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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Note About Koopman-von Neumann Theory and Density Matrix

Authors:
J. Kluson↗

arXiv:2606.25085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this short note we study Koopman-von Neumann theory for N-particle system. We argue that it is natural to identify classical N-particle distribution function as diagonal form of density matrix operator in coordinate representation. We also determine generalized BBGKY hierarchy for reduced density matrix in coordinate representation.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Shachi: A Modular, Controllable Framework for LLM-Based Agent-Based Modeling of Emergent Collective Behavior

Authors:
So Kuroki↗Yingtao Tian↗Kou Misaki↗Takashi Ikegami↗Takuya Akiba↗Yujin Tang↗

arXiv:2509.21862v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: How collective behaviors emerge from the interactions of individual LLM-driven agents is a central question in artificial life, yet controlled study of these emergent dynamics has been hindered by the lack of a principled simulation framework for systematic experimentation. To address this, we introduce Shachi, a principled methodology and modular framework that decomposes an agent's cognition into core components: Configuration for intrinsic identity, Memory for contextual continuity, and Tools for extended capabilities, all orchestrated by an LLM reasoning engine. This decomposition treats each cognitive component as an independently controllable variable, enabling perturbation studies that trace how micro-level cognitive traits propagate into population-level dynamics. We investigate behavioral patterns across a 10-task benchmark spanning three levels of collective complexity. Shachi enables memory transfer across environment transitions, producing history-dependent behavioral shifts, and allows agents to simultaneously inhabit multiple environments, revealing cross-environment interference invisible in single-environment studies. Furthermore, in a real-world U.S. tariff shock case study, locally interacting agents with individually controlled cognitive components produce macro-level market dynamics directionally consistent with observed real-world outcomes. Our work provides a rigorous, open-source simulation framework for LLM-based ABM, aimed at fostering cumulative scientific inquiry into the emergent collective behaviors of interacting artificial agents.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation: Post-Training Without Rubric Verifiers

Authors:
MohammadHossein Rezaei↗Anas Mahmoud↗Zihao Wang↗Utkarsh Tyagi↗Advait Gosai↗Razvan-Gabriel Dumitru↗Aakash Sabharwal↗Bing Liu↗Yunzhong He↗

arXiv:2606.12507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubrics have emerged as an alternative to RLVR in open-ended domains where a single ground-truth final answer is not available. Existing rubric-based training methods rely on an LLM verifier that scores each rollout against rubrics. This introduces substantial training-time overhead, exposes optimization to verifier-specific biases, and reduces rubric feedback to a sparse end-of-trajectory signal. We propose Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation (RGSD), a verifier-free training method in which the base policy, conditioned on the rubric, serves as the teacher for the unconditioned student. RGSD distills the rubric-conditioned teacher distribution into the student token-by-token, replacing sparse trajectory-level rewards with dense per-token learning signals and removing the LLM judge from the training loop entirely. Across Qwen-2.5 (3B, 7B) and Qwen3-Thinking (4B, 8B) models on medical and science domains, RGSD achieves rubric satisfaction comparable to judge-based GRPO while using one on-policy rollout per prompt and no training-time verifier calls. Ablations show that raw rubrics provide a stronger teacher enrichment signal than self-generated reference responses, while a stronger GRPO judge can outperform RGSD in some settings, positioning RGSD as a complementary verifier-free alternative when verifier cost or reliability is the bottleneck.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Distinct Neuronal, Proliferative, and Secretory Pathways are Perturbed in Cancer Survivors with Depressive Symptoms

Authors:
Trudeau↗Thati↗Ng↗D. Q↗Chavez-Iglesias↗Olshen↗A. B↗Dhruva↗Chan↗J. W↗R. J↗Kober↗…

Introduction Depression is highly prevalent among cancer survivors and may be biologically distinct, although clinical studies investigating these mechanisms remain limited. Thus, the aims of this study were to (1) identify perturbed biological pathways associated with depressive symptom severity in cancer survivors, and (2) investigate whether these pathways are common or distinct to those perturbed in an age-matched non-cancer cohort. Methods We analyzed cross-sectional self-reported and transcriptomic data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (PHD #39341). Cancer survivors and an age-matched non-cancer cohort (target ratio 1:2) were identified. The 20-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) was used to split participants into low (CES-D

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

Authors:
Subhajit Barman↗Bibhas Ranjan Majhi↗

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.

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

A Short Note on the Generators of Controlled Quantum Gates

Authors:
Richard M. Milbradt↗Christian B. Mendl↗

arXiv:2606.25789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present the analytical generators for arbitrary multi-qubit controlled gates. Closed forms for the generating Hamiltonians are given for gates with both multiple control and target qubits, as well as for arbitrary control conditions. This allows us to go beyond gate-based simulations of quantum circuits and incorporate decoherence and other noise in simulations of quantum computers. We exemplify this by simulating the impact of a harmonic oscillator interacting with two qubits during the application of a controlled NOT gate.

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

Geometry-Preserving in 3D Gaussian Splatting for LiDAR-Camera Extrinsic Calibration

Authors:
Kyoleen Kwak↗Daeho Kim↗Jeong Woon Lee↗Hyoseok Hwang↗

Accurate LiDAR-camera calibration is essential for robust multi-modal perception. Targetless approaches avoid manual setup but remain limited by the scarcity of discriminative cross-modal features. Recent methods address this by reconstructing the scene within a differentiable model, enabling extrinsic optimization through dense photometric supervision. Among these, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has been widely adopted as a geometric proxy that bridges LiDAR and camera within a single differentiable framework. However, since 3DGS was originally designed for novel view synthesis, existing methods tend to prioritize rendering quality, causing the proxy geometry to drift from the true LiDAR structure. We propose a framework that preserves the metric geometry of the Gaussian proxy by aggregating multi-view LiDAR observations for dense depth supervision and blocking photometric gradients from updating the Gaussian spatial parameters. We validate our method on public driving datasets, where it consistently outperforms existing targetless methods in calibration accuracy.

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

Pre-Deployment Robustness Stress Testing for CT Segmentation Systems Using Clinically Motivated Multi-Corruption Augmentation

Authors:
CholMin Kanga↗Jonghyun Chung↗Amanpreet Kaur↗Nagesh Gulkotwar↗Aarthi Sivasankaran↗

Deep learning-based CT segmentation systems often achieve high accuracy on clean benchmark images, but their performance may degrade under heterogeneous clinical imaging conditions such as noise, resolution loss, contrast variation, intensity shift, and artifacts. This instability can limit reliable deployment in real-world medical imaging workflows. We propose Robustness via Augmented Multi-corruption Pipeline (RAMP), a robustness-oriented augmentation framework for CT segmentation. RAMP combines anatomically constrained spatial perturbations, CT intensity transformations, and stochastic multi-corruption composition to expose models to clinically plausible image degradation during training. Across two CT segmentation evaluation settings, RAMP achieved the strongest corrupted-image performance and the smallest clean-to-corrupted robustness gap. In the five-organ noisy evaluation benchmark, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.610 to 0.753 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.264 to 0.064 compared with the nnU-Net baseline. In Abdomen1K, RAMP improved mean corrupted Dice from 0.633 to 0.789 and reduced the robustness gap from 0.290 to 0.070. Although RAMP did not achieve the highest clean-image Dice, it substantially mitigated worst-case segmentation collapse under severe image degradation. These results suggest that multi-corruption augmentation can serve as a practical pre-deployment strategy for improving the reliability of CT segmentation systems in heterogeneous clinical environments.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Islamic Large Language Models: From Knowledge Acquisition to Trustworthy and Hallucination-Resistant AI

Authors:
Mohammed Amine Mouhoub↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for knowledge-intensive question answering, including religious and legal questions. Islamic knowledge is a particularly demanding setting: answers are expected to be grounded in authoritative sources, citations must be exact, Arabic varieties differ substantially from the language of classical sources, and legitimate jurisprudential disagreement must be represented rather than collapsed into a single answer. This survey reviews the emerging field of Islamic LLMs and trustworthy Islamic AI. We organize the literature around Arabic NLP and Arabic-centric LLMs, Islamic NLP resources, Qur'anic question answering, Islamic knowledge benchmarks, retrieval-augmented generation, Islamic legal reasoning, inheritance reasoning, hallucination evaluation, and trustworthiness. We argue that fluency in Arabic is not sufficient for Islamic AI. Reliable systems require curated sources, retrieval and verification modules, citation-aware generation, madhhab-aware reasoning, human expert evaluation, and benchmarks that measure not only answer accuracy but also faithfulness, source validity, and reasoning quality. The survey concludes with a research agenda for hallucination-resistant Islamic AI systems.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

ESBMC-PLC+: A Unified IEC~61131-3 Formal Verification Framework as a PLCverif Successor

Authors:
Pierre Dantas↗Lucas Cordeiro↗Waldir Junior↗

PLCverif is the most mature open-source platform for PLC formal verification, developed at CERN and in production use since 2019. Yet it has two fundamental limitations: no support for Ladder Diagram (LD) programs, the dominant PLC notation, and reliance on CBMC as its primary backend, which restricts verification to bounded proofs. The PLCverif authors themselves identified ESBMC as the appropriate backend improvement. Prior work established ESBMC-PLC (a textual LD frontend with k-induction) and ESBMC-GraphPLC (graphical PLCopen XML support); together, they cover LD with unbounded proofs but not Structured Text (ST), and graphical LD with timer/counter function blocks remains unverifiable. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC+, a unified framework that closes both gaps: (1) an ST/SCL frontend via the MATIEC IEC 61131-3 compiler, routing C-compiled ST to ESBMC with nondeterministic input modeling and YAML property injection; (2) function block state semantics for graphical LD, extending the DFS resolver to model TON/TOF/TP timers, CTU/CTD counters, and R_TRIG/F_TRIG edge triggers as persistent scan-cycle state variables in the GOTO IR. ESBMC-PLC+ is the first open-source PLC verification framework to support all three major IEC 61131-3 input formats via a single ESBMC backend, enabling k-induction-unbounded safety proofs. A feature comparison with PLCverif and experimental evaluation on 8 benchmark programs, including programs with up to 8 integer timers, shows that ESBMC-PLC+ matches PLCverif's input coverage while providing stronger guarantees. Against nuXmv's BDD backend, ESBMC-PLC+ is 400-2,000x faster on timer programs and completes proofs where nuXmv BDD times out at 120s.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MARD: Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation for Mechanism-Level Drug-Drug Interaction Prediction

Authors:
Mohammadreza Riyazat↗Vian Lelo↗Rameen Jafri↗Yumna Khan↗Abeer Badawi↗

Mechanism-level drug-drug interaction (DDI) prediction requires identifying which enzyme or pharmacodynamic axis is implicated, in which direction, and with which evidence – not merely whether two drugs interact. We introduce a reproducible mechanism-level DDI labelling and evaluation protocol with a structured 7-family/147-subtype taxonomy, leakage-safe cold-split protocols, and auditable reasoning metrics for evaluating pharmacological prediction beyond flat interaction classification. We propose a pipeline that produces a 7B reasoning MARD (Mirror-Augmented Reasoning Distillation), combining three training innovations: a single-token KL divergence on direction tag that ties the model's prediction, per-loss PRM-weighted DPO with programmatic hard negatives, and a leakage-safe mechanism-aware retrieval channel. Process-reward step labels are automatically verifiable against DrugBank-structured fields, requiring no human or LLM judges. On the April-2026 DrugBank release, our MARD-7B is the only system in a 32-system comparison whose accuracy survives drug-pair novelty, beating the best baseline by +13.9 pp and GPT-4o by +6.7 pp at ~1% of frontier API cost. Further analysis reveals an anti-memorisation signature where accuracy improves on rarely seen drugs, suggesting that gain comes from structured pharmacological reasoning rather than drug-frequency memorisation. We release corpus, DDI-PRM, retrieval index, and training code.

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12.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-05

Heuristic multi-site optimization for protein sequence design using Masked Protein Language Models

Authors:
Lijuan Wang↗

by Lijuan Wang, Yuze Wang, Chen Qiu, Liwei Xiao, Xianliang Liu, Junjie Chen Protein sequence design for tailored functional properties is a fundamental task in protein engineering, with critical applications in drug discovery and therapeutic development. Efficient navigation of the combinatorial vastness of protein sequence space to identify functional variants remains a formidable challenge. Conventional approaches, which predominantly rely on template-based local search or single-residue mutagenesis, are constrained by their susceptibility to local optima and their potential risk of destabilizing native structural stability. In this study, we introduce ProtHMSO, a heuristic multi-site optimization framework leveraging masked protein language models (ProtLMs) for context-aware sequence exploration. ProtHMSO mimics natural evolutionary mechanisms by employing ProtLM-derived substitution probabilities to guide heuristic searches for synergistic mutations, thereby constraining combinatorial search spaces through evolutionary and biophysical priors. ProtHMSO is further applied to replace the exploration strategies in genetic algorithms (GAs) and Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) for improving their convergence efficiency. Benchmark experiments demonstrate that protein sequences generated by ProtHMSO exhibit superior functional performance and closer alignment with natural sequence distribution, compared with state-of-the-art methods. These advancements highlight that ProtHMSO has strong potential and compatibility to accelerate functional protein discovery, offering a robust framework for efficient and context-aware exploration of protein sequence space.

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

APEX: Adaptive Principle EXtraction A Three-Layer Self-Evolution Framework for Production AI Agents

Authors:
Ya-Chuan Chen↗Tien-Jen Lai↗Hsiang-Wei Hu↗

arXiv:2606.15363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improvement in AI agents has emerged as a key research frontier: systems that modify their own prompts, workflows, and decision rules based on accumulated operational experience. The state-of-the-art Self-Harness framework [1] achieves 14–21% improvement on Terminal-Bench-2.0 by mining failure clusters and patching the agent harness. However, Self-Harness optimises only one dimension – the prompt harness – leaving behavioural principles and workflow topology unchanged. We propose APEX (Adaptive Principle EXtraction), a three-layer co-evolution framework that simultaneously evolves: (L1) the harness via failure-mode patching, (L2) behavioural principles via success-trace distillation [2], and (L3) the agent workflow topology via structural fitness-based selection [6]. We implement APEX on Joe [13], a production-grade super AI Agent built on NVIDIA Nemotron and designed as an Edge AI Agent Factory for the NVIDIA Agent Challenge 2026, managing a 15-node compute fleet using 114 real task traces collected over 18 days. APEX achieves an APEX Health Score of 0.570 (+90% vs. baseline 0.300) in a single evolutionary run, distilling 6 novel reusable principles and selecting a research-first workflow topology scoring 0.900 (+20%). Our results demonstrate that multi-dimensional co-evolution substantially outperforms single-axis harness optimisation, at a cost of only 4 LLM calls (~270 s) on a local qwen2.5-coder:32b instance.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

The Erdős-Hajnal High-Girth Subgraph Conjecture Holds in the Polynomial Chromatic-Sparsity Regime

Authors:
Eric Li↗

arXiv:2606.17901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For a graph $G$ put $h_r(G)=\max{\chi(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r}.$ Erdős and Hajnal asked whether $h_r(G)\to\infty$ as $\chi(G)\to\infty$, for every fixed $r\ge4$. We prove this in every fixed polynomial edge-density regime: for all $r\ge4$, $k\ge2$, $P,C>0$, there is $M=M_{r,k}(P,C)$ such that $\chi(G)\ge M,\ e(G)\le C\chi(G)^P\Longrightarrow h_r(G)\ge k.$ Quantitatively, after replacing $P$ by $P\vee2$ and $C$ by $C\vee2$, $M_{r,k}(P,C)\le \exp!\left(O_{r,k}\bigl((P+2+\log(C\vee2))^2\bigr)\right),$ and consequently the same conclusion holds throughout the quasi-polynomial range $e(G)\le \exp\bigl(C_0(\log\chi(G))^a\bigr),\ 1 < a < 3/2,$ for all sufficiently large $\chi(G)$. In each fixed polynomial-density regime we also obtain $f_{P,C}(k,r)\le k^{O_{r,P,C}(1)}.$ The proof combines a chromatic-defect random extraction lemma, compact and near-quadratic sparse-core bases, and a peeling/thinning bootstrap increasing the admissible edge exponent by $1/(r-1)$. We also prove structural saturation results for possible counterexamples, including Moore-strength exact-cycle packings and quadratic saturation in projected colour-pair space. Finally, writing $h_r^{\mathrm f}(G)=\max{\chi_{\mathrm f}(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r},$ we develop a fractional random-extraction framework based on Mohar-Wu preservation. We prove sufficient cheap-cycle-killing criteria and verify them for several structured families, including clique-organised families, line graphs of incidence graphs of equal-order generalized quadrangles and generalized hexagons, and the Bohman-Keevash tracking-time triangle-free-process graph. We also isolate a density-free obstruction that any proof using this fractional surgery route must overcome.

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

Expert-Driven Survival Machines: Improving Stratification and Interpretability in Multiple Clinical Cohorts

Authors:
Farica Zhuang↗Zixuan Wen↗Christos Davatzikos↗Li Shen↗

arXiv:2606.14608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Survival prediction plays a central role for healthcare providers and clinical researchers. Accurate risk stratification enables early intervention and improved patient management. Most existing deep survival models learn one common feature representation for all patients, which may hide important differences between patient subgroups. In contrast, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework allows different parts of the model to focus on different patient patterns, leading to more individualized representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a mixture-of-experts enhanced adaptive deep clustering survival framework (AdaCSM) for modeling such heterogeneous survival patterns. We introduce a routing-based expert mechanism that enables conditional specialization within a parametric survival modeling framework. The proposed architecture allocates patients to specialized risk predictors dynamically while preserving the patient survival and subtype clustering objectives. We compare our method with state-of-the-art survival and deep clustering models on multiple real-world longitudinal clinical cohorts spanning diverse disease domains. The proposed method demonstrates improved predictive performance and leads to interpretable results in survival analysis.

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16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Introduction to Automated Negotiation

Authors:
Dave de Jonge↗

arXiv:2511.08659v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This book is an introductory textbook targeted towards computer science students who are completely new to the topic of automated negotiation. It does not require any prerequisite knowledge, except for elementary mathematics and basic programming skills. This book comes with an simple toy-world negotiation framework implemented in Python that can be used by the readers to implement their own negotiation algorithms and perform experiments with them. This framework is small and simple enough that any reader who does not like to work in Python should be able to re-implement it very quickly in any other programming language of their choice.

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

Sol Video Inference Engine: Agent-Native Full-Stack Acceleration Framework for Efficient Video Generation

Authors:
Yitong Li↗Junsong Chen↗Haopeng Li↗Haozhe Liu↗Jincheng Yu↗Ligeng Zhu↗Ping Luo↗Song Han↗Enze Xie↗

arXiv:2606.23743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern video diffusion models achieve higher generation quality through scaling, but this also increases inference cost. Although many acceleration methods have been proposed, a central challenge is that the most effective acceleration strategy is highly instance-specific: a recipe that works well for one combination of model, hardware, and inference configuration often does not transfer to another. Different models vary in architecture, numerical sensitivity, and attention concentration patterns. Inference settings differ in spatial and temporal resolution and video duration, while hardware platforms differ in memory hierarchy, supported numerical formats, and kernel throughput. These factors create a large tuning space, making manual performance engineering costly. We present Sol Video Inference Engine, an agentic, native, training-free acceleration framework for video diffusion models. It organizes five broadly applicable techniques, cache, sparse attention, token pruning, quantization, and kernel fusion, into an agentic acceleration stack for instance-specific optimization. For a concrete deployment target defined by a model, hardware platform, and serving configuration, parallel skill agents optimize the implementation of each technique, an agent integrator composes them into a global acceleration stack, and a human validator provides feedback on generation quality. We instantiate this workflow on three video models with different sizes and architectures: 64B Cosmos3-Super, 22B LTX-2.3, and 2B SANA-Video. With little human effort, the full stack achieves more than 2x end-to-end acceleration while maintaining near-lossless VBench quality, demonstrating the effectiveness of the agent framework for video diffusion acceleration.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models

Authors:
Shaowei Zhang↗Jiahan Cao↗Xunlan Zhou↗Shenghua Wan↗De-Chuan Zhan↗

arXiv:2606.16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models. However, prevailing approaches typically rely on monolithic latent dynamics, entangling environment dynamics into a coupled process. This coupling severely limits reusability: altering the agent necessitates retraining the entire world from scratch, even if the environment remains constant. To address this, we introduce BRICKS-WM (Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models), a framework for the modular assembly of structured world models. Driven by the insight that the physical world is composed of independent entities, we posit that global dynamics can be modeled as a composition of distinct dynamical modules interacting via latent interfaces. As a minimal instantiation, we factorize the latent state space into an actuated Agent module and an external Background module, bridged by a learned latent interface. Unlike prior object-centric methods that prioritize visual segmentation, BRICKS-WM enforces a functional separation in transition dynamics, ensuring that background dynamics remains agnostic to the agent's dynamics. Empirically, BRICKS-WM achieves control performance comparable to strong monolithic baselines when trained from scratch, and enables the reuse of frozen background dynamics across agents.

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

Dynamic In-Group Persona Generation for Enhancing Human-AI Rapport

Authors:
Yoonseok Oh↗Inseo Jung↗Jinkyu Kim↗Jungbeom Lee↗Minwoo Kang↗Suhong Moon↗

arXiv:2606.18256v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based chatbots are increasingly applied in interpersonal domains such as counseling and peer support, where establishing human-AI rapport is crucial yet remains challenging. In this work, we introduce a novel approach for conditioning LLMs with in-group personas, which (i) first identifies a user's primary concern and brief personal context (e.g., a computer science undergraduate worried about future career prospects), and (ii) generates a synthetic in-group persona that shares a similar primary concern while differing in background and narrative details, such as age or profession (e.g., a junior researcher at an AI startup). Furthermore, we conduct a human-subject study to systematically evaluate the effectiveness of in-group persona agents in enhancing human-AI rapport. We compare our approach against two baseline conditions: a conventional agent without persona conditioning and an agent exhibiting minimal self-disclosure (e.g., "I've felt that too"). Results from post-task questionnaires assessing rapport and user experience indicate that the in-group persona agent significantly improves perceived rapport and personal relevance compared to the baselines, and also yields more positive user experience-most notably higher engagement.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Structural ethnic inequities in maternal mortality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Paraguay, 2014-2023: a national analysis of territorial, institutional, and preventable factors.

Authors:
Duarte-Zoilan↗Tullo Gomez↗J. E↗Nunez↗Ramos↗

Background: Indigenous women in Paraguay continue to experience disproportionately high maternal mortality despite national efforts to improve maternal health. Evidence on the structural factors underlying these disparities remains limited. Objectives: To analyze structural ethnic inequities in maternal mortality between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Paraguay, focusing on territorial patterns, institutional access, and potentially preventable causes of death. Design: National population-based study using maternal mortality records registered in Paraguay between 2014 and 2023. Maternal mortality ratios (MMRs), incidence rate ratios (IRRs), and absolute differences were estimated according to Indigenous status. Logistic regression models were used to assess associations with deaths occurring outside healthcare institutions and specific preventable causes of death. Results: A total of 907 maternal deaths were identified, including 112 among Indigenous women (12.3%). Indigenous women were overrepresented by a factor of 4.8 relative to their population share. Maternal mortality remained consistently higher among Indigenous women throughout the study period, with mortality ratios ranging from 317.7 to 773.6 per 100,000 live births, compared with 58.7 to 145.1 among non-Indigenous women. Absolute inequalities remained persistently high over time. Overall, 24.3% of maternal deaths occurred outside healthcare institutions, with a substantially higher proportion among Indigenous women (44.6% versus 21.5%). After adjustment for age and educational level, Indigenous women had more than three times greater odds of dying outside healthcare institutions (aOR = 3.41; 95% CI: 2.20-5.29). Potentially preventable causes accounted for 42.4% of maternal deaths. Obstetric hemorrhage was strongly associated with Indigenous status (aOR = 3.83; 95% CI: 2.31-6.37). Conclusion: Indigenous women in Paraguay experience a disproportionate burden of maternal mortality characterized by persistent ethnic disparities, higher occurrence of deaths outside healthcare institutions, and a substantial burden of preventable causes of death. These findings suggest the presence of enduring territorial, institutional, and healthcare access barriers that contribute to structural ethnic inequities in maternal health.

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

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

Authors:
Aristotelis Papatheodorou↗Jose Rojas↗Ioannis Havoutis↗Carlos Mastalli↗

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

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22.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Beyond the canonical: The role of post-transcriptional regulation in drug-target interaction prediction

Authors:
Md Istiaq Ansari↗

by Md Istiaq Ansari, Khandakar Tanvir Ahmed, Debby D. Wang, Kirill Medvedev, Wei Zhang Protein isoforms produced from the same gene through post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms, such as alternative splicing, can substantially alter protein structure and function, including drug-binding properties. However, most existing drug-target interaction (DTI) and drug-target affinity (DTA) prediction models rely exclusively on a single representative protein sequence per gene, typically the canonical or longest isoform, thereby overlooking the functional diversity introduced by alternative isoforms. This assumption can introduce bias, limit generalizability, and compromise the biological validity of model predictions. In this study, we systematically investigate the impact of protein isoform variation on DTI prediction accuracy. Our results show that substituting the canonical sequence with an alternative isoform often leads to substantial declines in predictive performance. Structural and binding affinity analyses further reveal that these discrepancies are frequently associated with changes in predicted binding-site configurations, which we further examine through controlled perturbations of binding-site residues. These experiments suggest that even subtle alterations in binding regions can lead to inconsistent DTI predictions. Overall, our findings uncover a critical limitation in current DTI modeling frameworks and underscore the importance of incorporating isoform-specific information to better reflect biological reality and improve therapeutic relevance. The codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/compbiolabucf/DTIVariant.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Spatial Localization of Relativistic Quantum Systems: The Commutativity Requirement and the Locality Principle. Part II: A Model from Local QFT

Authors:
Valter Moretti↗

arXiv:2604.04173v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper is the second and final part of a two-part study. We construct positive-energy relativistic spatial localization observables in Minkowski spacetime within standard quantum field theory, using the stress–energy–momentum tensor smeared with suitable test functions. For each fixed timelike direction, the construction gives positive operator-valued measures (POVMs) on spacelike hypersurfaces, well defined on every $n$-particle sector and satisfying a relativistic causality condition excluding superluminal propagation of detection probabilities. The observables are built from local or quasi-local field-theoretic quantities, thus providing a rigorous version of earlier heuristic proposals. In the one-particle sector, the construction reduces to the observable previously introduced by the author, and its first moment gives the Newton–Wigner position operator under appropriate normalization and centering assumptions. Because the Reeh–Schlieder theorem prevents the normally ordered stress–energy–momentum tensor from being positive on the full Fock space, we use quantum energy inequalities to obtain lower bounds controlling deviations from positivity. This leads to regularized operator families, bounded from below, which approximate the localization effects. Finally, we define conditional localization observables for finite laboratories through modified local energy operators. By Haag duality, the corresponding conditional POVMs belong to local von Neumann algebras and commute for causally separated regions, in accordance with the Araki–Haag–Kastler framework. The results show how commutativity of localization observables is recovered for conditional measurements in finite spacetime regions.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RAMS: Resource-Adaptive and Detection-Conditioned Model Switching for Embedded Edge Perception

Authors:
Kushal Khemani↗Evan Leri↗George Xu↗Amit Hod↗

Edge object detection on embedded hardware requires balancing inference latency and detection quality under changing resource pressure. We present RAMS, a lightweight runtime controller that monitors device pressure, calibrates switching thresholds from idle behavior, and dynamically selects among three resident YOLOv8 tiers (NANO/SMALL/MEDIUM at 320/416/640 px) without model-reload latency. RAMS defines five switching policies, including two detection-conditioned variants that prevent aggressive downgrades after recent vulnerable-road-user (VRU) detections. We further introduce the VRU-Weighted Accuracy Score (SWAS), a scalar metric for offline policy comparison without ground-truth annotations, together with an oracle-bounded variant that separates detector circularity from genuine tier-retention benefit. Across Raspberry Pi 5, x86 laptops, and Jetson Orin ONNX/TensorRT deployments, the same controller equations operate over a 37x latency range. On Jetson Orin TensorRT under heavy load, the safety2 policy achieves 3.41 ms mean latency, 5.6x faster than fixed-MEDIUM inference, while retaining 74% of its proxy accuracy through near-NANO operation with selective SMALL and MEDIUM locks during VRU-positive windows. Detection-conditioned switching improves SWAS by 25.4% under oracle scoring and 47.3% under detector-derived scoring relative to threshold-only policies under heavy load. Live KITTI evaluation reports per-tier VRU recall of 24.2%, 41.2%, and 59.0%, showing that reactive overrides are fundamentally limited by baseline detector recall.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Transformer Field Theory: A Response-Theoretic Approach to Mechanistic Interpretability

Authors:
David N. Olivieri↗Antonio F. P\'erez Rodr\'iguez↗

arXiv:2605.25225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mechanistic interpretability often studies Transformer behavior by intervening on internal activations through activation patching, causal tracing, path patching, and steering directions. This paper develops Transformer Field Theory: a response-theoretic framework in which the residual stream of a fixed forward pass is treated as a Transformer field over layer depth and token position. In this formulation, patching becomes a localized source insertion into the Transformer field, first-order sensitivity fields predict patch effects, Green functions describe downstream propagation, and patch selection is posed as an adjoint inverse problem. Empirically, we test the theory's forward response objects in GPT-2-style autoregressive Transformers. Localized Transformer-field interventions exhibit a bounded local linear regime; first-order sensitivities predict patch effects across layer-token sites; localized sources generate structured anisotropic Transformer-field propagation; high-sensitivity sites and sliced Green operators provide reduced response descriptions; and prompt-induced Transformer-field displacements partially transfer answer behavior. These results establish sensitivities, Transformer-field responses, and sliced Green operators as practical objects for organizing patching experiments, while providing the forward mathematical basis for patch-site inference and cross-scale response transfer.

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