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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Feynman–Kac formula for the heat equation with a one-center point interaction in $d=3$

arXiv:2606.11677v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study Schrödinger operators with a one-center point interaction, formally defined by \begin{align*} -\Delta_\alpha=-\Delta+\alpha\,\delta_0(\cdot), \end{align*} for $\alpha\in\mathbb{R}$, and the associated heat equation \begin{align} \partial_t u=\tfrac{1}{2}\Delta_{\alpha} u,\quad u(0,x)=u_0(x)\in C_c^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}).\label{eq:HEapp} \end{align} Here $\Delta$ denotes the Laplacian (self-adjoint on $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$) and $\delta_x$ the Dirac measure at $x$. The operator $-\Delta_\alpha$ can be realized either as a self-adjoint extension of $-\Delta|_{C_0^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\})}$ in $L^2(\mathbb{R}^3)$, or as the norm-resolvent limit of $-\Delta+\lambda_\varepsilon V(\cdot/\varepsilon)$ for suitable $\lambda_\varepsilon$ and $V:\mathbb{R}^3\to\mathbb{R}$. In this paper we construct, for each $t>0$ and $x\in\mathbb{R}^3\setminus\{0\}$, a probability law on path space and a normalizing function $G_t^\alpha(x)$ giving the following probabilistic representation of the solution to the associated equation: \begin{align*} u(t,x)=G_t^\alpha(x)\,\mathbb{E}\bigl[u_0\bigl(W^{t,x}(t)\bigr)\bigr], \end{align*} where $\{W^{t,x}(s):0\le s\le t\}$ is a continuous process depending on $(t,x,\alpha)$. The result provides a Feynman–Kac type formula for the heat equation with a one-point interaction in three dimensions.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Identifying anaphylaxis using weakly-supervised prediction models and natural language processing

Objectives Scalable computable phenotyping algorithms are critical for conducting high-throughput disease-outcome research in large, distributed-data electronic health record (EHR) and claims data settings. We developed and evaluated a claims- and EHR-based computable phenotyping algorithm for anaphylaxis, a rare acute condition that is challenging to accurately identify using claims data alone. Materials and Methods Potential anaphylaxis events came from two healthcare systems (Kaiser Permanente Washington [KPWA] and Vanderbilt University Medical Center [VUMC]). We engineered features from clinical text using automated natural language processing (NLP) methods. We then developed a phenotyping algorithm using four NLP- and diagnosis code-based silver labels (proxies for the gold-standard labels). Gold-standard abstracted outcomes were used to evaluate algorithm performance. Results The largest area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) was 0.931 for an NLP-based silver-label model at KPWA. Depending on the model and healthcare system site, positive predictive value (PPV) and sensitivity at the threshold of predicted probability that maximized F1 score ranged from 0.52 to 0.77 (PPV) and 0.78 to 1 (sensitivity). Discussion NLP-based silver-label models had large AUC at KPWA but not at VUMC. This may be because clinical text at KPWA is only available for outpatient encounters and secure messaging. High sensitivity for identifying anaphylaxis can be obtained using our best-performing models. Conclusion The best-performing models had better PPV and sensitivity tradeoffs than prior bespoke anaphylaxis models with costly, manually curated features. The simplicity of the approach compared to traditional phenotyping methods allows it to be deployed easily at multiple health care systems.

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

Enhancing Visual Feature Attribution via Weighted Integrated Gradients

arXiv:2505.03201v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Integrated Gradients (IG) is a widely used attribution method in explainable AI, particularly in computer vision applications where reliable feature attribution is essential. A key limitation of IG is its sensitivity to the choice of baseline (reference) images. Multi-baseline extensions such as Expected Gradients (EG) assume uniform weighting over baselines, implicitly treating all baseline images as equally informative. In high-dimensional vision models, this assumption often leads to noisy or unstable explanations. This paper proposes Weighted Integrated Gradients (WG), a principled approach that evaluates and weights baselines to enhance attribution reliability. WG introduces an unsupervised criterion for baseline suitability, enabling adaptive selection and weighting of baselines on a per-input basis. The method preserves the core axiomatic properties of IG in a generalized weighted-baseline form. Under an expected, proxy-based fitness–relevance monotonicity assumption, WG provides a probabilistic justification for assigning larger weights to more informative baselines. Experiments on commonly used image datasets and models show that WG improves over EG under our protocol, with up to 36% gains across evaluated convolutional and Transformer architectures. These gains come with additional fitness-evaluation cost, so WG should be viewed as an attribution-fidelity trade-off rather than a faster alternative to EG. By moving beyond the assumption that all baselines contribute equally, Weighted Integrated Gradients offers a clearer and more reliable approach to explaining computer-vision models, improving both understanding and practical usability in explainable AI.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

WiFi-Based People Counting Using Beam-Steerable Antennas: A Test-bed Study

arXiv:2606.23710v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ubiquitous perception through RF signals is a pivotal opportunity for future technology: it enables personalized services such as smart living, remote healthcare, automated logistics or interaction through free-space gestures. The ubiquity of Wi-Fi and cellular networks presents a promising platform for the development of innovative sensing tools. Future standards will also introduce dedicated sensing features which, for example, will allow routers to work as frequency modulated continuous wave radios targeting radar applications. Most of the current chip designs support ad-hoc firmware for CSI extraction with MIMO arrangements of the transmitter (TX) and receiver (RX) antennas and OFDM subcarriers. The CSI describes the phase shift and amplitude attenuation of multiple propagation paths on each subcarrier. The latest IEEE 802.11be standard (Wi-Fi 7) offers a wider subcarrier bandwidth of 160MHz (up to 320MHz), providing at least 120 usable pilot subcarriers for CSI or CIR estimation. Additionally, Wi-Fi signals have been recently exploited to track daily human movements and behaviors, while Wi-Fi signal variations have been shown to differ between different people and can consequently be used for their re-identification.

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

Epistemic Uncertainty Is Not the Reducible Kind

作者:

arXiv:2606.12646v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The standard taxonomy of predictive uncertainty defines epistemic uncertainty as the part removable by collecting more data, while the standard measure identifies it with a mutual-information term. We prove the definition and the measure are extensionally inconsistent. On an explicit construction, the measure assigns all uncertainty to the epistemic class, yet no quantity of training data reduces it. Reducibility is instead a property of the pair (uncertainty, acquisition class), and the dichotomy resolves into three parts: aleatoric, sample-reducible epistemic, and mechanism-reducible epistemic uncertainty. An exact identity for the value of an observation shows that in-distribution data never reduces mechanism-irreducible uncertainty and generically increases it. Ensemble disagreement, the deployed epistemic estimate, tracks the training procedure rather than the epistemic term. It collapses to zero beneath a positive truth under consistent training, and equals hyperparameter-scaled initialization noise under interpolation. A finite-sample falsification test and seed-swept experiments confirm the theory.

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

Imprecise Transition Matrices for Markov Cohort Models: Lower and Upper Expectations with a Practical Health Economic Application

arXiv:2606.25716v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In applied health research, Markov cohort models are built on a precisely specified transition probability matrix. However, in many applications, the available evidence – transition counts, structural constraints, and treatment-effect data – identifies a set of admissible matrices rather than one uniquely justified matrix. This paper formulates an imprecise-probability extension in which inference yields lower and upper expectations over an evidence-compatible set of precise Markov cohort models. The contribution differs from existing imprecise Markov-chain work by focusing on finite-horizon cohort trajectories, additive accumulated outcomes, and transition matrices constructed from empirical transition counts. Under non-empty compact separately specified outgoing-row sets, the lower and upper accumulated outcomes are computed exactly by Bellman-style lower and upper transition operators. We prove the envelope theorem, reduction to the classical model, coherence properties of the lower transition operator, and algebraic conditions under which a single selected matrix yields a non-robust decision. We then show how multinomial transition counts induce admissible matrix sets through the Imprecise Dirichlet Model. A real-world cost-effectiveness example of patent foramen ovale closure after cryptogenic stroke illustrates the practical consequence: the empirical transition matrix slightly favors closure, whereas the imprecise analysis yields an incremental net monetary benefit interval crossing zero. The method provides both a rigorous lower-expectation formulation and a practical diagnostic for decisions that depend on transition probabilities not fully resolved by the evidence.

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

Hierarchical GRU with Input-Conditioned Slot Queries for Ball Action Anticipation

We present a hierarchical model for ball action anticipation in football broadcast video. Given a 30-second observation window, the system predicts actions occurring in the subsequent 5-second window across 10 classes. A shared local Transformer encodes clip-level features within each 5-second sub-window; a GRU then aggregates temporal context across all sub-windows; finally, a Transformer decoder with K input-conditioned event slots decodes the anticipation target via three decoupled heads (objectness, class, temporal offset). We introduce frequency-reweighted Hungarian matching that systematically favours rare action classes, and Gaussian soft targets for temporal bin supervision. On the SoccerNet Ball Action Anticipation benchmark, our method achieves 17.91% mAP on the test server.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LARE: Low-Attention Region Encoding for Text-Image Retrieval

Image retrieval in crowded scenes is particularly challenging due to the salience bias of conventional visual encoders, which tend to focus on dominant objects while neglecting low-attention regions that are often crucial for fine-grained retrieval. We propose LARE (Low-Attention Region Encoding), a framework that explicitly models these overlooked regions. LARE adopts a dual-encoding strategy that encodes low-attention regions of an image and the full image in parallel, leading to more diverse and informative image embeddings. To evaluate image retrieval performance in challenging crowded scenes, we introduce Dense-Set, a challenging subset derived from COCO and Flickr30K. In this subset, images are re-captioned to provide richer descriptions of low-attention or previously overlooked regions. This dataset highlights the limitations of existing retrieval models and enables a more rigorous evaluation under densely crowded scene conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework improves retrieval performance by preserving subtle, non-dominant visual cues within the shared latent space.

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

Disentangling Dynamical Systems: Causal Representation Learning Meets Local Sparse Attention

arXiv:2603.14483v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Parametric system identification methods estimate the parameters of explicitly defined physical systems from data. Yet, they remain constrained by the need to provide an explicit function space, typically through a predefined library of candidate functions chosen via available domain knowledge. In contrast, deep learning can demonstrably model systems of broad complexity with high fidelity, but black-box function approximation typically fails to yield explicit descriptive or disentangled representations revealing the structure of a system. We develop a novel identifiability theorem, leveraging causal representation learning, to uncover disentangled representations of system parameters without structural assumptions. We derive a graphical criterion specifying when system parameters can be uniquely disentangled from raw trajectory data, up to permutation and diffeomorphism. Crucially, our analysis demonstrates that global causal structures provide a lower bound on the disentanglement guarantees achievable when considering local state-dependent causal structures. We instantiate system parameter identification as a variational inference problem, leveraging a sparsity-regularised transformer to uncover state-dependent causal structures. We empirically validate our approach across four synthetic domains, demonstrating its ability to recover highly disentangled representations that baselines fail to recover. Corroborating our theoretical analysis, our results confirm that enforcing local causal structure is often necessary for full identifiability.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Solving Markov Decision Processes with Future Information via MPC

arXiv:2606.24991v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model Predictive Control (MPC) is widely used in industrial and robotic systems for enforcing constraints and embedding domain knowledge through finite-horizon optimization-based planning. However, despite these strengths, an MPC scheme typically does not yield optimal policies for sequential decision-making problems formulated as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Recent combinations of MPC with Reinforcement Learning (RL) alleviate this issue by treating MPC as a parameterized model of the optimal policy of an MDP and adjusting its parameters using data. While these approaches typically consider classical MDPs, many real-world problems include future information–such as forecasts, prices, or reference trajectories–at decision time, which must be included in the MDP state for optimal decision-making. Current MPC-RL approaches do not directly account for this augmented-state structure, raising the question of how to incorporate future information into MPC to obtain an optimal policy. This work establishes the structural requirements under which a parameterized MPC can exactly represent the optimal value functions and policy of an MDP with future information. We further demonstrate that such a parameterized MPC can serve as a structured function approximator, with its parameters learned using RL. The approach is illustrated on a point-mass racing task with future reference information.

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

Same Evidence, Different Answer: Auditing Order Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines. We introduce Facet-Probe, a five-facet audit (option, evidence-chunk, document-rank, image-set, and mixed-modality ordering) of 18 frontier and open-weight MLLMs. A Bayesian item-response model separates ordering noise from per-facet bias, and a same-ordering control estimates the decoder-stochastic floor for observed flips. We find that none of the 18 MLLMs we audit are order-invariant: screened per-facet panel-mean flip rates span 24-50%. A Gemini same-ordering control at temperature 0 estimates a substantial ordering excess over a same-input decoder-noise floor in verified cells. Capability predicts but does not eliminate flips; the best model still flips on 13.4% of trials. In our Gemini mitigation tests, training-free prompt changes are modality-conditional and do not transfer from text to visual reasoning. These results suggest that prompt-level mitigation alone is unlikely to provide general order robustness, motivating future work on training-time and architectural approaches. We propose cross-ordering flip rate as a standard reporting axis for MLLMs.

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

An Explainable AI Assistant for Introductory Programming Education: Improving Feedback Reliability with Instructor-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.12425v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active learning is widely recognized as an effective approach for improving learning outcomes in introductory programming courses. However, insufficient instructional support often limits students' access to timely, personalized feedback, which is crucial for mastering foundational programming concepts. Although recent advances in AI, particularly large language models, offer scalable opportunities for feedback, concerns about explainability and reliability remain. In this paper, we present an AI-driven classroom assistant that leverages an explainable AI model to analyze student code, map logical errors to instructor-identified misconceptions, and deliver instructor-authored feedback, thereby grounding reliability in instructor-defined pedagogical knowledge. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conducted an expert evaluation to examine its alignment with instructor-verified feedback and deployed the system in a classroom setting to assess students' perceptions of its usability. Results indicate that the assistant can provide accurate, instructor-verified feedback to students while fostering a positive experience.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

BCoughBench: Benchmarking Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models Under Body-Coupled Wearable Sensor Conditions

arXiv:2606.25116v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Respiratory acoustic foundation models (FMs) are benchmarked exclusively on smartphone recordings, yet clinical deployment increasingly targets body-coupled (BC) wearables whose sensors attenuate high-frequency content through tissue and bone, leaving FM reliability uncharacterised. We introduce BCoughBench, evaluating five FMs (OPERA-CT/CE/GT, HeAR, M2D+Resp) on nine classification tasks (AUROC, sensitivity at 95% specificity, Expected Calibration Error) and three age regression tasks (MAE vs. a mean-predictor baseline) across five EBEN-simulated BC sensor conditions on five labeled cough datasets. Mean AUROC declines from 0.785 (smartphone) to 0.689-0.723, degrading most under temple vibration pickup ($\Delta$ = -0.096) and least under the soft in-ear ($\Delta$ = -0.062). No FM meets the clinical sensitivity threshold (Se@Sp95 $\geq$ 0.20) on most disease tasks under any BC sensor. Sex classification on the CIDRZ cohort collapses (AUROC 0.954 to 0.596-0.628, $\Delta$ = -0.341) while COVID detection is nearly unaffected ($\Delta$ = -0.004). Age regression is robust, improving under the forehead accelerometer on CoughVID (MAE 9.61 to 8.97 yr); HeAR leads on regression and demographic tasks, M2D+Resp on disease and characteristic tasks. BCoughBench provides a reproducible framework for FM evaluation under wearable conditions.

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

One-Step Generalization Ratio Guided Optimization for Domain Generalization

arXiv:2606.16301v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Domain Generalization (DG) aims to train models that generalize to unseen target domains but often overfit to domain-specific features, known as undesired correlations. Gradient-based DG methods typically guide gradients in a dominant direction but often inadvertently reinforce spurious correlations. Recent work has employed dropout to regularize overconfident parameters, but has not explicitly adjusted gradient alignment or ensured balanced parameter updates. We propose GENIE (Generalization-ENhancing Iterative Equalizer), a novel optimizer that leverages the One-Step Generalization Ratio (OSGR) to quantify each parameter's contribution to loss reduction and assess gradient alignment. By dynamically equalizing OSGR via a preconditioning factor, GENIE prevents a small subset of parameters from dominating optimization, thereby promoting domain-invariant feature learning. Theoretically, GENIE balances convergence contribution and gradient alignment among parameters, achieving higher OSGR while retaining SGD's convergence rate. Empirically, it outperforms existing optimizers and enhances performance when integrated with various DG and single-DG methods.

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

Standardized Methods and Recommendations for Green Federated Learning

arXiv:2602.00343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training over privacy-sensitive, distributed data, but its environmental impact is difficult to compare across studies due to inconsistent measurement boundaries and heterogeneous reporting. We present a practical carbon-accounting methodology for FL CO2e tracking using NVIDIA NVFlare and CodeCarbon for explicit, phase-aware tasks (initialization, per-round training, evaluation, and idle/coordination). To capture non-compute effects, we additionally estimate communication emissions from transmitted model-update sizes under a network-configurable energy model. We validate the proposed approach on two representative workloads: CIFAR-10 image classification and retinal optic disk segmentation. In CIFAR-10, controlled client-efficiency scenarios show that system-level slowdowns and coordination effects can contribute meaningfully to carbon footprint under an otherwise fixed FL protocol, increasing total CO2e by 8.34x (medium) and 21.73x (low) relative to the high-efficiency baseline. In retinal segmentation, swapping GPU tiers (H100 vs.\ V100) yields a consistent 1.7x runtime gap (290 vs. 503 minutes) while producing non-uniform changes in total energy and CO2e across sites, underscoring the need for per-site and per-round reporting. Overall, our results support a standardized carbon accounting method that acts as a prerequisite for reproducible 'green' FL evaluation. Our code is available at https://github.com/Pediatric-Accelerated-Intelligence-Lab/carbon_footprint.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Synchronization of Quasi-Particle Excitations in a Quantum Gas with Cavity-Mediated Interactions

arXiv:2504.17731v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Driven-dissipative quantum systems can undergo transitions from stationary to dynamical phases, reflecting the emergence of collective non-equilibrium behavior. We study such a transition in a Bose-Einstein condensate coupled to an optical cavity and develop a cavity-assisted Bragg spectroscopy technique to resolve its collective modes. We observe dissipation-induced synchronization at the quasiparticle level, where two roton-like modes coalesce at an exceptional point. This reveals how dissipation microscopically drives collective dynamics and signals a precursor to a dynamical phase transition.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring

LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines ($0.694$ vs. $0.647$ and $0.64$, $p

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

How Fragile Are Training-Free AI-Generated Image Detectors? A Controlled Audit of Score Direction, Preprocessing, and Compression

Training-free detectors of AI-generated images promise generator-agnostic deployment without classifier training, yet their reported numbers are rarely compared under a single controlled protocol. We audit two representative training-free scores – an autoencoder-reconstruction score (AEROBLADE-style) and a noise-perturbation feature-similarity score (RIGID-style) – plus a naive feature-kNN control, on a common 1,500-image GenImage-derived benchmark spanning seven generators and JPEG compression at quality 70 and 50. The audit yields three cautionary findings. (i) Implementation details masquerade as method differences: replacing the LPIPS backbone (AlexNet -> VGG-16) changes overall AUROC by +0.085, and switching between resize-to-512 and native-resolution preprocessing flips per-generator conclusions by up to 0.38 AUROC. (ii) Score direction is not a property of the method but of its hyperparameters: the RIGID-style score is inverted (AUROC < 0.5) on SD1.5 and Wukong at noise level sigma=0.05, recovers to >0.5 for every generator at sigma=0.01, and collapses to 0.15 at sigma=0.3. (iii) Dataset format bias inflates robustness claims: without unified re-encoding, AUROC under JPEG-50 exceeds the clean condition for the AlexNet-backbone reconstruction score; after bias correction the residual anomaly localizes to a single generator (BigGAN). The audited scores have complementary per-generator failure sets, but naive z-score fusion does not beat the best single score, indicating that exploiting complementarity requires direction-aware combination.

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

LaWAM: Latent World Action Models for Efficient Dynamics-Aware Robot Policies

arXiv:2606.15768v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLAs) leverage large-scale vision-language pretraining for semantic robot control, but often lack explicit foresight into how robot actions change the scene. World-Action Models (WAMs) address this limitation by conditioning policies on predicted futures, yet existing approaches typically rely on computationally expensive video generation with substantial pixel-level redundancy. We present LaWAM, a Latent World Action Model that exposes predictive dynamics to robot policies through compact latent visual subgoals instead of reconstructed future video. At the core of LaWAM is a latent-action-conditioned Latent World Model (LaWM). We obtain LaWM by training a latent action model in the latent space of a pretrained vision foundation model and repurposing its forward decoder to predict future observation features for scene evolution. LaWAM then conditions action generation on these predicted latent visual subgoals to enable dynamics-aware robot control. LaWAM achieves state-of-the-art or competitive success rates (SRs) across LIBERO (98.6% SR), RoboTwin (91.22% SR), and real-world manipulation tasks while retaining low-latency inference. LaWAM runs in 187 ms per action-chunk prediction and achieves up to 24x lower wall-clock latency than pixel-space WAMs.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Grouped Query Experts: Mixture-of-Experts on GQA Self-Attention

arXiv:2606.20945v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Self-attention is central to Transformer performance and is often the most expensive part of the Transformer at long context lengths because its pairwise token interactions scale quadratically with sequence length. Standard dense attention also applies the same set of attention heads to every token regardless of token difficulty or information content. This uniform activation can waste compute, especially as sequences grow longer and attention cost increases rapidly. We propose Grouped Query Experts (GQE), a mixture-of-experts layer on top of grouped-query attention (GQA). Within each GQA group, a router selects k query-head experts per token while all key-value (KV) heads remain dense and unchanged. Thus, GQE keeps the KV cache benefits of GQA and reduces only the active query-head computation. On a fixed 30B token budget at the 250M parameter scale, GQE matches the all-active GQA baseline in downstream accuracy while activating half the query heads per token.

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

Stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active conformational transition of NLRP3 monomer

作者:

by Jin Peng, Wenjian Li, Hao Wang, Xiaohui Chen, Manjie Zhang, Bin Sun The NLRP3 inflammasome is a multiprotein complex that primes cytokine production in the innate immune system. The inflammasome activation involves the cage-to-disk transition of NLRP3 oligomers, facilitated by the co-factor NEK7 protein. While NEK7’s role in promoting cage disassembly has been reported, its involvement in the large conformational changes of the NLRP3 monomer during activation remains elusive. Here, by using multi-scale simulations, we uncovered a stage-dependent role of NEK7 in the inactive-to-active transition. In the early stage, NEK7 reshapes the dynamics of the highly unstable inactive NLRP3 monomer to resemble active state, priming the conformational transition. In the middle stage, NEK7 impedes progression by populating an intermediate state farther from the active conformation than the NEK7-free counterpart, and structures in this state exhibit reduced allosteric potential toward activation. In the late stage, NEK7 has negligible impact, as the active conformation remains inherently isolated by a high energy barrier regardless of NEK7 presence. This highlights the critical role of oligomeric assembly in enabling monomeric NLRP3 to complete its conformational transition, in agreement with experiment observations. Our work suggests a multilayered activation mechanism where oligomer-level assembly and monomeric conformational changes are coupled, providing new mechanistic insights into this physiologically essential macromolecular process.

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

When Correct Edges Cannot Be Verified: A Provenance Gap in Incomplete KGQA and a Provenance-Favoring Completion Policy

Incomplete Knowledge Graph Question Answering (IKGQA) requires completing missing edges to continue reasoning. A growing line of work verifies completed edges against retrieved text, treating textual support as a proxy for edge quality. We ask a question that, to our knowledge, has not been systematically tested: does textual verifiability actually track correctness? Exploiting the gold deleted triples provided by the standard random-deletion protocol, we measure both. The finding is counterintuitive: among gold-correct completed edges, 76-96% have no supporting passage even under exhaustive retrieval, robustly across deletion rates (20%/40%), datasets (CWQ/WebQSP), and relation types (structural, commonsense, long-tail). Most Freebase-style facts simply do not occur as head-tail co-mentions in text. Textual faithfulness therefore measures provenance, not correctness – separated by a paradigm-level gap no in-corpus retrieval closes. This reframes edge completion. Since most completed edges – correct or not – are causally redundant for the answer (95-97% of correct answers do not depend on any unsupported edge), the central question shifts from "is the edge correct?" to "admit or abstain under provenance uncertainty?" Within this framing we present TGComplete, a provenance-favoring admission policy that retrieves evidence at a reasoning breakpoint, verifies a candidate through a lightweight loop, and abstains when support is absent. Against the generate-to-complete baseline GoG, it attains higher edge precision against gold (15-21% vs 3-14%), with no statistically detectable EM loss and 3.1-7.4 times higher strict faithfulness of admitted edges – at the cost of lower recall. We position TGComplete not as uniformly better, but as a principled point on a precision/provenance-recall trade-off, appropriate when auditability matters.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Physical Atari: A Robust and Accessible Platform for Real-time Reinforcement Learning on Robots

arXiv:2606.19357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We built a robot called the Robotroller that actuates an Atari CX40+ controller and a device called the Atari Devbox that renders the game frame and the reward signal from the Arcade Learning Environment on a screen. The Robotroller and the Atari Devbox, together with an off-the-shelf camera and a desktop computer, constitute a system that can be used to study reinforcement learning algorithms in the physical world. We call the full system Physical Atari. In this paper, we detail the key decisions that make Physical Atari a robust and accessible platform. To make the system robust, we designed the Robotroller so that all movement is done through bearings, which reduces wear. Additionally, we wrote software that monitors the state of the servos at a high frequency and intervenes to limit stress. To make the system accessible, we used affordable off-the-shelf components and parts that can be manufactured using consumer 3D printers. Physical Atari can be built for under $1,000 and has been used for weeks of non-stop reinforcement learning experiments without any mechanical failures. We used it to validate that reinforcement learning algorithms can learn directly on robots and show that even small distribution shifts between learning and deployment can significantly degrade the performance of policies. Our results underscore the importance of on-device adaptation for strong performance on robots.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

OpenTie: Open-vocabulary Sequential Rebar Tying System

Robotic practices on the construction site emerge as an attention-attracting manner owing to their capability of tackling complex challenges, especially in the rebar-involved scenarios. Most of existing products and research are mainly focused on the collection of large amounts of data with model training demands. To fulfill this gap, we propose OpenTie, a 3D training-free rebar tying framework utilizing a RGB-to-point-cloud generation and an open-vocabulary rebar detection on the real-world test. We implement the OpenTie via a robotic arm with a binocular camera and guarantee a high accuracy by applying the prompt-based object detection method on the image filtered by our proposed post-processing procedure for the image-to-point-cloud generation framework. Our pipeline requires no training efforts and outperforms the training-based object detection, i.e., YOLO-based method, with the verification on the real-world sequential rebar tying test. The system is flexible for horizontal and vertical rebar tying tasks and holds the potential application to the real construction site with possibility of commercialization.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

How Events Separated by a Timelike Interval Can Help Us Understand Quantum Nonlocality

arXiv:2604.03744v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum entanglement plays a fundamental role in quantum cryptography and computation. An important example of quantum entanglement can be found in the correlations of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR). However, despite the plethora of articles related to the topic, different interpretations of the EPR correlations coexist, and a consensus has not yet been reached. In this article, we seek to demonstrate, through the simple and direct application of quantum formalism, how events separated by timelike intervals can, strangely enough, help us better understand some aspects of the so-called "quantum nonlocality" associated with EPR correlations.