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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development and reliability and validity test of the Questionnaire on Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of ICU Nurses on Blood Oxygen Saturation Management in Mechanically Ventilated Patients

Objective: A questionnaire on the knowledge, attitude and practice of ICU nurses regarding the management of blood oxygen saturation in patients with mechanical ventilation was compiled, and its reliability and validity were tested. Method: Drawing upon the knowledge-attitude-practice theory, the initial questionnaire draft was developed through literature review and consultation with Delphi experts. Employing convenience sampling, 32 nurses from the General ICU of Wuxi Second People's Hospital were surveyed between 1 August 2025 and 27 September 2025, enabling item screening and assessment of reliability and validity.The full version of the developed questionnaire is provided as Supporting Information (S1 File). All items are published under a CC BY 4.0 license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Result: A questionnaire on the knowledge, attitude and practice of ICU nurses regarding the management of blood oxygen saturation in mechanically ventilated patients was finalised, comprising 26 items: 11 in the knowledge dimension, 6 in the attitude dimension and 9 in the behaviour dimension. The overall Cronbach's coefficient for the questionnaire was 0.88, with dimension-specific coefficients of 0.787, 0.722, and 0.781 respectively. The Spearman-Brown coefficient for the entire questionnaire was 0.967, while dimension-specific coefficients were 0.796, 0.666, and 0.728 respectively. The content validity index at the questionnaire level (S-CVI) was 0.886, and the item-level content validity index (I-CVI) ranged from 0.913 to 0.967. 0.728. The questionnaire's level content validity index (S-CVI) was 0.886, and the item level content validity index (I-CVI) ranged from 0.913 to 1.00. Conclusion: The questionnaire on knowledge, attitude and practice of blood oxygen saturation management in mechanically ventilated patients demonstrates good reliability and validity. It may serve as an assessment tool for intensive care unit nurses regarding their knowledge, attitude, and practices concerning blood oxygen saturation management in mechanically ventilated patients, thereby establishing a foundation for developing targeted intervention strategies in future practice.

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

Visual Verification Enables Inference-time Steering and Autonomous Policy Improvement

arXiv:2606.18247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world should learn from their experience and improve over time. This requires a mechanism of practicing and learning from feedback. In this paper, we propose VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework for generalist robot policies for inference-time policy steering and self-improvement. We use a pre-trained generalist robot policy as a ``generator'' and pair it with a gradient-free ``visual verifier'' that evaluates actions at inference time. This framework enables inference-time steering that improves policy performance without additional training. We demonstrate that inference-time verification consistently outperforms vanilla generalists without training on additional demonstration data. Additionally, we demonstrate that the verified rollouts provide effective supervision for offline policy improvement: policies fine-tuned on verified self-generated trajectories achieve consistent performance gains. Notably, we find that post-training with verified rollouts achieves comparable efficiency to expert demonstrations, while requiring no human interventions. Our results highlight inference-time verification as a practical and scalable mechanism for improving robotic policies during deployment.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Socioeconomic Determinants of Guideline-Concordant Therapy for Early-Stage Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Population-Based Analysis from Appalachian and Non-Appalachian Ohio, 2004-2015

Purpose: To examine the relative contributions of insurance, county-level poverty, and other socioeconomic factors, as compared with Appalachian geography, to receipt of guideline-concordant therapy for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in Appalachian and non-Appalachian Ohio. Methods: Retrospective population-based cohort study using the Ohio Cancer Incidence Surveillance System. We identified adults diagnosed with early-stage NSCLC between 2004 and 2015 (N=26,756). The primary outcome was receipt of guideline-concordant local therapy (surgery or definitive radiation). Rural-urban classification used USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Codes. Multivariable logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards models assessed predictors of treatment and survival, with E-values, race-stratified models, and propensity score weighting as sensitivity analyses. Findings: Median age was 71 years; 50.3% were male, 83.8% non-Hispanic White, and 20.4% Appalachian. Overall, 83.6% received guideline-concordant local therapy (59.6% surgery, 24.0% radiation). In adjusted analysis, Medicaid (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 0.53, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.44-0.63; adjusted risk ratio [RR] 0.94, 0.91-0.96), county-level poverty >20% (OR 0.77, 95% CI 0.68-0.87; RR 0.96, 0.95-0.98), and unmarried status were independently associated with lower therapy receipt, whereas Appalachian residence was associated with modestly higher receipt (OR 1.17, 95% CI 1.06-1.29; RR 1.02, 1.01-1.04). Therapy rates converged across regions over the study period (year x Appalachian interaction p20% (HR 1.13, 95% CI 1.07-1.20). Conclusions: Socioeconomic factors, particularly Medicaid insurance and county-level poverty, were the patient characteristics most strongly associated with lower receipt of guideline-concordant therapy, whereas Appalachian residence was not a barrier. Findings support targeted interventions addressing insurance-related and poverty-related barriers to lung cancer care in high-poverty communities regardless of geographic designation.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Towards the implementation of a quantum classifier

arXiv:2606.10150v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we investigate the use of a quantum circuit as a binary classification model in the context of quantum machine learning. We call this model, binary quantum classifier. First, we describe fundamental concepts of quantum computing and introduce the computational tool used: Qibo, an open-source framework for efficient quantum simulations and quantum hardware control. Then, we describe how to design a binary quantum classifier for the classification of images and small arrays of variables by showing how to input data in the circuit, defining a quantum circuit model Ansatz with trainable parameters and a loss function, and implementing multiple minimizers. We test our quantum classifier with two data sets. The first one is the MNIST data set which is composed of handwritten digits (reduced to only handwritten zeros and handwritten ones for binary classification). We study the behavior of different minimizers by increasing the number of layers of the Ansatz. The second data set represents two different high energy collisions that can occur at colliders such as LHC (CERN). Due to in-time proton-proton interactions known as pile-up, we distinguish two different data sets: "without pile-up" and "with pile-up". These collisions can be represented by images of size 32x32 or by six high-level variables that we call features. By increasing the size of the training data set and the number of layers of the Ansatz, we search for the best minimizer. Splitting the data set in training set and test set, we compute: ROC curve, AUC score, confusion matrices and test set accuracy. For "with pile-up" images, we compare the results obtained with the quantum classifier with a small convolutional neural network. We conclude that is possible to build a binary quantum classifier with a quantum circuit and we highlight its performances and limitations in comparison with classical technologies.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.15743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the missing-modality challenge in multi-modal learning by introducing Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multi-Modal Learning (UL4M4), a flexible framework that imputes missing feature embeddings in a task-independent manner before supervised prediction. We propose modality-specific normalization and a novel partial-modality distance metric to enable fair clustering of incomplete observations, capturing cross-modal structures while preserving scale-invariance across varying dimensionalities and modality counts. Cluster centers from this unsupervised stage guide an iterative greedy imputation process for any missing modalities during training or inference, supporting arbitrary numbers of modalities and arbitrary missing patterns per sample. The imputation module is lightweight, uses frozen encoders, and decouples from the downstream task, allowing easy integration with any fusion/prediction architecture. Extensive experiments under diverse and highly incomplete regimes demonstrate UL4M4's robustness, achieving, to the best of our knowledge, the first consistent F1-Micro scores above 0.7 on challenging missing configurations even when more than 50\% of modality slots are missing. Results are also stable across cluster sizes and significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available here: https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Multimodal-Learning-with-Missing-Modalities-via-Unsupervised-Learning.

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

AI SciBrief as a Gateway to Research: A Framework for Onboarding Students into New Research Areas

Students at all levels of higher education face a significant barrier in the form of information overload, which often paralyzes the initial stages of the research process and suppresses motivation. In response, this article introduces a pedagogical framework that leverages AI SciBrief, a platform powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) designed to automatically generate digests of scientific trends. We describe how this multidisciplinary tool - with initial coverage in finance, medicine, and education - can be integrated into the curriculum to overcome this "entry barrier." The framework provides concrete methodologies for utilizing these digests to facilitate topic selection for term papers, accelerate literature reviews for dissertations, and enable postgraduate students to continuously monitor emerging trends. We conclude that AI SciBrief functions as a "gateway to research" effectively reducing students' cognitive load and empowering them to transition more rapidly from information searching to knowledge creation.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

CFCamo: A Counterfactual Detect-or-Abstain Framework for Camouflaged Object Detection

Vision-language reinforcement learning has recently shown strong target-present localization for camouflaged object detection (COD). Yet localization is only one side of the decision: when the agent faces an ordinary image with no camouflaged target, will it still claim that a camouflaged object exists? Standard COD training and evaluation data are positive-only, so agents optimized under this setting can acquire an over-detect bias, a task-specific form of object hallucination that standard COD evaluation leaves unmeasured. To quantify this target-absent behavior, we construct Counterfactual COD (CF-COD), a paired benchmark that removes the camouflaged target from each held-out COD evaluation image while preserving a plausible background. CF-COD evaluates whether a model detects the target on the original image and abstains on the target-absent counterfactual, summarized by Pair Accuracy (PA). We further introduce CFCamo, a paired counterfactual framework for COD with abstention. For training, CFCamo optimizes a Qwen3-VL-4B-Instruct agent with Counterfactual Sequence Policy Optimization (CSPO), which samples paired original-counterfactual rollouts and uses a Counterfactual Paired Reward (CPR) to couple original-image detection with counterfactual abstention. On CAMO-test, CFCamo improves S_alpha by +3.7 pp over the prior RL-based COD baseline; across CF-COD, it reaches 80.0-90.8% PA. Ablations show that removing counterfactual coupling reduces PA to 1.4-5.2% despite strong target-present COD scores, showing that target-present evaluation alone does not characterize detect-or-abstain behavior. Overall, these results indicate that CFCamo improves COD agents by coupling target-present detection with target-absent abstention, rather than merely strengthening target-present localization. Code and data are available at https://github.com/suhang2000/CFCamo.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes

arXiv:2606.13200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes (ICDZM) in the generalized Creutz ladders using closed quench paths that pass through two critical points successively. By reading out the final zero-mode transfer probability, we find rich ICDZM interference patterns dependent on the quench path. In particular, when the closed path links two topologically nontrivial phases, the ICDZM pattern may either vanish or exhibit period doubling. Within the framework of WKB analysis, this phenomenon is well clarified by the interference phase accumulated in the quench procedure. We also demonstrate that the zero-mode transfer probability can be detected by the deviation of the boundary particle number from its initial fractional value, which arises from the blending of bulk modes in the critical dynamics. As an edge defect, the zero-mode transfer probability captures both the ICDZM oscillation and the known anomalous defect production in a non-closed quench path. These results identify ICDZM and the corresponding edge defect as probes for critical dynamics associated with topological zero modes.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Nonlinear Two-Time-Scale Stochastic Approximation: A Sharp Phase Transition and How to Beat It

arXiv:2606.14488v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent finite-time analyses of nonlinear two-time-scale stochastic approximation show that under contractive assumptions the slow iterate $Y_k$ with stepsizes $\beta_k=\Theta(k^{-1})$ and $\alpha_k=\Theta(k^{-a})$, $a\in(1/2,1)$, generally satisfies a mean-square rate of order $k^{-a}$; decoupled $k^{-1}$ rates require strong local linearity. We identify a sharp regularity-dependent boundary. In a rate-determining normal form where the slow drift contains a locally linear leakage and a nonlinear remainder of order $1+\rho$ ($\rho\in[0,1]$), the uncorrected recursion satisfies \[ \mathbb{E}\|Y_k\|^2 \le C\bigl(k^{-1}+k^{-a(1+\rho)}\bigr), \] and a matching scalar Gaussian lower bound shows that the slower term is unavoidable without modifying the update. Thus the decoupled $k^{-1}$ rate is guaranteed for the uncorrected recursion exactly when $a(1+\rho)\ge 1$. This lower bound concerns only the naive update; it is not an information-theoretic obstruction. We demonstrate this by equipping the normal-form recursion with an auxiliary online bias estimator \[ M_{k+1}=M_k+\gamma_k(R(X_k)-M_k),\qquad \beta_k\ll\gamma_k\ll\alpha_k, \] and subtracting $M_k$ from the slow update. Under the same stability, moment, and remainder assumptions, the corrected recursion achieves $\mathbb{E}\|\widetilde Y_k\|^2=O(k^{-1})$ for every $\rho\in[0,1]$, including regimes where the uncorrected update provably suffers the slower rate. Finally, we prove localized transfer theorems that extend the phase-transition mechanism to general nonlinear TTSA in fast-manifold coordinates. The proofs are non-asymptotic and rely on two Abel-transform cancellations: one for the locally linear fast-error leakage, and one for the tracked nonlinear bias.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-perturbative CPMG scaling and qutrit-driven breakdown under compiled superconducting-qubit control: a single-qubit study

作者:

arXiv:2603.29525v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Decoherence in superconducting qubits arises from both multilevel dynamics and structured environmental noise, yet perturbative models cannot capture all resulting signatures. Here, EmuPlat couples instruction-set-architecture-level waveform generation to the hierarchical equations of motion HEOM under $1/f$ non-Markovian pure dephasing. In the resulting non-perturbative regime – where filter-function predictions become quantitatively uninformative – CPMG scaling of a three-level superconducting transmon yields one calibration result, two physical findings, and one structural null. Y-CPMG exhibits axis-dependent scaling-law breakdown – non-monotonic decoherence, partial coherence revival, and pronounced X–Y population asymmetry ($0.204$ vs ${

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

A Multi-level Analysis of Factors Associated with Student Performance: A Machine Learning Approach to the SAEB Microdata

arXiv:2510.22266v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the factors that influence student performance in basic education is a central challenge for formulating effective public policies in Brazil. This study introduces a multi-level machine learning approach to classify the proficiency of 9th-grade and high school students using microdata from the System of Assessment of Basic Education (SAEB). Our model uniquely integrates four data sources: student socioeconomic characteristics, teacher professional profiles, school indicators, and principal management profiles. A comparative analysis of four ensemble algorithms confirmed the superiority of a Random Forest model, which achieved 90.2% accuracy and an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 96.7%. To move beyond prediction, we applied Explainable AI (XAI) using SHAP, which revealed that the school's average socioeconomic level is the most dominant predictor, demonstrating that systemic factors have a greater impact than individual characteristics in isolation. The primary conclusion is that academic performance is a systemic phenomenon deeply tied to the school's ecosystem. This study provides a data-driven, interpretable tool to inform policies aimed at promoting educational equity by addressing disparities between schools.

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

A Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-Based Transformer Method for Solving the Open Shop Scheduling Problem

arXiv:2606.13682v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The open shop scheduling problem (OSSP) arises in many industrial and service settings but remains computationally challenging as the number of jobs and machines increases. While exact methods quickly become intractable, classical dispatching rules and metaheuristics may require substantial tuning to maintain solution quality at large scales. This study develops a Transformer-based scheduling policy for OSSP using an encoder-decoder architecture with multi-head attention. The model is trained on Taillard benchmark instances (4x4, 5x5, 7x7, and 10x10) using only the processing-time matrix as input and produces feasible schedules with makespans typically within 15-30% of best-known values. To evaluate scalability, the trained policy is applied without retraining to randomly generated instances from 40x40 to 100x100 and compared against classical dispatching heuristics, including SPT, LPT, MWKR, and EST. Across these large instances, the Transformer achieved average gaps of 12.89-15.12% relative to a standard lower bound. Compared with EST, the Transformer remained competitive, typically within a modest margin, while substantially outperforming SPT and LPT. These results indicate that a Transformer policy trained on small OSSP instances can generalize to substantially larger problems and provide a feature-light, learning-based alternative to classical dispatching rules.

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

Atlas: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoning

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with external tools has significantly expanded the capabilities of AI agents. However, as the diversity of both LLMs and tools increases, selecting the optimal model-tool combination becomes a high-dimensional optimization challenge. Existing approaches often rely on a single model or fixed tool-calling logic, failing to exploit the performance variations across heterogeneous model-tool pairs. In this paper, we present ATLAS (Adaptive Tool-LLM Alignment and Synergistic Invocation), a dual-path framework for dynamic tool usage in cross-domain complex reasoning. ATLAS operates via a dual-path approach: (1) training-free cluster-based routing that exploits empirical priors for domain-specific alignment, and (2) RL-based multi-step routing that explores autonomous trajectories for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms closed-source models like GPT-4o, surpassing existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+10.1%) and out-of-distribution (+13.1%) tasks. Furthermore, our framework shows significant gains in visual reasoning by orchestrating specialized multi-modal tools.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Robustness of Similarity-based Positional Encoding Under Rotations: Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Validation

Positional encoding is a fundamental component of Transformer architectures, as it injects information about the spatial or sequential arrangement of inputs. Among recent alternatives to standard absolute and sinusoidal encodings, similarity-based positional encoding (simPE) has emerged as a flexible framework for representing positional structure through pairwise relations. simPE was originally designed for medical imaging applications, where geometric robustness is especially relevant: small rotations naturally arise during image acquisition, induced by imaging instruments, patient positioning, or slight acquisition misalignments. Despite its empirical promise, the theoretical behavior of simPE under geometric perturbations has not been fully characterized. In this paper, we study the robustness of simPE with respect to rotations, combining formal theoretical analysis with experimental validation. We first show that simPE is generally not rotation-invariant. We then prove that, under mild Lipschitz assumptions on the elementary components, simPE is stable under rotational perturbations and derive explicit perturbation bounds in Frobenius norm. We validate these findings experimentally on four controlled datasets–a synthetic Arrow dataset, a synthetic Shapes dataset (four geometric shape categories), a synthetic Digits dataset, and a benchmark image classification dataset (FashionMNIST)–in which training and validation images are kept in a fixed canonical orientation while test images are subjected to increasing rotation angles. Across all datasets, simPE consistently outperforms standard learned positional encoding in terms of accuracy, F1 score, precision, and recall under rotation, particularly in the small-to-moderate angle regime, corroborating the theoretical stability guarantees.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum-Driven Neuromorphic Computing for Million-Qubit-Scale Workloads

arXiv:2606.12968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Apollo, a 10000 node p-qubit neuromorphic processor fabricated in 16 nm mixed signal CMOS and operating fully at room temperature with a typical analog core power envelope of about 0.5 W. Its fundamental element, the p-qubit, is a bistable stochastic unit whose continuous time state fluctuations are driven by integrated quantum entropy units that inject true quantum derived randomness. This enables ultrafast stochastic transitions at low energy while preserving a classical state representation. Apollo combines these p-qubits with a high degree Hyperion 256 interconnect topology, allowing efficient embedding of dense Ising and QUBO problems with substantially reduced minor embedding overhead compared with sparse annealing platforms. We show that, through the Suzuki Trotter correspondence, the equilibrium statistics and annealing dynamics of the p-qubit network reproduce key properties of transverse field quantum annealing without cryogenic cooling, long lived coherence, or microwave control. Beyond device level validation, Apollo is evaluated on a three dimensional spin glass benchmark previously used to study quantum advantage in superconducting annealers. Across 300 disorder realizations, Apollo reaches substantially lower ground state energies than reported cryogenic quantum annealing hardware, while remaining distinct from classical simulated annealing and simulated quantum annealing. A 350 nm release candidate device experimentally validates the core p-qubit dynamics, thermodynamic sampling correctness, and continuous time annealing behavior. These results establish Apollo as a room temperature, industrially scalable platform for quantum driven energy based optimization, probabilistic inference, generative modeling, and hybrid classical quantum workflows.

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

The FID Lottery: Quantifying Hidden Randomness in Generative-Model Evaluation

The Frechet Inception Distance (FID) is the de facto arbiter of image generation, yet most papers report just a single number from a single trained model using a single sampling seed. How reproducible is that number if we retrain the model, or merely resample from it? In this paper, we treat FID as a random variable on a two-axis panel of training and generation seeds, and measure its variance directly on several hundred SiT networks trained on class-conditional ImageNet 256x256. We report surprising findings: (a) Retraining the model using the same recipe with a different seed moves FID 3.2x more (in Inception feature space) than redrawing samples from a fixed network. (b) That gap is driven by three factors: random initialisation, data ordering, and the per-step Gaussian noise of the flow-matching loss. (c) Increasing compute or model size barely tightens the spread, holding the FID coefficient of variation (CoV) inside a 1-2% band. (d) Per-cell classifier-free-guidance tuning halves the spread but reshuffles which seeds work best, and a lucky training seed reaches the same FID with up to 2x less compute than an unlucky one. Based on these findings, we recommend a new FID evaluation protocol: evaluate under per-cell optimal guidance, treat any FID gap below the empirically measured ~1.3% CoV as inconclusive, and report an error bar over several training seeds rather than a single FID number.

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

S2D2: Fast Decoding for Diffusion LLMs via Training-Free Self-Speculation

Block-diffusion language models offer a promising path toward faster-than-autoregressive generation by combining block-wise autoregressive decoding with within-block parallel denoising. However, in the few-step regime needed for practical acceleration, standard confidence-thresholded decoding is often brittle: aggressive thresholds hurt quality, while conservative thresholds require unnecessary denoising steps. Existing approaches that address this issue either require additional training or incur extra test-time compute. We present S2D2, a training-free self-speculative decoding framework for block-diffusion language models. Our key observation is that a block-diffusion model becomes autoregressive when the block size is reduced to one, allowing the same pretrained model to act as both drafter and verifier. S2D2 inserts a speculative verification step into standard block-diffusion decoding and uses lightweight routing policies to decide when verification is worth its cost. This yields a hybrid decoding trajectory in which diffusion proposes tokens in parallel, while the autoregressive mode acts as a local sequence-level critic. Across three mainstream block-diffusion families, S2D2 consistently improves the accuracy-speed tradeoff over strong confidence-thresholding baselines. On SDAR, we observe up to $4.7\times$ speedup over autoregressive decoding, and up to $1.57\times$ over a tuned dynamic decoding baseline while improving accuracy by up to $4.5$ points. On LLaDA2.1-Mini, S2D2 remains complementary to built-in self-correction, including a conservative setting where it is $4.4\times$ faster than the static baseline with slightly higher accuracy.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.

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

LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression for Vision Transformer Distillation

Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) with Vision Transformer (ViT) backbones, such as DINOv2, have become essential for downstream tasks like object recognition and semantic segmentation. The immense computational requirements of backbones often necessitate distillation into smaller architectures for edge deployment. Feature-based knowledge distillation (KD) often suffers from the teacher-student gap; the student struggles to imitate teacher's complex feature map due to its limited capacity. To mitigate this bottleneck, we propose LEAP: Layer-skipping Efficiency via Adaptive Progression, a training curriculum for ViT feature-based knowledge distillation. By utilizing the teacher's intermediate feature maps as a sequence of progressively more difficult targets, our curriculum allows the student to build a foundational representation before tackling higher-level abstractions. Our results demonstrate that this paradigm significantly accelerates convergence through adaptive difficulty selection across various student model sizes and dataset scales. With our curriculum, the LEAP-distilled ViT-S achieves 90.1% accuracy on ImageNet-100, a +12.24% improvement compared with baseline. On ImageNet-1K, LEAP achieves +3.84% and +7.75% improvement for the instance retrieval task on the Oxford and Paris datasets, respectively. Furthermore, the curriculum enables 25.1% savings in training FLOPs and 21% savings in training time on ImageNet-100 by implementing early-stopping for teacher inference during the initial stages of training. Code is available at https://github.com/KevinZ0217/LEAP

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields

Occlusion-robust scene recovery remains a major challenge in computational imaging, particularly in natural environments where dense foreground vegetation severely limits visibility. We propose a vision-reasoning-guided light field occlusion removal framework that combines the visibility recovery capability of light field integration (LFI) with the semantic reasoning capacity of vision-language models (VLMs). Multi-view observations are first integrated via LFI to suppress foreground occlusions and produce an initial visibility-enhanced representation. A VLM is then incorporated as a conditional semantic prior to restore degraded structures and recover fine details, guided by the observed measurements. To improve recovery consistency and reduce hallucination artifacts, we introduce a multi-sample fusion strategy that aggregates multiple generated hypotheses into a unified estimate. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving the highest average SSIM across four synthetic light field benchmark scenes (4-Syn) and strong generalization across structured and unstructured acquisition settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining physical imaging constraints with vision-language reasoning for robust perception under severe occlusion, with applicability to search-and-rescue and exploratory robotic navigation.

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

Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales

arXiv:2606.12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks for AI agents rarely capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and extended reasoning required by scientific work, whereas benchmarks for scientific tasks often reduce research to static, direct problems and provide limited support for interactive evaluation. Here, we introduce SciAgentArena, a systematic benchmark for evaluating AI agents in real-world scientific research scenarios drawn from emerging needs across multiple domains. SciAgentArena comprises approximately 200 tasks with stepwise verification and an interactive, agent-agnostic environment for assessing diverse AI agents. Using this benchmark, we find that current agents can contribute effectively to well-specified data-analysis workflows, particularly when the task structure and evaluation criteria are clear. However, their performance remains uneven across scientific contexts: agents struggle to generate genuinely novel insights, sustain self-directed exploration, and formulate robust solutions for open-ended research questions. We further characterize common failure modes across agents and identify opportunities for improving their reliability, autonomy, and scientific reasoning. Together, SciAgentArena provides a practical framework for measuring progress in AI agents for science and for guiding the design of future agents capable of addressing complex scientific challenges. Full codes, tasks, and datasets can be accessed via this link: https://sciagentarena.github.io/.

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

Akasha 2: Hamiltonian State Space Duality and Visual-Language Joint Embedding Predictive Architectur

作者:

We present Akasha 2, a state-of-the-art multimodal architecture that integrates Hamiltonian State Space Duality (H-SSD) with Visual-Language Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (VL-JEPA). The system leverages the Mamba-3 Selective State Space Model (SSM) augmented by a Sparse Mixture of Hamiltonian Experts (SMoE-HE) that enforces latent physical conservation laws through symplectic integration. For visual synthesis, we introduce Hamiltonian Flow Matching (HFM) and persistent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), enabling ultra-low latency (

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

Keep Policy Gradient in Charge: Sibling-Guided Credit Distillation for Long-Horizon Tool-Use Agents

Long-horizon tool-use reinforcement learning can learn from outcome verification, but its trajectory-level advantage is broadcast across many reasoning, API, and answer tokens. Self-distillation promises a denser signal by reusing a policy's own rollouts or a privileged teacher. We show, however, that direct token-level self-distillation can silently destroy tool use: it rehearses teacher behavior without knowing which actions the verifier rewards, so useful skills and harmful shortcuts are amplified together. We introduce Sibling-Guided Credit Distillation (SGCD), which uses distillation for credit assignment rather than as a competing actor loss. Dynamic sampling produces mixed successful and failed sibling rollouts; an external LLM summarizes their contrast into a training-only stepwise credit reference; dense teacher/student divergence drives credit reassignment; and bounded detached credit weights reshape GRPO token advantages. The deployed student sees no external LLM, sibling evidence, or oracle. Across AppWorld and $\tau^3$-airline, SGCD improves over matched GRPO comparators: AppWorld TGC $42.9 \to 45.6$ on test_normal and $24.7 \to 27.0$ on test_challenge, and $\tau^3$-airline pass@1 $0.583 \to 0.602$.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Splaxel: Efficient Distributed Training of 3D Gaussian Splatting for Large-scale Scene Reconstruction via Pixel-level Communication

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) enables high-fidelity and real-time 3D scene reconstruction, but scaling training to large-scale scenes requires optimizing hundreds of millions of Gaussians across multiple GPUs. Existing distributed approaches either partition scenes into isolated regions, causing global inconsistency, or rely on global Gaussian-level exchanges, which lead to substantial growth in inter-GPU communication and quickly dominate iteration time. We propose Splaxel, a communication-efficient distributed 3DGS training framework based on pixel-level local rendering and global composition. Instead of synchronizing Gaussians, each GPU renders its local subset and exchanges only partial pixel values, maintaining mathematical consistency while keeping communication cost stable as the scene size increases. Splaxel further reduces pixel-level redundancy through geometric and transmittance visibility prediction and improves GPU utilization via conflict-free camera-view consolidation. Evaluated on large-scale datasets with up to 120M Gaussians, Splaxel achieves up to 7.6$\times$ speedup over the state-of-the-art distributed 3DGS framework while preserving high reconstruction quality.