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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Objective Quality Assessment of Point Clouds Using Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity

The unstructured and irregular nature of points poses a significant challenge for accurate point cloud quality assessment (PCQA), particularly in establishing accurate perceptual feature correspondence. To tackle this, we propose the Multi-scale Implicit Structural Similarity Measurement (MS-ISSM). Unlike traditional point-to-point matching, MS-ISSM utilizes radial basis function (RBF) to represent local features continuously, transforming distortion measurement into a comparison of implicit function coefficients. This approach effectively circumvents matching errors inherent in irregular data. Additionally, we propose a ResGrouped-MLP quality assessment network, which robustly maps multi-scale feature differences to perceptual scores. The network architecture departs from traditional flat multi-layer perceptron (MLP) by adopting a grouped encoding strategy integrated with residual blocks and channel-wise attention mechanisms. This hierarchical design allows the model to preserve the distinct physical semantics of luma, chroma, and geometry while adaptively focusing on the most salient distortion features across High, Medium, and Low scales. Experimental results on multiple benchmarks demonstrate that MS-ISSM outperforms state-of-the-art metrics in both reliability and generalization. The source code is available at: https://github.com/ZhangChen2022/MS-ISSM.

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

Confidence is Not Reliability: Rethinking MC Dropout in Brain Tumour Segmentation

Glioma segmentation in multiparametric MRI is a critical component of treatment planning. A segmentation model that fails silently on treatment-critical sub-regions represents a patient safety risk that overlap-based metrics such as Dice scores cannot expose. We ask whether voxel-level uncertainty estimation via Monte Carlo (MC) Dropout can reliably identify segmentation errors in clinically critical sub-regions, and whether calibration failure modes are detectable from standard reporting metrics alone. In an empirical two-model case study on 126 BraTS21 patients, we evaluate a high-performance pretrained SegResNet and a locally trained UNet with residual units (UNet-Res). MC dropout preserved segmentation accuracy ($|\Delta Dice|$ $

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Initiation of Superradiance from Different Collective Spin States

arXiv:2606.14949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superradiance is an extensive cooperative spontaneous emission phenomenon. Some atomic collective spin states exhibit it. However, distinct initial states differ in their decay dynamics. Dicke states with different numbers of excitations have their peak emission intensity shifted in time depending on the number of excitations. Emission intensity in atomic coherent states depends on their polarization. Some specific states undergo a squeezing controlled crossover, making the emission character dependent on the amount of squeezing in the state. We present detailed results on the superradiant dynamics of a representative selection of Dicke states. For large N, we are able to predict fairly accurately the pulse profile in each case using the mean field approximation, an approach based on the Fokker Planck Equation. We also present results on the intensity correlation function of the emission.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RAMS: Resource-Adaptive and Detection-Conditioned Model Switching for Embedded Edge Perception

Edge object detection on embedded hardware requires balancing inference latency and detection quality under changing resource pressure. We present RAMS, a lightweight runtime controller that monitors device pressure, calibrates switching thresholds from idle behavior, and dynamically selects among three resident YOLOv8 tiers (NANO/SMALL/MEDIUM at 320/416/640 px) without model-reload latency. RAMS defines five switching policies, including two detection-conditioned variants that prevent aggressive downgrades after recent vulnerable-road-user (VRU) detections. We further introduce the VRU-Weighted Accuracy Score (SWAS), a scalar metric for offline policy comparison without ground-truth annotations, together with an oracle-bounded variant that separates detector circularity from genuine tier-retention benefit. Across Raspberry Pi 5, x86 laptops, and Jetson Orin ONNX/TensorRT deployments, the same controller equations operate over a 37x latency range. On Jetson Orin TensorRT under heavy load, the safety2 policy achieves 3.41 ms mean latency, 5.6x faster than fixed-MEDIUM inference, while retaining 74% of its proxy accuracy through near-NANO operation with selective SMALL and MEDIUM locks during VRU-positive windows. Detection-conditioned switching improves SWAS by 25.4% under oracle scoring and 47.3% under detector-derived scoring relative to threshold-only policies under heavy load. Live KITTI evaluation reports per-tier VRU recall of 24.2%, 41.2%, and 59.0%, showing that reactive overrides are fundamentally limited by baseline detector recall.

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

Improving Detection of Rare Nodes in Hierarchical Multi-Label Learning

arXiv:2602.08986v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In hierarchical multi-label classification, a persistent challenge is enabling model predictions to reach deeper levels of the hierarchy for more detailed or fine-grained classifications. This difficulty partly arises from the natural rarity of certain classes (or hierarchical nodes) and the hierarchical constraint that ensures child nodes are almost always less frequent than their parents. To address this, we propose a weighted loss objective for neural networks that combines node-wise imbalance weighting with focal weighting components, the latter leveraging modern quantification of ensemble uncertainties. By emphasizing rare nodes rather than rare observations (data points), and focusing on uncertain nodes for each model output distribution during training, we observe improvements in recall by up to a factor of five on benchmark datasets, along with statistically significant gains in $F_{1}$ score. We also show our approach aids convolutional networks on challenging tasks, as in situations with suboptimal encoders or limited data.

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

Prefill/Decode-Aware Evaluation of LLM Inference on Emerging AI Accelerators

arXiv:2606.17104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in latency- and cost-sensitive settings, inference efficiency has become a central systems challenge. While GPUs dominate current deployments, a growing number of AI accelerators claim advantages for LLM inference, yet it remains unclear under which conditions such accelerators outperform GPUs in practice. Recent inference systems decompose execution into Prefill and Decode phases, which exhibit distinct computational characteristics and latency metrics, commonly captured by time to first token (TTFT) and time per output token (TPOT). This paper presents a phase-aware evaluation of LLM inference performance across GPUs and emerging AI accelerators using a common model, Llama2-7B. By separately measuring Prefill and Decode performance, we reveal that accelerator advantages differ by phase and metric. Our results show that GPUs consistently excel in the compute-intensive Prefill phase, while GroqRack achieves significantly lower TPOT during Decode (batching not currently supported). However, GPUs regain an advantage in Decode throughput as batch size increases. These findings demonstrate that each platform exhibits distinct phase-dependent strengths. We further analyze heterogeneous Prefill/Decode disaggregation across different accelerator platforms, identifying performance gains and the workload and network conditions under which such gains are realized.

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

When Does q-error Predict Plan Regret? Three Regimes of Cardinality-Estimation Error

arXiv:2606.15600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cardinality-estimation (CE) research ranks estimators by q-error, yet it is well known that q-error is an imperfect proxy for query-plan quality. We give a measurement-driven account of when it is a good proxy and when it is not, and why. Modeling plan selection as an argmin over a piecewise-linear cost landscape, we find that plan regret (the cost of the chosen plan relative to the optimal, under true cardinalities) is governed by plan-cost geometry in a regime-dependent way. (i) For small errors, a true-point condition number kappa predicts regret and out-predicts q-error; its predictive power decays to zero as error grows, as a local linearization must. (ii) For large errors – where deployed learned estimators operate – an estimator-independent average-case sub-optimality measure ACS-infinity predicts which queries are regret-prone (Spearman rho ~ 0.54 on STATS-CEB), while q-error is nearly uninformative at the query level (rho ~ 0.05). (iii) The worst case is Haritsa's maximum sub-optimality (MSO). The three are one cost-ratio spectrum under three weightings. We prove a limit law ACS-infinity = sum_k r_k pi_k with cardinality-independent combinatorial weights, and validate every claim on STATS-CEB and JOB-light with four released estimators under pre-registered decision rules, and confirm on real PostgreSQL runtime that ACS-infinity predicts regret where q-error does not. The contribution is conceptual and empirical – an average-case companion to worst-case robust query optimization, and a characterization of when an accuracy metric tracks plan quality – rather than a new estimator. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Sure-almost-sure and Sure-limit-sure Window Mean Payoff in Markov Decision Processes

arXiv:2605.12191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given rationals $\alpha$ and $\beta$, the sure-almost-sure problem for a threshold Boolean objective $\varphi$ in a Markov decision process (MDP) asks if one can simultaneously ensure that all outcomes of the MDP have $\varphi$-value at least $\alpha$ (i.e. sure $\alpha$ satisfaction) and with probability $1$ the outcome has $\varphi$-value at least $\beta$ (i.e. almost-sure $\beta$ satisfaction). The sure-limit-sure problem asks if for all $\varepsilon > 0$ one can simultaneously ensure that all outcomes have $\varphi$-value at least $\alpha$ and with probability at least $1 - \varepsilon$ the outcome has $\varphi$-value at least $\beta$. Moreover, if simultaneous satisfaction of objectives is possible, then one would also like to construct a strategy (for sure-almost-sure) or a family of strategies (for sure-limit-sure) that achieves this. In this paper, we solve the sure-almost-sure and sure-limit-sure problems for window mean-payoff objectives. The window mean-payoff objective strengthens the standard mean-payoff objective by requiring that eventually, from every point in the infinite run, the average payoff becomes greater than a given threshold within a finite window length. We study two variants of window mean payoff: in the fixed variant, the window length $\ell$ is given, while in the bounded variant, the length is not given but is required to be bounded throughout the run. We show that the sure-almost-sure problem and the sure-limit-sure problem are both in P for the fixed variant (if $\ell$ is given in unary) and are both in NP $\cap$ coNP for the bounded variant, matching the computational complexity of sure satisfaction and almost-sure satisfaction when considered separately for these objectives. We also give bounds for the memory requirement of winning strategies for all considered problems.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Optimality Condition for the Petz Map

arXiv:2410.23622v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum error correction, the Petz map serves as a perfect recovery map when the Knill-Laflamme conditions are satisfied. Notably, while perfect recovery is generally infeasible for most quantum channels of finite dimension, the Petz map remains a versatile tool with near-optimal performance in recovering quantum states. This work introduces and proves, for the first time, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of the Petz map in terms of entanglement fidelity. In some special cases, the violation of this condition can be easily characterized by a simple commutator that can be efficiently computed. We provide multiple examples that substantiate our new findings.

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

Convergence Rate Analysis of the AdamW-style Shampoo: Unifying One-Sided and Two-Sided Preconditioning

arXiv:2601.07326v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies AdamW-style Shampoo, an effective variant of the classical Shampoo that won the external tuning track of the AlgoPerf neural network training competition. Our analysis unifies one-sided and two-sided preconditioning. When the exponents of the two preconditioners sum to $1/2$, we establish the convergence rate $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_*\right]\leq O(\frac{\sqrt{m+n}C}{K^{1/4}})$, where $K$ represents the number of iterations, $(m,n)$ denotes the dimensions of the matrix-valued parameters, and $C$ matches the constant appearing in the optimal convergence rate of SGD. Theoretically, the nuclear norm and Frobenius norm satisfy $||\nabla f(X)||_F\leq ||\nabla f(X)||_*\leq \sqrt{\min\{m,n\}}||\nabla f(X)||_F$, which suggests that our convergence rate is analogous to the optimal $\frac{1}{K}\sum_{k=1}^KE\left[||\nabla f(X_k)||_F\right]\leq O(\frac{C}{K^{1/4}})$ convergence rate of SGD in the ideal case where $||\nabla f(X)||_*= \Theta(\sqrt{\min\{m,n\}})||\nabla f(X)||_F$ and $m$ and $n$ are of comparable magnitude. Then, we extend our analysis to settings where the preconditioning exponents do not sum to 1/2, and establish convergence with an explicit but more involved rate.

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

G-IdiomAlign: A Gloss-Pivoted Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Idiom Alignment

Idioms are difficult to transfer across languages due to their non-compositionality and weak surface-form grounding, making literal mappings unreliable. We present G-IdiomAlign, a gloss-pivoted benchmark where each idiom is anchored by an English gloss from Wiktionary. We further construct a high-confidence reference alignment set for reproducible evaluation. G-IdiomAlign supports two protocols: (1) a controlled Multiple-Choice Idiom Equivalence with typed distractors for error attribution; and (2) a Gloss-Contrastive Generation contrasting No-gloss and With-gloss inputs to isolate the effect of an explicit semantic pivot. Across diverse LLMs, a bias to literal translation is a dominant failure mode, especially when the target is a low-resource language. Glosses consistently improve Gloss-Contrastive Generation under an embedding-based semantic proxy, but performance remains modest, indicating substantial headroom in the open output space. Subsequent analysis on Qwen3-8B further suggests that cross-condition differences are concentrated more in attention heads than in layers, while better With-gloss generations coincide with stronger gloss anchoring.

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

ProPlay: Procedural World Models for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

Self-evolving agents are expected to improve through interaction without external supervision, but this remains difficult in partially observable environments where agents must explore actively, learn from limited feedback, and decide when to trust prior experience. Existing LLM-agent methods often rely on memory or planning modules, yet they rarely close the loop between them to continually refine an internal understanding of environment dynamics. We introduce ProPlay, a procedural world model that supports procedure-level preplay, where agents can rehearse future procedural paths using the learned world knowledge. Rather than representing experience as isolated rules or low-level action constraints, ProPlay abstracts successful trajectories into procedures and organizes them in a procedure graph that captures causal transitions among task stages. Each transition is associated with a reliability record embedding to estimate its task-specific contribution from past outcomes. Before each episode, ProPlay simulates future procedural trajectories over known graph structures as structured soft guidance; after execution, it refines the graph using environment feedback. Experiments on public benchmarks show that ProPlay consistently improves environment understanding and self-evolution capability over strong baselines. Our code has been released in https://github.com/antman9914/proplay.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Ricci flow for the Bures–Helstrom qubit metric

arXiv:2606.19493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Bures–Helstrom metric is the minimal monotone Riemannian metric on the state space of a qubit. With the quantum Fisher normalization used here, it identifies the Bloch ball with a geodesic hemisphere of the unit round three–sphere. We describe its Ricci flow explicitly. In a general rotationally symmetric gauge the flow is a coupled system for the radial lapse and warping factor; a single scalar equation appears only after a Hamilton–DeTurck gauge choice. In the corresponding moving DeTurck frame the squared warping function $\Psi=\Phi^2$ satisfies the linear forced heat equation \begin{equation*} D_t\Psi=\Psi_{ss}-2, \end{equation*} while the fixed-lapse coordinate form contains the associated transport term. Since the Bures–Helstrom metric is Einstein, the geometric flow itself is the homothetic shrinker \begin{equation*} g(t)=(1-4t)g_{\mathrm{BH}}, \end{equation*} with scalar curvature $6/(1-4t)$ and extinction time $T=1/4$. Thus the metric remains inside the monotone cone for all $t

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Uniform-in-time error estimates for McKean-Vlasov SDEs with common noise and stochastic algorithms

arXiv:2606.14170v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, by construct an asymptotic coupling by reflection, we first explore the uniform-in-time estimate on probability distance for two measure-valued processes induced by a McKean-Vlasov SDE with common noise and an interacting particle system, where the drift terms are dissipative merely in the long distance. As direct applications of this estimate, we establish the uniform-in-time error estimates for the numerical solutions derived via backward/tamed/adaptive Euler-Maruyama methods. Moreover, as another direct application, the uniform-in-time conditional propagation of chaos is quantified.

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

Time Series Causal Discovery via Context-Conditioned and Causality-Augmented Pretraining

arXiv:2605.26759v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Causal discovery from time series is critical for many real-world applications, such as tracing the root causes of anomalies. Existing approaches typically rely on dataset-specific optimization, making it difficult to transfer their causal discovery capabilities to new time series governed by diverse causal mechanisms. In this paper, we propose PTCD, a novel Pretraining framework for Time-series Causal Discovery, which improves cross-task generalization through context-conditioned modeling and transferable causal augmentation. To model complex temporal causal dependencies, PTCD employs a dual-scale iterative attention mechanism to capture window-level causal relationships, and a Gaussian mixture with a context-level routing mechanism to handle heterogeneous exogenous distributions. To further address distribution shifts across causal graphs, PTCD adopts a pretraining paradigm on synthetic datasets that integrates intervention-based learning and a causal mixup strategy, promoting stable causal discovery and stronger generalization. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets demonstrate that PTCD excels in both causal discovery and root cause identification.

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

Does Traversal Order Matter? A Systematic Study of Tree Traversal Methods in Transformer Grammars

Transformer Grammars (TGs) enhance language modeling by incorporating syntactic tree structures. Despite the potentially significant impact on model performance of how syntactic trees are linearized in TGs, existing studies rely solely on Depth-First Traversal (DFT) for linearization. In this paper, we expand the traversal design space by exploring Breadth-First Traversal (BFT) and a novel hybrid traversal strategy, Production-Rule Traversal (PRT), which combines the structural lookahead of BFT with the early lexical generation of DFT. We integrate these traversal methods with varying tree configurations and masking strategies, and empirically evaluate their performance on language modeling, syntactic generalization and summarization. We reveal the inherent trade-offs between nested composition and global lookahead, providing actionable recommendations for designing task-aware Transformer Grammars.

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

When to Trust, How to Distill: Multi-Foundation Model Guidance for Lightweight, Robust Scientific Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.19363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of Time-Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) in physical sciences is hindered by a critical trade-off: while these models encode rich, universal temporal dynamics, they suffer from severe distributional misalignment when applied zero-shot to specific scientific domains, and their computational cost prohibits deployment in edge-computing sensor networks. We address a fundamental challenge: How can we extract latent structural knowledge from misaligned foundation models (FM) to train lightweight, specialized forecasters? We propose Gated Uncertainty-Aware Routing for Distillation (Guard), a novel framework that reframes multiteacher distillation as an instance-wise decision process with two adaptive mechanisms: (1) a Contextual Router that dynamically selects the most relevant teacher based on local input statistics, exploiting complementarity across diverse foundation models; and (2) an Uncertainty-Gated Temperature mechanism that acts as a "circuit-breaker," automatically attenuating distillation strength when teacher confidence diverges from domain reality. We evaluate our proposed lightweight framework on four climate-critical domains: meteorology, ecosystem carbon flux, soil moisture, and energy grids. Our method significantly reduces RMSE relative to a fixed-weight multi-teacher distillation baseline, successfully distilling knowledge from pretrained FMs (teachers) even when they exhibit suboptimal zero-shot accuracy due to distribution shift between the original and target data domains. We demonstrate that these domain-misaligned teachers can still serve as critical correctives, outperforming the globally superior FMs on 28.5% of the hardest instances. Ultimately, this enables high-precision scientific forecasting suitable for resource-constrained edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/RupasreeDey/GUARD-KDD2026.

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

Exploiting More Than Symmetry in Variational Quantum Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.20316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The success of variational quantum learning models crucially depends on choosing parametrizations that reflect the structure of the problem at hand. Symmetries provide one of the clearest such structures: whenever transformations of the input leave the desired outcome unchanged, this invariance should be built into the model rather than discovered during training. However, imposing a symmetry does not by itself determine a useful ansatz. Even within the symmetry-preserving space, one must decide where the trainable degrees of freedom should be placed. In this work, we study this remaining design freedom in equivariant variational quantum circuits. Building on symmetry-based parameter sharing, we disentangle two architectural choices: how much symmetry should be enforced, and which symmetry-respecting interactions should be trainable. Using Tic-Tac-Toe as a fully enumerable and structurally transparent test case, we find that suitable subgroups preserve most of the generalization benefit. By contrast, the dominant gains arise from gates acting directly on decisive task motifs. Thus, symmetry defines the admissible design space, while effective ansatze require an additional task-informed choice of trainable interactions.

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

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.

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

Reference-Driven Multi-Speaker Audio Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Priors

Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings. These systems operate within speech-only pipelines that produce clean vocal sequences without the ambient texture of real conversations. We take a different approach. Our method, ScenA, conditions a text-to-audio flow-matching foundation model, pretrained on large-scale in-the-wild data, directly on multiple reference voices and a free-form natural language prompt that describes an entire multi-speaker audio scene. Leveraging such a foundational model allows us to inherit its capacity for natural, non-studio audio: background noise, room acoustics, overlapping dialogue, and spontaneous paralinguistic events, while adding multi-speaker control without any per-turn structure. Concretely, reference latents are concatenated into the model's token sequence and distinguished by lightweight identity-aware positional encodings. However, we identify a critical obstacle to this approach: the Reference Shortcut. During training under standard noise schedules, the model can identify the matching reference by acoustic similarity to the noisy target, bypassing the text prompt entirely. We address this with a high-noise-biased timestep distribution that forces the model to rely on the text prompt for speaker assignment. We evaluate ScenA on the CoVoMix2-Dialogue benchmark, showing that it outperforms existing multi-speaker systems on speaker-binding metrics while generating rich conversational audio with overlapping speech, emotional vocalizations, and ambient sound. Our results demonstrate the advantage of using a general-purpose audio model conditioned on a free-form scene description, rather than passing structured dialog scripts through a speech-only pipeline.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

WISE: A Long-Horizon Agent in Minecraft with Why-Which Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is not only the lack of episodic memory, but also the decoupling of what-where-when memory from which-why reasoning. To address this, we propose WISE (Which-Why Informed Semantic Explorer), a long-horizon agent framework with an enhanced low-level controller equipped with a Causal Event Graph that augments episodic memory with explicit causal structure linking observations to task relevance. Unlike prior work such as MrSteve, which relies on feature similarity for retrieval, WISE enables robust recall under viewpoint changes and supports opportunistic task reordering through causal reasoning. Building on this memory, we propose an Opportunistic Task Scheduler that dynamically re-prioritizes subtasks when causally relevant opportunities are detected. We further equip WISE with a multi-scale progressive exploration strategy to provide spatially comprehensive observations for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that WISE largely improves task success and efficiency on long-horizon sparse tasks, particularly in settings requiring adaptive decision-making.

24.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Clinical Profile and Genomic Characterization of the 2026 Bundibugyo Virus Index Case in Uganda

Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) remains a high-consequence threat in Eastern and Central Africa, where cross-border mobility, nonspecific early symptoms, and delayed recognition can obscure transmission. In this case report, we describe Uganda’s 2026 BVD index case: a male patient who traveled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda and was admitted to a private hospital in Kampala on 11 May 2026 after more than two weeks of vomiting and diarrhea, with epigastric pain, weakness, and hiccups. He deteriorated rapidly, developing acute kidney injury, pulmonary edema, hepatic dysfunction, hypoxemia, delirium, atrial flutter, possible disseminated intravascular coagulation, and multiorgan failure, and died on 14 May. A posthumous EDTA whole-blood specimen tested at the Central Emergency Response and Surveillance Laboratory was positive for orthoebolavirus RNA and confirmed as Bundibugyo virus (BDBV) by RT-qPCR. Sequencing achieved 99% genome coverage at ≥100× depth. The 2026 BDBV genome formed a distinct lineage approximately equidistant from the 2007–2008 Butalya and 2012 Isiro variants, differing by 216–227 nucleotides (~1.2% sequence divergence). Here, we demonstrate the value of fatality surveillance, private-sector surveillance, diagnostic optimization through national specimen referral, and rapid molecular-genomic diagnostics for early detection, transmission chain interruption, and public health response coordination.

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

Dr-DCI: Scaling Direct Corpus Interaction via Dynamic Workspace Expansion

Agentic search over large corpora relies on retriever-mediated interfaces (e.g., BM25 or ColBERT) for scalable candidate discovery. While effective at ranking relevant documents, these interfaces expose evidence only as ranked results or bounded document views, limiting agents' ability to reorganize material and verify constraints across documents. Direct Corpus Interaction (DCI) addresses this limitation by exposing shell-executable corpus operations for flexible search, filtering, comparison, and verification. However, full-corpus terminal commands become slow and unstable as the corpus grows, degrading performance and efficiency. We introduce DR-DCI, a retriever-steered DCI framework that treats retrieval as an agent-callable action for expanding a local workspace. Rather than operating directly over the full corpus, the agent dynamically pulls relevant documents into an evolving workspace and conducts DCI operations within it. This design combines retriever-level recall with DCI-style precision: retrieval keeps exploration scalable, while DCI preserves the local operations needed for effective evidence resolution. Experiments show that DR-DCI is both effective and efficient across scales. On Browsecomp-Plus, DR-DCI reaches 71.2\% accuracy, improving over raw DCI and ablated variants by up to 8.3 points while reducing tool usage, wall time, and estimated cost. With workspace-preserving context reset, accuracy further improves to 73.3\%. In corpus-scaling experiments, DR-DCI remains effective from 100K to 10M documents, whereas raw DCI becomes unstable and BM25 performs substantially worse. DR-DCI also scales to a 20M-scale file-per-document Wiki-18 QA setting, achieving an average score of 63.0 across six benchmarks and outperforming retrieval-based and trained search-agent baselines. Ablation analysis further shows that ranked previews and inter-document DCI are key to performance.