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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Authors:
Zhisen Hu↗Antti Kemppainen↗David Johnson↗Egor Panfilov↗Huy Hoang Nguyen↗Timothy Cootes↗Claudia Lindner↗Aleksei Tiulpin↗

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

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

DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence

Authors:
DeepSeek-AI↗Anyi Xu↗Bangcai Lin↗Bing Xue↗Bingxuan Wang↗Bingzheng Xu↗Bochao Wu↗Bowei Zhang↗Chaofan Lin↗Chen Dong↗Chenchen Ling↗Chengda Lu↗…

We present a preview version of DeepSeek-V4 series, including two strong Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models – DeepSeek-V4-Pro with 1.6T parameters (49B activated) and DeepSeek-V4-Flash with 284B parameters (13B activated) – both supporting a context length of one million tokens. DeepSeek-V4 series incorporate several key upgrades in architecture and optimization: (1) a hybrid attention architecture that combines Compressed Sparse Attention (CSA) and Heavily Compressed Attention (HCA) to improve long-context efficiency; (2) Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC) that enhance conventional residual connections; (3) and the Muon optimizer for faster convergence and greater training stability. We pre-train both models on more than 32T diverse and high-quality tokens, followed by a comprehensive post-training pipeline that unlocks and further enhances their capabilities. DeepSeek-V4-Pro-Max, the maximum reasoning effort mode of DeepSeek-V4-Pro, redefines the state-of-the-art for open models, outperforming its predecessors in core tasks. Meanwhile, DeepSeek-V4 series are highly efficient in long-context scenarios. In the one-million-token context setting, DeepSeek-V4-Pro requires only 27% of single-token inference FLOPs and 10% of KV cache compared with DeepSeek-V3.2. This enables us to routinely support one-million-token contexts, thereby making long-horizon tasks and further test-time scaling more feasible. The model checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/collections/deepseek-ai/deepseek-v4.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SupraBench: A Benchmark for Supramolecular Chemistry

Authors:
Tianyi Ma↗Yijun Ma↗Zehong Wang↗Weixiang Sun↗Ziming Li↗Connor R. Schmidt↗Chuxu Zhang↗Matthew J. Webber↗Yanfang Ye↗

Supramolecular chemistry, which includes the study of non-covalent host-guest assemblies, has advanced various applications. However, designing host-guest systems remains time-consuming, requiring days of dry-lab verification per candidate pair. Although LLMs have emerged as a fast alternative with strong performance on molecular binding tasks, no benchmark currently systematically evaluates LLMs for host-guest reasoning across fundamental supramolecular chemistry tasks, e.g., binding affinity prediction. To this end, we collaborate with domain experts to release the first Supramolecular Benchmark, called SupraBench, to evaluate LLMs in chemistry reasoning. Specifically, we design four fundamental tasks, i.e., binding affinity prediction, top-binder selection, solvent identification, and host-guest description, plus an auxiliary vision-based task for molecular identification. We also release SupraPMC, a curated 16M-token corpus of Supramolecular chemistry articles distilled from Europe PMC, to support the adaptation to the supramolecular domain. We benchmark a broad range of open and proprietary LLMs and find that LLMs leave substantial headroom across all tasks. Domain adaptation pretraining over SupraPMC transfers cleanly to in-distribution regression but trades off against strict letter-format output. Moreover, the difficulty profile differs sharply across task families, revealing distinct failure modes that indicate specific gaps in current supramolecular chemistry reasoning. Our source codes and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/Tianyi-Billy-Ma/SupraBench.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Maximum entropy principle for quantum processes

Authors:
Siddhartha Das↗Ujjwal Sen↗

arXiv:2506.24079v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The maximum entropy principle, as applied to quantum systems, is a fundamental prescript positing that for a quantum system for which we only have partial knowledge, the maximum entropy state consistent with the partial knowledge is a valuable choice as the system's state. An intriguing result is that in case the only prior knowledge is of a fixed energy, the maximum entropy state turns out to be the thermal state, a ubiquitous state in several arenas, especially in statistical mechanics. We extend the consequences of this principle from static quantum states to dynamic quantum processes. We establish that a quantum channel attains maximal output entropy under a fixed energy constraint if and only if it is an absolutely thermalizing channel, where the fixed output is the thermal state corresponding to that energy. Our results have potential implications for understanding the informational and thermodynamic utility of quantum channels under physical constraints. As an application, we examine the consequences for private randomness distillation from fixed energy constrained quantum processes.

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

A Technical Taxonomy of LLM Agent Communication Protocols

Authors:
Linus Sander↗Habtom Kahsay Gidey↗Alexander Lenz↗Alois Knoll↗

arXiv:2606.19135v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) advance and multi-agent systems aim to overcome the limits of standalone agents, robust communication protocols are becoming essential infrastructure for distributed agent networks. Nonetheless, the fragmented protocol landscape presents a significant interoperability challenge. This study develops a technical taxonomy to classify and analyze LLM agent communication protocols. Following an established iterative method, we defined the taxonomy's purpose, meta-characteristic, and ending conditions, then performed five iterations, three empirical-to-conceptual and two conceptual-to-empirical, on nine actively maintained open-source protocols with demonstrable adoption. The taxonomy comprises five dimensions: counterparty, payload, interaction state, discovery mechanism, and schema flexibility. Classification reveals recurring architectural patterns: all sampled agent-to-agent protocols combine hybrid payloads with session-state persistence; most protocols support multiple predefined schemas, and two negotiate schemas at runtime, indicating a trend toward schema flexibility; decentralized discovery remains rare. Analysis suggests short-term convergence pressure toward protocols unifying agent-to-agent and agent-to-context (tool and data) communication. Long-term, however, no single protocol is likely to maximize versatility, efficiency, and portability simultaneously. The field will more likely evolve toward a federated, layered protocol stack. The framework guides protocol selection and highlights open research gaps such as privacy and policy enforcement.}

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

MedP-CLIP: Medical CLIP with Region-Aware Prompt Integration

Authors:
Jiahui Peng↗He Yao↗Jingwen Li↗Yanzhou Su↗Sibo Ju↗Yujie Lu↗Jin Ye↗Hongchun Lu↗Xue Li↗Lincheng Jiang↗Min Zhu↗Junlong Cheng↗…

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) has demonstrated outstanding performance in global image understanding and zero-shot transfer through large-scale text-image alignment. However, the core of medical image analysis often lies in the fine-grained understanding of specific anatomical structures or lesion regions. Therefore, precisely comprehending region-of-interest (RoI) information provided by medical professionals or perception models becomes crucial. To address this need, we propose MedP-CLIP, a region-aware medical vision-language model (VLM). MedP-CLIP innovatively integrates medical prior knowledge and designs a feature-level region prompt integration mechanism, enabling it to flexibly respond to various prompt forms (e.g., points, bounding boxes, masks) while maintaining global contextual awareness when focusing on local regions. We pre-train the model on a meticulously constructed large-scale dataset (containing over 6.4 million medical images and 97.3 million region-level annotations), equipping it with cross-disease and cross-modality fine-grained spatial semantic understanding capabilities. Experiments demonstrate that MedP-CLIP significantly outperforms baseline methods in various medical tasks, including zero-shot recognition, interactive segmentation, and empowering multimodal large language models. This model provides a scalable, plug-and-play visual backbone for medical AI, combining holistic image understanding with precise regional analysis.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Debate2Create: Robot Co-design via Multi-Agent LLM Debate

Authors:
Kevin Qiu↗Marek Cygan↗

arXiv:2510.25850v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Debate2Create (D2C), a multi-agent LLM framework that formulates robot co-design as structured, iterative debate grounded in physics-based evaluation. A design agent and control agent engage in a thesis-antithesis-synthesis loop, while criterion-specific LLM judges provide multi-objective feedback to steer exploration. Across five MuJoCo locomotion benchmarks, D2C achieves the highest default-normalized score among the evaluated LLM-based and black-box baselines, with gains up to 3.2x on Ant and nearly 9x on Swimmer. Iterative debate yields 18-35% gains over compute-matched zero-shot generation, and D2C-generated rewards transfer to default morphologies in 4/5 tasks. These results suggest that structured, simulator-grounded multi-agent interaction is a useful mechanism for joint morphology-reward optimization under a fixed-topology, per-candidate-RL protocol. Project page: debate2create.github.io.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MultiMem: Measuring and Mitigating Memorization in Multi-Modal Contrastive Learning

Authors:
Wenhao Wang↗Franziska Boenisch↗Michael Backes↗Adam Dziedzic↗

arXiv:2606.22220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Memorization in machine learning models enables high performance on rare in-distribution samples by capturing their atypical patterns. However, it also causes harmful retention of noise and outliers, degrading generalization. While memorization has been extensively studied in both supervised and self-supervised learning in the vision domain, it remains unexplored in multi-modal contrastive learning. We address this gap by introducing MultiMem, the first metric designed to quantify memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning. Through our systematic analysis, we demonstrate that cross-modal semantic misalignment has the strongest influence on memorization, with text being the dominant modality driving memorization, followed by video, image, and audio. We show that targeted augmentations applied across all modalities effectively reduce memorization as measured by our MultiMem metric and improve model performance. Overall, this work establishes the first framework for measuring and mitigating memorization in multi-modal contrastive learning, preventing harmful data retention and contributing to higher-performing models.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

A Differentiable Composite Approximation Framework for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Maneuvering Modeling from Sea-Trial Data

Authors:
Aobo Wang↗Aifei Xia↗Zihao Wang↗Lizhu Hao↗

arXiv:2606.19711v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Field-based modeling from onboard measurements can produce autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) maneuvering models that reflect real operating characteristics. From an approximation perspective, conventional maneuvering models use predefined constraint polynomial bases, whereas data-driven models use data-adaptive bases. Motivated by this basis-function view, this paper presents a differentiable composite-approximation formulation, in which the polynomial-basis component and the data-adaptive basis component are treated as differentiable parts of a single predictor and calibrated jointly. A gradient-based co-calibration method is developed for full-scale AUV maneuvering prediction, where a sensitivity-aware mechanism regulates bounded polynomial updates while the neural residual captures remaining nonlinear discrepancies under a shared prediction objective. To account for ocean-current effects in field data, a turning-motion-based current estimation and compensation procedure is incorporated to construct current-compensated learning targets for training and rollout. The framework is evaluated using sea-trial data collected from a 7-meter AUV under multiple maneuvering conditions. Results show that the proposed method improves recursive trajectory and velocity prediction compared with polynomial-only, neural-only, and frozen-prior hybrid baselines, demonstrating its applicability to field-data-based AUV maneuvering modeling.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Authorship Attribution in Multilingual Machine-Generated Texts

Authors:
Lucio La Cava↗Dominik Macko↗R\'obert M\'oro↗Ivan Srba↗Andrea Tagarelli↗

As Large Language Models (LLMs) have reached human-like fluency and coherence, distinguishing machine-generated text (MGT) from human-written content becomes increasingly difficult. While early efforts in MGT detection have focused on binary classification, the growing landscape and diversity of LLMs require a more fine-grained yet challenging authorship attribution (AA), i.e., being able to identify the precise generator (LLM or human) behind a text. However, AA remains nowadays confined to a monolingual setting, with English being the most investigated one, overlooking the multilingual nature and usage of modern LLMs. In this work, we introduce the problem of Multilingual Authorship Attribution, which involves attributing texts to human or multiple LLM generators across diverse languages. Focusing on 18 languages – covering multiple families and writing scripts – and 8 generators (7 LLMs and the human-authored class), we investigate the multilingual suitability of monolingual AA methods in terms of their cross-lingual transferability, and the impact of generators on attribution performance. Our results reveal that while certain monolingual AA methods can be adapted to multilingual settings, significant limitations and challenges remain, particularly in transferring across diverse language families, underscoring the complexity of multilingual AA and the need for more robust approaches to better match real-world scenarios.

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

Riemannian Metric Matching for Scalable Geometric Modeling of Distributions

Authors:
Jacob Bamberger↗Adam Gosztolai↗Pierre Vandergheynst↗Michael Bronstein↗Iolo Jones↗

arXiv:2606.14334v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-dimensional datasets often concentrate near low-dimensional structures, but estimating their geometry from samples typically relies on graphs and kernels that scale poorly with dataset size and dimension. We propose Riemannian metric matching: a denoising probabilistic framework for learning the Riemannian geometry of data using neural networks. Specifically, we learn the carré du champ operator, which, using diffusion geometry, gives us access to the Riemannian geometry toolkit for downstream machine learning and statistical tasks. Our key observation is that the carré du champ operator can be formulated as a conditional expectation over random perturbations of the data, which can be exploited for sample-wise training and constant cost, amortized inference without explicit kernel construction. Empirically, metric matching rivals or improves the accuracy of $k$-NN-based diffusion geometry estimators, while enabling amortized inference that is up to $400\times$ faster, and supports graph-free geometric analysis on high-dimensional images where nearest neighbors break down.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

How rare are Markovian quantum dynamics?

Authors:
Charlotte B\"acker↗Nick Maryshchak↗Walter T. Strunz↗

arXiv:2606.24511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A profound understanding of decoherence and dissipation in quantum dynamics is crucial for the realistic modeling of the evolution of quantum systems. In open quantum dynamics one distinguishes between a memoryless, so-called Markovian evolution and dynamics incorporating memory effects, termed non-Markovian. In this work we study how prevalent memory effects are in the set of all such dynamics. We thus investigate how often a Markovian description is applicable. This question is approached by investigating randomly generated two-step qubit dynamics with respect to different concepts and witnesses of non-Markovianity. We observe that almost all dynamics are non-Markovian, and only a small (yet finite) fraction is Markovian. Furthermore, we study how this proportion changes when considering certain subclasses such as lower rank or mixed-unitary dynamics. Importantly, our results shed light on the relative ratios of – and interrelations between – the sets of dynamics that are non-Markovian with respect to different criteria. Finally, we investigate the fraction of dynamics in which the memory effects are necessarily of quantum nature and establish a connection between two recently developed concepts that characterize the quantumness of memory in non-Markovian dynamics.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM-Aided Joint Secrecy Precoding and Trajectory for RSMA-Based Heterogeneous UAV Networks

Authors:
Lijie Zheng↗Ji He↗Shih Yu Chang↗Yulong Shen↗

arXiv:2507.17188v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper investigates secure communications in rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) enabled heterogeneous UAV networks, where multiple UAVs collaboratively serve ground terminals in the presence of eavesdroppers. By jointly considering secrecy rate maximization and propulsion energy consumption minimization, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem involving UAV trajectory design, service association, power allocation, and secrecy precoding under mobility, collision-avoidance, service-capacity, and communication constraints. The formulated problem is highly non-convex due to the coupling among UAV trajectories, RSMA transmission variables, and secrecy constraints.To address the resulting non-convex and highly coupled optimization problem, we propose a hierarchical optimization framework. The inner layer uses a semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based S2DC algorithm combining penalty functions and difference-of-convex (D.C.) programming to solve the secrecy precoding problem with fixed UAV positions. The outer layer introduces a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided heuristic multi-agent reinforcement learning approach (LLM-HeMARL) for trajectory optimization. LLM-HeMARL efficiently incorporates LLM-generated expert heuristic policy, enabling UAVs to learn energy-aware, security-driven trajectories without the inference overhead of real-time LLM calls. The simulation results show that our method outperforms existing baselines in secrecy rate and energy efficiency, with consistent robustness across varying UAV swarm sizes and random seeds.

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

Neuromorphic Speech Enhancement with Dual-Branch Spiking Neural Networks

Authors:
Taiyu Meng↗Wenbin Jiang↗Haoyi Zhang↗Yuhan Zhou↗Haibing Yin↗

arXiv:2606.23761v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Spiking neural network (SNN)-based neuromorphic speech enhancement has emerged as a promising paradigm due to its energy efficiency, yet it still underperforms classical artificial neural network (ANN)-based approaches owing to binary activations and the lack of well-designed network architectures. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel dual-branch spiking neural network architecture equipped with a gated spiking unit (GSU), termed GSU-DBNet. Specifically, GSU-DBNet simultaneously models the speech magnitude spectrum and complex spectrum, predicting the corresponding magnitude and complex spectral masks. Meanwhile, a dual-path GSU module is adopted to exploit temporal and frequency information for enhanced spatiotemporal feature representation. Experiments on a popular benchmark dataset show that GSU-DBNet achieves a PESQ score of 3.04 with only 394K parameters, outperforming existing SNN-based methods while using only 4.5%–10.6% of the parameters of representative ANN-based models.

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

RAVEN: A Regime-Aware Variable-context Expert Network for Financial Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Cheng He↗Zhenyu Guan↗Xijie Liang↗Defu Lian↗Jiajia Li↗Enhong Chen↗Patrick P. C. Lee↗Geng Hu↗Zehao Chen↗

arXiv:2606.24062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Financial time series forecasting presents structural challenges absent from standard benchmarks. Log-returns are non-stationary, exhibit exceptionally low signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios, and are governed by regime-dependent temporal dependencies. We identify a key limitation of state-of-the-art (SOTA) time series models in financial settings. A fixed context window is mismatched to the time-varying optimal look-back of non-stationary price processes. We propose the Regime-Aware Variable-context Expert Network (RAVEN), a Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to adaptively determine the temporal context for each input sample. Instead of relying on a fixed look-back horizon, RAVEN constructs a hierarchy of nested contiguous windows whose lengths are determined by the data itself. Specifically, RAVEN scores patches by learned importance in reverse chronological order and applies the Cumulative Importance Thresholding (CIT) mechanism to derive nested prefix windows, each routed to a scale-specialized expert. A Global Compressed Representation (GCR) branch runs in parallel over the full context, preserving global temporal coherence that local experts cannot guarantee. Because the nested routing induces structured overlap among expert inputs, we introduce a Correlation-Aware Weighting (CAW) to align variable-length expert outputs and penalize pairwise cosine similarity prior to aggregation. Experiments on cumulative log-return prediction (HS300, S&P500) and fund sales forecasting demonstrate that RAVEN achieves SOTA performances, improves Pearson correlation by 9.2% on HS300 and 20.2% on S&P500, and reduces MSE by 18.2% on fund sales forecasting, while achieving the best results in 14 of 16 metrics on four PEMS traffic benchmarks.

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

A Closer Look at Failure Modes in Temporal Understanding of Large Audio-Language Models

Authors:
Apoorva Kulkarni↗Kaousheik Jayakumar↗Sreyan Ghosh↗Sarah Wiegreffe↗Dinesh Manocha↗Ramani Duraiswami↗

arXiv:2606.17417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) achieve strong performance on a variety of audio understanding tasks but continue to struggle with temporal reasoning, a fundamental capability central to human auditory perception. Understanding the causes of these failures remains challenging as existing benchmarks report performance gaps without probing underlying mechanisms. To address this, we introduce a benchmark with 1,657 questions across three foundational tasks designed specifically for mechanistic analysis. Examining model outputs across varying input settings (behavioral analysis) reveals that models often under-utilize audio when textual cues are available. We also provide the first causal mechanistic analysis of temporal reasoning failures in LALMs. Comparing attention upweighting against scaling, we find that redistributing attention across audio tokens is more effective than increasing audio attention. Targeting task-relevant tokens yields further gains. These findings suggest that modality imbalance alone cannot explain failures. Attention scaling at bottleneck layers improves accuracy from 55.9% to 59.1% without fine-tuning, demonstrating a promising direction for future work.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Omni-Perception Policy Optimization for Multimodal Emotion Reasoning

Authors:
Zhiyuan Han↗Beier Zhu↗Wenwen Tong↗Pengyang Shao↗Peipei Song↗Xinyi Wang↗Jiangnan Chen↗Lewei Lu↗Xun Yang↗

arXiv:2606.25325v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that current emotion-oriented Omni-MLLMs still lack reliable omni-modal perception: they (i) underutilize multimodal cues in their reasoning trajectories and (ii) exhibit unfaithful behavior, often hallucinating modality-specific statements from other modalities. Building on these insights, we propose OPPO (Omni-Perception Policy Optimization), a reinforcement learning framework that explicitly optimizes multimodal perception. First, an Omni-Perception Reward decomposes ground-truth reasoning into fine-grained visual, acoustic, and emotion cues and rewards trajectories that semantically recover these cues. Second, an Omni-Perception Loss compares the policy under full and unimodally masked inputs, applying a KL penalty only to modality-specific evidence tokens to suppress cross-modal hallucination. We further introduce MEP-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark that quantifies utilization and faithfulness. Experiments show that OPPO achieves state-of-the-art performance on MER-UniBench and MME-Emotion, while substantially improving utilization and faithfulness scores on MEP-Bench, highlighting the importance of sufficient and faithful omni perception for multimodal emotion reasoning.

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Efficient and Trainable Language Model Test-Time Scaling via Local Branch Routing

Authors:
Yutong Yin↗Mingyu Jin↗Jin Pan↗Changyi Yang↗Zijie Xia↗Dhruv Pai↗Shuming Hu↗Zhen Zhang↗Chenyang Zhao↗Jinman Zhao↗Wujiang Xu↗Raymond Li↗…

Test-time scaling improves language-model reasoning, but existing approaches often face a difficult trade-off: long chain-of-thought sampling remains single-threaded, while sentence- or solution-level search can be computationally expensive and hard to train end-to-end. We introduce Local Branch Routing (LBR), a token-level test-time scaling framework that expands a small local lookahead tree, forwards all sampled branches through the language model, and uses a lightweight router to select the depth-1 subtree to commit. By routing over the hidden states of candidate local futures, LBR allows each token decision to use evidence beyond the root next-token distribution while avoiding full solution-level search. The resulting prune-shift-grow decoding process preserves discrete branch identities and defines a tractable tree-trajectory likelihood: newly grown nodes are counted when first sampled, and router decisions are assigned explicit probabilities. This enables end-to-end reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, jointly optimizing the base model and router under the same likelihood-ratio principle as discrete-token RLVR. On synthetic hierarchical-planning tasks, LBR shows that post-candidate hidden states provide useful routing evidence. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks, LBR improves both Pass@1 and Pass@32 over discrete chain-of-thought, vanilla discrete-token RLVR, and RL-compatible soft-token branching baselines. These results suggest that lightweight local branching offers an efficient, trainable, and discrete form of language-model test-time scaling.

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20.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Apitegromab for lean mass preservation during tirzepatide-induced weight loss: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 trial

Authors:
Richard E. Pratley↗

Loss of lean mass in proportion to total weight loss is observed with incretin mimetic therapies such as tirzepatide and has the potential to adversely affect health and function. Apitegromab is an investigational, fully human monoclonal antibody that selectively inhibits myostatin activation and is, thereby, capable of increasing muscle mass. In the randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled phase 2 EMBRAZE study, adults with overweight or obesity (n = 102) were randomized 1:1 to receive tirzepatide plus apitegromab (10 mg kg−1) or tirzepatide plus placebo. At week 24, apitegromab resulted in a least square mean (80% confidence interval (CI)) of 1.9 (1.2−2.7) kg less lean mass loss than placebo (P = 0.001), despite similar total body weight loss between groups, representing a 54.9% retention of lean mass relative to placebo. In participants receiving apitegromab, trough concentrations of apitegromab and total latent myostatin, a pharmacodynamic marker, both increased over time and reached a plateau after approximately 16 weeks. Incidence of adverse events (AEs) (% (95% CI)) was generally similar across apitegromab-treated participants and placebo-treated participants, with 39 of 51 (76% (63−86%)) and 36 of 51 (71% (57−81%)) participants experiencing an AE, respectively. Serious adverse events (SAEs) were balanced and experienced by one of 51 (2% (0−10%)) participants in each arm. In summary, this proof-of-concept study demonstrated that selective targeting of myostatin by apitegromab was well tolerated and effective in preserving lean mass when combined with tirzepatide. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT06445075 . In the phase 2 EMBRAZE study, participants receiving tirzepatide and apitegromab lost less lean mass compared to participants receiving tirzepatide and placebo.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Linear Recurrent Unit with Semantic Modulation for Image Super-Resolution

Authors:
Mingyu Choi↗Woo Kyoung Han↗Sunghoon Im↗Kyong Hwan Jin↗

Linear recurrent unit (LRU), designed with a principled formulation for stable linear recurrence, has demonstrated promising accuracy and robustness on long-range dependency tasks. However, its static parameterization and single-scan method limits its applicability to 2D vision tasks. In this study, we propose a LRU-based restoration network with a semantic modulating unit (SMU) to achieve a harmonious balance between performance and efficiency in single-image super-resolution. The SMU plays three key roles: LRU modulation, spatial categorization, and feature enhancement through learned prototype. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method quantitatively and qualitatively surpasses recent state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our approach achieves superior performance with computational complexity on par with existing methods. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/MingyuChoi-run/LSM

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel: Communicating through noisy closed timelike curves

Authors:
Kaiyuan Ji↗Seth Lloyd↗Mark M. Wilde↗

arXiv:2509.08965v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the capacity of a quantum channel for retrocausal communication, where messages are transmitted backward in time, from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past, through a noisy postselected closed timelike curve mathematically represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities, and we show that the corresponding asymptotic capacities are equal to the average and sum, respectively, of the channel's max-information and its regularized Doeblin information. This endows these information measures with a novel operational interpretation. Furthermore, our characterization can be generalized beyond quantum channels to all completely positive maps. This imposes information-theoretic limits on transmitting messages via postselected-teleportation-like mechanisms with arbitrary initial- and final-state boundary conditions, including those considered in various black-hole final-state models.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

RAGPPI: RAG Benchmark for Protein-Protein Interactions in Drug Discovery

Authors:
Youngseung Jeon↗Ziwen Li↗Thomas Li↗JiaSyuan Chang↗Morteza Ziyadi↗Xiang 'Anthony' Chen↗

Retrieving the biological impacts of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is essential for target identification (Target ID) in drug development. Given the vast number of proteins involved, this process remains time-consuming and challenging. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) frameworks have supported Target ID; however, no benchmark currently exists for identifying the biological impacts of PPIs. To bridge this gap, we introduce the RAG Benchmark for PPIs (RAGPPI), a factual question-answer benchmark of 4,420 question-answer pairs that focus on the potential biological impacts of PPIs. Through interviews with experts, we identified criteria for a benchmark dataset, such as a type of QA and source. We built a gold-standard dataset (500 QA pairs) through expert-driven data annotation. We developed an ensemble auto-evaluation LLM that incorporates expert labeling characteristics, average fact-abstract similarity (F1), and low-similarity fact counts (F2), enabling the construction of a silver-standard dataset (3,720 QA pairs). We are committed to maintaining RAGPPI as a resource to support the research community in advancing RAG systems for drug discovery QA solutions.

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24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

Cell differentiation can underpin the reproducibility of morphogenesis

Authors:
Dominic K. Devlin↗

by Dominic K. Devlin, Austen R. D. Ganley, Nobuto Takeuchi Morphogenesis of complex body shapes is reproducible despite the noise inherent in the underlying morphogenetic processes. However, how these morphogenetic processes work together to achieve this reproducibility remains unclear. Here, we ask how this reproducibility is achieved by evolving complex morphologies in a multi-scale, computational model. Each morphology consists of a population of cells on a two-dimensional grid using the Cellular Potts Model framework. Each cell contains a genome that encodes a gene regulatory network, morphogens for cell-cell signalling, and proteins that determine cell behaviours. By repeatedly simulating our model with different initial conditions under selection for shape complexity, we obtained a “zoo” of evolved morphologies. We find that these evolved, complex morphologies are reproducible in a sizeable fraction of simulations, despite no direct selection for reproducibility. We show that high reproducibility is caused by spatially segregating moving cells that “shape” morphologies from stationary cells that “maintain” morphologies during morphogenesis. Strikingly, most highly reproducible morphologies also evolved cell differentiation, where proliferative, moving progenitor cells irreversibly differentiate into non-dividing, stationary differentiated cells at tissue boundaries. These results suggest that cell differentiation observed in natural development plays a fundamental role in morphogenesis in addition to the production of specialised cell types. This previously unrecognised role of cell differentiation has major implications for our understanding of how morphologies are generated and regenerated.

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25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Associations between hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and obstetric complications: A retrospective observational study

Authors:
Veronica Tozzo↗

by Veronica Tozzo, Rachel Petherbridge, Kaitlyn James, Sarah Hsu, Deepti Pant, Chloe Michalopoulos, Brody H. Foy, Tanayott Thaweethai, Christopher Mow, Jacqueline Maya, Carolina Batlle Camero, Lydia Shook, Kathryn J. Gray, Logan Mauney, John M. Higgins, Camille E. Powe Background Pregnancy alters hematologic state as measured by complete blood count (CBC), but the longitudinal changes in CBC indices that define healthy pregnancies are not well established. In a large cohort based at an academic health system in the United States, we aimed to define reference intervals and typical longitudinal changes in CBC indices during pregnancy. We then tested for associations between extreme CBC values for gestational age or extreme longitudinal changes in CBC indices and obstetric complications. Methods and findings We studied nine CBC indices in individuals with singleton pregnancies who delivered after 30 weeks’ gestation and presented for prenatal care prior to 20 weeks. The electronic health record (EHR)-based Maternal Health Cohort (Massachusetts General Hospital; 1998–2016) formed our discovery cohort of 45,992 pregnancies, 18% of which had relevant complications. We developed a validation cohort of 48,868, 27% with complications from EHR data in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. In pregnancies without complications in the discovery cohort, we derived gestational-age-specific reference intervals (2.5th–97.5th percentile) and established typical intra-pregnancy longitudinal changes. In the validation cohort, we then tested CBC values outside of the 26–29 weeks’ gestation reference interval and CBC rare changes (uncommon changes in magnitude and direction) between 7–14 and 26–29 weeks’ gestation for association with a composite outcome (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, small for gestational age birthweight, preterm birth) and its individual components using generalized estimating equations. Derived reference intervals differed from those in the literature for mean red cell volume, mean red cell hemoglobin, red cell count, and mean red cell hemoglobin concentration; reference intervals for other indices were similar to those previously published. In validation, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red cell count values above their gestational-age specific reference intervals were associated with increased risk of the composite obstetric outcome: odds ratios (ORs) of 1.4 (95% CI [1.2, 1.5] p 

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