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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The Backward Stochastic Partial Differential Integral Equations: Solvability and Comparison Principle

Authors:
Qingxin Meng↗Qi Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.16237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The paper is concerned with the well-posedness of backward stochastic partial differential equations with jumps, also called backward stochastic partial differential integral equations. We start from the proof for the existence and uniqueness of solution to backward stochastic evolution equation with jump in the Gelfand triple framework. Then the well-posedness of both weak solution and strong solution to backward stochastic partial differential integral equation is obtained with the Gelfand triple replaced by specific Sobolev spaces. Finally, the comparison principle for backward stochastic partial differential integral equation is proved, which has potential applications in financial mathematics.

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

U$^2$Mamba: A Two-level Nested U-structure Mamba for Salient Object Detection

Authors:
Junhui Li↗Jialu Li↗Youshan Zhang↗

Mamba-based models have emerged as a promising alternative for salient object detection (SOD), offering significant advantages in modeling long sequences. However, existing models often fail to explore contextual information and the depth of the entire architecture. This paper introduces U$^2$Mamba, a powerful and innovative U-structured network for salient object detection. We propose multiscale Mamba U-blocks (MMUBs) that enhance the model depth to improve local feature extraction capabilities. Our newly developed nested U-structure, incorporating MMUBs, enables the network to integrate various receptive fields from shallow and deep layers, thereby collecting richer contextual information and longer-range data without being constrained by resolution. Instead of using the traditional deep supervision scheme and top-level supervised training, we propose a hierarchical training supervision method where the loss is computed at each level during the training process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that U$^2$Mamba achieves highly competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/JL021/U2Mamba}.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Improving Neural Network Training by Decoupling the Magnitude and Direction of Weight Vectors

Authors:
Alexander H\"agele↗Alejandro Hern\'andez-Cano↗Atli Kosson↗Martin Jaggi↗

arXiv:2606.25971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object. Yet every weight matrix carries two distinct quantities – a magnitude and a direction – and all optimizers stepping in the matrix as a whole couple their dynamics: the directional change from an update depends on the current magnitude, while the magnitude drifts as a byproduct of learning the direction, so neither is governed directly by the learning rate. Typical training therefore leans on surrounding recipes such as weight decay and warmup to keep learning stable at scale, though these regulate the coupling only indirectly; other recent methods instead constrain the weight to a fixed-norm sphere, but add no learnable magnitude, leaving scale control to normalization layers alone. We propose Magnitude–Direction (MD) Decoupling, an optimizer modification that factorizes each weight into a fixed-norm direction on a hypersphere and learnable per-row and per-column magnitude gains, updated at separate learning rates, all while the model still sees a single fused weight tensor. The method is agnostic to the base optimizer and removes the need for weight decay and warmup. Across both Adam and Muon, MD Decoupling improves on well-tuned baselines, transfers the optimal LR across model width without retuning, and continues to help at scale on large Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models. Treating magnitude and direction as separately controlled quantities thus yields more predictable training dynamics and a simple, broadly applicable improvement to modern optimizers.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Enhancing Brain MRI Anomaly Detection and Reasoning with ROI Rethink and Synthetic Data

Authors:
Shangkun Li↗Jie Xu↗Yi Guo↗Zeju Li↗Yuanyuan Wang↗

Medical vision-language models typically generate diagnoses through single-pass inference without indicating which image regions support their conclusions. This lack of spatial grounding limits clinical utility: outputs cannot be audited, and models may hallucinate findings on normal scans. We present BrReMark (Brain Rethink via ROI Marking), a framework that introduces explicit region marking into brain MRI diagnosis. The model first generates hypotheses about potential abnormalities and grounds them through explicit bounding box marking, then verifies conclusions by re-examining the marked evidence. Training combines supervised fine-tuning on structured reasoning trajectories with reinforcement learning using a composite reward over localization accuracy and diagnostic reasoning. Furthermore, we integrate a domain randomization-based pathology synthesis augmentation strategy to improve the model's generalizability to out-of-distribution (OOD) data. On internal benchmark, BrReMark improves mAP50 from 0.74% to 37.54% compared to the base model, while achieving 21.57% Clinical F1 and 45.26% diagnostic accuracy. On NOVA OOD benchmark, it also achieves competitive overall performance with a 45.7% reduction in false positives compared to the state-of-the-art, indicating reduced hallucination on rare pathologies. These findings suggest that explicit hypothesis-verification grounding is a practical path toward trustworthy open-ended brain MRI diagnosis across both in-distribution and OOD settings.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Exercise Training Improves Skeletal Muscle Insulin Sensitivity and Reprograms the Adipose Transcriptome in Heavier Monozygotic Twins

Authors:
Hentila↗Ullrich↗Ojala↗Lietzen↗M. S↗Heiskanen↗M. A↗Van der Stede↗Honkala↗Helmio↗Rajander↗Eskola↗…

Exercise training improves skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity, yet its effects on white adipose tissue remain incompletely understood. We investigated how adiposity and exercise training influence insulin-stimulated glucose uptake in skeletal muscle and abdominal subcutaneous adipose tissue (ASAT), alongside adaptations in gene expression and DNA-methylation. Ten monozygotic twin pairs discordant for BMI underwent [18F]FDG-PET/CT imaging of skeletal muscle (vastus lateralis, VL) and ASAT during a euglycemic-hyperinsulinaemic clamp before and after six months of exercise training. VL and ASAT biopsies were analyzed using mRNA-sequencing and reduced representation bisulfite sequencing. Exercise training improved whole-body and VL insulin sensitivity in leaner and heavier co-twins (p

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06.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-05

Structural motif search across the protein universe with Folddisco

Authors:
Hyunbin Kim↗

Detecting similar protein structural motifs in large structure collections is computationally expensive. We developed Folddisco, a fast structural motif search tool that uses an index of position-independent geometric features, including side-chain orientation, combined with a rarity-based scoring system. Folddisco is 20-fold faster in querying and fourfold more storage-efficient than existing methods while improving accuracy. Folddisco is freely available online ( https://folddisco.foldseek.com ), along with a webserver ( https://search.foldseek.com/folddisco ). Folddisco enables protein structural motif search in million scale databases.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TRIDENT: Breaking the Hybrid-Safety-Physics Coupling for Provably Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Zijie Meng↗Ziwei Li↗Yufei Liu↗Zhiyu Li↗Jiyuan Liu↗Wenhua Nie↗Bingcai Wei↗Miao Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.18308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe coordination in networked cyber-physical systems forces learning algorithms to simultaneously handle hybrid discrete-continuous actions, hard training-time safety constraints, and physics-governed dynamics. We show that these three features form a directed cycle of biases that defeats any naive composition of off-the-shelf modules, and formalize this as a three-way coupling lemma. We then introduce TRIDENT, the first MARL framework whose three components are co-designed to cancel each leak: a Richardson-Romberg gradient correction reducing Gumbel-Softmax bias from O(tau) to O(tau^2), a Lyapunov-constrained sequential trust-region update enforcing per-iterate feasibility, and a physics-informed residual critic that decomposes value rather than reward. We prove an O~(1/sqrt(K)) convergence rate to a constrained Nash equilibrium and an O(sqrt(K)) cumulative-violation bound. On multi-UAV mobile-edge computing, autonomous intersection management, and a hybrid SMAC variant, TRIDENT cuts training-time violations by 95.5% over MADDPG and 76.3% over MACPO, while improving reward by 13.5% over the strongest unconstrained baseline.

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08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Functions of Bounded Variation and Point Processes

Authors:
J. Antezana↗M. Levi↗J. Marzo↗J. Ortega-Cerd\`a↗

arXiv:2606.08304v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the relationship between the analytical properties of functions of bounded variation and the statistical behavior of hyperuniform point processes. We establish several characterization formulas for the jump part of the gradient of a bounded variation function, extending and unifying previous results by Beretti–Gennaioli and Dávila. In particular, we provide new expressions for the $L^2$-jump of the gradient using both difference quotients and Fourier transform methods. Furthermore, we connect these analytic structures to the theory of hyperuniform point processes. By analyzing the variance of linear statistics associated with bounded variation functions, we provide asymptotic estimates that depend on the specific classification of the hyperuniformity of the point process. The results show how the regularity and jump discontinuities of a function dictate the growth rate of fluctuations in point processes. Finally, we introduce an averaged quadratic BMO-type oscillation functional over translated and rotated cube partitions, similar to the one recently studied by Ambrosio et al., and prove, using results from point process, that it converges to an explicit dimensional constant times the $L^2-$jump, giving in particular a further new characterization of the perimeter of a set.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Giskard : Byzantine Robust and Confidential Aggregation for Large-Scale Decentralized Learning

Authors:
Ousmane Touat↗C\'esar Sabater↗Mohamed Maouche↗Sonia Ben Mokhtar↗

arXiv:2606.19129v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dealing simultaneously with confidentiality and Byzantine behaviors in decentralized learning is a challenging problem. Indeed, in decentralized learning, clients train a machine learning model while keeping their data locally and share their model parameters or gradients with a set of neighbors. While enforcing confidentiality calls for hiding the exchanged model parameters/gradients (e.g., by using cryptographic techniques), dealing with Byzantine contributions often requires inspecting the latter. Hence, most research works address these objectives separately. A recent line of work proposes to employ secure multi-party computation (MPC) to implement robust aggregators against model poisoning, thereby enforcing both confidentiality and Byzantine resilience. However, these solutions scale badly: they either require all-to-all communication between participants or delegate the entire computation to a small subset, whose computational and communication load grows proportionally with the size of the network. In this paper, we present Giskard, a protocol for confidential and Byzantine-robust decentralized aggregation. Giskard organizes $n$ parties into a tree of committees of size $O(\log n)$ and evaluates a coordinate-wise approximate median via a committee-adapted distributed binary search over the value domain, using BGW-style MPC within each committee. We assess Giskard both theoretically by proving its security and confidentiality properties and experimentally through extensive experiments involving up to one million participants. Compared to its closest competitors, Giskard reduces per-party communication complexity asymptotically while exhibiting comparable model utility under up to $n/4$ Byzantine parties.

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

Where Will They Go? Modelling Multimodal Pedestrian Manoeuvres from Ego-centric Videos

Authors:
Yuxuan Xie↗Nicolas Pugeault↗Chongfeng Wei↗Hubert P. H. Shum↗Edmond S. L. Ho↗

Pedestrian trajectory prediction from an ego-centric camera is challenging since it depends on complex interactions with vehicles and scene context, as well as the intention of the pedestrian. By modelling correlation and intent from the historical and future trajectories of the pedestrian, it will usually result in a multimodal (i.e. multiple modes) distribution. Existing stochastic predictors often sample multiple futures from a single unimodal distribution, which can yield sub-optimal 'mixed-mode' trajectories that lie between distinct motion patterns and become implausible in real scenes. In this paper, we propose MMPM, a mode-aware framework that separately models future trajectory distributions into semantically meaningful modes based on the pedestrian's crossing behavior. MMPM consists of two modules: behavior-aware Pedestrian Interaction Module (PIM) that jointly captures pedestrian-vehicle and pedestrian-environment interactions by introducing gaze, head and hand gesture, and a CVAE-based Mode-aware Trajectory Predictor (MTP) module to model the future trajectory distributions on two modes, crossing and non-crossing the road, separately. A query-based decoder further enforces mode consistency during decoding. Experiments on PIE and JAAD datasets show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. Our proposed MTP is model-agnostic, which can be integrated into existing frameworks such as BiTrap-NP and SGNet-ED to further improve future trajectory prediction performance. We additionally introduce a data-driven validation protocol that matches predictions to spatio-temporally consistent ground-truth trajectories, demonstrating improved frame-wise displacement errors over previous work.

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

Qwen-RobotNav Technical Report: A Scalable Navigation Model Designed for an Agentic Navigation System

Authors:
Jiazhao Zhang↗Gengze Zhou↗Hale Yin↗Yiyang Huang↗Zixing Lei↗Qihang Peng↗Haoqi Yuan↗Jie Zhang↗Xudong Guo↗Xiaoyue Chen↗An Yang↗Fei Huang↗…

Agentic navigation systems require a base navigation model whose observation strategy can be externally reconfigured at inference time, because instruction following, object search, target tracking, and autonomous driving share the same perception-planning backbone yet demand fundamentally different strategies for consuming the visual stream. We present Qwen-RobotNav, a scalable navigation model built on Qwen-RobotNav that addresses it through a parameterised interface with two complementary dimensions: multiple task modes that select the navigation behaviour, and controllable observation parameters (e.g., token budget, per-camera weights) that govern how visual history is encoded. With training-time randomization over all parameters, Qwen-RobotNav is robust to any inference-time configuration requiring zero architectural modification to the Qwen-RobotNav backbone. We train Qwen-RobotNav on 15.6M samples; co-training with vision-language data prevents the collapse into reactive action-sequence mappers observed in trajectory-only training. The parameterised interface also makes Qwen-RobotNav a natural building block for agentic systems: for long-horizon scenarios, an upper-level planner decomposes goals into sub-tasks and dynamically switches Qwen-RobotNav's task mode and context strategy mid-episode, composing complex behaviours from repeated calls to the same model. Extensive experiments show that Qwen-RobotNav sets new state-of-the-art results across major navigation benchmarks. The model exhibits favourable scaling from 2B to 8B parameters, with joint multi-task training developing a shared spatial-planning substrate that transfers across task families, and demonstrates strong zero-shot generalisation to real-world robots across diverse environments.

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

CADO: From Imitation to Cost Minimization for Heatmap-based Solvers in Combinatorial Optimization

Authors:
Hyungseok Song↗Deunsol Yoon↗Kanghoon Lee↗Han-Seul Jeong↗Soonyoung Lee↗Woohyung Lim↗

arXiv:2602.08210v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Heatmap-based solvers have emerged as a promising paradigm for Combinatorial Optimization (CO). However, we argue that the dominant Supervised Learning (SL) training paradigm suffers from a fundamental objective mismatch: minimizing imitation loss (e.g., cross-entropy) does not guarantee solution cost minimization. We dissect this mismatch into two deficiencies: Decoder-Blindness (being oblivious to the non-differentiable decoding process) and Cost-Blindness (prioritizing structural imitation over solution quality). We empirically demonstrate that these intrinsic flaws impose a hard performance ceiling. To overcome this limitation, we propose CADO (Cost-Aware Diffusion models for Optimization), a streamlined Reinforcement Learning fine-tuning framework that formulates the diffusion denoising process as an MDP to directly optimize the post-decoded solution cost. We introduce Label-Centered Reward, which repurposes ground-truth labels as unbiased baselines rather than imitation targets, and Hybrid Fine-Tuning for parameter-efficient adaptation. CADO achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse benchmarks, validating that objective alignment is essential for unlocking the full potential of heatmap-based solvers.

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13.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Why heritage sites are at risk in a warming world — and how to save them

Authors:
William Megarry↗

As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently. As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Discovering Novel intracranial EEG Biomarkers of Seizure Generating Tissue through Time-Frequency Analysis

Authors:
Romero Mila↗Hoang↗N. P↗Pinto-Orellana↗Daida↗Kanai↗Kuroda↗Hussain↗S. A↗Shrey↗D. W↗Asano↗…

Objective: EEG biomarkers for seizure-generating tissue have historically been identified visually, which lacks objectivity and limits utility of automated approaches. For example, high frequency oscillations and interictal epileptiform discharges were promising markers to improve surgical outcomes for refractory epilepsy, but low specificity has hindered clinical implementation, and automated algorithms have not improved this. Methods: We developed Intracranial EEG Pattern Identification and Categorization, an automated, data-driven time-frequency framework for EEG biomarker discovery. It detects transient high-power intracranial EEG waveforms (1-500 Hz) and characterizes them using eight features. In seizure-free patients, waveforms occurring predominantly in resected intracranial EEG channels are candidate biomarkers. Results: In retrospective data from 14 seizure-free post-surgical patients from University of California, Los Angeles, we identified 9 waveform categories strongly associated with resected intracranial EEG channels. These included beta, gamma, and ripple band bursts, sometimes co-occurring with interictal epileptiform discharges; however, many were visually imperceptible in the broadband EEG. Using a support vector machine, we generated a unified classification metric based on these waveforms and tested it on 87 seizure-free subjects from Detroit Medical Center. This metric achieved higher area under the precision-recall curve than six state-of-the-art benchmark algorithms (p

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

Optimizing bias-tailored quantum error correction beyond code-capacity noise

Authors:
C\'esar Benito↗I. Jes\'an Vel\'azquez-Res\'endiz↗Alejandro Bermudez↗

arXiv:2606.17709v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We find that the substantial advantages predicted for bias-tailored quantum error correction (QEC) under code-capacity noise are strongly reduced once realistic syndrome extraction and circuit-level noise models are considered. We start by comparing XZZX codes to rectangular surface codes with a bias-dependent optimised anisotropy. Although code-capacity simulations predict an advantage of rectangular surface codes in the limit of high noise bias, this actually disappears under circuit-level noise, making the XZZX codes the preferred and simplest choice even for platforms that allow for a flexible variation of the code layout adapted to changes in noise calibration. Our results identify bias degradation during syndrome extraction under circuit-level noise as the central limitation of biased-tailored QEC. To partially mitigate this effect, we introduce a bias-filtering CNOT gadget that temporarily encodes the ancillary target qubit during syndrome extraction in a repetition code and, upon measurement and feed forward, manages to reduce the bias degradation. In a regime of high-bias and low-idle errors, this bias-filtering gadget yields a few-percent relative improvement of the XZZX code error threshold, demonstrating that lightweight bias-filtering strategies can recover part of the lost bias-tailoring advantage for realistic circuit-level noise.

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

A comparative and critical study of EEGNet for fNIRS-driven cognitive load classification

Authors:
Mehshan Ahmed Khan↗Houshyar Asadi↗Li Zhang↗Mohammad reza Chalak Qazani↗Ghazal Bargshady↗Stefanos gkikas↗Christian arzate↗Sam Oladazimi↗Zoran Najdovsk↗Lei Wei↗Chee Peng Lim↗

arXiv:2606.16160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately classifying cognitive load from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals remains a significant challenge due to temporal variability, inter-subject differences, and sensitivity to preprocessing choices. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of EEGNet for fNIRS-based cognitive load classification by systematically examining the effects of temporal segmentation strategies (overlapping vs. non-overlapping), window lengths (10s, 20s, 30s), feature extraction methods (Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA)), learning rate configurations (fixed and adaptive), and evaluation protocols (random split vs. subject-independent (SI)). Results from random-split experiments show that overlapping segmentation, combined with smaller fixed learning rates (0.01-0.001), yields the highest accuracies, due to temporal redundancy and dense sampling of hemodynamic transitions. However, SI evaluation reveals a substantial drop in accuracy, demonstrating limited generalization to unseen participants. Under SI evaluation, non-overlapping segmentation outperformed overlapping windows, with the best accuracy of 56.11% achieved using PCA features with a 20-second window and a 0.1 learning rate. These findings indicate that eliminating temporal redundancy helps the model learn more robust and generalizable representations of cognitive load across individuals. Although adaptive learning rate strategy improved training stability, it did not surpass the performance of optimally selected fixed learning rates. The study highlights the critical role of segmentation strategy and learning rate selection in improving model generalization and identifies methodological considerations essential for developing reliable, real-time, and SI cognitive load classification systems using fNIRS.

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

MDForge: Agentic Molecular Dynamics Pipeline Design under Sparse Simulator Feedback

Authors:
Zehong Wang↗Yijun Ma↗Connor R. Schmidt↗Tianyi Ma↗Weixiang Sun↗Ziming Li↗Xiaoguang Guo↗Chuxu Zhang↗Matthew J. Webber↗Yanfang Ye↗

Molecular dynamics (MD) is the canonical in-silico method for atomistic molecular science, simulating molecular behavior from first-principle physics. Designing an MD pipeline for a new system requires substantial expert knowledge: running it on even one molecule is expensive, ruling out trial-and-error. We automate this expert pipeline-design process with an LLM agent. Unlike existing MD agents that orchestrate a predefined tool set, we treat pipeline design as open-ended code generation in which the agent's behavior is reshaped online by verbal reward. Specifically, we build MDForge, an LLM agent whose in-context update rule densifies the sparse reward via a multi-agent debate among physics experts. On three SAMPL host-guest binding free-energy benchmarks, MDForge automatically designs MD pipelines competitive with human experts. Deployed on a library of unseen candidate guests, its CB[7] pipeline discovers a novel binder that wet-lab competition NMR confirms is a high-affinity, picomolar CB[7] binder. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Zehong-Wang/MDForge.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

The role of Mediterranean diet adherence, smoking and their interactions in epigenetic age acceleration: A cross-sectional analysis of the Airwave cohort.

Authors:
Zaki↗A. R↗Mudway↗I. S↗Robinson↗Lau↗C.-H. E↗Eriksen↗Frost↗

Background: Epigenetic clocks are markers of biological aging that may vary in their sensitivity to environmental stressors and lifestyle modifiers. To evaluate the utility of these biomarkers as sensors of the human exposome, we investigated how they respond to two powerful and opposing exposures: smoking, a source of oxidative stress, and the antioxidant-rich Mediterranean diet. Objectives: We assessed the sensitivity of eleven epigenetic clocks to diet and smoking and evaluated whether Mediterranean diet adherence modifies associations between smoking and epigenetic aging. Methods: We analysed 928 participants (mean age 41 years, 59% male) from the Airwave Health Monitoring Study. Linear regression models assessed associations between Mediterranean Diet Score (MDS) and epigenetic age acceleration (EAA), alongside smoking status and blood cotinine. Interaction terms between smoking status and MDS were included to detect dietary attenuation of smoking-related EAA. Models were adjusted for demographic, socioeconomic, lifestyle, and psychological covariates. Results: Higher MDS was associated with lower EAA for GrimAge ({beta} = -0.07 SD; 95% CI: -0.13, -0.01) and Bernabeu ({beta} = -0.08 SD; 95% CI: -0.14, -0.02) after false discovery rate correction. Smoking was strongly associated with increased EAA, particularly for GrimAge, Bernabeu, and DunedinPACE. Among current smokers, effect sizes were greater in those with lower dietary adherence (e.g. GrimAge: 1.79 SD, 95% CI: 1.54, 2.04) compared with those with higher adherence (1.35 SD, 95% CI: 1.01, 1.68; P_interaction < 0.001). Similar attenuation patterns were observed for Bernabeu. Higher intake of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains contributed most to the attenuation of smoking-related EAA. Conclusions: Our findings indicate that certain epigenetic clocks effectively capture the tension between harmful and protective exposures within the exposome. Rather than suggesting that diet neutralises the risks of tobacco, these results demonstrate that specific clocks are sensitive enough to monitor how lifestyle factors modify molecular responses to environmental toxins. This highlights the value of second-generation clocks in quantifying biological resilience.

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

Deep Temporal Modeling and Ensemble Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals

Authors:
Desta Haileselassie Hagos↗Saurav Keshari Aryal↗Patrick Ymele-Leki↗Anietie Andy↗Legand L. Burge↗

Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Optimal learning of quantum channels in diamond distance

Authors:
Antonio Anna Mele↗Lennart Bittel↗

arXiv:2512.10214v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum process tomography, the task of estimating an unknown quantum channel, is a central problem in quantum information theory. A long-standing open question is how many uses of an unknown channel are required to learn it in diamond distance, the standard metric for distinguishing quantum processes. While quantum state tomography is well understood, for general channels the problem remained open beyond the unitary case. Here we establish the query complexity of channel tomography with optimal dependence on the dimension parameters, at any fixed constant accuracy. We design an algorithm showing that any channel with input/output dimensions $d_{\mathrm{in}},d_{\mathrm{out}}$ and Kraus rank at most $k$ can be learned to accuracy $\varepsilon$ using $O(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k/\varepsilon^{2})$ channel uses. Conversely, we prove that $\Omega(d_{\mathrm{in}}d_{\mathrm{out}}k)$ uses are necessary at constant accuracy and that, for non-minimal Kraus rank, a separate $\Omega(1/\varepsilon^{2})$ contribution is unavoidable. Since channels subsume states, unitaries, isometries, and measurements as special cases, our protocol provides a unified framework for these tomography tasks, yielding new guarantees for isometry and measurement tomography while recovering known optimal scalings for state and unitary tomography. Our algorithm follows the natural strategy of performing optimal tomography on the Choi state. The main technical contribution is to show that this suffices to control the induced diamond-distance error, avoiding the dimension loss incurred by a naive conversion from Choi-state trace distance to channel diamond distance. The protocol uses the channel non-adaptively to prepare Choi-state copies, purifies them in parallel, and performs optimal pure-state tomography on the resulting purifications. Hence, we reduce channel tomography to pure-state tomography.

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21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Rendering-Aware Sparse Sampling for BRDF Acquisition

Authors:
W. Cao↗D. J\"onsson↗Z. Huang↗J. Unger↗

Accurate BRDF acquisition is essential for realistic rendering, but dense gonioreflectometer measurements are slow and expensive. We study how to select a small set of BRDF measurements that is most informative for reconstructing material appearance under a learned BRDF prior. Existing sparse-acquisition methods often optimize samples for BRDF-space reconstruction for all materials, while the perceptual importance of a adaptive measurement ultimately depends on its effect on each rendered appearance. We therefore formulate sparse adaptive acquisition as a rendering-aware optimization problem. Our method combines a set encoder for sparse coordinate–value observations, a pretrained hypernetwork-based/PCA-based BRDF reconstructor, and a differentiable renderer. During sampler training, the reconstructor remains fixed, and gradients from a rendered-image loss optimize the measurement locations. This separates acquisition design from prior fitting and encourages the sampler to choose directions that are informative under the learned material distribution. To make the comparison controlled, we evaluate the uniform baseline, meta-learning method, HyperBRDF method, and our learned sampler under matched sample numbers, train/test split, rendering scene, object mask, image mapping, and metrics. Our central claim: rendering-aware sampling improves extremely sparse BRDF acquisition when final rendered appearance is the target. BRDF-space and combined losses are reported only as ablations, together with joint refinement and image-only latent fitting for unseen materials.

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22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

An Embodied Simulation Platform, Benchmark, and Data-Efficient Augmentation Framework for Wet-Lab Robotics

Authors:
Zhe Liu↗Huanbo Jin↗Zhaohui Du↗Zhe Wang↗He Xu↗Peijia Li↗Jiaming Gu↗Quan Lu↗Qi Wang↗Bin Ji↗Ting Xiao↗

arXiv:2606.12936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wet-lab robots can improve the reproducibility, throughput, and safety of biomedical experiments, but scaling their learning requires customizable simulators for safe and reproducible task generation, open editable laboratory assets, and efficient pipelines that turn limited demonstrations into usable training data. We present Pipette, an embodied simulation platform, benchmark, and data-efficient augmentation framework for wet-lab robot learning. Pipette releases over 43 open-source and re-editable wet-lab assets, together with an extensible asset-building pipeline. A key component of Pipette is its simulation-based data augmentation pipeline, replaying human demonstrations in simulation, applies lighting, camera, speed, and action perturbations, and filters generated episodes with automatic task success checks, rapidly expanding usable training data from limited manual demonstrations. We further introduce an 11-task wet-lab embodied benchmark covering sample handling, culture-ware manipulation, device operation, and precision placement. With only 30 demonstrations per task, ACT achieves 65.5% average success rate, while simulation augmentation improves SmolVLA from 44.1% to 74.7% and {\pi}0 from 40.4% to 46.5%, validating the effectiveness of Pipette for data-efficient VLA training and evaluation. Pipette also supports natural-language-driven scene construction and task registration, lowering the barrier for non-expert users to define new wet-lab robotic tasks.

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23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Cognitive Debt: AI as Intellectual Leverage and the Dynamics of Systemic Fragility

Authors:
Shuchen Meng↗

arXiv:2606.15078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a formal theory of cognitive debt: the stock of unverified reasoning obligations that accumulates when individuals use AI as a substitute rather than a complement for first-principles cognition. The model features two state variables per agent, cognitive capital and cognitive debt, and a multiplicative production technology in which cognitive capital functions as collateral that determines the return to AI adoption. We establish six propositions. Rational agents incur positive cognitive debt because the costs are deferred, partially external, and masked by short-run productivity gains. Tranquil periods lower subjective risk assessments, raise AI substitution intensity, and compound leverage, generating a cognitive Minsky moment in which subjective risk falls while true systemic fragility rises. Expected crisis losses are convex in aggregate leverage. Post-crisis, output-target pressure can produce a false-correction loop in which agents patch AI failures with more AI. The decentralised equilibrium over-adopts substitutive AI relative to the social optimum because of systemic risk, cognitive public goods, and arms-race externalities. In a two-type heterogeneous-agent economy, high-cognitive-capital agents adopt AI more intensively and may eventually erode their unaided cognitive capital below that of initially lower-skilled agents.

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

ADM-Fusion: Adaptive Deep Multi-Sensor Fusion for Robust Ego-Motion Estimation in Diverse Conditions

Authors:
Hasan Moughnieh↗Ibrahim Ghaddar↗Hadi Elham↗Imad H. Elhajj↗Daniel Asmar↗

Robust multi-sensor fusion is essential for reliable autonomy in diverse and degraded environments, where sensor reliability can fluctuate rapidly. Because different modalities fail in distinct ways, effective fusion should adaptively balance complementary cues rather than rely on fixed weighting. This adaptability is particularly important for ego-motion estimation, since accurate updates depend on the consistent integration of complementary sensor information. We propose ADM-Fusion, an end-to-end deep learning based multi-sensor fusion method designed to adapt to environmental changes and sensor degradation. ADM-Fusion employs an adaptive sensor mixture-of-experts framework with content-aware routing to dynamically assign weights to sensor inputs in real time. The system further incorporates separate translation and rotation branches, coupled through a cross-task attention mechanism to preserve task-specific specialization while enabling information sharing. ADM-Fusion is trained on the CARLA-LOC simulated dataset and subsequently fine-tuned on KITTI real-world data, demonstrating effective simulation-to-real transfer. Experiments show that ADM-Fusion remains robust under degraded conditions while maintaining competitive performance against existing methods.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

False Sense of Safety in Selective Signal Classification: Auditing Bound Tightness and Exchangeability for Risk Control

Authors:
Jingwen Zhou↗Mingzhe Wang↗

arXiv:2606.15153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selective prediction with distribution-free risk control promises that, with confidence 1-delta over the calibration draw, the error rate of accepted inputs stays below a user budget alpha. We audit this promise on signal-domain detectors – machine anomalous-sound detection (ASD) and AI-generated-image forensics – for four calibration rules: uncertified empirical thresholding (NAIVE) and certified Hoeffding, Clopper-Pearson (CP), and betting (WSR) upper confidence bounds. We report three findings. (i) NAIVE thresholding, common in practice, exceeds its declared budget in 49-73% of synthetic trials (n=200 calibration points) and in up to 68% of real-data splits: a false sense of safety rather than a broken theorem, since the rule never had a certificate. (ii) Tightness matters: CP and WSR certify substantial coverage where Hoeffding certifies none, with zero observed budget overruns under exchangeable splits. (iii) Under grouped deployment (unseen machine types or generators), certified rules overrun in 9-30% of trials – far above delta – showing the failure lies in the broken exchangeability premise, not in the bounds; a conservative per-group threshold restores validity at a severe coverage cost.

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