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

Superresolution technique beyond the diffraction limit under a structured beam via different optical nanostructures

arXiv:2602.19417v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: To overcome the limit of diffraction while achieving the superresolution technique, solid immersion lenses are the key optical elements for data storage and nanophotonics applications. Recent demonstrations have shown how different nanostructures (such as elliptical solid immersion lenses) are used in diverse fields of increasing resolution in the presence of a structured Gaussian beam. By applying twisted beams such as angular momentum beams (Laguerre- Gaussian) and spatial higher-order Gaussian beams (Hermite- Gauss), we can attain a sharp near-field focal spot pattern, which is considerably better than the conventional solid immersion lens structure in ~mm scale specifically for imaging beyond diffraction limit. Our computation results present a resolution of ~27 nm under a specific Hermite -Gauss mode illumination on a pyramidal shape nanolens structure. By numerical simulations, tolerance has been confirmed with a slight variation in beam size and geometrical modification to make the model compatible with fabrication errors. This narrow bandwidth intensity distribution can be utilized for scanning the sample with higher resolution, especially in the field of quantum technology.

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

SpatialAvatar-0: High-Quality 4D Head Avatar with Multi-Stage Reconstruction

High-quality 4D head avatars from one or a few source portraits are central to telepresence, AR/VR, and digital-human interaction. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has emerged as the dominant representation, with two complementary regimes (generalizable feed-forward predictors and per-subject refiners) maturing in parallel. However, existing feed-forward predictors are trained on a single dataset family with a hard-coded source count, inheriting the corresponding domain bias. Per-subject refiners require 300K–600K iterations and rely on adaptive densification that destroys upstream Gaussian layouts, preventing the two regimes from sharing a representation end-to-end. To bridge both regimes we propose SpatialAvatar-0 on a shared FLAME-mesh-bound Gaussian representation: a feed-forward generator with a parameter-free K-source mean-pool and a monocular-temporal to multi-view-spatial two-phase schedule that anchors against identity-prior collapse onto the smaller multi-view set. We further introduce a 10K-iter layout-preserving per-subject refinement loop that freezes the FLAME-binding and Gaussian count and replaces densification with a three-component anti-spike regularization. On VFHQ/HDTF cross-domain zero-shot we surpass the in-domain leader GAGAvatar by +1.5 dB PSNR despite never training on either test domain, and on the SplattingAvatar monocular benchmark we lead every reported metric, surpassing the 300K-iter GeoAvatar by +1.3 dB PSNR at up to 60x shorter per-subject schedule than common SOTA baselines. Website: https://spatialwalk.github.io/SpatialAvatar-0.

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

A Comprehensive Survey of Medical Image Segmentation: Challenges, Benchmarks, and Beyond

Medical image segmentation plays a critical role in clinical diagnostics, treatment planning, disease monitoring, and neurological disorder identification. This article presents a comprehensive review of its systematic development, covering widely used public datasets, representative methods built on the U-Net, Transformer, and SAM architectures, and key evaluation metrics with their differences, followed by an analysis of major challenges from multiple perspectives. Unlike surveys that focus on a single model family or a specific clinical application, this review organizes U-Net-, Transformer-, and SAM-based methods within a unified analytical framework, with a particular focus on their effectiveness in improving segmentation accuracy and efficiency. This work aims to guide future research and support clinical translation of medical image segmentation, with all related resources publicly available in our GitHub repository: https://github.com/andrew-pengyu/Awsome_MedSeg/tree/main.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Selective Capability Unlearning in End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding

Modern spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are increasingly deployed in real-world settings, where specific functionalities may need to be removed due to policy or safety constraints. In SLU, a functionality corresponds to an intent and its associated slot-generation behavior. However, in autoregressive models, suppressing a target intent does not eliminate the conditional mapping that generates slots conditioned on that intent. When the intent prefix is externally supplied, the model can reconstruct the original intent-slot structure. We identify this structural failure as capability persistence. We propose \underline{Binding \underline{S}ubspace (BSU)}, a representation-level framework that isolates and attenuates intent-conditioned directions underlying this mapping. Across SLU benchmarks, BSU substantially reduces forced-prefix recoverability while preserving retained performance.

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

Quantum sensing through bosonic-fermionic Bell-state transitions in two-photon interference

arXiv:2606.14408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference has become a central resource for quantum sensing and metrology owing to its sensitivity to temporal delay and photon indistinguishability. However, existing HOM-based sensing schemes generally rely on inserting a sample into one arm of the interferometer, making the measurement vulnerable to optical loss, alignment instability, and bandwidth-dependent distortion of the interference profile. Here, we demonstrate a symmetry-controlled quantum sensing scheme based on continuous transitions between symmetric (bosonic-like) and antisymmetric (fermionic-like) Bell states in two-photon interference. By imprinting a geometric phase onto the classical pump beam and transferring it to polarization-entangled photons generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion, we coherently tune the exchange symmetry of the entangled state without altering the temporal or spectral indistinguishability of the photons. The HOM response evolves continuously from bunching to antibunching with a sine square phase dependence, producing a coincidence modulation of approximately 10 * 10^4 counts s^-1 counts/s. In contrast to conventional HOM sensing, the phase-modulation linewidth remains fixed at pi/2, independent of photon bandwidth. Using a birefringent crystal placed directly in the pump beam, we measure thermo-dispersive birefringence with a resolution of the order of 10^{-6} over a broad temperature range. Our results establish exchange symmetry as a controllable resource for robust quantum sensing and symmetry-engineered photonic quantum information processing.

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

GF-DiT: Scheduling Parallelism for Diffusion Transformer Serving

arXiv:2606.13501v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Transformers (DiTs) have become the dominant architecture for image and video generation, creating growing demand for efficient DiT serving. Existing systems assign each request a fixed parallel configuration throughout its lifetime. However, DiT workloads exhibit substantial heterogeneity across requests, execution stages, and system conditions, making static parallelism inefficient and often leading to poor GPU utilization and degraded service quality. This paper argues that DiT serving should treat GPU parallelism as a first-class schedulable resource. We present GF-DiT, a policy-programmable runtime for elastic DiT serving that dynamically adapts the parallelism of running requests according to workload demands and service objectives. GF-DiT introduces an asynchronous execution abstraction that decomposes requests into independently schedulable trajectory tasks and enables online GPU reallocation. To make elastic parallelism practical, GF-DiT further proposes group-free collectives, a lightweight communication abstraction that supports low-overhead online formation and reconfiguration of arbitrary execution groups. We implement GF-DiT in vLLM-Omni and evaluate it on representative image and video diffusion workloads. Compared with fixed-pipeline execution with static parallelism, GF-DiT improves throughput by up to 6.01$\times$, reduces mean latency by up to 95%, lowers SLO violation rates by up to 90%, and reduces communication-group setup overhead from 778 ms to approximately 60 $\mu$s.

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

VIA-SD: Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding (SD) addresses the high inference costs of LLMs by having lightweight drafters generate candidates for large verifiers to validate in parallel. Existing draft-verify methods use binary decisions: accept or fully recompute. Yet we find that many rejected tokens can be verified correctly by a slim submodel derived from the full verifier via intra-model routing, instead of the full verifier. This motivates our slim-verifier to handle tokens requiring moderate verification resources, reducing expensive large-model calls. We propose Verification via Intra-Model Routing for Speculative Decoding (VIA-SD), a multi-tier framework using a routed slim-verifier. Draft tokens are processed hierarchically: direct acceptance for high-confidence cases, slim-verifier regeneration for medium-confidence cases, and full-model verification for uncertain cases. Across four representative tasks and multiple model families, VIA-SD reduces rejection rates by 0.10-0.22 and delivers 10-20% speedups over strong SD baselines, while achieving 2.5-3x acceleration over non-drafting decoding. Moreover, VIA-SD is compatible with existing SD frameworks without modifying their training procedures. Our results suggest multi-tier SD as a general paradigm for scalable and efficient LLM inference. Project page: https://zju-xyc.github.io/VIA-SD-Project-Page/

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Cutoff for asymmetric shelf shuffle

arXiv:2606.18039v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A mechanical shuffler consists of $m$ shelves. A deck of $n$ cards, arranged in increasing order, is dealt from the bottom sequentially. Each card is assigned a shelf uniformly at random and placed on the top (bottom) of the existing pile with probability $p$ ($1-p$) independently. We refer to this as asymmetric shelf-shuffle. We find the law $\nu_{n, m}^{(p)}$ of the permutation induced by the asymmetric shelf-shuffle and show that the pair consisting of the number of descents and the number of valleys is a sufficient statistic. This generalizes a result of Diaconis, Fulman, and Holmes (Ann. Appl. Prob., 2013) corresponding to the case $p=1/2$. For $p=1/2$, Chen and Ottolini (ECP, 2025) established the cutoff in the total variation distance near $\lfloor n^{5/4}\rfloor$. We establish the cutoff for the asymmetric shelf shuffle. Let $\nu_n$ be the uniform measure on the set of all permutations $S_n$ of $\{1, \ldots, n\}$. For a fixed $p\neq 1/2$ and $c>0$, we show that \[\operatorname{TV}\left(\nu_{n, \lfloor cn^{3/2}\rfloor }^{(p)}, \nu_n\right)=1-2\Phi\left(-\frac{|2p-1|}{4\sqrt{3}c}\right)+O_{c, p}(n^{-1/2})\;.\] We also establish the cutoff in the separation distance near $m\approx n^{2}$ and in the relative entropy near $m=n^{3/2}$. In both cases, we also obtain the cutoff profile explicitly.

09.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Risk-averse mean field games: exploitability and non-asymptotic analysis

arXiv:2301.06930v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we use mean field games (MFGs) to investigate approximations of $N$-player games ($N$pGs) with uniformly symmetrically continuous heterogeneous closed-loop actions. To incorporate agents' risk aversion (beyond the classical expected utility of total costs), we use an abstract evaluation functional for their performance criteria. Centered around the notion of exploitability, we conduct non-asymptotic analysis on the approximation capability of MFGs from the perspective of state-action distributions without requiring the uniqueness of equilibria. Under suitable assumptions, we first show that scenarios in the $N$pGs with large $N$ and small average exploitabilities can be well approximated by approximate solutions of MFGs with relatively small exploitabilities. We then show that $\delta$-mean field equilibria can be used to construct $\varepsilon$-equilibria in $N$pGs. Furthermore, in this general setting, we prove the existence of mean field equilibria. This proof reveals a possible avenue for incorporating penalization for randomized action into MFGs.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Variational Polaron Theory for Ground States of Strongly Coupled Light-Matter and Electron-Phonon Systems

arXiv:2606.19748v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Strong light-matter and electron-phonon coupling generate ground states dressed by virtual bosonic excitations, making bare-state truncations and perturbative treatments unreliable in the ultrastrong-coupling regime. We introduce a nonperturbative variational ground-state framework based on a state-dependent polaron transformation, combined with a product-state ansatz and a second-order perturbative correction for residual matter-boson entanglement. We show that the optimized transformed frame becomes asymptotically decoupled at infinite coupling, because the leading linear coupling is canceled while off-diagonal matter transitions are suppressed by displaced-oscillator overlaps. The approach is asymptotically correct in both weak- and strong-coupling limits and remains accurate in the intermediate regime, where fixed polaron transformations are least reliable. Dicke-model benchmarks reproduce ground-state energies, fidelities, and the superradiant transition, with second-order energy errors below 0.2%. Holstein-model benchmarks yield errors below 0.5% and clarify how translational symmetry affects wave-function quality. This dressed-basis framework enables nonperturbative modeling of strongly coupled light-matter and electron-phonon systems.

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

Accelerating Multimodal Large Language Models with Prior-Corrected Token Reduction

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

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

SAGE-OPD: Selective Agent-Guided Intervention for Multi-Turn On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation (OPD) improves student models by training them on trajectories induced by their own policy, making it a promising approach for mitigating exposure bias in agent training. However, most OPD studies focus on single-turn settings, while realistic LLM agents interact with environments over multiple turns. In this regime, early errors can alter future observations and compound across the trajectory, and standard dense token-level OPD becomes brittle, as it may over-penalize semantically valid alternatives, reinforce local degeneracies such as repeated actions, and propagate unreliable teacher supervision on off-distribution histories. We propose SAGE-OPD, a verifier-free selective intervention framework specifically designed for multi-turn OPD. Instead of applying teacher supervision uniformly across all turns, SAGE-OPD first observes environment feedback and uses teacher judgment to decide whether each student response should be skipped or intervened on. To further address compounding errors, SAGE-OPD weights token-level distillation by teacher confidence, reducing the influence of uncertain teacher distributions on corrupted or ambiguous histories. Finally, SAGE-OPD applies loss normalization to preserve the overall loss scale of standard OPD while retaining selective turn-level weighting. Experiments on agent tasks show that SAGE-OPD consistently improves over baselines, achieving up to a 13.3% relative improvement in ALFWorld unseen success rate over standard OPD. Ablation studies further demonstrate that turn-level intervention, teacher confidence weighting, and loss normalization provide complementary benefits. Our results suggest that effective multi-turn OPD should remain on-policy, but teacher supervision should be selectively allocated to turns where intervention is necessary and reliable.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigation

World action models~(WAMs) have shown great promise for autonomous driving and urban navigation. Built upon Vision-Language-Action models or video generation models, existing approaches suffer key limitations: (1) High inference latency due to future observation prediction at test time, and (2) tightly coupled video and action modeling leading to representational mismatch and degraded generalization. To address both issues, we propose Metis, an end-to-end WAM framework that decouples video generation and action prediction. Specifically, Metis employs a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture with dedicated experts for video generation and action prediction, preserving the intrinsic distributional properties of each task. To enhance efficiency, we introduce an asymmetric attention mask that enables joint training of both experts while allowing the action model to bypass explicit video generation during inference. This design ensures training-inference consistency and significantly reduces computational costs without compromising planning performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM navhard and navtest benchmarks and the CityWalker navigation benchmark, validating both the generalizability and efficiency across diverse tasks. Real-robot deployments further confirm the practical feasibility of our approach.

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

SLU-2K: A Question-Based Benchmark for Semantic Evaluation of Sign Language Translation

Sign Language Translation (SLT) is typically evaluated with surface-form metrics such as BLEU and ROUGE, which reward lexical overlap but do not directly measure whether a translation preserves the meaning of the source sign sequence. This is in contrast with the final objective of integrating SLT in assistive technology. In this work, we shift the focus from Sign Language Translation (SLT) to Sign Language Understanding (SLU), with particular emphasis on semantic understanding. Specifically, we evaluate systems based on their ability to correctly recover, from the input video, key semantic aspects of the original sentence, such as actions taking place and facts about people and objects. To enable this evaluation systematically, we propose SLU-2K, a dataset of 2,350 closed-ended video question-answer pairs based on the popular PHOENIX-2014T and CSL-Daily datasets. To obtain SLU-2K, we propose and extensively evaluate an automated data generation pipeline which produces questions across 7 categories, namely actions, locations, numbers, objects, people, time, and weather conditions. We show the potential of SLU-2K by evaluating popular Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) and two representative state-of-the-art systems, MMSTL and SpaMo. Our results show that MLLMs reach near-random performance, highlighting the need for a more systematic integration of SLU in current AI systems. Furthermore, state-of-the-art translation systems carefully fine-tuned on in-domain data still exhibit a substantial semantic gap, with results ranging from 56.7% to 75.2%. These findings suggest that current SLT evaluation protocols overestimate true understanding and that future progress should be measured not only by fluency and n-gram overlap, but also by semantic correctness. Code, prompts, and benchmark files are available at https://github.com/ZenoTsT/SLU-2K

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Building user-driven climate adaptation products

Climate adaptation products have traditionally been developed using a supply-driven model reliant on available climate information, leading to usability gaps1–4. To better meet user needs, the climate services field has recognized a need to shift towards a demand-driven model emphasizing co-production, that is, user-driven, scientifically informed products created through shared knowledge practices1–5. However, co-production can be challenging, especially for researchers unfamiliar with the approach or for digital and software-based products with complex user needs2,5–8. User-centred design, from the human–computer interaction field, offers a process that could complement co-production approaches to product development, yet its potential remains underexplored2. Here we show how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products. Through a systematic review of the co-production and user-centred design literature, we identify key processes, mechanisms and best practices for both approaches. Our findings offer practical guidance for researchers and propose an integrated approach for developing climate adaptation products that are useful, usable and used. A systematic review and analysis shows how user-centred design can be integrated into, and strengthen, co-production approaches for building user-driven climate adaptation products.

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

A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Models

arXiv:2509.11575v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series reasoning treats time as a first-class axis and incorporates intermediate evidence directly into the answer. This survey defines the problem and organizes the literature by reasoning topology with three families: direct reasoning in one step, linear chain reasoning with explicit intermediates, and branch-structured reasoning that explores, revises, and aggregates. The topology is crossed with the main objectives of the field, including traditional time series analysis, explanation and understanding, causal inference and decision making, and time series generation, while a compact tag set spans these axes and captures decomposition and verification, ensembling, tool use, knowledge access, multimodality, agent loops, and LLM alignment regimes. Methods and systems are reviewed across domains, showing what each topology enables and where it breaks down in faithfulness or robustness, along with curated datasets, benchmarks, and resources that support study and deployment (https://github.com/blacksnail789521/Time-Series-Reasoning-Survey). Evaluation practices that keep evidence visible and temporally aligned are highlighted, and guidance is distilled on matching topology to uncertainty, grounding with observable artifacts, planning for shift and streaming, and treating cost and latency as design budgets. We emphasize that reasoning structures must balance capacity for grounding and self-correction against computational cost and reproducibility, while future progress will likely depend on benchmarks that tie reasoning quality to utility and on closed-loop testbeds that trade off cost and risk under shift-aware, streaming, and long-horizon settings. Taken together, these directions mark a shift from narrow accuracy toward reliability at scale, enabling systems that not only analyze but also understand, explain, and act on dynamic worlds with traceable evidence and credible outcomes.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AutoDojo: Adaptive Attacks Expose Superficial Defenses and User-Underspecification Limits in LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.15057v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Indirect prompt injection (IPI) is a major security threat to LLM-powered agents. Thus, a growing body of work have proposed a variety of defensive approaches against IPI. These can be grouped into three broad categories: 1) prompt-based (using prompting as a way to prevent agents from following malicious instructions), 2) detection-based (identifying and filtering malicious instructions), and 3) system-level (using systems insights, such as control and data isolation, for defense). However, commonly used benchmarks for evaluating defense, such as AgentDojo, are inherently static, generating a fixed distribution of IPI attacks. Consequently, static benchmarks do not usefully evaluate defense robustness to adaptive threats. We address this issue by developing AutoDojo, an adaptive extension of AgentDojo that optimizes IPI against a given defense. Using AutoDojo against state-of-the-art IPI defenses across three task suites and five target models, we make two key observations. First, many defenses offer only limited protection: a cheap, black-box adaptive attack using a frontier LLM to iteratively optimize the injection raises attack success rate (ASR) well above the level achieved by static injections against nearly all evaluated defenses. Against a filter that reduces static ASR to 0\%, AutoDojo recovers 28\% overall and 64\% on action-open tasks. Second, for prompt-level and filter-based defenses, ASR is substantially higher on action-open tasks – where the user's request delegates the action itself to attacker-controlled content – than on precisely specified tasks. This is a structural limit: on such tasks the injection can pose as ordinary data rather than an explicit instruction, bypassing defenses that rely on detecting instruction-like text. AutoDojo is publicly available at https://github.com/xhOwenMa/AutoDojo.

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

ASymPO: Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization for Asynchronous LLM Post-Training Without Behavior Information

arXiv:2606.03070v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning can improve language-model post-training throughput by decoupling response generation from policy optimization, but stale responses introduce distribution drift. Standard behavior-corrected methods control this drift with behavior-policy probabilities, importance ratios, or clipping, which requires token-aligned, versioned, and numerically consistent behavior log-probabilities across rollout and learner systems. We ask whether asynchronous group-relative RL can instead be stabilized using only current-policy probabilities. We identify a scale-imbalance failure mode: when stale responses are evaluated under the current policy, positive and negative loss terms can appear at different negative log-probability scales, so zero-sum advantages no longer imply balanced loss contributions. We propose Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization (ASymPO), which normalizes each response's token loss by its current average token negative log-probability. ASymPO requires no behavior-policy probabilities, restores response-level zero-sum balance, and preserves a nonzero learning signal. We also introduce Scaled Policy Optimization (SPO), a fixed negative-scaling baseline, and evaluate both current-policy-only objectives in asynchronous mathematical reasoning post-training.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Counterfactual Credit Policy Optimization for Multi-Agent Collaboration

arXiv:2603.21563v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Collaborative multi-agent large language models (LLMs) can solve complex reasoning tasks by decomposing roles, but reinforcement learning for such systems is limited by credit assignment: shared terminal rewards obscure individual contributions and can encourage free-riding. We introduce two optimizer-agnostic credit assignment methods for converting joint outcomes into agent-specific learning signals. Counterfactual Credit for Policy Optimization (CCPO) estimates an agent's marginal contribution by comparing the realized joint outcome with a counterfactual outcome where that agent is removed. Self-Evaluated Credit for Policy Optimization (SEPO) uses constrained self- and peer-evaluations as a verifier-anchored credit signal while keeping the external task outcome dominant. Both operate at the reward-construction layer rather than as policy optimizers, producing role-specific rewards or advantages for GRPO, GSPO, or REINFORCE++. We instantiate these credit signals in a sequential Think–Solve setting and evaluate them on mathematical reasoning benchmarks. Results show that explicit credit assignment often improves dual-agent reasoning, especially on MATH500 and several out-of-distribution settings, while gains vary across models and datasets. Our code is available at: https://github.com/bhai114/ccpo.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Cardiometabolic multimorbidity and care experiences in primary healthcare among Brazilian adults aged 50 and over (ELSI-Brazil)

Background: Population aging and the rising burden of non-communicable diseases have increased the prevalence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity (CM-MM) among older adults. Patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) are recognized as essential components of healthcare quality assessment, yet evidence on primary care experiences among individuals with CM-MM remains scarce. Objective: To analyze primary care experiences according to the presence of cardiometabolic multimorbidity among Brazilians aged 50 years and older. Methods: Cross-sectional study using data from the second wave of the Brazilian Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSI-Brazil, 2019-2021; n = 9,949). CM-MM was defined as the self-reported coexistence of two or more of the following conditions: hypertension, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, acute myocardial infarction, and stroke. Primary care experiences were assessed using a validated 12-item instrument organized into four domains: first-contact access, longitudinality, communication, and care coordination. Associations were estimated using Poisson regression adjusted for sociodemographic, health conditions, and healthcare utilization variables, with stratified analysis by Family Health Strategy (FHS) coverage. Results: CM-MM prevalence was 25.5%, with a progressive increase by age and an inverse gradient by education. Individuals with CM-MM reported significantly more positive experiences in longitudinality (mean index 2.53 vs. 2.34; adjusted PR = 1.22; 95%CI 1.12-1.33; p < 0.001) and, to a lesser extent, in communication (mean index 2.68 vs. 2.58; adjusted PR = 1.10; 95%CI 1.00-1.20; p = 0.041). No statistically significant differences were found in first-contact access or care coordination. After stratified by FHS coverage, the observed differences in longitudinality and communication were no longer statistically significant. Conclusions: CM-MM was associated with more positive primary care experiences in longitudinality and communication. The absence of differentiated experiences in first-contact access and coordination highlights structural gaps in primary care responsiveness to individuals with greater clinical complexity. Keywords: Multimorbidity; Cardiometabolic diseases; Primary Care; Patient-reported experience measures; Older adults; ELSI-Brazil.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Monitoring Beam Splitter Entanglement using Quantumness

arXiv:2606.24242v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report on an experiment in which two independent squeezed vacuum states get entangled by mixing them with a balanced beam splitter. We follow standard practice and use an inseparability criterion to quantify their entanglement. However, this only allows us to witness the entanglement, but not to determine the deleterious effects of experimental imperfections due to the beam splitter mixing and the associated mode-mismatch and detection imperfections. We therefore introduce an alternative framework suitable for continuous variable systems using the states' quantumness, $\Xi$. We show that, under ideal circumstances, $\Xi$ is a conserved quantity under beam mixing. This allows us to benchmark the experiment's performance by comparing the states' quantumness $\Xi$ after the beam splitter mixing with $\Xi$ before. Such a comparison is not possible with entanglement witnesses, as the input states are unentangled. This highlights the main strength of our approach: its ability to generally quantify the quantumness of multi-mode continuous variable states and use this to probe different stages in an experiment.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Distinct Neuronal, Proliferative, and Secretory Pathways are Perturbed in Cancer Survivors with Depressive Symptoms

Introduction Depression is highly prevalent among cancer survivors and may be biologically distinct, although clinical studies investigating these mechanisms remain limited. Thus, the aims of this study were to (1) identify perturbed biological pathways associated with depressive symptom severity in cancer survivors, and (2) investigate whether these pathways are common or distinct to those perturbed in an age-matched non-cancer cohort. Methods We analyzed cross-sectional self-reported and transcriptomic data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (PHD #39341). Cancer survivors and an age-matched non-cancer cohort (target ratio 1:2) were identified. The 20-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) was used to split participants into low (CES-D

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

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.

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

Implicit Semantic-Aware Communication Based on Hypergraph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.20162v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Semantic-aware communication has emerged as a transformative paradigm for next-generation communication systems, shifting the fundamental goal from transmitting bit-level symbols to reliably recovering and understanding the semantic meaning of information. Previous studies have demonstrated that representing the semantic content of source messages as graph-based structures can significantly improve communication efficiency and the accuracy of semantic inference at the receiver. However, existing solutions typically employ graphs that capture only pairwise relationships, thereby neglecting higher-order implicit correlations commonly observed in real-world scenarios, such as group interactions, multi-entity associations, and complex relational contexts. This limitation reduces semantic expressiveness and makes semantic inference susceptible to ambiguity and performance degradation, particularly under noisy or corrupted channel conditions. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel hypergraph-based implicit semantic reasoning framework, HISR, which leverages hypergraphs to represent complex multi-entity relationships among semantic knowledge entities. In HISR, entities and their associated higher-order relations are mapped into dedicated semantic subspaces tailored to distinct relational contexts. This design not only disentangles diverse semantic interactions to mitigate the over-smoothing effects commonly found in traditional graph embedding methods but also enables robust semantic inference even when partial information loss occurs during transmission. Numerical results show that the proposed HISR achieves up to a 36.6% improvement in implicit semantic interpretation accuracy over the state-of-the-art benchmarks.

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

Towards Engineering Scaling Laws with Pretraining Data Composition

arXiv:2606.19781v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural scaling laws describe how model performance improves as a power law in compute, model size, and dataset size. While well-established for large language models, these relationships are emerging for large models in particle physics. As with language, empirical studies show that the performance scales as a power law. However, unlike natural language or image domains, fundamental physics has high-fidelity simulators that produce synthetic data cheaply. This favors scaling regimes where additional data is cheaper than additional parameters, and allows the pretraining dataset itself to be engineered to influence the scaling. For the task of classifying hadronic jets produced in collisions of high-energy particle beams, we show that the scaling behavior can be engineered towards requiring more data rather than larger models by inclusion of pretraining data which is more diverse and better aligned with the downstream classification task.