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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Certifying Nonclassical Proper-Time Histories with a Quantum Clock

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum clocks can acquire relativistic phases from motional or gravitational proper-time differences, but reduced clock dephasing alone does not certify nonclassical proper-time histories. We formulate this distinction as a channel-certification problem. First, we show that any two-level single-time dephasing signal, including one generated by an effective quantum proper-time label, admits a classical random proper-time representation. We then define the convex set of classical mixtures of experimentally specified proper-time histories and prove a Choi-rank separation criterion for conditioned coherent history recombination. A two-branch Ramsey protocol gives explicit bright- and dark-port population witnesses outside this classical set. The certification is operational and relative to the specified history set: it rules out classical mixtures of the same implemented proper-time histories, not arbitrary classical protocols with different histories or controls.

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

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606.13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes – quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment – using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoning-off contemporaries. Across 120 firm x axis x model scores, the pooled mean absolute deviation between the reasoning-on model and each reasoning-off counterpart is 0.38 on a 5-point scale; only 2% of pairwise comparisons reach a two-point deviation, and none exceeds two points. Per-firm cost accounting shows the reasoning-on arm alone costs roughly 5.6x as much as the three-provider reasoning-off ensemble, for outcomes that differ only within small margins. We conclude that in span-based ESG narrative scoring, reasoning-heavy deployment does not materially improve outcomes relative to reasoning-off consensus, while substantially increasing operational cost. We discuss implications for cost-effective ESG auto-scoring pipelines and LLM deployment governance in applied accountability settings. An earlier version of this work is available on SSRN (Abstract ID 6683303).

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-16

Mathematicians are developing rules for AI use — other fields should follow

Authors: Unknown Author

The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach. The mathematics community is right to call for transparency, integrity and fairness to be protected when AI tools are used. Researchers in other disciplines could learn from this approach.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Convergence of a Critical Multitype Bellman–Harris Process with One Infinite-Mean Lifetime

arXiv:2606.11511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a critical multitype Bellman–Harris branching particle system in $\mathbb R^N$ with a finite type space $\mathbb K=\{1,\dots,K\}$. Particles of type $i$ move according to a symmetric $\alpha_i$-stable process and reproduce according to a critical offspring law whose mean matrix is irreducible and stochastic. The lifetime distribution of type $1$ is assumed to have infinite mean with regularly varying tail $$ 1-F_1(t)\sim c_1t^{-\gamma},\, 0 \frac{\gamma}{\beta}, $$ and a local increment condition on the heavy lifetime distribution, we prove convergence of the system to a Poisson random measure concentrated on the infinite-mean type.

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

Sustainable Metal-Organic Framework Water Harvesters in the Artificial Intelligence Era

arXiv:2605.29179v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are excellent candidates for water harvesting due to their tunable pore environments, which can be precisely engineered to capture and release water in arid conditions. Integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into MOF discovery can further accelerate the design of high-performance sorbents by identifying structural features that enhance atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), stability, and cycling efficiency. In this Perspective, we examine key MOF design principles, including cooperative adsorption, operational relative humidity (RH), uptake capacity, hysteresis, and scalability. We highlight recent design advancements such as multivariate strategies and long-arm linker extension, and examine how these principles tune pore capacity and hydrophilicity, while preserving stability and crystallinity. Furthermore, we discuss how AI, large language models (LLMs), and data mining can accelerate the discovery process through predictive synthesis, inverse design, and elucidating synthesis-structure-property relationships for the next generation of MOF water harvesters.

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

Hybrid Classical-Quantum (HCQ) Alzheimer's Classification via Supervised $\beta$-VAE and Quantum Kernels

This paper presents a two-stage Hybrid Classical-Quantum (HCQ) pipeline for binary Alzheimer's disease (AD) classification from 3D T1-weighted structural MRI volumes, where the classical and quantum components are designed to complement each other rather than operate independently. A supervised 3D $\beta$-variational autoencoder (VAE) is trained end-to-end under voxel-wise reconstruction, KL-divergence, and focal classification losses that compress each 3D MRI volume (resized from 152 x 184 x 152 to 96 x 96 x 96) into a 64-dimensional latent code. Partial Least Squares (PLS) regression selects the six components in the latent code that best separate Alzheimer's Disease (AD) from cognitively normal (CN) subjects and rescales them into rotation angles, which are encoded onto a six-qubit register using the ZZ quantum feature map to give us the respective quantum states. The input to a precomputed-kernel Support Vector Machine (SVM) is an N x N Gram matrix (N = 308), created by calculating the overlap between every pair of quantum states. The novelty of this work lies in the fact that the quantum kernel operates directly on disease-aware features that are learned end-to-end by a supervised autoencoder, rather than on pre-extracted inputs. On 308 ADNI-1 subjects, consisting of 137 AD and 171 CN subjects, the baseline achieved 67.2% accuracy and 0.759 AUC, while the stability-enhanced variant reached 72.1% accuracy and 0.799 AUC with cross-fold variance halved. 3D Grad-CAM further helped validate our model's focus on brain regions linked to Alzheimer's. The HCQ pipeline could serve as a general-purpose framework for diagnostic classification across biomedical imaging domains that present similar challenges for classical approaches.

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

Automated Standardization of Legacy Biomedical Metadata Using an Ontology-Constrained LLM Agent

arXiv:2604.08552v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Scientific metadata are often incomplete and noncompliant with community standards, limiting dataset findability, interoperability, and reuse. Even when standard metadata reporting guidelines exist, they typically lack machine-actionable representations. Producing FAIR datasets requires encoding metadata standards as machine-actionable templates with rich field specifications and precise value constraints. Recent work has shown that LLMs guided by field names and ontology constraints can improve metadata standardization, but these approaches treat constraints as static text prompts, relying on the model's training knowledge alone. We present an LLM-based metadata standardization system that queries standard reporting guidelines and authoritative biomedical terminology services in real time to retrieve canonically correct standards on demand. We evaluate this approach on 839 legacy metadata records from the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program (HuBMAP) using an expert-curated gold standard for exact-match assessment. Our evaluation shows that augmenting the LLM with real-time tool access consistently improves prediction accuracy over the LLM alone across both ontology-constrained and non-ontology-constrained fields, demonstrating a practical approach to automated standardization of biomedical metadata.

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

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

arXiv:2504.09762v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thinking traces} – implicitly anthropomorphizing the traces, and implying that these traces resemble steps a human might take when solving a challenging problem, and as such can provide an interpretable window into the operation of the model's thinking process to the end user. In this position paper, we present evidence that this anthropomorphization isn't a harmless metaphor, and instead is quite dangerous – it confuses the nature of these models and how to use them effectively, and leads to questionable research. We call on the community to avoid such anthropomorphization of intermediate tokens.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Learning Fair Pareto-Optimal Policies in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fairness is an important aspect of decision-making in multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL), where policies must ensure both optimality and equity across multiple, potentially conflicting objectives. While single-policy MORL methods can learn fair policies for fixed user preferences using welfare functions such as the generalized Gini welfare function (GGF), they fail to provide the diverse set of policies necessary for dynamic or unknown user preferences. To address this limitation, we formalize the fair optimization problem in multi-policy MORL, where the goal is to learn a set of Pareto-optimal policies that ensure fairness across all possible user preferences. Our key technical contributions are threefold: (1) We show that for concave, piecewise-linear welfare functions (e.g., GGF), fair policies remain in the convex coverage set (CCS), which is an approximated Pareto front for linear scalarization. (2) We demonstrate that non-stationary policies, augmented with accrued reward histories, and stochastic policies improve fairness by dynamically adapting to historical inequities. (3) We propose three novel algorithms, which include integrating GGF with multi-policy multi-objective Q-Learning (MOQL), state-augmented multi-policy MOQL for learning non-statoinary policies, and its novel extension for learning stochastic policies. We evaluate our algorithms across various domains and compare our methods against the state-of-the-art MORL baselines. The empirical results show that our methods learn a set of fair policies that accommodate different user preferences.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Critical Percolation as a Synthetic Data Model for Interpretability

arXiv:2606.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks learn features that reflect the hierarchical, multi-scale structure of natural data. Synthetic datasets used to evaluate interpretability methods typically lack this structure, limiting their value as realistic toy models. To close this gap, we introduce a family of synthetic datasets consisting of hierarchical functions defined on critical mean-field percolation clusters embedded in a high-dimensional data space. The percolation data consists of sparse, low-dimensional fractal clusters with a power-law size distribution. Latent variables modeling a taxonomic hierarchy generate each data point's target value. The data model is analytically tractable with known critical exponents that fix its properties without requiring hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a mapping between percolation clusters, random trees, and additive coalescence to propose an almost linear-time algorithm to jointly sample a random tree and its hierarchical latent decomposition, enabling data generation at arbitrary scale. Using probing experiments, we find that the model's ground-truth latent variables can be linearly decoded from neural network activations. Together, sparsity, self-similarity, power-law statistics, and analytical tractability make critical percolation a principled testbed for interpretability research.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

ECG-Guided Pre-Screening of Family Members for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Background: Current clinical guidelines recommend serial ECG and echocardiographic surveillance for first-degree relatives of probands with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). Objectives: To evaluate the accuracy and validity of ECG alone as a pre-screening tool for the diagnosis of HCM and to develop a random forest (RF) model for HCM phenotype prediction. Method: Pediatric relatives of primary HCM probands attending the cardiomyopathy screening program at The Hospital for Sick Children were included from 1993 to 2025. Subjects were followed until the last follow-up, censored at phenotype conversion. ECGs were classified as normal or abnormal based on predefined parameters. Associations between binary ECG variables and HCM phenotype were assessed using Phi ({varphi}) coefficient. A Random Forest classifier was developed using significant ECG variables (70:30 training: test split) and evaluated using precision, recall, specificity, negative predictive value, F1 score and AUROC. Feature importance was assessed using SHAP analysis. Variables with an impact of >5% were included in a simplified model, which was evaluated by repeating performance metrics and externally validated in a healthy cohort. Results: 350 screened relatives (44% female, mean follow-up 6.8 +- 4.8 years) were included. At baseline, 13% (46350) were phenotype-positive for HCM. 9 subjects converted during the surveillance. Thirteen ECG variables were significantly associated with phenotype-positive HCM and were included in the full random forest model. Four variables had >5% impact (Left ventricular hypertrophy, right ventricular hypertrophy, T-wave inversion and ST-segment depression) and were included in a simplified model, which maintained high specificity (93% vs 97%), negative predictive value (97% vs 93%) and AUROC (90% vs 96%). The simplified model classified 83% subjects as phenotype-negative, with eight being false-negative, all of whom developed an abnormal ECG in a mean of 1 year, and none had an interim adverse cardiac event. The simplified model was evaluated in an independent healthy cohort of 153 school-age subjects and correctly identified 98% as phenotype-negative with 100% NPV. Conclusion: ECG abnormalities were strongly associated with phenotype-positive status. A simplified ECG-based random forest model using four ECG variables demonstrated high specificity and negative predictive value for identifying phenotype-negative subjects. If prospectively validated, this could reduce the need for concurrent echocardiographic screening by up to 83% per encounter, lowering screening burden and cost.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Initiation of Superradiance from Different Collective Spin States

arXiv:2606.14949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superradiance is an extensive cooperative spontaneous emission phenomenon. Some atomic collective spin states exhibit it. However, distinct initial states differ in their decay dynamics. Dicke states with different numbers of excitations have their peak emission intensity shifted in time depending on the number of excitations. Emission intensity in atomic coherent states depends on their polarization. Some specific states undergo a squeezing controlled crossover, making the emission character dependent on the amount of squeezing in the state. We present detailed results on the superradiant dynamics of a representative selection of Dicke states. For large N, we are able to predict fairly accurately the pulse profile in each case using the mean field approximation, an approach based on the Fokker Planck Equation. We also present results on the intensity correlation function of the emission.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Practical Anonymous Two-Party Gradient Boosting Decision Tree

arXiv:2605.26903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured data is well handled by gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT), which are usually trained on vertically partitioned features across mutually distrustful parties. High speed and interpretability make GBDTs popular in finance and healthcare, where neural networks may fall short. Enabling secure computation for GBDTs poses unique challenges, requiring secure record alignment for comparison. Relying on private set intersection (PSI) is a de facto approach. Mistaking PSI for a safety measure actually exposes which record identifiers (IDs) are shared between the datasets. Although circuit-PSI could help, it is costly for generic uses. New ideas are needed to efficiently train in a "dark forest". Aiming to hide the IDs, we initiate the study of anonymous GBDT training on split data held by two parties. Dual circuit-PSI in our design lets the parties alternate as receiver to run pick-then-sum over local features. Via oblivious programmable pseudorandom functions, we propagate circuit-PSI outputs as shared state across runs. Avoiding universal alignment, we resolve the neglected dilemma that ID hiding incurs a cost that scales with domain size. Next, we halve the cost of ciphertext packing used to convert single-instruction multiple-data homomorphic encryption from (ring) learning with errors in prior secure GBDT (Usenix Security' 23) and related secure machine-learning computations. Comparative experiments show our protocol remains competitive with leaky approaches in efficiency. Enabling ID-hiding aggregation, our techniques can extend to other vertically partitioned analytics.

14.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

A lactylation- and autophagy-associated prognostic signature reveals LSEC-derived CLEC3B as a novel mediator of hepatocellular carcinoma suppression

Authors:

by Youai Song, Yinkuan Ning, Meihui Li, Jianwei Lan, Liangchen Lei, Yufei Han, Zhuo Meng, Binjie Li, Pengpeng Liu, Quanyan Liu The crosstalk between lactylation and autophagy within the hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) microenvironment is a burgeoning field with profound implications. By integrating multi-omics data from public cohorts, we delineated two molecular subtypes of HCC with divergent clinical outcomes and established a lactylation-autophagy-related prognostic signature. This signature highlighted CLEC3B as a pivotal gene. Subsequent single-cell RNA sequencing and experimental validation unequivocally pinpointed liver sinusoidal endothelial cells (LSECs) as the principal cellular source of CLEC3B, which was significantly downregulated in HCC tissues. Functionally, conditioned media derived from CLEC3B-overexpressing LSECs potently inhibited HCC cell proliferation. Mechanistic investigations revealed that this tumor-suppressive effect was orchestrated through the concurrent suppression of autophagy and diminution of lactylation levels. Our findings position LSEC-secreted CLEC3B as a novel metabolic mediator in HCC, bridging two key pathways in tumor suppression, and endorse its clinical value both as a prognostic indicator and a promising therapeutic target.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Resource-Efficient Variational Quantum Classifier

arXiv:2511.09204v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the unambiguous quantum classifier based on Hamming distance measurements combined with classical post-processing. The proposed approach improves classification performance through a more effective use of ansatz expressivity, while requiring significantly fewer circuit evaluations. Moreover, the method demonstrates enhanced robustness to noise, which is crucial for near-term quantum devices. We evaluate the proposed method on a breast cancer classification dataset. The unambiguous classifier achieves an average accuracy of 90%, corresponding to an improvement of 6.9 percentage points over the baseline, while requiring eight times fewer circuit executions per prediction. In the presence of noise, the improvement is reduced to approximately 3.1 percentage points, with the same reduction in execution cost. We substantiate our experimental results with theoretical evidence supporting the practical performance of the approach.

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

Self-Driving Datasets: From 20 Million Papers to Nuanced Biomedical Knowledge at Scale

arXiv:2605.07022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manually curated biomedical repositories – spanning bioactivity, genomics, and chemistry – are expensive to maintain, lag behind primary literature, and discard experimental context, obscuring nuances needed to assess data correctness and coverage. We show that PubMed itself can be autonomously and cost-effectively turned into structured datasets that are larger, more nuanced, and more accurate than the curated databases they replace. We present three coupled contributions: (1) an LLM-based entity-tagging pipeline, grounded in nine biomedical ontologies, that tags 4.5B entities across 19 categories in a 22.5M-paper, 2.5T-token PubMed corpus; (2) hybrid sparse-dense retrieval supporting entity-filtered semantic queries over the tagged corpus; and (3) Starling, a multi-agent deep research system that, given only a natural-language task description, designs precision- and recall-targeted retrieval filters, induces an extraction schema, and emits structured records with nuance-rich fields and supporting passages. Across six tasks – blood-brain barrier permeability, oral bioavailability, acute toxicity (LD50), gene-disease associations, protein subcellular localization, and chemical reactions – Starling produces ~6.3M records (91K-3M per task); several are, to our knowledge, the largest public datasets for their property. Frontier-model rejection of our extractions is 0.6-7.7% across tasks, far below error rates we measure on widely used curated counterparts (e.g., 16.5% on BBB_Martins, 7.3% on Bioavailability_Ma). Beyond scale and accuracy, the supporting passages carry nuance tabular databases discard – e.g., oral bioavailability may depend on fed vs. fasted state. Together, the corpus, retrieval, and agent establish a foundation for AI-driven therapeutic design. Code and datasets: https://github.com/starling-labs/starling.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Bayesian Magnetic Resonance Joint Image Reconstruction and Uncertainty Quantification using Sparsity Prior Models and Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling

We propose a novel framework for uncertainty quantification using compressed sensing magnetic resonance image reconstruction. The problem is formulated within a Bayesian framework as a linear inverse problem, with prior distributions assigned to the unknown model parameters. Specifically, the image to be reconstructed is assumed to be sparse in a given basis. We develop a general framework applicable to any basis and as examples, we test the sparsity of the image in its (1) spatial gradients using a total variation prior model, and in its (2) wavelet transform. A Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, based on a split-and-augmented Gibbs sampler, is then employed to sample from the posterior distribution of the unknown parameters. The non-differentiable conditional distributions are efficiently sampled using a proximal MCMC method. The proposed algorithms are validated on both single-coil and multi-coil datasets using various k-space sub-sampling patterns and ratios. The results demonstrate the superior performance of each proposed approach in reconstructing images compared to its counterpart optimisation-based method. Moreover, our framework effectively quantifies uncertainty, showing a notable correlation between estimated uncertainty maps and error maps computed using ground truth and reconstructed images, compared with existing deep learning-based methods.

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

RLRC: Reinforcement Learning-based Recovery for Compressed Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2506.17639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action models (VLA) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and strong potential in complex robotic manipulation. However, their large parameter sizes and high inference latency hinder real-world deployment, especially on resource-constrained platforms. To address this, we conduct a systematic empirical study of model compression for VLAs. Building on these insights, we present RLRC, a three-stage compression and recovery pipeline consisting of structured pruning, performance recovery via SFT and RL, and subsequent quantization. The RL stage incorporates a critic warm-up strategy and BC loss regularization to stabilize training and preserve policy behavior. RLRC achieves up to an 8 times memory reduction and 2.3 times inference speedup while maintaining the original task success rate. Extensive experiments across multiple VLA backbones show that RLRC consistently outperforms existing compression baselines, highlighting its effectiveness for on-device deployment. Project website: https://rlrc-vla.github.io

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Scaling native entanglement generation in layered semiconductors with quasi-phase matching

arXiv:2606.14553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient generation of entangled photons typically relies on spontaneous parametric down-conversion (SPDC) in phase-matched macroscopic nonlinear media. However, generating entanglement under phase-matching constraints requires additional bulk optics or interferometers. In contrast, ultrathin van der Waals semiconductors - such as transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) - exhibit strong enough optical nonlinearities for SPDC to be observed from subwavelength-thick media, thereby bypassing conventional phase-matching constraints. In this microscopic domain, the intrinsic crystal symmetry governs the nonlinear optical response, enabling the native generation of polarization-entangled photon pairs. However, generating these states efficiently has been fundamentally restricted by the material's coherence length ($L_c$), which limits the attainable conversion efficiency. Here, we investigate periodically-poled TMDs (PPTMDs) designed to scale up this interaction via quasi-phase matching. We demonstrate that mechanically flipping the sign of the nonlinearity at precise intervals of $L_c$ introduces quasi-phase matching, that scales the pair-production rate while preserving the pristine, symmetry-generated polarization entanglement, with fidelities exceeding 99%. Backed by a rigorous theoretical model, our work clarifies the interplay between crystal symmetry and propagation effects in thin nonlinear media, providing a new avenue for engineering quantum light in nanophotonic systems.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SoftSkill: Behavioral Compression for Contextual Adaptation

arXiv:2606.20333v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills are commonly deployed as natural-language Markdown files that encode answer policies, evidence-use habits, and task procedures. These files are readable and portable, but they are consumed indirectly: for each task instance, a frozen language model must translate a long textual artifact into generation-time behavior. This paper asks whether a natural-language skill can instead initialize a compact continuous context object, refined by a trainable soft delta while the base model remains frozen. We propose SoftSkill, a frozen-backbone method that tunes such soft skills with next-token prediction and deploys them as latent behavioral priors at inference time. In our main single-round setting, a length-32 SoftSkill prefix on Qwen3.5-4B improves over no-skill prompting by 8.3 points on SearchQA, 42.1 points on LiveMath, and 1.3 points on DocVQA. Relative to SkillOpt, SoftSkill improves accuracy by 5.2 points on SearchQA and 12.5 points on LiveMath, while replacing hundreds to thousands of Markdown skill tokens with a few virtual tokens. We further study agentic execution as a harder boundary case, where sparse trajectory imitation provides useful signal but does not yet robustly compress long-horizon procedural behavior. More broadly, the results suggest that some task skills are better treated not as additional Markdown to be reinterpreted at inference time, but as compact latent controls over how a frozen model enters the task.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Blind Recovery of Latent Domains via Unsupervised Symmetry Discovery

arXiv:2606.17782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Primary motivation in blind inverse problems is to recover signals of interest from corrupted observations without knowing the obfuscating mechanism. Blind deconvolution is a prominent approach when the corruption is convolutional, but it is not applicable when general linear transformations obfuscate the domain structure. In this work, we propose an unsupervised framework for recovering latent domains and signals by discovering symmetries of the data distribution. Our framework models observations as linear measurements of signals sampled from a latent random field, and optimizes a shallow group-convolutional network by imposing stationarity and locality regularization at the model output. The model learns a latent symmetry action and an appropriate filter, thereby mapping unstructured observations to a symmetry-based representation that reveals latent signals. Experiments on stochastic processes, Ising models, shuffled and bit-scrambled images, and neural recordings show that the method recovers latent domains and signals from unstructured observations, suggesting symmetry discovery as a new direction for unsupervised structure learning and blind inverse problems.

23.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Towards modeling phage therapy

by Rob J. de Boer, Robert Schooley, Alan S. Perelson Patients infected with life-threatening multi-drug resistant (MDR) bacteria have been treated with cocktails of bacteriophages. This is a complicated form of personalized medicine as the phages given to a patient have to be selected beforehand on the basis of their lytic capacity of the infecting bacteria. Because bacteria rapidly become resistant, the evolution of resistance to a diverse cocktail of phages is a complicated dynamical process, during which competing bacterial strains replace one another by accumulating several resistance mechanisms, each of which may involve a fitness cost. As a consequence, it is typically not known why a particular phage therapy succeeded or failed, and how one can optimize the composition of the cocktails to maximize the rate of success. To improve upon this, we extend an existing in vivo-calibrated mouse model into a novel mathematical model for the human situation, and include multiple phages infecting multiple bacterial strains, differing in their resistance to each of the phages. We adjust several parameter estimates of the bacterial model to the human situation, and use the model to describe a successful case of phage therapy involving several cocktails, each containing several phages. In the model, treatment success crucially depended on pretreatment resistance levels, and on the diversity and the timing of the cocktails. Once an appropriate cocktail is found, it is less important to further optimize the infection rates of the phages. Resistant bacterial strains expand rapidly when sensitive strains decline, and the higher the infectivity of the phages, the faster resistant strains expand. Because resistance evolves rapidly, it is best to provide a diverse set of phages right from the start of therapy, i.e., to hit hard and early, and create a high genetic barrier to bacterial resistance.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Specific epigenetic age acceleration measures are associated with oral health outcomes in U.S. adults

Objectives: Oral health conditions impact a significant proportion of the global population. Chronological age is a known risk factor; however, characterization of epigenetic age remains limited and is expected to provide additional insight into biological mechanisms. Materials and Methods: The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) was used to analyze the effect of epigenetic age measures of DunedinPoAm, and epigenetic age acceleration (EAA) of Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, VidalBralo, PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, on various oral health outcomes from survey and examination results. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression were performed, adjusting for sex, race-ethnicity, education, poverty income ratio categories, and dental insurance coverage status. Results: DunedinPoAm was associated with the last dental appointment being for an existing issue (p=0.0093), poor general oral condition (p=0.0226), limiting food due to teeth problems (p=0.0031), and recommendation to see a dentist within the next two weeks (p=0.0171). EAAs for PhenoAge, GrimAge, and GrimAge2, were associated with a smaller number of oral health outcomes, whereas EAAs for Horvath, Hannum, Weidner, Lin, and Vidal-Bralo showed no associations. Conclusions: In a representative U.S. population, DunedinPoAm was most consistently positively associated with different adverse oral health outcomes compared with other epigenetic aging measures. Tracking specific epigenetic ages such as DunedinPoAm, EAA GrimAge, EAA GrimAge2, and PhenoAge, may aid in additional monitoring of oral health outcomes. Understanding specific aging-related CpGs associated with oral health may aid in elucidating underlying molecular mechanisms.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Telenor Nordics Customer Service self-help corpus

Authors:

This paper presents a multilingual customer service self-help corpus comprising 1,122 manually validated documents in Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish, totaling 274,599 words and 1,884,833 characters. The documents have been sourced from the public self-help pages of four Nordic telecommunications operators and subsequently filtered for person-identifiable information and relevance through a combined LLM and human annotation pipeline. Domain-specific datasets for Nordic languages remain scarce, particularly in customer service: a domain of growing importance for retrieval-augmented generation, cross-lingual transfer learning, and emerging agent-based service architectures. An analysis of the corpus reveals substantial variation in document length and structure across operators, reflecting distinct editorial strategies, as well as broad topical coverage spanning network hardware, mobile services, TV and streaming, billing, and account management. The dataset is publicly available under a CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 license at https://zenodo.org/records/20732652, intended to support reproducible research in Nordic NLP and information retrieval.