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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Image Quality Assessment of Identity Cards Using Measures from Open Face Image Quality

This paper addresses the challenge of assessing image quality in ID cards in remote verification systems by applying capture-related quality measures from the Open Face Image Quality (OFIQ) standard to ID card images. Our preprocessing pipeline includes corner detection, perspective normalization, and comprehensive foreground masking to ensure accurate and unbiased quality measure computation. We evaluate the effectiveness of these measures by analyzing their correlation with the performance of three presentation attack detection (PAD) algorithms across four diverse ID card datasets, where two datasets contain bona fide, i.e. pristine, images and two contain printed mock ID cards. Our results suggest that quality assessment based on some OFIQ measures can significantly improve PAD performance.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Simulation of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with Bivariate Quantum Signal Processing

arXiv:2605.12450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We achieve query-optimal quantum simulations of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians $H_{\mathrm{eff}} = H_R + iH_I$, where $H_R$ is Hermitian and $H_I \succeq 0$, using a bivariate extension of quantum signal processing (QSP) with non-commuting signal operators. The algorithm encodes the interaction-picture Dyson series as a polynomial on the bitorus, implemented through a structured multivariable QSP (M-QSP) circuit. A constant-ratio condition guarantees scalar angle-finding for M-QSP circuits with arbitrary non-commuting signal operators. A degree-preserving sum-of-squares spectral factorization permits scalar complementary polynomials in two variables. Angles are deterministically calculated in a classical precomputation step, running in $\mathcal{O}(d_R \cdot d_I)$ classical operations. Operator norms $\alpha_R\,,\beta_I$ contribute additively with query complexity $\mathcal{O}((\alpha_R + \beta_I)T + \log(1/\varepsilon)/\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ matching an information-theoretic lower bound in the separate-oracle model, where $H_R$ and $H_I$ are accessed through independent block encodings. The postselection success probability is $e^{-2\beta_I T}\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2\cdot (1 - \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon))$, decomposing into a state-dependent factor $\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2$ from the intrinsic barrier and an $e^{-2\beta_I T}$ overhead from polynomial block-encoding.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Creative Integration: A Decidable Criterion of Creativity

"Integrative" solutions are widely praised but rarely defined: we lack an operational way to tell a genuine integration – one that makes the world cheaper to describe – from a tidy re-description. Building on the lineage that treats creativity and intelligence as compression, we give such a criterion for creative integration (CI): the resolution of a real conflict between A and B is CI if and only if, under a fixed description language, the description length strictly shrinks (C = L_pre/L_post > 1), with the reduction located in the conflict itself. We make the judgment decidable through four binary, conjunctive gates, and we fix its extension through a taxonomy of pseudo-integration that names and rejects the look-alikes. We back the criterion with a curated, multi-domain corpus and – crucially – validate it not by human inter-rater agreement but by four falsifiable tests it could fail: an independent computational check, discrimination against hard negatives, out-of-sample prediction, and description-language robustness; all pass with margin. The contribution is not "creativity is compression" but its decidability, discrimination, and corpus: on this account, what makes a move genuinely creative – rather than merely novel – is that it compresses a conflict, with novelty and value as downstream symptoms; whether all creativity is so constituted we state as an explicit conjecture. We claim only the sign of C-1; we judge, not generate. The result is a citable primitive for a broader program.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

DART: A design-aware microfluidic chip paradigm for real-time live-cell image analysis

High-throughput microfluidic live-cell imaging generates rich single-cell data. Yet semi-automated procedures for locating regions of interest (RoIs), each containing one cell population, and removing surrounding microfluidic structures from recorded images, scale with the number of RoIs. This prevents real-time image analysis and delays time-to-insight by hours to days. We introduce the Design-Aware and Real-Time capable (DART) paradigm for microfluidic cultivation chips, which aligns the CAD blueprint with the physical chip and thereby enables throughput-independent localization of all RoIs and fully automated image processing across diverse RoI geometries and chip layouts. DART establishes this alignment through embedded fiducial markers and deep-learning-based marker detection. We validate DART using the Swiss Army Knife chip, which combines eight structurally distinct RoI designs across 1164 RoI locations. DART localizes all RoIs in five minutes, removes microfluidic structures from raw microscopy images in 40 ms, and performs fully automated image analysis, including cell segmentation, in under 1.1 s per image. Together, these capabilities establish DART as an end-to-end hardware-software paradigm with real-time-capable analysis that paves the way toward closed-loop and outcome-driven smart microscopy.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Zero-shot generalization of transformer neural operators to larger domains

arXiv:2606.14597v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transformer-based neural operators have shown remarkable performance for approximating solution operators of partial differential equations on complex geometries. However, existing approaches implicitly assume a fixed domain size, which limits their ability to generalize at inference. In this work, we investigate domain extension, namely zero-shot inference on spatial domains that are significantly larger than those encountered during training. We argue that this setting fundamentally requires spatial locality and translation equivariance. We propose to implement this locality via a decomposable bias in the attention logits computation, enabling finely controllable locality while remaining fully decomposable into query-key inner products and directly compatible with optimized attention kernels. Combined with rotary positional embeddings, it enables expressive embeddings with controllable spatial support without altering the transformer architecture. We empirically show that our approach substantially improves zero-shot generalization to larger domains across two PDE benchmarks and a 3D industrial atmospheric flow application. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/cerea-daml/domain-extension.

06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

Generalisable tissue-wide molecular reconstruction from histology

Spatial transcriptomics technologies measure gene expression within intact tissues but remain difficult to scale across large tissue sections and patient cohorts. Consequently, many studies rely on tissue microarrays (TMAs) or sparse spatial profiling designs, where molecular measurements are available for only limited tissue regions and are often generated using heterogeneous gene panels. Existing H&E to spatial gene expression prediction methods remain challenged by sparse molecular measurements, partially overlapping gene panels and tissue-wide reconstruction across heterogeneous spatial datasets. Here, we present GHIST+, a framework for tissue-wide reconstruction of single-cell molecular states from H&E histology. GHIST+ integrates cellular morphology, local tissue context and shared tissue representations to extend sparse molecular measurements into tissue-wide molecular maps across heterogeneous spatial datasets. Across multiple cancer types and GTEx breast tissues, GHIST+ reconstructs biologically meaningful tissue-wide molecular organisation from sparse TMA-derived measurements while preserving spatial tissue structure, cell-type organisation and age-associated tissue states across cancer and non-cancer settings. GHIST+ establishes a scalable framework for transforming sparse spatial profiling experiments into tissue-wide molecular maps, enabling cohort-scale molecular reconstruction from routine histology under heterogeneous spatial transcriptomic settings.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Controlled ion-ion interactions and cavity-enhanced emission of a coherent dinuclear Eu$^{3+}$ complex

arXiv:2606.11947v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Molecular rare-earth-ion complexes offer unique opportunities for quantum technologies by combining the intrinsic coherence properties of rare-earth ions with chemically tunable molecular environments. A crucial capability is the realization of multi-qubit architectures with defined qubit couplings to enable two-qubit quantum gates. Here, we investigate the optical coherence properties and excitation-induced interactions of two Eu$^{3+}$-based molecular complexes, comparing a mononuclear reference system with a dinuclear analogue in which two Eu$^{3+}$ ions are positioned at a well-defined intramolecular distance of about 7 Angstrom. Using cryogenic ensemble spectroscopy, including spectral hole burning, free-induction decay, and photon echo measurements at temperatures down to 100 mK, we demonstrate long optical coherence times $T_{2,o}$ of up to 9 $\mu$s. As a key step toward scalable multi-qubit architectures, a control-target sequence was implemented to probe conditional ion-ion interactions, revealing a stronger interaction-induced dephasing in the dinuclear complex. Finally, we show the integration of the dinuclear complex into a fiber-based optical microcavity, and observe an 380-fold emission enhancement of the $\mathrm{}^5\mathrm{D}_0\rightarrow\mathrm{}^7\mathrm{F}_0$ transition. Together, these results position molecular rare-earth complexes as versatile and chemically tunable building blocks for scalable quantum technologies.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

A Knowledge Theory of Capital:The Value of Natural and Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.18288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A complexity theory for non-local quantum computation

arXiv:2505.23893v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-local quantum computation (NLQC) replaces a local interaction between two systems with a single round of communication and shared entanglement. Despite many partial results, it is known that a characterization of entanglement cost in at least certain NLQC tasks would imply significant breakthroughs in complexity theory. Here, we avoid these obstructions and take an indirect approach to understanding resource requirements in NLQC, which mimics the approach used by complexity theorists: we study the relative hardness of different NLQC tasks by identifying resource efficient reductions between them. Most significantly, we prove that $f$-measure and $f$-route, the two best studied NLQC tasks, are in fact equivalent under $O(1)$ overhead reductions. This result simplifies many existing proofs in the literature and extends several new properties to $f$-measure. For instance, we obtain sub-exponential upper bounds on $f$-measure for all functions, and efficient protocols for functions in the complexity class $\mathsf{Mod}_k\mathsf{L}$. Beyond this, we study a number of other examples of NLQC tasks and their relationships.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Conditions for Unitarity in Timeless Quantum Theory

arXiv:2504.01579v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum timeless approaches solve the problem of time by recovering the usual unitary evolution of quantum theory relative to a clock in a stationary quantum Universe. For some Hamiltonians of the Universe, such as those including an interaction term with the clock, the dynamics is substantially altered and can be non-unitary. This work derives necessary and sufficient conditions for the relative dynamics to be unitary and finds the general form of the unitary evolution operator. A physical interpretation of these conditions is given in terms of the clock's rate. Unitary dynamics is associated with rates that are constant in time and independent of the clock's internal structure.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Diabetes is associated with increased nocturnal respiratory rate

Background and Objective: Diabetes mellitus (DM) causes autonomic neuropathy, which may alter nocturnal respiratory rate (NRR). To test the association between DM and NRR, we analyzed elective polysomnograms of four large observational cohorts. Research Design and Methods: We performed cross-sectional analysis of over 25,000 individuals with polysomnograms (PSGs) from the Sleep Heart Health Study (SHHS), Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL), Osteoporotic Fractures in Men Study (MrOS), and Wisconsin Sleep Cohort (WSC). Patient-level NRRs were derived from inductance plethysmography waveforms. DM status was determined by self-report, physician diagnosis, medication use, or laboratory values, depending on the cohort. We related DM and NRR (continuous and dichotomized) using logistic regression models and adjusted for potential confounders. Cohort-specific results were combined using random-effects meta-analysis. Results: Meta-analysis of unadjusted models showed a pooled odds ratio (OR) of 1.10 (95% CI:1.04-1.17) for each breath-per-minute (brpm) increase in NRR. This association remained significant after multivariable adjustment (OR:1.06, 95% CI:1.02-1.11). Dichotomized analyses similarly showed higher odds of DM across dichotomization thresholds ranging from 15 to 21 brpm. At a threshold of 18 brpm, the unadjusted pooled OR was 1.77 (95% CI:1.23-2.55, P=0.0022), and the adjusted OR was 1.49 (95% CI:1.10-2.02, P=0.0098). Conclusions: Clinically stable outpatients with elevated NRR have an increased prevalence of DM. Additional studies are needed to investigate whether the mechanism is autonomic neuropathy and whether monitoring NRR can detect early complications of DM.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers for Nonlinear Matrix Decompositions

arXiv:2512.17473v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present an algorithm based on the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) for solving nonlinear matrix decompositions (NMD). Given an input matrix $X \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$ and a factorization rank $r \ll \min(m, n)$, NMD seeks matrices $W \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times r}$ and $H \in \mathbb{R}^{r \times n}$ such that $X \approx f(WH)$, where $f$ is an element-wise nonlinear function. We evaluate our method on several representative nonlinear models: the rectified linear unit activation $f(x) = \max(0, x)$, suitable for nonnegative sparse data approximation, the component-wise square $f(x) = x^2$, applicable to probabilistic circuit representation, and the MinMax transform $f(x) = \min(b, \max(a, x))$, relevant for recommender systems. The proposed framework flexibly supports diverse loss functions, including least squares, $\ell_1$ norm, and the Kullback-Leibler divergence, and can be readily extended to other nonlinearities and metrics. We illustrate the applicability, efficiency, and adaptability of the approach on real-world datasets, highlighting its potential for a broad range of applications.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Adverse Childhood Experiences and Growth Outcomes in Childhood: A Longitudinal EHR-Based Study

Question Are adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) associated with altered growth trajectories in childhood? Findings In this cohort study of 412,549 children and adolescents, ACEs were associated with lower height throughout childhood, earlier pubertal timing, and shorter final stature. Height differences emerged approximately 2 years before ACE documentation and were greatest among those with earlier documentation. Meaning These findings suggest that early adversity affects physical growth in children and may serve as a measurable indicator of the biological consequences of early-life stress, especially in those with documentation of ACEs prior to the onset of typical pubertal growth. Importance Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are among the strongest risk factors for long-term mental and physical health complications, yet their impact on physical growth in childhood remains incompletely understood. Objective To determine the association of ACEs on childhood growth trajectories and growth dynamics. Design, Setting and Participants Retrospective cohort study using longitudinal electronic health record data. Data was collected from participants between February 1999 and August 2025. A large academic medical center biobank linked to deidentified electronic health records in the southeastern United States. A total of 412,549 individuals with at least 2 recorded height measurements between the ages of 2 and 20 were included in the primary analysis. Growth curve analyses were performed in a subset of 199,844 individuals with at least 3 height measurements spanning at least 2 years. Genetic analyses were performed in a subset of 10,114 individuals of primarily European ancestry. Exposure(s) Documented exposure to adverse childhood experiences before age 18 years identified through a natural language processing algorithm. Main Outcome(s) and Measure(s) Height-for-age z-scores across childhood, final attained height, and growth curve parameters estimated using SuperImposition by Translation and Rotation (SITAR) modeling. Results Among 412,549 participants, 18,502 (4.5%) had clinically documented ACEs during childhood. ACE documentation was associated with lower height-for-age z-scores throughout childhood and adolescence. Final attained height was significantly lower among ACE-documented individuals, with mean differences of -3.0 cm among males (174.0 cm vs 177.0 cm, p < 0.001) and -1.3 cm among females (161.8 cm vs 163.1 cm, p < 0.001). Height differences emerged approximately 2 years before clinical ACE documentation. Earlier age at first ACE documentation was associated with progressively shorter final attained height, with each year decrease in age at ACE documentation associated with a decrease in final height of -0.20 cm in females and -0.35 cm in males. Those with first ACE documented prior to pubertal age also showed the most pronounced growth dynamic differences, with males demonstrating a mean reduction in size of 5.25 cm (95% CI, -6.79 cm to -3.70 cm) and 1.26-year earlier pubertal timing (95% CI, -1.50 to -1.03 years), and females demonstrating a reduction in growth curve size of 3.62 cm (95% CI, -4.83 to -2.41 cm) and 1.14-year earlier pubertal timing (95% CI, -1.29 to -0.99 years). Conclusions and Relevance In this large clinical cohort, clinically documented ACEs were associated with time-dependent reductions in stature, earlier pubertal timing, and short final attained height. These findings suggest that early childhood adversity may have lasting effects on physical development and highlight growth trajectories as a potential marker of the biological consequences of early-life stress.

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

RepSelect: Robust LLM Unlearning via Representation Selectivity

Making large language models (LLMs) deeply forget specific knowledge and values without sacrificing general capabilities remains a central challenge in unlearning. However, current methods are easily reversed by fine-tuning or few-shot prompting, suggesting their forgetting is only shallow. We identify the root cause. Existing methods target representations shared with both the retain set and the subspace recovered by a fine-tuning attacker, making unlearning both disruptive to general capabilities and easy to reverse. We propose RepSelect (Representation Selectivity), isolates forget-set-specific representations by collapsing top principal components of weight gradients before each update, leaving general capabilities intact while limiting what fine-tuning can recover. We evaluate across two forget categories, biohazardous knowledge and abusive tendencies, and four model families spanning dense and Mixture-of-Experts architectures (Llama 3, Qwen 3.5, Gemma 4 E4B, DeepSeek V2 Lite). Compared to five popular baselines (GradDiff, NPO, SimNPO, RMU, UNDIAL), RepSelect achieves a 4-50x larger reduction in post-relearning answer accuracy than the strongest baseline, and is near-perfectly robust to few-shot prompting attacks. Targeting selective representations is thus an important step towards deep and robust LLM forgetting.

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

Shrinkage priors for Bayesian Substitute Confounders

arXiv:2606.18535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-cause observational studies contain information about unmeasured confounding through the dependence structure among causes. However, literal imputation of the unobserved confounder is often more complex than learning a lower-dimensional substitute score that preserves the shared assignment variation needed for stable causal adjustment. The deconfounder (Wang and Blei, 2019) and related substitute confounder methods exploit this idea, but flexible assignment models can fit the joint distribution of the causes while producing scores that over-encode the treatment vector, collapse overlap, or capture single-cause variation. We develop a Bayesian factor assignment framework for learning sparse substitute confounders that retain coarse multi-cause dependence with shrinkage priors. The theory is stated at the level of posterior concentration, factor score contraction, and overlap-preserving assignment geometry and therefore does not rely on a particular shrinkage prior. Under these conditions, the proposed regression-adjusted estimators are consistent for mean potential outcomes when the corresponding latent variable identification assumptions hold. Shrinkage priors provide a natural tool for latent structural learning: they favour low-dimensional factors supported by multiple causes, discourage effectively single-cause factors, and induce an ordering of the latent factors through progressive shrinkage. Synthetic experiments illustrate the roles of signal strength, outcome validity, and geometry-aware regularization. In an Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline analysis, sparse substitute scores recover much of the adjustment obtained by directly conditioning on invasive cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers, while collapse diagnostics identify when fitted factors reduce to individual observed measurements.

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

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

DynaTok: Token-Based 4D Reconstruction from Partial Point Clouds

We address 4D reconstruction from partial point cloud sequences, where depth-sensor observations are incomplete, unordered, and lack explicit temporal correspondences. This geometry-only setting is challenging due to missing observations and ambiguous dynamics. While recent progress has largely relied on image-based methods, existing point-based approaches typically focus on single objects, assume relatively complete inputs, or require explicit correspondences. To address these limitations, we propose DynaTok, a point-based framework for correspondence-free 4D reconstruction from partial point cloud sequences without images. DynaTok encodes frames into compact latent tokens, aggregates incomplete observations over time with a Transformer-based spatiotemporal encoder, and decouples geometry and motion through residual tokens in a unified model. A flow-matching decoder then reconstructs complete, temporally consistent 4D point-cloud sequences conditioned on the latent tokens. Experiments on object- and scene-level benchmarks demonstrate improved reconstruction quality and temporal coherence from partial point cloud observations. Project page: https://wrchen530.github.io/dynatok/.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fun with Graph States: Nonlocal Bell Pairs and the Arf Invariant

arXiv:2606.06582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study inner products and partial amplitudes of graph states–a commonly employed class of quantum states, which are specified by graphs. We find that the magnitudes of these quantities are simply related to the rank of the adjacency matrix of the graph over F_2 while the phase is determined by the Arf invariant of its quadratic refinement. These facts motivate a nonlocal tensor factorization of the Hilbert space, with respect to which all graph states are products of Bell pairs with unentangled ancillae. These results may illuminate the quantum advantage in the framework of Measurement-Based Quantum Computation and suggest that graph states can be usefully visualized in the language of algebraic topology. In addition, we develop a specialized technique for computing expectation values of qubit-wise permutations in graph states, which is useful for calculating multi-invariants.

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

Entropy Estimation in Multi-Qutrit Systems via Variational and Classical Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a systematic study of von Neumann entropy estimation in multi-qutrit quantum systems using two complementary approaches: variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) and classical convolutional neural networks (CNNs), evaluated using an ideal (noise-free) quantum simulator. For systems up to three qutrits, we construct and evaluate 11 hardware-efficient SU(3)-inspired ansatzes. A parameter sweep shows that estimation accuracy is primarily determined by the number of trainable parameters, provided sufficient entanglement is present. Based on this study, we fix the parameter count to approximately 120 for subsequent experiments, observing that increasing entangling-gate counts beyond a threshold yields only marginal improvements. For larger systems (two to five qutrits), we use a CNN trained on measurement outcomes from tensor-product mutually unbiased bases. The model achieves accurate and stable predictions and exhibits a systematic improvement in performance with system size, with the highest errors for two-qutrit systems and the lowest for five-qutrit systems. Notably, using only 12.5% of the measurements required for full state tomography is sufficient to reach 90th-percentile absolute errors of approximately 0.13-0.16 nats for both four- and five-qutrit systems. The CNN model is also robust to shot noise and generalizes well to out-of-distribution states. Overall, within the simulated settings studied here, our results indicate a transition in practical methods: VQAs are effective for small systems, while CNN-based estimators offer improved scalability and robustness for larger qutrit systems.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

End-to-End Machine Learning for Depressive State Classification via EEG and fNIRS

arXiv:2606.11555v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The escalating demand for mental healthcare, driven by rising societal stress, highlights the limitations of traditional psychiatric diagnostics. Conventional methods - relying primarily on clinical interviews and patient self-reports - are inherently vulnerable to subjective bias and the varying empirical judgment of practitioners. To address the need for quantitative evaluation, biological signal-based detection, including electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), has emerged as a promising objective alternative. Such technology is particularly vital for identifying latent depressive states that may be unrecognized by the subjects themselves. Furthermore, in aging populations, the high comorbidity between depression and dementia necessitates early differentiation to prevent mutual symptom exacerbation and maintain Quality of Life (QoL). This pilot study of eleven healthy students establishes a framework for biological signal-based depression detection, serving as a foundational step toward automated, objective diagnostic tools for clinical use.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Adaptive Identification and Modeling of Clinical Pathways with Process Mining

arXiv:2512.03787v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Clinical pathways are specialized healthcare plans that model patient treatment procedures. They are developed to provide criteria-based progression and standardize patient treatment, thereby improving care, reducing resource use, and accelerating patient recovery. However, manual modeling of these pathways based on clinical guidelines and domain expertise is difficult and may not reflect the actual best practices for different variations or combinations of diseases. We propose a two-phase modeling method using process mining, which extends the knowledge base of clinical pathways by leveraging conformance checking diagnostics. In the first phase, historical data of a given disease is collected to capture treatment in the form of a process model. In the second phase, new data is compared against the reference model to verify conformance. Based on the conformance checking results, the knowledge base can be expanded with more specific models tailored to new variants or disease combinations. We demonstrate our approach using Synthea, a benchmark dataset simulating patient treatments for SARS-CoV-2 infections with varying COVID-19 complications. The results show that our method enables expanding the knowledge base of clinical pathways with sufficient precision, peaking to 95.62% AUC while maintaining an arc-degree simplicity of 67.11%.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Decoding the Genetic Architecture of Autistic Traits in the Aging Population

Autism research has mostly focused on diagnostic frameworks in childhood. However, autistic traits including social skills, communication, attention switching, attention to detail, and imagination may also vary in many undiagnosed individuals beyond childhood, and the genetic architecture of autistic traits in undiagnosed aging adults remains poorly understood. Here, we performed an exome-wide association study of autistic traits in adults aged >=40 from the UK Biobank (n = 161,269) and independently validated key findings in the SPARK cohort (n = 142,357). We identified exome-wide significance at 17q21.31, represented by a lead variant associated with social skills (rs199533, beta = 0.081, P = 2.04e-11). In addition, we identified an independent signal for communication (rs12632110, beta = 0.042, P = 3.07e-12) and two independent signals for attention switching (rs690733, beta = 0.046, P = 4.26e-12; rs2164272, beta = -0.047, P = 1.73e-12). Gene-based analyses further implicated loss-of-function variation in ZSCAN2 (beta = 1.00, P = 2.44e-6), which was associated with communication differences. Enrichment analyses revealed preferential expression of implicated genes in the cerebral cortex, while phenotypic and neuroimaging analyses linked those variants to cortical brain structure and regional volume. Taken together, these findings delineate the genetic architecture of autistic traits in the aging population and link genetic variation to downstream molecular and neuroanatomical mechanisms.

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

ARROW: Augmented Replay for RObust World models

arXiv:2603.11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks. Most existing approaches rely on model-free methods with replay buffers to mitigate catastrophic forgetting; however, these solutions often face significant scalability challenges due to large memory demands. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, where the brain replays experiences to a predictive World Model rather than directly to the policy, we present ARROW (Augmented Replay for RObust World models), a model-based continual RL algorithm that extends DreamerV3 with a memory-efficient, distribution-matching replay buffer. Unlike standard fixed-size FIFO buffers, ARROW maintains two complementary buffers: a short-term buffer for recent experiences and a long-term buffer that preserves task diversity through intelligent sampling. We evaluate ARROW on two challenging continual RL settings: Tasks without shared structure (Atari), and tasks with shared structure, where knowledge transfer is possible (Procgen CoinRun variants). Compared to model-free and model-based baselines with replay buffers of the same-size, ARROW demonstrates substantially less forgetting on tasks without shared structure, while maintaining comparable forward transfer. Our findings highlight the potential of model-based RL and bio-inspired approaches for continual reinforcement learning, warranting further research.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

25.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Beyond phylogeny: Genome-wide DNA sequence patterns suggest DNA physical properties associated with thermal adaptation in extremophile microbes

Authors:

Temperature is a fundamental constraint on biological systems, yet how it is reflected in genome sequence organization remains unclear. Here, we show that genome-wide distributions of short DNA sequences contain a robust signal of thermal adaptation that is largely independent of phylogeny. Using Structural Topic Modelling (STM), a machine-learning approach for identifying groups of co-occurring sequence motifs, we analyze canonical 6-mer and 9-mer frequency profiles of bacterial and archaeal genome proxies (randomly sampled genomic regions) and identify motif families systematically associated with thermophiles and psychrophiles. In bacterial thermophiles, the identified motif families are dominated by highly specific, overrepresented and co-occurring C- and G-stacked hexamers, and a distinct family of CG-periodic hexamers recurring across multiple temperature comparisons. In contrast, bacterial psychrophile-associated motifs are dominated by low-complexity A-, T-, and AT-run hexamers. Thermophilic archaea generally exhibit a distinct CTAG-centred hexamer family, suggesting that different domains may adapt to similar environmental constraints through different sequence-level solutions. However, this domain-level contrast is not absolute: in a targeted analysis of two thermophilic bacterium–archaeon pairs, we find unusually similar frequencies of all the STM-identified thermophile-associated hexamer families, suggesting that shared high-temperature environments can, in specific cases, partially override phylogenetic divergence. Notably, the identified motif families constitute only a small and highly selective subset of the vast space of possible G+C-rich or A+T-rich sequences. This indicates that thermal adaptation is associated with specific sequence architectures rather than broad shifts in nucleotide composition. Accordingly, the observed signal cannot be explained by overall base composition alone, but instead arises from structured combinations and positional arrangements of nucleotides within short sequence contexts. Related motif families are recovered at both k=6 and k=9, indicating that the signal reflects systematic shifts in genome-wide sequence organization rather than isolated sequence motifs. These patterns are consistent with known sequence-dependent DNA physical properties documented in biochemical and biophysical studies, including differences in base-stacking interactions and conformational flexibility. Together, our results suggest that genome-wide sequence organization reflects sequence-dependent DNA physical properties associated with thermal adaptation, revealing a previously underappreciated physical layer of genomic information beyond phylogenetic history.