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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Encoding parameters by measurement: Forgetting can be better in quantum metrology

arXiv:2512.10541v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce quantum parameter estimation with the encoding being via a quantum measurement. We quantify the precision for estimating parameters characterizing a general two-outcome qubit measurement, considering two cases: when the outcomes of the encoding measurement are recorded and when the same are ignored. We find that in a large variety of such estimation scenarios, forgetting the outcomes yields higher precision. We derive a necessary criterion under which remembering the measurement outcomes provides better precision in comparison to the outcome-forgotten strategy. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient criterion for the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters encoded by an arbitrary quantum process, including those involving measurements, using qubit probes, and find when the quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound is valid and achievable. For simultaneous estimation of two parameters characterizing the measurement, we find that the achievable quantum Cramér$-$Rao bound can be a valid precision bound only when the measurement direction depends on the parameters of interest.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Deep Spectral Learning of Embedded Latent Transfer Operators for Stochastic Dynamical Systems

arXiv:2606.14079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a spectral learning method for stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems represented with embedded latent transfer operators in deep feature spaces. We instantiate the method as Deep Spectral Encoder (DSE), an operator-based latent state-space model in which a time-invariant neural encoder implements learnable nonlinear feature maps from observations, and these features define Markovian latent states whose temporal evolution and observation mapping are described by the transfer and observation operators, respectively. Functional canonical correlation analysis in a learnable Galerkin-projected feature space provides state coordinates from past and future observations, and the two linear operators are estimated on the state coordinates as ridge-regularized closed-form solutions that coincide with Galerkin projections of the associated covariance operators. On this representation, we generalize sequential Bayesian filtering and Koopman spectral mode decomposition in feature space. Experiments on several scenarios show stable and superior performance with sequential Bayesian filtering and dynamic mode decomposition baselines even under noise and partial observability.

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

DeepJEB++: Foundation Model-Driven Large-Scale 3D Engineering Dataset via 2D Latent Space Augmentation

arXiv:2606.12994v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-driven engineering design is constrained by the lack of large-scale 3D datasets that pair geometry with physics-based performance labels. In particular, existing 3D data augmentation techniques have limitations in preserving subtle and diverse geometric variations, and it remains difficult to automate the subsequent simulation-labeling process, where boundary conditions vary depending on the generated geometry. We present DeepJEB++, a foundation-model-driven data-augmentation framework that expands a small seed set of jet engine brackets into a large, simulation-labeled 3D dataset under constrained resources. Our key idea is to augment in the data-rich 2D latent space, then transfer to 3D. In Stage 1, we fine-tune a pretrained 2D latent diffusion model on multi-view renders and synthesize novel views by latent interpolation, retaining manufacturable designs through a vision-language-model (VLM) quality filter. In Stage 2, the validated images are lifted to 3D meshes by a domain-adapted generative foundation model. In Stage 3, an automated pipeline recognizes the load and bolt interfaces on each mesh and assigns finite-element labels – mass, stress, and displacement – without manual intervention. We assess augmentation quality along three intrinsic axes: manufacturability, label fidelity against the SimJEB ground truth, and distributional consistency. Starting from fewer than 400 seed designs, DeepJEB++ yields 15,360 simulation-labeled 3D brackets – a 40x expansion – using a single GPU per stage. The dataset will be made publicly available to support reproducible engineering-AI research.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

MetaPilot: genome-aware adaptive search-space refinement for unified DDA and DIA metaproteomics

Metaproteomic peptide identification is constrained by the structure and size of the protein search space. Pooled gene catalogues provide coverage but obscure genome-level evidence, and current workflows for data-dependent (DDA) and data-independent (DIA) acquisition diverge in their database strategies. We present MetaPilot, a genome-aware workflow that uses conserved marker-protein evidence to rank candidate genomes from MGnify catalogues and construct adaptive, sample-specific search spaces. Applied to paired DDA/DIA datasets of defined mixtures and fecal samples, MetaPilot adapted genome selection to community complexity and reproduced published peptide evidence while expanding the detectable peptide space. In DDA-independent reanalysis of Orbitrap human gut DIA data, MetaPilot identified 24.4% more peptides than the published DDA-derived library and 2.06-fold more than the matched DDA-assisted DIA search. On timsTOF DIA-PASEF mouse intestinal data, it outperformed uMetaP by 41.8~119.7%, enabling genome-resolved functional interpretation without DDA-PASEF input.

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

Dual Dimensionality for Local and Global Attention

Decoder-only Transformers compute attention over the KV cache of preceding tokens. Keys (and Values) are typically represented with the same dimensionality, regardless of its distance from the prediction target. In natural language, however, the next word is most strongly influenced by the immediately preceding tokens. We hypothesize that local and distant tokens impose asymmetric demands on representational capacity: local tokens are more critical for predicting immediate outputs and thus require richer representations, whereas distant tokens primarily serve as long-range memory, for which lower-dimensional representations may suffice. We formalize this idea as Distance-Adaptive Representation (DAR), implemented in a controlled setting that preserves full-dimensional representations within a local context window while assigning reduced-dimensional representations (e.g. 1/4 of the original dimensionality) to tokens beyond that window. Across multiple pretraining scales (70M to 410M parameters), as well as continued supervised fine-tuning on a 1B-scale model, this approach closely matches the performance of full-dimensional baselines. In contrast, uniformly reducing dimensionality across all token positions leads to worse performance. These results challenge the common assumption that key and value dimensionality should be uniform across token positions. Our findings suggest a new direction for designing attention architectures that adaptively allocate representational capacity across sequences, enabling further reductions in KV cache during inference.

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

CisTransCell: Single-Cell Perturbation Prediction via Gene Function, Regulatory Control, and Cellular Context

arXiv:2606.13713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting cellular transcriptional responses to genetic perturbations is a central problem in single-cell biology, especially in the zero-shot setting where the perturbed gene or gene combination is unseen during training. A major difficulty is that perturbation effects are not determined by expression state alone: they depend on how the perturbed gene product influences other genes and proteins, how those downstream factors act on cis-regulatory elements, and which regulatory programs are active in the current cell state. To better capture this biological complexity, we propose CisTransCell, a cell-conditioned multi-modal framework for single-cell perturbation prediction that augments each gene with two complementary priors: a regulatory-sequence prior that captures how the gene is controlled, and a coding-sequence prior that captures what the gene product does. By integrating these priors with cellular expression state, CisTransCell models perturbation response as a cascade from gene function to regulatory control to downstream transcriptional change. Experiments on benchmark single-cell perturbation datasets show that CisTransCell achieves strong performance in zero-shot perturbation prediction.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Unifying Quantum Smoothing Theories with Extended Retrodiction

arXiv:2510.08447v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Estimating the state of an open quantum system monitored over time requires incorporating information from past measurements (filtering) and, for improved accuracy, also from future measurements (smoothing). While classical smoothing is well understood within a Bayesian framework, its quantum generalization has been challenging, leading to distinct and seemingly incompatible approaches. In this work, we demonstrate that quantum state smoothing hinges on a uniquely quantum feature: the fundamental dependence of retrodiction on prior correlations. We introduce auxiliary systems into the prior belief to capture correlations formed during preparation and evolution and develop a comprehensive framework for quantum state smoothing based on extended Bayesian retrodiction. This framework identifies all previous approaches as different choices of the extended prior, and naturally extends it to other choices that have not been considered before. We also give an information-theoretic characterization of the choices of prior, in terms of the average entropy of the smoothed states. Our results establish quantum state smoothing as a fundamentally retrodictive process just like classical smoothing, with proper quantum features clearly identified.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Algebraic Dead Directions in LayerNorm Transformers: A Forward-Pass-Only Diagnostic at LLM Scale

arXiv:2606.19491v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained transformers sit near singular minima of the loss, where the Fisher information metric degenerates along dead directions: directions in parameter space along which the directional Fisher vanishes. Locating such a direction normally needs a forward pass and an eigendecomposition of activations, or a sampling-based complexity estimate; none returns a direction computable from the network's parameters alone. We give one, for LayerNorm transformers. The inverse-scale direction $\gamma^{-1}/\|\gamma^{-1}\|$ of the LayerNorm affine is an exact algebraic kernel of the post-final-norm centred activation covariance, for any input distribution, and induces a corresponding dead direction in parameter space. It is read from the LN scale parameter alone, with no forward or backward pass and no eigensolve: the cheapest dead-direction read, specific to LayerNorm. We test it on $14$ pretrained transformers ($9$ LayerNorm, $5$ RMSNorm; $160$M-$35$B; language and vision objectives). At random initialisation the predicted direction matches the measured bottom singular direction (one forward pass, direct SVD) to four decimal places on $9/9$ LayerNorm models, and is correctly absent on $5/5$ RMSNorm models, which lack the mean-subtraction projector that creates it. On the trained checkpoint the covariance eigenvalue along this direction deepens by ${\sim}10^3\times$ and further dead directions open; the random-init-to-trained gap is a one-forward-pass, per-checkpoint readout of singular structure along the predicted coordinate. Two consequences follow in closed form: the residual stream's smallest singular value is preserved block-to-block on $13/14$ transformers measured on their own input distribution, the one exception (Gemma$4$-$31$B) a genuine dead direction the same read pinpoints; and the kernel direction's presence classifies a transformer's normalisation from the parameters alone.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Low-Latency Real-Time Audio Game Commentary System via LLM-Based Parallel Text Generation

We present a low-latency real-time audio game commentary system that generates spoken commentary directly from live gameplay video. In this end-to-end setting, a key bottleneck is accumulated waiting time; conventional pipelines capture frames, generate text, and synthesize speech sequentially for each utterance, and do not request the next generation until speech playback has completed. This strict sequentiality causes long and unnatural silence between utterances. To address this latency bottleneck, our system runs text generation in parallel with speech playback and buffers multiple candidate utterances ahead of time, enabling immediate synthesis at playback boundaries. Experiments on fast-paced game videos show that our parallel design reduces the mean inter-utterance silence from 9.6 seconds to 0.3 seconds compared to sequential baselines. It also improves similarity to professional speaking–silence timing patterns by over 40 %, and a user study with 120 experienced game players confirms significantly improved perceived speaking rhythm. Our demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/pmrRUlvav8M.

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

Learning to Refine Hidden States for Reliable LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17524v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models show strong reasoning ability, but their internal reasoning process can remain unstable in complex multi-step settings, where early hidden-state errors may propagate to incorrect predictions. We propose ReLAR, a reinforcement-guided latent refinement framework that iteratively updates hidden representations before decoding. ReLAR maintains a compact latent reasoning state and uses learned depth and action controllers to adaptively determine both the number and direction of refinement steps. The controllers are trained with a policy gradient objective based on step-wise likelihood improvement, enabling efficient input-dependent reasoning without explicit chain-of-thought generation. Experiments on medical, mathematical, multi-hop reasoning, and open-ended generation benchmarks show that ReLAR improves accuracy, generation quality, and reasoning stability with substantially lower inference overhead than explicit reasoning baselines.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Spatially Masked Regression Reveals Local and Distributed Predictability in Electrophysiological Recordings

arXiv:2606.11415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural recordings are often interpreted as local measurements, yet the signal at any one sensor can also reflect structured activity distributed across the broader network. This raises a basic question: to what extent does an electrode's signal reflect local versus distributed information in the underlying system? More specifically, how much of an electrode's activity is carried by its immediate neighborhood, and how much is embedded more broadly across the array? We address this with a Spatially Masked Regression (SMR) framework that reconstructs each electrode's timeseries from the remaining electrodes while excluding a configurable neighborhood around the target. By progressively increasing this mask, spatial locality becomes an experimental control for quantifying how much predictive information survives after nearby channels are withheld. We apply SMR to intracranial EEG with heterogeneous electrode coverage and to scalp EEG with standardized montages over sensorimotor cortex. Using distance correlation between original and reconstructed signals, we find strong within-subject reconstruction in both modalities, substantial residual predictability even when local neighbors are excluded, and markedly stronger cross-subject transfer in EEG than in iEEG. Masking shows that nearby electrodes contribute strongly to reconstruction but do not account for all of it, indicating that individual channels reflect both local redundancy and broader distributed structure. Surrogates that preserve selected marginal or spectral properties while disrupting phase structure or temporal ordering substantially reduce performance, supporting the conclusion that SMR depends on structured temporal and cross-channel organization rather than on marginal statistics alone. These results position SMR as an interpretable framework for quantifying the balance between local and distributed information in recordings.

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

Fast-dLLM++: Fr\'{e}chet Profile Decoding for Faster Diffusion LLM Inference

Diffusion large language models promise parallel token generation, yet inference remains bottlenecked by deciding which masked tokens can be safely committed together. Fast-dLLM addressed this with KV caching and confidence-guided parallel decoding, but its decoding theory uses a homogeneous high-confidence assumption that effectively reduces each candidate set to its weakest selected token. We argue that this leaves speed on the table because real decoding steps exhibit heterogeneous confidence profiles. We propose Fast-dLLM++, a training-free extension that introduces Fr\'{echet profile decoding}: selecting parallel commit sets from the full sorted confidence profile rather than a single worst-case confidence. The resulting rule is a heterogeneous-confidence generalization of Fast-dLLM's factor selector and it recovers the previous rule exactly in the equal-confidence case and adds a provable heterogeneity bonus when the selected tokens have uneven confidences. Fast-dLLM++ leaves the model, diffusion process, and cache implementation entirely unchanged, making it a drop-in replacement for existing Fast-dLLM decoding. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH, HumanEval, and MBPP with the LLaDA-8B model show that the theoretical improvement translates directly into empirical gains: profile-aware selection improves the accuracy–throughput frontier by exploiting safe parallelism that weakest-token rules miss, achieving up to 37\% higher throughput at comparable accuracy. Our code release is at https://github.com/Ringo-Star/FastdLLM_plusplus.

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

Risk Stratification for ICU Delirium using Pervasive Ambient Sensing Information

arXiv:2606.19292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Delirium is a common and serious complication in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), associated with increased morbidity, prolonged hospital stays, and higher healthcare costs. Despite its prevalence, early prediction and prevention remain challenging. Environmental factors such as ambient sound and light may influence the onset of delirium, yet they are often overlooked in risk assessments. In this study, we examined whether light intensity and sound pressure levels can independently predict delirium across multiple prediction horizons. We evaluated four efficient sequential neural network models on data collected from 9 ICUs across 309 patients to predict delirium for 10 prediction-window sizes. We reported feature importance and direction of influence using Shapley Additive Explanations analysis. The convolutional model achieved the strongest discrimination, with AUC = 0.80 on sound data and on combined data. Sound features were the dominant predictors overall. Integrating sound with light improved short-term ($

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

InTrain: Intrinsic Trainability for Zero-Cost Neural Architecture Search

Training-free neural architecture search promises efficient discovery of high-performance networks without costly training. However, existing zero-cost proxies rely on fragmented heuristics that fail to capture the fundamental question: what makes an architecture trainable? This paper introduces Intrinsic Trainability (InTrain), a unified theoretical proxy that formalizes trainability as an architectural invariant emerging from two synergistic components: geometric capacity and optimization resilience. We operationalize intrinsic trainability through analysis of neural information processing. Geometric capacity is quantified via the participation ratio of activation covariance eigenspectrum, capturing the effective dimensionality of representation manifolds. Optimization resilience is measured through cumulative gradient health, assessing the robustness of backpropagation across network depth. InTrain synthesizes these dimensions through a scale-invariant multiplicative coupling, which we hypothesize is essential for capturing their synergistic, non-additive relationship. Extensive experiments on standard NAS benchmarks and search spaces demonstrate that InTrain achieves ranking correlations on par with state-of-the-art ensemble-based proxies and outperforms other single-metric methods.

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

An Analysis of the Coordination Gap between Joint and Modular Learning for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation Resources

arXiv:2604.24117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing. With the rise of "decentralized factories", multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach for the combined scheduling of production and transportation tasks. Prior work has largely focused on developing novel cooperative architectures while overlooking the question of when joint training is necessary. Joint training denotes the simultaneous training of job and automatic guided vehicle scheduling agents, whereas modular training involves independently training each agent followed by post-hoc integration. In this study, we systematically investigate the conditions under which joint training is essential for optimal performance in the job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. Through a rigorous sensitivity analysis of resource scarcity and temporal dominance, we quantify the coordination gap – the performance difference between these two training modalities. In our evaluation, joint training outperforms the majority of dispatching rule combinations and modular training approaches. However, the coordination gap advantage diminishes in bottleneck environments, particularly under severe transport and processing constraints. These findings indicate that modular training represents a viable alternative in environments where a single scheduling task dominates. Overall, our work provides practical guidance for selecting between training modalities based on environmental conditions, enabling decision-makers to optimize reinforcement learning-based scheduling performance.

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

Agentic Software: How AI Agents Are Restructuring the Software Paradigm

作者:

arXiv:2606.05608v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: For over half a century, software engineering has operated on a foundational premise: human engineers decompose problems, encode decision logic into static code, and manually adapt that code as requirements evolve. This paper argues that the emergence of AI agents – systems where large language models serve as the primary reasoning engine, dynamically generating and discarding code as an instrumental resource – constitutes a fundamental restructuring of what software is, not an incremental tool improvement. We formalize the distinction between traditional deterministic software and agentic software: in the former, code is the carrier of pre-written decision logic; in the latter, the agent itself is the software, and its decision logic is generated at runtime. We trace the historical arc from licensed software to SaaS to Agent-as-a-Service (AaaS), showing that each shift transferred additional complexity away from end-users – with the agentic shift transferring not just operational complexity but decision-making complexity itself. We introduce Agentic Engineering as an expansion of the software engineering discipline into a new paradigm, distinct in its core object of study (agent systems rather than static source code), its control model (LLM-driven rather than human-predefined), and its human role (intent architect rather than code author). Through analysis of recent benchmark evidence including SWE-bench Verified, EvoClaw, and LangChain's multi-agent coordination studies, we demonstrate both the transformative potential of the agentic paradigm and its current limitations. We conclude with a four-stage roadmap toward self-evolving agent ecosystems and concrete recommendations for practitioners navigating this transition.

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

Generative Modeling of Bach-Style Symbolic Music: A Comparative Study of Autoregressive, Latent-Variable, and Adversarial Approaches

arXiv:2606.13626v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study generative modeling of Bach-style symbolic piano music using a shared MIDI corpus and three model families: autoregressive LSTMs with attention, latent-variable models including recurrent VAEs and vector-quantized VAEs, and generative adversarial networks. We compare their ability to model polyphonic note sequences, learn useful latent representations, and generate stylistically coherent compositions. Our experiments show that the autoregressive LSTM with attention produces the most musically coherent samples, while vector quantization helps mitigate posterior collapse and yields more structured outputs than conventional recurrent VAEs. The adversarial approach captures local pitch patterns but remains difficult to train and generalizes less reliably to Bach's style. These results highlight the relative strengths and failure modes of autoregressive, latent-variable, and adversarial approaches for symbolic music generation.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Confirmation that bryozoan animals were present during the Cambrian explosion

作者: 未知作者

Bryozoans are marine invertebrates that live in colonies and have long been considered absent from the Cambrian explosion — a rapid evolutionary event that began around 538 million years ago. Newly discovered fossils from the Cambrian period reveal that the bryozoan phylum had already diversified by this time. Fossils of two forms of bryozoans show evidence of soft tissue still preserved inside their mineralized skeletons.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

PrefSQA: Pairwise Preference Prediction for Speech Quality Assessment and the Critical Role of High Quality Datasets

arXiv:2606.19597v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mean opinion scores (MOS) are widely used for speech quality assessment, yet scalar labels are sensitive to rater variability and listening test differences. This introduces labeling noise, which limits the reliability of MOS prediction. Preference prediction reduces this variability as listeners compare signals directly, producing cleaner labels. We study MOS-free preference prediction and propose PrefSQA, which incorporates uncertainty-aware logits, an impairment attention head, and a module based on non-matching-reference comparisons. We use and refine five datasets, including MOS-derived and low-noise simulated sets with matching and non-matching content, experiment with human preference sets, and test on unseen data. Experiments show small improvements on MOS-derived data, while other sets reveal clear improvement over the baselines, highlighting the value of high-quality preference data and demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MLLP-VRAIN UPV system for the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation task

This work describes the participation of the MLLP-VRAIN research group in the shared task of the IWSLT 2026 Simultaneous Speech Translation track. Our submission utilizes the recently released Parakeet and Qwen 3.5 models to create a robust, cascaded solution for long-form SimulST through the use of adaptive "black-box" policies. We explore relaxations of these policies to achieve better quality-latency trade-offs. Compared to last year, we participate on all language directions. In addition to this, for the En$\rightarrow${De, It, Zh} directions we also participate in this year's new context track employing a combination of ASR word-boosting and a RAG mechanism of offline pre-translated exemplars to guide generation and enrich our system with domain-specific context. Finally, we provide a detailed latency analysis of our system. Compared to last year, results on the MCIF En$\rightarrow$De test set shows a substantial quality improvement of +5.82 XCOMET-XL. Our context track processing further improves performance by +1.03.

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

A Multi-Domain Benchmark for Detecting AI-Generated Text-Rich Images from GPT-Image-2

Text-rich images often contain privacy-sensitive, transactional, or decision-relevant information. As recent multimodal image generation models become increasingly capable of synthesizing realistic textual content and structured visual designs, detecting AI-generated text-rich images has become an important challenge for digital trust and content authenticity. Existing benchmarks, however, largely focus on object-centric images and provide limited coverage of scenarios where textual semantics and layout organization are central. In this paper, we introduce a multi-domain benchmark for detecting text-rich images generated by OpenAI's GPT Image 2. The benchmark contains 8,602 images across six representative categories: commercial posters, infographics, academic posters, receipts, tables, and UI screenshots. Using this benchmark, we evaluate five representative AI-generated image detectors in a zero-shot setting and analyze their overall, category-wise, and post-processing robustness. Our results show that detector performance is highly domain-dependent: methods that perform well in some categories often fail on others, and even the strongest conventional detector exhibits severe sensitivity to JPEG compression. We further conduct an exploratory evaluation with a multimodal vision-language model, revealing both its promise and its limitations on structured formats. These findings highlight the need for text- and layout-aware detection methods for modern AI-generated images. Our dataset is released at XXX.

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

Keep It in Mind: User Centric Continual Spatial Intelligence Reasoning in Egocentric Video Streams

We introduce UCS-Bench, a dataset spanning 170+ hours of egocentric visual observations with 8.1K+ timestamped questions for diagnosing User-Centric Continual Spatial intelligence in egocentric video streams. UCS-Bench targets a new problem that emphasizes dynamic spatial reasoning, long-term memory, and their alignment with users' real-time locations. We propose DirectMe, a framework that incrementally constructs and maintains a structured spatial memory from streaming egocentric observations. DirectMe enables robust tracking and recall of object locations, all relative to the user's movement over time. By tightly coupling visual perception with memory updates and spatial reasoning, our approach supports long-horizon queries that require recalling interactions, resolving viewpoint-induced ambiguities, and adapting to dynamic scenes. Our experiments show that DirectMe significantly improves the spatial reasoning of leading multimodal LLMs; it also surpasses many spatially aware and long-form streaming video models. We hope our benchmark and solution will advance spatial intelligence research for egocentric AI assistants. Data and code are available at https://github.com/cocowy1/UCS-Bench.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes

Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced vision-language understanding, their application to meme content moderation remains underexplored. We propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training method that improves classification performance and reference-based explanation quality in thinking-based MLLMs via task-specific rewards and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Concretely, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful and propagandistic meme understanding across English and Arabic benchmarks, (ii) extend existing meme datasets with weakly supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales via distillation and multi-LLM fine-grained propaganda annotations, (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective with thinking-length regularization that jointly optimizes classification accuracy and explanation quality, and (iv) investigate self-supervised GRPO on unlabeled memes using consensus-based pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Hateful Memes and ArMeme benchmarks show that our approach improves over previously reported results on FHM accuracy (up to +2.1%, from 79.9% to 82.0%) and on ArMeme macro-F1 (up to +7.6 points, from 0.536 to 0.612 with explanations; +6.1 compared to the original ArMeme benchmark), while also generating natural-language explanations. On ArMeme, sequence-classification baselines remain stronger in terms of raw accuracy, whereas our approach provides more balanced per-class performance along with explanations. We publicly release our code, data extensions, and evaluation resources.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Associations of Chemical Exposures with Psychological Distress and Depression Diagnosis among Waste Pickers in Brasilia, Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Waste pickers face chemical exposures. We evaluated whether chemical exposure is associated with psychological distress and depression. Methods: A 2017 cross-sectional survey included 1,141 waste pickers working in the Estrutural open dump in Brasilia, Brazil. Participants self-reported occupational exposure to 11 chemical categories, 17 psychological distress symptoms, and depression diagnoses. Associations of chemical exposure with mean psychological distress scores and depression prevalence were assessed, adjusted for age, sex, marital status, and income. Results: Mean psychological distress score was higher among those exposed to any chemical (mean of 8.1 vs 6.1; adjusted mean difference [aMD]: 1.8 [0.9, 2.7]) and higher among those exposed to each of 11 chemical categories, for example, smoke (aMD: 1.2 [0.6, 1.7]), batteries (aMD: 1.5 [1.0, 1.9], and oils (aMD: 1.3 [0.9, 1.8]). Depression was more prevalent among those exposed to oils (16.6% vs 10.6%; adjusted prevalence difference [aPD]: 6.3% [95% CI: 2.3, 10.2]), cleaning products (aPD: 5.4% [1.2, 9.5]), medications (aPD: 4.7% [0.6, 8.8]), and aerosols (aPD: 5.3% [1.3, 9.3]) but, not smoke, batteries, greases, insecticides, solvents, paints, chemical containers, or any chemical. Conclusion: These associations highlight the need to consider policy level protections for waste pickers to reduce chemical exposure and guard against psychological distress. Further research is necessary to explore which specific chemicals, within broad chemical categories, are associated with psychological distress and depression.