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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

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

The Long Delay to Arithmetic Generalization: When Learned Representations Outrun Behavior

arXiv:2604.13082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Grokking in transformers trained on algorithmic tasks is characterized by a long delay between training-set fit and abrupt generalization, but the source of that delay remains poorly understood. In encoder-decoder arithmetic models, we argue that this delay reflects limited access to already learned structure rather than failure to acquire that structure in the first place. We study one-step Collatz prediction and find that the encoder organizes parity and residue structure within the first few thousand training steps, while output accuracy remains near chance for tens of thousands more. Causal interventions support the decoder bottleneck hypothesis. Transplanting a trained encoder into a fresh model accelerates grokking by 2.75 times, while transplanting a trained decoder actively hurts. Freezing a converged encoder and retraining only the decoder eliminates the plateau entirely and yields 97.6% accuracy, compared to 86.1% for joint training. What makes the decoder's job harder or easier depends on numeral representation. Across 15 bases, those whose factorization aligns with the Collatz map's arithmetic (e.g., base 24) reach 99.8% accuracy, while binary fails completely because its representations collapse and never recover. The choice of base acts as an inductive bias that controls how much local digit structure the decoder can exploit, producing large differences in learnability from the same underlying task.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Characteristics and Outcomes of Gene-Elusive Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Background and Aims Genetic testing in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) guides risk stratification and family screening. Likely pathogenic or pathogenic (LP/P) variants are identified in approximately one-third of patients, leaving many without a genetic diagnosis. Cohort studies suggest that "gene-elusive" patients have a lower risk of adverse events. This study aims to better characterise this group and identify factors associated with adverse outcomes. Methods Consecutive and unrelated DCM patients undergoing genetic testing and returning no LP/P variants were retrospectively recruited and compared to two control cohorts of DCM patients carrying LP/P variants in LMNA and TTN for a primary composite endpoint of end-stage heart failure (ESHF) or malignant ventricular arrhythmia (MVA). Results Among patients without prior MVA, the composite endpoint occurred in 36/423 (8.5%) gene-elusive, 14/39 (35.9%) LMNA and 11/100 (11%) TTN cardiomyopathy patients (log-rank p

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

Independent Chiral Control in Theory-Space Models:A Rank-Preserving Framework and Its Application to Neutrino Mass Generation

arXiv:2409.09033v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a general framework of rank-preserving, element-wise matrix transformations for engineering fermion mass hierarchies in theory-space constructions. We prove that preservation of massless modes requires the transformation function to be separable, $g_f(i,j)=g^{(L)}_f(i)g^{(R)}_f(j)$, which in turn enables independent control of left- and right-chiral zero-mode profiles directly at the level of the theory-space mass matrix. This formalism unifies and extends the clockwork mechanism, permits controlled deformation of Kaluza–Klein spectra, and enhances hierarchy generation in GIM-like fine-cancellation scenarios. As a concrete application, we show that in theory-space models for neutrino masses, suitable transformations allow sub-eV light neutrinos to arise from TeV-scale new physics with only $\mathcal{O}(40)$ additional fermionic sites, while remaining consistent with charged-lepton flavor-violation bounds. In contrast, the corresponding untransformed models asymptote at the MeV scale and cannot access the phenomenologically required regime without extreme field multiplicities or hierarchical parameters.

06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Hardware-Oriented Inference Complexity of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

arXiv:2604.03345v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) have recently emerged as a powerful architecture for various machine learning applications. However, their unique structure raises significant concerns regarding their computational overhead. Existing studies primarily evaluate KAN complexity in terms of Floating-Point Operations (FLOPs) required for GPU-based training and inference. However, in many latency-sensitive and power-constrained deployment scenarios, such as neural network-driven non-linearity mitigation in optical communications or channel state estimation in wireless communications, training is performed offline and dedicated hardware accelerators are preferred over GPUs for inference. Recent hardware implementation studies report KAN complexity using platform-specific resource consumption metrics, such as Look-Up Tables, Flip-Flops, and Block RAMs. However, these metrics require a full hardware design and synthesis stage that limits their utility for early-stage architectural decisions and cross-platform comparisons. To address this, we derive generalized, platform-independent formulae for evaluating the hardware inference complexity of KANs in terms of Real Multiplications (RM), Bit Operations (BOP), and Number of Additions and Bit-Shifts (NABS). We extend our analysis across multiple KAN variants, including B-spline, Gaussian Radial Basis Function (GRBF), Chebyshev, and Fourier KANs. The proposed metrics can be computed directly from the network structure and enable a fair and straightforward inference complexity comparison between KAN and other neural network architectures.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment

Item discrimination is a fundamental psychometric property of educational assessment, which measures whether an item meaningfully distinguishes students with higher proficiency from students with lower proficiency. While various existing works have explored whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate item difficulty, it remains unclear whether they can capture item discrimination. In this work, we evaluate 42 proprietary and open-weight LLMs in zero-shot settings using two complementary approaches: direct discrimination prediction, where models explicitly estimate an item's discrimination value from its content, and response-based Classical Test Theory (CTT) calibration, where LLM answers are treated as synthetic student responses to compute discrimination scores. Our results show that direct prediction yields weak alignment with human-calibrated discrimination: the best-performing model reaches only a Spearman correlation of 0.152. Response-based CTT calibration provides a stronger but still limited signal, with the all-persona synthetic respondent pool reaching a Spearman correlation of 0.241. These findings highlight item discrimination as an open challenge for LLM-based psychometric evaluation: current LLMs contain non-random discrimination-relevant signal, but they do not yet reliably capture how assessment items distinguish human students.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Experimental quantum state learning with pairs of photons

arXiv:2606.16932v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tomography allows one to estimate the density matrix describing the state an ensemble of quantum systems are prepared in (for example, polarization tomography determines the polarization state of a beam of identically prepared photons). In general, it is not possible to uniquely decompose the density matrix into its pure state components. Agarwal et al. proposed a protocol which, for a mixture composed of any two pure states of a qubit (with arbitrary probabilities), allows an observer to infer not only the density matrix but the identity of those specific pure states and their weights - the additional requirement being that the qubits arrive in pairs, where both qubits in each pair are in the same state. We experimentally demonstrate this learning-from-pairs concept using photons in the polarization degree of freedom. We use tomography to measure a sequence of single photons and make use of their time-of-arrival information to 'pair up' the photons after the measurement. From here we are able to infer the photons' polarization states and their respective probabilities, and we demonstrate this for various different choices of polarization states and ratios. Finally, we investigate our ability to discriminate between two equal mixtures of distinct pairs of orthogonal polarization states. We find that on the order of approx. 10e4 photons is typically enough to achieve tomography fidelities of approximately 0.9999. This is sufficient to discriminate between two different preparations of the same mixed state, differing by angles of less than 5 degrees between the pure states used in the two preparations.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Strategic PAC Learnability via Geometric Definability

arXiv:2605.13426v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Strategic classification studies learning settings in which individuals can modify their features, at a cost, in order to influence the classifier's decision. A central question is how the sample complexity of the induced (strategic) hypothesis class depends on the complexities of the underlying hypothesis class and the cost structure governing feasible manipulations. Prior work has shown that in several natural settings, such as linear classifiers with norm costs, the induced complexity can be controlled. We begin by showing that such guarantees fail in general - even in simple cases: there exist hypothesis classes of VC dimension $1$ on the real line such that, even under the simplest interval neighborhoods, the induced class has infinite VC dimension. Thus, strategic behavior can turn an easy learning problem into a non-learnable one. To overcome this, we introduce structure via a geometric definability assumption: both the hypothesis class and the cost-induced neighborhood relation can be defined by first-order formulas over $\mathbb{R}_{\mathtt{exp}}$. Intuitively, this means that hypotheses and costs can be described using arithmetic operations, exponentiation, logarithms, and comparisons. This captures a broad range of natural classes and cost functions, including $\ell_p$ distances, Wasserstein distance, and information-theoretic divergences. Under this assumption, we prove that learnability is preserved, with sample complexity controlled by the complexity of the defining formulas.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Can Aggregate Invariants Accelerate Continuous Subgraph Matching? Limits, Laws, and a Dynamic Spectral Index

arXiv:2606.24421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spectral filtering recently delivered substantial pruning for static subgraph matching: Laplacian interlacing rejects candidates whose neighborhoods cannot host the query. We study whether such aggregate structural tests can accelerate continuous subgraph matching (CSM) over dynamic graphs, and answer in three parts. First, lazily maintained spectral bounds are infeasible exactly where spectral pruning has value: we characterize the tightest safe rule over a formalized perturbation relaxation and show that even it loses essentially all pruning power within four touching updates. Second, exact maintenance is affordable when selective: pruning utility and recomputation cost are anti-correlated across vertices – hubs provably never prune – so recomputing small-neighborhood spectra on touch sustains exact local spectra at microseconds per update, complete by construction. Third, integrated into a decoupled CSM benchmark against an identical-minus-spectra control, the tests remove up to $51\%$ of candidates or safely skip up to $47\%$ of update enumerations, yet enumeration intermediates remain unchanged – beyond the gates' skipped first-level bindings, typically zero – across two engines, four real graphs, two stream types, and $77$ solved queries; a constructed radius-stratified workload confirms the instrument detects the exception when one exists ($-99.9\%$ intermediates, $748\times$ faster). Aggregate tests accelerate what scales with candidate sets – construction, list scans – never adjacency-guided exploration. We distill an intermediate-invariance methodology for evaluating CSM filters and release a reusable dynamic local-spectra index.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

GePBench: Evaluating Fundamental Geometric Perception for Multimodal Large Language Models

Geometric shapes play important roles in both physical world and human cognition. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant advancements in visual understanding, their abilities to recognize geometric shapes and their spatial relationships, which we term geometric perception, are not explicitly and systematically explored. To address this gap, we introduce GePBench, a novel benchmark specifically designed to assess the geometric perception capabilities of MLLMs. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even the current state-of-the-art MLLMs exhibit significant deficiencies in geometric perception tasks. Furthermore, we show that models trained with GePBench data demonstrate considerable improvements on a wide range of downstream tasks, highlighting the critical role of geometric perception in enabling advanced multimodal applications. Our code and datasets are available at \href{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}{https://github.com/Changhao-Xiang/GePBench}.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A quantitative coordinate system for developmental dynamics

Quantitative comparison of morphogenesis across individuals remains a fundamental challenge, as developing embryos vary in shape, orientation and developmental tempo. Moreover, real-time three-dimensional imaging generates large, heterogeneous four-dimensional datasets that are difficult to directly align. As a result, developmental variability is typically described qualitatively rather than measured. Here we introduce STERN, a quantitative framework that learns continuous spatiotemporal representations of morphogenesis directly from in vivo 4D imaging data. By embedding embryos into a shared spatiotemporal space, STERN defines a quantitative developmental coordinate system that enables direct comparison of developmental trajectories across individuals without requiring explicit registration or staging. Applied to mouse embryogenesis, STERN reveals that embryos follow conserved developmental trajectories while progressing at distinct temporal rates, providing a quantitative measure of developmental heterochrony. Extending this framework to zebrafish neural crest light-sheet timelapse imaging, we further show that developmental order is preserved across distinct imaging views even with altered anatomical coverage, supporting the generality of the learned representation across vertebrate imaging contexts. Finally, in developing mouse hearts, where morphogenesis proceeds through subtle and continuously evolving structural changes, STERN resolves fine-scale developmental dynamics at minute-scale temporal resolution that are difficult to localize reproducibly using human experts or general-purpose multimodal AI. Together, these results establish a shared quantitative coordinate system for morphogenesis, in which developmental trajectories become directly comparable across individuals and developmental variability becomes a measurable property.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Graph-based Target Back-Propagation for Context Adaptation in Multi-LLM Agentic Systems

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target–output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

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

Overcoming Rank Collapse in Feedback Alignment

arXiv:2606.11123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Backpropagation (BP) is widely viewed as biologically implausible, in part because it requires feedback weights to be the transpose of forward weights for error propagation. Interestingly, when training a network with fixed random feedback weights to circumvent this issue, learning aligns the forward weights with the feedback weights, leading the backpropagated error signal to become an approximation of the standard gradient used by BP. This process, called Feedback Alignment (FA), occurs in MLPs and very shallow CNNs but does not scale well to deeper architectures. In this work, we first investigated differences between BP and FA models, trained on CIFAR10, specifically focusing on the effective rank of the signal. We found that the FA error has a considerably lower rank and hence is constrained to a lower-dimensional subspace compared to BP, limiting exploration of the parameter space. Motivated by this observation, we evaluated two mechanisms for increasing the effective dimensionality of FA: Muon, an optimiser that orthogonalises weight updates; and hidden activity normalisation, which promotes activation orthogonality. Across larger architectures and benchmarks, we find that these methods consistently improve over FA baselines, for example, on CIFAR100 with a Resnet-18, accuracy increases by 9 percentage points. Our results identify low-dimensional gradient dynamics as a key obstacle to scaling FA and suggest that inducing higher-dimensional update geometry is a promising route toward scaling alternatives to backpropagation.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Unveiling the Awareness of Private Health Insurance Coverage among Healthcare Professionals in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Insights Extracted from Their Perspectives.

Our study is an assessment of the knowledge, personal coverage, and related determinants of private health insurance as revealed by healthcare professionals in Freetown, the urban capital of Sierra Leone. This study stands as a precursor for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), like Sierra Leone, seeking to establish Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to provide healthcare access and coverage through publicly arranged risk pooling, designed to help protect against unmanageable medical costs. In parallel, such countries face significant challenges with achieving sustainable universal coverage due to limited public resources, inefficient allocation systems, uneasy reliance on out-of-pocket payments, and large struggling populations. Our research sheds particular light on how healthcare professionals view their own participation with private healthcare options. A cross-sectional, analytical study was conducted, openly recruiting individuals from various facilities in Freetown. Using the Yamane Formula, a sample size of 109 participants was calculated. STATA 14.0 was used for data analysis. Our findings revealed that 96 (88.9%) participants did not have private health insurance, while 12 (11.1%) did have private coverage. However, 105 (97.2%) reported other modes of health insurance, with only 3 (2.8%) uninsured. Notably, 97.2% expressed willingness to join a private health insurance scheme. Our study found no statistically significant associations between selected indicators (demographic or socioeconomic fac tors) and current insurance coverage among study participants. These results highlight a low prevalence and understanding of private health insurance among healthcare professionals in a representative urban center in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), while acknowledging high willingness to enroll. The lack of any significant determinants suggests other unexamined factors, such as cost, accessibility, or awareness, capable of influencing the adoption and implementation of a universal health program.

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

A Layered Security Framework Against Prompt Injection in RAG-Based Chatbots

Prompt injection is ranked as the most critical vulnerability in large language model (LLM) deployments by the OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications, yet existing defenses operate at isolated pipeline stages and remain incomplete. Input filters cannot inspect retrieved documents, while output monitors cannot prevent malicious payloads from reaching the model. Consequently, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbots remain vulnerable to indirect injection, where a poisoned knowledge-base document compromises every user whose query retrieves it. We present a three-layer framework that intercepts both direct and indirect prompt injection throughout the inference pipeline. Layer 1 screens user input using a rule-based pattern library and a fine-tuned semantic anomaly classifier. Layer 2 enforces a provenance-based instruction hierarchy during context assembly, preventing retrieved content from overriding operator policy. Layer 3 audits model output using a policy rule engine and semantic drift detector before delivery. A continuous audit loop aggregates structured logs and supports retraining to adapt the classifier to emerging attack patterns. The framework is model-agnostic and deploys as middleware without modifying the underlying LLM. Evaluation on 5,080 samples across GPT-4o, Llama 3, and Mistral 7B shows that the framework reduces Attack Success Rate (ASR) from 71.4\% to 11.3\%, outperforming the best single-layer baseline by 27.3 percentage points and a published guardrail system by 23.8 percentage points, while maintaining a 4.8\% false positive rate and a median latency overhead of 61.2 ms. Ablation studies confirm that all three layers provide complementary protection and that their combined effect exceeds the sum of individual contributions.

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

Factorized Neural Operators Decompose Dynamic and Persistent Responses

arXiv:2606.16900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical systems often exhibit heterogeneous mechanisms, where rapidly evolving dynamics coexist with persistent structures. Capturing such multiscale physical behavior remains challenging for existing neural operators, which typically rely on single dominant inductive bias and therefore couple distinct physical responses into a shared representation. We introduce the Unified Green's Function Framework across domains and propose the Factorized Neural Operators (FaNO), which decompose spectral representations into equivariant dynamic responses and invariant persistent responses, leading to better interpretability and generalization. Mechanistically, we show that the two operator branches spontaneously specialize into distinct physical roles that remain consistent across scales and domains: the equivariant branch captures rapidly varying transient dynamics, whereas the invariant branch extracts coherent persistent structures. This factorized mechanism of FaNO improves prediction accuracy, parameter efficiency and cross-scale generalization across physical systems and domains. In particular, it maintains consistent predictions under long-horizon autoregressive rollout, cross-resolution extrapolation and physical-regime shifts. These findings suggest that scalable physical modeling may benefit from moving beyond single-inductive-bias formulations toward factorized operator representations that better reflect the heterogeneous organization of physical systems, accelerating the reliable deployment of machine learning for scientific computing and discovery.

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

Attention as Frustrated Synchronization

A network of oscillators that synchronizes perfectly computes nothing further, so an attention architecture built from synchronization must locate its computation in structured departures from agreement. We introduce the Frustrated Synchronization Network (FSN), whose token states are phases on a torus and whose entire value pathway is one learned complex coupling kernel over harmonics and a one-step delay. Each component of the kernel is a frustration in the sense of the synchronization literature. The complex phases are static Kuramoto-Sakaguchi frustration angles, the signed harmonics are repulsive Daido components, and the delay term, which couples each token to the successors of the tokens it attends to, is algebraically identical to Kuramoto-Sakaguchi coupling whose frustration angle is the data's own transition, so next-token prediction is implemented as synchronization frustrated by the data. At matched one-million-parameter and training budgets on character-level text and code, the FSN's validation loss is below a tuned RoPE-SwiGLU transformer's at every epoch measured, and the comparison survives training the baseline to convergence: every thirty-epoch enwik8 seed finishes below the transformer's converged fifty-epoch loss of 1.611, and the FSN's completed fifty-epoch runs converge to 1.5953 +/- 0.0014. A variant with every feed-forward block replaced by mean-field coupling to learned collective modes, leaving no multilayer perceptron in the stack, tracks the transformer. On natural text the unfrustrated base layer falls behind the converged transformer at every copy depth, worst on long-range copy events; the kernel reverses the deficit at every depth of four and beyond. Headline comparisons are at the one-million-parameter scale; a scale ladder is complete through four million parameters with the advantage persisting, and remaining arms are marked as in progress.

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

On Approximating the Dynamic Response of Synchronous Generators via Operator Learning: A Step Towards Building Deep Operator-based Power Grid Simulators

arXiv:2301.12538v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops an Operator Learning framework for approximating the dynamic response of synchronous generators. The framework can be used to (i) build a neural network-based generator model that interacts with a power grid simulator or (ii) shadow the true generator's transient response. First, we develop a data-driven Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) to approximate the infinite-dimensional solution operator of the generators. Then, we design a numerical scheme based on DeepONet that simulates the generator's response over a given time horizon. The proposed scheme recursively employs the trained DeepONet to simulate the response for a given multi-dimensional input that describes the interaction between the generator and the power grid. In addition, we design a residual DeepONet numerical scheme that can incorporate information from existing mathematical models. We accompany this residual DeepONet scheme with an estimate for the prediction's cumulative error. Finally, we build a data aggregation (DAgger) strategy that allows fine-tuning of DeepONets using aggregated training data that the DeepONets will likely encounter during interactive simulations with other grid components. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that the proposed frameworks can effectively approximate the transient model of a synchronous generator.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

FlowMPC: Improving Flow Matching policies with World Models

arXiv:2606.16286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) is a powerful approach for behavior cloning in multimodal action spaces [Jiang et al., 2025], but because it is not trained to directly maximize expected return, there is still room to improve how FM policies act at test time. This work investigates whether a learned world model can improve FM policies by enabling Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning over candidate action sequences proposed by the policy. Building on TD-MPC2 [Hansen et al., 2024], I introduce FlowMPC, a framework that combines an imitation-learned FM policy with a learned world model for test-time planning in ManiSkill manipulation tasks [Tao et al., 2025]. Across PickCube and PickSingleYCB, adding the world model improved performance over the FM policy alone, with especially clear gains in end-of-episode success. These results suggest that world-model-based planning can effectively complement flow-based imitation policies without modifying the FM training objective.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Looking beyond stereotyped neuron structures reveals links between beading and morphological rearrangements in aging phenotypes.

Understanding how neuronal morphology changes during aging and acute stress is essential for elucidating mechanisms of neurodegeneration. The highly branched PVD neuron of Caenorhabditis elegans provides a powerful model for studying dendritic remodeling and degeneration-associated phenotypes such as dendritic beading. However, the complexity of this arbor presents substantial challenges for automated segmentation and quantitative analysis. In this study, we adapted a convolutional neural network (CNN)-guided region growing framework for automated dendrite tracing, coupled with two topology-based algorithms for categorizing dendritic segments by branching degree. The segmentation algorithm achieved high accuracy relative to manual tracing, with a median Dice coefficient of 0.82, while reducing analysis time by approximately tenfold. Automated dendrite categorization demonstrated strong agreement with manual annotations across branching orders, though position-based mapping performance declined with age due to progressive morphological distortion. Leveraging this platform, we investigated mechanistic differences in dendritic beading patterns observed during aging and cold shock. Consistent with prior work, aging was associated with decreased inter-bead spacing, whereas cold shock produced increased bead dispersion with stress severity. Structural analysis revealed that these trends were not driven by dendritic pruning or reduced arbor complexity. Instead, while a traditional anatomically unflexible paradigm falsely implicated lower-degree dendrites as highly vulnerable, our branching-informed framework revealed that age-dependent beading is fundamentally dictated by a segments history of successive branching events. Conversely, acute cold shock triggered systemic beading that expanded across all dendritic orders in a severity-dependent manner. Together, these findings demonstrate that chronic aging and acute stress engage distinct degenerative pathways (compartment-specific lineage vulnerability versus global architectural collapse) rather than gross morphological loss, as well as highlighting the need for paradigms that enable reliable analysis of changing morphologies.

22.
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.

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

RLPR: Radar-to-LiDAR Place Recognition via Two-Stage Asymmetric Cross-Modal Alignment for Autonomous Driving

All-weather autonomy is critical for autonomous driving, which necessitates reliable localization across diverse scenarios. While LiDAR place recognition is widely deployed for this task, its performance degrades in adverse weather. Conversely, radar-based methods, though weather-resilient, are hindered by the general unavailability of radar maps. To bridge this gap, radar-to-LiDAR place recognition, which localizes radar scans within existing LiDAR maps, has garnered increasing interest. However, extracting discriminative and generalizable features shared between modalities remains challenging, compounded by the scarcity of large-scale paired training data and the signal heterogeneity across radar types. In this work, we propose RLPR, a robust radar-to-LiDAR place recognition framework compatible with single-chip, scanning, and 4D radars. We first design a dual-stream network to extract structural features that abstract away from sensor-specific signal properties (e.g., Doppler or RCS). Subsequently, motivated by our task-specific asymmetry observation between radar and LiDAR, we introduce a two-stage asymmetric cross-modal alignment (TACMA) strategy, which leverages the pre-trained radar branch as a discriminative anchor to guide the alignment process. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate that RLPR achieves state-of-the-art recognition accuracy with strong zero-shot generalization capabilities.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Clinical care site data integration reveals heterogeneity in EHR phenotyping and healthcare utilization patterns

Objective: Genomic research using electronic health record (EHR)-linked biobanks is influenced by heterogeneity in the clinical settings (care sites) where encounters occur. We developed two methods leveraging care site data: ClinicScan identifies where phenotype documentation occurs, and ClinicWAS identifies specialty utilization patterns associated with a risk factor. Materials and Methods: We extracted care sites for each clinical encounter at an academic medical center and mapped each to a clinical specialty. ClinicScan summarizes the specialty distribution of a user-specified diagnosis; ClinicWAS fits a logistic regression for each care site to identify specialty encounters associated with a user-specified risk factor. We applied ClinicScan to depression to test whether requiring a psychiatry encounter strengthened the association between a polygenic risk score (PRS) and a depression phenotype, and ClinicWAS to a coronary heart disease (CHD) PRS to identify sites enriched for high-risk patients. Results: Across 64,983,257 encounters, 2,544 care sites mapped to 57 specialties. Most depression diagnoses occurred in primary care (30.3%) and psychiatry (19.8%). Requiring a psychiatry encounter strengthened the PRS-phenotype association (OR=1.30, 95% CI 1.26-1.35) versus two or more diagnosis codes alone (OR=1.21, 95% CI 1.19-1.24). CHD ClinicWAS identified 19 associated care sites, including 5 catheterization labs. Men and women with high genetic risk (PRS[≥]95th percentile) underwent catheterization for CHD 3.1 (1.5-4.6) and 4.6 (2.5-6.7) years earlier than normal-risk participants, respectively. Discussion: Care site data capture phenotype heterogeneity that otherwise distorts EHR-based phenotypes and obscures high-risk subpopulations. Conclusion: Clinical care site data are an under-utilized resource in EHR-linked biobanks.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Daily briefing: NASA to launch satellite-rescue mission

作者:

The space agency will lift the orbit of a falling satellite by around 200 kilometres. Plus, Europe’s efforts to take on the US and China as a science superpower and the narcissism of bosses who want to nix remote working. The space agency will lift the orbit of a falling satellite by around 200 kilometres. Plus, Europe’s efforts to take on the US and China as a science superpower and the narcissism of bosses who want to nix remote working.