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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ACC: Compiling Agent Trajectories for Long-Context Training

Recent development of agents has renewed demand for long-context reasoning capacity of LLMs. However, training LLMs for this capacity requires costly long-document curation or heuristic context synthesis. We observe that agents produce massive trajectories when solving problems, invoking tools and receiving environment observations across many turns. The evidence needed to answer the original question is thus scattered throughout these turns, requiring integration of distant context segments. Nevertheless, standard agent SFT masks tool responses and only trains turn-level tool selection, creating a supervision blind spot where these scattered signals go unused. We propose Agent Context Compilation (ACC), which converts trajectories from search, software engineering, and database querying agents into long-context QA pairs that combine the original question with tool responses and environment observations gathered across multiple turns, training the model to answer directly without tool use. This makes the dependencies between the question and the evidence explicit, enabling direct supervision of long-context reasoning over distant segments without additional annotation. ACC is a simple but effective approach that can be combined with any existing long-context extension or training method, providing scalable supervised fine-tuning data. We validate ACC on long-range dependency modeling tasks through MRCR and GraphWalks, challenging benchmarks requiring cross-turn coreference resolution and graph traversal over extended contexts. Training Qwen3-30B-A3B with ACC achieves 68.3 on MRCR (+18.1) and 77.5 on GraphWalks (+7.6), results comparable to Qwen3-235B-A22B, while preserving general capabilities on GPQA, MMLU-Pro, AIME, and IFEval. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the ACC-trained model exhibits task-adaptive attention restructuring and expert specialization.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SING: Synthetic Intention Graph for Scalable Active Tool Discovery in LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on agent harnesses that manage context, tools, and multi-turn execution, making tools a central interface for acting in realistic digital environments. As harness-connected tool ecosystems expand to hundreds or thousands of APIs, services, and task-specific skills, exhaustive tool schema injection becomes costly and imposes a closed-world assumption that limits agents to a predefined static inventory. Retrieval-augmented tool selection offers a natural alternative, but existing one-shot retrieval methods often fail to align isolated tool descriptions with the agent's true task intention, especially in long-horizon tasks where required capabilities emerge through decomposition, observations, and newly induced subgoals. We propose SING, an intention-aware active tool discovery framework that builds an intention-tool graph linking user intentions, tool capabilities, and tool collaboration patterns, and dynamically retrieves tools according to evolving task states. Using a unified corpus of 7,471 tools, we evaluate SING on three real-world tool-use benchmarks. SING improves Global Recall@5 by up to 59.8% and downstream success rate by up to 28.9% over baselines, while reducing full-corpus tool-schema exposure by 99.8%, demonstrating that intention-aware graph structure enables more accurate and context-efficient tool discovery in large-scale agentic ecosystems.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SciR: A Controllable Benchmark for Scientific Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.13020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three paradigmatic forms of inference recur across scientific reasoning: deduction, induction, and causal abduction. Reliably evaluating LLMs on these in scientific settings is currently out of reach: scientific benchmarks built on human annotations are costly and lack mechanistic ground truth, while synthetic logical-reasoning benchmarks do not resemble real scientific documents. We introduce SciR, a benchmark that combines multi-paradigm reasoning with controllable scientific rendering, anchored on three paradigmatic scientific problems. Tasks are generated from formal objects (deduction tree, inductive rule hypothesis, causal graph) to guarantee verifiable answers, then rendered into multi-document scientific discourse via per-track domain-tuned genres. The construction lets us independently vary two difficulty axes: how hard it is to extract the key information needed for inference, and how hard the principled inference itself is. We test six models. Both axes hurt every model, and their effects compound. The rendering even hurts neurosymbolic pipelines, which hand inference to a verified solver. The two axes yield a per-model extraction-vs-inference profile: for instance, reasoning models like deepseek-r1 mostly surpass non-reasoning instruct models on the inference axis. To our knowledge, SciR is the first multi-paradigm scientific-reasoning benchmark with parametric control on both extraction and inference difficulty.

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

Enhancing Multilingual Reasoning via Steerable Model Merging

Model merging is an effective technique for composing the capabilities of a multilingual model and a reasoning model. It has achieved promising generalization in multilingual reasoning tasks by aligning feature spaces of different models. However, the merged single model often fails to address the conflicts between source models, leading to suboptimal performance. In other words, the one-size-fits-all merging strategy may not align with the characteristics of different inputs which may require prioritizing certain models over others. To this end, we propose a Steerable Model Merging (ST-Merge) framework to modulate the contribution of each source model. To realize this idea, we introduce a gated cross-attention mechanism to weight or filter the two attended source models in an adaptive manner. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ST-Merge consistently outperforms multiple strong baselines on four multilingual reasoning benchmarks across 21 different languages.

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

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Diffusion approximations for interacting stochastic systems with reflection and control

arXiv:2601.05895v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study diffusion approximations for a class of interacting stochastic systems with reflection and control. Motivated by interacting stochastic dynamics subject to feedback mechanisms and boundary constraints, we consider diffusion-scaled stochastic processes incorporating stochastic fluctuations, state-dependent interactions, and reflection. Under suitable assumptions, we establish convergence in distribution of the scaled processes to systems of interacting reflected stochastic differential equations of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type. The limiting dynamics capture key features of constrained multi-agent systems, including mean-reverting behavior, interaction effects, and confinement within bounded domains through Skorokhod reflection. The analysis combines diffusion-scaling arguments, stability estimates, and continuity properties of the Skorokhod map to connect discrete stochastic systems with their reflected diffusion limits. To illustrate the framework, we present numerical examples motivated by crowd dynamics and neural population dynamics. The simulations demonstrate qualitative agreement between the finite stochastic systems and the corresponding reflected diffusion models and illustrate how diffusion approximations can provide tractable descriptions of interacting stochastic systems with constraints.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Multi-platform reassessment of human mitochondrial DNA methylation reveals signals consistent with technical artifacts

The existence and functional relevance of mitochondrial DNA methylation remain controversial. Here, we systematically profiled cytosine methylation and hydroxymethylation across human brain and blood tissues spanning healthy and malignant states using orthogonal sequencing approaches that avoid chemical conversion during library preparation. While nuclear DNA exhibited canonical methylation patterns, mitochondrial DNA consistently showed negligible signal, indistinguishable from background technical noise. By mapping cytosine-guanine sites between mitochondrial DNA and nuclear-embedded mitochondrial sequences, we demonstrate the potential of these nuclear counterparts to confound not only cytosine methylation but also hydroxymethylation measurements, corroborating and extending prior findings implicating nuclear contamination as a potential source of apparent mitochondrial epigenetic signals. Additional technical factors that inflate apparent mtDNA methylation signals were identified, including sequence context biases, flow cell chemistries, and coverage-dependent discrepancies between the heavy and light strands. Collectively, these results provide convergent evidence against the presence of biologically meaningful cytosine methylation or hydroxymethylation in mitochondrial DNA. These findings caution against interpreting apparent mtDNA methylation signals in human adult tissues as meaningful without rigorous orthogonal validation and comprehensive consideration of technical and analytical confounding factors.

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

HawkesNest: A Multi-Axis Synthetic Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Pattern Complexity

arXiv:2606.16863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation of spatiotemporal point process (STPP) models relies heavily on opaque real-world datasets, where latent generative structure is unknown and model failures are difficult to attribute. We introduce HawkesNest, a generator-aligned benchmark for controlled spatiotemporal pattern complexity built on a multivariate Hawkes backbone. HawkesNest defines four complexity axes: space–time entanglement, background heterogeneity, cross-type interaction, and domain topology. Each axis is associated with a deterministic index computed from the latent data-generating mechanism. By varying these axes while holding global rate, stability, and simulation budget fixed, HawkesNest enables diagnostic stress tests of STPP models under known structural difficulty. We verify that the indices are monotone and nearly orthogonal under controlled sweeps. We illustrate its use by showing that Hawkes-family baselines degrade under joint heterogeneity–entanglement complexity, even though they are structurally aligned with the Hawkes data-generating backbone. We further show that HawkesNest exposes neural-model sensitivity: AutoSTPP remains vulnerable under isolated increases in space–time entanglement. Code. Available at https://github.com/YahyaAalaila/HawkesNest

11.
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.

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

Calibrating Generative Models to Feature Distributions with MMD Finetuning

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.

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

On-Policy Distillation with Curriculum Turn-level Guidance for Multi-turn Agents

arXiv:2606.15912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn agents that plan, invoke tools, and interact with environments offer a promising paradigm for solving complex tasks, yet their capabilities typically rely on very large models whose inference cost is prohibitive in practice.On-Policy Distillation (OPD) is a natural recipe for transferring such capabilities to smaller students, but we find that it suffers a characteristic failure mode in this setting: small student errors compound across turns and push the trajectory out of the teacher's familiar state distribution, so the teacher's supervision becomes least reliable precisely where the student needs it most.We propose Guided On-Policy Distillation (Guided-OPD), a simple yet effective algorithm that mixes teacher- and student-generated turns within each rollout and schedules the teacher's intervention probability along a curriculum that decays to zero.Strong guidance keeps early trajectories close to the teacher distribution and is then gradually withdrawn to recover the purely on-policy regime used at inference.On ALFWorld, ScienceWorld, and WebShop, distilling Qwen3 students from a Qwen3-30B-A3B teacher, Guided-OPD improves Score by 21.1\% and Success Rate by 25.5\% over vanilla OPD on average, with larger gains on smaller students.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

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

Truncated Wigner dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses

作者:

arXiv:2606.20187v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum spin glasses are often considered testbeds for studying quantum optimization algorithms and as such have been the subject of various quantum advantage claims. Here we investigate the near adiabatic dynamics of biclique quantum spin glasses within the (discrete) truncated Wigner approximation (TWA). Benchmarks on small systems show that TWA recovers sample-to-sample fluctuations of the Edwards-Anderson order parameter, over a wide range of annealing times, with increasing fidelity when the system size increases. We extract critical exponents from the Binder cumulant in line with theoretical expectations, reproducing recent quantum experiments. The computational cost of the method is minimal and it can easily be applied to tens of thousands of qubits.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Menopausal symptoms in peri- and postmenopausal women: systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence, incidence, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes

Introduction: The global epidemiology of menopausal symptoms among middle-aged and elderly women remains unclear. Methods: Data on prevalence, comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms published up until March 1st 2019 were searched in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases. We used a random-effects model to compute point estimates of prevalence for 24 types of menopausal symptoms. We narratively summarized the patterns of the comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms due to limited data. Results: A total of 239 studies (n{approx}2.5 million middle-aged and elderly women) from 56 countries and regions were included in the analysis. The global pooled prevalence analysis revealed that hot flashes (48%) and night sweats (30%) were highly prevalent, alongside psychological symptoms like insomnia (47%), irritability (46%), anxiety (39%), and depression (30%). Physical symptoms including joint aches/pain (50%), backache (47%), and tiredness (61%) were also commonly reported. Heat intolerance showed the highest prevalence (76%), while symptoms like urinary incontinence (24%) and poor appetite (8%) were less frequent. These findings highlight the diverse and widespread impact of menopause on women globally, with significant variations across symptom types. Africa showed the highest pooled prevalence across a series of symptoms, compared with other continents. We observed high prevalence in developing countries, especially for psychological and physical symptoms; significant intra-Asian variation in vasomotor symptoms; hypertension and obesity as the most common comorbidities; joint pain, urinary incontinence, and vasomotor symptoms as the most incident complaints; and positive associations with cardiovascular disease in the psychological (depression and insomnia) and physical (joint pain) domains. Conclusion: This study highlights the global burden of menopausal symptoms, with significant differences across continents. The findings call for more inclusive research on underrepresented groups (particularly in Africa) and further investigation into drivers of this marked global heterogeneity in prevalence of menopausal symptoms and their comorbidities, incidence and outcomes.

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

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

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

SoftMatcha 2: A Fast and Soft Pattern Matcher for Trillion-Scale Corpora

We present SoftMatcha 2, an ultra-fast and flexible search algorithm that enables search over trillion-scale natural language corpora in under 0.3 seconds while allowing semantic variations in the form of substitution, insertion, and deletion. Our approach employs string matching based on suffix arrays that scales well with corpus size, and represents words as vectors, which underpin its semantic flexibility. To mitigate the combinatorial explosion induced by the semantic relaxation of queries, our method is built on two key algorithmic ideas: dynamic corpus-aware pruning and fast exact lookup enabled by a disk-aware design. We theoretically analyze the efficiency of the proposed method, indicating that it can mitigate exponential growth in the search space. Empirically, on FineWeb-Edu (Lozhkov et al., 2024) (1.4T tokens), it attains substantially lower search latency than existing methods: infini-gram (Liu et al., 2024), infini-gram mini (Xu et al., 2025), and SoftMatcha (Deguchi et al., 2025). As a practical application, our method uncovers benchmark contamination in training corpora that existing approaches miss, and it also benefits information retrieval and paraphrase detection. We also provide an online demo of fast, soft search across corpora in seven languages.

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

A Finite-Volume Scheme for the Continuum Extrapolation of Lattice Step-Scaling in (2+1)D Hamiltonian U(1) Gauge Theory

arXiv:2606.20029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a finite-volume scheme to perform controlled continuum extrapolations of the lattice step-scaling function, a key ingredient for determining the running coupling in a Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory in small volumes. As a testbed, we employ a dual Hamiltonian formulation of pure U(1) gauge theory in (2+1) dimensions and an operator basis that remains efficient toward weak coupling. We describe the implementation of static external charges on the spatial lattice and study, using matrix product states, the resulting confining string, from which we extract the static potential and a force-based renormalized coupling. Using the proposed finite-volume scheme, we demonstrate a stable continuum limit of the step-scaling function on the lattice sizes accessible to present Hamiltonian simulations. The method is readily extendable to other gauge groups and dimensions, providing a pathway toward Hamiltonian step-scaling studies in other theories.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Anomalous magneto-optical response at $\mathrm{RuO_2 / WSe_2}$ van der Waals interface

arXiv:2606.20262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ruthenium dioxide ($\mathrm{RuO_2}$) has been proposed as an altermagnetic candidate, although its magnetic ground state remains controversial. Here, we probe weak interfacial magnetic states at the surface of (001)-oriented $\mathrm{RuO_2}$ films using the magnetic proximity effect (MPE) in a van der Waals heterostructure consisting of monolayer tungsten diselenide ($\mathrm{WSe_2}$) atop $\mathrm{RuO_2}$. Temperature-dependent magneto-optical spectroscopy reveals an anomalous excitonic energy shift and a deviation from conventional Varshni behavior below 55 K that are absent in an encapsulated $\mathrm{WSe_2}$ control sample. The anomalous shift reverses sign upon field cooling with opposite magnetic field polarity, indicating a magnetic origin. Polarization-resolved measurements further show a nearly field-independent and fluctuating valley splitting in $\mathrm{WSe_2 / RuO_2}$ in strong contrast to the conventional linear Zeeman splitting observed in the control bare $\mathrm{WSe_2}$ sample. These results suggest that the valley states are governed predominantly by interfacial exchange fields associated with weak surface magnetic states in $\mathrm{RuO_2}$, which do not produce a conventional linear Zeeman response within the applied magnetic field range. Importantly, this approach enables direct optical probing of emergent surface magnetism without introducing an additional ferromagnetic layer, positioning MPE-based optical probing as a tool for investigating weak surface magnetism and offering new possibilities for studying magnetic materials with controversial magnetic states.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Numerical simulations of the spread from the mean of the SLE and Multiple SLE dynamics

arXiv:2606.11254v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Schramm-Loewner Evolution (SLE) describes a family of fractal curves that arise in the study of the scaling limits of many planar Statistical Physics models. These curves are modeled using the Loewner Differential Equation for the conformal maps $g_t(z)$ with a Brownian motion driver. Using Euler's Method, in the current work we performed numerical experiments to study at a fixed time the quantities $|g_t(z) - \overline{g_t(z)}|$ and $Re(g_t(z)) - Re(\overline{g_t(z)})$, where $Re$ denotes the real part and $\overline{g_t(z)}$ refers to the sample average. These random variables measure the 'spread' of the dynamics from the average behavior at fixed time. One of the scopes of this work is to give numerical predictions for future theoretical investigations on these quantities. When investigating these quantities in the SLE case our experiments predict that the distribution is bimodal when the dynamics started close to the origin, and it can become bell-shaped if the dynamics is started further from the origin. In the second part, we performed experiments for a Multiple SLE model whose driver is Dyson Brownian Motion. Due to singularity in the dynamics of the drivers and the many data points needed, this part is challenging from a computational perspective. In the multiple SLE case, our experiments predict that the distribution is bell-shaped in all cases. In addition, we check the changes in the distributions as we vary the parameter $\kappa$ in the SLE case and $\beta$ in the Multiple SLE case.

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

DREAM: Extending Vision-Language Models with Dual-Objective Encoding for Cross-Modal Retrieval

In today's media-driven world, the exponential growth of video content across domains such as surveillance, education, and entertainment has made retrieving semantically relevant videos via natural language queries increasingly critical. Early video retrieval systems relied on handcrafted features or shallow cross-modal mappings, limiting their ability to capture complex semantics and temporal dynamics. While large-scale vision-language models have improved cross-modal alignment, challenges remain in modeling fine-grained temporal dependencies and nuanced linguistic structures. In this paper, we introduce DREAM: Dual-path Representation Enhancement and Alignment Model, a novel multimodal framework that addresses these limitations through enhanced visual and textual encoding. DREAM incorporates a hybrid language modeling strategy that combines masked and permuted language modeling objectives to capture both local and global linguistic semantics. On the visual side, we design a hierarchical vision encoder with cascaded group attention, which integrates spatial and temporal information through multi-stage token interaction and coarse-to-fine attention refinement. We validate DREAM through comprehensive evaluations on the widely-used MSRVTT, MSVD and LSMDC benchmark datasets, where it achieves new state-of-the-art R1 scores of 49.4%, 49.7% and 27.3%, respectively. Qualitative analyses further show the model's ability to maintain coherent attention across frames and align complex queries with dynamic video content. These findings underscore the effectiveness of hierarchical attention and dual-objective textual modeling in enabling robust, context-aware video retrieval, and pave the way for future research in advancing cross-modal representation learning.

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

Mask-Morph Graph U-Net: A Generalisable Mesh-Based Surrogate for Crashworthiness Field Prediction under Large Geometric Variation

arXiv:2605.15231v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlinear finite element crash simulations are accurate but computationally expensive, limiting their use in iterative design optimisation. Machine-learning surrogate models based on graph neural networks (GNNs) offer a faster alternative. Message-passing GNNs are widely used for mesh simulation, and their shared node and edge update functions are relatively generalisable across varying graph structures. By contrast, non-shareable edge-specific aggregation layers can capture nonlinear relationships more accurately but usually require fixed graph connectivity, which limits generalisability. This paper presents Mask-Morph Graph U-Net (MMGUNet), a practical approach to addressing the limitation of hierarchical Graph U-Net architectures that use edge-specific downsampling and upsampling layers. Fixed coarse graph connectivity is required for edge-specific layers. To retain this while improving spatial correspondence, the proposed method morphs the coarsened graph hierarchy to each input mesh using feature-aligned barycentric parameterisation before constructing cross-graph edges. It further applies node masking during supervised pretraining, followed by parameter-efficient fine-tuning in which high-parameter edge-specific layers are frozen. The proposed approach is evaluated in in-distribution, out-of-distribution, and cross-component transfer settings using mean Euclidean distance and maximum intrusion percentage error. Results show that coarse-graph morphing improves test accuracy relative to a fixed-coarse-graph baseline, while masked supervised pretraining reduces the train-test discrepancy and improves data efficiency during transfer. The proposed model also achieves lower prediction error compared with external baselines. These results demonstrate a practical route toward reusable, data-efficient mesh-based surrogate modelling for crashworthiness design exploration.

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

Mosaic: Data-Free Knowledge Distillation via Mixture-of-Experts for Heterogeneous Distributed Environments

arXiv:2505.19699v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine learning paradigm that enables clients to collaboratively train models while preserving data privacy. However, the coexistence of model and data heterogeneity gives rise to inconsistent representations and divergent optimization dynamics across clients, ultimately hindering robust global performance. To transcend these challenges, we propose Mosaic, a novel data-free knowledge distillation framework tailored for heterogeneous distributed environments. Mosaic first trains local generative models to approximate each client's personalized distribution, enabling synthetic data generation that safeguards privacy through strict separation from real data. Subsequently, Mosaic forms a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) from client models based on their specialized knowledge, and distills it into a global model using the generated data. To further enhance the MoE architecture, Mosaic integrates expert predictions via a lightweight meta model trained on a few representative prototypes. Extensive experiments on standard image and multimodal benchmarks demonstrate that Mosaic consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches under both model and data heterogeneity. The source code has been published at https://github.com/Wings-Of-Disaster/Mosaic.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Daily briefing: Ancient ground squirrels ate like ‘zombies of the Pleistocene’

作者:

Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise. Evidence from fossilized poo reveals the diverse diet of ancient ground squirrels. Plus, the science behind the peptide craze and our innate tendency to wander anticlockwise.