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.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-12

The Hong Kong Genome Project is a flagship initiative for precision medicine in Chinese populations

作者: 未知作者

The Hong Kong Genome Project established a genome sequencing database that provides improved diagnoses for patients and more efficient, population-tailored carrier status screening. Actionable pharmacogenomic variants were identified in almost all participants, informing drug prescriptions. This work establishes a genomic resource and a transferable model for equitable precision medicine in underrepresented populations worldwide.

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

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities for product measures

作者:

arXiv:2606.13575v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities for polynomials with respect to product probability measures. In the Gaussian case, for $p\ge4$, we prove that \[ \|\nabla f\|_{L^p(\gamma^n)} \le C(p)d^{\frac12+\theta_p} \|f\|_{L^p(\gamma^n)} \] for every polynomial $f$ of degree at most $d$, where $\theta_p\le \frac{2}{3p}$ and $\theta_p=0$ whenever $p$ is an even integer. Thus, for even integer exponents, we establish the sharp dependence on the degree conjectured by Eskenazis–Ivanisvili. For general $p\ge4$, the estimate improves upon their dimension-free inequality. We also obtain dimension-free Markov–Bernstein inequalities with sharp dependence on the degree for even integer exponents beyond the Gaussian setting. We first prove such estimates for the uniform distribution on the unit cube and then extend them to products of absolutely continuous measures with unimodal densities. Finally, we treat products of one-dimensional Freud measures with densities proportional to $e^{-|t|^{2m}}$.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Where to Place the Query? Unveiling and Mitigating Positional Bias in In-Context Learning for Diffusion LLMs via Decoding Dynamics

While In-Context Learning (ICL) is extensively studied in Autoregressive (AR) LLMs, its mechanism within Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) remains largely unexplored. Unlike AR models restricted by unidirectional causal masking, dLLMs intrinsically utilize bidirectional attention, offering extensive spatial flexibility for query placement. Unfortunately, current practices conventionally inherit AR-style trailing-query templates, often overlooking the structural paradigm shift. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis unveiling that query position is actually a first-order variable in dLLMs. Through empirical decoupling, we demonstrate that positional variance impacts generation quality on par with example semantic quality. Internally, this positional sensitivity stems from a spatial ``Recency Effect'' in attention flow and task-dependent shifts in decoding trajectories. To mitigate this instability without ground-truth labels, we reveal that traditional single-step confidence ($C_{decoded}$) fails in dLLMs. Instead, we propose Average Confidence ($\overline{C}$), a novel metric tracking the iterative decoding process. By establishing the foundational spatial ICL baselines, we introduce Auto-ICL, a training-free adaptive routing strategy that dynamically optimizes query placement, robustly approaching oracle performance across heterogeneous reasoning and perception tasks.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum mechanics in configuration space in context

arXiv:2606.17622v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To enhance the way in which wave-particle duality is implemented in the modelling of quantum mechanical systems, Bukhari et al. [New J. Phys. 27, 084501 (2025)] recently introduced an alternative approach to quantum mechanics, namely quantum mechanics in configuration space. This formalism is based on a physically motivated quantisation of Newtonian mechanics and promotes the classical position-velocity states (x,v) to pairwise distinguishable quantum states. The resulting |x,v> states form the basis of the Hilbert space of individual quantum mechanical particles and evolve along classical trajectories. In this paper, we consider the modelling of a mechanical particle in free space and put quantum mechanics in configuration space into context. It is shown that this formalism increases the continuity between quantum and classical mechanics by avoiding a conceptual inconsistency associated with the definition of momentum in canonical quantisation. In addition, we emphasise that standard quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics in configuration space are based on two distinct formulations of classical mechanics.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Investigation of Intra-Fraction Stability and Inter-Fraction Reproducibility of Deep Inspiration Breath-Hold Across Two Hypofractionated Radiotherapy Regimens in the HYPORT Adjuvant Study.

Background: Deep Inspiration Breath Hold (DIBH) is a widely used respiratory motion management technique for minimizing cardiac dose in left-sided breast radiotherapy. In the Breast HYPORT Adjuvant study, DIBH was employed for cardiac sparing in patients without nodal irradiation using a standardized institutional protocol with the Varian Real-time Position Management (RPM) system. Both moderate-hypofractionation (control arm - 40Gy in 15 fractions) and one-week hypofractionation (experimental arm - 26 Gy in 5 fractions) regimens were delivered using this protocol. This study aimed to evaluate the robustness of DIBH by analyzing intra-fraction stability and inter-fraction reproducibility of breath-hold amplitude across the two treatment regimens. Methods: Respiratory waveforms acquired during each treatment session were analyzed to determine the median breath-hold amplitude and its standard deviation during beam delivery. Intra-fraction stability was assessed from vari- ations within individual treatment sessions, while inter-fraction reproducibility was evaluated relative to the simula- tion waveform amplitude across all treatment sessions. These parameters were compared between the two HYPORT regimens to examine breath-hold consistency during treatment delivery. Moreover, an additional comparison was made between the one-week hypofractionation regimen and the first five fractions of the moderate-hypofractionation regimen to evaluate the effect of treatment duration . Lung volumes from free-breathing and DIBH CT scans were analyzed to assess the effectiveness of patient breath-hold training. Results: Both arms demonstrated an average 1.7-fold increase of air volume in lung during the breath-hold position, confirming the effective implementation of DIBH during treatment planning and delivery. Structured training resulted in increased breath-hold amplitudes, with gains of 22.87% and 24.16% with respect to the first trial session in the experimental and control arms, respectively. Both regimens receive equivalent doses for approximately the same air volume in lung . Despite the different prescription doses in the two arms (26 Gy vs. 40 Gy), the experimental arm achieved an equivalent mean heart dose of 2.91% (75.6 cGy) compared with 2.95% (118.51 cGy) in the control arm, suggesting a similar cardiac preservation protocol adopted during treatment planning. Intra-fraction stability was similar between the control arm and the experimental arm, with median amplitude variations of 1.006 mm (95% CI: [0.998-1.015]) and 1.079 mm (95% CI: [1.067-1.097]), respectively. In contrast, inter-fraction reproducibility improved in the experimental arm, with lower deviation from simulation amplitude (0.44 {+/-} 0.24 mm vs. 0.66 {+/-} 0.25 mm) for the entire treatment schedule. The stability and reproducibility of experimental arm were further compared with the first five fractions of the control arm. The results were similar to those of the experimental arm. Conclusion: In this study, we compared two treatment regimens in terms of intra-fraction stability and inter-fraction reproducibility during DIBH radiotherapy. Both regimens demonstrated comparable intra-fraction stability, indicating effective motion management irrespective of treatment duration. However, the experimental arm showed better inter- fraction reproducibility, suggesting more consistent breath-hold performance throughout the treatment course. Based on stability and reproducibility, a reasonable narrowing of the DIBH gating window may be implemented with minor changes to the institutional protocol. The observed trend highlights the potential for improved consistency with the experimental approach and supports further investigation to better understand the underlying factors and strengthen these findings in future studies.

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

Pigeonholing: Bad prompts hurt models to collapse and make mistakes

While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing." **Unintentionally bad** contexts can happen without malicious jailbreaking intents: For example, a user asks the model to justify an incorrect math theorem or fails to correct the model's buggy code. Specifically, we investigate ``pigeonholing" in two scenarios: (1) when the user suggests a solution, and (2) when the conversation context includes the assistant's previous (incorrect) responses. Our experiments across 10 verifiable and open-ended tasks with 10 different models show that pigeonholing manifests in several ways: (1) repeating the incorrect answers from context (leading to 38-40% performance drop), (2) converging on a narrow set of answers in coding and text generation without exploring alternatives, and (3) flipping stance on controversial topics to align with the user or the assistant's previous claims. We find that pigeonholing worsens almost monotonically with the number of conversation turns (performance drops by additional 14+% as repeated mistakes increase from 1 to 5), and pigeonholing-induced mode collapse can happen even when the provided example is correct. As a step toward mitigation, we propose RLVR with synthetic errors which improves models by 43-60% under bad contexts compared to vanilla RLVR baselines.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

REGRID-QAOA: A Resource-Efficient Graph-Reduced Hybrid QAOA Framework for Physics-Constrained Power System Islanding

arXiv:2606.15083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computing has rapidly emerged as a powerful paradigm for tackling computationally demanding problems. In particular, quantum optimization shows strong promise for hard combinatorial problems in power systems, where increasing distributed energy penetration heightens the need for intentional islanding to maintain grid reliability and resilience. However, power system islanding is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that becomes computationally prohibitive for classical solvers as network size grows, motivating the use of quantum computing as a promising alternative pipeline. This study develops a resource-efficient hybrid QAOA islanding framework that brings physics-constrained power-system partitioning into the quantum optimization workflow. The framework combines coherency-informed graph reduction, physics-aware constraint modeling, and structured post-processing to efficiently convert shallow-circuit QAOA samples into high-quality feasible islanding decisions without deep circuits or large shot budgets. The proposed framework is validated on the standard IEEE benchmark systems (9-, 14-, 24-, 30-, 39-, and 57-bus), demonstrating that the hybrid workflow achieves Gurobi-optimal solution quality with a clear quantum resource advantage over vanilla QAOA, while the resulting islanding solutions satisfy all physical feasibility requirements after network separation. This study establishes QAOA-based islanding as a viable quantum approach for critical infrastructure, with structured post-processing as the key enabler of quantum resource efficiency.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Vascular Phenotyping in Parkinson's Disease: Diabetes Mellitus Operationalizes a Microvascular Metabolic Syndrome Cluster Across PPMI Diagnostic Cohorts

Background: Diabetes mellitus elevates Parkinson's disease (PD) risk, via hypothesized cerebrovascular mediation. Whether the diabetes/prediabetes vascular-risk phenotype concentrates in cardiometabolic risk or macrovascular events across prodromal and clinically diagnosed PD remains unresolved. Objectives: To quantify the vascular-risk burden associated with diabetes/prediabetes across the PPMI diagnostic cohorts to test whether this association differs by cohort. Methods: Cross-sectional analysis of 413 PPMI participants (76 healthy controls, 145 prodromal PD, 192 clinically diagnosed PD) examined diabetes/prediabetes (n = 73) and seven vascular risk factors. The Vascular Burden Score (0 to 7) was a priori partitioned into microvascular and macrovascular sub-scores. Modified Poisson regression estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (aPR), adjusted for age, sex, and body mass index. A cohort-by-diabetes interaction tested cross-cohort consistency. Sensitivity analyses incorporated nigral diffusion tensor imaging (PD-risk biomarker) and FreeSurfer white matter hypointensity volume (cerebrovascular marker). Results: Diabetes/prediabetes elevated Vascular Burden Score ({beta} = 0.53, 95% CI 0.29 to 0.77, p < 0.001) versus non-diabetic participants, with a non-significant cohort-by-diabetes interaction (F = 0.29, p = 0.747). Three microvascular factors survived false discovery rate correction: obesity (aPR 2.28), hypertension (aPR 1.60), and hyperlipidemia (aPR 1.45). Macrovascular events showed no diabetic amplification ({beta} = -0.06, p = 0.25). In the imaging-phenotyped subset, Vascular Burden Score components contributed classifier variance distinct from nigral microstructure. Conclusions: Diabetes/prediabetes operationalize a microvascular cluster stable across prodromal and idiopathic PD. Cardiometabolic phenotyping may complement established PD-risk biomarkers (dopamine transporter SPECT, nigral diffusion), pending longitudinal validation linking vascular phenotype to dopaminergic markers.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

SCAIL-2: Unifying Controlled Character Animation with End-to-end In-Context Conditioning

Controlled character animation requires transferring motion from a driving sequence to a reference character. Prior works heavily rely on intermediate representations, including pose skeletons to represent motion or masked background to represent environment, which inevitably leads to information loss. To address this, we present SCAIL-2, a framework that bypasses those intermediates and achieves end-to-end character animation. By directly concatenating driving videos to the sequence, the model can obtain all the required visual information from the input video. To address the lack of end-to-end data, we unify sub-tasks of character animation with decoupled conditions and then curate a pipeline to synthesize MotionPair-60K, an end-to-end motion transfer dataset containing heterogeneous tasks of character animation. To achieve the unification, we utilize in-context mask conditioning and mode-specific RoPE as soft guidance beyond textual instructions and raw visual information. To address synthetic discrepancy in detailed regions, we propose Bias-Aware DPO to construct preference items to mitigate the errors. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches in various character animation tasks. A large subset of synthetic data as well as model weights will be released at our project page: https://teal024.github.io/SCAIL-2/.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Quantifying Aleatoric Uncertainty of In-Context Learning for Robust Measure of LLM Prediction Confidence

In-Context Learning (ICL) allows LLMs to adapt to new tasks from a few demonstrations, but its reliability remains a concern: predictions are highly sensitive to both prompt design and the model's ability to understand the context, obscuring whether failures arise from data properties or model limitations. Uncertainty decomposition-separating aleatoric from epistemic sources-is particularly crucial in this setting, yet existing methods, designed for standard generation tasks, fail to capture the unique dynamics of ICL. To address this, we introduce a concept of self-function vectors, built upon Bayesian views and the mechanistic interpretability of ICL. These vectors leverage internal model representations to model the latent concept learned during in-context prompting, thereby enabling a direct estimation of aleatoric uncertainty within a Bayesian framework and circumventing the reliance on brittle input or decoding manipulations. Given the lack of established benchmarks and suitable evaluation protocols, we also propose the first and rigorous evaluation protocol, in which data is manipulated in controlled ways so as to quantify aleatoric uncertainty precisely and separately from epistemic uncertainty. With this new evaluation framework, initially grounded in synthetic tasks for conceptual development and subsequently extended to real-world datasets, we show that our proposed methodology can measure uncertainty of LLM predictions made under ICL more reliably than existing alternative methods. Moreover, we show it can be used as a practical tool for trustworthy-related applications, such as hallucination detection. Our findings pave a new direction for connecting the quantitative view of uncertainty with the mechanistic understanding of model behavior.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Complexity of detecting large coefficients in the Pauli basis

arXiv:2606.19545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of deciding, given a mechanism to prepare a quantum state $\rho$ and a value $\varepsilon > 0$, whether there is some non-identity Pauli matrix $P$ such that $|Tr(P \rho)| \geq \varepsilon$. We consider that the state $\rho$ is described as the result of tracing out some of the qubits of a pure state prepared by a circuit $C$, and we assume the promise that either there is a Pauli matrix satisfying the stated condition or, instead, that for all non-identity Pauli matrices $P$ it is the case that $|Tr(P\rho)|\leq \varepsilon/2$. The problem is in $QCMA$, and we prove that if it belongs to $BQP$ then $NP \subseteq BQP$. The result is obtained through a reduction from the minimum-weight code problem, and it holds even when $\rho$ is assumed to be a pure state (i.e. when no qubits are discarded) and $\varepsilon$ is constant. This resolves an open question regarding the existence of efficient tomographic procedures to find the largest coefficients of a quantum state in the Pauli basis: namely, they do not exist under the standard hypothesis $NP \nsubseteq BQP$.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stochastic Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent

arXiv:2509.14969v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a new adaptive step-size strategy for convex optimization with stochastic gradient that exploits the local geometry of the objective function only by means of a first-order stochastic oracle and without any hyper-parameter tuning. The method comes from a theoretically-grounded adaptation of the Adaptive Gradient Descent Without Descent method to the stochastic setting. We prove the convergence of stochastic gradient descent with our step-size under various assumptions, and we show that it empirically competes against tuned baselines.

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

Universality beyond the Kibble-Zurek mechanism in the condensation of coherently coupled Bose gases

arXiv:2606.24864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the universal spatial statistics of point-like topological defects formed during the nonequilibrium condensation of a coherently coupled Bose gas using the stochastic projected Gross-Pitaevskii equation. The symmetry-breaking transition is driven by a linear quench of the chemical potential, leading to stochastic vortex nucleation in the individual condensate components. When the two components are considered together, these elementary defects may combine across components to emerge as composite topological defects known as full quantum vortices. Beyond the mean defect density predicted by the Kibble-Zurek mechanism (KZM), we investigate the spatial organization of both the elementary and composite defects and show that their positions are well described by a Poisson point process, revealing a universal stochastic geometry. This universality is further described through Voronoi tessellation, whose cell-area statistics follow Poisson-Voronoi predictions. We also introduce the spatial form factor for characterizing the vortex configurations and demonstrate the emergence of a characteristic dip-ramp-plateau structure. Our results establish universal stochastic geometry of topological defects beyond conventional Kibble-Zurek scaling and identify it as a fundamental feature of nonequilibrium condensation in coherently coupled Bose gases.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-Order Hermite Optimization: Fast and Exact Gradient Computation in Open-Loop Quantum Optimal Control using a Discrete Adjoint Approach

arXiv:2505.09857v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces the High-Order Hermite Optimization (HOHO) method, an open-loop discrete adjoint method for quantum optimal control. Our method is the first of its kind to efficiently compute exact (discrete) gradients when using continuous, parameterized control pulses while solving the forward equations (e.g. Schrodinger's equation or the Linblad master equation) with an arbitrarily high-order Hermite Runge-Kutta method. The HOHO method is implemented in QuantumGateDesign$.$jl (https://github.com/leespen1/QuantumGateDesign.jl), an open-source software package for the Julia programming language, which we use to perform numerical experiments comparing the method to Juqbox$.$jl (https://github.com/LLNL/Juqbox.jl). For realistic model problems we observe speedups up to 775x.

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

Edu-Theater: A Data-Efficient Agent Framework for Scalable Learner Behavior Simulation through Staging Roll-Call

arXiv:2606.15225v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-scale learner-task interaction data are crucial for intelligent educational systems but are costly to collect and constrained by privacy and learner engagement. Learner simulators play a critical role in simulating scalable learner behavior without the need for continuous involvement of real learners. However, existing methods are predominantly individual-centric, pairing a simulator with each learner to iteratively infer latent knowledge states from dense interaction histories, which is both data- and computation-intensive, and fragile in cold-start scenarios. We propose a cohort-aware roll-call simulation paradigm that first constructs cohort-level proficiency priors and refines individual learner states through a small number of targeted diagnostic queries. Based on this paradigm, we introduce Edu-Theater, an LLM-powered agent system that performs cohort-aware learner simulation via a teacher agent and retrospective roll-call probing over learner logs. Edu-Theater enables scalable future behavior simulation without the need for dense per-learner histories. Experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that Edu-Theater achieves higher simulation accuracy with significantly fewer LLM calls, producing synthetic data that enhances downstream applications such as adaptive testing.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19

Simulation-based Bayesian deep learning enables uncertainty-aware tumor fraction estimation in cell-free DNA

Background: Estimating tumor fraction from whole-genome cell-free DNA sequencing is critical for liquid biopsy, but is hampered by weak signals and baseline noise at low tumor fractions. Existing computational methods often require matched controls or large labeled datasets for training and lack uncertainty quantification. To address these gaps, we developed purNPE, a Bayesian deep-learning framework trained without labeled cancer cell-free DNA samples. Specifically, purNPE leverages a two-part generative model: one component simulates diverse tumor copy-number profiles based on evolutionary genealogies, while a second, data-driven component learns and replicates realistic sequencing background patterns from cancer-free cell-free DNA. By training a Neural Posterior Estimator on synthetic tumor profiles augmented with learned noise, purNPE performs amortized inference in milliseconds without needing a reference sample set at inference. Results: In a real-world pan-cancer cohort, purNPE achieved comparable performance with existing methods against orthogonal mutant-allele-fraction validation (MAE = 0.066). In silico and semi-synthetic experiments suggested analytical sensitivity around 1% tumor fraction under the evaluated conditions and showed strong classification accuracy in low tumor fractions (AUC = 0.98 for TF [&le;] 3% versus controls). Conclusions: This work provides a framework for using simulation-based inference to derive calibrated, uncertainty-aware TF estimates, offering a potential alternative to traditional data-dependent methods.

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

Rethinking Air-Ground Collaboration: A Progressive Cross-Task Benchmark and Socialized Learning Framework

Air-ground collaborative perception is crucial for robust visual understanding in real-world dynamic environments. However, existing studies typically formulate collaboration as single-task cross-view fusion, overlooking the functional dependencies among localization, target association, and fine-grained parsing. In addition, the heterogeneous nature of aerial and ground views introduces substantial geometric, scale, and occlusion discrepancies, making uniform feature sharing vulnerable to negative transfer. To tackle these issues, we model air-ground perception as a progressive cross-task collaboration task and construct the Air-Ground Progressive Collaboration (AGPC) benchmark, a spatio-temporally aligned benchmark comprising more than 745K raw video frames. Built upon this benchmark, we propose Socialized Co-Perception (SCP), a coarse-to-fine framework that organizes collaboration progressively from aerial global localization to ground target association and identity-aware parsing. Its core module, the Dual-Layer Router (DLR), decouples input-side multi-scale expert selection from output-side task-conditioned modulation, enabling selective cross-view and cross-task interaction while suppressing harmful interference. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SCP. It achieves a 3.73\% coevolutionary gain and a 7.86\% improvement in average downstream performance. These results show that task-conditioned collaboration is more effective than uniform fusion for heterogeneous air-ground perception. The code is available at https://github.com/g1136639260-spec/AGSCP.

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

Fast and Slow Variational Continual Learning

arXiv:2606.24007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning remains a major challenge for modern deep networks, partly because commonly used optimizers lack inherent mechanisms for continual adaptation. One such natural mechanism is fast and slow adaptation to balance stability and plasticity. This mechanism has deep roots in neuroscience and biology, but there is no consensus on how to best incorporate it in commonly used optimizers. Here, we show that this can be easily done via the VCL framework, where past posteriors are used as priors in the future. Our key idea is to incorporate slow adaptation via merging of past posteriors to slow down the drift in the knowledge as learning progresses. The merged posterior is then used as the prior in the VCL update to implement the fast-weight updates. These steps can be seamlessly implemented in the IVON optimizer, whose form and costs are nearly identical to that of Adam. We call this new optimizer the Continual IVON (CoVON) optimizer and show that it not only consistently improves over existing VCL optimizers, but also performs better than other weight-regularization strategies across domain-incremental learning, continual pre-training, and fine-tuning of large language models.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ASymPO: Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization for Asynchronous LLM Post-Training Without Behavior Information

arXiv:2606.03070v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Asynchronous reinforcement learning can improve language-model post-training throughput by decoupling response generation from policy optimization, but stale responses introduce distribution drift. Standard behavior-corrected methods control this drift with behavior-policy probabilities, importance ratios, or clipping, which requires token-aligned, versioned, and numerically consistent behavior log-probabilities across rollout and learner systems. We ask whether asynchronous group-relative RL can instead be stabilized using only current-policy probabilities. We identify a scale-imbalance failure mode: when stale responses are evaluated under the current policy, positive and negative loss terms can appear at different negative log-probability scales, so zero-sum advantages no longer imply balanced loss contributions. We propose Asymmetric-Scale Policy Optimization (ASymPO), which normalizes each response's token loss by its current average token negative log-probability. ASymPO requires no behavior-policy probabilities, restores response-level zero-sum balance, and preserves a nonzero learning signal. We also introduce Scaled Policy Optimization (SPO), a fixed negative-scaling baseline, and evaluate both current-policy-only objectives in asynchronous mathematical reasoning post-training.

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

deFOREST: Fusing Optical and Radar satellite data for Enhanced Sensing of Tree-loss

arXiv:2510.14092v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we develop a deforestation detection pipeline that incorporates optical and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. A crucial component of the pipeline is the construction of anomaly maps of the optical data, which is done using the residual space of a discrete Karhunen-Lo\'{e}ve (KL) expansion. Anomalies are quantified using a concentration bound on the distribution of the residual components for the nominal state of the forest. This bound does not require prior knowledge on the distribution of the data. This is in contrast to statistical parametric methods that assume knowledge of the data distribution, an impractical assumption that is especially infeasible for high dimensional data such as ours. Once the optical anomaly maps are computed they are combined with SAR data, and the state of the forest is classified by using a Hidden Markov Model (HMM). We test our approach with Sentinel-1 (SAR) and Sentinel-2 (Optical) data on a $92\,km \times 92\,km$ region in the Amazon forest. The results show that both the hybrid optical-radar and optical only methods achieve high accuracy that is superior to the recent state-of-the-art hybrid method. Moreover, the hybrid method is significantly more robust in the case of sparse optical data that are common in highly cloudy regions.

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

Non-Gaussian Phase Transition and Cascade of Instabilities in the Dissipative Quantum Rabi Model

arXiv:2507.07092v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The open quantum Rabi model describes a two-level system coupled to a harmonic oscillator. A Gaussian phase transition for the nonequilibrium steady states has been predicted when the bosonic mode is soft and subject to damping. We show that oscillator dephasing is a relevant perturbation, which leads to a non-Gaussian phase transition and an intriguing cascade of instabilities for $k$-th order bosonic operators, as well as a jump in the steady-state qubit polarization. For the soft-mode limit, the equations of motion form a closed hierarchy and spectral properties can be efficiently studied. To this purpose, we establish a fruitful connection to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. The results for the phase diagram, stability boundaries, and relevant observables are based on mean-field analysis, exact diagonalization, perturbation theory, and Keldysh field theory.

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

Driving, Fast or Slow? Neuro-Symbolic Guidance for Motion Prediction in Multi-Modal Ground Mobility

arXiv:2606.15251v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate and interpretable motion prediction for heterogeneous traffic spaces, including pedestrians, bicycles, cars, and trucks, is essential for safe autonomous navigation. Nevertheless, state-of-the-art approaches remain predominantly black-box, lacking explicit encoding of the regulatory and behavioral constraints of real-world mobility. We propose Trajectory Compliance-Shaping (TraCS), a neuro-symbolic framework that augments existing black-box motion prediction backbones with interpretable and probabilistic first-order logic. To do so, TraCS employs an agentic code-generation pipeline to bridge the gap between natural-language descriptions of traffic regulations and probabilistic motion prediction. Furthermore, TraCS employs a reactive data-streaming inference engine that maintains and efficiently updates compliance landscapes as scenes evolve. To prevent TraCS from overconfidently steering the backbone's predictions in the wrong direction, we propose a neural confidence rating learned as a context-aware attenuation of the compliance signal. We demonstrate on the Argoverse 2 benchmark how TraCS consistently improves state-of-the-art prediction backbones, showing that probabilistic and symbolic compliance reasoning is a broadly applicable and computationally efficient complement to purely neural motion predictors.

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

Measuring Curriculum Alignment across Topical Coverage, Competency, and Cognitive Depth: A Longitudinal Framework Applied to CS2013 and CS2023

arXiv:2606.19469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Undergraduate computer science is governed by international curricular guidelines revised about once a decade, yet programs lack a reliable, reproducible way to measure how completely they cover the current guidelines and how that coverage shifts when the guidelines are restructured. We address this with a human-in-the-loop pipeline that measures a program's coverage of an external body of knowledge, applied longitudinally to one accredited BSc in Computer Science against Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) and 2023 (CS2023). The pipeline represents the program and each guideline as structured corpora, generates candidate course-to-knowledge-unit matches by semantic retrieval, and confirms them through human judgment under an explicit coverage definition. Of seven benchmarked retrievers, a reciprocal-rank-fusion ensemble was strongest, and a reputed long-context model underperformed a small sentence model, so retriever choice must be measured. Both maps were validated by an independent second rater (Cohen's kappa 0.64 for CS2023, 0.69 for CS2013). The program covers 49.7% of CS2023 and 50.9% of CS2013 knowledge units, near-constant across a decade. Extending the same retrieve-then-confirm design to competency articulation and cognitive depth shows that the program articulates the competency for ~88% of covered units under each guideline, yet delivers it at the recommended depth for 76% of present units under CS2023 against 95% under CS2013, a gap reflecting the newer guideline's raised expectations, not the program. The longitudinal comparison separates persistent structural gaps (parallel and distributed computing, foundations of programming languages, systems fundamentals), uncovered against both guidelines and ABET, from differences that reflect the standard's evolution. The instrument is reusable and available from the authors on request.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human-centred design approaches to health facility design: Evidence from perinatal care settings in Ethiopia and Bangladesh

While significant progress has been made in perinatal outcomes over recent decades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), maternal and newborn quality improvement initiatives often fail to account for the spatial conditions in which they are implemented. Health systems are increasingly deploying evidence-based care models into built environments that are not optimally structured to meet the needs of its patient population. As the principal users, patients and health care workers can offer pragmatic insights about improving these structural designs. Our objective was to gather insights from patients, providers, and companions about how the physical design of their health facilities influenced their experience receiving or delivering perinatal care. We conducted a prospective observational study using a human-centred design (HCD) approach to analyse perceptions of the quality of perinatal care across two low resource settings: Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Using engagement and assessment tools, we conducted interviews, focus groups, facility walk-throughs, co-design workshops, and infrastructural assessments with patients, companions, providers, and Ministry of Health representatives. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to identify key learnings and develop recommendations. Across both countries, participants identified the need for facility layouts that better support privacy, mobility during labour, alternative birth positions, companion involvement, cultural and religious practices, sanitation, and provider visibility. Based on these insights, we developed six recommendations to better align health facility infrastructure with maternal and newborn care delivery needs. Our findings suggest that investments in health facility infrastructure may improve care experiences and help enable respectful, safe, and evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Alongside targeted spatial improvements, government authorities responsible for health facility planning should incorporate participatory design processes to ensure infrastructure reflects the needs of patients, companions, and providers and supports high-quality care delivery.