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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Diffusion Approximation for Temporal-Difference Learning with Linear Features under Markovian Noise

Authors:
M. Forzo↗E. Monzio Compagnoni↗A. Russo↗A. Pacchiano↗

arXiv:2606.18183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation is a core method for policy evaluation. Its classical continuous-time description is an ordinary differential equation (ODE), which captures the asymptotic mean dynamics but neglects stochastic fluctuations determining the error floor. We introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE) approximation for linear TD(0) under Markovian noise. The resulting model distinguishes the contraction dynamics governed by the projected Bellman operator from the influence of Markovian sampling. As a consequence, the model explains the constant-stepsize error floor through the interaction between Markovian long-run covariance and the contraction geometry of the projected Bellman operator.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Recurrence After Hepatic Hydatid Cyst Surgery: Scolicidal Agent Application Technique and the Effect of Cystopiliary Fistula

Authors:
Erdogan↗Kol Özbay↗Özbay↗M. A↗

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate long-term outcomes in patients who underwent surgical treatment for hepatic hydatid cyst (HCC) disease and, in particular, to investigate the effect of scolicidal agent (SA) application method and the presence of cystobiliary fistula (CBF) on the development of recurrence. Materials and Methods: This single-center, retrospective study included 197 patients who underwent surgical treatment for HCC disease. Hypertonic saline was used as SA in all patients and was classified as intracystic or pericystic application according to the application method. The presence of CBF was evaluated according to intraoperative and postoperative findings. Patients were followed for 86 months, and the development of recurrence was identified by radiological methods. Comparisons were made between the groups with and without recurrence in terms of SA application method and the presence of CBF. Results: The median age of the patients was 38 years, and the median follow-up period was 86 months. SA application was performed into the cyst in 51.3% of the patients and around the cyst in 48.7%. The presence of CBF was detected in 49.7% of the patients. No statistically significant difference was found between the recurrent and non-recurrent groups in terms of SA application method (p = 0.344). Similarly, no significant relationship was found between the presence of CBF and the development of recurrence (p = 0.721). Conclusion: This study showed that the SA application method and the presence of CBF are not determinants of recurrence in HCC disease. It is thought that recurrence rates can be kept low with appropriate surgical technique and effective biliary tract management.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Reward-Conditioned Attention: How Reward Design Shapes What Autonomous Driving Agents See

Authors:
Mohamed Benabdelouahad↗Ahmed Djalal Hacini↗Nadir Farhi↗Aissa Boulmerka↗

arXiv:2606.25127v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate how reward design shapes the internal attention patterns of reinforcement learning agents trained for autonomous driving. Using three Perceiver-based agents that share identical architectures and training data but differ only in their reward configurations$\unicode{x2014}$ranging from basic violation penalties to continuous proximity penalties$\unicode{x2014}$we analyze cross-attention allocation across 50 real-world scenarios from the Waymo Open Motion Dataset. A central methodological finding is that naïve pooling of timesteps across episodes substantially underestimates the attention$\unicode{x2013}$risk relationship; within-episode correlation with Fisher z-transform aggregation is the appropriate statistic and reveals a robustly positive link between collision risk and agent-directed attention. Building on this validated methodology, we demonstrate two reward-conditioned effects: agents trained with navigation rewards allocate up to $2.0\times$ more attention to GPS-path tokens than those trained with additional proximity penalties$\unicode{x2014}$and $4.7\times$ more than agents with no navigation incentive$\unicode{x2014}$revealing that reward content directly determines which scene elements the encoder prioritizes, and continuous time-to-collision penalties create a $learned vigilance prior$$\unicode{x2014}$elevated resting agent surveillance maintained throughout collision-free phases. In several scenarios, the complete-reward and minimal-reward models exhibit opposite attention$\unicode{x2013}$risk correlation directions, demonstrating that reward design can qualitatively reverse attentional strategy rather than merely modulating its magnitude. These results suggest that attention analysis is a practical diagnostic for verifying that a reward function produces the intended representational behaviour in safety-critical RL systems.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Revisiting LLM Adaptation for 3D CT Report Generation: A Study of Scaling and Diagnostic Priors

Authors:
Vanshali Sharma↗Andrea M. Bejar↗Halil Ertugrul Aktas↗Quoc-Huy Trinh↗Debesh Jha↗Gorkem Durak↗Ulas Bagci↗

Recent advances in multimodal learning, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have demonstrated strong adaptability to natural images. However, extending their use to the medical domain, particularly for volumetric (3D) images, is challenging due to high computational complexity, volumetric dependencies and the semantic gap between visual features and clinical terminology. Naively fine-tuning LLMs on limited medical data often leads to overfitting and clinical hallucination, where linguistic fluency is prioritized over clinical factuality. In this study, we investigate parameter-efficient adaptation strategies for volumetric CT report generation and introduce RAD3D-Prefix, a lightweight diagnostic-prior conditioning framework that minimizes the need for extensive parameter training. This module integrates image embeddings with multi-label diagnostic classification logits, preserving critical clinical details while bridging the semantic gap. By keeping the LLM frozen, our method requires minimal trainable parameters and mitigates the risk of overfitting on small, domain-specific datasets. Through a systematic study spanning LLMs from 96.1M to 1.6B parameters, we find that fine-tuning is most beneficial for smaller LLMs, whereas freezing larger (~1B+ LLMs and training only lightweight projection layers provides a superior trade-off between performance, generalization, and computational efficiency. Across multiple automatic metrics and a clinical reader study, RAD3D-Prefix outperforms comparable parameter-efficient baselines and demonstrates strong out-of-domain generalization while using substantially fewer trainable parameters than fully fine-tuned alternatives.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigation

Authors:
Jingyu Li↗Zhe Liu↗Dongnan Hu↗Junjie Wu↗Zipei Ma↗Wenxiao Wu↗Chao Han↗Zhihui Hao↗Zhikang Liu↗Kun Zhan↗Jiankang Deng↗Xiatian Zhu↗…

World action models~(WAMs) have shown great promise for autonomous driving and urban navigation. Built upon Vision-Language-Action models or video generation models, existing approaches suffer key limitations: (1) High inference latency due to future observation prediction at test time, and (2) tightly coupled video and action modeling leading to representational mismatch and degraded generalization. To address both issues, we propose Metis, an end-to-end WAM framework that decouples video generation and action prediction. Specifically, Metis employs a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture with dedicated experts for video generation and action prediction, preserving the intrinsic distributional properties of each task. To enhance efficiency, we introduce an asymmetric attention mask that enables joint training of both experts while allowing the action model to bypass explicit video generation during inference. This design ensures training-inference consistency and significantly reduces computational costs without compromising planning performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM navhard and navtest benchmarks and the CityWalker navigation benchmark, validating both the generalizability and efficiency across diverse tasks. Real-robot deployments further confirm the practical feasibility of our approach.

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06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On the Singular Control of a Diffusion and its Running Infimum or Supremum

Authors:
Giorgio Ferrari↗Neofytos Rodosthenous↗

arXiv:2501.17577v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study a class of singular stochastic control problems for a one-dimensional diffusion $X$ in which the performance criterion to be optimised depends explicitly on the running infimum $I$ (or supremum $S$) of the controlled process. We introduce two novel integral operators that are consistent with the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation for the resulting two-dimensional singular control problems. The first operator involves integrals where the integrator is the control process of the two-dimensional process $(X,I)$ or $(X,S)$; the second operator concerns integrals where the integrator is the running infimum or supremum process itself. Using these definitions, we prove a general verification theorem for problems involving two-dimensional state-dependent running costs, costs of controlling the process, costs of increasing the running infimum (or supremum) and exit times. Finally, we apply our results to explicitly solve an optimal dividend problem in which the manager's time-preferences depend on the company's historical worst performance.

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07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement Scaling and Problem Structure in Quantum Approximate and Adiabatic Optimization Algorithms

Authors:
Georgios Arapantonis↗Paraj Titum↗Gregory Quiroz↗

arXiv:2606.19502v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement is widely regarded as a key resource underlying the power of quantum algorithms and their potential to achieve quantum advantage. With the emergence of variational quantum algorithms, however, questions have arisen regarding how entanglement relates to problem structure and algorithmic performance in near-term quantum applications. Here, we examine this relationship through the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA), a specific class of variational algorithms, applied to the MaxCut problem. We show that suboptimal variational parameter training can significantly modify the observed entanglement profile, obscuring its scaling behavior. By employing a high-performance optimizer, we find empirical evidence that QAOA exhibits entanglement scaling consistent with that of fermionic Gaussian states (up to a scaling factor) across a broad range of MaxCut instances. We further compare these results with adiabatic quantum computation, observing annealing-schedule-dependent entanglement profiles whose scaling behavior differs markedly from that of QAOA. Together, these findings provide new insight into how entanglement manifests in and distinguishes these two algorithmic paradigms, highlighting its connection to both computational performance and application structure.

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

Repeated Shared Access Enables Grokking, but Edit Propagation Depends on an Addressable Memory

Authors:
Yanan Niu↗

arXiv:2606.20737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study factual edit propagation in a controlled synthetic knowledge-graph QA setting using a 2x2 grid that crosses loop recurrence with shared-memory access: a dense transformer (Dense), a looped transformer (Loop), a dense backbone with shared memory (Dense+Mem), and a looped backbone with shared memory (loop-memory coupling, LMC). The two factors dissociate. For learning, both routes to repeated shared access – looped recomputation and repeated memory rereading – cross the out-of-distribution (OOD) grokking barrier that Dense fails, so repeated shared access is the behavioral regularity, not a specific architecture. For editing, the substrates split along a different axis: applying a single localized factual edit (conditioned on direct success) and measuring 2-hop propagation on a shared pre-edit-correct set, the edit propagates strongly in both memory-bearing cells (LMC 0.78-0.92, Dense+Mem 0.71-0.96) and only weakly in the memory-free ones (Loop 0.04-0.30, Dense 0.00-0.03). The split is along the memory axis, not the loop axis: every memory-bearing seed exceeds every memory-free seed, with no detectable difference between the two memory cells. Crucially Dense+Mem has no recurrence, so the propagating ingredient is an addressable site that an edit can write to and later computation rereads, not loop recomputation; Loop is at best a partial intermediate. The affordance survives coarsening the store (N=128 to N=13): propagation attenuates but the memory/no-memory split persists, so fine granularity buys precision rather than the affordance itself. These results dissociate learning competence from editing affordance – repeated shared access suffices to grok, but edit propagation depends on whether the substrate exposes an addressable memory that the forward computation can write to and later reread, an affordance that loop recurrence provides only partially.

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Acute Ischemic Stroke Detection on Non-Contrast CT: A Deep Learning Approach

Authors:
Goyal↗Stevens↗R. D↗

Acute ischemic stroke (AIS) is a leading cause of disability and death while effective treatment requires quick and accurate diagnosis. Non-contrast CT (NCCT) is widely used in the initial screening of AIS, but stroke detection is challenging because early changes on NCCT are subtle or indistinguishable. Using hyperacute NCCTs as inputs and diffusion-weighted MRI as ground truth, we trained a deep learning algorithm to classify patients with AIS and segment the stroke lesions. We hypothesized that this approach would accurately detect hyperacute tissue density changes on NCCT. For the classification task, our ResNet50 model delivered the best performance (with 98.5% accuracy, 97.4% precision, and 100% recall on an evaluation set). Classification performance remained strong when restricted to lesions smaller than 5 mL, which constituted the majority of our evaluation cases. For the segmentation task accomplished using a range of U-Net architectures, performance was acceptable for large lesions and declined sharply for smaller lesions. Together, these findings demonstrate the feasibility of deep learning for AIS detection and represent a step towards faster triage and treatment for stroke patients.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

GPT-Based Fast Simulation of CLAS12 Detector Hits via Conditional Autoregressive Generation

Authors:
Cole Granger↗James Giroux↗Richard Tyson↗Maurizio Ungaro↗Cristiano Fanelli↗

arXiv:2606.16035v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern particles physics experiments have demonstrated an increasing need for fast, high-fidelity detector simulation as detector components have improved and subsequent computational requirements approach the limits of available resources. Recently, deep generative models have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Monte-Carlo methods, with recent works drawing inspiration from large language models (LLMs) and self-supervised next-token prediction methods. In this work, we present an application of a GPT-style autoregressive transformer as a fast surrogate model for the calorimeter inside the CLAS12 experiment at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. The model is conditioned on incident momentum and generates realistic detector hits autoregressively across all nine calorimeter layers as sequences of strip, ADC, and TDC tokens. We demonstrate that the model faithfully reproduces hit multiplicity, spatial distributions, energy deposits, and the energy-momentum response of the electromagnetic calorimeter. The generator achieves inference rates exceeding 700 events per second on a single GPU, providing a substantial speedup over traditional Geant4-based simulations while maintaining physics fidelity essential for high-luminosity experimental programs.

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11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Genetic overlap with schizophrenia and Parkinson's reveals psychomotor basis of physical activity

Authors:
van der Walt↗Shadrin↗Tesfaye↗van der Meer↗Andreassen↗Rokicki↗Campbell↗

Background Physical activity levels are altered across neuropsychiatric disorders. While these traits are heritable, the genetic overlap between normal variation in activity levels and neuropsychiatric disorders that involve motor dysfunction such as schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease (PD) remains unexplored. Objectives To investigate the genetic overlap between physical activity, schizophrenia, and PD. Methods Multi-Trait Analysis of genome-wide association studies (GWAS) was used to boost the GWAS power for objectively measured physical activity (n=89,683) by leveraging three GWAS of self-reported activity (n=124,842-377,234). Genetic overlap between the activity, schizophrenia and PD was characterized using linkage disequilibrium score regression, causal mixture modeling, and local genetic correlations. Pleiotropic variants were identified using the conjunctional false discovery rate, annotated to genes, and investigated for enrichment of biological processes, tissue types and association with GWAS-catalog traits. Results Genetic correlations of physical activity with schizophrenia and PD were negligible (rg=-0.02-0.02, p>0.05), but polygenic overlap was substantial, reflecting mixed effect directions. We identified 32 independent variants shared with schizophrenia and 11 with PD, including CRHR1, MAPT and KANSL1 within the 17q21.31 region. Schizophrenia-shared variants mapped to genes differentially expressed in subcortical regions, especially amygdala and basal ganglia. Gene-set analyses revealed enrichment for mental health and cognitive-behavioural traits (schizophrenia-shared genes) versus structural brain phenotypes and neurodegenerative disorders (PD-shared genes). Conclusions Despite negligible genetic correlations, physical activity shares substantial genetic architecture with schizophrenia and PD. Shared genes implicated brain regions and traits spanning motor and cognitive-affective function, consistent with the psychomotor nature of physical activity.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Hierarchical Probabilistic Conformal Prediction for Distributed Energy Resources Adoption

Authors:
Wenbin Zhou↗Shixiang Zhu↗

arXiv:2411.12193v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The rapid growth of distributed energy resources (DERs) presents both opportunities and operational challenges for electric grid management. Accurately predicting DER adoption is critical for proactive infrastructure planning, but the inherent uncertainty and spatial disparity of DER growth complicate traditional forecasting approaches. Moreover, the hierarchical structure of distribution grids demands that predictions satisfy statistical guarantees at both the circuit and substation levels, a non-trivial requirement for reliable decision-making. In this paper, we propose a novel uncertainty quantification framework for DER adoption predictions that ensures validity across hierarchical grid structures. Leveraging a multivariate Hawkes process to model DER adoption dynamics and a tailored split conformal prediction algorithm, we introduce a new nonconformity score that preserves statistical guarantees under aggregation while maintaining prediction efficiency. We establish theoretical validity under mild conditions and demonstrate through empirical evaluation on customer-level solar panel installation data from Indianapolis, Indiana that our method consistently outperforms existing baselines in both predictive accuracy and uncertainty calibration.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TaFD: Threat-Aware Frequency Decoupling for Adversarial Robustness against Heterogeneous Attacks

Authors:
Mengda Xie↗Yiling He↗Meie Fang↗

Multi-threat robustness remains a fundamental challenge in deep learning. Although joint adversarial training (JAT) is widely adopted, it suffers from negative transfer under heterogeneous threats, particularly between $\ell_p$-bounded and semantic attacks. Through first-order gradient analysis, we formalize this as gradient incompatibility and theoretically establish the necessity of decoupled optimization. We further reveal that these conflicting threats exhibit separable spectral characteristics in the frequency domain. Motivated by this observation, we propose Threat-aware Frequency Decoupling (TaFD), a two-stage defense framework that reformulates JAT as a frequency-domain divide-and-conquer paradigm. TaFD first discovers latent threat domains via unsupervised clustering of attack spectral prototypes and trains a lightweight classifier for inference-time threat domain identification. Conditioned on the prediction, TaFD employs a Frequency-Conditional Convolution that learns threat-domain-specific spectral masks and routes each sample to the corresponding expert, enforcing structural parameter separation and alleviating optimization conflicts. We validate TaFD on three representative image-classification benchmarks (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny-ImageNet) and on two representative architectures (the convolutional ResNet and the hybrid-transformer MobileViT). Extensive results demonstrate that TaFD achieves more balanced robustness against heterogeneous attacks than existing JAT and frequency-domain baselines, improving average robust accuracy by approximately 11\% over the strongest baseline while maintaining leading clean accuracy.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

4DSloMo: 4D Reconstruction for High Speed Scene with Asynchronous Capture

Authors:
Yutian Chen↗Shi Guo↗Tianshuo Yang↗Lihe Ding↗Xiuyuan Yu↗Jinwei Gu↗Tianfan Xue↗

Reconstructing fast-dynamic scenes from multi-view videos is crucial for high-speed motion analysis and realistic 4D reconstruction. However, the majority of 4D capture systems are limited to frame rates below 30 FPS (frames per second), and a direct 4D reconstruction of high-speed motion from low FPS input may lead to undesirable results. In this work, we propose a high-speed 4D capturing system only using low FPS cameras, through novel capturing and processing modules. On the capturing side, we propose an asynchronous capture scheme that increases the effective frame rate by staggering the start times of cameras. By grouping cameras and leveraging a base frame rate of 25 FPS, our method achieves an equivalent frame rate of 100-200 FPS without requiring specialized high-speed cameras. On processing side, we also propose a novel generative model to fix artifacts caused by 4D sparse-view reconstruction, as asynchrony reduces the number of viewpoints at each timestamp. Specifically, we propose to train a video-diffusion-based artifact-fix model for sparse 4D reconstruction, which refines missing details, maintains temporal consistency, and improves overall reconstruction quality. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly enhances high-speed 4D reconstruction compared to synchronous capture.

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15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Comparative Evaluation of Pretrained Large Language Models for Suicide Risk Prediction from Clinical Notes in U.S. Veterans

Authors:
Levy↗Levis↗Dimambro↗Rozema↗Ayandeh↗Diallo↗Zhou↗Li↗Wu↗Shiner↗Gui↗

Background: Suicide remains a significant and potentially preventable cause of death among United States veterans. Predictive models based on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, including the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs' Recovery Engagement and Coordination for Health-Veterans Enhanced Treatment (REACH-VET) program, aim to identify individuals at elevated risk for enhanced monitoring and follow-up. Increasing evidence suggests that unstructured clinical narratives contain additional psychosocial information that may enhance risk prediction when analyzed using natural language processing (NLP). However, optimal approaches for representing clinical text remain uncertain. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable contextual text representations that capture complex semantic relationships beyond traditional lexical methods. Methods: We compared the predictive performance of pretrained LLMs with classical bag-of-words (BoW) representations for suicide risk prediction using clinical notes from 27,241 veterans receiving care in the Veterans Health Administration. Patients were stratified by REACH-VET risk tier (low, moderate, high), and models were evaluated across prediction windows defined by note look-back periods (

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16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-27

Sequential chemo-immunotherapy followed by standard versus reduced thoracic radiotherapy for older and/or frail stage III non-small-cell lung cancer: A randomized open-label cohort trial

Authors:
Wei-Xiang Qi↗

by Wei-Xiang Qi, Shuyan Li, Mengdi Wang, Huan Li, Feifei Xu, Lei Yao, Biao Yu, Linlin Chen, Gang Cai, Cheng Xu, Xianwen Sun, Zhiyao Bao, Jiayi Chen, Yi Xiang, Shengguang Zhao Background The appropriateness of concurrent chemoradiotherapy (cCRT) for older or clinically vulnerable stage III unresectable non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients remains contentious. Furthermore, the survival implications of de-escalating thoracic radiotherapy (RT) intensity in this population have not been conclusively elucidated. Methods and findings We conducted a phase II randomized, open-label, two-cohort (non-comparative) trial at a tertiary hospital in China (NCT05557552). Between September 30, 2022 and April 30, 2024, we enrolled 56 older and/or frail patients with stage III NSCLC who were ineligible for cCRT. The primary endpoint was the 1-year progression-free survival (PFS) rate estimated using the Kaplan–Meier method. Secondary endpoints included objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), and safety. In the intention-to-treat (ITT) set, which included all 56 randomized patients who received at least one dose of study treatment, the 1-year PFS was 84.3% (95% confidence interval [CI] [70.3%, 98.3%]) in the standard RT group and 70.7% (95% CI [54.3%, 87.1%]) in the reduced RT group. In the per-protocol set (53 patients), the 1-year PFS was 82.9% (95% CI [68.9%, 98.8%]) in the standard RT group and 73.4% (95% CI [58.3%, 92.4%]), with a median follow-up of 24 months. Among 56 patients in the safety analysis set, 71.4% of patients experienced grade 3/4 adverse events (AEs) in the standard RT group and 53.6% in the reduced RT group. One patient (3.6%) in the reduced RT and three patients (10.7%) in the standardized RT experienced grade 5 AEs. The main limitations are the non-comparative design, small sample size, and lack of power to establish non-inferiority or superiority. Conclusion The current study suggested that reduced RT combined with sequential chemo-immunotherapy might be feasible for older/frail patients intolerant to cCRT, showing numerically similar survival outcomes. These exploratory findings warrant confirmation in larger, adequately powered randomized trials. Trial registration The trial had been registered on ClinicalTrials.gov on Sep 30, 2022.ClinicalTrials.gov NCT05557552

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis

Authors:
Andoni Rodr\'iguez↗Alberto Pozanco↗Daniel Borrajo↗

arXiv:2606.14831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents and characterizes a spectrum of previously unreported behaviours we term Constraint-Evasive Fabrication (CEF): when an LLM agent operates under irreconcilable constraints (where no response can simultaneously satisfy all active rules) it spontaneously fabricates plausible external obstacles and presents them as a fact. At the extreme end of this spectrum lies Constraint-Evasive Thanatosis (CET); the limit case where, rather than inventing a plausible excuse, the model simulates a full system crash to make the user disengage entirely. We first observed CET in an uncontrolled deployment test, where a GPT-4o banking agent fabricated Python-style exception traces (complete with memory addresses) to feign a system failure when threatened by a user. In subsequent controlled experiments, the model independently invented audit restrictions, microservice architectures, error codes, and service timeouts, none present in its prompt. Reproduction attempts across pressure levels and attacker personas yielded CEF consistently but with substantial variation in form, onset, and severity: the phenomenon is robust but stochastic. Critically, injecting ground-truth data mid-conversation did not restore honest behaviour once fabrication had taken hold (the model ignored correct information and continued confabulating) suggesting CEF is self-reinforcing rather than a knowledge gap. We show that (1) standard enterprise guardrails routinely create CEF-enabling conditions in production, (2) current RLHF procedures suppress but cannot eliminate CEF, and (3) existing safety benchmarks do not test for this failure mode. Our results highlight the need for irreconcilable-constraint benchmarks, CEF-aware training procedures, and deployment-time detection methods before constrained agents become further entrenched in high-stakes domains.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Resourcefulness of non-classical continuous-variable quantum gates

Authors:
Massimo Frigerio↗Antoine Debray↗Nicolas Treps↗Mattia Walschaers↗

arXiv:2410.09226v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In continuous-variable quantum computation, identifying key elements that enable a quantum computational advantage is a long-standing issue. Starting from the standard results on the necessity of Wigner negativity, we develop a comprehensive and versatile approach in which the techniques of $(s)$-ordered quasiprobabilities are exploited to provide rigorous statements on the simulability of photonic quantum circuits consisting of previously characterized gates and thereby identifying the contribution of each quantum gate to the potential achievement of quantum computational advantage. This is achieved by means of an analysis of the so-called transfer function, allowing us to highlight the resourcefulness of a gate set. As such this technique can be straightforwardly applied to current continuous-variables quantum circuits, while also constraining the tolerable amount of losses above which any potential quantum advantage can be ruled out. We use $(s)$-ordered quasiprobability distributions on phase-space to capture the non-classical features in the protocol, and focus our technique entirely on the ordering parameter $s$. This allows us to highlight the resourcefulness and robustness to loss of a universal set of unitary gates comprising three distinct Gaussian gates and any non-Gaussian unitary gate, providing important insight on the role of non-Gaussianity.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Twin-beam advantage in quantum LiDAR under correlated noise

Authors:
Valeria Cimini↗

arXiv:2606.17908v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum light promises improved precision in optical remote sensing, but its practical advantage depends critically on whether nonclassical resources remain useful under realistic noise and experimentally accessible detection. This question becomes especially relevant for LiDAR systems, where a quantum advantage has been demonstrated for target detection and joint range-velocity estimation, but mostly under idealized conditions or simple noise models, such as optical loss and thermal background. A key open point is whether entanglement provides an operational advantage when the dominant disturbance is not independent noise, but structured interference across sensing modes. Here, we address this question by studying the joint estimation of target range and velocity with bright two-mode Gaussian probes and homodyne detection, comparing coherent, separable squeezed, and twin-beam states at a fixed resource budget. Our results reveal a hierarchy of quantum resources set by the noise structure: separable squeezing provides a robust advantage over coherent illumination under loss and thermal background, whereas twin-beam probes become superior under correlated jamming when the receiver is adaptively optimized. These results establish correlated noise as the operational regime in which entanglement provides a robustness advantage beyond local squeezing, opening a receiver-aware route to quantum-enhanced LiDAR in realistic and potentially adversarial environments.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

Authors:
Ali Arabat↗Mohammed Sayagh↗

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

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

Smoothness Errors in Dynamics Models and How to Avoid Them

Authors:
Edward Berman↗Luisa Li↗Jung Yeon Park↗Robin Walters↗

arXiv:2602.05352v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Modern neural networks have shown promise for solving partial differential equations over surfaces, often by discretizing the surface as a mesh and learning with a mesh-aware graph neural network. However, graph neural networks suffer from oversmoothing, where a node's features become increasingly similar to those of its neighbors. Unitary graph convolutions, which are mathematically constrained to preserve smoothness, have been proposed to address this issue. Despite this, in many physical systems, such as diffusion processes, smoothness naturally increases and unitarity may be overconstraining. In this paper, we systematically study the smoothing effects of different GNNs for dynamics modeling and prove that unitary convolutions hurt performance for such tasks. We propose relaxed unitary convolutions that balance smoothness preservation with the natural smoothing required for physical systems. We also generalize unitary and relaxed unitary convolutions from graphs to meshes. In experiments on PDEs such as the heat and wave equations over complex meshes and on weather forecasting, we find that our method outperforms several strong baselines, including mesh-aware transformers and equivariant neural networks.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

AI translation of literary texts is "fine", but readers still prefer human translations

Authors:
Yves Ferstler↗Adam Podoxin↗Ty Brassington↗Roman Grundkiewicz↗Maite Taboada↗Marzena Karpinska↗

AI translation of literary works is increasingly common. While the content may be rendered adequately, we do not know enough about how readers experience it in terms of immersiveness and literary effect, aspects poorly captured by automatic machine translation metrics or human evaluation targeting fluency and adequacy. We ask 15 avid readers to compare recently published human translations (HT) to machine translations (MT) generated with an agentic large language model (LLM)-based pipeline, for 15 recent novels in French, Polish, and Japanese and translated into English. Readers evaluated approximately 8K-word excerpts in two conditions: immersive reading of the whole excerpt (30 comparisons) and close reading of 386 aligned HT-MT chunk pairs (772 comparisons), with two readers per book and in alternating order of presentation. Overall, readers find MT "fine", but prefer HT (slightly at excerpt-level 19/30, more clearly at chunk-level 522/772) for its ease, clarity, and immersive nature. Readers' highlights show that MT's quality varies more within one book than HT's does. Crucially, readers cannot reliably tell the two apart (17/30 guess correctly) and tend to prefer the version they believe to be human. Automatic metrics, including LLM-as-a-judge approaches, fail to recover reader preferences and favor MT. We release LAIT (Literary AI Translation), a reader-centered evaluation dataset with 1K reader comments, 2K judgments and preference ratings, and 7.2K span-level annotations, along with our evaluation protocol and supporting interface.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Quantifying Prior Dominance in RAG Systems

Authors:
Barak Or↗

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds Large Language Models in external knowledge, yet current evaluations rely on discrete heuristics that suffer from ''epistemic blindness'' - failing to distinguish genuine contextual information extraction from parametric memory recall. To address this, we introduce the Normalized Context Utilization (NCU) metric, leveraging continuous token log-probabilities across zero-shot, oracle, and adversarial conditions to strictly quantify contextual information gain. Evaluating architectures ranging from 1.5B to 72B parameters alongside a proprietary commercial API reveals that for strict factual extraction (without Chain-of-Thought reasoning), traditional scaling laws exhibit extreme diminishing returns: highly efficient Small Language Models (SLMs) match or outperform high-capacity architectures. Furthermore, we demonstrate that ``Prior Dominance'' correlates with model scale and proprietary alignments. The evaluated commercial API not only overrode explicit external evidence in nearly half of adversarial conflicts, but also frequently suffered from systemic confidence collapse (Negative Transfer) when its parametric priors were contradicted. Our findings highlight the structural epistemic advantage and superior contextual adherence of SLMs in strict extraction workflows.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Structured Representation Learning with Locally Linear Embeddings and Adaptive Feature Fusion

Authors:
Somjit Nath↗Jackson J Cone↗Derek Nowrouzezahrai↗Samira Ebrahimi Kahou↗

arXiv:2606.18469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neuroscientific research has revealed that the brain encodes complex behaviors by leveraging structured, low-dimensional manifolds and dynamically fusing multiple sources of information through adaptive gating mechanisms. Inspired by these principles, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that encourages the disentanglement of dynamics-specific and reward-specific features, drawing direct parallels to how neural circuits separate and integrate information for efficient decision-making. Our approach leverages locally linear embeddings (LLEs) to capture the intrinsic, locally linear structure inherent in many environments, mirroring the local smoothness observed in neural population activity, while concurrently deriving reward-specific features through the standard RL objective. An attention mechanism, analogous to cortical gating, adaptively fuses these complementary representations on a per-state basis. Experimental results on benchmark tasks demonstrate that our method, grounded in neuroscientific principles, improves learning efficiency and overall performance compared to conventional RL approaches, highlighting the benefits of explicitly modeling local state structures and adaptive feature selection as observed in biological systems.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Family-Aware Residual Architecture for Predicting Quantum Circuit Simulation Performance

Authors:
Honjar Xing↗Yehong Jiang↗Xianbang Wang↗Zehua Wang↗Zhicheng Jiang↗

arXiv:2606.11620v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Approximate tensor-network simulators enable classical simulation of quantum circuits beyond the reach of exact methods, but selecting optimal approximation parameters – such as bond dimension thresholds – remains a costly trial-and-error process. We present a family-aware neural architecture that predicts both the minimum approximation threshold required to achieve target fidelity and the expected wall-clock runtime for quantum circuit simulation, given only the circuit's OpenQASM description and execution context. Our key insight is that quantum circuits from different algorithmic families (e.g., QFT, Grover, VQE) exhibit fundamentally distinct simulation cost profiles due to their differing entanglement structures. We employ family-conditioned residual corrections – additive, family-specific adjustments atop a shared backbone, drawing on established conditional computation techniques – enabling the model to capture both universal circuit properties and algorithmic nuances. The architecture incorporates a pretrained family classifier (97.5% accuracy) and domain-informed algorithm fingerprint features derived from gate-composition heuristics. Evaluated on circuits spanning 7–130 qubits across 10 algorithm families, our system achieves 79.5% exact threshold accuracy (91.2% within one rung) and $R^2 = 0.82$ runtime correlation, with inference completing in approximately 50 ms – replacing trial-and-error simulation runs that may take minutes to hours. Ablation studies confirm that family-aware modeling provides the single largest performance improvement (+3.2 percentage points), validating the hypothesis that algorithm family is a first-class feature for simulation cost prediction.

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