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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Order statistics for edge eigenvectors of Wigner matrices

arXiv:2606.17425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we establish a general comparison theorem for the order statistics of the edge eigenvectors for generalized Wigner matrices. Consequently, we derive the Gumbel law for the maximal edge eigenvector component and prove the universality of the Gaussian fluctuations of the order statistics in an intermediate regime close to the maximum. In addition, our comparison result also implies a quantitative first order estimate for moderately small order statistics.

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

The Complexity of Min-Max Optimization for Quadratic Polynomials

arXiv:2606.17000v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We prove that computing approximate stationary points of min-max optimization over the hypercube is PPAD-hard for quadratic polynomials. This holds even when the polynomials are multilinear, each variable appears in at most three monomials, and the approximation factor is inverse polynomial. As a direct consequence, we obtain the first PPAD-hardness results for two-team zero-sum polymatrix games.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fisher geometry reshapes the effect of incompatibility in multiparameter quantum estimation

arXiv:2606.11343v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multiparameter quantum estimation faces two fundamental obstacles: sloppiness, i.e., anisotropy of the quantum Fisher information matrix (QFIM) that renders some parameter directions insensitive, and incompatibility, the non-commutativity of optimal measurements for different parameters. The trade-off bound $C_T$ captures their joint impact on precision, but it has remained unclear how the distribution of incompatibility across parameter planes affects its overall cost. Here we separate the total amount of incompatibility from its location. We introduce a dimensionless quantity $G_n^{(F)}$ that measures the alignment between the incompatibility distribution and the eigenvalues of the QFIM, and show how the Frobenius scale of the incompatibility contribution factorizes. We obtain a bound and prove the incompatibility cost lies between this bound and a rank-dependent multiple thereof. We also prove that at fixed sloppiness, or equivalently fixed Fisher volume, concentrating incompatibility into a single parameter plane reduces the optimized trade-off cost because the Fisher geometry can then be reshaped to allocate more Fisher area to that plane. A qutrit $SU(2)$ encoding numerically confirms that states with larger incompatibility strength can nevertheless incur a smaller cost if the matching factor $G$ is sufficiently small. Our results establish that the distribution of incompatibility relative to the Fisher eigenbasis is a central diagnostic for multiparameter estimation, beyond the total incompatibility strength.

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

3D Classification of Paramagnetic Rim Lesions in Multiple Sclerosis via Asymmetric QSM-FLAIR Modeling

Paramagnetic rim lesions (Rim$^+$) identified on susceptibility-sensitive MRI have recently emerged as a specific biomarker of chronic active inflammation in Multiple Sclerosis (MS) and are associated with long-term disability progression. However, susceptibility imaging and expert interpretation remain limited to specialized centers, visual assessment is time-consuming and variable, and the low prevalence of Rim$^+$ lesions poses severe class imbalance challenges for automated analysis. We propose a 3D multimodal deep learning framework for lesion-level Rim$^+$/Rim$^-$ classification from Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (QSM) and FLAIR MRI. The architecture explicitly models modality asymmetry by treating QSM as the primary susceptibility-driven signal and conditioning it with FLAIR-derived structural context. To improve robustness under limited data, we employ self-supervised multimodal pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning with contrastive regularization. The method was evaluated on a clinically acquired cohort of 88 people with MS with expert lesion annotations as reference standard. Results highlight improved performance compared to prior architectures, supporting the effectiveness of asymmetric multimodal modeling for automated chronic active lesion identification.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

SEAL: Searching Expandable Architectures for Incremental Learning

arXiv:2505.10457v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Incremental learning is a machine learning paradigm where a model learns from a sequential stream of tasks. This setting poses a key challenge: balancing plasticity (learning new tasks) and stability (preserving past knowledge). Neural Architecture Search (NAS), a branch of AutoML, automates the design of the architecture of Deep Neural Networks and has shown success in static settings. However, existing NAS-based approaches to incremental learning often rely on expanding the model at every task, making them impractical in resource-constrained environments. In this work, we introduce SEAL, a NAS-based framework tailored for data-incremental learning, a scenario where disjoint data samples arrive sequentially and are not stored for future access. SEAL adapts the model structure dynamically by expanding it only when necessary, based on a capacity estimation metric. Stability is preserved through cross-distillation training after each expansion step. The NAS component jointly searches for both the architecture and the optimal expansion policy. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SEAL effectively reduces forgetting and enhances accuracy while allocating additional capacity only when required. These results highlight the promise of combining NAS and selective expansion for efficient, adaptive learning in incremental scenarios.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cognitive and Neuroimaging Biomarker Intra-Individual Variability in Alzheimer's Disease

Background Greater cognitive intra-individual variability (IIV) reflects increased heterogeneous performance across cognitive domains and has been linked to a higher risk of Alzheimer's disease (AD). However, it remains unclear whether cognitive IIV is linked to heterogeneous dispersion of regional AD pathology. Hence, we aimed to examine the association between cognitive IIV and AD neuroimaging biomarker IIV. Methods This study included participants with normal cognition (CN) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative. Cognitive IIV was computed as the within-person standard deviation of five domain-specific neuropsychological test z-scores. Four neuroimaging biomarker IIV metrics were similarly derived using regional amyloid-{beta} (n = 1,021), tau (n = 719), cortical thickness (n = 2,148), and combined amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration (ATN, n = 258). Associations between cognitive IIV and each biomarker IIV were evaluated using linear regression models, adjusted for relevant covariates. Results Higher cognitive IIV was associated with greater biomarker IIV across amyloid-{beta} ({beta} = 0.039, SE = 0.014, p = .006), tau ({beta} = 0.196, SE = 0.033, p < .001), cortical thinning ({beta} = 0.036, SE = 0.008, p < .001), and ATN ({beta} = 0.176, SE = 0.043, p < .001). Interaction analyses revealed that the associations of cognitive IIV with tau IIV, cortical thickness IIV, and ATN IIV were stronger in MCI than CN individuals. Significant interactions between cognitive IIV and biomarker positivity status showed that the effect with amyloid-{beta} IIV was attenuated in A- ({beta} = 0.004, SE = 0.014, p = .78) but that the effect with tau IIV remained robust even in T- individuals ({beta} = 0.088, SE = 0.022, p < .001). Conclusion Elevated cognitive IIV is associated with greater heterogeneity in cortical dispersion of AD-related pathology, particularly in prodromal AD and in the presence of abnormal pathology. As a novel measure that captures variation in topographical scattering of AD pathological burden across the cortex, AD biomarker IIV may offer research and clinical utility beyond evaluating absolute biomarker load or thresholds.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

A Universal All-Fiber Quantum Buffer for the Telecom Band

arXiv:2606.24681v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The realization of a scalable quantum internet relies on the ability to temporally align asynchronous photonic signals through on-demand buffering. While matter-based quantum memories achieve long storage times, their extremely narrow bandwidths and cryogenic requirements pose significant barriers to integration with existing telecommunications infrastructure. Conversely, current all-optical memories operate at room temperature but are hampered by high input/output losses and a lack of universality across different photonic degrees of freedom. Here, we demonstrate a universal, fully fiber-integrated quantum buffer operating over the full telecom C-band that overcomes these fundamental trade-offs. By implementing an actively switched dual-Sagnac cavity driven by cross-phase modulation, we achieve an ultra-low input/output loss of 0.46 dB and a storage time exceeding 18 $\mu$s. The device exhibits an operational bandwidth exceeding 12.5 THz ($\sim$100 nm), covering the full telecom C-band. We show the simultaneous buffering of over 200 temporal modes with the ability to address them either collectively or one by one. We demonstrate high-fidelity storage for all three degrees of freedom compatible with optical fiber propagation, namely time-bin, frequency-bin, and polarization qubits, along with faithful preservation of entanglement, confirming the platform's true universality. These results provide a robust, room-temperature solution for the high-rate synchronization of multidimensional quantum states, clearing a major hurdle for the deployment of global photonic quantum networks.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Actionable Interpretability Must Be Defined in Terms of Symmetries

arXiv:2601.12913v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper argues that interpretability research in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is fundamentally ill-posed as existing definitions of interpretability fail to describe how interpretability can be formally tested or designed for. We posit that actionable definitions of interpretability must be formulated in terms of *symmetries* that inform model design and lead to testable conditions. Under a probabilistic view, we hypothesise that four symmetries (inference equivariance, information invariance, concept-closure invariance, and structural invariance) suffice to (i) formalise interpretable models as a subclass of probabilistic models, (ii) yield a unified formulation of interpretable inference (e.g., alignment, interventions, and counterfactuals) as a form of Bayesian inversion, and (iii) provide a formal framework to verify compliance with safety standards and regulations.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Cordyceps: Covert Control Attacks on LLMs via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2605.26595v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often fine-tuned on uncurated text datasets that adversaries can poison. Existing poisoning attacks primarily rely on fixed trigger phrases that defenses such as outlier detection, clean-data regularization, or online monitoring can neutralize. In this paper, we propose a data poisoning method that teaches an LLM an information hiding scheme reliably and stealthily through semantic associations between shared knowledge such as facts or concepts and attacker-chosen phrases. The induced hiding scheme can encode and decode arbitrary malicious instructions, thus revealing a new and subtle poisoning-induced vulnerability: covert control attacks. We precisely characterize covert control attacks and evaluate them across $5$ LLMs, $3$ backdoor defenses, and $4$ prompt injection defenses. With a small poisoned fraction, covert control attacks outperform heuristic-based prompt injection attacks in average attack success rate by about $40\%$ relative to clean fine-tuned models. They also circumvent defenses based on detection and fine-tuning, maintaining up to $93\%$ attack success rate after backdoor defenses and up to $98\%$ after prompt injection defenses.

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

Next-Latent Prediction Transformers Learn Compact World Models

arXiv:2511.05963v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transformers replace recurrence with a memory that grows with sequence length and self-attention that enables ad-hoc lookups over past tokens. Consequently, they lack an inherent incentive to compress history into compact latent states with consistent transition rules. This often leads to learning solutions that generalize poorly. We introduce Next-Latent Prediction (NextLat), which extends standard next-token training with self-supervised predictions in the latent space. Specifically, NextLat trains a transformer to learn latent representations that are predictive of its next latent state given the next token. Theoretically, we show that these latents provably converge towards belief states, compressed information about the history necessary to predict the future. This simple auxiliary objective injects a recurrent inductive bias into transformers while leaving their architecture, parallel training efficiency, and inference unchanged. NextLat effectively encourages transformers to form compact internal world models with coherent belief states and transition dynamics – crucial properties not guaranteed by standard next-token prediction alone. Empirically, across benchmarks in world modeling, reasoning, planning, and language modeling, NextLat demonstrates significant gains over standard next-token prediction and other baselines in downstream accuracy, representation compression, and lookahead planning. Furthermore, NextLat enables variable-length self-speculative decoding, accelerating inference by up to 3.3x in language modeling. NextLat offers a simple yet effective paradigm for learning compact, predictive representations in transformers that generalize better. Our code is available at https://github.com/JaydenTeoh/NextLat.

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

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

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

MAD: Manifold Attracted Diffusion

arXiv:2509.24710v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models are a highly effective method for generating samples from a distribution of images. We consider scenarios where the training data comes from a noisy version of the target distribution, and present an efficiently implementable modification of the inference procedure to generate noiseless samples. Our approach is motivated by the manifold hypothesis, according to which meaningful data is concentrated around some low-dimensional manifold of a high-dimensional ambient space. The central idea is that noise manifests as low magnitude variation in off-manifold directions in contrast to the relevant variation of the desired distribution which is mostly confined to on-manifold directions. We introduce the notion of an extended score and show that, in a simplified setting, it can be used to reduce small variations to zero, while leaving large variations mostly unchanged. We describe how its approximation can be computed efficiently from an approximation to the standard score and demonstrate its efficacy on toy problems, synthetic data, and real data.

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

Honest-binding quantum bit commitment from separable operations

arXiv:2501.07351v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive and a cornerstone for numerous two-party cryptographic protocols, including zero-knowledge proofs. However, it has been proven that unconditionally secure bit commitment, both classical and quantum, is impossible. In this work, we demonstrate that imposing a restriction on the committing party to perform only separable operations enables secure quantum bit commitment schemes. Specifically, we prove that in any perfectly hiding bit commitment protocol, an honestly-committing party limited to separable operations will be detected with high probability if they attempt to alter their commitment. To illustrate our findings, we present an example protocol.

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

Emergency hub placement with a neutral-atom quantum computer

arXiv:2606.19589v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of emergency operation center placement in disaster response, where a minimal number of hubs must be selected to ensure timely coverage of all affected locations. This task can be formulated as a minimum dominating set problem on a graph encoding reachability within a target response time. We propose a hybrid quantum-classical approximation framework that leverages neutral-atom quantum computers as independent set samplers. Candidate dominating sets are constructed from both small maximal independent sets and complements of large independent sets, and are subsequently refined via a lightweight classical procedure. We benchmark the approach on synthetic instances and realistic case studies, and implement it on the Fresnel quantum processor by Pasqal, solving instances of up to 100 nodes. Our results show that quantum-generated samples, despite hardware noise, enable near-optimal solutions of the placement problem. Overall, our results demonstrate that neutral-atom devices operating in analog mode can already be used to tackle graph optimization problems for real-world applications.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Dirac-Frenkel dynamics with inertia for nonlinearly parametrized solutions of evolution problems

arXiv:2606.24769v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Even when Dirac-Frenkel dynamics determine a well-defined evolution in function space, the corresponding parameter dynamics can be non-unique or ill-conditioned for redundant nonlinear parametrizations such as neural networks or mixture models. We propose to add inertia to the Dirac-Frenkel dynamics and show that this allows useful parameter velocity information to persist from the past trajectory in directions that are weakly informed, while well-informed parameter velocity directions continue to follow the Dirac-Frenkel dynamics. We prove that the inertial formulation yields well-posed parameter dynamics and provide a posteriori error bounds. After time discretization, the method requires the solution of the same type of regularized linear least-squares problem as standard Dirac-Frenkel dynamics, but with the previous velocity appearing as an anchor. Numerical experiments demonstrate the increased robustness obtained with inertia.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Observation of alignment tensor effects in metastability-exchange collisions with highly polarized 3He ensembles

arXiv:2606.20330v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Highly polarized 3He ensembles prepared by metastability-exchange optical pumping (MEOP) have been widely used in precision measurements and fundamental physics. Metastability-exchange (ME) collisions, serving as the basis of MEOP, are traditionally described in terms of atomic orientation, while the significant contributions of metastable alignment tensor at high polarization remain unexplored. In this work, we develop a linearized model under mean-field approximation to investigate alignment tensor effects in highly polarized 3He , which originate from the metastable F = 3/2 manifold and are revealed through ME-induced relaxation and frequency shift. By means of free-induction-decay (FID) measurements, a pronounced dependence on nuclear polarization is experimentally observed in the response of the ground-state-metastable hybrid 3He ensembles to the external magnetic field. Furthermore, after obtaining the characteristics of tensor-induced phenomena, we demonstrate good agreement between the experiment and the theory. This work advances the understanding of nuclear spin dynamics in highly polarized 3He using MEOP. It further provides applications in systematic error correction of high-accuracy magnetometry, as well as in optimal protocol for the generation of nuclear spin-squeezed states.

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

TrustErase: Auditable Instant Machine Unlearning with Passport-Embedded Representations

arXiv:2606.17122v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The demand for privacy-compliant AI has amplified the need for machine unlearning; yet, existing retraining or distillation-based methods remain unverifiable and computationally costly. We introduce TrustErase, a verifiable, data-free unlearning framework leveraging passport-embedded representations for instant, modular, and auditable forgetting. By treating passports as cryptographic keys within parameter-efficient adaptation layers, TrustErase enables the removal of specific classes or datasets through simple deactivation, without retraining, fine-tuning, or access to the original data. A singular value based decomposition conceals passports within model weights, ensuring that unlearning actions remain transparent and provably compliant. Evaluations on MNIST, CIFAR10 and CIFAR100 show that TrustErase matches or exceeds state-of-the-art benchmarks such as DELETE, L2UL, and Boundary Shrink, while operating in a strictly data-free regime. Ultimately, TrustErase establishes a new paradigm for trustworthy, accountable, and instantly forgettable AI systems.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

EnerInfer: Energy-Aware On-Device LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.23001v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-device LLM inference is increasingly attractive for privacy-preserving, reliable, and cost-effective deployment, yet its energy and thermal costs remain a critical bottleneck. Existing systems primarily optimize for decoding speed, implicitly assuming that faster execution is always preferable. We show instead that on-device LLM inference often has exploitable configuration slack: modestly lowering NPU and memory frequencies preserves quality of experience (QoE) while substantially improving energy efficiency and reducing heat. Realizing this opportunity in production is challenging. The most energy-efficient NPU/DDR setting varies with the model, inference engine, platform, and runtime conditions, with no stable ranking across configurations. Commercial devices further lack component-level power sensing, and shell temperature evolves with request arrivals, response lengths, and thermal history. To address these challenges, we propose EnerInfer, the first on-device LLM inference framework that jointly manages energy efficiency, throughput, and thermal comfort for LLM workloads. EnerInfer replaces per-model profiling and sensor-heavy control with disaggregated, model-structure-aware prediction and ranking-driven online feedback. It predicts throughput and power for unseen LLMs across NPU/DDR frequency settings, selects QoE-satisfying efficient configurations under runtime interference, and uses lightweight limited-horizon thermal prediction to dynamically switch between energy-optimized and thermally constrained inference. Evaluations on real-world LLMs show that EnerInfer improves energy efficiency by up to 65%, 12%, and 24% on phones, a laptop, and a development board, respectively, without QoE violation.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Dissipation-induced superradiance in matter coupled to a self-interacting cavity

arXiv:2606.14526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Light-matter interactions are often modeled via the Dicke model, namely, by two-level systems coupled to a cavity mode. Alas, the threshold for superradiance is often experimentally inaccessible or hindered by light's diamagnetic term. Here, within the Dicke setting, we consider self-interacting light in a cavity, modeled by a photonic Kerr nonlinearity. We show that negative Kerr nonlinearity gives rise to a low-threshold superradiant phase with spin inversion. While unstable in a closed system, cavity dissipation stabilizes this lit phase, opening avenues for lasing and bath-engineered phases.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Atlas H&E-TME: Scalable AI-Based Tissue Profiling at Expert Pathologist-Level Accuracy

Hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) staining is the cornerstone of histopathology, yet scalable, quantitative analysis of H&E whole-slide images (WSIs) remains a central challenge in computational pathology. We present Atlas H&E-TME, an AI-based system built on the Atlas family of pathology foundation models that predicts tissue quality, tissue region, and cell type labels across multiple cancer types, yielding over 4,500 quantitative readouts per slide at cell-level resolution. A key challenge to validating such systems is overcoming morphological ambiguity inherent to H&E-only ground truth and the limited scalability of more informed references drawing on modalities such as immunohistochemistry (IHC). We address this with a dual validation framework combining biologically grounded depth with technical and morphological breadth. For depth, we propose an IHC-informed multi-pathologist consensus protocol that substantially improves inter-rater agreement over conventional H&E-only annotation. This yields a molecularly grounded reference against which we compare Atlas H&E-TME and pathologists working from H&E alone. For breadth, we benchmark Atlas H&E-TME on over 200,000 high-confidence H&E-only pathologist annotations across 1,500+ cases spanning eight cancer types and their most common metastatic sites, with subtypes covering >90% of clinical cases per cancer type, drawn from 25+ sources and 8+ scanner models. Benchmarked against the IHC-informed consensus, Atlas H&E-TME matches or exceeds pathologist H&E-only performance and generalizes consistently and robustly across this broad morphological and technical scope. In doing so, Atlas H&E-TME turns the H&E slide – the most ubiquitous data in pathology – into a scalable, quantitative window into the tumor and its microenvironment, laying a foundation for the next generation of tissue-based biomarkers in translational and clinical research.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Graph it first! Enabling Reasoning on Long-form Egocentric Videos through Scene Graphs

Existing multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) face significant challenges in processing long video sequences due to strict input token limitations. As a result, current video understanding approaches, especially in egocentric settings characterized by complex dynamics, frequent state changes, and moving cameras, are forced to massively subsample frames. This leads to severe loss of temporal and contextual information, constraining their ability to perform fine-grained video reasoning. In this work, we introduce a framework for egocentric video question answering (VQA) that overcomes these input constraints through Egocentric Scene Graphs (EgoSGs), i.e., temporally grounded, structured representations that capture objects, attributes, spatial relations, and interactions over time. By representing videos as compact, text-based scene graphs, our method preserves the essential visual and temporal information of the original video in a symbolic form that drastically reduces input length while maintaining semantic richness. Crucially, this enables MLLMs to reason efficiently over entire video sequences within their token budget. On HD-EPIC VQA, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, outperforming strong video-based baselines on multiple models and suggesting that structured, temporally grounded representations like EgoSGs can bridge long-form egocentric video understanding and the context limitations of today's MLLMs.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Feasibility-driven QAOA with penalty scheduling

arXiv:2606.25117v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most available quantum algorithms address constrained optimization problems by treating constraints as soft penalty terms within a QUBO formulation. This approach requires careful adjustment of the penalty coefficients, which scales poorly with the number of constraints and lacks a proper strategy to balance feasibility and solution quality. In this work, we introduce two extensions of standard linear-ramp QAOA (lr-QAOA) tailored to problems with multiple heterogeneous constraints. We first construct $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA, in which each penalty term is assigned its own linear-ramp schedule, promoting penalty weights from external hyperparameters to internal variational parameters of QAOA, similarly to the objective and mixer parameters. By optimizing all schedules jointly in a single run, this approach eliminates nested penalty tuning and scales more efficiently to multiple constraints. The optimization is guided by a feasibility-driven loss function that pushes the quantum state towards high-quality feasible solutions. As a further refinement, we introduce piecewise-ramp QAOA, in which the linear ramps are replaced by two-segment piecewise schedules, enhancing the expressiveness of the Ansatz at the cost of a small parameter overhead independent of the circuit depth. We benchmark both methods on Earth-observation satellite mission planning tasks formulated as budget-constrained Maximum Weight Independent Set problems. Numerical results show that piecewise-ramp QAOA consistently outperforms lr-QAOA and $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA across circuit depths and system sizes. Furthermore, both $\Lambda$-lr-QAOA and piecewise-ramp QAOA exhibit a high feasibility rate, which is crucial in industrial applications. Our analysis highlights an intrinsic feasibility-optimality trade-off, which we address by introducing a filtered variant of the loss providing a single hyperparameter to tune this balance.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Stochastic signal sensing with finite energy and dead time at the fundamental quantum limit

arXiv:2606.18133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State preparation, measurement, and reset operations take finite time and use finite energy in realistic experiments, yet the impact of this on optimal quantum metrological protocols is not properly understood. We study the effect on sensing a stochastic signal, relevant for the detection of ultralight dark matter and other searches for fundamental physics. We prove that two-mode squeezed vacuum is the optimal probe state given a finite mean-energy constraint for a family of incoherent sensing problems, including noise sensing and quantum illumination. For estimating a gain independent of a loss, we show that entanglement is a required resource to achieve the fundamental quantum limit and observe a non-Gaussian to Gaussian transition in the optimal unentangled state as the dead time increases. We apply our results to bulk acoustic wave resonators.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Validation of an Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Mobile Application for Dietary Oxalate Assessment in Kidney Stone Prevention

Background: Calcium oxalate nephrolithiasis is the most common type of kidney stone disease. Dietary oxalate intake is an important modifiable factor. Assessing dietary oxalate exposure in clinical practice poses challenges due to limitations of traditional dietary recall tools and variability in food composition data. Artificial intelligence (AI) applications in mobile health may offer scalable solutions for better dietary monitoring and kidney stone prevention. We examined the ability of StoneFree AI to estimate dietary oxalate from verbal and image-based food inputs. Objective: To evaluate the accuracy and limitations of StoneFree AI, for estimating dietary oxalate intake from verbal food descriptions and meal images, and to evaluate errors from entries that may inform future clinical use in kidney stone prevention. Methods: StoneFree AI is a cross-platform mobile application that uses a multimodal large language model (Google Gemini) to interpret verbal food descriptions and visual food images. The identified foods were mapped to oxalate values using the Harvard Oxalate Database. System performance was evaluated using 804 verbal food entries and 276 portion-size food images obtained from the ASA24 dietary assessment database. Verbal inputs were compared with reference oxalate values using absolute error and predefined agreement thresholds ({+/-}1, {+/-}5, {+/-}10 mg). Image-based inputs were evaluated against mutually exclusive primary error categories, including food identification, portion estimation, ingredient recognition, oxalate reference selection, and non-analyzable cases. Results: For verbal food entries, the AI system showed strong agreement with reference oxalate values. Overall, 82.1% of estimates were within {+/-}1 mg, 91.5% within {+/-}5 mg, and 94.5% within {+/-}10 mg of reference values. The mean absolute error was 3.32 mg, the median absolute error was 0.10 mg, and the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) was 0.860. Image-based inputs showed a higher overall error rate of 63.0%, primarily due to food identification errors (33.0%), inaccurate portion estimation (11.0%), and ingredient recognition errors (9.8%). Most errors occurred with visually complex meals, such as mixed dishes and grain-based foods. Conclusions: AI-assisted estimation of dietary oxalate intake demonstrated high accuracy when structured verbal inputs were used but was less reliable for image-based meal analysis. These findings suggest AI-enabled mobile tools may support dietary monitoring for kidney stone prevention, particularly when user input is structured. Further refinement of computer vision models and prospective clinical validation are required before widespread clinical implementation.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

MJEPA: A Simple and Scalable Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture for Audio-Visual Learning

Self-supervised learning from large-scale video data has emerged as a dominant paradigm for visual representation learning. Since audio and visual streams naturally co-occur in video data, extending this success to jointly learn from both modalities is a natural next step, yet it remains challenging. Existing audio-visual self-supervised methods rely on modality-specific encoders and complex combinations of contrastive or reconstruction objectives, limiting cross-modal synergy and scalability. Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) offer a simple, modality-agnostic alternative, but have to date been applied primarily to individual modalities. We introduce MJEPA, a joint-embedding predictive architecture for audio-visual learning that uses a single, unified encoder for both modalities. Our approach uses only a single predictive objective, applied both within and across modalities. We show that cross-modal prediction is critical: without it, a shared encoder degrades below unimodal baselines; with it, each modality's representation benefits from the other. Our frozen ViT-g model outperforms the best prior frozen baseline by over 6.8 mAP on AudioSet-20K, surpasses fully finetuned models on ESC-50 and FSD50K, and is competitive on video benchmarks despite using 10x less video data.