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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FlowEdit: Associative Memory for Lifelong Pronunciation Adaptation in Flow-Matching TTS

Authors:
Harshit Singh↗Ayush Pratap Singh↗Nityanand Mathur↗

arXiv:2606.20518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Flow-matching text-to-speech systems achieve remarkable zero-shot quality but remain static after deployment: pronunciation errors on out-of-vocabulary proper nouns persist unless the model is retrained. We introduce FlowEdit, a life-long adaptation framework for frozen flow-matching TTS that learns pronunciation corrections as latent conditioning edits rather than weight updates. When corrective feedback is provided, FlowEdit optimizes a token-level perturbation in the text embedding space, then stores the correction in a Modern Hopfield Network serving as content-addressable episodic memory. At inference, corrections are retrieved via soft attention with a similarity gate, enabling fuzzy morphological matching. On our curated benchmark of 312 multilingual proper nouns across 18 language families, FlowEdit reduces target-word Phoneme Error Rate by 92.7% relative to the zero-shot baseline while maintaining identical general-speech quality. Corrections complete in approximately 15 seconds on a single GPU.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory

Authors:
Shiqi He↗Yue Cui↗Xinyu Ma↗Yaliang Li↗Bolin Ding↗Mosharaf Chowdhury↗

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

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03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Grounding Multi-Hop Reasoning in Structural Causal Models via Group Relative Policy Optimization

Authors:
Yunhan Bu↗Quan Zhang↗Huaping Zhang↗Guotong Geng↗Chunxiao Gao↗Askar Hamdulla↗Juan Wang↗Qiuchi Li↗Baohua Zhang↗Shuai Lei↗Yunbo Cao↗Zhunchen Luo↗…

arXiv:2605.01482v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-Hop Fact Verification requires complex reasoning across disparate evidence, posing significant challenges for Large Language Models , which may suffer from hallucinations and fractured logical chains. Existing methods, while improving transparency via Chain-of-Thought , often lack explicit modeling of the structural dependencies between evidence and claims. In this work, we introduce an SCM-inspired framework that grounds reasoning in explicit directed dependency graphs, treating verification as a constructive structural reasoning process rather than full causal inference with interventions or counterfactual semantics. We empirically identify an "inverted U-shaped" correlation between reasoning-chain length and accuracy, revealing that excessive structural complexity can degrade performance. To address this, we propose a rule-based reinforcement learning strategy using Group Relative Policy Optimization. This approach dynamically optimizes the trade-off between structural depth and conciseness. Extensive experiments on HoVer and EX-FEVER demonstrate that our SCM-GRPO framework outperforms strong baselines while producing more traceable reasoning structures for complex fact verification.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

A Comparative Study of Graph Neural Network Layer Selection for Interaction Modelling in Driving Trajectory Prediction

Authors:
George Daoud↗Mohamed El-Darieby↗

arXiv:2606.14956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous driving systems rely on precise trajectory prediction to plan safe and efficient movement. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become a promising approach for modelling spatiotemporal interactions among road agents. However, designing GNN architectures for trajectory prediction remains non-standardized, with little guidance on which graph layers effectively capture spatial interactions and temporal dynamics. This paper offers a detailed comparative study of 19 graph layer types, focusing on their spatial and temporal processing capabilities to discover the most effective architectures for trajectory prediction. Within the explored hyperparameter setting, we highlight five standout layer combinations, with ARMA, Chebyshev, and topology-aware layers consistently performing better than others. Beyond performance metrics, our findings yield practical design principles: sum-based aggregation is more effective than mean-based methods, multi-head attention mechanisms enable richer interactions, and assigning different weights to different hop distances significantly improves prediction accuracy. These findings offer useful guidance for designing more interpretable and effective trajectory prediction models.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

OSCS-SupCon: Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning for Robust Feature Disentanglement

Authors:
Bin Wang↗Fadi Dornaika↗

Supervised Contrastive Learning (SupCon) has achieved strong performance by explicitly modeling pairwise relationships among samples. However, existing SupCon-based methods suffer from two key limitations: negative-sample dilution induced by the standard InfoNCE loss, and feature-space entanglement caused by the lack of explicit constraints separating category-relevant (common) and category-irrelevant (style) features. These limitations reduce feature discriminability and generalization ability. To address these issues, we propose OSCS-SupCon (Orthogonal Sigmoid-based Common and Style Supervised Contrastive Learning), a unified framework that combines a sigmoid-based pairwise contrastive objective with explicit orthogonality constraints. Specifically, we introduce a sigmoid-based contrastive loss with two learnable parameters, temperature and bias, which adaptively modulate pairwise decision boundaries and alleviate negative-sample dilution. Furthermore, we enforce orthogonality between common and style feature subspaces via a linear projection with ReLU nonlinearity, thereby reducing feature overlap and improving disentanglement of style-irrelevant representations. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that OSCS-SupCon consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised contrastive learning methods across multiple backbone architectures. In particular, on the fine-grained CUB200-2011 dataset with a ResNet-18 backbone, the proposed method achieves a 3.4% improvement in classification accuracy over CS-SupCon, highlighting its robustness and generalization capability. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of each component.

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

Generative Molecular Design with Steerable and Granular Synthesizability Control

Authors:
Jeff Guo↗V\'ictor Sabanza-Gil↗Olha Semenenko↗Oleksii Hrabovskyi↗Mykola Protopopov↗Anna Kapeliukha↗Oleksandr Mosia↗Sofiia Hatych↗Diana Alieksieieva↗Tom Nelis↗Patrick Molliet↗Helena Sol\'e-\`Avila↗…

arXiv:2505.08774v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Designing molecules that are both property-optimal and readily synthesizable is a central challenge in drug discovery. Existing works that do consider synthesizability can jointly output predicted synthesis routes for generated molecules. However, there has been minimal attention in addressing the ease of synthesis and with flexibility to incorporate desired reaction constraints. On the other hand, virtual screening searches for commercially available compounds, but imposes challenges when scaling to ultra-large (billion-size and beyond) chemical spaces. Here, we propose a generative design framework that unifies synthesis-constrained molecular design and ultra-large-scale virtual screening through steerable and granular synthesizability control. Generated molecules satisfy arbitrary multi-parameter optimization objectives with predicted synthesis routes satisfying mix-and-match constraints: including or avoiding certain reactions, incorporating specific building blocks, and minimizing synthesis route length. In an end-to-end in-house campaign targeting BRD4, we designed molecules synthesizable with specific selected reactions and building blocks, synthesized all six selected compounds, and identified two micromolar binders. We further demonstrate that reaction control enables efficient navigation of ultra-large make-on-demand chemical spaces to identify property-optimal candidates. By applying our framework to Chemspace's Freedom 4.0 make-on-demand space (142 billion molecules), we generated ~320k molecules (0.00023% of the library) on a single consumer-grade GPU (with only 8 GB GPU memory) and identified a micromolar Wee1 binder amongst 60 synthesized candidates. The single unified framework thus enables generating novel synthesizable molecules and retrieving catalogue-ready candidates, offering a flexible solution to mitigating the synthesizability bottleneck.

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

Context-Aware RL for Agentic and Multimodal LLMs

Authors:
Peiyang Xu↗Bangzheng Li↗Sijia Liu↗Karthik R. Narasimhan↗Pramod Viswanath↗Prateek Mittal↗Xingyu Fu↗

Large language models (LLMs) often fail when answering requires identifying a small but decisive piece of evidence within a long or complex context, such as a single line in a tool trace or a subtle detail in an image. We propose ContextRL, a context-aware reinforcement learning (RL) method that improves long-horizon reasoning and multimodal performance through an indirect auxiliary objective. Instead of supervising only the final answer, ContextRL presents the model with a query, an answer, and two highly similar contexts, and rewards it for selecting the context that supports the query–answer pair, thereby encouraging fine-grained grounding. We construct contrastive context data in two domains: for coding agents, trajectories serve as contexts, yielding 1k pairs built via condition filtering; for multimodal reasoning, images serve as contexts, yielding 7K pairs built via generative editing and similarity search. ContextRL achieves average gains of +2.2% over standard GRPO on 5 long-horizon benchmarks, and +1.8% across 12 diverse visual question answering benchmarks. To disentangle the effect of the proposed objective from that of additional data, we compare against data-augmentation baselines that repurpose the same contrastive contexts as standard query–context–answer examples. These baselines provide little to no improvement, showing that the gains arise from the proposed context-selection objective rather than from the contrastive data alone.

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08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

PepAnno: A structure-aware deep learning framework for bioactive peptide prediction, structural visualization, and physicochemical profiling

Authors:
Enyan Liu↗

by Enyan Liu, Yueming Hu, Liya Liu, Yifan Chen, Shilong Zhang, Sida Li, Haoyu Chao, Luyao Xie, Yi Shen, Liangwei Wu, Julio Raúl Fernández Massó, Ming Chen Peptides are gaining prominence as therapeutic candidates due to their diverse physiological functions and structural simplicity. Although multiple computational tools exist for bioactive peptide prediction, many suffer from limitations such as non-intuitive interfaces, sequence-only representations, insufficient structural awareness, restricted interpretability, or fragmented analysis workflows, leading to reduced research efficiency and higher costs. To address these challenges, we present PepAnno (https://bis.zju.edu.cn/pepanno/), a comprehensive and user-friendly web server for multi-functional peptide annotation. PepAnno is powered by a novel structure-aware, multi-view geometric deep learning framework that integrates pre-trained sequence embeddings with predicted 3D structural graphs through a dual-stream architecture combining a Transformer and a GATv2 network. A cross-modal attention mechanism is employed to effectively fuse semantic and geometric representations, enabling accurate multi-task prediction across 7 key bioactivities, including antimicrobial and anticancer properties. Comprehensive evaluation on seven curated bioactivity datasets demonstrates that PepAnno achieves robust and competitive predictive performance across tasks, consistently outperforming or matching existing methods in terms of discrimination and stability. Beyond functional prediction, PepAnno provides automated calculation of physicochemical properties, structure visualization, and access to an integrated repository of peptide-related databases and tools. By enabling one-click peptide annotation, PepAnno offers an efficient and interpretable solution for large-scale peptide analysis and facilitates downstream experimental design and peptide-based drug discovery.

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

Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton: Learning Compliant Whole-body Policies with Real-time Torque Feedback

Authors:
Litian Liang↗Jingxi Xu↗Xinda Qi↗Yujun Cai↗Houzhu Ding↗Luqi Wang↗Zhixin Sun↗Jyh-Herng Chow↗Ming Yang↗Mark Cutkosky↗

arXiv:2606.14218v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For robots to work safely in household environments, they need to be compliant and react to torque and force feedback during contact. However, the majority of existing data collection pipelines still lack the ability to capture force and torque data for learning active compliant policies. In this paper, we present Universal Manipulation Exoskeleton (UME), an upper-limb exoskeleton that provides real-time haptic torque feedback while recording whole-arm configurations and joint torque signals for teleoperation. With transparent torque feedback, human operators can even unsheathe kinematically constrained objects while blindfolded. UME is low-cost, lightweight, and portable. Equipped with an embedded IMU, it enables teleoperation for mobile manipulation. With our proposed universal retargeting algorithm, UME can teleoperate a range of robots, including the 7DoF OpenArm, 7DoF Franka, and 6DoF X-ARM. We demonstrate that this combination of capabilities enables learning bimanual, whole-body, and active compliant policies that operate effectively in highly constrained spaces. The learned robust autonomous policies achieve high success rates across a variety of tasks, including long-horizon mobile manipulation, force-mediated box flipping, visually occluded box pushing, and space-constrained tabletop manipulation. Videos, code, and additional information can be found at https://ume-exo.github.io.

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10.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

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

Authors:
Jin Peng↗

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

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

Generalised Medical Phrase Grounding

Authors:
Wenjun Zhang↗Shekhar S. Chandra↗Aaron Nicolson↗

Medical phrase grounding (MPG) maps textual descriptions of radiological findings to corresponding image regions. These grounded reports are easier to interpret, especially for non-experts. Existing MPG systems mostly follow the referring expression comprehension (REC) paradigm and return exactly one bounding box per phrase. Real reports often violate this assumption. They contain multi-region findings, non-diagnostic text, and non-groundable phrases, such as negations or descriptions of normal anatomy. Motivated by this, we reformulate the task as generalised medical phrase grounding (GMPG), where each sentence is mapped to zero, one, or multiple scored regions. To realise this formulation, we introduce the first GMPG model: MedGrounder. We adopted a two-stage training regime: pre-training on report sentence–anatomy box alignment datasets and fine-tuning on report sentence–human annotated box datasets. Experiments on PadChest-GR and MS-CXR show that MedGrounder achieves strong zero-shot transfer and outperforms REC-style and grounded report generation baselines on multi-region and non-groundable phrases, while using far fewer human box annotations. Finally, we show that MedGrounder can be composed with existing report generators to produce grounded reports without retraining the generator.

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

GLACIER: A Multimodal Student-Teacher Foundation Model for Molecular Property Prediction

Authors:
Emily Nguyen↗Yongchan Hong↗Harsh Toshniwal↗Yan Liu↗Andreas Luttens↗

arXiv:2606.11382v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning models facilitate the discovery of molecules with tailored properties among billions of candidate compounds. However, the computational burden to develop and deploy state-of-the-art models continuously increases, limiting their scalability. Most large-scale models are unimodal in nature and overlook the potential to leverage complementary molecular data modalities. To address these shortcomings, this paper introduces the Graph-Language Alignment for Chemical Inference and Exploration using Representations (GLACIER) model, a student-teacher framework that integrates molecular graphs, SMILES strings, and physicochemical descriptors to learn rich molecular embeddings. Our framework consists of three stages: (1) we pretrain three student encoders on 100,000 drug-like molecules: a message-passing neural network for molecular graphs, a transformer-based encoder for SMILES strings, and a multilayer perceptron for physicochemical descriptors, (2) we fuse these student modalities using a novel Finsler geometry-aware module, and (3) distill complementary knowledge from large teacher models, including MiniMol and MolFormer, into a single lightweight model via contrastive learning. We demonstrate that GLACIER is a robust framework that delivers high predictive performance and computational efficiency in complex molecular property prediction tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/eemokey/glacier.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bi-qutrit entangled edge states of positive partial transposes with largest ranks

Authors:
Kyung Hoon Han↗Seung-Hyeok Kye↗

arXiv:2606.16265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whenever $E$ is an eight dimensional subspace of the bi-qutrit quantum system whose orthogonal complement is spanned by a vector of Schmidt rank three, we show that there exist PPT entangled edge states with the range space $E$ whose partial transposes are of rank six, which is the largest possible rank. In this way, we exhibit a huge family of bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of type $(8,6)$. They make faces of the convex set of all PPT states, and we find bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of other types on the boundaries of such faces.

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14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

On the Memorization Behavior of LLMs in Generative Recommendation: Observations, Implications, and Training Strategies

Authors:
Sunwoo Kim↗Sunkyung Lee↗Clark Mingxuan Ju↗Donald Loveland↗Bhuvesh Kumar↗Kijung Shin↗Neil Shah↗Liam Collins↗

arXiv:2606.17276v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation (GR) has emerged as a promising direction for recommender systems. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been increasingly adopted for GR, as their rich pretrained knowledge is expected to help them generalize beyond common user behavior patterns that traditional memorization-oriented baselines can capture. However, existing LLM-based GR works largely ignore LLMs' well-known tendency to memorize, which, if present in LLMs fine-tuned for GR, would restrict their utilization of pretrained knowledge. In this work, we investigate this concern by examining one-hop memorization, where a model recommends items that are direct successors of items in the training data. We show that LLMs do this more than non-LLM-based GR models-in fact, the vast majority of their gains over GR baselines are actually on users whose target items can be predicted through one-hop memorization. We intuit that improving performance on the remaining users requires LLMs to learn richer item-item relations beyond one-hop transitions. To achieve this, we propose IIRG, a novel training strategy that teaches LLMs to capture: (1) collaborative relations derived from item co-occurrences across multiple hops in user sequences, and (2) semantic relations among items with similar themes, both of which can serve as useful recommendation signals. We show that IIRG significantly improves over LLMs trained solely with standard next-item prediction, with especially large gains for users whose test items are not covered by train-time one-hop transitions.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Do Neural Networks Lose Plasticity in a Gradually Changing World?

Authors:
Tianhui Liu↗Lili Mou↗

arXiv:2602.09234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning has become a trending topic in machine learning. Recent studies have discovered an interesting phenomenon called loss of plasticity, referring to neural networks gradually losing the ability to learn new tasks. However, existing plasticity research largely relies on benchmarks with abrupt task transitions, without examining whether the abruptness itself contributes to the observed plasticity loss. In this paper, we investigate the role of transition abruptness by simulating gradually changing environments through input/output interpolation and task sampling. We perform theoretical and empirical analysis, showing that the severity of plasticity loss is closely tied to the abruptness of task transitions, and can be substantially reduced when the environment changes gradually.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Conditioning Matters: Stabilizing Inversion and Attention in Diffusion Image Editing

Authors:
Zheyuan Zhan↗Hongchen Li↗Can Wang↗Yinfei Ma↗Mingzhen Huang↗Ruoshi Bai↗Jiawei Chen↗Siwei Lyu↗Defang Chen↗

Inversion-based image editing offers flexible and training-free control but still struggles with inversion accuracy and the trade-off between editing fidelity and background preservation. While recent methods improve inversion formulations or attention interactions, the role of textual conditioning in shaping diffusion dynamics and editing behavior remains underexplored. We show both empirically and theoretically that the precision of textual conditioning influences inversion stability by modulating the geometry of the diffusion velocity field, while also affecting the consistency of cross-branch attention during editing. These effects directly impact background preservation and semantic fidelity. Building on this analysis, we propose SimEdit, a conditioning-aware framework with two complementary components: (a) conditioning refinement, which constructs conditioning signals with improved semantic precision and structural alignment to facilitate stable inversion and consistent attention manipulation, and (b) token-wise cross-branch attention control, which separates edit-relevant and structure-preserving components and modulates them asymmetrically during attention manipulation. Extensive experiments on PIE-Bench demonstrate that SimEdit consistently improves both inversion reconstruction quality and editing performance over previous attention-manipulation approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/zju-pi/SimEdit.

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

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

Authors:
Umer Siddique↗Peilang Li↗Yongcan Cao↗

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.

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Once-for-All: Scalable Simultaneous Forecasting via Equilibrium State Estimation

Authors:
Beinan Xu↗Andy Song↗Jiti Gao↗Feng Liu↗

arXiv:2606.13285v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Equilibrium State Estimation (ESE), a novel paradigm for simultaneous prediction, where multiple interacting systems require separate yet coordinated forecasts. Such scenarios often arise in real-world settings such as economics and healthcare modeling. Unlike existing approaches that predict one system at a time, ESE forecasts all systems in a single pass. It first estimates the equilibrium state across systems, then generates holistic forecasts based on the difference between the current state and the estimated equilibrium. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets, including currency exchange and COVID-19 spread modeling, demonstrate that ESE is at least as accurate as state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods while being significantly faster. In addition, ESE integrates seamlessly with conventional predictors, combining their accuracy with its exceptional efficiency and delivering a 10-70x speedup. With linear-time complexity, ESE scales far better than SOTA methods as the number of systems increases. Moreover, it remains accurate under diverse perturbations, establishing ESE as a fast, generalizable, robust, and scalable multi-prediction method.

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

Pantheon360: Taming Digital Twin Generation via 3D-Aware 360{\deg} Video Diffusion

Authors:
Ting-Hsuan Chen↗Ying-Huan Chen↗Tao Tu↗Jie-Ying Lee↗Cho-Ying Wu↗Fangzhou Lin↗Hengyuan Zhang↗David Paz↗Xinyu Huang↗Yuliang Guo↗Yu-Lun Liu↗Yue Wang↗…

Generating complete digital twins from videos requires precise camera control, global scene coverage, and strict spatial-temporal consistency constraints that remain challenging for perspective video generators due to their limited field of view (FoV). Their narrow FoV forces long or multi-view trajectories, amplifying cross-view inconsistency and temporal drift. We argue that 360{\deg} video generation offers a natural solution: panoramic coverage simplifies trajectory design and provides a strong global context for maintaining coherence. We introduce Pantheon360: Taming Digital Twin Generation via 3D-Aware 360{\deg} Video Diffusion, a controllable 360{\deg} video generation framework that synthesizes high-fidelity videos from sparse 360{\deg} inputs. The key idea is an explicit 3D Cache, reconstructed from the input, which serves as a geometric scaffold for any user-defined camera path. This allows the diffusion model to focus on photorealistic texture refinement while the 3D Cache enforces global geometric consistency. Experiments show that Pantheon360 achieves superior visual quality and unmatched geometric coherence, enabling reliable and flexible 360{\deg} scene generation for downstream simulation and digital-twin applications.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Measurement Geometry for Quantum Random Access Codes: Beyond Nayak Bound and Toward Optimality

Authors:
Seiseki Akibue↗Rudy Raymond↗Suguru Tamaki↗Kosei Teramoto↗

arXiv:2606.12700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum random access codes (QRACs) ask how well N classical bits can be encoded into M qubits while allowing any single bit to be recovered. Although the Nayak bound remains the standard general upper bound on the decoding probability, numerical evidence suggests a stronger upper bound in the small-qubit regime. In this work, we formulate the optimal decoding probability in terms of decoding measurements, reformulating QRAC design as a spectral problem for noncommuting measurements. Using this formulation, we give an elementary proof of the Nayak bound by simplifying the Chernoff-bound argument. Moreover, we refine the argument to obtain upper bounds that improve over Nayak's bound in the entire finite-size regime. The equality conditions of our bounds justify defining mutually unbiased projector-valued measurements (MUPVMs), a generalization of mutually unbiased bases. We show that decoding measurement of any two-qubit QRAC attaining the conjectured bound must form MUPVMs. We also show that any MUPVM, assisted by one ancillary qubit, yields a QRAC with optimal N-scaling decoding probability. Finally, we propose a new MUPVM-based construction for the (M+2,M)-QRAC family attaining the conjectured bound.

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

Quantile of Means: A Bonus-Free Ensemble Method for Minimax Optimal Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Asaf Cassel↗Aviv Rosenberg↗

arXiv:2606.20107v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Optimal Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms typically rely on carefully constructed count-based uncertainty estimates to drive exploration. Although theoretically sound, such estimates are hard to compute in practical settings and therefore offer limited insight for designing exploration heuristics. Meanwhile, ensembling has emerged as a practical approach, but remains without theoretical justification. Building on a recent ensemble-based method for Multi-Armed Bandits, we propose a quantile-based ensemble method for finite-horizon Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). Our simple count-free approach achieves optimal variance-dependent regret bounds, providing theoretical grounding for ensemble-based exploration in RL.

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

Unifying Acoustic Features and Text with Multimodal LLMs for Neurodegenerative Screening

Authors:
Qingfeng Zhang↗Yuanxiong Guo↗Yanmin Gong↗

arXiv:2606.14788v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Voice-based screening offers a scalable and non-invasive way to assess neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD), but their staging remains challenging due to the difficulty of integrating heterogeneous data. This paper presents NeurMLLM, an efficient multimodal generative framework for neurodegenerative disease staging. NeurMLLM first encodes the spectrograms and Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients of audio data with vision transformers and projects their representations into the embedding space of a large language model (LLM), where they are concatenated with transcript and demographic instruction tokens as a single unified sequence. The LLM is then instruction-tuned via Low-Rank Adaptation using task prompts to autoregressively predict a constrained label token, enabling a generative classification. By evaluating on the Bridge2AI-Voice dataset for fine-grained staging of AD and PD, we observe that NeurMLLM achieves strong performance, consistently outperforming classical machine learning methods and existing LLM-based approaches. The results show the high potential of multimodal LLMs in neurodegenerative disease staging, improving staging accuracy and supporting accessible deployment.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

QueryMarket: Cost-Aware Online Active Learning in Data Markets

Authors:
Xiwen Huang↗Pierre Pinson↗

arXiv:2606.17805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data acquisition is a major bottleneck for learning in real-time streams: analysts must decide on the fly which labels to purchase while respecting a rolling budget. However, existing online active learning rarely unifies pricing, information gain, and rolling budget constraints under concept drift. We introduce QueryMarket, a market-inspired framework that queries each incoming data point based on its estimated utility to the model and its price. Within this framework, we propose OVBAL (online variance-based active learning), which integrates data pricing with information-driven selection by estimating each sample's marginal utility via a D-optimality criterion with exponential forgetting and executing cost-aware purchases under rolling budget constraints. OVBAL yields a simple, fully online decision rule that adapts to nonstationary streams and heterogeneous label costs. Experiments on synthetic data and a real-world solar power generation forecasting task show that OVBAL is particularly effective under seller-centric pricing and yields a more favorable long-run error-cost trade-off in the real-world task under both pricing schemes.

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

Revisiting LLM Adaptation for 3D CT Report Generation: A Study of Scaling and Diagnostic Priors

Authors:
Vanshali Sharma↗Andrea M. Bejar↗Halil Ertugrul Aktas↗Quoc-Huy Trinh↗Debesh Jha↗Gorkem Durak↗Ulas Bagci↗

Recent advances in multimodal learning, including large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), have demonstrated strong adaptability to natural images. However, extending their use to the medical domain, particularly for volumetric (3D) images, is challenging due to high computational complexity, volumetric dependencies and the semantic gap between visual features and clinical terminology. Naively fine-tuning LLMs on limited medical data often leads to overfitting and clinical hallucination, where linguistic fluency is prioritized over clinical factuality. In this study, we investigate parameter-efficient adaptation strategies for volumetric CT report generation and introduce RAD3D-Prefix, a lightweight diagnostic-prior conditioning framework that minimizes the need for extensive parameter training. This module integrates image embeddings with multi-label diagnostic classification logits, preserving critical clinical details while bridging the semantic gap. By keeping the LLM frozen, our method requires minimal trainable parameters and mitigates the risk of overfitting on small, domain-specific datasets. Through a systematic study spanning LLMs from 96.1M to 1.6B parameters, we find that fine-tuning is most beneficial for smaller LLMs, whereas freezing larger (~1B+ LLMs and training only lightweight projection layers provides a superior trade-off between performance, generalization, and computational efficiency. Across multiple automatic metrics and a clinical reader study, RAD3D-Prefix outperforms comparable parameter-efficient baselines and demonstrates strong out-of-domain generalization while using substantially fewer trainable parameters than fully fine-tuned alternatives.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Towards a Robust cell-free DNA Isolation Protocol for NGS Applications in a Clinical Molecular Diagnostics Setting

Authors:
Apweiler↗Broche↗Loitz↗Hackenbruch↗Ossowski↗Schroeder↗Schmit↗K. J↗

Cell-free DNA (cfDNA), released from apoptotic and necrotic cells into body fluids, represents a non-invasive source of genetic information for disease prediction, diagnosis, and monitoring. However, its low physiological abundance makes cfDNA highly susceptible to pre-analytical influences. In particular, genomic DNA (gDNA) released from lysed white blood cells (WBCs) can contaminate plasma and compromise downstream cfDNA analyses. This study evaluated the impact of different blood collection tubes and isolation methods on cfDNA stability and yield. Blood samples from 13 healthy donors were collected using cfDNA-stabilizing tubes (Cell-Free DNA BCT, Streck; S-Monovette cfDNA Exact, Sarstedt) and stored at room temperature for 1, 5, or 10 days before plasma isolation. CfDNA was extracted using either a magnetic bead-based method or a silica column-based approach. DNA quantity and quality were assessed by fluorometric quantification, automated fragment analysis, and gene-specific quantitative PCR. Streck-based workflows maintained stable cfDNA yields and characteristic mononucleosomal fragmentation profiles across all storage times. In contrast, Sarstedt tubes showed reduced cfDNA concentrations after 5 days and a pronounced increase at 10 Days, accompanied by high-molecular weight DNA patterns consistent with WBC lysis. These trends were largely independent of the extraction method. Overall, the results demonstrate that blood collection tube chemistry critically influences cfDNA integrity during delayed processing. Streck tubes, particularly when combined with QIAamp, provided the most robust and reproducible workflow for routine molecular diagnostics, whereas Sarstedt tubes produced physiologically implausible results after extended storage.

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