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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

On chip, multifunctional quantum sensing using single spins in a van der Waals crystal

Authors:
James Liddle-Wesolowski↗Konosuke Shimazaki↗Jiyun Kim↗Benjamin Whitefield↗Kenji Watanabe↗Takashi Taniguchi↗Mehran Kianinia↗Igor Aharonovich↗

arXiv:2606.19978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Nanoscale thermometry and magnetometry are in high demand across a wide range of scientific and technological applications. In this context, optically addressable spins in solids have emerged at the forefront of on-chip quantum sensing. However, simultaneous quantum sensing of multiple parameters (e.g., temperature and magnetic field) using the same spin sensor remains challenging due to cross-sensitivity to multiple physical quantities. Here, we demonstrate independent dual sensing of temperature and magnetic field using single quantum emitters in hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). We experimentally verify the independent response of the zero-phonon line (ZPL) position to temperature and of optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) to magnetic fields. Furthermore, we demonstrate local temperature sensing of a microcircuit while simultaneously measuring an external magnetic field. Our results establish quantum emitters in hBN as a robust platform for multifunctional quantum sensing under realistic operating conditions.

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

SAM3 Self-Distillation for Fine-Grained GOOSE 2D Semantic Segmentation

Authors:
Xuesong Wang↗

We describe our 4th-place entry to the ICRA 2026 GOOSE 2D Fine-Grained Semantic Segmentation Challenge, which reached a composite mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) of 69.73% on the official 1,815-image test set. Our model adapts the image encoder of a recent visual foundation model, Segment Anything Model 3 (SAM3), with a lightweight decoder. Beyond this, we contribute two techniques and one empirical finding: (i) a self-distillation scheme that re-uses SAM3 itself, prompted with ground-truth boxes, as a teacher on the classes where it outperforms our own model; (ii) an image-level multi-scale test-time augmentation scheme that restores multi-scale inference for a fixed-input-size model by rescaling the image rather than the model input; and (iii) the finding that an aggressive photometric distortion from a winning 2025 GOOSE 2D entry, transplanted onto our pipeline, is its single largest source of improvement.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Effects of interaction range on the mean-field dynamics of Bose polarons

Authors:
Piotr Wysocki↗Ubaldo Cavazos Olivas↗Marek Tylutki↗Krzysztof Jachymski↗

arXiv:2606.20020v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the three-dimensional Bose polaron problem in the regime of finite range interactions and competing length scales. Working in the reference frame of the impurity, we study both static and out of equilibrium properties of the system, in particular the transfer of momentum between the impurity and the host gas. We find that relaxation dynamics can occur via damped oscillations of the impurity velocity with simple dependence on the interaction strength. Furthermore, the equilibration process is sensitive to the type of the impurity-bath interaction. Specifically, interatomic forces describing ion-atom systems lead to much longer timescales and more pronounced oscillations in the strong coupling regime with respect to local interaction potentials. We also find that the effective masses can differ by a large amount between the two scenarios, even if the number of atoms in the polaron cloud remains similar for both cases.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Smoothing Dark Areas in Molecular Latent Diffusion

Authors:
Xi Wang↗Jiahan Li↗Yuxuan Xia↗Yingcheng Wu↗Shaoyi Zheng↗Shengjie Wang↗

arXiv:2606.13955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Latent diffusion is a promising framework for scalable 3D molecular generation, but it requires a latent space that remains smooth, valid, and navigable beyond posterior samples. Existing molecular VAEs, however, are typically learned through reconstruction-based objectives, which do not guarantee such a latent space. We show that this leads to dark areas: regions of latent space that are reachable during diffusion sampling but decode to disconnected or chemically invalid molecules. Unlike in image generation, molecular decoding requires strict structural and chemical precision, so even small latent perturbations can produce catastrophic failures. We therefore propose TopVAE, a topology-optimized VAE that reduces dark areas by making the decoder internalize structural and chemical constraints during training, eliminating the need for test-time chemical correction. TopVAE greatly improves off-posterior robustness, and when paired with a standard DiT, achieves $77\%$ lower FCD-3D on QM9, the highest V&C, $52\%$ lower FCD-3D on GEOM-Drugs, and $1.29{\times}$ more stable and connected molecules on zero-shot scaffold inpainting.

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

Fast Human Attention Prediction for Fixation-guided Active Perception in Autonomous Navigation

Authors:
Fatma Youssef Mohammed↗Grzegorz Malczyk↗Kostas Alexis↗

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

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

Fusion-E2Pulse: A Multimodal Event-RGB Fusion Network for Non-contact Pulse Wave Reconstruction

Authors:
Qian Feng↗Hao Guo↗Yan Niu↗Zhenhuan Xu↗Yidi Li↗

Non-contact pulse wave reconstruction hinges on the precise recovery of waveform morphology, including the dicrotic notch. Conventional Red-Green-Blue (RGB)-based methods, which extract physiological signals from recorded facial videos, are constrained by the integral imaging mechanism of standard cameras, where the exposure process induces a smoothing effect that attenuates subtle vascular pulsation details. Conversely, neuromorphic event cameras, while offering exceptional sensitivity to intensity fluctuations, are inherently susceptible to noise and artifacts induced by minor motion. To exploit the synergy between frame-based integration and event-based differential sensing, we propose a novel multimodal network named Fusion-E2Pulse. This framework utilizes filtered RGB signals as structural priors to suppress motion artifacts, while leveraging the high-sensitivity of event streams to recover fine-grained morphological details. Experimental results demonstrate that Fusion-E2Pulse achieves state-of-the-art performance, effectively balancing noise suppression and morphological fidelity, achieving a mean absolute error of 0.78 bpm for heart rate estimation, a waveform correlation of 0.89, and a systolic phase duration error of 16.74 ms, validating its efficacy in reconstructing fine-grained pathological features.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

MOSAIC: Methylation-Oriented Site Analysis and Information Classifier for Robust Epigenomic Classification of Acute Leukemia in Clinical Cohorts with Variable Tumor Purity

Authors:
Shah↗Green↗Wainmann↗Karrs↗

DNA methylation-based classification offers a rapid diagnostic complement to conventional molecular workflows in acute leukemia. Existing classifiers are trained on array-derived reference cohorts whose construction favors specimens with adequate tumor content, leaving clinically relevant low-purity specimens underrepresented and classifier robustness in this regime uncharacterized. On held-out low-purity specimens, existing classifiers were concordant with expert pathology in only 7 of 10 (MARLIN) and 5 of 10 (ALMA) cases, motivating a classifier built to maintain accuracy at low tumor purity. We developed MOSAIC (Methylation-Oriented Site Analysis and Information Classifier), a neural network classifier built to maintain accuracy across the full range of tumor purities encountered in clinical practice. MOSAIC is a neural network trained on publicly available array-based methylation data augmented with native methylation calls from Oxford Nanopore sequencing. MOSAIC was evaluated on low-purity specimens held out entirely from training. On these held-out low-blast leukemia specimens, all below 25% blasts and including a case at 1.4%, MOSAIC was concordant with expert pathology in every case, recovering the correct subtype where diluted disease signal would otherwise be mistaken for normal or unrelated tissue. Gradient-based saliency analysis showed that the network relies on a partially distinct set of discriminative CpG probes when classifying low-blast specimens. MOSAIC demonstrates that augmenting training with clinically representative clinical specimens yields methylation-based leukemia classification that maintains effectiveness under the variable tumor purity of real clinical cohorts.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Fusion is not one-size-fits-all: Cross-Modal Representation Alignment for Time-to-Event Modeling

Authors:
Zhemin Zhang↗Weijie Chen↗David Le↗Amara Tariq↗Alex Wallace↗Matthew Stib↗Juan Maria Farina↗Chadi Ayoub↗Reza Arsanjani↗Imon Banerjee↗

arXiv:2606.15038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate time-to-event (TTE) prediction from multimodal clinical data remains challenging due to modality imbalance and distribution shift. We introduce a foundation model-driven framework for cross-modal representation alignment between CT imaging and longitudinal EHR data, designed to generalize across tasks and institutions. CT and EHR modalities are encoded independently using domain-specific foundation models and aligned in a shared latent space through four principled fusion strategies: late fusion, contrastive alignment, cross-attention, and co-attention. We evaluate two clinically distinct TTE tasks: pulmonary embolism (PE) mortality and cardiovascular disease (CVD) outcomes, on large-scale multi-institutional cohorts (PE: N=3,099 train; 1,098 internal; 435 external; CVD: N=2,951 train; 837 internal; 682 external). Fusion consistently improves concordance index by 1.5-5.4% over unimodal baselines when modalities contribute comparably. Overall, contrastive multimodal fusion, particularly with CLMBR representations, provided the most consistent and statistically robust improvements, especially for PE mortality prediction. For MACE, cross-attention (one-hot) achieved the highest internal performance and image-guided co-attention achieved the best external performance. We therefore introduce a generalizable foundation model-based cross-modal alignment framework and provide the first systematic analysis of fusion behavior under modality imbalance in TTE prediction. Our results establish task-aware multimodal alignment as a necessary design principle for robust generalization and scalable clinical deployment.

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

AIChilles: Automatically Uncovering Hidden Weaknesses in AI-Evolved Systems

Authors:
Yajie Zhou↗Ao Li↗Ashwin Silla↗Zaoxing Liu↗Vyas Sekar↗

arXiv:2606.15834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The computer systems community has recently seen growing interest in AI-driven system evolution, where AI agents iteratively rewrite systems. Frameworks such as AdaEvolve and Engram report 12-60% score improvements over human-designed algorithms. While these results are promising, there are practical concerns if these AI-evolved programs can perform worse on unseen workloads and exhibit scalability regressions. Given the speed and scale of AI-generated code, we need automated mechanisms to uncover such identify hidden weaknesses in AI-evolved systems programs. To this end, we develop AIChilles that takes as input a baseline program $P$ and an AI-evolved program $P'$, AIChilles searches for valid workloads where $P'$ regresses relative to $P$ in correctness, runtime, memory usage, or output quality. To tackle the diversity in system applications, weakness types and potential bugs, AIChilles combines deterministic workload-parameter extraction, agent-based constraint inference, differential oracles, and code-frequency coverage to discover diverse failures. Across five system applications and 30 AI-evolved programs, AIChilles finds 49 distinct hidden weaknesses. We also show that explicitly including AIChilles in the AI-driven development lifecycle can mitigate several of these weaknesses.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Enhancing Spectral Embedding through Robust and Flexible Knowledge Transfer in Electronic Health Records

Authors:
Feiqing Huang↗Zongqi Xia↗Rong Ma↗Tianxi Cai↗

arXiv:2606.11570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a spectral-based, unsupervised representation learning framework to derive low-dimensional embeddings for clinical concepts and patients in rare disease cohorts from electronic health records, where data are high-dimensional but sample sizes are limited. To overcome this challenge, we incorporate a knowledge matrix extracted from a broader population that shares a partially overlapping subspace with the rare-disease cohort. Our method departs from existing approaches by relaxing restrictive one-to-one signal-alignment assumptions between the latent data matrix and knowledge matrix, allowing more flexible and realistic forms of structured sharing. We introduce a novel two-step spectral embedding procedure: first, we identify and remove irrelevant components from the knowledge matrix; then, we apply a projection-based method to separately recover shared and heterogeneous components. Simulations and an analysis of a real-world multiple sclerosis cohort show that the proposed method outperforms competing approaches, particularly in challenging scenarios where shared signals are weak and only partially aligned, as is common in rare-disease data.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Performance-Driven Environment Abstraction with Multi-Timescale Learning

Authors:
Yue Guan↗Dipankar Maity↗Panagiotis Tsiotras↗

arXiv:2606.17377v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study performance-driven environment abstraction for decision-making in large Markov decision processes. Rather than preserving geometric or topological structure, we seek abstractions that directly optimize decision quality. We model abstraction as a controlled approximation obtained by aggregating the state space and enforcing a shared action distribution within each aggregated state. For a fixed partition, we establish a performance guarantee that separates value-function approximation error from the loss introduced by action sharing. Guided by this analysis, we develop a multi-timescale reinforcement learning framework that jointly adapts the policy and a tree-structured environment abstraction. The resulting algorithm refines and coarsens regions of the state space based on Q-value discrepancies, balancing performance against abstraction size and complexity. Empirical results demonstrate substantial state compression, improved sample efficiency, and faster replanning compared to actor-critic baselines.

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

Identifiable Markov Switching Models with Instantaneous Effects and Exponential Families

Authors:
Roel Hulsman↗Carles Balsells-Rodas↗Sara Magliacane↗

arXiv:2606.02231v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Temporal systems often exhibit non-stationary behaviour, such as seasonal climate variation or glucose fluctuations in patients with type-1 diabetes. One way to model non-stationarity is through discrete latent regimes, i.e., stationary segments of time. Such systems induce a Markov Switching Model (MSM), a class of Hidden Markov Models with autoregressive dependencies among latent regimes and observed variables. Identifying latent regimes is challenging in the presence of frequent regime switches and nonlinear and non-Gaussian dynamics, particularly when there are instantaneous effects between the variables, e.g., due to slow rates of measurements. In this work, we establish the identifiability of both latent regimes and regime-dependent causal structures under temporal regime dependencies, nonlinear lagged and instantaneous effects, and independent noise from the exponential family. Our identifiability theory subsumes non-temporal mixtures of causal models. Furthermore, we introduce FlowMSM, a regime detection framework that can be paired with any stationary causal discovery method to recover regime-dependent causal structures. Experiments on synthetic benchmarks and a financial economics dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to detect latent regimes and discover causal structures from non-stationary time series.

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14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesis

Authors:
Dominic K. Devlin↗

by Dominic K. Devlin, Austen R. D. Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we ask how this reproducibility is achieved by evolving complex morphologies in a multi-scale, computational model. Each morphology consists of a population of cells on a two-dimensional grid using the Cellular Potts Model framework. Each cell contains a genome that encodes a gene regulatory network, morphogens for cell-cell signalling, and proteins that determine cell behaviours. By repeatedly simulating our model with different initial conditions under selection for shape complexity, we obtained a “zoo” of evolved morphologies. We find that these evolved, complex morphologies are reproducible in a sizeable fraction of simulations, despite no direct selection for reproducibility. We show that high reproducibility is caused by spatially segregating moving cells that “shape” morphologies from stationary cells that “maintain” morphologies during morphogenesis. Strikingly, most highly reproducible morphologies also evolved cell differentiation, where proliferative, moving progenitor cells irreversibly differentiate into non-dividing, stationary differentiated cells at tissue boundaries. These results suggest that cell differentiation observed in natural development plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis in addition to the production of specialised cell types. This previously unrecognised role of cell differentiation has major implications for our understanding of how morphologies are generated and regenerated.

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

Human-on-the-Loop Orchestration for AI-Assisted Legal Discovery

Authors:
Anushree Sinha↗Srivaths Ranganathan↗Abhishek Dharmaratnakar↗Debanshu Das↗

arXiv:2606.19812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in electronic discovery (e-discovery), where compounding errors across multi-step reasoning chains can constitute legal malpractice. Unlike single-turn retrieval, agentic workflows operating over privileged document corpora exhibit a class of failure we term "trajectory collapse": an early misclassification silently propagates, rendering an entire privilege review invalid. This paper makes three contributions. First, we propose a structured taxonomy of agentic failures in legal information retrieval, organized by functional stage. Second, we introduce a four-layer verification architecture – spanning planning, reasoning, execution, and uncertainty quantification – designed to intercept these failures before they compound. Third, we present a preliminary simulation study on a synthetic e-discovery corpus that demonstrates how mandatory Human-on-the-Loop (HOTL) escalation thresholds reduce privilege-waiver risk relative to fully autonomous baselines. Our results suggest that calibrated uncertainty thresholds can reduce privilege-waiver risk by up to 61% versus fully autonomous deployment, while routing fewer than one quarter of documents to attorney review.

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

Data-Forcing Distillation: Restoring Diversity and Fidelity in Few-Step Video Generation

Authors:
Siyi Chen↗Shaowei Liu↗Yixuan Jia↗Zian Wang↗Huan Ling↗Qing Qu↗Jun Gao↗

Recent progress has shown promise in distilling multi-step video diffusion models into efficient few-step students. Among them, Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) and its successor DMD2 achieved strong generation quality and fast convergence. However, due to the nature of the reverse Kullback–Leibler (KL) objective, these methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: a substantial drop in sample diversity, and visibly over-saturated outputs that deviate from real-video appearance. In this work, we propose Data-Forcing Distillation (DFD), a simple post-training framework that restores diversity and fidelity in DMD with only a single-line of code change. At its core is the teacher score discrepancy to guide the student toward the real-data distribution, pulling it to missing modes (mitigating mode collapse) and away from problematic modes absent in real data (avoiding over-saturation). We provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of our framework and validate our approach on text-to-video, image-to-video, and autoregressive video generation. With only 100–300 steps of finetuning, DFD effectively restores diversity and fidelity on both Wan2.1-1.3B and Cosmos-Predict2.5-2B model, resolving the over-saturation artifacts with significantly better video dynamics and appearance, and even outperforms the teacher model.

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

Spectral Retrieval-Augmented Time-Series Forecasting

Authors:
Huu Hiep Nguyen↗Minh Hoang Nguyen↗Dung Nguyen↗Hung Le↗

arXiv:2606.19412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting leverages historical patterns to predict future values, but traditional methods face challenges when dealing with complex, non-stationary patterns that are difficult to memorize during training. Retrieval-augmented approaches have emerged as promising solutions by retrieving similar historical patterns to enhance predictions. However, existing retrieval methods suffer from two fundamental limitations: spectral blindness, which overlooks critical frequency-domain characteristics that capture underlying periodic structures, and temporal recency, which treats all historical data equally without emphasizing recent, more relevant patterns. In this paper, we propose SpecReTF, a novel retrieval method that addresses these issues by converting time series into windowed frequency representations, measuring similarity with a combined metric that captures both amplitude and phase information. To balance recency and historical context, we apply an exponential moving average weighting scheme that emphasizes recent windows. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that SpecReTF outperforms time-domain retrieval methods, achieving superior forecasting accuracy across diverse, non-stationary time series.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum Resources and Wigner Symmetry in Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering from Effective Field Theory

Authors:
Ian Low↗Thomas R. Richardson↗Sokratis Trifinopoulos↗

arXiv:2606.17148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study quantum resources in the spin degrees of freedom, such as entanglement, stabilizer magic, and non-local magic, in low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering through next-to-leading order in pionless effective field theory. Treating each nucleon spin as a qubit, we calculate the corresponding resource-generating powers of the scattering operator at generic center-of-mass momentum and scattering angle $\Theta$. The analysis retains $S$- and $P$-wave channels generated by two-derivative contact interactions. When the microscopic physics exhibits Wigner's $SU(4)$ spin-flavor symmetry, the neutron-proton amplitude becomes proportional to the spin-space identity operator and therefore generates no new resources after scattering, extending an observation previously made for leading-order $S$-wave scattering. The same-nucleon channel remains resource-generating because constraints from identical particles project out part of the Hilbert space. These results show how enhanced symmetries, partial-wave structure, and resource generation are intertwined in low-energy two-body scattering.

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

Agents All the Way Down; A Methodology for Building Custom AI Agents from Substrate to Production

Authors:
Marc Alier Forment↗Juanan Pereira↗Francisco Jos\'e Garc\'ia-Pe\~nalvo↗Mar\'ia Jos\'e Casa\~n Guerrero↗

arXiv:2606.11869v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Custom AI agents areagents that live inside their own application, talk to their own data and tools, enforce their own security boundaries, and carry their own brand and audit trail. What separates them from the general-purpose tier is fit, not capability: each is built for one job, by the engineer who will maintain it. No published practice sets out how to build one end to end. The pieces are everywhere (function-calling APIs, the Model Context Protocol, code agents to pair with), but the practice that chains them lives in podcasts, blogs, and leaked system prompts. This paper writes that practice down as a methodology, Agents All the Way Down: two preconditions crossed once and kept, then three practices repeated for the agent's life. The preconditions are (P1) Substrate, the LLM as a software component, framed as tools, then system, then messages under prompt-caching; and (P2) Building blocks: function calling, MCP, CLI orchestration, the liteshell pattern, the agent loop, skills, characters, hooks, and scaffolding. The practices are (P3) prototype with a general-purpose agent; (P4) harvest, fold, and ship the result as a CLI, the Turtle pattern; and (P5) agent-tests-agent, in which a general-purpose agent drives it through behavioural scenarios, a complement to classical testing, not a replacement. The working loop is P3 to P4 to P5 and back, and one corollary falls out for free: multi-agent orchestration is just CLI composition. The methodology is framework-free by construction. It was distilled from the AAC, a custom agent for the open-source LAMB platform, built in about ten days by one developer with an AI pair-programmer and in production . We present it as a transferable practice, independent of any language or framework.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Dialogue to Discovery: Attribute-Aware Preference Elicitation for Conversational Product Search Assistants

Authors:
Sarthak Harne↗Natwar Modani↗Debabrata Mahapatra↗Shubham Agarwal↗

Conversational product search assistants offer a more expressive, natural, and interactive alternative to traditional keyword-based product search. With limited screen space, showing only a few items increases the need for precise preference elicitation, which can prolong conversations, leading to user frustration and session abandonment. Conversely, rushing to recommend items without a clear understanding of preferences risks poor matches and a degraded user experience. We present Dialogue to Discovery (D2D), an attribute-oriented preference elicitation framework that dynamically exploits the structure of product attributes to efficiently steer conversations toward the user's desired item. D2D adaptively prioritizes the most informative queries and strategically times product recommendations, reducing premature or off-target suggestions that harm engagement. To evaluate D2D, we curate three datasets from the Amazon Reviews corpus. In simulated conversations modelled using a multi-factor utilitarian patience framework, D2D achieves a 22.2-29.9% improvement in target-finding accuracy, 6.6-16.1% reduction in abandonment, and 27.5% shorter average conversations over the state-of-the-art baselines. A complementary user study further confirms significant gains in both user satisfaction and perceived efficiency.

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

Explicit Context-Driven Neural Acoustic Modeling for High-Fidelity RIR Generation

Authors:
Chen Si↗Qianyi Wu↗Chaitanya Amballa↗Romit Roy Choudhury↗

arXiv:2509.15210v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Realistic sound simulation plays a critical role in many applications. A key element in sound simulation is the room impulse response (RIR), which characterizes how sound propagates within a given space. Recent studies have applied neural implicit methods to learn RIR using context information collected from the environment, such as scene images. However, these approaches do not effectively leverage explicit geometric information from the environment. To further exploit neural implicit models with direct geometric features, we present MiNAF, which queries a rough room mesh at given locations and extracts distance distributions as an explicit representation of local context. Our approach demonstrates that incorporating explicit local geometric features can better guide the model in generating more accurate RIR predictions. Through comparisons with conventional and state-of-the-art methods, we show that MiNAF performs competitively across various evaluation metrics.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Beyond Safe Data: Pretraining-Stage Alignment with Regular Safety Reflection

Authors:
Jinhan Li↗Kexian Tang↗Yihan Xu↗Zhuorui Ye↗Kaifeng Lyu↗

arXiv:2606.19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms. We argue that pretraining-stage alignment should go beyond making the data safe: LLMs may compose seemingly benign knowledge and capabilities into unsafe behaviors. To this end, we propose Safety Reflection Pretraining, a pretraining-stage alignment method which regularly inserts short safety reflections into pretraining corpora to integrate self-monitoring directly into language modeling, establishing a foundational capability that is subsequently reinforced by compatible post-training. Our experiments with 1.7B models pretrained on FineWeb-Edu show that Safety Reflection Pretraining improves safety classification accuracy and substantially reduces the success rates of inference-stage and finetuning attacks. Complementary to our real-world experiments, we also introduce a fully controlled synthetic environment, MedSafetyWorld, with a clear definition of safety and a reasoning structure under which models can easily generalize unsafe behaviors from safe data. Ablations in MedSafetyWorld further demonstrate a clear advantage of Safety Reflection Pretraining in preventing models from acting on unsafe behaviors generalized from safe data, compared with data filtering and rewriting. Taken together, our findings suggest that pretraining alignment should not only make the training data safe, but also shape the behaviors that models are likely to acquire from safe data.

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

Echo2ECG: Enhancing ECG Representations with Cardiac Morphology from Multi-View Echos

Authors:
Michelle Espranita Liman↗\"Ozg\"un Turgut↗Alexander M\"uller↗Eimo Martens↗Daniel Rueckert↗Philip M\"uller↗

arXiv:2603.08505v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electrocardiography (ECG) is a low-cost, widely used modality for diagnosing electrical abnormalities like atrial fibrillation by capturing the heart's electrical activity. However, it cannot directly measure cardiac morphological phenotypes, such as left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), which typically require echocardiography (Echo). Predicting these phenotypes from ECG would enable early, accessible health screening. Existing self-supervised methods suffer from a representational mismatch by aligning ECGs to single-view Echos, which only capture local, spatially restricted anatomical snapshots. To address this, we propose Echo2ECG, a multimodal self-supervised learning framework that enriches ECG representations with the heart's morphological structure captured in multi-view Echos. We evaluate Echo2ECG as an ECG feature extractor on two clinically relevant tasks that fundamentally require morphological information: (1) classification of structural cardiac phenotypes across three datasets, and (2) retrieval of Echo studies with similar morphological characteristics using ECG queries. Our extracted ECG representations consistently outperform those of state-of-the-art unimodal and multimodal baselines across both tasks, despite being 18x smaller than the largest baseline. These results demonstrate that Echo2ECG is a robust, powerful ECG feature extractor. Our code is accessible at https://github.com/michelleespranita/Echo2ECG.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

From Self-Supervised Speech Models to Mixture-of-Experts for Robust Anti-Spoofing

Authors:
Hugo Daumain↗Driss Matrouf↗Khaled Khelif↗Mickael Rouvier↗

arXiv:2606.14639v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in speech generation have significantly improved the naturalness of synthetic speech, making spoofing detection increasingly challenging. A key limitation of current anti-spoofing systems is their limited robustness to unseen synthesis methods. In this work, we transform a self-supervised speech representation model into a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture to improve generalization. Feed-forward blocks in selected encoder layers are replaced by multiple expert networks controlled by a layer-wise gating mechanism, allowing experts to capture complementary acoustic patterns while preserving the representations learned during self-supervised pretraining. We further analyze the architectural choices affecting the performance of this MoE conversion and investigate the activation behavior of the experts. The proposed approach is evaluated on 14 spoofing datasets and reduces the macro EER from 5.46% to 4.81%, corresponding to 11.9% relative improvement over the baseline.

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25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Ductile alloys offering 100 MPa tensile strength at 2,400 °C

Authors:
Mintao Xue↗

Extreme applications call for materials that are not only strong to withstand thermomechanical loads at temperatures in excess of 2,000 °C (refs. 1–3), but also highly formable at room temperature to allow for processing into complex-shaped parts. The latter excludes brittle ceramics4 and intermetallic compounds5, limiting the selection to highly ductile metals and their alloys, but for them, an adequate strength at ultrahigh temperatures seems unreachable. Here we show a breakthrough in casting alloys that achieve both simultaneously. A boron-stabilized HfO2-strengthened Ta-based alloy was carefully crafted using a new boron-intervened in situ oxidation reaction, producing about 50-nm diameter oxide particles dispersed densely and uniformly in the grain interior. The new alloy fills the blank at ultrahigh temperatures in terms of tensile yield strength, around 200 MPa at 2,000 °C and 100 MPa at 2,400 °C, while simultaneously possessing an excellent strength–ductility balance at room temperature (ultimate tensile strength >800 MPa, elongation-to-failure of about 35%), a property combination surpassing all previous refractory (including multi-principal-element) alloys. Moreover, the boron segregation around the oxide nanoparticles imparts excellent thermal stability against coarsening at 2,000–2,400 °C. Our strategy thus goes beyond traditional oxide-dispersion strengthening to enable highly ductile refractory alloys that are capable of load-bearing applications at extreme temperatures. A boron-stabilized oxide-strengthened tantalum alloy combines exceptional room-temperature ductility with record ultrahigh-temperature strength, enabling load-bearing applications above 2,000 °C.

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