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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AI-Assisted Longitudinal Analyses of Environmental and Psychosocial Determinants of Subjective Cognitive Difficulties

Authors:
Ma↗Cao↗

Short-term environmental exposures have been linked to cognitive and behavioral outcomes, although many reported associations may reflect broader geographic and contextual differences. Using longitudinal data from the All of Us Research Program (2018–2024), we linked daily weather and air-pollution exposures to repeated attention-related and subjective cognitive outcomes. Associations were evaluated using pooled, fixed-effects, lagged, and event-study analyses. Additional machine-learning analyses were conducted to explore potential heterogeneity and latent psychosocial structure. Replication analyses were performed using the 2024 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). Several environmental exposure measures showed small associations with cognitive outcomes in pooled analyses, but most attenuated substantially after accounting for within-location temporal variation. Mediation, sensitivity, and machine-learning analyses yielded similar conclusions. In contrast, mental-health burden, loneliness, and social functioning were consistently associated with subjective cognitive difficulty and exhibited substantially larger effect sizes than environmental exposures. Similar patterns were observed in BRFSS. Exploratory AI-assisted analyses yielded findings broadly consistent with the primary longitudinal analyses. These findings suggest that short-term environmental perturbations may have limited associations with cognitive outcomes after accounting for within-location variation, whereas psychosocial factors appear to be more consistently associated with subjective cognitive burden.

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02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Infectious Disease Forecasting via Physics-Informed Machine Learning

Authors:
Hart↗J. C↗Smith↗McMahan↗Rennert↗

Infectious disease transmission evolves as a dynamic process shaped by biological mechanisms, population behavior, and intervention policies, yet public health responses are often driven by lagging indicators. Accurate short- and long-term disease forecasting is essential for the timely deployment of intervention strategies, healthcare capacity planning, and uncertainty-aware, risk-informed decision-making. To address this challenge, three broad classes of forecasting models have traditionally been used: statistical, machine learning, and mechanistic approaches. However, each of these modeling paradigms faces fundamental limitations. In particular, traditional statistical models often lack the flexibility needed to capture complex disease dynamics, machine learning approaches require large, high-quality data streams, and mechanistic models are notoriously difficult to calibrate. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel physics-informed machine learning (PIML) framework for forecasting infectious disease dynamics. Our approach simultaneously forecasts new case and hospitalization counts, along with other key epidemiological quantities such as the time-varying reproduction number. This is achieved through the design of a machine learning model and estimation strategy regularized by a system of differential equations that encode disease dynamics of the SIHR model, thereby bridging the gap between purely data-driven and mechanistic models. We demonstrate the proposed methodology through in-depth numerical studies and an application to COVID-19 data collected in the state of South Carolina.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Physically Constrained Ensemble Gaussian Process Modelling for Expensive Quantum Systems with Heteroskedastic Noise

Authors:
Arpan Biswas↗Surtirtha Paul↗Joseph Agada↗Matthias Thamm↗Adrian Del Maestro↗

arXiv:2606.11240v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate modeling of quantum many-body systems often requires computationally expensive simulations such as Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) or Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) calculations. These methods, while precise, impose significant time and resource constraints, limiting their use in exhaustive parameter exploration. Moreover, these expensive simulations can contain variable errors over the large unknown parameter space, which needs to be quantified and propagated. Thus, predictive modelling is required to estimate the functional space accurately over scarcely sampled data with heteroskedastic noise, while preserving the physical relevance of the estimation. Therefore, we present a Physically Constrained Ensemble Gaussian Process (pc-EGP) framework designed to efficiently model complex and noisy quantum systems under physical consistency constraints. The proposed method first enforces physical constraints as a user controlled weighted penalty to the data-driven loss function of the Gaussian Process (GP) surrogates. Then an ensemble of such GP models is trained with variable noisy simulations via numerical quadrature method where these multiple GP(s) at different nodes is integrated as a quadrature weighted average. We first demonstrate the framework on synthetically generated data before applying to quantum systems. In the first case study, we leverage DMRG simulations of the Bose-Hubbard Model to predict the critical interaction parameter Uc governing the superfluid-to-Mott-insulator transition. In the second case study, we demonstrate our method on QMC simulations, of a quantum liquid confined inside a nanoporous silicate with the goal of optimizing a chemical environment to realize a one-dimensional superfluid. Compared to conventional GP, pc-EGP achieves a better balance of accuracy and physically meaningful predictions.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

MUFFLe: Efficient Model Update Compression via Generalized Deduplication for Federated Learning

Authors:
Xiaobo Zhao↗Daniel E. Lucani↗

arXiv:2606.14354v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning is well suited to edge environments but is often limited by the uplink cost of transmitting model updates. This Work-in-Progress paper presents MUFFLe, a communication-efficient update compression scheme that integrates generalized deduplication (GD) into the FedAvg pipeline. MUFFLe deduplicates repeated patterns across the update vector, yielding a fixed-rate, variable-count compression scheme. Preliminary experiments on IID MNIST with 20 clients show that MUFFLe reaches the target accuracy of $92.93\%$ with 38~MB cumulative uplink communication, compared with 75~MB for 8-bit quantization, 86~MB for Top-$k$ sparsification, and 310~MB for uncompressed FedAvg. These results demonstrate the feasibility of applying GD to communication-efficient federated learning.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Proteomics Uncovers Cryptic JPH2 Loss in Paediatric Dilated Cardiomyopathy

Authors:
Smith-Diaz↗C. C↗Iaprintsev↗Huckstep↗Macciocca↗Piers↗A. T↗Henden↗Bryen↗Stewart↗Butters↗Baker↗…

Despite recent advances in next-generation sequencing, genetic diagnostic rates for dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) remain low. Among paediatric DCM, causes are often heritable, with a greater frequency of de novo, recessive and syndromic causes of disease. Novel diagnostic methods are therefore required to solve monogenic cases. To assess the value of proteomics as a diagnostic tool for paediatric DCM, we obtained left ventricle myocardial samples from paediatric patients undergoing heart transplantation at the Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne. We performed genome sequencing and proteomics and leveraged this multi-omics dataset to uncover the molecular cause of disease in a gene elusive proband. The proband carried a heterozygous JPH2 frameshift variant identified on clinical exome sequencing. However, proteomic analysis showed a pronounced downregulation of JPH2, suggestive of biallelic loss-of-function. Closer inspection of the genomic data revealed a large inversion (~8.34 Mb) with a breakpoint falling within intron 5 of JPH2 that displaces the 3'UTR from the coding transcript. The two variants were confirmed to be in trans using long read DNA sequencing, consistent with a diagnosis of JPH2 autosomal recessive DCM. Finally, we applied RNA sequencing with total RNA library preparation to show that transcripts containing a 3'UTR were reduced to ~10% relative to controls. As a proof-of-principle, we present the first reported use of proteomics from explanted cardiac tissue to provide a genetic diagnosis. Our methodology has broad relevance to patients with genetically unsolved Mendelian diseases, who might undergo organ transplantation as part of clinical management.

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

Sobolev Approximation by Fixed-Size Neural Networks with Arbitrary Accuracy

Authors:
Baicheng Li↗Haizhao Yang↗Shijun Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.16975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this work, we investigate new activation functions for achieving arbitrary-accuracy Sobolev approximation by fixed-size neural networks. We first show that any function in $W^{2,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ can be approximated with arbitrary accuracy, measured in the $W^{1,\infty}$-norm, by a fixed-size neural network using the Elementary Universal Activation Function ($\mathrm{EUAF}$). To extend this result to $W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ for $s\in\mathbb{N}$, we introduce a smooth activation $\mathrm{DUAF}_{\infty}$ from the family of Differentiable Universal Activation Functions ($\mathrm{DUAF}_n$). We prove that any function in $W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ can be approximated with arbitrary accuracy in the $W^{s-1,\infty}$-norm by a fixed-size $\mathrm{DUAF}_{\infty}$-activated network. We further construct sigmoidal variants $\widetilde{\mathrm{DUAF}}_n$ and show that, for every $1\leq s\leq n$, fixed-size $\widetilde{\mathrm{DUAF}}_n$-activated networks still approximate any $f\in W^{s,\infty}((a,b)^d)$ with arbitrary accuracy in the $W^{s-1,\infty}$-norm. In all these results, the width and depth bounds are computed explicitly, and the proposed activations are elementary.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MAND: Modality-Aware Novelty Detection for Open-World Egocentric Activity Recognition

Authors:
Hyejeong Im↗Wonseon Lim↗Dae-Won Kim↗

Multimodal egocentric activity recognition integrates visual and inertial cues for robust first-person behavior understanding. However, deploying such systems in open-world environments requires detecting novel activities while continuously learning from non-stationary data streams. Existing methods rely on the main fused logits for novelty scoring, without fully exploiting the complementary evidence available from individual modalities. Because these logits are often dominated by RGB, cues from other modalities, particularly IMU, remain underutilized, and this imbalance worsens as catastrophic forgetting accumulates. To address this, we propose MAND, a modality-aware framework for multimodal egocentric open-world continual learning. At inference, Modality-aware Adaptive Scoring (MoAS) adaptively adjusts modality contributions using sample-wise reliability and refines novelty scoring with deviation and disagreement penalties. During training, Modality-aware Representation Stabilization Training (MoRST) preserves the discriminative capacity of each modality across tasks through modality-specific heads and modality-wise logit distillation. Experiments on a public multimodal egocentric benchmark show that MAND consistently improves novel activity detection and known-class accuracy while substantially reducing FPR95, indicating more reliable open-world recognition. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/HyeJeongIm/MAND}{github.com/HyeJeongIm/MAND}.

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

When Roleplaying, Do Models Believe What They Say?

Authors:
Benjamin Sturgeon↗David Africa↗Sid Black↗

Language models can state that "the Earth orbits the Sun" and, when role-playing Aristotle, assert the opposite. Recent work argues that persona adoption is fundamental to how language models operate, with models constantly selecting the most appropriate persona for a given context. Does such role-playing merely change the model's outputs, or does it also affect what the model internally represents as truthful? We study this question with linear truth probes, applying them to LLMs role-playing historical personas whose likely beliefs differ from modern consensus. For each persona, we compare false claims the persona would likely have endorsed (*era-believed*) with topic-matched false claims they would not have endorsed (*era-false*). Across prompting, in-context learning, and supervised fine-tuning, persona induction suppresses era-believed statements less than equally false alternatives, yet they remain classified as false overall. Role-play therefore shifts what these models say more than what they internally represent as true. We contrast this with models trained on harmful advice that exhibit Emergent Misalignment (EM). Across three model families (Qwen 2.5 14B, Qwen 3 8B, and Llama 3.3 70B), their false claims move substantially toward the true region of probe space, are defended under challenge roughly half the time versus about a sixth for role-play, and are used in downstream reasoning. Role-play and Emergent Misalignment thus are points on a spectrum of belief internalization, where role-play changes what a model says with little representational change, while Emergent Misalignment shifts the internal representation of false claims without fully marking them as true.

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

MyPCBench: A Benchmark for Personally Intelligent Computer-Use Agents

Authors:
Lawrence Keunho Jang↗Andrew Keunwoo Jang↗Jing Yu Koh↗Ruslan Salakhutdinov↗

Current benchmarks for computer-use agents evaluate models in impersonal environments. This leaves a gap between evaluation and deployment where personal assistants are expected to work across a user's whole digital life, including their context, historical data, and logged-in accounts. This gap is widest on web tasks, where live web evaluations cannot exercise sites that require logging in or personal information, the kind of site a real personal assistant has to drive. We introduce MyPCBench, which tests computer-use agents as personal assistants on a Linux desktop populated with 17 simulated real-world web applications and a full desktop stack, all seeded for one canonical persona, Michael Scott from The Office. We define 184 tasks in this environment, each inspired by a real request drawn from the OpenClaw community, and benchmark six closed and open-weight models with a uniform computer+bash tool surface. We find that the best model, Claude Opus 4.6, fully solves 55.4\% of the tasks, the only model above 50\%. Model failures cluster on tasks that span many applications and on long trajectories, where personalization stresses an assistant the most. We release the environment, task set, and agent harness at https://mypcbench.com.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Learning to Inject: Automated Prompt Injection via Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Xin Chen↗Jie Zhang↗Florian Tram\`er↗

arXiv:2602.05746v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt injection is a critical vulnerability in LLM agents, yet the strongest methods still rely on human red-teamers and hand-crafted prompts. Adapting automated jailbreak optimizers does not close this gap: jailbreaks shape models toward generic compliance, while prompt injection requires emitting specific tool calls with correct parameters. The success signal is binary, and randomly sampled suffixes almost never trigger it, so standard optimizers have no gradient to follow. We present AutoInject, a black-box reinforcement learning (RL) framework that learns adversarial suffixes for prompt injection. A learned comparison-based reward scores each candidate against the best suffix seen so far, turning the binary signal into a dense reward suitable for RL optimization. The framework supports both online query-based attacks and offline-trained transferable suffixes that need no utility access at deployment, and incorporates a utility objective when task-completion feedback is available. On AgentDojo, AutoInject outperforms template attacks, GCG, TAP, and adaptive attack across production models, with statistically significant improvements under McNemar's test with p

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

DarkVGGT: Seeing Through Darkness Using Thermal Geometry without Daylight Tax

Authors:
Minseong Kweon↗Wenyuan Zhao↗Nuo Chen↗Lulin Liu↗Huiwen Han↗Zihao Zhu↗Srinivas Shakkottai↗Chao Tian↗Zhiwen Fan↗

Recent feed-forward 3D reconstruction methods have demonstrated strong performance and flexibility in efficient end-to-end scene geometry estimation from image streams. However, their reliance on visible-light appearance makes them vulnerable in dark and low-visibility environments, where RGB cues are severely degraded and geometric evidence becomes ambiguous. To address this challenge, we propose DarkVGGT, an RGB-T feed-forward geometry framework that uses physics-aware thermal modeling for robust 3D estimation in low-light scenes. DarkVGGT introduces two complementary modules. First, physics-inspired thermal factorization extracts emissive-dominant, geometry-consistent thermal cues while isolating sparse reflective residuals that may introduce geometric ambiguity. Second, geometry-shared thermal routing isolates modality-invariant geometric structures from thermal-specific patterns, selectively injecting reliability-aware structural guidance into the RGB stream. Together, these components enable accurate thermal-informed geometry estimation under degraded RGB conditions while largely preserving performance in well-lit environments. Experiments on low-visibility RGB-T benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in both depth and camera pose estimation over existing feed-forward geometry baselines.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MAGE-RAG: Multigranular Adaptive Graph Evidence for Agentic Multimodal RAG in Long-Document QA

Authors:
Yilong Zuo↗Xunkai Li↗Jing Yuan↗Qiangqiang Dai↗Hongchao Qin↗Ronghua Li↗

Long-document multimodal question answering requires a system to locate sparse evidence in long PDFs and integrate clues from text, tables, images, charts, and complex layouts. Existing RAG methods mostly rely on fixed Top-k retrieval over text chunks or pages. Text retrieval can compress the context but often loses visual and layout information; page-level visual retrieval preserves the original page, yet it also sends large irrelevant regions to the reader, leading to a static trade-off among evidence coverage, noise, and inference cost. This paper proposes MAGE-RAG, a multigranular adaptive graph evidence framework for long-document multimodal QA. MAGE-RAG uses page retrieval as the entry point for query-time evidence construction. Offline, it builds an evidence graph with page nodes and element nodes, encoding containment, reading order, layout adjacency, section hierarchy, and semantic-neighbor relations. At query time, an online evidence controller iteratively activates, opens, searches, and prunes evidence under explicit budgets. The resulting evidence subgraph is then rendered into structured multimodal reader input, allowing the LVLM to consume compact and relevant evidence within a limited context. On LongDocURL and MMLongBench-Doc, we establish a unified comparison and analysis protocol covering Direct MLLM, Text RAG, Page-level Visual RAG, and Graph/Agentic RAG. Experiments show that MAGE-RAG achieves 52.75 overall accuracy on LongDocURL, and 53.26 accuracy with 51.19 F1 on MMLongBench-Doc. Fine-grained breakdowns, budget-performance curves, ablations, and trace-based analysis further show that query-time evidence subgraph construction can balance dispersed evidence coverage with context-noise control. Our code is available at https://github.com/laonuo2004/MAGE-RAG.git.

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

InTrain: Intrinsic Trainability for Zero-Cost Neural Architecture Search

Authors:
Qinqin Zhou↗Fuhai Chen↗Jipeng Wu↗Zhiwei Chen↗Zhikai Hu↗Weiwei Cai↗

Training-free neural architecture search promises efficient discovery of high-performance networks without costly training. However, existing zero-cost proxies rely on fragmented heuristics that fail to capture the fundamental question: what makes an architecture trainable? This paper introduces Intrinsic Trainability (InTrain), a unified theoretical proxy that formalizes trainability as an architectural invariant emerging from two synergistic components: geometric capacity and optimization resilience. We operationalize intrinsic trainability through analysis of neural information processing. Geometric capacity is quantified via the participation ratio of activation covariance eigenspectrum, capturing the effective dimensionality of representation manifolds. Optimization resilience is measured through cumulative gradient health, assessing the robustness of backpropagation across network depth. InTrain synthesizes these dimensions through a scale-invariant multiplicative coupling, which we hypothesize is essential for capturing their synergistic, non-additive relationship. Extensive experiments on standard NAS benchmarks and search spaces demonstrate that InTrain achieves ranking correlations on par with state-of-the-art ensemble-based proxies and outperforms other single-metric methods.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Quantum CT via Dynamic Interval Encoding and Prior-Balanced QUBO Reconstruction

Authors:
Ao Wang↗Yikuang Yuluo↗Yujie Liu↗Shuangyang Zhong↗Yuwen Zhang↗Zihao Wang↗Fenglin Liu↗Andreas Maier↗Haijun Yu↗Yixing Huang↗

Quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO)-based quantum computed tomography (CT) casts reconstruction as a binary quadratic problem for quantum annealing and hybrid quantum–classical solvers. For grayscale CT, however, image encoding is constrained by the binary-variable budget: fixed global bit-plane encodings increase QUBO size and coupling complexity as gray-level precision improves, whereas low-bit encodings introduce quantization error. We propose a QUBO-based grayscale CT reconstruction framework that combines dynamic interval encoding with prior-balanced optimization. Each refinement round encodes active pixels only within local gray-level intervals around the current estimate, and a boundary-hit-guided update rule adaptively switches between search expansion and local refinement. To improve optimization stability, the method balances projection-domain data consistency and an edge-preserving quadratic prior before forming the final QUBO. Sparse-view and limited-angle fan-beam CT experiments show that the proposed method recovers structures and gray-level distributions more faithfully than the evaluated analytic, iterative, variational, and representation-based baselines. Expressivity analysis and ablation studies further indicate that the improvement mainly arises from effective gray-level representation through dynamic local encoding and more stable data-fidelity–prior coupling. Experiments on the D-Wave hybrid binary quadratic model (BQM) solver further demonstrate that the formulation is executable on a hardware-backed hybrid quantum–classical backend.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

Authors:
Kushal Raj Bhandari↗Ling Yue↗Ching-Yun Ko↗Dhaval Patel↗Shaowu Pan↗Pin-Yu Chen↗Jianxi Gao↗

arXiv:2606.12674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

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

GEMS: Geometric Constraints Enable Multi-Semantic Superposition in LLMs

Authors:
Yu Deng↗

Activation steering controls model behavior by modifying intermediate hidden states at inference time without retraining. Existing methods handle only single-direction injection; when multiple semantic directions are superposed without constraints, the model collapses. We show that this collapse decomposes into two independently acting sources: distributional deviation, where additive perturbations accumulate in norm across layers and drive activations outside the training distribution, and directional interference, where non-orthogonal semantic vectors mutually dampen when superposed. These two sources define the design constraints that any training-free multi-directional intervention must address. As one instantiation of these principles, we propose GEMS, a training-free method that maps each source to a corresponding geometric constraint: norm-preserving weighted superposition and targeted attention-pathway injection for distributional deviation, and real-time orthogonalization for directional interference. On GSM8K, injecting three concurrent non-mathematical directions preserves accuracy at 98% (baseline 92%), while unconstrained addition collapses to 4%; on Wikitext-2, the same injection incurs only 2.2% PPL increase. Component ablation isolates the causal role of each constraint, and layer-level probes confirm that orthogonalized signals survive the FFN pathway and reach the output distribution with semantic specificity. Qualitative steering effects transfer across architectures from 3B to 31B.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

''Circumstantial Determinants'': An Efficient Approach to Reaching People in Need of HIV Prevention?

Authors:
Bagnay↗S. H↗Gregson↗Skovdal↗Maswera↗Moorhouse↗L. R↗Ncube↗Tsenesa↗Mandizvidza↗Pickles↗Garnett↗…

HIV prevention and testing programmes primarily reach people who self-refer or attend routine health services. Higher-risk individuals are missed if they are healthy, under-estimate their risk of infection or under-report sexual risk-behaviours. We assess a new approach to address limitations in existing programmes by targeting HIV services on ''Circumstantial Determinants'' (CDs) of HIV risk - the social circumstances, settings, and norms associated with behaviours that increase risk of HIV acquisition. Data on potential CDs and sexual behaviour were collected in a population survey in Zimbabwe in 2018/19 (N=9141). HIV-negative individuals reporting [≥] 1 sexual risk-behaviours were defined as the 'priority population' for HIV prevention. For each sex, six circumstantial determinants were associated with being in the priority population (aOR [≥] 1.30; p [≤] 0.01). Reach and efficiency of CDs (and combinations) were calculated; ROC curve algorithms evaluated their ability to identify priority population membership; and HIV prevention condom cascades were compared between CD-defined priority population subgroups. Example findings include that targeting men at bars and beerhalls could reach 48.5% of the priority population and 25.1% of lower-risk men. These percentages increase to 77.1% and 53.7% if men with poor mental health, no religious affiliation, negative social capital, or living on agricultural estates are also targeted. Targeting women with poor mental health could reach 32.0% of the priority population and 21.3% of lower-risk women. Targeting additional circumstantial determinants increases these percentages to 54.1% and 37.5%, respectively. Cascade barriers to condom use differed between CD-defined subgroups. The Circumstantial Determinants approach demonstrates proof-of-concept potential to strengthen HIV prevention services.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A Quantum Approach to Stochastic Optimization in Insurance Underwriting

Authors:
Mitchell Bordelon↗Maurice Garfinkel↗Vivek Dixit↗Thomas Whitehead↗Jenny Holzbauer↗Guillermo Mijares Vilarino↗Alberto Maldonado Romo↗Abhijit Mitra↗Vaibhaw Kumar↗Jean Utke↗

arXiv:2605.01169v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The presence of stochastic elements in combinatorial optimization problems makes them particularly challenging, as such problems quickly become intractable for classical computers even at relatively small sizes. In this work, we propose a novel quantum-classical hybrid scheme for solving a class of stochastic optimization problems known as chance-constrained knapsack problems, in which item weights follow probability distributions and constraints may be violated within a specified risk tolerance. Our method employs knapsack-specific QAOA-based circuits to generate samples which, when combined with a new self-consistent classical recovery scheme introduced in this work, produce high-quality solutions. Experiments carried out on IBM Heron processors, using circuits with depths up to 177 and comprising 3443 gates acting on as many as 150 qubits, yield solutions that indicate performance comparable to classical optimization schemes. The proposed quantum-classical scheme paves the way to tackling such problems, with the potential to outperform approaches that rely solely on classical computation.

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19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Deleterious mitochondrial heteroplasmy drives high-risk clonal hematopoiesis and hematological malignancy

Authors:
Arking↗D. E↗McDonald↗Shi↗Puiu↗J. V↗Pasca↗Hong↗Y. S↗Gondek↗

Abstract Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) heteroplasmy, the coexistence of multiple mtDNA variants within cells, accumulates with age and is associated with hematological malignancies and mortality. However, whether predicted deleterious heteroplasmies causally contribute to cancer or merely represent passenger mutations remains unresolved. Here, leveraging ~36,000 first-degree relative pairs from the UK Biobank and All of Us Research Program cohorts, we deconvolute overall heteroplasmy metrics into those that are shared across family members (representing inherited variants) and those that are not (representing de novo variants) to establish a Mendelian randomization framework for assessing causality. We show that shared heteroplasmies exhibit strong purifying selection, with reduced predicted deleteriousness compared to not shared variants, and that 90% of an individual's deleterious heteroplasmy burden is somatically acquired. Critically, shared deleterious heteroplasmy burden, fixed at conception and thus temporally upstream of potential confounders, is significantly associated with hematological malignancies (RR=2.81, 95% CI 1.29-6.13), with effect sizes concordant with the not shared heteroplasmy burden. Furthermore, shared deleterious heteroplasmy specifically associates with high-risk clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP), particularly spliceosome mutations, suggesting mitochondrial dysfunction promotes clonal expansion of specific CHIP subtypes. Finally, we identify ultra-rare individual mtDNA variants associated with hematological malignancies, a hallmark of driver mutations. These findings establish mtDNA heteroplasmies, including inherited variants, as causal contributors to hematological malignancy risk and demonstrate that most disease-relevant burden is acquired during life, identifying potential opportunities for prevention and therapeutic intervention in individuals at elevated risk for hematological cancer, particularly of myeloid origin.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Adaptable Segmentation Pipeline for Diverse Brain Tumors with Radiomic-Guided Subtyping and Lesion-Wise Model Ensemble

Authors:
Daniel Capell\'an-Mart\'in↗Abhijeet Parida↗Zhifan Jiang↗Nishad Kulkarni↗Krithika Iyer↗Austin Tapp↗Syed Muhammad Anwar↗Mar\'ia J. Ledesma-Carbayo↗Marius George Linguraru↗

Robust and generalizable segmentation of brain tumors on multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains difficult because tumor types differ widely. The BraTS 2025 Lighthouse Challenge benchmarks segmentation methods on diverse high-quality datasets of adult and pediatric tumors: multi-consortium international pediatric brain tumor segmentation (PED), preoperative meningioma tumor segmentation (MEN), meningioma radiotherapy segmentation (MEN-RT), and segmentation of pre- and post-treatment brain metastases (MET). We present a flexible, modular, and adaptable pipeline that improves segmentation performance by selecting and combining state-of-the-art models and applying tumor- and lesion-specific processing before and after training. Radiomic features extracted from MRI help detect tumor subtype, ensuring a more balanced training. Custom lesion-level performance metrics determine the influence of each model in the ensemble and optimize post-processing that further refines the predictions, enabling the workflow to tailor every step to each case. On the BraTS testing sets, our pipeline achieved performance comparable to top-ranked algorithms across multiple challenges. These findings confirm that custom lesion-aware processing and model selection yield robust segmentations yet without locking the method to a specific network architecture. Our method has the potential for quantitative tumor measurement in clinical practice, supporting diagnosis and prognosis.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning optimal policies from event logs through reinforcement learning: a comparison of deep and MDP-based approaches

Authors:
Stefano Branchi↗Andrei Buliga↗Chiara Di Francescomarino↗Chiara Ghidini↗Riccardo Graziosi↗Francesca Meneghello↗Massimiliano Ronzani↗

arXiv:2303.09209v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Prescriptive Process Monitoring is an emerging area within Process Mining that focuses on recommending actions to optimize business outcomes. Most existing works prescribe pre-defined interventions, i.e., sets of actions applied to ongoing process executions to achieve a specific objective or Key Performance Indicator (KPI). In contrast, only a few approaches have explored learning and evaluating optimal behavioral policies, i.e., general strategies that determine the best sequence of actions to maximize a desired KPI. In this paper, we address the problem of learning optimal behavioral policies by proposing an AI-based approach that learns an optimal policy directly from historical process executions using Reinforcement Learning (RL) to recommend the best actions for optimizing a KPI. To this end, we employ two RL techniques. The first is a classical model-based approach that extends previous work by the authors through the construction of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) capturing process behavior. The second is a model-free technique based on offline Deep RL. Unlike state-of-the-art work, we aim to minimize the use of domain knowledge and learn optimal policies directly from historical event data. This allows us to learn when to apply interventions and discover effective ones directly from data. Moreover, we target complex scenarios involving external actors, where the process owner controls only part of the activities. We adopt a data-driven Business Process Simulation (BPS) environment to evaluate the learned policies. Results show that both methods improve the targeted KPI with similar effectiveness, while the model-based approach outperforms offline Deep RL in computational efficiency.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Flood and Harvest: The Provable Necessity of Trivia for Generating Valuable Mathematics via the Lens of Language Generation in the Limit

Authors:
Xiaoyu Li↗Andi Han↗Dai Shi↗Zheng Gao↗Jiaojiao Jiang↗Junbin Gao↗

AI systems coupled to proof assistants now generate formal mathematics at scale, and the gap between what a checker can verify and what a mathematician would value has become the binding constraint. We model the generation of valuable mathematics as nested language generation in the limit: a verifiable formal language $F$, accessed through a membership oracle (the proof checker), contains an unknown valuable language $H \in \mathcal{H}$ revealed only through an adversarial enumeration of a core $C \subseteq H$ of exact density $\alpha$ (the literature). Every output is valuable ($\in H$), trivial ($\in F \setminus H$), or a hallucination ($\notin F$). We settle four questions. First, the verifier is not taste: the collections admitting generation with breadth are exactly those of the oracle-free model, characterized fiber-wise by Angluin's condition. Second, the verifier does buy sound coverage, covering all unseen valuable statements while asserting only valid ones: possible with it, impossible without it; it relocates unavoidable errors from false to trivial. Third, and centrally, a sharp dichotomy on the tight family: generators emitting finitely many trivia achieve optimal coverage $\alpha/2$, while any infinite trivia allowance, even at vanishing rate, jumps the optimum to $1-\alpha/2$ (both tight, for cores presented as the candidate intersection), and one generator attains both ends. The transition is in trivia count, not rate; the gap $1-\alpha$ is the unrecorded mass. Fourth, both regimes instantiate in a compression model of mathematics. A perfect verifier cannot substitute for taste: the unbounded stream of correct-but-worthless statements is not an engineering accident but a provable necessity, since covering unrecorded valuable mathematics requires an infinite, but asymptotically negligible, stream of certified trivia.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization: Teacher in Prompts, Not Gradients

Authors:
Byung-Kwan Lee↗Ximing Lu↗Shizhe Diao↗Minki Kang↗Saurav Muralidharan↗Karan Sapra↗Andrew Tao↗Pavlo Molchanov↗Yejin Choi↗Yu-Chiang Frank Wang↗Ryo Hachiuma↗

Knowledge distillation transfers a teacher's competence to a small student but is brittle in the small-student regime: forcing the student to imitate logits from a much larger teacher concentrates it on the teacher's sharpest modes, hurting generalization on benchmark families beyond the training corpus. Reinforcement learning (RL) avoids logit imitation by training on the student's own rollouts. However, on questions where every rollout fails-yielding zero advantage and being silently discarded-injecting a stronger teacher's response into the policy gradient breaks the on-policy assumption and induces drift. We introduce Zone of Proximal Policy Optimization (ZPPO), inspired by Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, which keeps the teacher inside the prompt rather than the policy gradient. On hard questions, ZPPO constructs two reformulated prompts: a Binary Candidate-included Question (BCQ) pairs one correct teacher response with one incorrect student response as anonymized candidates the student must discriminate, and a Negative Candidate-included Question (NCQ) aggregates the student's wrong rollouts into a single prompt to surface their shared failure modes. A prompt replay buffer recirculates each hard question until it either graduates-the student's mean rollout accuracy on it reaches half- or is FIFO-evicted under finite capacity, amplifying BCQ and NCQ inside the student's current zone of proximal development. On the Qwen3.5 family at four student scales (0.8B-9B) with a 27B teacher, post-trained as vision-language models and evaluated on a 31-benchmark suite (16 VLM, 10 LLM, 5 Video), ZPPO outperforms off/on-policy distillation and GRPO, with the largest gains at the smallest scale.

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24.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Measurement of reactor neutrino oscillation with the first JUNO data

Authors:
Angel Abusleme↗

Neutrino oscillations (see refs. 1,2 and references therein), a quantum effect manifesting at macroscopic scales, are governed by lepton flavour mixing angles and neutrino mass-squared differences3 that are fundamental parameters of particle physics, representing phenomena beyond the Standard Model. Precision measurements of these parameters are essential for testing the completeness of the three-flavour framework, determining the mass ordering of neutrinos and probing possible new physics. The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO)4 is a 20-ktonne liquid-scintillator detector located 52.5 km from multiple reactor cores, designed to resolve the interference pattern of reactor neutrinos with sub-percent precision5,6. Here we report, using the first 59.1 days of data collected since detector completion in August 2025, the first simultaneous high-precision determination of two neutrino oscillation parameters, $${\sin }^{2}{\theta }_{12}=0.3092\,\pm \,0.0087$$ and $$\Delta {m}_{21}^{2}=(7.50\,\pm \,0.12)\times 1{0}^{-5}\,{\mathrm{eV}}^{2}$$ for the normal mass ordering scenario, improving the precision by a factor of 1.6 relative to the combination of all previous measurements. These results advance the basic understanding of neutrinos, validate the design of the detector and indicate the readiness of JUNO for resolving the neutrino mass ordering with a larger dataset. The rapid achievement with a short exposure highlights the potential of JUNO to push the frontiers of precision neutrino physics and paves the way for its broad scientific programme. The first data of the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory deliver high-precision neutrino oscillation parameters, improving measurements and demonstrating readiness to determine neutrino mass ordering.

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