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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Ferritin across long-term conditions in England: cross-sectional primary care study

Background Iron deficiency (ID) is a readily treatable condition once identified. Ferritin is the primary diagnostic marker, but cut-offs vary and inflammation complicates interpretation in patients with long-term conditions (LTCs). Aim To describe ferritin distribution and the prevalence of threshold-defined low ferritin in adults with and without LTCs in primary care. Design and setting Cross-sectional observational study using routinely collected electronic health records from a national primary care database in England (1st January 2015 to 31st December 2021). Method Adults with >1 ferritin test in Clinical Practice Research Datalink (CPRD) Aurum were included. LTCs were identified using validated primary-care code lists. Outcomes included ferritin distribution and threshold-defined ID prevalence using World Health Organization (WHO) (

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

Neuron Level Analysis of Large Language Model in Legal Domain Reasoning

We presented a neuron-level analysis of legal-domain reasoning in LLMs, comparing it with other applied domain tasks across seven open-weight models. Using neuron attribution scores to rank and suppress influential neurons, we confirmed that suppressing the identified neurons collapses accuracy on the target task, whereas suppressing the same number of random neurons does not. We further found a small subset of neurons influential across all seven tasks; once these are removed, suppressing the remaining neurons degrades only the task they were identified from, revealing genuinely task-specific neurons in every model studied. Within the legal domain, the three benchmarks exhibit relatively high neuron overlap and tend to be affected jointly, suggesting of legal components neurons that span jurisdictions. The distribution of identified neurons in our experiments suggests that the hypothesis that influential neurons are concentrated in middle MLP layers may depend on the input format and content, rather than being a universal phenomenon.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Enhancing CVRP Solver through LLM-driven Automatic Heuristic Design

arXiv:2602.23092v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP), a fundamental combinatorial optimization challenge, focuses on optimizing fleet operations under vehicle capacity constraints. While extensively studied in operational research, the NP-hard nature of CVRP continues to pose significant computational challenges, particularly for large-scale instances. This study presents AILS-AHD (Adaptive Iterated Local Search with Automatic Heuristic Design), a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to revolutionize CVRP solving. Our methodology integrates an evolutionary search framework with LLMs to dynamically generate and optimize ruin heuristics within the AILS method. Additionally, we introduce an LLM-based acceleration mechanism to enhance computational efficiency. Comprehensive experimental evaluations against state-of-the-art solvers, including AILS-II and HGS, demonstrate the superior performance of AILS-AHD across both moderate and large-scale instances. Notably, our approach establishes new best-known solutions for 8 out of 10 instances in the CVRPLib large-scale benchmark, underscoring the potential of LLM-driven heuristic design in advancing the field of vehicle routing optimization.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

I Understand How You Feel: Enhancing Deeper Emotional Support Through Multilingual Emotional Validation in Dialogue System

Emotional validation - explicitly acknowledging that a user's feelings make sense - has proven therapeutic value but has received little computational attention. Emotional validation in dialogue systems can be decomposed into (i) validating response identification, (ii) validation timing detection, and (iii) validating response generation. To support research on all three subtasks, we release M-EDESConv, a 120k English-Japanese multilingual corpus created through hybrid manual and automatic annotation, and M-TESC, a multilingual spoken-dialogue test set. For timing detection, we propose MEGUMI, a Multilingual Emotion-aware Gated Unit for Mutual Integration, that fuses frozen XLM-RoBERTa semantics with language-specific emotion encoders via cross-modal attention and gated fusion. MEGUMI shows superior performance on both the M-EDESConv and M-TESC datasets, both objectively and subjectively. Finally, our EmoValidBench benchmarks of GPT-4.1 Nano and Llama-3.1 8B indicate that current LLMs generate contextually similar and diverse validating responses, but emotional understanding remains a major area for improvement. Project page: https://github.com/zihaurpang/Multilingual-Emotional-Validation

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

Understanding LLM Reasoning for Abstractive Summarization

Reasoning has substantially improved Large Language Models (LLMs) on analytical tasks such as mathematics and code generation, but its value for abstractive summarization remains unclear. To address this gap, we adapt general reasoning strategies to the summarization setting and conduct a large-scale comparative study of 8 reasoning strategies and 3 Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) across 8 diverse datasets, evaluating both summary quality and factual faithfulness. Our results show that reasoning is not a universal solution and its effectiveness depends strongly on the strategy and the summarization setting. In particular, we find a trade-off between summary quality and factual faithfulness. Explicit reasoning strategies often improve reference-based quality, but may weaken factual grounding, whereas implicit reasoning in LRMs shows the opposite tendency. We further find that increasing an LRM's internal reasoning budget does not reliably improve summarization and can even reduce factual consistency. These findings suggest that, for summarization, more reasoning is not always better. Effective reasoning should preserve faithful compression rather than induce over-elaboration. Our source code is publicly available.

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

Interpretable Neural Marked Statistics for Cosmological Inference

arXiv:2606.11295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering cosmological information beyond the power spectrum is a central goal for upcoming cosmological surveys, since late-time non-Gaussian signal in the matter density cannot be accessed through two-point statistics alone. Marked statistics fold part of this information back into the two-point level by reweighting the field with non-linear functions. We propose a neural marking scheme to generalize this process through a set of interpretable, physically motivated transformations that directly allow to interpret the gain in cosmological information at the morphological level. We employ a contrastive learning objective to align learnable marked summaries with the underlying cosmological parameters. At $k_{\max}=0.2\,h\mathrm{Mpc}^{-1}$, our neural mark tightens the marginalized constraint on $\sigma_8$ by $2.9\times$ and on $\Omega_m$ by $1.8\times$ compared to classical marks, breaking the $\Omega_m-\sigma_8$ degeneracy at the Fisher information level. It further reduces the parameter MSE across our cosmological parameter prior by $1.45\times$ over the best classical mark. The learned latent geometry aligns with the $\Omega_m$ and $\sigma_8$ directions in parameter space, indicating that the contrastive objective recovers the dominant axes of cosmological information. Our approach opens the door to more powerful, interpretable summary statistics for cosmological inference.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Simulation of Non-Markovian Quantum Accelerated Dynamics via Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation

arXiv:2606.20024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation (TFSE) is an effective tool for simulating the dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems. The Quantum Speed Limit (QSL) time characterizes the minimum time required for the evolution of a non-Markovian quantum system. In this paper, Wei's TFSE is employed to simulate the non-Markovian quantum accelerated evolution process in the Resonant Dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (RDJC) model. By solving the QSL time of a time-fractional single-qubit open system, the enhancement mechanism of the system evolution speed induced by the non-Markovian memory effects of the environment is revealed. Further studies show that the optimized acceleration of the system evolution can be achieved by jointly regulating the fractional order, coupling strength, and photon number. Comparative analyses indicate that Wei's TFSE can accurately capture the non-Markovian accelerated dynamical features of the system over the entire fractional order range, whereas Naber's TFSE is applicable only within a limited fractional order interval. In addition, the comparisons of the average simulation time for calculating the dynamical trajectory of the excited-state probability demonstrate that Wei's TFSE has a significant simulation advantage in computational efficiency. Therefore, Wei's TFSE is more accurate and efficient for simulating the accelerated dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems.

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

PIVOT: Bridging Black-Scholes Implied-Volatility and Price Objectives via Differentiable Jäckel Operator

arXiv:2606.17065v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern option-learning systems operate in two coordinates: price space, where markets quote and no-arbitrage constraints are most naturally enforced, and implied volatility (IV) space, where volatility surfaces are smoothed, regularized, and evaluated. The bottleneck is interface, not approximation: Jäckel's seminal "Let's Be Rational" (LBR) solver already inverts the Black-Scholes price to machine precision efficiently. What is missing is a differentiable layer that preserves LBR in the forward pass and avoids backpropagating through its branch logic. Such a layer must also confront the unavoidable singularity of the inverse map in the low-vega regime, where the sensitivity 1/vega diverges as vega -> 0. We close this gap with PIVOT, the Price-Implied-Volatility Objective Translator. PIVOT keeps the LBR forward pass intact and supplies the backward pass by implicit differentiation through the smooth Black-Scholes/Black-76 price map, with an explicit gating contract: invalid domains return NaN, well-conditioned rows receive the exact 1/vega gradient, and low-vega rows are attenuated rather than silently regularized. On a single H100, a fused Triton kernel reaches 1.79e9 IV/s at machine precision (9.3e-14 max relative error vs. the reference C solver); end-to-end label generation sustains 48.9M/s on synthetic chains and 16.6M/s on SPX OptionMetrics. In a HyperIV-style one-day reproduction on SPX, PIVOT-augmented objectives Pareto-dominate the baselines, reducing held-out price MAE by up to 43.4% and the strongest three-seed gated objective improving price MAE by 38.8% and IV MAE by 21.3% jointly; cross-asset results on RUT, VIX, and NDX show directional price-MAE gains of 40.1%, 24.2%, and 16.7%, while an ungated IV-roundtrip control collapses to a degenerate near-zero surface, confirming the gate as a correctness contract rather than a tuning knob.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Connecting entanglement growth with local integrals of motion in the disordered Fermi-Hubbard model

arXiv:2606.15481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generically a quantum system initialized in an unentangled state will, under unitary dynamics, rapidly become entangled, a process closely related to information transport and to thermalization. Disorder can suppress the growth of entanglement and result in memory of initial conditions. In non-interacting systems this arises from localization of single-particle states, the occupancy of which is fixed by the initial condition. In interacting systems similar localized conserved quantities persist, but with the added feature that they are coupled, resulting in entanglement growth which is distinct from both non-interacting localized systems and from generic ergodic systems. The Fermi-Hubbard model has two degrees of freedom per site – charge and spin – and disorder may be present in both of these. We study the growth of entanglement in two scenarios – disorder in charge equal and unequal to that in spin, and determine the distinct contributions of charge and spin degrees of freedom by expanding the Hamiltonian in terms of a set of optimally localized conserved quantities with separate charge and spin character. We find that coupling between charge and spin is significantly weaker than charge-charge and spin-spin coupling. While this decoupling is present in all our results, it is only apparent when the strength of the disorder in the two sectors is different such that there is a separation between the characteristic timescales of the contributions to entanglement made by charge and by spin.

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

Provable Recovery of Locally Important Signed Features and Interactions from Random Forest

arXiv:2512.11081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature and Interaction Importance (FII) methods are essential in supervised learning for assessing the relevance of input variables and their interactions in complex prediction models. In many domains, such as personalized medicine, local interpretations for individual predictions are often required, rather than global scores summarizing overall feature importance. Random Forests (RFs) are widely used in these settings, and existing interpretability methods typically exploit tree structures and split statistics to provide model-specific insights. However, theoretical understanding of local FII methods for RF remains limited, making it unclear how to interpret high importance scores for individual predictions. We propose a novel, local, model-specific FII method that identifies frequent co-occurrences of features along decision paths, combining global patterns with those observed on paths specific to a given test point. We prove that our method consistently recovers the true local signal features and their interactions under a Locally Spike Sparse (LSS) model and also identifies whether large or small feature values drive a prediction. We illustrate the usefulness of our method and theoretical results through simulation studies and a real-world data example.

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

The Tao of Agency: Autotelic AI, Embedded Agency and Dissolution of the Self

arXiv:2606.19924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most artificial intelligence systems are built on the assumption that goals are exogenous and specified by the designer. Exploring what happens when an agent begins generating its own goals opens the field of autotelic AI. Agents are expected not merely to pursue objectives but to discover them. In this article, we trace its consequences through intrinsic motivation, resource-driven priors, causal-interventional learning, homeostasis, and embeddedness; the last of which is found to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for autotelic agency. Embeddedness individuates the agent at the cost of revealing that the individuation is non-unique, such that the same dynamics admit many valid partitions, each defining a different candidate self. The deepest problem with autotelic AI is therefore not how the agent generates goals, but how it generates and relativizes the self to which the goals are assigned. The agent must believe in its own boundary in order to act, and see through that boundary in order to understand. We consolidate these developments into a single framework and extend it along three directions: a quantum formulation in which the agent-environment cut becomes physical, a philosophical reading against non-dual contemplative traditions, and a concrete LLM-based agentic instantiation.

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

JADE: Expert-Grounded Dynamic Evaluation for Open-Ended Professional Tasks

arXiv:2602.06486v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating agentic AI on open-ended professional tasks faces a fundamental dilemma between rigor and flexibility. Static rubrics provide rigorous, reproducible assessment but fail to accommodate diverse valid response strategies, while LLM-as-a-judge approaches adapt to individual responses yet suffer from instability and bias. Human experts address this dilemma by combining domain-grounded principles with dynamic, claim-level assessment. Inspired by this process, we propose JADE, a two-layer evaluation framework. Layer 1 encodes expert knowledge as a predefined set of evaluation skills, providing stable evaluation criteria. Layer 2 performs report-specific, claim-level evaluation to flexibly assess diverse reasoning strategies, with evidence-dependency gating to invalidate conclusions built on refuted claims. Experiments on BizBench show that JADE improves evaluation stability and reveals critical agent failure modes missed by holistic LLM-based evaluators. We further demonstrate strong alignment with expert-authored rubrics and effective transfer to HealthBench and DR.BENCH, covering medical and 10-domain professional evaluation settings. Code and data are available at https://github.com/smiling-world/JADE.

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

SceneMiner: Identity-Preserving Multi-Task Fine-Tuning for Unified BEV Scene Mining

Mining hard, safety-critical scenes from driving logs is bottlenecked by the absence of difficulty labels, and no single proxy, collision risk, trajectory ambiguity, or semantic rarity suffices to find such scenes on its own. We present SceneMiner, a unified, camera-only bird's-eye-view pipeline that emits complementary mining signals from a frozen vision-language backbone in a single forward pass, with no LiDAR or radar: a retrieval embedding for text-prompted scenario search, a multi-label scene-tag distribution, and a continuous physics-based risk score (a motion forecast is a byproduct, not a contribution). Building such a multi-head model exposes our central finding, a failure mode we term cross-task interference: adding or upgrading one head shifts a shared activation stream and degrades weight-frozen sibling heads, so freezing parameters alone is insufficient. Our contribution, identity-preserving multi-task fine-tuning, removes this interference by zero-initializing every new sub-module and freezing every parameter that feeds the shared stream. The mining heads are thereby preserved bit-identically while training only ~102k parameters. The tagging head reaches mAP 0.4614 (micro-F1 0.5557) on 20 scene tags by pooling each scene into 32 visual tokens, and the embedding head supports text-prompted retrieval, validated qualitatively. Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/sceneminer_anonymous-64E5

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Position: Generative Engine Optimization Creates Underexamined Risks, Governance Must Target Concentration, Disclosure, and Academic Blind Spots

arXiv:2606.12439v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) answer engines are increasingly used for information seeking, shifting visibility from ranked lists to synthesized answers. This enables Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which targets LLM answer engines' evidence pool and generation. We analyze the search engine optimization (SEO) to GEO transition to identify two risks: (i) concentrated influence from low contestability and system sensitivity, and (ii) undisclosed commercial influence embedded in evidence and reasoning. We then formalize a general GEO pipeline to locate where optimization acts and compare academic and industry practices, revealing a third risk: (iii) academic-industry blind spots driven by visibility and evaluation asymmetries between offline setups and deployed systems. This position argues the need for answer-level governance and measurement: stronger contestability, high-precision disclosure, black-box auditing of material influence, and deployment-aligned metrics for exposure persistence.

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

When Should Agent Trust Be Conditional? Characterizing and Attacking Skill-Conditional Reputation in Agent Swarms

arXiv:2606.14200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open platforms increasingly route tasks among heterogeneous LLM agents–differing in base model, scaffold, and tool stack–whose competence varies sharply by skill: an agent excellent at one skill may be useless at another. The standard reputation approach summarizes each agent by a single global trust score, but that scalar is the wrong object here, because routing every task to the globally most-trusted agent leaves the value of specialization unclaimed. We study skill-conditional trust R(i | k)–the trust to place in agent i for a task requiring skill k, rather than one score per agent–and pose three falsifiable questions: when is conditioning worth it, how much cross-skill evidence should be borrowed, and whether that borrowing is safe. A controlled phase-diagram analysis answers the first two: conditional trust wins only in a specific regime–high agent heterogeneity, sparse per-skill evidence, and correlated skills–and the coupling strength beta that buys this data efficiency is dual-use, because the same cross-skill borrowing is also a laundering channel. On a public benchmark of 14 genuinely heterogeneous AppWorld agents, real pools land inside the beneficial regime–a small but genuine gain, with the per-skill best agent genuinely changing across skills. We then show that an attacker with cheap evidence in one skill and none in a target skill hijacks the conditional router, driving routing regret from 0 to 0.94 on a pool our zero-cost Conditional Information Value Test (CIVT) rates GREEN–while the ungated trust verdict it contaminates reads -0.06 instead of the honest +0.19. A zero-evidence gate bounds the attack but does not eliminate it; we characterize the residual cost under an explicit budget. We do not claim Sybil-resistance–we quantify the trade-off.

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

GeoDial: A Multimodal Conversational Tutoring Dataset for Geometry Problem-Solving with Visual Tutor Turns

arXiv:2606.12419v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Several educational domains rely heavily on diagrams and visual cues, yet most existing tutoring datasets are limited to text-only interactions. This limits the development of AI tutors that can teach in visually grounded ways used by human instructors. Thus, we introduce GeoDial, a multimodal tutoring dataset of over 1.3K teacher-student dialogs in the domain of geometry collected from experienced math teachers, where instructional turns are explicitly grounded in diagram highlights. We propose a scalable annotation protocol that integrates dialog acts, visual highlighting, and feedback, enabling fine-grained supervision of both language and visual tutoring behavior. To illustrate the challenges posed by this setting, we fine-tune several vision-language models on GeoDial and evaluate their ability to generate tutoring utterances and diagram highlights. While supervised fine-tuning substantially improves the quality of generated dialog, it struggles to produce accurate diagram highlights, revealing a key limitation of current methods and highlighting the need for approaches that more effectively integrate visual reasoning with pedagogical interaction.

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

Evaluation of Image Matching for Art Skills Assessment

While some individuals possess a natural talent for drawing, mastering this skill requires dedicated training and practice. Determining one's skill in the art of drawing requires proper comprehensive assessment. In this paper, we propose a method to measure drawing skill by by matching the hand-drawn image with the original template. Existing techniques often involve complex processes. However, advancements in computer vision allow us to train computers to perform these comparisons at a human-like level, thereby resolving the tedious and overwhelming traditional process. Using computer vision applications, determining image similarity involves identifying the level of similarities in an image with a reference image. We have implemented and analyzed the SIFT feature and Siamese network to measure image similarity. Our results indicate that it is feasible to assess art skill levels. Through feature analysis, we found that SIFT-based key point matching provides a more effective means of detecting drawing skills.

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

Judging to Improve: A De-biased VLM-as-3D-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Generation

arXiv:2606.20364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A companion study established a de-biased, cross-model VLM-as-3D-judge that reliably ranks single-image-to-3D mesh quality where cheap geometry and CLIP proxies fall short. This paper asks: can that judge's preferences specialize a strong open generator, TRELLIS, on one asset class (furniture), cheaply and without human labels? Taking the judge from ranking to optimization is where the work lives. Pushing a VLM judge into the training and evaluation loop exposes failure modes ranking never triggered, so our contribution is an optimization-grade hardening of the judge: a training judge (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) held distinct from an evaluation judge (InternVL3-8B) to break circularity; position-bias correction; and fixes for three failure modes (image overload, geometry-hiding splat renders, and reference-free judging that rewards clean-but-wrong outputs), with calibration evidence (clear-gap win-rate 0.83-1.0; base-vs-base ~0.5). Using this protocol as an independent evaluator, and working only from public models and data with lightweight parameter-efficient adaptation, we find our methods match the strong base rather than exceed it. Independent base samples carry essentially no learnable preference (0.94 order-flip rate), so signal must be engineered by quality-contrastive construction. Across six adaptation methods, two input regimes, and a severity sweep, the most targeted - conditioner repair under severe degradation - reaches parity (0.50) with the base, while no method clears the >=65% win-rate target. The result is mechanistic: clean inputs saturate the judge, flow-DIT fine-tuning washes out through the sampler, and conditioning repair is the locus that moves geometry. Win-rates are directional at n=8 objects. Matching a strong public-data base with cheap adaptation is itself informative: exceeding it needs more than lightweight PEFT on public data, and the judge protocol is reusable.

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

Dealing with Annotator Disagreement in Hate Speech Classification

Hate speech detection is a crucial task, especially on social media where harmful content can spread quickly. Collecting social media content (tweets etc.) to train machine learning models is easy, but detecting and categorizing hate speech can be difficult due to the inherently subjective nature. This subjectivity leads to frequent disagreement among annotators, particularly for subtle or borderline content. Traditional approaches either discard non-consensus samples or force a ''gold standard'' through expert adjudication, ignoring valuable information about uncertainty and diverse human perspectives. We examine the largely overlooked problem of annotator disagreement in hate speech classification and evaluate a range of aggregation methods, including majority voting, ordinal strategies (minimum, maximum, and mean), and analyze their impact across binary, 4-class, and 6-class classification tasks. In addition, we leverage annotators' perceived hate speech strength scores to explore regression-based and hybrid modeling approaches. Among others, we show that filtering non-consensus samples results in over-optimistic results and that the perceived strength provides a complementary signal that enhance classification performance. Finally, we establish new state-of-the-art results for hate speech detection in Turkish tweets, and demonstrate that annotator disagreement, when properly modeled, is a valuable resource for building more robust and reliable systems.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Is Spurious Correlation Removal Always Learnable?

arXiv:2606.12930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Invariant learning can fail even when the invariant structure is statistically identifiable. We show a conditional computational barrier: under a black-box samplable supervised sparse recovery primitive motivated by average-case sparse-recovery reductions, there exist samplable multi-environment instances with a one-dimensional predictive invariant subspace ($k=1$) that are learnable with polynomial samples by exhaustive search, while any polynomial-time constant-accuracy recovery algorithm would contradict the primitive. We further quantify environment diversity by a separation parameter $\gamma$, which controls identifiability and the curvature of invariance objectives. Under sufficient diversity and local Gaussian regularity, the minimax risk is $\mathbb{E}[\dist(\hat{V},V_{\mathrm{inv}})^2]=\Theta(k(d-k)/(n|\mathcal{E}|))$, and under label-induced shifts a phase transition occurs at $n^*\propto k(d-k)/(|\mathcal{E}|\gamma^2)$ with refined estimation error scaling proportional to $1/\gamma^2$. Synthetic and real datasets illustrate the predicted gaps and transitions and motivate simple diversity diagnostics.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MDForge: Agentic Molecular Dynamics Pipeline Design under Sparse Simulator Feedback

Molecular dynamics (MD) is the canonical in-silico method for atomistic molecular science, simulating molecular behavior from first-principle physics. Designing an MD pipeline for a new system requires substantial expert knowledge: running it on even one molecule is expensive, ruling out trial-and-error. We automate this expert pipeline-design process with an LLM agent. Unlike existing MD agents that orchestrate a predefined tool set, we treat pipeline design as open-ended code generation in which the agent's behavior is reshaped online by verbal reward. Specifically, we build MDForge, an LLM agent whose in-context update rule densifies the sparse reward via a multi-agent debate among physics experts. On three SAMPL host-guest binding free-energy benchmarks, MDForge automatically designs MD pipelines competitive with human experts. Deployed on a library of unseen candidate guests, its CB[7] pipeline discovers a novel binder that wet-lab competition NMR confirms is a high-affinity, picomolar CB[7] binder. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/MDForge.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

You Don't Need Strong Assumptions: Visual Representation Learning via Temporal Differences

Progress in AI has largely been driven by methods that assume less. As compute and data increase, approaches with weaker inductive biases generally outperform those with stronger assumptions. This is particularly characteristic of the field of Visual Representation Learning, where approaches have gone from being dominated by Supervised Learning, to Weakly Supervised Learning, to the now widespread success of Self-Supervised Learning without human labels. Yet, even modern Self-Supervised Learning approaches still depend on strong inductive biases such as augmentations, masking, or cropping. If this trend holds, even these remaining biases should become bottlenecks at scale – and our experiments confirm this: the optimal strength of inductive biases decreases as data grows. This motivates the search for approaches that rely on fewer assumptions. To this end, we introduce Temporal Difference in Vision (TDV), a new paradigm for self-supervised learning from video that avoids existing inductive biases, relying instead on a causal assumption that the past causes the future. TDV functions by jointly training an image encoder and a motion encoder so that the current frame's representation plus the encoded motion equals the next frame's representation. Despite not leveraging any strong inductive biases, TDV matches state-of-the-art recipes on dense spatial tasks, laying the foundation for representation learning without strong assumptions.

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

AVA-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action models with Active Visual Attention

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown remarkable progress in embodied tasks recently, but most methods process visual observations independently at each timestep. This history-agnostic design treats robot manipulation as a Markov Decision Process, even though real-world robotic control is inherently partially observable and requires reasoning over past interactions. To address this mismatch, we reformulate VLA policy learning from a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process perspective and propose AVA-VLA, a framework that conditions action generation on a recurrent state that serves as a neural approximation to the agent's belief over task history. Built on this recurrent state, we introduce Active Visual Attention (AVA), which dynamically reweights visual tokens in the current observation to focus on regions most relevant given both the instruction and execution history. Extensive experiments show that AVA-VLA achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard robotic benchmarks, including LIBERO and CALVIN, and transfers effectively to real-world dual-arm manipulation tasks. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of temporally grounded active visual processing for improving VLA performance in robotic sequential decision-making. The project page is available at https://liauto-dsr.github.io/AVA-VLA-Page.

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

A Neuromorphic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems

arXiv:2606.20031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic environmental changes, confined workspaces, and stringent real-time constraints make pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) a challenging problem for conventional search- and rule-based methods, which typically suffer from high computational complexity and long decision latency. While reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, deploying learned policies with extreme energy efficiency on resource-constrained hardware remains an open challenge. We present SDQN-RMFS, an end-to-end framework that achieves high-fidelity deployment of an RL-trained policy from a full-precision artificial neural network (ANN) through to a neuromorphic chip. By computing only when triggered by sparse events, this framework unlocks ultra-low-power RMFS pathfinding. Our full-stack pipeline operates as follows: an ANN policy is first efficiently trained via a collision-allowing strategy to densify informative trajectories, and then converted into a spiking neural network (SNN) via a hard-label knowledge distillation approach. This effectively addresses the output distribution mismatch, preserving policy capability across the ANN-to-SNN pipeline while substantially reducing inference latency. Hardware experiments demonstrate up to 11,281$\times$ energy savings and a nearly two-fold reduction in latency compared to a high-performance GPU baseline, while maintaining decision quality on par with the original trained policy. These results establish physical neuromorphic inference as a practical and energy-sustainable pathway for large-scale RMFS operations.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars

Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designed to support ACT-oriented psychotherapy training through spoken dialogue with an embodied virtual patient. The system uses large language models to simulate patient behavior conditioned on profiles derived from real therapy sessions and configurable clinical scenarios, while a separate automated evaluator provides turn-by-turn feedback on therapist responses based on established ACT fidelity criteria. Rather than aiming to replace supervision, the system is intended to support deliberate practice by enabling experimentation, reflection, and immediate feedback in low-risk settings. Expert evaluation with practicing psychologists confirmed high realism in patient behavior and demonstrated that immediate turn-by-turn ACT feedback increased therapists' awareness of intervention choices and enabled effective experimentation with alternative responses. Quantitative evaluation across 49 therapy transcripts identified GPT-4o-mini as the optimal feedback model, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 6.12) in replicating human supervisor ACT fidelity ratings with statistically significant agreement. This work demonstrates the potential of fidelity-aware simulated patients as a scalable complement to psychotherapy training.