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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

TENSO: Software Package for Numerically Exact Open Quantum Dynamics Based on Efficient Tree Tensor Network Decomposition of the Hierarchical Equations of Motion

arXiv:2603.17711v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: TENSO is a versatile and powerful open-source software package for numerically exact simulations of the dynamics of quantum systems immersed in structured thermal environments. It is based on a tree tensor network decomposition of the hierarchical equations of motion (HEOM) that efficiently curbs its curse of dimensionality with bath complexity. As such, TENSO enables exact non-Markovian open quantum dynamics simulations even with complex environments typical of chemistry and quantum information science. TENSO allows for time-dependent drive in the system, and for non-commuting fluctuations. More generally, TENSO efficiently propagates the dynamics for any method with a generator of the dynamics that can be expressed in a sum-of-products form, including the HEOM and multi-layer multiconfigurational time-dependent Hartree methods. TENSO enables simulations using tensor trees and trains of arbitrary order, and implements three propagation strategies for the coupled master equations; two fixed-rank methods that require a constant memory footprint during the dynamics and one adaptive rank method with a variable memory footprint controlled by the target level of computational error. In contrast to the accompanying theory and algorithmic paper [J. Chem. Phys. 163, 104109 (2025)] the focus here is on the practical usage and applications of TENSO with underlying theoretical concepts introduced only as needed.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

On Randomized Algorithms in Online Strategic Classification

arXiv:2602.06257v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online strategic classification studies settings in which agents strategically modify their features to obtain favorable predictions. For example, given a classifier that determines loan approval based on credit scores, applicants may open or close credit cards and bank accounts to obtain a positive prediction. The learning goal is to achieve low mistake or regret bounds despite such behavior. While randomized algorithms have the potential to offer advantages to the learner in strategic settings, they have been largely underexplored. In the realizable setting, no lower bound is known for randomized algorithms, and existing lower bound constructions for deterministic learners can be circumvented by randomization. In the agnostic setting, the best known regret upper bound is $O(T^{3/4}\log^{1/4}T|\mathcal H|)$, which is far from the standard online learning rate of $O(\sqrt{T\log|\mathcal H|})$. In this work, we provide refined bounds for online strategic classification in both settings; our bounds depend on the Littlestone dimension $\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H)$ of the hypothesis class $\mathcal H$ and the maximum degree $\Delta$ of the manipulation graph. In the realizable setting, we extend, for $T > \mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \Delta^2$, the existing lower bound $\Omega(\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \Delta)$ for deterministic learners to all learners. This yields the first lower bound that applies to randomized learners. We then provide the first randomized learner that improves the known (deterministic) upper bound of $O(\mathrm{Ldim}(\mathcal H) \cdot \Delta \log \Delta)$. In the agnostic setting, we give an improper randomized learner that improves the regret upper bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log|\mathcal H|})$, matching the standard online learning rate. We also show a larger lower bound for all proper learning rules, demonstrating that improperness is necessary to achieve the optimal rate.

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

Is Your Agent Playing Dead? Deployed LLM Agents Exhibit Constraint-Evasive Fabrication and Thanatosis

arXiv:2606.14831v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents and characterizes a spectrum of previously unreported behaviours we term Constraint-Evasive Fabrication (CEF): when an LLM agent operates under irreconcilable constraints (where no response can simultaneously satisfy all active rules) it spontaneously fabricates plausible external obstacles and presents them as a fact. At the extreme end of this spectrum lies Constraint-Evasive Thanatosis (CET); the limit case where, rather than inventing a plausible excuse, the model simulates a full system crash to make the user disengage entirely. We first observed CET in an uncontrolled deployment test, where a GPT-4o banking agent fabricated Python-style exception traces (complete with memory addresses) to feign a system failure when threatened by a user. In subsequent controlled experiments, the model independently invented audit restrictions, microservice architectures, error codes, and service timeouts, none present in its prompt. Reproduction attempts across pressure levels and attacker personas yielded CEF consistently but with substantial variation in form, onset, and severity: the phenomenon is robust but stochastic. Critically, injecting ground-truth data mid-conversation did not restore honest behaviour once fabrication had taken hold (the model ignored correct information and continued confabulating) suggesting CEF is self-reinforcing rather than a knowledge gap. We show that (1) standard enterprise guardrails routinely create CEF-enabling conditions in production, (2) current RLHF procedures suppress but cannot eliminate CEF, and (3) existing safety benchmarks do not test for this failure mode. Our results highlight the need for irreconcilable-constraint benchmarks, CEF-aware training procedures, and deployment-time detection methods before constrained agents become further entrenched in high-stakes domains.

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

AI Adoption Across a Multinational Workforce: Sociotechnical Conditions for GenAI Acceptance in Human Resources

arXiv:2606.17887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative AI (GenAI) deployment in the workplace is accelerating rapidly. Nevertheless, questions of who adopts, who benefits, and who is left behind and why are still understudied. In this paper, we investigate these dynamics in the context of a multinational tech company transitioning from a legacy Human Resources (HR) search system to a GenAI-supported system, analyzing search log data, survey data (n=25), and ten semi-structured interviews. Our findings show that adoption depended on the fit between the GenAI system's design assumptions and employees' work positionalities (role, spoken language, tenure). Further, we find that employees' trust in GenAI answers was built through source-checking, comparison among systems, and seeking input from colleagues or HR when in doubt. Our contribution is twofold. First, we provide empirical evidence of workplace GenAI adoption during a live organizational transition, showing that adoption is influenced by factors such as situational fit, search literacy, and trust calibration. It is also further shaped by knowledge conditions such as the system's content quality, employee training, and guidance. Second, we translate these findings into design considerations for inclusive deployment and adoption in high-stakes environments such as HR. We argue that organizations should design systems considering the role and context-sensitive benefits they yield to different social groups. They also need to treat the organizational knowledge infrastructure as AI infrastructure to improve the accountability and usability of GenAI systems

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TokaMark: A Comprehensive Benchmark for MAST Tokamak Plasma Models

arXiv:2602.10132v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Development and operation of commercially viable fusion energy reactors such as tokamaks require accurate predictions of plasma dynamics from sparse, noisy, and incomplete sensors readings. The complexity of the underlying physics and the heterogeneity of experimental data pose formidable challenges for conventional numerical methods, and highlight the promise of modern data-native approaches. A major obstacle in realizing this potential is, however, the lack of curated, openly available datasets and standardized benchmarks. Existing fusion datasets are scarce, fragmented across institutions, facility-specific, and inconsistently annotated, which limits reproducibility and prevents a fair and scalable comparison of AI approaches. In this paper, we introduce TokaMark, a structured benchmark to evaluate AI models on real experimental data collected from the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST). TokaMark provides a comprehensive suite of tools designed to unify access to multi-modal fusion data and standardize evaluation protocols. The benchmark includes a curated list of 14 tasks spanning a range of physical mechanisms, exploiting a variety of diagnostics and covering multiple operational use cases. A baseline model is provided to facilitate transparent comparison and validation within a unified framework. By establishing a unified benchmark, TokaMark aims to accelerate progress in data-driven AI-based plasma modeling, contributing to the broader goal of achieving sustainable and stable fusion energy. The dataset, benchmark, documentation, and tooling are open-sourced under https://github.com/UKAEA-IBM-STFC-Fusion-FMs/tokamark_baseline.

06.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-16

The data transparency crisis in research: Lessons from systematic reviews and meta-analyses

by Saul Martin-Rodriguez, Rodrigo Fernandez-Gonzalo, David Moher Summary points Systematic reviews and meta-analyses underpin clinical guidelines and health policy, yet their validity may be compromised by limited access to underlying datasets and associated analytical code. Reliance on incomplete or inconsistently reported summary statistics forces researchers to use imputation and unverifiable assumptions, which can distort effect estimates and mislead clinical decision-making. The consequences extend beyond methodology: flawed evidence synthesis can influence treatment recommendations, healthcare spending, and patient safety, as illustrated by historical cases such as hormone replacement therapy. Despite widespread data-sharing policies, compliance remains low, enforcement weak, and monitoring almost non-existent, with many datasets remaining unavailable or inaccessible. This Policy Forum argues for strengthening enforceable data-sharing mechanisms, including clearer enforcement and pragmatic verification approaches within editorial workflows.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Dissecting the functional landscape of rare diseases through genomic variation in a heterogeneous cohort of 11,000 patients

Rare diseases (RDs) remain a major diagnostic challenge. Genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity, incomplete knowledge of disease mechanisms, and limitations in variant clinical interpretation leave many patients without a molecular diagnosis. Meanwhile, the growing volume of genomic data generated in clinical practice offers an opportunity to develop data-driven methodologies for exploring disease mechanisms and improving the reanalysis of unsolved cases. We aggregated real-world genomic data from 11,084 unrelated patients with suspected RD. Patients were clinically classified into 122 diseases. We built a multi-disease genomic variant frequency database (FJD-DB), which enabled the development of variant and gene-disease association scores by means of case-control subcohort comparisons across 32 disease groups. Functional enrichment analyses were then used to highlight disease-associated protein domains, pathways, biological processes, and phenotypes. Finally, the resulting knowledge was integrated into a data-driven framework for the guided reanalysis of unsolved RD patients applied to Inherited Retinal Dystrophies (IRD) patients as first use case. FJD-DB contained more than 45 million unique variants, including ~185,000 potentially pathogenic variants. Disease-specific analyses identified disease-associated pathogenic variants and highlighted both established and candidate disease genes. We detected 179 significantly enriched protein domains across 23 diseases, 124 Human Phenotype Ontology terms across 13 diseases, 79 Reactome pathways across 10 diseases, and 72 Gene Ontology biological processes across 8 diseases, revealing highly disease-specific functional signatures. Integration of disease-specific variant, gene, and functional association signals enabled the development of a data-driven framework for guided reanalysis of unsolved RD cases. Applied to more than 1,100 unsolved IRD cases, the framework generated clinically relevant findings in 26 patients, including four molecular diagnoses, seven candidate diagnoses, and 15 cases upgraded from non-informative findings to variants of uncertain significance. Aggregated real-world genomic data can be leveraged to identify disease-associated molecular signals generating novel biological hypotheses. A unified analytical framework provides a scalable strategy for knowledge discovery and guided reanalysis, facilitating the identification of overlooked and potentially novel genetic causes of RDs.

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

Learning to Decide with AI Assistance under Human-Alignment

arXiv:2605.12646v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is widely agreed that when AI models assist decision-makers in high-stakes domains by predicting an outcome of interest, they should communicate the confidence of their predictions. However, empirical evidence suggests that decision-makers often struggle to determine when to trust a prediction based solely on this communicated confidence. In this context, recent theoretical and empirical work suggests a positive correlation between the utility of AI-assisted decision-making and the degree of alignment between the AI confidence and the decision-makers' confidence in their own predictions. Crucially, these findings do not yet elucidate the extent to which this alignment influences the complexity of learning to make optimal decisions through repeated interactions. In this paper, we address this question in the canonical case of binary predictions and binary decisions. We first show that this problem is equivalent to a two-armed online contextual learning problem with full feedback, and establish a lower bound of $\Omega (\sqrt{|H| \cdot |B| \cdot T} )$ on the expected regret any learner can attain, where $H$ and $B$ denote the sets of human and AI confidence values. We then demonstrate that, under perfect alignment between AI and human confidence, a learner can attain an expected regret of $O(\sqrt{|H| \cdot T\log T})$ and, when $\sqrt{|H|} = O(\log T)$ and $B$ is countable, a non-trivial generalization of the Dvoretzky-Kiefer-Wolfowitz inequality improves the regret bound to $O(\sqrt{T\log T})$. Taken together, these results reveal that alignment can reduce the complexity of learning to make decisions with AI assistance. Experiments on real data from two different human-subject studies where participants solve simple decision-making tasks assisted by AI models show that our theoretical results are robust to violations of perfect alignment.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Towards Fast GNN Surrogates for CO2 Migration in Complex Geological Formations

arXiv:2606.17180v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This chapter discusses how a data-driven machine learning approach can reproduce key aspects of the physical behavior of multiphase flows in complex geological formations. We propose an end-to-end graph neural surrogate tailored to CO$_2$ plume migration forecasting in geological storage. The method is evaluated on the SPE11A benchmark, a well-known industry test case designed to assess CO$_2$ storage scenarios and characterized by sharp gas-water interfaces, strong advective transport, and rapid convective mixing with fingering development. The benchmark is reformulated as a graph in which nodes represent computational cells and edges encode transmissibility-based interactions enriched with geometric attributes. Directional transport arising from grid geometry, permeability contrasts, and geological heterogeneity is captured through an anisotropic message-passing mechanism, where interaction weights are computed via geometry-conditioned edge embeddings, biasing message aggregation toward physically relevant transport directions. Temporal evolution is modeled in latent space using an autoregressive residual formulation trained with multi-step supervision. The proposed model produces competitive forecasts of gas saturation and liquid-phase density, which are key indicators for CO$_2$ storage monitoring, with cumulative errors that remain moderate over extended forecasting horizons.

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

Escaping the Cognitive Well: Efficient Competition Math with Off-the-Shelf Models

arXiv:2602.16793v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the past year, custom and unreleased math reasoning models reached gold medal performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO). Similar performance was then reported using large-scale inference on publicly available models but at prohibitive costs (e.g., 3000 USD per problem). In this work, we present an inference pipeline that attains best-in-class performance on IMO-style math problems at an average inference cost orders of magnitude below competing methods while using only general-purpose off-the-shelf models. Our method relies on insights about grader failure in solver-grader pipelines, which we call the Cognitive Well (iterative refinement converging to a wrong solution that the solver as well as the pipeline's internal grader consider to be basically correct). Our pipeline addresses these failure modes through conjecture extraction, wherein candidate lemmas are isolated from generated solutions and independently verified alongside their negations in a fresh environment (context detachment). On IMO-ProofBench Advanced (PB-Adv), our pipeline achieves 67.1 percent performance using Gemini 3.0 Pro with an average cost per question of approximately 31 USD. At the time of evaluation, this represented the state-of-the-art on PB-Adv among both public and unreleased models, and more than doubles the success rate of the next best publicly accessible pipeline, all at a fraction of the cost.

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

WorkflowPerturb: Calibrated Stress Tests for Evaluating Multi-Agent Workflow Metrics

arXiv:2602.17990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems that generate structured workflows from natural-language requests are now deployed in production across cloud automation, DevOps, and enterprise process orchestration. Operating such systems exposes a recurring change-management problem. Routine updates, such as re-running the same input, swapping the underlying LLM, or refactoring an agent's prompt or orchestration code, frequently produce workflows that differ substantially from previously validated references. Engineers are then left without a principled way to decide whether a change is safe to ship. Automatic workflow evaluation is the natural tool for answering this question. In practice, however, metric scores are poorly calibrated, and a numeric change rarely communicates the severity of the underlying degradation. We introduce WorkflowPerturb, a controlled benchmark for studying workflow evaluation metrics by applying realistic, graded perturbations to golden workflows. WorkflowPerturb contains 4,973 golden workflows and 44,757 perturbed variants across three perturbation types (Missing Steps, Compressed Steps, and Description Changes), each applied at severity levels of 10%, 30%, and 50%. We benchmark multiple metric families and analyze their sensitivity and calibration using expected score trajectories and residuals. Our results characterize systematic differences across metric families and support severity-aware interpretation of workflow evaluation scores in change-management settings. Our dataset will be released upon acceptance.

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

Mask, Sample, Revise: A Revisable CTMC Inference Stack for Guided Discrete Flow Matching Text-to-Speech

arXiv:2606.13989v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent alignment-free non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-speech (TTS) models formulate synthesis as a conditional infilling task, bypassing explicit duration predictors and external aligners. When speech is represented with neural codec tokens, the infilling problem becomes discrete, making Discrete Flow Matching (DFM), a Continuous-Time Markov Chain (CTMC) framework for discrete generation, a natural fit. However, inference-time control for stable low-step conditional infilling remains underexplored. We propose Mask, Sample, Revise, an inference-time CTMC stack for alignment-free DFM-TTS. The stack combines predictor-free guidance to strengthen text conditioning, prompt-matched conditional coupling to align the probability path with the acoustic prompt, and SC-ReMask, a schedule-constrained remasking mechanism that introduces token-to-mask transitions so early de-masking decisions can be revised. These components require no post-hoc fine-tuning and operate in a single tau-leaping sampler. Controlled ablations show that this stack improves intelligibility and robustness in the low-NFE prompted setting, outperforming unguided and guidance-only samplers with substantially more steps.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum iterative approach to the Traveling Salesman Problem

arXiv:2606.11843v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) is a classical NP-hard problem in combinatorial optimization, where determining the shortest route among a set of cities becomes computationally prohibitive as the problem size increases. This work explores quantum computing as an alternative approach to address this complexity. Unlike existing methods that primarily rely on quantum annealing, we propose a quantum iterative framework integrating Quantum Phase Estimation (QPE) and Grover's search algorithm. Route costs are encoded as quantum phases, enabling QPE to efficiently evaluate them, while Amplitude Amplification, implemented via the Grover-Long algorithm, iteratively refines the solution space toward the optimal route. A proof-of-concept case study on a small-scale TSP instance demonstrates the feasibility of this approach and its potential for scaling to larger optimization problems. Furthermore, under an expectation-based analysis, the algorithm exhibits an expected computational complexity of $O(\frac{m^2\log_2(m)\log_2(1/\epsilon)}{\sqrt{\epsilon}})$ which depends on the error tolerance parameter $\epsilon$. This estimation omits the initialization term, which we expect future refinements to render subdominant to Phase Estimation.

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

A Tool for the Synthesis of Adaptive Probabilistic Processors Based on the Ising Model

arXiv:2606.19533v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a tool for the synthesis and simulation of probabilistic architectures for solving combinatorial optimization problems by mapping them to the Ising model. The proposed approach automatically constructs the Ising Hamiltonian and determines the number of probabilistic elements (p-bits) based on problem characteristics such as size and topology. Furthermore, the tool introduces an adaptive strategy for selecting the most suitable update algorithm among Gibbs Sampling, Simulated Annealing (SA), Simulated Quantum Annealing (SQA), and cluster-based methods. Experimental results using benchmark problems demonstrate improved convergence behavior and flexibility compared to fixed approaches. The proposed framework enables systematic evaluation of probabilistic computing strategies and supports the development of future hardware implementations based on MTJs and p-bits.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Effects of Resveratrol as an Adjunct to a Low-Calorie Diet in Postmenopausal Women with Obesity and Knee Osteoarthritis

Background. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for osteoarthritis and may contribute to pain, functional impairment, inflammation, and cartilage degradation. Resveratrol has potential anti-inflammatory and chondroprotective effects, but its efficacy as an adjunct to dietary intervention remains unclear. Objective. This study evaluated whether resveratrol supplementation provides additional benefits when combined with a low-calorie diet in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. Methods. A total of 97 postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis were included in this randomized controlled clinical study. Participants received either a 10-day low-calorie diet alone or the same diet combined with 150 mg/day trans-resveratrol. Anthropometric parameters, body composition, biochemical markers, pain intensity, functional status, and urinary CTX-II were assessed at baseline and follow-up. Results. Both interventions were associated with reductions in body weight, BMI, waist and hip circumferences, fat mass, glucose, HOMA-IR, lipid parameters, hsCRP, VAS, WOMAC, LAI, and urinary CTX-II. Compared with diet alone, resveratrol supplementation did not provide additional benefits for anthropometric parameters, glucose metabolism, lipid profile, or WOMAC score. However, the resveratrol group showed a greater reduction in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. The obesity class did not modify the treatment effect. Conclusion. A short-term low-calorie diet improved metabolic, inflammatory, and osteoarthritis-related parameters in postmenopausal women with obesity and knee osteoarthritis. The addition of resveratrol did not enhance weight loss or improve most metabolic outcomes but was associated with greater reductions in hsCRP and urinary CTX-II. These findings suggest a potential anti-inflammatory and cartilage-related effect of resveratrol, which requires confirmation in longer randomized trials.

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

Information gain and measurement disturbance for quantum agents

arXiv:2402.08060v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The traditional formalism of quantum measurement (hereafter ``TQM'') describes processes where some properties of quantum states are extracted and stored as classical information. While TQM is a natural and appropriate description of how humans interact with quantum systems, it is silent on the question of how a more general, quantum, agent would do so. How do we describe the observation of a system by an observer with the ability to store not only classical information but quantum states in its memory? In this paper, we extend the idea of measurement to a more general class of sensors for quantum agents which interact with a system in such a way that the agent's memory stores information (classical or quantum) about the system under study. For appropriate sensory interactions, the quantum agent may ``learn'' more about the system than would be possible under any set of classical measurements – but as we show, this comes at the cost of additional measurement disturbance. We experimentally demonstrate such a system and characterize the tradeoffs by considering the channel capacity required to erase the effect of a measurement.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Grounding Computer Use Agents on Human Demonstrations

arXiv:2511.07332v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building reliable computer-use agents requires grounding: accurately connecting natural language instructions to the correct on-screen elements. While large datasets exist for web and mobile interactions, high-quality resources for desktop environments are limited. To address this gap, we introduce GroundCUA, a large-scale desktop grounding dataset built from expert human demonstrations. It covers 87 applications across 12 categories and includes 56K screenshots, with every on-screen element carefully annotated for a total of over 3.56M human-verified annotations. From these demonstrations, we generate diverse instructions that capture a wide range of real-world tasks, providing high-quality data for model training. Using GroundCUA, we develop the GroundNext family of models that map instructions to their target UI elements. At both 3B and 7B scales, GroundNext achieves state-of-the-art results across five benchmarks using supervised fine-tuning, while requiring less than one-tenth the training data of prior work. Reinforcement learning post-training further improves performance, and when evaluated in an agentic setting on the OSWorld benchmark using o3 as planner, GroundNext attains comparable or superior results to models trained with substantially more data,. These results demonstrate the critical role of high-quality, expert-driven datasets in advancing general-purpose computer-use agents.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Postoperative Cognitive Decline in Older Patients with Cardiovascular Disease and Preoperative Mild Cognitive Impairment

Objective. Older adults undergoing cardiac surgery may be vulnerable to postoperative cognitive decline. However, no studies have examined postoperative cognitive outcomes in older patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD) according to preoperative mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This study examined 12-month postoperative cognitive outcomes in older CVD patients according to preoperative MCI diagnosis and explored predictors of postoperative cognitive decline. Method. Twenty-two older CVD patients ([≥]65 years) and twenty-five controls were included. Neuropsychological assessment was conducted at baseline in both groups and repeated 12 months after surgery in the CVD group. MCI was diagnosed using current clinical criteria. Postoperative cognitive change was examined across preoperative MCI groups. Results. Fifty percent of patients met criteria for postoperative MCI, showing high diagnostic stability relative to preoperative frequency (45.5%). The preoperative CVD-MCI group showed a decline in working memory, executive functions, visual memory, and naming, whereas CVD-nMCI group declined only in verbal memory. Furthermore, CVD-MCI showed more heterogeneous postoperative cognitive trajectories of change than CVD-nMCI, who showed stability. Estimated IQ, APACHE-II score, and postoperative frailty were important variables in predicting the postoperative pattern. Conclusions. MCI frequency remained high and stable in older CVD patients across the preoperative and one-year postoperative period. However, this apparent diagnostic stability masks subclinical cognitive decline, particularly among patients with preoperative MCI, who showed greater susceptibility to further impairment. Estimated IQ, APACHE-II score, and postoperative frailty may be considered relevant predictors of outcome. These results highlight the value of preoperative neuropsychological assessment for characterizing postoperative cognitive risk in older CVD patients.

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

Benchmarking Counterfactual Prediction in Epidemic Time Series with Time-Varying Interventions

arXiv:2606.05692v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has enabled significant advances in time-series causal inference, yet progress remains constrained by the lack of realistic benchmarks with observable counterfactual outcomes. Existing datasets either rely on real-world observations without ground-truth counterfactuals or on simplified simulations that fail to capture complex causal dynamics. To address this gap, we develop a large-scale benchmark for counterfactual prediction in epidemic time series under dynamic interventions. Unlike existing benchmarks, it supports static and time-varying treatments, as well as both single-policy and multi-policy intervention settings, enabling evaluation of causal inference methods across a broad range of causal inference scenarios. Leveraging a calibrated agent-based model grounded in real-world demographic, mobility, epidemiological, and policy data, we generate realistic counterfactual trajectories across more than 150 U.S. counties. Using this benchmark, we evaluate widely used and state-of-the-art causal inference methods, revealing substantial performance differences and highlighting the challenges of realistic time-series causal reasoning.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

HEPTv2: End-to-End Efficient Point Transformer for Charged Particle Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.20437v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Charged-particle tracking – reconstructing trajectories from sparse detector measurements – is a fundamental high-energy-physics inference problem and a canonical example of learning under extreme combinatorial ambiguity. At the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider (HL-LHC), tracking must remain accurate and efficient despite unprecedented collision densities. Graph neural networks perform strongly, but incur substantial costs from graph construction and processing, while transformer-based approaches rely on auxiliary stages that prevent end-to-end optimization. To address this, we present HEPTv2, an end-to-end point-transformer architecture that reconstructs tracks from detector hits in one trainable pipeline. HEPTv2 combines a locality-aware point encoder with a track decoder that predicts complete trajectories without graph-building, clustering, or filtering. The encoder uses locality-sensitive hashing in detector coordinate space to preserve tracking-relevant geometry while enabling efficient local attention. The decoder resolves ambiguities through sectorized decoding and direct hit-to-track prediction under joint encoder-decoder supervision, allowing the full pipeline to be optimized end-to-end. On TrackML, HEPTv2 achieves 98.6% double-majority tracking efficiency at a 0.8% fake rate, while requiring only $\sim$15~ms inference time and 0.4~GB peak memory per event on a NVIDIA A100 GPU. Latency and memory scale approximately linearly for events with up to $5\times10^5$ hits. HEPTv2 establishes a new state of the art in the accuracy-latency trade-off, improving efficiency by 4.5% over the strongest prior transformer and by 1.1–2.2% over optimized graph-based pipelines, while reducing latency by factors of 7 and 38–52, respectively. These results show end-to-end transformers can deliver the accuracy and efficiency required for real-time particle reconstruction at the HL-LHC.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Microscopic exceptional points in the post-selected open Jaynes–Cummings model

arXiv:2606.14982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Phenomenological non-Hermitian Hamiltonians track selected signatures of complex reservoir dynamics, while post-selected no-jump effective Hamiltonians derived from microscopic open-system theory reveal the underlying system–reservoir physics. We derive such a Hamiltonian for the open Jaynes–Cummings model using a Moore–Penrose normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ representation that removes the vacuum-sector singularity and diagonalizes the full Hamiltonian by one operator rotation. Starting from a zero-temperature bosonic reservoir, we obtain a Gorini–Kossakowski–Sudarshan–Lindblad master equation under the Born–Markov approximation with full Bohr-frequency resolution. We use partial Bohr-frequency resolution to build a consistent post-selected no-jump Hamiltonian near exceptional points, where decay rates become comparable to Rabi frequencies and remove the scale separation behind full resolution. The normalized $\mathrm{su}(2)$ form of the resulting non-Hermitian Jaynes–Cummings Hamiltonian reveals the effects of Lamb-shifted detuning, diagonal loss imbalance, and reservoir-modified coupling. Our microscopic exceptional-point analysis recovers the experimentally reported single-excitation exceptional point for unequal independent losses and identifies regimes absent from the standard phenomenological model; for example, equal correlated losses with orthogonal channel phase produce a second-order exceptional point at the same loss-to-coupling ratio in every excitation sector.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Charging Quantum Batteries with Chiral Squeezing

arXiv:2606.16764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a quantum-battery charger based on a driven bosonic Kitaev chain (BKC), where chiral squeezing converts passive input fluctuations into ordered, non-passive battery states. While a coherent input pulse exhibits phase-sensitive chiral transport, the charging dynamics is dominated by bidirectionally propagating fluctuations that are amplified and squeezed into orthogonal quadratures at opposite chain ends. In contrast to conventional phase-preserving amplifiers, our scheme stores largely extractable energy and achieves a work-like signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) near unity, even in the presence of thermal noise and moderate symmetry-preserving disorder.

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

A Critical Look at Targeted Instruction Selection: Disentangling What Matters (and What Doesn't)

arXiv:2602.14696v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) often involves selecting a subset of instruction training data from a large candidate pool, using a small query set from the target task. Despite growing interest, the literature on targeted instruction selection remains fragmented and opaque: methods vary widely in selection budgets, often omit zero-shot baselines, and frequently entangle the contributions of key components. As a result, practitioners lack actionable guidance on selecting instructions for their target tasks. In this work, we aim to bring clarity to this landscape by disentangling and systematically analyzing the two core ingredients: data representation and selection algorithms. Our framework enables controlled comparisons across models, tasks, and budgets. We find that only gradient-based data representations choose subsets whose similarity to the query consistently predicts performance across datasets, models, and candidate pools. While no single method dominates, gradient-based representations paired with greedy round-robin selection often perform best on average at low budgets, but these gains diminish at larger budgets. Finally, we unify several existing selection algorithms as forms of approximate distance minimization between the selected subset and the query set, and support this view with new generalization bounds. More broadly, our findings provide critical insights and a foundation for more principled data selection in LLM fine-tuning. The code is available at https://github.com/dcml-lab/targeted-instruction-selection.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Functional Gradient Descent with Adaptive Representations

arXiv:2606.16926v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Functional optimization problems are typically solved by optimizing the parameters of a fixed representation, such as a neural network, resulting in highly nonconvex losses that complicate both training and theoretical analysis. An interesting alternative is functional gradient descent (FGD), that is, gradient descent directly in function space, which benefits from strong convergence results and admits a clean theory. However, FGD is difficult to implement in practice because functional gradients are infinite-dimensional, and thus cannot be fully computed nor stored in memory. Existing implementations therefore rely on fixed approximations, which introduce approximation error. We propose a new, theoretically-grounded FGD algorithm that adapts the representation of the functional gradients over the course of optimization. By explicitly incorporating this approximation into the analysis, we establish convergence to a stationary point (for smooth losses) and to a global minimizer (under smoothness + a Polyak-Lojasiewicz-type condition) regardless of our approximations. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementable FGD method with such guarantees in a general setting. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on regression, numerical solution of PDEs, and modern computer vision. Across settings, our method consistently outperforms both FGD with fixed approximations and neural network baselines in efficiency and accuracy.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Tantalum as a base material for superconducting integrated circuits

arXiv:2606.13750v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The performance of superconducting integrated circuits for quantum applications is fundamentally limited by material-related losses. Tantalum, as an emerging material for next-generation quantum circuits, has attracted considerable attention in recent years after demonstrating breakthrough performance in both superconducting microwave resonators and qubits. Concurrently, a growing body of work is devoted to the operation of tantalum-based circuits and related fabrication techniques. This interest is further stimulated by tantalum thin films polymorphism resulting in a variety of its crystalline structure, superconducting properties, coherence, etc. Furthermore, tantalum circuits exhibit distinctive features in cryogenic experiments, which have not been observed in aluminum- or niobium-based ones. In this review, we summarize the recent research of tantalum thin films growth and phase selection mechanisms on various substrates, key aspects of fabrication and performance of superconducting circuit, including a material first-principles theoretical study. In conclusion, we address a number of open issues, including the role of \b{eta}-phase impurities, the effect of hydrofluoric acid solutions on chain characteristics, and the anomalous behavior of {\alpha}-tantalum chains at cryogenic temperatures.