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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A deep learning framework for jointly solving transient Fokker-Planck equations with arbitrary parameters and initial distributions

arXiv:2604.06001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Fokker-Planck equation (FPE) is central to analyzing complex parameterized stochastic systems. However, current numerical methods lack parallel computation capabilities across varying conditions, severely limiting comprehensive parameter exploration and transient analysis. This paper introduces a deep learning-based pseudo-analytical probability solution (PAPS) that, via a single training process, simultaneously resolves transient FPE solutions for arbitrary multi-modal initial distributions, system parameters, and time points. The core idea is to unify initial, transient, and stationary distributions via Gaussian mixture distributions (GMDs) and develop a constraint-preserving autoencoder that bijectively maps constrained GMD parameters to unconstrained, low-dimensional latent representations. In this representation space, the panoramic transient dynamics across varying initial conditions and system parameters can be modeled by a single evolution network. Extensive experiments on paradigmatic systems demonstrate that the proposed PAPS maintains high accuracy while achieving inference speeds four orders of magnitude faster than GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulations. This efficiency leap enables previously intractable real-time parameter sweeps and systematic investigations of stochastic bifurcations. By decoupling representation learning from physics-informed transient dynamics, our work establishes a scalable paradigm for probabilistic modeling of multi-dimensional, parameterized stochastic systems.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Temporal Conductance and Bounds on the Voter Model for Dynamic Networks

arXiv:2606.13374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The voter model is a classical stochastic process that models how opinions might spread through a network: at each step, every node lazily adopts the opinion of a random neighbour; eventually all nodes share the same opinion (consensus). Stronger connectivity should yield faster consensus. Berenbrink, Giakkoupis, Kermarrec, and Mallmann-Trenn (ICALP 2016) make this precise via the network's conductance: if the network has $m$ edges, minimum degree $d_{\min}$, and conductance at least $\phi$, then the voter model reaches consensus in expected $O(m/(d_{\min}\phi))$ steps. Their results extend to dynamic networks with fixed vertex degrees by considering the network's conductance at each time step. We introduce temporal conductance $\Phi$, a more general connectivity measure for dynamic networks. Unlike static conductance, which collapses to $0$ whenever some snapshot is disconnected, $\Phi$ captures connectivity through edges that appear at different times. We generalise the results of Berenbrink et al. from static conductance to temporal conductance, showing that the expected consensus time of the standard voter model is at most $O(m/(d_{\min}\Phi))$. Moreover, we prove that this bound is tight up to constant factors. We expect temporal conductance to be a useful primitive for analysing other dynamics on temporal networks, and potentially time-inhomogeneous Markov chains more generally.

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

Incentives Of EdTech: A Systematic Review Of EduNLP Research

While the Natural Language Processing community has dedicated significant resources in developing educational technologies (EdTech) that support this shift, it remains unclear whose interests are being best served among the stakeholders of education. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review of 204 papers published in venues of the Association for Computational Linguistics' Special Interest Group on Building Educational Applications in 2024 and 2025, and validate these against EdTech papers from the wider ACL Anthology. By examining stakeholder inclusion and the prioritisation of research tasks, our findings reveal a critical tension: a push and pull between private-sector incentives and the foundational needs of educational infrastructure. Our analysis reveals that teachers are systematically under-represented as beneficiaries of research (33.3%) despite being the most affected, that real-world deployment remains rare (9.8%), and that ethical engagement tends toward acknowledgement rather than action. Drawing on exemplary papers in our corpus, we offer concrete recommendations for more responsible EduNLP research practices.

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

Upper Bounds on the Generalization Error of Deep Learning Models via Local Robustness and Stability

arXiv:2606.16883v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalization is a critical property of data-driven models, particularly deep learning models deployed in safety-critical applications. Robustness-based generalization bounds have gained attention as a principled way to link robustness properties to generalization performance, often in a data-dependent manner. However, most existing bounds suffer from vacuousness in practical settings, yielding loose upper bounds that greatly exceed the actual error rates and limiting their usefulness for real-world evaluation. While this issue is often attributed to the uncertainty term, a substantial part of the problem originates from the robustness term itself, particularly for the 0-1 loss. Existing approaches typically treat the robustness term as a global measure, ignoring its variation across different sub-regions of the input space. In this work, we propose a generalization bound that addresses this limitation by scaling the robustness term according to the number of stable and unstable samples within each sub-region. Our bounds incorporate both data- and model-dependent factors while maintaining practical relevance (yielding tighter upper bounds on true error). Experiments on models trained on the ImageNet dataset show that our bounds remain consistently non-vacuous and achieve the tightest estimates among existing methods, closely aligning with empirical performance across a range of robust deep neural networks.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Knowledge Theory of Capital:The Value of Natural and Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.18288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.

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

FraudSMSWalker: Benchmarking Agentic Large Language Models for SMS-to-Webpage Fraud Detection

SMS fraud is increasingly cross-channel: a message directs the user to a webpage, and the final risk depends on how the SMS claim aligns with the page content and requested user action. However, existing evaluations either focus on message-only smishing classification or expose URL and domain cues that allow models to rely on reputation shortcuts. To address this gap, we introduce FraudSMSWalker, a controlled benchmark for URL-masked SMS-to-webpage fraud judgment. FraudSMSWalker contains 699 bilingual chains, including 332 fraudulent and 367 benign cases, across ten service scenarios. The model-visible input consists of the SMS context and sanitized webpage evidence, while raw URLs, hosts, domains, IPs, redirects, and reputation metadata are withheld. The benchmark further includes hard benign cases whose pages contain login, payment, verification, or account-management elements that are plausible under the service context but also appear in scam flows. We evaluate nine web agents under masked browser-agent protocols and conduct URL-visibility ablations. The results show that current agents can detect suspicious cues, but struggle to preserve benign recall and often produce positive predictions that are weakly supported by the observed evidence. These findings position FraudSMSWalker as a benchmark for measuring whether web agents can make fraud judgments that remain both accurate and evidence-grounded when direct reputation shortcuts are suppressed. The associated code and dataset are accessible at the \href{https://anonymous.4open.science/w/FraudMessageWalker-Bench}{anonymous link}.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Learning Instance-Adaptive Low-Rank Orthogonal Subspaces for Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Evidence for recombination in dengue virus genomes

Recombination is a key driver of RNA virus evolution, yet its extent and evolutionary implications in dengue virus (DENV) remain incompletely understood. We conducted a comprehensive, genome-wide recombination screen across 6,905 complete DENV genomes representing all four serotypes, 82 countries, and eight decades of sampling (1944-2023) retrieved from the Bacterial and Viral Bioinformatics Resource Center. Using seven complementary recombination detection methods implemented in RDP5, we identified 66 recombination events across 53 unique recombinant sequences, of which 29 are newly described. Events included intra-genotypic (n = 18), inter-genotypic (n = 32), and inter-serotypic (n = 16) exchanges spanning 14 genotypes and four continents, with no meaningful serotype-level enrichment (Cramer's V = 0.054). Recombination was concentrated in non-structural genes, most frequently NS3 (19 events), NS5 (17), and NS2 (12), while the capsid gene contained no recombination events, consistent with strong functional constraint. Single-nucleotide polymorphism analyses confirmed low divergence between recombinants and their inferred parents in both recombinant and non-recombinant regions. Phylogenomic analysis of 6,642 sequences revealed that recombinants cluster significantly closer to their major parents (p = 8.9 x 10-6 ) and that their removal does not significantly alter tree topology (p = 0.898), suggesting that the short length of recombinant regions limits phylogenetic conflict. We also introduce RECOSIM, an unsupervised machine-learning tool for recombination detection that achieved higher precision than RDP5 on both simulated (93.4% vs. 80.0%) and empirical (98.1% vs. 39.3%) datasets. Collectively, these results establish recombination as a widespread, pan-serotypic phenomenon in DENV with implications for genomic surveillance, vaccine evaluation, and evolutionary inference.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Contextualizing Biological Language Models across Modalities via Logit-Space Contrastive Alignment

arXiv:2606.18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation. Yet these distributions are learned from broad unlabeled corpora and are not naturally conditioned on task-specific biological contexts such as interaction partners, cellular environments, or therapeutic interventions. Existing contextual matching methods often distort this interface through pooled embeddings, contrastive latent spaces, or task-specific prediction heads. We introduce LOGICA (Logit-space Contrastive Alignment), a framework for context-conditioned prediction that performs contrastive learning directly in output-logit space. Using gated cross-modal adapters compatible with each model's native token head, LOGICA preserves the pretrained likelihood interface and converts contextualized token log-likelihoods into matching scores. Alignment is defined through context-sensitive token probabilities rather than proximity in a shared embedding space, enabling learning from sparse paired data across models with distinct vocabularies, without a shared tokenizer or decoder. LOGICA is particularly effective for mutation-local variant ranking, where comparisons reduce to context-conditioned likelihoods of mutant tokens at perturbed sites. Across protein–ligand binding, TCR–peptide activity, and drug-conditioned resistance prediction, LOGICA improves over prior state-of-the-art methods, including matched latent-contrastive and conditional MLM baselines, while retaining a token-level interface for interpretation and generation. On held-out-gene single-mutation drug-resistance prediction, LOGICA improves AUC from near-random latent-space baselines of $\sim$0.55 to $\sim$0.65.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation with Topological Regularisation

arXiv:2606.17531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the learning of interpretable bases in non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) by regularising the topology of the learned basis functions. Our approach is motivated by the observation that many data modalities can be viewed as non-negative functions on a structured domain, where the quality of a basis is intrinsically linked to its topology. However, naive methods for incorporating the topology of the support are often hindered by discreteness and threshold dependence, rendering them unsuitable for continuous optimisation. We address these challenges by employing persistent homology as a stable, threshold-free topological quantifier and by designing topological scores that integrate into the NMF objective as regularisers. The resulting framework encompasses spatially coherent image components, periodic time-series structures, and clique-like graph signals within a unified modelling language.

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

Shachi: A Modular, Controllable Framework for LLM-Based Agent-Based Modeling of Emergent Collective Behavior

arXiv:2509.21862v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How collective behaviors emerge from the interactions of individual LLM-driven agents is a central question in artificial life, yet controlled study of these emergent dynamics has been hindered by the lack of a principled simulation framework for systematic experimentation. To address this, we introduce Shachi, a principled methodology and modular framework that decomposes an agent's cognition into core components: Configuration for intrinsic identity, Memory for contextual continuity, and Tools for extended capabilities, all orchestrated by an LLM reasoning engine. This decomposition treats each cognitive component as an independently controllable variable, enabling perturbation studies that trace how micro-level cognitive traits propagate into population-level dynamics. We investigate behavioral patterns across a 10-task benchmark spanning three levels of collective complexity. Shachi enables memory transfer across environment transitions, producing history-dependent behavioral shifts, and allows agents to simultaneously inhabit multiple environments, revealing cross-environment interference invisible in single-environment studies. Furthermore, in a real-world U.S. tariff shock case study, locally interacting agents with individually controlled cognitive components produce macro-level market dynamics directionally consistent with observed real-world outcomes. Our work provides a rigorous, open-source simulation framework for LLM-based ABM, aimed at fostering cumulative scientific inquiry into the emergent collective behaviors of interacting artificial agents.

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

Tamed Feynman-Kac diffusion processes: Killing-branching intertwine

arXiv:2605.07824v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Relaxation to equilibrium of a drifted Brownian motion is quantified by a transition probability density function, whose main (multiplicative) entry is an inferred Feynman-Kac kernel of the Schr\"{o}dinger semigroup operator. Although seemingly devoid of a natural probabilistic significance (except for its explicit path integral definition), the pertinent kernel relaxes to equilibrium as well. The implicit Feynman-Kac potential ${\cal{V}}(x)$, continuous, confining and bounded from below, may take negative values. If positive, ${\cal{V}}(x)$ can be interpreted as the killing rate of the decaying diffusion process. In case of relaxing F-K kernels the killing effects are tamed (often overcompensated). The taming inavoidably appears in conjunction with the existence of the negativity subdomains of ${\cal{V}}(x)$ in $R$. If locally ${\cal{V}}(x) < 0$, its sign inversion $- {\cal{V}}(x)$ can be interpreted as the branching (cloning, alternatively bifurcation) rate in the course of the other wise free random motion. The arising killed diffusion processes with branching, we interpret as the possible path-wise background of tamed (relaxing) Feynman-Kac diffusions. We present acomputer-assisted path-wise arguments, towards a consistency of the killing/branching taming scenario, for a number of nonlinear model systems in one space dimension. Special attention is paid to Feynman-Kac potential shapes in the double well form, where an analytic access to eigenvalues and eigenfunctions is scarce. Throughout the paper the dynamics refers to the positive real time. Since the Newton-type equations of motion for admissible classical trajectories have a Euclidean form (due to the sign inverted force term), we give a brief resume of a couple of their explicit solutions, without recourse to the Euclidean time intuitions, and the instanton lore of related quantum model systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Projected random forests and conformal prediction of circular data

arXiv:2410.24145v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We apply conformal prediction techniques to regression problems with circular responses, producing prediction sets with adaptive arc length and finite-sample coverage guarantees for any circular predictive model under the assumption of data exchangeability. Leveraging the high performance of existing predictive models designed for linear responses, we analyze a general projection procedure that converts any linear-response regression model into one suitable for circular responses. When random forests are used as base models in this projection procedure, we leverage the random forest out-of-bag mechanism to eliminate the need for a separate calibration sample in the construction of prediction sets. On synthetic and real datasets, the resulting projected random forest model produces more efficient out-of-bag conformal prediction sets, with shorter median arc length, than the split conformal prediction sets generated by two existing alternative models.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Tyler: Typed Latent Reasoning for Language Models – When to Think, What to Compute, and How Much to Allocate

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by externalizing intermediate computation as discrete text tokens, but this textual interface also introduces redundancy and inference overhead. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by carrying part of the computation in continuous representations. However, existing methods typically predefine when latent computation is invoked and how it is allocated during decoding, leaving a key problem unresolved: when to invoke latent computation, what type of computation to perform, and how much budget to allocate. We propose Typed Latent Reasoning (Tyler), a typed and budget-aware framework for latent reasoning during autoregressive decoding. Tyler learns a policy that, at each decoding step, chooses between emitting a text token and switching to a latent computation module specialized for a particular reasoning function. Once invoked, an operator maps the current reasoning state into latent tokens that support global planning, local state updates, or reusable procedural abstraction. Across extensive experiments on three backbone LLMs, Tyler improves accuracy by up to 14.49 points over CoT and by up to 4.30 points over the strongest competing baseline. It further generalizes across diverse reasoning domains and achieves the best final-stage performance with the lowest forgetting.

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

3-Key-Input: Exploring the Theoretical Minimum Keys for Text Entry

Authors:

How far can we reduce the number of physical keys if we endow an ambiguous keyboard with modern language models? Fewer keys increase hardware design freedom in constrained settings such as assistive devices and mobile form factors. This paper systematically evaluates text entry systems using 2-5 physical keys combined with language-model-based disambiguation. On a 300-sentence English corpus (100 sentences each for Business / Conversational / Technical), we compare key counts (2-5), letter-to-key mappings (layout-based / frequency-based / intentionally worst-case), and decoders (Trie-only, GPT-2 beam search, GPT-4o selection). We find that 3 keys + GPT-4o achieves character error rate (CER) 9.46% and word error rate (WER) 12.20%, reducing CER by 59% relative to 2 keys (CER 23.3%). At 3 keys, the key-stream entropy is 1.54 bits/char; while increasing to 5 keys improves accuracy (CER 5.4%), the marginal gains diminish. Mapping choice has a small impact under standard designs ({\Delta}CER < 0.5 pp), and even an intentionally worst mapping degrades CER by only +0.5 pp, whereas Technical sentences yield roughly twice the error rate of Business. These results suggest that, in our evaluated offline setting under a strong LM prior, 3 keys are a practical minimum for general English.

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

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

R2D-RL: A RoboCup 2D Soccer Environment for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Robot soccer is a challenging testbed for multi-agent reinforcement learning because it combines partial observability, cooperative and adversarial interaction, sparse rewards, and long-horizon tactical behavior. RoboCup 2D Soccer Simulation (RCSS2D) provides a mature robot-soccer platform, but its competition-oriented server-client architecture is difficult to use directly with modern Python-based MARL workflows. We introduce R2D-RL, a reinforcement learning environment that connects RCSS2D and HELIOS-based player clients to a Python MARL interface through shared-memory communication and cycle-level synchronization. R2D-RL supports full-field and scenario-based training with configurable opponents, Base discrete and Hybrid parameterized action spaces, action masks, expected possession value (EPV)-based reward shaping, and parallel execution. We provide front-goal scenarios and an 11-vs-11 full-field benchmark, together with baseline results.

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

SAERec: Constructing Fine-grained Interpretable Intents Priors via Sparse Autoencoders for Recommendation

arXiv:2606.18897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent-based recommender systems have gained significant attention for improving accuracy and interpretability by modeling the underlying motivations behind user behaviors. Most existing models derive intents directly from user sequences via clustering or prototype learning. However, they are sensitive to sequence quality, require presetting the number of intents, and lack explicit semantic grounding. These issues lead to an incomplete and coarse intent set and limit the effectiveness of recommendation. In this paper, we propose the Sparse Autoencoder for intent-based recommendation (SAERec), a novel recommender that automatically constructs a fine-grained and interpretable intent space from a textual corpus to guide recommendation. Rather than treating texts as side signals, SAERec leverages them as high information density evidence for intent construction. Specifically, we first extract a comprehensive set of fine-grained interpretable intents from the latent space of large language models (LLMs) by using a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to disentangle and interpret text embeddings, which isolates intent-related semantics from textual noise. Then, for each user, we retrieve relevant intents from this set as priors to guide recommendation. It contains personal intents matching a user's current interests and public intents capturing general item patterns shared across users (e.g., quality, price). Finally, to integrate retrieved intents into sequence modeling, we propose a multi-branch attention mechanism that captures temporal dependencies and injects both personal and public intent signals, followed by an adaptive fusion layer to construct the final user representation for recommendation. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAERec, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while providing human-understandable explanations.

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

A Perception vs. Distortion Perspective on Score-Based Generative Channel Estimation

arXiv:2606.16815v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Driven by their remarkable success in computer vision and inverse problem solving, score-based models are increasingly applied to wireless communications, where they show promise across a range of physical-layer tasks. However, despite this growing interest, the current literature often lacks a rigorous analysis of when score-matching offers a tangible advantage over traditional discriminative learning. This paper aims to address this gap through the use-case of channel estimation, a fundamental inverse problem in wireless systems. We present a theoretically grounded interpretation of score-based channel estimation through the lens of the perception-distortion tradeoff, identifying the conditions where score matching excels as well as its key limitations. In particular, by modeling downstream wireless tasks (e.g., capacity maximization) as functionals of the channel estimation process, we quantify the excess risk incurred by standard distortion-minimization approaches. Extensive numerical results show that under high predictive uncertainty, the large excess risk gap can be offset by score-based estimation, enabling near Bayesian-optimal precoding via the learned posterior, whereas in the low predictive uncertainty regime, discriminative distortion-minimization approaches are preferable due to lower complexity and more efficient use of model capacity.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum repeater segment with free-space coupled co-trapped ions using telecom photon interference

arXiv:2606.12313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A quantum repeater segment is a basic building block of a quantum repeater, generating buffered entanglement of quantum memories to connect quantum repeater cells. It also enables the connection between quantum computers. In the implementation we present here, photons emitted from two co-trapped free-space coupled $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions are converted to the telecom-C band and interfered after transmission over 440$\,$m of optical fiber (220$\,$m per arm), where a photonic Bell measurement is performed to create entanglement between the memories. With this scheme we generate an entangled $\left|\Psi^+\right\rangle$ Bell state with $\ge 68(8)\,$% fidelity, highlighting trapped $^{40}$Ca$^+$ ions as a promising quantum repeater hardware platform.

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

PhyloSDF: Phylogenetically-Conditioned Neural Generation of 3D Skull Morphology via Residual Flow Matching

Generating novel, biologically plausible three-dimensional morphological structures is a fundamental challenge in computational evolutionary biology, hampered by extreme data scarcity and the requirement that generated shapes respect phylogenetic relationships among species. In this work, we present PhyloSDF, a phylogenetically-conditioned neural generative model for 3D biological morphology that integrates two innovations: (1) a DeepSDF auto-decoder regularized by a novel Phylogenetic Consistency Loss that structures the latent space to correlate with evolutionary distances (Pearson r=0.993); (2) a Residual Conditional Flow Matching (Residual CFM) architecture that factorizes generation into analytic species-centroid lookup and learned residual prediction, enabling generation from as few as ~4 specimens per species. We evaluate PhyloSDF on 100 micro-CT-scanned skulls of Darwin's Finches and their relatives across 24 species. The model generates novel meshes achieving 88-129% of real intra-species variation at the code level, with all 180 generated meshes verified as non-memorized. Residual CFM surpasses denoising diffusion (which fails entirely at this scale), standard flow matching (which mode-collapses to 3-6% variation), and a Gaussian mixture baseline in both fidelity (Chamfer Distance 0.00181 vs. 0.00190) and morphometric Fr\'{e}chet distance (10,641 vs. 13,322). Leave-one-species-out experiments across 18 species demonstrate phylogenetic extrapolation capability, and smooth latent interpolations produce biologically plausible ancestral skull reconstructions.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

The ancestors of eukaryotic cells contained a mix of genes from various microbes

Authors: Unknown Author

Reconstruction of the ancestral gene repertoire of eukaryotic cells reveals traces of a series of close, long-term interactions with diverse microorganisms, and a role of viruses in gene exchange. The findings challenge the view that eukaryotic cells evolved from a simple merger of just two organisms. A series of gene-transfer events might have taken place in complex microbial communities.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Incremental costs of transitioning from four to eight WHO-recommended antenatal care visits in Uganda: A costing analysis from a societal perspective

Background In 2016, the World Health Organization revised its antenatal care (ANC) recommendation from four to eight visits. For low- and middle-income countries like Uganda, where achieving even four visits remains a challenge, this transition has significant cost implications for both the health system and households. This study estimated the incremental costs of adopting the eight-visit model from a societal perspective. Methods The study was conducted in six government health facilities in southwestern Uganda. A micro-costing approach estimated health facility costs (personnel, equipment, consumables, and overhead). Costs incurred at patients end (transport, ultrasound, medical expenses, and time) were collected from 785 women using a questionnaire, with all costs in 2025 USD. Results For an average of 4.3 visits, total cost per woman was $100.1: facility costs $43.7 (43.7%), and patient costs $56.4 (56.3%). Transitioning to eight visits would increase total cost by $57.8 (57.8%), of which $36.4 (63.0%) would fall on households, equivalent to 68.8% of average monthly household income. Total costs would rise by 55.4% ($115.5 to $179.5) at Health Center IVs and 64.3% ($102.3 to $168.1) at Health Center IIIs, with facility costs up 43.4% and 62.9% and patient costs up 61.2% and 65.7%, respectively. Conclusion Transitioning to eight ANC visits would impose a large financial burden on households, with the incremental patient cost equivalent to more than two-thirds of average monthly household income. Equitable implementation requires improving availability of medicines and diagnostics, subsidizing transport, exploring telemedicine or community-based models, and improving efficiency at lower-tier health centers.

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

MimicIK: Real-Time Generative Inverse Kinematics from Teleoperation with FK Consistency

arXiv:2606.15148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inverse kinematics (IK) remains a critical bottleneck for real-time robot manipulation. Classical numerical solvers achieve high geometric precision but often suffer from discontinuous branch switching and unstable behavior near kinematic singularities during closed-loop deployment. Meanwhile, learned IK approaches frequently struggle to balance spatial accuracy, motion smoothness, and real-time efficiency, particularly when trained on noisy human teleoperation data. We present MimicIK, a real-time generative inverse kinematics framework that learns smooth and robust joint-space motion priors from teleoperation demonstrations through conditional flow matching. Given the current joint configuration and a target end-effector pose, MimicIK predicts continuous delta-joint commands using an efficient two-step iterative refinement process based on a Minimal Iterative Policy (MIP) backbone. To enforce physical consistency, we further introduce an FK consistency loss, a differentiable forward-kinematics regularization that penalizes task-space deviations from the target pose during training. We evaluate MimicIK on a real-world 6-DOF robot dataset containing 8,848 teleoperation demonstrations. MimicIK achieves a mean position error of 4.65 mm, a 10 mm success rate of 92.01\%, and a trajectory spike rate of only 7.99\%. Compared with a UNet diffusion baseline, our method improves both spatial accuracy and motion smoothness while reducing inference latency from 21.66 ms to 6.74 ms. Furthermore, unlike deterministic MLP baselines that catastrophically diverge under out-of-distribution deployment, MimicIK remains stable near singular configurations and enables robust 20 Hz real-time control on deployment hardware.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CPS4: Class Prompt driven Semi-Supervised Spine Segmentation with Class-specific Consistency Constraint

Vision Language Model (VLM) has great potential to enhance the quality of pseudo labels in semi-supervised spine segmentation by leveraging textual class prompts to generate segmentation map, but no one has studied it yet. Although promising, it lacks explicit constraints to ensure consistency between spine class prompts and spine unit region, resulting in unsatisfactory performance in multi-class segmentation map generation. In this paper, we propose CPS4, the first text-guided semi-supervised spine segmentation network using class prompts to enhance the quality of spine pseudo labels. Specifically, CPS4 is implemented through two training stages. (i) Class-specific consistency constrained VLM pretraining stage: we propose token- and pixel-level attention loss to optimize the consistency between class prompts and spine units, forcing the textual class prompt to be closely coupled with the target spine unit in the semantic space. (ii) Class Prompt driven semi-supervised spine segmentation stage: using the pretrained vision-text encoder, we derive each class-specific binary segmentation map for the unlabeled spine image and integrate them into an unified multi-class segmentation map, improving the quality of the spine pseudo label generated by the semi-supervised spine segmentation network. Experimental results show that our CPS4 achieves superior spine segmentation performance with Dice of 80.44%, only using 5% labeled data on the public spine segmentation dataset, surpassing popular semi-supervised learning and VLM methods. Our code will be available.