Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FM-Agent: Scaling Formal Methods to Large Systems via LLM-Based Hoare-Style Reasoning

arXiv:2604.11556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-assisted software development has become increasingly prevalent, and can generate large-scale systems, such as compilers. It becomes crucial to strengthen the correctness of the generated code. However, automated reasoning for large-scale systems remains challenging due to code complexity. Hoare logic offers an approach to decomposing a large system into smaller components and reasoning about them separately (i.e., compositional reasoning). However, existing works still struggle to scale, because Hoare logic requires writing formal specifications for each function, imposing a heavy human burden. The problem is exacerbated when code is generated by LLMs, as developers lack a deep understanding of each function's expected behavior. This paper presents FM-Agent, the first framework that realizes automated compositional reasoning for large-scale systems. Leveraging LLMs, FM-Agent introduces a top-down paradigm to automatically generate function-level specifications. Specifically, FM-Agent derives the specification of a function from how its callers expect the function to behave, so the generated specifications can reflect the developer's intent of a function even if the implementation is buggy. Developers' intent is usually expressed in natural language, while existing verifiers only support formulas. Therefore, FM-Agent generalizes Hoare-style inference to reason about functions against natural-language specifications. Finally, to confirm bug existence and explain bug causes, FM-Agent automatically generates test cases to trigger potential bugs. In our evaluation, FM-Agent successfully reasons about large-scale systems within 2 days, each of which has up to 143k LoC. These systems have already been tested by their developers, but FM-Agent still finds 522 newly discovered bugs. These bugs can cause serious consequences, including system crashes and incorrect execution results.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

TokenRatio: Principled Token-Level Preference Optimization via Ratio Matching

Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a widely used RL-free method for aligning language models from pairwise preferences, but it models preferences over full sequences even though generation is driven by per-token decisions. Existing token-level extensions typically decompose a sequence-level Bradley-Terry objective across timesteps, leaving per-prefix (state-wise) optimality implicit. We study how to recover token-level preference optimality using only standard sequence-level pairwise comparisons. We introduce Token-level Bregman Preference Optimization (TBPO), which posits a token-level Bradley-Terry preference model over next-token actions conditioned on the prefix, and derive a Bregman-divergence density-ratio matching objective that generalizes the logistic/DPO loss while preserving the optimal policy induced by the token-level model and maintaining DPO-like simplicity. We introduce two instantiations: TBPO-Q, which explicitly learns a lightweight state baseline, and TBPO-A, which removes the baseline through advantage normalization. Across instruction following, helpfulness/harmlessness, and summarization benchmarks, TBPO improves alignment quality and training stability and increases output diversity relative to strong sequence-level and token-level baselines.

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

Mitigating Visual Hallucinations in Multimodal Systems through Retrieval-Augmented Reliability-Aware Inference

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in vision-language understanding and natural-language response generation. However, these systems can still produce overconfident predictions and hallucination-like outputs, particularly when the visual evidence is weak, ambiguous, or semantically inconsistent. Most existing approaches focus on improving multimodal representation alignment or retrieval-augmented generation, while providing limited mechanisms to quantify instance-level prediction reliability or identify incorrect visual outputs. This work proposes a retrieval-augmented reliability-aware inference framework for trustworthy multimodal visual understanding. The proposed framework constructs an external visual evidence database using pretrained visual embeddings and nearest-neighbor retrieval over normalized feature representations. Retrieved evidence is used to estimate prediction trustworthiness through multiple reliability indicators, including similarity strength, class-support agreement, evidence margin, entropy-based uncertainty, and an aggregate reliability score. Based on these signals, a decision gate determines whether the system should accept the prediction, answer with caution, or abstain/fallback when evidence is insufficient. A multimodal response-generation layer then produces a final user-facing response conditioned on the reliability decision. Experiments on ImageNet-100 demonstrate that the proposed reliability-aware framework improves accepted prediction accuracy from 85.84\% to 88.88\% at 89.04\% coverage. The hallucination-like accepted wrong-answer rate is reduced from 14.16\% to 11.12\%. These results show that integrating retrieval evidence, reliability estimation, and selective decision gating can improve calibration and reduce overconfident visual errors without retraining large multimodal models.

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

TRON: Tracing Rays to Orchestrate a Neural Renderer for 3D Gaussian Reconstructions

We introduce TRON, a rendering framework that combines 3D Gaussian ray tracing with neural rendering to enable realistic and controllable rendering of real-world 3D scenes under novel lighting, dynamic object motion, object insertion, and material editing. Prior approaches that rely solely on physically based rendering (PBR) of Gaussian representations struggle to achieve realistic relighting due to imperfections in reconstructed geometry, material estimates, and light transport estimation. At the same time, neural rendering methods often lack an explicit scene representation, limiting their ability to support interactive editing with fine-grained manipulation. TRON bridges these two paradigms. We use intrinsic decomposition priors from a learned inverse rendering model to regularize the material properties of a Gaussian field, and repurpose a ray tracer to provide radiometric guidance rather than final pixels. By treating this output as a structured 3D scaffold, we empower a lightweight neural renderer to bridge the domain gap between shading-model constrained estimates and photorealistic output. Our key insight is that the combination of explicit 3D knowledge with robust material priors provides speed and controllability, while neural rendering enables the synthesis of photorealistic images. To support real-world scenarios, we train our neural renderer with a multi-stage strategy consisting of large-scale pretraining and targeted fine-tuning on a newly constructed dataset of 2.1M rendered synthetic and real-world frames from 3D reconstructions. TRON outperforms Gaussian-based relighting methods in realism, and prior neural renderers in editability and speed. To the best of our knowledge, TRON is the first method to enable practical interactive applications in captured 3D environments, offering realistic appearance under dynamic geometric, lighting and material conditions.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Federated Medical Image Segmentation under Real-World Label Noise: A Benchmark Suite for Noisy Label Learning Method Selection

While federated learning (FL) enables collaborative medical image segmentation without centralizing sensitive data, real-world deployment is frequently complicated by cross-site label imperfections such as contour disagreement, missing or additional structures, and confused labels. Federated noisy label learning (FNLL) aims to mitigate these effects, yet remains underused in practice as existing evidence is largely based on synthetic noise, simplified settings, and limited real-world noisy evaluation. We address this gap by introducing a benchmark suite that combines diverse real-world noisy datasets, deployment-relevant client-noise scenarios, and label-noise-targeted evaluation to support systematic FNLL assessment and informed method selection. The suite combines curated real-world noisy medical image segmentation datasets from diverse sources with a comprehensive federated segmentation framework including various client-noise scenarios and noise-targeted evaluation. The presented suite provides a realistic and discriminative basis for FNLL evaluation in medical image segmentation and establishes a reusable foundation for fair benchmarking, dataset-specific label-noise characterization, and future method development under realistic federated settings. Code is available at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/FedSegNoiseBench.

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

Human-in-the-Loop Atlas-Based 3D Asset Segmentation for Interactive Content Workflows

Segmenting 3D assets into meaningful regions remains challenging, especially when segmentation criteria are application-dependent and require user control. We present a human-in-the-loop pipeline for generating a segmented 2D parameterized atlas from a 3D model for interactive media, game, and XR content workflows. Our method first selects a compact set of rendered views using a greedy set cover strategy over sampled surface points, and then supports interactive segmentation of these views with SAM~2 and Label Studio. The resulting masks are back-projected onto the model's UV parameterization to produce a unified segmented atlas that supports downstream production tasks such as segment-wise material assignment, style transfer, and semantic labeling. We assess the pipeline through a demonstration-based technical evaluation on eight cultural heritage objects. The results show that the approach can generate usable segmented atlases across diverse geometries while revealing recurring sources of manual correction, particularly fine structures, cavities, and weak appearance boundaries.

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

Quasi-local Edge Mode in XXX Spin Chain/Circuit with Interaction Boundary Defect

arXiv:2603.17835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the Heisenberg spin-1/2 model on a semi-infinite chain - or, equivalently, a trotterized unitary SU(2) symmetric six-vertex quantum circuit - with a boundary defect where the interaction between the two spins nearest the edge differs from that in the bulk. For sufficiently strong boundary interaction we explicitly construct a conserved operator quasi-localized near the boundary using a matrix-product ansatz. This quasi-local edge mode leads to non-decaying boundary correlation functions, corresponding to a nonzero boundary Drude weight. The correlation length of the edge mode diverges at a finite critical value of the boundary interaction, signaling a transition to ergodic boundary dynamics for subcritical interactions.

08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Comparison of count-based and clustering definitions of multimorbidity and their association with prevalence of multimorbidity, health profiles, and mortality: A cohort study of UK Biobank participants

by Gabriella C. Silva, Aurore Fayosse, Louis Jacob, Séverine Sabia, Archana Singh-Manoux, Benjamin Landré Background Multimorbidity, the presence of several chronic conditions, is linked to higher mortality and healthcare use and thus poses a major challenge for aging populations. While most studies rely on simple counts of conditions, clustering approaches have been proposed to describe patterns of co-occurring diseases. We aimed to evaluate the extent to which these methodological choices influence prevalence and association with health profiles and mortality. Methods and findings Using UK Biobank baseline data (n = 474,397), collected between 2006 and 2010, we compared six count-based definitions of multimorbidity based on different condition lists (extended, most prevalent, or body systems) and thresholds (≥2 versus ≥3 conditions). We also applied a clustering analysis to characterize subtypes of multimorbidity among participants with at least two chronic conditions. We compared prevalence and associations with concurrent health outcomes (polypharmacy, self-rated health, frailty, falls, surgery, chronic pain), blood-based measures (C-reactive protein, Cystatin-C, HDL, LDL Cholesterol, IGF-1), and 3- and 10-year mortality risks. Analyses were undertaken separately in men and women using multivariable regression models adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics and body mass index. Multimorbidity prevalence ranged from 1.0% (cluster-based) to 35.3% (count-based). Count-based definitions using lists with more conditions yielded higher prevalence. Higher thresholds identified more severe health profiles on all measured health outcomes, blood-based measures, but not higher mortality risks. Associations with blood-based measures were more pronounced using clustering, with the highest differences from the standard definition distributed across clusters. Odds ratios for 3-year mortality ranged from 1.44 [1.26; 1.64] to 4.60 [3.73; 5.62] for men and 1.35 [1.07; 1.69] to 3.83 [2.78; 5.14] for women. For 10-year mortality, they ranged from 1.42 [1.34; 1.50] to 3.86 [3.46; 4.30] in men and 1.29 [1.21; 1.39] to 3.33 [2.93; 3.77] for women, with clustering identifying groups with low prevalence and high mortality risks. Findings should be interpreted in light of the selected nature of the UK Biobank cohort and the cross-sectional assessment of several health indicators. Conclusion Operational definitions of multimorbidity substantially influence prevalence estimates, while associations with mortality appear more robust across count-based approaches. Clustering analyses provide complementary insights into heterogeneity within multimorbid populations. Future translational studies are warranted to determine how multimorbidity definitions can be optimized to ultimately improve clinical management and health outcomes in practice.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning and Generating Mixed States Prepared by Shallow Channel Circuits

arXiv:2604.01197v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning quantum states from measurement data is a central problem in quantum information and computational complexity. In this work, we study the problem of learning to generate mixed states on a finite-dimensional lattice. Motivated by recent developments in mixed state phases of matter, we focus on arbitrary states in the trivial phase. A state belongs to the trivial phase if there exists a shallow preparation channel circuit under which local reversibility is preserved throughout the preparation. We prove that any mixed state in this class can be efficiently learned from measurement access alone. Specifically, given copies of an unknown trivial phase mixed state, our algorithm outputs a shallow local channel circuit that approximately generates this state in trace distance. The sample complexity and runtime are polynomial (or quasi-polynomial) in the number of qubits, assuming constant (or polylogarithmic) circuit depth and gate locality. Importantly, the learner is not given the original preparation circuit and relies only on its existence. Our results provide a structural foundation for quantum generative models based on shallow channel circuits. In the classical limit, our framework also inspires an efficient algorithm for classical diffusion models using only a polynomial overhead of training and generation.

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

How LLMs Fail and Generalize in RTL Coding for Hardware Design?

Translating sequential programming priors into the parallel temporal logic of hardware design remains a crucial bottleneck for large language models(LLM). To investigate this, we introduce a new error taxonomy grounded in problem solvability, inspired by cognitive theory. Our taxonomy categorizes failures into syntactic, semantic, solvable functional, and unsolvable functional types. Evaluations reveal a strict empirical ceiling on the VerilogEval benchmark, as frontier models plateau at a 90.8% initial pass rate. These plateaus are defined by unsolvable functional errors, exposing persistent knowledge gaps immune to test time compute scaling. Furthermore, we expose a striking surface convergence gap: optimization readily eliminates syntax errors but concurrently exacerbates deeper functional failures. Our findings demonstrate that alignment techniques merely teach models to compile. While repeated sampling strategies can patch solvable errors, register-transfer level(RTL) coding capacity remains strictly bounded by pretraining knowledge. Addressing challenges in the current LLM based hardware generation pipeline requires more studies in model reasoning rather than alignment interventions.

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

Medical Heuristic Learning: An LLM-Driven Framework for Interpretable and Auditable Clinical Decision Rules

arXiv:2606.16337v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predictive modeling for clinical tabular data is central to clinical decision support and therefore requires not only strong predictive performance but also transparent decision logic. Although deep learning and tree-based ensemble methods can achieve high accuracy, their black-box nature remains a major obstacle to clinical deployment. This challenge is further compounded by common characteristics of medical data, including limited sample sizes, severe class imbalance, and feature evolution arising from changes in diagnostic criteria and clinical documentation. To address these issues, we propose Medical Heuristic Learning (MHL), an instantiation of the learning-beyond-gradients paradigm for clinical tabular prediction. Instead of relying on neural network weight updates, MHL uses a large language model (LLM)-driven workflow that integrates statistical probes, medical knowledge probes, rule synthesis, and code-level iterative refinement to optimize a deterministic and executable decision system. The resulting model is expressed not as opaque parameters, but as versioned pure-Python decision rules that are explicitly interpretable, fully auditable, and clinically grounded. MHL also supports continual learning by starting from previously validated rules and iteratively revising them using updated feature information under data drift or feature evolution. Comprehensive experiments on medical datasets show that MHL achieves performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining strong behavior in small-sample and highly imbalanced settings. The results further indicate that this explicit rule update mechanism can help alleviate catastrophic forgetting under feature evolution. Overall, these findings suggest that non-gradient-based heuristic systems offer a transparent and adaptable alternative for high-stakes clinical decision support.

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

StereoFactory: A Unified Merging Framework for Robust Stereo Matching

Stereo matching has advanced through foundation models trained on large-scale datasets, yet this paradigm suffers from a scalability bottleneck: incorporating new data requires costly joint retraining. Model merging offers a scalable post-hoc alternative by integrating knowledge from specialized models after source checkpoints are available. However, existing merging methods typically retain all available models or rely on greedy inclusion, which can preserve harmful task-vector interference. We propose StereoFactory, a coarse-to-fine evolutionary framework for adaptive model merging. Stage~1 employs a genetic algorithm to search the combinatorial space of model subsets, determining which models should participate. Stage~2 addresses module-level knowledge specialization (different functional modules exhibit distinct preferences for knowledge sources) through CMA-ES optimization of architecture-adaptive routing over the selected task vectors, with optional module-level scaling. Experiments across two architectures and four benchmarks demonstrate that StereoFactory consistently achieves the best four-benchmark average under the same checkpoint pool, reducing the average error from 3.80 to 3.30 on NMRF and from 2.88 to 2.19 on FoundationStereo relative to the strongest controlled baseline. The post-hoc search requires only 2.7–3.7\% of the corresponding joint-retraining wall-clock time. Analysis reveals that knowledge contributions are inherently module-specific, and selected subsets can transfer across architectures with minimal degradation. Code will be publicly released upon acceptance at: https://github.com/XiandaGuo/StereoFactory.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Model-Based and Data-Driven Hierarchical Control and Topology Co-Design for Robust Networked Systems

arXiv:2606.11596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider a class of networked systems comprising an interconnected set of linear subsystems, disturbance inputs, and performance outputs. Using dissipativity theory, we first propose a model-based hierarchical control design strategy to ensure the closed-loop networked system is dissipative from its disturbance inputs to performance outputs. This involves designing local controllers for each subsystem to enforce local dissipativity guarantees, which are then exploited to co-design distributed global controllers and the interconnection topology to enforce global dissipativity guarantees while optimizing interconnection topology costs. The overall design process requires only solving a sequence of linear matrix inequality (LMI) problems, thereby retaining compositionality and decentralizability while avoiding non-convex, iterative design processes that are inefficient and centralized. This model-based hierarchical control design strategy assumes the knowledge of the subsystem dynamics, which may not hold in many real-world networked systems. Motivated by this, we also propose a data-driven hierarchical control design strategy that assumes only the availability of rich input-state-output trajectory data from the subsystems. The proposed data-driven design process assumes that the unknown disturbances affecting the subsystem dynamics are bounded by a quadratic matrix inequality (relaxing conventional bounds) and accounts for this by using the matrix S-lemma. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed model-based and data-driven hierarchical control designs is illustrated for a networked system representing a DC microgrid, with the aim of enforcing robust (dissipative) voltage regulation and current sharing.

14.
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.

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

FastMix: Fast Data Mixture Optimization via Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.14971v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While large and diverse datasets have driven recent advances in large models, identifying the optimal data mixture for pre-training and post-training remains a significant open problem. We address this challenge with FASTMIX, a novel framework that automates data mixture discovery while training only a single proxy model. Instead of relying on predefined heuristics or resource-intensive simulations, FASTMIX jointly optimizes mixture coefficients and model parameters, substantially improving efficiency and scalability over prior approaches. At the core of FASTMIX is a reformulation of mixture selection as a bilevel optimization problem. Under this reformulation, we show that optimizing mixture ratios is mathematically equivalent to assigning per-source loss weights under uniform source sampling. This embeds the mixture coefficients directly into the differentiable iterative optimization objective, enabling efficient, gradient-based optimization of both mixture and model. To solve the optimization problem, FASTMIX implements an approximate iterative optimization procedure, alternating between (i) updating model parameters on data sampled according to current mixture ratios (inner loop) and (ii) updating mixture ratios based on validation feedback (outer loop). Across pre- and post-training, FASTMIX outperforms baselines while drastically reducing search cost. Code (https://github.com/hrtan/fastmix)

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Functional central limit theorems for non-local branching Markov processes

arXiv:2502.19382v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The aim of this paper is to study the fluctuations of a general class of supercritical branching Markov processes with non-local branching mechanisms. We establish functional central limit theorems and show that the limiting behaviour falls into three regimes, determined by the size of the spectral gap associated with the first-moment semigroup of the branching process. The main novelty is to develop a unified functional fluctuation theory for spatial branching Markov processes with non-local reproduction, allowing a general finite-dimensional spectral structure for the first-moment semigroup, including non-simple leading eigenvalues and nilpotent Jordan-type components. In doing so, we extend the classical small, critical and large fluctuation trichotomy beyond the finite-type and local spatial settings, and obtain limiting processes that capture the covariance structure induced by non-local offspring displacement.

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

Person Identification from Contextual Motion

We consider the problem of identifying people based on their motion styles. We present a generative model describing the action instance creation process and derive a probabilistic identity inference scheme for two common person identification scenarios motivated by the surveillance and authentication applications. We introduce a novel, interactive, scenario for person identification from motion patterns. To this end, we formalize the identification process in the context of a sequential message exchange session between the subject and the system. The subject's behavior is modeled using a probabilistic generative model inspired by the Human Information Processing (HIP) paradigm. At each stage, the system presents a visual stimulus (a cue) to the subject and records their motion response. The cue is selected so as to maximize the mutual information of the expected response and the subject's identity. Once recorded, the response is used to update the a posteriori probability over possible subjects' identities. The process terminates once a sufficient classification confidence level is reached. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time person identification is addressed in such interactive setting. We report high recognition rates on five publicly available datasets and our own novel dataset consisting of 4,476 recordings of 22 test subjects responding to 15 cues.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity in Germany: A repeated cross-sectional analysis from 1998 to 2024

Background: Smoking inequalities by socioeconomic status have widened consistently in Germany, but sex-specific trends after 2013 and inequalities in daily cigarette consumption among smokers (intensity) are unknown. We analyzed trends in absolute and relative socioeconomic inequalities in smoking prevalence and intensity among German adults across three decades. Methods: We used 14 waves (1998-2024) of population-representative cross-sectional data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate sex-specific trends in smoking prevalence and intensity in adults aged 25-64. Inequalities were quantified across strata of education, occupation, and equivalized household income using the absolute and relative concentration index with 95% bootstrap confidence intervals. Results: Overall smoking prevalence declined from 35.05% (CI: [33.90%, 36.20%] in 1998 to 22.19% (CI: [21.15%, 23.24%]) in 2024, and mean intensity from 17.49 (CI: [17.09,17.90]) to 13.33 (CI: [12.88, 13.79]) cigarettes/day. Over this period sex-differences in both outcomes narrowed almost completely. Absolute and relative inequalities in smoking prevalence widened across all SES dimensions, particularly for education and occupation. By 2024, inequalities were larger among women than men driven by a stagnating or rising smoking prevalence among low-SES women at least until 2018 alongside continued declines in higher-SES women and for men. Inequalities in smoking intensity, particularly related to income, were generally smaller than those in prevalence. Conclusion: Socioeconomic smoking inequalities in Germany widened from 1998 to 2024 primarily driven by reductions among higher-SES groups and increases in low-SES women. However, recent reductions in low-SES women may indicate a new phase in the smoking epidemic. Health equity considerations should be integrated into a targeted German tobacco control strategy.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Fundamental Limitations of QAOA on Constrained Problems and a Route to Exponential Enhancement

arXiv:2511.17259v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study fundamental limitations of the generic Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) on constrained problems where valid solutions form a low dimensional manifold inside the Boolean hypercube, and we present a provable route to exponential improvements via constraint embedding. Focusing on permutation constrained objectives, we show that the standard generic QAOA ansatz, with a transverse field mixer and diagonal r local cost, faces an intrinsic feasibility bottleneck: even after angle optimization, circuits whose depth grows at most sublinearly with n cannot raise the total probability mass on the feasible manifold much above the uniform baseline suppressed by the size of the full Hilber space. Against this envelope we introduce a minimal constraint enhanced kernel (CE QAOA) that operates directly inside a product one hot subspace and mixes with a block local XY Hamiltonian. For permutation constrained problems, we prove an angle robust, depth matched exponential enhancement where the ratio between the feasible mass from CE QAOA and generic QAOA grows exponentially in $n^2$ for all depths up to a linear fraction of n, under a mild polynomial growth condition on the interaction hypergraph. Thanks to the problem algorithm co design in the kernel construction, the techniques and guarantees extend beyond permutations to a broad class of NP-Hard constrained optimization problems.

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

Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multimodal Learning

arXiv:2606.15743v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper addresses the missing-modality challenge in multi-modal learning by introducing Unsupervised Learning for Missing Modalities in Multi-Modal Learning (UL4M4), a flexible framework that imputes missing feature embeddings in a task-independent manner before supervised prediction. We propose modality-specific normalization and a novel partial-modality distance metric to enable fair clustering of incomplete observations, capturing cross-modal structures while preserving scale-invariance across varying dimensionalities and modality counts. Cluster centers from this unsupervised stage guide an iterative greedy imputation process for any missing modalities during training or inference, supporting arbitrary numbers of modalities and arbitrary missing patterns per sample. The imputation module is lightweight, uses frozen encoders, and decouples from the downstream task, allowing easy integration with any fusion/prediction architecture. Extensive experiments under diverse and highly incomplete regimes demonstrate UL4M4's robustness, achieving, to the best of our knowledge, the first consistent F1-Micro scores above 0.7 on challenging missing configurations even when more than 50\% of modality slots are missing. Results are also stable across cluster sizes and significantly outperform state-of-the-art baselines. Code is available here: https://github.com/h-ismkhan/Multimodal-Learning-with-Missing-Modalities-via-Unsupervised-Learning.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Human Universal Grasping

arXiv:2606.17054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Humans can grasp objects effortlessly, whereas multi-fingered robots are far from this level of generality. We argue that the most natural source of robot grasping data is from humans, who pick up thousands of objects every day. We present HUG, a flow-matching model that generates diverse human grasps for any user-specified object in a single RGB-D image captured from a stereo camera. Using smart glasses, we first collect 1M-HUGs, an egocentric dataset of human grasps spanning 1M frames (27.8 hrs) and 6,707 object instances across 41 buildings. Next, to model the distribution of natural human grasps, our novel flow-matching model fuses RGB and depth observations to output a grasp parameterized by wrist translation, wrist rotation, and MANO hand pose. Predicted grasps can be retargeted to various robot hands, enabling zero-shot grasping in everyday scenes. To standardize evaluation, we build a new simulated benchmark, HUG-Bench, of 90 unseen objects from five geometric categories and various sizes, with metric-scale 3D meshes. We evaluate HUG in the real world on the 30-object test set of HUG-Bench across multiple stereo cameras, robot embodiments, and household environments. HUG outperforms the state-of-the-art grasping baselines by +23% and +34% on our challenging object set. Code, data, benchmark, checkpoints, and an interactive demo are released on our website: https://grasping.io/

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Additivity and chain rules for quantum entropies via multi-index Schatten norms

arXiv:2502.01611v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The primary entropic measures for quantum states are additive under the tensor product. In the analysis of quantum information processing tasks, the minimum entropy of a set of states, e.g., the minimum output entropy of a channel, often plays a crucial role. A fundamental question in quantum information and cryptography is whether the minimum output entropy remains additive under the tensor product of channels. Here, we establish a general additivity statement for the optimized sandwiched Rényi entropy of quantum channels. For that, we generalize the results of [Devetak, Junge, King, Ruskai, CMP 2006] to multi-index Schatten norms. As an application, we strengthen the additivity statement of [Van Himbeeck and Brown, 2025] thus allowing the analysis of time-adaptive quantum cryptographic protocols. In addition, we establish chain rules for Rényi conditional entropies that are similar to the ones used for the generalized entropy accumulation theorem of [Metger, Fawzi, Sutter, Renner, CMP 2024].

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

HiLo-Token: Input-Adaptive High-Low Frequency Token Compression for Efficient Image Editing

Creative image editing tools, such as Photoshop's Remove or Generative Fill buttons, are central to everyday customer use and account for a major share of traffic in Photoshop and Lightroom. However, current generative AI models face significant latency challenges, which become even more pronounced when transitioning from convolution-based U-Nets to Diffusion Transformers (DiTs). In our evaluation on hundreds of representative image editing samples spanning a wide range of mask ratios, the DiT module alone accounts for an average of 73% of the total model latency, even after being distilled from 50 timesteps down to 8 timesteps. To tackle this challenge, we propose $HiLo-Token$, an input-adaptive token compression framework that allocates more token budget to high-frequency, rich-context regions while assigning fewer tokens to low-frequency areas. Specifically, for the editing region specified by the user mask, we retain all tokens within a dilated mask to preserve strong locality and contextual relevance. Outside the editing region, we introduce a simple yet effective high-frequency token selection strategy based on spatial frequency to capture important local details, while using tokens from a 16x downsampled image to represent low-frequency components and preserve the blurry but global structure. Extensive experiments on production-level evaluation data validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, achieving 3.13x, 2.59x, and 1.67x DiT speedups on A100-80GB for image editing tasks across small, medium, and large mask ratio categories with average ratios of 6.38%, 15.92%, and 35.36%, respectively, without any regression in generation quality.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Room-Specialized Mixture-of-Experts for In-Home ADL Recognition with Ambient Sensors

Monitoring activities of daily living (ADLs) in the home is a promising approach for tracking dementia progression in older adults. While ambient sensor-based ADL systems are well-studied, most existing ADL recognition systems rely on globally trained models that ignore the spatial organization of in-home activities. In real deployments, where training data are sparse and highly home-specific, global transformer models may fail to capture room-dependent behavioral structure. We propose a deterministic Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture for in-home ADL recognition, in which each expert is a compact transformer specialized to one room of the home (bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, living area). Input segments are routed using a deterministic gating strategy based on room-level motion activity and time-of-day priors for sleep-related behaviors. Unlike learned routing networks, the proposed gate encodes domain knowledge about where ADLs are likely to occur, reducing model complexity under limited per-home training data. By decomposing ADL recognition into room-specific activity spaces, the proposed architecture reduces competition between dominant and low-frequency activities under highly imbalanced residential data. We evaluated the system on data collected via low-cost ambient sensors (motion, light, temperature, humidity) and Raspberry Pi edge devices across five homes, with ground-truth ADL labels provided by participants and caregivers. Across the five homes, the proposed MoE consistently outperformed global transformer, 1D CNN, and Random Forest baselines, achieving macro-F1 scores ranging from 0.60 to 0.88, highlighting the importance of home-specific modeling in real-world deployments. These findings suggest that room-aware expert specialization may provide a practical and interpretable strategy for low-data ADL recognition in real-world residential environments.

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

Interpretable Sperm Morphology Classification via Attention-Guided Deep Learning

arXiv:2606.20438v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Male infertility is a major cause of couple infertility, often linked to abnormal sperm morphology. While deep learning models offer automated analysis, most lack interpretability, limiting their clinical adoption. This study proposes an attention-guided deep learning framework for sperm morphology classification. We combine a pretrained EfficientNet-B0 with a Convolutional Block Attention Module (CBAM) to focus on key areas of the sperm head, improving both accuracy and interpretability. Evaluated on the SMIDS and HuSHem public datasets, our model achieves accuracies of 90.2% and 93.9% (macro F1 scores of 0.913 and 0.948), outperforming SimpleCNN and standard EfficientNet-B0. Furthermore, we use Grad-CAM++ visualizations to highlight features influencing the model's decisions. The results demonstrate that this accurate and transparent framework is a practical tool for automated sperm analysis in fertility clinics.