中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

The Register Gap: A Meaning Intelligence Framework for Nigerian Public Discourse

Authors:
Celestine Achi↗

We introduce the Meaning Intelligence Framework (MIF), a nine-dimension annotation and evaluation schema for Nigerian public discourse that separates surface sentiment from true communicative intent. Existing benchmarks for Nigerian languages, including NaijaSenti and AfriSenti, treat sentiment classification as a three-way polarity task (positive, negative, neutral). We argue that the dominant failure mode of AI systems on Nigerian discourse is not translation failure but context failure: the same utterance carries opposite pragmatic force depending on speaker, audience, and situation. The MIF operationalises this insight across nine scored dimensions: register, surface sentiment, true intent, irony, coded subtext, risk tier, annotator confidence, speaker emotion, and recommended communications action. We construct a 30-item calibration dataset spanning Standard English, Nigerian English, Nigerian Pidgin, and code-mixed registers, and evaluate a frontier language model (Gemini 2.5 Flash) under zero-shot and schema-informed prompting conditions. The headline finding is the Register Gap: zero-shot register classification accuracy is 33.3%, rising to 73.3% (+40 points) when the model receives the MIF schema in-context. The composite Meaning Intelligence Score increases by 5.4 points (73.2 to 78.6) under schema-informed prompting, with the largest practical gains in register identification, coded-subtext detection (+10 points), and strategic action recommendation (+10.3 points). We release the framework specification, annotation guidelines, and the 30-item public calibration set to support reproducibility, while retaining a private holdout corpus for contamination-protected evaluation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Emotional regulation improves deep learning-based image classification

Authors:
Riccardo Emanuele Landi↗Jo\~ao M. F. Rodrigues↗Marta Chinnici↗

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

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning What to Say to Your VLA: Mostly Harmless Vision Language Action Model Steering

Authors:
Hyun Joe Jeong↗Gokul Swamy↗Andrea Bajcsy↗

arXiv:2606.12299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models provide a natural language interface to robot control, but the mapping from language to behavior is often brittle and unintuitive: semantically similar instructions can induce drastically different behaviors, while some capabilities may not be elicitable through prompting alone. As a result, both human instructions and zero-shot language models can fail to reliably steer VLAs toward successful task execution. In this work, we propose a framework that interactively searches for language sequences that improve closed-loop VLA task performance, distills these sequences into a test-time language feedback policy (LFP), and learns an improvement head that predicts when language steering will improve performance. We conformalize this improvement head to prevent harmful steering interventions, where the LFP decreases task performance relative to the original instruction on out-of-distribution scenarios. Crucially, our approach operates on arbitrary frozen pre-trained VLAs, requiring neither access to the original training distribution nor fine-tuning of the underlying model. On seen environments, our conformalized LFP improves base VLA performance by 24.7% in simulation and 65.0% in hardware. On visual and semantic perturbations, our conformalized LFP has strong harmlessness guarantees, and produces recovery behaviors not observed with open-loop prompting.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Enhancing Underwater Light Field Images via Global Geometry-aware Diffusion Process

Authors:
Yuji Lin↗Qian Zhao↗Zongsheng Yue↗Junhui Hou↗Deyu Meng↗

This work studies the challenging problem of acquiring high-quality underwater images via 4-D light field (LF) imaging. To this end, we propose GeoDiff-LF, a novel diffusion-based framework built upon SD-Turbo to enhance underwater 4-D LF imaging by leveraging its spatial-angular structure. GeoDiff-LF consists of three key adaptations: (1) a modified U-Net architecture with convolutional and attention adapters to model geometric cues, (2) a geometry-guided loss function using tensor decomposition and progressive weighting to regularize global structure, and (3) an optimized sampling strategy with noise prediction to improve efficiency. By integrating diffusion priors and LF geometry, GeoDiff-LF effectively mitigates color distortion in underwater scenes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework outperforms existing methods across both visual fidelity and quantitative performance, advancing the state-of-the-art in enhancing underwater imaging. The code will be publicly available at https://github.com/linlos1234/GeoDiff-LF.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Multi-entropy in heavy local quenches

Authors:
Kosei Fujiki↗Kenya Tasuki↗

arXiv:2606.12526v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the time evolution of tripartite entanglement in heavy local quenches in two-dimensional holographic conformal field theories. Our diagnostic is the genuine multi-entropy of adjacent intervals, computed from both bulk and boundary perspectives. A perturbative bulk analysis shows that the first-order small-mass perturbation around the vacuum geodesic network cancels identically at any time after the quench. In the fully back-reacted geometry, a vacuum-subtracted genuine multi-entropy arises from a mismatch between the winding selected by the trivalent geodesic network and the windings selected independently by the pairwise geodesics. In the sharp quench limit, the time dependence of genuine multi-entropy is kinematically fixed to logarithms of rational functions of time and is independent of the heavy operator dimension. The CFT calculation reproduces the same formula within the heavy-light vacuum block approximation, where the branch choice in the heavy-background uniformization map corresponds to the winding selection in the bulk. These results indicate that, in this setup, the genuine multi-entropy is controlled by global saddle selection, rather than by a local energy response or quasiparticle propagation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Surrogate-Assisted Framework for SI-Compliant Interconnect Design Optimization Using the Earth Mover's Distance

Authors:
Emre Ecik↗Werner John↗Julian With\"oft↗Ralf Br\"uning↗J\"urgen G\"otze↗

arXiv:2606.15234v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a deterministic, machine-assisted framework for SI-compliant PCB design based on the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). In contrast to conventional surrogate-based optimization methods that rely on iterative black-box search procedures, the proposed approach follows an interpretable, sequential evaluation strategy. Neural surrogate models are first used to efficiently predict waveform describing features from topology-dependent design parameters. A decision tree then acts as a physically motivated quality gate that identifies SI-compliant waveforms according to predefined SI criteria. Within the resulting valid solution space, the Earth Mover's Distance is employed as a similarity metric to rank candidate designs according to their proximity to an ideal reference signal. This enables not only the deterministic identification of admissible parameter regions but also a transparent prioritization of physically superior solutions without inverse modeling or stochastic search procedures. The methodology is demonstrated using a large-scale set of simulated DDR3 fly-by waveforms. By combining surrogate prediction, interpretable classification, and EMD-based waveform evaluation, the framework provides an explainable and computationally efficient alternative to conventional optimization strategies for supporting PCB development with AI-based methods.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Entanglement structure of the dynamical phases in the sub-Ohmic spin-boson model

Authors:
Cunxi Gong↗Zirui Sheng↗Weitang Li↗

arXiv:2606.20313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The sub-Ohmic spin-boson model exhibits three distinct dynamical regimes in its spin population dynamics, classified as coherent, incoherent, and pseudo-coherent. Whether these regimes correspond to distinct spin-bath entanglement structures remains an open question. Here we address this using tree tensor network states with projector-splitting time evolution (TTN-TDVP-PS), scanning a broad grid in the sub-Ohmic $(s, \alpha)$ plane. We find that the spin entanglement entropy $S_\mathrm{spin}(t)$ reaches a stationary plateau on a timescale shorter than the polarization relaxation, enabling construction of a stationary entropy landscape from the stationary value $S_\mathrm{stable}$. Within this scalar entropy landscape, the entropy ridge broadly follows the population-based phase boundary at small $s$, but does not reproduce the two-branch structure at large $s$. The ridge remains single-valued within the incoherent region rather than separately tracking both population-based transitions. The Bloch-sphere representation provides a geometric interpretation of this behavior. The entropy plateau corresponds to trajectories settling onto constant-radius shells, with the ridge marking the parameters of smallest stationary Bloch radius. Mode-resolved bath entanglement shows that low-frequency modes dominate the environmental entropy scale and that coherent dynamics enhance bath-mode correlations beyond direct spin–mode correlations. These results establish the stationary spin entanglement entropy as a physically informative observable that complements population-based classifications of dissipative quantum dynamics.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Post-Launch Capability Expansion of Vision-Language Models via Prompting for On-Orbit Spacecraft Inspection

Authors:
Nicholas A. Welsh↗Lennon J. Shikhman↗Monty Nehru Attazs↗Seemanthini K. Putane↗Van Minh Nguyen↗Ryan T. White↗

Spaceborne inspection systems often deploy perception models prior to launch, after which updating model weights or expanding fixed label sets becomes operationally impractical. While supervised models can be integrated pre-flight, adding new semantic capabilities in orbit requires retraining and re-uploading parameters. We investigate whether prompt-driven vision–language models can enable post-launch semantic expansion, allowing new spacecraft components to be specified via natural-language prompts without modifying onboard weights. We evaluate zero-shot instance segmentation of spacecraft components under a strictly frozen, single-pass inference protocol on a test set of $129$ images of previously unseen satellites. Under fixed global thresholds and no post-processing, SAM3 achieves $0.385$ mAP@$0.5$ and $0.267$ mAP@$0.5{:}0.95$. Performance is strongly scale-dependent: large structural elements like spacecraft bodies ($0.639$ AP@$0.50$) and solar arrays ($0.598$ AP@$0.5$) localize reliably, while relatively small appendages like antennas ($0.221$ AP@$0.5$) and thrusters ($0.081$ AP@$0.5$) remain difficult. Prompt formulation influences performance, with structured prompts incorporating spatial and geometric descriptors yielding up to $82%$ improvement over short category-name prompts. The model operates within the memory and compute envelope of contemporary embedded GPUs, suggesting prompt-driven grounding can provide a practical mechanism for post-launch semantic extension of dominant spacecraft structures while highlighting limitations of zero-shot localization for fine-scale components under orbital domain shift.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

FedSteer: Taming Extreme Gradient Staleness in Federated Learning with Corrective Projections and Caching

Authors:
Haoran Zhang↗Cain\~a Figueiredo Pereira↗Marie Siew↗Xutong Liu↗Carlee Joe-Wong↗Rachid El-Azouzi↗

arXiv:2606.10124v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is often subject to aggregation variance if clients do not consistently participate in training rounds. While reusing stale model updates from inactive clients is a common technique to reduce this variance, we find that with skewed client participation, the resulting update staleness can become severe enough to destabilize training. To remedy this, we propose FedSteer, a novel method that constructs a gradient subspace from a cache of recent client gradients to serve as a low-dimensional representation of the current optimization landscape. FedSteer projects an active client's true gradient onto this subspace to find a set of optimal coordinates. For an inactive client, FedSteer reuses these coordinates with the now-evolved subspace drifted by other active clients. This process effectively "steers" outdated gradients toward the current global objective. This is complemented by a selective caching strategy that identifies a representative client subset to form the subspace, reducing server memory. Experiments demonstrate that FedSteer significantly outperforms baselines, preventing performance collapse in challenging scenarios while delivering accuracy gains of over 7% in others.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Implementation of two-qubit Rydberg operations on neutral Rb-87 atoms in systems with different intermediate states

Authors:
I. V. Iukhnovets↗O. V. Bychkova↗I. B. Bobrov↗A. P. Gordeev↗M. Y. Goloshchapov↗G. I. Struchalin↗S. S. Straupe↗

arXiv:2606.13975v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work presents an experimental setup for implementing two-qubit operations on neutral atoms ($^{87}$Rb) with the possibility of using two different Rydberg excitation schemes. One of them uses 5P$_{1/2}$ as the intermediate level and applies the second-stage beam locally to the addressed atoms. The second scheme uses the 6P$_{3/2}$ level; in this scheme, the particles to be entangled are moved to a separate zone through which both Rydberg beams pass. The advantages and limitations of both schemes are analyzed. Based on numerical modeling performed with a Julia package developed by the authors, it is demonstrated that the spatial configuration has a greater effect on quantum-operation fidelity than the choice of intermediate level. An experimental implementation of the scheme using the 6P$_{3/2}$ level is demonstrated, making it possible to achieve a two-qubit operation fidelity of 94%.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Hallucination in Medical Imaging AI: A Cross-Modality Analytical Framework for Taxonomy, Detection, and Mitigation under Regulatory Constraints

Authors:
Omar Alshahrani↗Muzammil Behzad↗

arXiv:2606.13211v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems are being deployed across medical imaging faster than their failure modes are understood. At this point in time, the failure of greatest clinical concern is hallucination: clinically plausible but factually incorrect outputs, including fabricated anatomical structures, missed findings, incorrect laterality, and invented measurements in generated reports, with direct consequences, for example, for biopsy decisions, staging, and treatment planning. This structured narrative synthesizes peer-reviewed studies, benchmark datasets, and FDA regulatory guidance across five imaging modalities to produce a cross-modality analysis of hallucination taxonomy, etiology, detection, and mitigation. Specifically, we address three questions in this study: (1) how can existing taxonomies be unified across modalities?, (2) how do medical-specialized foundation models hallucinate less than general-purpose ones?, and (3) which mitigation strategies are effective and compatible with FDA lifecycle oversight? We note that three taxonomic frameworks together cover the imaging pipeline in a way no single framework does alone. We also highlight that general-purpose foundation models outperform medical-specialized models on hallucination-specific benchmarks, indicating that narrow domain fine-tuning can introduce overfitting-induced confabulation. At the same time, the oversight of radiologists remains essential; for instance, a very high percentage of of AI-generated flags required expert correction before clinical use. Physics-informed architectural constraints, Chain-of-Thought prompting, and human-in-the-loop safeguards each address different failure modes and is effective when combined. All findings are mapped to the FDA's Total Product Lifecycle and Predetermined Change Control Plan frameworks, which treat hallucination management as a lifecycle obligation rather than a pre-deployment checklist.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DeceptionX: Explainable Deception Detection with Multimodal Large Language Models

Authors:
Jiayu Zhang↗Shuo Ye↗Jiajian Huang↗Yawen Cui↗Taorui Wang↗Wei Xia↗Zeheng Wang↗Haowen Tang↗Hui Ma↗Zitong Yu↗

Deception detection is a critical and highly challenging task within affective computing and behavioral analysis. Existing deep learning methods typically treat this task as a straightforward classification problem; however, this black-box approach lacks interpretability and fails to capture the complex logical deduction processes utilized by human experts when identifying lies. While Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown potential, applying them effectively requires a bridge between low-level audiovisual cues and high-level logical reasoning. In this paper, we propose DeceptionX, a novel MLLM framework that shifts the paradigm of deception detection from black-box classification to an interpretable Observe-Think-Summarize reasoning process. To address the scarcity of high-quality reasoning data, we first constructed DeceptChain, a high-quality dataset developed through a human-in-the-loop process. This dataset synthesizes fine-grained visual and auditory evidence (such as micro-expressions and vocal tremors) into structured chain-of-thought reasoning data. Furthermore, we propose a three-stage training pipeline and a Discrepancy-Aware Redundancy Elimination~(DARE) strategy for DeceptionX to further enhance the model's generalization capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeceptionX not only outperforms existing MLLM baselines and state-of-the-art methods on standard real-world benchmarks but also provides transparent, expert-level reasoning paths, bridging the critical gap between accuracy and interpretability in multimodal deception detection.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

A Controlled Study of Decoding-Time Truthfulness Methods on Instruction-Tuned LLMs

Authors:
Ao Sun↗

In this work, we introduce CHAIR (Classifier of Hallucination As ImproveR), a supervised framework for detecting hallucinations by analyzing internal logits from each layer of every token. Our method extracts a compact set of features such as maximum, minimum, mean, standard deviation, and slope-from the token logits across all layers, enabling effective hallucination detection without overfitting. Experiments on TruthfulQA and MMLU datasets demonstrate that CHAIR significantly improves detection accuracy, particularly in zero-shot scenarios, showcasing its robustness and generalizability. Beyond hallucination detection, CHAIR highlights the potential of using internal representations for designing advanced decoding strategies. By leveraging patterns in logits, we suggest that more sophisticated models and adaptive decoding methods could further reduce hallucinations and enhance text completion quality. CHAIR not only offers a practical solution for detecting hallucinations but also lays the groundwork for exploring richer representations in LLMs to improve their factuality and coherence.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Uptake of minimal intervention dentistry among Romanian dental professionals and trainees: an exploratory cluster and network analysis

Authors:
Simionescu↗D. P↗Sfeatcu↗Vinereanu↗

Background Minimal intervention dentistry (MID) is promoted as a prevention-oriented approach to caries management, but its integration into routine practice remains uneven. Existing research often examines MID-related knowledge, attitudes, or practices separately, offering limited insight into how these dimensions co-occur within individuals or are conditionally associated. Methods This exploratory cross-sectional survey examined multidimensional MID uptake among 327 Romanian dental students, residents, and specialists from five university centers. Ten MID-related scores were analyzed, including nine formative composites and one single-item peer-norm indicator. K-means clustering examined uptake profiles, and Gaussian graphical model network analysis with stepwise BIC selection examined conditional associations among constructs. Results A two-cluster solution was highly reproducible but modestly separated (n = 144 vs n = 183; average silhouette width = 0.13; mean Jaccard similarities = 0.92 and 0.94). The profiles reflected broadly lower versus higher uptake across knowledge-, belief-, and practice-related dimensions, while perceived peer norms for hygiene instruction showed the opposite pattern. Profile membership was not clearly patterned by gender, age band, professional status, or clinical experience. The primary network included 14 non-zero edges out of 36 possible edges, all positive; the strongest partial association linked diagnostic knowledge to diagnostic methods used in practice (partial r = .22). Familiarity, diagnostic knowledge, and general practices occupied more interconnected positions descriptively, but limited centrality stability precluded interpreting them as intervention targets. Conclusions MID uptake in this sample was better represented as a continuum of modestly differentiated profiles than as sharply separated participant types. The findings provide an exploratory map of multidimensional MID uptake and may inform future survey validation, implementation research, and dental education studies. Because the study was cross-sectional, convenience-sampled, and based on self-report, findings should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating rather than causal or population-representative.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

Authors:
Mohamed Youssef↗Lukas Brunner↗Klaus Rundhammer↗Gerald Czech↗Oliver Bimber↗

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

A Stabilized Path-Space Approach to Diffusion-Based Posterior Sampling

Authors:
Evan Scope Crafts↗Umberto Villa↗Saviz Mowlavi↗Yanting Ma↗Hassan Mansour↗Wael H. Ali↗

arXiv:2606.12710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Diffusion models provide expressive data-driven priors for Bayesian inverse problems, but many diffusion posterior samplers rely on heuristic guidance approximations that can fail for nonlinear operators and multimodal posteriors. In this work, we develop a stabilized path-space framework for diffusion-based posterior sampling. Starting from a base diffusion process whose terminal marginal represents the prior, we define a likelihood-weighted target measure on trajectories and cast posterior sampling as learning a controlled stochastic process whose path measure matches this target. This formulation connects diffusion posterior sampling to stochastic optimal control while preserving the Bayesian structure needed for uncertainty quantification. We introduce a time reparameterization that makes the path-space control problem well posed by removing the bias induced by the unknown initial value function, without auxiliary training. We then learn the control via a trust-region path-space optimization method with log-variance objectives. The path-space perspective also unifies our learned control approach with existing guidance-based samplers, quantifies the sampling error induced by approximate controls, and yields importance sampling corrections for asymptotically exact posterior expectations. We evaluate the proposed framework on a suite of benchmark inverse problems with analytically characterized or high-quality reference posteriors, enabling principled assessment of sampling accuracy and uncertainty quantification. These experiments provide insight into the behavior of diffusion-based posterior samplers and demonstrate improved accuracy and robustness over leading approaches.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

From Uncertain Judgments to Calibrated Rankings: Conformal Elo Estimation for LLM Evaluation

Authors:
Bora Kargi↗David Salinas↗

arXiv:2606.13221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale. LLM-as-a-judge offers a cheaper alternative, but judge scores carry systematic errors - such as position bias, self-preference, or intransitivity - that can strongly miscalibrate the resulting rankings. We quantify the resulting judge-human disagreement at two complementary levels. At the local level, we estimate per-battle uncertainty from the judge's own score differences by propagating calibrated win probabilities rather than hard labels into the Bradley-Terry procedure. This alone provides a drastic improvement to Elo estimation accuracy, bringing LLM-derived ratings within 17.9 Elo MAE of human-derived ones when averaged over 55 held-out models on LMArena. At the global level, we apply split conformal prediction to the residual gap between LLM-derived and human-derived Elo ratings across held-out models, producing prediction intervals with distribution-free marginal coverage guarantees that account for irreducible LLM-human disagreement. Together, these two layers yield a low-cost evaluation tool that provides developers with calibrated Elo estimates and honest uncertainty bounds, without access to large-scale human annotations.To facilitate reproducibility, we release our code at https://github.com/kargibora/SoftElo .

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Estimating COVID-19 Cumulative Incidence from Seroprevalence Surveys accounting for Time-Varying Seroreversion: A Fully Bayesian Methodology

Authors:
Owusu-Boaitey↗Meyer↗M. J↗Herrera-Esposito↗Bottcher↗Lukz↗Cook↗Stoto↗M. A↗Kraemer↗J. D↗

Seroprevalence surveys reveal the extent of humoral immunity against pathogens such as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and under some circumstances represent cumulative incidence of prior infection. However, antibody waning - or seroreversion - biases these estimates by reducing assay sensitivity in a time-varying manner. Because assay sensitivity decays over time, naively using serosurveys can substantially bias estimates of SARS-CoV-2 cumulative incidence and fatality rates. The Bayesian assay-specific, time-varying sensitivity adjustment developed in this paper can reliably correct for this bias and account for the delay between infection and serosurvey. In seroprevalence studies conducted in the United States in 2020, adjusting for time-varying sensitivity increased cumulative incidence by up to 1.4-fold, with an adjustment of 1.08 for a national study. Our estimates contrast with a previously published 2-fold adjustment that did not account for assay design. This suggests that previous analyses overestimated cumulative incidence by applying seroreversion corrections that did not account for assay-specific effects, or underestimated cumulative incidence by not applying seroreversion corrections. These biases imply fatality rate underestimation and overestimation, respectively. Our model provides a framework for design-specific time-varying sensitivity corrections in seroprevalence surveys for other pathogens.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Translating the Untranslatable: An Operationalizable Ontology for Untranslatability

Authors:
Jacob Bremerman↗Brihi Joshi↗Hirona Arai↗Xiang Ren↗Jonathan May↗

Untranslatability, cases where meaning cannot be directly preserved across languages, is well-studied in linguistics but underexplored in NLP. As machine translation (MT) systems improve on standard benchmarks, their limitations increasingly concentrate in such cases, where translation cannot be reduced to one-to-one equivalence. We introduce a structured ontology of untranslatability along with a taxonomy of compensation strategies, which are specific techniques to convey meaning under these untranslatable circumstances. We operationalize this framework into a multilingual dataset of untranslatable sentences paired with strategy-based translations, enabling controlled analysis of translation behavior. Initial human preference studies suggest that translation quality depends on the strategy used, with consistent preferences for outputs that include explanatory context, known as the Annotation compensation strategy. Our framework and dataset provide a foundation for studying and modeling strategy-informed machine translation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reload-Mamba: Hierarchical Anti-Dilution State-Space Modeling for Multi-Class Semantic Segmentation

Authors:
Sheng-Wei Chan↗Hsin-Jui Pan↗Jen-Shiun Chiang↗

Mamba-based state space models offer linear-time long-range modeling for high-resolution dense prediction, but sequential state-space propagation can attenuate boundary-sensitive and detail-sensitive responses that are critical in multi-class semantic segmentation. We propose Reload-Mamba, a semantic segmentation framework that addresses this propagation-induced response dilution through three segmentation-specific designs: (i) a boundary-supervised local detail prior that is explicitly trained with ground-truth boundary masks to identify regions requiring response restoration; (ii) a class-uncertainty-aware Reload Gate that incorporates per-pixel class entropy from a pre-reload auxiliary head as an additional gating signal, a formulation that is informative only under multi-class dense prediction; and (iii) a hierarchical multi-level Reload mechanism that applies anti-dilution refinement at three decoder levels and fuses the restored representations top-down. Built upon a ConvNeXt-Tiny encoder with a multi-scale decoder and four-directional Mamba scanning with pixel-wise directional attention, Reload-Mamba achieves 47.9% single-scale (48.9% multi-scale) mIoU on ADE20K and 83.2% single-scale mIoU on Cityscapes. With ResNet-101 + COCO pre-training under the standard DeepLab-style protocol, Reload-Mamba reaches 87.8% mIoU on PASCAL VOC 2012 val. Controlled ablations show that each of the three segmentation-specific designs contributes beyond a direct port of the prior anti-dilution architecture proposed for binarization, cumulatively improving over the direct-port baseline by +2.2 mIoU on ADE20K.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Gradual Fine-Tuning for Flow Matching Models

Authors:
Gudrun Thorkelsdottir↗Arindam Banerjee↗

arXiv:2601.22495v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning flow matching models is a central challenge in settings with limited data, evolving distributions, or computational constraints. While recent work has produced significant advances, particularly in the area of reward-based fine-tuning, current methods fail to demonstrate both theoretical correctness as well as strong empirical results in terms of stability, efficiency, and diversity preservation. In this work, we propose Gradual Fine-Tuning (GFT), a simple yet principled annealing-based framework for fine-tuning flow generative models when only samples from the target distribution are available. For stochastic flows, GFT defines a temperature-controlled sequence of intermediate objectives that smoothly interpolate between the pretrained and target drifts, provably approaching the true target as the temperature approaches zero. We analytically demonstrate that sample generation after GFT can be made substantially more efficient with the use of arbitrary (e.g., optimal transport) couplings, as well as by utilizing few-step inference methods. Empirically, GFT significantly improves convergence stability, while maintaining or improving generation quality, training speed, and generation diversity compared to other fine-tuning methods. Our results position GFT as a simple yet theoretically grounded and practically effective alternative for scalable adaptation of flow matching models under distribution shift.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Intrapartum Oxytocin and Maternal Outcomes Following Vaginal and Unscheduled Cesarean Delivery

Authors:
Allouche-Kam↗Arora↗I. H↗Lee↗M. C↗Zhang↗Hughes↗Dekel↗

Objective To examine whether intrapartum synthetic oxytocin exposure for labor induction or augmentation is associated with breastfeeding and postpartum depressive and traumatic stress symptoms. Methods We studied 1,296 postpartum women who delivered at a single tertiary care center, with assessments from the third trimester through approximately two months postpartum. Intrapartum oxytocin exposure was obtained from electronic medical records. Outcomes included exclusive breastfeeding, postpartum depression, and childbirth-related traumatic stress. Analyses were stratified by delivery mode and adjusted for key maternal and obstetric covariates. Results Overall, 63.3% of participants received intrapartum oxytocin. Among participants with vaginal delivery, oxytocin exposure was associated with lower exclusive breastfeeding at two months after adjustment (58.2% vs 70.3%; adjusted RR 0.86, 95% CI 0.76- 0.97; p = 0.02), but not with postpartum mental health outcomes. Among participants with unscheduled cesarean delivery, oxytocin exposure was independently associated with higher immediate postpartum depressive symptoms (F = 4.97, p = 0.03), acute childbirth-related stress (F = 4.56, p = 0.03), and two-month childbirth-related posttraumatic stress symptoms (F = 4.30, p = 0.04), but not two-month depressive symptoms. Conclusion Intrapartum oxytocin exposure was associated with lower exclusive breastfeeding after vaginal delivery and modestly higher childbirth-related distress after unscheduled cesarean delivery. These findings suggest that oxytocin exposure may mark or contribute to postpartum vulnerability in specific delivery contexts.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

CoDaLoMic: An R package for modeling microbiome compositional and longitudinal data

Authors:
Irene Creus-Martí↗

by Irene Creus-Martí, Andrés Moya, Francisco J. Santonja In this paper we present CoDaLoMic, an R package for analyzing longitudinal and compositional microbiome datasets. The CoDaLoMic package implements three models specifically designed for the analysis of microbiome data that are both compositional and longitudinal. Unlike many existing methods that focus solely on pairwise interactions, CoDaLoMic also captures interactions among groups of bacteria, providing a more robust methodological framework for studying microbial relationships at the community level. In addition, the package facilitates the analysis of microbiome variability in relation to host health status and allows for the identification of groups of taxa that exhibit similar temporal dynamics. Working with time series data makes it possible to understand not only the current state of a microbial community but also its dynamics over time, which is essential for identifying patterns of ecological succession, detecting events of dysbiosis or recovery, and inferring potential causal relationships between taxa. On the other hand, focusing on interactions among groups of bacteria, rather than analyzing only pairwise relationships, enables a more integrated and functionally meaningful view of the microbiome. Many key ecological functions are the result of the collective behavior of functionally related groups of taxa. Two datasets have been considered in CoDaLoMic, one real and one simulated. The real dataset contains the information of the genera present in the microbiome of the Blatella germanica cockroach at 105 time points. The simulated dataset is defined taking Lotka-Volterra structure into account. CoDaLoMic is available at CRAN.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Degeneracy Cannot Violate the Quantum Hamming Bound

Authors:
Yu-Xuan Zhang↗Jing-Ling Chen↗

arXiv:2606.15558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum Hamming bound is the standard finite-length sphere-packing bound for exact correction of arbitrary qubit errors. Whether degeneracy can evade this bound has remained unresolved in full generality for nearly three decades: distinct correctable errors may act identically on the code space, so the usual disjoint-sphere argument breaks down. We prove that every exact binary quantum subspace code with $K>1$ obeys the bound, without assuming either nondegeneracy or additivity. Our proof turns the Li–Xing linear-programming polynomial into an exact intersection count for quaternary Hamming balls. Monotonicity in block length and in ball-center separation then reduces the problem to a local node–edge charging inequality at the shortest admissible length. Thus degeneracy can merge correctable error sectors, but cannot enlarge the finite-length binary Hamming bound.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient Simulation of Szegedy Quantum Walk Formulations and Algorithms

Authors:
Sergio A. Ortega↗Daniel K. Park↗

arXiv:2606.14226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum walks provide a versatile framework for quantum algorithms across a wide range of applications. We develop efficient classical simulation methods for Szegedy quantum walks that avoid explicit construction of the full unitary evolution operator. Unlike previous approaches restricted to a particular walk formulation, our framework is built from fundamental update and reflection operators, enabling the simulation of a broader class of Szegedy walk formulations. We further extend these methods to phase-estimation-based algorithms coupled to the walk, including implementations suitable for large sparse graphs. The resulting methods achieve optimal $O(N^2)$ complexity for dense graphs with $N$ nodes. For sparse graphs, the computational cost scales linearly with the number of edges, which is $O(N)$ in many cases. We implement the framework in the Python package SQWLib and illustrate its capabilities through simulations of representative algorithms, including quantum simulated annealing and quantum search on graphs. These results provide a practical tool for studying Szegedy-walk-based algorithms numerically beyond purely analytical treatments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →