arXiv:2606.00076v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The present work introduces DefocusTrackerAI, a generalized deep-learning framework for the automatic detection and position estimation of defocused particle images from any kind of optical configuration without compromising uncertainty and recall, intended as a follow-up of the open-source project DefocusTracker. We selected the deep neural network architecture from the direct comparison of two well-known object detection models, Faster R-CNN and YOLOv9, trained on a diverse and feature-rich synthetic image set containing astigmatic and non-astigmatic defocused particle images of varying diameters. The model evaluation on synthetic data showed that, first, YOLOv9 outperforms Faster R-CNN, achieving higher recall and lower uncertainty, particularly at high particle image densities; and second, that YOLOv9 provides enhanced spatial resolution, with uncertainty values between 0.1 and 0.4 pixels for particle image densities N_s up to 0.5, outperforming state-of-the-art algorithms. We demonstrated that our models are able to detect astigmatic and non-astigmatic defocused particle images in multiple optical setups with varying lighting conditions. In addition, we successfully applied our models on real DPT experiments, including fluorescence and shadowgraph data, showing that they can be used beyond conventional DPT applications, including the tracking of sprays and droplets. A pre-trained, ready-to-use version of DefocusTrackerAI based on YOLOv9 is available at https://gitlab.com/goncalo.coutinho/defocustrackerAI-main/-/tree/7e0f11f649ebad50e20dca5b9545f26ca303ebe0 and can be used for automatic detection of defocused particle images of any kind with high accuracy. In combination with a suitable calibration approach for the depth position, it can be used as an effective first step for three-dimensional defocusing particle tracking.

arXiv:2606.00095v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to reach target locations in unseen environments by following language instructions. Despite recent progress with vision-language models (VLMs), a critical semantic-geometric gap remains: while VLMs excel at language and 2D visual understanding, they struggle with 3D spatial reasoning and fail to capture the causal dynamics between actions and spatial transitions, resulting in unreliable navigation, particularly in zero-shot settings. To bridge this gap, we propose a Hierarchical Semantic-Geometric Map (HSGM) that transforms 3D geometric information into a structured representation compatible with VLMs, effectively linking them to the physical world. Specifically, HSGM is represented as a multi-channel top-down map organized into three levels: (1) geometric level that records navigable regions and obstacles, (2) semantic level that represents objects and their relations, and (3) decision level that supports high-level task reasoning and goal selection. During navigation, the VLM acts as a high-level semantic planner, interpreting the spatial layout encoded in the HSGM to select geometrically valid waypoints, while low-level, collision-free movements between waypoints are executed by a classical path-planning algorithm, fully decoupling semantic reasoning from action execution. Additionally, complex instructions are decomposed into subtasks to alleviate the problem of progress forgetting or hallucinating in long-horizon navigation. Extensive experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks demonstrate that our zero-shot framework achieves state-of-the-art performance and even outperforms several supervised methods. Code is available at https://github.com/Teacher-Tom/HSGM_public.

arXiv:2606.00092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weakly-supervised classification of whole-slide images with attention-based multiple instance learning (ABMIL) on top of foundation features now reaches near-saturation on Camelyon16 slide-level performance, but the corresponding attention maps are an imperfect localization signal: in clinical interpretation, a model that classifies correctly without firing on the actual lesion is hard to trust. We address this gap with cellular sheaves, which equip each vertex and edge of a graph with a finite-dimensional vector space and consistent linear maps between them, providing a principled way to detect local disagreement on graph-structured data. We apply cellular sheaves to weakly-supervised tumour localization on whole-slide images, combining a sheaf disagreement field with ABMIL. The natural training objective, encouraging consistency between similar features, produces a disagreement field that tracks tissue-level texture rather than diagnostic content. We propose attention-conditional consistency, which uses the classifier's attention to define which neighbouring patches should agree. Joint training of the classifier and the sheaf under this objective produces a disagreement field with patch-level AUC 0.940 on Camelyon16 and raises the attention head from its ABMIL-alone level of 0.717 to 0.953. Two-stage ablation with the classifier frozen at its ABMIL values reaches only 0.727 on the disagreement field and leaves attention at 0.717, confirming that the gain comes from the projector co-adapting under both objectives, not from the loss change in isolation. The trained model transfers without retraining to annotated slides from Camelyon17, maintaining Delta AUC 0.932 +/- 0.083 and attention AUC 0.955 +/- 0.099. The result is an attention map and a sheaf-disagreement map that fire on the same diagnostic regions, giving clinicians two complementary explanations for each slide-level prediction.

arXiv:2606.00087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective pre-polysomnography screening for obstructive sleep apnea-hypopnea syndrome (OSAHS) requires combining clinical risk factors with visible craniofacial and neck cues. Directly prompting general-purpose multimodal foundation models for medical yes/no decisions can yield unstable, poorly calibrated outputs. We propose EviOSAHS, an evidence-grounded multimodal reasoning framework that separates image-only anatomical evidence acquisition from final clinical adjudication. Each frontal facial image is decomposed into seven fixed anatomical queries covering the neck, chin, mouth, face/neck fat, lower jaw, midface, and nose. Visual responses are converted into structured evidence cards recording target anatomy, visibility, risk direction, evidence strength, confidence, and a concise summary. These cards are combined with a cleaned clinical profile only in the final stage, where a large language model performs balanced binary screening adjudication. We evaluated EviOSAHS on a 642-subject cohort, mapping normal subjects to screening-negative and mild, moderate, or severe OSAHS subjects to screening-positive. EviOSAHS achieved 88.47% accuracy, 94.86% sensitivity, 93.74% F1-score, and a 5.14% false-negative rate, outperforming clinical-only prompting, direct multimodal prompting, and naive two-stage pipelines under a unified protocol. Ablations showed that seven-question visual decomposition and balanced final adjudication were critical to the high-sensitivity operating point. A question-level audit of 4,494 visual outputs showed a 100% structured parse rate and 93.88% high-visibility rate. EviOSAHS provides an auditable, high-sensitivity workflow for binary pre-polysomnography OSAHS screening, but should be viewed as a triage assistant rather than a diagnostic system. Prospective validation, external testing, and calibrated operating-point control are needed before clinical deployment.

arXiv:2606.00080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Marine plankton underpin aquatic food webs and play a key role in global CO2 sequestration, making reliable species identification critical for understanding ocean health and climate feedbacks. Existing classification models perform well on individual collections but fail to generalize across instruments and environments due to isolated training datasets and inconsistent labels. To address this, we introduce Planktonzilla-17M, a unified dataset consolidating publicly available plankton image collections spanning thirteen imaging systems. It comprises 17.4 million images with standardized taxonomy and geo-environmental metadata, including 3.74 million plankton images spanning over 602 taxonomic classes, of which 201 are identified at the species level, making it the largest and most comprehensive plankton image dataset to date. Using this large-scale dataset, we perform a controlled comparison between supervised and CLIP-style image--text training on a shared ViT backbone. We find that a supervised classifier matches or exceeds CLIP-style training when trained using taxonomic lineage as text. We further observe that BioCLIP and BioCLIP2 perform poorly on plankton in zero-shot and few-shot settings. Leveraging Planktonzilla-17M improves plankton classification performance, highlighting the limitations of current biological foundation models in marine imaging domains.

arXiv:2606.00078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Numerous modern applications in signal processing and medical imaging necessitate acquiring high-dimensional signals under tight resource constraints. Traditional sampling theory suggests that accurate signal reconstruction requires a number of measurements proportional to the signal's ambient dimension, a requirement often too expensive or impractical. Compressed sensing challenges this notion by demonstrating that sparse signals can be recovered with fewer measurements, provided the measurement operator meets certain conditions. This proof-of-concept study presents a task-aware flow-based generative framework -- a reformulation of the conventional Flow Matching training paradigm with a flow model trained to optimize subsampling in compressed sensing applications. We establish the fundamental feasibility of the proposed framework of learning subsampling masks that substantially enhance the performance of compressed sensing for image classification, image reconstruction, and MRI acceleration. For the image reconstruction task, our method demonstrated state-of-the-art performance, achieving Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio of 25.17 dB at the subsampling rate of 5\% on the CelebA dataset and 29.24 dB when reconstructing $8\times$ accelerated MRI measurements (fastMRI dataset) with the minimal computational overhead. These results highlight the effectiveness of task-conditioning within generative flow models and reveal a promising direction for representation learning strategies. Overall, the proposed framework offers a unified, flexible approach to designing data- and task-driven sensing schemes that can be potentially adapted to a broad range of inverse problems.

arXiv:2606.00077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recently, Belief-Attention \cite{Guoqiang25BeliefAttention} has been proposed by first performing an orthogonal projection of the softmax-based weighted summation of $V$ vectors with respect to the original $V$ vectors and then taking the perpendicular component as the residual signal in Transformer for performance improvement. In this paper, we first conduct an ablation study showing the projected component also carries information about the token correlation, which should not be ignored. We then propose to extend Belief-Attention by making use of both the perpendicular and projected components. In particular, the projected component goes through certain activation function and then a linear mapping before merging with the considered token. Conceptually speaking, the neural block for the projected component can be viewed as a two-layer feedforward network (FFN) within the new attention block. It is also noted that standard attention captures the token correlation via the inner-product matrix $QK^T$. We propose to introduce an additional inner-product matrix $ZZ^T$ to $QK^T$ to capture richer token correlation. We refer to the new module as Belief2-Attention. It can be easily shown that Belief2-Attention is more expressive than standard Attention. We then verify the effectiveness of Belief2-Attention for vision tasks of image classification and segmentation.

arXiv:2606.00094v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Image generative models aim to sample data points from the underlying data manifold, a task that requires learning and decoding a dense, low-dimensional, and compact parameterization space. To achieve this, we propose the Data Manifold-aware Image diffusioN moDel (MIND), a novel framework that explicitly models manifold geometry by integrating discrete patch tokenization into the score function of a continuous diffusion model. This approach successfully leverages both the structural quantification capabilities of discrete tokens and the parallel generation flexibility of continuous diffusion. Moreover, we enable end-to-end differentiable training via a novel soft top-$k$ aggregation mechanism and introduce dual-branch high-frequency feature embedding layers to alleviate the spectral bias of transformer backbones on low-dimensional inputs. Furthermore, for inference, we design a multi-stage transition sampling scheme that dynamically adjusts the sampling scheme based on timestep. Extensive experiments on ImageNet 256$\times$256 demonstrate the effectiveness of MIND. After 80-epoch training, our base model achieves an FID of 22.73 without guidance, nearly halving the 43.47 FID of the vanilla DiT-B/2 baseline. The proposed method reduces FID by 15.95 and 9.06 on average compared with the baselines DiT and SiT, respectively. For image generation on ImageNet-256$\times$256 with guidance, the proposed MIND-B with only 130M parameters achieves an FID of 2.06, superpassing the LlamaGen-3B with 3.1B parameters. The proposed MIND-XL with 715M parameters further reduces the FID to 1.95. Our MIND introduces a fresh perspective on diffusion-based image generation, paving the way for future research and innovation in this community. The code will be publicly available.

arXiv:2606.00133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models, internal simulators that learn the structure and dynamics of an environment, have emerged as a central paradigm in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence, enabling agents to predict, plan, and reason within learned representations. Despite rapid progress across reinforcement learning, robotics, autonomous driving, and video generation, the field lacks a unified framework integrating its diverse architectural choices, training methods, reasoning mechanisms, and application settings. This survey addresses that gap with a multi-axis taxonomy organized along four dimensions: (i) architecture, encompassing representation format, dynamics formulation, input modality, learning paradigm, and downstream application; (ii) methodological family, including state-space and recurrent approaches, transformer-based models, diffusion-based generators, physics-informed networks, and language-augmented multimodal systems; (iii) reasoning strategy, covering imagination-based planning, latent policy learning, counterfactual reasoning, and planning under uncertainty; and (iv) application domain, spanning robotics, autonomous driving, video prediction, multimodal agents, reinforcement learning, scientific modeling, medical imaging, educational measurement, and business and finance. Tracing the field from early cognitive-science foundations to milestone systems such as PlaNet, the Dreamer family, MuZero, Sora, Cosmos, and Genie, we examine how these dimensions interact and highlight the recent convergence of chain-of-thought reasoning with world-model imagination. We review evaluation protocols and benchmarks, identify persistent challenges such as compounding prediction errors, sim-to-real transfer, and fragmented evaluation, and outline future directions toward unified multimodal world models, foundation-scale interactive simulators, and safe deployment in safety-critical domains.

arXiv:2606.00130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Automatically Differentiable Nonlinear Tensor Networks (ADNTNs), a family of structured weight generators whose compact core tensors are trained end-to-end by reverse-mode automatic differentiation (AD). The approach can be viewed as a natural extension of low-rank adaptation and tensor factorisation: instead of using one low-rank matrix update, an ADNTN builds a large weight tensor through a hierarchy of small cores, nonlinear activations, and optional lateral mixing tensors. The paper focuses on three architectures: Tree Tensor Networks (TTNs), augmented TTNs (aTTNs) with boundary disentanglers, and Multi-scale Entanglement Renormalisation Ansatze (MERA). The formulation supports nonlinear activations, task-aware objectives, batching, and hardware-aware execution schedules. At the same time, the paper keeps a clear distinction between \emph{differentiating} a contraction program and making contraction free: AD does not remove the cost of large intermediates, poor contraction orders, or exact contraction of general loopy tensor networks. Extensive simulations on AlexNet and VGG-16 layers show per-layer compression ratios from roughly $2000\times$ to $77000\times$ in the studied settings, with accuracy often matching the dense baseline and, in several VGG-16 cases, improving it. These results are encouraging rather than final: they suggest that ADNTNs are a promising, mathematically structured, and hardware-aware route toward much smaller neural networks, provided that optimisation, contraction schedules, and deployment kernels are designed together.

<p><strong>Release:</strong> <a href="https://github.com/simonw/micropython-wasm/releases/tag/0.1a0">micropython-wasm 0.1a0</a></p> <p>My latest sandboxing experiment: This alpha package bundles a lightly customized WASM build of <a href="https://micropython.org/">MicroPython</a> with a wrapper to execute code in it via <a href="https://wasmtime.dev/">wasmtime</a>.</p> <p>Tags: <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/python">python</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/sandboxing">sandboxing</a>, <a href="https://simonwillison.net/tags/webassembly">webassembly</a></p>

Simon Lock / TBIJ: Wise confirms it is under investigation by Belgian prosecutors over suspicions its accounts were used for money laundering involving €500M in transactions  —  Help change the world by becoming a Bureau Insider  —  Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

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Zijing Wu / Financial Times: Sources: Tencent, which has fallen behind domestic rivals in AI models, plans to test an AI agent for WeChat with a small group of users before a phased rollout  —  Maker of WeChat has fallen behind domestic rivals in artificial intelligence models  —  Tencent is moving closer to launching …

In December, we shared our vision for completing the lakehouse: open storage, open...

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As AI agents move from the digital world to the physical environment, they can readily use NVIDIA Jetson to accelerate real-world deployment with optimized... As AI agents move from the digital world to the physical environment, they can readily use NVIDIA Jetson to accelerate real-world deployment with optimized memory and performance. NVIDIA JetPack 7.2 directly supports one-command deployment of NVIDIA NemoClaw, an open source stack that adds privacy and security controls to OpenClaw. It introduces NVIDIA agent skills for Jetson—Jetson device… Source

The Next Era of Knowledge Work report explores how Codex is transforming productivity through AI-powered research, data analysis, workflow automation, and content creation.

Kyle Orland / Ars Technica: GitHub Copilot's new pricing model went into effect today, and many noted sticker shock with some saying a few hours of AI usage ate big chunks of monthly caps  —  In April, GitHub announced that it was moving subscribers from request-based billing to a usage-based model for its AI-powered Copilot service.

Maximilian Schreiner / The Decoder: Nvidia launches Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550B-parameter MoE open model; Artificial Analysis: it's the smartest open US model but trails the Chinese model Kimi K2.6  —  It has roughly 550 billion total parameters, with about 55 billion active at any given time.  On the Artificial Analysis …