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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Hybrid Acousto-Optical Double Dressing of a Two-Level System

arXiv:2509.25847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We experimentally investigate resonance fluorescence from a two-level system in a novel configuration where a strong laser drives an optical Rabi oscillation while an acoustic field parametrically modulates the frequency of the two-level system. We observe emission spectra that deviate markedly from the standard Mollow triplet, including dynamical cancellation of the central peak. A doubly dressed state model incorporating hybridization among the emitter, optical field, and acoustic field captures these features. Guided by this model, we experimentally validate the condition for optimal cooling of acoustic phonons in an emitter-optomechanical system. These results reveal new regimes of strongly driven quantum nonlinear interactions.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Descriptor: Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD)

arXiv:2606.18135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we introduce the Certus Caliber Classification Gunshot Dataset (C3GD), a publicly accessible data set developed for the analysis of firearm muzzle blast sounds. The dataset aims to provide a wide variety of firearms, calibers, cartridges, microphones, and microphone locations with metadata detailed beyond what is currently otherwise available. It comprises more than 8000 field-collected data points from 28 firearms across 16 calibers. Because data collection in the field is costly, much of the existing research has been done using gunshot audio collected from the internet, which increases the risk of low-quality data and label noise. This dataset is primarily focused on caliber classification, but can also be used for gunshot detection, audio separation, and audio signal processing, providing a diversified and real-world reference. The dataset aims to provide enough diversity to be able to generalize to more real-world applications while also providing enough metadata for detailed academic analysis.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Exploring the relationship between human-centric AI and firm idiosyncratic risks

arXiv:2606.24224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the extensive discussions of human-centric AI (HCAI) in Industry 5.0, its effects on firms' idiosyncratic risks (IR) remains underexplored. This is an imperative issue for firms navigate financial risks during the current technological revolution, as IR reflects investor reactions to corporate heterogeneous AI strategies and implementations by isolating firm-level stock volatility from systematic factors. Integrating situated AI theory with social-technical systems theory, we conceptualise HCAI as a situated AI strategy that reduces AI-related ethical risks and fosters AI-Human synergies in firms' business operations, ultimately reducing IR by aligning with stakeholders' diverse expectations. Moreover, socio-technical factors, namely digitalisation, operational efficiency, executive shareholding, and CEOs with IT background, may moderate the HCAI-IR relationship. Using a multi-source panel dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2023, we find that HCAI is associated with lower firm IR. Furthermore, digitalisation and executive shareholding strengthen this risk-reducing effect, whereas operational efficiency and CEOs with IT background surprisingly attenuate it. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and practical insights for both ethical AI governance and firm financial risk management in the AI era.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

On-site interactions in quantum thermal machines: efficiency, rectification and entanglement beyond local and global master equations

arXiv:2606.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in experimental techniques have opened new routes for harnessing non-equilibrium dynamics in mesoscopic quantum systems. In this context, we study the impact of on-site interactions on the transport properties of a continuous quantum thermal machine composed of two coupled oscillators connected to two thermal reservoirs. In the weak system-reservoir coupling regime, where a long-standing debate concerns which reduced description should be preferred, we first show that the Redfield master equation (RME) provides an accurate and unifying framework that interpolates between two well-known limits: the local and global master equations. By relying on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), a numerically exact stochastic method, we then explore the full parameter space and show that interactions can be leveraged to tune the efficiency of the thermal machine at high temperatures (while leaving it essentially unchanged at low temperatures), induce non-reciprocal transport under asymmetric reservoir couplings, and generate steady-state entanglement within the junction. We derive expressions for system-bath correlators, such as heat and particle currents, consistently across different frameworks. Our work features on-site interactions to enhance the versatility of quantum thermodynamic junctions and clarifies the role of non-Markovianity and non-linearities in quantum transport.

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

Momentum LMS Theory beyond Stationarity: Stability, Tracking, and Regret

arXiv:2602.11995v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In large-scale data processing scenarios, data often arrive in sequential streams generated by complex systems that exhibit drifting distributions and time-varying system parameters. This nonstationarity challenges theoretical analysis, as it violates classical assumptions of i.i.d. (independent and identically distributed) samples, necessitating algorithms capable of real-time updates without expensive retraining. An effective approach should process each sample in a single pass, while maintaining computational and memory complexities independent of the data stream length. Motivated by these challenges, this paper investigates the Momentum Least Mean Squares (MLMS) algorithm as an adaptive identification tool, leveraging its computational simplicity and online processing capabilities. Theoretically, we derive tracking performance and regret bounds for the MLMS in time-varying stochastic linear systems under various practical conditions. Unlike classical LMS, whose stability can be characterized by first-order random vector difference equations, MLMS introduces an additional dynamical state due to momentum, leading to second-order time-varying random vector difference equations whose stability analysis hinges on more complicated products of random matrices, which poses a substantially challenging problem to resolve. Experiments on synthetic and real-world data streams demonstrate that MLMS achieves rapid adaptation and robust tracking, in agreement with our theoretical results especially in nonstationary settings, highlighting its promise for modern streaming and online learning applications.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Scientists have a bad case of AI FOMO, <i>Nature</i> poll reveals

作者:

Almost half of the scientists who responded said that they feel broadly negative towards artificial intelligence, but they think that some tools are better than others. Almost half of the scientists who responded said that they feel broadly negative towards artificial intelligence, but they think that some tools are better than others.

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

Every Eval Ever: A Unifying Schema and Community Repository for AI Evaluation Results

AI evaluations are widely used for testing and understanding progress. However, the diverse evaluators bring with them inconsistencies that challenge analysis and comparison. First, results are saved in incompatible formats, scattered across leaderboards, papers, blog posts, evaluation harness logs, and custom repositories. Second, results are created by different evaluation frameworks, which produce divergent scores for nominally identical evaluations and record metadata inconsistently, hindering comparison, cross-community evaluation science, cost reduction, and reuse. We introduce Every Eval Ever, the first shared schema and community-crowdsourced repository for AI evaluation results. The schema standardizes how evaluations are represented in a unified, single JSON document. It is source-agnostic by design, ingesting results from evaluation harnesses and papers alike, and optionally stores per-instance outputs for fine-grained analysis. We contribute: (i) a community-governed metadata schema with a companion instance-level schema, the first standardization effort of its kind; (ii) automatic converters from popular formats, evaluation harnesses, and leaderboards to the unified schema; and (iii) a crowdsourced community database hosted on Hugging Face, currently spanning to date 22,235 models, 2,273 unique benchmarks, and 31 evaluation formats.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Pigeonholing: Bad prompts hurt models to collapse and make mistakes

While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing." **Unintentionally bad** contexts can happen without malicious jailbreaking intents: For example, a user asks the model to justify an incorrect math theorem or fails to correct the model's buggy code. Specifically, we investigate ``pigeonholing" in two scenarios: (1) when the user suggests a solution, and (2) when the conversation context includes the assistant's previous (incorrect) responses. Our experiments across 10 verifiable and open-ended tasks with 10 different models show that pigeonholing manifests in several ways: (1) repeating the incorrect answers from context (leading to 38-40% performance drop), (2) converging on a narrow set of answers in coding and text generation without exploring alternatives, and (3) flipping stance on controversial topics to align with the user or the assistant's previous claims. We find that pigeonholing worsens almost monotonically with the number of conversation turns (performance drops by additional 14+% as repeated mistakes increase from 1 to 5), and pigeonholing-induced mode collapse can happen even when the provided example is correct. As a step toward mitigation, we propose RLVR with synthetic errors which improves models by 43-60% under bad contexts compared to vanilla RLVR baselines.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

World Models in Pieces: Structural Certification for General Agents

arXiv:2606.24842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the big-world regime, agents cannot be universally capable and their ability is inevitably specialized across a world model in pieces. Consequently, standard uniform guarantees fail to distinguish between the understanding of critical bottlenecks and irrelevant failures. We first formalize this limitation by proving that general agents are not universal, rendering standard worst-case analysis uninformative. To overcome this, we introduce structural certification, a transition-local framework that maps bounded goal-conditioned performance to entry-wise guarantees on the agent's internal world model. Our main contribution is constructive. We provide algorithms that filter specific transitions using deep compositional goals and prove that a general agent on these goals has a structural world model with a $\mathcal{O}(1/n) + \mathcal{O}(\delta)$ error bound. Conversely, this bound is tight in the small-$\delta$ regime, whose existence is explicitly guaranteed by our certification. These results enable the certifiable deployment of general agents by localizing the specific transitions where long-horizon planning is reliable.

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

Who Should Lead Decoding Now? Tracking Reliable Trajectories for Ensembling Masked Diffusion Language Models

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) have emerged as a distinct paradigm for sequence generation. As MDLMs become diverse in capabilities and knowledge coverage, an important question is how to combine their knowledge. Toward this, we first investigate the unique decoding dynamics of MDLMs. We find that successful generations exhibit stable confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions, while unreliable trajectories can often be corrected by injecting promising intermediate states from other models. Guided by this observation, we propose $TIE$ ($T$rajectory-based $I$terative $E$nsembling), a knowledge fusion framework in which MDLMs iteratively identify reliable decoding trajectories and relay them across models. TIE tracks confidence dynamics over answer-relevant positions to determine which model currently follows a more reliable trajectory and selectively transfers partially denoised sequences across models. As the model on the more promising trajectory often changes across denoising steps, TIE allows different models to contribute complementary strengths at different stages of generation. Strong performance across diverse reasoning tasks, along with our analyses, suggests that TIE offers a practical approach to the underexplored problem of MDLM ensembling.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Interactor: Agentic RL oriented Iterative Creation for Ad Description Generation in Sponsored Search

This paper focuses on automatically generating informative ad descriptions in sponsored search. Unlike ad titles which are usually optimized to attract user click feedbacks, ad descriptions have a longer text span and possess the potential of incorporating world knowledge to address user search intents while presenting the fine-grained selling points of the ads. We propose Interactor, a multi-turn iterative creation framework optimized with agentic RL for ad description generation. The generation model acts as a policy that interacts with a customized environment consisting of multiple generative reward models. Given initial generations by the policy, the customized GenRMs evaluate multi-dimensional qualities including knowledge capacity and landing page consistency, providing both binary signals and reasoning feedbacks. The policy then iteratively refines the descriptions based on such feedbacks to ensure continuous improvement. Experiments on industrial datasets show that the Interactor framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in generating knowledge-rich and faithful ad descriptions. Since May 2026, it has been deployed online in a leading search ads system, contributing to both ad revenue and user experience.

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

From Tokens to Policy: Causal and Interpretable Heterogeneous Treatment Effects Identification

arXiv:2606.17010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Heterogeneous Treatment Effect (HTE) identification is crucial to explain the impact of an intervention and optimize our policies accordingly. Existing approaches trade expressivity for interpretability, but, if some active heterogeneity drivers are unmeasured, methods at both ends of this spectrum allow for spurious HTE characterization with no causal reading. In this work, we focus on controlled experiments and argue that an oracle HTE causal characterization via the latent interactors is now within reach, thanks to (i) more extensive pre-treatment measurements, i.e., multi-modal and multi-view, and (ii) scalable representations with minimal human supervision. We then re-frame HTE identification as a Markov-blanket discovery problem on a sufficient and aligned pre-treatment representation, and introduce Neural EXposure Interaction Search (NEXIS), an iterative procedure with provable and empirically validated consistent selection. We deploy NEXIS on two anti-poverty programs in Africa, augmenting each with satellite imagery capturing previously unmeasured environmental effect modifiers, leading to novel, interpretable and prescriptive guidelines to optimize the programs' next iterations.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Mood-Aware Music Recommendation: Integrating User Affective Signals into Ranking Systems

arXiv:2606.13858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recommendation systems are essential in modern music streaming platforms due to the vast amount of available content. While collaborative filtering is widely used to suggest items based on the preferences of others with similar patterns, it performs poorly in domains where user-item interactions are sparse, such as music. Content-based filtering is an alternative approach that examines the qualities of the items themselves. Genre, instrumentation, and lyrics have been explored; however, relatively little attention has been given to emotion recognition. Since a user's emotional state strongly influences their music choice, incorporating mood signals offers a promising direction for personalization. In this work, we propose a mood-conditioned ranking framework that integrates user affective signals into the recommendation process via softmax-based sampling in the energy-valence space. We evaluate the approach via single-blind experiments in which participants compare recommendations from the proposed system against a baseline. The results indicate improved perceived recommendation quality, providing preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of incorporating mood-based inputs into music recommendations.

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

M4FC: a Multimodal, Multilingual, Multicultural, Multitask Real-World Fact-Checking Dataset

Existing real-world datasets for multimodal fact-checking have multiple limitations: they contain few instances, cover on only one or two languages, focus only on one task, or rely on external news article sets for sourcing true claims. To address these shortcomings, we introduce M4FC, a new real-world dataset comprising 4,982 images paired with 6,980 claims. The images, verified by professional fact-checkers from 22 organizations, represent a diverse range of cultural and geographic contexts. Each claim is available in one or two out of ten languages. M4FC spans six multimodal fact-checking tasks: visual claim extraction, claimant intent prediction, fake image detection, image contextualization, location verification, and verdict prediction. We provide baseline results for all tasks and analyze how combining intermediate tasks affects verdict prediction performance. We make our dataset and code publicly available.

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

Dual Distribution Estimation for Zero-shot Noisy Test-Time Adaptation with VLMs

While test-time adaptation (TTA) empowers vision-language models to adapt without costly retraining, it remains highly vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) outliers prevalent in real-world applications. This discrepancy motivates Noisy TTA (NTTA), an online task to filter noisy OOD samples on the fly while maximizing in-distribution (ID) classification accuracy. Existing zero-shot NTTA approaches typically rely on test-time discriminative training, leading to overconfident misclassifications and significantly degraded inference efficiency. To address these limitations, we propose a novel framework named Dual Distribution Estimation (DDE), shifting the zero-shot NTTA paradigm from instance-level learning to training-free Gaussian distribution modeling. DDE incorporates two novel modules: Positive Feature Distribution Estimation (PFDE) and Negative Label Distribution Estimation (NLDE). PFDE explicitly models class-wise inclusion and exclusion Gaussian distributions to formulate a calibrated contrastive score, robustly enhancing ID accuracy. In parallel, NLDE improves OOD identification by explicitly modeling the negative label distribution to mine highly discriminative labels, effectively mitigating spurious correlations. Extensive experiments show that on the large-scale ImageNet benchmark, DDE achieves an improvement of 3.70\% in harmonic mean accuracy and reduces the FPR95 for OOD detection by 6.20\%, while ensuring highly scalable and efficient online inference. Furthermore, DDE is zero-shot and training-free, demonstrating remarkable robustness in data-scarce scenarios. Codes are available at https://github.com/ZhuWenjie98/DDE.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Adaptive Machine Learning Framework for UAV Trajectory Optimization in O-RAN

arXiv:2606.24483v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as open radio units (O-RUs) in 6G cellular systems presents a promising opportunity to achieve scalable and adaptive network coverage. However, optimizing UAV trajectories in dynamic and unfamiliar environments remains a critical challenge, particularly due to the need for extensive retraining in each new scenario. In this paper, we introduce a novel UAV trajectory optimization framework that integrates enhanced continual transfer learning within the O-RAN architecture. The proposed system maintains a library of pre-trained models and employs a model selection mechanism to identify and transfer knowledge from the most relevant environments, minimizing adaptation time and improving efficiency. When no sufficiently similar model is available, a fallback model empowered by continuous refinements ensures baseline performance. The framework leverages real-world city maps and ray tracing techniques to enhance learning reliability and improve trajectory planning. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed model selection-based transfer learning approach reduces convergence time by 44% to 56% compared to retraining from scratch, and up to 40% compared to traditional transfer learning without model selection.

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

Analyzing Defensive Misdirection Against Model-Guided Automated Attacks on Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.20470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems increasingly rely on language-model components to interpret instructions, process external data, invoke tools, and coordinate with other agents. These capabilities make prompt-injection and jailbreak attacks more consequential, especially as attackers adopt model-guided automation to scale probing, prompt refinement, and response evaluation. This work analyzes the resulting attack-defense setting through a probabilistic model of a target system, its defense mechanism, and the attacker's automated judge. Our analysis shows that conventional detect-and-block defenses can allow attacker success rate (ASR) to approach one as the query budget grows, since predictable refusals provide useful feedback to automated search. We then examine detect-and-misdirect, where detected malicious interactions receive controlled, non-operational responses designed to induce false-positive errors in the attacker's judge. This strategy reduces the positive predictive value of attacker-selected candidates and yields a bounded asymptotic ASR. We evaluate a proof-of-concept realization of this strategy through Contextual Misdirection via Progressive Engagement (CMPE), a lightweight conversational misdirection method designed to replace predictable refusal text with safe but strategically misleading responses in automated jailbreak settings. On jailbreak benchmarks, CMPE reduces estimated ASR upper bounds by up to two orders of magnitude and nearly eliminates verified attack success in end-to-end PAIR and GPTFuzz attack runs.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

FiCA: Feed-forward instant Gaussian Codec Avatars from a Single Portrait Image

We introduce FiCA, a Feed-forward, instant Gaussian Codec Avatar generation pipeline that creates lifelike avatars from a single portrait image. Generating a photorealistic and drivable avatar from just a single image is significantly challenging due to the limited visual information available to accurately infer the 3D appearance and geometry of human heads. To address this, we develop a novel system that combines human-centric vision foundation models with a diffusion model. This system is designed to fully exploit partial visual observations to generate lifelike human avatars. Our proposed diffusion model learns a generative mapping from these partial observations to complete and authentic 3D mesh reconstruction. Additionally, we introduce a feed-forward mesh refinement network that enhances the fidelity and identity preservation of the generated avatars, eliminating the need for person-specific test-time optimization. By leveraging a universal prior model that decodes a generated mesh into a set of 3D Gaussians, we generate a photorealistic 3D Gaussian avatar, capable of being driven with novel expressions in real-time. Our experiments demonstrate that the avatars generated by our feed-forward approach faithfully represent diverse identities and surpass the visual quality of avatars produced by recent competing methods.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Anomalous weak values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer extracted directly from intensity measurements

arXiv:2606.24798v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weak values provide a powerful framework for characterizing quantum systems. Their experimental extraction conventionally relies on weak conditioned von Neumann measurements, involving weak interactions and meter states that increase experimental complexity and often limit measurement efficiency. Here we introduce a method to fully characterize path weak-values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer employing neither meter states nor weak interactions. We experimentally demonstrate the technique in matter-wave interferometry. We identify anomalous weak values and, equivalently, negative quasiprobability distributions, which reflect the nonclassical behavior of the quantum system. The approach relies uniquely on intensity measurements at the output ports of the interferometer combined with controlled relative phase shifts between the paths. The absence of meter states enables considerable simplification of the setup and shorter measurement times, while preserving full access to weak values with comparable or increased accuracy. The scheme is directly applicable to a broad class of experiments involving two-level quantum systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ForceForget: Reinforcement Concept Removal for Enhancing Safety in Text-to-Image Models

With the advance of generative AI, the text-to-image (T2I) model has the ability to generate various contents. However, T2I models still can generate unsafe contents. To alleviate this issue, various concept erasing methods are proposed. However, existing methods tend to excessively erase unsafe concepts and suppress benign concepts contained in harmful prompts, which can negatively affect model utility. In this paper, we focus on eliminating unsafe content while maintaining model capability in safe semantic meaning interpretation by optimizing the concept erasing reward (CER) with reinforcement learning. To avoid overly content erasure, we introduce the Safe Adapter to project partial text embedding for efficient concept regulation in cross-attention layers. Extensive experiments conducted on different datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in alleviating unsafe content generation while preserving the high fidelity of benign images compared with existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) concept erasing methods. In terms of robustness, our method outperforms counterparts against red-teaming tools. Moreover, we showcase the proposed approach is more effective in emerging image-to-image (I2I) scenarios compared with others. Lastly, we extend our method to erase general concepts, such as artistic styles and objects. Disclaimer: This paper includes discussions of sexually explicit content that may be offensive to certain readers. All images used in this work are synthesized or from public datasets.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Boson Sampling as a Probe of Chaotic and Integrable Quantum Dynamics in a Photonic Chip

arXiv:2605.25398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum chaos plays a key role in understanding complex quantum dynamics, while integrated photonics offers unique advantages for quantum applications, including high-speed operation, scalability, and programmable unitary transformations. However, integrated photonic approaches to probing quantum chaos remain largely unexplored, owing to the absence of a clear connection between programmable photonic dynamics and established chaos diagnostics. In this work, we establish Fock-state boson sampling as a practical probe of quantum chaos by exploiting the sensitivity of multiphoton interference to the random-matrix properties of underlying single-particle unitary dynamics. More importantly, we design and fabricate a programmable quantum photonic chip to experimentally implement this framework, achieving the first integrated-photonic demonstration of quantum-chaos probes based on boson sampling. Experimental results show that the three complementary probes proposed in this work, namely the distance to Porter–Thomas statistics, Shannon entropy, and Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator-equivalent observables, exhibit close agreement with theoretical predictions and consistently distinguish chaotic and integrable dynamics. Our work provides a scalable route for investigating complex quantum dynamics on programmable photonic platforms while leveraging the intrinsic advantages of boson sampling through multiphoton interference and complex output statistics.

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

HumanScale: Egocentric Human Video Can Outperform Real-Robot Data for Embodied Pretraining

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Early-life nutritional environment is associated with late-life cognition in the Health and Retirement Study, a pellagra epidemic natural experiment

Early-life exposures are important to several late-life health outcomes. We sought to study the effect of an in utero nutritional environment and its interaction with Alzheimer's disease (AD) genetic risk on late-life cognitive function. We used a natural experiment created by the pellagra epidemic, a nutritional disease caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, to evaluate the association between in utero pellagra epidemic exposure and late-life cognitive function in the Health and Retirement Study (N = 18,285). We also evaluated whether the in utero exposure could modify the AD polygenic score's (PGS) effect on cognition. In utero pellagra epidemic exposure was significantly associated with cognition ({beta} = -0.025). However, these effects were not isolated to the prenatal period as exposure during childhood periods also had an effect. The interaction between the in utero exposure and the AD PGS was significant, where the genetic effect on cognition was amplified with increasing (progressively worse) in utero exposure levels. These associations imply that the early-life nutritional environment affects late-life cognitive function and that these effects can modify genetic risk.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Whole-genome duplication shaped cell-type evolution in the vertebrate brain

作者:

The complex brains of vertebrates have more cell types than those of their closest relatives. Whole-genome duplications (WGDs) occurred during early vertebrate evolution1, but it is unclear whether the duplicated genes (ohnologues) facilitated cell-type evolution. Here using brain single-cell transcriptomes from five chordates—human2, mouse3, lizard4, lamprey5 and amphioxus—we report that many cell-type families with conserved core transcription factors in vertebrates do not show one-to-one homology with amphioxus. Moreover, ohnologues, particularly those from the first WGD, were more important than small-scale duplication paralogues for vertebrate cell-type evolution. To explore whether ohnologues are mechanistically important for this process, we predicted ancestral cell-type states and compared them to amphioxus and experimentally investigated macroglia. The findings indicate that ohnologues had a role in early vertebrate cell-type diversification. Moreover, by examining paralogue expression across cell types and species, we show that expression changes were mainly driven by dosage selection and subfunctionalization. We also link ohnologues to cellular diversity at different anatomical and cell-type scales. Our findings demonstrate the importance of WGDs for the evolution of early vertebrate brain complexity and highlight that the resultant ohnologues continued to capacitate cell-type evolution long after they were formed. Analyses of brain single-cell transcriptomes from human, mouse, lizard, lamprey and amphioxus reveal that duplicated genes (ohnologues) played a pivotal part in early vertebrate cell-type diversification.