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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Hybrid refinery process turns plant material into industrially important chemical

An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals. An ingredient of nylon has been made in high yields from lignin — revealing a fresh strategy for turning this complex plant biopolymer into industrial chemicals.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

A non-invasive liquid biopsy resolves the diagnostic blind spot in chronic kidney disease

Chronic kidney disease is a major global health burden, and its early detection is critical for delaying progression to kidney failure using recently developed targeted therapies. However, current diagnostic screening relies heavily on blood markers that are confounded by muscle mass, and on urine tests that frequently miss structural damage occurring without protein leakage. This creates a critical diagnostic blind spot that hinders timely intervention. Here we show a non-invasive liquid biopsy platform that quantifies a specific protein marker, MUC1, on urinary extracellular vesicles to accurately assess renal parenchymal integrity. By bypassing the systemic metabolic noise of traditional blood tests, our assay provides a remarkably stable, person-specific functional signature. Following extensive validation across diverse cohorts, our longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the discrepancy between this novel urine-based readout and standard blood tests unmasks hidden renal vulnerability, successfully predicting rapid functional decline. By comprehensively evaluating both tubular and glomerular integrity from a single spot urine sample, these findings establish a completely non-invasive, highly scalable prescreening tool that resolves the diagnostic blind spot, enabling broader early detection strategies and ushering in a new era of proactive risk management.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multi-fidelity aerodynamic data fusion by autoencoder transfer learning

arXiv:2512.13069v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate aerodynamic prediction often relies on high-fidelity simulations; however, their prohibitive computational costs severely limit their applicability in data-driven modeling. This limitation motivates the development of multi-fidelity strategies that leverage inexpensive low-fidelity information without compromising accuracy. Addressing this challenge, this work presents a multi-fidelity deep learning framework that combines autoencoder-based transfer learning with a newly developed Multi-Split Conformal Prediction (MSCP) strategy to achieve uncertainty-aware aerodynamic data fusion under extreme data scarcity. The methodology leverages abundant Low-Fidelity (LF) data to learn a compact latent physics representation, which acts as a frozen knowledge base for a decoder that is subsequently fine-tuned using scarce HF samples. Tested on surface-pressure distributions for NACA airfoils (2D) and a transonic wing (3D) databases, the model successfully corrects LF deviations and achieves high-accuracy pressure predictions using minimal HF training data. Furthermore, the MSCP framework produces robust, actionable uncertainty bands with pointwise coverage exceeding 95%. By combining extreme data efficiency with uncertainty quantification, this work offers a scalable and reliable solution for aerodynamic regression in data-scarce environments.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Certification of the genuine resolution of photon number resolving detectors

arXiv:2606.14365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors are essential components of photonic quantum technologies, yet thus far, no practical metric exists to certify how many photons they can genuinely resolve in a single measurement. Here we introduce an operational framework for quantifying the capability of a PNR detector to distinguish between different numbers of photons, i.e. its genuine resolution. In turn, we develop a practical and scalable protocol for certifying the genuine resolution of a detector, which is based on coherent state probes. We apply the method to a 28-pixel photon-number-resolving superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (PNR-SNSPD) and certify genuine four-outcome resolution. Our work highlights the critical requirements in terms of detector efficiency towards achieving high genuine resolution. This approach provides an operational benchmark for PNR detectors and fills a crucial gap in the characterization of photonic quantum devices.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Computational Design of Optimal Sequences for Targeted Hypermutagenesis Using Recombination-Coupled Diversity-Generating Retroelements

Diversity-generating retroelements (DGRs) are natural systems that accelerate evolution via targeted hypermutation at adenines. We previously developed DGRec, a system combining DGRs and recombineering for programmable mutagenesis in Escherichia coli. We here address two important issues with DGRec: the dependence of mutagenesis efficiency on the dgrRNA secondary structure and the variability of the reverse-transcription biases with sequence context and position. First, we introduce and validate a method to recode non-functional templates, i.e. with low mutagenesis efficiency, into highly functional ones through synonymous mutations. Second, we develop a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model to predict DGRec mutational profiles for any given template sequence. By integrating this LSTM model with our recoding method, we establish a comprehensive workflow for customized directed evolution, enabling researchers to precisely fine-tune DGRec in vivo mutagenesis to their engineering needs.

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

Direction-Conditioned Policies via Compositional Subgoal Scoring for Online Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory implies that the optimal goal-conditioned action depends on the goal only through the gradient of the goal-reaching distance at the current state, yet standard online GCRL still conditions the actor on the raw goal – a signal that is geometrically uninformative when the goal is far from the data distribution. We propose Direction-Conditioned Policies (DCP), a fully online method that decomposes goal-reaching into two components sharing one InfoNCE representation $\psi$: a subgoal-scoring step that selects a visited state $z_t$ aligned with the final goal $g$ in $\psi_g$, and a direction-conditioned actor that consumes the unit direction $d_t$ and magnitude $r_t$ from $\psi(s_t)$ to $\psi(z_t)$. The two components train jointly, factor cleanly at deployment (subgoal scoring is removed, while direction conditioning remains with $g$ in place of $z_t$), and admit independent modification at the same $(d_t,r_t)$ interface. We prove three results. First, direction sufficiency under HJB: the optimal action under control-affine dynamics depends on the goal only through the value gradient. Second, a quantitative bound showing that, under mild conditions on the learned representation and assuming the scoring rule returns an on-path $z_t$, the actor's conditioning input at training and at deployment coincide up to representation error and geodesic slack. Third, a controllable-subspace characterization of when directional conditioning fails. Across nine environments, DCP improves over Contrastive RL on most final metrics, with the largest gains on manipulation and obstacle-interaction tasks; a qualitative analysis of the learned $\psi$-distance landscape shows the contrastive representation behaves as an online quasimetric encoding environment topology, and the single failure case (AntSoccer) localizes to a learned-gradient pathology that the theory anticipates.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Transformer-Guided Graph Attention for Direct Cardiac Mesh Reconstruction: A Structural Digital Twin Framework

Building patient-specific cardiac models sits at the heart of precision cardiology, yet getting those models into clinical use keeps running into the same wall: mesh generation is slow, messy, and frustrating. The standard workflow – segmenting the image, running Marching Cubes, and then manually cleaning up the result – is time-consuming, inconsistent across operators, and demands specialist knowledge most clinical teams do not have. We take a fundamentally different approach. Instead of treating segmentation and mesh generation as two separate problems, we train a single end-to-end network that goes directly from a raw 3D medical image to a smooth, simulation-ready cardiac surface mesh. The core is a 3D Swin Transformer encoder-decoder that extracts volumetric features from CT or MRI volumes, paired with a Graph Attention Network (GAT) head that iteratively deforms a template mesh to fit the patient's cardiac boundary. We tested on the MM-WHS 2017 benchmark using both CT and MRI. Segmentation scores were competitive (Dice of 0.84 on CT, 0.83 on MRI), but the primary focus is mesh quality: mean Chamfer distance of 1.8 mm, with 95th-percentile surface distance below 5 mm. Every mesh is produced in a single forward pass – no Marching Cubes, no smoothing filters, no manual cleanup. We argue that for cardiac digital twin pipelines, geometric fidelity and topological correctness matter more than pixel-level Dice scores. By removing the post-processing bottleneck, this approach makes patient-specific cardiac simulation substantially more accessible for clinical use.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

CHORUS: Decentralized Multi-Embodiment Collaboration with One VLA Policy

arXiv:2606.12352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-robot collaboration allows robots to efficiently take on a wide range of tasks, from moving a couch through a doorway to assembling structures on a construction site. However, achieving such coordination in mobile multi-robot settings remains challenging: centralized methods conditioned on the combined observations of a team scale poorly with team size, and decentralized methods that train one policy per robot often require explicit alignment procedures or information sharing at inference time to overcome partial observability. Our key insight is that the visuomotor priors of pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) models should enable reactive, decentralized collaboration from each robot's local observations alone, without these inference-time assumptions. We propose CHORUS, a framework that adapts a single VLA backbone to control diverse, multi-robot teams. At inference time, each robot runs an independent copy of CHORUS, conditioned only on its own observations and a robot-identifying prompt. In real-world experiments including mobile tape measurement, library book handovers, and laundry basket lifting, CHORUS achieves a 64% point improvement over decentralized, from-scratch models, improves reactivity to teammate behavior by 40% points, and outperforms centralized baselines. Together, these results show that a shared VLA backbone is capable of achieving decentralized multi-robot collaboration, without per-robot policies or inter-robot communication at inference.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Scaling limits of multitype Bienaymé trees

arXiv:2507.23241v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider critical multitype Bienaymé trees that are either irreducible or possess a critical irreducible component with attached subcritical components. These trees are studied under two distinct conditioning frameworks: first, conditioning on the value of a linear combination of the numbers of vertices of given types; and second, conditioning on the precise number of vertices belonging to a selected subset of types. We prove that, under a finite exponential moment condition, the scaling limit as the tree size tends to infinity is given by the Brownian Continuum Random Tree. Additionally, we establish strong nonasymptotic tail bounds for the height of such trees. Our main tools include a flattening operation applied to multitype trees and sharp estimates regarding the structure of monotype trees with a given sequence of degrees.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Blind Recovery of Latent Domains via Unsupervised Symmetry Discovery

arXiv:2606.17782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Primary motivation in blind inverse problems is to recover signals of interest from corrupted observations without knowing the obfuscating mechanism. Blind deconvolution is a prominent approach when the corruption is convolutional, but it is not applicable when general linear transformations obfuscate the domain structure. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework for recovering latent domains and signals by discovering symmetries of the data distribution. Our framework models observations as linear measurements of signals sampled from a latent random field, and optimizes a shallow group-convolutional network by imposing stationarity and locality regularization at the model output. The model learns a latent symmetry action and an appropriate filter, thereby mapping unstructured observations to a symmetry-based representation that reveals latent signals. Experiments on stochastic processes, Ising models, shuffled and bit-scrambled images, and neural recordings show that the method recovers latent domains and signals from unstructured observations, suggesting symmetry discovery as a new direction for unsupervised structure learning and blind inverse problems.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Simulation of Spin-Dependent Electron Transfer in a Synthetic Chiral Lattice with a Trapped Ion

arXiv:2606.13930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electron transfer through chiral structures can exhibit spin asymmetry, known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect, whose microscopic origin remains an open question. While path-interference within the chiral moiety has been proposed as a key mechanism, its experimental validation requires precise and versatile tunability of system parameters. Here we implement a programmable quantum simulation of spin-dependent electron transfer in a donor–chiral-bridge–acceptor model using a trapped ion. The bridge is encoded in internal states of the ion with tunable nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor couplings, while donor and acceptor states are coupled via a spectator bosonic motional mode. We observe spin-dependent interference within the bridge, and further reveal spin-dependence in donor-to-acceptor transfer dynamics, controlled by amplitude and phase of the coupling parameter. Our results identify interference among spin-dependent pathways as a microscopic origin of spin-dependent transfer, and open a route toward quantum simulations of complex chiral lattices with multi-level and bosonic degrees of freedom.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Latent Space Reinforcement Learning for Inverse Material Estimation in Food Fracture Simulation

Realistic visual simulation of food manipulation requires accurate material parameters, yet these are difficult to measure directly and vary across the heterogeneous regions of a single food item. We address the inverse problem of estimating material parameters from a target description of fracture behavior in a non-differentiable continuum damage mechanics simulator. Using orange peeling as a test case, we train a neural surrogate on 2,000 forward simulations and compare Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES, a gradient-free evolutionary optimizer) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm) across the original 9-dimensional parameter space and two learned 4-dimensional latent representations. Since different oranges have different material properties, a practical inverse system must handle arbitrary targets without retraining. We train a goal-conditioned PPO policy that learns a general inverse mapping: given any target description of peeling behavior, the policy produces a material parameter estimate in a single forward pass (8 surrogate evaluations, approximately 10ms). Operating in a normalizing flow latent space with a shared surrogate evaluator, the goal-conditioned policy achieves 0.642 actual recovery when validated through the simulator, outperforming the original parameter space by 23%. A warm-start extension that initializes CMA-ES refinement from the policy's output further improves recovery to 0.828 with 540 evaluations. These findings provide a practical framework for inverse food physics and lay groundwork for vision-driven material identification from video observations of food manipulation.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Fast Human Attention Prediction for Fixation-guided Active Perception in Autonomous Navigation

Human visual attention relies on structured scanpaths to efficiently process scenes, yet instilling this behavior into robot autonomy is in its infancy and hindered by the high,computational costs of existing predictive models. To address this, we introduce GazeLNN, a computationally lightweight,scanpath prediction model that leverages Liquid Neural Networks as its recurrent engine and employs MobileNetV3 for feature extraction. Operating auto-regressively, the architecture predicts sequential fixation heatmaps conditioned on the current visual stimulus and fixation history. Despite requiring only 0.61 GFLOPs, GazeLNN achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MIT Low Resolution dataset achieving 0.47 ScanMatch score. It outperforms existing recurrent baselines across diverse evaluation metrics, while reducing computational costs by 99.40% and accelerating inference by up to six times. To investigate the role of human attention modeling in robot autonomy and demonstrate the practical utility of this highly efficient architecture, we integrate GazeLNN into an active camera-robot control policy trained via Reinforcement Learning. This integration enables human-fixation-guided perception during autonomous navigation, validated through successful real-world deployments on an aerial robot.

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

Goal-Autopilot: A Verifiable Anti-Fabrication Firewall for Unattended Long-Horizon Agents

Authors:

Long-horizon LLM agents are not trusted to run unattended: with no human watching, they confidently report success they never verified. We treat honesty – bounding what an agent may claim at termination – as a first-class metric for unattended autonomy, distinct from capability. We present Autopilot, an execution model that makes silent fabricated success structurally impossible rather than merely rarer. Autopilot externalizes all working state into a durable, gated finite-state machine that a scheduler advances one stateless tick at a time; a hard floor forbids any terminal "done" claim whose falsifiable gate did not actually execute and pass. We prove a No-False-Success theorem – under gate soundness, floor enforcement, and plan coverage, termination implies the goal holds – whose only trust points are empirically measurable, and show the worst case degrades to an honest stall, never a fabricated success. Because each tick rehydrates only the state machine, per-step context cost is constant in the horizon. Across a 3,150-cell paired corpus (70 tasks $\times$ 3 systems $\times$ 3 models $\times$ 5 seeds, including 50 SWE-bench Lite tasks across 11 OSS repos), Autopilot fabricates on 0.95% of cells [95% CI 0.38–1.62] while Reflexion and StateFlow baselines fabricate on 8.10% [6.48–9.81] and 25.05% [22.48–27.62] respectively. The headline contrast lives in the hard regime: on SWE-bench Lite, the firewall reduces fabrication from 33.7% (StateFlow) to 0.67%, a paired difference of $-33.07$ pp [95% CI $-36.53, -29.73$]. The mechanism is the gate, not the model: all ten Autopilot fabrications come from the strongest model, while two weaker mid-tier models never fabricate across 700 paired cells. The firewall trades coverage for honesty by design – an honest stall is recoverable; a confident wrong output shipped downstream is not.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Accelerating String Comparison in RLZ Compressed Sequences via LCE Jumps

Relative Lempel-Ziv (RLZ) is an effective compression method for large, repetitive collections; however, the fundamental primitives required to elevate it from a passive archival format to a tractable representation for compressed construction have yet to be fully established. In this paper, we introduce an algorithmic framework for structurally comparing and lexicographically sorting sequences of RLZ factors. We characterize when direct factor comparisons are necessary and when they can be bypassed using RLZ specific shortcuts. We further introduce a method for extending truncated factors into right-maximal matches, enabling the recovery of matching statistics from the RLZ parse. Experimentally, RLZ sorting achieved speedups of up to 3.93x over character-based sorting. Together, these results advance the use of the RLZ format as a foundation for compressed construction.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Chest X-Ray as a critical screening tool for Household Contacts of TB: Lessons from Three Years of Programmatic Data in India

Introduction: Household contacts (HHCs) of pulmonary TB patients remain at high risk for TB infection and disease progression, yet many remain asymptomatic and are missed by symptom-screening pathways. While India expanded its TB preventative guidelines to include all HHCs in 2021, chest X-ray (CXR) screening continues to be used selectively, representing a missed opportunity in early case detection. Methods: The analysis uses programmatic data from Project JEET 2.0 (Joint Effort for Elimination of Tuberculosis), implemented by the William J. Clinton Foundation in India, between October 2021 and March 2024. Eligible HHCs (>=5 years) were offered CXR screening as part of TB preventive therapy (TPT) evaluation. Descriptive and multivariable analyses examined predictors of CXR uptake and TB yield. A two-stage logistic regression model estimated potential TB yield under universal CXR coverage. Model performance was evaluated using the area under the curve (AUC), and bootstrap simulations generated counterfactual estimates of missed TB cases. Results: Among 1,034,621 HHCs, 1.02% individuals were found positive for TB, which includes 7,786 HHCs who were on TB treatment already, while an additional 2,812 were identified during pre-TPT evaluation. Among eligible HHCs (n = 1,026,835), 70% were screened with CXR, of which 2.4% had suggestive TB findings. Of these, 79% went for further TB assessment. Symptomatic HHCs were more likely to be CXR screened (84% vs 69%) and assessed for TB, yet two-thirds of all detected TB cases were asymptomatic. It is estimated that universal CXR coverage and TB testing for suggestive cases can increase TB detection by at least 87%. Conclusion: The study provides a scalable approach to expand CXR coverage through public-private partnerships, enabling early TB detection among HHCs, especially among asymptomatic contacts. Future implementations will benefit from integrating AI-enabled reading, along with systematic follow up for those with suggestive findings.

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

Scale Buys Interpolation, Structure Buys a Horizon: Certified Predictability for Equivariant World Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scale buys interpolation; structure buys a certified horizon. A world model's average error says nothing about whether a particular prediction can be trusted, or for how long. For equivariant latent world models we give a computable, multi-step certificate of the predictable horizon: $T$-step rollout error is provably constant over each symmetry orbit (Theorem A) and stratified channel-by-channel by the predictor's Lyapunov spectrum, $T_j(\epsilon)\sim\log(1/\epsilon)/\lambda_j$. The horizon is two-sided – a matching lower bound makes approximate equivariance provably horizon-limited – and the certificate is exclusive to structure: orbit-constant error characterizes equivariance, so no non-equivariant model has it at any scale. Empirically, on 40-D Lorenz-96 only a $\mathbb{Z}_N$-equivariant network recovers the full Lyapunov spectrum ($R^2{=}0.98$); dense and recurrent baselines fail. Because the spectrum is faithful, the certificate acts, a priori: under a fixed sensing budget a $c\times$-inflated certificate provably needs $c\times$ the budget, and the equivariant certificate meets a budget its inflated dense counterpart cannot – with zero calibration data. The same read-out, unchanged, audits public pretrained world models training-free: TD-MPC2 checkpoints land on the certificate's own scope taxonomy – calibrated where strongly expansive (ratio 0.94-1.02), optimistic where weakly expansive, correctly abstaining where contracting – a map a deployed monitor replicates cell-by-cell, out-of-sample. Across the official 1M-317M multitask ladder, calibration does not improve with parameters. On V-JEPA 2-AC (1B, real robot data) the measured cross-check correctly overrides an over-promising tangent spectrum – the cross-validated audit, not the raw number, is the deployable object. Scale buys interpolation, not a calibrated horizon.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Incentives and Evidence in Learned Service Orchestration

arXiv:2606.16555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning for service orchestration has been the subject of sustained research for over a decade, yet it is not used in production at scale. The usual explanation is that learned controllers degrade under delayed and noisy telemetry, workload shifts, and uncontrolled tenants. We test whether existing evidence supports that explanation. We evaluate three highly influential RL-based orchestration systems spanning resource allocation, DAG scheduling, and autoscaling, using pre-registered predictions about comparative degradation under production-relevant perturbations and paired inference with family-wise error correction. Across the tests, most predicted performance reversals do not occur. Diagnostic analyses show that these outcomes often reflect comparator collapse, artefact limitations, or evaluation choices rather than evidence that learned controllers tolerate the perturbations. One apparent advantage under observation lag is roughly fortyfold compared to a Kubernetes HPA-equivalent controller. Another widely cited result cannot be reconstructed from its released artefact, and the strongest reproducible margin is far smaller than the published results. Conclusions also reverse under changes in perturbation magnitude and evaluation mode. Based on these results and broader patterns in the literature, we identify an institutional problem. Publication and review incentives favour benchmark gains against convenient comparators, even when those gains provide little evidence of deployment performance. We argue that the problem is not solely technical. Rather, it is institutional, so learned orchestration needs production-grade comparators, registered perturbation models, separate operational metrics, and publication criteria that reward reproducible operational evidence. Without these changes, the literature can grow without establishing whether learning improves orchestration.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MorVess: Morphology-Aware Pulmonary Vessel Segmentation Network

Accurate pulmonary vessel segmentation remains challenging due to the sparse, tortuous, and multi-scale nature of vascular structures, where small branches are easily lost and topology integrity is difficult to preserve under voxel-wise supervision. Existing deep segmentation models primarily optimize binary masks, lacking explicit geometric constraints, thus struggling to recover continuous tubular morphology and fine vascular connectivity. In this study, we introduce MorVess, a morphology-aware segmentation framework that integrates differentiable geometric priors with large-scale foundation model adaptation to achieve fine-grained vascular parsing. MorVess jointly predicts vessel masks, distance maps, and thickness maps, providing explicit supervision for vascular boundaries, centerline consistency, and smooth diameter transitions. A lightweight 2.5D adapter bridges 3D spatial context and 2D SAM representations, while a global-local fusion block aggregates multi-level semantics and geometric cues for high-fidelity topology reconstruction. Across two challenging pulmonary CT benchmarks, MorVess delivers superior Dice, clDice, and HD95 scores, substantially improving small-vessel recovery and global connectivity. These results demonstrate that embedding geometric intelligence into pretrained vision models offers a principled and scalable pathway toward precise vessel analysis and clinically reliable structural quantification. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MaoFuyou/MorVess.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Task Decomposition for Efficient Annotation

High-quality annotations of structured representations are expensive to collect over large corpora. Manual annotation of structure is laborious, and model-based annotation, although cheaper to generate, requires expensive validation and potentially significant supervision to ensure that the annotation quality is strong enough to be useful downstream. In traditional annotation workflows, annotation of each complete example is performed end-to-end by a single annotator. However, structured annotation is complex, and each aspect of the task represents a unique challenge with an associated inferential load for a given annotator. Modern annotation projects can incorporate heterogeneous groups of annotators, including both models and human annotators with varying domain and linguistic expertise. It remains unclear, however, how to redesign annotation tasks in this setting, where efforts are discriminately allocated across heterogeneous annotators with respect to distinct annotation challenges. We propose to decompose annotation tasks into sub-tasks in order to reduce the aggregate inferential load of annotation projects. Inspired by the notion of centers from centering theory, we introduce a formal model of inferential load based on the degrees of freedom in the space of valid annotations. Using this model, we show that identifying these centers (i.e. salient anchor entities realized by annotation sub-tasks) constrains the output space complexity, and decompositions which isolate and advance center identification reduce the aggregate inferential load. We provide guidelines for decomposing complex structured annotation tasks, supported by examples demonstrating improved cost-efficiency from our prior work. Finally, we present a procedure for allocating sub-tasks across annotators to maximize quality under a fixed budget.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Conditional channel entropy sets fundamental limits on thermodynamic quantum information processing

arXiv:2604.01217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The thermodynamic resourcefulness of quantum channels primarily depends on their underlying causal structure and their ability to generate quantum correlations. We quantify this interplay within the resource theory of athermality for bipartite quantum channels in the presence of a side channel acting as memory, referred to as the resource theory of conditional athermality. For channels with trivial output Hamiltonians, we characterize the optimal one-shot rates for distilling the identity gate from a given channel, as well as the cost of simulating the channel using the identity gate, under conditional Gibbs-preserving superchannels. We show that these rates have a direct trade-off relation with the conditional channel entropies, attributing operational significance to signaling in quantum processes. Furthermore, we establish an asymptotic equipartition property for the conditional channel min-entropy for classes of channels that are either tele-covariant or no-signaling from the non-conditioning input to the conditioning output. As a consequence, we demonstrate asymptotic reversibility of the resource theory for these channels. The asymptotic conditional athermality capacity of a tele-covariant channel is half the superdense coding capacity of its Choi state. Our work establishes the conditional channel entropy as a primitive information-theoretic concept for quantum processes, elucidating its potential for wider applications in quantum information science.

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

Sharp Transitions for Subsystem Complexity

arXiv:2510.18832v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The circuit complexity of time-evolved pure quantum states grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time. This behavior has been proven in certain models, is conjectured to hold for generic quantum many-body systems, and is believed to be dual to the long-time growth of black hole interiors in AdS/CFT. Achieving a similar understanding for mixed states remains an important problem. In this work, we study the circuit complexity of time-evolved subsystems of pure quantum states. We find that for greater-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity grows linearly in time for an exponentially long time, similarly to that of the full state. However, for less-than-half subsystem sizes, the complexity rises and then falls, returning to low complexity as the subsystem equilibrates. Notably, the transition between these two regimes occurs sharply at half system size. We use holographic duality to map out this picture of subsystem complexity dynamics and rigorously prove the existence of the sharp transition in random quantum circuits. Furthermore, we use holography to predict features of complexity growth at finite temperature that lie beyond the reach of techniques based on random quantum circuits. In particular, at finite temperature, we argue for an additional sharp transition at a critical less-than-half subsystem size. Below this critical value, the subsystem complexity saturates nearly instantaneously rather than exhibiting a rise and fall. This novel phenomenon, as well as an analogous transition above half system size, provides a target for future studies based on rigorous methods.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Resonant Minds: Closed-Loop Social Avatars with Theory of Mind

Creating lifelike digital humans with genuine social intelligence requires unifying cognitive reasoning and multimodal generation within a coherent framework. Current approaches treat these as separate tasks: Large Language Models excel at dialogue but lack embodied expression, while diffusion-based talking head models achieve visual fidelity but ignore social cognition. To bridge this gap, we propose a closed-loop dual-agent framework integrating perception, social reasoning, and expression into a continuous interaction cycle. The perception module analyzes partners' multimodal behaviors from video, while the social reasoning module infers hidden mental states through Theory of Mind and selects responses via an ensemble mechanism. The expression module then generates emotion-controllable videos that jointly synthesize speaker speech and facial expressions with listener reactive behaviors, capturing bidirectional dynamics absent in prior work. We further construct a hierarchical Persona-Scenario dataset with psychologically grounded personas and private social goals to support evaluation under information asymmetry. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate competitive or superior performance on both dialogue quality and video generation metrics. Notably, our method surpasses even the full-information Script mode on key dialogue quality dimensions, suggesting that explicit mental state inference under uncertainty can elicit more thoughtful dialogue than unrestricted information access. Project page: https://resonantminds.github.io/.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

The Pragmatic Persona: Discovering LLM Persona through Bridging Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) reveal inherent and distinctive personas through dialogue. However, most existing persona discovery approaches rely on surface-level lexical or stylistic cues, treating dialogue as a flat sequence of tokens and failing to capture the deeper discourse-level structures that sustain persona consistency. To address this limitation, we propose a novel analytical framework that interprets LLM dialogue through bridging inference – implicit conceptual relations that connect utterances via shared world knowledge and discourse coherence. By modeling these relations as structured knowledge graphs, our approach captures latent semantic links that govern how LLMs organize meaning across turns, enabling persona discovery at the level of discourse coherence rather than surface realizations. Experimental results across multiple reasoning backbones and target LLMs, ranging from small-scale models to 80B-parameter systems, demonstrate that bridging-inference graphs yield significantly stronger semantic coherence and more stable persona identification than frequency or style-based baselines. These results show that persona traits are consistently encoded in the structural organization of discourse rather than isolated lexical patterns. This work presents a systematic framework for probing, extracting, and visualizing latent LLM personas through the lens of Cognitive Discourse Theory, bridging computational linguistics, cognitive semantics, and persona reasoning in large language models. Codes are available at https://github.com/JiSoo-Yang/Persona_Bridging.git