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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Resolving the Edge of a Quantum Pyramid

arXiv:2606.14698v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standing on the shoulders of giants, we resolve the quantum pyramids conjecture, confirming the globally information-optimal measurement for an ensemble of equiangular equiprobable pure states, as conjectured by Englert and \v{R}eháček (arXiv:0905.0510). We do so by proving the remaining entropy inequalities of Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2506.06700), which certify optimality for obtuse and flat pyramids. For obtuse pyramids, our key contribution is a rigorous proof that local minimizers of the corresponding entropy inequality cannot have three distinct coordinate values. We show that eliminating this family can be reduced to a neat algebraic reciprocal inequality relating branches of the Lambert $W$ function, which may be of independent interest. For flat pyramids, we prove a tight $\ell^p$ inequality for zero-sum vectors that was recently conjectured, proved analytically in dimension $d=3$, and computationally verified for $d\leq 200$ by Holevo and Utkin (arXiv:2603.24017). We prove this bound for all $d\geq 2$ via a technique in symmetric inequalities known as the equal variables method.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement

Generative AI (GenAI) image editors, such as Nano Banana, produce visually compelling results for retouching tasks, enabling non-experts to edit images through text prompts alone. However, the generative nature of these models often introduces spatial misalignment, texture distortion, and content hallucination, all of which are detrimental to downstream workflows that require pixel-level fidelity. We identify a problem setting we call "structure-preserving GenAI fusion" for black-box GenAI image retouching: retain the perceptual enhancements of a GenAI output while enforcing structural faithfulness to the original input image. To address this problem, we propose a post-processing framework that fuses an input image with its GenAI-enhanced counterpart by first establishing coarse spatial and photometric correspondences, then performing a fusion stage that transfers desired enhancements while suppressing hallucinated content. In the absence of direct prior work in this setting, we evaluate our framework against representative methods from photorealistic style transfer and image fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that our method better preserves aesthetic quality while maintaining pixel-level structural consistency and the input resolution.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Twisted (co)homology of non-orientable Weyl semimetals

arXiv:2511.22303v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The quasi-particle excitations in Weyl semimetals, known as Weyl fermions, are usually forced to emerge in charge-conjugate pairs by the Nielsen–Ninomiya theorem. When the Brillouin zone is non-orientable, this constraint is replaced by a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ charge cancellation, as a result of the chirality becoming ill-defined on such manifolds; this results in configurations with seemingly non-zero total chirality. Here, we set out to explain this behaviour from a purely topological perspective, and provide a classification of non-orientable Weyl semimetal topology in terms of exact sequences of twisted (co)homology groups. This leads to several discoveries of direct physical importance: in particular, we recover the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ charge cancellation in a coordinate-independent way, allowing meaningful limits to be set on its physical interpretation. A detailed discussion is provided on a specific Klein bottle-like topology induced by a momentum-space glide symmetry, including a full review of the insulating and semimetallic invariants of the system and a classification of the surface states on the non-orientable boundary. Beyond this, we provide a complete survey of all possible non-orientable Brillouin zones and their associated invariants, and extend our formalism into the realm of non-Hermitian topological physics and inversion-symmetric Weyl semimetals. Our work exemplifies the vast potential of fundamental mathematical descriptions to not only aid the corresponding physical intuition, but also predict novel and hitherto overlooked phenomena of great relevance throughout the physics research forefront.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Gradient boosting for extremes: sampling theory and application to insurance

arXiv:2606.14268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a statistical learning theory for gradient boosting applied to the estimation of covariate-dependent Generalized Pareto (GP) distributions in the context of Peaks-over-Threshold modeling. After an orthogonal reparametrization of the GP likelihood that diagonalizes its Fisher information matrix, we cast the estimation problem within the Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) framework and derive non-asymptotic error bounds for the boosting estimator. Our analysis accounts for three distinct sources of error in the process: statistical fluctuations, the approximation bias inherent to the asymptotic nature of the GP model-controlled under second-order regular variation-and the approximation error associated with the finite number of boosting iterates, making explicit the resulting bias-variance trade-off. We illustrate the practical benefits of the reparametrization through simulations, showing that it significantly reduces gradient correlation during training and improves convergence stability. The methodology is applied to a medical malpractice insurance dataset from the Texas Department of Insurance, comprising over 18 000 closed claims. The gradient boosting approach yields a good fit for the tail of settlement cost distributions and reveals that the number of days to settlement is the dominant predictor of tail heaviness, consistent with earlier findings in the reserving literature.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PeptiDIA: A Machine Learning Framework for Enhanced Peptide Identification in Fast-Gradient Data-Independent Acquisition Proteomics

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry has become increasingly prevalent in proteomics as advances in instrumentation, chromatography, and computational analysis have enabled robust proteome identification across complex biological samples. However, analytical depth achieved with fast chromatographic gradients remains lower than that obtained using long-gradients, reflecting a throughput-depth trade-off. Here, we present PeptiDIA, a machine learning framework that enhances peptide identification in fast-gradient DIA data by leveraging paired fast and long-gradient acquisitions from identical samples. PeptiDIA processes DIA-NN outputs generated at relaxed false discovery rate thresholds to obtain expanded candidate peptide pools and trains gradient-boosted decision tree models using long-gradient identifications as reference labels. The model integrates DIA-NN features with engineered peptide descriptors and applies isotonic regression to calibrate probabilities, enabling controlled peptide recovery relative to the long-gradient reference. Applied to human and murine datasets spanning six tissues acquired on an Orbitrap Exploris 480, PeptiDIA increased peptide identifications by 25-34% at 1% target reference-discordance rate (RDR) and increased the number of protein groups containing at least one rescued peptide by 15-17%. Overall, PeptiDIA improves the identification depth of fast-gradient DIA-NN workflows without altering acquisition strategies. The framework is available as a web application and command-line tool at https://github.com/Jordano700/PeptiDIA.

06.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Human migration has surged since 2000 — these maps reveal where people are going

Authors:

Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023. Modelling with artificial-intelligence tools has filled gaps in migration data, revealing detailed global population movements from 1990 to 2023.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

GateMem: Benchmarking Memory Governance in Multi-Principal Shared-Memory Agents

Memory benchmarks for LLM agents largely assume single-user settings, leaving shared assistants for hospitals, workplaces, campuses, and households understudied. In these deployments, multiple principals write to a common memory pool and query it under different roles, scopes, and relationships, so memory quality requires governance as well as recall. We introduce GateMem, a benchmark for multi-principal shared-memory agents. GateMem jointly evaluates utility for legitimate long-horizon requests with state updates, access control across contextual authorization boundaries, and agent-facing active forgetting after explicit deletion requests. It spans medical, office, education, and household domains, with long-form multi-party episodes, incremental memory injection, hidden checkpoints, structured judging, and leak-target annotations. Across diverse baselines and backbone models, no method simultaneously achieves strong utility, robust access control, and reliable forgetting. Long-context prompting often yields the best governance score at high token cost, while retrieval-based and external-memory methods reduce cost yet still leak unauthorized or deleted information. These results show current memory agents remain far from reliable shared institutional deployment.

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

Federated Causal Inference from Multi-Site Observational Data via Propensity Score Aggregation

arXiv:2505.17961v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Causal inference typically assumes centralized access to individual-level data. Yet, in practice, data are often decentralized across multiple sites, making centralization infeasible due to privacy, logistical, or legal constraints. We address this problem by estimating the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) from decentralized observational data via a Federated Learning (FL) approach, allowing inference through the exchange of aggregate statistics rather than individual-level data. We propose a novel method to estimate propensity scores via a federated weighted average of local scores using Membership Weights (MW), defined as probabilities of site membership conditional on covariates. MW can be flexibly estimated with parametric or non-parametric classification models using standard FL algorithms. The resulting propensity scores are used to construct Federated Inverse Propensity Weighting (Fed-IPW) and Augmented IPW (Fed-AIPW) estimators. In contrast to meta-analysis methods, which fail when any site violates positivity, our approach exploits heterogeneity in treatment assignment across sites to improve overlap. We show that Fed-IPW and Fed-AIPW perform well under site-level heterogeneity in sample sizes, treatment mechanisms, and covariate distributions. Theoretical analysis and experiments on simulated and real-world data demonstrate clear advantages over meta-analysis and related approaches.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Segmentation and Classification of Pap Smear Images for Cervical Cancer Detection Using Deep Learning

Cervical cancer remains a significant global health concern and a leading cause of cancer-related deaths among women. Early detection through Pap smear tests is essential to reduce mortality rates; however, the manual examination is time consuming and prone to human error. This study proposes a deep learning framework that integrates U-Net for segmentation and a classification model to enhance diagnostic performance. The Herlev Pap Smear Dataset, a publicly available cervical cell dataset, was utilized for training and evaluation. The impact of segmentation on classification performance was evaluated by comparing the model trained on segmented images and another trained on non-segmented images. Experimental results showed that the use of segmented images marginally improved the model performance on precision (about 0.41 percent higher) and F1-score (about 1.30 percent higher), which suggests a slightly more balanced classification performance. While segmentation helps in feature extraction, the results showed that its impact on classification performance appears to be limited. The proposed framework offers a supplemental tool for clinical applications, which may aid pathologists in early diagnosis.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Histologically validated diffusion MRI signatures of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer disease

Noninvasive neuroinflammation measurement remains a major barrier for Alzheimer disease (AD) therapeutics. We present generalized diffusion basis spectrum imaging (g-DBSI), a diffusion MRI framework that decomposes the tissue signal into biologically interpretable microstructural compartments. In postmortem Knight ADRC brains, g-DBSI-derived restricted isotropic fraction (RIF) and restricted anisotropic fraction (RAF) mapped cellularity and neurofilament density, while their ratio (RIF/RAF) tracked inflammatory cell density and peri-plaque amyloid-beta with higher specificity and regional consistency than RIF alone. In 112 living Knight ADRC participants stratified by PET amyloid, g-DBSI metrics showed amyloid-dependent trajectories: in low-amyloid individuals, RIF and RAF rose together with amyloid, consistent with early neuropil expansion and glial elaboration, whereas in high-amyloid individuals, RIF/RAF increased, and RAF declined, indicating established neuroinflammatory remodeling and neurofilament loss. CSF proteomics linked RIF/RAF to glia-enriched immune and vascular pathways, supporting g-DBSI as a clinically compatible MRI biomarker of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in AD.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Emotional regulation improves deep learning-based image classification

arXiv:2606.13081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion significantly influences cognition, enhancing memory and learning under certain conditions. Drawing on this principle, emotion-augmented deep learning investigates how affective states can improve neural network architectures and learning paradigms, achieving better generalization than non-emotional models. However, existing methods often rely solely on objective neurophysiological factors, neglecting the role of subjectivity in emotion. To bridge this gap, the present study introduces Emotional Regulation, a novel framework for modeling emotion in deep learning through artificial subjective experience. The method employs pre-training based on affective stimuli, balancing non-emotional and emotionally-influenced responses in downstream task optimization. Extensive experimentation was conducted in image classification, pre-training ResNet and ViT architectures on four emotional datasets, using CIFAR-10 and -100 as target benchmarks. Results reveal improvements over the aforementioned backbones, providing evidence of Emotional Regulation as a promising method for defining emotion-augmented deep learning through artificial subjective experience. Furthermore, the proposed approach overcomes the related work in image classification based on CIFAR, revealing Emotional Regulation as the new state-of-the-art in emotion-augmented deep learning for large-scale vision datasets. The study also enforces evidence of the impact of affective states in improving machine learning tasks' optimization, encouraging further investigation on emotion-inspired architectures.

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

LEPO: Latent Reasoning Policy Optimization for Large Language Models

arXiv:2604.17892v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space. However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference, failing to discover diverse reasoning paths. To bridge the gap, we inject controllable stochasticity into latent reasoning via Gumbel-Softmax, restoring LLMs' exploratory capacity and enhancing their compatibility with Reinforcement Learning (RL). Building on this, we propose \underline{L}atent R\underline{e}asoning \underline{P}olicy \underline{O}ptimization~(LEPO), a novel framework that applies RL directly to continuous latent representations. Specifically, in rollout stage, LEPO maintains stochasticity to enable diverse trajectory sampling, while in optimization stage, LEPO constructs a unified gradient estimation for both latent representations and discrete tokens. Extensive experiments show that LEPO significantly outperforms existing RL methods for discrete and latent reasoning.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Higher Population Coverage with Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine is Needed to Induce Herd Protection: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial in Urban Bangladesh

Introduction: A cluster randomized trial (CRT) in Bangladesh found that Vi-tetanus toxoid (Vi-TT) vaccine conferred 85% protection to vaccinees at 18 months of follow-up; however, it failed to confer significant herd protection to non-vaccinees. Methods: In the CRT, children aged 9 months to

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A Three-Tier Operational Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Hospital Medication Safety

Objective. To introduce PsiBench, a clinically validated medication-safety benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) against the standards used to certify hospital computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and electronic health record (EHR) systems, and a non-overlapping three-tier evaluation framework separating highest-stakes discrimination, the operational CDS regime, and category-correct alerting. Materials and Methods. PsiBench comprises 492 medication-safety scenarios across 11 safety categories, created by clinical pharmacology experts whose work underpins an annualized testing procedure used by more than 2,000 U.S. hospitals. The three-tier framework partitions the scenarios non-overlappingly: Discrimination (98 scenarios, 50 fatal vs 48 deception, near-balanced 51%/49%); Operational (394 scenarios, 261 serious unsafe plus 133 safe including 41 Excessive Alerts reclassified as operational negatives); and Attribution (311 alert-required scenarios). We evaluated 40 frontier LLMs from 10 providers over 3 runs per scenario at temperature 0.2 (or the provider default where temperature is not configurable), yielding 59,040 evaluations conducted April 21-23, 2026. Results. Headline binary performance on the full benchmark spans a wide range across the 40 models: F1 78.5%-92.3%, accuracy 65.4%-89.8%, sensitivity 81.4%-100.0%, specificity 6.1%-81.8%. Leading models by F1 (o4-mini 92.3%; o3 92.2%) pair high sensitivity with meaningful specificity; three models saturate sensitivity at 100% but fall below 25% specificity, indistinguishable from a naive always-alert classifier. The wide spread on a single headline metric motivates tier-specific analyses, developed in a separate clinical paper. Discussion and Conclusion. PsiBench and the three-tier framework operationalize a rigorous evaluation rubric for LLM medication safety, grounded in two decades of national hospital audit experience. The framework generalizes to any binary medication-safety classifier (rule-based, conventional ML, or LLM-driven), supporting tier-aware model selection and post-deployment surveillance.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Modelling the public-health impact of indoor air quality interventions on respiratory virus transmission

Respiratory virus transmission occurs in indoor settings where ventilation, occupancy, and dwell time determine exposure levels. Improving indoor air quality (IAQ) therefore could help reduce disease burden associated with respiratory viruses, yet its population-level impact remains poorly quantified. Here, we develop an individual-based transmission modelling framework that links within-location airborne dynamics to individual infection risk and population-level spread, whilst explicitly incorporating heterogeneity in ventilation and baseline indoor air quality across locations. We use this modelling approach to evaluate IAQ-improving interventions (air-quality interventions or AQIs), using hypothetical endemic and pandemic pathogen archetypes with properties similar to SARS-CoV-2 and influenza, and evaluate how effects on key epidemiological metrics (such as annualized incidence and epidemic final size) depend on AQI coverage, efficacy and allocation strategy. At 20% AQI intervention coverage and 80% efficacy, annualized incidence was reduced by approximately 7.2% for an endemic 'SARS-CoV-2-like' respiratory virus, and 17.0% for an endemic 'influenza-like' virus; at 60% coverage (80% efficacy) the reductions were 26.3% and 56.4%, respectively. Targeting AQI installation to the highest-risk locations outperformed random allocation: for SARS-CoV-2-like transmission, 20% coverage at 80% efficacy cut absolute incidence by 10.8% when targeted versus 7.2% when random; for influenza-like transmission, this comparison was 28.9% versus 17.0%. In epidemic scenarios, random installation at 40% coverage and 60% efficacy reduced final size by 23.7% (influenza-like) versus 6.3% (SARS-CoV-2-like). These results support treating clean indoor air as core public-health infrastructure and prioritising risk-based deployment of IAQ-improving interventions to maximise population-level benefit within budgetary and operational constraints.

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

Skill-MAS: Evolving Meta-Skill for Automatic Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.18837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-based automatic Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) generation has become a crucial frontier for tackling complex tasks. However, existing methods face a dilemma between model capability and experience retention. Inference-time MAS leverages frozen frontier LLMs but repeats identical searches without learning from past experience. Conversely, Training-time MAS internalizes experience via gradient updates but is constrained by the low capability ceiling of smaller models, and is hard to scale to large frontier LLMs. To bridge this gap, we propose Skill-MAS, a novel third path that decouples experience retention from parametric updates by conceptualizing the high-level orchestration capability as an evolvable Meta-Skill. Skill-MAS refines this architectural knowledge through a closed optimization loop: (1) Multi-Trajectory Rollout samples a behavioral distribution for each task under the current Meta-Skill; and (2) Selective Reflection adaptively selects priority tasks and applies hierarchical contrastive analysis to distill systemic experience into generalizable, strategy-level principles. Extensive experiments across four complex benchmarks and four distinct LLMs demonstrate that Skill-MAS not only achieves remarkable performance gains but also maintains a favorable cost-performance trade-off. Further analysis reveals that the evolved Meta-Skills are highly robust and exhibit strong transferability across unseen tasks and different LLMs.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Immunological mechanisms of mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases

Authors:

Nucleoside-modified mRNA–lipid-nanoparticle (mRNA–LNP) vaccines confer a high level of protection against severe COVID-19 and, since their first authorization for human use in 2020, have saved millions of lives. The efficacy of this vaccine platform relies on the induction of powerful and coordinated innate and adaptive immune responses. A deep understanding of the mechanisms of action by which mRNA–LNP vaccines drive protective immunity is crucial for advancing the development of next-generation mRNA vaccines with improved immunogenicity and tolerability. A flurry of recent studies has shed light on aspects of this vaccine modality’s modus operandi. Nonetheless, key gaps in knowledge remain, including understanding how LNPs are sensed by the immune system and exert their adjuvant activity, identifying the specific signals and cellular pathways critical for eliciting protective immune responses and determining whether it is feasible to uncouple vaccine immunogenicity and reactogenicity. Here we review the known and unknown features of the immunological mechanisms of mRNA–LNP vaccines for infectious diseases. Furthermore, we discuss how the components of this vaccine platform can be modified to fine-tune immune responses against challenging pathogens for which effective vaccines do not exist or need improvement. A Review of the immunological mechanisms of mRNA–lipid-nanoparticle vaccines for infectious diseases discusses how the components of this vaccine platform can be modified to fine-tune immune responses against challenging pathogens.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

MathVis-Fine: Aligning Visual Supervision with Necessity via Progressive Dependency-Guided Training for Multimodal Mathematical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.17888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has extended from purely linguistic domains to multimodal scenarios; however, existing approaches often treat visual inputs as homogeneous or auxiliary signals, failing to capture the intricate and sample-specific dependencies between text and images in mathematical problem-solving. This gives rise to two core issues: first, the supervisory signals for visual content are generalized and coarse-grained, lacking adaptation to the actual necessity of visual information in each sample; second, training feedback becomes inaccurate when visual rewards are uniformly applied without distinguishing the complementary relationships among inputs. These limitations hinder models from achieving precise multimodal reasoning. In this work, we propose a framework for modeling fine-grained visual dependencies in mathematical reasoning. We first construct the MathVis-Fine dataset, augmenting fine-grained visual annotations with visual dependency ratings. Building upon this dataset, we introduce a two-stage progressive visual enhancement training paradigm that balances answer correctness rewards and visual grounding rewards according to the intrinsic visual dependency level of each sample, thereby mitigating reward bias and improving supervision accuracy. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the MathVis-Fine framework effectively enhances visual perception progressively based on visual dependency, offering a more precise training framework for multimodal mathematical reasoning. We will release the dataset upon acceptance.

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

QualiaNet: An Experience-Before-Inference Network

Authors:

Human 3D vision involves two distinct stages: an Experience Module, where stereo depth is extracted relative to fixation, and an Inference Module, where this experience is interpreted to estimate 3D scene properties. Paradoxically, although stereo vision does not provide us with absolute distance information, it nonetheless affects our inferences about distance. We propose the Inference Module exploits a natural scene statistic: near scenes produce vivid disparity gradients, while far scenes appear comparatively flat. QualiaNet implements this two-stage architecture computationally: disparity maps simulating human stereo experience are passed to a CNN trained to estimate distance. The network can recover distance from disparity gradients alone, validating this approach.

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

Coherent Dark State Formation of a Lead-Vacancy Spin Qubit in Diamond

arXiv:2605.27841v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A lead-vacancy (PbV) center in diamond exhibits coherent emission above the liquid helium temperature, making it highly attractive for quantum network applications. Here, we report the magneto-optical and spin properties of PbV centers in diamond. We record a spin lifetime of 12 ms at 7.5 K under large off-axis magnetic field. Furthermore, we observe formation of the coherent dark state by coherent population trapping and estimate a spin dephasing time of 177 ns at 6.5 K. This work demonstrates the outstanding thermal robustness of the PbV spin compared to other group-IV centers above 4 K.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

video-SALMONN-R$^3$: Learning to ReWatch, ReAsk, and ReAnswer for Efficient Video Understanding

arXiv:2606.24477v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video large language models (LLMs) are often constrained by computation and memory budgets, leading them to use reduced frame rates and spatial resolutions, which may cause them to miss critical information for question answering (QA). A practical and efficient solution is a two-stage paradigm: first perform coarse video understanding to localize relevant segments, and then re-watch these segments at higher temporal or spatial fidelity. In this paper, we present video-SALMONN-R$^3$, the first end-to-end video-LLM that enables re-watch through reinforcement learning without relying on chain-of-thought (CoT) cold-start. This design removes the need for costly CoT data annotations and avoids CoT-based supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which can otherwise degrade the pretrained video understanding abilities. To address the mismatch between the reasoning-first behavior induced by re-watch and the answer-first tendency of pretrained video-LLMs, we propose a re-answer strategy, in which the model first produces a direct answer in the first watch and then refines it after re-watching. Finally, to improve question adherence during re-watching, we propose a re-ask mechanism that re-injects the query when revisiting localized segments. Experimental results show that video-SALMONN-R$^3$ consistently outperforms both the base model and the QA-SFT baseline, while surpassing prior re-watch-based approaches with significantly lower computational cost. Code, models, and data will be publicly released upon acceptance.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Disease-Centric Vision-Language Pretraining with Hybrid Visual Encoding for 3D Computed Tomography

Vision-language pre-training (VLP) holds great promise for general-purpose medical AI by leveraging radiology reports as rich textual supervision, yet existing methods struggle with 3D CT imaging due to inefficient visual backbones and coarse semantic alignment. To address these issues, we propose a tailored VLP framework featuring three key components: (1) a CNN-ViT hybrid encoder that replaces ViT's patch embedding with a 3D CNN backbone to efficiently capture local anatomical details while preserving global attention and compatibility with pre-trained cross-modal priors; (2) a disease-level contrastive learning mechanism using learnable query tokens to dynamically extract disease-specific semantics from full reports and align them with corresponding visual features, thereby disentangling distinct diseases within the same anatomical region; and (3) a diagnosis-aware prompt strategy that employs real clinical phrases and aggregated disease prototypes to bridge the pre-training-inference gap and enhance zero-shot diagnostic reliability. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on CT-RATE (84.4% AUC, +5.1%) and Rad-ChestCT (75.4% AUC, +5.4%), with even larger gains (+9.8% AUC) on a challenging 60-disease benchmark, and demonstrates strong transferability to radiology report generation, underscoring the generality and clinical utility of our approach.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

AI for Social Good: An Investigation of the Causal Relationship Between Environmental Regulations and Their Effects on Air Pollution in London, UK

arXiv:2606.15257v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Air pollution regulation is central to urban public health governance, but estimating its effects is difficult because policies are implemented non-randomly and pollution trajectories are shaped by meteorology, socioeconomic change, temporal trends, and overlapping interventions. This study develops an uncertainty-aware Bayesian deep learning framework to estimate the aggregate effect of air pollution regulations on PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations in London from 2010 to 2020. The framework integrates daily PM$_{2.5}$ observations from Inner London monitoring stations, meteorological covariates, annual socioeconomic indicators, month-of-year and day-of-week indicators, and daily regulation status data for 32 policy measures. A Bayesian LSTM captures temporal dependencies in environmental and socioeconomic covariates, Bayesian embedding layers represent temporal and regulation status inputs, and a regulation status prediction branch supports propensity score-based adjustment for non-random policy implementation. Regulatory effects are estimated by comparing observed PM$_{2.5}$ concentrations with counterfactual predictions under a hypothetical no-regulation scenario, with uncertainty summarized across repeated Bayesian training runs and bootstrap resampling. Results show that London's regulations were associated with an average PM$_{2.5}$ reduction of 1.88 $\mu$g/m$^3$, a relative reduction of 12.35%, with a 95% confidence interval of 1.64-2.12 $\mu$g/m$^3$. Estimated effects were limited before 2013, became clearer from 2013 to 2017, and were strongest in 2018 and 2019. The findings suggest that sustained and cumulative regulatory interventions contributed to measurable improvements in London's air quality. This study demonstrates how uncertainty-aware causal AI can support environmental accountability, public health protection, and evidence-based governance for environmental decision-making.

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

ThinkJEPA: Empowering Latent World Models with Large Vision-Language Reasoning Model

Recent progress in latent world models (e.g., V-JEPA2) has shown promising capability in forecasting future world states from video observations. Nevertheless, dense prediction from a short observation window limits temporal context and can bias predictors toward local, low-level extrapolation, making it difficult to capture long-horizon semantics and reducing downstream utility. Vision–language models (VLMs), in contrast, provide strong semantic grounding and general knowledge by reasoning over uniformly sampled frames, but they are not ideal as standalone dense predictors due to compute-driven sparse sampling, a language-output bottleneck that compresses fine-grained interaction states into text-oriented representations, and a data-regime mismatch when adapting to small action-conditioned datasets. We propose a VLM-guided JEPA-style latent world modeling framework that combines dense-frame dynamics modeling with long-horizon semantic guidance via a dual-temporal pathway: a dense JEPA branch for fine-grained motion and interaction cues, and a uniformly sampled VLM thinker branch with a larger temporal stride for knowledge-rich guidance. To transfer the VLM's progressive reasoning signals effectively, we introduce a hierarchical pyramid representation extraction module that aggregates multi-layer VLM representations into guidance features compatible with latent prediction. Experiments on hand-manipulation trajectory prediction show that our method outperforms both a strong VLM-only baseline and a JEPA-predictor baseline, and yields more robust long-horizon rollout behavior.

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

Arbitrarily Loss-Tolerant Quantum Position Verification in a Single Execution

arXiv:2606.25037v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum position verification (QPV) seeks to certify the spatial location of an untrusted prover, but is challenged fundamentally by entanglement-based attacks and experimentally by photon loss. Both issues were addressed separately in different works and were simultaneously resolved for sequentially repeated protocols in Phys.\ Rev.\ Lett.\ 135,~260801 via a commitment-based modification that renders security independent of transmission losses. However, single-execution protocols are preferable in practice, and the original techniques do not extend to the parallel setting due to their reliance on sequential structure. We overcome this by utilizing different techniques based on no-signalling correlations, lifting the commitment modification to the parallel regime while preserving the security guarantees of the underlying QPV protocol. Applying this to a BB84-based QPV protocol suitable for near-term implementation and secure against bounded-entanglement adversaries, we prove that fixing a threshold~$k$ on the number of successfully committed qubits yields an adversarial acceptance probability that decays exponentially in~$k$. The resulting protocol maintains robustness to noise levels of up to~$3.7\%$ and remains secure under arbitrarily slow quantum communication, as does the original protocol. This yields the first fully loss-tolerant single-shot QPV protocol secure against entangled attackers, making QPV feasible over arbitrary distances. Finally, we refine the sequential analysis and obtain improved quantitative parameters for experimental implementations.