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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin counting via projection noise measurement of mesoscopic solid-state spin ensemble

Authors:
Lorenzo Bechelli↗Konstantin Herb↗Laura Alicia V\"olker↗Christian L. Degen↗

arXiv:2606.14437v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum projection noise is the fundamental noise source for the population measurement of spin ensembles. While projection-noise-limited measurements have been extensively studied in atomic systems, corresponding experiments on solid-state spin ensembles remain challenging due to dominant classical readout noise. Here, we report direct measurement of the quantum projection noise of mesoscopic ensembles of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) spin defects at room temperature. Our experiment is enabled by a high optically-detected magnetic resonance (ODMR) contrast of over 20% for a single crystallographic orientation of the defect spins, obtained by combining polarization-selective optical excitation with spin-to-charge conversion. We use our protocol to demonstrate projection noise measurements and spin counting from nanoscale NV ensembles of up to 43 spins. We further demonstrate that the protocol allows for significant gains in sensitivity for magnetometry applications without need for cryogenic operation or high bias magnetic fields.

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

FashionChameleon: Towards Real-Time and Interactive Human-Garment Video Customization

Authors:
Quanjian Song↗Yefeng Shen↗Mengting Chen↗Hao Sun↗Jinsong Lan↗Xiaoyong Zhu↗Bo Zheng↗Liujuan Cao↗

Human-centric video customization, particularly at the garment level, has shown significant commercial value. However, existing approaches cannot support low-latency and interactive garment control, which is crucial for applications such as e-commerce and content creation. This paper studies how to achieve interactive multi-garment video customization while preserving motion coherence using only single-garment video data. We present FashionChameleon, a real-time and interactive framework for human-garment customization in autoregressive video generation, where users can interactively switch garment during generation. FashionChameleon consists of three key techniques: (i) Instead of training on multi-garment video data, we train a Teacher Model with In-Context Learning on a single reference-garment pair. By retaining the image-to-video training paradigm while enforcing a mismatch between the reference and garment image, the model is encouraged to implicitly preserve coherence during single-garment switching. (ii) To achieve consistency and efficiency during generation, we introduce Streaming Distillation with In-Context Learning, which fine-tunes the model with in-context teacher forcing and improves extrapolation consistency via gradient-reweighted distribution matching distillation. (iii) To extend the model for interactive multi-garment video customization, we propose Training-Free KV Cache Rescheduling, which includes garment KV refresh, historical KV withdraw, and reference KV disentangle to achieve garment switching while preserving motion coherence. Our FashionChameleon uniquely supports interactive customization and consistent long-video extrapolation, while achieving real-time generation at 23.8 FPS on a single GPU, 30-180$\times$ faster than existing baselines.

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

Variable-Rate Deep Image Compression based on Low-Rank Adaptation by Progressive Learning

Authors:
Xing-Yu Xu↗Chen-Hsiu Huang↗Ja-Ling Wu↗

In the digital age, image compression is crucial for numerous applications, including web media, streaming services, high-resolution medical imaging, and connected vehicle networks, enabling efficient data storage and transmission. With the increasing demand for high-quality image communication, the need for advanced compression techniques becomes increasingly critical. Numerous Deep Image Compression (DIC) techniques have recently been introduced, showing impressive performance compared to traditional standards. However, variable-rate image compression remains an unresolved issue. Specific DIC methods deploy multiple networks to attain different compression rates, whereas others use a single model, which often results in higher computational complexity and reduced performance. This work proposes a progressive learning approach for variable-rate image compression based on the parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, the Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). We introduce an additional LoRA Rate-Adaptive Module (LoRAM) in DIC methods. Due to the re-parameterized merging of LoRA, our proposed method does not introduce additional computational complexity during inference. Compared to methods utilizing multiple models, comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance, saving 99\% in parameter storage, 90% in datasets, and 97% in training steps.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Majorana bound states in a hybrid Kitaev ladder with long-range pairing

Authors:
Rajiv Kumar↗Tapan Mishra↗Levan Chotorlishvili↗Sunil Kumar Mishra↗

arXiv:2606.19963v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate an inter-leg coupled hybrid Kitaev ladder composed of two parallel superconducting chains with distinct pairing interactions. The upper chain of the ladder hosts conventional $p$-wave pairing, while the lower chain exhibits long-range pairing that decays algebraically with distance. We demonstrate that the mutual influence of long-range pairing exponent, chemical potential, and inter-leg coupling strength gives rise to a rich topological phase diagram characterized by multiple Majorana zero modes and massive Dirac modes. In particular, we show that the inter-leg coupling renormalizes the effective energy scales, leading to a systematic shift of the topological phase boundaries and enabling controlled tuning of the Majorana modes. Furthermore, we identify a transition from a two Majorana zero mode phase to a phase encapsulating four Majorana zero modes, as the long-range pairing exponent is varied. This transition is accompanied by a crossover regime in which Majorana zero modes coexist with massive Dirac modes, reflecting hybridization between edge and bulk excitations. This ladder thus provides a minimal and attractive platform for realizing the impact of a long-range pairing on topological phases. Our results highlight the potential of long-range hybrid systems for engineering tunable topological states relevant for quantum information applications.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

ProtoX-AD: Self-Explainable Time Series Anomaly Detection and Characterization

Authors:
Aitor S\'anchez-Ferrera↗Elisabeth Wetzer↗Kristoffer Wickstr{\o}m↗Michael Kampffmeyer↗Robert Jenssen↗

arXiv:2606.13277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in time series anomaly detection (TSAD) have highlighted the effectiveness of self-supervised classification-based approaches. These methods apply transformations to normal training samples, training a classifier to recognize transformation-specific patterns that help identify anomalies through increased classification errors. Despite their strong performance, a significant challenge is their lack of explainability, as they provide limited insight into the characteristics of flagged anomalies. To address this limitation, we propose ProtoX-AD, a prototype-based self-explainable framework for self-supervised TSAD. ProtoX-AD learns transformation-aware latent representations alongside interpretable prototypes, enabling both accurate anomaly detection and the identification of distinct anomalous profiles through prototype-based explanations. Additionally, it allows for systematic analysis of how transformation design impacts detection performance and explainability. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that ProtoX-AD achieves detection performance comparable to its black-box counterparts while offering more consistent and semantically meaningful explanations than existing explainable baselines. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Aitorzan3/ProtoX-AD.

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

When More Documents Hurt RAG: Mitigating Vector Search Dilution with Domain-Scoped, Model-Agnostic Retrieval

Authors:
Nabaraj Subedi↗Ahmed Abdelaty↗Shivanand Venkanna Sheshappanavar↗

Retrieval-augmented generation degrades when scaled to large, heterogeneous document collections, where dense similarity loses discriminative power, and top-k retrieval increasingly returns semantically similar but contextually incorrect chunks. We refer to this failure mode as vector search dilution. Even when using hybrid dense+sparse retrieval, we observed this firsthand in a deployed Wyoming Department of Transportation corpus, where scaling from 54 to 1,128 documents (88,907 chunks) reduced accuracy from 75% to below 40%. To address this dilution, we propose MASDR-RAG ( Multi-Agent Scoped Domain Retrieval for RAG) and evaluate it on 200 expert-validated queries across five LLM backbones, six corpora, and two index stacks. Our results indicate that domain scoping using organizational metadata is the key fix, significantly improving P@10 from 0.77 to 0.86 ($p < 0.05$). Furthermore, our investigation of multi-agent orchestration revealed that a high degree of configuration dependence results –creating what we call the precision-faithfulness paradox. Based on these varied outcomes, our practical recommendation is simple: scope first, then perform a single synthesis call, reserving full multi-agent orchestration for genuinely multi-domain corpora paired with native-tool-call backbones. Code and Data will be made public upon acceptance.

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

Latent space mapping of interpretable structural coordinates from stochastic single-molecule signals

Authors:
Matteo Cartiglia↗Sandro Kuppel↗Wouter Botermans Wannes Peeters↗Natan Biesmans↗Liam Vandekerckhove↗Eric Beamish↗Koen Ongena↗Wouter Renckens↗Pol Van Dorpe↗Sanjin Marion↗

arXiv:2606.16950v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Nanopores are versatile single-molecular sensors, but their utility is fundamentally constrained by stochastic translocation dynamics warping any encoded information. We resolve it by shifting from time-domain analysis to a learned latent-space mapping via a contrastive encoder trained exclusively on simulated signals from a physics-informed model. This encoder maps solid-state nanopore signals of engineered DNA barcodes into an interpretable molecular coordinate system. The learned representation is responsive to structural barcode parameters while remaining invariant to acquisition conditions and translocation conformation, allowing data pooling across devices. Molecule identification requires a single pass through the encoder, reducing computational cost by three orders of magnitude relative to alignment-based methods. We experimentally validate through mixture quantification, rare-variant detection, consensus barcode reconstruction, and real-time signal acquisition. This shift from temporal analysis to mapping structural coordinates into a latent space changes the paradigm behind analyzing stochastic sensor signals by linking classification to interpretable encoded molecular information.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Learning Arbitrary Lindbladians with Quantum Error Correction

Authors:
Nikita Romanov↗Petr Ivashkov↗Weiyuan Gong↗Ishaan Kannan↗Andi Gu↗Hong-Ye Hu↗Susanne F. Yelin↗

arXiv:2606.18188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study ansatz-free Lindbladian learning, the problem of reconstructing the generator of an open quantum system without prior knowledge of its Hamiltonian or dissipator structures. This problem exhibits two distinct information-theoretic precision limits: Hamiltonian components unmasked by dissipation are Heisenberg-limited, while the remaining Lindbladian components are subject to the quadratically worse standard quantum limit. Existing approaches that attain these optimal scalings strongly rely on pre-specified structure of interaction and noise, leaving the ansatz-free setting an open problem. In this work, we present the first standard-quantum-limited algorithm for learning arbitrary sparse Lindbladians. Under an additional physically motivated regularity condition, our framework also learns the Hamiltonian component disjoint from the dissipator at the Heisenberg limit, without prior knowledge of either the Hamiltonian or dissipator supports. Our main technical ingredient is a recursive random stabilizer-code construction that suppresses the strongest Lindbladian terms while preserving sensitivity to weaker unknown ones. These results establish a scalable framework for characterizing unknown open quantum systems, with quantum error correction serving as a key learning primitive.

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09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

SMLMFlow: Improving Structural Resolution in Single Molecule Localization Microscopy with Flow Matching

Authors:
Bauer↗Panconi↗Cunha↗Latron↗Sage↗Peters↗Griffie↗

While Single Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) aims to generate precise coordinates of molecular targets in cells, the resulting point clouds are inherently blurred by additive noise sources across the experimental, imaging, and processing workflow. This blurring often limits SMLM's ability to accurately quantify complex assembled structures required to address biological issues, despite reported localization precision down to a couple of nanometers. Here, we present SMLMFlow, a machine learning framework for improving structural resolution in SMLM datasets that combines a graph neural network and a hierarchical transformer with flow matching. We show that SMLMFlow improves structural resolution and downstream quantification across different structures, including filaments and protein nano-clusters, and generalizes to new unseen photophysics models.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Automated Airways Characterization and Assessment of Cystic Fibrosis from CT Imaging

Authors:
Chong Chie↗J. A. K. H↗Cooper↗M. L↗Persohn↗S. A↗Burton↗C. P↗Salama↗Territo↗P. R↗

Background Advancements in medical imaging have enabled non-invasive diagnosis and staging of cystic fibrosis (CF) using CT scans, revealing dilated airways, an increased number of visible airways, and airway generation splits in these patients. However, manual characterization of airways remains time-consuming and challenging due to the numerous structural changes, thereby limiting clinical feasibility. This study aims to develop an automated algorithm to characterize airways from segmented lung CT scans and apply this to a retrospective population. This approach reduces the time required to analyze images and obtain disease-staging results. Methods This framework consists of two stages. The first stage extracts and skeletonizes the airway tree from lung CTs, while the second stage measures lung features, including airway volumes, branch counts, generation splits, diameters, and cross-sectional areas. This permits comprehensive characterization for use in clinical assessment. Results The airways analysis was performed on 169 CT volumes ranging in age from 6 to 18 years of age, revealing substantial differences in detected airway branches, generation splits, and normalized airway volume between the control and CF groups. The framework also measures airway diameters and cross-sectional areas, revealing an increase in the number of small airways in cystic fibrosis patients, due to early bronchiectasis. These findings align with previous research and demonstrate the framework's ability to accurately quantify airway changes in patients with CF. Discussion The framework extracts entire airway trees, facilitating measurements of volume, branch count, diameters, and cross-sectional areas, which change with CF severity and/or treatment. However, partial lung atelectasis can limit the accuracy of airway detection in moderate-to-severe cases. Funding NIA U54 AG054345 and NIA R21 AG07857501

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11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

Bias-mitigated microbiome inference refines coronary artery disease signature

Authors:
Honeybrook↗

Roughly half the cells in the human body are microbial, and changes in these communities are increasingly implicated in cardiovascular, metabolic, and oncological diseases. Yet identifying which taxa truly differ in abundance, differential abundance (DA), is distorted by four major sources of bias: loss of total microbial load, taxa measurement efficiencies, arbitrary pseudocounts required to handle pervasive zeros, and contamination which has recently driven retractions. No existing DA method accounts for all four. Here we introduce BootDA, a non-parametric bootstrap-based method that explicitly models each bias source without data transformations, pseudocounts, parametric assumptions, or assuming that most taxa are non-DA. In semi-parametric simulations preserving the sparsity (>70% zeros) and correlation structure of real 16S amplicon data, BootDA achieved the highest sensitivity among tested methods, including ANCOM-BC2, LinDA, MaAsLin 3, and Wilcoxon tests, while controlling the false discovery rate. Performance was retained in low biomass settings when contamination contributed ~50% of counts, and without negative controls, indicating de novo decontamination capability. Applied to a coronary artery disease cohort, BootDA refined the original signature to two co-enriched genera, Klebsiella and Gemmiger, and excluded likely contaminants. BootDA is available as an R package and could generalise to other sparse, high dimensional biological data.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DDTNet: Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network for Test-Time All-in-One De-weathering Adaptation

Authors:
Kuan-Hung Lin↗Fu-Jen Tsai↗Yan-Tsung Peng↗Min-Hung Chen↗Chia-Wen Lin↗Yen-Yu Lin↗

All-in-one adverse weather image restoration aims to remove multiple degradations, such as rain, haze, and snow, using a single unified model. Despite their broad applicability, existing methods typically compromise performance, delivering balanced but suboptimal results for individual degradation types. This issue becomes more pronounced when a domain gap exists between training and testing data. Motivated by the observation that modeling degradation patterns is more feasible than recovering clean content, we propose the Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network (DDTNet), which focuses specifically on degradation transfer. By disentangling degradation patterns from target-domain degraded images and transferring them to source domain clean images, DDTNet generates domain-adaptive paired training data. These pairs are then used to fine-tune restoration models, significantly enhancing their adaptability across diverse weather conditions and domains. The core of DDTNet is the Degradation Disentanglement Module (DDM), which comprises Degradation Coupled Attention (DCA) to capture both general and weather-specific features, thereby enabling effective disentanglement and transfer of degradation patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that DDTNet significantly and consistently improves existing all-in-one models across real-world deraining, desnowing, and dehazing datasets.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Reverse Flow Matching: A Unified Framework for Online Reinforcement Learning with Diffusion and Flow Policies

Authors:
Zeyang Li↗Sunbochen Tang↗Navid Azizan↗

arXiv:2601.08136v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion and flow policies are gaining prominence in online reinforcement learning (RL) due to their expressive power, yet training them efficiently remains a critical challenge. A fundamental difficulty that distinguishes online RL from standard generative modeling is the lack of direct samples from the target Boltzmann distribution defined by the Q-function. To address this, two seemingly distinct families of methods have been proposed for diffusion policies: a noise-expectation family, which uses a weighted average of noise as the training target, and a gradient-expectation family, which employs a weighted average of Q-function gradients. However, it remains unclear how these objectives are formally related, or whether they can be synthesized into a more general formulation. In this paper, we propose a unified framework, reverse flow matching (RFM), which rigorously addresses the problem of training diffusion and flow models without direct target samples. By adopting a reverse inferential perspective, we formulate the training target as a posterior mean estimation problem given an intermediate noisy sample. Crucially, we introduce Langevin Stein operators to construct zero-mean control variates, deriving a general class of estimators that share the same expectation. We show that existing noise-expectation and gradient-expectation methods are simply two specific instances within this broader class. This unified view yields two key advancements: it extends the capability of targeting Boltzmann distributions from diffusion to flow policies, and it enables the principled combination of Q-value and Q-gradient information to form an effective estimator, thereby improving training efficiency and stability. We instantiate RFM to train a flow policy in online RL and demonstrate improved performance on continuous-control benchmarks compared to diffusion policy baselines.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Nonlocal continuous-variable gates by amplified optical connections

Authors:
Michele N. Notarnicola↗Radim Filip↗

arXiv:2603.12866v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nonlocal quantum gates, coupling quantum systems located at a distance, are crucial for distributed quantum computing. To this aim, high-capacity optical noiseless connections between different processing units are essential for transmitting large amounts of information per mode. Simultaneously, optical quantum computing offers future high-speed multimode quantum processors. We propose a library of feasible protocols to implement a necessary nonlocal continuous-variable (CV) quantum nondemolition (QND) gate between two distant users sharing a quantum channel and exploiting classical communication. The users are endowed with a newly achieved high-fidelity and large-bandwith element - single-pass phase-sensitive optical parametric amplifier (OPA), that allows for both online squeezing and channel-loss compensation. The use of OPAs enhances quality of the resulting gate in terms of both excess noise and entangling capability. The proposed schemes are also applicable to CV cluster state fusion, providing a first step towards development of distributed CV measurement-based quantum computation.

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

Wasserstein Policy Learning for Distributional Outcomes

Authors:
Yiyan Huang↗Cheuk Hang Leung↗Qi Wu↗Zhiheng Zhang↗

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 $\mathrm{N-dim}(\Pi)$.

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

Layer-wise Geometric Approximation Rates for Deep Networks

Authors:
Shijun Zhang↗Zuowei Shen↗Yuesheng Xu↗

arXiv:2604.20219v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Depth is widely viewed as a central contributor to the success of deep neural networks, whereas standard neural network approximation theory typically provides guarantees only for the final output and leaves the role of intermediate layers largely unclear. We address this gap by developing a quantitative framework in which depth admits a precise scale-dependent interpretation. Specifically, we design a single shared mixed-activation architecture of fixed width $2dN+d+2$ and any prescribed finite depth such that each intermediate readout $\Phi_\ell$ is itself an approximant to the target function $f$. For $f\in L^p([0,1]^d)$ with $p\in [1,\infty)$, the approximation error of $\Phi_\ell$ is controlled by $(2d+1)$ times the $L^p$ modulus of continuity at the geometric scale $N^{-\ell}$ for all $\ell$. The estimate reduces to the geometric rate $(2d+1)N^{-\ell}$ if $f$ is $1$-Lipschitz. Our network design is inspired by multigrade deep learning, where depth serves as a progressive refinement mechanism. For every prescribed terminal depth, the construction yields a finite nested family of prefix readouts whose earlier correction terms remain embedded in later readouts. Thus the approximation may be truncated within the prescribed depth range once the desired certified accuracy is reached.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

T Cell Receptor repertoire analysis reveals antigenic convergence and immunotherapeutic opportunities in Prostate Cancer

Authors:
Gallo↗Palmieri↗

Background: The T-cell receptor {beta} (TCR{beta}) repertoire reflects antigen-driven adaptive immune responses and provides insight into tumor-immune interaction. In prostate cancer (PCa), the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment limits effective T-cell activation, and the antigenic drivers shaping intratumoral TCR repertoires remains poorly defined. This study aimed to characterize matched tumor and peripheral TCR{beta} repertoires from treatment-naive PCa patients and to identify shared clonotypes and antigenic specificities associated with disease severity. Methods: Next-generation sequencing was used to profile TCR{beta} repertoires from matched tumor biopsies and peripheral blood mononuclear cells obtained from treatment-naive PCa patients. Repertoires clonality, diversity, and was assessed using established metrics. Antigenic convergence was evaluated using GLIPH2 to identify shared CDR3{beta} motifs and predicted tumor-associated antigen (TAA) recognition, followed by functional validation using IFN-{gamma} ELISpot and T-cell expansion assays. Results: Tumor-derived TCR{beta} repertoires displayed reduced richness and increased clonality compared with peripheral blood mononuclear cells, consistent with local antigen-driven expansion. High-grade tumors demonstrated greater interpatient clonotype sharing and motif-level convergence, indicative of recognition of common TAAs. GLIPH2 analysis associated expanded clonotypes with epitopes derived from prostate-specific G-protein coupled receptor (PSGR), prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA), and prostate-specific antigen (PSA). Functional validation confirmed that peptide pools containing PSGR- and PSMA-derived epitopes induced IFN-{gamma} production and antigen-specific T-cell proliferation in vitro. Conclusions: These findings reveal an oligoclonal, antigen-driven intratumoral TCR{beta} landscape and identify PSGR and PSMA as immunogenic, potentially actionable targets. Integration of TCR profiling with antigen discovery pipelines may support the development of TCR-based biomarkers and precision immunotherapeutic strategies in prostate cancer.

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

EverydayGPT: Confidence-Gated Routing for Efficient and Safe Hybrid GPT-RAG Conversational QA

Authors:
Jaspreet Singh Nahal↗

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines route every query through retrieval and generation unconditionally, incurring unnecessary computation and propagating low-quality context to the generator. We introduce EverydayGPT, a lightweight conversational QA system built around a Confidence-Gated Routing (CGR) mechanism that formalises the routing decision as a joint policy over retrieval distance and extraction adequacy. The backbone is a 205M-parameter GPT trained from scratch on 10B tokens of FineWeb-Edu. CGR avoids invoking the costly GPT pathway (~5.9s) for 85 percent of queries by resolving them via fast RAG extraction (~45 ms), yielding over 120x latency reduction on the majority of queries while maintaining answer quality. On a 500-question in-domain benchmark, the system achieves F1 = 0.226 +/- 0.004 compared to 0.171 for GPT-only and 0.210 for unconditional RAG. Gains over strong baselines are modest but consistent, while efficiency improvements are substantial (6.3x mean latency reduction). A structured grounding audit finds no unsupported claims in the sampled set, with explicit scope limitations. We position this work as a study of routing strategies under resource constraints rather than a claim of state-of-the-art performance.

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19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A small noise approximation for Muller's Ratchet

Authors:
Carola Sophia Heinzel↗Peter Pfaffelhuber↗Anton Wakolbinger↗

arXiv:2606.15842v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider an infinite system of SDEs with Fleming-Viot noise indexed by $k=0,1,2,\dots$, whose parameters $\alpha,\lambda$, and $\nu$ are the (deleterious) selection coefficient, the (uni-directional) mutation rate, and a quantity which determines the size of the system's fluctuations. The SDE's unique weak solution $X(t) = (X_k(t))_{k=0,1,2,...}$ models what is known in population genetics as Muller's ratchet. Here, $X_k(t)$ stands for the frequency of individuals carrying $k$ deleterious mutations. Since the mutation process is uni-directional, $t\mapsto \inf\{k: X_k(t)> 0\}$ is non-decreasing for almost every path of $X$, and we refer to an increase as a click of Muller's ratchet. A long standing question concerns the clicking rate of Muller's ratchet. Using Duhamel's principle for semigroups, we give a partial answer by approximating $E(\sum_{k=1}^\infty kX_k(t) )$ and $E\big(X_0(t)\big)$ up to $O(1/\nu^2)$ for fixed $\alpha$, $\lambda$ and $t>0$. Our results suggest that $\psi:=\nu \alpha e^{-\lambda/\alpha}$ is a crucial quantity also when the mutation/selection ratio $\theta = \lambda/\alpha$ is moderately large: for large $\nu \alpha$, clicking of the ratchet on the time scale $\frac 1\alpha \log \theta$ becomes rare as soon as $\psi$ becomes large.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Spatial-Aware Reduction Framework: Towards Efficient and Faithful Visual State Space Models

Authors:
Jindi Lv↗Aoyu Li↗Yuhao Zhou↗Zheng Zhu↗Xiaofeng Wang↗Qing Ye↗Yueqi Duan↗Wentao Feng↗Jiancheng Lv↗

arXiv:2606.19932v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mamba demonstrates strong efficiency in modeling long visual sequences. However, when token reduction is applied to structurally enhanced Mamba variants, these models exhibit a severe performance collapse. We attribute this degradation to the spatially agnostic nature of existing reduction methods, which violate the two-dimensional structural premise required by the selective scanning mechanism. In this work, we propose STORM, a spatial-aware token reduction framework designed to maintain structural integrity throughout the compression process. STORM reformulates reduction into a structured operation on spatial units, enforcing localized constraints to maintain both grid topology and neighborhood coherence. As a plug-and-play module, STORM equips existing reduction pipelines with explicit spatial awareness without any training. Empirical results demonstrate that STORM achieves state-of-the-art pruning accuracy across diverse vision Mamba backbones under training-free settings. Notably, STORM delivers a substantial accuracy recovery on VMamba, outperforming prior methods by up to 63.3\% in top-1 accuracy. Meanwhile, STORM incurs only a 1.0\% accuracy drop on PlainMamba, achieving performance comparable to ViT.

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

Why Tree-Style Branching Matters for Thought Advantage Estimation in GRPO

Authors:
Hongcheng Wang↗Yinuo Huang↗Sukai Wang↗Guanghui Ren↗Hao Dong↗

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) trains Chain-of-Thought reasoning with verifiable rewards, but estimating thought-level advantages without value functions often suffers from high variance. Although tree-style branching is used in practice to reduce variance, it lacks a theoretical explanation of why it works and whether it is important or potentially necessary. We study thought-level advantage estimation in GRPO from a variance perspective under a minimal tree-style setting where multiple continuations are sampled for each thought. Using the multivariate delta method, we reveal a sampling-dimension asymmetry. Increasing sampled thoughts ($K$) leaves a strictly positive estimation-variance floor, whereas increasing continuations per thought ($M$) drives the leading-order estimation variance to zero at rate $1/M$. This implies that, within the fixed-temperature GRPO-style estimator without value models studied here, accurate thought-level advantage estimation cannot be achieved by scaling thought sampling alone, making continuation-level branching a principled and potentially necessary mechanism rather than a heuristic. Experiments further provide empirical evidence for its effectiveness and potential necessity, demonstrating improved optimization stability, training efficiency, and final performance not only in math but also across vision domains and under different model architectures and sizes.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Space Is Intelligence: Neural Semigroup Superposition for Riemannian Metric Generation

Authors:
Chenghao Xu↗

arXiv:2606.18828v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional approaches place intelligence in the agent, whether as a learned policy or a search procedure. We instead place intelligence in the space itself: a scene induces a Riemannian metric on the configuration manifold, and action reduces to following the geodesics of that metric rather than invoking a separate planner or collision checker. A single Encoder-Router network realizes this idea through three complementary parameter groups – frame parameters that orient the generators, modulation parameters that govern their spatial propagation, and basic coefficients that determine their strength. These groups combine through a shared semigroup-superposition mechanism to produce a single Riemannian metric field, yielding a compact architecture whose geometry scales naturally with scene complexity. Trained on a single two-obstacle scene, the model demonstrates robust zero-shot generalization across unseen obstacle configurations, with orders-of-magnitude separation between collision-free and obstacle-penetrating path costs.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Reinforcement Learning Towards Broadly and Persistently Beneficial Models

Authors:
Akshay V. Jagadeesh↗Rahul K. Arora↗Khaled Saab↗Ali Malik↗Mikhail Trofimov↗Foivos Tsimpourlas↗Johannes Heidecke↗Karan Singhal↗

As AI systems are deployed across increasingly diverse and high-stakes settings, model alignment must generalize beyond the tasks and domains seen during training. This is especially important for reinforcement learning (RL), which can introduce unexpected misalignment through reward hacking, deception, or other unintended strategies. We study whether RL on beneficial behavior, instantiated in realistic domains, can produce broad and persistent alignment generalization beyond the training distribution. We construct a dataset of realistic situations designed to measure and train beneficial traits, such as truthfulness, fairness, risk awareness, and corrigibility, spanning varied domains, including health, science, and education. We then train models with RL on this dataset and evaluate them on more than 50 independent benchmarks of alignment and beneficial behavior. Compared to a compute-matched baseline, beneficial trait RL improves performance on over 80% of these out-of-distribution benchmarks. We observe substantial out-of-distribution alignment transfer: a beneficial-behavior RL intervention entirely limited to one domain, health, produces broad improvements on non-health alignment evaluations, including reduced reward hacking, deception, and general misalignment. Finally, we study alignment persistence: whether behavior remains robustly aligned under attempts to steer models towards misalignment. Models trained with beneficial trait RL show improved persistence, including greater resistance to adversarial prompting and harmful finetuning; further work is required to isolate the sources of these effects. These results suggest that RL to reinforce beneficial behavior in realistic domains can produce models that are more robustly aligned with human flourishing.

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

Learning Sparse Latent Predictive Foundation Model for Multimodal Neuroimaging

Authors:
Haoxu Huang↗Long Chen↗Jingyun Chen↗Jinu Hyun↗James Ryan Loftus↗Kara Melmed↗Daniel Orringer↗Jennifer Frontera↗Seena Dehkharghani↗Arjun Masurkar↗Narges Razavian↗

Brain MRIs are routinely acquired as multiple complementary sequences with unique contrast weighting, including T1-weighed imaging (T1w) anatomic and fluid-sensitive T2-weighted (T2w) contrasts. However, methods for learning unified representations across the multitude of MRI contrast mechanisms at health-system scale are lacking. In this study, we introduce Neuro-JEPA, a sparse multimodal neuroimaging foundation model that combines a latent predictive objective with a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to encode brain MRI across core T1w, T2w, and fluid-suppressed FLAIR imaging (FLAIR). We further provide a systematic methodological study of architectural, masking, objective, and sparsity design choices beneficial for robust neuroimaging multimodal representation learning. Neuro-JEPA was pretrained on 1,551,862 scans from 428,647 studies after modality-specific preprocessing with data curation across three core structural brain MRI sequences. We evaluated the learned representations across clinical and research settings, including 25 tasks from three health systems: NYU Langone, NYU Long Island, and Massachusetts General Hospital, and 22 tasks from 12 public datasets, covering unimodal, multimodal and cross-domain evaluation configurations. Across these benchmarks, existing neuroimaging foundation models showed inconsistent gains over a simple convolutional neural network (CNN) baseline, whereas Neuro-JEPA achieved stronger and more consistent performance across all evaluated settings. These results establish a scalable methodological framework for multimodal neuroimaging representation learning and highlight the need for foundation model evaluation protocols that include simple baselines, clinically heterogeneous cohorts and controlled multimodal comparisons.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PepALD: Macrocyclic Peptide Generation via Autoregressive Latent Diffusion

Authors:
Junming Zhang↗Siyu Yi↗Wei Ju↗Zhonghui Gu↗

arXiv:2606.14510v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Macrocyclic peptides are promising therapeutic candidates for intracellular targets, but their design requires simultaneous control over non-natural monomer chemistry, ring topology, membrane permeability, and target binding. Existing SMILES- or HELM-string generative models either operate in long atom-level sequence spaces or treat monomers as symbolic tokens with limited chemical grounding. We introduce PepALD, an Autoregressive Latent Diffusion (ALD) foundation model for de novo macrocyclic peptide generation. The model represents HELM monomers with structured chemical embeddings, generates each residue through context-conditioned diffusion in chemically informed latent space, predicts R-group-aware ring closures during autoregressive generation, and aligns the denoiser to affinity rewards using winner-protected diffusion-adapted preference optimization. In silico experiments demonstrate PepALD's generation quality and reward-optimization performance against representative peptide generation baselines.

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