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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Qwen-RobotWorld Technical Report: Unifying Embodied World Modeling through Language-Conditioned Video Generation

We introduce Qwen-RobotWorld, a language-conditioned video world model for embodied intelligence. With natural language as a unified action interface, it predicts physically grounded future visual trajectories from current observations across robotic manipulation, autonomous driving, indoor navigation, and human-to-robot transfer. This unified formulation provides three promising application directions: synthetic data generation for policy training augmentation, scalable virtual environments for policy evaluation, and language-guided planning signals for downstream robot control. This is achieved through a three-part design: a) Double-Stream MMDiT with MLLM Action Encoding, where a 60-layer double-stream diffusion transformer couples frozen Qwen2.5-VL semantics with video-VAE latents through layer-wise joint attention; b) Embodied World Knowledge (EWK), an 8.6M video-text corpus (200M+ frames) with action-language mapping over 20+ embodiments and 500+ action categories; and c) General+Expert Progressive Curriculum, a two-stage training strategy that first learns general visual priors and then injects embodied specialization under a shared language interface. Extensive results show strong competitiveness: ranks 1st overall on EWMBench and DreamGen Bench, outperforms all open-source models on WorldModelBench and PBench. Additional zero-shot analyses on RoboTwin-IF benchmark further support robust generalization and multi-view consistency.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Addressing Detail Bottlenecks in Latent Diffusion for RGB-to-SWIR Image Translation

Latent diffusion models (LDMs) enable efficient image-to-image translation but discard fine spatial details during compression, degrading downstream perception tasks. We identify two bottlenecks: the autoencoder, which loses spatial information, and the conditioning pathway, which further degrades the source signal through naive downsampling. We propose two lightweight, backbone-agnostic fixes: a Source-Conditioned Autoencoder (SCAE) that injects high-resolution source features into the decoder via skip connections, and a Learnable Guidance Encoder (LGE) that replaces naive downsampling with a learned conditioning signal. Evaluated on RGB-to-SWIR translation for driving scenes with two denoiser backbones (U-Net and DiT), our approach improves detection mAP by up to 2x over the latent diffusion baseline, with up to 3.4x gains on small objects (COCO-small,

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

TimeLens: On-Device Artifact Recognition with Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering for the Grand Egyptian Museum

TimeLens is an AI-powered bilingual mobile guide for the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Pointing a phone at an exhibit, a visitor sees the artifact recognized in real time and can ask follow-up questions answered in English or Arabic. The work addresses three problems specific to in-gallery deployment: fine-grained visual similarity among 51 catalogued artifacts (many near-identical Ramesside statues), the gap between curated training data and handheld camera conditions, and the risk of an AI guide stating unsupported historical facts. Two engineering contributions are reported. First, an on-device artifact detector was developed through a data-quality-driven iteration study – from foundation-model auto-annotation (YOLO-World), through spatial label-cleaning rules, to a fully hand-annotated dataset – isolating label quality as the decisive factor: the final YOLOv8n model resolves every previously failing class while remaining a 5.97 MB TensorFlow Lite asset that runs in real time on a mid-range phone (mAP@0.5 = 0.995, mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.924). Second, a bilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) guide, grounded in a 108-record ChromaDB knowledge base, was benchmarked across seven candidate language models, with Gemma 4 E2B (Q4 K M) selected; ten targeted optimizations reduce end-to-end latency from over 30 s to approximately 10 s. Both subsystems are integrated in a production Flutter application with bilingual interface, museum location gating, and text-to-speech support.

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

The Structural Attention Tax: How Retrieval Format Hijacks In-Context Learning Independent of Content

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content – distinct from its semantic relevance – can independently distort the model's attention distribution. We identify and formalise a phenomenon we term the structural attention tax: knowledge graph (KG) triples, due to their relational delimiters and repeated slot patterns, capture 2-3x more attention per token than semantically equivalent natural-language text ($\hat{o}$(KG) $\approx$ 0.70 vs. $\hat{o}$(neutral) $\approx$ 0.25), compressing demonstration attention by up to 42% – regardless of whether the triples are relevant or noise. We develop a formal framework decomposing attention scores into semantic and structural components (Eq. 2), derive a compression bound (Proposition 1) connecting token-level format bias to demonstration attention loss, and show that the structural term governs how much attention is diverted while the semantic term governs whether this helps or hurts. This decoupling reveals two orthogonal axes for improving retrieval-augmented ICL: optimising retrieval quality (semantic axis) and reducing format-driven attention capture (structural axis). Empirically, across two model families (Mistral-7B, LLaMA-3-8B) and three QA benchmarks, we observe that source-task alignment dominates: task-matched BM25 retrieval achieves 58-62% on HotpotQA vs. ConceptNet's 25-27%, a >30 pp gap that dwarfs all gating strategies ($\leq$2 pp). We derive five structure-aware mitigation strategies from the framework, ranging from zero-cost prompt modifications to training-time regularisation; format flattening (S3) is validated by both accuracy and attention-level evidence from a verbalized-triple control, while structural dispersal (S1) yields mixed results that illuminate the challenges of format-level intervention.

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

Human Cognition in Machines: A Unified Perspective of World Models

This report of world models distinguishes prior works by the cognitive functions they innovate. Many works claim an almost human-like cognitive capability in their world models. To evaluate these claims requires a proper grounding in first principles from human and machine cognition theory. In moving towards human-like world models we present a conceptual unified framework for world models that fully incorporates all the cognitive functions (i.e., memory, perception, language, reasoning, imagining, motivation, and metacognition) and identify gaps in existing research as a guide for future states of the art. In particular, we find that motivation (especially intrinsic motivation) and metacognition remain drastically under-researched, and we propose concrete directions to address these gaps informed by active inference and global workspace theory. We also introduce epistemic world models, a new category encompassing agent frameworks for scientific discovery that operate over structured knowledge. Our taxonomy, applied to video, embodied, and epistemic world models, suggests research directions where prior taxonomies have not.

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

Sharp Transitions for Subsystem Complexity

arXiv:2510.18832v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The circuit complexity of time-evolved pure quantum states grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time. This behavior has been proven in certain models, is conjectured to hold for generic quantum many-body systems, and is believed to be dual to the long-time growth of black hole interiors in AdS/CFT. Achieving a similar understanding for mixed states remains an important problem. In this work, we study the circuit complexity of time-evolved subsystems of pure quantum states. We find that for greater-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time, similarly to that of the full state. However, for less-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity rises and then falls, returning to low complexity as the subsystem equilibrates. Notably, the transition between these two regimes occurs sharply at half system size. We use holographic duality to map out this picture of subsystem complexity dynamics and rigorously prove the existence of the sharp transition in random quantum circuits. Furthermore, we use holography to predict features of complexity growth at finite temperature that lie beyond the reach of techniques based on random quantum circuits. In particular, at finite temperature, we argue for an additional sharp transition at a critical less-than-half subsystem size. Below this critical value, the subsystem complexity saturates nearly instantaneously rather than exhibiting a rise and fall. This novel phenomenon, as well as an analogous transition above half system size, provides a target for future studies based on rigorous methods.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Optimal Sparsification of Gaussian Processes

arXiv:2606.19763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove an optimal dimension-free sparsification theorem for suprema of centered Gaussian processes. Given a bounded set $T\subseteq\mathbb{R}^n$, we show that the supremum of the canonical Gaussian process on $T$ can be $L^2$-approximated by the supremum of a shifted subprocess indexed by only $\exp(O(1/\varepsilon^2))$ points, with error at most $\varepsilon$ times the Gaussian width of $T$. In particular, the size of the approximating process is independent of both the ambient dimension and the cardinality of the original index set. This improves a recent sparsification theorem of De, Nadimpalli, O'Donnell, and Servedio (2026) by an exponential factor, and we show that the dependence on $\varepsilon$ is tight up to constants in the exponent. As consequences, we obtain an exponentially improved junta theorem for norms over Gaussian space and sharpen results on learning, property testing, and polyhedral approximation of convex sets under the Gaussian measure. The proof is based on an interpolation argument that combines Sudakov's minoration with the Brascamp–Lieb inequality.

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

Contour-Constrained Deformable Registration with Parameter Characterization for Head and Neck Surgical Guidance

With 890,000 annual new cases globally, head and neck squamous cell carcinoma has one of the highest recurrence rates among solid malignancies. Although frozen section analysis is the standard of care for intraoperative margin assessment, accurately relocating detected positive margins on the resection bed remains challenging due to imprecise alignment between resected specimens and their resection bed, compounded by post-resection mucosal tissue shrinkage. We present a biomechanics-driven deformable registration framework that corrects post-resection tissue deformation to provide intraoperative guidance. Our approach registers 3D specimen meshes to intraoperative resection bed point clouds using a deformable registration approach based on regularized Kelvinlet basis functions. The registration matches surface point clouds, fiducial landmarks, and boundary contour constraints that directly penalize perpendicular distance-to-agreement between specimen and resection bed boundaries. Across nine specimens from skin, buccal mucosa, and tongue sites, the overall mean target registration error was $11.11 \pm 4.07$ mm using rigid registration, which decreased to $8.20 \pm 2.68$ mm (26.19\% reduction) using deformable registration without contour constraint. The proposed contour-constrained deformable registration further reduced the error to $5.62 \pm 2.28$ mm, a 49.41\% reduction relative to rigid registration. We observed the largest reduction in the most clinically challenging tongue specimens. We also performed a systematic two-stage parameter search to characterize the relative importance of surface alignment, fiducial correspondences, contour constraint, and strain energy regularization. This search revealed that contour weighting dominates registration accuracy for tissue types with large lateral deformation, while the algorithm operates over a broad range of parameter combinations.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent representations

Single-cell transcriptomics is typically modeled in low-dimensional latent representations that improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. Such representations underpin data integration, cell state discovery, and perturbation prediction, with applications ranging from large-scale organ atlases to latent trajectory modeling. Recent virtual cell approaches further leverage these representations to predict cellular responses as distributional shifts in latent space. Each of these applications ultimately requires faithful gene expression reconstruction from latent spaces for biological interpretation, enabling gene-level analysis of predicted perturbed or batch-corrected cells. Yet representation choice is typically treated as an implementation detail rather than a primary modeling decision, with no systematic evaluation of how well latent representations support gene expression reconstruction. Here, we introduce ReconEval, a benchmark for evaluating gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent spaces. We benchmark two classes of latent representations: end-to-end trained models such as PCA, autoencoders, and variational autoencoders, and pretrained single-cell foundation model embeddings coupled to newly trained decoders. Reconstruction is evaluated both directly and after latent-space perturbation prediction. Across perturbational and observational datasets totaling over 100 million cells, our metric suite quantifies statistical fidelity; biological signal preservation, including differential expression, coexpression, cell-cycle structure, cytokine response and pathway activity; and perturbation-specific effects. We find that autoencoders achieve the strongest stand-alone reconstruction at low dimensionality, while variational regularization does not improve generalization in reconstruction. Frozen foundation model embeddings retain recoverable gene-level information, with reconstruction quality depending strongly on decoder architecture and pretraining objective. In latent perturbation modeling, high-dimensional PCA matches foundation model embeddings, while low-dimensional AE embeddings are optimal for flow-based generative models. Overall, reconstruction depends critically on the interplay between representation and downstream model, and simpler representations can outperform complex alternatives given appropriate capacity. Our benchmark establishes reconstruction as a critical evaluation axis for single-cell foundation models. We envision it improving the biological interpretability of latent-space modeling, a prerequisite for future virtual cell models to be validated by domain experts and grounded in biology.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Simulation of Non-Markovian Quantum Accelerated Dynamics via Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation

arXiv:2606.20024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation (TFSE) is an effective tool for simulating the dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems. The Quantum Speed Limit (QSL) time characterizes the minimum time required for the evolution of a non-Markovian quantum system. In this paper, Wei's TFSE is employed to simulate the non-Markovian quantum accelerated evolution process in the Resonant Dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (RDJC) model. By solving the QSL time of a time-fractional single-qubit open system, the enhancement mechanism of the system evolution speed induced by the non-Markovian memory effects of the environment is revealed. Further studies show that the optimized acceleration of the system evolution can be achieved by jointly regulating the fractional order, coupling strength, and photon number. Comparative analyses indicate that Wei's TFSE can accurately capture the non-Markovian accelerated dynamical features of the system over the entire fractional order range, whereas Naber's TFSE is applicable only within a limited fractional order interval. In addition, the comparisons of the average simulation time for calculating the dynamical trajectory of the excited-state probability demonstrate that Wei's TFSE has a significant simulation advantage in computational efficiency. Therefore, Wei's TFSE is more accurate and efficient for simulating the accelerated dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

IBAD: Interpretable Behavioral Anomaly Detection on Human Mobility Data

arXiv:2606.16023v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human mobility appears highly diverse, yet much of a person's daily mobility can be explained by a small set of recurring behavioral templates, such as commuting, school-centered activities, caregiving, nightlife, or errand patterns. We present \texttt{IBAD} (\underline{I}nterpretable \underline{B}ehavioral \underline{A}nomaly \underline{D}etection), a framework that learns interpretable daily mobility templates and represents each individual as a distribution over mixtures of these templates. Rather than focusing on specific locations, IBAD characterizes activities that individuals perform across locations. This approach first discovers global behavioral templates using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), then employs a hierarchical self-supervised model to learn normal behavior of individuals from their soft behavioral templates. We also introduce a splicing benchmark that creates controlled behavioral mismatches between an individual's historical profile and injected mobility patterns. Experiments on real-world and synthetic datasets show that daily behavior can be effectively decomposed into a small number of interpretable templates. Crucially, we show that the learned behavioral archetypes transfer across distinct geographic and demographic contexts. Furthermore, IBAD maintains a robust competitive performance across all settings. For reproducibility purposes, the code is accessible at ~\href{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}{https://github.com/USC-InfoLab/IBAD}.

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

Skill-Constrained Model Predictive Control for Resilient Manufacturing Supply Chains

arXiv:2606.17269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In skill-constrained production-inventory systems, the qualified human capacity available tomorrow depends on training decisions made today: production requires certified workers, certifications decay unless maintained, and training consumes the same scarce worker hours that production needs now. We study a closed-loop skill-constrained model predictive controller that, at every shift, solves a finite-horizon mixed-integer program over production, inventory, backlog, and training, with binary predicted certification, hard production eligibility, and an interpretable terminal value that prices certified-capacity gaps at the horizon boundary; only the first-period action is applied before replanning. On synthetic, seed-controlled SkillChain-Gym scenarios - announced and surprise new-skill shocks, demand shocks, absenteeism, forecast- and availability-quality modes, capacity-boundary and training-rate sweeps, and negative controls - we evaluate the controller against production-only and maintenance-only ablations, static cross-training insurance plans, and a strong reactive heuristic, under an ex-ante locked configuration and paired statistics. The result is regime dependence, not superiority: no policy class dominates. Predictive control helps when skill or labor bottlenecks are forecastable early enough for training to complete; lean static insurance remains hard to beat under surprise shocks, near the demand-capacity boundary, and wherever pre-shock slack makes insurance cheap. Attribution ablations separate certification maintenance, re-acquisition of lapsed certifications, and greenfield skill acquisition. Forecastability, not adaptivity per se, decides when predictive control pays.

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

SalArt-VQA: Diagnosing Whether VLMs Understand Salient Artifacts in Generated Images

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to detect whether AI-generated images contain visible artifacts, yet their ability to analyze such artifacts remains poorly understood. A correct image-level decision can still hide important failures: a model may correctly flag an artifact while relying on the wrong visual cue, selecting the wrong region, or describing a defect that the image does not support. To evaluate these behaviors directly, we introduce SalArt-VQA, a diagnostic benchmark for fine-grained SALient ARTifact understanding in AI-generated images. SalArt-VQA contains 950 images and 3,681 human-authored multiple-choice questions spanning artifact images, matched real reference images, and paired generated reference images. Four aligned question types evaluate presence detection, semantic localization, spatial grounding, and evidence-grounded defect identification, while the reference splits test calibration and abstention when the annotated defect is absent. Across 20 VLMs, SalArt-VQA reveals failures that image-level detection accuracy hides: the strongest model reaches 99.37% detection recall on artifact images but answers all four artifact-side questions correctly on only 53.26% of images. Comparing artifact images with artifact-free references reveals a sensitivity-calibration tradeoff: sensitive models often make unsupported artifact claims, while conservative models avoid false alarms largely by missing real artifacts. These results show that high artifact detection accuracy alone does not imply grounded artifact understanding. SalArt-VQA exposes these hidden failure modes and provides a fine-grained evaluation of whether VLM artifact claims are supported by local visual evidence.

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

Text-Driven Fusion for Infrared and Visible Images: Achieving Image Scene Adaptation on Hyperbolic Space

Infrared and visible image fusion aims to integrate complementary modalities, while existing Euclidean methods impose rigid distance metrics that distort multi-modal interactions and parent-to-child semantic hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a text-driven fusion framework empowered by hyperbolic manifold learning. During training, BLIP-extracted text prompts serve as topological anchors within the hyperbolic space, guiding vision-attribute alignment through hyperbolic embeddings that naturally accommodate varying semantic granularities. By exploiting the exponential volume growth dictated by the Poincaré ball's negative curvature, this approach seamlessly embeds hierarchical trees to encode coarse-to-fine semantics without metric saturation, while the vast peripheral space prevents texture distortion during cross-modal fusion. At inference, the fusion process autonomously adapts to input content using the learned text-attribute priors, completely eliminating the need for textual input. Experimental results show our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on benchmark datasets, with code available at https://github.com/Shaoyun2023/TEDFusion.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MODE-RAG: Manifold Outlier Diagnosis and Energy-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation Evaluation

While Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (M-RAG) enhances Large Vision-Language Models, it remains highly susceptible to cross-modal hallucinations, causal fabrications, and sycophancy. Furthermore, existing mitigation pipelines often face an intervention paradox: static rules tend to unnecessarily disrupt accurate generations, whereas leaving the multi-modal reasoning completely unguided allows existing mismatches to cascade into severe logical fabrications. To quantify and mitigate these hallucinations, we propose a Multi-Agent system, MODE-RAG, driven by Variational Free Energy (VFE) and internal attention states to dynamically gate interventions. High-risk queries are routed to five stage-specific agents, integrating Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) for rigorous causal derivation and logit perturbations to penalize sycophancy. Dedicated Correction and Overseer agents ensure formatting stability and perform post-hoc factual verification. To objectively evaluate our approach, we introduce ModeVent, a challenging subset derived from the MultiVent dataset. Extensive experiments indicate that our system effectively reduces hallucination rates and logical fabrication, significantly improving the robustness of M-RAG systems.

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

Timestamp-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning for Network Intrusion Detection

arXiv:2606.17109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given their effectiveness in modeling the relational structure among network traffic flows, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). However, most existing GNN-based NIDS approaches focus on the relational structure of traffic flows, and treat them as temporally independent, which limits their ability to cope with evolving attack behaviors. Moreover, their reliance on supervised or semi-supervised learning often restricts generalization to unseen attacks. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised GNN-based framework. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is among the first self-supervised GNN-based NIDS models to explicitly leverage real timestamps, which provides faithful temporal dependencies for representation learning. We first construct a series of temporal graphs from network traffic flows according to their timestamps, and then employ an E-GraphSAGE and LSTM based encoder to fully extract temporal information and spatial dependencies of network traffic, without introducing time-costly attention mechanisms. A multi-view graph contrastive learning (GCL) scheme is introduced, where temporal, spatial, and feature contrasts are jointly performed to capture temporal continuity, preserve structural consistency, and improve the generalization and robustness of the learned representations, respectively. In addition, a gradient-norm-based adaptive weighting strategy is designed to optimize the contrastive loss weights. Experimental results on four representative NIDS datasets with real timestamps demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing self-supervised approaches and achieves performance comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art GNN method, while maintaining high computational efficiency.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sparse probes and murky physics: a case study of interpretability challenges in a foundation model for continuum dynamics

arXiv:2606.11657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI emulators are increasingly used in scientific domains where we already have strong theory, benchmarks, and physical intuition. This raises a central evaluation and interpretability question: when a foundation-style model can reproduce known continuum dynamics, what internal mechanism supports that behavior, is the internal behaviour consistent with known physics, and how does it relate to where the emulator succeeds or fails? We investigate a cross-domain foundation model for continuum dynamics, Walrus by Polymathic, using mechanistic interpretability guided by physical principles. We apply a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to probe a selected layer, and address the practical challenge of triaging a large feature set (over 20,000) using enstrophy as a physically grounded metric. As a deliberately simple testbed, we focus on shear flow and compare feature recruitment across multiple shear-flow setups, i.e. parameter values in the numerical simulation. Across setups we find evidence of piecewise consistency, with subsets of features recurring in similar roles, but this structure is intermittent and does not map cleanly onto standard physical decompositions. In parallel, direct comparisons between numerical simulation and the emulator reveal systematic output-level discrepancies, including regimes where energy/structures become too diffuse or too localized. We connect parts of these discrepancies to changes in specific SAE feature usage. Our work highlights open questions for scientific foundation models: how to robustly prioritize mechanistically meaningful features, how to separate stable structure from analysis artifacts (including single-layer and SAE limitations), and how to use established benchmarks to decide when "different" internal representations are genuinely informative rather than merely effective.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

EChO-Agent: Evidence Chain Orchestration Agent for Audio Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LALMs show promise on audio question answering, they fail to focus on question-relevant segments of audio and provide a clear, checkable reasoning process when dealing with complex audio reasoning. Reinforcement learning and tool-augmented prompting can help models better relate questions to audio but lack a reliable way to understand, integrate, and self-verify audio segments. To address this gap, we present EChO-Agent, a modular agent framework that reformulates complex audio QA as a planning, tool execution, evidence integration, and answer verification workflow. Experiments on MMAR benchmark show EChO-Agent improves both accuracy and rubric scores over baseline and ablation studies show evidence integration is the key factor.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

HTS-Oracle v2: Prospective AI-Guided Discovery and Experimental Validation of Small Molecule Modulators Across Multiple Targets

High-throughput screening (HTS) remains the cornerstone of early-phase small molecule discovery yet consistently underperforms against immunotherapy targets, yielding validated hit rates below 0.1%. Here we introduce HTS-Oracle v2, which features rigorous cross-validation that ensures honest performance estimates. HTS-Oracle v2 was trained and validated across four clinically significant immune checkpoint targets (CD28, ICOS, LAG-3, and TIGIT) achieving ROC-AUC values of 0.968, 0.969, 0.875, 0.928 respectively under rigorous cross-validation. For prospective experimental validation, HTS-Oracle v2 was applied to an 8,960-compound Enamine Protein Mimetic Library, selecting only 25 compounds per target for experimental testing using temperature-related intensity change (TRIC) technology, a 99.7% reduction in screening burden. HTS-Oracle v2 identified 4, 5, 4, and 6 validated binders from 25 prospectively selected compounds per target, corresponding to validated hit rates of 16%, 20%, 16%, and 24%, respectively. Notably, 67-80% of all experimentally confirmed hits across the full 8,960-compound library were captured within just 25 model-selected compounds per target. For CD28, this represents a 28-fold improvement over HTS-Oracle v1 (239x versus 8.4x), establishing HTS-Oracle v2 as an efficient platform for AI-guided prospective hit discovery across immunotherapy targets.

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

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

arXiv:2606.13222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

A continental-scale scenario modelling framework for evaluating infant RSV immunisation strategies across Europe

Background. The recent approval of long-acting monoclonal antibodies (la-mAbs) and a maternal vaccine (MV) in the EU enables universal RSV prevention in infants. Modelling studies are widely used to quantify the population-level impact of alternative immunisation strategies. However, existing assessments of new RSV immunisation products focus on national or sub-national settings. Methods. We developed an age-stratified, stochastic compartmental model of RSV transmission for 28 EU/EEA countries. It combines literature-based parameters on RSV natural history and product efficacy with country-specific demographic and contact patterns. After model calibration against age- and country-specific RSV hospitalisation rates, we designed scenarios for both la-mAbs and MV at four coverage levels, with and without catch-up immunisation for infants under six months at season onset. We then evaluated each scenario against a no-immunisation baseline. Results. At 95% coverage, the cross-country median reduction in RSV hospitalisations over one season in infants under 12 months is 29.9% for la-mAbs (country median range: 27.7-33.9%) and 22.4% for MV (20.0-25.6%), scaling linearly with coverage. Out of all averted hospitalisations, 78.3% (90% CI: [67.3, 92.7]%) are concentrated in infants aged 0-2 months for la-mAbs and 72.7% (90% CI: [61.4, 88.6]%) for MV. A catch-up campaign nearly doubles the overall reduction in RSV hospitalisations. Conclusions. Despite country-specific heterogeneities, impact of la-mAbs and MV is comparable across settings and herd-immunity effects are largely negligible. This supports harmonised European guidelines on coverage targets. Seasonal catch-up campaigns emerge as an effective lever to maximise the impact of immunisation programmes.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MVM-IOD: An Industrial Object-Centric Benchmark Dataset for the Evaluation of 3D Reconstruction Methods

3D object reconstruction, and camera pose estimation in industrial applications are challenging tasks, as errors are costly while the computation time is often limited. The complexity of typical industrial objects further complicates these tasks. Most of the existing datasets in this context do not depict realistic industrial scenarios. Therefore, we introduce the Machine Vision Metrology Industrial Object Dataset (MVM-IOD). Images of typical industrial objects are captured systematically, by moving a camera, mounted at the end effector of an industrial robot arm, on a hemisphere around the objects. MVM-IOD contains reference camera poses and reference 3D point clouds, the acquired RGB images of 9 objects and 2 background choices resulting in 18 scenes, which allows evaluation of all image based methods that compute a 3D reconstruction, camera poses, or novel views of a scene. Based on MVM-IOD, we extensively evaluate current SOTA 3D reconstruction and camera pose estimation methods, such as Structure from Motion, Multi-View Stereo, recent feed forward methods (Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer, {\pi}3), and 2D Gaussian Splatting and report our findings as a baseline for future research. The experiments show that capture setups like ours generate out-of distribution images for feed forward methods, leading to suboptimal point clouds and camera poses. However, these out-of-distribution images can be shifted closer to the training distribution by applying simple preprocessing steps. Consequently, in certain industrial applications, feed forward methods should be used with caution.