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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Simulation of Non-Markovian Quantum Accelerated Dynamics via Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation

Authors:
Dongmei Wei↗Junxiang Wang↗Hanxiu Xu↗Cancan Chen↗Jiaying Wu↗

arXiv:2606.20024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation (TFSE) is an effective tool for simulating the dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems. The Quantum Speed Limit (QSL) time characterizes the minimum time required for the evolution of a non-Markovian quantum system. In this paper, Wei's TFSE is employed to simulate the non-Markovian quantum accelerated evolution process in the Resonant Dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (RDJC) model. By solving the QSL time of a time-fractional single-qubit open system, the enhancement mechanism of the system evolution speed induced by the non-Markovian memory effects of the environment is revealed. Further studies show that the optimized acceleration of the system evolution can be achieved by jointly regulating the fractional order, coupling strength, and photon number. Comparative analyses indicate that Wei's TFSE can accurately capture the non-Markovian accelerated dynamical features of the system over the entire fractional order range, whereas Naber's TFSE is applicable only within a limited fractional order interval. In addition, the comparisons of the average simulation time for calculating the dynamical trajectory of the excited-state probability demonstrate that Wei's TFSE has a significant simulation advantage in computational efficiency. Therefore, Wei's TFSE is more accurate and efficient for simulating the accelerated dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Unified Theory of Sinusoidal Activation Families for Implicit Neural Representations

Authors:
Alireza Morsali↗MohammadJavad Vaez↗Mohammadhossein Soltani↗Amirhossein Kazerouni↗Babak Taati↗Morteza Mohammad-Noori↗

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) model continuous signals with compact neural networks and have become a standard tool in vision, graphics, and signal processing. A central challenge is accurately capturing fine detail without heavy hand-crafted encodings or brittle training heuristics. Across the literature, periodic activations have emerged as a compelling remedy: from SIREN, which uses a single sinusoid with a fixed global frequency, to more recent architectures employing multiple sinusoids and, in some cases, trainable frequencies and phases. We study this family of sinusoidal activations and develop a principled theoretical and practical framework for trainable sinusoidal activations in INRs. Concretely, we instantiate this framework with Sinusoidal Trainable Activation Functions (STAF), a Fourier-like activation whose amplitudes, frequencies, and phases are learned. Our analysis (i) establishes a Kronecker-equivalence construction that expresses trainable sinusoidal activations with standard sine networks and quantifies expressive growth, (ii) characterizes how the Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK) spectrum changes under trainable sinusoidal parameterization, and (iii) provides an initialization that yields standard normal post-activations without asymptotic central limit theorem (CLT) arguments. Empirically, on images, audio, shapes, inverse problems (super-resolution, denoising) and NeRF, STAF is competitive and often stronger on distortion-oriented reconstruction metrics such as PSNR/SSIM across the evaluated INR tasks, with favorable parameter efficiency under layer-wise sharing. While periodic activations can alleviate practical manifestations of spectral bias, our results indicate they do not eliminate it; instead, trainable sinusoids can improve the observed capacity-optimization trade-off in the evaluated settings.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Vector Quantized Latent Concepts: A Scalable Alternative to Clustering-Based Concept Discovery

Authors:
Xuemin Yu↗Ankur Garg↗Samira Ebrahimi Kahou↗Hassan Sajjad↗

Large language models (LLMs) encode rich semantic information in their hidden states, yet it remains difficult to understand what information these internal representations capture. Latent concepts extracted from hidden states offer a promising direction for interpreting LLMs, but existing clustering-based methods face a trade-off: hierarchical clustering produces coherent concepts but is limited to small datasets due to its quadratic memory cost, while K-Means scales efficiently but may yield less semantically coherent concepts. We propose Vector Quantized Latent Concept (VQLC), a discrete concept learning framework that learns a codebook of latent concepts on frozen hidden states. Across 12 dataset-model settings, VQLC stays close to K-Means in computational cost, scales better than hierarchical clustering, and remains competitive in faithfulness, with the clearest gains on decoder-only models. LLMs-based evaluation, qualitative analysis, and a Sparse Autoencoder (SAE) comparison demonstrate that the learned concepts are interpretable and task-relevant.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Visored: A Controlled-Natural-Language Prover for LLM-Generated Mathematics

Authors:
Xiyu Zhai↗Xinyi Chen↗Yiping Wang↗Runlong Zhou↗Liao Zhang↗Simon S. Du↗

arXiv:2606.17581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a dependent-type-based prover designed around the way LLMs (and humans) tend to write mathematics, complementing existing systems such as Lean and Rocq. Its core design choices are a surface that imitates mathematical natural language and a rule-driven automation layer that closes the routine steps a textbook would omit, so that an accepted proof can be re-emitted as a checked Lean file. Early experiments suggest that, even without any prover-specific training data, LLMs can learn to use it effectively on the miniF2F benchmark. Lean output excerpts: https://github.com/xiyuzhai-husky-lang/visored/

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05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Theorem-Grounded Execution Ontologies for Interpretable Machine Reasoning

Authors:
Raghu Anantharangachar↗

arXiv:2606.16010v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models have achieved impressive performance on reasoning tasks spanning mathematics, science, programming, and commonsense inference. Despite these advances, their reasoning processes remain largely latent, making them difficult to interpret, verify, replay, debug, and transfer across domains. Existing approaches such as chain-of-thought, tree-of-thoughts, graph-of-thoughts, and tool-augmented reasoning expose intermediate reasoning artifacts but typically lack explicit execution semantics, formal state representations, and verifiable reasoning structures. We introduce Theorem-Grounded Execution Ontologies (TGEO), a framework that models reasoning as an executable state-transition process rather than a sequence of generated tokens. Given an input problem, TGEO identifies relevant theorem families, binds the problem to a domain ontology, discovers semantic objects, instantiates states and operators, constructs predicates and contracts, and synthesizes an executable reasoning graph. The resulting graph provides an interpretable, replayable, and auditable representation of reasoning in which every state transition, operator application, and validation step is explicitly represented. TGEO integrates five architectural components: (1) theorem-grounded reasoning priors, (2) executable ontologies, (3) operator-mediated state transitions, (4) predicate and contract-based execution validation, and (5) architectural auditing and failure localization. We evaluate TGEO on theorem-intensive reasoning tasks derived from mathematical benchmark domains and a curated Golden Execution Suite. Our findings demonstrate the value of executable reasoning representations for interpretable, verifiable, and reproducible AI reasoning systems.

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

EvoArena: Tracking Memory Evolution for Robust LLM Agents in Dynamic Environments

Authors:
Jundong Xu↗Qingchuan Li↗Jiaying Wu↗Yihuai Lan↗Shuyue Stella Li↗Huichi Zhou↗Bowen Jiang↗Lei Wang↗Jun Wang↗Anh Tuan Luu↗Caiming Xiong↗Hae Won Park↗…

Large language model (LLM) agents have achieved strong performance on a wide range of benchmarks, yet most evaluations assume static environments. In contrast, real-world deployment is inherently dynamic, requiring agents to continually align their knowledge, skills, and behavior with changing environments and updated task conditions. To address this gap, we introduce EvoArena, a benchmark suite that models environment changes as sequences of progressive updates across terminal, software, and social domains. We further propose EvoMem, a patch-based memory paradigm that records memory evolution as structured update histories, enabling agents to reason about environmental evolution through changes in their memory. Experiments show that current agents struggle on EvoArena, achieving an average accuracy of 39.6% across evolving terminal, software, and social-preference domains. EvoMem consistently improves performance, yielding an average gain of 1.5% on EvoArena and also improving standard benchmarks such as GAIA and LoCoMo by 6.1% and 4.8%. Beyond individual tasks, EvoMem further improves chain-level accuracy by 3.7% on EvoArena, where success requires completing a consecutive sequence of related evolutionary subtasks. Mechanistic analysis shows that EvoMem improves evidence capture in the memory, indicating better preservation of complete evolving environment states. Our results highlight the importance of modeling evolution in both evaluation and memory for reliable agent deployment.

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07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

Reference-guided immune recovery matching prioritizes traditional Chinese medicine ingredients

Authors:
Hu↗Xiao↗Chen↗C. Y.-C↗

Therapeutic prioritization from single-cell transcriptomes requires a target that is closer to treatment response than disease-signature reversal. In immune diseases, post-treatment recovery may follow patient- and cell-type-specific trajectories rather than a simple return along the pretreatment disease axis. We developed ImmuneNavi, a healthy-reference-anchored recovery-matching workflow for ranking traditional Chinese medicine ingredients from paired PBMC data. The workflow maps heterogeneous PBMC cohorts to a common healthy immune coordinate system, constructs patient-cell-type disease and recovery states, and processes ITCM treated-control profiles into a fixed ingredient perturbation bank. Patient and ingredient states are represented in matched gene, pathway and transcription-factor views, allowing the model to combine local transcriptional direction with more stable program-level features. A matcher trained on one paired treatment cohort preserved recovery-aligned ingredient rankings in independent PBMC cohorts without redefining the feature space, candidate set or preprocessing procedure. This provides a reusable transcriptomic pipeline for moving from paired immune-state measurements to prioritized natural-product candidates for experimental follow-up.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Midwifery Practice in Conflict Contexts: Lived Experiences from Somalia and Nigeria

Authors:
Elnakib↗Ngozi Iwu↗Mohammed↗H. A↗Mary↗Tappis↗Charity↗Rejoice Helma↗Israel-Isah↗Kazeem Olalekan↗Odonye↗Ahmed↗…

Background: Midwives are a central cadre in the health system, particularly in conflict-affected settings where they are sometimes the primary or even only skilled providers available. Yet, despite their critical role, there is limited qualitative evidence capturing their lived experiences and how these shape workforce entry, retention, and overall well-being. Methods: Drawing on a phenomenological research methodology, this qualitative study was embedded within a larger prospective longitudinal cohort of midwifery students and graduates in Somalia and Nigeria. We conducted focus group discussions with graduate midwives (n=48 in Nigeria; n=63 in Somalia) to explore their experiences transitioning into the workforce and their realities working in health systems impacted by conflict and violent insecurity. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Five themes emerged from the data: (1) job search and workforce entry, which was described as fraught with challenges and shaped by a set of formal systems in Nigeria but informal networks and structural barriers in Somalia (2) working conditions that were marked by resource scarcity, infrastructural challenges, and heavy and unreasonable workloads, (3) safety, security and coping strategies that differed across the two contexts but reflected persistent exposure to violence and a reliance on ad hoc and personal coping in lieu of systematic protection, (4) community perceptions of midwives, shaped and constrained by social and gender norms and (5) mental health and emotional wellbeing, highlighting stress, burnout and moral injury experienced by this cadre. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the profound challenges faced by midwives working in conflict-affected settings, and they shine a light on the urgent need to support and invest in this critical and predominantly female health workforce.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

IVIE: A Neuro-symbolic Approach to Incremental and Validated Generation of Interactive Fiction Worlds

Authors:
Micaela Vaucher↗Santiago Silveira↗Santiago G\'ongora↗Luis Chiruzzo↗

Computational creativity in Interactive Fiction faces a fundamental tension: Large Language Models (LLM) may produce creative narratives but struggle with world coherence, while symbolic systems ensure consistency but lack creative flexibility. We present IVIE (Incremental & Validated Interactive Experiences), a neuro-symbolic approach to generating complete and playable interactive fiction worlds from scratch. Building upon PAYADOR's neuro-symbolic framework, IVIE implements a four-stage incremental generation pipeline that delegates creative decisions–setting and character creation, puzzle design–to LLMs while grounding the world state through symbolic validation. The system generates worlds with interconnected locations, functional items, non-player characters, and coherent puzzles, all structured around a central goal-oriented architecture. Human evaluation shows the approach generates immersive, thematically coherent worlds with high player engagement. Results seem to indicate that the neuro-symbolic approach successfully balances flexibility with narrative coherence: symbolic validation grounds LLM generation without eliminating generative freedom. However, challenges remain: LLM inconsistencies occasionally bypass puzzle constraints, and objective validation gaps allow some structurally impossible goals. We identify key design considerations for future neurosymbolic interactive storytelling systems, particularly regarding LLM capabilities and their limitations.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Model Knows, the Decoder Finds: Future Value Guided Particle Power Sampling

Authors:
Tu Nguyen↗Matthieu Zimmer↗Rasul Tutunov↗Xiaotong Ji↗Haitham Bou Ammar↗

arXiv:2605.02427v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A recurring pattern in "reasoning without training" is that base LLMs already assign non-trivial probability mass to correct multi-step solutions; the bottleneck is locating these modes efficiently at inference time. Power sampling provides a principled way to bias decoding toward such modes by targeting p_theta(x)^alpha with alpha > 1, but practical approximations must account for future-dependent correction factors that determine which prefixes remain promising. We introduce Auxiliary Particle Power Sampling (APPS), a blockwise particle algorithm for approximating the sequence-level power target with a bounded population of partial solutions. APPS propagates hypotheses in parallel using proposal-corrected power reweighting and refines their survival through future-value-guided selection at resampling boundaries. This redistributes finite compute across competing prefixes rather than committing to a single unfolding path, while providing a direct scaling knob in the particle count and predictable peak memory. We instantiate the future-value signal with short-horizon rollouts and also study an amortized variant that replaces rollouts with a lightweight learned selection head. AMore broadly, APPS improves the accuracy–runtime trade-off of training-free decoding, further supporting the view that inference-time power approximation can recover gains often attributed to post-training.

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

Beyond Algorithms: Conceptual Innovation in Medical Imaging AI

Authors:
Mark A. Anastasio↗

arXiv:2606.19270v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence has driven rapid progress in medical imaging research, producing increasingly sophisticated algorithms and steady improvements on benchmark tasks. However, this algorithm-centric trajectory has also revealed a growing imbalance: while computational methods advance rapidly, the conceptual foundations that define imaging tasks, evaluation metrics, and clinical meaning sometimes remain underexamined. In this Perspective, we distinguish algorithmic innovation, which focuses on improving computational implementations and performance within a fixed problem definition, from conceptual innovation, which reframes what problems are posed, how success is measured, and why an approach is clinically relevant. We argue that prevailing incentive structures, training pathways, and publication norms disproportionately reward algorithmic novelty, particularly for early-career researchers, while at times undervaluing conceptual contributions that are essential for scientific maturation and clinical translation. Through representative examples from medical imaging AI, we show how insufficient conceptual grounding can lead to misaligned objectives, fragile generalization, and limited real-world impact. We conclude with actionable recommendations for researchers, mentors, reviewers, and journals to better recognize, support, and integrate conceptual innovation alongside algorithmic advances.

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12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Regulating the Machine Contributor: Governance and Policy Alignment in Open Source

Authors:
Jassem Manita↗Aziz Amari↗

arXiv:2606.14594v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-assisted software development has moved from line-level autocomplete to agents that can plan changes, edit files, and submit pull requests with limited human supervision. Open-source software, however, evolves through a process designed for humans: contributor agreements, codes of conduct, and review norms all assume a legally accountable person who can attest to provenance and answer reviewer questions. Autonomous and semi-autonomous AI contributors strain those assumptions, and the 2025-2026 record of agent-driven incidents, AI-generated nuisance volume, and platform-level shutdowns shows that the gap is operationally consequential. Several open-source organisations have responded with contribution policies, but the result is fragmented, and its alignment with emerging AI governance frameworks (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF with the UC Berkeley Agentic AI Profile, ISO/IEC 42001 and 23894) is unmapped at the contribution level. We compare policies across six organisations (SymPy, LLVM, matplotlib, OpenInfra, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Linux Foundation) using Most-Similar Systems Design with indicator-based coding and process tracing for SymPy and LLVM. From this we derive a six-dimensional taxonomy (disclosure, responsibility, human oversight, licensing, enforcement, maintainer workload), an ordinal Policy Maturity Score, and a mapping of documented agent incidents onto the dimensions each policy fails to govern. Aligning the dimensions with the regulatory frameworks above identifies overlapping gaps neither side currently closes, and we close by sketching the shape of a harmonised tiered framework and the empirical evaluation needed to calibrate it.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Dynamics from Lax Pair Theory: A Reconstruction from Spectrum Preservation

Authors:
P\'eter Szab\'o↗

arXiv:2606.19664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We reconstruct unitary quantum dynamics from a minimal axiomatic foundation built on Hilbert-space observables and isospectral evolution. The only dynamical assumption is that physical time evolution is a continuous one-parameter flow of Hermitian observables that preserves their spectra, i.e. the possible outcomes of measurement. We show that this assumption is already sufficient to force the Lax form of quantum dynamics. The Heisenberg equation, the time-dependent and time-independent Schrödinger equations, conservation laws, and good quantum numbers then follow as theorems rather than postulates. In this formulation, Lax pair theory supplies the missing dynamical bridge between the measurement structure of a Hilbert space and standard quantum evolution: the Hamiltonian is not assumed, but emerges as the generator required for an isospectral observable flow.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

3D-CBM: A Framework for Concept-Based Interpretability in Generative 3D Modeling

Authors:
Ahmad Al-Kabbany↗

This research introduces a framework for incorporating Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) into 3D generative architectures to address the inherent 'semantic gap' in deep geometric learning. As deep models become central to 3D content creation, explainability shifts from a peripheral feature to a fundamental requirement for trust and accountability in safety-critical domains such as healthcare and manufacturing. CBMs provide an intrinsic interpretability solution by constraining latent representations to align with human-defined concepts, yet their application to unstructured 3D data remains largely unexplored. We design, implement, and validate a formal 3D-CBM architecture that maps raw geometric inputs, including point clouds and meshes, into a multi-tiered taxonomy of interpretable primitives and functional attributes. The framework further identifies strategic datasets, such as PartNet and ShapeNet, specialized for concept-based supervision. Experimental results from a 3D part-manipulation proof-of-concept experiment demonstrate the framework's efficacy, achieving a concept prediction accuracy of 88.8\% and a Chamfer Distance of 0.0115. Critically, the model enables precise test-time intervention, allowing for the interactive correction of structural errors. This work establishes a foundation for semantically-steerable 3D generation and invites further exploration into collaborative human-in-the-loop design systems.

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

DiffAttn: Diffusion-Based Drivers' Visual Attention Prediction with LLM-Enhanced Semantic Reasoning

Authors:
Weimin Liu↗Qingkun Li↗Jiyuan Qiu↗Wenjun Wang↗Joshua H. Meng↗

Drivers' visual attention provides critical cues for anticipating latent hazards and directly shapes decision-making and control maneuvers, where its absence can compromise traffic safety. To emulate drivers' perception patterns and advance visual attention prediction for intelligent vehicles, we propose DiffAttn, a diffusion-based framework that formulates this task as a conditional diffusion-denoising process, enabling more accurate modeling of drivers' attention. To capture both local and global scene features, we adopt Swin Transformer as encoder and design a decoder that combines a Feature Fusion Pyramid for cross-layer interaction with dense, multi-scale conditional diffusion to jointly enhance denoising learning and model fine-grained local and global scene contexts. Additionally, a large language model (LLM) layer is incorporated to enhance top-down semantic reasoning and improve sensitivity to safety-critical cues. Extensive experiments on four public datasets demonstrate that DiffAttn achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance, surpassing most video-based, top-down-feature-driven, and LLM-enhanced baselines. Our framework further supports interpretable driver-centric scene understanding and has the potential to improve in-cabin human-machine interaction, risk perception, and drivers' state measurement in intelligent vehicles.

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

Semantic Segmentation of Node and Edge Diagrams for Assistive Technology

Authors:
Michael Cormier↗Yichun Zhao↗Laura Paul↗Cameron Swift↗Duc Tri Dang↗Miguel Nacenta↗

In this paper, we present a novel set of related models for semantic segmentation of node-link diagrams. These diagrams are frequently used to represent mathematical graphs, relationships between concepts, and flowcharts. Such diagrams are difficult to access non-visually; while some assistive interfaces have been designed for node-link diagrams, they rely upon a machine-readable representation of the diagram, whereas such diagrams will generally be made available as bitmap images. Our compact deep learning models show excellent quantitative and qualitative performance on a large synthetic dataset of node-link diagrams, reaching per-pixel accuracy over 93\%.

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

Minimum Distance Summaries for Robust Neural Posterior Estimation

Authors:
Sherman Khoo↗Dennis Prangle↗Song Liu↗Mark Beaumont↗

arXiv:2602.09161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Simulation-based inference (SBI) enables amortized Bayesian inference by first training a neural posterior estimator (NPE) on prior-simulator pairs, typically through low-dimensional summary statistics, which can then be cheaply reused for fast inference by querying it on new test observations. Because NPE is estimated under the training data distribution, it is susceptible to misspecification when observations deviate from the training distribution. Many robust SBI approaches address this by modifying NPE training or introducing error models, coupling robustness to the inference network and compromising amortization and modularity. We introduce minimum-distance summaries, a plug-in robust NPE method that adapts queried test-time summaries independently of the pretrained NPE. Leveraging the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) as a distance between observed data and a summary-conditional predictive distribution, the adapted summary inherits strong robustness properties from the MMD. We demonstrate that the algorithm can be implemented efficiently with random Fourier feature approximations, yielding a lightweight, model-free test-time adaptation procedure. We provide theoretical guarantees for the robustness of our algorithm and empirically evaluate it on a range of synthetic and real-world tasks, demonstrating substantial robustness gains with minimal additional overhead.

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

Continual Quadruped Robots Coordination via Semantic Skill Discovery

Authors:
Daoqing Wang↗Yuchen Xiao↗Weixuan Huang↗Zhilong Zhang↗Shenghua Wan↗Meng Li↗Lei Yuan↗Yang Yu↗

arXiv:2606.08102v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multi-quadruped coordination has attracted increasing attention due to its enhanced payload capacity, broader contact coverage, and improved adaptability to challenging tasks. Existing methods for multi-quadruped manipulation typically focus on predefined or closed task families, often relying on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to train task-specific coordination policies. However, such methods struggle in open-ended continual learning settings, where tasks arrive sequentially and robots are expected to acquire new coordination skills while reusing previously learned ones without catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose Conquer, a semantic skill-library framework that formulates continual multi-quadruped coordination as a retrieve-adapt-update process. First, to accommodate varying team sizes across tasks, we design a team-structured Self-Allies-Goal (SAG) backbone that supports variable-cardinality robot teams by explicitly modeling each robot's own state, teammate context, and task goal. For each incoming task, Conquer constructs a task-level semantic descriptor from pre-execution information and retrieves a relevant skill from the library for adaptation. After successful execution, Conquer updates the skill library by extracting trajectory-level semantic descriptors and organizing them according to semantic distance, thereby enabling continual skill accumulation and cross-task knowledge transfer. Simulation experiments show that Conquer achieves a final average success rate of 95.6%, demonstrating strong forward transfer and negligible catastrophic forgetting. Real-world rollouts on Unitree Go2 teams further validate the deployment feasibility of Conquer for practical multi-quadruped coordination. Simulation and real-robot demonstration videos are available at: https://conquer-project.pages.dev/.

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19.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-16

Evolution and the ultimatum game: An agent-based model with interbirth intervals and population structure

Authors:
Jeffrey C. Schank↗

by Jeffrey C. Schank, Matt L. Miller The ultimatum game (UG) is widely used to study mutually beneficial exchanges, fairness, and prosocial behavior across different societies. However, human behavior in UG experiments does not align with the game-theoretical prediction that proposers should offer the least positive amount and responders should accept such offers. Instead, proposers make generous offers that are greater than the minimum responders are willing to accept, resulting in generous offers with wide offer-acceptance gaps. Numerous evolutionary models of the UG have been created and studied to explain human behavior, particularly generous offers made in UG experiments. These models have recently faced criticism for lacking biological realism and not adequately explaining the data. Here, we present an agent-based model inspired by our hunter-gatherer ancestors and with a biologically more realistic selection process. We assume that (1) agents exist in group-structured and group-clustered populations, where reproduction (2) depends on resource accumulation, but (3) is limited by interbirth intervals. We ran simulations to assess whether this biologically more realistic model evolves patterns of behavior consistent with patterns in the data from meta-analyses of human behavior in the UG. For the proposed model, we show that generous offers robustly evolve, as well as the difficult-to-explain offer-acceptance gaps, only in group-structured populations with interbirth intervals. We demonstrate that these results are robust and may help explain variation in data across societies. We discuss how interbirth intervals interact with group structure to modulate offer and rejection costs, favoring the evolution of generous offers, offer-acceptance gaps, and other patterns in the data on human behavior in the UG. We also discuss why weak selection and/or high mutation rate models cannot explain all the patterns in UG experimental data. We discuss biological realism and conclude that group structure and interbirth intervals may be essential for explaining prosocial behavior across societies.

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

A geometric and deep learning reproducible pipeline for monitoring floating anthropogenic debris in urban rivers using in situ cameras

Authors:
Gauthier Grimmer↗Romain Wenger↗Cl\'ement Flint↗Germain Forestier↗Gilles Rixhon↗Valentin Chardon↗

The proliferation of floating anthropogenic debris in rivers has emerged as a pressing environmental concern, exerting a detrimental influence on biodiversity, water quality, and human activities such as navigation and recreation. The present study proposes a novel methodological framework for the monitoring the aforementioned waste, utilising fixed, in-situ cameras. This study provides two key contributions: (i) the continuous quantification and monitoring of floating debris using deep learning and (ii) the identification of the most suitable deep learning model in terms of accuracy and inference speed under complex environmental conditions. These models are tested in a range of environmental conditions and learning configurations, including experiments on biases related to data leakage. Furthermore, a geometric model is implemented to estimate the actual size of detected objects from a 2D image. This model takes advantage of both intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of the camera. The findings of this study underscore the significance of the dataset constitution protocol, particularly with respect to the integration of negative images and the consideration of temporal leakage. In conclusion, the feasibility of metric object estimation using projective geometry coupled with regression corrections is demonstrated. This approach paves the way for the development of robust, low-cost, automated monitoring systems for urban aquatic environments.

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

Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting

Authors:
Shiqiao Zhou↗Zipeng Wu↗Holger Sch\"oner↗Edouard Fouch\'e↗IAG Wilson↗Shuo Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting models often benefit from historical patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent research explored retrieving relevant historical time series segments to enhance forecasting. However, relying solely on time series similarity is often insufficient for retrieval under non-stationarity. To address this, we propose a multimodal approach: a Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting framework, SERAF. Unlike mainstream approaches that depend only on time series similarity, SERAF conducts dual retrieval over the time series and their self-generated textual descriptions. It retrieves two complementary sets of historical patterns and corresponding futures, which are selectively and jointly used to guide future predictions. Experiments across seven real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SERAF in bridging numerical and semantic views of time series compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning for Single-shot Test-time Ultrasound Image Denoising

Authors:
Jiajing Zhang↗Bingze Dai↗Xi Zhang↗Yue Xu↗Wei-Ning Lee↗

The inherent electronic and speckle noise complicates clinical interpretation of ultrasound images. Conventional denoising methods rely on explicit noise assumptions whose validity diminishes under composite noise conditions. Learning-based methods are usually pretrained in a limited image domain using a labeled dataset, which implies inevitable domain shift in complex in vivo environments. This study proposes a Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning (PSCL) framework for test-time ultrasound image denoising without pretraining. Given multiple noisy samples from only one-shot imaging, PSCL disentangles anatomical similarity and noise randomness into separate pyramid latent spaces. The clean image is then decoded from the anatomy space while discarding the noise space. We first apply PSCL to synthetic aperture ultrasound (SAU), where an Aperture-to-Aperture loop serves as a self-supervised proxy task to ensure denoising fidelity. Simulation experiments, including noise levels from 0 to 30 dB and inclusion geometries from simple to complex, demonstrated improvements of 69.3% in SNR and 34.4% in CNR. The in vivo results showed 84.8% SNR and 25.7% CNR gains using only two aperture data of the heart in six echocardiographic views, liver, and kidney. PSCL delivers clear images across diverse imaging targets and configurations, paving the way for more reliable anatomical visualization without domain shift and pretraining costs.

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23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

All about quantum error correction: distillation, mitigation, self-correction and beyond

Authors:
D. -S. Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, it is shown that many quantum error-manipulating techniques, such as distillation, error mitigation, and dynamical decoupling, are special cases of the most general framework for quantum error correction. This unifying perspective is achieved by extending quantum error correction to include state-adaptive and channel-adaptive settings, as well as multi-stage coding scenarios. Based on this insight, a model of self-correcting quantum memory is also proposed. This work clarifies the relationship among these techniques and illustrates, through explicit constructions, how the unified perspective can guide the design of reliable quantum information systems.

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling for Stable RLHF

Authors:
Licheng Pan↗Haocheng Yang↗Haoxuan Li↗Yichen Sun↗Yunsheng Lu↗Shijian Wang↗Lei Shen↗Yuan Lu↗Zhixuan Chu↗Hao Wang↗

arXiv:2606.19818v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) aligns large language models by training reward models on preference data and optimizing policies to maximize predicted rewards. However, this pipeline faces two fundamental challenges: (1) reward models cannot signal when their predictions are unreliable, since they usually act as deterministic point estimators; and (2) modern group-based policy optimization can amplify unreliable reward signals, as exemplified by GRPO's uniform treatment of rewards during advantage computation. As policies explore increasingly diverse responses, these two limitations create a critical vulnerability: unreliable reward estimates may be granted disproportionate influence, triggering severe reward hacking. We propose Uncertainty-Aware Reward Modeling (UARM), which equips reward models with calibrated uncertainty via quantile-based conformal prediction and reweights GRPO advantages through heteroscedastic variance decomposition. Experiments across HelpSteer, UltraFeedback, and PKU-SafeRLHF demonstrate that UARM significantly improves reward model calibration, reduces reward hacking, and enhances downstream alignment quality compared to standard GRPO and uncertainty-agnostic baselines.

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

Mining Architectural Quality Under Agentic AI Adoption: A Causal Study of Java Repositories

Authors:
Oliver Aleksander Larsen↗Mahyar T. Moghaddam↗

arXiv:2606.13298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI coding tools are now used by a majority of developers, and agentic use of these tools has popularized the practice colloquially called "vibe coding". Yet causal evidence on their effect on software architecture is scarce. Prior causal work has measured code-level outcomes (complexity, static analysis warnings); whether such degradation propagates to architecture-level outcomes remains unknown. We mine 151 open-source Java repositories, 74 with detectable agentic AI adoption (identified via configuration files and Co-Authored-By commit trailers) and 77 propensity-matched controls, across a 13-month per-repository window yielding 1,811 monthly Arcan snapshots. We estimate the causal effect of adoption on architectural smell density (ASD) with a staggered difference-in-differences design and the Borusyak imputation estimator, applying a causal design recently used for code-level metrics to the architecture level. Total smell counts are essentially unchanged (+1.1%, p = 0.82) while lines of code grow +12.8% (p = 0.003); the resulting 6.7% ASD decline (p = 0.004) is therefore a denominator effect rather than an architectural improvement. Per-type estimates and robustness checks (wild cluster bootstrap, Lee bounds, stale-observation sensitivity) corroborate the pattern; pre-trends are flat (Wald p = 0.90), consistent with parallel trends. Density-normalized outcomes can mislead when treatment affects system size: raw counts and explicit decomposition are required for causal mining studies of AI tool adoption. The complete replication package, including the curated 151-repository monthly panel, is publicly available.

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