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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

\texttt{Range-Arithmetic}: Verifiable Deep Learning Inference on an Untrusted Party

arXiv:2505.17623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Verifiable computing (VC) has gained prominence in decentralized machine learning systems, where resource-intensive tasks like deep neural network (DNN) inference are offloaded to external participants due to blockchain limitations. This creates a need to verify the correctness of outsourced computations without re-execution. We propose \texttt{Range-Arithmetic}, a novel framework for efficient and verifiable DNN inference that transforms non-arithmetic operations, such as rounding after fixed-point matrix multiplication and ReLU, into arithmetic steps verifiable using sum-check protocols and concatenated range proofs. Our approach avoids the complexity of Boolean encoding, high-degree polynomials, and large lookup tables while remaining compatible with finite-field-based proof systems. Experimental results show that our method not only matches the performance of existing approaches, but also reduces the computational cost of verifying the results, the computational effort required from the untrusted party performing the DNN inference, and the communication overhead between the two sides.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning from Delayed Marketplace Feedback for Objective-Weight Adaptation in Three-Sided Dispatch

arXiv:2606.13604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dispatch in three-sided marketplaces provides a natural setting for reinforcement learning from world feedback: decisions are evaluated by delayed operational outcomes such as delivery speed, courier utilization, and merchant congestion. We present a deployed reinforcement learning system at DoorDash that adapts dispatch objective weights in a large-scale food-delivery marketplace using delayed signals. Rather than replacing the combinatorial assignment optimizer, a store-level policy learned from logged marketplace data selects a discrete multiplier that shifts the dispatch optimizer's tradeoff between delivery quality and batching efficiency. This interface enables offline policy learning under noisy, delayed, and coupled feedback while preserving production feasibility constraints and operational safeguards. We train a shared value function using centralized offline data and decentralized store-level execution, with Double Q-learning targets and a conservative regularizer to reduce out-of-distribution value overestimation. In a production switchback experiment, the offline-trained policy increases batching and reduces courier-side time costs without degrading customer-facing delivery quality. Results illustrate how world feedback from a live economic and logistics system can be used to safely adapt decision policies online.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ActiTect: A Generalizable Machine Learning Pipeline for REM Sleep Behavior Disorder Screening through Standardized Actigraphy

arXiv:2511.05221v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Isolated rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder (iRBD) is a major prodromal marker of $\alpha$-synucleinopathies, often preceding the clinical onset of Parkinson's disease, dementia with Lewy bodies, or multiple system atrophy. While wrist-worn actimeters hold significant potential for detecting RBD in large-scale screening efforts by capturing abnormal nocturnal movements, they become inoperable without a reliable and efficient analysis pipeline. This study presents ActiTect, a fully automated, open-source machine learning tool to identify RBD from actigraphy recordings. To ensure generalizability across heterogeneous acquisition settings, our pipeline includes robust preprocessing and automated sleep-wake detection to harmonize multi-device data and extract physiologically interpretable motion features characterizing activity patterns. Model development was conducted on a cohort of 78 individuals, yielding strong discrimination under nested cross-validation (AUROC = 0.95). Generalization was confirmed on a blinded local test set (n = 31, AUROC = 0.86) and on two independent external cohorts (n = 113, AUROC = 0.84; n = 57, AUROC = 0.94). To assess real-world robustness, leave-one-dataset-out cross-validation across the internal and external cohorts demonstrated consistent performance (AUROC range = 0.84-0.89). A complementary stability analysis showed that key predictive features remained reproducible across datasets, supporting the final pooled multi-center model as a robust pre-trained resource for broader deployment. By being open-source and easy to use, our tool promotes widespread adoption and facilitates independent validation and collaborative improvements, thereby advancing the field toward a unified and generalizable RBD detection model using wearable devices.

04.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-19

Optimized R2 retroelement complexes for DNA insertion into plant genomes

Traditional approaches for DNA insertion into plant genomes using Agrobacterium tumefaciens result in random integration. Newer genetic engineering methods based on nucleases, prime editors, transposases and recombinases extend capabilities but remain constrained with low efficiencies, off-target integration or limited payload size. Here we adapt the avian Taeniopygia guttata R2 protein (R2Tg) for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes by engineering R2Tg expression cassettes and RNA payloads carrying intron-disrupted reporters, with optimized ribosomal DNA homology arms and untranslated regions. In Arabidopsis thaliana protoplasts, Nicotiana benthamiana leaves and Solanum lycopersicum seedlings, our R2Tg editor system achieves targeted insertion of full-length payloads ranging from 2.2 kb to 5 kb. In Nicotiana benthamiana leaves, integration occurs, on average, at 1 copy per genome, which is 30 times more efficient than that achieved by Cas9 homology-directed repair. This work establishes an R2Tg ribonucleoprotein platform for targeted DNA insertion into plant genomes, using a multicopy genomic safe-harbor site to enable efficient addition of multikilobase genes. R2 retrotransposons are used to integrate DNA into plant and crop 25S ribosomal DNA sites.

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

Comparing Linear Probes with Mahalanobis Cosine Similarity

arXiv:2606.19603v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Linear probes are widely used in interpretability research and often compared by cosine similarity. The Mahalanobis cosine similarity (MCS) between two directions, which reweights the inner product by test data covariance, is a natural task-aware refinement. Ying et al. (2026) report that a probe's MCS to a reference probe trained on the out-of-distribution (OOD) data near-perfectly linearly predicts the probe's OOD AUROC (R^2 = 0.98). Here, we extend this empirical finding across models, layers, and concept domains, and prove this general phenomenon in closed form: For balanced classes whose projections are Gaussian, OOD AUROC and MCS to the reference probe are linear because both are sigmoid-shaped functions of the probe's signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the test data. The theory also predicts when this linearity fails, which we verify empirically. MCS offers a theoretically grounded and empirically effective alternative to Euclidean cosine similarity for comparing linear probes.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MuseVLA: An Adaptive Multimodal Sensing Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks.

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

MassSpecGym in the Wild: Uncovering and Correcting Evaluation Pitfalls in AI-Driven Molecule Discovery

arXiv:2606.19624v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable benchmarking is critical for developing machine learning models for tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) based molecule discovery. Subtle issues in experimental design and model evaluation procedures can degrade the trustworthiness of such benchmarks and lead to erroneous conclusions. We conduct a thorough review of model evaluation issues in the recent MS/MS machine learning literature, using the standard MassSpecGym benchmark suite as a case study to illustrate the impact of these issues. We find evaluation issues in at least 17 of 26 papers reporting MassSpecGym benchmark results in the first year of its adoption. We isolate three classes of failures: (i) data leakage, (ii) shortcut learning, and (iii) implementation bugs and metric divergence. Through extensive experimentation and code replication, we quantify the impact of these issues and show how they corrupt the evaluation standards MassSpecGym was designed to enforce. We distill our findings into recommendations generalizable to MS/MS challenges, benchmarks, and custom evaluation setups. We also release MassSpecGym v1.5, an implementation of our recommendations in the MassSpecGym benchmarking suite which addresses the failure modes identified in this audit. MassSpecGym v1.5 is publicly available at https://github.com/pluskal-lab/MassSpecGym.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Deciphering shared and divergent tissue architectures from cross-species spatial transcriptomics

作者:

The integration of spatial transcriptomics (ST) data across species is essential for cross-species and translational studies, but remains challenging due to molecular divergence and anatomical differences between organisms. We present STACAME, a graph attention autoencoder-based framework to decipher shared and divergent tissue architectures from cross-species ST data by explicitly modeling both orthologous and species-specific genes. STACAME aligns ST slices in a spatially aware manner, identifies homologous and species-specific domains, and enables a suite of downstream comparative analyses. We demonstrate its utility by integrating ST datasets from diverse tissues, including hippocampus, isocortex, embryo, breast, liver, and cerebellum, across multiple species such as human, macaque, marmoset, mouse, and zebrafish. STACAME supports cross-species spatial domain alignment, the detection of shared and divergent spatially variable genes, development alignment and comparison, and the 3D integration of tissue architecture. This flexible approach facilitates the translation of findings from model organisms to humans, providing a unified computational platform for cross-species spatial transcriptomics.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Seeing What Matters: Perceptual Wrapper with Common Randomness for 3D Gaussian Splatting

While 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) achieves impressive real-time rendering, it frequently struggles to synthesize high-frequency textures, a limitation heavily exacerbated in memory-constrained and rate-distortion-optimized (RDO) pipelines. To address this, we propose a versatile 2D perceptual wrapper that enhances the rendered outputs of existing 3DGS representations in a content- and view-dependent manner. Our method leverages a lightweight synthesis network conditioned on pseudo-random Gaussian noise to synthesize perceptually plausible textures. Supervised by Wasserstein Distortion, the network learns to match local feature statistics rather than strictly enforcing pixel-wise reconstruction fidelity, effectively mitigating the blurriness inherent in standard frameworks. We demonstrate the broad applicability of our plug-and-play approach across vanilla, memory-constrained, and RDO 3DGS methods. Comprehensive subjective and objective experiments confirm that our method significantly improves over existing baselines, yielding superior perceptual quality at sharply reduced file or model sizes.

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

TxBench-PP: Analyzing AI Agent Performance on Small-Molecule Preclinical Pharmacology

arXiv:2606.19245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) agents promise to accelerate drug discovery by compressing interpretation and decision-making loops, but practical deployment requires trusted evaluation on realistic program decisions. We introduce TherapeuticsBench Preclinical Pharmacology (TxBench-PP), a verifiable benchmark for small-molecule preclinical pharmacology and the first focused slice of a broader TherapeuticsBench effort across drug-discovery stages and therapeutic modalities. TxBench-PP tests whether agents can recover accurate conclusions from real-world assay data rather than memorized facts from literature. The benchmark contains 100 evaluations indexed by program stage, assay type, and task structure, spanning mechanism-of-action (MoA) and pharmacodynamic (PD) reasoning, compound-target engagement, causal target validation, developability and safety, and translational efficacy. Agents receive realistic workflow snapshots, inspect files in a coding environment, and return structured answers graded deterministically. Across 16 model-harness configurations, comprising 11 models and 4,800 trajectories, no system reliably recovered preclinical pharmacology decisions. The strongest configuration, Claude Opus 4.8 / Pi, passed 59.3\% of endpoint attempts (178/300; 95\% CI, 51.1-67.6), followed by GPT-5.5 / Pi at 55.3\% (166/300; 47.0-63.6).

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

PH-KAN: Port-Hamiltonian Kolmogorov-Arnold Network

arXiv:2606.14708v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data-driven machine learning approaches have become increasingly attractive for nonlinear system identification, but standard models often fail to preserve the underlying physical structure and remain difficult to interpret, especially when no analytical model is available. In this context, port-Hamiltonian (pH) models provide a natural physics-informed representation. However, when these models are parameterized with standard multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), the learned constitutive components often remain poorly interpretable. In this paper, we propose a structure-preserving identification framework for nonlinear port-Hamiltonian systems based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs). The proposed PH-KAN model parameterizes the interconnection matrix, dissipation matrix, Hamiltonian, and input mapping using dedicated KAN blocks, while enforcing the port-Hamiltonian constraints by construction. This yields constitutive representations in which the nonlinear functions defining the identified pH components can be explicitly inspected, leading to a more interpretable model than with standard MLP-based parameterizations.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Can Vision Foundation Models Navigate? Zero-Shot Real-World Evaluation and Lessons Learned

arXiv:2603.25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations. Despite growing real-world deployment, existing evaluations rely almost exclusively on success rate, whether the robot reaches its goal, which conceals trajectory quality, collision behavior, and robustness to environmental change. We present a real-world evaluation of five state-of-the-art VNMs (GNM, ViNT, NoMaD, NaviBridger, and CrossFormer) across two robot platforms and five environments spanning indoor and outdoor settings. Beyond success rate, we combine path-based metrics with vision-based goal-recognition scores and assess robustness through controlled image perturbations (motion blur, sunflare). Our analysis uncovers three systematic limitations: (a) even architecturally sophisticated diffusion and transformer-based models exhibit frequent collisions, indicating limited geometric understanding; (b) models fail to discriminate between different locations that are perceptually similar, however some semantics differences are present, causing goal prediction errors in repetitive environments; and (c) performance degrades under distribution shift. We will publicly release our evaluation codebase and dataset to facilitate reproducible benchmarking of VNMs.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin counting via projection noise measurement of mesoscopic solid-state spin ensemble

arXiv:2606.14437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum projection noise is the fundamental noise source for the population measurement of spin ensembles. While projection-noise-limited measurements have been extensively studied in atomic systems, corresponding experiments on solid-state spin ensembles remain challenging due to dominant classical readout noise. Here, we report direct measurement of the quantum projection noise of mesoscopic ensembles of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) spin defects at room temperature. Our experiment is enabled by a high optically-detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) contrast of over 20% for a single crystallographic orientation of the defect spins, obtained by combining polarization-selective optical excitation with spin-to-charge conversion. We use our protocol to demonstrate projection noise measurements and spin counting from nanoscale NV ensembles of up to 43 spins. We further demonstrate that the protocol allows for significant gains in sensitivity for magnetometry applications without need for cryogenic operation or high bias magnetic fields.

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

Light Interaction: Training-Free Inference Acceleration for Interactive Video World Models

arXiv:2605.31158v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Interactive video world models generate video chunk by chunk in response to user-controlled camera movements, enabling applications such as real-time game simulation, virtual scene navigation, and embodied AI training. However, scaling to long interactive trajectories is prohibitively expensive due to growing context memory, quadratic attention complexity, and repeated denoising steps. We present Light Interaction, a training-free inference acceleration framework for interactive video world models. Our key insight is that interaction naturally enables trajectory-dependent adaptive computation: retrieved spatial memory can be discarded during novel exploration, temporal context can be adjusted according to local latent dynamics, and early-step model outputs can be reused when the camera revisits familiar regions. Based on this insight, Light Interaction combines adaptive context management, denoising cache acceleration, and hardware-software co-designed 3D block sparse attention with fused Triton kernels. Evaluated on HY-WorldPlay and Matrix-Game-3.0, Light Interaction achieves up to 2.59x speedup without model retraining while maintaining competitive visual quality.

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

On Surjectivity of Neural Networks: Can you elicit any behavior from your model?

arXiv:2508.19445v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given a trained neural network, can any specified output be generated by some input? Equivalently, does the network correspond to a function that is surjective? In generative models, surjectivity implies that any output, including harmful or undesirable content, can in principle be generated by the networks, raising concerns about model safety and jailbreak vulnerabilities. In this paper, we prove that many fundamental building blocks of modern neural architectures, such as networks with pre-layer normalization and linear-attention modules, are almost always surjective. As corollaries, widely used generative frameworks, including GPT-style transformers and diffusion models with deterministic ODE solvers, admit inverse mappings for arbitrary outputs. By studying surjectivity of these modern and commonly used neural architectures, we contribute a formalism that sheds light on their unavoidable vulnerability to a broad class of adversarial attacks.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Toward Trustworthy AI: Multi-Target Adversarial Attacks and Robust Defenses for Continuous Data Summarization

arXiv:2606.11804v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trustworthy AI requires reliable data-processing pipelines, not only robust downstream predictive models. As an upstream component, data summarization determines which information is retained and passed to subsequent learning or decision modules. Therefore, adversarial perturbations to the summarization process can compromise trustworthy AI in an upstream manner: they may alter the selected summary, reduce its representativeness, and further degrade the utility of subsequent learning tasks. In this paper, we study adversarial attacks on continuous data summarization under similarity-level perturbations through DR-submodular optimization. We show that a class of multi-resolution image summarization objectives can be formulated as multilinear extensions of non-negative submodular set functions and satisfy DR-submodularity with $m$-weak monotonicity. We then formulate multi-target attack generation as a min-max problem, where one admissible perturbation of the similarity structure is optimized to degrade multiple target summarization models. To mitigate such perturbations, we formulate robust defense against mixed attack types as a regularized max-min problem. For both problems, we develop approximation algorithms with theoretical guarantees. Experiments on real-data and controlled clustered benchmarks show that the proposed attack is effective in representative low-to-moderate budget regimes and can induce downstream task-performance loss. The proposed defense improves the robustness–mitigation trade-off in structured settings, while also revealing the parameter sensitivity of robust protection on real data.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Effectiveness and Safety of Bempedoic Acid Across Clinically Relevant Subgroups: Insights from the CLEAR Taiwan Study

Background Despite available lipid-lowering therapies (LLT), many patients fail to achieve low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) targets. This gap persists across clinically relevant subgroups. Bempedoic acid has demonstrated effective LDL-C lowering with a favorable safety profile in the CLEAR Taiwan study; however, its effects across subgroups in Asian populations remains limited. Methods The phase IV CLEAR Taiwan study (NCT06925100) enrolled patients with inadequately controlled hypercholesterolemia who received bempedoic acid for 12 weeks in addition to background LLT. This analysis evaluated changes in lipid parameters, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), and safety outcomes in clinically relevant subgroups, including cardiovascular risk, diabetes, age, statin tolerance, and sex. Results A total of 180 patients were included. Bempedoic acid achieved significant LDL-C reductions in all subgroups. Numerically greater LDL-C reductions were observed in primary prevention, statin-intolerant, younger (< 65 years), and female patients, while comparable reductions were observed across diabetes status. Reductions in non-high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, total cholesterol, and apolipoprotein B were consistent with LDL-C findings. Significant decreases in hsCRP were observed in all subgroups, with numerically greater reductions in patients aged < 65 years and those without diabetes. Bempedoic acid was well tolerated, with a low incidence of adverse events and no new safety signals identified. Changes in liver enzymes, renal function, and uric acid were minimal within subgroups. Conclusion Subgroup analyses from the CLEAR Taiwan study demonstrate consistent efficacy and safety of bempedoic acid across clinically relevant subgroups and support its use as a flexible option to address residual gaps in lipid management.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Intrinsic Pointer Basis and Irreversible Classicality from Coherence Contraction

arXiv:2604.23304v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work analyzes an operational route to classical behavior for reduced quantum states using the intrinsic reference basis (IRB). Relative to a fixed physical conjugation, the IRB separates intrinsic populations from a real antisymmetric cohesion sector. A globally bounded cohesion index is defined and its exponential contraction is proved for phase-free dephasing dynamics aligned with the IRB; for general aligned dephasing, the corresponding modulus-based coherence functional contracts at the same computable rates. The results provide distance bounds to the IRB-diagonal description and a logarithmic upper bound on the time required to reach a prescribed experimental tolerance. The IRB projectors constitute state-derived candidate pointer sectors, and they become dynamically stable pointer sectors when the effective dephasing generator is aligned with them and damps the relevant inter-sector coherences. Degenerate population sectors lead naturally to block-classicality and protected intra-block coherence. In a two-level active sector, the cohesion index equals fringe visibility, giving a direct interferometric test of the contraction law. The construction is independent of any spacetime- or unification-emergence hypothesis and is intended as a channel-level complement to environment-induced einselection.

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

Beyond the Training Distribution: Evaluating Predictions Under Distribution Shift and Selection Bias

arXiv:2606.14506v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding how a prediction model will perform in a new environment before deployment is essential to preventing harm when algorithms inform decision-making. Two common sources of model performance degradation are (i) covariate shift, where the target covariate distribution differs from the source, and (ii) selective labels, where the observability of outcomes depends on historical decisions. We study pre-deployment model evaluation under the joint presence of covariate shift and labeling of outcomes selectively based on observed features. In particular, we present a double machine learning procedure for estimating the target risk of an arbitrary black-box prediction model under a general loss function. We show identification of this estimand under standard assumptions and derive a bias-corrected estimator based on the influence function of the target risk. Finally, we evaluate our estimator through experiments using the eICU electronic health records database, showing that it tracks the true target risk more accurately than methods that address either selective labels or covariate shift alone, as well as baselines that combine standard plug-in approaches.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

DeepInflation: an AI agent for research and model discovery of inflation

arXiv:2601.14288v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present DeepInflation, an AI agent designed for research and model discovery in inflationary cosmology. Built upon a multi-agent architecture, DeepInflation integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with a symbolic regression (SR) engine and a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) knowledge base. This framework enables the agent to automatically explore and verify the vast landscape of inflationary potentials while grounding its outputs in established theoretical literature. We demonstrate that DeepInflation can successfully discover simple and viable single-field slow-roll inflationary potentials consistent with the latest observations (with the ACT DR6 results taken as an example) or any given $n_s$ and $r$, and provide accurate theoretical context for obscure inflationary scenarios. DeepInflation serves as a prototype for a new generation of autonomous scientific discovery engines in cosmology, which enables researchers and non-experts alike to explore the inflationary landscape using natural language. This agent is available at https://github.com/pengzy-cosmo/DeepInflation.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

From Imitation to Alignment: Human-Preference Flow Policies for Long-Horizon Sidewalk Navigation

arXiv:2606.12603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous long-horizon sidewalk navigation is essential for micro-mobility applications such as robotic food delivery and assistive electronic wheelchairs. Unlike autonomous driving on the road, long-horizon sidewalk navigation requires precise maneuvering through unpredictable sidewalk terrains and pedestrians, with a lightweight perception stack as minimal as a single monocular RGB camera. While imitation learning (IL) from demonstrations offers a practical solution, the resulting autopilot policy often suffers from compounding errors, a lack of social compliance on sidewalks, and deficiencies in counterfactual reasoning to handle complex situations. To address these challenges, we introduce FlowPilot, a mapless navigation policy that achieves robust and efficient long-horizon navigation performance using only a monocular RGB camera. We first propose to use anchored flow matching as an action representation for policy pre-training on large-scale robot fleet data and to capture the diverse, complex, multimodal distribution of sidewalk navigation behaviors. To bridge the gap between imitation and alignment, we further design a human-in-the-loop preference learning scheme to tune the policy on a small amount of human intervention data. It strengthens the model's counterfactual reasoning and social compliance on sidewalks. We evaluate FlowPilot through extensive simulation and real-world experiments in diverse sidewalk environments. FlowPilot achieves 42% success rate and 66% route completion in simulation, while FlowPilot-HP further improves real-world robustness and social compliance, reducing IR by 40.0% and NIR by 52.1% relative to the base model.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MiniPIC: Flexible Position-Independent Caching in <100LOC

Retrieval-augmented and agentic workloads repeatedly prefill recurring predictable structured inputs (which we call "spans") such as documents and code files. Yet, prefix caching in engines such as vLLM cannot reuse their KV entries unless they share identical prefixes with another request, while Position-Independent Caching (PIC) implementations within production-grade inference servers typically either require substantial server code changes or keep KV state outside the server, incurring host-to-device transfer overhead. We present Minimalistic PIC (MiniPIC): a minimal, flexible and fast vLLM design built from two ingredients: positional-encoding-free KV cache and user-controlled cache-reuse primitives. MiniPIC stores unrotated K vectors in the KV cache, applies RoPE to K tiles inside attention using per-request logical positions, and exposes three user-facing and token-level primitives: block-aligned padding, span separator (SSep), and prompt depend (PDep), that modify hashing behavior and effective block-level causal attention structure. With fewer than 100 lines of core-engine changes plus a custom attention backend, these primitives are sufficient to realize multiple PIC methods, including Block-Attention, EPIC, and Prompt Cache, within the same running vLLM instance, while natively integrating with KV cache CPU offload implementations. On 2WikiMultihopQA, MiniPIC with interleaved scheduling improves prefill throughput by 49% over baseline vLLM, reduces cached-span time-to-first-token by up to two orders of magnitude, preserves the linear prefill scaling of uncached spans, and incurs only 5.7% worst-case overhead.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

When LLMs Analyze Scars: From Images to Clinically-Meaningful Features

Medical image classification faces a fundamental dilemma: while deep learning models achieve remarkable performance at scale, real-world clinical scenarios often suffer from severe data scarcity due to annotation costs, privacy constraints, and disease rarity. This challenge is particularly pronounced in pathological scar classification, where differentiating keloids from hypertrophic scars requires subtle expert knowledge and labeled images are extremely limited. We propose a novel paradigm that repositions large language models (LLMs) as knowledge-driven feature engineers rather than end-to-end classifiers. We call this framework ScaFE (Scar Feature Engineering). Our key insight is that LLMs encode rich medical knowledge that can be externalized as executable feature extraction code, enabling the transformation of high-dimensional images into low-dimensional, clinically interpretable representations. Specifically, we prompt an LLM with established scar assessment criteria to generate deterministic Python code that extracts features aligned with clinical scoring systems such as the Vancouver Scar Scale. Our approach offers three key advantages: (1) data efficiency, achieving robust performance with limited training samples by decoupling knowledge acquisition from statistical learning; (2) privacy preservation, as raw images are processed locally without exposure to external LLMs; and (3) interpretability, through explicit features grounded in clinical reasoning. Extensive experiments on scar classification demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms end-to-end deep learning baselines or using LLMs as black-box classifiers under limited data conditions, establishing a promising direction for integrating LLMs into data-efficient and clinically transparent medical AI systems.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Multiagent Protocols with Aggregated Confidence Signals

arXiv:2606.13591v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Confidence is used for reliability, oversight, and a range of downstream decision tasks in Natural Language Processing (NLP), yet no existing method produces or evaluates a confidence for the output of a multiagent system. Prior work uses confidence within multiagent debate (MAD) to weight messages, trigger debate, or calibrate individual agents, but it never aggregates these into a single confidence for the system itself. We introduce three protocols that produce a final answer along with a single aggregated confidence by first transforming raw confidence signals to make them comparable across models, then combining them via soft voting or a probability fusion we call Bayesian fusion. This aggregated confidence is substantially more discriminative (AUARC) than that of the best single agent or the standard debate baselines, while correctness (F1-score) stays stable and recovers the losses MAD incurs on more ambiguous tasks. Analyzing two estimators, sequence probability and self-report, alongside parametric and non-parametric calibrators, we find that calibration improves F1 for both estimators while AUARC is less reliant on it. We evaluate six homogeneous and heterogeneous debating pairs per benchmark, across five benchmarks and four task types, spanning a range of model capabilities and sizes.