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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Camera and LiDAR BEV Fusion for Cooperative 3D Object Detection on TUMTraf V2X

We describe a Camera and LiDAR fusion detector developed for the TUMTraf V2X cooperative 3D object detection track of the DriveX 2026 challenge. The detector fuses three roadside cameras with a fused infrastructure-plus-vehicle point cloud in a shared bird's-eye-view space and predicts boxes through a CenterPoint-style head with a generalized IoU regression loss and an IoU quality re-ranking head. Trained on the provided train and validation splits, the model reaches a 3D mAP of 0.85 on the public Codabench test split. While iterating on the system, we observed that 44 of the 50 test frames are also present in the released train (40) and validation (4) splits with their labels. We therefore conducted two additional studies to quantify how this overlap affects the final score: (1) a finetuning run that oversamples the 44 overlapping frames, reaching 0.89 mAP, and (2) a post-processing run that replaces predictions on those frames with the released ground truth, reaching 0.99 mAP (uploaded to our Codabench account for testing but not published on the leaderboard). All three configurations and their per-class results are reported.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria tethered to the nucleus secure its energy supply

Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation. Direct interactions between the cell’s powerhouses and nuclear pores might channel energy straight into the nucleus, fuelling cell division and differentiation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Sumi: Open Uniform Diffusion Language Model from Scratch

Diffusion models have become a promising alternative to autoregressive models. Among these, uniform diffusion language models (UDLMs) permit any token to be updated at any step, in principle enabling more flexible generation. However, no UDLM has yet been pretrained from scratch at both large parameter scale and large token budget. Both autoregressive modeling and masked diffusion modeling already have capable models at scale that the community can study and build on; uniform diffusion has none. A scratch-pretrained UDLM at scale would provide a clean reference point for studying scaling behavior, generation dynamics, controllability, and trade-offs against established autoregressive and masked diffusion models. To this end, we introduce Sumi ("ink" in Japanese), a fully open 7B uniform diffusion language model pretrained from scratch on 1.5T tokens. Sumi performs competitively with autoregressive models trained at comparable token budgets on knowledge, reasoning, and coding benchmarks, while under-performing on commonsense benchmarks, where our education-heavy data mixture is a likely contributor. We release our model weights, checkpoints, and full training recipe, including a complete specification of the data mixture over publicly available corpora. We hope this release enables the community to study native uniform diffusion at scale and catalyzes work on its as-yet poorly understood aspects.

05.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-16

Evolution and the ultimatum game: An agent-based model with interbirth intervals and population structure

by Jeffrey C. Schank, Matt L. Miller The ultimatum game (UG) is widely used to study mutually beneficial exchanges, fairness, and prosocial behavior across different societies. However, human behavior in UG experiments does not align with the game-theoretical prediction that proposers should offer the least positive amount and responders should accept such offers. Instead, proposers make generous offers that are greater than the minimum responders are willing to accept, resulting in generous offers with wide offer-acceptance gaps. Numerous evolutionary models of the UG have been created and studied to explain human behavior, particularly generous offers made in UG experiments. These models have recently faced criticism for lacking biological realism and not adequately explaining the data. Here, we present an agent-based model inspired by our hunter-gatherer ancestors and with a biologically more realistic selection process. We assume that (1) agents exist in group-structured and group-clustered populations, where reproduction (2) depends on resource accumulation, but (3) is limited by interbirth intervals. We ran simulations to assess whether this biologically more realistic model evolves patterns of behavior consistent with patterns in the data from meta-analyses of human behavior in the UG. For the proposed model, we show that generous offers robustly evolve, as well as the difficult-to-explain offer-acceptance gaps, only in group-structured populations with interbirth intervals. We demonstrate that these results are robust and may help explain variation in data across societies. We discuss how interbirth intervals interact with group structure to modulate offer and rejection costs, favoring the evolution of generous offers, offer-acceptance gaps, and other patterns in the data on human behavior in the UG. We also discuss why weak selection and/or high mutation rate models cannot explain all the patterns in UG experimental data. We discuss biological realism and conclude that group structure and interbirth intervals may be essential for explaining prosocial behavior across societies.

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

IndustryBench-MIPU: Benchmarking Multi-Image Attribute Value Extraction for Industrial Products

Industrial products such as valves and circuit breakers are defined by dense technical specifications that govern procurement, compatibility, and safety across supply chains. These specifications are scattered across multiple heterogeneous product images, including specification tables, nameplates, and technical drawings, yet whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can reliably recover them remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce IndustryBench-MIPU, the first large-scale benchmark for multi-image industrial product understanding, built around structured attribute extraction – recovering property-value pairs from product images. This task jointly probes text recognition on specification tables and nameplates, visual reasoning over technical drawings, domain knowledge to decode industrial terminology, and cross-image evidence integration to assemble scattered specifications. Concretely, the benchmark comprises 4,559 products across 27,652 images with 103,703 annotations spanning 18 industrial categories, constructed through multi-model consensus and three-tier quality assurance. Evaluating nine MLLMs under both single-image and product-level multi-image settings reveals a stark completeness gap: models achieve high precision (86–94%) but the best recovers only 49.9% of product-level attributes; moving from single-image to multi-image extraction costs 15–34 percentage points of recall. Multi-image completeness, not single-image accuracy, is the core bottleneck. Dataset and code are publicly available.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

A Computational Audit of Demographic Association Encoding in ClinicalBERT Language Predictions

Transformer-based clinical language models are increasingly integrated into high-stakes clinical decision support pipelines, yet the computational mechanisms through which demographic associations encoded in medical documentation propagate into model probability distributions remain empirically underspecified. We present a systematic computational audit of representational bias in ClinicalBERT (Alsentzer et al., 2019), a BERT-based model pretrained on MIMIC-III discharge summaries, employing two complementary probing methodologies: Log Probability Bias Analysis (LPBA), which quantifies demographic descriptor-induced shifts in masked token probability distributions across behavioral and evaluative semantic categories, and Masked Language Model-based analysis (MLM), which probes internal representational structure for demographic agency attribution encoding across 98 real clinical sentence templates and eight intersectional race-gender combinations. Corpus frequency analysis operationalizes the distinction between statistical disparity and bias amplification by benchmarking model outputs against empirical term frequencies in the MIMIC-III training corpus. Of 32 statistically significant findings, 65.6% contradict observed corpus distributions, rising to 80% for Black patients and 87.5% for agency attribution under MLM probing, providing direct empirical evidence that representational bias in ClinicalBERT operates predominantly through model-internal amplification rather than training data inheritance. Keywords: natural language processing, clinical documentation, algorithmic auditing, representational bias, health equity 1

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

ANEForge: Python for direct computation on the Apple Neural Engine

arXiv:2606.17090v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ANEForge is a Python package that programs the Apple Neural Engine (ANE), the fixed-function neural accelerator on every recent Apple device, directly and without CoreML. In production the engine is reachable only through CoreML, which treats it as a scheduling option: no configuration requires the ANE, and a model can silently run on the CPU or GPU instead. ANEForge compiles a lazy tensor graph, built from 58 fused operators and 19 native bridge operators, into a single ANE program. The program is dispatched through the same ANE daemon and kernel-driver stack as Apple's internal framework. Beyond inference, the package reaches the engine's native fused attention, streams int8, int4, and sparse weights, keeps decoder and optimizer state resident across steps, and runs the forward pass, backward pass, and optimizer update of training on the engine. A small fused program completes a call in about 90us, near the engine's 70us per-program dispatch floor, and a pretrained ResNet-18 forward runs end-to-end in 0.33ms. ResNet-18, a sentence encoder, and a Vision Transformer run end-to-end against framework references, and a Stable Diffusion U-Net validates its forward pass. ANEForge targets Apple Silicon under macOS 14 and later. Each release is verified against a recorded macOS and ANE-compiler version.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Diverse binding poses of agonistic neurotoxins on human Na<sub>v</sub>1.6

Authors:

Voltage-gated sodium (Nav) channels are key targets of various venomous toxins. Deciphering the binding poses and mechanisms of action of representative toxins will help to dissect the functional mechanism of the channels and facilitate therapeutic development targeting Nav channels1,2. Here we present cryo-electron microscopy&nbsp;(cryo-EM) structures of distinct binding poses of three agonistic peptide toxins on the human Nav1.6–β1 channel complex. The globular β-scorpion toxin Cn2 nestles between the extracellular segment of voltage-sensing domain (VSD)&nbsp;in the second repeat of the Nav1.6 core α-unit (VSDII) and the pore extracellular loops in the third repeat of the Nav1.6 core α-unit (ECLIII), where it is stabilized by interactions with both protein regions and the branched N1372-glycan. Cone&nbsp;snail ι-conotoxin RXIA adopts an elongated conformation, spanning VSDI and VSDIV to wrap around the shoulder of the pore domain (PD). The bullet&nbsp;ant-derived toxin δ-paraponeritoxin-Pc1a exists as a transmembrane helix that stands between VSDII and PDIII. Our findings, corroborated by functional characterizations, illustrate the diversity in peptide toxin binding poses and mechanisms of action, link stabilization of the up state of VSDI or VSDII to channel activation, and provide clues to the rational design of selective Nav channel modulators. Structures of the distinct binding poses of three agonistic peptide toxins—bullet-ant-derived toxin δ-paraponeritoxin-Pc1a, cone&nbsp;snail ι-conotoxin RXIA and the globular β-scorpion toxin Cn2—on the human Nav1.6–β1 channel complex illustrate a diversity in binding poses and mechanisms of action.

10.
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.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

LaViSA: A Language and Vision Structural Ambiguity Benchmark

Structural ambiguity arises when a single sentence admits multiple valid interpretations due to its syntactic structure, posing a fundamental challenge for language understanding. Visual scenes serve as useful cues for resolving such ambiguity, and Vision and Language Models (VLMs) need to be capable of deriving possible semantic interpretations from visual scenes. We introduce Language and Vision Structural Ambiguity (LaViSA), a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of VLMs to resolve structural ambiguity leveraging visual scenes. LaViSA consists of ambiguous sentences, their disambiguated sentences, and corresponding images of these disambiguated sentences across seven ambiguity categories. Using LaViSA, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of diverse VLMs, including both proprietary and open-source models with varying parameter scales and reasoning capabilities. Experimental results show that although recent VLMs can leverage visual scenes to resolve structural ambiguity to a some extent, they still struggle with certain ambiguity types and visually subtle semantic distinctions, indicating remaining limitations in resolving structural ambiguity using visual scenes.

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

Quasilinear Equivalence Checking for Detector Error Models

arXiv:2606.14677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A Detector Error Model (DEM) is a structured representation of error mechanisms in quantum circuits, which has gained popularity in quantum compilation pipelines for its ability to capture fault-tolerance at a circuit level. It lists error mechanisms as instructions targeting detectors and observables, specifying for each physical fault channel the probability that the fault fires, the detectors it triggers, and the observables it flips. In this paper, we develop an equational theory for DEMs, with its associated categorical semantics. We present a sound, terminating, confluent rewriting system for DEM terms, formulating it as a symmetric monoidal theory (a PROP) over the Giry monad. We prove that every DEM term has a unique normal form, which can be computed efficiently in quasilinear time $O(k|E|\log|E|)$, where $|E|$ is the number of instructions and $k$ bounds the size of a target set. This provides a complete set of invariants (via Tanner graphs) for structural DEM equivalence. We provide the first static decision procedure for DEM equivalence, with rigorous correctness guarantees. It is complete (decides full decoder-equivalence exactly) for non-adaptive quantum error correction (QEC) pipelines, and scales to a sound and applicable decision procedure for partially-adaptive circuits (lattice surgery, distributed QEC, ...) without suffering exponential overhead. We discuss its application to the verification and optimisation of quantum compilers.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

arXiv:2606.19460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

CREDENCE: Claim Reduction for Decomposition & Enhanced Credibility – Semantic Metrics and Convergence Analysis

Decomposing compound sentences into atomic, verifiable claims is a prerequisite for reliable automated fact-checking. Prior work has relied on token-overlap (Jaccard) metrics that systematically underestimate decomposition quality for paraphrastic claims, and has lacked formal termination analysis for the repair loop. We present Credence, a revised claim decomposition and evaluation framework addressing both shortcomings. Our contributions are: (1) Semantic-F1: we use BGE-large cosine similarity fidelity metric that resolves Jaccard's penalisation and improves downstream fact-checking accuracy; (2) Convergence theorems: we formally characterise four properties of the repair pipeline, establishing that rule-based repair is monotone and finitely terminating under an oracle parser assumption; LLM-based self-repair is provably non-monotone and requires an early-exit guard; (3) Three evaluation benchmarks spanning social-media, encyclopaedic, and news domains for cross-domain generalisation measurement; (4) Multi-model benchmarking across four decomposer models (3.8B-12B) and a closed API model. Experiments on SocialClaimSplit, WikiSplitBench, and ClaimDecompBench show that Semantic-F1 outperforms Jaccard-F1 by +15-32pp. EPR ranges from 0.94 to 1.00 on SocialClaimSplit and WikiSplitBench, while ClaimDecompBench includes lower base EPR cases (down to 0.824) due to harder news-domain constructions, and rule-repair reduces the Atomicity Violation Rate (AVR) by 47-100% relative to the base model without degrading fidelity.

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

Universal Time Series Generation with Neural Controlled Differential Equations

arXiv:2605.28507v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on the sequence universality of State Space Models (SSMs) has introduced efficient, maximally expressive continuous-time approaches for time-series modelling. While these works focus on discriminative settings, we extend this perspective to generative time-series modelling by proving that maximally expressive Structured Linear Controlled Differential Equations (SLiCEs) are universal time-series generators, in the sense that they can approximate the induced path laws of continuous causal pushforwards on compact latent sets in $W_\infty$. Building on these theoretical results, we propose Generative SLiCEs (G-SLiCEs), a maximally expressive continuous-time model for flow matching on path-space. Empirically, we show that expressivity improves performance in probabilistic forecasting and downstream tasks, while retaining the advantages of continuous-time models such as generalising to arbitrary observation grids. This is particularly beneficial for irregular grids, where fixed-grid models often struggle.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mathematical Basis for Analyzing Superconducting Phase Transitions Using Catastrophe Theory

arXiv:2606.11810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We establish a rigorous mathematical bridge from quantum many-body path integrals to the cusp catastrophe model by Lyapunov-Schmidt reduction, which provides a theoretical foundation for analyzing superconducting phase transition using the catastrophe theory. First, it is proved that, near the critical point the infinite-dimensional effective action is diffeomorphic to a finite-dimensional catastrophe. Secondly, starting from Ginzburg-Landau free energy functional, the Euler-Lagrange partial differential equation can be reduced to the cusp catastrophe model. Thirdly, the fermionic imaginary-time path integral to the cusp catastrophe is derived through the Hubbard-Stratonovich transformation, Matsubara frequency expansion, and Grassmann algebra. Furthermore, we connect this framework with the adsorption potential theory we proposed, elucidating the catastrophic topological nature of the electron pairing mechanism in high-temperature superconductivity. The precise microscopic derivation of the adsorption potential from first-principles electronic structure calculations would strengthen the predictive power of the theory.

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

REVEAL++: Differentiable Phenotypic Grouping for Vision-Language Retinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Risk

arXiv:2606.19522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The retina offers a noninvasive window into neurodegenerative disease, capturing subtle structural patterns associated with a risk of future cognitive decline. Vision-language alignment frameworks such as REVEAL have shown that pairing retinal fundus images with structured clinical risk narratives improves early prediction of Alzheimer's disease (AD). A key design choice in these approaches is the use of phenotypic grouping, where individuals with similar risk profiles are treated as multi-positive pairs during contrastive learning. However, existing methods operationalize phenotypic similarity as a discrete construct, relying on hard group assignments that impose rigid supervision and decouple group formation from representation learning. We propose a continuous formulation of phenotypic structure within contrastive learning. Rather than assigning samples to fixed clusters, we model inter-subject similarity as a differentiable weighting function derived from intra-modality embedding similarities in both retinal images and risk profiles. These weights define soft multi-positive relationships through a continuous aggregation operator, enabling graded supervision that reflects the spectrum nature of disease risk. We further introduce a soft-target contrastive objective that jointly learns cross-modal alignment and phenotypic structure in an end-to-end manner. Evaluated on UK Biobank retinal imaging data for incident AD prediction, the proposed framework consistently outperforms discrete group-based contrastive learning and standard vision-language baselines. By treating phenotypic similarity as a learnable, continuous signal rather than a fixed grouping rule, our approach provides a principled and robust foundation for population-scale neurodegenerative risk modeling from multi-modal retinal and clinical data.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.

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

Softmax as Linear Attention in the Large-Prompt Regime: a Measure-based Perspective

arXiv:2512.11784v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Softmax attention is a central component of transformer architectures, yet its nonlinear structure poses significant challenges for theoretical analysis. We develop a unified, measure-based framework for studying single-layer softmax attention under both finite and infinite prompts. For i.i.d. Gaussian inputs, we lean on the fact that the softmax operator converges in the infinite-prompt limit to a linear operator acting on the underlying input-token measure. Building on this insight, we establish non-asymptotic concentration bounds for the output and gradient of softmax attention, quantifying how rapidly the finite-prompt model approaches its infinite-prompt counterpart, and prove that this concentration remains stable along the entire training trajectory in general in-context learning settings with sub-Gaussian tokens. In the case of in-context linear regression, we use the tractable infinite-prompt dynamics to analyze training at finite prompt length. Our results allow optimization analyses developed for linear attention to transfer directly to softmax attention when prompts are sufficiently long, showing that large-prompt softmax attention inherits the analytical structure of its linear counterpart. This, in turn, provides a principled and broadly applicable toolkit for studying the training dynamics and statistical behavior of softmax attention layers in large prompt regimes.

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

Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for Continuous and Consistent Robotic Action Generation

arXiv:2606.20135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow matching has emerged as a standard paradigm for robotic manipulation owing to its strong expressive power for modelling complex, multimodal action distributions, alongside similar approaches like diffusion policy. However, existing methods rely on discretized action chunks, making them brittle to demonstrations collected at heterogeneous control frequencies and prone to temporally inconsistent actions that degrade control stability. In this paper, we propose Frequency-Aware Flow Matching (FAFM), which outputs continuous, temporally consistent actions. To handle heterogeneous frequency input, we transform discrete action sequences into the frequency domain with the discrete cosine transform (DCT), perform flow matching over the resulting coefficients, and reconstruct continuous actions via cosine basis expansion. To generate temporally consistent actions, we regularize the first-order temporal derivative to promote smooth actions. This corresponds to a Sobolev-type constraint that suppresses high-frequency errors and discourages abrupt action changes. Our FAFM is simple, introduces no additional network parameters and applies to standalone flow-matching policies and vision-language action models. Across synthetic toy benchmark, obstacle avoidance, LapGym, and LIBERO, FAFM improves success rates, multimodal expressivity, motion smoothness, convergence speed, robustness to mechanical bias and mixed-frequency input. These gains are consistent when deployed on a real-world Franka robot. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FAFM.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

AutoMine Solution for AV2 2026 Scenario Mining Challenge

arXiv:2606.11874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With the development of autonomous driving systems, mining high-value, safety-critical, and planning-relevant scenarios from large-scale driving logs has become essential for data-driven evaluation. In this paper, we propose AutoMine, a robust self-refining scenario mining method based on LLMs and VLMs. AutoMine uses semantics-preserving prompt augmentation to reduce LLM prompt sensitivity, combines robust trajectory atomic functions with VLM-based functions to handle perception noise and open-world visual cues, and refines generated code through execution feedback from real logs. In the Argoverse 2 Scenario Mining Competition at CVPR 2026, AutoMine achieves a HOTA-Temporal score of 36.38 and a Timestamp BA score of 77.21.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

NOVA: NOise-aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration for Robust Large Language Models in RAG Systems

Accurately assessing model confidence is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in mission-critical factual domains. While retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is widely adopted to improve grounding, confidence calibration in RAG settings remains poorly understood. We conduct a systematic study across four benchmarks, revealing that LLMs exhibit poor calibration performance especially when noisy contexts are retrieved. Specifically, contradictory or irrelevant evidence tends to exacerbate the model's overconfidence issue. To address this, we propose NOVA Rules (NOise-Aware Verbal Confidence CAlibration Rules) to provide a principled foundation for resolving overconfidence under noise. We further design NOVA, a noise-aware calibration framework that synthesizes supervision from ~2K HotpotQA examples guided by these rules. By performing supervised fine-tuning (SFT) with this data, NOVA equips models with intrinsic noise awareness without relying on stronger teacher models. Empirical results show that NOVA yields substantial gains, improving ECE scores by 10.9% in-domain and 8.0% out-of-domain. By bridging the gap between retrieval noise and verbal calibration, NOVA paves the way for both accurate and epistemically reliable LLMs.

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

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Geometry-Aware Dataset Condensation for Diffusion Model Training

Dataset condensation aims to construct compact datasets from real data via synthesis or selection. However, existing approaches are ill-suited for diffusion model training: synthetic data generation often yields low-fidelity samples unsuitable for authentic modeling, while real subset selection typically fails to preserve the distributional geometry required by diffusion likelihood objectives. To address this, we propose to reformulate real subset selection as a geometry-aware distribution alignment problem. By incorporating one-sided partial optimal transport, our method selectively aligns a compact subset with the full data distribution while allowing unmatched mass in low-density regions, ensuring the preserved geometric structure necessary for effective diffusion model training. To further ensure distributional fidelity, we complement geometric alignment with lightweight feature-statistics and semantic consistency regularization. An efficient two-stage discrete optimization strategy is proposed to achieve this alignment objective. Extensive experiments across diffusion variants, subset sizes, image resolutions, and training rounds show that our method achieves superior fidelity and distributional coverage in diffusion model training. Codes are available at https://github.com/2018cx/GADC.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cucurbituril-based anion-conducting membranes with supramolecular nanopores

Authors:

Nanoporous anion-conducting membranes have gained considerable interest for their potential to reduce resistance in electrochemical devices1–4. Current pore-forming methods, such as backbone engineering through polymers of intrinsic microporosity5,6 or covalent organic and metal–organic frameworks7,8, however, suffer from limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis. Here we establish a supramolecular strategy that overcomes these limitations by constructing uniform, dynamic nanopores. Co-assembly of the rigid macrocyclic host cucurbit[7]uril with the cationic polymer guest quaternized poly(piperidinium-terphenyl) yields a robust network of nanometre-scale channels while simultaneously enhancing mechanical and chemical stability. The dynamic host–guest interactions allow the pore structure to fluctuate on picosecond and angstrom scales. This transient environment supports low-friction hydroxide migration through a Grotthuss mechanism, producing a marked enhancement in ionic conductivity. This bottom-up design principle provides a versatile new tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways and promises to advance electrochemical reactors with respect to energy efficiency, operational stability and the production of high-purity products. A supramolecular strategy, in which uniform, dynamic nanopores are constructed, overcomes the limitations of limited structural control, mechanical fragility or demanding synthesis in nanoporous anion-conducting membranes, providing a versatile tool for molecularly engineering transport pathways.