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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Study protocol and statistical analysis plan for a randomized controlled trial evaluating the safety and feasibility of the recombinant human platelet-derived growth factor B (rhPDGF-BB)-enhanced collagen plug for complex perianal fistula healing

Background A drug-repurposing-specific phenome-wide association study (PheWAS) demonstrated that patients with a single nucleotide variant that decreases expression of platelet-derived growth factor receptor beta (PDGFR{beta}) have a higher prevalence of fistulas, suggesting that PDGFR{beta} signaling is important for tissue repair. Recombinant human platelet derived growth factor B (rhPDGF) is an FDA-approved protein-based therapeutic that signals through PDGFR{beta} to heal and regenerate cutaneous skin wounds, periodontal tissue, and orthopedic bone with a strong safety profile. We hypothesize that rhPDGF will benefit other conditions identified by PheWAS with a similar physiological mechanism as the existing indications, such as complex perianal fistulas that are ineligible for a fistulotomy. Methods and analysis This prospective, blinded, single-site study aims to enroll 12 participants, randomized at a ratio of 2:1, comparing implantation of rhPDGF-enhanced collagen to routine care procedures, and stratified by fistula etiology, idiopathic versus Crohns disease (CD)-related. The primary outcome of this study will evaluate the technical performance of the rhPDGF-enhanced collagen implant for treatment of complex perianal fistulas as measured by the proportion of participants with successful implantation of the intervention without any intervention-related serious adverse events. The secondary outcomes will assess the preliminary safety and efficacy of the intervention based on all intervention-related adverse events, total fistulas healed, rate of fistula recurrence, and change in patient-reported symptoms. Complex perianal fistulas, idiopathic or CD-related, remain a major clinical challenge in need of new multimodal treatments aimed at tissue repair and regeneration. Pharmaceutical rhPDGF stimulation of PDGFR{beta} signaling promotes healing of skin, bone, and soft tissue. PheWAS revealed fistulas as a novel indication for repurposing rhPDGF. This protocol aims to evaluate the technical performance, preliminary safety and efficacy, and feasibility of rhPDGF-enhanced collagen for healing and remission of complex perianal fistulas. Ethics and dissemination This trial was approved by the Vanderbilt University Medical Center institutional review board (IRB#240585). Results will be submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

A Benchmark for Heterogeneous Stereo Deblurring with Physically- and Epipolar-constrained Cross Attention

Modern stereo-capable smartphones enable immersive XR content capture. However, hardware heterogeneity across camera modules often causes severe asymmetric blur artifacts. Existing methods and benchmarks largely assume homogeneous stereo setups and therefore do not explicitly address such asymmetric degradation. To bridge this gap, we present a dedicated framework for heterogeneous stereo deblurring. First, we introduce the heterogeneous stereo deblurring (HSD) dataset, constructed from real smartphone stereo captures via multi-frame integration. Second, we propose physically- and epipolar-constrained cross attention (PECA), a lightweight module that restricts cross-view matching to an epipolar search window bounded by a optics-derived disparity upper bound. By enforcing physically valid disparity constraints, PECA enables efficient and reliable cross-view feature fusion. Moreover, our confidence-weighted attention with residual fusion emphasizes cross-guided deblurring when correspondences are reliable, while naturally falling back to self-deblurring in occluded or unreliable regions. PECA is architecture-agnostic and consistently improves CNN-, Transformer-, and NAFNet-based baselines. Extensive experiments on HSD show that PECA-enhanced models achieve improved restoration performance with favorable efficiency.

03.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Prognostic value of cervical length for spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic women with singleton pregnancy: An individual participant data meta-analysis

作者:

by Kelly Hughes, David Nguyen, Mason Aberoumand, Heather Ford, Erin Clarke, Nuria Banos Lopez, Margaret Dziadosz, Richard Fischer, Renato T. Souza, Jose Guilherme Cecatti, Kelly Orzechowski, Courtney Olson-Chen, Alberto Borges Peixoto, Vorapong Phupong, Joshua Rosenbloom, Moeun Son, Athena Souka, Liu Du, Michael Sean Esplin, Roberta Granese, Simi Gupta, Brenda Kazemier, Lindsay Kindinger, Pihla Kuusela, Jeanine Van der Ven, Omer Weitzner, Evelyn Minis, Alba Farras Llobet, Heather Frey, Rashmi Bagga, Siddhidatri Mishra, Elizabeth Patberg, Philip Bennett, Megan Hall, Andrew Shennan, Shaun Brennecke, Shakila Thangaratinam, Anna Lene Seidler, Ben Willem Mol, Rui Wang Background Spontaneous preterm birth (SPTB) is the leading cause of perinatal and early childhood mortality worldwide. Studies have generally suggested that mid-trimester transvaginal sonographic cervical length

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

Embedded Machine Learning for Microcontroller-Class Edge Devices: Data, Feature, Evaluation, and Deployment Pipelines

arXiv:2606.18122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Embedded machine learning moves inference from cloud services to resource-constrained devices that must acquire data, preprocess signals, run a model, and act within tight limits on memory, energy, and latency. This paper presents a systems-oriented synthesis of an embedded machine-learning workflow for microcontroller-class platforms. The emphasis is placed on engineering decisions that are often hidden in generic machine-learning introductions: sampling and buffering, feature extraction as dimensionality reduction, validation under class imbalance, model/runtime co-design, and streaming deployment. Two representative signal families are used throughout the paper. The first is inertial motion recognition, where a two-second, three-axis accelerometer window is transformed from raw samples into root-mean-square and spectral features before classification. The second is keyword spotting, where audio is sampled, anti-aliased, transformed into mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, and processed by a compact one-dimensional convolutional network. The paper concludes with practical design rules for robust on-device inference, including data curation, quantization, thresholding, scheduling, and field monitoring.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

CreativeBench: Benchmarking and Enhancing Machine Creativity via Self-Evolving Challenges

The saturation of high-quality pre-training data has shifted research focus toward evolutionary systems capable of continuously generating novel artifacts, leading to the success of AlphaEvolve. However, the progress of such systems is hindered by the lack of rigorous, quantitative evaluation. To tackle this challenge, we introduce CreativeBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine creativity in code generation, grounded in a classical cognitive framework. Comprising two subsets – CreativeBench-Combo and CreativeBench-Explore – the benchmark targets combinatorial and exploratory creativity through an automated pipeline utilizing reverse engineering and self-play. By leveraging executable code, CreativeBench objectively distinguishes creativity from hallucination via a unified metric defined as the product of quality and novelty. Our analysis of state-of-the-art models reveals distinct behaviors: (1) scaling significantly improves combinatorial creativity but yields diminishing returns for exploration; (2) larger models exhibit ``convergence-by-scaling,'' becoming more correct but less divergent; and (3) reasoning capabilities primarily benefit constrained exploration rather than combination. Finally, we propose EvoRePE, a plug-and-play inference-time steering strategy that internalizes evolutionary search patterns to consistently enhance machine creativity.

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

Optimal Order of Multi-Agent and General Many-Body Systems

作者:

arXiv:2606.20485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops a general framework for analyzing multi-agent systems with feedback loops between agents actions and collective observations. The framework is built on two fundamental agent-level variables: power, which measures agent influence on collective outcomes, and response functions, which determine how agents react to observations. We derive how macroscopic properties, including total power, useful power, entropy, order, fragility, and mobility, emerge from these two variables of heterogeneous agents. To study the trade off between growth and resilience, we introduce a system-level utility function parameterized by a risk-appetite coefficient and derive an optimal degree of order that balances productivity, stability, and adaptability. The analysis suggests that stronger synchronization can increase collective output but may also increase systemic fragility and reduce mobility. We further argue that order, entropy, information, and useful energy are task-dependent and system-relative concepts whose meanings depend on the objectives of the system. By measuring and designing agent power distributions and response functions, it may be possible to better understand, predict, and optimize collective behavior and identify the conditions under which collective intelligence and optimal order emerge.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Bayesian control for coding agents

Modern coding agents pair LLM generators with various tools, including cheap diagnostics and expensive verifiers. The tool-use decisions are typically governed by orchestrators that often use fixed rules and ignore uncertainty. We formulate orchestration as cost-sensitive sequential hypothesis testing: a Bayesian controller maintains a belief over candidate correctness and dynamically decides whether to gather more evidence, refine the candidate, verify it, or stop. Across six generators and nine coding benchmarks, Bayesian control proves to be most valuable when verification is costly and critics are informative but imperfect. Beyond control, the belief state yields an interpretable correctness score that outperforms token-probability and raw tool-success baselines for uncertainty quantification.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

The Geometry of Allostery: A Laplacian Minor Hierarchy for Many-Body Protein Communication

Quantifying how cooperative, many-body relationships drive allostery in protein networks remains a major challenge. To address this, we develop the Laplacian minor hierarchy, a mathematical framework that characterizes the geometric invariants of a protein network. Lower-order minors yield standard metrics including the partition function and effective distances, whereas higher-order minors define novel topological measures: cooperation indices, each bounded between zero and one, that characterize pathway correlations at increasing levels of complexity, the third-order minor determines whether allosteric pathways are correlated or uncorrelated, and the fourth-order minor quantifies how distinct pathways communicate through intermediary residues. We apply this framework to analyze the evolutionary adaptation of the PSD95pdz3 domain from Class I to Class II ligand specificity via mutations G330T and H372A. The cooperation index demonstrates a distinct evolutionary hierarchy: the G330T mutation establishes distributed pathway couplings that the H372A mutation subsequently exploits, whereas H372A alone produces minimal global changes. Furthermore, the fourth-order analysis identifies His317 as a critical intermediary node bridging the class-switching (330-372) and class-bridging (330-400) allosteric pathways. These results demonstrate that allosteric dependencies emerge only when mutations accumulate in specific combinations, with a hierarchical organization of pathways structured around position 330 and intermediary nodes His317 and Phe400. Rather than predicting allosteric mechanisms, this framework provides a mechanistic explanation for why and how allostery emerges during protein evolution.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

The classical boundaries of the EPR argument and quantum ontology

arXiv:2606.07826v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Von Neumann's Hilbert-space formalism of quantum mechanics constitutes a logico-physical theory of observed or measured reality. Imposing the logical constraint of Booleanity, essential for objectively shareable descriptions among observers, reveals the physical meaning of classicality inherently embedded within the formalism itself. Starting from this consideration, the present work reformulates the quantum-classical transition via Hilbert-space classical mechanics (HCM), grounding classicality not in the dynamical limit ($\hbar \to 0$), but in the logical constraint of Booleanity (i.e., the mutual commutativity of preparable states). Within this state-centric framework, applying the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) criterion alongside locality and measurement independence reduces standard quantum mechanics to the HCM model. Thus, the EPR argument reveals not quantum incompleteness, but the implicit classical boundaries of its own premises. To resolve this impasse, we articulate a nuanced quantum ontology grounded in a fundamental structural bipartition between the observational environment and the observed object, which accommodates three categorical distinctions: ontic, processional, and tropos-existential. Building on this, we propose a criterion of objective reality wherein descriptive objectivity is treated as merely a sufficient condition for physical reality. This addresses the historical Bohr-Einstein ambiguity, enabling the quantum formalism to ontologically unify objective measured phenomena and non-objective observed interference within a context-dependent framework.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum mechanics over real numbers fully reproduces standard quantum theory

arXiv:2604.19482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard quantum mechanics employs complex Hilbert spaces, but whether complex numbers are fundamental or merely convenient has long been debated. For decades, real-valued equivalents were considered mathematically possible but cumbersome. However, a highly cited 2021 result claimed that any quantum theory based on real numbers is experimentally falsifiable via network Bell experiments. Yet, it remains an open question whether this falsification applies to all real-valued theories. Here we show that this conclusion rests on an incomplete real formulation, and we present a rigorous real-valued framework that perfectly reproduces all predictions of standard quantum mechanics. We demonstrate that the standard real tensor product ($\otimes_{\mathbb{R}}$) used in previous no-go theorems is algebraically incompatible with the rich structure of conventional quantum mechanics. We present a real framework based on K\"{a}hler space and prove that it is exactly isomorphic to established quantum mechanics via an explicit bijection $\gamma$. The isomorphism extends to composite systems through a symplectic composition rule $\otimes^{\ks}$ that replaces the Kronecker product. Consequently, our formulation achieves the maximal $\mathrm{CHSH}_{3}$ violation of $6\sqrt{2}$ using purely real variables, demonstrating that the no-go theorem is specific to a particular real representation of states and operators and to the composition rule $\otimes_\mathbb{R}$ built upon it, neither of which extends to the present K\"{a}hler framework. These results demonstrate that complex numbers are not fundamentally required by nature; rather, they encode a deeper real geometric structure that governs quantum interference and entanglement, settling this long debate.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Conditioning Matters: Stabilizing Inversion and Attention in Diffusion Image Editing

Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit.

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

MolE-RAG: Molecular Structure-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Chemistry

arXiv:2606.05693v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for molecular property prediction, but their ability to reason over chemical structures remains limited, as molecular representations such as SMILES differ substantially from the natural language on which LLMs are primarily trained. To bridge this semantic and chemical knowledge gap, we propose MolE-RAG, a training-free, molecule-centric retrieval-augmented generation framework for LLM-based molecular property prediction. MolE-RAG augments each prediction with three complementary sources of inference-time context: retrieved chemistry literature, molecule-specific information including compound synonyms, identifiers, functional group annotations, and physicochemical descriptors, and structurally similar molecules retrieved from the training set. We evaluate MolE-RAG across nine molecular property prediction tasks using proprietary, chemistry-specialized, and open-source LLMs. Across general-purpose LLMs, MolE-RAG improves ROC-AUC by up to 28 percentage points on classification tasks and reduces regression RMSE by up to 67% relative to a SMILES-only baseline. We further find that the utility of each context source varies across models and tasks, with different models benefiting most from textual retrieval, molecular context, or structural retrieval. These results suggest that molecule-centric retrieval can improve LLM-based molecular property prediction without model fine-tuning while providing a flexible framework for integrating heterogeneous chemical knowledge at inference time.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DifFRACT: Diffusion Feature Reconstruction and Attribution for Circuit Tracing

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to explain neural network behavior by decomposing model computations into interpretable features and circuits. While transcoder-based circuit tracing has recently enabled detailed causal analyses of large language models, multimodal diffusion transformers for image generation remain comparatively opaque. We still lack tools for understanding how semantic information propagates across denoising steps and how text and image representations interact within double-stream MM-DiT architectures. Existing methods provide only partial insight: attention maps expose a limited view of token interactions, while sparse autoencoders can discover interpretable features but do not directly reveal how these features are transformed and composed through nonlinear MLP layers. In this work, we extend transcoder-based circuit tracing to multimodal diffusion transformers. We train timestep-conditioned transcoders that faithfully approximate the input-output behavior of MLP sublayers in FLUX.1[schnell]. By replacing MLPs with transcoders and linearizing the remaining computation, we obtain exact feature-to-feature attribution and recover compact, interpretable circuits. Empirically, our transcoders match or slightly outperform sparse autoencoders on the sparsity-faithfulness tradeoff. The resulting circuits reveal mechanisms underlying attribute binding and cross-stream semantic propagation, and provide causal explanations for systematic generation errors. Moreover, circuit-guided interventions are substantially more precise and effective than standard SAE-based steering. Our results demonstrate that transcoder-based circuit analysis is feasible for state-of-the-art diffusion transformers and provides a powerful framework for understanding and controlling multimodal generative models. The code is available at https://github.com/Artalmaz31/DifFRACT

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

Towards More General Control of Diffusion Models Using Jeffrey Guidance

A key strength of diffusion models lies in their flexibility, since their outputs can be controlled at sampling time through guidance. However, beyond simple cases such as conditional sampling, the target distribution is often left implicit, defined only through a sampling rule or a heuristic energy function. To address this, we propose Jeffrey guidance, a principled framework that extends diffusion-model control to applications beyond what standard guidance can express. It leverages Jeffrey's rule of conditioning to update marginal distributions towards a prescribed target, preserving the conditional structure and minimally perturbing the joint distribution. We first demonstrate Jeffrey guidance by targeting a prescribed embedding distribution. With Inception embeddings as the target, this leads to substantial reductions in FID on both CIFAR-10 and FFHQ. We further apply Jeffrey guidance to fairness on CelebA-HQ, updating an unconditional diffusion model to enforce independence between attributes.

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

ReportQA: QA-Based Radiology Report Evaluation

Radiology report evaluation is essential for advancing automated report generation. Natural language generation metrics have limited clinical relevance. Clinical efficacy (CE) metrics evaluate important medical findings, but focus mainly on presence and cover only a limited set of entities. Due to heavy reliance on manual annotations, it is difficult for CE metrics to extend clinical entities or attributes. In clinical practice, radiology reports serve as a medium for information transfer. Clinicians use them to perform downstream diagnostic tasks without directly inspecting images. Based on this insight, we propose ReportQA, a clinical-related and flexible radiology report evaluation framework, supporting detailed quantitative analysis of radiology report generation systems. We first collect datasets covering multiple imaging modalities and anatomical regions. We then construct knowledge trees of clinical entities and attributes with radiologist guidance, and use large language models (LLMs) to extract structured information from raw reports. Next, we generate QA pairs from predefined templates and apply quality control through self-filtering and report-based filtering. During evaluation, the report is treated as context, and an LLM acts as a judge model to answer the QA pairs. Based on the resulting QA accuracy, we introduce QAScore metric. Compared with existing metrics, QAScore shows better alignment with radiologist judgments. Experiments on multiple state-of-the-art vision-language models reveal that current report-based inference paradigms struggle to learn fine-grained clinical representations and exhibit strong negative prior biases. In contrast, question-driven inference provides a more effective alternative. For reproducibility and extensibility, we release the knowledge trees, structured reports, and QA pairs, along with the pipeline code for QA construction and evaluation.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

BiPACE: Bisimulation-Guided Policy Optimization with Action Counterfactual Estimation for LLM Agents

Stepwise group-based RL is an attractive way to train long-horizon LLM agents without a learned critic: it reuses multiple sampled rollouts to estimate local advantages. Its weakness is less visible but more fundamental: every group-relative estimator assumes that the steps it compares are equivalent for credit assignment. We show that current agentic variants violate this assumption through a state-action credit mismatch. The observation-hash partition is overly fine on the state side, creating singleton groups with zero step-level signal, while a single within-group mean is too coarse on the action side, mixing state-value estimation with action-specific credit. We introduce BiPACE (Bisimulation-Guided Policy Optimization with Action Counterfactual Estimation), a drop-in advantage estimator that fixes both sides without adding a critic, auxiliary loss, or extra rollouts. BiGPO clusters steps by cosine distance in the actor's own hidden-state geometry, an empirical policy-induced proxy for bisimulation that substantially lowers the singleton rate left by observation hashing. PACE then recenters returns within each behavioral cluster using action-conditioned peer baselines; its Q-style instance estimates a local Q(s,a)-V(s) nonparametrically. On ALFWorld/Qwen2.5-7B, BiPACE_Q raises overall validation success from GiGPO's 90.8 to $97.1\pm0.9$ over three seeds, and crosses the 95% threshold on every seed, which GiGPO never does within the same budget. On Qwen2.5-1.5B it reaches $93.5\pm1.2$ versus GiGPO's 86.7, and on WebShop and TextCraft it improves over GRPO and GiGPO at both model scales. The measured BiPACE-specific overhead is 11.3% of a single training-step wall time. Yet it changes the estimator's comparison unit from surface identity to approximate behavioral equivalence plus action-side counterfactuals. The code is available at https://github.com/TianxiangZhao/BiPACE.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

AutoSpec: Safety Rule Evolution for LLM Agents via Inductive Logic Programming

arXiv:2606.24245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate complex tasks by integrating language models with external tools and environments. However, their autonomy poses significant safety risks: agents may execute destructive commands, leak sensitive data, or violate domain constraints. Existing safety approaches face a fundamental tradeoff: hand-crafted rules are interpretable but brittle, with overly conservative rules blocking safe operations (high false positives) while permissive rules miss unsafe behaviors (high false negatives). Neural classifiers lack the interpretability required for safety-critical deployments. We present AutoSpec, a framework that automatically evolves deployed expert-designed safety rules from user safe/unsafe annotations through counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS) guided by inductive logic programming (ILP). Starting from the expert rules and a stream of annotated traces, AutoSpec iteratively evaluates rules, mines false-positive and false-negative counterexamples, uses ILP to learn which predicates discriminate them, generates candidate rule edits, and verifies candidates to select the best revision. The key insight is that ILP efficiently identifies predicates that appear frequently in false negatives but rarely in false positives (or vice versa), dramatically pruning the exponential search space of rule edits. This continues until convergence, producing interpretable rules that balance precision and recall. We evaluate AutoSpec on 291 execution traces spanning code execution and embodied agent domains. AutoSpec raises rule F1 to 0.98 and 0.93 across the two domains, achieving up to 94% false positive reduction while maintaining high recall, and converges within 4-5 iterations. The ILP-guided approach achieves up to 4.8x higher F1 than heuristic CEGIS. The learned rules are human-readable, auditable, and generalize to unseen scenarios.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

CEO-Bench: Can Agents Play the Long Game?

Language model agents are becoming proficient executors at isolated, short-horizon tasks such as software engineering and customer service. Yet real-world challenges require a combination of sophisticated skills that remain largely untested in agents: (1) navigating long horizons amid uncertainty; (2) acquiring information in noisy environments; (3) adapting to a changing world; (4) orchestrating multiple moving parts toward a coherent goal. We introduce CEO-Bench, which evaluates these capabilities together by simulating a representative real-world task: operating a startup for 500 days. An agent manages pricing, marketing, budgeting, and many other aspects of a fictional company through a programmable Python interface, operating in the same environment and facing the same challenges as a human CEO. Success demands analyzing noisy, interconnected business databases, translating signals into sound strategy, and coordinating many decisions with programming. The strongest agents write sophisticated code that simulates customer cohorts to forecast future cash and mines negotiation history to uncover hidden customer preferences. Even so, most state-of-the-art models struggle in this environment. Only Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 finish above the $1M starting balance, and neither consistently turns a profit. CEO-Bench takes a first step toward measuring the intelligence required to drive sustained, adaptive progress over time.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Strong-field control of the $Z$-boson resonance in $e^+e^-$ collisions

arXiv:2606.09394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Resonant $Z$-boson production is a cornerstone of precision electroweak physics, with its vacuum line shape set by the $Z$ mass, width, and collision kinematics. We show that a strong laser field can significantly alter this picture. By treating the field nonperturbatively, we find that laser dressing of the incoming fermions alters the effective collision kinematics and opens laser-photon exchange channels, including multiphoton processes, in $e^{+}e^{-}$ collisions. As a result, the $Z$-resonance profile develops distinct intensity-dependent regimes, evolving from the vacuum limit to saturation at intermediate field strengths and to an approximately quadratic enhancement at higher intensities. Additionally, the polarization composition of the produced $Z$ bosons is redistributed. In particular, at high intensities the laser-induced contribution can compensate the intrinsic chiral asymmetry of the electroweak interaction, leading to nearly parity-balanced $Z$-boson production. Our results identify that strong classical fields can dynamically control electroweak resonance phenomena, opening a bridge between strong-field QED and high-energy collider physics.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Pixel-TTS: Image based Text Rendering for Robust Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human-AI Agent Interaction in a Business Context

arXiv:2606.18716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As AI agents are increasingly integrated into core business processes, understanding and designing effective interaction patterns between humans and AI agents becomes crucial for value creation. This study identifies and evaluates principles and criteria for a positive User Experience (UX) with AI agents, along with methods for its measurement. We identify user expectations and needs to facilitate adoption, build trust, and support user-centered decision-making by development teams. Using a mixed-methods approach that combines qualitative and quantitative techniques, we explore interaction patterns between humans and AI agents. The findings from this exploratory research serve as the basis to develop a survey experiment which evaluates the effectiveness of specific design elements on a larger scale. This foundational research contributes to the development of more intuitive and effective human-AI agent interactions in business settings.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Mask-Based Breath Sampling for Detection of Pseudomonas aeruginosa in Adults with Cystic Fibrosis and Bronchiectasis

Background: Monitoring Pseudomonas aeruginosa (P. aeruginosa) infection in people with cystic fibrosis (pwCF) is essential for early detection, targeted treatment, and prevention of chronification. Sputum culture is the current standard, yet many patients, particularly those receiving CFTR modulator therapy, struggle to expectorate sputum. Microbial aerosols from the respiratory tract offer a non-invasive alternative. This proof-of-principle study assessed the accuracy and feasibility of the AveloMask, a novel breath aerosol collection kit paired with qPCR detection. Methods: Adult pwCF and bronchiectasis patients attending routine monitoring visits and healthy controls were enrolled in a cross-sectional study. Participants wore the mask for 30 minutes, followed by 20 instructed coughs. Mask filters were tested with a triplex qPCR assay targeting P. aeruginosa specific ecfX and gyrB, and human RPP30 as an endogenous control. Accuracy was evaluated using a composite reference standard (sputum culture and PCR). Results: Of 25 patients enrolled, 23 were included in the analyses. Sensitivity was 12/19 (63.2%) for breath qPCR versus 15/19 (78.9%) for sputum culture. Breath qPCR missed 5 cases detected by sputum culture but detected 2 sputum culture-negative/qPCR-positive cases. Specificity of breath qPCR was 100% in 4 patients and 15 healthy controls. RPP30 was detected in all mask samples. AveloMask was perceived as easy to use, with many patients preferring it over sputum collection. Discussion: Mask-based breath collection demonstrated promising diagnostic accuracy for detection of P. aeruginosa. Breath sampling may complement or partially substitute sputum-based diagnostics, especially in patients unable to expectorate. Further studies are needed to define its clinical role.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Deep numerical schemes for systems of Ergodic BSDEs with applications to regime-switching forward utilities

arXiv:2606.24271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we introduce two neural-network-based numerical schemes for solving systems of coupled ergodic Backward Stochastic Differential Equations (eBSDEs), motivated by the approximation of optimal strategies within the framework of forward utilities in a regime-switching stochastic factor model. Our approach builds on the representation of such models through systems of eBSDEs introduced in [HLT20]. We first establish a link between the solution of the system of ergodic BSDEs and that of an associated multidimensional BSDE with random terminal time, given by the hitting time of the positive recurrent stochastic factor. Building on this representation, we introduce a locally additive deep learning scheme obtained by minimizing aggregated local error terms. We then present a new Deep Galerkin Method (DGM) inspired algorithm that minimizes the residual of the associated ergodic PDE system, relying on a representation of the ergodic cost. Finally, we apply this framework to regime-switching forward utilities in a stochastic factor model. We first derive a general consistency SPDE that characterizes regime-switching forward utilities and retrieve their representation with systems of ergodic BSDEs in the homothetic case. Numerical experiments demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods, with a particular focus on the impact on forward preferences of taking into account regime switches.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Efficient Time Series Clustering from Multiscale Reservoir Dynamics with Granular-Ball Anchoring Graph Optimization

arXiv:2606.12077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series clustering remains challenging due to the inherent trade-off between clustering effectiveness and computational efficiency. Similarity-based methods often suffer from quadratic complexity caused by pairwise distance computations, while deep learning-based approaches typically rely on costly iterative training and a large number of trainable parameters. In this paper, we propose MSRGC-Net, an efficient time-series clustering framework that integrates multiscale reservoir computing, granular-ball-based anchoring graph construction, and consensus learning. MSRGC-Net adopts a training-free reservoir computing paradigm to extract multiscale temporal representations from raw time series without backpropagation, significantly reducing computational overhead. To capture the intrinsic structure of the resulting representations, granular-ball computing is employed to adaptively model data distributions via density-consistent regions, yielding compact and robust anchor graph representations. Furthermore, a consensus-based anchoring graph optimization strategy is introduced to effectively align multiscale reservoir representations and integrate complementary information across temporal scales. Extensive experiments on widely used univariate and multivariate benchmark datasets demonstrate that MSRGC-Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in clustering performance while maintaining superior computational efficiency.