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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

An innovative technology boosts image quality for protein structures

作者:
Michael Eisenstein↗

After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins. After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Divination by Prompt: LLM-Mediated Xuanxue on Chinese Social Media

作者:
Chuang Li↗Lixuan Wang↗Yuqi Chen↗Ze Hong↗

arXiv:2606.12418v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has produced a striking cultural practice: using conversational AI for divination. This paper offers one of the first systematic studies of LLM-mediated divination in the context of Xuanxue, an internet-native umbrella term for mystical and spiritual practices on Chinese social media. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyze 23000+ posts and comments from Xiaohongshu and conduct 32 semi-structured interviews with users and professional diviners. Users primarily consult LLMs about pragmatic concerns - romantic relationships, careers, exams, and in-game gacha draws - via two intersecting pathways: trend-driven curiosity enabled by viral visibility and zero-cost access, and event-driven anxiety under conditions of uncertainty. A defining feature is collaborative prompt refinement, which turns users into active prompt engineers. Among commenters expressing a clear stance, perceived efficacy skews positive, with "accuracy" often justified through biographical fit and retrospective confirmation, consistent with Barnum and confirmation bias. Users also develop verification practices such as repeated trials and cross-model comparison. Professional diviners, by contrast, portray LLMs as lacking the "spiritual power" required for genuine divination, reflecting both ontological commitments and economic boundary-work. We also show how participants navigate tensions between scientific and metaphysical frames when interpreting AI-generated readings. Situating these findings in anthropological and cognitive-evolutionary theories of divination, we argue that LLM divination preserves core functions of traditional practice while introducing scalability, repeatability, and prompt-driven co-production that reshape how divinatory authority is constructed and evaluated.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A Geometric Profile of Semantic Information in Text: Frame-Conditional Uniqueness and a Trade-Off Triangle for Scalar Summaries

作者:
Dmitriy Kompaneets↗

How much meaning does a text carry? Shannon's theory measures uncertainty over symbols and is intentionally indifferent to meaning, while pairwise metrics such as BERTScore compare two texts rather than characterizing one. We develop a geometric framework that measures semantic content from the structure of a text's sentence embeddings. The framework has three parts. First, within a fixed embedding and baseline, six natural axioms uniquely determine a scalar measure up to scale, a frame-conditional uniqueness theorem. The resulting scalar is empirically too coarse, motivating a richer representation. Second, we propose a three-coordinate semantic profile capturing novelty (displacement from generic discourse), breadth (diversity of distinct ideas), and integration (connectedness among them), together with a discrete minimal unit (the semantic quantum) whose resolution is fixed by a clustering threshold $\tau$. Third, we prove a no-go theorem: no scalar summary of the profile can simultaneously satisfy analytic stability under paraphrase and concatenation, ordinal robustness across text scales, and cross-representation comparability. We exhibit two practical scalars, $S_{\mathrm{minmax}}$ and $S_{\mathrm{rank}}$, each occupying a distinct corner of this trade-off triangle. Validation across 23 synthetic categories, 5 Project Gutenberg novels, and 3 embedding models confirms the trade-off. The recommended rank-normalized configuration passes 25 of 28 ordinal checks as point estimates (21 of 28 after Benjamini-Hochberg correction), outperforming seven baselines including unigram entropy and a BERTScore-based novelty signal. A separate variational result connects the breadth coordinate to the log-determinant of a determinantal point process (Spearman $\rho = 0.985$ over 507 Gutenberg chapters), giving an optimization-theoretic foundation for breadth.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Before You Think: System 0, AI-Mediated Cognition and Cognitive Colonization

作者:
Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini↗Massimo Chiriatti↗Enrico Panai↗Giuseppe Riva↗

arXiv:2606.13658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper examines three recent frameworks for understanding the cognitive and epistemic consequences of artificial intelligence: Tri-System Theory, Thinkframes, and System 0. It argues that while the first two capture important dimensions of AI's influence on individual reasoning and collective epistemic practices, System 0 occupies a theoretically distinctive position that neither can fully replicate. The paper introduces the concept of cognitive colonization, according to which AI systems can embed external interests within the architecture of the self in ways that are difficult for users to perceive. Because such systems are already widely deployed, understanding these invisible forms of influence is an urgent philosophical and practical task.

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

Positional Encoding in the Context of Memristor-Based Analog Computation for Automatic Speech Recognition

作者:
Benedikt Hilmes↗Nick Rossenbach↗Ralf Schl\"uter↗

arXiv:2606.13379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memristors provide a new chance for resource-efficient computation of neural models for natural language processing by enabling analog execution of vector-matrix-multiplication. Yet, computations on these devices are currently subject to larger distortion, both in weight programming and execution. In this work, we identify large output values of transformed positional encodings to cause major degradation within analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) as part of memristor-based computation. By adjusting the proportion of weight and precision bits of the ADC of specific memristor layers, we reduce the degradation of the execution by ~50% relative, while keeping the estimated energy consumption stable. Additionally, we investigate scenarios where the ADC cannot be modified. In that case the degradation can be reduced by ~30% relative after removing encoding-related linear transformations.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Using wastewater surveillance to explore community-level dietary intake in sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa

作者:
Holm↗R. H↗Chigwechokha↗Kaponda↗Stephens↗Limbong↗Ercumen↗Hart↗Workman↗C. L↗de los Reyes↗F. L↗…

Wastewater can be used to measure biomarkers that reflect population-level dietary intake and diversity; however, how this approach may apply in a low-income country remains a knowledge gap. This study aims to evaluate whether select dietary-related metabolites can be detected in wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) samples from both sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa. Fourteen WES samples were collected and analyzed from two university campuses in Mzuzu and Thyolo, Malawi. Four targets were analyzed: N-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide (2PY; a biomarker of vitamin B3), 4-pyridoxic acid (4-PA; a biomarker of vitamin B6), as well as enterodiol and enterolactone (biomarkers of dietary fiber and polyphenol consumption). An 18-question survey, paired spatiotemporally with the WES measurements, assessed self-reported daily dietary intake, food insecurity, and nutrient deficiency symptoms among 500 respondents. Among the 14 WES samples, 2PY, 4-PA, and enterolactone were detected, while enterodiol was not detected above the method limit (

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Transformer-Based Warm-Starting for Feasible and Optimal Terminal Approach to Tumbling Objects with Space Manipulators

作者:
Yuji Takubo↗Maximilian Adang↗Mac Schwager↗Simone D'Amico↗

arXiv:2606.17317v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time trajectory generation for on-orbit robotic servicing is challenging due to the nonlinear coupling between spacecraft bus motion, manipulator dynamics, visibility cone, and trajectory-level safety constraints. This paper studies learning-based warm-starting for sequential convex programming (SCP) in the terminal approach of a space manipulator toward a tumbling target. The proposed framework decomposes the problem into a system center-of-mass translational planning stage and a coupled attitude–manipulator torque-allocation stage, and applies a causal transformer warm-start to the latter, which constitutes the dominant computational bottleneck. Linear and flow matching action decoders are compared under different action-chunking and training dataset sizes, and the resulting warm-starts are evaluated under both cost-optimal and feasibility projection using SCP. Across 300 held-out scenarios, the learned warm-start reduces the second-stage SCP iteration count by up to 28% and the runtime by 23% while preserving the final control-cost distribution. When the learned warm-starts are used for nonconvex feasibility projection, they nearly halve the runtime relative to cost-optimal SCP, while avoiding the catastrophic high-cost tail behavior observed when initialized heuristically. These results indicate that sequence-model warm-starts can improve both the computational efficiency and trajectory robustness of optimization-based terminal guidance for space manipulation.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Open Materials Generation with Inference-Time Reinforcement Learning

作者:
Philipp Hoellmer↗Stefano Martiniani↗

arXiv:2602.00424v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continuous-time generative models for crystalline materials enable inverse materials design by learning to predict stable crystal structures, but incorporating explicit target properties into the generative process remains challenging. Policy-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) provides a principled mechanism for aligning generative models with downstream objectives but typically requires access to the score, which has prevented its application to flow-based models that learn only velocity fields. We introduce Open Materials Generation with Inference-time Reinforcement Learning (OMatG-IRL), a policy-gradient RL framework that operates directly on the learned velocity fields and eliminates the need for the explicit computation of the score. OMatG-IRL leverages stochastic perturbations of the underlying generation dynamics preserving the baseline performance of the pretrained generative model while enabling exploration and policy-gradient estimation at inference time. Using OMatG-IRL, we present the first application of RL to crystal structure prediction (CSP). Our method enables effective reinforcement of an energy-based objective while preserving diversity through composition conditioning, and it achieves performance competitive with score-based RL approaches. Finally, we show that OMatG-IRL can learn time-dependent velocity-annealing schedules, enabling accurate CSP with order-of-magnitude improvements in sampling efficiency and, correspondingly, reduction in generation time. The OMatG-IRL code is included in a new release of the Open Materials Generation (OMatG) framework available at https://github.com/FERMat-ML/OMatG.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Precision Is Not Faithfulness: Coverage-Aware Evaluation of Grounded Generation with a Complete Oracle

作者:
Juan S. Santillana↗

Reference-free faithfulness metrics verify each atomic claim a model makes against ground truth, and are increasingly used to evaluate grounded generation. We show they share a blind spot: they measure only precision – are the stated claims supported? – and therefore reward abstention, since a model can score near-perfect faithfulness by saying almost nothing. We make this measurable using Formula 1 telemetry, a domain where strategic ground truth is derived deterministically and, crucially, completely: for each decision we know the full set of facts that mattered. This completeness – absent in open-domain faithfulness benchmarks – lets us measure recall (coverage of the relevant facts) exactly, alongside precision. On a multilingual (EN/ES/PT) benchmark of 7,253 decision instances spanning 157 races, the most precise frontier model covers under half of the relevant facts and ranks last by F1, so requiring coverage reorders the systems; the same effect reappears in a second complete-oracle domain (NOAA weather forecasts). Fine-tuning small models (1B-7B) on the complete oracle closes the precision-recall gap entirely (F1 ~0.98), beating every zero-shot frontier system regardless of scale. We pair faithfulness with coverage into a single score, validate the metric (controlled perturbation; agreement across a model-free regex extractor and a cross-family LLM extractor, system-level Spearman 1.0), and give a verifier-guided generation method that improves precision and recall without references. We release the benchmark, structured annotations, metric, baselines, and an interactive demo.

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10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Backward Stochastic Partial Differential Integral Equations: Solvability and Comparison Principle

作者:
Qingxin Meng↗Qi Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.16237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The paper is concerned with the well-posedness of backward stochastic partial differential equations with jumps, also called backward stochastic partial differential integral equations. We start from the proof for the existence and uniqueness of solution to backward stochastic evolution equation with jump in the Gelfand triple framework. Then the well-posedness of both weak solution and strong solution to backward stochastic partial differential integral equation is obtained with the Gelfand triple replaced by specific Sobolev spaces. Finally, the comparison principle for backward stochastic partial differential integral equation is proved, which has potential applications in financial mathematics.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Lifecycle-Aware Dynamic Analysis for Secure ML Model Execution

作者:
Gabriele Digregorio↗Marco Di Gennaro↗Francesco Pastore↗Stefano Zanero↗Stefano Longari↗Michele Carminati↗

arXiv:2606.19023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing reliance on pre-trained Machine Learning (ML) models has introduced new attack surfaces. Recent vulnerabilities demonstrate that malicious behavior can be embedded within model artifacts, often bypassing existing defenses. Current model-scanning solutions primarily rely on static, format-specific rules or known attack signatures, which limit their ability to generalize across frameworks and to detect novel exploitation paths. In contrast, we propose a solution that focuses on the effects an attack has on the host system executing the model and builds on foundational intuitions about ML model execution. In particular, we observe that ML models operate within well-defined lifecycle phases and that, within each phase, interactions with the host system are highly structured and predictable. We translate these intuitions into Moat, a dynamic lifecycle-aware approach for securing ML model execution, and instantiate this design in Re-Moat, our reference implementation. We evaluate Re-Moat across multiple ML frameworks using 77,974 real-world model artifacts from the Hugging Face Hub, 31 Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs) from CVEs, and 334 models from a state-of-the-art dataset, and compare it against state-of-the-art model-scanning solutions. Our results show that our approach detects all evaluated attack classes while maintaining a close-to-zero false-positive rate, validating our intuitions and motivating dynamic analysis for securing ML model execution.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dark state spectroscopy in nonlinear waveguide quantum electrodynamics

作者:
Shay Nadel↗Amir Sivan↗Aviv Karnieli↗

arXiv:2606.11997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum systems face a fundamental trade-off: they must remain decoupled from the environment to maintain long coherence times, yet they require interactions with the environment to be accessible for measurement. As a prime example, emitter arrays coupled to waveguides facilitate collective modes that, owing to interference, can suppress radiation into the waveguide. While complete destructive interference creates perfectly dark states with infinite lifetimes, their inherent decoupling makes them unmeasurable in standard waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Consequently, current approaches must rely on system non-idealities that permit measurement but limit the coherence times. In this work, we lift this limitation by proposing the use of weakly squeezed light generated in \{chi}(2) nonlinear waveguides for the spectroscopy of completely dark states. We show that the fluorescence spectrum probes transitions between the dressed dark states of the emitter array. This work paves the way towards the measurement and control of dark states, with applications for robust quantum memories, computation, and communication.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM): Agent-Based Finite Element Modeling of Concrete Bridge Barriers

作者:
Quankai Wang↗Yulin Xie↗Tongfei Yang↗Minghui Cheng↗Ran Cao↗

arXiv:2606.12025v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite element (FE) modeling of safety-critical infrastructure such as bridge barriers requires high-fidelity nonlinear dynamic analysis, yet the current FE modeling process remains labor-intensive and lacks automation. This paper presents the Human-Enhanced Loop Modeling (HELM) framework, a collaborative human-agent protocol that decomposes long-sequence finite element modeling into discrete, visually verifiable checkpoints across geometry generation, boundary condition definition, and material assignment. The framework is demonstrated through a 20-case matrix of reinforced concrete bridge barriers under MASH TL-4 and TL-5 lateral loading conditions, interfacing specialized agents with two widely used commercial FE softwares, i.e., ANSYS and LS-PrePost. Experimental results show that HELM improves the baseline autonomous modeling success rate from 20% to 75%, with agent-level pass rates for geometry and boundary condition tasks approximately doubling. Error analysis reveals that spatial reasoning and algebraic logic limitations constitute the primary failure modes, underscoring the value of structured human-in-the-loop intervention for modeling automation. The complete agent design code and prompts are open-sourced and can be accessed at: https://github.com/SimAgentDev/Ansys-LSPP-AgentKit.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Wigner Cat Phases: A finely tunable system for exploring the transition to quantum chaos

作者:
M. S\"uzen↗

arXiv:2512.22169v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A quantum mechanical setting consisting of a frozen qubit composed with a fully thermalized chaotic system of N states is proposed, with potential relevance to quantum control. Observing the states of the composed system selectively retaining the states leads to the observation of novel localization in the subsystem. At a tuning parameter of 1.0, implying no selection, the system exhibits Wigner-Dyson level spacing statistics, indicative of quantum chaos. As the tuning parameter is reduced and selection occurs at a cutoff, the nearest-neighbor level spacing distribution develops heavier tails, a signature of suppressed spectral mixing and the emergence of non-thermal dynamics. In these regimes, the eigendensity develops a pronounced "cat-ears" structure, reflecting the formation of spatially localized bimodal eigenstates. These topological features persist without transitioning to Poisson statistics, indicating a transition from quantum chaos to a non-thermal, novel many-body localized (MBL) regime-referred to as Wigner Cat Phases. The proposed mixed random matrix ensemble offers a practical probe for sustaining this novel quantum localization setting. Results from our rigorous spectral statistics analysis show how "cat-ears" form in spectral densities based on the degree of selection or disorder and indicate that gap ratio statistics must be used with caution in detecting the full integrable limit due to the possibility of heavy-tailed Wigner-Dyson distributions.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frozen Multimodal Embeddings for Personality and Cognitive Ability Assessment in Asynchronous Video Interviews

作者:
Kuo-En Hung↗Hung-Yue Suen↗Shih-Ching Yeh↗Hsiang-Wen Wang↗

Predicting psychological traits from asynchronous video interviews (AVIs) is a challenging multimodal learning problem because labeled datasets are limited while each response contains high-dimensional visual, acoustic, and verbal signals. This paper presents our solution for the ACM Multimedia AVI Challenge 2026, which evaluates two tasks: Track~1 predicts self-reported HEXACO personality traits from personality-related interview responses, and Track~2 classifies cognitive ability levels from structured AVI responses. We treat the problem as a small-sample representation learning task. Instead of fine-tuning large pretrained models, we use frozen multimodal encoders, including CLIP for visual features, Whisper for acoustic features and transcripts, and RoBERTa, E5, and DeBERTaV3 for textual representations, followed by low-capacity downstream models. For Track~1, our trait-specific regression and late-fusion system achieves an average validation MSE of 0.2696, improving over the official baseline of 0.3334. Ablation results show a three-step improvement from a global model (0.3189), to per-trait modeling (0.2871), to per-trait late fusion (0.2696), corresponding to a 19.1\% relative MSE reduction over the official baseline. For Track~2, a compact subject-attribute baseline reaches 0.5781 accuracy, while our multimodal ensemble reaches 0.5313, both above the official baseline of 0.4062. We interpret this result as evidence of possible subject-attribute shortcuts in the validation split rather than robust cognitive inference from AVI content. Overall, our findings suggest that AVI-based psychological assessment benefits from trait-specific multimodal modeling, but cognitive ability prediction requires careful control of dataset shortcuts.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation

作者:
Yinhan He↗Liam Collins↗Bhuvesh Kumar↗Jundong Li↗Neil Shah↗Donald Loveland↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge. Yet reliably invoking this knowledge for GR remains poorly understood. A key obstacle is that LLM-based GR typically represents items with Semantic IDs (SIDs), disrupting LLMs' natural-language reasoning interface because these tokens are unseen by the LLM during pretraining. Existing approaches address this with expensive multi-stage pipelines that ground SIDs and elicit explicit rationales, but offer limited insight into when and why each stage is necessary. In this work, we systematically decompose explicit reasoning training pipelines for LLM-based GR, revealing three key limitations: weakened world-knowledge verbalization, misalignment between SID and natural-language token embedding spaces, and sensitivity to rationale quality, all of which hurt explicit reasoning performance. To circumvent these issues, we propose PauseRec, a lightweight implicit reasoning paradigm tailored for GR. PauseRec is exceptionally practical, avoiding costly reasoning trace acquisition and reasoning alignment training, leading to a multitude of benefits: (1) it outperforms standard explicit CoT methods by up to 6.22%, (2) it reduces training cost by up to 65% GPU hours, and (3) it speeds up inference by up to 71.3%. These results position PauseRec as a lightweight alternative to explicit rationale generation, enabling more effective and efficient LLM-based GR.

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

RUB: Evaluating Residual Knowledge in Unlearned Models

作者:
Hao Xuan↗Xingyu Li↗

Machine Unlearning (MUL) has emerged as a key mechanism for privacy protection and content regulation, yet current techniques often fail to guarantee the complete removal of sensitive information. While most existing works focus on verifying the execution of unlearning, they overlook the critical question of whether models remain robust against adversarial attempts to recover forgotten knowledge. In this work, we advocate for the principle of Robust Unlearning, which requires models to be both indistinguishable from retrained counterparts and resilient against diverse adversarial threats. To instantiate this principle, we propose a unified benchmark, RUB (Robust Unlearning Benchmark), that systematically evaluates the robustness of unlearning algorithms across classification, image-to-image reconstruction, and text-to-image synthesis. Within this framework, we introduce the Unlearning Mapping Attack (UMA) as a generalizable method to detect residual information, and demonstrate how existing attack strategies can be adapted into this framework as long as they conform to the generic UMA framework. Our experiments across discriminative and generative tasks reveal that state-of-the-art unlearning methods remain vulnerable under these evaluations, even when passing standard verification metrics. By positioning robustness as the central criterion and providing a benchmark for adversarial evaluation, we hope RUB paves the way toward more reliable and secure unlearning practices. The codebase and model checkpoints in RUB will be published.

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18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

A unicellular relative links aggregative multicellularity to animal origins

作者:
Ruibao Li↗

How animals evolved complex multicellularity from their unicellular ancestors remains unanswered. Unicellular relatives of animals exhibit simple multicellularity through clonal division, formation of multinucleate coenocytes, or aggregation. 1 Therefore, animal multicellularity may have evolved from one (or a combination) of these behaviours. Aggregation has classically been dismissed as a means to complex multicellularity. 2 However, aggregation occurs in many extant animal cells and has also been recently described in three close unicellular relatives of animals (the choanoflagellates Salpingoeca rosetta and Choanoeca flexa, and the filasterean Capsaspora owczarzaki). 3-5 It is unclear whether aggregation in these species is derived or ancestral, and its relevance for animal origins remains unknown. To fill this gap, we investigated whether an additional close unicellular relative of animals can undergo aggregation. We discovered that the marine free-living bacterivorous filasterean Ministeria vibrans 6 forms homogeneous aggregates with reproducible kinetics that have long-term stability, and that improved feeding and mating may be evolutionary drivers of this aggregation. Notably, we found that homologs of many animal multicellularity genes involved in cell adhesion, signalling, and transcriptional regulation were deployed during the aggregation process, indicating that they may have been used for aggregation in the unicellular ancestors of animals before being co-opted into animal multicellular development. Thus, our results imply that aggregative multicellularity was key to the development of the multicellular animal genetic toolkit.

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

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

作者:
Ligong Han↗Hao Wang↗Han Gao↗Kai Xu↗Akash Srivastava↗

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

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

When Does Mixing Help? Analyzing Query Embedding Interpolation in Multilingual Dense Retrieval

作者:
Tongyao Zhu↗Chao-Ming Huang↗Min-Yen Kan↗

While mixed-language querying is ubiquitous in multilingual communities, the sensitivity of dense retrievers to such queries remains poorly understood. We present a ratio-controlled study on mMARCO that systematically evaluates retrieval performance by varying the mixing proportion of parallel query translations via embedding-level mixing – constructing mixed queries as an interpolation of monolingual embeddings. Experiments with BGE-M3 demonstrate that an optimal mixing ratio outperforms the best monolingual endpoint in 88/105 cases. We uncover a distinct asymmetry driven by English dominance: mixing is uniformly beneficial when retrieving from non-English document indices, whereas indices containing English are best served by pure English queries. Furthermore, English acts as the strongest mixing partner for every non-English document language. Finally, when controlling for English dominance, mixing gains correlate negatively with typological distance. We conclude that language-mix sensitivity is structured and predictable, and we validate the robustness of these patterns across model families and scales.

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

MapAgent: An Industrial-Grade Agentic Framework for City-scale Lane-level Map Generation

作者:
Deguo Xia↗Zihan Li↗Haochen Zhao↗Dong Xie↗Yuyao Kong↗Xiyan Liu↗Jizhou Huang↗Mengmeng Yang↗Diange Yang↗

arXiv:2606.04513v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Lane-level maps are critical infrastructure for autonomous driving and lane-level navigation, yet constructing and maintaining standardized lane networks for hundreds of cities remains highly labor-intensive. Recent end-to-end vectorized mapping methods can predict lane geometry and topology directly from sensor data, but they typically treat mapping specifications and traffic regulations as implicit, dataset-dependent supervision. Moreover, in complex scenes (e.g., worn or missing markings and occlusions), correct lane configurations are often under-determined by visual evidence alone, making specification violations a major source of human post-editing. We propose MapAgent, an industrial-grade agentic architecture that augments a vectorization backbone for specification-compliant lane-map production. Rather than merely adding an agent loop to map prediction, MapAgent couples backbone perception with explicit specification verification, constraint-aware reasoning, and deterministic map editing under a bounded, verification-driven Judge-Planner-Worker loop. A vision-language Judge diagnoses errors by jointly inspecting visual evidence and draft vectors, while a tool-calling Planner generates minimal corrective edits with post-edit re-validation. To remain scalable for city-scale production, MapAgent is selectively triggered only on tiles with low backbone confidence, adding modest overhead while preserving throughput. Experiments on real-world datasets show consistent gains over strong production baselines, especially in complex and long-tail scenarios. Additionally, MapAgent has been integrated into Baidu Maps, supporting lane-level map generation for over 360 cities nationwide and elevating the overall production automation to over 95%, demonstrating MapAgent's practicality and effectiveness for large-scale lane-level map generation.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Safe Exploration via Policy Priors

作者:
Manuel Wendl↗Yarden As↗Manish Prajapat↗Anton Pollak↗Stelian Coros↗Andreas Krause↗

arXiv:2601.19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative policies (e.g., obtained from offline data or simulators) as priors. Our approach, SOOPER, uses probabilistic dynamics models to optimistically explore, yet pessimistically fall back to the conservative policy prior if needed. We prove that SOOPER guarantees safety throughout learning, and establish convergence to an optimal policy by bounding its cumulative regret. Extensive experiments on key safe RL benchmarks and real-world hardware demonstrate that SOOPER is scalable, outperforms the state-of-the-art and validate our theoretical guarantees in practice.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Calibrating Generative Models to Feature Distributions with MMD Finetuning

作者:
Nathaniel L. Diamant↗Brian L. Trippe↗

arXiv:2606.19496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative models can produce individually plausible samples while deviating substantially from a target set in the distribution of key features. For example, a model pretrained on broad drug-like chemical space may generate molecules whose molecular features differ from those of a therapeutic class of interest, such as known antibiotics. Correcting such distributional miscalibration is challenging: direct finetuning on the target set can overfit and does not control which features are matched. To fill this gap, we introduce kernel Calibrating Generative Models (kCGM). kCGM minimizes a maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) between generated and target feature distributions using an unbiased score-function estimator, with KL regularization to remain close to the pretrained model. On a target set of 174 antibiotics, direct finetuning sacrifices chemical validity for feature-distribution matching, whereas kCGM improves target feature matching while increasing validity. We further demonstrate kCGM in protein and DNA generation tasks, showing it can adapt autoregressive, continuous-space diffusion, and discrete diffusion models using only feature-level supervision. Code is available at https://github.com/smithhenryd/cgm.

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

Rethinking One-Step Image Editing through ChordEdit: Reproduction, Simplification, and New Insights

作者:
Minghan Li↗Jeremy Moebel↗Mengyu Wang↗

One-step image editing is important for making text-guided editing fast, practical, and easy to deploy, but its underlying mechanism is still not fully understood. We revisit ChordEdit through reproduction, ablation, and simplification. Our analysis shows that a) the chord window $\delta$ largely acts as an effective timestep shift from $t$ to $t - \delta$; b) chord transport acts on high-noise images and mainly performs low-frequency semantic editing; and c) proximal alignment acts on low-noise images and complements it by adding high-frequency target details. In this view, ChordEdit naturally decomposes editing into a coarse low-frequency transport stage and a fine high-frequency alignment stage. These findings suggest a path toward prompt-conditioned dynamic timestep selection for adaptive image editing. All code and results can be found at \href{https://github.com/Harvard-AI-and-Robotics-Lab/ChordEdit-Reproduction}{link}.

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

FlowMPC: Improving Flow Matching policies with World Models

作者:
Chandon Hamel↗

arXiv:2606.16286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) is a powerful approach for behavior cloning in multimodal action spaces [Jiang et al., 2025], but because it is not trained to directly maximize expected return, there is still room to improve how FM policies act at test time. This work investigates whether a learned world model can improve FM policies by enabling Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning over candidate action sequences proposed by the policy. Building on TD-MPC2 [Hansen et al., 2024], I introduce FlowMPC, a framework that combines an imitation-learned FM policy with a learned world model for test-time planning in ManiSkill manipulation tasks [Tao et al., 2025]. Across PickCube and PickSingleYCB, adding the world model improved performance over the FM policy alone, with especially clear gains in end-of-episode success. These results suggest that world-model-based planning can effectively complement flow-based imitation policies without modifying the FM training objective.

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