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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

QueryOcc: Query-based Self-Supervision for 3D Semantic Occupancy

Learning 3D scene geometry and semantics from images is a core challenge in computer vision and a key capability for autonomous driving. Since large-scale 3D annotation is prohibitively expensive, recent work explores self-supervised learning directly from sensor data without manual labels. Existing approaches either rely on 2D rendering consistency, where 3D structure emerges only implicitly, or on discretized voxel grids from accumulated lidar point clouds, limiting spatial precision and scalability. We introduce QueryOcc, a query-based self-supervised framework that learns continuous 3D semantic occupancy directly through independent 4D spatio-temporal queries sampled across adjacent frames. The framework supports supervision from either pseudo-point clouds derived from vision foundation models or raw lidar data. To enable long-range supervision and reasoning under constant memory, we introduce a contractive scene representation that preserves near-field detail while smoothly compressing distant regions. QueryOcc surpasses previous camera-based methods by 26% in semantic RayIoU on the self-supervised Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark while running at 11.6 FPS, demonstrating that direct 4D query supervision enables strong self-supervised occupancy learning. https://research.zenseact.com/publications/queryocc/

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

Aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition with patch-level self-supervised learning and expanded reciprocal re-ranking

LiDAR place recognition determines one's position on a prior point cloud map. The most studied ground-level LiDAR place recognition suffers from pre-visit requirements, incomplete coverage, and limited perspectives. Using pre-acquired, full-coverage Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data as an aerial prior map overcomes these drawbacks, making cross-view place recognition necessary and advantageous. However, aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition faces significant challenges, including the domain gap between aerial and ground point clouds, and false positives during initial retrieval. To address these challenges, we present a novel retrieval and re-ranking framework for aerial-ground LiDAR place recognition. Based on the priors that neighboring point cloud patches share similar semantics with anchor patch, our retrieval network introduces patch-level self-supervised learning modules at multiple scales and integrates with scene-level learning to improve global feature discriminativeness between aerial and ground point clouds. Furthermore, leveraging the structured spatial distribution of ALS point clouds, we introduce an Expanded Reciprocal (ER) re-ranking algorithm to exploit neighborhood information maximally and refine each feature based on neighbor features, which are then used to update the similarity matrix for final ranking. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our retrieval network outperforms existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, achieving a 9.8\% improvement in average Recall@1 and a 3.2\% improvement in average Recall@1\% on the CS-Urban-Scenes, while also showing the best performance on the CS-Campus3D dataset. Additionally, our ER re-ranking algorithm further boosts the average Recall@1 by 4.9\% on CS-Campus3D and 10.2\% on CS-Urban-Scenes without additional training.

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

AdaPLD: Adaptive Retrieval and Reuse for Efficient Model-Free Speculative Decoding

Speculative decoding accelerates generation by verifying multiple drafted tokens in a single target-model forward pass, reducing sequential decoding iterations. Model-free variants avoid auxiliary draft models by reusing text and model states already available during generation, but their speedup depends on the reliability of the constructed drafts. We identify two limitations of existing reuse-based methods: lexically anchored retrieval has limited recall under surface-form variation, and deterministic span copying can be brittle when the retrieved context does not uniquely determine the continuation. We propose AdaPLD, a training-free method that adaptively improves both retrieval and draft construction. AdaPLD preserves high-precision lexical reuse while using semantic similarity to recover additional reuse opportunities when lexical matching fails. It further constructs branched reuse hypotheses to account for continuation uncertainty, rather than relying on a single copied span. Across diverse benchmarks, AdaPLD reduces target-model forward passes and achieves up to $3.10\times$ decoding speedup.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

{\alpha}-Fair Insurance Pricing: A Fairness Continuum

arXiv:2606.14898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness in insurance pricing remains a long-standing and deeply debated puzzle. On one hand, insurers, driven by profitability considerations, set premiums that differentiate across individual risks to achieve actuarial fairness. On the other hand, insurance serves a critical societal function by pooling risks across a population, motivating cross-subsidization among groups to promote solidarity fairness. The tension between these two competing notions of fairness makes insurance pricing inherently complex, particularly in modern settings where granular data allow for increasingly fine risk differentiation and regulators face growing pressure to protect vulnerable groups. To address this challenge, we propose an $\alpha$-Fair Individual Solvent Premium ($\alpha$-FISP) framework for insurance pricing that explicitly captures the trade-off between actuarial and solidarity fairness while guaranteeing solvency, a fundamental requirement in insurance operations. We formulate the pricing problem as a constrained optimization task, where actuarially fair premiums are adjusted subject to budget constraints on cross-subsidization within each risk class. This formulation naturally yields a family of solutions parameterized by $\alpha$, tracing a continuum between purely actuarial and purely solidarity-based pricing and enabling decision-makers to select an operating point along this fairness spectrum. We derive theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework. Numerical experiments show that $\alpha$-FISP is computationally tractable and aligns well with the U.S. regulatory regimes featuring heterogeneous state-level fairness requirements.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

VeryTrace: Verifying Reasoning Traces through Compilable Formalism and Structured Verification

arXiv:2606.24124v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-step reasoning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting remains fragile: logical errors or hallucinations in early steps silently propagate, producing confident but incorrect conclusions. This paper presents VeryTrace, a zero-shot verification-and-repair framework that formalizes natural-language reasoning traces into a structured, compilable representation. VeryTrace introduces a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that (i) makes step dependencies explicit, (ii) mechanizes quantitative content as executable expressions, and (iii) structures semantic inferences via deduction schemas. Our hybrid verifier combines deterministic checks for computational correctness, dependency resolution, and constraint satisfaction with targeted LLM audits for non-mechanizable semantic judgments, enabling step-level error localization and repair. Across three diverse domains-competition mathematics (AIME 2025), robotics planning (LLM-BabyBench), and kinship reasoning (CLUTRR), VeryTrace improves accuracy over zero-shot baselines on state-of-the-art LLMs without requiring domain-specific training or in-context examples, demonstrating that formalized trace verification achieves both precision and generalization.

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

findsylls: A Language-Agnostic Toolkit for Syllable-Level Speech Tokenization and Embedding

Syllable-level units offer compact and linguistically meaningful representations for spoken language modeling and unsupervised word discovery, but research on syllabification remains fragmented across disparate implementations, datasets, and evaluation protocols. We introduce findsylls, a modular, language-agnostic toolkit that unifies classical syllable detectors and end-to-end syllabifiers under a common interface for syllable segmentation, embedding extraction, and multi-granular evaluation. The toolkit implements and standardizes widely used methods (e.g., Sylber, VG-HuBERT) and allows their components to be recombined, enabling controlled comparisons of representations, algorithms, and token rates. We demonstrate findsylls on English and Spanish corpora and on new hand-annotated data from Kono, an underdocumented Central Mande language, illustrating how a single framework can support reproducible syllable-level experiments across both high-resource and under-resourced settings.

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

Exact Schur-Sylvester Dimensionality Reductions for Non-Smooth Stochastic Complexity and Manifold Sampling

arXiv:2606.23867v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The exact computation of the Normalized Maximum Likelihood (NML) codelength for regular non-smooth estimators (e.g., Lasso) has been historically limited by the cubic scaling walls of manifold-constrained projection and volume integration. At each step of the geometric Propose-and-Project Metropolis–Hastings (PPMH) sampler, evaluating the projection operator requires inverting an $(N+k) \times (N+k)$ generalized KKT matrix, while calculating the volume factor requires the determinant of an $(N-k) \times (N-k)$ Gram matrix. This paper presents an exact, mathematically equivalent formulation that bypasses both bottlenecks by utilizing the block Schur complement and Sylvester's determinant identity. We prove that the computational complexity of both operations collapses from $\mathcal{O}(N^3)$ to $\mathcal{O}(k^3 + N^2 k)$ per step. We generalize this reduction to Sparse Support Vector Machines (SVMs), Elastic Net, and Group Lasso. Finally, we provide a rigorous numerical stability analysis and evaluate the sampler's efficiency using the Effective Sample Size (ESS) per second. Our empirical benchmarks on high-dimensional datasets confirm a constant speedup exceeding $14{,}100\times$ while maintaining double-precision numerical equivalence, rendering exact non-smooth NML estimation highly tractable for large-scale statistical inference.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

The impact of pre-stroke statin use on baseline corrected infarct volume and collateral perfusion

Stroke is a leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide, with ischaemic stroke the most prevalent type. Statins, used for cholesterol management, have demonstrated benefits in reducing stroke risk and improving outcomes in preclinical studies. However, the impact of pre-stroke statin use on stroke outcomes remain inconsistent. In this study, we aim to evaluate whether pre-stroke statin use is associated with greater volume of salvaged tissue and improved cerebral collateral perfusion. A retrospective analysis was conducted using data from 281 patients presenting with acute ischemic stroke to the John Hunter Hospital between May 2015 and May 2020. Patients were grouped based on pre-stroke statin use, and clinical variables, including infarct volume and collateral perfusion, were assessed. The primary outcome was salvage volume derived from baseline perfusion lesion volume minus infarct volume at follow-up. Collateral perfusion was measured by the hypoperfusion volume defined by delay time (DT)>6 seconds divided by the hypoperfusion volume defined by DT >2 seconds. Patients on statins at admission were significantly older and had more comorbidities. No significant association was found between pre-stroke statin use and salvage volume or collateral perfusion after adjusting for covariates. Larger initial infarct core was a significant predictor of salvage volume due to larger salvageable tissue volume at baseline. These findings indicate that pre-morbid statin use is not associated with larger salvage volume or improved cerebral collateral perfusion.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PCR-CA: Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment for Multiple-Category App Recommendation

arXiv:2508.18166v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern app store recommender systems struggle with multiple-category apps, as traditional taxonomies fail to capture overlapping semantics, leading to suboptimal personalization. We propose PCR-CA (Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment), an end-to-end framework for improved CTR prediction. PCR-CA first extracts compact multimodal embeddings from app text, then introduces a Parallel Codebook VQ-AE module that learns discrete semantic representations across multiple codebooks in parallel – unlike hierarchical residual quantization (RQ-VAE). This design enables independent encoding of diverse aspects (e.g., gameplay, art style), better modeling multiple-category semantics. To bridge semantic and collaborative signals, we employ a contrastive alignment loss at both the user and item levels, enhancing representation learning for long-tail items. Additionally, a dual-attention fusion mechanism combines ID-based and semantic features to capture user interests, especially for long-tail apps. Experiments on a large-scale dataset show PCR-CA achieves a +0.76% AUC improvement over strong baselines, with +2.15% AUC gains for long-tail apps. Online A/B testing further validates our approach, showing a +10.52% lift in CTR and a +16.30% improvement in CVR, demonstrating PCR-CA's effectiveness in real-world deployment. The new framework has now been fully deployed on the Microsoft Store.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Coherence-gated quantum devices via real-time weak measurement

Authors:

arXiv:2604.18662v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Single-photon routers in cavity and circuit QED direct photons by the qubit's energy eigenstate – a projective decision that destroys coherence. We propose a different primitive: coherence-gated routing, where the decision depends on the magnitude of the qubit's quantum coherence, estimated in real time from simultaneous weak measurements of $\sigma_x$ and $\sigma_z$. A photon is accepted if the coherence score $S(T) = \sqrt{\langle\sigma_x\rangle_c^2 + \langle\sigma_y\rangle_c^2}$, extracted from the conditional density matrix via the stochastic master equation, exceeds a tunable threshold $S_{\mathrm{th}}$. Certifying coherence at emission enables two applications conventional heralded sources cannot: (i) a quantum random number generator with min-entropy bounded by Bloch-sphere geometry, $H_\infty \geq -\log_2\!\bigl(\frac{1+\sqrt{1-S_{\mathrm{th}}^2}}{2}\bigr)$, and (ii) a phase-tracked photon source whose two-node coherence certification bounds the matter-matter entanglement fidelity after Bell-state measurement. The estimator is itself a security primitive. Benchmarking seven configurations, we find that underestimating detector efficiency ($\eta_{\mathrm{a}} < \eta_{\mathrm{true}}$) both stabilizes the numerics and suppresses overcertification. We trace this via a purity-monotonicity result, identify a geometric loophole amplifying purity undercertification into coherence overcertification by an order of magnitude ($\sim$40$\times$), and prove two complementary tail bounds: an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck comparison giving $4.5\%$ raw overcertification (empirical $3.7\%$ from $10^6$ trajectories) and an exponential supermartingale establishing structural exponential decay.

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

Curvature-Guided Geometric Representation for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

arXiv:2606.14159v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein-ligand binding affinity (PLA) prediction is critical in drug discovery. Despite the notable advancements in machine learning-based approaches, existing methods struggle to jointly characterize local geometric organization and globally coordinated cross-molecular interactions, limiting their ability to model complex binding mechanisms. Here, we propose RicciBind, a geometric representation framework that integrates curvature-guided hierarchical structure learning with optimal transport (OT)-based cross-domain alignment to model molecular interactions. Specifically, RicciBind leverages Ricci curvature to capture local interaction tightness within molecular structures, enhancing structural awareness and organizing atomic interactions into curvature-aware hierarchical representations. An OT-based cluster matching mechanism then aligns protein and ligand clusters across heterogeneous domains under geometric constraints, enabling globally consistent correspondences and revealing higher-order interaction patterns beyond local neighborhoods. By coupling curvature-guided structure encoding with OT-driven cross-domain alignment, RicciBind effectively models complex interaction semantics and substantially improves both the accuracy and interpretability of binding affinity prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RicciBind achieved superior predictive performance and generalization across PLA benchmarks and virtual screening tasks. Ablation studies further confirmed the essential role of Ricci curvature in enhancing molecular interaction representations.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Large-scale semantic mapping of learner agency and autonomy reveals what measurement and generative AI research overlook

arXiv:2606.10881v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learner agency and autonomy are foundational to personal development, yet a pervasive "jingle-jangle" fallacy (i.e. identical terms denoting different constructs, distinct terms denoting identical ones) has substantially hindered cumulative knowledge. Treating meaning as a phenomenon constituted through use in linguistic practice, we extracted 8,954 definitions and 2,700 scale items from over 14,000 publications, to investigate how researchers actually used learner agency and autonomy with a semantic analysis pipeline. The definitional landscape of two constructs resolves into three dimensions: regulation and control of learning (task), intrinsic motivation and internal decision-making (person), and social-relational action (sociocultural), thereby empirically quantifying the jingle-jangle fallacy. Existing scales, however, systematically underrepresent the sociocultural dimension. Critically, current generative AI research in education concentrates on learning regulation and control, narrowing the behavioral repertoire that AI-mediated learning environments are designed to cultivate. Beyond conceptual clarification, this work carries direct implications for conceptualization, measurement, and practice towards supporting the multidimensional learner agency and autonomy.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Denoising Distances in Metric Measure Spaces

arXiv:2606.18301v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent work studied the problem of finding clusters and denoising pairwise distances from noisy distances of points sampled on a manifold. We study the same problems in more general metric measure spaces under \lowerphiregularity{}. We give an algorithm that extracts large localized clusters around every sampled point and uses them to denoise distances to any fixed accuracy, with near-linear running time in the dense fixed-accuracy regime. We also show how to achieve much higher accuracy with a non-efficient algorithm. This suggests that unlike the Riemannian case, denoising to higher accuracy in more general metric spaces has a statistical-computational gap.

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

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Learning User Simulators with Turing Rewards

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains–conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion–we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

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

Limited Marginal Benefit of Reasoning-Heavy LLM Deployment in ESG Narrative Scoring: A 4-Model Consensus Study on Japanese Listed Firms

arXiv:2606.13693v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring of ESG narrative disclosures with large language models (LLMs) is gaining traction, yet whether reasoning-heavy frontier models add value commensurate with their cost remains empirically unsettled. We evaluate this question on a corpus of ten Japanese listed firms across three rubric axes – quantitative targets, progress-tracking infrastructure, and external-standard alignment – using a four-model consensus design that combines a reasoning-on frontier model with three reasoning-off contemporaries. Across 120 firm x axis x model scores, the pooled mean absolute deviation between the reasoning-on model and each reasoning-off counterpart is 0.38 on a 5-point scale; only 2% of pairwise comparisons reach a two-point deviation, and none exceeds two points. Per-firm cost accounting shows the reasoning-on arm alone costs roughly 5.6x as much as the three-provider reasoning-off ensemble, for outcomes that differ only within small margins. We conclude that in span-based ESG narrative scoring, reasoning-heavy deployment does not materially improve outcomes relative to reasoning-off consensus, while substantially increasing operational cost. We discuss implications for cost-effective ESG auto-scoring pipelines and LLM deployment governance in applied accountability settings. An earlier version of this work is available on SSRN (Abstract ID 6683303).

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

A Hybrid Quantum-Classical Approach for Melt Pool Prediction in Laser Powder Bed Fusion

arXiv:2606.23719v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) is a promising additive manufacturing technique that suffers from quality assurance concerns. Predicting melt pools from process parameters is crucial for assessing quality prior to manufacturing but remains a difficult problem because of the complex physical processes underlying LPBF. Quantum computers present a new computing paradigm, providing a new approach to information processing using quantum entanglement and superposition. This paper presents a practical demonstration of a hybrid quantum-classical model that leverages quantum computing to improve process parameter feature extraction with a quantum feature encoder. To make the quantum approach computationally feasible for large datasets, we first employ a clustering algorithm to reduce the number of expensive quantum computations. These quantum features are then processed by a classical neural network to predict the melt pool morphology, allowing for more accurate predictions of melt pools. We demonstrate the method using a quantum simulator, analyze the effect of measurement shot noise on the predictive performance of the network, and verify the results using quantum hardware. Finally, by examining which quantum features are most important, we provide insights that can inform the future design of more effective quantum encoding circuits. Ultimately, the performance improvement over purely classical networks validates the hybrid approach, demonstrating an engineering application of quantum computing using noisy and intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

On the localization transition from MAA to AA models

arXiv:2606.24720v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite their potential similarity between the mosaic Aubry-André (MAA) and AA models, the MAA model allows mobility edges (MEs), whereas the AA model does not. Here we develop a new double quasiperiodic MAA (DMAA) model consisting of one primitive MAA with nonzero even-site potentials and the other modified one with both nonzero odd-site potentials and a tunable amplitude factor, to reveal how localization transitions evolve from MAA to AA models. Interplays and competitions among the extended, critical and localized states arising from superpositions of double quasi-periodic MAA potentials enable new twice and multiple localization-delocalization transitions besides the original single localization transition. Our numerical calculations on inverse participation ratio, normalized participation ratio, fractal dimension and real-space wavefunction distribution confirm such localization features. The continuum model simulations on the experimental polariton modes also yield consistent results and hence validate their experimental feasibility. The constructed DMAA model provides a new framework for studying the localization transition processes between two analogous quasiperiodic models and broadens the understanding of Anderson localization.

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Multi-omics biomarkers of endothelial dysregulation preceding chronic lung allograft dysfunction: A prospective cohort study

Authors:

by Giulia Iacono, Christina Begka, Bailey Cardwell, Carmel Daunt, Roxanne Chatzis, Celine Pattaroni, Alana Butler, Matthew Macowan, Bronwyn Levvey, Gregory I. Snell, Glen P. Westall, Benjamin J. Marsland Background Long-term survival of lung transplant recipients remains limited by chronic lung allograft dysfunction (CLAD). CLAD is only diagnosed following a persistent and substantial decline in lung function, after which irreversible damage to the lungs has occurred, limiting opportunities to effectively intervene at an early stage. There is a critical need for earlier detection prior to its clinical manifestation. The immunological drivers of CLAD remain unclear, limiting the development of predictive biomarkers and new therapies. Methods and findings In this hypothesis-generating, prospective cohort study, we profiled the microbial, metabolic, lipidomic, and gene expression dynamics of longitudinally collected broncho-alveolar lavages (BALs) from 56 CLAD-free lung transplant recipients up to 30 months post-transplant, and compared BALs from 13 CLAD-free patients to BALs from 13 patients who developed CLAD. In CLAD-free patients, the first 6 months post-transplant were hallmarked by diminished microbial diversity and increased abundance of Staphylococcus and Candida, coupled with upregulated innate and adaptive immune responses, and elevated nitric oxide metabolism (FDR 

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

An Algebraic Matrix Spencer Theorem

arXiv:2606.16005v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop an algebraic approach to matrix discrepancy based on the representation theory of finite-dimensional C$^*$-algebras. As an application, we resolve a substantial structured special case of the Matrix Spencer conjecture. In particular, we show that for every family of contractions $A_1,\ldots,A_n$ that are contained in a finite-dimensional $C^*$-algebra $\mathcal A$ with $dim_{\mathbb C} (\mathcal A) \lesssim n$, there exists signs $x\in\{\pm1\}^n$ such that $\|\sum_{i=1}^n x_i A_i\| \le O(\sqrt n)$. As a noteworthy special case, our main result also resolves the Group Spencer conjecture of (Bandeira'24). We furthermore prove that Matrix Spencer continues to hold for low-rank perturbations of matrix families coming from an $C^*$-algebra of small dimension.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Instabilities in a Non-KAM System via Information Scrambling: A Note

arXiv:2606.12761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study operator growth in quantized non-KAM systems using out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOCs), focusing on the kicked harmonic oscillator as a representative example. Since the classical harmonic oscillator is degenerate, the dynamics fall outside the usual Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) framework, and resonances play a central role in shaping the phase space. We examine the system near resonances, where the ratio between the oscillator and driving frequencies takes integer values. Even though the classical Lyapunov exponent remains small at these points, and hence no conventional chaos, the phase space still undergoes strong structural changes. The OTOCs are particularly sensitive to these resonances, with a quadratic-in-time growth at resonance compared to linear growth away from it. Within a perturbative treatment, we derive closed-form expressions for the OTOCs and uncover a number-theoretic structure emerging in the behavior of OTOCs, governed by the Euler totient function of the frequency ratio. Overall, the results we present in this short note imply that resonant structures can play an important role in controlling information spreading.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Physics-Informed Neural Network with Squeeze-Excitation-like Attention

arXiv:2606.19853v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce SEA-PINN, a novel architecture that incorporates a Squeeze-Excitation-like attention mechanism into physics-informed neural networks to dynamically recalibrate the importance of neurons across layers. A key feature of SEA-PINN is its highly stable initialization. On 17 out of 20 benchmark problems, SEA-PINN exhibit nearly negligible variance and significantly reduced initial loss, establishing a quasi-deterministic and favorable starting point for optimization. Notably, without employing Fourier feature embeddings or periodic activation functions, SEA-PINN attained competitive accuracy (83\% vs. 90\% improvement relative to FNN-PINN on the high-frequency case 7) as compared with TSA-PINN-a model specifically engineered for high-frequency problems via learnable frequencies in sinusoidal activations. Furthermore, integrating SEA-PINN into TSA-PINN boosted performance by 42.49\%. These results underscore SEA-PINN as a lightweight plug-in module that enhances nonlinear representation power, promotes more robust and efficient convergence, and strengthens the overall reliability of physics-informed learning.

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

Quantum Resources and Wigner Symmetry in Nucleon-Nucleon Scattering from Effective Field Theory

arXiv:2606.17148v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study quantum resources in the spin degrees of freedom, such as entanglement, stabilizer magic, and non-local magic, in low-energy nucleon-nucleon scattering through next-to-leading order in pionless effective field theory. Treating each nucleon spin as a qubit, we calculate the corresponding resource-generating powers of the scattering operator at generic center-of-mass momentum and scattering angle $\Theta$. The analysis retains $S$- and $P$-wave channels generated by two-derivative contact interactions. When the microscopic physics exhibits Wigner's $SU(4)$ spin-flavor symmetry, the neutron-proton amplitude becomes proportional to the spin-space identity operator and therefore generates no new resources after scattering, extending an observation previously made for leading-order $S$-wave scattering. The same-nucleon channel remains resource-generating because constraints from identical particles project out part of the Hilbert space. These results show how enhanced symmetries, partial-wave structure, and resource generation are intertwined in low-energy two-body scattering.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The impact of changes in age-based eligibility criteria on seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in England between 2019 and 2024: A retrospective cohort study

Objectives: To examine changes in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake among clinical risk groups over periods of differing age-based eligibility. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Individuals in England registered in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum. Participants: Between 1,239,802 (2019/20) and 1,289,330 (2023/24) individuals aged 40-69 years in clinical risk groups. Interventions: Natural experiment involving temporary expansion of age-based eligibility for influenza vaccination to include 50-64-year-olds from 2020/21 to 2022/23. Main outcome measures: Influenza vaccine uptake from 1st September to 28th February, incidence rate ratio (IRR) of vaccine uptake across consecutive seasons within age groups, and the ratio of IRRs between age groups. Results: Influenza vaccine uptake increased in all age groups in 2020/21 relative to 2019/20. The increase was larger in individuals aged 50-64 years (13.3%; IRR 1.50, 95% CI 1.50-1.51) compared with those aged 40-49 years (8.3%; IRR 1.35, 95% CI 1.34-1.35) and 65-69 years (6.8%; IRR 1.34, 95% CI 1.33-1.35). From 2020/21 to 2022/23, vaccine uptake decreased, with a more pronounced decline among those aged 40-49 years (-5.4%) compared with age-eligible groups (50-64 years: -3.0%; 65-69 years: -3.1%). The reversion of age eligibility in 2023/24 was associated with a larger decrease in uptake among those aged 50-64 years (-9.6% vs 2022/23; IRR 0.79, 95% CI: 0.79-0.79) compared with those aged 40-49 years (-4.9%; IRR 0.87, 95% CI: 0.87-0.88) and 65-69 years (-3.3%; IRR 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96-0.97). Patterns were broadly consistent across clinical risk groups. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic saw a general increase in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in clinical risk groups. This increase was larger and more sustained in 50-64 year-olds who had also become eligible based on age. Our findings highlight the potential gains in vaccine coverage among clinical risk groups based on expanded age-based eligibility.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

FinSTaR: Towards Financial Reasoning with Time Series Reasoning Models

arXiv:2605.03460v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time series (TS) reasoning models (TSRMs) have shown promising capabilities in general domains, yet they consistently fail in the financial domain, which exhibits unique characteristics. We propose a general 2 x 2 capability taxonomy for TSRMs by crossing 1) single-entity vs. multi-entity analysis with 2) assessment of the current state vs. prediction of future behavior. We instantiate this taxonomy in the financial domain-where the distinction between deterministic assessment and stochastic prediction is particularly critical-as ten financial reasoning tasks, forming the FinTSR-Bench benchmark based on S&P stocks. To this end, we propose FinSTaR (Financial Time Series Thinking and Reasoning), trained on FinTSR-Bench with distinct chain-of-thought (CoT) strategies tailored to each category. For assessment, which is deterministic (i.e., computable from observable data), we employ Compute-in-CoT, a programmatic CoT that enables models to derive answers directly from raw prices. For prediction, which is inherently stochastic (i.e., subject to unobservable factors), we adopt Scenario-Aware CoT, which generates diverse scenarios before making a judgment, mirroring how financial analysts reason under uncertainty. The proposed method achieves 78.9% average accuracy on FinTSR-Bench, substantially outperforming LLM and TSRM baselines. Furthermore, we show that the four capability categories are complementary and mutually reinforcing through joint training, and that Scenario-Aware CoT consistently improves prediction accuracy over standard CoT. Code is available at https://github.com/seunghan96/FinSTaR.