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

Grid-state deformation in a no-jump non-Hermitian bosonic dimer

arXiv:2606.17036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the no-jump evolution of ideal grid states in a lossy bosonic dimer with differential decay. The effective non-Hermitian quadratic dynamics induces a complex symplectic flow in phase space that deforms both the primitive lattice vectors and the origin seed. The average decay rate controls common attenuation, while coherent hopping and differential decay control the reduced dimer deformation. The reduced sector contains elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic regimes with imaginary spectra, an exceptional point, and real spectra, producing oscillatory, linear, and exponential lattice deformations. Although projected lattice areas can change, the deformation comes from a determinant-one complex symplectic flow on the full four-dimensional phase space. For a Gaussian regularization of the origin seed, we derive the associated complex width matrix and identify the positivity conditions that preserve Gaussian form. For an initial two-mode qunaught product state, the lossless limit recovers the standard beam-splitter generation of a square GKP$+$ Bell pair, while the no-jump dynamics produces its non-Hermitian deformation with a postselection cost set by the no-jump probability.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Excess mortality in Germany during 2020-2023: A descriptive age-stratified analysis

Authors:

This study investigates excess mortality in Germany in the years from 2020 to 2023 and its temporal alignment with reported COVID-19 deaths. The analysis uses annual and weekly all-cause mortality data and linear baseline trends derived from pre-pandemic years. Possible effects of demographic and population changes on baseline trends were also examined. Excess mortality was analysed over time and across age groups. Excess mortality was observed in all investigated years, rising from 2020 to its highest value in 2022. In absolute terms, the age group [≥]80 years accounted for the largest proportion of excess deaths throughout the study period. After 2021, elevated mortality relative to baseline was also observed in younger age groups down to 15 years of age, although absolute numbers remained substantially lower than in older groups. No evidence of excess mortality was observed for individuals younger than 15 years. Periods of excess mortality were temporally aligned with waves of reported COVID-19 deaths. In 2020, cumulative excess mortality after calendar week 11 closely matched reported COVID-19 deaths (43 876 vs. 41 835 deaths). Weekly excess mortality, reported COVID-19 deaths and wastewater viral load, when available showed strong temporal synchrony, although excess mortality increasingly exceeded reported COVID-19 deaths during later pandemic waves. Temporal patterns differed from the typical seasonal mortality peaks commonly associated with influenza epidemics during the early months of the year. In 2023, excess mortality declined substantially, possibly indicating a return to mortality levels before the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Benchmarking Quantum Computers via Protocols, Comparing IBM's Heron vs IBM's Eagle

arXiv:2603.04377v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing hardware rapidly advances, objectively evaluating the capabilities and error rates of new processors remains a critical challenge for the field. A clear and realistic understanding of current quantum performance is essential for guiding research priorities and driving meaningful progress. In this work, we apply and extend a protocol-based benchmarking methodology (Meirom, Mor, Weinstein Arxiv 2505.12441) that utilizes well-defined \underline{quantumness} thresholds. By evaluating performance at protocol level rather than the gate level, this approach provides a transparent and intuitive assessment of whether specific quantum processors, or isolated sub-chips within them, can demonstrate a practical quantum advantage. To illustrate the utility of this method, we compare two generations of IBM quantum computers: the older Eagle architecture and the newer Heron architecture. Our findings reveal the genuine operational strengths and limitations of these devices, demonstrating substantial performance improvements in the newer Heron generation. This work was made possible by IBM Quantum policies that enable independent and objective assessment of its quantum computers and sub-chips. We strongly encourage other companies to emulate the independent qubit availability and the fair pricing that allow researchers to perform such assessments.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Minimum measurements quantum protocol for band structure calculation

arXiv:2511.04389v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Protocols for quantum measurement are an essential part of quantum computing. Measurements are no longer confined to the final step of computation but are increasingly embedded within quantum circuits as integral components of noise-resilient algorithms. However, each observable typically requires a distinct measurement basis, often demanding a different circuit configuration. As the number of such configurations typically grows with the number of qubits, measurements constitute a major bottleneck. Focusing on electronic structure calculations in crystalline systems, we propose a measurement protocol that restricts the required measurement configurations to an absolute minimum of just three, independent of the number of qubits. This makes it one of the few known protocols that do not scale with qubit number. In particular, we derive the measurement protocol from the symmetries of tight-binding (TB) Hamiltonians and implement it within the Orthogonal-Ansatz Variational Quantum Eigensolver (OA-VQE) algorithm. We demonstrate its performance on three systems, namely a two-dimensional CuO$_2$ square lattice (3 qubits), bilayer graphene with hexagonal (Honeycomb) lattice (4 qubits) and three-dimensional diamond lattice (10 qubits). Beyond tight-binding systems, the protocol can be extended to enable efficient initial state preparation for many-body Hamiltonians, such as multi-orbital Hubbard models in a momentum space.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Semantic DLM+: Improving Diffusion Language Models through Bias-variance Trade-off in Transition Kernel Design

arXiv:2606.15327v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have demonstrated strong scaling capacity as alternatives to autoregressive language models. However, their performance is highly sensitive to the choice of transition kernels, and poorly designed kernels can lead to issues like training instability, slow convergence, and biased sampling. In this paper, we study this sensitivity through a principled analysis of generalization error and identify three critical factors: asymptotic bias (difficulty in approximating the posterior distribution), exposure bias (error propagation during sampling), and optimization variance induced by kernel dispersion. We further compare different transition kernels: masking diffusion yields sparse and easier posterior-approximation targets, while uniform diffusion provides stronger sampling-side repair but induces harder approximation. Motivated by this trade-off, we revisit a previously overlooked variant, semantic DLM (SemDLM), where the transition kernel corrupts tokens to neighborhoods that are semantically similar. Our theory suggests that SemDLM can serve as a plausible middle ground by reducing the posterior approximation difficulty of uniform diffusion while retaining repair ability. However, we find that SemDLM suffers from a semantic basin problem, where sampling repeatedly stays within a semantic region and produces low-diversity text. To address this, we propose SemDLM+, which adds a global transition and a semantic-frequency penalty during sampling. Experiments on LM1B and OpenWebText show that SemDLM+ improves training dynamics and achieves competitive language modeling and generation quality with satisfactory diversity.

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

Semantic Robustness Certification for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs) are now widely used in downstream tasks. However, real-world applications often expose VLMs to distribution shifts induced by semantic variation (e.g., shape, size, and style). Robustness certification determines if a model's prediction changes when transformations are applied to its input. While most certification frameworks study geometric or pixel-level transformations over inputs, this work proposes a novel framework that enables certifying VLM robustness under semantic-level transformations. Leveraging the open-vocabulary capability of VLMs, we use text prompts as semantic proxies to construct transformations parameterized by an extent that controls the degree of semantic variation. By characterizing the VLM decision boundary in closed form, our framework quantitatively certifies extent intervals for which the predicted class remains unchanged under the semantic transformation. Our framework is the first to certify VLM robustness under semantic-level variations without requiring additional data for each variation, making it practical to apply. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world data show that our framework enables certifying robustness under diverse semantic variations across scenarios.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Learning Instance-Adaptive Low-Rank Orthogonal Subspaces for Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Certification of the genuine resolution of photon number resolving detectors

arXiv:2606.14365v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photon-number-resolving (PNR) detectors are essential components of photonic quantum technologies, yet thus far, no practical metric exists to certify how many photons they can genuinely resolve in a single measurement. Here we introduce an operational framework for quantifying the capability of a PNR detector to distinguish between different numbers of photons, i.e. its genuine resolution. In turn, we develop a practical and scalable protocol for certifying the genuine resolution of a detector, which is based on coherent state probes. We apply the method to a 28-pixel photon-number-resolving superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (PNR-SNSPD) and certify genuine four-outcome resolution. Our work highlights the critical requirements in terms of detector efficiency towards achieving high genuine resolution. This approach provides an operational benchmark for PNR detectors and fills a crucial gap in the characterization of photonic quantum devices.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Trustworthy Image Authentication using Forensic Knowledge Graphs

Advances in generative AI have made image falsification highly realistic, demanding trustworthy authentication systems. Existing forensic detectors can target certain forgery types but lack interpretability, while vision-language models (VLMs) provide explanations but cannot exploit forensic traces for reliable detection. We propose Forensic Knowledge Graphs (FKGs), a unified framework that integrates forensic evidence extraction, structured reasoning, and human-interpretable explanation. Our FKG structure encodes forensic traces along with their causal dependencies and links to scene content. To generate accurate FKGs, we introduce a novel forensic authentication network and an Iterative Context Refinement strategy that guides VLMs to produce faithful, grounded explanations. We also present FKG-50K, a dataset of 50,000 realistic forgeries with ground-truth FKGs. Experiments demonstrate that FKG outperforms both forensic detectors and VLMs in detection, forgery identification and localization, and forensic justification.

10.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Prediction of hospitalisation in young children with pneumonia in Malawi: A machine learning-based approach

by Patrick Staunton, Mohammad Adib Makrooni, Master Chisale, Billy Nyambolo, Joseph Wu, Damien McCarthy, Mark Ledwidge, Yasir Bin Nisar, Chris Watson, Balwani Mbakaya, Cathal Seoighe, Joe Gallagher Background Globally, pneumonia remains the single biggest cause of mortality in children under 5 years of age. This study sought to train and test a prediction model for hospitalisation within 7 days after initial presentation in 2- to 59-month-old Malawian children with WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care and compare its performance to existing risk prediction models. Methods and findings BIOTOPE is a cohort study of children with pneumonia in a primary healthcare setting in Malawi. The training cohort involved nine primary care centres and the testing cohort involved two primary care centres in Northern Malawi. The training cohort was recruited between December 2022 and April 2023 while the testing cohort was recruited in 2016. Participants were consecutive children aged 2–59 months presenting with cough and/or difficulty breathing and who were diagnosed as WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care of any severity. The training cohort was used to train and validate a machine learning model with a prespecified primary outcome defined as hospitalisation and/or death within 7 days as the outcome. This model was then further evaluated in the testing cohort.Median age was 15 months (interquartile range 8−27) in the training and 17 months (interquartile range 9−29) in the external testing cohort (52.1% and 54.4% male, respectively). Hospitalisation occurred in 14.3% (294) of the training cohort and 12.1% (55) of the testing cohort. There was one death in the training cohort only. WHO danger signs were present in 17.6% (360) and 15.9% (70) of children in the training and testing cohorts, respectively. The optimal machine learning model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves of 0.87 and 0.57, respectively, in the testing cohort outperforming existing risk prediction models; furthermore, this model produced an expected calibration error of 0.16 (a logistic regression model using severity status as the response variable and the log odds of the machine learning model’s calibrated probabilities produced an intercept estimate of −0.32 and a slope estimate of 1.13). Key limitations include the use of hospitalisation and/or death as a severity outcome, which may reflect health system factors rather than true disease severity, that mortality-based comparisons were not possible due to low mortality in these primary care cohorts, and that comparator tools were developed for hospital populations rather than primary care populations. Conclusion This machine learning score outperformed traditional pneumonia risk scores in predicting hospitalisation within 7 days in Malawian children presenting to primary care. Traditional pneumonia risk scores diminish in performance when externally applied to new datasets suggesting they may not generalise well beyond their original derivation settings. Mortality-related findings are not applicable as there was only one death in this cohort. Overall these findings support the potential of machine learning to meaningfully improve early identification of children at risk of severe pneumonia in low-resource primary care settings. Further external validation and clinical impact studies are needed to confirm these results.

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

SAM-Deep-EIoU: Selective Mask Propagation for Multi-Object Tracking

Multi-object tracking has a heavy-tailed difficulty distribution: most frames are easy for a lightweight base tracker, while a small fraction are intrinsically hard. Video object segmentation (VOS) models can often preserve identity through the hard frames where the base tracker fails, but they are much more expensive in compute and memory. We propose selective mask propagation, a tracking algorithm that dispatches from a base tracker to a VOS model only on windows where an assignment-uncertainty signal fires. The base tracker's output is modified only when the VOS model makes a confident prediction that contradicts the base tracker's identity assignment; weak or inconclusive predictions preserve the base output. The method is training-free, treats both the base tracker and the VOS model as black boxes, and can benefit from replacing the VOS component with a more capable model. On DanceTrack, selective mask propagation improves three different base trackers. On SportsMOT, where identity preservation is central to sports analytics, SAM3-Deep-EIoU with global track association achieves state-of-the-art performance on the benchmark with 86.8 HOTA.

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

THEIA: Learning Complete Kleene Three-Valued Logic in a Pure-Neural Modular Architecture

arXiv:2604.11284v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present THEIA, a 2.75M-parameter modular neural architecture that learns the complete Kleene three-valued logic (K3) truth table from task data without external symbolic inference or hand-encoded K3 gate primitives. Across 5 seeds it passes all 39 K3 rules at >99% per-rule accuracy. K3 learnability is not the central finding: Transformer baselines also pass all 39 rules, and flat MLPs match THEIA on Phase-1 accuracy within 0.04pp. The contributions are two properties of the learned system. (1) Uncertainty-verdict asymmetric propagation. THEIA preserves Has-Unknown at every upstream boundary (80.0/91.1/90.8/99.7% across Arith/Order/Set/Logic vs. ~52% majority) while final-verdict decodability stays at or below a 73.4% U-vs-non-U oracle reference under linear and nonlinear probes. Activation patching on non-absorbent T->U cases flips 4,898/4,898 OR and 4,719/4,719 AND pairs across 5 seeds, ruling out residual shortcuts. (2) Reliability spectrum under discretized end-to-end training, on tasks decomposable along the engine boundaries. A mod-3 sequential composition task generalizes from 5- to 500-step evaluation at 99.96+-0.04% (5 seeds). Under identical Gumbel-softmax training, flat MLPs collapse to chance by 50 steps; a 2x2 ResMLP grid reaches >=99% on only 3/20 (config, seed) trials; a pre-LN Transformer reaches 99.24+-0.34%. Straight-through discretization prevents 0.999^500 compounding; the architectural separator is sustaining Phase-1 accuracy under Phase-3 training, where flat MLPs fail. Auxiliary: under per-architecture development defaults (not optimizer-controlled), THEIA reaches 12/12 Kleene coverage 6.5x faster than a parameter-comparable 8L Transformer; this narrows to ~3.6x with Transformer-standard tuning and 4.93x with the same recipe on both. Ratios are config-specific, not asymptotic.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi Gas

arXiv:2602.24006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An asymmetric three-component Fermi gas, featuring Raman-induced spin-orbit coupling between the first and second components and contact interaction only between the first and third components, introduces both spin-orbit coupling and population imbalance-two mechanisms known to stabilize the Fulde-Ferrell superfluids.We systematically study Fulde-Ferrell superfluids in an asymmetric three-component Fermi gas { in two dimensions and at zero temperature} by finding the global minima of the thermodynamic potential. We reveal a new class of composite Fulde-Ferrell superfluids that emerges when strong spin-orbit coupling generates a double-well structure in momentum space within the lower spin-orbit-coupled band. The key features of these composite superfluids are identified.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

The Optimal Rate Function in Covariant Quantum State Tomography

arXiv:2606.16948v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The problem of quantum tomography is to estimate an unknown quantum state $\rho$ from a measurement of $n$ copies of $\rho$. One can ask which tomography protocol, i.e.\ which choice of multi-copy measurement, gives the best possible estimate of $\rho$. To do so, we characterize tomography protocols by their rate function, which governs the exponential rate at which a protocol assigns probability to a particular estimate $\sigma$ of the true state $\rho$. This rate function is a quantum mechanical generalization of the classical relative entropy between the true state and its estimate, and depends on the choice of protocol. It is bounded by the quantum relative entropy, and we show that this bound is sharp: for any $\rho$ and $\sigma$ we construct a family of protocols whose rate functions converge to the quantum relative entropy $D(\sigma\|\rho)$. We consider the family of covariant tomography protocols; these are the basis independent state estimation schemes that assume no prior information about $\rho$ and $\sigma$. Keyl described a specific tomography protocol based on Schur sampling, and conjectured that among all covariant tomography protocols it has the largest possible rate function for all $\sigma$ and $\rho$. We prove this conjecture. The resulting rate function is an annealed version of quantum relative entropy, due to the cost of learning the eigenbasis in covariant quantum state tomography.

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

CausalDrive: Real-time Causal World Models for Autonomous Driving

World models have emerged as a promising paradigm for scaling autonomous driving (AD) data, yet existing video generative models fall short as interactive simulators. Layout-conditioned renderers rely on "oracle" future trajectories of all background agents, rendering them strictly non-reactive. Conversely, pure action-conditioned predictors lack semantic control over complex interactions and suffer from prohibitive diffusion latencies, hindering closed-loop policy learning. To bridge this gap, we present CausalDrive, a controllable, real-time foundation driving world renderer. CausalDrive operates solely on the initial front-view frame, the ego-vehicle's trajectory, and a macroscopic text prompt. By excluding future NPC layouts, we compel the model to intrinsically predict causal interactions, enabling text-driven control over Driving Sociology, allowing users to dynamically orchestrate diverse counterfactual reactions to identical ego-actions. To overcome the efficiency bottleneck and address the covariate shift in autoregressive generation, we propose a novel Context-Forced DMD architecture. This combines continuous flow-matching with a self-correcting distillation objective, achieving interactive speeds of 12 FPS. This breakthrough transforms the passive video generator into a playable neural simulator. We demonstrate its versatility across three downstream applications: (1) generative closed-loop evaluation with significantly mitigated collision artifacts, (2) large-scale Reinforcement Learning (RL) post-training driven by a Video2Reward module, and (3) real-time human-in-the-loop simulation. Extensive experiments validate that policies trained within CausalDrive's reactive scenarios exhibit superior interaction capabilities in the real world.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Quality-Preserving Imperceptible Adversarial Attack on Skeleton-based Human Action Recognition

Adversarial attacks on skeletal human action recognition have received significant attention. However, existing methods typically introduce noise-like perturbations that degrade motion quality post-attack, and thereby are inherently perceptible with recent advancements in S-HAR systems. We discover that this degradation stems from the gap between empirical and true risks during the optimization process of previous adversarial attacks. To address this issue, we propose an attack where adversarial motions are obtained without compromising their motion quality. To minimize the risk gap and preserve motion quality, we propose a distribution-based adversarial attack method without introducing noise-like perturbations. To faithfully evaluate the motion quality, we propose a new metric that aligns with human perception on real-world naturalness. Experiments have been conducted on the state-of-the-art S-HAR methods across two datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our method in both the attack success rate and the post-attack motion quality through qualitative and quantitative analyses. The success of our quality-preserving attack application and distribution-based method raises serious concerns about the robustness of action recognizers, highlighting the need for further enhancements in this domain.

17.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Multi-floor generalization of TASEP

arXiv:2603.13610v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider an interacting particle system, which generalizes the classical totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP), in that each site can contain up to a fixed finite number of particles, and the particle movement is governed by a back-pressure (BP) algorithm (also often called MaxWeight). There are $N$ sites (with $N$ finite or infinite), each may contain at most $c$ particles, $1 \le c < \infty$. New particles enter the system at the left-most site $1$ as a Poisson process of rate $\alpha\le 1$, unless site $1$ has $c$ particles. Particles (if any) are removed from the right-most site $N$ as a Poisson process of rate $\beta \le 1$. The left-to-right movement of particles between neighboring sites is governed by the BP rule: one particle moves from site $n$ to $n+1$ at epochs of a rate $1$ Poisson process, as long as the former site has strictly more particles than the latter. When $c=1$, this is the standard TASEP. Our main results address the asymptotics of the stationary distribution of a finite system, and especially the limit of the flux (current) as $N\to\infty$. In particular, we prove that interesting non-trivial phase transitions take place in a system with $c>1$. For example, if $c>1$ and $1/2 \le \beta \le 1$, the maximum limiting flux $1/4$ is achieved as long as $\alpha \ge \alpha_c^*$, where $\alpha_c^* < 1/2$ is some non-trivial threshold. (For the standard TASEP the threshold is $1/2$.) We also put forward a general conjecture about the stationary distribution asymptotics under an arbitrary parameter setting. We illustrate our formal results and the conjecture by simulations, and identify interesting directions for further research.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Generating adversarial inputs for a graph neural network model of AC power flow

Authors:

arXiv:2602.17975v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work formulates and solves optimization problems to generate input points that yield high errors between a neural network's predicted AC power flow solution and solutions to the AC power flow equations. We demonstrate this capability on an instance of the CANOS-PF graph neural network model, as implemented by the PF$\Delta$ benchmark library, operating on a 14-bus test grid. Generated adversarial points yield errors as large as 3.7 per-unit in reactive power and 0.08 per-unit in voltage magnitude. When minimizing the perturbation from a training point necessary to satisfy adversarial constraints, we find that the constraints can be met with as little as an 0.04 per-unit perturbation in voltage magnitude on a single bus. This work motivates the development of rigorous verification and robust training methods for neural network surrogate models of AC power flow.

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

RL-Index: Reinforcement Learning for Retrieval Index Reasoning

arXiv:2606.16316v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieving external knowledge is essential for solving real-world tasks, yet it remains challenging when the relationship between a query and its relevant knowledge involves implicit and complex reasoning beyond surface-level semantic or lexical matching (e.g., mathematical problems relying on the same theorem or coding requiring deep reasoning). Existing approaches primarily rely on query-side reasoning (e.g., query rewriting), which introduces significant online latency and underutilizes the opportunity to perform reasoning over the knowledge corpus itself (i.e., index-side reasoning). In this paper, we propose RL-Index, an agentic indexing framework that formulates retrieval index reasoning as a reinforcement learning problem. Instead of performing reasoning at query time, RL-Index shifts reasoning to the indexing stage by augmenting documents with LLM-generated rationales that explicitly encode the latent query-knowledge relationship. To optimize the quality of these rationales, we employ Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and use retrieval similarity as a verifiable reward signal, enabling direct optimization of indexing decisions for retrieval effectiveness. Extensive experiments on the BRIGHT benchmark demonstrate that RL-Index consistently improves both retrieval and downstream question-answering performance, while significantly reducing online inference latency. Moreover, the learned rationale augmentation generalizes across diverse retrievers and generators, highlighting its robustness as a plug-and-play indexing strategy across different retrieval systems.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Female-RHINO: A Real-Time Scanner-Integrated Framework for Automated Quantitative Uterine MRI Analysis and Structured Reporting

arXiv:2606.24390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized assessment of uterine MRI remains challenging due to anatomical variability, observer dependence, and the lack of workflow-integrated automated analysis tools. This work presents Female-RHINO: (R)eproductive (H)ealth (I)maging A(N)alysis T(O)ol, a real-time AI-assisted framework for automated quantitative uterine MRI analysis and structured reporting during image acquisition. We present an end-to-end system that integrates inline communication with the MRI scanner and deep learning-based analysis to derive quantitative uterine biomarkers from sagittal T2-weighted pelvic MRI. The framework combines segmentation and anatomical landmark detection models trained and evaluated on more than 500 multi-center datasets spanning diverse protocols, vendors, and patient populations. It performs volumetry, detects and quantifies common incidental findings such as fibroids and Nabothian cysts, and extracts six anatomical landmarks for biometric assessment. Results are compiled into a structured clinician-oriented report with integrated visualizations, without manual interaction. Evaluation on independent retrospective and prospective cohorts demonstrated robust performance across varying acquisition settings. Mean Dice similarity coefficients were 0.82 for the uterus and 0.80 for fibroids, with lower but consistent agreement for Nabothian cysts. Landmark detection achieved a mean radial error of 3.7 mm. End-to-end processing was completed in under 70 seconds, enabling availability of results during the ongoing scan. Prospective deployment yielded immediate, standardized, and reproducible analyses supported by inter-observer agreement. The proposed system enables real-time scanner-integrated AI for automated uterine MRI analysis and reporting, with potential to improve standardization, efficiency, and clinical workflow in pelvic imaging.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A complexity theory for non-local quantum computation

arXiv:2505.23893v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces a local interaction between two systems with a single round of communication and shared entanglement. Despite many partial results, it is known that a characterization of entanglement cost in at least certain NLQC tasks would imply significant breakthroughs in complexity theory. Here, we avoid these obstructions and take an indirect approach to understanding resource requirements in NLQC, which mimics the approach used by complexity theorists: we study the relative hardness of different NLQC tasks by identifying resource efficient reductions between them. Most significantly, we prove that $f$-measure and $f$-route, the two best studied NLQC tasks, are in fact equivalent under $O(1)$ overhead reductions. This result simplifies many existing proofs in the literature and extends several new properties to $f$-measure. For instance, we obtain sub-exponential upper bounds on $f$-measure for all functions, and efficient protocols for functions in the complexity class $\mathsf{Mod}_k\mathsf{L}$. Beyond this, we study a number of other examples of NLQC tasks and their relationships.

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

Autonomous End-to-End SOH Prediction Services for Battery Systems via Temporal-Contrastive Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.16434v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate state of health (SOH) estimation is a critical diagnostic service for lithium-ion battery management. However, reliance on labor-intensive manual feature engineering and opaque black-box models hinders scalable industrial deployment. To address this, we introduce TC-SOH: a modular, plug-and-play service architecture for autonomous, end-to-end SOH prediction. TC-SOH employs a temporal-contrastive mechanism and a cross-window prediction pretext task to extract degradation-relevant representations directly from raw operational data. To improve transparency, we connect model efficacy with representation diagnostics: visualization, sensitivity analysis, redundancy analysis, bidirectional probing, future-SOH probing, and temporal shuffling show that learned features overlap with selected expert descriptors while retaining additional SOH-relevant variation, and that ordered temporal context improves subsequent-SOH prediction. Across four public datasets, TC-SOH outperforms the considered physics-informed and data-driven baselines, reducing MAPE by 1.91 times and RMSE by 2.13 times.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Spatially Masked Regression Reveals Local and Distributed Predictability in Electrophysiological Recordings

arXiv:2606.11415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural recordings are often interpreted as local measurements, yet the signal at any one sensor can also reflect structured activity distributed across the broader network. This raises a basic question: to what extent does an electrode's signal reflect local versus distributed information in the underlying system? More specifically, how much of an electrode's activity is carried by its immediate neighborhood, and how much is embedded more broadly across the array? We address this with a Spatially Masked Regression (SMR) framework that reconstructs each electrode's timeseries from the remaining electrodes while excluding a configurable neighborhood around the target. By progressively increasing this mask, spatial locality becomes an experimental control for quantifying how much predictive information survives after nearby channels are withheld. We apply SMR to intracranial EEG with heterogeneous electrode coverage and to scalp EEG with standardized montages over sensorimotor cortex. Using distance correlation between original and reconstructed signals, we find strong within-subject reconstruction in both modalities, substantial residual predictability even when local neighbors are excluded, and markedly stronger cross-subject transfer in EEG than in iEEG. Masking shows that nearby electrodes contribute strongly to reconstruction but do not account for all of it, indicating that individual channels reflect both local redundancy and broader distributed structure. Surrogates that preserve selected marginal or spectral properties while disrupting phase structure or temporal ordering substantially reduce performance, supporting the conclusion that SMR depends on structured temporal and cross-channel organization rather than on marginal statistics alone. These results position SMR as an interpretable framework for quantifying the balance between local and distributed information in recordings.

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

Augmenting Molecular Language Models with Local $n$-gram Memory

Transformer-based language models for SMILES strings suffer from a locality gap: standard character-level tokenization fragments chemically meaningful motifs, forcing models to repeatedly learn local syntax at the expense of long-range dependencies. To address this without disrupting standard tokenizers, we propose MolGram, which integrates a conditional $n$-gram memory module into molecular language models. MolGram maps local string patterns to learned embeddings via scalable hash lookups and dynamically injects this regional context into hidden states. Evaluations across three tasks, including unconditional molecule generation, forward reaction prediction, and single-step retrosynthesis, show that MolGram consistently improves performance. Crucially, our analyses demonstrate that MolGram outperforms baselines with 3$\times$ more parameters, establishing explicit local pattern memory as a highly efficient inductive bias.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SAMTok: Representing Any Mask with Two Words

Pixel-wise capabilities are essential for building interactive intelligent systems. However, pixel-wise multi-modal LLMs (MLLMs) remain difficult to scale due to complex region-level encoders, specialized segmentation decoders, and incompatible training objectives. To address these challenges, we present SAMTok, a discrete mask tokenizer that converts any region mask into two special tokens and reconstructs the mask using these tokens with high fidelity. By treating masks as new language tokens, SAMTok enables base MLLMs (such as the QwenVL series) to learn pixel-wise capabilities through standard next-token prediction and simple reinforcement learning, without architectural modifications and specialized loss design. SAMTok builds on SAM2 and is trained on 209M diverse masks using a mask encoder and residual vector quantizer to produce discrete, compact, and information-rich tokens. With 5M SAMTok-formatted mask understanding and generation data samples, QwenVL-SAMTok attains state-of-the-art or comparable results on region captioning, region VQA, grounded conversation, referring segmentation, scene graph parsing, and multi-round interactive segmentation. We further introduce a textual answer-matching reward that enables efficient reinforcement learning for mask generation, delivering substantial improvements on GRES and GCG benchmarks. Our results demonstrate a scalable and straightforward paradigm for equipping MLLMs with strong pixel-wise capabilities. Our code and models are available.