Normal view
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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MELT: Improve Composed Image Retrieval via the Modification Frequentation-Rarity Balance Network
arXiv:2603.29291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Composed Image Retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a modification text as a query to retrieve a target image satisfying the requirement of ``modifying the reference image according to the text instructions''. However, existing CIR methods face two limitations: (1) frequency bias leading to ``Rare Sample Neglect'', and (2) susceptibility of similarity scores to interference from hard negative samples and noise. To address these limitations
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Self-Improving Code Generation via Semantic Entropy and Behavioral Consensus
arXiv:2603.29292v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Improving the code generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) typically relies on supervised fine-tuning or preference optimization, both of which require costly external resources such as powerful teacher models or reliable test units. However, in real-world scenarios, it is much harder to obtain reference solutions and test oracles than problem descriptions and test inputs. In this paper, we tackle a challenging yet realistic ques
Self-Improving Code Generation via Semantic Entropy and Behavioral Consensus
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Delta1 with LLM: symbolic and neural integration for credible and explainable reasoning
arXiv:2603.12953v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neuro-symbolic reasoning increasingly demands frameworks that unite the formal rigor of logic with the interpretability of large language models (LLMs). We introduce an end to end explainability by construction pipeline integrating the Automated Theorem Generator Delta1 based on the full triangular standard contradiction (FTSC) with LLMs. Delta1 deterministically constructs minimal unsatisfiable clause sets and complete theorems in polynomial ti
Delta1 with LLM: symbolic and neural integration for credible and explainable reasoning
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Weakly Supervised Teacher-Student Framework with Progressive Pseudo-mask Refinement for Gland Segmentation
arXiv:2603.08605v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Background and objectives: Colorectal cancer histopathological grading depends on accurate segmentation of glandular structures. Current deep learning approaches rely on large scale pixel level annotations that are labor intensive and difficult to obtain in routine clinical practice. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation offers a promising alternative. However, class activation map based methods often produce incomplete pseudo masks th
Weakly Supervised Teacher-Student Framework with Progressive Pseudo-mask Refinement for Gland Segmentation
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MIT Technology Review
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Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze
Feng Qingyang had always hoped to launch his own company, but he never thought this would be how—or that the day would come this fast. Feng, a 27-year-old software engineer based in Beijing, started tinkering with OpenClaw, a popular new open-source AI tool that can take over a device and autonomously complete tasks for a user, in January. He was immediately hooked, and before long he was helping other curious tech workers with less technical proficiency install the AI agent. Feng soon re
Hustlers are cashing in on China’s OpenClaw AI craze
Feng Qingyang had always hoped to launch his own company, but he never thought this would be how—or that the day would come this fast.
Feng, a 27-year-old software engineer based in Beijing, started tinkering with OpenClaw, a popular new open-source AI tool that can take over a device and autonomously complete tasks for a user, in January. He was immediately hooked, and before long he was helping other curious tech workers with less technical proficiency install the AI agent.
Feng soon realized this could be a lucrative opportunity. By the end of January, he had set up a page on Xianyu, a secondhand shopping site, advertising “OpenClaw installation support.” “No need to know coding or complex terms. Fully remote,” reads the posting. “Anyone can quickly own an AI assistant, available within 30 minutes.”
At the same time, the broader Chinese public was beginning to catch on—and the tool, which had begun as a niche interest among tech workers, started to evolve into a popular sensation.
Feng quickly became inundated with requests, and he started chatting with customers and managing orders late into the night. At the end of February, he quit his job. His side gig has now grown into a full-fledged professional operation with over 100 employees. So far, the store has handled 7,000 orders, each worth about 248 RMB or approximately $34.
“Opportunities are always fleeting,” says Feng. “As programmers, we are the first to feel the winds shift.”
Feng is among a small cohort of savvy early adopters turning China’s OpenClaw craze into cash. As users with little technical background want in, a cottage industry of people offering installation services and preconfigured hardware has sprung up to meet them. The sudden rise of these tinkerers and impromptu consultants shows just how eager the general public in China is to adopt cutting-edge AI—even when there are huge security risks.
A “lobster craze”
“Have you raised a lobster yet?”
Xie Manrui, a 36-year-old software engineer in Shenzhen, says he has heard this question nonstop over the past month. “Lobster” is the nickname Chinese users have given to OpenClaw—a reference to its logo.
Xie, like Feng, has been experimenting with OpenClaw since January. He’s built new open-source tools on top of the ecosystem, including one that visualizes the agent’s progress as an animated little desktop worker and another that lets users voice-chat with it.
“I’ve met so many new people through ‘lobster raising,’” says Xie. “Many are lawyers or doctors, with little technical background, but all dedicated to learning new things.”
Lobsters are indeed popping up everywhere in China right now—on and offline. In February, for instance, the entrepreneur and tech influencer Fu Sheng hosted a livestream showing off OpenClaw’s capabilities that got 20,000 views. And just last weekend, Xie attended three different OpenClaw events in Shenzhen, each drawing more than 500 people. These self-organized, unofficial gatherings feature power users, influencers, and sometimes venture capitalists as speakers. The biggest event Xie attended, on March 7, drew more than 1,000 people; in the packed venue, he says, people were shoulder to shoulder, with many attendees unable to even get a seat.
Now China’s AI giants are starting to piggyback on the trend too, promoting their models, APIs, and cloud services (which can be used with OpenClaw), as well as their own OpenClaw-like agents. Earlier this month, Tencent held a public event offering free installation support for OpenClaw, drawing long lines of people waiting for help, including elderly users and children.
This sudden burst in popularity has even prompted local governments to get involved. Earlier this month the government of Longgang, a district in Shenzhen, released several policies to support OpenClaw-related ventures, including free computing credits and cash rewards for standout projects. Other cities, including Wuxi, have begun rolling out similar measures.
These policies only catalyze what’s already in the air. “It was not until my father, who is 77, asked me to help install a ‘lobster’ for him that I realized this thing is truly viral,” says Henry Li, a software engineer based in Beijing.
A programmer gold rush
What’s making this moment particularly lucrative for people with technical skills, like Feng, is that so many people want OpenClaw, but not nearly as many have the capabilities to access it. Setting it up requires a level of technical knowledge most people do not possess, from typing commands into a black terminal window to navigating unfamiliar developer platforms. On the hardware side, an older or budget laptop may struggle to run it smoothly. And if the tool is not installed on a device separate from someone’s everyday computer, or if the data accessible to OpenClaw is not properly partitioned, the user’s privacy could be at risk—opening the door to data leaks and even malicious attacks.
Chris Zhao, known as “Qi Shifu” online, organizes OpenClaw social media groups and events in Beijing. On apps like Rednote and Jike, Zhao routinely shares his thoughts on AI, and he asks other interested users to leave their WeChat ID so he can invite them to a semi-private group chat. The proof required to join is a screenshot that shows your “lobster” up and running. Zhao says that even in group chats for experienced users, hardware and cloud setup remain a constant topic of discussion.
The relatively high bar for setting up OpenClaw has generated a sense of exclusivity, creating a natural opening for a service industry to start unfolding around it. On Chinese e-commerce platforms like Taobao and JD, a simple search for “OpenClaw” now returns hundreds of listings, most of them installation guides and technical support packages aimed at nontechnical users, priced anywhere from 100 to 700 RMB (approximately $15 to $100). At the higher end, many vendors offer to come to help you in person.
Like Feng, most providers of these services are early adopters with some technical ability who are looking for a side gig. But as demand has surged, some have found themselves overwhelmed. Xie, the developer in Shenzhen who created tools to layer on OpenClaw, was asked by a friend who runs one such business to help out over the weekend; the friend had a customer who worked in e-commerce and had little technical experience, so Xie had to show up in person to get it done. He walked away with 600 RMB ($87) for the afternoon.
The growing demand has also pushed vendors like Feng to expand quickly. He has now standardized his operation into tiers: a basic installation, a custom package where users can make specific requests like configuring a preferred chat app, and an ongoing tutoring service for those who want a hand to hold as they find their footing with the technology.
Other vendors in China are making money combining OpenClaw with hardware. Li Gong, a Shenzhen-based seller of refurbished Mac computers, was among the first online sellers to do this—offering Mac minis and MacBooks with OpenClaw preinstalled. Because OpenClaw is designed to operate with deep access to a hard drive and can run continuously in the background unattended, many users prefer to install it on a separate device rather than on the one they use every day. This would help prevent bad actors from infiltrating the program and immediately gaining access to a wide swathe of someone’s personal information. Many turn to secondhand or refurbished options to keep the cost down. Li says that in the last two weeks, orders have increased eightfold.
Though OpenClaw itself is a new technology, the general practice of buying software bundles, downloading third-party packages, and seeking out modified devices is nothing new for many Chinese internet users, says Tianyu Fang, a PhD candidate studying the history of technology at Harvard University. Many users pay for one-off IT support services for tasks from installing Adobe software to jailbreaking a Kindle.
Still, not everyone is getting swept up. Jiang Yunhui, a tech worker based in Ningbo, worries that ordinary users who struggle with setup may not be the right audience for a technology that is still effectively in testing.
“The hype in first-tier cities can be a little overblown,” he says. “The agent is still a proof of concept, and I doubt it would be of any life-changing use to the average person for now.” He argues that using it safely and getting anything meaningful out of it requires a level of technical fluency and independent judgment that most new users simply don’t have yet.
He’s not alone in his concerns. On March 10, the Chinese cybersecurity regulator CNCERT issued a warning about the security and data risks tied to OpenClaw, saying it heightens users’ exposure to data breaches.
Despite the potential pitfalls, though, China’s enthusiasm for OpenClaw doesn’t seem to be slowing.
Feng, now flush with the earnings from his operation, wants to use the momentum—and the capital—to keep building out his own venture with AI tools at the center of it.
“With OpenClaw and other AI agents, I want to see if I can run a one-person company,” he says. “I’m giving myself one year.”
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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AtomicVLA: Unlocking the Potential of Atomic Skill Learning in Robots
arXiv:2603.07648v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Visual-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promising potential for robotic manipulation tasks. However, real-world robotic tasks often involve long-horizon, multi-step problem-solving and require generalization for continual skill acquisition, extending beyond single actions or skills. These challenges present significant barriers for existing VLA models, which use monolithic action decoders trained on aggregated data, res
AtomicVLA: Unlocking the Potential of Atomic Skill Learning in Robots
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Weakly Supervised Teacher-Student Framework with Progressive Pseudo-mask Refinement for Gland Segmentation
arXiv:2603.08605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Background and objectives: Colorectal cancer histopathological grading depends on accurate segmentation of glandular structures. Current deep learning approaches rely on large scale pixel level annotations that are labor intensive and difficult to obtain in routine clinical practice. Weakly supervised semantic segmentation offers a promising alternative. However, class activation map based methods often produce incomplete pseudo masks that empha
Weakly Supervised Teacher-Student Framework with Progressive Pseudo-mask Refinement for Gland Segmentation
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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OTESGN: Optimal Transport-Enhanced Syntactic-Semantic Graph Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
arXiv:2509.08612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to identify aspect terms and determine their sentiment polarity. While dependency trees combined with contextual semantics provide structural cues, existing approaches often rely on dot-product similarity and fixed graphs, which limit their ability to capture nonlinear associations and adapt to noisy contexts. To address these limitations, we propose the Optimal Transport-Enhanced Syntactic-Sem
OTESGN: Optimal Transport-Enhanced Syntactic-Semantic Graph Networks for Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendation
arXiv:2603.03761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM agents are rapidly becoming the practical interface for task automation, yet the ecosystem lacks a principled way to choose among an exploding space of deployable configurations. Existing LLM leaderboards and tool/agent benchmarks evaluate components in isolation and remain fragmented across tasks, metrics, and candidate pools, leaving a critical research gap: there is little query-conditioned supervision for learning to recommend end-to-end a
AgentSelect: Benchmark for Narrative Query-to-Agent Recommendation
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Farther the Shift, Sparser the Representation: Analyzing OOD Mechanisms in LLMs
arXiv:2603.03415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate how Large Language Models (LLMs) adapt their internal representations when encountering inputs of increasing difficulty, quantified as the degree of out-of-distribution (OOD) shift. We reveal a consistent and quantifiable phenomenon: as task difficulty increases, whether through harder reasoning questions, longer contexts, or adding answer choices, the last hidden states of LLMs become substantially sparser. In short
Farther the Shift, Sparser the Representation: Analyzing OOD Mechanisms in LLMs
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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DisenReason: Behavior Disentanglement and Latent Reasoning for Shared-Account Sequential Recommendation
arXiv:2603.03782v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Shared-account usage is common on streaming and e-commerce platforms, where multiple users share one account. Existing shared-account sequential recommendation (SSR) methods often assume a fixed number of latent users per account, limiting their ability to adapt to diverse sharing patterns and reducing recommendation accuracy. Recent latent reasoning technique applied in sequential recommendation (SR) generate intermediate embeddings from the us
DisenReason: Behavior Disentanglement and Latent Reasoning for Shared-Account Sequential Recommendation
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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ShareVerse: Multi-Agent Consistent Video Generation for Shared World Modeling
arXiv:2603.02697v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents ShareVerse, a video generation framework enabling multi-agent shared world modeling, addressing the gap in existing works that lack support for unified shared world construction with multi-agent interaction. ShareVerse leverages the generation capability of large video models and integrates three key innovations: 1) A dataset for large-scale multi-agent interactive world modeling is built on the CARLA simulation platform, fea
ShareVerse: Multi-Agent Consistent Video Generation for Shared World Modeling
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Benefits and Pitfalls of Reinforcement Learning for Language Model Planning: A Theoretical Perspective
arXiv:2509.22613v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits and limitations through a tractable graph-based abstraction, focusing on policy gradient (PG) and Q-learning methods. Our theoretical analyses reveal that supervised fine-tuning (SFT) may introduce co-occurr
Benefits and Pitfalls of Reinforcement Learning for Language Model Planning: A Theoretical Perspective
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Learning of Population Dynamics: Inverse Optimization Meets JKO Scheme
arXiv:2506.01502v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning population dynamics involves recovering the underlying process that governs particle evolution, given evolutionary snapshots of samples at discrete time points. Recent methods frame this as an energy minimization problem in probability space and leverage the celebrated JKO scheme for efficient time discretization. In this work, we introduce $\texttt{iJKOnet}$, an approach that combines the JKO framework with inverse optimization
Learning of Population Dynamics: Inverse Optimization Meets JKO Scheme
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Learning to Remember: End-to-End Training of Memory Agents for Long-Context Reasoning
arXiv:2602.18493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Long-context LLMs and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems process information passively, deferring state tracking, contradiction resolution, and evidence aggregation to query time, which becomes brittle under ultra long streams with frequent updates. We propose the Unified Memory Agent (UMA), an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework that unifies memory operations and question answering within a single policy. UMA maintains a dual
Learning to Remember: End-to-End Training of Memory Agents for Long-Context Reasoning
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Learning from Complexity: Exploring Dynamic Sample Pruning of Spatio-Temporal Training
arXiv:2602.19113v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spatio-temporal forecasting is fundamental to intelligent systems in transportation, climate science, and urban planning. However, training deep learning models on the massive, often redundant, datasets from these domains presents a significant computational bottleneck. Existing solutions typically focus on optimizing model architectures or optimizers, while overlooking the inherent inefficiency of the training data itself. This conventional app
Learning from Complexity: Exploring Dynamic Sample Pruning of Spatio-Temporal Training
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Test-Time Learning of Causal Structure from Interventional Data
arXiv:2602.19131v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Supervised causal learning has shown promise in causal discovery, yet it often struggles with generalization across diverse interventional settings, particularly when intervention targets are unknown. To address this, we propose TICL (Test-time Interventional Causal Learning), a novel method that synergizes Test-Time Training with Joint Causal Inference. Specifically, we design a self-augmentation strategy to generate instance-specific training
Test-Time Learning of Causal Structure from Interventional Data
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Agentic AI for Scalable and Robust Optical Systems Control
arXiv:2602.20144v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present AgentOptics, an agentic AI framework for high-fidelity, autonomous optical system control built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP). AgentOptics interprets natural language tasks and executes protocol-compliant actions on heterogeneous optical devices through a structured tool abstraction layer. We implement 64 standardized MCP tools across 8 representative optical devices and construct a 410-task benchmark to evaluate request underst
Agentic AI for Scalable and Robust Optical Systems Control
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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GenesisGeo: Technical Report
arXiv:2509.21896v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent neuro-symbolic geometry theorem provers have made significant progress on Euclidean problems by coupling neural guidance with symbolic verification. However, most existing systems operate almost exclusively in a symbolic space, leaving diagram-based intuition largely unused during reasoning. For humans, geometric diagrams provide essential heuristics for identifying non-trivial auxiliary constructions. Meanwhile, visual language models
GenesisGeo: Technical Report
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cs.AI, q-bio.NC updates on arXiv.org
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Interpreting Emergent Extreme Events in Multi-Agent Systems
arXiv:2601.20538v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model-powered multi-agent systems have emerged as powerful tools for simulating complex human-like systems. The interactions within these systems often lead to extreme events whose origins remain obscured by the black box of emergence. Interpreting these events is critical for system safety. This paper proposes the first framework for explaining emergent extreme events in multi-agent systems, aiming to answer three fundame