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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Intellectual Property Literacy, Innovation Readiness and Innovation Practice in Syria's Pharmaceutical Sector: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background Innovation in pharmaceutical sectors operating under resource and institutional constraints may depend not only on knowledge and attitudes but also on the conditions that enable innovation-related activities to occur. This study examined the relationships among intellectual property (IP) literacy, innovation attitudes, innovation readiness, and reported innovation practice among pharmaceutical professionals in Syria. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 303 pharmaceutical professionals between March and April 2026. Four composite indices were constructed to assess IP literacy, innovation attitudes, innovation readiness, and innovation practice. Descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, group comparisons, and multivariable regression models were used to characterize patterns of association among study domains. The analysis was designed to identify empirical patterns rather than infer causal relationships. Results Innovation attitudes were comparatively high (73.56/100), whereas innovation readiness (17.00/100) and innovation practice (12.65/100) were substantially lower. IP literacy was positively associated with innovation readiness (r = 0.384, p < 0.001) and innovation practice (r = 0.205, p < 0.001). In contrast, innovation attitudes were not significantly associated with reported innovation practice (p = 0.332). Regression analyses indicated that the inclusion of innovation readiness improved model fit beyond specifications based on knowledge and attitudes alone ({Delta}R{superscript 2} = 0.058, p = 0.028). Significant differences in readiness and practice were observed across professional groups (p < 0.001), whereas knowledge and attitudes showed limited variation. Conclusions High levels of innovation-related knowledge and positive attitudes did not correspond to high levels of reported innovation practice in this setting. The findings suggest that innovation readiness may capture enabling conditions that are not reflected by knowledge or attitudinal measures alone. These results support the value of examining contextual and institutional factors when assessing innovation capacity in resource-constrained pharmaceutical systems. Given the substantial gap observed between innovation attitudes and innovation practice, educational strategies may represent one avenue for strengthening innovation readiness. In the Syrian context, strengthening innovation-oriented education and university-industry engagement may help cultivate innovation competencies and support the translation of research into practical applications.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

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

Evaluating Japanese Dialect Robustness Across Speech and Text-based Large Language Models

Dialogue systems based on large language models (LLMs) have advanced significantly in recent years. However, dialectal variation remains a major challenge, particularly for systems that process spoken input. LLM-based speech language models (SLMs), which integrate LLMs with speech processing components, show promise for spoken language tasks, yet their ability to comprehend dialects has not been sufficiently studied. Moreover, it remains unclear how the dialectal understanding of the base LLM affects SLM performance. This study investigates the dialectal robustness of both LLMs and SLMs using Japanese dialects as a test case. We define robustness as the ratio of performance on dialectal versus standard inputs, enabling fair comparisons. Our experiments show that SLM robustness correlates with that of their text-based counterparts. Furthermore, training with dialectal data and fine-tuning the speech encoder each improves robustness in SLMs.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Position: AI Must Become Planet-Centered, Not Just Human-Centered

arXiv:2606.13704v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This position paper argues that contemporary AI paradigms are insufficient for supporting complex global goals and introduces Planet-Centered AI (PCAI) as a design philosophy and research agenda that reorients AI toward planetary-scale socio-ecological systems and their long-term trajectories. A planet-centered approach is grounded in systems thinking, treating Earth as an interconnected whole of which humans are part. We diagnose recurring limitations across AI frameworks, many of which remain human-centered, and show why these become especially consequential under current planetary conditions characterized by systemic risk, non-stationarity, and deep uncertainty. We then articulate how PCAI reshapes the AI lifecycle, from problem formulation and model design to evaluation and deployment, by emphasizing alignment with global agendas, developing system-aware AI foundations, trajectory-oriented evaluation, and monitorability. Finally, we advance a falsifiable claim: AI systems optimized without explicit consideration of systemic consequences are more likely to exacerbate systemic instability than to mitigate it.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

FlowBender: Feedback-Aware Training for Self-Correcting Conditional Flows

Conditional diffusion and flow models routinely fail to satisfy the very constraints that define their task. For instance, a depth-conditioned model often produces images whose re-extracted depth disagrees with the input, even though the forward operator–the depth predictor defining the constraint–is available during both training and inference. Existing approaches generally fall into two categories: supervised models that treat the conditioning signal as a static cue and ignore alignment information at inference, and guidance-based methods that consult it through hand-tuned linear updates, typically trading fidelity to the condition against the plausibility of the generated sample. We argue that the fundamental gap in both paradigms is that the model is never trained to utilize its own alignment error. We introduce FlowBender, a closed-loop framework that treats this error as a first-class input, training the network to learn a correction policy conditioned on inference-time feedback. At each step, an unguided look-ahead pass estimates the clean signal, a task-specific deviation is computed via the forward operator, and a refinement pass consumes this signal to produce a corrected velocity. We propose several variants of FlowBender, including a gradient-based formulation for differentiable operators and a zero-order variant for non-differentiable settings such as JPEG compression. For efficient sampling, we introduce a prior-step shortcut that enables closed-loop correction at a minimal additional computational cost. Across image-to-image translation, restoration, and 3D mesh texturing, FlowBender consistently outperforms standard supervised baselines, alignment-loss-augmented training, and state-of-the-art inference-time guidance, improving fidelity and plausibility simultaneously rather than trading them against each other. Project page: https://flow-bender.github.io/

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

3D-RFT: Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards ( RLVR ) has emerged as a transformative paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models ( LLMs), yet its potential in 3D scene understanding remains under-explored. Existing approaches largely rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning ( SFT), where the token-level cross-entropy loss acts as an indirect proxy for optimization, leading to a misalignment between training objectives and task performances. To bridge this gap, we present Reinforcement Fine-Tuning for Video-based 3D Scene Understanding (3D-RFT ), the first framework to extend RLVR to video-based 3D perception and reasoning. 3D-RFT shifts the paradigm by directly optimizing the model towards evaluation metrics. 3D-RFT first activates 3D-aware Multi-modal Large Language Models ( MLLM s) via SFT, followed by reinforcement fine-tuning using Group Relative Policy Optimization ( GRPO) with strictly verifiable reward functions. We design task-specific reward functions directly from metrics like 3D IoU and F1-Score to provide more effective signals to guide model training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that 3D-RFT-4B achieves state-of-the-art performance on various video-based 3D scene understanding tasks. Notably, 3D-RFT-4B significantly outperforms larger models (e.g., VG LLM-8B) on 3D video detection, 3D visual grounding, and spatial reasoning benchmarks. We further reveal good properties of 3D-RFT such as robust efficacy, and valuable insights into training strategies and data impact. We hope 3D-RFT can serve as a robust and promising paradigm for future development of 3D scene understanding.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

StatefulDiscovery: Evidence-Calibrated Claim Formation in Open-Ended Scientific Discovery

arXiv:2606.11851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Open-ended scientific discovery asks agents to move beyond executing analyses for predefined questions. Across multiple rounds of exploration, a discovery agent must decide which phenomena warrant investigation while avoiding overinterpretation, where emerging claims exceed the evidential scope of the analyses supporting them. This creates an evidence-calibration problem: the exploration trajectory must be coupled with claim status so that evidence can guide both what to investigate next and what can be claimed. We introduce StatefulDiscovery, a discovery framework that externalizes investigation state and uses it to coordinate frontier selection, evidence acquisition, and claim adjudication. We evaluate StatefulDiscovery across 40 real-data discovery tasks. Compared with several baselines, StatefulDiscovery produces more claims overall judged to be both well-supported and high-value. Ablations indicate that structured hypotheses, local adjudication, and frontier control contribute to performance. Together, these results suggest that explicit discovery state can couple exploration with evidence-calibrated claim formation.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Composing Linear Layers from Irreducibles

arXiv:2507.11688v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contemporary large models often exhibit behaviors suggesting the presence of low-level primitives that compose into modules with richer functionality, but these fundamental building blocks remain poorly understood. We investigate this compositional structure in linear layers by asking: can we identify/synthesize linear transformations from a minimal set of geometric primitives? Using Clifford algebra, we show that linear layers can be expressed as compositions of bivectors – geometric objects encoding oriented planes – and introduce a differentiable algorithm that decomposes them into products of rotors. This construction uses only O(log^2 d) parameters, versus O(d^2) required by dense matrices. Applied to the key, query, and value projections in LLM attention layers, our rotor-based layers match the performance of strong baselines such as block-Hadamard and low-rank approximations. Our findings provide an algebraic perspective on how these geometric primitives can compose into higher-level functions within deep models.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

FlowID : Enhancing Forensic Identification with Latent Flow-Matching Models

Every day, many people die under violent circumstances, whether from crimes, war, migration, or climate disasters. Medico-legal and law enforcement institutions document many portraits of the deceased for evidence, but cannot immediately carry out identification on them. While traditional image editing tools can process these photos for public release, the workflow is lengthy and produces suboptimal results. In this work, we leverage advances in image generation models, which can now produce photorealistic human portraits, to introduce FlowID, an identity-preserving facial reconstruction method. Our approach combines single-image fine-tuning, which adapts the generative model to out-of-distribution injured faces, with attention-based masking that localizes edits to damaged regions while preserving identity-critical features. Together, these components enable the removal of artifacts from violent death while retaining sufficient identity information to support identification. To evaluate our method, we introduce InjuredFaces, a novel benchmark for identity-preserving facial reconstruction under severe facial damage. Beyond serving as an evaluation tool for this work, InjuredFaces provides a standardized resource for the community to study and compare methods addressing facial reconstruction in extreme conditions. Experimental results show that FlowID outperforms state-of-the-art open-source methods while maintaining low memory requirements, making it suitable for local deployment without compromising data privacy.

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

Revisiting Active Speaker Detection: An In-the-Wild Benchmark for Generalization and Robustness

We present UniTalk, a novel dataset emphasizing challenging scenarios to enhance model generalization for the task of active speaker detection (ASD). Previously established benchmarks such as AVA predominantly comprise old movies and thus exhibit significant domain gaps with real-world video. In contrast, UniTalk covers diverse video types reflecting challenging real-world conditions, including underrepresented languages, noisy backgrounds, and crowded scenes, while being on par with AVA in scale. Extensive evaluations reveal that ASD remains unsolved under realistic conditions: state-of-the-art models near-perfect on AVA fail to reach saturation on UniTalk. Conversely, models trained on UniTalk generalize better to modern in-the-wild datasets including Talkies and ASW. UniTalk thus establishes a new benchmark for ASD, providing researchers with a valuable resource for developing and evaluating versatile and resilient models.

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

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

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

Matrix phase-space representations for gaussian boson sampling

arXiv:2503.12749v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce coherent matrix phase-space distributions. These use conservation laws and symmetries to improve the accuracy and speed of quantum phase-space representations. As an example, this is applied to validation of low-loss Gaussian boson sampling (GBS) quantum computational advantage experiments, where classical generation of the random photon-number counts is exponentially hard. Large improvements in sampling errors are demonstrated compared to previous methods. Matrix phase-space representations also provide a large numerical speed-up, due to their (at worst) quadratic scaling, compared to other methods for validating total count probabilities of large-scale, low-loss GBS networks.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Why Commodity WiFi Sensors Fail at Multi-Person Gait Identification: A Systematic Analysis Using ESP32

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI) has shown promise for single-person gait identification, raising interest in its use for contactless biometrics, continuous authentication, and passive identification. However, the feasibility of multi-person identification on low-cost commodity devices remains unclear. A critical question is whether weak multi-person performance is primarily an algorithmic limitation, or whether it reflects a more fundamental sensing ceiling on commodity WiFi hardware. We address this question through a systematic empirical study using commodity ESP32 WiFi sensors. We evaluated six different signal separation methods–FastICA, SOBI, PCA-ICA, NMF, Wavelet, and Tensor decomposition–across seven scenarios spanning 1-10 people in both controlled and realistic indoor environments. To investigate beyond classification accuracy, we introduce three diagnostic metrics: intra-subject variability (ISV), inter-subject distinguishability (ISD), and performance degradation rate (PDR). In all methods, performance remains moderate (39%-56% accuracy), with limited evidence that algorithmic choice alone solves the problem. The best-performing method, NMF, reaches 56% accuracy, while all methods exhibit extremely high feature-space overlap (97%-99%), unstable within-subject representations, and marked environmental sensitivity. These findings suggest that, under commodity ESP32 CSI constraints, dense multi-person gait identification is limited more by sensing quality and spatial diversity than by the chosen separation algorithm. Our results have direct implications for security and privacy: they call into question the practicality of commodity WiFi CSI as a robust multi-user biometric primitive for authentication, while also placing important bounds on the passive identification capabilities achievable with low-cost off-the-shelf WiFi hardware.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Analyzing Initialization Strategies for the Local Unitary Cluster Jastrow Ansatz within the Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Framework

arXiv:2606.14933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this study, we analyze the choice of local unitary cluster Jastrow (LUCJ) ansatz initialization and sensitivity of the sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) algorithm within the quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework. We examine six initialization strategies, including those based on coupled-cluster singles and doubles (CCSD), M{\o}ller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory (MP2), data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC), and trivial (zeroes and random) initializations, across twelve molecular systems and three basis sets (STO-3G, cc-pVDZ, and aug-cc-pVDZ). We find that while the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between the alternative and CCSD-initialized t2-amplitudes span many orders of magnitude, the resulting SQD energies are largely insensitive to this variation. In particular, most initializations recover energies within chemical accuracy (+/-1.6 mEh) of the CCSD reference, with convergence improving as the basis set size increases. Notably, random initialization achieves performance competitive with CCSD across all basis sets, while zeroes initialization, despite having smaller deviations from CCSD, yields the worst energy agreement. Our results highlight that the proximity to the CCSD initialization is not a reliable predictor of the quality of electronic energies. These findings establish that configuration recovery within SQD, rather than circuit initialization, is the dominant factor governing energy accuracy, and suggest that computationally cheaper initialization strategies are viable alternatives to CCSD for QCSC workflows

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

Otters++: A Time-to-first-spike Based Energy Efficient Optical Spiking Transformer

arXiv:2606.13016v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are promising for energy-efficient inference, and time-to-first-spike (TTFS) coding is especially attractive because each neuron fires at most once. In practice, however, this benefit is often reduced by the cost of computing a temporal decay term and multiplying it by the synaptic weight. We address this issue by turning a physical hardware "bug," the natural signal decay in optoelectronic devices, into the main computation of TTFS, named Otters++. Specifically, we use the measured decay of a custom In$_2$O$_3$ optoelectronic synapse to directly realize the TTFS temporal term, removing the need for explicit digital decay computation. To scale this idea to Transformer models, we establish a layer-wise functional equivalence between the Otters++ and a quantized neural network (QNN), and develop a hybrid training method that uses device-faithful SNN computation in the forward pass and QNN straight-through gradients through the equivalent QNN path in the backward pass, together with model distillation. This avoids differentiation through discrete first-spike events and reduces the over-sparsity problem in direct TTFS-SNN training. We further make training aware of measured device noise by sampling run-to-run variation, and refine the system-level energy model by accounting for device sharing and multi-hop communication. On GLUE dataset, Otters++ improves the average score to 84.17\% while maintaining a clear energy advantage over prior spiking Transformer baselines. These results show that physically grounded TTFS computing can be efficient, trainable, and robust under realistic hardware effects.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

PreAct: Computer-Using Agents that Get Faster on Repeated Tasks

作者:

arXiv:2606.17929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-using agents drive real software through the screen – clicking and typing – but they solve every task from scratch: asked to repeat a task, an agent re-reads the screen, re-reasons every tap, and pays the full cost again. We present PreAct, which lets such an agent get faster on tasks it has done before. The first time it succeeds, PreAct compiles the run into a small state-machine program-states that check the screen, transitions that act-and on later runs replays it directly instead of invoking the agent 8.5-13x faster, with no per-step language-model calls. Replay is not blind: at each step PreAct checks that the screen matches what the program expects before acting, and hands control back to the agent the moment something is off. PreAct applies the same discipline when deciding what to keep: a freshly compiled program enters the store only if, re-run from a clean state, an independent evaluator confirms it solved the task-catching programs that replay to their last step yet leave the task undone. Across a mobile, a desktop, and a web benchmark, this store-time check separates repeated runs that improve from ones that degrade as faulty programs accumulate, worth 1.75-2.6 tasks per benchmark, the same direction on all three; a fallback that explores afresh when no program fits brings PreAct level with a strong record-and-replay baseline. We also report what did not matter: prompt wording, runtime guardrails, and whether a language model or a plain embedding retriever selects which program to reuse.

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

OPD-Evolver: Cultivating Holistic Agent Evolver via On-Policy Distillation

Memory has become a standard substrate for self-evolving agents, yet retaining experience is not the same as learning how to evolve through it. Existing memory agents can store trajectories, retrieve reflections, or accumulate skills, but often lack the holistic competence to select useful experience, act on it, write reusable knowledge, and maintain a growing repository. We introduce OPD-Evolver, a slow-fast co-evolution framework that cultivates such an agent evolver through on-policy self-distillation. In the fast loop, OPD-Evolver interacts with a four-level memory hierarchy to read, use, write, and maintain experience for rapid test-time evolution. In the slow loop, outcome-calibrated memory attribution and privileged hindsight distill these four abilities into the deployable policy. Across multi-domain benchmarks, OPD-Evolver surpasses memory systems such as ReasoningBank by up to 11.5%, and training-based methods such as Skill0 by ~5.8%. Further analysis shows that OPD-Evolver internalizes high-value experience and memory management, enabling OPD-Evolver-9B to challenge giant counterparts such as Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and Step-3.5-Flash, pointing beyond memory-augmented agents toward genuinely qualified agent evolvers.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Critical parameters of germ-monotone families of branching random walks

arXiv:2602.21062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a broad class of families of branching random walks on a countable set $X$, which we refer to as germ-monotone branching random walks (GMBRWs). The processes in each family are parametrized by a positive parameter $\lambda>0$, which controls the overall reproductive speed, and they are monotonically increasing in $\lambda$ with respect to the germ order, a notion that extends classical stochastic domination. This framework encompasses a wide range of models, including classical continuous-time branching random walks, as well as discrete-time counterparts of certain non-Markovian processes such as ageing branching random walks. We define a general notion of critical parameter $\lambda(A)$ associated with each subset $A \subseteq X$, which serves as a threshold separating almost sure extinction in $A$ from positive probability of survival in $A$. This unifies and extends the classical global and local critical parameters $\lambda_w$ and $\lambda_s$, which can be recovered as special cases. We then investigate how modifications of the reproduction laws, either on a finite set or on a more general subset of $X$, affect these critical parameters. Our results extend earlier contributions in the literature.

19.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Microglia at a key inflection point in Alzheimer’s disease

作者: 未知作者

We analyzed brains from octogenarians and cognitively resilient centenarians to understand why some individuals with substantial Alzheimer’s disease pathology develop dementia whereas others remain cognitively intact. Spatial transcriptomics revealed gene expression changes in discrete tissue domains surrounding amyloid plaques and tau pathology that distinguish early, clinically silent, disease from later stages associated with cognitive decline.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

InfoGeo: Information-Theoretic Object-Centric Learning for Cross-View Generalizable UAV Geo-Localization

Cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) is fundamental for precise localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments, aiming to match ground or UAV imagery with satellite views. Existing approaches often rely on global feature alignment, but they suffer from substantial domain shifts induced by varying regional textures and weather conditions. This issue becomes even more pronounced in UAV-based scenarios, where the broader perspective inevitably introduces dense, fine-grained objects, creating significant visual clutter. To address this, we draw inspiration from Object-Centric Learning (OCL) and propose InfoGeo, an information-theoretic framework designed to enhance robustness and generalization. InfoGeo reformulates the optimization as an information bottleneck process with two core objectives: (i) maximizing view-invariant information by aligning the object-centric structural relations across views, and (ii) minimizing view-specific noisy signals through cross-view knowledge constraints. Extensive evaluations across diverse benchmarks and challenging scenarios demonstrate that InfoGeo significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Sex-Specific Hemostatic Responses and Diagnostic Potential of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-Dimer in Mild COVID-19, Malaria, and Co-Infection in a Tropical Setting: A Case-Control Study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria

Background: In malaria-endemic tropical regions, the overlapping coagulopathy in COVID-19 and malaria poses diagnostic and prognostic challenges, particularly with potential sex differences. This study evaluated sex-specific variations in platelet indices and fibrinolytic markers and assessed the utility of Platelet Distribution Width (PDW) and D-dimer in mild/asymptomatic cases. Methods: A case-control study was conducted with 220 participants (55 each in healthy controls, malaria-positive, COVID-19-positive, and COVID-19+malaria co-infected groups), aged 20-65 years, in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Platelet indices were analysed using Sysmex XP-300 haematology analyser, while D-dimer and fibrinogen were measured by ELISA. Data were analysed using SAS 9.4 with ANOVA, Tukey's HSD, Pearson correlation, and sex-stratified comparisons. Results: PDW was significantly elevated in all infected groups compared to controls (malaria: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; COVID-19: 15.21 +/- 0.22 fL; co-infection: 15.61 +/- 0.21 fL vs. control: 13.26 +/- 0.17 fL; F=25.850, p < 0.001). D-dimer levels were highest in the co-infected group (553.42 +/- 59.74 ng/ml, F=2.816, p = 0.040). No significant changes were observed in other platelet indices or fibrinogen across groups. No significant correlation existed between platelet indices and the fibrinolytic markers. Males exhibited significantly higher D-dimer levels across all infected groups (p < 0.05) and higher fibrinogen in COVID-19 subjects (p = 0.036). Sex exerted a stronger influence on parameters than age. Conclusion: Males show heightened fibrinolytic activation in COVID-19 and malaria co-infection. PDW and D-dimer are promising, cost-effective biomarkers for screening mild infections in resource-limited tropical settings.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Closed-loop discovery of out-of-distribution processing protocols by evolutionary search and uncertainty-aware learning

arXiv:2606.13859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Many materials and chemical systems exhibit history-dependent responses, where functional outcomes are governed not only by final-state variables but by the time-dependent sequence of fields, temperatures, or chemical potentials applied during operation. Discovering new processing protocols is therefore a high-dimensional search problem in which the control variable is an entire waveform or sample history, and conventional strategies either remain confined to conservative interpolative families or become prohibitively measurement intensive. Here, a closed-loop workflow is introduced that couples evolutionary search over a compact waveform representation with uncertainty-aware deep kernel learning to generate, rank, and experimentally validate candidate protocols. Applied to ferroelectric thin films, with the scanning-probe tip-bias waveform as the protocol and the nonlinear electromechanical response as the reward, the workflow discovers waveform families that enhance nonlinearity by de-aging the film. Spatially resolved before/after measurements show that the best-performing waveforms selectively activate pre-existing, weakly pinned domain-wall segments, whereas the worst drive long-range irreversible switching. This framework reframes protocol tuning as out-of-distribution discovery, generalizable to synthesis and annealing trajectories, battery formation protocols, and other high-dimensional control problems.

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

Narrative Theory-Driven LLM Methods for Automatic Story Generation and Understanding: A Survey

Applications of narrative theories using large language models (LLMs) deliver promising methods in automatic story generation and understanding tasks. Our survey examines how natural language processing (NLP) research uses LLM methods to engage with diverse concepts from narrative studies. We use established distinctions from narratology to categorise ongoing efforts and discover the following: \redtext{(a) narrative texts come from diverse sources beyond just literature, (b) theoretical synthesis and validation are potential outcomes, (c) generation tasks lag behind understanding in several ways: theoretical application, post-training methods, exploring non-fiction narratives and addressing narrative levels beyond fabula and discourse.} For future directions, instead of the pursuit of a single, generalised benchmark for `narrative quality', we believe that progress can benefit from efforts that focus on the following: defining and improving theory-based metrics for individual narrative attributes; continue conducting large-scale, theory-driven literary/social/cultural analysis; generating narratives in situated contexts; and continuing experiments where outputs can be used to validate or refine narrative theories. This work provides a contextual foundation for more systematic and theoretically informed narrative research in NLP by providing an overview to ongoing research efforts and the broader narrative studies landscape.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

ADAPT: An Autonomous Forklift for Construction Site Operation

Efficient material logistics play a critical role in controlling costs and schedules in the construction industry. However, manual material handling remains prone to inefficiencies, delays, and safety risks. Autonomous forklifts offer a promising solution to streamline on-site logistics, reducing reliance on human operators and mitigating labor shortages. This paper presents the development and evaluation of ADAPT (Autonomous Dynamic All-terrain Pallet Transporter), a fully autonomous off-road forklift designed for construction environments. Unlike structured warehouse settings, construction sites pose significant challenges, including dynamic obstacles, unstructured terrain, and varying weather conditions. To address these challenges, our system integrates AI-driven perception techniques with traditional approaches for decision making, planning, and control, enabling reliable operation in complex environments. We validate the system through extensive real-world testing, comparing its continuous performance against an experienced human operator across various weather conditions. Our findings demonstrate that autonomous outdoor forklifts can operate near human-level performance, offering a viable path toward safer and more efficient construction logistics.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Spotlight: Synergizing Seed Exploration and Spot GPUs for DiT RL Post-Training

arXiv:2606.19004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training of Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) is prohibitively expensive, requiring thousands of high-end GPUs. Existing works explore two directions to reduce cost: seed exploration improves training convergence by selecting high-contrast samples, yet adds compute to the critical path; spot GPUs offer 69–77\% lower cost, yet sit idle during training because DiT rollouts finish nearly simultaneously, which prevents LLM-style pipelining of rollout with training. Spot preemptions further break Sequence Parallelism (SP) groups, fragmenting GPU topology. We present Spotlight, the first system that harvests spot GPUs for DiT RL post-training. Spotlight rests on two key insights we devise: (1)~we show that exploration can tolerate stale model weights because exploration that uses the model weights from the previous iteration preserves the relative ranking of random seeds, allowing exploration to run on idle spot GPUs during training. (2)~SP reconfiguration can reuse on-node state, reducing group recovery from minutes to sub-second launches. Built on these insights, Spotlight introduces three techniques: a bandit-based exploration planner that maximizes reward variance within the training time budget, elastic sequence parallelism that reconfigures SP groups on the fly via persistent schedulers and intra-node weight copying, and a preemption-aware pull-based request scheduler that balances load and commits in-flight state upon preemption. We implement Spotlight on the open-source RL platform ROLL and evaluate it on Qwen-Image post-training. Spotlight reaches the same target validation score $4\times$ faster than baselines, reducing total cost by $1.4$-$6.4\times$ while achieving superior image quality on DeepSeek-OCR and Geneval datasets with resolution $512\times512$ and $1280\times1280$.