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

Quantized time in quantum walks under weak rank-K measurements

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Measurements can be used to monitor the evolution of quantum systems and may lead to a universally quantized time statistics. It is known that the mean return time is quantized for strong and indirect monitoring through the winding number of the return amplitude in a one-dimensional space. Here we discuss that under multi-channel strong or indirect monitoring, where the latter is achieved through ancilla coupling, the mean return time of a quantum walk in the projected subspace is also quantized. This reflects a universal time quantization for a higher dimensional evolution.

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

Protein-Based Fish Species Identification: Dataset, Models, and Insights from Native Bangladeshi Fish

arXiv:2606.18302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Correct identification of fish species is highly significant for food security, economic development, and climate resilience in Bangladesh. Protein sequences directly reflect functional and evolutionary constraints which are important for species authentication and biodiversity monitoring. Yet there exists no benchmark for native Bangladeshi fish species identification from protein sequence. In this study, we addressed this gap by introducing the first curated dataset for nine native Bangladeshi fish species of 2845 high quality protein sequences. We also established the first protein sequence classification baseline for this domain through a systematic benchmarking of seven architectural paradigms. Moreover, we propose a realistic deployable novel hybrid architecture of MotifCNN and Transformer with Terminal-Aware Positional-Encoding (MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE). Our novel architecture achieves 79.80% accuracy with macro-F1 of 0.80. The highest 83.04% accuracy is achieved by finetuned protein language model ProtBERT that has 420M parameters and requires dual 16GB GPUs for inference. According to McNemar's test, ProtBERT's 3.24% accuracy gain over our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is statistically insignificant (p = 0.1120). Our novel architecture beats it among six of the nine classes in per class identification. Also our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is approximately 5x faster, 42x smaller, and supports 16x larger batch size than ProtBERT and has GPU free inference, making it more practical for deployment in resources constrained areas such as rural Bangladesh. Beyond this, our foundational work shows effects of phylogenetic relationships on sequence similarity and establishes pathways for fisheries management, food authentication and biodiversity conservation in South Asia's protein dependent economy.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Innate immunity associates with protection from pneumococcal colonisation, but colonisation does not confer capsule-independent protection

Nasopharyngeal colonisation with Streptococcus pneumoniae is a prerequisite for transmission and disease and represents an important immunising event. While colonisation induces serotype-specific immunity, the mechanisms underlying heterologous protection remain unclear. We developed a controlled human infection model using pneumococcal serotype 15B and investigated colonisation dynamics, immunogenicity, and cross-protection against subsequent heterologous challenge with serotype 6B. Fifty-four healthy adults were intranasally inoculated with 15B at escalating doses. Colonisation rates peaked at 31.4% with 8 x 10 CFU per naris, lower than those historically observed with 6B and 3 strains. Density was also lower than previously observed with other strains. In vitro assays demonstrated that 15B adhered more readily to epithelial cells than 6B, but was less efficiently internalised, potentially reducing attack rates and colonisation density. Colonisation with 15B induced capsular polysaccharide-specific serum IgG, but baseline humoral immune measures did not predict protection from acquisition. Prior colonisation with 15B did not reduce acquisition of 6B upon re-challenge. Analysis of nasal microbiopsy samples revealed distinct innate activation signatures. Resistance to colonisation was associated with elevated baseline MIP-1 and MIP-1{beta} responses upon in vitro stimulation, whereas carriage was associated with enhanced chemokine and IL-6 responses. Local innate immune activation, rather than circulating antibody responses alone, may therefore contribute to colonisation control. We demonstrate that experimental colonisation with 15B does not confer heterologous protection against 6B and highlight the importance of mucosal innate immune conditioning in serotype-independent defence. Strategies enhancing nasal innate immune recruitment and activation may be required for broader protection against pneumococcal colonisation.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Moments in Rough Bergomi and Boundary Attainment in Rough Heston

arXiv:2606.07482v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We address two open questions in the rough volatility literature. First, we prove finite positive moments for the rough Bergomi price process, and for a wider class of Gaussian Volterra Bergomi models, in the whole subcritical range under negative correlation. More precisely, if \(\rho\in[-1,0)\), then \(\E[S_T^p]

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Preserved Medial Temporal Lobe Flexibility Predicts Memory Generalization Only in the Context of Good Sleep Quality among Older African Americans

Objectives: Poor sleep quality is a risk factor for Alzheimer's disease (AD). Older African Americans experience disproportionately high rates of sleep disturbance and AD. Medial temporal lobe (MTL) flexibility reflects dynamic neural reorganization and may be a marker of generalization performance. This study examined whether sleep quality moderates the association between MTL flexibility and memory generalization. Methods: Fifty older African Americans (MeanAge=69.7{+/-}6.21 years; 80% women) underwent rs-fMRI to quantify MTL flexibility, Rutgers Acquired Equivalence Task for memory generalization, and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index for sleep quality. Results: Greater MTL flexibility was associated with better generalization (r=0.367, p=.017). Good sleepers showed higher MTL flexibility (F(1,44)=8.11, p2=.156, p=.007) and superior generalization (F(1,46)= 12.33, p2=.211, p=.001). Sleep quality significantly moderated the MTL flexibility and generalization relationship ({beta}=-1.519, p=.012). Conclusions: Preserved MTL flexibility may confer generalization only in good sleepers, suggesting that sleep disturbance may disrupt the MTL neural resilience among older African Americans.

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

AutoSpec: Safety Rule Evolution for LLM Agents via Inductive Logic Programming

arXiv:2606.24245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate complex tasks by integrating language models with external tools and environments. However, their autonomy poses significant safety risks: agents may execute destructive commands, leak sensitive data, or violate domain constraints. Existing safety approaches face a fundamental tradeoff: hand-crafted rules are interpretable but brittle, with overly conservative rules blocking safe operations (high false positives) while permissive rules miss unsafe behaviors (high false negatives). Neural classifiers lack the interpretability required for safety-critical deployments. We present AutoSpec, a framework that automatically evolves deployed expert-designed safety rules from user safe/unsafe annotations through counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS) guided by inductive logic programming (ILP). Starting from the expert rules and a stream of annotated traces, AutoSpec iteratively evaluates rules, mines false-positive and false-negative counterexamples, uses ILP to learn which predicates discriminate them, generates candidate rule edits, and verifies candidates to select the best revision. The key insight is that ILP efficiently identifies predicates that appear frequently in false negatives but rarely in false positives (or vice versa), dramatically pruning the exponential search space of rule edits. This continues until convergence, producing interpretable rules that balance precision and recall. We evaluate AutoSpec on 291 execution traces spanning code execution and embodied agent domains. AutoSpec raises rule F1 to 0.98 and 0.93 across the two domains, achieving up to 94% false positive reduction while maintaining high recall, and converges within 4-5 iterations. The ILP-guided approach achieves up to 4.8x higher F1 than heuristic CEGIS. The learned rules are human-readable, auditable, and generalize to unseen scenarios.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Web-based education on Metabolism and Obesity is associated with improved lifestyle and health behaviours among Brazilian school teachers

Background: Obesity is a major global public health challenge, and teachers play a critical role in school-based health promotion. This study examined the perceived impact of a web-based educational program on metabolism and obesity delivered to Brazilian school teachers. Methods: This analytical cross-sectional study included 217 teachers who responded to the evaluation questionnaire after attending the course between 2017 and 2022. Statistical analyses included logistic regression and chi-square tests. Findings: Course completion rate was 81.98%, substantially exceeding the 5-15% typical of global MOOCs. However, ethnic disparities were observed: White respondents were 4.95 times more likely to complete the course than Black respondents (p=0.00097) and Brown respondents were 3.05 times more likely (p=0.0268) than Black respondents. Among non-completers, lack of time (64.7%) was the primary barrier. Participation was concentrated in Sao Paulo (77%), with no respondents from three northern states. Perceived difficulty showed a non-significant trend (p=0.0893) where by Black respondents had the lowest predicted difficulty; the most challenging course material was Scientific Content/Reading papers (50%). Completion was strongly associated with applying learned activities in teaching (p

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

HG-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Page Handwritten Answer-Region Grounding in Automated Homework Assessment

Automated homework assessment depends not only on recognizing student answers, but also on accurately locating where each answer and each intermediate reasoning step appears in noisy, multi-page handwritten work. This paper addresses the missing evaluation setting of page-aware, two-level answer-region grounding: given a sequence of homework page images, a model must localize complete answer regions and their ordered step-level subregions. We introduce HG-Bench, a benchmark of 500 human-annotated K-12 homework samples curated from a 1,489,278-image source pool, with question-level and step-level boxes linked by a hierarchical containment constraint. HG-Bench is paired with a page-aware evaluation protocol that separately measures complete-answer localization (FA) and step-level decomposition (FSm), revealing whether models truly ground the spatial structure of student reasoning rather than merely parse visible text. Across frontier closed-source APIs and competitive open-weight VLMs, no zero-shot system exceeds 55.22% on FA or 48.22% on FSm, while a GLM-4.6V 9B reference model fine-tuned on ~10k in-domain examples reaches 74.97/72.26. These results identify step-level handwritten grounding as a concrete capability gap and provide a reproducible benchmark, evaluation protocol, and trained reference point for future work on automated homework assessment.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

MultiMolecule: a modular ecosystem for biomolecular sequence-model workflows

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16540v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Biomolecular sequence models are increasingly reused outside the studies in which they were introduced, but public checkpoints rarely preserve the execution context needed to inspect source-defined behavior, adapt models to new assays, compare models under shared task definitions or deploy biological predictions. MultiMolecule is an open-source Python ecosystem that turns heterogeneous RNA, DNA and protein sequence-model releases into complete, source-checked model-family implementations with shared loading, workflow and prediction interfaces. The Resource state reported here includes 53 complete model-family implementations with 112 standardized model checkpoints, together with 16 curated dataset resources released through 39 public dataset repositories and 10 user-facing prediction pipelines. Standardized components are linked to source provenance, conversion or preparation code, source-reference checks, Extended Data summaries and public documentation, allowing users to inspect what was standardized, what behavior was checked and how each component enters training, evaluation, inference or deployment. By shifting reuse from repository-specific checkpoints to executable implementations connected to standardized checkpoints, curated datasets, Runner workflows and biological prediction pipelines, MultiMolecule provides common infrastructure for preserving source-defined model behavior, adapting models to new assays, enabling controlled evaluation and deploying biomolecular predictions.

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

Connecting Quantum Tomography and Quantum Retrodiction

arXiv:2606.23777v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum tomography and quantum retrodiction are traditionally viewed as separate inference tasks: tomography reconstructs quantum states from measurement data, whereas retrodiction infers past quantum states from observed outcomes. We show that the two are manifestations of the same underlying principle. We prove that the Petz recovery map associated with a measurement channel is precisely the gradient update of the log-likelihood used in maximum-likelihood tomography. Consequently, repeated applications of the Petz map monotonically increase the likelihood. Extending beyond measurement channels, we derive a noncommutative generalization of the Petz map from the gradient of a generalized likelihood for arbitrary quantum channels. The resulting iterative procedure maximizes the likelihood and provides a general framework for quantum tomography, establishing a direct bridge between retrodiction, recovery maps, and statistical inference.

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

Integrated Sensing and Communications for Real-time Avatar Control in XR over 5G

arXiv:2606.23771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extended Reality (XR) presents a challenging use case for 5G and 6G networks, requiring high data-rates and lowlatency communication to deliver a truly immersive experience. Moreover, in order to seamlessly translate physical actions to the virtual world, accurate gesture recognition and pose estimation are required. Current XR interaction solutions based on handheld controllers and cameras cannot easily capture full-body poses, inhibit the free use of hands, and require good visibility and a clear line of sight. In this work, we propose a multimodal sensing architecture for XR that combines 5G MillimeterWave (mmWave) Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and surface electromyography (sEMG) signals. 5G mmWave ISAC cannot only be used to deliver content wirelessly to the Head-mounted display (HMD), but also the same communication signals can be used to derive coarse body-level gestures and poses of the user, to support real-time avatar control. For fine-grained finger-level gestures, our architecture leverages lightweight sEMG sensors that capture forearm muscle activity. To illustrate the need of both modalities, we present evaluations of both sensing technologies. At the body level (5G), our architecture relies on power-per-beam-pair (PPBP), which can be computed from standard beam management or beam sweeping procedures of the 5G NR standard. PPBP-based sensing achieves 82.2$\pm$5.9% average accuracy when evaluated on users not seen during training. For fine-grained finger-level interactions, we show that surface electromyography (sEMG) carries strong discriminative information achieving consistent promising performance across different movement settings. Thus, combining the two modalities enables multi-scale gesture recognition, at the body level via existing 5G signals and finger level via lightweight sEMG sensors, forming a complete XR framework.

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

Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling for Non-Stationary Contextual Bandits

arXiv:2606.23933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study non-stationary linear contextual bandits where the reward model drifts over time, rendering classical contextual bandit algorithms brittle because historical data becomes systematically biased. We propose Flow-Corrected Thompson Sampling (fcTS), a Bayesian method that reuses experience by transporting past rewards to the present using an explicit drift model and incorporating each transported observation with a confidence weight that reflects transport reliability. This yields a unified template that specializes in (i) linear parameter drift via online slope estimation and reward correction, (ii) periodic variation via phase-aware reuse across cycles, and (iii) recurring regime switches via changepoint detection and regime-specific posterior memory. The resulting posterior updates remain closed-form under a linear Gaussian model and can be implemented efficiently with truncated, incrementally updated sufficient statistics. Across five controlled case studies and a semi-synthetic portfolio-selection benchmark with multiple overlapping non-stationarities, fcTS outperforms standard forgetting-based baselines (discounting, sliding windows, and periodic restarts), with the largest gains in settings exhibiting recurring temporal structure. These results demonstrate that when non-stationarity is structured, correcting and reweighting historical observations can be substantially more sample-efficient than uniformly discarding them.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A theory of learning data statistics in diffusion models, from easy to hard

arXiv:2603.12901v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While diffusion models have emerged as a powerful class of generative models, their learning dynamics remain poorly understood. We address this issue first by empirically showing that standard diffusion models trained on natural images exhibit a distributional simplicity bias, learning simple, pair-wise input statistics before specializing to higher-order correlations. We reproduce this behaviour in simple denoisers trained on a minimal data model, the mixed cumulant model, where we precisely control both pair-wise and higher-order correlations of the inputs. We identify a scalar invariant of the model that governs the sample complexity of learning pair-wise and higher-order correlations that we call the diffusion information exponent, in analogy to related invariants in different learning paradigms. Using this invariant, we prove that the denoiser learns simple, pair-wise statistics of the inputs at linear sample complexity, while more complex higher-order statistics, such as the fourth cumulant, require at least cubic sample complexity. We also prove that the sample complexity of learning the fourth cumulant is linear if pair-wise and higher-order statistics share a correlated latent structure. Our work describes a key mechanism for how diffusion models can learn distributions of increasing complexity.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

MemSlides: A Hierarchical Memory Driven Agent Framework for Personalized Slide Generation with Multi-turn Local Revision

Personalized presentation generation requires more than conditioning on a current prompt or template: agents must preserve stable user preferences across tasks, retain newly introduced preferences and constraints during multi-turn revision, and carry out local edits reliably. We propose MemSlides, a hierarchical memory framework for personalized presentation agents that separates long-term memory from working memory and further divides long-term memory into user profile memory and tool memory. User profile memory stores intent-conditioned profiles for round-0 personalization, working memory carries active preferences and session constraints across revision rounds, and tool memory stores reusable execution experience for reliable localized editing. MemSlides pairs this memory design with scoped slide-local revision, so targeted updates act on the smallest affected region instead of repeatedly regenerating the full deck. In controlled experiments, user profile memory improves persona-alignment judgments on a multi-persona, multi-intent profile bank, tool-memory injection improves closed-loop modify behavior in diagnostic matched-pair settings, and qualitative cases illustrate working memory's ability to carryover preferences. Taken together, these results suggest that effective personalization in presentation authoring depends on separating persistent user profiles, session-level working memory, and reusable execution experience across generation and localized revision.

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

LoRA-Muon: Spectral Steepest Descent on the Low-Rank Manifold

arXiv:2606.12921v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) significantly reduces compute and memory costs for finetuning Deep Learning models but is often harder to tune than dense training: when using factor-wise optimizers such as AdamW, it is sensitive to initialization choices, its optimal learning rates transfer poorly across ranks, and it often fails to beat dense baselines. We derive LoRA-Muon by applying the Muon optimizer's spectral steepest-descent rule to the low-rank setting. Along with our split weight-decay rule, our main claim is that LoRA-Muon is a good low-rank proxy for full-rank Muon and Shampoo-family optimizers. Its optimal learning rates transfer across rank, width, depth, and factor-rescaling. In our compute-matched TinyShakespeare study, a rank-$2$ proxy recovers the dense best tested learning rate, and a rank-$32$ LoRA-Muon run attains lower mean validation loss than the dense baseline in the seed-averaged sweep. We further show that the Spectron optimizer depends on arbitrary factor scaling, so it would likely be a poor fit when finetuning starts from badly imbalanced factors, and that LoRA-RITE's simplified QR-coordinate core implements the same spectral update. LoRA-Muon computes that update without QR-decomposition and avoids storing second moments, making it more accelerator-friendly and memory-efficient.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mixed-State Topological Order under Coherent Noise

arXiv:2411.03441v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mixed-state phases of matter under local decoherence have recently garnered significant attention due to the ubiquitous presence of noise in current quantum processors. One of the key issues is understanding how topological quantum memory is affected by realistic coherent noise, such as random rotation noise and amplitude-damping noise. In this work, we investigate the intrinsic error threshold of the two-dimensional toric code (TC), a paradigmatic topological quantum memory, under these types of coherent noise by employing both analytical and numerical methods based on the doubled-Hilbert-space formalism. A connection between the mixed-state phase of the decohered TC and a non-Hermitian Ashkin-Teller-type statistical-mechanics model is established, and the mixed-state phase diagrams under the coherent noise are obtained. We find remarkable stability of mixed-state topological order under random rotation noise with axes near the $Y$-axis of qubits. We also identify intriguing extended critical regions at the phase boundaries, highlighting a connection with non-Hermitian physics. We argue that these phase boundaries provide upper bounds for the intrinsic error threshold, beyond which quantum error correction becomes impossible. We complement these findings by estimating the error thresholds for random rotation noise under standard quantum error correction, thereby providing lower bounds on the intrinsic error threshold.

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

Audited Conformal Prediction for Classification under Unknown Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.14909v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of uncertainty quantification for a pretrained classification model deployed under unknown distribution shift. We propose Audited Conformal Prediction (ACP), a method that leverages a small labeled dataset from the target population to train an auxiliary audit model identifying inputs where the legacy model is likely to fail. By integrating the audit model's outputs into the conformal prediction framework, ACP produces prediction sets that guarantee marginal coverage while achieving substantially higher conditional coverage in practice than existing approaches. We develop and analyze two complementary integration strategies – one targeting marginal coverage with improved conditional performance, the other providing explicit group-conditional coverage guarantees – and establish theoretical guarantees for both. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets validate the method and illustrate trade-offs between prediction set size and conditional coverage.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-25

Itô's Formula for It\^{o} processes defined with respect to a cylindrical-martingale valued measure

arXiv:2407.16086v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Using the authors' recently developed stochastic integration [Stoch PDE: Anal Comp, 2024], we prove an It\^{o} formula for Hilbert space-valued It\^{o} processes defined with respect to a cylindrical martingale-valued measure. We develop some tools from stochastic analysis, as are the predictable and optional quadratic variation of a stochastic integral, the continuous and purely discontinuous parts of an integral process, and a Riemann representation formula. As an application of our It\^{o} formula, we prove a Burkholder inequality for the stochastic integral defined with respect to a cylindrical martingale-valued measure. Finally, we derive It\^{o} formulas for Hilbert space-valued martingale-valued measures and for cylindrical square integrable martingales.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Volterra Generative Models

arXiv:2606.18071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Score-based diffusion models typically use Brownian perturbations, which provide tractable reverse-time dynamics but impose memoryless noising. We introduce Volterra generative models, a continuous-time score-based framework whose forward process injects path-dependent noise through fractional kernels. To handle the non-Markovian and non-semimartingale dynamics, we construct finite-dimensional Markovian lifts using Gaussian quadrature in both regimes and a hybrid finite-difference exponential approximation in the smooth regime. We prove squared error bounds, derive an augmented linear-Gaussian forward process, and show that the learning can remain data-dimensional by considering residual states and analytic auxiliary Gaussian scores. We also identify covariance and reverse-time degeneracies caused by shared Brownian factors and signed smooth-regime weights. The degeneracy motivates stabilized conditioning and, for stiff larger lifts, a Gaussian-bridge reconstruction sampler. Experiments on MNIST and CIFAR-10 show that persistent fractional perturbations with small Markovian lifts can improve score-based generation on MNIST and provide a promising extension to natural images, while the bridge sampler provides a stability mechanism for larger lifts.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

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

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

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

Virtual Speech Therapist: A Clinician-in-the-Loop AI Speech Therapy Agent for Personalized and Supervised Therapy

This paper develops Virtual Speech Therapist (VST), an intelligent agent-based platform that streamlines stuttering assessment and delivers customized therapy planning through automated and adaptive AI-driven workflows. VST integrates state-of-the-art deep learning-based stuttering classification, and multi-agent large language model (LLM) reasoning to support evidence-based clinical decision-making. The VST begins with the acquisition and feature extraction of patient speech samples, followed by robust classification of stuttering types. Building on these outputs, VST initiates an agentic reasoning process in which specialized LLM agents autonomously generate, critique, and iteratively refine individualized therapy plans. A dedicated critic agent evaluates all generated therapy plans to ensure clinical safety, methodological soundness, and alignment with peer-reviewed evidence and established professional guidelines. The resulting output is a comprehensive, patient-specific therapy draft intended for clinician review. Incorporating clinician feedback, the system then produces a finalized therapy plan suitable for patient delivery, thereby maintaining a clinician-in-the-loop paradigm. Experimental evaluation by expert speech therapists confirms that VST consistently generates high-quality, evidence-based therapy recommendations. These findings demonstrate the system's potential to augment clinical workflows, reduce clinician burden, and improve therapeutic outcomes for individuals with speech impairments. An interactive user interface for the proposed system is available online at: https://vocametrix.com/ai/stuttering-therapy-planning-agent , facilitating real-time stuttering assessment and personalized therapy planning.

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

Compositional Reasoning Depth Predicts Clinical AI Failure: Empirical Evidence Consistent with Transformer Compositionality Limits in Electronic Health Record Question Answering

Authors:

Aggregate accuracy benchmarks conceal a systematic structure in how large language models fail at electronic health record (EHR) question answering: questions requiring more inferential steps produce disproportionately more errors. Motivated by theoretical results on transformer compositionality limits, we introduce a pre-specified hop-count taxonomy – the number of distinct reasoning steps required to answer a clinical question from an EHR – as a principled predictor of model failure. We annotate 313 clinician-generated MedAlign EHR question-answer pairs across four hop levels and evaluate 301 questions in a within-model ablation (claude-sonnet-4-6, zero-shot vs. extended thinking) and cross-architecture replications (gpt-4o and gpt-5.4-2026-03-05, zero-shot). All three models, spanning two providers and two OpenAI generations (GPT-4 and GPT-5), show monotone accuracy decline with hop count: Claude Sonnet zero-shot falls from 30.6% (hop=1) to 17.6% (hop=4) (Cochran-Armitage z=-2.30, p=0.011; OR per hop 0.72, 95% CI [0.56,0.92], p=0.008); GPT-4o replicates this (37.8% to 14.7%; OR 0.58 [0.45,0.75], p

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Instantaneous-Frequency EEG Microstate Dynamics Stratify Motor Subtypes in Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) is clinically heterogeneous, yet objective electrophysiological markers of its postural-instability/gait-difficulty (PIGD) and tremor-dominant (TD) motor subtypes are lacking. We tested whether the temporal dynamics of instantaneous-frequency (IF) microstates in resting-state electroencephalography (EEG) distinguish these subtypes from each other and from healthy controls (HC). In a publicly available cohort (OpenNeuro ds007526) comprising 28 HC and 97 PD patients classified as PIGD (n=50) or TD (n=47), the spatial distribution of the IF was reduced by principal component analysis and modeled with a Gaussian hidden Markov model, yielding three recurrent microstates. Per-participant mean dwell time, occupancy, and state-transition probabilities were compared across the three groups and, within PD, correlated with clinical scores. We found that the dynamics of one microstate varied systematically across groups: its dwell time, occupancy, and self-transition probability increased monotonically from HC through TD to PIGD, while outgoing transitions decreased, so that the state became an increasingly persistent attractor. For dwell time, all three pairwise contrasts survived correction (HC versus PIGD, Hedges' g=1.06; HC versus TD, g=0.59; PIGD versus TD, g=0.40). None of the dynamic indices was associated with clinical severity, disease duration, or medication dose within PD. IF-microstate dynamics thus stratify the PD motor subtypes along a graded continuum without tracking continuous disease severity. The approach offers a candidate objective EEG marker for motor-subtype stratification, complementing spectral characterizations of PD.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Neural network decoder confidence as a learned proxy for the logical gap

arXiv:2606.08758v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: To utilize quantum error-correcting codes, a decoder must infer the logical sector from the measured syndrome. Beyond producing a hard logical decision, some decoders provide soft information that estimates the reliability of that decision. For minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), a common confidence measure is the complementary, or logical, gap. Here we test whether the logit of a graph neural network (GNN) decoder can act as a learned proxy for the logical gap. Using a pretrained GNN for the rotated surface code under uniform circuit-level noise [Physical Review Research, 7(2):023181, 2025], we compare its soft output with the MWPM complementary gap on the same sampled syndromes. We find that post-selection based on the GNN logit yields a lower logical error rate than one based on the MWPM gap. Shot-by-shot, the signed GNN confidence distribution resembles the signed MWPM gap at low and intermediate values, but assigns higher confidence to many correctly decoded shots. While both scores approximate the posterior log-likelihood ratio, the GNN confidence magnitude is closer to its ideal value. These results show that a neural-network decoder trained only on syndromes and logical labels learns both gap-like discrimination and a quantitative confidence scale, enabling confidence-based post-selection when MWPM gap estimates are unavailable, costly, or poorly matched to the noise model.

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

The Almost Intelligent Revolution: Options for Scaling Up Deliberation and Empowering People with AI

Authors:

The increasing prominence of Large Language Models (LLMs) in public discourse presents both opportunities and challenges for democratic deliberation. While red teaming strategies help mitigate specific risks, broader concerns persist regarding linguistic constraints, biases, and the sycophantic tendencies of LLMs. This chapter explores how LLMs can be used to significantly scale up and democratise deliberation, particularly in fostering inclusivity and empowering traditionally marginalised groups. Drawing on concepts from Systemic-Functional Linguistics, the chapter examines how variations across language users (for example, with respect to socio-demographic groups) and across language use (for example, with respect to communicative functions) shape participation in AI-supported deliberation. The chapter presents AI-driven deliberation studies and assesses their potential to scaffold argumentation, enhance access, and reduce the influence of exclusionary linguistic norms and biases which are embedded in prestigious registers. At the same time, the chapter cautions against both overclaiming, which leads to unrealistic expectations, and underclaiming, which risks missed opportunities for AI-assisted engagement. The chapter concludes by identifying future research directions to maximise the democratic potential of AI-assisted participation while embedding ethical safeguards to counteract the reproduction of linguistic inequalities.