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

Asymptotic properties for fully coupled delayed forward-backward stochastic differential equations

arXiv:2606.19925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the asymptotic behavior of solutions to a class of fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with time-delayed generators. Such systems arise naturally in stochastic models with memory effects and constitute a significant extension of the classical fully coupled FBSDE framework. The presence of delay introduces additional analytical difficulties due to the dependence of the coefficients on the past trajectories of the solution processes and the resulting non-Markovian structure. Under suitable assumptions on the coefficients, we study the asymptotic properties of a perturbed delayed FBSDE driven by a small noise parameter. We first establish the convergence in distribution of the associated solution processes as the perturbation parameter tends to zero. We then prove almost sure convergence towards the solution of the corresponding deterministic limiting system. As a consequence of these asymptotic results, we derive a large deviation principle for the solution processes. Our results extend the asymptotic analysis of Cruzeiro, Gomes and Zhang (2014) from the classical fully coupled FBSDE setting to the delayed framework, and complement existing works on weakly coupled delayed forward-backward systems. They provide, to the best of our knowledge, the first large deviation principle for fully coupled forward-backward stochastic differential equations with delayed generators.

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

Learning Robust Pair Confidence for Multimodal Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction

Multimodal emotion-cause pair extraction (MECPE) requires reliable pair confidence over candidate pairs. Existing pair scorers commonly use pair-level cross entropy over valid candidates, which treats links mostly independently. This leaves the relative confidence geometry among competing causes under-constrained, allowing gold pairs to stay close to hard negatives or rely on incidental non-gold context. We study this vulnerability as pair-confidence brittleness and propose RPCL (Robust Pair Confidence Learning), a training-only framework for pair-confidence learning. RPCL encourages pair confidence to be both discriminative and stable: gold pairs are separated from row-wise hard negatives through a confidence-difference margin constraint, and clean pair predictions are aligned with predictions from a corrupted view where non-gold contextual utterance representations are partially corrupted. The original clean pair scorer and decoding pipeline are used unchanged at inference time. On ECF, MECAD, and MEC4, RPCL improves the three-seed mean Pair F1 over a matched base model by 2.58 to 2.83 percentage points in the full text-audio-video setting, and improves mean Pair AUPRC on all three datasets. Diagnostic analysis further shows larger gold-negative confidence gaps and lower margin-violation severity. These results suggest that explicitly shaping pair confidence is an effective training strategy for MECPE.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Relighting as a Probe of Visual Priors via Augmented Latent Intrinsics

Image-to-image relighting requires representations that separate illumination from scene properties while preserving dense geometry, material, and photometric cues. We use this task as a probe of visual priors: unlike recognition tasks that reward invariance, relighting tests whether visual features retain the information needed for light transfer. Through a controlled generative relighting framework, we find that strong semantic encoders can degrade relighting quality, exposing a semantic–photometric trade-off between abstraction and physical fidelity. We introduce Augmented Latent Intrinsics (ALI), which balances this trade-off by fusing dense, pixel-aligned visual features into a latent-intrinsic relighting model and refining it with self-supervision on unlabeled real image pairs. ALI improves relighting quality, especially on glossy, metallic, and transparent materials, and demonstrates that generative relighting is an effective tool for quantifying what visual encoders encode about the physical world.

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

Representation Interventions Enable Lifelong Knowledge Memory Control in LLMs

arXiv:2511.20892v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often produce incorrect or outdated content after being employed. Efficient and accurate knowledge updates without costly retraining are a major challenge. This problem is particularly challenging in lifelong settings, where complex, unstructured knowledge must coexist without interference. We introduce RILKE (Representation Intervention for Lifelong KnowledgE Control), a robust and scalable method that treats knowledge control as interventions within the model's representation space. Leveraging representation-space expressiveness, we identify two key properties enabling RILKE to achieve fine-grained control over complex, unstructured knowledge while maintaining general utility with frozen base weights. During training, RILKE learns paraphrase-robust and edit-localized modules that limit each update to a low-dimensional subspace to minimize cross-edit interference. At inference, a query-adaptive router selects the appropriate module to guide the model's generation. Across LLaMA and Qwen models, RILKE scales effectively to large-scale benchmarks, demonstrating high edit success and strong paraphrase generalization while preserving general utility with modest memory overhead. These results show RILKE is an effective and scalable solution for lifelong knowledge control in LLMs.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MLLMs Get It Right, Then Get It Wrong: Tracing and Correcting Late-Layer Textual Bias

When vision contradicts text, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) consistently favor text, even when images provide clear evidence otherwise. This bias poses risks for applications requiring visual grounding, yet its cause remains unclear. In this paper, we uncover a surprising finding: models often get it right initially, forming correct vision-based predictions in their intermediate layers, before changing their minds and favoring text in the final output. We call this "late-layer textual override". The visual information is encoded, it simply does not survive to the output. More intriguingly, we find that how predictions change reveals whether they're correct: 85% of failures shift toward text, while 89% of successes shift toward vision. This directional signature enables a simple but powerful intervention: when we detect a confident visual prediction being suppressed, we restore it. We propose CALRD (Conflict-Aware Layer Reference Decoding), a training-free method that recovers overridden predictions at inference time. Experiments across five MLLMs of varying architectures demonstrate up to 9.4% absolute improvements on conflict benchmarks while largely preserving standard performance, without training or external knowledge. It recovers what the model already knew but failed to preserve.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

NoiseTilt: Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernels for Diffusion Reward Alignment

arXiv:2606.18066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Noise-Tilted Reverse Kernel (NTRK), a reward-guided diffusion sampler that injects reward gradients through the noise term, leaving the pretrained reverse kernel unchanged and requiring only a single sample per step. Reward-guided sampling at inference time has greatly expanded the versatility of pretrained diffusion models. Yet existing methods face a trade-off. Gradient-based guidance shifts the reverse mean, steering generation but pushing intermediate states outside the region that the model was trained on and degrading quality. Search-based methods preserve quality but gain no gradient signal. No prior method achieves both. NTRK resolves this by keeping the reverse mean fixed and biasing the noise term toward high reward. We introduce a whitening operator, the central mechanism behind NTRK, that makes the reward gradient safe to inject as noise without losing its guiding signal. Across various reward alignment tasks, NTRK outperforms recent state-of-the-art baselines without losing sample quality. Remarkably, on aesthetic generation, NTRK surpasses the reward of the best baseline at 500 NFEs using only 25 NFEs, a 20$\times$ reduction in compute.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Fast and high-fidelity transfer of edge states via dynamical control of topological phases and effects of dissipation

arXiv:2505.16606v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological edge states are robust against symmetry-preserving perturbations and noise, making them promising for quantum information and computation, particularly in topological quantum computation through the braiding operations of Majorana quasiparticles. Realizing these applications requires fast and high-fidelity dynamic control of edge states. In this work, we theoretically propose a high-fidelity protocol for transferring topological edge states by dynamically moving a domain wall between two regions with different topological numbers in one dimension. This protocol fundamentally relies on Lorentz invariance and relativistic effects, because moving the domain wall at a constant speed is described by a mass term with the uniform linear motion in the Dirac equation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our protocol in transferring edge states with high fidelity using a one-dimensional quantum walk with two internal states, which is feasible with current experimental technology. We also investigate how bit-flip and dephasing dissipation to the environment affect transfer efficiency. Remarkably, bit (dephasing) dissipation does not affect the fidelity at the slow (fast) transfer limit, which can be explained by the relativistic effects on the edge states.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The Art of Mixology: Mixup-based Obfuscation for Privacy-Preserving Split Learning in Large Language Models

Split learning provides a practical paradigm for resource-constrained users to train Large Language Models (LLMs) by offloading computation-intensive layers to a server while keeping raw data local. However, existing privacy-preserving split learning methods still face a difficult trade-off among utility, privacy, efficiency, and stability. Specifically, these methods often suffer from substantial utility degradation, remain vulnerable to advanced data reconstruction attacks, incur prohibitive computational and communication overhead, or exhibit unstable performance across different tasks. In this paper, we propose MIXGUARD, a novel mixup-based privacy-preserving split learning framework for LLMs. MIXGUARD introduces token-level obfuscation, representation-level obfuscation, and adaptive gradient perturbation mechanisms, which operate jointly to preserve useful learning signals while preventing privacy leakage to the server. Technically, MIXGUARD first constructs a lightweight calibration model on a public dataset to refine the approximated target representation, and then applies this model during privacy-preserving fine-tuning on private data. We conduct extensive experiments on four classification tasks and four text generation tasks across multiple LLM families, model sizes, architectures, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that MIXGUARD preserves model utility comparable to non-split training baselines, consistently achieves stronger privacy protection than existing split learning defense methods against state-of-the-art data reconstruction attacks, and remains robust under adaptive attack settings.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum-classical hybrid models based on error correction for time series forecasting

arXiv:2606.15213v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting largely benefits from combining the strengths of different models, especially using a scheme where a model corrects another model by capturing supplementary patterns from forecasting errors. Concurrently, quantum models are providing a means to augment the classical capacity, including in time series forecasting, by acting alongside classical models in hybrid architectures. In this work, we propose the first forecasting system based on error correction that jointly uses quantum and classical models. Here, quantum models first extract patterns by exploring quantum phenomena, and classical models capture the remaining patterns from the quantum errors. Compared to classical single models and classical-classical hybrid models based on error correction, the complementary capacity that emerges from this quantum-classical system provided the best results in most of the addressed problems. Therefore, this work paves the way to introduce quantum models in established hybridization schemes for time series forecasting.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

CDH13 is associated with cellular viability after exposure to ionizing radiation using genome-wide screening

Background: It is well known that genetic variants contribute to cellular sensitivity to chemotherapeutic agents and ionizing radiation (IR). The aim of this study was to identify single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) and genes associated with the spectrum of normal cellular sensitivity of lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) towards ionizing radiation and mitomycin C (MMC). Methods: In a first step, we determined the viability of LCLs established from male participants of the Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II) aged >=62 years following treatments with increasing doses of IR (n=137 cell lines) or MMC (n=140 cell lines) using the alamarBlue assay. Results from intra-experimental triplicates and three independent experiments for each cell line and treatment were used to calculate the area under the curves (AUCs) representing the specific sensitivity to IR and MMC of each LCL. The data from these experiments were subsequently used as outcomes in genome-wide association studies (GWASs). In addition, we calculated polygenic risk scores (PGS) from UK Biobank GWAS results for four cancer-related phenotypes and assessed the extent to which the variance in the IR and MMC sensitivity is explained by these PGS. Results: The GWAS analyses revealed one variant, rs74728080, located in CDH13 on chromosome 16, to show genome-wide significant (p < 5 x 10-8, beta = 2.81) association with cellular viability after treatment with IR. In the GWAS on MMC sensitivity the most interesting signal was elicited by SNP rs113978558 in an intron of the PLD5 gene on chromosome 1 (p = 9.232 x 10-8; beta = 1.44). Several other SNPs with statistically suggestive (i.e., p < 1 x 10-5) evidence of association with IR or MMC sensitivity were identified. PGSs calculations from GWAS of four cancer-related traits in UKB explained ~5% and ~3% of phenotypic variance in IR- and MMC-induced cell viability, respectively. Conclusion: The genome-wide significant association of rs74728080 with IR sensitivity and the location of this variant in CDH13 is interesting and functionally highly plausible given its known involvement in oxidative-stress response and function as tumor suppressor. Taken together, our novel data suggest that CDH13 may be genuinely involved in regulating cellular IR sensitivity.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Virtual Responsive Neurostimulation Implantation: From Intracranial Connectivity to Optimized Lead Placement

Responsive neurostimulation (RNS) is an implanted device that delivers direct brain stimulation for drug-resistant focal epilepsy. Individual responses are highly variable, and no validated framework exists to predict outcome or guide lead placement before implantation. We hypothesized that this variability is partly explained by lead placement in relation to patterns of functional connectivity in brain networks. Fourty-nine patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy who underwent pre-implantation intracranial EEG (iEEG) and RNS implantation across three independent epilepsy centers were retrospectively studied. We developed a composite functional connectivity score, based on simple Spearman correlation, combining the standard deviation and kurtosis of interictal iEEG connectivity distributions to predict the response outcome in a training cohort (HUP, n=18) and validated in two independent cohorts (NYU, n=17; UCSF, n=14). We accounted for a spatial mismatch between iEEG and RNS electrodes with a distance-based correction. The score was extended to generate patient-specific 3D maps of predicted RNS efficacy across 200 simulated, or virtual RNS, lead configurations. Accuracy of the score in predicting clinical outcome was 72% at the group level, 61% at the individual patient level, and, after distance-based optimization, 100% in patients with RNS electrodes placed close to location of iEEG electrodes. Applied to the validation cohort, the same score reached 68% accuracy (71% balanced accuracy, 55% sensitivity, 88% specificity). The spatial combination of the scores at different SEEG contacts localization gives a spatial score for each patient. Responders showed significantly higher spatial scores than non-responders, supporting that actual RNS lead placement in responders was located in map-identified favorable regions. Interictal iEEG functional connectivity predicts individual RNS response across independent epilepsy centers, and patient-specific 3D maps derived from this biomarker could prospectively guide lead implantation toward favorable network regions, opening a promising avenue toward network-informed RNS surgical planning.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Some Complexity Results for Robustness Verification for Binarized Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18918v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper studies the computational complexity of verification problems for Binarized Neural Networks (BNNs), where activations (and sometimes weights) are binary. We analyze two problems: satisfiability and robustness under uniform image occlusion. We show that BNN satisfiability is NP-complete via a reduction from Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), and that uniform occlusion induces a piecewise-constant structure in the network output, enabling a polynomial-time robustness-checking algorithm.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

When AI Meets Finance (StockAgent): Large Language Model-based Stock Trading in Simulated Real-world Environments

arXiv:2407.18957v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Can AI Agents simulate real-world trading environments to investigate the impact of external factors on stock trading activities (e.g., macroeconomics, policy changes, company fundamentals, and global events)? These factors, which frequently influence trading behaviors, are critical elements in the quest for maximizing investors' profits. Our work attempts to solve this problem through large language model based agents. We have developed a multi-agent AI system called StockAgent, driven by LLMs, designed to simulate investors' trading behaviors in response to the real stock market. The StockAgent allows users to evaluate the impact of different external factors on investor trading and to analyze trading behavior and profitability effects. Additionally, StockAgent avoids the test set leakage issue present in existing trading simulation systems based on AI Agents. Specifically, it prevents the model from leveraging prior knowledge it may have acquired related to the test data. We evaluate different LLMs under the framework of StockAgent in a stock trading environment that closely resembles real-world conditions. The experimental results demonstrate the impact of key external factors on stock market trading, including trading behavior and stock price fluctuation rules. This research explores the study of agents' free trading gaps in the context of no prior knowledge related to market data. The patterns identified through StockAgent simulations provide valuable insights for LLM-based investment advice and stock recommendation. The code is available at https://github.com/MingyuJ666/Stockagent.

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

PolyFlow: Safe and Efficient Polytope-Constrained Flow Matching with Constraint Embedding and Projection-free Update

arXiv:2606.13400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While flow-based generative models have demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of domains, deploying them in safety-critical physical systems remains challenging due to strict constraint requirements. Existing approaches typically enforce safety through post-hoc corrections, which incur substantial computational overhead and may distort the learned distribution. We propose PolyFlow, a polytope-constrained flow matching framework that embeds constraints directly into the model and flow dynamics. PolyFlow introduces a discrete-time flow formulation and a projection-free architecture, which eliminate the discretization error and guarantee strict satisfaction of arbitrary polyhedral constraints, without the need for expensive iterative solvers. Experimental results show that PolyFlow achieves zero constraint violation while maintaining high distributional fidelity across a range of planning and control tasks. Compared to state-of-the-art constrained generation baselines, PolyFlow significantly reduces inference latency and demonstrates a favorable trade-off between safety, efficiency, and generative quality. Code is available on https://github.com/MJianM/PolyFlow.

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

DSAEval: Evaluating Data Science Agents on a Wide Range of Real-World Data Science Problems

Recent LLM-based data agents aim to automate data science tasks ranging from data analysis to deep learning. However, the open-ended nature of real-world data science problems, which often span multiple taxonomies and lack standard answers, poses a significant challenge for evaluation. To address this, we introduce DSAEval, a benchmark comprising 641 real-world data science problems grounded in 285 diverse datasets, covering both structured and unstructured data (e.g., image and text). DSAEval incorporates three distinctive features: (1) Multimodal Environment Perception, which enables agents to interpret observations from multiple modalities, including text and vision; (2) Multi-Query Interactions, which mirror the iterative and cumulative nature of real-world data science projects; and (3) Multi-Dimensional Evaluation, which provides a holistic assessment across reasoning, code, and results. We systematically evaluate 13 recent advanced agentic LLMs using DSAEval. Our results show that Claude-Sonnet-4.5 achieves the strongest overall performance, MiMo-V2-Pro and GPT-5.2 lead in duration and step efficiency, respectively, and MiMo-V2-Flash is the most cost-effective. We further demonstrate that multimodal perception consistently improves performance on vision-related tasks, with gains ranging from 2.04\% to 11.30\%. Overall, while current data science agents perform well on structured data and routine data analysis workflows, substantial challenges remain in unstructured domains. Finally, we offer critical insights and outline future research directions.

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

TokenPilot: Cache-Efficient Context Management for LLM Agents

As LLM agents are deployed in long-horizon sessions, context accumulation drives up inference costs. Existing approaches utilize text pruning or dynamic memory eviction to minimize token footprints; however, their unconstrained sequence mutations alter layouts, introducing prefix mismatches and cache invalidation. This reveals a critical trade-off between text sparsity and prompt cache continuity. To address this, we present TokenPilot, a dual-granularity context management framework. Globally, Ingestion-Aware Compaction acts as a framework harness to stabilize prompt prefixes and eliminate open-world environmental noise at the ingestion gate. Locally, Lifecycle-Aware Eviction monitors the ongoing residual utility of context segments, enforcing a conservative batch-turn schedule to offload content segments only when task relevance expires. Experiments on PinchBench and Claw-Eval under both isolated and continuous modes demonstrate that TokenPilot reduces costs by 61% and 56% in isolated mode, and 61% and 87% in continuous mode, while maintaining competitive performance compared to prior systems. TokenPilot has been integrated into LightMem2 at https://github.com/zjunlp/LightMem2.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

SegmentAnyTreeV2: Scaling Transformer-Based Tree Instance Segmentation Across Sensors, Platforms, and Forests

We present SegmentAnyTreeV2, a sensor- and platform-agnostic framework for semantic and instance segmentation of forest point clouds. The model combines a serialization-based Point Transformer v3 backbone with a lightweight semantic head and a tree-focused cross-attention mask decoder. Semantic predictions restrict instance decoding to tree-class voxels, while instance-aware query initialization, one-to-many seed supervision, and asymmetric mask scoring improve separation in dense and structurally complex stands. We further introduce FOR-instance v3, an expanded benchmark comprising 427 scenes and 26,496 annotated trees across diverse biomes, forest structures, and LiDAR platforms. On the FOR-instanceV2 test split, SegmentAnyTreeV2 achieves 90.5% precision, 80.2% recall, 85.0% F1, 90.7% coverage, and 87.6% semantic mIoU, outperforming previous learning-based methods in both instance detection and mask completeness. Zero-shot evaluation on independent sites further demonstrates strong cross-domain generalization.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The Answer Lies Within: Self-Derived Rewards Enable Explainable Relation Extraction

Despite the remarkable reasoning capabilities of large language models, they still struggle with one-shot relation extraction without predefined relation labels. We identify two pitfalls: models are often misled by irrelevant tokens instead of relation-conveying semantics, and they often fail to align with the abstraction level human annotators expect. We introduce a novel framework that closes this gap with two components: (1) COGRE, a cognitively-inspired reasoning framework that structures RE into a series of processes mimicking human text-processing; and (2) HIT@DICT, a reinforcement learning intermediate reward strategy that encourages reasoning to align with relational labels by rewarding relation-relevant phrases in reasoning. The reward is derived on a credit dictionary automatically extracted from correct predictions. Our experiments show that our framework improves both accuracy and explanation quality by addressing these two pitfalls. For example, COGRE with Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct on One-shot NYT29 achieves 24.65% F1, surpassing prior reasoning-based designs. Optimizing this approach with RL using HIT@DICT further improves performance by +23.46% points. Finally, human evaluation shows that our best model generates relational phrases closely aligned with gold labels, increasing human explanation quality ratings by 54% (relative).

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (``drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) – a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms. Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL) deals with adapting state-of-the-art RL methods to deal with changing environments: these however usually require (partially) perfect information about the drift such as ``task IDs'' or ``context''. To mitigate the effects of drift, this work develops Space-sampled Value Decay as an explicit forgetting mechanism for value-based deep RL architectures as a simple yet effective approach. In particular we demonstrate and discuss positive effects but also limitations in achieved returns for modifications of Deep Q-networks (DQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) when evaluated on non-stationary environments.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

UltraSketchLLM: Sub-1-Bit LLM Compression via Sketch and Hardware-Friendly Operators

arXiv:2506.17255v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) require larger GPU memory size these days, necessitating efficient and extreme weight compression methods. Existing compression methods are either theoretically limited by 1 bit per weight or face severe performance degradation and inefficiency. To deploy LLMs in resource-constrained scenarios, we introduce UltraSketchLLM, compressing LLMs with data sketch. It reduces peak GPU memory footprint with a high compression rate down to 0.5 bit per weight. Combined with hardware-friendly implementation, UltraSketchLLM keeps tolerable performance degradation and extremely low latency overhead with 14.9x speedup compared to naive sketch solution.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Lattice surgery for near-term experimental logical qubit entanglement creation in planar architectures

arXiv:2606.15190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the era of early fault-tolerant quantum computing, basic demonstrations of entanglement operations between a few logical qubits are at the frontier of recent developments in quantum computing. In this work, we describe in detail, at both the logical and physical qubit levels, a logical teleportation protocol between two surface code logical qubits based on lattice surgery. We address several aspects of the teleportation protocol pertinent to superconducting qubit architectures. We explore the modularity constraints in the number and location of stabilizer readouts and compare variants of the teleportation protocol in this regard. Additionally, we investigate potential performance improvements related to in-sequence decision logic and the optimal size of the interface region between two surface code patches on a superconducting chip. Based on our simulations, we show possible near-term improvements in lattice surgery protocols that facilitate fault-tolerant quantum computing in superconducting circuit architectures.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Catecholamine precursor modulation of human exploration: Evidence from a large gender-balanced sample

by Angela Mariele Brands, Kilian Knauth, David Mathar, Tim Roedder, Kerstin Lisner, Jan Peters The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine has been linked to improved cognitive performance, but investigations into decision-making and reinforcement learning processes known to be under catecholamine control are sparse. We examined the impact of a single dose of Tyrosine (2g) on reinforcement learning and exploration in a large (n = 63) gender-balanced sample in a within-subjects preregistered study. Reinforcement learning performance was significantly improved under Tyrosine. Based on previous work, we preregistered the hypotheses that Tyrosine would reduce directed exploration, response times, and physiological arousal. However, neither response times nor physiological arousal revealed the predicted reductions. Computational modelling using an established pre-registered reinforcement learning model revealed that the performance improvement under Tyrosine was due to an increase value-driven exploitation, without affecting directed exploration. Non-preregistered modelling analyses then revealed that accounting for higher-order perseveration substantially improved model fit, and substantiated the observation of increased value-driven exploitation under Tyrosine. Furthermore, it revealed reliable reductions in directed exploration and value-independent perseveration under Tyrosine. Tyrosine thus improved reinforcement learning performance by stabilizing choice patterns in the service of optimizing reward accumulation, modulating several computational mechanisms thought to be under catecholamine control.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Food insecurity, caloric intake and nutritional status among children under 5 years old: a predictive modelling analysis of the MAL-ED multi-country cohort

Background For children at risk of acute malnutrition, being able to predict and forecast dietary intakes and/or nutritional evolution would support decision-making, particularly in crisis settings where ground data collection is unfeasible or scant. We explored whether statistical models could offer accurate predictions of caloric intake or anthropometric (weight-for-height Z score, WHZ) changes, given intake, household food insecurity and other plausible predictors. Methods We reanalysed data from the Malnutrition and Enteric Disease (MAL-ED) multi-country (Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Peru, South Africa, Tanzania) birth cohort (2009-2014), which consistently tracked household food insecurity experience, dietary intake, anthropometry, infectious disease symptoms, breastfeeding and other variables among children 9 to 35 months old. We quantified the performance on cross-validation of three models: (M1) change in WHZ as a function of household food insecurity; (M2) change in WHZ as a function of caloric intake; (M3) caloric intake as a function of household food insecurity. We compared random forests, lasso regressions, additive models and generalised boosted regressions. All models included age, sex, birth weight, urban versus rural residence, breastfeeding status and the longitudinal prevalence of diarrhoea, acute respiratory infection and fever as additional predictors. Results Altogether, M1, M2 and M3 leveraged 2957, 23,651 and 2013 longitudinal child observations, respectively. Both at country and individual level, there was low correlation among the key variables of interest. All three models featured low performance and moderate to extreme regression dilution, even when fitted to each country cohort separately. Discussion This secondary analysis based on data from a rigorous observational study suggests that statistical prediction of key variables along the causal pathway to childhood acute malnutrition may not be feasible. These negative findings may in part be explained by error in predictor measurement and the narrow range of both predictor and outcome values in the MAL-ED cohort, relative to the more extreme scenarios common to crisis settings. They also imply that mechanistic models requiring caloric intake as an input cannot rely on a statistical shortcut of this kind and must instead depend on empirical data or scenario assumptions.