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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Age as a moderator of a brief alcohol intervention among injury patients in Northern Tanzania

Background: Alcohol use is a leading modifiable risk factor for injury in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, young people ([≤]24 years) experience greater alcohol-related harm despite drinking less frequently than adults. Punguza Pombe kwa Afya Yako (PPKAY) is a culturally adapted, brief intervention for injury patients in Tanzania. This study examined whether age moderates its effectiveness. Methods: We conducted an exploratory secondary analysis of baseline and 3-month data from the PPKAY randomized trial among injury patients aged [≥]18 years at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, Tanzania. Eligible participants reporting alcohol use before injury, AUDIT [≥]8, or positive breathalyzer were randomized to usual care or PPKAY with SMS boosters. The primary outcome was binge drinking days. Count outcomes were analyzed using negative binomial regression with robust SEs and continuous outcomes using mixed-effects models. Effect modification was assessed using a three-way interaction (Time x intervention x Age). Results: Among 543 participants (mean age 36.8 years; 16.2% aged 18–24), age moderated the intervention effect for drinking days (IRR = 0.27, 95% CI 0.07 – 0.98; p = 0.046) and drinks consumed (IRR = 0.17, 95% CI 0.04 – 0.77; p = 0.021). The intervention reduced 4 drinking days (95% CI -7.1 to -0.8) and 27.5 drinks (95% CI -42.8 to -12.2) among young people, while adults showed reductions in both arms, without intervention-specific effect. Conclusion: The effects of ED-based brief alcohol interventions are not uniform, varying across both age groups and alcohol-related outcomes. We found a greater responsiveness in drinking frequency and quantity reported among young people.

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

What Should a Streaming Video Model Remember?

Streaming video understanding models must answer queries at any moment during an ongoing stream, using only what they have observed so far and under fixed memory and computation budgets. Existing methods address this by adding memory banks, retrieval modules, or visual token compression to preserve long-range history. However, strong recent-window baselines show that indiscriminate history injection can dilute current-scene perception, suggesting that the key challenge is not whether to use memory, but how to allocate it selectively. We formulate this as budgeted online latent evidence allocation and propose SelectStream, a selective latent-memory framework that keeps the current observation directly visible to a frozen VLM while exposing historical information only through a compact, query-conditioned evidence budget. Three coordinated mechanisms govern when to write, what to preserve, and how to retrieve: surprise-driven adaptive windowing, priority-preserving consolidation, and query-conditioned graph reasoning over a fixed-capacity latent memory graph. Retrieved evidence is calibrated and injected as latent tokens for answer generation, without replaying frames or growing the context with stream length. Experimental results show that SelectStream achieves strong online streaming performance and preserves general video understanding, reaching 82.67\% on StreamingBench, 67.03\% on OVO-Bench, and 74.4\% average accuracy on offline video benchmarks, while outperforming strong recent-window baselines and prior streaming memory methods.

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

Latent Thought Flow: Efficient Latent Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2606.16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead. Latent reasoning moves deliberation into continuous space, but existing methods mostly learn deterministic or reward-maximizing paths, lacking a principled way to allocate probability across trajectories with different correctness and costs. We propose Latent Thought Flow (LTF), which models reasoning as variable-length continuous trajectories and trains a sampler to match a reward-induced posterior over answer quality and computation cost. We instantiate this with a continuous GFlowNet using stochastic latent transitions. To handle sparse answer supervision, we introduce an Entropy-Weighted Subtrajectory Balance objective for intermediate rewards and a reference-prior regularizer to anchor exploration. Experiments under finetuning and transfer learning settings show that LTF outperforms explicit CoT and latent reasoning baselines, improving accuracy by 9.5% while reducing reasoning length by 27.2% on average compared with strong latent reasoning baselines.

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

Variational Test-time Optimization for Diffusion Synchronization

Collaborative generation, which coordinates multiple diffusion trajectories to extend the capabilities of pretrained priors, has emerged as a powerful paradigm for extending the applicability of diffusion models. Among existing approaches, diffusion synchronization provides a scenario-agnostic solution by introducing general guidance mechanisms. However, current synchronization approaches rely heavily on heuristics and still require task-specific tailoring, which limits their generalizability and performance. In this work, we mathematically derive a synchronization framework based on optimal control, providing a principled explanation of diffusion synchronization. During sampling, we optimize control variables to guide multiple trajectories toward coherent solutions while remaining close to the underlying diffusion prior. Our method operates entirely at test-time without additional training, thereby enabling broad applicability across diverse generation scenarios when combined with strong pretrained priors. We demonstrate consistent improvements over baselines on three representative collaborative generation tasks, covering a wide range of modalities and applications. Beyond performance gains, our work establishes a novel foundation for collaborative generation, opening a principled path toward extending pretrained generative models to new collaborative generation settings.

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

Pix2Pix-Hybrid: Structure-Guided Conditional Synthesis of Hajj Crowd Images with Multi-Channel Conditioning and Weak Attribute Supervision

Developing accurate crowd-counting models for Hajj pilgrimage scenes remains challenging because domain-specific annotated images are scarce and data collection during large gatherings raises privacy concerns. To address these limitations, this paper proposes Pix2Pix-Hybrid (P2P-H), a hybrid conditional GAN for structure-guided Hajj crowd-image synthesis and data augmentation. P2P-H builds on Pix2Pix and employs a U-Net generator conditioned on eight input channels that jointly encode structural cues (edges and grayscale) and contextual attributes (crowd density and time of day). To capture detailed textures in dense scenes, the framework integrates two multi-scale PatchGAN discriminators operating at different resolutions. The training procedure combines adversarial, perceptual, and feature-matching objectives with adaptive data augmentation and stabilization strategies. The model was trained on 993 real Hajj frames collected from 60 publicly available video sources, with conditioning attributes derived automatically to reduce manual labeling effort. Using this framework, we constructed CrowdH, a synthetic dataset of 10,000 high-resolution Hajj crowd images. Experimental results show that P2P-H improves structure-preserving conditional synthesis quality compared with Pix2Pix and StyleGAN2-ADA baselines and shows favorable transfer to other crowd datasets. To assess downstream utility, we further constructed CrowdH-Mix-469, an annotated mixed real-synthetic dataset comprising 384 real Hajj images and 85 selected synthetic images,and evaluated five crowd-counting models under real-only and real-plus-synthetic training. The selected synthetic data reduced MAE across all five models, with the strongest gain observed for CSRNet.

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

Who Drifted: the System or the Judge? Anytime-Valid Attribution in LLM Evaluation Pipelines

作者:

arXiv:2606.15474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous evaluation of LLM products relies on a strong LLM judge treated as ground truth: a cheap monitor scores every interaction and a team is paged when the score drifts down. But the judge is itself a model behind an API, and a silent version bump or scoring-prompt update changes how it scores – so every drift alarm is ambiguous between a worse product and a changed judge. We resolve the ambiguity with a fixed, human-labeled anchor set that the current judge re-scores at a steady interleave, a second betting e-process on the judge-versus-human gap, and a guard-window rule returning a verdict in {none, system, judge}. We prove anytime-validity, one-way identification (only the judge can move the anchors), an attribution race whose design law is that the anchors must out-run the main process they guard, and process orthogonality. On two real judge changes, a silent version bump is detected as judge drift in 60/60 runs with zero judge-to-system misattribution, and a contaminating strict-prompt change is correctly attributed on 110 of 120 runs at guard width 300 – while the industry-default rolling z-test false-alarms on 75% of drift-free streams. Every experiment replicates on a second domain (TL;DR summarization) with nothing re-tuned, and where the domains differ the differences are the ones the race predicts: the strict-prompt change shifts scores harder there, so the anchors fire faster and attribution becomes perfect (240/240). The monitor runs at approximately 0.64 of the cost of strong-judging every item, or 0.21 in a cheaper-but-deafer regime.

08.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-12

Comparison of count-based and clustering definitions of multimorbidity and their association with prevalence of multimorbidity, health profiles, and mortality: A cohort study of UK Biobank participants

by Gabriella C. Silva, Aurore Fayosse, Louis Jacob, Séverine Sabia, Archana Singh-Manoux, Benjamin Landré Background Multimorbidity, the presence of several chronic conditions, is linked to higher mortality and healthcare use and thus poses a major challenge for aging populations. While most studies rely on simple counts of conditions, clustering approaches have been proposed to describe patterns of co-occurring diseases. We aimed to evaluate the extent to which these methodological choices influence prevalence and association with health profiles and mortality. Methods and findings Using UK Biobank baseline data (n = 474,397), collected between 2006 and 2010, we compared six count-based definitions of multimorbidity based on different condition lists (extended, most prevalent, or body systems) and thresholds (≥2 versus ≥3 conditions). We also applied a clustering analysis to characterize subtypes of multimorbidity among participants with at least two chronic conditions. We compared prevalence and associations with concurrent health outcomes (polypharmacy, self-rated health, frailty, falls, surgery, chronic pain), blood-based measures (C-reactive protein, Cystatin-C, HDL, LDL Cholesterol, IGF-1), and 3- and 10-year mortality risks. Analyses were undertaken separately in men and women using multivariable regression models adjusted for sociodemographic characteristics and body mass index. Multimorbidity prevalence ranged from 1.0% (cluster-based) to 35.3% (count-based). Count-based definitions using lists with more conditions yielded higher prevalence. Higher thresholds identified more severe health profiles on all measured health outcomes, blood-based measures, but not higher mortality risks. Associations with blood-based measures were more pronounced using clustering, with the highest differences from the standard definition distributed across clusters. Odds ratios for 3-year mortality ranged from 1.44 [1.26; 1.64] to 4.60 [3.73; 5.62] for men and 1.35 [1.07; 1.69] to 3.83 [2.78; 5.14] for women. For 10-year mortality, they ranged from 1.42 [1.34; 1.50] to 3.86 [3.46; 4.30] in men and 1.29 [1.21; 1.39] to 3.33 [2.93; 3.77] for women, with clustering identifying groups with low prevalence and high mortality risks. Findings should be interpreted in light of the selected nature of the UK Biobank cohort and the cross-sectional assessment of several health indicators. Conclusion Operational definitions of multimorbidity substantially influence prevalence estimates, while associations with mortality appear more robust across count-based approaches. Clustering analyses provide complementary insights into heterogeneity within multimorbid populations. Future translational studies are warranted to determine how multimorbidity definitions can be optimized to ultimately improve clinical management and health outcomes in practice.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

From Consumption to Reflection: Designing Human-AI Relations for Stable Reasoning

arXiv:2606.11195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have transformed how humans access information, but not how we reason with it. Their fluency accelerates consumption while bypassing the slow, reflective processes that underpin sound judgment. This paper introduces Relational Reflective Intelligence (RRI), an inference-time governance layer that operationalizes reflection through auditable reasoning loops. RRI operates not inside the model but around it, providing a practical structure for stable, auditable reasoning between humans and LLMs. The core premise is that LLMs inherit cognitive vulnerabilities similar to those that shape human thought: reliance on intuitive shortcuts, confusion between representation and reality, and a preference for coherence over falsification. When humans and models share these tendencies, their errors compound. We refer to this as relational drift, a failure that arises from interaction rather than from the model alone. Addressing this requires a shift from modeling relations between words to structuring relations between model outputs and human reasoning. RRI provides this missing layer through three components: the Rose-Frame, which identifies likely breakdowns in reasoning; the Architect's Pen, which introduces targeted reflection steps at critical moments; and an inference-time workflow that embeds these steps without retraining the model. Together, these elements transform human-AI interaction into a joint reasoning system with explicit checkpoints, conflict surfacing, and an auditable trail of assumptions. Rather than making machines think like humans or forcing humans to reason like machines, RRI creates a structured interaction in which both compensate for each other's limitations. It reframes AI safety as a cognitive architecture problem, where reliable decisions depend on embedding reflection directly into the interaction process.

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

Inference-time Policy Steering via Vision and Touch

arXiv:2606.14981v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Inference-time steering adapts pre-trained generative robot policies during deployment by verifying candidate actions before execution. While prior methods typically perform this verification only with visual observations, vision alone is often insufficient for contact-rich manipulation, where success depends on both global task progress and subtle local interactions such as contact force. We introduce ViTaL, a visuo-tactile inference-time steering framework that formulates multimodal guidance as a bi-level optimization problem. At the high level, visual sampling-and-verification performs long-horizon mode selection, deciding what behavior the robot should execute. At the low level, tactile-guided diffusion editing refines the selected action sequence over a shorter horizon to satisfy local contact requirements. To support outcome-based steering, ViTaL learns a visuo-tactile latent world model and employs semantically aligned visual and tactile verifiers, including a novel text-conditioned tactile reward that scores predicted tactile futures directly in latent space. Across three real-world contact-rich manipulation tasks, ViTaL improves overall success by 51% over the base policy, outperforms unimodal steering by at least 33%, and exceeds naive multimodal fusion by at least 20%. Website: https://yilin-wu98.github.io/vital_website.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Stealthy World Model Manipulation via Data Poisoning

arXiv:2606.18697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based learning agents use learned world models to predict future states, plan actions, and adapt to new environments. However, the process of updating world models from collected experience creates a training-time attack surface: adversarially poisoned fine-tuning trajectories can manipulate the learned dynamics and thereby corrupt downstream planning. In this paper, we propose SWAAP, the first two-stage data poisoning framework for learned world models. In the first stage, SWAAP identifies a harmful target world model that induces low-return behavior under planning while remaining close to clean dynamics, using first-order bilevel optimization enabled by a transition-gradient theorem. In the second stage, SWAAP realizes this target through stealth-constrained gradient matching, modifying only a limited fraction of fine-tuning transition targets so that the induced training gradients steer the victim model toward the adversarial target, while a prediction-error regularizer encourages the poisoned targets to remain close to the world model's natural approximation error. To assess attack stealthiness, we evaluate defenses and detectability across three stages of the poisoning pipeline: pre-training detection of poisoned transitions, robust training during fine-tuning, and test-time monitoring of the resulting world model. Across diverse continuous-control tasks, SWAAP causes substantial performance degradation while keeping poisoned transitions close to clean data and evading the evaluated non-adaptive residual/CUSUM/TRIM-style defenses. These results reveal a practical vulnerability in world-model adaptation pipelines and highlight the need for robustness methods that protect both world-model training data and learned dynamics.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

BiWM: Advancing Open-Source Interactive Video World Models with Bidirectional Autoregression

Transitioning bidirectional video diffusion models into an autoregressive paradigm improves the interactivity of video world models, but existing causal pipelines need many stages (control fine-tuning, autoregressive training, causal initialization, few-step distillation) and still trail bidirectional models in quality due to error accumulation. Recent world models such as Yume-1.5 and Matrix-Game-3.0 instead adopt a bidirectional autoregressive approach, gaining fidelity and stable long-horizon rollout from self-correcting error propagation, yet open-source frameworks (e.g., minWM) support only causal models. We present BiWM, the first full-stack framework for interactive video world models under the bidirectional autoregressive paradigm, jointly optimizing generation quality and inference speed. From a pretrained video backbone, BiWM injects camera control by fine-tuning, then runs a few-step Distribution Matching Distillation (DMD) stage that turns the backbone into an action/camera-controllable world model: just two training stages instead of four in minWM, converging in a few hundred steps on 8xH200 GPUs. A single recipe spans Wan2.1-1.3B, Wan2.2-5B, HunyuanVideo-1.5-8B, and LTX-2.3-22B, and also supports secondary fine-tuning of existing bidirectional models. BiWM enables real-world camera control where minWM loses controllability, integrates pluggable history compression (FramePack-style and PackForcing-style) for long rollouts, and offers an optional NVFP4 4-bit training/inference pipeline. To counter DMD's mode-seeking degradation, we add GAN and mass-covering forward-KL objectives that preserve scene dynamics. We open-source BiWM for resource-constrained research and high-fidelity environment simulation.

13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Quenched and Annealed CLTs for the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment

arXiv:2510.11846v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the asymptotic behavior of random dimer coverings of the one-periodic Aztec diamond in random environment. We investigate quenched limit theorems for the height function and we extend annealed limit theorems that were recently studied in [arXiv:2507.08560]. We consider more general choices of random edge weights (independence is not assumed) and we distinguish two cases where the random edge weights satisfy the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) under different scalings. For both cases, we prove convergence to the Gaussian Free Field for the quenched fluctuations. For the annealed version, it had been shown in [arXiv:2507.08560], that Gaussian Free Field fluctuations can be dominated by the much larger fluctuations of the random environment. To access quenched fluctuations we analyze the Schur process with random parameters in a way that allows to prove the annealed CLT for the height function for non i.i.d. weights. We consider specific examples where we determine the asymptotic fluctuations.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Domain Generalizable Adaptation of 3D Vision-Language Models via Regularized Fine-Tuning

Domain adaptation remains a central challenge in 3D vision, especially for multimodal foundation models that align 3D point clouds with visual and textual data. While these models demonstrate strong general capabilities, adapting them to downstream domains with limited data often leads to overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. To address this, we introduce ReFine3D, a regularized fine-tuning framework designed for domain-generalizable tuning of 3D large multimodal models (LMMs). ReFine3D combines selective layer tuning with two targeted regularization strategies: multi-view consistency across augmented point clouds and text diversity through synonym-based prompts generated by large language models. Additionally, we incorporate point-rendered vision supervision and a test-time augmentation mechanism with confidence-based aggregation to further enhance robustness. Extensive experiments across different 3D domain generalization benchmarks show that ReFine3D improves base-to-novel class generalization by 1.36%, cross-dataset transfer by 2.43%, robustness to corruption by 1.80%, and few-shot accuracy by up to 3.11%, outperforming prior state-of-the-art methods with minimal added computational overhead.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

A Deep Hypergraph Learning Model for Predicting Antimicrobial Combination Effects Across Bacterial Targets

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) creates an urgent need for efficient strategies to identify effective antibacterial combinations. Combination therapy, including antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) paired with conventional antibiotics, is a promising approach, but exhaustive experimental screening across drug pairs and bacterial targets is impractical. This study introduces a hybrid GCN-based hypergraph neural network (HGNN) for predicting antimicrobial-agent combination outcomes against bacterial targets. Each antimicrobial-agent-antimicrobial-agent-bacterium triplet is represented as a ternary hyperedge, enabling the model to learn context-dependent interaction patterns. The framework integrates SMILES-derived molecular graph embeddings for antimicrobial agents, including conventional antibiotics and AMPs, with taxonomy-derived bacterial representations. The prediction task was formulated as a three-class classification problem: synergy, antagonism, and non-interaction. The non-interaction class included experimentally verified indifferent records and synthetic presumed non-interaction triplets generated by negative sampling. Model development used drug-pair-grouped splitting, five-fold grouped cross-validation within the training/validation partition, and final evaluation on a held-out test set. On the held-out three-class test set, the selected GCN-based HGNN achieved an accuracy of 0.83, weighted F1-score of 0.84, macro F1-score of 0.80, and ROC-AUC of 0.95. Per-class evaluation showed accuracies of 0.80 for synergy, 0.92 for antagonism, and 0.85 for non-interaction. Pair-type analysis showed strong performance across AMP-AMP, AMP-conventional antibiotic, and conventional antibiotic-conventional antibiotic combinations. These findings suggest that hypergraph-based representation learning can support computational prioritization of antimicrobial combinations for experimental follow-up. Further studies will be needed to improve model interpretability and to perform prospective validation of predicted synergistic combinations.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of a symptom-based severity score anchored to health-related quality of life post-COVID-19 within the population-based EPILOC cohorts

Purpose Because simple symptom counts treat all symptoms as equally important and may not adequately capture the HRQoL impact of heterogeneous post-COVID-19 symptoms, we aimed to develop an HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score providing an interpretable measure of post-COVID-19 disease burden. Methods Baseline data from the population-based EPILOC and EPILOC Omicron surveys (adults aged 18-65 years) were used to develop a symptom-based severity score anchored to physical and mental HRQoL assessed with the SF-12. A two-stage modelling approach was applied to identify HRQoL-relevant symptoms and to derive symptom-specific weights for physical and mental component scores, incorporating 30 ordinal symptom severity variables. Symptom-specific weights were extracted to compute physical, mental, and composite severity scores. Score interpretation was examined using external reference measures, including EPILOC case status, self-reported health recovery, and functional consequences. Results A total of 19,004 participants (mean age 44.3 years, 59.6% female) were included. Sixteen symptoms contributed to the physical and eleven to the mental HRQoL score, with a limited subset accounting for most of the HRQoL loss. Severity scores were heavily right-skewed, with 50.6% of participants showing no measurable HRQoL impairment. Higher scores correlated with lower self-reported recovery, and increased probability of rehabilitation use and health-related changes in working time, supporting convergent and criterion-related validity. Conclusions This study introduces a transparent, HRQoL-anchored symptom severity score that measures graded post-COVID-19 burden beyond simple symptom counts. The score may be particularly suited for longitudinal assessment of recovery trajectories.

17.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-09

Don’t compete, collaborate: why collective funding applications are the future

Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them. Scientists with disparate expertise writing grants together can identify knowledge gaps and drive progress — but systems must change to incentivize them.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Remote sensing data imputation using deep learning for multispectral imagery

Remote sensing techniques have been increasingly utilised in aquatic applications in recent years. A common challenge in using optical satellite data is the presence of missing observations due to cloud cover. These data gaps can lead to missed detection of critical events, such as algal blooms, in lakes of high interest to water authorities. As a result, enhancing the completeness of optical satellite datasets is crucial for improving the monitoring and prediction of algal blooms. In this study, we compared a traditional data imputation method (i.e., linear interpolation) with deep learning models for reconstructing missing spectral bands across four lakes with historical records of algal blooms. The deep learning models adopted include CNN-based architectures (i.e., CNN, Inception Resnet, and Autoencoder) and CNN-LSTM-based architectures (i.e., CNN-LSTM, Resnet-LSTM, and Autoencoder-LSTM). Our results demonstrated that deep learning models substantially outperformed the baseline linear interpolation method in imputing spectral band values within artificially masked regions. Among these models, CNN delivered the best performance across most lakes. Furthermore, we evaluated the performance of algal bloom indices (i.e., Green/Red and NDCI) derived from the imputed imagery by comparing them with the observed data. Our results demonstrate that deep learning models are effective for imputing missing data in PlanetScope SuperDove imagery, enabling more reliable applications in water monitoring.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions in a laser-cooled Ca+ matrix

arXiv:2512.12266v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report on the sympathetic cooling and Coulomb crystallization of xenon highly charged ions (HCIs) with laser-cooled Ca$^+$ ions. The HCIs are produced in a compact electron beam ion trap, then charge selected, decelerated, and finally injected into a cryogenic linear Paul trap. There, they are captured into $^{40}$Ca$^+$ Coulomb crystals, and co-crystallized within them, causing dark voids in their fluorescence images. Fine control over the number of trapped ions and HCIs allows us to realize mixed-species crystals with arbitrary ordering patterns. By investigating Xe$^{q+}$–Ca$^+$ strings, we confirm the HCI charge states, measure their lifetime and characterize the mixed-species motional modes. Our system effectively combines the established quantum control toolbox for Ca$^+$ with the rich set of atomic properties of Xe highly charged ions, providing a resourceful platform for optical frequency metrology, searches for signatures of new physics, and quantum information science.

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

Dynamic Black-hole Emission Tomography with Physics-informed Neural Fields

With the success of static black-hole imaging, the next frontier is the dynamic and 3D imaging of black holes. Recovering the dynamic 3D gas near a black hole would reveal previously-unseen parts of the universe and inform new physics models. However, only sparse radio measurements from a single viewpoint are possible, making the dynamic 3D reconstruction problem significantly ill-posed. Previously, BH-NeRF addressed the ill-posed problem by assuming Keplerian dynamics of the gas, but this assumption breaks down near the black hole, where the strong gravitational pull of the black hole and increased electromagnetic activity complicate fluid dynamics. To overcome the restrictive assumptions of BH-NeRF, we propose PI-DEF, a physics-informed approach that uses differentiable neural rendering to fit a 4D (time + 3D) emissivity field given EHT measurements. Our approach jointly reconstructs the 3D velocity field with the 4D emissivity field and enforces the velocity as a soft constraint on the dynamics of the emissivity. In experiments on simulated data, we find significantly improved reconstruction accuracy over both BH-NeRF and a physics-agnostic approach. We demonstrate how our method may be used to estimate other physics parameters of the black hole, such as its spin.

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

EdgeZSAD: Practical Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection on Edge Devices

Industrial inspection needs zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) that remains useful under edge deployment constraints. Recent methods often rely on ViT-L foundation backbones (~300M parameters), which exceed the memory and operator budget of typical embedded hardware. We study this regime through EdgeZSAD, a compact reference system built around a TinyViT-21M-512 backbone, an asymmetric global-local readout (EdgeGLR), and a reproducible source-side training recipe (Real-IAD-DR). We train a single checkpoint in a source-trained, target-unseen protocol and evaluate it across six industrial benchmarks. Across three independent runs, the resulting model reaches an average image AUROC of 91.6 on MVTec-AD and 88.2 on VisA, while remaining directly deployable on Jetson Orin Nano Super (TensorRT FP16) and RB5 Gen2 (QNN GPU FP16). Across the six device-rescored benchmarks, image-AUROC drift stays below 0.2 points, indicating that the exported graph preserves host-side ranking behavior in the evaluated deployment setting.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Reward hacking in physical reinforcement learning revealed by turbulent drag reduction

arXiv:2606.06227v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A reinforcement-learning agent maximises its reward, which can diverge from the outcome its designer intended. In physical control the reward rarely closes that gap, and drag reduction in wall turbulence makes it concrete. A mass-conservation projection couples agents' outputs and erases the per-agent credit the policy gradient needs; a memoryless policy cannot resolve the slow near-wall cycle it acts on; and a pressure-gradient reward pays for nominal drag reduction by pumping power through the wall. Two degenerate controllers achieve large drag reductions while total dissipation rises, so the reported figure can mask a more wasteful flow. We trace each fault to its cause and fix it: a differentiable projection that restores credit, a recurrent policy with a widened sensing stencil, and a reward scored on the true wall power. The corrected controller acts on the flow within a closed energy budget, earning a conservative $17\%$ under honest accounting.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Signed Compression Progress on a Sealed Audit is Goodhart-Resistant

arXiv:2606.11417v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Compression progress is a long-standing proposal for intrinsic motivation: reward an agent when its world model becomes better at predicting or compressing experience. The folk claim is that this reward is "credible" because it is paid only for learning. We make this precise and prove it. If intrinsic reward is the signed decrease of a fixed sealed-audit loss, r_t = E(theta_{t-1}) - E(theta_t), then cumulative reward telescopes exactly to endpoint audit improvement, so no policy can push reward up indefinitely while true audit performance stagnates or degrades. For finite audit panels the same result holds with a sharp false-positive budget: cumulative empirical reward is at most true audit improvement plus 2 Delta_n(F, delta), the uniform audit deviation of the model class. This is horizon-free: adaptivity over time costs nothing once the sealed panel uniformly controls the class. The theorem also identifies the failure modes: the guarantee disappears if progress is clipped, scored on the agent's own stream, exposed to a high-capacity model on a reusable panel, or applied to a neural class that makes Delta_n vacuous. We give a Lean 4 mechanization of the structural core (telescoping, the finite-audit bound, finite Gibbs, and the entropy floor) and an experiment suite on ARC-TGI grid-transformation generators with adaptive holdout attacks. Experiments confirm the theory: finite-audit deviation scales as n^{-0.527}; signed progress resists clip-farming, stream leakage, and noisy-TV curiosity; naive reusable audits are exploitable by black-box scalar feedback, while standard release defenses keep the attack below the 2 Delta_n threshold. Signed compression progress on a sealed audit is an accounting signal of genuine improvement.

25.
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.