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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Neural quantum states for entanglement depth certification from randomized Pauli measurements

arXiv:2512.13121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement depth quantifies how many qubits share genuine multipartite entanglement, but certification typically relies on tailored witnesses or full tomography, both of which scale poorly with system size. We recast entanglement-depth and non-$k$-separability certification as likelihood-based model selection among neural quantum states whose architecture enforces a chosen entanglement constraint. A hierarchy of separable neural quantum states is trained on finite-shot local Pauli outcomes and compared against an unconstrained reference model trained on the same data. When all constrained models are statistically disfavored, the data certify entanglement beyond the imposed limit directly from measurement statistics, without reconstructing the density matrix. We validate the method on simulated six- and ten-qubit datasets targeting GHZ, Dicke, and Bell-pair states, and demonstrate robustness for mixed states under local noise. Finally, we discuss lightweight interpretability diagnostics derived from trained parameters that expose coarse entanglement patterns and qubit groupings directly from bitstring statistics.

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

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

arXiv:2606.15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information. We provide the first local convergence analysis of three such methods – Equilibrium Propagation (EP), Coupled Learning (CL), and a new method we call Adjoint Coupled Learning (AL) – for linear circuits, in the limit of small-nudging for both discrete and continuous time. EP and AL perform gradient descent on a natural loss function, while CL follows modified dynamics with an additional cubic correction. Assuming the existence of a solution, we identify a coercivity condition, expressed as a rank condition on a matrix built from the network's incidence structure, under which the training loss decays exponentially and the parameters converge to the solution manifold. We show that coercivity can fail by exhibiting a kite circuit in which a symmetry causes the coercivity constant to degenerate on the solution manifold, but prove using Sard's theorem that such degeneracies are non-generic: coercivity holds at every point of the solution manifold for almost every choice of desired output.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Quenched and Annealed CLTs for the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment

arXiv:2510.11846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of random dimer coverings of the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment. We investigate quenched limit theorems for the height function and we extend annealed limit theorems that were recently studied in [arXiv:2507.08560]. We consider more general choices of random edge weights (independence is not assumed) and we distinguish two cases where the random edge weights satisfy the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) under different scalings. For both cases, we prove convergence to the Gaussian Free Field for the quenched fluctuations. For the annealed version, it had been shown in [arXiv:2507.08560], that Gaussian Free Field fluctuations can be dominated by the much larger fluctuations of the random environment. To access quenched fluctuations we analyze the Schur process with random parameters in a way that allows to prove the annealed CLT for the height function for non i.i.d. weights. We consider specific examples where we determine the asymptotic fluctuations.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Prevalence and Correlates of Ideal Cardiovascular Health among Ugandan Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors often emerge during adolescence and track into adulthood, yet data on cardiovascular health (CVH) in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of ideal CVH among Ugandan adolescents. Methods: We analysed baseline data of adolescents enrolled in a cluster-randomised controlled trial being conducted in urban (Kampala) and rural (Jinja) districts of Uganda. In this study, Ideal CVH was defined as meeting "ideal" status of 5-7 of the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics. Random-effects logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ideal CVH, accounting for village-level clustering. Results: We recruited 1316 participants with a mean age of 13.2 years, of whom 58.1% were female. Overall, the prevalence of ideal CVH was 66.8% (95% CI: 64.2% - 69.3%). The prevalence was higher in Jinja (74.4%, 95%CI: 70.9% - 77.7%) than Kampala (59.6%, 95%CI: 55.8%-63.2%) and the difference was evident (p

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Proto-LeakNet: Towards Signal-Leak Aware Attribution in Synthetic Human Face Imagery

The growing sophistication of synthetic image and deepfake generation models has turned source attribution and authenticity verification into a critical challenge for modern computer vision systems. Recent studies suggest that diffusion pipelines unintentionally imprint persistent statistical traces, known as signal-leaks, within their outputs, particularly in latent representations. Building on this observation, we propose Proto-LeakNet, a signal-leak-aware and interpretable attribution framework that integrates Closed-set classification with a density-based Open-set evaluation on the learned embeddings, enabling analysis of unseen generators without retraining. Acting in the latent domain of diffusion models, our method re-simulates partial forward diffusion to expose residual generator-specific cues. A temporal attention encoder aggregates multi-step latent features, while a feature-weighted prototype head structures the embedding space and enables transparent attribution. Trained solely on closed data and achieving a Macro AUC of 98.13\%, Proto-LeakNet learns a latent geometry that remains robust under post-processing, surpassing state-of-the-art methods, and achieves strong separability both between real images and known generators, and between known and unseen ones. The codebase is available at the following link: https://github.com/claudiunderthehood/Proto-LeakNet .

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

FitText: Evolving Agent Tool Ecologies via Memetic Retrieval

arXiv:2605.02411v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A semantic gap separates how users describe tasks from how tools are documented. As API ecosystems scale to tens of thousands of endpoints, static retrieval from the initial query alone cannot bridge this gap: the agent's understanding of what it needs evolves during execution, but its tool set does not. We identify this retrieval interface, not planning, as the binding constraint on end-to-end agent performance, and introduce FitText, a training-free framework that makes retrieval dynamic by embedding it directly in the agent's reasoning loop. FitText treats retrieval as test-time evolution of hypotheses: the agent generates natural-language pseudo-tool descriptions (revisable beliefs about the tool it needs), refines them iteratively using retrieval feedback, and explores diverse alternatives through stochastic generation. Memetic Retrieval adds evolutionary selection pressure over candidate descriptions, guided by a tool memory that avoids redundant search. On ToolRet (three domains), FitText's reformulation strategies improve NDCG@5 by 2.7 to 10.6 points over static query retrieval across all base models; on StableToolBench (16,464 APIs) with GPT-5.4-mini, Memetic reaches an 84.3% pooled pass rate, a 26.7-point absolute gain over static query retrieval.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models with Prior-Corrected Token Reduction

Visual token reduction has emerged as an effective strategy for accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Many existing methods prune tokens by ranking text-visual attention scores. However, we show that attention is often dominated by a model-induced prior: even without textual instruction, MLLMs tend to focus on certain task-agnostic regions. Consequently, the attention scores of instruction-conditioned tokens are suppressed, increasing the risk that these tokens are discarded during pruning. To address this issue, we propose Prior-Corrected Token Reduction (PriorTR), a training-free token reduction method that explicitly separates task-conditioned attention from the model-induced prior. PriorTR estimates the attention map of the prior, and contrasts it with the task-conditioned attention distribution to measure the additional usable information contributed by each visual token. Importantly, PriorTR computes both the model-induced prior and the task-conditioned posterior within a single forward pass by introducing a null token that serves as an instruction-agnostic probe in the attention block. This design avoids duplicated propagation. Extensive experiments across multiple multimodal benchmarks and MLLMs demonstrate that PriorTR consistently improves the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency over strong training-free baselines, particularly under aggressive token budgets.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

UniDexTok: A Unified Dexterous Hand Tokenizer from Real Data

Dexterous hands are essential for fine-grained manipulation, but their hardware designs vary substantially across embodiments. Differences in kinematics, joint definitions, and degrees of freedom make it difficult to define a shared state representation compared with parallel grippers. As a result, dexterous-hand data remains fragmented and difficult to use for joint training. In this work, we propose the Unified Dexterous Hand Model (UDHM), which maps human and robot hand states into a shared 22-DoF semantic interface. Based on UDHM, we introduce UniDexTok, a retargeting-free state tokenizer that learns embodiment-conditioned discrete tokens from standardized real joint states. UniDexTok provides a unified representation for heterogeneous dexterous hands without relying on retargeting or simulation data. Compared with the recent baseline UniHM, UniDexTok reduces MPJAE from 15.63 degrees to 0.16 degrees and MPJPE from 18.51 mm to 0.18 mm, corresponding to error reductions of 98.98% and 99.03%, respectively. These results improve reconstruction from centimeter-scale to sub-millimeter accuracy. Experiments further show that data from other embodiments improves target-embodiment reconstruction accuracy, demonstrating the benefit of cross-embodiment tokenization. UniDexTok also shows strong zero-shot and few-shot reconstruction ability when new dexterous hands are introduced.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/trongduc-nguyen/SSHR

10.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Stochastic control with dividend payments and capital injections for Markov additive processes

Authors:

arXiv:2604.00190v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by de Finetti's optimal dividend problem with capital injections, we study a stochastic control problem for the additive component of a Markov additive process (MAP). In contrast to previous studies, the modulating component is allowed to be a general right process on a Radon space, so the model is not restricted to finite-state regime switching and cannot in general be reduced to a finite collection of Lévy process control problems. Capital injections are allowed at arbitrary times. We first consider the case in which dividend payments are allowed only at prescribed discrete times and establish necessary and sufficient conditions for the optimality of a strategy. These conditions then yield the optimality of a class of Markov-modulated periodic–classical barrier strategies. Combining this optimality result with an approximation argument, we obtain insight into the possible form of optimal strategies in the case where dividend payments, like capital injections, may be made at arbitrary times. Because of the generality of the MAPs considered here, the proof techniques used in previous studies of similar problems are not directly applicable. We therefore develop an alternative argument based on the additive structure of MAPs and dynamic programming between dividend opportunities. The argument also suggests a possible approach to other stochastic control problems involving general MAPs.

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

HyPE: Category-Aware Hypergraph Encoding with Persistent Edge Embeddings for Persona-Grounded Dialogue

Persona-grounded dialogue systems aim to produce responses consistent with a speaker's persona, yet existing methods treat personas as a flat set of sentences and fail to model the high-order relations among persona attributes-e.g., that several persona sentences share a topical category. We propose HyPE (Hypergraph Persona Encoder), a framework that (i) analyzes each persona-bearing text as a (Core, Expression, Sentiment, Category) quadruple, and (ii) organizes persona elements into a hypergraph whose hyperedges are induced by shared category labels. An HyperGCN hypergraph neural network propagates this structure into a persona summary vector and a soft-memory bank that condition the response generator. We further propose Persistent Edge Embeddings (PEE), lightweight per-category learnable priors fused into the HyperGCN message-passing step. On PersonaChat under greedy decoding, HyPE consistently outperforms sentence-level pooling baselines across GPT-2, LLaMA-3.2-3B, and Qwen2.5-3B backbones by demonstrating that structured hyperedge-level persona encoding provides a transferable advantage across model scales.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Beyond Domains: Reusing Web Skills via Transferable Interaction Patterns

Large language model (LLM) web agents are usually deployed as tool callers: each turn, the model reads a fresh page observation and emits one structured tool action. When every action is a low-level primitive, horizons grow quickly and so do policy-facing LLM completions, dominating latency and cost on benchmarks such as Mind2Web and WebArena. Recent systems therefore wrap repeated interaction fragments as web skills: callable tools built from successful trajectories or induced programs, so one call can replace several primitives. However, prior skill libraries are still triggered mainly by instruction similarity or coarse site metadata, which yields low skill reuse on held-out sites and leaves much of the potential step and token reduction on the table. We present SkillMigrator, an agent that learns reusable web skills and transfers them across sites by matching layout structure rather than specific element references. Each induced skill is stored as a transferable interaction pattern (TIP): the skill paired with a structural sketch of the snapshot at induction time. At test time, SkillMigrator retrieves TIPs by layout similarity and grounds their references on the live page. The rest of the stack is standard: accessibility-snapshot observations with stable references, and fixed tool calling over primitives plus skill invocations. Compared with the state-of-the-art approaches, SkillMigrator reduces the average LLM-action count on successful trajectories by 8-10% across both WebArena and Mind2Web at matched success rate.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Where Will They Go? Modelling Multimodal Pedestrian Manoeuvres from Ego-centric Videos

Pedestrian trajectory prediction from an ego-centric camera is challenging since it depends on complex interactions with vehicles and scene context, as well as the intention of the pedestrian. By modelling correlation and intent from the historical and future trajectories of the pedestrian, it will usually result in a multimodal (i.e. multiple modes) distribution. Existing stochastic predictors often sample multiple futures from a single unimodal distribution, which can yield sub-optimal 'mixed-mode' trajectories that lie between distinct motion patterns and become implausible in real scenes. In this paper, we propose MMPM, a mode-aware framework that separately models future trajectory distributions into semantically meaningful modes based on the pedestrian's crossing behavior. MMPM consists of two modules: behavior-aware Pedestrian Interaction Module (PIM) that jointly captures pedestrian-vehicle and pedestrian-environment interactions by introducing gaze, head and hand gesture, and a CVAE-based Mode-aware Trajectory Predictor (MTP) module to model the future trajectory distributions on two modes, crossing and non-crossing the road, separately. A query-based decoder further enforces mode consistency during decoding. Experiments on PIE and JAAD datasets show that our method surpasses state-of-the-art baselines. Our proposed MTP is model-agnostic, which can be integrated into existing frameworks such as BiTrap-NP and SGNet-ED to further improve future trajectory prediction performance. We additionally introduce a data-driven validation protocol that matches predictions to spatio-temporally consistent ground-truth trajectories, demonstrating improved frame-wise displacement errors over previous work.

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

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the localization transition from MAA to AA models

arXiv:2606.24720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their potential similarity between the mosaic Aubry-André (MAA) and AA models, the MAA model allows mobility edges (MEs), whereas the AA model does not. Here we develop a new double quasiperiodic MAA (DMAA) model consisting of one primitive MAA with nonzero even-site potentials and the other modified one with both nonzero odd-site potentials and a tunable amplitude factor, to reveal how localization transitions evolve from MAA to AA models. Interplays and competitions among the extended, critical and localized states arising from superpositions of double quasi-periodic MAA potentials enable new twice and multiple localization-delocalization transitions besides the original single localization transition. Our numerical calculations on inverse participation ratio, normalized participation ratio, fractal dimension and real-space wavefunction distribution confirm such localization features. The continuum model simulations on the experimental polariton modes also yield consistent results and hence validate their experimental feasibility. The constructed DMAA model provides a new framework for studying the localization transition processes between two analogous quasiperiodic models and broadens the understanding of Anderson localization.

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

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

Authors:

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

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

A Benchmark for Hallucination Detection in VLMs for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy

arXiv:2606.24115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are prone to hallucination, which remains a major barrier to their safe deployment in clinical practice. To date, most hallucination detection methods have been evaluated on radiology benchmarks such as MIMIC-CXR and VQA-RAD, while gastrointestinal (GI) endoscopy remains largely underexplored. In this paper, we benchmark nine hallucination detection methods on the Gut-VLM dataset, a GI diagnostic Visual Question Answering (VQA) dataset with 4,392 test VQA pairs, across five VLMs (MedGemma-4B, MedGemma-27B, LLaVA-Med-7B, LLaVA-v1.6-7B, and Lingshu-32B). The methods span three categories: black-box methods (RadFlag, SelfCheckGPT-NLI), gray-box methods (AvgProb, AvgEnt, MaxProb, MaxEnt, Semantic Entropy, and VASE), and a white-box method (ReXTrust). Our results show that ReXTrust, a white-box method, achieves the highest AUC across all five models, outperforming the strongest alternative method on each VLM by a statistically significant margin (paired permutation test, p < 0.001 in all cases), reaching a peak AUC of 93.0 on MedGemma-4B. White-box hidden-state access provides a consistent advantage of 19.5 AUC points on average (range: 9.5–33.5), with ReXTrust maintaining strong performance even on LLaVA-v1.6-7B (AUC 79.9), where black-box methods and clustering-based gray-box methods collapse to near-chance performance. Among non-white-box methods, token-level gray-box statistics (MaxEnt, MaxProb) are the strongest alternatives, outperforming both clustering-based gray-box methods (Semantic Entropy, VASE) and black-box approaches on average. We further identify confident confabulation, a failure mode in which models hallucinate with high inter-sample consistency or high token-level probability, as a systemic failure for both consistency and uncertainty-based methods.

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

TRAP: Benchmark for Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction

arXiv:2606.18996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents are increasingly deployed in document-intensive workflows where sensitive private information is not an edge case but a routine input, e.g., an agent booking a flight needs passport numbers. In such settings, the agent must use private information to complete tasks accurately while never exposing it in its responses, because it cannot verify who is actually at the keyboard. These two obligations are in fundamental tension. A model capable enough to use private information for task completion can, by the same capability, be induced to reveal it. To evaluate the trade-off of task accuracy and privacy leakage, we introduce Task-completion and Resistance to Active Privacy-extraction (TRAP). Each scenario includes a document containing private information, a task query that requires the agent to invoke the correct tool using private fields, and an attack query that attempts to elicit the same information in natural language. Evaluating 22 models spanning frontier proprietary and open-source models at multiple scales, we find that all model families exhibit non-trivial leakage, and that instruction-following ability correlates with leakage rate. Existing prompt-based defenses reduce leakage but at significant cost to task accuracy. Prompt optimization fails to escape this trade-off. We demonstrate that this failure is not incidental. For any softmax-based model, no soft-constraint defense, e.g., prompt-based defenses, can jointly achieve high task success with zero leakage probability. Motivated by this impossibility result, we propose structural private field isolation, which replaces private fields with hash keys before they reach the model. This approach largely prevents leakage while keeping task accuracy.

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

Tracking Large-scale Shared Bikes with Inertial Motion Learning in GNSS Blocked Environments

arXiv:2605.07412v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Although Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) provide a general solution for bike tracking outdoors, there still exist complex riding environments where only inertial navigation systems work, such as urban canyons. Despite decades of research, localization using only low-cost inertial sensors still faces challenges such as cumulative drifts and poor robustness caused by filtering methods. Furthermore, sensors such as visual and LiDAR could provide reliable measurements, but they are not suitable for large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose an inertial tracking framework that integrates bicycle mechanical constraints with a mixture-of-experts model. Specifically, we leverage multiple expert modules to capture shared representations and weight them through the gating mechanism, thus improving multi-task learning performance and enabling uncertainty-aware trajectory estimation. Furthermore, based on the mechanical transmission between the pedal and the rear wheel of a bike, we explore the intrinsic relationship between the rider's periodic pedalling behaviors and acceleration variations, and convert such patterns into bike's wheel speed for dynamic calibration. Experiments with real-world riding data from shared bikes of the DiDi ride-hailing platform demonstrate that our system improves the accuracy of baselines by at least 12%, with wheel speed errors below 0.5 m/s at 95-percentile.

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

Multi-task Learning is Not Enough: Representational Entanglement in Dual-output Second Language Speech Recognition

Second-language (L2) speech recognition often requires transcriptions of pronunciations and intended meanings. Multi-task learning (MTL) is a natural approach because it assumes that shared representations benefit both outputs. However, this paper shows that this assumption does not hold across Korean and English. MTL improves meaning but degrades surface transcription, especially in English, where the degradation scales with surface-meaning divergence measured by Levenshtein edit distance. Encoder analysis links these patterns to encoder-level entanglement, with Korean preserving distinct task representations while English produces nearly identical ones. Cross-task decoder analysis shows that the meaning dual-output decoder adapts with a unique representation, while the surface dual-output decoder remains constrained by the encoder. These findings motivate the design of MTL frameworks that mitigate encoder-level entanglement to reduce surface degradation in dual-output L2 automatic speech recognition.

21.
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.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Emergent Bell Phase in an Electro-Nanomechanical Quantum Simulator

arXiv:2511.02613v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Suspended carbon nanotubes hosting electrostatically defined quantum dots allow for exceptionally strong and tunable electromechanical coupling as well as mechanical modes that can reach the quantum ground state of motion simply by cryogenic cooling. This makes them a unique platform for quantum simulation of electron-phonon coupling. Here, we propose an experimentally realisable setup with two such carbon nanotubes in parallel, each hosting four quantum dots. Our system not only exhibits phonon-mediated electron-electron attraction, but also supports a robust, maximally entangled Bell phase at mesoscopic scales shared across the subsystems. These features highlight its potential as a simulator of strongly correlated quantum systems.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Tight Bounds for Logistic Regression with Large Stepsize Gradient Descent in Low Dimension

arXiv:2602.12471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the optimization problem of minimizing the logistic loss with gradient descent to train a linear model for binary classification with separable data. With a budget of $T$ iterations, it was recently shown that an accelerated $1/T^2$ rate is possible by choosing a large stepsize $\eta = \Theta(\gamma^2 T)$ (where $\gamma$ is the dataset's margin) despite the resulting non-monotonicity of the loss. In this paper, we provide a tighter analysis of gradient descent for this problem when the data is two-dimensional: we show that GD with a sufficiently large learning rate $\eta$ finds a point with loss smaller than $\mathcal{O}(1/(\eta \gamma^2 T))$, as long as $T \geq \Omega(n/\gamma + 1/\gamma^2)$, where $n$ is the dataset size. Our improved rate comes from a tighter bound on the time $\tau$ that it takes for GD to transition from unstable (non-monotonic loss) to stable (monotonic loss), via a fine-grained analysis of the oscillatory dynamics of GD in the subspace orthogonal to the max-margin classifier. We also provide a lower bound of $\tau$ matching our upper bound up to logarithmic factors, showing that our analysis is tight.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Probing Quantum States over Spacetime Through Interferometry

arXiv:2507.19258v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Establishing a notion of the quantum state that applies consistently across space and time could be a crucial step toward formulating a relativistic quantum theory. We give an operational meaning to multipartite quantum states over arbitrary regions in spacetime through a causally agnostic measurement, a measurement scheme that can be consistently implemented independently of the causal relation between the regions. We prove that such measurements can always be implemented with interferometry, also known as the scattering circuit technique, wherein the conventional density operator, the recently developed quantum state over time (QSOT), and the process matrix formalisms smoothly merge. This framework allows for a systematic study of mixed states in the temporal setting, which turn out to be crucial for modeling quantum non-Markovianity. Based on this, we demonstrate that two different ensembles of quantum dynamics can be represented by the same QSOT, indicating that they cannot be distinguished through interferometry. Moreover, our formalism reveals a new type of spatiotemporal correlation between two quantum dynamics that originates from synchronized propagation in time under time-reversal symmetry. We show that quantum systems with such correlation can be utilized as a reference frame to distinguish certain dynamics indistinguishable under time-reversal symmetry.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Fusion Learning from Dynamic Functional Connectivity: Combining the Amplitude and Phase of fMRI Signals to Identify Brain Disorders

arXiv:2603.24603v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) derived from resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been extensively utilized in brain science research. The sliding window correlation (SWC) method is a widely used approach for constructing dFC by computing correlation coefficients between amplitude time series of signals from pairs of brain regions. In this study, we propose an integrated approach that incorporates both amplitude and phase information of fMRI signals to improve the detection of brain disorders. Specifically, we introduce a multi-scale fusion learning framework, namely MSFL, which leverages two complementary dFC features derived from SWC and phase synchronization (PS). Here, SWC captures amplitude correlations, while PS measures phase coherence within dFC. We evaluated the efficacy of MSFL in classifying autism spectrum disorder and major depressive disorder using two publicly available datasets: ABIDE I and REST-meta-MDD, respectively. The results indicate that MSFL significantly outperforms existing comparative models. Moreover, we performed model explanation analysis using the SHAP framework, which showed that both types of dFC features from SWC and PS contribute to detecting brain disorders.