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

Aligning Quantum Operators with Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.13811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can Large Language Models (LLMs) understand and reason about quantum operators? Despite their remarkable capabilities in mathematics and symbolic reasoning, LLMs remain inherently blind to quantum representations such as unitary matrices. In this work, we take a step toward bridging this gap by introducing an approach that maps unitary operators into the latent space of an LLM, enabling unified modeling over quantum and linguistic inputs. We instantiate this idea on Clifford+T circuit synthesis over a Pauli rotation gate set, where our model achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art methods and scales consistently with training data, with no signs of saturation. Our approach further enables language-conditioned synthesis, allowing gate constraints unseen during training to be specified directly in natural language. This work suggests a path toward quantum–aware foundation models that can natively interpret and reason about quantum operations, which could have broader implications reaching across quantum compilation and algorithm discovery.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Polaris: A Godel Agent Framework for Small Language Models through Experience-Abstracted Policy Repair

arXiv:2603.23129v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Gödel agent realize recursive self-improvement: an agent inspects its own policy and traces and then modifies that policy in a tested loop. We introduce Polaris, a Gödel agent for compact models that performs policy repair via experience abstraction, turning failures into policy updates through a structured cycle of analysis, strategy formation, abstraction, and minimal code pat ch repair with conservative checks. Unlike response level self correction or parameter tuning, Polaris makes policy level changes with small, auditable patches that persist in the policy and are reused on unseen instances within each benchmark. As part of the loop, the agent engages in meta reasoning: it explains its errors, proposes concrete revisions to its own policy, and then updates the policy. To enable cumulative policy refinement, we introduce experience abstraction, which distills failures into compact, reusable strategies that transfer to unseen instances. On MGSM, DROP, GPQA, and LitBench (covering arithmetic reasoning, compositional inference, graduate-level problem solving, and creative writing evaluation), a 7-billion-parameter model equipped with Polaris achieves consistent gains over the base policy and competitive baselines.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Deep Learning Model Reuse in the Scientific Process

arXiv:2603.13584v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has achieved recognition for its impact within natural sciences, yet the prohibitive financial and technical cost of training models from scratch inhibit adoption. Following software engineering community guidance, natural scientists are reusing pre-trained deep learning models (PTMs) to amortize these costs. While prior works recommend PTM reuse patterns, we present the first empirical study of PTM reuse patterns in the natural sciences, quantifying the utilization and impact of PTM reuse within the scientific process across 17,718 peer reviewed, open access papers. Our results show that "Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology" has outpaced other natural scientific fields in PTM reuse, "adaptation" reuse is the most prevalent PTM reuse pattern identified across all natural science fields, and the "testing" stage of the scientific process has been most impacted by PTM integration.

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

Fast Speech Foundation Model Distillation Using Interleaved Stacking

Distilling a large speech foundation model (SFM) into an efficient student model has been successfully applied to low-resource environments. Although distillation reduces inference latency, it requires an additional student model training. However, the training efficiency of SFM distillation remains underexplored. In this work, we explore training acceleration of SFM distillation to speed up model deployment. We examine the potential of stacking, in which the model depth is progressively increased through training until the target model depth is reached. While existing stacking methods improve training speed, they suffer from performance degradation. To handle this limitation, we propose interleaved stacking, a novel stacking method that consistently preserves layer position throughout the stacking process. This property is particularly critical in SFMs, in which each layer encodes distinct layer-specific knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on SUPERB.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Retrieval-Augmented Foundation Models for Water Level Prediction in the Everglades

arXiv:2508.04888v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate water level forecasting in the Everglades is essential for flood mitigation, drought management, water resource planning, and biodiversity conservation. While recent time-series foundation models have shown strong performance on generic tasks (represented in their pre-training), their effectiveness in domain-specific applications remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we curate a domain-specific dataset for water-level forecasting in the Everglades and observe that the performance of current state-of-the-art models remains limited. To address this gap, we leverage a retrieval-augmented mechanism that retrieves analogous multivariate hydrological episodes from an external archive of historical observations to enrich the input context of those pre-trained models. We study two retrieval strategies, statistical similarity-based retrieval and mutual information-based retrieval, and analyze how incorporating retrieved historical contexts affects predictive performance. Extensive experiments show that retrieval augmentation consistently improves long-horizon water level forecasts and yields disproportionately larger gains during extreme events, which is particularly critical for environmental decision-making. Our study provides empirical evidence that analog-based retrieval can benefit pretrained time-series foundation models in environmental science, offering practical insights into their strengths, limitations, and failure modes when applied to hydrological forecasting in the Everglades. Although evaluated in the Everglades, the proposed framework is general and can be applied to other hydrological systems given time series data. The code and data have been made publicly available at https://github.com/rahuul2992000/WaterRAF.

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

LLM Compression by Block Removal with Constrained Binary Optimization

In this paper, we formulate the compression of large language models (LLMs) by optimally deleting transformer blocks (``block removal'') as a constrained binary optimization (CBO) problem that can be mapped to a physical system (Ising glass), whose energies are a strong proxy for downstream model performance. This formulation enables an efficient ranking of a large number of candidate block-removal configurations yielding many high-quality, non-trivial solutions beyond those only removing consecutive regions. Our method performs strongly in the deep compression regime, such as for 50% compression of Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct, where we achieve an almost 23 percentage point increase on the MMLU benchmark compared to other state-of-the-art (SOTA) block-removal methods. For lighter compression, it performs on par with those methods across several benchmarks for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Qwen3-14B (both before and after retraining), as well as Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct. The approach is computationally efficient and requires only forward and backward passes on a calibration dataset for a few active parameters. Additionally, we demonstrate that using good heuristic solvers for the CBO problem provides solutions that perform well on downstream tasks in negligible runtime when it is unfeasible to solve the problem exactly. The method can be readily applied to any architecture. We illustrate this generality on the recent NVIDIA-Nemotron-3-Nano-30B-A3B-FP8 model, which exhibits a highly inhomogeneous and challenging block structure, and where we outperform SOTA for AIME25 and GPQA when removing either 2 attention layers or 3 mixture-of-experts layers.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

TimeProVe: Propose, then Verify for Efficient Long Video Temporal Reasoning in Activities of Daily Living

Long Video Question Answering (LVQA) requires identifying sparse, query-relevant evidence within hours-long untrimmed videos. Existing approaches either process videos densely with large vision-language models (VLMs), incurring prohibitive computational cost, or rely on sparse caption-based reasoning, which often misses temporally localized and motion-centric evidence. We introduce TimeProVe, a cost-efficient hybrid framework for temporally grounded reasoning in long videos. TimeProVe first employs lightweight modules to generate action-grounded answer–evidence hypotheses and subsequently invokes an expensive VLM only for targeted verification. The core of our framework lies in the Action-based Candidate Evidence (ACE) module, which converts temporally localized actions into query-conditioned candidate answers and supporting evidence windows through lightweight LLM reasoning. We further introduce OpenTSUBench (OTB), an open-ended benchmark designed to evaluate temporally grounded reasoning in real-world Activities of Daily Living (ADL) scenarios. Experiments show that TimeProVe outperforms the strongest baseline on OTB by 7.3%, while reducing VLM calls by 75% and inference cost by 93%. Furthermore, without explicit temporal grounding training, TimeProVe achieves competitive performance on Charades-STA, and reaches state-of-the-art results when enhanced with grounding VLMs.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Staying In Character: Perspective-Bounded Memory For Book-Based Role-Playing Agents

Recent LLM role-playing systems build character agents from novels by extracting characters, scenes, and relations. Yet long-narrative role-playing suffers from two failures: Factual Overreach, where shared retrieval or parametric memory lets a character use facts outside its perspective, and Stylistic Monotony, where profile descriptions flatten a character into a fixed voice. To address these failures, we propose REVERIEMEM, a three-layer memory architecture for book-based character agents. The episodic layer stores first-person scene memories; the semantic layer stores visibility-tagged facts; and the personality layer stores situation-dependent speech and behaviour patterns. For evaluation, we construct KBF-QA, a 4,386-question benchmark over eight novels for testing knowledge boundaries. REVERIEMEM improves Knowledge Boundary Fidelity by 34.6 percentage points over the strongest prior method. On BOOKWORLD's five-dimension pairwise narrative protocol, REVERIEMEM achieves a ~ 79% win rate, suggesting that perspective-bounded memory improves both boundary fidelity and character-grounded narrative generation.

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

DeepRoot: A KG-Coordinated Multi-Agent System for Therapeutic Reasoning over Historical Medical Texts

arXiv:2606.15931v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Historical medical archives and traditional medicines hold immense potential for drug discovery and remain a primary source for current drug development. However, pre-ontological prose and idiosyncratic taxonomies prevent the standardization and medical modernization of the data for use in current biomedical pipelines. Furthermore, no existing LLM agent system, whether tool-calling, retrieval-augmented, or agentic deep-research, can convert such text into verifiable drug-discovery leads at scale. We close this gap with DeepRoot, a multi-agent LLM system that jointly builds and utilizes a verified knowledge graph, showing that grounding and reasoning – often conflated – are separable axes the system can compose for therapeutic reasoning. Applied to the Shen Nong Ben Cao Jing, DeepRoot recovers $10$ of $21$ held-out compound-disease treatment pairs at R@$20$ ($47.6\%$ vs $4.8\%$ for a raw corpus LLM and $\sim\!2.4\%$ random) and dominates an LLM-as-judge audit for reasoning quality over baseline LLMs and LLMs with direct tool-call access to the same APIs DeepRoot itself queries. Tool-using LLMs hallucinate evidence on $87\%$ of claims, versus 7-10% for DeepRoot. Graph-only inference hallucinates $0\%$ but ranks lowest on reasoning coherence; DeepRoot KG+LLM is the only condition to win on both axes, pointing toward a route for systematic mining and repurposing of historical medical knowledge.

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

MPMWorlds: Material-Point-Method Simulations for Inferring and Extrapolating Physical Dynamics

To study the ability to infer physical dynamics from videos and extrapolate them forward in time, we assemble a dataset of 2D Material Point Method (MPM) physical simulations covering rich physical phenomena such as deformable objects, fluids, kinetic objects, and emitters. We study code generation and video diffusion approaches on this dataset, identifying their strengths and weaknesses by varying the amount of physically relevant side information. The code generation model, beyond giving a working demonstration of automatic synthesis of MPM simulations, reveals that such an approach struggles with inferring physical parameters from visual input, but relative to video diffusion, produces physically and temporally stable extrapolations forward in time, while the video diffusion model more strongly identifies geometric properties from visual input but produces physically implausible extrapolations.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Tracing Target Answers in Poisoned Retrieval Corpora via Token Influence Attribution

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning attacks that manipulate model outputs through malicious retrieved documents. Existing detection methods typically rely on auxiliary classifiers or additional LLM-based verification, introducing substantial computational overhead. We present TRACE, a lightweight detection framework that identifies poisoning attacks by tracing answer-related tokens through token influence attribution. TRACE first discovers recurrent high-influence keywords across retrieved documents and then performs a secondary verification to confirm their influence on model predictions. Experiments on three QA benchmarks and six LLMs demonstrate strong detection performance while simultaneously uncovering attacker-specified target answers.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

STaR-DRO: Stateful Tsallis Reweighting for Group-Robust Structured Prediction

arXiv:2604.09737v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Structured prediction with large language models requires outputs that are label-accurate, ontology-constrained, structurally valid, and evidence-grounded under label imbalance and heterogeneous group difficulty. We present a unified framework for ontology-constrained generation. First, we introduce a modular prompt-engineering architecture combining XML-style structure, expert disambiguation rules, chain-of-thought reasoning, metadata-aware decision logic, schema contracts, and a self-validation gate. It targets recurrent in-context failures, including format drift, label ambiguity, evidence hallucination, and metadata-conditioned confusion. Second, we propose STaR-DRO, combining Tsallis mirror ascent, sparse entmax-style primal mapback, EMA-smoothed group-loss tracking, rescaled ascent signals, and bounded excess-only multipliers. Unlike conventional DRO, which relies on dense Shannon-entropy exponentiated-gradient updates, can introduce high-variance stochastic reweighting, assigns positive adversarial mass to groups that are not persistently hard, and incurs costs through simplex competition, STaR-DRO upweights only persistently hard groups without suppressing easier ones. We evaluate the framework on EPPC Miner, a clinically grounded high-stakes structured-prediction task requiring hierarchical label prediction and evidence-span extraction from patient-provider secure messages. Across 1B-70B Llama models, prompt engineering improves zero-shot extraction, yielding an average label F1 gain of +14.46 and a Span F1 gain of +17.40. Building on supervised fine-tuning, STaR-DRO further improves accuracy and robustness, increasing average label F1 by +1.08 and +2.20 while reducing mean groupwise validation cross-entropy by 21.3% and 14.8% relative to SFT and standard DRO, respectively. These results advance reliable automated communication mining for patient-centered clinical care analysis.

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

A theoretical model for task routing in mixture-of-expert transformers

arXiv:2606.14398v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mixture-of-experts (MoE) layers enable the scaling of transformer models while keeping the inference compute fixed. While task-expert specialization has been observed in empirical studies of frontier MoE transformer models, existing theoretical work analyzes this using continuous mixture models that cannot be used to model natural language effectively. An important open question is to theoretically explain task-expert specialization in transformer MoE models using discrete models of language. To address this, we represent structured knowledge via syntactic templates and finite key-value dictionaries, and prove formally that a single-layer MoE transformer can encode knowledge by using experts that specialize in the corresponding tasks. Our construction shows how queries are routed to unique, task-specific experts whose size depends solely on the intrinsic complexity of the given task (i.e. the combined size of its syntactic templates and factual dictionary). Our construction provides a theoretical support for empirical results on localized knowledge circuits in MoE models. We support our theoretical findings with experiments evaluating model performance under varying MoE loss functions.

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

World Model Self-Distillation: Training World Models to Solve General Tasks

Pretrained video generators are promising visual world models that exhibit emergent task-solving abilities; however, their reliance on detailed textual descriptions limits their direct use for planning and decision-making. Existing approaches either outsource this reasoning to language or vision-language models, or rely on supervised fine-tuning with paired task-execution videos, which are costly to collect and difficult to scale. We propose a scalable framework that elicits task-solving ability in such models by combining self-distillation with reinforcement learning. Given an unlabeled scene image, a vision-language model generates a candidate task and a detailed step-by-step solution. The solution conditions a pretrained video diffusion model, the Demonstrator; we distill its behavior into an Executor conditioned only on the image and a short task prompt. This transfers execution knowledge from caption-guided generation to instruction-conditioned task solving without curated task-video supervision. We further improve the Executor with reinforcement learning from VLM feedback, exploiting the asymmetry between judging whether a sampled video satisfies a task and generating the solution. Experiments on our proposed WorldTasks-Benchmark and the DreamGen robotics benchmark show that the Executor surpasses the Demonstrator under our VLM-based evaluation protocol and transfers competitively to robotic tasks.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Recovering Stranded Discrimination in Knowledge Tracing: Per-Item Bias Correction via Empirical-Bayes Shrinkage

arXiv:2606.14123v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deployed knowledge-tracing models are typically frozen after training, yet systematic per-item logit bias arises, from limited per-item expressivity in backbone architectures and from post-deployment shifts in item properties, degrading prediction quality. Global post-hoc calibrators such as Platt scaling, temperature scaling, and isotonic regression improve probability estimates but leave discriminative ability, as measured by AUC, unchanged. This AUC invariance is a structural consequence of monotone score-only transforms; recovering the stranded discrimination requires conditioning on item identity. We propose SLC (State-space Logit Correction), which converts binary observations to Gaussian pseudo-observations via Laplace/IRLS, applies empirical-Bayes shrinkage through a Kalman smoother, and fits an offset-Platt link. The state-space formulation also yields a detectability bound that characterizes the Bernoulli information floor, explaining why temporal tracking provides no benefit at current data densities. Across four datasets, five backbones, and three seeds, SLC improves AUC on all four datasets and NLL on three, with the advantage concentrating on sparse items. Cross-domain controls suggest that the same phenomenon can arise beyond education when the deployed backbone leaves entity-level bias.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

StyleShield: Exposing the Fragility of AIGC Detectors through Continuous Controllable Style Transfer

arXiv:2605.00924v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: AI-generated content (AIGC) detectors are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings such as academic integrity screening, yet their reliability rests on a fundamental paradox: as language models are trained on human-written corpora, the statistical boundary between AI and human writing will inevitably dissolve as models improve. Commercial incentives have further distorted this landscape – detection services and "de-AIification" tools often operate within the same supply chain, replacing evaluation of content quality with judgment of content origin. We present StyleShield, the first flow matching framework for conditional text style transfer, operating directly in continuous token embedding space via a DiT backbone with zero-initialized cross-attention adapters conditioned on frozen Qwen-7B representations. At inference, we adapt the SDEdit paradigm from image synthesis to text embeddings, with a single parameter gamma providing smooth continuous control over the evasion-preservation trade-off. On a multi-domain Chinese benchmark, StyleShield achieves 94.6% evasion against the training detector and >=99% against three unseen detectors, maintaining 0.928 semantic similarity. We further introduce RateAudit, a document-level scheduling algorithm that demonstrates detection-rate verdicts can be set to arbitrary values, directly questioning the reliability of score-based evaluation.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

An Embodied Simulation Platform, Benchmark, and Data-Efficient Augmentation Framework for Wet-Lab Robotics

arXiv:2606.12936v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wet-lab robots can improve the reproducibility, throughput, and safety of biomedical experiments, but scaling their learning requires customizable simulators for safe and reproducible task generation, open editable laboratory assets, and efficient pipelines that turn limited demonstrations into usable training data. We present Pipette, an embodied simulation platform, benchmark, and data-efficient augmentation framework for wet-lab robot learning. Pipette releases over 43 open-source and re-editable wet-lab assets, together with an extensible asset-building pipeline. A key component of Pipette is its simulation-based data augmentation pipeline, replaying human demonstrations in simulation, applies lighting, camera, speed, and action perturbations, and filters generated episodes with automatic task success checks, rapidly expanding usable training data from limited manual demonstrations. We further introduce an 11-task wet-lab embodied benchmark covering sample handling, culture-ware manipulation, device operation, and precision placement. With only 30 demonstrations per task, ACT achieves 65.5% average success rate, while simulation augmentation improves SmolVLA from 44.1% to 74.7% and {\pi}0 from 40.4% to 46.5%, validating the effectiveness of Pipette for data-efficient VLA training and evaluation. Pipette also supports natural-language-driven scene construction and task registration, lowering the barrier for non-expert users to define new wet-lab robotic tasks.

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

UltraEP: Unleash MoE Training and Inference on Rack-Scale Nodes with Near-Optimal Load Balancing

arXiv:2606.04101v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large-scale expert parallelism (EP) is becoming pivotal for training and serving frontier MoE models, but it also amplifies device-level expert load imbalance into compute stragglers, token all-to-all bottlenecks, and activation-memory spikes. Existing balancers redistribute experts periodically based on historical load, which becomes unreliable for production deployments with non-stationary load patterns. We present UltraEP, the first exact-load, real-time balancer for large-EP MoE training and serving prefill on rack-scale nodes (RSNs). Leveraging the extended scale-up connectivity among dozens of GPUs within RSNs, UltraEP rebalances every microbatch and layer on critical paths, which requires nontrivial co-design of plan solving and expert replication communication to minimize exposed overhead. To this end, UltraEP eagerly reacts to post-gating load with an efficient quota-driven planner, and executes the resulting irregular expert-state transfers with RSN-native persistent tile streaming and relay-based fan-out mitigation. We evaluate UltraEP in a multi-RSN deployment of up to 256 GPUs, using cutting-edge MoE models from 106B to 671B parameters. Averaged across training and serving, UltraEP achieves 94.3% of the force-balanced ideal throughput, delivering 1.49$\times$ improvement over no-balancing, while reducing the final inter-rank imbalance from 1.30$-$4.01 to 1.01$-$1.04.

20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

Interpreting higher-order dependence in multimorbidity using cohort data: A partial information decomposition approach

by Cillian Hourican, Geeske Peeters, René J. F. Melis, Almar Kok, Natasja M. van Schoor, Sandra Wezeman, Mike Lees, Marcel G. M. Olde Rikkert, Rick Quax In the context of multimorbidity, clinical features seldom act in isolation: symptoms, signs and behaviours form interdependent systems in which joint effects on function can be demonstrated only when features are considered together. We introduce an open, reusable workflow that detects and interprets these “together-only” interactions using bivariate Partial Information Decomposition (PID; two sources to one target), linking synergy-based dependence to the broader network of clinical variables rather than to a single target. The workflow estimates synergy with small-sample bias correction and summarises each pair in a Breadth–Uniformity–Synergy–Total (BUST) map: breadth of synergy across target variables (broad “generalist” vs narrow “specialist” patterns), cross-stratum uniformity across age, sex and multimorbidity (uniform vs subgroup-specific), synergy strength, and total shared information. Simple diagnostics contrast observed targets with additive expectations, revealing the specific joint configurations through which non-additive effects arise. Applied to data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam, we treated all health-related variables—covering symptoms, clinical signs, behaviours, lifestyle factors, and self-rated health indicators—as both sources and targets in the PID framework. This symmetric design permits synergy to be quantified for every pair of variables with respect to every other variable. The workflow identifies synergistic constellations that additive models miss. Multidomain cliques involving subjective health, pain, cognition and grip strength showed multiple non-additive configurations, whereas pairs such as alcohol use with grip strength exhibited focused, narrow but uniform synergy. Notably, the pairs with the strongest synergistic contributions were largely distinct from those with the highest total mutual information, indicating that synergy captures dependency structure overlooked by conventional association measures. Rather than a new measure, this work provides a bias-aware workflow that makes higher-order dependence visible and transferable. Our results support synergy-aware mapping as a practical complement to conventional multimorbidity analyses: it highlights specific combinations of routinely assessed features whose joint states may be especially informative across multiple health targets and therefore candidates for prioritised joint assessment and future multi-domain intervention studies.

21.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Comparative impacts and cost-effectiveness of tuberculosis systematic screening strategies in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru: A mathematical modeling study

作者:

by Yiran E. Liu, José Victor Bortolotto Bampi, Ronan F. Arthur, Argita D. Salindri, Caroline Busatto, Pedro Avedillo Jiménez, Daniele Maria Pelissari, Fernanda Dockhorn Costa Johansen, Robert Arana-Narvaez, Alvaro Fernando Moreno Roca, Wilfredo Santos Solís Tupes, Esther Mori Jiu, Christian Alfredo Moreno Roca, Erika Albertina Abregú Contreras, Valentina Antonieta Alarcón Guizado, Julián Trujillo Trujillo, Belkys Marcelino, Mónica Alonso Gonzalez, Mayra Cecilia Córdova Ayllon, Ted Cohen, Moises A. Huaman, Jeremy D. Goldhaber-Fiebert, Julio Croda, Jason R. Andrews Background Incarceration is a leading driver of tuberculosis in Latin America. Systematic screening in prisons may reduce tuberculosis burden, but optimal strategies and cost-effectiveness remain uncertain. We examined the population-wide health impacts and cost-effectiveness of systematic screening in prisons in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, comparing different timepoints, frequencies, and screening algorithms. Methods and findings Using dynamic transmission models calibrated to Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, we simulated annual or biannual (twice-yearly) prison-wide screening, alone or combined with entry and exit screening from 2026 to 2035. We evaluated four algorithms: (1) symptom screening, (2) chest X-ray with computer-aided detection (CXR-CAD), (3) symptoms and CXR-CAD (follow-up testing if either is positive), and (4) GeneXpert Ultra (Xpert) with pooled sputum. Individuals screening positive then received individual Xpert. We projected impacts on within-prison and population-level tuberculosis incidence in 2035, along with discounted costs (2023 US dollars) and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs). Model projections showed that combined entry, exit, and biannual screening with CXR-CAD was highly impactful and cost-effective across countries, reducing tuberculosis incidence by 61%–87% in prisons and 18%–28% population-wide. Compared to only biannual CXR-CAD (the next best strategy), the incremental cost per DALY averted of adding entry and exit screening was $2,984 (Brazil), $2,925 (Colombia), and $645 (Peru). Adding symptom screening to CXR-CAD marginally increased benefit and was only cost-effective in Peru’s higher-incidence prisons. Biannual screening alone remained cost-effective at prison incidence levels well below national averages, as well as at far lower willingness-to-pay thresholds. In settings without CXR-CAD, pooled Xpert was an impactful, cost-effective alternative. Key limitations include the model’s simplified representation of tuberculosis disease states and lack of stratification by age, gender/sex, HIV, or drug resistance. Conclusions These modeling results support immediate national-level adoption of prison-wide tuberculosis screening twice-yearly and at entry and exit, using CXR-CAD or pooled Xpert.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Cardiac positronium lifetime in human PET: a reproducible right-left ventricular contrast that is not explained by blood oxygenation

Background. Ortho-positronium (o-Ps) lifetime, now measurable in vivo on long-axial-field-of-view (LAFOV) PET/CT, has been proposed as a biomarker of tissue oxygenation and hypoxia. Because o-Ps lifetime is dominated by tissue free-volume structure while the oxygen- specific contribution is small, whether an in-vivo lifetime contrast reflects oxygenation rather than anatomy is an open, identifiability-limited question. Aim. To test the oxygenation hypothesis directly using the heart's natural arterial/venous oxygenation contrast, with a built-in anatomical control. Methods. We re-analysed a public [82Rb]Cl human cardiac LAFOV PET/CT dataset (5.30 x 10^8 evaluated three-photon events). Per-compartment o-Ps lifetimes were extracted with a background-plus-two-component exponentially-modified-Gaussian (EMG) model. The list-mode to image mapping and right/left ventricle (RV/LV) identity were established lifetime-free (the mapping reproduces the provider's reconstructed image at block-correlation 0.998 and wins a joint multi-organ alignment panel). We applied a confound battery: registration stress test, blood-core vs wall, lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume, tissue density; and a structure/position-matched control (pulmonary artery, deoxygenated, vs aorta, oxygenated). An isotope-matched 82Rb uniform-quartz reference bounded the instrument's positional behaviour. All results were produced by two independent analysis pipelines. Results. RV o-Ps lifetime exceeded LV by delta tau = +0.304 ns (RV 1.700 +/- 0.172, LV 1.396 +/- 0.130 ns; about 1.4 sigma), in the oxygen-expected direction; the contrast was stable across +/-16 mm registration perturbation (sign preserved in 100% of 342 shifts) and resided in the blood core, not the wall. However, the matched-vessel control was null: pulmonary artery minus aorta = -0.011 +/- 0.344 ns. Lung-air and wall-myocardium partial-volume were disfavoured, and the effect fell within the isotope-matched 82Rb instrumental positional envelope (about 0.1-0.35 ns over 40 mm in uniform material). Conclusion. On this single subject, the cardiac o-Ps lifetime contrast does not provide a clean readout of blood oxygenation: an oxygenation effect of the observed (about 0.3 ns) magnitude is ruled out by the matched control, while a small physiological effect cannot be excluded. We provide a reusable confound-control battery for evaluating future in-vivo o-Ps oxygenation claims. Multi-subject replication with anatomy decoupled from oxygenation is required.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Reachability and optimal-time certificates for quantum control

arXiv:2606.24645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Finite-time control is central to quantum technologies, yet rigorous limits on reachable targets and optimal control times remain largely unknown. We develop a framework for finite-time reachability and optimal-time certificates in constrained quantum control based on moment relaxations with implicitly time-dependent differential constraints. For fixed control horizons and control constraints, the method yields rigorous upper bounds on achievable terminal fidelities, lower bounds on the optimal control times required to reach them, and certificate gaps for benchmarking explicit control pulses. We demonstrate the versatility of our framework in three use cases: entangled-state preparation in two and three qubits, one-qubit gate synthesis across different control geometries, and excitation transfer in an $N$-qubit $XX$ chain. Our work establishes differential moment hierarchies as a practical tool for certifying reachability limits and optimal control times in quantum control, providing hardware-aware quantum speed limits while highlighting structure exploitation as a key ingredient for scalable certification.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SPRI: SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization for Data-Constrained MoE Upcycling

arXiv:2606.16456v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) models enable efficient scaling, but training them from scratch remains prohibitively expensive. MoE upcycling mitigates this cost by converting pretrained dense models into sparse MoE models. However, existing upcycling methods typically rely on large-scale continued training and often perform poorly under data-constrained supervised adaptation, due to either homogeneous experts or overly disruptive perturbations to pretrained parameters. In this setting, effective upcycling must leverage pretrained weight structure while introducing sufficient diversity among routed experts. To this end, we propose SVD-Partitioned Residual Initialization (SPRI), which distributes SVD-partitioned residuals derived from pretrained feed-forward network (FFN) weights across routed experts, introducing controlled expert diversity grounded in pretrained spectral structure. We further introduce a two-stage training strategy to improve adaptation stability. We evaluate SPRI on multilingual speech-to-text translation, where limited supervised data challenges MoE upcycling and multiple target languages provide natural routing heterogeneity. On CoVoST2 across 15 En-to-XX directions, SPRI improves average BLEU and COMET over fully fine-tuned dense models by 2.58 and 3.32 points, respectively, and outperforms the prior best MoE upcycling baseline by 3.39 BLEU and 4.34 COMET points.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Machine-learning clustering of close-in exoplanet populations: links to pebble accretion

arXiv:2606.11737v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Close-in exoplanets exhibit a wide range of orbital architectures and physical properties shaped by both formation conditions and migration processes. Although population-synthesis models predict distinct planetary populations, establishing a quantitative connection between observed exoplanets and synthetic populations remains challenging. We investigate the intrinsic organisation of close-in exoplanets using physically motivated dynamical parameters and connect the resulting populations to pebble-accretion formation pathways. A two-stage Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is applied to an observed sample of close-in exoplanets, performing unsupervised probabilistic clustering in a feature space dominated by dynamical descriptors of planet-star interactions. The resulting clusters are mapped onto a pebble-accretion synthetic population within a statistically motivated three-dimensional parameter space. Formation-related quantities, including gas availability, gas fraction, and ice-rock mass ratio, are then used to interpret the mapped populations. We identify statistically supported sub-populations without imposing predefined classification boundaries, including very-massive gas giants, hot giants, warm-Jupiter-dominated systems, and lower-mass giants. The mapped synthetic populations reveal systematic differences in formation timing, gas accretion, and solid growth histories. In particular, very-massive gas giants are preferentially associated with earlier formation epochs than hot-giant and warm-Jupiter-dominated populations. These results demonstrate that physically motivated machine-learning approaches can provide a statistically robust framework for linking observed exoplanet populations to theoretical planet formation pathways.