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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Optimizing Encoder Circuits of Entanglement-Assisted Quantum LDPC Codes via Beam Search

arXiv:2606.11468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement-assisted (EA) quantum QC-LDPC codes offer strong error-correction capabilities with structured parity-check matrices, but their practical use depends on efficient encoder circuits and the availability of pre-shared Bell pairs (ebits). In all encoder implementations based on the stabilizer formalism, the dominant contribution to this complexity comes from the use of controlled gates. In this paper, we adopt the Sharma-Kumar-Garani (SKG) encoder construction. We formulate the encoder optimization as a search over GF(2) row operations that decompose the binary matrix derived from its CNOT sub-sequence. We solve this problem using a beam search algorithm guided by a Hamming-distance heuristic. For the tested EA quantum QC-LDPC code families, the proposed method achieves CNOT-count reductions of 7.3-34.0% relative to the SKG baseline encoder. The optimized circuits also yield lower CNOT counts than Patel-Markov-Hayes synthesis on all tested instances and are verified by stabilizer-tableau simulation. These results show that substantial encoder simplification is possible for structured EA QC-LDPC codes.

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

Pruning via Causal Attribution Preserves Reasoning Performance in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at multi-step reasoning but incur substantial inference cost. We introduce Causal Attribution Pruning (CAP), a training-free method that identifies critical attention heads by measuring their causal impact on reasoning tasks and uses these head-level scores to guide fine-grained weight pruning. For each attention head, CAP estimates the expected performance degradation when the head is masked during forward passes on a small calibration set of reasoning problems. These causal scores are then converted into weight-level importance values for the corresponding projection matrices. Unlike magnitude-only or activation-based criteria, CAP's interventional measurement directly captures each head's functional contribution, yielding relative accuracy gains of up to 61% over Wanda on ARC-Challenge at 20% sparsity. We evaluate CAP on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and ARC-Challenge using Llama-3-8B-Instruct and Mistral-7B-Instruct at 10%, 20%, and 50% sparsity. At moderate sparsity (10-20%), CAP improves over Wanda in most model-benchmark configurations. with especially large gains on ARC-Challenge for Llama-3. Our results suggest that attention-head-level causal attribution can better preserve reasoning performance on downstream benchmarks than correlational pruning criteria at equivalent sparsity, while remaining limited by coarse MLP attribution at 50% sparsity.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

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

Mitigating Heterogeneity-Induced Drift in Hierarchical Sign-Based Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.02355v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is well suited for large-scale wireless and Internet of Things systems, where devices communicate with nearby edge servers before reaching the cloud. In these environments, uplink bandwidth and latency impose strict communication constraints, making aggressive gradient compression essential. One-bit sign-based stochastic gradient descent methods provide an attractive solution in flat federated settings, but their behavior in hierarchical edge–cloud architectures remains insufficiently understood, especially under inter-cluster data heterogeneity. To address this gap, we develop a sign-based HFL framework in which devices transmit binary stochastic-gradient signs to edge servers, edge servers apply majority voting, and the cloud periodically aggregates edge models. Our analysis reveals that inter-cluster heterogeneity induces a persistent bias term in the convergence bound, reflecting the drift of edge models toward local objectives. This term cannot be removed by increasing the number of training rounds or by tuning standard hyperparameters alone. We therefore propose \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\), a drift-corrected sign-based HFL algorithm in which devices apply a cloud-assisted gradient correction before taking the sign. We show that this pre-sign correction mitigates the non-vanishing heterogeneity-induced bias while preserving binary device–edge communication during the repeated local sign-update steps. Experiments under severe inter-cluster heterogeneity demonstrate that \(\mathtt{DC-HierSignSGD}\) improves the stability and accuracy of sign-based HFL and achieves performance comparable to full-precision hierarchical SGD with substantially lower device–edge communication.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Projection and Quantisation: A Unifying View of Learning to Hash, from Random Projections to the RAG Era

作者:

Approximate nearest-neighbour search underpins large-scale retrieval and retrieval-augmented generation, yet its methods are studied in communities that seldom read one another. We argue that they form one field with three design choices. We develop the projection-quantisation-organisation lens: every method places its projections, places its quantisation thresholds, and organises the resulting codes for search. We test the lens with a reproducible measurement, released as the open BitBudget benchmark, and report three findings. First, the quantisation axis delivers the largest memory savings: a one-bit code with full-precision re-ranking matches uncompressed quality for six of seven embedders, the scanned code one thirty-second of the float's size. Second, the orderings the lens anticipates, including a learned-embedding regime where binary codes overtake an inverted-file product quantiser at a matched byte budget, recur as the embedding is enlarged. Third, given class labels, an eight-byte supervised code more than doubles the retrieval quality of the two-kilobyte task-agnostic float it replaces. We also recast the semantic identifiers of generative retrieval as quantisation codes. The main contribution is a single, tested account of compact-code search, from random projections to the retrieval-augmented era.

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

Learning Fair Pareto-Optimal Policies in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness is an important aspect of decision-making in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), where policies must ensure both optimality and equity across multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. While single-policy MORL methods can learn fair policies for fixed user preferences using welfare functions such as the generalized Gini welfare function (GGF), they fail to provide the diverse set of policies necessary for dynamic or unknown user preferences. To address this limitation, we formalize the fair optimization problem in multi-policy MORL, where the goal is to learn a set of Pareto-optimal policies that ensure fairness across all possible user preferences. Our key technical contributions are threefold: (1) We show that for concave, piecewise-linear welfare functions (e.g., GGF), fair policies remain in the convex coverage set (CCS), which is an approximated Pareto front for linear scalarization. (2) We demonstrate that non-stationary policies, augmented with accrued reward histories, and stochastic policies improve fairness by dynamically adapting to historical inequities. (3) We propose three novel algorithms, which include integrating GGF with multi-policy multi-objective Q-Learning (MOQL), state-augmented multi-policy MOQL for learning non-statoinary policies, and its novel extension for learning stochastic policies. We evaluate our algorithms across various domains and compare our methods against the state-of-the-art MORL baselines. The empirical results show that our methods learn a set of fair policies that accommodate different user preferences.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities for product measures

作者:

arXiv:2606.13575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities for polynomials with respect to product probability measures. In the Gaussian case, for $p\ge4$, we prove that \[ \|\nabla f\|_{L^p(\gamma^n)} \le C(p)d^{\frac12+\theta_p} \|f\|_{L^p(\gamma^n)} \] for every polynomial $f$ of degree at most $d$, where $\theta_p\le \frac{2}{3p}$ and $\theta_p=0$ whenever $p$ is an even integer. Thus, for even integer exponents, we establish the sharp dependence on the degree conjectured by Eskenazis–Ivanisvili. For general $p\ge4$, the estimate improves upon their dimension-free inequality. We also obtain dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities with sharp dependence on the degree for even integer exponents beyond the Gaussian setting. We first prove such estimates for the uniform distribution on the unit cube and then extend them to products of absolutely continuous measures with unimodal densities. Finally, we treat products of one-dimensional Freud measures with densities proportional to $e^{-|t|^{2m}}$.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Multi-agent Framework for Time-Sensitive Complementary Collaboration in Minecraft

arXiv:2606.15684v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present TickingCollabBench, a Minecraft-based multi-agent benchmark for a novel class of time-sensitive complementary collaboration tasks. Our benchmark reflects four core characteristics of real-world collaboration: agent heterogeneity, mandatory collaboration, dynamic environments, and strict real-time constraints with failure risks. To enable this, we develop the TickingCollab framework, which supports the generation of diverse dynamic environments and abstracts Minecraft's primitive APIs to enable declarative YAML task specifications for composing these events. Building on this, we design a feasibility-aware automated benchmark generation pipeline, where an LLM drafts structurally diverse task configurations and feasibility verifier filters out invalid ones using approximate constraints. Evaluations demonstrate that lang latency and inherent difficulty of coordinating under partial observability and agent heterogeneity cause LLMs to frequently fail under dynamic environments and fall significantly short of a global-knowledge oracle.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Semi-Device-Independent Certification for Nonlocality without Entanglement

arXiv:2606.13667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we investigate maximum-confidence discrimination, which encompasses minimum-error and unambiguous discrimination, for ensembles of separable states by considering global and separable measurements. We demonstrate that global measurements outperform separable ones, thereby establishing nonlocality without entanglement (NLWE) in terms of confidence in a detection event, a fine-grained state-identification strategy that maximizes the probability of a correct guess given a measurement outcome. Conversely, verifying achievable confidence in measurement outcomes can certify global measurements, namely, semi-device-independent certification of NLWE. Our results make it feasible to experimentally demonstrate NLWE using present-day quantum measurement devices, even with non-unit detection efficiencies, since maximum-confidence measurements rely only on detected measurement outcomes.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GASE: Gaussian Splatting-Based Automated System for Reconstructing Embodied-Simulation Environments

Training embodied agents in the real world requires skilled operators and expensive hardware. Simulation environments offer a compelling alternative by enabling large-scale, cost-effective data augmentation. Consequently, rapidly constructing high-fidelity simulation scenes with a minimal sim-to-real gap has become a critical objective in robot learning. While reconstruction-based methods provide superior visual quality, current workflows are hindered by inefficient data acquisition and subpar foreground object extraction. We thus propose GASE, a highly automated system for simulation scene construction. GASE leverages multi-view video streams from panoramic camera arrays to enable rapid environment scanning. To ensure high-quality asset generation, our pipeline introduces a camera-pose-based strategy that robustly extracts objects across frames in the 2D domain, followed by high-fidelity scene inpainting. Foreground objects and the static background are then reconstructed independently and seamlessly imported into physics simulators for policy training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GASE outperforms existing 3D Gaussian-based methods in segmentation accuracy by over 10\% while achieving state-of-the-art inpainting quality. Furthermore, real-robot deployments across manipulation and navigation tasks maintains a performance gap of less than 10\% compared to policies trained purely on real-world data. These results confirm that GASE provides an efficient and highly effective solution for bridging the sim-to-real gap. Code will be released.

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

Diffusing to Coordinate: Efficient Online Multi-Agent Diffusion Policies

arXiv:2602.18291v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a prominent framework for efficient agent coordination. Crucially, enhancing policy expressiveness is pivotal for achieving superior performance. Diffusion-based generative models are well-positioned to meet this demand, having demonstrated remarkable expressiveness and multimodal representation in image generation and offline settings. Yet, their potential in online MARL remains largely under-explored. A major obstacle is that the intractable likelihoods of diffusion models impede entropy-based exploration and coordination. To tackle this challenge, we propose among the first \underline{O}nline off-policy \underline{MA}RL framework using \underline{D}iffusion policies (OMAD) to orchestrate coordination. Our key innovation is a relaxed policy objective that maximizes scaled joint entropy, facilitating effective exploration without relying on tractable likelihood. Complementing this, within the centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, we employ a joint distributional value function to optimize decentralized diffusion policies. It leverages tractable entropy-augmented targets to guide the simultaneous updates of diffusion policies, thereby ensuring stable coordination. Extensive evaluations on MPE and MAMuJoCo establish our method as the new state-of-the-art across $10$ diverse tasks, demonstrating a remarkable $2.5\times$ to $5\times$ improvement in sample efficiency.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

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

libhmm: A Modern C++20 Library for Hidden Markov Models with Correct MLE Emission M-Steps

作者:

arXiv:2605.29208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We describe libhmm, a C++20 library for Hidden Markov Model parameter estimation, sequence decoding, and model selection. libhmm addresses two gaps in existing software: the absence of a well-maintained, zero-dependency C++ HMM library suitable for embedding in production systems, and the widespread use of method-of-moments (MOM) approximations in the emission distribution M-step of the Baum-Welch algorithm. The library implements correct maximum likelihood estimators for sixteen scalar emission distributions, including an ECME algorithm for the location-scale Student-t distribution, Newton-Raphson maximization for Gamma, Beta, Weibull, and Negative Binomial distributions, and the von Mises distribution for circular data. All forward-backward and Viterbi calculations operate in full log-space. SIMD acceleration is provided for AVX-512, AVX2, SSE2, and ARM NEON via compile-time dispatch with scalar fallback. Version 4 adds multivariate observation support via the BasicHmm template, with three multivariate emission families (diagonal Gaussian, full-covariance Gaussian, and independent components) each with correct weighted MLE M-steps. Python bindings are available via the companion package pylibhmm. We compare libhmm against established C and C++ HMM libraries and against published R reference packages on seven real-data benchmarks, and discuss the architectural tradeoffs made in the design.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Optimal Decoding of Small Codes by Density Matrix Propagation

arXiv:2606.14455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate and efficient decoding is a crucial component for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realistic circuit-level noise introduces temporal correlations and degeneracy, making optimal (maximum-likelihood) decoding computationally intractable in general. As a result, practical decoders rely on heuristic approximations, and it is generally difficult to quantify how suboptimal they are, as this strongly depends on the code and noise model considered. In this work, we study the accuracy of practical decoding algorithms under circuit-level noise by comparing them against a maximum likelihood decoding benchmark. Our approach propagates the density matrix through the full memory experiment and computes the optimal decoding decision for each syndrome history. We introduce pruning techniques with rigorous bounds, allowing us to access larger numbers of syndrome-extraction rounds. We apply this framework to small instances of the repetition code and a cellular automaton code, and benchmark minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD), Tesseract, and Planar decoders against optimal decoding. While standard decoders remain close to optimal for the repetition code, we find significant deviations for the cellular automaton code, with BP+OSD deteriorating already in experimentally relevant noise regimes. Moreover, the pruning method developed here highlights that, at low physical error rates, only a narrow fraction of syndrome histories contributes significantly to the logical error rate.

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

ScholarQuest: A Taxonomy-Guided Benchmark for Agentic Academic Paper Search in Open Literature Environments

arXiv:2606.20235v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Academic paper search is a core step in scientific research, and LLM-based search agents are emerging as a promising paradigm for iterative, intent-driven literature exploration. However, existing benchmarks are insufficient for systematically evaluating agentic academic search under realistic open literature environments. We propose ScholarQuest, a large-scale, taxonomy-guided benchmark for agentic academic paper search. ScholarQuest is constructed from over 1,000 computer science topics and four representative research intents, including method-oriented, setting-anchored, comparison-based, and scope-controlled queries. It further provides scalable answer construction and a shared retrieval backend ScholarBase for reproducible evaluation. Benchmarking results show that agentic methods outperform single-shot retrieval baselines, yet the best-performing agent only achieves 0.314 Recall@100 and 0.355 Recall@All, indicating substantial room for improvement. In addition, analyses of search efficiency, intent-level robustness, and failure cases further highlight the benchmark's ability to provide multi-dimensional evaluation signals for academic paper search agents.

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

Shattering the Autoregressive Curse: Dynamic Epistemic Entropy Orchestrated Erasable Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

arXiv:2606.17735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although reinforcement learning (RL) has expanded the cognitive boundaries of large language models (LLMs), it often remains vulnerable to the autoregressive curse in long-horizon logical reasoning: small epistemic perturbations introduced early in generation can propagate irreversibly along the Markov decision process flow, triggering cascading failures that drive the reasoning trajectory toward collapse. To overcome this autoregressive cascade, in which a single early mistake can compromise all subsequent reasoning steps, we propose dynamic epistemic entropy orchestrated erasable reinforcement learning ($E^3RL$). $E^3RL$ eliminates reliance on external signals by grounding the model's endogenous local autoregressive cross-entropy as an intrinsic coordinate of epistemic uncertainty. By introducing segment-level adaptive dynamic thresholds and advantage allocation, $E^3RL$ enables the model to precisely excise localized logical defects while reusing historical key-value (KV) cache streams, thereby endowing the reasoning process with a self-healing capability. We train $E^3RL$ on the DeepMath-103k dataset. Experimental results show that $E^3RL$ reshapes the exploration efficiency of long-sequence reasoning and improves sample efficiency while maintaining linear memory overhead. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as AIME, $E^3RL$ achieves substantial performance gains, with the 4B and 8B parameter models surpassing previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) results by 5.349\% and 6.514\%, respectively. These findings suggest that $E^3RL$ shatters the autoregressive curse in long-sequence reasoning and establishes a theoretical and systems-level foundation for the next generation of self-healing artificial general intelligence (AGI).

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

Performance Analysis and Optimization of 3D Generative Diffusion Models across GPU Architectures

arXiv:2606.19365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have become essential for high-fidelity 3D MRI synthesis, yet their deployment remains constrained by substantial GPU resource demands arising from hundreds of U-Net evaluations per sample and a highly heterogeneous kernel behavior. This paper performs a comprehensive performance analysis of the state-of-the-art medical diffusion model, Med-DDPM, across three generations of NVIDIA architectures to study kernel-level runtime breakdowns, instruction-mix characteristics, memory system utilization, warp-level activities, and profiler priority-score estimates. We show that training is overwhelmingly dominated by cuDNN convolution and implicit-GEMM kernels, with inefficiencies arising from memory-access patterns, tensor-layout conversions, and limited Tensor Core utilization. Guided by these insights, we evaluate two architecture-aware optimizations TF32 Tensor Core activation and a 3D channels-last layout and demonstrate that they reduce SM cycles by up to 100x, cut dynamic instructions by 100x, raise Tensor Core utilization from 1.45 to 9.98x, and increase IPC by 7% on A100, all without degrading synthesis quality.

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

Calibrated Triage, Not Autonomy: Confidence Estimation for Medical Vision-Language Models

A vision-language model can answer a question about a medical image fluently and confidently while barely using the image, leaning instead on language priors. In medicine this is the failure that matters most, because the answer looks trustworthy and is not, and the only protection is a confidence score reliable enough to tell the system when to abstain. We ask a deployment question rather than an accuracy one: how much imaging work a model can safely handle alone, and which confidence signal makes that possible. We evaluate seven confidence estimators across five open-weight LVLMs and three medical visual-question-answering datasets spanning broad clinical imaging, radiology, and pathology, with every probe trained only on natural images and applied without adaptation. Recast as bounded selective prediction (automate a case only when confidence clears a threshold, defer the rest), the comparison is cautionary. The standard metrics are poor guides: discrimination barely separates the methods, and the weak calibration of a cheap self-report is cheaply removed by off-domain temperature scaling without changing deployable yield. What distinguishes a usable estimator is the high-confidence region a clinician acts on: the weakest baselines are confidently wrong on 41 to 45 percent of their errors against 1 to 4 percent for the best probe, and no estimator is reliably best across domains or models. Safe handoff is governed at two levels: base-model competence sets a ceiling, so a well-calibrated score recovers roughly a third of radiology cases at a 20 percent error tolerance but almost none of pathology; the confidence layer then decides how much of that ceiling is reachable. The usable role today is calibrated triage, not autonomy: automate the cases a calibrated score marks safe, route the rest to a clinician. We release all outputs, correctness judgments, and confidence scores, with code.

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

Sustainable Materials Discovery in the Era of Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21527v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) has transformed materials discovery, enabling rapid exploration of chemical space through generative models and surrogate screening. Yet current generative AI models for materials discovery, which now drive exploration of vast chemical and structural spaces, optimize candidates exclusively for structural stability and functional properties, with no integration of environmental assessment at any stage of the design loop. Prospective and ex-ante life cycle assessment methods exist and have been applied to emerging technologies, but they operate as standalone downstream analyses, not as active constraints within generative or active-learning pipelines. The result is that environmental feedback, even when produced, arrives after design decisions have been made rather than informing them. The disconnect between atomic-scale design and lifecycle assessment (LCA) reflects fundamental challenges: (i) data scarcity across heterogeneous sources, (ii) scale gaps from atoms to industrial systems, (iii) uncertainty in synthesis pathways, and (iv) the absence of frameworks that co-optimize performance with environmental impact. In this Perspective, we propose integrating upstream ML-assisted materials discovery with downstream LCA into the ML-LCA framework, comprising five components: information extraction for building materials-environment knowledge bases, harmonized databases linking properties to sustainability metrics, multi-scale models bridging atomic properties to lifecycle impacts, ensemble prediction of manufacturing pathways with uncertainty quantification, and uncertainty-aware optimization enabling simultaneous performance-sustainability navigation. Case studies spanning polymers, glass, photoresists, and cement demonstrate both necessity and feasibility while identifying material-specific integration challenges.

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

ENPIRE: Agentic Robot Policy Self-Improvement in the Real World

arXiv:2606.19980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving dexterous robotic manipulation in the real world heavily relies on human supervision and algorithm engineering, which becomes a central bottleneck in the pursuit of general physical intelligence. Although emerging coding agents can generate code to automate algorithm search, their successes remain largely confined in digital environments. We conjecture that the missing abstraction to automate robotics research is a repeatable feedback loop for real-world policy improvement: reset the scene, execute a policy, verify the outcome, and refine the next iteration. To bridge this gap, we introduce ENPIRE, a harness framework for coding agents that instantiates this physical feedback routine with four core modules: an Environment module (EN) for automatic reset and verification, a Policy Improvement module (PI) that launches policy refinement, a Rollout module (R) to evaluate policies with one or multiple physical robots operating in parallel, and an Evolution module (E) in which coding agents analyze logs, consult literature, improve training infrastructure and algorithm code to address failure modes. This closed-loop system transforms real-world manipulation learning into a controllable optimization procedure, minimizing human effort while allowing fair ablations across training recipe and agent variants. Powered by ENPIRE, frontier coding agents can autonomously train a policy to achieve a 99% success rate on challenging, dexterous manipulation tasks, such as organizing a pin box, fastening a zip tie, and tool use, a process that further accelerates when we dispatch an agent team on a robot fleet. Our results suggest a practical and scalable path toward deploying coding agents to autonomously advancing robotics in the physical world.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Unraveling the Mechanism of Drug Binding to SARS-CoV-2 RNA Pseudoknot with Thermodynamics-Driven Machine Learning

arXiv:2604.14906v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The pseudoknot secondary structure in SARS-CoV-2 RNA is essential for regulating protein synthesis through $-$1 programmed ribosomal frameshifting ($-1$ PRF), a mechanism that allows the virus to generate both structural and non-structural proteins from overlapping reading frames. This pseudoknot exhibits both threaded and unthreaded long-lived topologies. The influence of ligand binding on its folding is a process critical for the development of $-$1 PRF small-molecule inhibitors. Understanding this process through unbiased molecular dynamics (MD) simulations can be facilitated by introducing collective variables (CVs) that capture the corresponding slowest dynamical modes. Here, we use spectral map (SM), a thermodynamics-driven machine learning technique, to learn such CVs directly from all-atom MD trajectories of the SARS-CoV-2 RNA pseudoknot in complex with the $-$1 PRF inhibitor merafloxacin and its two structural analogs in neutral and ionized forms. Free-energy landscapes (FELs) derived from the learned CVs indicate that ligand-induced destabilization is topology-selective. In the threaded pseudoknot, the inhibitors destabilize the S2 stem, while in the unthreaded pseudoknot, destabilization occurs in the S1 and S3 stems. Furthermore, the extent to which each ligand reshapes the FEL matches experimentally reported antiviral potency, whereas the protonation state qualitatively alters dynamics within the same RNA topology. Overall, our results show how pseudoknot topology, ligand type, and protonation state collectively influence the slow conformational dynamics of viral RNA and establish physiological protonation as a critical factor for modeling RNA-targeted drug action.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Computer Vision Scoring of Figure Copy and Recall

Objective. Figure copy and recall tests are sensitive measures of visuoconstruction and visual episodic memory, but their clinical is constrained by labor-intensive manual scoring. We developed and validated an automated, element-level scoring pipeline using Vertex AI object detection for the tablet-based figure copy and recall tasks in the California Cognitive Assessment Battery (CCAB). The automated scoring pipeline duplicated the scoring procedures used by expert manual raters. Methods. A normative sample of 2,011 community-dwelling adults aged 18-90 completed figure copy and delayed recall trials at baseline, with subsamples retested at 1 day and at 6, 18, and 30 months. Participants completed the drawings with their index finger on a tablet computer with finger position digitized to analyze the speed and timing of individual drawing strokes A convolutional object-detection model trained on the Vertex AI AutoML Vision platform identified each of twelve canonical figure elements in rendered drawings. Separate element presence and location scores were computed after homographically warping drawings onto a canonical template to produce trial-level Element, Location, and Total scores. To compare Vertex and human scores, Vertex AI and expert human raters independently scored 1500 randomly selected drawings to evaluate inter-rater agreement, including a common subset of 100 drawings scored by Vertex AI and all raters. Results. Total scores were virtually indistinguishable (r = 0.966) from human-human agreement (mean r = 0.971) as were Element presence scores (mean r = 0.959 vs. r = 0.963). Location-score agreement (r = 0.951) was slightly below the human-human mean (r = 0.972) due to pixel-level analysis by Vertex AI that was impossible for human raters. The Vertex pipeline showed no preferential advantage for the single expert rater who categorized Elements during training. Automated scores showed strong demographic gradients, age effects on Recall (r = -0.32) were approximately twice those in Copy conditions (r = -0.16). A Memory Cost score (Recall - Copy) showed a monotonic age-related decline from +0.40 z in the youngest subjects to -0.54 z in the oldest. Kinetic analysis revealed that drawing speed and efficiency showed significant age-related changes. Overnight test-retest reliability was high (Recall r = 0.72) and the Recall trial showed a large overnight learning effect ({Delta} = +1.18) that continued with repeated tests up to 30 months ({Delta} = +0.75).

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

Training-Free Open-Vocabulary Visual Grounding for Remote Sensing Images and Videos

Remote sensing visual grounding (RSVG) aims to localize a referred target in a remote sensing image or video according to a natural language expression. Existing RSVG methods usually rely on task-specific manual annotations, which are costly to collect and inevitably limited in covering the diversity of real-world geospatial scenarios. As a result, they often struggle to generalize to open-vocabulary queries involving novel objects, fine-grained attributes, complex spatial relationships, and functional semantics. In this paper, we propose RSVG-ZeroOV, a training-free framework that leverages frozen generic foundation models for zero-shot open-vocabulary RSVG. RSVG-ZeroOV follows an Overview-Focus-Evolve paradigm, which exploits the distinct yet complementary attention patterns of vision-language models (VLMs) and diffusion models (DMs) to progressively generate precise grounding results. Specifically, (i) Overview utilizes a VLM to extract cross-attention maps that capture semantic correlations between the referring expression and visual regions; (ii) Focus leverages the fine-grained modeling priors of a DM to compensate for object structure and shape information often overlooked by VLM attention; and (iii) Evolve introduces a simple yet effective attention evolution module to suppress irrelevant activations, yielding purified object masks. To handle video inputs, we further present Video RSVG-ZeroOV, which extends image-level grounding to spatio-temporal grounding through a query-relevant key-frame selector and a temporal propagator, enabling efficient and temporally coherent video grounding without video annotations or fine-tuning. Extensive experiments on six image and video grounding benchmarks show that RSVG-ZeroOV consistently outperforms existing zero-shot baselines and achieves competitive or superior performance compared with weakly- and fully-supervised methods.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning Sparse Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Multimodal Neuroimaging

Brain MRIs are routinely acquired as multiple complementary sequences with unique contrast weighting, including T1-weighed imaging (T1w) anatomic and fluid-sensitive T2-weighted (T2w) contrasts. However, methods for learning unified representations across the multitude of MRI contrast mechanisms at health-system scale are lacking. In this study, we introduce Neuro-JEPA, a sparse multimodal neuroimaging foundation model that combines a latent predictive objective with a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to encode brain MRI across core T1w, T2w, and fluid-suppressed FLAIR imaging (FLAIR). We further provide a systematic methodological study of architectural, masking, objective, and sparsity design choices beneficial for robust neuroimaging multimodal representation learning. Neuro-JEPA was pretrained on 1,551,862 scans from 428,647 studies after modality-specific preprocessing with data curation across three core structural brain MRI sequences. We evaluated the learned representations across clinical and research settings, including 25 tasks from three health systems: NYU Langone, NYU Long Island, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and 22 tasks from 12 public datasets, covering unimodal, multimodal and cross-domain evaluation configurations. Across these benchmarks, existing neuroimaging foundation models showed inconsistent gains over a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline, whereas Neuro-JEPA achieved stronger and more consistent performance across all evaluated settings. These results establish a scalable methodological framework for multimodal neuroimaging representation learning and highlight the need for foundation model evaluation protocols that include simple baselines, clinically heterogeneous cohorts and controlled multimodal comparisons.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

ScriptManager: a platform for scalable and reproducible high-resolution analysis of genomics datasets

Background: The growing diversity of genomic and epigenomic assays has driven a parallel expansion in data formats, analysis workflows, and figure-generation tools. However, tools for analyzing data and assembling publication-quality figures are often specialized to a specific assay, dramatically limiting their interoperability and reproducibility. Results: We present the v1.0 release of ScriptManager, a Java-based framework for modular and reproducible analysis and visualization workflows of genomics and epigenomics data. Unlike existing tools specialized for individual assay types, ScriptManager provides a unified and extensible framework for cross-assay visualization and workflow reproducibility. The v1.0 release adds novel analytical modules, GUI session logging, automated unit and integration testing, tutorials, and expanded documentation. It also integrates with the broader reproducibility ecosystem through Singularity containers, Anaconda packaging, and Galaxy XML wrappers. We demonstrate ScriptManager's TagPileup scaling from local single-core execution to a 10,305-job analysis distributed across the Open Science Grid (OSG), with the full workload completing in