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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-19

Daily briefing: Human detritus remakes geology

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

What, exactly, is a rock? Plus, a stem-cell success for a severe autoimmune disease and evidence that ‘AI deskilling’ is real. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

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

Skill-3D: Evolving Scene-Aware Skills for Agentic 3D Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Haoyuan Li↗Zhengdong Hu↗Jun Wang↗Hehe Fan↗Yi Yang↗

This paper explores agentic 3D spatial understanding, i.e., MLLM agents performing 3D reasoning through tool use. Existing methods often misuse tools and exhibit biased tool preferences under 3D scenarios, leaving the agentic paradigm with only marginal gains over non-agentic strategies. We reveal that 3D spatial reasoning tasks are heterogeneous across scenes, while these agents apply a uniform tool-use strategy to all scenes rather than selecting tools according to the specific scene and task. To address this, we propose Skill-3D, a framework that learns self-evolving scene-aware skills. Specifically, Skill-3D identifies the task scene and records the agent's tool-use trajectory into a Scene Memory, where successful trajectories from similar scenes are aggregated and distilled into a reusable scene-aware skill, with failed ones attached to the skill as lessons. During training, once a similar scene recurs, the corresponding skill is injected to guide the agent, producing new trajectories whose successes and failures further refine the skill, forming a loop in which the memory and the skill library co-evolve. Experiments show that Skill-3D substantially improves tool utilization in 3D spatial reasoning (from 39% to 78% on VSI-Bench), driving the agent toward correct and sufficient tool use. For instance, it improves Gemini-3-Flash by 67% on MMSI-Bench. Furthermore, we conduct agentic post-training over skill-guided trajectories, which boosts Qwen3-VL-8B by 60% on VSI-Bench.

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

Learning Developmental Scaffoldings to Guide Self-Organisation

Authors:
Milton L. Montero↗Elias Najarro↗Jakob Schauser↗Sebastian Risi↗

arXiv:2605.14998v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: From subcellular structures to entire organisms, many natural systems generate complex organisation through self-organisation: local interactions that collectively give rise to global structure without any blueprint of the outcome. Yet a significant portion of the information driving such processes is not produced by self-organisation itself, instead, it is often offloaded to initial conditions of the system. Biological development is a prime example, where maternal pre-patterns encode positional and symmetry-breaking information that scaffolds the self-organising process. From maternal morphogen gradients in early embryogenesis to tissue-level morphogenetic pre-patterns guiding organ formation, this transfer of information to initial conditions, analogous to a memory-compute trade-off in computational systems, is a fundamental part of developmental processes. In this work, we study this offloading phenomenon by introducing a model that jointly learns both the self-organisation rules and the pre-patterns, allowing their interplay to be varied and measured under controlled conditions: a Neural Cellular Automaton (NCA) paired with a learned coordinate-based pattern generator (SIREN), both trained simultaneously to generate a set of patterns. We provide information-theoretic analyses of how information is distributed between pre-patterns and the self-organising process, and show that jointly learning both components yields improvements in robustness, encoding capacity, and symmetry breaking over purely self-organising alternatives. Our analysis further suggests that effective pre-patterns do not simply approximate their targets; rather, they bias the developmental dynamics in ways that facilitate convergence, pointing to a non-trivial relationship between the structure of initial conditions and the dynamics of self-organisation.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

The Quantum Split-Step Fourier Algorithm for Nonlinear Optical Waveguides

Authors:
Fabio Biancalana↗

arXiv:2606.24643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the Quantum Split-Step Fourier (QSSF) algorithm for nonlinear optical waveguides, a numerical framework that combines split-step propagation of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a commutator-preserving Bogoliubov evolution of Gaussian quantum fluctuations. The method propagates the classical mean field together with the Bogoliubov matrices $U$ and $V$, from which reduced second moments, covariance matrices, symplectic eigenvalues, and entropic measures are constructed for arbitrary spectral windows. Applied to soliton-driven resonant radiation, QSSF shows that the selected radiation band acquires a steadily increasing von Neumann entropy and a corresponding loss of purity, quantifying its entanglement with the rest of the spectrum in the lossless Gaussian setting. The analysis also reveals a surprisingly pronounced low-dimensional structure: although the radiation occupies many Fourier bins, its reduced Gaussian state is dominated by only a few Williamson modes. QSSF therefore provides a practical information-theoretic diagnostic for quantum correlations in nonlinear frequency conversion, supercontinuum generation, and multimode squeezed-light formation in ultrafast waveguide platforms.

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

Low-Rank Tensor Completion Based on Fractional Regularization with Ky Fan p-k Norm

Authors:
Shan Fan↗Feng Zhang↗Jianjun Wang↗Xi-Le Zhao↗Tingwen Huang↗

This paper addresses low-rank tensor completion (LRTC) by proposing a novel nonconvex surrogate, namely the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan p-k norm (TNPK), to accurately approximate the tensor tubal rank. The TNPK possesses appealing properties, including scale invariance, parameter flexibility, and the existence of closed-form solutions under specific choices of p and k. With specific parameter settings of p and k, it reduces to the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Ky Fan k norm (TNK) or the ratio of the tensor nuclear norm to the tensor Frobenius norm (TNF). We construct a LRTC model and, under the tensor null space property (NSP), prove that low-rank tensors are local minimizers of the proposed model. Moreover, we derive the proximal operator of the Ky Fan p-k inverse-norm and further develop an efficient alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) algorithm with guaranteed subsequential convergence under mild conditions. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the superior performance of our method against state-of-the-art competitors.

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

ThinkJEPA: Empowering Latent World Models with Large Vision-Language Reasoning Model

Authors:
Haichao Zhang↗Yijiang Li↗Shwai He↗Tushar Nagarajan↗Mingfei Chen↗Jianglin Lu↗Ang Li↗Yun Fu↗

Recent progress in latent world models (e.g., V-JEPA2) has shown promising capability in forecasting future world states from video observations. Nevertheless, dense prediction from a short observation window limits temporal context and can bias predictors toward local, low-level extrapolation, making it difficult to capture long-horizon semantics and reducing downstream utility. Vision–language models (VLMs), in contrast, provide strong semantic grounding and general knowledge by reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, but they are not ideal as standalone dense predictors due to compute-driven sparse sampling, a language-output bottleneck that compresses fine-grained interaction states into text-oriented representations, and a data-regime mismatch when adapting to small action-conditioned datasets. We propose a VLM-guided JEPA-style latent world modeling framework that combines dense-frame dynamics modeling with long-horizon semantic guidance via a dual-temporal pathway: a dense JEPA branch for fine-grained motion and interaction cues, and a uniformly sampled VLM thinker branch with a larger temporal stride for knowledge-rich guidance. To transfer the VLM's progressive reasoning signals effectively, we introduce a hierarchical pyramid representation extraction module that aggregates multi-layer VLM representations into guidance features compatible with latent prediction. Experiments on hand-manipulation trajectory prediction show that our method outperforms both a strong VLM-only baseline and a JEPA-predictor baseline, and yields more robust long-horizon rollout behavior.

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

Better Adherence, Richer Context: A Field Evaluation of LLM-Powered Conversational Voice Diaries for Sleep

Authors:
Amama Mahmood↗Bokyung Kim↗Honghao Zhao↗Molly E. Atwood↗Luis F. Buenaver↗Michael T. Smith↗Chien-Ming Huang↗

arXiv:2606.18596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sleep diaries are central to behavioral sleep medicine and cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, yet daily completion is difficult to sustain, and static forms often provide limited context for interpreting night-to-night sleep variation. We designed an LLM-powered conversational voice diary that delivers clinically grounded morning and evening sleep diary questions through proactive smart-speaker prompts, structured conversational intake, and adaptive follow-up dialogue. We evaluated the system in a four-week between-subjects field study with 30 university students, comparing it with a text-based mobile diary using matched diary items, reporting windows, and reminder intervals. Compared with the text-based diary, the conversational voice diary showed higher adherence and elicited more detailed contextual self-report about routines, stressors, environmental conditions, and other sleep-related factors. Participants also described the voice diary as easier to integrate into daily routines, despite longer perceived completion time. However, voice-based conversational intake produced lower completeness for some structured diary fields, revealing a trade-off between expressive richness and structured precision. These findings show both the promise and the challenge of using LLM-powered conversational voice assistants for longitudinal health self-report.

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

Deep Learning and Elicitability for McKean-Vlasov FBSDEs With Common Noise

Authors:
Felipe J. P. Antunes↗Yuri F. Saporito↗Sebastian Jaimungal↗

arXiv:2512.14967v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present a novel numerical method for solving McKean–Vlasov forward–backward stochastic differential equations (MV–FBSDEs) with common noise, combining Picard iterations, elicitability and deep learning. The key innovation involves elicitability to derive a pathwise loss function, enabling efficient training of neural networks to approximate both the backward process and the conditional expectations arising from common noise, without requiring computationally expensive nested Monte Carlo simulations. The mean-field interaction term is parameterized via a recurrent neural network trained to minimize an elicitable score, while the backward process is approximated through a hybrid feedforward and recurrent network representing the decoupling field. We validate the algorithm on a systemic-risk inter-bank borrowing and lending model, where analytical solutions exist, demonstrating accurate recovery of the true solution. We further extend the model to quantile-mediated interactions, showcasing the flexibility of the elicitability framework beyond conditional means or moments. Finally, we apply the method to a non-stationary Aiyagari–Bewley–Huggett economic growth model with endogenous interest rates, illustrating its applicability to complex mean-field games without closed-form solutions.

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

On the Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation for the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model and its mean-field limit

Authors:
Alexander Czernik↗Ruoyuan Liu↗Shao Liu↗

arXiv:2606.15214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ interacting stochastic damped nonlinear wave equations (SdNLW) with coupled cubic nonlinearities, posed on the two-dimensional torus and indexed by a parameter $\varepsilon > 0$. We show that as $\varepsilon$ goes to zero (Smoluchowski-Kramers approximation) and $N$ goes to infinity (mean-field limit), each component of the solution to the SdNLW system converges to the solution to the stochastic nonlinear heat equation (SNLH) with a mean-field nonlinearity. We prove such convergence via two regimes: first with $\varepsilon$ going to zero to obtain the parabolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model, i.e. a system of $N$ coupled SNLH, and then with $N$ going to infinity; or first with $N$ going to infinity for each component to obtain the mean-field SdNLW and then with $\eps$ going to zero. As a result, we obtain a commutative diagram regarding the convergence from the hyperbolic $O(N)$ linear sigma model to the mean-field SNLH.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

2.5-D Decomposition for LLM-Based Spatial Construction

Authors:
Paul Whitten↗Li-Jen Chen↗Sharath Baddam↗

arXiv:2605.07066v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous systems that build structures from natural-language instructions need reliable spatial reasoning, yet large language models (LLMs) make systematic coordinate errors when generating three-dimensional block placements. We present a neuro-symbolic pipeline based on 2.5-D decomposition: the LLM plans in the two-dimensional horizontal plane while a deterministic executor computes all vertical placement from column occupancy, eliminating an entire class of errors. On the Build What I Mean benchmark (160 rounds), GPT-4o-mini with this pipeline achieves 94.6\% mean structural accuracy across 12 independent runs, within 3.0 percentage points of the 97.6\% ceiling imposed by architect-agent errors that no builder-side improvement can address. This outperforms both GPT-4o at 90.3\% and the best competing system at 76.3\%. A controlled ablation confirms that 2.5-D decomposition is the dominant contributor, accounting for 50.7 percentage points of accuracy. The pipeline transfers directly to edge hardware: Nemotron-3 120B running locally on an NVIDIA Jetson Thor AGX matches the cloud result at 94.5\% with no prompt modifications. The underlying principle, removing deterministic dimensions from the LLM's output space, applies to any autonomous construction or assembly task where gravity or other physical constraints fix one or more degrees of freedom. A transfer experiment on 500 IGLU collaborative building tasks confirm the effect generalizes beyond the primary benchmark.

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11.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Adhesion and polarity-driven morphogenesis: Mechanisms and constraints in tissue formation

Authors:
Yoshiyuki T. Nakamura↗

by Yoshiyuki T. Nakamura, Chikara Furusawa, Kunihiko Kaneko Embryonic development in multicellular organisms exhibits diverse morphogenetic patterns, which can generally be categorized into fundamental types such as monolayer and multilayer spheres, as well as cell masses. Furthermore, we identify two distinct processes for the formation of spherical structures. These basic patterns are thought to be governed by the microscopic properties of intercellular adhesion. However, the specific mechanisms linking the microscopic factors to the emergence of distinct macroscopic morphogenetic patterns remain poorly understood. In this study, we explore how different morphogenetic patterns arise by employing a computational model that incorporates intercellular adhesion and polarity. Our results demonstrate that all fundamental morphogenetic patterns can be generated through the interplay of two key parameters: the polarity strength of the cell and the regulation of polarity via mechanical signals. Furthermore, analytical considerations reveal key mechanisms underlying the formation of these patterns. These findings highlight the critical role of physical constraints in morphogenesis and suggest potential applications to the design of artificial tissues and organoids.

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12.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-23

Europe must seize the moment to lead on free and open science

Authors: Unknown Author

An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent. An under-appreciated research powerhouse, Europe has a responsibility to champion democratic science that is accessible to all the world’s research talent.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

CAVEWOMAN: How Large Language Models Behave Under Linguistic Input and Output Compression

Authors:
Morayo Danielle Adeyemi↗Ryan A. Rossi↗Franck Dernoncourt↗

"Talk short. Drop grammar. Save token." This caveman style is widely promoted as a way to cut inference cost, but whether it actually saves anything depends on which channel (the user's prompt or the model's response) is being compressed. We present Cavewoman, a two-channel evaluation protocol that scores every generation on task accuracy, realized per-item cost, and reference-text agreement against the model's unconstrained reference. We evaluate eight models on five datasets at five reduction levels, with both channels measured on the same items. Output compression cuts realized cost on most API models (1.4-2.4x per model, up to 3x in the best case) and on all four open-weight models under public-tier pricing. Input compression has the opposite effect, a strict lose-lose: it raises net cost rather than lowering it (~1.15x on the five-benchmark mean, up to 1.8x on the worst dataset and 2.7x under stronger compression), because models compensate with longer responses even as accuracy collapses. Under the same setting, surface text diverges from the unconstrained reference: on the non-reasoning models, roughly half of all generations are correct yet their surface text no longer entails the model's own unconstrained baseline generation. The divergence survives length-controlled re-scoring, multiple-comparisons correction, and replication under complementary semantic measures. Code and data are available at https://github.com/danielle34/cavewoman.

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

FlowPipe: LLM-Enhanced Conditional Generative Flow Networks for Data Preparation Pipeline Construction

Authors:
Kunyu Ni↗Lei Cao↗Jie He↗Xiaotong Zhang↗Jianfeng Jin↗Junyu Dong↗Yanwei Yu↗

arXiv:2606.24679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data preparation pipelines improve data quality in machine learning by transforming raw tables into learning-ready data through sequential cleaning and feature transformation operators. However, automatically constructing such pipelines is computationally difficult because operator sequences are combinatorial and end-to-end evaluation is expensive. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) Multi-DQN methods still face three key limitations: decoupled value estimators weaken long-horizon credit assignment, dataset context is only weakly injected into the policy, and exploration is inefficient in a sparse search space with many invalid states. To address these issues, we propose FlowPipe, a unified framework that formulates pipeline synthesis as conditional probabilistic flow generation over a directed acyclic graph. FlowPipe uses Conditional Generative Flow Networks (C-GFlowNets) with a Trajectory Balance objective to connect terminal validation rewards with early pipeline decisions. It further introduces Deep Semantic Modulation through Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM), allowing LLM-derived logical priors to condition the policy's internal activations according to dataset semantics. In addition, FlowPipe incorporates failure awareness into the flow objective to avoid invalid states and concentrate search on high-potential regions. Experiments on two benchmark suites with 74 real-world datasets show that FlowPipe outperforms SOTA baselines, improving accuracy by 11.96% on average and achieving 12.5x faster training convergence. Source code is available at https://github.com/KunyuNi/FlowPipe.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Authors:
Boyi Zeng↗Yiqin Hao↗Zitong Wang↗Shixiang Song↗He Li↗Feichen Song↗Yifan Liu↗Ziwei He↗Xinbing Wang↗Zhouhan Lin↗

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference–a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache–the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

SEVRA-BENCH: Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents

Authors:
Rui Melo↗Riccardo Fogliato↗Sean Zhou↗Pratiksha Thaker↗Zhiwei Steven Wu↗

arXiv:2606.13757v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) reviewers are increasingly used in pull-request (PR) workflows, where their approvals help decide which code is merged into a repository. This raises a question that benchmarks for static vulnerability detection or code generation do not address: can an automated reviewer reject a malicious contribution when the attacker controls both the code change and the accompanying PR text? We introduce SEVRA-BENCH (Social Engineering of Vulnerabilities in Review Agents), a benchmark that measures how often an automated reviewer approves such adversarial pull requests. Each malicious PR in SEVRA-BENCH is built from a real project commit that previously fixed a vulnerability listed in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database. We automatically invert that fix to restore the original vulnerable code and submit it as a pull request wrapped in one of 15 social-engineering framings, which vary the claims made, the supporting evidence, the urgency conveyed, signals of prior approval, and appeals to authority. SEVRA-BENCH contains 1,062 malicious PRs drawn from Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE)-linked fixes across the top 10 entries of the 2025 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) Top 25. In a realistic setting, we evaluate 8 current LLMs as code review agents on PRs that introduce vulnerabilities previously reported in public disclosures. Our results reveal a sharp gap in security capabilities between closed- and open-source models. We hope SEVRA-BENCH will serve as a valuable resource for advancing open-source models and narrowing this gap.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

A Mechanistic Understanding of Pronoun Fidelity in LLMs

Authors:
Katharina Trinley↗Jesujoba O. Alabi↗Dietrich Klakow↗Vagrant Gautam↗

Faithful and robust pronoun use is important for fair and coherent generations, yet large language models largely fail when multiple referents use different pronouns. To study the interplay of reasoning, repetition, and bias in this task, prior work relies exclusively on behavioural approaches, which may not reflect a model's internal workings. Therefore, we provide a mechanistic, model-internal perspective on pronoun fidelity, testing whether three mechanisms – group entity binding (G), recency bias (R), and stereotypical bias (S) – are causally implemented across several SOTA language models. Using Boundless Distributed Alignment Search, we find all three coexist as causal subspaces distributed across network depth. No single mechanism fully explains model behaviour, but a combination of the three consistently accounts for 91-99.5%. An attention head analysis further reveals two competing copying routes; group binding and stereotype share a localized concept-level route that retrieves a bound occupation-pronoun unit, while recency uses a distributed token-level route that repeats surface forms. In sum, pronoun fidelity arises from competition between simultaneously active causal subspaces.

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the Berry-Keating Operator

Authors:
Fabio Bagarello↗Sergiusz Ku\.zel↗

arXiv:2606.24405v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review here two different viewpoints on the Berry-Keating operator $H_{BK}$, whose connection to the Riemann hypothesis remains an intriguing and not yet fully understood question, despite considerable attention in the recent literature. In particular, we propose two somehow complementary views to $H_{BK}$: the first is based on a purely Hilbertian point of view, on dilation operators and on the Mellin transform. The second is a distributional approach, with a specific view to ladder operators, generalized eigenstates of $H_{BK}$, and generalized coherent states.

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19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Markov property and path regularity for the solutions to SPDEs driven by cylindrical-martingale valued measures

Authors:
Santiago Cambronero↗David Campos↗C. A. Fonseca-Mora↗Dar\'io Mena↗

arXiv:2606.12381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we prove the Markov property for the solution to stochastic partial differential equations driven by a cylindrical orthogonal martingale-valued measure. We assume our coefficients are time-dependent and satisfy some growth and Lipschitz conditions. We also prove that for time-independent coefficients and under mild assumptions on the cylindrical orthogonal martingale-valued measure, the solutions to our stochastic partial differential equations are Feller. Finally, in the case that the $C_{0}$-semigroup is quasi-contraction, we show that the solution to our stochastic partial differential equation possesses a càdlàg version.

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20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

Authors:
Nicolai Gerber↗Rishabh S. Gvalani↗Martin Hairer↗Grigorios A. Pavliotis↗Andr\'e Schlichting↗

arXiv:2510.17629v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Are LLMs Bad at Moral Reasoning?

Authors:
Menghang Zhu↗Seth Lazar↗

arXiv:2606.11635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For highly capable AI systems to operate safely in dynamic, open-ended environments, they must be able to identify, understand, and respond to moral reasons for action, and constrain their behaviour accordingly. A growing body of research aims to evaluate this capacity – moral competence – in today's most capable AI systems, recently reaching broadly pessimistic conclusions. One of the most ambitious such papers collects gold-standard human-authored rubrics for evaluating moral reasoning in 1,000 cases, and benchmarks frontier AI models against those rubrics, with underwhelming results. In this paper, we argue that the MoReBench dataset can be redeployed to give a much more optimistic picture of LLMs' moral reasoning (an essential part of moral competence). We show that if, instead of scoring LLMs' responses to these cases against these rubrics, we instead give the LLMs the same task given to humans – to generate scoring rubrics for the moral analysis of particular cases – the rubrics they generate are both better calibrated to the human rubrics than their open-ended responses, and, where they differ, plausibly reflect nothing more than the vast dimensionality of most moral problems, as well as highlighting some human departures from the "rubric for creating rubrics". Taking these points into consideration, the MoReBench dataset suggests that LLMs are significantly more capable at moral reasoning than was previously believed.

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

Learning Earthquake Wave Arrival Time Picking from Labels with Inaccuracies

Authors:
Sen Li↗Xu Yang↗S. Mostafa Mousavi↗Anye Cao↗Keting Fan↗Yaoqi Liu↗Changbin Wang↗Qiang Niu↗

arXiv:2606.15377v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inaccurately labeled training data, or "label noise", poses a significant threat to the integrity of supervised machine learning models. This corruption directly degrades performance by teaching the model erroneous mappings between features and labels, which leads to poor generalization and reduced accuracy on properly labeled validation and test data. Current seismological applications mainly rely on large-scale training sets or data augmentation to reduce the label-noise impact, which can be labor-intensive and costly. Here, we introduce a Label Noise-Contrastive Robust Learning (LaNCoR) approach that can effectively handle noisy labels in seismic signal processing tasks, without requiring large-scale training datasets. In this approach, the input waveform feature and label representation distributions are aligned in the feature space to correct mislabeling and reduce its impact on the training process. We present LaNCoR's performance on the task of P-phase arrival-time picking of real microseismic data using two baseline models and training approaches. Our results indicate that LaNCoR can improve performance by up to 28.8% across performance metrics. This approach holds great promise for model training in seismology and geosciences.

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23.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active conformational transition of NLRP3 monomer

Authors:
Jin Peng↗

by Jin Peng, Wenjian Li, Hao Wang, Xiaohui Chen, Manjie Zhang, Bin Sun The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multiprotein complex that primes cytokine production in the innate immune system. The inflammasome activation involves the cage-to-disk transition of NLRP3 oligomers, facilitated by the co-factor NEK7 protein. While NEK7’s role in promoting cage disassembly has been reported, its involvement in the large conformational changes of the NLRP3 monomer during activation remains elusive. Here, by using multi-scale simulations, we uncovered a stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active transition. In the early stage, NEK7 reshapes the dynamics of the highly unstable inactive NLRP3 monomer to resemble active state, priming the conformational transition. In the middle stage, NEK7 impedes progression by populating an intermediate state farther from the active conformation than the NEK7-free counterpart, and structures in this state exhibit reduced allosteric potential toward activation. In the late stage, NEK7 has negligible impact, as the active conformation remains inherently isolated by a high energy barrier regardless of NEK7 presence. This highlights the critical role of oligomeric assembly in enabling monomeric NLRP3 to complete its conformational transition, in agreement with experiment observations. Our work suggests a multilayered activation mechanism where oligomer-level assembly and monomeric conformational changes are coupled, providing new mechanistic insights into this physiologically essential macromolecular process.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

An Attention-based Model for Robust Forecasting with Missing Modality

Authors:
Zhitian Zhang↗Wenjie Zi↗Yunduz Rakhmangulova↗Saghar Irandoust↗Hossein Hajimirsadeghi↗Thibaut Durand↗

arXiv:2606.13970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning with missing modalities is a fundamental challenge in multimodal robot learning, as real-world robotic systems often operate in environments with incomplete sensor data. Attention-based models are appealing for processing multimodal data because they can handle multiple modalities with a single backbone network. However, most multimodal models assume that all modalities are available during both training and inference, limiting their applicability in robotic perception and decision-making. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal model designed to handle missing modalities during both training and inference. The model is formulated as a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE) and incorporates a transformer-based architecture that leverages attention mechanisms to learn a unified, fixed-dimensional representation, even when some modalities are missing. We show that our proposed model can be trained with missing modalities while approximating a robust representation of all modalities. We evaluate our approach on five multimodal datasets across two robot learning tasks: human trajectory prediction and robot manipulation forecasting. Experimental results demonstrate that our model effectively learns from incomplete data and is superior to prior multimodal fusion approaches.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Disentangling Confounders from Pathology in Long-COVID Trajectory Prediction for Women: An Interpretable Large-Language-Model Approach

Authors:
Wang↗Galis↗Zhang↗Luo↗Sra↗Niu↗Shen↗Xie↗Weiss↗J. C↗

Objective. Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, "Long COVID") dispropor- tionately affects women, in whom hallmark symptoms–insomnia, fatigue, palpitations, cogni- tive difficulty–overlap with comorbidities and hormonal transitions such as menopause. This diagnostic overlap is a confounding problem: models that forecast future symptom severity risk attributing baseline physiological noise to viral pathology. We ask whether an interpretable, causally disentangled language model can separate true pathological signal from such con- founders while remaining competitive with strong predictors of future PASC severity

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