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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Presurgical immune biomarkers associated with pain intensity and pain interference recovery after total knee arthroplasty: findings from the PRIME-KNEE study

Authors:
Simon↗C. B↗Kraus↗V. B↗Huebner↗J. L↗Ashner↗M. C↗Bareja↗Peskoe↗Hall↗K. S↗…

Chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP) prevalence after total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is >20%. Circulating immune biomarkers are known factors of musculoskeletal pain but poorly understood as CPSP predictors. This prospective, longitudinal study of 203 patients s/p TKA tested presurgical plasma biomarkers associated with 6-month CPSP, using promising approaches from geriatrics biomarker research: expected recovery differential (ERD; resilience outcome) and penalized, machine-learning regularization modeling (elastic net and LASSO regression). Forty-nine presurgical candidate biomarkers were considered. CPSP was operationalized using ERDs built around PROMIS pain intensity and pain interference, which quantified the difference between observed and expected recovery after accounting for demographic, comorbidity, reserve, and perioperative factors. Plasma/ERDs from ~130 patients revealed 13 biomarkers with the highest selection stability criteria, and either positive or negative (+/-) associations with ERDs. Interleukin (IL) 5 (-) and Lipopolysaccharide-Binding Protein (LBP; +) were associated with both ERDs. Unique associations with pain intensity ERD included Cytomegalovirus-Specific IgG Negative (CMV IGg-; -), Macrophage Inflammatory Protein-1 Beta (MIP1b; -), IL12p70 (-, Cluster of Differentiation 30 (sCD30;-), Interferon alpha 2a (IFN2a;+), and Leukemia Inhibitory Factor (LIF;+). Unique associations with pain interference ERD included Lipopolysaccharide (LPS;-), Activin A (-), IL8 (-), Serum Amyloid A (SAA;-), and IL7 (+). Protein-protein interaction analyses and topology motifs suggest a centralized network with higher-than-expected connectivity, involving IL5, IL7, IL8, MIP1{beta}, and IFN2a, among others. This study proposes rigorous yet feasible approaches to expedite pain biomarker research, and introduces presurgical biomarkers t0 consider in future TKA-CPSP biosignature derivation.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Escaping the Self-Confirmation Trap: An Execute-Distill-Verify Paradigm for Agentic Experience Learning

Authors:
Shiding Zhu↗Yudi Qi↗Yajie Wang↗Jiaze Li↗Chao Song↗Yaorui Shi↗Yibo Miao↗Hanqi Gao↗Kai Zhang↗

Experience-driven self-evolution is critical for large language model (LLM) agents to improve through open-world interaction. However, existing experience learning methods mostly rely on single-agent loops, where the same agent executes tasks, summarizes outcomes, and determines memory content. This setup makes agents vulnerable to the Self-Confirmation Trap: wrong-but-self-consistent trajectories are misidentified as successful experience, leading to cumulative errors during retrieval and reuse. To address this issue, we propose EDV, an Execute-Distill-Verify framework for reliable experience learning. In the Execute stage, multiple heterogeneous agents explore the same task space in parallel to generate diverse candidate trajectories. In the Distill stage, a dedicated third-party agent comparatively analyzes these trajectories to produce candidate experiences, reducing executor-centric summarization bias. In the Verify stage, the execution group validates candidates via a consensus mechanism, and only approved experiences are written into shared or private memory. By decoupling the three stages, EDV transforms experience learning from isolated self-reflection into collaborative construction, filtering erroneous and noisy content before memory insertion. We evaluate EDV on three challenging long-horizon benchmarks: tau2-bench, Mind2Web and MMTB. Results show EDV consistently outperforms strong baselines, validating that reliable experience construction is essential for robust agent self-evolution. Our code is available at https://github.com/shidingz/EDV.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

On the significance of Wigner's Friend in contexts beyond quantum foundations

Authors:
Caroline L. Jones↗Markus P. Mueller↗

arXiv:2402.08727v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: There has been a surge of recent interest in the Wigner's Friend paradox, sparking several novel thought experiments and no-go theorems. The main narrative has been that Wigner's Friend highlights a counterintuitive feature that is unique to quantum theory, and which is closely related to the quantum measurement problem. Here, we challenge this view. We argue that the gist of the Wigner's Friend paradox can be reproduced without assuming quantum physics, and that it underlies a much broader class of enigmas in the foundations of physics and philosophy. To show this, we first consider several recently proposed Extended Wigner's Friend scenarios, and demonstrate that some of their implications for the absoluteness of observations can be reproduced by classical thought experiments that involve the duplication of agents. Crucially, some of these classical scenarios are technologically much easier to implement than their quantum counterparts. Then, we argue that the essential structural ingredient of all these scenarios is a feature that we call "Restriction A": that a physical theory cannot give us a probabilistic description of the observations of all agents. Finally, we argue that this difficulty is at the core of other puzzles in the foundations of physics and philosophy, and demonstrate this explicitly for cosmology's Boltzmann brain problem. Our analysis suggests that Wigner's Friend should be studied in a larger context, addressing a frontier of human knowledge beyond quantum foundations: to obtain reliable predictions for experiments in which these predictions can be privately but not intersubjectively verified.

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

CACR:Reinforcing Temporal Answer Grounding in Instructional Video via Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning

Authors:
Muge Qi↗Rong Fu↗Pengbin Feng↗Xianda Li↗Yu Cai↗Yifu Guo↗Shizhe Zhang↗Simon James Fong↗Lei Ma↗Bin Li↗

The task of temporal answer grounding in instructional video (TAGV), which aims to locate precise video segments that respond to natural language queries, is increasingly important for direct video answer retrieval. This task remains challenging due to the need to comprehend semantically complex questions and to address the significant length mismatch between untrimmed videos and short target moments. Existing methods often suffer from sensitivity to irrelevant content or insufficient visual reasoning capabilities. To tackle these limitations, we propose a Candidate-Aware Causal Reasoning (CACR) framework. Our approach first employs a Visual-Language Pre-training based Candidate Selection (VBCS) algorithm to efficiently generate K candidate segments, then applies a temporal logic reasoning module enhanced by a rejection reward mechanism and optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for robust inference. Extensive experiments on six benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU), providing a new perspective for reasoning-based retrieval in long videos.

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

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

Authors:
Zhilin Huang↗Hang Gao↗Ziqiang Dong↗Yuan Chen↗Yifeng Luo↗Chujun Qin↗Jingyi Wang↗Yang Yang↗Guanjun Jiang↗

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

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

Efficient Image-to-Image Schrödinger Bridge for CT Field of View Extension

Authors:
Zhenhao Li↗Song Ni↗Long Yang↗Xiaojie Yin↗Haijun Yu↗Jiazhou Wang↗Hongbin Han↗Weigang Hu↗Yixing Huang↗

Computed tomography (CT) is a cornerstone imaging modality for non-invasive, high-resolution visualization of internal anatomical structures. However, when the scanned object exceeds the scanner's field of view (FOV), projection data are truncated, resulting in incomplete reconstructions and pronounced artifacts near FOV boundaries. Conventional reconstruction algorithms struggle to recover accurate anatomy from such data, limiting clinical reliability. Deep learning approaches have been explored for FOV extension, with diffusion generative models representing the latest advances in image synthesis. Yet, conventional diffusion models are computationally demanding and slow at inference due to their iterative sampling process. To address these limitations, we propose an efficient CT FOV extension framework based on the image-to-image Schrödinger Bridge (I$^2$SB) diffusion model. Unlike traditional diffusion models that synthesize images from pure Gaussian noise, I$^2$SB learns a direct stochastic mapping between paired limited-FOV and extended-FOV images. This direct correspondence yields a more interpretable and traceable generative process, enhancing anatomical consistency and structural fidelity in reconstructions. I$^2$SB achieves superior quantitative performance, with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values of 49.8 HU on simulated noisy data and 152.0 HU on real data, outperforming state-of-the-art diffusion models such as conditional denoising diffusion probabilistic models (cDDPM) and patch-based diffusion methods. Moreover, its one-step inference enables reconstruction in just 0.19 s per 2D slice, representing over a 700-fold speedup compared to cDDPM (135 s) and surpassing DiffusionGAN (0.58 s), the second fastest. This combination of accuracy and efficiency indicates that I$^2$SB has potential for real-time or clinical deployment.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Teaching Diffusion to Speculate Left-to-Right

Authors:
Lexington Whalen↗Yuki Ito↗Ryo Sakamoto↗

Large language models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks, but their autoregressive decoding process incurs substantial inference costs due to inherently sequential token generation. Speculative decoding addresses this bottleneck by employing a lightweight draft model to propose multiple future tokens that are subsequently verified in parallel by a larger target model. Recent work has demonstrated that diffusion language models are well suited for this setting, as they can generate entire blocks of draft tokens in parallel and thereby alleviate the sequential constraints of autoregressive drafting. A subtlety of this regime is that block-diffusion drafters generate tokens bidirectionally within a block, whereas verification is performed by an autoregressive target model that evaluates tokens in a strictly left-to-right manner, leaving a gap between the symmetric training-time objective and the asymmetric verification-time reward. In this work, we offer an empirical analysis of three training-time interventions that narrow this gap: token positional weighting, a first-error focal loss that targets the position that breaks the accepted prefix within each block, and a chain loss term that substitutes a differentiable surrogate for the expected accepted length. The three interventions act along orthogonal axes (position, block-conditional first error, joint prefix) and compose additively; they are likewise orthogonal to test-time alignment mechanisms such as multi-draft self-selection, with which they can in principle be combined. Across four target models and six reasoning, code, and dialogue benchmarks, the three interventions raise accepted draft length by 21-76% per benchmark over a position-uniform baseline, without adding additional forward passes and without changing the inference pipeline or the rejection-sampling exactness contract.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RGFVR: Reference-Guided Face Video Restoration with Flow Matching

Authors:
Cem Eteke↗Batuhan Tosun↗Eckehard Steinbach↗

Face video restoration from degraded observations is challenging, as it requires simultaneously recovering visual fidelity, temporal consistency, and subject identity. Existing approaches are often either reference-free, which can lead to identity loss when person-specific facial details are lost, or subject-specific, which limits generalization to unseen identities. We propose a subject-agnostic, reference-guided framework for identity-preserving face video restoration. Our method introduces bimodal perceptual-descriptive identity conditioning into a pretrained flow-based text-to-video generator and employs a two-stage training strategy to strengthen identity guidance during restoration. Experiments show that our approach improves restoration fidelity, temporal consistency, and identity preservation, achieving superior performance under challenging video degradations, including downsampling, blur, noise, and compression artifacts. The code is available under: https://github.com/batuhanntosun/RG-FVR.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Polyp-D2ATL: Deep Domain-Adaptive Transfer Learning for Colorectal Polyp Classification under Label Distribution Shift

Authors:
Sajad Jabarzadeh Ghandilu↗Maryam Sadat Hosseini Azad↗Shahriar Baradaran Shokouhi↗Emad Fatemizadeh↗

Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Bandstructure of a coupled BEC-cavity system: effects of dissipation and geometry

Authors:
David Baur↗Simon Hertlein↗Alexander Baumg\"artner↗Justyna Stefaniak↗Tilman Esslinger↗Gabriele Natale↗Tobias Donner↗

arXiv:2504.17730v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present a theoretical model for a transversally driven Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity. We focus on the interplay between different coherent couplings, which can trigger a structural phase transition, known as the superradiant phase transition. Our approach, based on band structure theory and a mean-field description, enables a comprehensive analysis of the nature of the system's excited modes, precursing the phase transitions. By incorporating dissipative couplings, intrinsic to these systems, we find non-Hermitian phenomena such as the coalescence of crossing precursor modes and the emergence of exceptional points (EPs). The general formulation of our model allows us to explain the role of an angle between transverse pump and the cavity deviating from $90^\circ$. This offers us a unified perspective on the plethora of different implementations of such systems.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Prior-guided Fusion of Multimodal Features for Change Detection from Optical-SAR Images

Authors:
Xuanguang Liu↗Lei Ding↗Yujie Li↗Chenguang Dai↗Zhenchao Zhang↗Mengmeng Li↗Ziyi Yang↗Yifan Sun↗Yongqi Sun↗Hanyun Wang↗Lorenzo Bruzzone↗

Multimodal change detection (MMCD) identifies changed areas in multimodal remote sensing data, demonstrating significant application value in land use monitoring and urban sustainable development. However, literature MMCD approaches exhibit limitations in both cross-modal interaction and exploiting modality-specific characteristics. This leads to insufficient modeling of fine-grained change information, thus hindering the precise detection of semantic changes. To address these problems, we propose STSF-Net, a framework designed for MMCD between optical and SAR images. STSF-Net jointly models modality-specific and spatio-temporal common features to enhance change representations. Specifically, modality-specific features are exploited to capture genuine semantic change signals, while spatio-temporal common features are embedded to suppress pseudo-changes caused by differences in imaging mechanisms. Furthermore, we introduce an optical and SAR feature fusion strategy that adaptively adjusts multimodal feature importance based on semantic priors obtained from visual foundation models. Finally, we introduce the novel Delta-SN6 dataset, the first openly-accessible multiclass MMCD benchmark consisting of very-high-resolution fully polarimetric SAR and optical images. Experimental results on Delta-SN6, BRIGHT, and Wuhan datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art by 3.21%, 0.87%, and 1.32% in mIoU, respectively.

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12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A quantum implementation of high-order power method for estimating geometric entanglement of pure states

Authors:
Andrii Semenov↗Niall Murphy↗Simone Patscheider↗Alessandra Bernardi↗Elena Blokhina↗

arXiv:2405.19134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement is one of the fundamental properties of a quantum state and is a crucial differentiator between classical and quantum computation. There are many ways to define entanglement and its measure, depending on the problem or application under consideration. Each of these measures may be computed or approximated by multiple methods. However, hardly any of these methods can be run on near-term quantum hardware. This work presents a quantum adaptation of the iterative high-order power method for estimating the geometric measure of entanglement of multi-qubit pure states using rank-1 tensor approximation. This method is executable on early fault-tolerant (hybrid) quantum hardware and does not depend on quantum memory. We simulate this algorithm and mitigate the effects of noise on the results of the computation using a theoretical model based on a known mitigation approach, which assumes a global depolarising noise channel.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Generating Natural and Expressive Robot Gestures through Iterative Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback using LLMs

Authors:
Chris Lee↗Flora Salim↗Benjamin Tag↗Francisco Cruz↗

arXiv:2606.18747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive gestures are essential for natural and effective communication, complementing speech when verbal cues alone are insufficient (e.g., pointing). For social robots such as the humanoid Pepper, producing natural and expressive movements is critical for improving human-robot interaction (HRI) and long-term acceptance. However, generating gestures remains challenging due to reliance on expert-authored animations, resulting in rigid behaviors that are impractical for dynamic and diverse environments. Alternatively, machine learning approaches often struggle to capture perceived naturalness, becoming increasingly challenging with more degrees of freedom. Consequently, producing expressive robot gestures requires a system that can adapt to the environment while adhering to social norms and physical constraints. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable dynamic code generation, offering new opportunities for runtime gesture synthesis from natural language. In this paper, we integrate ChatGPT into the humanoid robot Pepper to generate co-speech gestures aligned with conversational output. While this baseline enables flexible gesture generation, the resulting motions are often perceived as stiff and unnatural. To address this limitation, we introduce an iterative reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) system that finetunes gesture generation based on user evaluations, leveraging an iterative user study to compare Pepper's generated gestures. Our results show that RLHF improved the LLM's co-speech generative capabilities, producing more expressive, relevant and fluid movements.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QMCtwin: Master-Equation Simulation of Syndrome Statistics Beyond Pauli Noise

Authors:
Tong Shen↗Huo Chen↗Benchen Huang↗Tyler Takeshita↗Arian Vezvaee↗Izhar Medalsy↗Daniel A. Lidar↗

arXiv:2606.19848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum error correction moves toward large-scale experimental implementations, decoder performance increasingly depends on how faithfully hardware noise is translated into syndrome statistics. Standard stabilizer workflows achieve scalability by replacing device dynamics with stochastic Pauli or detector-error models, but this compression can discard coherent phase information, nonunital drift, continuous-time effects of always-on couplings, and correlations generated by simultaneous Hamiltonian and dissipative evolution. Here we present QMCtwin, a sign-problem-suppressed quantum Monte Carlo framework for master-equation simulation of QEC circuits, and apply it to a full syndrome-extraction round of a distance-$7$ rotated surface code with $97$ physical qubits. The open-system model includes realistic superconducting-device noise mechanisms such as relaxation, pure dephasing, coherent gate miscalibration, residual $ZZ$ crosstalk, and drive-qubit detuning. By directly estimating syndrome observables from the QMC-generated stochastic density matrix estimator, we compare the master-equation dynamics with their Pauli-twirled Clifford simulation counterparts. QMCtwin predicts syndrome-extraction biases and correlations between syndromes and proxies of logical-string-parity that are absent or strongly suppressed in the stochastic Pauli description. We introduce information-theoretic diagnostics that further quantify how information concerning syndromes versus string-parity proxies differs between the realistic master-equation simulation and the corresponding Pauli-twirled model. These results show that QMC-based master-equation digital twins can expose noise features hidden by conventional Pauli/Clifford noise models and provide a practical path toward more accurate decoder-facing syndrome models.

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15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Gradient Mean-Field Dynamics with Measure-Valued States: Well-Posedness, Chaos, and Long-Time Stability

Authors:
Anderson Melchor Hernandez↗

arXiv:2606.24385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a stochastic mean-field interacting particle system whose state space is $\Y = \Tt^d \times \cP(U)$, where the first component represents a spatial variable and the second one is a probability measure over a compact metric space $U$. The dynamics are driven by locally Lipschitz drift operators: the spatial component evolves according to a Brownian diffusion, while the measure-valued component is perturbed by a projected cylindrical noise acting in the Arens–Eells space. We first establish existence and uniqueness of strong solutions for both the $N$-particle system and the associated nonlinear McKean–Vlasov equation under locally Lipschitz and linear growth assumptions on the drift coefficients. We then prove propagation of chaos: as $N\to\infty$, the empirical measure converges in expectation in Wasserstein–1 distance towards the unique McKean–Vlasov solution. Further, we investigate exponential convergence of the nonlinear McKean–Vlasov dynamics towards a unique invariant measure.

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

Speaking the Language of Science: Toward a General-Purpose Generative Foundation Model for the Natural Sciences

Authors:
Mingyang Li↗Yurou Liu↗Jieping Ye↗Bing Su↗Ji-Rong Wen↗Zheng Wang↗

In this report, we present LOGOS (Language Of Generative Objects in Science), a scientific generative language model that unifies heterogeneous tasks across the natural sciences within a single autoregressive framework based on a shared scientific grammar. It encodes diverse scientific objects and their spatial interactions as token sequences over a common vocabulary. By representing spatial contact and constraint patterns as discrete tokens, the model captures complex structural interactions in a purely sequential manner, without relying on explicit coordinates or geometric neural networks. This unified representation enables a wide range of downstream tasks to be formulated consistently as next-token prediction in the same grammar space, creating strong alignment between continued multi-domain pre-training and downstream objectives. Across diverse tasks, LOGOS consistently matches or outperforms domain-specific baselines, providing preliminary evidence for the feasibility of "one model fits all" in the natural sciences. We train LOGOS models at different scales (1B, 3B, and 8B parameters) and find a consistent positive correlation between model size and performance. This suggests that the future of AI for Science (AI4S) may not lie in building an independent technical stack that is separated from large language models (LLMs). Instead, it may depend on deeply aligning scientific foundation models with LLMs through shared architectures, shared training paradigms, and shared inference infrastructure, so that LLMs can truly become a new entry point for AI4S. We release the model weights and associated resources to facilitate further research.

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17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Catastrophic Compositional Generation: Why Vanilla Diffusion Models Fail to Extrapolate

Authors:
Duncan Soiffer↗Chandler Squires↗Yuan Guan↗Jason Hartford↗Pradeep Ravikumar↗

arXiv:2606.23920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The task of compositional generation involves using a conditional generative model, trained only on a subset of the possible conditions, to produce samples from compositionally-defined target distributions such as a geometric combination of the source distributions. In this work, we argue that this task is often infeasible for vanilla conditional diffusion models: we conjecture that no inference-time technique can efficiently produce samples from the target distribution in certain well-motivated settings. This idea is supported by theory-guided generalization arguments and carefully-designed experiments on both synthetic and realistic data. In particular, while recent methods such as Feynman-Kac correction reduce inference-time approximation error, our results show that score estimation error has a more catastrophic effect on performance when the target distribution is out-of-distribution with respect to the sources, highlighting the need for a different approach to this task.

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18.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Microglia at a key inflection point in Alzheimer’s disease

Authors: Unknown Author

We analyzed brains from octogenarians and cognitively resilient centenarians to understand why some individuals with substantial Alzheimer’s disease pathology develop dementia whereas others remain cognitively intact. Spatial transcriptomics revealed gene expression changes in discrete tissue domains surrounding amyloid plaques and tau pathology that distinguish early, clinically silent, disease from later stages associated with cognitive decline.

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

Effective Faraday interaction between light and Helium-3 nuclear spins in a multi-pass cell

Authors:
Kaiwen Yi↗Yida Sha↗Zejia Lin↗Matteo Fadel↗Xiang Peng↗

arXiv:2606.20328v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Helium-3 nuclear spins form an exceptionally stable quantum system with extremely long coherence time, offering exciting opportunities for quantum technologies. In particular, nuclear spin-squeezed states promise enhanced precision for sensing tasks and tests of new physics. A central challenge for all these applications is the realization of a controllable light-nuclear spin interface. Here we experimentally demonstrate such an interface by exploiting metastability-exchange collisions in a low-pressure helium-3 gas cell at room temperature. A radio-frequency discharge produces a small population of metastable atoms that both enables efficient optical pumping and mediates an effective Faraday interaction between the collective nuclear spin and an optical probe. We quantitatively characterize the strength of this interaction as a function of the nuclear polarization, applied magnetic field, and probe-beam parameters. Moreover, we show that using a multi-pass cell enhances this interaction by effectively increasing the optical depth. Extrapolating to a tenfold increase of the probe power used in the present experiment, we project a measurement-induced squeezing rate of 0.52 s$^{-1}$. Our results provide a practical pathway for optical access to helium-3 nuclear spins and open prospects for generating long-lived, macroscopic nuclear spin-squeezed states for quantum metrology.

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20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Lignin to adipic acid in a high-yield chemical and biological redox process

Authors:
Kathryn M. Mains↗

Viable manufacturing pathways to produce bio-based chemicals from renewable feedstocks, such as lignin derived from plant biomass, are needed to decarbonize the chemicals manufacturing sector. Converting the recalcitrant lignin polymer to valuable bioproducts remains a longstanding challenge in biorefining, with the highest reported single-product yield from lignin currently around 20 wt% (refs. 1–4). Most existing lignin depolymerization strategies target aryl–ether bond cleavage, which can produce aromatic monomers in yields of only about 30 wt%, and still as complex mixtures with C–C-linked dimers and oligomers5,6. The recalcitrance of these C–C linkages between aromatic moieties fundamentally limits single-product yields from lignin, prompting the development of strategies to efficiently cleave these C–C bonds3,7–9. Here we show how reductive processing of lignin from poplar accesses a hydrocarbon mixture of alkyl-aromatic monomers and oligomers that is privileged for oxidative conversion to monomeric aromatic carboxylic acids, comprising mostly benzoic acid and phthalic acid isomers in up to 73 wt% monomer yields, using a Co/Mn/Br catalyst. The soil bacterium Pseudomonas putida KT2440 was engineered to convert this mixture of aromatic carboxylic acids to muconolactone, a precursor to bio-based nylons, enabling final adipic acid yields up to 26 wt% (gram adipic acid per gram lignin) with a maximum theoretical yield of 57 wt%. This pairing of reductive and oxidative steps with lignin resembles processes in petrochemical refining and shows how lignin may be converted into a single, valuable bioproduct in high yields. A chemical and biological redox process that resembles processes in petrochemical refining is used to convert lignin from poplar into a single, valuable bioproduct, adipic acid, in high yields.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Tensor-Network-Based Distributed Quantum Dynamics on Independent Quantum Computers

Authors:
Anurag Dwivedi↗Melissa C. Revelle↗Daniel S. Lobser↗Brian K. McFarland↗Edward C. Tortorici↗Christopher G. Yale↗Susan M. Clark↗Philip Richerme↗Srinivasan S. Iyengar↗

arXiv:2606.11579v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an approach based on tensor networks for distributed quantum computing simulation of chemical wavepacket dynamics in a continuous variable representation. The central idea is that the tensor-network representation of the multidimensional time-evolution operator naturally induces an elevated Hilbert space where the dynamics decomposes into a set of independent lower-dimensional propagations. This transformation converts an entangled quantum evolution into a set of parallel computational tasks that can be executed asynchronously across heterogeneous quantum and classical computing architectures. The resulting formalism establishes a direct connection between tensor-network decompositions, uniformly controlled quantum circuits, and asynchronous distributed quantum computing. The approach is developed with a goal towards hybrid quantum/classical implementation, and is appropriate for a general heterogeneous mixture of quantum hardware systems. The experimental realization of the asynchronously distributed quantum processes that arise from the tensor-network decomposition are carried out on the Sandia National Laboratories' trapped-ion quantum computer, where the circuits are compiled using native partial-entangling $XX(\theta)$ gates, reducing the expected two-qubit gate infidelity by more than 30\% relative to conventional fully entangling decompositions. We demonstrate the methodology by quantum computing the vibrational spectra of a small protonated water cluster that shows critical quantum nuclear behavior. Such water cluster systems have been found to be challenging for experimental action spectroscopy and for theory, and here, for the first time, we provide results for vibrational spectroscopy that are in agreement with the respective classical results to within 4cm$^{-1}$, thus allowing for the potential for spectroscopic accuracy from quantum computations.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Exploring Adaptive Masked Reconstruction for Self-Supervised Skeleton-Based Action Recognition

Authors:
Shengkai Sun↗Zhiyong Cheng↗Zefan Zhang↗Jianfeng Dong↗Zhihui Li↗Meng Wang↗

Recently, masked skeleton reconstruction models have emerged as strong action representation learners, driving significant progress in self-supervised skeleton-based action recognition. However, existing state-of-the-art methods must predict an exceedingly large number of spatiotemporal patches, significantly prolonging training time. Besides, by treating all spatiotemporal regions equally during reconstruction, these models are distracted from learning the critical motion patterns that underlie action semantics. To address these challenges, we propose Adaptive Masked Reconstruction (AMR), a faster and stronger pre-training framework. We first decouple the decoder from the encoder, enabling flexible prediction of larger spatiotemporal patches and dramatically reducing reconstruction complexity. Given that larger patches contain more complex information, which is challenging to predict and consequently degrades performance, we accordingly introduce an adaptive guidance module. This module identifies regions of high motion informativeness, guiding the model to focus on the most discriminative parts of each patch and alleviating reconstruction difficulty. Experiments on NTU RGB+D 60, NTU RGB+D 120, and PKU-MMD datasets demonstrate that AMR not only accelerates pre-training substantially but also improves downstream recognition accuracy, surpassing current state-of-the-art approaches.

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

SPARC: Reliable Spatial Annotations from Robot Demonstrations at Scale

Authors:
Nils Blank↗Paul Mattes↗Maximilian Xiling Li↗Jakub Suliga↗Thomas Roth↗Moritz Reuss↗Pankhuri Vanjani↗Rudolf Lioutikov↗

This work introduces Spatial Annotations from Robot Demonstrations with Reliability Calibration (SPARC), a risk-aware framework that automatically labels robot demonstrations with structured spatial annotations and assigns each annotation a reliability score. Structured spatial annotations, such as bounding boxes, object trajectories, and manipulation phase labels, benefit a broad range of robotics applications from training grounded robot policies and embodied foundation models to motion planning and hierarchical task composition. Existing automated pipelines generate such annotations at scale but provide no reliable quality signal: detector confidence is poorly calibrated for annotation correctness, forcing a choice between accepting noisy labels or discarding useful samples. In contrast to existing automated pipelines, SPARC leverages the spatio-temporal structure inherent to robot tasks to generate a reliability signal, reducing noisy labels and retaining more useful samples. We further introduce Interaction-Aware Bench (IA-Bench), a benchmark that measures model accuracy in grounding the locations of interacted objects in robot demonstrations. On 1.7k human-annotated demonstrations spanning diverse embodiments and scenarios, SPARC significantly outperforms detection-only baselines in localization accuracy while retaining three times more samples at high-precision operating points. Our experiments demonstrate that models finetuned on our annotations achieve state-of-the-art results on object-grounding and pointing benchmarks among similarly sized models, while remaining competitive on broader spatial-reasoning suites without manually verified or annotated training data. Furthermore, policies trained on SPARC-generated annotations outperform baselines in cluttered, visually ambiguous real-world scenes. Code, data, and models are available at intuitive-robots.github.io/sparc-labeling.

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24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Mean-field limits for stochastic particle systems on dense graphs

Authors:
Angeliki Koutsimpela↗Elena Magnanini↗

arXiv:2606.11369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic interacting particle systems whose interaction structure is described by dense weighted directed graphs converging to a graphon. In the thermodynamic limit, we prove a law of large numbers for the empirical measure process and derive a deterministic nonlinear master equation describing the macroscopic evolution. The limiting equation retains the heterogeneous interaction structure of the microscopic system through the limiting graphon, allowing for spatially non-homogeneous behaviors such as localized or community-type interactions.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

Authors:
Xiwen Huang↗Pierre Pinson↗

arXiv:2606.17805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

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