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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum codes and optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs via the MP construction

arXiv:2606.14253v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we employ MP codes whose defining matrices are $\tau$-optimal defining ($\tau$-OD) matrices to construct new quantum codes and quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs. Specifically, we report the following results: We establish a unified $\tau$-monomial decomposition theorem for invertible self-adjoint matrices over finite fields of arbitrary characteristic, which generalizes the result in "Quantum codes using the $\tau$-OD MP construction" where the characteristic was required to be odd. Based on this theorem, we prove the existence of $\tau$-OD matrices over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ for any characteristic and demonstrate that there exist several new infinite families of $\tau$-OD matrices over $\mathbb{F}_{q^2}$ of characteristic $2$. As an application of MP codes involving $\tau$-OD matrices, we construct several infinite families of quantum codes with flexible parameters. Within this framework, we present $222$ record-breaking quantum codes that surpass the best-known records maintained in Grassl's database. We propose two effective schemes for constructing optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs via MP codes. Accordingly, we construct four new infinite families of optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs with flexible parameters. Notably, we report an interesting phenomenon by exhibiting $30$ optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs derived from our framework; that is, there exist quantum codes that are not only optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs but also, according to Grassl's database, best-known, optimal, or record-breaking quantum codes. To the best of our knowledge, the new discovery that quantum codes are simultaneously optimal pure quantum $(r,\delta)$-LRCs and record-breaking quantum codes has not been previously reported in the literature.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Semi-Device-Independent Certification for Nonlocality without Entanglement

arXiv:2606.13667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, we investigate maximum-confidence discrimination, which encompasses minimum-error and unambiguous discrimination, for ensembles of separable states by considering global and separable measurements. We demonstrate that global measurements outperform separable ones, thereby establishing nonlocality without entanglement (NLWE) in terms of confidence in a detection event, a fine-grained state-identification strategy that maximizes the probability of a correct guess given a measurement outcome. Conversely, verifying achievable confidence in measurement outcomes can certify global measurements, namely, semi-device-independent certification of NLWE. Our results make it feasible to experimentally demonstrate NLWE using present-day quantum measurement devices, even with non-unit detection efficiencies, since maximum-confidence measurements rely only on detected measurement outcomes.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Toward Simultaneously Optimal Regret in U-Calibration

arXiv:2606.18527v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: U-calibration studies online forecasting algorithms whose predictions can be consumed by any unknown downstream agent, guaranteeing sublinear regret simultaneously for all proper loss functions. Existing U-calibration algorithms achieve worst-case optimal $O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss, but they fail to adapt to easier losses: as we show, even for smooth losses such as squared loss, they incur $\Omega(\sqrt{T})$ regret instead of the optimal $O(\log T)$ regret. In this work, we show that this limitation is not inherent. Specifically, we design a single forecast algorithm that simultaneously achieves $\tilde O(\sqrt{T})$ regret for every bounded proper loss and $O(\log T)$ regret for every bounded smooth proper loss. More generally, our algorithm also attains logarithmic regret for losses that are smooth relative to the log-barrier, which include several non-Lipschitz examples. Our approach is based on a novel variant of Follow-the-Perturbed-Leader (FTPL) in which perturbations are applied directly in the prediction space using self-concordant noise. The resulting analysis also departs substantially from prior FTPL analyses due to the complex nature of this noise and may be of independent interest.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Variational Inference via Entropic Transport Descent

arXiv:2606.25265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Particle-based variational inference (ParVI) methods approximate an intractable target distribution by evolving an ensemble of interacting samples. Existing approaches rely predominantly on kernel-based repulsion (e.g., SVGD), which suffers from variance collapse in high dimensions and mode collapse on multimodal targets – pathologies caused by the absence of global transport structure. We introduce entropic transport descent (ETD), a ParVI family that frames each particle update as an entropy-regularized optimal transport problem. Derived from the JKO proximal scheme by lifting to the space of couplings and relaxing via the KL chain rule, each ETD iteration reduces to a Sinkhorn computation. The resulting transport plan provides global coordination, guiding each particle to nearby high-density proposals and naturally preserving multimodal structure. ETD can operate entirely score-free, requiring only pointwise evaluations of the unnormalized target density. Experiments on variance-collapse diagnostics, Bayesian logistic regression, neural networks, and molecular Boltzmann distributions show that ETD matches or outperforms SVGD, AGF-SVGD, and SGLD, with the largest gains in high-dimensional and multimodal settings.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Coherent Control of Quantum-Dot Spins with Cyclic Optical Transitions

arXiv:2509.14445v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Solid-state spins are promising as interfaces from stationary qubits to single photons for quantum communication technologies. Semiconductor quantum dots have excellent optical coherence, exhibit near unity collection efficiencies when coupled to photonic structures, and possess long-lived spins for quantum memory. However, the incompatibility of performing optical spin control and single-shot readout simultaneously has been a challenge faced by almost all solid-state emitters. To overcome this, we leverage light-hole mixing to realize a highly asymmetric lambda system in a negatively charged heavy hole exciton in Faraday configuration. By compensating GHz-scale differential Stark shifts, induced by unequal coupling to Raman control fields, and by performing nuclear-spin cooling, we achieve quantum control of an electron-spin qubit with a $\pi$-pulse contrast of 97.4% while preserving spin-selective optical transitions with a cyclicity of 471 (50). We demonstrate this scheme for both GaAs and InGaAs quantum dots, and show that it is compatible with the operation of a nuclear quantum memory. Our approach thus enables repeated emission of indistinguishable photons together with qubit control, as required for single-shot readout, photonic cluster-state generation, and quantum repeater technologies.

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

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

arXiv:2606.20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training. However, existing approaches materialize both attention distributions before computing the KL reduction, incurring $O(N_QN_K)$ memory and IO costs that become prohibitive at long context lengths. We present StreamKL, the first fused GPU primitive for attention KL divergence that eliminates this quadratic materialization. StreamKL derives a novel online formulation for the coupled two-distribution KL reduction, enabling a single one-pass forward kernel that streams query-key tiles through on-chip SRAM. For the backward pass, StreamKL recomputes attention probabilities tile-by-tile, avoiding storage of quadratic intermediates. We further design and implement efficient GPU kernels with dedicated optimizations. Experiments show StreamKL delivers up to $43\times$ and $14\times$ speedups over baseline methods in the forward and backward passes, respectively. Most importantly, StreamKL reduces the extra HBM footprint of attention distillation from $O(N_QN_K)$ to $O(1)$, enabling long-context distillation on a single GPU.

07.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

novelBGC: An interactive dual-score framework for biosynthetic gene cluster novelty assessment and candidate prioritisation

Genome mining now yields tens of thousands of putative biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) per project, yet, separating genuinely novel candidates from rediscoveries of known compounds remains the rate-limiting step before experimental validation. Single-axis prioritisation tools, antiSMASH similarity, BiG-FAM GCF distance, and self-resistance-enzyme (SRE) filters such as ARTS, each surface a different facet of evidence, yet their isolated use systematically over-ranks rediscovery-prone BGCs and overlooks genuinely orphan clusters. We present novelBGC, a web-hosted framework that converts these disparate outputs into two deliberately non-inverse continuous metrics per BGC, a Novelty (N) and a Reference Similarity (RS) score which together define a 2D decision plane that resolves rediscoveries, divergent family members, contig-edge artefacts, and uncharted chemistry with interactive visualisations, with all component weights user-tuneable at submission. Retrospective validation across three independent experimental datasets demonstrates the utility of the framework for candidate prioritization. Within the first 186-BGC SRE-guided cloning study, every confirmed bioactive product fell within the low-to-mid N band whereas 55 high-N (N [≥] 0.50) BGCs were never selected. Moreover, in the other two studies, it correctly prioritised the fully orphan lariocidin BGC of Paenibacillus sp. M2 and the divergent within-family indanopyrrole-A idp BGC of Streptomyces sp. CNX-425. Together, these case studies demonstrate that the joint (N, RS) space facilitates prioritization decisions that are difficult to achieve using any single criterion alone. from identical input data. novelBGC requires no command-line expertise, no local tool installation, and no manual integration of intermediate output formats, addressing a well-documented accessibility barrier for wet-laboratory researchers engaging with genome-mining workflows. novelBGC is freely available at https://project.iith.ac.in/sharmaglab/novelbgc/.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

CrossAccent-TTS: Cross-Lingual Accent-Intensity Controllable Text-to-Speech via Disentangled Speaker and Accent Representations

arXiv:2606.25403v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accent conversion and controllability remain fundamental challenges in cross-lingual text-to-speech (TTS), particularly for low-resource and phonetically diverse Indic languages. While recent large language model (LLM)-based TTS systems exhibit strong cross-lingual generalization, they provide limited explicit control over accent characteristics and intensity. In this paper, we propose CrossAccentTTS, a framework that enables both accent control and conversion while preserving speaker identity. Specifically, we introduce an Accent Intensity Controller (AIC) that injects weighted language embeddings into the accent subspace, allowing smooth interpolation between accents and fine-grained modulation of accent strength at inference time. Experiments on the Indic Multilingual and L2-arctic datasets shows that CrossAccent-TTS achieves precise control of accent intensity, outperforming strong baselines in accent similarity and controllability by maintaining speaker similarity and naturalness.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Multi-entropy in random tensor networks

arXiv:2606.04470v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the evaluation of Rényi multi-entropies $S^{(q)}_n$ in Random Tensor Network (RTN) states in the large bond-dimension limit. For the case of Rényi index $n=2$ and arbitrary number of parties $q$, we prove that that multi-entropies are determined by minimal multiway cuts through the network. When the minimal multiway cut is degenerate, we characterize the full minimizer set via compatible families of minimal cuts and give a criterion for all minimizers to come from ordinary cut partitions. For $n=2$, this gives a natural generalization of the minimal cut description of bipartite entanglement to multipartite systems with arbitrarily many parties. For the case of integer $n>2$, we show that the minimal multiway cut conjecture is in general not true by providing explicit counter examples for both the single random tensor and for the network built from isometric tilings. We discuss the implication for our results on the multipartite entanglement structures in RTN and holography.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

GeoT2V-Bench: Benchmarking 3D Consistency in Text-to-Video Models via 3D Reconstruction

Camera-prompted text-to-video (T2V) models are increasingly used to synthesize virtual camera captures, such as orbiting objects or moving through static scenes. For these outputs, visual plausibility is insufficient: the generated frames should also provide coherent multi-view evidence for a single static 3D scene. We introduce GeoT2V-Bench, a reconstruction-based diagnostic benchmark for evaluating whether camera-prompted T2V clips can support explicit rigid 3D reconstruction. Our pipeline estimates per-frame camera intrinsics and poses with VGGT-style geometry estimation, fits DeformableGS, derives a static MedianGS proxy by temporal-median aggregation, and renders this proxy along the estimated camera path. Instead of producing a pass/fail label or a single scalar score, GeoT2V-Bench reports a continuous reconstruction profile covering apparent image motion, estimated trajectory behavior, MedianGS static rendering error, static-render flow agreement, and the gap between flexible and static fits. On a fair-format four-seed evaluation with 3,840 completed reconstructions from 12 open-weight model configurations and 80 GeCo-Eval static-scene prompts, we find that visible motion, static rendering error, flow agreement, and flexible-vs-static behavior often disagree. GeoT2V-Bench therefore captures complementary failure modes that emerge when generated videos are tested as global static-scene acquisitions.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Differentially Private Weighted Empirical Risk Minimization Procedure and its Application to Outcome Weighted Learning

arXiv:2307.13127v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data used to train predictive models via empirical risk minimization (ERM) often contain sensitive personal information. While differential privacy (DP) provides mathematically provable bounds to protect such data, previous work has focused almost exclusively on unweighted ERM. We consider weighted ERM (wERM) – an important generalization where individual contributions to the objective function vary. We propose the first DP algorithm for general wERM with formal privacy guarantees and derive both its empirical and population excess risk bounds. Crucially, this general wERM framework provides a pathway for deriving privacy-preserving learning methods for individualized treatment rules, including the popular outcome-weighted learning (OWL) approach. We evaluate DP-wERM applied to OWL in simulated and real data experiments. Our empirical results demonstrate that training OWL models via wERM provides strong DP guarantees while maintaining robust performance, proving the method is practical for sensitive, real-world data.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Conversational Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Precision Oncology Reveals Context-Specific TGFβ and JAK/STAT Alterations in Pancreatic Cancer

Background: Pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) is characterized by extensive molecular complexity, profound stromal remodeling, and limited responsiveness to systemic therapies. Although gemcitabine-based regimens remain widely utilized, the molecular pathways that influence treatment-associated biological variation are incompletely understood. The TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT signaling networks are recognized regulators of tumor progression, immune modulation, and therapeutic resistance; however, their genomic architecture in clinically stratified PDAC populations remains poorly defined. Methods: We employed a conversational artificial intelligence-driven analytical framework to investigate TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT pathway alterations in a cohort of 184 PDAC patients. Clinical and molecular data were integrated to generate age- and treatment-stratified cohorts, enabling pathway-level and gene-level analyses according to gemcitabine exposure. Findings generated through AI-assisted interrogation were subsequently evaluated using conventional statistical approaches. Results: TGF{beta} pathway alterations were identified in approximately one-quarter to one-third of tumors across clinical subgroups and demonstrated relatively stable frequencies regardless of age at diagnosis or gemcitabine treatment status. Gene-level analyses revealed that pathway disruption was predominantly driven by recurrent alterations in SMAD4, with additional low-frequency events involving TGFBR1 and TGFBR2. Notably, TGFBR2 mutations were significantly more frequent among late-onset PDAC patients receiving gemcitabine compared with untreated late-onset patients (8.8% vs. 1.4%; p = 0.04), suggesting a potential treatment-associated enrichment. In contrast, JAK/STAT pathway alterations were rare throughout the cohort, with only isolated mutations observed in pathway components including JAK1, JAK2, JAK3, STAT1, STAT3, and related regulatory genes. No significant differences in JAK/STAT alteration frequencies were identified according to age or treatment exposure. Conclusions: TGF{beta} and JAK/STAT pathways exhibit distinct genomic architectures in PDAC. TGF{beta} pathway disruption represents a recurrent feature of disease biology, largely driven by SMAD4 alterations, while TGFBR2 enrichment in gemcitabine-treated late-onset tumors suggests a potential context-specific association worthy of further investigation. Conversely, genomic alterations within the JAK/STAT pathway are uncommon, indicating that pathway activity may be regulated predominantly through non-genomic mechanisms. These findings demonstrate the utility of conversational artificial intelligence agents for rapid, scalable, and clinically contextualized pathway interrogation and support future studies integrating multi-omic data to refine precision medicine strategies in PDAC.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Quantum CT via Dynamic Interval Encoding and Prior-Balanced QUBO Reconstruction

Quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO)-based quantum computed tomography (CT) casts reconstruction as a binary quadratic problem for quantum annealing and hybrid quantum–classical solvers. For grayscale CT, however, image encoding is constrained by the binary-variable budget: fixed global bit-plane encodings increase QUBO size and coupling complexity as gray-level precision improves, whereas low-bit encodings introduce quantization error. We propose a QUBO-based grayscale CT reconstruction framework that combines dynamic interval encoding with prior-balanced optimization. Each refinement round encodes active pixels only within local gray-level intervals around the current estimate, and a boundary-hit-guided update rule adaptively switches between search expansion and local refinement. To improve optimization stability, the method balances projection-domain data consistency and an edge-preserving quadratic prior before forming the final QUBO. Sparse-view and limited-angle fan-beam CT experiments show that the proposed method recovers structures and gray-level distributions more faithfully than the evaluated analytic, iterative, variational, and representation-based baselines. Expressivity analysis and ablation studies further indicate that the improvement mainly arises from effective gray-level representation through dynamic local encoding and more stable data-fidelity–prior coupling. Experiments on the D-Wave hybrid binary quadratic model (BQM) solver further demonstrate that the formulation is executable on a hardware-backed hybrid quantum–classical backend.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Statistically Valid Hyperparameter Selection: From Tuning to Guarantees

arXiv:2606.25601v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperparameter selection is a critical step in the deployment of modern artificial intelligence systems, given the need to tune degrees of freedom such as inference-time parameters, implementation-level settings, and thresholds driving decision rules. Despite its practical importance, hyperparameter selection is typically performed using best-effort empirical methods such as grid search or Bayesian optimization, which provide no formal statistical guarantees on reliability or safety. This monograph presents a unified statistical framework for reliable hyperparameter selection, centered on the learn-then-test (LTT) paradigm, which formulates the problem as multiple hypothesis testing over a candidate set of hyperparameters. The framework enables the selection of hyperparameters that provably satisfy application-specific reliability requirements – such as bounds on average risk, quantile risk, or information-theoretic constraints – with explicit, finite-sample control of error probabilities. The supporting statistical machinery, namely p-values, e-values, and concentration inequalities, is developed from first principles in a dedicated appendix.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Clipping Makes Distributed and Federated Asynchronous SGD Robust to Stragglers

arXiv:2606.13287v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In modern machine learning, parallelization of training is an important strategy for increasing scale. Asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (ASGD), which maximizes the utilization of available hardware by avoiding waiting for slow workers. However, with constant step sizes, the convergence of ASGD is nonetheless affected negatively by slow workers due to large delays in updates. At the same time, it has been empirically observed in asynchronous training of deep learning models that gradient clipping "stabilizes" training. In this work, we provide a theoretical justification for this behavior, as we show that clipping removes the dependence of the maximum delay in the oracle complexity. We employ a sub-Weibull model of gradient noise which generalizes sub-Gaussian and sub-exponential distributions to more heavy-tailed distributions, motivated by empirical observations in deep learning. We show convergence in expectation, and the first time in asynchronous optimization, convergence with high probability.

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

CrossFlow: One-Step Generation Across Latent and Pixel Spaces

Most diffusion and flow-matching generators define the prior, probability path, and prediction target in the same representation space. Latent diffusion improves efficiency by moving this path into an autoencoder latent space, but the final sample is still produced by a separately trained decoder. This separation creates a mismatch: the generator is optimized for latent-space prediction, while final quality depends on how the decoder handles generated latents that may differ from clean encoder outputs. We introduce CrossFlow, a cross-space flow formulation that maps noisy latent inputs directly to pixel-space images. The key technical step is a velocity-free one-step objective: the latent trajectory defines the training path, but the supervised prediction is an image rather than a latent displacement. This lets one model act both as a one-step latent-to-pixel generator and as a decoder replacement for latent diffusion pipelines. On class-conditional ImageNet-1k at $256\times256$, CrossFlow-XL achieves 1.62 FID with one function evaluation. Ablations show that the latent encoder and pixel-space perceptual and adversarial losses are important for fidelity. These results indicate that cross-space flow objectives can combine the efficiency of latent representations with direct pixel-space supervision, without requiring a separate decoder at inference.

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

HairLRM: Strand-based Hair Modeling via Large Reconstruction Models

The fundamental limitation of traditional strand-based modeling is not simply data scarcity, but the ill-posedness of inferring complex 3D fields from 2D imagery without structural constraints. This unconstrained regression leads to catastrophic failures in resolving both global occlusion (e.g., in ponytails) and local directionality (e.g., in curls), resulting in over-smoothed, plausible-but-incorrect geometries. To resolve this, we integrate the strong geometric priors of Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) into the strand generation pipeline. Using the LRM mesh as a structural anchor, we employ a novel Dual Orientation AutoEncoder to lift coarse geometry into high-fidelity strands. By resolving vector field singularities through latent-space optimization and surface-guided refinement, our method effectively disentangles complex topological structures, setting a new benchmark for robustness and accuracy in hair reconstruction.

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

Investigating Inductive Biases for Machine Learning Emulation of Sudden Stratospheric Warmings in Idealised Isca Simulations

arXiv:2606.18857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine-learning emulators are increasingly used for weather prediction and have the potential to extend skill on subseasonal-to-seasonal timescales by learning dynamically important sources of predictability. A key challenge is whether the models can exploit predictability anchors, such as stratospheric variability, that influence tropospheric circulation beyond short lead times. We test how architectural inductive bias affects emulation of sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) dynamics using paired idealised Isca simulations that differ only in an imposed wave-2 heating perturbation. Across convolutional, transformer, and graph-based architectures trained for one-step prediction, model differences are modest when the stratosphere is dynamically quiet but widen substantially when SSW-like variability is active. Our results identify explicit three-dimensional vertical coupling as a key inductive bias for machine-learning emulation of stratospheric dynamics. However, Eliassen-Palm flux diagnostics show that low forecast error does not guarantee physically faithful wave-mean-flow interaction, with coherent errors remaining in stratospheric wave-driving structure.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

MSAVBench: Towards Comprehensive and Reliable Evaluation of Multi-Shot Audio-Video Generation

Video generation is rapidly evolving from single-shot synthesis to complex multi-shot audio-video (MSAV) narratives to meet real-world demands. However, evaluating such frontier models remains a fundamental challenge. Existing benchmarks are limited in scope and data diversity, and rely on rigid evaluation pipelines, preventing systematic and reliable assessment of modern MSAV models. To bridge these gaps, we introduce MSAVBench, the first comprehensive benchmark and adaptive hybrid evaluation framework for multi-shot audio-video generation. Our benchmark spans four key dimensions, video, audio, shot, and reference, covering diverse task settings, varying shot counts of up to 15, and challenging non-realistic scenarios. Our evaluation framework improves robustness through an adaptive self-correction mechanism for shot segmentation, instance-wise rubrics for subjective metrics, and tool-grounded evidence extraction for complex judgments. Furthermore, MSAVBench achieves high alignment with human judgments, reaching a Spearman rank correlation of 91.5%. Our systematic evaluation of 19 state-of-the-art closed- and open-source models shows that current systems still struggle with director-level control and fine-grained audio-visual synchronization, while modular or agentic generation pipelines offer a promising path toward narrowing the gap between open- and closed-source models. The benchmark data and evaluation code are publicly available at https://github.com/ali-vilab/MSAVBench.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

HG-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Page Handwritten Answer-Region Grounding in Automated Homework Assessment

Automated homework assessment depends not only on recognizing student answers, but also on accurately locating where each answer and each intermediate reasoning step appears in noisy, multi-page handwritten work. This paper addresses the missing evaluation setting of page-aware, two-level answer-region grounding: given a sequence of homework page images, a model must localize complete answer regions and their ordered step-level subregions. We introduce HG-Bench, a benchmark of 500 human-annotated K-12 homework samples curated from a 1,489,278-image source pool, with question-level and step-level boxes linked by a hierarchical containment constraint. HG-Bench is paired with a page-aware evaluation protocol that separately measures complete-answer localization (FA) and step-level decomposition (FSm), revealing whether models truly ground the spatial structure of student reasoning rather than merely parse visible text. Across frontier closed-source APIs and competitive open-weight VLMs, no zero-shot system exceeds 55.22% on FA or 48.22% on FSm, while a GLM-4.6V 9B reference model fine-tuned on ~10k in-domain examples reaches 74.97/72.26. These results identify step-level handwritten grounding as a concrete capability gap and provide a reproducible benchmark, evaluation protocol, and trained reference point for future work on automated homework assessment.

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

Simulation-Augmented Multi-Step Split Conformal Prediction for Aggregated Forecasts

arXiv:2606.16356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study uncertainty quantification for aggregated forecasting tasks such as annual totals and year-over-year growth rates. We propose SA-MSCP, a simulation-augmented multi-step split conformal method that generates future paths from cross-validated residuals using a block bootstrap and constructs prediction intervals from empirical quantiles. Experiments show that SA-MSCP improves empirical coverage over a simulated-path baseline for aggregated and growth-rate targets. Our results demonstrate that simulation-enhanced conformal calibration is an effective and general framework for uncertainty quantification in aggregated time-series forecasting.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Midwifery Practice in Conflict Contexts: Lived Experiences from Somalia and Nigeria

Background: Midwives are a central cadre in the health system, particularly in conflict-affected settings where they are sometimes the primary or even only skilled providers available. Yet, despite their critical role, there is limited qualitative evidence capturing their lived experiences and how these shape workforce entry, retention, and overall well-being. Methods: Drawing on a phenomenological research methodology, this qualitative study was embedded within a larger prospective longitudinal cohort of midwifery students and graduates in Somalia and Nigeria. We conducted focus group discussions with graduate midwives (n=48 in Nigeria; n=63 in Somalia) to explore their experiences transitioning into the workforce and their realities working in health systems impacted by conflict and violent insecurity. Data were analysed using inductive thematic analysis. Results: Five themes emerged from the data: (1) job search and workforce entry, which was described as fraught with challenges and shaped by a set of formal systems in Nigeria but informal networks and structural barriers in Somalia (2) working conditions that were marked by resource scarcity, infrastructural challenges, and heavy and unreasonable workloads, (3) safety, security and coping strategies that differed across the two contexts but reflected persistent exposure to violence and a reliance on ad hoc and personal coping in lieu of systematic protection, (4) community perceptions of midwives, shaped and constrained by social and gender norms and (5) mental health and emotional wellbeing, highlighting stress, burnout and moral injury experienced by this cadre. Conclusion: Our findings highlight the profound challenges faced by midwives working in conflict-affected settings, and they shine a light on the urgent need to support and invest in this critical and predominantly female health workforce.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

SPARQ-MI leverages end-to-end spatial single-cell analysis of the tumor microenvironment

Detailed spatial analysis of the tumor micro-environment (TME) through multiplexed fluorescence imaging requires quantitative image-processing and data-analysis methods. While data-preprocessing down to segmentation of individual cells is captured by available methods, statistical analysis of single-cell features is compromised by the uneven noise distribution especially in complex tissues such as the TME, as well as by labor-intensive manual cell-type annotation and region segmentation. Here, we present SPARQ-MI (Spatial Phenotyping, Architecture Reconstruction and Quantification from Multiplexed Imaging) for streamlined spatial single-cell analysis, along with a tissue microarray PhenoCycler data-set with 37 fluorescent channels from melanoma patients under immunotherapy. We demonstrate that SPARQ-MI enables robust reconstruction of the cellular and spatial composition in this and other tissue types. Our analysis reveals associations of the cell-state and spatial location of CD8 T cells with response to immunotherapy. Overall, SPARQ-MI allows for quantitative analysis of complex fluorescence histology samples under minimal user input, and accounting for spatially uneven coverage of antibody signals, setting the stage for quantitative analysis of clinical samples.

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

Robustness Verification of Recurrent Neural Networks with Abstraction Refinement

arXiv:2606.12490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Certified local robustness verification for recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is challenging because approximation errors introduced by nonlinear relaxations can propagate through recurrent connections and accumulate over time. As a result, scalable linear bound propagation methods often become overly conservative and fail to certify inputs that are in fact robust, especially when many pre-activation intervals cross zero. We propose an abstraction-refinement framework for RNN verification that partitions such intervals to remove the dominant relaxation error: on each refined branch, ReLU becomes exact, and smooth activations such as tanh and sigmoid admit substantially tighter linear envelopes. To control the combinatorial cost of splitting in long sequences, we introduce a SHAP-guided timestep selection strategy that ranks hidden states by their contribution to the verification objective and refines only the most critical timesteps in temporal order. Experiments on CIFAR10 and MNIST stroke benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in verification success and robustness-margin tightness over abstraction-only baselines, while exposing clear runtime trade-offs between ReLU and tanh models.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Milstein-type Schemes for Hyperbolic SPDEs

arXiv:2512.19647v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This article studies the temporal approximation of hyperbolic semilinear stochastic evolution equations with multiplicative Gaussian noise by Milstein-type schemes. We take the term hyperbolic to mean that the leading operator generates a contractive, not necessarily analytic $C_0$-semigroup. Optimal convergence rates are derived for the pathwise uniform strong error \[ E_h^\infty := \Big(\mathbb{E}\Big[\max_{1\le j \le M}\|U_{t_j}-u_j\|_X^p\Big]\Big)^{1/p} \] on a Hilbert space $X$ for $p\in [2,\infty)$. Here, $U$ is the mild solution and $u_j$ its Milstein approximation at time $t_j=jh$ with step size $h>0$ and final time $T=Mh>0$. For sufficiently regular nonlinearity and noise, we establish strong convergence of order one, with the error satisfying $E_h^\infty\lesssim h\sqrt{\log(T/h)}$ for rational Milstein schemes and $E_h^\infty \lesssim h$ for exponential Milstein schemes. This extends previous results from parabolic to hyperbolic SPDEs and from exponential to rational Milstein schemes. Moreover, root-mean-square error estimates are strengthened to pathwise uniform estimates. Numerical experiments validate the convergence rates for the stochastic Schrödinger equation. Further applications to Maxwell's and transport equations are included.