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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Syndrome aware mitigation of logical errors

Authors:
Dorit Aharonov↗Yosi Atia↗Eyal Bairey↗Zvika Brakerski↗Itsik Cohen↗Omri Golan↗Ilya Gurwich↗Netanel H. Lindner↗Maor Shutman↗

arXiv:2512.23810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Broad applications of quantum computers will require error correction (EC). However, hardware roadmaps indicate that physical qubit numbers will remain limited in the foreseeable future, leading to residual logical errors that constrain the size and accuracy of achievable computations. Recent work suggested logical error mitigation (LEM), which applies known error mitigation (EM) methods to logical errors, eliminating their effect at the cost of a runtime overhead. We introduce syndrome-aware logical error mitigation (SALEM), which mitigates logical errors conditioned on the error syndromes measured during error correction. The runtime overhead of SALEM is exponentially lower than that of LEM schemes which do not make use of syndrome data, enabling substantially larger circuit volumes that can be executed accurately. Compared to the routinely used combination of error correction and syndrome rejection (post-selection), SALEM increases the size of reliably executable computations by orders of magnitude. In the practical setting where space and time overheads are fixed and error reduction methods are compared by their resulting estimation errors, we observe a surprising phenomenon: SALEM, which tightly combines EC with EM, can outperform physical EM even above the standard fault-tolerance (pseudo) threshold. Thus, SALEM can make use of EC in regimes of physical error rates where EC is commonly deemed useless.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

From spectral structure to sensing limits in quantum thermometry

Authors:
Youssef Aiache↗Simone Cavazzoni↗Abderrahim El Allati↗Paolo Bordone↗Matteo G. A. Paris↗

arXiv:2606.25933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The precision of a quantum thermometer is fundamentally constrained by the spectral structure of the probe itself, and a systematic mapping between the configurations of energy levels and thermometric performance provides relevant information to design optimized devices. In this work, we establish such a mapping by analyzing a broad class of quantum systems, ranging from finite spin ensembles and degenerate atoms to confining potentials, quantum walks, and continuous-spectrum models. We derive exact scaling laws for the quantum Fisher information, revealing two distinct high-temperature universality classes: finite-spectrum probes exhibit a $T^{-4}$ decay, while unbounded or continuous spectra yield a slower $T^{-2}$ decay. At low temperatures, we show that sensitivity, though universally exponentially suppressed, can be enhanced arbitrarily by engineering degenerate excited states or a quantum walk on a fully connected topology. By contrast, specific quantum walk topologies provide a distinct enhancement mechanism based on gap engineering, whereby an optimal network size yields an optimized $T^{-2}$ low-temperature scaling. Furthermore, power-law spectra enable tunable scaling of thermometric performance with system size, offering a design principle for optimal probes in specific temperature windows. Our results contribute to transform spectral information into a resource for quantum thermometry, providing both fundamental bounds and practical guidelines to tailored temperature sensing.

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

Recover Semantics First, Generate Better: Improved Latent Modeling for 3D MRI Reconstruction and Cross-Contrast Synthesis

Authors:
Yonghao Chen↗Sicheng Yang↗Rui Tang↗Lei Zhu↗

Multi-contrast magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provides complementary information for clinical diagnosis. However, acquiring all MRI sequences is often time-consuming and costly. Recent generative models perform cross-contrast synthesis to address this issue by inferring absent contrasts from the available ones. Nevertheless, synthesizing 3D MRI presents significant challenges. Due to the massive volume sizes, operating directly in the pixel space is computationally prohibitive; therefore, a common approach is to first compress the 3D volumes into a latent space and subsequently train generative models in that space. We observe that existing compression architectures face several critical issues: they under-preserve long-range anatomical coherence, discard clinically meaningful semantics, and rely on optimization objectives that lead to over-smoothed reconstructions. Ultimately, these shortcomings compromise the performance of subsequent generative models. In this work, we propose a semantics-first latent modeling framework for 3D MRI reconstruction and cross-contrast synthesis. Specifically, we introduce a Latent Harmonization Encoder (LHE) to capture global anatomical dependencies, ensuring coherent volumetric representations. To mitigate semantic degradation during latent compression, we further design a Semantic Recovery Block (SRB) that injects high-level priors from a self-supervised semantic teacher, enhancing contrast-aware separability in the latent space. Additionally, we propose an Anatomy-aware Frequency Loss (AFL) to adaptively preserve diagnostically relevant high-frequency structures. Extensive experiments on two public multi-contrast MRI datasets demonstrate consistent improvements in reconstruction fidelity and cross-contrast synthesis quality. Our code is available at https://github.com/script-Yang/RSF.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cortisol Stress Response is Associated with Iron Status in Pregnancy

Authors:
Reid↗B. M↗Celestin↗G. F↗Georgieff↗M. K↗Mbayiwa↗Keenan↗

Background: Iron deficiency (ID) affects up to 40% of pregnant women in the third trimester, even in highly resourced and iron-supplemented populations, with adverse consequences for maternal health and long-term offspring development. Psychological stress may compromise iron status through hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis dysregulation and inflammation, but no study has directly examined cortisol in relation to iron status across human pregnancy. Objective: This longitudinal study examined associations between HPA function and maternal iron status across pregnancy and tested whether IL-6 and CRP mediated the relationship between cortisol and ferritin across gestation. Methods: One hundred sixty-eight pregnant Black women with Medicaid insurance completed up to four laboratory assessments across pregnancy. Salivary cortisol was measured before and in response to the Trier Social Stress Test, yielding basal and reactive cortisol indices. Serum ferritin, IL-6, and CRP were collected at each visit. Trimester-specific regression models examined cortisol reactivity in relation to ferritin; linear mixed-effects models with moderated mediation tested whether basal cortisol predicted ferritin via inflammation. Results: Higher cortisol reactivity was associated with lower ferritin specifically in the third trimester (std. {beta} = -0.197, p = .004). Higher basal cortisol predicted a steeper IL-6 rise across gestation (p = .002), and IL-6 was positively associated with ferritin (b = 0.236, p = .006), consistent with inflammatory iron sequestration. The indirect effect of basal cortisol on ferritin via IL-6 was statistically significant, and higher basal cortisol was negatively associated with cortisol reactivity in the third trimester. No pathway was observed through CRP. Conclusion: Greater cortisol reactivity predicted lower third-trimester ferritin, a pattern that suggests cumulative iron depletion, atypically sustained HPA reactivity in late pregnancy, or both. To our knowledge, this is the first prospective study linking cortisol reactivity to iron status across human pregnancy, identifying maternal stress physiology as a novel target for understanding and addressing gestational iron deficiency.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?

Authors:
Thennal DK↗Hans Ole Hatzel↗

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a consistent trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a ``mean'' generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.

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

Calibration Drift Under Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Budgets Induce Overconfidence in Large Language Models

Authors:
Prakul Sunil Hiremath↗Harshit R. Hiremath↗

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is widely used to improve accuracy and reliability, but its effect on calibration is not fully understood. We show that this picture is incomplete: in some settings, increasing the reasoning budget beyond a task-specific threshold can cause models to become systematically overconfident, assigning high confidence to incorrect answers. We call this phenomenon Calibration Drift Under Reasoning (CDUR) and study it both theoretically and empirically. We define reasoning budget B and analyze conditions under which Expected Calibration Error ECE(B) follows a non-monotonic pattern: it first decreases as reasoning corrects errors, then increases as longer reasoning produces internally consistent but incorrect explanations. We propose a Hypothesis Lock-In model based on autoregressive generation to explain this behavior. We evaluate Llama-3.1-8B and Llama-3.3-70B on 47 reasoning-trap questions across four reasoning budgets and three seeds (1,368 API calls; 574 valid responses). The 8B model shows non-monotonic calibration behavior, while results for the 70B model are limited to baseline evaluation and are inconclusive for budget-dependent effects. We introduce CABStop, a calibration-aware stopping rule that halts reasoning when confidence diverges from an auxiliary accuracy estimate. These results suggest that increasing reasoning depth does not always improve reliability and should be monitored carefully.

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07.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-15

Spatial transcriptomic-metabolic features of tumor foci and tumor capsule in microvascular invasion with hepatocellular carcinoma: A spatial multi-omics study

Authors:
Zhi-Hui Luo↗

by Zhi-Hui Luo, Na Wang, Jingwei Zhao, Fei Long, Si Wu, Wei Zhong, Wei-Ming Chen, Bicheng Wang, Kun Wang, Yufeng Yuan, Jingjiao Zhou, Chunhui Yuan, Fubing Wang Background Microvascular invasion (MVI) is closely related to the recurrence and metastasis of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC), but the underlying cellular mechanism remains largely elusive. This study aims to elucidate the regional cellular discrepancy between MVI-positive (MVI+) and MVI-negative (MVI−) HCC by integrating Spatial transcriptomics (ST) and spatial metabolomics (SM). Methods and findings ST and SM were performed on six tissue samples from four patients (including 2 MVI+, 2 MVI−, and 2 paratumor tissues), with the integration of 79 public single-cell RNA sequencing datasets of HCC. Patient identity was used as a covariate in the linear equation for regional differentially expressed gene analysis with the ST data. Clinical validation was conducted through multiplex immunofluorescence staining in 79 patients, together with external validation in the cancer genome atlas (TCGA)-liver hepatocellular carcinoma (LIHC) cohort (n = 299) and an independent microarray dataset (n = 62). For cell-type-specific metabolic profiling, spatial transcriptomic-metabolic registration was performed. The functional roles of key metabolites were further validated in vitro using inflammatory cancer-associated fibroblasts (iCAFs) derived from hepatic stellate cells (HSCs) and primary CAFs through co-culture models and various functional assays assessing cell proliferation, migration, and invasion. In the tumor lesion, a malignant STMN1+HMGN2+GPC3+ cell subtype enriched in MVI+ HCC was identified, which exhibited enhanced proliferative activity and was associated with poor prognosis. This finding was further confirmed in a local cohort of 79 patients, where multiplex immunofluorescence staining for the three genes (STMN1, HMGN2, and GPC3) showed significantly higher expression in the MVI+ group than in the MVI− group (p = 0.046). Integrated SM analysis further revealed that this cell population underwent metabolic reprogramming characterized by suppressed glycerolipid metabolism. In the tumor capsule, iCAFs-related genes were downregulated in MVI+ cases, and iCAFs were located distally from the tumor boundary. Spatial metabolite mapping showed a strong correlation between taurine and iCAFs, and functional assays demonstrated that taurine promotes HCC proliferation and migration by suppressing iCAF activity. One limitation of this study is the small sample size of spatial omics data, which hinders a more complete molecular functional analysis of the STMN1+HMGN2+GPC3+ cell subtype and iCAFs in MVI+ HCC. Larger-scale ST cohorts are required to further validate and expand the findings of this study. Conclusions This integrative spatial atlas proposes a hypothesis that there exists a highly proliferative and metabolically reprogrammed malignant cell subtype in the tumor lesion of MVI+ HCC, and that taurine in the tumor capsule modulates iCAF activity to influence tumor progression. The exploratory results provide mechanistic insights into MVI-related HCC progression and offer potential avenues for targeted therapeutic intervention of MVI+ HCC.

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08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PHI-Reason: evidence-grounded species-level phage-host prediction from structured biological text profiles

Authors:
Zhang↗Y.-z↗Xu↗Imoto↗

Phage–host interaction (PHI) prediction is a fundamental problem in microbiology with applications in microbial ecology and microbiome engineering. Existing computational approaches typically convert phage and host information into numerical representations derived from sequence similarity, protein content, genome composition or reference databases, then score candidate hosts or train host-prediction models. Although effective, such representations often make it difficult to inspect which biological evidence supports a prediction. Here, we present PHI-Reason, a species-level PHI prediction framework that reformulates host prediction as constrained biological text reasoning. Instead of embedding phages and hosts directly as numerical vectors, PHI-Reason converts heterogeneous PHI-related evidence from phage genomes, host genomes, functional annotations, homology searches and biological metadata into modular natural-language profiles. A frozen large language model then performs species-level candidate-host ranking or pairwise PHI assessment by integrating the supplied evidence at inference time. Across species-level benchmarks, PHI-Reason achieved competitive host-prediction performance and recovered complementary correct assignments relative to established sequence- and reference-based methods. Its explicit profile design enabled systematic evidence perturbation and rationale-grounding analyses, showing that predictions depend on coherent multi-source biological evidence and that hallucination risk from unsupported or incomplete profiles can be made operationally measurable. These results position PHI-Reason as a constrained evidence-integration framework for species-level PHI prediction. Rather than replacing sequence-based predictors, it provides an interpretable layer that shows how far explicit biological evidence can support host inference, and where that evidence falls short.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MENTOR: Reinforcement Learning via Flexible Teacher-Optimized Rewards for Tool-Use Distillation

Authors:
ChangSu Choi↗Hoyun Song↗Dongyeon Kim↗WooHyeon Jung↗Minkyung Cho↗Sunjin Park↗NohHyeob Bae↗Seona Yu↗KyungTae Lim↗

Distilling the tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) into small language models (SLMs) is essential for their practical application. The predominant approach, supervised fine-tuning (SFT), suffers from poor out-of-domain (OOD) generalization due to its rigid alignment with static teacher trajectories. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers an alternative, the capacity limitations of SLMs pose a severe dilemma: sparse outcome rewards provide insufficient guidance, whereas strict trajectory matching imposes overly restrictive constraints. To bridge this capacity-driven gap, we propose MENTOR, which introduces a flexible yet process-aware reward structure. Instead of enforcing rigid replication, MENTOR uses the teacher's reference to guide tool-use behavior, balancing behavioral alignment with downstream performance. Extensive experiments on controlled executable-tool benchmarks demonstrate that MENTOR improves OOD tool-use performance compared to SFT and strict RL baselines. Our findings suggest that within verifiable tool-use environments, flexible tool-use alignment offers a more effective approach than strict trajectory replication for developing adaptable small models.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Plasma proteomics reveals clinical and mechanistic heterogeneity among individuals who develop coronary artery disease

Authors:
Yang↗Tan↗Carrasco-Zanini↗Su↗C.-Y↗Zhou↗Koyama↗Natarajan↗langenberg↗Lu↗Yoshiji↗

BACKGROUND: Individuals who develop coronary artery disease (CAD) are clinically and mechanistically heterogeneous, and understanding this variation is crucial for precise risk stratification and tailored interventions. However, the molecular mechanisms that connect these two kinds of heterogeneity remain unclear, limiting progress toward biologically grounded risk stratification and targeted interventions. Here, we investigated the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD by leveraging plasma proteomic signatures, placed individuals along continuous metabolic gradients and revealed the molecular programs underlying these patterns, thereby linking mechanistic variation to clinical heterogeneity. METHODS AND RESULTS: From 42,803 UK Biobank participants, including 3,713 individuals who developed CAD within 10 years (incident CAD), we first identified a 320-protein panel from 2,923 baseline proteins that improved prediction of incident CAD beyond clinical risk scores. Using reverse graph embedding, we reduced the proteomic data to two dimensions and mapped each incident case onto the resulting two-dimensional latent proteomic space. These proteomic dimensions show significant associations with cardiometabolic and kidney-related clinical markers. The patterns were replicated in the EPIC-Norfolk study. Phenome-wide Cox regression analyses further linked these proteomic dimensions to 10-year incidence rates for various diseases, including type 2 diabetes, obesity, and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Furthermore, adding the proteomic dimensions to clinical variable-based Cox regression model improved prediction of 10-year incidence of CKD and other diseases, demonstrating the value of proteomic dimensions beyond conventional clinical risk factors. Moreover, individuals with prevalent CAD (diagnosed before proteomic sampling) exhibited high, metabolically adverse dimension values, indicating that these axes capture cumulative metabolic burden. Pathway enrichment analyses implicated altered extracellular matrix organization and immune programs among the proteins contributing to the proteomic dimensions. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings demonstrate that plasma proteomic signatures can dissect the heterogeneity of individuals who develop CAD in continuous phenotypic gradients, improve prediction of CAD and comorbidities, and map underlying biological mechanisms.

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11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Conditioning of incoherent sub-dictionaries sampled from a coherent dictionary

Authors:
Karin Schnass↗

arXiv:2606.24323v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Motivated by the desire to find a realistic and stable random model for $d$-dimensional signals, that are sparse in a transform-based and thus often coherent frame, such as a wavelet or a Gabor frame, we study the conditioning of incoherent sub-dictionaries sampled from a coherent dictionary, such as a unit norm frame. In particular, we show that if the sub-dictionary is selected via a coherence rejective Poisson sampling model, it is well-conditioned with high probability, as long as its expected size scales as $d/\log (K)$, where $K$ is the number of dictionary elements. The result is proved for the more general case of sampling quadratic sub-matrices from a real but not necessarily symmetric $K\times K$ matrix with zero diagonal, where coherence rejective sampling is defined via a symmetric mask, that acts as coherence substitute.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

ClaimFlow: Tracing the Evolution of Scientific Claims in NLP

Authors:
Aniket Pramanick↗Yufang Hou↗Saif M. Mohammad↗Iryna Gurevych↗

Scientific papers advance $claims$ that later work supports, extends, or sometimes refutes. Yet existing methods for citation and claim analysis capture only fragments of this dialogue. In this work, we make these interactions explicit at the level of individual scientific claims. We introduce $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, a claim-centric view of the NLP literature, built from $1{,}617$ ACL Anthology papers $(1979 - 2025)$ that are manually annotated with $5{,}689$ claims and $4{,}871$ cross-paper claim relations, indicating whether a citing paper $\texttt{supports}$, $\texttt{extends}$, $\texttt{qualifies}$, $\texttt{refutes}$, or references a cited claim as $\texttt{background}$. Building on $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$, we define a new task – $Claim Relation Classification$ – which requires models to infer the scientific stance toward a cited claim from the text and citation context. Evaluating neural models and large language models on this task, we report baseline performance of $0.81$ macro-F1, suggesting that the task is tractable while leaving room for improvement. We then scale this framework to $\sim$$13k$ NLP papers to study claim evolution across decades of NLP research. We show that $63.5\%$ claims are never reused; only $11.1\%$ are ever challenged. Widely propagated claims are more often $reshaped$ through qualification and extension than supported or refuted. Overall, $\texttt{ClaimFlow}$ offers a lens for examining how ideas shift and mature within NLP.

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13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Asymptotic properties for fully coupled delayed forward-backward stochastic differential equations

Authors:
Auguste Aman↗Cl\'ement Manga↗

arXiv:2606.19925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with time-delayed generators. Such systems arise naturally in stochastic models with memory effects and constitute a significant extension of the classical fully coupled FBSDE framework. The presence of delay introduces additional analytical difficulties due to the dependence of the coefficients on the past trajectories of the solution processes and the resulting non-Markovian structure. Under suitable assumptions on the coefficients, we study the asymptotic properties of a perturbed delayed FBSDE driven by a small noise parameter. We first establish the convergence in distribution of the associated solution processes as the perturbation parameter tends to zero. We then prove almost sure convergence towards the solution of the corresponding deterministic limiting system. As a consequence of these asymptotic results, we derive a large deviation principle for the solution processes. Our results extend the asymptotic analysis of Cruzeiro, Gomes and Zhang (2014) from the classical fully coupled FBSDE setting to the delayed framework, and complement existing works on weakly coupled delayed forward-backward systems. They provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first large deviation principle for fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with delayed generators.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Wide-field NV magnetometry under simultaneous high-pressure and high-temperature conditions

Authors:
Masahiro Ohkuma↗Eikichi Kimura↗Shumpei Ohyama↗Miu Tezuka↗Ryo Matsumoto↗Shinobu Onoda↗Yoshihiko Takano↗Shintaro Azuma↗Kenji Ohta↗Keigo Arai↗

arXiv:2606.25378v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We demonstrate wide-field optically detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) under simultaneous high-pressure and high-temperature conditions using nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers. Although NV-center magnetometry has been widely used for spatially resolved magnetic-field imaging, its application to extreme environments combining pressure and temperature remains challenging. In this work, we show that ODMR can be observed at 5 GPa and 500 K, demonstrating the feasibility of NV spin readout under such combined extreme conditions. We further perform wide-field ODMR of iron at 7 GPa and 500 K, where the stray magnetic field from the sample is spatially visualized through the pressure cell. These results establish NV-center magnetometry as a promising platform for imaging magnetic phenomena in materials under high-pressure and high-temperature environments.

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

DAM-VLA: Decoupled Asynchronous Multimodal Vision Language Action model

Authors:
Pankhuri Vanjani↗Zhuoyue Li↗Jakub Suliga↗Moritz Reuss↗Gianluca Geraci↗Xinkai Jiang↗Rudolf Lioutikov↗

Vision-language-action (VLA) models inherit a shared synchronous clock from vision-language pretraining, processing every input at one rate. This is misaligned with physical interaction, where a high-frequency modality changes at hundreds of hertz, vision evolves more slowly, and language stays constant across an episode. A synchronous VLA oversamples slow modalities, undersamples fast ones, and caps action generation at the lowest effective frequency. We hypothesize that decoupling temporal processing per modality, letting each update and retain information at its own sensor rate, yields stronger representations and more robust control. We present DAM-VLA, which maintains per-modality latent buffers refreshed at sensor rates and read continuously by the action head, integrating new high-frequency modalities through gated cross-attention that leaves the pretrained backbone intact. Across seven contact-rich real-world manipulation tasks, DAM-VLA more than doubles the average success rate of the strongest synchronous baseline (95.2\% vs.\ 40.95\%) while sustaining smooth, reactive 100\,Hz control. Project website: \href{https://intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/}{intuitive-robots.github.io/DAM-VLA/}

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

LaGO: Latent Action Guidance for Online Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Kuan-Yen Liu↗Ren-Jyun Huang↗Ti-Rong Wu↗

arXiv:2606.24669v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong potential for planning and sequential decision-making, but prior work often relies on using them as direct controllers, which requires precise action generation and can be unreliable in practice. This paper proposes Latent Action Guidance for Online Reinforcement Learning (LaGO), a framework that uses a pretrained LLM as a latent action prior to softly guide online policy optimization, rather than treating the LLM as an explicit planner or controller. Experiments on both a discrete-control benchmark, CLEVR-Robot, and a continuous-control benchmark, Meta-World, demonstrate that LaGO consistently improves both reward and success rate over Vanilla PPO. In particular, LaGO increases the average success rate from 15.1% to 27.2% on CLEVR-Robot and from 2.7% to 15.2% on Meta-World. Our analysis further shows that stronger pretrained LLMs provide more effective guidance, suggesting that LLM knowledge can improve planning and online decision-making.

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

DDTNet: Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network for Test-Time All-in-One De-weathering Adaptation

Authors:
Kuan-Hung Lin↗Fu-Jen Tsai↗Yan-Tsung Peng↗Min-Hung Chen↗Chia-Wen Lin↗Yen-Yu Lin↗

All-in-one adverse weather image restoration aims to remove multiple degradations, such as rain, haze, and snow, using a single unified model. Despite their broad applicability, existing methods typically compromise performance, delivering balanced but suboptimal results for individual degradation types. This issue becomes more pronounced when a domain gap exists between training and testing data. Motivated by the observation that modeling degradation patterns is more feasible than recovering clean content, we propose the Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network (DDTNet), which focuses specifically on degradation transfer. By disentangling degradation patterns from target-domain degraded images and transferring them to source domain clean images, DDTNet generates domain-adaptive paired training data. These pairs are then used to fine-tune restoration models, significantly enhancing their adaptability across diverse weather conditions and domains. The core of DDTNet is the Degradation Disentanglement Module (DDM), which comprises Degradation Coupled Attention (DCA) to capture both general and weather-specific features, thereby enabling effective disentanglement and transfer of degradation patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that DDTNet significantly and consistently improves existing all-in-one models across real-world deraining, desnowing, and dehazing datasets.

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

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

Authors:
Lanqing Li↗Shentong Mo↗Yang Yu↗Pheng-Ann Heng↗

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

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19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

Authors:
Evita Nestoridi↗Kenny Peng↗Bryan Wong↗

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

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

ScoreGate: Adaptive Chunk Selection for Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Dual-Score Statistical Fusion

Authors:
Karamvir Singh↗Arvind Jain↗

Fixed-cardinality retrieval injects a constant top-K chunks into the generator regardless of query complexity, causing over-retrieval for narrow queries and under-retrieval for compositional ones. We describe ScoreGate, a lightweight score-space decision mechanism that controls retrieval cardinality at inference time using two scores already produced by the standard pipeline: bi-encoder similarity s_i and cross-encoder reranker score r_i, with no additional model inference calls required. Its core insight is that cross-encoder affirmation can rescue semantically relevant chunks that bi-encoder retrieval ranks poorly due to vocabulary mismatch – a failure mode unaddressed by fixed-K or single-score thresholding. On MS MARCO (200 dev queries), ScoreGate achieves MRR@10 = 0.401 with 35% fewer retained chunks than Standard Top-K. On an internal benchmark (n=300, Fleiss' kappa=0.87), ScoreGate observed zero false positives (95% CI [96.4%, 100%]) at 97.77-99.34% recall, with 34.8% fewer tokens per query and only 31ms added latency. Results on both MS MARCO and real-world production traffic suggest that adaptive retrieval cardinality can improve retrieval efficiency without degrading retrieval quality.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Spectral Leakage and Masking Effects in the Measurement of Hyperuniformity

Authors:
Yang Jiao↗

arXiv:2606.24904v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The detection of hyperuniformity relies critically on accurate characterization of the small-wavenumber behavior of the static structure factor of the system. In practice, however, measurements are performed on finite subsystems or through incomplete observations that effectively mask portions of the underlying configuration. Inspired by a recent numerical study [Y. Liu, X. Li, J. Tian, X. Yan, G. Zhang, {\it J. Chem. Phys.} {\bf 164}, 094102 (2026)], we develop a unified theoretical framework that quantifies how finite windows and spatially correlated binary masks modify the observed structure factor. We show that the measured structure factor $S_{obs}(k)$ is the convolution of the intrinsic structure factor with the spectral density of the observation function, whether it is a compact window or an extended random mask. For generic hyperuniform systems with small-$k$ scaling $S(k)\sim k^{\alpha}$, finite observation window induces a universal quadratic leakage term at sufficiently small wavenumbers (i.e., $k \lesssim 1/L$), leading to an apparent $k^{2}$ scaling independent of the true exponent. The true hyperuniform exponent $\alpha$ can only be measured in the intermediate regime $1/L \ll k \ll q_c$. In stealthy hyperuniform systems, where the intrinsic structure factor possesses a spectral gap, all observed small-$k$ power arises entirely from this convolution mechanism. For spatially correlated masks, we derive the corresponding convolution relation in terms of the mask spectral density and identify conditions under which hyperuniform signatures are suppressed, preserved, or distorted. Our results establish quantitative criteria for reliably extracting intrinsic scaling exponents and distinguishing genuine hyperuniform order from measurement-induced artifacts.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Time-Series Foundation Model Embeddings for Remaining Useful Life Estimation

Authors:
Amir El-Ghoussani↗Michele De Vita↗Ronald Naumann↗Valiseios Belagiannis↗

arXiv:2606.11990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Remaining Useful Life (RUL) prediction is essential for industrial predictive maintenance, yet many learning-based approaches rely on extensive feature engineering or large labeled datasets to train task-specific sequence models. In this work, we introduce a lightweight learning approach, in which we leverage a frozen pretrained time-series foundation model (TSFM) and combine it with a small regression head for RUL estimation from multivariate sensor streams. More specifically, we use Chronos-2 as a frozen backbone to extract context window features and train a lightweight regression neural network for RUL prediction. Experiments on real-world industrial sensor data from two device types show that Chronos-2 features consistently improve over recurrent, convolutional, Transformer-based, and gradient-boosting baselines under the same preprocessing and evaluation protocol. We further analyze the impact of context length and find that performance improves significantly with longer histories, indicating that TSFM representation offer a practical and data-efficient alternative for RUL estimation in industrial settings.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Efficient Graph State Purification with Factorized Graph-Preserving Operations across Local Clifford Orbits

Authors:
Mingyuan Wang↗Guus Avis↗Kenneth Goodenough↗Stefan Krastanov↗

arXiv:2606.23809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph states form a broad class of multipartite entangled states underlying measurement-based quantum computation, quantum networks, and stabilizer codes. However, systematic entanglement distillation for arbitrary graph states remains challenging because the circuit design space grows rapidly with the number of parties. We introduce a group of Clifford operations that we call "factorized graph-preserving". It enables us to efficiently enumerate and optimize graph-state purification circuits at finite size for realistic noisy hardware. These operations map products of graph-basis states to products of graph-basis states, so their action can be represented as permutations of graph-basis labels. Moreover, this useful gate set admits a compact factorized description determined by simple graph-theoretic features. This structure also allows, after some initial cached precomputation, drastically lower computational complexity for simulating a gate. We further organize these operations over local-complementation (LC) orbits using minimum-edge representatives (MERs), which let us design purification circuits that apply to all locally equivalent graph states (up to a basis change). Using this framework, we optimize noisy finite-size multipartite distillation circuits for several graph-state families. Numerical results show that the resulting graph-preserving circuits can outperform standard recurrence-based purification protocols under realistic gate and measurement noise. Our results establish LC-orbit structure and factorized graph-preserving operations as practical tools for scalable, topology-aware and hardware-constrained graph-state distillation protocol design. Our work can also be interpreted as a graph-based heuristic for finding transversal gates.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Dissecting the functional landscape of rare diseases through genomic variation in a heterogeneous cohort of 11,000 patients

Authors:
Uria-Regojo↗Fernandez-Caballero↗Lopez-Alcojor↗Lopez-Lopez↗Benitez↗Rodilla↗Avila Fernandez↗Trujillo-Tiebas↗M. J↗Osorio↗Corton↗Almoguera↗…

Rare diseases (RDs) remain a major diagnostic challenge. Genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity, incomplete knowledge of disease mechanisms, and limitations in variant clinical interpretation leave many patients without a molecular diagnosis. Meanwhile, the growing volume of genomic data generated in clinical practice offers an opportunity to develop data-driven methodologies for exploring disease mechanisms and improving the reanalysis of unsolved cases. We aggregated real-world genomic data from 11,084 unrelated patients with suspected RD. Patients were clinically classified into 122 diseases. We built a multi-disease genomic variant frequency database (FJD-DB), which enabled the development of variant and gene-disease association scores by means of case-control subcohort comparisons across 32 disease groups. Functional enrichment analyses were then used to highlight disease-associated protein domains, pathways, biological processes, and phenotypes. Finally, the resulting knowledge was integrated into a data-driven framework for the guided reanalysis of unsolved RD patients applied to Inherited Retinal Dystrophies (IRD) patients as first use case. FJD-DB contained more than 45 million unique variants, including ~185,000 potentially pathogenic variants. Disease-specific analyses identified disease-associated pathogenic variants and highlighted both established and candidate disease genes. We detected 179 significantly enriched protein domains across 23 diseases, 124 Human Phenotype Ontology terms across 13 diseases, 79 Reactome pathways across 10 diseases, and 72 Gene Ontology biological processes across 8 diseases, revealing highly disease-specific functional signatures. Integration of disease-specific variant, gene, and functional association signals enabled the development of a data-driven framework for guided reanalysis of unsolved RD cases. Applied to more than 1,100 unsolved IRD cases, the framework generated clinically relevant findings in 26 patients, including four molecular diagnoses, seven candidate diagnoses, and 15 cases upgraded from non-informative findings to variants of uncertain significance. Aggregated real-world genomic data can be leveraged to identify disease-associated molecular signals generating novel biological hypotheses. A unified analytical framework provides a scalable strategy for knowledge discovery and guided reanalysis, facilitating the identification of overlooked and potentially novel genetic causes of RDs.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Sensor Configuration Matters: A Systematic Evaluation of Multimodal SLAM on Quadruped Robots

Authors:
Roberto Corlito↗Fabian Schmidt↗Nils Seibert↗Markus Enzweiler↗Abhinav Valada↗Arne Roennau↗

Autonomous navigation of quadrupedal robots in diverse environments fundamentally relies on resilient Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). While visual-inertial SLAM has matured across wheeled, handheld, and aerial platforms, a critical evaluation gap remains regarding how hardware-level sensor configurations affect performance under the aggressive dynamics of legged locomotion. Quadrupeds introduce distinct embodiment-induced sensory challenges, including foot-impact shocks, high-frequency mechanical vibrations, and rapid angular rotations, which degrade standard perception pipelines. To address this gap, we present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art visual, visual-inertial, and LiDAR-visual-inertial SLAM methods using the GrandTour dataset recorded on an ANYmal D quadruped. We isolate and quantify the impacts of camera modalities, shutter techniques, and inertial sensor tiers, analyzing their trade-offs across localization accuracy, algorithmic robustness, and computational resource utilization. Our empirical findings demonstrate that hardware selection has substantial influence on system resilience: stereo configurations consistently outperform monocular and RGB-D modalities, global shutter cameras significantly mitigate motion-induced tracking failures compared to rolling shutter cameras, and, crucially, standard inertial integration can degrade the performance of primarily vision-based frameworks under harsh legged locomotion. These insights additionally offer concrete design guidelines for tailoring custom sensor payloads to achieve dependable perception on agile legged systems.

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