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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Effects of Josephson Junction Non-idealities on Adiabatic Quantum Flux Parametron Circuits

Authors:
Daryoush Shiri↗Likai Yang↗Mohamed A. Hassan↗Philip Krantz↗Eric T. Holland↗

arXiv:2606.17338v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adiabatic quantum flux parametron (AQFP) gate is a promising approach to scale up the cryogenic microwave electronics for superconducting qubit multiplexed control. However, the performance of these circuits depends on the quality of the Josephson junctions which are ideally superconductor-insulator-superconductor (SIS) type following the ideal sinusoidal relation between current and quantum phase. We demonstrate how the non-sinusoidal current-phase relation in Superconductor-Normal metal-Superconductor (SNS) and weak link (WL) junctions affects the speed, delay, and margin of the AQFP gates. The JJ models are defined in the Keysight ADS simulator using symbolically defined device (SDD) method.

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02.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Nickel-Driven Dynamics of Urease in Sporosarcina pasteurii: Integrated Computational and Experimental Insights

Authors:
Al-Thawadi↗S. M↗

Urease is a nickel-dependent enzyme that plays an important role in urea hydrolysis and in a process named as microbial-induced calcium carbonate precipitation (MICP), which is widely used in sustainable environmental biotechnology. Despite its ecological importance, urease powers Biogrout (biocementation), a promising green technology for soil stabilization and infrastructure repair. Yet, the relationship between nickel availability, enzyme activation, and bacterial fitness remains poorly understood. In this study, we reveal a striking dual effect of nickel on Sporosarcina pasteurii: while high Ni2+ concentrations strongly inhibit growth (IC50 {approx} 637.7 {micro}M), they simultaneously boost specific urease activity up to six-fold. This uncoupling between biomass and enzymatic efficiency highlights a previously overlooked adaptive strategy under metal stress. Using structural bioinformatics and molecular docking, we show that Ure1–the catalytic subunit–exhibits the strongest nickel affinity (-4.3 kcal{middle dot}mol-1), supported by highly conserved active-site residues, whereas accessory proteins UreE and UreG display moderate and weak binding, consistent with their roles in metal delivery and GTP-dependent maturation. In addition, microscopic observations confirmed that calcium carbonate precipitation was most pronounced at intermediate nickel concentrations (approximately 400-1000 {micro}M), whereas higher concentrations ([≥]1000-1300 {micro}M) led to reduced mineral formation due to loss viable cells. Taken together, these results indicates that nickel availability controls both urease activation and bacterial fitness, and that an optimal balance is required to maximize biomenerilization efficiency in environmental applications, particularly in biocementation technology.

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

On-site interactions in quantum thermal machines: efficiency, rectification and entanglement beyond local and global master equations

Authors:
Salvatore Araceli↗Teddy H. M. Ong↗Baptiste Debecker↗Kai M\"uller↗Oliver Lunt↗Andrew J. Daley↗Fran\c{c}ois Damanet↗

arXiv:2606.14593v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advances in experimental techniques have opened new routes for harnessing non-equilibrium dynamics in mesoscopic quantum systems. In this context, we study the impact of on-site interactions on the transport properties of a continuous quantum thermal machine composed of two coupled oscillators connected to two thermal reservoirs. In the weak system-reservoir coupling regime, where a long-standing debate concerns which reduced description should be preferred, we first show that the Redfield master equation (RME) provides an accurate and unifying framework that interpolates between two well-known limits: the local and global master equations. By relying on the Hierarchy of Pure States (HOPS), a numerically exact stochastic method, we then explore the full parameter space and show that interactions can be leveraged to tune the efficiency of the thermal machine at high temperatures (while leaving it essentially unchanged at low temperatures), induce non-reciprocal transport under asymmetric reservoir couplings, and generate steady-state entanglement within the junction. We derive expressions for system-bath correlators, such as heat and particle currents, consistently across different frameworks. Our work features on-site interactions to enhance the versatility of quantum thermodynamic junctions and clarifies the role of non-Markovianity and non-linearities in quantum transport.

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04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Programmatic access to ICTV virus taxonomy through a public ontology API

Authors:
Lieutaud↗McLaughlin↗Hendrickson↗R. C↗David↗Parkinson↗Lefkowitz↗Dempsey↗Coutard↗

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) is responsible for developing and maintaining a universal virus taxonomy. As the reference framework for organising the viral world, it is essential for virology and related fields. Despite its widespread use in research and public health, programmatic access to ICTV taxonomy has remained limited, posing challenges for integration, versioning, and interoperability across databases and bioinformatics resources requiring up-to-date virus taxonomy. To address this, we developed a public and sustainable solution leveraging ontology-based APIs. Successive ICTV Master Species List (MSL) releases were transformed into a structured ontology and deployed as a unified representation through the Ontology Lookup Service (OLS). The framework also provides ICTV-NCBI mappings and helper libraries for integration into downstream systems. This enables, for the first time, public programmatic retrieval of current and historical virological taxon names, taxonomic relationships, metadata, and persistent identifiers through stable endpoints. More broadly, this work illustrates a general strategy for transforming structured biological datasets into semantically enriched graph resources exposed through scalable public APIs. These developments enhance interoperability, reduce manual curation, and support FAIR-aligned taxonomic data management in virology and pandemic preparedness.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Early-life nutritional environment is associated with late-life cognition in the Health and Retirement Study, a pellagra epidemic natural experiment

Authors:
Vasiljevic↗Schmitz↗L. L↗Engelman↗C. D↗

Early-life exposures are important to several late-life health outcomes. We sought to study the effect of an in utero nutritional environment and its interaction with Alzheimer's disease (AD) genetic risk on late-life cognitive function. We used a natural experiment created by the pellagra epidemic, a nutritional disease caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, to evaluate the association between in utero pellagra epidemic exposure and late-life cognitive function in the Health and Retirement Study (N = 18,285). We also evaluated whether the in utero exposure could modify the AD polygenic score's (PGS) effect on cognition. In utero pellagra epidemic exposure was significantly associated with cognition ({beta} = -0.025). However, these effects were not isolated to the prenatal period as exposure during childhood periods also had an effect. The interaction between the in utero exposure and the AD PGS was significant, where the genetic effect on cognition was amplified with increasing (progressively worse) in utero exposure levels. These associations imply that the early-life nutritional environment affects late-life cognitive function and that these effects can modify genetic risk.

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06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Large-scale proteomics and timing of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy

Authors:
Hauspurg↗Huang↗Greenland↗Pemberton↗Bairey Merz↗C. N↗Saade↗G. R↗Yee↗L. M↗Levine↗L. D↗…

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

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Temporal Backtracking Search for Test-time Generative Video Reasoning

Authors:
Sejoon Jun↗Zheng Ding↗Huangyuan Su↗Weirui Ye↗Yilun Du↗

While test-time scaling has revolutionized reasoning in large language models, generative video reasoning remains bottlenecked by a single-shot paradigm. We demonstrate that searching over denoising steps cannot rescue logically flawed rollouts because spatial trajectories commit early in the diffusion process. Root-level Best-of-N (BoN) sampling is similarly inefficient: reasoning errors cluster early in the temporal axis, and resampling blindly discards verified upstream progress. To unlock effective test-time scaling for video models, we introduce Temporal Backtracking Search (TBS), which shifts the search space to the temporal axis. TBS transforms video generation into an iterative generate-verify-restart loop via three core mechanisms: (1) variable-K conditioning to resume generation from arbitrary clean prefixes; (2) temporal process verification to localize failures and extract valid restart anchors; and (3) prefix-based search to reallocate compute toward extending correct trajectories rather than root resampling. Across algorithmic, navigation, and robotics domains, TBS Pareto-dominates matched-budget BoN. In a strict out-of-distribution setting where one-shot generation collapses (0.7% for BoN), TBS achieves 22.7%, with every solved episode stemming from a restarted branch. Ultimately, TBS reveals that the local reasoning competence of video models far exceeds what single-shot rollouts indicate, providing a scalable test-time framework to unlock it.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Rescaling Confidence: What Scale Design Reveals About LLM Metacognition

Authors:
Yuyang Dai↗Yuxia Wang↗

arXiv:2603.09309v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Verbalized confidence, in which LLMs report a numerical certainty score, is widely used to estimate uncertainty in black-box settings, yet the confidence scale itself (typically 0–100) is rarely examined. We show that this design choice is not neutral. Across six LLMs and three datasets, verbalized confidence is heavily discretized, with more than 78\% of responses concentrating on just three round-number values. To investigate this phenomenon, we systematically manipulate confidence scales along three dimensions: granularity, boundary placement, and range regularity, and evaluate metacognitive sensitivity using $meta-d'$. We find that a 0–20 scale consistently improves metacognitive efficiency over the standard 0–100 format, while boundary compression degrades performance and round-number preferences persist even under irregular ranges. These results demonstrate that confidence scale design directly affects the quality of verbalized uncertainty and should be treated as a first-class experimental variable in LLM evaluation.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ViT-FREE: Efficient Face Recognition via Early Exiting and Synthetic Adaptation

Authors:
Tahar Chettaoui↗Guray Ozgur↗Eduarda Caldeira↗Naser Damer↗Fadi Boutros↗

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant attention in computer vision and shown strong potential for face recognition (FR). However, their high computational cost makes deployment on resource-constrained devices challenging, motivating the need for methods that balance efficiency and accuracy. In this work, we investigate early exiting in pretrained ViTs as a simple yet effective training-free strategy for efficient FR inference. Leveraging the uniform feature dimensionality across transformer encoder blocks, we introduce ViT-FREE, a multi-exit framework that enables face verification directly from intermediate representations without modifying or retraining the backbone model, and thus, reducing inference cost. Empirically, we show that patch embeddings and attention maps evolve progressively across depth, exhibiting high similarity between consecutive ViT blocks and increasing alignment with the final representation. This indicates gradual feature refinement and attention convergence, suggesting that intermediate layers already provide stable and discriminative representations suitable for early exiting. Through extensive experiments on multiple FR benchmarks, we systematically analyze the accuracy-efficiency trade-off across exit depths. Our results demonstrate that later exits achieve a highly favorable balance, with exiting at layer 10 yielding up to a 20% speedup while incurring only a 1.5 drop in verification performance on benchmarks such as IJB-C. Also, we propose ViT-FREE_FT, a lightweight exit-specific fine-tuning strategy that adapts only the projection layers using a small synthetic dataset while keeping the transformer backbone frozen. This approach improves the performance of shallow exits while preserving the efficiency benefits and leaving deeper exits largely unaffected.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

PARSE: Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization for Professional Domain LLM Agents

Authors:
Aaditya Pai↗

Prompt injection defenses evaluated on synthetic benchmarks do not generalize to real enterprise documents, which are longer, denser, and interleave legitimate authority language with factual content. We demonstrate this gap with a real-document benchmark of 122 tasks across five professional domains (financial, legal, medical, scientific, DevOps) using actual SEC filings, Federal Register rules, PubMed abstracts, arXiv papers, and GitHub postmortems. Paraphrasing, the strongest defense on synthetic benchmarks, shows no statistically significant attack success rate reduction on real documents (p=0.500) while degrading utility from 91.8% to 82.8%. We introduce PARSE (Provenance-Aware Retrieval Sanitization), a domain-aware, fact-preserving sanitization pipeline that classifies each sentence by injection likelihood, extracts structured facts before rewriting, and verifies fact preservation via a consistency-checking loop. A directiveness gate routes 59% of real enterprise documents to a lightweight path, concentrating computational cost on high-risk documents. PARSE achieves 15.6% attack success rate – a 38% reduction versus the 25.4% baseline – at 86.9% utility, the only condition that is both statistically significant (p=0.014, adequately powered) and maintains near-baseline utility. Practitioners should evaluate defenses on domain-matched real documents, not synthetic proxies.

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

Improving End-to-End Speech Recognition for Dysarthric Speech through In-Domain Data Augmentation

Authors:
Paban Sapkota↗Hemant Kumar Kathania↗Sudarsana Reddy Kadiri↗Shrikanth Narayanan↗

arXiv:2606.19797v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dysarthric speech recognition is crucial for facilitating effective communication among individuals with dysarthria. However, accurately recognizing dysarthric speech poses significant challenges due to varying severity levels and limited data availability. In this paper, we explore data augmentation techniques for dysarthric automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems by fine-tuning the End-to-End pre-trained Wav2Vec2 model, with a specific focus on severity levels. To address the challenges of data scarcity and the need for extensive data in fine-tuning pre-trained ASR systems for dysarthric speech, we investigate four prominent data augmentation methods: Speaking-Rate Modification (SRM), Pitch Modification (PM), Formant Modification (FM), and vocal tract Length Perturbation (VTLP), tailored to different aspects of dysarthria. The study uses individually fine-tuned Wav2Vec2 models for each severity class as baseline systems. Additionally, we conducted severity-specific fine-tuning of the ASR model using augmented data. Results demonstrate distinct efficacy patterns for each augmentation technique across severity levels. The best WERs were achieved with SRM ($s$=0.8) for low (9.02\%) and medium (38.11\%) severities, and with PM ($\tau$=0.8) for high severity (55.15\%), reflecting relative improvements of 30.02\%, 16.64\%, and 15.47\%, respectively. These results confirm the effectiveness of the augmentation methods in improving dysarthric ASR performance.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Predicting gestational age at birth in the context of preterm birth from multi-modal fetal MRI

Authors:
Diego Fajardo-Rojas↗Megan Hall↗Daniel Cromb↗Mary A. Rutherford↗Lisa Story↗Emma C. Robinson↗Jana Hutter↗

arXiv:2606.20172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Preterm birth is associated with significant mortality and a risk for lifelong morbidity. The complex multifactorial aetiology hampers accurate prediction and thus optimal care. A pipeline consisting of bespoke machine learning methods for data imputation, feature selection, and regression models to predict gestational age (GA) at birth was developed and evaluated from comprehensive multi-modal morphological and functional fetal MRI data from 333 control cases and 93 preterm birth cases. The GA at birth predictions were classified into term and preterm categories and their accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity were reported. An ablation study was performed to further validate the design of the pipeline. Performance was evaluated using stratified 10-fold cross-validation. The pipeline achieves an R2 score of 0.13 and a mean absolute error of 2.74 weeks. It also achieves a 0.77 accuracy, 0.59 sensitivity, and 0.82 specificity across folds. The predominant features selected by the pipeline include cervical length and statistics derived from placental T2* values. The confluence of fast, motion-robust and multi-modal fetal MRI techniques and machine learning prediction allowed the prediction of the gestation at birth. This information is essential for any pregnancy. To the best of our knowledge, preterm birth had only been addressed as a classification problem in the literature. Therefore, this work provides a proof of concept. Future work will increase the cohort size to allow for finer stratification within the preterm birth cohort. Our code is available at https://github.com/dfajardorojas/ml-for-preterm-birth-.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

CausalT5k: Diagnosing Refusal and Failure Modes in Trustworthy Causal Reasoning Across Causal Rungs

Authors:
Longling Geng↗Andy Ouyang↗Theodore Wu↗Daphne Barretto↗Matthew John Hayes↗Rachael Cooper↗Yuqiao Zeng↗Sameer Vijay↗Gia Ancone↗Ankit Rai↗Matthew Wolfman↗Patrick Flanagan↗…

arXiv:2602.08939v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models increasingly produce fluent causal explanations, yet they often fail in ways aggregate accuracy cannot diagnose: confusing association with intervention, abandoning correct judgments under pressure, over-refusing valid claims, or answering when evidence is underdetermined. We introduce CTK, a diagnostic benchmark of 5,147 cases and growing, across 10 domains and all three levels of Pearl's Ladder of Causation. Unlike benchmarks that only score correctness, CTK reveals why a model failed by annotating causal rung, trap type, pressure sensitivity, refusal quality, and Utility-Safety tradeoffs. Its Sheep/Wolf taxonomy separates valid causal designs from inferential traps; paired neutral/pressure variants measure sycophantic drift through Bad Flip Rate; and Wise Refusal fields test whether a model identifies the missing information needed before endorsing a claim. CTK exposes failure modes hidden by aggregate accuracy: the Skepticism Trap, Rung Collapse under scaling, pressure-induced drift, Detection-Correction gaps, and counterfactual error modes. Rather than prescribing a correction method, it provides the diagnostic substrate for studying causal-reasoning failure profiles.

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

DiffMath: Symbol- and Graph-Aware Latent Diffusion Transformer for Handwritten Mathematical Expression Generation

Authors:
Wei Pan↗Xuhan Zheng↗Yilin Shi↗Huiguo He↗Hiuyi Cheng↗Dezhi Peng↗Minghui Liao↗Lianwen Jin↗

Handwritten Mathematical Expression Generation (HMEG) is challenging due to the complex two-dimensional layouts and long-range structural dependencies of mathematical expressions. Existing methods typically rely on explicit spatial supervision, such as symbol-level bounding boxes, which incurs high annotation costs and limits scalability. In this work, we propose DiffMath, a symbol- and graph-aware latent diffusion framework that leverages the hierarchical structure inherent in LaTeX as a structural prior, eliminating the need for positional supervision. First, we design a Relational Abstract Syntax Tree (RelAST), a generation-oriented representation that distills MathML trees into compact triplet sequences [S, R, D], where each token directly encodes a symbol identity, spatial relation, or nesting depth. Second, we introduce MathVAE, which learns structure-preserving latent representations through symbol-aware and relation-aware perceptual regularization, ensuring that the latent space captures both character semantics and spatial topology. Third, MathDiT performs conditional denoising in this structured latent space, further guided by a global symbol-count prior via Adaptive Layer Normalization (AdaLN) to improve structural coherence. Experiments show that DiffMath produces structurally consistent handwritten expressions, achieves superior performance over existing methods, and improves the accuracy of downstream OCR models through synthetic data augmentation.

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15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Neural network surrogates with uncertainty quantification for inverse problems in partial differential equations

Authors:
Christian Jimenez-Beltran↗Aretha L. Teckentrup↗Antonio Vergari↗Konstantinos C. Zygalakis↗

arXiv:2606.20417v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse problems for differential equations arise throughout science and engineering, where one seeks to infer unknown model parameters from noisy or incomplete observations. Traditional numerical methods for these problems are often computationally expensive, particularly in Bayesian settings where evaluating the likelihood becomes costly for complex forward models and high-dimensional parameter spaces. To address this challenge, we introduce DeepGaLA, a neural-network surrogate for differential equation solvers that provides uncertainty-aware predictions, reducing overconfident inference when training data are limited. To evaluate the fidelity of the surrogate-induced posterior approximations in practice, we show that a short run of delayed-acceptance Markov chain Monte Carlo can serve as an effective diagnostic. Across a range of numerical experiments, DeepGaLA delivers forward-model approximations with accuracy comparable to established Gaussian-process surrogates, while better maintaining efficiency as parameter dimension grows. Moreover, it can incorporate differential-equation constraints, including in nonlinear settings. Overall, these results indicate that uncertainty-quantified neural surrogates can enable scalable and reliable Bayesian inference for inverse problems in complex systems.

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

Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA for Joint Anomaly-Feature Selection

Authors:
Pauli Taipale↗

arXiv:2606.13244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting anomalous samples and explanatory features under fixed budgets defines a coupled constrained-optimization problem. Sequential feature-first selection ranks features before choosing samples, which can overlook features whose utility depends on which samples are selected, especially when scores are calibrated from reference data that may be limited, noisy, or drifting. We instead formulate the task as joint sample-feature selection under the same fixed counts. In the analyzed formal model, calibration-error sensitivity grows linearly with the number of samples for feature-first ordering but stays constant for joint selection. We introduce Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA, a constraint-preserving grouped-angle variant for the resulting optimization problem. On matched sparse IBM Heron R3 benchmarks, a hardware-aware implementation reduces circuit depth by 45.9%-61.3% and two-qubit gates by 2.6%-5.2% relative to Qiskit optimization level 3 on the CZ-basis target. It enables, to our knowledge, the largest reported width-depth configurations for constraint-preserving bipartite-selection QAOA hardware executions with feasible-sector retention: 64 qubits at p=2 and 36 qubits at p=3. The 20-qubit p=5 runs retain 63% valid samples. Across 36-64 qubits, fixed-angle runs yield lower-energy feasible samples than matched random-feasible sampling. Warm starts reduce the gap to strict-feasible classical references by 57.5%-80.5%, and near-budget repair matches the sparse classical reference at 36 qubits. Benchmarks show gains in balanced fixed-budget regimes, and noiseless simulations show that problem-structured angle grouping improves over same-depth XY-QAOA and matched-parameter, type-preserving randomization controls. Overall, the results support calibrated joint selection and hardware-realizable constrained-mixer execution in the tested regimes.

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17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology

Authors:
Michael P. H. Stumpf↗

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics. An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.

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18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

A multilevel hierarchical framework for quantification of experimental heterogeneity in population snapshot data

Authors:
David J. Warne↗

by David J. Warne, Xiangrun Zhu, Thomas P. Steele, Stuart T. Johnston, Scott A. Sisson, Matthew Faria, Ryan J. Murphy, Alexander P. Browning Biological systems exhibit substantial heterogeneity: that is, variation in specific characteristics of individuals within a population. As a result, it is of critical importance to appropriately account for biological heterogeneity when calibrating mathematical models to infer cellular processes and predict behaviour. Recent approaches consider ordinary differential equations with random parameters to quantify heterogeneity in dynamical processes of cells. In this setting, statistical inference is performed to characterise the distribution of these random parameters within a cell population. One significant limitation of this approach is the tacit assumption that there are no substantial deviations in these distributions across experimental replicates. In this work, we propose a flexible Bayesian hierarchical differential equation modelling framework that quantifies and distinguishes both inter-experimental heterogeneity (heterogeneity between experimental replicates) and intra-experimental heterogeneity (biological heterogeneity within replicate populations). We consider two recent studies that employ mathematical models to interpret flow cytometry snap-shot data and quantify heterogeneity in nano-particle cell interactions and cell internalisation processes. Using simulation data, we demonstrate that substantial inaccuracy in the inferred dynamics can arise when experimental heterogeneity is not accounted for. By contrast, our hierarchical approach is robust to variability in inter-experimental and intra-experimental heterogeneity and our method simplifies to previous methods when inter-experimental heterogeneity is negligible. Our approach is flexible and widely applicable to applications involving replicate populations and snapshot data. We provide open-source implementations of our methods on GitHub.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SAGE: Retain-Aware Post-Hoc Sanitization of Final Unlearning Vector

Authors:
Jingyuan Zhang↗Yucheng Bai↗Peixi Wen↗Zhehao Huang↗Zhengbao He↗Hanling Tian↗Xinwen Cheng↗Haiyin Ran↗Xiaolin Huang↗

arXiv:2606.18309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning aims to remove undesirable knowledge or behaviors while preserving retained capabilities. Current unlearning methods all involve a trade-off between unlearning and retention. We have found that the retention activation bias can also be used to quantify the damage an unlearning method inflicts on retention, without considering the specific implementation of the unlearning process. This allows us to restore retention performance for any unlearning method using a post-hoc approach. Therefore, we propose a complementary post-hoc setting to sanitize the final update vector without rerunning the original unlearning pipeline. In this setting, we design SAGE, Spectral Activation-GEometry Sanitization, a source-agnostic correction for final unlearning updates. SAGE collects real module inputs from a small retain proxy, extracts their dominant activation geometry, and solves a source-anchored optimization objective in closed form, which suppresses update components aligned with high-energy retained directions while preserving the source method's forgetting carrier. Across multiple unlearning methods, model scales, and benchmarks, SAGE consistently relieves the retain-forget trade-off, identifying post-hoc sanitization of final vectors as a practical and underexplored axis for machine unlearning.

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20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-12

A new method for augmenting short time series, with application to pain events in sickle cell disease

Authors:
Kumar Utkarsh↗

by Kumar Utkarsh, Nirmish R. Shah, Tanvi Banerjee, Daniel M. Abrams Researchers across different fields, including but not limited to ecology, biology, and healthcare, often face the challenge of sparse data. Such sparsity can lead to uncertainties, estimation difficulties, and potential biases in modeling. Here we introduce a novel data augmentation method that combines multiple sparse time series datasets when they share similar statistical properties, thereby improving parameter estimation and model selection reliability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach through validation studies comparing Hawkes and Poisson processes, followed by application to subjective pain dynamics in patients with sickle cell disease (SCD), a condition affecting millions worldwide, particularly those of African, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern, and Indian descent.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus transmission: exploring perceptions of human-animal-tick interactions across six districts in Uganda

Authors:
Kugler↗Mujumbusi↗Pickering↗Muhumuza↗Akugizibwe↗Obicho↗Apangu↗Umo↗Nuwamanya↗Ashraf↗Atim↗S. A↗…

Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) causes a viral zoonotic disease transmitted through tick bites and direct contact with infected blood or tissue of infected animals. Socio-ecological and behavioural risk factors for CCHFV exposure in Uganda remain poorly understood, which can lead to the omission of key risk factors in quantitative survey design and limit our wider understanding. In this study, we explored human-animal-tick interaction transmission risks in Uganda. We conducted 24 focus group discussions (FGDs) and 31 key-informant interviews (KIIs) across six environmentally and socio-ecologically diverse districts, between October 2023 and March 2024. Study sites were selected using K-prototype analysis, which combined environmental and socio-ecological variables to identify distinct clusters within Uganda. FGDs were conducted separately with groups of community leaders, men, women and teenagers with stratified purposive sampling. Medical doctors, veterinarians, traditional healers, district surveillance officers, and herdsmen were individually interviewed as key informants and purposively sampled. Data were transcribed and translated into English, and analysed thematically using iterative categorisation in NVivo 14. Most participants reported tick bites, some as frequently as every day. Close contact with animals was common, including sleeping next to them in the same building, largely due to concerns about animal theft. Less frequent but notable practices included slaughtering animals for consumption or sacrifice and interactions with wild animals during hunting. Slaughtering and butchering an animal which was sick or had died was reportedly performed by participants in most districts. Plucking and roasting engorged ticks was a practice described in the Kaabong and Arua districts of Northern Uganda. These practices and behaviours highlight potential key risks of CCHFV transmission and underscore the need for future studies to address specific behaviours, to quantify if, and to what extent, they present an exposure risk. Further work should include underlying reasons for the behaviours, which would help ensure that culturally appropriate interventions are targeted.

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

BadWorld: Adversarial Attacks on World Models

Authors:
Linghui Shen↗Mingyue Cui↗Xingyi Yang↗

Visual world models (VWMs) synthesize interactive, action-conditioned rollouts from a single context image. However, it remains an open question how robust these models are to adversarial perturbations. Standard adversarial attacks fail to assess this vulnerability because attackers lack ground-truth future videos and cannot predict subsequent user controls. We introduce BadWorld, a label-free adversarial framework tailored for autoregressive VWMs that systematically overcomes both constraints. First, to bypass the need for future supervision, we propose a self-supervised velocity attack that directly disrupts the early denoising dynamics of the model. Second, to ensure the attack generalizes across unpredictable user actions, we formulate a trajectory-adaptive bi-level optimization that actively mines hard control sequences to forge control-agnostic perturbations. Evaluated on representative VWMs with continuous and discrete controls, BadWorld exposes severe structural fragility. Visually indistinguishable adversarial images reliably trigger catastrophic degradation in future rollouts, leading to incomplete denoising, structural collapse, and control inconsistency. These findings reveal critical risks for deploying VWMs in safety-critical systems while highlighting a practical mechanism for privacy protection.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

TimeLens: On-Device Artifact Recognition with Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering for the Grand Egyptian Museum

Authors:
Rawan Hesham↗Ali Ashraf↗Amr Ahmed↗Malak Alaa↗Omar Ahmed↗Omar Wagih↗

TimeLens is an AI-powered bilingual mobile guide for the Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM). Pointing a phone at an exhibit, a visitor sees the artifact recognized in real time and can ask follow-up questions answered in English or Arabic. The work addresses three problems specific to in-gallery deployment: fine-grained visual similarity among 51 catalogued artifacts (many near-identical Ramesside statues), the gap between curated training data and handheld camera conditions, and the risk of an AI guide stating unsupported historical facts. Two engineering contributions are reported. First, an on-device artifact detector was developed through a data-quality-driven iteration study – from foundation-model auto-annotation (YOLO-World), through spatial label-cleaning rules, to a fully hand-annotated dataset – isolating label quality as the decisive factor: the final YOLOv8n model resolves every previously failing class while remaining a 5.97 MB TensorFlow Lite asset that runs in real time on a mid-range phone (mAP@0.5 = 0.995, mAP@0.5:0.95 = 0.924). Second, a bilingual Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) guide, grounded in a 108-record ChromaDB knowledge base, was benchmarked across seven candidate language models, with Gemma 4 E2B (Q4 K M) selected; ten targeted optimizations reduce end-to-end latency from over 30 s to approximately 10 s. Both subsystems are integrated in a production Flutter application with bilingual interface, museum location gating, and text-to-speech support.

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

VERITAS: Verifier-Guided Proof Search for Zero-Shot Formal Theorem Proving

Authors:
Manish Acharya↗Zhenyu Liao↗Yueke Zhang↗Kevin Leach↗Yu Huang↗Yifan Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based formal provers often collapse rich verifier signals (syntax errors, type mismatches, partial goal progress) into a binary pass/fail bit. We present VERITAS, a zero-shot framework that routes every verifier signal back into proof search through a two-phase protocol: Best-of-N sampling first, then a critic-guided MCTS pass that ingests Phase 1 failures as explicit negative examples. The protocol preserves every theorem solved by its own Phase 1 sweep, so Phase 2's additional solves are attributable to feedback-driven exploration. VERITAS reaches 40.6% on miniF2F (vs. an independently run Best-of-5 at 36.9%, Portfolio 26.2%) and 7.3% on VERITAS-CombiBench, a 55-theorem combinatorics benchmark we release on which Best-of-5 (1.8%) falls below Portfolio (3.6%), exposing that unguided sampling hurts when correct lemma names must be recovered iteratively from verifier feedback. Artifacts are available on GitHub.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Automating Low-Risk Code Review at Meta: RADAR, Risk Calibration, and Review Efficiency

Authors:
Chris Adams↗Arjun Singh Banga↗Parveen Bansal↗Souvik Bhattacharya↗Payal Bhuptani↗Rujin Cao↗Pedro Canahuati↗Nate Cook↗Brian Ellis↗Prabhakar Goyal↗Gurinder Grewal↗Tianyu He↗…

arXiv:2605.30208v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-assisted coding tools have altered software production. At Meta, significant lines of code per human-landed diff grew by 105.9% year over year and per-developer diff volume rose 51%, with agentic AI responsible for over 80% of that growth. Meanwhile, the share of diffs receiving timely review has declined, exposing a widening gap between code supply and reviewer bandwidth. We ask three questions that progress from feasibility through calibration to impact: (1) can risk-stratified automation operate at scale across diverse organizations, (2) how does tuning the risk threshold affect the trade-off between automation yield and safety, and (3) to what extent does automated review reduce end-to-end latency for AI-generated changes? We deployed RADAR (Risk Aware Diff Auto Review), a multi-stage funnel that classifies each diff by authorship and source type, applies eligibility gates, static heuristics, a machine-learned Diff Risk Score, LLM-based Automated Code Review, and deterministic validation before landing qualifying changes. We evaluate RADAR through telemetry covering 535K+ RADAR-reviewed diffs, observational before-after comparisons for policy changes, and difference-in-differences analysis of efficiency outcomes. RADAR has reviewed 535K+ diffs and landed 331K+. Relaxing the Diff Risk Score threshold from the 25th to the 50th percentile increased the approve rate to 60.31%. The revert rate for RADAR-reviewed diffs is 1/3 that of non-RADAR diffs, and the Production Incident rate is 1/50 that of non-RADAR diffs. RADAR reduces median time to close by over 330% and median diff review wall time by 35%. Risk-aware layered automation can materially reduce review bottlenecks created by AI-driven code growth without compromising production safety.

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