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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tensor network compression using fluid dynamics as a testbed: Analytical foundations in one dimension

arXiv:2606.17064v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High performance computers produce extreme-scale data sets that require sampling or compression if they are to be used to their full potential. Existing data compression techniques typically exploit features such as sparsity in the data, homogeneity in the data, or {\it a priori} knowledge of what subsets of data are of most interest. Fluid dynamics data in general do not exhibit these features and so are attractive test beds for generic compression techniques that are objective, robust, and tuneable with respect to information lost due to compression. Presented here is a method based on tensor networks, specifically matrix product states or tensor trains, that meets these requirements. The method is demonstrated for compression in one-dimension and is extensible to higher dimensionality. Lossless compression is demonstrated for random Fourier series for sufficiently high bond dimension of the tensor network, with the memory required to store the tensor network scaling directly proportional to the bond dimension. The lossy compression exhibited at lower bond dimension can be well within the relative error of many fluid simulations. The compression algorithm is tested for the time evolution of Burger's equation with excellent results. We additionally demonstrate the capability to perform computations in the compressed form through a tensor network periodic convolution that can be orders of magnitude faster than using fast Fourier transforms and the convolution theorem. In addition to being an attractive method for working with data sets generated by existing computers, the tensor network methods utilised are directly translatable to the emerging paradigm of quantum computing.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Searching for Synergy in Shared Workspace Human-AI Collaboration

arXiv:2606.18413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated AI agents are increasingly capable, yet many scientific and professional tasks require human judgment and contextual expertise. We study shared-workspace human-AI teams, where AI agents and human collaborators must coordinate responsibilities before submitting a final answer. Using the Collaborative Gym environment with DiscoveryBench tasks, we examine when adding simulated human collaborators improves performance and when process loss turns additional collaborators into coordination overhead. Across 1,482 sessions, adding relevant collaborators can lower performance when teams lack structure to coordinate their contributions. We then evaluate scaffolding that combines shared group memory with simulated human-in-the-loop (HITL) gates, where selected actions require approval from a designated simulated participant. This scaffolding yields higher mean performance, most clearly in three-person teams, with clearer responsibility signals and stronger routing of expertise to team actions. Overall, how human-AI teams coordinate and integrate expertise matters as much as the capability available to them.

03.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-22

Affordable centimeter-scale 3D microscopy with submicrometer resolution

作者: 未知作者

Submicrometer-resolution three-dimensional (3D) imaging of large samples has been constrained by the short working distance, high cost and inflexible design of immersion objectives. We developed hybrid solid–liquid optics (HySIL) — a refractive framework with index-matched components — for submicrometer-resolution 3D imaging of centimeter-scale samples in various immersion media using inexpensive air objectives.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

APCyc: Property-Informed Design of Cyclic Peptides via Automated Cyclization

arXiv:2606.12991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cyclic peptides represent a promising class of therapeutic compounds in modern drug discovery, often offering improved stability and binding affinity. However, the de novo design of cyclic peptides remains challenging because methods must identify pocket-adaptive cyclization patterns and linkage sites while simultaneously controlling drug-relevant properties. This challenge is particularly pronounced for recent generative models trained predominantly on linear peptide data, which may fail to capture cyclization-specific constraints. To address the limitation, we introduce APCyc, a target-aware de novo cyclic peptide generation framework that explicitly models cyclization and jointly optimizes multiple essential physicochemical properties. By using an expanded residue vocabulary and explicitly encoding cyclization-site and linkage-type information, APCyc learns cyclization-aware representations and leverages Bayesian posterior guidance to steer sampling toward cyclic peptides satisfying multiple property objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our model learns target-dependent cyclization preferences, and enables effective and controllable multi-property optimization for cyclic peptide design. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/HKUSTGZ-ML4Health-Lab/APCyc.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Histologically validated diffusion MRI signatures of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in Alzheimer disease

Noninvasive neuroinflammation measurement remains a major barrier for Alzheimer disease (AD) therapeutics. We present generalized diffusion basis spectrum imaging (g-DBSI), a diffusion MRI framework that decomposes the tissue signal into biologically interpretable microstructural compartments. In postmortem Knight ADRC brains, g-DBSI-derived restricted isotropic fraction (RIF) and restricted anisotropic fraction (RAF) mapped cellularity and neurofilament density, while their ratio (RIF/RAF) tracked inflammatory cell density and peri-plaque amyloid-beta with higher specificity and regional consistency than RIF alone. In 112 living Knight ADRC participants stratified by PET amyloid, g-DBSI metrics showed amyloid-dependent trajectories: in low-amyloid individuals, RIF and RAF rose together with amyloid, consistent with early neuropil expansion and glial elaboration, whereas in high-amyloid individuals, RIF/RAF increased, and RAF declined, indicating established neuroinflammatory remodeling and neurofilament loss. CSF proteomics linked RIF/RAF to glia-enriched immune and vascular pathways, supporting g-DBSI as a clinically compatible MRI biomarker of neuroinflammation and neurodegeneration in AD.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Multi-strain Probiotics Alter Gut Microbiota and Estrobolome Pathways in Primary Dysmenorrhea

Background: Exact cause of primary dysmenorrhoea is unknown but recent evidence uncovers a potential link between gut dysbiosis and benign gynaecological disorder via disruption of estrobolome. Methods: A randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of multi-strain oral probiotics on primary dysmenorrhoea has been conducted. This is a secondary analysis comparing the stool microbiome in women with primary dysmenorrhoea and those without (control), and the effects of treatment with probiotics versus placebo. Results: Although microbial richness and evenness were comparable between groups (alpha diversity, p > 0.05), gut microbial community composition differed significantly (Bray Curtis PERMANOVA, p = 0.015), characterised by reduced Bifidobacterium adolescentis and Blautia and enrichment of Faecalibacterium in dysmenorrhoea, alongside condition-specific core taxa. Post-intervention analysis revealed significant shifts in microbial community structure between pre- and post-treatment groups (PERMANOVA, F = 2.11, p = 0.005), with probiotic supplementation inducing more consistent and directed microbiome changes than placebo, without altering alpha diversity (p > 0.05). Functional prediction showed no significant difference in overall beta glucuronidase pathway abundance (p > 0.05); however, dysmenorrhoea was associated with higher abundance of beta glucuronidase producing taxa (MaAsLin2, q < 0.05) that were differentially modulated by probiotic treatment. Conclusion: This discovery provides evidence on the microbial disruption in primary dysmenorrhoea as well as the benefit of probiotics to modulate the intestinal microbiota to improve the condition.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Association between depressive symptoms and physical function among participants with heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study.

Background: Depression and heart disease frequently co-occur in the aging population and are associated with functional decline and poor health outcomes. Understanding how depressive symptoms relate to different aspects of physical function among adults with heart disease may help identify high-risk subgroups. Objective: To examine the association of depressive symptoms with self-reported and observed physical function measures among participants with heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study and assess whether associations differ by sex and race?sex groups. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis using data from REGARDS study second in-home visit (2013?2016). Depressive symptoms were measured with the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES D 10), considering scores ?10 as clinically significant. Physical function measures were instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), activities of daily living (ADL), chair stand time (5 repetitions), and gait speed. Linear regression models estimated associations of depressive symptoms with function, adjusting for sociodemographic, health behavior, antidepressant medications, body mass index, and social support. Effect modification by sex and race?sex group was evaluated. Results: Among 3,055 participants, 11.7% had CES D 10 ?10. Compared to CES-D-10 scores

08.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-09

Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial

Lassa fever causes substantial morbidity and mortality in West Africa, and no licensed vaccine is available. We evaluated LASSARAB, an inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus (Josiah strain) glycoprotein complex vaccine. We conducted a randomized, controlled, dose-escalation phase 1 trial. Participants (total n = 54) received two intramuscular doses of LASSARAB containing 700 (n = 15), 1,400 (n = 15) or 2,800 (n = 14) relative units of antigen formulated with the TLR-4 agonist 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE adjuvant, or licensed rabies vaccine control (n = 10), administered 28 days apart. This protocol-defined interim analysis reports the primary safety evaluation and secondary immunogenicity assessments through day 61. There were no prespecified hypotheses or formal power calculations. All primary safety end points demonstrated an acceptable safety profile. After dose 1, local solicited adverse events occurred in 86.7–100.0% of LASSARAB groups and 80% of controls; systemic events in 33.3–71.4% and 60.0% of controls. After dose 2, local solicited adverse events occurred in 66.7–86.7% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls; systemic events in 53.3–71.4% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls. Events were predominantly mild and self-limited. Unsolicited adverse events occurred in 28.6–60.0% of LASSARAB groups and 20.0% of controls. No serious adverse event, immune-mediated condition or sensorineural hearing loss occurred. Safety laboratory abnormalities occurred in 13.3–66.7% of LASSARAB groups and 30.0% of controls (14 mild, 6 moderate and none severe). After two doses, Lassa virus GPC IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) was achieved in 100.0% (44 of 44) of LASSARAB recipients and 0.0% (0 of 10) of controls. Rabies glycoprotein IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) and neutralizing antibody by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) seroprotection (≥0.5 IU ml−1) were also 100% across all groups, including controls. LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl phosphorylated hexaacyl disaccharide (PHAD)-SE demonstrated a favorable safety profile and immunogenicity against Lassa and rabies viruses. The per-protocol final study report will include safety and durability through day 394. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT06546709 . An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

From Sparse and Imperfect 2D Anchors to Consistent 3D Gaussian Street Scenes: Support-Aware Appearance

Image priors can synthesize target conditions for 3D Gaussian street scenes, but independently edited views do not define a coherent 3D target. Direct fitting can propagate view-specific noise, while existing pipelines do not jointly handle imperfect sparse anchors and standard-rasterizer deployment. To address this gap, teacher-relative appearance residual distillation is introduced for appearance baking. A structured space for frequency decomposition, confidence estimation, and primitive-level lifting is formed by residuals between teacher anchors and original renders. The direct optimization signal is supplied by renderer-space matching, while primitive assignment is regularized by support-aware Gaussian-space aggregation. Supported detail is admitted and unsupported noise is suppressed through confidence-gated coarse-to-fine optimization, after which all residuals are baked into fixed-geometry spherical-harmonic coefficients. The teacher and auxiliary training modules are discarded at inference. Evaluation across Waymo street assets, Tanks and Temples scenes, and multiple target conditions shows a favorable overall balance of target alignment, content preservation, artifact suppression, and cross-view consistency over editing-based baselines. Ablations confirm the effectiveness of the main components. Code will be released at https://github.com/Cagares/Baking-for-3D-Gaussian.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

QueryOcc: Query-based Self-Supervision for 3D Semantic Occupancy

Learning 3D scene geometry and semantics from images is a core challenge in computer vision and a key capability for autonomous driving. Since large-scale 3D annotation is prohibitively expensive, recent work explores self-supervised learning directly from sensor data without manual labels. Existing approaches either rely on 2D rendering consistency, where 3D structure emerges only implicitly, or on discretized voxel grids from accumulated lidar point clouds, limiting spatial precision and scalability. We introduce QueryOcc, a query-based self-supervised framework that learns continuous 3D semantic occupancy directly through independent 4D spatio-temporal queries sampled across adjacent frames. The framework supports supervision from either pseudo-point clouds derived from vision foundation models or raw lidar data. To enable long-range supervision and reasoning under constant memory, we introduce a contractive scene representation that preserves near-field detail while smoothly compressing distant regions. QueryOcc surpasses previous camera-based methods by 26% in semantic RayIoU on the self-supervised Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark while running at 11.6 FPS, demonstrating that direct 4D query supervision enables strong self-supervised occupancy learning. https://research.zenseact.com/publications/queryocc/

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Jolia: Concept-Level Vision-Language Alignment for 3D CT Contrastive Learning

Vision-language contrastive pretraining has become the dominant recipe for 3D medical foundation models, leveraging the large volumes of paired scans and reports produced in clinical practice. However, medical images usually span dozens of organs, and radiological reports are much longer than typical natural image captions and are composed of multiple structured sections. CLIP-style pretraining compresses this structure by encoding each modality into a single global token, at the risk of losing important details. We introduce ConQuer (Concept Queries), an image-text pretraining method that augments CLIP's global alignment with a set of localized alignments, one per concept. ConQuer splits the report into concept-specific sections and learns cross-attention queries that pool the matching image features without using any segmentation mask or spatial supervision. Contrastive learning is then applied independently for each concept. Concepts can be any unit of semantic localization; here, they are anatomical regions, one query per organ or gross body region. As a byproduct, each query learns attention maps focused on its concept, providing built-in spatial interpretability. We use ConQuer to train Jolia, a 3D CT foundation model on chest and abdominal CT. Jolia consistently outperforms a CLIP baseline on findings classification, report generation, and cross-center transfer, and sets a new state of the art across multiple public benchmarks. Jolia's weights will be released upon acceptance.

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

Last-Iterate Convergence of Optimistic Multiplicative Weight Update

arXiv:2606.11773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimistic Gradient Descent Ascent (OGDA) and Optimistic Multiplicative-Weights Update (OMWU) are two very popular algorithms to solve convex/concave saddle-point problems, where OMWU is the non-Euclidean, entropic version of OGDA. It is known since the '80s that the last iterate of OGDA asymptotically converges to a saddle point in smooth problems. On the other hand, it is unknown if OMWU has the same property. In this paper, I show that OMWU converges asymptotically for smooth convex-concave saddle-point problems, with a small enough constant learning rate. The result does not require uniqueness, strict complementarity, an error bound, or initialization near a solution. The main new ingredient is a boundary argument showing that every cluster point satisfies the inactive-coordinate KKT inequalities. The boundary argument was discovered with assistance from ChatGPT and is documented in the appendix.

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

Explainable Task-Oriented Token Communication for AI-Native 6G Networks

The integration of Foundation Models (FMs) and wireless communications is driving the evolution of image communication from bit-accurate transmission toward task-oriented transmission. However, existing task-oriented image communication methods still face three major challenges: insufficient task-oriented Token representation, inadequate collaboration between Visual Tokens and Task Tokens, and limited interpretability of task decisions. To address these challenges, we propose an Explainable Task-Oriented Token Communication (ET-TokenCom) framework. By treating Tokens as unified units for information representation and transmission, the proposed framework constructs an end-to-end communication link that spans visual perception, wireless transmission, and task reasoning. At the transmitter, the ET-TokenCom framework extracts Visual Tokens from images to preserve low-level visual information. Meanwhile, Task Tokens generated by the FM are introduced to represent the target information and decision intent required by the current task. A Cross-Modal Attention (CMA) fusion mechanism is further designed, enabling Task Tokens to explicitly guide the selection, weighting, and transmission of Visual Tokens. At the receiver, the framework integrates Token decoding with an explainable output mechanism, where attention heatmaps are generated to highlight critical perceptual regions under different task objectives and reveal the influence of Task Tokens on the outputs. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed ET-TokenCom framework.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Relativistic Locality from Electromagnetism to Quantum Field Theory

arXiv:2412.11532v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetism is the paradigm case of a theory that satisfies relativistic locality. This can be proven by demonstrating that, once the theory's laws are imposed, what is happening within a region fixes what will happen in the contracting light-cone with that region as its base. The Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations meet the same standard. We show that this standard can also be applied to quantum field theory (without collapse), examining two different ways of assigning reduced density matrix states to regions of space. Our preferred method begins from field wave functionals and judges quantum field theory to be local. Another method begins from particle wave functions (states in Fock space) and leads to either non-locality or an inability to assign states to regions, depending on the choice of creation operators. We take this analysis of quantum field theory (without collapse) to show that the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics is local at the fundamental level. We argue that this fundamental locality is compatible with either local or global accounts of the non-fundamental branching of worlds, countering an objection that has been raised to the Sebens-Carroll derivation of the Born Rule from self-locating uncertainty.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

MMed-Bench-IR: A Heterogeneous Benchmark for Multilingual Medical Information Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in clinical settings increasingly requires multilingual retrieval against predominantly English evidence corpora. Multilingual medical retrieval demands three capabilities: cross-lingual alignment, concept discrimination, and evidence retrieval. However, existing benchmarks evaluate these only in isolation, leaving the interaction between biomedical expertise and multilingual coverage unmeasured. We introduce MMed-Bench-IR, a benchmark designed to disentangle these axes across 6 languages and three structurally heterogeneous tasks: (1) cross-lingual medical QA retrieval with 6,127 queries grounded in the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS), (2) concept discrimination over 4,975 confusion sets at three difficulty tiers, and (3) multilingual evidence retrieval for RAG with 2,040 quality-assured queries. The three tasks share zero concept and query overlap by design, ensuring that aggregate scores reflect genuine capability breadth. Evaluation of ten systems across six paradigm families reveals severe cross-lingual failure: biomedical encoders that score 0.818 nDCG@10 in English drop to 0.056 in Japanese, a gap that English-only benchmarks cannot detect.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on Cancer Risk and Cross-Cancer Associations in Nordic Twins

The relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental influences to cancer risk and cross-cancer associations remain poorly understood. We analyzed data from 222,530 same-sex twins from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer, including 43,060 incident cancers over a median follow-up of 41.6 years. Using a target trial framework, biometric modeling, and competing-risk adjustment, we estimated familial risk, heritability, and shared environmental contributions across 35 cancer sites. Lifetime cancer risk was 36.5%, increasing to 51.4% in monozygotic (MZ) twins and 45.3% in dizygotic (DZ) twins with an affected co-twin. Overall cancer risk was explained by heritable (28%) and shared environmental (40%) influences. Heritability was highest for prostate (42%), non-melanoma skin (24%), and breast (18%) cancers. Cross-cancer analyses revealed extensive overlap in the genetic and shared environmental factors across sites, consistent with widespread pleiotropy and shared environmental susceptibility. Prostate cancer exhibited the strongest genetic overlap with rectum/anus (12%) and kidney (11%) cancers, whereas co-shared environmental influences were most pronounced for breast-lung (11%), prostate-bladder (11%), and prostate-lung (12%) cancers. These findings show pervasive genetic overlap across cancers at different sites and emphasize the importance of incorporating familial shared environmental exposures into cancer risk prediction and prevention strategies.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Representation-Induced Symmetry Trapping in Adaptive Variational Quantum Simulations of Multi-Reference Topologies

arXiv:2606.13387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating the trainability of adaptive quantum chemistry algorithms under multi-reference static correlation requires understanding how representation topologies intertwine with molecular geometry. We systematically expose a deep physical dependence on point-group symmetry by evaluating a spin-conserved SUSD operator pool across highly stretched configurations (2 x Re) of asymmetric LiH, symmetric BeH2, and asymmetric H2O. Under asymmetric distortions, the non-local mapping constraints of the Bravyi-Kitaev transformation create an optimization trapping effect–an encodement-locked manifestation of the broader barren plateau crisis. Crucially, by comparing these to the symmetrical stretching baseline of BeH2, we demonstrate that the preservation of point-group symmetry structurally protects the optimization landscape, proving that ansatz symmetry restrictions are necessary but insufficient without accounting for the underlying fermion-to-qubit representation. While current methods rely on numerical pruning to throttle pool sizes, our structural approach establishes that the mapping representation remains a critical factor in maintaining landscape trainability. Furthermore, exploiting structural overlap within our pool, we introduce a covariance-driven, adaptive shot-allocation filter. Diverging from static energy-variance minimization frameworks, our allocation engine operates as a dynamic runtime diagnostic tool. By continuously monitoring the gradient precision threshold epsilon, it aggressively prunes dead symmetry channels and triggers an automated circuit-termination sequence upon detecting representation-induced flat-lined states (dE/dtheta approx 0). This integration of algebraic measurement reuse with topology-aware statistical filtering provides a promising, resource-efficient strategy for executing deep variational algorithms on early fault-tolerant architectures.

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

Model Stealing Through the Lens of Model Multiplicity

arXiv:2606.15493v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model stealing attacks, where adversaries create high-fidelity surrogate models, are a significant threat to the intellectual property of machine learning services. Conventional wisdom suggests these surrogates could provide adversaries with economic leverage comparable to the original service providers. This paper challenges this assumption by evaluating model stealing attacks beyond mere fidelity to the target model. Because query-based extraction provides only partial supervision of the target's input-output behavior, the surrogate is not uniquely identified: many near-optimal surrogates can achieve comparable fidelity while differing in deployment-relevant properties. Instead of performing a classic learning-based model stealing attack, we compute the Rashomon Set (i.e., the set of almost-equally-accurate models) of surrogate models, and evaluate its diversity using multiplicity metrics (ambiguity, discrepancy, and Rashomon Capacity) and group fairness metrics. Across tabular, medical imaging, and NLP tasks, our experiments on real-world datasets reveal that despite exhibiting similar fidelity to the target model, surrogate models can display significant variances in other critical performance metrics. These findings cast doubt on the presumed equivalence between high-fidelity surrogates and the target model in practical deployment scenarios.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Probing Dec-POMDP Reasoning in Cooperative MARL

arXiv:2602.20804v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is typically framed as a decentralised partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), a setting whose hardness stems from two key challenges: partial observability and decentralised coordination. Genuinely solving such tasks requires Dec-POMDP reasoning, where agents use history to infer hidden states and coordinate based on local information. Yet it remains unclear whether popular benchmarks actually demand this reasoning or permit success via simpler strategies. We introduce a diagnostic suite combining statistically grounded performance comparisons and information-theoretic probes to audit the behavioural complexity of baseline policies (IPPO and MAPPO) across 37 scenarios spanning MPE, SMAX, Overcooked, Hanabi, and MaBrax. Our diagnostics reveal that success on these benchmarks rarely requires genuine Dec-POMDP reasoning. Reactive policies match the performance of memory-based agents in over half the scenarios, and emergent coordination frequently relies on brittle, synchronous action coupling rather than robust temporal influence. These findings suggest that some widely used benchmarks may not adequately test core Dec-POMDP assumptions under current training paradigms, potentially leading to over-optimistic assessments of progress. We release our diagnostic tooling to support more rigorous environment design and evaluation in cooperative MARL.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Many-body chirality of topological stabilizer states

arXiv:2606.20472v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A defining feature of chirality is the distinction between a system and its mirror image. Despite extensive experimental observations of chiral phases and theoretical advances, a quantum-information theoretic characterization of chirality based solely on the entanglement structure of many-body quantum states remains elusive. Here, we introduce the notion of many-body chirality by formulating it as an obstruction to transforming a quantum state into its complex conjugate through finite-depth local operations. We rigorously establish many-body chirality for stabilizer realizations of $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ anyon theories, proving that complex conjugation can be implemented by local quantum channels if and only if the underlying anyon data are mirror invariant. This reveals forms of chirality that evade conventional diagnostics, including examples with vanishing modular commutator, vanishing chiral central charge, and commuting-projector realizations. We further show that this obstruction is intrinsically four-partite, while invisible to tripartite entanglement structure. Finally, we prove that $\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}$ states with $d>2$ possess intrinsic many-body imaginarity: their complex phase structure cannot be removed by finite-depth local unitaries. Remarkably, this includes states that are not many-body chiral.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

What's Missing in Vision-Language Models? Probing Their Struggles with Causal Order Reasoning

Despite the impressive performance of vision-language models (VLMs) on downstream tasks, their ability to understand and reason about causal relationships in visual inputs remains unclear. Robust causal reasoning is fundamental to solving complex high-level reasoning tasks, yet existing benchmarks often include a mixture of reasoning questions, and VLMs can frequently exploit object recognition and activity identification as shortcuts to arrive at the correct answers, making it challenging to truly assess their causal reasoning abilities. To bridge this gap, we introduce VQA-Causal and VCR-Causal, two new benchmarks specifically designed to isolate and rigorously evaluate VLMs' causal reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal that while VLMs excel in object and activity recognition, they perform poorly on causal reasoning tasks, often only marginally surpassing random guessing. Further analysis suggests that this limitation stems from a severe lack of causal expressions in widely used training datasets, where causal relationships are rarely explicitly conveyed. We additionally explore fine-tuning strategies with hard negative cases, showing that targeted fine-tuning can improve model's causal reasoning while maintaining generalization and downstream performance. Our study highlights a key gap in current VLMs and lays the groundwork for future work on causal understanding.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

arXiv:2606.16712v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing methods for deciding whether a bipartite quantum state is separable or entangled typically fall into one of two categories: they are either complete but require access to an explicit density matrix followed by numerical optimization, or they can be evaluated directly by measuring the quantum system but are incomplete, in the sense that they cannot detect all forms of entanglement. In this work, we overcome both limitations in a unified framework. First, we bypass numerical optimization by deriving separability criteria in the form of universal bounds on tensor powers of separable states. We prove that these bounds are complete: every entangled state violates them for sufficiently large tensor powers. Second, we explicitly construct a corresponding complete family of nonlinear entanglement witnesses, which can detect all forms of entanglement without requiring an explicit density matrix. The witnesses we construct are moreover basis-independent, in the sense that they are invariant under conjugation by local unitaries. Altogether, our results expand the toolbox for entanglement detection in arbitrary local dimensions in a manifestly invariant way.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Associations Among Changes in Inflammatory Biomarkers, Pain Intensity, and Health-Related Quality of Life Following a 12-Week Aerobic Exercise Programme in Individuals with Non-Specific Chronic Low Back Pain

Abstract Background: Non-specific chronic low back pain (NSCLBP) is associated with persistent pain, reduced health-related quality of life (HRQoL), and low-grade systemic inflammation. This study examined associations among changes in inflammatory biomarkers, pain intensity, and HRQoL following a 12-week aerobic exercise programme. Methods: This secondary analysis used data from a randomized controlled trial involving 41 participants with NSCLBP (intervention, n = 21; control, n = 20). Participants received either supervised aerobic exercise plus health education or health education alone for 12 weeks. Change scores for tumour necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-), interleukin-6 (IL-6), high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hs-CRP), pain intensity, and HRQoL domains were analysed using correlation and multiple regression analyses. Results: Improvements in IL-6 (r = 0.434, p = 0.005) and hs-CRP (r = 0.444, p = 0.004) were significantly associated with improvements in pain intensity. No significant associations were observed between biomarker changes and HRQoL domains. Treatment allocation was the strongest independent predictor of improvement in physical HRQoL ({beta} = 0.492, p = 0.017) and pain intensity ({beta} = -0.512, p = 0.006). Conclusions: Improvements in IL-6 and hs-CRP were associated with reductions in pain intensity but not with improvements in HRQoL. Treatment allocation was the strongest predictor of clinical improvement, suggesting that mechanisms beyond systemic inflammation may contribute to the benefits of aerobic exercise in NSCLBP. Keywords: non-specific chronic low back pain; aerobic exercise; inflammation; interleukin-6; high-sensitivity C-reactive protein; pain intensity; health-related quality of life.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Breaking Data Symmetry is Needed For Generalization in Feature Learning Kernels

arXiv:2604.00316v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Grokking occurs when a model achieves high training accuracy but generalization to unseen test points happens long after that. This phenomenon was initially observed on a class of algebraic problems, such as learning modular arithmetic (Power et al., 2022). We study grokking on algebraic tasks in a class of feature learning kernels via the Recursive Feature Machine (RFM) algorithm (Radhakrishnan et al., 2024), which iteratively updates feature matrices through the Average Gradient Outer Product (AGOP) of an estimator in order to learn task-relevant features. Our main experimental finding is that generalization occurs only when a certain symmetry in the training set is broken. Furthermore, we empirically show that RFM generalizes by recovering the underlying invariance group action inherent in the data. We find that the learned feature matrices encode specific elements of the invariance group, explaining the dependence of generalization on symmetry.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

When Does Streaming Tool Use Help? Characterizing Tool-Intent Stabilization in Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Streaming Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Streaming RAG) reduces user-perceived latency by issuing tool queries in parallel with ongoing user input, before the utterance is complete. Reported gains are aggregate, yet the mechanism's benefit is fundamentally query-intrinsic: speculation can only help when the correct tool query becomes determinable before the user stops speaking or typing. We isolate and measure this property – tool-intent stabilization, the point in the input stream at which a speculative query's retrieval converges to the answer-bearing result. On the CRAG benchmark (1371 validation questions) we (i) measure the distribution of stabilization, (ii) derive a model-agnostic bound H on the portion of tool latency that can be hidden behind the user's remaining input, as a function of tool latency L and input cadence {\delta}, (iii) validate against a working streaming pipeline that realized savings meet or exceed this bound, and (iv) identify which query properties predict early versus late stabilization. The study requires no model training and runs on commodity CPU hardware. We find that at a realistic operating point (L=600ms, {\delta}=3w/s, {\theta}=0.8), 73.9% of queries across the full benchmark admit substantial latency hiding – a blended figure that mixes sufficiency stabilization on the 21.3% of questions where gold evidence is verbatim-present and BM25-retrievable (95.2% streamable on this favorable slice) with a grounding-free top-1-settling fallback on the remainder. On the favorable slice, {\phi}_suf is bracketed to [0.26, 0.281] by exact and relaxed grounding – both early. Question type produces a significant but coarse early/late split (Kruskal-Wallis p=0.017, epsilon^2=0.04), directly informing when a learned speculative trigger is worth its cost.