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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

TSPO PET binding in vivo reflects increased phagocytic microglia at post mortem in people with frontotemporal dementia

Authors:
Vontobel↗D. S↗Lai↗K. O↗Bacioglu↗Nolan↗Maddison↗D. C↗Adamski↗Goddard↗Shapiro↗N. L↗…

Brain inflammation is a key feature of frontotemporal dementia (FTD). TSPO PET is widely used as an in vivo proxy for neuroinflammation, but whether the elevated signal reflects microglial, astrocytic, or vascular pathology is controversial. We paired ante mortem [11C]PK11195 TSPO PET with post mortem neuropathology in 10 individuals with FTD (5 FTLD-tau, 5 FTLD-TDP) and 5 controls, combining CD68 immunohistochemistry across 17 regions, multiplex immunofluorescence pairing TSPO with microglial/macrophagic (IBA1, CD68), astrocytic (GFAP) and endothelial (CD31) markers, and three-dimensional single-cell reconstruction. CD68 burden was elevated in FTD, concentrated in white matter, and correlated with regional TSPO PET binding across pathologies ({beta} = 8.40, P < 0.001). Only the CD68-TSPO co-localised fraction tracked the PET signal, with no TSPO upregulation per-cell. The elevated TSPO PET signal in FTD likely reflects an increased burden of lysosome-enriched CD68+ microglia, supporting TSPO PET as a microglial-burden biomarker in both FTLD-tau and FTLD-TDP.

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02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

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

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

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Keeping the Evidence Chain: Semantic Evidence Allocation for Training-Free Token Pruning in Video Temporal Grounding

Authors:
Jiaqi Li↗Shuntian Zheng↗Yixian Shen↗Jia-Hong Huang↗Xiaoman Lu↗Minzhe Ni↗Yu Guan↗

Video Temporal Grounding (VTG) localizes the temporal boundaries of query-relevant moments in long, untrimmed videos, making video-language-model prohibitively expensive. While recent training-free token pruning has shown success in video question answering, naively applying these objectives to VTG causes drastic degradation, as VTG crucially depends on boundary-sensitive evidence and cross-frame reasoning chains. We therefore identify two VTG-specific pruning principles: evidence retention, which keeps query-critical patches especially around event boundaries, and connectivity strength, which preserves cross-frame connectivity for long-range evidence aggregation. Building on these insights, we propose SemVID, a training-free pruning framework that constructs a compact yet coherent token subset with complementary semantic roles. SemVID first allocates per-frame budgets by balancing query relevance and inter-frame variation to avoid over-pruned segments, and then selects three types of tokens: object tokens for diverse query-critical evidence, motion tokens to capture meaningful transitions and serve as cross-frame relays, and context tokens for scene continuity. Extensive experiments show that SemVID achieves a strong accuracy-efficiency trade-off, retaining up to 95.4% mIoU with only 12.5% visual tokens and delivering up to a 5.8x prefill speedup, consistently outperforming prior methods under the same budgets. Our code is available at https://github.com/JiaqiLi404/SemVID

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04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Resource theory of interactive quantum instruments

Authors:
Chung-Yun Hsieh↗Armin Tavakoli↗Huan-Yu Ku↗Paul Skrzypczyk↗

arXiv:2603.27676v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum instruments describe both the classical outcome and the updated quantum state in a measurement process. To do this in a non-trivial way, instruments must have the capability to interact coherently with the state that they measure. Here, we develop a resource theory for instruments. We consider a relevant quantifier of the separation between interactive and non-interactive instruments and show that it admits three distinct operational interpretations in terms of quantum information tasks. These concern (i) the preservation of maximally entangled states after a local measurement, (ii) the average ability to preserve random states after measurement, and (iii) the ability to recover the classical information generated from measuring half of a maximally entangled state. We also introduce a natural set of allowed operations and show that the third task fully characterises the resource content of instruments. Our general framework reproduces as special cases established resource theories for channels and measurements.

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

2.5-D Decomposition for LLM-Based Spatial Construction

Authors:
Paul Whitten↗Li-Jen Chen↗Sharath Baddam↗

arXiv:2605.07066v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous systems that build structures from natural-language instructions need reliable spatial reasoning, yet large language models (LLMs) make systematic coordinate errors when generating three-dimensional block placements. We present a neuro-symbolic pipeline based on 2.5-D decomposition: the LLM plans in the two-dimensional horizontal plane while a deterministic executor computes all vertical placement from column occupancy, eliminating an entire class of errors. On the Build What I Mean benchmark (160 rounds), GPT-4o-mini with this pipeline achieves 94.6\% mean structural accuracy across 12 independent runs, within 3.0 percentage points of the 97.6\% ceiling imposed by architect-agent errors that no builder-side improvement can address. This outperforms both GPT-4o at 90.3\% and the best competing system at 76.3\%. A controlled ablation confirms that 2.5-D decomposition is the dominant contributor, accounting for 50.7 percentage points of accuracy. The pipeline transfers directly to edge hardware: Nemotron-3 120B running locally on an NVIDIA Jetson Thor AGX matches the cloud result at 94.5\% with no prompt modifications. The underlying principle, removing deterministic dimensions from the LLM's output space, applies to any autonomous construction or assembly task where gravity or other physical constraints fix one or more degrees of freedom. A transfer experiment on 500 IGLU collaborative building tasks confirm the effect generalizes beyond the primary benchmark.

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

Measurement incompatibility and quantum steering via linear programming

Authors:
Lucas E. A. Porto↗S\'ebastien Designolle↗Sebastian Pokutta↗Marco T\'ulio Quintino↗

arXiv:2506.03045v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The problem of deciding whether a set of quantum measurements is jointly measurable is known to be equivalent to determining whether a quantum assemblage is unsteerable. This problem can be formulated as a semidefinite program (SDP). However, the number of variables and constraints in such a formulation grows exponentially with the number of measurements, rendering it intractable for large measurement sets. In this work, we circumvent this problem by transforming the SDP into a hierarchy of linear programs that compute upper and lower bounds on the incompatibility robustness with a complexity that grows polynomially in the number of measurements. The hierarchy is guaranteed to converge and it can be applied to arbitrary measurements – including non-projective POVMs (Positive Operator-Valued Measures) – in arbitrary dimensions. While convergence becomes impractical in high dimensions, in the case of qubits our method reliably provides accurate upper and lower bounds for the incompatibility robustness of sets with several hundred measurements in a short time using a standard laptop. We also apply our methods to qutrits, obtaining non-trivial upper and lower bounds in scenarios that are otherwise intractable using the standard SDP approach, although such bounds are significantly looser than the ones obtained in the qubit case. Finally, we show how our methods can be used to construct local hidden state models for states (i.e., to prove that a state cannot lead to steering under any possible local measurements), or conversely, to certify that a given state exhibits steering; for two-qubit quantum states, our approach is comparable to, and in some cases outperforms, the current best methods.

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07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

MLaGA: Multimodal Large Language and Graph Assistant

Authors:
Dongzhe Fan↗Yi Fang↗Jiajin Liu↗Djellel Difallah↗Qiaoyu Tan↗

arXiv:2506.02568v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial efficacy in advancing graph-structured data analysis. Prevailing LLM-based graph methods excel in adapting LLMs to text-rich graphs, wherein node attributes are text descriptions. However, their applications to multimodal graphs–where nodes are associated with diverse attribute types, such as texts and images–remain underexplored, despite their ubiquity in real-world scenarios. To bridge the gap, we introduce the Multimodal Large Language and Graph Assistant (MLaGA), an innovative model that adeptly extends LLM capabilities to facilitate reasoning over complex graph structures and multimodal attributes. We first design a structure-aware multimodal encoder to align textual and visual attributes within a unified space through a joint graph pre-training objective. Subsequently, we implement a multimodal instruction-tuning approach to seamlessly integrate multimodal features and graph structures into the LLM through lightweight projectors. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of MLaGA compared to leading baseline methods, achieving superior performance in diverse graph learning tasks under both supervised and transfer learning scenarios.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Active interference suppression in frequency-division-multiplexed quantum gates via off-resonant microwave tones

Authors:
Haruki Mitarai↗Yukihiro Tadokoro↗Hiroya Tanaka↗

arXiv:2601.14547v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The increasing number of control lines connecting quantum processors to external electronics constitutes a major bottleneck in the realization of large-scale quantum computers. Frequency-division multiplexing is expected to enable control of multiple qubits through a single microwave cable; however, interference from off-resonant microwave tones hinders precise qubit control. Here, we propose an active interference suppression method for frequency-division-multiplexed simultaneous gates on microwave-controlled qubits. We demonstrate that the deliberate incorporation of off-resonant microwave tones improves single-qubit gate fidelity. In particular, the gate infidelity scales inversely with the square of the number of microwave tones when off-resonant orthogonal or quasi-orthogonal tones are incorporated. Furthermore, we show that fast oscillations, neglected under the rotating wave approximation, degrade the gate fidelity, and that this degradation can be mitigated through optimized frequency allocation. The proposed approach is simple and effective for improving the performance of frequency-division-multiplexed quantum gates.

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09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Climatic Drivers of Malaria risk in Children Under Five: A Large-Scale Analysis of individual-level data for 350,000 children in 26 Sub-Saharan African Countries

Authors:
Martellini O Nocentini↗Pandey↗Olivetti↗Defilippo↗Wybrant↗Worou↗Mazzoleni↗Quiros-Roldan↗Byakika↗Torti↗Magnusson↗Gasparrini↗…

Background Malaria risk is influenced by climatic conditions, and children under five are particularly vulnerable due to their limited acquired immunity. We investigate the association between climatic factors and malaria risk in 350,000 children aged 5-59 months in sub-Saharan Africa over 18 years. Methods We included children aged 5-59 months with malaria tests from Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 26 sub-Saharan African countries between 2006 and 2023. We linked these data to high-resolution climate exposures: temperature, precipitation, soil moisture, actual evapotranspiration and specific humidity. We fitted a mixed-effect logistic regression model incorporating Distributed Lag Non-linear Models (DLNM) over 1-6 month lag window for each exposure, controlling for seasonality and long-term trends. We examined effect modification by maternal education, household wealth, residential type, water source, sanitation facility, child age and sex, use of insecticide-treated bed nets (ITNs), and the age of the household head. Results Malaria prevalence was 19.5%. Malaria risk was highest at 24 degrees (OR: 1.45, 95% CI: [1.36, 1.54]), followed by a decline at higher temperatures. This elevated risk was mainly driven by short-term exposures (1-2 months). Precipitation increased risk up to 59 ~ 120 mm (1.10, [1.07, 1.12]), after which heavier rainfall reduced risk, particularly at short- to medium-term lags (1-4 months). Soil moisture was associated with increasing risk up to ~80 mm (1.11, [1.08, 1.14]), with a plateau at higher levels. Evapotranspiration showed a strong, near-linear positive association with malaria risk. Higher specific humidity levels (>14 g/kg) presented a lower risk, reaching a 45% reduction at 17 g/kg (0.55, [0.49, 0.61]), with the strongest protective effects at short-term lags (1-2 months). Elevated malaria risk at low and moderate average temperatures was particularly evident among children who did not sleep under an ITN net. Conclusion Malaria risk in children under five is strongly shaped by climatic factors, with complex and delayed associations. The findings provide evidence to guide targeted interventions and early-warning strategies for vulnerable populations.

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10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Characterizing Brazilian Atlantic Forest Restoration Outcomes with Geospatial AlphaEarth Embeddings

Authors:
Alice Heiman↗

The Atlantic Forest in Brazil is a critical biodiversity hotspot, yet less than 12-15% of its original cover remains. Although monitoring forest restoration on a large scale is essential, traditional methods are limited by the impracticality of on-the-ground reporting on such a scale and by the saturation of remote-sensing indices such as NDVI. Furthermore, reforestation is a gradual process as opposed to the rapid spectral changes caused by deforestation. In this study, we examine 1,729 restoration sites in S\~ao Paulo, using satellite embeddings from the AlphaEarth Foundation's model to evaluate their effectiveness in characterising early restoration success. We introduce the concept of a 'Reference Trajectory Embedding', defining a metric of restoration success based on cosine similarity to reference sites of mature secondary forest. We observe distinct clusters in embedding space according to different land use and land cover (LULC) types, and we can identify sites with clear change vectors. However, the signal can be noisy, and embeddings may require further fine-tuning to capture and predict site metadata beyond LULC.

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11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

A Red Teaming Framework for Large Language Models: A Case Study on Faithfulness Evaluation

Authors:
Abrar Alotaibi↗Raed Mughus↗Moataz Ahmed↗

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across natural language processing tasks, yet their deployment in high-stakes applications raises critical concerns regarding reliability, safety, and trustworthiness. In this paper, we present a red teaming framework that systematically uncovers vulnerabilities in LLM outputs. Our approach employs a novel multi-role architecture comprising target, attacker, and jury models. The attackers generate increasingly effective adversarial prompts while the jury rigorously evaluates response accuracy and consistency across tasks. In a case study, our strategy proved particularly effective at exposing unfaithfulness in LLM responses. Exploitative adversarial prompts increased the attack success rate by up to 7.9% in question-answering tasks, revealing weaknesses in reliability. The approach identifies how structural constraints in summarization can shape vulnerability patterns, with format limitations yielding measurable gains in faithfulness, and shows that architectural design choices typically outweigh parameter scaling in determining model safety. The framework's key strength is its adaptability across evaluation tasks, from English question-answering to Arabic summarization, enabling comprehensive comparison of model vulnerabilities. While it excels at comparing cross-model and cross-linguistic vulnerabilities, it faces challenges in fully automating adversarial prompt generation across languages. Our experiments also reveal limitations in detecting subtle forms of unfaithfulness that do not manifest as explicit factual contradictions, particularly across linguistic contexts. Overall, this architecture provides both actionable insights into current LLM vulnerabilities and a scalable methodology for ongoing safety evaluation as models evolve.

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

Zero-Inflated Gaussian Distributions Enable Parameter-Space Sparsity in Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms

Authors:
Andreas Faust↗Sven Nitzsche↗Juergen Becker↗

arXiv:2606.19369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a powerful class of evolutionary methods for black-box optimization, especially when little is known about the structure of the objective. Whereas classical evolutionary algorithms rely on hand-designed mutation and crossover operators, hard to devise for unknown problem structures, and a source of bias, EDAs sidestep operator design entirely: they fit a probability distribution to the best individuals and sample the next generation from it. EDAs are well established on continuous parameter spaces, but they have not previously been generalized to sparse ones, in which most coefficients of a good solution are exactly zero. Existing sparse black-box optimizers therefore reintroduce exactly what EDAs were designed to avoid: hand-crafted sparsity operators, bi-level schemes alternating between support set and active values, zeroing thresholds, and other baked-in assumptions. We close this gap by proposing multivariate zero-inflated Gaussian (ZIG) distributions as EDA sampling laws. A latent Gaussian model with separate indicator and value dimensions represents sparsity patterns, correlations among active parameters, and the interactions between the two, so sparsity patterns and active values are optimized jointly, hierarchy-free. We show that the latent parameters of this model are identifiable from observed samples, unlike in the missing-data settings where related constructions originate, and introduce practical amortized inversion-based estimators for them. The estimators accurately recover latent correlation structures, and on the Lunar Lander benchmark the resulting ZIG-EDA converges faster and reaches higher final returns than a dense Gaussian EDA, a hand-crafted sparse evolutionary algorithm, and an ad-hoc sparse EDA, while finding controllers with only a small fraction of parameters active.

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

Human-AI Coevolution Dynamics: A Formal Theory of Social Intelligence Emergence Through Long-Term Interaction

Authors:
Jingyi Zhou↗Senlin Luo↗Haofan Chen↗

Current conversational AI systems have made significant progress in language generation, personalization, and long-context interaction. However, most existing methods model social behavior through isolated components such as emotion modeling, memory retrieval, or persona conditioning, lacking a unified framework to explain the emergence of stable social relationships and social intelligence in long-term human-AI interaction.To address this, we propose the Human-AI Coevolution Dynamics Framework (HACD-H), a formal model of human-AI interaction as a self-organizing social cognitive system. HACD-H integrates emotional adaptation, relational organization, social memory, and personality consistency into a unified dynamical framework and introduces principles including multi-timescale social cognition, relational attractors, trust basins, developmental phase transitions, and social cognitive energy dynamics.We construct a conversational dataset with approximately 14,700 interaction turns and develop a theory-driven empirical evaluation framework. Results reveal a hierarchy of temporal persistence in social cognition, stable relational attractors, phase-transition-like developmental patterns, and a structured social cognitive energy landscape. Social intelligence shows a significant negative correlation with social cognitive energy (r = -0.391, p < 0.001), and interaction trajectories exhibit progressive energy reduction over time.These findings suggest that social intelligence emerges from long-term social cognitive coevolution rather than isolated conversational capabilities. HACD-H provides a unified theoretical foundation for modeling adaptive human-AI social interaction and developing socially intelligent AI systems.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

APEX: Adaptive Principle EXtraction A Three-Layer Self-Evolution Framework for Production AI Agents

Authors:
Ya-Chuan Chen↗Tien-Jen Lai↗Hsiang-Wei Hu↗

arXiv:2606.15363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-improvement in AI agents has emerged as a key research frontier: systems that modify their own prompts, workflows, and decision rules based on accumulated operational experience. The state-of-the-art Self-Harness framework [1] achieves 14–21% improvement on Terminal-Bench-2.0 by mining failure clusters and patching the agent harness. However, Self-Harness optimises only one dimension – the prompt harness – leaving behavioural principles and workflow topology unchanged. We propose APEX (Adaptive Principle EXtraction), a three-layer co-evolution framework that simultaneously evolves: (L1) the harness via failure-mode patching, (L2) behavioural principles via success-trace distillation [2], and (L3) the agent workflow topology via structural fitness-based selection [6]. We implement APEX on Joe [13], a production-grade super AI Agent built on NVIDIA Nemotron and designed as an Edge AI Agent Factory for the NVIDIA Agent Challenge 2026, managing a 15-node compute fleet using 114 real task traces collected over 18 days. APEX achieves an APEX Health Score of 0.570 (+90% vs. baseline 0.300) in a single evolutionary run, distilling 6 novel reusable principles and selecting a research-first workflow topology scoring 0.900 (+20%). Our results demonstrate that multi-dimensional co-evolution substantially outperforms single-axis harness optimisation, at a cost of only 4 LLM calls (~270 s) on a local qwen2.5-coder:32b instance.

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16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Development and Validation of Machine Learning Models for Predicting Initiation of Emergency Dialysis in Advanced Chronic Kidney Disease

Authors:
Hirano↗Seki↗Watanabe↗Kubota↗Kawazoe↗

Background: Initiation of emergency dialysis, often requiring temporary catheter owing to unprepared definitive vascular access, is associated with infectious and vascular complications and suggests advanced chronic kidney disease (CKD) care gaps. Previous studies focused on kidney failure or dialysis timing. This study aimed to predict initiation of emergency dialysis using machine learning and baseline data. Methods: This retrospective cohort study used the Japan Medical Data Center claims data (2014-2022). Adults with an estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR)

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multidimensional nutritional assessment in Crohns disease: cross-sectional comparison of active disease and remission

Authors:
Sarker↗Ghosh↗C. K↗Chowdhury↗

Malnutrition is common in Crohns disease (CD), and its assessment requires multiple tools. Comprehensive evaluation of nutritional status in a population with CD, predominantly characterized by metabolic phenotype, was inadequately reported. This study evaluated the nutritional status of CD patients using anthropometric, clinical, and biochemical measures and compared patients with active disease with those in remission. This cross-sectional study included 127 adults with CD: 63 with active disease and 64 in remission. Disease activity was classified using the Crohns Disease Activity Index, the Simple Endoscopic Score for Crohns Disease, and magnetic resonance enterography. Nutritional assessment included body mass index (BMI), mid-upper arm circumference, calf circumference, triceps skinfold thickness, mid-arm muscle circumference, Mini Nutritional Assessment-Short Form (MNA-SF), and biochemical markers including hemoglobin, serum iron, folate, vitamin B12, albumin, and zinc. Malnutrition was defined using the Global Leadership Initiative on Malnutrition criteria. Overall, 47.2% of participants were malnourished. Malnutrition was significantly more frequent in active disease than in remission (81.0% vs. 14.1%, P

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18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

A uniform-in-time weakly convergent explicit numerical method for the underdamped Langevin equation with polynomial potentials

Authors:
Diancong Jin↗

arXiv:2606.15175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The underdamped Langevin equation is a fundamental model in statistical mechanics for sampling Gibbs measures and simulating molecular dynamics, for which numerical methods with uniform-in-time weak convergence are essential for accurately reproducing long-time statistical observables and invariant measures of the underlying dynamics. Currently, such uniform-in-time weak convergence is established for implicit schemes, but remains unknown for explicit ones under polynomially growing potentials. To improve efficiency in long-time simulations, we propose the first explicit numerical method for the underdamped Langevin equation with polynomially growing potentials that is proven to achieve uniform-in-time weak convergence. The explicit numerical method is constructed by introducing a dissipativity on the scalar auxiliary variable (SAV), which we call the DSAV method. The proposed DSAV method enables the approximation of the invariant measure for the underdamped Langevin equation with a precision of $\varepsilon$ at a significantly reduced computational cost of $\mathcal{O}(\varepsilon^{-1} \log(\varepsilon^{-1}))$. In addition, we establish the existence and positivity of the density function of the numerical solution without using the Malliavin calculus. Numerical experiments are performed to verify the theoretical findings and demonstrate the long-time stability of the proposed numerical method.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Reinforcement Learning for Computer-Use Agents with Autonomous Evaluation

Authors:
Marta Sumyk↗Oleksandr Kosovan↗

arXiv:2606.24515v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Computer-Use Agents (CUAs) execute high-level user goals by perceiving and acting directly within graphical user interfaces. However, reinforcement learning for CUAs remains difficult because open-ended desktop environments rarely provide scalable, machine-readable reward signals: task success is often visually grounded and hard to specify with handcrafted reward functions or dense manual labels. We propose an RL fine-tuning framework that uses autonomous vision-language evaluation as a scalable supervision signal for GUI agents. Given a final screenshot and the original instruction, a Vision-Language Model judges task completion and provides terminal feedback without task-specific heuristics or manual labels during policy optimization. Because autonomous evaluators are imperfect, we model their feedback as a noisy binary reward channel and derive a noise-corrected reward estimator for Proximal Policy Optimization. Experiments across macOSWorld, Windows Agent Arena, and OSWorld show that corrected evaluator rewards outperform both zero-shot baselines and raw evaluator rewards, improving success rates by an average of 12.6 percentage points over zero-shot performance and 5.1 points over raw evaluator fine-tuning. These results suggest that autonomous evaluation can serve as a practical reward signal for RL in GUI environments when evaluator noise is explicitly modeled and corrected.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

TIGER: Taming Identity, Geometry, and Generative Priors for High-Quality Face Video Restoration

Authors:
Yang Zhou↗Wenxue Li↗Peng Zhang↗Yifei Chen↗Fei Wang↗Daiguo Zhou↗

Face Video Restoration (FVR) aims to recover high-fidelity facial videos from degraded input while preserving identity and semantic consistency across frames. Existing methods often struggle to simultaneously address three key challenges: identity shift, viewpoint-entangled guidance, and perceptual realism. To tackle these issues, we propose TIGER, a structured tri-prior fusion framework that Tames Identity, Geometry, and gEnerative pRiors for high-quality FVR. Specifically, an Identity Prior is first established by injecting subject-discriminative embeddings into the latent space, effectively anchoring the subject's identity against severe degradations. Then, to provide temporally consistent structural guidance for dynamic videos, TIGER constructs a Geometry Prior by lifting 2D reference cues into a disentangled 3D parameter space, creating a geometric anchor through cross-source parameter fusion. Moreover, to achieve maximum efficiency without compromising realism, we harness the video generation model's Generative Prior through a one-step rectified flow. We further design a progressive three-stage training optimization strategy that refines structural fidelity, textural reconstruction, and distribution-level realism to ensure robust optimization. We also construct a large-scale FVR dataset to facilitate robust training and standardized evaluation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TIGER achieves state-of-the-art performance in both identity fidelity and temporal stability, delivering a high-quality, efficient and identity-consistent FVR. Project page: https://yzhoulv.github.io/Tiger/.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

A Finite-Volume Scheme for the Continuum Extrapolation of Lattice Step-Scaling in (2+1)D Hamiltonian U(1) Gauge Theory

Authors:
Alessio Negro↗Emil Otis Rosanowski↗Lena Funcke↗Timo Jakobs↗Karl Jansen↗Paul Ludwig↗Carsten Urbach↗

arXiv:2606.20029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a finite-volume scheme to perform controlled continuum extrapolations of the lattice step-scaling function, a key ingredient for determining the running coupling in a Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory in small volumes. As a testbed, we employ a dual Hamiltonian formulation of pure U(1) gauge theory in (2+1) dimensions and an operator basis that remains efficient toward weak coupling. We describe the implementation of static external charges on the spatial lattice and study, using matrix product states, the resulting confining string, from which we extract the static potential and a force-based renormalized coupling. Using the proposed finite-volume scheme, we demonstrate a stable continuum limit of the step-scaling function on the lattice sizes accessible to present Hamiltonian simulations. The method is readily extendable to other gauge groups and dimensions, providing a pathway toward Hamiltonian step-scaling studies in other theories.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

QCI Connect: A Modular Full-Stack Quantum Computing Platform

Authors:
Eric Bertok↗Hannes Busche↗Florian Drinkler↗David Emmanuel-Costa↗Daniel Herr↗Steffen Hien↗Thomas Keitzl↗Elisabeth Lobe↗Alexandru Paler↗Johannes Renkl↗Martin Rymarz↗Gary Schmiedinghoff↗…

arXiv:2606.14456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In a world of various competing quantum computing architectures, hardware-agnostic, full-stack platforms are necessary to bring the full power of quantum computing hardware to domain experts via the cloud. QCI Connect and its Software Development Kit provide a reference architecture for a full-stack platform with a modular design and open-source interface definitions, built to facilitate a community-driven application ecosystem. Here, we present its overall design and features, central interfaces, and lessons learned, both for users of the platform and as a reference guide for future developments.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

UOL@IDEM at BEA 2026 Shared Task 1: Neural Fusion and Feature-Rich Modeling for L1-Aware Vocabulary Difficulty Prediction

Authors:
Nouran Khallaf↗Serge Sharoff↗

This paper describes UOL@IDEM's closed-track submission to the BEA 2026 shared task on L1-aware vocabulary difficulty prediction. We model the task as regression and train separate systems for Spanish, German, and Mandarin Chinese\footnote{Below we use Chinese for brevity.}. Our system combines multilingual contextual representations with engineered features capturing frequency, surface form, retrieval evidence, semantic alignment, cognate similarity, and masked-language-model predictability. Development results show consistent gains over the official closed-track baselines, with sentence-embedding encoders such as BGE-M3, multilingual E5, and LaBSE performing best. Official submissions achieve RMSE scores of 1.132, 1.037, and 0.891 for Spanish, German, and Chinese, respectively. Feature analysis identifies frequency as the most stable predictor, while contextual predictability, form similarity, retrieval, and semantic features provide complementary L1-sensitive signals. Error analysis shows strong ranking performance but weaker calibration for the easiest items, which are often overpredicted. See https://github.com/Nouran-Khallaf/UoL-IDEM-BEA2026-Vocabulary-Difficulty-Prediction

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of a symptom-based severity score anchored to health-related quality of life post-COVID-19 within the population-based EPILOC cohorts

Authors:
Peter↗R. S↗Sedelmaier↗Nieters↗Schilling↗Matits↗Goepel↗Merle↗Steinacker↗J. M↗Kern↗W. V↗…

Purpose Because simple symptom counts treat all symptoms as equally important and may not adequately capture the HRQoL impact of heterogeneous post-COVID-19 symptoms, we aimed to develop an HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score providing an interpretable measure of post-COVID-19 disease burden. Methods Baseline data from the population-based EPILOC and EPILOC Omicron surveys (adults aged 18-65 years) were used to develop a symptom-based severity score anchored to physical and mental HRQoL assessed with the SF-12. A two-stage modelling approach was applied to identify HRQoL-relevant symptoms and to derive symptom-specific weights for physical and mental component scores, incorporating 30 ordinal symptom severity variables. Symptom-specific weights were extracted to compute physical, mental, and composite severity scores. Score interpretation was examined using external reference measures, including EPILOC case status, self-reported health recovery, and functional consequences. Results A total of 19,004 participants (mean age 44.3 years, 59.6% female) were included. Sixteen symptoms contributed to the physical and eleven to the mental HRQoL score, with a limited subset accounting for most of the HRQoL loss. Severity scores were heavily right-skewed, with 50.6% of participants showing no measurable HRQoL impairment. Higher scores correlated with lower self-reported recovery, and increased probability of rehabilitation use and health-related changes in working time, supporting convergent and criterion-related validity. Conclusions This study introduces a transparent, HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score that measures graded post-COVID-19 burden beyond simple symptom counts. The score may be particularly suited for longitudinal assessment of recovery trajectories.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

KeepLoRA++: Continual Learning with Layer-Scaled Residual Gradient Adaptation

Authors:
Mao-Lin Luo↗Yi-Lin Zhang↗Zi-Hao Zhou↗Yankun Hong↗Xialiang Tong↗Mingxuan Yuan↗Tong Wei↗Min-Ling Zhang↗

Continual learning for pre-trained vision-language models requires balancing three competing objectives: retaining pre-trained knowledge, preserving knowledge from a sequence of learned tasks, and maintaining the plasticity to acquire new knowledge. This paper presents KeepLoRA++, balancing these objectives through a unified dual-dimensional knowledge retention mechanism. We analyze knowledge distribution of Transformer architecture from both inter-layer and intra-layer perspectives. The inter-layer perspective examines how retention is distributed across layers, while the intra-layer perspective focuses on the parameter space within each layer. Our analysis reveals a structural property: general transferable knowledge is mainly encoded in the shallow layers and the principal subspace of the parameters, while task-specific adaptations are localized in the deep layers and the residual subspace. Motivated by this insight, KeepLoRA++ introduces a layer-scaled residual gradient adaptation method. New tasks are learned by restricting LoRA parameter updates to the residual subspace, combined with a shallow-to-deep layer scaling, to prevent interference with previously acquired capabilities. Specifically, the gradient of a new task is projected onto a subspace orthogonal to both the principal subspace of the pre-trained model and the dominant directions of previous task features, while simultaneously assigning smaller update magnitudes to shallow layers and larger ones to deeper layers. Our theoretical analysis and empirical evaluations confirm that KeepLoRA++ successfully balances these three competing objectives, consistently outperforming representative baselines across image classification, visual question answering, and video understanding tasks.

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