Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:fa99cf93c4015ec88c64dbea112fa315

Sao Tome and Principe on the verge of eliminating lymphatic filariasis as a public health problem: evidence from IDA impact assessment surveys

Authors:

Bakajika↗Rosario↗Fernandes↗J. V↗Diawara↗L. S↗Mangala↗J.-P. T↗Kalenga↗Gil↗V. S↗Yumba↗…

Background Accelerated efforts to eliminate lymphatic filariasis (LF) as a public health problem have been supported by the introduction of the triple-drug regimen of ivermectin, diethylcarbamazine and albendazole (IDA) in endemic settings. In Sao Tome and Principe, nationwide mass drug administration (MDA) with diethylcarbamazine and albendazole was implemented in 2018, followed by IDA in 2019 and 2020. This study assesses progress towards elimination using post-MDA impact assessment surveys conducted after cessation of treatment. Methods Cross-sectional surveys were conducted among adults aged 20 years and older in 2022 and again between December 2024 and January 2025. Circulating filarial antigen (CFA) was detected using the filarial test strip (FTS). Individuals who tested positive were examined for microfilaremia using nocturnal calibrated thick blood smear microscopy. Additionally, programme data on MDA coverage and morbidity were obtained from national surveillance records. Results Three rounds of nationwide MDA achieved high epidemiological coverage (86.4% in 2018, 74.2% in 2019 and 80.0% in 2020). The impact assessment surveys conducted in 2022 evaluated 14 132 adults, with 21 individuals (0.15%) testing positive for CFA, while the follow-up survey conducted between December 2024 and January 2025 assessed 14 653 adults and detected seven positive cases (0.05%). No microfilariae were detected among the 28 antigen-positive individuals examined using nocturnal calibrated thick blood smears. National morbidity records documented 190 cases of lymphoedema and nine cases of hydrocoele. Conclusions Infection indicators remain well below WHO decision thresholds, suggesting that LF transmission is unlikely to be sustained. Sao Tome and Principe appears to be close to eliminating LF as a public health problem. However, strengthening morbidity management services will be essential to support the preparation of the national elimination dossier.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17639

ERQA-Plus: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Reasoning in Embodied AI

Authors:

Hong Yang↗Basura Fernando↗

Generalist embodied agents require more than object recognition: they must reason about spatial relations, actions, procedures, human intentions, environmental constraints, and commonsense consequences from situated visual observations. Yet existing visual and embodied question answering benchmarks often provide limited control over the reasoning dependencies being tested, making it difficult to distinguish grounded embodied reasoning from shortcut-driven visual or linguistic pattern matching. We present ERQA-Plus, a diagnostic benchmark for reasoning in embodied AI. ERQA-Plus contains 1,766 question-answer instances grounded in 711 robot-centric images and organized according to a structured taxonomy spanning perceptual, action-centric, social-interaction, navigation-environmental, and contextual commonsense reasoning. The dataset is constructed using a multi-stage generation and validation pipeline that combines taxonomy-guided question generation, automatic quality judging, iterative revision, and human assessment to improve visual grounding, answer validity, and reasoning quality. We benchmark representative general-purpose vision-language models and embodied models, including LLaVA-NeXT-8B, Prismatic-7B, MiniCPM-V-4.5-8B, Qwen3-VL, RoboRefer-8B, and RoboBrain2.5-8B. Although the strongest model, Qwen3-VL-32B, achieves 83.4% overall accuracy and 61.4 SBERT score, category-level results reveal persistent weaknesses in spatial reasoning, procedural reasoning, event prediction, and intention inference. ERQA-Plus therefore provides a fine-grained evaluation framework for measuring not only whether embodied agents answer correctly, but also which forms of embodied reasoning they can and cannot perform reliably. The dataset is available https://huggingface.co/datasets/huggingdas/erqa-plus and the project page at https://github.com/LUNAProject22/erqa-plus.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2503.05226

Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS: A Robust Decision-Making Framework for Robotic Manipulation in High Uncertainty Environments

Authors:

Xibai Wang↗

arXiv:2503.05226v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Monte Carlo tree search is attractive for robotic manipulation because it can improve action selection through simulation without requiring a fully differentiable policy. In uncertain domains, however, sparse terminal rewards and noisy transitions can make shallow search brittle: many candidate branches remain indistinguishable until late rollouts, and small simulation budgets amplify this ambiguity. This paper presents Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS, a decision-making framework that decomposes intermediate feedback into rule, heuristic, optional neural, and value-estimation channels, centers the resulting process signal against matched task contexts, and uses it to bias or repair search while preserving terminal-task evaluation. The primary evidence is intentionally tiered. Local tasks and matched ManiSkill diagnostics isolate reward-center mechanisms and ablations; matched option-level ManiSkill sweeps test robustness under primitive failure, observation noise, and initial-pose shifts while not claiming standard benchmark superiority; and an official same-backbone OpenVLA-OFT/LIBERO bridge tests bounded VLA action repair. The OpenVLA-OFT clean reproduction reaches 10/10 LIBERO-Spatial successes both with and without RCRM-Guard. A single-suite same-backbone action-channel stress artifact over ten paired LIBERO-Spatial action-channel stress episodes records 0/10 unguarded successes and 9/10 guarded successes. Additional observation-noise, language-perturbation, and visual-distractor probes are reported as coverage and negative-result context rather than superiority evidence. The resulting claim is bounded: Reward-Centered ReST-MCTS is an inspectable test-time verifier for same-backbone high-uncertainty manipulation, not a replacement VLA policy or a broad standard-benchmark superiority claim.

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04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2601.06468

Emission of time-ordered photon pairs from a coherently-driven Kerr microcavity

Authors:

Ferdinand Claude↗Yueguang Zhou↗Sylvain Ravets↗Jacqueline Bloch↗Martina Morassi↗Aristide Lema\^itre↗Alberto Bramati↗Anna Minguzzi↗Iacopo Carusotto↗Ir\'en\'ee Fr\'erot↗Maxime Richard↗

arXiv:2601.06468v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Weakly-interacting many-body systems possess remarkable quantum properties that are essential components of quantum technologies, and constitute a topic of fundamental interest. Here we show that in a solid-state nonlinear microcavity embedding discrete modes of exciton-dressed photons, we can isolate a single eigenmode of quantum fluctuations from the much brighter coherent fraction of the field. In this regime, we perform frequency- and time-resolved correlations measurements between photons on the red and blue side of the fluctuations spectrum. When the average number of fluctuation quanta is smaller than one, we observe the formation of large pairwise time-ordered correlations: red photon first and blue photon second. We show that this peculiar time-ordering correlation emerges spontaneously from the interplay between frequency-resolved detection, and the non-trivial internal quantum structure of the elementary fluctuations.

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05.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18309

SAGE: Retain-Aware Post-Hoc Sanitization of Final Unlearning Vector

Authors:

Jingyuan Zhang↗Yucheng Bai↗Peixi Wen↗Zhehao Huang↗Zhengbao He↗Hanling Tian↗Xinwen Cheng↗Haiyin Ran↗Xiaolin Huang↗

arXiv:2606.18309v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) unlearning aims to remove undesirable knowledge or behaviors while preserving retained capabilities. Current unlearning methods all involve a trade-off between unlearning and retention. We have found that the retention activation bias can also be used to quantify the damage an unlearning method inflicts on retention, without considering the specific implementation of the unlearning process. This allows us to restore retention performance for any unlearning method using a post-hoc approach. Therefore, we propose a complementary post-hoc setting to sanitize the final update vector without rerunning the original unlearning pipeline. In this setting, we design SAGE, Spectral Activation-GEometry Sanitization, a source-agnostic correction for final unlearning updates. SAGE collects real module inputs from a small retain proxy, extracts their dominant activation geometry, and solves a source-anchored optimization objective in closed form, which suppresses update components aligned with high-energy retained directions while preserving the source method's forgetting carrier. Across multiple unlearning methods, model scales, and benchmarks, SAGE consistently relieves the retain-forget trade-off, identifying post-hoc sanitization of final vectors as a practical and underexplored axis for machine unlearning.

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06.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13457

Reduced basis algorithm for solving nonlinear differential equations on quantum computers

Authors:

Monica L\u{a}c\u{a}tu\c{s}↗Matthias M\"oller↗Sauro Succi↗

arXiv:2606.13457v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As quantum computing moves toward scientific computing applications, nonlinear differential equations remain a central challenge since quantum evolution is intrinsically linear. In this work, we introduce a reduced basis algorithm (RBA) for polynomial nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) and spatially discretized partial differential equations (PDEs). After time discretization, the method composes the resulting polynomial update map over $m$ timesteps, identifies the reduced monomial basis appearing in this composed map, and constructs a linear RBA operator whose action recovers the exact $m$-timestep nonlinear dynamics. Thus, at the level of the chosen discrete update rule, the method introduces no additional approximation error beyond the time discretization error. The qubit number requirement is governed by the size of the reduced monomial basis. For an $n$-dimensional polynomial ODE system of degree $p>1$, the lifted register requires at most $q_m^{\mathrm{ODE}} = O(nm\log p)$ qubits in the full basis scenario. For PDEs discretized on $N^D$ grid points, a locality-based construction requires at most $q_m^{\mathrm{PDE}} = O(D\log N + n m^{D+1}\log p)$ qubits. Hence, the dependence on the grid size remains logarithmic, while the nonlinear overhead is controlled by local reduced basis size. The main computational burden is moved from the quantum computer to a classical preprocessing step, where the reduced monomial basis and RBA operator are constructed for the chosen timestep window. Through numerical tests on the Lorenz system and the one-dimensional Burgers equation, we verify that the RBA reproduces the corresponding discrete time nonlinear dynamics exactly, while exposing the trade-off between timestep composition, reduced basis growth, and locality.

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07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2602.20573

MolGraphBench: A Benchmark of GNN Architectures for Molecular Regression Tasks

Authors:

Rajan↗Ishaan Gupta↗

arXiv:2602.20573v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Molecules are often represented as SMILES strings, which can be readily converted to hand-crafted descriptors or fingerprints (FP) for molecular property prediction. Research has demonstrated that SMILES can be converted to molecular graphs $G = (V, E)$, with atoms as nodes $(V)$ and bonds as edges $(E)$. These molecular graphs can subsequently be used to train graph neural networks (GNN) models. Despite the recent surge in application of GNN (existing and novel architectures) for molecular property prediction, a rigorous benchmark is still lacking. We propose MolGraphBench, a comprehensive benchmark of four commonly used GNN models for molecular property prediction. Benchmarking results demonstrate graph convolutional network (GCN) and graph isomorphism networks (GIN) as the optimal GNN architectures for molecular graph regression tasks, based on absolute performance, training efficiency, transfer learning and prediction quality. The study also indicates the non-complementary nature of molecular fingerprints in the fusion (GNN-FP) framework. Furthermore, our GNN models achieved performance superior or comparable performance to current state-of-the-art GNN baselines across three datasets (GCN with RMSE of $0.518$ on B3DB, GIN-FP with RMSE of $1.022$ on FreeSolv and GIN with MAE of $63.783$ on RT datasets). Findings from this study indicate that type of GNN-layer, should be treated as a tunable hyperparameter rather than a fixed design choice to achieve superior performance.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.19876

Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Authors:

Qing Zhang↗Jinguang Tong↗Jing Zhang↗Jie Hong↗Xuesong Li↗

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12733

Let's Ask Gauss: Improved One-Run Privacy Auditing

Authors:

Adya Agrawal↗Yu Wei↗Jaspal Singh↗Malik Magdon-Ismail↗Vassilis Zikas↗

arXiv:2606.12733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privacy auditing provides an important safeguard by estimating the actual information leaked by a model, thus ensuring that theoretical privacy guarantees hold in practice. We study empirical privacy auditing for differentially private (DP) machine learning, focusing on efficient one-run methods for mechanisms such as DP-SGD. Prior one-run approaches threshold training examples or "canaries" into binary membership guesses, which discards useful information. We show that, in the white-box DP-SGD setting, canary-aligned signals naturally form a sequence of random variables whose normalized sum is asymptotically Gaussian. Leveraging this distributional perspective, we develop a DP-auditing framework that leads to tighter privacy lower bounds from a single training run.

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10.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-09 DOI: HASH:87baa210fde8d9bb6cb7f4adc2d6bfd2

A treasure trove of Neolithic necklace beads

Authors: Unknown Author

Archaeological findings from Italy, and machines with a life of their own, in our weekly dip into Nature’s archive. Snippets from Nature’s past.

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11.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15346

DYNA-PRUNER: Input-Adaptive Data-Model Co-Pruning for Efficient and Scalable Spatio-Temporal Media Prediction

Authors:

Fuyan Zhang↗Yuqi Li↗Yingli Tian↗Edmond S. L. Ho↗

Spatio-temporal prediction supports radar/satellite nowcasting and city-scale traffic monitoring, but modern models are often too expensive for real-time deployment. This stems from a mismatch between dense computation and strong input-dependent redundancy (e.g., calm seas or clear skies). To enable automated, resource-aware architecture optimization in scalable media analysis, we propose Dyna-Pruner, an end-to-end framework for input-dependent co-pruning of data and model structure. A shared-importance synchronization mechanism generates coupled masks that prune redundant regions and their corresponding computational units (e.g., convolutional filters), yielding per-sample sparse sub-networks at inference time. Experiments on WeatherBench, SEVIR, and TaxiBJ show seamless integration with CNN, RNN, and Transformer backbones, reducing FLOPs by up to $70\%$ and achieving a $2.5\times$ speedup on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin with negligible accuracy loss ($

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12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11988

What Uncertainties Do We Need for Dynamical Systems?

Authors:

Yusuf Sale↗Christopher B\"ulte↗Felix Czaja↗Joshua Stiller↗Eyke H\"ullermeier↗

arXiv:2606.11988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The distinction between aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty has received considerable attention in machine learning research, mainly in the context of supervised learning but also in other settings such as generative modeling. In this paper, we offer a machine learning perspective on uncertainty modeling for dynamical systems, which has been studied much less so far. In particular, we ask: what uncertainties do we need for dynamical systems? We discuss sources of uncertainty, clarify their nature (aleatoric or epistemic), and consider how the objectives of representing and quantifying uncertainty vary across different tasks.

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13.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17162

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

Authors:

Ye Jin↗Yangyang Xu↗Jun Zhu↗Yibo Yang↗

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

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13030

A Multi-Modal Framework with Cross-Subject Pseudo-Labeling and Semantic Alignment for Micro-Gesture Recognition

Authors:

Haoran Zhang↗Haokun Zhang↗Pengyu Liu↗Yujia Zhang↗Weibao Xue↗Yanbin Hao↗

Micro-gestures (MGs) are spontaneous and subtle body movements that frequently convey hidden human emotions. Recognizing MGs in untrimmed videos remains highly challenging due to their extremely low signal-to-noise ratio, severe long-tailed class distribution, and the inherent domain shift encountered in cross-subject evaluation scenarios. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive multi-modal framework for Track 1 of the 4th MiGA-IJCAI Challenge. To capture fine-grained representations, we design a saliency-guided multi-modal extraction pipeline integrating 68-keypoint skeleton joint coordinates, 3D heatmap volumes, and high-resolution RGB visual features. We introduce a gentle square-root smoothed weighting mechanism paired with an Orthogonal Semantic Embedding Loss to protect tail classes without compromising overall recognition capabilities. More importantly, to bridge the cross-subject generalization gap, we propose a Cross-Modal Pseudo-Labeling (CMPL) strategy for unsupervised domain adaptation, which significantly boosts single-modal robustness. A temperature-scaled soft-voting mechanism is finally utilized to alleviate overconfidence during late fusion. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework achieves a competitive F1-score of 68.13\%, securing the 4th place.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2603.04840

An Approach to Simultaneous Acquisition of Real-Time MRI Video, EEG, and Surface EMG for Articulatory, Brain, and Muscle Activity During Speech Production

Authors:

Jihwan Lee↗Parsa Razmara↗Kevin Huang↗Sean Foley↗Aditya Kommineni↗Haley Hsu↗Woojae Jeong↗Prakash Kumar↗Xuan Shi↗Yoonjeong Lee↗Tiantian Feng↗Takfarinas Medani↗…

Speech production is a complex process spanning neural planning, motor control, muscle activation, and articulatory kinematics. While the acoustic speech signal is the most accessible product of the speech production act, it does not directly reveal its causal neurophysiological substrates. We present the first simultaneous acquisition of real-time (dynamic) MRI, EEG, and surface EMG, capturing several key aspects of the speech production chain: brain signals, muscle activations, and articulatory movements. This multimodal acquisition paradigm presents substantial technical challenges, including MRI-induced electromagnetic interference and myogenic artifacts. To mitigate these, we introduce an artifact suppression pipeline tailored to this tri-modal setting. Once fully developed, this framework is poised to offer an unprecedented window into speech neuroscience and insights leading to brain-computer interface advances. The source code and data are available.

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16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.06010

Adaptive Oscillatory-State Alignment for Time Series Forecasting

Authors:

Zhangyao Song↗Chaofeng Qu↗Chao Zha↗Xiaoyu Zhao↗Yinfei Xu↗Tao Guo↗

arXiv:2606.06010v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long-term time series forecasting benefits from inductive biases that expose recurring temporal structure. Existing periodic forecasting methods typically model recurrence through predefined periods, global spectral components, or fixed learnable templates. However, real-world temporal dynamics are rarely rigidly periodic: around a nominal cycle, oscillatory behavior often exhibits non-rigid periodicity (NRP), where cycle magnitude, cycle alignment, and local cycle duration vary over time. Under these conditions, fixed-template periodic modeling can become fundamentally mismatched to the underlying temporal states. We propose AOSNet, a Hilbert-guided forecasting framework that reformulates periodic forecasting from fixed template matching to adaptive oscillatory-state alignment. AOSNet extracts analytic-signal descriptors from both the observed sequence and a learnable global oscillatory prior, then adaptively aligns local states through a descriptor-conditioned gate that selectively preserves reliable observations while softly correcting mismatched regions. The learned prior serves not as a rigid repeated template but as a flexible oscillatory reference interpreted through local state dynamics. Experiments on eight public benchmarks and two cloud workload traces demonstrate leading or highly competitive accuracy with a compact model size and low inference latency, supporting repeated forecasting settings such as capacity planning and autoscaling. Controlled synthetic studies that isolate cycle-magnitude and cycle-alignment variation and combine them with cycle-duration changes show that the advantage of oscillatory-state alignment increases as NRP intensifies.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24390

Female-RHINO: A Real-Time Scanner-Integrated Framework for Automated Quantitative Uterine MRI Analysis and Structured Reporting

Authors:

Deepak Bhatia↗Saad Ahmad↗Smiti Tripathy↗Maria Camila Bustos Vivas↗Lieselotte Kratzsch↗Anika Knupfer↗Jordina Aviles Verdera↗Susanne Schulz-Heise↗Matthias May↗Jana Hutter↗

arXiv:2606.24390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standardized assessment of uterine MRI remains challenging due to anatomical variability, observer dependence, and the lack of workflow-integrated automated analysis tools. This work presents Female-RHINO: (R)eproductive (H)ealth (I)maging A(N)alysis T(O)ol, a real-time AI-assisted framework for automated quantitative uterine MRI analysis and structured reporting during image acquisition. We present an end-to-end system that integrates inline communication with the MRI scanner and deep learning-based analysis to derive quantitative uterine biomarkers from sagittal T2-weighted pelvic MRI. The framework combines segmentation and anatomical landmark detection models trained and evaluated on more than 500 multi-center datasets spanning diverse protocols, vendors, and patient populations. It performs volumetry, detects and quantifies common incidental findings such as fibroids and Nabothian cysts, and extracts six anatomical landmarks for biometric assessment. Results are compiled into a structured clinician-oriented report with integrated visualizations, without manual interaction. Evaluation on independent retrospective and prospective cohorts demonstrated robust performance across varying acquisition settings. Mean Dice similarity coefficients were 0.82 for the uterus and 0.80 for fibroids, with lower but consistent agreement for Nabothian cysts. Landmark detection achieved a mean radial error of 3.7 mm. End-to-end processing was completed in under 70 seconds, enabling availability of results during the ongoing scan. Prospective deployment yielded immediate, standardized, and reproducible analyses supported by inter-observer agreement. The proposed system enables real-time scanner-integrated AI for automated uterine MRI analysis and reporting, with potential to improve standardization, efficiency, and clinical workflow in pelvic imaging.

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19585

Electrical Noise Produced by Micron-Sized Particles above a Surface Paul Trap

Authors:

Ben Saarel↗Ozgur Sahin↗Hartmut H\"affner↗Alpha T. N'Diaye↗

arXiv:2606.19585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electric field noise produced by the surface of ion trap electrodes reduces the fidelity of quantum computing operations. Despite decades of investigation its microscopic origins remain unclear. Here, we measure electric field noise at trapping locations along the symmetry axis of a linear surface Paul trap. We find that noise levels vary by three orders-of-magnitude in one 600$\,\mu$m section of the trap. Optical and scanning electron microscope images show micron-sized particles close to the trapping locations with the highest noise levels. We find that modeling the particles as a lossy dielectric with a effective loss tangent $\tan\theta=0.33(0.06)$ describes the magnitude of the noise, as well as its spatial and frequency dependence. Our observations may explain the large variation of reported noise levels in literature.

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19.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:ff1bd297ff19e2cca2403cc3fb31ef90

ECG-Guided Pre-Screening of Family Members for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy

Authors:

Lootah↗Min↗Fatah↗Hamilton↗R. M↗Mital↗

Background: Current clinical guidelines recommend serial ECG and echocardiographic surveillance for first-degree relatives of probands with Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). Objectives: To evaluate the accuracy and validity of ECG alone as a pre-screening tool for the diagnosis of HCM and to develop a random forest (RF) model for HCM phenotype prediction. Method: Pediatric relatives of primary HCM probands attending the cardiomyopathy screening program at The Hospital for Sick Children were included from 1993 to 2025. Subjects were followed until the last follow-up, censored at phenotype conversion. ECGs were classified as normal or abnormal based on predefined parameters. Associations between binary ECG variables and HCM phenotype were assessed using Phi ({varphi}) coefficient. A Random Forest classifier was developed using significant ECG variables (70:30 training: test split) and evaluated using precision, recall, specificity, negative predictive value, F1 score and AUROC. Feature importance was assessed using SHAP analysis. Variables with an impact of >5% were included in a simplified model, which was evaluated by repeating performance metrics and externally validated in a healthy cohort. Results: 350 screened relatives (44% female, mean follow-up 6.8 +- 4.8 years) were included. At baseline, 13% (46350) were phenotype-positive for HCM. 9 subjects converted during the surveillance. Thirteen ECG variables were significantly associated with phenotype-positive HCM and were included in the full random forest model. Four variables had >5% impact (Left ventricular hypertrophy, right ventricular hypertrophy, T-wave inversion and ST-segment depression) and were included in a simplified model, which maintained high specificity (93% vs 97%), negative predictive value (97% vs 93%) and AUROC (90% vs 96%). The simplified model classified 83% subjects as phenotype-negative, with eight being false-negative, all of whom developed an abnormal ECG in a mean of 1 year, and none had an interim adverse cardiac event. The simplified model was evaluated in an independent healthy cohort of 153 school-age subjects and correctly identified 98% as phenotype-negative with 100% NPV. Conclusion: ECG abnormalities were strongly associated with phenotype-positive status. A simplified ECG-based random forest model using four ECG variables demonstrated high specificity and negative predictive value for identifying phenotype-negative subjects. If prospectively validated, this could reduce the need for concurrent echocardiographic screening by up to 83% per encounter, lowering screening burden and cost.

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20.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:931925e20e659c9ef2c1c80963d8a99d

Development and validation of a risk prediction algorithm to estimate all-cause mortality among community-dwelling Canadians: the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT)

Authors:

Manuel↗Bader Eddeen↗Fines↗Bennett↗Fisher↗Jessri↗Perez↗Tuna↗Sanmartin↗Sequeira↗Li↗Rosella↗…

BACKGROUND: The risk of all-cause mortality can inform decision-making for chronic disease prevention. We developed a predictive algorithm to estimate the 5-year risk of death among community-dwelling adults. METHODS: We derived and validated the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT) using data from population health surveys in Canada (the Canadian Community Health Survey) and the United States (the National Health Interview Survey), survey years 2001 to 2011, linked to vital statistics. The outcome was death within five years of the survey response. The algorithm was developed using data from Ontario respondents using a Cox proportional hazards model, then modified and re-estimated to allow cross-national assessment in Canada and the United States. Twenty-three prespecified predictors were assessed: seven sociodemographic, six behavioural, and ten general health and chronic disease. RESULTS: 527,369 respondents aged 20 to 105 years were included in the Canadian and United States development and validation cohorts, with 43,758 deaths during 3.68 million person-years follow-up. The final sex-specific MPoRT algorithms each contained 21 variables, showing strong discrimination (C-statistic: females 0.874 [0.871–0.877]; males 0.867 [0.865–0.871]) and good calibration overall and in 246 of 247 subgroups. Discrimination was modestly attenuated (0.01 decrease in C-statistic) in cross-national validation between Canada and the United States, with good calibration across all 71 subgroups. INTERPRETATION: MPoRT accurately discriminated all-cause mortality using only self-reported data, enabling broad application without clinical measures. While validation outside North America is needed to confirm broader applicability, MPoRT is designed for straightforward recalibration using routinely available national mortality data. This supports targeted chronic disease prevention strategies at both the population and individual levels, though the limitations inherent to self-reported predictors should be considered when interpreting predictions.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15793

Proximal Policy Optimization for Amortized Discrete Sampling

Authors:

Anna Zykova-Myzina↗Timofei Gritsaev↗Daniil Tiapkin↗Nikita Morozov↗

arXiv:2606.15793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper explores policy gradient algorithms for training stochastic policies to sample from structured discrete probability distributions under the Generative Flow Network (GFlowNet) framework. Building on extensive theoretical connections between GFlowNets and entropy-regularized reinforcement learning, we derive equivalents of standard policy gradient algorithms for training GFlowNets, as well as experimentally explore their various methodological aspects, including baseline training and advantage estimation. Most importantly, our work is the first to derive and successfully apply proximal policy optimization to GFlowNets, showing its improved convergence speed and data efficiency compared to standard GFlowNet training objectives on benchmarks ranging from synthetic energies to molecular graph generation.

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22.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15036

Transformers Learn the Mestre-Nagao Heuristic

Authors:

Pranav Venkata Konda↗

arXiv:2606.15036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We train a two-layer transformer encoder to classify rational elliptic curves $E/\mathbb{Q}$ of conductor $\leq 10000$ as either rank 0 or rank 1 from the first 128 normalized Frobenius traces. We achieve >99% accuracy on both classes, and accuracy is essentially unchanged on test curves with no isogeny or quadratic-twist relative in the training set. We then apply techniques from mechanistic interpretability such as attention analysis, linear probing, activation patching, logit attribution, and neuron-level circuit analysis to reverse-engineer the algorithm the (centroid in function space) model learned. We find that a sparse circuit of 20 out of 512 layer-1 MLP neurons is sufficient for rank prediction under a linear probe with an AUROC of 0.992 at plateau, implementing a push-pull detector architecture of rank-0 and rank-1 detectors with a one-sided readout. However, we notice that the model has sub-optimal readout problems indicating a mismatch in rank-order between the readout pathway and the discriminative circuit. Critically, the learned input weights of the top discriminating neuron match the Mestre-Nagao sum heuristic weights $\log(p)/(p\cdot \log{B})$ with a Spearman coefficient $r = 0.997$ and Pearson coefficient $r = 0.952$: the model has learnt a result from analytic number theory from the Frobenius trace data alone. We additionally find that all 50 independently trained models concentrate CLS attention on prime positions at 2-50$\times$ the rate of composite positions. The CLS embedding encodes $\log{L(E,1)}$ with $R^2 = 0.962\pm 0.011$ across the 50 models (after controlling for the conductor). Activation patching analysis reveals that attention weights are dissociated from causal information flow. Additionally, the 50 solutions from training are near-identical in function space (with pairwise agreement $>$98.8%) despite large weight space barriers.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.30837

Send a SCOUT First: Pre-hoc Reasoning for Adaptive Detector Allocation in Prompt-Injection Defense

Authors:

Shuhao Zhang↗Jiarui Li↗Qi Cao↗Ruiyi Zhang↗Pengtao Xie↗

arXiv:2605.30837v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-injection detectors are heterogeneous: each is strong on a different slice of attacks, and none is always reliable. Yet existing systems still treat detection as a fixed single-detector pipeline, committing every request to one detector's blind spots. We reframe defense as detector allocation: given a heterogeneous pool, decide per request which detectors to run and whether to escalate to an LLM judge. Our framework SCOUT (Scalable and Controllable Outcome-prediction for Uncertainty-aware Triage) makes this decision dynamic by predicting each detector's per-sample reliability and latency from how it behaved on similar past inputs, and exposes a single safety-utility threshold to the operator (where utility bundles benign-pass rate and wall-clock). To evaluate this setting, we build SCOUT-450, a benchmark that captures the structurally complex, agent-facing injections that older prompt-injection sets under-represent. On SCOUT-450, a safety-oriented operating point reduces attack-success rate by 46% and total wall-clock by 40% relative to an always-on GPT-4o judge, at a 5.1-point benign-utility drop. SCOUT also transfers to three external benchmarks (BIPIA, IPI, and IHEval), improving the safety-utility frontier.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18749

Toward Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in 3D Medical Images: A Batch-Based Approach Using 2D Foundation Models

Authors:

Tai Le-Gia↗

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) is attractive for medical imaging because clinical systems must handle heterogeneous acquisition protocols, changing patient populations, and pathologies for which annotated training data may be unavailable. Most existing zero-shot anomaly detection methods are designed for 2D images, and their direct extension to 3D medical volumes is limited by the scarcity of large-scale volumetric foundation models or by the difficulty of utilizing volumetric context. We propose CS3F, a training-free batch-based framework for ZSAD in 3D medical images using 2D foundation models. Each volume is decomposed along multiple anatomical axes and encoded slice-wise by a 2D vision transformer. These are then converted into localized volumetric tokens by pooling neighboring slice features. Anomaly scores are obtained from cross-subject mutual similarity: tokens that lack close analogues in other subjects are assigned higher anomaly scores. To reduce the attenuation of focal lesion signals caused by depth pooling, we introduce a coarse-to-fine tokenization strategy that enables fine-resolution volumetric scoring without exhaustive matching. CS3F is evaluated on brain MRI across metastases, glioma, and stroke, as well as validated on lung CT to test generalizability beyond atlas-aligned brain MRI. The results show that frozen 2D foundation models can support anomaly localization in 3D medical images, and that the benefit of fine tokenization depends strongly on lesion contrast and imaging modality.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.05347

TopoPult-SSL: Gland-Mask-Free Cross-Device Meibomian Gland Segmentation via Self-Distilled Weak Clinical Priors

Authors:

Nicol\`o Savioli↗Luca Del Tongo↗

Every new clinical imaging device creates a domain shift where dense gland masks are expensive yet cheap clinical signals – eyelid outlines, Pult grades, morphometric ratios – are routinely recorded. We present TopoPult-SSL, a two-stage framework for cross-device meibomian gland segmentation. Stage 1 adapts a source-trained model without target gland masks in the training loss, using four weak-prior anchors driven by target eyelid masks and clinical metadata only. Stage 2, when target gland masks are available, distils complementary Stage-1 teachers into a single compact student via supervised self-distillation. We develop and validate the technique on the public MGD-1k to CAMG research benchmark (1,000 to 100 images, different device), where the distilled model achieves Dice 0.716+/-0.006 (best 0.726), surpassing UA-MT (0.710) and the ensemble teacher (0.720) – with a single pass. The gland-mask-free Stage-1 variant reaches Precision 0.694 vs. 0.30-0.34 for SAM/MedSAM (p

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