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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

ROSA-TFormer: A Radar-Optical Sensor-Aware Temporal Transformer for Pinus sylvestris Plantation Classification in Northern Shaanxi Using GEE-Derived Sentinel-1/2 Time Series

Accurate identification of Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica plantations is important for monitoring afforestation quality and ecological restoration in northern Shaanxi. This paper proposes ROSA-TFormer, a radar-optical sensor-aware temporal Transformer for P. sylvestris classification using Sentinel-1/2 time-series data generated on Google Earth Engine. The model integrates separate SAR and optical embedding branches, a sensor-aware gate, and temporal attention pooling to capture multi-source seasonal features. Experiments on monthly and half-month point-level datasets show that ROSA-TFormer achieves strong classification performance, with 99.67% overall accuracy, 99.56% macro F1, and 98.91% P. sylvestris F1 on the HalfMonth-dataBig dataset. Spatial block validation and ablation results further indicate the effectiveness of radar-optical temporal fusion and sensor-aware modeling. The results demonstrate the potential of ROSA-TFormer for point-level P. sylvestris plantation classification, while broader wall-to-wall validation remains necessary.

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

ViT-FREE: Efficient Face Recognition via Early Exiting and Synthetic Adaptation

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have gained significant attention in computer vision and shown strong potential for face recognition (FR). However, their high computational cost makes deployment on resource-constrained devices challenging, motivating the need for methods that balance efficiency and accuracy. In this work, we investigate early exiting in pretrained ViTs as a simple yet effective training-free strategy for efficient FR inference. Leveraging the uniform feature dimensionality across transformer encoder blocks, we introduce ViT-FREE, a multi-exit framework that enables face verification directly from intermediate representations without modifying or retraining the backbone model, and thus, reducing inference cost. Empirically, we show that patch embeddings and attention maps evolve progressively across depth, exhibiting high similarity between consecutive ViT blocks and increasing alignment with the final representation. This indicates gradual feature refinement and attention convergence, suggesting that intermediate layers already provide stable and discriminative representations suitable for early exiting. Through extensive experiments on multiple FR benchmarks, we systematically analyze the accuracy-efficiency trade-off across exit depths. Our results demonstrate that later exits achieve a highly favorable balance, with exiting at layer 10 yielding up to a 20% speedup while incurring only a 1.5 drop in verification performance on benchmarks such as IJB-C. Also, we propose ViT-FREE_FT, a lightweight exit-specific fine-tuning strategy that adapts only the projection layers using a small synthetic dataset while keeping the transformer backbone frozen. This approach improves the performance of shallow exits while preserving the efficiency benefits and leaving deeper exits largely unaffected.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Not Just How Much, But Where: Decomposing Epistemic Uncertainty into Per-Class Contributions

arXiv:2602.21160v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In safety-critical classification, the cost of failure is often asymmetric, yet Bayesian deep learning summarises epistemic uncertainty with a single scalar, mutual information (MI), that cannot distinguish whether a model's ignorance involves a benign or safety-critical class. We decompose MI into a per-class vector $C_k(x)=\sigma_k^{2}/(2\mu_k)$, with $\mu_k{=}\mathbb{E}[p_k]$ and $\sigma_k^2{=}\mathrm{Var}[p_k]$ across posterior samples. The decomposition follows from a second-order Taylor expansion of the entropy; the $1/\mu_k$ weighting corrects boundary suppression and makes $C_k$ comparable across rare and common classes. By construction $\sum_k C_k \approx \mathrm{MI}$, and a companion skewness diagnostic flags inputs where the approximation degrades. After characterising the axiomatic properties of $C_k$, we validate it on three tasks: (i) selective prediction for diabetic retinopathy, where critical-class $C_k$ reduces selective risk by 34.7\% over MI and 56.2\% over variance baselines; (ii) out-of-distribution detection on clinical and image benchmarks, where $\sum_k C_k$ achieves the highest AUROC and the per-class view exposes asymmetric shifts invisible to MI; and (iii) a controlled label-noise study in which $\sum_k C_k$ shows less sensitivity to injected aleatoric noise than MI under end-to-end Bayesian training, while both metrics degrade under transfer learning. Across all tasks, the quality of the posterior approximation shapes uncertainty at least as strongly as the choice of metric, suggesting that how uncertainty is propagated through the network matters as much as how it is measured.

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

WISE: A Long-Horizon Agent in Minecraft with Why-Which Reasoning

arXiv:2606.12852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rapid advances have been made in developing general-purpose embodied agent in environments like Minecraft through the adoption of LLM-augmented hierarchical approaches. Despite their promise, low-level controllers often become performance bottlenecks due to repeated execution failures. We argue that a key limitation is not only the lack of episodic memory, but also the decoupling of what-where-when memory from which-why reasoning. To address this, we propose WISE (Which-Why Informed Semantic Explorer), a long-horizon agent framework with an enhanced low-level controller equipped with a Causal Event Graph that augments episodic memory with explicit causal structure linking observations to task relevance. Unlike prior work such as MrSteve, which relies on feature similarity for retrieval, WISE enables robust recall under viewpoint changes and supports opportunistic task reordering through causal reasoning. Building on this memory, we propose an Opportunistic Task Scheduler that dynamically re-prioritizes subtasks when causally relevant opportunities are detected. We further equip WISE with a multi-scale progressive exploration strategy to provide spatially comprehensive observations for downstream reasoning. Experiments show that WISE largely improves task success and efficiency on long-horizon sparse tasks, particularly in settings requiring adaptive decision-making.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Learning Arbitrary Lindbladians with Quantum Error Correction

arXiv:2606.18188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study ansatz-free Lindbladian learning, the problem of reconstructing the generator of an open quantum system without prior knowledge of its Hamiltonian or dissipator structures. This problem exhibits two distinct information-theoretic precision limits: Hamiltonian components unmasked by dissipation are Heisenberg-limited, while the remaining Lindbladian components are subject to the quadratically worse standard quantum limit. Existing approaches that attain these optimal scalings strongly rely on pre-specified structure of interaction and noise, leaving the ansatz-free setting an open problem. In this work, we present the first standard-quantum-limited algorithm for learning arbitrary sparse Lindbladians. Under an additional physically motivated regularity condition, our framework also learns the Hamiltonian component disjoint from the dissipator at the Heisenberg limit, without prior knowledge of either the Hamiltonian or dissipator supports. Our main technical ingredient is a recursive random stabilizer-code construction that suppresses the strongest Lindbladian terms while preserving sensitivity to weaker unknown ones. These results establish a scalable framework for characterizing unknown open quantum systems, with quantum error correction serving as a key learning primitive.

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

Text region detection in historical astronomical diagrams

Text detection is a crucial task in the analysis of historical documents. While datasets and benchmarks exist for text detection in manuscripts and maps, the study of text in mathematical diagrams has received little attention. To address this, we introduce a large-scale, diverse, open-access dataset of 948 historical astronomical diagrams containing 10,940 oriented polygonal text regions. Our dataset spans ten centuries (8th to 18th) and seven main linguistic traditions: Arabic and Persian (115), Chinese (332), Byzantine (233), Latin (185), Hebrew (48), and Sanskrit (35). It captures a wide range of diagram styles and textual content, from symbols to multi-line paragraphs. Each text instance is annotated with ordered polygons that precisely delineate text regions and encode the reading direction. In addition, we annotated the 2,293 regions in Latin diagrams with 20 class labels. We evaluated several strong baselines on our dataset, including TESTR, DeepSolo++, and Poly-DETR, a simple extension of DINO-DETR that we design to predict ordered polygon vertices. Poly-DETR achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MTHv2 and cBAD2019 benchmarks and provides a solid, simple baseline on our dataset. Code and dataset available online.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

The Target48 Neurodegeneration Panel: A Novel Tool for Profiling Protein Signatures in Neurodegenerative Disorders

Introduction: Novel tools for absolute quantification of established and emerging fluid neuro-biomarkers are required to advance diagnostic studies and improve biological insights. Methods: We conducted an extensive analytical and clinical validation of the Olink Target 48 Neurodegeneration panel (T48 Neuropanel) in 352 paired CSF and plasma samples from cognitively unimpaired controls (CU), Alzheimer dementia (AD), frontotemporal dementia (FTD), and dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), n=44 per group. Comparisons with benchmark assays were performed. Results: Good detectability (CSF: 31 out of 42 assays; plasma: 38 out of 42 assays) and technical performance was observed. Benchmark assays showed good correlations, supporting method transformation formulas. Next to emerging biomarkers (MMP10, ITGB2), discriminative performance was excellent in AD: CSF pTau217: AUC=1; FTD: plasma NfL: AUC=0.952; and DLB: CSF DDC: AUC=0.901. Discussion: This analytical and clinical validation of the T48 Neuropanel highlights initial cut-offs and emerging biomarkers to aid clinical studies for the diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring of neurodegenerative diseases. Highlights: The T48 Neuropanel shows robust analytical performance, with high detectability across both plasma and CSF matrices. The T48 Neuropanel validates established (i.e., pTau217, Abeta42, NfL, and GFAP) and emerging biomarkers (i.e., DDC, MMP10, ITGB2, ITGAM, NPTX2, NPTXR, SMOC1, sTREM1, and sTREM2) in CSF and plasma. CSF NfL, GFAP, ITGB2, and ITGAM and plasma GFAP were dysregulated across AD, FTD, and DLB dementias. -The multiplex design of the T48 Neuropanel enables rich biological interpretation by simultaneously quantifying established and emerging neurodegeneration biomarkers. Importantly, the inclusion of absolute quantification facilitates the establishment of cut-offs, supporting its potential for clinical translation.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

segSHAPE: RNA secondary structure prediction from nanopore direct RNA sequencing

RNAs adopt complex structures that regulate key biological processes, making accurate structure prediction essential. Chemical probing coupled with Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) offers a route to single-molecule structural inference, but current tools are limited by inaccurate signal-to-sequence alignment, which degrades modification-rate estimation and downstream structure prediction. Here we introduce segSHAPE for RNA secondary structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data (both RNA002 and RNA004 chemistries), a probe-agnostic framework that improves signal alignment using prior information of basecalling and per-read signal baseline shift correction, learns position-specific k-mer raw signal parameters, and estimates per-nucleotide modification rates with an unsupervised anomaly detector. On three public RNA002 DRS datasets spanning different chemical probes (AcIm, NAI-N3) and RNAs from 421 to 1552 nt, segSHAPE achieves the highest F1 score and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) on all RNAs, exceeding the strongest baseline by 3.4 to 5.8 percentage points in MCC. It additionally captures the ligand-induced conformational change of the thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) riboswitch RNA directly from RNA002 DRS data using the DEPC probe. On a public RNA004 DRS dataset, segSHAPE improves over the sm-PORE-cupine baseline by 17 ROC-AUC points in modification rate estimation and by 6.7 MCC points in structure prediction. These results establish segSHAPE as a unified, probe-agnostic pipeline for RNA structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Towards Next-Generation Healthcare: A Survey of Medical Embodied AI for Perception, Decision-Making, and Action

Foundation models have demonstrated impressive performance in enhancing healthcare efficiency across a wide range of medical applications. Nevertheless, their limited ability to perceive, understand, and interact with the physical world significantly constrains their effectiveness in real-world clinical workflows, where safety-critical decision-making and physical execution are tightly coupled. Recently, embodied artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a promising physical-interactive paradigm for intelligent healthcare, enabling agents to operate in complex medical environments. As research in this area rapidly expands, understanding how intelligent agents function as integrated, end-to-end systems in clinical environments becomes increasingly critical. However, existing surveys on medical embodied AI largely emphasize individual aspects or functional components, lacking a unified system-level organization of the field. To support and consolidate recent advances, we systematically survey the core components of medical embodied AI, with a particular emphasis on the coordinated integration of perception, decision-making, and action. We further review representative medical applications and relevant datasets, and we analyze the major challenges encountered in real-world clinical practice. Finally, we discuss key directions for future research in this rapidly evolving field. The associated project can be found at https://github.com/VMVLab/Medical_Embodied_AI_Paper_List.

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

When Generator Replay Degrades: Projected Rehearsal Orchestration for Heterogeneous Federated Class-Incremental Learning

arXiv:2606.15695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated class-incremental learning (FCIL) becomes substantially harder when clients observe different label subsets, progress through tasks at different stages, and provide uneven supervision for the same semantic concepts. Existing FCIL methods often preserve old knowledge through input-space synthesis, but they can be fragile under heterogeneous task streams and difficult to transfer across modalities. To alleviate such issues, we propose PRO, a framework that replaces synthetic input replay with projected rehearsal orchestration. To remove external pretraining, we evaluate all methods under the same warmup. After this, PRO maintains compact class-level projected memories on the server and allows clients perform balanced pseudo multi-task training over current examples and old projected memories. To handle stronger representation drift, we further introduce PRO-MAX, which augments PRO with neighborhood-weighted memory alignment while preserving the same server-light principle that the server only aggregates model updates and memory statistics. Across image, text, and graph benchmarks, PRO and PRO-MAX improve retention and final utility under heterogeneous streams while remaining competitive in homogeneous FCIL. Even when baselines are given expanded replay budgets, they degrade under supervision imbalance and stage misalignment, indicating that replay quantity alone does not resolve replay-quality failures. Additional weak-task diagnostics further show that larger replay mismatch is associated with larger downstream degradation, while our method keeps projected memories better aligned with the evolving representation.

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

From Observation to Intervention: A Causal Audit of Expert Importance in Mixture-of-Experts Models

Interpretability methods routinely use population-level summary statistics over observed model behaviour to license claims about the effects of targeted interventions on specific computations; in Pearl's terms, they treat rung-1 associational evidence as if it supported rung-2 interventional conclusions, a move whose validity is rarely tested. We examine one concrete instance: the use of routing statistics in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) pruning, where utilization rates, activation norms, and routing weight distributions are treated as predictors of which experts can be removed without functional cost. A token-level interventional audit across three high-redundancy MoE architectures (OLMoE-1B-7B-0924, Qwen1.5-MoE-A2.7B, DeepSeek-V2-Lite) finds no observational metric predicts causal expert importance in any model: across all 60 metric-layer combinations effect sizes stay below Cohen's $d = 0.23$, and no metric is reliably positive under our corrected, dual-test criterion. A per-token routing weight control, run with identical $n$, rules out insufficient power, recovering a signal whose CI excludes zero at OLMoE's final MoE layer ($d = +0.231$, 95\% CI $[+0.09, +0.37]$, $p = 0.0013$). Existing pruning methods succeed in this regime not by identifying dispensable experts but because early-layer redundancy renders most selection criteria interchangeable. Our results provide an explicit counterexample to the common inferential step from population-level observational summaries to token-level interventional claims about expert importance, and illustrate how interventional audits can calibrate the evidential standards for interpretability claims.

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

Spectrally Corrected Polynomial Approximation for Quantum Singular Value Transformation

arXiv:2603.03998v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum Singular Value Transformation (QSVT) provides a unified framework for applying polynomial functions to the singular values of a block-encoded matrix. QSVT prepares a state proportional to $\bA^{-1}\bb$ with circuit depth $O(d\cdot\mathrm{polylog}(N))$, where $d$ is the polynomial degree of the $1/x$ approximation and $N$ is the size of $\bA$. Current polynomial approximation methods are over the continuous interval $[a,1]$, giving $d = O(\sqrt{\kap}\log(1/\varepsilon))$, and make no use of any properties of $\bA$. We observe here that QSVT solution accuracy depends only on the polynomial accuracy at the eigenvalues of $\bA$. When all $N$ eigenvalues are known exactly, a pure spectral polynomial $p_{S}$ can interpolate $1/x$ at these eigenvalues and achieve unit fidelity at reduced degree. But its practical applicability is limited. To address this, we propose a spectral correction that exploits prior knowledge of $K$ eigenvalues of $\bA$. Given any base polynomial $p_0$, such as Remez, of degree $d_0$, a $K\times K$ linear system enforces exact interpolation of $1/x$ only at these $K$ eigenvalues without increasing $d_0$. The spectrally corrected polynomial $p_{SC}$ preserves the continuous error profile between eigenvalues and inherits the parity of $p_0$. QSVT experiments on the 1D Poisson equation demonstrate up to a $5\times$ reduction in circuit depth relative to the base polynomial, at unit fidelity and improved compliance error. The correction is agnostic to the choice of base polynomial and robust to eigenvalue perturbations up to $10\%$ relative error. Extension to the 2D Poisson equation suggests that correcting a small fraction of the spectrum may suffice to achieve fidelity above $0.999$.

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

Reducing the Complexity of Deep Learning Models for EEG Analysis on Wearable Devices

arXiv:2606.12742v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Wearable healthcare devices are the fastest-growing Internet of Things (IoT) sector. Many automated healthcare services rely on two crucial biological signals, namely ECG and EEG, which reflect the activity of the heart and brain, respectively. Although deep neural networks are considered the primary way to process and analyze these signals, the very tight energy and computational power constraints in wearable devices are far below the computational, energy, and memory bandwidth demands of DNN models, thereby impeding the deployment of deep learning in many practical wearable services. This paper investigates the feasibility of deploying state-of-the-art DNN models in resource-constrained wearable devices. Notably, we explore the trade-off between accuracy and computational complexity of DNNs when parameter quantization and electrode reduction methods are used. Our investigation centers on several state-of-the-art DNN models designed for EEG signal analysis, specifically for detecting epileptic seizures. Our findings demonstrate that, when applied judiciously, these techniques can significantly reduce the complexity of the DNNs under consideration with minimal adverse effects on accuracy. These results reveal the explicit trade-offs between accuracy and complexity reduction encountered when adapting DNN-based online EEG analysis for wearable devices.

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

Leptomeningeal Collateral Detection on DSA via Vessel-Graph Neural Networks

Leptomeningeal collaterals (LMCs) are an important prognostic factor in acute ischemic stroke. Existing automated methods rely on CT angiography (CTA), but individual LMCs are often too small to be resolved on CTA, limiting these methods to coarse collateral scoring. Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) visualizes individual collaterals at superior resolution, yet current assessment remains subjective, relying on manual grading scales that suffer from poor inter-rater agreement. We present a framework that formulates collateral detection as the classification of individual vessel segments on a graph derived from DSA. A hybrid graph-pixel architecture combines a topology-aware graph branch with a dense pixel branch, fused in a shared node-probability space. In a five-fold cross-validation setting, the fused model achieves a PR-AUC of 0.434, outperforming the graph-only (0.403) and pixel-only (0.362) baselines. To our knowledge, this is the first method to enable the individualization of LMCs in DSA, allowing for precise per-vessel quantitative assessment. This integration shifts DSA assessment toward objective evaluation, supporting future biomarker and pattern discovery for individual LMCs.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Reporting patterns of adverse drug withdrawal events using individual case safety reports in United States and European databases

Introduction: Adverse drug withdrawal events (ADWEs) are a key safety concern with deprescribing but are infrequently reported in trials. Although pharmacovigilance systems have advanced our understanding of medication-related harms, it is unclear how extensively these systems have been used for ADWEs. Objectives: To examine the reporting patterns of ADWEs for all drugs recorded in United States and European pharmacovigilance databases between 2004 and 2023. Methods: A retrospective study was conducted using two pharmacovigilance databases, the publicly available FDA-FAERS dataset and EMA-EV Level 2A (individual-level) dataset. ADWE cases were identified using relevant MedDRA preferred terms. Data on patient characteristics, reporter type, drugs, indication, ADWE outcomes, dechallenge/rechallenge, seriousness criteria, time to onset, duration, and causality were summarised. Results: A total of 158,505 ADWE reports were analysed (FDA-FAERS: 145,514; EMA-EV: 12,987), with mean ages of 46.1 (FDA; 55.3% female) and 45.5 years (EMA; 57.1% female). The frequently reported drug classes were opioids (FDA: oxycodone, 29.8%; EMA: buprenorphine, 19%), antidepressants (FDA: duloxetine, 32%; EMA: venlafaxine, 25.9%) and gabapentinoids (FDA: pregabalin, 6.7%; EMA: pregabalin, 6.0%). The most common adverse outcomes were other serious medical conditions (FDA=63.9%; EMA=46.0%), hospitalisation (FDA=15.9%; EMA=28.3%), and disability (FDA=13.3%; EMA=6.2%) and these outcomes varied significantly based on sex and age group (p

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

Helical Dirac Current with Local Coupling to a Chiral Potential

arXiv:2606.17618v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that exact Dirac eigenstates in cylindrical confinement carry a definite helical conserved-current texture even in the zero orbital angular momentum channel l = 0. For the lowest confined mode, the Dirac current contains a nonvanishing azimuthal component together with longitudinal transport and exhibits opposite handedness in the two spin-resolved sectors. The structure also persists into the evanescent region. We further derive the channel-resolved matrix-element kernel generated by a static chiral scalar potential acting on the confined l = 0 Dirac modes. The resulting spin-selective coupling arises from the Dirac current texture and the scalar chiral potential, and yields a geometric selection rule in which diagonal channels vanish while off-diagonal conversion channels survive. The coupling strength is governed by an internal sampled-current overlap Jchi(k), defined as the integral from 0 to R of f(rho) times jphi_up(rho, k) times rho d rho. This quantity measures the spatial overlap between the chiral radial profile and the spin-up azimuthal Dirac-current density. The mechanism is fully local and texture-based, without external magnetic fields or spin-orbit coupling. Within standard Dirac theory, this work identifies the minimal static Dirac-geometric kernel underlying spin-selective response, establishing a baseline structure from which dynamical-medium, scattering, and transport formalisms can be systematically developed toward a complete description of spin-polarization phenomena such as CISS.

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

Urban Heat MiniCubes: An AI-Ready dataset for urban heat research

arXiv:2606.11534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban heat is amplified by impermeable surfaces and heterogeneous built environments, yet street-level variability remains difficult to quantify because multi-sensor observations are rarely available in consistent, analysis-ready form at the necessary spatiotemporal scales. We present "Urban Heat MiniCubes," a publicly available, FAIR-oriented dataset designed for machine learning applications in urban heat research. The dataset provides harmonized 90 x 90 km gridded data cubes for 48 cities in the Western Hemisphere spanning 2022-2023, with variables reprojected and collocated to a common grid to reduce preprocessing (e.g., reprojection, resampling, and spatiotemporal alignment). Urban Heat MiniCubes includes two complementary modalities: (i) higher-spatial-resolution, lower-frequency observations from Landsat 8/9 (e.g., surface reflectances) and Sentinel-1 (e.g., synthetic aperture radar backscatter), and (ii) higher-temporal-frequency, coarser observations from GOES-R (e.g., longwave infrared brightness temperatures) and a microwave land surface temperature product. We document variables and metadata and provide technical assessment using inter-variable analyses and autoencoder-based reconstruction-error summaries across pixel classes (e.g., water and cloud). Potential use cases and limitations are also discussed.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

BASENet: Band-Adapted Speech Enhancement Network with Cross-Band Attention

arXiv:2606.12662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech enhancement models typically apply uniform capacity across all frequencies, disregarding the non-uniform spectral resolution of human hearing. We propose BASENet, a frequency-adapted architecture that partitions the spectrum into Bark-scale bands and assigns each a scaled-capacity encoder derived from critical-band density, automatically granting deeper branches to perceptually dense low frequencies and lighter ones to high frequencies. A cross-band attention module captures harmonic dependencies across bands through compact frequency-pooled representations at linear complexity. Built on inverted residual blocks with dense connectivity and a convolutional recurrent network, BASENet achieves 3.55 PESQ and STOI~96% on VoiceBank+DEMAND with only 0.83M parameters and 7.3 G~MACs, the fewest parameters among all methods with PESQ > 3.50. A causal variant (3.44 PESQ) surpasses several non-causal baselines, confirming suitability for real-time streaming on resource-constrained devices.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests for replacing or expanding laboratory testing in Ethiopia

Background: In low- and middle-income countries, laboratory testing to rapidly detect measles outbreaks is limited by infrastructure availability and high costs. This study estimates the potential impact and cost-effectiveness of measles rapid diagnostic tests (RDTs) if implemented nationally in Ethiopia to either replace or expand current testing. Methods: An agent-based model to simulate measles outbreaks was calibrated to Ethiopian measles surveillance data. Modelled outbreak outcomes were aggregated over a 10-year period. Scenarios included using RDTs to (1) replace laboratory testing; (2) replace epidemiological linkage; and (3) increase case detection, in addition to replacing laboratory testing and epidemiological linkage. Testing and outbreak response costs (in 2025 US$) were obtained from Ethiopian Public Health Institute from a government perspective. Total costs and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) for each scenario were compared to baseline. Results: All scenarios were cost saving compared to baseline. Replacing laboratory testing with RDTs saved US$4.2M (3.2M-4.9M) over 10-years, but due to very low testing rates the benefits of eliminating laboratory testing delays were offset by missed cases from the lower RDT sensitivity, leading to similar outbreak detection times and DALYs. Replacing epidemiological linkage with RDTs had similar DALYs but increased the cost savings to US$9.7M. Using RDTs to double case detection reduced outbreak detection time from 113 to 80 days, averted 17,000 DALYs, and saved US$4.3M. Conclusions: In Ethiopia, use of measles RDTs could be cost saving, and if used to expand testing could prevent measles infections through faster outbreak detection and response.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Quantized Evolution Strategies: High-precision Fine-tuning of Quantized LLMs at Low-precision Cost

arXiv:2602.03120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

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

Elastic ODYN: Differentiable Optimization for Infeasible Control and Learning in Robotics

arXiv:2606.16564v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems routinely encounter conflicting objectives, modeling errors, and degenerate contact conditions that render quadratic programs (QPs) infeasible. Yet most optimization solvers and differentiable QP layers assume feasibility, leading to numerical failures, unstable gradients, or solver breakdown when constraints cannot be simultaneously satisfied. We present Elastic ODYN, a primal–dual non-interior-point QP solver that handles infeasibility through smooth squared-$\ell_2$ elastic relaxations. The resulting formulation remains well posed under ill-conditioning and degeneracy, supports warm starting, and converges to closest-to-feasible solutions when no feasible point exists. A lightweight refinement stage recovers physically meaningful dual variables from the elastic solution. Building on this framework, we develop Elastic OdynLayer, a differentiable QP layer with stable gradients under infeasibility, and Elastic OdynSQP, an infeasibility-aware SQP method that resolves inconsistent subproblems and intrinsically infeasible optimal control tasks through selective constraint relaxation. We evaluate the framework on benchmark QPs, singular contact mechanics, differentiable parameter identification, and quadrupedal and humanoid trajectory optimization. Across all settings, Elastic ODYN consistently outperforms state-of-the-art elastic QP solvers in robustness, warm-start performance, and convergence reliability, enabling optimization, simulation, control, and learning beyond the feasibility assumptions of existing methods.

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

Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.14941v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time series forecasting models often benefit from historical patterns. Inspired by Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), recent research explored retrieving relevant historical time series segments to enhance forecasting. However, relying solely on time series similarity is often insufficient for retrieval under non-stationarity. To address this, we propose a multimodal approach: a Semantics-Enhanced Retrieval-Augmented Time Series Forecasting framework, SERAF. Unlike mainstream approaches that depend only on time series similarity, SERAF conducts dual retrieval over the time series and their self-generated textual descriptions. It retrieves two complementary sets of historical patterns and corresponding futures, which are selectively and jointly used to guide future predictions. Experiments across seven real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SERAF in bridging numerical and semantic views of time series compared with state-of-the-art baselines.

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

Learn to Quantify Social Interaction with Constraints for Pedestrian Walking

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-term human path forecasting in crowds is critical for autonomous moving platforms (like autonomous driving cars and social robots) to avoid collision and make high-quality planning. Although the current research take into account social interactions for prediction, they don't reveal the exact kinds of social interactions happened among people and how the social interactions affect the decision-making process of pedestrians, which further limits its robustness. Social interactions in pedestrian walking are intuitively massive and hard to label and quantify. In this paper, we explore creatively to quantify and interpret how pedestrians interact with others by proposing Learn to Cluster. Our clustering social interactions is probabilistic latent variable generative, learning directly from sequential trajectory observations, scalable to arbitrary number of pedestrians. Learn to cluster is label-free and can be naturally integrated into the training process of the prediction model. The latent variables will then serve as 'labels' to categorize social interactions. Extensive experiments over several trajectory prediction benchmarks demonstrate that our method is able to learn the patterns of social interactions and effectively integrate the patterns to pedestrian trajectory prediction.

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

Recognizing and Reconstructing a Multi-Unit Floor Plan

Digital twins have a major potential to form a significant part of urban management in emergency planning, as they allow more efficient designing of the escape routes, better orientation in exceptional situations, and faster rescue intervention. Nevertheless, creating the twins still remains a largely manual effort, due to a lack of 3D-representations, which are available only in limited amounts for some new buildings. Thus, in this paper we aim to synthesize 3D information from commonly available 2D architectural floor plans. We propose two novel pixel-wise segmentation methods based on the MDA-Unet and MACU-Net architectures with improved skip connections, an attention mechanism, and a training objective together with a reconstruction part of the pipeline, which vectorizes the segmented plans to create a 3D model. The proposed methods are compared with two other state-of-the-art techniques and several benchmark datasets. On the commonly used CubiCasa benchmark dataset, our methods have achieved the mean F1 score of 0.86 over five examined classes, outperforming the other pixel-wise approaches tested. We have also made our code publicly available to support research in the field.