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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Reliability and construct validity of the Technology Device Interference Scale in a sample of children and parents

Authors:
Schumacher↗Tu↗Cost↗K. T↗Baribeau↗Birken↗C. S↗Charach↗Kelley↗Burton↗Maguire↗J. L↗…

There is increasing interest in parent-child technoference: the interference with personal interactions caused by technology devices. This study examined the reliability and construct validity of the Technology Device Interference Scale (TDIS) to measure technoference in a sample of Canadian parents and children. Parents (n=883) and children (n=376) were recruited from clinical and community settings and completed the TDIS for their own and family member technoference over three timepoints (T1=2023, T2=2024, T3=2025). TDIS internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct validity were assessed using Cronbachs alpha, intraclass correlation coefficient, and confirmatory factor analysis, respectively. The TDIS showed good internal consistency and adequate to good construct validity when used by children to report on their own technoference (all >.70; CFI>.95, TLI>.95, RMSEA.70; CFI>.95, TLI>.90, RMSEA[≤].11). The TDIS had low to acceptable internal consistency and poor model fit for parent report of their own technoference ( range: .63 - .66; CFI

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02.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

A mean-field model of neural networks with PV and SOM interneurons reveals connectivity-based mechanisms of gamma oscillations

Authors:
Farzin Tahvili↗

by Farzin Tahvili, Martin Vinck, Matteo Di Volo Classic theoretical models of cortical oscillations are based on the interactions between two populations of excitatory and inhibitory neurons. Nevertheless, experimental studies and network simulations suggest that interneuron subclasses such as parvalbumin (PV) and somatostatin (SOM) exert distinct control over oscillatory dynamics. Yet, we lack a theoretical understanding of the mechanisms underlying oscillations in E-PV-SOM circuits and of the differences with respect to the classical mechanisms for oscillations in simpler E–I networks. Here, we derive a biologically realistic mean-field model of a canonical three-population E-PV-SOM circuit. This model robustly generates oscillations whose features are consistent with experimental observations, including the relative timing of PV and SOM activity and the effects of optogenetic perturbations. By reducing the model to a linear analytical form, we demonstrate that gamma oscillations emerge directly from the cell-specific connectivity of the three-population circuit. This connectivity motif alone accounts for experimentally observed phase relationships, with PV activity consistently leading that of SOM neurons. Together, this mean field model identifies a distinct structural mechanism giving rise to oscillations in canonical E–PV–SOM circuits and provides theoretical primitives for constructing large-scale, cell-type-specific models of cortical dynamics.

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03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Lignin to adipic acid in a high-yield chemical and biological redox process

Authors:
Kathryn M. Mains↗

Viable manufacturing pathways to produce bio-based chemicals from renewable feedstocks, such as lignin derived from plant biomass, are needed to decarbonize the chemicals manufacturing sector. Converting the recalcitrant lignin polymer to valuable bioproducts remains a longstanding challenge in biorefining, with the highest reported single-product yield from lignin currently around 20 wt% (refs. 1–4). Most existing lignin depolymerization strategies target aryl–ether bond cleavage, which can produce aromatic monomers in yields of only about 30 wt%, and still as complex mixtures with C–C-linked dimers and oligomers5,6. The recalcitrance of these C–C linkages between aromatic moieties fundamentally limits single-product yields from lignin, prompting the development of strategies to efficiently cleave these C–C bonds3,7–9. Here we show how reductive processing of lignin from poplar accesses a hydrocarbon mixture of alkyl-aromatic monomers and oligomers that is privileged for oxidative conversion to monomeric aromatic carboxylic acids, comprising mostly benzoic acid and phthalic acid isomers in up to 73 wt% monomer yields, using a Co/Mn/Br catalyst. The soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida KT2440 was engineered to convert this mixture of aromatic carboxylic acids to muconolactone, a precursor to bio-based nylons, enabling final adipic acid yields up to 26 wt% (gram adipic acid per gram lignin) with a maximum theoretical yield of 57 wt%. This pairing of reductive and oxidative steps with lignin resembles processes in petrochemical refining and shows how lignin may be converted into a single, valuable bioproduct in high yields. A chemical and biological redox process that resembles processes in petrochemical refining is used to convert lignin from poplar into a single, valuable bioproduct, adipic acid, in high yields.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Far Can Chord-Symbol Time-Series Adaptation Carry Genre Identity? Capabilities and Boundaries in Multi-Genre Chord-Symbol Modeling

Authors:
Jinju Lee↗

arXiv:2606.07334v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This report treats chord-symbol sequences as an interpretable, controllable time series for genre-local harmonic modeling. The frozen Music Transformer base - released as a pop-jazz fine-tune endpoint but verified in this revision weight-identical to the pop-only Phase-0 baseline, so all gains are measured over a pure-pop prior (see Changes in v2) - is extended to eleven target genres: blues, bossa nova, Bach chorales, country, electronic, folk, funk, gospel, hip-hop, R&B/soul, and rock. The main evaluation compares LoRA, IA3, BitFit, prefix tuning, and full fine-tuning over 11 genres and 3 seeds, a complete 165-cell grid. All five methods improve over the frozen base on held-out chord prediction (macro gains +2.89 to +3.61 percentage points); LoRA and IA3 score highest, but pairwise Wilcoxon tests with Holm and Benjamini-Hochberg correction do not support a decisive winner. A matched-data-size control sharpens this: at a common corpus size IA3 stays on top while LoRA drops to last, so the small method gaps are partly data-driven rather than representational. A control-token baseline is also strong, and wrong-genre adapters often beat the frozen base, suggesting the adaptation effect is largely lightweight conditioning over a reusable harmonic base rather than genre-specific adapter memory. Further diagnostics (rank sweeps, wrong-genre rotation, a base-checkpoint ablation that v2 reinterprets as a same-weights control, chord-only genre classification, output-distribution statistics, real-song evaluation, duplicate analysis) support a bounded conclusion: chord-symbol adaptation reliably improves genre-local harmonic prediction, but chord symbols alone do not carry complete genre identity. Perceived genre authenticity and musical quality are left to controlled listener evaluation.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Heterogeneous LiDAR Early Fusion and Learned Re-Ranking Strategy for Robust Long-Term Place Recognition in Unstructured Environments

Authors:
Judith Vilella-Cantos↗Juan Jos\'e Cabrera↗M\'onica Ballesta↗David Valiente↗Luis Pay\'a↗

Robust localization in unstructured environments, such as agricultural fields, is a critical challenge for autonomous systems. LiDAR sensors provide detailed 3D information about the environment and are invariant to lighting conditions. For this reason, LiDAR-based place recognition methods have gained significant attention. In this paper, we propose MinkUNeXt-VINE++, a novel approach that combines early fusion of heterogeneous LiDAR data from two sensors (Livox Mid-360 and Velodyne VLP-16) and a learned re-ranking strategy in inference time. This fusion leverages the strengths of each sensor to provide a more comprehensive representation of the environment. Additionally, the re-ranking approach is particularly important in repetitive environments, such as vineyards, as finding true positives is a major challenge. We evaluated our approach using the TEMPO-VINE dataset, which provides heterogeneous LiDAR data in vineyard environments across different phenological stages. Our results demonstrate that MinkUNeXt-VINE++ significantly improves place recognition performance compared to single-sensor approaches and state-of-the-art methods. MinkUNeXt-VINE++ achieves a 20% improvement in the Recall@1 metric compared to single-sensor approaches, and +30% including re-ranking. The code of our method is publicly available for reproduction.

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06.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

Authors:
Chengfu Liu↗Dongyang Hou↗Junwu Xiang↗Cheng Yang↗Xuezhi Cui↗Zeyuan Wang↗Liangtian Liu↗Zelang Miao↗

Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an instruction-driven agentic framework comprising three components. First, LandslideBench, a multimodal fine-grained dataset with seven subtype labels, high-resolution imagery, pixel-level masks, and high-quality textual descriptions, is constructed via multi-VLM cross-validation and interactive annotation. Then, LandslideVLM, a landslide-oriented VLM, is fine-tuned via LoRA on LandslideBench to enhance geological semantic understanding. Finally, LandslideAgent, a domain rule-enhanced agent taking LandslideVLM as its cognitive backbone, employs a dual-rule controller incorporating structured report metadata constraints and cross-validation identification constraints to regulate automated tool invocation. Experiments demonstrate that LandslideBench provides effective baselines across five mainstream models on fine-grained classification and semantic segmentation. LandslideVLM achieves accuracy improvements of 10.96%, 32.87%, and 15.91% on landslide discrimination, fine-grained classification, and semantic description quality, respectively. LandslideAgent further enables autonomous multi-source spatial data inference, realizing full-process intelligence for landslide identification and analysis.

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07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Hybrid refinery process turns plant material into industrially important chemical

Authors:
Micaela Chacón↗

An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals. An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

A Geometry-Informed Computer Vision Method for Detecting and Examining Overtaking Vehicles From A Bicycle

Authors:
Gandhimathi Padmanaban↗Rayane Moustafa↗Fred Feng↗

Instrumented bicycle studies have produced direct field evidence on vehicle passing behavior, but extracting overtaking events from continuous rear-facing video has remained dependent on manual, frame-by-frame annotation. This bottleneck constrains sample sizes and limits naturalistic cycling safety research. We present a geometry-informed computer vision pipeline that automates overtaking event detection from a single bicycle-mounted camera without multi-sensor configurations or explicit camera calibration. The system combines RT-DETR object detection with ByteTrack multi-object tracking through a three-stage geometric validation module enforcing bearing angle trend, apparent size growth, and spatial confirmation criteria derived from perspective projection principles. Validated on 315 manually annotated real-world overtaking events from urban roads in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the pipeline achieved 97.8% recall with zero false positives. The system identified overtaking intentions a mean of 2.44 seconds before vehicle passage, with 84.1% of events exceeding the 1.5-second human reaction time threshold, demonstrating feasibility for active cyclist warning. Lateral passing distance measurements from 96 events revealed 33.3% of passes below the 5-foot (152.4 cm) threshold, consistent with non-compliance rates in prior field and self-reported studies. A preliminary calibration-free lateral distance estimation approach using bounding box geometric features achieved mean absolute errors of 13-14 cm under leave-one-out cross-validation, sufficient to distinguish close passes from standard passes for safety categorization. By automating event isolation from consumer-grade footage, the system removes the primary annotation bottleneck of instrumented bicycle research and provides a scalable foundation for vehicle-bicycle interaction analysis across larger datasets and diverse urban environments.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

KFTD: Koopman-Fourier Time-Differentiable Network for Continuous Ocean Spatiotemporal Forecasting

Authors:
Qinghui Chen↗Zekai Zhang↗Hailong Liu↗Jinglin Zhang↗Cong Bai↗

arXiv:2606.17070v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate oceanic forecasting is critical for climate monitoring and disaster early warning. However, ocean spatiotemporal forecasting encounters the double challenges of modeling complex dynamical systems and ensuring computational efficiency. We present Koopman Fourier Time-Differentiable (KFTD) Network, a time continuous twostage paradigm that decouples interpolation from prediction to achieve efficient and scalable spatiotemporal modeling. We map complex nonlinear dynamics into the Koopman linear space and exploit Fourier analysis to enable continuous time interpolation at arbitrary sub-steps. A lightweight residual network consumes the high fidelity intermediate states to yield the final forecast. Unlike diffusion models, KFTD eliminates multi step noise sampling and directly evolves the system in continuous time, yielding a 4 computational speedup. We further introduce a DPP Loss that supports arbitrary PDE constraints in an endtoend manner, breaking the physical consistency bottleneck of pure data-driven approaches. Empirical results on four ocean datasets confirm that our continuous time framework reduces MSE by an average of 5.6% (up to 12.7% for SST) and improves efficiency over MCVD by 76.25%.

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10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

StickForStats: automated statistical assumption validation for reproducible computational biology

Authors:
Bharti↗Chakraborty↗

Reproducible computational biology depends on statistical decisions that routine workflows often skip: verifying that a differential-expression test's assumptions hold across all genes, that a strategy-comparison ANOVA is robust to non-normality, or that a meta-analysis is not distorted by publication bias. Surveys consistently find that fewer than 20% of published biomedical studies report checking these assumptions, and existing statistical software leaves validation to the analyst as an optional step. We present StickForStats, an open-source web platform that reframes assumption validation as a default precondition for every analysis. Its Guardian system–a middleware pipeline of eight validators (normality, variance homogeneity, independence, outliers, sample size, modality, linearity, homoscedasticity)–checks assumptions before execution and, on critical violations, reroutes to an appropriate nonparametric alternative with a documented decision trail. At genome scale, applying Guardian to a 91-sample synovial-sarcoma RNA-seq study (GSE271517) cascaded 90.6% of 27,221 genes to a rank-based test and flipped the differential-expression verdict for 553 genes–479 rescued from an under-powered t-test and 74 outlier-driven false positives rejected–materially changing the gene list a biologist would act on. The same automatic validation generalizes across domains: a CRISPR editing-strategy comparison (ANOVA F = 1122, with Guardian recommending Kruskal-Wallis H = 36.6), an ordinal correlation (Pearson r = 0.476 corrected to Spearman {rho} = 0.479), and a sixteen-trial clinical meta-analysis revealing severe publication bias (Egger's t = -5.78, p < 0.001); a complementary module extends the same validators to published manuscripts, checking claims against CONSORT, STROBE, ICH-E9, and JARS-Quant reporting standards. By making assumption validation automatic and transparent, StickForStats targets a tractable, under-served contributor to irreproducibility. The platform is MIT-licensed, validated against SciPy and R, and freely available at https://github.com/visvikbharti/stickforstats_new.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

GraphWorld: Long-Horizon Planning with World Models for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Authors:
Ziying Song↗Caiyan Jia↗Lin Liu↗Lei Yang↗Shengkai Zhang↗Feiyang Jia↗Fengda Zhao↗Peiliang Wu↗Shaoqing Xu↗Chen Lv↗Yadan Luo↗

End-to-end autonomous driving has made significant progress by unifying perception, prediction, and planning within a single learning framework, achieving strong performance in short-horizon decision making. However, most existing E2E-AD methods remain confined to short-horizon planning and lack the ability to model long-term temporal dependencies, which severely limits their generalization and security in complex and highly interactive driving scenarios. In this work, we propose GraphWorld, an E2E-AD framework that explicitly enhances long-horizon planning through latent world modeling. We introduce an Ego-Centric Interaction Graph, which adaptively models critical neighboring agents based on spatial proximity, and propagates relational context to planning queries via cross-node cross-attention. We present a World-State-Conditioned Planning that learns ego-centric latent world representations by modeling interactions between an ego vehicle and surrounding agents. This latent world state captures key interaction dynamics and safety-relevant semantics, and serves as a conditioning signal to guide long-horizon, safety-aware trajectory planning. Extensive experiments on Bench2Drive, NAVSIMv1/2, and nuScenes demonstrate that GraphWorld significantly reduces collision rates and improves long-horizon planning performance, validating its effectiveness in complex driving environments.

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

Spatial Priors via Space Filling Curves for Small and Limited Data Vision Transformers

Authors:
Leyla Naz Candogan↗Arshia Afzal↗Pol Puigdemont↗Volkan Cevher↗

Though Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the dominant backbone in many computer vision tasks, due to permutation equivariance, their attention mechanism lacks explicit spatial inductive biases. This become particularly important in two settings: when model capacity is small or training data is limited. Inspired by the attention masking strategies in Linear Transformers and the scanning patterns of Vision SSMs, we introduce VIOLIN, a lightweight masked attention mechanism that encodes spatial structure within attention via Space Filling Curves (SFCs) with less than 0.0015% extra parameters and negligible computational overhead. VIOLIN scans the image using multiple SFCs to construct curve-specific decay masks, which are then combined and multiplied with the attention matrix. Across a wide range of evaluations, VIOLIN consistently improves performance. In limited data regimes such as fine-tuning on VTAB-1K, it boosts accuracy across all task groups and by up to 8.7% on the tasks where spatial information is essential. It can be combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA to further increase the performance. Beyond fine-tuning, VIOLIN improves various small scale ViT architectures (e.g., DeiT, DINO) during pretraining on ImageNet-1K. Additionally, on pixel-level CIFAR-100 training, a task that is highly dependent on location information, VIOLIN increases accuracy by up to 7.2%. Overall, VIOLIN provides a computationally efficient yet effective way to inject spatial inductive bias into ViTs, especially benefiting small models and limited data settings.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Robust Model-Based Approach for Continuous-Time Policy Evaluation with Unknown Lévy Process Dynamics

Authors:
Qihao Ye↗Xiaochuan Tian↗Yuhua Zhu↗

arXiv:2504.01482v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops a model-based framework for continuous-time policy evaluation (CTPE) in reinforcement learning, incorporating both Brownian and Lévy noise to model stochastic dynamics influenced by rare and extreme events. Our approach formulates the policy evaluation problem as solving a partial integro-differential equation (PIDE) for the value function with unknown coefficients. A key challenge in this setting is accurately recovering the unknown coefficients in the stochastic dynamics, particularly when driven by Lévy processes with heavy tail effects. To address this, we propose a robust numerical approach that effectively handles both unbiased and censored trajectory datasets. This method combines maximum likelihood estimation with an iterative tail correction mechanism, improving the stability and accuracy of coefficient recovery. Additionally, we establish a theoretical bound for the policy evaluation error based on coefficient recovery error. Through numerical experiments, including a real-data BTC price experiment, we demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our method in recovering heavy-tailed Lévy dynamics and verify the theoretical error analysis in policy evaluation.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ImageWAM: Do World Action Models Really Need Video Generation, or Just Image Editing?

Authors:
Yuyang Zhang↗Wenyao Zhang↗Zekun Qi↗He Zhang↗Haitao Lin↗Jingbo Zhang↗Yao Mu↗Xiaokang Yang↗Wenjun Zeng↗Xin Jin↗

World Action Models (WAMs) commonly rely on video generation to bridge visual world modeling and robot control. However, video-based WAMs face three coupled limitations: dense multi-frame future tokens make inference costly, full video prediction spends capacity on action-irrelevant temporal and appearance details, and long-horizon future imagination may introduce errors that mislead action prediction. These issues raise a simple question: Does world action model really need video generation? We propose ImageWAM, a simple WAM framework that repurposes pretrained image editing models for robot action prediction. In contrast to video generation, image editing provides a better-matched prior: it only needs to model a target-frame transformation, focuses on action-relevant current-to-target visual differences, and grounds task instructions to localized visual changes through edit pretraining. In practice, ImageWAM does not decode the target frame at inference time; instead, it conditions a flow-matching action expert on the KV caches produced by image-editing denoising, using them as a compact world-action context. ImageWAM outperforms standard VLA baselines and matching competitive WAMs without additional policy pretraining across different simulator and real-world experiments. It also reduces FLOPs to 1/6 and latency to 1/4 of video-based WAMs. Attention analysis further shows that editing caches focus on task-relevant change regions, supporting image editing as an effective alternative to video-based world-action modeling.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

Authors:
Junghyun Lee↗Minju Hong↗Kwang-Sung Jun↗Chulhee Yun↗Se-Young Yun↗

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

Authors:
Shirantha Welikala↗Zihao Song↗Hai Lin↗Panos J. Antsaklis↗

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

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17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Reinforcement learning-driven unified generative framework for multi-objective RNA codon design

Authors:
Lin↗Tan↗Wang↗Zhu↗Xiong↗

Current RNA codon design methods are limited by inefficient long-sequence processing and poor generalizability, often relying on a decoupled "generate-or-optimize" paradigm. We introduce RNARL, a reinforcement learning-driven framework that unifies sequence generation with multi-objective optimization. RNARL directly learns to generate high-performance sequences, effectively optimizing sequences over 3,900 nucleotides and demonstrating superior performance and universality across six species and five RNA types. RNARL thus establishes an effective and generalizable framework for RNA codon design. Finally, a user-friendly web platform is freely available to facilitate its application for RNA therapeutic design.

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

AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward

Authors:
H. Sinan Bank↗Daniel R. Herber↗Thomas Bradley↗

arXiv:2606.19630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The March 2020 INCOSE INSIGHT special issue on AI and Systems Engineering (SE) became the most downloaded issue in the publication's history and launched a research community that now draws over 250 registrants to its annual workshop. In this article, we trace the progress in AI and SE across three phases (labeled here foundational, applied, and LLM inflection) based on the authors' reading of the field's core papers, and describe our opinions of where the community has converged and where critical gaps remain. Separately, a human-AI agreement literature review leveraging both human expertise and six AI models was performed to assess the relevance of 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications. The results identify five critical research gaps and offer guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in SE. We share the agreement data and the AI4SE/SE4AI Explorer web application so readers can compare their own relevance judgments with the human and AI raters.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A fairness-aware extension of Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis for ranking

Authors:
Guilherme Dean Pelegrina↗Renata Pelissari↗

arXiv:2606.17756v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness has become a central concern in ranking problems involving individuals or social groups, particularly under the Responsible Artificial Intelligence agenda. In Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis, Stochastic Multicriteria Acceptability Analysis (SMAA) provides a robust framework for handling uncertainty and incomplete preference information, but it does not explicitly address fairness in the resulting rankings. This paper proposes SMAA-Fair, a fairness-aware extension of SMAA for ranking problems. The approach reweights the simulated rankings generated by SMAA according to their level of group fairness, so that fairer rankings contribute more strongly to the acceptability indices and central weights vector. The framework is independent of the aggregation model and can incorporate different fairness metrics. In this study, Statistical Parity, normalized discounted Kullback–Leibler divergence (rKL) and normalized discounted cumulative Kullback–Leibler divergence (nDKL) are adopted. Rankings are derived from the fairness-adjusted acceptability matrix using expected ranking and maximum acceptability ranking. We also derive the central weight according to the degree of fairness in the obtained rankings. Numerical experiments with synthetic and real data show that SMAA-Fair improves the representation of protected groups among favourable ranking positions, while preserving robustness to preference uncertainty.

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20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

Authors:
Shuai Li↗Chuan-Xian Ren↗Yuhao Li↗Ziqi Huang↗Yue Pan↗Mingzhe Tang↗Hong Yan↗

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Towards Unified Song Generation and Singing Voice Conversion with Accompaniment Co-Generation

Authors:
Ziyu Zhang↗Chunyu Qiang↗Xiaopeng Wang↗Yuxin Guo↗Kang Yin↗Wenjie Tian↗Jingbin Hu↗Tianlun Zuo↗Zhao Guo↗Teng Ma↗Yuzhe Liang↗Chen Zhang↗…

arXiv:2606.07015v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While song generation and singing voice conversion (SVC) have evolved significantly, they have long been developed isolated: the former lacks zero-shot speaker cloning, while the latter overlooks vocal-accompaniment synergy. To bridge this gap, we propose UniSinger, the first end-to-end framework unifying speaker cloning song generation and accompaniment co-generation SVC. Building on the multimodal diffusion transformer, we construct a unified speaker embedding space transferring speaker representation from SVC to song generation, endowing fine-grained cross-task timbre control. To mitigate multi-task optimization conflicts, we design a curriculum learning strategy using task-specific modality masking to guide the model to gradually master the generative mechanisms among semantic content, vocal timbre, and accompaniment. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance on both tasks and realizes complementary benefits, offering new possibilities for intelligent music production.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TriFlow: Generating Artist-Like 3D Mesh Topology via Nearest-Vertex Vector Fields

Authors:
Haoxuan Li↗Ziya Erko\c{c}↗Daniele Sirigatti↗Vladislav Rosov↗Lei Li↗Angela Dai↗Matthias Nie{\ss}ner↗

We present TriFlow, a new generative approach for producing compact 3D meshes with artist-like triangle topology directly from input geometry conditions such as signed distance fields. Our key insight is to represent mesh topology as a nearest-vertex vector field (NVF) defined over the surface, where each point encodes its association to the nearest triangle vertex in the local barycentric frame. We train a latent flow-matching model to synthesize this field, enabling topology generation conditioned on the input geometry. To extract a coherent mesh, we cluster surface regions using the generated NVF and guide a constrained quadric error metric (QEM) mesh simplification with topology-aware optimization. This yields output meshes that closely match the input geometry while exhibiting structured, artist-like connectivity. Experiments demonstrate that TriFlow achieves stronger generalization and significantly improved topology quality compared to state-of-the-art learning-based approaches, alongside 90% lower Chamfer Distance and an 8x speedup.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DYNA-PRUNER: Input-Adaptive Data-Model Co-Pruning for Efficient and Scalable Spatio-Temporal Media Prediction

Authors:
Fuyan Zhang↗Yuqi Li↗Yingli Tian↗Edmond S. L. Ho↗

Spatio-temporal prediction supports radar/satellite nowcasting and city-scale traffic monitoring, but modern models are often too expensive for real-time deployment. This stems from a mismatch between dense computation and strong input-dependent redundancy (e.g., calm seas or clear skies). To enable automated, resource-aware architecture optimization in scalable media analysis, we propose Dyna-Pruner, an end-to-end framework for input-dependent co-pruning of data and model structure. A shared-importance synchronization mechanism generates coupled masks that prune redundant regions and their corresponding computational units (e.g., convolutional filters), yielding per-sample sparse sub-networks at inference time. Experiments on WeatherBench, SEVIR, and TaxiBJ show seamless integration with CNN, RNN, and Transformer backbones, reducing FLOPs by up to $70\%$ and achieving a $2.5\times$ speedup on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with negligible accuracy loss ($

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CloudCons: A Comprehensive End-to-End Benchmark for Cloud Resource Consolidation

Authors:
Xiaobin Zhang↗Lefei Shen↗Mouxiang Chen↗Zhuo Li↗Hongkai Li↗Han Fu↗Jianling Sun↗Xiaoxue Ren↗Chenghao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.13513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Driven by conservative over-provisioning to guarantee service reliability, resource utilization in cloud data centers remains at low levels. To mitigate this, the forecast-then-optimize paradigm has emerged to optimize consolidation by anticipating future demands. While emerging time series foundation models promise to enhance this paradigm through zero-shot generalization, existing benchmarks focus solely on prediction error metrics. The actual decision utility of these advanced models remains unverified, rendering their practical value for downstream tasks uncertain. To bridge this gap, we propose CloudCons, a comprehensive end-to-end benchmark designed to evaluate forecasting models within the specific context of cloud resource consolidation. We build high-quality datasets that cover diverse workloads from Huawei Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Google Borg, capturing distinct service characteristics ranging from synchronized diurnal rhythms to stochastic, pulse-like bursts and high-frequency noise. We conduct an extensive evaluation of statistical, deep learning, and foundation models. Our experiments reveal a pivotal finding: while foundation models demonstrate superior zero-shot forecasting accuracy, this advantage does not inherently translate into better decision utility. Of practical significance, we systematically analyze how the selection of predictive quantiles acts as a critical lever. We provide actionable guidelines for calibrating these selections to balance the trade-off between resource efficiency and service reliability, offering vital insights for real-world deployment decisions.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Encoder Winners Do Not Reliably Transfer Across VLA Backbone Scale: A Frozen-Backbone Grafting Diagnostic

Authors:
Qingping Zeng↗Fei She↗

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies typically inherit their vision encoder from upstream VLM releases, but it is unclear whether an encoder choice validated on a small VLA transfers to a larger backbone. We introduce a frozen-backbone grafting diagnostic: the vision tower of a released VLA is replaced by a candidate encoder under a fixed protocol (adaptive average pooling, LayerNorm, and a single trainable linear projector), with the language model and action expert frozen. Across four encoders, two LIBERO suites, two backbones (SmolVLA-450M and $\pi_{0.5}$-3.3B), and two-to-three seeds per cell (40 main grafting runs plus native, LoRA, pooling, and zero-/shuffled-image controls, all scored by offline action MSE), the small-backbone winner does not reliably select the large-backbone top tier: SigLIP is best on SmolVLA across both suites, while on $\pi_{0.5}$ DINOv2-small leads the spatial suite and the object suite is a seed-sensitive near-tie band; three of the four backbone-suite comparisons (and 11 of 12 seed-level cells) support backbone-dependent rankings. The grafting wrapper is itself non-neutral with opposite sign across backbones (+45-56% MSE on the SmolVLA native tower, -50-52% on $\pi_{0.5}$), so all conclusions are conditional on the fixed grafting protocol. We position frozen grafting as a cheap target-backbone diagnostic to run before committing to an encoder at scale, not as a closed-loop deployment claim.

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