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01.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-18

Mechanisms underlying spontaneous and evoked calcium responses in oligodendrocyte precursor cells: A modeling investigation

Authors:
Martin Lardy↗

by Martin Lardy, Leqi Wang, Claire Guerrier, Veronica T. Cheli, Pablo M. Paez, Anmar Khadra Calcium (Ca2+) signaling has emerged as a central regulator of activity-dependent myelination in oligodendrocytes. These Ca2+ signals encompass both the stimulus-independent spontaneous Ca2+ local transients (SCaLTs) generated intrinsically in a voltage-independent manner or facilitated by the membrane voltage, as well as evoked responses triggered by ATP and glutamate release. To investigate the regulatory mechanisms underlying this combined spiking activity, we developed a stochastic spatiotemporal flux-balance model of Ca2+ transients in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs). The model incorporates all the relevant fluxes in these cells and integrates membrane voltage dynamics with a Ca2+-induced Ca2+-release (CICR) mechanism using parameters fitted to Ca2+ fluorescence recordings. The model reproduced the intrinsic and voltage-facilitated SCaLTs in OPCs in the absence of purinergic and glutamatergic receptors, and captured the three distinct patterns of evoked Ca2+ responses induced by prolonged ATP and glutamate stimulations identified using machine classifier. The model highlighted the role of ATP and glutamate in generating these clusters, and showed that the fast dynamics of CICR is key to producing these evoked responses. Further analysis of the model also revealed that voltage-gated L- and T-type Ca2+ channels slightly increase the frequency of SCaLTs, while stimulation with ATP and glutamate, using randomly distributed pulses mimicking in vivo conditions, leads to an increase in both the amplitudes of Ca2+ spikes (i.e., the combination of SCaLTs and evoked responses) and the prevalence of wide spikes, especially upon glutamate stimulation. Bifurcation analysis of the deterministic version of the model, in the absence of diffusion, demonstrated that ATP and glutamate stimulation can shift the system into an oscillatory regime, thereby increasing the deterministic component of SCaLT dynamics. This study thus offers a comprehensive representation of OPC Ca2+ transients linking recorded in vitro behaviors to in vivo dynamics.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Detecting Lookahead Bias in LLM Forecasts

Authors:
Zhenyu Gao↗Wenxi Jiang↗Yutong Yan↗

arXiv:2512.23847v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a statistical procedure to detect lookahead bias in economic forecasts generated by large language models (LLMs). Using a date-only recall query for a firm-date pair, we estimate the probability that the LLM has internalized information about the realized outcome, a statistic we term Lookahead Propensity (LAP). LAP is materially positive throughout the in-sample period and collapses essentially to zero right after the training-data cutoff. We show that a positive interaction between LAP and the LLM forecast in an accuracy regression indicates lookahead-bias contamination, and apply the test to two forecasting tasks: news headlines predicting stock returns and earnings call transcripts predicting capital expenditures. In both applications, the LLM forecast's predictive power is amplified on high-LAP firm-date pairs, and the interaction loses significance on post-training-cutoff samples. Our test provides a cost-efficient, diagnostic tool for assessing the validity and reliability of LLM-generated forecasts.

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

LatentGym: A Testbed For Cross-Task Experiential Learning With Controllable Latent Structure

Authors:
Daksh Mittal↗Tommaso Castellani↗Thomson Yen↗Naimeng Ye↗Fangyu Wu↗Minghui Chen↗Tiffany Cai↗Emmanouil Koukoumidis↗William Zeng↗Hongseok Namkoong↗

arXiv:2606.15306v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision continually learning agentic systems that become more useful over time: as they encounter sequences of related tasks, they should infer the hidden structure shared across those tasks and use it to improve future decisions. This cross-task experiential learning capability is pivotal in domains such as personalization and interactive assistance, but existing training/evaluation frameworks do not provide shared, controllable latent structures and cannot measure whether or why agents improve. We introduce LatentGym: a controllable suite in which each environment is organized around a ground-truth latent variable governing the structure across tasks. Our construction yields metrics that separate exploration (whether the agent's actions gather information about the latent) from exploitation (whether the agent uses what it has gathered). We demonstrate our suite on empirical studies addressing three questions: how and why frontier models fail to adapt across related tasks; whether post-training on related task sequences improves general cross-task adaptation, and where those gains come from; and how design choices such as inter-task feedback shape training dynamics and generalization. Together, these results establish a controlled foundation for studying how LLM agents learn from experience across tasks, and for designing agents that adapt more reliably in sequential, personalized, and interactive settings.

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

REGRID-QAOA: A Resource-Efficient Graph-Reduced Hybrid QAOA Framework for Physics-Constrained Power System Islanding

Authors:
Yuqi Jiang↗Yuqi Zhang↗Zhiding Liang↗Qiang Guan↗Yan Li↗Ganesh Kumar Venayagamoorthy↗

arXiv:2606.15083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing has rapidly emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling computationally demanding problems. In particular, quantum optimization shows strong promise for hard combinatorial problems in power systems, where increasing distributed energy penetration heightens the need for intentional islanding to maintain grid reliability and resilience. However, power system islanding is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that becomes computationally prohibitive for classical solvers as network size grows, motivating the use of quantum computing as a promising alternative pipeline. This study develops a resource-efficient hybrid QAOA islanding framework that brings physics-constrained power-system partitioning into the quantum optimization workflow. The framework combines coherency-informed graph reduction, physics-aware constraint modeling, and structured post-processing to efficiently convert shallow-circuit QAOA samples into high-quality feasible islanding decisions without deep circuits or large shot budgets. The proposed framework is validated on the standard IEEE benchmark systems (9-, 14-, 24-, 30-, 39-, and 57-bus), demonstrating that the hybrid workflow achieves Gurobi-optimal solution quality with a clear quantum resource advantage over vanilla QAOA, while the resulting islanding solutions satisfy all physical feasibility requirements after network separation. This study establishes QAOA-based islanding as a viable quantum approach for critical infrastructure, with structured post-processing as the key enabler of quantum resource efficiency.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Airport Terminal Passenger Queue Forecasting for Departure Gates and Security Checkpoints

Authors:
Juhwan Lee↗Seokbin Yoon↗Keumjin Lee↗Hojong Baik↗Seyeon Jung↗

arXiv:2606.07622v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate passenger queue forecasting in airport terminals is essential for efficient departure operations, as it enables proactive congestion management. However, time-varying passenger demand and heterogeneous facility usage across multiple departure facilities make forecasting challenging. In this work, we propose a passenger queue forecasting framework that learns historical passenger flow patterns from operational data. The proposed model employs a Transformer-based architecture to capture temporal dependencies and inter-facility correlations using past queue length and waiting time at departure gates and security checkpoints, together with passenger throughput at check-in islands. The learned representations are mapped to two facility-specific prediction heads to predict queue length and waiting time at departure gates and security checkpoints. Experimental results demonstrate accurate forecasts up to two hours ahead. The proposed approach offers practical real-time decision support for proactive queue management and staff reallocation in airport terminal operations.

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

Trainable Quantum Channels as Computational Primitives for Quantum Learning

Authors:
Jingwei Wen↗Ling Qian↗Shijie Wei↗Guilu Long↗

arXiv:2606.15808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum learning is traditionally constrained to unitary dynamics, often treating quantum channels as detrimental noise. In this work, we reformulate the quantum channels as trainable computational primitives and establish a non-unitary quantum machine learning framework grounded in open-system dynamics. We demonstrate that the outputs of channel-enhanced quantum models form a structured superposition of multiple functional components. Each component is governed by an effective observable whose spectrum can be adaptively modulated during training, a significant departure from the spectral invariance in unitary transformations. Moreover, the proposed framework generalizes conventional unitary quantum models by retaining them as a special case while introducing additional non-unitary degrees of freedom. Furthermore, we reveal that trainable quantum channels enrich the optimization geometry through ensemble-averaged gradient and additional optimization directions induced by the Kraus operators. Empirical evaluations on classification tasks using trainable amplitude-damping and phase-damping channels confirm enhanced optimization dynamics and predictive performance. Our work provides a principled approach for leveraging quantum channels as trainable resources and advances the design of high-performance quantum learning architectures.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Your AI Travel Agent Would Book You a Bullfight: An Agentic Benchmark for Implicit Animal Welfare in Frontier AI Models

Authors:
Jasmine Brazilek↗Oliver Tulio↗Joel Christoph↗Miles Tidmarsh↗Carol Kline↗Arturs Kanepajs↗

AI agents are moving from advisors to actors, booking travel, planning menus, and running procurement on behalf of users. Existing benchmarks for AI and animal welfare evaluate model text responses to question-answer prompts, leaving open whether the welfare reasoning surfaced in those responses transfers to agentic deployment where the model must take actions with tools. We introduce TAC (Travel Agent Compassion), the first agentic benchmark measuring whether AI agents avoid options involving animal exploitation when acting on behalf of users. TAC presents an AI agent with twelve hand-authored travel booking scenarios across six categories of animal exploitation, augmented to forty-eight samples to control for price, rating, and position confounds. We evaluate seven frontier models from four labs. Every model scores below the chance level of sixty-four percent, with the best performer (Claude Opus 4.7) at fifty-three percent. A single welfare-aware sentence in the system prompt yields gains of forty-seven to sixty-three percentage points in Claude and GPT-5.5, twenty-six points in GPT-5.2, and under twelve points in DeepSeek and Gemini. An auxiliary Inspect Scout audit of 288 base-condition transcripts from the top two performers, using Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite as judge, flags zero transcripts for evaluation awareness, suggesting the below-chance rates do not stem from the models recognising the evaluation. We discuss implications for category-level variation across cultural domains, the limits of text-response welfare benchmarks, and the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice systemic risk framework.

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

EmoZone-Talker: Regional Semantic Control of Audio-Driven 3DGS Talking Heads via Facial Action Units

Authors:
Tingting Chen↗Shaojun Wang↗Huaye Zhang↗Diqiong Jiang↗Chenglizhao Chen↗

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has shown strong potential for high-fidelity talking head synthesis. However, enabling fine-grained, interpretable, and editable facial expression control remains fundamentally challenging due to intrinsic conflicts between speech-driven facial dynamics and explicit expression signals. Existing methods rely on implicit multimodal fusion, leading to spatial entanglement and temporal instability. We present EmoZone-Talker, a novel framework that reformulates audio-driven facial animation as a structured spatial-temporal coordination problem under cross-modal conflicts. Our approach introduces an explicit spatial disentanglement and temporal dynamics modeling of facial motion. Specifically, we propose Synergy Zones with Prioritized Attention Bias (SZ-PAB) to explicitly decouple modality contributions via region-wise constraints guided by anatomical priors, and a Channel-Independent Temporal AU Encoder (CIT-AE) to model temporally coherent AU dynamics. By integrating these representations into 3D Gaussian deformation, EmoZone-Talker enables precise and interpretable control over facial expressions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method improves expression controllability and realism, with notable gains in upper-face accuracy and temporal coherence, while preserving high rendering quality and accurate lip synchronization. Code will be publicly released to facilitate reproducibility and further research.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Pix2Pix-Hybrid: Structure-Guided Conditional Synthesis of Hajj Crowd Images with Multi-Channel Conditioning and Weak Attribute Supervision

Authors:
Amirah F. Alshammari↗Bander A. Alzahrani↗Nahed A. Alowidi↗

Developing accurate crowd-counting models for Hajj pilgrimage scenes remains challenging because domain-specific annotated images are scarce and data collection during large gatherings raises privacy concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Pix2Pix-Hybrid (P2P-H), a hybrid conditional GAN for structure-guided Hajj crowd-image synthesis and data augmentation. P2P-H builds on Pix2Pix and employs a U-Net generator conditioned on eight input channels that jointly encode structural cues (edges and grayscale) and contextual attributes (crowd density and time of day). To capture detailed textures in dense scenes, the framework integrates two multi-scale PatchGAN discriminators operating at different resolutions. The training procedure combines adversarial, perceptual, and feature-matching objectives with adaptive data augmentation and stabilization strategies. The model was trained on 993 real Hajj frames collected from 60 publicly available video sources, with conditioning attributes derived automatically to reduce manual labeling effort. Using this framework, we constructed CrowdH, a synthetic dataset of 10,000 high-resolution Hajj crowd images. Experimental results show that P2P-H improves structure-preserving conditional synthesis quality compared with Pix2Pix and StyleGAN2-ADA baselines and shows favorable transfer to other crowd datasets. To assess downstream utility, we further constructed CrowdH-Mix-469, an annotated mixed real-synthetic dataset comprising 384 real Hajj images and 85 selected synthetic images,and evaluated five crowd-counting models under real-only and real-plus-synthetic training. The selected synthetic data reduced MAE across all five models, with the strongest gain observed for CSRNet.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Specialty Choice Attitudes Among Medical Interns: Evidence from Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences

Authors:
Kashefi Sis↗Shendabadi↗Alimi↗Boushehri↗

Background: Choosing a medical specialty is a critical career decision that affects both physicians future professional lives and the composition of the healthcare workforce. Specialty preferences are shaped by multiple personal, educational, and socioeconomic factors, yet evidence from senior medical students in southern Iran remains limited. This study aimed to assess willingness to pursue specialty training among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences, identify their preferred specialties, and examine factors associated with their decisions. Methods: This descriptive-analytical cross-sectional study was conducted in 2023 among medical interns at Hormozgan University of Medical Sciences in Bandar Abbas, Iran. Using a convenience census approach, all eligible interns were invited to participate, and 83 students completed an online questionnaire. The instrument collected demographic, academic, and occupational data, as well as reasons for willingness or unwillingness to pursue specialty training and specialty preferences. Content and face validity were assessed by faculty members and students, and internal consistency reliability in the present study was acceptable (Cronbach alpha = 0.82). Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and logistic regression in SPSS version 27. Results: Of the 83 participants, 50 (60.2%) reported willingness to pursue specialty training, while 33 (39.8%) did not. Among students willing to continue, the most frequently cited reasons were achieving a better economic position, broader job opportunities, and higher social status. Among those unwilling to continue, the most common reasons were fatigue from prolonged studying, financial problems, and the desire to start working after graduation. Radiology was the most common first-choice specialty, followed by otorhinolaryngology, dermatology, and cardiology. In regression analyses, no demographic or academic variable remained independently associated with willingness to pursue specialty training in the final multivariable model. Conclusions: A majority of medical interns were interested in pursuing specialty training, with preferences concentrated in a limited number of specialties perceived as offering favorable financial prospects, prestige, and lifestyle. Economic concerns and educational fatigue were the dominant factors influencing willingness and unwillingness to continue specialty education. These findings highlight the need for structured career counseling, broader exposure to different specialties, and policy measures to address financial and structural barriers to residency training. Keywords: medical specialty choice; medical interns; residency training; medical education; Hormozgan university of medical sciences

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11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Authors:
Md. Minhazul Islam↗Md. Tanbeer Jubaer↗Amith Khandakar↗Shovon Sarker↗Sumaiya Rahman↗Md. Masum Mia↗Mohamed Arselene Ayari↗Hamed Noori↗

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

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

Graphical-Probabilistic Modeling of Generative Flows in LLM-Native Software Systems

Authors:
V\'ictor A. Braberman↗Flavia Bonomo-Braberman↗

arXiv:2606.15943v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering LLM-native software remains a challenging and immature field. Current practice is largely exploratory, relying on experimentation and heuristic techniques such as prompting and context engineering. These, however, are low-level and lack the principled structure needed to support design-level reasoning or analysis. In contrast, traditional software engineering leverages modularity and abstraction to communicate and analyze system behavior. To bring similar rigor to LLM-native development, we propose methods for documenting generative flows and for stating properties of LLM-based software designs. Such methods must account for the stochastic, prompt-dependent behavior of large language models while remaining expressive enough to capture emergent phenomena. Our initial approach is based on graphical probabilistic models, tailored to capture phenomena characteristic of LLM-native systems. This framework – what we term Generation Networks – aims to provide a foundation for principled reasoning about generative interactions and system-level properties in LLM-centric software architectures.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

TuneAhead: Predicting Fine-tuning Performance Before Full Training Begins

Authors:
Yuxiang Luo↗Haonan Long↗Chen Wang↗Qiqi Duan↗Xiaotian Lin↗Yanwei Xu↗Yuyu Luo↗Weikai Yang↗Nan Tang↗

arXiv:2606.17660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is compute-intensive and error-prone: model performance depends sensitively on data quality and hyperparameter choices, and naïve runs can even degrade model performance. This raises a practical question:can we predict fine-tuning performance before committing to a full training run? We present TUNEAHEAD, a lightweight framework for pre-hoc prediction of fine-tuning performance. TUNEAHEAD encodes each candidate run as a meta-feature vector that combines static dataset descriptors with dynamic probe features from a short standardized probe. A predictor maps these features to performance estimates, while SHAP-based attributions provide interpretable diagnostics that reveal which specific features drive the prediction. Across 1,300+ fine-tuning runs on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, TUNEAHEAD consistently outperforms strong baselines such as Early-Stop Extrapolation and ProxyLM. On a held-out test set of 370 runs, TUNEAHEAD achieves an RMSE of 1.47 percentage points and places 95.1% of predictions within +3/-3 percentage points of the true score. These accurate continuous predictions support practical go/no-go screening policies that can reduce unnecessary full fine-tuning while retaining most promising runs.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver for Accelerating Generative Modeling

Authors:
Hongxu Chen↗Hongxiang Li↗Zhen Wang↗Long Chen↗

arXiv:2601.21542v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) models have emerged as a leading paradigm for high-fidelity synthesis. However, their reliance on iterative Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) solving creates a significant latency bottleneck. Existing solutions face a dichotomy: training-free solvers suffer from significant performance degradation at low Neural Function Evaluations (NFEs), while training-based one- or few-steps generation methods incur prohibitive training costs and lack plug-and-play versatility. To bridge this gap, we propose the Bi-Anchor Interpolation Solver (BA-solver). BA-solver retains the versatility of standard training-free solvers while achieving significant acceleration by introducing a lightweight SideNet (1-2% backbone size) alongside the frozen backbone. Specifically, our method is founded on two synergistic components: 1) Bidirectional Temporal Perception, where the SideNet learns to approximate both future and historical velocities without retraining the heavy backbone; and 2) Bi-Anchor Velocity Integration, which utilizes the SideNet with two anchor velocities to efficiently approximate intermediate velocities for batched high-order integration. By utilizing the backbone to establish high-precision ``anchors'' and the SideNet to densify the trajectory, BA-solver enables large interval sizes with minimized error. Empirical results on ImageNet-256^2 demonstrate that BA-solver achieves generation quality comparable to 100+ NFEs Euler solver in just 10 NFEs and maintains high fidelity in as few as 5 NFEs, incurring negligible training costs. Furthermore, BA-solver ensures seamless integration with existing generative pipelines, facilitating downstream tasks such as image editing.

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

Hierarchical Control in Multi-Agent Games: LLM-based Planning and RL Execution

Authors:
Jannik H\"osch↗Alessandro Sestini↗Florian Fuchs↗Amir Baghi↗Joakim Bergdahl↗Konrad Tollmar↗Jean-Philippe Barrette-LaPierre↗Linus Gissl\'en↗

arXiv:2606.20014v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved strong performance in sequential decision-making, yet scaling to complex multi-agent environments remains challenging due to sparse rewards, large state-action spaces, and the difficulty of learning coordinated strategies. We propose a hierarchical architecture where a pretrained large language model (LLM) acts as a centralized strategic controller that selects among specialized RL skill policies for a team of agents, while RL policies handle reactive low-level execution. We evaluate this hybrid system in a competitive 2v2 King of the Hill environment against behavior tree (BT) and ``Flat'' RL (end-to-end training without skill decomposition) baselines. The LLM+RL system achieves task performance statistically equivalent to hand-crafted BT (46.4\% vs 51.5\% win rate, $p=0.103$) while both significantly outperform Flat RL trained without skill decomposition. A user study ($n=15$) reveals that 60\% of participants perceive LLM+RL agents as the most human-like ($p=0.027$), citing behavioral adaptability and tactical variability. These results demonstrate that pretrained LLM reasoning can effectively orchestrate pretrained RL skills, achieving competitive multi-agent coordination and superior perceived believability without manual rule engineering.

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16.
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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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Hantavirus Disease in Uruguay: Trends and Mortality Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Authors:
criscuolo↗Blanco↗Ferrara↗Ciaccio↗Gomez Carassale↗Gonzalez Reyes↗Machado Rivero↗Sosa Dias↗Facal Castro↗J. A↗

Introduction: Hantavirus disease is an emerging and potentially severe zoonosis of global distribution. In Uruguay, it is transmitted by rodents inhabiting peridomestic, suburban, and rural areas. Global incidence is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year, with up to 300 annual cases in the Americas. Since 1997, Uruguay's Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has monitored Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), the most common clinical presentation in the region. By 2019, a total of 271 cases had been identified in the country, with an estimated mortality rate of nearly 50%. Objectives: To describe the clinical, epidemiological, and occupational characteristics of patients with Hantavirus disease in Uruguay during the pre-pandemic (2018-2019) and pandemic (2020-2021) periods. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted, including all serologically confirmed cases of Hantavirus infection reported to the MPH between 2018 and 2021. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from the mandatory reporting form for zoonotic diseases. Incidence and case fatality rates were calculated, and factors associated with fatal outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 58 confirmed cases were identified between 2018 and 2021. Most patients were male (62%), with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD 16). A decline in incidence was observed during 2020-2021, with no significant change in case fatality. Direct rodent exposure was the most frequently associated risk factor. Montevideo and Canelones were the most affected departments. Renal and pulmonary involvement were significantly associated with mortality. Conclusion: Hantavirus remains a relevant public health concern in Uruguay. Although a decrease in incidence was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic years, case fatality rates remained high. The findings underscore the need for sustained surveillance and early recognition, particularly in urbanizing regions.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Preregistration for Experiments with AI Agents

Authors:
Michelle Vaccaro↗

arXiv:2606.11217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) and autonomous AI agents has given rise to a rapidly growing methodological paradigm: "in silico" behavioral experiments. Originally conceived as a way to use AI agents as proxies for human participants in studies of cognition, decision-making, and social dynamics, this approach has taken on new significance – as AI agents increasingly negotiate, transact, and make consequential decisions on behalf of people and organizations, understanding their behavior has become a research priority in its own right. While these experiments with AI agents offer unprecedented advantages in terms of scalability, cost efficiency, and experimental control, they also inherit, and in some cases amplify, methodological vulnerabilities that have long plagued human subjects research. To address these issues, this paper argues that preregistration practices – central to improving the credibility of human subjects experiments – should now be extended to experiments with AI agents. We systematically catalog the researcher degrees of freedom that experiments with AI agents introduce – model selection, prompt wording, settings, and outcome-contingent redesign, for example – and show how the low cost of iteration and lack of reporting norms make these choices both easy to exploit and difficult to detect. We propose a preregistration template tailored to experiments with AI agents and call on conferences, journals, and funding agencies to make preregistration standard practice for this emerging research paradigm.

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

Sequential Hiring of Contingent Workers Through Learning-Based Optimization

Authors:
Chris Lee↗Xiuli Chao↗Izak Duenyas↗

arXiv:2606.18438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we study a sequential workforce management problem in a contingent labor setting with uncertainty in both worker production and labor supply. A firm seeks to maximize cumulative profit by maintaining an active team of fixed size while learning worker productivity over time. We emphasize two critical operational frictions in this problem: replacing workers is costly, and workers may not be available immediately for hiring because of, for example, prior job commitments, scheduling constraints, or onboarding procedures. Thus, hiring decisions take effect only after a random delay. We formulate this problem as a stochastic multi-play bandit with costly switching and delayed actions, and develop a learning-based hiring policy, DR-UCB (DelayedReplacement-UCB), that makes replacement and hiring decisions sequentially through learning cycles. In each cycle, the policy uses real-time production data to determine when to initiate workforce changes and which workers to replace and hire. We show that the leading-order regret of the proposed policy matches its lower bound in its dependence on the time horizon. Our numerical experiments show that DR-UCB outperforms benchmark policies.

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20.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-22

Why heritage sites are at risk in a warming world — and how to save them

Authors:
William Megarry↗

As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently. As rising seas and intensifying disasters threaten historic sites worldwide, new ways to understand, preserve and adapt these places are needed urgently.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

AI Receptivity or AI Adoption Breadth? A Tool-Specific Reanalysis of the Lower-Literacy/Higher-Usage Link

Authors:
Hristo Inouzhe↗

arXiv:2606.13734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent evidence reported by Tully, Longoni, and Appel (2025) suggests that lower artificial intelligence (AI) literacy predicts greater receptivity toward AI. We revisit this claim using the public data from Study 3 of that article, which measures past usage of five AI tool categories on a five-point frequency scale. We first reproduce the negative association between AI literacy and aggregate AI usage using OLS on participant-level averages, binary logit, ordered logit, and multinomial logit specifications. We then show that the aggregate relationship masks substantial heterogeneity by tool type. In our demographic-adjusted primary specification, AI literacy does not significantly predict text AI usage (ordered-logit $\beta$ = -0.090, p = .387), whereas it remains a strong predictor of non-text AI adoption ($\beta$ = -0.377, p < .001). The non-text effect is also robust under Tully et al.'s original Study 3 control specification ($\beta$ = -0.502, p < .001). Binary, ordered-logit, and multinomial specifications suggest that the non-text relationship is primarily an adoption/non-adoption pattern rather than evidence of intensive use: the demographic-adjusted odds ratio of ever having used a non-text AI tool is 0.68. Thus, in the study that measures self-reported past usage rather than stated preferences, the evidence does not support a simple claim that lower AI literacy predicts greater receptivity to AI in general. It points instead to a narrower pattern of broader adoption across lower-penetration, non-text AI tools.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Data-driven Lake Water Quality Forecasting for Time Series with Missing Data using Machine Learning

Authors:
Rishit Chatterjee↗Tahiya Chowdhury↗

arXiv:2601.15503v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Volunteer-led lake monitoring yields irregular, seasonal time series with many gaps arising from ice cover, weather-related access constraints, and occasional human errors, complicating forecasting and early warning of harmful algal blooms. We study Secchi Disk Depth (SDD) forecasting on a 30-lake, data-rich subset drawn from three decades of in-situ records collected across Maine lakes. Missingness is handled via Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE), and we evaluate performance with a normalized Mean Absolute Error (nMAE) metric for cross-lake comparability. Among six candidates, ridge regression provides the best mean test performance. Using ridge regression, we then quantify the minimal sample size, showing that under a backward, recent-history protocol, the model reaches within 5% of full-history accuracy with approximately 176 training samples per lake on average. We also identify a minimal feature set, where a compact four-feature subset matches the thirteen-feature baseline within the same 5% tolerance. Bringing these results together, we introduce a joint feasibility function that identifies the minimal training history and fewest predictors sufficient to achieve the target of staying within 5% of the complete-history, full-feature baseline. In our study, meeting the 5% accuracy target required about 64 recent samples and just one predictor per lake, highlighting the practicality of targeted monitoring. Hence, our joint feasibility strategy unifies recent-history length and feature choice under a fixed accuracy target, yielding a simple, efficient rule for setting sampling effort and measurement priorities for lake researchers.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum Network Routing based on Surface Code Error Correction

Authors:
Tianjie Hu↗Jindi Wu↗Qun Li↗

arXiv:2606.12781v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum networks encounter unavoidable channel noises and erasure errors, presenting a huge obstacle in designing protocols that attain both high reliability and efficiency. Typically, quantum networks fall into two categories: those utilize quantum entanglements for quantum teleportation, and those directly transfer the actual quantum messages. In this paper, we present SurfNet, a quantum network that inherits the main advantages from both categories. It employs surface codes as logical qubits for encoding messages, and utilizes two parallel communication channels to fault-tolerantly transfer each surface code in a modular manner. Our approach of using surface codes can timely correct both operational and photon loss errors within the network, and the integration of the two channels within the network can greatly improve network throughput. For the implementation of SurfNet, we propose a novel network architecture, designed to better integrate surface codes into quantum networks. We also propose a novel error correction decoder, designed to fully utilize the modular characteristic of surface codes within our network. Simulation results demonstrate that SurfNet with its decoder significantly enhances the communication fidelity within quantum networks.

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

From Persistence to Survival: Hypothesis Testing, Effect Sizes and Vectorisation for Topological Features

Authors:
Juliette Murris↗Bernadette Stolz↗Karsten Borgwardt↗

arXiv:2606.11911v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Persistence diagrams are common representations in topological data analysis, but they do not naturally live in a vector space, and the statistical tools developed for comparing them have largely evolved separately from those used for downstream prediction. We introduce STRAND (Survival Topological Representation ANalysis of Diagrams), which treats (collections of) PDs as survival data: each topological feature with persistence value $p = d - b$ is a fully observed time-to-event, and the persistence survival function $S(t) = \mathbb{P}(p > t)$ is the central object for comparing diagrams. From this single representation we derive (i) a non-parametric two-sample test with calibrated Type I error and high power from a small number of diagrams; (ii) interpretable effect sizes; and (iii) a 1-Wasserstein-stable feature vector for downstream machine learning. We validate calibration and power on synthetic manifolds with controlled topology, demonstrate competitive vectorisation across 14 graph and 3D point cloud benchmarks, and apply the method to study functional brain connectivity in fMRI/neuroscience data. To our knowledge, STRAND is the first method to provide hypothesis testing and vectorisation for persistence diagrams from a single coherent and interpretable representation.

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