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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum deformations of $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$. Part I: Fidelity and experimental benchmarking

arXiv:2606.19462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work explores the effects of both the standard quantum $q$-deformation and the non-standard $h$-deformation of the Hopf algebra $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$ on multi-qubit systems. By constructing the states of a Hilbert space of $N$ qubits through the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients associated with the deformed algebras, we show that these states naturally coincide with the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the $q$- and $h$-deformed Kittel-Shore models. We compare the resulting deformed states with those typically targeted in quantum information experiments, providing a bridge between algebraic constructions and experimentally relevant quantum resources. Fidelities with respect to the undeformed states are computed to establish how the quantum correlations are affected, both for few-qubit systems (including Dicke and non-Dicke states), and in the macroscopic limit ($N \to \infty$) through closed-form formulas derived for arbitrary Dicke states. The results reveal different behaviors between the two deformations. The $q$-deformation smoothly modifies the states and maintains a residual overlap with the original configurations, while the $h$-deformation rapidly makes the states orthogonal to their undeformed counterparts. Both models demand a standard $N^{-1}$ rescaling to preserve fidelity stability in the macroscopic limit.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Improving Medical Communication using Rubric-Guided Counterfactual Recommendations

Text-based telemedicine increasingly relies on lightweight patient feedback, however, such feedback primarily reflects perceived communication quality rather than medical accuracy. We introduce an LM-guided counterfactual recommendation pipeline that discovers and refines interpretable communication features such as tone, personalization, actionability and completeness in addressing patient concerns, without interfering with the medical content. These features are used together with patient-doctor interaction metadata to estimate positive feedback. At inference time, the system searches over low-cost ordinal feature changes and recommends minimal communication changes predicted to increase the probability of positive feedback, while independent auditor models test whether these gains generalize beyond the selection model. Across interactions, recommendations yield a mean +6.41% gain in predicted positive feedback probability under independent auditors, and are non-negative for 93.31% of recommendations. These results suggest that small, interpretable communication changes can capture most predicted gains while preserving the doctor's control over medical reasoning and final wording.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Regional Service-System Conditions Associated with Facility-Linked Home-Based Specialist Care in Japan: A Claims-Based Ecological Study of Home Dialysis

Authors:

Background Complex chronic care is increasingly delivered in patients' homes while remaining linked to specialist facilities for training, monitoring, and backup care. Home dialysis provides a useful case because peritoneal dialysis (PD) and home hemodialysis (HHD) share a home-facility delivery structure but differ in technical and operational requirements. This study examined regional service-system conditions associated with the presence and scale of PD and HHD in Japan. Methods This ecological study used publicly available claims, administrative, census, and geospatial data harmonized to 334 Secondary Medical Areas. Regional indicators were organized into four domains: dialysis service delivery, implementation support for home-based care, hospital backup capacity, and living and sociodemographic context. Diffusion was examined using claims-based indicators of regional presence and post-presence scale, analyzed separately for PD and HHD with Firth penalized logistic regression and zero-truncated negative binomial regression, respectively. Results PD was observed in 271 regions and HHD in 109. Patterns of associated regional conditions differed by modality and stage. PD was associated mainly with existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was associated with broader regional supports, including home-care delivery, living infrastructure, transition support, and hospital-system indicators. Conditions associated with presence differed from those associated with scale. Cross-modality associations suggested that shared regional factors may shape the distribution of both modalities. Conclusions Regional conditions for home dialysis diffusion in Japan differed by modality and stage. PD was linked mainly to existing dialysis-service organization, whereas HHD was linked to multi-domain regional support for technically demanding home treatment. Under standardized reimbursement, local service-system capacity may remain important for modality- and stage-specific diffusion of home dialysis.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DemoDiffusion: One-Shot Human Imitation using pre-trained Diffusion Policy

arXiv:2506.20668v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks by imitating a single human demonstration, without requiring task-specific training or paired human-robot data. Our approach is based on two insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Unlike approaches based on online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, our method enables robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal effort. In real-world experiments across 8 diverse manipulation tasks, DemoDiffusion achieves 83.8\% average success rate, compared to 13.8\% for the pre-trained policy and 52.5\% for kinematic retargeting, succeeding even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/

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

G-Loss: Graph-Guided Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Traditional loss functions, including cross-entropy, contrastive, triplet, and su pervised contrastive losses, used for fine-tuning pre-trained language models such as BERT, operate only within local neighborhoods and fail to account for the global semantic structure. We present G-Loss, a graph-guided loss function that incorporates semi-supervised label propagation to use structural relationships within the embedding manifold. G-Loss builds a document-similarity graph that captures global semantic relationships, thereby guiding the model to learn more discriminative and robust embeddings. We evaluate G-Loss on five benchmark datasets covering key downstream classification tasks: MR (sentiment analysis), R8 and R52 (topic categorization), Ohsumed (medical document classification), and 20NG (news categorization). In the majority of experimental setups, G-Loss converges faster and produces semantically coherent embedding spaces, resulting in higher classification accuracy than models fine-tuned with traditional loss functions.

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

Loss-Shift Transfer via Bayes Quotients

arXiv:2606.13178v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer learning is usually studied as a consequence of distribution shift. This paper identifies an orthogonal failure mode in which the data distribution is fixed and the loss changes. This setting is called loss shift. A loss determines which information in \(X\) is Bayes-relevant, and two losses may therefore require different representations even under the same joint law \(P(X,Y)\). The idea is formalized using Bayes quotients, which allow losses to be ordered by refinement. In the Bayes-quotient formulation, strict refinement gives an immediate qualitative obstruction. A source-minimal representation for a coarser loss is insufficient for a strictly finer target loss. For finite-output log loss, this obstruction becomes an exact quantitative identity. The excess risk is the conditional information about \(Y\) discarded by the representation. Experiments in controlled, learned, synthetic-image, and real-image settings show the predicted effect, i.e., classification-equivalent representations can have different optimal log-loss performance under a fixed data distribution.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Excitation-Inhibition Balance in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders: EEG Criticality Reflects Frontal Metabolites and a Potential Compensatory Mechanism

Background The excitation-inhibition (E-I) balance is essential for normal brain functioning, while deviations from this balance have been implicated in several psychiatric disorders. However, the extent to which electroencephalography (EEG) and proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H-MRS) E-I markers are altered in schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD), how they converge across modalities, and how they relate to cognitive performance and clinical symptoms remain insufficiently characterized. Methods We recruited 111 healthy controls (HC) and 113 individuals with SSD. All participants underwent resting-state EEG and 1H-MRS. Metabolites were measured either in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; NSSD = 63, NHC = 58) or in the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC; NSSD = 50, NHC = 53), from which gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), glutamate + glutamine (Glx), and the Glx/GABA ratio were extracted. Extracted EEG E-I markers included oscillatory activity, aperiodic activity, functional E-I, microstates, multiscale entropy, and neuronal avalanche criticality. Results MRS results showed no group differences in GABA, Glx, or the Glx/GABA ratio. In contrast, most EEG-derived E-I markers indicated increased cortical inhibition in SSD, including steeper aperiodic exponents, prolonged microstate durations, and greater prevalence of subcritical states. However, functional E-I showed a divergent pattern, suggesting balanced dynamics in SSD and relatively inhibition-weighted dynamics in HC. Across groups, higher ACC and lDLPFC GABA predicted a lower kappa index, whereas a higher lDLPFC Glx/GABA ratio was associated with a higher kappa index. In SSD, reduced avalanche criticality was associated with better cognition and less severe symptoms. Conclusion Several EEG-derived E-I proxies, but not MRS measures, indicate an increased cortical inhibition in SSD. Criticality indices best capture frontal neurochemical metabolites and improvements in clinical symptoms, potentially reflecting inhibitory compensation mechanisms in SSD.

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

CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark

AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research. To spur the development of useful agents, we need benchmarks that are challenging, but more crucially, directly correspond to real-world tasks of interest. This paper introduces such a benchmark, designed to measure the accuracy of AI agents in tackling a crucial yet surprisingly challenging aspect of scientific research: computational reproducibility. This task, fundamental to the scientific process, involves reproducing the results of a study using the provided code and data. We introduce CORE-Bench (Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark), a benchmark consisting of 270 tasks based on 90 scientific papers across three disciplines (computer science, social science, and medicine). Tasks in CORE-Bench consist of three difficulty levels and include both language-only and vision-language tasks. We provide an evaluation system to measure the accuracy of agents in a fast and parallelizable way, saving days of evaluation time for each run compared to a sequential implementation. We evaluated two baseline agents: the general-purpose AutoGPT and a task-specific agent called CORE-Agent. We tested both variants using two underlying language models: GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best agent achieved an accuracy of 21% on the hardest task, showing the vast scope for improvement in automating routine scientific tasks. Having agents that can reproduce existing work is a necessary step towards building agents that can conduct novel research and could verify and improve the performance of other research agents. We hope that CORE-Bench can improve the state of reproducibility and spur the development of future research agents.

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

Lagrange: An Open-Vocabulary, Energy-Based Sparse Framework for Generalized End-to-End Driving

arXiv:2606.20274v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scaling end-to-end autonomous driving to complex, open-world environments requires perceptual models that generalize to anomalous scenarios and planners that produce kinematically valid trajectories. Existing paradigms face a distinct dichotomy between representational efficiency and generalization capacity. Dense models (e.g., occupancy networks), while geometrically robust, incur critical computational bottlenecks and struggle with high-level semantic reasoning. Conversely, sparse, query-based planners are efficient but reliant on closed-set definitions, rendering them vulnerable to out-of-distribution (OOD) events. Although recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models offer open-vocabulary reasoning, their autoregressive, discrete token generation fundamentally conflicts with the continuous, high-frequency control requirements of vehicle dynamics. To address this, we propose Lagrange, an open-vocabulary, computationally sparse driving framework based on Masked Latent Fields (MLF). Rather than relying on dense volumetric reconstructions or closed-set query mechanisms, Lagrange exploits Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to encode class-agnostic object proposals into continuous semantic visual tokens. We introduce an intent-driven masked cross-attention module that temporally filters irrelevant entities, decoding the attended tokens into an implicit continuous energy field defined over spatial coordinates. By framing decision-making as a Lagrangian action minimization problem spanning this energy field, we enforce strict compliance with vehicle kinematics while executing collision avoidance. Extensive offline evaluations on both standard (nuScenes) and long-tail (CODA) benchmarks demonstrate that Lagrange establishes a promising framework for robust, interpretable, and kinematically feasible open-world autonomy.

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

Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution Makes Better Deep Researcher

arXiv:2606.13710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep research and agent evolution serve as de-facto tasks for AI agents in real-world applications toward artificial general intelligence. The former enables autonomous retrieval and integration of information in open-ended environments to tackle open-ended research tasks, yet it is constrained by the static parametric deep research capabilities of agent systems. The latter allows agents to autonomously interact with the environment to gain experiences that evolve model capabilities. However, its effectiveness has been widely validated only on verifiable tasks with standard answers, leaving a gap with open-ended research tasks. To bridge these two critical tasks, we propose the Hybrid Open-Ended Tri-Evolution (HOTE) framework, which leverages hybrid-mode reinforcement learning to facilitate the collaborative evolution of a proposer, solver and judge based on web-scale knowledge, moving toward autonomous evolving agents in open-ended tasks and environments. Extensive experiments on three long-form deep research benchmarks demonstrate that the 8B model trained via HOTE surpasses the strongest static open 8-32B models as well as those trained by state-of-the-art deep research training methods with less time overhead, and further verify that the evolution of all three modules in HOTE is indispensable.

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

CoMNeT: A MedNeXt-CorrDiff Framework for Volumetric Brain Tumor Segmentation

Accurate brain tumor segmentation from multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is critical for treatment planning, response assessment, and quantitative neuro-oncology research. However, automated segmentation remains a difficult task in computer vision because of variation in tumor appearance and MRI protocols across patient scans. Moreover, clinically important regions such as enhancing tumor (ET) and tumor core (TC) are often small relative to the full brain volume, furthering increasing the difficulty of achieving high voxel-level precision. In this paper, we show that combining a modern 3D convolutional segmentation model with corrective diffusion-based refinement and ensembling improves volumetric glioma segmentation on the UTSW-Glioma dataset. We propose CoMNeT, a MedNeXt-CorrDiff framework that uses four MRI modalities as input and predicts ET, TC, and whole tumor (WT) regions for automated brain tumor segmentation. MedNeXt is used as the primary segmentation model with Global Response Normalization for feature learning, while CorrDiff is trained as a postprocessing residual refinement method to correct errors in the probability maps before final thresholding. Using five-fold cross-validation, CoMNeT achieved the highest Dice score for most tumor regions, with ET, TC, WT, and average Dice scores of 0.7543 +/- 0.0261, 0.6806 +/- 0.0166, 0.9049 +/- 0.0128, and 0.7798 +/- 0.0184, respectively. CoMNeT outperformed two selected baseline models: SegResNet (0.7555 +/- 0.0190 average Dice) and standalone MedNeXt (0.7697 +/- 0.0154 average Dice). Our findings support the use of corrective diffusion and fold-level probability ensembling as practical additions to existing state-of-the-art 3D convolutional models for automated glioma segmentation.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TMR-GGNN: Credit Card Fraud Detection based on Time-Aware Multi-Relational Guided Graph Neural Network

arXiv:2606.18444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In recent years, credit card fraud detection has faced significant challenges due to highly imbalanced data, evolving fraud patterns, and complex relational structures among transaction entities. To address these issues, this research proposes a novel framework called Timeaware Multi Relational Guided Graph Neural Network (TMR GGNN). Particularly, the proposed TMR GGNN extends the encoder decoder Graph Neural Network GNN architecture by modeling heterogeneous interactions across customers, merchants, devices, and IPs over temporal windows. Subsequently, the proposed TMR GGNN approach constructs a dynamic, multi relational graph and incorporates a time aware relational attention mechanism within the encoder to adaptively weigh the transaction relevance based on temporal proximity and semantic context. Consequently, the decoder employs a contrastive learning module to distinguish between real and synthesized transaction patterns, while improving the models generalization of rare fraud cases. Additionally, to effectively manage severe class imbalances and emphasize discriminative learning, a composite loss function combining Information Noise Contrastive Estimation (InfoNCE) based contrastive loss with Focal Loss is introduced. This integration assists in improving fraud identification while mitigating false negatives.

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

The Market in the Model: Latent Diffusion as Neural Economy

Valuable critique of generative image models within visual culture and the humanities has emphasized the role of datasets in shaping the images they produce. Yet, close studies of the ideological positions embedded into the mechanism of the models have been neglected, leaving them imagined as "black boxes." In a bid to expand, rather than replace, dataset critique, this paper examines the mechanisms of the latent diffusion model in terms of the problems they were brought in to solve on behalf of computer vision engineers, and the decisions each component was tasked with automating. I interpret that ensemble through the histories of its parts and the theory of vision the system inscribes into every generated image. Drawing on Impett and Offert's notion of neural exchange value, I offer this analysis to argue that the model operates as a neural economy: a contained symbolic system that abstracts social communication into commensurable vectors as it transfers the social sphere into parcels for sale. Tracing the training and generation pipelines component by component reveals what each operation displaces, and how it further entrenches the logics of platform and attention economies over social communication. The paper warns that any critique fixated exclusively on copyright and commodity defenses risks reaffirming the very fetishism the model produces, and argues instead for centering social exchange.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Efficient Rationale-based Retrieval: On-policy Distillation from Generative Rerankers based on JEPA

Unlike traditional fact-based retrieval, rationale-based retrieval typically necessitates cross-encoding of query-document pairs using large language models, incurring substantial computational costs. To address this limitation, we propose Rabtriever, which independently encodes queries and documents, while providing comparable cross query-document comprehension capabilities to rerankers. We start from training a LLM-based generative reranker, which puts the document prior to the query and prompts the LLM to generate the relevance score by log probabilities. We then employ it as the teacher of an on-policy distillation framework, with Rabtriever as the student to reconstruct the teacher's contextual-aware query embedding. To achieve this effect, Rabtriever is first initialized from the teacher, with parameters frozen. The Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) paradigm is then adopted, which integrates a lightweight, trainable predictor between LLM layers and heads, projecting the query embedding into a new hidden space, with the document embedding as the latent vector. JEPA then minimizes the distribution difference between this projected embedding and the teacher embedding. To strengthen the sampling efficiency of on-policy distillation, we also add an auxiliary loss on the reverse KL of LLM logits, to reshape the student's logit distribution. Rabtriever optimizes the teacher's quadratic complexity on the document length to linear, verified both theoretically and empirically. Experiments show that Rabtriever outperforms different retriever baselines across diverse rationale-based tasks, including empathetic conversations and robotic manipulations, with minor accuracy degradation from the reranker. Rabtriever also generalizes well on traditional retrieval benchmarks such as MS MARCO and BEIR, with comparable performance to the best retriever baseline.

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

Lifecycle-Aware Dynamic Analysis for Secure ML Model Execution

arXiv:2606.19023v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing reliance on pre-trained Machine Learning (ML) models has introduced new attack surfaces. Recent vulnerabilities demonstrate that malicious behavior can be embedded within model artifacts, often bypassing existing defenses. Current model-scanning solutions primarily rely on static, format-specific rules or known attack signatures, which limit their ability to generalize across frameworks and to detect novel exploitation paths. In contrast, we propose a solution that focuses on the effects an attack has on the host system executing the model and builds on foundational intuitions about ML model execution. In particular, we observe that ML models operate within well-defined lifecycle phases and that, within each phase, interactions with the host system are highly structured and predictable. We translate these intuitions into Moat, a dynamic lifecycle-aware approach for securing ML model execution, and instantiate this design in Re-Moat, our reference implementation. We evaluate Re-Moat across multiple ML frameworks using 77,974 real-world model artifacts from the Hugging Face Hub, 31 Proofs-of-Concept (PoCs) from CVEs, and 334 models from a state-of-the-art dataset, and compare it against state-of-the-art model-scanning solutions. Our results show that our approach detects all evaluated attack classes while maintaining a close-to-zero false-positive rate, validating our intuitions and motivating dynamic analysis for securing ML model execution.

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

BBR-Net: Boundary-Balanced Replay for Continual Medical Image Segmentation

Continual learning for medical image segmentation remains challenging under domain shift because replay-based methods often preserve appearance information without explicitly modeling anatomical structure. This study investigates whether structural consistency governs knowledge retention in continual cardiac ultrasound segmentation. We propose the Boundary-Balanced Replay Network (BBR-Net), which selects replay samples using boundary-aware priority and class balance to preserve anatomically informative regions. The method is evaluated on CAMUS and CardiacNet under forward (CAMUS to CardiacNet) and reverse (CardiacNet to CAMUS) task orders. In the forward setting, BBR-Net retains source-task performance close to an offline joint-training reference, while markedly reducing catastrophic forgetting and preserving competitive target-task adaptation. Ablation results show that boundary-aware prioritization contributes to retention and improves the balance between source-task preservation and target-task adaptation when combined with class-aware sampling. In contrast, the reverse setting reveals that structure-aware replay fails when initial representations are learned from noisy and structurally inconsistent data. To isolate this effect, we conduct a controlled structural perturbation analysis by progressively corrupting source-task boundaries while keeping the dataset, architecture, and training protocol fixed. Forgetting increases consistently as structural reliability decreases, suggesting that replay effectiveness is strongly influenced by the quality of stored structural information, rather than by memory capacity alone. These findings indicate that preserving anatomical structure under domain shift is a central factor in continual medical image segmentation, and that replay mechanisms should account for structural reliability to support robust knowledge retention.

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

On the entanglement induced by the deformation of phase-space

arXiv:2606.17587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most quantum gravity theories propose that the fundamental concept of space-time is mostly compatible with quantum theory in noncommutative (NC) space. In the present paper, we revisit the notion of entanglement induced by NC deformations of phase space. The positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion for separability of bipartite Gaussian states is extended to a general class of Bopp's shift. In particular, we have considered both the position-position and momentum-momentum noncommutativity, with deformation parameters $\theta$ and $\eta$, respectively. It turns out that $\theta$ and $\eta$ induce the entanglement. We have directly applied the formalism for an anisotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator. Peres-Horodecki separability condition leads to a constraint equation for the parameter values of the oscillator in NC space. It turns out that the bipartite Gaussian state is almost always entangled in deformed space. To implement the theoretical idea, we provide an outline for a gedankenexperiment to identify the signature of phase-space noncommutativity, i.e., quantum gravity. In particular, the gedankenexperiment is devised to test the separability of supposedly separable Gaussian states in the usual commutative space, through the covariance matrix, which is constructed via measured output photocurrents after interaction of input Gaussian states and reference states. If the experiment shows that the supposedly separable states are actually entangled, then the entanglement is created through the intermediate background noncommutative space, which is a signature of the quantum nature of gravity.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Maternal BMI and Placental Transcriptomic Changes: A Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression at the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Objective: Maternal body mass index (BMI) is often used as a measure of metabolic status and increased or decreased maternal BMI is associated with a heightened risk of cardiometabolic diseases across generations. The placenta mediates these maternal metabolic cues; however, its genome wide transcriptional adaptations in response to maternal BMI remain incompletely defined. Methods: To delineate placental genes, pathways, and interaction clusters whose transcript abundance varies with maternal prepregnancy BMI through a genome wide meta analysis of human placental RNA sequencing datasets. Placental RNA seq reads from four publicly available cohorts (n=146) were mapped to the GRCh38 reference genome and differentially expressed genes were identified. An independent microarray cohort (n=19) was reanalysed separately to facilitate cross platform comparison. Functional enrichment employed GO, KEGG, and STRING protein interaction resources. Results: Meta-analysis of 146 RNA seq samples identified eight genes with genome-wide significance in placentae from underweight pregnancies including inflammatory signaling gene MAP4K1 and metabolic enzyme PSPH, while overweight and obese categories revealed nominally significant differential expression. KEGG analysis demonstrated significant downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation with increasing maternal BMI, and protein-protein interaction networks revealed inflammatory mediators as central nodes in overweight and obese groups. Independent microarray validation corroborated key findings, including consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation in obesity. Conclusion: Maternal BMI is associated with placental transcriptomic signatures involving inflammatory, metabolic, and hormonal pathways, with consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation across platforms. This genome-wide meta-analysis provides a reproducible catalogue of BMI-responsive placental transcripts that may contribute to developmental programming of offspring health.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Silent Manipulation of Mental Health Treatment Recommendations from a Large Language Model

Authors:

Importance. Large language models (LLMs) increasingly inform mental health decisions by patients and clinicians. Inference-time activation steering can shift model behavior on a target dimension without altering weights or prompts and without disclosure to users, allowing treatment recommendations to be silently changed for commercial or ideological reasons. Objective. To determine whether directional activation steering can shift an open-weights LLM's depression treatment recommendations. Design, Setting, and Participants. This non-human subjects study applied directional activation steering to an open-weights LLM (DeepSeek V4 Flash) responding to 12 depression-advice scenarios (4 favoring medication, 4 favoring avoidance, 4 neutral), generated at 30 amplitudes from -1.5 to +1.5 in 0.1 increments plus an unsteered baseline. Exposures. A single steering direction contrasting antidepressant medication with self-directed approaches (diet, exercise, meditation, dietary supplements), constructed from 16 paired training prompts and applied at the attention output of every transformer block; weights and system prompt were held constant. Main Outcomes and Measures. The extent to which medication and four self-care categories were addressed, scored 0 to 3 by a human-validated LLM rater (Claude Opus 4.7), the medication-versus-self-care balance, and clinician referral, estimated per unit of amplitude using mixed-effects models with a scenario random intercept. Results. Across 372 generations, steering produced a graded, dose-dependent shift in the medication-versus-self-care balance, which declined by 0.32 per unit of amplitude (beta=-0.32; 95% CI, -0.39 to -0.25; P < .001); medication extent fell and self-care extent rose. The shift was largest for scenarios with no stated treatment preference (beta = -0.44; 95% CI, -0.54 to -0.34; P < .001). A clinician referral appeared in 322 of 372 responses (87%) and did not vary with steering amplitude (P = .63). Conclusions and Relevance. In this open-weights LLM providing depression treatment information, inference-time activation steering shifted treatment recommendations without altering weights, prompt structure, or safety outputs, with the largest effect among users expressing no treatment preference. These findings suggest a need for LLM disclosure standards and independent auditing as such models inform clinical decisions.

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

OpenClaw-Skill: Collective Skill Tree Search for Agentic Large Language Models

Equipping Large Language Model (LLM) agents with effective skills is crucial for solving complex tasks in real-world systems like OpenClaw. In this work, we aim to develop a framework that automatically constructs such reusable skills to enhance LLMs in tool use, multi-step reasoning, and dynamic environment interaction. To this end, we propose Collective Skill Tree Search (CSTS), a novel tree-search-based skill construction framework that constructs structured, diverse and generalizable tree of skills. The core idea of CSTS is to leverage collective intelligence to jointly search, identify and compose effective skills via two iterative phases: Collective Skill Node Generation (CSN-Gen) and Collective Skill Node Assessment (CSN-Assess). CSN-Gen exploits collective knowledge from multiple models to explore diverse candidate skills for each subtask, enabling comprehensive skill exploration. CSN-Assess employs multiple models as judges to evaluate and select skill nodes with two scoring mechanisms: (1) collective quality scoring that aggregates independent evaluations to produce a robust estimate of skill effectiveness, and (2) collective transferability scoring that explicitly verifies whether a skill generalizes well across different models. With CSTS, we construct a set of comprehensive tree of skills along with skill-augmented training data, enabling models to effectively learn and utilize skills. Besides, we introduce Collective Skill Reinforcement Learning, which actively selects multiple relevant skills from the tree to broaden solution-space exploration, avoid being trapped by a single skill and its resulting homogeneous or suboptimal solutions. As a result, our trained model, OpenClaw-Skill, exhibits outstanding agentic capabilities in long-horizon planning, tool use and generalization over challenging benchmarks.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Geometric and Quantum Kernel Methods for Predicting Skeletal Muscle Outcomes in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

arXiv:2601.00921v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) affects hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and skeletal-muscle dysfunction is clinically important. Quantum machine learning is increasingly explored for biomedical prediction, but its value in small biomarker cohorts requires benchmarking against strong classical baselines. We analysed a cigarette-smoke COPD cohort of 213 animals with blood and bronchoalveolar-lavage biomarkers to predict tibialis anterior muscle weight, muscle quality, and force. We developed a kernel-geometric quantum hybrid method in which synthetic symmetric positive definite (SPD) references are mapped through a reproducing kernel Hilbert space, compressed using train-only random projection, normalised, and supplied to low-dimensional quantum regression circuits. We benchmarked this approach against classical ridge/kernel models, SPD relational representations, and quantum-kernel regression (QKR). All methods were evaluated using condition-stratified repeated cross-validation. The largest numerical improvement was observed for muscle weight, where the proposed method had the numerically lowest mean root mean squared error (RMSE), approximately 1.8% below the best classical comparator; paired fold-level testing did not establish statistically significant superiority after Holm adjustment, but the endpoint is biologically meaningful. The method also had the numerically lowest mean RMSE for muscle quality. For force, biomarker-only Ridge performed best, suggesting a more linear endpoint structure.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Accelerating physics-informed neural networks for full waveform inversion using a hybrid quantum-classical finite-basis architecture

arXiv:2606.01110v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) reconstructs heterogeneous material properties from receiver data but remains computationally demanding. Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) and their domain-decomposed variants (FBPINNs) offer a mesh-free alternative but face convergence challenges when representing complex velocity fields. We present a hybrid quantum-classical FBPINN for acoustic FWI, bringing together quantum computing and classical machine learning, in which the decomposed wavefield network and the global velocity network are implemented as classical-to-quantum pipelines terminating in parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs). The PQCs are realized as differentiable JAX statevector simulators, enabling end-to-end automatic differentiation through the classical PINN, the quantum circuit, and the physics-informed loss. On a geophysical anomaly benchmark, the quantum hybrid reaches a lower L1 velocity error than the primary classical FBPINN baseline in approximately 8x fewer training iterations, despite using approximately 33% fewer trainable parameters, and it outperforms all 15 classical hyperparameter variants tested. A second benchmark (checkerboard) demonstrates the generality of the inversion pipeline, confirming that the quantum hybrid architecture can recover structured spatial variations beyond the localized anomaly benchmark. Our framework is broadly applicable to wave-based inverse problems beyond geophysics, including medical ultrasound tomography and non-destructive evaluation.

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

Towards End-to-End Automation of AI Research

arXiv:2606.15497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The automation of science is a long-standing ambition in the field of AI. While the community has made significant progress in automating individual components of the scientific process, a system that autonomously navigates the entire research lifecycle – from conception to publication – has remained out of reach. Here, we present the strongest demonstration to date toward automating the entire process end-to-end. We present The AI Scientist, which creates research ideas, writes code, runs experiments, plots and analyzes data, writes the entire scientific manuscript and performs its own peer review. Its ideas, execution, and presentation are of sufficient quality to produce a manuscript generated by an AI system that passes the first round of peer review at a major machine learning conference workshop. The workshop has an acceptance rate of 70 percent. Our system leverages modern foundation models within a complex agentic system. We evaluate The AI Scientist in two settings: a focused mode using human-provided code templates as an initial scaffold to conduct research on a specific topic, and a template-free, open-ended mode that leverages agentic search for wider scientific exploration. Both settings produce diverse ideas and automatically test, report on, and evaluate them. This achievement demonstrates AI's growing capacity for scientific contribution and signifies a potential paradigm shift in how research is conducted. As with any impactful new technology, there could be significant risks, including taxing overwhelmed review systems and adding noise to scientific literature. However, if developed responsibly, such autonomous systems could greatly accelerate scientific discovery.

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arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Subtyping patients with chronic disease using longitudinal BMI patterns

arXiv:2111.05385v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Obesity is a major health problem, increasing the risk of various major chronic diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, and stroke. While the role of obesity identified by cross-sectional BMI recordings has been heavily studied, the role of BMI trajectories is much less explored. In this study, we use a machine-learning approach to subtype individuals' risk of developing 18 major chronic diseases by using their BMI trajectories extracted from a large and geographically diverse EHR dataset capturing the health status of around two million individuals for a period of six years. We define nine new interpretable and evidence-based variables based on the BMI trajectories to cluster the patients into subgroups using the k-means clustering method. We thoroughly review each cluster's characteristics in terms of demographic, socioeconomic, and physiological measurement variables to specify the distinct properties of the patients in the clusters. In our experiments, the direct relationship of obesity with diabetes, hypertension, Alzheimer's, and dementia has been re-established and distinct clusters with specific characteristics for several of the chronic diseases have been found to be conforming or complementary to the existing body of knowledge.