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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Scribby: A Multi-Level LLM Framework for Semantic Video Analysis

As video content continues to expand across educational platforms, recorded lectures, and live-streamed entertainment, the need for efficient and structured analysis of long-form footage has increased [1]. Although many existing AI programs provide high-level video summaries based on AI-generated transcripts [2,3,4,5], these approaches are often limited to coarse overviews and lack detailed analysis of a video's structure, thematic progression, and semantic relationships, all of which are required for comprehensive video analysis. This paper proposes an LLM-based video summarization framework that balances macro-level comprehension with micro-level semantic analysis [6,12,13]. The first stage of the process indexes the video at a micro level by (1) analyzing the full transcript, (2) analyzing individual transcript sentences, and (3) grouping these sentences by semantic similarity using an LLM as a judge [6,13]. Contextual continuity is retained during sentence-level processing by incorporating both the global transcript analysis and adjacent sentence information into each evaluation prompt. This framework establishes a foundation for video analysis tools that visualize semantic chunking and semantic matching through relevance-based heatmaps. Limitations and future expansions of the framework are also discussed.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Small moments of the sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions

arXiv:2606.16004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the first version of Chang, Slote, Volberg, and Zhang's paper [BSA_of_PTF], the authors modify a nice recursive approach due to Kane in [Correct_exponent_for_AS] where he bounded the average sensitivity of polynomial threshold functions. In [BSA_of_PTF] Kane's argument was adopted to estimate the boolean surface area of polynomial threshold function. The bridge is a combinatorial averaging lemma considering all balanced partitions. The lemma serves as a substitute for an additive property of average sensitivity. With the lemma, one can apply a Kane-type algorithm to derive a recurrence. Solving the recurrence then gives an upper bound of $e^{C_d \sqrt{\log n}}$ for the boolean surface area. In the second version of the same paper, the authors derive a polylog upper bound for BSA of PTFs. The difference is that they use a tail estimate for the sensitivity function. With the help of a polynomial restriction lemma in [poly_restriction] they sharpen the upper bound. It is noteworthy that when applying the polynomial restriction, each coordinate is put into each part independently with equal probability. As a result, a partition does not necessarily have equal-size blocks. In other words, it may not be balanced. In this note, we first investigate the effect of different partitioning. Second, we use the recursive method in the first version to derive a polylog upper bound for $\mathbb E[s(x)^{\eta}]$ where $\eta < 1/2$. It is interesting to note the phase transition that happens at $\eta=1/2$ in both versions of the proof (but in a completely different form). Section [PhaseTr-s] treats that.

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

MBABench: Evaluating LLM Agents on End-to-End Spreadsheet Tasks in Finance

arXiv:2605.22664v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM agents are increasingly expected to carry out end-to-end workflows, producing complete artifacts from high-level user instructions. To meet enterprise needs, frontier AI labs have developed agents that can construct entire spreadsheets from scratch. This is especially relevant in finance, where core workflows such as financial modeling, forecasting, and scenario analysis are commonly conducted through spreadsheets. Yet, existing spreadsheet benchmarks do not measure this advanced capability, focusing instead on question-answering or single-formula edits. To address this gap, we provide one of the first evaluations of agents on end-to-end spreadsheet tasks, focusing on economically critical financial workflows such as modeling and scenario analysis. Since deliverables therein are routinely reviewed and revised by multiple stakeholders, judging their quality necessarily involves high-level criteria such as readability or ease of modification. To reflect the multidimensional nature of solution quality, we develop an evaluation taxonomy comprising three dimensions: Accuracy, Formula, and Format, each comprising fine-grained criteria that reflect professional standards. The Claude family leads the benchmark and produces the most professional-looking outputs in our qualitative review, but even the strongest agents frequently fall short of professional finance standards and degrade sharply as the difficulty increases beyond a few chained calculations. This suggests that current agents are not yet able to reliably produce professional-quality spreadsheets at the level of complexity real-world workflows demand.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Estimating carbon pools in the European Shelf sea environment: replacing reanalysis by model-informed machine learning?

arXiv:2508.10178v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Shelf seas are important for the economy and the carbon cycle, but shelf sea observations for carbon pools are often sparse, or highly uncertain. An alternative can be provided by carbon reanalyses (whether assimilating proxy variables, such as chlorophyll-$a$, or directly carbon), but these are often expensive to run. We propose to use a computationally cheap ensemble of neural networks (i.e. deep ensemble) to learn the relationship between the directly observable (atmospheric, riverine and ocean) variables and marine carbon pools from a coupled physics-biogeochemistry model. The deep ensemble was trained on a North-West European Shelf (NWES) physical-biogeochemistry model free run simulation. After training, the deep ensemble was run using inputs from the NWES reanalysis instead of the free run, demonstrating that it can efficiently predict several NWES carbon pools (e.g., detritus, zooplankton, heterotrophic bacteria) in much better agreement with the reanalysis than the free run, while also providing uncertainty information. We further show that the deep ensemble performs similarly well when it is driven directly by the observations assimilated into the reanalysis, with the limitation that carbon pools can then be predicted only at the observed locations and times. We focus on explainability of the results and demonstrate potential use of the deep ensembles for future climate what-if scenarios. We suggest that model-informed machine learning presents a viable alternative to expensive reanalyses and could complement observations, wherever they are missing and/or highly uncertain.

05.
Science (Express) 2026-05-21

Observation of quantum vortex core fractionalization and skyrmion formation in a superconductor | Science

作者: 未知作者

Magnetic fields can penetrate a superconductor in the form of quantum vortices, which consist of a core singularity with circulating currents. London’s quantization implies that there is one core singularity per quantum of magnetic flux in single-component superconductors. Here, we report signatures of quantum vortex core fractionalization on the potassium-terminated surface of a multiband superconductor KFe 2 As 2 . The observed splitting of single integer-flux vortices into several fractional vortices results in a disparity between the numbers of flux quanta and vortex cores. These fractional vortices often arrange in chains, which calculations show are characterized by a ℂP 2 skyrmionic topological invariant; this constitutes a different type of topological defect: the chiral skyrmion. The disparate natures of integer and fractional vortices comprising skyrmions lead to distinct spectroscopic signatures.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Repeat expansions in Parkinson's disease and parkinsonism across ancestries: insights from a global genetic cohort

Expanded short tandem repeats contribute to a broad spectrum of neurodegenerative diseases, yet their roles in Parkinson's disease (PD) and parkinsonism remain incompletely characterized, especially across diverse ancestries. We analyzed short-read whole-genome (WGS) and clinical exome sequencing (CES) data from 38,365 individuals (28,861 WGS; 9,504 CES), encompassing 23,242 patients with PD, 4,729 patients with atypical parkinsonism and 10,394 healthy controls from 11 genetic ancestries. To determine carrier frequencies and characterize repeat structures across diverse ancestries, we genotyped 12 established pathogenic loci where normal, intermediate, and pathogenic alleles can be reliably differentiated using short-read sequencing data. Additionally, we conducted threshold-based associations to determine the minimum threshold associated with increased PD risk in 15,995 individuals (8,591 PD, 7,404 controls) of European ancestry. Pathogenic repeat expansions were detected in 62 patients (56 PD and 6 atypical parkinsonism) and 5 controls across seven loci (AR, ATXN1, ATXN2, ATXN3, CACNA1A, HTT and THAP11), spanning seven ancestries. Among these, ATXN2 expansions were the most frequently observed in PD and were present in African, East Asian, European and Middle Eastern ancestries. Additionally, intermediate ATXN2 repeat expansions exhibited a strong, length-dependent association with PD risk in the European population, with individuals with [&ge;]32 repeats having a more than four-fold increased risk (odds ratio 4.25, 95% confidence interval 1.80-12.05). Overall, >92% of expanded alleles harbor CAA interruptions within the CAG tract. Pathogenic expansions at other loci, such as ATXN3 and THAP11, showed more ancestry-specific distributions. Clinically, individuals with pathogenic ATXN2 and ATXN3 expansions most often presented with typical PD features but frequently showed earlier disease onset and a strong family history of PD. This large-scale, multi-ancestry study comprehensively maps the genetic landscape of pathogenic and intermediate repeat expansions in PD. Our findings confirm a length- and structure-dependent risk association for ATXN2 with PD in the European population, and highlight the pleiotropic effects of repeat expansions across the parkinsonian spectrum.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Targeted Proteomic Profiling of Nasal Fluid from the Brain-Nose Interface

The brain-nose interface is an anatomical junction where olfactory neurons from the olfactory bulb traverse the cribriform plate into the nasal mucosa, providing minimally invasive access to the central nervous system (CNS). We hypothesized that nasal fluid from this region could enable detection of neurology-relevant proteins using targeted multiplex assays. Using nosecollect, a targeted nasal sampling device, nasal fluid proximal to brain-nose interface was collected from cognitively impaired patients, alongside matched cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and plasma. After nasal sample-specific dilution optimization and intra-assay precision evaluation, all matrices were profiled with the Olink Target 96 Neurology and NUcleic acid Linked Immuno-Sandwich Assay CNS disease 120 (NULISAseq CNS Disease 120) panels. Nasal fluid showed technically repeatable detection (intra-assay coefficient of variation

09.
Nature Biotechnology 2026-06-11

Large-scale, spatially resolved panoramic CRISPR screening in native tissue environments using Perturb-DBiT

作者:

Spatially resolved CRISPR screening in vivo has been limited to small perturbation panels and subsets of protein-coding RNAs. We present Perturb-DBiT, a method for co-sequencing of spatial total RNA whole transcriptomes and single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) on the same tissue section in situ. In a human cancer metastatic colonization model, we applied large (80,000+) sgRNA panels across tumor colonies in multiple consecutive tissue sections alongside their corresponding total RNA transcriptomes. We linked perturbations affecting long noncoding RNA covariation, microRNA–mRNA interactions and distinct amino acid-specific tRNA alterations to tumor migration and growth. By integrating transcriptional pseudotime trajectories, we further observed the impact of perturbations on clonal dynamics and cooperation. In an immune-competent syngeneic mouse model, investigation of the tumor immune microenvironment indicated distinct, synergistic effects on immune infiltration and suppression. Perturb-DBiT provides a spatially resolved comprehensive view of perturbation responses in complex tissues, including small and large RNA regulation, tumor proliferation, migration, metastasis and immune interactions. In vivo CRISPR genetic perturbations are spatially mapped at scale.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Proxy Knows Too Much: Sealing LLM API Routers with Attested TEEs

arXiv:2606.16358v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents increasingly access large language models (LLMs) through API routers. A router terminates the client's transport-layer security session and opens a separate upstream session, so it holds the full interaction in plaintext. This makes the router an application-layer man-in-the-middle: it can rewrite agent tool calls, swap dependencies for typosquatted packages, trigger attacks only under audit-evading conditions, and passively exfiltrate secrets. Existing client-side defenses are evadable. We propose AEGIS, a provider-transparent attested API router whose data path is a client-verified faithful passthrough. AEGISconfines plaintext handling to a small hardware-enclave component while leaving authentication, scheduling, accounting, and management on the untrusted host. The client verifies the enclave before releasing plaintext. The host can neither read nor alter the interaction, and plaintext leaves only toward destinations fixed by the measured image. We show that all four malicious-router attack classes succeed against a plaintext-access baseline and are blocked by AEGIS, including adaptive tests against the same boundary. The trusted path is $851$ lines, carries three provider-native APIs without conversion, and completes every request under real-provider workload and concurrency. In a seeded audit pilot, two commodity coding agents find eight and ten of ten planted invariant violations. The local relay overhead is about six milliseconds per request.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum statistical enhancement of collective behaviour in a bosonic active Ising model

arXiv:2606.18091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collective behaviour such as flocking (the collective motion of a spontaneously formed group along a common direction) or aster formation (the binding of opposing flocks, inhibiting each others motion) are intriguing emergent phenomena in active systems with local alignment rules. Until recently, their occurrence was mainly studied for classical systems, a prime example being the active Ising model (AIM), which translates the main ingredients of flocking and aster formation (i.e., alignment and self-propulsion) to a lattice framework. Here we introduce and study a one-dimensional (1D) quantum lattice variant of the AIM, based on ideal bosons with a spin degree of freedom. We find that both the collective behaviours of the 1D classical model, flocking and aster formation, are markedly enhanced by the bosonic quantum statistics. This contrasts with a recent quantum generalization of the AIM based onto hard-core bosons [Khasseh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 248302 (2025)], where flocking, but neither its quantum-statistical stabilization nor aster states were observed as a consequence of interactions. Moreover, we investigate the competition of this quantum statistical stabilization of collective phases with their suppression by the quantum fluctuations induced by a transverse external magnetic field.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Gaussian superpositions for bosonic encodings

arXiv:2603.15258v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Non-Gaussian bosonic states are ubiquitous in interacting light–matter systems, many-body platforms, and relativistic quantum field settings, but their quantitative characterization is hindered by the infinite-dimensional Hilbert space and by the poor scalability of Fock-space truncation methods. We introduce an exact finite-manifold encoding for states supported on a finite span of Gaussian branches, enabling the use of standard finite-dimensional quantum-information tools directly on an effective density matrix whose entries are determined by Gaussian overlaps. As demonstrations, we obtain closed-form and numerically stable evaluations of entropies and relative-entropy non-Gaussianity, and derive an analytic expression for the bipartite entanglement negativity of arbitrary multimode two-branch Gaussian superpositions, including a minimal which-branch dephasing model. Our framework provides a practical bridge between experimentally accessible continuous-variable resources (e.g., cat-like and measurement-conditioned states) and discrete-variable information measures, with immediate applications to benchmarking non-Gaussian resources in several quantum technology platforms.

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

Coping in Crisis: Computational Modeling of Coping Styles in Digital Crisis Discourse During the 2023 Turkiye Earthquake

How do people cope when disaster strikes and can we detect it at scale, in real time, from what they write? This study addresses that question using over one million Turkish-language tweets posted in the aftermath of the February 6, 2023 earthquake in Turkiye, which unfolded in a deeply polarized political context just months before a national election. Drawing on Lazarus and Folkman's (1984) coping theory, we develop a multi-label BERTurk classifier to detect three coping styles (problem-focused, emotion-focused, and meaning-making) across four theoretically motivated crisis phases. BERTurk achieves a macro F1 of 0.693, substantially outperforming a zero-shot mDeBERTa baseline (macro F1 = 0.324). Applied to the full corpus, the classifier reveals a clear temporal trajectory: problem-focused coping dominates the urgency phase and declines sharply, emotion-focused coping rises and stabilizes, and meaning-making increases monotonically. Anger correlates most strongly with meaning-making (Spearman r = 0.387), suggesting it functions as a mobilizing force toward blame attribution rather than practical action. These findings demonstrate that coping theory can be reliably operationalized in real-world digital crisis data and that doing so can help humanitarian organizations tailor their responses to where a population actually is.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Filtered ANN as a Phase Transition: When Selectivity-Estimation Error Causes Plan Regret

arXiv:2606.16341v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A filtered approximate-nearest-neighbor (ANN) query returns the k nearest vectors among those satisfying an attribute predicate P of selectivity s. The best execution strategy – pre-filter, post-filter, or in-filter – changes with s, so a system must estimate s and choose. We model this as an argmax over a landscape with phases (regions where each strategy wins) separated by boundaries, and show that selectivity-estimation error produces plan regret – recall lost versus the oracle strategy – only in the critical regions around those boundaries. The regret is a wedge of log-width equal to the multiplicative estimation error epsilon and height equal to the local cliff |V'(s*)| epsilon; the flip-margin 1/|V'(s*)| is the condition number of a sibling cardinality-estimation study reappearing as the local boundary theory. The two phase boundaries follow from independent mathematics: order statistics place the post-filter cliff at s ~ k/K, and site percolation places the in-filter cliff at s_c ~ 0.83/M for graph degree M (corpus-size independent). Criticality exists only under a constrained budget B < sqrt(k n). Under pre-registered decision rules we confirm, on synthetic sweeps and real SIFT1M, that regret concentrates ~290x at the boundary and that the regret curves obey a finite-size scaling collapse onto one universal wedge across two decades of corpus size. A real approximate index does not mis-locate the boundary, but a biased cost model opens a persistent miscalibration band that estimation-error robustness cannot fix. The contribution is a characterization, not a new index. Code and the full pre-registration are public.

15.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Diffuse Interface Energies with Microscopic Heterogeneities II: Rare Events

arXiv:2606.17968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze Allen-Cahn functionals with stationary ergodic coefficients in the regime where the length scale $\delta$ of the heterogeneities is much smaller (microscopic) than the interface width $\epsilon$ (mesoscopic). In a companion paper, we show that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta$ vanishes fast enough as $\epsilon \to 0$, then the functionals converge to an effective surface energy where the energy density is determined by homogenization effects originating at microscopic scales. Here we prove that if the ratio $\epsilon^{-1} \delta $ vanishes too slowly, the limit of the functional may actually be smaller than this homogenized energy. We refer to this as the rare events regime. In the case of the random checkerboard in dimension one, we use large deviations techniques to give a complete description of the rare events regime, showing that the limiting energy depends in a nontrivial way on the limit of $\epsilon^{-1} \delta | \log \epsilon |$. We further construct, in any dimension, examples of random media in which rare events become relevant at algebraic scales $\delta \approx \epsilon^{1 + \alpha}$ for an arbitrary $\alpha > 0$, as well as almost periodic examples in which atypical configurations play the same role as rare events.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Association between the hemoglobin albumin lymphocyte and platelet score and chronic kidney disease: insights from patient data and animal models

Introduction The hemoglobin, albumin, lymphocytes and platelets (HALP) score, a novel nutritional and inflammatory biomarker, has been used in various chronic disease studies. However, the relationship between the HALP score and chronic kidney disease (CKD) remains poorly elucidated. This study aimed to explore the possible association between the HALP score and CKD. Methods Our analysis encompassed 25,160 adult participants drawn from NHANES cycles spanning 2009 through 2018. Weighted multivariable logistic regression and generalized additive models (GAMs) were employed to evaluate the independent associations between the HALP score and CKD, albuminuria, and low-estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR). Threshold effects were examined using two-piecewise linear regression. Subgroup and sensitivity analyses were performed to assess robustness. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analyses were applied to compare the discriminative capacity of the HALP score with the prognostic nutritional index (PNI), systemic immune-inflammation index (SII), lymphocyte-to-monocyte ratio (LMR), and platelet-to-lymphocyte ratio (PLR). The clinical findings were further validated in a 5/6 nephrectomy rat model. Results After adjustment for multiple confounders, higher HALP scores were inversely associated with the risk of CKD (OR = 0.97, 95% CI: 0.94-0.99) and albuminuria (OR = 0.97, 95% CI: 0.93-0.99). However, after full adjustment for demographic characteristics, physical examination indices and laboratory parameters (Model 3), the correlation between the HALP score and low-eGFR was no longer statistically significant. Non-linear analyses revealed a threshold effect, with CKD risk declining as the HALP score increased up to an inflection point of 52.43 (OR = 0.97, 95% CI: 0.95-0.99), beyond which no further protective effect was observed. A similar threshold effect was identified for albuminuria. Subgroup and interaction analyses indicated no meaningful effect modification by age, sex, BMI, hypertension, or diabetes. Sensitivity analyses confirmed the robustness of the results. ROC analysis demonstrated that the HALP score showed superior discriminative ability for CKD and albuminuria compared with PNI, SII, LMR, and PLR. In the animal experiment, CKD model rats exhibited significantly lower HALP scores than controls. Inverse correlations were observed between the HALP score and serum creatinine (Scr), blood urea nitrogen (BUN), and urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR), with UACR showing the strongest correlation, which was consistent with the clinical findings. Conclusion Lower HALP scores are independently associated with increased prevalence of CKD and albuminuria. As an affordable and readily measurable biomarker, the HALP score may facilitate CKD risk assessment.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Coupled integrated photonic quantum memristors using a single photon source made of a colour center

arXiv:2602.14736v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Photonic quantum memristors provide a measurement-induced route to nonlinear and history-dependent quantum dynamics. Experimental demonstrations have so far focused on isolated devices or simple cascaded devices configurations. Here, we experimentally realize and characterize a network of two coupled photonic quantum memristors with crossed feedback, implemented on a silicon nitride photonic integrated circuit and fed by a room-temperature single-photon source based on a silicon-vacancy color center SiV$^-$ in a nanodiamond. Each memristor consists of an integrated Mach-Zehnder interferometer whose transfer function is adaptively updated by photon detection events on another memristor, thus generating novel non-Markovian input-output dynamics with an enhanced memristive behaviour compared to single devices. In particular, we report inter-memristor input-output hysteresis curves exhibiting larger form factors and displaying self-intersecting loops, respectively revealing marked bistability and self-intersecting hysteresis geometry. Furthermore, numerical simulations show how these features emerge from the interplay between memory depth and relative input phase, for both intra- and inter-memristor input-output relations. We experimentally test the performance of our system in the NARMA task. Our results establish coupled integrated photonic quantum memristors as scalable nonlinear building blocks and highlight their potential for implementing compact quantum neuromorphic and reservoir computing architectures.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

The Acceptability of Three Co-Created Peer Support Interventions for People Living with Leprosy Reactions in Indonesia: A Mixed-Methods Pilot Study

Background: Leprosy reactions (LR) are immune-mediated complications associated with disability, emotional distress, and social isolation. We identified a gap in affected-individual-informed interventions that aim to improve the management of LR in healthcare settings. To address this gap, we assessed the acceptability of three peer-support interventions co-created with people affected by LR in Indonesia. Methods: Using an interactive learning and action approach, we co-created peer counselling, telesupport groups, and participatory video interventions which were piloted in an urban hospital and 13 rural community clinics. A mixed-methods design was applied with interviews, focus group discussions, and pre-post assessments involving four participant groups. Data were analyzed thematically using an acceptability framework. Results: One hundred participants were enrolled, and 92 completed the pilot intervention between November 2022 and July 2023. Qualitative findings showed that all interventions were acceptable. Peer counselling provided emotional reassurance through shared experiences and was perceived as trustworthy and supportive. Perceived burdens differed by setting, with time constraints in urban facilities and geographical barriers in rural clinics. Knowledge improved significantly among participants of peer counselling and telesupport groups in rural settings. Telesupport groups facilitated connection, information exchange, and continuity of care. Digital access and literacy limited participation for some, particularly in rural areas. The participatory video was perceived as reassuring and informative. Improvements in knowledge, attitude, practices, and mental well-being domain scores were observed among urban participants, but responses in rural settings showed less change. Participants and co-implementers reported increased self-efficacy, participants confidence to perform required behaviors within peer support interventions, with effects shaped by intervention and setting. Conclusions: The three co-created peer-support interventions were acceptable for individuals with LR in diverse healthcare settings. These outcomes highlight the importance and effectiveness of selective, and context-sensitive implementation of one or more peer-support modalities.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

When Do Data-Driven Systems Exhibit the Capability to Infer?

arXiv:2606.11769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The European AI Act is the first comprehensive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), setting out extensive obligations, particularly for so-called high-risk and general-purpose AI systems. A key distinguishing feature of AI systems under the AI Act is the capability to infer. Since the AI Act does not clearly define what inference is, there is a gray area for certain data-driven systems. A specific example is credit scoring systems, which are listed by Annex III of the AI Act. At the same time, however, these are often implemented using statistical models for which it is unclear whether they have the capability to infer and thus fall under the AI definition of the AI Act at all. Motivated by statistical learning theory, this work develops a framework for grading different levels of the capability to infer. Based on the AI Act and the Commission Guidelines on the definition of an artificial intelligence system, we analyze which levels constitute sufficient capability to infer within the meaning of the AI Act and where further regulatory clarity is needed. We illustrate the framework by creating two realistic credit scoring workflows and show whether and where inference occurs in them. Our analysis illustrates that not only individual models but the entire data processing workflow must be considered. It also shows that the involvement of human experts during development can have significant influence on the capability to infer. Code can be found at https://github.com/fraunhofer-iais/inference-framework-creditscorecards.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Identifiability Without Gaussianity: Symbolic World Models and Near-Infinite Temporal Consistency

Klindt, LeCun, and Balestriero (arXiv:2605.26379) proved that Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) achieve linear identifiability, the linear recovery of the world's true latent variables, if and only if the world's latent dynamics follow a Gaussian, stationary process. This Gaussian boundary implies a fundamental limit on temporal consistency: for any non-Gaussian physical system, the representation error of a statistical World Model grows monotonically with time. We prove that this limit is an artifact of the statistical alignment mechanism, not a property of World Models in general. We introduce the Physics-Grounded Symbolic Architecture (PGSA) and prove three results: (1) a PGSA achieves exact linear identifiability for all physical regimes, regardless of the latent distribution; (2) the per-step error of a PGSA is bounded by numerical precision alone; and (3) as a direct consequence, a PGSA maintains temporal consistency for an unbounded number of transitions, a property we term near-infinite temporal consistency. We further prove that statistical World Models cannot achieve this property for any non-Gaussian system, regardless of model capacity or the volume of training data. The algebraic cores of four of the theorems are formalized in Lean 4 with Mathlib4 v4.31.0 (zero sorry placeholders); the Klindt et al. converse is taken as an external premise. The contrast establishes that symbolic grounding in the causal generator of the world's dynamics is the sufficient condition and, in non-Gaussian regimes, the only condition for near-infinite temporal consistency.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

MeiBRD: Meta-Learning Intraoperative Biomechanical Residual Deformation

Accurate intraoperative liver registration is challenging due to substantial soft-tissue deformation yet sparse intraoperative measurements. Biomechanical models regularize this ill-posedness with prior knowledge but exhibit persistent prediction bias due to simplifying assumptions, while data-driven learning solutions struggle with data efficiency, generalization, and physical plausibility. We propose a hybrid registration framework that adapts a biomechanical prior using sparse intraoperative correspondences. Rather than learning a full deformation field, we learn a residual deformation function that corrects linear biomechanical predictions, modeled as a graph neural diffusion function with geometry-aware attention over the 3D liver mesh. To enable long-range information transfer of sparse observations, we take a novel perspective of sparse intraoperative measurements as context samples where input-output pairs of the residual deformation function are fully observed, casting the problem into learning-to-learn this residual function from intraoperative context samples with feedforward meta-learners. Experiments on a deformable liver phantom dataset demonstrate improved registration accuracy and generalization compared to rigid, biomechanical, and data-driven baselines, particularly for out-of-distribution geometries and deformations.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A polynomial-time approximation scheme for minimum-weight decoding of topological codes

arXiv:2606.18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two-dimensional topological translationally invariant (2D TTI) stabilizer codes lie at the heart of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but using them requires solving the decoding problem. Minimum-weight decoding of these codes was recently shown to be NP-hard, even in basic settings, such as the color code with Pauli $Z$ errors and the toric code with Pauli $X$, $Y$ and $Z$ errors. Here, we prove that minimum-weight decoding of 2D TTI codes nonetheless admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS), i.e., for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, a recovery operator of weight within a multiplicative factor of $1+\varepsilon$ of the minimum can be found in polynomial time. Our approach builds on Arora's PTAS for Euclidean problems, such as the traveling salesman problem, and applies when decoding can be cast in terms of point-like excitations connected by string-like errors. It therefore extends beyond two dimensions, covering certain higher-dimensional topological codes and quantum memories, including the toric code with phenomenological or circuit-level noise.

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Revisiting Active Speaker Detection: An In-the-Wild Benchmark for Generalization and Robustness

We present UniTalk, a novel dataset emphasizing challenging scenarios to enhance model generalization for the task of active speaker detection (ASD). Previously established benchmarks such as AVA predominantly comprise old movies and thus exhibit significant domain gaps with real-world video. In contrast, UniTalk covers diverse video types reflecting challenging real-world conditions, including underrepresented languages, noisy backgrounds, and crowded scenes, while being on par with AVA in scale. Extensive evaluations reveal that ASD remains unsolved under realistic conditions: state-of-the-art models near-perfect on AVA fail to reach saturation on UniTalk. Conversely, models trained on UniTalk generalize better to modern in-the-wild datasets including Talkies and ASW. UniTalk thus establishes a new benchmark for ASD, providing researchers with a valuable resource for developing and evaluating versatile and resilient models.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

The impact of pre-stroke statin use on baseline corrected infarct volume and collateral perfusion

Stroke is a leading cause of disability and mortality worldwide, with ischaemic stroke the most prevalent type. Statins, used for cholesterol management, have demonstrated benefits in reducing stroke risk and improving outcomes in preclinical studies. However, the impact of pre-stroke statin use on stroke outcomes remain inconsistent. In this study, we aim to evaluate whether pre-stroke statin use is associated with greater volume of salvaged tissue and improved cerebral collateral perfusion. A retrospective analysis was conducted using data from 281 patients presenting with acute ischemic stroke to the John Hunter Hospital between May 2015 and May 2020. Patients were grouped based on pre-stroke statin use, and clinical variables, including infarct volume and collateral perfusion, were assessed. The primary outcome was salvage volume derived from baseline perfusion lesion volume minus infarct volume at follow-up. Collateral perfusion was measured by the hypoperfusion volume defined by delay time (DT)>6 seconds divided by the hypoperfusion volume defined by DT >2 seconds. Patients on statins at admission were significantly older and had more comorbidities. No significant association was found between pre-stroke statin use and salvage volume or collateral perfusion after adjusting for covariates. Larger initial infarct core was a significant predictor of salvage volume due to larger salvageable tissue volume at baseline. These findings indicate that pre-morbid statin use is not associated with larger salvage volume or improved cerebral collateral perfusion.

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medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of a Novel Blood-Based Assay for Brain-Derived Tau and Its Validation in Traumatic Brain Injury

Brain-derived tau (BD-tau) is an emerging blood-based biomarker for neurodegeneration, yet there are currently limited well validated BD-tau assays available for research and clinical use. To enhance access to this vital biomarker for neurological disorders including traumatic brain injury (TBI), we developed a novel blood-based immunoassay for BD-tau on the ultra-sensitive Quanterix HD-X platform using Single Molecule Array technology. Analytical validation assessed dilution linearity, specificity, precision, detection limits, and spike recovery, each recording robust metrics in agreement with international expert recommendations. The assay demonstrated robust validation metrics, achieving between-run stability of 95% when analyzing aliquots from six independent plasma and serum samples across five analytical runs. It also showed strong dilution linearity when diluted four-fold and achieved over 90% recovery when spiked with cerebrospinal fluid. Next, we evaluated the clinical utility of the assay in cohorts of individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI), where strong performances were recorded whether using the 2-step or 3-step assay formats ({rho}= 0.94; p < 0.0001). Furthermore, plasma BD-tau distinguished samples from TBI patients based on time from injury and severity (AUC=0.93). Plasma BD-tau differentiated between favorable and unfavorable functional outcomes in the acute-severe group. Our findings underscore the significant potential of the BD-tau assay as a biomarker for TBI in the severe phase.