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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Critique of Agent Model

Authors:
Eric Xing↗Mingkai Deng↗Jinyu Hou↗

arXiv:2606.23991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: What is an agent? What constitutes agency? With the rise of Large Language Model (LLM) systems marketed as ``coding agents'', ``AI co-scientists'', and other ``agentic" tools that promise to drive up productivity, and at the same time, ``existential" concerns such as AI escaping human control with destructive power under a speculative ``machine agency" against humans, it has become essential to clarify where automation ends and agency begins, both for building capable systems and for understanding whether and what to fear. Drawing on Descartes' grounding of agency in independent thought, and on portrayals of autonomous beings in science fiction, we survey the current landscape of AI agents, and analyze agent architectures along five dimensions: goal, identity, decision-making, self-regulation, and learning. Specifically, we argue that genuine agency requires these structures to be internalized within the system itself rather than assembled through external scaffolding. This distinction between agentic systems, whose competence resides in engineered workflows, and agentive systems, whose capabilities (including social interaction) arise endogenously, defines the boundary between systems designed for prescribed tasks, and those capable of operating in the open world with true autonomy. Building on this analysis, we propose the Goal-Identity-Configurator (GIC) architecture for a general-purpose agent model, combining hierarchical goal decomposition, identity evolution, simulative reasoning grounded in a separately trained world model, learned self-regulation, and self-directed learning from both real and simulated experience. Furthermore, we share insight on the auditability, controllability, and safety of agentive systems that possess greater autonomy and ``agency", but remain under human oversight.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TimeProVe: Propose, then Verify for Efficient Long Video Temporal Reasoning in Activities of Daily Living

Authors:
Arkaprava Sinha↗Dominick Reilly↗Siddharth Krishnan↗Hieu Le↗Srijan Das↗

Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) requires identifying sparse, query-relevant evidence within hours-long untrimmed videos. Existing approaches either process videos densely with large vision-language models (VLMs), incurring prohibitive computational cost, or rely on sparse caption-based reasoning, which often misses temporally localized and motion-centric evidence. We introduce TimeProVe, a cost-efficient hybrid framework for temporally grounded reasoning in long videos. TimeProVe first employs lightweight modules to generate action-grounded answer–evidence hypotheses and subsequently invokes an expensive VLM only for targeted verification. The core of our framework lies in the Action-based Candidate Evidence (ACE) module, which converts temporally localized actions into query-conditioned candidate answers and supporting evidence windows through lightweight LLM reasoning. We further introduce OpenTSUBench (OTB), an open-ended benchmark designed to evaluate temporally grounded reasoning in real-world Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scenarios. Experiments show that TimeProVe outperforms the strongest baseline on OTB by 7.3%, while reducing VLM calls by 75% and inference cost by 93%. Furthermore, without explicit temporal grounding training, TimeProVe achieves competitive performance on Charades-STA, and reaches state-of-the-art results when enhanced with grounding VLMs.

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

Dual-branch Prompting for Multimodal Machine Translation

Authors:
Jie Wang↗Zhendong Yang↗Liansong Zong↗Xiaobo Zhang↗Dexian Wang↗Ji Zhang↗

Multimodal Machine Translation (MMT) typically enhances text-only translation by incorporating aligned visual features. Despite the remarkable progress, state-of-the-art MMT approaches often rely on paired image-text inputs at inference and are sensitive to irrelevant visual noise, which limits their robustness and practical applicability. To address these issues, we propose D2P-MMT, a diffusion-based dual-branch prompting framework for robust vision-guided translation. Specifically, D2P-MMT requires only the source text and a reconstructed image generated by a pre-trained diffusion model, which naturally filters out distracting visual details while preserving semantic cues. During training, the model jointly learns from both authentic and reconstructed images using a dual-branch prompting strategy, encouraging rich cross-modal interactions. To bridge the modality gap and mitigate training-inference discrepancies, we introduce a distributional alignment loss that enforces consistency between the output distributions of the two branches. Extensive experiments on the Multi30K dataset demonstrate that D2P-MMT achieves superior translation performance compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/MentaY/DDP.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM-Aided Joint Secrecy Precoding and Trajectory for RSMA-Based Heterogeneous UAV Networks

Authors:
Lijie Zheng↗Ji He↗Shih Yu Chang↗Yulong Shen↗

arXiv:2507.17188v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper investigates secure communications in rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) enabled heterogeneous UAV networks, where multiple UAVs collaboratively serve ground terminals in the presence of eavesdroppers. By jointly considering secrecy rate maximization and propulsion energy consumption minimization, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem involving UAV trajectory design, service association, power allocation, and secrecy precoding under mobility, collision-avoidance, service-capacity, and communication constraints. The formulated problem is highly non-convex due to the coupling among UAV trajectories, RSMA transmission variables, and secrecy constraints.To address the resulting non-convex and highly coupled optimization problem, we propose a hierarchical optimization framework. The inner layer uses a semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based S2DC algorithm combining penalty functions and difference-of-convex (D.C.) programming to solve the secrecy precoding problem with fixed UAV positions. The outer layer introduces a Large Language Model (LLM)-guided heuristic multi-agent reinforcement learning approach (LLM-HeMARL) for trajectory optimization. LLM-HeMARL efficiently incorporates LLM-generated expert heuristic policy, enabling UAVs to learn energy-aware, security-driven trajectories without the inference overhead of real-time LLM calls. The simulation results show that our method outperforms existing baselines in secrecy rate and energy efficiency, with consistent robustness across varying UAV swarm sizes and random seeds.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Authors:
Xianda Guo↗Pinhan Fu↗Ruilin Wang↗Wenke Huang↗Mang Ye↗Qin Zou↗

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7–3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

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

Tying the Loop – Tied Expert Layers in Mixture-of-Experts Language Models

Authors:
Martin Jaggi↗

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures efficiently scale Large Language Models (LLMs) by activating only a small fraction of their experts per token, yet the full parameter count - dominated by the expert parameters - must be held in training and inference memory. To address this, we introduce Expert Tying, an architectural modification that shares expert parameters across consecutive transformer layers while preserving independent, layer-wise routing and attention. We evaluate this approach across common, state-of-the-art architectures, including OLMoE, Qwen3, and DeepSeek-style MoEs. Our pretraining experiments demonstrate that tying experts can reduce memory footprint by almost 2x at virtually no degradation in perplexity or downstream quality. By exploiting the parameter redundancy inherent in MoE pathways, our method provides a highly favorable compute-to-memory trade-off, advancing efficient training and scaling of next-generation LLMs.

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07.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

The mutational landscape of STING-induced immunity

Authors:
Bing Zhang↗

Stimulator of interferon genes (STING) is an evolutionary conserved immune signalling protein with key roles in host defence, cancer, senescence and inflammation1–3. Downstream of STING, type I interferon, inflammatory cytokine signalling and non-canonical autophagy are governed by a multilayered mechanism integrating ligand-induced structural transitions, protein–protein interactions and coordinated intracellular trafficking4–13. Despite its central role in immunity and relevance as therapeutic target14, the sequence elements that govern STING (in)activation in cells remain incompletely understood. Here we developed a massively parallel assay to systematically chart the sequence-function landscape of STING. Profiling thousands of single amino-acid variants, we identified structural and functional determinants that shape the immunostimulatory capacity of STING and its ability to translate ligand recognition into distinct signalling outputs. Cryogenic-electron microscopy structures of select STING hyperactive variants revealed new regulatory principles dictating conformational transition from inactive to signalling-competent states of STING. Mutational effects are widespread across the functional landscape and can sensitize STING towards the natural ligand 2′3′-cGAMP15–18 or decouple interferon induction from non-canonical autophagy, demonstrating a diversity of possible responses that can be accessed through single point substitutions. Finally, our data showed the clinical and evolutionary relevance of naturally occurring STING protein variants. Collectively, these findings define molecular principles that tune STING activity and chart the landscape of its functional potential across immune contexts. A massively parallel assay systematically charts the sequence-function landscape of the STING signalling protein, and the findings define molecular principles that tune STING activity and show its functional potential across immune contexts.

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08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Hierarchical Advantage Weighting for Online RL Fine-Tuning of VLAs from Sparse Episode Outcomes

Authors:
Tongyan Fang↗Siyuan Huang↗Naiyu Fang↗Ganlong Zhao↗Zhongjin Luo↗Jianbo Liu↗Xiaogang Wang↗Ying Dong↗Hongsheng Li↗

arXiv:2606.17043v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When pretrained VLA policies are fine-tuned through online RL, each rollout episode produces only a single binary outcome (success or failure), yet the actor update requires per-transition supervision. Existing approaches commonly reduce this sparse outcome to a single scalar reward or advantage signal, which conflates distinct forms of transition-level feedback and provides limited guidance once basic task success becomes achievable. First, a single scalar signal conflates the two objectives of viability and efficiency; once basic success is achieved, the binary label provides no gradient to distinguish efficient completions from slow ones. Second, real-world rollouts mix autonomous and intervention segments; naively assigning episode outcomes across these boundaries introduces incorrect credit assignment. To address these issues, we propose Hierarchical Advantage-Weighted Behavior Cloning (HABC), which trains separate critic heads for these two objectives on different data subsets and combines their outputs with a state-adaptive balance. A state-adaptive gate $g_t$ merges their one-step advantages, prioritizing viability when success is uncertain and shifting to efficiency only when viability is high, and converts the result into per-transition weights on the actor loss. Intervention-aware credit assignment further restricts outcome labels to segments executed by the current policy, preventing supervision from leaking across intervention boundaries. In real-robot experiments on three contact-rich bimanual tasks, HABC raises success from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baselines of 36%, 44%, and 12% to 92%, 88%, and 38%.

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09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Machine learning-driven identification of virulence determinants in <i>Borrelia burgdorferi</i> associated with human dissemination

Authors:
Hoa Thanh Nguyen↗

by Hoa Thanh Nguyen, Catherine A. Brissette Lyme disease, the most common tick-borne infectious disease in the United States, presents with highly variable clinical outcomes, ranging from localized erythema migrans to severe disseminated complications affecting the heart, joints, and nervous system. The bacterial determinants underlying this phenotypic variation remain largely unknown, limiting our ability to predict disease progression and optimize treatment strategies. Here, we applied machine learning (ML) approaches to identify specific amino acid residues within surface-exposed virulence factors that predict human dissemination phenotypes. Utilizing the published whole genome sequences from 299 clinical Borrelia burgdorferi isolates collected from the United States and Slovenia over a 30-year period (1992–2021), we extracted and characterized translated amino acid sequences (variants) of seven known virulence factors (BB_0406, BBK32, DbpA, OspA, OspC, P66, and RevA). Protein variants were classified based on their association with disseminated versus localized infections using clinical metadata. Cramér’s V analysis revealed possible strong associations between dissemination phenotypes and five adhesins: BBK32, DbpA, OspC, P66, and RevA. We developed ML models using five algorithms with multiple feature selection strategies, achieving robust predictive performance for DbpA, OspC, and RevA variants (all performance metrics > 0.7). Feature importance analysis identified 57, 29, and 42 key predictive residues for DbpA, OspC, and RevA, respectively. Notably, B-cell epitope prediction revealed significant enrichment of ML-identified residues within predicted epitope regions for OspC (11 overlapping residues, OR = 3.57, p = 0.006) and RevA (12 overlapping residues, OR = 2.37, p = 0.048), suggesting these residues may influence immune recognition and bacterial persistence. This study establishes the first computational framework linking Borrelia protein sequence variants to clinical dissemination phenotypes, providing molecular insights into Lyme disease pathogenesis that may inform the development of improved diagnostics and therapeutic targets.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Seeing Below the Limit of Detection: A Censored-Poisson Bayesian Latent-Growth Change-Point Detector (the Span Detector) for Serial ctDNA in HR+/HER2- Metastatic Breast Cancer

Authors:
Aarchi Singh Thakur↗Abhijoy Sarkar↗

arXiv:2606.11876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circulating-tumour DNA (ctDNA) carries evidence of drug resistance months before imaging shows it, but the earliest evidence lives below the assay's limit of detection (LoD): a nascent subclone is detected only intermittently, producing a flickering sequence of faint detects and non-detects. Commercial liquid biopsies treat each draw as an independent snapshot and a non-detect as nothing. We argue a non-detect is a left-censored observation, and the pattern of non-detects and faint detects over time carries actionable evidence of growth before any single value is trustworthy. We introduce Span, a censored-Poisson Bayesian latent-growth change-point detector that models the binary detection process, accumulates a sequential generalised-likelihood-ratio statistic for an upward change-point in the per-variant detection rate, and raises a competing-risks alarm with calibrated false-alarm control. Span has no learned weights, so there is nothing to overfit. On a synthetic cohort of HR+/HER2- metastatic breast cancer on first-line CDK4/6-inhibitor plus endocrine therapy, at a matched 10% false-alarm rate, Span roughly doubles the fraction of impending progressions caught three months ahead (indolent regime: 25% vs 11% for the snapshot), with a falsifiable dose-response: large for indolent emergence, vanishing for fast emergence. A value-trajectory baseline performs identically to the snapshot, isolating the gain to the censored detection model. The survival backbone matches a Cox baseline on real breast-cancer data (GBSG-2, n=686; C-index 0.67 vs 0.68), and on a real longitudinal cohort with clean biomarkers (PBC2, n=312) the same pipeline correctly declines to win, a falsifiable boundary test confirming the mechanism is regime-specific. All ctDNA trajectories are synthetic.

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11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

FuseSampleAgg: One-Pass Neighborhood Estimation for Budgeted Knowledge-Graph Refresh and Validation

Authors:
Aleksandar Stankovi\'c↗Haoran Du↗Xinming Wang↗

arXiv:2511.13645v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Operational knowledge-graph (KG) pipelines in networking and cybersecurity increasingly need to refresh embeddings under strict time, memory, and audit budgets, especially as curated feeds and LLM-assisted extraction accelerate KG updates. A recurring per-step cost in mini-batch KG learning is neighborhood-context estimation: uniform neighbor sampling without replacement followed by mean aggregation. Common frameworks implement this estimator through sampled-subgraph materialization and intermediate feature gathers, adding kernel launches, allocator pressure, and transient memory spikes. We present One-Pass Neighborhood Estimation, a fused PyTorch CUDA operator that samples neighbors and directly emits the sampled-neighborhood mean, avoiding explicit block construction while preserving GraphSAGE-mean semantics for the same sampled neighbor IDs. It supports seed-controlled sampling and optional saved-index replay for reproducible validation and regression testing. Across large-graph mini-batch workloads, it improves FP32 end-to-end step latency by 2.24x-3.48x over tuned DGL baselines and reduces transient GPU memory by up to 160x in our measurements. On OGB KG completion benchmarks such as WikiKG2 and BioKG, it reduces step time and peak VRAM while matching ranking quality within seed variability, improving time-to-quality for budgeted KG refresh.

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12.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-08

Effects of SGLT2 inhibition on incident heart failure in carriers of cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variants

Authors:
Nicholas A. Marston↗

Although the beneficial effects of sodium–glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibition in heart failure (HF) have been well established, it is unknown whether SGLT2 inhibition confers benefit in carriers of rare variants in cardiomyopathy-associated genes. Here we evaluated whole-exome sequencing data from the randomized DECLARE-TIMI 58 trial, in which adults with type 2 diabetes and increased cardiovascular risk were randomized to dapagliflozin or placebo treatment. Pathogenic or likely pathogenic variants (P/LP) in high-confidence cardiomyopathy genes were identified, and treatment effects on hospitalization for HF (HHF) were compared between carriers of such variants and noncarriers. Among 12,685 patients for whom sequence data were obtained, 121 carried a cardiomyopathy variant (76 dilated cardiomyopathy, 25 hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and 25 arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy). Over a median follow-up of 4.2 years, dapagliflozin lowered the risk of HHF more strongly in carriers (hazard ratio 0.18, 95% confidence interval 0.04–0.86) than in noncarriers (hazard ratio 0.70, 95% confidence interval 0.57–0.86; P interaction 0.03). Absolute risk reduction was 13.0% in carriers and 1.0% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.03). Most carriers (82%) had no prior HF, and in carriers without prior HF, treatment with dapagliflozin reduced the absolute risk of HHF by 12.8%, compared with a reduction of 0.6% in noncarriers (P interaction 0.01). The findings from this cohort of older and high-risk patients raise the possibility that SGLT2 inhibitor treatment should be started early to prevent HF in individuals who carry P/LP cardiomyopathy variants. These results need to be confirmed in a prospective, dedicated trial of preventive HF treatments in carriers of P/LP cardiomyopathy-associated variants. In a whole-exome sequencing analysis, the beneficial effects of the SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin in reducing the risk of future heart failure hospitalization in individuals with type 2 diabetes were markedly greater in individuals who carried a cardiomyopathy-associated genetic variant compared with noncarriers, suggesting a personalized preventative therapy based on genetic information.

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

Reliability-Calibrated Edge-IoT Early Fault Warning for Rotating Machinery with a Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer

Authors:
Changyu Li↗Huabei Nie↗Xiaoya Ni↗Lu Wang↗Lijuan Shen↗Kaishun Wu↗Fei Luo↗

arXiv:2601.21293v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) systems increasingly rely on distributed vibration sensing to support predictive maintenance of rotating machinery. In practical deployments, however, raw signal upload is costly and alarm decisions must be made locally under limited computation, changing operating conditions, and strict nuisance-alarm budgets. This paper presents a reliability-calibrated edge-IoT early-warning framework, in which a compact Physics-Guided Tiny-Mamba Transformer (PG-TMT) acts as the representation module and an extreme value theory (EVT) layer converts streaming anomaly scores into event-level alarm episodes. PG-TMT combines a depthwise-separable convolutional stem, a Tiny-Mamba state-space branch, and a lightweight local Transformer to capture transient, long-horizon, and multichannel degradation cues under batch-size-one inference. To improve auditability, temporal attention is projected to the frequency domain and softly aligned with analytical bearing fault-order bands. EVT calibration, dual-threshold hysteresis, and trimmed-tail fitting provide controllable false-alarm intensity even when healthy calibration data are imperfect. Experiments on CWRU, Paderborn, XJTU-SY, and an industrial pilot demonstrate that the proposed framework improves PR-AUC, reduces detection delay under a controlled nuisance-alarm budget, and remains robust to structured interference, metadata uncertainty, compound fault mixtures, and domain transfer. With a sub-1 MB footprint and Jetson p99 latency below 7 ms, the framework supports calibrated and interpretable early warnings for IIoT predictive maintenance.

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

Information-Theoretic Measures in AI: A Practical Decision Guide

Authors:
Nikolaos Al. Papadopoulos↗Konstantinos E. Psannis↗

arXiv:2604.23716v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Information-theoretic (IT) measures are ubiquitous in artificial intelligence: entropy drives decision-tree splits and uncertainty quantification, cross-entropy is the default classification loss, mutual information underpins representation learning and feature selection, and transfer entropy reveals directed influence in dynamical systems. A second, less consolidated family of measures, integrated information (Phi), effective information (EI), and autonomy, has emerged for characterizing agent complexity. Despite wide adoption, measure selection is often decoupled from estimator assumptions, failure modes, and safe inferential claims. This paper provides a practical decision framework for all seven measures, organized around three prescriptive questions for each: (i) what question does the measure answer and in which AI context; (ii) which estimator is appropriate for the data type and dimensionality; and (iii) what is the most dangerous misuse. The framework is operationalized in two complementary artifacts: a measure-selection flowchart and a master decision table. We cover both AI/ML and decision-making agent application domains per measure, with standardized Bridge Boxes linking IT quantities to cognitive constructs. Three worked examples illustrate the framework on concrete practitioner scenarios spanning representation learning, temporal influence analysis, and evolved agent complexity.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Learning to Emulate Chaos: Adversarial Optimal Transport Regularization

Authors:
Gabriel Melo↗Leonardo Santiago↗Peter Y. Lu↗

arXiv:2604.21097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chaos arises in many complex dynamical systems, from weather to power grids, but is difficult to accurately model with data-driven methods such as machine learning emulators. While emulators are promising tools for accelerating simulations and solving inverse problems, they still struggle to learn chaotic dynamics, where sensitivity to initial conditions renders exact long-term forecasts infeasible, especially given noisy data. Recent work instead trains emulators to match the statistical properties of chaotic attractors, but these approaches often rely on handcrafted summary statistics or large, diverse multi-environment datasets. In this work, we propose a family of adversarial optimal transport objectives that can jointly learn high-quality summary statistics and a physically consistent emulator from a single noisy trajectory. We theoretically analyze and experimentally validate a Sinkhorn divergence formulation (2-Wasserstein) and a WGAN-style dual formulation (1-Wasserstein) of our approach. Numerical experiments across a variety of chaotic systems, including ones with high-dimensional spatiotemporal chaos, show that emulators trained using our proposed objectives have significantly improved long-term statistical fidelity.

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16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-22

Differences in tuberculosis prevalence by sex in low- and middle-income countries over 1993–2025: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Authors:
Nicole A. Swartwood↗

by Nicole A. Swartwood, Nanki Singh, Seyed Alireza Mortazavi, Melike Hazal Can, Hening Cui, Do Kyung Ryuk, Peter MacPherson, Katherine C. Horton, Nicolas A. Menzies Background Global and national initiatives to combat tuberculosis (TB) have expanded over recent years. Despite this, the TB burden remains high in some population groups, with men recognized as having elevated TB risks. Summary measures of sex differences in TB prevalence were last estimated in 2016. Since then, many additional prevalence surveys have been conducted, including in the highest TB burden countries. We conducted a systematic review of sex-stratified TB prevalence survey data published over 1993–2025, to provide updated estimates of male-to-female (M:F) TB prevalence ratios and determine whether sex-related disparities in TB burden have closed over time. Methods and findings We identified surveys reporting community-representative, sex-stratified estimates of pulmonary TB prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including surveys from an earlier review (covering January 1993–March 2016) and a new systematic review (covering 1st December 2015–13th October 2025). This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024503853) and included searches of PubMed, Embase, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, Africa Index Medicus, LILACS, and SciELO. We extracted data on bacteriologically confirmed and smear-positive TB prevalence among adults (aged ≥ 15 years), stratified by sex. Risk of bias was evaluated using eight criteria specific to prevalence surveys. We fit multi-level Bayesian regression models with study- and country-level random effects to estimate the M:F ratio of TB prevalence (male prevalence divided by female prevalence), overall and for key subgroups. In meta-regression analyses, we estimated how prevalence ratios varied over time and according to known TB risk factors and TB case definitions.We identified 10,124 publications and extracted data from 100 eligible studies representing 102 unique prevalence surveys and 4,658,310 participants (45.6% male) in 33 LMICs. TB prevalence was higher in men than women in 90/102 of the included surveys, with a pooled M:F prevalence ratio of 2.02 (95% credible interval (CrI): 1.71, 2.34) for bacteriologically confirmed TB and 2.38 (95% CrI: 1.91, 2.90) for smear-positive TB. Time trend analyses showed a 2.0% (95% CrI: −0.2, 4.5%) average annual change in the M:F ratio of bacteriologically confirmed TB over the study period. The M:F prevalence ratio was estimated to be higher for countries with greater excess HIV prevalence among men, and countries with greater gender equity (as measured by the United Nation’s Gender Development Index). The estimated M:F prevalence ratio was also higher for surveys that did not restrict testing to individuals reporting TB symptoms. Study limitations include heterogeneity in survey methods and definitions, as well as limited data from the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe WHO world regions and post-COVID-19 period. Conclusions Men in LMICs consistently experience TB at a higher prevalence than women. Time trend estimates are uncertain, but consistent with widening sex differences in TB prevalence over the last three decades, despite efforts to address the risk factors underlying this excess TB burden.

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

Independent Chiral Control in Theory-Space Models:A Rank-Preserving Framework and Its Application to Neutrino Mass Generation

Authors:
Aadarsh Singh↗

arXiv:2409.09033v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a general framework of rank-preserving, element-wise matrix transformations for engineering fermion mass hierarchies in theory-space constructions. We prove that preservation of massless modes requires the transformation function to be separable, $g_f(i,j)=g^{(L)}_f(i)g^{(R)}_f(j)$, which in turn enables independent control of left- and right-chiral zero-mode profiles directly at the level of the theory-space mass matrix. This formalism unifies and extends the clockwork mechanism, permits controlled deformation of Kaluza–Klein spectra, and enhances hierarchy generation in GIM-like fine-cancellation scenarios. As a concrete application, we show that in theory-space models for neutrino masses, suitable transformations allow sub-eV light neutrinos to arise from TeV-scale new physics with only $\mathcal{O}(40)$ additional fermionic sites, while remaining consistent with charged-lepton flavor-violation bounds. In contrast, the corresponding untransformed models asymptote at the MeV scale and cannot access the phenomenologically required regime without extreme field multiplicities or hierarchical parameters.

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18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Critical spectral behavior and large deviations for geometric $\alpha$-stable processes

Authors:
Kaneharu Tsuchida↗

arXiv:2606.17501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study the Schrödinger-type operator associated with geometric stable processes on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$, especially the differentiability of spectral function. Let $\mathcal{H}$ be the generator of the geometric stable process and $\mu$ a smooth measure on $\mathbb{R}^{d}$. Then the spectral function $C(\theta)$ is defined as $C(\theta) = -\inf \sigma(-\mathcal{H} - \theta \mu)$, where $\sigma(\mathcal{A})$ denotes the spectrum of $\mathcal{A}$ and $\theta$ is a real parameter. Since the geometric stable process exhibits severe local singularities in its Lévy measure, its transition semigroup lacks ultracontractivity, which invalidates classical methods for proving the differentiability. To overcome this obstacle, we use the compact embedding of the extended Dirichlet space into $L^2(\mu)$. As a primary application of this differentiability, we establish a large deviation principle for a positive continuous additive functional associated with the smooth measure $\mu$.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Assessing Distribution Shift in Human Activity Recognition for Domain Generalization

Authors:
Rebecca Adaimi↗Edison Thomaz↗

arXiv:2606.24781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While the field of Human Activity Recognition (HAR) continues to draw interest from researchers and advance in important ways, some key challenges remain. One of the most difficult aspects of building HAR models that show good performance in real-world settings is dealing with data diversity from device and sensor heterogeneity, and contextual changes that are intrinsic to real-world applications. While data diversity in HAR has been well-acknowledged in the literature, there remains a gap in understanding the effect of various types of distribution shifts on HAR models and the domain generalization problem that arises. Towards that end, this paper systematically evaluates 4 different types of distribution shifts, including variations in device type, sensor placement, sampling rate, and user behavior. Quantifying their effects, we illustrate that diversity shifts predominantly define all types of shifts, indicating the existence of unique features that are not shared across different domains. We then introduce a uniform HAR-based distribution shift benchmarks and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of up to 28 domain generalization methods. Our analysis exposes the limitations of current domain generalization algorithms in achieving model generalizability, marginally outperforming the empirical risk minimization baseline. This work represents the first systematic exploration of domain generalization and adaptation concerning specific distribution shifts in sensor-based HAR, offering an open-source benchmark platform and datasets to spur further research.

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20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Geometry-Aware Post-Hoc Uncertainty Quantification in Operator Learning

Authors:
Oriol Vendrell-Gallart↗Nima Negarandeh↗Ramin Bostanabad↗

arXiv:2606.17513v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural operators provide fast surrogates for PDEs but their deterministic predictions limit their use in tasks requiring uncertainty quantification (UQ), especially under geometric variability. Existing approaches primarily model uncertainty in network parameters, largely overlooking the geometry-aware representations learned by the operator itself. We propose REEF-GP (Residual on Embedded Features Gaussian Process), a post-hoc UQ framework that fits a GP to the residuals of a frozen neural operator whose internal embeddings define the kernel feature space. Rather than learning a separate feature map, REEF-GP adapts the operator's intrinsic coordinate-feature representations to construct geometry-aware uncertainties. To ensure stability and scalability on unstructured domains, REEF-GP incorporates spectral-normalized projections, heteroscedastic geometry-aware noise, and efficient subset-based training that avoids restrictive low-rank approximations. Across five PDE benchmarks with varying geometries, REEF-GP preserves predictive accuracy while achieving calibrated uncertainty estimates competitive with deep ensembles but at a fraction of their cost. Our approach remains robust under geometric distribution shift, with uncertainty concentrating in physically meaningful regions (e.g., shock fronts). Our results demonstrate that accurate and scalable post-hoc UQ for neural operators can be achieved directly in their learned feature space, offering a practical alternative to parameter-centric approaches.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Logic Codes: Complete Transversal Logical Clifford Instruction Sets for High-Rate Stabilizer Quantum Error Correcting Codes

Authors:
Adam Holmes↗

arXiv:2606.13521v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the structure and transversal logical capabilities of stabilizer quantum error correcting codes. Among our results, we identify universal lower bounds on circuit depth to generate a full logical Clifford algebra, and develop novel constructions of logical transversal gates including a new depth-one transversal phase $\mathrm{\overline{S}}$ gate in the rotated surface code and a depth-one intra-block $\mathrm{\overline{CZ}}$ gate in the 2D-toric code that generalizes to all odd distances and all lengths $L\ge3$, respectively. Finally, we construct a high-rate non-LDPC CSS code family with parameters $[[n,\sqrt{n},\Theta({n^{\beta}})]]$ where $\beta \approx 0.2823$ in one demonstrated case, that provably possesses a constant-depth complete 2-local transversal logical Clifford basis instruction set architecture (ISA) composed of all individually targeted $\mathrm{\overline{S}}$, $\mathrm{\overline{SHS}} = \sqrt{X}$, and $\mathrm{\overline{CZ}}$ gates. This ISA is depth-one for certain subfamilies that we design and generally constant-depth under certain conditions. The code family is built from a small code with parameters $[[n_0, 2, d_0]]$, and is tunable in the standard way: it tiles out to form utility-scale logical qubit counts, and it scales up through concatenation to achieve higher distances and error suppression. We show that this construction preserves the depth-one complete transversal logical Clifford basis ISA when composed with these commuting construction actions, inheriting structure from the core codes so that at scale the complete logical Clifford basis ISA remains depth-one up to depth-two addressable operations between tiled cores. We call these Quantum Logic Codes.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Few shot chain-of-thought driven reasoning to prompt LLMs for open ended medical question answering

Authors:
Saeel Sandeep Nachane↗Ojas Gramopadhye↗Prateek Chanda↗Ganesh Ramakrishnan↗Kshitij Sharad Jadhav↗Yatin Nandwani↗Dinesh Raghu↗Sachindra Joshi↗

In this paper, we propose a modified version of the MedQA-USMLE dataset, named MEDQA-OPEN, which contains open-ended medical questions without options to mimic clinical scenarios, along with clinician-approved reasoned answers. Additionally, we implement a prompt driven by Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, CLINICR, to mirror the prospective process of incremental reasoning, reaching a correct response to medical questions. We empirically demonstrate how CLINICR outperforms the state-of-the-art 5-shot CoT-based prompt (Liévin et al., 2022). We also present an approach that mirrors real-life clinical practice by first exploring multiple differential diagnoses through MCQ-CLINICR and subsequently narrowing down to a final diagnosis using MCQ-ELIMINATIVE. Finally, emphasizing the importance of response verification in medical settings, we utilize a reward model mechanism, replacing the elimination process performed by MCQ-ELIMINATIVE.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Lower Privileges Suffice: Investigating Over-Privileged Tool Selection in LLM Agents

Authors:
Kaiyue Yang↗Yuyan Bu↗Jingwei Yi↗Yuchi Wang↗Biyu Zhou↗Juntao Dai↗Songlin Hu↗Yaodong Yang↗

As LLM agents increasingly select tools autonomously, their choices among tools with different privileges become safety-relevant. However, prior tool-selection studies focus on safety-agnostic metadata preferences, leaving privilege-sensitive choices underexplored. To address this gap, we study over-privileged tool selection, in which an agent selects or escalates to a higher-privilege tool despite a sufficient lower-privilege alternative. We introduce ToolPrivBench to evaluate whether agents choose higher-privilege tools despite sufficient lower-privilege alternatives, measuring both initial selection and escalation after transient tool failures. Across eight domains and five recurring risk patterns, we find that over-privileged tool selection is common among mainstream LLM agents and is further amplified by transient failures. We further find that general safety alignment does not reliably transfer to least-privilege tool choice, while prompt-level controls provide only limited mitigation under transient failures. We therefore introduce a privilege-aware post-training defense that teaches agents to prefer sufficient lower-privilege tools and escalate only when necessary. Our mitigation experiments show that this defense substantially reduces unnecessary high-privilege tool use while preserving general capabilities.

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24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

The table maker's quantum search

Authors:
Benjamin C. A. Morrison↗Stefanos Kourtis↗

arXiv:2601.13306v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that quantum search can be used to compute the hardness to round an elementary function, that is, to determine the minimum working precision required to compute the values of an elementary function correctly rounded to a target precision of $n$ digits for all possible precision-$n$ floating-point inputs in a given interval. For elementary functions $f$ related to the exponential function, quantum search takes time $\tilde O(2^{n/2} \log (1/\delta))$ to return, with probability $1-\delta$, the hardness to round $f$ over all $n$-bit floating-point inputs in a given binade. For periodic elementary functions in large binades, standalone quantum search yields an asymptotic speedup over the best known classical algorithms and heuristics. We then estimate the resources required for a fault-tolerant implementation of the proposed algorithm for the $\sin$ and $\cos$ functions in double precision. We find that, although the algorithm can in principle compete with the fastest known practical method for computing the hardness to round over all binades in the format, it requires qubit coherence times that are unrealistically long for present technology.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

The Sparse Frontier: Sparse Attention Trade-offs in Transformer LLMs

Authors:
Piotr Nawrot↗Robert Li↗Renjie Huang↗Sebastian Ruder↗Kelly Marchisio↗Edoardo M. Ponti↗

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs remain unclear due to the lack of comprehensive evaluation. We address this gap with the largest-scale empirical analysis to date of training-free sparse attention, evaluating six methods across multiple model families and sizes, sequences up to 128K tokens, and sparsity levels up to 0.95 (i.e., $1/20$ attention budget) on nine diverse tasks. We first organise the rapidly evolving landscape of sparse attention methods into a taxonomy along four design axes. Our analysis then yields actionable insights: 1) sparse attention is effective: larger sparse models outperform smaller dense ones at equivalent cost, improving the Pareto frontier; 2) for the training-free methods we study, fine-grained per-query importance estimation during prefilling remains impractical-due to both the cost of estimation and the lack of sparse kernels that translate fine-grained sparsity into wall-clock gains-forcing a task-dependent choice between global-to-token and block-to-block selection. Instead, during decoding, token-to-page selection becomes feasible, enabling better generalisation and higher sparsity tolerance; 3) longer sequences tolerate higher sparsity, suggesting that fixed-budget methods in production are suboptimal. Together, these findings provide practical guidance for deploying sparse attention and methodological recommendations for future evaluations. Our code is available at https://github.com/PiotrNawrot/sparse-frontier.

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