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

A Causal Model of Theory of Mind in Conflict for Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.16944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM), the capacity to ascribe mental states to others and use those ascriptions for prediction and inference, is widely assumed to be essential for effective human-machine integration. Existing AI-ToM models address how to mentalize, but leave the question of when largely unaddressed. The central question is: under what situational and agent-level conditions is ToM engagement causally warranted in conflict? This paper presents a structural causal model formalized as a directed acyclic graph (DAG), treating ToM as a mechanism activated by situational and agent-level conditions rather than as an always-on capacity. The model specifies four exogenous variables capturing situational and agent-level conditions, five endogenous mediators, and a mechanistic ToM node producing engagement states through three distinct causal pathways: a tractability pathway, a reasoning-depth pathway, and an enabling-cause pathway. The primary outcome is epistemic accuracy, which decouples social reasoning from behavioral policy and generalizes across social phenomena beyond conflict. The framework gives AI systems a principled, resource-rational decision procedure for mentalizing, with implications for efficiency, trust, and the development of robust artificial social intelligence. Simulation validation, empirical human-machine teaming studies, and ethical considerations arising from conflict-optimized mentalizing are discussed.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Scaling Human and G2P Supervision for Robust Phonetic Transcription

Expert phonetic annotation is costly, especially for non-standard dialects and atypical speech. A common alternative is using Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) models to auto-generate phonetic labels from text transcripts at scale. We study how automatic phonetic transcription performance scales with human and G2P supervision in English. Using a curated 80-hour benchmark spanning native, non-native and post-stroke speech, we identify a supervision quality threshold: G2P supervision helps only when fewer than 20-30 hours of human annotation are available. Beyond this threshold, it provides no significant benefit and can reduce cross-dialect robustness. What is effective after this threshold is ASR pretraining which we use to achieve a 2.3x reduction in weighted phone feature error rate over prior systems, with strong gains on non-native and aphasic speech. These results suggest that quantity-driven G2P scaling may yield diminishing returns for robust generalization.

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

LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation

arXiv:2508.18636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representing a new paradigm in software distribution, LLM app stores are rapidly emerging, offering users diverse choices for content generation, coding assistance, education, and more. However, current ranking and recommendation mechanisms in LLM app stores predominantly rely on static metrics, such as user interactions and favorites, making it challenging for users to efficiently identify high-quality apps. At the same time, current academic research focuses on specific vertical fields and lacks a general, automated evaluation framework applicable to the diverse LLM app ecosystem. To address the above challenges, we present LaQual, an automated framework for LLM app quality evaluation. LaQual integrates three key stages: (1) LLM app labeling and hierarchical classification for precise scenario mapping; (2) static indicator evaluation using time-weighted user engagement and functional capability indicators to filter low-quality apps; and (3) dynamic scenario-adapted evaluation, where an LLM generates scenario-specific evaluation metrics, scoring criteria, and tasks for comprehensive quality evaluation. Experiments on a mainstream LLM app store demonstrate the effectiveness of LaQual. Its automated scores show high consistency with human judgments. Through effective screening, LaQual can reduce the candidate LLM app pool by 66.7% to 81.3%. User studies further validate its significant outperformance over baseline systems, particularly in comparison efficiency (mean 5.45 vs. 3.30) and value of explanatory information (4.75 vs. 2.25). These results demonstrate that LaQual provides a scalable, objective, and user-centric solution for high-quality discovery and recommendation of LLM apps in real-world scenarios.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-13

Testing the reliability of AI-generated protein structures

Although AlphaFold2 and its competitors have demonstrated remarkable abilities to predict protein structure, more work is needed to explore the limitations of these methods. Here we investigated the reliability of AlphaFold2 and ColabFold by creating a set of realistic but false protein sequences, using ColabFold to predict their structure, and then asking how often the program produces a high-scoring structure for a sequence that does not represent a protein. We determined that AlphaFold2 has a very small but non-zero false positive rate, estimated here at approximately 1 in 435 if one uses a threshold pLDDT score of 70 to define positive predictions. We also discovered, serendipitously, that some high-scoring sequences in the human genome were not false positives, but instead were previously unknown and un-annotated pseudogenes. These latter findings indicate that some well-established human annotations of protein-coding genes may have incorrectly extended the 5-prime untranslated regions too far. They also suggest that the false positive rate of AlphaFold2 is low enough that almost any high-scoring structure, even in a noncoding region, is worthy of further investigation.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Explaining RhythmFormer: A Systematic XAI Analysis of Periodic Sparse Attention for Remote Photoplethysmography

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) transformers achieve low heart-rate error on benchmarks, yet their decisions remain opaque–a growing concern as rPPG moves toward clinical heart rate estimation. Existing rPPG XAI is dominated by qualitative heatmap inspection without quantitative faithfulness metrics or physiology-grounded validation, leaving a gap between visual plausibility and auditable evidence. We address this gap. First, we adapt four attribution methods (raw attention, rollout, flow, Beyond Intuition) to RhythmFormer's bi-level routing attention with top-$k$ selection. Second, we introduce a skin coverage metric quantifying how much attribution mass falls on skin regions. Third, we adapt the SaCo faithfulness coefficient from its original classification setting to rPPG regression by using the MAE between original and perturbed predicted rPPG waveforms as the perturbation impact. Applying these tools, we quantify a multi-hop leakage effect under sparse top-$k$ routing: attention rollout and flow almost completely restores the connections that individual refined-attention layers explicitly set to zero. Beyond Intuition mitigates this via its value-projection-weighted rollout and gradient-supported mask, attaining the highest median refined skin coverage ($0.83$ vs. $0.57$ for vanilla rollout) and faithfulness ($F=0.92$) among the evaluated methods on UBFC-rPPG. Validation across diverse datasets and model variants is needed. A case study on a low-SaCo outlier further shows all four methods recovering consistently once an artefactual region is replaced, suggesting consistent SaCo behavior across attribution families in this illustrative case. Together, these metrics move XAI for rPPG toward auditable numerical evidence about spatial alignment and perturbation faithfulness, i.e. trustworthy rPPG XAI.

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

Quantum geometrical description of hole spin qubits far away from the $\Gamma$-point

arXiv:2606.14683v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hole spin qubits provide one of the leading platforms for spin-based quantum computing due to their large intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI), which enables fast electrical manipulation. The SOI of planar quantum dots has mostly been investigated in theoretical studies by examining the SOI already present in the two-dimensional hole gas (2DHG). Here, we study the SOI created by the in-plane confinement by deriving non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians numerically for hole spin qubits. We find that the quantum geometry of the 2DHG naturally emerges, leading to a meaningful non-perturbative definition of pseudospin valid far away from the $\Gamma$-point. The SOI of the 2DHG and of the in-plane confinement have different forms; therefore, they cannot be turned off simultaneously, ruining the perfect spin-orbit switch functionality of spin qubits. We construct effective Hamiltonians using the symmetry approach for various low-dimensional hole systems: (i) a heavy-hole confined in a SiGe/Ge/SiGe heterostructure, (ii) a light-hole confined in SnGe/Ge, (iii) a gate-defined nanowire in SiGe/Ge/SiGe, and (iv) a hole confined in a Ge/Si core/shell nanowire. The non-perturbative effective Hamiltonians provide results with excellent agreement with the full Hamiltonians.

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

Structural Energy Guidance for View-Consistent Text-to-3D Generation

Text-to-3D generation based on diffusion models often suffers from the Janus problem, leading to inconsistent geometry across viewpoints. This work identifies viewpoint bias in 2D diffusion priors as the main cause and proposes Structural Energy-Guided Sampling (SEGS), a training-free and plug-and-play framework to improve multi-view consistency. SEGS constructs a structural energy in the PCA subspace of U-Net features and injects its gradient into the denoising process. It can be easily integrated into SDS/VSD pipelines without retraining. Experiments show that SEGS reduces the Janus Rate by about 10% on average and improves View-CS scores across multiple baselines, including DreamFusion, Magic3D, and LucidDreamer. This method effectively alleviates viewpoint artifacts while preserving appearance fidelity, providing a flexible solution for high-quality text-to-3D content generation.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MNet++: Extended 2D/3D Networks for Anisotropic Medical Image Segmentation

This work demonstrates a full reproduction and extension of MNet, a hybrid 2D/3D convolutional network designed for anisotropic medical image segmentation. The original architecture was re-implemented within the nnU-Net framework to verify its reported performance and robustness to variable voxel spacing, known as anisotropy. Experiments were conducted on PROMISE prostate MRI and a controlled subset of LiTS liver CT under matched preprocessing and compute constraints. The reproduced MNet achieved a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 89.0 +/- 0.9% on PROMISE, within 0.8% of the published result, and 94.3 +/- 1.9% / 54.6 +/- 3.1% for liver and tumor segmentation on LiTS, respectively. Two lightweight extensions were further introduced: (1) a learned Fusion Gating mechanism enabling adaptive 2D-3D feature blending, and (2) a VMamba state-space module for efficient long-range depth modelling. The Spatial Gating variant improved DSC by +0.8% with less than 3% inference overhead, while VMamba improved performance consistency, reducing PROMISE Dice variation to +/- 0.7% and achieving the strongest LiTS liver performance at 95.8% Dice. Both extensions preserved MNet robustness to anisotropy, with delta Dice = 1.5% across 1-4 mm voxel spacing. Overall, the study confirms MNet reproducibility and demonstrates that adaptive fusion and state-space modelling have the potential to further strengthen segmentation reliability under anisotropic conditions. However, further tests are required to provide definitive conclusions.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Realizing Native INT8 Compute for Diffusion Transformers on Consumer GPUs: A Fused INT8 GEMM Kernel for Ideogram 4.0

arXiv:2606.14598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training INT8 (W8A8) quantization of diffusion transformers is widely deployed as a speed optimization, yet on consumer Ampere GPUs it is frequently slower than the FP8 and NF4 alternatives it is meant to beat. We trace this to a software artifact: the production "INT8" forward quantizes weights and activations only to immediately dequantize them back to bf16 and run a bf16 matrix multiply, never engaging the GPU's INT8 tensor cores, so the hardware's compute advantage is left entirely unrealized. We close this gap with a single fused Triton INT8 GEMM (int8xint8->int32 on Ampere tensor cores, with per-token x per-channel dequantization and bias folded into the epilogue, autotuned per GEMM shape) dropped into the Ideogram 4.0 diffusion transformer's linear layers in place of the dequantize-to-bf16 path. In the kernel, the int8xint8->int32 accumulation is bit-exact against torch._int_mm and the dequantized output matches the reference at cosine similarity 1.0 with no NaNs, running 2.8-4.2x faster than bf16 per GEMM. End to end it delivers a ~1.1x (~9-10%) speedup at 768px, and at 1024px it generates an image in 156.5 s on a single RTX 3090, faster than the single-card NF4 (164.5 s) and FP8 (172.9 s) baselines, at no measurable quality cost on these point estimates (PickScore/CLIPScore). INT8 thus goes from the slowest variant to the fastest, and 1024px becomes single-GPU feasible. The primary speed criterion (beat FP8, by ~9.5%) is comfortably met; the NF4 margin (~4.9%, single-run n=4) is within run-to-run variance we did not quantify and is best read as consistent with meeting the stretch target. We close with an honest deployment map: the win is specific to consumer Ampere, and on A100 and B200 the same kernel loses to those cards' fast native bf16/FP8 paths.

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

Pre-Training for Simulation-Based Science: A Study on Jet Foundation Model Training Objectives

arXiv:2606.14870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) trained on large datasets and fine-tuned on downstream tasks have emerged as a powerful paradigm in AI for science. Industrial FMs are typically trained using self-supervision with masking due to the lack of labels. In many scientific domains, accurate simulations are plentiful and facilitate large, labeled datasets. This opens up new possibilities for pre-training. We present a systematic comparison of pre-training methods using the OmniLearned High Energy Physics FM framework. We test supervised classification, flow-matching generation, and self-supervised masked particle modeling. All models are pre-trained on the JetClass dataset and fine-tuned on two representative downstream tasks, top jet classification and JetNet conditional generation. Among other observations, for classification tasks, we find that pure classifier pre-training is optimal when downstream labels and model capacity are plentiful, but combining it with self-supervised masked particle modeling (MPM) is uniquely powerful in the low-finetuning label regime. Flow matching-based generative pre-training seems to provide little benefit for downstream classification, and interestingly, for downstream generation, we find that flow matching must be in the pre-training objective to see a significant finetuning advantage, hinting at the orthogonality of classification and generation tasks. That is, for a model to transfer to both generative and classification downstream tasks, it must be pre-trained on both. This study provides a template for controlled scaling analysis of pre-training objectives for foundation models in simulation-based sciences.

11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp connectivity bounds for the vacant set of random interlacements

arXiv:2504.02777v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements at intensity $u$ in dimensions three and higher, and derive lower bounds on the truncated two-point function for all values of $u>0$. These bounds are sharp up to principal exponential order for all $u$ in dimension three and all $u \neq u_\ast$ in higher dimensions, where $u_*$ refers to the critical parameter of the model, and they match the upper bounds derived in the article arXiv:2503.14497. In dimension three, our results further imply that the truncated two-point function grows at large distances $x$ at a rate that depends on $x$ only through its Euclidean norm, which offers a glimpse of the expected (Euclidean) invariance of the scaling limit at criticality. The rate function is atypical, it incurs a logarithmic correction and comes with an explicit pre-factor that converges to $0$ as the parameter $u$ approaches the critical point $u_*$ from either side. A particular challenge stems from the combined effects of lack of monotonicity due to the truncation in the super-critical phase, and the precise (rotationally invariant) controls we seek, that measure the effects of a certain "harmonic humpback" function. Among others, their derivation relies on rather fine estimates for hitting probabilities of the random walk in arbitrary direction $e$, which witness this invariance at the discrete level, and preclude straightforward applications of projection arguments.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Ensembling Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2505.16077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that a single SAE captures only a limited subset of features that can be extracted from the activation space. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce and formalize SAE ensembles. Furthermore, we propose to ensemble multiple SAEs through naive bagging and boosting. In naive bagging, SAEs trained with different weight initializations are ensembled, whereas in boosting SAEs sequentially trained to minimize the residual error are ensembled. Theoretically, naive bagging and boosting are justified as approaches to reduce reconstruction error. Empirically, we evaluate our ensemble approaches with three settings of language models and SAE architectures. Our empirical results demonstrate that, compared to an expanded SAE that matches the number of features in the ensemble, ensembling SAEs improves the reconstruction of language model activations along with SAE stability. Additionally, on downstream tasks such as concept detection and spurious correlation removal, SAE ensembles achieve better performance, showing improved practical utility.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The Art of Mixology: Mixup-based Obfuscation for Privacy-Preserving Split Learning in Large Language Models

Split learning provides a practical paradigm for resource-constrained users to train Large Language Models (LLMs) by offloading computation-intensive layers to a server while keeping raw data local. However, existing privacy-preserving split learning methods still face a difficult trade-off among utility, privacy, efficiency, and stability. Specifically, these methods often suffer from substantial utility degradation, remain vulnerable to advanced data reconstruction attacks, incur prohibitive computational and communication overhead, or exhibit unstable performance across different tasks. In this paper, we propose MIXGUARD, a novel mixup-based privacy-preserving split learning framework for LLMs. MIXGUARD introduces token-level obfuscation, representation-level obfuscation, and adaptive gradient perturbation mechanisms, which operate jointly to preserve useful learning signals while preventing privacy leakage to the server. Technically, MIXGUARD first constructs a lightweight calibration model on a public dataset to refine the approximated target representation, and then applies this model during privacy-preserving fine-tuning on private data. We conduct extensive experiments on four classification tasks and four text generation tasks across multiple LLM families, model sizes, architectures, and fine-tuning strategies. The results show that MIXGUARD preserves model utility comparable to non-split training baselines, consistently achieves stronger privacy protection than existing split learning defense methods against state-of-the-art data reconstruction attacks, and remains robust under adaptive attack settings.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Leverage Is Not Reach: A Control-Window Law for Single-Neuron Steering in Language Models

Aligned language models gate behaviors such as refusal and language routing through sparse feed forward neurons, yet no theory predicts when a single neuron intervention controls a behavior coherently rather than collapsing the output. We develop a budget normalized control window framework for single neuron steering. A dose along one write direction reduces to one control coordinate: the alignment between the residual stream and the write, driven along a universal saturation curve in units of a coherence budget set by the residual norm divided by the write norm. Coherent control exists when a behavior trigger lies below the collapse ceiling. The same coordinate governs benign mode switches and refusal; the ceiling follows from weights and one generic forward pass, while triggers are measured at rollout. On fifteen held out neurons, the predicted ceiling has mean absolute error 0.14, about 0.07 in bulk layers, and the committed open or closed verdict holds on eleven against a ten of fifteen majority baseline. Closed cases expose three failure modes rather than violations: collapse before trigger, too little depth to propagate, or a normalization that caps how far one neuron can push. The law explains why local gradient attribution anti predicts control: true controllers write off the readout axis and carry a near zero first order gradient. A forward only contrastive screen made precise by the window recovers controllers that attribution misses. On refusal, the hardest case, intervention success is typed, not scalar: coherent bypass and strict actionable reach separate, so a neuron can flip refusal in fluent, on task text with no actionable content, and genuine actionable reach appears only for three of six audited Llama pivots and only at later rollout horizons. Single neuron steering is therefore a budgeted, typed audit of controllability rather than a fixed dose anecdote.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

DNA-binding specificity recognition from predicted homologous protein-DNA structures

Predicting protein DNA-binding specificity is essential for understanding gene regulation and disease mechanisms. Existing deep learning methods typically infer specificity from a single protein-DNA complex structure, which limits their ability to capture the diverse geometric patterns underlying protein-DNA recognition. Homologous protein-DNA interfaces provide complementary structural evidence and richer geometric features related to interatomic interactions. To address the limited diversity and coverage of experimentally determined complexes, we constructed a large-scale library of predicted homologous protein-DNA complex structures. Building on this resource, we propose HomoDSP, a template-retrieval-based framework for accurate DNA-binding specificity prediction. Benchmark evaluations and validation on newly released JASPAR 2026 samples indicate that HomoDSP outperforms existing methods in both accuracy and generalization, with particularly substantial gains on high-error samples. Moreover, this performance is largely retained when AlphaFold3-predicted complex structures are used as input. Template- and residue-level interpretability analyses suggest that HomoDSP improves prediction by focusing on DNA-affinity residues across multiple homologous templates. Finally, universal Protein Binding Microarrays evaluations on AI-designed DNA-binding proteins show that HomoDSP rescues a baseline failure mode in which the baseline method produces incorrect predictions because of training-set bias. Together, these results support the use of homologous template interfaces as informative structural priors for decoding protein DNA-binding specificity.

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

Wasserstein Equilibrium Decoding for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering

Small vision-language models (2-8B) are well-suited for clinical deployment due to privacy constraints, limited connectivity, and low-latency requirements favouring on-device or on-premise inference. However, their limited capacity exacerbates the generation of plausible but incorrect outputs. We extend game-theoretic decoding, previously restricted to text-only, closed-ended NLP tasks, to vision-language models for open-ended Medical VQA. We introduce a semantically aware Wasserstein stopping criterion that replaces lexical order matching, enabling convergence based on semantic consensus among near-synonymous candidate answers and avoiding unnecessary iterations caused by clinically equivalent ranking swaps. On VQA-RAD and PathVQA, we obtain consistent, statistically significant improvements over greedy and discriminative baselines. On VQA-RAD, we improve Qwen3-VL-2B by +3.5 percentage points (p < 0.01), surpassing the greedy 4B model, with similar trends at larger scales. On PathVQA, Gemma-3-4B with BDG matches MedGemma-4B under greedy decoding despite no domain-specific fine-tuning. At accuracy parity with classic BDG, the Wasserstein criterion reduces average convergence iterations by approximately 20%, improving inference efficiency while preserving the game-theoretic equilibrium behaviour. Code is available at https://github.com/luca-hagen/ Wasserstein-BDG-medical-VQA.

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

DepthMaster: Unified Monocular Depth Estimation for Perspective and Panoramic Images

While monocular depth estimation has achieved significant progress, achieving generalized metric depth estimation for both narrow field-of-view (FoV) perspectives and $360^\circ$ panoramas remains an unsolved challenge. Existing methods are often tailored to specific camera types and struggle to produce accurate metric depth that generalizes across diverse settings. This limitation stems from two key challenges: the inherent geometric discrepancy between perspective and panoramic cameras, and the scarcity of panoramic training data with metric annotations. In this work, we introduce DepthMaster, a unified metric depth estimation framework. Rather than employing specialized networks to learn spherical distortions, we reformulate the problem by decomposing panoramic images into overlapping perspective patches. Crucially, distinct from prior projection-based methods that rely on ad-hoc architectural modifications to handle boundaries, we introduce a novel Correspondence Consistency Loss (CCL) and inject virtual projection cameras as geometric priors, allowing us to seamlessly stitch the patches while avoiding specialized operators and keeping the backbone largely compatible with standard Transformer designs. This strategy also resolves the geometric differences by unifying all inputs into a canonical perspective representation, and effectively circumvents data scarcity by directly unlocking powerful metric priors from vast perspective datasets. Trained on a mixed dataset that contains only one panorama dataset, DepthMaster achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 13 diverse datasets, outperforming not only universal methods but also leading specialist models in both perspective and panoramic domains.

20.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-13

Contribution of nosocomial transmission to <i>Klebsiella pneumoniae</i> neonatal sepsis in Africa and South Asia: An observational study of infection clusters inferred from pathogen genomics and temporal data

by Erkison Ewomazino Odih, Jabir A. Abdulahi, Anne V. Amulele, Matthew Bates, Eva Heinz, Weiming Hu, Kajal Jain, Rindidzani Magobo, Courtney P. Olwagen, John M. Tembo, Tolbert Sonda, Jonathan Strysko, Caroline C. Tigoi, Kyle Bittinger, Jennifer Cornick, Ebenezer Foster-Nyarko, Wilson Gumbi, Steven M. Jones, Chileshe L. Musyani, Carolyn M. McGann, Ahmed M. Moustafa, Patrick Musicha, James C. L. Mwansa, Moreka L. Ndumba, Thomas D. Stanton, Donwilliams O. Omuoyo, Oliver Pearse, Laura T. Phillips, Paul J. Planet, Charlene M. C. Rodrigues, Fatou Secka, Kirsty Sands, Erin Theiller, Allan M. Zuza, Sulagna Basu, Grace J. Chan, Kenneth C. Iregbu, Jean-Baptiste Mazarati, Semaria Solomon Alemayehu, Timothy R. Walsh, Rabaab Zahra, Angela Dramowski, Sombo Fwoloshi, Appiah-Korang Labi, Lola Madrid, Noah Obeng-Nkrumah, David Ojok, Boaz D. Wadugu, Andrew C. Whitelaw, Anudita Bhargava, Atul Jindal, Ramesh K. Agarwal, Alexander M. Aiken, James A. Berkley, Susan E. Coffin, Nicholas A. Feasey, Nelesh P. Govender, Davidson H. Hamer, Shabir A. Madhi, Mari Jeeva Sankar, Kelly L. Wyres, Kathryn E. Holt Background Klebsiella pneumoniae is the leading cause of sepsis among neonates in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Africa and Asia, contributing substantially to the overall burden of antimicrobial-resistant infections and mortality among neonates globally. Pathogen sequencing has been used to investigate case clusters and confirm nosocomial transmission in a small number of neonatal units. Here we utilise pathogen sequence data to estimate the fraction of K. pneumoniae neonatal sepsis attributable to nosocomial transmission in African and South Asian countries. Methods and findings We estimated the proportion of invasive K. pneumoniae disease involved in nosocomial transmission clusters in a given neonatal unit, using single-linkage clustering based on pairwise temporal and genetic distances estimated from bacterial whole-genome sequences aggregated from 10 contributing studies. Analysing 1,523 K. pneumoniae isolates from 27 units in 13 countries in Africa and South Asia between 2013 and 2023, we inferred 156 nosocomial transmission clusters, ranging from 2 to 188 neonates each (83 of the clusters comprised ≥3 cases). Overall, we estimated that 1,035 neonatal infections (68.0%) were part of nosocomial transmission clusters. Excluding the first infection in each cluster as a potential index case, we estimate at least 879 (57.7%) infections were acquired via nosocomial transmission. Sensitivity analyses showed that results were robust to the choice of genetic distance estimation methods and thresholds used to define clusters, and cluster estimates were stable over temporal distance thresholds ranging from 2 to 8 weeks. Isolates were mostly extended-spectrum beta-lactamase (ESBL) producers (90.9%) and included 172 multi-locus sequence types (STs). Fourteen STs, including several globally recognised multidrug-resistant lineages, were associated with transmission clusters at multiple units, and these were collectively responsible for two-thirds of all infections. Carriage of carbapenemase genes (adjusted odds ratio, aOR = 2.08 [95% confidence interval, CI: 1.04, 4.14]; p = 0.04) and ESBL genes (aOR = 2.48 [95% CI: 1.26, 4.90]; p = 0.006) were significantly positively associated with transmission in a logistic regression model with site as a covariate. Limitations of this study include the lack of sufficient clinical data to allow high-resolution investigation of transmission dynamics and lack of facility-level data to investigate contributors to the observed differences in transmission burden across sites. Conclusions Nosocomial transmission contributes to a substantial proportion of K. pneumoniae sepsis in neonatal care units in Africa and South Asia. Reducing transmission within these settings through improved infection prevention and control and other measures could substantially reduce the neonatal sepsis burden. A high burden of transmission clusters is associated with the same drug-resistant lineages that are recognised as high-risk clones associated with hospital outbreaks in high-income countries, indicating global connectivity of the antimicrobial-resistant pathogen population.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Physically Motivated Ansatz for Open Fermionic Systems on Quantum Computer

arXiv:2606.16823v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Determining non-equilibrium steady states (NESS) of open fermionic systems is a fundamental problem akin to finding ground states of closed systems. To address this, variational quantum algorithms can be used to solve the Lindblad master equation, much like the Schrödinger equation, yet ansatz design for NESS remains challenging. Existing approaches rely mostly on hardware-efficient ansätze (HEA), which suffer from the barren plateau problem. Here, we introduce a physically motivated ansatz named NE-UCC. Numerical simulations demonstrate that NE-UCC reliably converges to the steady state even in strongly correlated regimes far from equilibrium, reducing the infidelity by up to ten orders of magnitude compared to HEA. Furthermore, NE-UCC facilitates the exploration of excited eigenmodes with specific symmetries.

22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Interaction and non-Hermiticity controlled transmission in extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger models

arXiv:2606.15245v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study the transport characteristics of an extended version of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model with next-nearest-neighbor (NNN) interactions and non-Hermitian onsite energies. We observed that transport in such a system is significantly modified by the NNN interaction and the non-Hermitian terms. The transmission coefficient exhibits oscillatory behavior as the strength of the NNN interaction varies in a fixed-length chain. Moreover, the transmission coefficient also shows oscillation with system size for a fixed strength of the NNN interaction. We find that novel oscillatory behavior of the transmission coefficient, arising form the NNN interaction, is a unique feature of such a model and has not been reported previously. The presence of the non-Hermitian terms also enhances/reduces the transmission coefficient depending on the values of the other system parameters like intra-, inter- and NNN hopping. It appears from our study that both the NNN interaction and the non-Hermiticity introduce significant changes in the transport properties of the extended SSH chain, which are not observed in the standard Hermitian nearest-neighbour variant of the SSH model.

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

Expert-Driven Survival Machines: Improving Stratification and Interpretability in Multiple Clinical Cohorts

arXiv:2606.14608v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Survival prediction plays a central role for healthcare providers and clinical researchers. Accurate risk stratification enables early intervention and improved patient management. Most existing deep survival models learn one common feature representation for all patients, which may hide important differences between patient subgroups. In contrast, a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework allows different parts of the model to focus on different patient patterns, leading to more individualized representations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a mixture-of-experts enhanced adaptive deep clustering survival framework (AdaCSM) for modeling such heterogeneous survival patterns. We introduce a routing-based expert mechanism that enables conditional specialization within a parametric survival modeling framework. The proposed architecture allocates patients to specialized risk predictors dynamically while preserving the patient survival and subtype clustering objectives. We compare our method with state-of-the-art survival and deep clustering models on multiple real-world longitudinal clinical cohorts spanning diverse disease domains. The proposed method demonstrates improved predictive performance and leads to interpretable results in survival analysis.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RAID: Semantic Graph Diffusion for True Cold-Start and Cross-Lingual Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models show strong transfer performance when given a non-empty history window. However, true cold-start scenarios, where a new item has no prior observations, violate this assumption. We propose RAID (Retrieval-Augmented Iterative Diffusion) a framework, which replaces history-based correlation learning with metadata-driven semantic retrieval and graph-conditioned diffusion. RAID maps textual metadata into a shared semantic space using a frozen multilingual embedding model and constructs an inductive retrieval graph that extends naturally to unseen items. It first forms a base forecast by aggregating information from semantically related neighbors, then refines this forecast with a gated diffusion module to model residual uncertainty. Under a strict true cold-start protocol, RAID outperforms strong foundation models and competitive baselines on both forecasting accuracy and prediction interval coverage, while reducing inference latency by an order of magnitude through non-autoregressive decoding. The shared semantic space also enables zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, allowing a model trained on English descriptions to generalize to items described in other languages without direct supervision.

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

Do Neural Networks Lose Plasticity in a Gradually Changing World?

arXiv:2602.09234v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning has become a trending topic in machine learning. Recent studies have discovered an interesting phenomenon called loss of plasticity, referring to neural networks gradually losing the ability to learn new tasks. However, existing plasticity research largely relies on benchmarks with abrupt task transitions, without examining whether the abruptness itself contributes to the observed plasticity loss. In this paper, we investigate the role of transition abruptness by simulating gradually changing environments through input/output interpolation and task sampling. We perform theoretical and empirical analysis, showing that the severity of plasticity loss is closely tied to the abruptness of task transitions, and can be substantially reduced when the environment changes gradually.