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

Weight Space Representation Learning via Neural Field Adaptation

arXiv:2512.01759v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate the potential of weights to serve as effective representations, focusing on neural fields. Our key insight is that constraining the optimization space through a pre-trained base model and low-rank adaptation (LoRA) can induce structure in weight space. Across reconstruction, generation, and analysis tasks on 2D and 3D data, we find that multiplicative LoRA weights achieve high representation quality while exhibiting distinctiveness and semantic structure. When used with latent diffusion models, multiplicative LoRA weights enable higher-quality generation than existing weight-space methods.

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

A Benchmark of State-Space Models vs. Transformers and BiLSTM-based Models for Historical Newspaper OCR

End-to-end OCR for historical newspapers remains challenging, as models must handle long text sequences, degraded print quality, and complex layouts. While Transformer-based recognizers dominate current research, their quadratic complexity limits efficient paragraph-level transcription and large-scale deployment. We investigate linear-time State-Space Models (SSMs), specifically Mamba, as a scalable alternative to Transformer-based sequence modeling for OCR. We present to our knowledge, the first OCR architecture based on SSMs, combining a CNN visual encoder with bi-directional and autoregressive Mamba sequence modeling, and conduct a large-scale benchmark comparing SSMs with Transformer- and BiLSTM-based recognizers. Multiple decoding strategies (CTC, autoregressive, and non-autoregressive) are evaluated under identical training conditions alongside strong neural baselines (VAN, DAN, DANIEL) and widely used off-the-shelf OCR engines (PERO-OCR, Tesseract OCR, TrOCR, Gemini). Experiments on historical newspapers from the Bibliotheque nationale du Luxembourg, with newly released >99% verified gold-standard annotations, and cross-dataset tests on Fraktur and Antiqua lines, show that all neural models achieve low error rates (~2% CER), making computational efficiency the main differentiator. Mamba-based models maintain competitive accuracy while halving inference time and exhibiting superior memory scaling (1.26x vs 2.30x growth at 1000 chars), reaching 6.07% CER at the severely degraded paragraph level compared to 5.24% for DAN, while remaining 2.05x faster. We release code, trained models, and standardized evaluation protocols to enable reproducible research and guide practitioners in large-scale cultural heritage OCR available at https://github.com/MarcoPerson/ssm-ocr-benchmark.

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

Morpheus: A Morphology-Aware Neural Tokenizer and Word Embedder for Turkish

Turkish is agglutinative: meaning is carried by morphemes, yet the subword tokenizers that drive modern language models split words by corpus statistics, fragmenting semantically loaded suffixes and – in the case of WordPiece and rule-based analyzers – failing to decode their output back to the original text. This paper presents Morpheus, a neural morpheme-boundary model for Turkish that is at once a lossless, morphology-aware tokenizer and a word-embedding producer. A differentiable Poisson-binomial dynamic program turns per-character boundary probabilities into soft morpheme memberships during training and exact segments at inference, with no string normalization, so $\mathrm{decode}(\mathrm{encode}(w)) = w$ holds by construction. Because the model is neural, the same forward pass that tokenizes also emits a structured word embedding. Among reversible tokenizers – the only ones valid for generation – Morpheus attains the lowest bits-per-character ($1.425$), roughly doubles the gold morphological alignment of the subword family (MorphScore macro-F1 $0.61$ vs.\ ${\sim}0.32$), and uses ${\sim}19\%$ less GPU memory than 64K-vocabulary subword tokenizers. As an embedder, frozen Morpheus vectors lead on lexical retrieval (root-family MAP $0.85$) and same-root verification (ROC-AUC $1.00$), surpassing the multilingual retriever BGE-M3 and BERTurk; on context- and inflection-dependent tasks (NER, case/number probing) the heavier contextual encoders remain ahead – a trade-off we attribute to Morpheus's root-centric geometry. Code: https://github.com/lonewolf-rd/TurkishMorpheus; model: https://huggingface.co/lonewolflab/Morpheus-TR-50K; interactive demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/lonewolflab/morpheus-tr-demo.

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

Non-Autoregressive Minimum Bayes' Risk Decoding for Fast Speech Recognition

Non-autoregressive (NAR) decoding generates output tokens in parallel, making speech recognition faster than autoregressive decoding, which generates them sequentially from left to right. However, the recognition performance is degraded because NAR decoding cannot resolve uncertainty by conditioning on previously generated tokens. To address this issue, we propose a novel NAR decoding framework based on minimum Bayes' risk (MBR) decoding, termed NAR-MBR decoding, that maximizes the expected utility calculated from samples drawn from the output probability of an NAR model rather than maximizing the output probability. Notably, by leveraging the nature of NAR models, multiple samples are obtained efficiently with a single forward computation. Our experiments across LibriSpeech, Switchboard, AMI, and web presentation corpus demonstrated that our NAR-MBR decoding outperformed previous NAR decoding and ran faster than AR decoding.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SwitchBraidNet: Quantisation-Aware Lightweight Architecture for Hybrid Brain-Computer Interface

arXiv:2606.18816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hybrid brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that integrate motor imagery (MI) and steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) provide high-dimensional neural decoding but typically exceed the computational limits of embedded hardware. To address this, we propose SwitchBraidNet, a compact EEG classification architecture designed for low-power deployment. The model employs a dual-path temporal braid to extract multiscale oscillatory features, an adaptive squeeze-and-excitation spatial switch for electrode gating, and a log-variance readout layer for direct band-power encoding. Furthermore, through systematic quantisation-aware training on the OpenBMI dataset, we compared SwitchBraidNet against four established baselines across FP32, FP16, and INT8 precisions. Experimental results demonstrate superior efficiency and performance, achieving MI accuracy of 69.49% (FP16), SSVEP accuracy of 93.48% (FP32), and a hybrid information transfer rate of 64.82 bits/min (FP16). With an INT8 footprint of only 3.03 KB, SwitchBraidNet maintains high accuracy across varying numerical precisions, demonstrating its suitability for low-power embedded BCI deployment.

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

SEDULity: A Proof-of-Learning Framework for Distributed and Secure Blockchains with Efficient Useful Work

arXiv:2512.13666v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The security and decentralization of Proof-of-Work (PoW) have been well-tested in existing blockchain systems. However, its tremendous energy waste has raised concerns about sustainability. Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) aims to redirect the meaningless computation to meaningful tasks such as solving machine learning (ML) problems, giving rise to the branch of Proof-of-Learning (PoL). While previous studies have proposed various PoLs, they all, to some degree, suffer from security, decentralization, or efficiency issues. In this paper, we propose a PoL framework that trains ML models efficiently while maintaining blockchain security in a fully distributed manner. We name the framework SEDULity, which stands for a Secure, Efficient, Distributed, and Useful Learning-based blockchain system. Specifically, we encode the template block into the training process and design a useful function that is difficult to solve but relatively easy to verify, as a substitute for the PoW puzzle. We show that our framework is distributed, secure, and efficiently trains ML models. We further demonstrate that the proposed PoL framework can be extended to other types of useful work and design an incentive mechanism to incentivize task verification. We show theoretically that a rational miner is incentivized to train fully honestly with well-designed system parameters. Finally, we present simulation results to demonstrate the performance of our framework and validate our analysis.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Reinforcement Learning-Guided Retrieval with Soft Fusion for Robust Multimodal Imitation Learning under Missing Modalities

arXiv:2606.15514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems perceive the world through multiple input modalities – including visual camera streams and natural language instructions – and must select appropriate actions based on these signals. However, assuming the permanent availability of all input devices is unrealistic, as sensors may fail, become occluded, or drop out entirely during deployment. Robust handling of such missing-modality scenarios is therefore essential for real-world robot operation. This paper introduces RL4IL, a reinforcement learning guided method for imitation learning that selects the most suitable action for a given observation by identifying the most relevant expert demonstrations from a training library. A reinforcement learning policy, trained via Proximal Policy Optimisation over Breadth-First Search candidate sets, ranks candidate demonstrations and a soft cross-attention fusion head aggregates their action signals to produce the final prediction. When a modality is missing at inference time, a dedicated per-modality RL retrieval policy identifies donor demonstrations from the training library, and a soft imputation head reconstructs the missing embedding via cross-attention over the top-ranked donors – without requiring any retraining of the system. Experiments on three LIBERO benchmark suites demonstrate that RL4IL substantially outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning methods under sensor dropout conditions, while requiring no policy network training. The code can be found at https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Reinforcement-Learning-via-kNN-for-Robotic-Learning-with-Missing-Camera

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

AgentArmor: A Framework, Evaluation, \& Mitigation of Coding Agent Failures

arXiv:2606.19380v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Software engineering and deployment are increasingly being delegated to AI coding agents. The scale of their adoption is surfacing rare, but highly destructive, failure modes. In this paper, we study these failure modes as stemming from three distinct mechanisms: underspecification, where default model behavior is unsafe; capability errors, where the safe action is available but the model does not adhere to it due to bias or capability limitations; and agent harness errors, where the model fails to execute the safe action through the harness. We evaluate these across 8 different evaluations, each inspired by real-life deployment failures, totaling 20 coding environments and 59 synthetic transcript templates. Based on this evaluation, we propose AgentArmor, an agent harness modification, to mitigate these errors. By adding an extended system prompt, a separate command classifier, a ``3 strikes'' policy, deterministic guardrails, and tools for the agent to edit its own context, we show that AgentArmor is safer across a statistically significant number of samples. Thus, we suggest concrete mitigations for current coding agents and a design philosophy for future agent harness features.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Show, Don't Ask: Generative Visual Disambiguation for Composed Image Retrieval with Turn-Valid Coverage

Composed image retrieval (CIR) uses a reference image and a text modification to search for a target image. However, such queries often describe several possible images rather than one exact target, making the user's intent ambiguous. Recent methods address this by using conformal prediction to estimate ambiguity and by asking users clarifying text questions. However, these methods have two limitations: their coverage guarantee only holds at the first interaction, and text questions are often insufficient for resolving fine-grained visual differences such as appearance, attributes, or viewpoint. We propose CLARA, a clarification framework that resolves ambiguity by showing users a small panel of visual alternatives. Instead of answering text questions, the user simply selects the prototype image closest to the intended target. This provides a direct visual signal and avoids relying on a model to predict the user's answer. To maintain valid conformal guarantees across multiple interaction rounds, CLARA reweights calibration using the likelihood ratio induced by the user's selection. The displayed prototypes are also constrained to represent the current candidate set and are snapped to real corpus images, ensuring that generated images cannot artificially improve coverage. Experiments on open-domain and fashion benchmarks show that CLARA matches single-turn state-of-the-art retrieval performance, maintains nominal coverage across interaction rounds, and finds the intended target in fewer rounds than strong text-question baselines. Its advantage is especially clear when ambiguity involves viewpoint or fine-grained attributes, where visual clarification is more effective than textual questioning.

10.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Waning protection of long-acting RSV monoclonal antibodies in infants: a Bayesian analysis of clesrovimab and nirsevimab trial data

Clesrovimab and nirsevimab are long-acting monoclonal antibodies used to prevent respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) disease in infants, but waning protection in the first year of life is incompletely characterised. We applied a published Bayesian inference framework to clesrovimab and pooled nirsevimab trial data to estimate time-varying efficacy against medically attended RSV lower respiratory tract infection (LRTI) and RSV-associated hospitalisation, accounting for differences in placebo-arm event timing between trials. Estimated clesrovimab efficacy declined from 60.7% (95% CrI: 46.3-72.6) shortly after dosing to 38.3% (8.6-52.9) at six months against medically attended RSV LRTI, and from 87.1% (71.2-96.2) to 49.6% (10.4-70.7) against RSV-associated hospitalisation. For nirsevimab, corresponding estimates declined from 86.9% (75.4-95.0) to 53.8% (27.4-69.7) against LRTI, and from 77.5% (52.6-91.8) to 49.7% (15.7-68.3) against hospitalisation. After accounting for differences in RSV exposure timing and LRTI endpoint definitions between trials, we found no evidence of a difference in efficacy or waning between clesrovimab and nirsevimab.

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

Neural Slack Variables for Shape Constraints

arXiv:2606.13803v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enforcing functional inequality constraints such as monotonicity and convexity in neural networks is a fundamental challenge in many industrial and scientific applications. Classical one-sided penalty methods, along with primal-dual methods gated by complementary slackness, provide constraint gradients only at violated locations, resulting in fragile satisfaction. Architectures that guarantee feasibility by construction, on the other hand, remain largely limited to elementary cases and impose additional inductive biases. We introduce neural slack variables, a deep learning native primal-side approach that converts constraint enforcement into a regression problem by coupling the primary network with a jointly learned auxiliary network. The auxiliary network serves as a valid target for the primary network's constraint quantities, inducing feasibility and regularity. Neural slack variables achieve zero measured violations on dense-grid monotonicity and convexity test cases, where penalty and primal-dual baselines leave residual violations, and enable arbitrage-free learning of volatility surfaces, an open industrial challenge in quantitative finance.

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

SSNAPS: Audio-Visual Separation of Speech and Background Noise with Diffusion Inverse Sampling

arXiv:2602.01394v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper addresses the challenge of audio-visual single-microphone speech separation and enhancement in the presence of real-world environmental noise. Our approach is based on generative inverse sampling, where we model clean speech and ambient noise with dedicated diffusion priors and jointly leverage them to recover all underlying sources. To achieve this, reformulate a recent inverse sampler to match our setting. We evaluate on mixtures of 1, 2, and 3 speakers with noise and show that, despite being entirely unsupervised, our method consistently outperforms leading supervised baselines in WER across all conditions. We further extend our framework to handle off-screen speaker separation. Moreover, the high fidelity of the separated noise component makes it suitable for downstream detection of the acoustic scene. Code and pretrained models will become available upon acceptance. Demo page: https://ssnaps2026.github.io/ssnaps2026/

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Efficient Online 3D Multi-Camera Multi-Object Tracking and Pose Estimation

This paper proposes a fast and online method for jointly performing 3D multi-object tracking and pose estimation using multiple monocular cameras. Our algorithm requires only 2D bounding box and pose detections, eliminating the need for costly 3D training data or computationally expensive deep learning models. Our solution is an efficient implementation of a Bayes-optimal multi-object tracking filter, enhancing computational efficiency while maintaining accuracy. We demonstrate that our algorithm is significantly faster than state-of-the-art methods without compromising accuracy, using only publicly available pre-trained 2D detection models. We also illustrate the robust performance of our algorithm in scenarios where multiple cameras are intermittently disconnected or reconnected during operation.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Private Learning with Public Feature Conditioning

arXiv:2606.18773v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study differentially private (DP) regression in settings where each data sample includes public, non-sensitive features – common in applications such as recommendation and advertising systems. While such label-DP or semi-sensitive-feature settings have been primarily explored in the context of classification, effective approaches for regression remain underexplored. We introduce Cond-DP, a conditioned variant of DPSGD that leverages the structure of public feature matrices to improve optimization under privacy constraints. Motivated by the observation that these public features often exhibit rapidly decaying spectra, Cond-DP incorporates a data-driven conditioning matrix to reshape the optimization landscape and accelerate convergence. We provide convergence guarantees for convex, strongly convex, and non-convex settings, and recover standard DPSGD as a special case when the conditioning matrix is the identity. We show how to construct an effective conditioning matrix for Cond-DP directly from public features, enabling provably faster convergence than DPSGD in private linear regression without incurring additional privacy cost. Empirically, Cond-DP with this conditioning matrix consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across a wide range of datasets and model architectures under label DP, demonstrating strong and robust performance in practice.

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

Relational Retrieval: Leveraging Known-Novel Interactions for Generalized Category Discovery

In this study, we tackle Generalized Category Discovery (GCD) via a Relational Retrieval perspective, explicitly coupling labeled and unlabeled data through bidirectional knowledge transfer. While existing methods treat these sources separately, missing valuable interaction opportunities, we propose Relational Pattern Consistency (RPC) that enables mutual enhancement. RPC employs One-vs-All classifiers for soft ID/OOD decomposition, then introduces two mechanisms: (i) for known-class preservation, we transfer semantic behavioral alignment; (ii) for category discovery, we leverage the insight that samples from the same category maintain invariant relationships with known-class prototypes, transforming unreliable pseudo-labeling into well-defined relational pattern matching. This bidirectional design allows labeled data to guide unlabeled learning while discovering novel categories through their collective relational signatures. Extensive experiments demonstrate RPC achieves state-of-the-art performance on both generic and fine-grained benchmarks.

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

Dual Cross-Attention Siamese Transformer for Rectal Tumor Regrowth Assessment in Watch-and-Wait Endoscopy

Increasing evidence supports watch-and-wait (WW) surveillance for patients with rectal cancer who show clinical complete response (cCR) at restaging following total neoadjuvant treatment (TNT). However, accurate methods to early detect local regrowth (LR) from follow-up endoscopy images during WW are essential to manage care and prevent distant metastases. Hence, we developed a Siamese Swin Transformer with Dual Cross-Attention (SSDCA) to combine longitudinal endoscopic images at restaging and follow-up and distinguish cCR from LR. SSDCA leverages pretrained Swin Transformers to extract domain agnostic features and enhance robustness to imaging variations. Dual cross attention is implemented to emphasize features from the paired scans without requiring any spatial alignment to predict response. SSDCA as well as Swin-based baselines were trained using image pairs from 135 patients and evaluated on a held-out set of image pairs from 62 patients. SSDCA produced the best balanced accuracy (81.76% $\pm$ 0.04), sensitivity (90.07% $\pm$ 0.08), and specificity (72.86% $\pm$ 0.05). Robustness analysis showed stable performance irrespective of artifacts including blood, stool, telangiectasia, and poor image quality. UMAP clustering of extracted features showed maximal inter-cluster separation (1.45 $\pm$ 0.18) and minimal intra-cluster dispersion (1.07 $\pm$ 0.19) with SSDCA, confirming discriminative representation learning. Code and weights available at: https://github.com/Jotanator/SSDCA

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

Resource-Efficient Variational Quantum Classifier

arXiv:2511.09204v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the unambiguous quantum classifier based on Hamming distance measurements combined with classical post-processing. The proposed approach improves classification performance through a more effective use of ansatz expressivity, while requiring significantly fewer circuit evaluations. Moreover, the method demonstrates enhanced robustness to noise, which is crucial for near-term quantum devices. We evaluate the proposed method on a breast cancer classification dataset. The unambiguous classifier achieves an average accuracy of 90%, corresponding to an improvement of 6.9 percentage points over the baseline, while requiring eight times fewer circuit executions per prediction. In the presence of noise, the improvement is reduced to approximately 3.1 percentage points, with the same reduction in execution cost. We substantiate our experimental results with theoretical evidence supporting the practical performance of the approach.

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

TokenMinds: Pretrained User Tokens and Embeddings for User Understanding in Large Recommender Systems

arXiv:2606.25147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: User modeling in industrial recommender systems typically produces dense embeddings, which suffer from representational constraints inherent to fixed-dimensional vectors. An emerging alternative for discrete user representation – using LLMs to generate text-based user tokens – captures topical co-occurrences rather than deep sequential behavior dynamics and produces outputs that are difficult to ground to item attributes. Meanwhile, Semantic ID (SID) based item tokenization has proven effective for improving generalization in generative recommendation, yet discrete SID-based representations for users remain largely unexplored. We propose TokenMinds, an industrial-scale system that extends the PLUM framework from item retrieval to user modeling, generating both discrete SID-based user tokens and dense user embeddings via an encoder-decoder architecture adapted from pre-trained LLMs. This dual-output design provides the complementary benefits of discrete, semantically grounded user representations while maintaining compatibility with existing downstream models that rely on dense embeddings. Additionally, the shared SID vocabulary naturally extends to cross-scenario modeling: by unifying long-form and short-form video behaviors into a single model, we substantially reduce training and serving costs. We validate TokenMinds through extensive offline experiments and live launches on multiple YouTube surfaces, served on full user traffic (billions of users) via an asynchronous infrastructure that decouples representation generation from downstream scoring. Focusing on ranking as the primary downstream use case, our results confirm the practical viability of SID-based user tokens at industrial scale and demonstrate that tokens and dense embeddings provide complementary value across different production ranking systems.

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

Incremental Residual Reinforcement Learning Toward Real-World Learning for Social Navigation

arXiv:2604.07945v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As the demand for mobile robots continues to increase, social navigation has emerged as a critical task, driving active research into deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. However, because pedestrian dynamics and social conventions vary widely across different regions, simulations cannot easily encompass all possible real-world scenarios. Real-world RL, in which agents learn while operating directly in physical environments, presents a promising solution to this issue. Nevertheless, this approach faces significant challenges, particularly regarding constrained computational resources on edge devices and learning efficiency. In this study, we propose incremental residual RL (IRRL). This method integrates incremental learning, which is a lightweight process that operates without a replay buffer or batch updates, with residual RL, which enhances learning efficiency by training only on the residuals relative to a base policy. Through the simulation experiments, we demonstrated that, despite lacking a replay buffer, IRRL achieved performance comparable to those of conventional replay buffer-based methods and outperformed existing incremental learning approaches. Furthermore, the real-world experiments confirmed that IRRL can enable robots to effectively adapt to previously unseen environments through the real-world learning.

20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-22

Differences in tuberculosis prevalence by sex in low- and middle-income countries over 1993–2025: A systematic review and meta-analysis

by Nicole A. Swartwood, Nanki Singh, Seyed Alireza Mortazavi, Melike Hazal Can, Hening Cui, Do Kyung Ryuk, Peter MacPherson, Katherine C. Horton, Nicolas A. Menzies Background Global and national initiatives to combat tuberculosis (TB) have expanded over recent years. Despite this, the TB burden remains high in some population groups, with men recognized as having elevated TB risks. Summary measures of sex differences in TB prevalence were last estimated in 2016. Since then, many additional prevalence surveys have been conducted, including in the highest TB burden countries. We conducted a systematic review of sex-stratified TB prevalence survey data published over 1993–2025, to provide updated estimates of male-to-female (M:F) TB prevalence ratios and determine whether sex-related disparities in TB burden have closed over time. Methods and findings We identified surveys reporting community-representative, sex-stratified estimates of pulmonary TB prevalence in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including surveys from an earlier review (covering January 1993–March 2016) and a new systematic review (covering 1st December 2015–13th October 2025). This review was prospectively registered with PROSPERO (CRD42024503853) and included searches of PubMed, Embase, Global Health, the Cochrane Library, Africa Index Medicus, LILACS, and SciELO. We extracted data on bacteriologically confirmed and smear-positive TB prevalence among adults (aged ≥ 15 years), stratified by sex. Risk of bias was evaluated using eight criteria specific to prevalence surveys. We fit multi-level Bayesian regression models with study- and country-level random effects to estimate the M:F ratio of TB prevalence (male prevalence divided by female prevalence), overall and for key subgroups. In meta-regression analyses, we estimated how prevalence ratios varied over time and according to known TB risk factors and TB case definitions.We identified 10,124 publications and extracted data from 100 eligible studies representing 102 unique prevalence surveys and 4,658,310 participants (45.6% male) in 33 LMICs. TB prevalence was higher in men than women in 90/102 of the included surveys, with a pooled M:F prevalence ratio of 2.02 (95% credible interval (CrI): 1.71, 2.34) for bacteriologically confirmed TB and 2.38 (95% CrI: 1.91, 2.90) for smear-positive TB. Time trend analyses showed a 2.0% (95% CrI: −0.2, 4.5%) average annual change in the M:F ratio of bacteriologically confirmed TB over the study period. The M:F prevalence ratio was estimated to be higher for countries with greater excess HIV prevalence among men, and countries with greater gender equity (as measured by the United Nation’s Gender Development Index). The estimated M:F prevalence ratio was also higher for surveys that did not restrict testing to individuals reporting TB symptoms. Study limitations include heterogeneity in survey methods and definitions, as well as limited data from the Americas, Eastern Mediterranean, and Europe WHO world regions and post-COVID-19 period. Conclusions Men in LMICs consistently experience TB at a higher prevalence than women. Time trend estimates are uncertain, but consistent with widening sex differences in TB prevalence over the last three decades, despite efforts to address the risk factors underlying this excess TB burden.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Neural Network Quantization by Learning Low-Loss Subspaces

Neural network quantization aims to find a discrete representation of parameters that preserves the performance of a full-precision (FP) model as faithfully as possible. Enforcing discrete constraints perturbs parameters away from a well-optimized minimum, generally resulting in performance degradation. Recent studies indicate that low-loss FP solutions are not isolated, but instead belong to connected low-loss subspaces of the loss landscape, where the loss maintains nearly the same minimum value. Models sampled from these subspaces are diverse and retain high accuracy. This raises the question: can a quantized model be constructed to lie within a low-loss subspace of the FP model, thereby automatically preserving performance? We address this question by learning quantization-aware linear paths in weight space optimized to minimize loss. We demonstrate that the midpoint of the resulting subspace is, by design, quantization-friendly and that its direct quantization yields performance comparable to that of quantization-aware training. The proposed procedure offers a novel perspective on weight quantization and, in contrast to conventional methods, neither relies on the straight-through estimator nor involves explicit discretization during training.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching

The explosive growth of user-generated video content on online platforms is accompanied by the emergence of numerous near-duplicate videos–videos that are identical or highly similar but differ by partial edits. These duplicates degrade user experience and increase storage and bandwidth costs, making large-scale video deduplication a critical task. Existing video deduplication frameworks face a fundamental challenge in retrieving sufficient high-quality candidates under a limited index budget, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and precision. To address these issues, we propose MLT-Dedup, an efficient large-scale online video deduplication framework with Multi-Level representations and spatial-Temporal matching. Our approach employs a Multi-Level Video Encoder (ML-VE) to extract both fine-grained frame-level and sparse clip-level embeddings: sparse embeddings support efficient candidate retrieval, while fine-grained embeddings are loaded for precise pairwise matching. During matching, we introduce DiF-SiM, a Differential Feature-enhanced Similarity Module capable of locating duplicated temporal segments and providing reliable similarity evidence to support policy-driven deduplication decisions. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale platform demonstrate that MLT-Dedup reduces online repetition rates by 91% at 90% precision. Furthermore, our sparse retrieval design achieves a 5x increase in indexing capacity, enabling broader candidate coverage in real-world deployment.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum simulation of the Liouville equation in classical mechanics with discontinuous potential via Schrödingerization

arXiv:2606.15066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop quantum simulation algorithms for the Liouville equation of classical mechanics with discontinuous potential. Such discontinuities represent potential barriers at which classical particles undergo energy preserving transmission or reflection, and the resulting interface conditions must be incorporated into the numerical flux. We combine Hamiltonian-preserving schemes by Jin and Wen in Commun. Math. Sci. 3(3), 285-315 (2005) with the Schrödingerization method, which embeds the resulting nonunitary semi-discrete dynamics into a unitary Schrödinger type system in one additional auxiliary variable [arXiv:2212.14703, arXiv:2212.13969]. For one-, two-, and $n$-dimensional problems with grid aligned interfaces, we construct sparse matrix representations of the transmission and reflection fluxes using step and hat functions, derive the corresponding Hamiltonians of the Schrödingerized systems, and analyze their sparse-access query complexity. In the sparse-access oracle model, the resulting algorithms have a polynomial dependence on the inverse accuracy and avoid the exponential dependence on the phase-space dimension suffered by classical grid based Hamiltonian-preserving schemes, up to the cost of implementing the oracles and the postselection overhead. We also describe the postselected recovery of the physical solution state and the quantum readout of macroscopic observables such as density and averaged velocity through overlap estimation. Numerical experiments based on classical simulation of the Schrödingerized dynamics validate the proposed formulation and illustrate the correct transmission/reflection behavior at potential barriers.

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

Flexible Catalysis

arXiv:2510.01065v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In quantum information and computation, a central challenge is to determine which quantum states can be transformed into which others under restricted sets of free operations. While many transformations are impossible directly, catalytic processes can enable otherwise forbidden conversions: an auxiliary quantum state (the catalyst) facilitates the transformation while remaining unchanged. In this work, we introduce flexible catalysis, a generalization in which the catalyst is allowed to transform into a different auxiliary state, provided it remains a valid catalyst. We show that this framework subsumes both standard catalytic and multicopy transformations, and we analyse its advantages across several classes of free operations. In particular, we prove that when the free operations are local unitaries or permutation matrices, flexible catalysis enables state extractions that are unattainable with standard catalysis alone.

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

Tabular Foundation Models for Clinical Survival Analysis via Survival-Aware Adaptation

arXiv:2606.12006v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicting time-to-event outcomes such as mortality is a fundamental task in clinical decision-making, commonly addressed through survival analysis. While classical statistical and deep learning approaches have been widely studied, they typically require task-specific training and sufficient labeled data. Recent advances in tabular foundation models offer a new paradigm by learning general-purpose representations for structured data. However, their applicability to censored time-to-event prediction in clinical settings remains underexplored, as typical applications are restricted to discrete classification rather than survival analysis tasks. In this work, we propose a lightweight adaptation approach for applying tabular foundation models to clinical survival analysis by directly training a survival-aware head on top of the pretrained representations. We study representative architectures, including TabPFN, TabDPT, and TabICL, and adapt them using a multi-task logistic regression (MTLR) head to model right-censored time-to-event outcomes. We evaluate this approach on a diverse set of public survival benchmarks and two large-scale ICU cohorts, MIMIC-IV and eICU. Our results show that this transfer learning approach achieves competitive or superior performance compared to strong baselines. On MIMIC-IV, TabDPT-FT-MTLR reaches a C-index of 0.856, corresponding to a relative improvement of +1.4% over the best non-FM baseline (DeepSurv, 0.844) and +6.7% over the best zero-shot model (0.802). On eICU, TabICL-FT-MTLR achieves 0.797, yielding gains of +1.7% (DeepSurv, 0.784) and +6.4% (0.749), respectively. These findings highlight the importance of combining pretrained tabular representations with survival-aware objectives and suggest that tabular foundation models provide a practical and effective alternative for clinical survival prediction.