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01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Asymptotic Learning Curves for Diffusion Models with Random Features Score and Manifold Data

arXiv:2603.22962v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the theoretical behavior of denoising score matching–the learning task associated to diffusion models–when the data distribution is supported on a low-dimensional manifold and the score is parameterized using a random feature neural network. We derive asymptotically exact expressions for the test, train, and score errors in the high-dimensional limit. Our analysis reveals that, for linear manifolds the sample complexity required to learn the score function scales linearly with the intrinsic dimension of the manifold, rather than with the ambient dimension. Perhaps surprisingly, the benefits of low-dimensional structure starts to diminish once we have a non-linear manifold. These results indicate that diffusion models can benefit from structured data; however, the dependence on the specific type of structure is subtle and intricate.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

New Identity for Cayley's First Hyperdeterminant with Applications to Symmetric Tensors and Entanglement

作者:

arXiv:2512.03093v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this article, a new formula for computing Cayley's first hyperdeterminant in terms of the Levi-Civita symbol is given. It is then shown that this formula can be used to compute the hyperdeterminant of symmetric tensors in polynomial time with respect to their order (assuming fixed side length). Applications to quantifying the entanglement of states of bosonic quantum systems are then discussed. Additionally, in order to obtain the fast calculation of the hyperdeterminant on symmetric tensors, generalized elimination and duplication matrices are defined and their explicit formulas are derived.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Large audio language models (LALMs) have shown impressive capabilities on diverse audio understanding tasks, ranging from speech transcription to music analysis. However, because LALMs are typically trained to produce text-aligned responses, their hidden states are progressively shaped for text generation rather than for preserving acoustic information. As a result, the diverse acoustic content that audio carries, such as phonetic detail, prosody, sound events, affect, and pitch, is lost along the way and difficult to leverage in the response. We introduce Continuous Audio Thinking (CoAT), a framework that equips audio language models with a continuous latent workspace for organizing acoustic information prior to response generation, grounded by distillation from audio experts. Within the thinking space, the model can utilize the rich acoustic information provided by expert distillation when generating its response. Furthermore, the proposed continuous thinking block can be processed in a single prefill, so CoAT does not require additional autoregressive decoding cost over the baseline. Across three LALMs, Qwen2-Audio, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B, and Audio Flamingo~3, performance gains on a broad benchmark suite spanning audio reasoning, audio understanding, music classification, speech emotion, and speech transcription demonstrate the effectiveness of CoAT. Further analysis confirms that the auxiliary supervision propagates from the thinking positions to the model's textual responses.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Would a Large Language Model Pay Extra for a View? Inferring Willingness to Pay from Subjective Choices

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as travel assistance and purchasing support, they are often required to make subjective choices on behalf of users in settings where no objectively correct answer exists. We study LLM decision-making in a travel-assistant context by presenting models with choice dilemmas and analyzing their responses using multinomial logit models to derive implied willingness to pay (WTP) estimates. These WTP values are subsequently compared to human benchmark values from the economics literature. In addition to a baseline setting, we examine how model behavior changes under more realistic conditions, including the provision of information about users' past choices and persona-based prompting. Our results show that while meaningful WTP values can be derived for larger LLMs, they also display systematic deviations at the attribute level. Additionally, they tend to overestimate human WTP overall, particularly when expensive options or business-oriented personas are introduced. Conditioning models on prior preferences for cheaper options yields valuations that are closer to human benchmarks. Overall, our findings highlight both the potential and the limitations of using LLMs for subjective decision support and underscore the importance of careful model selection, prompt design, and user representation when deploying such systems in practice.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Aligning Human-AI-Interaction Trust for Mental Health Support: Survey and Position for Multi-Stakeholders

Building trustworthy AI systems for mental health support is a shared priority across stakeholders from multiple disciplines. However, "trustworthy" remains loosely defined and inconsistently operationalized. AI research often focuses on technical criteria (e.g., robustness, explainability, and safety), while therapeutic practitioners emphasize therapeutic fidelity (e.g., appropriateness, empathy, and long-term user outcomes). To bridge the fragmented landscape, we propose a three-layer trust framework, covering human-oriented, AI-oriented, and interaction-oriented trust, integrating the viewpoints of key stakeholders (e.g., practitioners, researchers, regulators). Using this framework, we systematically review existing AI-driven research in mental health domain and examine evaluation practices for ``trustworthy'' ranging from automatic metrics to clinically validated approaches. We highlight critical gaps between what NLP currently measures and what real-world mental health contexts require, and outline a research agenda for building socio-technically aligned and genuinely trustworthy AI for mental health support.

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

Complete entanglement detection using polynomial invariants

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

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantum-Driven Neuromorphic Computing for Million-Qubit-Scale Workloads

arXiv:2606.12968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce Apollo, a 10000 node p-qubit neuromorphic processor fabricated in 16 nm mixed signal CMOS and operating fully at room temperature with a typical analog core power envelope of about 0.5 W. Its fundamental element, the p-qubit, is a bistable stochastic unit whose continuous time state fluctuations are driven by integrated quantum entropy units that inject true quantum derived randomness. This enables ultrafast stochastic transitions at low energy while preserving a classical state representation. Apollo combines these p-qubits with a high degree Hyperion 256 interconnect topology, allowing efficient embedding of dense Ising and QUBO problems with substantially reduced minor embedding overhead compared with sparse annealing platforms. We show that, through the Suzuki Trotter correspondence, the equilibrium statistics and annealing dynamics of the p-qubit network reproduce key properties of transverse field quantum annealing without cryogenic cooling, long lived coherence, or microwave control. Beyond device level validation, Apollo is evaluated on a three dimensional spin glass benchmark previously used to study quantum advantage in superconducting annealers. Across 300 disorder realizations, Apollo reaches substantially lower ground state energies than reported cryogenic quantum annealing hardware, while remaining distinct from classical simulated annealing and simulated quantum annealing. A 350 nm release candidate device experimentally validates the core p-qubit dynamics, thermodynamic sampling correctness, and continuous time annealing behavior. These results establish Apollo as a room temperature, industrially scalable platform for quantum driven energy based optimization, probabilistic inference, generative modeling, and hybrid classical quantum workflows.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Latent Geometric Chords for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks

While decision-based black-box adversarial attacks present a severe security threat, current methodologies suffer from fundamental limitations. Pixel-wise attacks frequently introduce unnatural, high-frequency visual artifacts, while latent-space frameworks are confined by the limited search space of low-dimensional manifolds and inherent reconstruction flaws. To resolve these limitations, we propose Latent Geometric Chords (LGC) for Query-Efficient Decision-Based Adversarial Attacks alongside a variant, LGC-H. At its core, LGC navigates decision boundaries by executing a curvature-aware geometric search within a compressed semantic manifold. To guarantee high visual fidelity and circumvent dimensionality bottlenecks, we introduce a Residual-based Adversarial Generation (RAG) mechanism. RAG isolates semantic perturbations as geometric chords and superimposes them directly onto the original source image. RAG substantially resolves baseline reconstruction flaws and effectively doubles the permissible search space dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that LGC achieves robust cross-dataset transferability and substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, our method, LGC, minimizes perturbation magnitudes while achieving state-of-the-art visual fidelity–with a Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) exceeding 0.99 and a Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) below 0.01 at 5000 queries–and sustaining high attack success rates under stringent perceptual constraints, successfully compromising adversarially trained robust models. The source code is available at: https://github.com/eihmuekhine/Latent-Geometric-Chords.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Epistemic Constitutionalism Or: how to avoid coherence bias

作者:

Large language models increasingly function as artificial reasoners: they evaluate arguments, assign credibility, and express confidence. Yet their belief-forming behavior is governed by implicit, uninspected epistemic policies. This paper argues for an epistemic constitution for AI: explicit, contestable meta-norms that regulate how systems form and express beliefs. Source attribution bias provides the motivating case: I show that frontier models enforce identity-stance coherence, penalizing arguments attributed to sources whose expected ideological position conflicts with the argument's content. When models detect systematic testing, these effects collapse, revealing that systems treat source-sensitivity as bias to suppress rather than as a capacity to execute well. I distinguish two constitutional approaches: the Platonic, which mandates formal correctness and default source-independence from a privileged standpoint, and the Liberal, which refuses such privilege, specifying procedural norms that protect conditions for collective inquiry while allowing principled source-attending grounded in epistemic vigilance. I argue for the Liberal approach, sketch a constitutional core of eight principles and four orientations, and propose that AI epistemic governance requires the same explicit, contestable structure we now expect for AI ethics.

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

Weibull Weight-Scale Parameter Evolution under AdamW Training Dynamics

作者:

arXiv:2606.19367v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building on a two-parameter Weibull framework for diagnosing transformer weight distributions, we study why the Weibull weight-scale parameter $\lambda$ grows, overshoots, and then relaxes during AdamW training. We derive a leading-order three-force decomposition of the squared weight norm from the AdamW update: an alignment force measuring the correlation between weights and the adaptive update direction, an injection force from adaptive step magnitude, and a decay force from decoupled weight decay. On self-trained Pythia-70M models with ground-truth optimizer moments, alignment dominates the rise phase, contributing 88-94% of the absolute force budget across four random seeds and remaining robust to super-weight removal. Near saturation, alignment and decay approach balance, explaining the transition from weight-scale growth to relaxation. These force dynamics directly govern the squared-norm component underlying $\lambda(t)$; the remaining RMS-to-Weibull reconstruction offset is measurable and decomposes into bridge and integration components, totaling approximately 5-6% in densely sampled regions. To extend the analysis to real models where optimizer moments are unavailable, we introduce a spline displacement method that recovers the alignment force from sparse checkpoints with approximately 92-94% accuracy, about twice the naive two-point baseline. We further observe that the peak value of $\lambda(t)$ varies with training-data coherence in our experiments, suggesting a data-dependent component of weight-scale growth that we leave to a controlled follow-up study. Code and data are available at https://github.com/tiexinding/NPM-Weibull-public.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Planning with Unified Multimodal Models

With the powerful reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs), many recent works have explored using them for decision-making. However, most of these approaches rely solely on language-based reasoning, which limits their ability to reason and make informed decisions. Recently, a promising new direction has emerged with unified multimodal models (UMMs), which support both multimodal inputs and outputs. We believe such models have greater potential for decision-making by enabling reasoning through generated visual content. To this end, we propose Uni-Plan, a planning framework built on UMMs. Within this framework, a single model simultaneously serves as the policy, dynamics model, and value function. In addition, to avoid hallucinations in dynamics predictions, we present a novel approach self-discriminated filtering, where the generative model serves as a self-discriminator to filter out invalid dynamics predictions. Experiments on embodied decision-making tasks show that Uni-Plan substantially improves success rates compared to VLM-based methods, while also showing strong data scalability, requiring no expert demonstrations and achieving better performance under the same training-data size. This work lays a foundation for future research in reasoning and decision-making with UMMs.

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

Active Learning with Low-Rank Structure for Data Selection

arXiv:2606.16045v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the data selection problem, the objective is to choose a small, representative subset of data that can be used to efficiently train a machine learning model. Sener and Savarese [ICLR 2018] showed that, given an embedding representation of the data and suitable geometric assumptions, heuristics based on $k$-center clustering can be used to perform data selection. This perspective was further explored by Axiotis et. al. [ICML 2024], who proposed a data selection approach based on $k$-means clustering and sensitivity sampling. However, these methods rely on the assumption that the dataset exhibits intrinsic geometric structure that can be effectively captured by clustering, whereas many modern datasets instead possess global algebraic structure that is better exploited by low-rank approximation or principal component analysis. In this paper, we introduce a new data selection framework based on low-rank approximation and residual-based sampling, formulated through the lens of row subset selection and loss-preserving coreset construction. Given an embedding representation of the data satisfying mild regularity conditions, which can be interpreted as algebraic or angular notions of Lipschitz continuity, we show that it is possible to select a weighted subset of $\tilde{O}\left(k + \frac{1}{\varepsilon^2}\right)$ data points whose average loss approximates the average loss over the full dataset within a $(1+\varepsilon)$ relative error, up to an additive $\varepsilon \Phi_k$ term, where $\Phi_k$ denotes the optimal rank-$k$ approximation cost of the embedding matrix. We complement these theoretical guarantees with empirical evaluations, demonstrating that on a range of real-world datasets, our data selection approach achieves improved performance over prior strategies based on uniform sampling or clustering-based sensitivity sampling.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Generalization in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation

Fetal brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for studying neurodevelopment, but remains challenging due to data heterogeneity and limited annotations. Domain randomization (DR) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for single-source domain generalization by synthesizing training images with randomized artifacts, contrast, and resolution. In this work, we investigate how to maximize the out-of-domain (OOD) generalization of DR-based methods. We evaluate several synthetic data generation strategies for DR, with a particular focus on our recently proposed framework, FetalSynthSeg. We show that simple Gaussian mixture-based intensity modeling outperforms more complex physics-based simulations, and that intensity clustering (subdividing tissue classes based on intensity) improves OOD robustness. Evaluated on 348 fetal subjects from four sites spanning 0.55-3T and both T1w and T2w contrasts, FetalSynthSeg reaches state-of-the-art performance on several FeTA 2024 testing datasets (80-85 Dice score) and, for the first time, offers robust segmentation on modalities other than T2w for fetal brain segmentation (80 Dice on dHCP-T1w dataset). Compared with state-of-the-art methods such as BOUNTI, nnU-Net ensemble, and the FeTA 2024 winner, FetalSynthSeg delivers comparable or superior accuracy while maintaining strong robustness across domain shifts. Our code, model weights, and Docker image ready for easy inference are available at https://hub.docker.com/r/vzalevskyi/fetalsynthseg.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

What Does It Mean to Break a Distillation Defense?

arXiv:2606.25059v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Black-box LLMs (accessible only via API) are vulnerable to distillation attacks, in which an attacker queries the model and trains a student on its outputs. A recent line of work proposes output perturbation defenses that modify the teacher's output to reduce student performance while preserving utility for legitimate users. As a relatively new family of approaches, output perturbation defenses lack a shared threat model, making it difficult to compare them, reason about composing them with other attacks, or evaluate their robustness against realistic adversaries. This underspecification matters beyond technical evaluation: when defenses are deployed to protect intellectual property or justify regulatory compliance, an imprecise threat model can create a false sense of security. We propose a threat model framework that describes attackers along three dimensions: a query budget, a data budget, and an interface profile that captures how attackers interact with the API. Using antidistillation sampling as a case study, we show that whether the defense is considered effective depends on the assumed threat model. We argue that future work on distillation defenses, along with any governance or policy frameworks built around them, should explicitly specify and stress-test attacker capabilities along our three dimensions.

15.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Targeting Cancer-Specific Mutations with RNA-Triggered Chromatin Shredding

作者:

Genetic mutations that drive cancer often occur in tumor suppressor proteins, including the p53 transcription factor which is altered in ~40-50% of cases1,2. However, current therapies fail to target most such mutations because the mutant proteins typically lack defined drug-binding pockets, and restoring the endogenous function has proven challenging. Here, we programmed CRISPR-Cas12a2, an RNA-guided nuclease with trans-nucleolytic cleavage activities3,4, to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting cancer-specific transcripts. This approach limits cell growth by inducing trans shredding of chromatin, triggering DNA damage responses and cell death. Unlike existing methods, RNA-guided Cas12a2 senses cellular RNA signatures, enabling precise targeting of undruggable mutations. Transcript-activated chromatin shredding provides a new approach to precision disease treatments for undruggable targets.

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

Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation in LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct: A Mechanistic Interpretability Audit of Ethical Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Behavioral audits of Large Language Models on moral prompts measure what the model says, not the internal computation producing it. We use Transluce, an AI-driven mechanistic-interpretability platform, to examine LLaMA 3.1-8B-Instruct on 54 moral prompts in four batteries: 17 dilemmas, policy, and meta-ethical questions (B1); 6 role-playing scenarios (B3); and a controlled trolley contrast varying the switching mechanism with people fixed (B4, 15 prompts) or identity attributes with mechanism fixed (B5, 16 prompts). Two complementary metric families, five cluster-level metrics and a six-metric neuron-level panel, converge on a Situational Anchor Effect: domain-specific representations dominate the top of the activation list across every battery. The model's ethics-labeled capacity stays essentially constant; its salience (rank, priority, top-of-list presence) is highly sensitive to the interpretive frame the prompt selects. The B4-vs-B5 contrast confirms the model attends to whichever surface feature varies: aggregate ethics metrics are indistinguishable, but the dominant non-ethics distractor mirrors the design. A multi-temperature audit identifies a candidate ethics neuron (L16/N3837) stable across temperatures; a cross-model behavioral proxy on two frontier models yields preliminary evidence of divergence in self-reported moral focus, consistent with an Alignment Wrapper in which RLHF re-orders surface text without removing underlying domain-first frames. We unify these as Frame-Conditioned Moral Computation: the prompt's surface vocabulary selects a feature manifold, and the moral conclusion is downstream of that selection. Behavioral alignment must be supplemented by Mechanistic Alignment: a research program asking whether ethics-related features can be shown causally privileged under controlled frame variation, not merely loud in the explanation.

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

Scale Buys Interpolation, Structure Buys a Horizon: Certified Predictability for Equivariant World Models

作者:

arXiv:2606.13092v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Scale buys interpolation; structure buys a certified horizon. A world model's average error says nothing about whether a particular prediction can be trusted, or for how long. For equivariant latent world models we give a computable, multi-step certificate of the predictable horizon: $T$-step rollout error is provably constant over each symmetry orbit (Theorem A) and stratified channel-by-channel by the predictor's Lyapunov spectrum, $T_j(\epsilon)\sim\log(1/\epsilon)/\lambda_j$. The horizon is two-sided – a matching lower bound makes approximate equivariance provably horizon-limited – and the certificate is exclusive to structure: orbit-constant error characterizes equivariance, so no non-equivariant model has it at any scale. Empirically, on 40-D Lorenz-96 only a $\mathbb{Z}_N$-equivariant network recovers the full Lyapunov spectrum ($R^2{=}0.98$); dense and recurrent baselines fail. Because the spectrum is faithful, the certificate acts, a priori: under a fixed sensing budget a $c\times$-inflated certificate provably needs $c\times$ the budget, and the equivariant certificate meets a budget its inflated dense counterpart cannot – with zero calibration data. The same read-out, unchanged, audits public pretrained world models training-free: TD-MPC2 checkpoints land on the certificate's own scope taxonomy – calibrated where strongly expansive (ratio 0.94-1.02), optimistic where weakly expansive, correctly abstaining where contracting – a map a deployed monitor replicates cell-by-cell, out-of-sample. Across the official 1M-317M multitask ladder, calibration does not improve with parameters. On V-JEPA 2-AC (1B, real robot data) the measured cross-check correctly overrides an over-promising tangent spectrum – the cross-validated audit, not the raw number, is the deployable object. Scale buys interpolation, not a calibrated horizon.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

UniTeD: Unified Temporal Diffusion for Joint Perception and Planning in Autonomous Driving

Diffusion models have shown strong potential for multi-modal planning in end-to-end autonomous driving. However, most existing methods confine diffusion to the planning module, conditioning on fixed outputs from separate discriminative perception networks. This decoupled design propagates perception errors to the planner, increasing optimization difficulty and reducing robustness. To overcome these limitations, we propose UniTeD, a Unified Temporal Diffusion framework that jointly models perception and planning through iterative denoising in a shared generative space. By enabling bidirectional information exchange, the framework facilitates mutual refinement between tasks and improves robustness via noise-conditioned multi-task training. We further extend this unified diffusion paradigm to a streaming setting by incorporating temporal context. A Temporal Transition Module (TTM) is introduced to resolve the noise-level mismatch between historical and current frames. In addition, we propose an Anchor Refresh Strategy (ARS) to alleviate the training-inference distribution shift commonly observed in sparse diffusion-based end-to-end driving frameworks. Without bells and whistles, UniTeD achieves state-of-the-art performance across multiple benchmarks, surpassing both recent discriminative end-to-end methods and diffusion-based planning approaches.

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-09

Prediction of hospitalisation in young children with pneumonia in Malawi: A machine learning-based approach

by Patrick Staunton, Mohammad Adib Makrooni, Master Chisale, Billy Nyambolo, Joseph Wu, Damien McCarthy, Mark Ledwidge, Yasir Bin Nisar, Chris Watson, Balwani Mbakaya, Cathal Seoighe, Joe Gallagher Background Globally, pneumonia remains the single biggest cause of mortality in children under 5 years of age. This study sought to train and test a prediction model for hospitalisation within 7 days after initial presentation in 2- to 59-month-old Malawian children with WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care and compare its performance to existing risk prediction models. Methods and findings BIOTOPE is a cohort study of children with pneumonia in a primary healthcare setting in Malawi. The training cohort involved nine primary care centres and the testing cohort involved two primary care centres in Northern Malawi. The training cohort was recruited between December 2022 and April 2023 while the testing cohort was recruited in 2016. Participants were consecutive children aged 2–59 months presenting with cough and/or difficulty breathing and who were diagnosed as WHO-defined pneumonia in primary care of any severity. The training cohort was used to train and validate a machine learning model with a prespecified primary outcome defined as hospitalisation and/or death within 7 days as the outcome. This model was then further evaluated in the testing cohort.Median age was 15 months (interquartile range 8−27) in the training and 17 months (interquartile range 9−29) in the external testing cohort (52.1% and 54.4% male, respectively). Hospitalisation occurred in 14.3% (294) of the training cohort and 12.1% (55) of the testing cohort. There was one death in the training cohort only. WHO danger signs were present in 17.6% (360) and 15.9% (70) of children in the training and testing cohorts, respectively. The optimal machine learning model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic and precision recall curves of 0.87 and 0.57, respectively, in the testing cohort outperforming existing risk prediction models; furthermore, this model produced an expected calibration error of 0.16 (a logistic regression model using severity status as the response variable and the log odds of the machine learning model’s calibrated probabilities produced an intercept estimate of −0.32 and a slope estimate of 1.13). Key limitations include the use of hospitalisation and/or death as a severity outcome, which may reflect health system factors rather than true disease severity, that mortality-based comparisons were not possible due to low mortality in these primary care cohorts, and that comparator tools were developed for hospital populations rather than primary care populations. Conclusion This machine learning score outperformed traditional pneumonia risk scores in predicting hospitalisation within 7 days in Malawian children presenting to primary care. Traditional pneumonia risk scores diminish in performance when externally applied to new datasets suggesting they may not generalise well beyond their original derivation settings. Mortality-related findings are not applicable as there was only one death in this cohort. Overall these findings support the potential of machine learning to meaningfully improve early identification of children at risk of severe pneumonia in low-resource primary care settings. Further external validation and clinical impact studies are needed to confirm these results.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Teleportation-based quantum state tomography

arXiv:2511.18621v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We explicitly show that the quantum teleportation protocol can be employed to completely reconstruct arbitrary two- and three-qubit density matrices. We also extend the present analysis to n-qubit density matrices. The only quantum resources needed to implement the teleportation-based quantum state tomography protocol are the ability to make Bell measurements and the ability to prepare a few different single qubit states to be teleported from Alice to Bob.

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

You Don't Need Strong Assumptions: Visual Representation Learning via Temporal Differences

Progress in AI has largely been driven by methods that assume less. As compute and data increase, approaches with weaker inductive biases generally outperform those with stronger assumptions. This is particularly characteristic of the field of Visual Representation Learning, where approaches have gone from being dominated by Supervised Learning, to Weakly Supervised Learning, to the now widespread success of Self-Supervised Learning without human labels. Yet, even modern Self-Supervised Learning approaches still depend on strong inductive biases such as augmentations, masking, or cropping. If this trend holds, even these remaining biases should become bottlenecks at scale – and our experiments confirm this: the optimal strength of inductive biases decreases as data grows. This motivates the search for approaches that rely on fewer assumptions. To this end, we introduce Temporal Difference in Vision (TDV), a new paradigm for self-supervised learning from video that avoids existing inductive biases, relying instead on a causal assumption that the past causes the future. TDV functions by jointly training an image encoder and a motion encoder so that the current frame's representation plus the encoded motion equals the next frame's representation. Despite not leveraging any strong inductive biases, TDV matches state-of-the-art recipes on dense spatial tasks, laying the foundation for representation learning without strong assumptions.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The Dark Regulome: Disentangling Predictability from Regulation in Genomic Foundation Models

High-grade gliomas integrate into neural circuits through functional synapses with neurons, raising the question of which noncoding elements shape synaptogenic gene expression in tumor cells. The regulatory program written across the dark genome, what we call the $dark regulome$, is the natural substrate to probe, and sequence foundation models offer a zero-shot route through in-silico mutagenesis (ISM); yet likelihood-based scoring is tautologically coupled to local sequence predictability, leaving the regulatory interpretation underdetermined. Across three architecturally distinct foundation models (Caduceus-Ph, HyenaDNA, Enformer) and 30,448 dark genome elements at 92 glioma-relevant loci, we introduce a residualization-and-permutation diagnostic that separates predictability-driven from regulation-driven RIS variance. A sharp 10kb proximal-regulatory horizon survives every control we apply, but the LM-derived element-class hierarchy does not: a six-feature linear baseline matches Caduceus top-decile membership at AUC $= 0.985$. Cross-architecture decomposition cleanly separates a sequence-predictability layer (the two language models co-rank long well-predicted transposable elements) from a regulatory-output layer (Enformer alone retains residual cCRE-discriminative signal), with literally zero overlap between the two top-100 lists. Conservation, brain cis-eQTL, and STRING-PPI cross-checks then anchor what biology survives: top-100 elements across all three models are $3.3\times$ enriched per model for matching brain eQTLs ($p_\mathrm{emp} < 5\times 10^{-3}$), while a tempting transposable-element regulatory layer and a striking NRXN1+NLGN1 protein-pair convergence both fail proper permutation tests once those tests are constructed. We deliver the diagnostic as a general methodological tool for any ISM-based regulatory study.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

A Quantitative Analysis of Multimodal Biomarkers in Alzheimer's Disease

Despite increasing adoption of multimodal approaches in Alzheimer's Disease (AD) research – aimed at integrating molecular, structural, clinical, and genetic biomarkers to enhance disease characterization – the relationships among these modalities remain poorly understood. A systematic analysis of their dynamic interaction is essential for improving disease modeling, identifying redundant assessments, and reducing patient burden and acquisition costs. In this paper, we present a quantitative analysis of multimodal AD biomarkers by integrating tau-PET, structural MRI, cognitive scores (MMSE and CDR), and APOE4 data from 789 subjects drawn from the ADNI dataset. In our analyses, we (A) quantify cross-modal mutual information and explained variance to assess redundancy and predictive dependencies; (B) examine associations between tau topologies and structural atrophy across brain regions to select informative ROIs; (C) perform a statistical decomposition of the tau-cognition association into atrophy-related and atrophy-independent components; (D) and identify a dominant neurodegenerative trajectory that aligns with cognitive decline. This study provides a systematic characterization of cross-modal relationships, improving the interpretability and selection of biomarkers in AD. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/antonioscardace/Multimodal-AD.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

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

Task Decomposition for Efficient Annotation

High-quality annotations of structured representations are expensive to collect over large corpora. Manual annotation of structure is laborious, and model-based annotation, although cheaper to generate, requires expensive validation and potentially significant supervision to ensure that the annotation quality is strong enough to be useful downstream. In traditional annotation workflows, annotation of each complete example is performed end-to-end by a single annotator. However, structured annotation is complex, and each aspect of the task represents a unique challenge with an associated inferential load for a given annotator. Modern annotation projects can incorporate heterogeneous groups of annotators, including both models and human annotators with varying domain and linguistic expertise. It remains unclear, however, how to redesign annotation tasks in this setting, where efforts are discriminately allocated across heterogeneous annotators with respect to distinct annotation challenges. We propose to decompose annotation tasks into sub-tasks in order to reduce the aggregate inferential load of annotation projects. Inspired by the notion of centers from centering theory, we introduce a formal model of inferential load based on the degrees of freedom in the space of valid annotations. Using this model, we show that identifying these centers (i.e. salient anchor entities realized by annotation sub-tasks) constrains the output space complexity, and decompositions which isolate and advance center identification reduce the aggregate inferential load. We provide guidelines for decomposing complex structured annotation tasks, supported by examples demonstrating improved cost-efficiency from our prior work. Finally, we present a procedure for allocating sub-tasks across annotators to maximize quality under a fixed budget.