Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:48d8b1b220fcf5cfee28c9967b1ce872

Sex-Specific Hemostatic Responses and Diagnostic Potential of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-Dimer in Mild COVID-19, Malaria, and Co-Infection in a Tropical Setting: A Case-Control Study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Authors:

Ekprikpo↗E. S↗Jeremiah↗Z. A↗Ken-Ezihuo↗S. U↗

Background: In malaria-endemic tropical regions, the overlapping coagulopathy in COVID-19 and malaria poses diagnostic and prognostic challenges, particularly with potential sex differences. This study evaluated sex-specific variations in platelet indices and fibrinolytic markers and assessed the utility of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-dimer in mild/asymptomatic cases. Methods: A case-control study was conducted with 220 participants (55 each in healthy controls, malaria-positive, COVID-19-positive, and COVID-19+malaria co-infected groups), aged 20-65 years, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Platelet indices were analysed using Sysmex XP-300 haematology analyser, while D-dimer and fibrinogen were measured by ELISA. Data were analysed using SAS 9.4 with ANOVA, Tukey's HSD, Pearson correlation, and sex-stratified comparisons. Results: PDW was significantly elevated in all infected groups compared to controls (malaria: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; COVID-19: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; co-infection: 15.61 +/- 0.21 fL vs. control: 13.26 +/- 0.17 fL; F=25.850, p < 0.001). D-dimer levels were highest in the co-infected group (553.42 +/- 59.74 ng/ml, F=2.816, p = 0.040). No significant changes were observed in other platelet indices or fibrinogen across groups. No significant correlation existed between platelet indices and the fibrinolytic markers. Males exhibited significantly higher D-dimer levels across all infected groups (p < 0.05) and higher fibrinogen in COVID-19 subjects (p = 0.036). Sex exerted a stronger influence on parameters than age. Conclusion: Males show heightened fibrinolytic activation in COVID-19 and malaria co-infection. PDW and D-dimer are promising, cost-effective biomarkers for screening mild infections in resource-limited tropical settings.

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02.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14239

SkillAudit: Ground-Truth-Free Skill Evolution via Paired Trajectory Auditing

Authors:

Haowen Gao↗Haoran Chen↗Can Wang↗Shasha Guo↗Liang Pang↗Zhaoyang Liu↗Huawei Shen↗Xueqi Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.14239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are structured procedural packages that guide frozen LLM agents in specialized workflows. Skills rarely remain sufficient after deployment: edge cases, API changes, and deployment constraints become visible only through use, making skill evolution a practical necessity. Existing methods depend on privileged feedback such as held-out validation scores, hidden test outcomes, or environment rewards – signals often unavailable when a practitioner has only a task description and workspace data. We introduce SkillAudit, a framework for evolving agent skills without ground-truth feedback. The key idea is paired trajectory auditing: at each iteration, the same task is executed with and without the candidate skill, isolating how the skill changes agent behavior without external labels. To turn behavioral differences into edit guidance, SkillAudit uses Process-Aligned Contrastive Evaluation (PACE), a cluster of evaluators that maps trajectory divergences to diagnostic signals linked to specific passages in the skill document. A structural verifier, compiled once from the task specification and then fixed, checks task constraints and rolls back harmful updates. SkillAudit routes edits through two pipelines: Refine removes noisy or irrelevant guidance from broadly useful skills, while Repair replaces passages that conflict with the task. Across 89 containerized tasks spanning 8 professional domains, SkillAudit achieves 73.9% average task reward, outperforming an agent without skills (40.9%) and the static expert skill (56.7%). These gains are obtained without accessing hidden tests, reference solutions, or external scoring functions during evolution.

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03.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24 DOI: HASH:ef936a3f9a2ee1e58008bafe826acdb2

An atlas-scale generative model for unified representation learning of bulk RNA-seq data

Authors:

Pande↗Uyar↗Akalin↗

Public bulk RNA-seq repositories contain hundreds of thousands of samples, creating opportunities for large-scale representation learning, but integration across studies remains challenging because of heterogeneous annotations, experimental protocols, and technical variation. While pre-trained foundation models are now widely available for single-cell RNA-seq, comparable resources for bulk RNA-seq remain scarce, motivating a model that learns a unified, tissue-aware representation directly from bulk data. We trained a supervised variational autoencoder (VAE) on a compendium of 118,263 bulk RNA-seq samples that we assembled from TCGA, GTEx, and ARCHS4 and mapped to 42 tissue categories. The model classifies tissue of origin at 94.9% balanced accuracy (weighted F1 96.2%) and compresses 16,115 genes into a 121-dimensional latent space. Tissue identity is the primary organizing axis of the latent space, while source effects remain secondary. To assess the impact of data volume, we constructed training sets at three different scales (38K, 75K, and 118K samples). Our results demonstrated that reconstruction fidelity improved incrementally with each expansion of the dataset, but with diminishing returns. We validated the model on an independent cohort of 734 paediatric tumour samples from TARGET, achieving 84.6% agreement with the expected tissue of origin. The trained model and code are available at GitHub (https://github.com/BIMSBbioinfo/flexynesis_tissue_vae_manuscript) with an interactive web application.

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04.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:00e9390c6acfc58469a0d7038322c59e

Social networks and their association with quality of life among older adults in rural Burkina Faso

Authors:

Welgama↗Goodman-Palmer↗Harling↗G. P↗Agyapong-Badu↗Greig↗Inghels↗Witham↗Ouermi↗Coulibaly↗HIrschhorn↗L. R↗…

Objective: This study aimed to identify the types of social networks present among older adults in a rural, low-income country setting and describe their association with quality of life (QoL). Methods: A population-representative, cross-sectional survey was conducted in 60 villages around Nouna in Burkina Faso from July to August 2021. Data were collected from resident adults aged 40 years and older. Variables captured were sociodemographic status; social network characteristics (using the Practitioner Assessment of Network Typology (PANT)); quality of life (using the EuroHIS-8 tool); presence of non-communicable diseases, mental health conditions, and disability. Additionally, social networks were broadly categorised as aggregated integrated and aggregated less-integrated groups. Social network types and the groups were described separately, and a multivariable linear regression model was used to understand the association between social network types and QoL, adjusted for sociodemographic and morbidity factors. Results: Among the 2390 respondents, median age was 55 yrs (IQR: 47-64 yrs) and 55.8% were female. Locally Integrated (35.4%) or Family Dependent (30.3%) were the most common PANT social network types, followed by a mixed group (having characteristics of two or more social network types) (30.5%). Private Restricted (2.1%), Locally Self-Contained (1.2%), and Wider Community-Focussed (0.4%) types were uncommon. Adults with aggregated integrated network groups (36.1%) and aggregated less-integrated group (36.0%) were near equal, while others were non-aggregable. Although Wider Community-Focused type showed a significantly better QoL ({beta}= 8.69, 95%CI: 4.10 to 13.27), the association between social networks and QoL were subdued when controlled for morbidity factors, and hence no significant associations were observed between other types or the aggregated groups. Conclusion: Although having integrated social networks lead to a better QoL, morbidity has a greater effect on the QoL among older adults in Nouna and hence, investing more on improving the physical and mental health needs appears more beneficial.

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05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18436

Pointwise is Pointless? A Multimodal Ablation Study for Precipitation Nowcasting with Graph Neural Networks

Authors:

Oph\'elia Miralles↗M\'at\'e Mile↗Christoffer Artturi↗Thomas Nipen↗Ivar Seierstad↗

arXiv:2606.18436v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sparse point observations are increasingly available for precipitation nowcasting, but it is unclear how much they improve dense radar-field forecasts. We partially address this question with a multimodal graph neural network nowcasting system over the Nordic radar domain. The model predicts rain rate every five minutes up to two hours ahead and is trained with different combinations of radar history, MEPS numerical weather prediction, Netatmo surface observations, MSG satellite channels, stochastic noise, and CRPS-based ensemble losses. The study is designed as an ablation of operationally relevant information sources and training objectives. We compare radar-only, NWP-informed, station-informed, satellite-informed, noise-augmented, and CRPS-based configurations using complementary diagnostics on the radar grid, at station locations, for rain onset, and through oracle, displacement, and amplitude scores. The results show that each source improves a different part of the forecast problem. MEPS stabilises radar-only extrapolation, Netatmo observations improve local station and onset diagnostics, and satellite predictors reduce some station-level biases but may activate rain too early when used deterministically. CRPS-based configurations provide the most consistent radar-grid gains, while the combined satellite and CRPS setup gives the best overall oracle/DAS score. These results do not support the conclusion that point observations are uninformative for nowcasting, but they show that local observational skill and spatially coherent radar-field skill are distinct targets. The practical implication is that sparse observations can provide useful local constraints, but their benefit for radar-like fields depends on the training loss, uncertainty representation, and how observation support is encoded in the model.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16362

Input-Dependent Fisher Information for Local Sensitivity Analysis of Medical Image Classifiers

Authors:

Sourya Sengupta. Mark A. Anastasio↗

arXiv:2606.16362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks have achieved strong performance in medical image classification, but often work like black-box. Commonly used post-hoc interpretation methods often provide heuristic visualizations whose relationship to the classifier's predictive distribution is indirect. This work introduces a local sensitivity analysis framework based on the input-dependent Fisher Information Matrix (iFIM) of a trained classifier. The iFIM characterizes how the classifier's predictive distribution changes under infinitesimal perturbations of the input image. By using a Gram-matrix formulation, the nonzero eigenspectrum of the iFIM can be recovered without explicitly forming the full image-dimensional Fisher matrix. The leading iFIM eigenspace is then used to project an input image into a high local-sensitivity component and its orthogonal component. These components provide a model-intrinsic description of local predictive sensitivity, rather than a conventional pixel-wise attribution heatmap or a causal segmentation of task-relevant anatomy. The framework is evaluated on controlled and clinical medical image classification tasks using multiple classifier architectures. Perturbation-based experiments show that high-sensitivity iFIM components are more strongly coupled to changes in predictive confidence and classification performance than lower-sensitivity complementary components. The results support the iFIM framework as a principled tool for analyzing local decision sensitivity and for complementing existing attribution-based interpretability methods in medical imaging.

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07.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:09934c3d6b0d32a1f47cd32b933431d5

Excitation-Inhibition Balance in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: EEG Criticality Reflects Frontal Metabolites and a Potential Compensatory Mechanism

Authors:

Hasanaj↗Kallweit↗M. S↗Karsli↗Meisinger↗Boudriot↗Roell↗Melcher↗Vural↗Schulz↗Klimas↗Schmoelz↗…

Background The excitation-inhibition (E-I) balance is essential for normal brain functioning, while deviations from this balance have been implicated in several psychiatric disorders. However, the extent to which electroencephalography (EEG) and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) E-I markers are altered in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), how they converge across modalities, and how they relate to cognitive performance and clinical symptoms remain insufficiently characterized. Methods We recruited 111 healthy controls (HC) and 113 individuals with SSD. All participants underwent resting-state EEG and 1H-MRS. Metabolites were measured either in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; NSSD = 63, NHC = 58) or in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC; NSSD = 50, NHC = 53), from which gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate + glutamine (Glx), and the Glx/GABA ratio were extracted. Extracted EEG E-I markers included oscillatory activity, aperiodic activity, functional E-I, microstates, multiscale entropy, and neuronal avalanche criticality. Results MRS results showed no group differences in GABA, Glx, or the Glx/GABA ratio. In contrast, most EEG-derived E-I markers indicated increased cortical inhibition in SSD, including steeper aperiodic exponents, prolonged microstate durations, and greater prevalence of subcritical states. However, functional E-I showed a divergent pattern, suggesting balanced dynamics in SSD and relatively inhibition-weighted dynamics in HC. Across groups, higher ACC and lDLPFC GABA predicted a lower kappa index, whereas a higher lDLPFC Glx/GABA ratio was associated with a higher kappa index. In SSD, reduced avalanche criticality was associated with better cognition and less severe symptoms. Conclusion Several EEG-derived E-I proxies, but not MRS measures, indicate an increased cortical inhibition in SSD. Criticality indices best capture frontal neurochemical metabolites and improvements in clinical symptoms, potentially reflecting inhibitory compensation mechanisms in SSD.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17059

Towards Distributed Inference of LLMs on a P2P Network

Authors:

Shabari S Nair↗Krishanu Saini↗

arXiv:2606.17059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Prefix caching can reduce LLM inference latency by reusing KV caches across requests with shared prompts, but cluster-scale reuse is challenging because caches are partitioned across nodes. We propose a decentralized, prefix-cache-aware routing scheme for peer-to-peer LLM serving. Each node maintains a local radix tree of its own cached prefixes and asynchronously refreshed estimates of peer caches using periodic anti-entropy. Requests are routed to the node with the longest estimated prefix match, without centralized coordination or KV-cache transfer. Stale metadata only causes cache misses, not incorrect outputs, making weak consistency sufficient for correctness. Evaluation on simulated MMLU workloads show that decentralized routing improves latency under low communication delay and skewed prefix distributions, while high network latency and affinity-induced hotspots limit its benefits.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14759

Temporally Consistent and Controllable Video Generation of 2D Cine CMR via Latent Space Motion Modeling

Authors:

Yiheng Cao↗Gustavo Andrade-Miranda↗Jiatian Zhang↗Guillaume Sall\'e↗Xin Gao↗

Cine cardiac magnetic resonance is the gold standard for assessing cardiac function, but the scarcity of public datasets limits the development of advanced data-driven models. To address this limitation, we propose a generative method for synthesizing temporally coherent and anatomically consistent cardiac sequences. Our text-to-video framework decouples cardiac spatial structure from temporal motion. First, a fine-tuned diffusion model synthesizes an initial frame from a clinical text prompt, controlling anatomical features. Then, a latent flow model conditioned on a cardiac phase embedding generates the complete cardiac motion, ensuring spatial consistency and temporal control. Our model generates anatomically and pathologically diverse sequences with high temporal coherence and strong fidelity to input prompts, achieving a FID of 31.68 for image realism and a CLIP score of 31.04 for text-image alignment. These experimental results highlight its potential to produce high-fidelity, on-demand medical data, offering a scalable solution to data scarcity.

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10.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24360

Multipartite synchronization residuals in driven-dissipative spin networks

Authors:

Jatin Ghildiyal↗Shubhrangshu Dasgupta↗Asoka Biswas↗

arXiv:2606.24360v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a phase-space measure of quantum synchronization that quantifies relative phase localization for two-qubit and three-qubit systems. This measure is built from the first angular moments of phase distributions obtained from Husimi-Q quasiprobability functions. Using this framework, we formulate a new class of synchronization residuals, motivated by subadditivity-type hierarchies of information-theoretic measures. We investigate these residuals in a driven-dissipative quantum Rabi network in the dispersive adiabatic regime. We show that, for two qubits, collective synchronization remains bounded by single-qubit contributions yielding a non-negative bipartite residual. The three-qubit nonequilibrium steady state exhibits a negative tripartite residual, which indicates collective phase synchronization, which cannot be described by pairwise decomposition. The corresponding entropy-based residuals, however, remain non-negative in both cases. Our results therefore, underscore that phase-sensitive synchronization measures and entropic correlation measures probe distinct aspects of open-system dynamics.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20231

Thermodynamic Measure of Intelligence

Authors:

Ishanu Chattopadhyay↗

arXiv:2606.20231v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Can intelligence be measured? We propose that intelligence can be defined as the lawful amplification of rare but valid futures: a system increases the probability of outcomes that would be unlikely under passive dynamics but remain admissible under the constraints of the domain. We start with the premise that an intelligent system must model the world and its own place within it. Because the system is part of the world it models, this leads naturally to recursive self-simulation: the system represents futures in which its own actions are part of the trajectory. Our central results give a necessity statement and a conditional near-sufficiency statement connecting this architecture to a precise thermodynamic measure of lawful amplification of rare-valid futures: high rare-valid lift is impossible unless the internal simulation identifies rare-valid futures with high fidelity; conversely, when rare-valid fidelity is high and the simulation contains an effective policy, the achievable lift approaches the actuation-limited optimum. Thus recursive self-simulation is not merely a plausible feature of intelligence but, under the stated assumptions, is necessary and nearly sufficient for high thermodynamic intelligence. The resulting framework makes intelligence measurable on a universal scale, from passive matter and feedback controllers, large language models, and humans as text generators to Maxwell-demon-like information engines.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14816

A Security Analysis of Long-Horizon Agentic AI Systems: Threats, Evaluation, and Framework Development

Authors:

Ahmed Mohammed Almalki↗Mehedi Masud↗

arXiv:2606.14816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a structured analysis of security challenges in long-horizon agentic AI systems. The study reviews existing threats, evaluation approaches, attack propagation mechanisms, and security frameworks. A taxonomy of security threats and a framework for analyzing attack propagation are proposed to support future research in agentic AI security

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16062

Auditing Reward Hackability in Code RL Training Environments

Authors:

Shreshth Rajan↗

arXiv:2606.16062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13710

Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution Makes Better Deep Researcher

Authors:

Hongming Piao↗Chi Liu↗Mengzhuo Chen↗Yan Shu↗Derek Li↗Ying Wei↗Bryan Dai↗

arXiv:2606.13710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research and agent evolution serve as de-facto tasks for AI agents in real-world applications toward artificial general intelligence. The former enables autonomous retrieval and integration of information in open-ended environments to tackle open-ended research tasks, yet it is constrained by the static parametric deep research capabilities of agent systems. The latter allows agents to autonomously interact with the environment to gain experiences that evolve model capabilities. However, its effectiveness has been widely validated only on verifiable tasks with standard answers, leaving a gap with open-ended research tasks. To bridge these two critical tasks, we propose the Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution (HOTE) framework, which leverages hybrid-mode reinforcement learning to facilitate the collaborative evolution of a proposer, solver and judge based on web-scale knowledge, moving toward autonomous evolving agents in open-ended tasks and environments. Extensive experiments on three long-form deep research benchmarks demonstrate that the 8B model trained via HOTE surpasses the strongest static open 8-32B models as well as those trained by state-of-the-art deep research training methods with less time overhead, and further verify that the evolution of all three modules in HOTE is indispensable.

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15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2405.15379

Randomized Midpoint Method for Log-Concave Sampling under Constraints

Authors:

Yifeng Yu↗Shijie Zhang↗Lu Yu↗

arXiv:2405.15379v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we study the problem of sampling from log-concave distributions supported on convex and compact sets, with a particular focus on the randomized midpoint discretization of both overdamped and kinetic Langevin diffusions in constrained domains. We revisit the proximal framework for handling constraints through projection operators and develop a more general formulation that encompasses Euclidean, Bregman, and Gauge projections. The resulting smooth approximation allows a unified and tractable analysis of Langevin algorithms and their variants under constraints. Within this framework, we establish convergence guarantees in Wasserstein-$q$ $(q\geqslant 1)$ distances between the smooth surrogate and the target distribution. We further derive complementary lower bounds, showing that the results are near-optimal in order. Building upon this tight approximation analysis, we obtain new convergence guarantees for the randomized midpoint Langevin algorithms and refined bounds for both vanilla and kinetic Langevin Monte Carlo methods under constraints, thereby advancing the theoretical understanding of constrained diffusion-based sampling.

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16.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2506.03045

Measurement incompatibility and quantum steering via linear programming

Authors:

Lucas E. A. Porto↗S\'ebastien Designolle↗Sebastian Pokutta↗Marco T\'ulio Quintino↗

arXiv:2506.03045v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of deciding whether a set of quantum measurements is jointly measurable is known to be equivalent to determining whether a quantum assemblage is unsteerable. This problem can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP). However, the number of variables and constraints in such a formulation grows exponentially with the number of measurements, rendering it intractable for large measurement sets. In this work, we circumvent this problem by transforming the SDP into a hierarchy of linear programs that compute upper and lower bounds on the incompatibility robustness with a complexity that grows polynomially in the number of measurements. The hierarchy is guaranteed to converge and it can be applied to arbitrary measurements – including non-projective POVMs (Positive Operator-Valued Measures) – in arbitrary dimensions. While convergence becomes impractical in high dimensions, in the case of qubits our method reliably provides accurate upper and lower bounds for the incompatibility robustness of sets with several hundred measurements in a short time using a standard laptop. We also apply our methods to qutrits, obtaining non-trivial upper and lower bounds in scenarios that are otherwise intractable using the standard SDP approach, although such bounds are significantly looser than the ones obtained in the qubit case. Finally, we show how our methods can be used to construct local hidden state models for states (i.e., to prove that a state cannot lead to steering under any possible local measurements), or conversely, to certify that a given state exhibits steering; for two-qubit quantum states, our approach is comparable to, and in some cases outperforms, the current best methods.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24101

NavWM: A Unified Navigation World Model for Foresight-Driven Planning

Authors:

Yanghong Mei↗Longteng Guo↗Ming-Ming Yu↗Guiyu Zhao↗Xingjian He↗Jing Liu↗

Conventional visual navigation policies often struggle with myopic decision-making and mode collapse in complex environments. While world models offer a promising alternative, existing paradigms typically isolate perception, generation, and control, failing to capture their shared spatio-temporal dynamics. In this paper, we propose NavWM, a unified navigation world model that seamlessly integrates latent world reasoning, multimodal action prediction, and controllable visual generation. At its core, NavWM leverages latent world tokens to distill geometric and semantic priors, endowing the agent with robust structural understanding. To overcome the limitations of deterministic policies, we introduce an anchor-based multimodal trajectory forecasting framework that generates a diverse action space. This inherent diversity explicitly empowers the generative world model to act as a robust closed-loop planner, utilizing visual foresight to evaluate and select the optimal path. Extensive experiments across diverse robotics datasets demonstrate that NavWM significantly advances the state-of-the-art, delivering remarkable improvements in both high-fidelity future state generation and zero-shot navigation success.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16748

MyPCBench: A Benchmark for Personally Intelligent Computer-Use Agents

Authors:

Lawrence Keunho Jang↗Andrew Keunwoo Jang↗Jing Yu Koh↗Ruslan Salakhutdinov↗

Current benchmarks for computer-use agents evaluate models in impersonal environments. This leaves a gap between evaluation and deployment where personal assistants are expected to work across a user's whole digital life, including their context, historical data, and logged-in accounts. This gap is widest on web tasks, where live web evaluations cannot exercise sites that require logging in or personal information, the kind of site a real personal assistant has to drive. We introduce MyPCBench, which tests computer-use agents as personal assistants on a Linux desktop populated with 17 simulated real-world web applications and a full desktop stack, all seeded for one canonical persona, Michael Scott from The Office. We define 184 tasks in this environment, each inspired by a real request drawn from the OpenClaw community, and benchmark six closed and open-weight models with a uniform computer+bash tool surface. We find that the best model, Claude Opus 4.6, fully solves 55.4\% of the tasks, the only model above 50\%. Model failures cluster on tasks that span many applications and on long trajectories, where personalization stresses an assistant the most. We release the environment, task set, and agent harness at https://mypcbench.com.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16672

Sinkhorn-CPD: Robust point cloud registration via unbalanced entropic optimal transport

Authors:

Jin Zhang↗Mingyang Zhao↗Bing Liu↗Xin Jiang↗

Coherent Point Drift (CPD) is widely used for rigid point cloud registration because of its soft correspondences and closed-form parameter updates. However, CPD's target-side marginal constraint forces every observation, including outliers, to receive exactly unit probability mass. This assumption degrades registration accuracy under heavy outliers and partial overlap. Optimal transport (OT) methods can handle missing mass through unbalanced formulations, but require hand-tuned annealing schedules. In this paper, we propose Sinkhorn-CPD, which replaces CPD's target-side marginal constraint with dual Kullback-Leibler penalties, allowing the algorithm to discard outliers on both sides. The resulting formulation is a fully unbalanced entropic optimal transport problem, which can be efficiently solved by generalized Sinkhorn iterations. Moreover, Sinkhorn-CPD preserves the closed-form Procrustes and variance updates of CPD. In our method, the variance sigma^2 plays the role of the entropic regularization parameter, which induces an automatic annealing schedule from diffuse to sharp correspondences without manual temperature tuning. Experiments on synthetic, cross-category, and scan-to-CAD benchmarks show that Sinkhorn-CPD achieves state-of-the-art accuracy, with strong robustness to outliers and partial overlap.

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20.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24864

Universality beyond the Kibble-Zurek mechanism in the condensation of coherently coupled Bose gases

Authors:

Subhadeep Patra↗Paolo Comaron↗Arko Roy↗

arXiv:2606.24864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the universal spatial statistics of point-like topological defects formed during the nonequilibrium condensation of a coherently coupled Bose gas using the stochastic projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The symmetry-breaking transition is driven by a linear quench of the chemical potential, leading to stochastic vortex nucleation in the individual condensate components. When the two components are considered together, these elementary defects may combine across components to emerge as composite topological defects known as full quantum vortices. Beyond the mean defect density predicted by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM), we investigate the spatial organization of both the elementary and composite defects and show that their positions are well described by a Poisson point process, revealing a universal stochastic geometry. This universality is further described through Voronoi tessellation, whose cell-area statistics follow Poisson-Voronoi predictions. We also introduce the spatial form factor for characterizing the vortex configurations and demonstrate the emergence of a characteristic dip-ramp-plateau structure. Our results establish universal stochastic geometry of topological defects beyond conventional Kibble-Zurek scaling and identify it as a fundamental feature of nonequilibrium condensation in coherently coupled Bose gases.

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21.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:1314a73deb95b83732dbf2271ee99952

Tox21mer, A transformer foundation model for Tox21 high-throughput concentration-response curves data

Authors:

Li↗Hwang↗Shockley↗Motsinger-Reif↗Hsieh↗J.-H↗Auerbach↗S. S↗Reif↗

The U.S. Tox21 collaboration has generated a large reference library of high-throughput concentration-response assays. Here we present Tox21mer, a 43.5-million-parameter transformer that encodes each Tox21 concentration-response curve together with assay metadata into a 768-dimensional representation. Tox21mer was pretrained on ~2.5 million curves from 102 assay protocols and 6,727 compounds using masked-response reconstruction as the primary objective, with low-weight auxiliary supervision on assay outcome and AC50. To evaluate the learned representation, we trained lightweight probes on frozen embeddings from concentration-response curves of held-out compounds. The representation supported a macro-F1 of 0.985 for three-class outcome prediction (agonist, antagonist, inactive), a binary F1 of 0.994 for active/inactive prediction, and an R2 of 0.87 for log10(AC50). The learned embeddings formed coherent groupings by curve-class category. A masked-only pretraining variant retained near-baseline probe performance, indicating that the representation is learned largely from the self-supervised objective rather than from auxiliary labels. Ablation analyses further showed that predictive performance depends mainly on curve-level response-value distributions conditioned on assay context, with limited reliance on detailed within-curve ordering. Tox21mer thus provides a reusable foundation representation for Tox21 concentration-response data that can support extrapolation to untested compounds through integration with chemical features or distillation into chemistry-only student models for large-scale external screening.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2507.19137

Assessment of Personality Dimensions Across Situations in Dyadic Role-Play Scenarios

Authors:

Alice Zhang↗Skanda Muralidhar↗Daniel Gatica-Perez↗Mathew Magimai-Doss↗

arXiv:2507.19137v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prior research indicates that users prefer assistive technologies whose personalities align with their own. This has sparked interest in automatic personality perception (APP), which aims to predict an individual's perceived personality traits. Previous studies in APP have treated personalities as static traits, independent of context. However, perceived personalities can vary by context and situation as shown in psychological research. In this study, we investigate the relationship between conversational speech and perceived personality for participants engaged in two work situations (a neutral interview and a stressful client interaction). Our key findings are: 1) perceived personalities differ significantly across interactions, 2) loudness, sound level, and spectral flux features are indicative of perceived extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness in neutral interactions, while neuroticism correlates with these features in stressful contexts, 3) handcrafted acoustic features and non-verbal features outperform speaker embeddings in inference of perceived personality, and 4) stressful interactions are more predictive of neuroticism, aligning with existing psychological research.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24172

A P\={a}ninian Foundation for Indic Language Processing

Authors:

Ritwik Banerjee↗Lav R. Varshney↗

More than a billion people communicate in Indic languages, yet the natural language processing infrastructure serving them remains fragmented and underdeveloped. The cause is structural: the field organizes its tools and benchmarks around individual languages or small subsets of genealogical language families, building separate analyzers, parsers, and datasets for each language and starting over for the next. This overlooks a deep regularity. Through more than two millennia of convergence around Sanskrit, Indic languages came to share a morphosyntactic architecture formalized in P\={a}nini's grammar, the Ast\={a}dhy\={a}y\={i}. This cuts across genealogical lines, uniting languages through a common framework. We argue that this P\={a}ninian framework supplies a unifying computational architecture the field has lacked, and that benchmarks grounded explicitly in it would make Indic language systems more accurate, more data-efficient, and more transferable, effectively merging many apparently disparate and sparse Indic language resources into a single high-resource metalanguage bedrock. We propose a four-part benchmark suite to render this shared architecture explicit, measurable, and ready to be leveraged for practical applications. Moreover, we underscore the question it raises for interpretability research: whether neural models trained on these languages come to represent P\={a}nini's categories on their own.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16092

VinQA: Visual Elements Interleaved Long-form Answer Generation for Real-World Multimodal Document QA

Authors:

Young Rok Jang↗Hyesoo Kong↗Kyunghwan An↗Jae Sub Huh↗Gyeonghun Kim↗Stanley Jungkyu Choi↗

Real-world documents combine text with tables, charts, photographs, and diagrams arranged in diverse layouts, yet existing research on multimodal large language models (MLLMs) for document QA predominantly produces text-only responses, underutilizing these visual elements. We introduce VinQA, a dataset for long-form answer generation where cited visual elements are explicitly interleaved with their supporting text and grounded in relevant document pages. To support this task, we study two encoding methods for feeding raw document page images into an MLLM, along with their visual-element citation mechanisms: (1) Page Encoding, which directly encodes full-page images with bounding boxes of visual elements and treats these boxed regions as citable units; and (2) Modality Encoding, which parses each page to extract text and crop visual elements, encodes them separately, and uses these cropped elements as citable units. In our experiments, we propose M-GroSE, a multimodal evaluation framework extending GroUSE to assess answers along four dimensions: completeness, answer relevancy, faithfulness, and unanswerability. We additionally report Visual Source F1 to directly measure visual citation accuracy. Although proprietary frontier models still achieve the best overall scores on the VinQA test split, fine-tuning open Qwen2.5-VL models on the training split substantially improves their performance and narrows this gap. Modality Encoding is initially more robust for complex documents with long text, many visual elements, and diverse citation requirements. After training on VinQA, however, Page Encoding reaches a comparable level, competing effectively even without the explicit parsing used in Modality Encoding. Finally, Visual G-Eval, an MLLM-based judge, confirms that fine-tuned models insert visual elements at semantically appropriate positions with faithful supporting text.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16615

SUP-MCRL: Subject-aware Unified Pseudo-feature Coded Multimodal Contrastive Representation Learning for EEG Visual Decoding

Authors:

Shengyu Gong↗Weiming Zeng↗Yueyang Li↗Zijian Kang↗Hongjie Yan↗Wai Ting Siok↗Nizhuan Wang↗

Non-invasive brain-computer interfaces suffer severe fidelity degradation in neural visual decoding when generalizing to natural visual experiences. Conventional multimodal contrastive representation learning solely optimizes geometric distance alignment, neglecting semantic consistency and subject selectivity, causing spurious zero-shot alignment. We propose SUP-MCRL, a unified framework integrating three collaborative mechanisms: (1) Semantic-entity Aware Visual Encoder (SAVE), learning spatial attention to extract semantic content without pre-trained saliency models; (2 Unified EEG Enhancer (UEE), employing multi-scale atrous convolutions and inter-band attention for adaptive cross-subject robustness; and (3) Prototype-based Progressive Augmenter (PPA), maintaining an EMA-updated pseudo-feature pool to prevent representation collapse. Zero-shot experiments on THINGS-EEG achieve 66.0%/91.9% (Top-1/Top-5) intra-subject and 24.0%/52.9% LOSO accuracy, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Code is available at https://github.com/NZWANG/SUP-MCRL.

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