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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Designing AI-Supported Focus Groups: A Role x Modality Playbook

arXiv:2606.11835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Collecting participants' lived experiences is central to design research. Focus groups are uniquely valuable because participants not only share individual accounts but also respond to one another, surfacing comparison, disagreement, and collective sensemaking. However, focus groups are resource-intensive and highly sensitive to facilitation: moderators must probe for specificity, balance participation, manage topic flow, and sustain psychological safety, and subtle facilitation choices can shape what becomes salient. Recent HCI work and commercial meeting tools show that generative AI can scaffold live conversation through prompting, turn regulation, thematic mapping, and real-time summarization. Yet UXR teams lack a clear map of what these capabilities mean in focus groups and what methodological risks they introduce. We synthesize AI supports for live conversation and translate them into a focus-group-specific playbook organized by AI role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied).We synthesize prior work on AI-supported live conversation and propose a focus-group-specific playbook of AI supports organized by role (tool, co-host, host) and modality (text, voice, embodied). We characterize interactional trade-offs and identify open questions for evaluating AI-supported focus groups as methodological configurations.

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

DDTNet: Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network for Test-Time All-in-One De-weathering Adaptation

All-in-one adverse weather image restoration aims to remove multiple degradations, such as rain, haze, and snow, using a single unified model. Despite their broad applicability, existing methods typically compromise performance, delivering balanced but suboptimal results for individual degradation types. This issue becomes more pronounced when a domain gap exists between training and testing data. Motivated by the observation that modeling degradation patterns is more feasible than recovering clean content, we propose the Degradation Disentanglement and Transfer Network (DDTNet), which focuses specifically on degradation transfer. By disentangling degradation patterns from target-domain degraded images and transferring them to source domain clean images, DDTNet generates domain-adaptive paired training data. These pairs are then used to fine-tune restoration models, significantly enhancing their adaptability across diverse weather conditions and domains. The core of DDTNet is the Degradation Disentanglement Module (DDM), which comprises Degradation Coupled Attention (DCA) to capture both general and weather-specific features, thereby enabling effective disentanglement and transfer of degradation patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that DDTNet significantly and consistently improves existing all-in-one models across real-world deraining, desnowing, and dehazing datasets.

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

Multiple Descents in Deep Learning as a Sequence of Order-Chaos Transitions in LSTM Networks

arXiv:2505.20030v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We observe a novel `multiple-descent' phenomenon during the learning process of a recurrent neural network called long-short-term memory (LSTM) networks during its training on real-world task, in which the performance goes through long cycles of up and down trends multiple times after the model is overtrained. By carrying out asymptotic stability analysis of the models, we found that the cycles in performance – indicated by loss function in test data – are closely associated with the phase transition process between order and chaos of the model, and the local optimal training step are consistently at the critical transition point between the two phases. More importantly, the most optimal point of the model usually occurs at the first transition from order to chaos, where the `width' of the `edge of chaos' is often the widest, allowing the best exploration of weight configurations for learning.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LEDGER: A Long-Context Benchmark of Corporate Annual Reports for Grounded Financial Retrieval and Extraction

Finance reporting is a natural proving ground for large language models, and the very-long-context capabilities of recent models across all sizes make rigorous evaluation in this domain an increasingly pressing need. Yet most public financial resources reduce the task to plain-text SEC 10-K filings paired with a handful of question-answer items. We release LEDGER (Long-context Evaluation of Documents for Grounded Extraction and Retrieval), a corpus of 4,999 digitized corporate annual reports - full documents with figures, tables, and narrative, not just regulatory filings. Each report is labeled with 31 consolidated financial KPIs to be extracted and linked to the market's reaction at the earnings date. From this data we derive three evaluation benchmarks spanning the difficulty spectrum: a pure page-level KPI retrieval task with TREC-style relevance judgments over 118,048 questions in natural language, a conversational "needle-in-a-haystack" single-value lookup, and a full KPI extraction task, both from long, numerically dense reports. We additionally provide human OCR-quality annotations with inter-annotator agreement and the complete extraction, validation, and scoring toolchain. We further demonstrate the dataset's research utility with a case study linking CEO-letter rhetoric to post-publication market impact.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Agreement in Representation Space for Open-Ended Self-Consistency

Self-consistency improves LLM reasoning by sampling multiple outputs and selecting the most consistent answer, but existing formulations largely rely on exact matching and therefore remain limited to tasks with categorical outputs. In this work, we study self-consistency in open-ended generation tasks such as code synthesis and text summarization. We hypothesize that consistency can be understood as a geometric property of the generation space, where semantically compatible generations concentrate in similar regions of representation space. To study this hypothesis, we introduce Embedding-Based Agreement (EBA), a simple training-free operationalization that estimates agreement by clustering sampled generations in embedding space. Through experiments on mathematical reasoning, code generation, and summarization, we show that agreement in representation space provides a robust and scalable signal of self-consistency for open-ended tasks. In particular, EBA consistently outperforms random selection and exhibits more stable scaling behavior than recent selection approaches based on LLM evaluation or uncertainty estimation. We further show that these agreement signals remain stable across model families and embedding spaces, even with native hidden representations. Finally, our analysis shows that the geometric location occupied by sampled generations is strongly correlated with generation quality: generations concentrated near central regions of representation space tend to correspond to more reliable outputs, whereas peripheral generations are substantially less accurate. Overall, our findings support viewing self-consistency as a property of the geometric organization of sampled generations rather than exact symbolic overlap.

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

Towards Multi-Agent-Simulation-Based Community Note Evaluation

arXiv:2606.18268v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Community-based fact-checking that relies on cross-consensus is expanding rapidly on social media platforms. However, the delay and low-ratio of cross-consensus community fact-checks rated by human contributors remains a significant challenge. To address this, we first created ComRate, a large-scale dataset comprising 2.5 million community notes and over 209 million ratings sourced from $\mathbb{X}$. We then propose MultiCom, a persona-guided multi-agent rating framework for community note evaluation. MultiCom simulates diverse rater population by clustering contributors in a matrix-factorized rater space and prompting persona agents to generate structured assessments based on the official community notes rating schema. These agents output structured and explainable judgments, such as confidence, agreement signals and reasons. An out-of-fold calibrated aggregation algorithm combines features such as raw votes and diagnostic reason signals for reliable prediction. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MultiCom outperforms alternative methods, achieving an average accuracy of 84.7% (balanced accuracy 68.3%, macro-F1 60.1%) on the evaluation set.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

From 50K to 8.2 Million in 24 Hours: Vozinha's Algorithmic Consecration and the Multilingual Making of World Cup Visibility

We present a multilingual computational discourse analysis of how language constructed the algorithmic consecration of Vozinha, the 40-year-old Cape Verde goalkeeper, after Spain 0-0 Cape Verde at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The study contributes a multilingual corpus in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French; a nine-frame narrative taxonomy with cue-based frame annotation; a reproducible annotation pipeline combining LLM-assisted suggestion with human validation; and an analysis of cross-lingual narrative diffusion across discourse phases. We treat the platform follower count itself, narrated as "50k to 8M", as a linguistic object: a circulating and narratable proof of visibility rather than a mere measurement. The follower-growth timeline is used only as contextual metadata: we reconstruct a conservative phase structure, not a continuous API-native series, and type every datapoint by value class, confidence, and evidence type. The only exact primary scraper anchor is 8,235,652 followers at 2026-06-16 15:47 UTC; all other figures are reported as estimated ranges or thresholds, including an estimated pre-match baseline of 45k-56k. Findings suggest that distinct languages carried distinct frames: Portuguese mobilization, Spanish crisis, English nation-making, and a shared platform-metric spectacle through which peripheral athletic performance became globally visible. As a v0.1 pilot, the paper releases the corpus schema, frame taxonomy, annotation guidelines, hashed visual-evidence log, and typed timeline, while flagging full double annotation and inter-annotator agreement as planned work.

08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-15

WormSORT: A detection-based multiple object tracking model for individual silkworms in breeding environments

Authors:

by Hongkang Shi, Linbo Li, Shiping Zhu, Haibo He, Minghui Zhu, Jianfei Zhang Variety breeding has long been a cornerstone of high-quality agriculture, and recent advances in artificial intelligence have opened new avenues for accelerating biological breeding. In this study, we applied multiple object tracking (MOT) technology to silkworm breeding to achieve efficient, non-invasive, and dynamic individual monitoring. Unlike pedestrian or vehicle tracking, silkworms pose unique challenges for MOT due to their small size, dense distribution, and high inter-individual similarity, which complicate accurate tracking and behavioral analysis. To address these issues, we propose WormSORT, an enhanced tracking method based on a tracking-by-detection framework with an optimized data association strategy. A pre-trained detection model identifies silkworms in each frame, and deep feature vectors are extracted using a re-identification network. Identity association is first performed using Intersection over Union (IoU) matching, followed by deep feature similarity for unmatched cases, improving both tracking accuracy and reliability. To further enhance tracking stability, we introduce a candidate input padding mechanism, including IoU padding and feature padding, ensuring that high-confidence unmatched trajectories and detections remain involved in the matching process. To validate the proposed tracking strategy, we constructed two multiple silkworm tracking (MST) datasets: MST-50, containing approximately 50 individuals over 1000 frames, and MST-100, containing approximately 100 individuals over 1200 frames. Experimental results demonstrate that WormSORT outperforms existing methods, including DeepSORT, StrongSORT, OCSORT, ByteTrack, and BotSORT, achieving superior tracking performance. This study provides a valuable reference for silkworm tracking and behavioral analysis, contributing to the advancement of high-quality silkworm rearing and management.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

SemanticXR: Low Power and Real-time Queryable Semantic Mapping with an Object-Level Device-Cloud Architecture

Semantic mapping is a core service that enables grounded interactions in emerging Extended Reality (XR) applications such as AI assistants and spatial object search. Deploying this capability on mobile XR devices requires a system that is open-vocabulary, real-time, and low-power. Existing approaches are compute-intensive and assume server-class resources. Cloud offloading offers a practical path, but no existing system splits semantic mapping across the device-cloud boundary or manages its communication, execution, and memory footprint. We present SemanticXR, the first device-cloud system for real-time, open-vocabulary semantic mapping and querying under XR power, bandwidth, and memory constraints. Our key insight is to elevate semantically identifiable objects to first-class units of communication, execution, and memory across the device and server. On the server, object-level parallelism and geometry downsampling improve mapping latency, while object-level depth-mapping co-design reduces upstream bandwidth. On the device, an object-level sparse local map with incremental updates and update prioritization enables network-robust querying with bounded memory and downstream bandwidth. Object-level configurable resource usage vs. quality trade-offs let applications and the system adapt mapping to application requirements and operating conditions, respectively. Against a device-cloud baseline with the same perception models, object-level organization improves server-side mapping latency by 2.2X at equal semantic quality. Depth-mapping co-design maintains upstream bandwidth under 2.5 Mbps. On the device, SemanticXR sustains sub-100 ms query latency for up to 10,000 objects even under network drops, supports tens of thousands of objects within 500 MB, and scales downstream bandwidth with map changes, not total scene size. The system adds only 2% device power during normal operation.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Tree-Structured Orthonormal Decomposition of the Aitchison Simplex

arXiv:2606.11646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositional data – vectors encoding relative proportions – arise across scientific domains, including ecology, geochemistry, and genomics. The features in these data often come with known hierarchical structure (e.g., taxonomies, phylogenies, ontologies), yet existing methods either ignore this structure, discard the intrinsic Aitchison geometry, are designed for binary trees, or yield incomplete coordinate systems. We describe PolyILR, a canonical orthonormal decomposition of the Aitchison tangent space aligned with any tree topology. Our construction defines a weighted local geometry at each internal node capturing full branching structure, then lifts these to a global orthonormal basis where every coordinate corresponds to a specific tree location. On microbiome and single-cell benchmarks, PolyILR yields stable, interpretable features and enables inference at multiscale tree resolution. We also establish a novel theoretical connection to softmax classifiers, suggesting possible applications to probabilistic modeling.

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

Neural Events: Discrete Asynchronous Autoencoders for Event-Based Vision

Event cameras capture dynamic scenes with exceptional temporal fidelity by representing them as a continuous stream of microsecond resolution events. Each individual event, however, only carries minimal semantic value, merely signaling a localized brightness change. To derive meaningful signals, downstream algorithms need to quickly integrate cues from a potentially massive torrent of low-information events. Current architectures, however, are easily overwhelmed, struggling to balance capturing fine-grained temporal dynamics and maintaining a manageable data throughput. This paper proposes a framework to re-tokenize event streams into a small set of highly informative neural events, each representing a local spatio-temporal context window with a discrete learnable code. Every time this code flips, a neural event is triggered, yielding a highly compressed data stream. We demonstrate that, across object detection and classification, networks trained on neural events are on par or surpass the performance of state-of-the-art approaches while reducing the event rate by a factor of 2.0.

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

MOCHI: Motion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions

Collaborative human-object interaction shows dynamic and complex movements that require mutual anticipation and continuous adjustment between participants and the shared object. Modeling such collaborative multi-human object interaction (MHOI) scenarios requires high-quality data acquisition as a foundational step; however, this is challenging due to the inherent complexity of MHOI where human-human and human-object interactions occur simultaneously. Such complexity leads to noisy MHOI captures characterized by several artifacts: contact misalignment between hands and objects, motion jitter and temporal inconsistencies in the captured sequences, and missing or incomplete finger-level articulation details. To address these challenges, we present MOCHI (MOtion Enhancement of Collaborative Human-object Interactions), a two-stage framework for enhancing noisy MHOI data. Our approach first generates physically plausible hand grasps through optimization from noisy body input, producing grasps that are both physically plausible and semantically consistent with the body pose, where these optimized grasps are extended into complete hand-object interaction sequences. Consequently, the full-body motion for all participants are refined through a diffusion-based noise optimization framework that uses single-person motion priors. During the optimization process, we introduce optimization objectives to encode human-object and human-human interaction information within these single-person priors. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our pipeline across diverse MHOI data, either acquired by existing capture methods or synthesized by generative models. We further show robustness of our system across varying numbers of participants and types of interactions, and demonstrate various applications including keyframe-based MHOI creation and data augmentation through varying object geometries.

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

Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement

Generative AI (GenAI) image editors, such as Nano Banana, produce visually compelling results for retouching tasks, enabling non-experts to edit images through text prompts alone. However, the generative nature of these models often introduces spatial misalignment, texture distortion, and content hallucination, all of which are detrimental to downstream workflows that require pixel-level fidelity. We identify a problem setting we call "structure-preserving GenAI fusion" for black-box GenAI image retouching: retain the perceptual enhancements of a GenAI output while enforcing structural faithfulness to the original input image. To address this problem, we propose a post-processing framework that fuses an input image with its GenAI-enhanced counterpart by first establishing coarse spatial and photometric correspondences, then performing a fusion stage that transfers desired enhancements while suppressing hallucinated content. In the absence of direct prior work in this setting, we evaluate our framework against representative methods from photorealistic style transfer and image fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that our method better preserves aesthetic quality while maintaining pixel-level structural consistency and the input resolution.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Detect, Remask, Repair: Diffusion Editing for Faithful Summarization of Evolving Contexts

Summaries of real-world events can become outdated as contexts evolve and new information arrives. A common response is to generate a new summary from the updated context, but full regeneration discards the previous draft, can obscure what changed, and may be unnecessary when only a few claims are unsupported. We study localized faithfulness repair: updating outdated spans in an existing summary while preserving supported content. We propose DETECT-REMASK-REPAIR, a diffusion-based framework that identifies, remasks, and repairs outdated regions with masked diffusion language models. To evaluate evolving-context summarization, we introduce StreamSum, a benchmark of synthetic event timelines. Experiments on DialogSum and StreamSum show that localized diffusion repair provides a controllable alternative to full rewriting: faithfulness-steered repair improves early drafts, one-step repair reduces repair cost to under half a second, with the framework enabling faithfulness-speed-preservation tradeoffs across datasets. We also find that the framework can provide a post-hoc correction step that improves faithfulness for autoregressive systems.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-17

Combining machine learning and iterative experiments to keep pace with emerging viral variants of concern

by Thomas Sheffield, Ryan C. Bruneau, Stephen Won, Kenneth L. Sale, Brooke Harmon, Le Thanh Mai Pham Modeling and predicting viral mutations before they emerge plays a crucial role in pandemic preparedness, enabling the early identification of emerging variants of concern (VOCs) and guiding timely updates to vaccines, diagnostic tests, and therapeutic strategies. However, existing machine learning models and large-scale experiments lose their predictive power as viral variants evolve further from the original strains in sequence space. Here, we present a scalable framework that integrates random forest and neural network machine learning models with targeted high-throughput experimentation to anticipate and evaluate emerging SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD) variants. Using public datasets, we trained predictive models for binding to human Angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), RBD expression, and antibody escape, and refined these models through iterative integration of experimental data focused on over 200 variants derived from wild-type (WT) and Omicron strains. Through an indirect transfer learning approach, our machine learning models achieved high accuracy having correlation coefficients of up to 0.79 for antibody binding. The models were also generalizable across diverse antibody types including heavy-chain-only antibodies (HCAbs) by encoding complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) as input features. This dynamic approach enables rapid assessment of emerging variants, facilities prioritization of the therapeutic strategies, and supports a proactive, data-driven response to evolving viral threats.

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

Gen-VCoT: Generative Visual Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Diffusion-Based RGB Intermediate Representations

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual reasoning but rely on text-based chain-of-thought (CoT), lacking interpretable visual intermediates. Existing methods use opaque tokens or external tools, missing key properties. We propose Gen-VCoT, a framework using expert vision models to generate RGB images as reasoning intermediates. It has three stages: visual grounding (SAM segmentation), geometric reasoning (Marigold depth maps), and semantic reasoning (Qwen2-VL integration). An adaptive router selects reasoning depth. Evaluations show Gen-VCoT improves spatial (25% better) and depth (50% better) questions, but may hurt simple factual queries. Text CoT outperforms visual intermediates on CLEVR (91.2% vs 62.5%), showing task-dependent optimal representations. Gen-VCoT establishes a new paradigm for interpretable multimodal reasoning.

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

Ultracold atomic lattice systems for simulating topological phases: A review

arXiv:2606.16598v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Owing to rapid recent progress, ultracold atomic lattice systems for simulating topological phases are now at a pivotal stage, evolving from established paradigms into increasingly versatile and programmable quantum simulators. In this review, we survey recent experimental advances across four major classes of platforms: optical lattices, including optical lattices with laser-assisted tunneling and optical Raman lattices; synthetic lattices in momentum or internal-state space; Floquet-engineered lattices; and optical tweezer arrays, all of which offer distinct capabilities for realizing and probing topological matter. For each class, we highlight representative experimental breakthroughs, the topological models that have been realized, and the advanced detection and characterization techniques employed, emphasizing how these complementary approaches collectively expand the frontier of quantum simulation. We also discuss emerging directions in strongly correlated and nonequilibrium topological phases, and conclude with an outlook on future prospects.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Stochastic Reaction Networks Within Interacting Compartments with Content-Dependent Fragmentation

arXiv:2511.10223v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic reaction networks with mass-action kinetics provide a useful framework for understanding processes – biochemical and otherwise – in homogeneous environments. However, cellular reactions are often compartmentalized, either at the cell level or within cells, and hence non-homogeneous. We investigate a model of compartmentalization in which the rate of fragmentation of a compartment depends on the abundance of some designated species inside that compartment. The particular model of study is part of a general framework for compartmentalized chemistry with dynamic compartments that was proposed in (Duso and Zechner, PNAS, 2020). This paper builds on (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) where the special case where the compartment dynamics do not depend on their contents was studied mathematically. In particular, we demonstrate that the explosivity characterization from (Anderson and Howells, Bull. Math. Biol., 2023) fails in this setting and provide new sufficient conditions for non-explosivity and positive recurrence, under the assumption that the underlying CRN admits a linear Lyapunov function. These results extend the theoretical foundation for modeling content-mediated compartment dynamics, with implications for systems such as cell division and intracellular transport.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ScholaWrite: A Dataset of End-to-End Scholarly Writing Process

Writing is a cognitively demanding activity that requires constant decision-making, heavy reliance on working memory, and frequent shifts between tasks of different goals. To build writing assistants that truly align with writers' cognition, we must capture and decode the complete thought process behind how writers transform ideas into final texts. We present ScholaWrite, the first dataset of end-to-end scholarly writing, tracing the multi-month journey from initial drafts to final manuscripts. We contribute three key advances: (1) a Chrome extension that unobtrusively records keystrokes on Overleaf, enabling the collection of realistic, in-situ writing data; (2) a novel corpus of full scholarly manuscripts, enriched with fine-grained annotations of cognitive writing intentions. The dataset includes \LaTeX-based edits from five computer science preprints, capturing nearly 62K text changes over four months; and (3) analyses and insights into the micro-dynamics of scholarly writing, highlighting gaps between human writing processes and the current capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in providing meaningful assistance. ScholaWrite underscores the value of capturing end-to-end writing data to develop future writing assistants that support, not replace, the cognitive work of scientists.

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

FlowMPC: Improving Flow Matching policies with World Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.16286v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Flow Matching (FM) is a powerful approach for behavior cloning in multimodal action spaces [Jiang et al., 2025], but because it is not trained to directly maximize expected return, there is still room to improve how FM policies act at test time. This work investigates whether a learned world model can improve FM policies by enabling Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning over candidate action sequences proposed by the policy. Building on TD-MPC2 [Hansen et al., 2024], I introduce FlowMPC, a framework that combines an imitation-learned FM policy with a learned world model for test-time planning in ManiSkill manipulation tasks [Tao et al., 2025]. Across PickCube and PickSingleYCB, adding the world model improved performance over the FM policy alone, with especially clear gains in end-of-episode success. These results suggest that world-model-based planning can effectively complement flow-based imitation policies without modifying the FM training objective.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Possible or Definite? A Benchmark for Evaluating Diagnostic Uncertainty Preservation in Clinical Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical text tasks such as summarization and revision. While most studies evaluate the fluency and coherence of LLM-generated text, whether LLMs correctly preserve diagnostic uncertainty remains underexplored. In clinical practice, phrases such as ``possible pneumonia'' communicate the strength of available evidence and directly guide decisions about follow-up testing and treatment. Altering these uncertainty expressions can change the clinical meaning entirely. In this paper, we systematically evaluated this problem in two steps. First, we constructed a benchmark of 1,200 clinical documents with 9,184 uncertainty annotations across five levels. Second, we evaluated three LLMs on this benchmark. Our results show that (1) LLMs preserve the original uncertainty cues poorly, often less than half the time; (2) LLMs struggle with nuanced distinctions between adjacent levels. This work reveals a failure mode not captured by standard evaluation metrics and provides implications for the safe deployment of LLMs in clinical workflows.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Prevalence and Correlates of Ideal Cardiovascular Health among Ugandan Adolescents: A Cross-Sectional Study

Introduction: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors often emerge during adolescence and track into adulthood, yet data on cardiovascular health (CVH) in sub-Saharan Africa remain limited. We assessed the prevalence and correlates of ideal CVH among Ugandan adolescents. Methods: We analysed baseline data of adolescents enrolled in a cluster-randomised controlled trial being conducted in urban (Kampala) and rural (Jinja) districts of Uganda. In this study, Ideal CVH was defined as meeting "ideal" status of 5-7 of the American Heart Association's Life's Simple 7 metrics. Random-effects logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ideal CVH, accounting for village-level clustering. Results: We recruited 1316 participants with a mean age of 13.2 years, of whom 58.1% were female. Overall, the prevalence of ideal CVH was 66.8% (95% CI: 64.2% - 69.3%). The prevalence was higher in Jinja (74.4%, 95%CI: 70.9% - 77.7%) than Kampala (59.6%, 95%CI: 55.8%-63.2%) and the difference was evident (p

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Uncertainty Is Not a Safety Net for Clinical VQA, but Can It Anticipate Model Failure?

Safe deployment of clinical vision-language models (VLMs) requires reliable uncertainty estimation (UE): a signal indicating when predictions should be trusted or escalated to a clinician. We test whether current UE methods actually deliver this signal. Benchmarking 8 methods across 12 VLMs on clinical visual question-answering (VQA), we find that UE quality is not an intrinsic property of the UE method: it tracks model accuracy, degrading precisely where the model performance is weakest, and therefore where reliability is most needed. When we stress-test models by hiding the correct option among the multiple-choice answers (NOTA perturbations), accuracy collapses while uncertainty barely changes, leaving models systematically miscalibrated. Yet, we find that uncertainty on the unperturbed input reliably anticipates which predictions will collapse under NOTA, indicating that UE in current VLMs carries diagnostic information about model fragility. Our results position UE as a diagnostic tool for identifying fragile predictions and motivate perturbation-based evaluation as a path toward safe clinical deployment.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Boson Sampling as a Probe of Chaotic and Integrable Quantum Dynamics in a Photonic Chip

arXiv:2605.25398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum chaos plays a key role in understanding complex quantum dynamics, while integrated photonics offers unique advantages for quantum applications, including high-speed operation, scalability, and programmable unitary transformations. However, integrated photonic approaches to probing quantum chaos remain largely unexplored, owing to the absence of a clear connection between programmable photonic dynamics and established chaos diagnostics. In this work, we establish Fock-state boson sampling as a practical probe of quantum chaos by exploiting the sensitivity of multiphoton interference to the random-matrix properties of underlying single-particle unitary dynamics. More importantly, we design and fabricate a programmable quantum photonic chip to experimentally implement this framework, achieving the first integrated-photonic demonstration of quantum-chaos probes based on boson sampling. Experimental results show that the three complementary probes proposed in this work, namely the distance to Porter–Thomas statistics, Shannon entropy, and Out-of-Time-Ordered-Correlator-equivalent observables, exhibit close agreement with theoretical predictions and consistently distinguish chaotic and integrable dynamics. Our work provides a scalable route for investigating complex quantum dynamics on programmable photonic platforms while leveraging the intrinsic advantages of boson sampling through multiphoton interference and complex output statistics.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bi-qutrit entangled edge states of positive partial transposes with largest ranks

arXiv:2606.16265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whenever $E$ is an eight dimensional subspace of the bi-qutrit quantum system whose orthogonal complement is spanned by a vector of Schmidt rank three, we show that there exist PPT entangled edge states with the range space $E$ whose partial transposes are of rank six, which is the largest possible rank. In this way, we exhibit a huge family of bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of type $(8,6)$. They make faces of the convex set of all PPT states, and we find bi-qutrit PPT entangled edge states of other types on the boundaries of such faces.