中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Vision-Encoder Behavioral Fingerprints of Image-to-Image Generative Models: A Training-Paradigm-Driven Taxonomy of Six Commercial APIs

Authors:
Hunter Hill↗

We study six production image-to-image AI systems (gpt-image-1, Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, Flux Kontext, SDXL img2img, SD3 img2img, and Qwen Image Edit) under a content-adaptive sub-JND adversarial perturbation pipeline, scoring all outputs by frozen DINOv2 ViT-B/14 token distances against clean references. Across a 3,588-call corpus spanning COCO photographs, CelebA-HQ portraits, and AI-generated inputs, the six systems partition into two image-invariant behavioral bands on a 2D (patch_mean, ssim_clean) plane: edit-trained models (Flux Kontext, Qwen Edit, Gemini) cluster in a tight band, while T2I-base models adapted at sampling time (SDXL, SD3, gpt-image-1) cluster in a drift band.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Foresight: Iterative Reasoning About Clues that Matter for Navigation

Authors:
Arthur Zhang↗Carl Qi↗Donne Su↗Xiangyun Meng↗Amy Zhang↗Joydeep Biswas↗

arXiv:2606.12550v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open-world mapless navigation from sparse language instructions requires resolving underspecified goals and inferring which environmental cues are relevant for reaching the goal. For instance, reaching an out-of-view destination may require interpreting ramps, signs, or detours that reveal where to go or which route to take. Prior works are limited by their reliance on known navigation factors and closed-set factor categories, or identify cues before motion planning and miss plan-dependent cues. We argue that pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) can discover novel instruction-relevant cues, but require adaptation to focus on which cues matter and how they should influence motion planning. We realize these ideas in Foresight, a test-time framework in which a finetuned VLM alternates between proposing image-space motion plans and critiquing them using the language goal and visual context. Subsequent plans are conditioned on prior critiques, enabling iterative motion refinement before execution. To align plan critiques and refinements with open-set behavior preferences, we learn a reward model from human feedback and use it to post-train the VLM with reinforcement learning in the plan-critique loop. In offline evaluations and 6 real-world environments, Foresight improves average task success by 37% and reduces interventions per mission by 52% relative to state-of-the-art test-time reasoning and foundation-model baselines, while running in real-time on a Jetson AGX Orin. We will release code, data, and training details to support future work on test-time reasoning for robot motion refinement. Additional videos at: https://amrl.cs.utexas.edu/foresight

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Clarify Before You Draw: Proactive Agents for Robust Text-to-CAD Generation

Authors:
Bo Yuan↗Zelin Zhao↗Petr Molodyk↗Bin Hu↗Yongxin Chen↗

arXiv:2602.03045v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models have recently enabled text-to-CAD systems that synthesize parametric CAD programs (e.g., CadQuery) from natural-language prompts. In practice, however, geometric descriptions can be under-specified or internally inconsistent: critical dimensions may be missing and constraints may conflict. However, existing fine-tuned models tend to reactively follow the user instructions and hallucinate dimensions when the text is ambiguous. To address this, we propose a proactive agentic framework for text-to-CadQuery generation, named as ProCAD, that resolves specification issues before code synthesis. Our framework pairs a proactive clarifying agent, which audits the prompt and asks targeted clarification questions only when necessary to produce a self-consistent specification, with a CAD coding agent that translates the specification into an executable CadQuery program. We fine-tune the coding agent based on a curated high-quality text-to-CadQuery dataset and train the clarifying agent via agentic SFT on clarification trajectories. Experiments show that proactive clarification significantly improves robustness to ambiguous prompts while keeping interaction overhead low. ProCAD outperforms frontier closed-source models, including Claude Sonnet 4.5, reducing the mean Chamfer distance by 79.9% and lowering the invalidity ratio from 4.8% to 0.9%. Our code and datasets are made publicly available on https://github.com/BoYuanVisionary/Pro-CAD.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Scaling Laws of Global Weather Models

Authors:
Yuejiang Yu↗Langwen Huang↗Alexandru Calotoiu↗Torsten Hoefler↗

arXiv:2602.22962v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Data-driven models are revolutionizing weather forecasting. To optimize training efficiency and model performance, this paper analyzes empirical scaling laws within this domain. We investigate the relationship between model performance (validation loss) and three key factors: model size ($N$), dataset size ($D$), and compute budget ($C$). Across a range of models, we find that Aurora exhibits the strongest data-scaling behavior: increasing the training dataset by 10x reduces validation loss by up to 3.2x. GraphCast demonstrates the highest parameter efficiency, yet suffers from limited hardware utilization. Our compute-optimal analysis indicates that, under fixed compute budgets, allocating resources to more total training data yields greater performance gains than increasing model size. Furthermore, we analyze model shape and uncover scaling behaviors that differ fundamentally from those observed in language models: weather forecasting models consistently favor increased width over depth. These findings suggest that future weather models should prioritize wider architectures and larger effective training datasets to maximize predictive performance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

UNIEGO: Proxies as Mediators for Unified Egocentric Video Representation Learning

Authors:
Wenhao Chi↗Arkaprava Sinha↗Dominick Reilly↗Hieu Le↗Srijan Das↗

arXiv:2606.20559v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Egocentric video understanding is inherently limited by the narrow perspective of wearable cameras: a single viewpoint, a single modality, a single model cannot capture the full richness of human action. We argue that a truly expressive egocentric representation must subsume complementary knowledge across viewpoints, modalities, and foundation model representations, yet remain deployable from egocentric video alone. To this end, we introduce a hierarchical multi-teacher distillation framework that produces UNIEGO, a unified egocentric encoder trained with nine teachers spanning ego-exo viewpoints, RGB, depth, and skeleton modalities, and four foundation models. Rather than distilling directly from heterogeneous teachers whose incompatible architectures and feature geometries induce conflicting gradients, our framework interposes a layer of representation-specific Proxy models that translate diverse teacher knowledge into a homogeneous egocentric space. A second distillation stage, Selective Proxy Distillation (SPD), then adaptively selects, for each training sample, the subset of proxies that are both correct and confident, distilling exclusively from reliable supervision and suppressing erroneous signals. SPD is further stabilized by initializing UNIEGO as a learned convex combination of proxy parameters, placing the unified model in a well-conditioned region of the loss landscape before distillation begins. UNIEGO achieves state-of-the-art performance across three egocentric video understanding tasks - action recognition, video retrieval, and action segmentation on three challenging ego-exo benchmarks, outperforming naive multi-teacher distillation baselines and demonstrating that structured, proxy-mediated knowledge transfer yields richer and more discriminative egocentric representations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

FM-Agent: Scaling Formal Methods to Large Systems via LLM-Based Hoare-Style Reasoning

Authors:
Haoran Ding↗Zhaoguo Wang↗Haibo Chen↗

arXiv:2604.11556v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-assisted software development has become increasingly prevalent, and can generate large-scale systems, such as compilers. It becomes crucial to strengthen the correctness of the generated code. However, automated reasoning for large-scale systems remains challenging due to code complexity. Hoare logic offers an approach to decomposing a large system into smaller components and reasoning about them separately (i.e., compositional reasoning). However, existing works still struggle to scale, because Hoare logic requires writing formal specifications for each function, imposing a heavy human burden. The problem is exacerbated when code is generated by LLMs, as developers lack a deep understanding of each function's expected behavior. This paper presents FM-Agent, the first framework that realizes automated compositional reasoning for large-scale systems. Leveraging LLMs, FM-Agent introduces a top-down paradigm to automatically generate function-level specifications. Specifically, FM-Agent derives the specification of a function from how its callers expect the function to behave, so the generated specifications can reflect the developer's intent of a function even if the implementation is buggy. Developers' intent is usually expressed in natural language, while existing verifiers only support formulas. Therefore, FM-Agent generalizes Hoare-style inference to reason about functions against natural-language specifications. Finally, to confirm bug existence and explain bug causes, FM-Agent automatically generates test cases to trigger potential bugs. In our evaluation, FM-Agent successfully reasons about large-scale systems within 2 days, each of which has up to 143k LoC. These systems have already been tested by their developers, but FM-Agent still finds 522 newly discovered bugs. These bugs can cause serious consequences, including system crashes and incorrect execution results.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Low-resource Language Discrimination Towards Chinese Dialects with Transfer learning and Data Augmentation

Authors:
Fan Xu↗Yangjie Dan↗Keyu Yan↗Yong Ma↗Mingwen Wang↗

Chinese dialects discrimination is a challenging natural language processing task due to scarce annotation resource. In this article, we develop a novel Chinese dialects discrimination framework with transfer learning and data augmentation (CDDTLDA) in order to overcome the shortage of resources. To be more specific, we first use a relatively larger Chinese dialects corpus to train a source-side automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. Then, we adopt a simple but effective data augmentation method (i.e., speed, pitch, and noise disturbance) to augment the target-side low-resource Chinese dialects, and fine-tune another target ASR model based on the previous source-side ASR model. Meanwhile, the potential common semantic features between source-side and target-side ASR models can be captured by using self-attention mechanism. Finally, we extract the hidden semantic representation in the target ASR model to conduct Chinese dialects discrimination. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark Chinese dialects corpora.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

Authors:
Mikhail Krasnov↗Carolina Fortuna↗Bla\v{z} Bertalani\v{c}↗

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Diffusing to Coordinate: Efficient Online Multi-Agent Diffusion Policies

Authors:
Zhuoran Li↗Hai Zhong↗Xun Wang↗Qingxin Xia↗Lihua Zhang↗Longbo Huang↗

arXiv:2602.18291v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a prominent framework for efficient agent coordination. Crucially, enhancing policy expressiveness is pivotal for achieving superior performance. Diffusion-based generative models are well-positioned to meet this demand, having demonstrated remarkable expressiveness and multimodal representation in image generation and offline settings. Yet, their potential in online MARL remains largely under-explored. A major obstacle is that the intractable likelihoods of diffusion models impede entropy-based exploration and coordination. To tackle this challenge, we propose among the first \underline{O}nline off-policy \underline{MA}RL framework using \underline{D}iffusion policies (OMAD) to orchestrate coordination. Our key innovation is a relaxed policy objective that maximizes scaled joint entropy, facilitating effective exploration without relying on tractable likelihood. Complementing this, within the centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, we employ a joint distributional value function to optimize decentralized diffusion policies. It leverages tractable entropy-augmented targets to guide the simultaneous updates of diffusion policies, thereby ensuring stable coordination. Extensive evaluations on MPE and MAMuJoCo establish our method as the new state-of-the-art across $10$ diverse tasks, demonstrating a remarkable $2.5\times$ to $5\times$ improvement in sample efficiency.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

High-Order Hermite Optimization: Fast and Exact Gradient Computation in Open-Loop Quantum Optimal Control using a Discrete Adjoint Approach

Authors:
Spencer Lee↗Daniel Appelo↗

arXiv:2505.09857v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This work introduces the High-Order Hermite Optimization (HOHO) method, an open-loop discrete adjoint method for quantum optimal control. Our method is the first of its kind to efficiently compute exact (discrete) gradients when using continuous, parameterized control pulses while solving the forward equations (e.g. Schrodinger's equation or the Linblad master equation) with an arbitrarily high-order Hermite Runge-Kutta method. The HOHO method is implemented in QuantumGateDesign$.$jl (https://github.com/leespen1/QuantumGateDesign.jl), an open-source software package for the Julia programming language, which we use to perform numerical experiments comparing the method to Juqbox$.$jl (https://github.com/LLNL/Juqbox.jl). For realistic model problems we observe speedups up to 775x.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Surrogate Benchmarks for Model Merging Optimization

Authors:
Rio Akizuki↗Yuya Kudo↗Nozomu Yoshinari↗Yoichi Hirose↗Toshiyuki Nishimoto↗Kento Uchida↗Shinichi Shirakawa↗

arXiv:2509.02555v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Model merging techniques aim to integrate the abilities of multiple models into a single model. Most model merging techniques have hyperparameters, and their setting affects the performance of the merged model. Because several existing works show that tuning hyperparameters in model merging can enhance the merging outcome, developing hyperparameter optimization algorithms for model merging is a promising direction. However, its optimization process is computationally expensive, particularly in merging LLMs. In this work, we develop surrogate benchmarks for optimization of the merging hyperparameters to realize algorithm development and performance comparison at low cost. We define two search spaces and collect data samples to construct surrogate models to predict the performance of a merged model from a hyperparameter. We demonstrate that our benchmarks can predict the performance of merged models well and simulate optimization algorithm behaviors.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Structure preserving properties of higher order moment closures for TASEP

Authors:
Kilian Pioch↗Lars Gr\"une↗Thomas Kriecherbauer↗Michael Margaliot↗

arXiv:2604.15925v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) is a stochastic model for the unidirectional flow of interacting particles on a 1D-lattice that is much used in systems biology and statistical physics. Its master equation describes the evolution of the probability distribution on the configuration space. The size of the master equation grows exponentially with the length of the lattice. It is known that the complexity of the system may be reduced using mean-field approximations. We provide a rigorous definition of a family of such models using moments of any order and an extension to the pair approximation for obtaining closures for the system. The dimension of these models grows linearly with the lattice size and exponentially in the order of the approximation. Moreover, we show that the states of these models still have a probabilistic interpretation and that basic structural properties of the master equation are preserved. This extends known results on the Ribosome Flow Model which can be viewed as the first order approximation for TASEP.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Diffusion Flow Matching: Dimension-Improved KL Bounds and Wasserstein Guarantees

Authors:
Marta Gentiloni Silveri↗Giovanni Conforti↗Alain Durmus↗

arXiv:2606.16610v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion Flow Matching (DFM) has recently emerged as a versatile framework for generative modeling, yet its theoretical convergence properties remain only partially understood. In this work, we provide refined and novel convergence guarantees for Brownian motion based DFMs, focusing on the discretization error. Our analysis is conducted under the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence and the 2-Wasserstein distance. Under finite-moment conditions and a mild score integrability assumption, we derive KL convergence bounds with improved dimensional dependence compared to prior work, achieving, up to our knowledge, state-of-the-art scaling under minimal conditions. We further extend the analysis to the 2-Wasserstein distance: under an additional first-order score integrability assumption and a weak log-concavity condition, we obtain convergence guarantees with dimensional dependence consistent with the KL case.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

LiFT: Local Search via Linear Programming for Overfitting-Controlled Transformers

Authors:
Abhishek Shukla↗Anikeit Khanna↗Ankur Sinha↗Faiz Hamid↗

This paper proposes a Linear Programming (LP)-based local search framework for fine-tuning pretrained transformer models with explicit control against overfitting. The approach formulates transformer fine-tuning as a bilevel optimization-based regularization problem, in which model parameters and regularization hyperparameters are jointly updated. Information collected during initial warm-up iterations, including validation gradients and training Hessian information, is used to construct a local descent direction by solving an LP that minimizes a scaled directional derivative while preserving training optimality. This validation-aware descent direction enables focused local updates of both parameters and regularization hyperparameters, reducing overfitting without requiring repeated full retraining cycles. The resulting method, termed Linear Programming-based Fine-Tuning (LiFT) for transformers, differs from conventional fine-tuning by systematically identifying task-specific updates rather than relying on heuristic or grid-based hyperparameter selection. Experiments on GPT-2 Small fine-tuned on WikiText-2 demonstrate that LiFT enables effective adaptation through selective tuning of transformer blocks and regularization parameters, yielding consistent improvements in test perplexity across multiple layer configurations and regularization settings, with particularly pronounced gains in overfitting-prone scenarios. Beyond empirical performance, LiFT establishes a principled connection between transformer fine-tuning, bilevel optimization, local search, and regularization theory.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

Authors:
Yufeng Xu↗Zishuo Bao↗Qian Wang↗Zeshen Zhang↗Haoqi Zhang↗Bowen Peng↗Ang Li↗Rahul Chalamala↗Yucheng Lu↗

arXiv:2605.18817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Natural-Language Temporal Grounding in Hour-Long Videos is a Search Problem: A Benchmark and Empirical Decomposition

Authors:
Sukmin Seo↗Geewook Kim↗

Temporal grounding–returning the interval $[t_s, t_e]$ for a natural-language query over a video–is the language interface to long-form video, yet has been studied on short videos; the dynamics of hour-scale natural-language grounding remain underexplored. We take the position that at hour-scale, the binding constraint is search, not recognition: Video-LLMs are bottlenecked not by localizing a nearby event, but–given a natural-language query–by searching for the relevant region of a long video. To test this, we release ExtremeWhenBench, the first open hour-scale grounding benchmark (2,273 queries over 194 videos, mean 75.7 min, max 9 hr) with an open-form query distribution. Every open Video-LLM collapses while a frame-level retrieval baseline outperforms them; a failure taxonomy attributes 85% of failures to search; and a retrieve-then-ground hybrid recovers 6.7x over the monolithic Video-LLM–mirroring retrieve-then-read in open-domain QA.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ReMoT: Reinforcement Learning with Motion Contrast Triplets

Authors:
Cong Wan↗Zeyu Guo↗Jiangyang Li↗SongLin Dong↗Yifan Bai↗Lin Peng↗Zhiheng Ma↗Yihong Gong↗

We present ReMoT, a unified training paradigm to systematically address the fundamental shortcomings of VLMs in spatio-temporal consistency – a critical failure point in navigation, robotics, and autonomous driving. ReMoT integrates two core components: (1) A rule-based automatic framework that generates ReMoT-16K, a large-scale (16.5K triplets) motion-contrast dataset derived from video meta-annotations, surpassing costly manual or model-based generation. (2) Group Relative Policy Optimization, which we empirically validate yields optimal performance and data efficiency for learning this contrastive reasoning, far exceeding standard Supervised Fine-Tuning. We also construct the first benchmark for fine-grained motion contrast triplets to measure a VLM's discrimination of subtle motion attributes (e.g., opposing directions). The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art performance on our new benchmark and multiple standard VLM benchmarks, culminating in a remarkable 25.1% performance leap on spatio-temporal reasoning tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

RQUL-UIE: Revitalizing Quality-Unstable Labels for Underwater Image Enhancement via In-Dataset Self-Supervision

Authors:
Haochen Hu↗Yanrui Bin↗Chih-yung Wen↗Bing Wang↗

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is essential for mitigating degradations caused by water medium. Although learning-based methods have advanced significantly, most rely on paired datasets with unstable label quality, which bottlenecks model performance. This paper proposes a diffusion-based, in-dataset self-supervised learning strategy designed to exploit the quality distribution of training labels. Specifically, we evaluate label quality via semantic perception embeddings from a pre-trained diffusion model in a training-free manner. These quality scores are subsequently quantized into noise-level indices, guiding a multi-step denoising process for level-wise supervision. This mechanism prevents low-quality labels from degrading the model while maximizing their utility during training. Furthermore, a Fourier-based refinement network is incorporated to explicitly reconstruct high-frequency components. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms SOTA approaches in restoration quality. The code and pre-trained model will be available once accepted in link.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum Algebraic Diversity: Single-Copy Density Matrix Estimation via Group-Structured Measurements

Authors:
Mitchell A. Thornton↗

arXiv:2604.03725v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We extend the algebraic diversity (AD) framework from classical signal processing to quantum measurement theory. The Quantum Algebraic Diversity (QAD) Theorem establishes that a group-structured positive operator-valued measure (POVM) applied to a single copy of a quantum state produces a full-rank, group-averaged density matrix estimator whose eigenbasis and eigenvalue ordering track those of the true density matrix, with a bias toward the symmetrized state, analogous to the classical recovery of covariance eigenstructure from a single observation. We establish a Classical-Quantum Duality Map connecting classical covariance estimation to quantum state tomography, and an Optimality Inheritance Theorem showing that classical group optimality transfers to quantum settings via the Born map within the group-averaged family. SIC-POVMs are identified as AD with the Heisenberg-Weyl group and mutually unbiased bases as AD with the Clifford group, revealing the hierarchy $\mathrm{HW}(d) \subseteq \mathcal{C}(d) \subseteq S_d$ that mirrors the classical $\mathbb{Z}_M \subseteq G_{\min} \subseteq S_M$. The double-commutator eigenvalue theorem gives polynomial-time adaptive POVM selection. A worked qubit example shows the group-averaged estimator from a single computational-basis measurement, averaged over a matched $\mathbb{Z}_2$ group, reaching fidelity 0.99 where standard single-basis tomography gives a rank-1 estimate of fidelity 0.80. Monte Carlo simulations for $d = 2$ to $13$ confirm fidelity above 0.90 from a single outcome while standard fidelity degrades as $\sim 1/d$. The growing ratio reflects collapse of the rank-1 standard estimator, not fewer copies per parameter: the biased single-copy estimator reduces the number of distinct measurement settings, not the per-parameter sampling cost, and a genuine copy reduction holds only under exact symmetry.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Electrical signatures of divergent connectivity in the human subgenual cingulate cortex

Authors:
Qianq↗Kerezoudis↗Gregg↗Hermes↗Klassen↗B. T↗Chari↗Tisdall↗M. M↗Baker↗M. R↗Miller↗…

Background: Major depressive disorder remains a leading cause of disability. While subgenual cingulate cortex (sgCC) deep brain stimulation (DBS) shows promise for medically refractory depression, clinical outcomes have been heterogeneous, suggesting that individual differences in neural circuitry engagement may critically influence therapeutic efficacy. We aimed to define the electrophysiological signatures of sgCC efferent connectivity using single-pulse electrical stimulation (SPES) with intracranial stereo-EEG (sEEG) to inform rational targeting and physiological biomarkers for sgCC-DBS. Methods: In four patients undergoing clinically indicated sEEG for seizure mapping, SPES was delivered through sgCC pairs, while distributed brain stimulation-evoked potentials (BSEPs) were recorded across cortical and subcortical sites. Responses were characterized using Canonical Response Parameterization to extract reproducible waveforms and per-trial reliability. Results: sgCC stimulation elicited reproducible, spatially organized BSEPs across frontal, limbic, and paralimbic networks, aligning with known anatomical pathways. Frontal recruitment featured robust, lateralized orbitofrontal activation favoring the ipsilateral central, medial OFC and bilateral ventromedial prefrontal responses. Limbic effects demonstrated bilateral cingulate activation with stronger ipsilateral recruitment and lateralized amygdala and hippocampal responses. Paralimbic engagement included insular responses with subject-specific anterior predominance and bi-hemispheric temporal-polar slow-wave deflections. Conclusion: These findings provide direct electrophysiological evidence of distributed, lateralized sgCC divergent network connectivity in the human brain, offering physiologic confirmation of its role in affective circuitry. The observed topography and laterality have direct applications for sgCC-DBS targeting and implicate BSEP signatures as candidate biomarkers to guide patient-specific therapy.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Random Local Stabilizer Codes in Three Dimensions without String or Self-Similar Fractal Logical Operators

Authors:
Han Yan↗

arXiv:2606.19873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum error-correcting codes (QECs) are essential components quantum computation and have deep connections to quantum phases of matter. A key obstruction to passive self-correcting QECs is the presence of string logical operators, which can generate logical errors through constant-energy-barrier processes. Haah's Codes (fracton codes) showed that three-dimensional stabilizer codes can forbid such string logical operators, but their translation-invariant structure supports self-similar fractal logical operators with a logarithmic energy barrier. We introduce the qutrit random cubic codes, a family of local qutrit Calderbank-Shor-Steane stabilizer Hamiltonians with similar cube-check structure as Haah's Code 1 but built from spatially varying stabilizers. We prove that these models retain the no-string property and numerically observe that they have properties distinct from translation-invariant fracton codes: the smallest ground-state degeneracy exponent is $k=2$ for odd $L$ and $k=4$ for even $L$; noncontractible plane-logical operators span the entire logical space; and charge-push diagnostics show that the self-similar fractal operators are absent. These results demonstrate that constrained randomness can fundamentally change the nature of stabilizer codes and improve their self-correction properties. They further point to broader families of quantum error-correcting codes and quantum phases beyond canonical topological and fracton orders.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Estimating the effectiveness of syndromic screening at airports for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease

Authors:
Quilty↗B. J↗

We used a stochastic simulation model to estimate the effectiveness of combined exit and entry airport screening for Bundibugyo ebolavirus disease (BVD), using natural-history parameters from a Bayesian re-analysis of the 2012 Isiro outbreak. For a 12-hour international flight from DRC or Uganda at 86% screening sensitivity, we estimate 65% of infected travellers would arrive undetected (95% CrI: 38 - 76%). The main driver of this outcome is the relative duration of the the incubation period (approximately 7.7 days) and the onset-to-severe-disease interval (approximately 4 days): most infected travellers board before symptom onset and are undetectable by any syndromic screen, whilst those who are symptomatic progress rapidly to illness severe enough to preclude travel. This is compounded during active epidemic growth, when recently exposed (and therefore pre-symptomatic) cases are overrepresented among travellers. Syndromic airport screening offers limited protection against BVD spread via air travel, and should be complemented by outbreak control at source and strengthened clinical surveillance in receiving countries with high travel connectivity to affected areas.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Beyond LoRA: Is Sparsity-Induced Adaptation Better?

Authors:
Elijah Cadenhead↗Cristian McGee↗Xin Li↗El Houcine Bergou↗Aritra Dutta↗

arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Human Intuition vs. Computational Precision: Neurologists, Feature-based Models, and Deep Learning for Stroke Prognosis

Authors:
Herzog↗Blindenbacher↗Globas↗Haeberlin↗M. I↗Baumgartner↗Capecchi↗Inauen↗Sick↗Majoie↗C. B↗van Zwam↗…

Background: Prognostication in large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke remains challenging. Although several prognostic models exist, their comparison to clinician performance, human-model interaction, and specific sources of human bias remain poorly understood. Methods: Using pre-treatment clinical and CT data from the MR CLEAN trial (n=500), six neurologists predicted three-month modified Rankin Scale (mRS) scores for 40 patients, both unaided and assisted by a validated feature-based model (MR PREDICTS). Human performance was benchmarked against MR PREDICTS and a multimodal, interpretable deep learning (DL) approach using raw imaging data. We explicitly assessed neurologists? ability to estimate model-required imaging features and identified systematic human biases. Models were additionally validated in a larger MR CLEAN trial cohort (n=404). Results: For predicting the full mRS distribution, standalone models achieved good ordinal agreement (MR PREDICTS quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) 0.51 [0.24 to 0.70]; DL model 0.49 [0.25 to 0.67]), significantly outperforming unaided neurologists (QWK 0.27 [0.10, 0.42]). Neurologists showed systematic overoptimism, predicting lower mRS scores than observed. Furthermore, there was poor accuracy in extracting imaging features. Raters? ASPECTS predictions deviated by 3.4 points from the confirmed scores, and collateral score accuracy was 44.6%. However, for predicting binary mRS (0-2 vs. 3-6), accuracy was comparable between unaided neurologists (64.17% [55.42% to 72.92%]) and models (MR PREDICTS 67.50% [52.50% to 82.50%]; DL model 63.16% [47.37% to 78.95%]). Model-assistance modestly improved and harmonized neurologists? predictions (QWK 0.41 [0.22 to 0.55]; binary accuracy 68.75% [58.33% to 78.34%]. Model performance remained robust in the larger cohort. Conclusions: Multimodal prognostic models outperform clinicians in predicting the full range of mRS outcomes, while human error in imaging assessment and systematic optimism bias are primary drivers of prognostic inaccuracy. End-to-end DL models eliminate human-input variability and hold strong potential as an automated second opinion to support prognostication and decision-making in acute LVO stroke.

Read & Discuss → View Source →