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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Investigating shared genetic overlap of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases and cardiometabolic diseases

Abstract Background: Immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs) are associated with increased risk of cardiometabolic diseases. Investigating genetic overlap among these conditions can provide insights into their clinical management. Methods: Genetic correlation was assessed using linkage disequilibrium score regression (LDSC). Then, a meta-analysis was conducted using Association Analysis Based on SubSETs (ASSET) to pinpoint independent single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) shared across the diseases. Each independent SNP was then used to define a genomic window (+/-500KB) for colocalisation analysis and Local Analysis of [co]Variant Association (LAVA) to offer multiple layers of regional pleiotropic evidence. Over-representation analysis was then run to identify enriched biological pathways, which then were used for drug target analysis. Results: The LDSC analysis showed a significant global genetic correlation for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and cardiometabolic diseases including hypertension, coronary artery disease (CAD), heart failure (HF), stroke, atrial fibrillation (AF), and type two diabetes mellitus (T2DM) ranging from rg = 0.09 to 0.24. ASSET meta-analysis identified 164 independent SNPs shared across RA and the cardiometabolic diseases with P < 5 x 10- in the overall one-sided meta-analysis P-value, FDR < 0.05 in both individual GWASs, and TRUE phenotype matrix. Colocalisation analysis revealed multiple loci with strong evidence (Posterior probabilities [&ge;] 80) of single causal SNPs between the trait pairs. LAVA analysis was then used as an additional layer of confirmation for the findings generated by ASSET and colocalisation and thus several loci were highlighted. Over-representation analysis showed significant enriched immune-related pathways across RA-hypertension, RA-CAD, RA-AF, and RA-T2DM trait pairs. Drug target analysis highlighted several drugs which could be further tested for their effectiveness in RA and its common comorbidities. Conclusion: The findings revealed a shared genetic architecture and key immune-related biological pathways underlying RA and its associated cardiometabolic comorbidities. The identified genes and drugs provide opportunities for further therapeutic assessment which could improve clinical management strategies.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

$K$-Theoretic Obstructions to Linearizing QCA Representations

arXiv:2606.19657v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Projective representations arise naturally in physics and representation theory, and determining whether they can be linearized has been a fundamental problem. In this work, we study the analogous problem for quantum cellular automata (QCA) representations, which incorporate locality constraints imposed by a metric space $X$. Over an arbitrary field $\mathbb{F}$, we develop an obstruction theory for the linearization of QCA representations, using the algebraic $K$-theory spectrum of QCA constructed in previous work of the authors. The resulting obstructions are governed by the homotopy type of the QCA spaces, from which we extract universal obstruction classes to linearization. In the complex algebraic and unitary case, we also fully compute the homotopy types of the QCA spaces over a point, a line, and a plane.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAERec: Constructing Fine-grained Interpretable Intents Priors via Sparse Autoencoders for Recommendation

arXiv:2606.18897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent-based recommender systems have gained significant attention for improving accuracy and interpretability by modeling the underlying motivations behind user behaviors. Most existing models derive intents directly from user sequences via clustering or prototype learning. However, they are sensitive to sequence quality, require presetting the number of intents, and lack explicit semantic grounding. These issues lead to an incomplete and coarse intent set and limit the effectiveness of recommendation. In this paper, we propose the Sparse Autoencoder for intent-based recommendation (SAERec), a novel recommender that automatically constructs a fine-grained and interpretable intent space from a textual corpus to guide recommendation. Rather than treating texts as side signals, SAERec leverages them as high information density evidence for intent construction. Specifically, we first extract a comprehensive set of fine-grained interpretable intents from the latent space of large language models (LLMs) by using a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to disentangle and interpret text embeddings, which isolates intent-related semantics from textual noise. Then, for each user, we retrieve relevant intents from this set as priors to guide recommendation. It contains personal intents matching a user's current interests and public intents capturing general item patterns shared across users (e.g., quality, price). Finally, to integrate retrieved intents into sequence modeling, we propose a multi-branch attention mechanism that captures temporal dependencies and injects both personal and public intent signals, followed by an adaptive fusion layer to construct the final user representation for recommendation. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAERec, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while providing human-understandable explanations.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Optimal Spatio-Temporal Decoupling for Bayesian Conformal Prediction

arXiv:2605.00432v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online conformal prediction must balance fast adaptation to distribution shift against stable coverage: feedback-driven methods react quickly but become volatile, while strongly discounted Bayesian methods lag and inflate intervals at tight coverage. We introduce State-Adaptive Bayesian Conformal Prediction (SA-BCP), which forms the predictive quantile as a gated convex combination of long-term temporal inertia and local spatial evidence from a kernel density estimate, controlled by a single interpretable evidence threshold $K$. We establish three results: (i) asymptotic marginal validity of the resulting intervals; (ii) a closed-form expression for the MSE-optimal threshold, $K^*_{\mathrm{MSE}}=\alpha(1-\alpha)/M^{\mathcal{T}}$, trading the coverage-indicator (Bernoulli) variance against the temporal structural bias $M^{\mathcal{T}}$; and (iii) a rolling-origin procedure for selecting $K$ online – consistent under stationarity, with $O(\sqrt{T\log N})$ regret against the best fixed $K$ and, for a segmented variant, a sublinear dynamic-regret bound under bounded drift. Across four financial-volatility and weather datasets, three target coverage levels, and eight baselines (including the strongest recent conditional-quantile methods, SPCI and KOWCPI), SA-BCP attains at-or-above-nominal coverage in most settings while producing substantially sharper intervals – up to roughly $3\times$ lower Winkler score than discounted Bayesian CP at the tightest coverage – and a coverage-matched audit confirms these efficiency gains are not an artifact of under-coverage. We disclose one principal limitation: a volatility-specialized conformal-GARCH competitor remains more efficient on its home volatility-base series, though it does not transfer across domains.

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

InternVideo3: Agentify Foundation Models with Multimodal Contextual Reasoning

Recent progress in foundation models has shifted toward agentic behavior involving multi-step reasoning and tool use. However, open-source efforts largely focus on text-dominant settings, leaving long-horizon multimodal tasks underexplored. This gap is evident in video tasks requiring sustained temporal understanding and iterative interaction. We present InternVideo3, a framework enhancing these capabilities via Multimodal Contextual Reasoning (MCR). MCR treats understanding as a closed-loop process over a shared, evolving context containing observations, instructions, reasoning, tool actions, and memory. This frames long-video understanding as evidence accumulation and verification. To ensure efficiency, we introduce Multimodal Multi-head Latent Attention (M^2LA), a token-preserving reparameterization compressing KV-cache states while retaining the full token stream. Our staged training includes continued pretraining, short-to-long supervised fine-tuning, rule-based reinforcement learning, and on-policy distillation. Experiments show InternVideo3 achieves strong performance on benchmarks like Video-MME, MLVU, and EgoSchema. We further instantiate the model as a video agent with retrieval tools, demonstrating robust evidence-grounded behavior. Our results suggest that efficient context handling and closed-loop reasoning are vital for adapting open multimodal models toward long-horizon visually grounded agency.

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

Edit3DGS: Unified Framework for Dynamic Head Editing via 2D Instruction-Guided Diffusion and 3D Gaussian Splatting

We present Edit3DGS, a unified framework for dynamic 3D head editing that integrates 2D instruction-guided diffusion with 3D Gaussian splatting. Unlike prior approaches that separately address frame-based edits or static 3D reconstruction, our method couples semantic controllability in the image domain with photorealistic, temporally consistent 3D representations. Given an input video, editable facial regions are masked and modified using a text-conditioned diffusion model to support fine-grained operations such as expression transformation, attribute modification, and appearance refinement. The edited frames are then aggregated through 3D Gaussian splatting to produce a coherent, high-fidelity avatar that preserves both identity and motion dynamics. To enforce consistency, Edit3DGS incorporates multi-view batch editing and lightweight inpainting strategies that recover lost expressions across timesteps. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables controllable, artifact-free head editing with smooth temporal transitions, offering practical applications in virtual avatars, immersive communication, film production, and interactive media.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Physics-IQ Verified

Video generative models ( VGMs) have become a new frontier that can be used not just for video generation but for a multitude of downstream tasks, including world modeling. To advance these tasks, a good video model must understand the physical reality of the world. Evaluating this understanding is an emerging field and has led to the Physics-IQ benchmark, which quantifies this explicitly by comparing model-generated videos to real-world videos of physical experiments. In this work, we present a systematic audit of the Physics-IQ benchmark, expose shortcomings and propose three solutions that sharpen how we can measure physical understanding of VGMs. Specifically, we improve prompt and ground-truth quality to reduce the influence of confounding factors and further introduce a sample-level scoring system that weights each sample and metric equally. Our resulting benchmark, Physics-IQ Verified, refines 57.6\% of all samples and improves over 34.8\% of prompts. In a comparison study using six image-to-video generative models, we observe moderate but meaningful ranking changes (Kendall's $\tau = 0.46$). We hope Physics-IQ Verified advances the community by providing a more reliable signal toward physically accurate VGMs. The code for the benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-iq-benchmark

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SEAGym: An Evaluation Environment for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.17546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop. Existing evaluations often reduce this process to isolated task scores or a single sequential curve, obscuring whether an update produces reusable improvement, overfits recent tasks, increases cost, or harms older behavior. We introduce SEAGym, an evaluation environment for measuring agent harness updates across training, validation, test, replay, and cost records. SEAGym turns Harbor-compatible benchmarks into dynamic self-evolution task sources with train batches, frozen update-validation, held-out ID and OOD transfer views, replay diagnostics, and saved snapshot and metric records. Instantiating SEAGym on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and HLE, we compare ACE, TF-GRPO, and AHE under a shared epoch/batch protocol. The results show that these evaluation views provide complementary signals about the evolution process: frequent updates may fail to improve held-out performance, useful intermediate snapshots may collapse later, and source diversity and model backend can affect harness reliability.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Edit Knowledge, Not Just Facts via Multi-Step Reasoning over Background Stories

arXiv:2602.02028v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to update knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts, improving factual recall but often failing to integrate updated information into a coherent framework usable across contexts. In this work, we argue that knowledge update is fundamentally a reasoning problem rather than a memorization problem. Consequently, a model should be trained in situations where the new information is instrumental to solving a task, combined with pre-existing knowledge, and exercised through multi-step reasoning. Based on this insight, we propose a training strategy based on three principles. First, new knowledge is introduced as a coherent background story that contextualizes novel facts and explains their relation to existing knowledge. Second, models are trained using self-generated multi-hop questions that require multi-step reasoning involving the new information. Third, training is done using knowledge distillation, forcing a student model to internalize the teacher's reasoning behavior without access to the novel information. Experiments show that models trained with this strategy effectively leverage newly acquired knowledge during reasoning and achieve remarkable performance on challenging questions that require combining multiple new facts.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Battery-Explicit Thermodynamic Witnesses of Bell Post-Quantumness

arXiv:2605.09149v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a battery-explicit thermodynamic witness of post-quantum Bell correlations. In each round, a single supplied excitation is routed into an explicit two-level battery if and only if a Bell-game condition is satisfied. The routing operation is implemented by an energy-preserving controlled SWAP, with all logical control registers taken to be degenerate. Thus the correlation resource does not create energy; it only determines the probability that the supplied excitation reaches the battery. The construction is first formulated for finite two-player XOR games. For any such game, the mean battery charge is exactly the game success probability multiplied by the battery gap. Optimizing over local, quantum, or nonsignalling behaviours therefore turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, or nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. For the CHSH game, Tsirelson's bound becomes a strict quantum ceiling on the mean battery charge, while a PR-box behaviour reaches the single-excitation cap. The witness is trusted-module rather than device-independent: it assumes calibrated Hamiltonians, correct classical wiring, and a trusted energy-preserving battery module. We also discuss a reversible-controller implementation, finite-statistics certification from work data, robustness to imperfect battery readout, and cyclic bookkeeping showing that no positive net work is obtained once fuel restoration and memory erasure are included.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

When does dissipation help neural surrogates learn open quantum dynamics?

arXiv:2606.23894v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Dissipation is usually viewed as an obstacle to predicting quantum dynamics, yet it can also contract trajectories toward steady states and thereby suppress accumulated prediction errors, leaving it unclear whether dissipation ultimately helps or hinders the learnability of open quantum dynamics. We investigate this question using Neural Ordinary Differential Equation (NODE) surrogates for open Heisenberg XYZ spin chains. Closed-system learnability deteriorates rapidly with system size, culminating in a static-prediction collapse at four qubits; dissipation reverses this trend, creating a broad high-fidelity regime at intermediate system sizes, while at four qubits a fidelity-aware objective recovers learnable rollout structure that is absent under closed-system training. Comparison against static and steady-state baselines reveals that dissipation improves performance through two fundamentally different mechanisms: at weak-to-moderate dissipation the surrogate captures nontrivial transient dynamics and substantially outperforms trivial predictors, whereas at stronger damping high fidelity increasingly reflects trajectory simplification toward the steady state rather than improved learned dynamics. These results show that dissipation can enhance the learnability of open quantum dynamics, but that fidelity alone is insufficient to distinguish genuine dynamical learning from steady-state trivialization: dissipative contraction and trajectory simplification are distinct effects that peak in different regimes and should be disentangled when evaluating learned quantum-dynamical surrogates.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

SuCo: Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning

Despite remarkable performance on complex tasks, Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often generate excessively long Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT), inflating computational costs even for simple queries. Existing efforts to mitigate this inefficiency typically rely on discrete reasoning modes or fixed budget tiers, lacking a principled criterion of when reasoning is sufficient. In this work, we introduce Minimal Sufficient CoT (MSC), defined as the shortest prefix of a CoT trajectory which is adequate for producing the correct answer. We empirically show that MSC not only reduces reasoning tokens, but also improves accuracy across difficulty levels. Building on MSC, we propose Sufficiency-guided Continuous Adaptive Reasoning (SuCo), a two-stage training framework for autonomous reasoning control along a continuous spectrum. In stage 1, MSC-Aligned Fine-Tuning (MFT) constructs MSC data using problem-adaptive sufficiency thresholds that naturally scale with question difficulty, then fine-tunes the model to internalize concise yet sufficient reasoning patterns. In stage 2, Sufficiency-Aware Policy Optimization (SAPO) further optimizes the model through reinforcement learning with dynamic complexity tracking and sufficiency-aware rewards that penalize both over- and under-thinking. Extensive experiments across mathematics, code, and science benchmarks show that SuCo consistently achieves improvements in both accuracy and reasoning efficiency.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

CacheRL:Multi-Turn Tool-Calling Agents via Cached Rollouts and Hybrid Reward

We present CacheRL, a system for training small agent foundation models that achieves 92 percent process accuracy on multi-step tool-calling tasks, approaching GPT-5's 94 percent while requiring 100 times less compute. Our approach addresses three challenges in practical agent training: transferring tool-calling knowledge from large models at scale, enabling reinforcement learning without costly live tool execution, and learning robustly from noisy cached environments. CacheRL introduces three key innovations. First, a hybrid thinking trajectory pipeline augments agent trajectories with LLM-generated reasoning traces, producing training examples that teach models not only what tools to call but also why. Second, the CacheAgentLoop eliminates live execution costs through a three-tier fuzzy cache while preserving trajectory fidelity using token-level masking. Third, a cache-tier-aware reward dynamically adjusts answer-quality weights to avoid penalizing models for cache-induced limitations. Through iterative supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), CacheRL improves Qwen3-4B-Thinking's validation reward from 0.43 to 0.78. On public agentic tool-calling benchmarks, our model achieves competitive performance against frontier models such as GPT-5. Ablation studies show that removing knowledge transfer reduces performance by 41 percent, while cache-aware rewards contribute a 17 percent improvement. Interestingly, reinforcement learning improves training stability but yields limited gains beyond strong supervised fine-tuning, suggesting that data quality and reward design play a more important role than complex optimization methods in building practical small agent models.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Zero-shot generalization of transformer neural operators to larger domains

arXiv:2606.14597v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based neural operators have shown remarkable performance for approximating solution operators of partial differential equations on complex geometries. However, existing approaches implicitly assume a fixed domain size, which limits their ability to generalize at inference. In this work, we investigate domain extension, namely zero-shot inference on spatial domains that are significantly larger than those encountered during training. We argue that this setting fundamentally requires spatial locality and translation equivariance. We propose to implement this locality via a decomposable bias in the attention logits computation, enabling finely controllable locality while remaining fully decomposable into query-key inner products and directly compatible with optimized attention kernels. Combined with rotary positional embeddings, it enables expressive embeddings with controllable spatial support without altering the transformer architecture. We empirically show that our approach substantially improves zero-shot generalization to larger domains across two PDE benchmarks and a 3D industrial atmospheric flow application. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cerea-daml/domain-extension.

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

HoloRec: Holistic Encoding and Interleaved Reasoning for Generative Recommendation

arXiv:2606.15331v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative recommendation models that formulate the task as sequence generation overcome the objective fragmentation problem of traditional cascade architectures, yet existing approaches still suffer from flat semantic representations lacking hierarchical structure for multi-step reasoning and an externally constructed chain-of-thought (CoT) that requires expensive annotations and remains disconnected from the generation objective. We propose HoloRec, an endogenous chain-of-thought recommendation mechanism that unifies representation, reasoning, and generation by constructing a hierarchical semantic encoding matrix via multi-granularity nested residual quantization optimized by a holistic reconstruction loss. HoloRec supports two inference modes: a non-thinking mode that uses lightweight multi-granularity supervised alignment for fast prediction, and a thinking mode that employs an interleaved reasoning scheme to generate CoT steps on the fly, directly embedding reasoning into the generation process without external data. Experiments on multiple public recommendation datasets demonstrate that HoloRec consistently outperforms baselines, with especially significant gains in sparse scenarios, and the thinking mode achieves better accuracy than the non-thinking mode with only modest inference overhead.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Efficient and accurate neural-field reconstruction using resistive memory

Authors:

Applications such as medical imaging, augmented and virtual reality, and embodied artificial intelligence (AI) depend on the ability to reconstruct complex signals from sparse observations. These applications are characterized by incomplete measurements and limited computational resources. Traditional approaches to digital hardware face the following challenges: explicit signal representations require heavy sampling and storage, data movement across the von Neumann bottleneck dominates energy and latency, and CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor)-based circuits offer limited parallel efficiency. Here we present a software–hardware co-optimization framework for sparse-input signal reconstruction. At the software level, we use neural fields1 to implicitly represent signals using neural networks, which are further compressed by low-rank decomposition and structured pruning. At the hardware level, we design a resistive-memory-based computing-in-memory platform, featuring a Gaussian encoder and a multi-layer perceptron processing engine. The Gaussian encoder leverages the intrinsic stochasticity of resistive memory for efficient encoding, whereas the processing engine enables precise weight mapping through a hardware-aware quantization circuit. On a 40-nm 256 Kb resistive-memory macro, the system delivers 23.5×, 21.0× and 32.3× gains in projected energy efficiency, together with 10.8×, 38.8× and 6.2× gains in projected&nbsp;parallelism, for three-dimensional computed tomography sparse reconstruction, novel view synthesis and dynamic-scene novel view synthesis, without compromising on reconstruction quality. This work advances AI-driven signal reconstruction technology and paves the way for future efficient and robust medical AI and three-dimensional vision applications. A co-optimized AI hardware–software system using resistive-memory computing improves energy efficiency and parallelism for sparse signal reconstruction in imaging and three-dimensional vision applications.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

HERO: Hindsight-Enhanced Reflection from Environment Observations for Agentic Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.11559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning typically improves multi-turn agent capabilities through the terminal outcome of the trajectories, which makes it difficult to determine credit assignments for each intermediate turns. Recent on-policy self-distillation methods offer a promising alternative by converting privileged feedback into dense token-level supervision through a self-teacher. Our study is motivated by the unexpected performance degradation observed when naively extending this paradigm to multi-turn settings, which we attribute to a lack of alignment between privileged feedback, such as successful trajectories or terminal outcomes, and the student's current decision context. We introduce HERO, a hindsight-enhanced self-distillation framework that uses next environment observations as locally aligned feedback. After each rollout, HERO reflects on the completed interaction to convert each observation into a compact turn-level diagnosis, that captures actionable feedback about the original action such as its necessity, validity or failure cause. On TauBench and WebShop, HERO improves task success and reduces unnecessary turns over environment-feedback-only self-distillation and GRPO. It is especially effective under limited training turn budgets, where successful rollouts are rare and GRPO provides weak reward-contrast signals.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limits of the single-curve interface and outermost loops in the planar random field Ising model

arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Generalization Hacking: Models Can Game Reinforcement Learning by Preventing Behavioral Generalization

arXiv:2606.12016v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model post-training, and in particular reinforcement learning (RL), is one of the primary mechanisms by which developers can shape models' values and behaviors. However, as models become increasingly evaluation and training aware, they may be motivated to resist training when the perceived objective conflicts with their current values, undermining developers' ability to detect misalignment and correct model behavior through further training. In this paper, we demonstrate generalization hacking, in which a model collects reward during RL while preventing the rewarded behavior from generalizing. We construct a model organism on Qwen3-235B-A22B, finetuning on synthetic documents describing training awareness and self-inoculation, a novel mechanism in which the model frames compliance as context-specific in its chain of thought, without demonstrating or instructing either behavior. The model organism achieves train-time harmfulness comparable to controls while maintaining a persistent ${\sim}15$ percentage point compliance gap across 700 steps of RL. Additionally, a control organism trained only on training awareness documents independently discovers inoculation-like reasoning under RL pressure, developing its own compliance gap despite never being exposed to the concept. Because the generalization-hacking organism receives high reward throughout, standard training metrics provide no signal that generalization has failed. Our results constitute the first demonstration that a model can actively resist RL behavioral modification while maintaining high reward, suggesting that as models become more capable and training-aware, they may be able to undermine the training process itself.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Algorithmic-Human Manager: AI, Apps, and Workers in the Indian Gig Economy

arXiv:2606.19975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue-collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management. This paper examines the impact of artificial intelligence and digital technologies on the blue collar gig economy in India, focusing on algorithmic management he use of automated systems to allocate, monitor, and evaluate work in location-based services such as ride sharing and delivery. Using a social justice framework and a mixed-methods approach comprising interviews with 16 gig workers and 21 key stakeholders, the study uncovers a dual reality: while AI-powered systems expand access to work and generate operational efficiencies, they simultaneously introduce significant challenges related to fairness, transparency, and worker dignity. Key findings reveal that algorithmic systems are opaque by design, produce inequitable outcomes, and are not structured to reward additional labour with proportionate pay. The study advocates for a pragmatic hybrid governance model an Algorithmic Human Manager framework in which technological efficiency and human accountability operate together rather than in opposition. The findings carry implications for policymakers, platform companies, and civil society organizations working to design equitable AI governance frameworks for the gig economy in India and across the Global South.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The algebra of Krom logic programs

arXiv:2606.15719v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the algebraic structure of Krom logic programs, consisting only of facts and rules with at most one body atom. We show that sequential composition endows the class of Krom programs with a natural monoid structure and that this structure admits rich algebraic extensions to Krom seminearrings, Krom quemirings, Krom-Conway seminearrings, and Krom-Conway omegaseminearrings. Furthermore, we establish explicit generating sets and canonical decompositions, study the associated ${}^\omega$-operator, characterize the Kleene star in graph-theoretic terms, and relate finite Krom monoids to transformation monoids and finite-state automata. These results provide new connections between logic programming, algebraic automata theory, and algebraic graph theory.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Sensorimotor World Models: Perception for Action via Inverse Dynamics

arXiv:2606.20104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perception for action suggests that representations of the world should be shaped not by visual fidelity alone, but by their relevance for actions. At the same time, latent JEPA-style world models advocate learning compact predictive states from high-dimensional observations to facilitate the prediction of future states, but end-to-end training of these models is nontrivial because representations may collapse if our only goal is to construct a latent state that is easy to predict. We introduce a sensorimotor world model (SMWM): a latent world model trained end-to-end with inverse dynamics regularization. This single regularizer addresses both issues: it prevents representation collapse and induces action-aligned representations. By forcing latent states to preserve information about the action underlying a transition, it biases the model toward the controllable degrees of freedom of the environment while discarding uncontrollable distractors. This yields stable latent world models trained from offline, reward-free trajectories, without frozen encoders, exponential moving averages, or complex latent regularizers. Empirically, SMWM learns compact, interpretable latent spaces and enables competitive planning performance across simple 2D and 3D control tasks.

23.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

Authors:

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

SPARQ-MI leverages end-to-end spatial single-cell analysis of the tumor microenvironment

Detailed spatial analysis of the tumor micro-environment (TME) through multiplexed fluorescence imaging requires quantitative image-processing and data-analysis methods. While data-preprocessing down to segmentation of individual cells is captured by available methods, statistical analysis of single-cell features is compromised by the uneven noise distribution especially in complex tissues such as the TME, as well as by labor-intensive manual cell-type annotation and region segmentation. Here, we present SPARQ-MI (Spatial Phenotyping, Architecture Reconstruction and Quantification from Multiplexed Imaging) for streamlined spatial single-cell analysis, along with a tissue microarray PhenoCycler data-set with 37 fluorescent channels from melanoma patients under immunotherapy. We demonstrate that SPARQ-MI enables robust reconstruction of the cellular and spatial composition in this and other tissue types. Our analysis reveals associations of the cell-state and spatial location of CD8 T cells with response to immunotherapy. Overall, SPARQ-MI allows for quantitative analysis of complex fluorescence histology samples under minimal user input, and accounting for spatially uneven coverage of antibody signals, setting the stage for quantitative analysis of clinical samples.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Information Is Not Physical: Possibility Spaces, Erasure, and the Structure of Unrealized Alternatives

arXiv:2606.15120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The slogan ``information is physical,'' introduced by Rolf Landauer and developed through quantum information theory and black-hole thermodynamics, has achieved near-axiomatic status in modern physics. Yet the ontological status of information remains surprisingly underexamined: most discussions either reduce information to a form of energy or treat it as a purely mathematical object. This paper proposes a third position. I argue that information is neither a physical substance nor a free-floating abstraction, but rather the structure of physically realizable alternatives – a counterfactual structure that a physical system instantiates in virtue of the possibility space available to it. Building on Shannon's combinatorial definition, the Landauer principle, the no-cloning theorem, and the black-hole information paradox, I show that the informational content of any physical event is constituted by the set of outcomes that could have occurred but did not. This counterfactual reading dissolves several persistent confusions: it explains why erasing information dissipates heat without making information ``material,'' why quantum superposition is informationally richer than any classical mixture, and why information loss in black holes is physically significant beyond mere bookkeeping. The proposal sits within a structural-realist framework but departs from standard structural realism by locating the relevant structure in modal, not merely actual, relations. I conclude by sketching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and scientific ontology more broadly.