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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

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

Pushing the Boundaries of Natural Reasoning: Interleaved Bonus from Formal-Logic Verification

arXiv:2601.22642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, yet their stochastic next-token prediction creates logical inconsistencies and reward hacking that formal symbolic systems avoid. To bridge this gap, we introduce a formal logic verification-guided framework that dynamically interleaves formal symbolic verification with the natural language generation process, providing real-time feedback to detect and rectify errors as they occur. Distinguished from previous neuro-symbolic methods limited by passive post-hoc validation, our approach actively penalizes intermediate fallacies during the reasoning chain. We operationalize this framework via a novel two-stage training pipeline that synergizes formal logic verification-guided supervised fine-tuning and policy optimization. Extensive evaluation on six benchmarks spanning mathematical, logical, and general reasoning demonstrates that our 7B and 14B models outperform state-of-the-art baselines by average margins of 10.4% and 14.2%, respectively. These results validate that formal verification can serve as a scalable mechanism to significantly push the performance boundaries of advanced LLM reasoning.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

CellOS: Learning a World Model of Cellular State through Joint Embedding Prediction

Foundation models learned from single-cell transcriptomes are central to the prospect of AI virtual cell that can represent, query and predict cellular state. However, most current single-cell foundation models learn from a single view of gene expression and are optimized primarily through reconstruction or next-token prediction. As a result, they capture expression abundance but can-not explicitly reconcile complementary views of cellular state. Here we present CellOS, a multi-view foundation model that learns cellular representations from paired expression and perception views. CellOS integrates complementary views through a scalable three-stage training strategy that combines causal cell-sentence language modelling, function-preserving dense-to-mixture-of-experts expansion and latent-space alignment via an LLM-JEPA objective. Using this framework, we trained a 12-billion-parameter model on 390.5 million single-cell transcriptomes. Across diverse benchmarks spanning cell-state annotation, batch integration and perturbation-response prediction, CellOS consistently outperformed state-of-the-art single-cell foundation models in cell-state annotation and perturbation-response prediction while preserving robust batch integration. Together, these results suggest that predictive alignment between complementary cellular views provides a scalable path toward representation-centric cellular world models and transferable AI virtual cells.

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

When, Where, and How: Adaptive Binning for Tabular Self-Supervised Learning

arXiv:2606.19827v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical tabular data are ubiquitous in clinical research, but deep learning for tables remains underexplored because reliable labels often require costly expert adjudication, even though structured clinical variables are routinely available in tabular form. Self-supervised learning can leverage these unlabeled tables, and recent binning-based pretexts offer a promising inductive bias, but existing objectives fix a single global quantile discretization and apply feature-agnostic supervision. We propose Adaptive Binning, a training-adaptive discretization pretext for tabular SSL that couples discretization to learning through a feature-wise coarse-to-fine curriculum. Motivated by the spectral bias of neural networks and the principles of curriculum learning, our method progressively refines discretization per feature upon plateau detection and selects representation-aware splits to jointly improve value-space concentration and representation-space coherence. A heterogeneity-aware objective unifies categorical reconstruction with ordinal supervision for numerical features, and experiments on public medical tabular datasets under unified evaluation protocols show consistent gains for linear probing and fine-tuning without dataset-specific discretization tuning. We further introduce a medical tabular SSL benchmark with standardized protocols to support reproducible progress in this underexplored domain. Our code is available at https://github.com/labhai/Adaptive-Binning.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CacheRL:Multi-Turn Tool-Calling Agents via Cached Rollouts and Hybrid Reward

We present CacheRL, a system for training small agent foundation models that achieves 92 percent process accuracy on multi-step tool-calling tasks, approaching GPT-5's 94 percent while requiring 100 times less compute. Our approach addresses three challenges in practical agent training: transferring tool-calling knowledge from large models at scale, enabling reinforcement learning without costly live tool execution, and learning robustly from noisy cached environments. CacheRL introduces three key innovations. First, a hybrid thinking trajectory pipeline augments agent trajectories with LLM-generated reasoning traces, producing training examples that teach models not only what tools to call but also why. Second, the CacheAgentLoop eliminates live execution costs through a three-tier fuzzy cache while preserving trajectory fidelity using token-level masking. Third, a cache-tier-aware reward dynamically adjusts answer-quality weights to avoid penalizing models for cache-induced limitations. Through iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), CacheRL improves Qwen3-4B-Thinking's validation reward from 0.43 to 0.78. On public agentic tool-calling benchmarks, our model achieves competitive performance against frontier models such as GPT-5. Ablation studies show that removing knowledge transfer reduces performance by 41 percent, while cache-aware rewards contribute a 17 percent improvement. Interestingly, reinforcement learning improves training stability but yields limited gains beyond strong supervised fine-tuning, suggesting that data quality and reward design play a more important role than complex optimization methods in building practical small agent models.

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

Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.13989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech (TTS) models formulate synthesis as a conditional infilling task, bypassing explicit duration predictors and external aligners. When speech is represented with neural codec tokens, the infilling problem becomes discrete, making Discrete Flow Matching (DFM), a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework for discrete generation, a natural fit. However, inference-time control for stable low-step conditional infilling remains underexplored. We propose Mask, Sample, Revise, an inference-time CTMC stack for alignment-free DFM-TTS. The stack combines predictor-free guidance to strengthen text conditioning, prompt-matched conditional coupling to align the probability path with the acoustic prompt, and SC-ReMask, a schedule-constrained remasking mechanism that introduces token-to-mask transitions so early de-masking decisions can be revised. These components require no post-hoc fine-tuning and operate in a single tau-leaping sampler. Controlled ablations show that this stack improves intelligibility and robustness in the low-NFE prompted setting, outperforming unguided and guidance-only samplers with substantially more steps.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation. We first revisit the definition of enthymemes and propose annotation guidelines anchored in Walton's argumentation schemes, offering a structured and constrained approach that nonetheless preserves room for the interpretive nature of the task. This contrasts with past resources, which tend to eliminate disagreement, obscuring its sources and preventing investigation of its potential benefits for model performance. We further propose a complexity analysis of the task, identifying where annotation imposes high cognitive load and may give rise to inconsistent annotation. Our preliminary experiments show that models trained on annotator disagreement outperform models trained on hard majority-vote labels. We close by reflecting on how structural openness in enthymeme definitions and guidelines enables the study of variation in subjective inferential processes for future resources and downstream NLP applications concerned with human inference.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

Authors:

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

GeoIMO: Geometry-Driven Independent Motion Classification for Event Cameras

Existing automotive event datasets rely on appearance-based annotations from frame pipelines, making them poorly suited for motion-aware event perception. We present a geometry-driven, annotation-free framework that classifies detected objects as static or independently moving by exploiting ego-motion structure directly from the event stream. A Focus of Expansion model with yaw compensation estimates global background motion, while objects are labeled as moving when local motion deviates from this prediction, as quantified by a scale-invariant residual. Temporal stabilization improves robustness across consecutive event windows. The method requires no learning, no manual motion labels, and works with any input bounding boxes. Experiments on MVSEC and the Prophesee 1 Megapixel Automotive Detection dataset demonstrate consistent performance across diverse driving scenarios, with yaw compensation improving results during turns and a simple translational local model offering a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Differential Recovery Trajectories of Emergency Otolaryngologic Conditions across the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Six-year Longitudinal Study from an Urban Emergency Center

Authors:

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic markedly altered social activity patterns, healthcare utilization, and the epidemiology of infectious diseases. However, its long-term impact on emergency otolaryngologic conditions remains incompletely understood. This study investigated long-term trends in emergency otolaryngologic conditions before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic using comprehensive data from a large urban emergency clinic in Osaka, Japan. Methods: All new otolaryngologic outpatients who visited the Chuo Emergency Medical Clinic (CEMC) in Osaka City between 2019 and 2024were retrospectively analyzed. Annual trends in absolute numbers and relative proportions of emergency otolaryngologic conditions were examined by anatomical region and disease category, using 2019 as the pre-pandemic baseline. Results: A total of 99,324 new otolaryngologic outpatients were analyzed. Overall emergency visits declined sharply to approximately half of baseline in 2020, followed by a gradual but incomplete recovery toward pre-pandemic levels by 2024. Most anatomical categories declined to 45-61% of baseline in 2020 and exhibited gradual yet incomplete recovery through 2023; in stark contrast, laryngeal conditions diverged sharply, surging beyond pre-pandemic levels after 2022. Acute infectious otorhinolaryngologic diseases fell to 23-50% of baseline in 2020 and showed variable recovery (69-103%) by 2024. Notably, laryngitis exceeded the baseline, reaching 132% in 2023, whereas epiglottic edema exhibited only a transient increase approaching the baseline in 2021. Non-infectious emergency conditions generally showed only a marginal decrease in 2020 and remained relatively stable throughout the study period, except for sudden sensorineural hearing loss (SSNHL), which dropped sharply to 39% of the baseline in 2020 and remained persistently reduced through 2024. Traumatic emergencies declined variably to 53-81% of the baseline in 2020, followed by an incomplete recovery, reaching only 55-69% by 2024. Conclusion: Emergency otolaryngologic conditions demonstrated heterogeneous recovery trajectories following the COVID-19 pandemic. While most infectious and traumatic conditions gradually but incompletely normalized, laryngeal conditions showed a distinct post-pandemic surge, and SSNHL remained persistently suppressed. These findings reveal heterogeneous, condition-specific recovery trajectories that reflect both genuine shifts in community pathogen burden, true traumatic incidence, and persistent alterations in healthcare-seeking behaviors, insights essential for resource allocation during future public health emergencies.

11.
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.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

A Novel Correction Method for QT Interval in the Presence of Left Bundle Branch Block Morphology

Background Accurate assessment of the QT interval is challenging in the presence of QRS prolongation, such as during ventricular pacing or bundle branch block. Current correction methods are heterogeneous and lack consensus. To evaluate the relationship between QRS duration and QT interval during ventricular pacing and to develop a practical correction method for QT assessment. Methods In this prospective single-centre study, 94 patients undergoing electrophysiology study for supraventricular tachycardia were included. Standardised pacing was performed at the same cycle length from the right ventricular (RV) apex, high output and low output pacing from His catheter, and coronary sinus (reference). QRS and QT intervals were measured from 12-lead ECGs. Changes in QT (QT) and QRS duration (QRS) were analysed using linear regression and mixed-effects modelling. QT correction formulas of the form QT corrected = QT N x QRS were evaluated using Bland-Altman analysis across multiple coefficients. Results A significant positive correlation between QRS and QT was observed across all pacing sites (r = 0.52-0.74, p < 0.001). In mixed-effects modelling, QRS was a strong independent predictor of QT (0.59, p < 0.001), with no significant interaction between pacing site and QRS, supporting a consistent relationship across pacing locations. Bland-Altman analysis demonstrated that correction coefficients of 0.65-0.70 minimised systematic bias compared with lower coefficients, with similar precision across models (SD 16 ms) and no evidence of proportional bias. A coefficient of 0.65 provided the most balanced performance between bias and variability. Conclusion QT prolongation during ventricular pacing is primarily driven by QRS widening and follows a consistent linear relationship across pacing sites. A simple correction using QT corrected = QT 0.65 x (QRS 100 ms) provides a practical and accurate method for QT assessment, with potential clinical applicability in patients with conduction abnormalities or ventricular pacing.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

JEDEL: Zero-Shot DNA-Encoded Library Design for Early-Stage Drug Discovery

arXiv:2606.23745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present JEDEL, a framework for generating synthesis-ready DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) directly from three-dimensional pharmacophore representations of active ligands. JEDEL is the first model to map pharmacophore interaction patterns to actionable, scalable synthesis instructions, enabling the design of targeted libraries comprising potentially millions of molecules. Unlike existing generative approaches that produce virtual compounds requiring downstream synthesis planning, JEDEL operates within the space of purchasable building blocks and validated reactions, ensuring that every output is experimentally realizable by construction. JEDEL learns a predictive alignment between pharmacophore geometry and molecular structure and decodes this into combinatorial synthesis routes at scale. Across 18 protein targets, it generates focused libraries that outperform random and diversity-based baselines in predicted binding affinity, pharmacophore recovery, and sample efficiency, without target-specific retraining. JEDEL enables a shift from virtual molecule generation to experimentally deployable library design.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.14867v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

CausalMoE: A Billion-Scale Multimodal Foundation Model for Granger Causal Discovery with Pattern-Routed Heterogeneous Experts

arXiv:2606.13024v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Granger Causal Discovery (GCD) is fundamental for analyzing temporal dependencies in complex systems. However, existing neural GCD methods predominantly rely on a "one-size-fits-all" paradigm, struggling to capture distribution shifts and dynamic regime changes inherent in real-world time series. This often leads to entangled representations and spurious causal graphs. In this paper, we propose CausalMoE, a billion-scale multimodal Granger causal foundation model that explicitly models patch-level heterogeneity. CausalMoE introduces a Pattern-Routed Mixture of Heterogeneous Experts, which dynamically identifies latent temporal patterns and routes patches to specialized domain experts, effectively decoupling regime-specific mechanisms from shared dynamics. To ensure interpretable graph recovery, we design a Causality-Aware Self-Attention mechanism operating across variables, yielding sparse Granger causal graphs via proximal optimization. Furthermore, CausalMoE is the first to integrate LLMs and VLMs to align numerical signals with textual and visual priors, regularizing causal estimation in complex scenarios. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CausalMoE establishes a new state-of-the-art on fully supervised benchmarks, while effectively generalizing to few-shot settings where traditional methods fail.

16.
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.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Hardy and Cabello Arguments in Spatial and Temporal Frauchiger-Renner Scenarios

arXiv:2606.15467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate Hardy- and Cabello-type logical structures within spatial and temporal extensions of the Frauchiger–Renner (FR) framework, embedding these constructions directly into the FR multi-observer architecture. In the spatial multi-observer scenario, both Hardy and Cabello contradictions arise, with the Cabello construction yielding the stronger violation,$\(\Delta_Cabello^{\max}=0.1078\)$, which exceeds the maximal Hardy probability $\(P_{H}^{\max}=\frac{5\sqrt{5}-11}{2}\approx 0.09017\)$. We then develop a sequential temporal FR protocol based on coherent multi-observer measurements performed on a single spin-$\tfrac12$ system. In this temporal setting, the Hardy contradiction disappears identically due to dynamical constraints imposed by sequential state updates, whereas a finite Cabello-type violation survives, \(\Delta_Cabello^{\max}\approx 0.0674\). Our results establish a fundamental structural distinction between spatial entanglement and temporal multi-observer correlations in FR-type logical scenarios, and demonstrate that certain observer-independent description failures persist even without spacelike separation.

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

Virtual Sensing to Enable Real-Time Monitoring of Inaccessible Locations & Unmeasurable Parameters

arXiv:2412.00107v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Real-time monitoring of safety-critical interior states remains an open problem in energy systems where physical instrumentation is infeasible. Existing approaches rely on explicit governing equations, finite-dimensional state vectors, or per-instance retraining, which prevents mesh-independent, field-level inference at arbitrary interior coordinates under real-time constraints. We introduce operator-based virtual sensing for nuclear-grade thermal-fluid systems: we use the neural-operator framework to learn solution operators that map sparse boundary measurements to coupled internal fields in physically inaccessible regions, framing the problem class explicitly to distinguish it from classical state estimation and pointwise soft sensing. We instantiate this framework with MIMONet, a branch-trunk operator extended with three practical choices: multi-modal branch encoders for heterogeneous (scalar and function-valued) inputs; multiplicative branch fusion to preserve the bilinear PDE coupling structure; and shared-latent multi-field decoding with per-channel basis projections at the trunk's final layer. Evaluated across escalating complexity, from canonical lid-driven cavity flow to pressurized water reactor subchannels to fully coupled heat exchangers, MIMONet achieves below 5% relative errors and sub-millisecond inference on data-center accelerators (0.35 ms / 46 mJ per heat-exchanger inference on an NVIDIA H200, and sub-millisecond across the A40-H200-GH200 range), while remaining stable under 50% sensor noise. By staying accurate as geometric confinement and physics coupling intensify, MIMONet shows that operator-based virtual sensing can restore observability where physical instrumentation fails, establishing simulation-based feasibility within the evaluated operating envelopes as a step toward future experimental and cross-solver validation for safety-critical energy systems.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Asymptotic analysis of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution

Authors:

arXiv:2509.05664v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Using a recently derived integral in terms of elementary functions, we derive new asymptotic expansions of the normal inverse Gaussian cumulative distribution function. One of the asymptotic representations is in terms of the normal Gaussian distribution or complementary error function.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Supporting people to access social security payments through the Special Rules for End of Life: a qualitative study of the perspectives of patients, carers and health care professionals

Background: People living with terminal illness face a double financial burden from additional costs and loss of earning for themselves and their carers. Social security benefits are intended to help alleviate some of this financial pressure, and in the UK and other countries people are eligible for fast-tracked access to financial support via the Special Rules for End of Life. One in 3 people who are eligible miss out on this support, yet there is limited evidence on the reasons for this take-up deficit. Objectives: The aim of this study is to understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits for terminally ill people from the perspectives of patients, carers, and health care professionals. Methods: This is a qualitative study combining i) focus groups with healthcare professionals recruited via professional networks and social media, and ii) interviews with patients and carers recruited in hospital and hospice settings. We analysed the data using Practical Thematic Analysis Results: Fifty-five multidisciplinary healthcare professionals participated in 11 focus groups, and we interviewed 10 patients and carers. We constructed five descriptive themes to summarise the data: Navigating priorities and uncertainty; positive impacts alongside a sense of shame and stigma; talking about money, difficulties and dividends; everybodys, yet nobodys, responsibility; and sticking points in the system. Conclusion: The themes reveal several challenges that may contribute to people not taking up this financial support. However, discussions about access to benefits were also seen as a core part of holistic care, a positive way to offer support and a gateway to other discussions about end-of-life care preferences and decisions. Recommendations for policy and practice include evaluating the adoption of a diagnostic rather than a prognostic eligibility criteria, integrating discussions about benefits into existing processes such as advance care planning, and improving education and support for clinicians.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

LatentGym: A Testbed For Cross-Task Experiential Learning With Controllable Latent Structure

arXiv:2606.15306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision continually learning agentic systems that become more useful over time: as they encounter sequences of related tasks, they should infer the hidden structure shared across those tasks and use it to improve future decisions. This cross-task experiential learning capability is pivotal in domains such as personalization and interactive assistance, but existing training/evaluation frameworks do not provide shared, controllable latent structures and cannot measure whether or why agents improve. We introduce LatentGym: a controllable suite in which each environment is organized around a ground-truth latent variable governing the structure across tasks. Our construction yields metrics that separate exploration (whether the agent's actions gather information about the latent) from exploitation (whether the agent uses what it has gathered). We demonstrate our suite on empirical studies addressing three questions: how and why frontier models fail to adapt across related tasks; whether post-training on related task sequences improves general cross-task adaptation, and where those gains come from; and how design choices such as inter-task feedback shape training dynamics and generalization. Together, these results establish a controlled foundation for studying how LLM agents learn from experience across tasks, and for designing agents that adapt more reliably in sequential, personalized, and interactive settings.

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

Offline Reinforcement Learning for Warehouse SLAM Throughput Control

arXiv:2606.23978v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an offline reinforcement learning (RL) framework for optimizing SLAM throughput control in a warehouse fulfillment environment. SLAM (Scan/Label/Apply/Manifest) throughput directly influences system congestion and operational efficiency. Our RL-based control approach dynamically recommends SLAM throughput settings that adaptively balance throughput maximization with downstream stability through intelligent adjustment of throttling behavior. We include a history-informed state representation, action space abstraction for delayed-impact control, and a reward function that captures both upstream and downstream operational metrics. Our approach is algorithm-agnostic, enabling integration of multiple offline RL methods under a unified architecture. We instantiate our framework with three state-of-the-art offline RL algorithms, and trained the models offline using de-identified historical operational logs from a large-scale warehouse. Policy performance is evaluated using a comprehensive multi-method strategy. These include model-free approaches including immediate reward estimation via regression models and long-horizon Fitted Q Evaluation (FQE), as well as model-based Deep Koopman dynamics evaluation. Empirical results reveal that the CQL policy consistently outperforms alternatives, improving system health by 22.97% and reducing average throttling duration by 3.18%. These findings demonstrate the potential of offline RL for safe and scalable warehouse throughput control optimization.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on Cancer Risk and Cross-Cancer Associations in Nordic Twins

The relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental influences to cancer risk and cross-cancer associations remain poorly understood. We analyzed data from 222,530 same-sex twins from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer, including 43,060 incident cancers over a median follow-up of 41.6 years. Using a target trial framework, biometric modeling, and competing-risk adjustment, we estimated familial risk, heritability, and shared environmental contributions across 35 cancer sites. Lifetime cancer risk was 36.5%, increasing to 51.4% in monozygotic (MZ) twins and 45.3% in dizygotic (DZ) twins with an affected co-twin. Overall cancer risk was explained by heritable (28%) and shared environmental (40%) influences. Heritability was highest for prostate (42%), non-melanoma skin (24%), and breast (18%) cancers. Cross-cancer analyses revealed extensive overlap in the genetic and shared environmental factors across sites, consistent with widespread pleiotropy and shared environmental susceptibility. Prostate cancer exhibited the strongest genetic overlap with rectum/anus (12%) and kidney (11%) cancers, whereas co-shared environmental influences were most pronounced for breast-lung (11%), prostate-bladder (11%), and prostate-lung (12%) cancers. These findings show pervasive genetic overlap across cancers at different sites and emphasize the importance of incorporating familial shared environmental exposures into cancer risk prediction and prevention strategies.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Operads for compositional reasoning in LLMs

Question decomposition, i.e. breaking a complex query into simpler sub-queries whose answers are composed to produce a final answer, is a widely used strategy for improving LLM reasoning, yet it currently lacks a rigorous mathematical foundation. In this paper, we propose operads, mathematical structures that model many-in, one-out operations and compositions thereof, as a natural framework for describing question decomposition. We define the questions operad $Q$, in which operations correspond to question templates and composition corresponds to substitution of sub-answers, and show how QA models can be interpreted as algebras over $Q$. Beyond reframing existing practice, this operadic perspective points toward new methods, in particular a notion of operadic consistency, which measures whether a QA model's answers agree across the partial collapses of a question decomposition tree. Empirical evaluation of operadic consistency is reported in our companion paper (Bottman, Liu, and Richardson, 2026), which finds it strongly correlated with accuracy across twelve LLMs and four multi-hop QA datasets and outperforming standard temperature-based self-consistency baselines. We argue that operads are the natural mathematical home for question decomposition, and that invariants such as operadic consistency open new directions for analyzing and improving the reliability of multi-step reasoning.