Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Is ChatGPT Fair for Recommendation? Evaluating Fairness in Large Language Model Recommendation

The remarkable achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to the emergence of a novel recommendation paradigm – Recommendation via LLM (RecLLM). Nevertheless, it is important to note that LLMs may contain social prejudices, and therefore, the fairness of recommendations made by RecLLM requires further investigation. To avoid the potential risks of RecLLM, it is imperative to evaluate the fairness of RecLLM with respect to various sensitive attributes on the user side. Due to the differences between the RecLLM paradigm and the traditional recommendation paradigm, it is problematic to directly use the fairness benchmark of traditional recommendation. To address the dilemma, we propose a novel benchmark called Fairness of Recommendation via LLM (FaiRLLM). This benchmark comprises carefully crafted metrics and a dataset that accounts for eight sensitive attributes1 in two recommendation scenarios: music and movies. By utilizing our FaiRLLM benchmark, we conducted an evaluation of ChatGPT and discovered that it still exhibits unfairness to some sensitive attributes when generating recommendations. Our code and dataset can be found at https://github.com/jizhi-zhang/FaiRLLM.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Subsystem Quantum Error Correction for Noisy Quantum Metrology

arXiv:2606.19628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error correction has been successfully applied to enhance the precision of parameter estimation in the presence of noise. Nonetheless, existing methods require a number of noiseless, controllable ancillae and lack efficient encoding and decoding procedures. In this Letter, we demonstrate that subsystem error correction provides a new direction that can substantially simplify the metrological protocol. We derive general conditions under which subsystem stabilizer codes achieve the Heisenberg limit and show that, for broad classes of noise, this can be realized by syndrome-free protocols using at most a single ancilla qubit. Furthermore, we extend this framework to dynamical error correction and show that Floquet codes can protect time-dependent metrological signals in reaching the Heisenberg limit.

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

What Do Flow-Based Inverse Solvers Approximate? A Posterior-Transport View

A growing family of training-free solvers – FlowDPS, FLOWER, PnP-Flow and their diffusion ancestors (DPS, DAPS) – repurpose a pretrained flow-matching prior to solve imaging inverse problems by adding a measurement-guidance term to the deterministic probability-flow ODE. Despite strong empirical results, what these per-step corrections actually approximate – and how far the resulting samples are from the true posterior $p(x\mid y)$ – has not been characterized. We give a posterior-transport account of flow-based inverse problem solving. Our starting point is a simple but consequential fact: for a deterministic flow prior, Bayesian conditioning is realized entirely by a reweighting of the source distribution, not by a drift correction; pushing the reweighted source through the unmodified velocity field yields exact posterior samples. From this we show that trajectory-guidance solvers can be read as the minimum-kinetic-energy correction field needed to morph the unconditional source into the posterior, and that FlowDPS / FLOWER / PnP-Flow correspond to distinct zeroth-order / Gaussian / proximal approximations of this single object; we bound the resulting posterior bias in Wasserstein distance. A controlled $2$D study with a closed-form posterior confirms the theory decisively: source reweighting matches the true posterior to the Monte-Carlo floor on every metric, whereas trajectory guidance incurs $200$–$800\times$ larger error and collapses posterior modes, regardless of guidance strength. Guided by the analysis we propose a cheap, principled velocity-correction solver that is competitive across two in-domain priors (AFHQ, CelebA) and two out-of-distribution settings while, unlike point-estimate source-space optimizers, producing diverse posterior samples with uncertainty that correlates with reconstruction error.

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

No Hidden Prompts Needed! You Can Game AI Peer Review with Presentation-Only Revisions

As AI-generated reviews move from experimental tools into peer-review infrastructure, most robustness concerns have focused on explicit attacks such as hidden instructions and prompt injection. We study a harder and more policy-relevant failure mode: no hidden text, no prompt injection, and no changes to methods, experiments, figures, equations, proofs, or numerical results. The attacker modifies only presentation-level content, such as the abstract, contribution framing, related work, discussion, and narrative structure. We introduce adversarial repackaging: a closed-loop attack that uses AI-reviewer feedback to search for presentation-level revisions while keeping the scientific evidence fixed. Across three mainstream AI reviewers, adversarial repackaging achieves a 75.1% attack success rate and a mean score gain of +1.21/10. The effect is not explained by ordinary prose polishing. We also reveal that strategies that change how the reviewer interprets the paper, such as related-work repositioning and analytical discussion expansion, substantially outperform surface edits such as local polishing, table formatting, and algorithm boxes. Our analysis reveals two deeper structural failure modes. First, AI reviewers are easier to impress than to convince: highlighting strengths reliably increases perceived merit, while attempts to dissolve weaknesses frequently backfire. Second, AI reviewers can confuse the appearance of addressing a limitation with actually resolving it, allowing unchanged evidence to be reinterpreted as stronger scientific contribution. These results show that the deployment risk is not only malicious hidden instructions, but the emergence of paper presentation itself as an optimization surface. We release a contamination-free rolling benchmark and attack framework for testing whether AI reviewers remain anchored to scientific content under presentation-only edits.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

FlexPooling with Simple Auxiliary Classifiers in Deep Networks

In computer vision, the basic pipeline of most convolutional neural networks consists of multiple feature extraction layers, where the input signal is downsampled to a lower resolution in each subsequent layer. This downsampling process is commonly referred to as pooling, which is an essential operation in CNNs. Pooling improves robustness against transformations, reduces the number of trainable parameters, increases the receptive field, and lowers computation time. Since pooling is a lossy process but remains important for extracting high-level information from low-level representations, it is important to preserve the most prominent information from previous activations to improve network discriminability. Standard pooling is usually performed using dense pooling methods, such as max pooling or average pooling, or through strided convolutional kernels. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective adaptive pooling method, called FlexPooling, which generalizes average pooling by learning a weighted average over activations jointly with the rest of the network. We further show that attaching Simple Auxiliary Classifiers (SAC) to the CNN improves performance and demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed method compared with standard pooling methods. Experiments on multiple popular image classification datasets show that FlexPooling consistently outperforms baseline networks, achieving approximately 1 to 3 percent improvement in accuracy.

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

CORE-Bench: Fostering the Credibility of Published Research Through a Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark

AI agents have the potential to aid users on a variety of consequential tasks, including conducting scientific research. To spur the development of useful agents, we need benchmarks that are challenging, but more crucially, directly correspond to real-world tasks of interest. This paper introduces such a benchmark, designed to measure the accuracy of AI agents in tackling a crucial yet surprisingly challenging aspect of scientific research: computational reproducibility. This task, fundamental to the scientific process, involves reproducing the results of a study using the provided code and data. We introduce CORE-Bench (Computational Reproducibility Agent Benchmark), a benchmark consisting of 270 tasks based on 90 scientific papers across three disciplines (computer science, social science, and medicine). Tasks in CORE-Bench consist of three difficulty levels and include both language-only and vision-language tasks. We provide an evaluation system to measure the accuracy of agents in a fast and parallelizable way, saving days of evaluation time for each run compared to a sequential implementation. We evaluated two baseline agents: the general-purpose AutoGPT and a task-specific agent called CORE-Agent. We tested both variants using two underlying language models: GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. The best agent achieved an accuracy of 21% on the hardest task, showing the vast scope for improvement in automating routine scientific tasks. Having agents that can reproduce existing work is a necessary step towards building agents that can conduct novel research and could verify and improve the performance of other research agents. We hope that CORE-Bench can improve the state of reproducibility and spur the development of future research agents.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ABACUS: Adapting Unified Foundation Model for Bridging Image Count Understanding and Generation

ABACUS is a unified vision-language model that handles object counting, crowd counting, referring-expression counting, and count-faithful image generation without any benchmark-specific training required. Our model is built on existing 3B-parameter unified foundation model and is adapted for object localization tasks using three key innovations: density-aware adaptive zooming with objectness maps for spatial grounding; a boundary-aware count policy via GRPO to eliminate crop-boundary errors; and a cycle-consistent GRPO strategy where the understanding branch self-critiques generated outputs, closing the understanding-generation gap without any external annotations. ABACUS achieves state-of-the-art results across seven benchmarks, outperforming both task-specific specialists and larger generalist models.

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

Structure-Oriented Randomized Neural Networks for Poisson-Nernst-Planck and Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes Systems

arXiv:2606.19912v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a structure-oriented randomized neural network framework, termed SO-RaNN, for the Poisson-Nernst-Planck (PNP) system and the Poisson-Nernst-Planck-Navier-Stokes (PNP-NS) system. The decoupled linearized subproblems are solved iteratively by randomized neural networks in a space-time framework. For the concentration variables, a pointwise cut-off is used to enforce positivity at the value level, and discrete mass-scaling factors are computed at selected correction instants and interpolated in time, so as to ensure exact mass matching at those instants and to promote approximate mass preservation between them. To introduce an auxiliary discrete dissipation mechanism, we further employ an SAV-type post-processing correction, which yields monotonicity of the SAV auxiliary variable under the ideal SAV update. For the PNP-NS system, a structure-preserving randomized neural network (SP-RaNN) is used for the velocity field, so that the velocity approximation satisfies the incompressibility constraint pointwise by construction. On the theoretical side, we derive residual-based estimates for the raw, uncorrected RaNN solvers of the linearized subproblems, formulate a conditional local-in-time convergence result for the raw outer Picard iteration of the PNP system, and analyze the value-level positivity correction together with the mass-correction and SAV post-processing steps. For the PNP-NS system, we establish an approximation result for the SP-RaNN space and provide a conditional error statement for the corresponding linearized Oseen-type problem. Numerical experiments demonstrate approximation accuracy in the source-driven manufactured tests and illustrate the intended value-level positivity correction, selected-time mass matching, computed free-energy curves based on the final gauge-fixed potential, and divergence-free approximation in benchmark tests.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

HadBalance: A Plug-and-Play Unified Global Geometric Prior Framework for Generalizable Biomedical Segmentation

Precise biomedical image segmentation is crucial for clinical diagnosis. Geometric cues (e.g., boundary, shape, and topology) can improve structural consistency, yet most are task-specific and lack a unified geometric foundation that generalizes across organs and modalities. We are motivated by the observation that several medical segmentation targets can be approximated as globally near-convex shapes. A convex region is one in which any two interior points can be connected by a line segment entirely contained within the region. In practice, medical targets may exhibit small local concavities or boundary irregularities; we refer to such globally convex-like shapes as near-convex. Motivated by this, we derive Hadwiger Shape Priors from Hadwiger's theorem as an interpretable global regularizer using three 2D measures: area A, perimeter P, and Euler characteristic chi, enabling transfer across organs and modalities. However, because medical datasets are shape-heterogeneous, enforcing near-convex priors uniformly can over-regularize non-convex anatomy with significant concavities, washing out concavities and fine details and degrading segmentation accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose Conflict-Aware Objective Balancing (CAOB), which integrates shape priors with segmentation in a gradient-aware manner. For each prior, CAOB removes only the gradient component that conflicts with segmentation while preserving the remaining aligned component, and adaptively regulates objective influences to prevent prior dominance. This enables stable use of shape priors on shape-heterogeneous data without erasing genuine concavities or fine structural details. We call this plug-and-play framework HadBalance.

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

SeamEdit: A Black-Box VLM-Agnostic Pipeline for Large-Image Semantic Editing

Semantic region editing for large images must satisfy two requirements at the same time: high generative quality and natural integration with surrounding content. Some related methods rely on white-box models and leave the strong generation capability of closed-source models underexplored. Directly applying closed-source models to tiled editing, however, introduces several failure modes: semantic deformation, canvas-level alignment drift, and visible seam artifacts. This paper presents SeamEdit, a training-free and model-agnostic pipeline that treats any VLM with inpainting capability as a black-box oracle. SeamEdit mitigates these issues through a five-stage post-hoc pipeline: overlay-based tile decomposition, black-box VLM inpainting, geometric and color-consistency correction, seam-risk-based multi-candidate ranking, and dynamic-programming curved seam fusion. The pipeline reduces seam visibility and supports semantic modification of arbitrary tile regions.

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

The impact of generative artificial intelligence on academic development of Chinese students in humanities and social sciences

arXiv:2606.24104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative artificial intelligence(GenAI) is reshaping learning in higher education, with particularly pronounced implications for the humanities and social sciences(HSS), where learning outcomes are commonly expressed through written and interpretive forms that align closely with GenAI's capabilities. Yet, systematic evidence on the educational impacts of GenAI on HSS students remains limited. Addressing this gap, this study draws on a large-scale survey of HSS students in China to examine its role in academic development. Guided by relevant learning theories, this study focuses on four dimensions: patterns of use, effects on learning processes and academic performance, challenges associated with GenAI use, and preferred approaches to curricular integration. We found that more than half perceived enhanced learning motivation, independent thinking and creativity, although a substantial minority reported little change or even decline. Comparatively, a notably larger majority reported academic performance gains, although these gains may partly reflect limitations in conventional assessment practices. The study identifies variations in perceived learning and performance improvements among students with differing durations of GenAI experience, along with observable disciplinary differences and modest gender differences. While an overwhelming majority valued the importance of ethical considerations, only slightly more than half were satisfied with privacy protection. Limited accuracy and overreliance emerged as the most pressing concerns reported by students. Students favored partial or optional curricular integration supported by practice-oriented training, and widely recognized GenAI's significance for their future professional development. Grounded in student perspectives, this study offers evidence-based recommendations for the responsible and pedagogically meaningful integration of GenAI

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

EffGen: Enabling Small Language Models as Capable Autonomous Agents

Most existing language model agentic systems today are built and optimized for large language models (e.g., GPT, Claude, Gemini) via API calls; while powerful, this approach faces several limitations including high token costs and privacy concerns for sensitive applications. We introduce EffGen, an open-source agentic framework optimized for small language models (SLMs) that enables effective, efficient, and secure local deployment. EffGen makes four major contributions: (1) Enhanced tool-calling with prompt optimization that compresses input prompts by up to 70-80% (and 57% on average across our benchmarks) while preserving task semantics, (2) Intelligent task decomposition that breaks complex queries into parallel or sequential subtasks based on dependencies, (3) Complexity-based routing using five factors to make smart pre-execution decisions, and (4) Unified memory system combining short-term, long-term, and vector-based storage. Additionally, EffGen unifies multiple agent protocols (MCP, A2A, ACP) for cross-protocol communication. Results on 13 benchmarks show EffGen outperforms LangChain, AutoGen, and Smolagents with higher success rates, faster execution, and lower memory. Our results reveal that prompt optimization and complexity routing have complementary scaling behavior: optimization benefits SLMs more (11.2% gain at 1.5B vs 2.4% at 32B), while routing benefits large models more (3.6% at 1.5B vs 7.9% at 32B), providing consistent gains across all scales when combined. EffGen is released under the Apache 2.0 License, ensuring broad accessibility for research and commercial use, with the code available at https://github.com/ctrl-gaurav/effGen, the Python package at https://pypi.org/project/effgen/ (pip install effgen), and the project website and documentation at https://effgen.org/ and https://docs.effgen.org/.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Think Again or Think Longer? Selective Verification for Budget-Aware Reasoning

Test-time reasoning is increasingly used as a serving-time control knob, but extra reasoning is not uniformly valuable: it can repair failed attempts, waste compute on already-correct answers, or introduce harmful answer changes. We study this as a deployment allocation problem rather than a new-verifier problem. We introduce \sevra, Selective Verification for Reasoning Allocation, a serving-layer controller that decides whether to preserve a frozen solver's initial answer or invoke active verification. Using a frozen Qwen3-4B solver, we log intervention outcomes and train recoverability-aware gates from serving-visible attempt state. On \mathfive, selective verification reaches 76.3\% accuracy, compared with 75.5\% for always verifying, while reducing post-generation tokens by 26.8\% and harmful flips from 2.2\% to 1.0\%. However, an 8,192-token initial solve reaches 76.0\% accuracy with 28\% fewer total model tokens, showing that selective recovery is useful but not the best tested cost frontier. In frozen transfer to \gsm, the selective policy verifies only 3.0\% of examples, improves accuracy from 93.4\% to 94.5\%, and reduces verification tokens by 91.2\% relative to always verifying; again, a longer initial solve matches its accuracy with fewer realized tokens. On CommonsenseQA, always-on verification hurts, while Self-Consistency@5 improves accuracy at about five times the realized token cost. The resulting deployment rule is: tune the initial budget first, then use selective recovery when explicit checks, bounded retries, auditability, or regression-risk control matter.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

MagPlus: Bridging Micro-to-Regular Facial Expressions through Learnable Magnification

Facial micro-expressions are subtle and short-lived facial movements that provide important cues about genuine human emotions. However, modeling and generating them remains difficult because annotated micro-expression data is limited and the underlying facial motions are extremely weak. Existing micro-expression generation methods therefore often suffer from limited quality, weak robustness, and poor generalization. We propose MagPlus, a transferable micro-expression processing pipeline that connects micro-expression analysis with standard facial animation models. Instead of training a dedicated generator from scratch, MagPlus learns to magnify subtle facial motions into the range of regular facial expressions, transforming micro-expressions into signals that are compatible with existing facial expression processing models. The magnified sequence is then used by a standard facial expression model for tasks such as transfer and synthesis. A complementary DeMagPlus module then restores the generated motion back to realistic micro-expression intensity levels while preserving the synthesized dynamics. We evaluate the framework using four facial animation models: FOMM, FSRT, MetaPortrait, and EmoPortraits. None of these models are trained on micro-expression data. Experiments show that MagPlus-DeMagPlus enables pretrained macro-expression models to generate more realistic micro-expression motion without retraining the backbones.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Systematic AI-Driven Drug Repurposing via Clinical Trial Data Mining: A Framework and Six Cross-Therapeutic Case Studies.

作者:

Drug repurposing, the application of approved or shelved compounds to new therapeutic indications, offers a cost- and time-efficient alternative to de novo drug discovery. However, the systematic identification of repurposing candidates from the rapidly expanding body of clinical trial data remains a significant challenge. Here we present a publicly accessible AI-powered tool that mines the ClinicalTrials.gov registry to identify approved drugs with under-explored therapeutic potential in high-value disease areas. The tool integrates natural language processing, mechanism-of-action pathway analysis, and trial density scoring to surface candidates where biological plausibility is high and clinical trial coverage is sparse. We demonstrate the tool's utility across six cross-therapeutic case studies spanning oncology, cardiology, neurology, rare diseases, immunology, and infectious disease. Key findings include: the identification of Zonisamide as an under-explored combination candidate for obesity alongside GLP-1 receptor agonists; mechanistic validation of SGLT2 inhibitors in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF); and a novel cross-domain mapping of anti-TNF biologics to early-stage neurodegeneration via shared neuroinflammatory pathways. The tool is freely accessible and designed to lower the barrier for academic and industry researchers to systematically pursue repurposing opportunities.

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

Asymptotically Optimal Sequential Testing with Markovian Data

arXiv:2602.17587v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study one-sided and $\alpha$-correct sequential hypothesis testing for data generated by an ergodic, finite-state Markov chain. The null hypothesis is that the unknown transition matrix belongs to a prescribed set $P$ of stochastic matrices, and the alternative corresponds to a disjoint set $Q$. We establish a non-asymptotic instance-dependent lower bound on the expected stopping time of any valid sequential test under the alternative, which is asymptotically tight. Our novel analysis improves the existing lower bounds, which are either asymptotic or provably sub-optimal in this setting. Our lower bound incorporates both the stationary distribution and the transition structure induced by the unknown Markov chain. We further propose an optimal test whose expected stopping time matches this lower bound asymptotically as $\alpha \to 0$. We illustrate the usefulness of our framework through applications to sequential detection of model misspecification in Markov Chain Monte Carlo and to testing structural properties, such as the linearity of transition dynamics, in Markov decision processes. Our findings yield a sharp and general characterization of optimal sequential testing procedures under Markovian dependence.

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

CADET: Physics-Grounded Causal Auditing and Training-Free Deconfounding of End-to-End Driving Planners

作者:

arXiv:2606.14438v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end (E2E) autonomous-driving planners trained by imitation are prone to statistical shortcuts: they associate scene elements that merely co-occur with expert actions (a roadside object, a building facade) with driving decisions, rather than the variables that causally determine them. Such causal confusion silently compromises reliability in long-tail scenarios, and it is difficult to detect, because prevailing open-loop metrics (L2 displacement and collision rate) are dominated by ego status and do not indicate whether a planner depends on spurious cues. Existing remedies based on causal-intervention training require retraining large models and cannot audit a planner that is already deployed. We present CADET, a training-free framework that audits, benchmarks, and repairs spurious reliance in pretrained E2E planners without any parameter update.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Heterogeneity of Treatment Effect of Aspirin and Clinically Significant Bleeding in Older Adults

Aim: The global population of older adults is growing, and older age is linked to higher bleeding risk. Although guidelines discourage aspirin for primary prevention in healthy older adults due to bleeding harms outweighing benefits, many continue taking it without a clear indication. It remains unclear whether all older adults face uniform aspirin-related bleeding risk or if certain subgroups are more vulnerable. Methods: We analyzed data from 19,114 ASPREE trial participants to develop machine learning models using 116 baseline variables. Random forest (RF) and random survival forest (RSF) models predicted 5-year bleeding risk, and participants were stratified into low, intermediate, and high-risk groups based on the 20th and 80th percentiles of predicted risk. We assessed heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE) by testing treatment-by-risk group interactions on the relative scale using Fine-Gray models, and on the absolute scale using observed 5-year cumulative incidence rates. Results: Over a median follow-up of 4.7 years, 626 major bleeding events occurred. The RF model had moderate discrimination (AUC = 0.65, 95% CI: 0.63-0.67) and good calibration (Brier = 0.032, 95% CI: 0.029-0.034). Statistically significant HTE was observed on the relative scale, with the greatest relative increase in bleeding risk seen in the low-risk group (subdistribution hazard ratio = 2.26, 95% CI: 1.27-4.01). On the absolute scale, low-risk participants experienced higher bleeding with aspirin (absolute risk difference (ARD) = 1.17%, 95% CI: 0.37-1.95), but heterogeneity in ARDs was not statistically significant (Cochran's Q p > 0.45). Similar findings were observed when using the RSF model. Conclusion: Participants at lowest baseline bleeding risk experienced the greatest relative increase in bleeding risk with aspirin therapy. We found statistically significant heterogeneity in treatment effects on the relative but not absolute scale. These findings support an individualized, risk-based approach to aspirin therapy decision-making in older adults.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

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

A Riemannian Approach to Low-Rank Optimal Transport

arXiv:2606.12120v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Low-rank optimal transport (OT) mitigates the quadratic scaling of classical solvers, yet existing approaches rely heavily on first-order mirror-descent updates that require careful hyperparameter tuning and ignore the optimization landscape's curvature. To address these limitations, we propose a unified Riemannian geometric framework for low-rank OT, modeling balanced and unbalanced rank-$r$ positive factored couplings as novel smooth embedded submanifolds of the positive orthant. By equipping these manifolds with the Fisher-Rao product metric, we derive tractable formulations for Riemannian projectors, retractions, and Hessian-vector products. Our cost-agnostic framework seamlessly extends to linear OT, Gromov-Wasserstein (GW), fused GW, and their unbalanced counterparts. For balanced OT, our geometric ingredients are computed via efficient conjugate-gradient and iterative Bregman updates. For the unbalanced OT, our operations elegantly reduce to closed-form scalings, completely eliminating inner iterative loops. In both regimes, per-iteration complexity scales linearly with dataset size, and we provide a rank-sufficiency certificate for global optimality verification. Extensive experiments across a range of problem sizes demonstrate that our regularization-free first- and second-order solvers achieve faster convergence and superior performance over existing state-of-the-art low-rank OT solvers.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The t-Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond Model

arXiv:2606.19507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work we consider an Aztec diamond model split into two unequal regions which are asymptotically fixed in size. Each region is weighted with a distinct two-periodic weighting. We refer to this model as the t-split two-periodic Aztec diamond, to signify its difference from the previous work title Split Two-Periodic Aztec Diamond, where the model was split into two equal regions. We derive an integral expression for the correlation kernel of the model and give a partial description of the scaling limit behavior, along with a conjecture for the remainder. We refer to the larger and smaller sides of the model as the dominant and non-dominant sides, and to the location of the weight change as the interface. The dominant side exhibits a limit shape that depends only on its own weighting and is identical to that of the two-periodic Aztec diamond, while the non-dominant side appears to have a novel limit shape that depends on both weightings and the location of the interface. Lastly, we consider the complete limit shape in the case where the dominant side two-periodic parameter goes to 0.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Resource theory of interactive quantum instruments

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

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Space-time duality approach to (inhomogeneous) integrable quenches

arXiv:2606.20445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterising the universal aspects of non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics is one of the key goals of this century's physics research. Progress, however, is hindered by the lack of general theoretical frameworks for studying interacting quantum matter far from equilibrium. A recent breakthrough has been the realization that several key non-equilibrium quantities, such as the rate of growth of entanglement or the fluctuations of conserved charges within finite subsystems, can be related to equilibrium properties through a space-time duality that effectively exchanges the roles of space and time. This observation effectively enables the study of non-equilibrium phenomena using tools and concepts borrowed from equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. A first proof of principle of this framework, dubbed space-time duality approach (SDA), was provided by interacting integrable systems, where thermodynamic properties can often be characterized exactly, while dynamical quantities typically remain beyond analytical reach. Subsequent developments, however, revealed that the SDA suffered from an intrinsic ambiguity, restricting its applicability to homogeneous quenches and to charge fluctuations arising from symmetric initial states. Here we resolve this ambiguity from first principles and derive closed-form predictions for entanglement growth and charge fluctuations after general quantum quenches. We benchmark our results against the exact analytical solution of the Rule 54 quantum cellular automaton and extensive TEBD simulations of the XXZ chain. Moreover we show that, when specialised to the entanglement entropy, our framework naturally reproduces the predictions of the quasiparticle picture.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Unveiling Hierarchical Invariants in Multiphoton Linear Optics

arXiv:2506.12857v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Linear optical networks driven by quantum states of light are important building blocks of photonic quantum technologies. They access large bosonic Hilbert spaces through multiphoton interference. At the same time, their dynamics are generated by single-particle mode transformations, thereby defining a highly structured subset of multiphoton unitaries and setting boundary on linear optics capability. To elucidate this boundary, we reveal an underlying fine-grained symmetry structure that partitions the multiphoton operator space into invariant subspaces and generates a hierarchy of invariants. We experimentally confirm the conservation of high-order invariants and demonstrate their operational utility in characterizing state reachability and the metrological capability of multiphoton probes. Our framework provides a symmetry-based perspective for understanding and harnessing structured multiphoton dynamics across photonic quantum technologies.