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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Regulating the Machine Contributor: Governance and Policy Alignment in Open Source

Authors:
Jassem Manita↗Aziz Amari↗

arXiv:2606.14594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted software development has moved from line-level autocomplete to agents that can plan changes, edit files, and submit pull requests with limited human supervision. Open-source software, however, evolves through a process designed for humans: contributor agreements, codes of conduct, and review norms all assume a legally accountable person who can attest to provenance and answer reviewer questions. Autonomous and semi-autonomous AI contributors strain those assumptions, and the 2025-2026 record of agent-driven incidents, AI-generated nuisance volume, and platform-level shutdowns shows that the gap is operationally consequential. Several open-source organisations have responded with contribution policies, but the result is fragmented, and its alignment with emerging AI governance frameworks (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF with the UC Berkeley Agentic AI Profile, ISO/IEC 42001 and 23894) is unmapped at the contribution level. We compare policies across six organisations (SymPy, LLVM, matplotlib, OpenInfra, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Linux Foundation) using Most-Similar Systems Design with indicator-based coding and process tracing for SymPy and LLVM. From this we derive a six-dimensional taxonomy (disclosure, responsibility, human oversight, licensing, enforcement, maintainer workload), an ordinal Policy Maturity Score, and a mapping of documented agent incidents onto the dimensions each policy fails to govern. Aligning the dimensions with the regulatory frameworks above identifies overlapping gaps neither side currently closes, and we close by sketching the shape of a harmonised tiered framework and the empirical evaluation needed to calibrate it.

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02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Super-Arrhenius relaxation of the triangular plaquette model in any dimension

Authors:
Laurent Bartholdi↗Ivailo Hartarsky↗Ivan Mitrofanov↗

arXiv:2606.16259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Consider the following plaquette model from statistical physics: a lamp lies at every vertex of the triangular lattice and a switch lies at every even vertex of the (bipartite) dual hexagonal lattice. Each switch toggles the three lamps on its face. The energy of a configuration is the number of ON lamps. For the Glauber dynamics associated with the Gibbs measure defined by this Hamiltonian at any inverse temperature $\beta>0$, we show that, in any dimension $d\ge 2$, the infinite volume relaxation time satisfies \[e^{\beta^2/C}/C \le T_{\mathrm{rel}}\le Ce^{e^{C\beta}}\] for some $C>0$. Our result entails that the Gibbs measure is unique. The $e^{\beta^2}$ scaling was conjectured by Newman and Moore in 1999 and matches the behaviour of supercritical rooted kinetically constrained models such as the East model, thus recovering fragile glass phenomenology in the absence of kinetic constraints. More precisely, we show that, on a torus of side length $2^k$, when $\beta\to\infty$ and $k/\beta\to0$, we have $T_{\mathrm{rel}}=e^{2\beta k(1+o(1))}$. Quite surprisingly, however, we also prove that, on non-periodic finite domains of size $n\le e^{\beta/C}$ for large $C>0$, we have the much larger asymptotics $\ln T_{\mathrm{rel}}=\beta n^{\Theta(1)}$. The main ingredients of the proofs are new results in extremal and enumerative combinatorics and rely on renormalisation ideas for the dynamics and its groundstates also known as the Ledrappier subshift. We note consequences of our results to geometric group theory (more precisely to the complexity of the word problem for the Baumslag finitely presented group) and to ergodic theory.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Phenotyping TPF via Self-Supervised Learning: A Label-Agnostic Framework with Expert Validation

Authors:
Miral Elnakib↗Muhammad Saad↗Ahmad Al-Kabbany↗

The full potential of artificial intelligence in tibial plateau fracture characterisation remains unrealised, constrained by a fundamental dependency on labelled datasets whose consistency cannot be guaranteed: conventional classification schemes such as Schatzker and AO/OTA suffer from inter-observer variability, causing supervised models to learn human disagreement rather than stable fracture morphology. We design, implement, and validate a label-agnostic framework that eliminates this constraint by learning fracture representations directly from imaging data without observer-assigned labels. A RadImageNet-pretrained ResNet-50 encoder is fine-tuned on 154 cleaned knee radiographs using the SimCLR contrastive objective, preceded by a data cleaning protocol and followed by UMAP dimensionality reduction and k-means clustering to discover four imaging-derived phenotypes. Phenotype validity is assessed through a blinded expert review protocol administered to two independent clinicians. The four phenotypes demonstrate robust stability (bootstrap ARI = 0.319 +/- 0.041), strong internal cohesion (silhouette = 0.511), and coherence ratings of 3-5/5 from both reviewers under blinded conditions; one phenotype was unanimously identified as exhibiting comminution – a high-complexity feature isolated without any supervisory signal. Inter-partition comparison against Schatzker labels yields ARI = 0.013, confirming orthogonality to conventional classification boundaries. Notably, expert reviewers anchored to established classification vocabularies perceived imaging-derived groups as heterogeneous precisely where Schatzker alignment was lowest, suggesting that Schatzker-trained perception and label-agnostic embedding geometry measure orthogonal dimensions. These findings establish label-agnostic SSL phenotyping as a reproducible and clinically interpretable complement to conventional classification.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Online Learning for Supervisory Switching Control

Authors:
Haoyuan Sun↗Ali Jadbabaie↗

arXiv:2603.14762v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study supervisory switching control for partially-observed linear dynamical systems. The objective is to identify and deploy a suitable controller for the unknown system by periodically selecting among a collection of $N$ candidate controllers, some of which may destabilize the underlying system. While classical estimator-based supervisory control guarantees asymptotic stability, it lacks quantitative finite-time performance bounds. Conversely, current non-asymptotic methods in both online learning and system identification require restrictive assumptions that are incompatible in a control setting, such as system stability, which preclude testing potentially unstable controllers. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel, non-asymptotic analysis of supervisory control that adapts multi-armed bandit algorithms to a control-theoretic setting. The proposed data-driven algorithm evaluates candidate controllers via scoring criteria that leverage system observability to isolate the effects of state history, enabling both detection of destabilizing controllers and accurate system identification. We present two algorithmic variants with dimension-free, finite-time guarantees, where each identifies the matching controller in $O(N \log^2 N)$ steps, while simultaneously achieving finite $L_2$-gain with respect to system disturbances.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Can Vision-Language Models See the Vital Signs? Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Intraoperative Monitor Reading

Authors:
Gao↗Wang↗Zhao↗Yang↗Zhang↗Feng↗He↗

Background Vital-sign deterioration is a leading contributor to preventable perioperative death, yet manual monitor reading is intermittent, error-prone, and subject to alarm fatigue. Automating this perceptual step could enable continuous surveillance, but existing solutions depend on device-specific hardware integration or cloud-hosted vision-language models (VLMs), which raise privacy, cost, and connectivity barriers in resource-limited healthcare facilities. Methods We constructed a benchmark of 200 in-the-wild intraoperative monitor photographs (spanning multiple vendors, angles, and illumination conditions) annotated for eight vital-sign parameters: heart rate, SpO2, ETCO2, respiratory rate, systolic/diastolic/mean blood pressure, and temperature. We evaluated an optical character recognition (OCR)-based pipeline, nine instruction-tuned VLMs (four commercial, five open-weight ranging from [≤]4B to 31B parameters) under two prompting regimes, and a compact open model (Qwen3.5-9B) adapted via low-rank fine-tuning (LoRA, 0.46% of parameters updated). Results Under a domain-aware prompt, frontier VLMs reached 0.98-0.997 exact-match accuracy zero-shot, whereas the OCR pipeline and [≤]4B model scored approximately 0.20 lower, defining a 9B-class usable floor. LoRA fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on 80-120 images raised accuracy from 0.953 to 0.994 (statistically indistinguishable from the best commercial model) and reduced the critical-error rate fivefold (0.0313 [->] 0.0063). Ablations showed that performance saturated at 80 training images and rank-8 adapters. Conclusion Monitor reading is a solved perception problem for VLMs above the 9B scale. A lightweight fine-tuned open model achieves frontier accuracy while running entirely on local hardware, preserving data privacy, offline capability, and near-zero marginal cost. Residual errors stem from blood-pressure source ambiguity and are addressable with explicit disambiguation logic.

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

EG-VQA: Benchmarking Verifiable Video Question Answering with Grounded Temporal Evidence

Authors:
Linpeng Huang↗Weixing Chen↗Zexin Chen↗Yang Liu↗Liang Lin↗

arXiv:2606.24797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Video Large Language Models (Video-LLMs) have yielded promising performance on video question answering (VideoQA). Nevertheless, existing benchmarks are predominantly evaluated through answer correctness, while the grounding of predictions in relevant video evidence remains largely unexamined. This disconnect between answer generation and evidence understanding motivates the construction of the Evidence-Grounded Video Question Answering Benchmark (EG-VQA), an open-ended evaluation protocol in which each QA pair is explicitly annotated with supporting temporal evidence, thereby requiring joint reasoning and precise evidence localization. EG-VQA is comprised of 2,067 videos and 11,838 QA pairs with fine-grained evidence annotations. To evaluate predicted evidence, Evidence-Grounded F1 (EG-F1) is introduced as a unified metric in which temporal alignment and semantic consistency against ground-truth evidence are jointly measured. Experimental evaluation reveals that even strong proprietary models struggle to accurately ground their predictions, exposing a fundamental discrepancy between answer correctness and faithful evidence localization. To bridge this gap, EG-Reasoner, an evidence-grounded reasoning model trained with explicit supervision, is proposed. State-of-the-art performance is achieved among open-source models, with results competitive against proprietary systems, particularly pronounced gains are observed on reasoning-intensive tasks such as counterfactual questions. These findings demonstrate that scaling alone is insufficient for robust video understanding and that structured evidence supervision is essential for the development of more reliable and interpretable VideoQA systems.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

A Mathematical Forum Platform for Collaborative Problem Solving and Dataset Generation for AI Reasoning

Authors:
Akbar Erkinov↗Nurmukhammad Abdurasulov↗

arXiv:2606.12976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sharing mathematical content in online forums remains a significant friction point for students and educators: writing raw LATEX is error-prone, standalone optical character recognition tools require platform switching, and current forum software offers no integrated path from a photograph of a formula to a rendered post. We present a unified system that eliminates this friction by embedding an image to LATEX conversion pipeline directly inside a forum posting interface. A user uploads or captures an image of a mathematical expression; the system routes it through the Mathpix OCR API, detects whether the returned output is LATEX or plain text containing inline math, applies the appropriate delimiter normalisation, and renders a live preview in either LATEX or Markdown mode before the post is committed to the database. The architecture is organized in three loosely coupled layers: image processing, rendering, and storage, and supports both desktop and mobile clients. A provisional US patent application has been filed covering the core methods. We describe the full system design, each component in detail, the data schema, and the key technical innovations, and we position the work against existing standalone tools and forum platforms to demonstrate the practical gap it closes. Beyond immediate usability, we argue that a deployed platform of this kind constitutes a continuously growing, community-validated dataset of mathematical problems and step-by-step solutions, a resource that can be used to train and benchmark AI systems for accurate mathematical reasoning

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

The Metric Picks the Winner: Evaluation Choice Flips Model Rankings for Drug-Response Prediction in Unseen Chemistry

Authors:
Dhruv Agarwal↗Riya Bisht↗

arXiv:2606.12639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting how a cell's transcriptome responds to a drug it has never seen is a core, hard problem in computational cell biology: recent benchmarks show complex models often fail to beat trivial baselines once test compounds are held out by chemistry. We study one cell line and assay, THP-1 cells profiled by DRUG-seq, scored by the active-compound weighted MSE(wMSE) of the VCPI prediction contest. We propose a staged approach: dumb baselines (untreated control and mean training-compound response) that the field keeps failing to beat; non-parametric retrieval (a Tanimoto-weighted average of a held-out compound's nearest training compounds); and a fusion stage combining a frozen chemistry embedding with retrieval-support features to predict the residual over the mean, with an uncertainty head and gene programs. On the released VCPI THP-1 drug-seq data (14,026 training compounds), under a Bemis-Murcko scaffold split, the model ranking inverts depending on the metric. Under an inverse-variance per-gene proxy, a regularized linear regression on Morgan fingerprints appears to win over the deep models, retrieval, and ChemBERTa – the textbook "simple baselines win" result. But under the contest's true active-set metric (per-(gene, compound) Mejia weights, validated against the official scorer; mean baseline 0.535 vs the organizers' 0.507 reference), that reverses: the deep models win, our fusion decoder significantly beats the linear fingerprint baseline (-0.012 wMSE, paired bootstrap p < 10^-4), and the proxy's winner becomes the worst chemistry-aware predictor. Picking the metric picks the winner – to our knowledge the first demonstration on real held-out drug chemistry of the metric-calibration effect established largely on genetic perturbation. We release a reproducible pipeline wired to the official scorer that emits a valid submission over the real 1064 x 12,995 grid.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Large Fluctuations in Open Quantum Systems

Authors:
V. Yu. Mylnikov↗S. O. Potashin↗A. Kamenev↗

arXiv:2606.11822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study statistics of atypical measurement outcomes in the steady states of driven open quantum systems. In equilibrium, the probability distribution over the phase space, as encoded in, e.g., the Wigner function, is analytic in the phase-space coordinates. We show that this property is generically lost in driven dissipative systems: their {\it large-deviation function} develops lines and surfaces across which its derivatives are discontinuous. As an illustrative example, we consider a parametrically driven Kerr oscillator coupled linearly and/or nonlinearly to a dissipative bath. Rare fluctuations in the amplitude and phase of the induced oscillations are governed by semiclassical instanton trajectories of the corresponding Keldysh-Lindblad action. We demonstrate that a given fluctuation can be realized through multiple distinct instanton trajectories. The competition between these trajectories leads to abrupt switching of the dominant instanton and, consequently, to non-analytic features in the large-deviation function.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum gates with parametrically driven multi-qubit couplers

Authors:
Verena Feulner↗Marjan Fani↗Lukas Heunisch↗Stephan Tasler↗Michael J. Hartmann↗

arXiv:2606.14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting quantum processors could significantly profit from enhanced connectivity together with precise control of interactions and gates between qubits. Here we investigate plaquettes of four qubits that are coupled via a central tunable coupling circuit, so that not only gates between qubits connected by an edge of the plaquette can be executed but also between qubits across the diagonal. By numerically and analytically analyzing parametrically driven processes, we explore $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates between any pair of qubits, also across the diagonal, as well as three-qubit interactions and gates. For experimentally available circuit parameters, we for example find $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates with a gate time of 50 ns and 99.9\% fidelity, which is decreased to 99.4\% if two such gates are executed in parallel on disjoint qubit pairs in the plaquette. For three-qubit gates we find fidelities of 95\% fidelity at a gate time of 200 ns.

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

Ten Digits on a Train: AI-Assisted Verification of Two Eigenvalue Problems

Authors:
Matthew J. Colbrook↗

arXiv:2606.23821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate numerical eigenvalues are often difficult to certify, especially in singular or non-normal settings. This article reports a human–AI collaboration on two such computations. For a singular self-adjoint Schrödinger operator, a verified zero count and Dirichlet–Neumann bracketing certify the complete negative spectrum to ten decimal places. For a delicate non-normal atom–molecule benchmark, a previously unresolved resonance pair is separated, with each member enclosed to ten digits. The second result is achieved not by increasing the precision of one-way shooting, but by reformulating the problem as a global matching system for projective solution lines. The infinite tail is encoded as uncertainty in the terminal projective data, and a componentwise, tail-robust Krawczyk–Brouwer inclusion supplies the certificate. This gives a reusable architecture for analytic boundary-value systems with ill-conditioned propagation and uncertain asymptotic data. The collaboration also exposes the strengths and limits of AI assistance. AI rapidly produced accurate candidates and plausible proof strategies, but several failed, including one apparently complete tail argument that omitted the componentwise check required by a nonuniform polydisc. Validated computation is a stringent test of AI-assisted mathematics: the output is not merely a number, but a number with a proof. These examples show why the proof object matters, and why human mathematical judgment remained decisive. More broadly, as AI makes code, exposition, and plausible numerical claims inexpensive, standards for verification, attribution, peer review, and training must adapt. The implications are unsettling; the opportunity is extraordinary.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Offline Preference-Based Trajectory Evaluation

Authors:
Fernando Diaz↗

arXiv:2606.17541v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline evaluation of agentic systems often collapses trajectories to terminal success, discarding information about partial progress and inducing widespread ties, creating substantial statistical inefficiency by reducing effective sample size and weakening the ability to distinguish systems. We propose preference-based trajectory evaluation, which compares trajectories directly through temporal preferences over progress and time-to-return profiles. We find that, across diverse agentic and interactive benchmarks, standard success-based metrics produce tied comparisons on roughly 75% of instances, whereas trajectory-aware preferences reduce ties to roughly 35%, improving discriminative power, ranking stability, and data efficiency. Our results suggest that benchmark saturation, often attributed to poor data collection or problem difficulty, may also be explained by the choice of evaluation measure.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SuperCarver: Texture-Consistent 3D Geometry Super-Resolution for High-Fidelity Surface Detail Generation

Authors:
Qijian Zhang↗Xiaozheng Jian↗Xuan Zhang↗Wenping Wang↗Junhui Hou↗

Conventional production workflow of high-precision mesh assets necessitates a cumbersome and laborious process of manual sculpting by specialized 3D artists/modelers. The recent years have witnessed remarkable advances in AI-empowered 3D content creation for generating plausible structures and intricate appearances from images or text prompts. However, synthesizing realistic surface details still poses great challenges, and enhancing the geometry fidelity of existing lower-quality 3D meshes (instead of image/text-to-3D generation) remains an open problem. In this paper, we introduce SuperCarver, a 3D geometry super-resolution pipeline for supplementing texture-consistent surface details onto a given coarse mesh. We start by rendering the original textured mesh into the image domain from multiple viewpoints. To achieve detail boosting, we construct a deterministic prior-guided normal diffusion model, which is fine-tuned on a carefully curated dataset of paired detail-lacking and detail-rich normal map renderings. To update mesh surfaces from potentially imperfect normal map predictions, we design a noise-resistant inverse rendering scheme through deformable distance field. Experiments demonstrate that our SuperCarver is capable of generating realistic and expressive surface details depicted by the actual texture appearance, making it a powerful tool to both upgrade historical low-quality 3D assets and reduce the workload of sculpting high-poly meshes.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Efficient Reinforcement for Visual-Textual Thinking with Discrete Diffusion Model

Authors:
Yoonjeon Kim↗Yuhta Takida↗Chieh-Hsin Lai↗Eunho Yang↗Yuki Mitsufuji↗

RL-based post-training has been widely adopted to enable interleaved visual and textual reasoning in unified multimodal models capable of both text and image generation. However, most existing approaches are built upon autoregressive (AR) unified models, which require full image regeneration during visual reasoning. In this work, we demonstrate that multimodal discrete diffusion models are effective alternatives to AR models for reinforcement learning in interleaved reasoning, owing to their ability to perform efficient visual rollouts via localized visual editing rather than full image-token regeneration. This reduces rollout computation during GRPO by 26.9\% compared to AR baselines, with minimal performance drop. Despite the improved efficiency, we find that joint reward assignment, which employs a shared reward signal across modalities, introduces cross-modal interference between unrelated image and text token sequences during RL updates. To address this issue, we propose factorized reward assignment, a strategy that assigns rewards independently to text and vision segments. With factorized reward assignment, our RL approach achieves an 11.2% improvement over joint reward assignment and a 38.04% improvement over the base model.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Bimanual Robot Manipulation via Multi-Agent In-Context Learning

Authors:
Alessio Palma↗Indro Spinelli↗Vignesh Prasad↗Luca Scofano↗Yufeng Jin↗Georgia Chalvatzaki↗Fabio Galasso↗

arXiv:2604.20348v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful reasoning engines for embodied control. In particular, In-Context Learning (ICL) enables off-the-shelf, text-only LLMs to predict robot actions without any task-specific training while preserving their generalization capabilities. Applying ICL to bimanual manipulation remains challenging as the high-dimensional joint action space and tight inter-arm coordination constraints rapidly overwhelm standard context windows. To address this, we introduce BiCICLe (Bimanual Coordinated In-Context Learning), the first framework that enables standard LLMs to perform few-shot bimanual manipulation without fine-tuning. BiCICLe frames bimanual control as a multi-agent leader-follower problem, decoupling the action space into sequential, conditioned single-arm predictions. Evaluated on 13 tasks from the TWIN benchmark, BiCICLe achieves 70.5% average success rate, outperforming the best training-free baseline by 6.1 percentage points and surpassing most supervised methods. We also demonstrate superior real-world performance on 3 tasks without hardware-specific retraining.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Beyond the Apnea-Hypopnea Index: Physiological and Demographic Predictors of Excessive Daytime Sleepiness in Obstructive Sleep Apnea

Authors:
Tan↗Parekh↗Wickramaratne↗S. D↗

Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is a common but inconsistently predicted symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). OSA is typically diagnosed with polysomnography (PSG), and the current standard for severity assessment is the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI). AHI has many limitations, including its inability to explain physiological mechanisms or reflect variability in patient symptoms, such as EDS. This retrospective study aims to find physiological and demographic parameters that better predict EDS in patients with OSA and to evaluate whether these parameters outperform AHI using PSG data from the Mount Sinai Integrative Sleep Center. Clinical variables used to predict EDS included arousal index (AI), average oxygen desaturation during sleep, average heart rate during sleep, and AHI, along with demographic variables including age, sex, and BMI. Hypothesis tests, logistic regression models, and decision tree classifier models were performed on the data to discriminate sleepy from nonsleepy patients as determined by an Epworth Sleepiness Scale (ESS) score [&ge;] 10. AI and oxygen desaturation were found to be the most predictive physiological variables, and sex and BMI were found to be the most predictive demographic variables. The final decision tree model with these four variables outperformed the AHI in predicting EDS. These findings suggest that daytime sleepiness in OSA can be better explained by measures of apnea burden, oxygenation impairment, and patient demographics than by AHI alone, although these remain only modestly predictive. Future studies should focus on investigating more comprehensive physiological markers, multi-night sleep data, and more objective assessments of sleepiness.

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

Stabilizing the Q-Gradient Field for Policy Smoothness in Actor-Critic Methods

Authors:
Jeong Woon Lee↗Kyoleen Kwak↗Daeho Kim↗Hyoseok Hwang↗

arXiv:2601.22970v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Policies learned via continuous actor-critic methods often exhibit erratic, high-frequency oscillations, making them unsuitable for physical deployment. Current approaches attempt to enforce smoothness by directly regularizing the policy's output. We argue that this approach treats the symptom rather than the cause. In this work, we theoretically establish that policy non-smoothness is fundamentally governed by the differential geometry of the critic. By applying implicit differentiation to the actor-critic objective, we prove that the sensitivity of the optimal policy is bounded by the ratio of the Q-function's mixed-partial derivative (noise sensitivity) to its action-space curvature (signal distinctness). To empirically validate this theoretical insight, we introduce PAVE (Policy-Aware Value-field Equalization), a critic-centric regularization framework that treats the critic as a scalar field and stabilizes its induced action-gradient field. PAVE rectifies the learning signal by minimizing the Q-gradient volatility while preserving local curvature. Experimental results demonstrate that PAVE achieves smoothness comparable to policy-side smoothness regularization methods, while maintaining competitive task performance, without modifying the actor.

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18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Phylogenetic tree inference using generative models

Authors:
Dotan↗Schers↗Wygoda↗Pupko↗Belinkov↗

Accurate inference of phylogenetic trees is fundamental to evolutionary biology, yet existing methods rely on complex pipelines involving multiple sequence alignment, explicit evolutionary models, and computationally intensive tree search procedures. Here, we present BetaInfer, a generative framework that reformulates phylogenetic tree inference as a sequence transduction problem. BetaInfer leverages hybrid transformer-based architectures to directly map sets of unaligned sequences to phylogenetic trees represented in Newick format. Trained on large-scale simulated evolutionary data with known ground truth, BetaInfer learns to capture complex evolutionary signals directly from sequence data. Ensemble-based generation of multiple candidate trees further improves robustness, reducing reconstruction error by over 30% relative to single predictions. Across extensive evaluations on both simulated and empirical datasets, BetaInfer achieves competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art phylogenetic pipelines, matching, and in some cases exceeding, the accuracy of established likelihood-based and distance-based methods under a wide range of conditions. Interpretability analyses reveal that BetaInfer leverages internal pairwise-distance computations to synthesize evolutionary relationships into an integrated, global representation that supports direct tree generation. Together, these results demonstrate that generative models can serve as a viable and scalable alternative to standard phylogenetic pipelines.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

$\mu$VLA: On Recurrent Memory for Partially Observable Manipulation in VLA Models

Authors:
Egor Cherepanov↗Nikita Kachaev↗Daniil Zelezetsky↗Aydar Bulatov↗Artem Pshenitsyn↗Yuri Kuratov↗Alexey Skrynnik↗Aleksandr I. Panov↗Alexey K. Kovalev↗

arXiv:2606.12497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict chunks of future actions from the current observation, an assumption that fails under partial observability, where decisions depend on information no longer visible. Existing memory-augmented VLAs simultaneously introduce recurrence, retrieval, compression modules, auxiliary objectives, hierarchical memory, or task-specific architectural changes, so the contribution of recurrence itself remains entangled with surrounding machinery. We present a controlled isolation study of recurrence in a strong pretrained VLA backbone. Our formulation augments the transformer with a small set of learnable memory tokens carried across timesteps and updated through self-attention, trained end to end with truncated backpropagation through time, with no auxiliary losses and no architectural changes. We instantiate this as $\mu$VLA, a family of OpenVLA-OFT variants parameterized by memory width m, TBPTT length K, and the memory update rule (cross-step gradients or a detached EMA), so that recurrence is the only varying factor. On MIKASA-Robo, $\mu$VLA improves average success rate on five training tasks from 0.42 to 0.84 at the strongest setting and reaches 0.23 on held-out tasks with the same memory structure versus 0.07 for the memoryless baseline. On tasks requiring different memory structure, performance remains near baseline. On LIBERO, the strongest recurrent variant achieves 96.2% average success, indicating no regression under full observability. We interpret these results as a calibration of the capability envelope of minimal in-backbone recurrence, identifying the regime in which it is sufficient and the regime where additional memory structure is required. Demos and videos can be found in https://avanturist322.github.io/mu-vla/.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Identification of environmental factors and growth stages in the prediction of fibre yield and fibre quality traits in rain-grown cotton

Authors:
Feng↗Rafter↗Wilson↗Li↗Conaty↗

Context Understanding how and when environmental conditions influence overall crop performance is crucial for optimising the development of genotypes to a specific breeding target environment. We focused on economically important traits of Australian rain-grown cotton including fibre yield and quality traits, which have not been investigated comprehensively. The aim of the study was to identify relevant environmental factors, and the timing and extent of their impact on rain-grown cotton production. Methods We used a data driven approach to analyse the relationship between ten climate related environmental factors across various plant growth stages and eight fibre yield and quality traits, using a large-scale field dataset of 9,283 records collected over 23 years at 4 locations, with 53 unique year-location combinations. We applied eight complementary statistical models including stepwise, penalised and Bayesian linear regression, regression-tree based ensemble methods and deep learning frameworks to (1) select the most essential environmental covariates affecting rain-grown cotton production, and (2) evaluate the predictive performance of these models. Results The environmental impacts on rain-grown cotton production were trait and growth-stage specific. Number of rainy days and solar radiation were identified as the most influential environmental factors for fibre yield traits, vapour pressure deficit at maximum daily temperature was the most influential factor for majority of fibre quality traits. However, each analysed trait was influenced by multiple environmental factors across multiple growth stages (rather than a single factor or a single growth stage). These influential covariates explained a wide range of variation in the traits, accounting for 5.8% to 68.2%. Using the best-fit random forest model, our findings revealed non-linear relationships between key environmental covariates and the traits. Conclusions Environmental factors at different rain-grown cotton growth stages are key determinants for the performance of end-of-season fibre yield and fibre quality parameters. These findings highlight the need to account for environment conditions when developing cotton varieties optimised for rain-grown production systems. Potential strategies are proposed whereby these key environmental factors can be used to increase the rate of genetic gain in rain-grown cotton production systems. Implications The results of this study will be crucial for future genetic evaluations and analyses of genotype-by-environment interaction effects in rain-grown cotton, which must account for the influence of the environment on plant performance. Furthermore, these methods can be applied to other species to identify critical growth stages and environmental factors which most influence crop performance.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

On-chip semi-device-independent quantum random number generator exploiting contextuality

Authors:
Maddalena Genzini↗Caterina Vigliar↗Mujtaba Zahidy↗Hamid Tebyanian↗Andrzej Gajda↗Klaus Petermann↗Lars Zimmermann↗Davide Bacco↗Francesco Da Ros↗

arXiv:2601.08392v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a semi-device-independent quantum random number generator (QRNG) based on the violation of a contextuality inequality, implemented by the integration of two silicon photonic chips. Our system combines a heralded single-photon source with a reconfigurable interferometric mesh to implement qutrit state preparation, transformations, and measurements suitable for testing a KCBS contextuality inequality. This architecture enables the generation of random numbers from the intrinsic randomness of single-photon interference in a complex optical network, while simultaneously allowing a quantitative certification of their security without requiring entanglement. We observe a contextuality violation exceeding the classical bound by more than 10{\sigma}, unambiguously confirming non-classical behavior. From this violation, we certify a conditional min-entropy per experimental round of Hmin = 0.077 +- 0.002, derived via a tailored semidefinite-programming-based security analysis. Each measurement outcome therefore contains at least 0.077 +- 0.002 bits of extractable genuine randomness, corresponding to an asymptotic generation rate of 21.7 +- 0.5 bits/s. These results establish a viable route towards general-purpose, untrusted quantum random number generators compatible with practical integrated photonic quantum networks.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Many-body chirality of topological stabilizer states

Authors:
Tyler D. Ellison↗Dongjin Lee↗Zhi Li↗Amin Moharramipour↗Yasamin Panahi↗Beni Yoshida↗

arXiv:2606.20472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A defining feature of chirality is the distinction between a system and its mirror image. Despite extensive experimental observations of chiral phases and theoretical advances, a quantum-information theoretic characterization of chirality based solely on the entanglement structure of many-body quantum states remains elusive. Here, we introduce the notion of many-body chirality by formulating it as an obstruction to transforming a quantum state into its complex conjugate through finite-depth local operations. We rigorously establish many-body chirality for stabilizer realizations of $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ anyon theories, proving that complex conjugation can be implemented by local quantum channels if and only if the underlying anyon data are mirror invariant. This reveals forms of chirality that evade conventional diagnostics, including examples with vanishing modular commutator, vanishing chiral central charge, and commuting-projector realizations. We further show that this obstruction is intrinsically four-partite, while invisible to tripartite entanglement structure. Finally, we prove that $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ states with $d>2$ possess intrinsic many-body imaginarity: their complex phase structure cannot be removed by finite-depth local unitaries. Remarkably, this includes states that are not many-body chiral.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

Authors:
Zedian Shao↗Charles Fleming↗Teodora Baluta↗

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

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25.
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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