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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FlowEdit: Associative Memory for Lifelong Pronunciation Adaptation in Flow-Matching TTS

arXiv:2606.20518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching text-to-speech systems achieve remarkable zero-shot quality but remain static after deployment: pronunciation errors on out-of-vocabulary proper nouns persist unless the model is retrained. We introduce FlowEdit, a life-long adaptation framework for frozen flow-matching TTS that learns pronunciation corrections as latent conditioning edits rather than weight updates. When corrective feedback is provided, FlowEdit optimizes a token-level perturbation in the text embedding space, then stores the correction in a Modern Hopfield Network serving as content-addressable episodic memory. At inference, corrections are retrieved via soft attention with a similarity gate, enabling fuzzy morphological matching. On our curated benchmark of 312 multilingual proper nouns across 18 language families, FlowEdit reduces target-word Phoneme Error Rate by 92.7% relative to the zero-shot baseline while maintaining identical general-speech quality. Corrections complete in approximately 15 seconds on a single GPU.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Expressivity of Quantum Reservoir Computers

arXiv:2501.15528v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using Hamiltonian encoding to inject an input into parameterized quantum circuits (PQCs), the output of the PQC can be written as truncated Fourier series. In recent years, the expressivity of PQCs was established as the number of frequencies contained in this Fourier series. While this concept has also been applied to other quantum machine learning (QML) paradigms, a clear notion of expressivity for temporal information processing with quantum systems is still lacking. Here, we introduce such a notion to the field of quantum reservoir computing (QRC). We analytically derive an expression for the readouts showing that the output of a QRC can be interpreted as a multi-dimensional Fourier series. We give a formula for the growth of expressivity induced by the sequential information injection, which we corroborate with numerical simulations, calculating explicitly the number of multi-dimensional output functions which can be generated from the readouts. Our results show that the specific interplay between system size, input encoding, and memory time gives rise to a boundary on the system size beyond which it is obstructive to further increase the reservoir size in extreme scrambling systems. We propose a recipe for determining this maximal system size for a given QRC setup.

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

Steering the Noise: Turning Random Perturbations into Effective Descent for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization avoids this overhead by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, yet it typically converges slowly because random Gaussian perturbations yield high-variance gradient estimates in high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework that turns random perturbations into more effective descent directions. The key idea is to draw a small pool of candidate perturbations, evaluate their loss values, and then select or combine those that are best aligned with the optimization objective. We develop two instantiations of this idea: MeZO-GV, which forms a guiding vector from the contrast between low-loss and high-loss perturbation groups, and MeZO-Greedy, which keeps the single best perturbation within a fixed evaluation budget. We theoretically show that both strategies yield a larger per-step reduction in the objective than standard ZO estimation, leading to improved convergence rates. Experiments on LLMs of different scales and architectures confirm that the proposed methods integrate naturally with existing ZO optimizers and consistently improve convergence speed and task accuracy. On OPT-13B, our approach outperforms all ZO baselines across 11 benchmarks and exceeds gradient-based methods on 9 of them, while retaining the memory efficiency of forward-only optimization.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

OMIO: A policy-driven Python library for reproducible microscopy image I/O

Modern fluorescence and multiphoton microscopy workflows operate within a heterogeneous ecosystem of file formats, partially overlapping metadata standards, and reader-specific conventions. In practice, this frequently leads to silent axis misinterpretations, loss or corruption of physical voxel size information, and laboratory-specific glue code that is fragile, poorly documented, and difficult to reproduce. OMIO, short for Open Microscopy Image I/O, addresses these issues by providing a lightweight, policy-driven image I/O layer for Python that enforces a canonical, OME-compatible data representation at the API boundary. The central contribution of OMIO is the explicit separation of low-level format access from semantic normalization. Existing reader libraries are used as interchangeable backends for extracting pixel data and available metadata, while OMIO enforces axis conventions, metadata interpretation, and fallback decisions in a centralized and auditable policy layer. This design allows heterogeneous microscopy inputs to be converted into a stable representation without propagating backend-specific assumptions into downstream analysis code. The core design principles of OMIO include canonical axis semantics (TZCYX), robust metadata normalization with explicit and auditable fallbacks, memory-aware operation via optional Zarr-based backends, and workflow-level semantics that extend beyond individual files to folder stacks and BIDS-like project structures. This architecture allows OMIO to orchestrate existing reader libraries into a coherent and reproducible I/O pipeline without replacing or duplicating their functionality. OMIO is implemented as an open-source and community-oriented system in which support for additional file formats and metadata conventions can be added incrementally through modular reader backends. By encouraging the contribution of example datasets, backend extensions, and feature requests, OMIO is designed to evolve alongside emerging acquisition systems while preserving strict semantic guarantees at the interface level. The resulting standardized OME-TIFF outputs are immediately suitable for downstream quantitative analysis and interactive inspection in scientific Python workflows, including workflows based on ImageJ and Napari.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Implementation of Licensed Plate Detection and Noise Removal in Image Processing

Authors:

Car license plate recognition system is an image processing technology used to identify vehicles by capturing their Car License Plates. The car license plate recognition technology is also known as automatic number-plate recognition, automatic vehicle identification, car license plate recognition or optical character recognition for cars. In Malaysia, as the number of vehicle is increasing rapidly nowadays, a pretty great number of vehicle on the road has brought about the considerable demands of car license plate recognition system. Car license plate recognition system can be implemented in electronic parking payment system, highway toll-fee system, traffic surveillance system and as police enforcement tools. Additionally, car license plate recognition system technology also has potential to be combined with various techniques in other different fields like biology, aerospace and so on to achieve the goal of solving some specialized problems.

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

Spectral Adaptive Conformal Prediction for Structured Non-Exchangeable Data

arXiv:2606.15950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal prediction gives prediction intervals with finite-sample coverage when the data are exchangeable. Many time-indexed datasets are not exchangeable. They have seasons, recurring regimes, changing frequencies, or other forms of structured dependence. This paper studies a simple way to use that structure. We propose spectral adaptive conformal prediction, a method that forms weighted conformal quantiles using local spectral similarity and then updates the target miscoverage level online. The spectral weights choose calibration residuals that look relevant to the current test point. The adaptive update corrects the long-run miss rate when uncertainty changes over time. We give an approximate coverage result for the fixed spectral weighted quantile and a deterministic long-run calibration result for the adaptive update. Simulations with recurring regimes and slowly changing frequencies, together with three U.S. real-data examples, show that the hybrid method can improve on fixed spectral weighting, while also showing that spectral weighting must be monitored through effective sample size diagnostics.

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

Structure-aware Knowledge-guided Heterogeneous Mamba for Zygomaticomaxillary Suture Assessment

The Zygomaticomaxillary Suture is a key circummaxillary structure that connects the zygomatic bone and the maxilla, which serves as a primary site of resistance during maxillary advancement, and its maturation status directly influences the timing and efficacy of orthopedic interventions. However, accurate staging of ZMS maturation remains challenging due to subtle high-frequency transitions in suture lines and the global semantic ambiguity between adjacent stages. To address this, we present the first public ZMS dataset, comprising 3,790 ZMS images covering the entire age range from 4 to 24 years. Based on this dataset, we propose SKMamba, a Structure-aware and Knowledge-guided Mamba-based multi-modal framework for automated ZMS maturation assessment. SKMamba adopts a decoupled dual-path architecture that mimics the hierarchical diagnostic process used by experienced orthodontists. We first introduce an Implicit Edge Extractor (IEE), which leverages structural pre-training to reduce trabecular noise and accentuate sutural boundaries. Complementarily, a Cross-Modal Semantic Alignment (CSA) module is designed to incorporate anatomical descriptions from a large language model (LLM). This module helps align local morphological cues with global semantic descriptions while ensuring that objective morphological evidence remains the primary basis for decisions. Extensive experiments on our ZMS dataset demonstrate that SKMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/galaxygxq1116/SKMamba.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Exposure Bias as Epistemic Underidentification in Recursive Forecasting

arXiv:2606.12990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recursive multi-step forecasting is usually framed as distribution shift: models are trained on observed histories but deployed on their own predictions. We show this framing is incomplete by proving that, under partial observability or state truncation, recursive rollout is also an epistemic underidentification problem. Even with deterministic latent dynamics, one-step Bayes supervision identifies behavior only on observed contexts and need not identify the deployed recursive predictor once rollout queries self-generated induced states whose correct local targets are not determined by numeric state alone. We formalize this with induced states $Z$ and provenance variables $P$, and derive a decomposition of induced-state error into teacher-forcing/rollout mismatch, representation–class approximation, and provenance information gaps. Empirically, we show that rollout enters a distinct induced-state regime, that fixed induced states define a distinct local corrective task, and that closed-loop gains arise not only from local adaptation but also from changing the induced states visited during rollout. Using a simple binary provenance encoding, provenance-aware correction can further improve performance, though gains are conditional rather than uniform. These results recast exposure bias as reasoning under self-induced epistemic uncertainty.

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

Crypto x AI, AI x Crypto: A Survey

arXiv:2606.13892v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The intersection of crypto x AI is spawning papers, products, online posts, and companies. All the surrounding buzz, though, obscures what exactly has been done, what the opportunities and challenges are, and what open questions deserve attention. This survey paper asks what AI can do for blockchain-based technologies (broadly construed as "crypto") (crypto x AI), and vice versa (AI x crypto). We systematize existing work, summarize key takeaways, highlight open research questions, and offer a perspective on pervasive industry misconceptions, concluding that AI and crypto are still in the very early stages of meaningful integration.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Beware of Aliases – Signal Preservation is Crucial for Robust Image Restoration

Image restoration networks are usually comprised of an encoder and a decoder, responsible for aggregating image content from noisy, distorted data and to restore clean, undistorted images, respectively. Data aggregation as well as high-resolution image generation both usually come at the risk of involving aliases, i.e.~standard architectures put their ability to reconstruct the model input in jeopardy to reach high PSNR values on validation data. The price to be paid is low model robustness. In this work, we show that simply providing alias-free paths in state-of-the-art reconstruction transformers supports improved model robustness at low costs on the restoration performance. We do so by proposing BOA-Restormer, a transformer-based image restoration model that executes downsampling and upsampling operations partly in the frequency domain to ensure alias-free paths along the entire model while potentially preserving all relevant high-frequency information.

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

Consistent Evaluation of Operators Involving the Position Operator in the Bloch Representation: Application to the Orbital Moment

arXiv:2606.11679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The position operator plays a central role in condensed-matter observables such as velocity, orbital moment, and electric polarization. In solid-state physics, the evaluation of operators incorporating the position operator has not reached a consensus, as observed in the operator-level discrepancy between the local circulation of Wannier functions and the self-rotation of wave packets. Here, to achieve a consistent evaluation of such operators, we propose three rules for evaluating operators involving the position operator in the Bloch representation. The rules are devised to satisfy physical conditions: independence from the choice of unit cell, preservation of Hermitian conjugacy for the product of operators, and recovery of the correct intraband velocity. We further address the gauge dependence of the position operator and introduce a scheme termed gauge filtration, which systematically removes gauge-dependent contributions from the operators containing the position operator. This methodology ensures that the quantities obtained from the operator evaluation correspond to observable physical phenomena. By applying our framework, we reconcile the results concerning the self-rotation of the wave packet and the local circulation of the Wannier function. We expect our proposal to establish a consistent framework for evaluating operators involving the position operator.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Effect of tenofovir on the outcomes of COVID-19 in persons with chronic hepatitis B: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden.

Background: Patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) may have an increased risk of severe COVID-19. Tenofovir has been hypothesized to confer protection against severe disease, but evidence is inconclusive. We evaluated the risk of severe COVID-19 among CHB patients treated with tenofovir compared with other nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs). Methods and findings: In this nationwide, registry-based cohort study, we included all adults with CHB and laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Sweden between February 2020 and July 2022. Data from national health and socioeconomic registers were linked using unique personal identification numbers (PINs). Patients with HIV, hepatitis C, or hepatitis D coinfection were excluded. Exposure was defined as tenofovir versus other NA therapy. The primary outcome was severe COVID-19, defined as hospitalization >2 days or death within 30 days of diagnosis. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), controlling for age, sex, comorbidities, vaccination, socioeconomic status, and region of birth. Among 5,877 CHB patients with COVID-19, 672 were receiving NA therapy (437 tenofovir, 235 other NAs). Severe COVID-19 occurred in 8.0% of tenofovir-treated patients and 14.5% of those receiving other NAs (unadjusted OR 0.52; 95% CI, 0.31-0.85). After adjustment, the association was attenuated and no longer significant (aOR 0.72; 95% CI, 0.39-1.31). Older age, comorbidities, and unvaccinated status were strongly associated with severe disease. Conclusions: The apparent protective effect of tenofovir against severe COVID-19 in unadjusted analyses was largely explained by confounding factors. The risk of severe disease was primarily driven by age, comorbidities, and vaccination status. Prevention of severe COVID-19 in patients with CHB should instead focus on vaccination and management of comorbidities.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

The Pound-Drever-Hall Method for Superconducting-Qubit Readout

arXiv:2512.03138v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scaling quantum computers to large sizes requires the implementation of many parallel qubit readouts. Here we present an ultrastable superconducting-qubit readout method using the multi-tone self-phase-referenced Pound-Drever-Hall (PDH) technique, originally developed for use with optical cavities. In this work, we benchmark PDH readout of a single transmon qubit, using room-temperature heterodyne detection of all tones to reconstruct the PDH signal. We demonstrate that PDH qubit readout is insensitive to microwave phase drift, displaying $0.73^\circ$ phase stability over 2 hours, and capable of single-shot readout in the presence of phase errors exceeding the phase shift induced by the qubit state. We show that the PDH sideband tones do not cause unwanted measurement-induced state transitions for a transmon qubit, leading to a potential signal enhancement of at least $14$~dB.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

ProMiSE: Protein Multi-State Evaluation Benchmark in Biological Contexts

Proteins are inherently dynamic, with biological functions often emerging from transitions between multiple conformational states. While recent breakthroughs have largely addressed the static structure prediction problem, no systematic benchmark exists to demonstrate how well current models capture functionally relevant dynamics. We introduce ProMiSE, the first benchmark that provides both a dataset and an evaluation scheme, based on native biological assemblies and integrating major conformational change mechanisms - intrinsic, ligand-induced, and protein-induced - within a single curated dataset. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of state-of-the-art structure prediction models, including AlphaFold3 and recent generative approaches. Our findings reveal that current models exhibit a limited ability to sample intrinsic multi-states and are often insensitive to biological context in induced scenarios. Internal representation analysis suggests that training-data exposure can shift predictions toward dominant conformational states over alternative biologically relevant states, primarily at the structure module. In contrast, results from BioEmu indicate that reducing decoding-stage bias can substantially improve multi-state sampling without major changes to upstream pair representations.

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

Riemann-Bench: A Benchmark for Moonshot Mathematics

arXiv:2604.06802v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent AI systems have achieved gold-medal-level performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad, demonstrating remarkable proficiency at competition-style problem solving. However, competition mathematics represents only a narrow slice of mathematical reasoning: problems are drawn from limited domains, require minimal advanced machinery, and can often reward insightful tricks over deep theoretical knowledge. We introduce Riemann-Bench, a private benchmark of expert-curated problems designed to evaluate AI systems on research-level mathematics that goes far beyond the olympiad frontier. Problems are authored by Ivy League mathematics professors, graduate students, and PhD-holding IMO medalists, and routinely took their authors weeks to solve independently. Each problem undergoes double-blind verification by two independent domain experts who must solve the problem from scratch, and yields a unique, closed-form solution assessed by programmatic verifiers. We evaluate frontier models as unconstrained research agents, with full access to coding tools, search, and open-ended reasoning, using an unbiased statistical estimator computed over 100 independent runs per problem. Our results reveal that all frontier models currently score below 10%, exposing a substantial gap between olympiad-level problem solving and genuine research-level mathematical reasoning. By keeping the benchmark fully private, we ensure that measured performance reflects authentic mathematical capability rather than memorization of training data.

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

Latent World Recovery for Multimodal Learning with Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.12362v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study multimodal learning under missing modalities, with particular motivation from bioscience applications in which heterogeneous modalities are often only partially available when decisions need to be made. We propose Latent World Recovery (LWR), a framework built on two key ideas: (i) modality-specific embeddings from different modalities are aligned in a shared latent space, and (ii) a unified representation is constructed by fusing only the embeddings of the modalities that are actually available at both training and inference time. Rather than imputing missing modalities or requiring a fixed modality set, LWR treats each modality as a partial perception of an underlying latent state and performs availability-aware representation learning directly from the observed modalities. This combination of neighbor-based latent alignment and availability-aware modality fusion enables robust multimodal prediction under partial observation, while avoiding error propagation from explicit reconstruction of missing modalities. We evaluate the proposed framework on real-world incomplete multi-omics benchmarks and demonstrate that it provides an effective approach to downstream tasks such as cancer phenotype classification and survival prediction.

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

When Should Agent Trust Be Conditional? Characterizing and Attacking Skill-Conditional Reputation in Agent Swarms

arXiv:2606.14200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open platforms increasingly route tasks among heterogeneous LLM agents–differing in base model, scaffold, and tool stack–whose competence varies sharply by skill: an agent excellent at one skill may be useless at another. The standard reputation approach summarizes each agent by a single global trust score, but that scalar is the wrong object here, because routing every task to the globally most-trusted agent leaves the value of specialization unclaimed. We study skill-conditional trust R(i | k)–the trust to place in agent i for a task requiring skill k, rather than one score per agent–and pose three falsifiable questions: when is conditioning worth it, how much cross-skill evidence should be borrowed, and whether that borrowing is safe. A controlled phase-diagram analysis answers the first two: conditional trust wins only in a specific regime–high agent heterogeneity, sparse per-skill evidence, and correlated skills–and the coupling strength beta that buys this data efficiency is dual-use, because the same cross-skill borrowing is also a laundering channel. On a public benchmark of 14 genuinely heterogeneous AppWorld agents, real pools land inside the beneficial regime–a small but genuine gain, with the per-skill best agent genuinely changing across skills. We then show that an attacker with cheap evidence in one skill and none in a target skill hijacks the conditional router, driving routing regret from 0 to 0.94 on a pool our zero-cost Conditional Information Value Test (CIVT) rates GREEN–while the ungated trust verdict it contaminates reads -0.06 instead of the honest +0.19. A zero-evidence gate bounds the attack but does not eliminate it; we characterize the residual cost under an explicit budget. We do not claim Sybil-resistance–we quantify the trade-off.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Uniform integrability of the distance to the nearest leaf in random trees

arXiv:2606.15339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the distance from the root to the nearest leaf, the analogous quantity for a uniformly chosen vertex, and its protection number, in size-conditioned simply generated trees. We prove a uniform exponential tail bound for each of these quantities, valid for arbitrary offspring distributions. As a consequence, these random variables are uniformly integrable of every order. This yields convergence of all moments to those of the corresponding local limit. The argument is probabilistic and unified across the three quantities.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Learning from Own Solutions: Self-Conditioned Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

arXiv:2606.18810v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in training LLMs for reasoning tasks, but representative methods such as GRPO assign uniform credit across all tokens, wasting gradient on routine tokens while under-crediting pivotal reasoning steps. Existing token-level credit assignment methods require resources beyond the model's own rollouts. GRPO variants rely on process reward models or ground-truth answers. Knowledge distillation assigns credit through per-token divergence but requires external teachers (On-Policy Distillation) or privileged information (On-Policy Self Distillation). However, these dependencies limit applicability in the pure RLVR setting. We observe that conditioning the model on its own verified trajectories induces a measurable per-token KL divergence between the original and conditioned distributions, and prove that distilling from a self-teacher constructed by verified trajectories leads to infeasible weighted-average solutions when multiple verified trajectories exist. We propose SC-GRPO (Self-Conditioned GRPO), which uses KL divergence mentioned before as a multiplicative weight on GRPO gradients. Across five benchmarks spanning math, code, and agentic tasks, SC-GRPO consistently outperforms 8.1% over GRPO and 5.9% over DAPO with stronger OOD performance. Moreover, SC-GRPO achieves higher performance than OPD.

20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

HydraMPP: A lightweight library for distributed massive parallel processing in Python - threading at scale.

We now exist in the era of massive datasets from genomics, large language models, and all the known knowledge of humanity right at our fingertips. Much of this data is becoming more accessible; however, processing such data remains an ongoing issue across systems including high performance computing (HPC) infrastructures. Massively parallel computing (MPP) has solved this using a divide and conquer approach by splitting workloads across independent nodes (i.e., central processing units (CPU) allowing for higher scaling of data). The main engine for this in python is Ray; however, it has many issues including a large code space, security issues, debugging opacity, and memory management issues. Here, we present HydraMPP, a lightweight, ease of use and utilization, with high auditability, and with SLURM ergonomics.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Pixel-TTS: Image based Text Rendering for Robust Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.

22.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

Efficacy and target engagement of dopamine agonist pramipexole for anhedonic depression: a randomized placebo-controlled trial

Authors:

Anhedonia is a core and disabling symptom of mood disorders with limited treatment options. We evaluated the efficacy and safety of the dopamine agonist pramipexole in patients with mood disorders characterized by clinically significant anhedonia. In this single-center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, adults with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression and elevated Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS) scores were assigned (1:1) to flexible dose, once-daily oral pramipexole as add-on treatment or placebo for 9 weeks. The primary outcome was change in SHAPS score from baseline to week 9. Analyses were conducted in the modified intention-to-treat population. Eighty-five participants were randomized, and 82 were included in the analysis. The primary outcome was met: pramipexole was associated with a greater reduction in SHAPS scores compared to placebo (mean difference: −4.04, 95% confidence interval: −6.89 to −1.18, P = 0.006, Hedges’ g = 0.62). Exploratory analyses indicated that pramipexole was associated with increased light physical activity and relative preservation of reward-related ventral striatal activation. Improvements in anhedonia were sustained during a 6-month open-label extension. Pramipexole was generally well tolerated compared to placebo. Pramipexole significantly improved anhedonia and showed a favorable safety profile, supporting its potential as an augmentation strategy in mood disorders. ClinicalTrials.gov identifiers: NCT05355337 and NCT05825235 . Pramipexole, in patients with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression, reduced Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale scores significantly compared to placebo.

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

Forecasting Future Behavior as a Learning Task

arXiv:2606.11445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trust in an AI system is often anchored by explanations of how it works, which one then uses to forecast its behavior on new inputs. For large reasoning models (LRMs), this conventional route is particularly difficult to follow: explanation methods for single token generations do not naturally generalize to long trajectories, and the trajectories themselves are often not faithful when read as natural language. We propose an alternative that bypasses the explanation step: treat behavior forecasting as a learnable task and train Behavior Forecasters that operates on a single reasoning trajectory to make the same forecasts one would typically seek from an explanation. The forecaster's training data is obtained by querying the LRM with no human annotation, and its inference is done in a single forward pass. We instantiate this approach on two tasks: how likely the LRM is to repeat its answer on re-runs, and how removing parts of the input changes its answer. We evaluate this approach on both tasks across three diverse reasoning datasets and find that trained Behavior Forecasters are more accurate than GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus-4.6 reading the same trajectories as naive readers, at a small fraction of their inference cost. We find that fine-tuning the backbone end-to-end and initializing it from the target LRM are each necessary for strong performance. These results show that the reasoning trajectory carries information about the LRM's future behavior that goes beyond what naive reading conveys.

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

MineExplorer: Evaluating Open-World Exploration of MLLM Agents in Minecraft

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong capabilities in perception, reasoning, and action generation. However, their ability to sustain exploration in dynamic open worlds remains unclear. Existing embodied and game-based benchmarks often compress interaction into short-horizon tasks or entangle success with domain-specific game mechanics. In this paper, we introduce MineExplorer benchmark for evaluating open-world exploration capabilities of MLLM agents in Minecraft. We first filter atomic tasks whose solutions rely heavily on Minecraft-specific knowledge to better reflect general open-world reasoning. Then we organize the benchmark around a ReAct-style capability formulation and compose atomic tasks into implicit multi-hop tasks. To further construct reliable instances, MineExplorer uses a multi-agent synthesis workflow that jointly designs task graphs, sandbox scenes, and rule-based milestone evaluators. Human evaluation shows that the multi-agent synthesis workflow produces significantly more reliable instances than a single-agent baseline. Experiments with advanced MLLM agents show that open-world exploration remains challenging, as strong models can handle many single-hop tasks but degrade sharply when hidden prerequisites must be coordinated over longer trajectories. Further analysis finds that task difficulty tracks agent completion, and larger models or thinking modes do not consistently translate into better performance. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Jometeorie/MineExplorer.

25.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

U = U for all: Advancing equity in HIV prevention

by Thiago S. Torres, Paula M. Luz Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U). However, U = U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. Equitable and accurate awareness of U = U requires culturally tailored interventions, improved provider education, and supportive policy environments beyond biomedical evidence alone. Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). However, U=U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. In this Perspective, Thiago Torres and Paula Luz outline what is needed to improve equity and accuracy in global awareness and education of U=U.