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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

DAL: A Practical Prior-Free Black-Box Framework for Piecewise Stationary Bandits

Authors:
Argyrios Gerogiannis↗Yu-Han Huang↗Subhonmesh Bose↗Venugopal V. Veeravalli↗

arXiv:2501.19401v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a practical, black-box framework termed Detection Augmented Learning (DAL) for the problem of piecewise stationary bandits without knowledge of the underlying non-stationarity. DAL accepts any stationary bandit algorithm with order-optimal regret as input and augments it with a change detector, enabling applicability to all common bandit variants. Extensive experimentation demonstrates that DAL consistently surpasses all state-of-the-art methods across diverse non-stationary scenarios, including synthetic benchmarks and real-world datasets, underscoring its versatility and scalability. We provide theoretical insights into DAL's strong empirical performance, complemented by thorough empirical validation.

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02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Steady-State Approximation Error of Heterogeneous Mean-Field Models

Authors:
Lei Ying↗

arXiv:2606.09022v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies heterogeneous mean-field models in which agent parameters are sampled from a population distribution. We establish an $O(1/M)$ bound on the steady-state mean-square error between the occupancy measure of the $M$-agent system and the corresponding annealed mean-field equilibrium. The analysis extends Stein's method for homogeneous mean-field models and reveals a fundamental difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. While stability of the mean-field dynamics is sufficient in the homogeneous setting, heterogeneous systems further require uniform robustness of the occupancy dynamics with respect to perturbations of the initial condition. The results are illustrated through a heterogeneous SIS epidemic model.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Atlas: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoning

Authors:
Jinyang Wu↗Guocheng Zhai↗Ruihan Jin↗Jiahao Yuan↗Yuhao Shen↗Shuai Zhang↗Zhengqi Wen↗Jianhua Tao↗

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with external tools has significantly expanded the capabilities of AI agents. However, as the diversity of both LLMs and tools increases, selecting the optimal model-tool combination becomes a high-dimensional optimization challenge. Existing approaches often rely on a single model or fixed tool-calling logic, failing to exploit the performance variations across heterogeneous model-tool pairs. In this paper, we present ATLAS (Adaptive Tool-LLM Alignment and Synergistic Invocation), a dual-path framework for dynamic tool usage in cross-domain complex reasoning. ATLAS operates via a dual-path approach: (1) training-free cluster-based routing that exploits empirical priors for domain-specific alignment, and (2) RL-based multi-step routing that explores autonomous trajectories for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms closed-source models like GPT-4o, surpassing existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+10.1%) and out-of-distribution (+13.1%) tasks. Furthermore, our framework shows significant gains in visual reasoning by orchestrating specialized multi-modal tools.

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

SP$^3$: Spherical Priors for Plug-and-Play Restoration

Authors:
Sean Man↗Ron Raphaeli↗Matan Kleiner↗Or Ronai↗

In this paper, we introduce SP$^3$, a novel Plug-and-Play algorithm that accelerates maximum a posteriori image restoration by replacing denoisers with Spherical Encoders (SE) as generative priors. SP$^3$ approximates the intractable proximal prior step by utilizing the SE tightly structured latent space as a robust projection onto the natural image manifold. Alternating this projection with a closed-form data-consistency step, via Half-Quadratic Splitting, achieves stable convergence without requiring gradient computation during inference. This unique formulation unlocks "anytime" restoration capabilities, producing sharp, plausible images from the first iteration. Evaluations across a variety of image restoration tasks demonstrate that SP$^3$ achieves perceptual quality comparable to state-of-the-art zero-shot diffusion and flow methods while being $3$-$630\times$ faster.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning from almost nothing: How neural networks survive heavy input corruption

Authors:
Justin Tahmassebpur↗Asadullah Bhuiyan↗Hyejin Kim↗Omri Lesser↗

arXiv:2606.11319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from imperfect data is a central theme in machine learning, connecting practical questions of robustness to fundamental questions of learnability. Here we examine attribute noise: learning from corrupted inputs while keeping the labels intact, a setting that has received considerably less analytical attention than its label-noise counterpart. We consider two types of corruption models: additive noise and replacement noise. Through experiments with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on corrupted classification datasets, we find that neural networks remain robust, maintaining well-above-chance accuracy even when inputs are >90% corrupted – far beyond human recognition. To understand this robustness, we analyze infinite-width networks in the heavy-corruption regime using a mean-field-inspired approach and derive a leading-order decision rule for the classification outcome: the network implements a prototype rule, the nearest-class-mean, assigning each test point to the class whose training-set average it most closely resembles. This leading-order decision rule is universal across a broad range of MLP architectures, holding for any depth, as well as a wide class of activation functions and noise distributions. The same centroid mechanism closely matches finite-width network behavior in our experiments and provides an interpretable and analytically tractable account of why learning can succeed even when individual training examples carry almost no signal.

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

UBP2: Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Mohamed Nabail↗Leo Cheng↗Jingmin Wang↗Nicholas Rhinehart↗

arXiv:2606.19328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based RL provides an approach to learning reward models from pairwise comparisons of behaviors, bypassing the need for explicit reward design. However, existing methods typically rely on passive data collection and suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially during the early stages of learning. We introduce a model-based approach that actively directs exploration by jointly reasoning over uncertainties in the reward, dynamics, and value functions. Our method, Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning (UBP2), uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value function models to evaluate candidate trajectories according to a unified score that combines expected reward, terminal value, and epistemic uncertainty. Planning under this objective yields an explicit tradeoff between exploitation and information acquisition without requiring ad hoc exploration heuristics. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish sublinear regret guarantees for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings. Empirically, experiments on the Meta-World benchmark show UBP2 achieves substantially higher sample efficiency than model-free preference-based methods and non-optimistic model-based baselines.

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

Does Traversal Order Matter? A Systematic Study of Tree Traversal Methods in Transformer Grammars

Authors:
Zongru Liu↗Pengyu Ji↗Pengcheng Wang↗Kewei Tu↗

Transformer Grammars (TGs) enhance language modeling by incorporating syntactic tree structures. Despite the potentially significant impact on model performance of how syntactic trees are linearized in TGs, existing studies rely solely on Depth-First Traversal (DFT) for linearization. In this paper, we expand the traversal design space by exploring Breadth-First Traversal (BFT) and a novel hybrid traversal strategy, Production-Rule Traversal (PRT), which combines the structural lookahead of BFT with the early lexical generation of DFT. We integrate these traversal methods with varying tree configurations and masking strategies, and empirically evaluate their performance on language modeling, syntactic generalization and summarization. We reveal the inherent trade-offs between nested composition and global lookahead, providing actionable recommendations for designing task-aware Transformer Grammars.

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

The Journal of Prompt-Engineered (Moral) Philosophy Or: Why AI-Assisted Ethics Research Requires Process Transparency

Authors:
Michele Loi↗

arXiv:2511.08639v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing AI disclosure mandates in scholarship require that AI assistance be reported but leave transparency philosophically unspecified: they fix the duty without explaining what the duty serves. We argue that ethical inquiry is essentially contested at two independent levels – about what it is, and about what it demands of the inquirer – defeating output-only evaluation and welfare-economic dismissal of the transparency question, and, by extension, reproducibility framings imported from the empirical sciences. The transparency duty is grounded instead in agent-integrity: the legibility, before a community of inquiry, of the identity-constituting commitments that the author's mode of philosophising expresses. Because the standards for evaluating such work are not communally settled, the achievable goal for transparency is not evaluation against agreed criteria but tracking – accumulating the evidentiary record that lets each tradition assess the work on its own terms and makes future normative judgments possible. We develop a documentation-adequacy framework that operationalises Meaningful Human Control through five transparency elements – declaration, navigation, documentation account, process documentation, and development records – demonstrated by the paper itself, whose full documentation record is archived at a persistent identifier. The framework is a first iteration subject to revision, not a settled standard.

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09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Probabilistic representation and classical solutions of wave equations with complex polynomial nonlinearities

Authors:
Joshua J. Y. Chan↗Nicolas Privault↗

arXiv:2606.18919v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We review the probabilistic representation of solutions of wave equations with polynomial nonlinearities in spatial dimensions d=1,2,3 using stochastic branching processes. Under regularity assumptions on the initial data, we derive conditions ensuring the integrability of the corresponding Monte Carlo estimator, and the existence and smoothness of mild and classical solutions. We also present numerical results and comparisons with grid-based algorithms for the solution of nonlinear wave equations.

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

EARS: Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling in Large-scale Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:
Shuang Xie↗Yunan Lu↗Han Li↗Lingyun Wang↗

In large-scale enterprise settings, centralized multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly adopted, in which a coordinator delegates user requests to lightweight, domain-specialized sub-agents. While this architecture improves modularity, scalability, and cost efficiency, its reliability depends not only on accurate routing but also on sub-agents' ability to calibrate their responses to capability constraints. In particular, sub-agents built on smaller fine-tuned models often struggle with such calibration, leading them to over-answer ambiguous, underspecified, misrouted, or unsupported requests and produce hallucinated outputs instead of actionable feedback. To address this challenge, we present EARS (Explanatory Abstention for Reliable Sub-Agent Modeling), a production-oriented framework that reframes sub-agent abstention as an inter-agent communication protocol: a sub-agent does not merely abstain, but exposes an actionable failure state to the coordinator. EARS curates human-agent interaction data using an ensemble of calibrated LLM-as-a-Judge models, producing structured abstention labels and rationales under a taxonomy of sub-agent failure modes. These data are used to fine-tune sub-agents to detect failure conditions and return rationales for coordinator-level clarification, rerouting, or fallback. We evaluate EARS in a large-scale production e-commerce assistant supporting enterprise business intelligence workflows. EARS improves the overall response pass rate from 68.5% to 78.9%, demonstrating that sub-agent-side explanatory abstention improves MAS reliability.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Connecting entanglement growth with local integrals of motion in the disordered Fermi-Hubbard model

Authors:
Ahad Nokhostin Helm↗Brandon Leipner-Johns↗Rachel Wortis↗

arXiv:2606.15481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generically a quantum system initialized in an unentangled state will, under unitary dynamics, rapidly become entangled, a process closely related to information transport and to thermalization. Disorder can suppress the growth of entanglement and result in memory of initial conditions. In non-interacting systems this arises from localization of single-particle states, the occupancy of which is fixed by the initial condition. In interacting systems similar localized conserved quantities persist, but with the added feature that they are coupled, resulting in entanglement growth which is distinct from both non-interacting localized systems and from generic ergodic systems. The Fermi-Hubbard model has two degrees of freedom per site – charge and spin – and disorder may be present in both of these. We study the growth of entanglement in two scenarios – disorder in charge equal and unequal to that in spin, and determine the distinct contributions of charge and spin degrees of freedom by expanding the Hamiltonian in terms of a set of optimally localized conserved quantities with separate charge and spin character. We find that coupling between charge and spin is significantly weaker than charge-charge and spin-spin coupling. While this decoupling is present in all our results, it is only apparent when the strength of the disorder in the two sectors is different such that there is a separation between the characteristic timescales of the contributions to entanglement made by charge and by spin.

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

The censored stochastic six-vertex model and parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials

Authors:
Hindy Drillick↗Levi Haunschmid-Sibitz↗

arXiv:2606.12670v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a censored version of the stochastic six-vertex model. We show that for parameters $b_1 < b_2$, this model started from the initial condition ${1}_{x>0}$ is stochastically dominated at any time by the blocking measure. This is a partial analog of the censoring inequality for monotone spin systems. In particular, this result allows us to control the behavior of second-class particles. The proof uses parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials, whose appearance is explained using a connection between the stochastic six-vertex model and the Iwahori–Hecke algebras of symmetric groups. Furthermore, we find an intertwining relation for this process using normalized parabolic Kazhdan–Lusztig $R$-polynomials as an intertwining kernel.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MAWARITH: A Dataset and Benchmark for Legal Inheritance Reasoning with LLMs

Authors:
Abdessalam Bouchekif↗Shahd Gaben↗Samer Rashwani↗Somaya Eltanbouly↗Mutaz Al-Khatib↗Heba Sbahi↗Mohammed Ghaly↗Emad Mohamed↗

Islamic inheritance law is challenging for large language models because solving inheritance cases requires complex, structured, multi-step reasoning and the correct application of juristic rules to compute heirs' shares. We introduce MAWARITH, a large-scale annotated dataset of 12,500 Arabic inheritance cases for training and evaluating models on the full reasoning chain: (i) identifying eligible heirs, (ii) applying blocking (\d{hajb}) and allocation rules, and (iii) computing exact inheritance shares. To the best of our knowledge, MAWARITH is the first Arabic corpus and benchmark designed for end-to-end Islamic inheritance reasoning. Unlike prior datasets that restrict inheritance case solving to multiple-choice questions, MAWARITH supports the full reasoning chain and provides step-by-step solutions with justifications grounded in classical juristic sources and established inheritance rules, as well as exact share calculations. This enables models to learn how to generate detailed, step-by-step responses to user queries that reflect real-world Islamic inheritance cases. To evaluate models beyond final-answer accuracy, we propose MIR-E (Mawarith Inheritance Reasoning Evaluation), a weighted multi-stage metric that scores key reasoning stages and captures error propagation across the pipeline. We evaluate six large language models in a zero-shot setting. A commercial model achieves about 90\%, whereas all evaluated open-source models remain below 50\%. Our error analysis identifies recurring failure patterns, including scenario misinterpretation, errors in heir identification, errors in share allocation, and missing or incorrect application of key inheritance rules such as \textquotesingle awl and radd. The MAWARITH dataset is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/nlpresearcher/mawarith.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Text region detection in historical astronomical diagrams

Authors:
Zeynep Sonat Baltac{\i}↗Rapha\"el Baena↗Fei Meng↗Somk\'eo Norindr↗Florence Somer↗Matthieu Husson↗Mathieu Aubry↗

Text detection is a crucial task in the analysis of historical documents. While datasets and benchmarks exist for text detection in manuscripts and maps, the study of text in mathematical diagrams has received little attention. To address this, we introduce a large-scale, diverse, open-access dataset of 948 historical astronomical diagrams containing 10,940 oriented polygonal text regions. Our dataset spans ten centuries (8th to 18th) and seven main linguistic traditions: Arabic and Persian (115), Chinese (332), Byzantine (233), Latin (185), Hebrew (48), and Sanskrit (35). It captures a wide range of diagram styles and textual content, from symbols to multi-line paragraphs. Each text instance is annotated with ordered polygons that precisely delineate text regions and encode the reading direction. In addition, we annotated the 2,293 regions in Latin diagrams with 20 class labels. We evaluated several strong baselines on our dataset, including TESTR, DeepSolo++, and Poly-DETR, a simple extension of DINO-DETR that we design to predict ordered polygon vertices. Poly-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MTHv2 and cBAD2019 benchmarks and provides a solid, simple baseline on our dataset. Code and dataset available online.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

REACH: Interpretability-Driven Feature Identification and Architecture Compression for Multi-Channel Vehicular Channel Estimation

Authors:
Simbarashe Aldrin Ngorima↗Albert Helberg↗Marelie H. Davel↗

arXiv:2606.11857v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-channel mixed-SNR training improves out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation of deep learning channel estimators for IEEE 802.11p vehicular communications, yet the internal mechanism responsible for this remains unexplained. This work presents REACH (Relevance-based Explanation and Architectural Compression for cHannel estimators), a gradient-based interpretability framework that operates at two levels. Input-level attribution identifies a subset of time-frequency features consistently relevant across all evaluated channel conditions, enabling input dimensionality reduction with minimal performance loss. Filter-level attribution reveals a near-universal internal representation, providing a representational account of the observed OOD generalisation. Guided by the resulting filter taxonomy, relevance-guided architecture compression substantially reduces both the number of parameters and the number of floating-point operations (FLOPs) with sub-1 dB normalised mean square error (NMSE) degradation, and OOD generalisation degrades more slowly than within-distribution accuracy under increasing compression.

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16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

Authors:
Lanqing Li↗Shentong Mo↗Yang Yu↗Pheng-Ann Heng↗

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Positive Conserved Quantities in the Klein-Gordon Equation

Authors:
Robert Lin↗

arXiv:2410.04666v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce an embedding of the Klein-Gordon equation into a pair of coupled equations that are first-order in time. The existence of such an embedding is based on a positivity property exhibited by the Klein-Gordon equation. These coupled equations provide a more satisfactory reduction of the Klein-Gordon equation to first-order differential equations in time than the Schrodinger equation. Using this embedding, we show that the ``negative probabilities" associated with the Klein-Gordon equation do not need to be resolved by introducing matrices as Dirac did with his eponymous equation. For the case of the massive Klein-Gordon equation, the coupled equations are equivalent to a forward Schrodinger equation in time and a backward Schrodinger equation in time, respectively, corresponding to a particle and its antiparticle. We show that there are two positive integrals that are conserved (constant in time) in the Klein-Gordon equation and thus provide a concrete resolution of the historical puzzle regarding the previously supposed lack of a probabilistic interpretation for the field governed by the Klein-Gordon equation. A significant consequence is that the Schrodinger equation is given a relativistic formulation, which does not require creation and annihilation operators, i.e. quantum fields. Physically, this corresponds to a theory in which the positive and negative energy parts do not directly interact, hence there will be no annihilation events–for example, particle-antiparticle collisions which do not result in photon emission. Thus, one practical consequence of this relativistically consistent theory is a simple explanation for dark matter.

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

Task-Restricted Symmetries in Recurrent Weight Space

Authors:
Simon Dr\"ager↗

arXiv:2606.18457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recurrent networks can contain substantial functional redundancy in weight space: changing a recurrent matrix may leave the input-output rollout nearly unchanged on a task distribution, while similar-scale changes can destroy the same behavior. We study this redundancy in one-layer tanh RNNs using ordered real Schur coordinates. The Schur form separates spectral blocks from directed nonnormal couplings, giving a diagnostic basis for structured ablations that keep the input and readout maps fixed. In a fixed-length copy task, selected nonnormal Schur couplings can be removed with little loss in some trained solutions, whereas other couplings are necessary for accurate autonomous replay. Across flip-flop, sine generation, and context-dependent integration, the loss-preserving ablation profile varies across tasks and trained solutions. These results identify candidate approximate functional invariances, not universal symmetries of recurrent weight space. Schur-coordinate ablations provide a practical diagnostic for which structured perturbations preserve a trained recurrent solution and which ones disrupt its computation.

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19.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Blood signatures of cell type-specific aging forecast disease risk and resilience

Authors: Unknown Author

By measuring thousands of proteins in blood samples from over 60,000 people, we built molecular ‘clocks’ to estimate how fast cells age. Our analyses show that cell types age at different rates within the same person. Accelerated aging of specific cell types is associated with increased disease risk, whereas slower aging of others is linked to protection and improved survival.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Socioeconomic Determinants of Guideline-Concordant Therapy for Early-Stage Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer: A Population-Based Analysis from Appalachian and Non-Appalachian Ohio, 2004-2015

Authors:
Martin↗Waugh↗

Purpose: To examine the relative contributions of insurance, county-level poverty, and other socioeconomic factors, as compared with Appalachian geography, to receipt of guideline-concordant therapy for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in Appalachian and non-Appalachian Ohio. Methods: Retrospective population-based cohort study using the Ohio Cancer Incidence Surveillance System. We identified adults diagnosed with early-stage NSCLC between 2004 and 2015 (N=26,756). The primary outcome was receipt of guideline-concordant local therapy (surgery or definitive radiation). Rural-urban classification used USDA Rural-Urban Continuum Codes. Multivariable logistic regression and Cox proportional hazards models assessed predictors of treatment and survival, with E-values, race-stratified models, and propensity score weighting as sensitivity analyses. Findings: Median age was 71 years; 50.3% were male, 83.8% non-Hispanic White, and 20.4% Appalachian. Overall, 83.6% received guideline-concordant local therapy (59.6% surgery, 24.0% radiation). In adjusted analysis, Medicaid (adjusted odds ratio [OR] 0.53, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.44-0.63; adjusted risk ratio [RR] 0.94, 0.91-0.96), county-level poverty >20% (OR 0.77, 95% CI 0.68-0.87; RR 0.96, 0.95-0.98), and unmarried status were independently associated with lower therapy receipt, whereas Appalachian residence was associated with modestly higher receipt (OR 1.17, 95% CI 1.06-1.29; RR 1.02, 1.01-1.04). Therapy rates converged across regions over the study period (year x Appalachian interaction p20% (HR 1.13, 95% CI 1.07-1.20). Conclusions: Socioeconomic factors, particularly Medicaid insurance and county-level poverty, were the patient characteristics most strongly associated with lower receipt of guideline-concordant therapy, whereas Appalachian residence was not a barrier. Findings support targeted interventions addressing insurance-related and poverty-related barriers to lung cancer care in high-poverty communities regardless of geographic designation.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Evoflux: Inference-Time Evolution of Executable Tool Workflows for Compact Agents

Authors:
Kushal Raj Bhandari↗Ling Yue↗Ching-Yun Ko↗Dhaval Patel↗Shaowu Pan↗Pin-Yu Chen↗Jianxi Gao↗

arXiv:2606.12674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compact language models (LMs) reduce cost, latency, and deployment risk for tool agents. Yet MCP-style tool use requires more than isolated function calling: an agent must discover tools from live catalogs, satisfy schemas, preserve dependencies across intermediate outputs, and ground final responses in executed evidence. Small planners often generate plausible workflow graphs that fail under tool resolution, parameter validation, dependency tracking, or execution. We argue that this failure mode is poorly handled by small-corpus distillation. A few hundred teacher traces can teach workflow format, but rarely cover the recovery behavior needed to repair failed plans over changing tool catalogs. We introduce Evoflux, an inference-time evolutionary search method that treats compact tool use as the repair of executable tool workflows. It evolves typed workflow graphs through structured edits, execution feedback, adaptive intensity, meta-guided redesign, and diversity pruning. On held-out MCP-Bench tasks spanning live MCP servers and 250 tools, Evoflux raises execution feasibility from roughly 3% to 17-24% across small planners. In contrast, SFT and SFT+DPO on the same search-mined data match, underperform, or collapse below zero-shot performance; ReAct reaches higher peaks, but with higher variance and token cost. These results show that execution-grounded search is more reliable under scarce teacher-trace budgets.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Global Control with the Tavis-Cummings Interaction

Authors:
Plato Deliyannis↗Iman Marvian↗

arXiv:2606.12906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the controllability of a system of qubits under global control, where control pulses act identically on all qubits. Specifically, we consider a collection of qubits identically coupled to a single bosonic mode, or harmonic oscillator, via the Jaynes-Cummings interaction. This collective coupling, known as the Tavis-Cummings (TC) interaction, has been realized in several quantum computing platforms, including superconducting and atomic qubit systems. Although the qubits do not interact directly with one another, they can become entangled through their common coupling to the bosonic mode. We characterize the group of unitaries that can be implemented on the joint Hilbert space of the qubits and bosonic mode using the TC interaction together with a global $z$ field $J_z$, corresponding to identical z rotations on all qubits. We show that for n>2 qubits the set of realizable unitaries is restricted by an "accidental" symmetry of the TC Hamiltonian, distinct from its "standard" U(1) and permutational symmetries. On the other hand, we find that the Hamiltonian $J_z^2$ breaks this accidental symmetry and, together with the TC interaction and $J_z$, achieves semi-universality: it allows the implementation of arbitrary unitaries that respect permutational and U(1) symmetry, up to certain constraints on the center of the group. In a companion paper, we further analyze this remarkable accidental symmetry and show that it can be understood through Schwinger's bosonic model of angular momentum.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of Prophylactic Vasopressors for Preventing Post-induction Hypotension in the Elderly: A Systematic Review and Network Meta-analysis

Authors:
Zhang↗Wang↗Duan↗C. L↗Di↗Y. R↗

Background: Post-induction hypotension is a predictable haemodynamic hazard in older adults undergoing general anaesthesia. Prevention remains divided among volume optimisation, anaesthetic dose reduction, rescue treatment after hypotension occurs and proactive vasoactive support. Methods: We searched PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, CENTRAL, CNKI, Wanfang and VIP from inception to 30 March 2026. Eligible studies were randomised trials of prophylactic vasoactive drugs given before, during or immediately after induction in older adults. The primary outcome was post-induction hypotension. Secondary outcomes were post-induction mean arterial pressure (MAP), systolic arterial pressure (SBP), heart rate (HR) and reported haemodynamic adverse events. Random-effects network meta-analysis was used, and confidence in network estimates was assessed using CINeMA principles. Results: Thirty-one trials including 2,821 participants were included in the revised network. Compared with placebo/control, all active agents favoured lower post-induction hypotension. The most favourable point estimates were observed for phenylephrine (odds ratio [OR] 0.17, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.01 to 2.16) and metaraminol (OR 0.19, 95% CI 0.02 to 1.53), although both were imprecise. More precise reductions were observed for methoxamine (OR 0.23, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.43), norepinephrine (OR 0.25, 95% CI 0.13 to 0.47) and ephedrine (OR 0.34, 95% CI 0.19 to 0.63). Phenylephrine ranked highest for MAP support, norepinephrine ranked highest for SBP support, and ephedrine ranked highest for HR preservation. Global inconsistency was detected for SBP but not for hypotension incidence, MAP or HR, supporting cautious profile-based interpretation. Conclusions: Prophylactic vasopressor choice during induction should be guided by haemodynamic phenotype rather than ranking alone. In the revised network, active prophylaxis consistently favoured lower hypotension, but sparse nodes produced uncertainty. Norepinephrine retained a comparatively balanced profile when vasodilatory post-induction hypotension is anticipated, phenylephrine and related alpha-agonists provided stronger pressure support when HR and cardiac-output reserve are preserved, and ephedrine was most relevant when chronotropic support is desired. Keywords: general anaesthesia; induction; hypotension; norepinephrine; phenylephrine; ephedrine; network meta-analysis; older adults.

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24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Ten simple rules for turning your qualifying exam into an NIH-style fellowship proposal: A guide for graduate students

Authors:
Courtney Peña-Lima↗

by Courtney Peña-Lima, Cameron S. Bader, Brendan K. Ball, Troy C. Dildine, Mekhala V. Dissanayake, Iris van ‘t Erve, Albina Ibrayeva, Amy Nippert, M.K. Quinn, Chelse Spinner, Samuel Thompson, Antonio Tomasso, Crystal M. Botham Qualifying exams, often referred to as “quals” or candidacy exams, are an important milestone in doctoral programs. Although the style of quals varies greatly by program and institution, it is usually a proposal that requires students to develop research ideas as well as their scientific writing skills. Many quals are modeled after funding mechanisms that graduate students can apply to and on a topic that the student will pursue in their dissertation. This paper offers graduate students a step-by-step guide on how to turn their quals into a fellowship-style research proposal, using National Institutes of Health (NIH) mechanisms as a benchmark, as this is the norm within US research institutions. This paper will be most useful for students who have completed or are in the process of completing proposal-based qualifying exams, usually in the second year of a doctoral program.

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