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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

JoyAI-VL-Interaction: Real-Time Vision-Language Interaction Intelligence

Many moments in the real world do not wait for a user to ask. A fire starts on a security monitor, an expression flickers across a video call, or a product a viewer wants flashes by in a livestream. Yet today's large models remain mostly turn-based by design: they answer only when addressed, and even video-call apps that appear interactive still operate as question-answer systems, reacting only when polled or prompted. We argue for a different paradigm: a model that is present in the world like a person. It continuously watches what is happening now, decides on its own whether to speak or stay silent, interacts in real time, and delegates to a background model when the problem is hard. To advance interaction models and their adoption across domains, we make two fully open-sourced contributions. First, we release JoyAI-VL-Interaction, an 8B-scale, vision-first VL-interaction model. The model makes the response decision internally, choosing each second to stay silent, respond, or delegate to a background model, and it excels at vision-triggered responsiveness and time awareness. We pair it with a transferable training recipe, from which capabilities we never trained for emerge, such as guiding a shopper through changing app screens or improvising a lecture from a slide deck. Second, we release a complete, deployable system built around that model. The system streams any ongoing video into the model, making it genuinely present in the world. All other components are pluggable, including ASR/TTS modules, memory, visualization UI, and a background brain that can connect to any API or agent. Across six real-world scenarios, human raters prefer JoyAI-VL-Interaction over the in-app video-call assistants of Doubao and Gemini by a wide margin. To our knowledge, this is the first open, vision-driven interaction model released together with its training recipe, data, and complete deployable system.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model in RLHF

arXiv:2505.12843v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) relies on reward models to align large language models with human preferences. However, RLHF often suffers from reward hacking, wherein policy learning exploits flaws in the trained reward model to maximize reward scores without genuinely aligning with human preferences. A significant example of such reward hacking is length bias, where reward models usually favor longer responses irrespective of actual response quality. Previous works on tackling length bias have notable limitations, these approaches either mitigate bias without characterizing the bias form, or simply assume a linear length-reward relation. To accurately model the intricate nature of length bias and facilitate more effective bias mitigation, we propose FiMi-RM (Bias Fitting to Mitigate Length Bias of Reward Model), a framework that autonomously learns and corrects underlying bias patterns. Our approach consists of three stages: First, we warm up by training a standard reward model which inherently contains length bias. Next, we deploy a lightweight fitting model to capture the non-linear relation between length and reward. Finally, we incorporate this learned relation into the reward model, effectively decoupling length from reward while preserving preference modeling capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that FiMi-RM achieves a more balanced length-reward distribution. Furthermore, when applied to alignment algorithms such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) and Best-of-N (BoN), our debiased reward model improves length-controlled win rate and reduces verbosity without compromising its performance.

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

Consistent Zero-Shot Imitation with Contrastive Goal Inference

arXiv:2510.17059v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Zero-shot imitation learning requires an agent to reproduce expert behavior from a single demonstration without additional environment interaction or gradient updates at test time. We introduce Contrastive Inverse Reinforcement Learning (CIRL), a self-supervised framework for pre-training zero-shot imitation agents. Our methods rests on a key observation that many useful tasks can be summarized by a single goal state. We can thus convert the multi-task inverse RL problem into a more tractable goal-inference problem, and utilize state-of-the-art goal-conditioned RL methods to recover a policy that reaches the goal. During pre-training, CIRL jointly employs three components to learn without any rewards or demonstrations: (1) a variant of contrastive RL designed to learn maximum-entropy goal-conditioned policies, (2) an automatic goal proposal mechanism (GoalKDE) that drives exploration, and (3) a mean-field variational model that performs amortized goal inference from trajectories. We prove that this procedure consistently recovers the demonstrator's intent by accounting for the relative difficulty of reaching different states and show how structurally similar prior work may otherwise fail to infer the correct reward. Experiments on goal-conditioned and standard reward-maximizing control tasks show that CIRL outperforms prior zero-shot imitation methods, supporting the expressiveness of goals as a compact summary of behavior.

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

PERRY: Policy Evaluation with Confidence Intervals using Auxiliary Data

arXiv:2507.20068v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Off-policy evaluation (OPE) methods estimate the value of a new reinforcement learning (RL) policy prior to deployment. Recent advances have shown that leveraging auxiliary datasets, such as those synthesized by generative models, can improve the accuracy of OPE methods. Unfortunately, such auxiliary datasets may also be biased, and existing methods for using data augmentation within OPE lack principled uncertainty quantification. In high stakes domains like healthcare, reliable uncertainty estimates are important for ensuring safe and informed deployment of RL policies. In this work, we propose two methods to construct valid confidence intervals for OPE with data augmentation. The first provides a confidence interval over $V^{\pi}(s)$, the policy value conditioned on an initial state $s$. To do so we introduce a new conformal prediction method suitable for Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with continuous state spaces, extending prior work to higher-dimensional settings. Second, we consider the more common task of estimating the average policy performance over all initial states, $V^{\pi}$; we introduce a method that draws on ideas from doubly robust estimation and prediction powered inference. Across simulators spanning inventory management, robotics, healthcare, and a real healthcare dataset from MIMIC-IV, we find that our methods can effectively leverage auxiliary data and consistently produce confidence intervals that cover the ground truth policy values, unlike previously proposed methods. Our work enables a future in which OPE can provide rigorous uncertainty estimates for high-stakes domains.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Constrained Semantic Decompression in LLMs through Persian Proverb-Conditioned Story Generation

Transforming a dense, abstract proverb into an engaging and morally faithful narrative requires deep cultural understanding and robust semantic grounding. We frame this problem as a constrained semantic decompression task and study proverb-conditioned story generation as a testbed for abstraction-to-realization in large language models (LLMs). Focusing on Persian, we introduce the Proverb Aligned Narrative Dataset (PAND), pairing proverbs with human-written stories and explicit meanings. By a hybrid evaluation framework that combines human-calibrated LLM-as-a-Judge with structural metrics, we analyze model behavior across multiple prompting regimes. Our findings reveal a persistent decompression gap: current LLMs often achieve strong surface-level fluency while failing to faithfully instantiate the underlying moral and causal structure encoded in proverbs. We further show that explicit reasoning and iterative refinement can partially mitigate these failures, suggesting that many decompression errors arise from difficulties in translating abstract meaning into narrative form rather than a complete lack of relevant knowledge. Our proposed task naturally extends to other forms of compressed cultural knowledge.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Large-scale proteomics and timing of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

Background: Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy (HDP) may first be diagnosed antepartum, during labor, or postpartum. We utilized untargeted large-scale proteomics to identify pathways associated with HDP based on timing of onset. Methods: We performed a nested case-control study comparing differential protein expression, from the SomaScan 7K platform, based on timing of onset of HDP versus controls (referent) using first-trimester samples from the NuMoM2b-Heart Health Study, a multi-site cohort that followed nulliparous individuals from the first trimester. Associations of proteins with timing of onset of HDP, adjusted for co-variates, were assessed using logistic regression q value-based false discovery rates and pathway enrichment and differential expression analysis were conducted. Results: Of 1628 individuals included, 678 had HDP, of which 67% manifested antepartum (AP), 29% intrapartum (IP), and 3% postpartum (PP). After adjusting for co-variates, compared to controls, 698 proteins, 39 proteins, and 144 proteins were differentially expressed in those with HDP according to AP, IP, PP onset, respectively. There was little overlap in individual protein expression based on timing of HDP. Pathway enrichment and graphical summary analyses suggested distinct processes. Specifically, there was downregulation of angiogenic proteins in AP HDP, downregulation of immune-related proteins in IP HDP, and upregulation of complement activation promoting fibrotic changes leading to cardiac dysfunction in PP HDP. Conclusion: There are differences in first-trimester protein expression based on whether HDP first manifests AP, IP or PP. This raises the possibility that there may be distinct mechanistic phenotypes that could uniquely inform diagnostic and therapeutic targets for HDP.

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

RAIGen: Rare Attribute Identification in Text-to-Image Generative Models

Text-to-image diffusion models achieve impressive generation quality but inherit and amplify training-data biases, skewing coverage of semantic attributes. Prior work addresses this in two ways. Closed-set approaches mitigate biases in predefined fairness categories (e.g., gender, race), assuming socially salient minority attributes are known a priori. Open-set approaches frame the task as bias identification, highlighting majority attributes that dominate outputs. Both overlook a complementary task: uncovering rare or minority features underrepresented in the data distribution (social, cultural, or stylistic) yet still encoded in model representations. We introduce RAIGen, the first framework, to our knowledge, for label-free rare-attribute discovery in diffusion models, requiring no predefined minority categories. RAIGen leverages Matryoshka Sparse Autoencoders and a novel minority metric combining neuron activation frequency with semantic distinctiveness to identify interpretable neurons whose top-activating images reveal underrepresented attributes. Experiments show RAIGen discovers attributes beyond fixed fairness categories in Stable Diffusion, scales to larger models such as SDXL, supports systematic auditing across architectures, and enables targeted amplification of rare attributes during generation. The project page is available at https://vssilpa.github.io/RAIGen_webpage/ .

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Feasibility-driven QAOA with penalty scheduling

arXiv:2606.25117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most available quantum algorithms address constrained optimization problems by treating constraints as soft penalty terms within a QUBO formulation. This approach requires careful adjustment of the penalty coefficients, which scales poorly with the number of constraints and lacks a proper strategy to balance feasibility and solution quality. In this work, we introduce two extensions of standard linear-ramp QAOA (lr-QAOA) tailored to problems with multiple heterogeneous constraints. We first construct $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA, in which each penalty term is assigned its own linear-ramp schedule, promoting penalty weights from external hyperparameters to internal variational parameters of QAOA, similarly to the objective and mixer parameters. By optimizing all schedules jointly in a single run, this approach eliminates nested penalty tuning and scales more efficiently to multiple constraints. The optimization is guided by a feasibility-driven loss function that pushes the quantum state towards high-quality feasible solutions. As a further refinement, we introduce piecewise-ramp QAOA, in which the linear ramps are replaced by two-segment piecewise schedules, enhancing the expressiveness of the Ansatz at the cost of a small parameter overhead independent of the circuit depth. We benchmark both methods on Earth-observation satellite mission planning tasks formulated as budget-constrained Maximum Weight Independent Set problems. Numerical results show that piecewise-ramp QAOA consistently outperforms lr-QAOA and $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA across circuit depths and system sizes. Furthermore, both $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA and piecewise-ramp QAOA exhibit a high feasibility rate, which is crucial in industrial applications. Our analysis highlights an intrinsic feasibility-optimality trade-off, which we address by introducing a filtered variant of the loss providing a single hyperparameter to tune this balance.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Experimental probe of quantum coherence in top-quark pair production

arXiv:2602.21069v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate quantum coherence in top–antitop spin states produced at the LHC using the $l_1$-norm of coherence applied to the reconstructed spin density matrix. Combining Standard Model predictions with recent CMS measurements of spin-correlation coefficients, we study the dependence of coherence on the invariant mass $M_{t\bar t}$ and the scattering angle. We find that coherence is large both near the production threshold and in boosted central events, whereas an intermediate-mass region exhibits reduced interference strength and enhanced sensitivity to radiative effects. This non-monotonic kinematic behavior originates from the helicity-interference structure of the underlying QCD production amplitudes. Recasting the CMS measurements in terms of quantum coherence yields values that are broadly consistent with Standard Model expectations. Our results establish quantum coherence as an experimentally accessible probe of spin dynamics in top-quark pair production and demonstrate its potential as a precision observable for studies of the top-quark spin-density matrix at hadron colliders.

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Semiclassical limit of Polyakov-Liouville measure and Q-Curvature Uniformization on evev-dimensional manifolds

arXiv:2606.14443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the semiclassical limit of the Polyakov-Liouville measure $\boldsymbol{\nu}_\gamma$, which is a non-Gaussian measure on $H^{-\eps}(M)$ that has recently been extended from Riemann surfaces to general Riemannian manifolds $(M,g)$ of even dimension. We show that under an appropriate rescaling in the semiclassical limit as $\gamma\to0$, the normalized Polyakov-Liouville measure $\Q_\gamma$ concentrates on the unique smooth weight $u$ for which the conformal metric $e^{2u}g$ on $M$ has constant $Q$-curvature.

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

Probing Quantum States over Spacetime Through Interferometry

arXiv:2507.19258v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Establishing a notion of the quantum state that applies consistently across space and time could be a crucial step toward formulating a relativistic quantum theory. We give an operational meaning to multipartite quantum states over arbitrary regions in spacetime through a causally agnostic measurement, a measurement scheme that can be consistently implemented independently of the causal relation between the regions. We prove that such measurements can always be implemented with interferometry, also known as the scattering circuit technique, wherein the conventional density operator, the recently developed quantum state over time (QSOT), and the process matrix formalisms smoothly merge. This framework allows for a systematic study of mixed states in the temporal setting, which turn out to be crucial for modeling quantum non-Markovianity. Based on this, we demonstrate that two different ensembles of quantum dynamics can be represented by the same QSOT, indicating that they cannot be distinguished through interferometry. Moreover, our formalism reveals a new type of spatiotemporal correlation between two quantum dynamics that originates from synchronized propagation in time under time-reversal symmetry. We show that quantum systems with such correlation can be utilized as a reference frame to distinguish certain dynamics indistinguishable under time-reversal symmetry.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Predicting optimal growth temperatures of bacteria using learned structural information from a single protein

Temperature is a fundamental determinant of bacterial physiology and ecology. Optimal growth temperature (OGT) is highly variable across species, contributing to differences in where and when species are most likely to thrive. Although the OGTs for most bacteria remain unknown, the increasing availability of genomes from uncultivated and cultivated taxa has made it advantageous to build genomic, cultivation-independent models to infer OGT. However, pre-existing genomic models often lack the generalizability and mechanistic grounding required for robust inferences of OGT. We propose a novel framework for predicting bacterial OGT which uses learned protein structural signatures of thermal adaptation. We hypothesize that biophysical tradeoffs which dictate enzymatic functions across variable temperatures provide a more robust empirical basis for OGT prediction than broad genomic features. Our OGT-predicting model, ROSEATE, is based on a single gene, adenylate kinase (ADK), that encodes for a ubiquitous enzyme essential for energy homeostasis. ROSEATE uses high-dimensional latent space encoding via MSA Transformer, a protein language model which embeds ADKs in a manner which preserves biophysical information about embedded proteins. We show that the accuracy of the ROSEATE model is on par with other genome-based models, has a high degree of phylogenetic generalizability, and the ESM embeddings effectively capture key temperature-adaptive enzyme characteristics derived from AlphaFold structures. Because ROSEATE is based on analyses of a single ubiquitous protein, it can be used with metagenomic data to infer the community-level variation in bacterial OGTs. We demonstrate this feature of ROSEATE by reconstructing ADK sequences from over 500 environmental and host-associated metagenomes, successfully distinguishing community-wide thermal preferences across diverse habitats, from polar oceans to mammalian guts. By transitioning from genomic proxies to informationally dense protein structural features, this work provides an efficient, interpretable tool for predicting bacterial OGTs across taxa and whole communities.

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

HumanScale: Egocentric Human Video Can Outperform Real-Robot Data for Embodied Pretraining

Embodied foundation models are expected to benefit from data scaling like large language models, but face a much tighter data bottleneck. Teleoperated real-robot trajectories remain the dominant pretraining source due to their precise action supervision and embodiment alignment, yet their scalability is limited by high collection cost, acquisition difficulty, and low behavioral and environmental diversity. These limitations have sparked interest in egocentric human video as a scalable, substantially lower-cost, and more diverse alternative for embodied model pretraining. However, its effectiveness compared to teleoperated real-robot data remains underexplored. To address this question, we conduct a systematic study comparing egocentric human video and teleoperated real-robot trajectories as pretraining data sources for embodied foundation models, under fixed post-training and validation protocols. Surprisingly, we find that egocentric data, when processed through a carefully designed filtering and labeling pipeline, is not merely a viable substitute for model pretraining but can lead to superior performance. With the same amount of pretraining data, models pretrained on egocentric data achieve a 24% lower validation loss on real-robot action prediction, as well as 52.5% and 90% higher success rates on in-distribution and out-of-distribution real-robot task execution, respectively. This finding verifies a scalable paradigm for embodied foundation models: pretrain on egocentric human video to learn diverse world representations, then adapt with a small amount of labeled real-robot data for action-space alignment. We hope this study encourages broader exploration of egocentric data and offers guidance for data quality assessment before costly robot data collection.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

A <i>Streptomyces</i> megacluster encodes synergistic biotin-targeting antibiotics

Natural products remain a major source of antibiotics, but discovery efforts have traditionally treated biosynthetic gene clusters as sources of individual bioactive molecules1–5. Increasing evidence has suggested that microorganisms can instead encode coordinated multi-metabolite systems, yet the genetic architectures and biological logic of such systems remain poorly understood6–12. Here we show that Streptomyces spp. encode a highly conserved biosynthetic megacluster that produces four structurally distinct natural product families—stravidins, acidomycin, dapamycins, and 2-methyl-7-keto-8-aminopelargonic acid (α-Me-KAPA)—alongside the biotin-binding protein streptavidin. These components converge on bacterial biotin metabolism through complementary mechanisms, including enzyme inhibition, prodrug activation, cofactor mimicry and biotin sequestration. The encoded metabolites are co-produced and act synergistically across Gram-negative and mycobacterial species, with stravidin S2 and α-Me-KAPA showing enhanced efficacy in combination in a mouse model of multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli infection. This megacluster reveals a genetically encoded chemical arsenal that functions as a naturally evolved combination therapy against a conserved metabolic pathway. More broadly, our findings suggest that higher-order biosynthetic architectures may represent an overlooked reservoir of antibiotic mechanisms and support a shift from discovering isolated natural products to reconstructing native synergistic systems. In Streptomyces spp., a conserved biosynthetic gene megacluster produces an arsenal of distinct antimicrobials that converge on bacterial biotin biosynthesis as a naturally evolved combination therapy.

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

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

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

QoS-Aware Token Scheduling and Private Data Valuation for Multi-Modal Agentic Networks

arXiv:2606.15573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In agentic systems, human-generated data records anchor the value of AI services. Yet cloud compute pipelines centralize processing on remote servers. Data centralization reduces personal data sovereignty and may potentially degrade the quality of service (QoS). Meanwhile, user contributions are diverse in quantity and quality: decentralized records can be biased, noisy, and heterogeneously distributed. To address the data challenge, we study fair token allocation and private data valuation for decentralized and resource-constrained agentic systems. Our approach embeds multi-modal representations in a shared semantic space and releases differentially private (DP) prototypes to preserve utility while reducing semantic leakage. With the DP guarantee, we design a fair token allocation scheme that rewards effective contributions and remains robust to data heterogeneity and AI resource scarcity. Extensive simulations demonstrate improved contribution-based fairness and QoS compared to standard benchmarks. The improved resistance to image reconstruction attacks indicates enhanced privacy for multi-modal personal data.

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

TacCoRL: Integrating Tactile Feedback into VLA via Simulation

arXiv:2606.11743v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models provide strong visual, language, and action priors for robot manipulation, but visual observations alone often miss the local contact state required for contact-rich tasks. We present TacCoRL, a scalable framework that injects Tactile feedback into VLA policies and improves them through sim-real Co-training and simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL), without requiring large-scale tactile pretraining or extensive real-world contact exploration. The key idea is not only adding touch as an input, but learning how contact readings should modulate action responses in near-failure states that are rare in demonstrations and risky to collect on hardware. We use a real-aligned simulator as a closed-loop training environment for contact interaction. Mixed simulated and real trajectories first warm-start tactile-conditioned actions in the pretrained policy. Reinforcement learning with verifiable task rewards then optimizes the policy using simulated contact rollouts. It reinforces tactile-conditioned actions that lead to task completion, while a supervised objective on real trajectories keeps the refined policy anchored to deployment visual, tactile, and action distributions. The resulting policy transfers directly to the real robot without privileged simulation state or online real-world RL. Across four bimanual contact-rich tasks, the final visuo-tactile policy achieves an average success rate of 72.5%, compared to baseline of 50.0%. Result videos and more details are available at https://tac-corl.github.io/

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

Protein Representation Learning with Secondary-Structure and Energy-Filtered Hydrogen-Bond Graphs

arXiv:2606.19374v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Graph-based representations are widely used in protein modeling, yet many existing approaches rely primarily on sequence adjacency or geometric proximity, which only partially reflect the principles governing protein folding. Proteins instead adopt complex three-dimensional conformations organized around secondary structure elements, such as $\alpha$-helices and $\beta$-sheets, which encode recurring local motifs and stabilizing hydrogen-bond interactions. In this work, we introduce a secondary-structure-aware graph neural network for protein representation learning. Residue-level node representations are augmented with secondary structure assignments, and graph edges are constructed from hydrogen-bond interactions filtered by their energetic strength. This design enables the model to capture both local structural context and long-range couplings that are central to protein stability and function. We evaluate the proposed approach on commonly used protein benchmarks and observe consistent improvements over existing graph-based methods. In addition, the resulting graph representations offer enhanced biological interpretability, as the learned connectivity aligns with established structural motifs. These findings suggest that incorporating secondary structure and energy-filtered hydrogen-bond topology provides an effective inductive bias for protein representation learning. The code is released at https://github.com/mohamedmohamed2021/SSProNet

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Large Language Models Abilities for Addressee, Turn-change, and Next Speaker Prediction in Meetings

We investigate turn-taking in multimodal multi-party conversations using large language models (LLMs). We construct an evaluation framework for three tasks: addressee detection, turn-change prediction, and next speaker prediction. We compare supervised models trained for these tasks, text-based LLMs, multimodal LLMs (MM-LLMs), and human subjects. Experiments on the AMI corpus showed that LLMs outperformed supervised models and humans in next speaker prediction, despite not being trained on the target domain and without access to audio or visual information. An MM-LLM performed better than text-based LLMs on addressee detection and turn-change prediction but remained below human performance, indicating difficulty leveraging raw audio-visual signals. Ablation analyses revealed that conversational context was critical, particularly for next speaker prediction. We observed that human and LLM prediction patterns were similar, and intervals with frequent turn changes were difficult for both.

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

Refusal Beyond a Single Direction: A Preliminary Comparison of Diff-in-Means and INLP

arXiv:2606.13720v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arditi et al. (2024) has shown that refusal in safety fine-tuned chat models is mediated by a single linear direction in the residual stream, recoverable by a difference-in-means (DiM) of harmful and harmless activations. We compare DiM-based interventions (activation addition and directional ablation) with two interventions derived from Iterative Nullspace Projection (INLP) – nullspace projection and counterfactual flipping – on five open-weight chat models, asking whether INLP can match DiM at steering refusal and whether its richer parameterisation yields more tweakable interventions. INLP counterfactual flipping is competitive with DiM directional ablation on refusal suppression, while nullspace projection is consistently weaker. Restricting INLP to the leading directions of the extracted subspace preserves most of the suppression effect at near-baseline perplexity, giving a tunable capability. Geometrically, the two INLP interventions land in qualitatively different regions of activation space: nullspace projection collapses transformed activations between the harmful and harmless clusters, while counterfactual flipping moves them into the opposite cluster, suggesting that the model encodes the absence of a concept differently from its opposite – an intriguing distinction that warrants further investigation in future work.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Treatment of Multi-Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis with Second-Line All-Oral Drugs in Ghana: Incidence of Adverse Events.

Introduction: The treatment of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) remains challenging due to the toxicity of second-line medications and suboptimal treatment outcomes. This study aimed to determine the incidence of adverse events and identify factors associated with these events in patients undergoing treatment for MDR-TB with second-line all-oral drugs in Ghana. Methods: This retrospective cohort study reviewed the medical records of 384 MDR-TB patients treated with second-line all-oral drugs at selected health facilities in Ghana, including the Greater Accra Regional Hospital, Eastern Regional Hospital, and Kumasi South Hospital. Data were extracted using the Kobo Collect tool, capturing patient demographics, baseline clinical and laboratory characteristics, treatment regimens, and adverse events. The study period spanned from 2020 to August 2024. Results: The study included a total of 384 MDR-TB patients, with a mean age of 45 years (SD = 15). The majority of patients were male (65.78%), and most were within the 45-64 years age group (33.85%), followed by those aged 25-44 years (31.25%). Regionally, the highest number of cases were reported from the Greater Accra Region (39.06%), followed by the Eastern Region (31.25%) and Kumasi South Hospital (29.69%). Approximately one in four patients (25%) presented with comorbidities, with HIV being the most common (19.5%). The most frequently reported adverse events were diarrhea (14%), dizziness (13.7%), and vomiting (12.3%). Most of these were mild to moderate in severity and tended to decrease as treatment progressed. Severe adverse events, such as leukopenia and acute kidney injury, were rare, occurring in less than 5% of patients. Over the course of treatment, gastrointestinal adverse events such as vomiting and nausea showed a significant decline, indicating possible patient adaptation or improved clinical management. Results from the multivariate Poisson regression analysis revealed that age and comorbidities were significant predictors of adverse events. Patients aged 65 years and above had a 56% lower risk of developing adverse events compared to younger patients (Adjusted Risk Ratio [aRR] = 0.44, 95% CI: 0.25-0.79, p = 0.005). Conversely, patients with comorbid conditions such as diabetes or hypertension were approximately 2.6 times more likely to experience adverse events compared to those without comorbidities (aRR = 2.65, 95% CI: 1.58-4.43, p < 0.001). The effect of sex was not statistically significant after adjustment (aRR = 1.03, 95% CI: 0.70-1.50, p = 0.86). At the end of the treatment period, 74.9% of patients achieved successful outcomes, including both those who were cured and those who completed treatment without being classified as cured. However, 25.1% had unsuccessful outcomes, which included treatment failure, relapse, or death. Conclusion: In conclusion, adverse events are common in the treatment of MDR-TB with second-line All-Oral drugs, with gastrointestinal adverse events being the most prevalent. These findings highlight the importance of monitoring and managing adverse events to optimize treatment outcomes for MDR-TB patients in Ghana.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Generalized Discrete Diffusion with Self-Correction

arXiv:2603.02230v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Self-correction is an effective technique for maintaining parallel sampling in discrete diffusion models with minimal performance degradation. Prior work has explored self-correction at inference time or during post-training; however, such approaches often suffer from limited generalization and may impair reasoning performance. GIDD pioneers pretraining-based self-correction via a multi-step BERT-style uniform-absorbing objective. However, GIDD relies on a continuous interpolation-based pipeline with opaque interactions between uniform transitions and absorbing masks, which complicates hyperparameter tuning and hinders practical performance. In this work, we propose a Self-Correcting Discrete Diffusion (SCDD) model to reformulate pretrained self-correction with explicit state transitions and learn directly in discrete time. Our framework also simplifies the training noise schedule, eliminates a redundant remasking step, and relies exclusively on uniform transitions to learn self-correction. Experiments at the GPT-2 scale demonstrate that our method enables more efficient parallel decoding while preserving generation quality.

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

Benchmarking LLM Agents on Meta-Analysis Articles from Nature Portfolio

Meta-analysis is a demanding form of evidence synthesis that combines literature retrieval, PI/ECO-guided study selection, and statistical aggregation. Its structured, verifiable workflow makes it an ideal substrate for evaluating systematic scientific reasoning, yet existing benchmarks lack ground truth across the full retrieval-screening-synthesis pipeline. We introduce MetaSyn, a dataset of 442 expert-curated meta-analyses from Nature Portfolio journals. Each entry pairs a research question with PI/ECO criteria, a retrieval corpus of 140k PubMed articles, verified positive studies, hard negatives that are topically similar but PI/ECO-ineligible, and complete search strategies and date bounds. Benchmarking twelve pipeline configurations (nine RAG variants and a protocol-driven agent) reveals a critical screening bottleneck: despite a retrieval ceiling of 90.9% recall at K=200, no system recovers more than 52.7% of ground-truth included literature. Current LLMs fail to reliably separate eligible studies from PI/ECO-failing distractors in pools of comparable topical relevance. Stage-attributed metrics capture where systems succeed and fail; a single end-to-end score does not.

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arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

arXiv:2506.09046v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. Our framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, our work surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.