Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18246

Variable-Width Transformers

Authors:

Zhaofeng Wu↗Oliver Sieberling↗Shawn Tan↗Rameswar Panda↗Yury Polyanskiy↗Yoon Kim↗

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.17997

Whole-Brain Connectomic Graph Model Enables Whole-Body Locomotion Control in Fruit Fly

Authors:

Zehao Jin↗Yaoye Zhu↗Chen Zhang↗Yanan Sui↗

arXiv:2602.17997v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Animals perform coordinated whole-body movements under the control of neural systems shaped by brain-wide connectivity. The mapping of the whole-brain neural connections, or the connectomes, provides a natural graph for modeling sensorimotor information flow, yet its potential as a neural controller for embodied agents remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce the Fly-connectomic Graph Model, which directly instantiates the whole-brain connectome of an adult Drosophila as a graph-structured neural controller for movements of a simulated biomechanical fruit fly via deep reinforcement learning. We achieve stable performance across diverse locomotion tasks, as well as better sample efficiency compared to both graph and non-graph baselines. Our results demonstrate a biologically informed way towards effective control policy design by translating whole-brain wiring principles into actionable architectural priors, while also improving the interpretability through dynamic information flow. This work also highlights the potential to bridge neuromechanics with embodied intelligence by providing a computational platform for investigating the sensorimotor transformation underlying animal behavior and a paradigm to advance the development of more nature-aligned intelligent systems.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24331

Transformer-Based Language Models Across Domain Verticals: Architectures, Applications and Critical Assessment

Authors:

Guruprakash J↗Krithika L. B↗

Transformer-based language models have become the default substrate for natural language processing and the pace of new releases has made it hard for practitioners to separate durable ideas from the noise of incremental announcements. This review works at two levels. At the level of mechanism, we organise the main transformer families into a working taxonomy, covering encoder-only, decoder-only, encoder-decoder, long-context, permutation-based, and generator-discriminator variants. We then extend the discussion to post-2023 developments that changed the picture in practice: instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, direct preference optimisation, mixture-of-experts scaling, retrieval augmentation and the current flagship model families from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek. At the level of use, we survey deployments across healthcare, finance, legal, education, customer service, creative writing and scientific work. Based on this we link each to the specific capabilities that make a transformer the appropriate tool. The contribution of this paper is a critical assessment that is based on the survey. We compare architectures on four axes that matter to deployment decisions, we quantify the trade-off between parameter count and energy cost. We also discuss how alignment methods, data provenance and benchmark saturation change what it means to call a model "state of the art". The final section lists the research questions that we think deserve more attention.

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04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23727

Certifying Quantum Optimization and Circuit Cutting by Using Quantum-Classical Moment Duality

Authors:

Ammar Daskin↗

arXiv:2606.23727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We establish a direct quantum-classical duality based on the degree-$2$ Sum-of-Squares (SoS) semidefinite programming cone: the matrix of two-qubit Pauli-$Z$ correlation functions obtained from any quantum state $\rho$ is automatically a feasible point of the classical Goemans-Williamson (GW) relaxation. This observation provides a universal ``safety net'' for quantum optimization algorithms: applying GW random hyperplane rounding to the quantum-driven moment matrix yields a certified expected cut value $\mathbb{E}[\mathrm{Cut}] \ge \alpha_{\mathrm{GW}}\langle\mathcal{H}\rangle_\rho$, valid for every state produced by variational algorithms such as QAOA or the Variational Quantum Power Method (VQPM), regardless of convergence quality. We further show that the same moment matrix reveals the tensor-product structure of the underlying unitary circuit, enabling a polynomial-time, correlation-based circuit cutting procedure with rigorous error bounds. The framework is validated numerically on Max-Cut instances for variational quantum algorithms and on random states for circuit cutting, demonstrating that the cheap two-point correlation data are sufficient to locate near-optimal bipartitions and that the theoretical error bounds hold in practice.

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05.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:5d04178a2a73f8cad4dc53d0b32fa659

When Less Is Not More: DICEPro Mitigates the Impact of Incomplete Reference Matrices on Cellular Frequency Deconvolution.

Authors:

BA↗Thiebaut↗Hinaut↗Hejblum↗B. P↗

Cellular deconvolution aims to estimate the frequencies of different cell populations from gene expression measurements in a biological sample. Supervised approaches, such as CIBERSORTx and DISSECT, critically depend on the reference signature matrix, which encodes the gene expression profiles of cell-types based on prior knowledge. Despite numerous deconvolution methods, the impact of missing cell populations in the reference matrix remains understudied. Here, we evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art deconvolution approaches using simulations based on real dataset examples combined with statistical modeling, validated against published data, and multiple real benchmark datasets. Results show that deconvolution performance remains stable when the reference matrix includes most cell-types, but declines sharply as the matrix becomes incomplete, especially for abundant cell populations. To address the limitations of incomplete reference matrices, we introduce DICEPro, an optimization-based framework designed to enhance existing deconvolution methods. By systematically adjusting the reference signatures, DICEPro better accounts for missing or underrepresented cell populations, leading to improved precision and robustness. We show that DICEPro consistently boosts deconvolution performance across both simulated datasets, derived from real data examples, and multiple real biological datasets, offering a practical solution when standard methods are hindered by incomplete references.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13930

Quantum Simulation of Spin-Dependent Electron Transfer in a Synthetic Chiral Lattice with a Trapped Ion

Authors:

Yi Li↗Chuyuan Chen↗Xingyu Zhao↗Zihan Xie↗Min Jiang↗Xinhua Peng↗Han Pu↗Lyuzhou Ye↗Yao Wang↗Guozhen Zhang↗Yiheng Lin↗

arXiv:2606.13930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electron transfer through chiral structures can exhibit spin asymmetry, known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect, whose microscopic origin remains an open question. While path-interference within the chiral moiety has been proposed as a key mechanism, its experimental validation requires precise and versatile tunability of system parameters. Here we implement a programmable quantum simulation of spin-dependent electron transfer in a donor–chiral-bridge–acceptor model using a trapped ion. The bridge is encoded in internal states of the ion with tunable nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor couplings, while donor and acceptor states are coupled via a spectator bosonic motional mode. We observe spin-dependent interference within the bridge, and further reveal spin-dependence in donor-to-acceptor transfer dynamics, controlled by amplitude and phase of the coupling parameter. Our results identify interference among spin-dependent pathways as a microscopic origin of spin-dependent transfer, and open a route toward quantum simulations of complex chiral lattices with multi-level and bosonic degrees of freedom.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24767

Compact Object-Level Representations with Open-Vocabulary Understanding for Indoor Visual Relocalization

Authors:

Zhaopeng Cui↗Jiarui Hu↗Jingbo Liu↗Boming Zhao↗Xiyue Guo↗Boyin Feng↗Haocheng Peng↗Yujun Shen↗Hujun Bao↗Guofeng Zhang↗

Indoor visual relocalization plays a critical role in emerging spatial and embodied AI applications. However, prior research was predominantly devoted to low-level vision schemes, struggling to perceive scene semantics and compositions, which limits both interpretability and applicability. In this paper, we explore the issue of how to organize rich object information in a scene, including semantics, layout, and geometry, into a structured map representation, thereby utilizing object units exclusively to drive the camera relocalization task. To this end, we propose OpenReLoc, a camera relocalization system designed to provide scene understanding and accurate pose estimation capabilities. Leveraging recent foundation models, we first introduce a multi-modal mechanism to integrate open-vocabulary semantic knowledge for effective 2D-3D object matching. Additionally, we design object-oriented reference frames as position priors, paired with a reference frame selection strategy based on the Distance-IoU (DIOU), enabling extension to scalable scenes. Moreover, to ensure stable and accurate pose optimization, we also propose a dual-path 2D Iterative Closest Pixel loss guided by object shape. Experimental results demonstrate that OpenReLoc achieves superior relocalization recall and accuracy across various datasets. Our source code will be released upon acceptance.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16978

Task-Error Residual Learning for Real-Robot Five-Ball Juggling

Authors:

Kai Ploeger↗Jan Peters↗

arXiv:2606.16978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For residual learning that refines existing behavior, sample efficiency depends on two things: how much information each rollout returns, and how efficiently the learner uses that information. Reinforcement learning's standard scalar reward carries far less information than the directional task error that defines the task. Random exploration further discards whatever information each rollout returns. Through residual learning with directional task-error supervision and a task error model that drives sample selection, we achieve stable three-, four-, and five-ball juggling on anthropomorphic Barrett WAM arms. Despite planning and controlling through a simple, idealized stack, the system converges from the second attempt. The first attempt drops, after which task error decreases monotonically without further failures. In comparison, five-ball juggling typically takes humans years of practice. We compare residual learners across two ternary axes, the directional information in the learning feedback and the commitment of the analytic prior, spanning Newton-style Jacobian updates, Composite Bayesian Optimization, and stochastic search methods. Both axes prove necessary: neither directional feedback nor an informative prior suffices alone, and the simplest method that combines them, a fixed-Jacobian Newton update, is the most reliable. The learned residual tolerates substantial prior misalignment and degraded joint tracking, affecting mainly convergence speed. The bottleneck for residual learning on real robots is therefore the information content of the supervision signal and how the learner uses it, not the accuracy of the surrounding stack. Video documentation of all experiments is available at https://kai-ploeger.com/residual-juggling.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2602.15720

ToaSt: Token Channel Selection and Structured Pruning for Efficient ViT

Authors:

Hyunchan Moon↗Cheonjun Park↗Steven L. Waslander↗

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have achieved remarkable success across various vision tasks, yet their deployment is often hindered by prohibitive computational costs. While structured weight pruning and token compression have emerged as promising solutions, they suffer from prolonged retraining and inter-layer dependencies that complicate optimization, respectively. We propose ToaSt, a decoupled framework applying specialized strategies to distinct ViT components. We apply coupled head-wise structured pruning to Multi-Head Self-Attention modules, leveraging attention operation characteristics to enhance robustness. For Feed-Forward Networks (over 60% of FLOPs), we introduce Token Channel Selection (TCS), a training-free method that filters redundant noise channels at inference time. Extensive evaluations across nine diverse models, including DeiT, ViT-MAE, and Swin Transformer, demonstrate that ToaSt achieves superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency, consistently outperforming existing baselines. On ViT-MAE-Huge, ToaSt achieves 88.52% accuracy (+1.64%p) with 39.4% FLOPs reduction. ToaSt also transfers effectively to diverse downstream tasks (COCO detection, ADE20K segmentation, CIFAR-100 classification), achieving 52.2 versus 51.9 mAP on COCO. Code: github.com/SHANNonLab-HUFS/ToaSt

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13861

Temporal Backtracking Search for Test-time Generative Video Reasoning

Authors:

Sejoon Jun↗Zheng Ding↗Huangyuan Su↗Weirui Ye↗Yilun Du↗

While test-time scaling has revolutionized reasoning in large language models, generative video reasoning remains bottlenecked by a single-shot paradigm. We demonstrate that searching over denoising steps cannot rescue logically flawed rollouts because spatial trajectories commit early in the diffusion process. Root-level Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is similarly inefficient: reasoning errors cluster early in the temporal axis, and resampling blindly discards verified upstream progress. To unlock effective test-time scaling for video models, we introduce Temporal Backtracking Search (TBS), which shifts the search space to the temporal axis. TBS transforms video generation into an iterative generate-verify-restart loop via three core mechanisms: (1) variable-K conditioning to resume generation from arbitrary clean prefixes; (2) temporal process verification to localize failures and extract valid restart anchors; and (3) prefix-based search to reallocate compute toward extending correct trajectories rather than root resampling. Across algorithmic, navigation, and robotics domains, TBS Pareto-dominates matched-budget BoN. In a strict out-of-distribution setting where one-shot generation collapses (0.7% for BoN), TBS achieves 22.7%, with every solved episode stemming from a restarted branch. Ultimately, TBS reveals that the local reasoning competence of video models far exceeds what single-shot rollouts indicate, providing a scalable test-time framework to unlock it.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12735

Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Radial Basis Functions for PDEs with Dirac Delta Sources

Authors:

Manuel Reyna↗Alexandre Tartakovsky↗

arXiv:2606.12735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are a machine learning method for solving forward and inverse Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). When applied to PDEs with Dirac delta functions in the forcing terms, boundary conditions, or initial conditions, PINNs require approximating them with smooth surrogate functions, a practice that can introduce significant modeling errors. In this work, we exploit the interpretation of PINNs as Residual Least Squares (RLS) methods and show that this perspective enables direct treatment of Dirac delta terms by integrating the weak-form equation. Among RLS formulations other than PINN, we focus on the Radial Basis Function (RBF) expansion (also known as a single-layer RBF Network). We show that while integrating out the Dirac delta in PINNs causes residuals to fail to converge to zero, RBF-RLS consistently provides good forward and inverse solutions to transport problems. We explain this finding using the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) theory. We test both approaches on linear PDEs that represent groundwater flow and transport in porous media and rivers. We solve inverse problems to fit synthetic data, noisy synthetic data, and real-world measurements.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19145

OrthoReg: Orthogonal Regularization for Hybrid Symbolic-Neural Dynamical Systems

Authors:

Till Richter↗Niki Kilbertus↗

arXiv:2606.19145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamical systems are fundamental to modeling the natural world, yet modeling them involves a persistent trade-off: manually prescribed mechanistic models are interpretable by design but often overly simplistic and misspecified; in contrast, flexible data-driven neural methods lack physical insight. Hybrid modeling aims for the best of both worlds by combining a prescribed or symbolic, physics-based component with a flexible neural network. A critical challenge, however, is that the neural component may relearn mechanistic parts, yielding redundant and uninterpretable models, especially when the symbolic structure itself is discovered from data. Existing methods based on standard $L^2$ regularization rely on a projection argument that breaks when the symbolic component is learned through sparse discovery, allowing the neural augmentation to overlap with symbolic structure. We introduce OrthoReg (Orthogonal Regularization), which directly penalizes overlap between the symbolic and neural components, preventing symbolic structure from being absorbed by the neural residual. This yields a complementary decomposition: the symbolic part captures what the library can express, and the neural part captures what remains. On benchmark dynamical systems with partial library mismatch, OrthoReg improves symbolic recovery and out-of-distribution behavior.

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13.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.26819

Sharp One-Dimensional Sub-Gaussian Comparison in Convex Order

Authors:

Yihan Zhang↗

arXiv:2604.26819v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove that any random variable $X$ whose moment generating function is point-wise upper bounded by that of $ G \sim \mathcal{N}(0,1) $ must be dominated by $ G/\mathbb{E}[|G|] $ in convex order, meaning $ \mathbb{E}[f(X)] \le \mathbb{E}[f(G/\mathbb{E}[|G|])] $ for all convex $f$. This is sharp as witnessed by $ X \sim \mathrm{Unif}(\{-1,1\}) $ and $ f(x) = |x| $.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24162

BehaviorBench: Benchmarking Foundation Models for Behavioral Science Tasks

Authors:

Jin Huang↗Yutong Xie↗Wanli Song↗Xingjian Zhang↗Walter Yuan↗Matthew O. Jackson↗Qiaozhu Mei↗

Foundation models have been increasingly applied to behavioral science domains such as psychology, sociology, and economics. While these models show promise in individual tasks such as survey response prediction and human-subject experiment simulation, there remains no systematic understanding of how well they perform across diverse behavioral science tasks, contexts, and populations. We introduce BehaviorBench, a comprehensive benchmark that evaluates foundation models along four core capabilities: (1) behavior prediction and simulation, (2) strategic decision-making, (3) subject-trait inference, and (4) behavioral knowledge application. Crucially, BehaviorBench evaluates model outputs at both the individual and distributional levels, capturing not only per-subject accuracy but also population-level alignment, an essential requirement for behavioral validity. Leveraging the tasks in BehaviorBench, we further develop Be.FM-1.5, extending the Be.FM family of behavioral foundation models fine-tuned on behavioral data. Our results reveal a considerable gap: proprietary general-purpose models excel at individual-level prediction and knowledge-intensive tasks, whereas behavioral foundation models, fine-tuned on behavioral data, achieve substantially stronger distributional alignment. Notably, Be.FM-1.5 leads on distributional metrics and remains competitive on individual-level metrics, suggesting that proper behavioral adaptation can close the gap. Our results highlight the importance of distributional evaluation, establish BehaviorBench as a foundation for developing and assessing behaviorally aligned AI systems, and demonstrate Be.FM-1.5's potential for a broad range of behavioral science studies. Our BehaviorBench and Be.FM-1.5 models can be accessed via https://umich-foreseer.github.io/behaviorbench/.

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15.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15432

A Concavity Theorem for the Parisi PDE

Authors:

Fu-Hsuan Ho↗

arXiv:2606.15432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the map sending the diffusion profile to the solution of a time-changed Parisi PDE evaluated at time-space $(0,0)$ is concave. This result strengthens the raywise concavity result proven by Auffinger and Chen (2016). As an application, for the balanced multispecies Ising spin glasses, the lower bound of Bates and Sohn (2025) matches the Hopf-type upper bound given by the Hamilton–Jacobi framework developed by Mourrat, Chen and Xia.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13196

Under What Conditions Can a Machine Become Genuinely Creative?

Authors:

Yong Zeng↗

arXiv:2606.13196v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent AI systems can generate texts, software architectures, hypotheses, designs, and scientific workflows that appear creative. This paper asks under what conditions a machine can become genuinely creative, and how human agency can be preserved within shared cognitive and creative environments. It develops a requirement framework derived from Designics, the science of meaning-bearing intentional change. The paper argues that genuine machine creativity should not be defined by output novelty, current performance, or transient architecture alone. Instead, creativity is understood as the structural transformation of incomplete situations through recursive intervention dynamics. On this view, it depends on ten requirements: environment representation, scoped perception, conflict identification, intervention capability, consequence observation, knowledge and environment update, rescoping, local-to-global unfolding, value-based scoping, and human-AI co-living. These are organized through the three laws of Designics: perception, conflict, and capability. The paper illustrates the computational tractability of these requirements through selected cyber-physical and cyber-biological studies, including recursive element extraction, autonomous mesh generation, and neurophysiological and workload analysis. It then treats open-ended systems, automated discovery frameworks, self-modifying agents, foundation models, and agentic workflows as pressure cases: they demonstrate powerful generative means but do not by themselves establish genuine machine creativity. Finally, the paper argues that proactive AI ethics is internal to genuine machine creativity rather than an after-the-fact filter. Value-based scoping and human-AI co-living must shape how creative machines perceive environments, identify conflicts, select interventions, observe consequences, update knowledge, and rescope future action.

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17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2605.02089

Cross-Lingual Learning within Arabic Script for Low-Resource HTR

Authors:

Sana Al-azzawi↗Elisa Barney↗Marcus Liwicki↗

Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) with limited labeled data remains a challenging problem, particularly for Arabic-script languages. Although modern sequence-based recognizers perform well in high-resource settings, their accuracy degrades sharply as training data becomes scarce. Arabic-script languages share a common writing system with substantial character overlap, motivating cross-lingual learning as a strategy to mitigate data scarcity. We conduct a controlled line-level study of cross-lingual joint training for Arabic-script HTR under low-resource regimes (number of samples K = 100, 500, 1000 labeled lines) on Arabic (KHATT), Urdu (NUST-UHWR) and Persian (PHTD). CRNN and Vision Transformer-based HTR-VT models are trained on the union of multiple related Arabic-script datasets to mitigate the data scarcity and are evaluated on individual target languages. Both architectures benefit from cross-language training under low-resource conditions. CRNN remains more effective under extremely limited target-language data, whereas the benefits of cross-language training for HTR-VT become less consistent as larger amounts of target-language data become available. On Persian (PHTD), joint training achieves a Character Error Rate (CER) of 9.99 , surpassing previously reported results despite not using the full available training data. On an additional Urdu dataset (UNHD), joint training reduces CER from 17.20 to 14.45.

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18.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:99d3929f57de69b0d9961419dc6f40af

Amylo-Pipe: an integrated web server for mechanistic and kinetic prediction of protein and peptide aggregation

Authors:

Rawat↗Ramakrishnan↗Cardente↗Kumar↗Greiff↗Gromiha↗M. M↗

Protein aggregation is central to amyloid-related disorders and remains a major developability challenge for protein therapeutics. Over the past two decades, significant advances have been made to predict aggregation-prone regions (APRs) and estimate aggregation propensity in proteins and peptides. In contrast, the prediction of aggregation kinetics has received relatively less attention due to the limited availability and heterogeneity of experimental data. Consequently, aggregation propensities from APR prediction algorithms were widely accepted as a means to predict relative changes in the aggregation kinetics of proteins and mutants. Previous studies have demonstrated, using large-scale datasets, that aggregation propensity shows a weak or inconsistent correlation with aggregation kinetics. In the present study, we have integrated complementary state-of-the-art mechanistic and kinetic prediction tools for protein aggregation into a unified, user-friendly web framework entitled "Amylo-Pipe". Amylo-Pipe also implements practical features that are especially useful for protein engineering, such as gatekeeper-residue mutational scanning to support the design of aggregation-resistant variants. By consolidating multiple prediction tasks in a single interface, Amylo-Pipe enables a more comprehensive assessment of aggregation behavior than APR-only workflows. The web server is freely accessible at: https://web.iitm.ac.in/bioinfo2/amylopipe/.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2603.03417

Parallel Test-Time Scaling with Multi-Sequence Verifiers

Authors:

Yegon Kim↗Seungyoo Lee↗Chaeyun Jang↗Hyungi Lee↗Juho Lee↗

arXiv:2603.03417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling, which generates multiple candidate solutions for a single problem, is a powerful technique for improving large language model performance. However, it is hindered by two key bottlenecks: accurately selecting the correct solution from the candidate pool, and the high inference latency from generating many full solutions. We argue that both challenges are fundamentally linked to verifier calibration, as a well-calibrated verifier improves answer selection and enables early-stopping strategies to reduce latency. However, existing non-generative verifiers are limited as they score each candidate in isolation, overlooking rich contextual information across the set of candidates. To address this, we introduce the Multi-Sequence Verifier (MSV), a lightweight verifier that predicts each candidate's correctness conditioned on the full sampled set. MSV achieves improved calibration, which directly enhances best-of-N selection performance and empowers a novel early-stopping framework. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, MSV improves best-of-64 accuracy by up to 6\% relative to strong baselines, and in the early-stopping setting reaches the same accuracy as baselines with less than half the latency.

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20.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2410.01492

Topological entanglement and number theory

Authors:

Siddharth Dwivedi↗

arXiv:2410.01492v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The recent developments in the study of topological multi-boundary entanglement in the context of 3d Chern-Simons theory (with gauge group $G$ and level $k$) suggest a strong interplay between entanglement measures and number theory. The purpose of this note is twofold. First, we introduce a $q$-deformed version of the Witten zeta function using the Chern-Simons theory at level $k$. We analyze the large $k$ limit of this function and show that it converges to an integer multiple of the classical Witten zeta function of $G$, where the integer multiple is precisely the order of the center of the group. This analysis provides an alternative way to compute the classical zeta functions, and we present some examples. Next, we study the quantum state associated with the $S^3$ complement of torus links of type $T_{p,p}$ and show that we can write the Rényi entropies at finite $k$ in terms of $q$-deformed Witten zeta functions. Using our first result, we obtain the $k \to \infty$ limit of the Rényi entropies and find that the entropies converge to finite values, which can be written in terms of the classical Witten zeta functions evaluated at positive integers. Since Witten zeta functions naturally appear in the symplectic volumes of moduli spaces of flat connections on Riemann surfaces, we give a geometric interpretation of the $k \to \infty$ limit of the Rényi and entanglement entropies in terms of these volumes. The results of this paper reveal an intriguing connection between topological entanglement, number-theoretic structures arising from Witten zeta functions, and the geometry of moduli spaces.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15768

LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies

Authors:

Jialei Chen↗Kai Wang↗Kang Chen↗Shuaihang Chen↗Feng Gao↗Wenhao Tang↗Zhiyuan Li↗Weilin Liu↗Zhuyu Yao↗Boxun Li↗Yuanbo Xu↗Chao Yu↗…

arXiv:2606.15768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core of LaWAM is a latent-action-conditioned Latent World Model (LaWM). We obtain LaWM by training a latent action model in the latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model and repurposing its forward decoder to predict future observation features for scene evolution. LaWAM then conditions action generation on these predicted latent visual subgoals to enable dynamics-aware robot control. LaWAM achieves state-of-the-art or competitive success rates (SRs) across LIBERO (98.6% SR), RoboTwin (91.22% SR), and real-world manipulation tasks while retaining low-latency inference. LaWAM runs in 187 ms per action-chunk prediction and achieves up to 24x lower wall-clock latency than pixel-space WAMs.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2402.08128

Recursive Joint Simulation in Games

Authors:

Vojtech Kovarik↗Caspar Oesterheld↗Vincent Conitzer↗

arXiv:2402.08128v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Game-theoretic dynamics between AI agents could differ from traditional human-human interactions in various ways. One such difference is that it may be possible to accurately simulate an AI agent, for example because its source code is known. Such an agent would then be fundamentally uncertain whether it is in the real world or in a simulation. Our aim is to explore ways of leveraging this possibility to achieve more cooperative outcomes in strategic settings. In this paper, we study an interaction between AI agents where the agents run a recursive joint simulation. That is, the agents first jointly observe a simulation of the situation they face. This simulation in turn recursively includes additional simulations (with a small chance of failure, to avoid infinite recursion), and the results of all these nested simulations are observed before an action is chosen. We show that the resulting interaction is strategically equivalent to an infinitely repeated version of the original game, allowing a direct transfer of existing results such as the various folk theorems. As evidence that the equivalence is robust, we show that it holds even when we relax some of the assumptions and that it also holds ``from the inside'' – meaning, for an agent that finds itself inside the game and has self-locating uncertainty.

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23.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.22597

MapReason-OSM: Can Vision-Language Models Make Graph-Verifiable Mobility Decisions from Street Maps ?

Authors:

Srinivas Venkatanarayanan↗Clement Pakkam Isaac↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used to read maps for logistics, delivery, and accessible navigation, where the output is an actionable decision (a route, a pin, a parking choice) that must respect the road network. Yet most map benchmarks grade free text or multiple-choice answers that cannot be verified against the underlying graph. We present MapReason-OSM, a benchmark and evaluation harness for graph-verifiable mobility decisions on self-rendered OpenStreetMap panels. We render fixed-style maps for ten U.S. downtowns at two aligned zoom scales, overlay a consistent marker grammar, and pair each panel with a hidden street graph and exact oracles, yielding 6,000 instances (12,000 panels across the two zooms) over 12 routing, facility-location, and visual disambiguation tasks. Models return structured decisions that we snap back to the graph and score for validity, legality, optimality, and constraint satisfaction, plus cross-zoom consistency. Across seven VLMs, models read maps and route simply but fail at graph cost reasoning (single-facility pin placement is near chance even for frontier reasoning models), and are frequently scale-inconsistent. We release the benchmark, harness, and deterministic generator. Code and data: https://github.com/Vi-Sri/mapreason-osm

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24.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:c351e0f28a484f38beb54738684a7740

The impact of changes in age-based eligibility criteria on seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in England between 2019 and 2024: A retrospective cohort study

Authors:

Suffel↗A. M↗Walker↗Barry↗E. V↗Campbell↗C. N↗Lopez Bernal↗J. V↗McDonald↗S. L↗H. I↗…

Objectives: To examine changes in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake among clinical risk groups over periods of differing age-based eligibility. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Individuals in England registered in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum. Participants: Between 1,239,802 (2019/20) and 1,289,330 (2023/24) individuals aged 40-69 years in clinical risk groups. Interventions: Natural experiment involving temporary expansion of age-based eligibility for influenza vaccination to include 50-64-year-olds from 2020/21 to 2022/23. Main outcome measures: Influenza vaccine uptake from 1st September to 28th February, incidence rate ratio (IRR) of vaccine uptake across consecutive seasons within age groups, and the ratio of IRRs between age groups. Results: Influenza vaccine uptake increased in all age groups in 2020/21 relative to 2019/20. The increase was larger in individuals aged 50-64 years (13.3%; IRR 1.50, 95% CI 1.50-1.51) compared with those aged 40-49 years (8.3%; IRR 1.35, 95% CI 1.34-1.35) and 65-69 years (6.8%; IRR 1.34, 95% CI 1.33-1.35). From 2020/21 to 2022/23, vaccine uptake decreased, with a more pronounced decline among those aged 40-49 years (-5.4%) compared with age-eligible groups (50-64 years: -3.0%; 65-69 years: -3.1%). The reversion of age eligibility in 2023/24 was associated with a larger decrease in uptake among those aged 50-64 years (-9.6% vs 2022/23; IRR 0.79, 95% CI: 0.79-0.79) compared with those aged 40-49 years (-4.9%; IRR 0.87, 95% CI: 0.87-0.88) and 65-69 years (-3.3%; IRR 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96-0.97). Patterns were broadly consistent across clinical risk groups. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic saw a general increase in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in clinical risk groups. This increase was larger and more sustained in 50-64 year-olds who had also become eligible based on age. Our findings highlight the potential gains in vaccine coverage among clinical risk groups based on expanded age-based eligibility.

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25.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12781

Quantum Network Routing based on Surface Code Error Correction

Authors:

Tianjie Hu↗Jindi Wu↗Qun Li↗

arXiv:2606.12781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum networks encounter unavoidable channel noises and erasure errors, presenting a huge obstacle in designing protocols that attain both high reliability and efficiency. Typically, quantum networks fall into two categories: those utilize quantum entanglements for quantum teleportation, and those directly transfer the actual quantum messages. In this paper, we present SurfNet, a quantum network that inherits the main advantages from both categories. It employs surface codes as logical qubits for encoding messages, and utilizes two parallel communication channels to fault-tolerantly transfer each surface code in a modular manner. Our approach of using surface codes can timely correct both operational and photon loss errors within the network, and the integration of the two channels within the network can greatly improve network throughput. For the implementation of SurfNet, we propose a novel network architecture, designed to better integrate surface codes into quantum networks. We also propose a novel error correction decoder, designed to fully utilize the modular characteristic of surface codes within our network. Simulation results demonstrate that SurfNet with its decoder significantly enhances the communication fidelity within quantum networks.

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