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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

HarnessBridge: Learnable Bidirectional Controller for LLM Agent Harness

arXiv:2606.12882v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as agents for long-horizon tasks, yet their performance is shaped not only by model capability and environment design, but also by the harness that mediates agent–environment interaction. Existing harnesses are largely manually engineered, making them difficult to scale as trajectories grow longer and interactions become more complex. In this work, we ask whether harness can be generated by a learnable plug-in module that can be trained in an end-to-end fashion. We introduce HarnessBridge, a lightweight learnable harness controller that parameterizes the agent–environment interface as a bidirectional projection. HarnessBridge learns two bidirectional projections: observation projection, which distills raw trajectories into compact, decision-relevant states, and action projection, which converts proposed actions into executable transitions or trajectory-grounded rejections. We train HarnessBridge on a harness supervision dataset via unified instruction tuning. On Terminal-Bench~2.0 and SWE-bench Verified, HarnessBridge matches or surpasses strong specialized harnesses while substantially reducing token usage and trajectory length, and generalizes from smaller generators to larger commercial models.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Optimizing Agentic Reasoning with Retrieval via Synthetic Semantic Information Gain Reward

arXiv:2602.00845v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning enables large reasoning models (LRMs) to dynamically acquire external knowledge, but yet optimizing the retrieval process remains challenging due to the lack of dense, principled reward signals. In this paper, we introduce InfoReasoner, a unified framework that incentivizes effective information seeking via a synthetic semantic information gain reward. Theoretically, we redefine information gain as uncertainty reduction over the model's belief states, establishing guarantees, including non-negativity, telescoping additivity, and channel monotonicity. Practically, to enable scalable optimization without manual retrieval annotations, we propose an output-aware intrinsic estimator that computes information gain directly from the model's output distributions using semantic clustering via bidirectional textual entailment. This intrinsic reward guides the policy to maximize epistemic progress, enabling efficient training via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Experiments across seven question-answering benchmarks demonstrate that InfoReasoner consistently outperforms strong retrieval-augmented baselines, achieving up to 5.4% average accuracy improvement. Our work provides a theoretically grounded and scalable path toward agentic reasoning with retrieval. The code is available at https://github.com/dl-m9/InfoReasoner

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

BIM-Edit: Benchmarking Large Language Models for IFC-Based Building Information Modeling

arXiv:2606.20146v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to computer-aided design (CAD) to generate design artifacts from textual instructions. In engineering practice, this requires more than creating new geometry, models must also understand existing scenes, edit them correctly, and preserve semantics and relations. However, many CAD benchmarks focus on creating new models rather than editing existing ones, and mostly evaluate geometric correctness. We introduce BIM-Edit, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs on natural-language editing of Building Information Models (BIM) represented in the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) format. BIM provides a challenging testbed because building models encode geometry together with semantic and relational structure. BIM-Edit contains 324 editing tasks spanning 11 realistic building models and 36 synthetic scenes. Tasks are expressed using three instruction categories - direct, spatial, and topological - covering both explicit and scene-grounded edits. We evaluate outputs along three dimensions: geometric accuracy, semantic validity, and topological consistency. Across evaluated LLMs, the best-performing model achieves only 49.5% average score across the three metrics, and no model fully solves more than 3.4% of tasks. These results demonstrate a substantial gap between current LLM capabilities and the requirements of structured engineering design workflows.

06.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Multiplexed, precise genome engineering in monocots with twin prime editing systems

Authors:

Simultaneously introducing diverse genomic edits remains a challenge in crop genome engineering. Here we describe a twin prime editing-based knockout (TKO) system that installs stop codon clusters (SCCs) for precise translational termination with minimal in-frame mutations. TKO achieves knockout efficiencies of up to 70.5%, 58.6% and 75.1% in rice, maize and wheat protoplasts, respectively, and produces heritable knockout alleles in 96.8% of regenerated rice plants. In hexaploid wheat, TKO outperforms Cas9 4.2-fold in generating triple-homolog knockouts, largely by reducing in-frame mutations. Orthogonal TKO editors with sequence-divergent SCCs enable simultaneous knockout of up to ten genes without cross-interference. Integration of TKO with conventional prime editing establishes TRIM1 (TKO editor-enabled gene rupture and development of integrated multitype genome modification system) for simultaneous knockout and precise editing, achieving a 22.8% coediting of four genes in rice. TRIM2 extends this capacity to kilobase-scale modifications through a prime editor–recombinase system, enabling a 4.9-kb insertion (1.2% efficiency) and gene knockout (up to 79.8%) in protoplasts. Plant genome editing is multiplexed with twin prime editing.

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

Toward 360-Degree Indoor Panorama Editing via Tuning-Free Diffusion Model with Refocusing Cross-Attention

Zero-shot text-guided diffusion has significantly advanced image editing; however, its practical usability remains constrained by three persistent challenges: prompt brittleness that requires meticulous prompt engineering, spillover edits that unintentionally affect non-target regions, and failures on small or cluttered objects caused by limited fine-grained supervision in training data. We propose FocusDiff (Target-Aware Refocusing for Tuning-Free Diffusion Editing), a tuning-free framework for precise and region-specific image manipulation based on refocusing cross-attention. Given a target region obtained through automated segmentation or manual selection, FocusDiff applies selective blurring to non-edit areas to guide attention toward the masked region while accurately transferring the object's identity, structure, and appearance to the edited output. Integrated context-preserving modules further ensure background fidelity and global coherence, enabling accurate edits from simple text prompts in a single pass. We also extend FocusDiff to 360-degree indoor panorama editing and demonstrate its effectiveness within virtual reality environments. Extensive experiments on our localized editing benchmark LIMB, comprising 30 multi-object images and 100 annotated examples including challenging small-object cases, show that FocusDiff outperforms existing zero-shot editors in text-image alignment and background preservation, achieving superior precision, photorealism, and usability. The project page is available at https://vdkhoi20.github.io/FocusDiff.

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

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Low-Regularity Semigroup Sewing Lemma via Quotient Structures

arXiv:2606.16164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a low-regularity Sewing theory for the semigroup coboundary $\hat\delta=\delta-a$ associated with a strongly continuous semigroup $S$. Unlike the ordinary low-regularity Sewing problem, the semigroup setting has an intrinsic algebraic non-uniqueness below the threshold $1$, in the sense that solutions are canonical only modulo semigroup cocycles. Accordingly, the natural target is a quotient space rather than an increment space. We identify this quotient structure and construct the corresponding semigroup Sewing map. The construction uses a frozen terminal-time transform, which rewrites semigroup defects, for each terminal time, as ordinary low-regularity Sewing problems on a frozen simplex. This reduction, however, does not by itself produce a genuine semigroup increment; the main additional step is to prove that the frozen solution classes are compatible as the terminal time varies and hence assemble into a canonical quotient class for $\hat\delta$. This yields canonical classes for $0

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

Classification of Astronomical Spectra Using PCA-Compressed Flux and Inverse-Variance Features

arXiv:2606.13978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper evaluates a signal-processing and supervised-learning pipeline for classifying SDSS DR17 astronomical spectra into stars, galaxies, and quasars. Each spectrum is represented by its measured flux and inverse-variance information, combining spectral shape with a wavelength-dependent reliability profile. After resampling onto a common logarithmic wavelength grid, the flux and inverse-variance vectors are standardized and separately compressed using principal component analysis. The resulting components are concatenated and used to train several classifiers. The best performance was obtained with the LightGBM gradient-boosting classifier, reaching $94.6\%$ accuracy and $92.1\%$ balanced accuracy on the test set.

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

PEC-Home: Interpretation of Progressively Elliptical Commands in Smart Homes

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have empowered home assistants with natural language interaction capabilities. However, current assistants overlook the progressive omission that occurs in human dialogue as shared context accumulates, leading to more elliptical expressions for efficient communication. Thus, current assistants still struggle to interpret such elliptical expressions accurately, which limits their effectiveness in real-world applications. In practical smart home scenarios, assistants face two major challenges caused by elliptical commands: (1) referential ambiguity caused by different environmental expectations among multiple users; and (2) intention ambiguity resulting from user preferences that evolve over time or change with the environment. To address these challenges, we introduce PEC-Home, the first simulated home dataset specifically designed for interpreting progressively elliptical commands in smart homes. Extensive experiments on various LLMs, including GPT-4o, show that existing home assistants struggle to execute user-intended operations based solely on elliptical commands. Even when equipped with tools for storing and retrieving user dialogue history, execution accuracy remains below that achieved with complete commands.}.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantum Cinema: An Interactive Cinematic Exploration of Quantum Computing Hardware via Generative World Models

arXiv:2606.17102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Quantum computing promises transformative advances across science and industry, yet the physical hardware that enables these computations remains invisible to the public: quantum processors operate inside sealed dilution refrigerators at temperatures near absolute zero, making direct observation impossible. This "imagination gap" between quantum computing's growing societal impact and the public's ability to visualize it represents a significant barrier to quantum literacy and workforce development. We present Quantum Cinema, an open-source, browser-based interactive application that closes this gap by transforming invisible quantum hardware into explorable, cinematic experiences using generative world models. Quantum Cinema guides users through a four-act narrative – from the foundational Nobel Prize-winning science of quantum entanglement, through curated video introductions to three major quantum computing architectures (trapped-ion, neutral-atom, and superconducting systems), into immersive three-dimensional generative worlds that make invisible quantum phenomena observable, and finally to interactive radar-chart comparisons grounded in real quantum device specifications. All three-dimensional environments are generated using WorldLabs' generative world model platform and are scientifically grounded in curated metrics from Amazon Web Services (AWS) Braket quantum hardware. Quantum Cinema requires no installation, no specialized hardware, and no quantum computing background. It is designed to serve two distinct communities: scholars and developers seeking to replicate or extend the platform, and educators, researchers, and science communicators seeking an intuitive tool for explaining quantum hardware to diverse audiences. This paper describes the system architecture, the generative world model pipeline, use cases for both communities, and directions for future work.

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

UR-BERT: Scaling Text Encoders for Massively Multilingual TTS Through Universal Romanization and Speech Token Prediction

We propose UR-BERT, a Romanized transcription-based text-to-speech (TTS) encoder for massively multilingual TTS systems. Conventional grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P)-based approaches are limited to around 100 languages due to the availability of reliable G2P resources. In contrast, UR-BERT scales to 495 languages by unifying diverse writing systems into a shared Romanization representation. To further enhance phonetic fidelity and text-speech alignment, we introduce a speech token prediction objective during training, which encourages the encoder to learn speech-aware phonetic representations in a data-efficient manner. Experiments show that TTS systems built on UR-BERT consistently outperform recent text encoder baselines across a wide range of languages and resource conditions, and demonstrate strong generalization to unseen languages.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Isolation And Characterization Of Bacteria Associated With Urethritis In Women Within Child Bearing Age Attending Local African Health Clinics

Background: Urethritis in women of childbearing age constitutes a significant but underreported burden of reproductive morbidity in Sub-Saharan Africa, where diagnostic constraints often necessitate suboptimal syndromic management. Methods: To identify the localized etiological profile, mid-stream urine and urethral swab specimens were prospectively collected from symptomatic women attending local clinics, subjected to standard microbiological culture, and characterized using rigorous phenotypic and biochemical diagnostic protocols. Results: Microbiological analysis successfully isolated a high prevalence of both Gram-negative and Gram-positive uropathogens, predominantly Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Klebsiella pneumoniae, demonstrating distinct phenotypic traits characteristic of the regional microbial ecology. Conclusion: The pronounced isolation of these specific bacterial agents highlights the critical inadequacy of generalized empirical treatments and underscores the urgent need for tailored diagnostic criteria in resource-limited African healthcare settings.

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

Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2602.17315v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős–R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.

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

Optimal Spatio-Temporal Decoupling for Bayesian Conformal Prediction

arXiv:2605.00432v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online conformal prediction must balance fast adaptation to distribution shift against stable coverage: feedback-driven methods react quickly but become volatile, while strongly discounted Bayesian methods lag and inflate intervals at tight coverage. We introduce State-Adaptive Bayesian Conformal Prediction (SA-BCP), which forms the predictive quantile as a gated convex combination of long-term temporal inertia and local spatial evidence from a kernel density estimate, controlled by a single interpretable evidence threshold $K$. We establish three results: (i) asymptotic marginal validity of the resulting intervals; (ii) a closed-form expression for the MSE-optimal threshold, $K^*_{\mathrm{MSE}}=\alpha(1-\alpha)/M^{\mathcal{T}}$, trading the coverage-indicator (Bernoulli) variance against the temporal structural bias $M^{\mathcal{T}}$; and (iii) a rolling-origin procedure for selecting $K$ online – consistent under stationarity, with $O(\sqrt{T\log N})$ regret against the best fixed $K$ and, for a segmented variant, a sublinear dynamic-regret bound under bounded drift. Across four financial-volatility and weather datasets, three target coverage levels, and eight baselines (including the strongest recent conditional-quantile methods, SPCI and KOWCPI), SA-BCP attains at-or-above-nominal coverage in most settings while producing substantially sharper intervals – up to roughly $3\times$ lower Winkler score than discounted Bayesian CP at the tightest coverage – and a coverage-matched audit confirms these efficiency gains are not an artifact of under-coverage. We disclose one principal limitation: a volatility-specialized conformal-GARCH competitor remains more efficient on its home volatility-base series, though it does not transfer across domains.

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

How Do Instructions Shape Speech? Cross-Attention Attribution for Style-Captioned Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.20532v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Style-captioned text-to-speech systems use natural language to control voice characteristics, but how individual words influence acoustic output remains unclear. Understanding this is critical for diagnosing failure modes and improving controllability in expressive TTS. We propose cross-attention attribution for speech diffusion models, adapting the DAAM framework to the speech domain for the first time, and apply it to CapSpeech-TTS. Our method extracts per-token heatmaps across 25 layers and 24 ODE steps. We analyze 3,600 (style caption, text transcript) combinations comprising 120 style captions conditioning the generation of 30 text transcripts each, revealing how caption tokens shape waveforms. Results show: (1) style tokens have lower temporal variance than content/function tokens, confirming global conditioning; (2) style attention correlates with F0 and energy; (3) style conditioning peaks in early steps and deep layers; (4) attention entropy reaches its minimum at layer 17, co-occurring with the style importance peak, indicating maximal network selectivity at the most style-critical stage. This is the first study of how natural language influences cross-attention in speech diffusion models

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Expert in Ultrasound Skills: Feasibility of an IMU-video platform to describe technical profiles during focused cardiac ultrasound. Pilot study

Background: Focused cardiac ultrasound (FoCUS) is operator dependent and requires coordinated probe manipulation, image interpretation and iterative visual feedback. Existing assessment approaches often emphasize final image quality or expert rating. We developed Expert in Ultrasound Skills (EXUS) , a platform that synchronizes transducer-mounted inertial measurement unit (IMU) data with ultrasound video, and evaluated its technical feasibility during FoCUS acquisition. Methods: This observational pilot study included 6 operators performing two repetitions of a four-view FoCUS protocol, yielding 12 analytical sessions and 48 planned acquisitions. Feasibility was defined by acquisition completion, video availability, start/stop events, fused IMU-video windows, temporal coverage, complete human label entries and IMU integrity. A 100-image Likert rating task was used to summarize pairwise inter-rater agreement for still-frame image quality assessment. Results: All 48 planned acquisitions were completed with video, start/stop events, fused windows and complete human label entries. Temporal coverage was at least 90% in 47/48 acquisitions. IMU integrity endpoints exceeded the 80% threshold: 43/48 acquisitions had no extreme IMU-derived artifact, 43/48 had no active-segment IMU restart and 44/48 had no complete motion flatline. Mean pairwise exact agreement for the Likert task was 38.9%, with mean quadratic-weighted Cohen's kappa of 0.564. Post hoc profiles varied across duration, visual quality, mechanical load and motor efficiency. Conclusions: EXUS was technically feasible for synchronized IMU-video capture during FoCUS. The pilot supports multimodal acquisition data as a way to describe technical profiles and generate formative feedback hypotheses, but the post hoc indices are not validated competency measures. Keywords: focused cardiac ultrasound; point-of-care ultrasound; inertial measurement unit; medical education; deliberate practice

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

Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

arXiv:2606.19998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are increasingly deployed across diverse tasks, yet they remain black boxes whose physical interactions can cause irreversible harm, making generalizable and interpretable failure detection essential. We observe that successful and failed rollouts carry systematically different information-theoretic signatures. Building on this, we formalize VLA control as a closed-loop information pipeline and derive the Triple Information-theoretic (Tri-Info) signals that capture whether actions remain diverse, temporally consistent, and coupled to state transitions. Across six VLA models and three benchmark environments, Tri-Info matches the strongest baselines in-domain. Moreover, Tri-Info transfers across architectures, environments, and the sim-to-real gap without retraining, reaching 83\% accuracy on real-world tasks where prior detectors collapse to chance. This establishes Tri-Info as a simple yet powerful method that not only detects failures with strong cross-domain generalization, but also delivers interpretable diagnostics of the underlying failure modes.

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

Investigating Human-Model Discrepancies in Speech Quality Assessment via Acoustic and Prosodic Perturbations

Mean opinion score (MOS) prediction models are widely used as proxy metrics in text-to-speech (TTS) research, yet their ability to capture quality differences beyond acoustic fidelity remains unclear. We investigate this via controlled perturbations on speech: acoustic degradation, prosodic errors, and manipulation of speaker-specific characteristics such as pitch and speaking rate. We obtained MOS predictions for these speech samples from both human listeners and the model, and analyzed the differences in their perceptual characteristics. Results show that most models track acoustic degradation well, while all are insensitive to prosodic errors despite large subjective score drops. For speaker characteristics, models exhibit a double dissociation: strong mean fundamental frequency (F0) biases absent in human ratings, yet insensitivity to speaking rate and F0 variability that humans notice. These findings highlight limitations of scalar MOS prediction beyond acoustic fidelity.

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

Attention-Based Estimation of the Individual Treatment Benefit Probability under Dose Variation

arXiv:2606.13821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Estimating the probability that a treatment outperforms a control for an individual patient, called the Individual Probability of Treatment Benefit (IPTB), offers a clinically intuitive alternative to population-average metrics. However, existing methods for IPTB estimation are largely confined to binary treatment settings, despite the prevalence of dose-varying interventions in clinical practice. We propose a general framework for IPTB estimation with ordinal outcomes under discrete dose assignments, called Dose-AIPTB (Dose Attention-based IPTB). Our approach recasts the problem as binary classification over the unobserved sign of the individual treatment effect, constructing pseudo-labels from covariate-similar pairwise comparisons and aggregating them via attention mechanisms or Nadaraya-Watson kernel regression. This formulation naturally accommodates multiple discrete dose levels, extending beyond the binary treatment paradigm. Through numerical experiments on real-world and synthetic data under covariate shift, varying sample sizes, and heterogeneous outcomes, we demonstrate that attention-based aggregation consistently outperforms kernel alternatives. The framework provides a foundation for personalized dose selection grounded in individual-level benefit probabilities. Codes implementing the model are publicly available at https://github.com/NTAILab/AIPTBDose.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Self-Guidance: Enhancing Neural Codecs via Decoder Manifold Alignment

arXiv:2606.12940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural speech codecs based on Vector-Quantized VAEs (VQ-VAEs) are core audio tokenizers for speech LLMs, yet their reconstruction fidelity is bottlenecked by quantization error. Modifying the quantizer or increasing model capacity are common fixes, but they complicate downstream language modeling. Our core idea is to align the decoder's internal feature manifolds when processing both the quantized tokens and their original continuous embeddings, using a lightweight feature-mapping loss. This requires minimal training overhead and no inference-time changes. Applied to XCodec2, self-guidance improves all reconstruction metrics, achieving state-of-the-art low-bitrate performance. Notably, it enables a 4x codebook reduction without fidelity loss, which downstream TTS experiments show significantly improves LLM-based synthesis by simplifying the token modeling space. Multiple statistical observations and visualizations corroborate the enhanced internal manifold alignment in the decoder. Extensive experiments confirm its generality across various inductive biases. Self-guidance thus establishes an efficient, broadly applicable method for high-fidelity neural audio coding.

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

IHBench: Evaluating Post-Interruption Recovery in Voice Agents with Structured Workflows

arXiv:2606.19595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures. Existing benchmarks for speech-capable models focus on the timing of interruptions: barge-in detection, endpointing, and turn-taking dynamics. They leave unmeasured what happens after the interruption: does the agent resume the workflow at the correct step? Does it address the user's interjection? Does it avoid re-delivering content the user already heard? We introduce IHBench (Interruption Handling Benchmark), a benchmark that evaluates post-interruption recovery in voice agents executing state-machine-driven workflows across 10 enterprise domains. Six interruption types are injected at controlled points mid-utterance, with per-interruption evaluation rubrics generated alongside the data. Each interruption is scored on two axes: task fulfillment and recovery quality. We evaluate 27 audio-language model configurations from OpenAI, Google, and the open-weight community. Models vary widely, and recovery quality depends strongly on the interruption type. Across our experiments, closed-weight models are consistently more robust to interruptions than open-weight ones: they win far more often on task fulfillment, degrade roughly 3.3x more slowly as conversations grow longer, and show no audio-versus-text modality gap, whereas the open-weight models lose ground on all three. A human study validates the LLM judge against human annotators, and a cross-benchmark analysis against AudioMultiChallenge indicates that recovery quality is a largely distinct capability axis.

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

G2IA: Geometry-Guided Instance-Aware Retrieval and Refinement for Cross-Modal Place Recognition

Cross-modal place recognition (CMPR) enables camera-only robots to localize against pre-built LiDAR maps in autonomous navigation scenarios. This image-to-point-cloud setting is challenged by two coupled ambiguities: the modality gap between perspective RGB appearance and sparse metric geometry, and perceptual aliasing among urban places with similar roads, facades, intersections, and object arrangements. Instead of treating CMPR as a single global descriptor matching problem, we argue that reliable retrieval requires both geometry-aware representation alignment and fine-grained candidate verification. In this paper, we propose G2IA, a geometry-guided instance-aware framework for image-to-point-cloud place recognition. In the retrieval stage, visual geometry priors from VGGT and instance features are integrated to construct place descriptors that are more compatible with LiDAR-derived map representations. In the refinement stage, the retrieved candidates are re-ranked by explicitly verifying whether local instance shapes and their relative spatial layouts are consistent across modalities. Experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate that G2IA consistently improves image-to-point-cloud place recognition under different localization thresholds, and exhibits strong cross-dataset generalization.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Overcoming Labelled Data Scarcity for Defect Classification in Scanning Tunneling Microscopy

arXiv:2506.01678v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) is a powerful technique for imaging surfaces with atomic resolution, providing insight into physical and chemical processes at the level of single atoms and molecules. A regular task of STM image analysis is the identification and labelling of features of interest against a uniform background. Performing this manually is a labour-intensive task, requiring significant human effort. To reduce this burden, we propose an automated approach to the segmentation of STM images that uses both few-shot learning and unsupervised learning. Our technique offers greater flexibility compared to previous supervised methods; it removes the requirement for large manually annotated datasets and is thus easier to adapt to an unseen surface while still maintaining a high accuracy. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using it to recognise atomic features on three distinct surfaces: Si(001), Ge(001), and TiO$_2$(110), including adsorbed AsH$_3$ molecules on the silicon and germanium surfaces. Our model exhibits strong generalisation capabilities, and following initial training, can be adapted to unseen surfaces with as few as one additional labelled data point. This work is a significant step towards efficient and material-agnostic, automatic segmentation of STM images.