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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Integrated expectile-based measures of inequality

arXiv:2606.12333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expectiles provide a class of asymmetric location functionals that incorporate the magnitude of deviations and admit a natural geometric interpretation. Building on their structural consistency with the convex stochastic order, this paper introduces a family of integrated expectile functionals for measuring risk, dispersion, and inequality. The proposed functionals admit analytical representations as integrals of expectiles across asymmetry levels. For a distinguished subclass of these constructions, a geometric representation is available: the resulting quantities can be expressed as weighted areas of star-shaped sets encoding the distributional asymmetry of a random variable. This approach yields a new class of expectile-based inequality indices, constituting a natural counterpart to classical Gini-type measures while preserving desirable monotonicity and consistency properties. Empirical counterparts are derived in closed form and admit explicit decompositions over finite samples. The framework extends naturally to multivariate settings through directional expectile constructions, leading to measures capable of capturing genuinely joint forms of multivariate dispersion and inequality.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Governing Technical Debt in Agentic AI Systems

arXiv:2605.29129v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic AI systems are increasingly being explored as production infrastructure: they reason over multiple steps, call tools, act through workflows, and adapt through memory and feedback. These systems create governance challenges that are not fully captured by traditional software or predictive ML technical debt. We define Agentic Technical Debt as the accumulated liability created when prompts, memory, tool schemas, orchestration graphs, control policies, and observability routines are patched together faster than they can be validated, standardized, and governed. We define Stochastic Tax as the recurring operating burden of keeping probabilistic agent behavior within acceptable bounds. The distinction matters: debt is a stock of design and governance liability, while the tax is a flow of operating cost that arises because stochastic agents act through tools and workflows. We outline how managers can make both visible through lightweight dashboards and governance controls.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Learning from almost nothing: How neural networks survive heavy input corruption

arXiv:2606.11319v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning from imperfect data is a central theme in machine learning, connecting practical questions of robustness to fundamental questions of learnability. Here we examine attribute noise: learning from corrupted inputs while keeping the labels intact, a setting that has received considerably less analytical attention than its label-noise counterpart. We consider two types of corruption models: additive noise and replacement noise. Through experiments with multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) on corrupted classification datasets, we find that neural networks remain robust, maintaining well-above-chance accuracy even when inputs are >90% corrupted – far beyond human recognition. To understand this robustness, we analyze infinite-width networks in the heavy-corruption regime using a mean-field-inspired approach and derive a leading-order decision rule for the classification outcome: the network implements a prototype rule, the nearest-class-mean, assigning each test point to the class whose training-set average it most closely resembles. This leading-order decision rule is universal across a broad range of MLP architectures, holding for any depth, as well as a wide class of activation functions and noise distributions. The same centroid mechanism closely matches finite-width network behavior in our experiments and provides an interpretable and analytically tractable account of why learning can succeed even when individual training examples carry almost no signal.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Markovianity-based ultrasensitive parameter estimation

Authors:

arXiv:2211.05142v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate parameter estimation is a central task in quantum metrology and sensing, where quantum resources can provide precision beyond classical limits. In realistic settings, however, system-environment interactions lead to decoherence, reducing these strategies to their classical counterparts. Noise is typically classified as Markovian or non-Markovian, with the latter often preserving quantum coherence longer and thus supporting better metrological performance. Still, the absence of noise is generally considered ideal. In this work, we uncover a striking reversal: certain non-Markovian environments not only outperform Markovian ones - including their quantum Cramér-Rao bounds - but can also surpass the entirely noiseless case. We demonstrate these findings numerically for an all-optical setup, which is experimentally feasible and can be extended to other physical platforms. In general, our results open new avenues for noise-assisted quantum metrology beyond conventional limits.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multi-domain AD risk burden and plasma biomarkers in cognitively unimpaired adults

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology accumulates decades before symptom onset, yet how the cumulative effect of genetic, familial, and modifiable lifestyle risk burden jointly affects plasma biomarker levels and trajectories in cognitively unimpaired older adults remains unknown. Methods: We analyzed data from 261 participants in the PREVENT-AD cohort. A composite risk score integrating APOE e4 status, polygenic score, family history, and modifiable/lifestyle risk was examined against six plasma biomarkers using linear regression and linear mixed-effects models. Results: APOE e4 was the strongest predictor of plasma biomarker levels. Higher composite risk burden was associated with elevated ptau181, ptau217, ptau217/Ab42, and GFAP levels, and lower Ab42/40 levels. A higher risk burden was predictive of accelerated ptau181 accumulation. Discussion: Cumulative AD risk burden is broadly associated with plasma biomarker levels and specifically predicts accelerated ptau181 accumulation in cognitively unimpaired older adults, supporting structured composite risk profiling as a framework for AD risk stratification.

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

A Prototypical Signature Approach for Writer-Independent Offline Signature Verification

Offline handwritten signature verification aims to distinguish genuine from forged signatures using static images. Since real forgeries are rarely available, negative samples are usually randomly drawn from genuine signatures of other users to create training data. However, this random selection often lacks diversity, increases redundancy, and escalates computational cost, leading to inefficient training. We propose a data-driven strategy to generate diverse, informative negative samples using prototypical signatures, which are compact, non-identifiable summaries of genuine signature features. Based on the experiments results, we conclude that (i) prototypical signatures yield more informative negative samples, improving the detection of skilled forgeries; (ii) the proposed approach is backbone-agnostic, showing robustness across architectures; and (iii) when combined with a primal-form linear SVM, it serves as an alternative to RBF-based models while significantly improving scalability and computational efficiency. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdmoura/proto_hsv.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Controlled Chaos in 4D SCFTs

arXiv:2606.23785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chaotic dynamics play an important role in a number of physical systems. One of the qualitative hallmarks of this behavior is the appearance of a sufficiently "complex" spectrum of energy levels. This also makes it challenging to directly verify the onset of chaos in interacting quantum field theories. We present a class of 4D superconformal field theories (SCFTs) given by orbifolds of 4D $\mathcal{N} = 4$ Super Yang–Mills theory in which operator mixing in a controlled subsector is described by an effective spin chain in one spatial dimension with nearest neighbor interactions tuned by the marginal couplings of the SCFT. Tuning the marginal couplings results in a chaotic spectrum, while generically the spin chain exhibits Anderson localization. We diagnose the onset of chaos by analyzing the statistical distribution of eigenvalues of the dilatation operator, in particular properties such as eigenvalue level repulsion, spectral rigidity, and the spectral form factor. We also show that other diagnostics such as Krylov complexity sometimes do not faithfully capture this information. This structure defines a chaotic billiard in the target space of the stringy realization. We also comment on the large $N$ holographic dual description, where the controlled single spin chain approximation must be supplemented by multi-trace dynamics, i.e., the splitting and joining of multiple spin chains.

09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Amplified Arctic iceberg traffic reshapes benthic biodiversity

The Arctic is undergoing rapid warming, resulting in retreating sea ice and glaciers1, yet how cryospheric changes propagate into the deep ocean remains poorly understood2. Here we identify a climate-driven mechanism linking accelerating glacier disintegration to an increase in deep-sea hard-bottom habitats far beyond calving fronts. Seafloor observations in Fram Strait show a localized increase in the density and patchiness of dropstones delivered by debris-laden icebergs. At the same time, four decades of shipboard records show that the occurrence of icebergs increased abruptly in the early 2000s. Backtracking links these icebergs to the main outlet glaciers in northeast Greenland and the Russian High Arctic. In northeast Greenland, the timing of glacier destabilization coincides with this rise, whereas sparse satellite coverage in the Russian sector limits temporal attribution despite indications of enhanced glacier activity. A model sensitivity study shows that, apart from intensified calving, a more dynamic sea ice cover enhances downstream transport of glacial ice. Along these pathways, increased iceberg activity could reshape deep-sea habitats through enhanced melt and associated lithogenic input, and elevate navigational hazards as maritime traffic expands in the Arctic. Although modest compared with the iceberg discharges of Pleistocene Heinrich events, this mechanism provides a modern analogue of long-range cryospheric influence on the seafloor in a warming climate. Accelerated Arctic glacier disintegration and a more dynamic sea ice cover are increasing iceberg-delivered dropstones in the deep ocean, reshaping seafloor habitats and extending cryospheric impacts far beyond glaciers.

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

Budget-Constrained Step-Level Diffusion Caching

Step-level caching accelerates diffusion models by exploiting temporal redundancy across denoising steps. Existing methods make per-step cache decisions using threshold-based heuristics, without directly optimizing for final output quality. As a result, their inference latency varies across inputs and is difficult to control at deployment. In this work, we propose BudCache, which inverts this formulation: rather than letting per-step error thresholds dictate the runtime cost, we fix the compute budget in advance and search for the cache policy that best preserves the final output. To tackle the combinatorial complexity of step selection, we combine Simulated Annealing with deterministic Hill Climbing. This offline search identifies high-quality cache policies within minutes and introduces no online search or thresholding overhead during inference. When the compute budget is very tight, we further introduce cache-aware schedule alignment, which adapts the time discretization to the selected cache policy to reduce cache-induced trajectory mismatch. Experiments on FLUX.1-dev and Wan2.1 show that BudCache achieves better generation quality than heuristic caching baselines under the same inference budgets. Code is available at https://github.com/Westlake-AGI-Lab/BudCache

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Cost analysis of overseas versus domestic vaccination of US-bound refugees

Context: To ensure healthy resettlement and protect US health security, the Vaccination Program for US-bound Refugees (VPR) offers some recommended vaccines to refugees overseas before resettlement to the United States. The selected vaccines and number of doses vary by country of departure. VPR was found to be cost-saving in 2018 but had since expanded to more sites. Objective: Assess VPR's current costs and impact on post-arrival domestic vaccination needs and costs. Setting and Participants: A model-based analysis of the Federal government costs for VPR and post-arrival (US) vaccination of resettled refugees separated across five regions: Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North Africa/Republic of Turkiye and Middle East, Europe, and the Americas using fiscal year 2024 data. Design: We quantified and compared full vaccination costs for refugees under two scenarios: (1) 'No VPR' and (2) 'VPR'. Refugees would receive no vaccines overseas and be fully vaccinated after US arrival under 'No VPR'. Under 'VPR', refugees receive one or two doses of selected vaccines overseas before completing vaccination schedules after arrival. Main Outcomes: Costs were reported in 2023 US dollars for 'VPR' and 'No VPR' scenarios and further subdivided by grouping countries/sites depending on whether the International Organization for Migration (IOM) provides vaccination services for refugees (IOM sites) versus non-IOM providers (non-IOM sites). Results: 'VPR' resulted in average net cost savings of $147 per person or $14.7 million per 100,000-refugee cohort compared to providing all vaccines after US arrival ('No VPR'). 'VPR' was cost-saving across most regions, except for IOM sites in Europe, where a net cost of $44 per person was observed. Net cost savings per person were highest for IOM sites in Africa ($333). Conclusions: VPR remains a cost-saving strategy, while protecting US-bound refugees' health and US health security by preventing disease outbreaks during resettlement.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Cinematic Compositing Using Character-Environment-Harmonized Video Generation Models

Cinematic compositing aims to integrate green-screen characters into novel environments while maintaining physical and photometric realism. Previous methods often fail to capture the complex bidirectional interactions between characters and their surroundings, which we characterize as Character-to-Environment (C2E) physical interaction and Environment-to-Character (E2C) lighting harmonization. To address this, we propose an end-to-end video diffusion framework that jointly models C2E and E2C interactions, specifically handling the challenges of interactive props. Our approach introduces a tri-mask-guided architecture with RGB-D joint denoising to ensure physically consistent interactions among the character, props, and environment. We further develop an efficient prior-driven data curation pipeline to construct high-quality relighting pairs without expensive rendering. Finally, a reference-conditioned mechanism enables controllable environment synthesis and precise prop replacement. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms existing methods in cinematic-quality dynamic video compositing.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Intermediate State Formation of Topologically Associated Chromatin Domains using Quantum Annealing

arXiv:2505.23289v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Topologically Associating Chromatin Domains are spatially distinct chromatin regions that regulate transcription by segregating active and inactive genomic elements. Empirical studies show that their formation correlates with local patterns of epigenetic markers, yet the precise mechanisms linking 1D epigenetic landscapes to 3D chromatin folding remain unclear. Recent models represent chromatin as a spin system, where nucleosomes are treated as discrete-state variables coupled by interaction strengths derived from genomic and epigenetic data. Classical samplers struggle with these models due to high frustration and dense couplings. Here, we present a quantum annealing (QA) approach to efficiently sample chromatin states, embedding an epigenetic Ising model into the topology of D-Wave quantum processors. Rather than reconstructing exact TAD size distributions or insulation scores, our method reproduces statistical features, such as mean marker incidences and intra-/inter-nucleosome correlations, while generating configurations that exhibit TAD-like structural motifs. These results demonstrate QA as an alternative to explore the chromatin architecture and provide a foundation in epigenetic modeling.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Projected epidemiologic and economic impact of the 7-1-7 outbreak response framework in Uganda: a stochastic modelling study of Bundibugyo Ebola virus

The 7 1 7 framework (detection 7 days, notification & 1 day, response & 7 days) is a global target for epidemic preparedness, but its prospective value during an active cross border outbreak has not been quantified. Using a stochastic SEIR model parameterised for Uganda with the Bundibugyo Ebola strain and three daily importation probabilities (10%, 30%, and the observed 56%), we compared a rapid 3 1 5 response (detection 3 days, notification 1 day, response 5 days) against a delayed counterfactual (detection 11 days, notification 10 days, response 12 days). The rapid response reduced median cumulative cases by 60 to 66% (26 to 31 cases vs. 76 to 80 cases) and deaths by 62 to 63% (3 deaths vs. 8 deaths) across all import levels, with total costs of USD 29.1 to 29.9 million compared to USD 37.4 to 38.1 million for the delayed scenario. The rapid response was strictly dominant (cost saving and life saving). Variance based Sobol sensitivity analysis identified the case fatality rate, import probability, and basic reproduction number as the most influential parameters, with detection and response delays contributing through interactions. Institutionalising the 7 1 7 framework in Uganda is projected to be highly cost effective and should be supported with sustainable domestic financing, community based surveillance at unofficial border points, three consecutive PCR laboratory capacity, and multilingual risk communication.

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

David vs. Goliath in Next Activity Prediction: Argmax vs. LSTM, Transformer, and LLM

arXiv:2606.15868v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Next activity prediction (NAP) is a cornerstone of predictive process monitoring (PPM), enabling organizations to move from retrospective analysis to proactive process steering. The PPM field has progressed from classical machine learning through deep learning architectures such as LSTMs and Transformers to large language models (LLMs). Despite growing model complexity, no benchmark jointly compares LLMs, Transformers, LSTMs, and simple baselines in a direct sequence modeling setting for NAP. In this paper, we fill this gap with a systematic benchmark. We compare vocabulary-adapted LLMs, Transformers trained from scratch, LLM-distilled Transformers, and LSTMs against a simple counting-based argmax baseline across seven real-life event logs. Our results tell a David vs. Goliath story: pretraining confers no consistent improvement over training from scratch, model size shows little effect on performance, and on most datasets the argmax baseline matches or approaches the performance of billion-parameter LLMs.

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

TRIDENT: Breaking the Hybrid-Safety-Physics Coupling for Provably Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18308v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safe coordination in networked cyber-physical systems forces learning algorithms to simultaneously handle hybrid discrete-continuous actions, hard training-time safety constraints, and physics-governed dynamics. We show that these three features form a directed cycle of biases that defeats any naive composition of off-the-shelf modules, and formalize this as a three-way coupling lemma. We then introduce TRIDENT, the first MARL framework whose three components are co-designed to cancel each leak: a Richardson-Romberg gradient correction reducing Gumbel-Softmax bias from O(tau) to O(tau^2), a Lyapunov-constrained sequential trust-region update enforcing per-iterate feasibility, and a physics-informed residual critic that decomposes value rather than reward. We prove an O~(1/sqrt(K)) convergence rate to a constrained Nash equilibrium and an O(sqrt(K)) cumulative-violation bound. On multi-UAV mobile-edge computing, autonomous intersection management, and a hybrid SMAC variant, TRIDENT cuts training-time violations by 95.5% over MADDPG and 76.3% over MACPO, while improving reward by 13.5% over the strongest unconstrained baseline.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Generative modelling powered by room-temperature polariton condensates

arXiv:2606.15344v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Generative modelling requires efficient stochastic nonlinear transformations and physical platforms that can naturally realise them. We experimentally demonstrate that nonlinear optical systems operating in the strong light-matter coupling regime can serve as physical transformation layers for conditional generative modelling. Specifically, we develop a workflow in which room-temperature exciton-polariton condensates formed in organic dye microcavities act as a physical stochastic transform within a generative adversarial network and enable conditional digit-to-image translation. By using the nonlinear many-body dynamics and intrinsic stochasticity of polariton condensates, the workflow outperforms baseline approaches based on digitally injected perturbations. We find that polariton-enabled sampling via generative adversarial network (Polariton GAN) yields improved inception score, digit preservation accuracy and structural similarity compared with both digital sampling and laser-based systems. We further show that spatially correlated output variations can naturally regularise adversarial training and enhance output diversity. Our results establish polariton condensation as a new computational resource for generative modelling, opening a pathway towards physics-enhanced machine learning systems.

18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Deep Dense Exploration for LLM Reinforcement Learning via Pivot-Driven Resampling

Effective exploration is a key challenge in reinforcement learning for large language models: discovering high-quality trajectories within a limited sampling budget from the vast natural language sequence space. Existing methods face notable limitations: GRPO samples exclusively from the root, saturating high-probability trajectories while leaving deep, error-prone states under-explored. Tree-based methods blindly disperse budgets across trivial or unrecoverable states, causing sampling dilution that fails to uncover rare correct suffixes and destabilizes local baselines. To address this, we propose Deep Dense Exploration (DDE), a strategy that focuses exploration on $pivots$-deep, recoverable states within unsuccessful trajectories. We instantiate DDE with DEEP-GRPO, which introduces three key innovations: (1) a lightweight data-driven utility function that automatically balances recoverability and depth bias to identify pivot states; (2) local dense resampling at each pivot to increase the probability of discovering correct subsequent trajectories; and (3) a dual-stream optimization objective that decouples global policy learning from local corrective updates. Experiments on mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms GRPO, tree-based methods, and other strong baselines. Code is available at https://github.com/AgentCombo/DEEP-GRPO

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TivTok: Broadcasting Time-Invariant Tokens for Scalable Video Tokenization

Video tokenization is fundamental to scalable video generation, as the number of tokens directly determines the computational cost and the length of videos that can be modeled. Existing tokenizers mainly improve scalability by compressing videos into fewer tokens, but they often continue to represent persistent content, such as static backgrounds and consistent object appearances, repeatedly across frames and chunks. In this paper, we propose TivTok (Time-Invariant Tokenizer), a reuse-aware video tokenizer that makes persistent information reusable across time. TivTok represents a clip with Time-Invariant (TIV) tokens that encode information shared across frames and Time-Variant (TV) tokens that encode frame-specific residuals. To obtain this factorization, we introduce Scope-Induced Factorization (SIF), which assigns different attention scopes to the two token groups: TIV tokens attend to the full clip, whereas each TV token only accesses its corresponding frame together with the TIV tokens. In the decoder, Invariant Broadcasting (IB) reuses the same TIV tokens across frames and chunks for parallel reconstruction and long-video tokenization. Experiments show that TivTok achieves an rFVD of 12.65 on the standard $16{\times}256{\times}256$ benchmark and improves compression efficiency by 2.91$\times$ for 128-frame videos compared with the evaluated baselines, while using only 1.1\% of the tokens required by downsample-based tokenizers in our evaluation.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SkillsBench: Benchmarking How Well Agent Skills Work Across Diverse Tasks

arXiv:2602.12670v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agent Skills are structured packages of procedural knowledge that augment large language model (LLM) agents at inference time. Despite rapid adoption, there is no standard way to measure whether they actually help. We present SkillsBench, a benchmark whose current inventory contains 87 tasks across 8 domains paired with curated Skills and deterministic verifiers. Our latest aggregate evaluation runs the 87-task benchmark under matched no-Skills and curated-Skills conditions for 18 model-harness configurations. Curated Skills raise the average pass rate from 33.9% to 50.5% (+16.6 percentage points; 25.5% normalized gain), with configuration-level gains ranging from +4.1 to +25.7 pp. Focused Skills with at most three modules outperform larger or exhaustive bundles, and smaller models with Skills can match larger models without them. SkillsBench establishes paired evaluation as the foundation for rigorous measurement of Skill efficacy on agentic, expertise-heavy work.

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

Improving Zero-Shot Offline RL via Behavioral Task Sampling

arXiv:2604.25496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn agents that optimize unseen reward functions without additional environment interaction. The standard approach to this problem trains task-conditioned policies by sampling task vectors that define linear reward functions over learned state representations. In most existing algorithms, these task vectors are randomly sampled, implicitly assuming this adequately captures the structure of the task space. We argue that doing so leads to suboptimal zero-shot generalization. To address this limitation, we propose extracting task vectors directly from the offline dataset and using them to define the task distribution used for policy training. We introduce a simple and general reward function extraction procedure that integrates into existing offline zero-shot RL algorithms. Across multiple benchmark environments and baselines, our approach improves zero-shot performance by an average of 20%, highlighting the importance of principled task sampling in offline zero-shot RL.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Brevity is the Soul of Inference Efficiency: Inducing Concision in VLMs via Data Curation

Inference efficiency is typically pursued by shrinking the model: distillation, pruning, quantization, and sparse routing each lower per-token cost while treating token count as fixed. But output length has been inflating, and it is precisely the component the standard toolkit leaves untouched. Here, we argue that brevity is the missing inference-efficiency lever, and that pretraining data curation is a practical way to pull it: a model trained on concise, correct data learns to answer in fewer tokens; i.e. it has a lower Cost-of-Pass. We apply our VLM curation pipeline to the MAmmoTH-VL single-image subset, and compare models trained on our curated data, the standard MAmmoTH-VL data, and external open-weight frontier VLMs. On a controlled 20-evaluation set and 14 VLMs at 1B-4B activated parameters, we hold output length fixed with a per-model regression, separating brevity from quality, and price models in FLOPs per correct answer. Curation buys a 35x Cost-of-Pass advantage over the most verbose 4B comparator (Qwen3.5-4B) within $\sim$1 pp of accuracy (0.41 vs 14.58 TFLOPs per correct answer; 0.691 vs 0.704 mean accuracy). Curation also buys a +17.55-percentage-point matched-length accuracy gain over the uncurated baseline that grows with model scale (from +16.7 pp at 1B to +21.2 pp at 4B). This brevity improvement concedes no quality: generic verbosity buys no accuracy at any capability or scale, and the window where reasoning-structured verbosity still earns its tokens shrinks from 4 of 8 capability groups at 2B to 1 of 8 at 4B. Per example, the concise model even reaches correct answers the verbose reasoning model misses, marking reasoning as a distinct curation target rather than something brevity gives up. Inference efficiency in this regime is a tokens-per-correct problem, and brevity is the lever that targets it directly.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Intellectual Property Literacy, Innovation Readiness and Innovation Practice in Syria's Pharmaceutical Sector: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background Innovation in pharmaceutical sectors operating under resource and institutional constraints may depend not only on knowledge and attitudes but also on the conditions that enable innovation-related activities to occur. This study examined the relationships among intellectual property (IP) literacy, innovation attitudes, innovation readiness, and reported innovation practice among pharmaceutical professionals in Syria. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 303 pharmaceutical professionals between March and April 2026. Four composite indices were constructed to assess IP literacy, innovation attitudes, innovation readiness, and innovation practice. Descriptive statistics, correlation analyses, group comparisons, and multivariable regression models were used to characterize patterns of association among study domains. The analysis was designed to identify empirical patterns rather than infer causal relationships. Results Innovation attitudes were comparatively high (73.56/100), whereas innovation readiness (17.00/100) and innovation practice (12.65/100) were substantially lower. IP literacy was positively associated with innovation readiness (r = 0.384, p < 0.001) and innovation practice (r = 0.205, p < 0.001). In contrast, innovation attitudes were not significantly associated with reported innovation practice (p = 0.332). Regression analyses indicated that the inclusion of innovation readiness improved model fit beyond specifications based on knowledge and attitudes alone ({Delta}R{superscript 2} = 0.058, p = 0.028). Significant differences in readiness and practice were observed across professional groups (p < 0.001), whereas knowledge and attitudes showed limited variation. Conclusions High levels of innovation-related knowledge and positive attitudes did not correspond to high levels of reported innovation practice in this setting. The findings suggest that innovation readiness may capture enabling conditions that are not reflected by knowledge or attitudinal measures alone. These results support the value of examining contextual and institutional factors when assessing innovation capacity in resource-constrained pharmaceutical systems. Given the substantial gap observed between innovation attitudes and innovation practice, educational strategies may represent one avenue for strengthening innovation readiness. In the Syrian context, strengthening innovation-oriented education and university-industry engagement may help cultivate innovation competencies and support the translation of research into practical applications.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Tensor network manifolds and Riemannian fundamental theorem for tensor networks

arXiv:2606.14613v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tensor networks provide a powerful framework for efficiently representing high-dimensional data and many-body quantum states. Endowing tensor networks with a Riemannian manifold structure provides a natural setting for numerical optimization and analysis. A central feature of tensor networks is their gauge freedom, whose characterisation (captured by so-called fundamental theorems) underlies both their intrinsic structure and the design of numerical algorithms. In this work, we study the interaction between the Riemannian manifold structure and the gauge freedom for several families of tensor networks. Using group actions and Riemannian submersions, we establish a Riemannian fundamental theorem for the tensor network families studied.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Robustness of Similarity-based Positional Encoding Under Rotations: Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Validation

Positional encoding is a fundamental component of Transformer architectures, as it injects information about the spatial or sequential arrangement of inputs. Among recent alternatives to standard absolute and sinusoidal encodings, similarity-based positional encoding (simPE) has emerged as a flexible framework for representing positional structure through pairwise relations. simPE was originally designed for medical imaging applications, where geometric robustness is especially relevant: small rotations naturally arise during image acquisition, induced by imaging instruments, patient positioning, or slight acquisition misalignments. Despite its empirical promise, the theoretical behavior of simPE under geometric perturbations has not been fully characterized. In this paper, we study the robustness of simPE with respect to rotations, combining formal theoretical analysis with experimental validation. We first show that simPE is generally not rotation-invariant. We then prove that, under mild Lipschitz assumptions on the elementary components, simPE is stable under rotational perturbations and derive explicit perturbation bounds in Frobenius norm. We validate these findings experimentally on four controlled datasets–a synthetic Arrow dataset, a synthetic Shapes dataset (four geometric shape categories), a synthetic Digits dataset, and a benchmark image classification dataset (FashionMNIST)–in which training and validation images are kept in a fixed canonical orientation while test images are subjected to increasing rotation angles. Across all datasets, simPE consistently outperforms standard learned positional encoding in terms of accuracy, F1 score, precision, and recall under rotation, particularly in the small-to-moderate angle regime, corroborating the theoretical stability guarantees.