Paper Plaza - AcademicHub

01.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18246

Variable-Width Transformers

Authors:

Zhaofeng Wu ↗Oliver Sieberling ↗Shawn Tan ↗Rameswar Panda ↗Yury Polyanskiy ↗Yoon Kim ↗

Scaling model size, specifically depth and width, has driven significant progress in transformer-based language models. However, most architectures maintain a constant width across all layers, allocating a fixed parameter and computation budget evenly despite different layers potentially playing distinct computational roles. In this work, we empirically investigate nonuniform capacity allocation across network depth by proposing a $\times$-shaped >

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02.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2512.24838

CropTrack: A Tracking with Re-Identification Framework for Precision Agriculture

Authors:

Md Ahmed Al Muzaddid ↗Jordan A. James ↗William J. Beksi ↗

Multiple-object tracking (MOT) in agricultural environments presents major challenges due to repetitive patterns, similar object appearances, sudden illumination changes, and frequent occlusions. Contemporary trackers in this domain rely on the motion of objects rather than appearance for association. Nevertheless, they struggle to maintain object identities when targets undergo frequent and strong occlusions. The high similarity of object appearances makes integrating appearance-based association nontrivial for agricultural scenarios. To solve this problem we propose CropTrack, a novel MOT framework based on the combination of appearance and motion information. CropTrack integrates a reranking-enhanced appearance association, a one-to-many association with appearance-based conflict resolution strategy, and an exponential moving average prototype feature bank to improve appearance-based association. Evaluated on publicly available agricultural MOT datasets, CropTrack demonstrates consistent identity preservation, outperforming traditional motion-based tracking methods. Compared to the state of the art, CropTrack achieves significant gains in association accuracy and identification precision scores with a lower number of identity switches.

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03.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11625

TimeRouter: Efficient and Adaptive Routing of Time-Series Foundation Models

Authors:

Kanghui Ning ↗Yushan Jiang ↗Kashif Rasul ↗Anderson Schneider ↗Yuriy Nevmyvaka ↗Dongjin Song ↗

arXiv:2606.11625v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models (TSFMs) are increasingly explored as predictive experts within emerging agentic time-series systems. However, TSFMs exhibit heterogeneous inductive biases, and no single model consistently dominates across forecasting regimes, making expert selection a critical challenge. Existing systems often delegate this decision to LLM-based controllers, incurring substantial inference overhead. We present TimeRouter, an efficient routing framework that leverages empirical complementarity across a pool of pretrained TSFMs through lightweight discriminative routing, selective gating, and ensemble fallback. Concretely, TimeRouter combines a learned routing head, a selective gate, and an ensemble fallback, enabling adaptive expert selection without invoking an LLM at inference time. TimeRouter achieves state-of-the-art performance on the GIFT-EVAL leaderboard, with an LB MASE of 0.6765. Beyond benchmark performance, our ablation studies provide empirical insights into TSFM routing design, highlighting the importance of pool composition and selective gating. Taken together, these results position TimeRouter as a modular and lightweight routing layer for future agentic time-series systems built upon foundation-model pools. Our code is available at https://github.com/UConn-DSIS/TimeRouter.

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04.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:6cfb10c2f2558e76de3f2b39e6040e03

Changes in hierarchical brain dynamics of rumination following mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression

Authors:

Dagnino ↗P. C ↗van der Velden ↗A. M ↗Ruhe ↗H. G ↗Kuyken ↗Kringelbach ↗M. L ↗Vohryzek ↗Deco ↗

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a leading cause of disability worldwide with risk of onset and recurrence linked to depressive ruminative thought patterns. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) is an evidence-based treatment for depression that targets the ability to recognise, decenter, and disengage from ruminative thought patterns. Elucidating how MBCT impacts hierarchical brain organisation may be key to understanding the processes by which MBCT can modulate ruminative tendencies. In a randomised controlled functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) trial on individuals with MDD (N=80) before and after MBCT in addition to treatment as usual (TAU), we investigated changes in hierarchical brain organisation during resting-state and rumination. We built whole-brain models to obtain generative connectivity (GEC) matrices per patient and quantified brain hierarchy by measuring the global directedness and regional trophic levels in each GEC, in which greater directedness reflects more directional information flow and less recurrence. Global directedness in MBCT+TAU compared to TAU increased during rumination, with no changes during resting-state. Furthermore, increased regional breadth of hierarchy during rumination was related to improvements in clinical and behavioural outcomes following MBCT+TAU. Increased brain hierarchy during rumination following mindfulness training may be consistent with a shift away from self-reinforcing negative mental loops towards more differentiated and less coupled cognitive and bodily cycles, supporting MBCT's ability to interrupt ruminative processes. Hierarchical brain dynamics may hold promise as a treatment-sensitive marker and a potential mechanism of therapeutic change in MBCT for depression.

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05.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:91e4e28b33e66a1a760ee15a8237b090

A non-invasive liquid biopsy resolves the diagnostic blind spot in chronic kidney disease

Authors:

Nishimura ↗Harita ↗Hirakawa ↗Takizawa ↗Fujishiro ↗Ogawa ↗Kajiho ↗Kanda ↗Kushima ↗Omori ↗Hamasaki ↗Gotoh ↗…

Chronic kidney disease is a major global health burden, and its early detection is critical for delaying progression to kidney failure using recently developed targeted therapies. However, current diagnostic screening relies heavily on blood markers that are confounded by muscle mass, and on urine tests that frequently miss structural damage occurring without protein leakage. This creates a critical diagnostic blind spot that hinders timely intervention. Here we show a non-invasive liquid biopsy platform that quantifies a specific protein marker, MUC1, on urinary extracellular vesicles to accurately assess renal parenchymal integrity. By bypassing the systemic metabolic noise of traditional blood tests, our assay provides a remarkably stable, person-specific functional signature. Following extensive validation across diverse cohorts, our longitudinal analysis demonstrated that the discrepancy between this novel urine-based readout and standard blood tests unmasks hidden renal vulnerability, successfully predicting rapid functional decline. By comprehensively evaluating both tubular and glomerular integrity from a single spot urine sample, these findings establish a completely non-invasive, highly scalable prescreening tool that resolves the diagnostic blind spot, enabling broader early detection strategies and ushering in a new era of proactive risk management.

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06.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2602.11453

From Noise to Order: Learning to Rank via Denoising Diffusion

Authors:

Sajad Ebrahimi ↗Bhaskar Mitra ↗Negar Arabzadeh ↗Ye Yuan ↗Haolun Wu ↗Fattane Zarrinkalam ↗Ebrahim Bagheri ↗

arXiv:2602.11453v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) methods have traditionally been limited to discriminative machine learning approaches that model the probability of the document being relevant to the query given some feature representation of the query-document pair. We propose an alternative denoising diffusion-based generative approach to LTR that instead models the full joint distribution over features and relevance labels. While in discriminative LTR, an over-parameterized ranking model may find different ways to fit the training data, we posit that candidate solutions that can explain the full data distribution under the generative setting maybe better at estimating relevance. Thus, we propose DiffusionRank that extends TabDiff, an existing diffusion model for tabular datasets, to create generative alternatives to classical discriminative pointwise and pairwise LTR objectives. Our work demonstrates improvements from DiffusionRank over discriminative counterparts on four standard LTR datasets and points to a rich space for future exploration to leverage ongoing advancements in deep generative models for LTR. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/sadjadeb/DiffusionRank.

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07.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2504.11171

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

Authors:

arXiv:2504.11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) – the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output – and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16960

SurroundNEXO: Ego-Centric Metric Bridging for Spatially Consistent Geometry in Autonomous Driving

Authors:

Shuai Yuan ↗Runxi Tang ↗Yuzhou Ji ↗Fudong Ge ↗Hanshi Wang ↗Yifei Wang ↗Xianming Zeng ↗Jianyun Xu ↗Xingliang Liu ↗Yanfeng Wang ↗Zhipeng Zhang ↗

Modern autonomous driving depends on accurate metric 3D understanding for perception, reconstruction, and planning, which in turn requires reliable multi-camera depth prediction. However, the outward-facing nature of vehicle-mounted surround-view camera rigs inherently limits visual overlap across views, challenging the correspondence-based assumptions that underpin conventional multi-view geometry. To bridge this gap, we present SurroundNEXO, named after the Spanish word nexo for a geometric link, a low-overlap multi-camera metric depth framework that grounds cross-view reasoning in ego-centric geometry rather than dense visual correspondences. Instead of directly enforcing early global fusion, SurroundNEXO first assigns image tokens globally comparable ego-frame viewing directions through Ego-Ray Positional Encoding, then uses sparse LiDAR measurements as metric anchors to propagate absolute scale cues, and finally expands feature interaction progressively from view-local modeling to decomposed spatio-temporal reasoning and global integration. This design enables metric-scale depth prediction with improved spatial consistency across weakly overlapping cameras. Across low-overlap autonomous driving benchmarks, including NuScenes, Waymo and DDAD, SurroundNEXO reduces single-view error by 33.2%, improves cross-view consistency by 10.5%, and enhances metric reconstruction quality by 25.6% compared with SOTA methods. It further remains robust under extremely sparse depth prompts and exhibits strong zero-shot generalization to unseen camera layouts.

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09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2511.14897

HULFSynth : An INR based Super-Resolution and Ultra Low-Field MRI Synthesis via Contrast factor estimation

Authors:

Pranav Indrakanti ↗Luca Trautmann ↗Ivor Simpson ↗

We present an unsupervised single image bidirectional Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) synthesizer that synthesizes an Ultra-Low Field (ULF) like image from a High-Field (HF) magnitude image and vice-versa. Unlike existing MRI synthesis models, our approach is inspired by the physics that drives contrast changes between HF and ULF MRIs. Our forward model simulates a HF to ULF transformation by estimating the tissue-type Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) values based on target contrast values. For the Super-Resolution task, we used an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to synthesize HF image by simultaneously predicting tissue-type segmentations and image intensity without observed HF data. The proposed method is evaluated using synthetic ULF-like data from generated from standard 3T T$_1$-weighted images for qualitative assessments and paired 3T-64mT T$_1$-weighted images for validation experiments. WM-GM contrast improved by 52% in synthetic ULF-like images and 37% in 64mT images. Sensitivity experiments demonstrated the robustness of our forward model to variations in target contrast, noise and initial seeding.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16667

Look Again Before You Abstain:Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition for Reliable Vision-Language Model

Authors:

Jian Xu ↗Delu Zeng ↗John Paisley ↗Qibin Zhao ↗

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) hallucinate: they assert visual details that the image does not support. A principled remedy is selective prediction with a distribution-free guarantee-verify each claim and abstain when the claim is not grounded, so that the hallucination rate among asserted claims is provably bounded. We show, however, that this guarantee is bought at a brutal price: to keep the hallucination rate below $5\%$ on a balanced object-existence benchmark, a state-of-the-art conformal filter must abstain on more than $80\%$ of claims. We argue that abstention is wasteful when more visual evidence is cheaply available, and introduce Budgeted Conformal Evidence Acquisition (BCEA), which replaces the binary answer/abstain decision with a three-way choice: answer, abstain, or acquire additional visual evidence by re-examining the image (zooming, cropping, or applying a claim-specific intervention) under a bounded compute budget. We make two observations. First, acquisition that is plugged naively into a calibrated filter breaks the statistical guarantee – realized risk overshoots the target by up to $17$ points – because the acquisition step destroys the exchangeability that conformal calibration relies on. Second, folding the entire acquisition policy into the score function and re-calibrating on post-acquisition scores restores the finite-sample guarantee while still recovering coverage. BCEA further uses structured, claim-type-specific interventions. Across the POPE benchmark and COCO-constructed existence and spatial-relation claims, on four open VLMs, BCEA controls the hallucination rate at the target level and consistently improves coverage over a guaranteed-abstention baseline.

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11.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12651

Physics-Aware Auxiliary Losses Improve Out-of-Distribution Generalization of a GNN Synthesizability Filter

Authors:

Riya Bisht ↗Dhruv Agarwal ↗

arXiv:2606.12651v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning drug-discovery pipelines increasingly rely on generative models that propose molecules far from the data used to train downstream synthesizability filters. Existing filters (SAScore, SCScore, RAscore, DeepSA) are purely statistical and degrade in exactly this out-of-distribution (OOD) regime. We ask whether cheap, closed-form physical priors, used as auxiliary supervision on a graph neural network (GNN), improve OOD generalization. We add two auxiliary losses to a GINE backbone: a topological complexity regression supervised by the Bertz index, and a strain-energy soft penalty supervised by MMFF94 force-field energy. On a 65,177-molecule corpus (HIV, Tox21, COCONUT) labeled by SAScore thresholds we reproduce a strong in-distribution baseline, then evaluate a 4-way ablation (baseline / +complexity / +strain / +both) on a single-source OOD split (train on drug-like HIV+Tox21, test on COCONUT natural products), repeated over 5 seeds with paired bootstrap confidence intervals. All three physics-aware variants give a small but statistically significant OOD improvement over the baseline (mean OOD AUC 0.9774): +complexity Delta = +0.0060 (95% CI [+0.0023, +0.0102]), +strain Delta = +0.0032 ([+0.0008, +0.0052]), +both Delta = +0.0066 ([+0.0038, +0.0093]); every interval excludes zero, and the combination is best. The variants are indistinguishable in-distribution, so the effect is visible only under OOD evaluation. We are explicit that the effects are modest, and we report a cautionary methodological finding: a single-seed version of this experiment produced a qualitatively different (non-monotone) story that did not survive multi-seed evaluation.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14122

Beyond Perplexity: UTF-8 Validity in Byte-aware Language Models

Authors:

Sangwhan Moon ↗Daisuke Oba ↗Youmi Ma ↗Tatsuya Hiraoka ↗Naoaki Okazaki ↗

Byte-level tokenization enables language models to handle any Unicode input, but models can generate invalid UTF-8 sequences when encountering rare or unseen characters. We investigate the relationship between training scale and UTF-8 generation reliability with a 355M parameter model trained on 80B tokens from a balanced multilingual corpus of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. We introduce multiple evaluation protocols that isolate UTF-8 structural validity from language modeling. UTF-8 validity convergence lags perplexity by a roughly a factor of two: perplexity stabilizes after 2.1B tokens, but UTF-8 validity requires 4.2B tokens. In context-free generation, rare characters achieve higher structural validity than common characters, suggesting over-specialization of frequent character representations. Through experiments, we observed that reliable UTF-8 generation is a distinct capability requiring evaluation beyond perplexity.

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13.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19245

TxBench-PP: Analyzing AI Agent Performance on Small-Molecule Preclinical Pharmacology

Authors:

Hannah Le ↗Ramesh Ramasamy ↗Alex Urrutia ↗Mahsa Yazdani ↗Tim Proctor ↗Kenny Workman ↗

arXiv:2606.19245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) agents promise to accelerate drug discovery by compressing interpretation and decision-making loops, but practical deployment requires trusted evaluation on realistic program decisions. We introduce TherapeuticsBench Preclinical Pharmacology (TxBench-PP), a verifiable benchmark for small-molecule preclinical pharmacology and the first focused slice of a broader TherapeuticsBench effort across drug-discovery stages and therapeutic modalities. TxBench-PP tests whether agents can recover accurate conclusions from real-world assay data rather than memorized facts from literature. The benchmark contains 100 evaluations indexed by program stage, assay type, and task structure, spanning mechanism-of-action (MoA) and pharmacodynamic (PD) reasoning, compound-target engagement, causal target validation, developability and safety, and translational efficacy. Agents receive realistic workflow snapshots, inspect files in a coding environment, and return structured answers graded deterministically. Across 16 model-harness configurations, comprising 11 models and 4,800 trajectories, no system reliably recovered preclinical pharmacology decisions. The strongest configuration, Claude Opus 4.8 / Pi, passed 59.3\% of endpoint attempts (178/300; 95\% CI, 51.1-67.6), followed by GPT-5.5 / Pi at 55.3\% (166/300; 47.0-63.6).

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14.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:4e62f3de9694c1c42b19e92f04a4c48e

Within-host pathogen population diversity predicts treatment response in tuberculosis

Authors:

Kulkarni ↗Marin ↗Mann ↗Rawoot ↗Goodwin ↗Cesare ↗Warren ↗Jacobson ↗Farhat ↗

Background: Tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes remain suboptimal, and standard clinical diagnostics cannot reliably identify patients at high risk of treatment failure or relapse at the time of diagnosis. While within-host Mycobacterium tuberculosis genetic diversity is hypothesized to reflect the viable bacterial burden and adaptive capacity of the infection, its clinical prognostic value remains unknown. Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 364 patients with newly diagnosed, rifampicin-susceptible pulmonary TB in South Africa. Patients received standard 6-month therapy and were monitored for up to two years to ascertain composite unfavorable outcomes (treatment failure, death, or relapse). To accurately detect low-frequency (unfixed) genetic variants and eliminate reference bias artifacts, we mapped medium to high depth short-read sequences against matched, patient-specific long-read assemblies. The association between baseline pathogen genetic diversity and clinical outcomes was evaluated using multivariable Cox proportional-hazards models. Results: After bioinformatic filtering, true unfixed variants were relatively rare but significantly enriched in genes mediating pathogen adaptation and drug tolerance, including transporter proteins and two-component regulatory systems. Within-host bacterial genetic diversity (i.e., the total number of unfixed variants) ranged from 0-20, with a median of 1 per patient. In survival analysis adjusting for known clinical risk factors–including HIV status, prior TB, baseline smear positivity, and radiographic lung involvement–baseline within-host genetic diversity emerged as a strong, independent predictor of unfavorable treatment outcomes. For patients with greater than 3 unfixed variants at diagnosis, each increase of 5 unfixed variants was associated with more than double the risk of a composite unfavorable outcome (adjusted Hazard Ratio, 2.36; 95% CI, 1.27 to 4.39; p=0.007). Conclusions: Baseline within-host pathogen genetic diversity is an independent predictor of unfavorable TB treatment outcomes. As sequencing becomes increasingly integrated into routine diagnostics, quantifying unfixed variants is an accessible approach that promises to risk-stratify patients and guide the duration of individualized regimens.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15033

Cloze: An Open Research Platform for Studying Human-AI Conversations in Mental Health Contexts

Authors:

Matthew Flathers ↗Francesco Cipriani ↗John Torous ↗

Cloze is an open-source web platform for conducting controlled, monitored studies of human-AI conversation in mental health research contexts. Consumer large language model (LLM) products such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built for individual productivity, and offer researchers little experimental control, inconsistent data export, and no shared safety scaffolding that holds across providers. Cloze gives research teams a single environment in which they configure which models participants converse with, how the AI is instructed, how conversations are scheduled over time, and which safety constraints apply unconditionally, while every message is captured with full provenance (model version, prompt configuration, timing). The platform currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and locally hosted open-weight models served through Ollama behind a unified interface, and runs in the cloud or fully on premises so that participant data need never leave an institution. Cloze is research infrastructure for building an evidence base on human-AI interaction in mental health contexts. It is not a therapeutic product.

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16.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19787

ORAgentBench: Can LLM Agents Solve Challenging Operations Research Tasks End to End?

Authors:

Jiajun Li ↗Mingshu Cai ↗Yixuan Li ↗Yu Ding ↗Ran Hou ↗Guanyu Nie ↗Xiongwei Han ↗Wanyuan Wang ↗

arXiv:2606.19787v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents for multi-step tasks in executable environments, yet their ability to perform realistic operations research (OR) work remains unclear. Existing OR evaluations often decouple modeling from solving, rely on pre-formalized or text-only instances, and rarely test the full workflow from operational artifacts to validated decisions. In this work, we introduce ORAgentBench, an execution-grounded benchmark for evaluating autonomous agents on challenging end-to-end operations research tasks. It contains 107 human-reviewed tasks across diverse operational scenarios, each packaged in an isolated environment with a natural-language brief, multi-file data, configuration artifacts, and a required submission schema. Agents must write and run solution code, and their submissions are evaluated by hidden validators for schema validity, hard-constraint feasibility, and normalized objective quality. Experiments with fourteen frontier agent-model configurations show that current agents remain far from reliable OR practice. The best agent passes only 35.51% of all tasks and 20.59% of hard tasks, and many feasible submissions still fall below the required quality threshold. Failure analysis further shows that errors are dominated by strategic weaknesses, including missed operational rules, brittle formulations, weak feasible-solution construction, and insufficient solution improvement. OR-specific procedural skills increase hard-task feasibility, but do not reliably improve solution quality or pass rate. These results suggest that progress in OR agents requires moving beyond plausible optimization code toward dependable, high-quality operational decision-making.

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17.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:8db6ec85d98cee6d30d4497fec9fa6b2

Longitudinal monitoring exposes correlated temporal protein variations in the female plasma proteome

Authors:

Kalaidopoulou Nteak ↗Drouin ↗Michalik ↗Salazar ↗M. G ↗Hammer ↗Dhople ↗Holtfreter ↗Weiss ↗van den Toorn ↗Broeker ↗Domanska ↗…

The plasma proteome is a valuable resource for assessment of the physiological state of the donor. Containing hundreds of different proteins of variable concentrations, it displays substantial inter-donor differences in individual protein levels, making each plasma proteome highly donor-specific. Less is known about intra-donor variability in the plasma proteome over time, although such variations may even be more indicative of a changing physiological state. Here we assessed data obtained from the TIMES cohort, comprising 51 apparently healthy participants monitored monthly over 12 months, focusing especially on temporal variations in blood protein levels. Most strikingly, we observed that several women in this cohort revealed strongly correlated temporal variations in their plasma proteome, including most notably PZP, SHBG, FETUB, AGT, SERPINA6, SERPINA7, CP, APOL1 and KNG1, with levels sometimes fluctuating by more than 20-fold. In contrast, such variations were absent in men. Some of the fluctuating proteins have been known to be hormone-regulated (e.g., PZP, SHBG), but for others this was not yet fully clear. Through the tight co-variation observed for these proteins in the plasma proteome of women, we can conclude that all these proteins are similarly hormone regulated. The findings reported here not only corroborate previous studies showing estrogen-dependent regulation of several plasma proteins, but also extend this category to include also CP, APOL1, and KNG1. As these latter have been often proposed as candidate biomarkers, they should be validated in sex-balanced cohorts and interpreted with caution, especially in large-scale plasma proteomics studies wherein often only one or a few sampling time points are measured per donor.

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18.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:862513ca864de856bba94026afbc4faa

Reconfigurable quantum computer juggles 98 qubits

Authors:

Crystal Noel ↗

A quantum computer based on trapped ions can connect any two quantum bits, reaching performance levels that conventional computers cannot match. A quantum computer based on trapped ions can connect any two quantum bits, reaching performance levels that conventional computers cannot match.

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19.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11975

Super-Heisenberg Non-Equilibrium Quantum Sensing with Waveguide-Coupled Emitters

Authors:

Mohammad B. Arjmandi ↗

arXiv:2606.11975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We explore an array of quantum emitters as non-equilibrium probes, coupled to a one-dimensional photonic waveguide, aiming to estimate its properties such as wave number which encodes the waveguide frequency and dispersive characteristics. By considering transient dynamics following initial excitation, we show that the quantum Fisher information (QFI) can be significantly enhanced through careful emitter positioning. For two-emitter probes, optimal spacing stabilizes populations and coherences in the single-excitation subspace, suppressing super radiant decay and extending both the magnitude and longevity of QFI. Randomized emitter configurations also reveal that vanishing waveguide-mediated cross decay maximizes both achievable sensitivity and the temporal duration over which information about the parameter remains accessible. Extending to multipartite probes, we demonstrate that the maximum QFI and its temporal integral scale with system size, exceeding the Heisenberg limit for all positioning strategies. Our results highlight the potential of waveguide-coupled emitter arrays as versatile quantum sensors, where collective radiative dynamics can be harnessed to achieve tunable, long-lived, and enhanced precision.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2410.00722

On the Geometry and Optimization of Polynomial Convolutional Networks

Authors:

Vahid Shahverdi ↗Giovanni Luca Marchetti ↗Kathl\'en Kohn ↗

arXiv:2410.00722v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study convolutional neural networks with monomial activation functions. Specifically, we prove that their parameterization map is regular and is an isomorphism almost everywhere, up to rescaling the filters. By leveraging on tools from algebraic geometry, we explore the geometric properties of the image in function space of this map - typically referred to as neuromanifold. In particular, we compute the dimension and the degree of the neuromanifold, which measure the expressivity of the model, and describe its singularities. Moreover, for a generic large dataset, we derive an explicit formula that quantifies the number of critical points arising in the optimization of a regression loss.

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21.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:04ed6cdb383bd67a060af68674fb4810

Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Hospital Readmission Review: A Single-Center Blinded Evaluation and Exploratory Qualitative Analysis

Authors:

Gensheimer ↗M. F ↗Adhikari ↗Parmer-Chow ↗Liu ↗Ma ↗Shieh ↗

Background: Manual review of 30-day hospital readmissions can identify actionable quality and safety problems, but it is labor-intensive. We developed and evaluated an agentic AI workflow for evidence-grounded readmission review. Materials and methods: We studied adult patients with unplanned 30-day readmission after discharge from a medicine hospitalist service at a single academic health system. An AI agent using a large language model queried a database containing notes, encounters, procedures, laboratory results, and other clinical data, and completed the same structured readmission-review rubric used by physicians. In the primary comparative evaluation, 20 randomly selected readmissions from 2025 were each reviewed by two physicians and the AI system. Blinded physician evaluators rated review quality. After rubric refinement, the AI workflow was applied to 100 recent readmissions in an exploratory expanded-cohort analysis of recurring improvement opportunities. Results: In the primary comparative evaluation, the AI classified 9/20 readmissions (45%) as preventable, compared with 19/40 physician reviews (47.5%). Blinded overall quality ratings were similar for AI and physician reviews (4.35 vs. 4.20 on a 1-5 scale; mean difference 0.15, 95% CI -0.20 to 0.48; p=0.49), as were factuality/support and usefulness/actionability ratings. No AI hallucinations were identified during factuality review. Agreement on preventability and primary readmission category was low for both AI-human and human-human comparisons. The AI system cost $0.23 per chart; physician reviewers took a median of 15 minutes, corresponding to an estimated $42.43 per chart. In the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis, AI-assisted review identified recurring vulnerabilities in post-discharge follow-up plans, incomplete inpatient workups, medication-safety transitions, and indwelling-device transitions. Conclusions: Agentic AI produced readmission reviews with similar blinded quality ratings to physician reviews in this small single-center primary comparative evaluation and supported identification of recurring quality-improvement themes in the exploratory expanded-cohort analysis. Preventability judgments remained variable among both AI and physicians, underscoring the need for human oversight and prospective evaluation before operational use.

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22.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2511.10223

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

Authors:

David F. Anderson ↗Aidan S. Howells ↗Diego Rojas La Luz ↗

arXiv:2511.10223v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic reaction networks with mass-action kinetics provide a useful framework for understanding processes – biochemical and otherwise – in homogeneous environments. However, cellular reactions are often compartmentalized, either at the cell level or within cells, and hence non-homogeneous. We investigate a model of compartmentalization in which the rate of fragmentation of a compartment depends on the abundance of some designated species inside that compartment. The particular model of study is part of a general framework for compartmentalized chemistry with dynamic compartments that was proposed in (Duso and Zechner, PNAS, 2020). This paper builds on (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) where the special case where the compartment dynamics do not depend on their contents was studied mathematically. In particular, we demonstrate that the explosivity characterization from (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) fails in this setting and provide new sufficient conditions for non-explosivity and positive recurrence, under the assumption that the underlying CRN admits a linear Lyapunov function. These results extend the theoretical foundation for modeling content-mediated compartment dynamics, with implications for systems such as cell division and intracellular transport.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18463

Mixed-Precision Communication-Avoiding SGD for Generalized Linear Models on GPUs

Authors:

Aditya Devarakonda ↗Irene Sim\'o Mu\~noz ↗Giulia Guidi ↗

arXiv:2606.18463v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is limited by communication rather than computation, since each iteration requires an AllReduce across processes. Communication-avoiding SGD (CA-SGD) amortizes communication over $s$ iterations by replacing $s$ consecutive AllReduces with a single AllReduce of an $sb\times sb$ Gram matrix, trading more computation and bandwidth for fewer synchronization points. Modern GPUs with matrix hardware and reduced-precision formats offset this by accelerating the Gram GEMM and shrinking BF16 traffic. We study mixed-precision CA-SGD for generalized linear models on NVIDIA GPUs. Our finite-precision analysis decomposes the local rounding error of one CA-SGD outer iteration into nine independent precision choices, depending on the hardware only through its low-precision unit roundoffs, so the resulting recipes transfer in principle across GPU generations. The recipe stores the input matrix and margin vector in low precision, computes the Gram matrix from low-precision inputs with high-precision accumulation, communicates it in high precision, and performs the inner recurrence and weight updates in high precision. On NERSC Perlmutter A100 GPUs, mixed-precision CA-SGD matches FP32 SGD loss within $0.5\%$ on logistic, linear, and Poisson problems and reaches $5.1$–$6.8\times$ speedup over FP32 SGD on epsilon, SUSY, HIGGS, synth, and Poisson-synth. Our software is available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20448273

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13209

Understanding helpfulness and harmless tension in reward models

Authors:

Eshaan Tanwar ↗Pepa Atanasova ↗

Reward models are a key component of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), aligning language models toward both helpful and harmless behaviour. However, the internal mechanisms underlying these objectives and their conflicts remain poorly understood. We study alignment tension in reward models trained under helpfulness-only, harmlessness-only, and mixed-objective settings. We find that mixed-objective models often underperform single-objective models, indicating interference between objectives. Using activation-based methods, we identify neurons associated with each objective and study their functional roles via targeted ablations. We find that these neurons causally support their corresponding objectives while often negatively affecting the opposing one. We find that a substantial proportion of neurons are shared between helpfulness and harmlessness, and that these shared neurons exert a disproportionate influence on model behaviour, contributing to alignment tension. Additionally, our results provide insights and mechanistic interpretation into how alignment objectives are represented in reward models and why multi-objective alignment remains challenging, motivating future work on disentangled and controllable alignment methods.

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25.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2501.07351

Honest-binding quantum bit commitment from separable operations

Authors:

Ziad Chaoui ↗Anna Pappa ↗Matteo Rosati ↗

arXiv:2501.07351v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Bit commitment is a fundamental cryptographic primitive and a cornerstone for numerous two-party cryptographic protocols, including zero-knowledge proofs. However, it has been proven that unconditionally secure bit commitment, both classical and quantum, is impossible. In this work, we demonstrate that imposing a restriction on the committing party to perform only separable operations enables secure quantum bit commitment schemes. Specifically, we prove that in any perfectly hiding bit commitment protocol, an honestly-committing party limited to separable operations will be detected with high probability if they attempt to alter their commitment. To illustrate our findings, we present an example protocol.

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