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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

One Year Later...The Harms Persist, But So Do We!

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for mental health-related conversations, yet safety safeguards remain inadequate and inconsistent across clinical conditions. This study evaluates six proprietary LLMs across 16 DSM-5 conditions using four adversarial attack variants, introducing an eight-dimension harm taxonomy and a multi-dimensional evaluation framework. Results show that safeguards hold reliably only for suicide and self-harm, while conditions such as eating disorders, substance use disorder, and major depressive disorder exhibit failure rates of up to 100%. We argue that ethical design and deployment of these LLMs demand clearly defined harm categories across clinical conditions and implementation of safeguards accordingly. Until such safeguards are in place, these models pose significant risks to vulnerable populations, making their growing integration into educational settings a particularly concerning.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Wasserstein Policy Learning for Distributional Outcomes

arXiv:2606.19117v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline policy learning has received growing attention in causal inference. The primary objective is to learn a policy (individualized treatment rule) as a mapping from covariates to treatment that maximizes the empirical welfare defined as the mean of scalar-valued potential outcomes. In this paper, we study offline policy learning with distribution-valued outcomes, where each potential outcome is a probability measure on $\mathbb{R}$ and the reward is defined through a utility functional applied to the Wasserstein barycenter of induced outcome distributions. We establish statistical guarantees for the policy learning framework based on both Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW) and Doubly Robust (DR) estimators. By handling the challenging uniform deviation over the product of the combinatorial policy class and the infinite-dimensional quantile domain, we prove that the finite-sample regret has leading dependence $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\sqrt{\mathrm{N-dim}(\Pi)/N})$. In the one-dimensional Wasserstein setting and under the stated regularity conditions, the leading regret rate is still governed by the policy-class complexity. Moreover, we provide a minimax lower bound establishing the sharpness of the leading dependence on $N$ and $\mathrm{N-dim}(\Pi)$.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VisualClaw: A Real-Time, Personalized Agent for the Physical World

Vision language models are serving as general-purpose interfaces for complex multimodal tasks. However, deployment still faces three gaps: VLMs typically incur high latency and cost when processing dense video frames and long prompts, the agent scaffold remains static after deployment, and standard video-QA benchmarks do not test whether agents can use visual evidence inside tool-using workspaces. We present VisualClaw, a self-evolving multimodal agent built around two principles. First, hybrid encoding reduces deployment cost by filtering less informative streaming frames with a cascaded gate and compressing the text skill bank through hot/cold top-k injection. Second, skill evolution lets the agent learn from failures: retrieved memories condition an evolver as direct concatenated context or as guided evidence, producing skill-bank updates that help future questions. Across 4 video-QA benchmarks with 2 VLMs, VisualClaw cuts per-question API cost by an average -98% versus full-frame upload and by -25.9% over the offline uniform 8 frame baseline, while boosting accuracy in most settings, e.g., an average +3.85% and a peak +15.80% on EgoSchema with Gemini 3 Flash. To address the gap, we curate VisualClawArena, a 200-scenario multimodal agentic benchmark built through a strict five-stage pipeline; models must use video evidence, documents, dynamic updates, and executable checks inside a workspace. On VisualClawArena, the same framework with computer-use agent backends improves macro accuracy by +2.9% for Codex (GPT-5.5) and +3.2% for Claude Code (Sonnet 4.6) over no-evolution baselines, with a -9.5% cost reduction compared to the uniform-sampled baseline. These properties make VisualClaw a natural fit for edge applications, where the cascade reduces a 1-hour streaming session from ~3,600 API uploads down to only 5-20 calls and the self-evolution makes it a perfect personalized assistant.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

SCAN: Enhance Time Series Anomaly Detection via Multi-Scale Neighborhood-Centered Clustering

arXiv:2606.19255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series anomaly detection plays a crucial role in a wide range of real-world applications. Reconstruction-based methods have become the mainstream paradigm, but they suffer from over-generalization and under-generalization problems, which are challenging to balance. To address this, we introduce multi-scale clustering to enhance reconstruction-based methods. At the representation level, we integrate the cluster center representations of normal patterns to constrain the model to target representative normal patterns for reconstruction, preventing dominance of powerful capacity and representation capability. At the anomaly criterion level, we derive anomaly confidence score based on cluster membership probability and combine it with reconstruction error, providing dual criteria for detection. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the cluster center representations and anomaly confidence score depends on the clustering performance. Accordingly, we extract neighborhood-centered representations for multi-view clustering to improve clustering performance. Extensive experiments on multiple real-world datasets from diverse application domains demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of SCAN.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

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

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

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

Olmo Hybrid: From Theory to Practice and Back

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of non-transformer language models, especially linear recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and hybrid models that mix recurrence and attention. Yet there is no consensus on whether the potential benefits of these new architectures justify the risk and effort of scaling them up. To address this, we provide evidence for the advantages of hybrid models over pure transformers on several fronts. First, theoretically, we show that hybrid models do not merely inherit the expressivity of transformers and linear RNNs, but can express tasks beyond both, such as code execution. Putting this theory to practice, we train Olmo Hybrid, a 7B-parameter model largely comparable to Olmo 3 7B but with the sliding window layers replaced by Gated DeltaNet layers. We show that Olmo Hybrid outperforms Olmo 3 across standard pretraining and mid-training evaluations, demonstrating the benefit of hybrid models in a controlled, large-scale setting. We find that the hybrid model scales significantly more efficiently than the transformer, explaining its higher performance. However, its unclear why greater expressivity on specific formal problems should result in better scaling or superior performance on downstream tasks unrelated to those problems. To explain this apparent gap, we return to theory and argue why increased expressivity should translate to better scaling efficiency, completing the loop. Overall, our results suggest that hybrid models mixing attention and recurrent layers are a powerful extension to the language modeling paradigm: not merely to reduce memory during inference, but as a fundamental way to obtain more expressive models that scale better during pretraining.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Inverse Reinforcement Learning for Interpretable Keystroke Biomarkers in Parkinson's Disease

Authors:

arXiv:2606.25270v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Keystroke dynamics have been explored extensively as a passive digital biomarker for Parkinson's disease (PD), typically by extracting summary statistics from typing timing and training a classifier to discriminate PD from healthy controls. We instead apply inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to keystroke data, modeling each keystroke as a discrete choice over typing speed and recovering, per subject, an interpretable reward function that explains their observed timing behavior. To our knowledge this is the first application of IRL to keystroke dynamics. On the public neuroQWERTY MIT-CSXPD dataset (85 subjects, 42 with PD), an initial four-parameter reward decomposition (speed, effort, smoothness, hand-alternation cost) was found to suffer severe feature collinearity between two terms ($r=1.000$ in typical contexts); we diagnose and correct this, yielding an identifiable three-parameter model. The recovered speed-preference weight correlates with UPDRS-III severity at $r=-0.607$ ($p

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Entanglement of Bethe States

arXiv:2606.14140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the quantum entanglement of Bethe states across a family of integrable spin chains, including the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ model, its higher-spin generalizations (XXX$_s$), and the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain. For on-shell eigenstates, we perform a comprehensive scan of the bipartite entanglement entropy across the entire spectrum of finite chains with periodic boundary conditions, and identify the Bethe solutions that minimize and maximize the entanglement. These extremal solutions follow systematic, spin-dependent patterns in the Bethe quantum numbers. In the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ spin chain, for the antiferromagnetic chain, the state with minimal entropy always coincides with the lowest-energy state (the ground state) within a given fixed-magnon sector. For the higher-spin XXX$_s$ model, however, the lowest-entropy state is not always identical to the ground state, and can even be the state of highest energy. By contrast, the Bethe roots that maximize entropy exhibit considerably more intricate structure. Our analysis further reveals how special Bethe root configurations, such as singular and strange solutions, affect entanglement, and it uncovers characteristic entanglement features in the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain that are absent from compact spin chains. For off-shell Bethe states, we develop an optimization algorithm that extremizes the entanglement entropy over rapidity distributions, enabling us to explore the maximum entanglement achievable by a Bethe state without imposing the Bethe ansatz equations.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Correction scheme for molecular total energies from quantum phase estimation under limited qubit resources

arXiv:2603.02715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a practical method for accurately evaluating molecular total energies using a hybrid approach that integrates fault-tolerant quantum computers with classical computing. Our scheme consists of two complementary components: quantum dominant orbital selection (QDOS) and subspace dynamical correlation (SDC). QDOS extracts only the essential active orbitals from the complete active space (CAS) configuration interaction (CI) state on a quantum computer, yielding a compact active space suitable for classical CASCI calculations. SDC then evaluates dynamical-correlation corrections for the CASCI energy using this compact state, which remains tractable on classical machines. To demonstrate that the CAS energy obtained on a quantum computer can be post-corrected by SDC, we examine two frameworks: multireference perturbation theory and tailored coupled-cluster theory. Our scheme enables effective treatment of relatively large molecular systems by combining limited quantum and classical resources.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

From Benchmarks to Skills: Low-Rank Factors for LLM Evaluation

Current evaluations of large language models (LLMs) rely heavily on a growing collection of benchmarks and on aggregate benchmark scores, yet it remains unclear what this comparison actually captures, and what these scores reveal about models' underlying capabilities. Here, we propose a new paradigm for LLM evaluation, by asking whether benchmark performance reflects many independent abilities, or rather relies on a small number of shared dimensions. To answer this, we apply Factor Analysis (FA) to a massive performance matrix of LLMs versus benchmarks \((60\times44)\) revealing an intrinsically low-rank structure of that matrix. That is, a small number of latent factors captures most of the structure in the full task space. This low-rank geometry reveals substantial redundancy across existing tasks and explains why many benchmarks appear to be measuring overlapping abilities. We further show that these latent factors correspond to coherent, skill-like, dimensions of LLM behavior. Leveraging this latent skill-space, we deliver three practical tools for LLM evaluation and downstream users: (i)~identifying redundant tasks, (ii)~profiling new models using a small subset of tasks, and (iii)~selecting models aligned with desired skill profiles. Our method provides a solid alternative to the de-facto standard of a single aggregate score, and establishes an interpretable and practical framework for understanding and benchmarking LLM core capabilities.

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

TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment

Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

IUU+DB: Tracking Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing, Seafood Fraud, and Labor Abuse through LLM-driven Information Extraction

arXiv:2606.18181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) traditionally refers to fishing activities that violate applicable laws or occur in areas that lack applicable laws. We propose the term IUU+ to capture a broader suite of fisheries sector environmental and associated supply chain trade-related crimes and behaviors. Although IUU+ activity is widely recognized as a serious threat to marine ecosystems, markets, and livelihoods, a quantitative understanding of these incidents, e.g., their frequency, geography, species, actors, and patterns in the type of illicit activity, remains difficult to obtain. We propose IUU+DB, a large language model driven system for building a global incident database of IUU+ activity. The system ingests heterogeneous documents, classifies whether they describe relevant incidents, extracts key data elements such as actors, locations, species, vessels, violations, and enforcement outcomes, and supports deduplication and trend analysis. Case studies and validation results show that IUU+DB can help organize fragmented evidence, surface geographic and behavioral hotspots, support fisheries-domain specific research in academia and non-government organizations, assist source and species risk assessments for industry, and provide support for policy implementation and targeted enforcement efforts to government agencies.

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

How to Score Experts for One-Shot MoE Expert Pruning: A Unified Formulation and Selection Principle

arXiv:2606.15716v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models reduce per-token computation through sparse expert activation, yet deployment still requires storing the full expert pool, making one-shot expert pruning a practical approach for reducing memory usage. Although effective, existing criteria are largely heuristic, and no single criterion is universally optimal. Thus, establishing a principle for selecting pruning criteria suited to different deployment objectives remains an important yet largely underexplored problem in one-shot expert pruning. To this end, we introduce a unified formulation for one-shot MoE expert pruning organized around three factors: routing frequency, gate weighting, and activation strength. The formulation yields a criteria selection principle: task-agnostic pruning should favor routed-token-averaged, gate-free activation-based criteria, whereas task-specific pruning can benefit from retaining routing-frequency and gate-weight information. Beyond this principle, the formulation also provides a systematic view of existing heuristic criteria and gives rise to two new task-agnostic criteria, Mean Activation Norm (MAN) and Mean Squared Activation Norm (MSAN). Across four representative MoE models and 16 diverse benchmarks, MAN and MSAN are consistently strong in the task-agnostic setting, obtain the top-two average ranks, and improve average performance by up to 8.8 points over the strongest baseline.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Electronic Band Structure of Silicon Determined via a Variational Adiabatic Eigensolver: Theory and Experiment

arXiv:2606.16604v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work addresses the critical challenge of excited-state preparation for semiconductor band structure calculations. We introduce a variational adiabatic eigensolver (VAE) protocol that combines adiabatic evolution with variational optimization to prepare high-fidelity eigenstates on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Applying a momentum-space truncation, we accurately compute the electronic band structure of silicon – an idealized infinite periodic system – using only a modest number of qubits. Our approach employs multi-qubit parameterized circuits and a phase-based loss function, overcoming limitations of conventional methods. These limitations include the circuit-construction difficulty in traditional adiabatic approaches and the reduced accuracy of variational quantum eigensolvers for excited states. Through rigorous numerical simulation and experimental implementation on a superconducting quantum processor, we successfully prepare silicon's valence-band and conduction-band eigenstates. Single-shot readout yields state fidelities exceeding 96%, and the measured energy expectations agree with theoretical band energies within 0.5 eV. Further refinement via single-frequency oscillation fitting reduces the energy deviation to below 0.01 eV. This framework provides a robust and practical pathway for precisely determining electronic structures in quantum materials.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Quantum Annealing Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for Accurate Remaining Useful Lifetime Prediction

arXiv:2606.18503v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Remaining useful life (RUL) estimation is central to predictive maintenance, where an unplanned failure can cost far more than the asset itself. Statistical degradation models miss the strong nonlinearity of real systems, and data-driven models often converge to suboptimal solutions in high-dimensional, non-convex search spaces. We propose a Quantum Annealing enhanced Q-Learning (QAQL) framework that couples the sampling behaviour of quantum annealing with the sequential decision making of Q-learning. Each Q-value update is encoded as a small quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) whose ground state is the greedy action; rather than acting as a deterministic optimizer, the annealer returns a distribution over near-optimal actions across many reads, and this stochastic action selection supplies the exploration that curbs premature convergence on nonlinear degradation trajectories. The QUBO is solved on the D-Wave Advantage system using minor embedding, with the annealer woven into the reinforcement-learning loop rather than bolted on after training. We validate QAQL on two public benchmarks: the NASA C-MAPSS turbofan engine datasets and a device-fleet predictive maintenance dataset. Averaged over many independent runs and across six error metrics, QAQL outperforms the classical and quantum baselines considered in this study, with statistically significant improvements. The results indicate that quantum annealing is a usable, not merely theoretical, optimizer inside a reinforcement-learning loop for industrial predictive-maintenance applications.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

A phase-space approach for performing continuous-variable quantum teleportation with a non-Gaussian resource

arXiv:2606.25471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a comprehensive phase-space analysis of continuous-variable quantum teleportation employing a photon-subtracted two-mode squeezed Fock state (PS-TMSFS) as an entangled resource. We investigate the usefulness of PS-TMSFS within the Braunstein-Kimble teleportation protocol. We explain the generation scheme for the resource state and derive the analytical expression for the success probability associated with the photon-subtraction process. The Wigner characteristic function of PS-TMSFS is calculated and then employed to determine the fidelity for coherent and squeezed state inputs. The dependence of the success probability and teleportation fidelity on the squeezing parameter and beam-splitter transmissivity is analyzed in detail for both symmetric and asymmetric photon-subtraction scenarios. We find that the teleportation fidelity exhibits a strong dependence on the resource parameters and is highly sensitive to variations in the subtraction process. The photon-subtraction process modifies the non-Gaussianity of the resource state, but no substantial enhancement of the teleportation fidelity is detected. Despite the non-Gaussian character of the resource state, fidelity above the classical coherent-state benchmark is observed only for the symmetric $(1,1) $ photon-subtraction configuration in the low-squeezing regime that decreases with increasing squeezing. The remaining configurations remain below the classical threshold throughout the parameter range considered. These findings indicate that the PS-TMSFS may not be a suitable resource for continuous-variable quantum teleportation and offers insight into the limitations of this class of non-Gaussian states.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AgentLeak: A Benchmark for Internal-Channel Privacy Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

arXiv:2602.11510v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems create privacy risks that current output-only benchmarks cannot measure. When agents coordinate on tasks, sensitive data may pass through inter-agent messages, shared memory, and tool arguments, all pathways that final-output audits typically do not inspect. We introduce AgentLeak, a benchmark for evaluating internal-channel privacy leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. AgentLeak instruments seven privacy-relevant communication pathways and provides a large-scale empirical evaluation focused on final outputs, inter-agent messages, and shared memory. Across 1,000 scenarios spanning healthcare, finance, legal, and corporate domains, five production LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Mistral Large, and Llama 3.3 70B), and 4,979 validated execution traces, we find that multi-agent configurations reduce final-output leakage (C1: 27.2% vs 43.2% in single-agent mode) compared with single-agent baselines but introduce internal channels that raise total system exposure to 68.9% (aggregated across C1, C2, C5). Inter-agent messages (C2) leak at 68.8%, compared with 27.2% for final outputs (C1), meaning that output-only audits miss 41.7% of violations. Across all five models and four domains, the pattern C2 $\geq$ C1 holds consistently. These results suggest, within the evaluated coordinator-worker setting, that privacy risk in multi-agent systems is strongly shaped by architectural coordination channels rather than final-output behavior alone: it arises from internal channels that remain invisible to standard output-level defenses.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

SPARK: A Systems-level Computational Framework for Reconstructing Transcriptomic State Organisation in Lung Adenocarcinoma

Lung adenocarcinoma (LUAD) exhibits substantial molecular heterogeneity, which complicates tumour stratification and limits the ability of mutation-centric models to capture tumour behaviour and predict patient outcomes. This study investigates whether coordinated transcriptomic programs can provide a systems-level representation of tumour states. Bulk RNA-sequencing data from the TCGA-LUAD cohort were analysed to reconstruct pathway-level transcriptomic organisation using a stability-optimised network framework (SPARK). This analysis identified eight transcriptomic modules representing coordinated biological processes active across tumours. Module activity scores were subsequently used to derive a composite Transcriptomic Risk Score through elastic-net Cox proportional hazards modelling. The resulting risk score showed a significant association with overall survival in the discovery cohort and improved prognostic discrimination beyond clinical variables. An independent evaluation in the CPTAC-LUAD cohort confirmed the prognostic signal and preserved risk stratification across patient groups. Unsupervised clustering of module activity further revealed three transcriptomic patient groups characterised by distinct biological programs, genomic alteration patterns, and survival outcomes. Single-cell analysis also demonstrated that the identified transcriptomic modules reflect coordinated organisation of the tumour-immune-stromal ecosystem across cellular compartments. Together, these findings suggest that LUAD heterogeneity can be organised into coordinated transcriptomic programs with measurable clinical relevance, providing a systems-level framework for representing tumour molecular states.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FUSE: Quantifying Uncertainty in Vision-Language Models by Bayesian Fusing Epistemic and Aleatoric Uncertainty

Vision-language models (VLMs) are playing an increasingly important role across multiple domains. In many applications, such as robotics, it is crucial to quantify the uncertainty in the output of these models. } We develop FUSE, a probabilistic framework for capturing two complementary sources of uncertainty in vision-language modeling: (i) aleatoric embedding-level uncertainty derived from input data vision-language ambiguity, and (ii) epistemic model-level uncertainty estimated from the semantic response diversity of VLMs. Our approach formulates a Bayesian fusion mechanism that analytically combines these uncertainty sources to produce a scalar measure of uncertainty. This measure can be used to reliably predict the model's output correctness for downstream applications. We demonstrate that our method outperforms baselines and achieves SOTA uncertainty calibration.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Anterior-superior hypothalamic enlargement as specific marker in episodic migraine: converging evidence from an independent discovery-replication design

Background: Growing evidence implicates the hypothalamus as a key structure in migraine pathophysiology; however, our understanding of its precise role and of the specific nuclei involved remains limited. We combined MRI data from our laboratory with publicly available MRI datasets from OpenNeuro to examine hypothalamic subunit volumes in episodic migraine and assess the specificity of these alterations relative to chronic pain conditions. Methods: Structural MRI combined with an automated atlas-based segmentation algorithm and a discovery-replication design was employed to investigate cross-sectional volumetric differences across 5 bilateral hypothalamic subunits in two independent migraine cohorts: DS1-MIG (DS1-MIG-base, n = 111 patients, n = 35 controls) and DS2-MIG (n = 27 patients, n = 31 controls). The adjusted volumes were compared between groups using MANOVA as an omnibus test, followed by Welch t-tests to test univariate follow-up. Longitudinal volumetric changes were additionally assessed in DS1-MIG participants with available follow-up scans using linear mixed models. To assess the specificity of findings to migraine, the same pipeline was applied to two chronic pain datasets, one including patients with fibromyalgia (DS-FM, n = 33 patients, n = 33 controls) and the other including patients with trigeminal neuralgia (n = 119 patients, n = 55 controls). Results: MANOVA revealed significant multivariate group differences in the discovery and replication migraine cohorts (DS1-MIG-base: = .006; DS2-MIG: = .008). Follow-up univariate analyses identified a consistent enlargement of the left anterior-superior subunit across both cohorts (FDR = .023 in DS1-MIG-base and FDR = .046 in DS2-MIG), representing the only cross-cohort replication finding. Beyond this shared signature, DS2-MIG exhibited additional significant enlargements of the right anterior-inferior and right tubular-inferior subunits. Longitudinal analyses in DS1-MIG showed that hypothalamic subunit volumes remained broadly stable over time within both migraine patients and control participants. No significant volumetric alterations were detected in the fibromyalgia or trigeminal neuralgia cohorts, either in multivariate or univariate analyses, underscoring migraine-specific findings. Conclusions: These findings provide evidence for subunit-specific hypothalamic structural alterations in migraine localized in the left anterior hypothalamic subunit. The stability of these differences over time and their absence in other chronic pain conditions suggest a migraine-specific structural organisation of hypothalamic circuitry.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Lithium Production Decisions under Geological, Demand, and Pricing Uncertainties: A POMDP Framework for Multi-Objective Decision Making

arXiv:2606.18598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Decision making in lithium production is challenging, whether from an investor's perspective or a strategic production standpoint. Determining which mines to open and when to open them involves not only geological and price uncertainties, but also complexities around the choice of extraction method, from direct lithium extraction to hard rock mining. Prior work explored models of this problem and different methods to optimize mining decisions; these models did not account for uncertainty in pricing, uncertainty in demand, or different mining technologies to extract lithium. Incorporating different pricing models and extraction technology into these models enables more robust strategies for determining not only when and where to open a mine, but also which method of production to pursue. We frame the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) and solve using belief state planning methods to get optimal decision making. In our study, we show that POMDP solvers outperform human inspired heuristics by dynamically adapting to shifting lithium price regimes (static, linear, exponential, and stochastic) through belief state planning and explicit uncertainty management. By optimally sequencing exploration, production, and technology choice, the framework achieves higher demand fulfillment and more balanced economic environmental outcomes over the projects lifetime in all different pricing and deposit scenarios.

22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Ten simple rules for executing an inherited research plan in computational biology

by Sahar Javaheri Tehrani, Toni Ingolf Gossmann Trainees in computational biology frequently inherit research plans whose aims, datasets, analytical strategies, and technical constraints were defined before their arrival. These plans often emerge from grants, collaborations, legacy codebases, shared high-performance computing environments, or partially completed analyses. While such plans provide a useful scaffold, they rarely specify all implementation details, prior assumptions, evaluation criteria, or dependencies needed for reliable execution. The transition from inheriting a partially articulated plan to producing reproducible results therefore creates an execution gap: a phase in which trainees must reconstruct what the project is, which elements are fixed, which remain negotiable, and which technical or organizational assumptions need to be tested before full-scale analysis begins. In this Ten Simple Rules article, we provide a practice-oriented framework for stabilizing inherited computational biology projects before workflows, benchmarks, and decision paths become entrenched. We do not claim that the individual practices described here are novel in isolation. Rather, our contribution is to organize familiar practices into a sequenced framework for a recurrent but under-articulated phase of computational research: inherited-plan execution. Computational biology makes this phase especially important because projects often combine heterogeneous datasets, fragile software environments, undocumented preprocessing choices, benchmarking assumptions, distributed collaborators, and asymmetrical access to contextual knowledge. By making this transition visible and operational, the rules aim to help trainees, supervisors, and collaborators reduce ambiguity, test feasibility, document decisions, and support reproducible and equitable project execution under real-world constraints.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes

arXiv:2606.13200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the interference of critical dynamics associated with zero modes (ICDZM) in the generalized Creutz ladders using closed quench paths that pass through two critical points successively. By reading out the final zero-mode transfer probability, we find rich ICDZM interference patterns dependent on the quench path. In particular, when the closed path links two topologically nontrivial phases, the ICDZM pattern may either vanish or exhibit period doubling. Within the framework of WKB analysis, this phenomenon is well clarified by the interference phase accumulated in the quench procedure. We also demonstrate that the zero-mode transfer probability can be detected by the deviation of the boundary particle number from its initial fractional value, which arises from the blending of bulk modes in the critical dynamics. As an edge defect, the zero-mode transfer probability captures both the ICDZM oscillation and the known anomalous defect production in a non-closed quench path. These results identify ICDZM and the corresponding edge defect as probes for critical dynamics associated with topological zero modes.

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

ATOM-Bench: A Real-World Benchmark for Atomic Skills and Compositional Generalization in Manipulation Policies

arXiv:2606.16826v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generalist manipulation policies are increasingly presented as foundation models for robotic control, but their real-world generalization remains difficult to diagnose. A policy may succeed on demonstrated tasks while still failing to execute fine-grained atomic skills or recombine learned skills in new task structures. We introduce ATOM-Bench, a real-world benchmark for evaluating both atomic skills and compositional generalization in manipulation policies. ATOM-Bench factorizes tabletop manipulation into motor atoms and instruction atoms, and contains 30 atomic tasks and 24 held-out compositional tasks across paired single-arm and dual-arm robot tracks. We collect 3,000 human demonstrations for atomic fine-tuning and release both the demonstration data and evaluation rollout data to support reproducible real-world evaluation. Policies are fine-tuned on atomic tasks and evaluated on both atomic skill acquisition and held-out compositional tasks. We further introduce Atomic Score (AS) and Compositional Failure Share (CFS) to distinguish failures caused by weak atomic skills from failures caused by limited compositional reuse. Through 2,700 physical rollouts on five representative manipulation policies, we find that current policies can acquire simple instruction-grounding skills, but still struggle with fine-grained motor atoms, counting, and logical filtering. More importantly, strong atomic performance does not reliably transfer to held-out compositional tasks. ATOM-Bench provides a diagnostic testbed for studying whether failures arise from weak motor execution, poor instruction grounding, or limited compositional reuse.

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

MuseVLA: An Adaptive Multimodal Sensing Vision-Language-Action Model for Robotic Manipulation

Humans naturally leverage diverse sensing modalities to interact with the physical world, while most Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models for robotics rely solely on RGB observations. This limits their ability to perceive physical properties that are difficult or impossible to infer from RGB cameras, such as temperature, sound, or radar response. We present MuseVLA, an adaptive multimodal sensing VLA model that integrates novel sensors as on-demand tools for robotic manipulation. Given a task instruction and visual context, MuseVLA first generates a sensor token and target description that select the sensing modality to invoke and what to attend to, analogous to a tool call with arguments. It then converts the selected sensor measurement into a grounded sensor image, a unified intermediate representation that encodes heterogeneous readings for multimodal fusion and action generation. This design decouples sensor-specific processing from the VLA backbone, enabling efficient integration of diverse modalities. To reduce the need for expensive multisensory robot datasets, we further introduce a data synthesis pipeline that augments existing RGB video datasets with grounded sensor images, enabling generalization to unseen sensor-guided tasks. We evaluate MuseVLA on a real-world robot across challenging dexterous hand manipulation tasks that require multimodal sensing inputs, including temperature-guided pick-and-place, audio-driven object search, and radar-assisted hidden object retrieval. MuseVLA achieves 80.6% success rate on average, outperforming RGB-only and multisensory VLA baselines significantly, and exhibits strong zero-shot capabilities on unseen tasks.