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.CL) 2026-06-12

Helping Figures Tell their Story! Paper-Grounded Video Generation Explaining Complex Scientific Figures

Scientific figures compress complex pipelines into a single canvas, yet understanding them requires paper-grounded, step-by-step narration aligned with visual highlights a capability missing from current video generation systems and benchmarks. To address this, we introduce paper-grounded figure-to-video generation: generating narrated, region-grounded walkthrough videos from a figure and its paper. We propose MINARD (Multimodal Interpretation of Narrated Architecture via Region Decomposition), a pipeline that generates paper-grounded narrations and sequentially grounds them to figure regions. We also release FigTalk, a benchmark with new sequential and component-level grounding metrics derived. On FigTalk, MINARD generates humanlike, paper-faithful narrations and outperforms narration-conditioned figure spatial grounding compared to existing approaches in both automatic and human evaluation

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

Landmark-free Assessment of Lower-limb Alignment with Implicit Neural Shape Functions from Knee Radiographs

Radiographic assessment of lower-limb alignment (LLA) is important for predicting joint health and surgical outcomes in total knee arthroplasty. Traditional measurement methods are manual and time-consuming, while recent machine learning approaches typically rely on locating a fixed set of anatomical landmarks. This dependence limits flexibility and may require re-annotation when clinical definitions change. To address this, we propose an automated workflow using Implicit Neural Shape Functions (INSF). Rather than relying on explicit landmark coordinates, we encode the anatomy into a compact latent space and regress clinical alignment measurements directly from these latent codes. This architecture allows for rapid extendability to new tasks without altering the backbone representation. We trained our method on an internal dataset of 566 knee radiographs, each annotated with the outline of the femur and tibia. We evaluated it on both an internal test dataset of 50 patients and a separate external set of 402 preoperative cases from the MRKR dataset. Manual clinical measurements are available for these data, and the MRKR measurements will be made publicly accessible. Performance was comparable to state-of-the-art landmark-based methods and manual agreement, while offering a flexible shape representation that can be extended to additional measurement tasks.

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

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-08

DipSkmer: Reference-free population genomics with diploid genome skims

Ecologists and conservation biologists rely on genetic diversity as a key essential biodiversity variable (EBV) used to track population health and dynamics, and utilize the population parameter {theta} (estimated by the average pairwise genomic distance) as a key metric of diversity. While whole-genome-sequencing (wgs) is increasingly affordable, it will be considerable time before the full diversity of life is represented by high-quality assembled genomes; even then, constant monitoring will still require repeated sampling of populations. In contrast, genome skimming (low-coverage, short-read wgs) is highly cost-effective but challenging to analyze because the coverage is too low for assembly and reliable error correction. Mature methods, such as Mash, exist for estimating pairwise genomic distances based on the Jaccard similarity of k-mer sets computed using sketching techniques. Some, such as Skmer, additionally model the impacts of low coverage. These methods have been successfully applied to assembly-free species identification and phylogenetics; however, their use in population genetics has been limited. This is because these methods implicitly treat genomes as haploid and heterozygosity confounds true estimates of genomic distance for diploid organisms. In this paper, we address this problem through a number of technical advances. First, we use coalescent theory to mathematically derive how the Jaccard index between two diploid samples changes with the scaled population size parameter ({theta}). Next, we derive an estimator that computes {theta} from the Jaccard index, in addition to several auxiliary variables, which we also estimate from the genome skims. The resulting method, DipSkmer, enables more accurate estimates of coverage, sequencing error, and pairwise nucleotide distance for diploid samples. Analyses of both simulated and empirical datasets show that for diploids and low distances (e.g.,

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Fine-Grained Open-Vocabulary Object Detection with Fined-Grained Prompts: Task, Dataset and Benchmark

Open-vocabulary detectors are proposed to locate and recognize objects in novel classes. However, variations in vision-aware language vocabulary data used for open-vocabulary learning can lead to unfair and unreliable evaluations. Recent evaluation methods have attempted to address this issue by incorporating object properties or adding locations and characteristics to the captions. Nevertheless, since these properties and locations depend on the specific details of the images instead of classes, detectors can not make accurate predictions without precise descriptions provided through human annotation. This paper introduces 3F-OVD, a novel task that extends supervised fine-grained object detection to the open-vocabulary setting. Our task is intuitive and challenging, requiring a deep understanding of Fine-grained captions and careful attention to Fine-grained details in images in order to accurately detect Fine-grained objects. Additionally, due to the scarcity of qualified fine-grained object detection datasets, we have created a new dataset, NEU-171K, tailored for both supervised and open-vocabulary settings. We benchmark state-of-the-art object detectors on our dataset for both settings. Furthermore, we propose a simple yet effective post-processing technique. Our data, annotations and codes are available at https://github.com/tengerye/3FOVD.

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

HRDX: A Large-Scale Vector HD-Map Dataset

Reliable autonomous driving requires vectorized HD maps that are geometrically accurate, semantically rich, and scalable to long-horizon driving. However, existing public HD map datasets are limited in scale, provide sparse semantic attributes, and lack modalities such as aerial imagery that could enable new research directions. We present HRDX, a large-scale dataset for vector HD-map construction, spanning about 40 hours (1,400 km) of minimally overlapping drives, which is several times larger than prior public HD map datasets. Data is captured using six synchronized surround cameras, a 128-beam LiDAR, and centimeter-level RTK GNSS/IMU, and is further complemented by precisely aligned aerial orthoimagery. Annotations cover 10 vector map classes, complemented with over 20 semantic and topological attributes. To evaluate this richer ontology, we introduce the Composite Score (CS) to jointly assess geometric fidelity and attribute correctness. Benchmark experiments show that HRDX's scale improves online vector-map construction, and that aligned aerial imagery provides a useful structural prior: using aerial imagery at training and/or inference improves geometric map quality, while aerial-augmented teachers can transfer part of this benefit to camera-only students without increasing inference-time sensor requirements. HRDX is intended to support reproducible research on large-scale HD-map learning, multimodal BEV fusion, and training-time privileged information. HRDX dataset and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/honda-research-institute/HRDX

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Testing quantum-like markers in neural dynamics

arXiv:2508.21490v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose two experiments for identifying quantum markers in neural data based on quantum variants of well-known equations for neural activity that describe electrical signal propagation on axonal arbors and dendrites. These include (i) testing if power spectra from subthreshold oscillations in neuronal cultures follow the classical Fitzgugh-Nagumo equations or a recently introduced quantum variant of them and (ii) testing if propagation statistics of electrical activity in axons follow the classical diffusive cable equation or a quantum variant of it.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Multimedia and Visual Analytics in the Agentic Era

arXiv:2504.06138v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Professional users need tools to help them gain actionable insights from large multimedia collections. Foundation models and AI agents have rapidly changed the playing field, and improving their accuracy, trustworthiness, and reasoning capabilities are active topics in the computer vision, machine learning, and multimedia communities. Most current research focuses on benchmark driven algorithmic improvements. The multimedia community is the place to go beyond algorithms and consider complete multimedia analytics systems that support professional users in their complex tasks and achieve a true teaming of humans and AI. Supporting users with machine learning and visualizations has been studied for decades in the visual analytics field. In this paper, we propose a framework to bring multimedia and visual analytics together and indicate how it could impact current and new multimedia analytics solutions. Additional information can be found at https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/m.worring/analytics-model.html

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

Phase locking nuclear spins in silicon with spin-orbit coupling

arXiv:2606.20340v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Because they have such long coherence times, nuclear spins have extraordinary potential for use in quantum information processing devices. However, coherent nuclear spin control generally requires external phase references, such as microwave control fields. Here, we phase-lock a $^{29}$Si nuclear spin ensemble in a silicon quantum dot using only the internal electronic spin-orbit coupling as a phase reference. When driven with the quantum-dot electrons, the nuclear spins align themselves to a phase determined by the electronic spin-orbit coupling and the timing of the drive protocol. This enables us to measure the coherent precession and inhomogeneous dephasing of the nuclear spins. We corroborate our results with detailed numerical simulations of the many-body electron nuclear system. Our work opens new routes for coherently controlling solid-state nuclear spin ensembles.

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

Execution-bound advisory automation for agentic AI: a reproducible AIBOM-driven CSAF-VEX framework

arXiv:2606.19390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A protocol driven framework is presented that binds SBOM and AIBOM artefacts to deterministic environment capture and structured runtime telemetry. Exploitability is computed from declared artefacts, observed activation conditions, and enforced execution policies. CSAF VEX advisories are generated from combined static and runtime evidence, cryptographically signed, and validated through deterministic replay. Evaluation uses approximately 10000 component entries across synthetic Agentic AI workloads 50 to 5000 components, incorporating OSV, GitHub Advisory, KEV, and EPSS datasets.

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

Notes2Skills: From Lab Notebooks to Certainty-Aware Scientific Agent Skills

Scientific discovery workflows usually contain and rely heavily on lab notes, where researchers record observations, interpret uncertain results, and plan follow-up experiments. Such informative lab notes preserve evolving scientific reasoning and author uncertainty, rather than polished final results exhibited in publications, providing a valuable opportunity for AI to engage in scientific exploration at a more comprehensive and deeper level. However, most prior work on scientific text focuses on papers, protocols, or structured databases, leaving informal laboratory notes underexplored as inputs to AI agents for science. This gap matters because lab notes often intermingle validated observations, tentative judgments, and possible experimental next steps within the same passage. If these signals are conflated, an AI agent may mistake uncertain scientific judgments for confirmed conclusions or executable actions. To this end, we present Notes2Skills, a two-stage framework for turning lab notebooks into verifiable skills for scientific AI agents while preserving the author's certainty. Across seven conditions and three wet-lab sessions, Notes2Skills is the only configuration that neither mistakes uncertain notes for firm instructions nor discards firm ones. We show that certainty preservation is the missing piece between lab notebooks and reliable agent skills, opening a path toward safer AI co-scientist systems.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Joint convergence in Wiener chaos via transport hierarchy and Malliavin covariances

arXiv:2606.14812v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the joint convergence in distribution of a sequence $X_N = I_p(f_N)$ of multiple Wiener–Itô integrals of order $p\geq 2$ that converges to a Gaussian limit $Z\sim N(0,\sigma^2)$, together with another sequence $Y_N = I_q(g_N)$ converging in law. The central finding is that the joint convergence of $(X_N, Y_N)$ is completely governed by the asymptotic behavior of the iterated Malliavin covariances $Y_{r+1,N} = \langle DX_N, DY_{r,N}\rangle_H$, $r\geq 0$: joint convergence holds as soon as these covariances converge jointly with $Y_N$, and the structure of the limiting distribution is then explicitly determined by their limits. Moreover, the convergence of the Malliavin covariances is necessary for joint convergence, as shown by a counterexample. When $q

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

RATS! Patches Talk Through Registers: Emergent Parts in Register Attention Transformers

When humans see a bird, they recognize far more than just "bird" – they see a head, wings, and talons, a structured assembly of reusable parts that can be identified across every bird they have ever seen. We ask whether a self-supervised visual model can discover the same compositional structure on its own. To this end, we propose RATS (Register Attention Transformers), which decomposes the classification token into N learnable register tokens that route patch information through an L->N->N->L bottleneck via a three-step compress-communicate-broadcast attention. The N registers are partitioned across the H attention heads, so that registers assigned to different heads do not interact with each other. Without auxiliary losses or part annotations, each register spontaneously specializes into a proto-semantic region whose emerging structure resembles object parts. RATS surpasses all baselines by +12 mIoU on average across five segmentation benchmarks, with consistent gains on ADE20K (+1.11 mIoU) and COCO (+0.2 AP^m). Its register dictionary further exhibits part-level consistency and semantic proximity across related categories. Our results suggest that RATS may provide a useful architectural prior for structured and interpretable visual representation learning.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606.13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes – quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment – using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoning-off contemporaries. Across 120 firm x axis x model scores, the pooled mean absolute deviation between the reasoning-on model and each reasoning-off counterpart is 0.38 on a 5-point scale; only 2% of pairwise comparisons reach a two-point deviation, and none exceeds two points. Per-firm cost accounting shows the reasoning-on arm alone costs roughly 5.6x as much as the three-provider reasoning-off ensemble, for outcomes that differ only within small margins. We conclude that in span-based ESG narrative scoring, reasoning-heavy deployment does not materially improve outcomes relative to reasoning-off consensus, while substantially increasing operational cost. We discuss implications for cost-effective ESG auto-scoring pipelines and LLM deployment governance in applied accountability settings. An earlier version of this work is available on SSRN (Abstract ID 6683303).

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cardio Heart Connect: Protocol for a Randomized Trial of a Commercially Available mHealth Fitness Intervention for Cardiac Rehabilitation After Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement

Background: Despite ample evidence of the benefits of cardiac rehabilitation (CR), few transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) patients participate. Commercially available mobile health offers an opportunity to deliver activity-promotion content to populations that are challenged to participate in CR. This study aims to test the efficacy of clinically controlled, commercially available fitness programming for improving physical activity and cardiovascular health outcomes designed to be initiated while patients are on waitlists for traditional CR. Methods: The Cardio Heart Connect study is a hybrid type I effectiveness-implementation trial aiming to enroll N=200 patients who have been placed on a cardiac rehab waitlist following a TAVR procedure from the University of Colorado Hospital Heart and Vascular Center. Participants will be randomized 1:1 to the Cardio Heart Connect intervention with commercially available fitness or attention control, designed to control for technology access. At baseline, post-intervention (8 weeks), and follow-up (12 months), we will assess the primary outcome of participants? daily steps as measured by smartwatch accelerometer and secondary outcomes of interest including functional capacity (Duke Activity Status Index; VO2max), quality of life (Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire), and cardiovascular health status (Life Essential 8). In addition, we will use mixed methodologies to evaluate the implementation of intervention using the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) Framework. Conclusions: Commercially available fitness programs have the potential to provide more accessible opportunities for patients recovering from TAVR to engage in physical activity and may be preferred due to their customizability, convenience, and ease of scheduling. Overall, this study will provide insight into the use of commercial mHealth to promote activity following TAVR.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Autoregressive Processes on Riemannian Manifolds

arXiv:2606.24771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a Riemannian autoregressive (R-AR) model of order one, generalising classical discrete-time stochastic processes to manifold-valued data. The model is based on two parameters, a parameter $\mu$ representing the intrinsic central tendency as the Fréchet mean and an autoregressive parameter $\phi$ controlling the stationarity and ergodic properties. Due to the inherent dependence structure of the R-AR process, the estimation procedure for these parameters necessitates new asymptotic results for dependent processes on manifolds. Thus, we establish a strong law of large numbers for the sample Fréchet mean set of ergodic Markov chains in proper metric spaces. By proving this general consistency result, we move beyond the limitations of classical i.i.d. theory to provide the mathematical foundation required for the strong consistency of our proposed estimators. The framework is validated through numerical simulations in the hyperbolic plane and an application to aerosol size distributions on the Fisher-Rao manifold, demonstrating how the proposed model can characterise mean-reverting dynamics in nonlinear geometries.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MemRefine: LLM-Guided Compression for Long-Term Agent Memory

Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly expected to operate over long-term interactions, where information from past dialogues must be preserved and recalled to support future tasks. However, as interactions accumulate, the memory store grows without bound and fills with redundant entries that inflate storage cost and degrade retrieval by crowding out the most useful evidence. Furthermore, this is especially limiting on resource-constrained platforms with hard memory budgets, motivating us to formulate storage-budgeted memory management, the task of keeping an already constructed memory store within a fixed budget while preserving information useful for future interactions. To this end, we then propose MemRefine, an LLM-guided framework that, since surface similarity poorly reflects factual value, uses similarity only to propose candidate pairs and defers delete, merge, and preserve decisions to an LLM judge based on factual content, iterating until the budget is met. Across multiple memory frameworks and long-term conversation benchmarks, MemRefine consistently meets target budgets while preserving downstream performance and outperforming rule-based baselines under tight budgets.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

BaltiVoice: A Speech Corpus and Fine-tuned Whisper ASR System for the Balti Language

Authors:

We present BaltiVoice, a 16.8-hour read-speech corpus for Balti (ISO 639-3: bft), a Tibetic language spoken in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, with no prior publicly available ASR resources. The corpus contains 10,060 validated utterances in native Nastaliq script, derived from Mozilla Common Voice recordings. Fine-tuning OpenAI Whisper-small yields a Word Error Rate (WER) of 26.74% and a Character Error Rate (CER) of 8.67% on a 538-utterance speaker-disjoint validation set, down from a zero-shot baseline of 159.19% WER and 152.52% CER. A Whisper-base fine-tuned on the same data achieves 44.54% WER and 15.61% CER, confirming that model capacity matters for this low-resource setting. The dataset, fine-tuned model, and a live transcription demo are publicly available on HuggingFace.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

The Geometry of Admissible Short Selling in Discrete-Time Stochastic Portfolio Theory

arXiv:2606.11191v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While discrete-time Stochastic Portfolio Theory (SPT) provides a robust framework for market analysis, existing work on functional generation has predominantly focused on long-only portfolios defined on the entire unit simplex. This paper extends the geometric framework of functional generation to the broader class of bankruptcy-proof long-short portfolios defined on local market state spaces. We establish that, within this admissible setting, pseudo-arbitrage is fully characterized by the concavity of the generating function on the market state space, thereby relaxing the usual global domain requirement. A central contribution of this work is a geometric characterization of the short-selling mechanism. We prove that the presence of short selling is equivalent to the negativity of the maximal concave extension of the generating potential. This phenomenon is linked to the steepness of the logarithmic gradient as the market approaches a zero boundary nested inside the simplex. To systematically exploit this mechanism, we introduce the barycentric scaling transformation, a constructive methodology that maps classical long-only generating functions onto restricted domains to engineer admissible strategies with controlled short-selling exposure. Finally, through the analysis of specific shrunken portfolios, we identify a geometric phase transition: under suitable boundary conditions, admissible strategies exhibit a long-only core and a short-selling region in a qualitative sense (without asserting an exact partition of the state space). This provides a unified geometric perspective on relative arbitrage beyond the long-only constraint.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Ingredient-Level Food Image Segmentation for Nutrition Awareness

Food images often contain several visible ingredients, so assigning one dish label to an entire image hides important visual structure. This work studies ingredient-level semantic segmentation on FoodSeg103, where the model predicts an ingredient class for each pixel. Two SegFormer variants were fine-tuned and evaluated under a controlled setup: SegFormer-B0 as the smaller baseline model and SegFormer-B1 as the larger final model. Both models use ImageNet-pretrained MiT backbones with newly initialized 104-class output layers. On the held-out FoodSeg103 test split of 2,135 images, B0 achieved 0.7709 pixel accuracy and 0.2521 mean IoU, while B1 achieved 0.7929 pixel accuracy and 0.3204 mean IoU. B1 improved every saved test metric, including a +0.0683 absolute gain in mean IoU. The system also converts predicted masks into visible ingredient-area percentages, giving a simple visual composition summary of the predicted meal. This summary can serve as a first-pass nutrition-awareness cue by providing a visual alternative to detailed food tracking similar to plate-based meal guidance, but it is not a direct estimate of calories, macronutrients, food mass, volume, density, or true portion size.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Certifying Nonclassical Proper-Time Histories with a Quantum Clock

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum clocks can acquire relativistic phases from motional or gravitational proper-time differences, but reduced clock dephasing alone does not certify nonclassical proper-time histories. We formulate this distinction as a channel-certification problem. First, we show that any two-level single-time dephasing signal, including one generated by an effective quantum proper-time label, admits a classical random proper-time representation. We then define the convex set of classical mixtures of experimentally specified proper-time histories and prove a Choi-rank separation criterion for conditioned coherent history recombination. A two-branch Ramsey protocol gives explicit bright- and dark-port population witnesses outside this classical set. The certification is operational and relative to the specified history set: it rules out classical mixtures of the same implemented proper-time histories, not arbitrary classical protocols with different histories or controls.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-08

Statistics of cortical representational drift can enable robust readout

Authors:

by Charles Micou, Timothy O’Leary Representational drift of fixed stimuli, learned tasks and familiar environments is observed in many brain areas, leading to reconfiguration of population codes over days to weeks. This raises the question of whether downstream brain regions employ mechanisms to track changes in population activity and thus preserve the fidelity of the information they extract. We show that the statistical properties of drift have a significant impact on such mechanisms. Over an extended period, a net change in population tuning due to drift can arise from an accumulation of small changes distributed across the population, or via abrupt jumps that affect smaller subsets of cells at each time point. We demonstrate that an adaptive readout can exploit the heavy-tailed statistics of abrupt jumps to maintain a more stable readout using a simple inference mechanism. Using experimental data, we investigate the extent to which heavy-tailed drift statistics are observed during representational drift in the posterior parietal cortex and visual cortex. We find that experimentally measured drift does not conform to a Gaussian random walk. Instead, we find sudden jumps in neural tuning that would be advantageous for a downstream observer adapting to changes in representation. These observations motivate future study to determine whether adaptive decoding mechanisms exist in the brain and to determine the physiological mechanisms that shape the statistics of representational drift.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Scheme for Transport-based Global Entanglement Distribution using Quantum Processors

arXiv:2606.15421v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a scheme for distributing entanglement over global distances in a heralded manner by using satellites to physically transport entangled processor nodes with rare-earth-ion qubits. A full analysis of channel losses, errors and background light is performed to determine the fidelity and number of entangled pairs that can be distributed between two ground stations. We show that the scheme works already with a single satellite and can distribute close to the theoretical maximum number of entangled pairs that can be generated in a satellite overpass. In addition, we argue that in theory transportation-based schemes outperform other satellite-based schemes and can be scaled up to a constellation without additional channel losses. Daytime operation seems feasible as long as the sky is clear, with an EPR pair fidelity ranging from 99.3% at shorter network lengths to 93.9% with global coverage and can be further improved by active error correction or entanglement purification.