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

Charging Quantum Batteries with Chiral Squeezing

arXiv:2606.16764v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a quantum-battery charger based on a driven bosonic Kitaev chain (BKC), where chiral squeezing converts passive input fluctuations into ordered, non-passive battery states. While a coherent input pulse exhibits phase-sensitive chiral transport, the charging dynamics is dominated by bidirectionally propagating fluctuations that are amplified and squeezed into orthogonal quadratures at opposite chain ends. In contrast to conventional phase-preserving amplifiers, our scheme stores largely extractable energy and achieves a work-like signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) near unity, even in the presence of thermal noise and moderate symmetry-preserving disorder.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Quantifying and Auditing LLM Evaluation via Positive–Unlabeled Learning

arXiv:2606.19057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges for scalable evaluation, yet such LLM–as–a–Judge systems exhibit systematic biases that are decoupled from semantic quality, most notably verbosity bias. Meanwhile, human supervision is costly and typically selective, yielding reliable positive judgments but leaving most outputs unlabelled and potentially mixed in quality. We formulate LLM evaluation under selective human supervision as a positive–unlabelled learning problem and propose a geometric auditing framework based on Partial Optimal Transport. By aligning a small set of human–verified positives with a reliable subset of unlabelled outputs in a fixed embedding space, our method identifies human–consistent preferences and corrects biased judges without retraining. Experiments demonstrate improved alignment with human preferences, increased robustness to presentation biases, and interpretable confidence estimates, offering a scalable and statistically grounded alternative to existing LLM–as–a–judge pipelines.

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Microbial-based yeast protein is similar to whey protein and greater than collagen hydrolysate in supporting whole-body protein synthesis as determined by the indicatory amino acid oxidation method: a randomized controlled trial

Background: Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is a model organism in agricultural and industrial fermentation with nutritional benefits, yet less is understood about its nutritional value for supporting whole-body protein synthesis in vivo, and its comparison to animal-based protein. Objective: This study aimed to determine the effect of microbial-based protein (yeast) compared to a high (whey) and low (collagen) quality animal-based protein on the ability to support whole-body protein synthesis using the indicator amino acid oxidation technique. Methods: Thirteen healthy participants (M: n=6, 24{+/-}4 yr; F: n=7, 27{+/-}7 yr) consumed eight hourly yeast (Y), whey (W), or collagen (CH) protein beverages at 0.9 g{middle dot}kg-1{middle dot}d-1 supplemented with L-[1-13C]phenylalanine in a randomized, cross-over, counterbalanced design. Breath and urine were collected to measure fraction of expired 13CO2 (F13CO2) and [1-13C]Phe oxidation (PheOx) as inverse correlates of whole-body protein synthesis. An a priori 20% noninferiority margin was used to determine equivalency between protein sources. A Visual Analog Scale (VAS) was provided to assess fullness and hunger by protein sources. Results: Protein source had no effect on F13CO2 (P=0.15) or PheRa (P=0.10). PheOx was greater in CH compared to both Y (14.94{+/-}2.16 vs. 12.93{+/-}2.80 mol{middle dot}kg BM-1{middle dot}h-1, P

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Risk beliefs, intensive digital information and demand for a new preventative health product in public clinics: Evidence from an experiment in Zimbabwe.

Demand for preventative health care is weak in low-income settings. In a field experiment in a low-income, high-risk setting, we evaluated whether demand for a new bio-medical preventative health product, offered free at public health clinics, responds to digital feedback-based intensive information on health risks and benefits of prevention along with a clinic referral enabling access to the product. In our sample of women aged 18-24 years, we find a large correction in risk beliefs sustained six months after the intervention. Against a background of very low baseline usage, within six months we find a 5.8 percentage point increase in take up of the prevention method, a level of uptake which is very large relative to the control group. Reassuringly, there is no meaningful difference in up-take amongst baseline high- risk and low-risk individuals.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Pulmonary extracellular vesicles drive alveolar macrophage dysfunction via microRNA transfer in Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome

Background: Alveolar macrophage (AM) dysfunction contributes to Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS) pathogenesis. We investigated the role of extracellular vesicles (EVs) in mediating this dysfunction. Methods: Pulmonary EVs were isolated from broncho-alveolar lavage and non-directed bronchial lavage samples of ventilated sepsis patients with and without ARDS, and post-operative control patients via ultracentrifugation. AMs were isolated from lung tissue resections of lobectomy patients. AMs were treated with pooled EVs for 24 hours prior to functional, metabolic and autophagy profiling. EV cargo was profiled via small RNA transcriptomics and proteomics. Mechanistic role of EV microRNAs was assessed via mimic / antagomir transfection. Results: Pulmonary EVs from sepsis patients with ARDS impaired AM efferocytosis, and control EVs had no effect. ARDS EV treatment enhanced AM mitochondrial-linked respiration, but not glycolysis. ARDS EV treatment impaired LC3B-II and LAMP1 expression, indicating dysregulated AM autophagy-lysosomal machinery. Proteomics revealed downregulation of innate immune pathways in ARDS EVs. Transcriptomics revealed enrichment of 24 microRNAs in ARDS EVs; miR-652-3p was the most enriched, validated by RT-qPCR. EV miR-652-3p was associated with 90-day mortality (9.20 vs 0.59 RQ, p=0.0295) and inversely correlated with oxygenation (PaO2/FiO2). AM transfection with miR-652-3p mimic induced similar dysregulation of function and autophagy as ARDS EVs. Transfection of ARDS EVs with antagomirs to miR-652-3p prior to AM treatment partially rescued efferocytosis and autophagy. Conclusions: Targeting EV miR-652-3p may restore alveolar macrophage function and reduce excessive inflammation, thus offering a novel therapeutic strategy for patients with ARDS.

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

ESBMC-PLC+: A Unified IEC~61131-3 Formal Verification Framework as a PLCverif Successor

PLCverif is the most mature open-source platform for PLC formal verification, developed at CERN and in production use since 2019. Yet it has two fundamental limitations: no support for Ladder Diagram (LD) programs, the dominant PLC notation, and reliance on CBMC as its primary backend, which restricts verification to bounded proofs. The PLCverif authors themselves identified ESBMC as the appropriate backend improvement. Prior work established ESBMC-PLC (a textual LD frontend with k-induction) and ESBMC-GraphPLC (graphical PLCopen XML support); together, they cover LD with unbounded proofs but not Structured Text (ST), and graphical LD with timer/counter function blocks remains unverifiable. This paper presents ESBMC-PLC+, a unified framework that closes both gaps: (1) an ST/SCL frontend via the MATIEC IEC 61131-3 compiler, routing C-compiled ST to ESBMC with nondeterministic input modeling and YAML property injection; (2) function block state semantics for graphical LD, extending the DFS resolver to model TON/TOF/TP timers, CTU/CTD counters, and R_TRIG/F_TRIG edge triggers as persistent scan-cycle state variables in the GOTO IR. ESBMC-PLC+ is the first open-source PLC verification framework to support all three major IEC 61131-3 input formats via a single ESBMC backend, enabling k-induction-unbounded safety proofs. A feature comparison with PLCverif and experimental evaluation on 8 benchmark programs, including programs with up to 8 integer timers, shows that ESBMC-PLC+ matches PLCverif's input coverage while providing stronger guarantees. Against nuXmv's BDD backend, ESBMC-PLC+ is 400-2,000x faster on timer programs and completes proofs where nuXmv BDD times out at 120s.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Atlas: Orchestrating Heterogeneous Models and Tools for Multi-Domain Complex Reasoning

The integration of large language models (LLMs) with external tools has significantly expanded the capabilities of AI agents. However, as the diversity of both LLMs and tools increases, selecting the optimal model-tool combination becomes a high-dimensional optimization challenge. Existing approaches often rely on a single model or fixed tool-calling logic, failing to exploit the performance variations across heterogeneous model-tool pairs. In this paper, we present ATLAS (Adaptive Tool-LLM Alignment and Synergistic Invocation), a dual-path framework for dynamic tool usage in cross-domain complex reasoning. ATLAS operates via a dual-path approach: (1) training-free cluster-based routing that exploits empirical priors for domain-specific alignment, and (2) RL-based multi-step routing that explores autonomous trajectories for out-of-distribution generalization. Extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms closed-source models like GPT-4o, surpassing existing routing methods on both in-distribution (+10.1%) and out-of-distribution (+13.1%) tasks. Furthermore, our framework shows significant gains in visual reasoning by orchestrating specialized multi-modal tools.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Helical Dirac Current with Local Coupling to a Chiral Potential

arXiv:2606.17618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that exact Dirac eigenstates in cylindrical confinement carry a definite helical conserved-current texture even in the zero orbital angular momentum channel l = 0. For the lowest confined mode, the Dirac current contains a nonvanishing azimuthal component together with longitudinal transport and exhibits opposite handedness in the two spin-resolved sectors. The structure also persists into the evanescent region. We further derive the channel-resolved matrix-element kernel generated by a static chiral scalar potential acting on the confined l = 0 Dirac modes. The resulting spin-selective coupling arises from the Dirac current texture and the scalar chiral potential, and yields a geometric selection rule in which diagonal channels vanish while off-diagonal conversion channels survive. The coupling strength is governed by an internal sampled-current overlap Jchi(k), defined as the integral from 0 to R of f(rho) times jphi_up(rho, k) times rho d rho. This quantity measures the spatial overlap between the chiral radial profile and the spin-up azimuthal Dirac-current density. The mechanism is fully local and texture-based, without external magnetic fields or spin-orbit coupling. Within standard Dirac theory, this work identifies the minimal static Dirac-geometric kernel underlying spin-selective response, establishing a baseline structure from which dynamical-medium, scattering, and transport formalisms can be systematically developed toward a complete description of spin-polarization phenomena such as CISS.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A prognostic human brain network for diffuse midline glioma

Authors:

Diffuse midline gliomas (DMGs) are near-universally lethal tumours of the childhood central nervous system1,2. In animal models, DMGs form brain-wide integrated networks through neuron-to-glioma synapses3–6 and glioma-to-glioma gap junctional coupling3. This extensive connectivity robustly promotes the growth and invasion of DMG3–9 and other glial malignancies10–12 through paracrine mechanisms and direct neuron-to-glioma synapses. However, the organization and clinical implications of these connections in the living human brain remain to be elucidated. Here, we develop tumour network mapping to compute the brain-wide connectivity profile of DMG, defining a conserved brain network across pontine and thalamic DMG associated with patient short-term survival (DMG network). Tumour functional connectivity with the DMG network was independently predictive of patient overall survival across two external validation cohorts. Tumour growth mapped to DMG network-specific trajectories and peak in-network neurometabolic changes across development spatiotemporally aligned with the peak age incidence of DMG. Analyses of single-nucleus RNA sequencing data confirmed diverse synaptic gene enrichment in high-connectivity DMG. Strikingly, incidental surgical resection of high-connectivity thalamic DMG tissue conferred a significant survival advantage. Collectively, these data define a conserved and prognostically important brain network in children with DMG, consistent with the hypothesis that DMGs exploit otherwise healthy brain circuits to promote tumour growth. Tumour network mapping of diffuse midline glioma (DMG) defines a conserved and prognostically important brain network in children with DMG, consistent with the hypothesis that DMGs exploit otherwise healthy brain circuits to promote tumour growth.

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

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.

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

Emotional regulation improves deep learning-based image classification

arXiv:2606.13081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Emotion significantly influences cognition, enhancing memory and learning under certain conditions. Drawing on this principle, emotion-augmented deep learning investigates how affective states can improve neural network architectures and learning paradigms, achieving better generalization than non-emotional models. However, existing methods often rely solely on objective neurophysiological factors, neglecting the role of subjectivity in emotion. To bridge this gap, the present study introduces Emotional Regulation, a novel framework for modeling emotion in deep learning through artificial subjective experience. The method employs pre-training based on affective stimuli, balancing non-emotional and emotionally-influenced responses in downstream task optimization. Extensive experimentation was conducted in image classification, pre-training ResNet and ViT architectures on four emotional datasets, using CIFAR-10 and -100 as target benchmarks. Results reveal improvements over the aforementioned backbones, providing evidence of Emotional Regulation as a promising method for defining emotion-augmented deep learning through artificial subjective experience. Furthermore, the proposed approach overcomes the related work in image classification based on CIFAR, revealing Emotional Regulation as the new state-of-the-art in emotion-augmented deep learning for large-scale vision datasets. The study also enforces evidence of the impact of affective states in improving machine learning tasks' optimization, encouraging further investigation on emotion-inspired architectures.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Predicting Immune Biomarkers with MultiModal Mixture-of-Expert Pathology Foundation Models Empowers Precision Oncology

Predicting immune biomarkers associated with the tumor immune microenvironment (TIME) is critical for advancing precision oncology, yet existing approaches are largely limited to single image modalities and suffer from insufficient resolution and incomplete utilization of complementary clinical and biological information. Here we introduce MixTIME, a multimodal foundation model that leverages a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture to integrate pathology foundation models trained across distinct modalities: image only (UNIv2), image text (CONCHv1.5), and image transcriptomic (STPath) representations for pixel-level and slide-level prediction of multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) protein expression from hematoxylin and eosin (HE) whole-slide images. MixTIME employs a learnable router to dynamically weight expert contributions and is trained with a distribution- and tendency-aware loss function. Benchmarked on two datasets of different scales, MixTIME achieves state-of-the-art performance across 17 protein markers as measured by correlation metrics. The predicted mIF profiles substantially enhance downstream tasks, including spatial domain identification, survival prediction, and AI-assisted pathology report generation validated by expert pathologists from multiple institutes across the world. Furthermore, MixTIME enables longitudinal tracking of protein expression dynamics across clinical time points and reveals protein gene interaction patterns linked to drug resistance and immune suppression in tumor microenvironments. Collectively, MixTIME provides a scalable framework for multimodal biomarker discovery and clinical translation in computational pathology.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Debiasing Without Protected Attributes: Latent Concept Erasure from Textual Profiles

Most fairness research in NLP assumes direct access to protected attributes such as gender, race, or nationality. In practice, however, such information is often unavailable due to privacy constraints, missing metadata, or legal restrictions, even though models may infer it from indirect textual cues. This raises a key question: can debiasing succeed without direct access to sensitive attributes? We propose H-SAL, which performs post-hoc concept and attribute erasure using self-description text as an implicit debiasing signal. To support this setting, we introduce a multi-domain Stack Exchange-based fairness benchmark for helpfulness prediction that includes both explicit and implicit signals, enabling comparison between standard debiasing with protected labels and debiasing without access to sensitive information. Across encoder and decoder-only language models, we find that implicit self-description often matches or outperforms explicit-label-based debiasing. Our results broaden representation-level fairness research and provide a new benchmark for studying debiasing under realistic data constraints.

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

Think Again or Think Longer? Selective Verification for Budget-Aware Reasoning

Test-time reasoning is increasingly used as a serving-time control knob, but extra reasoning is not uniformly valuable: it can repair failed attempts, waste compute on already-correct answers, or introduce harmful answer changes. We study this as a deployment allocation problem rather than a new-verifier problem. We introduce \sevra, Selective Verification for Reasoning Allocation, a serving-layer controller that decides whether to preserve a frozen solver's initial answer or invoke active verification. Using a frozen Qwen3-4B solver, we log intervention outcomes and train recoverability-aware gates from serving-visible attempt state. On \mathfive, selective verification reaches 76.3\% accuracy, compared with 75.5\% for always verifying, while reducing post-generation tokens by 26.8\% and harmful flips from 2.2\% to 1.0\%. However, an 8,192-token initial solve reaches 76.0\% accuracy with 28\% fewer total model tokens, showing that selective recovery is useful but not the best tested cost frontier. In frozen transfer to \gsm, the selective policy verifies only 3.0\% of examples, improves accuracy from 93.4\% to 94.5\%, and reduces verification tokens by 91.2\% relative to always verifying; again, a longer initial solve matches its accuracy with fewer realized tokens. On CommonsenseQA, always-on verification hurts, while Self-Consistency@5 improves accuracy at about five times the realized token cost. The resulting deployment rule is: tune the initial budget first, then use selective recovery when explicit checks, bounded retries, auditability, or regression-risk control matter.

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

Transferable Attack against Face Swapping in an Extended Space

Although deep Face Swapping (FS) models may benefit the entertainment industry, they pose severe threats to privacy and security. Existing protections, including deepfake detection and adversarial perturbation, are either passive responses or ineffective to unseen subject-agnostic FS models. In this paper, we propose a transferable attack against subject-agnostic FS models named Additive Identity attack based on a Relighting function (AIR). AIR leverages reillumination and additive perturbations to mislead the identity extraction modules in subject-agnostic FS models. By using these two types of perturbations simultaneously, the attack space is extended such that stronger but more visually natural adversarial examples can be identified. To further enhance the visual quality while preserving the effectiveness of the attack, an adaptive translation-invariant operation and an illumination control scheme are designed for AIR. Unlike other methods, AIR does not require a surrogate FS model to achieve high transferability. In addition, a mathematical proof is given for the extension of the attack space. Extensive experiments using 1000 image pairs across various state-of-the-art subject-agnostic FS models, including GAN and diffusion-based FS models, show that AIR surpasses all existing attacks in terms of both attack success rate and image quality.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Fibonacci Steady-States and Persistent Oscillations in an Ordered Multimode Dicke Model

arXiv:2606.13072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ultracold atoms in multimode optical cavities provide a rich testbed for many-body phenomena enabled by light-mediated interactions. Recent experiments include realizations of spin glasses and associative memories, as described by multimode Dicke models with disordered couplings. However, the properties of multimode Dicke models with ordered coupling geometries remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate the stable steady-states of the multimode Dicke model with an ordered nearest-neighbor coupling geometry, where $n_c$ atomic clusters are coupled via $n_c-1$ cavity modes. We show that the number of mean-field stable steady-states in the superradiant phase exhibits Fibonacci scaling with the number of atomic clusters, and that a subset of these steady-states exhibit persistent oscillations. Using both the truncated Wigner approximation and the numerically-exact hierarchy of pure states, we further demonstrate that these features of the stable steady-state solutions persist for finite cluster sizes. Ordered multimode Dicke models, such as the nearest-neighbor coupling geometry considered here, are accessible with current experimental technologies and point toward a broader class of strongly interacting dissipative systems with similarly rich behavior.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

StepGuard: Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration

arXiv:2606.17871v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Web navigation requires agents to follow natural language goals, interact with web pages, and produce accurate answers. While recent advances leverage vision-language models and reinforcement learning, existing methods still suffer from single-step fragility due to reward misalignment and error propagation. To tackle the reward entanglement, we design Dynamic Dual-Policy Optimization (DDPO), which dynamically switches between a navigation-first mode for exploration and an answer-first mode for question-answering to mitigate reward conflict. To calibrate the single-step error, we propose Confidence-Guided Adaptive Navigation Reflection (CANR), a mechanism that estimates per-step confidence, triggers reflection only when necessary, and uses contrastive rewards to encourage self-correction to calibrate the single-step inaccuracy. With the above as the main components, we finally develop our StepGuard, a new framework of Guarding Web Navigation via Single-Step Calibration. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly improves navigation and answer accuracy, setting new state-of-the-art performance on standard web navigation benchmarks.

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

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Trusted Uncertainty in Large Language Models: A Unified Framework for Confidence Calibration and Risk-Controlled Refusal

Deployed language models must decide not only what to answer but also when not to answer. We present UniCR, a unified framework that turns heterogeneous uncertainty evidence including sequence likelihoods, self-consistency dispersion, retrieval compatibility, and tool or verifier feedback into a calibrated probability of correctness and then enforces a user-specified error budget via principled refusal. UniCR learns a lightweight calibration head with temperature scaling and proper scoring, supports API-only models through black-box features, and offers distribution-free guarantees using conformal risk control. For long-form generation, we align confidence with semantic fidelity by supervising on atomic factuality scores derived from retrieved evidence, reducing confident hallucinations while preserving coverage. Experiments on short-form QA, code generation with execution tests, and retrieval-augmented long-form QA show consistent improvements in calibration metrics, lower area under the risk-coverage curve, and higher coverage at fixed risk compared to entropy or logit thresholds, post-hoc calibrators, and end-to-end selective baselines. Analyses reveal that evidence contradiction, semantic dispersion, and tool inconsistency are the dominant drivers of abstention, yielding informative user-facing refusal messages. The result is a portable recipe of evidence fusion to calibrated probability to risk-controlled decision that improves trustworthiness without fine-tuning the base model and remains valid under distribution shift.

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

OBCache: Optimal Brain KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size. Existing cache eviction methods address this by exploiting attention sparsity, yet they typically rank tokens heuristically using accumulated attention weights without considering their true impact on attention outputs. We propose Optimal Brain Cache (OBCache), a principled framework that formulates cache eviction as a layer-wise structured pruning problem. Building upon the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) theory, OBCache quantifies token saliency by measuring the perturbation in attention outputs induced by pruning tokens, with closed-form scores derived for isolated keys, isolated values, and joint key-value pairs. Our scores account not only for attention weights but also for information from value states and attention outputs, thereby enhancing existing eviction strategies with output-aware signals. Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that replacing the heuristic scores in existing works, which estimate token saliency across different query positions, with OBCache's output-aware scores consistently improves long-context accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamSoul-AI/OBCache.

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

Learning Directional Semantic Transitions for Longitudinal Chest X-ray Analysis

Chest X-ray (CXR) interpretation often requires longitudinal comparison to assess disease progression. Existing approaches typically rely on temporal feature fusion or inter-study discrepancy modeling, yet remain limited in capturing subtle progression semantics and overlook the inherently directional nature of disease trajectories. In this paper, we propose ProTrans, a novel vision-language pretraining framework that formulates disease progression as a directional semantic transition between paired CXR studies. ProTrans leverages radiology reports to anchor individual CXR representations within interpretable disease states, and introduces a learnable progression feature map to explicitly encode semantic shifts between states, aligned with report-derived progression descriptions. To enforce direction-aware perception, ProTrans incorporates a reversed temporal modeling process and imposes bidirectional reconstruction consistency across states and transitions, thereby disentangling directional semantics and promoting coherent trajectory modeling. Extensive experiments on longitudinal downstream tasks, including disease progression classification and progression captioning, demonstrate that ProTrans consistently outperforms existing methods, establishing a unified pretraining framework for longitudinal CXR understanding. https://github.com/RPIDIAL/ProTrans

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coupled-Mode Equations with Arbitrary Mode Combinations for Kinetic-Inductance Superconducting Traveling-Wave Parametric Devices: Theory and Experimental Validation

arXiv:2606.17264v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The coupled-mode equations (CMEs) have proven very successful in describing parametric processes in nonlinear optics. More recently, the same formulation has been used to model microwave superconducting parametric amplifiers and frequency multipliers. However, when applied to the microwave regime, not all assumptions remain valid and losses play a more dramatic role. Here, we revisit the CMEs applied to traveling-wave superconducting amplifiers to include losses and provide a formulation that enables their systematic derivation for any combination of traveling waves. As examples, we discuss the impact of unwanted harmonics and intermodulation products on parametric amplification, as well as harmonic generation. We verify that, if not properly accounted for, device performance can deviate considerably from the ideal case. Furthermore, using a superconducting CPW-based artificial transmission line and combining an independent experimental determination of its nonlinear parameter $I'_*$ with simulations of its linear properties, we obtain a parameter-free validation of this formulation. The nonlinear parameter was determined to be $I'_* \approx 27$ mA which, surprisingly, scales with the theoretical depairing current and not with the much smaller critical current of the device. For the validation, we measured multiple-harmonic generation and found excellent agreement between theory and experiment. The fact that $I'_* \gg I_C$ has direct implications for device design.

24.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

A statistical framework for comparing epidemic forests

Authors:

by Cyril Geismar, Peter J. White, Anne Cori, Thibaut Jombart Inferring who infected whom in an outbreak is essential for characterising transmission dynamics and guiding public health interventions. However, this task is challenging due to limited surveillance data and the complexity of immunological and social interactions. Instead of a single definitive transmission tree, epidemiologists often consider multiple plausible trees forming epidemic forests. Various inference methods and assumptions can yield different epidemic forests, yet no formal test exists to assess whether these differences are statistically significant. We propose such a framework using a chi-square test and permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA). We assessed each method’s ability to distinguish simulated epidemic forests generated under different offspring distributions. While both methods achieved perfect specificity for forests with 100+ trees, PERMANOVA consistently outperformed the chi-square test in sensitivity across all epidemic and forest sizes. Implemented in the R package mixtree, we provide the first statistical framework to robustly compare epidemic forests.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Separating Oblivious and Adaptive Models of Variable Selection

arXiv:2602.16568v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sparse recovery is among the most well-studied problems in learning theory and high-dimensional statistics. In this work, we investigate the statistical and computational landscapes of sparse recovery with $\ell_\infty$ error guarantees. This variant of the problem is motivated by variable selection tasks, where the goal is to estimate the support of a $k$-sparse signal in $\mathbb{R}^d$. Our main contribution is a provable separation between the oblivious (``for each'') and adaptive (``for all'') models of $\ell_\infty$ sparse recovery. We show that under an oblivious model, the optimal $\ell_\infty$ error is attainable in near-linear time with $\approx k\log d$ samples, whereas in an adaptive model, $\gtrsim k^2$ samples are necessary for any algorithm to achieve this bound. This establishes a surprising contrast with the standard $\ell_2$ setting, where $\approx k \log d$ samples suffice even for adaptive sparse recovery. We conclude with a preliminary examination of a partially-adaptive model, where we show nontrivial variable selection guarantees are possible with $\approx k\log d$ measurements.