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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

Authors:
Erkison Ewomazino Odih↗

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Distributional Loss for Robust Classification

Authors:
Kathleen Anderson↗Thomas Martinetz↗

This paper proposes a novel loss concept for supervised classification tasks. Rather than enforcing a direct mapping from each input sample to a single assigned label, we define an optimization objective over all classifier outputs as a bimodal Gaussian distribution. This softer target formulation implicitly captures class ambiguity, mitigates overfitting, and encourages the learning of more robust decision boundaries, all without requiring additional label information. Experimental results demonstrate consistent improvements in robustness, with particularly pronounced gains in low-data regimes, while requiring only minimal modifications to standard training pipelines.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

m2sv: A Scalable Benchmark for Map-to-Street-View Spatial Reasoning

Authors:
Yosub Shin↗Michael Buriek↗Igor Molybog↗

Vision–language models (VLMs) achieve strong performance on many multimodal benchmarks but remain brittle on spatial reasoning tasks that require aligning abstract overhead representations with egocentric views. We introduce m2sv, a scalable benchmark for map-to-street-view spatial reasoning that asks models to infer camera viewing direction by aligning a north-up overhead map with a Street View image captured at the same real-world intersection. We release m2sv-20k, a geographically diverse benchmark with controlled ambiguity, along with m2sv-sft-11k, a curated set of structured reasoning traces for supervised fine-tuning. Despite strong performance on existing multimodal benchmarks, the best evaluated VLM achieves only 65.2% accuracy on m2sv, below human annotators who reach 72.0% on average (and 95% for an expert) with strong inter-annotator agreement ($\kappa$ up to 0.76). While supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning yield consistent gains, cross-benchmark evaluations reveal limited transfer. Beyond aggregate accuracy, we systematically analyze difficulty in map-to-street-view reasoning using both structural signals and human effort, and conduct an extensive failure analysis of adapted open models. Our findings highlight persistent gaps in geometric alignment, evidence aggregation, and reasoning consistency, motivating future work on grounded spatial reasoning across viewpoints.

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

CASHEW: Stabilizing Multimodal Reasoning via Iterative Trajectory Aggregation

Authors:
Chaoyu Li↗Deeparghya Dutta Barua↗Fei Tao↗Pooyan Fazli↗

Vision-language models achieve strong performance across a wide range of multimodal understanding and reasoning tasks, yet their multi-step reasoning remains unstable. Repeated sampling over the same input often produces divergent reasoning trajectories and inconsistent final predictions. To address this, we introduce two complementary approaches inspired by test-time scaling: (1) CASHEW, an inference-time framework that stabilizes reasoning by iteratively aggregating multiple candidate trajectories into higher-quality reasoning traces, with explicit visual verification filtering hallucinated steps and grounding reasoning in visual evidence, and (2) CASHEW-RL, a learned variant that internalizes this aggregation behavior within a single model. CASHEW-RL is trained using Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) with a composite reward that encourages correct answers grounded in minimal yet sufficient visual evidence, while adaptively allocating reasoning effort based on task difficulty. This training objective enables robust self-aggregation at inference. Extensive experiments on 13 image understanding, video understanding, and video reasoning benchmarks show significant performance improvements, including gains of up to +26.2 percentage points on ScienceQA and +9.1 percentage points on EgoSchema.

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05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

A Tanaka-Type Formula for Compact Sets and Equilibrium Measures of L\'{e}vy Processes

Authors:
Kohki Iba↗Victor Rivero↗

arXiv:2606.17472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Tanaka's formula is a classical identity for Brownian motion, and Tsukada (2018) extended it to L\'{e}vy processes not necessarily symmetric. From a potential-theoretic point of view, this formula shows that the invariant function for the process killed upon hitting a singleton can be decomposed into the sum of a martingale part and a local time. In this paper, we generalize this singleton setting and derive a Tanaka-type formula for a compact set $B$. To this end, we introduce the equilibrium measure, defined as the rescaled limit of the $q$-capacity measures, and show that the invariant function for the process killed upon hitting $B$ can be represented as the integral, with respect to the equilibrium measure, of the invariant functions associated with processes killed upon hitting singletons, up to an additive constant called the Robin constant. Moreover, when $B$ is an interval, we obtain explicit representations of the equilibrium measure, the Robin constant, and the martingale part for recurrent stable processes as well as for recurrent spectrally negative L\'{e}vy processes. Finally, we discuss how an analogous Tanaka-type formula can also be established for transient L\'{e}vy processes.

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

Implementation of two-qubit Rydberg operations on neutral Rb-87 atoms in systems with different intermediate states

Authors:
I. V. Iukhnovets↗O. V. Bychkova↗I. B. Bobrov↗A. P. Gordeev↗M. Y. Goloshchapov↗G. I. Struchalin↗S. S. Straupe↗

arXiv:2606.13975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents an experimental setup for implementing two-qubit operations on neutral atoms ($^{87}$Rb) with the possibility of using two different Rydberg excitation schemes. One of them uses 5P$_{1/2}$ as the intermediate level and applies the second-stage beam locally to the addressed atoms. The second scheme uses the 6P$_{3/2}$ level; in this scheme, the particles to be entangled are moved to a separate zone through which both Rydberg beams pass. The advantages and limitations of both schemes are analyzed. Based on numerical modeling performed with a Julia package developed by the authors, it is demonstrated that the spatial configuration has a greater effect on quantum-operation fidelity than the choice of intermediate level. An experimental implementation of the scheme using the 6P$_{3/2}$ level is demonstrated, making it possible to achieve a two-qubit operation fidelity of 94%.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Mirage Probes: How Vision Models Fake Visual Understanding

Authors:
Daniel Ben-Levi↗Judah Goldfeder↗Weiliang Zhao↗Raz Lapid↗Amit LeVi↗Allen G. Roush↗Ravid Shwartz-Ziv↗Hod Lipson↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) can answer image-based questions confidently, and often correctly, even when no image is provided. This mirage behavior inflates benchmark scores without reflecting visual grounding. Prior work treats this as a single failure mode. We argue it is two. Using Mirage Probes, a contrastive probing framework that pairs paraphrased question variants with matched mirage and non-mirage labels on the same image, we show that mirage behavior is linearly decodable from internal activations across residual stream, MLP, post-attention, and attention-head sites in two open-source VLMs. We demonstrate that a Naive Bayes text baseline cannot recover this signal, ruling out surface lexical confounds. Cross-benchmark separability patterns, together with a novel Prior Harnessing Index (PHI) measuring how much a model can answer from text alone, expose two distinct regimes: textual biases, where the model answers from language priors without engaging visual representations, and spurious images, where it constructs false visual content in latent space and answers as if grounded. The distinction has direct mitigation consequences: text-distribution cleaning can address the first regime but cannot reach the second, since spurious-image mirages live in the model's visual representations rather than its text. Faithful visual grounding will require interventions at the representational level.

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

LoComposition: Terrain-Adaptive Energy-Efficient Quadruped Locomotion without Gait Priors

Authors:
Loukas Kordos↗Leonard T. Franz↗Simon Rappenecker↗Oliver Hausdoerfer↗Angela P. Schoellig↗Pavel Kolev↗Georg Martius↗

arXiv:2606.15896v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning-based quadrupedal locomotion typically relies on complex reward formulations that entangle task specification, operational limits, gait preference, and terrain adaptation within a single optimization objective. We instead treat these functions through distinct mechanisms: rewards for task specification, constraints for operational limits, energy minimization for gait preference, and exteroceptive perception for adapting energy use to terrain difficulty. We show that these components jointly enable efficient, terrain-adaptive locomotion, and that removing each component exposes a distinct failure mode. Our formulation removes explicit gait priors (including air-time, contact-count, and foot-clearance targets) in favor of emergent behavior. Compared to a conventional complex-reward baseline, our formulation achieves comparable terrain traversal while reducing cost of transport by 56% and operational-limit violations by 96%. The resulting policies transfer zero-shot to a physical Unitree Go2 using LiDAR-based elevation mapping. Project website with videos: https://tinyurl.com/locomposition.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-Order Hermite Optimization: Fast and Exact Gradient Computation in Open-Loop Quantum Optimal Control using a Discrete Adjoint Approach

Authors:
Spencer Lee↗Daniel Appelo↗

arXiv:2505.09857v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces the High-Order Hermite Optimization (HOHO) method, an open-loop discrete adjoint method for quantum optimal control. Our method is the first of its kind to efficiently compute exact (discrete) gradients when using continuous, parameterized control pulses while solving the forward equations (e.g. Schrodinger's equation or the Linblad master equation) with an arbitrarily high-order Hermite Runge-Kutta method. The HOHO method is implemented in QuantumGateDesign$.$jl (https://github.com/leespen1/QuantumGateDesign.jl), an open-source software package for the Julia programming language, which we use to perform numerical experiments comparing the method to Juqbox$.$jl (https://github.com/LLNL/Juqbox.jl). For realistic model problems we observe speedups up to 775x.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

MentalMARBERT: Domain-Adaptive Pre-training and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Arabic Mental Health Disorders Detection

Authors:
Fatimah Almalki↗Areej Alhothali↗Lulwah Alharigy↗Abdulrahman Aladeem↗

Detecting mental health disorders from Arabic social media text remains challenging due to dialectal variation, informal language, limited high-quality annotated resources, and severe class imbalance. While English mental health natural language processing (NLP) has progressed substantially, Arabic multi-class disorder classification remains insufficiently studied. This study proposes a two-phase framework for Arabic mental health text classification. In phase 1, three Arabic pre-trained language models, AraBERT, CAMeLBERT, and MARBERT, undergo Domain-Adaptive and Task-Adaptive Pretraining (DAPT and TAPT) using a large-scale corpus of unlabeled Arabic mental health tweets. The adapted models are evaluated under a unified protocol to identify the most effective backbone model. In phase 2, the selected model is assessed across four configurations combining single-stage and hierarchical two-stage classification architectures with full fine-tuning and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). To support this study, we constructed a novel annotated Arabic mental health dataset comprising 50,670 tweets across six categories, with strong inter annotator agreement (Krippendorff's Alpha = 0.733, average pairwise agreement = 0.797). Experimental results show that the domain-adapted MARBERT (MentalMARBERT) achieves statistically significant improvements over baseline models in both accuracy and macro-F1. The hierarchical two-stage architecture combined with full fine-tuning achieves the best overall performance, reaching a macro-F1 of 0.861 and an accuracy of 0.877. These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of domain-specific adaptive pretraining and hierarchical classification for Arabic mental health disorder detection.

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

AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

Authors:
Ahmadreza Jeddi↗Minh Ngoc Le↗Amirhossein Kazerouni↗Hakki Can Karaimer↗Hue Nguyen↗Iqbal Mohomed↗Michael Brudno↗Alex Levinshtein↗Konstantinos G. Derpanis↗Babak Taati↗Radek Grzeszczuk↗

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains. We view this cost through two coupled axes: Visual Context Scaling (VCS), which controls how much visual evidence is passed to the language model, and Visual Reasoning Scaling (VRS), which controls how much inference-time reasoning search is performed. Existing methods typically optimize one axis at a time, leaving the joint allocation of compute across these axes underexplored. We introduce Adaptive Visual Inference Scaling (AVIS), a lightweight policy that adapts both VCS and VRS per query. AVIS realizes VCS through Key Diversity Visual (KDV) pruning, a training-free $O(N)$ key-based rule for removing redundant visual tokens before prefilling, and realizes VRS through adaptive self-consistency, using a learned difficulty predictor to select the number of reasoning rollouts. AVIS is deployment-friendly and compatible with shared-prefill inference, where all rollouts reuse a single prefilling pass and KV cache. Across diverse image and video reasoning benchmarks, AVIS improves the accuracy–compute trade-off relative to VCS-only and VRS-only baselines, and remains effective on top of RL post-trained VLMs while keeping compute and latency low.

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

How Transparent is DiffusionGemma?

Authors:
Joshua Engels↗Callum McDougall↗Bilal Chughtai↗Janos Kramar↗Senthoran Rajamanoharan↗Cindy Wu↗Arthur Conmy↗Asic Q Chen↗Jean Tarbouriech↗Min Ma↗Brendan O'Donoghue↗Jo\~ao Gabriel Lopes de Oliveira↗…

arXiv:2606.20560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM reasoning transparency is a critical affordance for understanding model decisions, mitigating misuse and misalignment, and debugging surprising model behaviors. However, DiffusionGemma performs a larger fraction of its computation in a continuous latent space; does this make its reasoning less transparent? We study this question by decomposing transparency into two components: variable transparency, whether we understand intermediate snapshots of a model's computational state; and algorithmic transparency, whether we can use these snapshots to reconstruct the process by which the model arrived at its outputs. Naively, DiffusionGemma has poor variable transparency: its opaque serial depth, the amount of serial computation that occurs in between interpretable model states, seems at first 28.6X higher than the corresponding autoregressive Gemma 4 model. However, we show that we can map the information flowing between denoising steps through an interpretable token bottleneck with no decrease in downstream performance. Treating these intermediate states as interpretable reduces the opaque serial depth to just 1.1X that of Gemma 4. Algorithmic transparency is harder for diffusion models than for autoregressive models because all token predictions in the canvas can change at every denoising step, giving the model the power to implement complicated distributed algorithms during the denoising process. To begin bridging this gap, we conduct a suite of interpretability case studies, uncovering initial evidence of novel diffusion-specific phenomena such as non-chronological reasoning, token and sequence smearing, and intermediate-context reasoning. Finally, we test monitorability, a key application of transparency that measures whether model outputs are useful for downstream tasks. We find that DiffusionGemma is similarly monitorable to Gemma 4.

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13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Simulation of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with Bivariate Quantum Signal Processing

Authors:
Joshua M. Courtney↗

arXiv:2605.12450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We achieve query-optimal quantum simulations of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians $H_{\mathrm{eff}} = H_R + iH_I$, where $H_R$ is Hermitian and $H_I \succeq 0$, using a bivariate extension of quantum signal processing (QSP) with non-commuting signal operators. The algorithm encodes the interaction-picture Dyson series as a polynomial on the bitorus, implemented through a structured multivariable QSP (M-QSP) circuit. A constant-ratio condition guarantees scalar angle-finding for M-QSP circuits with arbitrary non-commuting signal operators. A degree-preserving sum-of-squares spectral factorization permits scalar complementary polynomials in two variables. Angles are deterministically calculated in a classical precomputation step, running in $\mathcal{O}(d_R \cdot d_I)$ classical operations. Operator norms $\alpha_R\,,\beta_I$ contribute additively with query complexity $\mathcal{O}((\alpha_R + \beta_I)T + \log(1/\varepsilon)/\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ matching an information-theoretic lower bound in the separate-oracle model, where $H_R$ and $H_I$ are accessed through independent block encodings. The postselection success probability is $e^{-2\beta_I T}\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2\cdot (1 - \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon))$, decomposing into a state-dependent factor $\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2$ from the intrinsic barrier and an $e^{-2\beta_I T}$ overhead from polynomial block-encoding.

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14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Hierarchical Random Measures without Tables

Authors:
Marta Catalano↗Claudio Del Sole↗

arXiv:2505.02653v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The hierarchical Dirichlet process is the cornerstone of Bayesian nonparametric multilevel models. Its generative model can be described through a set of latent variables, commonly referred to as tables within the popular restaurant franchise metaphor. The latent tables simplify the expression of the posterior and allow for the implementation of Gibbs sampling algorithms to approximately draw posterior samples. However, managing their assignments can become computationally expensive, especially as the size of the dataset and the number of levels increase. In this work, we identify a prior for the concentration parameter of the hierarchical Dirichlet process that (i) induces a quasi-conjugate posterior distribution, and (ii) removes the need for tables, leading to more interpretable expressions for the posterior, with both a scalable and an exact algorithm to sample from it. Remarkably, this construction extends beyond the Dirichlet process, leading to a new framework for defining normalized hierarchical random measures and a new class of algorithms to sample from their posteriors. The key analytical tool is the independence of multivariate increments, that is, their representation as completely random vectors.

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

Beyond Models: Reflections on Engineering AI-enabled Systems in a Project-Based Course

Authors:
Amir Mashmool↗Kishan Ravindra Sawant↗Mojtaba Shahin↗Nico Hochgeschwender↗Rainer Koschke↗

arXiv:2606.16842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Teaching Software Engineering for AI-enabled systems entails addressing the integration of AI components within full-scale software architectures under realistic constraints. While machine learning courses emphasize model development, students often lack experience in architectural design, deployment, and monitoring of AI-enabled systems. Empirical evaluations of such system-oriented AI courses remain limited. This paper reflects on the design and implementation of a project-based master's-level course titled AI Algorithms: Theory and Engineering, at the University of Bremen, in which students developed a movie recommendation system while making architectural design decisions to address challenges related to scalability, deployment, and evolving requirements. We conducted a mixed-methods study combining analyses of student submissions and questionnaire responses to investigate integration challenges, learning outcomes, and opportunities for improvement. Our results indicate persistent difficulties in early architectural decisions, heterogeneous ML integration, evolving requirements, and data management, largely due to uneven ML and software engineering expertise. From the educator's perspective, the course fostered system-level reasoning and strengthened awareness of data-centric ML practices in AI-enabled systems.

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

V2P-Manip: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Monocular Human Videos

Authors:
Kaihan Chen↗Yanming Shao↗Haifeng Ji↗Xiaokang Yang↗Yao Mu↗

Achieving autonomous robotic dexterous manipulation requires precise, human-like action sequences at scale. As a scalable supplement to costly teleoperation data, extracting trajectories with both visual fidelity and physical plausibility from monocular videos represents a promising frontier in embodied AI. To this end, we introduce V2P-Manip, an efficient framework designed to learn dexterous manipulation policies directly from human demonstration videos. We establish an efficient, integrated pipeline encompassing 3D asset acquisition, trajectory estimation, and dexterous policy learning. To bridge the gap between visual perception and physical constraints, we introduce a two-stage refinement process to enforce spatial alignment and physical consistency. Evaluations on the TACO and OakInk benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in pose accuracy, adaptability to unstructured environments, and training efficiency. Ultimately, experimental results confirm an average success rate of over 75% across multiple synthetic manipulation tasks and validate the adaptability of the extracted manipulation priors across diverse dexterous hand embodiments.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Nonadiabatic Self-Healing of Trotter Errors in Digitized Counterdiabatic Dynamics

Authors:
Mara Vizzuso↗Gianluca Passarelli↗Giovanni Cantele↗Procolo Lucignano↗Xi Chen↗Koushik Paul↗

arXiv:2512.22636v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trotter errors in digitized quantum dynamics arise from approximating time-ordered evolution under noncommuting Hamiltonian terms with a product formula. In the adiabatic regime, such errors are known to exhibit long-time self-healing [Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 060602 (2023)], where discretization effects are effectively suppressed. Here we show that self-healing persists at finite evolution times once nonadiabatic errors induced by finite-speed ramps are compensated. Using counterdiabatic driving to cancel diabatic transitions and isolate discretization effects, we study both noninteracting and interacting spin models and characterize the finite-time scaling with the Trotter steps and the total evolution time. In the instantaneous eigenbasis of the driven Hamiltonian, the leading digital error maps to an effective harmonic perturbation whose dominant Fourier component yields an analytic upper bound on the finite-time Trotter error and reveals the phase-cancellation mechanism underlying self-healing. Our results establish finite-time self-healing as a generic feature of digitized counterdiabatic protocols, clarify its mechanism beyond the long-time adiabatic limit, and provide practical guidance for high-fidelity state preparation on gate-based quantum processors.

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

EqCollide: Equivariant and Collision-Aware Deformable Objects Neural Simulator

Authors:
Qianyi Chen↗Tianrun Gao↗Chenbo Jiang↗Tailin Wu↗

arXiv:2506.05797v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulating collisions of deformable objects is a fundamental yet challenging task due to the complexity of modeling solid mechanics and multi-body interactions. Existing data-driven methods often suffer from lack of equivariance to physical symmetries, inadequate handling of collisions, and limited scalability. Here we introduce \name, the first end-to-end equivariant neural fields simulator for deformable objects and their collisions. We propose an equivariant encoder to map object geometry and velocity into latent control points. A subsequent equivariant Graph Neural Network-based Neural Ordinary Differential Equation models the interactions among control points via collision-aware message passing. To reconstruct velocity fields, we query a neural field conditioned on control point features, enabling continuous and resolution-independent motion predictions. Experimental results on 2D and 3D scenarios show that \name achieves accurate, stable, and scalable simulations across diverse object configurations. It achieves $24.34\%$ to $57.62\%$ lower rollout MSE, even compared with the best-performing baseline model. Furthermore, \name could generalize to more colliding objects and extended temporal horizons, and stay robust to input transformed with group action. Code is available at: https://github.com/AI4Science-WestlakeU/EqCollide

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20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Matrix Discrepancy for Representations of Finite Groups

Authors:
Afonso S. Bandeira↗Helmut B\"olcskei↗

arXiv:2606.12181v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Given a finite group $G$, we prove that there exist signs $\varepsilon\in\{\pm1\}^G$ such that $$\left\| \sum_{g\in G} \varepsilon_g\rho(g) \right\|\leq C\, \sqrt{|G|},$$ where $\rho$ is the left regular representation of $G$, and $C$ is a universal constant. This special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture was posed in [BKMZ24], where it was established for simple groups.

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21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Robust Instruction Compliance in Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Wo Wei Lin↗Ethan Rathbun↗Enrico Marchesini↗Xiang Zhi Tan↗

arXiv:2605.12655v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) in real-world use cases may need to adapt to external natural language instructions that interrupt ongoing behavior and conflict with long-horizon objectives. However, conditioning rewards on instructions introduces a fundamental failure mode as Bellman updates couple value estimates across instruction contexts, leading to inconsistent values when instructions interrupt macro-actions. We propose Macro-Action Value Correction for Instruction Compliance (MAVIC), which corrects Bellman backups at instruction boundaries by correcting the incoming instruction objective and restoring the continuation value under the current objective. Unlike reward shaping, MAVIC modifies the bootstrapping target itself, enabling consistent value estimation under stochastic instruction switching within a unified policy. We provide theoretical analysis and an actor-critic implementation, and show that MAVIC achieves high instruction compliance while preserving base task performance in increasingly complex cooperative multi-agent environments.

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

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Authors:
Yechan Kang↗Yongjin Kweon↗Mingyeong Seo↗Sohee Park↗Yeonguk Jeon↗Jongkil Park↗Hyun Jae Jang↗Jaewook Kim↗YeonJoo Jeong↗Suyoun Lee↗Seongsik Park↗

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.

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23.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

Biological aging and generational shifts in early-onset cancer risk

Authors:
Ruiyi Tian↗

Incidence of early-onset cancer is rising globally in recent generations, which underscores the need to elucidate the influence of emerging generational risk factors. Systemic and organ-specific aging reflects the cumulative impact of exposures and may provide an integrative and complementary approach to understand early-onset cancer risk. Here among 154,169 young adults from the United Kingdom Biobank, systemic aging measured by PhenoAge increased across birth cohorts, with 23% s.d. increase for those born 1965–1974 versus 1950–1954, and was associated with early-onset solid cancer risk (hazard ratio (HR)per s.d. 1.08; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.03–1.13), driven by lung, gastrointestinal and uterine cancers, independent of genetic risks of aging and cancer. Patterns were consistent using alternative systemic aging measures, including the Klemera–Doubal method-defined age gap and metabolomic-based age gap. These findings were validated partially among 10,262 participants in the United States All of Us Research Program. Proteomics-based organ-specific aging analyses linked immune aging with early-onset lung cancer (HRper s.d. 1.89; CI, 1.20–2.97) and adipose tissue aging to early-onset colorectal cancer (HR 1.60; CI, 1.11–2.32). Greater age gap, reflecting more advanced biological aging relative to chronological age, may serve as a driver associated with risk of early-onset solid cancers, highlighting the importance of uncovering underlying mechanisms to guide effective prevention strategies. Analyses of population cohorts found that young adults exhibited earlier systemic and organ-specific aging, which was associated with increased risk of early-onset cancer compared with older adults born decades earlier.

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24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Resource-Efficient Variational Quantum Classifier

Authors:
Petr Pt\'a\v{c}ek↗Paulina Lewandowska↗Ryszard Kukulski↗

arXiv:2511.09204v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the unambiguous quantum classifier based on Hamming distance measurements combined with classical post-processing. The proposed approach improves classification performance through a more effective use of ansatz expressivity, while requiring significantly fewer circuit evaluations. Moreover, the method demonstrates enhanced robustness to noise, which is crucial for near-term quantum devices. We evaluate the proposed method on a breast cancer classification dataset. The unambiguous classifier achieves an average accuracy of 90%, corresponding to an improvement of 6.9 percentage points over the baseline, while requiring eight times fewer circuit executions per prediction. In the presence of noise, the improvement is reduced to approximately 3.1 percentage points, with the same reduction in execution cost. We substantiate our experimental results with theoretical evidence supporting the practical performance of the approach.

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

Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates

Authors:
Yuan Wang↗Marcin Muszynski↗Avinash Dash↗Rishabh Kaurav↗Vinod M. Menon↗Oleksandr Kyriienko↗

arXiv:2606.15344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.

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