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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

XAI-Grounded Explanation Generation for Speech Deepfake Detection with Training-Free Multimodal Large Language Models

Speech deepfake detection (SDD) systems require trustworthy explanations for reliable decision-making. Existing explanation ways mainly fall into two categories. Traditional explainable AI (XAI), such as gradient-based attribution, produces low-level attribution signals tightly coupled with model decisions, and harder to be understood by human than natural language explanations. Meanwhile, large language model (LLM)-based explanation generation often produces generic and ungrounded descriptions due to the lack of heuristic evidence and task-specific supervision, stemming from limited grounded explanation datasets for SDD. We therefore propose a training-free explanation framework that integrates XAI evidence with multimodal LLMs to generate grounded and specific explanations. Using the PartialSpoof dataset, we construct a grounded explanation dataset and show that methods with XAI increase inside accuracy by over 45\%, verified through human evaluation and faithfulness checks.

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

A Formal Framework for Declarative Agentic AI in Business Process Analysis

arXiv:2606.15291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic AI opens new opportunities for automating Business Process (BP), enabling autonomous decision-making and dynamic adaptation. However, realising this potential requires BP entities and their interactions to be defined with formal precision. This paper presents a formal framework for Agentic BP analysis through the AGO methodology. AGO captures the modelling perspective in terms of who is acting (Agents), why it is carried out (Goals), and what the relevant entities are (Objects). Grounded in set theory and mathematical logic, we formally define the AGO entity types and their interactions, organising all definitions into a BP Knowledge Base (BPKB). The resulting BPKB supports structured querying, incremental updates, and automatic generation of BP workflows, while ensuring soundness and completeness of the derived paths.

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

RAMS: Resource-Adaptive and Detection-Conditioned Model Switching for Embedded Edge Perception

Edge object detection on embedded hardware requires balancing inference latency and detection quality under changing resource pressure. We present RAMS, a lightweight runtime controller that monitors device pressure, calibrates switching thresholds from idle behavior, and dynamically selects among three resident YOLOv8 tiers (NANO/SMALL/MEDIUM at 320/416/640 px) without model-reload latency. RAMS defines five switching policies, including two detection-conditioned variants that prevent aggressive downgrades after recent vulnerable-road-user (VRU) detections. We further introduce the VRU-Weighted Accuracy Score (SWAS), a scalar metric for offline policy comparison without ground-truth annotations, together with an oracle-bounded variant that separates detector circularity from genuine tier-retention benefit. Across Raspberry Pi 5, x86 laptops, and Jetson Orin ONNX/TensorRT deployments, the same controller equations operate over a 37x latency range. On Jetson Orin TensorRT under heavy load, the safety2 policy achieves 3.41 ms mean latency, 5.6x faster than fixed-MEDIUM inference, while retaining 74% of its proxy accuracy through near-NANO operation with selective SMALL and MEDIUM locks during VRU-positive windows. Detection-conditioned switching improves SWAS by 25.4% under oracle scoring and 47.3% under detector-derived scoring relative to threshold-only policies under heavy load. Live KITTI evaluation reports per-tier VRU recall of 24.2%, 41.2%, and 59.0%, showing that reactive overrides are fundamentally limited by baseline detector recall.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Multicluster measles outbreak with a substantial proportion of modified cases in Tokyo, Japan, January-May 2026

Tokyo experienced a measles outbreak (260 cases) in early 2026 despite elimination status. Adults aged 20-39 years were most affected, and 38% of cases were modified measles, increasing with prior vaccination. Although incidence rose until April, the effective reproduction number; R(t) fell below 1, consistent with outbreak control. Multiple clusters were identified, but many cases lacked epidemiological links, suggesting that modified measles is less likely to be considered in differential diagnosis. Intensive contact tracing and surveillance contributed to limiting transmission.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MetaPlate: Counterfactual-Guided RAG-LLM Tool for Personalized Food Recommendation and Hyperglycemia Prevention

arXiv:2606.10120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Postprandial hyperglycemia is a key risk factor for metabolic disorders; however, existing dietary guidance is often static, impractical, and insufficiently personalized, providing recommendations that are difficult to follow or not impactful. While recent advances leverage continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) and machine learning to predict glycemic responses, these approaches are largely predictive and lack actionable guidance. Moreover, recommendation systems are often misaligned with user goals and require extensive input. We present MetaPlate, a counterfactual explanation (CF) guided, context-aware decision-support framework that generates personalized meal recommendations to mitigate postprandial glucose excursions in healthy adults. MetaPlate integrates multimodal data, including CGM readings, wearable-derived physiological signals, and user-provided meal inputs from $25$ individuals to model pre-meal context. A machine learning model predicts glucose response, while a CF optimization module adjusts meal composition modifying macronutrient amounts to maintain glucose levels within a target range ($\leq 140$ mg/dL). An LLM-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) layer enhances interpretability by producing human-readable recommendations using constrained search of the USDA food database. We evaluate MetaPlate via a structured expert-in-the-loop assessment with registered dietitians (RDs), comparing performance before and after prompt refinement. Results show improvements in meal realism, portion suitability, and recommendation likelihood, with expert feedback indicating a shift from clinically implausible outputs to actionable, contextually appropriate recommendations. Our findings emphasize the importance of domain knowledge and structured constraints in LLM-driven systems and highlight the potential of MetaPlate as a real-time personalized dietary decision-support tool.

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

Factorized Neural Operators Decompose Dynamic and Persistent Responses

arXiv:2606.16900v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physical systems often exhibit heterogeneous mechanisms, where rapidly evolving dynamics coexist with persistent structures. Capturing such multiscale physical behavior remains challenging for existing neural operators, which typically rely on single dominant inductive bias and therefore couple distinct physical responses into a shared representation. We introduce the Unified Green's Function Framework across domains and propose the Factorized Neural Operators (FaNO), which decompose spectral representations into equivariant dynamic responses and invariant persistent responses, leading to better interpretability and generalization. Mechanistically, we show that the two operator branches spontaneously specialize into distinct physical roles that remain consistent across scales and domains: the equivariant branch captures rapidly varying transient dynamics, whereas the invariant branch extracts coherent persistent structures. This factorized mechanism of FaNO improves prediction accuracy, parameter efficiency and cross-scale generalization across physical systems and domains. In particular, it maintains consistent predictions under long-horizon autoregressive rollout, cross-resolution extrapolation and physical-regime shifts. These findings suggest that scalable physical modeling may benefit from moving beyond single-inductive-bias formulations toward factorized operator representations that better reflect the heterogeneous organization of physical systems, accelerating the reliable deployment of machine learning for scientific computing and discovery.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

URDF Synthesis from RGB-D Sequences via Differentiable Joint Inference and Energy-Consistent Verification

Authors:

Reconstructing simulation-ready digital twins of articulated objects from sensor observations remains constrained by two persistent gaps: (i) part-level geometric reconstruction is decoupled from kinematic-parameter estimation, and (ii) the recovered models often violate basic dynamic invariants such as energy conservation, leading to drift when the URDF is replayed in physics simulators. We present KinemaForge, a constraint-driven pipeline that jointly infers part-level shape, joint topology, and joint parameters from short RGB-D sequences and validates the result against an energy-consistent verifier built on differentiable rigid-body dynamics. The pipeline introduces three components: a kinematic constraint graph that encodes joint-part incidences as soft edges; a differentiable screw-axis solver that backpropagates from rendered observations through Featherstone's articulated-body algorithm to joint parameters; and an energy residual loss that penalises non-physical free responses of the reconstructed model. Across five PartNet-Mobility categories and an internal RGB-D benchmark, KinemaForge reduces the average joint-axis error from 4.52 degrees to 2.83 degrees (-37.4%) over the strongest geometric baseline (PARIS) and from 5.30 degrees to 2.83 degrees (-46.6%) over the interaction-based Ditto baseline, lowers long-horizon simulation drift by 64% (vs. PARIS) over 50 s rollouts, and yields URDFs whose closed-loop manipulation success rate improves by 14.6 percentage points over Ditto in our preliminary evaluation. Code and reconstruction data will be released upon acceptance.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Task-Restricted Symmetries in Recurrent Weight Space

arXiv:2606.18457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recurrent networks can contain substantial functional redundancy in weight space: changing a recurrent matrix may leave the input-output rollout nearly unchanged on a task distribution, while similar-scale changes can destroy the same behavior. We study this redundancy in one-layer tanh RNNs using ordered real Schur coordinates. The Schur form separates spectral blocks from directed nonnormal couplings, giving a diagnostic basis for structured ablations that keep the input and readout maps fixed. In a fixed-length copy task, selected nonnormal Schur couplings can be removed with little loss in some trained solutions, whereas other couplings are necessary for accurate autonomous replay. Across flip-flop, sine generation, and context-dependent integration, the loss-preserving ablation profile varies across tasks and trained solutions. These results identify candidate approximate functional invariances, not universal symmetries of recurrent weight space. Schur-coordinate ablations provide a practical diagnostic for which structured perturbations preserve a trained recurrent solution and which ones disrupt its computation.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Food4All: An Agentic Framework and Benchmark for Food Resource Navigation with Adaptive User Understanding

Food assistance referral requires conversational agents to translate underspecified, often noisy help-seeking dialogues into locally valid resource recommendations. We present Food4All, an agentic food-resource referral framework and benchmark grounded in 686 structured Indiana food resources. Food4All couples a food-specific search tool with 300 multi-turn evaluation tasks spanning single food needs, composite cases with access or document constraints, and five non-ideal user interaction traits: unreasonable demands, rambling responses, impatience, incomplete answers, and inconsistent information. We evaluate six Large Language Models (LLMs) on requirement grounding, resource retrieval, final referral correctness, and interaction efficiency. Although the strongest model achieves 96.33% referral accuracy, our diagnostics reveal persistent failures in grounding schedule, eligibility, intake, and document constraints, as well as failures to preserve valid retrieved resources in the final recommendation. Trait-level analysis further shows that different non-ideal behaviors stress different parts of the referral pipeline. Food4All provides a controlled testbed for studying tool-calling agents in constraint-sensitive food assistance referral under realistic user interaction challenges.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Can Machine Learning Forecast Rice Yields in Data-Constrained Settings? Satellite Climate Data, National Crop Statistics, and Lessons from Sierra Leone

arXiv:2606.13959v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sierra Leone's agriculture operates with almost no data-driven decision support, and no published machine learning study has examined the country's crop yields. We ask whether rice yield can be forecast from data Sierra Leone currently has. Using 25 years of FAOSTAT production data (2000-2024) for nine major crops, we train XGBoost, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest under a strict anti-leakage protocol with expanding-window walk-forward evaluation across seven held-out years, benchmarked against naive persistence. No model trained on crop statistics alone outperforms persistence. Augmenting with free satellite climate data (CHIRPS rainfall, NASA POWER temperature) reverses this result: a climate-only XGBoost reduces forecast error by one third (RMSE 284 vs 428 kg/ha), a gain that holds for a linear model and is robust to excluding the anomalous 2018 season. Early-season (May-June) rainfall is the dominant predictor, implying seasonal yield risk is observable months before harvest. No model anticipated the 2018 collapse, whose origins were institutional rather than climatic. We translate the findings into policy recommendations for Sierra Leone's Feed Salone Strategy, with a fully open-source pipeline.

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

Linear Recurrent Unit with Semantic Modulation for Image Super-Resolution

Linear recurrent unit (LRU), designed with a principled formulation for stable linear recurrence, has demonstrated promising accuracy and robustness on long-range dependency tasks. However, its static parameterization and single-scan method limits its applicability to 2D vision tasks. In this study, we propose a LRU-based restoration network with a semantic modulating unit (SMU) to achieve a harmonious balance between performance and efficiency in single-image super-resolution. The SMU plays three key roles: LRU modulation, spatial categorization, and feature enhancement through learned prototype. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method quantitatively and qualitatively surpasses recent state-of-the-art methods. Notably, our approach achieves superior performance with computational complexity on par with existing methods. The source code and models are available at https://github.com/MingyuChoi-run/LSM

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Waning protection of long-acting RSV monoclonal antibodies in infants: a Bayesian analysis of clesrovimab and nirsevimab trial data

Clesrovimab and nirsevimab are long-acting monoclonal antibodies used to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease in infants, but waning protection in the first year of life is incompletely characterised. We applied a published Bayesian inference framework to clesrovimab and pooled nirsevimab trial data to estimate time-varying efficacy against medically attended RSV lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) and RSV-associated hospitalisation, accounting for differences in placebo-arm event timing between trials. Estimated clesrovimab efficacy declined from 60.7% (95% CrI: 46.3-72.6) shortly after dosing to 38.3% (8.6-52.9) at six months against medically attended RSV LRTI, and from 87.1% (71.2-96.2) to 49.6% (10.4-70.7) against RSV-associated hospitalisation. For nirsevimab, corresponding estimates declined from 86.9% (75.4-95.0) to 53.8% (27.4-69.7) against LRTI, and from 77.5% (52.6-91.8) to 49.7% (15.7-68.3) against hospitalisation. After accounting for differences in RSV exposure timing and LRTI endpoint definitions between trials, we found no evidence of a difference in efficacy or waning between clesrovimab and nirsevimab.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Sonar-TS: Search-Then-Verify Natural Language Querying for Time Series Databases

Natural Language Querying for Time Series Databases (NLQ4TSDB) aims to assist non-expert users retrieve meaningful events, intervals, and summaries from massive temporal records. However, existing Text-to-SQL methods are not designed for continuous morphological intents such as shapes or anomalies, while time series models struggle to handle ultra-long histories. To address these challenges, we propose Sonar-TS, a neuro-symbolic framework that tackles NLQ4TSDB via a Search-Then-Verify pipeline. Analogous to active sonar, it utilizes a feature index to ping candidate windows via SQL, followed by generated Python programs to lock on and verify candidates against raw signals. To enable effective evaluation, we introduce NLQTSBench, the first large-scale benchmark designed for NLQ over TSDB-scale histories. Our experiments highlight the unique challenges within this domain and demonstrate that Sonar-TS effectively navigates complex temporal queries where traditional methods fail. This work presents the first systematic study of NLQ4TSDB, offering a general framework and evaluation standard to facilitate future research.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An AI Security Agent for University ACMIS: Multi-Vector Threat Detection and Automated Response

arXiv:2606.08270v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: University Academic Management Information Systems (ACMIS) are high-value targets for a wide spectrum of security threats including brute-force login attacks, payment fraud, privilege escalation, insider data theft, and academic integrity violations. Traditional rule-based intrusion detection systems are inadequate because many malicious activities are structurally indistinguishable from normal operations. This paper presents an AI-based security agent for ACMIS that combines supervised anomaly detection, behavioural analytics, and a natural language processing chatbot for secure password recovery. The agent monitors five operational layers: authentication, authorisation, financial transactions, user behaviour, and system health, and responds through a four-tier risk escalation framework. A modular architecture allows the core engine to be extended to other institutional systems. Experiments on a simulated ACMIS event log dataset of 147,922 sessions demonstrate a threat detection macro-average F1 of 0.966, compared to 0.156 for a rule-based baseline and 0.836 for a sequence-only (LSTM) baseline, with end-to-end critical-tier automated response latency under 1 ms on a single-node prototype. The integrated recovery chatbot achieves 97.1 percent identity verification accuracy and an 87.3 percent mass-reset attack detection rate with zero false positives on legitimate high volume recovery periods.

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

Decoupled Latent Optimization of Diffusion Models for Full Waveform Inversion

arXiv:2606.14139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) recovers subsurface velocity from seismic recordings by solving a severely ill-posed, nonconvex PDE-constrained optimization. Classical regularizers stabilize the inversion but fail to reproduce realistic geological structures; recent diffusion-prior methods improve realism at the cost of a fragile trade-off between data fidelity and prior consistency. We propose Decoupled Latent Optimization (DLO), which relaxes the standard latent-optimization formulation into a quadratic-penalty objective over an auxiliary physical variable and a latent variable. The data-fidelity gradient acts in physical space, the diffusion sampler contributes only through a decoded prior sample, and the standard smoothed-velocity initialization of classical FWI is preserved. On the OpenFWI benchmark, DLO outperforms classical regularizers and existing diffusion-based methods under clean, noisy, and missing-trace acquisitions. The prior, trained on 70*70 OpenFWI models, transfers directly to the Marmousi and Overthrust benchmarks, where DLO recovers intricate fault structures and remains robust to initialization smoothing and measurement noise.

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

Trade-offs in Medical LLM Adaptation: An Empirical Study in French QA

The development of large language models (LLMs) has led to an increased focus on their adaptation to specialized domains and languages, yet the effectiveness of domain adaptation strategies remains unclear. We present a study of medical domain adaptation using French medical question-answering (QA) as a case study. We compare continual pretraining (CPT), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and their combination across three model families, multiple sizes, and three initialization types, explicitly disentangling adaptation effects from base model choice. We evaluate both multiple-choice (MCQA) and open-ended QA (OEQA) under greedy and constrained decoding using automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation. For MCQA, CPT+SFT most often achieves the best scores, but gains over SFT are small and frequently not statistically significant, making SFT a strong and cost-effective default. For OEQA, CPT consistently improves overlap-based metrics, while SFT often degrades generation quality; instruction tuning and CPT+SFT are preferred by LLM-based evaluation. Cross-lingual experiments further show effective transfer from French adaptation to English benchmarks. Overall, we provide practical guidelines for selecting adaptation strategies under computational constraints.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

The optimal sub-Gaussian normalisation for randomised monotone functions

arXiv:2312.01265v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Let $\mathcal{M}$ denote the class of randomised monotone functions on $\mathbb{R}$ with values in $[0,1]$, and let $U_{\mathcal{M}}\colon \mathbb{R}_+\to \mathbb{R}_+$ be the minimal function for which $$ \mathbb{P}\left\{ \sqrt{\eta_f}\, \sup_{t\in\mathbb{R}} \left| f_Z(t) - \Exf{f_Z(t)} \right| \ge \varepsilon\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(\eta_f)} \right\} \le 2\e^{-2\varepsilon^2} $$ holds for every member $f_Z$ of $\mathcal{M}$ with finite effective sample size $\eta_f$ and every positive $\varepsilon$. We prove that for every $x> 1$, $$ \left| \sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)} - \sqrt{\log_4 x} \right| \le 2 \min\!\left\{ 1,\, \frac{2 \ln(\e + \ln x)}{\sqrt{\ln x}} \right\}\,. $$ The optimal adjustment $\sqrt{U_{\mathcal{M}}(x)}$ matches $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2\ln 2}}\sqrt{\ln x}$ for all $x>1$, with residuals bounded as above.

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

Efficient Flow Matching using Latent Variables

Flow matching models have shown great potential in image generation tasks among probabilistic generative models. However, most flow matching models in the literature do not explicitly utilize the underlying clustering structure in the target data when learning the flow from a simple source distribution like the standard Gaussian. This leads to inefficient learning, especially for many high-dimensional real-world datasets, which often reside in a low-dimensional manifold. To this end, we present $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$, which provides efficient training strategies by conditioning on the features extracted from data using pretrained deep latent variable models. Through experiments on synthetic data from multi-modal distributions and widely used image benchmark datasets, we show that $\texttt{Latent-CFM}$ exhibits improved generation quality with significantly less training and computation than state-of-the-art flow matching models by adopting pretrained lightweight latent variable models. Beyond natural images, we consider generative modeling of spatial fields stemming from physical processes. Using a 2d Darcy flow dataset, we demonstrate that our approach generates more physically accurate samples than competing approaches. In addition, through latent space analysis, we demonstrate that our approach can be used for conditional image generation conditioned on latent features, which adds interpretability to the generation process.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Compressing Image Style Training into a Single Model Forward

Diffusion-based style transfer must balance inference efficiency with stylization fidelity. Adapter-based methods are efficient, but they inject style as an external condition and can either weaken reference-specific appearance or copy reference semantics into the generated image. Optimization-based personalization methods such as LoRA internalize style more effectively, but require a separate training process for every new style. We introduce i2L (image-to-LoRA), a framework that amortizes style LoRA training into a single forward pass. Given one or more reference images, i2L predicts LoRA weights for a text-to-image model, enabling immediate style instantiation without per-style optimization. The architecture combines an image encoder, learnable LoRA queries, and compressed decoding heads that generate adapted matrices. Training on semantically diverse style pairs encourages the predictor to preserve appearance cues while suppressing reference-content copying. Experiments on Z-Image, FLUX.2, and Hidream-O1 show that i2L improves style fidelity, prompt alignment, and perceptual quality over existing baselines. Because i2L produces explicit LoRA weights, it also supports asymmetric classifier-free guidance, multi-reference style fusion, and composition with controllable-generation modules.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Experimental straintronics in nanotube quantum dots

arXiv:2606.12180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are narrow ribbons of graphene with atomically precise edges and a single quantum transport channel, at experimentally-relevant dopings. This makes them ideal systems to harness quantum transport straintronics (QTS), i.e. using mechanical strain to control accurately quantum transport. We present QTS data from three single-wall carbon nanotube quantum dot (SWCNT-QD) transistors over a broad range of in-situ tunable and reversible uniaxial strain ($\Delta\varepsilon_mech\approx$ 0 to 3 %). We first present the nanofabrication of the suspended SWCNT transistors whose channel lengths are $\approx$ 30 nm. The channels are strained by moving gold clamps holding firmly the nanotubes. We present detailed charge transport data, $dI/dV_{B} - V_{B} - V_{G}$ and $dI/dV_{B} - V_{B} - \Delta\varepsilon_mech$, showing a large mechanical-gating effect of the SWCNT-QDs. The precise reversibility of the data, and their agreement with QTS theory, confirms that the tubes are strained elastically. We demonstrate that the mechanical control of the QD doping is not due to capacitive-gating effects, but to quantitatively predictable bandstructure changes including a strain-tunable bandgap. This precise mechanical control of the doping and bandgap of SWCNT-QDs could find applications in qubits, condensed matter physics, and homojunction molecular transistors.

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

Unlocking Diffusion Hierarchies: Adaptive Timestep Selection for Zero-Shot Segmentation

Zero-shot segmentation has recently shown notable improvement by leveraging the rich visual priors in large-scale text-to-image diffusion models, such as Stable Diffusion. However, current diffusion-based methods often face limitations due to the trade-off between spatial resolution and contextual information, as well as their reliance on a single static timestep for feature extraction. To overcome these challenges, our work introduces two key advancements. First, our Contextual Similarity Maps fuse high-resolution attention maps with rich U-Net encoder features, providing both fine-grained and robust per-pixel representations. Second, we identify an emergent hierarchical semantic progression within the denoising process of various diffusion models: representations transition from part-level abstractions at earlier timesteps to object-level abstractions at later stages. Leveraging this insight, we introduce a mechanism to adaptively select the optimal timestep for each pixel. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms existing zero-shot segmentation baselines, validating the efficacy of combining contextual features with dynamic, hierarchical timestep selection.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning for Single-shot Test-time Ultrasound Image Denoising

The inherent electronic and speckle noise complicates clinical interpretation of ultrasound images. Conventional denoising methods rely on explicit noise assumptions whose validity diminishes under composite noise conditions. Learning-based methods are usually pretrained in a limited image domain using a labeled dataset, which implies inevitable domain shift in complex in vivo environments. This study proposes a Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning (PSCL) framework for test-time ultrasound image denoising without pretraining. Given multiple noisy samples from only one-shot imaging, PSCL disentangles anatomical similarity and noise randomness into separate pyramid latent spaces. The clean image is then decoded from the anatomy space while discarding the noise space. We first apply PSCL to synthetic aperture ultrasound (SAU), where an Aperture-to-Aperture loop serves as a self-supervised proxy task to ensure denoising fidelity. Simulation experiments, including noise levels from 0 to 30 dB and inclusion geometries from simple to complex, demonstrated improvements of 69.3% in SNR and 34.4% in CNR. The in vivo results showed 84.8% SNR and 25.7% CNR gains using only two aperture data of the heart in six echocardiographic views, liver, and kidney. PSCL delivers clear images across diverse imaging targets and configurations, paving the way for more reliable anatomical visualization without domain shift and pretraining costs.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

HydraHead: From Head-Level Functional Heterogeneity to Specialized Attention Hybridization

The quadratic complexity of attention poses a critical bottleneck for long-context processing, spurring interest in hybrid attention designs. Most open-source hybrid models adopt a layer-wise strategy. Yet, prior work has noted the inherent difficulty of integrating Linear Attention (LA) with Full Attention (FA), suggesting that the design space of attention hybridization remains underexplored. To probe this space, we conduct interpretability analysis and observe that layers exhibit block-wise functional similarity, while individual heads within the same layer display distinct functional specialization despite sharing input features. This head-level heterogeneity suggests that the head dimension provides a natural and principled granularity for fusing heterogeneous attention signals. Building on this insight, we introduce HydraHead, a novel architecture that hybridizes FA and LA along the head axis. HydraHead features two key innovations: (1) an interpretability-driven selection strategy that identifies retrieval-critical heads and preserves FA only for them, and (2) a scale-normalized fusion module that reconciles the distributional gap between FA and LA head outputs. By leveraging a three-stage transfer pipeline with parameter reuse and distillation, we achieve high-performance hybrid models with minimal training overhead. Under a unified training setup, HydraHead outperforms other hybrid designs in long-context tasks while maintaining strong general reasoning. With interpretability-driven head selection, it matches a 3:1 layer-wise hybrid's long-context performance at a 7:1 LA-to-FA ratio. Crucially, trained on only 15B tokens, HydraHead achieves over 69% improvement over the baseline at 512K context length, approaching Qwen3.5, a leading model of comparable size with a native context length of 256K. This highlights the significant scaling potential of head-level hybridization.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Accelerated Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency quantum memory via shortcuts to adiabaticity

arXiv:2603.18399v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) enables coherent light-matter storage, forming the basis of photonic quantum memories that are essential for scalable quantum networks and distributed quantum computing. However, accelerating the storage process violates the adiabatic condition, resulting in the excitation of the lossy intermediate state and a reduction in writing efficiency. We propose and numerically investigate a high-speed, high-fidelity quantum storage scheme by incorporating a shortcut-to-adiabaticity (STA) technique based on counter-diabatic (CD) driving. By introducing a precisely engineered auxiliary field into a conventional EIT system, our protocol significantly shortens the writing time beyond the conventional adiabatic limit while effectively suppressing the transient population of the lossy intermediate state. Furthermore, our scheme demonstrates strong flexibility in pulse design, remaining effective across different temporal profiles of both the control and signal fields. It also exhibits robustness against imperfections in the CD drive. Even with imperfect single-photon writing and non-ideal Rydberg blockade, the scheme retains clear advantages, maintaining high storage performance and overcoming the intrinsic speed-fidelity trade-off of traditional EIT protocols. These features pave the way for fast and robust quantum devices suitable for high-throughput quantum repeaters and advanced quantum information processing.

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

Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance

With the recent advent of image generative models, synthetic data are increasingly being used to supplement limited real datasets for training computer vision models. However, not all synthetic datasets improve performance equally, and their effectiveness can only be assessed by training a downstream model, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This problem is pronounced in the task of object detection, where the required annotations are much more dense due to bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a pre-computable metric family, dubbed Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which serves as a proxy for the relative utility of candidate synthetic training sets for downstream detection. Experiments on the VisDrone-DET dataset show that the CCDM metric families achieve a Spearman correlation of 1.0 with the downstream performance of YOLOv8, clearly outperforming existing metrics for synthetic image evaluation.