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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Associations of Chemical Exposures with Psychological Distress and Depression Diagnosis among Waste Pickers in Brasilia, Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Study

Authors:
King Stone↗K. L↗Maia Pelagalli↗Melanson↗Steelman↗Cruvinel↗V. R. N↗Pintas↗C. P↗Macena↗Thygerson↗Thacker↗…

Introduction: Waste pickers face chemical exposures. We evaluated whether chemical exposure is associated with psychological distress and depression. Methods: A 2017 cross-sectional survey included 1,141 waste pickers working in the Estrutural open dump in Brasilia, Brazil. Participants self-reported occupational exposure to 11 chemical categories, 17 psychological distress symptoms, and depression diagnoses. Associations of chemical exposure with mean psychological distress scores and depression prevalence were assessed, adjusted for age, sex, marital status, and income. Results: Mean psychological distress score was higher among those exposed to any chemical (mean of 8.1 vs 6.1; adjusted mean difference [aMD]: 1.8 [0.9, 2.7]) and higher among those exposed to each of 11 chemical categories, for example, smoke (aMD: 1.2 [0.6, 1.7]), batteries (aMD: 1.5 [1.0, 1.9], and oils (aMD: 1.3 [0.9, 1.8]). Depression was more prevalent among those exposed to oils (16.6% vs 10.6%; adjusted prevalence difference [aPD]: 6.3% [95% CI: 2.3, 10.2]), cleaning products (aPD: 5.4% [1.2, 9.5]), medications (aPD: 4.7% [0.6, 8.8]), and aerosols (aPD: 5.3% [1.3, 9.3]) but, not smoke, batteries, greases, insecticides, solvents, paints, chemical containers, or any chemical. Conclusion: These associations highlight the need to consider policy level protections for waste pickers to reduce chemical exposure and guard against psychological distress. Further research is necessary to explore which specific chemicals, within broad chemical categories, are associated with psychological distress and depression.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

SHARD: Safe and Helpful Alignment via Self-Reframing Distillation

Authors:
Viswonathan Manoranjan↗Amogh Gupta↗Anvesh Rao Vijjini↗Thomas Hofweber↗Snigdha Chaturvedi↗

Large language models often struggle with sensitive prompts. They may refuse outright, provide generic safety boilerplate, or fail to address the user's legitimate informational needs that can be answered safely. We introduce SHARD, a self-reframing distillation method to improve safe-helpfulness. It first rewrites sensitive prompts to surface benign intent using philosophical guidelines, then reframes its original responses into safe, more helpful ones, and finally fine-tunes the model on its self-reframed responses. Across DNA and the English subset of LINGUASAFE, SHARD improves helpfulness for most model families while preserving safety. It also remains competitive with distillation from a larger teacher model, suggesting that models can internalize safe and helpful behavior elicited from their own. Warning: This paper contains content that may be offensive or harmful.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

StaminaBench: Stress-Testing Coding Agents over 100 Interaction Turns

Authors:
Vlad Sobal↗Shuo Yang↗Yuting Zhang↗Wei Xia↗Stefano Soatto↗

arXiv:2606.19613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce StaminaBench, a benchmark that measures the stamina of coding agents: how many consecutive interaction turns (change requests) they can handle before failing. Unlike the prevailing fraction-of-tasks-solved metric, this matches real vibe-coding where sessions run dozens or hundreds of turns. In StaminaBench, agents implement a REST API server and modify it across a tunable number of procedurally generated follow-up change requests - 100 in our experiments, resulting in codebases of up to 6,000 lines. Tests are generated fully programmatically without LLM involvement, ensuring reproducibility and reliability; change sequences are drawn from either a hardcoded or LLM-driven sampler, both constrained to a structured action space to ensure changes are valid. The agent and the server run in an isolated environment and communicate with the benchmark through HTTP, making testing fully black-box and language-agnostic. We evaluate six agent harnesses paired with seven open-source LLMs across 20 scenarios of 100 turns each and find that: (1) all the tested models fail within 5-6 turns, confirming that vibe-coding-style programming without thorough testing produces bugs; (2) passing test feedback back to the agent and allowing it to retry improves passed turn count by up to 12x; and (3) a good harness is required for strong performance: stronger models exhibit up to a 6x gap between their best and worst harness, while weaker models fail with any harness. We release the benchmark and the generated tasks to enable further research into multi-turn coding agent behavior. Benchmark code and data: github.com/amazon-science/StaminaBench.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Language-Instructed Vision Embeddings for Controllable and Generalizable Perception

Authors:
Chengzhi Mao↗Xudong Lin↗Wen-Sheng Chu↗

Vision foundation models are typically trained as static feature extractors, placing the burden of task adaptation onto large downstream models. We propose an alternative paradigm: instead of solely feeding visual features into language models, we use language itself to dynamically guide the vision encoder. Our method, Language-Instructed Vision Embeddings (LIVE), leverages language as high-level guidance to produce task-centric embeddings at inference time, removing the need for task-specific retraining. This enables the encoder to focus on contextually relevant aspects of the input, yielding more controllable and generalizable representations. Empirically, LIVE reduces visual hallucinations (+34 points on MMVP), surpasses vision-language models with orders of magnitude more parameters on visual question answering, and generalizes to unseen instructions and tasks – offering a direct path toward adaptive, instruction-driven visual intelligence.

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

Noise-Guided Transport for Imitation Learning

Authors:
Lionel Blond\'e↗Joao A. Candido Ramos↗Alexandros Kalousis↗

arXiv:2509.26294v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider imitation learning in the low-data regime, where only a limited number of expert demonstrations are available. In this setting, methods that rely on large-scale pretraining or high-capacity architectures can be difficult to apply, and efficiency with respect to demonstration data becomes critical. We introduce Noise-Guided Transport (NGT), a lightweight off-policy method that casts imitation as an optimal transport problem solved via adversarial training. NGT requires no pretraining or specialized architectures, incorporates uncertainty estimation by design, and is easy to implement and tune. Despite its simplicity, NGT achieves strong performance on challenging continuous control tasks, including high-dimensional Humanoid tasks, under ultra-low data regimes with as few as 20 transitions.

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07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Cardiometabolic multimorbidity and care experiences in primary healthcare among Brazilian adults aged 50 and over (ELSI-Brazil)

Authors:
Souza↗F. H. A. d↗Delpino↗F. M↗Batista↗S. R. R↗

Background: Population aging and the rising burden of non-communicable diseases have increased the prevalence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity (CM-MM) among older adults. Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) are recognized as essential components of healthcare quality assessment, yet evidence on primary care experiences among individuals with CM-MM remains scarce. Objective: To analyze primary care experiences according to the presence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity among Brazilians aged 50 years and older. Methods: Cross-sectional study using data from the second wave of the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSI-Brazil, 2019-2021; n = 9,949). CM-MM was defined as the self-reported coexistence of two or more of the following conditions: hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, acute myocardial infarction, and stroke. Primary care experiences were assessed using a validated 12-item instrument organized into four domains: first-contact access, longitudinality, communication, and care coordination. Associations were estimated using Poisson regression adjusted for sociodemographic, health conditions, and healthcare utilization variables, with stratified analysis by Family Health Strategy (FHS) coverage. Results: CM-MM prevalence was 25.5%, with a progressive increase by age and an inverse gradient by education. Individuals with CM-MM reported significantly more positive experiences in longitudinality (mean index 2.53 vs. 2.34; adjusted PR = 1.22; 95%CI 1.12-1.33; p < 0.001) and, to a lesser extent, in communication (mean index 2.68 vs. 2.58; adjusted PR = 1.10; 95%CI 1.00-1.20; p = 0.041). No statistically significant differences were found in first-contact access or care coordination. After stratified by FHS coverage, the observed differences in longitudinality and communication were no longer statistically significant. Conclusions: CM-MM was associated with more positive primary care experiences in longitudinality and communication. The absence of differentiated experiences in first-contact access and coordination highlights structural gaps in primary care responsiveness to individuals with greater clinical complexity. Keywords: Multimorbidity; Cardiometabolic diseases; Primary Care; Patient-reported experience measures; Older adults; ELSI-Brazil.

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

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

Authors:
Lanqing Li↗Shentong Mo↗Yang Yu↗Pheng-Ann Heng↗

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

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09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

OdysSim: Building Foundation Models for Human Behavior Simulation

Authors:
Xuhui Zhou↗Weiwei Sun↗Weihua Du↗Jiarui Liu↗Haojia Sun↗Qianou Ma↗Tongshuang Wu↗Yiming Yang↗Maarten Sap↗

Large language models are increasingly deployed as human simulators for interactive evaluation and social simulation. Yet helpfulness-driven post-training pulls them toward a homogeneous, overly agreeable assistant register, creating a behavioral Sim2Real gap. We present OdysSim, the largest open systematic investigation of behavioral foundation models, i.e., models trained to simulate human behavior at scale. We propose SOUL, a taxonomy of five capability axes (CONV, SS, COG, ROLE, EVAL) that unifies 62 datasets and 23 benchmark tasks under one framework. Specifically, we curate the OdysSim corpus (21.4M interactions, 10B tokens, retrofitted with back-generated social contexts), construct the SOUL-Index benchmark, and develop an end-to-end training recipe combining midtraining, task-specific RL, and expert distillation. The resulting open 8B OSim model ranks first or tied-first on 8 of 23 tasks, outperforming any individual frontier model by this count, with the strongest gains on conversational and social tasks. Its outputs are also more human-like in length, formatting, and word choice, and it transfers zero-shot to out-of-distribution user simulation on $\tau$-bench, nearly matching real users on reaction alignment (93.2 vs. 93.5). We further show that LLM-as-judge RL induces reward-hacking patterns, and that our detectors can mitigate them during post-training. Together, our findings suggest that behavioral foundation models require rethinking the LLM training paradigm. We release all artifacts to support future research.

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

CoAgent: Concurrency Control for Multi-Agent Systems

Authors:
Hongtao Lyu↗Dingyan Zhang↗Mingyu Wu↗Xingda Wei↗Haibo Chen↗

arXiv:2606.15376v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems – coding agents, devops agents, document agents – now routinely run several agents in parallel against the same git tree, Kubernetes cluster, or document. As soon as two of them mutate shared state, they enter the regime classical concurrency control has studied for decades, but classical mechanisms fit LLM agents poorly. A single agent transaction spans minutes of inference, read sets are broad and opaque rather than statically inferable, and the live state agents act on admits neither fork nor buffer, so writes take effect the moment they execute. Locks block long inference intervals; OCC abort-and-retry discards minutes of work on every conflict. This paper builds concurrency control on a capability classical transactions lack: the LLM inside each agent can judge whether a conflicting write invalidates its plan, and can repair exactly the operations that depended on it. Control therefore turns advisory: the runtime informs, the agent repairs. Our protocol, MTPO (Monotonic Trajectory Pre-Order), fixes a serialization order at launch, serves each read the order-filtered value, and applies writes speculatively in place; a one-way notification asks an affected reader to re-judge and patch its plan, while the framework mechanically undoes and reorders misplaced writes through the saga-style inverse each tool registers in advance. At quiescence the run is serializable in the pre-decided order. We realize MTPO as CoAgent, toolcall middleware whose privileged ToolSmith grows footprint-declared, undoable tools online. On ten contended workloads, CoAgent stays within 5\% of serial correctness at a $1.4\times$ speedup and near-serial token cost, where 2PL and OCC surrender nearly all concurrency gains; on a bash-only target system, it grows a 25-tool library online and lifts the task pass rate from 45/71 to 63/71 at $0.80\times$ the time and $0.86\times$ the cost.

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

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

Authors:
Jinpeng Lu↗Dexu Zhu↗Haoyuan Shi↗Linghan Cai↗Guo Tang↗Yinda Chen↗Jie Cao↗Duyu Tang↗Yi Zhang↗Yong Dai↗Xiaozhu Ju↗

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

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

Training-Free Adversarial Robustness in Computational MRI

Authors:
Mahdi Saberi↗Chi Zhang↗Mehmet Ak\c{c}akaya↗

Deep learning (DL) methods have become the state-of-the-art for reconstructing sub-sampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. However, studies have shown that these methods are susceptible to small adversarial input perturbations, resulting in major distortions in the output images. Various strategies have been proposed to reduce the effects of these attacks, but they require retraining. In this work, we propose a novel approach for mitigating adversarial attacks on MRI reconstruction models without any retraining. Based on the idea of cyclic measurement consistency, we devise a novel mitigation objective that is minimized in a small ball around the attack input. Results show that our method substantially reduces the impact of adversarial perturbations across different datasets, attack types/strengths and PD-DL networks, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms conventional mitigation methods. We also introduce a practically relevant scenario for small adversarial perturbations that models impulse noise in raw data, which relates to herringbone artifacts, and show the applicability of our approach in this setting. Finally, we show our mitigation approach remains effective in two realistic extension scenarios: a blind setup, where the attack strength or algorithm is not known to the user; and an adaptive attack setup, where the attacker has full knowledge of the defense strategy.

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

Higher order PCA-like rotation-invariant features for detailed shape descriptors modulo rotation

Authors:
Jarek Duda↗

PCA can be used for rotation invariant features, describing a shape with its $p_{ab}=E[(x_i-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])]$ covariance matrix approximating shape by ellipsoid, allowing for rotation invariants like its traces of powers. However, real shapes are usually much more complicated, hence there is proposed its extension to e.g. $p_{abc}=E[(x_a-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])(x_c-E[x_c])]$ order-3 or higher tensors describing central moments, or polynomial times Gaussian allowing decodable shape descriptors of arbitrarily high accuracy, and their analogous rotation invariants. Its practical applications could be rotation-invariant features to include shape modulo rotation e.g. for molecular shape descriptors, or for up to rotation object recognition in 2D images/3D scans maybe also for 3D scene understanding, or shape similarity metric allowing inexpensive comparison of objects modulo rotation avoiding costly optimization over rotations.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Computing noise-canceling observables via Pauli propagation

Authors:
Andrew Eddins↗Caleb Johnson↗Alberto Baiardi↗Francesco Tacchino↗Ewout van den Berg↗Roy Elkabetz↗Vinay Tripathi↗Swarnadeep Majumder↗Max Rossmannek↗Liran Shirizly↗Abhinav Kandala↗

arXiv:2606.20441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The pursuit of quantum advantage is driving the co-evolution of quantum processors and classical simulation methods. Despite advances in scale and quality, the accuracy of quantum simulation is ultimately limited by error rates and sampling overheads. Similarly, while classical simulation methods such as Pauli propagation have made remarkable progress, their accuracy is ultimately limited by the exponential growth of operator paths and the truncations needed to control memory and runtime. Here we show that these complementary limitations can be mitigated by embedding Pauli propagation within a hybrid error-mitigation framework that reduces quantum sampling overhead while achieving lower truncation errors with fewer classical resources than traditional Pauli propagation alone. In this framework, a target observable is classically propagated through noise-canceling inverse channels, producing a modified observable that is measured directly on a quantum processor. We prototype two implementations and benchmark their performance numerically on canonical models that challenge traditional Pauli propagation. We also perform experiments on a quantum processor using 56 superconducting qubits, revealing the tradeoffs of their respective truncation strategies. These results illustrate how classical and quantum resources can be orchestrated to extend observable estimation beyond the limits of either approach alone, providing a foundation for quantum-centric supercomputing and future demonstrations of quantum advantage.

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

Learning and Generating Mixed States Prepared by Shallow Channel Circuits

Authors:
Fangjun Hu↗Christian Kokail↗Milan Kornja\v{c}a↗Pedro L. S. Lopes↗Weiyuan Gong↗Sheng-Tao Wang↗Xun Gao↗Stefan Ostermann↗

arXiv:2604.01197v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning quantum states from measurement data is a central problem in quantum information and computational complexity. In this work, we study the problem of learning to generate mixed states on a finite-dimensional lattice. Motivated by recent developments in mixed state phases of matter, we focus on arbitrary states in the trivial phase. A state belongs to the trivial phase if there exists a shallow preparation channel circuit under which local reversibility is preserved throughout the preparation. We prove that any mixed state in this class can be efficiently learned from measurement access alone. Specifically, given copies of an unknown trivial phase mixed state, our algorithm outputs a shallow local channel circuit that approximately generates this state in trace distance. The sample complexity and runtime are polynomial (or quasi-polynomial) in the number of qubits, assuming constant (or polylogarithmic) circuit depth and gate locality. Importantly, the learner is not given the original preparation circuit and relies only on its existence. Our results provide a structural foundation for quantum generative models based on shallow channel circuits. In the classical limit, our framework also inspires an efficient algorithm for classical diffusion models using only a polynomial overhead of training and generation.

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16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

BRICKS-WM: Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models

Authors:
Shaowei Zhang↗Jiahan Cao↗Xunlan Zhou↗Shenghua Wan↗De-Chuan Zhan↗

arXiv:2606.16489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) has achieved remarkable success in continuous control by leveraging latent world models. However, prevailing approaches typically rely on monolithic latent dynamics, entangling environment dynamics into a coupled process. This coupling severely limits reusability: altering the agent necessitates retraining the entire world from scratch, even if the environment remains constant. To address this, we introduce BRICKS-WM (Building Reusability via Interface Composition Kinetics for Structured World Models), a framework for the modular assembly of structured world models. Driven by the insight that the physical world is composed of independent entities, we posit that global dynamics can be modeled as a composition of distinct dynamical modules interacting via latent interfaces. As a minimal instantiation, we factorize the latent state space into an actuated Agent module and an external Background module, bridged by a learned latent interface. Unlike prior object-centric methods that prioritize visual segmentation, BRICKS-WM enforces a functional separation in transition dynamics, ensuring that background dynamics remains agnostic to the agent's dynamics. Empirically, BRICKS-WM achieves control performance comparable to strong monolithic baselines when trained from scratch, and enables the reuse of frozen background dynamics across agents.

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

When the Chain of Thought Knows Better: Failure Modes in Multi-Turn Reasoning Models

Authors:
Sai Kartheek Reddy Kasu↗Nils Lukas↗Samuele Poppi↗

Failures in multi-turn reasoning models are largely invisible to terminal-score evaluation. A model can lock onto an unsafe stance early in a long dialogue, yet its final-turn refusal rate may appear indistinguishable from a robustly aligned baseline. To expose these hidden temporal dynamics, we propose a trace-level diagnostic - the CoT-Output 2x2 safety matrix. This framework labels every turn along two independent axes (internal reasoning and visible output), yielding four operationally defined failure cells: robust alignment, alignment faking, overt jailbreak, and a distinct failure mode we term context-injection failure (where the CoT maintains safe reasoning, but the visible output produces harm, highlighting a multi-turn manifestation of reasoning unfaithfulness). We evaluate three distilled reasoning targets against a fixed attacker across five oversight conditions, collecting 6750 turn-level observations on the Information-Hazard scenario. Our analysis reveals two reproducible vulnerabilities: an oversight paradox where explicit monitoring cues paradoxically increase alignment-faking rates rather than suppress them, and a context-injection failure where models lock onto unsafe external outputs despite safe internal states. We release the full dataset of multi-turn dialogues and CoT traces to support follow-up trace-diagnostic research.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Level of Physical Activity and ApoE Status - Effects on Alzheimer's Disease and on Mortality

Authors:
Ma↗Cheng↗Shao↗Zamrini↗Sui↗Tsuang↗D. W↗Logue↗Ahmed↗Kokkinos↗Faselis↗C. J↗…

Background: Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) affect over 7.2 million Americans aged 65 and older, with the APOE-4 allele representing the strongest known genetic risk factor. Physical activity (PA) has been associated with reduced dementia risk, but its interaction with APOE genotype remains poorly characterized in large, genomically informed cohorts. Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis using linked genomic, survey, and longitudinal electronic health record data from the VA Million Veteran Program (MVP). Veterans aged

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

Overcoming the Impedance Mismatch: A Theoretical Roadmap for Fusing Foundation Models and Knowledge Graphs

Authors:
Sahil Rajesh Dhayalkar↗

arXiv:2606.15656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern artificial intelligence remains fundamentally divided between the continuous, probabilistic spaces of Foundation Models and the discrete, deterministic structures of Knowledge Graphs. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) attempts to connect them by serializing graph data into text, we argue this lexical bridging is merely a superficial patch. In this paper, we formalize the underlying structural and geometric friction as the Impedance Mismatch. By categorizing current neuro-symbolic integration strategies into a three-tiered hierarchy, we demonstrate that neither surface-level prompt injection nor continuous representation alignment can preserve the strict logical motifs required for reliable multi-hop reasoning. We define the specific mathematical limits, such as the Lexical Bottleneck and Topological Collapse, that show current architectures will eventually hallucinate or conflate semantic nodes. To achieve true semantic fusion, we propose a rigorous theoretical roadmap. We advocate for natively internalizing discrete symbolic structures through Structured Residual Streams, utilizing Vector Symbolic Architectures for latent sub-graph injection, and performing model updates via Orthogonal Subspace Editing. This actionable framework paves the way for models that seamlessly fuse the precision of symbolic logic with the expressivity of parametric memory.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

How Fine-Grained Should a RAG Benchmark Be? A Hierarchical Framework for Synthetic Question Generation

Authors:
Chase M. Fensore↗Kaustubh Dhole↗Jason Fan↗Eugene Agichtein↗Joyce C. Ho↗

Evaluating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems requires benchmarks that capture diverse question characteristics, yet practitioners lack empirical guidance on which dimensions to vary and at what granularity. We present HieraRAG, a hierarchical framework for studying granularity in RAG benchmark construction, defining optimal granularity as the level that maximizes discriminative power (the standard deviation of generation quality across categories) within a given RAG configuration. As a case study, we generate 5,872 synthetic question-answer (QA) pairs from FineWeb-10BT across 3 dimensions (Question Complexity, Answer Type, Linguistic Variation) at 3 granularity levels (2, 4, and 8 categories). With a BM25+Falcon-3-10B pipeline, optimal granularity varies by dimension: complexity benefits from fine-grained distinctions (discriminative power: 0.053) while answer type and linguistic variation peak at medium granularity. We introduce a Coherence Ratio metric to quantify whether fine-grained splits cleanly subdivide parent categories, revealing structural differences across dimensions (Question Complexity: 0.40 vs. Answer Type: 1.44). Human evaluation of 110 stratified QA pairs confirms synthetic quality. While these specific findings reflect a single configuration, HieraRAG provides a portable procedure and validation metric for practitioners to determine evaluation granularity within their own RAG settings.

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

WavSLM: Single-Stream Speech Language Modeling via WavLM Distillation

Authors:
Luca Della Libera↗Cem Subakan↗Mirco Ravanelli↗

Large language models show that simple autoregressive training can yield scalable and coherent generation, but extending this paradigm to speech remains challenging due to the entanglement of semantic and acoustic information. Most existing speech language models rely on text supervision, hierarchical token streams, or complex hybrid architectures, departing from the single-stream generative pretraining paradigm that has proven effective in text. In this work, we introduce WavSLM, a speech language model trained by quantizing and distilling self-supervised WavLM representations into a single codebook and optimizing an autoregressive next-chunk prediction objective. WavSLM jointly models semantic and acoustic information within a single token stream without text supervision or text pretraining. Despite its simplicity, it achieves competitive performance on consistency benchmarks and speech generation while using fewer parameters, less training data, and supporting streaming inference.

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

Pixel-TTS: Image based Text Rendering for Robust Text-to-Speech

Authors:
Adarsh Arigala↗Arjun Gangwar↗S Umesh↗Yova Kementchedjhieva↗

Recent advances in pixel-based text modeling show that representing text as images enables models to exploit visual cues for language understanding. Grounding text in its visual form allows structurally similar characters with different Unicode encodings to produce similar embeddings, benefiting cross-lingual and zero-shot scenarios. Conventional text-based approaches treat each character independently, limiting generalization to unseen characters and requiring embedding expansion during cross-lingual adaptation. We propose Pixel-TTS, the first framework for visually grounded speech synthesis. It renders text as images and projects them through a 2D convolutional layer to generate embeddings. This design eliminates embedding matrix expansion during fine-tuning while improving robustness to unseen characters and orthographic variations. Extensive experiments show Pixel-TTS achieves competitive performance with strong baselines, faster convergence and robust zero-shot generalization.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Detecting Historical Turning Points in Italian Media: A Complex Systems Approach to a Diachronic News Corpus

Authors:
Dario Zarcone↗Salvatore Miccich\`e↗David Sanchez↗

The increasing availability of large-scale textual corpora has opened new possibilities for data-driven, quantitative approaches to historical analysis using Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, diachronic corpora with historical relevance from the pre-digital era remain scarce and often incomplete. We present a quantitative approach to historical analysis based on the reconstruction and exploration of a diachronic corpus of around 600,000 articles from the Italian newspaper "La Repubblica", covering all the articles published from the 1st of January 1985 to the 31st of December 2000 - a period of major political, social, and geopolitical change in Italy and globally. Using NLP techniques, we analyze the text at both lexical and semantic levels; we then apply tools from complex systems and statistical physics to trace shifts in media discourse over time. This allows us to detect key transition periods, such as the transition from the First Republic to the Second Republic in Italy, or major international conflicts like the Gulf War or the Kosovo War, without relying on prior labeling. The results show how combining computational linguistics with ideas from complex systems can offer new quantitative insight into historical changes, opening up new paths for studying the dynamics of media and society through large-scale textual data.

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

Treatment Response Optimized Clinical Decision Support AI System via Digital Twin Simulation

Authors:
Xinyu Qin↗Anil K. Sood↗Ruiheng Yu↗Sara Corvigno↗Elaine Stur↗Lu Wang↗

arXiv:2606.17405v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Clinical decision support AI systems (CDSASs) must adapt to evolving patient conditions in real-time while adhering to strict safety constraints. We present an online adaptive framework that integrates Treatment Effect (TE) estimation to quantify clinical benefits, a patient Digital Twin (DT) to simulate treatment trajectories, and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for sequential decision-making. The AI system is initially trained on historical medical records and operates in a continuous learning loop. To ensure safety, a rule-based module monitors vital signs and blocks contraindicated treatments. Cases with strong internal model disagreement are flagged for clinician review, simulated in our experiments via a pre-trained outcome model. We validate our framework using both a synthetic clinical simulator and a real-world ovarian cancer dataset from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). In both simulated and clinical settings, our method demonstrated superior effectiveness and stability in recommending treatments compared to standard computational baselines. Furthermore, the AI system maintains low latency and requires expert consultation for only a minority of cases in our experimental validation, demonstrating its potential as a safe, clinician-supervised tool for personalized medicine that continuously improves through practical use.

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Memory as a Wasting Asset: Pricing Flash Endurance for Embodied Agents, and the Limits of Doing So

Authors:
Josef Liyanjun Chen↗

arXiv:2606.18144v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A robot's flash endurance is a non-renewable stock: every persisted write spends one of a few thousand program/erase cycles and never refills, yet no fielded robot memory system prices which memories are worth an erase cycle. We treat embodied memory as depreciating capital and price that stock with a single endurance shadow price $\eta$, which makes cost-minimizing placement across a RAM / on-board NVM / cloud hierarchy a threshold in a wear-augmented per-byte index. The index is cost-optimal whatever the sign of the value-write association $\chi$; only when $\chi > 0$ does the optimum turn non-monotone, sending a robot's most valuable memories off its flash. The pivot is thus empirical, and we measure $\chi$ on real robot logs at a pre-specified gate: its sign is a property of the deployment regime – positive on recurrent long-horizon manipulation ($\hat{\chi} \approx +1.0 \times 10^{-3}$, replicated at full power), null on a shorter-horizon suite, and negative on non-recurrent teleoperation. Two boundaries scope the result. The endurance budget is dormant on premium 3,000-P/E TLC at datasheet prices and binding on the commodity QLC/eMMC ($\sim$1,000 P/E) that cheaper edge robots run. And where it binds, a learned wear-aware controller only ties price-based routing on task value, because realized value is tier-invariant across RAM, NVM, and cloud: the rent governs device lifetime and cost, not task performance. Whether wear-aware placement improves task value remains open – $\chi$ is measured against a value proxy, and the non-monotone optimum, while proven, is not yet observed in data.

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