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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum gates with parametrically driven multi-qubit couplers

arXiv:2606.14522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superconducting quantum processors could significantly profit from enhanced connectivity together with precise control of interactions and gates between qubits. Here we investigate plaquettes of four qubits that are coupled via a central tunable coupling circuit, so that not only gates between qubits connected by an edge of the plaquette can be executed but also between qubits across the diagonal. By numerically and analytically analyzing parametrically driven processes, we explore $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates between any pair of qubits, also across the diagonal, as well as three-qubit interactions and gates. For experimentally available circuit parameters, we for example find $\sqrt{iSWAP}$-gates with a gate time of 50 ns and 99.9\% fidelity, which is decreased to 99.4\% if two such gates are executed in parallel on disjoint qubit pairs in the plaquette. For three-qubit gates we find fidelities of 95\% fidelity at a gate time of 200 ns.

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

Communication-Efficient Distributed Training for Collaborative Flat Optima Recovery in Deep Learning

arXiv:2507.20424v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study centralized distributed data parallel training of deep neural networks (DNNs), aiming to improve the trade-off between communication efficiency and model performance of the local gradient methods. To this end, we revisit the flat-minima hypothesis, which suggests that models with better generalization tend to lie in flatter regions of the loss landscape. We introduce a simple, yet effective, sharpness measure, Inverse Mean Valley, and demonstrate its strong correlation with the generalization gap of DNNs. We incorporate an efficient relaxation of this measure into the distributed training objective as a lightweight regularizer that encourages workers to collaboratively seek wide minima. The regularizer exerts a pushing force that counteracts the consensus step pulling the workers together, giving rise to the Distributed Pull-Push Force (DPPF) algorithm. Empirically, we show that DPPF outperforms other communication-efficient approaches and achieves better generalization performance than local gradient methods and synchronous gradient averaging, while maintaining communication efficiency. In addition, our loss landscape visualizations confirm the ability of DPPF to locate flatter minima. On the theoretical side, we show that DPPF guides workers to span flat valleys, with the final valley width governed by the interplay between push and pull strengths, and that its pull-push dynamics is self-stabilizing. We further provide generalization guarantees linked to the valley width and prove convergence in the non-convex setting.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On the Generalization Bounds of Symbolic Regression with Genetic Programming

arXiv:2604.17402v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Symbolic regression (SR) with genetic programming (GP) aims to discover interpretable mathematical expressions directly from data. Despite its strong empirical success, the theoretical understanding of why GP-based SR generalizes beyond the training data remains limited. In this work, we provide a learning-theoretic analysis of SR models represented as expression trees. We derive a generalization bound for GP-style SR under constraints on tree size, depth, and learnable constants. Our result decomposes the generalization gap into two interpretable components: a structure-selection term, reflecting the combinatorial complexity of choosing an expression-tree structure, and a constant-fitting term, capturing the complexity of optimizing numerical constants within a fixed structure. This decomposition provides a theoretical perspective on several widely used practices in GP, including parsimony pressure, depth limits, numerically stable operators, and interval arithmetic. In particular, our analysis shows how structural restrictions reduce hypothesis-class growth while stability mechanisms control the sensitivity of predictions to parameter perturbations. By linking these practical design choices to explicit complexity terms in the generalization bound, our work offers a principled explanation for commonly observed empirical behaviors in GP-based SR and contributes towards a more rigorous understanding of its generalization properties.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

SEAGym: An Evaluation Environment for Self-Evolving LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.17546v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-evolving LLM-based agents improve mainly by changing their agent harness: the structured execution layer around a base model, including prompts, memory, tools, middleware, runtime state, and the model-tool interaction loop. Existing evaluations often reduce this process to isolated task scores or a single sequential curve, obscuring whether an update produces reusable improvement, overfits recent tasks, increases cost, or harms older behavior. We introduce SEAGym, an evaluation environment for measuring agent harness updates across training, validation, test, replay, and cost records. SEAGym turns Harbor-compatible benchmarks into dynamic self-evolution task sources with train batches, frozen update-validation, held-out ID and OOD transfer views, replay diagnostics, and saved snapshot and metric records. Instantiating SEAGym on Terminal-Bench 2.0 and HLE, we compare ACE, TF-GRPO, and AHE under a shared epoch/batch protocol. The results show that these evaluation views provide complementary signals about the evolution process: frequent updates may fail to improve held-out performance, useful intermediate snapshots may collapse later, and source diversity and model backend can affect harness reliability.

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

The Challenges of Balancing AI Compliance and Technological Innovations in Critical Sectors: A Systematic Literature Review

arXiv:2606.12423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into critical infrastructure including healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, offers transformative benefits but also conflicts with evolving regulatory and governance frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to examine the challenges of balancing AI compliance and technological innovation across critical infrastructure sectors. The review follows established SLR guidelines to extract and synthesize insights from peer-reviewed articles, report, and institutional sources published between 2020-2025. The study identifies three interrelated challenges: fragmented regulations, excessive compliance burdens for smaller to medium enterprises (SMEs), and misaligned governance models. To address these challenges, the study highlights practical governance strategies, including risk-tiered regulation, compliance by design, and explainable AI, to support scalable and trustworthy AI deployment in critical sectors. Key contributions include a concise mapping of core AI-governance challenges and a conceptual diagram illustrating their overlap, as well as actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioner to harmonize oversight with innovation.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Kubo-Martin-Schwinger conditions for non-Hermitian systems

arXiv:2606.13251v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the extension of the Kubo–Martin–Schwinger (KMS) thermal equilibrium condition to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with real spectra and biorthogonal eigensystems, providing a systematic analysis through three complementary routes. Our central result is a thermodynamic characterisation of quasi-Hermiticity: for $H \in M_d(\mathbb{C})$ diagonalisable with real spectrum, the biorthogonal Gibbs functional $\omega_{\rm{bi}}(A) = Z_{\rm{bi}}^{-1} \sum_n e^{-\beta E_n}\langle\phi_n|A|\psi_n\rangle$ satisfies $\omega_{\rm{bi}}(A^\dag A) \geq 0$ for all $A$ if and only if $H$ is quasi-Hermitian. The proof constructs the metric $\eta$ directly from the eigenprojectors of $\omega_{\rm{bi}}$ via the Riesz representation theorem, with no prior choice of $\eta$, providing a metric-free certificate of quasi-Hermiticity outside the Mostafazadeh–Scholtz framework. Under the full quasi-Hermitian hypothesis, we prove that the $\eta$-Gibbs state $\omega_\eta(A) = Z_\eta^{-1}\, \rm{Tr}[\eta e^{-\beta H}A]$ satisfies all three analytic KMS conditions, using the Hadamard three-line theorem and Bari's theorem on Riesz bases. The result is non-trivial: the transported state $\hat\omega(X) = \rm{Tr}[e^{-\beta h}X\eta]/Z_\eta$ differs from the Gibbs state of the isospectral Hermitian partner $h = \eta^{1/2}H\eta^{-1/2}$ whenever $[\eta,h]\neq 0$, so the KMS property cannot be deduced from the Hermitian theory by similarity. The gap between this result and the full Haag–Hugenholtz–Winnink $C^*$-algebraic framework is identified. Failure modes at exceptional points and for complex spectra are analysed, and the relation to the Fagnola–Umanità quantum detailed balance condition for open systems is discussed.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Beyond the Golden Teacher: Enhancing Graph Learning through LLM-GNN Co-teaching

arXiv:2606.11583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-attributed graphs (TAGs) underlie real-world applications such as citation networks, social media, and e-commerce. Few-shot graph learning on TAGs is hard: with only a handful of labels per class and the rest of the graph unannotated, neither GNNs nor LLMs can learn well on their own. GNNs read topology and fail on cold nodes; LLMs read text and fail on text-ambiguous nodes. Existing LLM-GNN methods all follow the same recipe: designate one model as the golden teacher and use its outputs (e.g., features or pseudo-labels) to supervise the other. We argue this golden-teacher assumption breaks under sparse supervision: neither model is golden, and treating either as such transfers its blind spots into the student. We therefore ask: can we avoid designating either model as the golden teacher, and still perform effective graph learning? We answer with LLM-GNN Co-Teaching, a bidirectional co-teaching framework in which neither model is fixed as teacher. The GNN and LLM exchange their most confident pseudo-labels under an architecture-specific small-loss criterion, and both update every round. Supervision is then mined from the trajectory: whenever a node moves from cross-model contradiction at round t to cross-model agreement at round t+1, the LLM's two answers on the same input form a preference pair (old contradicting self < new peer-endorsed self) for DPO training. We call this Round-based Pseudo-Label Preference Optimization (RPL-PO). On six benchmarks, LLM-GNN Co-Teaching consistently outperforms GNN-as-Judge and all prior methods, with absolute 3-shot gains of 7.86% on Cora and 7.73% on ogbn-arxiv; improvements carry over to 5-shot and to zero-shot cross-dataset transfer. Error-structure analysis further shows that abandoning the golden-teacher assumption substantially improves the LLM's graph learning capability on challenging samples.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

SFT Overtraining Predicts Rank Inversion via Entropy Collapse Under RLVR

The standard heuristic of selecting the SFT checkpoint with the highest pass@1 for GRPO can fail when SFT compresses the rollout distribution. For binary rewards, the expected within group advantage variance is $p(1{-}p)(g{-}1)/g$; when early GRPO drives $p$ below $p^*(g)$, most groups have identical rewards and provide no group relative signal. We study SFT depth ladders for Qwen2.5-Coder-3B and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B. We test Qwen2.5-Coder-3B across five depths and three seeds, and DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B across four matched depths and three seeds. On Qwen, pre RL pass@1 rises with SFT depth, but peak GRPO pass@10 falls from $0.806$ to $0.481$ (3 seed mean, $n{=}20$); pre RL entropy is positively associated with the GRPO outcome ($\rho{=}{+}0.69$). On DeepSeek, pass@1 remains far above $p^*(8){=}0.083$, and GRPO outcomes compress rather than invert. A two stage diagnostic, combining pre RL entropy triage with an early GRPO entropy monitor, flags high risk checkpoints and can stop failing runs early. Simple KL to reference regularisation and label smoothing variants do not rescue the collapsed Qwen checkpoint in our setting, suggesting the failure is not a trivial GRPO hyperparameter artefact.

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

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control. We introduce Act2Answer, a lightweight protocol that adapts VLM knowledge benchmarks to VLA evaluation by requiring agents to answer through action. Each question becomes a short tabletop episode where the agent performs a single object-placement action to select among candidate answers, yielding an action-grounded success rate with reduced control confounds. We curate a test suite of such environments across diverse commonsense and world-knowledge categories and introduce layerwise intent probing to localize answer-relevant information across the VLM backbone and action head. In a large-scale study of 7 VLA models and 9 VLM baselines, we systematically rank models across categories, finding that VLAs show solid performance on simple concepts while exhibiting larger gaps on richer semantic categories relative to their source VLMs, that VQA co-training is associated with better knowledge retention, and that answer-relevant signals peak in middle VLA layers but attenuate in upper layers. Act2Answer is available at https://tttonyalpha.github.io/act2answer/.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

A Robust Point Cloud Analysis Framework Inspired By Primary Visual Cortex

Despite significant advancements in point cloud analysis, reducing energy consumption and improving robustness remain understudied, largely due to the inherent limitations of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). To address this issue, we draw inspiration from the primary visual cortex and propose a Dendritic-Connected Continuous-Coupled Neural Network (DC-CCNN), a novel Brain-Inspired Neural Network (BINN) architecture for point cloud analysis. By combining discrete and continuous encoding, our design replaces traditional Multilayer Perceptrons (MLPs) with more efficient and robust BINNs. Building upon this framework, we further propose an extended model, DC-CCNN++, to improve robustness under complex corruption conditions. Specifically, we introduce a Neuro-Inspired Robust Modulation-and-Readout Module (NRMR) to enhance feature stability and decision robustness through global-context gain modulation and dual-code evidence integration. We also design a Cortically Inspired Progressive Variability Training (CPVT) strategy, which progressively exposes the model to structured environmental variability while preserving stable clean-sample anchors during training. Experimental results show that DC-CCNN++ improves the performance of brain-inspired networks on point cloud analysis while maintaining performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. Compared with the original DC-CCNN, it achieves stronger results on both classification and part segmentation, and exhibits enhanced robustness against sparsity, occlusion, Gaussian noise, salt-and-pepper noise, and spatial transformations. With its efficiency, robustness, and biologically grounded design, DC-CCNN++ provides a promising alternative to traditional deep learning methods for point cloud analysis. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/DC-CCNNpp-44E3.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

UniIntervene: Agentic Intervention for Efficient Real-World Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.12372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human-in-the-loop reinforcement learning (HiL-RL) has emerged as an effective paradigm for real-world robotic manipulation, enabling online policy improvement with human guidance. However, current HiL-RL frameworks remain intervention-intensive, relying on frequent human corrections to redirect the policy out of unproductive exploration, which incurs high labor cost and limits real-world scalability. To address this, we propose UniIntervene, an agentic intervention model that detects unproductive exploration and autonomously recovers the policy toward high-value states, taking over the bulk of interventions from human operators. Specifically, UniIntervene first performs future-conditioned action-value estimation, predicting the latent consequence of the current action and evaluating its induced value, which provides a more stable progress signal. Building on this, a temporal value-risk critic aggregates recent value dynamics and triggers intervention when the estimated value exhibits sustained stagnation or degradation. When intervention is required, UniIntervene retrieves a high-value recovery target from a memory of past intervention episodes and produces executable corrective actions through a goal-conditioned recovery policy. In this way, UniIntervene turns intervention from passive human correction into a value-aware recovery process for efficient real-world RL. Extensive experiments on diverse real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that UniIntervene improves the average success rate by 8.6% while reducing human interventions by 57% relative to state-of-the-art HiL-RL baselines.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Open-SWE-Traces: Advancing Dual-Mode Multilingual Distillation for Software Engineering Agents

arXiv:2606.16038v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The path toward autonomous software engineering is currently bottlenecked by a severe deficit of diverse, large-scale trajectory data. We address this by introducing \ourdataset, an expansive dataset of 207,489 agentic trajectories spanning nine programming languages (Python, Go, TS, JS, Rust, Java, PHP, C, C++). Sourced from 20,000 real-world PRs via OpenHands and SWE-agent harnesses, the dataset utilizes a hybrid-reasoning synthesis: Minimax-M2.5 generates trajectories with explicit "thinking" processes, while Qwen3.5-122B provides high-quality "non-thinking" traces. Filtered for permissive licenses (MIT, Apache, BSD) from SWE-rebench-V2, this data facilitates the training of models capable of long-horizon reasoning. We validate the dataset by fine-tuning the Qwen3-30B-A3B series (Thinking, Instruct, and Coder). The best performing model achieves resolve rates of 61.7% on SWE-bench Verified, 57.1% on SWE-bench Multilingual, and 36.8% on SWE-bench Pro. These results establish Open-SWE-Traces as a premier resource for distilling human-level software engineering capabilities into efficient, open-source agentic LLMs.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

The Perceived Fragility of Explanations in Audio Models: Manipulation of Attribution with Unchanged Predictions

arXiv:2606.14466v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper investigates the fragility of post-hoc explanation methods in audio deepfake detection. While previous work on explanation manipulation focused on images using standard $L_p$ metrics, we introduce a psychoacoustic framework that optimizes inaudible perturbations to decouple model attributions from final classifications. We evaluate this vulnerability across state-of-the-art architectures under strict prediction-preserving constraints. By evaluating the manipulation cost through domain-specific perceptual audio quality metrics alongside explanation alignment criteria, our framework demonstrates that an adversary can systematically distort automated explanation heatmaps while preserving the predicted deepfake label. Full code available at: https://github.com/cncPomper/Audio-XAI

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MambaCount: Efficient Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting with Spatial Sparse State Space Duality Block

Text-guided Open-vocabulary Object Counting (TOOC) aims to estimate the number of objects described by text prompts, which is particularly challenging in dense scenes with large scale variations. Existing TOOC approaches predominantly rely on Transformers, whose quadratic complexity with respect to image resolution limits their scalability. Mamba offers a promising alternative due to its linear complexity. However, previous Mamba-based methods have two main limitations. On the one hand, the inherent causal formulation of Mamba constrains the bidirectional spatial dependency modeling required by non-causal vision tasks. On the other hand, existing Mamba-based vision models often overlook the unconstrained high entropy in the spatial token responses, which can weaken local details and high-frequency cues. To address these limitations, we propose MambaCount, an efficient framework built on the Spatial Sparse State Space Duality (S^4D) block. Specifically, we analyze and reconstruct the decay dynamics of hidden states in Mamba to alleviate the dependency constraints introduced by causal modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Spatial Token Selection (STS) sub-block to reduce the unconstrained high entropy in spatial token responses within Mamba. In addition, we design Multi-Granularity Prototypes (MGP) to identify object-like regions at different semantic levels, improving cross-modal alignment and interpretability. Extensive experiments on FSC-147 demonstrate that MambaCount achieves state-of-the-art performance among methods without secondary querying, obtaining a test MAE of 12.23, while retaining linear complexity.

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

Learning Instance-Adaptive Low-Rank Orthogonal Subspaces for Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Epipolar Geometry Improves Video Generation Models

Video generation models have advanced significantly through the latent diffusion transformers trained with rectified flow techniques. Yet these models still struggle with geometric inconsistencies, unstable motion, and visual artifacts that break the illusion of realistic 3D scenes. 3D-consistent video generation could significantly impact numerous downstream applications in generation and reconstruction tasks. We explore how epipolar geometry constraints improve modern video diffusion models. Despite using massive training data, these models fail to capture fundamental geometric principles. We align diffusion models using pairwise epipolar geometry constraints via preference-based optimization, directly addressing unstable trajectories and geometric artifacts through mathematically principled geometric enforcement. Our approach efficiently enforces geometric principles without requiring end-to-end differentiability. Evaluation demonstrates that classical geometric constraints provide more stable optimization signals than modern learned metrics. Training on static scenes with dynamic cameras ensures metric quality while the model generalizes to various dynamic scenes. By bridging data-driven learning with classical computer vision, we reduce epipolar error by 31% and improve human-rated consistency from 54% to 72% without compromising visual quality.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Evaluation of Alternative-Based Information Systems for Deliberative Polling using an Agentic Simulator

arXiv:2606.11692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deliberative polling promises to improve collective decision-making by exposing shareholders to a broad range of arguments before they vote. Yet ensuring that every voter encounters a representative sample of the reason space, the coverage problem, remains an open challenge, particularly at scale and in adversarial or strategically motivated electorates. This paper introduces a way of evaluating solutions using the LLM-based Agentic Bipolar Argumentation Simulator, grounded in a framework which formalises a poll as a six-tuple of endorsing and opposing justifications, attack and enhance relations, and shareholder- and relation-weights. ABAS simulates N autonomous shareholder agents, each assigned a latent opinion according to desired distributions in [-1, 1], who sequentially vote, choose or author justifications, and optionally submit argumentation-graph links. The simulator implements recommendations that rank existing justifications by their observable endorsement mass. It evaluates the mechanism's success by coverage, namely the fraction of the corpus reason-tag set represented in the K recommendations presented to each shareholder, as a solution to the NP-hard Subsuming Justification Problem. Reported experiments characterise how creativity rate (pown), recommendation size (K), argumentation density (plinks), and population size (N) affect coverage and corpus diversity. In an authenticated electorate where Sybil attacks are impossible and only the relation graph is gameable, we stress-test the scoring with coordinated strategic voting attacks: a tag-flood attack collapses coverage, while author-count relation weighting through a reversed-PageRank rule resists the flood markedly better than uniform weights.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Spatio-Temporal Audio Language Modeling for Dynamic Sound Sources

Sound events are entities with semantic identities, locations, and trajectories, but current audio-language models usually reason about clips as global event content. Conversely, sound event localization models track source directions over time but offer limited semantic coverage for language reasoning. To address this gap, we introduce ST-AudioQA, a spatio-temporal audio QA dataset and benchmark built from first-order ambisonic (FOA) renderings of static and moving sound sources. Each scene provides source identity, activity, direction, distance, and motion metadata, enabling dense trajectory supervision and questions about what is sounding, where it is, how it moves, and how sources relate. We further propose ST-Audio Encoder, a time-resolved FOA audio encoder that learns event semantics together with source trajectories, and ST-AudioLM, which connects the audio tokens from the encoder to an LLM for spatio-temporal audio QA. Experiments show that this representation improves the semantic-localization tradeoff and yields stronger reasoning performance than static spatial and localization-oriented baselines.

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

Time-Conditioned and Multi-Time Survival Prediction from 2D PET/CT Projections in Lung Cancer

Accurate prediction of overall survival (OS) from positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) can support personalized treatment and follow-up strategies in oncology. However, the impact of temporal modeling on imaging-based survival prediction remains insufficiently explored. We investigate how different temporal formulations influence survival prediction by developing two complementary approaches: Attention-guided Time-Conditioned Survival (ATCS) and Multi-Time Survival (MTS). We retrospectively analyzed pre-treatment PET/CT images from 848 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), including 556 for model development and 292 for held-out testing. A previously proposed Time-Conditioned Survival (TCS) model was used as a baseline. Models were trained using 5-fold cross-validation and evaluated on the test set using time-dependent area under the curve (AUC) at 6-month intervals from 0.5 to 5 years. Both ATCS and MTS outperformed the baseline TCS model, achieving mean AUCs of 0.794 and 0.793, respectively, compared to 0.767. ATCS performed better at earlier time points (0.5-3 years), whereas MTS performed better at later intervals (3.5-5 years). Combining tumor-specific and tissue-wise PET/CT features improved performance over either input alone. Finer temporal discretization improved short-term prediction, while coarser intervals provided more stable long-term estimates. These findings demonstrate that temporal modeling and input design influence PET/CT-based survival prediction. The proposed approaches enable time-specific survival estimation from pre-treatment imaging and may support improved risk stratification and clinical decision-making.

21.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Revealing competitive interfacial reactions in high-energy Li–S batteries

Authors:

Charge transfer at solid–liquid interfaces plays a critical role in various energy-storage systems1, particularly under dynamically varying reactant concentrations. Deciphering these intricate reaction pathways remains a substantial challenge, notably in lithium–sulfur (Li–S) batteries, in which achieving high energy density requires efficient conversion of highly concentrated lithium polysulfides (LiPSs)2,3. However, the mechanisms governing lithium sulfide (Li2S) deposition and dissolution under lean electrolyte conditions remain poorly understood. Here, using in situ liquid-cell electron microscopy, we directly visualize concentration-driven phase segregation at the electrode–electrolyte interface. Within these high-concentration interfacial layers (HCILs), competitive surface and solution dictate the charge-transfer dynamics and ultimately govern Li2S deposition at different phase boundaries. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that the aggregation of LiPSs alters molecular geometry, electronic properties and orbital hybridization, collectively facilitating charge transfer through highly concentrated LiPSs clusters. Guided by these insights, we design optimized electrodes that balance interfacial reaction pathways, enabling fast charging (4 C, 26.8 mA cm−2) and achieving high energy densities exceeding 400 Wh kg−1. These findings provide mechanistic understanding of interfacial reactions under practical working conditions and offer a design strategy to advance Li–S batteries. Visualization of concentration-driven phase segregation within high-concentration interfacial layers in the context of high-energy lithium–sulfur batteries using liquid-cell electrochemical transmission electron microscopy reveals competitive interfacial reactions under lean electrolyte conditions at different phase boundaries.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Can Vision-Language Models See the Vital Signs? Benchmarking and Fine-Tuning for Intraoperative Monitor Reading

Background Vital-sign deterioration is a leading contributor to preventable perioperative death, yet manual monitor reading is intermittent, error-prone, and subject to alarm fatigue. Automating this perceptual step could enable continuous surveillance, but existing solutions depend on device-specific hardware integration or cloud-hosted vision-language models (VLMs), which raise privacy, cost, and connectivity barriers in resource-limited healthcare facilities. Methods We constructed a benchmark of 200 in-the-wild intraoperative monitor photographs (spanning multiple vendors, angles, and illumination conditions) annotated for eight vital-sign parameters: heart rate, SpO2, ETCO2, respiratory rate, systolic/diastolic/mean blood pressure, and temperature. We evaluated an optical character recognition (OCR)-based pipeline, nine instruction-tuned VLMs (four commercial, five open-weight ranging from [&le;]4B to 31B parameters) under two prompting regimes, and a compact open model (Qwen3.5-9B) adapted via low-rank fine-tuning (LoRA, 0.46% of parameters updated). Results Under a domain-aware prompt, frontier VLMs reached 0.98-0.997 exact-match accuracy zero-shot, whereas the OCR pipeline and [&le;]4B model scored approximately 0.20 lower, defining a 9B-class usable floor. LoRA fine-tuning Qwen3.5-9B on 80-120 images raised accuracy from 0.953 to 0.994 (statistically indistinguishable from the best commercial model) and reduced the critical-error rate fivefold (0.0313 [-&gt;] 0.0063). Ablations showed that performance saturated at 80 training images and rank-8 adapters. Conclusion Monitor reading is a solved perception problem for VLMs above the 9B scale. A lightweight fine-tuned open model achieves frontier accuracy while running entirely on local hardware, preserving data privacy, offline capability, and near-zero marginal cost. Residual errors stem from blood-pressure source ambiguity and are addressable with explicit disambiguation logic.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Suppressing Intrinsic Spin-Phonon Errors in Trapped-Ion Quantum Simulation

arXiv:2606.15518v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Trapped-ion quantum simulators realize programmable spin models through phonon-mediated interactions. For Hamiltonians with noncommuting terms, however, the same phonon bus generates intrinsic spin-phonon errors that strongly distort the target dynamics. Because these errors are governed by the full time history of the spin-dependent phonon motion, they survive standard loop-closing control and limit simulation accuracy. Using a sequence of frame transformations, we isolate the residual error dynamics and show that this intrinsic error can be strongly suppressed while preserving programmable Ising couplings. Full spin-boson simulations of multi-ion chains demonstrate orders-of-magnitude lower error than both constant-drive and conventional loop-closing protocols. These results remove a central precision barrier in trapped-ion analog quantum simulation and enable accurate programmable simulation of noncommuting many-body Hamiltonians and dynamical protocols.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

On the entanglement induced by the deformation of phase-space

arXiv:2606.17587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most quantum gravity theories propose that the fundamental concept of space-time is mostly compatible with quantum theory in noncommutative (NC) space. In the present paper, we revisit the notion of entanglement induced by NC deformations of phase space. The positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion for separability of bipartite Gaussian states is extended to a general class of Bopp's shift. In particular, we have considered both the position-position and momentum-momentum noncommutativity, with deformation parameters $\theta$ and $\eta$, respectively. It turns out that $\theta$ and $\eta$ induce the entanglement. We have directly applied the formalism for an anisotropic two-dimensional harmonic oscillator. Peres-Horodecki separability condition leads to a constraint equation for the parameter values of the oscillator in NC space. It turns out that the bipartite Gaussian state is almost always entangled in deformed space. To implement the theoretical idea, we provide an outline for a gedankenexperiment to identify the signature of phase-space noncommutativity, i.e., quantum gravity. In particular, the gedankenexperiment is devised to test the separability of supposedly separable Gaussian states in the usual commutative space, through the covariance matrix, which is constructed via measured output photocurrents after interaction of input Gaussian states and reference states. If the experiment shows that the supposedly separable states are actually entangled, then the entanglement is created through the intermediate background noncommutative space, which is a signature of the quantum nature of gravity.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

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

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