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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Multi-agent rendezvous in fluid flows via reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.11274v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rendezvous is a critical task for multi-agent systems, requiring agents to coordinate to meet at an unspecified location. However, achieving this in fluid environments presents a challenge, as it remains unclear how agents can exploit underlying fluid kinematics to facilitate convergence. In this study, we adopt a multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) approach to develop physics-informed rendezvous strategies in vortical flows. Compared to a naive strategy, where agents navigate toward their counterparts, MARL strategies significantly improve the rendezvous rate. MARL strategies also show transferability across varying vortex intensities, vortex scales, and swarm sizes. By breaking the symmetry of the state-action map, MARL strategy leverages a non-intuitive mechanism that prevents agents from becoming trapped in separate vortices, thereby enhancing rendezvous success. Additionally, a heuristic strategy is extracted from the learned strategy and also outperforms the naive strategy. Furthermore, a theoretical analysis demonstrates that fluid deformation impedes the rendezvous process. Large finite-time Lyapunov exponents identify where fluid effects separate adjacent agents, suggesting that targets should be planned in weak-deformation regions. Our findings reveal the important role that agent-fluid interactions play in multi-agent tasks and highlight the MARL capability to explore swarm intelligence in complex flow environments.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

arXiv:2606.19656v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

From 2D Yang-Mills to Calogero-Sutherland via a colored particle

arXiv:2606.13388v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Yang-Mills theory coupled to a particle on a cylinder, where gauge invariance and compactness reduce the dynamics to a finite dimensional quantum system. In the Abelian case, this yields a model equivalent to the Landau problem on a torus, with a degenerate ground state structure. We generalize this construction to non-Abelian gauge groups and show that, for SU(N), the system reduces to a one dimensional quantum many body problem with a singular Calogero-Sutherland-type interaction.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entropic order parameters and topological holography

arXiv:2512.24225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that the symmetry topological field theory (SymTFT) construction, also known as the topological holography, provides a natural and intuitive framework for the entropic order parameter characterising phases with (partially) broken symmetries. Various examples of group and non-invertible symmetries are studied. In particular, the origin of the distinguishability of the vacua resulting from spontaneously broken non-invertible symmetries is made manifest with an information-theoretic perspective, where certain operators in the SymTFT are excluded from observation.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Visual Quality Score Assessment of Large White Goods in Remanufacture with Multi-View Deformable-DETR

Remanufacturing large white goods is essential for a circular economy, yet visual quality assessment remains a manual bottleneck for training and pricing. Conventional detection methods require extensive annotation and struggle with small defects in high-resolution multi-view data. We present a multi-view framework based on Deformable-DETR for automated quality scoring that aggregates information across redundant views to extract fine-grained features. To enhance robustness with limited labels, we employ self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning on expert-annotated scores. Additionally, a linear projection over frozen feature maps identifies regions of interest to explain model decisions. Evaluated on an industrial multi-view dataset, our approach delivers precise quality assessments while reducing reliance on manual annotation and per-part customization, enabling scalable and transparent inspection for remanufacturing lines.

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

V2P-Manip: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Monocular Human Videos

Achieving autonomous robotic dexterous manipulation requires precise, human-like action sequences at scale. As a scalable supplement to costly teleoperation data, extracting trajectories with both visual fidelity and physical plausibility from monocular videos represents a promising frontier in embodied AI. To this end, we introduce V2P-Manip, an efficient framework designed to learn dexterous manipulation policies directly from human demonstration videos. We establish an efficient, integrated pipeline encompassing 3D asset acquisition, trajectory estimation, and dexterous policy learning. To bridge the gap between visual perception and physical constraints, we introduce a two-stage refinement process to enforce spatial alignment and physical consistency. Evaluations on the TACO and OakInk benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in pose accuracy, adaptability to unstructured environments, and training efficiency. Ultimately, experimental results confirm an average success rate of over 75% across multiple synthetic manipulation tasks and validate the adaptability of the extracted manipulation priors across diverse dexterous hand embodiments.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Multi-Grade Deep Learning for Partial Differential Equations with Applications to the Burgers Equation

arXiv:2309.07401v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) show great promise for solving partial differential equations (PDEs), but their deep architectures introduce complex, large-scale, non-convex optimization challenges. Nonlinear PDEs, like the viscous Burgers' equation, compound these difficulties due to steep gradients and shock-like solutions. To address this, we propose a two-stage multi-grade deep learning (TS-MGDL) method. In the first stage, shallow networks are trained progressively grade by grade to fit the target function from low- to high-frequency components; previously learned grades are frozen, and each new residual block is trained solely to minimize the remaining approximation error. The second stage unfreezes and retrains selected layers using the first-stage network as initialization, achieving an interpretable, stable hierarchical refinement while mitigating optimization complexity. Furthermore, we theoretically prove that each grade and stage in TS-MGDL monotonically reduces the loss function under an appropriate optimization strategy. Numerical experiments on 1D, 2D, and 3D viscous Burgers' equations demonstrate that TS-MGDL significantly outperforms single-grade learning (SGL), reducing predictive errors by up to a factor of 60.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LAUKIN: A Multi-jurisdictional Common Law Contract Dataset

Multinational companies increasingly require cross-jurisdictional contract review, yet existing legal NLP datasets are largely restricted to a single jurisdiction. We introduce LAUKIN (Legal equivalence dataset of Australia, UK, and INdia), a dataset of clause pairs (AU-UK, UK-IN, IN-AU) labelled for boolean legal equivalence. We develop a novel multi-stage retrieval and reranking pipeline to construct the initial clause pair mapping, with a subset of clause pairs subsequently annotated by legal experts as Equivalent or Not Equivalent. The dataset comprises 14,727 clause pairs from 204 contracts across 8 agreement types, of which 3,000 are manually labelled: 900 train, 600 dev, and 1,500 test. We evaluate 12 models across 4 techniques, achieving a best macro-F1 of 65.11%, establishing LAUKIN as a challenging benchmark. Results reveal that, despite shared legal heritage, drafting conventions diverge significantly across jurisdictions, making cross-jurisdictional equivalence classification non-trivial. LAUKIN also includes 11,727 unlabelled training pairs to support future semi-supervised learning research in legal NLP.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning: Self-Aware Policy Execution for VLA Models

arXiv:2606.14375v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models are powerful action generators for robot manipulation, but they are typically executed with fixed inference and replanning schedules. This rigidity ignores the uneven difficulty of robot control: contact-rich or uncertain states may need more computation and fresher feedback, while easier states can often be handled with fewer inference steps and longer open-loop execution. We propose Elastic Queries Reinforcement Learning (EQRL), a framework that makes each VLA policy query elastic. A lightweight latent-schedule adaptor jointly selects the latent input, denoising budget, and action chunk length, without fine-tuning the underlying VLA model. To make scheduling difficulty-aware, EQRL trains a critic over the joint latent-schedule action and derives a state difficulty signal from critic ensemble disagreement. This signal guides compute toward difficult states, while a learned residual allows task-driven correction. We formulate variable chunk execution as query-level macro-action RL with chunk-dependent discounting and an amortized number-of-function-evaluations (NFE) budget. Across simulation and real-robot manipulation, EQRL reduces amortized inference cost while preserving or improving task success.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant is an Entanglement Measure

arXiv:2504.15511v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Previously, it was shown that both the concurrence and $n$-tangle on $2n$-qubit pure quantum states can be expressed in terms of Cayley's first hyperdeterminant [dobes2024qubits], indicating that Cayley's first hyperdeterminant, denoted $\mathrm{hdet}$, captures some aspects of a state's $2n$-way entanglement. In this paper, we rigorously prove that on both pure and mixed states, $|\mathrm{hdet}|^{2/d}$ is identically zero on separable states, is an LU invariant, and is non-increasing on average under LOCC, thus demonstrating that $|\mathrm{hdet}|^{d/2}$ is a physically meaningful and legitimate entanglement measure. Moreover, we discuss a few key examples to illustrate the particular type of entanglement Cayley's first hyperdeterminant is detecting: genuine full $d$-level GHZ-type entanglement across all $2n$ parties. Combined, this establishes Cayley's first hyperdeterminant (or $|\mathrm{hdet}|^{2/d}$ to be precise), as a genuine, physically significant generalization of the concurrence and the $n$-tangle to $2n$-qudit states.

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

Agentic AI-based Framework for Mitigating Premature Diagnostic Handoff and Silent Hallucination in Healthcare Applications

arXiv:2606.18068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-agent systems have driven the rise of Agentic AI, showing promise for medical reasoning. However, open-ended conversational agents remain prone to two critical failure modes: premature diagnostic handoff and silent clinical hallucinations that may go undetected before reaching the patient. In this work, we propose a multi-agent framework that addresses both issues by replacing ``LLM-as-a-judge'' routing with deterministic orchestration constraints. The framework incorporates two safety mechanisms. First, a neuro-symbolic state-tracking gate enforces completeness of the OLDCARTS clinical protocol (Onset, Location, Duration, Character, Aggravating/Alleviating factors, Radiation, Timing, and Severity) by blocking diagnostic transitions until all required dimensions are collected. Second, an epistemic uncertainty quantification (UQ) gate computes semantic entropy (H) across K=5 independent diagnostic samples to identify and intercept divergent outputs before delivery. We evaluate the system using simulated patient agents powered by the llama-3.1-70b-instruct model on 150 test cases. The full architecture achieves 49.3% diagnostic precision, representing an absolute improvement of 11.3 percentage points over an unconstrained baseline. Additionally, we observe a statistically significant negative correlation (r = -0.181, p < 0.05) between OLDCARTS completeness (\sigma) and semantic entropy (H), suggesting that structured information gathering is associated with reduced diagnostic uncertainty.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LESS Is More: Mutual-Stability Sampling for Diffusion Language Models

Diffusion large language models (dLLMs) offer a promising alternative to autoregressive decoding by iteratively refining masked sequences, enabling parallel token updates and bidirectional conditioning. Their practical efficiency, however, is limited by sampling procedures that execute a fixed number of reverse denoising steps selected before decoding, spending computation on already-stable positions and sometimes committing unstable ones too early. We present \textsc{LESS}, a training-free, model-agnostic adaptive sampler that treats token commitment as an online stopping problem. \textsc{LESS} implements mutual-stability sampling through a joint stability rule that makes a masked position eligible for unmasking only when its top-1 prediction has high confidence, its top-1 token persists across recent reverse steps, and its predictive distribution is stable under top-$K$ inter-step Jensen–Shannon divergence. We evaluate \textsc{LESS} on Dream-7B, LLaDA-8B, and LLaDA-1.5-8B, covering full-sequence diffusion and semi-autoregressive blockwise sampling regimes, across seven benchmarks spanning general knowledge, math, and code. \textsc{LESS} improves average accuracy over strong training-free adaptive samplers while using $72.1\%$ fewer reverse steps than fixed-budget decoding. Since each reverse step requires a Transformer forward pass, these step-count reductions translate into fewer forward evaluations, lower measured wall-clock latency, and lower estimated inference compute.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Benchmarking Large Language Models for Safety Data Extraction

Accurate extraction of structured information from Safety Data Sheets (SDS) remains challenging in industrial safety due to heterogeneous document formats and the limitations of traditional rule-based methods. This study benchmarks state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) for automated SDS data extraction, comparing text-based and multimodal processing pipelines. We systematically evaluate four models: Gemini 1.5 Pro, GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Llama 3.1-70B, across three prompting strategies: zero-shot, few-shot, and chain-of-thought. The evaluation framework assessed accuracy, latency, and cost across more than 50,000 extracted data fields. Results show that text-based extraction consistently outperforms multimodal processing across all metrics. Gemini 1.5 Pro combined with a Chain-of-Thought prompt achieved the highest accuracy (84%), outperforming GPT-4o (81%) and Claude 3.7 Sonnet (79%). However, no model surpassed the 90% accuracy threshold commonly required for reliable real-world deployment. These findings indicate that general-purpose LLMs are not yet robust enough for unsupervised industrial use, though performance suggests strong potential with task-specific fine-tuning. Future research should focus on domain-adapted training, model calibration, and the integration of Human-in-the-Loop verification to ensure safety-critical reliability.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network for Multimodal CT-PET Synthesis

We present a Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network (DDE-GAN) for multimodal CT-PET image synthesis. Traditional GAN-based approaches often operate solely in the spatial domain and ignore geometric consistency, resulting in limited structural fidelity. DDE-GAN addresses these challenges by jointly learning from both spatial and frequency (Fourier) domains, capturing complementary anatomical and spectral information. Furthermore, rotational equivariance embedded in the physics of the CT and PET measurements are integrated into the loss of both the generator and discriminator to ensure consistent responses under rotations, improving anatomical accuracy. A hierarchical dual-domain training strategy enforces intra- and inter-domain consistency through multi-stage loss functions. Evaluated on the HECKTOR 2022 CT-PET dataset, DDE-GAN achieves superior synthesis quality over baseline models for CT-PET image synthesis. The results demonstrate that combining dual-domain learning with geometric equivariance substantially enhances multimodal image synthesis accuracy and robustness, enabling practical applications in PET completion and data augmentation.

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

Policy Regret for Embedding Model Routing: Contextual Bandits with Low-Rank Experts

arXiv:2606.14929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern recommendation systems increasingly rely on dynamically routing diverse queries to multiple embedding models. Despite its practical significance, this problem remains poorly understood under realistic conditions like adversarial queries, bandit feedback, and limited observability of models. We formalize embedding model routing as an adversarial contextual linear bandit with low-rank experts, where contexts are queries, actions are items, and experts are the embedding models working on low-rank latent representation spaces. We first establish that standard regret notions suffer from structural misspecification or statistical intractability, and we identify a log-quadratic policy class that is expressive enough to capture query-dependent model routing, yet structured enough to allow efficient online learning. Second, we propose a policy gradient algorithm called Hypentropy Policy Gradient (HPG). It provably adapts to the unknown low-rank structure under incomplete information and attains $\tilde{\mathcal O}(s\sqrt{M T})$ linearized policy regret – where $s, M$, and $T$ are the intrinsic rank of the experts, the number of models, and the number of rounds – thus avoiding a curse of dimensionality. Finally, we also provide an computationally efficient and parameter-free implementation of HPG.

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

Distributional Biases in Post-Training: A Markovian Analysis of Reasoning Trajectories

arXiv:2511.07368v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models exhibit broad knowledge but limited task-specific reasoning, motivating post-training strategies such as RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and test-time scaling (TTS). While recent work highlights the role of exploration in improving pass@K, empirical evidence points to a paradox: RLVR and ORM/PRM typically reinforce existing paths rather than expanding the reasoning scope, raising the question of why exploration helps if no new patterns emerge. To reconcile this paradox, we adopt the perspective of Kim et al. (2025), viewing easy (e.g., simplifying a fraction) versus hard (e.g., discovering the some symmetry) reasoning steps as low versus high probability Markov transitions. In this tractable model, pretraining corresponds to tree-graph discovering, while post-training corresponds to CoT reweighting. We provably show that, both RLVR and ORM/PRM would favor heavily to several high-probability paths, and thereby forget rare-but-crucial CoTs. Building on this, we further prove that exploration strategies such as rejecting easy instances and KL regularization help preserve rare CoTs. Empirical simulations corroborate our theoretical results.

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

On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.07082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) is increasingly used to improve large language model reasoning, but its training dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize the trajectory of OPD updates in parameter space and compare it with supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). A suite of parameter-space diagnostics consistently places OPD in a relaxed off-principal regime: compared with SFT, its updates affect fewer weights and avoid principal directions more strongly, while compared with RLVR, they remain less tightly constrained. Beyond this static localization, OPD exhibits subspace locking: its cumulative updates rapidly enter a narrow low-dimensional channel. Constraining training to the update subspace formed early in training preserves OPD performance but substantially degrades SFT, indicating that the locked subspace is functionally sufficient for OPD. Control experiments further show that sparsifying the update tokens and shifting rollout generation off-policy preserve the rank dynamics, whereas mixing the OPD objective with RLVR changes them. Overall, these results suggest that OPD is not merely an intermediate point between SFT and RLVR, but induces its own update geometry in parameter space.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MODF-SIR: A Multi-agent Omni-modal Distilled Framework for Social Intelligence Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12018v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a multi-agent collaborative framework built upon a lightweight Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM), specifically designed for social intelligence reasoning. A key feature of our approach is that both the training and inference phases are augmented via knowledge distillation. Within this architecture, multi-modal data pertinent to social intelligence is precisely localized. Furthermore, relevant long-tail events are identified, extracted, and rendered as formatted, explicit text. This formatting strategy prevents critical long-tail information from being overshadowed by head events and environmental noise during the tokenization process. Specifically, we integrate Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) across the entire reasoning pipeline, encompassing the extraction and representation of long-tail events, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, and self-reflection. This TTA mechanism is also distillation-enhanced, utilizing Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to fine-tune the foundation model exclusively for instance-level reasoning. Extensive evaluations against various open-source and proprietary AI models across multiple benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. With around 30% of training data from IntentTrain, we achieve state-of-the-art results. Codes are available at https://github.com/eeee-sys/MODF-SIR, demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR, LoRA is available at https://huggingface.co/Harry-1234/MODF-SIR and the dataset for training router is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Harry-1234/IntentRouterTrain.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAGE: Retain-Aware Post-Hoc Sanitization of Final Unlearning Vector

arXiv:2606.18309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning aims to remove undesirable knowledge or behaviors while preserving retained capabilities. Current unlearning methods all involve a trade-off between unlearning and retention. We have found that the retention activation bias can also be used to quantify the damage an unlearning method inflicts on retention, without considering the specific implementation of the unlearning process. This allows us to restore retention performance for any unlearning method using a post-hoc approach. Therefore, we propose a complementary post-hoc setting to sanitize the final update vector without rerunning the original unlearning pipeline. In this setting, we design SAGE, Spectral Activation-GEometry Sanitization, a source-agnostic correction for final unlearning updates. SAGE collects real module inputs from a small retain proxy, extracts their dominant activation geometry, and solves a source-anchored optimization objective in closed form, which suppresses update components aligned with high-energy retained directions while preserving the source method's forgetting carrier. Across multiple unlearning methods, model scales, and benchmarks, SAGE consistently relieves the retain-forget trade-off, identifying post-hoc sanitization of final vectors as a practical and underexplored axis for machine unlearning.

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

AtomMem: Building Simple and Effective Memory System for LLM Agents via Atomic Facts

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning and generation abilities, but their fixed context windows limit long-term information accumulation and reuse across multi-session interactions. Existing memory-augmented systems often construct memory in a coarse and unstable manner, relying on inefficient memory representations or unstable unconstrained updates. To address these challenges, we propose AtomMem, a long-term memory system designed for value-dense storage and stable memory evolution. AtomMem introduces a Fact Executor, which selectively extracts high value atomic facts from long form interactions to serve as highly efficient memory representations. Subsequently, AtomMem organizes these facts into hierarchical event structures and temporal profiles, capturing coherent episodic contexts and tracking dynamically evolving user attributes over time. During retrieval, the system activates an associative memory graph to connect fragmented memories. Experiments on the LoCoMo benchmark confirm that AtomMem achieves state-of-the-art performance across various reasoning tasks, offering a scalable and economically viable solution for deploying intelligent personalized agents.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma: Foundations and Applications

Authors:

arXiv:2603.07245v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Lov\'{a}sz Local Lemma (LLL) is a central tool in probabilistic combinatorics, providing a sufficient condition under which a finite collection of undesirable events with limited dependencies can be simultaneously avoided with positive probability. This paper offers a self-contained expository treatment of the lemma and its strengthened versions, emphasizing mathematical foundations, conceptual clarity, and applications. We begin with a pedagogically motivated proof of the LLL based entirely on unconditional probability inequalities. Particular attention is given to the symmetric form of the lemma and several subsequent strengthenings. The paper also discusses a variety of classical applications of both the symmetric and asymmetric forms of the LLL in combinatorics and graph theory, including bounds for the edge-disjoint paths problem, satisfiability of Boolean formulas in conjunctive normal form, lower bounds on diagonal and off-diagonal Ramsey numbers, hypergraph coloring results, structural properties of directed graphs, and acyclic graph colorings. Additional observations and refinements are provided throughout. We also introduce the algorithmic framework of Moser and Tardos, highlighting its constructive counterpart to the LLL, together with an introduction to the entropy-compression principle. The lopsided LLL, a refinement of the LLL, is presented along with an application to the Latin transversal problem. We further discuss the cluster-expansion lemma and its relation to the LLL, and present an alternative treatment of the Latin transversal problem from the cluster-expansion perspective that yields an improved result. The paper concludes with a high-level overview of the iterated LLL, also known as the semi-random method.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A thalamus–brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions

Authors:

Natural environments often change gradually, making it adaptive to bias decisions on the basis of the recent past — a phenomenon known as serial dependence1–3. Large-scale recordings during behaviour have identified that serial dependence is a common motif for decision-making, with neural representations of past experiences found throughout the brain4–11. However, it remains unclear whether this bias arises from dedicated neural circuits with history-specific computations. Using whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in zebrafish performing memory-guided evasive manoeuvres12–14, we identified a hierarchical circuit that maintains past information and biases future choices. Discrete attractors in the dorsal thalamus encoded the position of the most recent obstacle, maintaining a categorical memory via persistent activity lasting 10–20 s. Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus abolished or imposed serial bias. A downstream hindbrain integrator received input from the thalamus and combined it with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history. Leveraging a comprehensive brain atlas in zebrafish15, we constructed a whole-brain computational model that recapitulated behaviour and also predicted a key role for heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes in enabling flexible state transitions. This attractor–integrator architecture reveals a hierarchical and modular computation that unifies robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration, providing a general principle for history-biased decisions. Whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging reveals a hierarchical thalamus–brainstem attractor network that encodes recent history and shapes behavioural bias in zebrafish.

23.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

DNA polymerization activates RNA cleavage of a reverse transcriptase–like antiviral enzyme | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) transcribe noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) for antiviral defense, but the mechanisms of ncRNA-independent DRTs remain unclear. In this work, we show that a single DRT4 mediates RNA-targeting antiphage defense by integrating DNA polymerase, exonuclease, and RNA endonuclease activities. First, through an equilibrium between its DNA polymerase and exonuclease activities, DRT4 senses phage infection, as elevated dNTP levels shift the equilibrium toward polymerase activity, thereby promoting protein-primed single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) synthesis. Second, ssDNA of sufficient length, phage DNA-binding proteins, and deoxyguanosine triphosphate collectively activate an unusual RNA endonuclease activity of DRT4, excising 3′–guanosine monophosphate from both phage and host RNA to terminate infection. These findings reveal a distinctive immune strategy combining nucleic acid synthesis and degradation, expanding the functional landscape of DRTs for new DNA- and RNA-processing technologies.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A prior-free blind detection of information leakage from model predictions

arXiv:2606.11267v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data leakage – contamination of a model with information unavailable at baseline – is the dominant reproducibility failure in machine-learning-based science, yet detection tools require training code, external data, or domain expertise. None operates on the artifact an auditor most often holds: the model's output. We ask what can be decided about leakage from predictions and outcomes alone. We give a decision-theoretic framework in which leakage diagnostics are functionals of the predicted-risk/outcome law, parameterized by a threshold-weighting linked to proper scoring rules and decision-curve analysis. We prove a sharp impossibility: a recalibrated leak matching an honest model's calibration and discrimination is indistinguishable from honest performance by any function of the predictions, so the broad class is detectable only against an externally supplied ceiling on achievable discrimination. We then prove what leakage cannot hide: a near-deterministic subgroup – the signature of a near-label leak – produces a sustained unit-purity head that no legitimate predictor of a non-deterministic outcome can manufacture, yielding a prior-free test. These results organize leakage into a trichotomy – miscalibrated, broad-calibrated, and deterministic – each with a matched detector and failure mode. We validate on UK Biobank using time-windowed comorbidity leakage with known, graded severity, measuring a detection floor of $\Delta\cstar \approx 0.007$ on this endpoint, below which residual leakage is undetectable from output and too small to alter conclusions. The numerical floor is cohort- and endpoint-specific; the structural lesson is general: output-only detection fails where residual leakage is indistinguishable from an honestly stronger predictor. The test returns a verdict on a prediction vector in under a second on commodity hardware.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-22

Differences in tuberculosis prevalence by sex in low- and middle-income countries over 1993–2025: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Nicole A. Swartwood, Nanki Singh, Seyed Alireza Mortazavi, Melike Hazal Can, Hening Cui, Do Kyung Ryuk, Peter MacPherson, Katherine C. Horton, Nicolas A. Menzies Background Global and national initiatives to combat tuberculosis (TB) have expanded over recent years. Despite this, the TB burden remains high in some population groups, with men recognized as having elevated TB risks. Summary measures of sex differences in TB prevalence were last estimated in 2016. Since then, many additional prevalence surveys have been conducted, including in the highest TB burden countries. We conducted a systematic review of sex-stratified TB prevalence survey data published over 1993–2025, to provide updated estimates of male-to-female (M:F) TB prevalence ratios and determine whether sex-related disparities in TB burden have closed over time. Methods and findings We identified surveys reporting community-representative, sex-stratified estimates of pulmonary TB prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including surveys from an earlier review (covering January 1993–March 2016) and a new systematic review (covering 1st December 2015–13th October 2025). This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024503853) and included searches of PubMed, Embase, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, Africa Index Medicus, LILACS, and SciELO. We extracted data on bacteriologically confirmed and smear-positive TB prevalence among adults (aged ≥ 15 years), stratified by sex. Risk of bias was evaluated using eight criteria specific to prevalence surveys. We fit multi-level Bayesian regression models with study- and country-level random effects to estimate the M:F ratio of TB prevalence (male prevalence divided by female prevalence), overall and for key subgroups. In meta-regression analyses, we estimated how prevalence ratios varied over time and according to known TB risk factors and TB case definitions.We identified 10,124 publications and extracted data from 100 eligible studies representing 102 unique prevalence surveys and 4,658,310 participants (45.6% male) in 33 LMICs. TB prevalence was higher in men than women in 90/102 of the included surveys, with a pooled M:F prevalence ratio of 2.02 (95% credible interval (CrI): 1.71, 2.34) for bacteriologically confirmed TB and 2.38 (95% CrI: 1.91, 2.90) for smear-positive TB. Time trend analyses showed a 2.0% (95% CrI: −0.2, 4.5%) average annual change in the M:F ratio of bacteriologically confirmed TB over the study period. The M:F prevalence ratio was estimated to be higher for countries with greater excess HIV prevalence among men, and countries with greater gender equity (as measured by the United Nation’s Gender Development Index). The estimated M:F prevalence ratio was also higher for surveys that did not restrict testing to individuals reporting TB symptoms. Study limitations include heterogeneity in survey methods and definitions, as well as limited data from the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe WHO world regions and post-COVID-19 period. Conclusions Men in LMICs consistently experience TB at a higher prevalence than women. Time trend estimates are uncertain, but consistent with widening sex differences in TB prevalence over the last three decades, despite efforts to address the risk factors underlying this excess TB burden.