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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MeiBRD: Meta-Learning Intraoperative Biomechanical Residual Deformation

Accurate intraoperative liver registration is challenging due to substantial soft-tissue deformation yet sparse intraoperative measurements. Biomechanical models regularize this ill-posedness with prior knowledge but exhibit persistent prediction bias due to simplifying assumptions, while data-driven learning solutions struggle with data efficiency, generalization, and physical plausibility. We propose a hybrid registration framework that adapts a biomechanical prior using sparse intraoperative correspondences. Rather than learning a full deformation field, we learn a residual deformation function that corrects linear biomechanical predictions, modeled as a graph neural diffusion function with geometry-aware attention over the 3D liver mesh. To enable long-range information transfer of sparse observations, we take a novel perspective of sparse intraoperative measurements as context samples where input-output pairs of the residual deformation function are fully observed, casting the problem into learning-to-learn this residual function from intraoperative context samples with feedforward meta-learners. Experiments on a deformable liver phantom dataset demonstrate improved registration accuracy and generalization compared to rigid, biomechanical, and data-driven baselines, particularly for out-of-distribution geometries and deformations.

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

Z-Plane Neural Networks: Bounded Geometric Activation Replaces ReLU and LayerNorm

arXiv:2606.15669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep neural networks rely on Euclidean scalar activations (e.g., ReLU) and global normalization techniques (e.g., LayerNorm) to prevent gradient instability in deep architectures. However, these mechanisms inherently cause dead neurons, discard critical directional information, and destroy the orthogonality of feature representations. Inspired by the frequency-modulation transmission of biological axons, we propose the Z-Plane Neural Network, which maps hidden states into 2D phasor bundles on a hypersphere. We introduce a novel geometric activation function, Radial Bounding($\mathbf{x} / \max(1, \|\mathbf{x}\|_2)$), which limits the energy magnitude while preserving the phase (direction). We demonstrate mathematically that this isotropic activation maintains 1-Lipschitz continuity and prevents gradient vanishing by preserving tangential gradients. Empirically, a 100-layer Z-Plane Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)-entirely devoid of ReLU and LayerNorm-successfully converges on the MNIST dataset with 98.34% accuracy and absolute numerical stability, proving that bounded geometric activation alone is sufficient for stable deep learning.

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

Linear Mode Connectivity under Data Shifts for Deep Ensembles of Image Classifiers

arXiv:2511.04514v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The phenomenon of linear mode connectivity (LMC) links several aspects of deep learning, including training stability under noisy stochastic gradients, the smoothness and generalization of local minima (basins), the similarity and functional diversity of sampled models, and architectural effects on data processing. In this work, we experimentally study LMC under data shifts and identify conditions that mitigate their impact. We interpret data shifts as an additional source of stochastic gradient noise, which can be reduced through small learning rates and large batch sizes. These parameters influence whether models converge to the same local minimum or to regions of the loss landscape with varying smoothness and generalization. Although models sampled via LMC tend to make similar errors more frequently than those converging to different basins, the benefit of LMC lies in balancing training efficiency against the gains achieved from larger, more diverse ensembles. Code and supplementary materials are available at https://github.com/DLR-KI/LMC. This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.

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

SPEA2$^+$: Improved Density Estimation in SPEA2 with Provable Runtime Guarantees

arXiv:2606.12382v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA2) is a popular and prominent evolutionary algorithm for solving multi-objective optimisation problems. Despite its popularity, theoretical analyses of SPEA2 have only appeared recently. Moreover, these analyses focus exclusively on how SPEA2 handles non-dominated solutions and disregard the algorithmic components responsible for handling dominated solutions. We conduct a first runtime analysis of SPEA2 for which these components are analysed. We prove that, unlike other prominent algorithms, including NSGA-II, NSGA-III and SMS-EMOA under the same setting of constant population size and duplicate elimination, SPEA2 is unable to cover the Pareto front of the OneTrapZeroTrap benchmark efficiently. Our results indicate that using k-th nearest-neighbour distance in the fitness assignment provides an insufficient signal to maintain diversity among dominated individuals. To address this issue, we propose an improved variant, SPEA2$^+$, that considers all pairwise distances. The new algorithm achieves the same performance guarantees as the other prominent algorithms on OneTrapZeroTrap, while matching the performance of the original SPEA2 on simpler problems. Experimental results complement our theoretical findings.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Selective Agentic Recovery for UAV Autonomy with a Persistent Mission Runtime

arXiv:2606.14219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI can support unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomy by providing high-level recovery reasoning when local waypoint- or setpoint-based execution encounters blocked passages, repeated no-progress behavior, or mission-level ambiguity. On physical UAVs, however, remote reasoning is most useful when it is invoked selectively, since each call introduces latency, resource cost, backend uncertainty, and a need to validate the returned decision. This paper presents Persistent Mission Runtime (PMR), a UAV recovery framework that keeps the mission loop and safety-critical execution local while using an external agentic reasoner only as an on-demand recovery module. The reasoner selects from predefined recovery skills, and each returned decision is parsed, verified, safety-filtered, and mapped to local executor actions before it can affect flight. PMR introduces learned Cognitive Value of Invocation (learned-CVI), a compact admission gate that estimates when remote agentic reasoning is likely to improve near-term mission progress enough to justify its operational cost. Across a fixed 400-run Gazebo/PX4 benchmark with eight scenarios, learned-CVI raises hard/ambiguous-regime success from 5.0% under local-only autonomy to 95.0%, outperforms one-shot and periodic reasoning baselines by 20.0 and 32.5 percentage points, and reduces remote-agent calls by 16.7% and logged tokens by 29.2% relative to a manually tuned rule-based invocation baseline.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

A Brain-Aging Transcriptomic Signature Reclassifies WHO Glioma Grade and Predicts Survival Independently of IDH Status: A Multi-Cohort Study

Background Despite WHO grade and IDH status, significant survival differences remain in diffuse gliomas. We hypothesized that a brain-aging transcriptomic signature, reflecting neuroinflammation, myeloid infiltration, and synaptic loss, would independently predict survival and allow for molecular reclassification. Methods A neurodegeneration score was derived via PCA of brain MRI volumes from 1,057 OASIS-3 subjects and projected onto 888 TCGA-LGG/GBM (discovery) and 693 CGGA gliomas (validation). A 14-gene signature of glial/myeloid (GFAP, AQP4, TYROBP, TREM2, C1QA, CD68, ITGAM) and neuronal (SYP, DLG4, GRIN1, GRIA1, SNAP25, SYN1, RBFOX3) genes were computed. Elastic-net Cox regression identified a 3-gene panel (C1QA, CD68, GRIA1). Kaplan-Meier, multivariate Cox, decision curve, and single-cell RNA-seq analyses were performed. Results High brain-aging scores predicted poorer overall survival (p < 0.0001) and remained an independent prognostic factor after adjusting for WHO grade and IDH status (z = 4.72, p < 0.001); chronological age was non-significant (p = 0.231). In IDH-mutant gliomas, significance was confirmed in both cohorts (TCGA p = 0.027; CGGA p < 0.0001). Bidirectional reclassification showed high-risk Grade 2 tumors with Grade 3-like survival (p = 0.00089), and indolent Grade 3 tumors resembling Grade 2 by Ki-67. Single-cell RNA-seq confirmed macrophage localization of signature genes; DCA demonstrated net benefit over grade alone at 5-30% probability thresholds. Conclusions A brain-aging transcriptomic signature independently predicts glioma survival beyond WHO grade and IDH status, validated in an independent Chinese cohort, with clinical utility for identifying high-risk Grade 2 and sparing over-treatment of indolent Grade 3 tumors.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

ThinkDeception: A Progressive Reinforcement Learning Framework for Interpretable Multimodal Deception Detection

arXiv:2606.18988v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multimodal deception detection is critical for identifying fraudulent intentions, yet existing approaches predominantly rely on end to end black–box paradigms. These methods suffer from a severe lack of interpretability failing to provide transparent reasoning trajectories and struggling to explicitly capture the subtle, cross modal inconsistencies inherent in deceptive behaviors. To transcend these limitations, we propose ThinkDeception, a novel and interpretable multimodal deception detection framework. As a pioneering effort, it introduces Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into this domain, transforming deception detection from a traditional binary classification task into an explicit cognitive reasoning process. Facilitated by the first meticulously annotated step–by–step multimodal Chain of Thought (CoT) dataset, we develop a foundational model, ThinkDeception Base, empirically validating the critical role of modal inconsistency in decoding deception. Building upon this foundation, our core innovation lies in proposing Visual-Audio Consistency Group Relative Policy Optimization(VAC–GRPO) equipped with a progressive training strategy. Distinct from standard GRPO, we stratify the training data into four progressive difficulty tiers, guiding the model through a psychologically grounded easy–to–hard cognitive transition. By innovatively coupling this dynamic curriculum scheduler with a multi dimensional, process aware reward mechanism and a reflective learning paradigm, we significantly elevate the model's overall reasoning quality. Extensive experiments on mainstream benchmarks demonstrate that ThinkDeception establishes a new SOTA, significantly outperforming existing methods in both detection accuracy and rationale quality. Ultimately, this work successfully drives the field of deception detection toward interpretable, multimodal cognitive reasoning.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Scaffold Effect: How Prompt Framing Drives Apparent Multimodal Gains in Clinical VLM Evaluation

arXiv:2603.28387v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Trustworthy clinical AI requires that performance gains reflect genuine evidence integration rather than surface-level artifacts. We evaluate 12 open-weight vision-language models (VLMs) on binary classification across two clinical neuroimaging cohorts, \textsc{FOR2107} (affective disorders) and \textsc{OASIS-3} (cognitive decline). Both datasets come with structural MRI data that carries no reliable individual-level diagnostic signal. Under these conditions, smaller VLMs exhibit gains of up to 58\% F1 upon introduction of neuroimaging context, with distilled models becoming competitive with counterparts an order of magnitude larger. A contrastive confidence analysis reveals that merely mentioning MRI availability in the task prompt accounts for 70-80\% of this shift, independent of whether imaging data is present, a domain-specific instance of modality collapse we term the scaffold effect. Expert evaluation reveals fabrication of neuroimaging-grounded justifications across all conditions, and preference alignment, while eliminating MRI-referencing behavior, collapses both conditions toward random baseline. Our findings demonstrate that surface evaluations are inadequate indicators of multimodal reasoning, with direct implications for the deployment of VLMs in clinical settings.

09.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-29

Characterization of the VHH-Fc construct rimteravimab in healthy adults and patients hospitalized for mild-to-moderate COVID-19: Two Phase 1 randomized clinical trials

作者:

by Ellen Jansen, Viki Bockstal, Florence Herschke, Per Olsson Gisleskog, Manuela Rinaldi, Angélique Boerboom, Salah Hadi, Natalia Gaibu, Michel Moutschen, Dominique Tersago Background Variable Heavy domain of Heavy chains (VHH) are innovative tools to target unique epitopes, yet few have been developed as heavy chain-only antibodies for clinical use. Rimteravimab (referred to here as XVR011) is a humanized antibody developed for the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), consisting of two identical VHHs targeting the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike, with a human immunoglobulin (Ig) G1 fragment constant of antibody (Fc), silenced for Fc effector functions. We conducted two Phase 1 studies in healthy volunteers or hospitalized COVID-19 patients to evaluate its safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics and immunogenicity. Methods and findings A randomized, double-blinded, single-center, placebo-controlled, single ascending dose study was performed in healthy volunteers (Phase 1a, EXEVIR0102, EudraCT 2021-003707-17), in parallel to an open-label, multi-center, single ascending dose study in patients hospitalized for mild to moderate COVID-19 (Phase 1b, EXEVIR0101, EudraCT 2020-005299-36, NCT04884295). Participants received a single intravenous infusion of 250, 500 or 1,000 mg of XVR011. The primary objective for both trials was the safety and tolerability of XVR011. Pharmacokinetics were evaluated as a secondary objective in Phase 1a and as an exploratory objective in Phase 1b. Efficacy (evaluated as respiratory parameters and COVID-19 clinical status) and antiviral activity in patients were evaluated as a secondary objective in Phase 1b. Immunogenicity was evaluated as an exploratory objective. Part 2 of the EXEVIR0101 study (initially a phase 1b/2 study) was not conducted due to the loss of XVR011 potency against SARS-CoV-2 Omicron BA.2. Demographics, safety, efficacy, and immunogenicity were analyzed using descriptive statistics, while pharmacokinetics were analyzed with noncompartmental pharmacokinetics (PK) modeling.In the Phase 1a study, there were no infusion-related reactions, serious treatment-emergent adverse events (TEAEs) or TEAEs grade ≥3. 22/30 volunteers (73.3%) reported 53 TEAEs (49 Grade 1, 4 Grade 2) with none being related to XVR011. The most common TEAE was headache (n = 8, 26.7%) in various treatment groups. In the Phase 1b study, 27 hospitalized patients were enrolled, and followed up to 30 days. Seven patients (25.9%) reported a total of 15 TEAEs, the majority (80%) being mild to moderate (Grade 1–2). There were no treatment-related serious TEAEs. All TEAEs resolved by the end of the study. Peak exposure (maximal concentration, Cmax) and systemic exposure (area under the curve, AUC0-t, and AUC0-inf) for XVR011 increased dose-proportionally. Geomean half-life ranged from 15.4 to 17.0 days in Phase 1a, while individual half-life ranged from 11.4 to 15.6 days in Phase 1b. SARS-CoV-2 viral load, as detected in nasopharyngeal samples by reverse transcription and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR), decreased similarly in all cohorts compared to baseline. No treatment-induced anti-drug antibodies (ADA) were detected in Phase 1a. In Phase 1b, higher XVR011 concentrations increased the likelihood of ADA formation, without impacting pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics. No obvious dose-response in COVID-19 clinical status or respiratory parameters was observed.Technological limitations included study size, absence of placebo for the Phase 1b, absence of repeated dosing, evolving SARS-CoV-2 variants and standard-of-care. Conclusions XVR011 displayed a favourable safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, and immunogenicity profile, both in healthy volunteers and in patients hospitalized for mild to moderate COVID-19. These data pave the way for the design and clinical development of VHH-Fc constructs.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Toward all-optical unsupervised Hebbian learning in deep photonic neuromorphic networks

arXiv:2601.22300v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a deep photonic neuromorphic network (PNN) architecture based on phase-change material (PCM) synapses and local optical feedback for online, unsupervised Hebbian learning. The proposed architecture combines optical vector-matrix multiplication, non-volatile PCM synaptic weighting, and local coincidence-driven synaptic adaptation within a multilayer photonic crossbar framework compatible with photonic integrated circuits. Unlike conventional PNNs that rely on externally computed gradients, repeated optical-electrical-optical conversions, or global backpropagation, the proposed framework employs local Hebbian learning governed directly by correlated pre- and post-synaptic optical activity. To investigate the feasibility of the proposed learning mechanism, we implemented the PNN design using fiber-optic components, programmable variable optical attenuators, and real-time software control that incorporates PCM thermal dynamics. Supervised and unsupervised learning behaviors were experimentally evaluated under both offline and online learning conditions using representative image-recognition tasks. The experimental results demonstrate adaptive synaptic evolution, successful optical inference, and autonomous pattern encoding through local Hebbian learning under realistic fiber-optic hardware conditions. These results establish a pathway toward future integrated photonic neuromorphic systems capable of scalable and energy-efficient online Hebbian learning.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Wildfire pollution exposure during childhood adversely affects cognitive and neural development

Air pollution has well-documented negative cardiovascular and respiratory consequences. However, the impact of particulate matter pollution (PM2.5) on brain development is unclear. Animal studies suggest that exposure to early-life PM2.5 can cause adverse neurodevelopmental outcomes, but in vivo human work has been hampered by cross-sectional designs and heavily confounded PM2.5 exposure measures. Here we use an innovative natural experimental design to isolate the effects of wildfire pollution on neurocognitive development in a large cohort of children (N>9000, 4 waves, age 9-16). Doing so, we find that greater wildfire PM2.5 exposure is robustly associated with slower brain development and shallower cognitive improvement across early adolescence. Our study underscores the urgent public health concern that wildfire PM2.5 poses for childhood development.

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

Physics-Informed Neural Networks for Chemotherapy Pharmacokinetics: Benchmarking the Clinical Estimator and Exposing Parameter Identifiability

arXiv:2606.12658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) are an attractive tool for partial-observation problems in biology, where the governing dynamics are known but some compartments cannot be measured. Chemotherapy pharmacokinetics (PK) is a clean instance: drug concentration in plasma is routinely measured, but concentration in tissue – which determines tumour kill and off-target toxicity – is not. We benchmark a PINN against the standard clinical baseline (nonlinear least-squares on the analytical biexponential plasma solution, hereafter NLS) and a physics-agnostic neural baseline (a data-only MLP) on two PK problems. On the linear two-compartment problem, NLS is near-optimal; the PINN matches it to within a small constant factor while also producing the tissue curve in a single training pass, whereas the data-only MLP fails on tissue by roughly 10x. On a Michaelis-Menten extension (saturable elimination), the biexponential closed form no longer exists, so NLS is mis-specified and silently returns meaningless rate constants. The PINN instead exposes a deeper fact: the Michaelis-Menten two-compartment model is non-identifiable from plasma alone, and the PINN reports this honestly by converging to a basin with k12 -> 0. Adding two sparse tissue observations largely resolves identifiability: across five seeds the PINN recovers k21 to within 1% of truth and Vmax, Km to within one standard-deviation bar, while k12 moves in the correct direction (0.02 -> 0.82) but remains ~2 sigma below truth – a recovery the closed-form NLS estimator cannot attempt at all, because its biexponential ansatz describes only plasma. Our claim is not that PINNs beat NLS. It is that PINNs offer a uniform recipe that ties the textbook estimator on the textbook problem, exposes structural identifiability that the textbook estimator hides, and absorbs heterogeneous measurements within a single loss.

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

Learned Image Compression for Vision-Language-Action Models

Vision-language-action (VLA) models increasingly rely on high-frequency multi-camera observations, making visual communication a major bottleneck for real-time robotic control in bandwidth-constrained or distributed deployment settings. Existing image and video codecs, however, are designed to preserve generic visual fidelity rather than the control performance of downstream VLA policies. In this work, we introduce SPARC (SPatially Adaptive Rate Control), a learned image compression framework tailored for VLA-driven robots. Our key observation is that the importance of visual information varies substantially across both camera views and spatial regions within an image. Based on this observation, SPARC employs a lightweight temporal mask selector that adaptively allocates bitrate over latent representations according to task relevance while leveraging temporal context. We further introduce a tilted rate loss that stabilizes training by reducing the tendency of entropy-based objectives to over-suppress rare yet task-critical visual patterns. Experiments on diverse robotic benchmarks, including RoboCasa365, VLABench, and LIBERO, show that SPARC consistently achieves stronger control performance than conventional image/video codecs and recent learned compression methods under the same bitrate budget. We additionally demonstrate real-world deployment benefits in remote-control settings, where our method substantially improves the bitrate-success tradeoff.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Evaluating Deep-Learning Based Quantification of Breast Arterial Calcification on Mammography for Cardiovascular Risk Assessment

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a deep learning model for automated quantification of breast arterial calcification (BAC) on screening mammography and to assess whether AI-derived BAC burden predicts major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in women. Methods: In this retrospective study, 202,006 women who underwent screening mammography without history of MACE were included. A BAC segmentation model was trained on an expert-annotated dataset using a multi-task U-Net with a ResNet-18 encoder to detect and segment BAC. BAC burden was quantified as area (mm{superscript 2}) from model-generated masks using DICOM pixel spacing and categorized by tertiles into low, intermediate, and high. The PREVENT score and incident MACE were identified from electronic health records. Cox proportional hazards models were developed to evaluate AI-derived BAC burden and PREVENT score alone, and combined models for 5 - and 10-year cardiovascular risk prediction. Results: Among 202,006 women (mean age 54.8{+/-}11.7 years), 23.1% had AI-detected BAC, and 7,701 (3.8%) developed incident MACE during a median follow - up of 7.5 years. On the geographically held-out test set, the BAC model achieved an AUROC of 0.97, Dice score of 0.6678, and Pearson correlation of 0.961 between AI-derived and manually annotated BAC burden. BAC burden increased with age and was higher among women who developed MACE. Five - year MACE incidence increased across BAC categories from 1.5% in women without BAC to 6.9% in those with high BAC burden. BAC burden alone showed modest prediction of MACE, with 5-year and 10-year AUROCs of 0.661 and 0.650, respectively, while PREVENT achieved AUROCs of 0.781 and 0.771. Adding BAC to PREVENT produced minimal improvement in discrimination. Conclusion: Deep learning-based BAC quantification from routine mammography is feasible, accurate, and associated with future cardiovascular risk. Although BAC added little to PREVENT for overall discrimination, it may serve as a scalable opportunistic imaging biomarker to identify women at elevated cardiovascular risk and support preventive care.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Scaling limits of the single-curve interface and outermost loops in the planar random field Ising model

arXiv:2606.13147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We prove that the interface separating $+1$ and $-1$ spins in the near-critical planar random field Ising model (RFIM) with Dobrushin boundary conditions has a scaling limit, whose law is conformally covariant and almost surely absolutely continuous with respect to SLE$_3$. The limiting curve can be seen as a massive version of SLE$_3$ in the sense of Makarov and Smirnov, but in a random environment. We then show that the outermost spin loops of the near-critical planar RFIM with $+1$ boundary conditions have subsequential limits and that any of these limits is almost surely singular with respect to CLE$_3$. This dichotomy between absolute continuity of the single interface and singularity of the outermost loops reflects the fact that a single interface does not explore enough of the magnetization field of the near-critical RFIM to detect the singularity of this field with respect to the critical Ising magnetization field, whereas the outermost spin loops do.

16.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Much Memory Do We Need? Adaptive Memory Gate for Neural Operators

arXiv:2606.13443v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural operators have emerged as a powerful data-driven approach for solving time-dependent PDEs. Among recent advances, memory-augmented neural operators explicitly incorporate past states and have achieved remarkable performance under low-resolution observation settings. However, existing approaches apply a fixed memory weight regardless of observation conditions, such as resolution or physical parameters, limiting their adaptability. Our preliminary experiments reveal that optimal memory weight varies with resolution and viscosity, implying that a fixed memory weight cannot simultaneously optimize performance across diverse settings. We propose AMGFNO, which dynamically modulates memory weight through a learnable gate. On the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky and Burgers' equations, AMGFNO achieves 55-79% nRMSE reduction over at low resolution, with the learned gate value automatically decreasing from $\bar{g} \approx 0.7$ to near-zero as resolution increases.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Path integral control of open quantum systems

arXiv:2410.18635v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate open-loop quantum state preparation for a class of open quantum systems whose dynamics follow a Gorini-Kossakowski-Lindblad-Sudarshan (GKLS) master equation that admits a trajectory-based stochastic representation. The deterministic control objective is reformulated as a stochastic optimal control problem – interpreting stochasticity as a methodological tool akin to stochastic Schrödinger equation unravelings – which situates the problem within the path integral control framework. For the class of GKLS generators under consideration, this reformulation leads to an explicit expression for the optimal control as a weighted average over stochastic quantum trajectories, thereby eliminating the need for gradient evaluations. Building on this theoretical result, we derive a control update rule for piecewise-constant control pulses and demonstrate that adaptive importance sampling progressively enhances the control estimator during optimization, culminating in the algorithm we term Path integral Quantum Control (PiQC). We further introduce an annealed variant of PiQC, wherein a synthetic noise schedule gradually steers open-system trajectories toward closed-system dynamics, enabling high-fidelity unitary state preparation. Numerical studies on a dissipative single-qubit system and a multi-qubit Nuclear Magnetic Resonance model verify that PiQC yields precise open-loop controls and displays robustness to Hamiltonian perturbations. We propose PiQC as a trajectory-based alternative to gradient-based approaches, which might offer a viable solution in quantum control problems where gradient computation is infeasible or computationally demanding.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Attention as Frustrated Synchronization

A network of oscillators that synchronizes perfectly computes nothing further, so an attention architecture built from synchronization must locate its computation in structured departures from agreement. We introduce the Frustrated Synchronization Network (FSN), whose token states are phases on a torus and whose entire value pathway is one learned complex coupling kernel over harmonics and a one-step delay. Each component of the kernel is a frustration in the sense of the synchronization literature. The complex phases are static Kuramoto-Sakaguchi frustration angles, the signed harmonics are repulsive Daido components, and the delay term, which couples each token to the successors of the tokens it attends to, is algebraically identical to Kuramoto-Sakaguchi coupling whose frustration angle is the data's own transition, so next-token prediction is implemented as synchronization frustrated by the data. At matched one-million-parameter and training budgets on character-level text and code, the FSN's validation loss is below a tuned RoPE-SwiGLU transformer's at every epoch measured, and the comparison survives training the baseline to convergence: every thirty-epoch enwik8 seed finishes below the transformer's converged fifty-epoch loss of 1.611, and the FSN's completed fifty-epoch runs converge to 1.5953 +/- 0.0014. A variant with every feed-forward block replaced by mean-field coupling to learned collective modes, leaving no multilayer perceptron in the stack, tracks the transformer. On natural text the unfrustrated base layer falls behind the converged transformer at every copy depth, worst on long-range copy events; the kernel reverses the deficit at every depth of four and beyond. Headline comparisons are at the one-million-parameter scale; a scale ladder is complete through four million parameters with the advantage persisting, and remaining arms are marked as in progress.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Metastability for the Curie-Weiss-Potts model with unbounded random interactions

arXiv:2505.11260v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We analyse the metastable behaviour of the disordered Curie–Weiss–Potts (DCWP) model subject to a Glauber dynamics. The model is a randomly disordered version of the mean-field $q$-spin Potts model (CWP), where the interaction coefficients between spins are general independent random variables. These random variables are chosen to have fixed mean (for simplicity taken to be $1$) and well defined cumulant generating function, with a fixed distribution not depending on the number of particles. The system evolves as a discrete-time Markov chain with single spin flip Metropolis dynamics at finite inverse temperature $\beta$. We provide a comparison of the metastable behaviour of the CWP and DCWP models, when $N \to \infty$. First, we establish the metastability of the CWP model and, using this result, prove metastability for the DCWP model (with high probability). We then determine the ratio between the metastable transition time for the DCWP model and the corresponding time for the CWP model. Specifically, we derive the asymptotic tail behavior and moments of this ratio. Our proof combines the potential-theoretic approach to metastability with concentration of measure techniques, the latter adapted to our specific context.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

On the Energy Distribution of the Galactic Center Excess' Sources

arXiv:2507.17804v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) may yet herald the discovery of annihilating dark matter. Weighing against that conclusion are analyses showing evidence for dim point sources within the spatial structure of the emission. Due to technical limitations these analyses are purely spatial with all spectral information that could disentangle the excess from astrophysical backgrounds discarded. Here, we demonstrate that a neural network simulation-based inference approach can jointly analyze the spatial and spectra data. The addition is profound: energy information drives the putative point sources to be significantly dimmer, indicating either the GCE is truly diffuse in nature or made of an exceptionally large number of sources. Quantitatively, for our best fit background model, the excess is essentially consistent with Poisson emission as predicted by dark matter. If due to point sources, our median prediction is $\mathcal{O}(10^5)$ sources, or more than 35,000 at 90\% confidence, both orders of magnitude larger than the hundreds preferred by earlier point-source analyses of the GCE, although variations allowed by background systematics could reduce the required number of sources by roughly an order of magnitude.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Effect of tenofovir on the outcomes of COVID-19 in persons with chronic hepatitis B: a nationwide cohort study in Sweden.

Background: Patients with chronic hepatitis B (CHB) may have an increased risk of severe COVID-19. Tenofovir has been hypothesized to confer protection against severe disease, but evidence is inconclusive. We evaluated the risk of severe COVID-19 among CHB patients treated with tenofovir compared with other nucleos(t)ide analogues (NAs). Methods and findings: In this nationwide, registry-based cohort study, we included all adults with CHB and laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 in Sweden between February 2020 and July 2022. Data from national health and socioeconomic registers were linked using unique personal identification numbers (PINs). Patients with HIV, hepatitis C, or hepatitis D coinfection were excluded. Exposure was defined as tenofovir versus other NA therapy. The primary outcome was severe COVID-19, defined as hospitalization >2 days or death within 30 days of diagnosis. Logistic regression was used to estimate adjusted odds ratios (aOR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI), controlling for age, sex, comorbidities, vaccination, socioeconomic status, and region of birth. Among 5,877 CHB patients with COVID-19, 672 were receiving NA therapy (437 tenofovir, 235 other NAs). Severe COVID-19 occurred in 8.0% of tenofovir-treated patients and 14.5% of those receiving other NAs (unadjusted OR 0.52; 95% CI, 0.31-0.85). After adjustment, the association was attenuated and no longer significant (aOR 0.72; 95% CI, 0.39-1.31). Older age, comorbidities, and unvaccinated status were strongly associated with severe disease. Conclusions: The apparent protective effect of tenofovir against severe COVID-19 in unadjusted analyses was largely explained by confounding factors. The risk of severe disease was primarily driven by age, comorbidities, and vaccination status. Prevention of severe COVID-19 in patients with CHB should instead focus on vaccination and management of comorbidities.

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

Bright Emission from Dark Sources in Hyperbolic Media

arXiv:2606.16071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperbolic media enable ultra-strong light-matter interactions through their extreme field localization and small mode volumes, but low-loss realizations are fundamentally limited to the mid-infrared, owing to the long lifetimes of optical phonons in high-quality crystals. Here we show that bright emitters operating at visible or near-infrared frequencies can be used to generate radiation in this regime by inducing mid-infrared population dynamics, thereby creating a source in the hyperbolic frequency band without a corresponding dipole transition. We demonstrate that even a source with vanishing dipole and higher multipole moments - strictly non-radiating in any isotropic medium - becomes radiatively active in a hyperbolic environment. This enables visible and near-infrared control of light-matter interactions in polaritonic hyperbolic materials, establishing a new low-loss solid-state quantum optics platform.

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

CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, focal aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require to include a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features also for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, providing also substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.

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

Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer

arXiv:2602.12753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy dependence: policies change due to ongoing learning, environmental non-stationarities, and changes in task demands, making established predictive representations obsolete. Furthermore, in topologically complex environments, SRs suffer from spectral diffusion, leading to dense and overlapping features that scale poorly. Here we propose the Hierarchical Successor Representation (HSR) for overcoming these limitations. By incorporating temporal abstractions into the construction of predictive representations, HSR learns stable state features which are robust to task-induced policy changes. Applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to the HSR yields a sparse, low-rank state representation that facilitates highly sample-efficient transfer to novel tasks in multi-compartmental environments. Further analysis reveals that HSR-NMF discovers interpretable topological structures, providing a policy-agnostic hierarchical map that effectively bridges model-free optimality and model-based flexibility. Beyond providing a useful basis for task-transfer, we show that HSR's temporally extended predictive structure can also be leveraged to drive efficient exploration, effectively scaling to large, procedurally generated environments.