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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Mixing times of one-sided $k$-transposition shuffles

arXiv:2112.05085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study mixing times of the one-sided $k$-transposition shuffle. We prove that this shuffle mixes relatively slowly, even for $k$ big. Using the recent ``lifting eigenvectors'' technique of Dieker and Saliola and applying the $\ell^2$ bound, we prove different mixing behaviors and explore the occurrence of cutoff depending on $k$.

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

GraspLLM: Towards Zero-Shot Generalization on Text-Attributed Graphs with LLMs

Research on Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs) has gained significant attention recently due to its broad applications across various real-world data scenarios, such as citation networks, e-commerce platforms, social media, and web pages. Inspired by the remarkable semantic understanding ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been numerous attempts to integrate LLMs into TAGs. However, existing methods still struggle to generalize across diverse graphs and tasks, and their ability to capture transferable graph structural patterns remains limited. To address this, we introduce the GraspLLM, a framework that combines Graph structural comprehension with semantic understanding prowess of LLMs to enhance the cross-dataset and cross-task generalizability. Specifically, we represent node texts from different graphs in a unified semantic space with a frozen general embedding model, on top of which we perform motif-aware contrastive learning across multiple motif-induced adjacency matrices to extract dataset-agnostic structural information. Then, with our proposed optimal contextual subgraph, we extract the most contextually relevant subgraph for each target node and align these subgraphs to the token space of LLM via an alignment projector. Extensive experiments on TAG benchmark datasets spanning diverse domains reveal that GraspLLM consistently outperforms previous LLM-based methods for TAGs, especially in zero-shot scenarios, highlighting its strong generalizability across different datasets and tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Heinz217/GraspLLM.

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

The limits of interpretability in multiple linear regression

arXiv:2606.16013v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interpreting machine-learning models has attracted increasing attention, particularly in the physical sciences, where one often seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms rather than merely make predictions. Multiple linear regression is often regarded as an interpretable alternative to more complex models, such as deep neural networks, because its predictions are expressed as explicit weighted sums of input features. However, when input features are strongly correlated, namely in the presence of multicollinearity, the learned weights can exhibit large dataset-to-dataset fluctuations and oscillatory behavior across physically similar features, making their interpretation difficult or even impossible. Although the instability of the weights under multicollinearity is well known in statistics, its consequences for physical interpretation, in particular its connection to oscillatory weights across physically similar features, have not been systematically clarified. Here, we theoretically discuss the mechanism behind this loss of interpretability by analyzing the eigenmodes of the feature correlation matrix. We show that small-eigenvalue modes associated with multicollinearity amplify fluctuations in the weights and generate oscillatory patterns that do not necessarily reflect meaningful contributions. We test this theoretical picture numerically on physics datasets and show that Ridge regularization suppresses these unstable modes, although the resulting weights must still be interpreted with caution. We further confirm the generality of our findings beyond physics by analyzing a diverse collection of publicly available datasets. Our results clarify why, in the presence of multicollinearity, physical interpretation can remain difficult even for linear regression models.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Simulation of Non-Hermitian Hamiltonians with Bivariate Quantum Signal Processing

arXiv:2605.12450v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We achieve query-optimal quantum simulations of non-Hermitian Hamiltonians $H_{\mathrm{eff}} = H_R + iH_I$, where $H_R$ is Hermitian and $H_I \succeq 0$, using a bivariate extension of quantum signal processing (QSP) with non-commuting signal operators. The algorithm encodes the interaction-picture Dyson series as a polynomial on the bitorus, implemented through a structured multivariable QSP (M-QSP) circuit. A constant-ratio condition guarantees scalar angle-finding for M-QSP circuits with arbitrary non-commuting signal operators. A degree-preserving sum-of-squares spectral factorization permits scalar complementary polynomials in two variables. Angles are deterministically calculated in a classical precomputation step, running in $\mathcal{O}(d_R \cdot d_I)$ classical operations. Operator norms $\alpha_R\,,\beta_I$ contribute additively with query complexity $\mathcal{O}((\alpha_R + \beta_I)T + \log(1/\varepsilon)/\log\log(1/\varepsilon))$ matching an information-theoretic lower bound in the separate-oracle model, where $H_R$ and $H_I$ are accessed through independent block encodings. The postselection success probability is $e^{-2\beta_I T}\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2\cdot (1 - \mathcal{O}(\varepsilon))$, decomposing into a state-dependent factor $\|e^{-iH_{\mathrm{eff}}T}|\psi_0\rangle\|^2$ from the intrinsic barrier and an $e^{-2\beta_I T}$ overhead from polynomial block-encoding.

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

Tangram: Unlocking Non-Uniform KV Cache Compression for Efficient Multi-turn LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.06302v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-turn LLM serving accumulates dialogue history whose Key-Value (KV) cache grows with every turn and every user, quickly exceeding the model weights themselves and making memory – not compute – the binding constraint on throughput. Non-uniform KV compression, which allocates heterogeneous budgets across attention heads, preserves accuracy far better than uniform schemes, yet remains impractical: modern serving stacks assume identical KV lengths across heads, so heterogeneity traps freed memory as page fragmentation, spends up to 25% of prefill time reclaiming scattered pages, and skews GPU workloads that inflate decode latency by up to $1.7\times$ or burn 15–20% of each decode step on re-planning. We observe that this heterogeneity need not be discovered at runtime: head-wise retention follows a two-level structural regularity – an input-invariant head ranking with narrowly bounded per-head ratios – that can be calibrated offline from as few as 50 samples. Building on this insight, we present Tangram, a serving framework that statically resolves what prior systems handle dynamically: Budget Reservation fixes each head's post-compression footprint at scheduling time, eliminating page reclamation; Ragged Paging clusters similar-budget heads into independent page tables, turning fragmentation into reclaimable memory; and Ahead-of-Time Load Balancing precomputes balanced GPU partitions with zero runtime planning. Implemented on vLLM, Tangram serves as a drop-in substrate for existing non-uniform compression methods, matching their accuracy while improving end-to-end throughput by up to $2.6\times$ over the full-KV baseline. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/TANGRAM.

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

A Survey on 3D Gaussian Splatting Applications: Segmentation, Editing, and Generation

In the context of novel view synthesis, 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has recently emerged as an efficient and competitive counterpart to Neural Radiance Field (NeRF), enabling high-fidelity photorealistic rendering in real time. Beyond novel view synthesis, the explicit and compact nature of 3DGS enables a wide range of downstream applications that require geometric and semantic understanding. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of recent progress in 3DGS applications. It first reviews the reconstruction preliminaries of 3DGS, followed by the problem formulation, 2D foundation models, and related NeRF-based research areas that inform downstream 3DGS applications. We then categorize 3DGS applications into three foundational tasks: segmentation, editing, and generation, alongside additional functional applications built upon or tightly coupled with these foundational capabilities. For each, we summarize representative methods, supervision strategies, and learning paradigms, highlighting shared design principles and emerging trends. Commonly used datasets and evaluation protocols are also summarized, along with comparative analyses of recent methods across public benchmarks. To support ongoing research and development, a continually updated repository of papers, code, and resources is maintained at https://github.com/heshuting555/Awesome-3DGS-Applications.

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

Can LLM Coding Agents Reason About Time Series?

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for automated decision-making systems in finance, healthcare, or environmental monitoring. Time series data are ubiquitous in these fields, yet hard to process automatically. Can time series be analyzed by LLM agents? We examine three approaches: providing the agent with raw numerical data, using the LLM as a coding agent, or a combination of both. In the coding agent setup, the model iteratively queries the data using Python code. Using two time series understanding benchmarks, we show that agents with code access can outperform models processing raw data by up to 10%. However, even the best performing agent still answers about 22-34% of the questions incorrectly. To get insights into models' strategies and reasoning gaps, we analyze the model outputs with a strong LLM judge. Our analysis reveals that coding agents can select appropriate statistical tests, but often miss important nuances. Meanwhile, models with access to raw data can reach the right conclusions using back-of-the-envelope calculations.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reliable Neural-Codec Text-to-Speech by ASR Self-Verification and Distillation: Near-Zero Catastrophic Failures Across Models and Codecs

arXiv:2606.18323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open autoregressive neural-codec text-to-speech (TTS) models sound excellent on typical inputs yet suffer stochastic catastrophic failures: on a meaningful fraction of utterances they emit silence, terminate early, or collapse into repetitive or hallucinated content. We show this failure mode is cheap to remove. Under a single format-robust metric (a catastrophic-failure rate via an ASR round-trip), best-of-N ASR self-verification drives failures to near-zero: no observed failures remain by N=2 on a standard corpus (LibriSpeech) and by N=4 on a hard prompt set. This is not an artifact of one model: the reduction replicates across four open codec-TTS systems and three neural codecs (XCodec2, SNAC, Mimi), reaching the near-zero floor by N=2 on three of the four. We then make the fix free at inference time by distilling the self-verified behaviour into the model, which recovers much of the robustness in single-shot decoding, closing ~52-58% of the failure mass on hard inputs at no test-time cost. The distillation gain concentrates where it is needed (hard inputs); on already-reliable prose there is no headroom and no detectable change. A controlled comparison adds a clean negative: offline direct preference optimization (DPO/IPO) does not beat plain supervised distillation, and an online iterative variant is promising but not statistically separable at our evaluation size. We report honestly the one model that resists (a larger Llasa where scale did not obviously help) and a rare-word capability ceiling that no self-distillation method overcomes

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Statistical Mechanics and Symmetries of Non-Abelian Anyon Proliferation: From Deformation to Decoherence

arXiv:2606.12527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological quantum computation relies on braiding non-Abelian anyons, but requires the underlying topological order to survive imperfect state preparation and environmental noise. We show that the instability of topological order to wavefunction deformations and to decoherence, with the latter probed by syndrome distributions, are generically captured by stat-mech models whose symmetries naturally expose the corrupting anyonic excitations. As an example, we combine this framework with Monte-Carlo simulations to resolve the stability of $D_4$ topological order under deformations and quantum channels that proliferate multiple non-Abelian anyon species that individually are unable to condense. We show that beyond a finite threshold, proliferation of two non-Abelian anyon species parasitically condenses a shared Abelian-anyon fusion outcome, destroying the topological order. Our symmetry-based approach sharply differentiates the resulting trivial phase from that obtained by condensing all Abelian charges; in other words, the trivial phase "remembers" which anyons condensed. This framework provides a first step into identifying the relevant symmetry for optimal decoders, conditioned on syndrome measurements, of non-Abelian topological order.

10.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

In silico characterization of lysis and host-recognition modules in Staphylococcus aureus bacteriophage genomes

Background/aim: Antimicrobial resistance in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) requires precision non-antibiotic therapeutics, yet phage lytic efficacy is poorly predicted by phenotypic assays, as shown by paradoxical biofilm responses. This study characterized the genomic architecture of lytic S. aureus bacteriophages, focusing on the conservation of the lysis module and the variability of host-recognition modules, to provide a rational basis for phage candidate selection. Materials and methods: Twenty-two complete S. aureus phage genomes were retrieved from NCBI GenBank. Genomic features were extracted with custom Biopython scripts. Lysis (endolysin, holin) and host-recognition (tail fiber/receptor-binding protein) modules were annotated and validated by InterPro domain analysis, with disrupted endolysins resolved by tBLASTn. Phylogeny was reconstructed from large terminase subunit (TerL) sequences using maximum likelihood. Results: Genome size spanned three classes, from 17.5 to 148.6 kb. The LysK-type endolysin (CHAP, Amidase, SH3b) was highly conserved, whereas tail fiber/RBP genes were detected in only 14 of 22 phages. Domain analysis reclassified two proteins annotated as endolysins as virion-associated peptidoglycan hydrolases, and identified two independent mechanisms, HNH endonuclease insertion and intron splitting, that interrupt lysis-module genes and confound automated annotation. Maximum likelihood analysis recovered a strongly supported, highly conserved core clade with EW and SA13 as divergent lineages. Conclusion: Lysis modules are conserved whereas host-recognition modules are variable, indicating that host recognition rather than the lytic enzyme is the principal determinant of host range and the more rational target for phage selection and engineering.

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

Mutual Distillation of Dual-Foundation Models for Semi-Supervised PET/CT Segmentation

Organ segmentation from PET/CT is critical for quantitative analysis and radiotherapy planning in oncology. To ease the high annotation cost of PET/CT segmentation, semi-supervised learning (SSL) provides a practical and effective solution for developing deep models with limited labeled data. Recent developments in visual foundation models have demonstrated remarkable adaptability with improved efficiency. In this work, we propose a mutual distillation framework that seamlessly exploits both structural and functional foundation models, which act as modality-specific generalists for distilling knowledge from structural CT and metabolic PET imaging. By bridging the gap between the task-specific precision of student models and the segmentation priors of generalist foundation models, we propose MuDuo, a mutual distillation framework that synergistically leverages SAM-Med3D for CT and SegAnyPET for PET to distill their knowledge into a lightweight student network. Our approach eliminates the need for manual prompts while maximizing the utility of unlabeled data for automatic segmentation, achieving state-of-the-art performance on the AutoPET dataset with only 5 labeled cases. Our source code is available at https://github.com/Wu-beining/MuDuo.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

A new class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation and their potential applications in optical memories

arXiv:2606.14256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this article, we present a novel class of degenerate solutions to the massless Dirac equation, corresponding to a wide variety of electromagnetic 4-potentials and fields, including both zero field and circularly polarized electromagnetic waves. An interesting property of these solutions is that the spin of the particles rotates in synchronization with the electric and magnetic fields of the electromagnetic waves. These results could be utilized for the development of optical memories based on materials supporting massless Dirac fermions, such as graphene.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TerraBench: Can Agents Reason Over Heterogeneous Earth-System Data?

arXiv:2606.13148v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Climate and environmental decision-making increasingly requires reasoning across heterogeneous inputs, including gridded physical data, satellite imagery, geospatial context, and simulator outputs. Weather and climate foundation models can forecast well, but do not reason interactively in language, while large language models (LLMs) reason in language but cannot operate directly on high-dimensional Earth-system data. As a result, real scientific workflows in Earth-science remain underserved. We introduce TerraBench, a benchmark for grounded Earth-science reasoning, built on TerraAgent, a ReAct-style executable framework that interleaves reasoning, tool calls, and observations to couple LLM planning with scientific tools for environmental retrieval, geospatial processing, simulation, and artifact-backed computation. TerraBench unifies analysis of Earth observation imagery, gridded data, GIS reasoning and simulation in a single executable interface, whereas prior benchmarks isolate these capabilities into narrow individual tasks. It is also the first in this space to pair process-level tool-use metrics with tolerance-aware numeric scoring. The benchmark comprises 403 extensive agentic tasks across three tracks (Fundamentals, Simulator-Grounded, and Document-Grounded Verification) and eight application domains with 24,500 verified execution steps. These results indicate that reliable Earth-science agents must go beyond tool access to coordinate heterogeneous workflows, parameterize tools precisely, and preserve artifact provenance.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Microwave-free vector magnetometry and crystal orientation determination with Nitrogen-Vacancy centers using Bayesian inference

arXiv:2512.13835v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond provide a solid-state platform for quantum sensing. While optically detected magnetic resonance techniques offer high sensitivity, their reliance on microwaves introduces heating and stray electromagnetic fields that can perturb nearby samples. Optical approaches based on cross-relaxation between differently oriented NV centers remove this constraint but have so far required stringent alignment of the external field with crystallographic axes, restricting their practicality. Here we introduce a general framework for microwave-free vector magnetometry at near-zero field that leverages Bayesian inference to extract both the magnetic field vector and the NV orientation directly from photoluminescence maps. An analytical model of cross-relaxation resonances enables efficient inference under arbitrary field and orientation configurations, while naturally incorporating the discrete degeneracies of the NV symmetry. We experimentally demonstrate robust orientation determination and vector-field reconstruction, establishing a general route toward compact and alignment-free NV magnetometers for practical sensing applications.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Improving Code-Switching ASR with Code-Mixing Guided Synthetic Speech

arXiv:2606.19381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training. Although synthetic data augmentation via Text-to-speech (TTS) has been explored, existing CS TTS approaches primarily optimise reconstruction fidelity and do not explicitly enforce language-boundary consistency, thereby limiting their effectiveness for CS ASR augmentation. This paper proposes a code-mixing guided preference-learning framework that steers synthetic speech generation toward improved code-switching fidelity using the Code Mixing Index (CMI). Experiments on the SEAME Mandarin-English conversational corpus demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the utility of synthetic data for ASR fine-tuning. Specifically, when fine-tuning Whisper Large, the proposed approach reduces Mixed Error Rate (MER) from 12.1%/17.8% to 8.9%/14.2% on the DevMAN and DevSGE sets, respectively.

16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Regularized Machine Learning for System Identification of Ship Free-Running Manoeuvres from CFD-Based Synthetic Data: A Comparative Study

arXiv:2606.17121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study investigates supervised machine learning techniques for identifying ship hydrodynamic coefficients from CFD-generated data from free-running simulations. Specifically, ordinary least squares and regularized regression methods are applied to Abkowitz-type manoeuvring models. Training and validation datasets are derived from URANS simulations of zig-zag and turning circle manoeuvres, which are validated against experimental benchmark data. The analysis evaluates the effects of coefficient set size, minimum training length required for predictive model training, and manoeuvre combinations on model performance. Results demonstrate the suitability of large-angle zig-zag manoeuvres for hydrodynamic system identification, provided that multicollinearity is addressed through appropriate coefficient selection, regression models, or input data variability. Larger coefficient sets offer greater model flexibility for variable conditions but are more prone to multicollinearity. Regularized regression techniques effectively mitigate multicollinearity and notably enhance prediction accuracy, as does incorporating more diverse manoeuvring data. Among tested models, Ridge regression provided the best compromise between computational efficiency and prediction accuracy.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Targeting Cancer-Specific Mutations with RNA-Triggered Chromatin Shredding

作者:

Genetic mutations that drive cancer often occur in tumor suppressor proteins, including the p53 transcription factor which is altered in ~40-50% of cases1,2. However, current therapies fail to target most such mutations because the mutant proteins typically lack defined drug-binding pockets, and restoring the endogenous function has proven challenging. Here, we programmed CRISPR-Cas12a2, an RNA-guided nuclease with trans-nucleolytic cleavage activities3,4, to selectively kill cancer cells by targeting cancer-specific transcripts. This approach limits cell growth by inducing trans shredding of chromatin, triggering DNA damage responses and cell death. Unlike existing methods, RNA-guided Cas12a2 senses cellular RNA signatures, enabling precise targeting of undruggable mutations. Transcript-activated chromatin shredding provides a new approach to precision disease treatments for undruggable targets.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Coherent Dark State Formation of a Lead-Vacancy Spin Qubit in Diamond

arXiv:2605.27841v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A lead-vacancy (PbV) center in diamond exhibits coherent emission above the liquid helium temperature, making it highly attractive for quantum network applications. Here, we report the magneto-optical and spin properties of PbV centers in diamond. We record a spin lifetime of 12 ms at 7.5 K under large off-axis magnetic field. Furthermore, we observe formation of the coherent dark state by coherent population trapping and estimate a spin dephasing time of 177 ns at 6.5 K. This work demonstrates the outstanding thermal robustness of the PbV spin compared to other group-IV centers above 4 K.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Nickel and Dimed: How a Common Earth Element is Short-Changing Our Health

Nickel has been studied for a long time as an environmental contaminant but less so in its connection to population health. It does not announce itself as loudly as its transition metal brethren like mercury and cadmium, but its chemical properties permit it to be deleterious as a low-dose, chronic exposure, particularly among those with immune systems sensitized to it. There is a growing evidence base and vocabulary to discuss nickel's affect on health. However, in the U.S., there are not recent, reliable estimates of the share of the population with a nickel allergy, let alone how much nickel Americans are exposed to through their diet. This paper seeks to close this evidence gap by creating a new dataset of dietary nickel and other heavy metal exposure and assessing how high levels of dietary nickel exposure shape local demand for health care services. We use soil data from the U.S. Geological Survey and data on agricultural product transport from FoodFlows.org to create a county-level dietary nickel exposure index. We then use a large electronic health record database and double machine learning to estimate how demand for primary care services varies across levels of dietary nickel exposure. We find that counties with high nickel exposure experience an increase in the share of primary care office visits for symptoms highly suggestive of nickel poisoning. This result survives multiple hypothesis test corrections and placebo tests. Our research suggests that nickel has harmful effects on individual health whose exposure can be measured at a population level, and is shaping primary care across the U.S.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Low-Burden LLM-Based Preference Learning: Personalizing Assistive Robots from Natural Language Feedback for Users with Paralysis

arXiv:2604.01463v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Physically Assistive Robots require personalized behaviors to ensure user safety and comfort. However, traditional preference learning methods, like exhaustive pairwise comparisons, cause substantial physical and cognitive fatigue for users with severe motor impairments. To solve this, we propose a low-burden, offline framework that translates unstructured natural language feedback directly into deterministic robotic control policies. To safely bridge the gap between ambiguous human speech and robotic code, our pipeline uses Large Language Models (LLMs) grounded in the Occupational Therapy Practice Framework. This clinical reasoning decodes subjective user reactions into explicit physical and psychological needs, which are then mapped into transparent decision trees. Before deployment, an automated "LLM-as-a-Judge" verifies the code's structural safety. We validated this system in a simulated meal preparation study with 10 adults with paralysis. Results show our natural language approach significantly reduces user workload compared to traditional baselines. Additionally, occupational therapists confirmed the generated policies are safe and accurately reflect user preferences.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Cloze: An Open Research Platform for Studying Human-AI Conversations in Mental Health Contexts

Cloze is an open-source web platform for conducting controlled, monitored studies of human-AI conversation in mental health research contexts. Consumer large language model (LLM) products such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are built for individual productivity, and offer researchers little experimental control, inconsistent data export, and no shared safety scaffolding that holds across providers. Cloze gives research teams a single environment in which they configure which models participants converse with, how the AI is instructed, how conversations are scheduled over time, and which safety constraints apply unconditionally, while every message is captured with full provenance (model version, prompt configuration, timing). The platform currently supports OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and locally hosted open-weight models served through Ollama behind a unified interface, and runs in the cloud or fully on premises so that participant data need never leave an institution. Cloze is research infrastructure for building an evidence base on human-AI interaction in mental health contexts. It is not a therapeutic product.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Your Privacy My Cloak: Backdoor Attacks on Differentially Private Federated Learning

arXiv:2606.17035v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior research suggests that differential privacy (DP) inherently enhances the robustness of federated learning (FL) against backdoor attacks. In this paper, we challenge this assumption. Through an empirical analysis of two baseline attack strategies, we uncover a fundamental tension in DP-FL: while bypassing DP allows state-of-the-art defenses to detect and filter malicious updates, complying with DP inadvertently masks their distinguishing statistical characteristics. Consequently, existing defenses become ineffective as DP reduces the raw backdoor signal. Building on this masking effect, we propose RING, a novel attack that explicitly exploits DP to conceal malicious contributions while maximizing attack impact. By collaboratively crafting adversarial perturbations, compromised clients reconstruct a strong backdoor signal during aggregation without triggering anomaly detection. RING operates as a perturbation layer that is agnostic to the underlying backdoor technique, making it broadly applicable and composable with existing attacks – a property that significantly amplifies the threat it poses to DP-FL. Extensive evaluations across four image and text datasets under non-iid distributions show that RING achieves an average attack success rate of 90.3% against six state-of-the-art defenses under a moderate privacy budget, an improvement of up to 26.08x over baseline strategies. Finally, we evaluate potential countermeasures and find that mitigating this threat incurs significant utility trade-offs, exposing a fundamental security gap in the deployment of differentially private FL.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Neighborhood socioeconomic status associated with post-stroke cognitive impairment: a retrospective cohort study

Background: Late complications after stroke (LCAS), including cognitive symptoms, impact quality of life and recovery. It is not known if neighborhood-level measures of socioeconomic status (SES) influence LCAS. This study assessed associations between SES measures, including neighborhood income inequality (Gini) and area deprivation index (ADI), and cognitive symptoms after acute ischemic stroke (AIS) in a hospital leveraging active surveillance of LCAS. Methods: This retrospective cohort study included 512 patients hospitalized with AIS at Tufts Medical Center with subsequent follow-up (between zero and three months or between three and twelve months) in the Stroke Clinic from 1/1/2018 - 12/31/2022. Using ZIP code data, patients were characterized as low Gini (low inequality) and high ADI (high deprivation) (Gini = 5) by state medians. These variables were combined, indicating patients who were living in both a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood to evaluate the effects of living in a homogeneously deprived area. There were 206 and 281 patients in the low Gini and high ADI groups respectively. 140 patients lived in a low Gini and high ADI neighborhood. The multivariable logistic analysis assessed the likelihood of cognitive symptoms, adjusting for age, race, ethnicity, sex, NIH Stroke Scale (NIHSS), thrombolysis, active LCAS surveillance, poverty, and ADI-Gini combination. Results: There were no associations between high ADI (OR: 1.03, 95% CI: 0.67 ? 1.57) or low Gini (OR: 1.74, 95% CI: 0.98 ? 3.07) alone and cognitive symptoms after AIS. However, the combined variable demonstrated increased likelihood of cognitive symptoms in the high ADI-low Gini group (OR: 1.82, 95% CI: 1.08 ? 3.06). Conclusions: This study suggests that individuals living in homogeneously deprived neighborhoods report higher likelihood of cognitive symptoms after AIS. Further studies with increased power are needed to investigate the underlying causes of these disparities and to develop interventions to reduce these complications.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Convex Quasilinearization Method for Solving Nonlinear PDEs with Physics-Informed Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.18175v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a numerical method for the forward solution of nonlinear partial differential equations (PDEs) in which Bellman-Kalaba quasilinearization reduces the nonlinear problem to a sequence of linear subproblems, each discretized by collocation onto a trial space that is linear in its parameters and solved by a single direct linear least-squares QR factorization. The trial space, which we term Linear-in-Learnables (LiL), comprises representations whose trainable parameters enter linearly, including random-feature extreme learning machines, spectral polynomial bases, and trigonometric expansions, each implemented as a physics-informed neural network. The method thus replaces the nonconvex gradient-based training that limits standard PINNs with a convex per-step solve. We establish local Newton-Kantorovich convergence of the outer iteration to a residual-limited neighborhood under an explicit smallness condition, with the limiting accuracy governed by the best-approximation residual of the trial space rather than by an optimization tolerance. The method, denoted LiL-Q, is assessed on seven benchmarks spanning scalar nonlinear PDEs (Bratu, viscous Burgers, Buckley-Leverett), coupled systems (plane-strain elasticity and the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in two and three spatial dimensions), and steady-state Darcy flow with heterogeneous permeability. Across these problems, LiL-Q converges in single-digit outer iterations in most cases, even at the coarsest basis sizes and independent of the parameter count. When the exact solution lies in the span of the trial space, the method recovers it to machine precision in a single solve. On the Navier-Stokes benchmarks, it matches or exceeds published PINN solvers with up to two orders of magnitude fewer trainable parameters, without gradient-based optimization.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Quantized time in quantum walks under weak rank-K measurements

arXiv:2606.13552v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Measurements can be used to monitor the evolution of quantum systems and may lead to a universally quantized time statistics. It is known that the mean return time is quantized for strong and indirect monitoring through the winding number of the return amplitude in a one-dimensional space. Here we discuss that under multi-channel strong or indirect monitoring, where the latter is achieved through ancilla coupling, the mean return time of a quantum walk in the projected subspace is also quantized. This reflects a universal time quantization for a higher dimensional evolution.