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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Timing of S. aureus-related mortality in a large randomized clinical trial: Implications for future study design

Background: Longer follow-up periods in clinical trials for S. aureus bacteremia (SAB) may capture unrelated deaths, adding random noise that risks biasing trial results towards the null. Objective: To evaluate the timing and infection-relatedness of deaths within a large SAB clinical trial platform. Design: Blinded duplicate adjudication of trial deaths using a modified 7-point Likert-Scale. A third reviewer settled disagreements. Setting: 37 Canadian hospitals participating in the S. aureus Network Adaptive Platform (SNAP) Trial. Participants: 1515 adult patients recruited to SNAP between February 2022 and May 2026. Measurements: Timing and relatedness of 90-day deaths categorized as at least possibly SAB-related not likely to be SAB-related. Optimal follow-up cut-off was determined using Youden's index and graphically. Results: 247 deaths occurred; 97 (39.3%) were adjudicated as at least possibly SAB-related and 150 (60.7%) as not likely related. For probably/definitely related deaths, interrater agreement was 85.0% (Gwet's AC 0.73, substantial); for at least possibly related, it was 77.3% (Gwet's AC 0.55, moderate). Median survival was significantly shorter for SAB-related deaths (12 vs. 30.5 days; difference: 19 days earlier, 95% CI: 12-26, p

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Effective Gaussian Management for High-fidelity Object Reconstruction

This paper proposes an effective Gaussian management framework for high-fidelity scene reconstruction of both appearance and geometry. Unlike recent Gaussian Splatting (GS) pipelines that treat all primitives uniformly during optimization, our framework explicitly manages the attribute activation, representation and pruning of Gaussian. Specifically, our framework first introduces GauSep, a novel densification strategy that selectively activates Gaussian color or normal attributes to alleviate destructive gradient conflicts arising from dual supervision. We further propose GauRep, an adaptive Gaussian representation that dynamically adjusts spherical harmonics (SHs) orders and performs task-decoupled pruning to reduce redundancy at both the individual and global levels. To provide reliable geometric supervision for above mangement process, we additionally introduce CoRe, an regularized surface reconstruction module that distills robust normal fields from an SDF branch to the Gaussian representation through a confidence mechanism. Notably, the proposed Gaussian management is compatible with various reconstruction architectures and can be seamlessly integrated to improve performance while reducing size of the model. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves superior or comparable performance in appearance and geometry reconstruction compared with state-of-the-art methods, while using significantly fewer parameters.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

MVG-KAN: Multi-View Geo-Wind Guided KAN for PM$_{2.5}$ Forecasting

arXiv:2606.24347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate short-term PM$_{2.5}$ forecasting is important for public health protection, air-quality early warning, and urban environmental management. However, PM$_{2.5}$ variation is driven by multiple coupled factors, including stable periodic changes induced by human activities and meteorological regularity, station-specific short-term concentration evolution, and meteorology-driven pollutant dispersion among monitoring stations. Existing spatio-temporal forecasting methods may capture station relationships to some extent, but distance-only, correlation-based, or purely adaptive graphs are often insufficient to comprehensively represent these heterogeneous factors, especially wind-direction-dependent pollutant transport. To address this problem, we propose a Multi-View Geo-Wind Guided KAN model for PM$_{2.5}$ forecasting, named MVG-KAN, which models station-level PM$_{2.5}$ evolution from three complementary views: local periodic regularity, station-wise residual temporal dynamics, and meteorological-environment-guided spatial dispersion. Specifically, the periodic-residual forecasting backbone first separates stable daily and weekly patterns from non-periodic residual variations. A Geo-Wind Graph is constructed by combining geographic distance decay with wind-direction- and wind-speed-aware transport, providing a lightweight physically motivated directed spatial prior for residual propagation among stations. In addition, a temporal Kolmogorov-Arnold network (TKAN) residual head is then introduced to learn station-wise nonlinear autoregressive correction from de-periodized PM$_{2.5}$ residuals and historical multi-pollutant sequences, thereby enhancing the modeling of local residual inertia and pollutant co-variation.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DivQuant: Estimation of Species Richness and Entropy from Small Samples

Estimating diversity properties of discrete distributions from a small observed sample is a fundamental problem in algorithmic statistics that has applications in many fields, in particular bioinformatics, but also in ecology or linguistics. The two most common diversity measures are the number of distinct elements in a multiset, also referred to as species richness in ecology or alpha diversity in microbial analysis, and the Shannon entropy, also referred to as evenness. Estimating these properties from a small sample is particularly challenging for distributions with many rare elements. Thus, many estimators have been proposed in the past that, in practice, work well for different types of distributions. We present DivQuant, an optimization-based, extrapolating richness and entropy estimator with three contributions. First, we formulate the upsampling problem as a convex quadratic program with a Neyman {chi}2 objective. Unlike the linear program of its predecessor RichnEst, DivQuant admits confidence intervals via {chi}2 test inversion that are empirically well-calibrated. Second, we replace RichnEst's fixed-threshold fingerprint truncation with the rare/abundant fingerprint split of Valiant and Valiant, which strongly reduces problem size and preserves enough degrees of freedom for the confidence-interval program to remain valid and feasible. Third, we plug the optimal population fingerprint returned by the program into Shannon's entropy formula to obtain an entropy estimate. DivQuant attains close-to-nominal 95% confidence intervals in essentially all tested regimes, including six simulated distribution families, Tara Oceans microbiome data, and 10X Genomics scRNA-seq data, while competing state-of-the-art methods (RichnEst, iNext, PreSeq) miss the true richness in up to 80% of instances, well above the nominal 5%. In addition, DivQuant outperforms classical asymptotic entropy estimators (Miller-Madow, CAE) and the extrapolating iNext estimator. Running times remain competitive, with DivQuant typically completing in seconds. DivQuant is available as a command-line tool at https://gitlab.com/rahmannlab/divquant.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Montreal Forced Aligner and the state of speech-to-text alignment in 2026

The Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA) was released in 2016 and has since become the most widely used tool for forced alignment in research and industry. In the decade since, MFA has undergone substantial development, including expanded coverage across more languages and dialects using larger open-source datasets, harmonized IPA dictionaries, model adaptation, cross-language phone remapping, and support utilities. This paper documents MFA 3.0's developments since version 1.0 and evaluates MFA's performance across English, Japanese, and Korean, benchmarked against classic and neural forced aligners. MFA 3.0 achieves state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance across all four benchmark datasets with mean boundary errors below 15 ms. Adaptation and cross-language remapping are effective for languages outside MFA's training distribution, and pronunciation probability modeling and phonological rules provide gains in specific conditions.

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

Exact Posterior Score Estimation for Solving Linear Inverse Problems

Diffusion and flow-based models learn powerful data priors by training a denoiser to reverse Gaussian corruption. To use this prior to solve a linear inverse problem, one needs to sample from the posterior, but the score that the prior provides is the unconditional score, not the posterior score. Existing methods either steer a fixed pretrained denoiser with approximate measurement-matching corrections, or train a conditional restoration model that abandons the denoising structure of the prior. We derive the exact posterior score in closed form for linear Gaussian inverse problems under general Gaussian interpolants, and show that posterior sampling reduces to a denoising problem at an operator-dependent shifted pivot under an anisotropic noise covariance. We turn this identity into Exact Posterior Score (EPS), a denoising training objective that preserves the input/output structure of standard pretraining and can therefore be trained from scratch or fine-tuned from a pretrained denoiser. At inference, EPS uses the same sampler as the underlying backbone, with no likelihood gradients or projections. We evaluate EPS on five linear inverse problems across FFHQ and ImageNet, where it outperforms training-free and training-based baselines on fidelity, perceptual, and distributional metrics, while using roughly an order of magnitude fewer denoiser evaluations than gradient-based posterior samplers.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Full-state information-disturbance tradeoff for direction estimation with antiparallel spin-coherent pairs

arXiv:2606.18040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We determine the optimal information–disturbance tradeoff for estimating an unknown spatial direction encoded in two antiparallel spins. Rotational covariance reduces the optimization over all instruments to a finite-dimensional Choi problem: a positive seed operator obeys one trace constraint for each irreducible sector of the input representation, while both the directional score and the operation fidelity are linear functionals of this seed. For two antiparallel spin-$1/2$ particles, whose physical representation decomposes as $0\oplus1$, we derive the two-multiplier dual problem and characterize the optimal instrument from the kernel vectors of the dual slack operator. The optimal operation is a covariant filter with scalar–vector coherence and is generally not a convex interpolation between the identity channel and a measure-and-reprepare strategy. At maximum information we recover the Gisin–Popescu score, but the least disturbing output state is optimized independently, giving a smaller disturbance than both the parallel-spin benchmark and antiparallel measure-and-reprepare. We also formulate the parallel benchmark and, as a central extension of the method, treat antiparallel spin-coherent states of arbitrary spin $j$. In this case the signal coherently occupies all sectors $\ell=0,\ldots,2j$ of $j\otimes j$, the endpoint information is governed by nearest-neighbor sector coherences, and the endpoint disturbance is obtained from an explicit finite block-diagonal eigenvalue problem.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Scheduling jobs with unknown size distribution in a M/G/1 queue: the shifted empirical Gittins

arXiv:2606.24703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider a M/G/1 queue for which we want to minimize the expected response time. We show how to compute indices from $n$ samples of the job size distribution such that the corresponding index policy is asymptotically optimal as $n$ grows. This construction is based on a discretization of the bounded support of the job size distribution and a shift of the samples to their nearest discrete point to the right. We show that the Gittins index of the empirical distribution of these shifted samples is close to the Gittins index of the original distribution. This translates to the asymptotic optimality of the corresponding index policy for minimizing the expected response time. Numerical comparison with other approaches further confirm the efficiency of our approach.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

Dietary cholesterol activates a Ral-dependent pathway driving LDLR turnover

Authors:

Metabolism of the hepatic low-density lipoprotein receptor (LDLR) is a key determinant of cholesterol homeostasis1,2. The molecular switches that coordinate LDLR trafficking and turnover in response to nutritional cues, including high dietary cholesterol, remain poorly defined3–6. Here we identify a new pathway regulated by Ral GTPases that links extracellular cholesterol signals to the intracellular trafficking machinery controlling LDLR turnover. Chronic dietary cholesterol activates the Ral proteins by increasing RAS activity, routing LDLR to lysosomes for degradation and inhibiting its recycling independently of transcriptional regulation or PCSK9. Constitutive activation of Ral via RalGAPB deletion or overexpression of constitutively active Ral mutants in hepatocytes reduces LDLR levels and impairs cholesterol clearance. Ral engages the endocytic RalBP1–REPS1 complex to promote LDLR internalization and lysosomal routing, where LDLR is degraded by the lysosomal protease cathepsin A (CTSA). Ral activation directs CTSA towards lysosomes for maturation while limiting its secretion, further promoting LDLR degradation in lysosomes. Genetic variants in this pathway significantly associate with altered cholesterol in humans. Pharmacological inhibition of CTSA activity increases hepatic LDLR function and improves cholesterol clearance, offering a potential new therapeutic strategy for hypercholesterolaemia and cardiovascular disease. Chronic dietary cholesterol activates Ral GTPases, which promote LDLR internalization and lysosomal degradation through RalBP1–REPS1 and CTSA, thereby reducing cholesterol clearance, whereas CTSA inhibition restores LDLR function and may offer a therapeutic strategy for cardiovascular disease.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

SEED: Semi-supervised Continual MalwarE Detection for Tackling ConcEpt Drift on a BuDget

arXiv:2605.24903v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Machine learning based malware detectors become obsolete over time due to concept drift in benign and malware applications. Recent methods rely on fully labeled data and use hierarchical contrastive loss (HCL) with active learning to improve robustness against drift by exploiting semantic structure in malware representations. However, obtaining labeled data in the security domain is difficult. Under partially labeled settings, HCL suffers significant performance degradation in detecting unseen malware, especially on datasets such as BODMAS where strong semantic structure may not exist. In this paper, we propose SEED, a semantic-structure-agnostic method for malware detection under limited supervision. SEED combines a tailored binary cross-entropy objective with semi-supervised continual learning and active learning. For partially labeled seen tasks, unlabeled samples are projected into a representation space constructed from previously seen data using singular value decomposition, and paired with suitable labeled samples to encourage representation consistency. For unseen tasks with fully unlabeled data, uncertainty is quantified using cosine distance in representation space, and the most uncertain samples are selected for analyst labeling. We evaluate SEED on both Windows and Android malware datasets. Using only 20% labeled data on seen tasks, SEED achieves average AUT improvements of 40% on BODMAS and 14% on AndroZoo for unseen malware detection compared to HCL* (the semi-supervised adaptation of HCL), while remaining competitive on APIGraph. Finally, we introduce a delayed buffer update strategy to reduce label noise propagation during replay and improve learning stability.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Optimizing Health Coverage in Ethiopia: A Learning-augmented Approach and Persistent Proportionality Under an Online Budget

arXiv:2509.00135v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As part of nationwide efforts aligned with the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 3 on Universal Health Coverage, Ethiopia's Ministry of Health is strengthening health posts to expand access to essential healthcare services. However, only a fraction of this health system strengthening effort can be implemented each year due to limited budgets and other competing priorities, thus the need for an optimization framework to guide prioritization across the regions of Ethiopia. In this paper, we develop a tool, Health Access Resource Planner (HARP), based on a principled decision-support optimization framework for sequential facility planning that aims to maximize population coverage under budget uncertainty while satisfying region-specific proportionality targets at every time step. We then propose two algorithms: (i) a learning-augmented approach that improves upon expert recommendations at any single-step; and (ii) a greedy algorithm for multi-step planning, both with strong worst-case approximation estimation. In collaboration with the Ethiopian Public Health Institute and Ministry of Health, we demonstrated the empirical efficacy of our method on three regions across various planning scenarios.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Rumination as a cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement: evidence from the CARING study

Purpose. Perinatal loss is associated with a high risk of persistent psychological distress, including prolonged grief, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Cognitive processes such as rumination may play a crucial role in maintaining and amplifying distress following loss, yet their specific contribution in perinatal bereavement remains underexplored. Methods. The CARING (Cognitive Analysis and Rumination INvestigation in perinatal Grief) study employed a cross-sectional design involving 298 parents who experienced perinatal loss within the previous five years. Participants completed an anonymous online survey including measures of depressive rumination (Ruminative Response Scale, RRS), angry rumination (Anger Rumination Scale, ARS), perinatal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale, PGS), general psychopathology (SCL-90), and post-traumatic stress symptoms (NSESSS). Non-parametric analyses were conducted to examine associations between rumination patterns and psychological outcomes. Results. Higher levels of rumination were significantly associated with greater perinatal grief, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and post-traumatic stress. Depressive rumination showed consistently stronger associations with all outcomes compared to angry rumination. Participants presenting both depressive and angry rumination exhibited the highest levels of grief intensity, psychological distress, and PTSD symptoms, suggesting a graded relationship between rumination patterns and severity of distress. Rumination levels were not significantly associated with gestational age at loss or with having received psychological support. Conclusions. Rumination, particularly in its depressive form, appears to function as a transdiagnostic cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement. These findings highlight rumination as a potential target for early screening and tailored psychological interventions aimed at reducing long-term distress following perinatal loss.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

The Impossibility of Eliciting Latent Knowledge

arXiv:2606.12268v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Advanced AI systems have extensive knowledge of their environments; in fact, their knowledge may (far) exceed that of their developers or users. Consequently, a desirable property for an AI system is that it is honest – that it accurately reports its beliefs about the world. Designing an AI system to be honest may be difficult, especially if we want to ask it questions about latent variables in the environment – variables which are hidden from the human interacting with it. This gives rise to the problem of eliciting latent knowledge (ELK): the problem of training an AI agent to honestly report its beliefs. In this paper, we make ELK formally precise using Causal Influence Diagrams (CIDs). CIDs can be used to describe the relationship between an agent's training environment and its subjective representation of the world. We use CIDs to formalise the distinction between observable and latent variables, to specify what exactly it means for an agent to be honest, and to formally define goal misgeneralisation. We show that, under certain circumstances, developers can incentivise an agent to honestly answer questions by providing correct feedback during training. However, a natural, but undesirable, way for an agent to generalise is to provide answers which humans would evaluate as true, rather than honest answers. We prove an impossibility theorem stating: There is no feedback-based training strategy that depends only on agent behaviour and with certainty produces an honest agent, even if feedback is perfect during training.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume: Complementary Scalable Benchmarks for Quantum Computers

arXiv:2512.19413v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing advances toward the late-NISQ and early fault-tolerant eras, scalable and platform-independent benchmarks are essential for quantifying computational capacity in a classically verifiable manner. We introduce two volumetric benchmarks, Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume, that assess quantum hardware by testing the execution of random Clifford and free fermion operations. These two groups of unitaries possess a combination of properties that make them ideal for benchmarking: (i) each is individually efficient to simulate classically, enabling verification at scale; (ii) together they form a universal gate set; (iii) they serve as essential algorithmic primitives in practical applications (including shadow tomography and quantum chemistry); and (iv) their definitions are formulated abstractly, without explicit reference to hardware-specific features such as qubit connectivity or native gate sets. This framework thus enables scalable and fair cross-platform comparisons and tracks meaningful computational advancement. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of these benchmarks through extensive numerical simulations across realistic noise parameters and through experimental validation on Quantinuum's H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer, which achieves a Clifford Volume of 34.

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

From Memorization to Parameter Interference: How Overtraining Experts Harms Model Merging

arXiv:2506.14126v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern deep learning is increasingly characterized by the use of open-weight foundation models that can be fine-tuned on specialized datasets. This has led to a proliferation of expert models and adapters, often shared via platforms like HuggingFace and AdapterHub. Model merging has recently emerged as an effective way to leverage these existing resources, enabling the composition of capabilities from different model checkpoints. A natural pipeline has thus formed to harness the benefits of transfer learning and amortize sunk training costs: models are pre-trained on general data, fine-tuned on specific tasks, and then multiple checkpoints are merged to obtain a more capable model. A prevailing assumption is that improvements at one stage of this pipeline propagate downstream, leading to gains at subsequent steps. In this work, we challenge that assumption by examining how expert fine-tuning affects model merging. We show that long fine-tuning of experts that optimizes for their individual performance leads to degraded merging performance across vision and language modalities, multiple model scales, and both fully fine-tuned and LoRA-adapted models. We trace this degradation to the memorization of a small set of difficult examples that dominate late fine-tuning steps. This causes negative parameter interference and encodes knowledge that is forgotten during merging. Finally, we demonstrate that task-dependent aggressive early stopping strategies can significantly improve model merging performance.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

When English Isn't the Best Teacher: Source Language Effects in Cross-Lingual In-Context Learning

Cross-lingual transfer in multilingual NLP has been widely explored in supervised fine-tuning contexts, where factors like data availability and linguistic similarity largely determine transfer quality. As the field shifts toward few-shot In-Context Learning (ICL), it is often presumed that insights from fine-tuning carry over unchanged. Yet this assumption has not been rigorously evaluated, leaving open the question of how to choose source languages for cross-lingual ICL. We conduct a broad empirical study of cross-lingual transfer in ICL spanning seven tasks, six models, and a typologically diverse set of languages. We further analyze language confusion, a key obstacle for generative tasks in cross-lingual ICL. Our results show that conventional fine-tuning-based expectations do not consistently apply in the ICL regime and point to alternative heuristics for selecting source languages effectively.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-11

Daily briefing: Deep-sea whale graveyard is a treasure trove of fossils

Authors:

Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better. Researchers have uncovered more than 400 fossilized whale bones in an ocean-floor chasm. Plus, the working lives of scientists, in pictures, and how AI could slow the pace of research publication for the better.

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

Self-Driving Datasets: From 20 Million Papers to Nuanced Biomedical Knowledge at Scale

arXiv:2605.07022v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Manually curated biomedical repositories – spanning bioactivity, genomics, and chemistry – are expensive to maintain, lag behind primary literature, and discard experimental context, obscuring nuances needed to assess data correctness and coverage. We show that PubMed itself can be autonomously and cost-effectively turned into structured datasets that are larger, more nuanced, and more accurate than the curated databases they replace. We present three coupled contributions: (1) an LLM-based entity-tagging pipeline, grounded in nine biomedical ontologies, that tags 4.5B entities across 19 categories in a 22.5M-paper, 2.5T-token PubMed corpus; (2) hybrid sparse-dense retrieval supporting entity-filtered semantic queries over the tagged corpus; and (3) Starling, a multi-agent deep research system that, given only a natural-language task description, designs precision- and recall-targeted retrieval filters, induces an extraction schema, and emits structured records with nuance-rich fields and supporting passages. Across six tasks – blood-brain barrier permeability, oral bioavailability, acute toxicity (LD50), gene-disease associations, protein subcellular localization, and chemical reactions – Starling produces ~6.3M records (91K-3M per task); several are, to our knowledge, the largest public datasets for their property. Frontier-model rejection of our extractions is 0.6-7.7% across tasks, far below error rates we measure on widely used curated counterparts (e.g., 16.5% on BBB_Martins, 7.3% on Bioavailability_Ma). Beyond scale and accuracy, the supporting passages carry nuance tabular databases discard – e.g., oral bioavailability may depend on fed vs. fasted state. Together, the corpus, retrieval, and agent establish a foundation for AI-driven therapeutic design. Code and datasets: https://github.com/starling-labs/starling.

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

Thermodynamic Value of XOR-Game-Induced Side Information in a Szilard Engine

arXiv:2605.12044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a Szilard-type thermodynamic valuation of side-information channels induced by Bell-type correlations. In each round, a two-level working system is thermalized with a degenerate Hamiltonian, so that its physical microstate is a uniform classical bit. A trusted referee embeds this bit into a finite two-player XOR game, and a correlation resource produces a compressed controller bit. The controller uses only this compressed bit as side information for feedback. The construction is formulated first for arbitrary finite XOR games. The referee encoding makes the game-winning event equivalent to correct prediction of the physical microstate. Consequently, the induced side-information channel is binary symmetric, with success probability equal to the XOR-game winning probability of the supplied behaviour. The reversible Szilard feedback value is therefore fixed by the mutual information between the microstate and the controller record. Optimizing over local, quantum, and nonsignalling behaviour sets turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, and nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. The construction is an effective-channel valuation, not a claim that Bell nonlocality is thermodynamic fuel. The controller receives only the compressed prediction bit, not the auxiliary variables that define the game. The thermodynamic costs of the referee, the correlation resource, and the preprocessing are not included. When controller-memory reset is included in a full cycle, the net work is non-positive, consistently with the second law.

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

Quantum Occam Learning: Sample-Supported Expressibility for Circuit-Based Quantum Learning

arXiv:2606.12211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central principle in quantum machine learning is that an ansatz should be expressive enough to represent the quantum data of interest. Yet, the expressibility is statistically meaningful only insofar as it can be learned from finitely many copies of an unknown quantum state. In this work, we develop an information-theoretic Occam theory for quantum data generated by finite-size quantum circuits. For the class $S_{n,G}$ of $n$-qubit pure states preparable with at most $G$ two-qubit gates, a metric-entropy argument gives the realizable sample law $\widetilde{\Theta}(G/\epsilon^2)$ in the circuit-limited regime. For an arbitrary source $\hat{\rho}$, we introduce the best $G$-gate approximation error $d_G(\hat{\rho})$ and the approximate circuit complexity $C_\eta(\hat{\rho})$. We prove an agnostic quantum Occam theorem: with $M$ copies, one can learn up to the best $G$-gate approximation error plus a statistical penalty $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{G/M})$. We then remove the need to know $G$ in advance through an adaptive model-selection theorem whose oracle inequality selects the circuit complexity justified by the data. Matching lower bounds yield a sample-supported expressibility law: at trace-distance accuracy $\epsilon$, $M$ samples can support only $G_supported \simeq M\epsilon^2$ gates, up to logarithmic factors and tomography saturation at $2^n$. Thus, the circuit complexity becomes an adaptive statistical resource rather than a static promise. Our framework turns bounded circuit complexity into a model-selection principle for quantum machine learning.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A matching decomposition algorithm for simulating quantum walk Hamiltonians

arXiv:2601.11418v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we present a new algorithm for generating quantum circuits that efficiently implement continuous time quantum walks on arbitrary simple sparse graphs. The algorithm, called matching decomposition, works by decomposing a continuous-time quantum walk Hamiltonian into a collection of exactly implementable Hamiltonians corresponding to matchings in the underlying graph followed by a novel graph compression algorithm that merges edges in the graph. We develop a greedy matching heuristic and a compression-aware matching heuristic, both of which can be used in the quantum circuit algorithm. Lastly, we convert the walks to a circuit and Trotterize over these components. The dynamics of the walker on each edge in the matching can be implemented in the circuit model as sequences of CX and CRx gates. We do not use Pauli decomposition when implementing walks along each matching. Furthermore, we compare greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition to a standard Pauli-based simulation pipeline and find that greedy (compression-aware) matching decomposition consistently yields substantial resource reductions, requiring up to 43$\%$ (70\%) fewer controlled gates and up to 54$\%$ (75\%) shallower circuits than Pauli decomposition across multiple graph families. Finally, we also present examples and theoretical results for when matching decomposition can exactly simulate a continuous-time quantum walk on a graph.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Cognitive Debt: AI as Intellectual Leverage and the Dynamics of Systemic Fragility

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a formal theory of cognitive debt: the stock of unverified reasoning obligations that accumulates when individuals use AI as a substitute rather than a complement for first-principles cognition. The model features two state variables per agent, cognitive capital and cognitive debt, and a multiplicative production technology in which cognitive capital functions as collateral that determines the return to AI adoption. We establish six propositions. Rational agents incur positive cognitive debt because the costs are deferred, partially external, and masked by short-run productivity gains. Tranquil periods lower subjective risk assessments, raise AI substitution intensity, and compound leverage, generating a cognitive Minsky moment in which subjective risk falls while true systemic fragility rises. Expected crisis losses are convex in aggregate leverage. Post-crisis, output-target pressure can produce a false-correction loop in which agents patch AI failures with more AI. The decentralised equilibrium over-adopts substitutive AI relative to the social optimum because of systemic risk, cognitive public goods, and arms-race externalities. In a two-type heterogeneous-agent economy, high-cognitive-capital agents adopt AI more intensively and may eventually erode their unaided cognitive capital below that of initially lower-skilled agents.

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

Dual-Anchoring: Addressing State Drift in Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv:2604.17473v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language Navigation(VLN) requires an agent to navigate through 3D environments by following natural language instructions. While recent Video Large Language Models(Video-LLMs) have largely advanced VLN, they remain highly susceptible to State Drift in long scenarios. In these cases, the agent's internal state drifts away from the true task execution state, leading to aimless wandering and failure to execute essential maneuvers in the instruction. We attribute this failure to two distinct cognitive deficits: Progress Drift, where the agent fails to distinguish completed sub-goals from remaining ones, and Memory Drift, where the agent's history representations degrade, making it lose track of visited landmarks. In this paper, we propose a Dual-Anchoring Framework that explicitly anchors the instruction progress and history representations. First, to address progress drift, we introduce Instruction Progress Anchoring, which supervises the agent to generate structured text tokens that delineate completed versus remaining sub-goals. Second, to mitigate memory drift, we propose Memory Landmark Anchoring, which utilizes a Landmark-Centric World Model to retrospectively predict object-centric embeddings extracted by the Segment Anything Model, compelling the agent to explicitly verify past observations and preserve distinct representations of visited landmarks. Facilitating this framework, we curate two extensive datasets: 3.6 million samples with explicit progress descriptions, and 937k grounded landmark data for retrospective verification. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world environments demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving a 15.2% improvement in Success Rate and a remarkable 24.7% gain on long-horizon trajectories. To facilitate further research, we will release our code, data generation pipelines, and the collected datasets.

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

Beyond Benchmarks: Continuous Edge Inference for Fine-Grained Roadside Perception

Continuous AI inference on resource-constrained edge hardware introduces deployment effects that are largely invisible to conventional benchmark evaluation, including temporal instability in streaming video, thermal throttling under sustained load, and workload-dependent performance variability. We present Edge-TSR, a deployment-oriented continuous edge inference system for sustained roadside perception on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Edge-TSR integrates detection, tracking, fine-grained classification, and a lightweight track-aware temporal stabilization mechanism that improves streaming inference consistency with negligible computational overhead. Our central finding is that benchmark-centric evaluation systematically overstates deployed edge inference performance. Across three state-of-the-art baselines, we observe consistent 20-30% relative degradation when transitioning from static-image evaluation to real-world streaming deployment. Edge-TSR addresses this gap through temporal inference stabilization, recovering up to 10.16% classification accuracy over per-frame inference baselines while maintaining sustained real-time performance under continuous operation. We evaluate the complete system under diverse real-world deployment conditions, jointly characterizing inference quality, latency, throughput, and thermal behavior during long-duration operation. A 55-minute vehicular deployment over a 26 km route demonstrates sustained operation at 16.18 FPS within safe thermal limits on a single embedded device without cloud offload. Our findings show that deployment-aware evaluation and temporal inference stabilization are necessary components of continuously operating edge AI systems intended for real-world sensing deployments. We release a sample annotated streaming video evaluation dataset and full system implementation to support reproducible deployment-centric evaluation.

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

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

Authors:

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.