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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits

Authors:
Sourav Chakraborty↗Amit Kiran Rege↗Claire Monteleoni↗Lijun Chen↗

arXiv:2602.17315v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős–R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AI-enhanced tuning of quantum dot Hamiltonians toward Majorana modes

Authors:
Mateusz Krawczyk↗Jaros{\l}aw Paw{\l}owski↗

arXiv:2601.02149v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a neural network-based model capable of learning the broad landscape of working regimes in quantum dot simulators, and using this knowledge to autotune these devices - based on transport measurements - toward obtaining Majorana modes in the structure. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner on synthetic data in the form of conductance maps, using a physics-informed loss that incorporates key properties of Majorana zero modes. We show that, with appropriate training, a deep vision-transformer network can efficiently memorize relation between Hamiltonian parameters and structures on conductance maps and use it to propose parameters update for a quantum dot chain that drive the system toward topological phase. Starting from a broad range of initial detunings in parameter space, a single update step is sufficient to generate nontrivial zero modes. Moreover, by enabling an iterative tuning procedure - where the system acquires updated conductance maps at each step - we demonstrate that the method can address a much larger region of the parameter space.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Steady-Forcing: Balancing Spatial Persistence and Motion Continuity in Long-Horizon Nature Video Diffusion

Authors:
Matiur Rahman Minar↗Seunghun Oh↗GangHyeon Jeong↗Unsang Park↗

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation but often degrade over long rollouts: static scene layouts drift, while mechanisms that improve spatial stability tend to suppress motion, causing natural flows such as water, fire, or smoke to stagnate. We study this stability-motion trade-off in fixed-camera long-horizon nature video generation, where the two failure modes can be more clearly separated than in moving-camera settings. We propose Steady-Forcing, a memory and training framework combining a persistent visual anchor (V-Sink), an exponential moving-average motion memory (EMA-Sink), block-relative temporal encoding, periodic cache purification, and distillation from a Wan2.1-14B teacher with motion-rewarded priors under task-focused configurations. Together, these components are designed to preserve background identity while sustaining visually plausible fluid dynamics over multi-minute autoregressive rollouts. Evaluations across seven baselines show that Steady-Forcing improves long horizon background consistency and imaging quality, while a blind user study indicates stronger perceived stability and motion continuity. The benchmark evaluation further suggest that generic VBench aggregate scores under-penalize fixed-camera artifacts as well as rewarding drift-induced optical flow as Dynamic Degree while not directly penalizing texture hardening or flow stagnation - motivating future task-specific benchmarks for static-camera nature-flow evaluation. Project page: https://minar09.github.io/steadyforcing/

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Learning ground state observables from quantum computing experiments

Authors:
Ben Jaderberg↗Freya Shah↗Minjun Jeon↗M. Emre Sahin↗Christa Zoufal↗Kunal Sharma↗

arXiv:2606.15983v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent theoretical progress has established conditions under which machine learning models can efficiently predict ground-state properties of gapped local Hamiltonians when trained on quantum-generated data. Previous experimental demonstrations in this paradigm, however, have largely been limited to small systems or highly structured states, due to the difficulty of preparing many-body ground states on quantum processors. In this work, we demonstrate learning from experimental quantum data generated from approximate ground states of the two-dimensional Heisenberg XXZ model with system sizes up to 115 qubits. We construct a dataset of single-site expectation values, two-point correlations, and 12-body loop correlations across the antiferromagnetic phase. We then train neural networks on this data and show that they can accurately predict spatially resolved observables for previously unseen Hamiltonian parameters, both within the training distribution and in an out-of-distribution regime approaching the phase boundary. Our results demonstrate the practical realization of learning from quantum data for an interacting two-dimensional many-body system at scale, motivating a path toward regimes where quantum processors could provide training data beyond the reach of classical approximation methods.

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

Policy-Embedded Graph Expansion: Networked HIV Testing with Diffusion-Driven Network Samples

Authors:
Akseli Kangaslahti↗Davin Choo↗Lingkai Kong↗Milind Tambe↗Alastair van Heerden↗Cheryl Johnson↗

arXiv:2601.16233v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: HIV is a retrovirus that attacks the human immune system and can lead to death without proper treatment. In collaboration with the WHO and the University of Witwatersrand, we study how to improve the efficiency of HIV testing with the goal of eventual deployment, directly supporting progress toward UN Sustainable Development Goal 3.3. While prior work has demonstrated the promise of intelligent algorithms for sequential, network-based HIV testing, existing approaches rely on assumptions that are impractical in our real-world implementations. Here, we study sequential testing on incrementally revealed disease networks and introduce Policy-Embedded Graph Expansion (PEGE), a novel framework that directly embeds a generative distribution over graph expansions into the decision-making policy rather than attempting explicit topological reconstruction. We further propose Dynamics-Driven Branching (DDB), a diffusion-based graph expansion model that supports decision making in PEGE and is designed for data-limited settings where forest structures arise naturally, as in our real-world referral process. Experiments on real HIV transmission networks show that the combined approach (PEGE + DDB) consistently outperforms baselines (e.g., 17.3% improvement in discounted reward and 15.4% more HIV detections with 25% of the population tested) and explore key tradeoffs that drive solution quality.

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

FOCUS: DLLMs Know How to Tame Their Compute Bound

Authors:
Kaihua Liang↗Xin Tan↗An Zhong↗Hong Xu↗Marco Canini↗

Diffusion Large Language Models (DLLMs) offer a compelling alternative to Auto-Regressive models, but their deployment is constrained by high decoding cost. In this work, we identify a key inefficiency in DLLM decoding: while computation is parallelized over token blocks, only a small subset of tokens is decodable at each diffusion step, causing most compute to be wasted on non-decodable tokens. We further observe a strong correlation between attention-derived token importance and token-wise decoding probability. Based on this insight, we propose FOCUS, an inference system designed for DLLMs. By dynamically focusing computation on decodable tokens and evicting non-decodable ones on-the-fly, FOCUS increases the effective batch size, alleviating compute limitations and enabling scalable throughput. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that FOCUS achieves up to 3.52$\times$ throughput improvement over the production-grade engine LMDeploy in large-batch settings, while preserving or improving generation quality across multiple benchmarks.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

ConSA: Controllable Sparsity in Hybrid Attention via Learnable Allocation

Authors:
Yao Chen↗Yinqi Yang↗Junyuan Shang↗Xiangzhao Hao↗Simeng Zhang↗Yilong Chen↗Tingwen Liu↗Shuohuan Wang↗Dianhai Yu↗

Hybrid architectures combining full attention (FA) and sliding-window attention (SWA) are a promising paradigm for efficient LLM inference. However, existing methods typically rely on hand-crafted rules or simple post-hoc heuristics for FA/SWA allocation and offer limited analysis of the attention behaviors underlying these designs. We propose Controllable Sparsity in Hybrid Attention (ConSA), a framework that learns optimal FA/SWA assignment under a user-specified sparsity target. ConSA employs L0 regularization to learn binary masks selecting between FA and SWA for each attention unit, while an augmented Lagrangian constraint enforces the target sparsity at either layer or KV-head granularity. We evaluate ConSA on two LLMs at the 0.6B and 1.7B scales. Learned allocations consistently outperform rule-based baselines, with KV-head-wise allocation yielding clear gains over layer-wise allocation. The learned patterns place SWA in the bottom layers and concentrate FA into contiguous middle-layer blocks, diverging from evenly interleaved patterns in rule-based methods. This structure persists across model scales, sparsity levels, and allocation granularities, revealing a fine-grained spectrum of intrinsic attention behaviors that underlies the learned allocation.

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

ChronoSurv: A Clinical Pathway-Guided Graph Framework for Multimodal Survival Analysis

Authors:
Hugo Miccinilli↗Theo Di Piazza↗

arXiv:2606.19140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate survival prediction is essential for personalized treatment planning in head and neck cancer, yet remains challenging due to the heterogeneous and high-dimensional nature of multimodal clinical data. While deep survival models have improved predictive performance over classical statistical approaches, existing methods typically rely on static fusion strategies or temporally agnostic modeling, limiting their ability to capture structured clinical workflows. In this work, we propose ChronoSurv, a heterogeneous hierarchical directed graph framework for multimodal survival analysis. ChronoSurv represents patient care as a progression-aware clinical trajectory using directed graphs aligned with key diagnostic steps. A hierarchical topology incorporates fine-grained, coarse, and global representations, further supporting flexible adaptation to missing modalities, while heterogeneous message passing models complex and asymmetric relationships across modalities and clinical steps. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that ChronoSurv achieves state-of-the-art discriminative performance while maintaining statistically reliable calibration. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm the contribution of each architectural component, highlighting the potential of trajectory-aware graph modeling for multimodal survival prediction.

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09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

A Physics-Inspired Optimizer: Velocity Regularized Adam

Authors:
Pranav Vaidhyanathan↗Lucas Schorling↗Natalia Ares↗Maike Osborne↗

arXiv:2505.13196v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Velocity-Regularized Adam (VRAdam), a physics-inspired optimizer for training deep neural networks that draws on ideas from quartic terms for kinetic energy with its stabilizing effects on various system dynamics. Previous algorithms, including the ubiquitous Adam, operate at the so-called adaptive edge of stability regime during training, leading to rapid oscillations and slowed convergence of loss. However, VRAdam adds a higher order penalty on the learning rate based on the velocity such that the algorithm automatically slows down whenever weight updates become large. In practice, we observe that the effective dynamic learning rate shrinks in high-velocity regimes, and damping oscillations. By combining this velocity-based regularizer for global damping with per-parameter scaling of Adam, we create a powerful hybrid optimizer. For this optimizer, we provide rigorous theoretical analysis of operation at the edge of stability from a physical and control perspective for the momentum. Furthermore, we derive convergence bounds with the rate $\mathcal{O}(\ln(N)/\sqrt{N})$ for a stochastic non convex objective under mild assumptions. We demonstrate that VRAdam exceeds the performance against standard optimizers including AdamW. We benchmark various tasks such as image classification, language modeling, and generative modeling using diverse architectures and training methodologies including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Transformers, and GFlowNets.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Silent Failures in Federated Personalization of Foundation Models

Authors:
YongKyung Oh↗Alex Bui↗

arXiv:2606.00947v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Foundation models are increasingly personalized on decentralized private data through federated learning and are now deployed at scale under growing regulatory requirements for post-market monitoring. We argue that this convergence creates a distinct and under-recognized class of trustworthiness failures, which we term "Silent Failures." These include amplified bias, fairness collapse, and alignment erosion that may remain difficult to detect because federated learning's privacy constraints limit visibility into model behavior. A landscape analysis of existing benchmarks reveals a structural divide. Federated benchmarks evaluate system performance but provide limited insight into model behavior, whereas centralized trustworthiness benchmarks assess behavior but require model access incompatible with federated privacy. We introduce a taxonomy of six silent failure modes arising from the interaction of foundation model personalization, dataset shift, and core federated constraints. Our analysis shows that privacy-preserving training alone is insufficient for trustworthy deployment. We conclude with a research agenda for privacy-preserving behavioral evaluation and propose that silent failures become a standard diagnostic category for trustworthy federated artificial intelligence.

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

TextHOI-3D: Text-to-3D Hand-Object Interaction via Discrete Multi-View Generation and Joint Mesh Optimization

Authors:
Zixiong Hao↗Zhencun Jiang↗

Text-conditioned 3D generation has progressed rapidly for images and isolated objects, but producing a hand-object mesh remains challenging: the output must preserve language semantics, cross-view consistency, object geometry, articulated hand shape, and physically plausible contact. We present TextHOI-3D, a staged framework that uses generated multi-view observations as an explicit interface between text-conditioned visual generation and geometry-aware hand-object recovery. TextHOI-3D learns a compact VQ token space for fixed-camera hand-object observations, predicts multi-view visual tokens from text with a CLIP-conditioned visual autoregressive model, and recovers a unified hand-object mesh through prior initialization, multi-view joint optimization, and anti-penetration refinement. The design separates semantic generation from geometric recovery while keeping both stages connected by a discrete multi-view representation. On HO3D-derived evaluations, the multi-view setting reduces object CD from 17.26 mm to 4.92 mm and penetration volume from 5.3721 cm^3 to 0.2193 cm^3 compared with a single-view counterpart, while improving hand errors and surface F-scores. These results support multi-view visual tokens as an effective intermediate representation for text-driven 3D hand-object mesh creation.

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

ReGenHuman: Re-Generating Human Appearances for Realistic Full-Body Video Anonymization

Authors:
Adam Sun↗Eshaan Barkataki↗Arnold Milstein↗Gordon Wetzstein↗Ehsan Adeli↗

Anonymizing human-centric video data is an understudied problem. Prior anonymization techniques either blur or redact pixels at the cost of realism and downstream utility, or generate frame-by-frame at the cost of temporal coherence. We introduce ReGenHuman, the first full-body video anonymization pipeline that is simultaneously realistic, temporally consistent, and anonymous by construction. Contrary to past approaches which redact or edit the inputs directly, we propose a regenerate, don't edit paradigm. Our approach composites 2D pose, segmentation, and monocular depth into two complementary conditioning streams - StructAll and StructHuman, which are used to fine-tune a video-to-video diffusion backbone on in-the-wild human videos, synthesizing the human regions entirely from identity-free structural cues. We evaluate our model on privacy, quality, and utility, and show that our ReGenHuman achieves the best tradeoff across all three axes against current baselines. We further show that our anonymized videos remain effective for downstream tasks, including video question answering.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

On Approximating the Dynamic Response of Synchronous Generators via Operator Learning: A Step Towards Building Deep Operator-based Power Grid Simulators

Authors:
Christian Moya↗Amirhossein Mollaali↗Guang Lin↗Meng Yue↗

arXiv:2301.12538v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper develops an Operator Learning framework for approximating the dynamic response of synchronous generators. The framework can be used to (i) build a neural network-based generator model that interacts with a power grid simulator or (ii) shadow the true generator's transient response. First, we develop a data-driven Deep Operator Network (DeepONet) to approximate the infinite-dimensional solution operator of the generators. Then, we design a numerical scheme based on DeepONet that simulates the generator's response over a given time horizon. The proposed scheme recursively employs the trained DeepONet to simulate the response for a given multi-dimensional input that describes the interaction between the generator and the power grid. In addition, we design a residual DeepONet numerical scheme that can incorporate information from existing mathematical models. We accompany this residual DeepONet scheme with an estimate for the prediction's cumulative error. Finally, we build a data aggregation (DAgger) strategy that allows fine-tuning of DeepONets using aggregated training data that the DeepONets will likely encounter during interactive simulations with other grid components. As a proof of concept, we demonstrate that the proposed frameworks can effectively approximate the transient model of a synchronous generator.

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

SARLO-80: Worldwide Slant SAR Language Optic Dataset 80cm

Authors:
Sol\`ene Debuys\`ere↗Nicolas Trouv\'e↗Nathan Letheule↗Elise Colin↗Georgia Channing↗

arXiv:2606.20523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal foundation models have advanced rapidly thanks to large optical benchmarks, but comparable resources for synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remain limited. Existing SAR–optical datasets largely rely on low-resolution, intensity-only Ground Range Detected~(GRD) products and do not preserve complex-valued SAR measurements or native acquisition geometry, which restricts physically grounded multimodal learning. In particular, large-scale public datasets combining very-high-resolution (VHR) SAR SLC, aligned optical imagery, and natural-language descriptions are still lacking. We present a VHR SAR–optical–text dataset built from open-access Umbra spotlight acquisitions distributed as Sensor Independent Complex Data (SICD). From around 2,500 worldwide scenes (VV/HH, 20cm–2m native resolution), we standardize all SAR data to an 80cm slant-range grid via band-limited FFT resampling and tile the imagery into 1024 by 1024 patches. For each SAR patch, we retrieve a high-resolution optical tile and warp it into the SAR grid using local coordinate correspondences for local pixel-level alignment. We further generate three caption variants (SHORT/MID/LONG) per sample to support vision–language training and evaluation. Our dataset contains 119,566 triplets (complex and amplitude slant-range SAR patch, aligned optical patch, natural-language description) covering 257 locations across 72 countries and a broad range of land types and infrastructures. We release fixed train/validation/test splits and the full preprocessing and baseline code to enable reproducible benchmarks for multimodal alignment on cross-modal retrieval and conditional generation in native SAR geometry. The dataset is publicly available on the Hugging Face Hub at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ONERA/SARLO-80.

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

Reinforcement Learning-Guided Retrieval with Soft Fusion for Robust Multimodal Imitation Learning under Missing Modalities

Authors:
Hassan Ismkhan↗Hamid Bouchahcia↗

arXiv:2606.15514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems perceive the world through multiple input modalities – including visual camera streams and natural language instructions – and must select appropriate actions based on these signals. However, assuming the permanent availability of all input devices is unrealistic, as sensors may fail, become occluded, or drop out entirely during deployment. Robust handling of such missing-modality scenarios is therefore essential for real-world robot operation. This paper introduces RL4IL, a reinforcement learning guided method for imitation learning that selects the most suitable action for a given observation by identifying the most relevant expert demonstrations from a training library. A reinforcement learning policy, trained via Proximal Policy Optimisation over Breadth-First Search candidate sets, ranks candidate demonstrations and a soft cross-attention fusion head aggregates their action signals to produce the final prediction. When a modality is missing at inference time, a dedicated per-modality RL retrieval policy identifies donor demonstrations from the training library, and a soft imputation head reconstructs the missing embedding via cross-attention over the top-ranked donors – without requiring any retraining of the system. Experiments on three LIBERO benchmark suites demonstrate that RL4IL substantially outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning methods under sensor dropout conditions, while requiring no policy network training. The code can be found at https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Reinforcement-Learning-via-kNN-for-Robotic-Learning-with-Missing-Camera

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17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Merged amplitude encoding for Chebyshev quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks: trading qubits for circuit executions

Authors:
Hikaru Wakaura↗

arXiv:2603.02818v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Kolmogorov–Arnold networks based on Chebyshev polynomials (CCQKAN) evaluate each edge activation function as a quantum inner product, creating a trade-off between qubit count and the number of circuit executions per forward pass. We introduce merged amplitude encoding, a technique that packs the element-wise products of all $n$ input-edge vectors for a given output node into a single amplitude state, reducing circuit executions by a factor of $n$ at a cost of only 1–2 additional qubits relative to the sequential baseline. The merged and original circuits compute the same mathematical quantity exactly; the open question is whether they remain equally trainable within a gradient-based optimization loop. We address this question through numerical experiments on 10 network configurations under ideal, finite-shot, and noisy simulation conditions, comparing original, parameter-transferred, and independently initialized merged circuits over 16 random seeds. Wilcoxon signed-rank tests show no significant difference between the independently initialized merged circuit and the original ($p > 0.05$ in 28 of 30 comparisons), while parameter transfer yields significantly lower loss under ideal conditions ($p < 0.001$ in 9 of 10 configurations). On 10-class digit classification with the $8\times8$ MNIST dataset using a one-vs-all strategy, original and merged circuits achieve comparable test accuracies of 53–78\% with no significant difference in any configuration. These results provide empirical evidence that merged amplitude encoding preserves trainability under the simulation conditions tested.

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

Biomazon: A Multimodal Dataset for 3D Forest Structure and Biomass Modeling in the Amazon Basin

Authors:
Sayan Mandal↗Rocco Sedona↗Simon Besnard↗Mikhail Urbazaev↗Morris Riedel↗Ehsan Zandi↗Gabriele Cavallaro↗

Accurate, spatially explicit characterization of tropical forest structure is essential for carbon accounting and ecosystem monitoring, yet most ML pipelines predict canopy-top height proxies (e.g., RH95/RH98) or AGBD as separate scalar targets, rather than learning the forest vertical structure as an ordered profile. The community lacks a ML-ready multimodal benchmark for predicting the entire GEDI RH profile jointly with AGBD, or for evaluating methods that enforce physically consistent ordering across RH percentiles. We address this with Biomazon, a 20 m multimodal benchmark dataset over the Amazon Basin that pairs GEDI RH and AGBD targets with multi-sensor predictors (Sentinel-1/2, ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, Copernicus DEM, Dynamic World LULC, and AlphaEarth embeddings) under standardized spatial splits and evaluation protocols. Using a shared encoder-decoder with task-specific heads as a baseline framework, we conduct a comprehensive ablation study of (i) backbone/model scale, (ii) modality contributions, and (iii) the use of auxiliary embeddings under standalone and fusion settings, and we report both single-target and joint-target results to quantify tradeoffs under a unified training protocol. Finally, we contextualize baseline performance through regionally aligned comparisons against existing gridded products, including GEDI L4D RH10-RH98 and AGBD, at matching temporal scale. Biomazon, together with the accompanying protocols and baseline results, establishes a reference benchmark for future work on structurally consistent RH-profile prediction and structure-biomass modeling in tropical forests.

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

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

Authors:
Han Yan↗

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

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20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Language fMRI lateralization success and head motion in pediatric epilepsy patients with ADHD, and improvements based on fMRI task training

Authors:
Alexander↗Santamaria↗Genc↗Barton↗Kean↗Wray↗Maixner↗Macdonald-Laurs↗Yang↗J. Y. Y.- M↗

Introduction Language functional MRI (fMRI) is a valuable tool for presurgical planning in epilepsy. Functional MRI can be challenging in children, and head motion can compromise its utility. The candidacy of patients with ADHD for fMRI is sometimes queried regarding concerns about possible head motion. In 2020, we implemented an fMRI task training program, via telehealth and/or mock MRI. We aimed to determine whether training increased language lateralisation success and/or reduced head motion in all patients, and in those with ADHD. We also aimed to determine whether patients with ADHD exhibited more head motion during fMRI than those without ADHD. Methods We retrospectively identified 223 epilepsy (85%) and other neurosurgery patients, (241 scans including repeats) with language fMRI at Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, 2016-2024. There were 24 individuals with ADHD listed in the Electronic Medical Record, five of whom had diagnoses of both ADHD and autism; and nine with autism. Language lateralisation success was determined by clinician description recorded as left/right/bilateral in the medical record. 99 patients were provided the training including fMRI task practise. Head motion was quantified by maximum Framewise Displacement (FDmax; mm). Results ADHD was associated with lower language lateralisation success. Training was associated with greater language lateralisation success, across all patients, and in those with ADHD. Regarding ADHD and head motion, outliers in FDmax were seen in 5 young patients with ADHD. Data were trimmed to allow separate investigation of FDmax for the sample with and without extremes of head motion. In untrimmed data, FDmax was significantly higher in patients with ADHD than in those without. In trimmed data, FDmax was on average lower in patients with ADHD than those without, however this was not statistically supported. Regarding training and head motion, across all patients, FDmax was significantly lower for scans with training than without. In patients with ADHD, FDmax was on average lower for scans with training, however training was not associated with FDmax. Conclusions Language fMRI training was associated with higher language lateralization success, particularly in patients with ADHD. Training was associated with reduced head motion across all patients. Although some young patients with ADHD had substantial head motion, most in our sample did not move more than those without ADHD. We conclude that the training program increases success of language fMRI, and that an ADHD diagnosis should not be a contraindication to language fMRI.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Additivity and chain rules for quantum entropies via multi-index Schatten norms

Authors:
Omar Fawzi↗Jan Kochanowski↗Cambyse Rouz\'e↗Thomas Van Himbeeck↗

arXiv:2502.01611v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The primary entropic measures for quantum states are additive under the tensor product. In the analysis of quantum information processing tasks, the minimum entropy of a set of states, e.g., the minimum output entropy of a channel, often plays a crucial role. A fundamental question in quantum information and cryptography is whether the minimum output entropy remains additive under the tensor product of channels. Here, we establish a general additivity statement for the optimized sandwiched Rényi entropy of quantum channels. For that, we generalize the results of [Devetak, Junge, King, Ruskai, CMP 2006] to multi-index Schatten norms. As an application, we strengthen the additivity statement of [Van Himbeeck and Brown, 2025] thus allowing the analysis of time-adaptive quantum cryptographic protocols. In addition, we establish chain rules for Rényi conditional entropies that are similar to the ones used for the generalized entropy accumulation theorem of [Metger, Fawzi, Sutter, Renner, CMP 2024].

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22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Supporting people to access social security payments through the Special Rules for End of Life: a qualitative study of the perspectives of patients, carers and health care professionals

Authors:
Davies↗J. M↗Marshall↗Hussain↗Diggle↗French↗Stone↗Fimister↗Ogden↗Sleeman↗K. E↗Bradshaw↗…

Background: People living with terminal illness face a double financial burden from additional costs and loss of earning for themselves and their carers. Social security benefits are intended to help alleviate some of this financial pressure, and in the UK and other countries people are eligible for fast-tracked access to financial support via the Special Rules for End of Life. One in 3 people who are eligible miss out on this support, yet there is limited evidence on the reasons for this take-up deficit. Objectives: The aim of this study is to understand the barriers and facilitators to claiming benefits for terminally ill people from the perspectives of patients, carers, and health care professionals. Methods: This is a qualitative study combining i) focus groups with healthcare professionals recruited via professional networks and social media, and ii) interviews with patients and carers recruited in hospital and hospice settings. We analysed the data using Practical Thematic Analysis Results: Fifty-five multidisciplinary healthcare professionals participated in 11 focus groups, and we interviewed 10 patients and carers. We constructed five descriptive themes to summarise the data: Navigating priorities and uncertainty; positive impacts alongside a sense of shame and stigma; talking about money, difficulties and dividends; everybodys, yet nobodys, responsibility; and sticking points in the system. Conclusion: The themes reveal several challenges that may contribute to people not taking up this financial support. However, discussions about access to benefits were also seen as a core part of holistic care, a positive way to offer support and a gateway to other discussions about end-of-life care preferences and decisions. Recommendations for policy and practice include evaluating the adoption of a diagnostic rather than a prognostic eligibility criteria, integrating discussions about benefits into existing processes such as advance care planning, and improving education and support for clinicians.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Periodic-MAE: Periodic Video Masked Autoencoder for rPPG Estimation

Authors:
Jiho Choi↗Sang Jun Lee↗

In this paper, we propose Periodic-MAE, a self-supervised framework for learning generalizable spatio-temporal representations of periodic physiological signals from unlabeled facial videos. The proposed method leverages a masked autoencoder (MAE), which learns high-dimensional facial representations by reconstructing masked video tokens without relying on remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) specific supervision. To explicitly align representation learning with the characteristics of rPPG, we introduce a periodicity-aware frame masking strategy based on video resampling, enabling the encoder to learn representations that capture quasi-periodic temporal patterns relevant to pulse signal estimation. In addition, physiological bandlimit constraints are integrated into the MAE pre-training framework, exploiting the sparsity of pulse signals in the frequency domain to guide the learned representations toward physiologically meaningful patterns. After pre-training, the learned representations are transferred to downstream rPPG estimation, where the encoder serves as a generic feature extractor for recovering pulse-related signals from facial videos. We conduct extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets, including PURE, UBFC-rPPG, MMPD, and V4V. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed approach on a real-world rPPG dataset collected under unconstrained lighting conditions and subject motion. Experimental results demonstrate that Periodic-MAE consistently improves rPPG estimation performance, particularly in challenging cross-dataset and real-world evaluation settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/ziiho08/Periodic-MAE.

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24.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-12

PeptiDIA: A Machine Learning Framework for Enhanced Peptide Identification in Fast-Gradient Data-Independent Acquisition Proteomics

Authors:
Ortona↗Leclercq↗Roux-Dalvai↗Routy↗Bonnet↗Droit↗

Data-independent acquisition (DIA) mass spectrometry has become increasingly prevalent in proteomics as advances in instrumentation, chromatography, and computational analysis have enabled robust proteome identification across complex biological samples. However, analytical depth achieved with fast chromatographic gradients remains lower than that obtained using long-gradients, reflecting a throughput-depth trade-off. Here, we present PeptiDIA, a machine learning framework that enhances peptide identification in fast-gradient DIA data by leveraging paired fast and long-gradient acquisitions from identical samples. PeptiDIA processes DIA-NN outputs generated at relaxed false discovery rate thresholds to obtain expanded candidate peptide pools and trains gradient-boosted decision tree models using long-gradient identifications as reference labels. The model integrates DIA-NN features with engineered peptide descriptors and applies isotonic regression to calibrate probabilities, enabling controlled peptide recovery relative to the long-gradient reference. Applied to human and murine datasets spanning six tissues acquired on an Orbitrap Exploris 480, PeptiDIA increased peptide identifications by 25-34% at 1% target reference-discordance rate (RDR) and increased the number of protein groups containing at least one rescued peptide by 15-17%. Overall, PeptiDIA improves the identification depth of fast-gradient DIA-NN workflows without altering acquisition strategies. The framework is available as a web application and command-line tool at https://github.com/Jordano700/PeptiDIA.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

S-GBT: Smooth Growth Bound Tensor for Certified Robustness Against Word Substitution Attacks in NLP

Authors:
Mohammed Bouri↗Mohammed Erradi↗Adnane Saoud↗

Despite recent progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP), models remain vulnerable to word substitution attacks. Most existing defenses focus on first order sensitivity and measure how much the output changes when the input is slightly perturbed. However, they ignore how this sensitivity evolves, which is described by curvature. When gradients vary sharply, models can still fail. This paper introduces the Smooth Growth Bound Tensor (S-GBT), a second order method that bounds the Hessian element-wise, for which we provide formal theoretical proofs on the resulting robustness bounds. A regularization term is added during training to minimize these bounds. This yields tighter certified robustness against word substitution attacks. The change in the output under word substitution is bounded by both a linear term and a quadratic term. S-GBT is derived for two architectures: Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). The method is integrated directly into the training objective. Its effectiveness is evaluated on multiple benchmark datasets. The results show that combining first and second order regularization improves certified robust accuracy by up to 23.4% compared to prior methods, while clean accuracy remains competitive. These findings indicate that controlling both the gradient and its variation is a promising direction for building more robust models.

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