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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA for Joint Anomaly-Feature Selection

Authors:
Pauli Taipale↗

arXiv:2606.13244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting anomalous samples and explanatory features under fixed budgets defines a coupled constrained-optimization problem. Sequential feature-first selection ranks features before choosing samples, which can overlook features whose utility depends on which samples are selected, especially when scores are calibrated from reference data that may be limited, noisy, or drifting. We instead formulate the task as joint sample-feature selection under the same fixed counts. In the analyzed formal model, calibration-error sensitivity grows linearly with the number of samples for feature-first ordering but stays constant for joint selection. We introduce Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA, a constraint-preserving grouped-angle variant for the resulting optimization problem. On matched sparse IBM Heron R3 benchmarks, a hardware-aware implementation reduces circuit depth by 45.9%-61.3% and two-qubit gates by 2.6%-5.2% relative to Qiskit optimization level 3 on the CZ-basis target. It enables, to our knowledge, the largest reported width-depth configurations for constraint-preserving bipartite-selection QAOA hardware executions with feasible-sector retention: 64 qubits at p=2 and 36 qubits at p=3. The 20-qubit p=5 runs retain 63% valid samples. Across 36-64 qubits, fixed-angle runs yield lower-energy feasible samples than matched random-feasible sampling. Warm starts reduce the gap to strict-feasible classical references by 57.5%-80.5%, and near-budget repair matches the sparse classical reference at 36 qubits. Benchmarks show gains in balanced fixed-budget regimes, and noiseless simulations show that problem-structured angle grouping improves over same-depth XY-QAOA and matched-parameter, type-preserving randomization controls. Overall, the results support calibrated joint selection and hardware-realizable constrained-mixer execution in the tested regimes.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

EDoF-NeRF: extended depth-of-field neural radiance fields using a coded aperture camera

Authors:
Yoshiyuki Shirasaki↗Ryoichi Horisaki↗

We propose a method for extending the depth-of-field (DoF) to construct high-fidelity neural radiance fields (NeRF) – an emerging technique for rendering photorealistic novel views from a dataset of images captured at different viewpoints, based on implicit neural representations. The trade-off between DoF and light quantity is inherent not only in conventional cameras but also in NeRF, since the datasets used by NeRF are captured by these cameras. To address this issue, we introduce a coded aperture placed at the camera pupil, preserving spatial frequency components under defocused conditions. We develop a camera model incorporating coded apertures into NeRF, allowing direct input of coded images and enabling the generation of novel views with an extended DoF. We validate the proposed method, termed extended DoF-NeRF (EDoF-NeRF), through simulations and experiments, demonstrating its superior performance compared to conventional aperture cameras.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Therapeutic efficacy study on shoulder impingement syndrome in swimmers: a network meta-analysis

Authors:
Chuo↗Li↗Duan↗Wang↗

Shoulder impingement syndrome (SIS), including subacromial impingement and rotator cuff tendinitis, is commonly caused by repetitive swimming movements and associated shoulder joint dysfunction. Despite numerous available treatment options, no consensus exists on the most effective treatment option. Therefore, this systematic review and network meta-analysis aimed to investigate treatment methods for SIS in swimmers. Using a frequentist framework and Cochrane PICOS principles, we compared SIS treatments, constructed network evidence diagrams, and assessed heterogeneity. A total of 45 studies were included in the qualitative synthesis, and 42 contributed to the network meta-analysis, comprising 1752 participants, 9 treatment categories, and outcome measures. For pain outcomes, some adjunctive interventions combined with exercise showed favorable ranking probabilities, although several estimates were accompanied by wide confidence intervals. For shoulder range-of-motion outcomes, taping, acupuncture, manual therapy, and sport-specific training showed favorable effects in selected comparisons, particularly for external and internal rotation. According to surface under the cumulative ranking curve (SUCRA) rankings, exercise combined with medium-frequency therapy ranked highly for pain reduction, whereas exercise combined with acupuncture or extracorporeal shock wave therapy ranked highly for shoulder flexion. Exercise combined with taping ranked highly for external rotation, and exercise combined with manual therapy ranked highly for internal rotation. However, the interpretation of ranking results should remain cautious because uncertainty and inconsistency were present in some comparisons. Exercise-based rehabilitation appears to remain central to the management of SIS in swimmers. Several adjunctive interventions showed favorable findings for selected outcomes, especially pain relief and shoulder rotational function. However, the available evidence was affected by heterogeneity, inconsistency, and imprecision across some treatment comparisons. More rigorously designed swimmer-specific randomized controlled trials are needed before firm treatment hierarchies can be established. Trial registration: The protocol for this systematic review is registered with PROSPERO (www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO; registration number: CRD42024498851). The first submission of PROSPERO was on January 15, 2024, and it was revised and updated on March 25, 2026.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NAMESAKES: Probing Identity Memorization in Text-to-Image Models

Authors:
Morris Alper↗Vasudha Varadarajan↗Moran Yanuka↗Angelina Wang↗Hadar Averbuch-Elor↗

Text-to-image (T2I) models generate realistic likenesses of some individuals when prompted with their names, raising privacy concerns. However, distinguishing whether a generated face is memorized or fabricated currently requires ground-truth photos, access to training data, or white-box access to model internals, limiting applicability. We introduce a fully black-box behavioral probe that distinguishes between these regimes while requiring no reference photos or prior knowledge of training data. To benchmark this task, we present the NAMESAKES dataset of over one thousand names and faces of public figures spanning a wide range of fame levels, along with perturbed, less famous names. Experiments on state-of-the-art T2I models show that our probe substantially predicts identity memorization and separates memorized from unrecognized names, with further insights into differences across model families.

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

Recursive Joint Simulation in Games

Authors:
Vojtech Kovarik↗Caspar Oesterheld↗Vincent Conitzer↗

arXiv:2402.08128v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game-theoretic dynamics between AI agents could differ from traditional human-human interactions in various ways. One such difference is that it may be possible to accurately simulate an AI agent, for example because its source code is known. Such an agent would then be fundamentally uncertain whether it is in the real world or in a simulation. Our aim is to explore ways of leveraging this possibility to achieve more cooperative outcomes in strategic settings. In this paper, we study an interaction between AI agents where the agents run a recursive joint simulation. That is, the agents first jointly observe a simulation of the situation they face. This simulation in turn recursively includes additional simulations (with a small chance of failure, to avoid infinite recursion), and the results of all these nested simulations are observed before an action is chosen. We show that the resulting interaction is strategically equivalent to an infinitely repeated version of the original game, allowing a direct transfer of existing results such as the various folk theorems. As evidence that the equivalence is robust, we show that it holds even when we relax some of the assumptions and that it also holds ``from the inside'' – meaning, for an agent that finds itself inside the game and has self-locating uncertainty.

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07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Moments in Rough Bergomi and Boundary Attainment in Rough Heston

Authors:
Arthur Bourdon↗Thibault Jeannin↗

arXiv:2606.07482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We address two open questions in the rough volatility literature. First, we prove finite positive moments for the rough Bergomi price process, and for a wider class of Gaussian Volterra Bergomi models, in the whole subcritical range under negative correlation. More precisely, if \(\rho\in[-1,0)\), then \(\E[S_T^p]

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

BioDivergence: A Benchmark and Evaluation Framework for Hidden Contextual Contradictions in Biomedical Abstracts

Authors:
Elias Hossain↗Sanjeda Sara Jennifer↗Sabera Akter Bushra↗Niloofar Yousefi↗

Biomedical findings often seem to conflict across studies, but many of these differences are context-dependent rather than true contradictions. Variations in cohort, geography, assay protocol, disease subtype, and clinical setting can make both claims locally valid. Existing NLI and scientific claim-verification benchmarks reduce such cases to entailment, contradiction, or neutral, failing to capture the contextual structure behind divergence. To address this, we introduce BioDivergence, an evaluation framework with a six-class conflict taxonomy, a 13-axis divergence ontology, and four structured outputs per claim pair: conflict type, divergence axes, dominant confounder, and reconciliation explanation. We release BioDivergence-Silver-v1.0, an article-disjoint silver benchmark of 11,865 claim pairs across five biomedical domains, alongside a legacy deduplicated variant for comparison. Results show notable ranking differences between the two variants, with the fine-tuned reference model dropping about 12 points under the article-disjoint setting, while Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3 achieves 0.5523 accuracy and 0.3894 contextual-F1 on the 842-example primary test set. BioDivergence offers a more faithful way to distinguish contextual divergence from direct contradiction and to separate article-level memorization from genuine task learning.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

RoTRAG: Rule of Thumb Reasoning for Conversation Harm Detection with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Authors:
Juhyeon Lee↗Wonduk Seo↗Junseo Koh↗Seunghyun Lee↗Haihua Chen↗Yi Bu↗

Detecting harmful content in multi turn dialogue requires reasoning over the full conversational context rather than isolated utterances. However, most existing methods rely mainly on models internal parametric knowledge, without explicit grounding in external normative principles. This often leads to inconsistent judgments in socially nuanced contexts, limited interpretability, and redundant reasoning across turns. To address this, we propose RoTRAG, a retrieval augmented framework that incorporates concise human written moral norms, called Rules of Thumb (RoTs), into LLM based harm assessment. For each turn, RoTRAG retrieves relevant RoTs from an external corpus and uses them as explicit normative evidence for turn level reasoning and final severity classification. To improve efficiency, we further introduce a lightweight binary routing classifier that decides whether a new turn requires retrieval grounded reasoning or can reuse existing context. Experiments on ProsocialDialog and Safety Reasoning Multi Turn Dialogue show that RoTRAG consistently improves both harm classification and severity estimation over competitive baselines, with an average relative gain of around 40% in F1 across benchmark datasets and an average relative reduction of 8.4% in distributional error, while reducing redundant computation without sacrificing performance.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

CineOrchestra: Unified Entity-Centric Conditioning for Cinematic Video Generation

Authors:
Sharath Girish↗Tsai-Shien Chen↗Zhikang Dong↗Mukesh Singhal↗Hao Chen↗Sergey Tulyakov↗Aliaksandr Siarohin↗

Cinematic video depicts multiple subjects acting or interacting at specific moments, captured with deliberate camera movement, and stitched together by shot transitions. Together, these elements demand a level of fine-grained control beyond current text-to-video models. Existing work addresses each axis in isolation: multi-subject personalization, temporal control, multi-shot synthesis, or camera control; no prior framework jointly integrates all four. We present CineOrchestra, a unified video diffusion model that controls subjects, events, cameras, and shot transitions simultaneously. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous cinematic elements share a fundamental structure: each is an entity acting over a specific temporal interval, which can therefore all be expressed through one shared structure of entity-centric conditioning primitives, augmented with reference images for visual entities. This formulation reduces the architectural challenge to a single positional encoding problem, which we solve with two parameter-free coordinated rotary embeddings: (a) an interval-sampled temporal RoPE that yields consistent attention behavior across events of dramatically varying duration, and (b) a 2D entity-temporal cross-attention RoPE that disambiguates per-entity conditions and routes each to its corresponding spatiotemporal region. On two new benchmarks, CineOrchestra outperforms six per-axis specialists on dense caption following and shot-transition timing, with consistent gains in a pairwise user study and component ablations.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Post-Selection Probability and Fidelity of Bidirectional Teleportation

Authors:
Ning Sun↗Lei Feng↗Pengfei Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.17251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding the scrambling of quantum information is central to many areas of quantum physics, including quantum thermalization, entanglement growth, and quantum information processing. Insights from these studies have, in turn, inspired the development of novel quantum protocols and algorithms. Recently, a bidirectional teleportation protocol was proposed to implement a digital SWAP operation between qubits by leveraging chaotic Hamiltonian evolution combined with measurement and post-selection. In this work, we provide a comprehensive study of two central quantities that characterize the protocol, the post-selection probability and the fidelity, taking into account possible errors in time-reversed dynamics. We show that these quantities can be expressed in terms of standard diagnostics in quantum dynamics, including the Loschmidt echo and its subsystem variant. The results unveil (1) the initial-state dependence of the fidelity and (2) the stability of the post-selection probability in integrable models. Our findings offer practical guidance for the implementation of the protocol on realistic quantum devices.

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

DeMaVLA: A Vision-Language-Action Foundation Model for Generalizable Deformable Manipulation

Authors:
Taiyi Su↗Jian Zhu↗Tianjian Wang↗Youzhang He↗Zitai Huang↗Jianjun Zhang↗Chong Ma↗Hanyang Wang↗Tianjiao Zhang↗Munan Yin↗Weihao Ding↗Yi Xu↗…

arXiv:2605.31286v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-world household robots require Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models that can acquire reusable manipulation skills across diverse objects, task conditions, and household environments. Deformable-object folding is a representative challenge, requiring robots to handle clothing items from random initial states across varying categories, geometries, materials, and scenes. However, existing VLA systems commonly train separate policies for different object categories, while naively mixed multi-task training often suffers from task interference and degraded performance. To move beyond category-specific folding policies, we introduce DeMaVLA, a VLA foundation model for generalizable Deformable Manipulation. DeMaVLA adopts a VLM backbone with an action expert and formulates continuous action generation using flow matching. To improve efficiency, the action expert is constructed by pruning every other transformer layer while preserving layer-wise alignment with the VLM backbone, reducing training and inference cost. DeMaVLA is first pre-trained on approximately 5,000 hours of selected real-world dual-arm demonstrations to acquire general manipulation priors. It is then post-trained on mixed folding data that aggregates self-collected demonstrations and corrective trajectories from real-robot failures across multiple folding tasks through a human-in-the-loop Data Aggregation~(DAgger) pipeline. Experiments show that DeMaVLA achieves competitive performance on RoboTwin 2.0 and strong real-world results on our household folding benchmark. These results highlight the value of scalable real-world data, efficient action generation, and corrective learning for general-purpose VLA policies in deformable-object manipulation.

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

GrapNet: A Programmable Dynamic-Architecture Neural Graph Substrate

Authors:
Zirong Li↗

arXiv:2606.18923v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Programmability is a missing first-class interface in fixed-tensor neural networks: editing a relation, freezing a subgraph, auditing a local function, or changing the execution backend should be an operation on the neural program rather than ad-hoc parameter surgery. GrapNet studies this graph-as-network setting. The graph is the architecture and executable program, not an input data graph. Each compute node owns its next-layer child references and a trainable allocation vector aligned with those references; deleting a relation physically removes both the child reference and the corresponding allocation coordinate. Structural rules and execution policies live outside the node core, so the same child-owned graph can be grown, frozen, structurally edited, grouped into trainable family blocks, routed by attention over active relations, or lowered to dense snapshots after topology stabilizes. GrapNet composes with conventional modules through a vector-valued parent interface: dense layers, CNN encoders, ResNet feature extractors, attention blocks, and transformer representations can all feed one sensory GrapNode per coordinate. The evaluation is organized as a programmability stress suite rather than as a new replay benchmark. In a matched ten-seed Split Fashion-MNIST study, a plastic GrapNet+ER head reaches 63.16 percent seen-class accuracy versus 51.08 percent for a parameter-larger dense MLP+ER under the same seen-class loss and replay memory, with paired delta 12.08 points and p=1.3e-5. On Split CIFAR-10 with a frozen ImageNet ResNet-18 encoder, the same substrate improves the online head over MLP-256 by 3.81 points, with p=0.0026. These results support GrapNet as an editable neural graph substrate whose core value is structural programmability with faithful execution views.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Deep-Learning Based Quantification of Breast Arterial Calcification on Mammography for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Authors:
Singh↗Platt↗Bussey↗Heacock↗Verdone↗Chen↗Reynolds↗H. R↗Yu↗Shen↗Bredella↗M. A↗…

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning model for automated quantification of breast arterial calcification (BAC) on screening mammography and to assess whether AI-derived BAC burden predicts major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in women. Methods: In this retrospective study, 202,006 women who underwent screening mammography without history of MACE were included. A BAC segmentation model was trained on an expert-annotated dataset using a multi-task U-Net with a ResNet-18 encoder to detect and segment BAC. BAC burden was quantified as area (mm{superscript 2}) from model-generated masks using DICOM pixel spacing and categorized by tertiles into low, intermediate, and high. The PREVENT score and incident MACE were identified from electronic health records. Cox proportional hazards models were developed to evaluate AI-derived BAC burden and PREVENT score alone, and combined models for 5 - and 10-year cardiovascular risk prediction. Results: Among 202,006 women (mean age 54.8{+/-}11.7 years), 23.1% had AI-detected BAC, and 7,701 (3.8%) developed incident MACE during a median follow - up of 7.5 years. On the geographically held-out test set, the BAC model achieved an AUROC of 0.97, Dice score of 0.6678, and Pearson correlation of 0.961 between AI-derived and manually annotated BAC burden. BAC burden increased with age and was higher among women who developed MACE. Five - year MACE incidence increased across BAC categories from 1.5% in women without BAC to 6.9% in those with high BAC burden. BAC burden alone showed modest prediction of MACE, with 5-year and 10-year AUROCs of 0.661 and 0.650, respectively, while PREVENT achieved AUROCs of 0.781 and 0.771. Adding BAC to PREVENT produced minimal improvement in discrimination. Conclusion: Deep learning-based BAC quantification from routine mammography is feasible, accurate, and associated with future cardiovascular risk. Although BAC added little to PREVENT for overall discrimination, it may serve as a scalable opportunistic imaging biomarker to identify women at elevated cardiovascular risk and support preventive care.

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15.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

On the evolution of the company we keep: Implications for infectious disease modeling

Authors:
Joël Mossong↗

by Joël Mossong Whom we meet shapes how infections spread. Where earlier focus of mathematical epidemiology was on incorporating age, more recent work has begun to reveal the importance of socioeconomic aspects for understanding and managing future epidemics. In this Perspective, Joël Mossong discusses the importance of understanding social contacts and how they have evolved for infectious disease modeling, and the need to factor in additional considerations such as ethic and socioeconomic backgrounds.

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

CountZES: Counting via Zero-Shot Exemplar Selection

Authors:
Muhammad Ibraheem Siddiqui↗Muhammad Haris Khan↗

Object counting in complex scenes is particularly challenging in the zero-shot (ZS) setting, where instances of unseen categories are counted using only a class name. Existing ZS counting methods that infer exemplars from text often rely on off-the-shelf open-vocabulary detectors (OVDs), which in dense scenes suffer from semantic noise, appearance variability, and multi-instance proposals. Alternatively, random image-patch sampling is employed, which fails to accurately delineate object instances. Since counting is sensitive to exemplar quality, such selection strategies often yield poorly representative exemplars, leading to inaccurate count estimation. To address these issues, we propose CountZES, an inference-only approach for object counting via ZS exemplar selection. CountZES discovers diverse exemplars through three synergistic stages: Detection-Anchored Exemplar (DAE), Density-Guided Exemplar (DGE), and Feature-Consensus Exemplar (FCE). DAE refines OVD detections to isolate precise single-instance exemplars. DGE introduces a density-driven, self-supervised paradigm to identify statistically consistent and semantically compact exemplars, while FCE reinforces visual coherence through feature-space clustering. Together, these stages yield a complementary exemplar set that balances textual grounding, count consistency, and feature representativeness. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate CountZES superior performance among ZOC methods while generalizing effectively across domains.

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

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

Authors:
Tongyan Fang↗Siyuan Huang↗Naiyu Fang↗Ganlong Zhao↗Zhongjin Luo↗Jianbo Liu↗Xiaogang Wang↗Ying Dong↗Hongsheng Li↗

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Gaze Heads: How VLMs Look at What They Describe

Authors:
Rohit Gandikota↗David Bau↗

How a vision-language model internally solves the task of describing an image is far from obvious. We find that the model develops a specific mechanism for this: a small set of attention heads in its language-model backbone, which we call gaze heads, whose attention tracks the image region the model is currently describing. We find them with a simple correlation score from a few forward passes, using comic strips as a controlled testbed where narrative order is laid out spatially. These gaze heads do not just track the image tokens being described: redirecting their attention to a chosen region forces the VLM to describe that region instead. A single attention-mask intervention on the top-100 gaze heads, fewer than 9% of all heads, steers the model's answer to any chosen comic panel at 83.1% accuracy, while the same intervention on random heads fails to redirect the answer, and intervening on all heads destroys generation. The same lever also extends to continuous control: switching the gaze target mid-generation makes the model wrap up its current panel description and move to the new one within a few tokens. Beyond comics, the same intervention redirects answers to chosen regions in natural COCO images. The mechanism further recurs across model sizes from 2B to 32B parameters and across other VLM architectures, although some frozen-encoder families show no comparable head set. More broadly, this shows that targeted edits identified through mechanistic analysis can serve as practical inference-time levers for steering multimodal model behavior, without any retraining. Our code, interactive demo, and datasets are available at https://gaze.baulab.info/

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

ZIVARI-TLBO: A Zero-Cost Inter-Group Evaluated-Elite Relay Mechanism for Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization

Authors:
Pezhman Zivari↗

arXiv:2606.17087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: ZIVARI-TLBO is a grouped Teaching-Learning-Based Optimization (TLBO) method that augments an existing population-state controller with a fixed inter-group evaluated-elite relay. At each scheduled event, every group offers its already evaluated elite to the next group in a fixed ring; the elite replaces the receiver's worst eligible learner only when its stored objective value is better. Because the exact relay copies an already evaluated solution and its stored fitness, it requires no additional objective-function calls. The frozen gts-v4-cm-fixed implementation is evaluated under equal 10,000-evaluation budgets on eight classical functions at dimensions 10, 30, 50, and 100, with 30 matched seeds, and on five constrained engineering problems. A direct ablation against the same grouped landscape-aware controller without relay records 728/11/221 wins/ties/losses and a rank-biserial effect size of 0.624 across dimensions. In an eight-method multidimensional comparison, WOA obtains the best average rank (2.914) and ZIVARI-TLBO ranks second (3.382); ZIVARI-TLBO significantly outperforms TLBO, MCTLBO, DE, PSO, and GWO, loses significantly to WOA, and is not significantly different from HHO after Holm adjustment. Feasibility-aware engineering results are mixed and sensitive to the current static-penalty formulation. The evidence supports a scoped relay contribution and budget-consistent information-sharing mechanism, but not universal state-of-the-art, global-convergence, engineering-dominance, or CEC superiority claims.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

IHBench: Evaluating Post-Interruption Recovery in Voice Agents with Structured Workflows

Authors:
Ahmad Salimi↗Wentao Ma↗Yuzhi Tang↗Dongming Shen↗Mu Li↗Alex Smola↗

arXiv:2606.19595v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice agents deployed in structured workflows (customer service, healthcare scheduling, account management) must handle frequent user interruptions while maintaining progress through multi-step procedures. Existing benchmarks for speech-capable models focus on the timing of interruptions: barge-in detection, endpointing, and turn-taking dynamics. They leave unmeasured what happens after the interruption: does the agent resume the workflow at the correct step? Does it address the user's interjection? Does it avoid re-delivering content the user already heard? We introduce IHBench (Interruption Handling Benchmark), a benchmark that evaluates post-interruption recovery in voice agents executing state-machine-driven workflows across 10 enterprise domains. Six interruption types are injected at controlled points mid-utterance, with per-interruption evaluation rubrics generated alongside the data. Each interruption is scored on two axes: task fulfillment and recovery quality. We evaluate 27 audio-language model configurations from OpenAI, Google, and the open-weight community. Models vary widely, and recovery quality depends strongly on the interruption type. Across our experiments, closed-weight models are consistently more robust to interruptions than open-weight ones: they win far more often on task fulfillment, degrade roughly 3.3x more slowly as conversations grow longer, and show no audio-versus-text modality gap, whereas the open-weight models lose ground on all three. A human study validates the LLM judge against human annotators, and a cross-benchmark analysis against AudioMultiChallenge indicates that recovery quality is a largely distinct capability axis.

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21.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

segSHAPE: RNA secondary structure prediction from nanopore direct RNA sequencing

Authors:
Cheng↗Härtsiä↗Änkö↗M.-L↗

RNAs adopt complex structures that regulate key biological processes, making accurate structure prediction essential. Chemical probing coupled with Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) offers a route to single-molecule structural inference, but current tools are limited by inaccurate signal-to-sequence alignment, which degrades modification-rate estimation and downstream structure prediction. Here we introduce segSHAPE for RNA secondary structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data (both RNA002 and RNA004 chemistries), a probe-agnostic framework that improves signal alignment using prior information of basecalling and per-read signal baseline shift correction, learns position-specific k-mer raw signal parameters, and estimates per-nucleotide modification rates with an unsupervised anomaly detector. On three public RNA002 DRS datasets spanning different chemical probes (AcIm, NAI-N3) and RNAs from 421 to 1552 nt, segSHAPE achieves the highest F1 score and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) on all RNAs, exceeding the strongest baseline by 3.4 to 5.8 percentage points in MCC. It additionally captures the ligand-induced conformational change of the thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) riboswitch RNA directly from RNA002 DRS data using the DEPC probe. On a public RNA004 DRS dataset, segSHAPE improves over the sm-PORE-cupine baseline by 17 ROC-AUC points in modification rate estimation and by 6.7 MCC points in structure prediction. These results establish segSHAPE as a unified, probe-agnostic pipeline for RNA structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data.

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Global population frequencies of NAT2 star alleles observed in three large biobanks

Authors:
Sangkuhl↗Whirl-Carrillo↗Woon↗Venkatesh↗Keat↗Whaley↗Ritchie↗M. D↗Klein↗T. E↗

NAT2 is an important pharmacogene which encodes the N-acetyltransferase 2 enzyme that is involved in the metabolism of multiple medications, and variants in this gene can affect patient response to these medications. CPIC has published a clinical guideline for prescribing hydralazine using NAT2 genotypes. Just prior to the guideline, updated NAT2 star allele numbering and definitions were released, differing somewhat from the historical nomenclature. Clinical pharmacogenomic testing panels often test for the most common star alleles, so knowledge of the most common updated NAT2 star alleles is critical for the implementation of the CPIC NAT2/hydralazine guideline. We first determine NAT2 diplotype frequencies from UK Biobank (UKBB) 200k phased genomes, then analyzed allele, diplotype, and phenotype population frequencies from the All of Us Research program, PennMedicine BioBank (PMBB) and UKBB 500k datasets. We found that analyzing NAT2 diplotypes from phased data provides critical information for algorithms designed to predict diplotypes from unphased data. We observed that NAT2*5, *6, and *4 were the most common star alleles in that order, and the top 11 most frequent NAT2 star alleles were the same across all biobanks. However, differences in star allele frequencies across biogeographical populations were observed. The largest difference led to a higher frequency of NAT2 poor metabolizer phenotypes as compared to rapid and intermediate metabolizer phenotypes in all global populations except in the EAS population, where NAT2 poor metabolizers were in the minority.

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

A Unified Causal-Origin Taxonomy of Distributional Shifts in Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Ardianto Wibowo↗Paulo E Santos↗Amer Baghdadi↗Matthew Stephenson↗Karl Sammut↗Jean-Philippe Diguet↗

arXiv:2606.16933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) systems often degrade when operating conditions differ from those previously encountered, reflecting distributional shifts in the underlying data-generating process. Such shifts may occur between training and evaluation, as in In-Distribution (ID) and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization, or within non-stationary settings where environment dynamics evolve over time. However, the formal relationship between these views remains unclear, and existing work mainly focuses on mitigation rather than the causal origin of shift within the agent-environment interaction. This work develops a unified causal-origin taxonomy that characterizes sources of distributional shift in RL and relates ID/OOD generalization to non-stationary settings. We transfer the classical dataset-shift principle from supervised learning to RL by reformulating distributional shift in terms of the generative interaction process. Using a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP), we decompose the interaction into structural components, including the state distribution, observation process, policy, reward, and transition dynamics, together with the shifted-time boundary. The proposed taxonomy distinguishes internal, agent-driven, and external, environment-driven, distributional shifts. The shifted-time boundary perspective further characterizes explicit, implicit, and hybrid shifts. This formulation unifies ID/OOD generalization and non-stationarity as structured changes in the underlying process. We also introduce an evaluation framework for measuring shift impact and adaptation through performance degradation and recovery metrics. By grounding distributional shift in the causal-origin structure of RL, this work supports systematic analysis of robustness under distributional shift.

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

WISE: A Long-Horizon Agent in Minecraft with Why-Which Reasoning

Authors:
Renmin Cheng↗Changhao Chen↗

arXiv:2606.12852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is not only the lack of episodic memory, but also the decoupling of what-where-when memory from which-why reasoning. To address this, we propose WISE (Which-Why Informed Semantic Explorer), a long-horizon agent framework with an enhanced low-level controller equipped with a Causal Event Graph that augments episodic memory with explicit causal structure linking observations to task relevance. Unlike prior work such as MrSteve, which relies on feature similarity for retrieval, WISE enables robust recall under viewpoint changes and supports opportunistic task reordering through causal reasoning. Building on this memory, we propose an Opportunistic Task Scheduler that dynamically re-prioritizes subtasks when causally relevant opportunities are detected. We further equip WISE with a multi-scale progressive exploration strategy to provide spatially comprehensive observations for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that WISE largely improves task success and efficiency on long-horizon sparse tasks, particularly in settings requiring adaptive decision-making.

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25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Real-order moments, tail representations, and logarithmic means

Authors:
Roberto Vila↗Eduardo Nakano↗

arXiv:2606.14019v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a unified framework for the study of real-order moments of arbitrary random variables. General integral representations are established in terms of cumulative distribution functions and survival functions, covering continuous, discrete, and mixed distributions supported on the whole real line. These formulas extend the classical tail-integral identities for nonnegative random variables and provide a common treatment of positive, fractional, and negative moments. For discrete distributions, explicit series representations are derived in terms of cumulative probabilities, yielding simple criteria for the existence of moments. Applications are presented for the zeta and Skellam distributions, illustrating how tail behavior determines moment finiteness and how moments can be represented geometrically through cumulative distribution functions. In addition, a representation for logarithmic moments is obtained, linking logarithmic means, Laplace transforms, and the classical Frullani identity. The results provide a unified perspective on moment representations and establish useful connections between tail probabilities, distribution functions, Laplace transforms, and moment existence.

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