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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limits of the single-curve interface and outermost loops in the planar random field Ising model

arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tensor-Network-Based Distributed Quantum Dynamics on Independent Quantum Computers

arXiv:2606.11579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an approach based on tensor networks for distributed quantum computing simulation of chemical wavepacket dynamics in a continuous variable representation. The central idea is that the tensor-network representation of the multidimensional time-evolution operator naturally induces an elevated Hilbert space where the dynamics decomposes into a set of independent lower-dimensional propagations. This transformation converts an entangled quantum evolution into a set of parallel computational tasks that can be executed asynchronously across heterogeneous quantum and classical computing architectures. The resulting formalism establishes a direct connection between tensor-network decompositions, uniformly controlled quantum circuits, and asynchronous distributed quantum computing. The approach is developed with a goal towards hybrid quantum/classical implementation, and is appropriate for a general heterogeneous mixture of quantum hardware systems. The experimental realization of the asynchronously distributed quantum processes that arise from the tensor-network decomposition are carried out on the Sandia National Laboratories' trapped-ion quantum computer, where the circuits are compiled using native partial-entangling $XX(\theta)$ gates, reducing the expected two-qubit gate infidelity by more than 30\% relative to conventional fully entangling decompositions. We demonstrate the methodology by quantum computing the vibrational spectra of a small protonated water cluster that shows critical quantum nuclear behavior. Such water cluster systems have been found to be challenging for experimental action spectroscopy and for theory, and here, for the first time, we provide results for vibrational spectroscopy that are in agreement with the respective classical results to within 4cm$^{-1}$, thus allowing for the potential for spectroscopic accuracy from quantum computations.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Higher Population Coverage with Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine is Needed to Induce Herd Protection: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial in Urban Bangladesh

Introduction: A cluster randomized trial (CRT) in Bangladesh found that Vi-tetanus toxoid (Vi-TT) vaccine conferred 85% protection to vaccinees at 18 months of follow-up; however, it failed to confer significant herd protection to non-vaccinees. Methods: In the CRT, children aged 9 months to

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Systematic functional annotation of thousands of BAHD acyltransferases in plant genomes using Protein Language Model and phylogenomic tools

The functional annotation of plant genes lags significantly behind their genomic annotation. Closing this gap requires thorough cataloging of reported protein activities alongside predictive methods that scale beyond sequence-similarity inference. Focusing on the BAHD acyltransferase enzyme family as a model, we assembled FuncZymeDB-BAHD, a large database of 2,705 LLM-retrieved and curated enzyme-acceptor-donor activities covering 336 BAHDs from 156 plant species, a 2-to-6-fold expansion over Swiss-Prot and prior compilations. We further developed FuncPred-OG, which maps queries to orthologous groups and previously characterized enzymes in FuncZymeDB-BAHD, returning hits with high evidence provenance. FuncPred-OG enabled functional prediction of over half of BAHDs across 85 plant proteomes, of which five novel predictions were validated via in vitro assays and recent studies. For the remaining BAHDs without FuncPred-OG annotation, we developed FuncPred-AI, where logistic-regression classifiers trained on protein language model embeddings achieved high Area-Under-the-Precision-Recall-curve (AUPR) scores and correct-hit rates up to 93%. FuncPred-AI yielded >1 probable donor/acceptor annotation for 99.9% (8894/8897) of BAHDs in our pan-plant dataset. Finally, the FuncPred workflow and datasets were deployed on a web portal for broader utilization, potentially reducing experimentalist efforts for selecting candidates from days to minutes. Overall, this framework provides a generalizable template for functional annotation of entire enzyme families.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

SOMA-SQL: Resolving Multi-Source Ambiguity in NL-to-SQL via Synthetic Log and Execution Probing

Natural language interfaces to databases aim to translate user questions into executable SQL, yet remain brittle in real-world settings where questions are underspecified and schemas are large and ambiguous. Ambiguity across user questions, database schemas, and model interpretations are central failure modes in NL2SQL, leading to misaligned intent, incorrect schema grounding, and erroneous SQL generation. Existing approaches rely on human clarification or treat ambiguity as a schema representation problem, but these do not scale nor resolve ambiguity autonomously. We propose SOMA-SQL to automatically resolve ambiguity via targeted synthetic query log and ambiguity-driven probing. SOMA-SQL constructs synthetic query log to ground schema interpretation and guide candidate SQL generation; it then executes targeted probing queries, driven by a structured ambiguity taxonomy and candidate disagreements, to produce disambiguation evidence for final SQL selection and repair. This active approach to ambiguity discovery and resolution generalizes across unseen schemas and query distributions without human-in-the-loop. Experiments on six public benchmarks demonstrate that SOMA-SQL improves execution accuracy by 13.0% on average over state-of-the-art baselines, with gains of up to 16.7% on ambiguous questions.

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

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

07.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

A multiscale, Bayesian inference approach to augment mechanistic models of cell signaling with machine-learning predictions of binding affinity

by Holly A. Huber, Stacey D. Finley Computational models in systems biology are often underdetermined—that is, there is little data relative to the complexity and size of the model. This lack of data is primarily due to limits in our ability to observe specific biological systems and restricts the utility of computational models. To reduce this uncertainty, recent methods have explored augmenting parameter inference of systems biology models with predictions from machine learning models. Such approaches expand the pool of data that is applicable for the inference problem. Here, we explore augmenting the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models. We choose to investigate signaling because experimental measurements of the variables of interest, protein dynamics, are still quite limited. To investigate, we propose a novel, multiscale, Bayesian inference approach that augments traditional signaling data with predictions of binding affinity. These predictions are generated using a machine learning pipeline with measurements of amino acid sequence, from the Universal Protein Resource, or protein structure, from the Protein Data Bank, as inputs. We find that we can successfully integrate these measurements into the inference problem using our novel framework. Excitingly, this integration significantly improves the parameter estimates of signaling models. We demonstrate that how much this improvement impacts predictions of signaling depends on the sensitivity of the prediction to perturbations in the parameter values. Overall, the framework we establish here improves the parameter inference of intracellular signaling models by successfully bridging data on protein sequence and structure with systems-level signaling.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Triangle Splatting SLAM

We present a dense RGB-D SLAM system using differentiable triangles as the 3D map representation. While 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as the leading method for novel-view synthesis, triangles remain the standard primitive for traditional rendering hardware, game engines, and downstream tasks requiring explicit geometry such as simulation, collision, and editing. Recent offline methods have demonstrated that an unstructured 'triangle soup' can be optimised into a photorealistic mesh via Delaunay triangulation across a set of posed images. Building upon this insight, we present the first dense SLAM system to employ Triangle Splatting to perform both tracking and mapping through online differentiable rendering of a triangle soup. The map can be converted into a connected mesh on-the-fly via restricted Delaunay triangulation, enabling new online capabilities such as mesh deformation and collision checking. On Replica and TUM-RGBD, our system outperforms baselines on 3D geometry, matches the camera-tracking accuracy, and enables online mesh-based scene editing.

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

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

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

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Decoupled Mixture-of-Experts for Parametric Knowledge Injection

Knowledge injection aims to equip large language models (LLMs) with external, domain-specific, or time-sensitive knowledge. Existing approaches typically face a trade-off between flexibility and integration: retrieval-augmented generation keeps knowledge outside the model but only provides prompt-level augmentation, whereas post-training based methods encode new knowledge into shared parameters but may introduce catastrophic forgetting, knowledge conflict, and costly updates. In this paper, we propose Decoupled Mixture-of-Experts (DMoE), a modular architecture for parametric knowledge injection that decouples both experts and the router from the base model. DMoE converts external knowledge corpora into independently updatable expert modules and uses a lightweight uncertainty-aware router to activate relevant experts only when the base model lacks sufficient knowledge during generation. To support efficient auto-regressive inference, DMoE attaches experts only to the final-layer feed-forward network, preserving KV-cache reuse while enabling parameter-level knowledge augmentation. Experiments on knowledge-intensive benchmarks show that DMoE consistently improves answer quality over retrieval and adapter-based baselines.

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

Noise-Adaptive Predictive Dynamical Decoupling

arXiv:2606.15769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protecting quantum coherence against realistic environmental noise remains one of the fundamental obstacles to scalable quantum technologies. We develop a noise-adaptive dynamical decoupling framework that combines analytical open-quantum-system modeling with machine-learning-based forecasting for a qubit interacting with random telegraph noise. Unlike conventional dynamical decoupling protocols based on fixed pulse schedules, the proposed approach continuously forecasts short-time coherence evolution and adaptively applies control pulses according to the instantaneous noise dynamics. We investigate stationary and non-stationary environments spanning both Markovian and non-Markovian regimes. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the machine-learning-assisted adaptive control strategy substantially outperforms conventional periodic dynamical decoupling while using a comparable number of control pulses. The improvement becomes particularly pronounced in non-Markovian and non-stationary regimes, where memory effects, coherence revivals, and temporally evolving noise strongly limit the effectiveness of static pulse protocols. These results establish predictive machine-learning-assisted dynamical decoupling as a promising and scalable framework for adaptive quantum control in realistic noisy quantum devices.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MENTOR: Reinforcement Learning via Flexible Teacher-Optimized Rewards for Tool-Use Distillation

Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization due to its rigid alignment with static teacher trajectories. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative, the capacity limitations of SLMs pose a severe dilemma: sparse outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, whereas strict trajectory matching imposes overly restrictive constraints. To bridge this capacity-driven gap, we propose MENTOR, which introduces a flexible yet process-aware reward structure. Instead of enforcing rigid replication, MENTOR uses the teacher's reference to guide tool-use behavior, balancing behavioral alignment with downstream performance. Extensive experiments on controlled executable-tool benchmarks demonstrate that MENTOR improves OOD tool-use performance compared to SFT and strict RL baselines. Our findings suggest that within verifiable tool-use environments, flexible tool-use alignment offers a more effective approach than strict trajectory replication for developing adaptable small models.

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

CADBench: A Multimodal Benchmark for AI-Assisted CAD Program Generation

arXiv:2605.10873v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recovering editable CAD programs from images or 3D observations is central to AI-assisted design, but progress is difficult to measure because existing evaluations are fragmented across datasets, modalities, and metrics. We introduce CADBench, a unified benchmark for multimodal CAD program generation. CADBench contains 18,000 evaluation samples spanning six benchmark families derived from DeepCAD, Fusion 360, ABC, MCB, and Objaverse; five input modalities including clean meshes, noisy meshes, single-view renders, photorealistic renders, and multi-view renders; and six metrics covering geometric fidelity, executability, and program compactness. STEP-based families are stratified by B-rep face count and all families are diversity-sampled to support controlled analysis across complexity and object variation. We benchmark eleven CAD-specialized and general-purpose vision-language systems, generating more than 1.4 million CAD programs. Under idealized inputs, specialized mesh-to-CAD models substantially outperform code-generating VLMs, which remain far from reliable CAD program reconstruction. CADBench further reveals three recurring failure modes: reconstruction quality degrades with geometric complexity, CAD-specialized models can be brittle under modality shift, and model rankings change across metrics. Together, these results position CADBench as a diagnostic testbed for measuring progress in editable 3D reconstruction and multimodal CAD understanding. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/anniedoris/CADBench.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Replay What Matters: Off-Policy Replay for Efficient LLM Reinforcement Unlearning

LLM unlearning has emerged as a cost-effective alternative to full retraining for removing hazardous knowledge from pretrained models while preserving general utility. Recent RL-based methods such as RULE reformulate unlearning as learning a refusal behavior, but their on-policy optimization repeatedly samples from the same forget and retain/boundary prompts throughout training. We identify a critical inefficiency in this process: easy cases quickly converge and provide little useful gradient signal, while hard cases near the forget/retain boundary continue to produce low-reward rollouts that are discarded after a single use. To address this issue, we propose ReRULE, an off-policy replay enhancement for reinforcement unlearning. ReRULE stores low-reward hard-case rollout groups in a replay buffer during early GRPO training and reuses them in later stages through importance-sampled off-policy updates, redirecting computation toward boundary cases that still require learning. Theoretically, we show that ReRULE yields a tighter hard-case convergence bound than pure on-policy RULE. Empirically, ReRULE improves MUSE-Books Retain Quality from 46.3 to 56.2 while adding only 5–11% training time across benchmarks. Its limited improvement on the simpler TOFU setting further supports the intended conditional behavior: replay is most beneficial when the hard/easy disparity is pronounced.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Value of XOR-Game-Induced Side Information in a Szilard Engine

arXiv:2605.12044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a Szilard-type thermodynamic valuation of side-information channels induced by Bell-type correlations. In each round, a two-level working system is thermalized with a degenerate Hamiltonian, so that its physical microstate is a uniform classical bit. A trusted referee embeds this bit into a finite two-player XOR game, and a correlation resource produces a compressed controller bit. The controller uses only this compressed bit as side information for feedback. The construction is formulated first for arbitrary finite XOR games. The referee encoding makes the game-winning event equivalent to correct prediction of the physical microstate. Consequently, the induced side-information channel is binary symmetric, with success probability equal to the XOR-game winning probability of the supplied behaviour. The reversible Szilard feedback value is therefore fixed by the mutual information between the microstate and the controller record. Optimizing over local, quantum, and nonsignalling behaviour sets turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, and nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. The construction is an effective-channel valuation, not a claim that Bell nonlocality is thermodynamic fuel. The controller receives only the compressed prediction bit, not the auxiliary variables that define the game. The thermodynamic costs of the referee, the correlation resource, and the preprocessing are not included. When controller-memory reset is included in a full cycle, the net work is non-positive, consistently with the second law.

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

The Illusion of Improvement: Reject Inference Strategies in Credit Scoring

arXiv:2606.18479v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reject inference methods are widely used to mitigate survival bias in credit scoring, yet their effectiveness remains poorly understood. We systematically evaluate several such methods and uncover a structural failure mode: in a natural retraining cycle, models whose accuracy improves while recall collapses create an illusion of improvement that leads practitioners to believe the system is getting better when, in fact, its rejection quality – the ability to correctly screen out defaulters – is deteriorating. We then propose a controlled exploration strategy that breaks the feedback loop without statistical assumptions: the lender deliberately approves a fraction of rejected applicants and observes their true outcomes. We show that accuracy and rejection quality give opposite recommendations on whether to explore: accuracy favors no exploration, while rejection quality improves with it, confirming that standard evaluation metrics are misleading under selection bias. Even minimal exploration rates (2–5\%) prove sufficient in our experiments to diagnose the severity of the feedback loop at near-zero cost. Our findings are consistent across two machine learning methods and three real-world datasets, and suggest that standard evaluation protocols are inadequate for assessing models trained under survival bias.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SkillWiki: A Living Knowledge Infrastructure for Agent Skills

While knowledge is managed through Wikipedia and software through GitHub, agent skills still lack an infrastructure for large-scale production, governance, and evolution. SkillWiki is a living knowledge infrastructure that supports the organization, grounding, and continuous evolution of agent skills by transforming heterogeneous knowledge into reusable skill assets linked to their originating evidence. Our demonstration presents the complete skill lifecycle, from knowledge ingestion and skill production to provenance-aware exploration, governance, and execution-driven evolution. SkillWiki highlights a future in which knowledge, skills, and execution experience co-evolve within a shared infrastructure. The live demonstration and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/Huangdingcheng/SkillWiki.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

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

Can Agents Read the Room? Benchmarking Visual Social Intelligence in Multimodal Simulation

Social interaction depends on both language and visible social signals, such as facial expressions, posture, gaze, and emotional shifts. Yet existing social-agent benchmarks are largely text-based and rarely test whether multimodal agents can use visual cues to guide interaction. We introduce \textsc{\benchmarkname{}}, a benchmark evaluating visual social intelligence in multimodal social simulation. It contains 240 scenarios, 585 role instances, and 2,340 role-task instances, combining aligned textual-visual evidence, structured role profiles, and four role-level tasks: expression task, characteristic task, interaction regulation task, and interaction outcome task. Evaluating seven recent MLLMs under verbalized-vision and direct-vision reveals a clear gap between local role enactment and interaction management: role-specific expression and conflict handling are near saturation, whereas interaction regulation and visually grounded outcome achievement remain substantially more difficult. The code is released at https://github.com/JunsWan/AgentViSS, and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/JunsWan/AgentViSS.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Weaving Multi-Source Evidence for Biomedical Reasoning: The BioMedHop Benchmark and BioWeave Framework

Biomedical question answering (QA) increasingly requires reasoning over interacting entities, where supporting evidence is scattered across biomedical knowledge graphs, literature documents, and web-accessible resources. However, existing biomedical QA benchmarks mainly focus on exam-style knowledge, literature comprehension, or short-range multi-hop inference, leaving source-conditioned graph reasoning and evidence topology construction underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce BioMedHop, a multi-source graph-grounded benchmark for evaluating biomedical reasoning over structured evidence topologies. BioMedHop contains 10,045 instances across KG, document, web, and hybrid evidence settings, covering shared-neighbor matching, intersection reasoning, path-based reasoning, and counting, with option-based, open-ended, and numeric count renderings. To support this benchmark, we further propose BioWeave, a source-aware reasoning framework that retrieves biomedical KG paths, gathers supporting clues from documents and web sources, assembles them into a unified evidence graph, and verifies answers through entity-level evidence support. Comprehensive experiments show that BioWeave achieves the best overall performance among compared methods on BioMedHop, outperforming the strong hybrid baseline ToG-2 by 10.5% in the overall average. Moreover, BioWeave consistently improves different LLM backbones and enables smaller models, such as Qwen3-4B, to achieve reasoning performance comparable to GPT-4-Turbo.

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

Can Artificial Intelligence Accelerate Technological Progress? Researchers' Perspectives on AI in Manufacturing and Materials Science

arXiv:2511.14007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) raises expectations of substantial increases in rates of technological progress, but such anticipations are often not connected to detailed ground-level studies of AI use in innovation processes. Accordingly, it remains unclear how and to what extent AI can accelerate innovation. To help to fill this gap, we explore and assess results from 32 interviews with U.S.-based academic manufacturing and materials sciences researchers experienced with AI and machine learning (ML) techniques. We found that AI was primarily used for modeling of materials and manufacturing processes, facilitating cheaper and more rapid search of design spaces for materials and manufacturing processes alike. Benefits included cost, time, and computation savings in technology development. However, AI/ML tools were unreliable outside design spaces for which dense data were already available; they required skilled and judicious application in tandem with older research techniques; and concerns were raised about the potential to detrimentally circumvent opportunities for disruptive theoretical advancement. Based on these results, we suggest there is reason for optimism about acceleration in sustaining innovations through the use of AI/ML; but that support for conventional empirical, computational, and theoretical research is required to maintain the likelihood of further disruptive advances in manufacturing and materials.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Cardiac Function Estimation from Phone Videos of Echocardiograms

Importance: Mobile phone-recorded echocardiogram videos are commonly used in point of care, telemedicine, and resource-limited workflows, but artificial intelligence models for left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) estimation have primarily been evaluated on native Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) videos. Objective: To evaluate whether previously described artificial intelligence models for LVEF estimation retain performance when applied to mobile phone-recorded echocardiographic videos. Design: Multicenter model validation study comparing model-estimated LVEF with clinician reported LVEF. Setting: Three medical centers: Kaiser Permanente Northern California, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center through MIMIC-IV-ECHO, and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Participants: Source studies with clinician reported LVEF and apical 4-chamber or apical 2-chamber views, yielding 6209 phone-recorded videos from 2648 studies and 2611 patients. Exposures: Mobile phone recording of native echocardiographic videos and fine-tuning of pretrained models using mobile phone-recorded videos from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California training cohort. Main Outcomes and Measures: Mean absolute error in ejection fraction percentage points, R^2 for continuous estimation, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for identifying ejection fraction greater than 50%. Results: The study included 6209 mobile phone recorded echocardiographic videos from 2648 studies and 2611 patients; the weighted mean age was 68.4 years, and 1031 patients were male (39.5%). Without phone-video fine-tuning, the primary model achieved a mean absolute error of 7.00 percentage points, coefficient of determination of 0.49, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.91 on phone-recorded videos; corresponding native DICOM performance was 6.08 percentage points, 0.60, and 0.93, respectively. On the 2396-video fine-tuning evaluation cohort, fine-tuning improved primary model performance to a mean absolute error of 6.96 percentage points, coefficient of determination of 0.61, and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.93. Fine-tuning the public EchoNet-Dynamic model improved performance from 9.36 percentage points, 0.37, and 0.84 to 7.86 percentage points, 0.50, and 0.89, respectively. Progressive central zoom preprocessing degraded model performance. Conclusions and Relevance: These findings suggest that artificial intelligence assisted left ventricular ejection fraction estimation from mobile phone-recorded echocardiograms may be feasible when native image export is unavailable, although prospective evaluation is needed before clinical deployment.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Learning to Decide with AI Assistance under Human-Alignment

arXiv:2605.12646v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is widely agreed that when AI models assist decision-makers in high-stakes domains by predicting an outcome of interest, they should communicate the confidence of their predictions. However, empirical evidence suggests that decision-makers often struggle to determine when to trust a prediction based solely on this communicated confidence. In this context, recent theoretical and empirical work suggests a positive correlation between the utility of AI-assisted decision-making and the degree of alignment between the AI confidence and the decision-makers' confidence in their own predictions. Crucially, these findings do not yet elucidate the extent to which this alignment influences the complexity of learning to make optimal decisions through repeated interactions. In this paper, we address this question in the canonical case of binary predictions and binary decisions. We first show that this problem is equivalent to a two-armed online contextual learning problem with full feedback, and establish a lower bound of $\Omega (\sqrt{|H| \cdot |B| \cdot T} )$ on the expected regret any learner can attain, where $H$ and $B$ denote the sets of human and AI confidence values. We then demonstrate that, under perfect alignment between AI and human confidence, a learner can attain an expected regret of $O(\sqrt{|H| \cdot T\log T})$ and, when $\sqrt{|H|} = O(\log T)$ and $B$ is countable, a non-trivial generalization of the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality improves the regret bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log T})$. Taken together, these results reveal that alignment can reduce the complexity of learning to make decisions with AI assistance. Experiments on real data from two different human-subject studies where participants solve simple decision-making tasks assisted by AI models show that our theoretical results are robust to violations of perfect alignment.

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

Masked and Predictive Self-Supervised Foundation Models for 3D Brain MRI

Self-supervised foundation models have shown strong promise in medical imaging. However, existing MRI foundation-model studies have primarily emphasized segmentation and dense prediction tasks, while systematic investigation of self-supervised foundation models for MRI-based disease detection remains limited. In this work, we investigate two major self-supervised pretraining paradigms for MRI-based disease detection: reconstruction-based learning via Masked Autoencoders (MAE) and predictive representation learning via Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA). We study the role of auxiliary objectives by introducing a novel spectral-domain reconstruction loss for MAE to enhance sensitivity to fine-grained anatomical structure, and by integrating variance–covariance regularization (VCR) within our JEPA framework to encourage decorrelated latent representations. Our models are pretrained on heterogeneous single-contrast MRI volumes in a contrast-agnostic setting, without modality concatenation. Across five downstream disease detection tasks, our results highlight the importance of self-supervised objective design for medical foundation model pretraining, demonstrating that the downstream benefit of each objective is determined by its relevance to the task's structure. Specifically, spectral regularization yields the largest improvements when the downstream discriminative signal is characterized by strong high-frequency anatomical structures, while covariance regularization is most beneficial when discriminative information spans multiple decorrelated feature dimensions. MAE with spectral-domain supervision consistently achieves superior downstream performance for MRI-based disease detection. These findings suggest that self-supervised objectives in medical imaging encode specific biases, and their downstream benefit is fundamentally conditioned on the task's structure.

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

Do Large Language Models Have Emotions?

arXiv:2606.14742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Do LLMs have emotions? A recent paper from Anthropic reports finding internal representations of emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5, concluding that the LLM has 'functional emotions.' We evaluate this claim against what is known about how emotions actually function in biological systems. We argue that emotions serve two core functions: the context-sensitive interpretation of situations, and the reorganization of processing across multiple systems in response to those interpretations. The Anthropic findings offer partial support for the first function, though the consistent, discrete emotional representations identified in Claude sit uneasily with affective neuroscience findings that human emotion is characterized by variable rather than uniform neural signatures. On the second function, the evidence is mixed: Claude's representations modulate output without producing the dynamic reorganization of attention, decision speed, and motivational state that defines emotion in biological systems. We close by proposing what it would take for an LLM to have emotions.