Week of August 10, 2026
2026-W33
Week 2026-W33: 20 curated papers with 20 free plain-English explainers.
Intern-S2-Preview: Scientific Agentic Foundation Model
Scientific discovery increasingly requires AI systems that can reason over scientific evidence of heterogeneous modalities, interact with scientific tools and…
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OmniScientist: An Omni-Modal Omni-Discipline AI Scientist
Recent advances in foundation models have enabled AI scientists to automate increasingly complete research workflows, from hypothesis generation and code execu…
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Clifford Circuit Synthesis for Distributed Quantum Architectures with Arbitrary Network Topology
To achieve large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computation, it may be easier to combine many small sets of qubits than to construct a single large set. For exam…
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First-Principles Investigation of 2D Copper Boride as a High-Performance Anode for Lithium-Ion Batteries
In this study, we investigate the two-dimensional copper boride, Cu$_8$B$_{14}$, as a possible anode material for lithium-ion batteries using first-principles…
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Scalable production of nuclear battery alpha emitters using fusion neutrons
Nuclear batteries powered by alpha decay have been deployed successfully for over 60 years, on a worldwide $^{238}$Pu supply of kilograms per year. We show tha…
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TraVEL: Trajectory-Guided Video Embedding Learning for Driving-Video Retrieval
Efficiently retrieving relevant clips from large-scale driving logs is essential for data curation, model development, and safety analysis. Structured and rule…
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Exponential quantum advantage for learning signals with a single qubit
Quantum technology has the potential to transform scientific discovery, but quantum advantages often require processing capabilities well beyond the reach of e…
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AutoDesign: Meta-Harness Optimization for Long-Horizon Agentic Design
Transforming multimodal sources into condensed and structured media outputs can be fundamentally conceptualized as a long-horizon agentic process centered on a…
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DFM Mimir v1: An Open HRM Delivering Frontier Performance at 1B Parameters Using Only Permissible Post-Training Data
Current large language model development relies on massive, often non-permissible datasets, creating a high barrier for researchers committed to open-source an…
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Mid-circuit ground-state cooling and ancilla readout in the $\textit{omg}$ architecture
The trapped-ion optical-metastable-ground ($\textit{omg}$) architecture for quantum processors promises the full functionality of two-species experiments, incl…
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Insight into SRF cavity performance from simulations of Nb's surface oxide dissolution and diffusion
We report simulations of the dissolution and diffusion of Nb's surface oxide layer in vacuum. While this chemical doping process is important for the surface p…
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Decoding Task Progress from VLA Representations
Vision-language-action models (VLAs) are moving rapidly towards deployment as general-purpose manipulation policies, but we currently lack basic tools for unde…
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ContactGuard: Pre-Contact Execution Monitoring with Action-Conditioned Latent World Models
Contact-rich manipulation failures are often detected only after the robot has committed to contact. This is especially limiting in wrist-camera setups: close…
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Deliberate Practice: Learning Robot Skills under a Budget
We consider the problem of autonomously learning robot skills under a limited practice budget for sequential tasks. We propose an active skill learning algorit…
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Vero: Can AI Agents Build Formally Verified Software Repositories?
AI agents are increasingly used for programming, but do not provide any guarantee on the correctness of generated code. Verified code generation, in which an a…
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TabSOM: A tabular-to-image encoding method based on self-organizing maps
Tabular-to-image methods have emerged as novel approaches to leverage the high predictive performance of convolutional neural networks and vision transformers.…
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GS$^{2}$CI: Robust Gaussian Splatting For Snapshot Compressive Imaging via Large Vision Model Priors
Snapshot Compressive Imaging (SCI) offers an efficient solution for high-speed video acquisition and, under exposure-time camera--scene relative motion, multi-…
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DreamX-Phi 1.0: Action-Conditioned Video World Model for Robotic Manipulation
We present \textbf{DreamX-Phi 1.0}, an action-conditioned video world model for robotic manipulation that, given an observed frame, a language instruction, and…
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Origin of effective non-Fourier heat conduction phenomena in heterogeneous materials
Phenomenological models of non-Fourier heat conduction often lack a strict microstructural foundation, leading to ambiguities when modeling complex heterogeneo…
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Giant exciton effects and magneto-excitonic coupling in V4S9X4 2D magnetic semiconductors
Room-temperature spin-optoelectronic devices require a combination of robust ferromagnetism and giant exciton binding, a pairing mutually exclusive in conventi…
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