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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Molecular Tumor Boards clinical impact on patient care and structural features: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Authors:
Luigi Russo↗

by Luigi Russo, Erika Giacobini, Nicolò Lentini, Tommaso Osti, Maud Kamal, Stefania Boccia, Roberta Pastorino Background Molecular Tumor Boards (MTBs) bring together multidisciplinary experts to translate genomic data into clinical decisions in oncology, however, their overall clinical impact remains unclear. The aim of this systematic review is to assess the clinical impact of MTB-recommended therapies on patients with cancer outcomes. Methods and findings In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched PubMed, Embase, Scopus, and CENTRAL up to July 2025. We included studies of any design, both single-arm studies and studies with a comparator group, that reported the clinical impact of MTBs in patients who received MTB-guided therapy. Meta-analyses were performed separately by study design, using hazard ratios (HRs) for overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS), relative risks (RRs) for objective response rate (ORR) and disease control rate (DCR), and pooled proportions for PFS ratio ≥1.3. All meta-analyses were conducted using random-effects models based on the inverse variance method. We evaluated the risk of bias using the RoB 2.0 for RCTs and ROBINS-I for non-randomized studies.From 6,846 records, 78 studies (9,195 patients; 4,569 treated per MTB recommendations) were included. MTB-guided therapies were associated with reduced risk of death (HR 0.87; 95% CI [0.76, 1.01]; p = 0.069; I2 = 0.0% in RCTs; 0.62 in retrospective studies) and disease progression (HR 0.73; 95% CI [0.64, 0.84]; p 

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Detect Before You Leap: Mirage Detection in Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury↗Md. Shaown Miah↗S. M. Taiabul Haque↗Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) can produce confident visual answers even when the required visual evidence is missing, blank, or unrelated to the question. This failure mode, recently described as mirage (mirage2026), is especially concerning in medical and document VQA, where a plausible but visually ungrounded answer may be mistaken for image-based evidence. We study the complementary problem of pre-release mirage detection: given an image-question pair, determine whether the VLM should answer or abstain before generation. To that end, we propose a novel model-agnostic Text-Conditioned Layer-wise Internal Alignment (TC-LIA) method that probes patch-token representations across the layers of a CLIP ViT-H/14 vision encoder. The key idea is to project layer-wise image patch tokens into the final CLIP embedding space and measure their similarity with the question embedding, thereby tracking whether question-relevant visual evidence emerges across vision layers. TC-LIA summarizes this alignment trajectory using final image-text cosine similarity, late-layer top-k patch-text alignment, early-to-late gain, and layer-wise slope. These features are combined with pixel-statistic based blank/noise detection, zero-shot domain routing, and structured VLM self-assessment in an ensemble. Across five VQA domains with related, unrelated-real, and blank/noise inputs, and across twelve VLM backbones, Qwen2.5-VL-32B achieves the highest three-class detection accuracy of 94.7% with a 3.0% mirage rate, while Qwen2.5-VL-72B achieves 94.6% accuracy with a lower 2.8% mirage rate. Baseline mirage rates span 21.7-66.6%.

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

Probing Many-Body Phenomena with Atomically Thin Nuclear Spin Layers in Diamond

Authors:
Philipp J. Vetter↗Christoph Findler↗Antonio Verd\'u↗Matthias Kost↗R\'emi Blinder↗Jens Fuhrmann↗Christian Osterkamp↗Johannes Lang↗Martin B. Plenio↗Javier Prior↗Fedor Jelezko↗

arXiv:2510.27374v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum simulation aims to recreate complex many-body phenomena in controlled environments, offering insights into dynamics that are otherwise difficult to model. Existing platforms, however, are often complex and costly to scale, typically requiring ultra pure vacuum or low temperatures. Here, we introduce a platform based on a thin, strongly interacting ${}^{13}C$ nuclear spin layer in diamond that allows controlled exploration of many-body dynamics at room temperature. Nearby nitrogen-vacancy centers enable polarization, readout, and, combined with radio-frequency fields, coherent control of the nuclear spins. We demonstrate strong, tunable interactions among the nuclear spins and use the system to probe discrete time-crystalline order across varying interaction ranges. By combining ease of use with operation at ambient temperatures, our work opens new opportunities for investigating strongly correlated many-body effects.

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04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SpikeTAD: Spiking Neural Networks for End-to-End Temporal Action Detection

Authors:
Min Yang↗Mi Zhou↗Limin Wang↗

Video understanding is a crucial part of computer vision, with numerous application scenarios. With the increasing popularity of mobile devices, an increasing number of efforts are trying to deploy video understanding models on them. However, existing video understanding models are difficult to deploy due to their large size and prohibitive power consumption. Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have shown bioplausibility and low power advantages over Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), especially on neuromorphic chips which are regarded as essential components of future mobile devices. However, excessively long conversion time-steps and severe performance degradation problems limit their application. To solve the problems above, we explore the application of SNNs on temporal action detection (TAD), which is an important task in video understanding, and propose the first SNN-based end-to-end TAD architecture coined as SpikeTAD. While maintaining extremely low power consumption, SpikeTAD achieves an average mAP of 67.2% in THUMOS14 and 37.42% in ActivityNet-1.3, demonstrating the feasibility of a low-power TAD model. Our code is available at https://github.com/MCG-NJU/SpikeTAD.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Development and Initial Validation of the Quality of life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST) Assessment

Authors:
Merker↗V. L↗Carias↗S. C↗Ferner↗R. E↗Golding↗J. F↗Plotkin↗S. R↗Buono↗F. D↗…

Individuals with NF2-related schwannomatosis (NF2-SWN) experience a complex constellation of physical, emotional, and social symptoms that substantially impact quality of life (QoL). Although disease-specific patient-reported outcome measures are increasingly important for evaluating treatment benefit in clinical trials, existing NF2-SWN QoL measures have limitations in content coverage and sensitivity to change. This study describes the development and initial validation a new disease-specific QoL assessment – the Quality of Life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST). Using a three-phase, mixed-methods approach, items were generated through concept elicitation interviews with individuals with NF2-SWN and clinicians, prioritized via patient survey data, and refined through iterative cognitive debriefing procedures. The resulting 21-item QUEST assesses the extent to which NF2-SWN has negatively impacted a persons daily life over the past seven days. Initial psychometric evaluation was conducted in an international sample of 174 individuals with NF2-SWN aged 15 years and older (117 women (67%), 158 White individuals (89%)). Exploratory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure, and the total score demonstrated excellent internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. Evidence of construct validity was demonstrated through hypothesized associations with disease-specific, generic, and domain-specific QoL measures, as well as known-groups validity based on self-reported disease severity and number of prior surgeries. Incremental validity analyses indicated that QUEST explained unique variance beyond existing measures. Together, findings support the QUEST as a reliable and valid disease-specific QoL measure with strong content validity and feasibility for use as a clinical trial endpoint in NF2-SWN.

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

PreAct: Computer-Using Agents that Get Faster on Repeated Tasks

Authors:
Bojie Li↗

arXiv:2606.17929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-using agents drive real software through the screen – clicking and typing – but they solve every task from scratch: asked to repeat a task, an agent re-reads the screen, re-reasons every tap, and pays the full cost again. We present PreAct, which lets such an agent get faster on tasks it has done before. The first time it succeeds, PreAct compiles the run into a small state-machine program-states that check the screen, transitions that act-and on later runs replays it directly instead of invoking the agent 8.5-13x faster, with no per-step language-model calls. Replay is not blind: at each step PreAct checks that the screen matches what the program expects before acting, and hands control back to the agent the moment something is off. PreAct applies the same discipline when deciding what to keep: a freshly compiled program enters the store only if, re-run from a clean state, an independent evaluator confirms it solved the task-catching programs that replay to their last step yet leave the task undone. Across a mobile, a desktop, and a web benchmark, this store-time check separates repeated runs that improve from ones that degrade as faulty programs accumulate, worth 1.75-2.6 tasks per benchmark, the same direction on all three; a fallback that explores afresh when no program fits brings PreAct level with a strong record-and-replay baseline. We also report what did not matter: prompt wording, runtime guardrails, and whether a language model or a plain embedding retriever selects which program to reuse.

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07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Genealogical processes of sequential Monte Carlo methods and other non-neutral population models under rapid mutation

Authors:
Jere Koskela↗Paul A. Jenkins↗Adam M. Johansen↗Dario Span\`o↗

arXiv:2406.16465v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that genealogical trees arising from a broad class of non-neutral models of population evolution converge to the Kingman coalescent under a suitable rescaling of time. As well as non-neutral biological evolution, our results apply to genetic algorithms encompassing the prominent class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. The time rescaling we need differs slightly from that used in classical results for convergence to the Kingman coalescent, which has implications for the performance of different resampling schemes in SMC algorithms. In addition, our work substantially simplifies earlier proofs of convergence to the Kingman coalescent, and corrects an error common to several earlier results.

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

Continuous-time Optimal Stopping through Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Cosmin Borsa↗Michael Ludkovski↗

arXiv:2606.17545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Simulation based solvers for optimal stopping problems must discretize the stopping decision. Under classical dynamic programming, a coarse exercise grid with only a few stopping opportunities can materially undervalue the optimal expected reward, whereas on a very fine grid, approximation errors accumulate through the backward recursion. To remove this limitation, we develop a new reinforcement-learning inspired algorithm that enables us to learn the exercise rule at arbitrarily fine time resolution. Our CARLOS (Continuous-time Adaptive Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Stopping) algorithm utilizes an aggregate deep neural network (ADNN) to learn a joint space-time decision boundary. Starting from a coarse time grid, we progressively increase the frequency of stopping opportunities, while in parallel training the ADNN to refine its timing-value estimates. We moreover design an adaptive sampling strategy that gradually concentrates training effort near the stopping boundary. Benchmarked results show that CARLOS delivers higher prices than existing Bermudan solvers, approaching the American upper bound, and achieves high computational efficiency relative to non-RL comparators.

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

LLMs Contain Multitudes: How Deployment Context Reshapes Model-Level Preferences and Values

Authors:
Filip Trhlik↗Aoife O'Flynn↗Angela Yu↗Arduin Findeis↗Paula Buttery↗

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly characterised in recent evaluation work as having stable, model-level preference and value systems. However, accompanying robustness checks are limited to incidental prompt perturbations such as syntax variation and option reordering. This leaves open whether the measured properties survive when the surrounding task context changes, as it does in most real deployments. We test this directly across two established pairwise paradigms: ranking country preferences and eliciting utility judgements. In both, we make the deployment context – the high-level task the model is performing while making concrete value-dependent choices – our controlled variable, varied across framings such as writing a Reddit post or a news article. Across five LLMs and over 1.2M pairwise decisions, deployment context produces variation far larger than prompt paraphrasing and temperature controls. In country preference rankings over 15 countries, context induces widespread, statistically significant rank shifts; the aggregate Global North favouritism reported in prior work is itself context-dependent, with each model's bias shifting systematically across contexts. In utility elicitation over 50 outcomes, broad cross-category ordering is preserved, but fine-grained rankings within domains vary substantially, and cardinal exchange rates between outcomes (e.g. how many lives in one region equal one in another) shift by a factor of 2.47 at the median. Reported model-level preferences and utilities are therefore better understood as context-conditioned measurements than fixed model-level properties: safety guarantees obtained under one framing provide limited assurance in another.

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10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

Authors:
Yufeng Xu↗Zishuo Bao↗Qian Wang↗Zeshen Zhang↗Haoqi Zhang↗Bowen Peng↗Ang Li↗Rahul Chalamala↗Yucheng Lu↗

arXiv:2605.18817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Exotic critical states as fractional Fermi seas in the one-dimensional Bose gas

Authors:
Alvise Bastianello↗Yi Zeng↗Sudipta Dhar↗Zekui Wang↗Xudong Yu↗Milena Horvath↗Grigori E. Astrakharchik↗Yanliang Guo↗Hanns-Christoph N\"agerl↗Manuele Landini↗

arXiv:2602.17656v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Critical quantum field theories occupy a central position in modern theoretical physics for their inherent universality stemming from long-range correlations. As an example, the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid (TLL) describes a wealth of one-dimensional quantum systems at low temperatures. Its behavior is deeply rooted in the emergence of an effective Fermi sea, leading to power-law correlations and Friedel oscillations. A promising direction to realize systems exhibiting novel universal behavior beyond TLL is through the generalization of the underlying Fermi sea. In this Letter, we show that fractional Fermi seas with reduced occupancy arise in an integrable Bose gas driven out of equilibrium by cyclic changes in interactions from repulsive to attractive. The correlation functions feature signatures of criticality incompatible with a conventional TLL, suggesting a novel critical phase. Our predictions, based on Generalized Hydrodynamics, are directly relevant to cold atoms.

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

Petrov-Galerkin Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network Framework for Two-Dimensional Singularly Perturbed Problems

Authors:
Vijay Kumar↗Gautam Singh↗

arXiv:2606.16510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study proposes a Petrov-Galerkin based Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network (VPINN) for efficiently solving two-dimensional singularly perturbed problems (SPPs) with one and two small perturbation parameters. The approach employs neural networks to construct the trial solution space, while tensor-product hat functions are adopted as test functions to enforce the variational form. To accurately resolve of sharp boundary layers, the variational form is implemented using a Petrov-Galerkin formulation. Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed directly, while the source terms are computed using automatic differentiation. Computational experiments on standard two-dimensional problems demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high accuracy in both the maximum and L_2 norms. These results confirm the efficiency and robustness of the Petrov-Galerkin VPINN approach in accurately capturing the multiscale features of two-dimensional SPPs.

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13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Visual-OPSD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Self-Distillation for Efficient Unified Multimodal Reasoning

Authors:
Pengyu Li↗Zhitao Gao↗Lingling Zhang↗Muye Huang↗Yuanming Li↗Fangzhi Xu↗Jun Liu↗

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) interleave generated ''visual thoughts'' (VTs) with text reasoning to improve spatial tasks. This incurs roughly an order-of-magnitude inference cost from multi-step diffusion. We find this cost yields limited direct benefit. On ThinkMorph, removing or noising VTs barely changes accuracy across nine benchmarks. Once rendered, attention concentrates on the VT regardless of content. Yet a KL diagnostic shows that conditioning on a privileged VT trace shifts the model's completion distribution. This suggests the generation pathway encodes useful reasoning beyond the rendered pixels. Motivated by this gap, we propose Visual On-Policy Self-Distillation(Visual-OPSD). Teacher and student share identical weights but differ in context: the teacher sees privileged VTs while the student sees only the question. Token-level JSD distillation on on-policy student trajectories transfers the teacher's reasoning to a text-only student. Across nine benchmarks, Visual-OPSD improves over its generative teacher by $+3.40$pp with $14.3\times$ speedup (10.0s vs. 142.8s per sample) and outperforms same-scale VLMs by $+63.83$pp on VSP. A Gaussian-noise control ($+0.40$pp vs. $+10.28$pp for real VTs) and $58.4\%$ closure of the KL gap confirm that gains come from the semantic content of the generation pathway.

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

End-to-End Machine Learning for Depressive State Classification via EEG and fNIRS

Authors:
Riki Sakurai↗Simon Kojima↗Mihoko Otake-Matsuura↗Shin'ichiro Kanoh↗Tomasz M. Rutkowski↗

arXiv:2606.11555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The escalating demand for mental healthcare, driven by rising societal stress, highlights the limitations of traditional psychiatric diagnostics. Conventional methods - relying primarily on clinical interviews and patient self-reports - are inherently vulnerable to subjective bias and the varying empirical judgment of practitioners. To address the need for quantitative evaluation, biological signal-based detection, including electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), has emerged as a promising objective alternative. Such technology is particularly vital for identifying latent depressive states that may be unrecognized by the subjects themselves. Furthermore, in aging populations, the high comorbidity between depression and dementia necessitates early differentiation to prevent mutual symptom exacerbation and maintain Quality of Life (QoL). This pilot study of eleven healthy students establishes a framework for biological signal-based depression detection, serving as a foundational step toward automated, objective diagnostic tools for clinical use.

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

Facial Affect Analysis for Service-Oriented Systems: Advances, Challenges, and Future Visions

Authors:
Spyridon Georgiou↗Aggelos Psiris↗Thomas Lagkas↗Vasileios Argyriou↗Panagiotis Sarigiannidis↗Iraklis Varlamis↗Georgios Th. Papadopoulos↗

Facial Affect Analysis (FAA) is evolving from a stand-alone recognition task into a reusable perception capability for Service-Oriented Software Ecosystems (SoSE). This paper preserves the FAA methodological core while reframing recent advances through systems-engineering requirements for composable and dependable services. We review representative progress in static and dynamic expression analysis, action-unit and micro-expression modeling, and modern CNN, Transformer, graph, and hybrid architectures, then interpret these advances by their operational fit in edge, cloud, and hybrid service pipelines. The synthesis emphasizes SoSE concerns that determine deployability: service contracts for uncertainty-aware outputs, latency and availability envelopes, lifecycle monitoring and recalibration, governance-aware integration, and interoperability across independently evolving components. Our analysis shows that benchmark gains alone are insufficient for SoSE readiness; robustness under shift, intervention stability, fairness, privacy posture, and runtime guarantees are equally critical. We conclude with a roadmap for treating FAA as an operational service component with explicit interfaces, measurable quality attributes, and accountable lifecycle management.

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

Imperfect Visual Verification for Code Edition : A Case Study on TikZ

Authors:
Charly Reux↗Mathieu Acher↗Djamel Eddine Khelladi↗Cl\'ement Quinton↗Olivier Barais↗

arXiv:2606.15693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs have significantly advanced code generation, enabling the synthesis of functional programs. While recent systems achieve strong performance on many coding benchmarks, tasks involving programs such as TikZ that generate visual artifacts remain challenging, in particular on visual code customization. Unlike generation from scratch, customization requires localized, semantics-preserving edits: the model must locate relevant code, modify it according to the instruction, and preserve the remaining structure and rendering. Approaches based on post-hoc iterative refinement/correction where a verifier provides feedback to guide corrections, have shown promise. However, in the case of programs with a visual outcome such as in TikZ, where correctness is harder or likely impossible to formalize and evaluate automatically, deterministic verifiers do not exist. Hence, developers can only rely on imperfect verifiers. In this paper, we conduct an empirical study to answer:to what extent can iterative refinement remain effective when the verifier itself is unreliable?} We use TikZ as a focused case study that isolates the core difficulties of the problem (weak code structure, fine-grained visual semantics, and difficult feature localization) in a controlled and challenging setting. We define visual code customization as an iterative editing problem with an imperfect oracle, and introduce a framework for analyzing such iterative refinements. We conduct a large-scale study and evaluate multiple LLM-based and tool-augmented visual verifiers within iterative refinement pipelines, and perform extensive manual annotation of refinement trajectories to assess verifier behavior and feedback quality. Our findings show that even imperfect verifiers can determine with moderate accuracy whether visual instructions are applied to code, achieving F1-scores up to 0.815. Feedback improves iterative refinement, especially for weaker models, adding 11–20 perfect customizations for Qwen3-vl-30b-a3b-Instruct, while stronger models like Gemini-3 gain fewer improvements (+5) but benefit more from accurate verification that prevents premature acceptance. Feedback is effective only when it precisely identifies image issues, provides actionable guidance, addresses all relevant problems, and remains grounded in the original instruction.

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

Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits

Authors:
Sourav Chakraborty↗Amit Kiran Rege↗Claire Monteleoni↗Lijun Chen↗

arXiv:2602.17315v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős–R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Understanding Scam Trends and Rail Paths from Reddit Self-Disclosure Narratives

Authors:
Yangjun Zhang↗Mirko Bottarelli↗Mark Hooper↗Carsten Maple↗

Online scam behavior is inherently multi-stage, and the lifecycle includes temporally ordered rails and events rather than isolated signals. Existing works analyze characteristics of scam types and rails, but they do not track scam trends across years. Moreover, the work on the relations between rails is hampered due to the lack of open-source datasets with annotations and coverage of different scam types. To address these gaps, we build a dataset to analyze the yearly trend of scam characteristics and rail paths using Reddit self-disclosure narratives from 2023 to 2025. We collect 21,304 posts from scam-related subreddits with at least one rail among identity, communication, platform, and payment for trend analysis by heuristic annotation. Then, we label 1,800 posts containing explicit or recoverable scam chains by an LLM-assisted method for scam path analysis. The method is evaluated with human annotation. Lastly, we run a topic model on the comments of the posts to analyze the community support behavior. The results reveal that scam processes are predominantly multi-rail. Across years, different scam types and rail components dominate. Different scam types vary systematically in path complexity. Reddit support behaviors have become more detailed over time. This work supports synthetic scam chain data simulation and AI-related scam risk assessment, though findings may not generalise to other platforms.

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

Graph-based Target Back-Propagation for Context Adaptation in Multi-LLM Agentic Systems

Authors:
Tan Zhu↗Tong Yao↗Kananart Kuwaranancharoen↗Amit Singh↗Yushang Lai↗Deepa Mohan↗Shankara Bhargava↗

Context adaptation automates prompt engineering in LLM-based systems by iteratively revising tunable prompts from task feedback, without modifying model weights. Extending this paradigm to multi-LLM agentic systems is crucial: existing methods suffer from inaccurate credit assignment and lack convergence guarantees. We propose Graph-based Target Back-Propagation (GTBP), a context adaptation framework for agentic workflows modeled as directed acyclic graphs. GTBP propagates local target outputs backward through the workflow graph and uses target–output discrepancies to guide a stage-wise prompt update mechanism. Theoretically, we show that GTBP's stage-wise prompt updates become stable over iterations, and that a sufficiently capable LLM optimizer can decrease the overall objective. Empirically, GTBP consistently outperforms strong baselines across three benchmarks while maintaining comparable computational cost.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

DRAG-Compatible Leakage Suppression in Landau–Zener Control via Isoprobability Twins

Authors:
Ivo S. Mihov↗Nikolay V. Vitanov↗

arXiv:2506.19572v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Analytically solvable models – particularly the Landau-Majorana-Stückelberg-Zener (LMSZ) and Allen-Eberly-Hioe (AEH) models – underpin many quantum-gate implementations and population-transfer protocols. However, their canonical pulse shapes are incompatible with modern leakage-suppression techniques and some systems. Most notably, the constant Rabi envelope of the LMSZ pulse prevents many leakage-suppression approaches, which require smoothness. We address both limitations by developing the concept of isoprobability twin models: distinct pairs of Rabi frequency $\Omega(t)$ and detuning $\Delta(t)$ that yield identical post-pulse transition probabilities based on the Delos-Thorson transformation. In this work, we formalise the method by experimentally demonstrating the equivalence of multiple LMSZ and AEH twin models on IBM's ibm_kyiv processor. Finally, we show a staggering leakage reduction by more than 3 orders of magnitude using a custom DRAG implementation of a cosine LMSZ isoprobability model.

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21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Robust discovery of mutational signatures using power posteriors

Authors:
Catherine Xue↗

by Catherine Xue, Jeffrey W. Miller, Scott L. Carter, Jonathan H. Huggins Mutational processes, such as the molecular effects of carcinogenic agents or defective DNA repair mechanisms, produce different mutation types with characteristic frequency profiles, known as mutational signatures. Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) has been successfully used to discover many mutational signatures, yielding novel insights into cancer etiology and informing targeted therapies. However, the NMF model is only a rough approximation to reality, and even small departures from this assumed model can have large negative effects on the accuracy and reliability of the results. We propose BayesPowerNMF, a Bayesian NMF method that provides nonparametric robustness to model misspecification, principled automated selection of the number of latent processes, and uncertainty quantification of model parameters. In extensive simulation studies, we find that our proposed approach recovers more true signatures with greater accuracy than current leading methods. On whole-genome sequencing data for six cancer types from the ICGC/TCGA Pan-Cancer Analysis of Whole Genomes Consortium, we find that our method is able to accurately recover more signatures than the current state-of-the-art.

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

CIWI-CKT: Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion and Cross-City Knowledge Transfer for Traffic Flow Forecasting

Authors:
Abdul Joseph Fofanah↗Lian Wen↗David Chen↗Shaoyang Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.15642v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate traffic flow prediction remains challenging in cross-city, data-scarce scenarios where limited historical data hinders model generalisation. The chaotic nature of traffic dynamics, complex spatio-temporal dependencies, and heterogeneous urban networks complicate few-shot learning across cities. Existing deep learning approaches either treat traffic as purely deterministic or lack mechanisms to model wave-like interference patterns essential for cross-regime traffic dynamics. To address these limitations, this paper proposes CIWI-CKT, a novel Chaos-Informed Wave Interference Feature Fusion framework with Cross-City Knowledge Transfer. Our framework introduces three core innovations: chaos-informed wave generation that extracts measurable chaos invariants and models traffic as adaptive wave components; meta-interference processing that captures wave interactions between support and query regimes while producing a predictability score for confidence estimation; and chaos-aware meta-learning that enables efficient cross-city knowledge transfer while preserving chaotic characteristics. We establish theoretical guarantees including chaos-to-wave stability, wave-induced dimension reduction, and meta-learning generalisation bounds. Extensive experiments on four real-world traffic datasets demonstrate that CIWI-CKT significantly outperforms state-of-the-art spatio-temporal graph learning, transfer learning, prompt-based, and few-shot methods, improving prediction accuracy while substantially reducing required training data.

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23.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Supervised deep learning with gene functional annotation for cell classification

Authors:
Zhexiao Lin↗

by Zhexiao Lin, Yuanyuan Gao, Wei Sun Gene-by-gene differential expression analysis is a widely used supervised approach for interpreting single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. However, modern scRNA-seq datasets often contain large numbers of cells, leading to the identification of many differentially expressed genes with extremely small p-values but negligible effect sizes, thus making biological interpretation difficult. To overcome this challenge, we developed Supervised Deep learning with gene functional ANnotation (SDAN), a method that integrates gene functional annotation information (e.g., protein-protein interaction) with gene-expression profiles through a graph neural network. SDAN identifies functionally coherent gene sets that optimally classify cells, and the resulting cell-level classification scores can be aggregated to make individual-level predictions. We evaluated SDAN alongside three representative existing methods in three real-data applications aimed at identifying gene sets associated with severe COVID-19, dementia, and cancer immunotherapy response. Across all applications, SDAN consistently outperformed the alternative approaches by achieving two objectives simultaneously: accurate outcome classification and clear assignment of genes to functionally related gene sets.

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24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Deciphering cell type-specific causal genetic effects on brain imaging-derived phenotypes and disorders with single-cell Mendelian randomization

Authors:
Anyi Yang↗

by Anyi Yang, Xingzhong Zhao, Xing-Ming Zhao, Yucheng T. Yang Reconstructing causality routes from genetic effects to complex phenotypes in particular cell types is crucial for understanding biological mechanisms underlying the brain-associated phenotypes including imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs), and brain disorders and behaviors (DBs). Here, we develop a single-cell Mendelian randomization framework to infer cell type-specific causal relationships between gene expression and diverse brain-associated complex phenotypes by integrating single-cell expression quantitative trait loci (cis-eQTLs) and genome-wide association study findings. We identifiy a set of 254 and 217 cis-eQTL target genes (eGenes) that may have causal effects on 112 IDPs and 26 DBs in eight cell types, respectively. These causal eGenes exhibit strong cell type specificity and varied pleiotropy among different types of brain-associated phenotypes. Further integrative analysis reveals putative causality routes among cell type-specific causal eGenes and brain-associated complex phenotypes. Finally, we characterize the spatiotemporal expression patterns of these causal eGenes, and highlight the coordinated associations of the brain-associated phenotypes based on the expression of their causal eGenes. Overall, our study presents a large-scale analysis of the genetic effects of brain structures, disorders and behaviors, providing a catalog of cell type-specific causal eGenes.

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25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Activation Functions, Statistics and Learning of Higher-Order Interactions in Restricted Boltzmann Machines

Authors:
Giovanni di Sarra↗Yasser Roudi↗

arXiv:2605.19178v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The great success of neural networks primarily arises from the presence of the large number of weight parameters combined with nonlinearities in the input-output relationship of single neurons. In this work, we study the relationship between the statistical properties of the weights and the nonlinearity of the hidden unit in Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) on the one side, and the distribution induced on binary visible units. We do this for four commonly used activation functions: Linear, Step, ReLU, and Exponential, and make qualitative predictions about the ability of these models to learn distributions with strong higher order interactions over the visible nodes. We show that in general, in an ensemble of RBMs with Gaussian weights, these distributions are rare and hard to learn, except when the hidden unit activation function is an Exponential.

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