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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

ClawEnvKit: Automatic Environment Generation for Claw-Like Agents

Constructing environments for training and evaluating claw-like agents remains a manual, human-intensive process that does not scale. We argue that what is needed is not just a dataset, but an automated pipeline capable of generating diverse, verified environments on demand. To this end, we introduce ClawEnvKit, an autonomous generation pipeline that instantiates this formalism from natural language descriptions. The pipeline comprises three modules: (1) a parser that extracts structured generation parameters from natural language input; (2) a generator that produces the task specification, tool interface, and scoring configuration; and (3) a validator that enforces feasibility, diversity, structural validity, and internal consistency across the generated environments. Using ClawEnvKit, we construct Auto-ClawEval, the first large-scale benchmark for claw-like agents, comprising 1,040 environments across 24 categories. Empirically, Auto-ClawEval matches or exceeds human-curated environments on coherence and clarity at 13,800x lower cost. Evaluated across 4 model families and 8 agent harness frameworks, we find that harness engineering boosts performance by up to 15.7 percentage points over a bare ReAct baseline, completion remains the primary axis of variation with no model saturating the benchmark, and automated generation enables evaluation at a scale previously infeasible. Beyond static benchmarking, ClawEnvKit enables live evaluation: users describe a desired capability in natural language and obtain a verified environment on demand, turning evaluation into a continuous, user-driven process. The same mechanism serves as an on-demand training environment generator, producing task distributions that adapt to an agent's current weaknesses rather than being bounded by existing user logs.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning Object Manipulation from Scratch via Contrastive Interaction

arXiv:2606.11525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Contrastive Reinforcement Learning (CRL) has seen recent success in a wide variety of goal-conditioned robotics tasks by learning structured representations of the dynamics. However, despite its success in locomotion and simpler control domains, CRL often struggles in interaction-rich manipulation. We argue that a key source of this difficulty is object-centric interaction, such as contact or grasping, that induces distinct changes in the underlying dynamic modes. In this work, we formulate manipulation dynamics as a piecewise-smooth Markov process and show that interaction-induced mode changes create piecewise nonlinear reachability structures that are difficult for standard CRL energy functions to represent and plan over. Based on this analysis, we introduce Interaction-weighted Resampling (IWR). IWR performs interaction-aware resampling around phases before, during, and after interactions, encouraging the learned representation to preserve the mode boundaries that determine future reachability to capture multi-modal and piecewise nonlinear reachability. Across interaction-centric environments, including 2D dynamic control, robotic manipulation, and robot air hockey, IWR improves both sample efficiency and overall performance over prior CRL methods, with 19.8% average improvement in simulation. Finally, using a sim-to-real pipeline with policies trained by IWR, we demonstrate the first real-world goal-conditioned robot air hockey agent capable of hitting goals, improving success from 25% to 60%. Project Page: IWR-arxiv.github.io.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Interpreting Bohm-like quantum potentials in "Computing quantum waves exactly from classical action"

arXiv:2605.20443v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The recent posting arXiv:2605.02621 [14], commenting on the article rspa.2025.0413 [7], argues that the proof of Lemma 3.1 in [7] is missing the spatial derivative of the density, which would lead to a Bohm-like quantum potential. This technical note shows why the propagated density is independent of space in the Feynman propagator construction of Lemma 3.1. This is done by extending the proof of Lemma 3.1 explicitly with Bohm-like quantum potential terms along the stationary action paths, and then showing that these terms are exactly zero. In [7], this property can also be verified directly on most examples (double slit, Aharonov-Bohm, potential well, harmonic oscillator, tunneling, EPR, QED), as well as in the derivations of the Pauli, Dirac, and Maxwell equations. For more general nonlinear actions, a time rescaling may be required to guarantee this space independence along stationary paths. In the hydrogen atom example, this time rescaling can be computed in closed form. In contrast to the general wave of the Madelung solution [9] Lemma 3.1 of [7] is defined first for a propagator, and a general wave is then constructed in a second step. Recall that a propagator is a specific quantum wave, which is initialized at $t=0$ with a Dirac impulse at a given initial position or momentum. In turn, a general wave is constructed in a second step by superposing a distribution of initial conditions using the propagator. This key difference is why the Bohm-like quantum potential terms disappear in the construction [7] (specifically, in the first step) while the Bohm potential in the Madelung analysis does not. This fundamental difference is also consistent with the fact that the wave construction in [7] extends naturally to relativistic contexts, while Bohmian non-locality notoriously prevents such extensions. Keywords - Response to arXiv:2605.02621, in relation to rspa.2025.0413

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

Phys-JEPA: Physics-Informed Latent World Models for Multivariate Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multivariate forecasting in physical systems requires models that predict coupled temporal variables while preserving meaningful state evolution. Deep forecasters can fit temporal correlations, and physics-informed models can regularize predictions with scientific constraints, but these directions are often connected only at the decoded-output level. As a result, the hidden predictive state that generates future trajectories may remain statistically useful but physically unstructured. We introduce Phys-JEPA, a physics-informed joint-embedding predictive architecture for multivariate time-series forecasting. Phys-JEPA learns a latent world model in which predictive states are decomposed into physical and residual components, and physical consistency is imposed directly on latent states and latent transitions rather than only on decoded forecasts. This formulation uses known physical variables to organize the representation space while retaining residual capacity for unresolved dynamics. On Jena Climate 2009–2016, Phys-JEPA reduces aggregate MSE from 0.12482 to 0.12273 and temperature MSE from 0.01892 to 0.01831 at H=24. On Traffic, full Phys-JEPA improves aggregate MSE over the supervised baseline across all tested horizons, reducing H=192 MSE from 0.800784 to 0.773873. On Electricity, the best variant depends on horizon: static latent consistency is strongest at H=24 and H=48, while full Phys-JEPA gives the best aggregate and target-variable MSE at H=192. These initial results suggest that moving physics-informed learning from output space to latent predictive state space is a promising direction for interpretable temporal world models.

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

HiRo: A Compact Four-Directional Hierarchical Reservoir Token-Mixer for Efficient Image Classification

Recent image classification models must balance local feature modeling, cross-window interaction, and parameter efficiency. Many high-performing architectures rely on fully trainable token-mixers, which improve representation learning but increase parameter count, optimization complexity and computational cost. We propose a parameter-efficient image classification model called HiRo that integrates shifted-window partitioning with multi-directional hierarchical reservoir computing. Images are divided into non-overlapping patches (treated as tokens), linearly projected, normalized, and enriched with 2D sinusoidal positional encodings, then processed within local windows. Inside each window, tokens are scanned in four directions and passed through a two-stage slice-and-mix reservoir module. In the first stage, directional sequences are split into contiguous slices, each processed by its own fixed reservoir with a trainable closed-loop readout. The resulting slice outputs are summarized using the start, end, and mean representations, and then mixed by a second-stage fixed reservoir for each direction. The mixed slice representations are expanded back to the token level and fused with the first-stage outputs, after which the four directional outputs are realigned and averaged. Consecutive blocks alternate between regular and shifted windows to enable cross-window interaction, followed by layer normalization, a residual feed-forward network, and global pooling for classification. This design combines regular and shifted window partitioning with hierarchical multi-directional reservoirs to make an efficient local-to-cross-window token-mixing framework for image classification. Despite using under 1M trainable parameters and significantly lower memory and time than transformer-style baselines, HiRo also achieves 99.46%, 85.57%, and 59.10% accuracy on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100, respectively.

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

A homotopy-type-theoretic generalization of neurosymbolic inference

arXiv:2606.17851v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A wide range of neurosymbolic (NeSy) systems compute one functional: a belief-weighted sum of a logical quantity over a space of $\sigma$-structures, of which weighted model counting, fuzzy logic, and probabilistic logic are special cases. This account is built on sets, and a set deliberately forgets two things that are important for NeSy: when two $\sigma$-structures are the same up to a symmetry of the theory, and how many distinct proofs witness a query. Replacing the underlying sets by types, in the sense of homotopy type theory, preserves this information, and turns this functional into a belief-weighted homotopy cardinality, a notion of size that counts each object in inverse proportion to its symmetries. We develop the framework from scratch for NeSy systems, prove a conservativity theorem that recovers the classical functional when symmetries are trivial, and show that the symmetry our framework exposes is exactly the one behind reasoning shortcuts. The payoff is concrete: the shortcut-aware concept posterior that recent methods reach by ensembling or expressive density estimation is the only symmetry-invariant point of the confusion-set simplex, computable in closed form by averaging a single model over the symmetry group. On MNIST reasoning-shortcut benchmarks this single-model wrapper is better calibrated than a diversity-trained ensemble, while leaving label accuracy and identifiable concepts untouched. Code is freely available at https://github.com/bio-ontology-research-group/hott-nesy.

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

A Knowledge Theory of Capital:The Value of Natural and Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.18288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

G-IdiomAlign: A Gloss-Pivoted Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Idiom Alignment

Idioms are difficult to transfer across languages due to their non-compositionality and weak surface-form grounding, making literal mappings unreliable. We present G-IdiomAlign, a gloss-pivoted benchmark where each idiom is anchored by an English gloss from Wiktionary. We further construct a high-confidence reference alignment set for reproducible evaluation. G-IdiomAlign supports two protocols: (1) a controlled Multiple-Choice Idiom Equivalence with typed distractors for error attribution; and (2) a Gloss-Contrastive Generation contrasting No-gloss and With-gloss inputs to isolate the effect of an explicit semantic pivot. Across diverse LLMs, a bias to literal translation is a dominant failure mode, especially when the target is a low-resource language. Glosses consistently improve Gloss-Contrastive Generation under an embedding-based semantic proxy, but performance remains modest, indicating substantial headroom in the open output space. Subsequent analysis on Qwen3-8B further suggests that cross-condition differences are concentrated more in attention heads than in layers, while better With-gloss generations coincide with stronger gloss anchoring.

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

Topological Data Analysis for High-Dimensional Dynamic Process Monitoring

arXiv:2606.20443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-time process monitoring requires methods that extract actionable information from high-dimensional time-series data. In this work, we present a new approach for process monitoring that combines tools of topological data analysis (TDA) and machine learning. In the proposed approach, we represent multivariate time-series data as manifolds and use topological descriptors to summarize the structure of such data; we then use a neural ordinary differential equation to learn the dynamic evolution of the topological structure of the system. Using real data from an industrial process, we show that this trajectory-based event detection approach is effective at detecting diverse types of events. We contrast this approach against reconstruction-based approaches such as principal component analysis and autoencoders and against a trajectory-based approach that uses Koopman autoencoders.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Diagnostic Concordance of Immediate Versus 1-Hour Technetium-99m Hydroxydiphosphonate Scintigraphy in Suspected Transthyretin Amyloid Cardiomyopathy

Background Bone-avid tracer myocardial scintigraphy for the diagnosis of transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) has traditionally employed imaging at one or 3-hour intervals. Technetium-99m hydroxydiphosphonate (99mTc-HDP) has unique characteristics that may enable earlier imaging. We investigated the diagnostic concordance of immediate versus 1-hour acquisitions. Methods Consecutive patients with suspected ATTR-CM underwent planar imaging and SPECT/CT immediately and at 1-hour following the administration of 99mTc-HDP. Perugini grades and heart to contralateral lung (H/CL) ratios were assessed. Target-to-background ratios (TBRs) were calculated on the SPECT/CT acquisitions using the left ventricular (LV) septum and three background regions: aorta, LV blood-pool, and vertebrae. We assessed diagnostic concordance using Cohen's Kappa ({kappa}), temporal stability using paired t-tests, and correlation between timepoints using Pearson's coefficient (r). The 1-hour SPECT/CT interpretation served as the protocol reference standard. Results Forty-eight patients (83% male; median age, 80 [73-85] years) were evaluated. One-hour SPECT/CT identified 19 positive and 29 negative cases. Immediate SPECT/CT demonstrated 100% diagnostic concordance with the 1-hour reference standard ({kappa} = 1.000; 95% CI: 1.00 to 1.00; p < 0.001). The LV septum/LV Blood-Pool TBR showed the highest correlation (r = 0.956; 95% CI: 0.922 to 0.975; p < 0.001). The LV Septum/Aorta TBR demonstrated high correlation (r = 0.918; 95% CI: 0.857 to 0.953; p < 0.001) and remained stable in the ATTR-negative cohort (-0.02; 95% CI: -0.08 to 0.04; p = 0.54). Significant decrease in the LV Septum/Vertebrae TBR in the ATTR-negative (-0.55; 95% CI: -0.64 to -0.47; p < 0.001) and ATTR-positive cohorts (-1.14; 95% CI: -1.39 to -0.89; p < 0.001) was observed. Conclusions Immediate 99mTc-HDP SPECT/CT is diagnostically concordant with standard 1-hour protocols. By leveraging SPECT/CT and the favorable kinetics of 99mTc-HDP, immediate-phase imaging can accurately reproduce 1-hour acquisitions in cases of suspected ATTR-CM. This expedited approach may improve nuclear laboratory throughput and patient satisfaction.

11.
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.

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

A Computational Audit of Demographic Association Encoding in ClinicalBERT Language Predictions

Transformer-based clinical language models are increasingly integrated into high-stakes clinical decision support pipelines, yet the computational mechanisms through which demographic associations encoded in medical documentation propagate into model probability distributions remain empirically underspecified. We present a systematic computational audit of representational bias in ClinicalBERT (Alsentzer et al., 2019), a BERT-based model pretrained on MIMIC-III discharge summaries, employing two complementary probing methodologies: Log Probability Bias Analysis (LPBA), which quantifies demographic descriptor-induced shifts in masked token probability distributions across behavioral and evaluative semantic categories, and Masked Language Model-based analysis (MLM), which probes internal representational structure for demographic agency attribution encoding across 98 real clinical sentence templates and eight intersectional race-gender combinations. Corpus frequency analysis operationalizes the distinction between statistical disparity and bias amplification by benchmarking model outputs against empirical term frequencies in the MIMIC-III training corpus. Of 32 statistically significant findings, 65.6% contradict observed corpus distributions, rising to 80% for Black patients and 87.5% for agency attribution under MLM probing, providing direct empirical evidence that representational bias in ClinicalBERT operates predominantly through model-internal amplification rather than training data inheritance. Keywords: natural language processing, clinical documentation, algorithmic auditing, representational bias, health equity 1

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

Spatio-Temporal Audio Language Modeling for Dynamic Sound Sources

Sound events are entities with semantic identities, locations, and trajectories, but current audio-language models usually reason about clips as global event content. Conversely, sound event localization models track source directions over time but offer limited semantic coverage for language reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce ST-AudioQA, a spatio-temporal audio QA dataset and benchmark built from first-order ambisonic (FOA) renderings of static and moving sound sources. Each scene provides source identity, activity, direction, distance, and motion metadata, enabling dense trajectory supervision and questions about what is sounding, where it is, how it moves, and how sources relate. We further propose ST-Audio Encoder, a time-resolved FOA audio encoder that learns event semantics together with source trajectories, and ST-AudioLM, which connects the audio tokens from the encoder to an LLM for spatio-temporal audio QA. Experiments show that this representation improves the semantic-localization tradeoff and yields stronger reasoning performance than static spatial and localization-oriented baselines.

14.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Generative design of antigen-specific T-cell receptor sequences with a conditional diffusion model

T cell receptor (TCR)-based immunotherapy holds immense potential for treating cancers and infectious diseases, where highly antigen-specific TCR recognition is crucial for adaptive immunity against tumors and pathogens. Engineering or de novo generation of the complementarity-determining region 3 (CDR3) loops of TCRs using artificial intelligence offers a powerful alternative to designing reactive TCRs rather than laborious experimental screening. However, current in silico approaches are constrained by weak conditional guidance, limited flexibility, and a lack of rigorous functional validation. To address these limitations, we introduce TCRDiff, a generative diffusion framework for designing antigen-specific TCRs conditioned on peptide-MHC (pMHC) targets and germline-encoded variable genes. By leveraging pre-trained knowledge from massive T-cell repertoires and TCR-pMHC recognition data, TCRDiff generates CDR3{beta} sequences with state-of-the-art fidelity to native binding TCRs through a denoising diffusion process. Furthermore, incorporating the interface geometry features generated TCR-pMHC complexes with superior structural plausibility. As a proof of concept, we deployed TCRDiff in a systematic pipeline to design candidate TCRs for immunotherapy. In vitro activation assays validated that TCRDiff-generated TCRs specifically recognize the MAGE-A3 epitope with minimized off-target cross-reactivity. Together, TCRDiff establishes a powerful, validated computational paradigm to accelerate the development of TCR-based immunotherapies.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DipSkmer: Reference-free population genomics with diploid genome skims

Ecologists and conservation biologists rely on genetic diversity as a key essential biodiversity variable (EBV) used to track population health and dynamics, and utilize the population parameter {theta} (estimated by the average pairwise genomic distance) as a key metric of diversity. While whole-genome-sequencing (wgs) is increasingly affordable, it will be considerable time before the full diversity of life is represented by high-quality assembled genomes; even then, constant monitoring will still require repeated sampling of populations. In contrast, genome skimming (low-coverage, short-read wgs) is highly cost-effective but challenging to analyze because the coverage is too low for assembly and reliable error correction. Mature methods, such as Mash, exist for estimating pairwise genomic distances based on the Jaccard similarity of k-mer sets computed using sketching techniques. Some, such as Skmer, additionally model the impacts of low coverage. These methods have been successfully applied to assembly-free species identification and phylogenetics; however, their use in population genetics has been limited. This is because these methods implicitly treat genomes as haploid and heterozygosity confounds true estimates of genomic distance for diploid organisms. In this paper, we address this problem through a number of technical advances. First, we use coalescent theory to mathematically derive how the Jaccard index between two diploid samples changes with the scaled population size parameter ({theta}). Next, we derive an estimator that computes {theta} from the Jaccard index, in addition to several auxiliary variables, which we also estimate from the genome skims. The resulting method, DipSkmer, enables more accurate estimates of coverage, sequencing error, and pairwise nucleotide distance for diploid samples. Analyses of both simulated and empirical datasets show that for diploids and low distances (e.g.,

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Meta-Learning Transformers to Improve In-Context Generalization

arXiv:2507.05019v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In-context learning enables transformer models to generalize to new tasks based solely on input prompts, without any need for weight updates. However, existing training paradigms typically rely on large, unstructured datasets that are costly to store, difficult to evaluate for quality and balance, and pose privacy and ethical concerns due to the inclusion of sensitive information. Motivated by these limitations and risks, we propose an alternative training strategy where we leverage a collection of multiple, small-scale, and domain-specific datasets. We empirically demonstrate that the increased quality and diversity of such data improve the generalization abilities of in-context learners beyond their training domain, while achieving comparable performance with models trained on a single large-scale dataset. We investigate this paradigm by leveraging meta-learning to train an in-context learner on the Meta-Album collection under several settings. Firstly, we show the performance in a controlled environment, where the test domain is completely excluded from the training knowledge. Secondly, we explore the robustness of these models to forgetting in a continual scenario where the information is accessible for a limited time. Finally, we explore the more challenging unsupervised scenario. Our findings demonstrate that transformers still generalize for in-context prediction when trained on a curated dataset collection while offering advantages in modularity and replaceability.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Cortical development dynamics across autism spectrum disorder mouse models

Despite the functional diversity of over 100 causal genes1–3, phenotypic convergence across models may reveal common neurobiological processes in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Here we profiled 251 samples from 11 monogenic mouse models of ASD using single-nucleus multi-omic sequencing across three developmental stages, both sexes and two brain regions. Despite genetic heterogeneity, ASD-linked mutations converged on perturbations of the radial glial cell lineage. These alterations reflect a transient developmental delay rather than lasting lineage misspecification and resolve by postnatal stages. Molecularly, the largest transcriptional differences emerged in neurons at early postnatal stages. These changes included downregulation of synaptic and ion channel-related genes, consistent with homeostatic adaptation or delayed maturation. Network analysis showed molecular convergence across models within each developmental stage, suggesting that diverse mutations linked to ASD impinge on common, stage-specific processes. Convergence becomes less pronounced by postnatal day 14, highlighting the dynamic nature of ASD-associated changes. Cross-genotype heterogeneity is superimposed on stage-specific effects. Electrophysiology corroborated this pattern: mutants generally showed altered neuronal excitability and synaptic properties with model-specific nuances. Our study also highlighted sex-specific gene expression alterations, with female mice often displaying larger effect sizes than male mice. Together, our findings provide a comprehensive view of developmental cellular and molecular dynamics across models of ASD. Using single-nucleus multi-omic sequencing, diverse autism spectrum disorder-linked gene mutations converge on transient, stage-specific disruptions in early brain development, and highlight sex-specific gene expression alterations.

18.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-14

Antibody fine specificity correlates with protection from malaria for the RTS,S vaccine in young African children: A post hoc analysis of a phase IIb randomised controlled trial

作者:

by Alessia Hysa, D. Herbert Opi, Joshua Waterhouse, Sandra Chishimba, Jessica L. Horton, Natalie Kingston, Hans J. Netter, David Wetzel, Michael Piontek, Gaoqian Feng, Jahit Sacarlal, Carlota Dobaño, Liriye Kurtovic, James G. Beeson Background The RTS,S/AS01 malaria vaccine was recently approved for implementation in children, but only provides modest and short-lived efficacy against malaria. RTS,S targets a portion of the Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) circumsporozoite protein (CSP), comprising the central NANP-repeat region and C-terminal domain. Mechanisms of immunity and correlates of protection for the RTS,S vaccine are not well defined, hindering progress towards generating highly effective CSP-based vaccines. Methods and findings We investigated epitope specificity and cross-reactivity of vaccine-induced antibodies to six peptides representing CSP epitopes in the N-terminal and central NANP-repeat region. We evaluated antibody reactivity in preclinical mouse vaccine studies, among CSP-specific monoclonal antibodies (mAbs), and in a large RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial in young children 1–4 years old (n = 735).The preclinical mouse vaccine studies and CSP-specific mAbs were used to initially evaluate IgG responses to the six peptides. Mice immunised with the central NANP-repeat region had IgG with cross-reactivity to an epitope in the N-terminal region. Additionally, we demonstrated that a single CSP-specific mAb could display cross-reactivity to several CSP epitopes. Through post hoc quantification and analysis of antibody responses in the RTS,S phase IIb clinical trial, we found that a subset of children generated IgG with specificity for a short NANP-repeat epitope (NANP2; amino acid sequence: NANPNANP) and cross-reactivity to an N-terminal epitope (J1; amino acid sequence: KQPADGNPDPNANPN). Notably, children with high IgG responses to NANP2 and J1 had a significantly reduced risk of clinical malaria, compared to children with low responses (IgG to NANP2 (aHR: 0.838 (95% CI [0.716, 0.981]; p = 0.028)) and J1 (aHR: 0.718 (95% CI [0.611, 0.844]; p 

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation with Topological Regularisation

arXiv:2606.17531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the learning of interpretable bases in non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) by regularising the topology of the learned basis functions. Our approach is motivated by the observation that many data modalities can be viewed as non-negative functions on a structured domain, where the quality of a basis is intrinsically linked to its topology. However, naive methods for incorporating the topology of the support are often hindered by discreteness and threshold dependence, rendering them unsuitable for continuous optimisation. We address these challenges by employing persistent homology as a stable, threshold-free topological quantifier and by designing topological scores that integrate into the NMF objective as regularisers. The resulting framework encompasses spatially coherent image components, periodic time-series structures, and clique-like graph signals within a unified modelling language.

20.
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.

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

Optimal Coarse Correlated Equilibria in Mean Field Games: Linear Programming and No-Regret Learning

arXiv:2606.20062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce optimal coarse correlated equilibria for continuous-time mean field games. A coarse correlated equilibrium is a randomized recommendation scheme from which no player can gain by ignoring the recommendation and switching to an alternative strategy. The problem is as follows: a moderator selects, among all mean-field coarse correlated equilibria, one that optimizes a prescribed performance criterion, which may differ from the representative player's objective. After formulating the problem, we develop a linear programming (LP) formulation, prove the existence of optimal LP coarse correlated equilibria, and relate the LP characterization to the original probabilistic setting. Building on this characterization, we design a no-regret primal-dual algorithm, based on an equivalent Lagrangian formulation of the external-regret constraint, for learning such equilibria. We provide explicit convergence rates for the learning algorithm, and numerical examples illustrate the method.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Probing picometre-scale interlayer deformations via hyperbolic polaritons

作者:

The resilience of van der Waals (vdW) materials to large strain fields makes them an ideal platform for tuning electronic, optical and magnetic properties1–4. Although in-plane strain is readily mapped, non-invasive and quantitative characterization of out-of-plane strain remains a formidable challenge, particularly for picometre-scale deformations buried at interfaces. Here we demonstrate a polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons (oHPs) mode to detect interlayer deformations in prototypical vdW polar insulator–hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). This method uses the softening mechanism of out-of-plane transverse optical (oTO) phonons induced by interlayer strain, enabling highly sensitive detection of picometre-scale deformations. Although these oTO phonon modes are typically spectroscopically ‘dark’, their strain response is activated through the oHPs, achieving an atomic displacement sensitivity of about 10 pm (about 8 × 10−7 times the probing wavelength), enabling ultradeep-subwavelength mechanical interlayer deformation detection. This is experimentally validated in both planar hBN and at the buried interface of quantum dot–hBN nanotube heterostructures. This polariton-based picometrology bridges nanomechanics and photonics, providing a non-destructive lens to visualize hidden stress landscapes with atomic precision. A new polaritonic optical method that uses the mid-infrared out-of-plane hyperbolic polaritons mode is described and experimentally validated to allow the examination of picometre-scale interlayer deformations, providing a bridge between nanomechanics and photonics.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves student models by training them on trajectories induced by their own policy, making it a promising approach for mitigating exposure bias in agent training. However, most OPD studies focus on single-turn settings, while realistic LLM agents interact with environments over multiple turns. In this regime, early errors can alter future observations and compound across the trajectory, and standard dense token-level OPD becomes brittle, as it may over-penalize semantically valid alternatives, reinforce local degeneracies such as repeated actions, and propagate unreliable teacher supervision on off-distribution histories. We propose SAGE-OPD, a verifier-free selective intervention framework specifically designed for multi-turn OPD. Instead of applying teacher supervision uniformly across all turns, SAGE-OPD first observes environment feedback and uses teacher judgment to decide whether each student response should be skipped or intervened on. To further address compounding errors, SAGE-OPD weights token-level distillation by teacher confidence, reducing the influence of uncertain teacher distributions on corrupted or ambiguous histories. Finally, SAGE-OPD applies loss normalization to preserve the overall loss scale of standard OPD while retaining selective turn-level weighting. Experiments on agent tasks show that SAGE-OPD consistently improves over baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% relative improvement in ALFWorld unseen success rate over standard OPD. Ablation studies further demonstrate that turn-level intervention, teacher confidence weighting, and loss normalization provide complementary benefits. Our results suggest that effective multi-turn OPD should remain on-policy, but teacher supervision should be selectively allocated to turns where intervention is necessary and reliable.

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

Finetuning Vision-Language-Action Models Requires Fewer Layers Than You Think

arXiv:2606.20246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models pre-trained on massive video-robot datasets have revolutionized robotic manipulation, yet their multi-billion parameter architectures impose prohibitive computational burdens during downstream fine-tuning and real-time inference. In this work, we reveal a highly non-trivial architectural characteristic of these continuous control foundation policies (e.g., pi_0, GR00T-N1.5): despite being trained on diverse physical trajectories, they exhibit severe layer-wise representational redundancy. To exploit this, we introduce a structural compression pipeline that is entirely training-free, bypassing the need of existing methods to load full-scale models to learn optimized token reductions or dynamic layer selectors. Instead, using only a single forward pass via Centered Kernel Alignment to identify redundant layer features, we remove twin layers to permanently compress the model depth by up to 50% across both the VLM backbone and the continuous control policy head. Downstream fine-tuning of this streamlined architecture yields a dual acceleration benefit: a 40-50% reduction in training time and up to 30% faster real-time inference, while matching or exceeding full-scale base model performance. We comprehensively validate our method across three simulation benchmarks (LIBERO, RoboCasa, SimplerEnv) and 10 diverse real-world manipulation tasks across 4 unique robotic embodiments. These results prove that advanced VLAs require significantly fewer layers than previously assumed, offering a highly compute-efficient paradigm for scalable robot learning.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Efficient certification of intractable quantum states with few Pauli measurements

arXiv:2511.07300v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient verification of quantum computational resources is crucial as experiments advance toward fault-tolerance. Universal quantum computation can be achieved by consuming resource states through simple Pauli measurements, yet a significant gap remains between states that are easy to certify and those required for universality. We focus on Clifford-enhanced Product States, a class of resource states obtained by applying Clifford circuits to a product of single-qubit, potentially magic, states. While essential for universal computation, the certification of such states has previously relied on query oracles that are \#P-hard to implement, leaving their efficient, oracle-free verification an open challenge. In this work, we demonstrate that such classically intractable resource states can be efficiently verified using only Pauli measurements. Our protocol achieves sample- and time-efficiency in both i.i.d.\ and adversarial settings. This work fills a gap in Pauli-based certification, providing a new practical pathway to verify resource states that drive universal Pauli-based quantum computation.