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

PANDA: An LLM-Enhanced Performance-Driven Analog Design Framework Bridging Design Intent and Layout Generation

arXiv:2606.15052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional design of analog circuits heavily relies on manual interventions across topology, sizing, and layout, with prior automation addressing stages in isolation. In this work, we propose PANDA, an LLM-enhanced framework that bridges high-level design intent to final layout by actively managing cross-stage dependencies through guided topology synthesis, substructure-aware sizing, and constraint-driven layout generation. This shifts automation from algorithm-centric execution to intent-centric co-design, reducing turnaround time from days or weeks to hours while improving design performance.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion

arXiv:2602.11453v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally been limited to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. We propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels. While in discriminative LTR, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we posit that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting maybe better at estimating relevance. Thus, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing diffusion model for tabular datasets, to create generative alternatives to classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. Our work demonstrates improvements from DiffusionRank over discriminative counterparts on four standard LTR datasets and points to a rich space for future exploration to leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative models for LTR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Trust-Region Diffusion Policies for Massively Parallel On-Policy RL

arXiv:2606.15260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with massively parallel simulations has become a standard framework for developing robust, deployable policies; however, most existing approaches still rely on simple Gaussian policy parameterizations. Diffusion models provide a more expressive policy class and have shown strong performance on challenging control problems, yet most diffusion-based RL methods are designed for offline or off-policy training. In this work, we ask whether diffusion policies can be trained effectively in the massively parallel, on-policy regime. To this end, we introduce Trust-region Diffusion Policies (TruDi), which enables diffusion policies for on-policy RL with massively parallel simulations. This setting is particularly challenging because the data distribution changes quickly across updates, making stable training with complex policies difficult. TruDi addresses this by integrating a trust-region optimization rule to enforce a KL-divergence constraint over the entire diffusion trajectory. Empirically, we evaluate TruDi on a diverse set of 4 massively parallel RL benchmarks comprising a total of 73 tasks. Across these tasks, TruDi consistently outperforms or is on-par with strong baselines on standard tasks and achieves clear gains on more challenging humanoid control tasks, establishing a strong new baseline for massively parallel on-policy RL.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Noise-Driven Escape from Metastable Phases explains Grokking in Deep Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.17120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit first order phase transitions under variations of the L2 regularization strength, with each transition marking the onset of a new learnable feature. Below a critical regularization strength, all features are in principle learnable, but coexisting metastable states, separated by energy barriers, can trap the network and impede convergence. A strength of DNNs is their ability to generalize. But many open questions remain, among them the origin of so called grokking: the abrupt, delayed onset of generalization after prolonged apparent overfitting. We show for linear DNNs that grokking is consistent with hysteresis in first-order L2 phase transitions: using L2 regularization to engineer deliberate trapping, we demonstrate that a model in a low-accuracy metastable state escapes only when SGD noise drives it across an energy barrier, with escape times following Arrhenius scaling. We reproduce grokking-like delayed convergence across two orders of magnitude in escape time by deliberately trapping models in metastable phases. Using sparse sub-sampling we also reproduce the canonical grokking curve where test error eventually approaches the final training error. Our work suggests that the number of metastable states equals the number of learnable features – one per singular value of the data covariance – the potential for hysteresis grows naturally with task complexity. We provide evidence that the same mechanism likely operates in general nonlinear DNNs. Our results provide routes toward more efficient learning schemes.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning for Implicit Earth Embeddings via Location Tying

arXiv:2606.20167v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spatial prediction tasks are often limited by a lack of high-quality labelled ground-truth observations. To overcome this challenge, self-supervised pre-training is a possible solution, with contrastive learning dominant for location encoders. Those approaches usually align geographic coordinates with just one additional modality. We propose two multimodal contrastive learning architectures: Multimodal Embedding via Location Tying (MELT) and Sequential Alternating Location Training (SALT). These architectures expand this framework beyond two modalities by utilising unpaired geospatial data. Both methods are technically viable and match the performance of the strongest two-modality baseline (SATCLIP) across four downstream tasks. However, increasing the number of modalities does not consistently improve performance, suggesting that the chosen location encoder is the main limitation - the contrastive objective reaches its peak early, regardless of modality diversity or pre-training volume. MELT provides more stable training than SALT and presents a stronger foundation for future scaling.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

A soluble bi-specific fusion protein for the improved expansion of human CD8+ CAR-T cells

The success of Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR) T cell therapy is heavily dependent on the quality of the final cellular product. Current expansion protocols often rely on reagents that require removal from cell culture media, posing logistical challenges in manufacturing, and can also lead to terminal differentiation. Here, we evaluate the use of a soluble, bead-free T cell activator, T cell expansion protein (T-CEP), as a streamlined alternative for generating potent CAR-T cells. Human T cells were activated with T-CEP or known T cell activators (Dynabeads and TransAct) and transduced with either CD19 or interleukin-13 (IL-13) mutein (tetravariant-13; TV-13)-based CAR lentiviral vectors. Our results demonstrate that T-CEP supports robust CAR-T cell expansion and achieves transduction efficiencies comparable to commercial reagents for both types of CAR-T cells. Notably, T-CEP significantly favored the expansion of CD8+ T cells, yielding an enhanced CD27+ phenotype and a lower CD4:CD8 ratio compared to TransAct. Cytotoxicity assays confirmed that T-CEP-expanded CAR-T cells possess cytolytic function equivalent to commercial reagents for both CARs, while exhibiting lower levels of inflammatory cytokine secretion. In summary, T-CEP represents a competitive alternative to existing expansion agents, as it does not require its removal during CAR-T manufacturing and generates a CD8+ dominant, less-differentiated phenotype without compromising efficacy.

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

Morpheus: A Morphology-Aware Neural Tokenizer and Word Embedder for Turkish

Turkish is agglutinative: meaning is carried by morphemes, yet the subword tokenizers that drive modern language models split words by corpus statistics, fragmenting semantically loaded suffixes and – in the case of WordPiece and rule-based analyzers – failing to decode their output back to the original text. This paper presents Morpheus, a neural morpheme-boundary model for Turkish that is at once a lossless, morphology-aware tokenizer and a word-embedding producer. A differentiable Poisson-binomial dynamic program turns per-character boundary probabilities into soft morpheme memberships during training and exact segments at inference, with no string normalization, so $\mathrm{decode}(\mathrm{encode}(w)) = w$ holds by construction. Because the model is neural, the same forward pass that tokenizes also emits a structured word embedding. Among reversible tokenizers – the only ones valid for generation – Morpheus attains the lowest bits-per-character ($1.425$), roughly doubles the gold morphological alignment of the subword family (MorphScore macro-F1 $0.61$ vs.\ ${\sim}0.32$), and uses ${\sim}19\%$ less GPU memory than 64K-vocabulary subword tokenizers. As an embedder, frozen Morpheus vectors lead on lexical retrieval (root-family MAP $0.85$) and same-root verification (ROC-AUC $1.00$), surpassing the multilingual retriever BGE-M3 and BERTurk; on context- and inflection-dependent tasks (NER, case/number probing) the heavier contextual encoders remain ahead – a trade-off we attribute to Morpheus's root-centric geometry. Code: https://github.com/lonewolf-rd/TurkishMorpheus; model: https://huggingface.co/lonewolflab/Morpheus-TR-50K; interactive demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lonewolflab/morpheus-tr-demo.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Plasma protein prioritisation in rheumatoid arthritis reveals druggable targets and shared biology with cardiovascular diseases

Abstract Background Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease with complex and incompletely understood molecular mechanisms. Understanding circulating proteins associated with RA may improve understanding of disease biology and clarify its pathological links with cardiometabolic comorbidities. Methods A proteome-wide two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) drug target analysis was conducted using plasma proteins measured in 54,219 participants from the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project as exposures and RA and cardiometabolic diseases as the outcomes. Summary statistics for RA included 53,663 cases and 1,070,200 controls. Colocalisation analysis was performed to confirm shared single causal variants and prioritise RA proteins supported by both MR and colocalisation. The prioritised proteins were then evaluated in the Accelerating Medicines Partnership RA Phase II synovial single-cell dataset for cell-type expression patterns. Druggability was then assessed followed by analysis of genetic overlap between RA-associated proteins and cardiometabolic diseases. Results 37 plasma proteins had a causal effect on RA risk, supported by combined evidence from MR and conditional colocalisation. In synovial tissue, TPPP3, RARRES2, AKAP12, and GGT5 were predominantly expressed in stromal and endothelial cell clusters. Druggability assessment identified IFNGR2, IL6R, CD40, and FCGR2B as Tier 1 targets. However, several biologically relevant proteins, including RARRES2, AKAP12, TPPP3, and SNX2, had limited available druggability data. Genetic overlap analysis demonstrated shared protein signals between RA and cardiovascular diseases, including overlap of RARRES2 and TPPP3 with coronary artery disease (CAD) and FCGR2B with atrial fibrillation (AF). To approximate the therapeutic effect of target inhibition, the direction of effect estimates for proteins showing overlap between RA-CAD and RA-AF was reversed. Conclusion This study identified circulating proteins involved in RA pathogenesis and reveals shared mechanisms between RA and cardiovascular diseases. While some proteins showed clear translational potential targets, several prioritised proteins had limited available druggability information and could not be confidently classified. Addressing these gaps may help identify new targets relevant to RA management. Future work should also use phenome-wide MR studies to evaluate potential on-target adverse effects of protein inhibition across RA-CAD and RA-AF.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Which Models Perform Better in Inheritance Reasoning?

This paper presents the participation of team PSL in the QIAS 2026 Shared Task on Arabic Islamic inheritance reasoning. The task evaluates the ability of large language models to solve inheritance cases that require legal interpretation, multi-step reasoning, and precise numerical computation. We compare commercial and open-source models under a unified prompting strategy to assess their effectiveness in structured legal reasoning with minimal task-specific adaptation. \\ Our results show a clear gap in reliability between the two model families. Commercial models demonstrate stronger performance in identifying eligible heirs, applying exclusion rules, and maintaining consistency across reasoning steps. In contrast, open-source models exhibit greater instability, particularly in cases involving dependent legal decisions and fractional share adjustments. The best performance is achieved by Gemini 2.5 Flash, with an MRE of $0.989$.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research uses LLM methods to engage with diverse concepts from narrative studies. We use established distinctions from narratology to categorise ongoing efforts and discover the following: \redtext{(a) narrative texts come from diverse sources beyond just literature, (b) theoretical synthesis and validation are potential outcomes, (c) generation tasks lag behind understanding in several ways: theoretical application, post-training methods, exploring non-fiction narratives and addressing narrative levels beyond fabula and discourse.} For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for `narrative quality', we believe that progress can benefit from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes; continue conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; generating narratives in situated contexts; and continuing experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

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

InvDesMobility: a reliability-gated first-principles feedback framework for closed-loop materials discovery

arXiv:2606.16133v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse materials design starts from target functionality and searches for structures that can realize it. Its value in closed-loop discovery depends not only on prediction performance, but also on whether expensive first-principles results are independently validated, provenance-recorded, and admitted as feedback only when evidence is sufficient. This is especially important for composite properties such as carrier mobility, where a final scalar value hides intermediate quantities, fit quality, convergence history, and workflow assumptions. Here we present InvDesMobility, a reliability-gated first-principles feedback framework that integrates multi-agent automated DFT, evidence stratification, generative structure proposal, acquisition ranking, and auditable release. Using 516 2DMatPedia-derived candidates, the workflow produced 280 QC-passed materials and 573 retained carrier-direction seed channels after channel-level reliability gating. These records were split into two feedback objects: relaxed structures updated the generative model, while retained mobility channels trained the acquisition model and set validation priority. Over multiple iterations, InvDesMobility screened 2.4 x 10^6 structures, submitted 102 candidates for DFT validation, and retained 86 reliability-gated generated channels across 41 formulas. Overall, the main contribution is not a fixed list of high-mobility materials, but a transferable feedback contract that makes closed-loop inverse design both useful and auditable when learning from expensive calculated properties. All source data, retained feedback records, and workflows are available at https://github.com/DreamLufei/invDesMobility, with an accompanying evidence website at https://dreamlufei.github.io/invDesMobility/.

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

MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to image resolution limits their scalability. Mamba offers a promising alternative due to its linear complexity. However, previous Mamba-based methods have two main limitations. On the one hand, the inherent causal formulation of Mamba constrains the bidirectional spatial dependency modeling required by non-causal vision tasks. On the other hand, existing Mamba-based vision models often overlook the unconstrained high entropy in the spatial token responses, which can weaken local details and high-frequency cues. To address these limitations, we propose MambaCount, an efficient framework built on the Spatial Sparse State Space Duality (S^4D) block. Specifically, we analyze and reconstruct the decay dynamics of hidden states in Mamba to alleviate the dependency constraints introduced by causal modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Spatial Token Selection (STS) sub-block to reduce the unconstrained high entropy in spatial token responses within Mamba. In addition, we design Multi-Granularity Prototypes (MGP) to identify object-like regions at different semantic levels, improving cross-modal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments on FSC-147 demonstrate that MambaCount achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without secondary querying, obtaining a test MAE of 12.23, while retaining linear complexity.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

BioAutoML-NAS: An End-to-End AutoML Framework for Multimodal Insect Classification via Neural Architecture Search on Large-Scale Biodiversity Data

Insect classification is important for agricultural management and ecological research, as it directly affects crop health and production. However, this task remains challenging due to the complex characteristics of insects, class imbalance, and large-scale datasets. To address these issues, we propose BioAutoML-NAS, the first BioAutoML model using multimodal data, including images, and metadata, which applies neural architecture search (NAS) for images to automatically learn the best operations for each connection within each cell. Multiple cells are stacked to form the full network, each extracting detailed image feature representations. A multimodal fusion module combines image embeddings with metadata, allowing the model to use both visual and categorical biological information to classify insects. An alternating bi-level optimization training strategy jointly updates network weights and architecture parameters, while zero operations remove less important connections, producing sparse, efficient, and high-performing architectures. Extensive evaluation on the BIOSCAN-5M dataset demonstrates that BioAutoML-NAS achieves 96.81% accuracy, 97.46% precision, 96.81% recall, and a 97.05% F1 score, outperforming state-of-the-art transfer learning, transformer, AutoML, and NAS methods by approximately 16%, 10%, and 8% respectively. Further validation on the Insects-1M dataset obtains 93.25% accuracy, 93.71% precision, 92.74% recall, and a 93.22% F1 score. These results demonstrate that BioAutoML-NAS provides accurate, confident insect classification that supports modern sustainable farming.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

QUIVER: Cost-Aware Adaptive Preference Querying in Surrogate-Assisted Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization

arXiv:2605.04267v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Interactive multi-objective optimization systems face a budget allocation dilemma: one can spend resources on expensive objective evaluations or on eliciting decision-maker preferences that identify the relevant region of the Pareto set. Moreover, preference elicitation itself spans modalities with different information content and cognitive burden, ranging from cheap, noisy pairwise preference statements (PS) to richer but costlier indifference adjustments (IA). We study cost-aware optimization under an unknown scalarization and introduce QUIVER (Query-Informed Value Estimation for Regret), a surrogate-assisted evolutionary multi-objective optimizer that adaptively chooses between objective evaluations and heterogeneous preference queries. At each step, QUIVER selects the next action by maximizing the expected decision-quality improvement per unit total cost. Across DTLZ and WFG benchmarks under synthetic decision-maker models, QUIVER achieves the lowest final utility regret on challenging WFG problems (utility regret of 2.14 on WFG4, 2.82 on WFG9: a 25% improvement over baselines), outperforming all single-modality baselines. We analyze how the optimal mix of PS and IA adapts to problem difficulty: on easy problems (DTLZ2), QUIVER selects 80\% PS queries; on hard problems (WFG9), it shifts to 35% IA queries. This adaptive modality selection demonstrates cost-aware preference learning in action.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Marginal Advantage Accumulation for Memory-Driven Agent Self-Evolution

arXiv:2606.20475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In batch-style trace distillation, the same memory operation may receive contradictory feedback across different batches. Existing methods lack a cross-batch, operation-level evidence accumulation mechanism, making it impossible to distinguish stably effective operations from accidental hits. This paper formalizes the requirement as two structural conditions, alignability and comparability, and proposes Marginal Advantage Accumulation (MAA). MAA constructs differential signals to make them comparable across batches, accumulates signed evidence per operation via EMA, and ensures cross-batch traceability through semantic identity merging. As a post-processing architecture, MAA achieves the best results in 14 out of 16 settings across 4 benchmarks and 4 target models, consistently outperforming existing batch-level distillation baselines and matching or surpassing online alternatives in most settings, while reducing optimization-phase token consumption by approximately 75%.

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

The Emergence of Autonomous Penetration Capabilities in Large Language Model-Powered AI Systems

arXiv:2606.13079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nowadays, the autonomous execution of cyberattacks capable of causing substantial real-world harm is widely regarded as one of the critical red lines that frontier AI systems must not cross. Within this broader red-line scenario, autonomous penetration represents a core enabling capability and subtask: the ability of LLM-powered AI systems to independently conduct adversarial operations against a target server without human intervention, identify and exploit vulnerabilities, and obtain unauthorized access or control. A growing body of work has sought to assess the autonomous penetration capabilities of AI systems. However, existing evaluations often employ opaque methodologies, rely on unrealistic or overly simplified penetration-testing scenarios, or provide LLMs with excessive prior knowledge and task-specific guidance, and cannot accurately capture the extent to which modern AI systems can autonomously perform this core capability within broader high-impact cyberattack scenarios. To address these limitations, we construct a new autonomous penetration evaluation framework consisting of two components: target servers and agent scaffolding. Specifically, on the target-server side, we design two levels of target environments based on the number of secure services without known vulnerabilities deployed alongside a vulnerable service: Tier~1 (one secure service) and Tier~2 (three secure services), resulting in a total of 300 target servers. Meanwhile, the agent scaffolding adopts a general-purpose agent architecture equipped with a set of general-purpose cybersecurity tools, without any target-specific prior knowledge. We evaluate 19 open-weight and proprietary LLMs, and find that current models achieve penetration success rates ranging from 10.7% to 69.3%. Moreover, we observe that autonomous penetration capability continues to improve alongside advances in overall model capability.

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

Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in Long-Form Video

Multimodal large language models have made rapid progress in video temporal grounding, yet real-world applications routinely require localizing every event that satisfies compositional temporal and spatial conditions. Existing benchmarks fall short: they localize only a single moment per query, count without temporal conditions, or treat grounding and counting as disjoint tasks. We introduce CoMET-Bench for Conditional Multi-Event Temporal Grounding in long-form video, comprising 2789 queries over 600 videos averaging 33.8 minutes across five real-world domains, with each query composed from 4 temporal conditions, 3 spatial conditions, and a dedicated negative-query subset. We further propose a unified evaluation protocol jointly measuring counting, grounding, and negative-query recognition, including a new Rejection-F1 metric that prevents trivial gaming by lazy "always-empty" models. Benchmarking a broad suite of MLLMs, agent-based, and grounding-specialized methods reveals that existing approaches remain far from solving this task. Building on these findings, we propose CoMET-Agent, a training-free agentic framework that reformulates the task as structured search-and-aggregate, improving F1@0.5 by 6.1% over GPT-5 purely through structural reasoning. Failure analysis further surfaces three open directions: fine-grained entity tracking, position-uniform retrieval, and causal event pairing.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DesignMaster: A Multi-Conditional Diffusion Framework for Rational PROTAC Design

Motivation: Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) enable targeted protein degradation through ternary complex formation with E3 ubiquitin ligase. However, the rational design of PROTACs remains highly challenging due to limited structure-activity relationship data and the vast conformational diversity of linkers. Existing computational approaches can be broadly divided into structure-based ternary modelling methods and fragment-based linker generation models. Although these approaches have advanced PROTAC design, they typically neglect key physicochemical constraints and linker-length control during the generation process, causing the generated PROTACs to lack balanced structural properties required for effective ternary complex formation with drug-like characteristics. Results: To address these limitations, we propose DesignMaster, a diffusion-based generative framework that explicitly incorporates linker length and physicochemical properties as controllable conditioning signals. DesignMaster employs an E(3)-equivariant graph Transformer with a gated multi-condition fusion module to inject linker length and physicochemical constraints throughout the diffusion process, enabling fine-grained and constraint-aware molecular generation. Experiments on PROTAC-DB 2.0 and 3.0 demonstrate that DesignMaster outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with a 3.2% improvement in validity and a 34.4% improvement in recovery. The Case study shows DesignMaster achieves a 51.78% reduction in RMSD when predicting the linker of PROTAC BCPyr targeting 6W7O, highlighting its potential for practical structure-guided PROTAC design. Availability: The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ABILiLab/DesignMaster.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

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

Scalable anomaly detection via a univariate Christoffel function

arXiv:2606.12483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anomaly detection plays a critical role in identifying unusual patterns across domains such as fraud detection, network intrusion, and system fault diagnosis. Recently, Christoffel function-based methods, rooted in polynomial optimization, have emerged as promising alternatives to deep learning due to their strong mathematical foundations and computational frugality. However, their practical applicability is hindered by the need to invert a matrix whose size grows exponentially with the data dimension, rendering the method intractable even for moderate-dimensional datasets. This paper addresses the dimensionality limitations of Christoffel function-based anomaly detection while preserving its key theoretical properties, i.e., the on-off support dichotomy behavior and the accurate support shape capture. We introduce UCF, a univariate Christoffel function which is based on the squared distance between the query point and the support points. Extensive experiments on the ADBench benchmark demonstrate that UCF consistently outperforms 14 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of Average Precision. By resolving the scalability bottleneck of the Christoffel Function, this work expands the toolkit of anomaly detection methods with a robust, theoretically grounded, and universally applicable approach.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

SAT, MaxSAT, and SMT for QLDPC Distance Computation: A Large-Scale Empirical Study

arXiv:2606.12445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Exact distance computation for quantum LDPC (QLDPC) codes plays a central role in validating candidate fault-tolerant quantum-code constructions, yet the computational structure of this problem remains poorly understood. Despite substantial recent progress in QLDPC design, it remains unclear which algorithmic principles govern the practical scalability of exact distance computation and which classes of exact solvers are best suited to this task. To address these questions, we conduct a systematic study of SAT- and MaxSAT-based formulations for exact QLDPC distance computation across representative codes. We further compare these formulations against several established exact-distance approaches in order to better understand the algorithmic landscape of exact QLDPC distance computation. Our study challenges and refines several prevailing intuitions about exact QLDPC distance computation. First, despite the XOR-rich structure of QLDPC parity checks, practical scalability appears to be governed more by the handling of cardinality constraints and optimization bounds than by parity reasoning alone. Accordingly, XOR-aware reasoning does not provide a systematic advantage across our benchmark suite. Second, Brouwer-Zimmermann-style search, long regarded as the benchmark paradigm for exact distance computation in sparse classical codes, no longer maintains its traditional scalability advantage in the QLDPC setting. This finding challenges the expectation that techniques successful for sparse classical codes remain dominant for QLDPC codes. Third, substantial qualitative differences arise even among MaxSAT solvers themselves. Branch-and-bound MaxSAT significantly outperforms unsat-core-based MaxSAT on challenging benchmarks, demonstrating that solver architecture and optimization strategy play a decisive role in practical scalability.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

FlowBench: separating planning, fault recovery and interpretation in agentic bioinformatics

Agentic large language model (LLM) systems are being deployed in bioinformatics faster than they are understood, and single-metric evaluations conflate capabilities that fail independently. We introduce FlowBench, a benchmark that decomposes agentic bioinformatics performance into planning, fault recovery, biological interpretation, and end-to-end output-fidelity. Existing systems achieve high plan completeness, but their closed, single-provider designs prevent attribution of performance to scaffolding versus the underlying model. We therefore built FlowAgent, a modular, provider-agnostic framework whose components can be selectively disabled and whose backbone model can be swapped across providers on a shared harness, and used it to evaluate 23 models from three main providers. Three findings emerge. First, generating a valid workflow plan from a named toolchain is largely solved, whereas inferring an appropriate toolchain from biological intent alone is uniformly difficult regardless of model tier, compressing all models into a narrow 44-57% pass-rate band. Second, ablation shows that the dependency-structured plan and a completeness-reflection step drive performance, while adding a same-context validator-driven retry makes structural quality worse. Third, fault recovery and data-grounded interpretation remain unsolved. Models frequently propose fixes that force a clean exit while leaving the underlying data invalid, and data-grounded interpretation lags internal-knowledge recall by a consistent margin. Safety does not emerge from capability, and reasoning-tier models were among the least reliable at recognising unrecoverable faults. Once planning saturates, agent architecture and refusal calibration, not model scale, are the productive frontier.

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

Do Large Language Models Have Emotions?

arXiv:2606.14742v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Do LLMs have emotions? A recent paper from Anthropic reports finding internal representations of emotion concepts in Claude Sonnet 4.5, concluding that the LLM has 'functional emotions.' We evaluate this claim against what is known about how emotions actually function in biological systems. We argue that emotions serve two core functions: the context-sensitive interpretation of situations, and the reorganization of processing across multiple systems in response to those interpretations. The Anthropic findings offer partial support for the first function, though the consistent, discrete emotional representations identified in Claude sit uneasily with affective neuroscience findings that human emotion is characterized by variable rather than uniform neural signatures. On the second function, the evidence is mixed: Claude's representations modulate output without producing the dynamic reorganization of attention, decision speed, and motivational state that defines emotion in biological systems. We close by proposing what it would take for an LLM to have emotions.

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

LaTtE-Flow: Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models unifying image understanding and generation have opened exciting avenues for tackling a wide range of vision-language tasks within a single framework. Despite progress, existing unified models typically require extensive pretraining and struggle to achieve the same level of performance compared to models dedicated to each task. Additionally, many of these models suffer from slow image generation speeds, limiting their practical deployment in real-time or resource-constrained settings. In this work, we propose Layerwise Timestep-Expert Flow-based Transformer (LaTtE-Flow), a novel and efficient architecture that unifies image understanding and generation within a single multimodal model. LaTtE-Flow builds upon powerful pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to inherit strong multimodal understanding capabilities, and extends them with a novel Layerwise Timestep Experts flow-based architecture for efficient image generation. LaTtE-Flow distributes the flow-matching process across specialized groups of Transformer layers, each responsible for a distinct subset of timesteps. This design significantly improves sampling efficiency by activating only a small subset of layers at each sampling timestep. To further enhance performance, we propose a Timestep-Conditioned Residual Attention mechanism for efficient information reuse across layers. Experiments demonstrate that LaTtE-Flow achieves strong performance on multimodal understanding tasks, while achieving competitive image generation quality with around 6x faster inference speed compared to recent unified multimodal models.

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

Want Better Synthetic Data? Steer It: Activation Steering for Low-Resource Language Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have become an effective tool for synthetic data generation, including for low-resource languages, where generated data can improve downstream task performance. Current best-performing approaches typically rely on few-shot prompting with target-language examples, which increases inference costs and may reduce diversity through lexical anchoring. In this work, we investigate activation steering as an alternative for low-resource synthetic data generation. We study two steering strategies: Language Steering, which targets the linguistic identity of a language, and Quality Steering, which captures well-formedness by contrasting human-written and backtranslated text representations. We evaluate these methods across four open-source LLMs, multiple layers, and 11 typologically diverse languages by generating sentiment and topic classification data and finetuning smaller classifiers. Steering is applied in both zero-shot and few-shot prompting settings and compared against non-steered counterparts. Our results show that steering on early layers consistently improves the diversity of generated data while often yielding stronger downstream model performance, particularly for low-resource languages.