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

Autonomous End-to-End SOH Prediction Services for Battery Systems via Temporal-Contrastive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.16434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate state of health (SOH) estimation is a critical diagnostic service for lithium-ion battery management. However, reliance on labor-intensive manual feature engineering and opaque black-box models hinders scalable industrial deployment. To address this, we introduce TC-SOH: a modular, plug-and-play service architecture for autonomous, end-to-end SOH prediction. TC-SOH employs a temporal-contrastive mechanism and a cross-window prediction pretext task to extract degradation-relevant representations directly from raw operational data. To improve transparency, we connect model efficacy with representation diagnostics: visualization, sensitivity analysis, redundancy analysis, bidirectional probing, future-SOH probing, and temporal shuffling show that learned features overlap with selected expert descriptors while retaining additional SOH-relevant variation, and that ordered temporal context improves subsequent-SOH prediction. Across four public datasets, TC-SOH outperforms the considered physics-informed and data-driven baselines, reducing MAPE by 1.91 times and RMSE by 2.13 times.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

DeepSWIP: Quotient-WMC Counterfactuals for Neural Probabilistic Logic Programs

arXiv:2606.20526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neurosymbolic systems such as DeepProbLog combine neural perception with probabilistic logic, but standard inference is associational. Counterfactual reasoning additionally requires a causal semantics for interventions and evidence. We introduce DeepSWIP, a single-world counterfactual semantics for DeepProbLog programs. Using neural materialization, we reduce fixed-context neural predicates to ordinary ProbLog choices, apply Single World Intervention Programs (SWIPs), and compute counterfactuals by weighted model counting (WMC) over a single transformed program. Under finite grounding and unique-supported-model assumptions, DeepSWIP is exact relative to the learned materialized FCM. The standard quotient-WMC form of ProbLog conditionals identifies active neural probabilities and explains intervention cleaning, calibration sensitivity, and rare-evidence instability. Experiments on MPI3D confirm the transformation against a DeepTwin construction against 12,000 queries, as predicted and a 2.14$\times$ inference speedup from avoiding the Twin's endogenous duplication. A SUMO HOV experiment shows that neural calibration degradation biases plug-in estimates, while a correctly scoped randomized-policy AIPW estimator removes most first-order bias for population mean and ATE estimands. Code is at https://github.com/saibib/deep_SWIP.

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

G-Loss: Graph-Guided Fine-Tuning of Language Models

Traditional loss functions, including cross-entropy, contrastive, triplet, and su pervised contrastive losses, used for fine-tuning pre-trained language models such as BERT, operate only within local neighborhoods and fail to account for the global semantic structure. We present G-Loss, a graph-guided loss function that incorporates semi-supervised label propagation to use structural relationships within the embedding manifold. G-Loss builds a document-similarity graph that captures global semantic relationships, thereby guiding the model to learn more discriminative and robust embeddings. We evaluate G-Loss on five benchmark datasets covering key downstream classification tasks: MR (sentiment analysis), R8 and R52 (topic categorization), Ohsumed (medical document classification), and 20NG (news categorization). In the majority of experimental setups, G-Loss converges faster and produces semantically coherent embedding spaces, resulting in higher classification accuracy than models fine-tuned with traditional loss functions.

05.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Associations between hematologic dynamics during pregnancy and obstetric complications: A retrospective observational study

by Veronica Tozzo, Rachel Petherbridge, Kaitlyn James, Sarah Hsu, Deepti Pant, Chloe Michalopoulos, Brody H. Foy, Tanayott Thaweethai, Christopher Mow, Jacqueline Maya, Carolina Batlle Camero, Lydia Shook, Kathryn J. Gray, Logan Mauney, John M. Higgins, Camille E. Powe Background Pregnancy alters hematologic state as measured by complete blood count (CBC), but the longitudinal changes in CBC indices that define healthy pregnancies are not well established. In a large cohort based at an academic health system in the United States, we aimed to define reference intervals and typical longitudinal changes in CBC indices during pregnancy. We then tested for associations between extreme CBC values for gestational age or extreme longitudinal changes in CBC indices and obstetric complications. Methods and findings We studied nine CBC indices in individuals with singleton pregnancies who delivered after 30 weeks’ gestation and presented for prenatal care prior to 20 weeks. The electronic health record (EHR)-based Maternal Health Cohort (Massachusetts General Hospital; 1998–2016) formed our discovery cohort of 45,992 pregnancies, 18% of which had relevant complications. We developed a validation cohort of 48,868, 27% with complications from EHR data in the Mass General Brigham healthcare system from 2016 to 2024. In pregnancies without complications in the discovery cohort, we derived gestational-age-specific reference intervals (2.5th–97.5th percentile) and established typical intra-pregnancy longitudinal changes. In the validation cohort, we then tested CBC values outside of the 26–29 weeks’ gestation reference interval and CBC rare changes (uncommon changes in magnitude and direction) between 7–14 and 26–29 weeks’ gestation for association with a composite outcome (hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, small for gestational age birthweight, preterm birth) and its individual components using generalized estimating equations. Derived reference intervals differed from those in the literature for mean red cell volume, mean red cell hemoglobin, red cell count, and mean red cell hemoglobin concentration; reference intervals for other indices were similar to those previously published. In validation, hematocrit, hemoglobin, and red cell count values above their gestational-age specific reference intervals were associated with increased risk of the composite obstetric outcome: odds ratios (ORs) of 1.4 (95% CI [1.2, 1.5] p 

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

Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

The popularization of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems has increased exploration of the demographic biases related to race, age, gender, and accent, often formed from imbalanced training data. Most of these studies focused on standard grapheme-based ASR systems with comparatively little emphasis on phoneme-based systems, such as models that produce International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) representations. As ASR systems shift toward multilingual support and low-resource language modeling, IPA-based layers serve as a critical, language-agnostic foundation. In this study, we evaluate the performance of two state-of-the-art open-source ASR systems, WhisperIPA and ZIPA, that generate IPA transcriptions across diverse accents and language sources. Our evaluation includes existing multilingual speech corpora and demographically annotated English-language corpora. We measure model performance by comparing model-generated IPA transcriptions against grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) systems using both standard phoneme error rate (PER) and a proposed Soft PER metric that tolerates linguistically similar phoneme substitutions. Our analysis examines how performance varies across languages and demographic groups such as gender, accent, ethnicity, and age, revealing persistent disparities even after accounting for acceptable phonemic variation. These findings provide insight into potential sources of bias and inform the development of more inclusive and linguistically robust phoneme-based ASR systems. Our code and data will be made publicly available to the community.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optimal Impulse Control for Cyber Risk Management

arXiv:2410.17706v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We explore an optimal impulse control problem wherein an electronic device owner strategically calibrates protection levels against cyber attacks. Utilizing epidemiological compartment models, we qualitatively characterize the dynamics of cyber attacks within the network. We determine the optimal protective measures against effective hacking by formulating and solving a stochastic control problem with optimal switching. We demonstrate that the value function for the cluster owner constitutes a viscosity solution to a system of coupled variational inequalities associated with a fully coupled reflected backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive algorithm alongside a verification procedure to ascertain the optimal timing for network protection across various cyber attack scenarios. Our findings are illustrated through numerical approximations employing deep Galerkin methods for partial differential equations (PDEs). We visualize the optimal protection strategies in the context of two distinct attack scenarios: (1) a constant cyber attack, (2) an exogenous cyber attack strategy modeled with a Poisson process.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

When Similar Means Different: Evaluating LLMs on Arabic–Hebrew Cognates

Arabic and Hebrew, as closely related Semitic languages, share a substantial lexicon of true cognates, misleading false friends, and modern loanwords. This overlap poses a challenge for cross-lingual semantic understanding in large language models (LLMs). To evaluate this capability, we introduce SemCog Bench, a curated benchmark of 1,858 Arabic–Hebrew word pairs with sentence-level annotations for cognate identification and semantic disambiguation. We evaluate open-source and commercial LLMs across multiple input representations (raw, diacritized, Romanized, and phonetic) and reveal a critical gap in cross-lingual reasoning. While models achieve high accuracy on true cognates, performance drops sharply on false friends and loanwords, reflecting a strong reliance on surface-form similarity. Furthermore, sentence-level context yields only modest improvements, suggesting that contextual cues alone are insufficient to overcome misleading form-based signals. These findings reveal a fundamental limitation of current LLMs in resolving cross-lingual form–meaning conflicts and establish SemCog Bench as a rigorous benchmark for multilingual semantic reasoning. Our code and data are publicly available.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

JAMER: Project-Level Code Framework Dataset and Benchmark on Professional Game Engines

Current AI-driven game development has made substantial progress in asset generation, gameplay design, and web-based game coding, yet project-level code engineering on professional game engines remains largely unexplored due to the absence of large-scale datasets and deterministic evaluation methods. We present JamSet and JamBench, the first project-level game code framework dataset and benchmark built on a professional game engine. Our key insight is that Game Jam competitions, community events where developers build complete games under tight time constraints, yield thousands of open-source projects suitable for this purpose. Building on the Godot engine's text-based format and headless execution mode, we design a deterministic verification pipeline from file integrity to runtime behavior collection, distilling 8,133 verified projects from over 240,000 repositories. Of these, 300 manually verified projects form JamBench; the rest constitute JamSet. JamBench defines theme-driven generation and code completion tasks, evaluated through a pipeline combining compilation pass rates, Structural Completeness Score (SCS), and Behavioral Alignment Score (BAS). Evaluation of 9 frontier models reveals a capability cliff as project scale increases, with runtime pass rates dropping from 80.4% on small projects to 5.7% on large ones (Task2a). Code Agents improve compilation rates yet yield no gains in runtime behavioral quality, indicating that the bottleneck lies in architectural design rather than syntactic correctness. Experiments validate JamSet as effective training data. All data and code are publicly available.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Theory of Mind Utility: Formal Specification of a Mentalizing Mechanism

arXiv:2606.12721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inferring others' beliefs requires more than reading surface signals; it requires tracking who told them what, in what order, and how credibly. The Theory of Mind Utility (ToM-U) formalizes this epistemic state inference problem at the computational level of analysis, specifying what mentalizing computes and why without commitment to algorithmic or neural implementation. ToM-U achieves this by constructing Local Epistemic World Models (LEWMs) – directed typed graphs that represent agents, state nodes, and the epistemic relationships among them – and evaluating discrete candidate LEWMs against observed behavior until one achieves sufficient confidence. Five formal definitions specify the LEWM structure, agent node properties including ordered information access history, a bounded proliferation mechanism for recursive mentalizing, three inference procedures, and a residue function that captures the structured trace left by failed mentalizing attempts. ToM-U differs from Bayesian Theory of Mind and adjacent formal accounts, which presuppose rather than derive belief states, and from simulation theory and theory-theory, which lack a formal apparatus for epistemic state inference. The architecture generates directional, falsifiable predictions about mentalizing failure that follow from structural properties of the model rather than auxiliary assumptions, and positions ToM-U as a domain-agnostic mechanism upstream of goal inference and other downstream social cognitive processes.

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

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

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

Quantum Field-Theoretic Predictions of {\Psi}-Epistemic Models of Quantum Mechanics

arXiv:2605.12546v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: {\Psi}-epistemic models of quantum mechanics imply that the quantum state does not correspond to physical reality, but instead reflects the observer's knowledge of the underlying quantum system. The epistemic view of the quantum state has the potential to shed light on several foundational problems of quantum theory and has attracted considerable attention in the literature. On the other hand, the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph theorem demonstrated that broad classes of {\psi}-epistemic models must lead to predictions that deviate from those of quantum mechanics. Although the original theorem involved entangled joint measurements on composite systems, alternative no-go theorems involving measurements on single quantum systems were developed shortly thereafter. Experimental investigations of the deviations predicted by {\psi}-epistemic models from quantum mechanics are still ongoing. So far, such tests have been performed within the framework of non-relativistic quantum mechanics and predominantly rely on quantum information based measurement procedures. In this work, we show that {\psi}-epistemic models can give rise to deviations from standard quantum field-theoretic predictions through modifications of polarized scattering cross sections and decay widths. Our results do not require a relativistic formulation of ontological models or of the Harrigan-Spekkens criterion; the essential assumption is merely that measurements implemented through relativistic processes can still be represented within the ontological framework by well-defined response functions and probabilities. The present work constitutes a proof-of-principle study demonstrating that particle physics tests of the ontological status of the quantum state are possible and that {\psi}-epistemic models may exhibit experimentally distinguishable signatures in particle phenomenology.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Atlas H&E-TME: Scalable AI-Based Tissue Profiling at Expert Pathologist-Level Accuracy

Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining is the cornerstone of histopathology, yet scalable, quantitative analysis of H&E whole-slide images (WSIs) remains a central challenge in computational pathology. We present Atlas H&E-TME, an AI-based system built on the Atlas family of pathology foundation models that predicts tissue quality, tissue region, and cell type labels across multiple cancer types, yielding over 4,500 quantitative readouts per slide at cell-level resolution. A key challenge to validating such systems is overcoming morphological ambiguity inherent to H&E-only ground truth and the limited scalability of more informed references drawing on modalities such as immunohistochemistry (IHC). We address this with a dual validation framework combining biologically grounded depth with technical and morphological breadth. For depth, we propose an IHC-informed multi-pathologist consensus protocol that substantially improves inter-rater agreement over conventional H&E-only annotation. This yields a molecularly grounded reference against which we compare Atlas H&E-TME and pathologists working from H&E alone. For breadth, we benchmark Atlas H&E-TME on over 200,000 high-confidence H&E-only pathologist annotations across 1,500+ cases spanning eight cancer types and their most common metastatic sites, with subtypes covering >90% of clinical cases per cancer type, drawn from 25+ sources and 8+ scanner models. Benchmarked against the IHC-informed consensus, Atlas H&E-TME matches or exceeds pathologist H&E-only performance and generalizes consistently and robustly across this broad morphological and technical scope. In doing so, Atlas H&E-TME turns the H&E slide – the most ubiquitous data in pathology – into a scalable, quantitative window into the tumor and its microenvironment, laying a foundation for the next generation of tissue-based biomarkers in translational and clinical research.

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

Do Large Language Models Always Tell The Same Stories?

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have enabled the generation of high-quality prose, yet the question of whether these models are capable of generating diverse outputs remains contested. In this work, we investigate the diversity of LLM-generated stories through the framework of narrative similarity. Using a contrastive framework and a dataset of human-written stories and prompts from r/WritingPrompts, we collect narrative similarity judgments across 10 representative LLMs, utilizing both human evaluations and three different automatic annotation methods. Our findings reveal a consistent trend: LLM-generated narratives are consistently more similar to each other than human-written stories are. We demonstrate that frontier models in particular converge on a ``mean'' generic narrative that approximates individual human stories but lacks the collective diversity of human authors. Finally, we show that common mitigation strategies, including negative prompting and temperature scaling, fail to meaningfully address this homogeneity.

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

Unified Multimodal Model for Brain MRI Imputation and Understanding

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great potential for medicine, as they inherit knowledge from LLM and allow multiple data modalities to be integrated, analysed and interpreted in natural language. However, the field of medical MLLMs is constrained by non-trivial challenges, notably the scarcity of high-quality training data and the frequent occurrence of missing data in the real-world clinical setting. Here, we propose a novel unified multimodal model, UniBrain, for brain magnetic resonance image (MRI) analysis. To address potential missing brain MRI modalities, we employ a unified training strategy to perform joint imaging modality imputation and brain image understanding. During training, an interleaved and description-enriched data flow is constructed to train the model in an autoregressive manner, enabling medical reasoning with generated multimodal data. A self-alignment strategy is introduced to leverage dense image embeddings to learn fine-grained anatomical features without requiring detailed image captions. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic hidden state mechanism to alleviate the exposure bias during long-context multimodal inference. Extensive experiments on multi-disease brain MRI dataset demonstrate that UniBrain achieves high performance for brain image imputation, understanding, and disease diagnosis under various extents of modality incompleteness.

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

The Distribution Postulate in Algorithmic Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2606.16165v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In order to make the right empirical predictions Bohmian mechanics requires a special statistical boundary condition – the distribution postulate – but it is unclear how best to understand this condition. We show how one might use the theory of algorithmic randomness to formulate the distribution postulate as an objective constraining law. The framework requires us to say something about admissible quantum-mechanical states and measurements. In return, algorithmic Bohmian mechanics (aBM) guarantees the standard Born statistics for a collection of canonical quantum experiments in the limit, not just with high probability. The algorithmic distribution postulate provides a sharp typicality condition, clarifies the status of quantum probabilities in the deterministic theory, and provides a concrete example of how notions provided by the theory of algorithmic randomness can aid in specifying the content of a physical law.

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

ACC: Compiling Agent Trajectories for Long-Context Training

Recent development of agents has renewed demand for long-context reasoning capacity of LLMs. However, training LLMs for this capacity requires costly long-document curation or heuristic context synthesis. We observe that agents produce massive trajectories when solving problems, invoking tools and receiving environment observations across many turns. The evidence needed to answer the original question is thus scattered throughout these turns, requiring integration of distant context segments. Nevertheless, standard agent SFT masks tool responses and only trains turn-level tool selection, creating a supervision blind spot where these scattered signals go unused. We propose Agent Context Compilation (ACC), which converts trajectories from search, software engineering, and database querying agents into long-context QA pairs that combine the original question with tool responses and environment observations gathered across multiple turns, training the model to answer directly without tool use. This makes the dependencies between the question and the evidence explicit, enabling direct supervision of long-context reasoning over distant segments without additional annotation. ACC is a simple but effective approach that can be combined with any existing long-context extension or training method, providing scalable supervised fine-tuning data. We validate ACC on long-range dependency modeling tasks through MRCR and GraphWalks, challenging benchmarks requiring cross-turn coreference resolution and graph traversal over extended contexts. Training Qwen3-30B-A3B with ACC achieves 68.3 on MRCR (+18.1) and 77.5 on GraphWalks (+7.6), results comparable to Qwen3-235B-A22B, while preserving general capabilities on GPQA, MMLU-Pro, AIME, and IFEval. Further mechanism analysis reveals that the ACC-trained model exhibits task-adaptive attention restructuring and expert specialization.

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

Extracting Semantics: LLM-Guided Automatic Population of Robot Ontology from URDF

arXiv:2606.17073v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While commonsense knowledge may suffice for virtual agents, embodied robots interacting with humans require grounded and semantically rich representations of both their environment and their own physical embodiment. In cognitive robotics, ontologies are effective for integrating such heterogeneous knowledge to enable explainable reasoning, even during continuous knowledge updates. Yet, their manual construction remains a bottleneck. We present a preliminary approach for the automatic generation of robot semantic abstractions by transforming Unified Robot Description Format (URDF) models into populated ontologies. Although URDF files provide structural and kinematic descriptions, their identifiers often require commonsense interpretation to recover meaningful semantics, a task at which Large Language Models (LLMs) excel. Our pipeline leverages LLMs to infer semantic relationships by prompting them with concepts from an existing ontology, ensuring the final classification remains aligned with the formal model. To improve reliability, the pipeline combines majority voting across multiple LLM queries along with syntactic and schema-level validation to ensure that generated outputs conform to the expected representation format and ontology constraints. We evaluate the approach on multiple robot descriptions and discuss the generated abstractions. Initial results indicate that the proposed method can effectively bridge the gap between low-level robot descriptions and the structured, grounded knowledge representations required for human-robot interaction.

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

ReGenHuman: Re-Generating Human Appearances for Realistic Full-Body Video Anonymization

Anonymizing human-centric video data is an understudied problem. Prior anonymization techniques either blur or redact pixels at the cost of realism and downstream utility, or generate frame-by-frame at the cost of temporal coherence. We introduce ReGenHuman, the first full-body video anonymization pipeline that is simultaneously realistic, temporally consistent, and anonymous by construction. Contrary to past approaches which redact or edit the inputs directly, we propose a regenerate, don't edit paradigm. Our approach composites 2D pose, segmentation, and monocular depth into two complementary conditioning streams - StructAll and StructHuman, which are used to fine-tune a video-to-video diffusion backbone on in-the-wild human videos, synthesizing the human regions entirely from identity-free structural cues. We evaluate our model on privacy, quality, and utility, and show that our ReGenHuman achieves the best tradeoff across all three axes against current baselines. We further show that our anonymized videos remain effective for downstream tasks, including video question answering.

20.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

Efficacy and target engagement of dopamine agonist pramipexole for anhedonic depression: a randomized placebo-controlled trial

Anhedonia is a core and disabling symptom of mood disorders with limited treatment options. We evaluated the efficacy and safety of the dopamine agonist pramipexole in patients with mood disorders characterized by clinically significant anhedonia. In this single-center, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, adults with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression and elevated Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale (SHAPS) scores were assigned (1:1) to flexible dose, once-daily oral pramipexole as add-on treatment or placebo for 9 weeks. The primary outcome was change in SHAPS score from baseline to week 9. Analyses were conducted in the modified intention-to-treat population. Eighty-five participants were randomized, and 82 were included in the analysis. The primary outcome was met: pramipexole was associated with a greater reduction in SHAPS scores compared to placebo (mean difference: −4.04, 95% confidence interval: −6.89 to −1.18, P = 0.006, Hedges’ g = 0.62). Exploratory analyses indicated that pramipexole was associated with increased light physical activity and relative preservation of reward-related ventral striatal activation. Improvements in anhedonia were sustained during a 6-month open-label extension. Pramipexole was generally well tolerated compared to placebo. Pramipexole significantly improved anhedonia and showed a favorable safety profile, supporting its potential as an augmentation strategy in mood disorders. ClinicalTrials.gov identifiers: NCT05355337 and NCT05825235 . Pramipexole, in patients with major depressive disorder, dysthymia or bipolar depression, reduced Snaith−Hamilton Pleasure Scale scores significantly compared to placebo.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Short-term relaxation after cervical rotatory manipulation is more closely associated with somatosensory input than cracking sound: a randomized controlled EEG study

Background Cervical rotatory manipulation is commonly used for neck-related symptoms and is often accompanied by a cracking sound. This sound is frequently regarded as a sign of successful manipulation, but whether it contributes substantially to the immediate relaxation response remains unclear. Objective This study examined whether short-term relaxation after cervical rotatory manipulation is more closely related to manipulation-associated sensory input than to the cracking sound cue alone. Methods In this single-session, three-arm, parallel randomized controlled study, 54 healthy volunteers were allocated to cervical rotatory manipulation, sham manipulation, or sham manipulation plus simulated cracking sound. Subjective outcomes were assessed before and after intervention, including positive affect, negative affect, comfort, and satisfaction. Eyes-closed resting-state electroencephalography was recorded before and after intervention. Prespecified neural outcomes included frontal alpha power, frontal alpha/beta ratio, occipital individual alpha frequency, and alpha-band fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal functional connectivity. Results Cervical rotatory manipulation produced greater improvements in positive affect, comfort, and satisfaction than sham manipulation or sham manipulation plus simulated cracking sound, whereas negative affect remained generally stable across groups. These subjective responses were accompanied by short-term electroencephalography changes, particularly in frontal alpha/beta and alpha-band fronto-parietal and fronto-temporal functional connectivity. Changes in frontal alpha/beta ratio were positively associated with changes in positive affect. In contrast, simulated cracking sound alone did not reproduce the full subjective or electroencephalography response observed after real manipulation. Conclusions The immediate relaxation response after cervical rotatory manipulation appears to be more closely related to manipulation-associated sensory input than to the cracking sound cue alone. These findings provide preliminary neurophysiological evidence for distinguishing real manipulation effects from sound-related contextual cues.

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

Trust Without Trusting: A Recomputable Trust Protocol for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2605.06738v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents already transact at production scale – 69,000 bots, 165 million transactions, $50 million in volume on a single marketplace – and any party can verify a signed credential without a central service. In an open agent world that covers most of what trust requires: there are no universal borders, and each party chooses for itself whom to deal with. Borders appear only where a closed space draws one – a marketplace, a platform, or a consortium sets house rules. Whoever draws the border holds the authority to apply it, and may apply it as they choose, behind closed doors. This paper addresses the gap that opens there: when you rely on someone else's border, how do you check that they applied their own published rules – taking no one's word for it, and handing the check to no new trusted party? Our answer is the Combined Evidence Protocol (CEP): a five-condition predicate any party recomputes from anchored data, turning "did the boundary-owner follow its own admission rules" into a fact anyone verifies rather than a claim anyone believes. The move that secures optimistic rollups secures this – correctness rests on recomputation, so the measurement belongs to everyone and the oracle problem dissolves. Its load-bearing setting is a consortium of co-equal, mutually distrusting peers under a shared charter, each able to verify, independently, that the rules they jointly agreed are the rules being applied. CEP belongs to the family of trustless systems – optimistic and zero-knowledge rollups, verifiable ML, self-sovereign-identity predicates. The infrastructure beneath it is live: a W3C VC + DID trust layer running since March 2026, anchored on Base L2, continuing arXiv:2605.06738 and standing on its own.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Seeing Roads Through Words: A Language-Guided Framework for RGB-T Driving Scene Segmentation

Robust semantic segmentation of road scenes under adverse illumination, lighting, and shadow conditions remain a core challenge for autonomous driving applications. RGB-Thermal fusion is a standard approach, yet existing methods apply static fusion strategies uniformly across all conditions, allowing modality-specific noise to propagate throughout the network. Hence, we propose CLARITY that dynamically adapts its fusion strategy to the detected scene condition. Guided by vision-language model (VLM) priors, the network learns to modulate each modality's contribution based on the illumination state while leveraging object embeddings for segmentation, rather than applying a fixed fusion policy. We further introduce two mechanisms - one which preserves valid dark-object semantics that prior noise-suppression methods incorrectly discard, and a hierarchical decoder that enforces structural consistency across scales to sharpen boundaries on thin objects. Experiments on the MFNet dataset demonstrate that CLARITY establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA), achieving 62.3% mIoU and 77.5% mAcc.

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

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.

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

ChiKhaPo: A Large-Scale Multilingual Benchmark for Evaluating Lexical Comprehension and Generation in Large Language Models

Existing benchmarks for large language models (LLMs) are largely restricted to high- or mid-resource languages, and often evaluate performance on higher-order tasks in reasoning and generation. However, plenty of evidence points to the fact that LLMs lack basic linguistic competence in the vast majority of the world's 3800+ written languages. We introduce ChiKhaPo, consisting of 8 subtasks of varying difficulty designed to evaluate the lexical comprehension and generation abilities of generative models. ChiKhaPo draws on existing lexicons, monolingual data, and bitext, and provides coverage for 2700+ languages for 2 subtasks, surpassing any existing benchmark in terms of language coverage. We further show that 6 SOTA models struggle on our benchmark, and discuss the factors contributing to performance scores, including language family, language resourcedness, task, and comprehension versus generation directions. With ChiKhaPo, we hope to enable and encourage the massively multilingual benchmarking of LLMs.