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

LoHoSearch: Benchmarking Long-Horizon Search Agents Beyond the Human Difficulty Ceiling

Search agent benchmarks exemplified by BrowseComp have rapidly saturated over the past year, with the strongest models surpassing 90% accuracy. Since these benchmarks are predominantly human-authored, annotators lack a global perspective on entity statistics and cannot systematically maximize search space size and structural complexity. This creates a difficulty ceiling that is hard to break. To address this, we introduce LoHoSearch (Long-Horizon Search Agents), a challenging benchmark comprising 544 human-verified questions across 11 domains. LoHoSearch is constructed via an automated pipeline built upon a knowledge graph covering over 7 million Wikipedia entities, which selects relations with large search spaces and assembles them into structurally complex questions with KG-verified unique answers. Our evaluation demonstrates that even the strongest model achieves only 34.74% accuracy, and existing context management strategies (best +6.8%) yield far smaller gains than on prior benchmarks. LoHoSearch provides a more demanding standard for evaluating long-horizon reasoning and context management in search agents.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Redact or Keep? A Fully Local AI Cascade for Educational Dialogue De-Identification

Educational dialogue is a valuable but sensitive resource for research: the same transcripts that capture authentic learning often capture personally identifiable information (PII) entangled with curricular content, where "Riemann" may refer to a real student or to a mathematical concept. Existing approaches force a tradeoff between governance and accuracy. Commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) can handle this ambiguity but require sending student data to third parties, while local named entity recognition (NER) systems preserve governance but over-redact curricular terms. We propose a fully local cascade framework that reframes de-identification from open-ended entity recognition to constrained privacy triage. A recall-first union proposer combines two lightweight encoders with deterministic rules to over-generate candidate spans; a context-aware reviewer then makes a binary Redact/Keep decision for each candidate using surrounding dialogue and speaker role. We evaluate three reviewer configurations against same-family LLM-only baselines and a commercial API on math tutoring transcripts from two large platforms. The strongest local configuration reaches 0.958 macro F1, compared with 0.767 for a same-family LLM-only baseline and 0.706 for the commercial API, while running entirely on a single laptop. On a targeted challenge set of curricular-personal name ambiguity, the same configuration degrades by only 0.03 F1 versus 0.19 to 0.25 for smaller reviewers. These results suggest that for educational de-identification, problem formulation matters more than model scale.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

HGCN(O): A Self-Tuning GCN HyperModel Toolkit for Outcome Prediction in Event-Sequence Data

arXiv:2507.22524v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose HGCN(O), a self-tuning toolkit using Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) models for event sequence prediction. Featuring four GCN architectures (O-GCN, T-GCN, TP-GCN, TE-GCN) across the GCNConv and GraphConv layers, our toolkit integrates multiple graph representations of event sequences with different choices of node- and graph-level attributes and in temporal dependencies via edge weights, optimising prediction accuracy and stability for balanced and unbalanced datasets. Extensive experiments show that GCNConv models excel on unbalanced data, while all models perform consistently on balanced data. Experiments also confirm the superior performance of HGCN(O) over traditional approaches. Applications include Predictive Business Process Monitoring (PBPM), which predicts future events or states of a business process based on event logs.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

The table maker's quantum search

arXiv:2601.13306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that quantum search can be used to compute the hardness to round an elementary function, that is, to determine the minimum working precision required to compute the values of an elementary function correctly rounded to a target precision of $n$ digits for all possible precision-$n$ floating-point inputs in a given interval. For elementary functions $f$ related to the exponential function, quantum search takes time $\tilde O(2^{n/2} \log (1/\delta))$ to return, with probability $1-\delta$, the hardness to round $f$ over all $n$-bit floating-point inputs in a given binade. For periodic elementary functions in large binades, standalone quantum search yields an asymptotic speedup over the best known classical algorithms and heuristics. We then estimate the resources required for a fault-tolerant implementation of the proposed algorithm for the $\sin$ and $\cos$ functions in double precision. We find that, although the algorithm can in principle compete with the fastest known practical method for computing the hardness to round over all binades in the format, it requires qubit coherence times that are unrealistically long for present technology.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Efficient time-series prediction on NISQ devices via time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine

arXiv:2602.21544v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We proposed a time-delayed quantum extreme learning machine (TD-QELM) for efficient time-series prediction on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. By encoding multiple past inputs simultaneously, TD-QELM achieves shallow circuit depth independent of sequence length, thereby, mitigating noise accumulation and reducing computational complexity. Experiments using the NARMA benchmark on both noiseless simulations and IBM's 127-qubit processor demonstrate that TD-QELM consistently outperforms conventional quantum reservoir computing in prediction accuracy and noise robustness. These results highlight TD-QELM as a practical and scalable framework for time-series learning on current NISQ hardware.

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

Decoherence-free algebras in quantum dynamics

arXiv:2403.12926v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this Article we analyze the algebraic properties of the asymptotic dynamics of finite-dimensional open quantum systems in the Heisenberg picture. In particular, a natural product (Choi-Effros product) can be defined in the asymptotic regime. Motivated by this structure, we introduce a new space called the Choi-Effros decoherence-free algebra. Interestingly, this space is both a C*-algebra with respect to the composition product, and a B*-algebra with respect to the Choi-Effros product. Moreover, such space admits a direct-sum decomposition revealing a clear relationship with the attractor subspace of the dynamics. In particular, the equality between the attractor subspace and the Choi-Effros decoherence-free algebra is a necessary and sufficient condition for a faithful dynamics. Finally, we show how all the findings do not rely on complete positivity but on the much weaker Schwarz property.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Imbalanced Classification under Capacity Constraints

arXiv:2605.03289v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Detecting observations from a minority class under severe class imbalance is a central challenge in applications such as fraud detection, medical screening, and industrial quality control. In these settings, each positive prediction triggers a costly follow-up action, an MRI scan, a transaction audit, whose execution is subject to real operational constraints. This paper proposes a formal classification framework under capacity constraints: given a user-defined bound limit $b$ on the proportion of observations that can be labeled as belonging to the minority class, the goal is to find the classifier that maximizes sensitivity on that class. We characterize the optimal classifier under this constraint and establish its equivalence with the classical Bayes classifier under a reweighting of the prior probabilities. We also introduce a capacity-adjusted performance metric $M$ that accounts for the effective detection rate when the capacity constraint is binding. The framework is implemented on top of standard learning methods, k-NN, SVM, random forests, and neural networks, and statistical consistency is established for each. We further show that these methods reduce to post-hoc thresholding when no hyperparameters are oriented toward the capacity-constrained objective, and introduce a capacity-aware support vector machine that exploits the constraint during training and achieves the strongest empirical performance. Experiments on the Taiwanese credit card default dataset confirm that capacity-constrained classifiers substantially outperform both classical approaches and SMOTE under high imbalance regimes. The framework extends naturally to multiclass settings and online environments.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to image resolution limits their scalability. Mamba offers a promising alternative due to its linear complexity. However, previous Mamba-based methods have two main limitations. On the one hand, the inherent causal formulation of Mamba constrains the bidirectional spatial dependency modeling required by non-causal vision tasks. On the other hand, existing Mamba-based vision models often overlook the unconstrained high entropy in the spatial token responses, which can weaken local details and high-frequency cues. To address these limitations, we propose MambaCount, an efficient framework built on the Spatial Sparse State Space Duality (S^4D) block. Specifically, we analyze and reconstruct the decay dynamics of hidden states in Mamba to alleviate the dependency constraints introduced by causal modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Spatial Token Selection (STS) sub-block to reduce the unconstrained high entropy in spatial token responses within Mamba. In addition, we design Multi-Granularity Prototypes (MGP) to identify object-like regions at different semantic levels, improving cross-modal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments on FSC-147 demonstrate that MambaCount achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without secondary querying, obtaining a test MAE of 12.23, while retaining linear complexity.

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

MeshFlow: Efficient Artistic Mesh Generation via MeshVAE and Flow-based Diffusion Transformer

We present MeshFlow, a new method for generating artist-like 3D meshes. Current mesh generators often adopt Auto-Regressive (AR) next-token prediction, a natural choice given the discrete nature of mesh topology. However, AR methods scale poorly because the inference cost is quadratic in mesh size. They also require discretizing the vertex coordinates, which introduces quantization errors. To address these challenges, we introduce a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) that, supervised with a contrastive loss, represents both continuous vertex positions and discrete connectivity in a continuous latent space. This latent space is significantly more compact than prior token-based mesh representations. We then build a 3D generator based on a Rectified Flow transformer, generating all mesh vertices and edges in parallel. Our model generates meshes 18x faster than the fastest AR generator while also achieving excellent accuracy across standard mesh-generation metrics. Homepage: https://mesh-flow.github.io/, Code: https://github.com/facebookresearch/meshflow

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum Correlation Hierarchy and Teleportation in Dephased Hydrogen Hyperfine System

arXiv:2606.11731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of quantum correlations in the hydrogen hyperfine spin system subject to Markovian phase noise. Treating the electron and proton spin degrees of freedom as an open two-qubit system governed by an isotropic hyperfine Hamiltonian and local dephasing, we obtain the exact time-dependent density matrix and derive analytical expressions for the full X-state family. We compute concurrence($C$), trace-distance measurement-induced nonlocality (Trace MIN–$\mathcal{N}_1$), and average steering coherence (ASC) in closed form and establish their strict ordering $ C(t)\leq \mathcal{N}_1(t)\leq \mathrm{ASC}(t) $ at all times. Entanglement is identified as the most fragile resource, undergoing sudden death at a finite time. Trace MIN exhibits dephasing-immune freezing for states with nonzero population imbalance, while ASC is the most robust quantity, persisting longest in every scenario studied.We additionally demonstrate that the dephased thermal hyperfine state serves as a resource for quantum teleportation, deriving a closed-form expression for the average fidelity and establishing that the teleportation advantage window coincides exactly with the entanglement survival interval, $\mathcal{F}_A > 2/3 \Longleftrightarrow \mathcal{C} > 0$, for the full X-state family with maximally mixed marginals. We identify four distinct dynamical regimes and map all three correlation measures onto directly measurable Pauli spin correlators, enabling experimental reconstruction of the full hierarchy without full state tomography.

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

Nonlocal continuous-variable gates by amplified optical connections

arXiv:2603.12866v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlocal quantum gates, coupling quantum systems located at a distance, are crucial for distributed quantum computing. To this aim, high-capacity optical noiseless connections between different processing units are essential for transmitting large amounts of information per mode. Simultaneously, optical quantum computing offers future high-speed multimode quantum processors. We propose a library of feasible protocols to implement a necessary nonlocal continuous-variable (CV) quantum nondemolition (QND) gate between two distant users sharing a quantum channel and exploiting classical communication. The users are endowed with a newly achieved high-fidelity and large-bandwith element - single-pass phase-sensitive optical parametric amplifier (OPA), that allows for both online squeezing and channel-loss compensation. The use of OPAs enhances quality of the resulting gate in terms of both excess noise and entangling capability. The proposed schemes are also applicable to CV cluster state fusion, providing a first step towards development of distributed CV measurement-based quantum computation.

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

Curiosity-Critic: Cumulative Prediction Error Improvement as a Tractable Intrinsic Reward for World Model Training

arXiv:2604.18701v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Local prediction-error-based curiosity rewards focus on the current transition without considering the world model's cumulative prediction error across all visited transitions. We introduce Curiosity-Critic, which grounds its intrinsic reward in the improvement of this cumulative objective, and show that it admits a tractable per-step surrogate: the difference between the current prediction error and the asymptotic error baseline of the current state transition. We estimate this error baseline online with a learned critic co-trained alongside the world model; since the critic only has to learn how hard a transition is to predict, its estimate of the irreducible noise floor converges well before the world model saturates, redirecting exploration toward learnable transitions. The reward is higher for learnable transitions and collapses toward zero for stochastic ones, thereby separating epistemic (reducible) from aleatoric (irreducible) prediction error online. Prior prediction-error curiosity formulations, from Schmidhuber (1991) to learned-feature-space variants, emerge as special cases corresponding to specific approximations of this error baseline. Experiments on a stochastic grid world show that Curiosity-Critic outperforms prediction-error, visitation-count, and Random Network Distillation methods in training speed and final world model accuracy.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Decoding the Genetic Architecture of Autistic Traits in the Aging Population

Autism research has mostly focused on diagnostic frameworks in childhood. However, autistic traits including social skills, communication, attention switching, attention to detail, and imagination may also vary in many undiagnosed individuals beyond childhood, and the genetic architecture of autistic traits in undiagnosed aging adults remains poorly understood. Here, we performed an exome-wide association study of autistic traits in adults aged >=40 from the UK Biobank (n = 161,269) and independently validated key findings in the SPARK cohort (n = 142,357). We identified exome-wide significance at 17q21.31, represented by a lead variant associated with social skills (rs199533, beta = 0.081, P = 2.04e-11). In addition, we identified an independent signal for communication (rs12632110, beta = 0.042, P = 3.07e-12) and two independent signals for attention switching (rs690733, beta = 0.046, P = 4.26e-12; rs2164272, beta = -0.047, P = 1.73e-12). Gene-based analyses further implicated loss-of-function variation in ZSCAN2 (beta = 1.00, P = 2.44e-6), which was associated with communication differences. Enrichment analyses revealed preferential expression of implicated genes in the cerebral cortex, while phenotypic and neuroimaging analyses linked those variants to cortical brain structure and regional volume. Taken together, these findings delineate the genetic architecture of autistic traits in the aging population and link genetic variation to downstream molecular and neuroanatomical mechanisms.

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

daVinci-kernel: Co-Evolving Skill Selection, Summarization, and Utilization via RL for GPU Kernel Optimization

GPU kernel optimization represents a paradigm where functional correctness is assumed and execution efficiency is the objective. We present daVinci-kernel, a reinforcement learning framework that couples skill discovery with skill exploitation through a dynamically evolving skill library. daVinci-kernel jointly trains three agents sharing one LLM backbone: a Skill Selection Agent that retrieves relevant techniques via BM25 and LLM reranking, a Policy Agent that generates multi-turn CUDA/Triton kernels conditioned on selected skills, and a Skill Summary Agent that distills successful rollouts into reusable skills. Candidate skills are added only after execution-based verification confirms reproducible speedups. All three agents share a single LLM backbone, are initialized via a structured SFT cold start on diversity-filtered data, and are then jointly optimized end-to-end with multi-turn REINFORCE and per-agent advantage estimation. On KernelBench, daVinci-kernel-14B achieves 37.2%, 70.6%, and 32.2% on Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 under the Fast$_1$ threshold, outperforming the strongest prior RL-trained model, Dr.Kernel-14B.

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

Universality in Ionic Three-body Systems Near an Ion-atom Feshbach Resonance

arXiv:2511.00325v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We calculate bound and scattering properties of a system of two neutral atoms and an ion near an atom-ion Feshbach resonance. Our results indicate that long-range atom-ion interactions lead to significant deviations from universal behavior derived from contact or van der Waals potentials. We find that ionic systems display an overall suppression of inelastic transitions leading to recombination rates and lifetimes of Efimov state orders of magnitude smaller with respect to those for neutral atoms. We further characterize the dense spectra of triatomic molecular ions with extended lifetimes. Our results provide a deeper insight on the universality and structure of three-body ionic systems and establishing them as a promising platform for exploring novel few- and many-body phenomena with long-range interactions.

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

PiDR: Physics-Informed Inertial Dead Reckoning for Autonomous Platforms

arXiv:2601.03040v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A fundamental requirement for full autonomy is the ability to sustain accurate navigation in the absence of external data, such as GNSS signals or visual information. In these challenging environments, the platform must rely exclusively on inertial sensors, leading to pure inertial navigation. However, the inherent noise and other error terms of the inertial sensors in such real-world scenarios will cause the navigation solution to drift over time. Although conventional deep-learning models have emerged as a possible approach to inertial navigation, they are inherently black-box in nature. Furthermore, they struggle to learn effectively with limited supervised sensor data and often fail to preserve physical principles. To address these limitations, we propose PiDR, a physics-informed inertial dead-reckoning framework for autonomous platforms in situations of pure inertial navigation. PiDR offers transparency by explicitly integrating inertial navigation principles into the network training process through the physics-informed residual component. PiDR plays a crucial role in mitigating abrupt trajectory deviations even under limited or sparse supervision. We evaluated PiDR on real-world datasets collected by a mobile robot and an autonomous underwater vehicle. We obtained more than 29% positioning improvement in both datasets, demonstrating the ability of PiDR to generalize different platforms operating in various environments and dynamics. Thus, PiDR offers a robust, lightweight, yet effective architecture and can be deployed on resource-constrained platforms, enabling real-time pure inertial navigation in adverse scenarios.

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

FlowEdit: Associative Memory for Lifelong Pronunciation Adaptation in Flow-Matching TTS

arXiv:2606.20518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching text-to-speech systems achieve remarkable zero-shot quality but remain static after deployment: pronunciation errors on out-of-vocabulary proper nouns persist unless the model is retrained. We introduce FlowEdit, a life-long adaptation framework for frozen flow-matching TTS that learns pronunciation corrections as latent conditioning edits rather than weight updates. When corrective feedback is provided, FlowEdit optimizes a token-level perturbation in the text embedding space, then stores the correction in a Modern Hopfield Network serving as content-addressable episodic memory. At inference, corrections are retrieved via soft attention with a similarity gate, enabling fuzzy morphological matching. On our curated benchmark of 312 multilingual proper nouns across 18 language families, FlowEdit reduces target-word Phoneme Error Rate by 92.7% relative to the zero-shot baseline while maintaining identical general-speech quality. Corrections complete in approximately 15 seconds on a single GPU.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Test-Time Training for Robust Text-Guided Open-Vocabulary Object Counting

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) enables counting arbitrary object categories specified by text prompts, offering substantially greater flexibility than conventional closed-set counting. However, existing TOOC methods are developed and evaluated primarily on ideal images, while real-world scenes often suffer from adverse conditions such as rain, fog, darkness, and sensor noise, which severely degrade visual quality and impair vision-language alignment. To bridge this gap, we introduce Robust-TOOC, the first benchmark for evaluating TOOC under diverse corruption conditions, which covers six representative degradation types: rain, fog, darkness, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and mixed corruption. To improve robustness while preserving the original counting architecture, we propose Dual-TTT, a dual-architecture test-time training framework for TOOC. Specifically, during test-time training, Dual-TTT updates only the Text-guided Lightweight Denoising module (TL-Denoiser), while keeping the original counting network frozen. Inspired by diffusion models, the TL-Denoiser is optimized to remove corruption-aware noise from image representations under degraded conditions. Since only the TL-Denoiser is trained at test time, Dual-TTT is annotation-free and can be seamlessly integrated into existing TOOC models without modifying their original architecture. Extensive experiments on multiple recent TOOC baselines demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Wigner Negativity in Scattering Processes Using Energetic Cost Functions

arXiv:2606.15101v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wigner negativities (WNs) are key signatures of non-Gaussian bosonic states and essential resources for quantum technologies. We study their generation in the scattering of coherent pulses by a two-level atom coupled to a one-dimensional reservoir, a unitary and energy-preserving platform. Optimization in this multimode setting is hindered by the complexity of evaluating Wigner functions. We overcome this challenge by introducing energetic cost functions that identify output modes most likely to host large negativities. First using incoherent energy and then isolating a genuinely non-Gaussian contribution, we demonstrate a strong correlation between these quantities and WNs. This correlation extends beyond short, intense pulses to encompass pulses of finite energy, where photons are scattered while the two-level atom is driven. Focusing on the energy-efficiency of the process, we show that maximally efficient generation takes place for one input photon, on average, spectrally mode-matched with the atom.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Can LLMs Be CEOs? Benchmarking Strategic Resource Reallocation with Multi-Role Agent Simulation

arXiv:2606.17459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the decision-making capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is a growing research priority, yet existing benchmarks focus on isolated cognitive tasks such as reasoning, knowledge retrieval, and economic rationality in stylized settings. These evaluations overlook the defining challenge of real executive decision-making: integrating conflicting recommendations from specialized stakeholders under information asymmetry, organizational constraints, and temporal dependencies. We introduce \textsc{CEO-Bench}, a multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on CEO-level strategic resource reallocation – the process of redirecting capital across business units in a multi-round, constraint-rich organizational environment. In \textsc{CEO-Bench}, LLM agents receive conflicting advice from four role-conditioned C-suite advisors (CFO, CTO, COO, CMO), each with private signals and distinct priorities, and must synthesize these into a concrete allocation plan evaluated along four dimensions: role integration, conditional boldness, history-sensitive judgment, and plan validity. Experiments across five frontier models on 13 scenarios reveal that all models achieve high structural validity but diverge sharply on strategic calibration – the hardest capability layer. We identify systematic failure modes including single-advisor capture, conservative default under ambiguity, and historical amnesia, and uncover a structural integration-boldness tradeoff: models that engage more deeply with conflicting perspectives tend to produce less decisive action. These findings delineate the current capability boundary of LLMs as organizational decision-makers and inform the design of future AI-assisted executive systems.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Exercise Training Improves Skeletal Muscle Insulin Sensitivity and Reprograms the Adipose Transcriptome in Heavier Monozygotic Twins

Exercise training improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, yet its effects on white adipose tissue remain incompletely understood. We investigated how adiposity and exercise training influence insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (ASAT), alongside adaptations in gene expression and DNA-methylation. Ten monozygotic twin pairs discordant for BMI underwent [18F]FDG-PET/CT imaging of skeletal muscle (vastus lateralis, VL) and ASAT during a euglycemic-hyperinsulinaemic clamp before and after six months of exercise training. VL and ASAT biopsies were analyzed using mRNA-sequencing and reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. Exercise training improved whole-body and VL insulin sensitivity in leaner and heavier co-twins (p

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

Stepwise Token Selection for Efficient Multimodal Large Language Models

In multimodal large language models (MLLMs), inference cost is largely dominated by the visual token prefix rather than the language backbone, making token reduction a key factor for improving efficiency. Existing approaches typically assign independent importance scores to visual tokens and retain a fixed number of top-ranked tokens, implicitly assuming token independence and a uniform compression ratio across inputs. In this work, we reformulate visual token pruning as a sequential decision-making process. Specifically, we introduce a pointer-style selection mechanism that iteratively chooses informative tokens, conditioning each decision on previously selected ones, and dynamically determines when to stop via a learned termination action. This enables joint optimization of both the selected subset and its size. To enable end-to-end training under standard language modeling objectives, we design a differentiable relaxation based on a variance-preserving noise interpolation scheme, allowing gradients to propagate through the discrete selection process. Extensive experiments on LLaVA-v1.5-7B and Qwen2.5-VL-7B demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms fixed-ratio baselines across different compression levels. Under aggressive pruning that removes 88.9% of visual tokens, our method preserves 94.6% of the original accuracy while achieving a 1.88x speed-up in prefill latency.

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

Foresight: Iterative Reasoning About Clues that Matter for Navigation

arXiv:2606.12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal. For instance, reaching an out-of-view destination may require interpreting ramps, signs, or detours that reveal where to go or which route to take. Prior works are limited by their reliance on known navigation factors and closed-set factor categories, or identify cues before motion planning and miss plan-dependent cues. We argue that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can discover novel instruction-relevant cues, but require adaptation to focus on which cues matter and how they should influence motion planning. We realize these ideas in Foresight, a test-time framework in which a finetuned VLM alternates between proposing image-space motion plans and critiquing them using the language goal and visual context. Subsequent plans are conditioned on prior critiques, enabling iterative motion refinement before execution. To align plan critiques and refinements with open-set behavior preferences, we learn a reward model from human feedback and use it to post-train the VLM with reinforcement learning in the plan-critique loop. In offline evaluations and 6 real-world environments, Foresight improves average task success by 37% and reduces interventions per mission by 52% relative to state-of-the-art test-time reasoning and foundation-model baselines, while running in real-time on a Jetson AGX Orin. We will release code, data, and training details to support future work on test-time reasoning for robot motion refinement. Additional videos at: https://amrl.cs.utexas.edu/foresight

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Sequential Kernel-based Conditional Independence Testing via Adaptive Betting

arXiv:2606.18993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Testing conditional independence is fundamental yet intrinsically difficult: without additional assumptions, Type I error control is impossible in general. The "Model-X'' paradigm addresses this difficulty by assuming exact knowledge of a relevant conditional distribution. While small deviations from this assumption can sometimes be tolerated in classical one-shot testing, existing sequential conditional independence tests typically require the Model-X conditional to be known exactly, making them fragile when it must instead be estimated. We propose a new approach that is substantially more robust to such estimation error. Our method applies testing-by-betting to an adaptively optimized Kernel Conditional Independence statistic, together with a normalization scheme and a truncate-and-shift calibration strategy. These modifications greatly reduce Type I error inflation while preserving high power across high-dimensional synthetic benchmarks and real-world fairness tasks, outperforming existing sequential Model-X approaches. Code is available at https://github.com/he-zh/SKCI.