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

Semantic Editing with Coupled Stochastic Differential Equations

Editing the content of an image with a pretrained text-to-image model remains challenging. Existing methods often distort fine details or introduce unintended artifacts. We propose using coupled stochastic differential equations (coupled SDEs) to guide the sampling process of any pre-trained generative model that can be sampled by solving an SDE, including diffusion and rectified flow models. By driving both the source image and the edited image with the same correlated noise, our approach steers new samples toward the desired semantics while preserving visual similarity to the source. The method works out-of-the-box, without retraining or auxiliary networks, and achieves high prompt fidelity along with near-pixel-level consistency. These results position coupled SDEs as a simple yet powerful tool for controlled generative AI. Project page: https://z-jianxin.github.io/syncSDE-release/. Code: https://github.com/Z-Jianxin/syncSDE-release.

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

R2RDreamer: 3D-aware Data Augmentation for Spatially-generalized 2D Manipulation Policies

Spatial generalization is critical for imitation-learned manipulation policies, but achieving it typically requires scaling demonstrations across diverse object poses, robot configurations, and camera viewpoints. Data augmentation from a few source demonstrations offers a practical alternative to costly real-world collection. Simulation-based augmentation can create controllable variation, but requires complex environment and object setup and may introduce a sim-to-real gap. Recent real-to-real methods avoid these issues by jointly editing 3D observations and action trajectories from real demonstrations, yet they still rely on strong 3D scene parsing and geometry completion, and often produce observations tailored to 3D pointcloud policies rather than RGB-based 2D policies. We propose R2RDreamer, a real-to-real demonstration augmentation framework that preserves the geometric consistency of 3D action-observation editing while moving visual completion to 2D video space. Specifically, R2RDreamer first performs lightweight 3D augmentation by editing incomplete object pointclouds and end-effector trajectories in a shared 3D frame; it then projects the edited scene into masked image-space control videos with occlusion-aware reasoning and uses a dense-control image-to-video model to complete temporally coherent RGB observations. Experiments on spatially shifted manipulation tasks with both 2D diffusion-style policies and vision-language-action policies show that R2RDreamer improves spatial generalization from limited source demonstrations, with analyses validating the contributions of 3D editing, occlusion-aware projection, and video completion.

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

AI Coding Agents Can Reproduce Social Science Findings

Recent anecdotal evidence suggests that AI coding agents can reproduce published findings when provided with original data and code; yet systematic evaluation across social sciences remains limited. Existing evaluation benchmarks are insufficient, either small or conflate agent performance with problems in the reproduction materials themselves, such as code that fails to execute correctly. Here we introduce SocSci-Repro-Bench, a benchmark of 221 tasks spanning four disciplines and 13 substantive domains, constructed from studies whose results are either fully reproducible with available materials or demonstrably non-reproducible due to missing data, allowing us to isolate agents' reproduction capacity. Evaluating two frontier coding agents, Claude Code and Codex, we find that both can reproduce a large share of social science findings, with Claude Code substantially outperforming Codex. These reproduction rates considerably exceed those previously reported for general-purpose LLM-based agents on comparable reproducibility benchmarks. Both agents also perform strongly on a reasoning task requiring identification of underlying research questions, and additional analyses suggest that results are not primarily driven by memorization. Providing the original paper PDF alongside replication materials modestly improves performance but introduces bias on tasks where reproduction is impossible. We also show that agents can be nudged toward confirmatory specification search through subtle prompt framing. Together, these findings suggest that at least some frontier coding agents can serve as reliable executors of computational workflows while underscoring the need for careful benchmarking and prompt design as AI systems assume larger roles in scientific production.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Bayesian Networks with Latent Time Embedding for Stage-Aware Causal Modeling of Alzheimer's Disease Progression

arXiv:2606.15784v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Alzheimer's disease (AD) progression is often described through the amyloid-tau-neurodegeneration, or AT(N), cascade. However, most longitudinal models represent this cascade either as a fixed sequence of biomarkers or as a black-box forecasting task. This makes it difficult to determine when biologically guided biomarker relationships influence future regional pathology. In this study, we introduce Bayesian Networks with Latent Time Embedding (BN-LTE), a Bayesian structural framework for stage-aware modeling of AD progression. BN-LTE estimates disease pseudotime from baseline biomarker profiles and constrains directed dependencies according to biologically plausible AT(N) ordering. Posterior spline-varying structural equations are then used to link initial multimodal measurements with future annualized regional tau-PET change. Across repeated subject-disjoint evaluations using ADNI data, BN-LTE shows strong spatial reconstruction of tau progression compared with the included forecasting baselines. Beyond spatial reconstruction, BN-LTE recovers posterior stage-varying AT(N)-constrained effects and identifies a mid-pseudotime window of amyloid sensitivity. This window is supported by model-implied g-formula contrasts, root-adjusted AIPW, mechanism-sensitive ablations, and robustness analyses across spline and prior specifications. Overall, these findings position BN-LTE as a Bayesian structural framework for forecasting tau progression while examining stage-dependent AT(N)-cascade mechanisms in observational longitudinal neuroimaging data. Our code is available at https://github.com/danleneurocom/BN-LTE.

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

Privacy-Preserving Federated Autoencoder for ECG Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices

arXiv:2606.11556v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continuous electrocardiography (ECG) monitoring could surface rhythm abnormalities before they escalate into cardiovascular events. However, a deployable system must satisfy three requirements simultaneously: legal-grade privacy (GDPR, HIPAA), real-time inference on constrained edge hardware, and detection quality under non-IID cross-hospital data. We design and evaluate an end-to-end federated system addressing all three for unsupervised 12-lead ECG anomaly detection on PTB-XL dataset, combining three autoencoder families (VanillaAE, ConvAE, VAE), Flower-based federated averaging (FedAvg) across ten simulated hospitals, client-side differentially private SGD (DP-SGD) with a Rényi-DP accountant, and 8-bit integer (INT8) post-training quantization with Raspberry Pi 4 benchmarking. Our main contributions are: an empirical characterization of how these mechanisms compose, practical DP-specific recommendations, and technical and security insights for a clinically sensitive setting. Federated learning matches or exceeds the centralized baseline across all architectures (ConvAE federated area under the ROC curve, AUROC, $0.782$), and an $\varepsilon$ sweep identifies $\varepsilon=4$ as the recommended clinical operating point. INT8 quantization roughly halves model size and cuts Pi 4 latency by up to $44%$ with $

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

Instability of a nonlinear oscillator with small friction and small additive noise

arXiv:2606.11389v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $\lambda = \lambda(\beta,\sigma,a,b)$ denote the top Lyapunov exponent for the linearization along trajectories of the noisy damped non-linear oscillator $\ddot{x}+\beta \dot{x} + ax+bx^3 = \sigma \dot{W}_t$, where $a$, $b$ and $\beta$ are all positive and $\sigma \neq 0$. In 2004 Arnold, Imkeller and Sri Namachchivaya stated without proof that $\lambda(\varepsilon^2 \beta,\varepsilon \sigma,a,b) \sim \overline{\lambda} \varepsilon^{2/3}$ as $\varepsilon \to 0$ with $\overline{\lambda} > 0$. This paper contains a proof of this assertion.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

How Useful is Causal Invariance for Domain Adaptation in Finite-Sample Settings?

arXiv:2606.12680v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine learning models often degrade when they are deployed on a target distribution that differs from the source distributions they were trained on. Recent work in causality-based domain generalization has shown how shared causal structure between domains can induce invariant predictors, e.g., models on a subset of features which have stable risk across structured domain shifts. However, the extent to which such population-level causal invariances can lead to gains in finite-sample settings remains underexplored. In particular, in practice we often have access to a few labeled target samples, a setting called supervised domain adaptation (sDA). In this paper, we explore when (full or partial) causal knowledge can provably improve supervised domain adaptation. As a first step, we study linear regression, where full or partial causal knowledge specifies a collection of invariant or possibly invariant feature subsets, each yielding a source-trained candidate predictor. We derive matching upper and lower bounds showing that finite-sample gains are governed by the target-risk margins separating the candidates, together with the finite-source estimation error. When these margins are sufficiently large relative to $n_Q$, an adaptive aggregation procedure can match the best candidate predictor while avoiding negative transfer relative to target-only learning. On the other hand, when the margins are too small, no algorithm can reliably exploit the candidate collection to obtain faster finite-sample rates. We further connect these margins to structural shift magnitude in linear SCMs and validate the theory on real-world causal benchmarks.

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Reimagining machine vision with optical computing

作者: 未知作者

A general-purpose artificial-intelligence vision system for use in image-sensing devices has been developed by embedding fundamentals of core computer-vision operations into a light-manipulating planar material called an optical metasurface. A prototype enables accurate, real-time perception and processing across diverse tasks, suggesting that this could be a solution for rapid, low-energy, on-device vision intelligence. A specialized ‘metasurface’ can preprocess incoming scene information on image-generating devices.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

The Magic Barrier before Thermalization

arXiv:2510.11681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the time dependence of anti-flatness in the entanglement spectrum, a measure for non-stabilizerness and lower bound for non-local quantum magic resource, on a subsystem of a linear SU(2) plaquette chain during thermalization. Tracing the time evolution of a large number of initial states, we find that the anti-flatness exhibits a barrier-like maximum during the time period when the entanglement entropy of the subsystem grows rapidly from the initial value to the microcanonical entropy. The location of the peak is strongly correlated with the time when the entanglement exhibits the strongest growth. This behavior is found for generic highly excited initial computational basis states and persists for coupling constants across the ergodic regime, revealing a universal structure of the entanglement spectrum during thermalization. We conclude that quantitative simulations of thermalization for nonabelian gauge theories require quantum computing. We speculate that this property generalizes to other quantum chaotic systems, a conjecture supported by analogous behavior observed in real-time simulations of the mixed-field Ising model.

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

Toward Calibrated Mixture-of-Experts Under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2606.20544v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Calibration aligns a model's predictive uncertainty with the frequencies of its empirical outcomes and is important for understanding and trusting reported probabilities. Recent work shows that enforcing calibration at the level of individual predictors can improve ensemble accuracy and calibration, with mixture-of-experts (MoE) models showing strong empirical improvements in particular; however, the conditions under which calibration helps MoE are not well understood. In this work, we study how MoE models behave under distribution shift, focusing on how routing mechanisms interact with expert-level calibration. We show that expert calibration is sufficient to ensure calibration of the overall model under a broad class of distribution shifts in hard-routed models, but is insufficient for calibrating soft-routed models. To address this, we propose an adversarial reweighting that penalizes calibration errors of the routed aggregate under distribution shift, and we demonstrate that it improves the accuracy-calibration tradeoff both on average and on difficult subsets of the data, across model classes, prediction tasks, and distribution shifts.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Fine-tuning LLMs for Passive Depression Severity Estimation from AI Mental Health Dialogue

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and early detection of symptom change is essential for timely intervention. Validated instruments such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) support symptom monitoring at scale, but real-world completion rates are low, introducing response bias and systematic missingness. Passive approaches that infer severity from routinely generated data could close this gap. We address this by predicting PHQ-9 total scores directly from transcripts of conversations between users and an AI mental health application, requiring only conversation text and no additional clinical data. We fine-tune a Qwen3.5-27B backbone with a regression head, augment 3,111 ground-truth labels with pseudolabels generated by a reasoning model (Claude Opus) and iteratively trained intermediate models, for a combined dataset of 6,283 users. On a held-out test set of 842 users, our best model achieves MAE = 2.6, RMSE = 4.0, Pearson r = 0.80, and AUC = 0.91 at the PHQ-9 >= 10 clinical threshold. We also find AUC > 0.87 at every severity threshold from PHQ-9 >= 3 to PHQ-9 >= 24, demonstrating that the model captures depression severity across the full clinical spectrum. This work opens the door to passive, continuous symptom monitoring in AI mental health platforms, without requiring users to complete self-report measures.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The Dark Regulome: Disentangling Predictability from Regulation in Genomic Foundation Models

High-grade gliomas integrate into neural circuits through functional synapses with neurons, raising the question of which noncoding elements shape synaptogenic gene expression in tumor cells. The regulatory program written across the dark genome, what we call the $dark regulome$, is the natural substrate to probe, and sequence foundation models offer a zero-shot route through in-silico mutagenesis (ISM); yet likelihood-based scoring is tautologically coupled to local sequence predictability, leaving the regulatory interpretation underdetermined. Across three architecturally distinct foundation models (Caduceus-Ph, HyenaDNA, Enformer) and 30,448 dark genome elements at 92 glioma-relevant loci, we introduce a residualization-and-permutation diagnostic that separates predictability-driven from regulation-driven RIS variance. A sharp 10kb proximal-regulatory horizon survives every control we apply, but the LM-derived element-class hierarchy does not: a six-feature linear baseline matches Caduceus top-decile membership at AUC $= 0.985$. Cross-architecture decomposition cleanly separates a sequence-predictability layer (the two language models co-rank long well-predicted transposable elements) from a regulatory-output layer (Enformer alone retains residual cCRE-discriminative signal), with literally zero overlap between the two top-100 lists. Conservation, brain cis-eQTL, and STRING-PPI cross-checks then anchor what biology survives: top-100 elements across all three models are $3.3\times$ enriched per model for matching brain eQTLs ($p_\mathrm{emp} < 5\times 10^{-3}$), while a tempting transposable-element regulatory layer and a striking NRXN1+NLGN1 protein-pair convergence both fail proper permutation tests once those tests are constructed. We deliver the diagnostic as a general methodological tool for any ISM-based regulatory study.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Low-Density Lipoprotein Cholesterol and Dementia Risk: Integrating Mendelian Randomization and Target Trial Emulation Within the Heart-Brain Axis

Background: The heart-brain axis links cardiovascular and neurodegenerative disease through shared vascular and inflammatory mechanisms. Although low-density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) is an established causal factor in atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD), its relationship with dementia remains uncertain, with midlife elevations associated with increased risk but late-life associations often appearing null or inverse. To address this cholesterol paradox, we integrated mendelian randomization (MR) with an active-comparator new-user target trial emulation. Methods: We applied a triangulated causal inference framework integrating two-sample MR with observational target trial emulation. Genetic variants associated with LDL-C were used as instrumental variables to evaluate Alzheimer disease (AD), dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and any dementia (AnyDem), with causal estimates derived using inverse-variance weighted models and sensitivity analyses for heterogeneity and pleiotropy. In parallel, an active-comparator new-user design compared statin versus ezetimibe initiation among adults aged 60 years or older using propensity score (PS) overlap weighting and Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate cardiovascular and dementia outcomes. Results: Genetically predicted LDL-C was associated with increased risk of DLB (OR 1.65, 95% CI 1.30-2.10; p

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Enhancing Spectral Embedding through Robust and Flexible Knowledge Transfer in Electronic Health Records

arXiv:2606.11570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose a spectral-based, unsupervised representation learning framework to derive low-dimensional embeddings for clinical concepts and patients in rare disease cohorts from electronic health records, where data are high-dimensional but sample sizes are limited. To overcome this challenge, we incorporate a knowledge matrix extracted from a broader population that shares a partially overlapping subspace with the rare-disease cohort. Our method departs from existing approaches by relaxing restrictive one-to-one signal-alignment assumptions between the latent data matrix and knowledge matrix, allowing more flexible and realistic forms of structured sharing. We introduce a novel two-step spectral embedding procedure: first, we identify and remove irrelevant components from the knowledge matrix; then, we apply a projection-based method to separately recover shared and heterogeneous components. Simulations and an analysis of a real-world multiple sclerosis cohort show that the proposed method outperforms competing approaches, particularly in challenging scenarios where shared signals are weak and only partially aligned, as is common in rare-disease data.

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

EiCAP: Beyond Fluency, Probing and Improving Emotional Intelligence in LLMs via Psychologically Grounded Multi-Turn Dialogue

Large Language Models increasingly serve in emotionally sensitive roles, including mental health support, education, and crisis response, yet they lack a principled framework for assessing or improving Emotional Intelligence (EI). We introduce EiCAP, a unified, psychologically grounded six-layer EI taxonomy operationalized into two complementary resources. EiCAP-Bench is a multi-turn, one-vs-three forced-choice evaluation suite with 3,174 probes across 24 subcategories and cross-turn dependencies that reflect real conversational EI demands. EiCAP-SFT is a 152,820-dialogue supervision corpus aligned to the same taxonomy, enabling controlled, interpretable fine-tuning. Two key findings emerge. First, generic conversational supervised fine-tuning does not confer EI: fine-tuning on UltraChat yields no significant gain in any of the 24 subcategories, with a macro score of 24.6%, near the chance level of 25%. Second, applying EI-grounded LoRA, using approximately 0.8% of parameters, directly to Qwen-2.5-7B-Base achieves significant gains in all 24 subcategories, reaching a macro score of 75.33%, a gain of 51.7 percentage points over Base and 37.1 percentage points over Instruct. Crucially, an ablation shows that the UltraChat pre-stage is counterproductive, reducing performance by 21.4 percentage points: direct EI-grounded training is both necessary and sufficient.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cardio Heart Connect: Protocol for a Randomized Trial of a Commercially Available mHealth Fitness Intervention for Cardiac Rehabilitation After Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement

Background: Despite ample evidence of the benefits of cardiac rehabilitation (CR), few transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) patients participate. Commercially available mobile health offers an opportunity to deliver activity-promotion content to populations that are challenged to participate in CR. This study aims to test the efficacy of clinically controlled, commercially available fitness programming for improving physical activity and cardiovascular health outcomes designed to be initiated while patients are on waitlists for traditional CR. Methods: The Cardio Heart Connect study is a hybrid type I effectiveness-implementation trial aiming to enroll N=200 patients who have been placed on a cardiac rehab waitlist following a TAVR procedure from the University of Colorado Hospital Heart and Vascular Center. Participants will be randomized 1:1 to the Cardio Heart Connect intervention with commercially available fitness or attention control, designed to control for technology access. At baseline, post-intervention (8 weeks), and follow-up (12 months), we will assess the primary outcome of participants? daily steps as measured by smartwatch accelerometer and secondary outcomes of interest including functional capacity (Duke Activity Status Index; VO2max), quality of life (Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire), and cardiovascular health status (Life Essential 8). In addition, we will use mixed methodologies to evaluate the implementation of intervention using the Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (RE-AIM) Framework. Conclusions: Commercially available fitness programs have the potential to provide more accessible opportunities for patients recovering from TAVR to engage in physical activity and may be preferred due to their customizability, convenience, and ease of scheduling. Overall, this study will provide insight into the use of commercial mHealth to promote activity following TAVR.

17.
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.

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

Tyler: Typed Latent Reasoning for Language Models – When to Think, What to Compute, and How Much to Allocate

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs) by externalizing intermediate computation as discrete text tokens, but this textual interface also introduces redundancy and inference overhead. Latent reasoning offers a promising alternative by carrying part of the computation in continuous representations. However, existing methods typically predefine when latent computation is invoked and how it is allocated during decoding, leaving a key problem unresolved: when to invoke latent computation, what type of computation to perform, and how much budget to allocate. We propose Typed Latent Reasoning (Tyler), a typed and budget-aware framework for latent reasoning during autoregressive decoding. Tyler learns a policy that, at each decoding step, chooses between emitting a text token and switching to a latent computation module specialized for a particular reasoning function. Once invoked, an operator maps the current reasoning state into latent tokens that support global planning, local state updates, or reusable procedural abstraction. Across extensive experiments on three backbone LLMs, Tyler improves accuracy by up to 14.49 points over CoT and by up to 4.30 points over the strongest competing baseline. It further generalizes across diverse reasoning domains and achieves the best final-stage performance with the lowest forgetting.

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

Quantum Correlation Hierarchy and Teleportation in Dephased Hydrogen Hyperfine System

arXiv:2606.11731v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the dynamics of quantum correlations in the hydrogen hyperfine spin system subject to Markovian phase noise. Treating the electron and proton spin degrees of freedom as an open two-qubit system governed by an isotropic hyperfine Hamiltonian and local dephasing, we obtain the exact time-dependent density matrix and derive analytical expressions for the full X-state family. We compute concurrence($C$), trace-distance measurement-induced nonlocality (Trace MIN–$\mathcal{N}_1$), and average steering coherence (ASC) in closed form and establish their strict ordering $ C(t)\leq \mathcal{N}_1(t)\leq \mathrm{ASC}(t) $ at all times. Entanglement is identified as the most fragile resource, undergoing sudden death at a finite time. Trace MIN exhibits dephasing-immune freezing for states with nonzero population imbalance, while ASC is the most robust quantity, persisting longest in every scenario studied.We additionally demonstrate that the dephased thermal hyperfine state serves as a resource for quantum teleportation, deriving a closed-form expression for the average fidelity and establishing that the teleportation advantage window coincides exactly with the entanglement survival interval, $\mathcal{F}_A > 2/3 \Longleftrightarrow \mathcal{C} > 0$, for the full X-state family with maximally mixed marginals. We identify four distinct dynamical regimes and map all three correlation measures onto directly measurable Pauli spin correlators, enabling experimental reconstruction of the full hierarchy without full state tomography.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Filum Terminale Diameter on Routine Pediatric MRI: A Large-Cohort Clinical Reference in 3,406 Children and the Age-Dependent Meaning of the 2-mm Thickened-Filum Threshold

Background. A filum diameter >2 mm is the conventional MRI threshold for a thickened filum, but it derives from small, mostly adult series showing no age dependence; whether one cutoff suits all of childhood is untested. Objective. To build an age-specific filum-diameter reference on routine pediatric MRI and test, adjusting for image resolution, whether the 2-mm threshold is age-stationary. Materials and methods. In this retrospective study an nnU-Net tracer measured the maximal filum diameter on consecutive lumbosacral MRI; versus manual tracing it showed negligible bias but moderate single-measure agreement. After excluding report-confirmed fatty filum, lipoma, or tethered cord, the proportion >2 mm was analysed within one acquisition protocol and by logistic regression adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness. Results. Of 7,245 examinations, 3,869 (53%) were traceable; untraced ones were younger (median 0.75 vs 2.0 years). The presumed-normal cohort had median diameter 1.48 mm. At matched resolution, 2 mm marked the 94th percentile in infants (5.6% exceeded it) but the 83rd by 3-6 years (17.4%); the age effect persisted after adjusting for voxel size and slice thickness (3-6 years vs infants, adjusted OR 4.7; P < .001). Conclusion. Filum diameter clusters near 1.5 mm, and the fixed 2-mm cutoff flags ~5% of infants but ~17% of preschoolers. Caliber should be judged against an age-specific clinical reference, not one fixed cutoff; a thick filum is not itself a diagnosis of tethered cord.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

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

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

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

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

Learning When to Sample: Confidence-Aware Selective Sampling for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet they often generate unnecessarily long reasoning paths that incur high inference cost. Self-consistency-based approaches push accuracy higher still, but they require sampling and aggregating multiple reasoning trajectories, leading to substantial computational overhead. In this paper, we introduce a confidence-aware selective sampling framework that, at inference time, analyzes a single reasoning trajectory to adaptively determine whether to rely on that trajectory alone or trigger multi-path sampling. The framework uses trajectory-level numeric features and sentence-level linguistic features extracted from reasoning states to guide selective multi-path reasoning. We train it on MedQA and evaluate it in-domain on MedQA and under calibration-only transfer on MathQA, MedMCQA, and MMLU, without further fine-tuning. Experimental results show that the proposed framework maintains comparable performance to full and efficient multi-path reasoning baselines, with accuracy changes of $-0.41 \pm 0.58$ and $-0.31 \pm 0.58$ percentage points, respectively, while reducing token usage by $71.7 \pm 5.0%$ and $36.6 \pm 9.1%$. These findings demonstrate that reasoning trajectories contain rich signals for uncertainty estimation, enabling a simple, transferable mechanism to balance accuracy and efficiency in LLM reasoning.

24.
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.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Value of XOR-Game-Induced Side Information in a Szilard Engine

arXiv:2605.12044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a Szilard-type thermodynamic valuation of side-information channels induced by Bell-type correlations. In each round, a two-level working system is thermalized with a degenerate Hamiltonian, so that its physical microstate is a uniform classical bit. A trusted referee embeds this bit into a finite two-player XOR game, and a correlation resource produces a compressed controller bit. The controller uses only this compressed bit as side information for feedback. The construction is formulated first for arbitrary finite XOR games. The referee encoding makes the game-winning event equivalent to correct prediction of the physical microstate. Consequently, the induced side-information channel is binary symmetric, with success probability equal to the XOR-game winning probability of the supplied behaviour. The reversible Szilard feedback value is therefore fixed by the mutual information between the microstate and the controller record. Optimizing over local, quantum, and nonsignalling behaviour sets turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, and nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. The construction is an effective-channel valuation, not a claim that Bell nonlocality is thermodynamic fuel. The controller receives only the compressed prediction bit, not the auxiliary variables that define the game. The thermodynamic costs of the referee, the correlation resource, and the preprocessing are not included. When controller-memory reset is included in a full cycle, the net work is non-positive, consistently with the second law.