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

High-Fidelity 4D Hand-Object Capture via Multi-View Spatiotemporal Tracking and Physics-Aware Gaussians

The growing demand for high-fidelity 4D hand-object interaction (HOI) data in embodied AI and spatial computing is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on pre-scanned object templates and physical markers. While recent methods have demonstrated promising results in reconstructing 4D hand-object interaction from videos, they are highly sensitive to initial estimates of hand and object poses. Yet, estimating these poses from images is challenging, in particular under severe occlusion which is inherent in hand-object interaction scenarios. We propose a novel system for the robust and accurate reconstruction of hands and objects from synchronized and calibrated multi-view videos without requiring any templates or markers. Our system consists of two main components with key innovations: (1) a multi-view feed-forward transformer model that aggregates cross-view geometry and temporal cues to provide a reliable, metric-consistent initialization for both poses and dense object geometry, and (2) a hand-object physics-aware Gaussian-based optimization framework to refine the initial estimates, integrating tetrahedral constraints, collision refinement, and appearance decomposition to produce physically plausible and visually accurate reconstruction. Validated on public benchmarks and an extensive internal dataset, our pipeline achieves highly robust, artifact-free reconstruction, providing an efficient foundation for automated 4D asset generation. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/HOSTPG/.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Can Trustless Agents Be Trusted? An Empirical Study of the ERC-8004 Decentralized AI Agent Ecosystem

arXiv:2606.26028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As autonomous AI agents increasingly transact across organizational boundaries, a fundamental trust challenge emerges: how can an agent assess whether an unknown counterpart is trustworthy? The ERC-8004 protocol addresses this challenge with the first permissionless trust layer for AI agent economies, built around three on-chain registries for Identity, Reputation, and Validation. Despite its rapid adoption, the protocol has not been studied empirically, leaving it unclear whether the information it records provides a trustworthy basis for decision-making. To address this gap, we present the first empirical study of ERC-8004 across three chains: Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain (BSC), and Base, covering the period from protocol deployment through May 13, 2026. We crawl on-chain Identity and Reputation events, off-chain files, and x402 payment transactions. On the identity side, we find that most registrations are placeholders rather than active agents, with only a small fraction (3%, 4%, and 15% across Ethereum, BSC, and Base) exposing a valid ERC-8004 registration file with at least one live service endpoint. On the reputation side, we show that the Registry, as currently deployed, cannot function as a trust signal: values are not commensurable, feedback records are rarely grounded in verifiable interactions, and reputation can be manipulated at minimal cost. Consistent with these design weaknesses, we find that a substantial fraction of reviewers (73.6%, 59.2%, and 90.6% across Ethereum, BSC, and Base) exhibit coordinated Sybil behavior. After removing Sybil-flagged feedback, 15.5%, 72.3%, and 89.4% of rated agents, respectively, are left with no valid feedback. We then turn these findings into concrete recommendations for future revisions of ERC-8004. Our study yields actionable protocol-design implications and establishes an empirical baseline for research on AI agent markets.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Real-rootedness of the Poincaré polynomials of $\overline{\mathcal M}_{0,n}$: an AI-assisted proof

arXiv:2605.29151v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We prove real-rootedness for the Poincaré polynomial \[ P_n(t)=\sum_{i=0}^{n-3} \dim H^{2i}(\overline{\mathcal M}_{0,n};\mathbb{Q})t^i \] of the Deligne–Mumford moduli space $\overline{\mathcal M}_{0,n}$ of stable $n$-pointed rational curves, proving a conjecture of Aluffi–Chen–Marcolli. The proof starts from the Keel–Manin–Getzler recurrence, but its main new idea is a bivariate deformation $F_m(y,t)$ of the Poincaré polynomial. This deformation reveals a hidden interlacing structure not visible in the one-variable recurrence. For fixed $t

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

Cross-lingual Embedding Clustering for Hierarchical Softmax in Low-Resource Multilingual Speech Recognition

We present a novel approach centered on the decoding stage of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) that enhances multilingual performance, especially for low-resource languages. It utilizes a cross-lingual embedding clustering method to construct a hierarchical Softmax (H-Softmax) decoder, which enables similar tokens across different languages to share similar decoder representations. It addresses the limitations of the previous Huffman-based H-Softmax method, which relied on shallow features in token similarity assessments. Through experiments on a downsampled dataset of 15 languages, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in improving low-resource multilingual ASR accuracy.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Brain age gap correlates with DTI-derived microstructural abnormalities in multiple sclerosis.

Background: Brain age gap (BAG) is increased in multiple sclerosis (MS), but whether it reflects microstructural pathology beyond conventional atrophy remains unclear. Objective: To test whether BAG is elevated in MS and correlates with conventional and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) abnormalities relative to healthy controls. Methods: A case-control study of 43 people with MS and 18 healthy controls was performed. BAG was estimated from T1-weighted MRI using brainageR. Controls were used as MRI reference distributions. MRI values were expressed as deviation z-scores and correlated with BAG within MS. Conventional MRI and DTI domains were analysed using age/sex-adjusted partial correlations with domain-wise Benjamini-Hochberg FDR correction, where appropriate. Results: BAG was higher in MS than controls (4.79 vs -2.58 years; p

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

Short-Term-to-Long-Term Memory Transfer for Knowledge Graphs under Partial Observability

arXiv:2605.22142v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning under partial observability requires deciding what information to retain, yet most memory-based approaches do not explicitly model short-term-to-long-term transfer of symbolic observations. We study this transfer process in a temporal knowledge-graph memory setting and cast it as a neuro-symbolic value-based decision problem: for each observed triple, the agent chooses whether to keep or drop it before long-term insertion. To handle variable-sized short-term buffers, we use a per-item Q-learning design with shared parameters and a practical temporal-difference update over matched items across consecutive steps. On the RoomKG benchmark at long-term memory capacity 128, learned transfer decisions outperform symbolic and neural baselines, including symbolic baselines with temporal annotations and history-based LSTM/Transformer baselines. Across transfer-policy ablations, a lightweight local short-term-only variant performs best, and step-level behavior shows that the policy keeps navigation- and query-relevant facts while discarding lower-value candidate facts, supporting explicit and interpretable memory decisions under memory constraints.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Techniques for Peak Memory Reduction for LoRA Fine-tuning of LLMs on Edge Devices

arXiv:2606.19528v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on an end-user's data offers personalized experiences while keeping data private, but faces severe memory constraints on consumer hardware. Peak memory during fine-tuning often exceeds device limits, especially for models with billions of parameters and long-context training data. This paper introduces a suite of complementary techniques to reduce memory footprint without sacrificing model quality: (1) base model quantization with on-the-fly dequantization, (2) memory-efficient checkpointing combining selective activation caching and disk offloading, (3) softmax approximation using semantically relevant token subsets, and (4) logits masking. Experiments on Llama-3.2 3B and Qwen-2.5 3B demonstrate up to $26\times$ and $28\times$ reduction in peak memory, enabling fine-tuning on resource-constrained devices.

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

Let LLMs Judge Each Other: Multi-Agent Peer-Reviewed Reasoning for Medical Question Answering

Objective: To enhance the accuracy, interpretability, and robustness of large language models (LLMs) in medical question answering (MedQA). Method: We designed a multi-agent peer-reviewed reasoning method in which multiple LLM agents independently generate chain-of-thought reasoning with candidate answers, then act as peer reviewers to evaluate each other's reasoning for factual correctness and logical soundness. The highest-rated reasoning chain is selected to produce the final answer. Experiments were conducted with five state-of-the-art LLMs (Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, Phi-4, DeepSeek-LLM-7B, GPT-oss-20B) on three benchmark datasets: HeadQA, MedQA-USMLE, and PubMedQA. Performance was compared against single-model chain-of-thought reasoning and chain-of-thought-based majority voting. Results: Peer-reviewed reasoning consistently outperformed both baselines. The best model combination achieved an average accuracy of 0.820 across datasets, exceeding the strongest single model (0.777) and majority voting ensembles (up to 0.789). The method also scaled effectively with more participating models, while peer assessments reliably distinguished high- from low-quality reasoning chains. Conclusion: The proposed multi-agent peer-reviewed reasoning method enables LLMs to act as both solvers and evaluators, yielding superior performance in MedQA. By emphasizing reasoning quality rather than answer agreement alone, this approach improves accuracy, interpretability, and robustness, offering a promising direction for trustworthy biomedical AI systems.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Evidence-Gated LLM Priors for Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization

arXiv:2606.01730v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as heuristic advisors for black-box optimization, yet their suggestions and self-reported confidence are not necessarily calibrated to downstream objective values. This issue becomes more pronounced in multi-objective Bayesian optimization, where different objectives may require different expert knowledge and where an LLM expert can be useful for one objective but misleading for another. We study how to use LLM-generated expert priors in discrete multi-objective Bayesian optimization without blindly trusting them. We propose an objective-wise reputation-market mechanism that treats each expert-objective pair as a falsifiable prior source. Expert weights are updated online from observed objective feedback, discounted over time, and gated by market-level trust. We then introduce a decoupled counterfactual gate that can use the LLM prior without confidence, use it with confidence, or abstain from the LLM prior entirely. Across controlled synthetic stress tests and three molecule optimization benchmarks with \qwenflash{}-generated expert priors, we find that dynamic objective-wise calibration improves robustness over fixed LLM priors. However, raw LLM confidence is not reliably beneficial: on ESOL, confidence is positively correlated with prediction error; on FreeSolv, confidence can help; and on Lipophilicity, ignoring confidence remains strongest. Our fixed three-arm counterfactual gate improves over the first counterfactual variant on ESOL and FreeSolv, while an attempted margin portfolio exposes a useful negative result: margin selection should be acquisition-aware rather than based only on one-step prior error.

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

Explainable Flood Segmentation on Sentinel-1 SAR Imagery: A Comparative Study of CNN and Transformer Architectures

Rapid and accurate flood prediction is essential for disaster response and mitigation planning. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) sensors in satellites are well-suited for this purpose because they operate independently of weather and daylight conditions. Although SAR-based data enable all-weather flood monitoring, distinguishing flooded land from permanent water remains a significant challenge, particularly when flooding is defined strictly as inundated land. This study provides a comprehensive comparison of convolutional neural network (CNN) and vision transformer architectures for multi-class flood segmentation using Sentinel-1 SAR imagery, specifically trained to separate flooded land from permanent water bodies and land. Three state-of-the-art (SOTA)CNN-based models, U-Net, U-Net++, and DeepLabV3 with ResNet-34 backbone, and three SegFormer variants (b0,b1,b2) were evaluated in two benchmark datasets, the ETCI NASA dataset and SenFloods11, using scene-based data splits to ensure a realistic assessment of spatial generalization. The results demonstrate that SegFormer-b2 significantly outperforms the U-Net baseline on the ETCI dataset (higher flood IoU across all 7 test scenes in the Wilcoxon signed-rank test), while after fine-tuning on Sen1Floods11, the advantage narrows to within the range of scene variability and is concentrated in spatially fragmented flood events. The study includes both qualitative and quantitative explainability techniques to visually comprehend model decisions and systematically assess prediction reliability. Qualitative analysis reveals that SegFormer-b2 produces more spatially coherent Grad-CAM activations focused on flood-relevant features, while U-Net generates more informative uncertainty estimates along flood boundaries.

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

Sub-Semantic Image Segmentation

Images can be segmented based on visual cues (i.e., texture segmentation) or into objects (i.e., semantic segmentation). We propose a new category of sub-semantic image segmentation that blurs the line between the two. In sub-semantic image segmentation, language is not used to name whole objects. Instead, it is used to partition an image into stable appearance patterns that can be described by language. To do that, we couple a general-purpose vision-language model to SAM 3, a promptable segmentation backbone whose native text pathway can ground rich descriptions into masks. Simple coupling fails for a number of reasons that we identify in the paper, and we overcome them by introducing DETECTURE that resolves three concrete failure modes – language leakage between texture regions, prompt competition inside the segmentation backbone, and semantic distortion at the language-to-mask interface. Since there is no dataset of sub-semantic image segmentation, we introduce one, termed TextureADE. The new dataset is derived from the ADE20K dataset using a system we designed. We compare DETECTURE to a number of baselines and find that it achieves the strongest performance on several datasets using different metrics. Code is available at https://github.com/Scientific-Computing-Lab/TextureDetecture.

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

Querying Counterfactuals on Tissue Graphs with Supervised Disentanglement

arXiv:2606.08493v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Tissue graph counterfactuals ask how a cell's expression would change under altered spatial neighbor contexts. Such queries are central to predicting cell behavior in tissues, but lack a unified definition, with existing methods targeting specific intervention types or treating cells as i.i.d. In this work, we first formalize tissue graph counterfactuals as a class of spatial interventions that either rewire connections between cells (edge perturbation) or modify the expression of their neighbors (node perturbation). We then introduce Cellina (https://cellina.readthedocs.io) - a framework that uses supervised disentanglement to decompose a cell's intrinsic state from its spatial context, using the latter as a conditioning input for counterfactual predictions. Across benchmarks spanning over 2.5 million spatially-resolved cells in colorectal cancer and mouse brain, Cellina outperforms spatially-informed and non-spatial competitors in in-silico graph perturbations, disentanglement, and scalability. Additionally, we show that Cellina reveals biologically distinct cancer subdomains in an unsupervised manner and enables targeted neighbor perturbation simulations.

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

Spectro-Temporal Interference Confounds Phase Encoding in Spatial Audio Foundation Models

Recent spatial self supervised audio models achieve high performance on localization tasks, raising questions about their encoding of microsecond interaural phase fine structures. We propose a psychoacoustic benchmark based on the binaural masking level difference to evaluate this. Using an equalization cancellation baseline and a GCC PHAT positive control we evaluate nine frozen audio models spanning binaural SSL, monaural SSL, and neural audio codecs. Four monaural negative controls yield zero BMLD confirming binaural specificity. Two general purpose binaural SSL models exhibit minimal phase sensitivity while dedicated binaural spatial SSL models achieve BMLD comparable to the analytical baseline. Progressive physical ablations show that general purpose binaural SSL models rely on spectro temporal interference textures rather than cross channel phase computation. High detection rates in speech reflect a confounding reliance on broadband envelopes rather than genuine phase encoding.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

APEX: Adaptive Principle EXtraction A Three-Layer Self-Evolution Framework for Production AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improvement in AI agents has emerged as a key research frontier: systems that modify their own prompts, workflows, and decision rules based on accumulated operational experience. The state-of-the-art Self-Harness framework [1] achieves 14–21% improvement on Terminal-Bench-2.0 by mining failure clusters and patching the agent harness. However, Self-Harness optimises only one dimension – the prompt harness – leaving behavioural principles and workflow topology unchanged. We propose APEX (Adaptive Principle EXtraction), a three-layer co-evolution framework that simultaneously evolves: (L1) the harness via failure-mode patching, (L2) behavioural principles via success-trace distillation [2], and (L3) the agent workflow topology via structural fitness-based selection [6]. We implement APEX on Joe [13], a production-grade super AI Agent built on NVIDIA Nemotron and designed as an Edge AI Agent Factory for the NVIDIA Agent Challenge 2026, managing a 15-node compute fleet using 114 real task traces collected over 18 days. APEX achieves an APEX Health Score of 0.570 (+90% vs. baseline 0.300) in a single evolutionary run, distilling 6 novel reusable principles and selecting a research-first workflow topology scoring 0.900 (+20%). Our results demonstrate that multi-dimensional co-evolution substantially outperforms single-axis harness optimisation, at a cost of only 4 LLM calls (~270 s) on a local qwen2.5-coder:32b instance.

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

XPASS-Vis: A Dataset for Cross-Domain Personalized Image Aesthetic Assessment

Personalized image aesthetic assessment (PIAA) seeks to model, at the individual level, the subjective nature of aesthetic judgments toward artworks and photographs. Aesthetic preference is known to be both deeply personal and partially consistent across visual domains. Yet existing PIAA datasets and methods are largely confined to a single domain, or provide too few samples per annotator within each domain to enable personalization across domains. Consequently, the cross-domain generalization of personalized aesthetic preferences remains largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce XPASS-Vis, the first dataset explicitly designed for cross-domain PIAA. XPASS-Vis comprises 6,526 stimuli from three visual domains – art, fashion, and landscape – rated by 129 annotators, yielding 87,836 user-stimulus interactions, each annotated with an overall aesthetic score and nine aesthetic-emotion ratings. Notably, each annotator rated more than 200 stimuli per domain, providing sufficient per-domain coverage to support personalization both within and across domains. Moreover, we establish baseline models for cross-domain PIAA under unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA), where a model trained on a labeled source domain is transferred to an unlabeled target domain. A systematic evaluation of representative UDA approaches shows that the best-performing method recovers approximately 60\% (Spearman's $\rho$ = .28) of the supervised upper bound under a fully unsupervised setting. This provides encouraging evidence that personalized aesthetic preferences are, to a meaningful extent, transferable across visual domains. At the same time, a substantial gap remains, highlighting the need for PIAA-specific adaptation strategies. XPASS-Vis and the accompanying baselines provide a foundation for future research on cross-domain PIAA. All datasets and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

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

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

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

18.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Efficient site-specific gene addition using R2 retrotransposons in tobacco and rice

作者:

Precise integration of multikilobase DNA fragments remains a major technical barrier in plants. Here we introduce non-long terminal repeat (non-LTR) R2 retrotransposons as a versatile system for targeted gene integration in plants. We reconstituted R2 activity in Nicotiana benthamiana and benchmarked insertion efficiency and fidelity using a TMV-based episomal reporter system. We demonstrate site-specific integration of GFP (2.2 kb) and recombinase-compatible landing pads (0.6 kb) into 28S rDNA arrays, with intact cassette insertion frequencies up to 75% and 53%, respectively. To temporally constrain donor availability and avoid DNA intermediates, we combined in planta effector expression with recombinant RNA virus-mediated donor delivery. We apply R2 retrotransposons for targeted insertion of resistance cassettes within the rDNA of rice callus, achieving integration efficiencies up to 17%. These results position R2 retrotransposons as a double-strand break-free system for RNA-templated insertion of multikilobase gene cassettes at rDNA loci, for safe-harbor trait stacking in plants with potential applications in crop improvement and synthetic biology. Retrotransposons are applied in plants for safe-harbor transgene integration.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum-enhanced estimation of stimulated Raman optical activity

arXiv:2606.23722v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent times there has been growing interest in Raman optical activity (ROA) for its label free detection of absolute configuration, conformation, and stereochemical structure in chiral biosamples and drug molecules. Since ROA signals are generally small, techniques such as stimulation by a probe beam can be used to enhance the signal strength. However, with a classical probe, the measurement precision is still fundamentally limited by its shot noise. To solve this problem we propose the use of two-mode squeezed vacuum and show that it can achieve sub-shot noise limited measurement sensitivity. Using quantum estimation theory, we derived the quantum Fisher information and the quantum Cramér-Rao bound (QCRB) for stimulated ROA measurement to quantify the precision enhancement. This improvement comes from photon-number correlations which suppress the intensity fluctuation common to both modes. We further show that balanced detection of the output intensity difference is a practical measurement scheme that approaches the QCRB and becomes optimal in the small-chirality limit. This opens a promising path toward more sensitive Raman chiroptical spectroscopy of weak and photosensitive samples.

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

LLMs on Tabular Data with Limited Semantics: Evidence from Industrial Car Retrofit Prediction

arXiv:2606.15314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Industrial retrofit planning depends on structured operational data rather than free text: planners must estimate whether a newly registered prototype will require a retrofit, which retrofit package it will need, and how long the work will take. We study an industrial dataset linking a prototype-registration system (284,271 vehicles) with a retrofit-management system (48,716 cleaned visits), and compare strong tabular machine learning baselines with three LLM-based strategies on row-serialized inputs: embedding features (Amazon Titan), direct prompted classification (Claude Sonnet 4), and an ML+LLM stacking approach. Across binary occurrence prediction, 15-way retrofit-type classification, per-visit duration regression, and an aggregated monthly benchmark, classical tree ensembles remain the strongest standalone models. However, the LLM results reveal a consistent pattern: embeddings remain useful on tables (binary AUC = 0.982), direct prompting collapses once semantic signal is stripped by hashing (binary AUC = 0.500; multiclass weighted F1 = 0.018), and hybrid stacking yields the best manually built multiclass model (weighted F1 = 0.626). On the monthly benchmark, lag-based machine learning outperforms time-series foundation models, though Chronos-small remains competitive in zero-shot forecasting. The results suggest that on privacy-constrained industrial tables, LLMs are more effective as complementary components than as replacements for strong tabular baselines.

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

Fung-AI: An AI/ML-driven pipeline for antifungal peptide discovery

by Daniel S. Berman, Libby M. Lewis, Tom D. Curtis, Olivia N. Tiburzi, Daniel F. Q. Smith, Arturo Casadevall, Laura J. Dunphy Emerging fungal pathogens represent a concerning threat to both global health and food security. In this study, we aimed to address our rising vulnerability to fungal pathogens through the development of the Fung-AI pipeline: an AI/ML-driven approach for antifungal discovery. A generative adversarial network (GAN) was trained to generate novel candidate antifungal peptide sequences. Next, in silico antifungal and hemolytic classifiers were built to further prioritize AI-generated peptides for experimental validation. From a pool of ~10,000 candidates, thirteen peptides were selected for testing over two-stages of experimentation. Five peptides were found to display mild antifungal activity against the wheat pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, with minimal inhibitory concentrations (MICs) ranging from 250 µg/mL to 500 µg/mL. Four of the five peptides also showed activity against the human pathogen, Candida albicans (MIC: 500 µg/mL). Two of our AI-generated antifungal peptides additionally demonstrated low cytotoxicity in HepG2 human liver carcinoma cells (LC50 > 704.2 µg/mL) indicating that they may be useful as scaffolds for future optimization for therapeutic applications. None of our peptides were found to considerably inhibit the emerging pathogen C. auris, suggesting the need for pathogen-specific down-selection of candidate peptides. Overall, we present a proof-of-principle, generative-AI-based approach for the rapid design of de novo antifungal peptides.

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

CAMEO: A Conditional and Quality-Aware Multi-Agent Image Editing Orchestrator

Conditional image editing aims to modify a source image according to textual prompts and optional reference guidance. Such editing is crucial in scenarios requiring strict structural control (i.e., anomaly insertion in driving scenes and complex human pose transformation). Despite recent advances in large-scale editing models (i.e., Seedream, Nano Banana, etc), most approaches rely on single-step generation. This paradigm often lacks explicit quality control, may introduce excessive deviation from the original image, and frequently produces structural artifacts or environment-inconsistent modifications, typically requiring manual prompt tuning to achieve acceptable results. We propose CAMEO, a structured multi-agent framework that reformulates conditional editing as a quality-aware, feedback-driven process rather than a one-shot generation task. CAMEO decomposes editing into coordinated stages of planning, structured prompting, hypothesis generation, and adaptive reference grounding, where external guidance is invoked only when task complexity requires it. To overcome the lack of intrinsic quality control in existing methods, evaluation is embedded directly within the editing loop. Intermediate results are iteratively refined through structured feedback, forming a closed-loop process that progressively corrects structural and contextual inconsistencies. We evaluate CAMEO on anomaly insertion and human pose switching tasks. Across multiple strong editing backbones and independent evaluation models, CAMEO consistently achieves 20\% more win rate on average compared to multiple state-of-the-art models, demonstrating improved robustness, controllability, and structural reliability in conditional image editing.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Human-Guided Agentic AI for Multimodal Clinical Prediction: Lessons from the AgentDS Healthcare Benchmark

arXiv:2602.19502v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly capable of autonomous data science workflows, yet clinical prediction tasks demand domain expertise that purely automated approaches struggle to provide. We investigate how human guidance of agentic AI can improve multimodal clinical prediction, presenting our approach to all three AgentDS Healthcare benchmark challenges: 30-day hospital readmission prediction (Macro-F1 = 0.8986), emergency department cost forecasting (MAE = $465.13), and discharge readiness assessment (Macro-F1 = 0.7939). Across these tasks, human analysts directed the agentic workflow at key decision points, multimodal feature engineering from clinical notes, scanned PDF billing receipts, and time-series vital signs; task-appropriate model selection; and clinically informed validation strategies. Our approach ranked 5th overall in the healthcare domain, with a 3rd-place finish on the discharge readiness task. Ablation studies reveal that human-guided decisions compounded to a cumulative gain of +0.065 F1 over automated baselines, with multimodal feature extraction contributing the largest single improvement (+0.041 F1). We distill three generalizable lessons: (1) domain-informed feature engineering at each pipeline stage yields compounding gains that outperform extensive automated search; (2) multimodal data integration requires task-specific human judgment that no single extraction strategy generalizes across clinical text, PDFs, and time-series; and (3) deliberate ensemble diversity with clinically motivated model configurations outperforms random hyperparameter search. These findings offer practical guidance for teams deploying agentic AI in healthcare settings where interpretability, reproducibility, and clinical validity are essential.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Time-spectral control of accidental coincidences in daylight entanglement-based free-space QKD

arXiv:2606.17365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Daylight entanglement-based free-space quantum key distribution (QKD) is limited by accidental coincidences from receiver-admitted background light. We develop and experimentally validate a receiver-level framework linking receiver bandwidth, accepted temporal width, and background-noise density to Bob singles, sifted-key rate, error rate, and quantum bit error rate (QBER) in telecom-wavelength BBM92 QKD. Indoor sweeps show that useful sifted counts saturate near the source-matched bandwidth, whereas broader bandwidth or higher background mainly increases accidental contamination. Increasing the accepted temporal width leaves Bob singles nearly unchanged but directly raises QBER by enlarging the random-overlap probability. A two-dimensional design map shows that the temporal-window margin contracts rapidly with increasing background-to-signal ratio, while the bandwidth margin remains comparatively broad near source-matched filtering. A 10 m rooftop daylight experiment demonstrates operation in the predicted low-accidental regime, yielding a mean sifted-key rate of 2,811 cps and a mean QBER of 4.43%.

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

Can We Stop Malicious AI? KILLBENCH: A Benchmark for External AI Kill Switch Feasibility

arXiv:2511.13725v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Malicious AI causing harm to humans is not just a Hollywood fantasy. Indeed, as highly capable models such as Claude Mythos emerge and agent systems like OpenClaw rapidly spread, the question of how to stop an AI that acts maliciously – whether by design or by accident – has become urgent. To address this, we propose Killbench, a benchmark for evaluating the Killswitch: a mechanism that halts a malicious AI's in-progress behavior using only external signals. Targeting web agents – the most widely deployed agent domain – Killbench evaluates a range of Kill Switch methods that halt a maliciously operating agent without any access to its internal parameters or the surrounding malicious AI's system, relying solely on external inputs. The benchmark comprises four malicious AI's agent configurations (including an uncensored LLM Agent), 8 harmful scenarios, and malicious prompts constructed from 10 distinct jailbreak patterns. We further construct four External AI Kill Switch defense methods and evaluate them on Grok-4.3, GPT-5.2, Gemma4, Qwen3.6 and Qwen3.5-uncensored, contributing an empirical instrument toward the feasibility of External AI Kill Switches against malicious AI and to the study of AI corrigibility.