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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Modeling light-matter coupled systems with neural quantum states

arXiv:2606.14352v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in cold atom manipulation enable the study of many-body systems where short-range interactions between neighboring atoms coexist with long-range interactions mediated by photons. Such a combination of interactions makes a theoretical approach challenging beyond mean-field methods. In this work, we develop a neural quantum state based approach to study these systems numerically. We introduce a neural-network architecture capable of handling hybrid Hilbert spaces with large local bosonic dimensions in strongly interacting spin-photon systems. We benchmark this approach on a model of a two-dimensional lattice of Rydberg atoms coupled to a photon mode. The superradiant ground states found in the large spin-photon coupling regime allow us to demonstrate the efficiency of the method in the presence of high photon occupation. Furthermore, the ability to capture spin-spin and spin-photon correlations leads us to observe quantitative deviations in the ground state phase boundaries with respect to mean-field theory. The method extends to other systems with a similar hybrid Hilbert space structure, such as spin-phonon systems, and provides a scalable framework for investigating their ground state properties.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When AI Says "I have been in similar situations": Synthetic Lived Experience in Peer-Like Caregiver Support

Caregivers often turn to online communities for informational and emotional support. In these spaces, peer supporters frequently draw on personal narratives to respond to emotionally complex caregiving situations. As LLMs are increasingly designed as peer-like sources of support, they introduce a critical tension: AI can provide immediate, private, and nonjudgmental support, but it cannot authentically possess the lived experiences that make human peer support meaningful. Yet, when prompted to sound peer-like, LLMs may generate language that implies lived experience. This creates a synthetic lived experience paradox: the same experiential language that may make AI support feel warm, relatable, and peer-like can also falsely position the system as someone with lived experience. We examine this paradox in the context of family caregivers of people living with Alzheimer's Disease and Related Dementias (ADRD). Drawing on caregiver support exchanges from online communities and prompted peer-like responses from three LLMs – LLaMA, GPT-4o-mini, and MedGemma – we analyze how human peers use personal narratives and how AI incorporates similar narrative forms. Psycholinguistic analysis shows that peer responses used significantly more first-person and past-focused language than peer-like AI responses. Qualitatively, we identify seven types of personal narratives in human peer support and show that AI often captures their emotional work, but can fabricate experiential grounding. These findings reveal a narrative authenticity gap: peer-like AI can generate synthetic lived experience without the real experience that makes peer support meaningful. We argue that caregiver-support AI systems need mechanisms to distinguish supportive peer-like framing from fabricated lived experience, ensuring that models can offer warmth and validation without falsely positioning themselves as experiential peers.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-15

Nanocrystal-tailored recombination for all-perovskite tandem solar modules

Authors:

The commercialization of all-perovskite tandem solar modules is hindered by the reliance on the conventional gold-based tunnel recombination junction (TRJ)1,2. Specifically, this TRJ introduces substantial near-infrared parasitic absorption3 and suffers from interfacial instability4, limiting both photocurrent generation and operational durability. Here, we develop a solution-processed interconnecting layer based on surface-engineered indium oxide (In2O3) nanocrystals featuring high optical transparency, wherein controlled nanocrystal morphology and tailored ligand chemistry enable smooth interfacial contact and favorable energy level alignment. Critically, we introduce a phosphonic acid additive into the lead–tin (Pb–Sn) perovskite precursor, which synergistically improves the electronic contact with the In2O3 recombination layer, thereby enhancing hole extraction. In addition, the additive regulates perovskite crystallization to mitigate residual strain during film formation, ensuring high-quality large-area deposits. This coordinated interfacial and crystallization engineering strategy simultaneously enhances carrier recombination efficiency at the interconnection layer, improves carrier extraction, and promotes large-area film uniformity in all-perovskite tandems. As a result, a 65-cm2 all-perovskite tandem solar module achieves a certified power conversion efficiency of 26.2%5, with an open-circuit voltage of 2.182 V, a fill factor of 77.4%, and a short-circuit current density of 15.6 mA cm-2 in terms of averaged subcell performance, measured by Japan Electrical Safety and Environment Technology Laboratories (JET). This marks a significant advance toward scalable perovskite tandem photovoltaics.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TreeSeeker: Tree-Structured Trial, Error, and Return in Deep Search

arXiv:2606.11662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search requires agents to answer complex questions through multi-step web search, browsing, evidence comparison, and synthesis. A central challenge is deciding how to search when several directions look plausible but only some will later lead to reliable evidence. If an agent greedily follows the current best-looking direction, it may keep extending a weak continuation. If it explores without discipline, it may waste budget on disconnected trials. We propose TreeSeeker, an inference-time framework for controlled trial-and-error in deep search. TreeSeeker organizes search as branch-and-return search over tree-structured states, where each branch is a tentative direction for a sub-goal. At each round, TreeSearch reads all sub-goal trees, identifies active goals, and uses textual UCB signals of value, uncertainty, and risk to select among exploiting a promising branch, exploring an uncertain alternative, or pruning an unproductive continuation and returning to an earlier branch point. TreeMem supports this control loop by keeping evidence, uncertainty, conflicts, progress, and failure cues attached to the branches that produced them, so trial outcomes can guide later decisions. Experiments on XBench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-ZH show that TreeSeeker consistently outperforms strong open-source baselines, suggesting that explicit branch-and-return control complements stronger reasoning and tool execution.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

LooseControlVideo: Directorial Video Control using Spatial Blocking

Precise 3D spatial orchestration in text-to-video generation remains a significant challenge, particularly for multi-object scenes where semantic layout and temporal dynamics are often entangled. While existing depth-conditioned models achieve good structural fidelity, they necessitate dense, frame-accurate guidance that is labor-intensive to author for dynamic events involving deformable objects. We present LooseControlVideo, a framework that enables intuitive and expressive control by using sparse, oriented 3D boxes as a "blocking" proxy. This allows users to author high-level layout and trajectory while leveraging a video generative model to generate realistic occlusions, dynamics and interactions. We achieve this by fine-tuning a Wan 2.2 backbone on a video dataset annotated with DNOCS, a novel encoding for 3D size, orientation and depth-ordered occlusions. Furthermore, our method allows for localized refinement, such as adjusting a jump trajectory or adding an interaction, with minimal disruption to the global scene context. Extensive evaluations on the nuScenes, HO-3D, and BEHAVE benchmarks demonstrate that LooseControlVideo significantly outperforms existing 2D-box and flow-based baselines. Our findings indicate a 1.2x to 3x improvement in Trajectory Error; 2x improvement in Rigid Motion Consistency; and a 1.5x to 2x increase in Occlusion Accuracy over current state-of-the-art layout-conditioned models, demonstrating that oriented 3D primitives provide good geometric prior for complex, multi-agent video authoring.

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

From Tokens to Faces: Investigating Discrete Speech Representations for 3D Facial Animation

The choice of speech representation is critical in speech-driven 3D facial animation. Representations differ in what they encode: SSL features emphasize segmental and semantic cues, neural codecs yield latents optimized for acoustic reconstruction, and ASR-style objectives produce label-based spaces. We evaluate four speech representation families for 3D facial synthesis, comparing their facial reconstruction quality across two facial decoders using objective metrics and a perceptual evaluation. We additionally conduct probing analyses that relate tokenized representations to phonetic units and to articulatory deformations. We found that encoding phonetic classes is beneficial for accurate facial animation prediction on both semantic and label-based representations with comparable facial animation quality. From the latter, we introduce an Audio Visual Text-to-Speech (AVTTS) pipeline that leverages, as a shared space, discrete representations to decode speech and 3D facial motion.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Classifying by Proxy: Explainable and Reproducible Ensemble of Proxy Tasks for Child Sexual Abuse Imagery Classification

Child Sexual Abuse Imagery (CSAI) classification systems are needed solutions for lessening the psychological impacts often felt by law enforcement agents responsible for evaluating these materials and for efficient removal of these materials from the web. However, due to the nature of the task, researching and developing such systems is not a trivial endeavor. The images are highly sensitive, and the related datasets are under restrictive access regimes, which means most studies in the area are not reproducible or distributable and are therefore hard to compare and validate. More concerning still, most models for this task today lack an aspect often desired by law enforcement agents: explainability. In this paper, we apply an ensemble of Proxy Tasks – tasks that correlate to CSAI classification – yielding improvements in reproducibility, explainability, and security for distribution. This concept is applied for the first time to real CSAI, with a novel selection of relevant Proxy Tasks (selected from the CSAI literature) and training adaptations to the original framework. Our final model achieves competitive results, yielding 91.9% balanced accuracy on the RCPD dataset with the best Proxy Task combination. We furthermore contrast these results with the best-in-class representation learning model, DINO, and show that our ensemble improves accuracy and provides explanations for its classification results, a feature that a single deep learning model can seldom provide.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

VisDom: Sparse Novel View Synthesis with Visible Domain Constraint

Sparse novel view synthesis (NVS) remains challenging due to the ambiguity of recovering 3D geometry from few input views. While NeRF- and Gaussian Splatting (GS)-based methods perform well with dense supervision, they often overfit in sparse settings, producing floating artifacts and inconsistent geometry. Silhouette consistency is commonly used as a regularizer, but it remains insufficient, as silhouette-consistent regions can extend beyond the true object geometry. We introduce VisDom, a learning-free geometric constraint that augments classical carving-based visual hull reconstruction by enforcing a minimum multi-view visibility requirement. Specifically, we define a visible domain as the subset of 3D space observed by at least $K$ views and use it as an additional filtering criterion on top of standard silhouette-based reconstruction. This provides a stronger spatial prior in sparse-view settings. We integrate VisDom into both implicit (NeRF) and explicit (GS) pipelines by restricting volumetric sampling and guiding Gaussian placement during optimization. Experiments on three challenging datasets show consistent improvements in sparse-view NVS, enabling high-quality object-centric reconstruction from as few as four input images. Our method is domain-agnostic, requires only silhouettes, and introduces no learned parameters, making it a simple complement to existing approaches. Applying VisDom on top of GaussianObject further improves performance on Omni3D and MipNeRF360, while matching or surpassing it at 22 $\times$ lower training cost.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Estimating Tail Risks in Language Model Output Distributions

arXiv:2604.22167v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Language models are increasingly capable and are being rapidly deployed on a population-level scale. As a result, the safety of these models is increasingly high-stakes. Fortunately, advances in alignment have significantly reduced the likelihood of harmful model outputs. However, when models are queried billions of times in a day, even rare worst-case behaviors will occur. Current safety evaluations focus on capturing the distribution of inputs that yield harmful outputs. These evaluations disregard the probabilistic nature of models and their tail output behavior. To measure this tail risk, we propose a method to efficiently estimate the probability of harmful outputs for any input query. Instead of naive brute-force sampling from the target model, where harmful outputs could be rare, we operationalize importance sampling by creating unsafe versions of the target model. These unsafe versions enable sample-efficient estimation by making harmful outputs more probable. On benchmarks measuring misuse and misalignment, these estimates match brute-force Monte Carlo estimates using 10-20x fewer samples. For example, we can estimate probability of harmful outputs on the order of 10^-4 with just 500 samples. Additionally, we find that these harmfulness estimates can reveal the sensitivity of models to perturbations in model input and predict deployment risks. Our work demonstrates that accurate rare-event estimation is both critical and feasible for safety evaluations. Code is available at https://github.com/rangell/LMTailRisk

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

(Human) Attention Is (Still) All You Need: Human oversight makes AI-assisted social science reliable

arXiv:2606.12848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for tasks once reserved for trained researchers, including hypothesis generation, specification choice, and drafting conclusions. We argue that the reliability of AI-assisted research depends not only on model capability, but also on how cognitive labour is structured between humans and machines. We study this problem through Human-in-the-Loop Economic Research (HLER), a decision architecture based on pre-commitment, decision sequencing, accountability, and attention allocation. In a pre-specified 2*4 factorial experiment with 280 complete research runs across four datasets, an unconstrained multi-agent baseline produced critical failures in 72% of runs. Using the same underlying model, the same agent decomposition, and identical prompts for the shared reasoning agents, HLER reduced the failure rate to 16% by imposing three architectural commitments: LLMs reason but do not execute data work, data and estimation are handled deterministically, and three human decision gates bind the workflow. Fisher's exact test rejects equality of failure rates at p

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Stop the Sampler! Classifier-Based Adaptive Stopping for Sampling Kernels

arXiv:2606.16073v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sampling from complex, unnormalized probability densities is a fundamental challenge in Bayesian inference and probabilistic modeling. While Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods provide asymptotic guarantees, they often suffer from slow mixing and high computational costs due to fixed or manually tuned trajectory lengths. In this work, we propose a novel framework that treats trajectory termination as a learnable component of the sampling dynamics. By framing MCMC within the theory of non-acyclic generative flow networks (GFlowNets), we train state-dependent neural classifiers to decide when a trajectory has reached a high-density region and should terminate. We theoretically establish the connection between optimal classifiers and the target density via detailed balance conditions and introduce a multilevel training scheme to facilitate exploration in complex geometries. Experimental results across various benchmark densities demonstrate that our approach significantly reduces average trajectory lengths while improving mode coverage and mixing compared to standard MCMC baselines.

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

PVminerLLM2: Improving Structured Extraction of Patient Voice via Preference Optimization

Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information on patients' lived experiences, social context, and care engagement, but remains largely unstructured, limiting its use in patient-centered outcomes research. Prior work introduced the PV-Miner benchmark and PVMinerLLM models for structured extraction. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone struggles with rare, fine-grained, and unevenly distributed errors, particularly in token-critical structured outputs. Results: We present PVminerLLM2, an improved set of LLMs for structured patient voice extraction that applies preference optimization to address token-critical errors beyond the reach of supervised fine-tuning. Our method introduces (i) a preference objective with token-level gated stabilization term that prevents degradation of absolute token likelihood under preference optimization, and (ii) confusion-aware preference pair construction to better capture low-separation distinctions. We further incorporate token-importance weighting and inverse-frequency reweighing to address token imbalance and class skew. Across multiple model sizes, PVMinerLLM2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.43% (Code), 3.50% (Sub-code), and 1.55% (Span), and outperforms baseline LLM trained with existing preference optimization methods. Availability and Implementation: The supplementary material, code, evaluation scripts, and trained models for PVminerLLM2 are publicly available at: https://github.com/Data-Mining-Lab-Yale/PVminerLLM2

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

UltraQuant: 4-bit KV Caching for Context-Heavy Agents

arXiv:2606.20474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context-heavy agents place unusual pressure on the key-value (KV) cache: long prefixes are reused across many short turns, while concurrency determines whether the serving system can keep GPUs utilized. We study 4-bit KV-cache compression for this setting, using TurboQuant-style rotation and codebook quantization as a quality anchor and vLLM FP8 KV caching as the deployment anchor. We report three contributions. First, we frame 4-bit KV caching around multi-round agent workloads where task quality, cache residency, and serving throughput must be measured jointly. Second, we describe the practical design choices needed to make the 4-bit path robust, including asymmetric K/V treatment, Walsh-Hadamard rotation, QJL removal, and block-scale variants. Third, we present serving optimizations on AMD GPUs, including optimized decode-attention kernels and UltraQuant, an FP4 approximation path that uses FP8 queries, FP4 KV tensors, UE8M0 group scales, and native scaled-MFMA support on CDNA4. On a long-context, multi-turn agentic workload, UltraQuant cuts P50 time-to-first-token by 3.47x in the cache-pressured late rounds (2.3x across all rounds) and raises output throughput by 1.63x over the FP8 KV baseline.

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

Bulk-Calibrated Credal Ambiguity Sets: Fast, Tractable Decision Making under Out-of-Sample Contamination

arXiv:2601.21324v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributionally robust optimisation (DRO) minimises the worst-case expected loss over an ambiguity set that can capture distributional shifts in out-of-sample environments. While Huber (linear-vacuous) contamination is a classical minimal-assumption model for an $\varepsilon$-fraction of arbitrary perturbations, including it in an ambiguity set can make the worst-case risk infinite and the DRO objective vacuous unless one imposes strong boundedness or support assumptions. We address these challenges by introducing bulk-calibrated credal ambiguity sets: we learn a high-mass bulk set from data while considering contamination inside the bulk and bounding the remaining tail contribution separately. This leads to a closed-form, finite $\mathrm{mean}+\sup$ robust objective and tractable linear or second-order cone programs for common losses and bulk geometries. Through this framework, we highlight and exploit the equivalence between the imprecise probability (IP) notion of upper expectation and the worst-case risk, demonstrating how IP credal sets translate into DRO objectives with interpretable tolerance levels. Experiments on heavy-tailed inventory control, geographically shifted house-price regression, and demographically shifted text classification show competitive robustness-accuracy trade-offs and efficient optimisation times, using Bayesian, frequentist, or empirical reference distributions.

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

Boson Sampling as a Probe of Chaotic and Integrable Quantum Dynamics in a Photonic Chip

arXiv:2605.25398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum chaos plays a key role in understanding complex quantum dynamics, while integrated photonics offers unique advantages for quantum applications, including high-speed operation, scalability, and programmable unitary transformations. However, integrated photonic approaches to probing quantum chaos remain largely unexplored, owing to the absence of a clear connection between programmable photonic dynamics and established chaos diagnostics. In this work, we establish Fock-state boson sampling as a practical probe of quantum chaos by exploiting the sensitivity of multiphoton interference to the random-matrix properties of underlying single-particle unitary dynamics. More importantly, we design and fabricate a programmable quantum photonic chip to experimentally implement this framework, achieving the first integrated-photonic demonstration of quantum-chaos probes based on boson sampling. Experimental results show that the three complementary probes proposed in this work, namely the distance to Porter–Thomas statistics, Shannon entropy, and Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator-equivalent observables, exhibit close agreement with theoretical predictions and consistently distinguish chaotic and integrable dynamics. Our work provides a scalable route for investigating complex quantum dynamics on programmable photonic platforms while leveraging the intrinsic advantages of boson sampling through multiphoton interference and complex output statistics.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Validating an Early Pregnancy HbA1c as the Screening Test for Gestational Diabetes Mellitus: Findings from PRISMA Pakistan Cohort

Background: Early identification of gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is critical to improving maternal and neonatal outcomes, particularly in resource-constrained settings where universal oral glucose tolerance testing (OGTT) is burdensome. We assessed whether early-pregnancy HbA1c alone or combined with common risk factors can predict GDM and reduce the burden of OGTT requirements in a peri-urban cohort in Karachi, Pakistan. Methods: We conducted a secondary analysis of the Pregnancy Risk Infant Surveillance and Measurement Alliance (PRISMA) Pakistan cohort. Women enrolled before 20 weeks' gestation with available early-pregnancy HbA1c and a 2-hour 75g OGTT at 24 to 28 weeks were included. We externally validated GDM prediction models originally developed in the STRiDE-India cohort. Model performance was evaluated using receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves and area under the curve (AUC). We assessed four models: HbA1c alone (Model 1a); age, BMI, and family history of diabetes mellitus (FH DM) (Model 1b); HbA1c combined with age, BMI, and FH DM (Model 2); and an extended model, i.e., Model 2 combined with socioeconomic status, gestational age, parity, systolic and diastolic blood pressure (Model 3). A dual-threshold approach was applied to assess rule-in and rule-out performance. Results: Among 2,489 women, GDM incidence was 7.5% (n=186). Models with a broader set of predictors demonstrated higher AUC values, with Model 2 achieving an AUC of 0.61 (95% CI: 0.57, 0.66). Including additional factors (Model 3) did not further improve predictive ability (AUC: 0.62; 95% CI: 0.58, 0.66). In addition, at predefined thresholds, Model 2 achieved sensitivity of 73.7% (rule-out) and specificity of 83.5% (rule-in), with the potential to reduce OGTT requirements (58.5%). Conclusions: Early-pregnancy risk stratification using HbA1c combined with simple clinical predictors offers a pragmatic approach to streamline GDM screening among high-risk pregnant women. A dual-threshold strategy using Model 2 could reduce reliance on universal OGTT while prioritizing high-risk women for confirmatory testing.

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

The Quantum Split-Step Fourier Algorithm for Nonlinear Optical Waveguides

arXiv:2606.24643v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the Quantum Split-Step Fourier (QSSF) algorithm for nonlinear optical waveguides, a numerical framework that combines split-step propagation of the nonlinear Schrödinger equation with a commutator-preserving Bogoliubov evolution of Gaussian quantum fluctuations. The method propagates the classical mean field together with the Bogoliubov matrices $U$ and $V$, from which reduced second moments, covariance matrices, symplectic eigenvalues, and entropic measures are constructed for arbitrary spectral windows. Applied to soliton-driven resonant radiation, QSSF shows that the selected radiation band acquires a steadily increasing von Neumann entropy and a corresponding loss of purity, quantifying its entanglement with the rest of the spectrum in the lossless Gaussian setting. The analysis also reveals a surprisingly pronounced low-dimensional structure: although the radiation occupies many Fourier bins, its reduced Gaussian state is dominated by only a few Williamson modes. QSSF therefore provides a practical information-theoretic diagnostic for quantum correlations in nonlinear frequency conversion, supercontinuum generation, and multimode squeezed-light formation in ultrafast waveguide platforms.

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

WAM4D: Fast 4D World Action Model via Spatial Register Tokens

World action models (WAMs) have recently shown promise in jointly modeling future observations and executable robot actions. However, most existing WAMs still operate in 2D video or latent spaces, where visually plausible rollouts miss the 3D spatial constraints and occluded contact geometry required for precise manipulation. While geometric foundation models offer strong priors for recovering dense 3D structure and motion from visual observations, forcing WAMs to predict the dense 4D representation introduces costly geometric decoding and slows down causal action generation. To address the trade-off, we present WAM4D, a fast 4D world action model that uses lightweight spatial register tokens as training-time future-depth readouts to transfer pretrained geometric priors into a causal video-action transformer, then removes the register branch for lightweight action inference. To prevent non-causal shortcuts, we further design causal mixture attention for the Mixture-of-Transformers (MoT) WAM backbone, defining modality-specific visibility among video, action, and geometry tokens. Comprehensive experiments on RoboTwin 2.0 and challenging real-world manipulation tasks show that WAM4D improves spatial consistency and achieves competitive action prediction while maintaining efficient inference.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

HyMaTE: A Hybrid Mamba and Transformer Model for EHR Representation Learning

arXiv:2509.24118v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electronic health Records (EHRs) have become a cornerstone in modern-day healthcare. They are a crucial part for analyzing the progression of patient health; however, their complexity, characterized by long, multivariate sequences, sparsity, and missing values poses significant challenges in traditional deep learning modeling. While Transformer-based models have demonstrated success in modeling EHR data and predicting clinical outcomes, their quadratic computational complexity and limited context length hinder their efficiency and practical applications. On the other hand, State Space Models (SSMs) like Mamba present a promising alternative offering linear-time sequence modeling and improved efficiency for handling long sequences, but focus mostly on mixing sequence-level information rather than channel-level data. To overcome these challenges, we propose HyMaTE (A Hybrid Mamba and Transformer Model for EHR Representation Learning), a novel hybrid model tailored for representing longitudinal data, combining the strengths of SSMs with advanced attention mechanisms. By testing the model on predictive tasks on multiple clinical datasets, we demonstrate HyMaTE's ability to capture an effective, richer, and more nuanced unified representation of EHR data. Additionally, the interpretability of the outcomes achieved by self-attention illustrates the effectiveness of our model as a scalable and generalizable solution for real-world healthcare applications. Codes are available at: https://github.com/healthylaife/HyMaTE.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Starting, stopping and restarting. Patterns of Methylphenidate Use over 14 years in a large public health system

Background Persistence with stimulant medication is poor in children and adolescents with ADHD, and the evidence base is derived predominantly from high-income countries. We describe methylphenidate utilisation patterns and predictors of 12-month retention across 14 years in a large South African public health service. Methods Retrospective cohort study using routine pharmacy data from the Western Cape provincial health service (2011-2024). Children aged 5-18 at first prescription were included. Treatment episodes were defined as continuous prescription sequences with no gap exceeding 90 days and classified as initiations or restarts. Logistic regression modelled 12-month retention against early visit frequency and formulation type as pre-specified exposures. Findings 421,925 prescription events for 23,243 children across 115 facilities generated 65,885 treatment episodes. Median age at first prescription was 10 years (IQR 8-12); 77.6% were male. Kaplan-Meier 12-month survival was 28.2% for initiations and 15.4% for restarts, substantially below high-income country comparators. A quarter of all initiating prescriptions were not followed by a subsequent dispensing event; nearly 40% of patients had three or more treatment episodes. Early visit frequency was the strongest predictor of 12-month retention (high vs low: OR 2.85, 95% CI 2.65-3.06). The sustained-release formulation effect was present but attenuated on multivariable adjustment. Treatment re-initiations showed a marked seasonal pattern consistent with the South African school calendar. Interpretation Twelve-month retention was markedly lower than high-income country rates. Against a backdrop of high attrition, both early visit frequency and sustained-release formulation access predicted persistence; clinical engagement and reducing structural barriers to access are modifiable factors in this setting. Funding None.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Beyond Parallel Sampling: Diverse Query Initialization for Agentic Search

arXiv:2606.17209v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling for agentic search typically increases depth (i.e., more turns and tokens per trajectory) or breadth (i.e., more parallel rollouts). Here we focus on breadth scaling, showing that standard parallel sampling yields diminishing returns, tracing this to query redundancy at the first turn. When models issue similar first queries across rollouts, the threads retrieve overlapping evidence, and subsequent turns are conditioned on this shared retrieval. We address this limitation with DivInit, a training-free intervention at the first turn. Rather than sampling k independent first queries, DivInit draws n candidates from a single call, picks k < n diverse seeds, and runs them as parallel trajectories. Across five open-weight models and eight benchmarks, DivInit consistently improves over standard parallel sampling, with average gains of five to seven points on multi-hop QA at matched compute. Code available at https://github.com/cxcscmu/diverse-query-initialization

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Minimal Oversight: Uncertainty-Aware Governance for Delegated AI Systems

arXiv:2606.15563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI systems increasingly delegate decisions to specialized models, evaluators, tools, and supervisory controllers. The central AI problem is no longer only model accuracy, but uncertainty-aware governance: how much autonomy to grant, which evidence should calibrate trust, what performance ceiling a delegated AI system can sustain, and when human intervention becomes necessary. We propose the Minimum Sufficient Oversight Principle (MSO), a variational principle for principled autonomy delegation: minimize governance burden on the Fisher information manifold subject to a delivery constraint. The resulting Euler-Lagrange solution yields a water-filling allocation of governed delegation across the task space. Building on a revealed-action governed delegation channel model, we prove a capacity theorem for stationary symbolwise review policies, derive a local first-order approximation relating workflow complexity to quality degradation, and give a drift-dominated autonomy-time scaling law linking intervention timing to effective capacity, complexity, and drift. Within this framework, masking appears as a structural AI-governance pathology: corrected performance can hide the competence signal needed to calibrate trust. Synthetic simulations and a semi-real reconstructed workflow support design prescriptions including upstream-first correction, sensitivity-based intervention, and explicit feasibility checks before autonomy is expanded. The result is a computable framework for uncertainty, planning, and oversight in delegated AI systems. A companion Python package is available at https://github.com/crbazevedo/delegation-lab.

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

COSMOS: Model-Agnostic Personalized Federated Learning with Clustered Server Models and Pseudo-Label-Only Communication

arXiv:2605.11165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated learning (FL) in heterogeneous environments remains challenging because client models often differ in both architecture and data distribution. While recent approaches attempt to address this challenge through client clustering and knowledge distillation, simultaneously handling architectural and statistical heterogeneity remains difficult. We introduce COSMOS, a model-agnostic framework that enables server-side personalization using only pseudo-label communication. Clients train local models and predict on the public data; the server clusters clients by prediction similarity, trains a cluster-specific model for each group using its own compute, and distills the resulting models back to clients. We provide the first theoretical analysis showing that distillation from the learned cluster models can yield exponential personalization risk contraction, going beyond the convergence-to-stationarity guarantees typically provided in model-agnostic FL. Experiments across benchmarks demonstrate that COSMOS consistently outperforms all model-agnostic FL baselines while remaining competitive with state-of-the-art personalized FL methods. More broadly, our results highlight personalized server-side learning with pseudo-labels as a promising paradigm for scalable and model-agnostic federated learning in highly heterogeneous environments.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DModE: An end-to-end framework for Differential Modification and Expression Analysis of Nanopore direct RNA sequencing data

Summary: Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) enables simultaneous quantification of transcript abundance and RNA modifications from native RNA molecules, providing a unique opportunity to study transcriptional and epitranscriptomic regulation within a single experiment. However, comprehensive analysis of DRS data remains challenging, as existing workflows typically focus on individual processing steps and often require manual integration of multiple software packages for expression analysis, modification detection, statistical testing, and visualization. Furthermore, integrated differential expression and differential RNA modification analysis at both gene and isoform resolution remains poorly supported by current workflows. Here, we present DModE (Differential Modification and Expression Analysis), an end-to-end framework for integrated analysis of Nanopore DRS data. DModE combines an Epi2ME-compatible Nextflow preprocessing workflow with a dedicated Python package for downstream statistical analysis, visualization, and reporting. The framework supports differential gene and isoform expression analysis, differential RNA modification analysis at genome and transcript level, metagene profiling, exploratory epitranscriptomic analyses, and integrated assessment of relationships between expression and modification dynamics. Results are automatically summarized in interactive HTML reports, facilitating reproducible and accessible data interpretation. By integrating transcriptomic and epitranscriptomic analyses within a single framework, DModE substantially simplifies comprehensive DRS data analysis and lowers the barrier for studying RNA modification biology using Nanopore sequencing.