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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Theory of uncertain probability: can we derive the probability density function of uncertain random experiments with continuously changing conditions?

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper aims to explore the formation mechanism of probability distribution in situations where the differences among random experiments are distinguishable, and these differences continue to evolve along with the dynamic changes in conditions and their mechanisms of action. To this end, we are motivated to devise a new theoretical system – theory of uncertain probability (TUP) with Kolmogorov's system and nonlinear theories as special cases. TUP develops a novel model that integrates probability and uncertainty as well as the known and unknown to more accurately depict numerous typical random phenomena under more realistic assumptions, and thus provides appropriate tools for greater variety of real needs. It also allows for pioneering interpretation of the causal mechanisms underlying many important distributional characteristics and incorporation of pathwise property to distribution model.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Landscape-Similarity-Guided Optimization in Divide-and-Conquer QAOA

arXiv:2602.21689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Divide-and-conquer strategies mitigate hardware constraints for the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) devices by partitioning large interaction graphs into smaller, hardware-compatible sub-problems. However, this approach introduces a severe classical training bottleneck: a decomposition across $m$ boundary nodes generates $2^m$ distinct sub-problems that typically require independent optimization. In this work, we demonstrate that across diverse synthetic and real-world interaction graphs, the variational landscapes of these reduced QAOA instances actually exhibit a robust universality. Adapting the replica-overlap framework of spin-glass physics, we define a landscape-overlap order parameter $q$ to quantify geometric correlations between energy landscapes, revealing a sharp landscape-similarity transition as graph connectivity is tuned. Exploiting this, we introduce Doubly Optimized QAOA (DO-QAOA), an adaptive pipeline that collapses the sub-problems from $2^m$ distinct sub-problems into $K=\mathcal{O}(1)$ effective landscape classes. By performing optimization on a single representative sub-problem and dynamically transferring parameters to remaining sub-problems, DO-QAOA lowers runtime and quantum measurement overhead by orders of magnitude while maintaining a competitive Approximation Ratio Gap (ARG).

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

DRA-GRPO: Your GRPO Needs to Know Diverse Reasoning Paths for Mathematical Reasoning

Post-training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning, specifically Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), has emerged as a paradigm for enhancing mathematical reasoning. However, standard GRPO relies on scalar correctness rewards that are often non-injective with respect to semantic content: distinct reasoning paths receive identical rewards. This leads to a Diversity-Quality Inconsistency, where the policy collapses into a narrow set of dominant modes while ignoring equally valid but structurally novel strategies. To bridge this gap, we propose Diversity-aware Reward Adjustment (DRA), a theoretically grounded framework that calibrates the reward signal using the semantic density of sampled groups. By leveraging Submodular Mutual Information (SMI), DRA implements an Inverse Propensity Scoring (IPS) mechanism that effectively de-biases the gradient estimation. This creates a repulsive force against redundancy, driving the policy to achieve better coverage of the high-reward landscape. Our method is plug-and-play and integrates seamlessly with GRPO variants. Empirical evaluations on five math benchmarks demonstrate that DRA-GRPO consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving an average accuracy of 58.2% on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B with only 7,000 training samples and $55 cost, highlighting the critical role of diversity calibration in data-efficient alignment. The code is available at https://github.com/xiwenc1/DRA-GRPO.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Power-Flexible AI Data Centers: A New Paradigm for Grid-Responsive Compute

arXiv:2606.25098v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid expansion of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is driving unprecedented growth in electricity demand from data centers. Traditional power-system planning treats large computing facilities as inflexible peak loads, leading to costly infrastructure upgrades and long delays in grid interconnection. Recent work has shown that AI clusters can reduce electricity consumption during peak demand through software-based workload orchestration. This article explores how modern GPU-based AI data centers can operate as grid-interactive assets that respond dynamically to power system conditions. We describe an architecture integrating grid signals, workload scheduling, and power telemetry for fine-grained cluster power control. Experimental results from a real-world deployment on a 130 kW GPU cluster demonstrate multiple forms of flexibility, including rapid load reduction, sustained curtailment, and carbon-aware operation while preserving service levels for priority jobs. We further demonstrate performance-aware load shifting across geographically distributed clusters, enabling workloads to migrate toward regions with lower grid stress. Together, these capabilities transform AI infrastructure from static electricity consumers into flexible resources that support grid reliability, accelerate interconnection, and improve computing sustainability.

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

ALIGNBEAM : Inference-Time Alignment Transfer via Cross-Vocabulary Logit Mixing

Domain fine-tuning degrades the safety of large language models: fine-tuned specialists readily comply with harmful prompts framed in domain language. Existing inference-time defenses that mix logits from a safe anchor model require both models to share a vocabulary, which rules them out for the cross-family specialists where safety is most degraded. We present ALIGNBEAM, a training-free method that lifts this restriction by translating anchor logits into the target model's vocabulary token-by-token at each decoding step; a small LLM judge then selects the safest among K candidate continuations. No weights are changed, and the safety-utility trade-off can be tuned at deployment without retraining. Across both cross-vocabulary and same-vocabulary evaluation pairs, ALIGNBEAM substantially raises refusal on adversarial benchmarks while keeping task accuracy and inference overhead within practical bounds. The results show that safety alignment can be transferred between model families at inference time, without touching either model's weights.

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

Multi-Adapter PPO: A Cross-Attention Enhanced Wavelength Selection Framework for LIBS Quantitative Analysis

arXiv:2606.17476v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) quantitative analysis faces critical challenges in wavelength selection due to high-dimensional spectral data and the fundamental trade-off between prediction accuracy and feature efficiency. This paper presents a novel Multi-Adapter PPO framework that transforms wavelength selection into a reinforcement learning problem, leveraging cross-attention mechanisms and multiple specialized adapters to capture complex spectral relationships. Our approach outperforms traditional Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) by an average of 28.4\% in comprehensive score and 45.2\% in prediction accuracy across steel and coal datasets. The proposed method demonstrates superior performance in balancing prediction accuracy with feature efficiency, achieving state-of-the-art results in LIBS quantitative analysis while maintaining interpretability and computational efficiency. We released our code and dataset here: https://github.com/Hflying/MAPPO

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

Benchmarking AI Agents for Addressing Scientific Challenges Across Scales

arXiv:2606.12736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents are increasingly being developed to accelerate scientific discovery, yet their practical capabilities in real research settings remain poorly understood. Existing benchmarks for AI agents rarely capture the complexity, heterogeneity, and extended reasoning required by scientific work, whereas benchmarks for scientific tasks often reduce research to static, direct problems and provide limited support for interactive evaluation. Here, we introduce SciAgentArena, a systematic benchmark for evaluating AI agents in real-world scientific research scenarios drawn from emerging needs across multiple domains. SciAgentArena comprises approximately 200 tasks with stepwise verification and an interactive, agent-agnostic environment for assessing diverse AI agents. Using this benchmark, we find that current agents can contribute effectively to well-specified data-analysis workflows, particularly when the task structure and evaluation criteria are clear. However, their performance remains uneven across scientific contexts: agents struggle to generate genuinely novel insights, sustain self-directed exploration, and formulate robust solutions for open-ended research questions. We further characterize common failure modes across agents and identify opportunities for improving their reliability, autonomy, and scientific reasoning. Together, SciAgentArena provides a practical framework for measuring progress in AI agents for science and for guiding the design of future agents capable of addressing complex scientific challenges. Full codes, tasks, and datasets can be accessed via this link: https://sciagentarena.github.io/.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Arbor: Tree Search as a Cognition Layer for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2606.12563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arbor is a multi-agent framework that introduces structured tree search as a cognition layer for autonomous agents operating in large, stateful action spaces. Prior autonomous optimization systems operate on isolated targets with stateless evaluation. Arbor instead maintains an explicit search tree of scored hypotheses that serves as the shared working memory across agents, evolving with every measurement, treating failures as diagnostic signal that reshapes subsequent exploration, and expanding as prior successes shift the bottleneck distribution. We validate Arbor on full-stack LLM inference optimization, a domain where achieving peak performance has historically required coordinated effort from engineering teams across the application, framework, compiler, kernel, and hardware stack. Arbor pairs an Orchestrator agent, which drives optimization by delegating to Domain Specialists across the inference stack, with a Critic agent that safeguards stability through root-cause analysis, introspection, and measurement validation – a checks-and-balances architecture where neither agent can unilaterally drive the system. Agent capabilities are decomposed into hard skills (domain expertise) and soft skills (coordination protocols that determine how contributions compose), enabling fully autonomous multi-day campaigns. Arbor achieves up to 193% inference throughput-latency Pareto improvement over vendor-optimized baselines, while a single agent without the harness plateaus at +33% throughput improvement and crashes irrecoverably within hours. Arbor generalizes to multiple generations of hardware platform, and run-to-run variance is within 2 percentage points demonstrating that the method is hardware-agnostic and reproducible.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

On-Chip Quantum Randomness Amplification

arXiv:2606.12173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Randomness amplification, the task of extracting uniform private bits from biased seeds that may be partly known by a malicious third party, is of central importance in cryptography. The highest security in this task is provided by a class of quantum protocols known as device-independent, which however are challenging to integrate into scalable devices. Semi-device-independent (SDI) protocols are a promising alternative that guarantees security under few natural assumptions, such as bounds on the amount of energy used by the devices. Here, we provide the first demonstration of SDI randomness amplification on an integrated silicon photonic chip, achieving a throughput rate of 20 Mbps suitable for practical applications. This rate is achieved through a novel technique for SDI entropy certification, which delivers strictly tighter von Neumann entropy bounds compared to existing methods and remains valid even if the preparation and measurement devices share quantum correlations. Overall, the methods developed in this work enable the integration of SDI technology into portable telecom devices, opening up a new generation of quantum cryptographic hardware.

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

Towards Effective Waste Segmentation for Automated Waste Recycling in Cluttered Background

Rapid expansion of urban areas and population growth is causing an immense increase in waste production, which demands the need for efficient and automated waste management. In this scenario, automated waste recycling (AWR) using deep learning methods can assist humans in optimal waste management. Recent deep learning approaches for AWR provide promising waste segmentation performance, however, these methods rely on large backbone networks that are inefficient for AWR systems and suffer from performance deterioration in cluttered scenes. To this end, an optimal waste segmentation network is introduced which effectively utilizes the spatial domain to capture localized structural dependencies and the spectral domain to efficiently extract global contextual relationships. This cascaded design allows the network to progressively leverage both local and global representations across complementary domains to highlight the semantic information necessary for effective segmentation of various waste objects. Furthermore, auxiliary feature enhancement module (AFEM) is introduced to enhance the target objects' boundaries and blob amplification for better segmentation in cluttered scenarios. Extensive experimentation on ZeroWaste-aug, ZeroWaste-f and SpectralWaste datasets reveals the merits of the proposed method.

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

Learning What to Remember: A Cognitively Grounded Multi-Factor Value Model for Agentic Memory

arXiv:2606.12945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-running LLM agents accumulate interaction histories far larger than any context window, forcing a standing decision: what to encode deeply, what to forget, and what to retrieve under a fixed memory budget. Production systems answer with semantic similarity or recency – both mis-specified for the forgetting decision, which is made at consolidation time before the future query is known. We propose a multi-factor memory value function V(m)=\sum_i w_i f_i(m) over seven interpretable factors (emotional intensity, goal relevance, value alignment, self/user relevance, task utility, reliability, and usage history) drawn from cognitive psychology, whose weights are learned from a downstream objective by a gradient-free optimiser, and whose single scalar uniformly controls encoding depth, forget risk, and retrieval rank. We make a methodological point: on LongMemEval, scoring goal relevance against the held-out evaluation question saturates gold-evidence retention at \approx 0.98 – this measures retrieval, not forgetting. In the realistic blind regime, a learned multi-factor value retains 0.770 \pm 0.011 of gold evidence across 479 usable cases, versus 0.657 for uniform weights, 0.518 for the best single factor, and 0.368 for recency; every paired gap's 95% bootstrap CI is above zero, and a neural network over the same factors ties the linear model. The learned weights are interpretable – reliability, emotional intensity, and self/user relevance dominate, while query-time goal similarity is correctly down-weighted for the forgetting decision. A controlled synthetic task with planted confounds confirms the learner recovers a separating weighting (1.00 retention) where uniform weighting fails (0.62). The substrate is open-source; all experiments run on a single CPU with no API calls.

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

Reliable Error Estimation for PINNs: Lower and Upper A Posteriori Bounds

arXiv:2606.12050v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) combine machine learning with physical laws to solve differential equations. While existing results provide rigorous a posteriori upper bounds for PINN prediction errors, complete certification also requires complementary lower information in order to obtain computable two-sided error enclosures. In this paper, we derive computable a posteriori lower bounds for PINN errors in ordinary differential equations on suitable certified state-space domains under a localized strong monotonicity condition. We combine these estimates with complementary localized upper bounds under a one-sided Lipschitz condition, which is weaker than the global Lipschitz assumption used in previous work and can yield sharper upper error bands. The resulting bounds depend only on the neural-network approximation, the ODE residual, and local monotonicity and growth constants, and therefore do not require access to the exact solution. For linear time-invariant and time-varying systems, we further derive explicit formulas in terms of the minimal and maximal eigenvalues of the symmetric part of the system matrix. We also discuss the distinction between soft and hard enforcement of initial conditions in PINNs and explain why exact enforcement can make the scalar lower certificate uninformative. To recover nontrivial lower information in the linear setting, we use a signed-residual finite-probe certificate based on coordinate unit vectors. We also formulate a certificate-informed training strategy in which the propagated upper certificate is used as an auxiliary regularizer, while lower certificates remain post-training diagnostics. Altogether, the proposed framework provides rigorous and practically computable error certificates for PINN approximations of ODEs, while making explicit the domains and model classes for which the assumptions can be verified.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

The Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset: Reconstructing U.S. Corporate and Financial Disclosures into Layout-Faithful and Token-Efficient Pretraining Data

arXiv:2606.18192v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As high-quality public web corpora become increasingly exhausted, clean long-context documents have become a scarce and expensive source of training data for large language models (LLMs). Existing long-context corpora are often proprietary and costly to acquire, synthetically generated, or concentrated in narrow domains such as programming. We introduce the Stanford EDGAR Filings Dataset (SEFD), an open reconstruction of SEC filings into layout-faithful MultiMarkdown for financial language modeling and evaluation. SEFD makes audited financial statements, risk disclosures, ownership reports, accounting notes, and market-moving event filings usable as long-context pretraining data and as a basis for financial reasoning, forecasting, compliance, and document understanding. The resulting corpus is token-efficient, model-ready, and has less than 0.1% overlap with Common Crawl-derived corpora. We release SEFD-v1, a 152B-token initial public snapshot, and provide corpus-level analyses of a larger 18.5M-filing archive estimated at 550B tokens. We further introduce two SEFD-derived benchmarks: EDGAR-Forecast, which evaluates filing-grounded numerical forecasting after model knowledge cutoffs, and EDGAR-OCR, which evaluates transcription of complex financial tables.

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

DVANet: Degradation-aware Visual-prior Alignment Network for Image Restoration

All-in-One image restoration aims to develop a unified restoration framework for handling diverse degradation types. Existing end-to-end methods usually regard the restoration process as a black-box mapping, lacking an explicit optimization interpretation. Although deep unfolding provides an interpretable iterative modeling paradigm for image restoration, existing methods mostly rely on fixed degradation assumptions or predefined degradation information, making them difficult to adapt to unified restoration requirements under complex degradations and locally damaged content. This limitation restricts their performance in degradation suppression and structural detail recovery. To address these issues, this paper proposes DVANet, a deep unfolding network inspired by the half-quadratic splitting optimization algorithm, which formulates unified image restoration under complex degradations as a collaborative unfolding process between degradation-aware observation consistency and visual-prior-guided reconstruction. Specifically, in the degradation-aware observation consistency branch, a degradation representation module is employed to extract global degradation attributes and local degradation cues, and degradation-conditioned mapping is used to enhance the model's adaptability to different degradation types. In the visual-prior-guided reconstruction branch, DINOv3 is introduced to provide structural and semantic information as hierarchical visual priors, thereby complementing the missing structural information in damaged regions and improving detail recovery. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DVANet achieves superior or competitive performance on multi-scenario degradation and cross-domain image restoration tasks, showing favorable degradation adaptability and generalization ability.

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

Generative AI and the future of scientometrics: current topics and future questions

In this paper, we contribute to the debate on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in scientometrics. We argue that moving from a trial-and-error approach to an explainable and actionable use requires a principled understanding of strengths and weaknesses of GenAI as compared with other techniques and with human judgment. To this end, we introduce a conceptual framework based on the distinction between the semantic dimensions of texts, i.e. the meanings attributed to words, and their pragmatic dimension, i.e. their embedding within communicative situations. We leverage this framework to interpret the results of applications of GenAI in scientometrics and to provide guidance to users. Specifically, we conclude that key parameters to be considered are the nature of the task, the level of granularity of the analysis and whether the goal was descriptive, inferential or evaluative. These parameters lead to different strategies for using GenAI and human-machine integration. Finally, we suggest that, by generating large amounts of scientific language, GenAI might affect textual characteristics used to measure science, such as authors, words, and references. We argue that careful empirical work and theoretical reflection will be essential to remain capable of interpreting the evolving patterns of knowledge production in the age of AI.

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

The Latent Bridge: A Continuous Slow-Fast Channel for Real-Time Game Agents

arXiv:2606.24470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A real-time agent for general computer use - with games as the most demanding case - must act within tens of milliseconds while still planning over seconds. These two regimes sit at opposite ends of the latency-quality tradeoff. A reasoning VLM (Qwen3-VL-8B-Thinking) deliberates effectively but requires ~1.5 s per response - far too slow for a 15 Hz control loop. In contrast, a reactive VLM (MiniCPM-o 4.5) acts in milliseconds but underperforms on planning-heavy tasks. We couple two frozen models of matched scale (9B reactive, 8B reasoning), leaving the communication channel as the sole trainable component. The standard coupling is a Text Bridge (T): the slow model writes a suffix the fast model reads. We introduce a learned continuous Latent Bridge (L) that projects the slow model's residuals into the fast model's input-embedding space in a LLaVA-style manner, avoiding any text round-trip; both are compared against Fast-Only (F). On 7 Atari games and a driving domain (MetaDrive), tuning the action decoder per channel on held-out seeds, the Latent Bridge matches or beats the Text Bridge in every domain: it significantly improves two games (MsPacman +57%, RoadRunner +28%) and is a safe drop-in elsewhere. Combining both channels interferes destructively (RoadRunner -96%), so only one should be used. The benefit is highly predictable: the bridge helps if and only if slow reasoning already beats fast reaction (T > F) - the Latent and Text gains over Fast-Only move together at r=0.93. MetaDrive is the controlled negative, where the Latent Bridge is demonstrably inert because the Text Bridge adds no value. We release replay recordings and reproducible pipelines.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

KCSAT-ML: Probing Reasoning Models with Nationwide-Cohort Human Difficulty

Math reasoning benchmarks have proliferated, yet most lack a per-item difficulty signal grounded in actual human performance. We introduce KCSAT-ML, a decade (2014-2025) of Korean College Scholastic Ability Test (KCSAT; Suneung) mathematics: 664 problems with a 339-item core set carrying official per-item error rates from nationwide cohorts of hundreds of thousands of examinees. We pair the benchmark with Difficulty-aligned Reasoning Gain (DRG): a score-orthogonal metric that asks whether a model's mistakes concentrate on the items humans found hard, or on items humans found easy. Together they expose, across a wide range of VLMs (and LLMs via OCR), three patterns: (i) low-budget accuracy collapses on the high-human-error tail at every model size; (ii) test-time scaling (TTS) raises token use roughly linearly with cohort error rate, while accuracy gains follow a non-monotonic curve; (iii) within a single family, TTS flips between anti-scaling on the hardest items and overthinking on easier ones – two faces of the same alignment failure. On DRG, models with near-identical accuracy can sit at near-opposite values: one model gets wrong what humans also find hard, while another solves the hardest items yet fails on items humans find easy – a contrast that aggregate accuracy hides. Our code and dataset builder will be open-sourced at https://github.com/naver-ai/KCSAT-ML.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Large Fluctuations in Open Quantum Systems

arXiv:2606.11822v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study statistics of atypical measurement outcomes in the steady states of driven open quantum systems. In equilibrium, the probability distribution over the phase space, as encoded in, e.g., the Wigner function, is analytic in the phase-space coordinates. We show that this property is generically lost in driven dissipative systems: their {\it large-deviation function} develops lines and surfaces across which its derivatives are discontinuous. As an illustrative example, we consider a parametrically driven Kerr oscillator coupled linearly and/or nonlinearly to a dissipative bath. Rare fluctuations in the amplitude and phase of the induced oscillations are governed by semiclassical instanton trajectories of the corresponding Keldysh-Lindblad action. We demonstrate that a given fluctuation can be realized through multiple distinct instanton trajectories. The competition between these trajectories leads to abrupt switching of the dominant instanton and, consequently, to non-analytic features in the large-deviation function.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Information bottleneck for learning the phase space of dynamics from high-dimensional experimental data

arXiv:2604.24662v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Identifying the dynamical state variables of a system from high-dimensional observations is a central problem across physical sciences. The challenge is that the state variables are not directly observable and must be inferred from raw high-dimensional data without supervision. Here we introduce DySIB (Dynamical Symmetric Information Bottleneck) as a method to learn low-dimensional representations of time-series data by maximizing predictive mutual information between past and future observation windows while penalizing representation complexity. This objective operates entirely in latent space and avoids reconstruction of the observations. We apply DySIB to an experimental video dataset of a physical pendulum, where the underlying state space is known. The method, with hyperparameters of the learning architecture set self-consistently by the data, recovers a two-dimensional representation that matches the dimensionality, topology, and geometry of the pendulum phase space, with the learned coordinates aligning smoothly with the canonical angle and angular velocity. These results demonstrate, on a well-characterized experimental system, that predictive information in latent space can be used to recover interpretable dynamical coordinates directly from high-dimensional data.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

<i>CHPO</i> coordinates chilling recovery and nitrogen use in rice

Authors:

Global rice production faces mounting challenges from abnormal temperature fluctuations and nitrogen-fertilizer-driven environmental pollution1–7. Developing varieties that balance chilling resilience and nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) offers a promising solution, but the molecular networks coordinating these traits remain poorly understood. Here we identify CHILLING PHOENIX (CHPO), a major gene underlying the quantitative trait locus shared by both chilling tolerance and resilience. It encodes a MYB transcription factor that acts as a key regulator coordinating post-chilling recovery with nitrogen use in rice. Natural variation in a GCG-repeat-encoded polyalanine tract alters CHPO DNA-binding preference and redirects regulatory outputs between the japonica-type (CHPOjap) and indica-type (CHPOind), causing opposing effects on chilling tolerance and resilience. This allelic variation is shaped by domestication selection, with the CHPOjap allele probably derived from Chinese wild rice. CHPOjap directly targets OsTCP19 and OsNRT2.4 to fine-tune NUE, thereby enhancing chilling tolerance and resilience. These findings provide a mechanistic framework for a chilling-induced high-nitrogen-utilization module that alleviates the damage caused by chilling stress, and a potential molecular design&nbsp;strategy for breeding rice varieties with both chilling resilience and high NUE at the&nbsp;recovery stage. A rice gene, CHPO, links chilling resilience with nitrogen-use efficiency, revealing a domestication-shaped regulatory mechanism that could guide breeding of climate-resilient, sustainable rice varieties.

22.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Multiplexed, precise genome engineering in monocots with twin prime editing systems

Authors:

Simultaneously introducing diverse genomic edits remains a challenge in crop genome engineering. Here we describe a twin prime editing-based knockout (TKO) system that installs stop codon clusters (SCCs) for precise translational termination with minimal in-frame mutations. TKO achieves knockout efficiencies of up to 70.5%, 58.6% and 75.1% in rice, maize and wheat protoplasts, respectively, and produces heritable knockout alleles in 96.8% of regenerated rice plants. In hexaploid wheat, TKO outperforms Cas9 4.2-fold in generating triple-homolog knockouts, largely by reducing in-frame mutations. Orthogonal TKO editors with sequence-divergent SCCs enable simultaneous knockout of up to ten genes without cross-interference. Integration of TKO with conventional prime editing establishes TRIM1 (TKO editor-enabled gene rupture and development of integrated multitype genome modification system) for simultaneous knockout and precise editing, achieving a 22.8% coediting of four genes in rice. TRIM2 extends this capacity to kilobase-scale modifications through a prime editor–recombinase system, enabling a 4.9-kb insertion (1.2% efficiency) and gene knockout (up to 79.8%) in protoplasts. Plant genome editing is multiplexed with twin prime editing.

23.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

DNA polymerization activates RNA cleavage of a reverse transcriptase–like antiviral enzyme | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

Defense-associated reverse transcriptases (DRTs) transcribe noncoding RNAs (ncRNAs) for antiviral defense, but the mechanisms of ncRNA-independent DRTs remain unclear. In this work, we show that a single DRT4 mediates RNA-targeting antiphage defense by integrating DNA polymerase, exonuclease, and RNA endonuclease activities. First, through an equilibrium between its DNA polymerase and exonuclease activities, DRT4 senses phage infection, as elevated dNTP levels shift the equilibrium toward polymerase activity, thereby promoting protein-primed single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) synthesis. Second, ssDNA of sufficient length, phage DNA-binding proteins, and deoxyguanosine triphosphate collectively activate an unusual RNA endonuclease activity of DRT4, excising 3′–guanosine monophosphate from both phage and host RNA to terminate infection. These findings reveal a distinctive immune strategy combining nucleic acid synthesis and degradation, expanding the functional landscape of DRTs for new DNA- and RNA-processing technologies.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Identification of Altered Potassium Channels for Drug Repurposing in Long COVID Patients

Long COVID (LC) is a complex condition characterized by persistent, chronic multisystem manifestations, with a significant proportion of patients exhibiting neurological symptoms. Human ion channels (HICs), particularly potassium channels, are abundantly expressed in the nervous system and linked to key metabolic processes, making them potential candidates for understanding LC pathophysiology and drug repurposing. Meta-analysis of RNA-Seq datasets from COVID-19 recovered and LC patients was performed to identify altered HICs in LC. Differential gene expression analysis, functional enrichment analysis, and weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA) were performed to uncover key genes, pathways, and co-expression modules consisting of HICs, lipid metabolism-, and immune signaling-related genes. Drug-gene interaction analysis was performed to identify approved drugs targeting potential HICs. A total of 715 dysregulated genes, including eighteen HICs were identified, among which seven were potassium channels. Three significant modules containing HICs, lipid metabolism-, and immune signaling-related genes were identified and found to be associated with antigen processing and presentation, complement and coagulation cascades, and cytokine-related pathways. Approved drugs targeting KCNA6, KCNJ10, KCNN3, and KCNH4 were identified. With further experimental validation, these dysregulated potassium channels, supported by their co-expression networks and pathway associations, may act as potential candidates for drug repurposing in LC patients.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Raw-Curve Quantum Fingerprints: A Mahalanobis Authentication Framework with Drift Early Warning and Adversarial Detection

arXiv:2606.11644v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum cloud platforms are poised to deliver powerful computing capabilities, but users have no direct means to verify which physical device executes their workload. This lack of transparency enables hardware substitution attacks, where a malicious adversary could redirect a job to a substituted or inferior processor. We present a general authentication framework that addresses this problem by constructing multi-dimensional quantum fingerprints from raw measurement data. Without any curve fitting, we directly concatenate the raw statistics of complementary experiments into a high-dimensional feature vector that preserves subtle device-specific information. A Mahalanobis nearest-neighbor classifier achieves 100\% benign authentication accuracy on three superconducting processors over a three-week chronological split. The classifier naturally yields an authentication confidence $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ which reveals device-specific safety margins and motivates per-device alert thresholds. We assess the framework's robustness under two distinct scenarios. Under additive isotropic Gaussian noise, $C_{\mathrm{claimed}}$ decays predictably at a rate explained by inverse covariance traces, enabling an early warning mechanism. Against white-box adversarial perturbations, the same confidence threshold detects $L_2$ targeted attacks with near-perfect success and reveals device-dependent empirical thresholds for $L_\infty$ attacks, while untargeted and sparse attacks are ineffective. The proposed framework thus unifies fingerprint extraction, drift-resilient authentication, proactive health monitoring, and adversarial defense, offering a practical step toward trustworthy quantum cloud computing.