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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.

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01.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The brain builds a sentence neuron by neuron

Authors:
Jacob Smith↗

Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals. Researchers have tracked the electrical activity of individual brain cells during conversation in real time. Plus, the history of GPS and a cross-species transplant that could reveal clues about the origin of animals.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Software compensation of trigger-synchronous control-frame errors in qubits and qudits

Authors:
Gaurav A. Tathed↗Nicholas C. F. Zutt↗Collin J. C. Epstein↗Crystal Senko↗

arXiv:2606.00358v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum control experiments are often subject to coherent, time-dependent disturbances that vary over timescales comparable to the experiment duration. We show that when such disturbances are reproducible with respect to a trigger signal, their effect can be measured and compensated through software-defined updates to the control frequency and phase. We experimentally verify the performance of our protocol using a trapped $^{137}$Ba$^+$ ion experiencing magnetic-field-induced energy shifts synchronous with the laboratory AC mains power. Using this compensation technique, the calibrated AC line contribution to the instantaneous oscillator detuning is reduced by $21(9)\times$, and the fitted AC-induced phase amplitude is reduced below the measurement uncertainty. We use randomized benchmarking to validate the compensation performance in quantum gate sequences, recovering an average single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.93(1)\% with a magnetic-field-sensitive qubit. Finally, we extend the compensation framework to multi-level qudit control. Using the Bernstein-Vazirani algorithm as a benchmark, we increase the algorithm's success probability from 10(7)\% to 70(9)\% in a 16 level system when compensation is enabled. Our results demonstrate that trigger-synchronized coherent errors can be reframed as deterministic control-frame errors and corrected in software.

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03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Phase Transition in Convex Relaxations for Graph Alignment

Authors:
Laurent Massouli\'e↗Sushil Mahavir Varma↗Louis Vassaux↗Ir\`ene Waldspurger↗

arXiv:2606.15581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the graph alignment problem for correlated Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE) matrices, where the goal is to recover a hidden vertex permutation given two correlated symmetric Gaussian matrices $(A, B)$ with correlation $1/\sqrt{1+\sigma^2}$. While the maximum likelihood estimator is information-theoretically optimal, its computation, which reduces to a quadratic assignment problem, is intractable. Motivated by this, we analyze convex relaxations based on minimizing $\|AX - XB\|_F$ over the set of doubly stochastic matrices and the unit hypercube. We show that when the correlation parameter satisfies $\sigma = o(n^{-1/2}/\log^4 n)$, the solution of either relaxation $(X^\star)$ concentrates around the ground-truth permutation matrix $(\Pi^\star)$, i.e., $\|X^\star-\Pi^\star\|_F^2 = o(n)$, implying recovery of all but a vanishing fraction of vertices after simple post-processing. Combined with existing lower bounds, our results precisely characterize that $\|X^\star-\Pi^\star\|_F^2$ transitions from $o(n)$ for $\sigma = \tilde{o}(n^{-1/2})$ to $\Omega(n)$ for $\sigma = \tilde{\Omega}(n^{-1/2})$. In doing so, our analysis significantly tightens prior results and extends them beyond doubly stochastic relaxations.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

KG-SoftMAP: Soft Knowledge-Graph Priors for Bayesian Network Structure Learning from Sparse Discrete Data

Authors:
Guoliang Xu↗James E. Corter↗

arXiv:2606.10358v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning Bayesian network (BN) structure from sparse discrete data is hard: when each instance records only a few variables, most variable pairs lack the joint observations needed for reliable scoring, and data-only methods recover little structure. However, imperfect domain knowledge, expressible as a weighted directed knowledge graph (KG), is often available. We propose KG-SoftMAP, which encodes such a KG as a finite-strength, confidence-weighted edge prior and maximizes a MAP objective combining the BDeu score with a logit-form prior; the KG may be expert-curated or LLM-extracted. On synthetic benchmarks with known DAGs, KG-SoftMAP reaches Directed-F1 (DF1) $0.19$–$0.32$ at observation rate $\rho=0.05$ and DF1 $0.44$–$0.97$ at $\rho\geq0.2$, while every data-only learner tested stays near zero under the same sparse masks. Recovery tracks KG quality: controlled corruption degrades it smoothly, a zero-signal KG yields DF1 $0.00$, and a blindly LLM-extracted KG with imperfect precision and recall still drives substantial recovery. On three real sparse educational datasets, the learned BN acts as a concept-level posterior model: on SAF it matches logistic regression (LR) within $0.03$ F1_FAIL while providing an inspectable concept graph, calibrated Fail probabilities, and tractable posterior queries from partial observations.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Graph Instance Landscapes: When Structural Similarity Does (Not) Reflect Shortest-Path Performance

Authors:
Maryam Gholami Shiri↗Ivana Krminac↗Marko Djukanovi\'c↗Sa\v{s}o D\v{z}eroski↗Eva Tuba↗Tome Eftimov↗

arXiv:2606.18267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking shortest-path algorithms is commonly based on aggregate performance over heterogeneous graph sets, which limits insight into how different search paradigms react to instance structure. We adopt an instance-landscape view of graph benchmarking by embedding graphs into a low-cost structural feature space and clustering them into regions of similar structure. Three benchmark suites are studied: weighted Erdős–Rényi graphs, random geometric (wireless) graphs, and real-world road networks. We evaluate four representative shortest-path solvers spanning uninformed exact search (Dijkstra), bidirectional exact search (bidirectional Dijkstra), heuristic-guided exact search (A$^{*}$), and deque-based strategies (DEQ). Clustering robustness is analyzed under multiple feature-selection schemes, and runtime distributions are compared across landscape regions using non-parametric tests. While generator parameters induce stable structural regions, we find that feature-space similarity does not necessarily imply performance similarity: significant runtime shifts are frequently observed even within the same landscape region. A merged-suite analysis further shows that different benchmark families occupy largely disjoint regions. These results highlight both the potential and the limits of structural landscapes for the structure-aware benchmarking of shortest-path algorithms.

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

RoboPIN: Grounded Embodied Reasoning via Pinned Chain-of-Thought

Authors:
Yaoting Huang↗Yifu Yuan↗Linqi Han↗Chengwen Li↗Shuoheng Zhang↗Xianze Yao↗Hongyao Tang↗Yan Zheng↗Jianye Hao↗

arXiv:2606.15753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied reasoning requires models to perceive task-relevant objects and spaces in physical environments and maintain consistent visual grounding throughout multi-step reasoning. However, current vision-language models rely on text-only or coordinate-augmented chain-of-thought, where entity references remain implicit and ambiguous. This may cause the reasoning process to decouple from visual evidence, entity references to drift across steps, and a causal disconnection between the reasoning trajectory and the final answer, with these problems further amplified in multi-view scenarios due to cross-view appearance changes. To address these issues, we propose Pinned Chain-of-Thought (\pincot{}), a structured reasoning paradigm that pins every reasoning step to visual evidence. \pincot{} introduces the concept of \reasoninganchor{}, which binds each task-relevant entity to a structured visual anchor with entity name, unique identity, view index, and spatial grounding, enabling consistent entity tracking across reasoning steps and views. We build a fully automated data generation pipeline to construct \dataset{}, a high-quality \pincot{}-formatted reasoning dataset. We then train \method{} through three-stage post-training that progressively injects embodied knowledge, structured reasoning ability, and process-supervised alignment, with rewards that directly constrain both anchor localization and identity consistency during reasoning. On 14 benchmarks covering embodied spatial reasoning, multi-view reasoning, and pointing, \method{} with only 4B parameters consistently outperforms 7B level open-source embodied models, achieving a 12\% average improvement over the strongest 7B baseline, Mimo-Embodied. Further analysis shows that \pincot{} improves grounding accuracy and cross-step identity consistency, validating the effectiveness of process supervision.

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

What's Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning

Authors:
Zhaotian Weng↗Haoxuan Li↗Xin Eric Wang↗Kuan-Hao Huang↗Jieyu Zhao↗

Despite the impressive performance of vision-language models (VLMs) on downstream tasks, their ability to understand and reason about causal relationships in visual inputs remains unclear. Robust causal reasoning is fundamental to solving complex high-level reasoning tasks, yet existing benchmarks often include a mixture of reasoning questions, and VLMs can frequently exploit object recognition and activity identification as shortcuts to arrive at the correct answers, making it challenging to truly assess their causal reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce VQA-Causal and VCR-Causal, two new benchmarks specifically designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate VLMs' causal reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal that while VLMs excel in object and activity recognition, they perform poorly on causal reasoning tasks, often only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further analysis suggests that this limitation stems from a severe lack of causal expressions in widely used training datasets, where causal relationships are rarely explicitly conveyed. We additionally explore fine-tuning strategies with hard negative cases, showing that targeted fine-tuning can improve model's causal reasoning while maintaining generalization and downstream performance. Our study highlights a key gap in current VLMs and lays the groundwork for future work on causal understanding.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Corpus Augmentation for Sign Language Translation via LLM-Guided Video Stitching

Authors:
Zsolt Robotka↗\'Ad\'am R\'ak↗Jalal Al-Afandi↗Andr\'as Horv\'ath↗Gy\"orgy Cserey↗

Sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language video into spoken language text and holds significant promise for improving accessibility and enabling communication between signing and non-signing communities. While large weakly-aligned datasets have enabled pre-training at scale and gloss-free methods have reduced reliance on expert annotation, high-quality parallel sign video-text pairs for fine-tuning remain scarce, limiting generalisation on long-tail vocabulary and unseen constructions. We propose a corpus augmentation approach that requires no additional human annotation, external sign-language video corpora, or generative video models, relying only on the existing gloss-annotated training corpus and an LLM for sentence generation: per-gloss clips are extracted from training videos via CTC forced-alignment, novel gloss-sentence pairs are generated by a corpus-anchored LLM, and synthetic sequences are assembled through random sentence sampling and clip assignment. The resulting synthetic RGB video-text pairs are architecture-agnostic at the downstream training stage and can be consumed directly by RGB-based SLT models, or converted into pose or feature representations by pipelines that derive such inputs from video. Sincan et al. re-evaluated five recent gloss-free methods under strictly identical conditions; the largest verified gain over the GFSLT-VLP baseline was only 0.98 BLEU-4. Our augmentation, applied within the same framework, achieves +2.92 BLEU-4 without any change to architecture or training protocol. We further identify that synthetic data harms vision-language pretraining despite improving its objectives, and that optimising clip transitions for visual smoothness is counter-productive under L2-based criteria; we propose that abrupt boundaries may act as a form of implicit regularisation. Code is available at https://github.com/robizso/slt-datagen.

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative insights into the role of phages and plasmids in the persistence of nontuberculous mycobacteria in chloraminated drinking water

Authors:
Lee↗Langenfeld↗Potgieter↗Ferdous↗S. M↗Vasagiri↗Bastien↗G. E↗Duhaime↗Wigginton↗Raskin↗Hegarty↗…

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are opportunistic pathogens that persist in chloraminated drinking water systems, yet the roles of phages and plasmids in their persistence remain largely unexplored. Using genome-resolved and quantitative metagenomics, we characterized NTM, phages, prophages, and plasmids in a chloraminated building plumbing system. Bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and viral operational taxonomic units (vOTUs) were quantified at mean concentrations of 8.41 * 10^7 and 8.00 * 10^8 copies/L, respectively, including seven NTM MAGs at a mean total concentration of 4.01 * 10^5 copies/L. NTM concentrations were highest at the site with the lowest bacterial and viral diversity. Predicted NTM-infecting virus concentrations were inversely related to NTM concentrations across sites, suggesting complex phage-host dynamics that warrant direct experimental investigation. NTM, putative phages, prophages, and plasmids encoded functions related to disinfectant tolerance, stress response, metal resistance, and secretion. These findings identify phage interactions, prophages, and plasmids as overlooked genomic and ecological dimensions of NTM persistence in engineered water systems.

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10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Dissecting the functional landscape of rare diseases through genomic variation in a heterogeneous cohort of 11,000 patients

Authors:
Uria-Regojo↗Fernandez-Caballero↗Lopez-Alcojor↗Lopez-Lopez↗Benitez↗Rodilla↗Avila Fernandez↗Trujillo-Tiebas↗M. J↗Osorio↗Corton↗Almoguera↗…

Rare diseases (RDs) remain a major diagnostic challenge. Genetic and phenotypic heterogeneity, incomplete knowledge of disease mechanisms, and limitations in variant clinical interpretation leave many patients without a molecular diagnosis. Meanwhile, the growing volume of genomic data generated in clinical practice offers an opportunity to develop data-driven methodologies for exploring disease mechanisms and improving the reanalysis of unsolved cases. We aggregated real-world genomic data from 11,084 unrelated patients with suspected RD. Patients were clinically classified into 122 diseases. We built a multi-disease genomic variant frequency database (FJD-DB), which enabled the development of variant and gene-disease association scores by means of case-control subcohort comparisons across 32 disease groups. Functional enrichment analyses were then used to highlight disease-associated protein domains, pathways, biological processes, and phenotypes. Finally, the resulting knowledge was integrated into a data-driven framework for the guided reanalysis of unsolved RD patients applied to Inherited Retinal Dystrophies (IRD) patients as first use case. FJD-DB contained more than 45 million unique variants, including ~185,000 potentially pathogenic variants. Disease-specific analyses identified disease-associated pathogenic variants and highlighted both established and candidate disease genes. We detected 179 significantly enriched protein domains across 23 diseases, 124 Human Phenotype Ontology terms across 13 diseases, 79 Reactome pathways across 10 diseases, and 72 Gene Ontology biological processes across 8 diseases, revealing highly disease-specific functional signatures. Integration of disease-specific variant, gene, and functional association signals enabled the development of a data-driven framework for guided reanalysis of unsolved RD cases. Applied to more than 1,100 unsolved IRD cases, the framework generated clinically relevant findings in 26 patients, including four molecular diagnoses, seven candidate diagnoses, and 15 cases upgraded from non-informative findings to variants of uncertain significance. Aggregated real-world genomic data can be leveraged to identify disease-associated molecular signals generating novel biological hypotheses. A unified analytical framework provides a scalable strategy for knowledge discovery and guided reanalysis, facilitating the identification of overlooked and potentially novel genetic causes of RDs.

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

Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Solutions

Authors:
Marie Farrell↗Matt Luckcuck↗Angelo Ferrando↗Rafael C. Cardoso↗Natasha Alechina↗Marco Autili↗Diana Benjumea Hernandez↗Luciana Brasil Rebelo dos Santos↗Daniela Briola↗Ana Cavalcanti↗Christian Colombo↗Louise A. Dennis↗…

arXiv:2606.23760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering reliable autonomous systems is an important and growing topic in computer science. As autonomous systems become more prevalent, easy-to-use techniques for building them reliably are increasingly important. This workshop report captures and expands on the discussions at the Lorentz Center Workshop "Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems" (ERAS), held from 10 to 14 June 2024. The workshop was co-organised by the organisers of the Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS) and the Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA). It brought together members of the FMAS and AREA communities, industry practitioners, and representatives from sectors where autonomous systems pose distinctive engineering challenges. The workshop focused on three main research topics: techniques for verification and validation of autonomous systems; engineering real-world autonomous systems; and software architectures for safe autonomous systems. Its main outcome is a catalogue of challenges in these areas and, most importantly, a pathway to solutions. Some challenges can already be tackled by techniques that are well known in academia but have not yet become regularly used in practice. Other challenges remain unresolved and require further research. This roadmap is intended to support future research and industrial collaboration.

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12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Non-negative Matrix Factorisation with Topological Regularisation

Authors:
Matias de Jong van Lier↗Shizuo Kaji↗Keunsu Kim↗

arXiv:2606.17531v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the learning of interpretable bases in non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) by regularising the topology of the learned basis functions. Our approach is motivated by the observation that many data modalities can be viewed as non-negative functions on a structured domain, where the quality of a basis is intrinsically linked to its topology. However, naive methods for incorporating the topology of the support are often hindered by discreteness and threshold dependence, rendering them unsuitable for continuous optimisation. We address these challenges by employing persistent homology as a stable, threshold-free topological quantifier and by designing topological scores that integrate into the NMF objective as regularisers. The resulting framework encompasses spatially coherent image components, periodic time-series structures, and clique-like graph signals within a unified modelling language.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Engagement Intensity as a Learner-Modeling Signal for Adaptive AI Ethics Instruction

Authors:
Yongkyung Oh↗Lynn Talton↗Alex Bui↗

arXiv:2606.18548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive AI ethics instruction in graduate research training benefits from intake measures that reflect differences in prior LLM experience. Prior coursework or workshop attendance is an obvious candidate, but it is not clear whether it is associated with pre-instruction ratings on key AI perception items. We compare three candidate intake features, self-reported usage frequency, self-rated LLM familiarity, and prior AI education, across five baseline perception outcomes in 93 bioscience graduate and postdoctoral trainees enrolled in a required research ethics course. Usage frequency shows Holm-corrected associations with all five outcomes, self-rated familiarity with three, and prior AI education with none. A threshold-like pattern at the lower end of the scale is most visible for training interest and accuracy trust rather than appearing as a uniform gradient across all five outcomes. In a short intake survey, reported LLM use is more consistently associated with these perceptions than prior coursework or workshops, with self-rated familiarity serving as a secondary indicator. These results suggest that simple pre-instruction behavioral signals can inform lightweight intake profiling for adaptive AI ethics education.

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14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Sociodemographic Disparities in Tafamidis Initiation and Clinical Outcomes in ATTR-CM Across the United States

Authors:
Cyrille-Superville↗Gaggin↗H. K↗Rosen↗Udall↗Hennum↗Zeldow↗Gao↗Nagelhout↗Keshishian↗Davis↗M. K↗…

BACKGROUND Transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) is a progressive, life-threatening disease. Sociodemographic factors may influence time to treatment initiation and resulting clinical outcomes, yet these relationships are poorly characterized. OBJECTIVE Assess the effects of sex and race on tafamidis initiation and subsequent outcomes and their interaction with factors such as ATTR-CM type and social deprivation measures. METHODS A retrospective cohort analysis was conducted using the US Komodo Healthcare Map (01/2016-06/2024) among patients with amyloidosis, identified by ICD-10-CM diagnosis codes. Cumulative incidence of treatment initiation and survival probabilities for cardiovascular-related hospitalization (CVH) or death were estimated by Kaplan-Meier, stratified by sex and race. Cox proportional hazards models were fitted for both endpoints to estimate hazard ratios, adjusting for demographics and clinical characteristics. RESULTS Of 11,311 patients identified, White and Black patients (n=9,223) were included in subsequent analyses. Within 12 months of diagnosis, White women had the lowest cumulative incidence of tafamidis initiation (11.4%), followed by Black women (22.0%), Black men (26.7%), and White men (31.0%). Event-free survival at 12 months was lowest in Black women (42.9%), followed by Black men (46.8%), White women (48.6%), and White men (54.4%). Median (95% CI) time to CVH or death was shortest for Black women (8.0 months [6.8-10.0]) followed by Black men (9.9 months [8.8-12.0]), White women (11.0 months [9.6-13.0]), and White men (15.0 months [14.0-16.0]). CONCLUSIONS In this large, real-world cohort of US patients with ATTR-CM, sex and race contributed to disparities in tafamidis initiation and survival, underscoring compounded disparities in both access and outcomes.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning of ResNet50 for High-Sensitivity Melanoma Detection on Dermoscopic Images

Authors:
Aryan Bhagat↗

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.

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

Against probability: A quantum state is more than a list of probability distributions

Authors:
Ladina Hausmann↗Renato Renner↗

arXiv:2601.18872v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The state of a quantum system can be represented by listing the outcome probabilities for a tomographically complete set of measurements. Such representations appear throughout physics, for example, in quantum field theory via correlation functions and in quantum foundations within generalized probabilistic frameworks. In this paper, we show a no-go result: To enable useful statements, the probability representation must be topologically robust$\unicode{x2014}$preserving the notion of closeness between states. Yet, a topologically robust probability representation cannot simultaneously retain other essential structure, such as the subsystem structure.

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Resource-state Quantum RAM for Fast and Error-Correctable Queries

Authors:
Francesco Cesa↗Hannes Bernien↗Hannes Pichler↗

arXiv:2503.19172v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum devices can process data in a fundamentally different way than classical computers. To leverage this potential, many algorithms require the aid of a quantum Random Access Memory (QRAM), i.e. a module capable of efficiently loading datasets onto the quantum processor. However, a realisation of this building block is still outstanding due to its formidable resource requirements, which become even more demanding in quantum error-correction schemes. Here we show that the challenge of implementing QRAM can be entirely reduced to a state-preparation problem: since such resource-state is independent on the memory, our approach allows one to prepare it offline, opening the door to new design strategies. As an example, we introduce a heralded 'QRAM factory' which enables improved fidelities with high acceptance rate. More broadly, our results introduce the concept of resource-state QRAM: we study its performance in noisy settings, showing that it preserves the noise-resilience of standard QRAM, and discuss how it can be efficiently combined with quantum error-correction. Finally, we propose an implementation with neutral-atom hardware, where our analysis suggests that high-fidelity and low-latency queries can be implemented.

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

A Benchmark of State-Space Models vs. Transformers and BiLSTM-based Models for Historical Newspaper OCR

Authors:
Merveilles Agbeti-Messan↗Pierrick Tranouez↗St\'ephane Nicolas↗Cl\'ement Chatelain↗Thierry Paquet↗

End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts. While Transformer-based recognizers dominate current research, their quadratic complexity limits efficient paragraph-level transcription and large-scale deployment. We investigate linear-time State-Space Models (SSMs), specifically Mamba, as a scalable alternative to Transformer-based sequence modeling for OCR. We present to our knowledge, the first OCR architecture based on SSMs, combining a CNN visual encoder with bi-directional and autoregressive Mamba sequence modeling, and conduct a large-scale benchmark comparing SSMs with Transformer- and BiLSTM-based recognizers. Multiple decoding strategies (CTC, autoregressive, and non-autoregressive) are evaluated under identical training conditions alongside strong neural baselines (VAN, DAN, DANIEL) and widely used off-the-shelf OCR engines (PERO-OCR, Tesseract OCR, TrOCR, Gemini). Experiments on historical newspapers from the Bibliotheque nationale du Luxembourg, with newly released >99% verified gold-standard annotations, and cross-dataset tests on Fraktur and Antiqua lines, show that all neural models achieve low error rates (~2% CER), making computational efficiency the main differentiator. Mamba-based models maintain competitive accuracy while halving inference time and exhibiting superior memory scaling (1.26x vs 2.30x growth at 1000 chars), reaching 6.07% CER at the severely degraded paragraph level compared to 5.24% for DAN, while remaining 2.05x faster. We release code, trained models, and standardized evaluation protocols to enable reproducible research and guide practitioners in large-scale cultural heritage OCR available at https://github.com/MarcoPerson/ssm-ocr-benchmark.

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

A Longitudinal Attribute-Conditioned Neural Network for Modeling Health-State Transition Probabilities in Temporally Irregular Data: The LANTERN Framework

Authors:
Bright Kwaku Manu↗Beckett Sterner↗Petar Jevtic↗

arXiv:2606.13880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate estimation of long-term care transition probabilities is central to disability insurance pricing, reserving, and solvency assessment. Classical actuarial multi-state models commonly rely on Markov, semi-Markov, or proportional-hazard specifications, which provide a direct connection to cohort projection but may be restrictive for irregular longitudinal health data with nonlinear aging patterns and heterogeneous covariate histories. This paper develops a well-calibrated estimator of multi-state transition probabilities for irregular longitudinal health data. The model learns from individual health history, incorporates the time elapsed between observations, and conditions transition probabilities on demographic and socioeconomic attributes. It produces a valid probability distribution over the next observed health state, with four possible states: healthy, mild disability, severe disability, and death. Individual probabilities are aggregated by age group and origin state to form transition matrices compatible with actuarial cohort projection. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare the proposed estimator with logistic regression, gradient-boosted trees, a recurrent neural network, and a last-state persistence benchmark. The evaluation considers probabilistic accuracy, endpoint discrimination and calibration for severe disability and death, risk concentration, and transition matrix error after aggregation. The proposed estimator improves severe disability discrimination relative to logistic regression and gradient-boosted tree benchmarks, maintains strong calibration, and yields the lowest transition matrix error among the evaluated models in the held-out test analysis. Results show that a structured machine learning estimator can support long-term care transition modeling when judged by calibration and projection fidelity, beyond discrimination.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

PreUnlearn: Auditing Collateral Knowledge Damage Before Large Language Model Unlearning

Authors:
Bo Su↗Ankit Shah↗Thai Le↗

Machine unlearning for large language models (LLMs) aims to remove specified knowledge while preserving the rest of the model's capabilities. However, the boundary between knowledge to forget and knowledge to retain is often unclear, since related and even distant information may be entangled in the model. In this paper, we study LLM unlearning from a data-centric perspective and measure how unlearning effects propagate from the forget set to same-domain and distant-domain knowledge. We find a consistent decay pattern: collateral damage is strongest near the forget set, weakens with semantic distance, but does not disappear at domain boundaries. We further ask whether such damage can be audited before unlearning is executed. We formulate forget-set auditing as a pre-unlearning prediction task and analyze which data features are most predictive of downstream damage. Our results show that interaction features between the forget set and evaluation set provide the strongest signals, suggesting that collateral damage is partly reflected in data geometry before model updates occur. These findings position forget-set auditing as an early warning tool for identifying risky unlearning runs and designing more reliable unlearning procedures.

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

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

Authors:
Joshua A. McGinnis↗Xinbo Li↗Yoichiro Mori↗

arXiv:2606.15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information. We provide the first local convergence analysis of three such methods – Equilibrium Propagation (EP), Coupled Learning (CL), and a new method we call Adjoint Coupled Learning (AL) – for linear circuits, in the limit of small-nudging for both discrete and continuous time. EP and AL perform gradient descent on a natural loss function, while CL follows modified dynamics with an additional cubic correction. Assuming the existence of a solution, we identify a coercivity condition, expressed as a rank condition on a matrix built from the network's incidence structure, under which the training loss decays exponentially and the parameters converge to the solution manifold. We show that coercivity can fail by exhibiting a kite circuit in which a symmetry causes the coercivity constant to degenerate on the solution manifold, but prove using Sard's theorem that such degeneracies are non-generic: coercivity holds at every point of the solution manifold for almost every choice of desired output.

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

PANDA: An LLM-Enhanced Performance-Driven Analog Design Framework Bridging Design Intent and Layout Generation

Authors:
Haoyi Zhang↗Weijian Fan↗Xiaohan Gao↗Bingyang Liu↗Runsheng Wang↗Yibo Lin↗

arXiv:2606.15052v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditional design of analog circuits heavily relies on manual interventions across topology, sizing, and layout, with prior automation addressing stages in isolation. In this work, we propose PANDA, an LLM-enhanced framework that bridges high-level design intent to final layout by actively managing cross-stage dependencies through guided topology synthesis, substructure-aware sizing, and constraint-driven layout generation. This shifts automation from algorithm-centric execution to intent-centric co-design, reducing turnaround time from days or weeks to hours while improving design performance.

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Accelerating Speculative Diffusions via Block Verification

Authors:
Alexander Soen↗Hisham Husain↗Valentin De Bortoli↗Arnaud Doucet↗

arXiv:2606.13426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding speeds up LLM inference by using a draft model to generate tokens, with an acceptance-rejection scheme that ensures that the output matches the target distribution. Adapting this to continuous diffusions is difficult because speculative sampling requires drawing from a residual distribution. While straightforward in discrete spaces, efficiently sampling this residual in continuous space is non-trivial. Consequently, existing diffusion adaptations either use computationally inefficient sampling techniques or rely on an alternative scheme. In this work, we introduce a novel scheme that efficiently implements the original speculative sampling mechanism for diffusion models. Our approach offers a critical advantage over current methods: it enables us to adapt block verification from LLMs to diffusions – which provably improves the acceptance rate of drafts. Furthermore, we formalize and analyze the Free Drafter, a heuristic self-speculative drafter for diffusions that requires no training. By enabling block verification, our Free Drafter yields up to a 6.3% speedup over existing speculative methods with no additional training and negligible overhead beyond the existing parallel verification pass.

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

VSANet: View-aware Sparse Attention Network for Light Field Image Denoising

Authors:
Gargi Panda↗Soumitra Kundu↗Saumik Bhattacharya↗Aurobinda Routray↗

Light field (LF) image denoising is challenging due to the high-dimensional structure of LF data. While noise is independent across sub-aperture images, scene content exhibits strong cross-view correlations. We introduce VSANet, a view-aware sparse attention network for LF denoising. Specifically, we propose a view-aware sparse attention (VSA) block that represents the 4D LF feature map as a unified spatial-angular token space and performs cross-view aggregation via locality-sensitive hashing-based sparse attention. This enables global feature interactions with linear complexity, effectively exploiting LF correlations across views and spatial locations. In addition, we design a feature refinement (FR) block to emphasize informative features in spatial, angular, and epipolar subspaces. The VSA and FR blocks are integrated within a sequential attention refinement module, forming the core of VSANet. Experiments demonstrate VSANet outperforms stateof-the-art LF denoising methods.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Efficient Financial Language Understanding via Distillation with Synthetic Data

Authors:
Wen-Fong↗Huang↗Edwin Simpson↗

Large instruction-following models are powerful but costly to deploy, particularly in finance, where labelled data are limited by confidentiality and expert annotation cost. We present an efficient framework for financial sentiment analysis through distillation with synthetic data, transferring knowledge from a large instruction-tuned teacher to compact student models. The framework is designed for low-resource conditions, where a small set of real examples are collected and labelled by hand. The framework then clusters the examples and uses the clusters to select seeds for generating synthetic examples via structured few-shot prompting. Experiments show that clustering-based seed selection yields more representative synthetic data than random sampling, enabling compact models to achieve strong performance with minimal supervision. Notably, on a more complex and noisy text domain, the compact model trained on the complete synthetic-seed corpus even outperforms the teacher model, while remaining competitive on formal text. The framework provides a practical route toward resource-efficient domain adaptation in financial NLP with minimal human labelling effort.

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