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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Electric Field Distortions in Surface Ion Traps with Integrated Nanophotonics

arXiv:2503.20387v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The integration of photonic components into surface ion traps provides a scalable approach for trapped-ion quantum computing, sensing, and metrology, enabling compact systems with enhanced stability and precision. However, the introduction of optical apertures in the trap electrodes can distort the trapping electric field. This can lead to excess micromotion (EMM) and ion displacement which degrade the performance of quantum logic operations and optical clocks. In this work, we systematically investigate the electric field distortion in a surface ion trap with integrated waveguides and grating couplers using Finite Element Method (FEM) simulations. We analyze methods to reduce these distortions by exploiting symmetries and transparent conductive oxide materials.

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

MolmoMotion: Forecasting Point Trajectories in 3D with Language Instruction

Motion forecasting is central to visual intelligence: agents must anticipate how objects will move in order to plan actions, reason about physical interactions, and synthesize realistic futures. We argue that 3D points in world coordinates provide a general representation that is class-agnostic, view-stable, compact, and directly useful for downstream tasks. We formalize the task of goal-conditioned 3D point motion forecasting: given a short visual history, a set of 3D query points on an object of interest, and a language description of the intended goal, the model predicts the future 3D trajectory of each point. We introduce a full stack to study this task at scale: (1) MolmoMotion-1M is a large corpus of action-described, object-grounded 3D point trajectories annotated from 1.16M unconstrained videos; (2) PointMotionBench is a human-verified benchmark spanning 111 object categories and 61 motion types; and (3) MolmoMotion is a general motion forecasting model that supports both autoregressive coordinate prediction and flow-matching-based trajectory generation. MolmoMotion accurately predicts diverse motion patterns with different language instructions, and significantly outperforms existing motion prediction baselines on PointMotionBench. Finally, we show that the learned 3D motion prior transfers well to downstream applications: it improves training efficiency and generalization for robot manipulation, and its predicted trajectories provide effective motion guidance for generative models to synthesize videos with more realistic object motion.

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

Towards Unified Song Generation and Singing Voice Conversion with Accompaniment Co-Generation

arXiv:2606.07015v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While song generation and singing voice conversion (SVC) have evolved significantly, they have long been developed isolated: the former lacks zero-shot speaker cloning, while the latter overlooks vocal-accompaniment synergy. To bridge this gap, we propose UniSinger, the first end-to-end framework unifying speaker cloning song generation and accompaniment co-generation SVC. Building on the multimodal diffusion transformer, we construct a unified speaker embedding space transferring speaker representation from SVC to song generation, endowing fine-grained cross-task timbre control. To mitigate multi-task optimization conflicts, we design a curriculum learning strategy using task-specific modality masking to guide the model to gradually master the generative mechanisms among semantic content, vocal timbre, and accompaniment. Experiments show state-of-the-art performance on both tasks and realizes complementary benefits, offering new possibilities for intelligent music production.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer: Scalable 3D CT Volume Generation

Generating high-resolution 3D CT volumes with fine details remains challenging due to substantial computational demands and optimization difficulties inherent to existing generative models. In this paper, we propose the Pixel-Level Residual Diffusion Transformer (PRDiT), a scalable generative framework that synthesizes high-quality 3D medical volumes directly at voxel-level. PRDiT introduces a two-stage training architecture comprising 1) a local denoiser in the form of an MLP-based blind estimator operating on overlapping 3D patches to separate low-frequency structures efficiently, and 2) a global residual diffusion transformer employing memory-efficient attention to model and refine high-frequency residuals across entire volumes. This coarse-to-fine modeling strategy simplifies optimization, enhances training stability, and effectively preserves subtle structures without the limitations of an autoencoder bottleneck. Extensive experiments conducted on the LIDC-IDRI and RAD-ChestCT datasets demonstrate that PRDiT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art models, such as HA-GAN, 3D LDM and WDM-3D, achieving significantly lower 3D FID, MMD and Wasserstein distance scores.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Exploring Multi-Modal Large Language Models and Two-Stage Fine-Tuning for Fashion Image Retrieval

Composed image retrieval retrieves a target image using a composed query of a reference image and a modified text description. In the fashion domain, this task requires understanding subtle attribute variations such as color, pattern, and texture. However, existing approaches face limitations due to scarce annotated data and simplistic negative sampling. We propose a novel framework that integrates a multi-modal large language model (LLaVA) to generate attribute-aware triplets and introduces a two-stage fine-tuning strategy to enhance contrastive learning. We leverage pretrained vision-language models, such as CLIP-ViT/B32, to generate and concatenate sentence-level prompts with the relative caption and to scale the number of negatives using static representations. Experimental results demonstrate enhanced compositional reasoning and improved fine-grained retrieval behavior, underscoring the feasibility and potential of the proposed framework for fashion retrieval.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent representations

Single-cell transcriptomics is typically modeled in low-dimensional latent representations that improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. Such representations underpin data integration, cell state discovery, and perturbation prediction, with applications ranging from large-scale organ atlases to latent trajectory modeling. Recent virtual cell approaches further leverage these representations to predict cellular responses as distributional shifts in latent space. Each of these applications ultimately requires faithful gene expression reconstruction from latent spaces for biological interpretation, enabling gene-level analysis of predicted perturbed or batch-corrected cells. Yet representation choice is typically treated as an implementation detail rather than a primary modeling decision, with no systematic evaluation of how well latent representations support gene expression reconstruction. Here, we introduce ReconEval, a benchmark for evaluating gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent spaces. We benchmark two classes of latent representations: end-to-end trained models such as PCA, autoencoders, and variational autoencoders, and pretrained single-cell foundation model embeddings coupled to newly trained decoders. Reconstruction is evaluated both directly and after latent-space perturbation prediction. Across perturbational and observational datasets totaling over 100 million cells, our metric suite quantifies statistical fidelity; biological signal preservation, including differential expression, coexpression, cell-cycle structure, cytokine response and pathway activity; and perturbation-specific effects. We find that autoencoders achieve the strongest stand-alone reconstruction at low dimensionality, while variational regularization does not improve generalization in reconstruction. Frozen foundation model embeddings retain recoverable gene-level information, with reconstruction quality depending strongly on decoder architecture and pretraining objective. In latent perturbation modeling, high-dimensional PCA matches foundation model embeddings, while low-dimensional AE embeddings are optimal for flow-based generative models. Overall, reconstruction depends critically on the interplay between representation and downstream model, and simpler representations can outperform complex alternatives given appropriate capacity. Our benchmark establishes reconstruction as a critical evaluation axis for single-cell foundation models. We envision it improving the biological interpretability of latent-space modeling, a prerequisite for future virtual cell models to be validated by domain experts and grounded in biology.

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

SAFformer:Improving Spiking Transformer via Active Predictive Filtering

Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) offer notable advantages in biological plausibility and energy efficiency, making them promising candidates for building low-power Transformers. However, existing Spiking Transformers largely adhere to a passive reactive paradigm, which struggles to focus on task-relevant information and incurs substantial computational overhead when processing redundant visual data. To overcome this fundamental yet underexplored limitation, we propose SAFformer, a novel Spiking Transformer architecture based on an active predictive filtering paradigm. Inspired by the brain's predictive coding mechanism, SAFformer actively suppresses predictable signals and focuses on salient visual features. Extensive experiments show that SAFformer establishes new state-of-the-art performance on CIFAR-10/100 and CIFAR10-DVS. Remarkably, on ImageNet-1K, it achieves 80.44% Top-1 accuracy with only 26.58M parameters and an energy consumption of 5.88 mJ, demonstrating an exceptional balance between accuracy and efficiency.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

When to Write and When to Suppress: Route-Specialized Dual Adapters for Memory-Assisted Knowledge Editing

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14668v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge editing systems must update selected facts while preserving nearby but irrelevant behavior. This paper studies this problem in a memory-assisted setting where an edit memory is retrieved at inference time and a parameter-efficient adapter corrects the model's object preference. We argue that the central design question is not only how to write an edit, but also when to suppress it. We introduce \method{}, a route-specialized dual-adapter editor. A relevance router first decides whether a prompt should receive an edit memory. Routed prompts use an edit adapter trained to prefer the new object over the original object; unrouted non-direct prompts use a separate locality adapter trained to preserve or restore the original-object preference. We evaluate \method{} on three 1,000-case protocols, \cf{}, \zsre{}, and \mquake{}, under the same memory protocol and two 7B/8B base models. On Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, \method{} obtains the best overall probability-preference accuracy on all three benchmarks: 0.8180 on \cf{}, 0.8946 on \zsre{}, and 0.9922 on \mquake{}. The same trend holds on Qwen3-8B. Router ablations show that the relevant memory boundary differs across datasets: a lexical neural router is safest on \cf{}, while BGE embedding routing is better on \zsre{} and \mquake{}. Component and module ablations show that the gain mainly comes from separating edit injection from off-route suppression rather than from simply increasing LoRA capacity.

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

Seeing Below the Limit of Detection: A Censored-Poisson Bayesian Latent-Growth Change-Point Detector (the Span Detector) for Serial ctDNA in HR+/HER2- Metastatic Breast Cancer

arXiv:2606.11876v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Circulating-tumour DNA (ctDNA) carries evidence of drug resistance months before imaging shows it, but the earliest evidence lives below the assay's limit of detection (LoD): a nascent subclone is detected only intermittently, producing a flickering sequence of faint detects and non-detects. Commercial liquid biopsies treat each draw as an independent snapshot and a non-detect as nothing. We argue a non-detect is a left-censored observation, and the pattern of non-detects and faint detects over time carries actionable evidence of growth before any single value is trustworthy. We introduce Span, a censored-Poisson Bayesian latent-growth change-point detector that models the binary detection process, accumulates a sequential generalised-likelihood-ratio statistic for an upward change-point in the per-variant detection rate, and raises a competing-risks alarm with calibrated false-alarm control. Span has no learned weights, so there is nothing to overfit. On a synthetic cohort of HR+/HER2- metastatic breast cancer on first-line CDK4/6-inhibitor plus endocrine therapy, at a matched 10% false-alarm rate, Span roughly doubles the fraction of impending progressions caught three months ahead (indolent regime: 25% vs 11% for the snapshot), with a falsifiable dose-response: large for indolent emergence, vanishing for fast emergence. A value-trajectory baseline performs identically to the snapshot, isolating the gain to the censored detection model. The survival backbone matches a Cox baseline on real breast-cancer data (GBSG-2, n=686; C-index 0.67 vs 0.68), and on a real longitudinal cohort with clean biomarkers (PBC2, n=312) the same pipeline correctly declines to win, a falsifiable boundary test confirming the mechanism is regime-specific. All ctDNA trajectories are synthetic.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Learning to Trigger: Reinforcement Learning at the Large Hadron Collider

arXiv:2606.23993v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-throughput scientific facilities such as the Large Hadron Collider depend on real-time event filtering (triggering) under tight constraints on bandwidth, latency, and storage. In practice, trigger menus are largely static and hand-tuned and can become suboptimal as detector conditions, pileup, and background composition drift over time. We cast online threshold tuning as a sequential decision-making problem: a reinforcement learning agent ingests streaming summaries of recent rates and signal-sensitive features and updates trigger thresholds to maximize signal efficiency while tracking a target background rate within a tolerance band. We adapt Group-Filtered Policy Optimization (GFPO) to streaming control and introduce two variants (GFPO-F, GFPO-FR) that enforce background rate feasibility during training. On a benchmark that emulates realistic collider operation, we study two representative triggers: a total transverse energy ($H_{T}$) trigger sensitive to pileup variation, and an anomaly-detection (AD) trigger based on reconstruction loss for rare or non-standard signatures. On Monte Carlo streams, our agent increases the fraction of in-tolerance time intervals by 48\% ($H_T$) and 28\% (AD), with a cumulative gain of up to 2\% in signal efficiency on those in-tolerance intervals. Transferring from simulation to real collision data (CMS Run 283408), the same agent, without fine-tuning, achieves a 56\% ($H_T$) and 28\% (AD) in-tolerance improvement over baselines, with further signal-efficiency gain on both triggers. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of RL-based trigger control on real Large Hadron Collider collision data. Code is available at https://github.com/Zixind/GFPO\_LHC.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Tool-IQA: Augmenting Image Quality Assessment with Simple Tools

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have been increasingly adopted for Image Quality Assessment (IQA). However, current methods typically employ a static one-shot scoring paradigm, despite the fact that humans assess image quality through dynamic visual inspection, e.g., selectively adjusting views to verify details and subtle artifacts. Specifically, relying solely on a single-pass observation introduces two primary limitations: first, perceiving the image only at a global scale restricts the assessment of finer local details; second, the original intensity distribution of the image may overwhelm the visibility, leading to insufficient inspection of image quality. To address these issues, we propose Tool-IQA, shifting the assessment mechanism from passive scoring to a tool-augmented workflow. In particular, we equip VLMs with simple yet effective view tools: a Magnifier to inspect local details, and a Gamma Corrector to uncover visibility and hidden artifacts. The assessment follows a structured pipeline that consists of an initial observation with rubric notes, a tool-augmented in-depth inspection, and a final quantification for calibrated quality score. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and purposeful tool callings, we introduce a batch-aware training strategy to reward tool interactions that can yield positive contributions rather than simply encouraging usage. Experiments on a variety of IQA benchmarks demonstrate that, with effective tool calling and calibrated assessment, our proposed Tool-IQA significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, e.g., it achieves a PLCC of 0.854 on the challenging CLIVE dataset.

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

TAB-PO: Preference Optimization with a Token-Level Adaptive Barrier for Token-Critical Structured Generation

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is an effective and widely adopted approach for offline alignment but is poorly matched to ontology-driven structured prediction, where preferred and rejected JSON objects often differ in only a few schema-defining tokens. In this low-edit-distance regime, sequence-level DPO spreads gradient mass across non-critical serialization tokens (gradient dilution) and can reduce likelihood on rare, under-confident preferred schema tokens (token erosion). To address these limitations, we first develop a confusion-aware preference-construction strategy that augments expert-curated ambiguity patterns with empirical structured-error modes estimated from validation-set SFT predictions, synthesizing minimally perturbed, schema-valid negatives that focus preference learning on realistic ontology-level decision errors. We then introduce Token-Adaptive Barrier Preference Optimization (TAB-PO), a post-SFT objective for token-critical structured generation. TAB-PO adds a confidence-gated token-level barrier that applies supervised anchoring to under-confident schema tokens. On the public SciERC scientific information extraction task, evaluated with Llama/Qwen models from 1.5B to 70B, TAB-PO improves ontology-critical semantic-label and relational-linking metrics over SFT by 11.59% on average, wins 100% of comparisons against the strongest token-level and sequence-level DPO variants on these metrics, and surpasses leading frontier models by 14.71%, while delivering strong gains in textual grounding.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

PROTECT-90: A Fault Dataset for Power System Protection

arXiv:2606.24298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing interest in data-driven methods for power system protection is accompanied by a lack of standardized, publicly available high-voltage waveform datasets that enable transparent and reproducible evaluation. To address this gap, this paper introduces the PROTECT-90 dataset, an open electromagnetic transient (EMT)-simulated reference benchmark for high-voltage fault studies with consistent digital-fault-recorder-like measurements, publicly released with this work. The dataset comprises 9,022 physically consistent short-circuit simulation episodes generated on a standardized 90 kV double-line topology with systematically documented domain randomization of grid operating points, line parameters, and fault conditions. For each episode, synchronized three-phase voltage and current waveforms are recorded at eight measurement locations and released together with structured, machine-readable metadata describing fault type, fault location, inception time, and operating conditions. All modeling assumptions, parameter ranges, and data-generation procedures are explicitly documented to ensure transparency and cross-study comparability. By combining physically grounded EMT simulation, balanced scenario coverage, and open accessibility, PROTECT-90 establishes a standardized foundation for reproducible benchmarking of protection-oriented signal processing and learning-based methods.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Projected logical ensembles in surface codes via the random-matrix theory of quantum dots

arXiv:2606.17140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Measurements underpin active quantum error correction (QEC) and have been recognized as a source of novel measurement-induced many-body phenomena. Here, we study the statistical properties of post-measurement logical states arising in QEC on topological codes subject to deterministic transversal unitary gates. Upon syndrome extraction followed by maximum-likelihood decoding, a Born-weighted ensemble arises which we dub the "projected logical ensemble" (PLE). Focusing on surface codes subject to uniform single-qubit Pauli-$X$ rotations, we characterize the measurement-induced randomness of the PLE. To this end, we show that for a code with a single logical qubit, the PLE is isomorphic to an ensemble of scattering matrices describing mesoscopic quantum dots obtained from a 2D Majorana network model with suitable boundary conditions. We uncover regimes where these quantum dots are chaotic such that their scattering matrices are well-described by random matrix theory. In these regimes, the PLE approaches a universal ensemble that is maximally random up to symmetry and decoder-induced constraints. The symmetry constraints, set by stabilizer and logical operator weights, realize Altland-Zirnbauer classes D or DIII, which we both illustrate. Our results establish a fundamental connection between emergent universality concepts in mesoscopic physics, quantum many-body systems, and QEC.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Pareto LoRA: Mitigating Modality Imbalance in Unified Multimodal Models via Pareto-Optimal Gradient Integration

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) have recently emerged as a promising paradigm for integrating multimodal understanding and generation within a single autoregressive transformer. However, during multimodal instruction tuning, these models often exhibit pronounced modality imbalance: language gradients dominate optimization, thus leading to lower image generation quality, especially under parameter-efficient fine-tuning such as LoRA. In this work, we systematically analyze modality imbalance in LoRA-based fine-tuning of UMMs for interleaved text-image generation. We show that vision modality performance degrades substantially more than text modality performance when compared to unimodal counterparts, and that modality-specific gradients can differ by orders of magnitude across various tasks and layers. Motivated by this observation, we reformulate the multimodal instruction tuning as a bi-objective optimization problem and propose Pareto LoRA, a Pareto-optimal gradient integration strategy that balances the text and image objectives by modulating the gradient direction and strength. Experiments on the CoMM benchmark with Emu2 demonstrate that Pareto LoRA consistently improves multimodal generation balance, achieving up to 44.9% gains in perceptual image quality over vanilla LoRA while maintaining comparable text performance.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Universal features of high-energy scattering of Laguerre-Gaussian states

arXiv:2604.00575v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vortex states of photons, electrons, and other particles are wave packets that carry intrinsic orbital angular momentum (OAM) and exhibit other features unavailable for plane waves. Collisions of high-energy vortex states can become a promising tool for nuclear and particle physics, once experimental challenges are overcome. An extensive literature exists on scattering processes involving vortex states; however, most works rely on assumptions that will be challenging to achieve in experiment. In this work, we initiate a systematic re-analysis of vortex-state scattering processes using paraxial Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) wave packets colliding at a non-zero impact parameter $b$. Since the total final transverse momentum $P_\perp$ is no longer fixed, we focus on how the differential cross section depends on $P_\perp$. We emphasize that non-trivial $P_\perp$-dependent features can originate either from the shape of the LG wave packets or from the dynamics of the scattering process under interest. Here, we focus on the former source and explore in detail these universal kinematic features, while the study of process-specific modifications, along with the novel insights they may bring, is delegated to a future work. Interestingly, the non-zero impact parameter $b$ plays a key role in many $P_\perp$-dependent effects, making it a useful probe of vortex states, not a nuisance factor as often assumed.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Estimating the effectiveness of syndromic screening at airports for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease

Authors:

We used a stochastic simulation model to estimate the effectiveness of combined exit and entry airport screening for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease (BVD), using natural-history parameters from a Bayesian re-analysis of the 2012 Isiro outbreak. For a 12-hour international flight from DRC or Uganda at 86% screening sensitivity, we estimate 65% of infected travellers would arrive undetected (95% CrI: 38 - 76%). The main driver of this outcome is the relative duration of the the incubation period (approximately 7.7 days) and the onset-to-severe-disease interval (approximately 4 days): most infected travellers board before symptom onset and are undetectable by any syndromic screen, whilst those who are symptomatic progress rapidly to illness severe enough to preclude travel. This is compounded during active epidemic growth, when recently exposed (and therefore pre-symptomatic) cases are overrepresented among travellers. Syndromic airport screening offers limited protection against BVD spread via air travel, and should be complemented by outbreak control at source and strengthened clinical surveillance in receiving countries with high travel connectivity to affected areas.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Laws of Large Numbers for Non-Independent Random Variables on Hyperspaces with respect to the Hausdorff Metric

arXiv:2011.07199v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper investigates the limit behavior of the Minkowski sums for sequences of set-valued random variables. When the underlying space is finite dimensional, by using the support function, we establish the weak and strong laws of large numbers for non-independent random variables in the hyperspace with respect to the Hausdorff metric $d_H$.

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

Does Head Pose Correction Improve Biometric Facial Recognition?

Biometric facial recognition models often demonstrate significant decreases in accuracy when processing real-world images, often characterized by poor quality, non-frontal subject poses, and subject occlusions. We investigate whether targeted, AI-driven, head-pose correction and image restoration can improve recognition accuracy. Using a model-agnostic, large-scale, forensic-evaluation pipeline, we assess the impact of three restoration approaches: 3D reconstruction (NextFace), 2D frontalization (CFR-GAN), and feature enhancement (CodeFormer). We find that naive application of these techniques substantially degrades facial recognition accuracy. However, we also find that selective application of CFR-GAN combined with CodeFormer yields meaningful improvements.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17664v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unsupervised dense retrievers offer scalability by learning semantic similarity from unlabeled documents via contrastive learning, but they struggle to capture the temporal relevance, retrieving semantically related but temporally misaligned documents-an important aspect when a document collection spans multiple time periods (e.g., retrieving documents from 2018-2025 for "Who is the president in 2019?" introduces temporal ambiguity). Existing methods rely on supervised training with explicit timestamps, which are not always feasible. We propose TPOUR (Temporal Preference Optimization for Unsupervised Retriever), which uses our novel training method Temporal Retrieval Preference Optimization (TRPO). TRPO reinterprets preference learning in the temporal dimension, guiding the retriever to favor temporally aligned documents. TPOUR further generalizes to unseen time periods via interpolation in a learned time embedding, enabling continuous temporal alignment. Experiments on temporal information retrieval (T-IR), TPOUR outperforms both unsupervised and supervised baselines. Compared to Qwen-Embedding-8B, despite being about 72.7x smaller, TPOUR Contriever improves average nDCG@5 by +4.04 (+12.15%) on explicit and +4.98 (+15.21%) on implicit queries. We provide our code at https://github.com/agwaBom/TPOUR.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Diurnal variation in brain-derived tau and five other blood-based biomarkers for dementia and their association with cognitive performance

Blood-based biomarkers of dementia are a promising scalable tool for early diagnosis, tracking disease progression, and evaluating therapeutic efficacy. Utility of these biomarkers will not only be dependent on the reliability of their association with pathology but also contingent on their ability to track cognitive status. Previously, we demonstrated diurnal variation in several biomarkers (amyloid beta (A{beta}) 42 and 40, 42/40 ratio, glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), neurofilament light (NfL), and phosphorylated-Tau 217 (p-Tau217)) which has implications for their reliability. Here, we extend these observations to a larger cohort, include brain-derived tau (BD-Tau), which is assumed to be produced exclusively in the brain, and report endocrine measures of circadian rhythmicity. We not only assessed whether these biomarkers vary with time of day, but also whether they associate with daytime function and whether these associations vary with cognitive domain and number of repeated assessments. Data collected in 20 PLWA (72.4{+/-}5.9 years, mean{+/-}SD) and 19 controls (68.9{+/-}9.8 years) were analysed. Participants completed 14 days of home monitoring and one laboratory assessment of sleep and daytime function: mood, daytime sleepiness, reaction time, immediate and delayed memory recall, everyday memory errors. During the 27-hour residential laboratory session, 3-hourly blood samples were collected and analysed for the six blood-based biomarkers of dementia as well as melatonin and cortisol. Rhythmicity of melatonin and cortisol did not differ between groups. P-Tau217 and GFAP (p

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

QuBE/Qubex: an integrated hardware-software system for superconducting qubit experiments with broadband control

arXiv:2606.13010v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Achieving high-fidelity operation in large-scale superconducting qubit systems requires not only control hardware with broad frequency coverage, low crosstalk, and tight synchronization but also software that coordinates system configuration, experiment execution, and data analysis. Here we present an integrated qubit-control system that combines broadband microwave hardware with a pulse-level software stack for scalable superconducting qubit experiments. The hardware provides broadband microwave coverage, including an instantaneous span of up to 1.6 GHz from a control output, while the software reduces setup and calibration overhead through automated configuration and built-in experiment workflows. We validate the system on a 64-qubit fixed-frequency transmon chip through full-chip frequency identification and representative demonstrations, including multi-unit far-detuned cross-resonance calibration and benchmarking that yields a measured two-qubit gate fidelity of 98.34%, and multilevel readout beyond the computational subspace. By disclosing the hardware architecture and releasing the software stack as open source, this work provides an inspectable hardware-software foundation for scalable superconducting qubit control experiments.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Acceptability of Three Co-Created Peer Support Interventions for People Living with Leprosy Reactions in Indonesia: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Background: Leprosy reactions (LR) are immune-mediated complications associated with disability, emotional distress, and social isolation. We identified a gap in affected-individual-informed interventions that aim to improve the management of LR in healthcare settings. To address this gap, we assessed the acceptability of three peer-support interventions co-created with people affected by LR in Indonesia. Methods: Using an interactive learning and action approach, we co-created peer counselling, telesupport groups, and participatory video interventions which were piloted in an urban hospital and 13 rural community clinics. A mixed-methods design was applied with interviews, focus group discussions, and pre-post assessments involving four participant groups. Data were analyzed thematically using an acceptability framework. Results: One hundred participants were enrolled, and 92 completed the pilot intervention between November 2022 and July 2023. Qualitative findings showed that all interventions were acceptable. Peer counselling provided emotional reassurance through shared experiences and was perceived as trustworthy and supportive. Perceived burdens differed by setting, with time constraints in urban facilities and geographical barriers in rural clinics. Knowledge improved significantly among participants of peer counselling and telesupport groups in rural settings. Telesupport groups facilitated connection, information exchange, and continuity of care. Digital access and literacy limited participation for some, particularly in rural areas. The participatory video was perceived as reassuring and informative. Improvements in knowledge, attitude, practices, and mental well-being domain scores were observed among urban participants, but responses in rural settings showed less change. Participants and co-implementers reported increased self-efficacy, participants confidence to perform required behaviors within peer support interventions, with effects shaped by intervention and setting. Conclusions: The three co-created peer-support interventions were acceptable for individuals with LR in diverse healthcare settings. These outcomes highlight the importance and effectiveness of selective, and context-sensitive implementation of one or more peer-support modalities.

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

LADBench: A Benchmark for Logical Fault Detection in Images

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) excel at visual question answering and semantic grounding, but their capacity for autonomous logical reasoning remains underexplored. Existing anomaly benchmarks emphasize visual errors or direct prompting rather than the physical and social common sense needed for open-world deployment. To address this, we introduce LAD-bench, a benchmark of more than 1,000 curated synthetic images with logical anomalies across four domains: Residential, Urban, Collaborative, and Nature. We further propose a Tiered Prompting Protocol based on progressive disclosure, which measures how much explicit assistance a model needs to localize and reason about a logical fault. Evaluating leading foundation models reveals substantial weaknesses: even the best achieves only 70.11% overall accuracy, showing that implicit logical fault detection remains unsolved. Crucially, models often fail to identify anomalies even after receiving explicit hints in deeper tiers. By surfacing these limitations in sequential multimodal reasoning, LAD-Bench offers a rigorous framework for advancing the safety, reliability, and cognitive alignment of autonomous visual systems. Dataset and Code: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SahasraK/LADBench

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Geometric and Stochastic Analysis of Discontinuities in Sparse Mixture-of-Experts

arXiv:2606.19036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE) architectures are now widely deployed in state-of-the-art language and vision models, where conditional routing allows scaling to very large networks. However, this very Top-$k$ expert selection that enables conditional routing also renders the SMoE map inherently discontinuous. In the vicinity of these discontinuity surfaces, even inputs that are arbitrarily close may activate substantially different sets of experts resulting in significantly different outputs. In this work we give a rigorous geometric and stochastic analysis of these discontinuities. We first classify them by order, determined by the number of tied experts at a switching event. Using measure-theoretic slicing arguments, we establish asymptotic volume estimates for the thickened discontinuity surfaces, showing that lower-order discontinuity sets dominate, whereas higher-order ones occupy a vanishingly small relative volume. Next, modeling random perturbations in the input space via a diffusion process, we prove that the path eventually encounter a discontinuity, and moreover that the first hit almost surely occurs on an order-1 discontinuity with explicit finite-time probability bounds. We further derive occupation-time bounds that quantify the duration the random path spend in the neighborhoods of each discontinuity order. These theoretical results imply that inputs are more likely to lie near lower order discontinuities. Motivated by this insight, we propose a simple smoothing mechanism that can be directly applied to existing SMoEs, softly incorporating experts near discontinuities; our analysis guarantees that the added computational overhead remains small while providing localized smoothing near discontinuities, and experiments across language and vision tasks show that smoothing not only enforces continuity of the SMoE map but also enhances empirical performance.