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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

How should I respond to race-based exclusion in my lab?

作者:

A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position? A researcher in Europe feels left out of their team and held to different standards from their colleagues. How can they challenge exclusion without risking their position?

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

Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigation

World action models~(WAMs) have shown great promise for autonomous driving and urban navigation. Built upon Vision-Language-Action models or video generation models, existing approaches suffer key limitations: (1) High inference latency due to future observation prediction at test time, and (2) tightly coupled video and action modeling leading to representational mismatch and degraded generalization. To address both issues, we propose Metis, an end-to-end WAM framework that decouples video generation and action prediction. Specifically, Metis employs a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture with dedicated experts for video generation and action prediction, preserving the intrinsic distributional properties of each task. To enhance efficiency, we introduce an asymmetric attention mask that enables joint training of both experts while allowing the action model to bypass explicit video generation during inference. This design ensures training-inference consistency and significantly reduces computational costs without compromising planning performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM navhard and navtest benchmarks and the CityWalker navigation benchmark, validating both the generalizability and efficiency across diverse tasks. Real-robot deployments further confirm the practical feasibility of our approach.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Capital Asset Pricing Model with Size Factor and Normalizing by Volatility Index

arXiv:2411.19444v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) relates a well-diversified stock portfolio to a benchmark portfolio. We insert size effect in CAPM, capturing the observation that small stocks have higher risk and return than large stocks, on average. For some size-based stock portfolios, dividing their returns by the Volatility Index makes them closer to independent and normal. In this article, we combine these ideas to create a new discrete-time model, which includes volatility, relative size, and CAPM. We fit this model using real-world data, prove the long-term stability, and connect this research to Stochastic Portfolio Theory. We fill important gaps in our previous article on CAPM with the size factor.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CoAgent: Concurrency Control for Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.15376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems – coding agents, devops agents, document agents – now routinely run several agents in parallel against the same git tree, Kubernetes cluster, or document. As soon as two of them mutate shared state, they enter the regime classical concurrency control has studied for decades, but classical mechanisms fit LLM agents poorly. A single agent transaction spans minutes of inference, read sets are broad and opaque rather than statically inferable, and the live state agents act on admits neither fork nor buffer, so writes take effect the moment they execute. Locks block long inference intervals; OCC abort-and-retry discards minutes of work on every conflict. This paper builds concurrency control on a capability classical transactions lack: the LLM inside each agent can judge whether a conflicting write invalidates its plan, and can repair exactly the operations that depended on it. Control therefore turns advisory: the runtime informs, the agent repairs. Our protocol, MTPO (Monotonic Trajectory Pre-Order), fixes a serialization order at launch, serves each read the order-filtered value, and applies writes speculatively in place; a one-way notification asks an affected reader to re-judge and patch its plan, while the framework mechanically undoes and reorders misplaced writes through the saga-style inverse each tool registers in advance. At quiescence the run is serializable in the pre-decided order. We realize MTPO as CoAgent, toolcall middleware whose privileged ToolSmith grows footprint-declared, undoable tools online. On ten contended workloads, CoAgent stays within 5\% of serial correctness at a $1.4\times$ speedup and near-serial token cost, where 2PL and OCC surrender nearly all concurrency gains; on a bash-only target system, it grows a 25-tool library online and lifts the task pass rate from 45/71 to 63/71 at $0.80\times$ the time and $0.86\times$ the cost.

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

Adaptive Model-Predictive Control of a Soft Continuum Robot Using a Physics-Informed Neural Network Based on Cosserat Rod Theory

arXiv:2508.12681v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic control of soft continuum robots (SCRs) holds great potential for expanding their applications, but remains a challenging problem due to the high computational demands of accurate dynamic models. While data-driven approaches like Koopman-operator-based methods have been proposed, they typically lack adaptability and cannot reconstruct the full robot shape, limiting their applicability. This work introduces a real-time-capable nonlinear model-predictive control (MPC) framework for SCRs based on a domain-decoupled physics-informed neural network (DD-PINN) with adaptable bending stiffness. The DD-PINN serves as a surrogate for the dynamic Cosserat rod model with a speed-up factor of up to 44,000. It is also used within an unscented Kalman filter for estimating the model states and bending compliance from end-effector position measurements. We implement a nonlinear evolutionary MPC running at 70 Hz on the GPU. In simulation, it demonstrates accurate tracking of dynamic trajectories and setpoint control with end-effector position errors below 3 mm (2.3\% of the actuator's length). In real-world experiments, the controller achieves similar accuracy and accelerations up to 3.55 m/s2.

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

SPDA-SAM: A Self-prompted Depth-Aware Segment Anything Model for Instance Segmentation

Recently, Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated strong generalizability in various instance segmentation tasks. However, its performance is severely dependent on the quality of manual prompts. In addition, the RGB images that instance segmentation methods normally use inherently lack depth information. As a result, the ability of these methods to perceive spatial structures and delineate object boundaries is hindered. To address these challenges, we propose a Self-prompted Depth-Aware SAM (SPDA-SAM) for instance segmentation. Specifically, we design a Semantic-Spatial Self-prompt Module (SSSPM) which extracts the semantic and spatial prompts from the image encoder and the mask decoder of SAM, respectively. Furthermore, we introduce a Coarse-to-Fine RGB-D Fusion Module (C2FFM), in which the features extracted from a monocular RGB image and the depth map estimated from it are fused. In particular, the structural information in the depth map is used to provide coarse-grained guidance to feature fusion, while local variations in depth are encoded in order to fuse fine-grained feature representations. To our knowledge, SAM has not been explored in such self-prompted and depth-aware manners. Experimental results demonstrate that our SPDA-SAM outperforms its state-of-the-art counterparts across twelve different data sets. These promising results should be due to the guidance of the self-prompts and the compensation for the spatial information loss by the coarse-to-fine RGB-D fusion operation.

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

Can LLM Agents Infer World Models? Evidence from Agentic Automata Learning

We propose agentic automata learning to evaluate the extent to which tool-calling LLM agents can uncover hidden environments through interaction. In our setup, an agent should uncover a hidden deterministic finite automaton (DFA) by interacting with an oracle through (1) membership queries ("Does this string belong to the target language?") and (2) equivalence queries ("Is this the target DFA?"). This yields a scalable testbed with controlled task complexity, measurable interaction efficiency, and strong baselines (classic automata-learning algorithms). Evaluating state-of-the-art LLMs, we find that performance drops sharply as DFA size increases. Reasoning models are markedly stronger than non-reasoning models, yet trajectory analyses reveal recurring failures in query planning, evidence integration, and hypothesis construction. Overall, our results show that current LLM agents can sometimes perform non-trivial interactive discovery, but remain far less robust and efficient than classic algorithms for the task.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum-Accelerated Self-Consistent Field: A Hybrid Algorithm

arXiv:2606.20176v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the Grover adaptive search self-consistent field (GAS-SCF) algorithm. GAS-SCF leverages quantum arithmetic to construct an efficient oracle that marks target states (Fock states) which improve upon some initial classical energy estimate. Amplitude amplification then increases the probability of measuring these states. This approach offers a theoretical quadratic speed-up for the optimization problem encountered in SCF quantum chemistry and establishes a baseline against which structured optimization algorithms, such as QAOA and DQI may be compared. In this work, we classically simulate three examples as proofs of concept of the algorithm, the largest consisting of 26 qubits. We then extend our analysis to two larger systems, with O3 representing the largest case at 330 qubits. These examples are chosen to probe classically challenging SCF regimes. Achieving chemically relevant applications of GAS-SCF will require large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum hardware.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effect we did not design in is masking: the aggregate pass-rate barely moves (-1.7 to -5.9 pp for six local regressions), while the matching slice craters (-25 to -91 pp). A layer's slice reacting to its own fault is partly by construction; the measured results are (i) the aggregate masking and (ii) that damage stays off the other slices: the injected layer's slice is the single worst-hit in 5 of 7 cases and top-3 in 7 of 7 (mean rank 1.29 of 19). Localization replicates on a second, structurally different tenant (Starbucks SG): all seven matching slices crater, so it is not a single-catalog artifact. We position it as a concrete, deterministic instantiation of the component-level evaluation EDDOps prescribes but leaves unimplemented, with CheckList as ancestor and as the deterministic mirror image of whole-workflow stochastic mutation testing. Our contributions: (a) a fully decomposed, sub-second, no-LLM per-layer harness for a production agent, (b) a coverage-honesty test-adequacy criterion that refuses to score an unexercised layer, and (c) the regression-injection demonstration that per-slice baseline-locked gates localize regressions an aggregate metric masks.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Evaluating and Enhancing Negation Comprehension in Remote Sensing MLLMs

arXiv:2606.20177v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various Remote Sensing (RS) tasks. However, their ability to comprehend negation remains underexplored, limiting deployment in real-world applications where models must explicitly identify what is false or absent, e.g., emergency responders need to locate non-flooded routes for evacuation. To comprehensively study this limitation, we introduce RS-Neg, the first benchmark to evaluate negation understanding across region-level to scene-level tasks. Specifically, we design an automated data generation pipeline for RS imagery, using LLMs to synthesize diverse negation queries, and introduce a dynamic visual focus module for verification. Our evaluation reveals that advanced RS MLLMs struggle with negation, exhibiting hallucinations and substantial performance degradation. To close this gap, we propose NeFo, a novel test-time learning method that explicitly incorporates the logical role of negation into the model optimization. Remarkably, using about 5\% unlabeled test samples, NeFo significantly improves the negation understanding of models and shows strong generalization to unseen tasks. Code and data will be released upon acceptance.

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

Translating the Untranslatable: An Operationalizable Ontology for Untranslatability

Untranslatability, cases where meaning cannot be directly preserved across languages, is well-studied in linguistics but underexplored in NLP. As machine translation (MT) systems improve on standard benchmarks, their limitations increasingly concentrate in such cases, where translation cannot be reduced to one-to-one equivalence. We introduce a structured ontology of untranslatability along with a taxonomy of compensation strategies, which are specific techniques to convey meaning under these untranslatable circumstances. We operationalize this framework into a multilingual dataset of untranslatable sentences paired with strategy-based translations, enabling controlled analysis of translation behavior. Initial human preference studies suggest that translation quality depends on the strategy used, with consistent preferences for outputs that include explanatory context, known as the Annotation compensation strategy. Our framework and dataset provide a foundation for studying and modeling strategy-informed machine translation.

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

Structured vs. Unstructured Pruning: An Exponential Gap

arXiv:2603.02234v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Strong Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (SLTH) states that large, randomly initialized neural networks contain sparse subnetworks capable of approximating a target function at initialization without training, suggesting that pruning alone is sufficient. Pruning methods are typically classified as unstructured, where individual weights can be removed from the network, and structured, where parameters are removed according to specific patterns, as in neuron pruning. Existing theoretical results supporting the SLTH rely almost exclusively on unstructured pruning, showing that logarithmic overparameterization suffices to approximate simple target networks. In contrast, neuron pruning has received limited theoretical attention, despite its practical appeal for direct hardware speedups. In this work, we consider the problem of approximating a single bias-free ReLU neuron by pruning hidden units of a randomly initialized two-layer ReLU network, effectively isolating the intrinsic limitations of neuron pruning. We show that achieving an $\varepsilon$-approximation requires a starting network size of $\Omega(1/\varepsilon)$ for neuron pruning, whereas weight pruning succeeds with only $O(\log(1/\varepsilon))$ hidden units, revealing an exponential separation between the two approaches.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bidirectional Tutoring for Developmental Motor Learning in Robots: Co-Developed Interaction Dynamics Support Stable Learning

arXiv:2606.19728v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Infants are well known to develop their motor skills through dense interaction with caregivers. Although such social interaction is crucial for human development, motor-skill learning in robots is often treated as a unidirectional process in which robots passively receive demonstrations from tutors. This overlooks a key property of social interaction: it is inherently bidirectional, with tutor and learner dynamically adapting to each other. In such interactions, the robot's past experiences may function as prior constraints that shape the dynamics of their co-developed trajectories. We hypothesize that bidirectional tutoring allows such constraints to guide the formation of consistent behavioral patterns that preserve behavioral coherence and support generalization, whereas unidirectional interaction lacks such constraints and leads to broader, less consistent behavioral patterns. To examine this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments with a physical humanoid robot performing an object manipulation task: one involving human-robot interaction and another employing an AI tutor interacting with the real robot through an adaptive intervention mechanism designed to examine whether similar effects would emerge under more controlled conditions. We implement the developmental learning framework using a free-energy-principle-based neural network extended with generative replay, which supports stable sequence-by-sequence learning from single tutored episodes. Across both settings, bidirectional tutoring fostered consistent behaviors and stage-wise generalization, while the robot gradually required less tutor guidance. These results suggest that bidirectional tutoring, as an embodied and socially grounded approach, provides an effective scaffold for developmental motor learning in robots.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VietFashion: Benchmarking Sketch-Text Composed Image Retrieval for Cultural Outfits

Cultural garments pose a unique challenge for visual retrieval systems, as their identity often depends on subtle structural and symbolic details that are poorly captured by standard AI models. We introduce VietFashion, a new benchmark for sketch-text composed image retrieval centered on the Ao Dai, a traditional Vietnamese garment. VietFashion enables designers and researchers to retrieve culturally meaningful outfits using a combination of hand-drawn sketches, which convey garment structure, and textual descriptions, which encode cultural semantics. The dataset is initialized with 650 sketches and expanded using generative models to produce over 21,000 photorealistic images with aligned captions. Textual prompts that describe detailed outfit attributes, which are extracted from fashion magazines to ensure authenticity and diversity. To better reflect the inherent ambiguity of design intent, VietFashion adopts a multi-target retrieval setting, where a single query may correspond to multiple valid results. We establish standardized evaluation protocols and benchmark state-of-the-art composed image retrieval methods. Experimental results reveal significant performance gaps in modeling fine-grained cultural semantics and multi-modal composition, positioning VietFashion as a challenging benchmark for fine-grained fashion retrieval. The dataset is publicly available at: https://hng0303.github.io/VietFashion.

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

REGRID-QAOA: A Resource-Efficient Graph-Reduced Hybrid QAOA Framework for Physics-Constrained Power System Islanding

arXiv:2606.15083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing has rapidly emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling computationally demanding problems. In particular, quantum optimization shows strong promise for hard combinatorial problems in power systems, where increasing distributed energy penetration heightens the need for intentional islanding to maintain grid reliability and resilience. However, power system islanding is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that becomes computationally prohibitive for classical solvers as network size grows, motivating the use of quantum computing as a promising alternative pipeline. This study develops a resource-efficient hybrid QAOA islanding framework that brings physics-constrained power-system partitioning into the quantum optimization workflow. The framework combines coherency-informed graph reduction, physics-aware constraint modeling, and structured post-processing to efficiently convert shallow-circuit QAOA samples into high-quality feasible islanding decisions without deep circuits or large shot budgets. The proposed framework is validated on the standard IEEE benchmark systems (9-, 14-, 24-, 30-, 39-, and 57-bus), demonstrating that the hybrid workflow achieves Gurobi-optimal solution quality with a clear quantum resource advantage over vanilla QAOA, while the resulting islanding solutions satisfy all physical feasibility requirements after network separation. This study establishes QAOA-based islanding as a viable quantum approach for critical infrastructure, with structured post-processing as the key enabler of quantum resource efficiency.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

作者:

Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools. Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

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

Revisiting Vehicle Color Recognition in Long-Tailed Surveillance Scenarios

Vehicle color recognition is an important cue for vehicle identification in surveillance systems, especially when license plates are illegible due to low resolution, occlusion, motion blur, or poor illumination. However, real-world vehicle color distributions are highly imbalanced, making overall accuracy insufficient to assess performance on rare but operationally relevant colors. This paper presents a comprehensive study of vehicle color recognition under severe class imbalance using UFPR-VeSV, a challenging real-world surveillance dataset. We investigate synthetic minority-class augmentation through two off-the-shelf generative strategies: text-conditioned image generation with RunDiffusion/JuggernautXL and image-conditioned color editing with Gemini 2.0 Flash. The curated synthetic data are combined with modern visual representations, loss reweighting, learning-rate scheduling, color-safe augmentation, foreground-aware preprocessing, and ensemble fusion. The bestperforming approach achieves 94.6% micro accuracy and 79.7% macro accuracy, improving macro accuracy by 8.2 percentage points over recent literature. A manual error analysis further shows that many remaining failures are visually ambiguous even for human annotators, highlighting the practical limits of color-based vehicle identification in unconstrained surveillance imagery. The generated images and source code are publicly available at https://github.com/viniciusorru/vcr-synthetic

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Critical parameters of germ-monotone families of branching random walks

arXiv:2602.21062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a broad class of families of branching random walks on a countable set $X$, which we refer to as germ-monotone branching random walks (GMBRWs). The processes in each family are parametrized by a positive parameter $\lambda>0$, which controls the overall reproductive speed, and they are monotonically increasing in $\lambda$ with respect to the germ order, a notion that extends classical stochastic domination. This framework encompasses a wide range of models, including classical continuous-time branching random walks, as well as discrete-time counterparts of certain non-Markovian processes such as ageing branching random walks. We define a general notion of critical parameter $\lambda(A)$ associated with each subset $A \subseteq X$, which serves as a threshold separating almost sure extinction in $A$ from positive probability of survival in $A$. This unifies and extends the classical global and local critical parameters $\lambda_w$ and $\lambda_s$, which can be recovered as special cases. We then investigate how modifications of the reproduction laws, either on a finite set or on a more general subset of $X$, affect these critical parameters. Our results extend earlier contributions in the literature.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Exploration Structure in LLM Agents for Multi-File Change Localization

arXiv:2606.11976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering tools increasingly rely on LLM based agents to localize files to change to resolve a software issue. Most AI agents explore repositories linearly, that is, visiting one directory or file per step. We postulate that this is a structural mismatch for changes that span several subsystems. We compare linear sequential exploration against non-linear, domain-scoped parallel agentic exploration. Using SWE Bench Pro as initial benchmark, we focus on ansible as an exemplar. We construct an approach for persistent-session evaluation of GitHub issues anchored at a single base commit. We compare our non-linear domain-agent file traversal system against a base LLM without direct repository access, a single agent Recursive Language Model (RLM) baseline with a persistent Python REPL and an external CLI baseline using Codex 5.5 High. Domain scoped parallel agent spawning with a small Haiku-class model achieves the highest micro F1 among Haiku class models by a large margin. Domain-agents is the second highest behind only the much larger Codex 5.5 High on our own expanded benchmark including over more recent PRs from 2025 and 2026. On the original, curated, 2020 SWE-bench Pro benchmark, a larger Sonnet plain LLM baseline attains higher micro F1 by predicting few files, leading to higher precision, but at significantly lower all gold recall. We also present three additional findings. First, documentation evolution is a latent dependency unresolved by any approach. Second, naive file system access can degrade localization driven by test-file over prediction. Lastly, forced multi-agent consultation does not measurably help and raises token cost substantially.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Computer Vision Scoring of Figure Copy and Recall

Objective. Figure copy and recall tests are sensitive measures of visuoconstruction and visual episodic memory, but their clinical is constrained by labor-intensive manual scoring. We developed and validated an automated, element-level scoring pipeline using Vertex AI object detection for the tablet-based figure copy and recall tasks in the California Cognitive Assessment Battery (CCAB). The automated scoring pipeline duplicated the scoring procedures used by expert manual raters. Methods. A normative sample of 2,011 community-dwelling adults aged 18-90 completed figure copy and delayed recall trials at baseline, with subsamples retested at 1 day and at 6, 18, and 30 months. Participants completed the drawings with their index finger on a tablet computer with finger position digitized to analyze the speed and timing of individual drawing strokes A convolutional object-detection model trained on the Vertex AI AutoML Vision platform identified each of twelve canonical figure elements in rendered drawings. Separate element presence and location scores were computed after homographically warping drawings onto a canonical template to produce trial-level Element, Location, and Total scores. To compare Vertex and human scores, Vertex AI and expert human raters independently scored 1500 randomly selected drawings to evaluate inter-rater agreement, including a common subset of 100 drawings scored by Vertex AI and all raters. Results. Total scores were virtually indistinguishable (r = 0.966) from human-human agreement (mean r = 0.971) as were Element presence scores (mean r = 0.959 vs. r = 0.963). Location-score agreement (r = 0.951) was slightly below the human-human mean (r = 0.972) due to pixel-level analysis by Vertex AI that was impossible for human raters. The Vertex pipeline showed no preferential advantage for the single expert rater who categorized Elements during training. Automated scores showed strong demographic gradients, age effects on Recall (r = -0.32) were approximately twice those in Copy conditions (r = -0.16). A Memory Cost score (Recall - Copy) showed a monotonic age-related decline from +0.40 z in the youngest subjects to -0.54 z in the oldest. Kinetic analysis revealed that drawing speed and efficiency showed significant age-related changes. Overnight test-retest reliability was high (Recall r = 0.72) and the Recall trial showed a large overnight learning effect ({Delta} = +1.18) that continued with repeated tests up to 30 months ({Delta} = +0.75).

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

Muse Spark Safety & Preparedness Report

arXiv:2606.12429v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Muse Spark is the latest large language model developed by Meta. In this report, we first present evaluations for catastrophic risk domains under Meta's Advanced AI Scaling Framework, along with the evidence that informed our launch decision. We then discuss additional considerations, such as Muse Spark's broader content safety and behavioral profile, that are relevant to overall safety but fall outside the catastrophic risk domains governed by the Framework. Our preparedness results covering Chemical and Biological, Cybersecurity, and Loss of Control risks assess Muse Spark's deployment within Meta AI as presenting acceptable levels of residual risks under our Advanced AI Scaling Framework. We conducted a broad set of evaluations targeting dual-use and high-risk capabilities across these catastrophic risk domains. Those evaluations identified elevated risks prior to mitigations, with Chemical and Biological capabilities assessed as likely reaching the "high risk" category under the Advanced AI Scaling Framework before safeguards were applied. We have implemented a multi-layered set of mitigations that address the identified risks, and Muse Spark demonstrates state-of-the-art refusal across a range of benchmarks related to hazardous workflows in chemistry and biology. We therefore release Muse Spark as the underlying model of Meta AI.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

An integrated ultrahigh vacuum cluster tool for diamond surface science and single nitrogen-vacancy center measurements

arXiv:2606.13961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a custom-designed ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) cluster tool developed for studying shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, enabling in situ diamond surface preparation, characterization, and single NV center dynamics measurements within a single connected platform. The system combines a surface science chamber for controlled surface modification and analysis with a cryogenic confocal microscope chamber dedicated to NV spin and optical measurements. This integrated approach enables a direct correlation between diamond surface chemistry and the resulting NV spin and charge properties. The instrument provides a versatile platform for systematic studies of surface-induced decoherence mechanisms and charge dynamics for shallow NV centers, and establishes a pathway toward reproducible surface engineering for quantum sensing applications.

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

Notation Matters: A Benchmark Study of Token-Optimized Formats in Agentic AI Systems

Large language models in Agentic AI systems consume tool schemas and execution results and emit tool invocations as structured data. The default language for that exchange, JSON, was designed for application-to-application interchange rather than token efficiency, so its structural elements impose substantial token overhead. Recent work proposes token-optimized alternatives such as TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) and TRON (Token Reduced Object Notation) as more compact replacements, but these formats have been evaluated only on isolated comprehension or generation tasks. Whether their token reductions hold inside end-to-end agentic loops therefore remains an open question. We evaluate TOON and TRON on four agentic benchmarks (BFCL, MCPToolBenchPP, MCP-Universe, StableToolBench) and five open-weight LLMs, decoupling input compression from output compression to measure comprehension and generation independently. TRON reduces tokens by up to 27% with accuracy within 14pp of the JSON baseline. TOON achieves up to 18% reduction at a similar 9pp accuracy cost, but additionally cascades on multi-turn parsing failures and collapses parallel tool-call output for most models. The code is available at: https://github.com/lkutschka/notation-matters