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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

History of the Muddy Children Puzzle

arXiv:2606.13703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Muddy Children Puzzle is a puzzle about knowledge and ignorance that has been inspiring for the development of epistemic logic. Who came up with it first? This is unclear. We trace the origin of the Muddy Children Puzzle through logical and literary publications over the past two centuries. The puzzle inspired a numerous variations such as involving numbers or coloured hats. We also present a novel hats puzzle involving self-reference.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Learning Ego-Centric BEV Representations from a Perspective-Privileged View: Cross-View Supervision for Online HD Map Construction

Bird's-eye-view (BEV) representations derived from multi-camera input have become a central interface for online high-definition (HD) map construction. However, most approaches rely solely on ego-centric supervision, requiring large-scale scene structure to be inferred from incomplete observations, occlusions, and diminishing information density at long range, where perspective effects and spatial sparsity hinder consistent structural reasoning. We introduce Cross-View Supervision (CVS), a representation learning paradigm that transfers geometric and topological priors from an ego-aligned overhead perspective into camera-based BEV encoders. Rather than adding auxiliary semantic losses, CVS aligns representations in a shared BEV feature space and distills globally consistent structural knowledge from a perspective-privileged teacher into the ego-centric backbone. This supervision enhances structural coherence without modifying the inference architecture or requiring overhead input at test time. Experiments on nuScenes using ego-aligned aerial imagery from the AID4AD cross-view extension demonstrate consistent improvements over StreamMapNet while maintaining identical camera-only inference. CVS yields +3.9mAP in the standard $60\times30\,\mathrm{m}$ region and +9.9mAP in the extended $100\times50\,\mathrm{m}$ setting, corresponding to a 44% relative gain at long range. These results highlight perspective-privileged structural supervision as a promising training principle for improving BEV representation learning in HD map construction.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

CAREPath: Semantic Context-Aware Reasoning Paths with Mechanism-Augmented Embeddings for Drug Repurposing

Biomedical knowledge graphs (BKGs) that include drugs, genes, and diseases support drug repurposing by connecting drugs to diseases through gene-mediated multi-hop paths, thereby enabling mechanism-of-action reasoning. However, deeper traversal does not necessarily improve mechanistic reasoning: long paths grow combinatorially and frequently pass through hub genes, producing irrelevant gene regulatory signals, whereas overly constrained or sparse paths may miss broader biological context. We propose CAREPath, a KG-LLM framework inspired by depth-first search (DFS)-like and breadth-first search (BFS)-like reasoning to balance mechanistic specificity, scalability, and context recovery. The DFS-like module constrains traversal to short disease-gene-drug paths, converts each path into a structured prompt, and encodes it with a biomedical language model to generate semantic path embeddings. Complementarily, the BFS-like module constructs entity-level mechanism-context embeddings from one-hop gene neighborhoods and enriches them through similarity-guided augmentation using pharmacologically related drugs and gene-signature-similar diseases. Across five biomedical KGs, CAREPath achieves the best overall AUPRC among 18 baselines, improving performance by up to 3.8%. Additional analyses show that semantic short-path encoding contributes most to performance, while mechanism-context augmentation improves robustness under sparse evidence and strengthens Gene Ontology functional agreement. Case studies and recently FDAapproved indications further demonstrate its practical relevance, positioning CAREPath as an interpretable framework for scalable and mechanism-aware drug repurposing. Source code is available at https://github.com/hamppy-song/CAREPath.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Improved State Readout in NV Centers using Regression Models and Rabi Driving

arXiv:2606.23454v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Readout of state populations in nitrogen-vacancy centers from fluorescence measurements at room-temperature is routinely achieved via contrast-based calibration. The fidelities achieved by this conventional approach are limited by reducing the dynamical fluorescence behaviour of the NV center to a scalar value, and calculating the population of each possible state independently. To address these limitations, we use regression models trained on experimental data to map the fluorescence signals onto ideal simulated populations. Additionally, we enhance the informational content of the fluorescence signals by performing measurements during induced Rabi oscillations. Our results demonstrate that including these dynamical signals significantly reduces state readout errors across multiple tested models. Notably, linear ridge regression performs nearly on par with a non-linear kernel-based model, showing that simple models already capture the relevant mapping between the enhanced fluorescence signals and the underlying state populations. This data-driven approach provides a robust alternative that achieves higher fidelities than conventional calibration in our setting, paving the way for high-fidelity state readout in solid-state quantum registers.

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

MAND: Modality-Aware Novelty Detection for Open-World Egocentric Activity Recognition

Multimodal egocentric activity recognition integrates visual and inertial cues for robust first-person behavior understanding. However, deploying such systems in open-world environments requires detecting novel activities while continuously learning from non-stationary data streams. Existing methods rely on the main fused logits for novelty scoring, without fully exploiting the complementary evidence available from individual modalities. Because these logits are often dominated by RGB, cues from other modalities, particularly IMU, remain underutilized, and this imbalance worsens as catastrophic forgetting accumulates. To address this, we propose MAND, a modality-aware framework for multimodal egocentric open-world continual learning. At inference, Modality-aware Adaptive Scoring (MoAS) adaptively adjusts modality contributions using sample-wise reliability and refines novelty scoring with deviation and disagreement penalties. During training, Modality-aware Representation Stabilization Training (MoRST) preserves the discriminative capacity of each modality across tasks through modality-specific heads and modality-wise logit distillation. Experiments on a public multimodal egocentric benchmark show that MAND consistently improves novel activity detection and known-class accuracy while substantially reducing FPR95, indicating more reliable open-world recognition. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/HyeJeongIm/MAND}{github.com/HyeJeongIm/MAND}.

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

Exploring the relationship between human-centric AI and firm idiosyncratic risks

arXiv:2606.24224v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite the extensive discussions of human-centric AI (HCAI) in Industry 5.0, its effects on firms' idiosyncratic risks (IR) remains underexplored. This is an imperative issue for firms navigate financial risks during the current technological revolution, as IR reflects investor reactions to corporate heterogeneous AI strategies and implementations by isolating firm-level stock volatility from systematic factors. Integrating situated AI theory with social-technical systems theory, we conceptualise HCAI as a situated AI strategy that reduces AI-related ethical risks and fosters AI-Human synergies in firms' business operations, ultimately reducing IR by aligning with stakeholders' diverse expectations. Moreover, socio-technical factors, namely digitalisation, operational efficiency, executive shareholding, and CEOs with IT background, may moderate the HCAI-IR relationship. Using a multi-source panel dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2015 to 2023, we find that HCAI is associated with lower firm IR. Furthermore, digitalisation and executive shareholding strengthen this risk-reducing effect, whereas operational efficiency and CEOs with IT background surprisingly attenuate it. Our findings offer theoretical contributions and practical insights for both ethical AI governance and firm financial risk management in the AI era.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement structure of the dynamical phases in the sub-Ohmic spin-boson model

arXiv:2606.20313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The sub-Ohmic spin-boson model exhibits three distinct dynamical regimes in its spin population dynamics, classified as coherent, incoherent, and pseudo-coherent. Whether these regimes correspond to distinct spin-bath entanglement structures remains an open question. Here we address this using tree tensor network states with projector-splitting time evolution (TTN-TDVP-PS), scanning a broad grid in the sub-Ohmic $(s, \alpha)$ plane. We find that the spin entanglement entropy $S_\mathrm{spin}(t)$ reaches a stationary plateau on a timescale shorter than the polarization relaxation, enabling construction of a stationary entropy landscape from the stationary value $S_\mathrm{stable}$. Within this scalar entropy landscape, the entropy ridge broadly follows the population-based phase boundary at small $s$, but does not reproduce the two-branch structure at large $s$. The ridge remains single-valued within the incoherent region rather than separately tracking both population-based transitions. The Bloch-sphere representation provides a geometric interpretation of this behavior. The entropy plateau corresponds to trajectories settling onto constant-radius shells, with the ridge marking the parameters of smallest stationary Bloch radius. Mode-resolved bath entanglement shows that low-frequency modes dominate the environmental entropy scale and that coherent dynamics enhance bath-mode correlations beyond direct spin–mode correlations. These results establish the stationary spin entanglement entropy as a physically informative observable that complements population-based classifications of dissipative quantum dynamics.

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

Questioning the Coverage-Length Metric in Conformal Prediction: When Shorter Intervals Are Not Better

arXiv:2601.21455v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Conformal prediction(CP) has become a cornerstone of distribution-free uncertainty quantification, conventionally evaluated by its coverage and interval length. This work critically examines the sufficiency of these standard metrics. We demonstrate that the interval length might be deceptively improved through a counter-intuitive approach termed Prejudicial Trick(PT), while the coverage remains valid. Specifically, for any given test sample, PT probabilistically returns an interval, which is either null or constructed using an adjusted confidence level, thereby preserving marginal coverage. While PT potentially yields a deceptively lower interval length, it introduces practical vulnerabilities: the same input can yield completely different prediction intervals across repeated runs of the algorithm. We formally derive the conditions under which PT achieves these misleading improvements and provide extensive empirical evidence across various regression and classification tasks. Furthermore, we introduce a new metric interval stability which helps detect whether a new CP method implicitly improves the length based on such PT-like techniques. Code is available at https://github.com/benben-cd/PT-Conformal-Prediction.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Leveraging Deep Learning for Object and Position Recognition of Load Carriers for Autonomous Logistics Vehicles

arXiv:2606.16042v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work explores the use of artificial intelligence in mobile robotics to achieve autonomous detection and pose estimation of load carriers for automated pickup. A deep neural network is designed to recognize predefined landmarks on the carrier from RGBD data; these landmarks are then used to compute the carrier's pose. The network operates directly on RGBD images to estimate landmark positions, which form the basis for determining the carrier's location. The approach is validated in extensive experiments and comprises both software and hardware implementations. A deep learning-based framework is presented to detect load carriers and estimate their pose for use with autonomous logistics vehicles. Our method uses a convolutional neural network to identify characteristic reference points on the carrier from RGBD input and computes its pose by combining these inferred landmarks with prior geometric knowledge. Experiments show that the resulting accuracy is sufficient for reliable load carrier detection in industrial environments, confirming the suitability of the method for autonomous intralogistics applications.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human-validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user-independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion reasoning and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models' emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory-enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may reinforce social inequalities. To mitigate these disparities, we curate a general-purpose preference dataset designed to reduce demographic profiles' influence on emotional understanding.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

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

QueryOcc: Query-based Self-Supervision for 3D Semantic Occupancy

Learning 3D scene geometry and semantics from images is a core challenge in computer vision and a key capability for autonomous driving. Since large-scale 3D annotation is prohibitively expensive, recent work explores self-supervised learning directly from sensor data without manual labels. Existing approaches either rely on 2D rendering consistency, where 3D structure emerges only implicitly, or on discretized voxel grids from accumulated lidar point clouds, limiting spatial precision and scalability. We introduce QueryOcc, a query-based self-supervised framework that learns continuous 3D semantic occupancy directly through independent 4D spatio-temporal queries sampled across adjacent frames. The framework supports supervision from either pseudo-point clouds derived from vision foundation models or raw lidar data. To enable long-range supervision and reasoning under constant memory, we introduce a contractive scene representation that preserves near-field detail while smoothly compressing distant regions. QueryOcc surpasses previous camera-based methods by 26% in semantic RayIoU on the self-supervised Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark while running at 11.6 FPS, demonstrating that direct 4D query supervision enables strong self-supervised occupancy learning. https://research.zenseact.com/publications/queryocc/

13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum computer with all-to-all connectivity

Quantum computers require both high-fidelity operations and large qubit numbers to surpass classical capabilities1. Trapped-ion platforms have demonstrated the highest gate fidelities of any modality2–6 but scaling to larger qubit numbers while preserving performance has remained a central challenge. We report on Quantinuum Helios, a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor based on the quantum charge-coupled device (QCCD) architecture7. Helios features 137Ba+ hyperfine qubits8,9, all-to-all connectivity enabled by a rotatable ion storage ring connecting two quantum operation regions by a junction10,11, speed improvements from parallelized operations12 and a new software stack with real-time compilation of dynamic programs13. Averaged over all operational zones in the system, we achieve average infidelities of 2.5(1) × 10−5 for single-qubit (1Q) gates, 7.9(2) × 10−4 for two-qubit (2Q) gates and 3.3(5) × 10−4 for state preparation and measurement (SPAM), none of which are fundamentally limited and probably able to be improved. These component infidelities are predictive of system-level performance in both random Clifford circuits and random circuit sampling (RCS), the latter demonstrating that Helios operates well beyond the reach of classical simulation and establishes a new frontier of fidelity and complexity for quantum computers14. A new quantum computer, Quantinuum Helios, which is a 98-qubit trapped-ion quantum processor built on the QCCD architecture, demonstrates performance well beyond classical capabilities and provides a path for scaling up quantum computing.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Qualitative Review of GenAI-Based Methods for Data Generation and Augmentation in Industrial Computer Vision Applications

AI-driven computer vision applications require a profound database to ensure predictable behaviors and performance. Such predictable behaviors are especially important for industrial applications in gaining trust from users. However, such a database is not readily available in industrial applications, and its acquisition is not trivial either. Active learning methods can be applied to ramp up data within a project deployment to iteratively increase the database, and thus the application predictability. Unfortunately, we observe that this often leads to a loss of user trust in the application, which is difficult to regain once lost. This leads to a "chicken-and-egg" dilemma in which neither the database nor the application is developed. In this work, we review state-of-the-art methods and approaches to further boost the database the initial active data ramp-up phase. Here, we focus on recent advancements in GenAI-based data generation and augmentation methods and review their adaptability on an industrial computer vision classification use case. Although we observe a potential for automatic data ramp-up, we also see a domain miss match in between the source (training environment) and target (industrial use-case) - regarding context defined in natural language and object characteristics.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The direct economic impact of surgical non-response in orthopaedic hip, knee, and spine surgery for osteoarthritis: a cost-utility analysis

Background Annually, nearly 2 million hip, knee, and spinal inpatient surgeries are performed in Canada and the US for osteoarthritis (OA), costing over $37 billion in hospital expenditures. However, 15-30% of patients experience limited or no improvement, resulting in poor value for money. This study evaluated the one-year cost-utility of joint and spine procedures for OA by comparing non-responders to responders, considering various responder definitions. Methods Individual micro-costing data were collected for 1,175 elective hip, knee, and spine patients enrolled in the Longitudinal Evaluation in the Arthritis Program - Osteoarthritis (LEAP-OA) between 2014 and 2018. Quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) were derived using the SF-6D utility index. One-year incremental cost-utility ratios (ICURs) were calculated from the hospital perspective. Results Responder rates varied by definition, ranging from 78%-94% for hip replacements, 64%-90% for knee replacements, 60%-64% for spine fusions, and 50%-68% for spine decompressions. Corresponding ICURs were: $45,956-$51,773/QALY for responders versus $108,593-$485,762/QALY for non-responders for hip replacements; $54,831-$71,151/QALY for responders versus $200,486-$1,203,596/QALY for non-responders for knee replacements; $65,980-$74,422/QALY for responders versus $262,039-$729,686/QALY for non-responders for spine fusions; and $29,947-$42,168/QALY for responders versus $63,195-$662,586/QALY for non-responders for spine decompressions. Conclusions While surgical response rates were highly dependent on the responder definition, ICURs for non-responders were significantly higher than those for responders across all definitions. Beyond the negative impact on patients, there is a compelling economic argument for investment in improved pre-operative identification of patients at risk of surgical non-response. Such efforts could enable more personalized, value-based care pathways and reduce the provision of low-value surgical interventions.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

On a class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks

arXiv:2504.14767v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A step-reinforced random walk is a discrete-time stochastic process with long-range dependence. At each step, with a fixed probability $\alpha$, the so-called positively step-reinforced random walk repeats one of its previous steps, chosen randomly and uniformly from its entire history. Alternatively, with probability $1-\alpha$, it makes an independent move. For the so-called negatively step-reinforced random walk, the process is similar, but any repeated step is taken with its direction reversed. These random walks have been introduced respectively by Simon (1955) and Bertoin (2024) and are sometimes refered to the self-confident step-reinforced random walk and the counterbalanced step-reinforced random walk respectively. In this work, we introduce a new class of unbalanced step-reinforced random walks for which we prove the strong law of large numbers and the central limit theorem. In particular, our work provides a unified treatment of the elephant random walk introduced by Schutz and Trimper (2004) and the positively and negatively step-reinforced random walks.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

The Bilateral Efficiency of Ethernet: Recalibrating Metcalfe and Boggs After Fifty Years

Authors:

arXiv:2603.19406v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In July 1976, Metcalfe and Boggs published their foundational paper on Ethernet in Communications of the ACM. Their efficiency model – E = (P/C)/(P/C + W*T) – measures the fraction of Ether time carrying good forward packets under contention. For fifty years this model has framed how the community thinks about Ethernet performance. We argue it is silent on the question that matters for modern intra-rack interconnect: bilateral transaction efficiency – the fraction of link time that produces committed agreements between sender and receiver. Metcalfe and Boggs themselves planted the seed in their EFTP "end-dally" protocol (Section 7.2.2), and the deeper anchor is older still: Abramson's Alohanet carried positive acknowledgments at the link layer – a bilateral mechanism Metcalfe consciously removed in 1973 to obtain Ethernet's simple, ACK-free packet format. The result is a fifty-year bilateral zigzag: Aloha (bilateral) to Ethernet (unilateral) to the EFTP end-dally (bilateral) to TCP (unilateral-with-bilateral-above). We formalize bilateral efficiency, connect it to the back-to-back Shannon channel with Perfect Information Feedback, and – scoping the claim explicitly to intra-rack distances of one meter or less – describe how the Open Aethernet link recovers mutual knowledge at the link layer. The correction to Table 1 is not a different set of numbers. It is a different question.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Temperature driven false vacuum decay in coherently coupled Bose superfluids

arXiv:2602.03834v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The relaxation of a quantum field from a metastable state (false vacuum) to a stable one (true vacuum), also known as false vacuum decay, is a fundamental problem in quantum field theory and cosmology. We study this phenomenon using a two-dimensional interacting and coherently coupled Bose-Bose mixture, a platform that has already been employed experimentally to investigate false vacuum decay in one dimension. In such a mixture, it is possible to define an effective magnetization that acts as a quantum field variable. Using the Stochastic Gross-Pitaevskii equation (SGPE), we prepare thermal equilibrium states in the false vacuum and extract decay rates from the magnetization dynamics. The decay rates show an exponential dependence on temperature, in line with the thermal theory of instantons. Since the SGPE is based on complex scalar fields, it also allows us to explore the behavior of the phase, which turns out to become dynamic during decay. Our results confirm the SGPE as an effective tool for studying coupled magnetization and phase dynamics and the associated instanton physics in ultracold quantum gases.

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

Hybrid NARX-LLM for Greenland Iceberg Discharge: Prompt-Driven Residual Correction

arXiv:2606.15288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Greenland iceberg discharge exhibits complex nonlinear dynamics with limited observability, challenging traditional predictive models. We present a Hybrid NARX-LLM framework that combines a nonlinear autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (NARX) and a large language model (LLM) for residual correction. We further propose a Physics-Informed Prompt (PIP) method that transforms unstructured physical knowledge into structured prompts for zero-shot in-context reasoning. The primary objective is to explore the corrective potential of this framework for modeling Greenland iceberg discharge, rather than merely optimizing predictive accuracy. The NARX component captures intrinsic temporal dependencies, while the LLM, guided by PIP, encodes glacier dynamics and environmental drivers and perceives key trend patterns to correct systematic prediction errors. This integration allows the model to reason about unmodeled factors and produce interpretable residuals, enhancing overall predictive accuracy. Applied to Greenland iceberg discharge time series, our approach addresses extreme events that are difficult to predict due to rare variations and nonstationary trends, a limitation often overlooked by traditional methods. By fusing structured time-series modeling with knowledge-driven foundation AI, the framework offers a scalable and interpretable pathway to bridge data-limited climate forecasting with physics-informed LLM reasoning. The code is available.

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

Active Sampling for Ultra-Low-Bit-Rate Video Compression via Conditional Controlled Diffusion

Diffusion models provide a powerful generative prior for perceptual reconstruction at ultra-low bitrates, but effective video compression requires controlling the generative process using highly compact conditioning signals. In this work, we present ActDiff-VC, a diffusion-based video compression framework for the ultra-low-bitrate regime. Our method partitions videos into variable-length segments, transmits keyframes only when needed, and summarizes temporal dynamics using a compact set of tracked point trajectories. Conditioned on these sparse signals, a conditional diffusion decoder synthesizes the remaining frames, enabling perceptually realistic reconstruction under severe rate constraints. To support this design, we introduce two mechanisms: content-adaptive keyframe selection and budget-aware sparse trajectory selection, which together enable compact yet effective conditioning for generative reconstruction. Experiments on the UVG and MCL-JCV benchmarks show that ActDiff-VC achieves up to 64.6\% bitrate reduction at matched NIQE, improves KID by up to 64.6\% and FID by up to 37.7\% at comparable bitrates against strong learned codecs, and delivers favorable perceptual rate–distortion trade-offs relative to learned and diffusion-based baselines in the ultra-low-bitrate regime.

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

Skill-MAS: Evolving Meta-Skill for Automatic Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.18837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based automatic Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) generation has become a crucial frontier for tackling complex tasks. However, existing methods face a dilemma between model capability and experience retention. Inference-time MAS leverages frozen frontier LLMs but repeats identical searches without learning from past experience. Conversely, Training-time MAS internalizes experience via gradient updates but is constrained by the low capability ceiling of smaller models, and is hard to scale to large frontier LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose Skill-MAS, a novel third path that decouples experience retention from parametric updates by conceptualizing the high-level orchestration capability as an evolvable Meta-Skill. Skill-MAS refines this architectural knowledge through a closed optimization loop: (1) Multi-Trajectory Rollout samples a behavioral distribution for each task under the current Meta-Skill; and (2) Selective Reflection adaptively selects priority tasks and applies hierarchical contrastive analysis to distill systemic experience into generalizable, strategy-level principles. Extensive experiments across four complex benchmarks and four distinct LLMs demonstrate that Skill-MAS not only achieves remarkable performance gains but also maintains a favorable cost-performance trade-off. Further analysis reveals that the evolved Meta-Skills are highly robust and exhibit strong transferability across unseen tasks and different LLMs.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Panel-level multilocus methylation quantification in native cell-free DNA by PCR-compatible sequential enzymatic processing

DNA methylation is informative for liquid biopsy, but low template abundance, distributed methylation signals and workflow complexity limit implementation. Here we present Delta-HLD, a PCR-compatible methylation assay platform that quantifies methylation directly in native DNA through sequential hybridization, ligation and methylation-sensitive digestion. The assay co-reports methylation-dependent signals from multiple loci through a shared amplification architecture, generating a single panel-level PCR readout. We established the chemistry, optimized panel size and composition through model-guided experiments, and implemented the assay as a triplex qPCR workflow with per-sample internal process controls. Plasma proof-of-concept analyses showed discriminatory signal in CRC and proof-of-concept transferability to hepatocellular carcinoma. Additional platelet-retaining experiments identified a strategy to increase recovery of analyzable circulating templates while reducing genomic DNA recognition. Delta-HLD provides a compact PCR-compatible framework for low-input methylation analysis without base conversion.

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

Repeated Shared Access Enables Grokking, but Edit Propagation Depends on an Addressable Memory

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20737v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study factual edit propagation in a controlled synthetic knowledge-graph QA setting using a 2x2 grid that crosses loop recurrence with shared-memory access: a dense transformer (Dense), a looped transformer (Loop), a dense backbone with shared memory (Dense+Mem), and a looped backbone with shared memory (loop-memory coupling, LMC). The two factors dissociate. For learning, both routes to repeated shared access – looped recomputation and repeated memory rereading – cross the out-of-distribution (OOD) grokking barrier that Dense fails, so repeated shared access is the behavioral regularity, not a specific architecture. For editing, the substrates split along a different axis: applying a single localized factual edit (conditioned on direct success) and measuring 2-hop propagation on a shared pre-edit-correct set, the edit propagates strongly in both memory-bearing cells (LMC 0.78-0.92, Dense+Mem 0.71-0.96) and only weakly in the memory-free ones (Loop 0.04-0.30, Dense 0.00-0.03). The split is along the memory axis, not the loop axis: every memory-bearing seed exceeds every memory-free seed, with no detectable difference between the two memory cells. Crucially Dense+Mem has no recurrence, so the propagating ingredient is an addressable site that an edit can write to and later computation rereads, not loop recomputation; Loop is at best a partial intermediate. The affordance survives coarsening the store (N=128 to N=13): propagation attenuates but the memory/no-memory split persists, so fine granularity buys precision rather than the affordance itself. These results dissociate learning competence from editing affordance – repeated shared access suffices to grok, but edit propagation depends on whether the substrate exposes an addressable memory that the forward computation can write to and later reread, an affordance that loop recurrence provides only partially.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Physically Motivated Ansatz for Open Fermionic Systems on Quantum Computer

arXiv:2606.16823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Determining non-equilibrium steady states (NESS) of open fermionic systems is a fundamental problem akin to finding ground states of closed systems. To address this, variational quantum algorithms can be used to solve the Lindblad master equation, much like the Schrödinger equation, yet ansatz design for NESS remains challenging. Existing approaches rely mostly on hardware-efficient ansätze (HEA), which suffer from the barren plateau problem. Here, we introduce a physically motivated ansatz named NE-UCC. Numerical simulations demonstrate that NE-UCC reliably converges to the steady state even in strongly correlated regimes far from equilibrium, reducing the infidelity by up to ten orders of magnitude compared to HEA. Furthermore, NE-UCC facilitates the exploration of excited eigenmodes with specific symmetries.

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

Shattering the Autoregressive Curse: Dynamic Epistemic Entropy Orchestrated Erasable Reinforcement Learning for LLMs

arXiv:2606.17735v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Although reinforcement learning (RL) has expanded the cognitive boundaries of large language models (LLMs), it often remains vulnerable to the autoregressive curse in long-horizon logical reasoning: small epistemic perturbations introduced early in generation can propagate irreversibly along the Markov decision process flow, triggering cascading failures that drive the reasoning trajectory toward collapse. To overcome this autoregressive cascade, in which a single early mistake can compromise all subsequent reasoning steps, we propose dynamic epistemic entropy orchestrated erasable reinforcement learning ($E^3RL$). $E^3RL$ eliminates reliance on external signals by grounding the model's endogenous local autoregressive cross-entropy as an intrinsic coordinate of epistemic uncertainty. By introducing segment-level adaptive dynamic thresholds and advantage allocation, $E^3RL$ enables the model to precisely excise localized logical defects while reusing historical key-value (KV) cache streams, thereby endowing the reasoning process with a self-healing capability. We train $E^3RL$ on the DeepMath-103k dataset. Experimental results show that $E^3RL$ reshapes the exploration efficiency of long-sequence reasoning and improves sample efficiency while maintaining linear memory overhead. On mathematical reasoning benchmarks such as AIME, $E^3RL$ achieves substantial performance gains, with the 4B and 8B parameter models surpassing previous state-of-the-art (SOTA) results by 5.349\% and 6.514\%, respectively. These findings suggest that $E^3RL$ shatters the autoregressive curse in long-sequence reasoning and establishes a theoretical and systems-level foundation for the next generation of self-healing artificial general intelligence (AGI).