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.CV) 2026-06-16

All Eyes on the Workflow: Automated and Efficient Event Discovery from Video Streams

Disciplines such as business process management and process mining aid organizations by discovering insights about processes on the basis of recorded event data. However, an obstacle to process analysis is data multi-modality: for instance, data in video form are not directly interpretable as events. Existing approaches rely on a dictionary of activity label as input, cannot provide frame-by-frame labeling explanations, or rely on superseded computer vision techniques. In this work, we present SnapLog, an approach to extract event data from videos by converting frames to feature vectors using image embeddings and performing temporal segmentation through frame-wise similarity matrices. A generalized few-shot classification is then used to assign labels to the video segments, yielding labeled, timestamped sub-sequences of frames that are interpretable as events. Conventional process mining techniques can be used to analyze the resulting data. We show that our approach produces logs that accurately reflect the process in the videos.

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

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

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

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

Random Grover Search

arXiv:2606.11759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Grover's algorithm achieves a quadratic speedup for unstructured search given a global oracle for the target set. In many applications, however, the target set is specified as the intersection of multiple constraint sets. Constructing a global oracle for the intersection can be costly, whereas the individual constraint oracles are often much simpler to implement. We study a randomized Grover search algorithm that directly uses these constraint oracles. At each iteration, one of the corresponding Grover operators is selected at random. For the two-operator case with uniform sampling, we prove that the success probability approaches one after \[ \Theta \left(\frac\pi4\sqrt{\frac{N}{r}}\right) \] iterations, where $r$ is the size of the intersection. Thus, the algorithm achieves the same asymptotic query complexity as standard Grover search but without requiring a global oracle. We then generalize the analysis to arbitrary sampling distributions and an arbitrary number of Grover operators through an auxiliary operator that approximates the expected Grover evolution, while retaining the same asymptotic complexity. We further show that highly biased sampling distributions can still achieve near-unit success probability, enabling cheaper Grover operators to be used more frequently. Finally, we prove asymptotic optimality and support the theoretical results with numerical simulations.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Developing and Evaluating an Online Educational Program for Falls Prevention Care in Community Optometric Primary Care Settings: A Pilot Study

Introduction Globally, falls are the leading cause of injury hospitalisation, with vision being a significant falls risk factor. Community optometrists, as primary eye care professionals, are well positioned to contribute to falls prevention care. However, scant studies have evaluated if education could enable optometrists to incorporate falls prevention care into practice. This two-phase pilot study aimed to design and develop an online education program for community optometrists to deliver primary falls prevention care and to evaluate optometrists reaction to, and learning from, the education. Methods In phase one, an education program was designed by optometrists and falls experts and published online. In phase two, community optometrists were recruited through convenience sampling to undertake the education. Guided by the New World Kirkpatrick model(R) of training evaluation, reaction and learning were evaluated using pre/post surveys. Quantitative data were analysed using Wilcoxon sign-rank tests and McNemar Exact Tests and qualitative responses using inductive content analysis. Results Participants (n=13) reported high levels of satisfaction and engagement with the online education and unanimously endorsed its relevance to clinical practice. Participants demonstrated significantly improved knowledge and awareness of falls prevention post-education, compared to pre-education and were significantly more confident to enact falls prevention care. Perceived enablers to providing falls prevention care included having access to practical resources and ongoing education. Time constraints during consultation and cost to patients for further care if subsequent referrals were made were identified as possible barriers to providing falls prevention care. Conclusion Online education improved community optometrists knowledge and confidence to provide falls prevention care. Further research that evaluates the effectiveness of continuing education for optometrists to enact falls prevention care into practice is required.

06.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Particle Filtering for Non-Deterministic Electrocardiographic Imaging

arXiv:2509.19404v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Electrocardiographic imaging (ECGI) aims to non-invasively reconstruct activation maps of the heart from temporal body surface potentials. While most existing approaches rely on inverse and optimization techniques that may yield satisfactory reconstructions, they typically provide a single deterministic solution, overlooking the inherent uncertainty of the problem stemming from its very ill-posed nature, the poor knowledge of biophysical features and the unavoidable presence of noise in the measurements. The Bayesian framework, which naturally incorporates uncertainty while also accounting for temporal correlations across time steps, can be used to address this limitation. In this work, we propose a low-dimensional representation of the activation sequence that enables the use of particle filtering, a Bayesian filtering method that does not rely on predefined assumptions regarding the shape of the posterior distribution, in contrast to approaches like the Kalman filter. This allows to produce not only activation maps but also probabilistic maps indicating the likelihood of activation at each point on the heart over time, as well as pseudo-probability maps reflecting the likelihood of a point being part of an earliest activation site. Additionally, we introduce a method to estimate the probability of the presence of a conduction lines of block on the heart surface. Combined with classical reconstruction techniques, this could help discriminate artificial from true lines of block in activation maps. We support our approach with a numerical study based on simulated data, demonstrating the potential of our method.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Non-Hermitian Delocalization Realizes Random Dirac Criticality in One Dimension

arXiv:2606.12089v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems can evade Anderson localization and exhibit delocalized states even in one dimension. Here, we show that such non-Hermitian delocalized states under periodic boundary conditions (PBC) are intrinsically critical, realizing the universality class of one-dimensional random Dirac fermions. By linking spectral winding to topological Anderson transitions via Hermitization, we demonstrate that the delocalized PBC states exhibit a Dirac-type criticality with universal algebraic correlations. In contrast to Hermitian systems, where this criticality occurs only at fine-tuned transition points, it emerges generically in non-Hermitian systems as a consequence of spectral topology. These results identify a universal mechanism by which non-Hermiticity promotes criticality, providing a unified description of non-Hermitian delocalization in one dimension.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

arXiv:2606.18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort. Pre-Large Language Model (LLM) automation sped up this process, but could not resolve the complex language and multi-step attack patterns found in unstructured CTI reports. LLMs addressed previous limitations by using contextual reasoning to understand unstructured text. However, current evaluations rely on simplified, single-technique sentences that ignore the complexity of real-world CTI reports, which often leads to inflated performance results. Consequently, the baseline performance of open-source LLMs on complex unstructured CTI reports remains unevaluated. To address this gap, we constructed a ground-truth dataset of 2,076 human-annotated sentences (1,281 technique-positive, 795 negative) from 83 complex unstructured CTI reports. These sentences were mapped to 114 unique ATT&CK techniques using a six-phase annotation process, achieving \k{appa} = 0.68 inter-annotator agreement. Using this dataset, we evaluated seven open-source LLMs ranging from 8B to 236B parameters across prompt strategy and temperature configurations. The highest-performing LLM achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.22, establishing the empirical baseline for multi-label ATT&CK classification on complex unstructured CTI. Parameter size showed a statistically significant positive correlation with F1 score. Prompt strategy and temperature produced no statistically significant gains across model configurations. These results indicate that current open-source LLMs are insufficient for production-grade ATT&CK classification. The dataset, benchmark, and findings provide a reproducible foundation for future CTI research.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

VLGA: Vision-Language-Geometry-Action Models for Autonomous Driving

Vision-language-action (VLA) models can describe scenes and reason about them in language, yet still struggle to ground their actions in the dense 3D world around them. Existing approaches either inject features from a frozen 3D foundation model without an objective that ensures the policy uses them, or constrain geometry with sparse box and map losses that provide no dense spatial signal. We introduce VLGA, the first vision-language-action model supervised to reconstruct the dense 3D world it drives through. VLGA introduces geometry as a fourth modality alongside vision, language, and action through a dedicated expert supervised by a per-pixel pointmap regression loss against LiDAR. Extensive experiments conducted on challenging nuScenes and Bench2Drive datasets for open-loop and closed-loop evaluations, respectively, show the superiority of VLGA over counterpart VLA methods. In particular, on open-loop nuScenes, VLGA sets a new state of the art among VLA methods without ego status, with the lowest L2 (0.50\,m average) and 3-second collision rate (0.18\%). On closed-loop Bench2Drive, VLGA attains the state-of-the-art driving score of 79.08, +0.71 over the strongest prior VLA, at comparable efficiency and comfort.

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

Mechanical Conscience: A Mathematical Framework for Dependability of Machine Intelligenc

arXiv:2605.03847v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Distributed collaborative intelligence (DCI), encompassing edge-to-edge architectures, federated learning, transfer learning, and swarm systems, creates environments in which emergent risk is structurally unavoidable: locally correct decisions by individual agents compose into globally unacceptable behavioral trajectories under uncertainty. Existing approaches such as constrained optimization, safe reinforcement learning, and runtime assurance evaluate acceptability at the level of individual actions rather than across behavioral trajectories, and none addresses the multi-participant, uncertainty-laden nature of DCI deployments. This paper introduces mechanical conscience (MC), a novel concept and simplified mathematical framework that operationalizes trajectory-level normative regulation for both single-agent and distributed intelligent systems. Mechanical conscience is defined as a supervisory filter that minimally corrects a baseline policy's actions to reduce cumulative deviation from a normatively admissible region, while accounting for epistemic uncertainty. We introduce associated constructs, conscience score, mechanical guilt, and resonant dependability, that provide an interpretable vocabulary and computable governance signals for this emerging field. Core theoretical properties are established: admissibility equivalence, existence of optimal regulation, and monotonic deviation reduction. Illustrative results demonstrate that MC-regulated agents maintain trajectory-level normative acceptability where conventional controllers drift outside admissible bounds, and that the framework naturally extends to suppress interaction-induced emergent risk in multi-agent DCI settings.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Exponential speedup in quantum simulation of Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian via orbifold lattice

arXiv:2506.00755v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate that the orbifold lattice Hamiltonian – an approach known for its efficiency in simulating SU($N$) Yang-Mills theory and QCD on digital quantum computers – can reproduce the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian in a controlled limit. While the original Kogut-Susskind approach faces significant implementation challenges on quantum hardware, we show that it emerges naturally as the infinite scalar mass limit of the orbifold lattice formulation, even at finite lattice spacing. Our analysis provides both a general analytical framework applicable to SU($N$) gauge theories in arbitrary dimensions and specific numerical evidence for $(2+1)$-dimensional SU($N$) Yang-Mills theories ($N=2,3$). Using Euclidean path integral methods, we quantify the convergence rate by comparing the standard Wilson action with the orbifold lattice action, matching lattice parameters, and systematically extrapolating results as the bare scalar mass approaches infinity. This reformulation resolves longstanding technical obstacles and offers a straightforward implementation protocol for digital quantum simulation of the Kogut-Susskind Hamiltonian with exponential speedup compared to classical methods and previously known quantum methods, modulo a standard assumptions made also for the original Kogut-Susskind approach.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

UMA-Split: unimodal aggregation for both English and Mandarin non-autoregressive speech recognition

This paper proposes a unimodal aggregation (UMA) based nonautoregressive model for both English and Mandarin speech recognition. The original UMA explicitly segments and aggregates acoustic frames (with unimodal weights that first monotonically increase and then decrease) of the same text token to learn better representations than regular connectionist temporal classification (CTC). However, it only works well in Mandarin. It struggles with other languages, such as English, for which a single syllable may be tokenized into multiple fine-grained tokens, or a token spans fewer than 3 acoustic frames and fails to form unimodal weights. To address this problem, we propose allowing each UMA-aggregated frame map to multiple tokens, via a simple split module that generates two tokens from each aggregated frame before computing the CTC loss.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning Patient-Specific Disease Dynamics with Latent Flow Matching for Longitudinal Imaging Generation

Understanding disease progression is a central clinical challenge with direct implications for early diagnosis and personalized treatment. While recent generative approaches have attempted to model progression, key mismatches remain: disease dynamics are inherently continuous and monotonic, yet latent representations are often scattered, lacking semantic structure, and diffusion-based models disrupt continuity with random denoising process. In this work, we propose to treat the disease dynamic as a velocity field and leverage Flow Matching (FM) to align the temporal evolution of patient data. Unlike prior methods, it captures the intrinsic dynamic of disease, making the progression more interpretable. However, a key challenge remains: in latent space, Auto-Encoders (AEs) do not guarantee alignment across patients or correlation with clinical-severity indicators (e.g., age and disease conditions). To address this, we propose to learn patient-specific latent alignment, which enforces patient trajectories to lie along a specific axis, with magnitude increasing monotonically with disease severity. This leads to a consistent and semantically meaningful latent space. Together, we present $\Delta$-LFM, a framework for modeling patient-specific latent progression with flow matching. Across three longitudinal MRI benchmarks, $\Delta$-LFM demonstrates strong empirical performance and, more importantly, offers a new framework for interpreting and visualizing disease dynamics.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists. We study LLM decision-making in a travel-assistant context by presenting models with choice dilemmas and analyzing their responses using multinomial logit models to derive implied willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. These WTP values are subsequently compared to human benchmark values from the economics literature. In addition to a baseline setting, we examine how model behavior changes under more realistic conditions, including the provision of information about users' past choices and persona-based prompting. Our results show that while meaningful WTP values can be derived for larger LLMs, they also display systematic deviations at the attribute level. Additionally, they tend to overestimate human WTP overall, particularly when expensive options or business-oriented personas are introduced. Conditioning models on prior preferences for cheaper options yields valuations that are closer to human benchmarks. Overall, our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of using LLMs for subjective decision support and underscore the importance of careful model selection, prompt design, and user representation when deploying such systems in practice.

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

RealityBridge: Bridging Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting Driving Simulations and Real-World Videos

Long-tail hazardous scenarios are essential for safety-oriented autonomous driving, yet they are difficult to collect and reproduce at scale. Editable 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) simulation offers a promising alternative by reconstructing real driving scenes and supporting controllable scene editing. However, edited 3DGS-rendered videos still suffer from a significant Sim-to-Real gap, including rendering artifacts, degraded foreground assets, inconsistent illumination, and temporal flickering. Existing restoration and video generation methods are insufficient for this task, as they often fail to jointly repair 3DGS-specific artifacts, improve visual realism, and ensure temporal consistency. To fill this gap, we propose RealityBridge, a structure-preserving and asset-aware Sim-to-Real framework for edited 3DGS driving videos. RealityBridge uses multimodal controls, including rendered videos, foreground masks, edge maps, and semantic masks, together with a lightweight GateNet for adaptive condition allocation across backbone layers. We further construct targeted training data and introduce autoregressive long-video training with reward-guided post-training to improve restoration quality, temporal stability, and hallucination suppression. Extensive experiments on internal and public driving datasets show that RealityBridge outperforms existing methods in artifact removal, illumination harmonization, and long-sequence temporal consistency.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

SL-S4Wave: Self-Supervised Learning of Physiological Waveforms with Structured State Space Models

arXiv:2606.19888v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modeling long-sequence medical time series data, such as electrocardiograms (ECG), poses significant challenges due to high sampling rates, multichannel signal complexity, inherent noise, and limited labeled data. While recent self-supervised learning (SSL) methods, based on various encoder architectures such as convolutional neural networks, have been proposed to learn representations from unlabeled data, they often fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and noise-invariant features. Structured state space models (S4) excel at long-sequence modeling, but existing S4 architectures fail to capture the unique characteristics of multichannel physiological waveforms. In this work, we propose SL-S4Wave, a self-supervised learning framework that combines contrastive learning with a tailored encoder built on structured state space models. The encoder incorporates multi-layer global convolution using multiscale subkernels, enabling the capture of both fine-grained local patterns and long-range temporal dependencies in noisy, high-resolution multichannel waveforms. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that SL-S4Wave (1) consistently outperforms state-of-the-art supervised and self-supervised baselines in a challenging arrhythmia detection task, (2) achieves high performance with significantly fewer labeled examples, showcasing strong label efficiency, and (3) maintains robust performance on long waveform segments, highlighting its capacity to model complex temporal dynamics in long sequences that most existing approaches fail to efficiently model, and (4) transfers effectively to unseen arrhythmia types, underscoring its robust cross-domain generalization. We additionally evaluate SL-S4Wave on multiple EEG tasks, achieving superior performance over strong baselines, demonstrating generalizability of our approach beyond cardiac waveforms.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Scaling-optimal purification of noisy qubit unitary channels

arXiv:2606.12394v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of purifying noisy qubit unitary channels. Given the ability to apply an unknown qubit unitary channel followed by depolarizing noise, we aim to construct a superchannel that purifies the noisy unitary back to the original unknown unitary. We first provide numerical evidence that sequential strategies can strictly outperform parallel strategies when the number of channel uses is finite, highlighting the fundamental distinction from state purification. We then provide a concrete $\mathrm{U}(2)$-covariant parallel protocol based on a novel entanglement-assisted quantum error-correcting code that suppresses the first-order noise strength as $O(1/n)$ with $n$ channel uses and show this scaling is asymptotically optimal in the low-noise regime, even when sequential strategies are allowed.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Higher moments of intrinsic volumes of random beta-prime polytopes

arXiv:2603.22224v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We consider beta-prime polytopes, i.e., the convex hulls of iid random points chosen according to beta-prime distributions in $\mathbb{R}^d$. After suitable scaling, beta-prime polytopes converge in distribution to the convex hulls of Poisson point processes with power-law intensity functions. We prove moment convergence for the volume and all intrinsic volumes. Beta-prime polytopes are the push-forwards of spherical random polytopes on the upper open half-sphere of the unit sphere $S^d\subset \mathbb{R}^{d+1}$. We prove convergence of moments of the spherical volume difference of the half-sphere and the spherical random polytopes.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets

LLMs are powerful generators of synthetic data, which are used for training smaller, specific models. This is especially valuable for low-resource languages, where human-labelled data is scarce but LLMs can still produce high-quality text. However, LLMs differ in how useful their outputs are for training. Selecting the best LLM as a generator is challenging because extrinsic evaluation requires costly human annotations (which are often unavailable for low-resource languages), while intrinsic metrics correlate poorly with downstream performance. We introduce Round robin Synthetic data Evaluation (RoSE), a proxy metric for selecting the best LLM generator without human test sets. RoSE trains a small model on the outputs of a candidate generator (LLM) and then evaluates it on generated synthetic examples from all other candidate LLMs. The final RoSE score is the mean performance of this small model. Across six LLMs, eleven languages, and three tasks (sentiment, topic, intent), RoSE identifies the optimal generator more often than any other intrinsic heuristics. RoSE outperforms intrinsic heuristics and comes within 0.76 percentage points of the optimal generator baseline. This result is measured in terms of downstream performance, obtained by training a small model on the chosen generator's outputs (optimal vs. proxy metric selected) and evaluating it on human-labelled test data. Additionally, RoSE is the only metric to achieve a positive correlation with performance on human test data.

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

LLM Judges Have Dark Current: A Psychometric Datasheet for LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

LLM-as-a-judge systems are now routinely used for open-ended model evaluation, where human preference annotation is costly, slow, and difficult to reproduce. Yet these judges are often reported as scalar accuracy, win-rate, or agreement devices. We argue that a judge should instead be reported as a measurement instrument. We introduce a Judge Datasheet protocol that measures dark current under true-vacuum inputs, stable cross-sensitivity to same-quality surface variation, positional false preference, target sensitivity on a controlled quality ladder, and the criterion or operating point induced by tie instructions. The direction-stability decomposition reveals that apparent Delta0 preference can be stable surface response or disguised position bias. In a three-judge open-weight case study, Llama-3.1-8B shows high dark current and presentation-conflicted Delta0 behavior, Qwen2.5-14B is vacuum-clean and target-sensitive but mixes stable and positional over-discrimination, and Qwen2.5-32B is vacuum-clean with low stable cross-sensitivity and low positional false preference. A strict tie criterion eliminates Qwen32B Delta0 false preference but absorbs marginal Delta1 target signals into ties while preserving Delta5 sensitivity. The results show that prompting moves the criterion, not the resolution. We do not claim that the downstream mechanism hypothesis that motivated this work is confirmed; the contribution is a metrological protocol for measuring the measuring device before downstream claims are made.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Genetic basis of dynamic brain states reveals cellular and disease associations

Dynamic resting-state fMRI captures the time-varying patterns of brain activity that are obscured by static approaches. Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) characterise these dynamics as recurring whole-brain states and quantify their fractional occupancy (FO), the proportion of time spent in each state, yet the biological basis of inter-individual variation in FO remains unclear. Using data from 52,335 White UK Biobank participants, with replication in East and South Asian subsamples, this study examined the heritability, cellular and neurotransmitter basis of brain states, and their links with complex phenotypes. FO was significantly heritable and enriched for neuronal populations, particularly glutamatergic and GABAergic signalling. Analyses identified shared and state-specific loci and revealed genetic correlations, colocalisation, and potential causal relationships between FO and several phenotypes, including educational attainment, sleep duration, and disease risk. These findings establish dynamic brain states as biologically grounded intermediate phenotypes, linking genetic variation to neural dynamics, diseases and traits.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The Target48 Neurodegeneration Panel: A Novel Tool for Profiling Protein Signatures in Neurodegenerative Disorders

Introduction: Novel tools for absolute quantification of established and emerging fluid neuro-biomarkers are required to advance diagnostic studies and improve biological insights. Methods: We conducted an extensive analytical and clinical validation of the Olink Target 48 Neurodegeneration panel (T48 Neuropanel) in 352 paired CSF and plasma samples from cognitively unimpaired controls (CU), Alzheimer dementia (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), n=44 per group. Comparisons with benchmark assays were performed. Results: Good detectability (CSF: 31 out of 42 assays; plasma: 38 out of 42 assays) and technical performance was observed. Benchmark assays showed good correlations, supporting method transformation formulas. Next to emerging biomarkers (MMP10, ITGB2), discriminative performance was excellent in AD: CSF pTau217: AUC=1; FTD: plasma NfL: AUC=0.952; and DLB: CSF DDC: AUC=0.901. Discussion: This analytical and clinical validation of the T48 Neuropanel highlights initial cut-offs and emerging biomarkers to aid clinical studies for the diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases. Highlights: The T48 Neuropanel shows robust analytical performance, with high detectability across both plasma and CSF matrices. The T48 Neuropanel validates established (i.e., pTau217, Abeta42, NfL, and GFAP) and emerging biomarkers (i.e., DDC, MMP10, ITGB2, ITGAM, NPTX2, NPTXR, SMOC1, sTREM1, and sTREM2) in CSF and plasma. CSF NfL, GFAP, ITGB2, and ITGAM and plasma GFAP were dysregulated across AD, FTD, and DLB dementias. -The multiplex design of the T48 Neuropanel enables rich biological interpretation by simultaneously quantifying established and emerging neurodegeneration biomarkers. Importantly, the inclusion of absolute quantification facilitates the establishment of cut-offs, supporting its potential for clinical translation.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Rigorous extension of semilocal collinear functionals to noncollinear DFT using $SU(2)$ rotations

arXiv:2605.31203v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the presence of spin-orbit coupling and in geometrically frustrated materials, a noncollinear treatment the magnetization density is essential. However, in density functional theory most exchange–correlation functional approximations were originally developed for locally collinear magnetization. Many practical approaches to noncollinear DFT have emerged over the past decade. However, a first-principles connection between widely used semilocal collinear functionals and their noncollinear generalizations remains lacking. In this work, a locally exact relation between collinear and noncollinear exchange–correlation functionals is derived at the level of gradient expansions within a $u(2)$ matrix representation of the energy functional. Within this framework, collinear semilocal variables naturally acquire distinct dependencies on transverse and longitudinal magnetization gradient components. The widely used Scalmani–Frisch scheme emerges as a first-order approximation. The transformation of collinear functional derivatives to noncollinear space is implemented through numerically robust $SU(2)$ rotations. A consistent description of local magnetic torques is demonstrated for the prototypical spin-frustrated Cr$_3$ cluster. The approach further extends to fully nonlocal functionals and provides a direct route towards numerically stable relativistic response calculations. The influence on magnetic properties in presence of spin-orbit coupling is illustrated through calculations of hyperfine couplings in the high-spin ground states of uranium and the uranium ion.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

ORCA: A Platform for Open-Source Dexterity Research

arXiv:2606.14561v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotics manipulation research increasingly focuses on two-finger parallel grippers for their effectiveness, affordability, and ease of teleoperation. Grippers are nonetheless limited by their form factor, often requiring bimanual setups even for simple reorientation tasks. Anthropomorphic hands are a more natural platform for dexterous robot learning – closer to the human hand, and capable of learning from human video – yet they remain hard to use in learning research: even where open and accessible hand hardware exists, the software for control, simulation, teleoperation, and retargeting is scattered in one-off code bases, and largely disconnected from the robot-learning ecosystem. In this work, we introduce the \orca~learning stack, an open-source research stack for dexterity as a first-class robot learning domain. Our \orca~stack unifies low-level control, simulation, teleoperation from a range of consumer platforms, and hand retargeting, behind a single interface, and integrates natively with popular robot-learning frameworks such as \lerobot, so dexterous hand researchers can leverage the same data, training, and evaluation pipelines used for non-dexterous robot learning. We demonstrate a complete end-to-end workflow, collecting expert demonstrations of an in-hand reorientation task by teleoperation with a consumer-grade VR headset, training an autonomous policy with \lerobot, and evaluating the learned policy in a fully reproducible and observable setup. We open-source the entire stack as a shared, reproducible foundation for dexterous-manipulation research.