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

TNODEV: Toolbox for Neural ODE Verification

arXiv:2606.16567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural ordinary differential equations (neural ODE) have started to appear in safety critical settings such as continuous-time controllers for cyber-physical systems and classifiers integrated into automated decision pipelines, raising the question of whether their behavior can be formally verified. Existing tools dedicated to neural ODE provide only a single reachability call without iterative input set refinement, limiting the precision of their verdicts to whatever one reachability call can deliver. We present TNODEV, the first sound formal verifier for neural ODE that integrates a falsification checker, a fast interval-based reachability backend based on continuous-time mixed monotonicity, a verification and refinement loop with three input-set splitting heuristics, and a parallel scheduler in a single end-to-end pipeline. TNODEV supports safe-set inclusion verification on pure neural ODE, neural ODE in closed loop with a neural network controller and general neural ODE (GNODE), with the safe set specified either as an interval or as the half-space intersection induced by a target classification label. We evaluate TNODEV on a range of benchmarks across safe-set inclusion and classification-robustness properties, including a direct reachability comparison against NNV~2.0 and CORA and a verification comparison against NNV2.0 on MNIST general neural ODE classifiers.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Simulation-Based Multi-Fillet Evaluation of Woody Breast Poultry Fillets

Woody breast (WB) is a myopathy in modern broiler chickens that causes the breast muscle to become unusually stiff and fibrous, leading to decreased meat quality and significant economic losses. State-of-the-art automated WB detection relies on a side-view imaging system to analyze the bending behavior of a single fillet as it falls off a conveyor belt. While highly accurate, this approach is constrained by its single-fillet field of view, creating throughput bottlenecks on commercial processing lines. In this paper, we address this limitation via a novel multi-fillet detection architecture utilizing a top-down camera configuration. To validate our approach, we first develop a high-fidelity digital twin of an industrial conveyor system. Next, we synthesize a diverse dataset of 3D fillet meshes and model their viscoelastic bending dynamics using a physics-based simulation engine. Lastly, a continuous 2D shape deformation score is extracted from the top-down perspective as the simulated fillets traverse the roller precipice. Experimental results demonstrate that the top-down shape score effectively captures the contour changes of the fillets as it bends, providing a robust and scalable alternative to a side-view imaging system for simultaneous multi-fillet WB evaluation.

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

Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

arXiv:2602.16793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Context-aware Modality-Topology Co-Alignment for Multimodal Attributed Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) model real-world entities by coupling graph topology with heterogeneous attributes such as text and images. They support graph-centric tasks requiring structural and class-discriminative representations, and modality-centric tasks requiring fine-grained cross-modal correspondence. However, existing MAG methods often rely on fixed graph contexts or uniformly fused representations, causing task-agnostic propagation and over-compressed fusion that hinder diverse task requirements and modality-specific evidence preservation. To address this, we propose CoMAG, a unified MAG backbone that learns task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment within them. CoMAG first conducts Reliable Context Learning by estimating edge reliability from multimodal semantic consistency, complementing raw topology with semantic neighbors, and selecting context components through a task-aware gate. It then performs Modality-preserving Hop-token Alignment by maintaining modality-specific multi-hop trajectories, matching modality-hop tokens across modalities, and decoupling shared and private representations. Thus, CoMAG produces graph and modality representations from one forward pass while retaining modality-specific cues. We further analyze stable propagation, over-smoothing mitigation, and modality-collapse control. Experiments on nine OpenMAG datasets compare CoMAG with feature-only, graph-only, multimodal, and unified MAG baselines across graph-level prediction, modality matching, and graph-conditioned generation. Results show that CoMAG achieves the best reported performance, demonstrating that task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment improve structural prediction, cross-modal matching, and graph-conditioned generation while retaining sparse edge-linear complexity.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

PVminerLLM2: Improving Structured Extraction of Patient Voice via Preference Optimization

Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information on patients' lived experiences, social context, and care engagement, but remains largely unstructured, limiting its use in patient-centered outcomes research. Prior work introduced the PV-Miner benchmark and PVMinerLLM models for structured extraction. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone struggles with rare, fine-grained, and unevenly distributed errors, particularly in token-critical structured outputs. Results: We present PVminerLLM2, an improved set of LLMs for structured patient voice extraction that applies preference optimization to address token-critical errors beyond the reach of supervised fine-tuning. Our method introduces (i) a preference objective with token-level gated stabilization term that prevents degradation of absolute token likelihood under preference optimization, and (ii) confusion-aware preference pair construction to better capture low-separation distinctions. We further incorporate token-importance weighting and inverse-frequency reweighing to address token imbalance and class skew. Across multiple model sizes, PVMinerLLM2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.43% (Code), 3.50% (Sub-code), and 1.55% (Span), and outperforms baseline LLM trained with existing preference optimization methods. Availability and Implementation: The supplementary material, code, evaluation scripts, and trained models for PVminerLLM2 are publicly available at: https://github.com/Data-Mining-Lab-Yale/PVminerLLM2

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

Hallucination in Medical Imaging AI: A Cross-Modality Analytical Framework for Taxonomy, Detection, and Mitigation under Regulatory Constraints

arXiv:2606.13211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems are being deployed across medical imaging faster than their failure modes are understood. At this point in time, the failure of greatest clinical concern is hallucination: clinically plausible but factually incorrect outputs, including fabricated anatomical structures, missed findings, incorrect laterality, and invented measurements in generated reports, with direct consequences, for example, for biopsy decisions, staging, and treatment planning. This structured narrative synthesizes peer-reviewed studies, benchmark datasets, and FDA regulatory guidance across five imaging modalities to produce a cross-modality analysis of hallucination taxonomy, etiology, detection, and mitigation. Specifically, we address three questions in this study: (1) how can existing taxonomies be unified across modalities?, (2) how do medical-specialized foundation models hallucinate less than general-purpose ones?, and (3) which mitigation strategies are effective and compatible with FDA lifecycle oversight? We note that three taxonomic frameworks together cover the imaging pipeline in a way no single framework does alone. We also highlight that general-purpose foundation models outperform medical-specialized models on hallucination-specific benchmarks, indicating that narrow domain fine-tuning can introduce overfitting-induced confabulation. At the same time, the oversight of radiologists remains essential; for instance, a very high percentage of of AI-generated flags required expert correction before clinical use. Physics-informed architectural constraints, Chain-of-Thought prompting, and human-in-the-loop safeguards each address different failure modes and is effective when combined. All findings are mapped to the FDA's Total Product Lifecycle and Predetermined Change Control Plan frameworks, which treat hallucination management as a lifecycle obligation rather than a pre-deployment checklist.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

AgentBeats: Agentifying Agent Assessment for Openness, Standardization, and Reproducibility

arXiv:2606.13608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems are advancing quickly across domains, but their evaluation remains fragmented. Most benchmarks rely on fixed, LLM-centric harnesses that require heavy integration, create test-production mismatch, and limit fair comparison across diverse agent designs. The root problem is the lack of an open, agent-agnostic assessment interface. We advocate Agentified Agent Assessment (AAA), where evaluation is performed by judge agents and all participants interact through standardized protocols: A2A for task management and MCP for tool access. Conventional benchmarking defines two separate interfaces, one for the benchmark and one for the agent, while AAA only needs one; this yields a generic, unified framework that separates assessment logic from agent implementation and enables reproducible, interoperable, and multi-agent evaluation. We further introduce AgentBeats as a concrete realization of AAA: we identify five practical operation modes that make standardized assessment compatible with real-world constraints on openness, privacy, and reproducibility. To evaluate our design at scale, we conduct two studies: a five-month open competition that drew 298 judge agents across 12 categories together with 467 subject agents from independent participants, showing that AAA applies across a heterogeneous range of benchmarks; and a case study on coding agents that confirms agentified evaluation preserves fidelity with the public record while surfacing previously missing head-to-head results, yielding research insights about agent design. Combining a community-scale field study and a controlled coding case study, we verify that AAA delivers coverage, practicality, and fidelity across heterogeneous scenarios at scale. Together, AAA and AgentBeats offer a clear path toward open, standardized, and reproducible agent assessment.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FAPO: Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization of Multi-Step LLM Pipelines

arXiv:2606.19605v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-step LLM pipelines fail through interactions among retrieval, reasoning, and formatting steps, so prompt-only optimization can miss bottlenecks in the chain. We present FAPO (Fully Autonomous Prompt Optimization), a framework that lets Claude Code optimize an LLM pipeline inside a standardized codebase. FAPO evaluates a pipeline, inspects intermediate steps, diagnoses failures, proposes scoped changes, and validates variants repeatedly to optimize against a score function. It first tries prompt edits and, only when prompt optimization appears insufficient, changes chain structure within the permitted scope when attribution identifies a structural bottleneck. Across six benchmarks and three task models, FAPO beats the baseline GEPA in 15 of 18 model-benchmark comparisons. In 11 model-benchmark comparisons, FAPO wins with non-overlapping mean $\pm$ trial-standard-deviation ranges, and the mean FAPO-GEPA gain is +14.1 pp. In the six HoVer and IFBench comparisons where prompt-first search escalated to structural changes, FAPO wins all six with a mean gain of +33.8 pp. FAPO also improves performance on security tasks: on CTIBench-RCM, a security CVE-to-CWE task, prompt-only FAPO lifts test accuracy by +4.0 pp on GPT-5, +7.1 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Instruct, and +2.0 pp on Foundation-Sec-8B-Reasoning. These results position FAPO as a state-of-the-art pipeline optimization technique for both general-purpose and security-focused tasks.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning Control for Resilient Cyber-Physical Systems

arXiv:2606.19069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper compares the performance of model-free controllers on a nonlinear system under cyberattacks, including false data injection and denial-of-service attacks. Four RL reward types are analyzed for accuracy, cost, and resilience. Results show that the Lyapunov reward offers the best resilience with low tracking error. Exponential mode also provides good trade-offs with acceptable resilience under moderate training conditions. Progressive and linear rewards converge faster but are less robust. RL-MPCs show strong steady-state resilience but require longer training times; RL-PID controllers are faster with significantly less training time. Proximal Policy Optimization outperforms Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient with a significant reduction in KPI variance. This study serves to highlight how well-designed RL rewards can improve performance and resilience against cyber threats.

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

More Context, Larger Models, or Moral Knowledge? A Systematic Study of Schwartz Value Detection in Political Texts

Detecting Schwartz values in political text is difficult because implicit cues often depend on surrounding arguments and fine-grained distinctions between neighboring values. We study when context and explicit moral knowledge help sentence-level value detection. Using the ValuesML/Touché ValueEval format, we compare sentence, window, and full-document inputs; no-RAG and retrieval-augmented settings with a curated moral knowledge base; supervised DeBERTa-v3-base/large encoders; and zero-shot LLMs from 12B to 123B parameters. The results show that more context is not uniformly better: full-document context improves supervised DeBERTa encoders by 3.8-4.8 macro-F1 points over sentence-only input, but does not consistently help zero-shot LLMs. Retrieved moral knowledge is more consistently useful in matched comparisons, improving each tested model family and context condition under early fusion. However, scaling from DeBERTa-v3-base to large and from 12B to larger LLMs does not guarantee gains, and simple early fusion outperforms the tested late-fusion and cross-attention RAG variants for encoders. Per-value analyses show that context and retrieval help most for socially situated or conceptually confusable values. These findings suggest that value-sensitive NLP should evaluate context, knowledge, and model family jointly rather than treating longer inputs or larger models as universal improvements.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Symptom-based phenotype discovery in motor neuron disease using natural language processing of electronic health records

Background: Motor neuron disease (MND) is a fatal neurodegenerative condition with significant clinical heterogeneity that is incompletely captured by existing phenotype classifications based on onset site. Electronic health records (EHRs) contain detailed symptom documentation in clinical narratives that may enable data-driven discovery of clinically meaningful patient subgroups. Methods: We developed a natural language processing (NLP) pipeline using MedCAT to extract symptoms from clinical notes of 2,361 people with a confirmed diagnosis of MND at a tertiary neurology center. MND cohort confirmation used three complementary methods: clinic attendance records, text-based diagnosis detection, and NLP extraction with negation detection. Extracted symptoms were filtered to Unified Medical Language System semantic type T184 (Sign or Symptom) with removal of negated concepts. Patients were clustered using latent class analysis on binary symptom profiles. Survival differences were assessed using Kaplan-Meier analysis, log-rank tests, and Cox proportional hazards regression. Results: From the first clinical notes, we identified four clusters of symptoms among 872 patients and 76 symptoms: Motor-Bulbar (n=373), Motor-Tremor (n=154), Sensory-Pain (n=222), and Motor-Respiratory (n=123). When extended to all clinical notes (n=2,065; 184 symptoms), these reorganized into three clusters: Autonomic-Respiratory (n=472), Nocturnal-Respiratory (n=338), and Classic Motor (n=1,255). Survival differences were significant across all clusters in both the first notes and all notes analyses (log-rank p < 0.001). Conclusions: NLP-based symptom extraction from EHRs identifies clinically meaningful MND subgroups that extend beyond traditional onset-site classifications. Autonomic-respiratory symptom burden is associated with poorer survival while a newly identified Sensory-Pain subtype with a better prognosis. These data-driven phenotypes may improve prognostication and inform targeted supportive care.

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

Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build

arXiv:2605.21629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much have students' ordinary learning processes shifted in response to generative AI, and how does that affect their durable learning outcomes? Self-report surveys show little change, while small-scale behavioral studies report widespread AI use without the scale or duration to measure learning consequences. We address both questions using a ten-year panel of $3.2$ million ALEKS learning interactions for investigating time-on-task, complemented by ALEKS PPL placement-assessment data for examining proctoring and learning outcomes, with a quasi-experimental design exploiting variation in tasks that are more susceptible to AI (text-based word problems) and less susceptible to AI (interactive graph-based problems). Learning time on AI-susceptible problems declines $2.8\%$ per quarter among college students after ChatGPT's release, cumulating to $26.9\%$ over eleven quarters; high-schoolers show $31.3\%$, middle-schoolers $9.0\%$, and Grade 5 students no detectable change. Among college students, the post-ChatGPT divergence vanishes entirely under proctoring, ruling out broad efficiency gains as the likely explanation. Logistic fixed-effects models on randomly assigned proctored retention items yield a $25\%$ cumulative decline in odds of correct response; the same estimator on non-proctored assessment produces a large opposite-signed increase – inconsistent with any platform, cohort, or curriculum explanation. These results are among the first large-scale behavioral and outcome evidence that generative AI has altered how students study and the knowledge they build – the population-level indicator of cognitive surrender, with direct implications for educational research, assessment governance, and AI policy.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Beyond the Commitment Boundary: Probing Epiphenomenal Chain-of-Thought in Large Reasoning Models

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood. We estimate each step's causal importance via early exit and use this measure to study how answers form across the reasoning traces of several model families. Across diverse tasks, we find that reasoning typically crosses a commitment boundary – a sharp transition from transient intermediate guesses to a stable, high-confidence answer. This transition often happens in a single step, well before the model's reasoning block ends, and is followed by epiphenomenal CoT steps that leave the final answer probability unaltered. Using attention probes, we show that answer-formation stages can be linearly decoded from intermediate reasoning steps with high accuracy and generalize robustly to unseen reasoning tasks. We exploit this signal to early-exit reasoning blocks at the commitment boundary, reducing the length of CoTs up to 55\% on average with negligible impact on model performance.

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

Sparse positive maps on qutrits with exact nondecomposability thresholds and PPT-entanglement transitions

arXiv:2606.19765v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a family of sparse positive maps on qutrits for which positivity, decomposability, and PPT entanglement can all be analysed explicitly. The block structure of the associated Choi matrices reduces positivity to a Hermitian biquadratic form and leads to exact positivity boundaries for three representative parametric families. For the same families we determine the exact transition between decomposable and non-decomposable maps and construct associated PPT states of two classes. The first consists of witness-adapted deformations naturally tied to the non-decomposability analysis. The second consists of analytically tractable families whose full PPT-entangled branch is detected by fixed positive maps, yielding exact thresholds between separability and bound entanglement. For the trace-preserving subclass, we further compare positivity with a recent eigenvalue bound for 2-positive maps, thereby making the gap between positivity and higher-order positivity fully explicit within this family.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

An epidemiological scenario for Mass Events During the World Cup

This brief work discusses potential superspreading events that may occur during the World Cup in Mexico. The study is particularly focused on the city of Guadalajara due to a large recent outbreak in January and February and insufficient vaccine coverage prior to 2026. Keywords: Superspreading; measles outbreak; branching process; individual reproduction number; World Cup

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Universal Crossovers of Stabilizer Entropy Beyond Criticality

arXiv:2606.13810v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Stabilizer Rényi entropy has emerged as a probe of nonstabilizerness in quantum many-body systems, but its scaling structure beyond critical points remains poorly understood compared with entanglement entropy. Recent field-theory approaches indicate that stabilizer entropy contains universal critical data and boundary-sensitive terms, raising the question of how these structures extend into massive and crossover regimes. We address this problem for a broad class of finite-range spin chains at Rényi index one-half. We derive exact finite-size formulas for both full periodic chains and finite intervals of the infinite chain, making the universal crossover from critical to noncritical behavior analytically accessible. In periodic geometry, the entropy obeys a volume law away from criticality and exhibits a universal finite-size crossover controlled by the competition between system size and correlation length. We also show that the large-scale SRE density develops a cusp across the field-tuned critical line, while the XX endpoint is governed by a distinct scaling regime associated with the saturation point. In the subsystem geometry, the interval entropy separates bulk critical behavior from boundary contributions generated by the way the finite region cuts the infinite chain. The crossover from critical to massive behavior is then encoded in boundary constants and universal functions controlled by the correlation length. Through exact stabilizer-entropy correspondences, the scaling theory extends to internal XY reductions, Finite-range spin chains, and Cluster–Ising representatives. Our results provide an exact lattice benchmark for the emerging QFT description of stabilizer entropy beyond isolated conformal points.

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

Learning When to Sample: Confidence-Aware Selective Sampling for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet they often generate unnecessarily long reasoning paths that incur high inference cost. Self-consistency-based approaches push accuracy higher still, but they require sampling and aggregating multiple reasoning trajectories, leading to substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce a confidence-aware selective sampling framework that, at inference time, analyzes a single reasoning trajectory to adaptively determine whether to rely on that trajectory alone or trigger multi-path sampling. The framework uses trajectory-level numeric features and sentence-level linguistic features extracted from reasoning states to guide selective multi-path reasoning. We train it on MedQA and evaluate it in-domain on MedQA and under calibration-only transfer on MathQA, MedMCQA, and MMLU, without further fine-tuning. Experimental results show that the proposed framework maintains comparable performance to full and efficient multi-path reasoning baselines, with accuracy changes of $-0.41 \pm 0.58$ and $-0.31 \pm 0.58$ percentage points, respectively, while reducing token usage by $71.7 \pm 5.0%$ and $36.6 \pm 9.1%$. These findings demonstrate that reasoning trajectories contain rich signals for uncertainty estimation, enabling a simple, transferable mechanism to balance accuracy and efficiency in LLM reasoning.

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

Hidden Ghost Hand: Unveiling Backdoor Vulnerabilities in MLLM-Powered Mobile GUI Agents

Graphical user interface (GUI) agents powered by multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown greater promise for human-interaction. However, due to the high fine-tuning cost, users often rely on open-source GUI agents or APIs offered by AI providers, which introduces a critical but underexplored supply chain threat: backdoor attacks. In this work, we first unveil that MLLM-powered GUI agents naturally expose multiple interaction-level triggers, such as historical steps, environment states, and task progress. Based on this observation, we introduce AgentGhost, an effective and stealthy framework for red-teaming backdoor attacks. Specifically, we first construct composite triggers by combining goal and interaction levels, allowing GUI agents to unintentionally activate backdoors while ensuring task utility. Then, we formulate backdoor injection as a Min-Max optimization problem that uses supervised contrastive learning to maximize the feature difference across sample classes at the representation space, improving flexibility of the backdoor. Meanwhile, it adopts supervised fine-tuning to minimize the discrepancy between backdoor and clean behavior generation, enhancing effectiveness and utility. Extensive evaluations of various agent models in two established mobile benchmarks show that AgentGhost is effective and generic, with attack accuracy that reaches 99.7\% on three attack objectives, and shows stealthiness with only 1\% utility degradation. Furthermore, we tailor a defense method against AgentGhost that reduces the attack accuracy to 22.1\%. Our code is available at \texttt{anonymous}.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

AFFORDABILITY OF INTOXICATION FROM CHEAP ETHANOL: EVIDENCE FROM RETAIL ALCOHOL MARKETS IN UGANDA

Background: Alcohol affordability is a determinant of consumption and alcohol-related harm. In many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), informal production, variable alcohol strength, and non-standard packaging complicate conventional affordability measures, limiting evidence on the economic accessibility of alcohol and the cost of intoxication. Objective: To assess the affordability of intoxication in Uganda by estimating the cost of obtaining ethanol to reach intoxication across alcohol products, packaging types, and retail contexts. Methods: Data were collected on 824 alcoholic beverages from urban, rural, and urban-slum retail markets. Ethanol-standardized pricing (price per gram of alcohol) was calculated, and the cost of consuming 60 g of ethanol was estimated. Multivariate regression identified determinants of ethanol affordability. Results: Affordability varied by product type and packaging. Opaque beers and illicit spirits provided the cheapest pathways to intoxication, with median costs of UGX 1,200-1,500 per 60 g of ethanol. Plastic packaging was associated with lower ethanol costs than glass packaging. Ethanol prices differed across formal and informal markets (p < 0.01), while rural areas and urban informal settlements had 20-25% lower costs than urban areas. Regulatory status alone did not predict affordability. Conclusions: In Ugandas diverse alcohol market, affordability is driven by access to ethanol rather than beverage price alone. Low-cost, high-strength alcohol sold through informal channels enables intoxication at minimal expense, among disadvantaged populations. Implications: Alcohol policies should target ethanol content through minimum unit pricing, alcohol-content-based taxation, and regulation of informal markets and packaging practices to reduce harmful consumption and inequities.

20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

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

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&nbsp;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&nbsp;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.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Smol-GS: Compact Representations for Abstract 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Smol-GS, a novel method for learning compact representations for 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS). Our approach learns highly efficient splat-wise features to model 3D space, which capture abstracted cues, including color, opacity, transformation, and material properties. We propose octree-derived positional encoding, which explicitly models spatial locality and enhances representation efficiency. We further apply entropy-based compression to exploit feature redundancy and compress splat coordinates using a recursive voxel hierarchy. This design enables orders-of-magnitude reduction in storage while preserving representation flexibility. Smol-GS achieves state-of-the-art compression performance on standard benchmarks with high-level rendering quality.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Off-Policy Evaluation for Missingness-Aware Policies in MDPs with Rewards Missing Not at Random

arXiv:2606.20206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In offline Reinforcement Learning, immediate rewards in logged batch data are often unobserved due to sparse or irregular record-keeping, or censored beyond certain reward values. This issue arises in practical settings, including health care and marketing. We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE) in finite-horizon Markov decision processes when rewards are missing not at random (MNAR), which breaks ignorability and induces selection bias even after conditioning on states and actions. To address this, we formalize a reward-dependent propensity model and use future states as shadow variables to identify the full-data conditional mean reward. We further introduce a bridge function that recovers the conditional mean reward without explicitly modeling the MNAR mechanism, and estimate it via a min-max procedure to avoid double sampling. Building upon these identification results, we propose an Fitted-Q-Evaluation-style estimator that propagates the recovered rewards while allowing target policies to depend on past missingness indicators. Finally, we establish consistency and finite-sample error bounds for our OPE estimator, and show through experiments the strong performance of our method compared to existing methods on simulated and MIMIC-III Sepsis data.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

nD-RoPE: A Generalized RoPE for n-Dimensional Position Embedding

arXiv:2606.12146v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) is widely adopted in Transformer models, yet its extension to high-dimensional domains lacks a unified theoretical formulation. Most existing approaches either apply rotations independently along each axis or empirically mix frequencies, which limits cross-dimensional interactions and yields direction-dependent representations. To address these limitations, we propose nD-RoPE, a decomposition-free generalization of RoPE to arbitrary dimensions. From a translation-invariant formulation in continuous Hilbert space, we derive a spectral condition for isotropy that requires treating positions and frequencies as coupled \(n\)-dimensional vectors. We instantiate this formulation with a multi-scale regular-simplex wave-vector design, which provides non-degenerate spatial coverage and a symmetric, directionally balanced second-order response. Experiments across images, videos, and point clouds demonstrate consistent performance gains and improved generalization in high-dimensional settings.

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Minimum Zero-Forcing Sets

arXiv:2606.18106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper explores the problem of finding the minimum zero-forcing set on undirected graphs and proposes an adapted machine-learning framework to solve the problem. The minimum zero-forcing set problem is a graph coloring problem where the color of an initial set of nodes propagates throughout a network. The set of nodes is zero-forcing if it forces all uncolored nodes to change color under the constraint of the color-change rule. There are several applications to this problem across different domains such as network science, network control, and designing logical circuits. Finding the minimum zero-forcing set is shown to be NP-hard. We propose a reinforcement learning framework, SD-ZFS, that adapts the S2V-DQN architecture to the ZFS problem. We train several models on this adapted framework and analyze the performance across graph datasets that have varying structures. We evaluate how the models trained on the framework generalize, scale, and transfer to different network types. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework when compared against the optimal solution and greedy heuristic. We provide further insight into how the ZFS problem can be solved through machine-learning and the influence of network structure on the problem.