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

Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications

arXiv:2606.14822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed numerous industrial sectors, yet classical paradigms face fundamental limitations: rapidly growing data volumes, rising computational costs, significant energy consumption, and the physical scaling limits of conventional hardware architectures. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm to address these challenges, giving rise to the field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). In this thesis, the theoretical foundations of QML are investigated, with a focus on near-term and future practical applications. Three central challenges are addressed: the trainability of variational quantum circuits, their expressivity, and their resistance to efficient classical simulation. The trainability of Hamming-weight preserving variational quantum circuits is first studied, and theoretical guarantees are established that resolve an open conjecture on the absence of barren plateaus for this circuit family. Subspace-preserving QML algorithms are then introduced, including photonic circuits and quantum convolutional neural networks, and are designed to mimic classical ML subroutines while offering polynomial quantum advantage. Finally, variational quantum circuits are analyzed as quantum Fourier models, and a framework is derived to jointly characterize expressivity and trainability, from which conditions are obtained under which quantum models provably separate from their classical counterparts. These contributions are intended to advance the theoretical roadmap for harnessing near-term and future quantum technologies in real-world applications.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Complementary Attention Head Pruning for Efficient Transformers

arXiv:2606.19150v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The remarkable success of Transformer-based models in natural language processing stems from architectural scaling, which leads to a large number of parameters and hinders deployment in resource-constrained environments. While structured pruning offers a pathway to compression, existing state-of-the-art methods often rely on gradient-based importance ranking or stochastic gating, which suffer from instability, structural degeneration, and the need for extensive manual hyperparameter tuning. In this paper, we introduce CAHP (Complementary Attention Head Pruning), a novel post-hoc framework that redefines head selection as a global graph-theoretical problem. Rather than evaluating heads in isolation, CAHP utilizes graph-based clustering combined with information-theoretic distance measures to identify and preserve a topologically diverse subset of complementary attention heads. Without requiring a predefined sparsity level or pruning ratio, the framework automatically determines the number of selected attention heads across layers by identifying a diminishing marginal performance curve, where pruning additional heads leads to a sharp degradation in performance, as determined by the chosen polynomial degree. Extensive evaluations on the SST-5 and MNLI benchmarks, across different Transformer model scales, demonstrate that CAHP consistently outperforms competitive baselines, particularly in high-compression regimes. Furthermore, our structural analysis shows that CAHP avoids the "proximity bias" of gradient-based pruning methods, which tend to preserve heads mainly in layers close to the output, and instead retains a functionally critical set of attention heads in the model's intermediate layers.

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

Contact-Based Fringe Projection Profilometry for High-Resolution 3-D Surface Measurement of Reflective and Transparent Objects

This paper presents a contact-based 3-D surface measurement method based on a Digital Fringe Projection (DFP) system, belonging to the vision-based tactile sensing family pioneered by the commercially successful GelSight sensor. Such sensors have proven effective for robotic fingertip manipulation and contact sensing. However, because GelSight employs photometric stereo with RGB LEDs, it does not measure absolute depth directly but instead infers it by integrating estimated surface gradients, which can accumulate reconstruction errors; in addition, it becomes increasingly difficult to calibrate as the sensing area grows, and its depth accuracy is challenged on highly reflective or transparent objects. To overcome these drawbacks, we propose a fringe-projection-based contact measurement technique that performs triangulation-based 3-D reconstruction on a coated silicone contact surface, providing dense per-pixel surface geometry and full-field 3-D shape measurement over the contact region. By integrating high-accuracy digital fringe projection into the sensor, our approach simplifies calibration over larger areas and enhances depth precision for complex surfaces. Experimental results, including a direct comparison with a GelSight Mini sensor, a sphere-fitting accuracy evaluation, and an uncertainty analysis, confirm that the proposed method significantly improves the accuracy and stability of structured-light-based 3-D measurements, allowing reliable reconstruction of objects with diverse optical properties.

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

Domain-Specific Agents for Cherenkov Telescope Array Control Software and Gamma-Ray Data Analysis

arXiv:2510.01299v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present domain-adapted large language model agents designed to support Cherenkov Telescope Array operation and data analysis. The agents combine contextual knowledge with automated validation and iterative correction to produce more reliable outputs. This approach reduces manual effort, improves consistency, and helps accelerate operational and scientific workflows. The results demonstrate the potential of agentic systems as practical assistants in specialized research environments.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Spin-orbit coupling by design in quantum state engineering of atomically defined quantum dots

arXiv:2606.14487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tuning spin-orbit coupling is essential in controlling both spin and charge in confined semiconductor nanostructures, yet it is rarely a truly controllable parameter. Here, we show control over the spin-orbit Hamiltonian in quantum dots and the resulting quantum states by tailoring the confinement potential with atomic-scale precision. Using scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, we pattern individual Cs ions into designer quantum dot structures on the surface of indium antimonide, in which electrons from a two-dimensional electron gas are confined with chosen in-plane electric-field gradients. We then quantify the atomic level structure, both spatially resolving the orbital character of the electronic states and their magnetic-field evolution. We demonstrate that the level structure, including the induced zero-field splitting, can be tailored by the designed geometry of the local electric fields. These effects can be described using a Hamiltonian that allows consistent treatment of the confinement-induced spin-orbit coupling beyond the conventional Bychkov-Rashba description. This Hamiltonian is derived from a multiband k.p model and takes the energy dependence of the relevant physical parameters into account. Such precise control of spin-orbit coupling in semiconductor quantum dots is relevant to quantum and spintronic technologies.

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

Near-Optimal Stochastic Linear Bandits with Delay

arXiv:2606.16656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study stochastic linear bandits with delayed feedback under several delay models and establish near-optimal regret guarantees. Our results identify when delayed linear bandits exhibit the same qualitative behavior as multi-armed bandits (MAB), and when the linear structure creates fundamentally new challenges. Specifically, (1) for loss-independent delays, where the delay does not depend on the realized loss (but potentially depends on the arm), we show that delays incur only an additive regret penalty. Under stochastic delays, this penalty scales with the expected delay, while under adversarial delays, it scales with the maximum number of outstanding observations. Notably, both delay penalties are dimension-free, improving upon the state-of-the-art results; (2) for loss-dependent delays, we show that linear bandits are substantially harder than MAB: unlike in MAB, we prove matching (up to log factors) upper and lower bounds in linear bandits, whose delay penalty depends on the square root of the dimension. (3) for the delay-as-payoff model, a special case of loss-dependent delay, we show that the optimal MAB guarantee, which depends only on the delay of the optimal arm, is also unattainable in linear bandits. Together, these results provide a sharp characterization of how delayed feedback interacts with linear generalization.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

A Three-Tier Operational Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models on Hospital Medication Safety

Objective. To introduce PsiBench, a clinically validated medication-safety benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) against the standards used to certify hospital computerized provider order entry (CPOE) and electronic health record (EHR) systems, and a non-overlapping three-tier evaluation framework separating highest-stakes discrimination, the operational CDS regime, and category-correct alerting. Materials and Methods. PsiBench comprises 492 medication-safety scenarios across 11 safety categories, created by clinical pharmacology experts whose work underpins an annualized testing procedure used by more than 2,000 U.S. hospitals. The three-tier framework partitions the scenarios non-overlappingly: Discrimination (98 scenarios, 50 fatal vs 48 deception, near-balanced 51%/49%); Operational (394 scenarios, 261 serious unsafe plus 133 safe including 41 Excessive Alerts reclassified as operational negatives); and Attribution (311 alert-required scenarios). We evaluated 40 frontier LLMs from 10 providers over 3 runs per scenario at temperature 0.2 (or the provider default where temperature is not configurable), yielding 59,040 evaluations conducted April 21-23, 2026. Results. Headline binary performance on the full benchmark spans a wide range across the 40 models: F1 78.5%-92.3%, accuracy 65.4%-89.8%, sensitivity 81.4%-100.0%, specificity 6.1%-81.8%. Leading models by F1 (o4-mini 92.3%; o3 92.2%) pair high sensitivity with meaningful specificity; three models saturate sensitivity at 100% but fall below 25% specificity, indistinguishable from a naive always-alert classifier. The wide spread on a single headline metric motivates tier-specific analyses, developed in a separate clinical paper. Discussion and Conclusion. PsiBench and the three-tier framework operationalize a rigorous evaluation rubric for LLM medication safety, grounded in two decades of national hospital audit experience. The framework generalizes to any binary medication-safety classifier (rule-based, conventional ML, or LLM-driven), supporting tier-aware model selection and post-deployment surveillance.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Agentic AI for Bilevel Long-Term Optimization of Policy-Driven Physical Layer Systems

arXiv:2606.24416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Network operators' changing policies, service requirements, and stringent real-time constraints render existing methods designed with fixed objectives and constraints ineffective. This paper presents Agentic long-term performance optimization (Agentic-LTPO), a nested bilevel optimization framework that can be applied to adaptive physical layer problem configuration. The key idea is to employ agentic AI to generate upper-level configurations in a bilevel optimization structure, where evolving operator policies, environment summaries, and historical experiences are translated into structured lower-level optimization problem configurations. The lower level solves the problems with updated configurations for real-time physical-layer decisions. Considering cell-free MIMO beamforming as a use case, we embody Agentic-LTPO by designing a new multi-agent decision process with retrieval-augmented experience-based verification in the upper level, together with a closed-form beamformer in the lower level. Experiments demonstrate that Agentic-LTPO exhibits strong adaptability to dynamic operator policies and effectively enhances the system's long-term performance by 57.2% compared to traditional methods.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

DriveJudge: Rethinking Autonomous Driving Evaluation with Vision-Language Models

Autonomous driving has shifted towards end-to-end policy learning, where reliable, interpretable policy evaluation is a fundamental challenge as driving quality is highly context-dependent. Commonly used rule-based driving metrics like EPDMS are interpretable but lack context-awareness, while recent VLMbased evaluations are context-aware but limited by ambiguous VLM outputs and weak physical grounding. To evaluate driving in a manner that is both interpretable and context-aware, we introduce DriveJudge. DriveJudge is a driving evaluation agent that combines rule-grounded evaluation with Vision-Language Model (VLM) reasoning and selectively invokes physically-grounded deterministic rule functions after interpreting the environmental context. To train and evaluate DriveJudge, we curate a large-scale dataset of 33,577 challenging driving samples with human annotations on whether the driving behavior is reasonable in the given scenario. With this dataset, we address the underexplored problem of driving metric evaluation, and introduce two human-aligned benchmark tasks: Driving Quality Classification and Trajectory Preference Selection. DriveJudge outperforms EPDMS for driving quality classification by 21.23 AUC, and the recent VLM-based DriveCritic for trajectory preference selection by 6.5%, setting a new standard for interpretable and precise driving evaluation.

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

Enhancing Underwater Light Field Images via Global Geometry-aware Diffusion Process

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

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

Probabilistic Contrastive Pretraining for Multi-task ADME Property Prediction

arXiv:2606.11508v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate prediction of absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion (ADME) properties is critical to drug discovery, but remains challenging because ADME endpoints are noisy, interdependent, and often data-limited. We propose a molecular graph-transformer pretraining framework that combines chemistry-specific self-supervision with contrastive mutual information machine learning (cMIM). Our method encodes molecular graphs into latent variables, reconstructs SMILES strings from the graph-derived latent codes, and augments the contrastive objective with domain-specific self-supervised chemistry tasks. Rather than treating these tasks as auxiliary regularizers with separately tuned loss weights, we formulate reconstruction, contrastive discrimination, and chemistry-specific supervision as unit-weighted log-probability factors in a single probabilistic latent-variable objective. For fine-tuning, we propose a multi-task GNN readout architecture with task-specific multilayer perceptron heads, preserving shared representation learning while mitigating negative transfer and improving the modeling of heterogeneous, nonlinear task relationships. Across Biogen, ExpansionRX, and ChEMBL-MT, the resulting Contrastive KERMT pretraining improves over the KERMT baseline by 7.6%, 9.9%, and 9.5% respectively (averaged over significantly-improved endpoints). Adding ADME-adjacent molecules to the pretraining corpus further improves transfer, and the contrastive component sharpens chemically meaningful latent neighborhoods.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

VFUSE: Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders

Generative models have shown remarkable progress in a variety of domains such as protein design, but such power enables the opaque generation of hazardous proteins. In this work, we introduce VFUSE (Virulent Feature Understanding with Sparse autoEncoders), a mechanistic interpretability approach that trains SAEs on diffusion-transformer activations to audit protein models for hazard-aware features. We apply VFUSE to RoseTTAFold3 and RFDiffusion3, popular open-weight models for protein folding and synthesis. We find that for certain blocks, linear probes detect hazardous designs significantly better when fit in the SAE latent space over the original model's representations: improving interpretability without sacrificing model performance. Furthermore, we identify monosemantic features from the SAE that fire only on hazardous designs at up to AUROC 0.84 (q < 10-13).

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Shopping Reasoning Bench: An Expert-Authored Benchmark for Multi-Turn Conversational Shopping Assistants

Conversational shopping assistants now serve hundreds of millions of customers, yet no existing benchmark jointly evaluates the open-ended multi-turn reasoning, domain expertise, and criterion-level quality that real shopping conversations demand. Shopping reasoning is unique among language model applications. Unlike factual question answering or verifiable code generation, it requires balancing subjective preferences, budget constraints, and cross-product trade-offs across multi-turn dialogue, capabilities absent from previous e-commerce and general-purpose benchmarks. We introduce the Shopping Reasoning Bench, an expert-authored benchmark of 525 missions (232 single-turn, 293 multi-turn) with 10863 importance-weighted binary rubrics authored by retail domain experts. These criteria are organized under a taxonomy of five reasoning categories and fifteen subcategories covering diverse demands such as preference refinement, trade-off analysis, and compatibility assessment. An evaluation of nine models across three families (GPT, Claude, Gemini) shows that pass rates reach only 57–77% overall. On multi-turn missions, all models score 13–29 points lower on optional above-and-beyond criteria than on required ones, and performance degrades 4–18 points as conversations progress. These gaps show that current models handle basic shopping assistance but fall short of expert-level advice, making Shopping Reasoning Bench a challenging testbed for future shopping assistant development.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

NightFeats @ MMU-RAGent NeurIPS 2025: A Context-Optimized Multi-Agent RAG System for the Text-to-Text Track

We present NightFeats, a structured multi-agent retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) system submitted to the MMU-RAGent competition at NeurIPS 2025, where it was awarded Best Dynamic Evaluation in the text-to-text track. Rather than targeting benchmark maximization, this work proposes a principled pipeline that decomposes knowledge synthesis into three coordinated phases: retrieval, curation, and composition, each governed by explicit intermediate representations and handoff contracts. Inspired by Agentic Context Engineering (ACE), the system introduces temporal-semantic reranking, bounded contradiction reconciliation, and citation-preserving composition as core architectural primitives. Competition results show that NightFeats surpasses proprietary baselines including Claude-SonnetV2 and Nova-Pro on LLM-as-a-Judge and Human Likert evaluations, confirming that architectural transparency and verifiable evidence grounding are better aligned with human preferences than systems optimizing narrowly for automatic similarity metrics.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Genealogical processes of sequential Monte Carlo methods and other non-neutral population models under rapid mutation

arXiv:2406.16465v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We show that genealogical trees arising from a broad class of non-neutral models of population evolution converge to the Kingman coalescent under a suitable rescaling of time. As well as non-neutral biological evolution, our results apply to genetic algorithms encompassing the prominent class of sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) methods. The time rescaling we need differs slightly from that used in classical results for convergence to the Kingman coalescent, which has implications for the performance of different resampling schemes in SMC algorithms. In addition, our work substantially simplifies earlier proofs of convergence to the Kingman coalescent, and corrects an error common to several earlier results.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Wavelet Matrix Product States for Quantum Fields

arXiv:2606.23823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce a variational method to solve continuum quantum models with discrete tensor network techniques. The method leverages wavelet matrix product states (wMPS): matrix product states built on top of sufficiently regular ($N\geq 6$) Daubechies scaling functions. These states live in the continuum field theory Fock space, have finite energy density, and can be optimized with standard algorithms, without restriction to free theories. Further, exploiting the multi-resolution analysis built into wavelets, and its quantum circuit description, we can iteratively refine wMPS to obtain accurate approximations at arbitrarily fine length-scales. We showcase the efficiency of the method on the Lieb-Liniger model, computing energy density and correlation functions.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Proactive Conversational Assistant for a Procedural Manual Task based on Audio and IMU

Real-time conversational assistants for procedural manual tasks often depend on video input, which can be computationally expensive and compromise user privacy. For the first time, we propose a real-time conversational assistant that provides comprehensive guidance for procedural manual tasks using only lightweight privacy-preserving modalities such as audio and IMU inputs from a user's wearable device to understand the context. Using a furniture assembly task and a cooking task, we show how this assistant proactively communicates step-by-step instructions to a user performing a procedural task, and answers user questions. We illustrate the data generation method and the system design to achieve such an assistant. On observing that an off-the-shelf language model is a talkative assistant but is not always able to answer questions correctly, we demonstrate how finetuning the model improves its ability to limit unnecessary dialogues with a 50% increase in the precision, while also improving its ability to answer questions correctly, measured by a 150% increase in the recall of answers. We further describe how such an assistant is implemented on an edge device with no dependence on the cloud.

19.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Haagerup property and group-invariant percolation

arXiv:2303.17429v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Let $\mathcal G$ be the Cayley graph of a finitely generated, infinite group $\Gamma$. We show that $\Gamma$ has the Haagerup property if and only if for every $\alpha\alpha\mathrm{deg}_{\mathcal G}(g)$ for every vertex $g$ and with the two-point function $\tau(g,h)=\mathbb P\big[g\leftrightarrow h\big]$ vanishing as $d(g,h)\to\infty$. On the other hand, we show that $\Gamma$ has Kazhdan's property (T) if and only if there exists a threshold $\alpha^*\alpha^*\mathrm{deg}(o)$ implies that the two-point function is uniformly bounded away from zero. These results in particular answer questions raised by Lyons (J. Math. Phys. 41. 1099-1126 (2000)) about characterizations of properties of groups beyond amenability through group-invariant percolations. The method of proof is new and is based on a construction of percolations with suitable dependence structures built from invariant point processes on spaces with measured walls. This construction furthermore leads to quantitative bounds on the two-point functions, exhibiting in particular exponential decay of the two-point function in several prominent examples of Haagerup groups, including co-compact Fuchsian groups, co-compact discrete subgroups of $\mathrm{Isom}(\mathbb H^n)$ and lamplighters over free groups. This method also allows us to extend the aforementioned characterization of property (T) to the setting of relative property (T) and provide an application to Bernoulli percolation at the uniqueness threshold.

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

Consistent Evaluation of Operators Involving the Position Operator in the Bloch Representation: Application to the Orbital Moment

arXiv:2606.11679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The position operator plays a central role in condensed-matter observables such as velocity, orbital moment, and electric polarization. In solid-state physics, the evaluation of operators incorporating the position operator has not reached a consensus, as observed in the operator-level discrepancy between the local circulation of Wannier functions and the self-rotation of wave packets. Here, to achieve a consistent evaluation of such operators, we propose three rules for evaluating operators involving the position operator in the Bloch representation. The rules are devised to satisfy physical conditions: independence from the choice of unit cell, preservation of Hermitian conjugacy for the product of operators, and recovery of the correct intraband velocity. We further address the gauge dependence of the position operator and introduce a scheme termed gauge filtration, which systematically removes gauge-dependent contributions from the operators containing the position operator. This methodology ensures that the quantities obtained from the operator evaluation correspond to observable physical phenomena. By applying our framework, we reconcile the results concerning the self-rotation of the wave packet and the local circulation of the Wannier function. We expect our proposal to establish a consistent framework for evaluating operators involving the position operator.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Resolving Diagnostic Discordance in Group 2 Pulmonary Hypertension Through Staged Physiologic Testing: Insights From PVDOMICS

Background World Symposium on Pulmonary Hypertension (WSPH) Group 2 pulmonary hypertension (PH) is a clinically integrated phenotype attributed to left heart disease, whereas pre- versus post-capillary classification is operationalized primarily by pulmonary capillary wedge pressure (PCWP). Although current recommendations emphasize contextual interpretation and provocative testing for intermediate PCWP values, the relationship between PCWP-based classification and underlying phenotype has not been systematically evaluated. We aim to quantify phenotype-hemodynamic discordance across the PCWP spectrum and evaluate a staged physiology-guided framework incorporating inhaled nitric oxide (iNO), ventricular geometry, and provocative testing. Methods We studied 1,032 participants from the NHLBI-sponsored PVDOMICS cohort with multidisciplinary adjudicated phenotypes integrating clinical, imaging, physiologic, and hemodynamic data. Stage-specific PCWP thresholds classified pre- versus post-capillary physiology at rest, during iNO, and during provocation (fluid challenge or invasive cardiopulmonary exercise testing [iCPET]). Echocardiographic right ventricular-to-left ventricular (RV/LV) ratio was evaluated as a marker of ventricular interdependence. Restricted cubic spline and staged concordance analyses defined certainty-based PCWP ranges and incremental diagnostic yield. Results Adjudicated Group 2 phenotype was present in 37.0% of participants. Resting PCWP demonstrated good discrimination (AUC 0.86), but substantial bidirectional phenotype-hemodynamic discordance persisted across intermediate PCWP ranges. At a resting PCWP of 12 mmHg, 25% of participants classified as pre-capillary had adjudicated Group 2 PH, whereas at 18 mmHg, 35% classified as post-capillary remained discordant non-Group 2. Concordance did not approach 90% until PCWP values were 24 mmHg. Dynamic testing incrementally improved concordance within these overlap zones. Nearly half of adjudicated Group 2 PH participants (46.5%) were not identified by resting PCWP alone; incorporation of iNO and provocative testing increased cumulative Group 2 identification by 63.4% and improved sensitivity from 79.9% to 83.7%. Model discrimination improved from an AUC of 0.863 to 0.908 (likelihood-ratio P

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Scalar-pathway fidelity improves physical accuracy in short-range equivariant interatomic potentials

arXiv:2606.15892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate interatomic potentials enable molecular dynamics of materials, molecules, and interfaces beyond density-functional-theory length and time scales. Equivariant neural network potentials have improved the representation of local geometry. However, their deployable energy surfaces ultimately manifest through invariant scalar channels, whose aggregation and spectral resolution remain comparatively underexamined. Here we use Physics-Aware Neighborhood (PAN) pooling and Physics-Guided Spectral (PGS) mixers as controlled scalar-pathway probes: lightweight, symmetry-preserving modifications that act only on \(\ell=0\) channels while leaving the equivariant tensor backbone unchanged. Using MACE as a high-body-order mechanistic scaffold, PAN adds coordination-sensitive amplitude modulation, whereas PGS augments edge and readout scalar features with radial and tapered spectral bases. Across metallic Ag, covalent Si, a short-range ionic LiF/Li–F subset, and MD17/rMD17 molecules, this scalar-pathway correction reduces MACE force errors by 22–27\% and energy errors by 19–22\%; on systems with stress labels, stress errors decrease by 27–28\%, at approximately 5\% additional inference-FLOPs cost. Directionally consistent gains in Allegro and NequIP further indicate that the correction is portable across distinct short-range equivariant backbones, although effect sizes remain architecture-dependent. These results identify scalar-pathway fidelity as a practical design dimension for short-range equivariant interatomic potentials.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Microbial etiology, antibiotic susceptibility profiles, and multidrug resistance of urinary tract infections at a secondary healthcare facility in Ghana

Background: Rising antibiotic resistance challenges empirical therapies for urinary tract infections (UTIs). This study evaluated the microbial etiology, susceptibility profiles, and multidrug resistance (MDR) patterns of uropathogens among outpatients at the Berekum Holy Family Hospital, Ghana. Methods: This cross-sectional study (February to August 2021) screened 263 symptomatic outpatients. Mid-stream urine samples underwent quantitative culture, biochemical identification, and antimicrobial susceptibility testing via the Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion method following the 2021 CLSI guidelines. Results: Significant bacteriuria prevalence was 22.8% (60/263). UTIs predominated in females (78.3%, 47/60; p = 0.1501) and individuals [&ge;]45 years (33.3%, 20/60). Gram-negative rods accounted for 90.0% of isolates, primarily Escherichia coli (26.7%), Citrobacter spp. (25.0%), and Enterobacter spp. (21.7%); Staphylococcus aureus (10.0%) was the only Gram-positive pathogen. Extreme phenotypic resistance was observed against piperacillin/tazobactam (98.3%), cefotaxime (93.3%), tetracycline (88.3%), and cefoperazone (85.0%). Conversely, highest therapeutic susceptibilities were retained by amikacin (78.3%), levofloxacin (61.7%), and gentamicin (58.3%). Conclusion: The high prevalence of MDR uropathogens against advanced beta-lactamase inhibitor combinations and cephalosporins necessitates an immediate re-evaluation of regional empirical protocols. Amikacin, levofloxacin, and gentamicin remain viable options prior to culture confirmation. These findings establish a crucial phenotypic baseline to guide localized prescribing policies and regional antimicrobial resistance tracking strategies.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.20559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

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

Evaluation Protocols and Validation for Cameras in Indoor Healthcare Monitoring

Camera-based monitoring systems are increasingly adopted in healthcare settings for the continuous assessment of patient movement and activities. However, their technical performance under real-world indoor conditions remains insufficiently characterised, preventing appropriate camera selection for clinical or home adoption and reproducibility. Existing validation studies typically assess either device metrological performance or algorithm accuracy in isolation, and often do not systematically account for practical deployment factors, such as lighting variability, occlusions, and camera positioning. We present two technical validation protocols: the first evaluates the metrological performance of RGB and RGB-D cameras, and the second assesses their use in supporting human pose estimation, validated using state-of-the-art pose estimators. The proposed protocols systematically assess five cameras, four RGB-D and one RGB, under controlled variations in lighting, camera height, viewing angle, and occlusion level within representative indoor scenarios. The experimental results show that metrological performance varies substantially across cameras, with depth bias at 5 m ranging from 50 mm to over 1400 mm depending on the device. For 2D pose estimation, all cameras achieve broadly comparable accuracy, with mean mAP between approximately 78% and 90% across cameras and estimators, whereas 3D reconstruction error differs markedly across devices, with MPJPE ranging from 104 mm to 365 mm, closely reflecting underlying depth-sensing quality. Environmental factors have a camera- and estimator-dependent effect on 3D performance, while camera mounting height has minimal influence within the evaluated range. This work provides evidence-based guidance for the selection and deployment of cameras in healthcare monitoring applications, addressing an important gap in current technical validation practice.