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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum-Driven Neuromorphic Computing for Million-Qubit-Scale Workloads

arXiv:2606.12968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Apollo, a 10000 node p-qubit neuromorphic processor fabricated in 16 nm mixed signal CMOS and operating fully at room temperature with a typical analog core power envelope of about 0.5 W. Its fundamental element, the p-qubit, is a bistable stochastic unit whose continuous time state fluctuations are driven by integrated quantum entropy units that inject true quantum derived randomness. This enables ultrafast stochastic transitions at low energy while preserving a classical state representation. Apollo combines these p-qubits with a high degree Hyperion 256 interconnect topology, allowing efficient embedding of dense Ising and QUBO problems with substantially reduced minor embedding overhead compared with sparse annealing platforms. We show that, through the Suzuki Trotter correspondence, the equilibrium statistics and annealing dynamics of the p-qubit network reproduce key properties of transverse field quantum annealing without cryogenic cooling, long lived coherence, or microwave control. Beyond device level validation, Apollo is evaluated on a three dimensional spin glass benchmark previously used to study quantum advantage in superconducting annealers. Across 300 disorder realizations, Apollo reaches substantially lower ground state energies than reported cryogenic quantum annealing hardware, while remaining distinct from classical simulated annealing and simulated quantum annealing. A 350 nm release candidate device experimentally validates the core p-qubit dynamics, thermodynamic sampling correctness, and continuous time annealing behavior. These results establish Apollo as a room temperature, industrially scalable platform for quantum driven energy based optimization, probabilistic inference, generative modeling, and hybrid classical quantum workflows.

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

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

PIGEON: VLM-Driven Object Navigation via Points of Interest Selection

Object navigation in unseen indoor environments requires agents to perform semantic search under partial observability. Vision-language models (VLMs) provide strong semantic-spatial priors for this task, but how to interface them with robot navigation remains challenging: dense VLM inference is expensive, while abstracting environments into symbolic memories often separates high-level reasoning from the raw visual evidence that supports it. We propose we propose PIGEON (Point of Interest Guided Exploration for Object Navigation), a VLM-driven framework that formulates object navigation as raw-observation-grounded sparse decision problem. PIGEON introduces Points of Interest (PoIs) as sparse visual decision units that couple geometrically executable waypoints with raw egocentric observations. Rather than using VLMs as dense controllers or restricting them to frontier ranking, PIGEON enables VLMs to select among task-critical PoIs, including exploration frontiers, suspected target objects, traversable stairs, and floor-level summaries, while low-level planners execute continuous motion between them. This PoI interface further makes high-level navigation decisions verifiable, allowing us to develop an RLVR pipeline that improves local VLMs without manual Chain-of-Thought annotations. Extensive experiments on Habitat ObjectNav benchmarks show that PIGEON achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, scales consistently with foundation model capacity, and transfers to Active Embodied Question Answering with only prompt modifications. Real-world deployments on physical robots further demonstrate its robustness and efficiency.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A Collective-Spin Derivation of the Uniform Magnon Hamiltonian in Cavity Magnonics

arXiv:2606.13830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a direct collective-spin derivation of the effective uniform-mode Hamiltonian used in cavity magnonics. Starting from a nearest-neighbor Heisenberg ferromagnet coupled to long-wavelength magnetic fields, we show that the relevant dynamics can be restricted to the fully symmetric spin sector, where the exchange interaction contributes only a constant energy shift and the ferromagnet behaves as a macrospin of length $Ns$. Applying the Holstein–Primakoff transformation directly to this total spin yields the usual uniform magnon mode and its leading nonlinear corrections without first introducing site-resolved bosonic operators. This collective formulation makes explicit the interpretation of the ferromagnet as a synthetic large-spin atom and provides a compact route to the effective Hamiltonians used in driven and Floquet cavity magnonics. As a physical consequence, the leading nonlinear correction produces an occupation-dependent reduction of the effective magnon–photon coupling, providing a simple signature of finite-spin saturation under strong uniform-mode driving.

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

Proprioceptive-visual correspondence enables self-other distinction in humanoid robots

arXiv:2606.13222v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distinguishing self from others is a prerequisite for social intelligence, yet humanoid robots that increasingly share workspaces with humans still lack this ability. Here we show that a humanoid robot can learn self-other distinction from proprioceptive-visual correspondence, without any identity labels or kinematic models. Once established, this distinction bootstraps a predictive self-model that maps joint configurations to three-dimensional body occupancy, capturing how the robot's body changes with action. In multi-agent scenes involving humans or morphologically identical robots, the system reliably identifies itself, learns a 3D self-model, and supports downstream tasks including target reaching, collision-aware motion planning, and human-to-robot motion retargeting. Together, these results outline a route toward bodily self-representation in robots that act and coordinate alongside others in shared physical environments. Project page: https://euron-zc.github.io/humanoid-self-model/.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Metastability for the Curie-Weiss-Potts model with unbounded random interactions

arXiv:2505.11260v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analyse the metastable behaviour of the disordered Curie–Weiss–Potts (DCWP) model subject to a Glauber dynamics. The model is a randomly disordered version of the mean-field $q$-spin Potts model (CWP), where the interaction coefficients between spins are general independent random variables. These random variables are chosen to have fixed mean (for simplicity taken to be $1$) and well defined cumulant generating function, with a fixed distribution not depending on the number of particles. The system evolves as a discrete-time Markov chain with single spin flip Metropolis dynamics at finite inverse temperature $\beta$. We provide a comparison of the metastable behaviour of the CWP and DCWP models, when $N \to \infty$. First, we establish the metastability of the CWP model and, using this result, prove metastability for the DCWP model (with high probability). We then determine the ratio between the metastable transition time for the DCWP model and the corresponding time for the CWP model. Specifically, we derive the asymptotic tail behavior and moments of this ratio. Our proof combines the potential-theoretic approach to metastability with concentration of measure techniques, the latter adapted to our specific context.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

AGORA: Can Deliberation and Governance Gates Absorb Participation Bias in Transit Planning?

arXiv:2606.13696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transit network design depends not only on the optimization algorithm but also on who shows up to the public hearing. Current practice often collects one-directional comments from self-selected attendees, leaving participant mix as an uncontrolled source of outcome variation. We present AGORA, a framework that holds the network, demand, and solver fixed while systematically varying meeting composition through stakeholder agents, structured deliberation, and governance gates. Across two standard benchmark networks at different scales, we find that (i) aggregate outcomes vary little across compositions, but on tail risk and fairness disparity, representative sampling still tends to outperform skewed compositions; (ii) without deliberation, composition produces no variation at all, showing that deliberation is the mechanism through which who attends affects outcomes; and (iii) governance gates compress cross-profile variance without shifting the average outcome on Mandl, but low acceptance on Mumford0 shows thresholds require instance-specific calibration. These findings reframe participation bias from an uncontrollable input to a process-design problem: even without guaranteed representative attendance, well-structured deliberation and governance criteria can substantially reduce how much outcomes depend on who is in the room.

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

CareTransition-Audit: A Benchmark to Audit Discharge Summaries for Efficient Care Transitions

arXiv:2604.05435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Incomplete or inconsistent discharge documentation drives care fragmentation and avoidable readmissions. Despite its critical role in patient safety, auditing discharge summaries relies on manual review and does not scale. We propose an automated framework for auditing discharge summaries using large language models (LLMs). Our approach operationalizes the DISCHARGED framework into a checklist of 46 questions. Using 50 summaries from the MIMIC-IV database, with clinician ground-truth labels, we benchmark 11 LLMs. Model-assessed mean documentation completeness ranges from 54.9% to 74.2%, and the best-performing models achieve a Cohen's kappa values around 0.5 against clinician labels, indicating moderate agreement. All models struggle to identify ambiguous documentation (Unclear), highlighting a key gap in current automated auditing. This work provides a clinician-validated benchmark and zero-shot baselines for systematic quality improvement in clinical documentation.

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

Power Battery Detection

Power batteries are essential components in electric vehicles, where internal structural defects can pose serious safety risks. We conduct a comprehensive study on a new task, power battery detection (PBD), which aims to localize the dense endpoints of cathode and anode plates from industrial X-ray images for quality inspection. Manual inspection is inefficient and error-prone, while traditional vision algorithms struggle with densely packed plates, low contrast, scale variation, and imaging artifacts. To address this issue and drive more attention into this meaningful task, we present PBD5K, the first large-scale benchmark for this task, consisting of 5,000 X-ray images from nine battery types with fine-grained annotations and eight types of real-world visual interference. To support scalable and consistent labeling, we develop an intelligent annotation pipeline that combines image filtering, model-assisted pre-labeling, cross-verification, and layered quality evaluation. We formulate PBD as a point-level segmentation problem and propose MDCNeXt, a model designed to extract and integrate multi-dimensional structure clues including point, line, and count information from the plate itself. To improve discrimination between plates and suppress visual interference, MDCNeXt incorporates two state space modules. The first is a prompt-filtered module that learns contrastive relationships guided by task-specific prompts. The second is a density-aware reordering module that refines segmentation in regions with high plate density. In addition, we propose a distance-adaptive mask generation strategy to provide robust supervision under varying spatial distributions of anode and cathode positions. The source code and datasets will be publicly available at \href{https://github.com/Xiaoqi-Zhao-DLUT/X-ray-PBD}{PBD5K}.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Scheme for Transport-based Global Entanglement Distribution using Quantum Processors

arXiv:2606.15421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a scheme for distributing entanglement over global distances in a heralded manner by using satellites to physically transport entangled processor nodes with rare-earth-ion qubits. A full analysis of channel losses, errors and background light is performed to determine the fidelity and number of entangled pairs that can be distributed between two ground stations. We show that the scheme works already with a single satellite and can distribute close to the theoretical maximum number of entangled pairs that can be generated in a satellite overpass. In addition, we argue that in theory transportation-based schemes outperform other satellite-based schemes and can be scaled up to a constellation without additional channel losses. Daytime operation seems feasible as long as the sky is clear, with an EPR pair fidelity ranging from 99.3% at shorter network lengths to 93.9% with global coverage and can be further improved by active error correction or entanglement purification.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FOSC-X: An Extended Framework for Optimal Local Cuts and Non-Horizontal Cluster Selection from Clustering Hierarchies

arXiv:2606.18972v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extracting a flat clustering solution from a hierarchy is a common task in practical cluster analysis and can be formulated as an optimisation problem. Existing approaches focus on finding a single optimal solution. We introduce FOSC-X, a framework for extracting the top-M globally optimal flat clusterings from local, non-horizontal cuts of a hierarchical cluster tree, while optionally enforcing constraints on the number of clusters. This enables automatic identification of multiple high-quality alternative clusterings that capture different aspects of the hierarchical structure. Without constraints, the top-M problem can be solved in polynomial time using dynamic programming, exploiting the property that locally optimal partial candidates within subtrees can be combined to form globally optimal solutions while automatically determining the number of clusters. However, this can lead to solutions with numbers of clusters that are ultimately undesirable – e.g., too large to be meaningful or practically analysed within a particular application domain. Imposing cluster-count constraints breaks the optimality property underlying the unconstrained dynamic programming approach, since locally optimal partial candidates may no longer combine into feasible globally optimal solutions. FOSC-X addresses this challenge through a dynamic programming strategy that maintains compact sets of feasible candidates using lower and upper feasibility bounds while pruning infeasible or dominated combinations. The resulting method guarantees optimal rankings of the top-M solutions with linear-time complexity in the number of cluster nodes and dataset size, both with and without cluster-count constraints. Experiments show that FOSC-X efficiently reveals alternative clustering structures overlooked by single-solution extraction methods.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Seeing Through Occlusion: Deterministic Arm Kinematic Correction for Robot Teleoperation

Markerless, single-RGB-D-camera motion capture provides a low-cost and non-invasive alternative to conventional marker-based systems for robot teleoperation; however, depth estimation often degrades in the presence of self-occlusion, particularly during upper-limb motion. This paper presents an Arm Kinematic Correction (AKC) method that improves depth estimation by enforcing geometric constraints based on constant arm lengths. The proposed approach reconstructs occluded joint depths by leveraging wrist positions and predefined arm lengths via a deterministic formulation based on the Pythagorean theorem, thereby avoiding the need for complex probabilistic modeling or parameter tuning. Experimental validation against a Vicon reference system demonstrates reliable performance for both static and dynamic joint motions, evaluated using root-mean-square error (RMSE) and Pearson correlation. Furthermore, motion-mapping teleoperation is successfully demonstrated in both simulated and physical robot environments. The results show that AKC enhances robustness and preserves anatomical consistency under long-duration, severe self-occlusion, even when paired with less reliable temporal filters, highlighting its practicality for real-time applications such as robot teleoperation and human-robot interaction.

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Rock weathering can counteract river CO<sub>2</sub> emissions induced by permafrost thaw

作者:

Climate-induced permafrost thaw unlocks large stores of organic carbon that are mineralized and emitted as carbon dioxide (CO2) from rivers to the atmosphere1. Concurrently, warming and permafrost thaw can increase mineral weathering rates, thus affecting the release and sequestration of inorganic carbon2–4. Yet how these biological and geological carbon cycles interact and jointly affect CO2 dynamics (emission compared with drawdown) in permafrost rivers remains unknown5. Here we combine CO2 emissions, organic and inorganic solute concentrations, dual carbon isotopes (δ13C–Δ14C) and geochemical modelling to infer how permafrost thaw may affect river biogeochemistry over decades to centuries across the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau. Leveraging a gradient of thermal permafrost degradation, we find that river CO2 emissions decline, whereas solute fluxes from rock weathering increase with decreasing permafrost cover. Across this region, net CO2 drawdown fluxes from rock weathering are about 35% of river CO2 emissions, varying from around 15% in catchments with continuous permafrost to more than 100% in catchments with discontinuous or isolated permafrost. Thus, carbon fluxes from chemical weathering may become increasingly important with ongoing permafrost thaw, potentially even outpacing river CO2 emissions. Our findings disentangle the interplay between biological and geological carbon fluxes that are important for the cryosphere and the global carbon cycle. Permafrost thaw on the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau increases rock-weathering rates while reducing river CO2 emissions, suggesting geological carbon fluxes may eventually outpace thaw-driven emissions.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MoCo-AIS: A Contrastive Learning Framework for Similarity Computation of Vessel Trajectories

arXiv:2606.17978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trajectory similarity is a fundamental task in analyzing mobility patterns, essential for applications such as route pattern extraction, mobility prediction, and anomaly detection. Traditional distance-based measures for computing similarity incur high computational cost, driving the adoption of lightweight learning-based approaches. Supervised methods rely on extensive labels derived from traditional distance measures and often reproduce these metrics, which limits generalization. While self-supervised learning addresses this issue through contrastive learning, it lacks a unified framework, making it difficult to compare deep learning (DL) models for consistent trajectory representation. Accordingly, this paper presents MoCo-AIS, a unified framework for learning vessel trajectory embeddings based on the Momentum Contrast (MoCo) paradigm, which formulates similarity learning through positive and negative trajectory pairs. Within this framework, we evaluate a diverse set of leading DL models on large-scale, real-world vessel-tracking AIS datasets that capture diverse navigation behaviors and operating conditions. Results demonstrate that our framework significantly improves similarity learning over existing baselines, while providing a benchmarking platform for evaluating trajectory representation models.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

On multidimensional infinite dihedral group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps

arXiv:2601.08961v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We obtain a local central limit theorem for cocycles associated with a class of non abelian and non compact group extensions of Gibbs Markov maps. This class consists of multidimensional infinite dihedral groups. Unlike in the set up of the random walks on groups, we cannot use the convolution of measures on the group and instead we resort to an approach based on irreducible representations. Depending on the dimension of the group, we obtain either mixing, and thus ergodicity, or dissipativity. Also, we obtain the asymptotics of the first return time of the group extension to the origin.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A Low-Regularity Semigroup Sewing Lemma via Quotient Structures

arXiv:2606.16164v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a low-regularity Sewing theory for the semigroup coboundary $\hat\delta=\delta-a$ associated with a strongly continuous semigroup $S$. Unlike the ordinary low-regularity Sewing problem, the semigroup setting has an intrinsic algebraic non-uniqueness below the threshold $1$, in the sense that solutions are canonical only modulo semigroup cocycles. Accordingly, the natural target is a quotient space rather than an increment space. We identify this quotient structure and construct the corresponding semigroup Sewing map. The construction uses a frozen terminal-time transform, which rewrites semigroup defects, for each terminal time, as ordinary low-regularity Sewing problems on a frozen simplex. This reduction, however, does not by itself produce a genuine semigroup increment; the main additional step is to prove that the frozen solution classes are compatible as the terminal time varies and hence assemble into a canonical quotient class for $\hat\delta$. This yields canonical classes for $0

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Benchmarking Vision-Language-Action Models on SO-101: Failure and Recovery Analysis

arXiv:2606.08881v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated strong generalization in robotic manipulation, yet existing evaluations are primarily conducted in simulation or on expensive robotic platforms, leaving their robustness on affordable real-world robots largely unexplored. We present a standardized real-world benchmark for evaluating representative VLA and imitation learning policies on the low-cost SO-101 robotic platform. The benchmark comprises four representative manipulation tasks together with unified evaluation protocols, enabling systematic comparison under embodiment uncertainty. Using real-world teleoperated demonstrations, we fine-tune and evaluate $\pi_{0.5}$, SmolVLA, Wall-X, and ACT directly on the physical platform. Beyond conventional task success rates, the benchmark incorporates a structured failure taxonomy, semantic- and execution-level failure decomposition, and recovery-aware evaluation metrics to characterize policy robustness. Experimental results show that stronger pretrained VLA policies generally outperform the imitation learning baseline, although performance remains highly task-dependent under low-cost robotic deployment conditions. Execution instability emerges as the dominant failure source, while recovery capability varies substantially across architectures. These results highlight the importance of failure and recovery analysis beyond binary task success and establish SO-101 as a practical benchmark for evaluating embodied AI systems under realistic low-cost robotic deployment conditions.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Getting Better at Working With You: Compiling User Corrections into Runtime Enforcement for Coding Agents

Interactive LLM agents are becoming part of daily work, but they do not reliably become easier to work with over time: a correction remembered in one session may still be violated in the next. We study this gap between preference access and preference compliance. In tasks derived from anonymized real-user friction cases, Mem0 memory still leaves 57.5% of applicable preference checks violated. We introduce Test-time Rule Acquisition and Compiled Enforcement (TRACE), a drop-in skill-layer pipeline for coding-agent runtimes that mines user corrections, rewrites them as atomic rules, and compiles them into runtime checks that must pass before an agent completes future tasks. Unlike runtime checks written ahead of time by developers, TRACE skills come from the user's own chat corrections. We evaluate TRACE with simulated user-in-the-loop experiments on ClawArena coding-agent tasks and MemoryArena-derived memory-intensive tasks. On ClawArena, TRACE reduces held-out preference violation from 100.0% to 37.6% on in-distribution tasks and from 100.0% to 2.0% on out-of-distribution tasks. On MemoryArena-derived tasks, TRACE reduces in-distribution violation from 100.0% to 60.5% while matching or exceeding the strongest memory baseline on task pass. These results suggest that compiling corrections into runtime enforcement can address a repeated-friction failure mode that memory alone does not reliably solve, reducing the need for users to restate the same correction across future sessions. Experiment code is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/TRACE_exp, and the deployable skill is available at https://github.com/YujunZhou/tellonce.

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

Measuring Whether LLM Tutors Teach or Solve: A Diagnostic for Educational Impact

Large language models are increasingly proposed as educational tutors, yet stronger task-solving ability does not necessarily imply stronger learning support. Motivated by recent calls to measure the social impact of NLP systems in practice, we study whether public LLM tutoring benchmarks distinguish learning-supportive behavior from mere answer production. We propose a lightweight diagnostic based on the gap between solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented benchmark performance. Using public MathTutorBench leaderboard results, we show that these dimensions are only partially aligned: across eight publicly reported models, the correlation between solving and pedagogy composites is 0.421, and several models shift meaningfully in rank when evaluation moves from solving to pedagogy. We then analyze the public TutorBench sample and show that agency-relevant behaviors are explicitly encoded in benchmark rubrics, especially in active-learning settings that reward guiding questions, calibrated hints, and non-disclosive scaffolding. Together, these findings suggest that educational-impact evaluation should not treat task success as a sufficient proxy for learning support. We argue that public tutoring benchmarks can better support positive-impact evaluation by reporting solving-oriented and pedagogy-oriented scores separately and by making disclosure-sensitive, student-agency-preserving criteria more explicit.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FlowMo-WM: A World Model with Object Momentum and Hidden Ambient Drift

arXiv:2606.13817v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: World models in robot learning predict future states from visual observations and actions, enabling agents to reason about the consequences of their controls. However, many action-conditioned models are evaluated in settings where motion is dominated by immediate control, whereas aquatic surface vehicles and other real-world objects continue moving under inertia and are displaced by hidden ambient drift, such as water currents or wind. We propose FlowMo-WM, an end-to-end trainable visual world model that infers object-centric motion state and a predictive long-history context associated with hidden drift from image-action histories without direct supervision of flow fields. FlowMo-WM factorizes image-action history into a short-history latent state, trained to summarize object-centric motion, and a longer-history context, trained to summarize slowly varying exogenous influences. A zero-context residual transition separates action-conditioned base dynamics from context-dependent drift effects during latent rollout. In simulated aquatic surface-vehicle environments with diverse hidden flows, disturbances, and randomized vehicle dynamics, FlowMo-WM improves long-horizon rollout accuracy over representative action-conditioned latent world models. Prediction-time context ablations, in which the inferred context is zeroed or shuffled during rollout, show that the ambient context is important for stable prediction under hidden drift, while frozen linear probes characterize information encoded in the learned factors.

21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A quantitative coordinate system for developmental dynamics

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

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

JE-IRT: A Geometric Lens on LLM Abilities through Joint Embedding Item Response Theory

Standard LLM evaluation practices compress diverse abilities into single scores, obscuring their inherently multidimensional nature. We present JE-IRT, a geometric item-response framework that embeds both LLMs and questions in a shared space. For question embeddings, the direction encodes semantics and the norm encodes difficulty, while correctness on each question is determined by the geometric interaction between the model and question embeddings. This geometry replaces a global ranking of LLMs with topical specialization and enables smooth variation across related questions. Building on this framework, our experimental results reveal that out-of-distribution behavior can be explained through directional alignment, and that larger norms consistently indicate harder questions. Moreover, JE-IRT naturally supports generalization: once the space is learned, new LLMs are added by fitting a single embedding. The learned space further reveals an LLM-internal taxonomy that only partially aligns with human-defined subject categories. We also show that simple linear probes of the embedding space recover cross-subject ability directions, such as an arithmetic axis that highlights quantitatively demanding questions in seemingly distant subjects like virology and global facts. JE-IRT thus establishes a unified and interpretable geometric lens that connects LLM abilities with the structure of questions, offering a distinctive perspective on model evaluation and generalization.

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

Multimodal Speaker Identification in Classroom Environments

Automated analysis of K-12 classroom dynamics faces challenges due to background noise and variable child speech, often confounding acoustic-only models. This study evaluates a multimodal speaker identification framework anchoring acoustic embeddings with LLM-derived semantic context. Using a subset of the EDSI dataset (8 math classrooms, N = 2,801 utterances), we found an acoustic baseline (ECAPA-TDNN) achieved only 39.0% accuracy. By integrating transcript-based "contextual anchoring" into a gradient boosting classifier, our multimodal approach raised student identification to 50.3%. Performance also improved for utterances over 5 seconds, reaching 76.9% accuracy (vs. 64.9% baseline) with a 90.9% Top-3 accuracy. Additionally, the model distinguished teacher vs. student roles with 99.3% accuracy. This approach advances the feasibility of automated feedback systems capable of considering individual student participation, a crucial step for supporting equitable instruction at scale.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

TopoHR: Hierarchical Centerline Representation for Cyclic Topology Reasoning in Driving Scenes with Point-to-Instance Relations

Topology reasoning is crucial for autonomous driving. Current methods primarily focus on instance-level learning for centerline detection, followed by a sequential module for topology reasoning that relies on simplified MLP layers. Moreover, they often neglect the importance of point-to-instance (P2I) relationships in topology reasoning. To address these limitations, we present TopoHR (Topological Hierarchical Representation), a novel end-to-end framework that establishes cyclic interaction between centerline detection and topology reasoning, allowing them to iteratively enhance each other. Specifically, we introduce a hierarchical centerline representation including point queries, instance queries, and semantic representations. These multi-level features are seamlessly integrated and fused within a hierarchical centerline decoder. Furthermore, we design a hierarchical topology reasoning module that captures both fine-grained P2I relationships and global instance-to-instance (I2I) connections within a unified architecture. With these novel components, TopoHR ensures accurate and robust topology reasoning. On the OpenLane-V2 benchmark, TopoHR refreshes state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. Notably, compared with previous best results, TopoHR achieves +3.8 in $\mathrm{DET}_{l}$, +5.4 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{ll}$ on $subset_A$ and +11.0 in $\mathrm{DET}_{l}$, +7.9 in $\mathrm{TOP}_{ll}$ on $subset_B$, validating the effectiveness of the proposed components. The code will be shared publicly at https://github.com/Yifeng-Bai/TopoHR.git.

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

Pulling The REINS: Training-Free Safety Alignment of Video Diffusion Models via Representation Steering

Open-weight video diffusion models can generate photorealistic unsafe content, from violence to misinformation, yet existing defenses either require expensive safety fine-tuning that degrades general capability, or apply external filters that are trivially bypassed by adversarial prompts. We present REINS (REpresentation-space INference-time Safety steering), a training-free method that aligns video diffusion models at inference time by steering their internal representations toward safe generation. Our key finding is that safety-relevant structure is linearly encoded in the hidden-state activations of video diffusion transformers, and a single direction, discovered via Supervised PCA on binary safety labels, suffices to separate safe from unsafe generation trajectories. At inference, adding this direction to hidden states at an intermediate transformer layer redirects generation from harmful content to semantically related safe alternatives, with no weight updates, no concept enumeration, and negligible computational overhead. Through mechanistic analysis, we reveal that while safety information accumulates monotonically with transformer depth, steering effectiveness peaks at intermediate layers (~50% depth), exposing a fundamental tradeoff between information availability and downstream propagation capacity. We evaluate REINS across 9 video diffusion models, multiple parameter scales (1.3B-5B), and both text-to-video and image-to-video generation, to our knowledge, the broadest safety evaluation suite in the video generation literature.