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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Diffusion Approximation for Temporal-Difference Learning with Linear Features under Markovian Noise

Authors:
M. Forzo↗E. Monzio Compagnoni↗A. Russo↗A. Pacchiano↗

arXiv:2606.18183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation is a core method for policy evaluation. Its classical continuous-time description is an ordinary differential equation (ODE), which captures the asymptotic mean dynamics but neglects stochastic fluctuations determining the error floor. We introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE) approximation for linear TD(0) under Markovian noise. The resulting model distinguishes the contraction dynamics governed by the projected Bellman operator from the influence of Markovian sampling. As a consequence, the model explains the constant-stepsize error floor through the interaction between Markovian long-run covariance and the contraction geometry of the projected Bellman operator.

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02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

novelBGC: An interactive dual-score framework for biosynthetic gene cluster novelty assessment and candidate prioritisation

Authors:
Shukla↗Merugu↗Sharma↗

Genome mining now yields tens of thousands of putative biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) per project, yet, separating genuinely novel candidates from rediscoveries of known compounds remains the rate-limiting step before experimental validation. Single-axis prioritisation tools, antiSMASH similarity, BiG-FAM GCF distance, and self-resistance-enzyme (SRE) filters such as ARTS, each surface a different facet of evidence, yet their isolated use systematically over-ranks rediscovery-prone BGCs and overlooks genuinely orphan clusters. We present novelBGC, a web-hosted framework that converts these disparate outputs into two deliberately non-inverse continuous metrics per BGC, a Novelty (N) and a Reference Similarity (RS) score which together define a 2D decision plane that resolves rediscoveries, divergent family members, contig-edge artefacts, and uncharted chemistry with interactive visualisations, with all component weights user-tuneable at submission. Retrospective validation across three independent experimental datasets demonstrates the utility of the framework for candidate prioritization. Within the first 186-BGC SRE-guided cloning study, every confirmed bioactive product fell within the low-to-mid N band whereas 55 high-N (N [≥] 0.50) BGCs were never selected. Moreover, in the other two studies, it correctly prioritised the fully orphan lariocidin BGC of Paenibacillus sp. M2 and the divergent within-family indanopyrrole-A idp BGC of Streptomyces sp. CNX-425. Together, these case studies demonstrate that the joint (N, RS) space facilitates prioritization decisions that are difficult to achieve using any single criterion alone. from identical input data. novelBGC requires no command-line expertise, no local tool installation, and no manual integration of intermediate output formats, addressing a well-documented accessibility barrier for wet-laboratory researchers engaging with genome-mining workflows. novelBGC is freely available at https://project.iith.ac.in/sharmaglab/novelbgc/.

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03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Approximate quantum error correction theory of non-isometric codes

Authors:
Yixu Wang↗Yijia Xu↗Zi-Wen Liu↗

arXiv:2606.13559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Non-isometric encoding arises in various important contexts in quantum error correction, most notably in the finite-energy, non-ideal codewords inevitable in experimental realizations of continuous-variable codes, and holographic quantum gravity. In this work, we present a general and systematic theory of non-isometric quantum error-correcting codes. In particular, we employ the approximate quantum error correction framework to quantitatively study the fundamental limitations imposed by non-isometric encodings on the accuracy of quantum error correction and implementation of logical operations. We apply our theory to analyze GKP and tiger codes under energy constraints, and discuss the implications to holography.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Behavioral Audit of Machine Unlearning Has a Privacy Cost

Authors:
Liou Tang↗James Joshi↗Ashish Kundu↗

arXiv:2606.14518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The removal of learned data from Machine Learning models through Machine Unlearning (MU) has been widely studied; however, there has yet to be an agreed-upon scheme for auditing MU. Existing work has shown that a dishonest model owner can falsify evidence to avoid executing MU, while curious auditors (and adversaries) can infer the privacy-sensitive properties of the model and its training data even with limited access. Yet auditing of MU under mutual distrust between the model owner and the auditor remains unexplored. We provide an information-theoretic proof for this scenario: for convex ML models, a generic audit scheme that relies solely on querying the model for behavioral signals cannot identify insufficiently unlearned models without revealing membership information of the retained set. Therefore, auditing MU under the assumption of a dishonest model owner and an honest-but-curious auditor faces an inherent privacy-audit tradeoff. Our empirical results on convex models strongly supports this result, while further experiments demonstrate that this privacy-audit tension persists in non-convex models. Our results call for a more careful consideration of the privacy-audit tension under a realistic auditor threat model, and serve as a foundation for more scrutiny of designs of privacy-preserving audit schemes for the MU pipeline. We also release our code implementation at https://github.com/LiouTang/Behavioral-Unlearn-Audit.

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

PISA: A Pragmatic Psych-Inspired Unified Memory System for Enhanced AI Agency

Authors:
Shian Jia↗Ziyang Huang↗Xinbo Wang↗Haofei Zhang↗Mingli Song↗

arXiv:2510.15966v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Memory systems are fundamental to AI agents, yet existing work often lacks adaptability to diverse tasks and overlooks the constructive and task-oriented role of AI agent memory. Drawing from Piaget's theory of cognitive development, we propose PISA, a pragmatic, psych-inspired unified memory system that addresses these limitations by treating memory as a constructive and adaptive process. To enable continuous learning and adaptability, PISA introduces a trimodal adaptation mechanism (i.e., schema updation, schema evolution, and schema creation) that preserves coherent organization while supporting flexible memory updates. Building on these schema-grounded structures, we further design a hybrid memory access architecture that seamlessly integrates symbolic reasoning with neural retrieval, significantly improving retrieval accuracy and efficiency. Our empirical evaluation, conducted on the existing LOCOMO benchmark and our newly proposed AggQA benchmark for data analysis tasks, confirms that PISA sets a new state-of-the-art by significantly enhancing adaptability and long-term knowledge retention.

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

The Containment Gap: How Deployed Agentic AI Frameworks Fail Public-Facing Safety Requirements

Authors:
Md Jafrin Hossain↗Mohammad Arif Hossain↗Weiqi Liu↗Nirwan Ansari↗

arXiv:2606.12797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic large language model systems that autonomously invoke tools, maintain persistent memory, and execute multi-step plans are increasingly deployed in public-facing domains, including government services, healthcare triage, and financial advising. We ask whether the frameworks used to build these systems provide architectural-level structural safety guarantees. Applying six containment principles derived from a compositional model of agentic architectures, we audit three dominant frameworks (LangChain, AutoGPT, and OpenAI Agents SDK) and find no native compliance in any of them. Memory integrity, a defense against one of the most prevalent vulnerability classes, is not observed in any of the three evaluated frameworks. We validate these findings empirically: in a simulated government benefits agent built on LangChain, a single memory-poisoning write induces persistent targeted corruption across all tested seeds and backends, increasing the wrongful denial rate for targeted applicants to 88.9%. Under a complex five-factor policy, the same attack preserves aggregate accuracy while increasing targeted wrongful denials by 3.5x, rendering the corruption difficult to detect through standard monitoring. We then introduce two lightweight containment mechanisms: a memory integrity validator and a policy gate, which eliminate both attack vectors with sub-millisecond overhead (

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SACE: Concept Erasure at the Semantic Singularity in Visual Autoregressive Models

Authors:
Siya Yang↗Nanxiang Jiang↗Zhaoxin Fan↗Yunfeng Diao↗

The rapid progress of visual autoregressive (VAR) models has unlocked a transformative frontier for high-fidelity text-to-image synthesis, while heightening concerns over the safety alignment of generated content. Naive application of existing erasure techniques to VAR models causes catastrophic semantic collapse and visual artifacts, since they are predominantly designed for the homogeneous denoising steps of diffusion models. To address this foundational challenge, we first propose the Semantic Singularity Axiom, which posits that any target semantic concept embedded within a prompt is definitively locked at Scale-0. Then rigorously validate this axiom through our proposed Incremental Semantic Saliency Analysis (ISSA),which also enable the community to transparently inspect the coarse-to-fine semantic injection process. Guided by this insight, we introduce the first scale-aware concept erasure framework (SACE) for VAR models. By strictly confining interventions to the first scale, our approach couples an Entropy-Regularized Erasure Objective to prevent high-entropy sampling degeneration, alongside a restorative preservation loss to safely anchor the integrity of entangled benign priors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves surgical concept erasure performance across various domains with minimal training overhead, timely and elegently resolute the critical safety vulnerabilities inherent in emerging VAR architectures. Code is available at: https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE}{https://github.com/limerenceysy/SACE.

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08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Building user-driven climate adaptation products

Authors:
Nabig A. Chaudhry↗

Climate adaptation products have traditionally been developed using a supply-driven model reliant on available climate information, leading to usability gaps1–4. To better meet user needs, the climate services field has recognized a need to shift towards a demand-driven model emphasizing co-production, that is, user-driven, scientifically informed products created through shared knowledge practices1–5. However, co-production can be challenging, especially for researchers unfamiliar with the approach or for digital and software-based products with complex user needs2,5–8. User-centred design, from the human–computer interaction field, offers a process that could complement co-production approaches to product development, yet its potential remains underexplored2. Here we show how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products. Through a systematic review of the co-production and user-centred design literature, we identify key processes, mechanisms and best practices for both approaches. Our findings offer practical guidance for researchers and propose an integrated approach for developing climate adaptation products that are useful, usable and used. A systematic review and analysis shows how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Efficiently Representing Algorithms With Chain-of-Thought Transformers

Authors:
Yanhong Li↗Anej Svete↗Ashish Sabharwal↗William Merrill↗

The increasing popularity of reasoning models – language models that output a series of reasoning or thought tokens before producing an answer – is justified, in part, by theoretical results showing that chain-of-thought (CoT) transformers can simulate Turing machines, and thus perform arbitrary computation. However, the Turing machine, while suitable for complexity-theoretic analysis, is not convenient, intuitive, or efficient for discussing algorithms. Algorithms are typically designed and analyzed at a higher level of abstraction, captured by the Word RAM model with random-access memory and unit-cost operations on $\bigO(\log n)$-bit words. As a result, Word RAM algorithms can be substantially more efficient than their Turing machine counterparts, raising the question: Can CoT transformers efficiently simulate Word RAM algorithms? For instance, can they sort $n$ items in $\bigO(n \log n)$ steps or run Dijkstra's algorithm in $\bigO(E + V \log V)$ steps? We answer affirmatively, up to poly-logarithmic overhead. We first establish this for finite-precision transformers with poly-logarithmic width and rightmost unique hard attention, then strengthen the result to two more practical settings with finite width and log-precision: continuous CoT, where reasoning takes the form of vectors rather than tokens, and a hybrid architecture in which transformer layers sit atop a recurrent (linear RNN) layer. In all three cases, we find that CoT can efficiently simulate any Word RAM algorithm with only a poly-logarithmic overhead in $n$. This overhead reduces to log-square when the Word RAM has a ``flat'' instruction set, and only logarithmic for multiplication-free flat instructions – in stark contrast to known CoT simulations of Turing machines, which require quadratic overhead over Word RAM.

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

Learning-Based Decision Making for Combustion Phasing Control in Multi-Fuel CI Engines with Latent Fuel Reactivity Estimation

Authors:
Rajasree Sarkar↗Aditya Satish Patil↗Arunava Banerjee↗Ihsan Berk Altiner↗Zongxuan Sun↗Kenneth Kim↗Chol-Bum Mike Keown↗

arXiv:2606.18393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control. This work formulates CA50 regulation under latent CN variation as a partially observable sequential decision problem and systematically evaluates controllers with increasing temporal and representational capacity, including LinUCB, history-augmented contextual bandits, observation-only DDPG, recurrent DDPG, and a proposed GRU-guided RL framework. A Gaussian-process surrogate trained on experimental multi-fuel engine data provides a controlled and reproducible evaluation environment. Results show that myopic and fixed-history bandit methods degrade under CN variation, observation-only RL suffers from latent-state aliasing, and generic recurrence is insufficient when CN evolves rapidly. The proposed framework learns a compact GRU-based representation of fuel reactivity from combustion history and conditions both actor and critic on this estimated signal rather than oracle CN. By training the policy on the same imperfect fuel-reactivity information available at deployment, the controller avoids train-deploy inconsistency in conventional online estimate-then-control pipelines. Across unseen CN trajectories, the policy achieves stable CA50 regulation with mean absolute tracking error below 0.25{\deg} CA at the training setpoint, while producing smooth, physically consistent SOI and glow-plug-power actuation. These results show that combustion control under latent, continuously evolving fuel dynamics requires more than standalone estimation or generic recurrence. By aligning fuel-reactivity inference with control policy learning, the proposed framework enables reactivity-aware decision-making using the same estimated state available during deployment.

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11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-on-the-Loop Orchestration for AI-Assisted Legal Discovery

Authors:
Anushree Sinha↗Srivaths Ranganathan↗Abhishek Dharmaratnakar↗Debanshu Das↗

arXiv:2606.19812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents are increasingly deployed in electronic discovery (e-discovery), where compounding errors across multi-step reasoning chains can constitute legal malpractice. Unlike single-turn retrieval, agentic workflows operating over privileged document corpora exhibit a class of failure we term "trajectory collapse": an early misclassification silently propagates, rendering an entire privilege review invalid. This paper makes three contributions. First, we propose a structured taxonomy of agentic failures in legal information retrieval, organized by functional stage. Second, we introduce a four-layer verification architecture – spanning planning, reasoning, execution, and uncertainty quantification – designed to intercept these failures before they compound. Third, we present a preliminary simulation study on a synthetic e-discovery corpus that demonstrates how mandatory Human-on-the-Loop (HOTL) escalation thresholds reduce privilege-waiver risk relative to fully autonomous baselines. Our results suggest that calibrated uncertainty thresholds can reduce privilege-waiver risk by up to 61% versus fully autonomous deployment, while routing fewer than one quarter of documents to attorney review.

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12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Higher Population Coverage with Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine is Needed to Induce Herd Protection: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial in Urban Bangladesh

Authors:
Ahmmed↗khanam↗Islam↗Park↗S. E↗Ongadi↗Im↗Zhang↗Khan↗A. I↗Aziz↗A. B↗…

Introduction: A cluster randomized trial (CRT) in Bangladesh found that Vi-tetanus toxoid (Vi-TT) vaccine conferred 85% protection to vaccinees at 18 months of follow-up; however, it failed to confer significant herd protection to non-vaccinees. Methods: In the CRT, children aged 9 months to

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13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Decoupling Search from Reasoning: A Vendor-Agnostic Grounding Architecture for LLM Agents

Authors:
Emmanuel Aboah Boateng↗Kyle MacDonald↗Amardeep Kumar↗Siddharth Kodwani↗Sudeep Das↗

Production LLM agents increasingly depend on real-time search, yet native search grounding bundles retrieval policy, provider choice, evidence injection, cost, latency, and generation behavior behind a single model-provider boundary. This coupling makes grounding hard to inspect, tune, reuse, or port, and can trigger Search-Induced Verbosity that breaks strict output contracts. We present Decoupled Search Grounding (DSG), a vendor-agnostic boundary that moves grounding outside the reasoning model through an MCP-compatible gateway, exposing provider routing, source-aware context rendering, configured fallback, retrieval-depth control, and exact plus semantic caching as first-class controls. Across five frontier models on SimpleQA, FreshQA, and HotpotQA, native search leads on recency-sensitive FreshQA, but DSG exposes a stronger frontier when control matters: on SimpleQA it nearly matches native accuracy (86.1% vs. 87.7%) at 91% lower search cost, preserves concise answer contracts, and reaches a 99.4% warm-cache hit rate with 68% lower latency. Deployed as a shared production grounding layer for large-scale agentic workloads with interchangeable models, DSG matches or slightly exceeds native-search accuracy on an e-commerce query-understanding (QIU) workload while cutting search cost by over 98%. Real-time grounding is best treated as an optimizable interface boundary, not a fixed model feature.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Robust Mixed-State Cluster States and Spurious Topological Entanglement Negativity

Authors:
Seunghun Lee↗Eun-Gook Moon↗

arXiv:2504.16165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate 1D and 2D cluster states under local decoherence to assess the robustness of their mixed-state subsystem symmetry-protected topological (SSPT) order. By exactly computing fidelity correlators via dimensional reduction of effective statistical mechanics models, we pinpoint the critical error rate for strong-to-weak spontaneous breaking of strong subsystem symmetry. Without resorting to the replica trick, we demonstrate that mixed-state SSPT order remains remarkably robust up to the maximal decoherence rate when noise respects strong subsystem symmetry. Furthermore, we propose that the mixed-state SSPT order can be detected by a constant correction to the area-law scaling of entanglement negativity, termed spurious topological entanglement negativity. This also highlights that topological entanglement negativity, a widely used diagnostic for mixed-state topological order, is generally not invariant under finite-depth quantum channels.

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15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

TRACEY: an updated resource for SNARE protein domain annotation with improved HMMs and expanded sequence coverage

Authors:
Pulido-Quetglas↗Fasshauer↗

Motivation: SNARE proteins catalyse membrane fusion across the eukaryotic endomembrane system, from synaptic vesicle exocytosis to intracellular trafficking, endosomal and vacuolar transport, and autophagy, and their accurate domain annotation depends on the quality of profile models and the sequence diversity behind them. The original SNARE domain classification predates the recent expansion of eukaryotic sequence data, leaving its HMM profiles and subgroup coverage unable to resolve divergent and lineage-specific paralogs. Results: We present an updated release of TRACEY built on a resynchronized, non-redundant collection of 18,915 curated SNARE proteins spanning 1,188 species, together with a consolidated set of 83 HMM profiles, including 43 models for newly defined subgroups, reconstructed through an iterative, mixture-model-driven procedure. In direct comparison with the legacy models, at least ~75% of sequences in every overlapping group scored better with the new HMMs, indicating systematic gains in domain detection. A redesigned web interface adds multiparameter querying, FASTA download, and direct scanning of user-submitted sequences against the curated profiles. Availability and implementation: TRACEY is freely available at https://tracey.unil.ch.

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

DiRecT: Safe Diffusion-Based Planning via Receding-Horizon Denoising

Authors:
Paolo Giaretta↗Zeyang Li↗Navid Azizan↗

arXiv:2606.15359v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models have emerged as powerful tools for planning and control by learning multimodal distributions over actions and trajectories. Yet reliable inference-time safety enforcement remains a key barrier to their deployment in safety-critical tasks. Existing approaches typically project each denoising iterate onto the feasible set, even though constraints are defined only on the final clean trajectory. Enforcing feasibility on noisy intermediate samples can therefore overconstrain the sampling dynamics, substantially degrading sample quality. To address this limitation, we introduce DiRecT (Diffusion-based planning via Receding-horizon denoising with Terminal constraints), a training-free algorithm for constrained sampling from diffusion models via stochastic optimal control (SOC). DiRecT enforces constraints only on the final clean sample, avoiding unnecessary restrictions on the intermediate denoising dynamics. Inspired by model predictive control, we derive a principled receding-horizon surrogate for the otherwise intractable constrained SOC formulation, yielding an efficient algorithm that cleanly separates stochastic denoising from constraint satisfaction, progressively steering samples toward feasible final trajectories without distorting the learned diffusion dynamics. Furthermore, DiRecT is highly flexible: it can leverage off-the-shelf or domain-specific optimizers, incorporate priors over environment dynamics, and optimize additional soft rewards. Extensive experiments on safe planning benchmarks demonstrate that DiRecT substantially improves deployment safety and task performance over existing diffusion-based planning baselines.

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17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Mitigating Scoring Errors and Compensating for Nonverbal Subtests in Speech-Based Dementia Assessment

Authors:
Franziska Braun↗Christopher Witzl↗Andreas Erzigkeit↗Hartmut Lehfeld↗Thomas Hillemacher↗Tobias Bocklet↗Korbinian Riedhammer↗

Early detection of cognitive impairment relies on neuropsychological tests to minimize subjectivity by assessing multiple cognitive domains. Speech-based evaluation can support diagnostics and improve accessibility, but transcription errors and the omission of nonverbal subtests (e.g., motor skills) limit accuracy. Beyond conventional test scores, speech-derived features can provide additional insights into cognitive status. This study investigates the speech-based evaluation of the German "Syndrom-Kurz-Test," a standardized dementia screening test comprising verbal and motor subtests. We train models that integrate transcript-derived scores and Whisper embeddings per verbal subtest to reduce scoring errors. To compensate for missing motor subtests, we then leverage these fused representations to approximate expert overall ratings. Despite omitting subtests, our models strongly correlate with expert ratings and efficiently and accurately discriminate between cognitive status groups.

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

Cross-Modal Registration Between 3D and 2D Fingerprints via Pose-Aware Unwrapping and Point-Cloud Fusion

Authors:
Xiongjun Guan↗Jianjiang Feng↗Jie Zhou↗

Three-dimensional (3D) fingerprints preserve global finger geometry and local ridge structure while avoiding contact-induced deformation, but they remain difficult to integrate with legacy two-dimensional (2D) fingerprint systems. This paper addresses the intermediate stage between 3D acquisition and cross-modal matching, and presents a unified framework for 3D fingerprint preprocessing and registration across contactless and contact-based 2D modalities. The framework combines four components: 1) a nonparametric visualization and unwrapping method that converts a 3D fingerprint point cloud into a rolled-equivalent 2D representation without relying on a global finger-shape model; 2) a point-cloud fusion pipeline that registers and mosaics multiple partial 3D captures into a more complete fingerprint model; 3) an ellipse-based pose normalization method for canonical finger alignment; and 4) a pose-aware cross-modal registration strategy that improves compatibility between 3D fingerprints and both contactless and contact-based 2D fingerprints. Experiments on a self-collected multimodal fingerprint database containing 150 fingers show that the proposed framework achieves ridge-level 3D registration accuracy, robust pose estimation, and consistent gains in 2D compatibility. In particular, the 3D fusion error is concentrated around 0.09 mm, contactless 2D–3D registration reaches ridge-scale projection accuracy, and pose-aware unwrapping improves genuine matching scores relative to generic 3D unwrapping. These results support the use of 3D fingerprints as an effective geometric bridge across heterogeneous fingerprint modalities. The baseline implementation has been publicly released at https://github.com/XiongjunGuan/3DFpVisual.

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

Augmenting Game AI with Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Alessandro Sestini↗Joakim Bergdahl↗Amir Baghi↗Jean-Philippe Barrette-LaPierre↗Florian Fuchs↗Linus Gissl\'en↗

arXiv:2606.20210v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Immersion in video games depends not only on graphics, audio, and game mechanics, but also on the quality of in-game characters. Producing believable characters, or game AI, remains a significant challenge as behavioral complexity is hard to capture with hand-coded systems. Game AI is a source of immersion and engagement; however, the limitations stemming from the challenges of creating game AI often lead to frustration and the breaking of the illusion of realism within the game. The introduction of machine learning models opens the door to creating more believable, authentic, and relatable characters in games. The promise is that they either learn from interacting with the game, or from player data, to develop true human-like behavior. In this paper, we envision more applications of reinforcement learning for game AI in the future. For this to materialize, current research limitations are prohibitive to broad deployment across game genres. Therefore, we propose a framework for training reinforcement learning models with a set of requirements in mind that are suited towards game AI and game development. We present examples of games with reinforcement learning-augmented game AI and describe the practicalities of deploying player-facing machine learning agents in modern games. Furthermore, we identify bottlenecks and hard problems in these areas, which we believe offer promising research directions to accelerate the adoption of machine learning in game AI for the video game industry.

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

Continuous-time Optimal Stopping through Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Cosmin Borsa↗Michael Ludkovski↗

arXiv:2606.17545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation based solvers for optimal stopping problems must discretize the stopping decision. Under classical dynamic programming, a coarse exercise grid with only a few stopping opportunities can materially undervalue the optimal expected reward, whereas on a very fine grid, approximation errors accumulate through the backward recursion. To remove this limitation, we develop a new reinforcement-learning inspired algorithm that enables us to learn the exercise rule at arbitrarily fine time resolution. Our CARLOS (Continuous-time Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Stopping) algorithm utilizes an aggregate deep neural network (ADNN) to learn a joint space-time decision boundary. Starting from a coarse time grid, we progressively increase the frequency of stopping opportunities, while in parallel training the ADNN to refine its timing-value estimates. We moreover design an adaptive sampling strategy that gradually concentrates training effort near the stopping boundary. Benchmarked results show that CARLOS delivers higher prices than existing Bermudan solvers, approaching the American upper bound, and achieves high computational efficiency relative to non-RL comparators.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Clinical Characteristics and mortality outcomes of Atrial fibrillation complicating Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction: A prospective study from South Africa

Authors:
Mboweni↗N. N↗Maseko↗Tsabedze↗N. I↗Toman↗Nel↗Kagodora↗B. S↗

Background: A growing burden of cardiovascular risk factors has raised cardiovascular disease-related mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), driving higher prevalence of heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF) and its complication with atrial fibrillation (AF). No prospective study has examined AF's clinical impact on HFrEF in SSA. Aim: To determine AF prevalence in HFrEF, describe HFrEF-AF clinical characteristics, and determine AF's impact on mortality. Methods: In this prospective observational study at a tertiary hospital in Johannesburg, 136 HFrEF patients were enrolled and categorised as HFrEF- SR (sinus rhythm) or HFrEF-AF. Baseline clinical characteristics and biochemistry were recorded. Comprehensive echocardiography including left atrial strain by 2D speckle-tracking was performed. Median follow-up was 30.6 months. Results: AF was present in 28 patients (21%). The mean age was 58.7 {+/-} 14.9 years (52.9% male) and differed between groups (p < 0.001). Hypertensive heart disease was the leading cause of HFrEF (36%). Compared with SR, HFrEF-AF patients had poorer health status (KCCQ 27 [16-43] vs 45 [32-60], p < 0.001) and lower left atrial strain (26.2 {+/-} 11.3%, p < 0.001). Guideline-directed medical therapy was suboptimal in the AF group: anticoagulation use was higher than SR (60% vs 9.5%, p < 0.001) but overall inadequate; HFrEF-AF patients received lower median doses of carvedilol (15.6 mg vs 25 mg, p = 0.002) and enalapril (10 mg vs 20 mg, p = 0.004), and fewer received spironolactone (50% vs 75.3%, p = 0.013). Survival was significantly lower in HFrEF-AF (0.41 [0.22-0.61]) versus SR (0.73 [0.61-0.82], p < 0.001). Independent predictors of mortality included prior stroke, lower TAPSE and KCCQ, and higher E/e' and heart rate. Conclusion: AF is common among HFrEF patients in this SSA cohort (though lower than in high-income countries) and associates with worse clinical status, suboptimal therapy, and higher mortality.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Diffusion-Proof: Recipe for Formal Theorem Proving Beyond Auto-Regressive Generation

Authors:
Ruida Wang↗Rui Pan↗Pengcheng Wang↗Shizhe Diao↗Tong Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19315v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enhancing the formal math reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a key focus in both mathematical and computer science communities in recent years. While significant progress has been made in using state-of-the-art Auto-Regressive (AR) LLMs for formal theorem proving, these models suffer from inherent limitations. Their next-token prediction generation methods may yield suboptimal performance due to the challenges of long-range coherence and the compounding of errors over long sequences. Recent advancements in diffusion LLMs (dLLMs), which generate text through iterative denoising of a multi-token block, offer a promising alternative. However, the application of dLLMs to formal mathematics, where maintaining long-range coherence is critical, remains largely understudied. To address the challenges above, we propose **Diffusion-Proof**, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework to train and apply dLLMs for formal theorem proving. Our frameworks contain training and inference methods for two models. The first one is *dLLM-Prover-7B*, which performs whole-proof writing with long-range coherent tactic usage. The second one is *dLLM-Corrector-7B*, which is a novel large block diffusion-based correction model. It leverages the in-filling capabilities of dLLMs to perform local proof correction using bi-directional information. Extensive experiments demonstrate that **Diffusion-Proof** relatively significantly outperforms the AR LLM baseline trained under the same dataset. **Diffusion-Proof** achieves an absolute improvement of **1.61%** on ProofNet-Test and **6.14%** on MiniF2F-Test benchmarks compare to the baseline. Notably, **Diffusion-Proof** successfully resolves one IMO problem that more advanced thinking model DeepSeek-Prover-V2-7B could not solve, showcasing the unique advantage of dLLMs in formal theorem proving.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

Authors:
Xiwen Huang↗Pierre Pinson↗

arXiv:2606.17805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bounding Boxes as Goals: Language-Conditioned Grasping via Neuro-Symbolic Planning

Authors:
Allison Andreyev↗Landon Eum↗Nestor Tiglao↗Romel Gomez↗

For robotics to be effectively integrated into household or industrial environments, machines must adapt to natural-language prompts in real time. Although Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have enabled zero-shot generalization in robot task and motion planning (TAMP), current state-of-the-art approaches often remain computationally "heavyweight" or require extensive training on thousands of demonstrations. We present GRASP (Grounded Reasoning and Symbolic Planning), a framework designed as a step toward open-vocabulary tabletop manipulation. Our approach leverages a pretrained VLM to translate natural-language queries into neuro-symbolic goal states, grounded in the physical world via a bounding-box detection pipeline. Unlike methods that rely on fixed color lists or hard-coded coordinates, GRASP enables robots to interpret abstract spatial concepts such as "top shelf" and execute tasks without additional fine-tuning. We achieve 73.3% overall success across 90 real-robot trials at three difficulty levels, requiring no task-specific training.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

INDEQS: Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS

Authors:
Michael Detzel↗Gabriel Nobis↗Kristiyan Blagov↗Juri Schubert↗Jackie Ma↗Wojciech Samek↗

arXiv:2606.19138v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Controlled Differential Equations (NCDE) provide a powerful continuous-time framework for forecasting time series, but standard graph-based extensions typically learn spatial structure purely from data, even in settings where a directed graph structure is known a priori. We introduce Informed Neural controlled Differential EQuationS (INDEQS), a graph-based NCDE forecasting method that incorporates prior knowledge of a directed graph at distinct architectural positions. INDEQS separates inner mixing of hidden states across graph nodes from outer mixing between vector field and control, and offers both a lightweight graph-constrained variant and a more expressive variant, learning additional graph connections from data via adaptive graph convolutions. To systematically study when graph informedness is beneficial in forecasting, we devise a continuous advection simulation on directed graphs, yielding synthetic spatio-temporal datasets with known ground-truth flow structure. We then evaluate INDEQS on two real-world tasks: river discharge forecasting on a hydrological network and traffic flow prediction on PeMS08. Across these synthetic and real-world benchmarks, outer informedness consistently improves mean absolute error over an uninformed NCDE with comparable parameter count, particularly on larger graphs, while inner informedness offers a more parameter-efficient alternative when strict adherence to a known adjacency is desired. A comparison of discrete convolutional and continuous-time decoders further shows that continuous decoders yield better accuracy and greater temporal flexibility on real-world tasks. An implementation of INDEQS and the advection simulation is available at https://github.com/Mitchi1/indeqs.

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