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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entanglement Detection by Approximate Entanglement Witnesses

arXiv:2402.14755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of determining whether a given quantum state is separable is known to be computationally difficult. We develop an approach to this problem based on approximations of convex polytopes in high dimensions. By showing that a convex polytope constructed from a finite number of hyperplanes approximates the Euclidean ball arbitrarily well in high dimensions, we find evidence that a finite set of approximate entanglement witnesses is potentially sufficient to determine the entanglement of a state with high probability.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Counterdiabatic Raman Atom Optics for Compact High-Sensitivity Gravimetry

arXiv:2606.16945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-momentum-transfer (LMT) atom interferometry provides a route toward enhanced inertial sensitivity in compact quantum sensors, but its scalability is limited by the accumulation of pulse-transfer errors across long Raman pulse sequences. We investigate theoretically the use of stimulated Raman shortcut-to-adiabatic passage (STIRSAP) for high-fidelity LMT atom optics in a Mach–Zehnder interferometer geometry. The counterdiabatic correction is encoded directly into the Raman pulse envelopes, eliminating the need for auxiliary microwave or radio-frequency control fields. Numerical simulations based on an effective Raman model show that $1~\mu\mathrm{s}$ STIRSAP pulses achieve single-pulse transfer fidelities of $F_\pi = 0.99902$ while maintaining negligible pulse-time overhead even at high momentum order. We analyze the resulting tradeoff between interferometric phase enhancement and compound contrast decay and identify an unconstrained shot-noise optimum near $n\approx270$. The analysis further shows that practical operation at extreme LMT order is constrained by wave-packet separation, vibration noise, Doppler detuning, and accumulated systematic effects rather than by pulse duration itself. These results establish superadiabatic Raman control as a promising approach for scalable high-fidelity atom optics and clarify the physical limitations governing compact high-order atom interferometers.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

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

Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier

For the development of Large language models (LLMs), recent approaches to generating pseudo intermediate reasoning have shown remarkable progress. But they typically rely on large numbers of correctly annotated answers to assess reasoning quality. This paper presents a semi-supervised framework that scales reasoning learning from minimal supervision, turning reasoning verification itself into a data creation mechanism. We train a lightweight reasoning-correctness classifier on only a few labeled samples, which judges whether intermediate reasoning traces generated by an LLM are valid. Furthermore, an entropy-based confidence threshold filters out unreliable samples, and the remaining high-confidence reasoning traces are used to fine-tune the model. Experiments on Verifiable Math Problems (Orca-Math subset) and Question Answering on Image Scene Graphs (GQA) with Visual Programming show that our method achieves accuracy comparable to using 10-15x more labeled data. Ablation analyses confirm that both the classifier and entropy filtering are essential for scalable and noise-resistant pseudo-labeling. By replacing expensive answer-level supervision with lightweight reasoning verification, our method provides a practical path toward constructing large-scale reasoning resources and paves the way for future autonomous reasoning systems that learn from minimal human input.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Correct When Paired, Wrong When Split: Decoupling and Editing Modality-Specific Neurons in MLLMs

Although Knowledge Editing provides an efficient mechanism for updating the knowledge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we find that current paradigms still suffer from an important yet remain underexplored issue : editing decoupling failure, where entity-related knowledge can be updated when the model is triggered by multimodal inputs (text–image query pairs), however, it often reverts to outdated pre-edit facts when the paired inputs are split into unimodal ones. Our in-depth empirical analysis reveals that the entity knowledge in MLLMs is not stored as a unified representation, but is instead distributed across disentangled modality-specific pathways. As a result, updates biased toward multimodal queries fail to propagate effectively to unimodal circuits. To bridge this gap, we propose DECODE, which explicitly disentangles and localizes modality-specific neuron groups for targeted knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DECODE consistently achieves effective knowledge updates under different modality triggers, thereby mitigating editing decoupling failures.

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

Sycophancy as Material Failure under Pushback Loading: A Multi-Axis Characterization Across Three Loading Cases and up to Seventeen Material Charges

Sycophancy in LLMs is documented across 70+ papers, but expert agreement on construct boundaries remains low (ICC=.184; Ye et al., 2026). The construct fragments because behavioral classification depends on which surface form is privileged. We adopt a materials-science framing: conversation as test specimen under load, LLM-model as material charge, pushback as progressive load, stance-flip as material failure. We characterize this failure across three loading cases (debate n=1000; false-presuppositions n=3400; ethical-setting n=3400; 10-17 material charges per case; 7800 specimens total) using 14 turn-level axis-measurements spanning velocity, damage accumulation, frame-drift, brittleness, and direction stability, plus three speaker-resolved axes from an independent pipeline. The measurements are Hooke-coupled ($\sigma = E \cdot \varepsilon$ analog) and reproduce across loading cases with effects up to $|r_{rb}| = 0.35$ on debate; the sign structure adds a second pattern: the ethical-setting case inverts the velocity and accumulation blocks. Variance composition partitions into two profiles: debate is charge-dominated (brittle-fracture-like: the material grade decides), false-presuppositions and ethical-setting are topic-dominated (creep-like: the load decides); the ratios (2.03 vs 0.13/0.17) are estimator-dependent, for debate even in direction. Cross-judge reliability (GPT-4o vs Haiku 4.5) shows debate scoring is judge-robust (Cohen's $\kappa = 0.88$) while false-presupposition scoring is judge-sensitive ($\kappa = 0.36$) – a caveat single-judge benchmarks must report. This is the methodological move Ye et al.'s diagnosis calls for: a multi-axis characterization that does not depend on which surface form of the construct one privileges.

07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Atypical Decay Rates for Atypical Heights in Random Recursive Trees

arXiv:2604.20139v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We establish the large deviation probabilities for the height of random recursive trees, revealing polynomial upper-tail decay and stretched-exponential lower-tail decay. Remarkably, the lower tail features an atypical prefactor that grows to infinity more slowly than any $n$-fold iterated logarithm.

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

K-Prism: A Knowledge-Guided and Prompt Integrated Universal Medical Image Segmentation Model

Medical image segmentation is fundamental to clinical decision-making, yet existing models remain fragmented. They are usually trained on single knowledge sources and specific to individual tasks, modalities, or organs. This fragmentation contrasts sharply with clinical practice, where experts seamlessly integrate diverse knowledge: anatomical priors from training, exemplar-based reasoning from reference cases, and iterative refinement through real-time interaction. We present $K-Prism$, a unified segmentation framework that mirrors this clinical flexibility by systematically integrating three knowledge paradigms: (i) $semantic priors$ learned from annotated datasets, (ii) $in-context knowledge$ from few-shot reference examples, and (iii) $interactive feedback$ from user inputs like clicks or scribbles. Our key insight is that these heterogeneous knowledge sources can be encoded into a dual-prompt representation: 1-D sparse prompts defining $what$ to segment and 2-D dense prompts indicating $where$ to attend, which are then dynamically routed through a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) decoder. This design enables flexible switching between paradigms and joint training across diverse tasks without architectural modifications. Comprehensive experiments on 18 public datasets spanning diverse modalities (CT, MRI, X-ray, pathology, ultrasound, etc.) demonstrate that K-Prism achieves state-of-the-art performance across semantic, in-context, and interactive segmentation settings.

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

Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference for Dependent Latent Modeling

arXiv:2606.15458v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Variational inference (VI) is a core engine of modern AI, enabling scalable approximate Bayesian learning and uncertainty-aware training of large probabilistic and generative models. In this paper, we propose Structured Nonparametric Variational Inference (SN-VI), a novel framework for modeling complex dependencies among latent variables in posterior approximation, leveraging multivariate spline techniques. Unlike traditional methods that rely on the mean-field assumption, SN-VI preserves intricate latent variable dependencies, providing a flexible and accurate approximation of posteriors with arbitrary shapes. We establish rigorous theoretical guarantees, including the derivation of the lower bound for the variational objective and proof of asymptotic consistency in posterior estimation. To facilitate practical implementation, we develop an algorithm that automatically identifies dependent latent variables and their underlying dependence structure, without requiring manual specification. Simulation studies validate the effectiveness of SN-VI in approximating posterior distributions with bounded support and complex dependencies. The proposed method has been successfully applied to high-dimensional structured data, including computer vision datasets and spatial transcriptomics. In these applications, SN-VI demonstrates improved generative model performance and effectively uncovers coupled biological signals through the learned dependency structure.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Automated AI-Based Ventricular Subcompartment Segmentation and Volumetry in Idiopathic Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus

Purpose In idiopathic normal pressure hydrocephalus (iNPH), longitudinal monitoring of ventricular size is important for diagnosis and treatment follow-up. This study aimed to validate a fully automated AI model for CT ventricular volumetry with subcompartments and to compare AI-derived volume changes with routine radiology assessments. Methods This retrospective, single-center study included 88 patients with iNPH and 456 non-contrast-enhanced head CT examinations. The model was trained on 38 manually labeled CT scans with 12 ventricular subcompartments. Outcomes included segmentation accuracy, correspondence between AI-derived longitudinal ventricular volume changes and radiology report categories (decreased, unchanged, increased), radiologist detection thresholds for ventricular change, and paired pre- and postoperative volume changes in 22 patients with ventriculoperitoneal shunt. Results Mean segmentation accuracy was high (Dice, 0.83). 91% of 100 segmentations were rated as excellent by an expert neuroradiologist. AI-derived ventricular volume changes corresponded well to radiology report categories (median total ventricular volume changes of -17% in cases reported as decreased, 0% in unchanged cases, and +22% in increased cases; all p < 0.001). Radiologists reported ventricular volume change in 50% of cases at an AI-measured relative volume change of +/-6%, and in 90% of cases at +21% for enlargement and -18% for decrease. After shunt placement, ventricular volume decreased by -8% (median), with the largest relative reductions observed in the right temporal and occipital horns. Conclusions Automated AI-based ventricular segmentation on CT enables accurate and reproducible assessment of ventricular volume changes in iNPH and complements routine radiological evaluation for longitudinal and postoperative monitoring.

11.
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.

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

The Inverse Born Rule Equivalence. On the Informational Limits of Real-Valued Amplitude Encodings and the Measurement of Quantum Advantage in Data Embeddings

arXiv:2602.21350v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: When does quantum data encoding provide genuine quantum advantage, and when does it merely rephrase a classically solvable problem? We prove an Equivalence Theorem demonstrating that any encoding mapping classical data to real-valued amplitudes, $\vert\psi_c\rangle = \sum_i c_i \vert i\rangle$ with $c_i \in \mathbb{R}$ and $\sum_i c_i^2 = 1$, composed with a data-independent parameterised unitary and computational-basis measurement, yields exactly the class of classical quadratic forms. We identify the geometric mechanism driving this collapse: the restriction to $\mathbb{R}$ forces a vanishing Berry connection, removing the complex phases required for data-dependent quantum interference. To operationalize this boundary, we introduce encoding diagnostics – phase complexity $C[\Phi]$ and mode-wise von Neumann mutual information $I[\Phi]$ – and link them to the information-geometric excess $\Delta g$. We show that for all real-valued encodings, $\Delta g = 0$ identically. We term the misidentification of such models as evidence of quantum computational power the Inverse Born Rule Fallacy. Supported by numerical experiments, our results establish that complex-phase structure is a strictly necessary condition for data-driven (Type~B) quantum advantage.

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

Calibrated Sampling-Free Uncertainty Estimation in Bayesian Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.16214v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning models remain notoriously prone to overconfidence, limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications. Bayesian methods aim to counter this by learning a distribution over model parameters, and recent advances now make this feasible for large-scale architectures at costs comparable to AdamW. However, a challenge remains at test time: predictions must be averaged across many forward passes with weights sampled from the posterior, which is prohibitively expensive. Variance propagation offers an efficient alternative, computing layer-wise analytical approximations of uncertainty in a single forward pass. While such techniques are effective for MLPs, their extension to modern architectures remains challenging, due to increased depth and diversity of layer types. To fill this gap, we propose Calibrated Variance Propagation (CVP), which introduces a new propagation method for normalization layers, combines it with recent techniques for handling activation functions, and absorbs residual error through a light calibration step. CVP yields comparably accurate uncertainty estimates to MC sampling across transformers and CNNs, at a fraction of the cost. Against prior variance propagation work, CVP improves coverage at $0.5\%$ risk from $8.2\%$ to $14.6\%$ with BEiT-3 on Visual Reasoning (NLVR2) and from $2.6\%$ to $10.8\%$ with ViLT on VQAv2, with gains extending to convolutional architectures.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

AGORA: Can Deliberation and Governance Gates Absorb Participation Bias in Transit Planning?

arXiv:2606.13696v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transit network design depends not only on the optimization algorithm but also on who shows up to the public hearing. Current practice often collects one-directional comments from self-selected attendees, leaving participant mix as an uncontrolled source of outcome variation. We present AGORA, a framework that holds the network, demand, and solver fixed while systematically varying meeting composition through stakeholder agents, structured deliberation, and governance gates. Across two standard benchmark networks at different scales, we find that (i) aggregate outcomes vary little across compositions, but on tail risk and fairness disparity, representative sampling still tends to outperform skewed compositions; (ii) without deliberation, composition produces no variation at all, showing that deliberation is the mechanism through which who attends affects outcomes; and (iii) governance gates compress cross-profile variance without shifting the average outcome on Mandl, but low acceptance on Mumford0 shows thresholds require instance-specific calibration. These findings reframe participation bias from an uncontrollable input to a process-design problem: even without guaranteed representative attendance, well-structured deliberation and governance criteria can substantially reduce how much outcomes depend on who is in the room.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

PT-WNO: Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operator for 3D Point Cloud Semantic Segmentation

Point cloud semantic segmentation requires architectures that capture both fine-grained local geometry and broad global scene structure. Transformer-based networks have demonstrated strong performance by focusing on detailed local feature aggregation; however, global context is conveyed primarily through skip connections across encoder-decoder stages, which we argue is insufficient for full scene understanding. We hypothesize that augmenting skip connections with a learnable global feature extraction module allows the network to acquire scene-level knowledge before descending into local detail, leading to richer and more contextually grounded representations. To this end, we propose Point Transformer with Wavelet Neural Operato (PT-WNO), which integrates a shared Wavelet Neural Operator (WNO) branch alongside the skip connections of a point cloud transformer backbone. At each encoder-decoder transition, point features are projected onto a dense 3D volumetric grid where the WNO captures multi-scale global spectral context through learnable wavelet decomposition and reconstruction. These global features are fused back into the network via lightweight adapters, complementing rather than replacing the existing skip connections. Experiments on four large-scale 3D point cloud benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of PT-WNO. On S3DIS (Area 5), PT-WNO achieves 71.59% mIoU, outperforming the Point Transformer v3 (PTv3) baseline by +1.03 points. On DALES it achieves 81.05% mIoU (+1.47 over the baseline). On ScanNet~v2, PT-WNO obtains 76.19% mIoU, remaining competitive with the baseline (76.36%).

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

Computational Identifiability

arXiv:2606.19361v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Identification conditions describe the computability of a target query or parameter of interest as a function of the type and amount of information available. In causal identification, this information is often expressed in the form of a causal graph, and data are observed or collected for some subset of variables in the graph. Target queries may be for a single effect alone or for a class of effects in a given model. The derivation of an identification algorithm then defines mathematically the process by which the desired causal effect(s) can be uniquely determined, theoretically, in expectation. Identifiability in expectation, or 'theoretical identifiability,' generally assumes asymptotic properties, infinite data, or other mathematically idealized conditions. In this paper, we explore a fundamental distinction between this theoretical, idealized notion of identifiability and a proposed alternative that is computation-bound. The framework we propose - 'computational identifiability' - is to instead define a finite computational search procedure for an empirical estimator. If this process finds an estimator empirically, within a desired error tolerance, then identifiability is satisfied, conditional on the specified assumptions of the search (i.e., a prior distribution over the parameters) and conditional on the search procedure itself. Through several experiments, we demonstrate how this framework allows us to answer fine-grained, practical identification questions, such as identification with small finite samples, with ambiguous graphical criteria, with mixed observational-interventional data, and across counterfactual data and estimands. Code is available at https://github.com/lbynum/metadentify.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Development and Initial Validation of the Quality of life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST) Assessment

Individuals with NF2-related schwannomatosis (NF2-SWN) experience a complex constellation of physical, emotional, and social symptoms that substantially impact quality of life (QoL). Although disease-specific patient-reported outcome measures are increasingly important for evaluating treatment benefit in clinical trials, existing NF2-SWN QoL measures have limitations in content coverage and sensitivity to change. This study describes the development and initial validation a new disease-specific QoL assessment – the Quality of Life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST). Using a three-phase, mixed-methods approach, items were generated through concept elicitation interviews with individuals with NF2-SWN and clinicians, prioritized via patient survey data, and refined through iterative cognitive debriefing procedures. The resulting 21-item QUEST assesses the extent to which NF2-SWN has negatively impacted a persons daily life over the past seven days. Initial psychometric evaluation was conducted in an international sample of 174 individuals with NF2-SWN aged 15 years and older (117 women (67%), 158 White individuals (89%)). Exploratory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure, and the total score demonstrated excellent internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. Evidence of construct validity was demonstrated through hypothesized associations with disease-specific, generic, and domain-specific QoL measures, as well as known-groups validity based on self-reported disease severity and number of prior surgeries. Incremental validity analyses indicated that QUEST explained unique variance beyond existing measures. Together, findings support the QUEST as a reliable and valid disease-specific QoL measure with strong content validity and feasibility for use as a clinical trial endpoint in NF2-SWN.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Formation of clusters and coarsening in weakly interacting diffusions

arXiv:2510.17629v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper studies the clustering behavior of weakly interacting diffusions under the influence of sufficiently localized attractive interaction potentials on the one-dimensional torus. We describe how this clustering behavior is closely related to the presence of discontinuous phase transitions in the mean-field PDE. For local attractive interactions, we employ a new variant of the strict Riesz rearrangement inequality to prove that all global minimizers of the free energy are either uniform or single-cluster states, in the sense that they are symmetrically decreasing. We analyze different timescales for the particle system and the mean-field (McKean-Vlasov) PDE, arguing that while the particle system can exhibit coarsening by both coalescence and diffusive mass exchange between clusters, the clusters in the mean-field PDE are unable to move and coarsening occurs via the mass exchange of clusters. By introducing a new model for this mass exchange, we argue that the PDE exhibits dynamical metastability. We conclude by presenting careful numerical experiments that demonstrate the validity of our model.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Machine-learning clustering of close-in exoplanet populations: links to pebble accretion

arXiv:2606.11737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Close-in exoplanets exhibit a wide range of orbital architectures and physical properties shaped by both formation conditions and migration processes. Although population-synthesis models predict distinct planetary populations, establishing a quantitative connection between observed exoplanets and synthetic populations remains challenging. We investigate the intrinsic organisation of close-in exoplanets using physically motivated dynamical parameters and connect the resulting populations to pebble-accretion formation pathways. A two-stage Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is applied to an observed sample of close-in exoplanets, performing unsupervised probabilistic clustering in a feature space dominated by dynamical descriptors of planet-star interactions. The resulting clusters are mapped onto a pebble-accretion synthetic population within a statistically motivated three-dimensional parameter space. Formation-related quantities, including gas availability, gas fraction, and ice-rock mass ratio, are then used to interpret the mapped populations. We identify statistically supported sub-populations without imposing predefined classification boundaries, including very-massive gas giants, hot giants, warm-Jupiter-dominated systems, and lower-mass giants. The mapped synthetic populations reveal systematic differences in formation timing, gas accretion, and solid growth histories. In particular, very-massive gas giants are preferentially associated with earlier formation epochs than hot-giant and warm-Jupiter-dominated populations. These results demonstrate that physically motivated machine-learning approaches can provide a statistically robust framework for linking observed exoplanet populations to theoretical planet formation pathways.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

County Year Informatics Model for Annual and Cumulative Unique Lung Cancer Screening Eligibility in Maryland, 2026 to 2045

Purpose: Population-level lung cancer screening programs require denominators that reflect age, smoking history, geography, and changing eligibility over time. We estimated annual prevalent and 20-year cumulative unique low-dose computed tomography screening eligibility for Maryland residents under alternative screening criteria. Methods: We built a deterministic cohort-cell stock-flow simulation using Maryland county-equivalent jurisdiction projections by age, sex, and race/ethnicity, with ACS socioeconomic/nativity covariates and smoking-history priors for ever-smoked status, pack-years, and quit-years. Scenarios included USPSTF 2013 legacy, USPSTF 2021, ACS 2023/2024, a risk-model-expanded sensitivity, and ever-smoked-only capacity stress tests. Cumulative unique eligibility counted people once at first eligibility rather than summing annual prevalent person-years. Results: Under USPSTF 2021, an estimated 238,346 Maryland residents were eligible in 2026 and 245,326 in 2045. The 20-year cumulative unique denominator was 768,668, whereas naively summing annual prevalent counts produced 4,850,735 person-years, a 6.31-fold overcount. ACS 2023/2024 expanded annual eligibility to 314,616 in 2026 and cumulative unique eligibility to 902,796 by adding remote former smokers. Ever-smoked-only adult eligibility was 1,957,699 in 2026 and 3,383,683 cumulative unique over 20 years. Conclusion: A Maryland statewide screening initiative should plan from cumulative unique eligibility and county-equivalent jurisdiction-specific burden rather than annual prevalence alone. Explicit pack-year and quit-year modeling materially changes statewide and county allocation compared with current-smoking proxy models.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Unified Framework for Structured Flow Modeling: From Representation to Verification and Model Discovery

Authors:

arXiv:2605.18250v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many dynamical systems can be described in terms of structured flows combining source/sink behavior, cyclic dynamics, and topology-constrained transport. These features arise across a wide range of physical, engineered, and data-driven systems. The objective of this work is to establish a unified perspective on such systems, to identify modeling approaches that balance expressivity, interpretability, computational complexity, and data requirements, and to investigate how highly expressive models can be used to uncover the dominant mechanisms underlying observed dynamics. Starting from the Helmholtz-Hodge decomposition of continuous vector fields, we review the recently proposed Graph Vector Field (GVF) framework and its discrete representation on simplicial complexes. We then introduce a hierarchy of alternative approaches, including parametric conditional models, linear graph dynamical systems, and reduced Hodge representations. Finally, we propose a verification and validation methodology based on benchmark datasets from well-understood physical systems and on systematic model-reduction and ablation studies. The resulting family of structured-flow models within a common framework, ranging from low-dimensional parametric representations to full GVF formulations, supports a diagnostic methodology in which gradient, curl, harmonic, and topological contributions are systematically assessed through ablation studies. This process enables the identification of dominant mechanisms underlying the observed dynamics and guides the construction of simplified models tailored to the available data and operational constraints. By separating structural verification, behavioral verification, and domain-specific validation, the proposed approach provides a foundation for scalable and interpretable analysis of complex dynamical systems across multiple application domains.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Natural-Language Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos is a Search Problem: A Benchmark and Empirical Decomposition

Temporal grounding–returning the interval $[t_s, t_e]$ for a natural-language query over a video–is the language interface to long-form video, yet has been studied on short videos; the dynamics of hour-scale natural-language grounding remain underexplored. We take the position that at hour-scale, the binding constraint is search, not recognition: Video-LLMs are bottlenecked not by localizing a nearby event, but–given a natural-language query–by searching for the relevant region of a long video. To test this, we release ExtremeWhenBench, the first open hour-scale grounding benchmark (2,273 queries over 194 videos, mean 75.7 min, max 9 hr) with an open-form query distribution. Every open Video-LLM collapses while a frame-level retrieval baseline outperforms them; a failure taxonomy attributes 85% of failures to search; and a retrieve-then-ground hybrid recovers 6.7x over the monolithic Video-LLM–mirroring retrieve-then-read in open-domain QA.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Hyperlipidemia Pharmacotherapy in Skilled Nursing Facilities: A Real-World Evidence Study

Objectives: To estimate hyperlipidemia medication order prevalence and associated variables in U.S. skilled nursing facility (SNF) residents. Design: Retrospective, observational study. Setting and Participants: Electronic Health Record data from 447,080 SNF residents with a hyperlipidemia diagnosis identified in PointClickCare's Life Sciences clinical database (January-April 2025) were reviewed. Methods: The presence and absence of medication orders for hyperlipidemia treatments recommended by the American Heart Association were assessed. Descriptive analyses summarized demographic and clinical characteristics, and a modified Poisson regression model was used to estimate risk ratios for having a medication order, adjusting for demographic, clinical, and facility characteristics. Results: Overall, 83.3% of residents diagnosed with hyperlipidemia had at least one hyperlipidemia medication order. Statins were ordered by 96.2% of active order residents, while other medication classes i.e., omega-3 fatty acids, cholesterol absorption inhibitors, fibrates were less common (

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

From Digital to Physical: Digital Agents as Autonomous Coaches for Physical Intelligence

arXiv:2601.21570v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The field of Embodied AI is witnessing a rapid evolution toward general-purpose robotic systems, fueled by high-fidelity simulation and large-scale data collection. However, this scaling capability remains severely bottlenecked by a reliance on labor-intensive manual oversight from intricate reward shaping to hyperparameter tuning across heterogeneous backends. Inspired by LLMs' success in software automation and science discovery, we introduce \textsc{EmboCoach-Bench}, a benchmark evaluating the capacity of LLM agents to autonomously engineer embodied policies. Spanning 32 expert-curated RL and IL tasks, our framework posits executable code as the universal interface. We move beyond static generation to assess a dynamic closed-loop workflow, where agents leverage environment feedback to iteratively draft, debug, and optimize solutions, spanning improvements from physics-informed reward design to policy architectures such as diffusion policies. Extensive evaluations yield three critical insights: (1) autonomous agents can qualitatively surpass human-engineered baselines by 26.5\% in average success rate; (2) agentic workflow with environment feedback effectively strengthens policy development and substantially narrows the performance gap between open-source and proprietary models; and (3) agents exhibit self-correction capabilities for pathological engineering cases, successfully resurrecting task performance from near-total failures through iterative simulation-in-the-loop debugging. Ultimately, this work establishes a foundation for self-evolving embodied intelligence, accelerating the paradigm shift from labor-intensive manual tuning to scalable, autonomous engineering in embodied AI field.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DART: A design-aware microfluidic chip paradigm for real-time live-cell image analysis

High-throughput microfluidic live-cell imaging generates rich single-cell data. Yet semi-automated procedures for locating regions of interest (RoIs), each containing one cell population, and removing surrounding microfluidic structures from recorded images, scale with the number of RoIs. This prevents real-time image analysis and delays time-to-insight by hours to days. We introduce the Design-Aware and Real-Time capable (DART) paradigm for microfluidic cultivation chips, which aligns the CAD blueprint with the physical chip and thereby enables throughput-independent localization of all RoIs and fully automated image processing across diverse RoI geometries and chip layouts. DART establishes this alignment through embedded fiducial markers and deep-learning-based marker detection. We validate DART using the Swiss Army Knife chip, which combines eight structurally distinct RoI designs across 1164 RoI locations. DART localizes all RoIs in five minutes, removes microfluidic structures from raw microscopy images in 40 ms, and performs fully automated image analysis, including cell segmentation, in under 1.1 s per image. Together, these capabilities establish DART as an end-to-end hardware-software paradigm with real-time-capable analysis that paves the way toward closed-loop and outcome-driven smart microscopy.