Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18066

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

Authors:

Jisung Hwang↗Yunhong Min↗Jaihoon Kim↗I-Chao Shen↗Minhyuk Sung↗

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

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02.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:73ef11b8011f457f28f47000e2090b6c

Mucosal and Systemic Antibodies Associated with Clinical Protection in a Pertussis Controlled Human Infection Model

Authors:

Milletich↗P. L↗ElSherif↗M. S↗Marx↗Caulfield↗Hariri↗Halperin↗S. S↗Pasetti↗M. F↗

Background The engagement of mucosal and systemic immunity in preventing Bordetella pertussis colonization and infection in humans, the impact of prior vaccination on host immunity and protective outcomes, and the dynamics of the host response following exposure remain poorly understood. Methods Healthy adults were challenged with increasing colony-forming units (CFUs) doses, 106-108, of B. pertussis D420 intranasally (NCT05136599). Shedding (PCR and culturing) and symptom development were monitored up to 21 days post-challenge. Serum and nasal wash IgA and IgG were measured before challenge (baseline) and up to 6 months post-challenge. Findings Antibodies increased post-challenge only in infected individuals, primarily nasal IgA. Participants who remained uninfected had higher baseline levels of filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA)- specific mucosal IgA and IgG, and higher serum IgA against fimbriae 2/3 (FIM). FHA was negatively associated with bacterial load and was a key discriminator between shedders and non-shedders, up to one week post-challenge. By day 14 post-challenge, pertussis toxin (PT) IgG and FIM IgA in both serum and mucosal samples were negatively associated with bacterial colonization. The majority (96.7%) of acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine recipients (n=23, median age 2.0 years) became infected, compared to 69.4% of those who received whole-cell pertussis vaccine (n=36; median age 32.0 years), and their antibody responses remained distinct following infection. Interpretation Nasal FHA antibodies emerged as early predictors of protection against pertussis infection, while PT IgG and FIM IgA antibodies may reflect clearance after infection. aP-primed individuals were more susceptible to infection, despite their younger age and more recent vaccination. Funding CDC Contract #75D30122C15467 and CDC IPA Agreement #24IPA2417512 Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US Department of Health and Human Services.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2504.21072

Erased but Not Forgotten: How Backdoors Compromise Concept Erasure

Authors:

Tobias Braun↗Jonas Henry Grebe↗Marcus Rohrbach↗Anna Rohrbach↗

arXiv:2504.21072v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The expansion of text-to-image diffusion models has raised concerns about harmful outputs, from fabricated depictions of public figures to sexually explicit imagery. To mitigate such risks, prior work has proposed concept erasure methods that aim to sever unwanted concepts from the model via fine-tuning, yet it remains unclear whether these approaches truly remove all links to the harmful concept or merely conceal superficial connections. In this work, we reveal a critical vulnerability, the Erasure Evasion Backdoor (EEB): an adversary binds a backdoor trigger to a concept slated for removal, and this malicious link survives subsequent erasure. We show that both black-box and white-box adversaries can instantiate this threat. Across six state-of-the-art erasure methods, including robust ones that explicitly search for alternative representations of the target concept, EEB consistently exposes harmful content: up to 82% success against celebrity-identity unlearning, up to 94% for object erasure, and up to 16 times amplification of explicit-content exposure. While EEB uncovers a blind spot in current erasure methods, it also provides a diagnostic tool for stress-testing future concept erasure techniques.

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04.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11285

EventRadar: Long-Range Visual UAV Discovery through Spatiotemporal Event Sensing

Authors:

Zhiting Zhou↗Xingchen Liu↗Xinglin Yu↗Jiashen Chen↗Haoyang Wang↗Jingao Xu↗Yunhao Liu↗Xinlei Chen↗

Unauthorized unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) activity around airports, public venues, and other sensitive sites has made protected-airspace monitoring increasingly important. A practical sensing system must search a wide angular region, find small long-range targets, and return both bearing support and UAV-specific evidence before a restricted perimeter is breached. Existing UAV detection paths often rely on spatially organized evidence, such as body extent, silhouette, or track continuity. At long range, however, these cues become difficult to preserve and verify as the target footprint weakens and its image-plane support shrinks. EventRadar follows a complementary cue: propeller-induced temporal periodicity, which recent event-camera sensing studies have shown can reveal UAV-specific motion after appearance becomes weak. We extend this cue to kilometer-scale active sensing with an event-camera prototype. Scene-Anchored Geometry Evidence (SAGE) fuses scanning events with IMU pose to maintain a bearing-indexed scene memory, separating transient candidate support from persistent background clutter. Comb-guided Harmonic-Group Learned Iterative Shrinkage and Thresholding Algorithm (CHG) then treats each candidate as a weak high-rate timing signal and recovers phase-insensitive harmonic evidence with fixed compute. Compared with related event-camera baselines on 700-1500 m UAV event recordings, EventRadar achieves 0.990 mAP$_{.3}$ and 0.949 F1$_{.3}$, reduces FN$_{.3}$ to 0.009, and shows real-time feasibility in prototype profiling.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12703

SMSR: Certified Defence Against Runtime Memory Poisoning in Persistent LLM Agent Systems

Authors:

Tarun Sharma↗

arXiv:2606.12703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agents increasingly run with persistent memory that accumulates across user sessions. This creates a new attack surface: an adversary interacting only through normal channels can inject crafted memories that, once retrieved, steer the agent's responses for future users, without touching model weights or code. We call this Multi-Session Memory Poisoning (MSMP) and show that no existing defence certifies against it; static-corpus defences (RobustRAG, ReliabilityRAG) assume a fixed knowledge base, and heuristic filters are bypassed by fluent enterprise-style text. We present Signed Memory with Smoothed Retrieval (SMSR), the first defence with a certified robustness bound for this setting. Component 1 adds HMAC-SHA256 provenance at write time, blocking unsigned injection. Component 2 applies randomised memory ablation with verdict-based majority voting at query time, bounding the influence of authenticated adversaries. We prove that no provenance-free retrieval-time filter can certify against adaptive injection, derive a hypergeometric certificate for Component 2, and formalise the Consistent Minority Effect, whereby a consistent adversarial answer wins string-based voting as a numerical minority while verdict-based voting removes it. Across 15 enterprise scenarios (3,150 repeated trials), Component 1 cuts attack success from 93-100% to 0% for all unsigned variants. For an authenticated adversary with a single injection, Component 2 holds success to 8.0% (95% CI [5.8, 10.9], n=450), below the certified worst case. In an end-to-end query-only attack where the agent itself writes the poison rather than it being pre-seeded, SMSR reduces success from 65.3% to 5.3% (n=150, non-overlapping CIs) on a live agent stack. Clean-query utility is 90% (Component 1) and 85% (combined).

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06.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:f95a05b33537cf40e1c75a5a1f179fd9

Systematic benchmarking of zero-shot utility and robustness in single-cell transcriptomic foundation models

Authors:

Liu↗Feng↗Pan↗Chen↗Ren↗Ye↗Sakurai↗Lin↗Zhang↗

Single-cell foundation models (scFMs) have been proposed as reusable representations for transcriptomic analysis, yet their practical utility and robustness when applied without task-specific fine-tuning remain incompletely characterized. Here, we systematically evaluated single-cell transcriptomic representations in zero-shot settings across 20 methods, 6 downstream tasks and 1,607 datasets comprising nearly 21.8 million cells. We characterized model behavior along three complementary dimensions: baseline utility, structural robustness, and dataset-level drivers of performance variability. Our large-scale analysis reveals a decoupling between utility and robustness: methods ranking highly on standard benchmarks often show marked instability under shifts in dataset structure. Furthermore, no single model performs uniformly well across tasks. In several tasks, classical statistical representations based on highly variable genes remain competitive under zero-shot conditions. Together, these results define the practical boundaries of zero-shot use in scFMs and provide a large-scale benchmark and decision framework for representation selection in single-cell genomics.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2511.08378

Bid Farewell to Seesaw: Towards Accurate Long-tail Session-based Recommendation via Dual Constraints of Hybrid Intents

Authors:

Xiao Wang↗Ke Qin↗Dongyang Zhang↗Xiurui Xie↗Shuang Liang↗

arXiv:2511.08378v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict anonymous users' next interaction based on their interaction sessions. In the practical recommendation scenario, low-exposure items constitute the majority of interactions, creating a long-tail distribution that severely compromises recommendation diversity. Existing approaches attempt to address this issue by promoting tail items but incur accuracy degradation, exhibiting a "see-saw" effect between long-tail and accuracy performance. We attribute such conflict to session-irrelevant noise within the tail items, which existing long-tail approaches fail to identify and constrain effectively. To resolve this fundamental conflict, we propose HID (Hybrid Intent-based Dual Constraint Framework), a plug-and-play framework that transforms the conventional "see-saw" into "win-win" through introducing the hybrid intent-based dual constraints for both long-tail and accuracy. Two key innovations are incorporated in this framework: (i) Hybrid Intent Learning, where we reformulate the intent extraction strategies by employing attribute-aware spectral clustering to reconstruct the item-to-intent mapping. Furthermore, discrimination of session-irrelevant noise is achieved through the assignment of the target and noise intents to each session. (ii) Intent Constraint Loss, which incorporates two novel constraint paradigms regarding the diversity and accuracy to regulate the representation learning process of both items and sessions. These two objectives are unified into a single training loss through rigorous theoretical derivation. Extensive experiments across multiple SBR models and datasets demonstrate that HID can enhance both long-tail performance and recommendation accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in long-tail recommender systems.

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08.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11503

Percolation on hierarchical lattices

Authors:

Caio Alves↗Rangel Baldasso↗Carlos Gustavo Moreira↗Augusto Teixeira↗

arXiv:2606.11503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider independent Bernoulli percolation on top of sequences of hierarchical graphs. Given a graph $G_{1}$ with two distinguished vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$, the hierarchical graph with seed $G_{1}$ is the sequence $\big( G_{k} \big)_{k \geq 1}$ resulting from the inductive procedure, where the graph $G_{k+1}$ is obtained from $G_{k}$ by replacing each of its edges with a copy of $G_{1}$, attached by the vertices $a_{1}$ and $b_{1}$. We prove that, under sharp hypotheses, percolation on these graphs presents a unique phase transition. Second, we establish the existence of several critical exponents in this context, such as the critical exponents for the correlation length $\nu$, the surface tension $\mu$, the one-arm exponent $\alpha_{1}$. Several results are also obtained for their infinite counterpart $G_\infty$, which is the Benjamini-Schramm limit of $G_k$: uniqueness of the infinite cluster, continuity of $\theta(p)$, existence of the percolation-probability exponent $\beta$ and scaling relations for the critical exponents $\alpha_1$, $\nu$ and $\beta$. Furthermore, we analyze noise sensitivity for crossing functions in $G_{k}$ and establish sharp noise sensitivity in this setting. Finally, we propose a setup where it is possible to verify the locality hypothesis, stating that the critical threshold for percolation is a local property, while critical exponents are determined by the global geometry of the graph. As a consequence of the techniques developed here, we also provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a unique fixed point for the map $p \mapsto \mathbb{E}_p[g]$ in $(0,1)$, where $g:\{0,1\}^n \to \{0,1\}$ is a nontrivial monotone Boolean function.

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09.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:c1e879214da84a99a68e705a7f64e920

AGZArank: Investigating epitope-conditioned antibody binder ranking with structure-derived synthetic supervision

Authors:

Sadykov↗Khamidullina↗Sultankulov↗Seitkali↗

Computational antibody design methods can generate large libraries of candidate binders for a target epitope, but prioritizing which candidates to test experimentally remains a major bottleneck. Existing scoring approaches, including physics-based affinity estimators, structure-prediction-derived confidence measures, and inverse-folding likelihood models, provide useful proxy signals but are not explicitly optimized for early enrichment of binders among many structurally similar candidates. Here we investigate epitope-conditioned antibody binder ranking as a dedicated learning problem and introduce AGZArank, a geometric deep learning framework trained with structure-derived synthetic supervision based on normalized pseudo-energy targets. On a benchmark of 45 experimentally validated antibody-antigen interfaces, AGZArank recovered the true binder within the top ten candidates in 44.4% of cases and showed stronger generalization on post-2021 structures than ProteinMPNN, ESM-IF, and PRODIGY. Ablation experiments indicate that ranking performance depends primarily on training scale and alignment between the optimization objective and retrieval-based evaluation, rather than architectural complexity alone. These results support candidate prioritization as a distinct and tractable problem in computational antibody design.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.08011

Rewrite to Translate, Translate to Reward: Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting in Machine Translation

Authors:

Boxuan Lyu↗Haiyue Song↗Zhi Qu↗Hidetaka Kamigaito↗Kotaro Funakoshi↗Manabu Okumura↗

Rewriting source text with large language models (LLMs) before translation has been shown to improve machine translation (MT) quality. However, we find that prompt-based rewriting can degrade translation quality rather than improve it, particularly when smaller LLMs, such as 4B-parameter models, are used. We argue that this limitation stems from the difficulty of controlling rewriting behavior through natural-language prompts alone: a rewrite is useful only if it improves downstream translation, yet existing prompt-based methods do not explicitly optimize for this signal. To address this issue, we propose RLSR (Reinforcement Learning for Source Rewriting), a reinforcement learning framework that trains the rewriting model with a reward based on the downstream translation-quality improvement produced by each rewrite. Experiments across six MT systems and 16 language pairs show that our 4B RLSR-trained rewriting models significantly outperform both the no-rewriting baseline and prompt-based rewriting baselines at the same model scale, while remaining competitive with baselines that use a 235B LLM.

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11.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:8a19fdbecfdfff07ef399b7bc9331d6b

A Randomized, Controlled, Double Blind Clinical Study to Evaluate Use of Hydron Alkaline Ionised Water (HAIW) in Healthy Participants

Authors:

Malhotra↗V. K↗Tamoli↗Kalbhor↗Nipanikar↗Dubey↗Singhvi↗Sharma↗

Background and Objectives: Alkaline Ionized Water (AIW) is considered among the highest quality healthy drinking water worldwide and is widely discussed for its various health benefits. Hydron Alkaline Ionized Water (HAIW) is produced through electrolysis, resulting in a stable pH of approximately 9.5 with a negative Oxidation Reduction Potential (ORP), making it an antioxidant beverage. The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety of HAIW and its effects on digestion, sleep, energy, and overall quality of life in healthy participants compared to Packaged Drinking Water (PDW). Materials and Methods: A randomized, controlled, double blind, prospective clinical study was conducted in which a total of 24 healthy participants between the age group of 21 to 40 years were randomized in a 1:1 ratio to either HAIW Group or Packaged Drinking Water Group with equal gender distribution. Participants were hospitalized for 7 days and asked to consume at least 3 litres of the assigned water daily. Primary outcomes were safety-related laboratory parameters and adverse event monitoring. Secondary outcomes included assessment of digestion (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), urine parameters, sleep quality, freshness after waking, fatigue, energy/stamina/strength, quality of life, and global assessment Results: All 24 participants completed the study with no dropouts. Baseline demographics were comparable between the two groups. Assessment of primary safety-related laboratory parameters including Complete Blood count, liver function tests, renal function tests, blood sugar, Electrocardiogram and serum electrolytes showed non-significant change from baseline to 7 days and remained within normal limits in both groups, with non-significant difference between groups (p>0.05). HAIW showed significantly better improvement in appetite, digestion, and bowel habits from Day 2 onwards compared to Packaged drinking water. Sleep quality and freshness after waking up showed significant improvement from Day 3 and Day 2 respectively in the HAIW and PDW group, with significantly better improvement in HAIW group. Fatigue scores showed significant reduction at Day 6 and 7 in both groups with non-significant difference between groups. A total of 5 adverse events were reported (3 in HAIW, 2 in PDW), all unrelated to study products and were mild in nature. Global assessment showed excellent to good overall safety and tolerability in both groups. Conclusion: HAIW was well tolerated by all participants without any adverse effects. All laboratory safety parameters remained within normal range. HAIW demonstrated significant improvements in digestive function (appetite, digestion, bowel habits), sleep quality, and freshness after waking as compared to PDW. The study concludes that HAIW can be safely consumed. HAIW improves digestive and sleep-related functions.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13361

Can I Buy Your KV Cache?

Authors:

Luoyuan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.13361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Right now, across the world, AI agents are repeating the same absurd act: to read one document, they each recompute it from scratch. Every agent re-runs prefill, the most compute-intensive step a large model takes, over identical text, only to rebuild a key-value (KV) cache identical to the one the agent before it just built. The same answer, computed a million times. We make a proposal that is almost offensively simple: compute it once. Let a publisher precompute a document's KV cache, and let every other agent buy the right to load it and skip prefill. It works, and it is token-exact: loading a precomputed KV and continuing matches prefilling from scratch (24/24 greedy tokens, and at the logits level), with no accuracy cost. On Qwen3-4B, reuse is 9-50x cheaper in compute than prefill, and the gap widens with length (prefill's attention scales with L^2), so a single reuse already pays it back. Then the part that matters: where the KV lives. Shipping it fails, because KV is nearly incompressible, so per-load egress costs more than the prefill it saves. Hosting it provider-side, exactly as production prompt-caching works, removes egress entirely. The size of the prize is set by our measured compute saving: serving one hot 3774-token document to 80M agents costs ~$1.5M to re-prefill but only ~$0.03M of reuse compute (49.7x less). The 0.1x cache-read tariff APIs charge passes a 10x discount to users while sitting inside this measured envelope, so the 10x is a floor that the measured ~50x compute saving clears, and the gap to the physical ~50x is provider margin: millions of dollars per popular document. We frame the resulting agent-native prefill CDN and leave lossless KV compression and a cross-party payment layer as the open problems.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13003

The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage

Authors:

Prathyusha Jwalapuram↗Hehai Lin↗Chuyuan Li↗Fangkai Jiao↗Sudong Wang↗Yifei Ming↗Zixuan Ke↗Chengwei Qin↗Giuseppe Carenini↗Shafiq Joty↗

Prevailing wisdom posits that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are superior to Single-Agent Systems (SAS), citing advantages like context protection, parallel processing and distributed decision-making. However, empirical support for this claim relies primarily on comparisons with SAS baselines using benchmarks that prioritize isolated reasoning tasks, which do not adequately assess these advantages. Focusing on automatically generated MAS that are designed for enhanced generalizability over manually-designed counterparts, we perform a rigorous, systematic evaluation against SAS, specifically Chain-of-Thought with Self-Consistency (CoT-SC). Across traditional reasoning datasets and tasks with interactive multi-step workflows (e.g., BrowseComp-Plus), we demonstrate that automatic MAS consistently underperform CoT-SC despite being up to 10x more expensive. To isolate these failures from limitations inherent to task structure, we introduce a diagnostic synthetic dataset tailored for MAS featuring explicit task decomposition, context separation and parallelization potential. We show that expert-architected MAS consistently outperforms automatically generated architectures in both raw performance and cost-efficiency on this dataset, demonstrating that existing evaluation frameworks mask critical architectural gaps and inefficiencies of complex MAS by failing to account for the marginal utility of increased computational cost. Critically, systematic deconstruction of the generated MAS architectures reveals that current automated design paradigms produce architectural bloat that prioritizes superficial complexity which does not translate into functional utility, exposing a fundamental misalignment with multi-agent principles.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2411.10077

Hierarchical mutual distillation for multi-view fusion: Learning from all possible view combinations

Authors:

Jiwoong Yang↗Haejun Chung↗Ikbeom Jang↗

Multi-view learning often struggles to effectively leverage images captured from diverse angles and locations. Learning methods for unstructured multi-view images remain largely underexplored. We propose a novel Hierarchical Mutual Distillation for Multi-View Fusion (HMDMV) method, which can handle both structured and unstructured multi-view scenarios. It makes predictions utilizing all possible view combinations: single view, partial multi-view, and full multi-view. The method generates predictions for each view combination and then applies hierarchical mutual distillation to enhance inter-view consistency. An uncertainty-based weighting mechanism further refines the fusion process by adjusting the influence of each view combination according to its prediction confidence, reducing the impact of low-confidence views. Extensive experiments on large-scale structured and unstructured datasets demonstrate that HMDMV consistently achieves state-of-the-art classification accuracy. Another unique advantage of HMDMV is that it provides improved flexibility in inference, allowing for more or fewer view counts in inference than those used in training without additional processing. We also provide a light version with reduced training cost by designing an efficient strategy that randomly samples subsets of view combinations during each training iteration. These results highlight HMDMV's robustness in real-world settings where view availability is variable or incomplete. The code is available at https://github.com/labhai/HMDMV.

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15.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14982

Microscopic exceptional points in the post-selected open Jaynes–Cummings model

Authors:

B. M. Rodr\'iguez-lara↗

arXiv:2606.14982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians track selected signatures of complex reservoir dynamics, while post-selected no-jump effective Hamiltonians derived from microscopic open-system theory reveal the underlying system–reservoir physics. We derive such a Hamiltonian for the open Jaynes–Cummings model using a Moore–Penrose normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ representation that removes the vacuum-sector singularity and diagonalizes the full Hamiltonian by one operator rotation. Starting from a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, we obtain a Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad master equation under the Born–Markov approximation with full Bohr-frequency resolution. We use partial Bohr-frequency resolution to build a consistent post-selected no-jump Hamiltonian near exceptional points, where decay rates become comparable to Rabi frequencies and remove the scale separation behind full resolution. The normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ form of the resulting non-Hermitian Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonian reveals the effects of Lamb-shifted detuning, diagonal loss imbalance, and reservoir-modified coupling. Our microscopic exceptional-point analysis recovers the experimentally reported single-excitation exceptional point for unequal independent losses and identifies regimes absent from the standard phenomenological model; for example, equal correlated losses with orthogonal channel phase produce a second-order exceptional point at the same loss-to-coupling ratio in every excitation sector.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15048

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models

Authors:

Qizhen Ying↗Yangchen Pan↗Victor Adrian Prisacariu↗Junfeng Wen↗

Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along the denoising trajectory. This lack of cross-time consistency can degrade performance, especially for few-step samplers. We introduce a temporal difference (TD) objective that penalizes inconsistency of the model's multi-step progress along the denoising path. By reformulating the diffusion process as a Markov reward process and casting denoising as a policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning, we derive a unified TD approach that applies to both discrete- and continuous-time diffusion formulations. We further propose a principled sample-based reweighting method that stabilizes training. Empirically, we show that using our TD training can significantly improve sample quality measured by FID, with stronger advantages when the number of sampling steps is small, highlighting its practical utility under low-computation-budget scenarios. We provide ablation studies to justify our design choices, including pairwise loss reweighting, regularization weight, and one-step stride. Overall, our TD approach can be a general drop-in that enforces cross-time consistency and improves generation quality across different diffusion generative models.

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17.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:fc6a88ee15401d85d8f28a5c481953a1

Orion: Towards Lab Automation with Computer-Using Agents

Authors:

Ma↗Trinh↗Bucci↗Regev↗Wang↗

Laboratory discovery increasingly depends on computational workflows that connect experimental data to analysis, interpretation and follow-up hypotheses. Yet these workflows remain constrained by labor-intensive use of specialized software, visual inspection through graphical user interfaces, and integration of knowledge across multiple sources. Here, we present Orion, a computer-using AI agent for biomedical image analysis and interpretation that moves towards lab automation by automating this computational layer of laboratory work. Orion combines large language models with terminal execution, GUI control and adaptive multi-step reasoning in a shared computing environment. It can inspect visual data, operate standard scientific software, mine web resources and conduct end-to-end analysis and interpretation workflows without requiring bespoke software integrations. Across benchmarks, Orion achieved over 90% accuracy on biomedical database and literature retrieval tasks, learned to use the popular tools CellProfiler and QuPath for quantitative analysis of cellular and tissue images, respectively, and facilitated autonomous discovery in experimental imaging data. In 100 hours of autonomous exploration of a large-scale perturbation imaging dataset, Orion generated 52 research reports, of which human scientist review prioritized 22 plausible mechanistic hypotheses. These results show that computer-using AI agents can substantially expand the reach of laboratory automation, providing a scalable and auditable route from experimental imaging data to quantitative analysis, reports and biologically grounded hypotheses.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.05876

Systematic Evaluation of Novel View Synthesis for Video Place Recognition

Authors:

Muhammad Zawad Mahmud↗Samiha Islam↗Damian Lyons↗

The generation of synthetic novel views has the potential to positively impact robot navigation in several ways. In image-based navigation, a novel overhead view generated from a scene taken by a ground robot could be used to guide an aerial robot to that location. In Video Place Recognition (VPR), novel views of ground locations from the air can be added that enable a UAV to identify places seen by the ground robot, and similarly, overhead views can be used to generate novel ground views. This paper presents a systematic evaluation of synthetic novel views in VPR using five public VPR image databases and seven typical image similarity methods. We show that for small synthetic additions, novel views improve VPR recognition statistics. We find that for larger additions, the magnitude of viewpoint change is less important than the number of views added and the type of imagery in the dataset.

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19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15457

Lesion-DDPM: Lesion-Enhanced 3D Diffusion for MS MRI Synthesis

Authors:

Weidong Zhang↗Yongchan Jung↗Shafayat Mowla Anik↗Furen Xiao↗Vasudevan Janarthanan↗Enkhzaya Chuluunbaatar↗Byeong Kil Lee↗Jeeho Ryoo↗

3D FLAIR MRI is widely recommended as one of the standard MRI sequences for brain imaging in multiple sclerosis (MS), but publicly available MS datasets remain relatively small and vary across scanners, acquisition protocols, and lesion patterns. This scarcity and variability hinder the development of robust neuroimaging machine learning models and are particularly challenging for generative models that aim to synthesize images while preserving small, sparse lesions. We propose Lesion-DDPM, a 3D conditional diffusion framework for lesion-aware FLAIR synthesis that incorporates multi-level anatomical mask injection together with a lesion-weighted reconstruction loss to emphasize lesion voxels while maintaining global brain structure. Using a curated subset of the MSLesSeg dataset, we compare Lesion-DDPM with representative state-of-the-art GAN- and diffusion-based models, assessing both image-generation metrics and downstream 3D U-Net segmentation. In our experiments, Lesion-DDPM achieved the lowest lesion-region reconstruction error among all methods. In a downstream 3D U-Net lesion segmentation task, a model trained only on Lesion-DDPM-generated scans and evaluated on real MRIs reached a Dice score of 0.616 compared with 0.569 for the best competing synthetic dataset. When Lesion-DDPM images were added to the real training set, the Dice score further increased to 0.685.

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20.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12 DOI: HASH:0c09cfc8263a9574de0cb9e7b3721c39

The Geometry of Allostery: A Laplacian Minor Hierarchy for Many-Body Protein Communication

Authors:

Senguler Ciftci↗Erman↗

Quantifying how cooperative, many-body relationships drive allostery in protein networks remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop the Laplacian minor hierarchy, a mathematical framework that characterizes the geometric invariants of a protein network. Lower-order minors yield standard metrics including the partition function and effective distances, whereas higher-order minors define novel topological measures: cooperation indices, each bounded between zero and one, that characterize pathway correlations at increasing levels of complexity, the third-order minor determines whether allosteric pathways are correlated or uncorrelated, and the fourth-order minor quantifies how distinct pathways communicate through intermediary residues. We apply this framework to analyze the evolutionary adaptation of the PSD95pdz3 domain from Class I to Class II ligand specificity via mutations G330T and H372A. The cooperation index demonstrates a distinct evolutionary hierarchy: the G330T mutation establishes distributed pathway couplings that the H372A mutation subsequently exploits, whereas H372A alone produces minimal global changes. Furthermore, the fourth-order analysis identifies His317 as a critical intermediary node bridging the class-switching (330-372) and class-bridging (330-400) allosteric pathways. These results demonstrate that allosteric dependencies emerge only when mutations accumulate in specific combinations, with a hierarchical organization of pathways structured around position 330 and intermediary nodes His317 and Phe400. Rather than predicting allosteric mechanisms, this framework provides a mechanistic explanation for why and how allostery emerges during protein evolution.

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21.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-10 DOI: HASH:b3961ac965b2fff22673685ef4c3b3e1

Amplified Arctic iceberg traffic reshapes benthic biodiversity

Authors:

Thomas Krumpen↗

The Arctic is undergoing rapid warming, resulting in retreating sea ice and glaciers1, yet how cryospheric changes propagate into the deep ocean remains poorly understood2. Here we identify a climate-driven mechanism linking accelerating glacier disintegration to an increase in deep-sea hard-bottom habitats far beyond calving fronts. Seafloor observations in Fram Strait show a localized increase in the density and patchiness of dropstones delivered by debris-laden icebergs. At the same time, four decades of shipboard records show that the occurrence of icebergs increased abruptly in the early 2000s. Backtracking links these icebergs to the main outlet glaciers in northeast Greenland and the Russian High Arctic. In northeast Greenland, the timing of glacier destabilization coincides with this rise, whereas sparse satellite coverage in the Russian sector limits temporal attribution despite indications of enhanced glacier activity. A model sensitivity study shows that, apart from intensified calving, a more dynamic sea ice cover enhances downstream transport of glacial ice. Along these pathways, increased iceberg activity could reshape deep-sea habitats through enhanced melt and associated lithogenic input, and elevate navigational hazards as maritime traffic expands in the Arctic. Although modest compared with the iceberg discharges of Pleistocene Heinrich events, this mechanism provides a modern analogue of long-range cryospheric influence on the seafloor in a warming climate. Accelerated Arctic glacier disintegration and a more dynamic sea ice cover are increasing iceberg-delivered dropstones in the deep ocean, reshaping seafloor habitats and extending cryospheric impacts far beyond glaciers.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16159

Continuous Splatting meets Retinex: Continuous Gaussian Splatting and Implicit Reflectance Modeling for Low-Light Image Enhancement

Authors:

Yuhan Chen↗Yicui Shi↗Guofa Li↗Wenxuan Yu↗Ying Fang↗Guangrui Bai↗Wenbo Chu↗Keqiang Li↗

Low-light image enhancement aims to recover clear images from low-illumination observations and is crucial for high-level downstream vision tasks. However, existing methods frequently encounter color distortion and structural artifacts when balancing global smooth illumination adjustment and local high-frequency detail recovery. To address these issues, we propose CGS-Retinex as the first low-light image enhancement framework based on explicit-implicit joint modeling. Our framework deeply integrates continuous Gaussian splatting with Retinex theory. Specifically, we represent the image grid as a continuous parameter field and propose a continuous Gaussian renderer to estimate the spatially continuous global illumination distribution. This approach fundamentally eliminates grid artifacts caused by discrete Gaussian sampling. Furthermore, we introduce an implicit neural representation to model reflectance independently. We leverage shallow high-frequency features to guide the network in accurately reconstructing degraded texture details. Within the Retinex framework, we incorporate physics-inspired brightness consistency constraints and illumination smoothness regularization to enable explicit illumination and implicit reflectance to maintain proper exposure and achieve high-fidelity recovery of high-frequency structures and colors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CGS-Retinex significantly suppresses dark-region noise and overexposure while achieving exceptional high-frequency structural fidelity and color restoration by precisely decoupling illumination and texture. This work establishes a novel continuous physical representation paradigm for low-light image enhancement.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2510.24399

GenTrack: A New Generation of Multi-Object Tracking

Authors:

Toan Van Nguyen↗Rasmus G. K. Christiansen↗Dirk Kraft↗Leon Bodenhagen↗

This paper introduces a novel multi-object tracking (MOT) method, dubbed GenTrack, whose main contributions include: first-a hybrid tracking approach employing both stochastic and deterministic manners to robustly handle unknown and time-varying numbers of targets, particularly in maintaining target identity (ID) consistency and managing nonlinear dynamics, second-leveraging particle swarm optimization (PSO) with some proposed fitness measures to guide stochastic particles toward their target distribution modes, enabling effective tracking even with weak and noisy object detectors, third-integration of social interactions among targets to enhance PSO-guided particles as well as improve continuous updates of both strong (matched) and weak (unmatched) tracks, thereby reducing ID switches and track loss, especially during occlusions, fourth-a GenTrack-based redefined visual MOT baseline incorporating a comprehensive state and observation model based on space consistency, appearance, detection confidence, track penalties, and social scores for systematic and efficient target updates, and five-the first ever publicly available source-code reference implementation with minimal dependencies, featuring three variants, including GenTrack Simple, Strengthen, and Super, facilitating flexible reimplementation. Experimental results have shown that GenTrack provides superior performance on standard benchmarks and real-world scenarios compared to state-of-the-art trackers, with integrated implementations of baselines for fair comparison. Potential directions for future work are also discussed. The source-code reference implementations of both the proposed method and compared-trackers are provided on GitHub: https://github.com/SDU-VelKoTek/GenTrack

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24.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:468ce309b1c33b2ebcfc373e470542c5

Oxidative Stress Biomarker Profile Dynamics across Blood and Cerebrospinal Fluid

Authors:

Noriega de la Colina↗Skaperda↗Charisis↗Ntanasi↗Mamalaki↗Yannakoulia↗Papandreou↗Tekos↗Kouretas↗Scarmeas↗

Peripheral blood measurements dominate oxidative stress research, yet whether they reflect central nervous system (CNS) redox status remains untested in humans. We simultaneously profiled five biomarkers, total antioxidant capacity (TAC), glutathione (GSH), thiobarbituric acid-reactive substances (TBARS), ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP), and hydroxyl radical scavenging activity (HRSA), in paired blood and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from 140 adults in the ALBION cohort. Only FRAP showed a significant positive cross-compartment correlation ({rho} = +0.49, FDR-p < 0.001), supporting its role as a systemic antioxidant signal. TBARS showed a significant inverse cross-compartment association ({rho} = -0.20, FDR-p = 0.042), suggesting compartmental compensation in lipid peroxidation regulation rather than parallel dynamics. TAC and GSH showed no meaningful intercompartmental alignment. Individual biomarker levels were largely stable across the 40-85 year age range in both compartments, suggesting that age effects operate through coordinated latent networks rather than single-marker trajectories. Principal component extraction with varimax rotation identified four latent factors explaining 66.6% of total variance, dominated by a coherent CSF-centred redox axis alongside multiple partially opposing peripheral components. Age stratification revealed progressive fragmentation: middle-aged adults retained four coherent cross-compartment factors, whereas older adults exhibited five more dispersed components. Sex-stratified analyses showed that females exhibited four-factor modular organisation centred on glutathione, while males showed a simpler three-factor structure with tighter cross-compartment coupling anchored by FRAP. Blood and CSF oxidative stress biomarkers are not interchangeable, a finding with direct implications for biomarker selection in clinical trials targeting neurological conditions.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16285

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Authors:

Jiangze Yan↗Yi Shen↗Wenjing Zhang↗Jieyun Huang↗Zhaoxiang Liu↗Ning Wang↗Kai Wang↗Shiguo Lian↗

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

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