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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Power-law-graded Ising Interactions Stabilize Time Crystals Realizing Quantum Energy Storage and Sensing

arXiv:2508.14847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study discrete time-crystalline (DTC) phases in one-dimensional spin-1/2 chains with power-law-graded Ising interactions under periodic Floquet driving. By generalizing Stark localization to power-law-graded Ising interaction profiles, we identify robust period-doubled dynamics across a wide range of interaction exponents, stabilized by the interplay between coherent driving and spatially varying coupling. Within the DTC phase, the energy stored in the system, interpreted as a quantum battery, increases superlinearly with system size, although no scaling advantage persists in normalized power. Beyond energy storage, we demonstrate that the DTC phase supports enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Fisher information associated with estimating timing deviations in the drive scales superextensively with system size, surpassing the Heisenberg limit. The degree of quantum advantage can be tuned by varying the interaction exponent, though DTC behavior remains robust throughout. Our results position power-law-graded Ising interacting Floquet systems as robust platforms for storing quantum energy and achieving metrological enhancement.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SPI: Query-Depth-Adaptive Indexing for Streaming RAG in Vector Databases

Vector databases (VecDBs) are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines where query processing and document ingestion occur concurrently. The index layer needs to provide low-latency search while incorporating new vectors without frequent global rebuilding. Existing VecDB pipelines typically operate within a uniform representation regime, despite substantial variation in the semantic granularity required across queries. This motivates an index design that supports incremental updates while adapting retrieval depth to query distribution and complexity. We propose Semantic Pyramid Indexing (SPI), a VecDB-layer indexing framework that organizes embeddings into $L$ semantically aligned resolution levels and selects retrieval depth per query via a lightweight uncertainty-aware controller. SPI supports progressive coarse-to-fine ANN search, level-wise streaming insertion without global rebuilds, and distributed execution through LSH partitioning with asynchronous gRPC coordination. Unlike hierarchical ANN structures with fixed traversal rules (e.g., SPANN), SPI adapts resolution at query time while remaining compatible with FAISS and Qdrant backends. On MS MARCO and Natural Questions, SPI achieves competitive Recall@10 with lower latency under the same dense encoder family, yielding a 1.4–2.3$\times$ average retrieval latency reduction under fixed Recall@10 targets relative to comparable approximate-ANN baselines. A prototype scaling study up to 8 nodes shows $6.2\times$ throughput scaling (${\approx}73\%$ efficiency); the 16-node configuration is included for completeness but shows diminishing efficiency. We provide a top-$K$ stability guarantee: queries with sufficient retrieval margin return an identical top-$K$ set at a shallower level. Code and configurations are available at https://github.com/FastLM/SPI_VecDB.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

FinTradeBench: A Financial Reasoning Benchmark for LLMs

Real-world financial decision-making is a challenging problem that requires reasoning over heterogeneous signals, including company fundamentals derived from regulatory filings and trading signals computed from price dynamics. Recently, with advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), financial analysts have begun to use them for financial decision-making tasks. However, existing financial question-answering benchmarks for testing these models primarily focus on company balance sheet data and rarely evaluate reasoning about how company stocks trade in the market or their interactions with fundamentals. To leverage the strengths of both approaches, we introduce FinTradeBench, a benchmark for evaluating financial reasoning that integrates company fundamentals and trading signals. FinTradeBench contains 1,400 questions grounded in NASDAQ-100 companies over a ten-year historical window. The benchmark is organized into three reasoning categories: fundamentals-focused, trading-signal-focused, and hybrid questions requiring cross-signal reasoning. To ensure reliability at scale, we adopt a calibration-then-scaling framework that combines expert seed questions, multi-model response generation, intra-model self-filtering, numerical auditing, and human-LLM judge alignment. We evaluate 14 LLMs under zero-shot prompting and retrieval-augmented settings and witness a clear performance gap. Retrieval substantially improves reasoning over textual fundamentals, but provides limited benefit for trading-signal reasoning. These findings highlight fundamental challenges in the numerical and time-series reasoning for current LLMs and motivate future research in financial intelligence.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Attention in Motion: Secure Platooning via Transformer-based Misbehavior Detection

arXiv:2512.15503v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vehicular platooning promises transformative improvements in transportation efficiency and safety through the coordination of multi-vehicle formations enabled by Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. However, the distributed nature of platoon coordination creates security vulnerabilities, allowing authenticated vehicles to inject falsified kinematic data, compromise operational stability, and pose a threat to passenger safety. Traditional misbehaviour detection approaches, which rely on plausibility checks and statistical methods, suffer from high False Positive (FP) rates and cannot capture the complex temporal dependencies inherent in multi-vehicle coordination dynamics. We present Attention In Motion (AIMformer), a transformer-based framework specifically tailored for real-time misbehaviour detection in vehicular platoons with edge deployment capabilities. AIMformer leverages multi-head self-attention mechanisms to capture intra-vehicle temporal dynamics, with a spatio-temporal variant that further models inter-vehicle spatial correlations. It incorporates global positional encoding with vehicle-specific temporal offsets to handle join/exit maneuvers. We propose a Precision-Focused Binary Cross-Entropy (PFBCE) loss function that penalizes FPs to meet the requirements of safety-critical vehicular systems. Extensive evaluation across 4 platoon controllers, multiple attack vectors, and diverse mobility scenarios demonstrates superior performance ($\geq$ 0.93) compared to state-of-the-art baseline architectures. A comprehensive deployment analysis utilizing TensorFlow Lite (TFLite), Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), and TensorRT achieves sub-millisecond inference latency, making it suitable for real-time operation on resource-constrained edge platforms. Hence, validating AIMformer is viable for both in-vehicle and roadside deployment.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Food additive exposure associated with reduction in gut microbiota diversity

Consumption of ultra-processed foods is rising globally and has been implicated in inflammation and metabolic dysfunction, yet the impact of specific food additives on the human gut microbiota remains poorly understood. Using dietary data from the Food & You study (approximately 1000 participants in Switzerland), we identified 257 unique additives from 4,119 unique packaged products to quantify each participant's daily additive exposure. Higher exposure to a combination of high intensity sweeteners and sugar polyols, commonly found in low calorie products, was independently associated with reduced gut microbial Shannon diversity (beta = -0.39, p < 0.001), after adjustment for demographics, diet quality, BMI and bowel movement frequency. At a broader level, total additive exposure and fast food consumption were each negatively associated with gut microbial diversity; however, additive exposure remained independently associated and also specifically attenuated the diversity benefits of vegetable rich diets. Furthermore, microbial log ratio signatures linked to additive exposure showed strong negative correlations with Shannon diversity, including emulsifiers and thickeners (r = -0.66) and preservatives and antioxidants (r = -0.56). Integrating additive exposure with healthy dietary components such as HEI, fruits, or vegetables strengthened associations with gut microbial diversity; for example, vegetable linked correlations with Shannon diversity increased from r = 0.52 to r = 0.65 when contrasted against preservative-antioxidant exposure. Concordantly, microbial signatures associated with the sweeteners and sugar polyols additive combination showed depletion of fiber associated commensal taxa, and enrichment of pathways involved in polyol and aromatic compound metabolism. Notably, these associations emerged despite packaged foods representing only approximately 15% of logged dietary intake, underscoring the sensitivity of gut microbial diversity to limited exposure, and demonstrating that without integrating additive and processed-food metrics, one of the largest effect-size phenomena in human gut microbiota diversity would remain undetected.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

GraphPO: Graph-based Policy Optimization for Reasoning Models

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a standard paradigm for enhancing the capability of large reasoning models. RLVR typically samples responses independently and optimizes the policy using from final answers. This paradigm has two limitations. First, independently responses often contain similar intermediate reasoning steps, causing redundant exploration and wasted computation. Second, sparse final-answer rewards make it hard to identify useful steps. Tree-based methods partly address this problem by sharing prefixes and comparing branches from the same prefix to provide fine-grained signals. However, tree branches are still expanded independently. When different branches reach similar reasoning states, they cannot share information and repeat similar exploration. Moreover, tree-based methods ignore such dispersion and only perform local comparisons within separate branches, which can lead to higher variance in advantage estimation. To address this challenge, we propose GraphPO (Graph-based Policy Optimization), a novel RL framework that represents rollouts as a directed acyclic graph, with reasoning steps as edges and semantic states summarized from the reasoning paths as nodes. GraphPO merges semantically equivalent reasoning paths into equivalence classes, allowing them to share suffixes and reallocating budget away from redundant expansions to diverse exploration. Furthermore, we assign efficiency advantages to incoming edges and correctness advantages to outgoing edges, thereby improving inference efficiency while deriving process supervision from outcome. Theory shows that GraphPO reduces advantage-estimation variance and enhances reasoning efficiency. Experiments on three LLMs across reasoning and agentic search benchmarks show that GraphPO consistently outperforms chain- and tree-based baselines with the same token budgets or response budgets.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

VISTA: Scale-Aware Visual Navigation via Action History Conditioning

arXiv:2606.17294v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision Navigation Foundation Models (VNMs) promise end-to-end learned navigation policies capable of zero-shot deployment across diverse embodiments and environments. To maintain generality, many vision-based navigation models predict normalized actions. However, this normalization introduces a critical deployment vulnerability: applying different scaling factors to the same normalized trajectory alters its physical geometry, which degrades navigation performance and increases collision risks. We address this vulnerability by conditioning the model on normalized action histories alongside image observations, providing explicit context on the relationship between the model's predictions and the robot's actual physical displacement. Furthermore, current VNMs often struggle in visually repetitive environments that lack distinct features. To resolve this issue, we integrate a DINOv3 encoder, whose richer representations enable our model to capture both spatial and geometric dimensions between observations. VISTA generalizes robustly to out-of-distribution environments, achieving 100% goal prediction accuracy in zero-shot, real-world deployment in Outdoor, Forest and Office settings, and an average of 95% checkpoints crossed, demonstrating consistent path following in unseen environments.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

DIFF-ERO: A Conformance-Aware Loss for Deep Learning in Process Mining

arXiv:2606.14283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning has driven many recent advances in process analytics, especially for predictive and prescriptive monitoring. However, standard objectives such as cross-entropy optimize local next-step likelihoods and only implicitly capture control-flow structure. As a result, models can achieve high token-level accuracy while permitting imprecise global behaviour. We introduce DIFF-ERO, a conformance-aware loss function for deep learning models on process data. DIFF-ERO is a differentiable formulation of entropy-based stochastic conformance that incorporates control-flow information during training. Our approach constructs batch-level stochastic transition matrices with soft edge memberships, allowing structural precision and recall signals to directly inform backpropagation. The loss is model-agnostic and can be applied whenever the final representation parametrizes stochastic transitions. We instantiate DIFF-ERO in transformer encoder-decoder pipelines for next-activity prediction and use it jointly with cross-entropy to analyse its theoretical components with respect to convergence. Across benchmarks comparing other loss functions and targets, DIFF-ERO shows improved predictive performance where structure matters most while maintaining parity elsewhere. At the same time, the learned stochastic automaton converges towards the structural ground truth, indicating that the network internalizes process model structure.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-22

Differences in tuberculosis prevalence by sex in low- and middle-income countries over 1993–2025: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Nicole A. Swartwood, Nanki Singh, Seyed Alireza Mortazavi, Melike Hazal Can, Hening Cui, Do Kyung Ryuk, Peter MacPherson, Katherine C. Horton, Nicolas A. Menzies Background Global and national initiatives to combat tuberculosis (TB) have expanded over recent years. Despite this, the TB burden remains high in some population groups, with men recognized as having elevated TB risks. Summary measures of sex differences in TB prevalence were last estimated in 2016. Since then, many additional prevalence surveys have been conducted, including in the highest TB burden countries. We conducted a systematic review of sex-stratified TB prevalence survey data published over 1993–2025, to provide updated estimates of male-to-female (M:F) TB prevalence ratios and determine whether sex-related disparities in TB burden have closed over time. Methods and findings We identified surveys reporting community-representative, sex-stratified estimates of pulmonary TB prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including surveys from an earlier review (covering January 1993–March 2016) and a new systematic review (covering 1st December 2015–13th October 2025). This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024503853) and included searches of PubMed, Embase, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, Africa Index Medicus, LILACS, and SciELO. We extracted data on bacteriologically confirmed and smear-positive TB prevalence among adults (aged ≥ 15 years), stratified by sex. Risk of bias was evaluated using eight criteria specific to prevalence surveys. We fit multi-level Bayesian regression models with study- and country-level random effects to estimate the M:F ratio of TB prevalence (male prevalence divided by female prevalence), overall and for key subgroups. In meta-regression analyses, we estimated how prevalence ratios varied over time and according to known TB risk factors and TB case definitions.We identified 10,124 publications and extracted data from 100 eligible studies representing 102 unique prevalence surveys and 4,658,310 participants (45.6% male) in 33 LMICs. TB prevalence was higher in men than women in 90/102 of the included surveys, with a pooled M:F prevalence ratio of 2.02 (95% credible interval (CrI): 1.71, 2.34) for bacteriologically confirmed TB and 2.38 (95% CrI: 1.91, 2.90) for smear-positive TB. Time trend analyses showed a 2.0% (95% CrI: −0.2, 4.5%) average annual change in the M:F ratio of bacteriologically confirmed TB over the study period. The M:F prevalence ratio was estimated to be higher for countries with greater excess HIV prevalence among men, and countries with greater gender equity (as measured by the United Nation’s Gender Development Index). The estimated M:F prevalence ratio was also higher for surveys that did not restrict testing to individuals reporting TB symptoms. Study limitations include heterogeneity in survey methods and definitions, as well as limited data from the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe WHO world regions and post-COVID-19 period. Conclusions Men in LMICs consistently experience TB at a higher prevalence than women. Time trend estimates are uncertain, but consistent with widening sex differences in TB prevalence over the last three decades, despite efforts to address the risk factors underlying this excess TB burden.

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

DLWM: Diverse Latent World Models for Efficient Multimodal Reasoning

Reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have improved considerably in recent years. Existing approaches typically rely on explicit chain-of-thought or continuous latent-space trajectories to enhance multi-step reasoning. However, these methods generally assume that an input admits a single latent interpretation and unfold reasoning along a fixed path or under a uniform computation budget. In real-world multimodal settings, visual observations are often subject to occlusion, blur, viewpoint variation, or semantic ambiguity, giving rise to multiple plausible interpretations. A uniform reasoning strategy not only limits the model's ability to explore multiple hypotheses but also incurs high memory usage and rollout cost. We present DLWM (Diverse Latent World Models), a multimodal reasoning framework that combines latent-space reasoning with reinforcement learning. First, we construct a set of diverse latent world hypotheses in continuous latent space, each capturing a different plausible interpretation of the visual input, and unfold latent reasoning independently on each hypothesis. An orthogonality-based diversity regularizer explicitly prevents hypothesis collapse. Second, we formulate the latent reasoning process as a resource-constrained sequential decision problem and introduce a resource-aware reinforcement learning policy that adaptively allocates computation across hypotheses, dynamically deciding whether to expand, terminate, or merge reasoning paths, thereby substantially reducing memory footprint and improving rollout efficiency. Experiments on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that DLWM outperforms existing methods by 2-5 points in accuracy while reducing memory usage by 24%.

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

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

arXiv:2606.14987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cortisol Stress Response is Associated with Iron Status in Pregnancy

Background: Iron deficiency (ID) affects up to 40% of pregnant women in the third trimester, even in highly resourced and iron-supplemented populations, with adverse consequences for maternal health and long-term offspring development. Psychological stress may compromise iron status through hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis dysregulation and inflammation, but no study has directly examined cortisol in relation to iron status across human pregnancy. Objective: This longitudinal study examined associations between HPA function and maternal iron status across pregnancy and tested whether IL-6 and CRP mediated the relationship between cortisol and ferritin across gestation. Methods: One hundred sixty-eight pregnant Black women with Medicaid insurance completed up to four laboratory assessments across pregnancy. Salivary cortisol was measured before and in response to the Trier Social Stress Test, yielding basal and reactive cortisol indices. Serum ferritin, IL-6, and CRP were collected at each visit. Trimester-specific regression models examined cortisol reactivity in relation to ferritin; linear mixed-effects models with moderated mediation tested whether basal cortisol predicted ferritin via inflammation. Results: Higher cortisol reactivity was associated with lower ferritin specifically in the third trimester (std. {beta} = -0.197, p = .004). Higher basal cortisol predicted a steeper IL-6 rise across gestation (p = .002), and IL-6 was positively associated with ferritin (b = 0.236, p = .006), consistent with inflammatory iron sequestration. The indirect effect of basal cortisol on ferritin via IL-6 was statistically significant, and higher basal cortisol was negatively associated with cortisol reactivity in the third trimester. No pathway was observed through CRP. Conclusion: Greater cortisol reactivity predicted lower third-trimester ferritin, a pattern that suggests cumulative iron depletion, atypically sustained HPA reactivity in late pregnancy, or both. To our knowledge, this is the first prospective study linking cortisol reactivity to iron status across human pregnancy, identifying maternal stress physiology as a novel target for understanding and addressing gestational iron deficiency.

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

Planning with the Views via Scene Self-Exploration

Can VLMs predict how each camera move changes the view, and plan many such moves ahead? We call this capability view planning, requiring (1)understanding how a single action transforms the view, and (2)composing many such transformations across multi-turn plans to identify a target view. We probe both abilities in our proposed ViewSuite, a 3D point-cloud environment on real ScanNet scenes. Across 13 frontier VLMs, a critical planning gap emerges: they possess basic view-action knowledge but fail to compose it across multi-turn plans, with the gap widening as viewpoint distance grows. To close this gap, we propose an iterative framework that alternates self-exploration with view graph distillation. The key insight is that all exploration trajectories, regardless of their outcome, collectively form a view graph that compactly captures how viewpoints connect across a scene. Distilling this graph into diverse supervised tasks reshapes the policy distribution and overcomes the sparse rewards that stall pure RL. This improves Qwen2.5-VL-7B from 2.5% to 47.8% on interactive view planning, surpassing GPT-5.4 Pro (18.5%) and Gemini 3.1 Pro (21.4%). Self-exploration emerges as a promising path toward VLMs that can actively reason and plan in 3D space. Code and Data are at https://viewsuite.github.io.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Failure Modes of Large Language Models on Research-Level Mathematics: A Taxonomy and an Empirical Characterisation

arXiv:2606.24902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The "First Proof" benchmark [1] posed ten research-level mathematics questions to the strongest publicly available LLMs and found them consistently wrong-not silent, but confidently, fluently wrong. This paper asks why. Working from the per-question post-mortems in First Proof's Appendix A, I identify four failure modes: citation fabrication (F1), premise smuggling (F2), silent problem reformulation (F3), and local-to-global compatibility gaps (F4). I then audit eight one-shot proofs generated by Gemini 2.5 Flash on Questions 1, 2, and 5 of the benchmark, using two instruments built specifically to surface F1 and F2. The central finding is uncomfortable for anyone who sees retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) as the obvious fix: not one of the eight proofs contained a confirmed fabricated citation, yet every single one contained at least one load-bearing claim asserted as a "fundamental result" or "standard argument" with no justification attached. That failure mode-F2, premise smuggling-is invisible to citation verification by design. A premise-audit instrument I introduce flags it at 100% precision (5/5 judge-confirmed flags are true positives) and 50% proof-level recall in this corpus. The taxonomy and the audit together suggest that the right long-term objective is building inference-time pipelines that prevent these failure modes from occurring, not just detecting them after the fact. Index Terms–Large language models, mathematical reasoning, hallucination, premise smuggling, failure-mode taxonomy.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Treatment of Multi-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis with Second-Line All-Oral Drugs in Ghana: Incidence of Adverse Events.

Introduction: The treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) remains challenging due to the toxicity of second-line medications and suboptimal treatment outcomes. This study aimed to determine the incidence of adverse events and identify factors associated with these events in patients undergoing treatment for MDR-TB with second-line all-oral drugs in Ghana. Methods: This retrospective cohort study reviewed the medical records of 384 MDR-TB patients treated with second-line all-oral drugs at selected health facilities in Ghana, including the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, Eastern Regional Hospital, and Kumasi South Hospital. Data were extracted using the Kobo Collect tool, capturing patient demographics, baseline clinical and laboratory characteristics, treatment regimens, and adverse events. The study period spanned from 2020 to August 2024. Results: The study included a total of 384 MDR-TB patients, with a mean age of 45 years (SD = 15). The majority of patients were male (65.78%), and most were within the 45-64 years age group (33.85%), followed by those aged 25-44 years (31.25%). Regionally, the highest number of cases were reported from the Greater Accra Region (39.06%), followed by the Eastern Region (31.25%) and Kumasi South Hospital (29.69%). Approximately one in four patients (25%) presented with comorbidities, with HIV being the most common (19.5%). The most frequently reported adverse events were diarrhea (14%), dizziness (13.7%), and vomiting (12.3%). Most of these were mild to moderate in severity and tended to decrease as treatment progressed. Severe adverse events, such as leukopenia and acute kidney injury, were rare, occurring in less than 5% of patients. Over the course of treatment, gastrointestinal adverse events such as vomiting and nausea showed a significant decline, indicating possible patient adaptation or improved clinical management. Results from the multivariate Poisson regression analysis revealed that age and comorbidities were significant predictors of adverse events. Patients aged 65 years and above had a 56% lower risk of developing adverse events compared to younger patients (Adjusted Risk Ratio [aRR] = 0.44, 95% CI: 0.25-0.79, p = 0.005). Conversely, patients with comorbid conditions such as diabetes or hypertension were approximately 2.6 times more likely to experience adverse events compared to those without comorbidities (aRR = 2.65, 95% CI: 1.58-4.43, p < 0.001). The effect of sex was not statistically significant after adjustment (aRR = 1.03, 95% CI: 0.70-1.50, p = 0.86). At the end of the treatment period, 74.9% of patients achieved successful outcomes, including both those who were cured and those who completed treatment without being classified as cured. However, 25.1% had unsuccessful outcomes, which included treatment failure, relapse, or death. Conclusion: In conclusion, adverse events are common in the treatment of MDR-TB with second-line All-Oral drugs, with gastrointestinal adverse events being the most prevalent. These findings highlight the importance of monitoring and managing adverse events to optimize treatment outcomes for MDR-TB patients in Ghana.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

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

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

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MM-TRELLIS: Point-Cloud Guided Multi-Modal 3D Vehicle Generation in Autonomous Driving

Recovering realistic 3D vehicle models from autonomous driving scenes is crucial for synthesizing training data and building simulation environment. However, most existing vehicle generation methods fail to fully exploit multimodal sensors i.e. multi-view images and LiDAR point clouds) and rely on neural rendering based reconstruction, leading to low-quality mesh. Recently, native 3D generative models have made significant progress, yet they are not built for arbitrary multi-view inputs and often struggle with in-the-wild driving images. In this work, we present MM-TRELLIS, a multi-modal version of TRELLIS for in-the-wild 3D vehicle generation that integrates LiDAR and image sensors from autonomous driving datasets into native 3D generative models. Specifically, multi-view images are cycled as conditioning inputs, while LiDAR point clouds provide test-time guidance to ensure geometric accuracy and cross-view consistency. During denoising, we first align the guidance point cloud with the model priors, then enforce consistency between the generated geometry and the guidance point cloud. Finally, we introduce a voxel filtering strategy based on the opacity of 3D Gaussian Splatting to suppress floaters and produce clean meshes. Comprehensive experiments on Waymo dataset demonstrate our method outperforms existing methods in high-fidelity 3D vehicle generation. Code is available at https://github.com/HongliXiao/MM-TRELLIS.

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

Context-Aware Markov VAE for CSI Compression in Wireless Systems

arXiv:2606.16607v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers neural channel state information (CSI) compression for time-varying massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels in frequency division duplex (FDD) systems with limited feedback resources. The main challenge lies in obtaining a compact and efficient representation of the CSI given that it exhibits strong temporal correlation across successive snapshots. Existing memoryless compression models do not exploit this property, while simple temporal extensions often incorporate multiple observations without explicitly modeling the latent dynamics. We propose a context-aware compression framework based on a k-memory Markov variational autoencoder (k-MMVAE), which uses a finite temporal window to capture the evolution of CSI in the latent space. The model introduces Markov-structured latent dynamics with finite memory, enabling efficient use of temporal dependencies for compression. Simulation results show that the proposed approach improves target CSI reconstruction performance compared to memoryless and weakly sequential baselines, particularly at low and moderate compression rates. These results suggest that explicit latent temporal modeling can provide an effective mechanism for CSI compression under limited feedback constraints.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

SIRT7 regulates dosage compensation and safeguards the female X&#xa0;chromosome

Sirtuins are deacetylases implicated in stress responses and longevity in mammals1,2. Although their differential impact on disease for the two sexes has been noted3–7, the underlying reasons are unclear. Here, using Sirt7 as a model in mice, we examine the mechanisms leading to sex differences and find that Sirt7−/− female mice have decreased fitness throughout their lifespan. Notably, SIRT7 preferentially localizes to the sex chromosomes. In female&nbsp;individuals, SIRT7 loss affects X-chromosome inactivation, the first arm of dosage compensation that equalizes X-linked gene expression between males and females8–10. Xist is overexpressed and gene silencing becomes more efficient. However,&nbsp;SIRT7 loss has greatest impact on the active X (Xa) chromosome. The Xa chromosome becomes hyperacetylated at Lys36 of histone H3, structurally disorganized, prone to DNA damage and overexpressed. Increased Xa-chromosome expression leads to genome imbalance and augmented X-chromosome upregulation—the second arm of dosage compensation that balances X-chromosome versus autosomal gene expression. These data reveal an essential crosstalk between sirtuins and the sex chromosomes, with SIRT7 safeguarding X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes. We propose that the sex bias in SIRT7 biology can be explained in part by unequal effects on the sex chromosomes. SIRT7 safeguards X-chromosome integrity and dosage balance with autosomes.

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

Agon: An Autonomous Large-Scale Omnidisciplinary Research System Built on Prompt Economy

Large language models are making research production scalable, shifting the bottleneck from producing artifacts to judging claims. We present \textsc{Agon}, a research orchestrator that validates what can be checked inside the workflow and leaves the remaining judgments to human scientists. \textsc{Agon} is built on six design principles: Prompt Economy, Future-Facing, Minimal Prompts, OmniDisciplinary, Massive Parallelism, and Zero-Code. We ran \textsc{Agon} across domains for 444 iterations of Prompt Economy loops, using only small starting topics and no human-written experimental code. These deployments demonstrate scalability while exposing new classes of failure. We organize these failures into a taxonomy along severity, fixability, visibility, and capability locus. The taxonomy separates failures the loops can see and fix from those that require human judgment. Together, these results show that \textsc{Agon} is pushing research toward a new paradigm: machine scales, human steers.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Predicting Chemotherapy Response from Staging Laparoscopy Images

Background: For patients with metastatic gastrointestinal cancers, chemotherapy resistance is a common phenomenon that, if known in advance, would allow for individualized treatment decisions. This study aimed to test the feasibility of developing a deep learning computer vision system that uses laparoscopy images depicting peritoneal surface metastases (i.e., capturing the in-vivo optical appearance of metastases as a summary of their molecular makeup) to predict whether a patient is resistant to standard chemotherapy. Methods: The retrospective observational feasibility study included 35 adult patients who underwent staging laparoscopy for non-colon gastrointestinal adenocarcinoma with biopsy-confirmed peritoneal surface metastases and who underwent chemotherapy as their only treatment modality. Chemotherapy resistance was determined based on each patient's observed cancer-specific survival after controlling for confounders. Results: Of 35 patients, 17 were assigned to the chemotherapy sensitive group and 18 to the chemotherapy resistant group. The study cohort provided 1010 laparoscopy image patches of 101 biopsy-confirmed metastases. A densely connected convolutional neural network with cross-validation provided the best results for correctly predicting chemotherapy resistance at the patient level (accuracy 0.80 (95%CI 0.63-0.92), sensitivity 0.72, specificity 0.88, AUC-ROC 0.78). Saliency maps demonstrated the system's trustworthiness. Conclusion: In this study, a prototype surgical computer vision system designed to determine chemotherapy resistance from operative images of peritoneal surface metastases demonstrated its technical feasibility. Further development and validation in a multi-institutional clinical study are pending.

23.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Heat kernel estimates for Markov processes with blowing-up jump kernels

arXiv:2512.24807v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this paper, we establish sharp two-sided heat kernel estimates for a large class of purely discontinuous symmetric Markov processes on closed subsets $F$ of $\mathbb{R}^d$, whose jump kernels blow up on a Borel subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. We assume that $F\setminus \Sigma$ is a $\kappa$-fat set and is dense in $F$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work establishing sharp heat kernel estimates for jump processes whose jump kernels blow up on part of the state space. The jump kernels under consideration take the form $J(x,y)=|x-y|^{-d-\alpha}{\mathcal B}(x,y)$, where $\alpha\in (0,2)$ and the function ${\mathcal B}(x,y)$ blows up at a subset $\Sigma$ of $F$. A fundamental obstacle is that the tails of the jump measures are not uniformly bounded, and hence standard techniques in heat kernel analysis do not provide a priori off-diagonal estimates. To overcome this difficulty, we develop a new approach based on weighted integral estimates for the heat kernel that are sensitive to both the blow-up behavior of the jump kernel and the geometry of $F\setminus \Sigma$. Examples of processes falling within our general framework include traces of isotropic $\alpha$-stable processes in $C^{1,\rm Dini}$ sets, processes in Lipschitz sets arising in connection with the nonlocal Neumann problem, and a large class of resurrected self-similar processes in the closed upper half-space.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Optimizing Encoder Circuits of Entanglement-Assisted Quantum LDPC Codes via Beam Search

arXiv:2606.11468v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Entanglement-assisted (EA) quantum QC-LDPC codes offer strong error-correction capabilities with structured parity-check matrices, but their practical use depends on efficient encoder circuits and the availability of pre-shared Bell pairs (ebits). In all encoder implementations based on the stabilizer formalism, the dominant contribution to this complexity comes from the use of controlled gates. In this paper, we adopt the Sharma-Kumar-Garani (SKG) encoder construction. We formulate the encoder optimization as a search over GF(2) row operations that decompose the binary matrix derived from its CNOT sub-sequence. We solve this problem using a beam search algorithm guided by a Hamming-distance heuristic. For the tested EA quantum QC-LDPC code families, the proposed method achieves CNOT-count reductions of 7.3-34.0% relative to the SKG baseline encoder. The optimized circuits also yield lower CNOT counts than Patel-Markov-Hayes synthesis on all tested instances and are verified by stabilizer-tableau simulation. These results show that substantial encoder simplification is possible for structured EA QC-LDPC codes.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-25

Oo oo, ha ha: why humans and great apes giggle alike when tickled

Authors:

The rhythmic patterns of laughter found in apes and humans reveal that complex primate vocal control might have started evolving 15 million years ago. The rhythmic patterns of laughter found in apes and humans reveal that complex primate vocal control might have started evolving 15 million years ago.