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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Empirical Validation and Predictive Utility of the Perinatal Grief Scale in Men after Perinatal Loss

Background. The Perinatal Grief Scale (PGS) is a widely used instrument for assessing grief following pregnancy loss, yet no study has validated it specifically in men despite documented use in several studies. This gap is critical given fathers' persistent underrepresentation in perinatal bereavement research and the absence of empirically supported screening thresholds for this population. Methods. This cross-sectional validation study used data from the OPALE project (Observatory on PerinatAL hEalth) conducted by the CiaoLapo Foundation in Italy. Among 276 fathers who experienced stillbirth or miscarriage, we examined criterion validity by testing the association between PGS scores and trauma-related symptomatology assessed via three validated instruments: the Revised Impact of Event Scale (RIES, n=103), National Stressful Events Survey Short Scale (NSESSS, n=95), and SCL-90 (n=173). We systematically tested multiple threshold combinations to identify optimal discriminative performance. Results. The PGS demonstrated excellent criterion validity. The optimal threshold (PGS >=92) showed sensitivity 81.0%, specificity 81.8%, and Youden's J index 0.628. Fathers scoring >=92 had 19.12 times the odds of high trauma symptoms (95% CI: 9.35 to 39.14, p

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SAGE: Stochastic Prompt Optimization via Agent-Guided Exploration

Context engineering has emerged as a primary lever for improving AI systems without parameter updates. Recent work showing that textual gradients do not function as real gradients motivates treating automatic prompt optimization (APO) as black-box search. We introduce SPO (Stochastic Prompt Optimization), a framework for stochastic search over prompt space, and compare three strategies of increasing sophistication: error-informed random search, a genetic algorithm with evolutionary operators, and SAGE (SPO via Agent-Guided Exploration), a multi-agent pipeline with diagnostic code execution. Across three benchmarks, no single strategy dominates; effectiveness depends on the interaction of landscape structure with error type. We further deploy SAGE on a mental-health chatbot under a continuous optimization paradigm, where it compounds eight cycles of individually-noisy A/B tests into a statistically robust gain in next-day retention. We argue that coupling qualitative diagnosis with quantitative validation is what makes agentic optimization effective for open-ended task-oriented dialogue.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Graph Structured Combinatorial Semi-Bandit with Nonlinear Reward Associations through Separable Signals

arXiv:2606.14650v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The identification of optimal structures within vast arrays of interconnected data necessitates significant sampling- and computational effort. Learning and leveraging underlying signal dependencies can improve efficiency and predictive capabilities considerably, but the ubiquity of nonlinear statistical relations amplifies the complexity of such undertakings. In this paper, we develop novel generic and adaptive strategies equipped with routines for graph-based causal reward modeling, analytic reproducing kernel methods, and Taylor approximation of functional processes. We establish theoretical performance guarantees sublinear in time and linear in data volume over time. Our analyses cover robustness to a multitude of uncertainties arising from noise interference, gradual model convergence, and solution space mismatch. The framework's general appeal is substantiated by a minimalistic set of conditions or reliance on prior estimates, while various outlined modifications address specific or extended settings. To demonstrate practical effectiveness, we conduct numerical experiments using both benchmarked synthetic and real-world transportation datasets.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

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

Manga109-v2026: Revisiting Manga109 Annotations for Modern Manga Understanding

Manga is a culturally distinctive multimodal medium and one of the most influential forms of Japanese popular culture. As AI systems increasingly target manga understanding, OCR, and translation, Manga109 has become a foundational dataset for manga-related AI research. However, the current Manga109 dataset contains inaccurate transcriptions and coarse annotations, which do not align well with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding tasks. In this work, we revisit the dialogue text annotations of Manga109 and identify five categories of annotation issues, including inaccurate transcriptions, missing text regions, overlapping dialogue and onomatopoeia, and under-segmented speech balloons. To address these issues, we combine OCR-based issue detection and manual revision to construct Manga109-v2026, revising approximately 29,000 dialogue annotations. Our revisions better align Manga109 with modern OCR and multimodal manga understanding systems while preserving expressive structures characteristic of manga.

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

From Overload to Convergence: Supporting Multi-Issue Human-AI Negotiation with Bayesian Visualization

arXiv:2603.22766v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As AI systems increasingly mediate negotiations, understanding how the number of negotiated issues impacts human performance is crucial for maintaining human agency. We designed a human-AI negotiation case study in a realistic property rental scenario, varying the number of negotiated issues; empirical findings show that without support, performance stays stable up to three issues but declines as additional issues increase cognitive load. To address this, we introduce a novel uncertainty-based visualization driven by Bayesian estimation of agreement probability. It shows how the space of mutually acceptable agreements narrows as negotiation progresses, helping users identify promising options. In a within-subjects experiment (N=32), it improved human outcomes and efficiency, preserved human control, and avoided redistributing value. Our findings surface practical limits on the complexity people can manage in human-AI negotiation, advance theory on human performance in complex negotiations, and offer validated design guidance for interactive systems.

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

Compact Geometric Representations of Hierarchies

Computing geometric representations of data is a cornerstone of modern machine learning, typically achieved by training dual encoders which map queries and documents into a shared embedding space. Recent work of You et al. [NeurIPS '25] has extended this approach to hierarchical retrieval, where relevance is determined by the ancestor-descendant relationships in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). While previous work has shown that valid embeddings exist when the number of descendants is small, these bounds degrade significantly for deep hierarchies, requiring dimensions as large as the total number of nodes. In this paper, we investigate compact reachability embeddings for more general graph classes and provide theoretical guarantees for representing hierarchies using embeddings whose dimension depends on structural graph parameters. We prove that for any directed tree, there exists a reachability embedding in constant dimension 3, independent of the tree's size or depth. We generalize this result to graphs characterized by treewidth $t$, constructing embeddings of dimension $O(t \log n)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes. Complementing these upper bounds, we provide matching or near-matching lower bounds, showing that dimension $\Omega(n)$ is necessary for general DAGs and $\Omega(t/\log(n/t))$ is required for graphs of treewidth $t$. We also obtain upper and lower bounds parameterized by the number of cross-edges in the DAG. We additionally show that our embeddings can be constructed on real world datasets, and that they give much smaller dimensions in high recall regimes compared to prior embeddings with theoretical guarantees.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models

The worldwide surge of authoritarianism, combined with the increasing central role in users' everyday lives, raises the question of to what extent specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes and characteristics. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark that aims to assess the risk of LLMs generating responses with authoritarian tendencies. This benchmark combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from an extensive pool of 15 human validated instruments; (ii) contextual behavior vignettes probing intended actions in concrete situations; and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu evaluates not only a general closeness towards authoritarianism but also the established sub-concepts Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find that all tested models exhibit substantial authoritarian response rates under the psychometric evaluation, though rates drop significantly in increasingly more realistic downstream task. We further find that an authoritarian system prompt easily manipulates 15 out of 17 models to promote increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and ultimately mitigate undesired authoritarian tendencies in generated output. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/AuAu

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

Training-Free Adversarial Robustness in Computational MRI

Deep learning (DL) methods have become the state-of-the-art for reconstructing sub-sampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. However, studies have shown that these methods are susceptible to small adversarial input perturbations, resulting in major distortions in the output images. Various strategies have been proposed to reduce the effects of these attacks, but they require retraining. In this work, we propose a novel approach for mitigating adversarial attacks on MRI reconstruction models without any retraining. Based on the idea of cyclic measurement consistency, we devise a novel mitigation objective that is minimized in a small ball around the attack input. Results show that our method substantially reduces the impact of adversarial perturbations across different datasets, attack types/strengths and PD-DL networks, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms conventional mitigation methods. We also introduce a practically relevant scenario for small adversarial perturbations that models impulse noise in raw data, which relates to herringbone artifacts, and show the applicability of our approach in this setting. Finally, we show our mitigation approach remains effective in two realistic extension scenarios: a blind setup, where the attack strength or algorithm is not known to the user; and an adaptive attack setup, where the attacker has full knowledge of the defense strategy.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Dynamics from Lax Pair Theory: A Reconstruction from Spectrum Preservation

arXiv:2606.19664v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We reconstruct unitary quantum dynamics from a minimal axiomatic foundation built on Hilbert-space observables and isospectral evolution. The only dynamical assumption is that physical time evolution is a continuous one-parameter flow of Hermitian observables that preserves their spectra, i.e. the possible outcomes of measurement. We show that this assumption is already sufficient to force the Lax form of quantum dynamics. The Heisenberg equation, the time-dependent and time-independent Schrödinger equations, conservation laws, and good quantum numbers then follow as theorems rather than postulates. In this formulation, Lax pair theory supplies the missing dynamical bridge between the measurement structure of a Hilbert space and standard quantum evolution: the Hamiltonian is not assumed, but emerges as the generator required for an isospectral observable flow.

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

Single vs. Multiple Branches in DeepONet and S-DeepONet: Network Architecture Follows Coupling in Multiphysics Systems

arXiv:2507.03660v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: `Real-time prediction of complex physical systems requires surrogate models that learn from data while representing strong multiphysics coupling. Deep Operator Networks have shown success in single-physics problems, yet their effectiveness in capturing nonlinear interactions in coupled systems (such as thermo-mechanical or electro-thermal coupling) remains underexplored. Here we pose a practical question: should the architecture of a neural operator reflect the strength of physical coupling it aims to model? We compare single-branch and multi-branch designs, in both feedforward and sequential recurrent forms, across three representative systems: a reaction–diffusion problem with heterogeneous sources, a nonlinear thermo-electrical problem with temperature-dependent conductivity and Joule heating, and a viscoplastic thermo-mechanical model of steel solidification. Single-branch networks consistently outperform multi-branch variants in tightly coupled regimes by encouraging shared latent representations, whereas multi-branch designs remain favorable for decoupled or single-physics tasks. Once trained, these surrogates deliver full-field predictions up to $1.8 \times 10^4$ times faster than physics-based solvers.

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

Forced Deferral: Manipulating Routing Decisions in Multimodal LLM Cascades

arXiv:2606.15308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown strong visual reasoning abilities, serving a large model for every query is computationally expensive. MLLM cascades mitigate this cost by first querying a weak but cheaper model and deferring to a strong model when the weak model's output is unconfident. However, since the weak model's confidence directly controls compute allocation, these systems expose a new attack surface: an adversary can manipulate confidence so that their queries are consistently deferred to the strong model. Motivated by this vulnerability, we introduce the Forced Deferral Attack (FDA), an adversarial image attack that lowers the weak model's confidence and causes cascades to route queries to the strong model. FDA learns a universal border trigger by optimizing a temperature-flattened objective. This objective pushes the weak model's token distribution on triggered inputs toward less concentrated targets constructed from its clean responses. Across datasets, model families, and deferral metrics, FDA consistently increases strong-model routing while outperforming image-perturbation and prompt-injection baselines. These results show that MLLM cascades are vulnerable to attacks that manipulate compute allocation, forcing unintended strong-model usage without directly targeting answer correctness.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Dissociating Decodability and Causal Use in Bracket-Sequence Transformers

When trained on tasks requiring an understanding of hierarchical structure, transformers have been found to represent this hierarchy in distinct ways: in the geometry of the residual stream, and in stack-like attention patterns maintaining a last-in, first-out ordering. However, it remains unclear whether these representations are causally used or merely decodable. We examine this gap in transformers trained on the Dyck language (a formal language of balanced bracket sequences), where the hierarchical ground truth is explicit. By probing and intervening on the residual stream and attention patterns, we find that depth, distance, and top-of-stack signals are all decodable, yet their causal roles diverge. Specifically, masking attention to the true top-of-stack position causes a sharp drop in long-distance accuracy, while ablating low-dimensional residual stream subspaces has comparatively little effect. These results, which extend to a templated natural language setting, suggest that even in a controlled setting where the relevant hierarchical variables are known, decodability alone does not imply causal use.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SkillChain-Gym: A Benchmark for Reskilling-Aware Production-Inventory Control under Disruptions

arXiv:2606.17266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Production planning increasingly has to treat workforce capability as a decision variable: certifications lapse when skills are not maintained, new products require skills the current workforce does not hold, and reskilling competes for the same worker hours needed for production. Existing operations benchmarks usually treat labor as exogenous, while workforce-planning models with skills and learning are rarely released as reusable testbeds. We introduce SkillChain-Gym, a benchmark specification for reskilling-aware production-inventory control: a single-site environment with stylized worker skill-state dynamics, hard threshold certification, forgetting, and capacity-consuming training actions constrained by the same per-worker time budget as production. The benchmark includes seed-controlled disruption scenarios, three feasibility modes with projection diagnostics, deterministic replay, and metrics covering operations, resilience, capability growth, and training-access distribution. We evaluate production-only, reactive adaptive, water-filling adaptive, and static-insurance policies with budget variants over 60-shift horizons with paired statistical tests. The results are regime-dependent rather than a ranking. Training-capable policies dominate the production-only baseline, and maintenance training is necessary under forgetting even without disruptions. Among training-capable classes, adaptive training helps when bottlenecks are visible in the forecast, while a lean static cross-training plan, a deliberately favorable comparator whose structure encodes relevant skill contingencies, acts as strong insurance under surprise shocks and absenteeism. Capacity slack and the forgetting rate govern the boundary between these regimes. No policy class dominates across regimes, motivating forecast-driven controllers that decide when to buy skill insurance and when to react.

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

Stochastic Linear Contextual Bandits with Bounded Noise: A Set-Membership Approach

arXiv:2606.20022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper considers stochastic linear contextual bandits (SLCB) with bounded reward noise. Existing works typically assume sub-Gaussian reward noise and bounded expected rewards, under which the optimal regret bound scales as $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ in terms of horizon $T$. However, in many applications, realized/observed rewards are also naturally bounded, implying bounded reward noise. Bounded noise is more informative than the sub-Gaussian condition but has not been leveraged explicitly in the SLCB literature. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm SME-OFU by utilizing an uncertainty quantification method called set-membership estimation (SME) and applying the principle of optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU). Our algorithm enjoys an improved regret bound $O(\log T)$. Notice that this does not contradict the existing optimal bound $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{T})$ for sub-Gaussian noise because bounded noise is a stronger condition. Finally, simulations show empirical improvements of SME-OFU over a benchmark algorithm designed for sub-Gaussian noise when the reward noise is bounded.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Learning to Emulate Chaos: Adversarial Optimal Transport Regularization

arXiv:2604.21097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chaos arises in many complex dynamical systems, from weather to power grids, but is difficult to accurately model with data-driven methods such as machine learning emulators. While emulators are promising tools for accelerating simulations and solving inverse problems, they still struggle to learn chaotic dynamics, where sensitivity to initial conditions renders exact long-term forecasts infeasible, especially given noisy data. Recent work instead trains emulators to match the statistical properties of chaotic attractors, but these approaches often rely on handcrafted summary statistics or large, diverse multi-environment datasets. In this work, we propose a family of adversarial optimal transport objectives that can jointly learn high-quality summary statistics and a physically consistent emulator from a single noisy trajectory. We theoretically analyze and experimentally validate a Sinkhorn divergence formulation (2-Wasserstein) and a WGAN-style dual formulation (1-Wasserstein) of our approach. Numerical experiments across a variety of chaotic systems, including ones with high-dimensional spatiotemporal chaos, show that emulators trained using our proposed objectives have significantly improved long-term statistical fidelity.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

Long-term mortality rates after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) remain elevated due to post-EVAR rupture caused by loss of seal in stent graft sealing zones. Structured CT review using centerline measurements improves detection, but current workflows require manual centerline editing and expert operators. We propose a transformer framework for automated, protocol-driven sealing zone assessment that combines 3D centerline tracking with embedding-based geometric prediction. Two state-of-the-art image-to-graph models are evaluated for aorto-iliac centerline extraction from follow-up CT and for measurement of stent position, vessel diameters, and seal lengths according to EVAR4C protocol. Across the full test set and a challenging no-contrast subset, the proposed fully automatic method outperforms the commercial semi-automatic workflow.

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

Bridging Functional Correctness and Runtime Efficiency Gaps in LLM-Based Code Translation

While large language models (LLMs) have greatly advanced the functional correctness of automated code translation systems, the runtime efficiency of translated programs has received comparatively little attention. With the waning of Moore's law, runtime efficiency has become increasingly important for program quality, alongside functional correctness. Our preliminary study reveals that LLM-translated programs often run slower than human-written ones, and this issue cannot be remedied through prompt engineering alone. Therefore, our work proposes SwiftTrans, a code translation framework comprising two key stages: (1) Multi-Perspective Exploration, where MpTranslator leverages parallel in-context learning (ICL) to generate diverse translation candidates; and (2) Difference-Aware Selection, where DiffSelector identifies the optimal candidate by explicitly comparing differences between translations. We further introduce Hierarchical Guidance for MpTranslator and Ordinal Guidance for DiffSelector, enabling LLMs to better adapt to these two core components. To support the evaluation of runtime efficiency in translated programs, we extend existing benchmarks, CodeNet and F2SBench, and introduce a new benchmark, SwiftBench. Experimental results across all three benchmarks show that SwiftTrans achieves consistent improvements in both correctness and runtime efficiency.

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

Quantum thermodynamics, quantum correlations and quantum coherence in accelerating Unruh-DeWitt detectors in both steady and dynamical state

arXiv:2512.18123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the interplay between quantum thermodynamics, quantum correlations, and quantum coherence within the framework of the Unruh-DeWitt (UdW) detector model. By analyzing both the steady and dynamical states of various quantum resources (including steerability, entanglement, quantum discord, and coherence), we study how these resources evolve under Markovian and non-Markovian environments. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of both the Unruh temperature and the energy levels on three key quantum phenomena: thermodynamic evolution, quantum correlations, and quantum coherence, considering different initial state preparations. The hierarchical structure relating quantum correlations and quantum coherence is determined. We further examine the thermodynamic performance of a quantum heat engine, highlighting the influence of memory effects and classical correlations on heat exchange, work extraction, and efficiency. Our results reveal that non-Markovian dynamics can enhance the preservation of quantum correlations and improve the engine's efficiency compared to purely Markovian regime. These findings provide insights into the role of quantum correlations and quantum coherence in quantum thermodynamic processes and open avenues for optimizing quantum devices operating in relativistic or open-system settings.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Not Just How Much, But Where: Decomposing Epistemic Uncertainty into Per-Class Contributions

arXiv:2602.21160v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical classification, the cost of failure is often asymmetric, yet Bayesian deep learning summarises epistemic uncertainty with a single scalar, mutual information (MI), that cannot distinguish whether a model's ignorance involves a benign or safety-critical class. We decompose MI into a per-class vector $C_k(x)=\sigma_k^{2}/(2\mu_k)$, with $\mu_k{=}\mathbb{E}[p_k]$ and $\sigma_k^2{=}\mathrm{Var}[p_k]$ across posterior samples. The decomposition follows from a second-order Taylor expansion of the entropy; the $1/\mu_k$ weighting corrects boundary suppression and makes $C_k$ comparable across rare and common classes. By construction $\sum_k C_k \approx \mathrm{MI}$, and a companion skewness diagnostic flags inputs where the approximation degrades. After characterising the axiomatic properties of $C_k$, we validate it on three tasks: (i) selective prediction for diabetic retinopathy, where critical-class $C_k$ reduces selective risk by 34.7\% over MI and 56.2\% over variance baselines; (ii) out-of-distribution detection on clinical and image benchmarks, where $\sum_k C_k$ achieves the highest AUROC and the per-class view exposes asymmetric shifts invisible to MI; and (iii) a controlled label-noise study in which $\sum_k C_k$ shows less sensitivity to injected aleatoric noise than MI under end-to-end Bayesian training, while both metrics degrade under transfer learning. Across all tasks, the quality of the posterior approximation shapes uncertainty at least as strongly as the choice of metric, suggesting that how uncertainty is propagated through the network matters as much as how it is measured.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learn Temporal Consistency For Robust Satellite Video Detector

Satellite video object detection (SVOD) for oriented and fine-grained objects plays an important role in satellite applications. Most existing SVOD methods only focus on one or a few coarse-grained categories of moving objects and represent objects with horizontal bounding boxes. They have difficulty extracting complete, accurate, and consistent information about objects in whole satellite videos. In this paper, we propose a satellite video object detection framework based on Temporal Consistency Learning (TCL). TCL adeptly detects oriented and fine-grained objects by leveraging the rich temporal contexts within satellite videos. The framework integrates three key modules: temporal and fine-grained feature aggregation (TFA), structure encoding (SE), and temporal consistency constraint (TCC). TFA and TCC modules facilitate consistent representation learning across frames, while the SE module encodes both appearance and structural information for precise fine-grained recognition. Experimental results on the SAT-MTB benchmark dataset demonstrate TCL's superior performance, achieving a new state-of-the-art oriented and fine-grained detection accuracy of 47.7% mAP–a 4.8% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, our TCL framework readily accommodates existing image-based detectors, leading to enhanced detection accuracies.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validating an Early Pregnancy HbA1c as the Screening Test for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Findings from PRISMA Pakistan Cohort

Background: Early identification of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is critical to improving maternal and neonatal outcomes, particularly in resource-constrained settings where universal oral glucose tolerance testing (OGTT) is burdensome. We assessed whether early-pregnancy HbA1c alone or combined with common risk factors can predict GDM and reduce the burden of OGTT requirements in a peri-urban cohort in Karachi, Pakistan. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Risk Infant Surveillance and Measurement Alliance (PRISMA) Pakistan cohort. Women enrolled before 20 weeks' gestation with available early-pregnancy HbA1c and a 2-hour 75g OGTT at 24 to 28 weeks were included. We externally validated GDM prediction models originally developed in the STRiDE-India cohort. Model performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the curve (AUC). We assessed four models: HbA1c alone (Model 1a); age, BMI, and family history of diabetes mellitus (FH DM) (Model 1b); HbA1c combined with age, BMI, and FH DM (Model 2); and an extended model, i.e., Model 2 combined with socioeconomic status, gestational age, parity, systolic and diastolic blood pressure (Model 3). A dual-threshold approach was applied to assess rule-in and rule-out performance. Results: Among 2,489 women, GDM incidence was 7.5% (n=186). Models with a broader set of predictors demonstrated higher AUC values, with Model 2 achieving an AUC of 0.61 (95% CI: 0.57, 0.66). Including additional factors (Model 3) did not further improve predictive ability (AUC: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.58, 0.66). In addition, at predefined thresholds, Model 2 achieved sensitivity of 73.7% (rule-out) and specificity of 83.5% (rule-in), with the potential to reduce OGTT requirements (58.5%). Conclusions: Early-pregnancy risk stratification using HbA1c combined with simple clinical predictors offers a pragmatic approach to streamline GDM screening among high-risk pregnant women. A dual-threshold strategy using Model 2 could reduce reliance on universal OGTT while prioritizing high-risk women for confirmatory testing.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Overcoming State Inertia in Full-Duplex Spoken Language Models via Activation Steering

Full-duplex spoken language models (FD-SLMs) enable seamless speech interaction by allowing models to listen and speak simultaneously, yet the internal mechanism by which they coordinate listening and speaking remains underexplored. We analyze the predictive behavior encoded in FD-SLM hidden representations and find that they exhibit stream-specific predictive patterns: during listening, they preferentially predict the incoming user stream, whereas during speaking, they preferentially predict the model output stream. Building on this observation, we show that FD-SLMs dynamically modulate their internal predictive focus between two states: a generative state aligned with model output generation and a perceptive state aligned with incoming user input. However, this modulation can lag behind abrupt changes in conversational context. During user interruptions, the model remains transiently biased toward the generative state before transitioning into the perceptive state, causing it to miss the beginning of the incoming input. We term this delayed internal transition state inertia. To quantify its downstream impact, we introduce the Zero-Buffer Benchmark (ZBB), a diagnostic benchmark for evaluating immediate interruption comprehension when user speech begins abruptly. We evaluate this setting using response correctness and initial-word occurrence rate (IWOR). Finally, we mitigate state inertia through activation steering with a perception vector, a training-free intervention with little additional computational overhead. Across multiple state-of-the-art FD-SLMs, activation steering substantially improves interruption handling; for example, on PersonaPlex, it improves correctness from 28% to 45% and IWOR from 40% to 72% without any fine-tuning.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Power-law-graded Ising Interactions Stabilize Time Crystals Realizing Quantum Energy Storage and Sensing

arXiv:2508.14847v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study discrete time-crystalline (DTC) phases in one-dimensional spin-1/2 chains with power-law-graded Ising interactions under periodic Floquet driving. By generalizing Stark localization to power-law-graded Ising interaction profiles, we identify robust period-doubled dynamics across a wide range of interaction exponents, stabilized by the interplay between coherent driving and spatially varying coupling. Within the DTC phase, the energy stored in the system, interpreted as a quantum battery, increases superlinearly with system size, although no scaling advantage persists in normalized power. Beyond energy storage, we demonstrate that the DTC phase supports enhanced quantum sensing. The quantum Fisher information associated with estimating timing deviations in the drive scales superextensively with system size, surpassing the Heisenberg limit. The degree of quantum advantage can be tuned by varying the interaction exponent, though DTC behavior remains robust throughout. Our results position power-law-graded Ising interacting Floquet systems as robust platforms for storing quantum energy and achieving metrological enhancement.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

From Content to Knowledge: Lightning Fast Long-Video Understanding with Neural Knowledge Representations

We propose a new paradigm for long video understanding by treating a long video as a Neural Knowledge Representation (NKR). NKR represents video contents neither as a stream of tokens nor pre-organized databases, but as an individual small portion of network weights attached to the VLM backbone. The NKR weights are optimized to encapsulate the video's semantic content via a novel Agentic Knowledge Distillation (AKD) process, where an agent automatically synthesizes dense descriptions and question-answer pairs to distill the video's knowledge into the NKR. While AKD serves as a comprehensive, one-time encoding phase, the resulting NKR transforms the video into a portable, reusable asset. At inference, the lightweight NKR is mounted onto a frozen Vision-Language Model (VLM), enabling direct, query-based understanding without reloading or re-encoding the original video. This approach decouples video length from inference cost, offering high amortized efficiency for multi-turn video understanding. Experiments on the LVBench benchmark show our method achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art approaches while reducing end-to-end latency by over two orders of magnitude, opening new possibilities for interactive long-video understanding.