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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Specific epigenetic age acceleration measures are associated with oral health outcomes in U.S. adults

Objectives: Oral health conditions impact a significant proportion of the global population. Chronological age is a known risk factor; however, characterization of epigenetic age remains limited and is expected to provide additional insight into biological mechanisms. Materials and Methods: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) was used to analyze the effect of epigenetic age measures of DunedinPoAm, and epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) of Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, VidalBralo, PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, on various oral health outcomes from survey and examination results. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression were performed, adjusting for sex, race-ethnicity, education, poverty income ratio categories, and dental insurance coverage status. Results: DunedinPoAm was associated with the last dental appointment being for an existing issue (p=0.0093), poor general oral condition (p=0.0226), limiting food due to teeth problems (p=0.0031), and recommendation to see a dentist within the next two weeks (p=0.0171). EAAs for PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, were associated with a smaller number of oral health outcomes, whereas EAAs for Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, and Vidal-Bralo showed no associations. Conclusions: In a representative U.S. population, DunedinPoAm was most consistently positively associated with different adverse oral health outcomes compared with other epigenetic aging measures. Tracking specific epigenetic ages such as DunedinPoAm, EAA GrimAge, EAA GrimAge2, and PhenoAge, may aid in additional monitoring of oral health outcomes. Understanding specific aging-related CpGs associated with oral health may aid in elucidating underlying molecular mechanisms.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Daily briefing: Iron-Age human bones were made into tools before interment

Authors:

Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools. Newly uncovered bones hint at how Iron Age Britons treated their dead. Plus, AI models have failed to beat human mathematicians at research-level problems and the everyday items that make great scientific tools.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Zero-Inflated Gaussian Distributions Enable Parameter-Space Sparsity in Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a powerful class of evolutionary methods for black-box optimization, especially when little is known about the structure of the objective. Whereas classical evolutionary algorithms rely on hand-designed mutation and crossover operators, hard to devise for unknown problem structures, and a source of bias, EDAs sidestep operator design entirely: they fit a probability distribution to the best individuals and sample the next generation from it. EDAs are well established on continuous parameter spaces, but they have not previously been generalized to sparse ones, in which most coefficients of a good solution are exactly zero. Existing sparse black-box optimizers therefore reintroduce exactly what EDAs were designed to avoid: hand-crafted sparsity operators, bi-level schemes alternating between support set and active values, zeroing thresholds, and other baked-in assumptions. We close this gap by proposing multivariate zero-inflated Gaussian (ZIG) distributions as EDA sampling laws. A latent Gaussian model with separate indicator and value dimensions represents sparsity patterns, correlations among active parameters, and the interactions between the two, so sparsity patterns and active values are optimized jointly, hierarchy-free. We show that the latent parameters of this model are identifiable from observed samples, unlike in the missing-data settings where related constructions originate, and introduce practical amortized inversion-based estimators for them. The estimators accurately recover latent correlation structures, and on the Lunar Lander benchmark the resulting ZIG-EDA converges faster and reaches higher final returns than a dense Gaussian EDA, a hand-crafted sparse evolutionary algorithm, and an ad-hoc sparse EDA, while finding controllers with only a small fraction of parameters active.

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

MyPCBench: A Benchmark for Personally Intelligent Computer-Use Agents

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.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

GDGU: A Gradient Difference-based Graph Unlearning Method for Cyberattack Localization in Electric Vehicle Charging Networks

arXiv:2606.19566v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electric vehicle charging stations (EVCSs) can expose distribution feeders to cyberattacks. While machine learning methods, including graph neural networks, can localize which bus is compromised, significant challenges remain in data sharing and model training. For example, privacy regulations grant EVCS owners the right to delete their training data from a deployed model, yet retraining from scratch on every request is computationally prohibitive. To address this, we study graph unlearning (GU) for EVCS cyberattack localization, formulated as a feature-level unlearning problem on a graph-level multi-label classification task. Specifically, we propose gradient difference-based graph unlearning (GDGU), which removes the influence of the requested deletion data through a first-order parameter correction. The correction is computed from the gradient difference between the original training data and a modified dataset in which only the charging power features at the requested EVCS buses are unlearned. Then, a batch-normalization recalibration and a brief recovery fine-tuning step are applied to restore localization utility. We benchmark GDGU against two second-order GU baselines on the IEEE 34-bus, 123-bus, and 8500-node distribution networks across three graph neural network backbones and cumulative unlearning scenarios. GDGU matches the strongest baseline on localization utility and reaches forgetting fidelity close to full-retraining, while unlearning 10 to 12 times faster than retraining from scratch and using far less memory than the second-order GU baselines.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

PertDiffBench: Benchmarking Diffusion Models for Single-Cell Perturbation Response Prediction

Diffusion models are increasingly used to predict transcriptional responses to perturbations, but whether they improve on simpler generative and representation-based baselines remains unclear. Existing evaluations often do not separate the effects of model architecture, input representation, biological context and metric choice, making it difficult to determine where diffusion-based methods are useful. Here we introduce PertDiffBench, a standardized benchmark for diffusion-based transcriptomic perturbation prediction across single-cell and bulk RNA-seq datasets. PertDiffBench evaluates diffusion-based models across three complementary evaluation settings: standard prediction in known single-cell contexts and bulk perturbation conditions, generalization to unseen cell types, species, drugs and intermediate time points, and stress tests of feature dimensionality, input representation, noise type and gene ordering. Across these settings, diffusion models did not show a consistent advantage. scGen remained a strong baseline in common prediction tasks, whereas scDiffusion was the most competitive diffusion-based method in several generalization settings. Temporal imputation showed a different pattern, with a simple DDPM operating directly in expression space outperforming more specialized models. Stress tests showed that performance was model dependent and sensitive to feature dimensionality, encoder choice, noise type and gene ordering. Pretrained encoders did not consistently improve performance, with the classical scVI representation slightly exceeding STATE in seen-condition and unseen-cell-type settings. These results indicate that diffusion-model performance in perturbation response prediction depends strongly on task design and representation choice. PertDiffBench provides a practical framework for evaluating these models under biologically varied and stress-tested conditions.

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

DC-Motion: Decoupling Semantics and Details via Discrete-Continuous Tokens for Human Motion Generation

Text-to-motion generation requires synthesizing physically realistic dynamics that strictly follow complex and long-horizon textual instructions. Existing approaches rely on homogeneous representation spaces that may fail to capture the hierarchical nature of human motion, with diffusion models struggling at compositional semantic reasoning and AR models sacrificing fine-grained physical details due to quantization. To solve it, we introduce DC-Motion, a factorized generative framework designed to explicitly decouple semantics and details via discrete-continuous tokens. A Discrete-Continuous VAE (DC-VAE) first decomposes motion into discrete tokens for semantics and continuous residuals for fine-grained dynamics. Then, a masked AR model predicts the discrete structure from text, and a lightweight residual diffusion model recovers the continuous physical details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DC-Motion effectively improves the capability to follow complex instructions. By effectively balancing semantic controllability and physical realism, our approach offers a highly adaptable modeling paradigm for human motion generation. On both HumanML3D and KIT-ML datasets, DC-Motion achieves state-of-the-art performance, delivering the best FID for motion realism and R-precision for text alignment.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Curvature-Informed Potential Energy Surface for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14217v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is essential for structure-based drug discovery. Recent geometric deep learning methods have achieved promising performance by representing protein-ligand complexes as three-dimensional graphs. However, most existing approaches mainly rely on static interaction geometry from a single bound conformation, while neglecting molecular flexibility and binding-induced conformational changes. To address this limitation, we propose a curvature-informed potential energy surface (CPES) graph neural network for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction, which incorporates physics-informed curvature representations to model conformational flexibility. CPES first derives curvature spectral descriptors from the Hessian of the potential energy surface evaluated at equilibrium configurations, whose eigenvalues define the local principal curvatures of the potential energy surface. It then uses spectral cross-attention to compare the unbound ligand and protein with the bound complex, thereby capturing binding-induced changes in conformational dynamics. In parallel, hierarchical protein-ligand interaction representations are learned from static structural features through geometry-aware message passing, soft clustering, and bidirectional cross-attention. Finally, CPES fuses the curvature-informed dynamic representations with static interaction representations for affinity regression. Extensive evaluations on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that CPES achieves improved predictive performance and offers physical interpretability.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Hua-Chen New Theory of Economic Optimization

arXiv:2504.19134v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Between 1957-1985, Chinese mathematician Loo-Keng Hua pioneered economic optimization theory through three key contributions: establishing economic stability's fundamental theorem, proving the uniqueness of equilibrium solutions in economic systems, and developing a consumption-integrated model 50 days before his death. Since 1988, Mu-Fa Chen has been working on Hua's theory. He introduced stochastics, namely Markov chains, to economic optimization theory. He updated and developed Hua's model and came up with a new model (Chen's model) which has become the starting point of a new economic optimization theory. Chen's theory can be applied to economic stability test, bankruptcy prediction, product ranking and classification, economic prediction and adjustment, economic structure optimization. Chen's theory can also provide efficient algorithms that are programmable and intelligent. {Stochastics} is the cornerstone of Chen's theory. There is no overlap between Chen's theory, and the existing mathematical economy theory and the economics developments that were awarded Nobel Prizes in Economics between 1969 and 2024. The distinguished features of Chen's theory from the existing theories are quantitative, calculable, predictable, optimizable, programmable and can be intelligent. This survey provides a theoretical overview of the newly published monograph [5rw24]. Specifically, the invariant of the economic structure matrix, also known as the Chen's invariant, was first published in this survey.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

DIPHINE: Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator

arXiv:2606.18997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncovering the true informational architecture of real-world complex systems requires disentangling how their components uniquely store, redundantly share, and synergistically integrate information over time. Integrated Information Decomposition ($\Phi$ID) is a framework for decomposing the information dynamics of multivariate systems into sixteen non-overlapping atoms that characterize redundant, unique, and synergistic modes of information storage, transfer, and integration. Existing methods to compute $\Phi$ID are restricted to Gaussian or discrete systems, preventing its application to continuous non-Gaussian dynamical systems. We address this limitation by proposing DIPHINE (Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator), the first neural estimator that leverages score-based diffusion models to jointly estimate all the mutual information terms required by $\Phi$ID from a single amortized network, recovering the sixteen atoms through Möbius inversion. We provide a theoretical analysis of error propagation through the inversion, showing that the Jacobian of the mapping from mutual informations to atoms is integer-valued and that the synergy-to-synergy atom is provably the hardest to estimate. We demonstrate accurate recovery of ground-truth atoms on synthetic benchmarks, superior performance compared to established mutual information estimators, and the ability to extract physiologically interpretable information-dynamic structure on an application involving real data without any distributional assumptions.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Stochastic Linear Contextual Bandits with Bounded Noise: A Set-Membership Approach

arXiv:2606.20022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers stochastic linear contextual bandits (SLCB) with bounded reward noise. Existing works typically assume sub-Gaussian reward noise and bounded expected rewards, under which the optimal regret bound scales as $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ in terms of horizon $T$. However, in many applications, realized/observed rewards are also naturally bounded, implying bounded reward noise. Bounded noise is more informative than the sub-Gaussian condition but has not been leveraged explicitly in the SLCB literature. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm SME-OFU by utilizing an uncertainty quantification method called set-membership estimation (SME) and applying the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU). Our algorithm enjoys an improved regret bound $O(\log T)$. Notice that this does not contradict the existing optimal bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for sub-Gaussian noise because bounded noise is a stronger condition. Finally, simulations show empirical improvements of SME-OFU over a benchmark algorithm designed for sub-Gaussian noise when the reward noise is bounded.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SciR: A Controllable Benchmark for Scientific Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.13020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three paradigmatic forms of inference recur across scientific reasoning: deduction, induction, and causal abduction. Reliably evaluating LLMs on these in scientific settings is currently out of reach: scientific benchmarks built on human annotations are costly and lack mechanistic ground truth, while synthetic logical-reasoning benchmarks do not resemble real scientific documents. We introduce SciR, a benchmark that combines multi-paradigm reasoning with controllable scientific rendering, anchored on three paradigmatic scientific problems. Tasks are generated from formal objects (deduction tree, inductive rule hypothesis, causal graph) to guarantee verifiable answers, then rendered into multi-document scientific discourse via per-track domain-tuned genres. The construction lets us independently vary two difficulty axes: how hard it is to extract the key information needed for inference, and how hard the principled inference itself is. We test six models. Both axes hurt every model, and their effects compound. The rendering even hurts neurosymbolic pipelines, which hand inference to a verified solver. The two axes yield a per-model extraction-vs-inference profile: for instance, reasoning models like deepseek-r1 mostly surpass non-reasoning instruct models on the inference axis. To our knowledge, SciR is the first multi-paradigm scientific-reasoning benchmark with parametric control on both extraction and inference difficulty.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex

Mitochondria regulate cellular processes through direct and indirect interactions with other organelles. A well-studied example has been contact with the endoplasmic reticulum at mitochondrial-associated endoplasmic reticulum membranes1, which control pathways including redox and calcium homeostasis2,3. Recent studies have also reported direct mitochondria–nuclear membrane contacts in cancer cells and yeast that promote pro-survival signalling4,5. Here we identify direct interactions between mitochondria and nuclear pores. Using two unbiased proteomic screens, GST pulldown and BioID, we found that VDAC1 was the top mitochondrial candidate that interacts with the filamentous nuclear pore protein RANBP2. In vitro RANBP2 CRISPR knockout, RANBP2 truncation or site-directed mutagenesis of RANBP2–VDAC1 interacting amino acids resulted in reduced mitochondria–nucleus proximity and decreased nuclear ATP and phosphocreatine levels. This was accompanied by a decline in the levels of the nuclear phosphoproteome and downregulation of pathways involved in histone modification, cellular differentiation and transcriptional regulation in vitro. Moreover, deletion of the RANBP2 C-terminal domain in vivo in mice resulted in embryonic lethality due to cardiac and neural crest differentiation defects. Collectively, these results describe a mechanism by which mitochondria directly interact with the nuclear pore complex, a phenomenon critical for regulation of nuclear energetics and cellular differentiation. Undoubtedly, additional roles of this interaction remain to be revealed. Mitochondria interact directly with the nuclear pore complex via VDAC1–RANBP2 binding to sustain nuclear ATP levels.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Symmetric Cooperative Motion in Higher Dimensions

arXiv:2606.13459v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove a distributional convergence result for a multidimensional version of symmetric cooperative motion which was introduced and studied in one dimension in [HRW, SCM1]. Our approach relies on framing the associated recursive distributional equation as a discretization of the porous medium equation. A major challenge is to analyze the behaviour of finite difference schemes which approximate weak solutions of the porous medium equation with unbounded initial data. In overcoming this difficulty, we perform a detailed analysis of the probability mass function of symmetric cooperative motion, in which we introduce several new comparison arguments for the discrete process. Consequently, along the way, we establish a novel multidimensional convergence result for a finite difference scheme approximating the ZKB/Barenblatt solution of the porous medium equation, which is of independent interest.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Geometry-Aware Superpixel Graph Transformer with Metadata for Skin Lesion Classification

Automated skin cancer classification from dermoscopic images remains challenging due to heterogeneous lesion structure, strong intra-class variability, and subtle visual differences between benign and malignant cases. Existing CNN/ViT pipelines typically rely on global or patch-level features and often combine patient metadata via late fusion, which limits spatially grounded multimodal reasoning. We present a novel region-based graph learning framework that explicitly models lesions as graphs of spatially coherent superpixel regions represented as frozen CNN features. To capture fine-grained lesion arrangements, we encode inter-regional geometry as edge attributes and introduce a dedicated metadata context node connected to all regions, providing structured integration of demographic/clinical variables within the same relational space. Node representations are updated using our edge-aware graph transformer followed by attention-driven propagation, and a final graph-level embedding for benign-malignant classification. Experiments on four public benchmarks demonstrate that explicit region-level relational modeling and graph-native multimodal fusion yield consistent gains over the state-of-the-art. Consequently, we establish a new graph-centric perspective in which CNN features are modeled as relational nodes and improved through contextual integration, yielding more expressive and robust classifications.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Symmetry-Induced Relaxation Comb and Strong Quantum Mpemba Effect in Long-Range XXZ Spin Chains

arXiv:2605.20930v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how symmetry constrains dissipative relaxation in open quantum many-body systems remains a central challenge in nonequilibrium physics. Here we uncover a symmetry-filtered Liouvillian mechanism for fast relaxation in a long-range XXZ spin chain subject to dephasing noise. At the isotropic point, the Hamiltonian has global \(SU(2)\) symmetry, whereas the full Liouvillian retains only the \(U(1)\) symmetry associated with total magnetization. This interplay selects a family of spatially uniform \(U(1)\)-neutral eigenoperators with exact eigenvalues \(\lambda=-2q\). Highly symmetric initial states have spectral weight only on this family, so higher-order components decay rapidly and the \(\lambda=-2\) mode governs the long-time dynamics, producing universal \(D(t)\sim e^{-2t}\) relaxation independent of system size and interaction range. Breaking the Hamiltonian symmetry restores overlap with slow Liouvillian modes and strongly suppresses relaxation. This symmetry-filtered accessibility gives rise to a strong quantum Mpemba effect, where a state farther from the steady state relaxes faster than closer thermal states. Our results establish symmetry-filtered Liouvillian mode accessibility as a route to controlling nonequilibrium relaxation in open quantum systems.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Personalizing Suicide Risk Assessment: Machine Learning Extraction of Cross-Modal Interactions Between Psychosocial and Demographic Factors in Veterans

Background: Veterans face an elevated risk of suicide compared to the general population, motivating national efforts to develop predictive models that can guide proactive care. Current models used by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) rely primarily on structured electronic health record (EHR) data, though clinical notes contain rich contextual information that can be quantified using natural language processing (NLP) to derive psychosocial variables that may improve risk detection. Machine learning methods, particularly classification and regression trees (CART), can also uncover interactions between clinical and psychosocial variables, enabling identification of patient characteristics that modify suicide risk factors. However, integrating structured and unstructured data presents challenges because NLP features often greatly outnumber traditional clinical variables, potentially biasing interaction discovery. In prior work, we addressed this imbalance by introducing a weighted CART framework that balances structured variables with NLP-derived psychosocial features from semantic lexicons (SEANCE). While effective, semantic approaches summarize language into predefined constructs and may overlook important lexical variation present in clinical narratives. Methods: In this study, we extend that framework by replacing semantic features with a high-dimensional bag-of-words (BoW) representation of clinical notes and by evaluating models across cohorts defined by structured suicide risk stratification (low, medium, high) and varying temporal lookback windows. Using a cohort of 27,241 veterans, we analyzed clinical documentation collected up to 30, 90, or 270 days prior to death (or a matched index date for controls), enabling temporally flexible risk modeling. XGBoost models were trained to balance structured and unstructured features and identify cross-modal interactions between textual and clinical variables. Results: When incorporated into generalized linear models, these interactions improved predictive performance, particularly among low- and medium-risk patients, and substantially reduced the performance gap between interpretable and more complex models. Notably, the BoW representation outperformed our prior semantic index-based approach. Discussion and Conclusions: Together, these findings demonstrate the utility of interpretable NLP methods for uncovering clinically meaningful interactions between psychosocial and demographic factors in suicide risk and establish a strong benchmark for future deep learning approaches aimed at capturing richer contextual and temporal information from clinical narratives.

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

Flex4DHuman: Flexible Multi-view Video Diffusion for 4D Human Reconstruction

We present Flex4DHuman, a multi-view video diffusion model that transforms a monocular or sparse multi-view video of a dynamic subject into synchronized dense multi-view videos using only relative camera-pose conditioning. Unlike prior human-centric methods that rely on skeletons, depth maps, normals, or rendered target-view geometry, Flex4DHuman requires no explicit geometry priors and instead conditions generation through relative camera-pose positional encoding. The generated videos can be directly ingested by downstream reconstruction pipelines to create dynamic 4D Gaussian splats. Built on the Wan 2.1 1.3B text-to-video model, Flex4DHuman preserves the backbone architecture and encodes camera and view information through a five-axis positional encoding that extends spatio-temporal RoPE with view indices and continuous SE(3) relative camera geometry. A three-stage curriculum progressively trains the model for pose following, flexible reference-to-target view generation, and temporal rollout. To support temporal rollout, we train with clean historical target-view tokens. We also add multi-view captions to enable test-time text control. Combined with an off-the-shelf 4D Gaussian Splatting stage, our framework lifts monocular static-camera videos into dynamic 4D Gaussian splats. Experiments on DNA-Rendering and ActorsHQ show that Flex4DHuman surpasses prior state-of-the-art methods, while the same formulation generalizes to animal categories after mixed human-animal training. These capabilities make Flex4DHuman a practical step toward scalable 4D content creation from casual monocular videos for simulation, gaming, AR/VR, and video re-shooting.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Emission of time-ordered photon pairs from a coherently-driven Kerr microcavity

arXiv:2601.06468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Weakly-interacting many-body systems possess remarkable quantum properties that are essential components of quantum technologies, and constitute a topic of fundamental interest. Here we show that in a solid-state nonlinear microcavity embedding discrete modes of exciton-dressed photons, we can isolate a single eigenmode of quantum fluctuations from the much brighter coherent fraction of the field. In this regime, we perform frequency- and time-resolved correlations measurements between photons on the red and blue side of the fluctuations spectrum. When the average number of fluctuation quanta is smaller than one, we observe the formation of large pairwise time-ordered correlations: red photon first and blue photon second. We show that this peculiar time-ordering correlation emerges spontaneously from the interplay between frequency-resolved detection, and the non-trivial internal quantum structure of the elementary fluctuations.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Role of Computation in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2602.05999v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How does the amount of compute available to a reinforcement learning (RL) policy affect its learning? Can policies using a fixed amount of parameters, still benefit from additional compute? The standard RL framework does not provide a language to answer these questions formally. Empirically, deep RL policies are often parameterized as neural networks with static architectures, conflating the amount of compute and the number of parameters. In this paper, we formalize compute bounded policies and prove that policies which use more compute can solve problems and generalize to longer-horizon tasks that are outside the scope of policies with less compute. Building on prior work in algorithmic learning and model-free planning, we propose a minimal architecture that can use a variable amount of compute. Our experiments complement our theory. On a set 31 different tasks spanning online and offline RL, we show that $(1)$ this architecture achieves stronger performance simply by using more compute, and $(2)$ stronger generalization on longer-horizon test tasks compared to standard feedforward networks or deep residual network using up to 5 times more parameters.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-modal Consistency Guidance for Robust Emotion Control in Auto-Regressive TTS Models

While Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems enable emotional control via natural-language instructions, expressiveness, naturalness, and speech quality degrade when the target emotion conflicts with the textual semantics. We propose a Cross-modal Consistency Guided Classifier-Free Guidance (CCG-CFG) method with dynamic scales based on the degree of inconsistency between the text emotion and the explicit speech emotion, replacing the dropout condition with the text emotion. We also distill the CCG-CFG guidance signal using a hard-sample mining strategy, improving the TTS model's emotional alignment capability. Evaluations on five emotional corpora and two TTS benchmarks show that our approaches applied to CosyVoice2 achieve up to a 12% absolute improvement in emotion-recognition accuracy and a 10% relative improvement in subjective scores, outperforming baselines including HierSpeech++, Qwen3-TTS, and original CosyVoice2, while preserving intelligibility, naturalness, and high speech quality.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Are you speaking my languages? On spoken language adherence in multimodal LLMs

While Large Language Model (LLM) based Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) enables seamless multilingual use, models often misidentify the output language, compromising transcription fidelity and downstream application quality. To preserve flexibility and code-switching capabilities, we propose a soft prompting approach that hints at potential spoken languages without strictly constraining the output. We formally define this challenge as a lack of language adherence, introduce a novel metric to quantify violations, and evaluate three mitigation strategies: (1) zero-shot prompting for robust guidance under uncertainty, (2) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to improve prompt adherence, and (3) Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to enforce adherence during decoding. We present a comparative analysis of these methods across multiple languages, evaluating effectiveness in reducing the language violation while maintaining overall ASR performance. Finally, we discuss trade-offs to guide strategy selection under various compute constraints.

25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Deciphering cell type-specific causal genetic effects on brain imaging-derived phenotypes and disorders with single-cell Mendelian randomization

Authors:

by Anyi Yang, Xingzhong Zhao, Xing-Ming Zhao, Yucheng T. Yang Reconstructing causality routes from genetic effects to complex phenotypes in particular cell types is crucial for understanding biological mechanisms underlying the brain-associated phenotypes including imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs), and brain disorders and behaviors (DBs). Here, we develop a single-cell Mendelian randomization framework to infer cell type-specific causal relationships between gene expression and diverse brain-associated complex phenotypes by integrating single-cell expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTLs) and genome-wide association study findings. We identifiy a set of 254 and 217 cis-eQTL target genes (eGenes) that may have causal effects on 112 IDPs and 26 DBs in eight cell types, respectively. These causal eGenes exhibit strong cell type specificity and varied pleiotropy among different types of brain-associated phenotypes. Further integrative analysis reveals putative causality routes among cell type-specific causal eGenes and brain-associated complex phenotypes. Finally, we characterize the spatiotemporal expression patterns of these causal eGenes, and highlight the coordinated associations of the brain-associated phenotypes based on the expression of their causal eGenes. Overall, our study presents a large-scale analysis of the genetic effects of brain structures, disorders and behaviors, providing a catalog of cell type-specific causal eGenes.