Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

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

01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

CRAFT: A Tendon-Driven Hand with Hybrid Hard-Soft Compliance

arXiv:2603.12120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce CRAFT hand, a tendon-driven anthropomorphic hand with hybrid hard-soft compliance for contact-rich manipulation. The design is based on a simple idea: contact is not uniform across the hand. Impacts concentrate at joints, while links carry most of the load. CRAFT places soft material at joints and keeps links rigid, and uses rollingcontact joint surfaces to keep flexion on repeatable motion paths. Fifteen motors mounted on the fingers drive the hand through tendons, keeping the form factor compact and the fingers light. In structural tests, CRAFT improves strength and endurance while maintaining comparable repeatability. In teleoperation, CRAFT improves handling of fragile and low-friction items, and the hand covers 33/33 grasps in the Feix taxonomy. The full design costs under $600 and will be released open-source with visionbased teleoperation and simulation integration. Project page: http://craft-hand.github.io/

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Transformer-Based Language Models Across Domain Verticals: Architectures, Applications and Critical Assessment

Transformer-based language models have become the default substrate for natural language processing and the pace of new releases has made it hard for practitioners to separate durable ideas from the noise of incremental announcements. This review works at two levels. At the level of mechanism, we organise the main transformer families into a working taxonomy, covering encoder-only, decoder-only, encoder-decoder, long-context, permutation-based, and generator-discriminator variants. We then extend the discussion to post-2023 developments that changed the picture in practice: instruction tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, direct preference optimisation, mixture-of-experts scaling, retrieval augmentation and the current flagship model families from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral and DeepSeek. At the level of use, we survey deployments across healthcare, finance, legal, education, customer service, creative writing and scientific work. Based on this we link each to the specific capabilities that make a transformer the appropriate tool. The contribution of this paper is a critical assessment that is based on the survey. We compare architectures on four axes that matter to deployment decisions, we quantify the trade-off between parameter count and energy cost. We also discuss how alignment methods, data provenance and benchmark saturation change what it means to call a model "state of the art". The final section lists the research questions that we think deserve more attention.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MiqraBERT: Regression-Based Sentence-BERT Finetuning for Biblical Hebrew Parallel Detection

Textual reuse pervades the Hebrew Bible, yet the computational methods used to detect it still rest largely on lexical overlap, and they falter once a parallel involves paraphrase, lexical substitution, or syntactic reworking. This paper introduces MiqraBERT, a Sentence-BERT model finetuned from AlephBERT (a Modern Hebrew encoder) for verse-level semantic similarity in Biblical Hebrew. The training set comprises 1,650 labeled verse and half-verse pairs: 825 true parallels drawn from the Chronicles synoptic material and from foundational studies of poetic parallelism, balanced against 825 randomly sampled negatives. Through cosine-similarity regression, the model learns an embedding space in which parallel verses cluster together and unrelated verses move apart. We evaluate separation with distribution-based metrics, Wasserstein distance and the overlap coefficient, across ten random seeds. MiqraBERT improves distributional separation 2.7-fold over the pre-trained baseline and reduces the ambiguous overlap region from roughly 24% to about 6%. Narrative synoptic parallels reach a recall@10 of 87.1%; poetic parallels remain difficult, below 9%. This genre-dependent asymmetry confines the model's reliable scope to narrative textual reuse. MiqraBERT is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/davidmsmiley/MiqraBERT

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

Two-Phase Bilevel Search for the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles

arXiv:2606.18730v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem (MT-TSP) seeks a minimum cost trajectory for an agent that departs from a static depot, visits a set of moving targets, each within one of their assigned time windows, and returns to the depot. In this article, we study the Moving-Target Traveling Salesman Problem with Moving Obstacles (MT-TSP-MO), a generalization of the MT-TSP where the agent trajectory must avoid moving obstacles. We present a Mixed-Integer Conic Programming (MICP) formulation that can be solved using off-the-shelf solvers, as well as a fast and scalable Two-Phase Bilevel Search (TPBS) algorithm that computes high-quality feasible solutions for the problem. We evaluate our approaches against an existing baseline algorithm on a broad range of problem instances with up to 40 targets and 40 obstacles. The results demonstrate that both the proposed methods significantly outperform the baseline with respect to success rates, solution costs, and computation time.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Cycle-Consistent Neural Explanation of Formal Verification Certificates

arXiv:2606.24414v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Formal verification produces machine-checkable certificates that attest to the satisfaction or violation of temporal properties, yet these certificates remain opaque to non-specialist stakeholders. We propose a cycle-consistent neural architecture that generates faithful natural language explanations of verification certificates. A forward network NN1 maps certificates to explanations, and an inverse network NN2 reconstructs certificates from explanations; a symbolic verifier closes the loop, providing a differentiable faithfulness proxy. A pointer-generator mechanism ensures lexical grounding by copying state names directly from the certificate. We evaluate on 420 test certificates spanning six verification methods (bounded proof, k-induction, inductive invariant, lasso, reachability, witness pair) in both YES and NO verdict variants, drawn from a financial compliance domain with 207 named states. Our trained architecture, combined with a hybrid inference-time routing strategy, achieves 90.0% cycle-verified soundness, surpassing a multi- LLM few-shot baseline (76.1% for the best of 16 LLM combinations across four frontier models) by 13.9 percentage points. The neural model wins on 10 of 12 verdict/kind categories, with three categories reaching 100% soundness. The architecture offers 860x faster inference (185 ms vs. 160 s per certificate for the full multi-LLM baseline), offline operation, deterministic outputs, and zero per-inference cost. These results demonstrate that trained specialization outperforms general-purpose LLM prompting for structured certificate explanation, while eliminating the deployment constraints of cloud-based inference.

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

T2D-Bench: Evidence-Gated Evaluation of LLM Outputs for Type 2 Diabetes Using a Multi-Layer Clinical-Lifestyle Knowledge Graph

arXiv:2606.24145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can produce clinically fluent recommendations for type 2 diabetes while failing to satisfy guideline constraints or explicitly justify lifestyle-related glycemic claims. We present T2D-Bench, a reproducible benchmark and evidence-gated evaluation framework for testing whether LLM outputs satisfy explicit, graph-checkable evidence requirements. T2D-Bench is built on a multi-layer clinical-lifestyle knowledge graph that combines a biomedical spine (UMLS, DrugBank, SIDER), computable ADA Standards of Care rules, and lifestyle knowledge connected through a mechanistic bridge to glycemic laboratory effects. Across 100 structured vignettes spanning diagnosis, medication safety, and adversarial lifestyle conflicts, baseline outputs failed benchmark-defined evidence-path checks in 35% of cases for GPT-4o-mini and 33% for GPT-4o. The evidence gate detects unsupported omissions and uses constrained revision to bring outputs into verifier-level compliance with benchmark-defined evidence requirements. These results show that computable evidence constraints can make unsupported clinical omissions explicit, measurable, and correctable in diabetes-focused LLM outputs.

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

HairLRM: Strand-based Hair Modeling via Large Reconstruction Models

The fundamental limitation of traditional strand-based modeling is not simply data scarcity, but the ill-posedness of inferring complex 3D fields from 2D imagery without structural constraints. This unconstrained regression leads to catastrophic failures in resolving both global occlusion (e.g., in ponytails) and local directionality (e.g., in curls), resulting in over-smoothed, plausible-but-incorrect geometries. To resolve this, we integrate the strong geometric priors of Large Reconstruction Models (LRMs) into the strand generation pipeline. Using the LRM mesh as a structural anchor, we employ a novel Dual Orientation AutoEncoder to lift coarse geometry into high-fidelity strands. By resolving vector field singularities through latent-space optimization and surface-guided refinement, our method effectively disentangles complex topological structures, setting a new benchmark for robustness and accuracy in hair reconstruction.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Geometric mechanisms enabling spin- and enantio-sensitive observables in one photon ionization of chiral molecules

arXiv:2603.02735v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We examine spin-resolved photoionization of randomly oriented chiral molecules via circularly polarized light, and revisit earlier predictions of Cherepkov (J. Phys. B: Atom. Mol. Phys. 16, 1543, 1983). We will show that the dynamical origin of spin- and enantio-sensitive observables arise from two intrinsic mechanisms that are quantified by two pseudovectors stemming from the geometric properties of the photoionization dipoles in spin space and in real space, and an extrinsic mechanism which is a directional bias introduced by the well-defined direction of light polarization. These mechanisms arise solely from electric dipole interactions. Consequently, this means that the ten independent parameters that was earlier predicted by Cherepkov to fully describe spin-resolved photoionization of chiral molecules can be reduced as moments of these three pseudovectors. We also find that the molecular pseudoscalars describing the spin- and enantio-sensitive components of the yield can be described by the flux of these pseudovectors through the energy shell, which changes sign upon switching enantiomers. Our results provide compact expressions for these observables which provide an intuitive picture on what determines the strength of these spin- and enantio-sensitive observables. The approach can be readily generalized to photoexcitation, multiphoton processes, and arbitrary field polarizations. Regardless of the specific driving conditions, the resulting spin- and enantio-sensitive observables are still controlled by the same three pseudovectors, underscoring their universal role as the primary generators of chirality-induced spin asymmetries, emphasizing their fundamental geometric origin and the universality of the mechanism identified here.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Genetic modifiers of psychiatric, motor, and cognitive symptoms in Huntington's disease

The Enroll HD natural history platform provides rich longitudinal phenotypes enabling genome wide analyses across diverse clinical domains. Psychiatric symptoms are a major source of morbidity in Huntington's disease (HD), yet the genetic architecture underlying their onset is poorly understood. We analyzed ~18,000 people with HD (PwHD) to define genetic determinants of ages at psychiatric, motor, and cognitive symptom onset, and HD diagnosis. GWAS meta analysis recapitulated 11 established modifiers of motor onset and identified a novel locus spanning RAB3B/ZFYVE9 associated with age at violent/aggressive behavior onset. Exome wide analyses in Enroll HD participants implicated rare variants in FAN1, PMS1, POLD1, and HTT. Several HD modifiers of motor and cognitive symptom onset (MSH3, FAN1, HTT) also influenced psychiatric symptom onset, whereas PMS1 and POLD1 showed significant association with motor symptom onset. Psychiatric polygenic scores predicted psychiatric symptom onset, revealing a hybrid architecture combining psychiatric liability in general population with HD- or repeat expansion disease (RED) specific pathways.

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

MedVeriSeg: Teaching LISA-Like Medical Segmentation Models to Verify Query Validity Without Extra Training

Despite recent progress in text-prompt-based medical image segmentation, existing LISA-like MLLM-based methods typically generate masks regardless of whether the target specified in the query is present, leading to hallucinated segmentation. In this work, we propose MedVeriSeg, a training-free query verification framework that enables LISA-like medical segmentation models to reject false segmentation queries. MedVeriSeg first quantifies the response quality between the [SEG] token and image features through a Similarity Response Quality Scoring Module. To further improve robustness, it employs a Lightweight Routed Multi-Agent Verification Module, which fuses quantitative score evidence with qualitative agent evidence to comprehensively verify the validity of the query. To support systematic evaluation, we construct MedVeriSeg-Bench, a benchmark designed for query verification in medical image segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that MedVeriSeg effectively identifies false segmentation queries and reduces hallucinated segmentation, while maintaining a high acceptance rate for valid queries, thereby largely preserving the segmentation utility of LISA-like medical segmentation models.

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

VikingMem: A Memory Base Management System for Stateful LLM-based Applications

arXiv:2605.29640v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have revolutionized interactive applications; however, their finite context windows pose a critical data management challenge for maintaining stateful, long-term interactions. Existing memory approaches often rely on simplistic extraction methods that lead to incomplete memories or use rigid, single-purpose memory extraction prompts tailored to a single use case, such as chatbots. Consequently, they lack generalizability and perform poorly across diverse downstream tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Memory Base, a novel data management paradigm for managing the persistent state of long-term interactions. It is characterized by three core principles: selective extraction of high-value memories from raw information streams; inherent statefulness and evolution, where memory content is progressively summarized, corrected, and temporally weighted to prioritize recent interactions; and a generalizable abstraction paradigm designed for robust transferability across diverse applications, including education, recommendation, and agent memory. Building on this foundation, we present VikingMem, an end-to-end Memory Base Management System implemented on the VikingDB vector engine. VikingMem materializes this paradigm through interconnected event and entity abstractions. It features event-centric memory extraction to selectively handle complex information streams, while entities are dynamically updated by events to achieve stateful evolution. Using temporal compression via a topic-wise timeline and time-weighted recall, the system progressively produces high-level summary memories, prioritizes recent items, and compresses and fades older ones. Extensive evaluations on long-term memory benchmarks demonstrate that VikingMem outperformes baselines by up to 30% in memory retrieval effectiveness while maintaining the low latency essential for interactive applications.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Trading symmetry for Hilbert-space dimension in Bell-inequality violation

arXiv:2601.02893v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information, asymmetry, i.e., the lack of symmetry, is a resource allowing one to accomplish certain tasks that are otherwise impossible. Similarly, in a Bell test using any given Bell inequality, the maximum violation achievable using quantum strategies respecting or disregarding a certain symmetry can be different. In this work, we focus on the symmetry involved in the exchange of parties and explore when we have to trade this symmetry for a lower-dimensional quantum strategy in achieving the maximal violation of given Bell inequalities. For the family of symmetric Collins-Gisin-Linden-Massar-Popescu inequalities, we provide evidence showing that there is no such trade-off. However, for several other Bell inequalities with a small number of dichotomic measurement settings, we show that symmetric quantum strategies in the minimal Hilbert space dimension can only lead to a suboptimal Bell violation. In other words, there exist symmetric Bell inequalities that can only be maximally violated by asymmetric quantum strategies of minimal dimension. In contrast, one can also find examples of asymmetric Bell inequalities that are maximally violated by symmetric correlations. The implications of these findings on the geometry of the set of quantum correlations and the possibility of performing self-testing therefrom are briefly discussed.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Measurement Geometry for Quantum Random Access Codes: Beyond Nayak Bound and Toward Optimality

arXiv:2606.12700v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum random access codes (QRACs) ask how well N classical bits can be encoded into M qubits while allowing any single bit to be recovered. Although the Nayak bound remains the standard general upper bound on the decoding probability, numerical evidence suggests a stronger upper bound in the small-qubit regime. In this work, we formulate the optimal decoding probability in terms of decoding measurements, reformulating QRAC design as a spectral problem for noncommuting measurements. Using this formulation, we give an elementary proof of the Nayak bound by simplifying the Chernoff-bound argument. Moreover, we refine the argument to obtain upper bounds that improve over Nayak's bound in the entire finite-size regime. The equality conditions of our bounds justify defining mutually unbiased projector-valued measurements (MUPVMs), a generalization of mutually unbiased bases. We show that decoding measurement of any two-qubit QRAC attaining the conjectured bound must form MUPVMs. We also show that any MUPVM, assisted by one ancillary qubit, yields a QRAC with optimal N-scaling decoding probability. Finally, we propose a new MUPVM-based construction for the (M+2,M)-QRAC family attaining the conjectured bound.

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

Earth Science Foundation Models: From Perception to Reasoning and Discovery

arXiv:2605.12542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large foundation models (FMs) are transforming Earth science by integrating heterogeneous multimodal data, such as multi-platform imagery, gridded reanalysis data, diverse geophysical and geochemical observations, and domain-specific text, to support tasks ranging from basic perception to advanced scientific discovery. This paper provides a unified review of Earth science foundation models (Earth FMs) through two complementary dimensions: depth, which traces the evolution of model capabilities from perception to multimodal reasoning and agentic scientific workflows, and breadth, which summarizes their expanding applications across the atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere, biosphere, anthroposphere, and cryosphere, as well as coupled Earth system processes. Using this framework, we review representative multimodal Earth foundation models and compile more than 200 datasets and benchmarks spanning diverse Earth science tasks and modalities. We further discuss key challenges in multimodal data heterogeneity, scientific reliability and continual updating, scalability and sustainability, and the transition from foundation models to agentic and embodied Earth intelligence, and outline future directions toward more integrated, trustworthy, and actionable AI Earth scientists. Overall, this paper offers a structured roadmap for understanding the development of Earth foundation models from both capability depth and application breadth.

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

QALM: Escaping Local Minima via Interleaved Exploration and Exploitation in Quantum Circuit Optimization

arXiv:2606.16221v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum circuit optimizers face a fundamental limitation in how they tolerate temporary cost increases. At one extreme, greedy rule-based optimizers immediately apply any cost-reducing transformation, achieving high efficiency but quickly becoming trapped in local minima. At the other extreme, search-based optimizers accept cost-increasing moves to explore the circuit space and escape such minima. However, because search-based optimizers cannot determine within a reasonable time budget whether a given point is promising, that is, whether its neighborhood contains a deeper local minimum, they must blindly explore higher-cost regions. As a result, escaping the current basin to reach a promising point takes exponentially many steps. In this work, we show that this limitation can be overcome with a hybrid framework that interleaves the exhaustive exploration capabilities of search algorithms with the efficiency of rule-based optimization. We implement this framework as QALM, a novel optimizer designed to escape local minima without incurring the runtime penalties of pure search. Crucially, our results demonstrate that QALM does not merely strike a balance; it outperforms existing rule-based and search-based optimizers in circuit reduction rates while operating with the computational efficiency of rule-based systems. In a comprehensive evaluation across 248 circuits, QALM matches or exceeds the fidelity of the strongest baseline on 83.9% of these circuits, given the same time budget.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Investigating naming error patterns after non-invasive brain stimulation and language treatment in persons with aphasia

Abstract Background: Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) paired with behavioral language therapy can improve naming in persons with aphasia (PWA), yet naming errors persist. Little is known about how naming error patterns change after non-invasive brain stimulation is combined with language treatment. Aims: To examine whether right cerebellar tDCS plus computerized aphasia therapy changes the types of naming errors in people with chronic aphasia across timepoints, and to determine whether effects differ by cerebellar tDCS polarity (anode vs. cathode). Methods and Procedures: In a randomized, double-blind, sham-controlled, within-subject crossover study, we retrospectively analyzed behavioral data from 24 individuals with post-stroke aphasia. Each participant completed two 15-session intervention periods (3-5 sessions/week) with active cerebellar tDCS + computerized aphasia therapy and sham + computerized aphasia therapy, separated by a two-month washout. General linear models (GLMs) assessed longitudinal changes in six error types (semantic, phonological real word, phonological nonword, no response, mixed, unrelated) on an untrained picture naming task (Philadelphia Naming Test; PNT) and a trained task (Naming 80; N80). Additional GLMs evaluated polarity effects with 2 (Group: anode vs. cathode) x 2 (Treatment) interactions, and treatment-order effects with 2 (Group: tDCS-first vs. sham-first) x 2 (Treatment) interactions. Outcomes and Results: Active cerebellar tDCS did not significantly change error types for trained items (N80). For untrained items (PNT), active tDCS reduced several error types relative to sham, with the clearest and most durable reduction in phonological nonword errors; more moderate reductions occurred for phonological real word and unrelated errors. Mixed errors showed a marginally opposite pattern, tending to increase after tDCS and decrease after sham. Polarity analyses indicated broadly similar effects across anodal and cathodal stimulation overall, but only the anode group showed a reliable treatment effect for phonological nonword errors on the PNT. Treatment-order analyses revealed no significant order effects. Conclusions: Our results indicate a shift in naming error types, particularly after tDCS treatment for the untrained naming task (PNT). These findings may help guide the course of treatment approaches of those with aphasia and what error naming pattern types may show changes post stroke when combining non-invasive brain stimulation and computerized aphasia therapy. Clinical Trial Registration: Cerebellar Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and Aphasia Treatment [NCT02901574] Keywords: aphasia, naming errors, non-invasive brain stimulation, cerebellar tDCS, computerized aphasia treatment

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

A Streaming Sparse Cholesky Method for Derivative-Informed Gaussian Process Surrogates Within Digital Twin Applications

arXiv:2511.00366v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Digital twins are developed to model the behavior of a specific physical asset (or twin), and they can consist of high-fidelity physics-based models or surrogates. A highly accurate surrogate is often preferred over multi-physics models as they enable forecasting the physical twin future state in real-time. To adapt to a specific physical twin, the digital twin model must be updated using in-service data from that physical twin. In this paper, we combine and extend several previous surrogate-related advancements with the goal of demonstrating an end-to-end digital twin (DT) solution for predicting performance of an aircraft structure (the physical asset). To this end, we extend Gaussian process (GP) models to include derivative data, for improved accuracy, with dynamic updating to ingest physical twin data during service. Including derivative data, however, comes at a prohibitive cost of increased covariance matrix dimension. We circumvent this issue through our modified dynamic sparse Cholesky linear system solver. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the prediction accuracy of the derivative-enhanced sparse Cholesky GP method produces improved models upon dynamic data additions. Lastly, we demonstrate the developed algorithm within a DT framework to model fatigue crack growth in an aerospace vehicle, thereby exhibiting through our assembled engineered system how digital twin technologies can be combined in practice.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Conditional channel entropy sets fundamental limits on thermodynamic quantum information processing

arXiv:2604.01217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The thermodynamic resourcefulness of quantum channels primarily depends on their underlying causal structure and their ability to generate quantum correlations. We quantify this interplay within the resource theory of athermality for bipartite quantum channels in the presence of a side channel acting as memory, referred to as the resource theory of conditional athermality. For channels with trivial output Hamiltonians, we characterize the optimal one-shot rates for distilling the identity gate from a given channel, as well as the cost of simulating the channel using the identity gate, under conditional Gibbs-preserving superchannels. We show that these rates have a direct trade-off relation with the conditional channel entropies, attributing operational significance to signaling in quantum processes. Furthermore, we establish an asymptotic equipartition property for the conditional channel min-entropy for classes of channels that are either tele-covariant or no-signaling from the non-conditioning input to the conditioning output. As a consequence, we demonstrate asymptotic reversibility of the resource theory for these channels. The asymptotic conditional athermality capacity of a tele-covariant channel is half the superdense coding capacity of its Choi state. Our work establishes the conditional channel entropy as a primitive information-theoretic concept for quantum processes, elucidating its potential for wider applications in quantum information science.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Adapting Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Thought Supervision for Explainable Detection of Hateful and Propagandistic Memes

Hateful and propagandistic memes exploit the interplay between images and text to convey harmful intent that neither modality reveals alone. Although thinking-based multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have advanced vision-language understanding, their application to meme content moderation remains underexplored. We propose a reinforcement learning-based post-training method that improves classification performance and reference-based explanation quality in thinking-based MLLMs via task-specific rewards and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Concretely, we (i) conduct a systematic empirical study of off-the-shelf MLLMs for hateful and propagandistic meme understanding across English and Arabic benchmarks, (ii) extend existing meme datasets with weakly supervised chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales via distillation and multi-LLM fine-grained propaganda annotations, (iii) introduce a GRPO-based objective with thinking-length regularization that jointly optimizes classification accuracy and explanation quality, and (iv) investigate self-supervised GRPO on unlabeled memes using consensus-based pseudo-labels. Experiments on the Hateful Memes and ArMeme benchmarks show that our approach improves over previously reported results on FHM accuracy (up to +2.1%, from 79.9% to 82.0%) and on ArMeme macro-F1 (up to +7.6 points, from 0.536 to 0.612 with explanations; +6.1 compared to the original ArMeme benchmark), while also generating natural-language explanations. On ArMeme, sequence-classification baselines remain stronger in terms of raw accuracy, whereas our approach provides more balanced per-class performance along with explanations. We publicly release our code, data extensions, and evaluation resources.

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

A multilevel hierarchical framework for quantification of experimental heterogeneity in population snapshot data

by David J. Warne, Xiangrun Zhu, Thomas P. Steele, Stuart T. Johnston, Scott A. Sisson, Matthew Faria, Ryan J. Murphy, Alexander P. Browning Biological systems exhibit substantial heterogeneity: that is, variation in specific characteristics of individuals within a population. As a result, it is of critical importance to appropriately account for biological heterogeneity when calibrating mathematical models to infer cellular processes and predict behaviour. Recent approaches consider ordinary differential equations with random parameters to quantify heterogeneity in dynamical processes of cells. In this setting, statistical inference is performed to characterise the distribution of these random parameters within a cell population. One significant limitation of this approach is the tacit assumption that there are no substantial deviations in these distributions across experimental replicates. In this work, we propose a flexible Bayesian hierarchical differential equation modelling framework that quantifies and distinguishes both inter-experimental heterogeneity (heterogeneity between experimental replicates) and intra-experimental heterogeneity (biological heterogeneity within replicate populations). We consider two recent studies that employ mathematical models to interpret flow cytometry snap-shot data and quantify heterogeneity in nano-particle cell interactions and cell internalisation processes. Using simulation data, we demonstrate that substantial inaccuracy in the inferred dynamics can arise when experimental heterogeneity is not accounted for. By contrast, our hierarchical approach is robust to variability in inter-experimental and intra-experimental heterogeneity and our method simplifies to previous methods when inter-experimental heterogeneity is negligible. Our approach is flexible and widely applicable to applications involving replicate populations and snapshot data. We provide open-source implementations of our methods on GitHub.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Visualizing the impact of quenched disorder on 2D electron Wigner solids

Authors:

Electron Wigner solids (WSs)1–12 provide an ideal system for understanding the competing effects of electron–electron and electron–disorder interactions, a central unsolved problem in condensed matter physics. Progress in this topic has been limited by a lack of single-defect-resolved experimental measurements as well as accurate theoretical tools to enable realistic experiment/theory comparison. Here we overcome these limitations by combining atomically resolved scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) with neural-quantum-state quantum Monte Carlo (NQS-QMC) simulation of disordered 2D electron WSs to discover new disorder-induced physical regimes of correlated electron behaviour. STM was used to image the electron density (ne)-dependent evolution of electron WSs in gate-tunable bilayer MoSe2 (BL-MoSe2) devices with varying long-range (nLR) and short-range (nSR) disorder densities. These images were compared with NQS-QMC simulations using realistic disorder maps extracted from experiment, thus allowing the roles of different disorder types to be disentangled. We identify two distinct physical regimes for disordered electron WSs that depend on nSR. For nSR ≲ ne, the WS behaviour is dominated by long-range disorder and features extensive mixed solid–liquid phases, a new type of local re-entrant melting/crystallization and prominent Friedel oscillations. By contrast, when nSR ≫ ne, these features are suppressed and a more robust amorphous WS phase emerges that persists to higher ne, highlighting the importance of short-range disorder in this regime. Our work establishes a powerful framework for studying disordered quantum solids through a combined experimental–theoretical approach. A technique combining atomically resolved scanning tunnelling microscopy with neural-quantum-state quantum Monte Carlo simulation of disordered 2D electron Wigner solids establishes a powerful framework to enable the clear identification of two distinct defect-induced disorder regimes.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Fine-Tuning SAM2 for Coronary Artery Segmentation in X-Ray Fluoroscopy

Authors:

SAM2 (Meta, 2024) provides a strong starting point for segmentation, but given the unique challenges in medical imaging (noise from patient movement, the projection-based nature of X-ray fluoroscopy, and low contrast between vessels and background), direct application is difficult. We fine-tune MedSAM2 on annotated coronary angiograms and apply it to video data for point-of-care use. On the ARCADE validation set (200 images), the fine-tuned model achieves Dice 0.767 compared to 0.033 zero-shot. On 10 fluoroscopic video studies from CoronaryDominance, it tracks vessels coherently and avoids falsely segmenting ribs, stents, and bypass grafts in 9 of 10 studies. Code is available at https://github.com/elakiyasivakumar/SAM2-Coronary-Angiography-VA and the fine-tuned checkpoint at https://huggingface.co/Elakiya17/CA-SAM2.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Delta-Based Target Reformulation for Short-Term Electricity Load Forecasting Using LSTM and Transformer Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term electricity load forecasting is critical for the reliable and economic operation of modern power systems, under non-stationarity arising from weather variability, calendar effects, and evolving consumption patterns. While deep learning models such as LSTMs and Transformers show promising performance, most existing studies focus on direct absolute load prediction without explicitly addressing target non-stationarity. Motivated by classical time-series differencing techniques in ARIMA models, this paper investigates a delta-based target reformulation for short-term electricity load forecasting using deep learning. Instead of directly predicting absolute load values, the proposed formulation trains models to predict the change in load between consecutive time steps, with final forecasts reconstructed using the last observed load. This aims to stabilize the learning target and reduce forecasting difficulty. Using multi-year, hourly real-world electricity load data from India, augmented with meteorological variables from the NASA POWER project and calendar features, this study evaluates LSTM and Transformer models under both formulations, benchmarking them against LightGBM. Experiments are conducted for hour-ahead and day-ahead horizons, assessing performance via Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE). Results show that delta-based reformulation consistently improves forecasting accuracy for hour-ahead prediction across all evaluated models, yielding MAPE reductions of over 50% compared to absolute formulations. For day-ahead forecasting, delta targets specifically benefit deep sequence models (LSTM and Transformer), while LightGBM remains competitive under the absolute formulation. These findings indicate that while delta reformulation is a powerful inductive bias for neural networks, its efficacy is model- and horizon-dependent.

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

Beyond Nearest Neighbor Interpolation in Data Augmentation

Avoiding the risk of undefined categorical labels using nearest neighbor interpolation overlooks the risk of exacerbating pixel level annotation errors in augmented training data. Additionally, the inherent low pass filtering effects of interpolation algorithms exacerbate the risk of degrading high frequency structural details within annotated regions of interest. To avoid these risks, the author modified convolutional neural networks data transformation functions by incorporating a modified geometric transformation function, removing reliance on nearest neighbor interpolation, and integrating a mean-based class filtering mechanism to handle undefined categorical labels with alternative interpolation algorithms. The author also implemented an offline data augmentation pipeline to generate interpolation specific augmented training data, enabling quantitative assessment of interpolation specific low pass filtering effects on augmented training data. Experimental evaluation on three medical image segmentation datasets and the XBAT+ datasets demonstrated performance gains across multiple quantitative metrics.