Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Tracking Large-scale Shared Bikes with Inertial Motion Learning in GNSS Blocked Environments

arXiv:2605.07412v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Although Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) provide a general solution for bike tracking outdoors, there still exist complex riding environments where only inertial navigation systems work, such as urban canyons. Despite decades of research, localization using only low-cost inertial sensors still faces challenges such as cumulative drifts and poor robustness caused by filtering methods. Furthermore, sensors such as visual and LiDAR could provide reliable measurements, but they are not suitable for large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose an inertial tracking framework that integrates bicycle mechanical constraints with a mixture-of-experts model. Specifically, we leverage multiple expert modules to capture shared representations and weight them through the gating mechanism, thus improving multi-task learning performance and enabling uncertainty-aware trajectory estimation. Furthermore, based on the mechanical transmission between the pedal and the rear wheel of a bike, we explore the intrinsic relationship between the rider's periodic pedalling behaviors and acceleration variations, and convert such patterns into bike's wheel speed for dynamic calibration. Experiments with real-world riding data from shared bikes of the DiDi ride-hailing platform demonstrate that our system improves the accuracy of baselines by at least 12%, with wheel speed errors below 0.5 m/s at 95-percentile.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

NEST3D: A High-Resolution Multimodal Dataset of Sociable Weaver Tree Nests

Sociable weaver nests function as complex ecological structures offering thermoregulatory microhabitats and sustaining diverse species; however, datasets used in prior studies lack fine-grained 3D structural detail. Producing usable and accurate 3D weaver nest data is challenging due to their irregular geometry and integration with complex host vegetation. We bridge this gap with an open-access, 1.4 TB multimodal drone dataset of 104 nest-bearing trees, comprising 27,945 RGB images, 111,780 multispectral images, approximately 781 million 3D points, and expert-annotated semantic segmentation labels. We benchmark semantic segmentation using KPConv, RandLA-Net, and Point Transformer V3, with PT-v3 achieving an mIoU of 86.35% on the test set. While the results demonstrate strong performance for transformer-based and point-wise methods, they also highlight architecture-dependent challenges, particularly for convolution-based approaches such as KPConv. By uniquely combining spectral, spatial, and structural information, the presented dataset advances 3D reconstruction, segmentation, and classification algorithms, enabling ecological applications from nest volume estimation to species conservation, and serves as a demanding benchmark that exposes architecture-dependent performance under extreme class imbalance.

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

Evolutionary Bilevel Reward Shaping for Generalization in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) often suffers from performance degradation when deployed in environments that differ from those encountered during training. Existing techniques such as domain randomization (DR) mitigate this, but require access to diverse training environments and full trajectory observability, assumptions that fail in privacy-preserving or restricted scenarios where only scalar performance metrics are available. We propose Generalization via Evolutionary Reward Shaping (GERS), a bilevel optimization approach to improve generalization on unseen test environments using only scalar feedback from validation environments. At the lower level, an RL agent guided via a reward function shaped by the upper level learns a policy on a limited set of training environments with accessible trajectory data; at the upper level, CMA-ES optimizes the reward shaping parameters to maximize the cumulative unshaped reward on separate validation environments for which trajectory access is unavailable. Results on continuous control tasks indicate that GERS outperforms the standard RL baseline on unseen test environments. GERS performance is comparable to DR, despite DR treating the combined set of training and validation environments of GERS as a single training set that requires trajectory access, whereas GERS cannot access validation trajectories. These results confirm that GERS effectively enhances generalization under restricted data access constraints.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Continual Adaptation for Pacific Indigenous Speech Recognition

Speech foundation models struggle with low-resource Pacific Indigenous languages because of severe data scarcity. Furthermore, full fine-tuning risks catastrophic forgetting. To address this gap, we present an empirical study adapting models to real-world Pacific datasets. We investigate the impact of data volume, adaptation strategies, and representational drift on speech foundation models for various Pacific languages. Additionally, we analyze a continual learning framework for sequential language acquisition. Empirical results across three distinct Pacific Indigenous languages demonstrate that adapting to these linguistically distant languages induces severe internal representational drift. Consequently, these models face a strict plasticity and stability dilemma. While LoRA adapts well initially, it suffers from catastrophic forgetting during sequential learning. Ultimately, this study highlights the urgent need for robust adaptation strategies tailored to underrepresented languages.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Lower Complexity Bounds for Nonconvex-Strongly-Convex Bilevel Optimization with First-Order Oracles

Authors:

arXiv:2511.19656v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Although upper bound guarantees for bilevel optimization have been widely studied, progress on lower bounds has been limited due to the complexity of the bilevel structure. In this work, we focus on the smooth nonconvex-strongly-convex setting and develop new hard instances that yield nontrivial lower bounds under deterministic and stochastic first-order oracle models. In the deterministic case, we prove that any first-order zero-respecting algorithm requires at least $\Omega(\kappa^{3/2}\epsilon^{-2})$ oracle calls to find an $\epsilon$-accurate stationary point, improving the optimal lower bounds known for single-level nonconvex optimization and for nonconvex-strongly-convex min-max problems. In the stochastic case, we show that at least $\Omega(\kappa^{5/2}\epsilon^{-4})$ stochastic oracle calls are necessary, again strengthening the best known bounds in related settings. Our results expose substantial gaps between current upper and lower bounds for bilevel optimization and suggest that even simplified regimes, such as those with quadratic lower-level objectives, warrant further investigation toward understanding the optimal complexity of bilevel optimization under standard first-order oracles.

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

A Fair Evaluation of Graph Foundation Models for Node Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.24509v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Due to the wide use of graph-structured data in different fields of industry and science, the development of Graph Foundation Models (GFMs) has recently attracted a lot of attention. While many different types of models are called GFMs, particular interest has been paid to GFMs designed for node property prediction tasks, which is one of the most popular settings in Graph ML with lots of real-world applications from fraud detection in financial and social networks to recommendation systems for e-commerce and user-generated content platforms. While a number of GFMs for this task have been recently proposed, the field has not converged to a unified evaluation setting, and different works evaluate their models in widely different ways, preventing reliable comparison of GFMs with each other and with other types of models. In this work, we conduct a fair and rigorous reevaluation of 9 recent GFMs for node property prediction, comparing them to strong Graph Neural Network (GNN) baselines. We find that, among these GFMs, only the most recent ones based on the Prior-data Fitted Networks paradigm outperform well-tuned GNNs in predictive performance, although at a higher inference cost.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Correction scheme for molecular total energies from quantum phase estimation under limited qubit resources

arXiv:2603.02715v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a practical method for accurately evaluating molecular total energies using a hybrid approach that integrates fault-tolerant quantum computers with classical computing. Our scheme consists of two complementary components: quantum dominant orbital selection (QDOS) and subspace dynamical correlation (SDC). QDOS extracts only the essential active orbitals from the complete active space (CAS) configuration interaction (CI) state on a quantum computer, yielding a compact active space suitable for classical CASCI calculations. SDC then evaluates dynamical-correlation corrections for the CASCI energy using this compact state, which remains tractable on classical machines. To demonstrate that the CAS energy obtained on a quantum computer can be post-corrected by SDC, we examine two frameworks: multireference perturbation theory and tailored coupled-cluster theory. Our scheme enables effective treatment of relatively large molecular systems by combining limited quantum and classical resources.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coarse-grained quantum thermodynamics: Observation-dependent quantities, observation-independent laws

arXiv:2507.15918v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In both classical and quantum thermodynamics, physical quantities are typically assigned objective values defined independently of our observations. We then refer to the 'work performed by a gas', or the 'entropy of the gas', regardless of how they are evaluated. Here, we question this conception in the context of quantum thermodynamics, estimating how the definition of pivotal thermodynamic quantities is affected by experimental instruments of limited precision. We find that the coarse-grained thermodynamic quantities frequently lead to different conclusions from those drawn in fine-grained scenarios. For instance, the irreversibility of a process, or its work payoff, can significantly vary with the instrument precision. We show nonetheless that coarse-grained thermodynamic quantities satisfy the same relations (i.e., the second law inequality, the relation between dissipation and distinguishability of a process from its time-reverse, and the quantum work fluctuation theorems) as their fine-grained counterparts. These results highlight the observation-independence of relations linking thermodynamic quantities which are themselves observation-dependent.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Micro-macro population dynamics models of benthic algae with long-memory decay and generic growth

arXiv:2505.04289v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benthic algae as a primary producer in riverine ecosystems develop biofilms on the riverbed. Their population dynamics involve growth and decay processes, the former owing to the balance between biological proliferation and mortality, while the latter to mechanical abrasion because of the transport of sediment particles. Contrary to the assumptions of previous studies, the decay has experimentally been found to exhibit long-memory behavior, where the population decreases at an algebraic rate. However, the origin and mathematical theory of this phenomenon remain unresolved. The objective of this study is to introduce a novel mathematical model employing spin processes to describe microscopic biofilm dynamics. A spin process is a continuous-time jump process transitioning between states 0 and 1, and the continuum limit of these processes captures the long-memory decay and generates generic growth. The proposed framework leverages heterogeneous spin rates, achieved by appropriately superposing spin processes with distinct rates, to reproduce the long-memory decay. Computational simulations demonstrate the behavior of the model, particularly emphasizing rate-induced tipping phenomena. This mathematical model provides a computationally tractable interpretation of benthic algae dynamics and their long-term prediction, relevant to river-engineering applications.

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

Positional Encoding in the Context of Memristor-Based Analog Computation for Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv:2606.13379v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memristors provide a new chance for resource-efficient computation of neural models for natural language processing by enabling analog execution of vector-matrix-multiplication. Yet, computations on these devices are currently subject to larger distortion, both in weight programming and execution. In this work, we identify large output values of transformed positional encodings to cause major degradation within analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) as part of memristor-based computation. By adjusting the proportion of weight and precision bits of the ADC of specific memristor layers, we reduce the degradation of the execution by ~50% relative, while keeping the estimated energy consumption stable. Additionally, we investigate scenarios where the ADC cannot be modified. In that case the degradation can be reduced by ~30% relative after removing encoding-related linear transformations.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Are LLMs Ready to Assist Physicians? PhysAssistBench for Interactive Doctor-Patient-EHR Assistance

The most plausible near-term role of medical LLMs is to assist rather than replace physicians, yet current evaluations often test isolated capabilities: clinical knowledge, EHR system interaction, or patient communication. Physician assistance instead requires coordinating these capabilities within the same interaction, where physicians issue underspecified requests, patients describe symptoms ambiguously, and EHR systems demand precise tool use. We introduce PhysAssistBench, a benchmark for interactive doctor-patient-EHR assistance. Built from real MIMIC-IV cases, PhysAssistBench uses a scalable pipeline to construct agentic patients: interactive, record-grounded agents that turn static EHR records into multi-turn clinical scenarios while preserving clinical factuality. PhysAssistBench provides a curated bilingual evaluation set of 1,296 manually reviewed and physician-validated turns. Experiments with leading LLMs show that current models remain unreliable in this setting, which exposes a key bottleneck for clinical LLMs: reliable assistance requires coordination across knowledge, communication, and systems, not isolated gains in any of them.

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

Building Customer Support AI Agents at 100M-User Scale: An Evaluation-Driven Framework

The rapid rise in LLM capabilities has made AI agents increasingly viable across a broad range of tasks. Among the most promising applications is building production-ready customer-facing agents, a challenge that demands coordinated excellence in evaluation methodology, context engineering, training, and online measurement. Yet these critical pillars are typically developed in isolation, creating blind spots that only surface after deployment. In this paper, we present a unified framework that bridges offline development with online impact for customer support AI agents at Nubank, a company with 100M+ users. Our approach integrates several key components: (1) structured context engineering tailored to customer support agents, (2) systematic human-in-the-loop prompt iteration, (3) rigorous LLM judge evaluation with measured inter-rater agreement and GEPA optimization for consistency, and (4) ideation-to-production validation. A central insight is that evaluation-pipeline quality directly determines iteration velocity. We present results from five production deployments spanning distinct domains: card delivery, debt management, credit-limit support, card management, and product explanation. These deployments deliver consistent customer-satisfaction gains while substantially accelerating iteration. In our card-delivery deployment, large-scale A/B testing yields a 37 percentage-point improvement in AI transactional Net Promoter Score and a 29 percentage-point gain in self-service rate over prior agent variants, alongside a strong correlation between offline simulation metrics and online outcomes, demonstrating that eval-driven development reliably predicts production impact. On most use cases, AI satisfaction reaches within a few percentage points of expert human agents.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Early Anomaly-Onset Detection based on Wigner–Ville Distribution Slice Spectra: A Transmission-Grid Test Case

arXiv:2606.15856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Operational disturbance monitoring in power networks requires decisions to be made from waveform windows as they arrive, rather than from completed records after the event. This study evaluates full-vector Wigner–Ville Distribution Slice (WVDS) spectra for sequential anomaly-onset detection in high-voltage grid-voltage waveforms. The approach keeps the bilinear midpoint interaction structure of the Wigner–Ville distribution and represents each 128-sample voltage window by a 128-dimensional slice spectrum, avoiding manually selected fault-frequency markers. WVDS is used with a baseline-normalized deviation (BND) score and is compared against the BND of Fast Fourier Transform (FFT-BND), raw-window autoencoders, FFT autoencoders, and WVDS autoencoders under the same thresholding and three-window persistence rule. A synthetic autoencoder–clustering teacher is used to select RTE fault records that start from an initially normal region and then transition to anomalous behavior. On the filtered test set, FFT-BND achieves the highest sensitivity, whereas WVDS-BND provides the lowest false-alarm operating point, reducing record-level pre-onset false alarms to 0.69%. The autoencoder comparison follows the same selectivity pattern: WVDS reconstruction decreases false alarms relative to FFT reconstruction but misses more examples. The results indicate that preserved WVD cross-term information can form a selective representation for online grid-waveform anomaly monitoring when false alarms are costly.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi Gas

arXiv:2602.24006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An asymmetric three-component Fermi gas, featuring Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling between the first and second components and contact interaction only between the first and third components, introduces both spin-orbit coupling and population imbalance-two mechanisms known to stabilize the Fulde-Ferrell superfluids.We systematically study Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi gas { in two dimensions and at zero temperature} by finding the global minima of the thermodynamic potential. We reveal a new class of composite Fulde-Ferrell superfluids that emerges when strong spin-orbit coupling generates a double-well structure in momentum space within the lower spin-orbit-coupled band. The key features of these composite superfluids are identified.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Ductile alloys offering 100 MPa tensile strength at 2,400 °C

Authors:

Extreme applications call for materials that are not only strong to withstand thermomechanical loads at temperatures in excess of 2,000 °C (refs. 1–3), but also highly formable at room temperature to allow for processing into complex-shaped parts. The latter excludes brittle ceramics4 and intermetallic compounds5, limiting the selection to highly ductile metals and their alloys, but for them, an adequate strength at ultrahigh temperatures seems unreachable. Here we show a breakthrough in casting alloys that achieve both simultaneously. A boron-stabilized HfO2-strengthened Ta-based alloy was carefully crafted using a new boron-intervened in situ oxidation reaction, producing about 50-nm diameter oxide particles dispersed densely and uniformly in the grain interior. The new alloy fills the blank at ultrahigh temperatures in terms of tensile yield strength, around 200 MPa at 2,000 °C and 100 MPa at 2,400 °C, while simultaneously possessing an excellent strength–ductility balance at room temperature (ultimate tensile strength >800 MPa, elongation-to-failure of about 35%), a property combination surpassing all previous refractory (including multi-principal-element) alloys. Moreover, the boron segregation around the oxide nanoparticles imparts excellent thermal stability against coarsening at 2,000–2,400 °C. Our strategy thus goes beyond traditional oxide-dispersion strengthening to enable highly ductile refractory alloys that are capable of load-bearing applications at extreme temperatures. A boron-stabilized oxide-strengthened tantalum alloy combines exceptional room-temperature ductility with record ultrahigh-temperature strength, enabling load-bearing applications above 2,000 °C.

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

GeoStream: Toward Precise Camera Controlled Streaming Video Generation

Accurate interactive camera control is essential for video-based world models, but most existing approaches learn camera motion implicitly, leading to inaccurate control under out-of-distribution trajectories. Explicit geometric conditioning improves controllability, but existing methods are non-autoregressive and rely on a static 3D cache built from an initial frame, which becomes ineffective once the viewpoint moves beyond the original frustum. We propose GeoStream, a framework that enables precise metric-scale camera control in autoregressive streaming video generation. Our method maintains a self-refreshing 3D cache that is periodically updated online from the model's own outputs: we estimate depth from the most recently generated frame, unproject to 3D, and reproject into the target view to produce point reprojections as geometric conditioning for subsequent synthesis. By the same principle, the conditioning seen during training is also rendered from the student's own generated frames, yielding a fully on-policy distillation that naturally aligns the train and inference conditioning distributions. Unlike prior work that uses off-policy condition noising, our approach trains the model against the exact error distribution it encounters at inference, mitigating both standard autoregressive drift and the second-order geometric feedback loop that arises when the cache itself is derived from generated outputs. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our approach substantially improves camera controllability.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum Metric Bound State of Light

arXiv:2606.22479v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The spatial confinement of defect-induced bound states is conventionally governed by the effective mass in dispersive bands. More recently, Compact Localized States (CLSs) arising from exact destructive interference have been utilized to achieve confinement in flat bands. However, CLSs rely on pristine lattice symmetries and fine-tuned defect profiles. The introduction of a generic local impurity inevitably breaks these strict phase-matching conditions, resulting in extensive bound states whose fundamental length scale has remained an open question. Here, we establish a third regime of confinement: the quantum metric bound state. We provide a rigorous mathematical proof demonstrating that in the absence of kinetic energy and CLS protection, the exponential decay length of these states is lower-bounded by the quantum metric of the unperturbed flat band. We demonstrate the tightness of this geometric limit by constructing a family of highly tunable flat-band generators, and we verify its universality across diverse realistic architectures. Ultimately, this classification establishes the independently measurable quantum metric as a predictive design principle for engineering confined modes in synthetic wave platforms.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Locally Acting Grover Mixers for Constraint-Preserving QAOA

arXiv:2606.11530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Grover mixer quantum alternating operator ansatz (GM-QAOA) employs the Grover mixer to confine the quantum evolution to the feasible subspace defined by the problem. Its mixing unitary, however, requires a global multi-controlled phase-shift gate acting on all qubits, resulting in substantial circuit overhead on near-term quantum devices. In this work, we propose locally acting Grover mixers tailored to initial states that admit a product structure over disjoint qubit subsystems, which may be obtained by encoding only a subset of problem constraints into the initial state preparation. The proposed method preserves the search space defined by the initial state while significantly lowering implementation cost, as the global multi-controlled phase-shift gate is replaced with local operations on disjoint subsystems. Numerical simulations on the exact-cover problem and the traveling salesman problem (TSP) demonstrate that the proposed method achieves convergence behavior comparable to that of the original GM-QAOA, while using shallower circuits with fewer gates. We further compare two constraint encoding strategies for the TSP, encoding only a subset of constraints versus all constraints into the initial state preparation, and show that the former combined with the proposed mixer yields markedly more compact circuits at the point where comparable solution quality is achieved.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Multi-agent imitation learning with function approximation: Linear Markov games and beyond

arXiv:2602.22810v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present the first theoretical analysis of multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) in linear Markov games where both the transition dynamics and each agent's reward function are linear in some given features. We demonstrate that by leveraging this structure, it is possible to replace the state-action level "all policy deviation concentrability coefficient" (Freihaut et al., arXiv:2510.09325) with a concentrability coefficient defined at the feature level which can be much smaller than the state-action analog when the features are informative about states' similarity. Furthermore, to circumvent the need for any concentrability coefficient, we turn to the interactive setting. We provide the first, computationally efficient, interactive MAIL algorithm for linear Markov games and show that its sample complexity depends only on the dimension of the feature map $d$. Building on these theoretical findings, we propose a deep MAIL interactive algorithm which clearly outperforms BC on games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect4.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

AlignDrive: Aligned Lateral-Longitudinal Planning for End-to-End Autonomous Driving

Practical autonomous driving requires models that generalize by reasoning through spatial-temporal possibilities to exclude unsafe outcomes. While state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods use parallel planning architectures, they fail to explicitly couple speed decisions with agent behavior along the driving path, leading to suboptimal coordination. To address this, we propose a cascaded framework that transforms longitudinal planning from an independent prediction task into a path-conditioned reasoning process. On the model side, we introduce an anchor-based regression design that conditions longitudinal prediction on the lateral drive path, and reformulate longitudinal planning as 1D displacement prediction along the path. This reduces geometric uncertainty and sharpens the model's focus on interaction-driven dynamics. On the data side, we introduce a planning-oriented data augmentation strategy that simulates rare safety-critical events by programmatically inserting agents and relabeling longitudinal targets to enforce collision avoidance. Evaluated on the challenging Bench2Drive benchmark, our method achieves SOTA performance with a driving score of 89.07 and a success rate of 73.18%, demonstrating significantly improved coordination and safety. Further evaluation on Fail2Drive confirms strong generalization to rare edge cases where parallel formulations typically fail. Project page:https://yanhaowu.github.io/AlignDrive/.

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

A Biased Nonnegative Block Term Tensor Decomposition Model for Dynamic QoS Prediction

arXiv:2605.04813v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: With the rapid development of cloud computing and Web services, Quality of Service (QoS) has become a key criterion for service selection and recommendation. Tensor latent feature analysis provides an effective way to model multidimensional QoS data, and most existing QoS prediction methods are mainly based on Canonical Polyadic (CP) decomposition or Tucker decomposition. However, constrained by their inherent structural properties, these methods cannot accurately capture the complex and dynamic dependencies in user-service interactions, which limits their prediction performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes a dynamic QoS prediction framework based on the Biased Nonnegative Block Term Tensor Decomposition Model, termed BNBT. Specifically, the proposed framework is developed from three aspects: (1) block term tensor decomposition is employed to enhance the representation capability of latent feature learning; (2) linear bias terms are incorporated to further improve prediction accuracy; and (3) a tensor-oriented single-element-dependent nonnegative multiplicative update algorithm, called SLF-NMUT, is designed for efficient parameter estimation. Extensive experiments on real-world QoS datasets demonstrate that the proposed BNBT framework consistently outperforms several state-of-the-art QoS prediction methods in terms of prediction accuracy.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the Limits of Stretching Quantum Pseudorandomness

arXiv:2606.24736v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pseudorandom states, introduced by Ji, Liu, and Song (CRYPTO '18), are quantum analogues of classical pseudorandom generators. A fundamental property of classical pseudorandom generators is that their output can be stretched to arbitrary polynomial length. Whether an analogous stretching property holds for quantum pseudorandom states remains unclear. In this work, we prove the first black-box separation between single-copy secure pseudorandom states ($\mathsf{1PRS}$) with different output lengths. Specifically, we construct a quantum oracle relative to which $\mathsf{1PRS}$ with output length $m(n)=1.1n$ exist, but $\mathsf{1PRS}$ with output length $m(n)=\Omega(n^{2+\epsilon})$ do not, for any $\epsilon>0$. Our proof leverages the Common Haar Random State (CHRS) model introduced by Chen, Coladangelo, and Sattath (EUROCRYPT '25), and introduces a technique to bound the effective number of resource CHRS states utilized by any $\mathsf{1PRS}$ generator in this model.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

Authors:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Presurgical immune biomarkers associated with pain intensity and pain interference recovery after total knee arthroplasty: findings from the PRIME-KNEE study

Chronic postsurgical pain (CPSP) prevalence after total knee arthroplasty (TKA) is >20%. Circulating immune biomarkers are known factors of musculoskeletal pain but poorly understood as CPSP predictors. This prospective, longitudinal study of 203 patients s/p TKA tested presurgical plasma biomarkers associated with 6-month CPSP, using promising approaches from geriatrics biomarker research: expected recovery differential (ERD; resilience outcome) and penalized, machine-learning regularization modeling (elastic net and LASSO regression). Forty-nine presurgical candidate biomarkers were considered. CPSP was operationalized using ERDs built around PROMIS pain intensity and pain interference, which quantified the difference between observed and expected recovery after accounting for demographic, comorbidity, reserve, and perioperative factors. Plasma/ERDs from ~130 patients revealed 13 biomarkers with the highest selection stability criteria, and either positive or negative (+/-) associations with ERDs. Interleukin (IL) 5 (-) and Lipopolysaccharide-Binding Protein (LBP; +) were associated with both ERDs. Unique associations with pain intensity ERD included Cytomegalovirus-Specific IgG Negative (CMV IGg-; -), Macrophage Inflammatory Protein-1 Beta (MIP1b; -), IL12p70 (-, Cluster of Differentiation 30 (sCD30;-), Interferon alpha 2a (IFN2a;+), and Leukemia Inhibitory Factor (LIF;+). Unique associations with pain interference ERD included Lipopolysaccharide (LPS;-), Activin A (-), IL8 (-), Serum Amyloid A (SAA;-), and IL7 (+). Protein-protein interaction analyses and topology motifs suggest a centralized network with higher-than-expected connectivity, involving IL5, IL7, IL8, MIP1{beta}, and IFN2a, among others. This study proposes rigorous yet feasible approaches to expedite pain biomarker research, and introduces presurgical biomarkers t0 consider in future TKA-CPSP biosignature derivation.