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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Improving Lunar Topography with Deep Learning Schrödinger Bridges

Increasing the resolution of planetary topography models can enable a better understanding of surface processes and geomorphology; however, existing analytical super-resolution methods are expensive and difficult to apply at large scales. Generative models provide the tools to learn complex relationships within data and can be applied at scale due to hardware accelerators and parallelization. We present a diffusion-based Schrödinger Bridge (SB) generative modeling approach for lunar topography super-resolution, connecting the distribution of low-resolution topography to that of high-resolution topography, incorporating physically-constraining optical imagery. Our approach is inspired by existing Shape-from-Shading methods, which improve a priori low-resolution topography by using optical images at the target resolution. We train SBs on a novel dataset of rendered lunar topography, emulating optical imagery from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Narrow Angle Camera. The result is a flexible approach for topography super-resolution which can provide pixel-level uncertainties in the reconstruction.

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

Analytical solution of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with $1/r^3$ and attractive $1/r^2$ potentials: Universal three-body parameter of mixed-dimensional Efimov states

arXiv:2601.19517v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with $1/r^3$ and attractive $1/r^2$ potentials. Using the quantum defect theory, we obtain analytical solutions for both repulsive and attractive $1/r^3$ interactions. The obtained discrete-scale-invariant energies and wave functions, validated by excellent agreement with numerical results, provide a natural framework for describing the universality of Efimov states in mixed dimension. Specifically, we consider a three-body system consisting of two heavy particles with large dipole moments confined to a quasi-one-dimensional geometry and resonantly interacting with an unconfined light particle. With the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, this system is effectively reduced to the Schr\"{o}dinger equation with $1/r^3$ and $1/r^2$ potentials, and manifests the Efimov effect. Our analytical solution suggests that, for repulsive dipole interactions, the three-body parameter of the mixed-dimensional Efimov states is universally set by the dipolar length scale, whereas for attractive interactions it explicitly depends on the short-range phase. We also investigate the effects of finite transverse confinement and find that our analytical results are useful for describing the Efimov states composed of two polar molecules and a light atom.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Unsupervised Learning of Efficient Exploration: Pre-training Adaptive Policies via Self-Imposed Goals

arXiv:2601.19810v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Unsupervised pre-training can equip reinforcement learning agents with prior knowledge and accelerate learning in downstream tasks. A promising direction, grounded in human development, investigates agents that learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. The core challenge lies in how to effectively generate, select, and learn from such goals. Our focus is on broad distributions of downstream tasks where solving every task zero-shot is infeasible. Such settings naturally arise when the target tasks lie outside of the pre-training distribution or when their identities are unknown to the agent. In this work, we (i) optimize for efficient multi-episode exploration and adaptation within a meta-learning framework, and (ii) guide the training curriculum with evolving estimates of the agent's post-adaptation performance. We present ULEE, an unsupervised meta-learning method that combines an in-context learner with an adversarial goal-generation strategy that maintains training at the frontier of the agent's capabilities. On XLand-MiniGrid benchmarks, ULEE pre-training yields improved exploration and adaptation abilities that generalize to novel objectives, environment dynamics, and map structures. The resulting policy attains improved zero-shot and few-shot performance, and provides a strong initialization for longer fine-tuning processes. It outperforms learning from scratch, DIAYN pre-training, and alternative curricula. Code is available at: https://github.com/Octavio-Pappalardo/ulee-jax

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Stubborn: A Streamlined and Unified Reinforcement Learning Framework for Robust Motion Tracking and Fall Recovery for Humanoids

arXiv:2606.12814v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning approaches have shown great promise in improving humanoid motion tracking performance and achieving fall recovery under disturbances. However, most existing works treat motion tracking and fall recovery as different tasks and require multi-stage training with specialized recovery rewards and/or separate recovery policies. Moreover, existing reinforcement learning-based methods often terminate training episodes immediately after severe tracking failures, limiting recovery-oriented exploration in unstable or fallen states. To address the above issues, we propose Stubborn, a streamlined and unified reinforcement learning framework to achieve robust humanoid motion tracking and fall recovery. Specifically, Stubborn uses an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture and consists of three major components. First, a yaw-aligned tracking representation is adopted to reduce sensitivity to global drift and heading disturbances while preserving gravity-related balance information. Second, we introduce a Bernoulli-based probabilistic termination mechanism that enables the policy to encourage exploration of fall-recovery behaviors under varying failure modes. Third, we propose a probabilistic termination and tracking-error-driven strategy that dynamically reshapes the sampling distribution based on tracking performance, increasing the training efficiency for difficult motion segments and unstable states. Extensive comparisons with SOTA methods and ablation studies show that Stubborn achieved competitive performance, and the proposed probabilistic termination mechanism and adaptive sampling strategy contributed to the performance and robustness gains. For real-world demonstrations, please refer to https://aislab-sustech.github.io/Stubborn/.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Empirical Validation and Predictive Utility of the Perinatal Grief Scale in Men after Perinatal Loss

Background. The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) is a widely used instrument for assessing grief following pregnancy loss, yet no study has validated it specifically in men despite documented use in several studies. This gap is critical given fathers' persistent underrepresentation in perinatal bereavement research and the absence of empirically supported screening thresholds for this population. Methods. This cross-sectional validation study used data from the OPALE project (Observatory on PerinatAL hEalth) conducted by the CiaoLapo Foundation in Italy. Among 276 fathers who experienced stillbirth or miscarriage, we examined criterion validity by testing the association between PGS scores and trauma-related symptomatology assessed via three validated instruments: the Revised Impact of Event Scale (RIES, n=103), National Stressful Events Survey Short Scale (NSESSS, n=95), and SCL-90 (n=173). We systematically tested multiple threshold combinations to identify optimal discriminative performance. Results. The PGS demonstrated excellent criterion validity. The optimal threshold (PGS >=92) showed sensitivity 81.0%, specificity 81.8%, and Youden's J index 0.628. Fathers scoring >=92 had 19.12 times the odds of high trauma symptoms (95% CI: 9.35 to 39.14, p

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Beyond Dark Knowledge: Mixup-Based Distillation for Reliable Predictions

Knowledge Distillation (KD) and mixup have proven effective at inducing smoothness in class boundaries; KD captures inherent class relationships in probability distributions, and mixup enforces them through convex combinations of inputs. Their interaction, however, remains poorly understood, particularly when mixup is applied only during student training. In this setting, the teacher is queried on inputs drawn from a vicinal distribution it never saw during training, a controlled mismatch whose effect on knowledge transfer has not been characterised. We show that this mismatch causes the teacher's supervisory signal to be dominated by distributional confusion rather than inter-class structure. Despite it, the student does not merely imitate the teacher: it independently acquires greater linearity in the vicinal region, a structural property that the teacher lacks, and goes beyond dark-knowledge transfer. KD with mixup consistently improves student accuracy and reduces overconfidence by an order of magnitude relative to the baseline, across CIFAR and ImageNet with varying-capacity teachers. Crucially, calibration propagates from teacher to student independently of accuracy transfer, and temperature scaling governs a measurable accuracy-calibration trade-off that becomes more pronounced under vicinal training. These results reframe mixup distillation not as a degraded version of standard KD, but as a richer transfer channel that simultaneously shapes discriminative performance, uncertainty estimation, and representational geometry.

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

A Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization with Application to Copy Number Analysis in Cancer

arXiv:2606.17491v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Binary data factorization is common, but real-valued methods ignore discreteness and yield hard-to-interpret factors. Boolean Matrix Factorization (BooMF) instead decomposes a binary matrix into two lower-rank binary matrices via logical AND and OR, expressing the data as a Boolean disjunction of interpretable patterns. In cancer genomics, BooMF can reveal coordinated feature changes that may drive tumor evolution, unlike rotational or additive decompositions. Most existing BooMF methods are heuristic, greedy, sensitive to initialization, prone to local optima, and do not support principled model selection or uncertainty quantification. We introduce Bayesian Boolean Matrix Factorization (BBMF), a fully conjugate generative model with sparsity-inducing priors. It enforces Boolean constraints, yields interpretable latent factors with coherent uncertainty quantification, and admits Gibbs sampling with closed-form full conditionals. Because cancer evolution often involves widespread, near-simultaneous chromosome-number changes (e.g., whole-genome duplication followed by instability and selection), Boolean factorizations capture these patterns more naturally than additive models. Applied to arm-level copy-number alteration data in multiple myeloma, where entries indicate presence/absence of chromosomal-arm amplifications, BBMF finds a small set of interpretable bicliques linking patient subsets to recurrently co-altered chromosomal arms, providing a compact, biologically meaningful summary of tumor heterogeneity and demonstrating BBMF's utility for uncovering discrete latent structure in complex binary data.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

NarrativeWorldBench: A Frontier-Saturated Benchmark and a Latent World Model for Long-Horizon Co-Creative Audio Drama

Long-form serialized audio drama, with arcs that run for 200 to 800 episodes, is a major creative medium and a setting where frontier large language models (LLMs) fail. We benchmark 21 models, spanning classical, fine-tuned, open-frontier, closed-frontier, and reasoning tiers, on a uniform set of structural narrative metrics. All closed-frontier systems saturate at a plot-beat F1 in the band [0.78, 0.81] and collapse by about -0.20 F1 at horizon h=200. We introduce NarrativeWorldBench, an open benchmark of nine narrative-structure metrics evaluated across horizons h in {10, 20, 50, 100, 200}, with cross-lingual evaluation across four Indic languages (Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi). We introduce N-VSSM, a Narrative Variational State-Space Model that maintains a structured 256-dimensional latent world state over more than 200 episodes via a Mamba-2 backbone with an event-conditioned posterior and an 8B decoder. N-VSSM holds plot-beat F1 >= 0.84 across all horizons at 4x lower compute than the closed-frontier band. A learned Cultural Transfer Function lifts cross-language fidelity by +0.20 to +0.23 Likert points. In a within-subjects writer study (n = 12 professional authors, 240 trials), N-VSSM is preferred over Claude Opus 4.5 on long-arc consistency 71% of the time and rated +1.3 Likert points higher on controllability.

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

Direction-Conditioned Policies via Compositional Subgoal Scoring for Online Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory implies that the optimal goal-conditioned action depends on the goal only through the gradient of the goal-reaching distance at the current state, yet standard online GCRL still conditions the actor on the raw goal – a signal that is geometrically uninformative when the goal is far from the data distribution. We propose Direction-Conditioned Policies (DCP), a fully online method that decomposes goal-reaching into two components sharing one InfoNCE representation $\psi$: a subgoal-scoring step that selects a visited state $z_t$ aligned with the final goal $g$ in $\psi_g$, and a direction-conditioned actor that consumes the unit direction $d_t$ and magnitude $r_t$ from $\psi(s_t)$ to $\psi(z_t)$. The two components train jointly, factor cleanly at deployment (subgoal scoring is removed, while direction conditioning remains with $g$ in place of $z_t$), and admit independent modification at the same $(d_t,r_t)$ interface. We prove three results. First, direction sufficiency under HJB: the optimal action under control-affine dynamics depends on the goal only through the value gradient. Second, a quantitative bound showing that, under mild conditions on the learned representation and assuming the scoring rule returns an on-path $z_t$, the actor's conditioning input at training and at deployment coincide up to representation error and geodesic slack. Third, a controllable-subspace characterization of when directional conditioning fails. Across nine environments, DCP improves over Contrastive RL on most final metrics, with the largest gains on manipulation and obstacle-interaction tasks; a qualitative analysis of the learned $\psi$-distance landscape shows the contrastive representation behaves as an online quasimetric encoding environment topology, and the single failure case (AntSoccer) localizes to a learned-gradient pathology that the theory anticipates.

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

Spectral DPPs via NEPv: A Scalable Continuous Relaxation of Determinantal MAP for Diversity-Aware Data Selection

arXiv:2606.19411v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting a small, diverse, high-quality subset from a massive pool of candidates is a recurring primitive in modern machine learning – data curation and coreset selection for training and fine-tuning large models, active-learning batch acquisition, prompt and exemplar selection for in-context learning, retrieval diversification, and experimental design. Determinantal Point Processes (\operatorname{DPP} s) give a principled, well-calibrated notion of diversity for this task, but their MAP objective – pick a size-$k$ subset $S$ maximizing $\logdet(L_S)$ – is NP-hard, and the standard greedy and sampling algorithms scale superlinearly in the ground-set size $n$. This cost is prohibitive precisely in the data-centric regime where diversity matters most, where $n$ ranges over millions to billions of candidate examples, features, or embeddings. We recast \operatorname{DPP}-MAP as a continuous optimization problem over the Stiefel manifold, and show that its first-order optimality conditions form a Nonlinear Eigenvalue Problem with eigenvector dependency (\operatorname{NEP}v) of a previously unstudied form. This \operatorname{NEP}v\ admits a self-consistent field (\operatorname{SCF}) iteration with a spectral-gap-based local contraction guarantee, giving a principled iterative solver where the diversity objective drives an eigenvector-dependent operator. The resulting algorithm, \OurMethod, requires only matrix-vector products with the kernel and runs in time $O\!\big((ndk+nk^2)\,t\big)$ for a small number of iterations $t$, scaling near-linearly in $n$ and integrating directly with low-rank and feature-map kernels common in ML. This paper focuses on the relaxation, solver, and scaling analysis; full real-data benchmarking is left to a planned empirical study.

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

Beyond task performance: Decoding bioacoustic embeddings with speech features

arXiv:2606.14662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained audio embeddings are standard in bioacoustics, yet little is known about which acoustic features these models encode, nor which are useful for a given task. This hinders transparency and limits extension to rare species or data-scarce domains. Here we reveal which speech-like features are encoded in bioacoustic representations. Using the 88~eGeMAPS features across six taxonomic groups, we apply linear and nonlinear regression probes to quantify which acoustic properties each model captures. Results confirm a ``no free lunch'' pattern: no single model captures the full feature space. A concatenated embedding achieves the highest performance, suggesting complementary acoustic space coverage across models. Loudness features are best encoded ($R^2 = 0.76$) while F0 is hardest to recover ($R^2 = 0.33$). By cross-referencing recoverability with per-species feature salience (NMI), we derive data-driven model selection guidance for bioacoustics.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CARE: Competence-Aware Reward Shaping for Adaptive Reasoning Length in Video-MLLMs

In multimodal video reasoning, reinforcement learning-based methods typically rely on simplistic and inflexible reasoning-length control strategies that fail to adapt to the model's evolving competence. This mismatch may suppress necessary exploration at early stages, while encouraging redundant reasoning and inefficient decoding once the model becomes more competent. In this paper, we propose CARE, a competence-aware reward shaping framework for adaptive reasoning length optimization in multimodal reasoning. Specifically, CARE maintains a smoothed competence estimate via an exponential moving average of pass rates, and uses it to route training into progressive stages that shift the reward preference from exploration-oriented long-form reasoning to efficiency-oriented concise reasoning. To avoid conflating verbosity with intrinsic task complexity, CARE further normalizes reasoning effort with batch-level statistics, and introduces a posterior amplifier to strengthen reward signals for unexpectedly strong performance on historically difficult samples. The proposed mechanism is seamlessly integrated into the GRPO training pipeline and incurs no additional inference-time overhead. Extensive experiments on multiple video reasoning and general video understanding benchmarks demonstrate that CARE consistently improves reasoning accuracy, stabilizes reinforcement learning, and significantly enhances token efficiency. Moreover, CARE exhibits a characteristic inverted-U trajectory of reasoning length during training, and yields shorter yet more informative reasoning traces at convergence, indicating effective adaptive allocation of reasoning budget. We provide the source code for our proposed CARE framework and experiments at https://github.com/1Pansy/Video-CARE.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.

15.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Plasma proteomic signatures of cellular aging predict human disease

Aging is asynchronous across cells and organs. Here we tested whether plasma proteomics can be used to analyze cell type-specific aging. From analyses of over 7,000 plasma proteins measured in 60,542 individuals, we developed machine learning models to estimate the biological age of over 40 cell types spanning neuronal, immune, glial, endocrine, epithelial and musculoskeletal origins. We observed that 20–25% of individuals exhibited accelerated aging in a single cell type and 1–3% in 10 or more cell types. Cellular aging signatures were associated with disease status and predicted incident disease and mortality over 15 years of follow-up. Individuals with the APOE4 genotype showed older astrocytes but younger macrophages compared to APOE3 carriers, whereas the APOE2 genotype had inverse associations. Moreover, extreme astrocyte aging tripled the risk of incident Alzheimer’s Disease in individuals with two APOE4 alleles, while youthful astrocytes reduced risk. Individuals with extremely aged compared to youthful skeletal myocytes exhibited a 12.7-fold higher risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In individuals who smoked, extreme respiratory epithelial cell aging was associated with a 58% higher lung cancer risk compared to smoking alone. Specific cellular vulnerabilities and cumulative cellular aging burden influenced survival, with youthful immune and neuronal cell types conferring protective effects. Finally, we developed a polycellular aging risk score that stratified mortality risk across cohorts and proteomics platforms. These findings establish a framework for quantifying human physiology at cellular resolution, revealing heterogeneous aging trajectories and their impact on disease susceptibility and resilience. The biological age of individual cell types can be evaluated using plasma proteomics, revealing diverse aging profiles across more than 40 cell types and links between the accelerated aging of specific cell types and disease.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Do as the Romans Do: Learning Universal Behaviors from Heterogeneous Agents

arXiv:2606.18537v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans often acquire new skills by observing others, since observed behaviors implicitly reveal how to act in an environment. However, observations drawn from a heterogeneous population introduce conflicting behavioral signals, making it difficult to determine which behaviors are worth imitating. We address this challenge with General Reward Inference and Disentanglement (GRID), a social learning method that extracts universally useful behaviors from a heterogeneous population of demonstrators pursuing different goals. GRID decomposes per-agent reward functions into a general reward, capturing behaviors shared across all agents, and specific rewards, capturing individual preferences and objectives. Training exclusively on the general reward provides a new paradigm of generalist pretraining. It yields a generalist agent that internalizes universal environmental competencies, such as safety and basic task proficiency, without the mode-averaging bias that afflicts standard learning from demonstration techniques. This generalist serves as a superior prior for fine-tuning to downstream tasks, including preferences unseen during training. Experiments across a synthetic basis function decomposition, multi-agent Craftax, and a continuous autonomous driving simulator (Highway-Env) confirm that GRID successfully disentangles reward structure in a semantically meaningful way, outperforms standard learning from demonstration baselines, and enables more efficient and stable specialization.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bath memory as a precision resource in quantum transport

arXiv:2606.17026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structured baths can reshape transport fluctuations in mesoscopic quantum devices, yet a predictive criterion for when this enhances precision has been lacking. We propose a route towards such precision advantages by utilizing bath memory in coherent fermionic transport through a noninteracting quantum-dot chain. Using the Landauer-Büttiker formalism, we derive a dual impedance-matching condition that synchronizes the conductor mode splitting, boundary dissipation, and bath bandwidth, and sustains constructive multimode interference across the transmission window. The analytical predictions for the optimal bath bandwidths show excellent agreement with exact nonequilibrium Green's function calculations of the transport for Lorentzian, Gaussian, and Newns spectral densities. The prescription yields an optimal bath bandwidth at which the current Fano factor is minimized and the thermodynamic and kinetic precision coefficients are simultaneously enhanced beyond their Markovian limits. The alignment of the optimal precision regime with the experimentally accessible current Fano factor minimum thus provides a practical strategy for designing precision-enhanced transport in mesoscopic platforms such as semiconductor quantum-dot arrays and ultracold fermionic channels.

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

Concept Modulation Models: A Unified Framework for Identifiability and Extrapolation

arXiv:2606.18509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable generalization in conditional latent variable models requires understanding both identifiability and extrapolation: how observed variation across attributes determines latent structure, and how that structure determines distributions at unseen attributes. However, existing identifiability and extrapolation guarantees are largely model-specific, with separate analyses in nonlinear ICA, causal representation learning, perturbation modeling, and related conditional latent variable models. We introduce concept modulation models (CMMs), an attribute-indexed class of conditional generative models with structure $A\to \Lambda \to C\to X$, where attributes select modulators, modulators induce latent concept laws, and concepts generate observed features. CMMs lift transition-based identifiability to conditional settings by showing that feature agreement on observed attributes induces a latent concept transition constrained by the CMM class. We express these constraints through attribute potentials, log-density ratios between attribute-conditioned concept laws, separating the generic lifting step from model-specific rigidity arguments. The same potentials control extrapolation: agreement at unseen attributes holds exactly when the transported attribute-potential identities extend to those attributes. This yields algebraic extrapolation criteria, identifies the common potential-based proof objects behind several existing identifiability and extrapolation results, and, when combined with the model-specific rigidity arguments in those works, recovers their stated conclusions.

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

AIRMap: AI-Generated Radio Maps for Wireless Digital Twins

arXiv:2511.05522v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurate, low-latency channel modeling is essential for real-time wireless network simulation and digital-twin applications. Traditional modeling methods like ray tracing are however computationally demanding and unsuited to model dynamic conditions. In this paper, we propose AIRMap, a deep-learning framework for ultra-fast radio-map estimation, along with an automated pipeline for creating the largest radio-map dataset to date. AIRMap uses a single-input U-Net autoencoder that processes only a 2D elevation map of terrain and building heights. Trained on 1.2M Boston-area samples and validated across four distinct urban and rural environments with varying terrain and building density, AIRMap predicts path gain with under 4 dB RMSE in 4 ms per inference on an NVIDIA L40S-over 100x faster than GPU-accelerated ray tracing based radio maps. A lightweight calibration using just 20% of field measurements reduces the median error to approximately 5%, significantly outperforming traditional simulators, which exceed 50% error. Integration into the Colosseum emulator and the Sionna SYS platform demonstrate near-zero error in spectral efficiency and block-error rate compared to measurement-based channels. These findings validate AIRMap's potential for scalable, accurate, and real-time radio map estimation in wireless digital twins.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

GeoDisaster: Benchmarking Orchestrated Agents for Operational Disaster Geo-Intelligence

Remote-sensing vision-language models (RS-VLMs) have advanced Earth-observation analysis toward visual interpretation and instruction-following, yet fall short of operational geo-intelligence, which demands tool-grounded spatial reasoning and structured, evidence-backed decisions. We introduce GeoDisaster, an operational geospatial disaster reasoning benchmark with 2,921 verified instances across 43 question types and five task families: deforestation monitoring, multi-hazard analysis, building-damage assessment, flood-safe routing, and Sentinel-1 SAR flood monitoring. Instances integrate heterogeneous EO/GIS evidence-optical and SAR imagery, raster masks, vector geometries, road networks, and exposure layers-spanning hazard detection, damage assessment, exposure estimation, and diagnostic report generation. Ground-truth answers are grounded in executable geospatial workflows and deterministic consistency checks, removing the need for language-model annotation. We further propose an orchestrated multi-agent framework with 18 disaster-oriented tools, where role-specialized agents coordinate through explicit execution contracts, aligned via Role-Contract Expectation Alignment (RCEA): failure-aware supervised fine-tuning combined with contract-grounded reinforcement learning over dense step-level signals. Experiments show that GeoDisaster challenges existing RS-VLMs and agentic systems, while RCEA improves tool use, evidence grounding, state consistency, and decision generation.

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

Goal2Pixel: Grounding Goals to Pixels for Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-language models (VLMs) have become a common foundation for vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE). Yet most VLM-based methods cast navigation as low-level action prediction, an interface that is ambiguous, tied to short-horizon motion primitives, and inefficient due to repeated VLM querying. We propose Goal2Pixel, a pure pixel-based paradigm that reformulates VLN-CE as navigable pixel grounding. Rather than predicting actions, Goal2Pixel uses the image plane as a unified spatial interface between VLM reasoning and robot motion: the model predicts a visible navigable pixel to the agent, which is back-projected into a 3D waypoint for forward navigation. For non-forward actions, we append auxiliary directive regions to the image plane, where the left/right/bottom regions are interpreted as turning left, turning right, and stopping, respectively. To enable long-horizon navigation, we propose a visibility-aware keyframe memory for compact and informative history representation. To adapt pretrained VLMs to navigable pixel grounding, we introduce semantic embeddings and coordinate-aware auxiliary losses. Goal2Pixel achieves competitive state-of-the-art performance while requiring fewer VLM inference calls than prior methods. On R2R-CE Val-Unseen it achieves 54.1% SR and 52.5% SPL with just 7.75 VLM calls per episode, 6x fewer than the 46.62 required by direct action prediction at 32.9% SR. The same trend holds on RxR-CE.Project Page: https://baobao0926.github.io/Goal2Pixel/.

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

Vines-DB: An RGB image dataset for multi-species ornamental vine segmentation

The Vines-DB dataset contains 1,218 original high-resolution RGB images of seven ornamental vine species collected under field conditions at the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station's Greenville Research Farm in Logan, Utah, USA. The dataset was generated from 168 individual vine plants that were transplanted in 2022 and photographed repeatedly across multiple months during the 2023 and 2024 growing seasons (July-October). Images were captured with an iPhone 16 Pro equipped with a 48 MP camera between 10:00 AM and 12:00 PM under daylight. Vines were grown on 1.2m x 2.4m trellises and photographed from a distance of 1m against black or white Styrofoam backdrops to improve contrast and reduce background noise. The dataset includes Akebia quinata, Campsis radicans, Hydrangea anomala petiolaris, Lonicera x heckrottii, Campsis x tagliabuana 'Madame Galen', Parthenocissus quinquefolia, and Wisteria floribunda. All original images were manually annotated in Roboflow by trained annotators to produce polygon-based instance segmentation masks for eight classes, including seven species and background. After preprocessing and data augmentation, the working dataset was expanded to 2,307 images for model development and evaluation. The augmented dataset was divided into 2,019 training images, 192 validation images, and 96 test images using stratified sampling to maintain balanced representation. Vines-DB supports the development and evaluation of deep learning models for multi-class instance segmentation in precision horticulture and urban ecology. The dataset enables applications such as automated canopy cover estimation, species identification, and scalable field phenotyping. In addition, repeated monthly imaging of the plants captures temporal variation in canopy development and plant appearance, increasing the dataset's utility for segmentation benchmarking under realistic field conditions.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

An Empirical Study of Automating Agent Evaluation

Agent evaluation requires assessing complex multi-step behaviors involving tool use and intermediate reasoning, making it costly and expertise-intensive. A natural question arises: can frontier coding assistants reliably automate this evaluation process? Our study shows that simply prompting coding assistants is insufficient for this task. Without domain-specific evaluation knowledge, frontier coding assistants achieve only a 30% execution success rate and produce over-engineered evaluations averaging 12+ metrics per agent, indicating that strong coding ability does not automatically translate to reliable agent evaluation. We introduce EvalAgent, an AI assistant that automates the end-to-end agent evaluation pipeline. EvalAgent encodes evaluation domain expertise as evaluation skills (procedural instructions, reusable code and templates, and dynamically retrieved API documentation) that compose into a trace-based pipeline producing complete evaluation artifacts including metrics, executable code, and reports. To systematically assess generated evaluations, we introduce a meta-evaluation framework alongside AgentEvalBench, a benchmark comprising 20 agents, each paired with evaluation requirements and test scenarios. We further propose the Eval@1 metric to measure whether generated evaluation code both executes and yields meaningful results on the first run. Our experiments show that EvalAgent produces focused evaluations, improving Eval@1 from 17.5% to 65%, and achieving 79.5% human expert preference over baseline approaches. Further ablation studies show that evaluation skills are critical for handling complex evaluation: removing them causes Eval@1 to drop significantly from 65% to 30%.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Learning-Based Decision Making for Combustion Phasing Control in Multi-Fuel CI Engines with Latent Fuel Reactivity Estimation

arXiv:2606.18393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control. This work formulates CA50 regulation under latent CN variation as a partially observable sequential decision problem and systematically evaluates controllers with increasing temporal and representational capacity, including LinUCB, history-augmented contextual bandits, observation-only DDPG, recurrent DDPG, and a proposed GRU-guided RL framework. A Gaussian-process surrogate trained on experimental multi-fuel engine data provides a controlled and reproducible evaluation environment. Results show that myopic and fixed-history bandit methods degrade under CN variation, observation-only RL suffers from latent-state aliasing, and generic recurrence is insufficient when CN evolves rapidly. The proposed framework learns a compact GRU-based representation of fuel reactivity from combustion history and conditions both actor and critic on this estimated signal rather than oracle CN. By training the policy on the same imperfect fuel-reactivity information available at deployment, the controller avoids train-deploy inconsistency in conventional online estimate-then-control pipelines. Across unseen CN trajectories, the policy achieves stable CA50 regulation with mean absolute tracking error below 0.25{\deg} CA at the training setpoint, while producing smooth, physically consistent SOI and glow-plug-power actuation. These results show that combustion control under latent, continuously evolving fuel dynamics requires more than standalone estimation or generic recurrence. By aligning fuel-reactivity inference with control policy learning, the proposed framework enables reactivity-aware decision-making using the same estimated state available during deployment.

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arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer

arXiv:2602.12753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy dependence: policies change due to ongoing learning, environmental non-stationarities, and changes in task demands, making established predictive representations obsolete. Furthermore, in topologically complex environments, SRs suffer from spectral diffusion, leading to dense and overlapping features that scale poorly. Here we propose the Hierarchical Successor Representation (HSR) for overcoming these limitations. By incorporating temporal abstractions into the construction of predictive representations, HSR learns stable state features which are robust to task-induced policy changes. Applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to the HSR yields a sparse, low-rank state representation that facilitates highly sample-efficient transfer to novel tasks in multi-compartmental environments. Further analysis reveals that HSR-NMF discovers interpretable topological structures, providing a policy-agnostic hierarchical map that effectively bridges model-free optimality and model-based flexibility. Beyond providing a useful basis for task-transfer, we show that HSR's temporally extended predictive structure can also be leveraged to drive efficient exploration, effectively scaling to large, procedurally generated environments.