason and make informed decisions. Recently, a promising new direction has emerged with unified multimodal models (UMMs), which support both multimodal inputs and outputs. We believe such models have greater potential for decision-making by enabling reasoning through generated visual content. To this end, we propose Uni-Plan, a planning framework built on UMMs. Within this framework, a single model simultaneously serves as the policy, dynamics model, and value function. In addition, to avoid hallucinations in dynamics predictions, we present a novel approach self-discriminated filtering, where the generative model serves as a self-discriminator to filter out invalid dynamics predictions. Experiments on embodied decision-making tasks show that Uni-Plan substantially improves success rates compared to VLM-based methods, while also showing strong data scalability, requiring no expert demonstrations and achieving better performance under the same training-data size. This work lays a foundation for future research in reasoning and decision-making with UMMs.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

UBP2: Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.19328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based RL provides an approach to learning reward models from pairwise comparisons of behaviors, bypassing the need for explicit reward design. However, existing methods typically rely on passive data collection and suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially during the early stages of learning. We introduce a model-based approach that actively directs exploration by jointly reasoning over uncertainties in the reward, dynamics, and value functions. Our method, Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning (UBP2), uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value function models to evaluate candidate trajectories according to a unified score that combines expected reward, terminal value, and epistemic uncertainty. Planning under this objective yields an explicit tradeoff between exploitation and information acquisition without requiring ad hoc exploration heuristics. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish sublinear regret guarantees for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings. Empirically, experiments on the Meta-World benchmark show UBP2 achieves substantially higher sample efficiency than model-free preference-based methods and non-optimistic model-based baselines.

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

Response-Aware Multimodal Learning for Post-Treatment Visual Acuity Forecasting

Long-term visual acuity (VA) forecasting after anti-VEGF therapy is important for counseling and follow-up planning in diabetic macular edema (DME), yet remains challenging when only early post-treatment findings are available. While prior OCT-based methods mainly focus on short-term response or single-endpoint prediction, multi-horizon VA forecasting from early longitudinal data remains insufficiently under-explored. In this study, we assembled a real-world cohort of 188 anti-VEGF–treated DME patients with paired baseline and month-1 OCT scans, along with tabular OCT-derived biomarkers and non-imaging clinical variables. Using only these early data, we formulate a multi-horizon VA forecasting problem aimed at predicting visual outcomes at 3, 6, 12, 18, and 24 months, reflecting clinically meaningful follow-up intervals. We propose ReVA, a response-aware multimodal framework that combines baseline and month-1 OCT features with tabular variables to capture disease status and early treatment response. ReVA integrates spatial OCT attention, dependency-aware tabular encoding, and cross-modal fusion to predict patient-specific long-term VA trajectories. The proposed framework achieves MAE=0.1246, RMSE=0.1621, and R^2=0.6064 for 24-month VA prediction, with consistent performance across all forecast horizons. Our findings show that incorporating early treatment-response signals enables clinically meaningful long-term visual acuity forecasting, supporting data-driven decision support for routine anti-VEGF management. Code and pretrained models will be released on https://github.com/nguyenpbui/ReVA.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Unified Latent Space Disentanglement VAE Framework with Robust Disentanglement Effectiveness Evaluation

arXiv:2603.11242v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating and interpreting latent representations, such as variational autoencoders (VAEs), remains a significant challenge for diverse data types, especially when ground-truth generative factors are unknown. To address this, we unify several state-of-the-art disentangled VAE approaches for latent space disentanglement into one framework – bfVAE. To assess the effectiveness of a disentangled VAE model and enhance latent space interpretability, we propose Feature Variance Heterogeneity via Latent Traversal (FVH-LT) and Dirty Block Sparse Regression in Latent Space (DBSR-LS). To ensure robust interpretability of learned latent space, we develop a greedy alignment strategy (GAS) that mitigates label switching and aligns latent dimensions across runs to set the foundation of result aggregation. We also introduce a convenient scalar latent space separation index (LSSI) based on the GAS-aligned outputs of FVH-LT and DBSR-LS to summarize the overall latent structural separation without knowledge of the ground-truth generative factors. We compare bfVAE to five VAE models and validate the effectiveness FVH-LT, DBSR-LS, and LSSI in on seven tabular and image datasets. Under our examined experimental settings, bfVAE provides a more flexible disentanglement framework achieves more favorable overall trade-off between disentanglement and reconstruction than the benchmark VAE models; FVH-LT and DBSR-LS reliably uncover semantically meaningful and domain-relevant latent structures and generally yield consistent results; and LSSI makes an effective quantitative summary of latent structural separation.

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

A Pragmatic VLA Foundation Model

Offering great potential in robotic manipulation, a capable Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation model is expected to faithfully generalize across tasks and platforms while ensuring cost efficiency (e.g., data and GPU hours required for adaptation). To this end, we develop LingBot-VLA with around 20,000 hours of real-world data from 9 popular dual-arm robot configurations. Through a systematic assessment on 3 robotic platforms, each completing 100 tasks with 130 post-training episodes per task, our model achieves clear superiority over competitors, showcasing its strong performance and broad generalizability. We have also built an efficient codebase, which delivers a throughput of 261 samples per second with an 8-GPU training setup, representing a 1.5~2.8$\times$ (depending on the relied VLM base model) speedup over existing VLA-oriented codebases. The above features ensure that our model is well-suited for real-world deployment. To advance the field of robot learning, we provide open access to the code, base model, and benchmark data, with a focus on enabling more challenging tasks and promoting sound evaluation standards.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Flex4DHuman: Flexible Multi-view Video Diffusion for 4D Human Reconstruction

We present Flex4DHuman, a multi-view video diffusion model that transforms a monocular or sparse multi-view video of a dynamic subject into synchronized dense multi-view videos using only relative camera-pose conditioning. Unlike prior human-centric methods that rely on skeletons, depth maps, normals, or rendered target-view geometry, Flex4DHuman requires no explicit geometry priors and instead conditions generation through relative camera-pose positional encoding. The generated videos can be directly ingested by downstream reconstruction pipelines to create dynamic 4D Gaussian splats. Built on the Wan 2.1 1.3B text-to-video model, Flex4DHuman preserves the backbone architecture and encodes camera and view information through a five-axis positional encoding that extends spatio-temporal RoPE with view indices and continuous SE(3) relative camera geometry. A three-stage curriculum progressively trains the model for pose following, flexible reference-to-target view generation, and temporal rollout. To support temporal rollout, we train with clean historical target-view tokens. We also add multi-view captions to enable test-time text control. Combined with an off-the-shelf 4D Gaussian Splatting stage, our framework lifts monocular static-camera videos into dynamic 4D Gaussian splats. Experiments on DNA-Rendering and ActorsHQ show that Flex4DHuman surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods, while the same formulation generalizes to animal categories after mixed human-animal training. These capabilities make Flex4DHuman a practical step toward scalable 4D content creation from casual monocular videos for simulation, gaming, AR/VR, and video re-shooting.

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

EdgeZSAD: Practical Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices

Industrial inspection needs zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) that remains useful under edge deployment constraints. Recent methods often rely on ViT-L foundation backbones (~300M parameters), which exceed the memory and operator budget of typical embedded hardware. We study this regime through EdgeZSAD, a compact reference system built around a TinyViT-21M-512 backbone, an asymmetric global-local readout (EdgeGLR), and a reproducible source-side training recipe (Real-IAD-DR). We train a single checkpoint in a source-trained, target-unseen protocol and evaluate it across six industrial benchmarks. Across three independent runs, the resulting model reaches an average image AUROC of 91.6 on MVTec-AD and 88.2 on VisA, while remaining directly deployable on Jetson Orin Nano Super (TensorRT FP16) and RB5 Gen2 (QNN GPU FP16). Across the six device-rescored benchmarks, image-AUROC drift stays below 0.2 points, indicating that the exported graph preserves host-side ranking behavior in the evaluated deployment setting.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Helping Figures Tell their Story! Paper-Grounded Video Generation Explaining Complex Scientific Figures

Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HanDyVQA: A Video QA Benchmark for Fine-Grained Hand-Object Interaction Dynamics

Hand-object interaction (HOI) inherently involves dynamics where human manipulations produce distinct spatio-temporal effects on objects. However, existing semantic HOI benchmarks focused either on manipulation or on the resulting effects at a coarse level, lacking fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning to capture the underlying dynamics in HOI. We introduce HanDyVQA, a fine-grained video question-answering benchmark that comprehensively covers both the manipulation and effect aspects of HOI. HanDyVQA comprises six complementary question types (Action, Process, Objects, Location, State Change, and Object Parts), totalling 11.1K multiple-choice QA pairs. Collected QA pairs recognizing manipulation styles, hand/object motions, and part-level state changes. HanDyVQA also includes 10.3K segmentation masks for Objects and Object Parts questions, enabling the evaluation of object/part-level reasoning in video object segmentation. We evaluated recent video foundation models on our benchmark and found that even the best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, reached only 73% average accuracy, which is far from human performance (97%). Further analysis shows the remaining challenges in spatial relationship, motion, and part-level geometric understanding. We also found that integrating explicit HOI-related cues into visual features improves performance, offering insights for developing future models with a deeper understanding of HOI dynamics.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

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

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

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

Learning from Own Solutions: Self-Conditioned Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606.18810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in training LLMs for reasoning tasks, but representative methods such as GRPO assign uniform credit across all tokens, wasting gradient on routine tokens while under-crediting pivotal reasoning steps. Existing token-level credit assignment methods require resources beyond the model's own rollouts. GRPO variants rely on process reward models or ground-truth answers. Knowledge distillation assigns credit through per-token divergence but requires external teachers (On-Policy Distillation) or privileged information (On-Policy Self Distillation). However, these dependencies limit applicability in the pure RLVR setting. We observe that conditioning the model on its own verified trajectories induces a measurable per-token KL divergence between the original and conditioned distributions, and prove that distilling from a self-teacher constructed by verified trajectories leads to infeasible weighted-average solutions when multiple verified trajectories exist. We propose SC-GRPO (Self-Conditioned GRPO), which uses KL divergence mentioned before as a multiplicative weight on GRPO gradients. Across five benchmarks spanning math, code, and agentic tasks, SC-GRPO consistently outperforms 8.1% over GRPO and 5.9% over DAPO with stronger OOD performance. Moreover, SC-GRPO achieves higher performance than OPD.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens

World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics reveal nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response signatures in critical illness

Background: Plasma proteomics may identify host-response signatures in sepsis, but it is unclear whether extracellular vesicle (EV)-enriched plasma provides distinct or redundant information compared with plasma. We compared paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomes in critically ill patients with sepsis and critically ill non-sepsis controls (CINS). Methods: In this prospective observational study, paired plasma and EV-enriched plasma samples were analyzed from 56 critically ill adults, including 40 patients with sepsis and 16 CINS patients. Protein abundance was quantified using liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Analyses compared proteomic depth, protein overlap, global concordance between compartments, and differential protein abundance between CINS and sepsis. Exploratory Gene Ontology enrichment was performed as a supplementary analysis. Results: EV-enriched plasma expanded proteomic detection, identifying 2,476 filtered proteins compared with 506 in plasma. Only 386 proteins were detected in both compartments, while 2,090 were unique to EV-enriched plasma and 120 were unique to plasma. Among shared proteins, plasma and EV-enriched plasma showed modest global concordance across critically ill patients (Spearman coeff = 0.322, p = 9.19 x 10^-11), with similar findings in sepsis alone. Differential abundance analysis identified 11 sepsis-associated proteins in plasma and 22 in EV-enriched plasma. Only SAA1, SAA2, and IGFBP6 were significant in both compartments. Exploratory pathway analysis supported acute-phase and inflammatory enrichment in plasma sepsis-associated proteins, while EV-enriched signals were directionally plausible but did not meet prespecified FDR thresholds. Conclusion: Plasma and EV-enriched plasma proteomics capture related but nonredundant sepsis-associated host-response information in critically ill patients.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The Protective Role of Belonging and Socioeconomic Status in Dropout Intent Among Minority Ethnic Students: A Mixed Methods Study

Improving minority ethnic student retention is a global higher education priority. This mixed-methods study investigated how institutional belonging and socioeconomic status interact to shape dropout intentions among minority university students in the UK (N = 182). Quantitative results revealed that perceived course difficulty and lower subjective socioeconomic status were the strongest predictors of dropout intent. While the interaction between socioeconomic status and difficulty was non-significant, qualitative accounts showed distinct structural vulnerabilities. Financial strain restricted social integration, turning socioeconomic disparities into campus isolation. Conversely, representative curricula, diverse peer networks, and stable cultural in-groups (e.g., religious affiliations, living in the parental home) functioned as essential psychological buffers against academic exhaustion and alienation. Universities must shift from transactional models to sustained structural equity to protect vulnerable student groups.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Sphere Packings in Higher Dimension (after Boaz Klartag)

arXiv:2606.13313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let $\delta_n^L$ be the maximal density of a lattice sphere packing in the $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. We explain how Boaz Klartag proved the inequality $\delta_n^L \geq c n^2 2^{-n}$ where $c>0$ is a universal constant. In higher dimension, even for non-lattice sphere packings, this new lower bound is a substantial improvement. Klartag's proof uses the probabilistic method in two different ways. The first, very standard, relies on the statistical properties of a uniformly chosen random lattice. The second, completely new, studies the stochastic evolution of an ellipsoid constrained to contain non nonzero lattice points in the interior.

17.
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.

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

Implementation of Licensed Plate Detection and Noise Removal in Image Processing

Authors:

Car license plate recognition system is an image processing technology used to identify vehicles by capturing their Car License Plates. The car license plate recognition technology is also known as automatic number-plate recognition, automatic vehicle identification, car license plate recognition or optical character recognition for cars. In Malaysia, as the number of vehicle is increasing rapidly nowadays, a pretty great number of vehicle on the road has brought about the considerable demands of car license plate recognition system. Car license plate recognition system can be implemented in electronic parking payment system, highway toll-fee system, traffic surveillance system and as police enforcement tools. Additionally, car license plate recognition system technology also has potential to be combined with various techniques in other different fields like biology, aerospace and so on to achieve the goal of solving some specialized problems.

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

Memento: Reconstruct to Remember for Consistent Long Video Generation

Long-form video generation requires recurring subjects to remain consistent across various shots, viewpoints, motions, and scene transitions. Existing temporal decomposition methods improve scalability by generating videos shot by shot. However, they mainly focus on optimizing plausible next-shot continuations without verifying whether the historical memory preserves identity-critical subject evidence. Consequently, as generation proceeds, recurring subjects may be diluted, overwritten, or forgotten. In this paper, we propose Memento, a subject-reconstruction-guided framework that treats subject preservation as an explicit identity grounding problem, based on the premise that a memory bank faithfully preserving a subject should support reconstructing that subject from memory alone. Specifically, Memento jointly trains autoregressive next-shot generation with memory-based subject reconstruction, recovering target appearances using historical memory and global story captions. To disentangle long-range subject evidence from short-range cues, Memento introduces a dual-query memory mechanism, where one query retrieves identity-relevant memory and the other selects short-context keyframes for coherent continuation. Additionally, a subject-aware cinematic data pipeline provides precise reconstruction supervision via consistent, pronoun-free subject descriptions. Experiments demonstrate that Memento achieves state-of-the-art performance in long-term subject consistency, cross-shot coherence, and visual quality.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

To GAN or Not To GAN: Segmentation Analysis on Mars DEM

arXiv:2606.13252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To better understand Martian Surface, which is needed to enable Rovers navigate Mars with ease, it is necessary to be able to determine the location of mounds. Detecting and studying these morphologies can also help us find evidence of extraterrestrial life, in this case, more specifically, water or signs of life conducive environments. Detection of mounds was done by manually mapping morphological parameters onto Digital Elevation Models. This paper solves the problem by automatically detecting and or predicting mounds on Mars using Neural Network based Semantic Segmentation methodologies. This is done by using supervised semantic segmentation model and generative adversarial approach. A comparison of the approaches shows that adding extra artificially generated data did not improve the result.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DRIVESPATIAL: A Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Intelligence in VLMs for Autonomous Driving

Spatiotemporal intelligence in autonomous driving (AD) requires an agent to integrate multi-view observations into a coherent scene representation, maintain object continuity across viewpoints and time, and reason about spatial relations, interactions, and future dynamics. However, existing AD vision-language benchmarks largely focus on single-view, static, ego-centric, or single-source question answering, leaving it unclear whether current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can truly construct and reason over dynamic driving scenes. We introduce DriveSpatial, a benchmark of 15.6K human-verified QA pairs across 20 tasks from five large-scale AD datasets. DriveSpatial evaluates four abilities: Cognitive Scene Construction, Multi-view Relational Understanding, Temporal Reasoning, and Generalization. Unlike prior benchmarks, DriveSpatial is generated from a dynamic multi-relational scene graph that encodes object states, spatial relations, interactions, camera visibility, and temporal correspondences, enabling QA pairs that enforce genuine cross-view and spatiotemporal reasoning. Evaluating 15 representative VLMs reveals a substantial human-model gap: the strongest model trails humans by 28.4 points, with Cognitive Scene Construction emerging as the key bottleneck. Further diagnostics show that language-only prompting is insufficient, while explicit BEV grounding consistently improves performance. These results suggest that current VLMs lack the scene-construction ability needed for reliable spatiotemporal driving intelligence. DriveSpatial and its construction pipeline will be released to support future research.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Fung-AI: An AI/ML-driven pipeline for antifungal peptide discovery

by Daniel S. Berman, Libby M. Lewis, Tom D. Curtis, Olivia N. Tiburzi, Daniel F. Q. Smith, Arturo Casadevall, Laura J. Dunphy Emerging fungal pathogens represent a concerning threat to both global health and food security. In this study, we aimed to address our rising vulnerability to fungal pathogens through the development of the Fung-AI pipeline: an AI/ML-driven approach for antifungal discovery. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained to generate novel candidate antifungal peptide sequences. Next, in silico antifungal and hemolytic classifiers were built to further prioritize AI-generated peptides for experimental validation. From a pool of ~10,000 candidates, thirteen peptides were selected for testing over two-stages of experimentation. Five peptides were found to display mild antifungal activity against the wheat pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 250 µg/mL to 500 µg/mL. Four of the five peptides also showed activity against the human pathogen, Candida albicans (MIC: 500 µg/mL). Two of our AI-generated antifungal peptides additionally demonstrated low cytotoxicity in HepG2 human liver carcinoma cells (LC50 > 704.2 µg/mL) indicating that they may be useful as scaffolds for future optimization for therapeutic applications. None of our peptides were found to considerably inhibit the emerging pathogen C. auris, suggesting the need for pathogen-specific down-selection of candidate peptides. Overall, we present a proof-of-principle, generative-AI-based approach for the rapid design of de novo antifungal peptides.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Kemeny's constant minimization for reversible Markov chains via structure-preserving perturbations

arXiv:2510.24679v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Kemeny's constant measures the efficiency of a Markov chain in traversing its states. We investigate whether structure-preserving perturbations to the transition probabilities of a reversible Markov chain can improve its connectivity while maintaining a fixed stationary distribution. Although the minimum achievable value for Kemeny's constant can be estimated, the required perturbations may be infeasible. We reformulate the problem as an optimization task, focusing on solution existence and efficient algorithms, with an emphasis on the problem of minimizing Kemeny's constant under sparsity constraints.

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

V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learning

We present V-JEPA 2.1, a family of self-supervised models that learn dense, high-quality visual representations for both images and videos while retaining strong global scene understanding. The approach combines four key components. First, a dense predictive loss uses a masking-based objective in which both visible and masked tokens contribute to the training signal, encouraging explicit spatial and temporal grounding. Second, deep self-supervision applies the self-supervised objective hierarchically across multiple intermediate encoder layers to improve representation quality. Third, multi-modal tokenizers enable unified training across images and videos. Finally, the model benefits from effective scaling in both model capacity and training data. Together, these design choices produce representations that are spatially structured, semantically coherent, and temporally consistent. Empirically, V-JEPA 2.1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, including 7.71 mAP on Ego4D for short-term object-interaction anticipation and 40.8 Recall@5 on EPIC-KITCHENS for high-level action anticipation, as well as a 20-point improvement in real-robot grasping success rate over V-JEPA-2 AC. The model also demonstrates strong performance in robotic navigation (5.687 ATE on TartanDrive), depth estimation (0.307 RMSE on NYUv2 with a linear probe), and global recognition (77.7 on Something-Something-V2). These results show that V-JEPA 2.1 significantly advances the state of the art in dense visual understanding and world modeling.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A distant brown dwarf coplanar to a warm Jupiter and a hot super-Earth

In transiting planetary systems, in which planetary sizes are accurately determined from transit observations, the presence of transit-timing variations1 (TTVs), especially when combined with radial velocity (RV) data, provides powerful constraints on masses and orbital eccentricities. Together, these measurements offer crucial insights into system architecture, formation mechanisms and dynamical evolution. We present long-term RV and transit/TTV monitoring of the relatively young star (age approximately 1 Gyr) TOI-201, revealing an exceptional multi-planet system composed of a hot super-Earth (SE) size planet transiting every 5.8 days, a warm Jupiter (WJ) on a 53-day orbit and an eccentric (e = 0.62) low-mass brown dwarf (BD) on an approximately 8-year orbit, with an estimated mass MBD of about 16 Jupiter masses. The BD is the longest-period transiting substellar object ever characterized by means of RVs and the only one known to be coplanar with inner planets. The architecture of this system suggests that the SE was formed isolated and in the innermost region of the gaseous disk. On the other hand, the orbital configuration of the outer companions suggests a nearly in situ formation of both objects, with the WJ forming in a dense inner disk. Alternatively, the BD might have formed farther out and migrated inward, while increasing its eccentricity owing to interactions with the disk. Analysis of long-term radial velocity data and transit time variations, induced by a super-Earth, a warm Jupiter and a brown dwarf in a coplanar orbit around the relatively young star TOI201.