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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-21

U = U for all: Advancing equity in HIV prevention

by Thiago S. Torres, Paula M. Luz Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U). However, U = U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. Equitable and accurate awareness of U = U requires culturally tailored interventions, improved provider education, and supportive policy environments beyond biomedical evidence alone. Suppression of HIV with antiretrovirals eliminates HIV transmission risk, summarized as Undetectable = Untransmittable (U=U). However, U=U literacy remains unevenly understood and shared, and stigmas persist. In this Perspective, Thiago Torres and Paula Luz outline what is needed to improve equity and accuracy in global awareness and education of U=U.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Model-independent upper bounds for the prices of Bermudan options with convex payoffs

arXiv:2503.13328v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Suppose $\mu$ and $\nu$ are probability measures on $\mathbb{R}$ satisfying $\mu \leq_{cx} \nu$. Let $a$ and $b$ be convex functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with $a \geq b \geq 0$. We are interested in finding $$\sup_{\mathbf{M}} \sup_{\tau} \mathbb{E}^{\mathbf{M}} \left[ a(X) I_{ \{ \tau = 1 \} } + b(Y) I_{ \{ \tau = 2 \} } \right] $$ where the first supremum is taken over consistent models $\mathbf{M}$ (i.e., filtered probability spaces $(\Omega, \mathbf{F}, \mathbb{F}, \mathbb{P})$ such that $Z=(z,Z_1,Z_2)=(\int_{\mathbb{R}} x \mu(dx) = \int_{\mathbb{R}} y \nu(dy), X, Y)$ is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$ martingale, where $X$ has law $\mu$ and $Y$ has law $\nu$ under $\mathbb{P}$) and $\tau$ in the second supremum is a $(\mathbb{F},\mathbb{P})$-stopping time taking values in $\{1,2\}$. Our contributions are first to characterise and simplify the dual problem, and second to completely solve the problem under some structural assumptions on the measures $\mu$ and $\nu$ (namely that $\mu$ and $\nu$ are absolutely continuous probability measures that satisfy the Dispersion Assumption). A key finding is that the canonical set-up in which the filtration is that generated by $Z$ is not rich enough to define an optimal model and additional randomisation is required. This holds even though the marginal laws $\mu$ and $\nu$ are atom-free. The problem has an interpretation of finding the robust, or model-free, no-arbitrage bound on the price of a Bermudan option with two possible exercise dates, given the prices of co-maturing European options.

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

MVEB: Massive Video Embedding Benchmark

We introduce the Massive Video Embedding Benchmark (MVEB), a 23-task benchmark for video embeddings spanning classification, zero-shot classification, clustering, pair classification, retrieval, and video-centric question answering. We evaluate 33 models and find that no single model dominates: MLLM-based embeddings lead on classification, clustering, pair classification, and QA; multimodal binding leads on retrieval and zero-shot classification; generative MLLMs without contrastive adaptation collapse on cross-modal tasks. Paired video-only vs. audio+video evaluations show that audio's contribution depends on dataset annotation provenance: audio helps when labels were produced from both modalities and hurts when they were produced from visuals alone, a six-point gap consistent across model families. MVEB is derived from MVEB+, a 184-task pool, and is designed to maintain task diversity while reducing evaluation cost. It integrates into the MTEB ecosystem for unified evaluation across text, image, audio, and video. We release MVEB and all 184 tasks along with code and a leaderboard at https://github.com/embeddings-benchmark/mteb.

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

Uncertainty Quantification of Engineering Structures by Polynomial Chaos Expansion and Multivariate Active Learning

arXiv:2606.17233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many engineering applications, a single high-fidelity model produces multiple quantities of interest (QoIs) under the same input parameters, e.g. finite element models of complex physical systems. To alleviate the high computational cost of direct model evaluations, surrogate models are widely used to construct efficient approximations of model responses. Naturally, the accuracy of surrogates strongly depends on the quality of the experimental design (ED). However, a single ED may not provide an adequate representation for all outputs simultaneously, especially when different outputs exhibit varying sensitivities to the input variables. A straightforward solution is to perform separate sampling for each output, but this results in increased sampling complexity and computational cost. From a statistical perspective, such an approach also ignores potential correlations among all outputs and may compromise data consistency. To address this issue, an adaptive sequential sampling method for constructing polynomial chaos expansion surrogate models is generalized for vector valued QoIs. The method sequentially selects new samples from a candidate pool based on their local contribution to the output variance, while balancing distance-based exploration of the input space and exploitation of aggregated variance information across all outputs. Its performance is compared with non-sequential Latin Hypercube Sampling through several numerical examples from engineering problems. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed strategy improves both surrogate accuracy and stability, and provides a more reliable estimation of second-order statistics.

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

The Journal of Prompt-Engineered (Moral) Philosophy Or: Why AI-Assisted Ethics Research Requires Process Transparency

作者:

arXiv:2511.08639v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing AI disclosure mandates in scholarship require that AI assistance be reported but leave transparency philosophically unspecified: they fix the duty without explaining what the duty serves. We argue that ethical inquiry is essentially contested at two independent levels – about what it is, and about what it demands of the inquirer – defeating output-only evaluation and welfare-economic dismissal of the transparency question, and, by extension, reproducibility framings imported from the empirical sciences. The transparency duty is grounded instead in agent-integrity: the legibility, before a community of inquiry, of the identity-constituting commitments that the author's mode of philosophising expresses. Because the standards for evaluating such work are not communally settled, the achievable goal for transparency is not evaluation against agreed criteria but tracking – accumulating the evidentiary record that lets each tradition assess the work on its own terms and makes future normative judgments possible. We develop a documentation-adequacy framework that operationalises Meaningful Human Control through five transparency elements – declaration, navigation, documentation account, process documentation, and development records – demonstrated by the paper itself, whose full documentation record is archived at a persistent identifier. The framework is a first iteration subject to revision, not a settled standard.

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

MDForge: Agentic Molecular Dynamics Pipeline Design under Sparse Simulator Feedback

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.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Displacement Is Not Direction: Evaluating Fidelity Metrics for Quantized LLM Deployment

Fidelity metrics, such as per-token KL divergence (KLD) against a high-precision reference, are often used in practice as low-cost proxies for benchmark quality. We test this practice on a 28-quant cohort of Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and a 41-quant cohort of Devstral-Small-2-24B, evaluated across a suite of downstream benchmarks. We find that KLD is strongly correlated with benchmark score over the full cohort ($\rho=-0.72$ on Qwen and $\rho=-0.86$ on Devstral, both with $p

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative Gait Categorization in Parkinson's Disease with and without Freezing of Gait

Background: Freezing of gait (FOG) is a disabling and often underrecognized feature of Parkinsons disease (PD). Objective gait analysis may improve characterization of this motor symptom. Objective: To compare quantitative 3D gait parameters in PD with FOG (PDF) and PD without FOG (PDNF) in a routine clinical cohort. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed a sequential sample of 180 patients with PD referred for motion analysis between 2020 and 2024. All patients underwent 3D motion capture in the off-medication state. Eighteen gait outcomes spanning pace, rhythm, postural control, variability, and asymmetry domains were derived from steady-state walking tasks. FOG status was determined using physician documentation and Movement Disorder Society Unified Parkinsons Disease Rating Scale (MDS-UPDRS) items. Group differences between PDF (n=99) and PDNF (n=81) were evaluated using independent samples t-tests, with outcomes adjusted for disease duration and corrected for multiple comparisons. A secondary analysis among PDF compared those in Hoehn and Yahr (H&Y) stage [≥]III to those in H&Y [≤]II. Results: PDF had longer disease duration, higher OFF MDS-UPDRS III scores, and higher Hoehn and Yahr stage than PDNF but were similar in age and sex. After adjusting for disease duration and multiplicity, PDF demonstrated reduced step length, stride length, and forward velocity, and greater cadence variability, while most postural control, and asymmetry measures were comparable between groups. Among PDF, advanced H&Y stage was associated with impaired pace and rhythm, similar to previous reports among PD in general. Conclusion: In this large, sequential, clinically referred cohort, FOG was associated with more advanced PD and specific impairments in pace and gait variability. These findings support comprehensive 3D gait analysis as an objective tool to better delineate FOG-related gait abnormalities and identify features that may predict FOG, informing targeted interventions.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Isotropic random walks and Brownian diffusion on complex projective space

arXiv:2606.11438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that isotropic random walks on the complex projective space provide a canonical and analytically tractable stochastic-geometric framework for the exploration of quantum-state space. The approach combines harmonic analysis on compact rank-one symmetric spaces with stochastic pure-state evolution and yields explicit analytical expressions for transition kernels, fidelity statistics, and geometric observables associated with the Fubini–Study metric. In particular, the framework provides a solvable reference model for isotropic depolarization and Haar equilibration, reproducing Haar-random fidelity statistics and the invariant measure on projective Hilbert space without specifying a microscopic Lindblad generator. In the short-time regime, the stochastic evolution converges to Brownian diffusion generated by the Fubini–Study Laplace–Beltrami operator, while the long-time limit exhibits concentration-of-measure behaviour characteristic of high-dimensional random quantum states. We further derive analytical and asymptotic results for the first-passage-time problem, including closed-form expressions in the Brownian limit for the mean first passage time and the long-time tail of the first-passage-time distribution. For high-fidelity target states, the mean first passage time exhibits a strong dimension-dependent divergence originating from the concentration properties of the Fubini–Study geometry.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Linear Mode Connectivity under Data Shifts for Deep Ensembles of Image Classifiers

arXiv:2511.04514v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The phenomenon of linear mode connectivity (LMC) links several aspects of deep learning, including training stability under noisy stochastic gradients, the smoothness and generalization of local minima (basins), the similarity and functional diversity of sampled models, and architectural effects on data processing. In this work, we experimentally study LMC under data shifts and identify conditions that mitigate their impact. We interpret data shifts as an additional source of stochastic gradient noise, which can be reduced through small learning rates and large batch sizes. These parameters influence whether models converge to the same local minimum or to regions of the loss landscape with varying smoothness and generalization. Although models sampled via LMC tend to make similar errors more frequently than those converging to different basins, the benefit of LMC lies in balancing training efficiency against the gains achieved from larger, more diverse ensembles. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/DLR-KI/LMC. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Energy Blind Spot: NVIDIA's Flagship Edge AI Hardware Cannot Support Process-Level Energy Attribution

arXiv:2605.27599v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Agentic AI workloads - where a single user goal triggers multi-step orchestration, tool calls, retries, and failure recovery - are being targeted for edge deployment, with NVIDIA, Dell, HP, ASUS, MSI, Acer, and Gigabyte all shipping GB10-based desktop AI systems in 2026. We recently demonstrated that orchestration structure dominates agentic energy cost, with workflows consuming 4.33x more energy per successful goal than linear baselines and OOI reaching 7.63x for multi-step reasoning tasks. Separately, Raj et al. show that CPU-side processing accounts for up to 90.6% of total latency and 44% of total dynamic energy in agentic workloads. We report a systematic energy-observability audit of the ASUS Ascent GX10 (GB10 SoC) and find that the platform exposes no CPU energy counter, no INA power-rail monitor, no IPMI/BMC, and no SCMI powercap protocol through any supported software interface. The only on-device energy telemetry is instantaneous GPU power via NVML. We further discover that the MediaTek firmware already computes per-rail energy internally via an undocumented ACPI interface (SPBM), but NVIDIA states there are "no plans to expose CPU rail information." On-device per-process energy attribution - as performed on x86 via RAPL - is therefore not reproducible on this platform through supported interfaces. We formalize a hardware requirements specification for energy-attributed AI, propose an interim calibration bridge for per-domain energy decomposition - confirmed on the Acer Veriton GN100 where CPU energy accumulators are live - and identify a standards-track path via SCMI powercap. Our findings motivate the low-carbon computing community to demand energy observability as a first-class hardware requirement.

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

MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks

arXiv:2602.09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf. While these agents offer powerful capabilities, their design exposes them to indirect prompt injection attacks embedded in untrusted web content, enabling adversaries to hijack agent behavior and violate user intent. Despite growing awareness of this threat, existing evaluations rely on fixed attack templates, manually selected injection surfaces, or narrowly scoped scenarios, limiting their ability to capture realistic, adaptive attacks encountered in practice. We present MUZZLE, an automated agentic framework for evaluating the security of web agents against indirect prompt injection attacks. MUZZLE utilizes the agent's trajectories to automatically identify high-salience injection surfaces, and adaptively generate context-aware malicious instructions that target violations of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Unlike prior approaches, MUZZLE adapts its attack strategy based on the agent's observed execution trajectory and iteratively refines attacks using feedback from failed executions. We evaluate MUZZLE across diverse web applications, user tasks, and agent configurations, demonstrating its ability to automatically and adaptively assess the security of web agents with minimal human intervention. Our results show that MUZZLE effectively discovers 44 new attacks on 4 web applications with 10 adversarial objectives that violate confidentiality, availability, or privacy properties across different LLMs and agent scaffolds. MUZZLE also identifies novel attack strategies, including 3 cross-application prompt injection attacks and an agent-tailored phishing scenario.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Oranits: Mission Assignment and Task Offloading in Open RAN-based ITS using Metaheuristic and Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2507.19712v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we explore mission assignment and task offloading in an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN)-based intelligent transportation system (ITS), where autonomous vehicles leverage mobile edge computing for efficient processing. Existing studies often overlook the intricate interdependencies between missions and the costs associated with offloading tasks to edge servers, leading to suboptimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce Oranits, a novel system model that explicitly accounts for mission dependencies and offloading costs while optimizing performance through vehicle cooperation. To achieve this, we propose a twofold optimization approach. First, we develop a metaheuristic-based evolutionary computing algorithm, namely the Chaotic Gaussian-based Global ARO (CGG-ARO), serving as a baseline for one-slot optimization. Second, we design an enhanced reward-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, referred to as the Multi-agent Double Deep Q-Network (MA-DDQN), that integrates both multi-agent coordination and multi-action selection mechanisms, significantly reducing mission assignment time and improving adaptability over baseline methods. Extensive simulations reveal that CGG-ARO improves the number of completed missions and overall benefit by approximately 7.1% and 7.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, MA-DDQN achieves even greater improvements of 11.0% in terms of mission completions and 12.5% in terms of the overall benefit. These results highlight the effectiveness of Oranits in enabling faster, more adaptive, and more efficient task processing in dynamic ITS environments.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Resolving problems with the continuum limit in coherent-state path integrals

arXiv:2602.02466v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The paper solves the problem of continuum limit in bosonic thermal coherent-state path integrals. For this purpose, exact discrete versions of the path integral are constructed for three different orderings of the Hamiltonian: normal, anti-normal and symmetric (Weyl order). Subsequently, their different continuum versions are checked on the harmonic oscillator, to choose the symmetric ordering as a possibly correct choice for all polynomial Hamiltonians. Spotted mathematical subtleties in the simple case serve as a clue to the general solution. Finally, a general justification for the symmetric order is provided by deriving the continuum path integral starting from the exact discrete case using a renormalization procedure in the imaginary time frequency domain. While the role of Weyl order has already been found, the paper provides the missing proof of its suitability for every polynomial Hamiltonian and simplifies the previously established construction by referring only to creation and annihilation operators (without position and momentum operators).

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Ordinal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Severity Using Structural MRI and Clinical Data

arXiv:2606.11794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) require accurate and scalable tools for assessing disease severity, yet current clinical staging remains time-intensive and prone to variability. We propose an attention-enhanced multimodal machine learning framework with ordinal regression for automated and interpretable AD severity staging. The framework integrates T1-weighted MRI with demographic and genetic variables and compares unimodal and multimodal architectures using ordinal and non-ordinal prediction heads. Models were trained and validated using cohort-stratified splits derived from the ADNI, AIBL, and NIFD datasets. A strictly held-out test set was constructed using subjects excluded from all training, validation, preprocessing, and hyperparameter tuning procedures, with subject-level splitting employed throughout to prevent data leakage. Among unimodal approaches, the T1-weighted MRI model achieved slightly higher adjacent-stage accuracy (0.963) and agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.444) than the tabular model (QWK 0.433). Integrating imaging, demographic, and genetic information improved overall performance. The multimodal non-ordinal baseline achieved the lowest prediction error (MAE 0.340), whereas the ordinal multimodal model achieved the highest adjacent-stage accuracy (0.970) and strongest agreement with clinical staging (QWK 0.549). These findings indicate that ordinal formulations better capture the ordered structure of the CDR scale and yield predictions more consistent with clinical staging. Explainability analyses using Grad CAM++ and SHAP demonstrated anatomically and clinically plausible model behavior, supporting transparent decision-making. Overall, attention-based multimodal learning with ordinal regression represents a robust, interpretable, and scalable approach for automated AD severity staging and AI-assisted clinical decision support.

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

V-JEPA 2.1: Unlocking Dense Features in Video Self-Supervised Learning

We present V-JEPA 2.1, a family of self-supervised models that learn dense, high-quality visual representations for both images and videos while retaining strong global scene understanding. The approach combines four key components. First, a dense predictive loss uses a masking-based objective in which both visible and masked tokens contribute to the training signal, encouraging explicit spatial and temporal grounding. Second, deep self-supervision applies the self-supervised objective hierarchically across multiple intermediate encoder layers to improve representation quality. Third, multi-modal tokenizers enable unified training across images and videos. Finally, the model benefits from effective scaling in both model capacity and training data. Together, these design choices produce representations that are spatially structured, semantically coherent, and temporally consistent. Empirically, V-JEPA 2.1 achieves state-of-the-art performance on several challenging benchmarks, including 7.71 mAP on Ego4D for short-term object-interaction anticipation and 40.8 Recall@5 on EPIC-KITCHENS for high-level action anticipation, as well as a 20-point improvement in real-robot grasping success rate over V-JEPA-2 AC. The model also demonstrates strong performance in robotic navigation (5.687 ATE on TartanDrive), depth estimation (0.307 RMSE on NYUv2 with a linear probe), and global recognition (77.7 on Something-Something-V2). These results show that V-JEPA 2.1 significantly advances the state of the art in dense visual understanding and world modeling.

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

Fixed-Point Reasoners: Stable and Adaptive Deep Looped Transformers

arXiv:2606.18206v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Looped architectures provide an inductive bias toward learning step-by-step procedures for tasks that require compositional reasoning. The number of effective layers reached by looping determines the quality of the solution these models find. Like deep architectures, looped architectures are prone to a signal propagation problem induced by depth as the halting decision is postponed. In this paper, we address this signal propagation issue using pre-norm layers and residual scaling. Building on these architectural modifications, we propose FPRM, a Transformer-based Fixed-Point Reasoning Model that uses fixed-point convergence as an end-to-end halting mechanism in a looped architecture. We show that fixed-point halting allows FPRM to adapt its compute to task difficulty. FPRM is effective on common reasoning benchmarks, namely Sudoku, Maze, state-tracking, and ARC-AGI.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

EurekAgent: Agent Environment Engineering is All You Need For Autonomous Scientific Discovery

LLM-based agents have shown increasing potential in automating scientific discovery. Given an optimizable metric and an execution environment, they can propose, validate, and iterate scientific solutions, and have produced results that outperform human-designed approaches. As model capabilities continue to improve, we argue that the bottleneck for autonomous scientific discovery is shifting from prescribing agent workflows to designing agent environments: the resources, constraints, and interfaces that shape agent behavior. We frame this as environment engineering: building environments that amplify productive behaviors, such as open-ended exploration, systematic artifact management, and inter-agent collaboration, while suppressing harmful behaviors, such as reward hacking and high-friction human oversight. We present EurekAgent, an environment-engineered agent system for metric-driven autonomous scientific discovery. EurekAgent engineers the environment along four dimensions: permissions engineering for bounded agent execution and isolated evaluation; artifact engineering for filesystem and Git-based collaboration; budget engineering for budget-aware exploration; and human-in-the-loop engineering for easy human supervision and intervention. EurekAgent sets new state-of-the-art results on multiple mathematics, kernel engineering, and machine learning tasks, including new state-of-the-art 26-circle packing results discovered with less than $11 in total API cost. We open-source our code and results, and call for environment engineering as a core research direction for developing reliable autonomous research agents.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Developmental Associations Linking Childhood Trauma and Early Cannabis Use to Adolescent DNA Methylation and Psychotic-Like Experiences

Background. Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) index early risk for psychotic disorders and are consistently associated with childhood trauma, yet underlying biological mechanisms remain poorly understood. DNA methylation (DNAm) may capture the biological embedding of early adversity, while adolescent exposures such as cannabis use may modify these processes. We examined epigenome-wide associations of childhood trauma and PLEs, tested the moderating role of early cannabis use, and evaluated DNAm as a potential mediator. Methods. We analysed data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a UK population-based birth cohort. Childhood trauma was assessed prospectively and retrospectively. Epigenome-wide DNAm was measured in peripheral blood at ~17 years using the Illumina 450K array, and PLEs were assessed at 18 using a structured interview. Epigenome-wide association studies were conducted for trauma-DNAm and DNAm-PLEs associations in the final sample (n = 1,457), adjusting for demographic, biological, and technical covariates. Differentially methylated regions (DMRs) were identified using DMRff, followed by functional enrichment analyses. Cannabis use at 15.5 was modelled as a moderator with multiple imputation for missing data. Mediation was tested using the Divide-Aggregate Composite-null Test (DACT). Results. Childhood trauma was associated with widespread DNAm differences, primarily at the regional level, with enrichment in pathways related to cellular stress responses. In contrast, DNAm associated with PLEs was more limited and implicated loci involved in epigenetic regulatory processes. These signatures were largely distinct, and there was no evidence supporting mediation after multiple testing correction. Incorporating cannabis use altered the pattern and extent of DNAm associations, with stronger and more significant signals observed at both CpG and regional levels, although these did not translate into evidence of mediation. Conclusion. Childhood trauma and PLEs show distinct DNAm signatures in adolescence, with trauma-related DNAm reflecting broad stress-related processes and PLE-associated DNAm implicating regulatory mechanisms. We found little evidence that DNAm mediates the trauma-PLE association. Instead, adolescent exposures, particularly cannabis use, may distinctly influence trauma-related epigenetic variation with limited detectable downstream effects on PLEs. These findings support a context-dependent model of epigenetic risk and highlight the need for larger longitudinal studies to clarify causal pathways linking early adversity to psychosis.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

VIMPO: Value-Implicit Policy Optimization for LLMs

arXiv:2606.20008v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a central tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but current methods face a trade-off between simplicity and credit assignment. Group-relative methods such as GRPO avoid training a critic, but typically assign a trajectory-level advantage to every token. Actor-critic methods provide denser learning signals, but require a learned value function with its own training instability. We introduce VIMPO, a critic-free policy optimization method that derives a policy-implied value function from the optimality conditions of KL-regularized reinforcement learning. For autoregressive generation, the resulting value recurrence can be written in terms of policy-reference log-ratios and anchored by the terminal condition that no future reward remains at the end of a trajectory. This gives a simple value loss that incorporates outcome-level verifiable rewards without training a critic. The same derivation also yields a critic-free actor advantage, allowing VIMPO to separate reward incorporation through the value loss from policy improvement through a PPO-style actor update. On mathematical RLVR benchmarks, VIMPO improves over GRPO across MATH-500, AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and OlympiadBench, with especially larger gains on competition-style evaluations. Under noisy rewards, VIMPO retains a consistent advantage over GRPO, suggesting that policy-implied value optimization can provide finer credit assignment while preserving the practical simplicity of critic-free training.

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

A Study of Belief Revision Postulates in Multi-Agent Systems (Extended Version)

arXiv:2605.02249v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the belief revision problem in epistemic planning, i.e., what will be the beliefs of all agents in a multi-agent system after an agent gains the belief in some state property. Based on the standard representation in epistemic planning of agents' beliefs via a single multi-agent Kripke model, we generalize the classical AGM belief revision postulates to the multi-agent setting, with the aim to provide a formal framework for evaluating dynamic epistemic reasoning frameworks in which the beliefs of all agents as the result of actions are computed. As an example of a simple operator that satisfies all of the generalized AGM postulates, we present generalized full-meet multi-agent belief revision. We moreover define a generalization of the standard postulates for iterated revision, present a more sophisticated, event model based revision operator, and discuss the potential issues in defining an epistemic operator on Kripke models that can satisfy all of the generalized postulates for iterated multi-agent belief revision.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Neuro-Symbolic Agents for Regulated Process Automation: Challenges and Research Agenda

arXiv:2606.13405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based agents are entering regulated industries where they automate judgment intensive quality management processes. We argue that symbolic structures already embedded in these domains, including regulations, typed process models, and compliance constraints, should be treated not merely as external monitoring mechanisms but as core architectural components that shape the agent's decision-making and behavior. We propose compliance-by-construction as a complementary paradigm to guardrail-based monitoring: a structural foundation that prevents control-flow violations, while guardrails remain essential for catching semantic errors. We identify a structured set of neuro-symbolic research challenges on foundational and capability level and show that addressing them jointly enables compliance-by-construction. We call on the neuro-symbolic community to engage with regulated process automation as a high impact research domain.

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

Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

arXiv:2604.13733v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables high-frequency, closed-loop control for robotic manipulation, but scaling to long-horizon tasks with sparse or imperfect rewards remains difficult due to inefficient exploration and poor credit assignment. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models leverage large-scale multimodal pretraining to provide generalist, task-level reasoning, but current limitations hinder their direct use in fast and precise manipulation. In this paper, we propose Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting (VLAJS), a method that bridges sparse VLA guidance with on-policy RL to improve exploration and learning efficiency. VLAJS treats VLAs as transient sources of high-level action suggestions that bias early exploration and improve credit assignment, while preserving the high-frequency, state-based control of RL. Our approach augments Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a directional action-consistency regularization that softly aligns the RL agent's actions with VLA guidance during early training, without enforcing strict imitation, requiring demonstrations, or relying on continuous teacher queries. VLA guidance is applied sparsely and annealed over time, allowing the agent to adapt online and ultimately surpass the guiding policy. We evaluate VLAJS on six challenging manipulation tasks: lifting, pick-and-place, peg reorientation, peg insertion, poking, and pushing in simulation, and validate a subset on a real Franka Panda robot. VLAJS consistently outperforms PPO and distillation-style baselines in sample efficiency, reducing required environment interactions by over 50% in several tasks. Real-world experiments demonstrate zero-shot sim-to-real transfer and robust execution under clutter, object variation, and external perturbations.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Convergence to the Brownian CRT for critical branching Markov processe

arXiv:2601.05906v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We prove an invariance principle for a general class of continuous time critical branching processes with finite variance (non-local) branching mechanism. We show that the genealogical trees, viewed as random compact metric measure spaces, converge under rescaling to the Brownian continuum random tree in the Gromov-Hausdorff-weak topology, establishing a universal scaling limit for critical finite variance branching processes.