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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Adaptive Distance-Aware Trunk Deep Operator Learning for Long-Span Roadway Bridges

arXiv:2606.20015v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-span roadway bridges exhibit highly localized structural responses under vehicular loading, making repeated FE analysis computationally expensive for applications such as influence surface generation and structural digital twins. Existing SciML approaches struggle to accurately capture these localized responses. To address this challenge, this study proposes an adaptive-trunk DeepONet for localized structural response prediction in large-scale bridge systems. The framework dynamically constructs a load-dependent learning domain using a KNN strategy, allowing the network to focus on structural influence zones. The trunk network is further enhanced using distance-aware features that encode the geometric relationship between the load and structural nodes. A physics-based full-field reconstruction is incorporated through a stiffness-informed Schur complement formulation, enabling predictions at adaptive nodes to be extended to the entire structural domain. To enable scalable training, response data are generated using a reduced-order equivalent shell model that preserves the dominant global behavior while significantly reducing computational cost. The proposed framework is validated on both a benchmark bridge model and the real-world Mussafah Bridge. Results show that the method achieves FEM-level accuracy with relative errors below 5%, while reducing the total response evaluation time (including full-field reconstruction) by approximately 60x; excluding the post-processing reconstruction step, the AD-DeepONet inference is up to four orders of magnitude faster than FEM. In addition, the framework enables rapid generation of full-field responses, influence lines, and influence surfaces under arbitrary vehicular loading configurations, demonstrating strong potential for large-scale bridge analysis and digital twin applications.

02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

RetroMol: Parsing a shared encoding from natural products and their biosynthetic gene clusters

Natural products such as polyketides and nonribosomal peptides (NRPs) are important sources of bioactive compounds, including many antibiotics. Many of them are assembled by modular enzyme complexes and further modified and diversified by tailoring reactions encoded by biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). Although natural products and their coding BGCs describe different data modalities of the same biochemical process, a unified language to jointly describe their biochemistry is lacking. Here we introduce a sequence-based representation of the core biosynthesis of modular natural products, which we call primary sequences, that bridges chemical structures and BGCs. We also present RetroMol, an algorithm that parses either natural product structures or their encoding BGCs into their primary sequences of natural product building blocks. RetroMol allows for similarity scoring between natural products and BGCs, enabling the retrieval of compounds, BGCs, and a combination of the two, based on their biosynthetic similarity. This can, for instance, be used to retrieve biosynthetically similar but structurally dissimilar compounds, or link natural products to candidate coding BGCs in large experimental datasets. We demonstrate the latter by rediscovering the nocardichelin B BGC as a proof of principle. We also exemplify the utility of biosynthetic similarity by showing various pairs of biosynthetically similar compounds with low structural similarity. Together, these results establish primary sequences as a shared biosynthetic encoding for natural product comparison and BGC prioritization.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

SPA-C: an hybrid tool to accurately scaffold genomes using Hi-C and Deep-Learning

Genome assembly is a computational pipeline designed to reconstruct chromosomes from small sequencing reads. Following their assembly, contiguous sequences (contigs) are arranged into chromosome-long sequences during scaffolding. Hi-C, a long-range linkage information between regions of the genome widely used in recent large sequencing projects, is often required to correctly order contigs. Several tools have been developed to automate this task following either statistical or deep-learning approaches. Statistical approaches summarise 2D Hi-C matrices into contact densities across sequences, thus ignoring informative visual patterns. The sole existing deep-learning tool uses a transformer-based computer vision model to correct the assembly. It has been trained on several species and uses Hi-C matrices directly. Yet it comes as a supplementary step in the scaffolding process, introducing extra computation time, and has been trained on a dataset that might contain labelling errors, which could provide sub-optimal results. We propose SPA-C, an hybrid pipeline combining the strengths of both approaches. Linkage prediction is handled with a frugal CNN-based model and a graph-solving algorithm is used to generate the scaffolds. Through our input's design, the model is able to both correct errors within assemblies and link contigs, leveraging small, local Hi-C contact matrices. We handled low-complexity regions that might induce erroneous predictions using an external tool, improving the overall accuracy of generated assemblies. On a benchmark of six various genomes and four standard metrics, SPA-C outperformed four out of four state-of-the-art methods while achieving comparable start-to-end computation time.Python and Bash scripts are available on GitHub (https://github.com/SPA-C/SPA-C.git) and Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19000361).

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Attention and memory in Parkinson's disease: a discriminant analysis approach

Background. Cognitive impairment in Parkinson's disease (PD) is highly prevalent and heterogeneous. Assessing multiple cognitive domains is challenging and risks redundancy. This study evaluated whether a discriminant analysis approach could optimize the selection of specific tasks and measures for identifying attention and memory deficits in PD. Methods. Thirty PD patients and 25 cognitively unimpaired (CU) controls completed four experimental tasks: two assessing attention (flanker and spatial Stroop), one for recognition memory, one for working memory (n-back). Following group-level difference analyses, a discriminant analysis was performed to identify which tasks, and performance metrics possessed the highest sensitivity for distinguishing PD patients from CU individuals. Results. At the group level, PD patients exhibited significantly worse conflict costs in both attention tasks and lower sensitivity scores (d') in the recognition memory task compared to CU controls. The discriminant analysis revealed that time-based measures from the spatial Stroop task and the sensitivity score from the recognition memory task provided the highest discriminating power to differentiate between the two groups. Conclusion. These findings suggest that cognitive deficits in PD can be identified with high diagnostic accuracy using a targeted subset of metrics, eliminating the need for extensive and redundant neuropsychological testing batteries for attention and memory, without needing an extensive number of cognitive tasks for attention and memory.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

RepSelect: Robust LLM Unlearning via Representation Selectivity

Making large language models (LLMs) deeply forget specific knowledge and values without sacrificing general capabilities remains a central challenge in unlearning. However, current methods are easily reversed by fine-tuning or few-shot prompting, suggesting their forgetting is only shallow. We identify the root cause. Existing methods target representations shared with both the retain set and the subspace recovered by a fine-tuning attacker, making unlearning both disruptive to general capabilities and easy to reverse. We propose RepSelect (Representation Selectivity), isolates forget-set-specific representations by collapsing top principal components of weight gradients before each update, leaving general capabilities intact while limiting what fine-tuning can recover. We evaluate across two forget categories, biohazardous knowledge and abusive tendencies, and four model families spanning dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures (Llama 3, Qwen 3.5, Gemma 4 E4B, DeepSeek V2 Lite). Compared to five popular baselines (GradDiff, NPO, SimNPO, RMU, UNDIAL), RepSelect achieves a 4-50x larger reduction in post-relearning answer accuracy than the strongest baseline, and is near-perfectly robust to few-shot prompting attacks. Targeting selective representations is thus an important step towards deep and robust LLM forgetting.

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

Resurgence of the Thermal Transition between Bounce and Sphaleron

arXiv:2606.13778v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the thermal transition between the bounce and the sphaleron in quantum mechanics with a metastable vacuum from the viewpoint of Borel resurgence. For two models representing a second-order and a first-order transition, we compute the perturbative expansion of the thermal free energy to high orders and extract the leading Borel singularity data $(A,b,S)$ as functions of temperature. The Borel singularity location $A$ reproduces the on-shell action of the dominant saddle on both sides of the transition, joining smoothly in the second-order case and developing a kink in the first-order case. The characteristic exponent $b$ jumps between $0$ and $1/2$ across the transition, counting the zero modes of the corresponding saddle. The Stokes constant $S$ matches the one-loop determinant around the saddle. The perturbative expansion around the false vacuum thus determines the transition temperature, the order of the transition, and the decay rate including the one-loop prefactor without relying on semiclassical inputs.

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

On the Energy Distribution of the Galactic Center Excess' Sources

arXiv:2507.17804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) may yet herald the discovery of annihilating dark matter. Weighing against that conclusion are analyses showing evidence for dim point sources within the spatial structure of the emission. Due to technical limitations these analyses are purely spatial with all spectral information that could disentangle the excess from astrophysical backgrounds discarded. Here, we demonstrate that a neural network simulation-based inference approach can jointly analyze the spatial and spectra data. The addition is profound: energy information drives the putative point sources to be significantly dimmer, indicating either the GCE is truly diffuse in nature or made of an exceptionally large number of sources. Quantitatively, for our best fit background model, the excess is essentially consistent with Poisson emission as predicted by dark matter. If due to point sources, our median prediction is $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$ sources, or more than 35,000 at 90\% confidence, both orders of magnitude larger than the hundreds preferred by earlier point-source analyses of the GCE, although variations allowed by background systematics could reduce the required number of sources by roughly an order of magnitude.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Reinforcement Learning for LLM-based Event Forecasting

arXiv:2606.15917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We use Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), a recently devised sample and memory efficient reinforcement learning method, to finetune pretrained LLMs in the range of 1.5B to 14B parameters equipped with the ability to get current information through the use of a Wikipedia revisions tool, or news summaries, to forecast real events beyond the knowledge cutoff of the LLM, as well as problems made to simulate different aspects of the dynamics of that training. We use the results of these experiments to comment on the scaling capability of LLMs for forecasting, as well as classify how judgmental forecasting fits into the verifiable/unverifiable domain taxonomy, considering the impact of the inherent aleatoric uncertainty when forecasting future events (e.g. the roll of a die). As a result of the GRPO training, we manage to bring a 1.5B parameter transformer (Qwen 2.5 1.5B) to forecasting performance superior to Claude Sonnet 3.5 over the same dataset as measured by cross entropy from the market agreed probabilities. We also discuss various dead ends on the path to this result.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Localizing Anchoring Pathways in Language Models

Irrelevant numbers in a prompt can shift language model judgments, producing anchoring effects in numerical reasoning. We study where this anchor-sensitive signal is carried inside language models using a controlled multiple-choice setup with shared answer options. We define a logit-difference metric comparing the correct answer option with the answer option corresponding to the anchor, and validate that it tracks behavioral anchoring. Using attribution-based circuit localization on 7B–8B Qwen and Llama base and instruction-tuned models, we find that edge-level methods recover this signal more faithfully than node-level methods. Low- and high-anchor circuits transfer strongly within a model, suggesting shared pathway structure across anchor direction. However, sparse transfer across base and instruction-tuned variants is less reliable, indicating that post-training changes which pathways matter most. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic account of how anchoring-related decision signals are carried inside language models.

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

Estimating carbon pools in the European Shelf sea environment: replacing reanalysis by model-informed machine learning?

arXiv:2508.10178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Shelf seas are important for the economy and the carbon cycle, but shelf sea observations for carbon pools are often sparse, or highly uncertain. An alternative can be provided by carbon reanalyses (whether assimilating proxy variables, such as chlorophyll-$a$, or directly carbon), but these are often expensive to run. We propose to use a computationally cheap ensemble of neural networks (i.e. deep ensemble) to learn the relationship between the directly observable (atmospheric, riverine and ocean) variables and marine carbon pools from a coupled physics-biogeochemistry model. The deep ensemble was trained on a North-West European Shelf (NWES) physical-biogeochemistry model free run simulation. After training, the deep ensemble was run using inputs from the NWES reanalysis instead of the free run, demonstrating that it can efficiently predict several NWES carbon pools (e.g., detritus, zooplankton, heterotrophic bacteria) in much better agreement with the reanalysis than the free run, while also providing uncertainty information. We further show that the deep ensemble performs similarly well when it is driven directly by the observations assimilated into the reanalysis, with the limitation that carbon pools can then be predicted only at the observed locations and times. We focus on explainability of the results and demonstrate potential use of the deep ensembles for future climate what-if scenarios. We suggest that model-informed machine learning presents a viable alternative to expensive reanalyses and could complement observations, wherever they are missing and/or highly uncertain.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Calibrated Uncertainty Quantification for Patient-Level AML Drug Sensitivity Prediction Using Split Conformal Prediction

Accurate prediction of ex vivo drug sensitivity in acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients from transcriptomic data is a critical challenge for precision oncology. Existing computational approaches have explored uncertainty quantification in cancer drug response prediction primarily using cell line data, while patient-level AML models typically rely on heuristic confidence measures rather than statistically calibrated uncertainty estimates. Here, we present a framework applying split conformal prediction to patient-level AML drug response modeling using the BeatAML 2.0 cohort. We trained Elastic Net and XGBoost regressors on bulk RNA-seq gene expression profiles from 318 AML patients, analyzing 34,764 patient-drug observations across 122 compounds. Baseline models achieved median Pearson R values of 0.291 (Elastic Net) and 0.281 (XGBoost) across 122 drugs. Wrapping these models with split conformal prediction yielded well-calibrated prediction intervals across three confidence levels: empirical coverages of 81.4%, 90.7%, and 95.5% against nominal targets of 80%, 90%, and 95%, respectively. Analysis of prediction interval widths revealed substantial drug-class-specific uncertainty patterns, with HDAC and BCL-2 inhibitors exhibiting markedly higher uncertainty than MDM2 inhibitors, suggesting a potential association between transcriptomic predictability and drug mechanism of action, although several drug classes were represented by only a small number of compounds. Predictive uncertainty was not significantly associated with ELN2017 molecular risk classification (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.395) or NPM1 mutation status (p=0.788). These results demonstrate that statistically valid uncertainty quantification can be achieved for patient-level AML drug response prediction despite substantial biological heterogeneity. to the best of our knowledge, no published study has applied split conformal prediction to patient-level ex vivo drug sensitivity prediction in the BeatAML cohort, providing a principled alternative to heuristic confidence scoring approaches. Keywords: Acute myeloid leukemia (AML); Ex vivo drug sensitivity; Conformal prediction; Uncertainty quantification; Precision oncology; BeatAML; Transcriptomic biomarkers; Machine learning.

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

Multi-Agent Embodied Autonomous Driving: From V2X Information Exchange to Shared World Models

Autonomous driving is shifting from isolated vehicle intelligence toward multi-agent embodied systems that share perception, infer intent, and coordinate action under uncertainty. This survey examines this transition through the lens of Shared World Models (SWMs): predictive cross-agent representations maintained across vehicles, infrastructure, and other traffic participants. We review more than 380 publications spanning vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, collaborative perception, inter-agent cognition, cooperative planning, end-to-end cooperative driving, and simulation and data engines for closed-loop validation. The organizing question is how exchanged observations become aligned state, intent-aware interaction, and coordinated downstream action. Across the surveyed literature, evaluation remains concentrated in simulation, curated benchmarks, and offline protocols. Foundation-model-based coordination also lacks verified real-time safety guarantees in open traffic. These gaps motivate key research priorities for multi-agent embodied autonomous driving (MAEAD): verifiable shared-state maintenance, robust intent and plan alignment, and safe coordinated action under communication, latency, and deployment constraints.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

FeatureMSEA: Metabolic Feature-based Metabolite Set Enrichment Analysis

Liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) untargeted metabolomics detects thousands of metabolic features, but converting these chemical signals into metabolite set-level biological knowledge remains challenging. This is because most features lack unambiguous metabolite identities. Conventional metabolite set enrichment analysis (MSEA) generally requires identified metabolites and metabolite-level ranked inputs, leaving much of the untargeted feature space unused. Here, we present FeatureMSEA, a feature rank-based framework for metabolite set enrichment directly from metabolic features with ambiguous annotations. FeatureMSEA integrates multi-evidence feature-to-metabolite annotation, feature rank-based enrichment scoring, permutation-based inference, and iterative leading-edge-guided annotation refinement, with an optional LLM-assisted module for post-enrichment interpretation. In null comparisons of randomly split healthy samples, FeatureMSEA detected no significant metabolite sets, whereas metabolite-set spike-in simulations showed recovery of implanted signals. In a cerebrospinal fluid metabolomics study of Huntington's disease, FeatureMSEA identified dysregulated metabolite sets related to amino acid metabolism, mitochondrial energy metabolism, and neuroactive signaling. MS/MS-based annotation analysis further showed that FeatureMSEA refinement reduced annotation ambiguity and prioritized chemically consistent candidate metabolites. In summary, FeatureMSEA provides a general framework for extracting metabolite set-level biological insights from LC-MS untargeted metabolomics in which confident metabolite identification remains incomplete.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Teacher-Student Structure for Domain Adaptation in Ensemble Audio-Visual Video Deepfake Detection

The rapid advancement of generative AI models is leading to more realistic deepfake media, encompassing the manipulation of audio, video, or both. This raises severe privacy and societal concerns. Numerous studies in this area have yielded promising intra-domain results; however, these models frequently exhibit decreased efficacy when faced with data from dissimilar domains. Consequently, recent deepfake detection approaches focus on enhancing the generalization ability through multiple techniques that incorporate all input modalities, including audio, images, and their interactions. In this regard, we propose the EAV-DFD method, a generalized deep ensemble audio-visual model (EAV-DFD) combined with a domain adaptation mechanism utilizing a teacher-student framework to enhance the model's ability to perform and generalize effectively across unseen domains. To evaluate the model's performance, we used the FakeAVCeleb dataset as the primary domain and the DFDC, Deepfake_TIMIT, and PolyGlotFake datasets as an unseen domain. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework is efficient in domain adaptation, improving AUC performance of the model by 4.09%, 17.94%, and 0.5% on three unseen datasets, using only a small portion of them to train the student model. This leads to a novel deepfake detection model capable of adapting to new domains and interpreting which modality has been manipulated, highlighting the potential of our approach for real-world applications.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Deontic Policies for Runtime Governance of Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2606.19464v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous agentic AI systems driven by Large Language Models (LLMs) introduce a new class of security, privacy, and compliance challenges: an agent that can invoke tools, manipulate data, install software, and coordinate with peer agents across organizational boundaries must be constrained not just by authentication and access control, but by the full structure of enterprise governance. This includes specifying what agents are permitted and prohibited from doing, what they areobliged to do after certain actions (e.g., notify the CISO), under what conditions a standing obligation may be waived, and which rules take precedence when policies conflict. This governance problem exceeds what current policy engines provide. Systems such as XACML, Rego, and Cedar address only the permit/prohibit subset of this governance structure. They do not provide obligation lifecycle management, meta-policy conflict resolution, dispensations that waive obligations in specific circumstances, and ontological reasoning over domain class hierarchies commonly found in applications such as healthcare, cybersecurity, or data privacy. We propose AgenticRei, which realizes key governance requirements such as obligations, dispensations, policy conflict resolutions, and reasoning over policies, as well as the basic permit/prohibit constraints. We use a deontic policy language built on the Rei framework, expressed as OWL (Web Ontology Language) and evaluated at runtime by a high-performance logic engine entirely outside the LLM. The same pipeline governs both tool invocations by the agent and agent-to-agent messages. We show through examples that deontic policies capture governance constraints around security and privacy that mostly cannot be expressed in current production engines. Our approach composes naturally with industry-standard frameworks like A2AS.

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

Demystifying Hidden-State Recurrence: Switchable Latent Reasoning with On-Policy Reinforcement Learning

Latent chain-of-thought compresses reasoning by replacing visible reasoning traces with continuous hidden-state recurrence, but existing formulations are difficult to optimize with standard on-policy reinforcement learning (RL) and hard to interpret causally. Our key insight is that a single pair of explicit boundary tokens can address both issues at once: discrete entry and exit anchors make the latent block compatible with standard on-policy RL, and the same anchors offer a natural foothold for mechanistic analysis. Motivated by this, we propose SWITCH, a switchable latent reasoning framework. The model emits to enter latent mode and to exit. Because the boundaries are ordinary discrete tokens, the GRPO policy ratio is well-defined at every decision point. The same anchors also expose the latent steps to direct probing and causal intervention. We train the model with a visible-to-latent curriculum and a Switch-GRPO objective that propagates gradients through recurrent latent computation. SWITCH consistently outperforms prior hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning approaches at similar scale. Mechanistic analysis through the boundary tokens further reveals three findings: (i) is a sharply localised, learned switching policy rather than a stylistic artefact; (ii) the latent step it opens performs problem-specific, causally important computation rather than acting as an inert placeholder; and (iii) that computation is concentrated at a single hidden-state transition on entry. Together, these results show that hidden-state-recurrence latent reasoning is both RL-trainable and open to direct mechanistic analysis, including of how on-policy RL itself improves the model from the inside.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Geometric Algebra Quantum Gate Decomposition

arXiv:2606.12480v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum gates are usually described through matrix and tensor-product formalisms that often obscure their geometric structure. In this work, we formulate the Pauli and Clifford groups within the complex Geometric Algebra (GA) framework. We show that the Pauli group is naturally identified with the group of blades up to a global phase, thereby providing a geometric interpretation of Pauli operators and their commutation relations in terms of oriented subspaces. We further prove that Clifford operators are generated by products of {\pi}/4-Pauli rotors and introduce a greedy Pauli rotor decomposition algorithm whose empirical behavior suggests unexpectedly compact decompositions for Clifford operators. Finally, we show that Clifford+T universality admits a natural geometric interpretation through {\pi}/8-rotors within this framework.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Faking entanglement with imperceptible measurement deviations

arXiv:2606.20396v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum entanglement is a central resource underpinning emerging quantum technologies, enabling capabilities beyond those of classical systems. Accurate verification of entanglement is therefore crucial. However, experimental schemes usually rely on the assumption that quantum measurements can be realized exactly. As the complexity of a quantum system grows, this assumption typically becomes increasingly unrealistic, therefore leading to a widening mismatch between theoretical models and experimental implementations. Here we demonstrate that arbitrarily small measurement errors, when adversarially encoded in the measurement apparatus, can lead to the false certification of high-dimensional entanglement in systems that are, in fact, separable. This is achieved by introducing explicit hacking attacks to measurement devices in well-established entanglement verification tests. We further experimentally demonstrate this effect using classical photonic states encoded in the spatial degree of freedom, spanning up to 61 dimensions with measurement fidelity errors as low as 0.23%. Our results uncover a fundamental vulnerability in current methods for high-dimensional entanglement detection, highlighting the susceptibility of complex quantum devices to small adversarial perturbations. The findings underscore the need for developing secure verification of quantum information that is robust to bounded discrepancies between theory and experiment.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Fine-Tuning SAM2 for Coronary Artery Segmentation in X-Ray Fluoroscopy

作者:

SAM2 (Meta, 2024) provides a strong starting point for segmentation, but given the unique challenges in medical imaging (noise from patient movement, the projection-based nature of X-ray fluoroscopy, and low contrast between vessels and background), direct application is difficult. We fine-tune MedSAM2 on annotated coronary angiograms and apply it to video data for point-of-care use. On the ARCADE validation set (200 images), the fine-tuned model achieves Dice 0.767 compared to 0.033 zero-shot. On 10 fluoroscopic video studies from CoronaryDominance, it tracks vessels coherently and avoids falsely segmenting ribs, stents, and bypass grafts in 9 of 10 studies. Code is available at https://github.com/elakiyasivakumar/SAM2-Coronary-Angiography-VA and the fine-tuned checkpoint at https://huggingface.co/Elakiya17/CA-SAM2.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Substantia Nigra and Subthalamic Nucleus Deep Brain Stimulation Exert Opposing Effects on Novelty Recognition in Parkinson's Disease

Episodic memory plays a critical role in supporting adaptive behavior; however, whether it can be causally regulated in humans via deep subcortical stimulation remains unclear. In the present study, we investigated the differential effects of substantia nigra (SN) and subthalamic nucleus (STN) stimulation on episodic memory, as well as the underlying mechanisms of its associated brain networks, using a recognition memory task combined with concurrent functional magnetic resonance imaging in patients with Parkinson's disease. SN-DBS increased recognition sensitivity and reduced false alarms at both frequencies, whereas 10 Hz STN-DBS reduced sensitivity and increased false alarms. Functional connectivity analyses in the absence of DBS stimulation identified a false recognition-related network linking nigral, pallidal, subthalamic, medial temporal, frontal, and occipital regions. SN-DBS-related false alarm reduction tracked modulation of this circuit and was marked by its baseline vulnerability state. These behavioral effects mapped onto target-dependent parieto-occipital and SN-visual retrieval pathways, supporting a model in which DBS bidirectionally regulates recognition memory through target- and frequency-dependent subcortical-cortical circuits.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

CoCoEmo: Composable and Controllable Human-Like Emotional TTS via Activation Steering

arXiv:2602.03420v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emotional expression in human speech is nuanced and compositional, often involving multiple, sometimes conflicting, affective cues that may diverge from linguistic content. In contrast, most expressive text-to-speech systems enforce a single utterance-level emotion, collapsing affective diversity and suppressing mixed or text-emotion-misaligned expression. While activation steering via latent direction vectors offers a promising solution, it remains unclear whether emotion representations are linearly steerable in TTS, where steering should be applied within hybrid TTS architectures, and how such complex emotion behaviors should be evaluated. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of activation steering for emotional control in hybrid TTS models, introducing a quantitative, controllable steering framework, and multi-rater evaluation protocols that enable composable mixed-emotion synthesis and reliable text-emotion mismatch synthesis. Our results demonstrate, for the first time, that emotional prosody and expressive variability are primarily synthesized by the TTS language module instead of the flow-matching module, and also provide a lightweight steering approach for generating natural, human-like emotional speech.

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

From Physics to Representation: Audio Learning with Synthetic Pre-training via Procedural Generation

arXiv:2606.14791v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Self-supervised learning advances audio representation for multimedia analysis. However, prevailing data-centric approaches rely on massive real-world corpora, increasing training costs, curation burdens, and privacy barriers. To address this, we present AudioPG, a procedural synthesis framework eliminating real audio recordings during pre-training. AudioPG trains a Transformer-based masked autoencoder on waveforms generated on-the-fly from basic acoustic primitives and composition rules. The encoder transfers effectively to real audio benchmarks, achieving 90.60% accuracy on ESC-50, 0.546 mAP on FSD50K, 88.17% on UrbanSound8K, and 97.03% on Speech Commands V2. Notably, pre-training completes in under 20 minutes on a single GPU. Latent space analysis reveals physical factors, including fundamental frequency and relative intensity, emerge in orthogonal subspaces, making representations linearly decodable. These results establish procedural synthesis as an efficient, interpretable pre-training signal when large-scale corpora are unavailable. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Freyliu0516/audioPG.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

STARE: Surprisal-Guided Token-Level Advantage Reweighting for Policy Entropy Stability

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards algorithms like GRPO have emerged as the dominant post-training paradigm for complex reasoning in LLMs, yet commonly suffer from policy entropy collapse during training. We conduct a first-order gradient analysis of token-level entropy dynamics under GRPO and identify a token-level credit assignment mismatch: the per-token entropy variation decomposes into the product of the trajectory-level advantage and an entropy sensitivity function over the next-token distribution, yielding an advantage-surprisal four-quadrant structure and a near-criticality property. Motivated by it, we propose STARE (Surprisal-guided Token-level Advantage Reweighting for policy Entropy stability), which identifies entropy-critical token subsets via batch-internal surprisal quantiles, selectively reweights their effective advantages, and incorporates a target-entropy closed-loop gate for stable entropy regulation. Across model scales from 1.5B to 32B and three task families (Short CoT, Long CoT, and Multi-Turn Tool Use), STARE sustains stable RL training over thousands of steps while maintaining policy entropy within the target band. On AIME24 and AIME25, STARE outperforms DAPO and other competitive baselines by 4%-8% in average accuracy, with reflection tokens and response length growing in tandem, indicating sustained exploration-exploitation balance that further unlocks RL training potential.Code is available at https://github.com/hp-luo/STARE.

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

Notation Matters: A Benchmark Study of Token-Optimized Formats in Agentic AI Systems

Large language models in Agentic AI systems consume tool schemas and execution results and emit tool invocations as structured data. The default language for that exchange, JSON, was designed for application-to-application interchange rather than token efficiency, so its structural elements impose substantial token overhead. Recent work proposes token-optimized alternatives such as TOON (Token-Oriented Object Notation) and TRON (Token Reduced Object Notation) as more compact replacements, but these formats have been evaluated only on isolated comprehension or generation tasks. Whether their token reductions hold inside end-to-end agentic loops therefore remains an open question. We evaluate TOON and TRON on four agentic benchmarks (BFCL, MCPToolBenchPP, MCP-Universe, StableToolBench) and five open-weight LLMs, decoupling input compression from output compression to measure comprehension and generation independently. TRON reduces tokens by up to 27% with accuracy within 14pp of the JSON baseline. TOON achieves up to 18% reduction at a similar 9pp accuracy cost, but additionally cascades on multi-turn parsing failures and collapses parallel tool-call output for most models. The code is available at: https://github.com/lkutschka/notation-matters

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

TA-RAG: Tone-Aware Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Peer-Support Health Communication

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) successfully grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in trusted documents, but factual grounding alone is insufficient for sensitive peer-support health communication. In domains such as HIV peer support, responses must also be accessible, stigma-free, empathetic, and tailored to the recipient. This paper presents TA-RAG, a lightweight, prompt-based tone-aware RAG framework that embeds explicit tone control into a RAG pipeline without requiring model fine-tuning. We operationalise tone across four core components: stigma-free rewriting, readability adjustment, recipient adaptation, and empathy rephrasing. We evaluate TA-RAG through component-level tests using questions derived from HIV Online Learning Australia (HOLA), UNAIDS terminology guidance, readability metrics, peer-support standards from National Association of People with HIV Australia (NAPWHA), and a public empathy dataset. Results show that the TA-RAG's components improve their targeted communication quality while preserving key content. These findings emphasise that prompt-based tone control is a potential direction for making RAG outputs suitable for sensitive peer-support health communication.