Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:49cc1d1e7f29d416c93640f2ac7df209

National trends and operational drivers of vaccine wastage in Uganda, 2020-2025: a descriptive analysis of four tracer antigens

Authors:

Namasambi↗Migisha↗Ankunda↗Matovu↗Lanyero↗Sagyiri↗Okello↗E. O↗Katongole↗Eyu↗Kwesiga↗Bulage↗…

Background Vaccine wastage reduces immunisation efficiency, increases costs, and complicates supply forecasting. Uganda routinely monitors vaccine use, but national evidence comparing observed wastage with World Health Organization (WHO) and Uganda-specific planning thresholds has been limited. We described national and sub-national trends for four tracer antigens to inform supply-chain planning and forecasting. Methods We conducted a retrospective descriptive analysis of routinely reported immunisation data from Ugandas District Health Information Software 2, 2020-2025. We analysed Bacille Calmette-Guerin (BCG), measles-rubella (MR), oral polio vaccine (OPV), and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis-containing vaccine (DPT). Vaccine wastage was calculated as the proportion of issued doses not administered. Annual wastage rates were summarised using medians, and temporal trends were assessed using the Mann-Kendall test. Observed wastage was compared with WHO thresholds: BCG[≤]50%, MR[≤]25%, OPV[≤]10%, DPT[≤]15%, and Ugandas planning thresholds: BCG[≤]70%, MR[≤]40%, OPV[≤]15%, DPT[≤]10%. Effective Vaccine Management reports were reviewed to summarise reported reasons for wastage. Results During 2020-2025, median national wastage was 40.6% for BCG, 25.9% for MR, 10.0% for OPV, and 9.2% for DPT. OPV wastage declined from 12.8% in 2020 to 8.0% in 2025, with a significant downward trend ({tau}b=-1.00; p=0.008). OPV and DPT wastage remained largely within their respective Uganda in-country thresholds ([≤]15% and [≤]10%) for most of the study period, while BCG generally remained below the WHO threshold ([≤]50%) and MR frequently exceeded the WHO threshold ([≤]25%) but remained within Uganda's planning threshold ([≤]40%) in most years. The proportion of districts exceeding both WHO and Uganda thresholds declined for OPV from 36.3% to 5.5% (p=0.024) and for DPT from 22.6% to 1.4% (p=0.013). Wastage was consistently higher in lower-level (Health Centre II and III) facilities, compared to hospitals. Among 50 service delivery points, reported reasons included low session attendance (66%), multi-dose vial policy non-compliance (28%), and vaccine expiry (12%). Conclusion Uganda achieved reductions in OPV wastage and district-level improvements in DPT wastage, while BCG and MR remained more variable and frequently had higher wastage. Strengthening adherence to the multi-dose vial policy and improving session planning at lower-level facilities could strengthen vaccine utilisation and forecasting.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24298

PROTECT-90: A Fault Dataset for Power System Protection

Authors:

Julian Oelhaf↗Georg Kordowich↗Christian Bergler↗Andreas Maier↗Johann J\"ager↗Siming Bayer↗

arXiv:2606.24298v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The increasing interest in data-driven methods for power system protection is accompanied by a lack of standardized, publicly available high-voltage waveform datasets that enable transparent and reproducible evaluation. To address this gap, this paper introduces the PROTECT-90 dataset, an open electromagnetic transient (EMT)-simulated reference benchmark for high-voltage fault studies with consistent digital-fault-recorder-like measurements, publicly released with this work. The dataset comprises 9,022 physically consistent short-circuit simulation episodes generated on a standardized 90 kV double-line topology with systematically documented domain randomization of grid operating points, line parameters, and fault conditions. For each episode, synchronized three-phase voltage and current waveforms are recorded at eight measurement locations and released together with structured, machine-readable metadata describing fault type, fault location, inception time, and operating conditions. All modeling assumptions, parameter ranges, and data-generation procedures are explicitly documented to ensure transparency and cross-study comparability. By combining physically grounded EMT simulation, balanced scenario coverage, and open accessibility, PROTECT-90 establishes a standardized foundation for reproducible benchmarking of protection-oriented signal processing and learning-based methods.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15651

Self-Questioning Vision-Language Models: Reinforcement Learning for Compositional Visual Reasoning

Authors:

Saraswathy Amjith↗

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are AI systems that process both images and text, yet they often struggle with compositional visual reasoning questions that require chaining multiple steps together, such as identifying objects, counting them, and comparing the results. Existing approaches improve this reasoning by training models on human-written step-by-step explanations, but creating these annotations is expensive and difficult to scale. We propose a self-questioning framework that trains a VLM to break visual questions into smaller sub-questions and answer each one before producing a final response, using a reinforcement learning algorithm called Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). The model is never shown examples of how to decompose questions, it discovers this behavior on its own, guided by a reward signal that scores whether the output contains sub-questions and whether the final answer is correct. We apply this framework to a 3-billion-parameter model, training on both synthetic scenes of geometric shapes (CLEVR) and real-world photographs (A-OKVQA). On A-OKVQA, both self-questioning and standard reinforcement learning substantially improve accuracy over the untrained model (52.2% and 51.6% vs. 46.8%). We introduce the first self-questioning VLM by rewarding not only the final answer like standard RL but additionally for generating intermediate sub-questions, enabling it to discover compositional decomposition strategies. These results suggest that teaching AI systems to ask themselves intermediate questions is a promising strategy for complex visual reasoning, particularly when the difficulty of a question warrants explicit step-by-step decomposition.

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04.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16987

Consensus-based Agentic Large Language Model Framework for Harmonized Tariff Schedule Code Classification

Authors:

Truong Thanh Hung Nguyen↗Khanh Van Quynh Nguyen↗Hoang-Loc Cao↗Tri Duong↗Phuc Ho↗Van Pham↗Loc Nguyen↗Hung Cao↗

arXiv:2606.16987v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) code classification is essential for customs clearance, duty assessment, trade statistics, and regulatory compliance in maritime logistics. However, exact HTS classification remains challenging because product descriptions are often short, incomplete, or ambiguous, while correct classification depends on hierarchical tariff structures, legal notes, and jurisdiction-specific rules. This paper proposes an agentic large language model (LLM) framework for Canadian 10-digit HTS code classification in smart-port and maritime logistics environments. The framework integrates multi-agent information retrieval, semantic retrieval over official tariff documents, evidence-grounded reasoning, consensus-based validation, element-wise voting across hierarchical code components, confidence estimation, and human-in-the-loop escalation. We evaluate the framework on a private dataset of 3,300 domain-expert-labeled product records collected from logistics and delivery contexts. Experimental results show that exact 10-digit classification remains difficult even for advanced LLMs, with performance decreasing from coarse chapter-level prediction to fine-grained tariff and statistical suffix assignment. These findings demonstrate the need for evidence-grounded, uncertainty-aware, and human-centered classification workflows rather than fully autonomous single-step prediction. The proposed framework supports more interpretable, accountable, and compliance-oriented HTS classification for maritime logistics and smart-port operations. Our code is available at https://github.com/Analytics-Everywhere-Lab/hts.

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05.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23 DOI: HASH:6fe89f1cdce1dc6d915191fb0e018e20

Uptake of minimal intervention dentistry among Romanian dental professionals and trainees: an exploratory cluster and network analysis

Authors:

Simionescu↗D. P↗Sfeatcu↗Vinereanu↗

Background Minimal intervention dentistry (MID) is promoted as a prevention-oriented approach to caries management, but its integration into routine practice remains uneven. Existing research often examines MID-related knowledge, attitudes, or practices separately, offering limited insight into how these dimensions co-occur within individuals or are conditionally associated. Methods This exploratory cross-sectional survey examined multidimensional MID uptake among 327 Romanian dental students, residents, and specialists from five university centers. Ten MID-related scores were analyzed, including nine formative composites and one single-item peer-norm indicator. K-means clustering examined uptake profiles, and Gaussian graphical model network analysis with stepwise BIC selection examined conditional associations among constructs. Results A two-cluster solution was highly reproducible but modestly separated (n = 144 vs n = 183; average silhouette width = 0.13; mean Jaccard similarities = 0.92 and 0.94). The profiles reflected broadly lower versus higher uptake across knowledge-, belief-, and practice-related dimensions, while perceived peer norms for hygiene instruction showed the opposite pattern. Profile membership was not clearly patterned by gender, age band, professional status, or clinical experience. The primary network included 14 non-zero edges out of 36 possible edges, all positive; the strongest partial association linked diagnostic knowledge to diagnostic methods used in practice (partial r = .22). Familiarity, diagnostic knowledge, and general practices occupied more interconnected positions descriptively, but limited centrality stability precluded interpreting them as intervention targets. Conclusions MID uptake in this sample was better represented as a continuum of modestly differentiated profiles than as sharply separated participant types. The findings provide an exploratory map of multidimensional MID uptake and may inform future survey validation, implementation research, and dental education studies. Because the study was cross-sectional, convenience-sampled, and based on self-report, findings should be interpreted as hypothesis-generating rather than causal or population-representative.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15048

Temporal Difference Learning for Diffusion Models

Authors:

Qizhen Ying↗Yangchen Pan↗Victor Adrian Prisacariu↗Junfeng Wen↗

Diffusion models are typically trained with objectives that focus on local denoising targets at individual time steps (or adjacent pairs), which do not enforce consistency between predictions along the denoising trajectory. This lack of cross-time consistency can degrade performance, especially for few-step samplers. We introduce a temporal difference (TD) objective that penalizes inconsistency of the model's multi-step progress along the denoising path. By reformulating the diffusion process as a Markov reward process and casting denoising as a policy evaluation problem in reinforcement learning, we derive a unified TD approach that applies to both discrete- and continuous-time diffusion formulations. We further propose a principled sample-based reweighting method that stabilizes training. Empirically, we show that using our TD training can significantly improve sample quality measured by FID, with stronger advantages when the number of sampling steps is small, highlighting its practical utility under low-computation-budget scenarios. We provide ablation studies to justify our design choices, including pairwise loss reweighting, regularization weight, and one-step stride. Overall, our TD approach can be a general drop-in that enforces cross-time consistency and improves generation quality across different diffusion generative models.

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07.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2604.27457

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

Authors:

Phattharaporn Singkanipa↗Victor Kasatkin↗Daniel A. Lidar↗

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

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08.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18430

Signature filtering: a lightweight enhancement for statistical watermark detection in large language models

Authors:

Chih-Duo Hong↗Yen-Pang Chen↗Fang Yu↗

arXiv:2606.18430v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Statistical watermarks help organizations attribute large language model (LLM) outputs, yet existing detectors often struggle when watermark signals are weak, texts are repetitive, or watermarks are edited. We propose signature filtering, a detection-time module that enhances watermark detection without modifying watermark embedding and text generation. It learns a small set of ``signature'' tokens whose presence makes watermark tests unreliable, and removes these tokens before detection. The signatures are obtained by solving a mixed-integer linear program on a small training set, with constraints that maximize the true positive rate. We additionally derive finite-sample and asymptotic bounds under several attacker models (color-blind, color-adaptive, and distributionally correlated). On four well-known watermark families (Kgw, Sweet, Unigram, Exp), four benchmark corpora (C4, MBPP, HumanEval, Code-Search-Net), and six LLMs (Opt-1.3b, Opt-6.7b, Llama2-13b, Llama3.1-8b, Qwen2.5-14b, Phi-3-medium-14b), 2- and 3-gram signatures raise detection rates in weak-signal and low-entropy settings from 8~31% without filtering to 78~99% with filtering, while keeping false positives controllable and often negligible. In stress tests where we scramble sentences and perturb 25~50% of tokens by dilution, deletions, and substitutions, 2-gram filters for Kgw-style watermarks preserve most of the clean-text detection gains, often matching or outperforming the advanced WinMax watermark detector. Signature filtering thus provides a simple, scalable, and model-agnostic add-on to strengthen watermark-based provenance checks for LLM text in information processing workflows.

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09.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:6037ee13009de8596f815533feae4a59

Evaluation of AI-Generated Synthetic Data for Clinical Research in Secondary Cardiovascular Prevention among Dyslipidemia Patients

Authors:

Bonomi↗Werba↗J. P↗Saccani↗Lu↗L. L↗Coser↗Franchi↗Valsecchi↗Teruzzi↗Terragni↗Centenaro↗…

Background: Access to high-quality clinical data is essential for advancing medical research and developing effective medical statistical and Artificial Intelligence models. However, privacy regulations and logistical barriers often hinder timely access to real-world data. Synthetic data offer a promising solution, preserving the statistical characteristics of original datasets while protecting patient privacy. Objectives: This study investigates the use of synthetic data for secondary cardiovascular prevention in patients with dyslipidemia, using two real-world datasets from Centro Cardiologico Monzino. Methods: Given the high dimensionality and limited sample size of the datasets, we employed a custom generative framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Pre-trained LLMs were fine-tuned on original clinical records to synthesize tabular data replicating source-data distributions. Fine-tuning was performed within the Centro Cardiologico Monzino's secure infrastructure to ensure data sovereignty. We evaluate clinical utility and privacy using fidelity and privacy metrics, identifying the optimal generative model and benchmarking against traditional anonymization methods. Results: Synthetic data achieved a superior trade-off than classically anonymized datasets. Real and synthetic datasets showed strong agreement, with significant distributional differences limited to few variables. Models trained on synthetic data replicated key associations from the original dataset, including therapy modification and creatine phosphokinase as predictors of SAMS, and pharmacological intensity as the main driver of LDL-C reduction. Conclusions: Results support the feasibility of using synthetic data as a proxy for real-world datasets in exploratory analyses and model development. Despite slight attenuation of some effect sizes, preserved clinical relationships reinforce the validity of synthetic data in medical research.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18658

On-Manifold Variational Learning with Heat-Kernel Priors

Authors:

Jiarui Xing↗Tal Zeevi↗Nian Wu↗Jian Wang↗

Learning unsupervised representations of medical imaging cohorts can reveal clinically meaningful prototypes without expert labels, which are often noisy and fail to capture true pathological heterogeneity. However, existing deep latent-variable models estimate Gaussian mixture priors via Euclidean averaging, producing prototypes that drift off the curved data manifold and degenerate as the number of sub-populations grows. We propose a manifold-anchored variational framework built on a geometry-aware Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm, whose M-step selects each sub-population prototype as the graph medoid with the highest diffusion centrality on a heat-kernel-weighted latent graph, ensuring that every prototype remains on-manifold. A Dirichlet energy regularizer enforces geometric smoothness of the latent space, and a per-sub-population uncertainty score enables label-free quality assessment. \rev{The manifold-anchored EM is a general-purpose geometric tool that extends standard EM and applies readily to other latent-variable models beyond this setting.} On cardiac scar and brain MRI benchmarks, our framework attains the highest accuracy among all compared methods, produces the sharpest prototypes reported to date, and remains stable at large sub-population counts where all baselines degenerate.

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2604.05859

When Do We Need LLMs? A Diagnostic for Language-Driven Bandits

Authors:

Uljad Berdica↗Fernando Acero↗Anton Ipsen↗Parisa Zehtabi↗Michael Cashmore↗Manuela Veloso↗

arXiv:2604.05859v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study Contextual Multi-Armed Bandits (CMABs) for non-episodic decision-making problems where the context includes both textual and numerical information (e.g., recommendation systems, dynamic portfolio adjustments, offer selection; all frequent problems in finance). While Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to these settings, utilizing LLMs for reasoning at every decision step is computationally expensive, and uncertainty estimates are difficult to obtain. To address this, we introduce LLMP-UCB, a bandit algorithm that derives uncertainty estimates from LLMs via repeated inference. However, our experiments demonstrate that lightweight numerical bandits operating on text embeddings (dense or Matryoshka) match or exceed the accuracy of LLM-based solutions at a fraction of their cost. We further show that embedding dimensionality is a practical lever on the exploration-exploitation balance, enabling cost-performance tradeoffs without prompt complexity. Finally, to guide practitioners, we propose a geometric diagnostic based on the arms' embeddings to decide when to use LLM-driven reasoning versus a lightweight numerical bandit. Our results provide a principled deployment framework for cost-effective, uncertainty-aware decision systems with broad applicability across AI use cases.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2408.01526

Recognizing and Reconstructing a Multi-Unit Floor Plan

Authors:

Lukas Kratochvila↗Gijs de Jong↗Monique Arkesteijn↗Simon Bilik↗Tomas Zemcik↗Karel Horak↗Jan S. Rellermeyer↗

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.

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13.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24772

A high-fidelity two-qubit gate for multimode superconducting P-mon qubits

Authors:

Frederik Pfeiffer↗Federico A. Roy↗Niklas J. Glaser↗Julius Feigl↗Leon Koch↗Kevin Kiener↗Gleb Krylov↗Johannes Schirk↗Christian M. F. Schneider↗Lasse S\"odergren↗Florian Wallner↗Max Werninghaus↗…

arXiv:2606.24772v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To scale superconducting quantum processors, it is essential to achieve long coherence times while engineering interactions that do not introduce additional decoherence channels. In superconducting qubit systems, this can be realized using multimode circuits that feature a protected qubit mode alongside a distinct mediator mode. Building on this concept, our recently developed P-mon qubit provides intrinsic protection against decoherence from the readout environment. We extend this approach to controlled two-qubit interactions, by exploiting the mediator modes of P-mons for on-demand coupling. Because direct interactions between the qubit modes are strongly suppressed, unwanted $ZZ$-type interactions are significantly reduced to below $3.6(5)~kHz$ in the idle state. When tuning the coupled mediator modes on resonance, the cross-Kerr interaction between the qubit and the hybridized mediator modes leads to a qubit-state dependent frequency shift. By selectively addressing these transitions, we implement a $180~ns$ long CZ gate and determine a fidelity of $99.62(4)~%$. These results represent a significant step toward a scalable superconducting architecture that maintains high performance at scale.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2510.10779

Structured Spectral Graph Representation Learning for Multi-label Abnormality Analysis from 3D CT Scans

Authors:

Theo Di Piazza↗Carole Lazarus↗Olivier Nempont↗Loic Boussel↗

With the growing volume of CT examinations, there is an increasing demand for automated tools such as organ segmentation, abnormality detection, and report generation to support radiologists in managing their clinical workload. Multi-label classification of 3D Chest CT scans remains a critical yet challenging problem due to the complex spatial relationships inherent in volumetric data and the wide variability of abnormalities. Existing methods based on 3D convolutional neural networks struggle to capture long-range dependencies, while Vision Transformers often require extensive pre-training on large-scale, domain-specific datasets to perform competitively. In this work, we propose a 2.5D alternative by introducing a new graph-based framework that represents 3D CT volumes as structured graphs, where axial slice triplets serve as nodes processed through spectral graph convolution, enabling the model to reason over inter-slice dependencies while maintaining complexity compatible with clinical deployment. Our method, trained and evaluated on 3 datasets from independent institutions, achieves strong cross-dataset generalization, and shows competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art visual encoders. We further conduct comprehensive ablation studies to evaluate the impact of various aggregation strategies, edge-weighting schemes, and graph connectivity patterns. Additionally, we demonstrate the broader applicability of our approach through transfer experiments on automated radiology report generation and abdominal CT data.

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15.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18509

Concept Modulation Models: A Unified Framework for Identifiability and Extrapolation

Authors:

Soheun Yi↗Yizhou Lu↗Chandler Squires↗Pradeep Ravikumar↗

arXiv:2606.18509v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable generalization in conditional latent variable models requires understanding both identifiability and extrapolation: how observed variation across attributes determines latent structure, and how that structure determines distributions at unseen attributes. However, existing identifiability and extrapolation guarantees are largely model-specific, with separate analyses in nonlinear ICA, causal representation learning, perturbation modeling, and related conditional latent variable models. We introduce concept modulation models (CMMs), an attribute-indexed class of conditional generative models with structure $A\to \Lambda \to C\to X$, where attributes select modulators, modulators induce latent concept laws, and concepts generate observed features. CMMs lift transition-based identifiability to conditional settings by showing that feature agreement on observed attributes induces a latent concept transition constrained by the CMM class. We express these constraints through attribute potentials, log-density ratios between attribute-conditioned concept laws, separating the generic lifting step from model-specific rigidity arguments. The same potentials control extrapolation: agreement at unseen attributes holds exactly when the transported attribute-potential identities extend to those attributes. This yields algebraic extrapolation criteria, identifies the common potential-based proof objects behind several existing identifiability and extrapolation results, and, when combined with the model-specific rigidity arguments in those works, recovers their stated conclusions.

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16.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17901

The Erdős-Hajnal High-Girth Subgraph Conjecture Holds in the Polynomial Chromatic-Sparsity Regime

Authors:

Eric Li↗

arXiv:2606.17901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: For a graph $G$ put $h_r(G)=\max{\chi(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r}.$ Erdős and Hajnal asked whether $h_r(G)\to\infty$ as $\chi(G)\to\infty$, for every fixed $r\ge4$. We prove this in every fixed polynomial edge-density regime: for all $r\ge4$, $k\ge2$, $P,C>0$, there is $M=M_{r,k}(P,C)$ such that $\chi(G)\ge M,\ e(G)\le C\chi(G)^P\Longrightarrow h_r(G)\ge k.$ Quantitatively, after replacing $P$ by $P\vee2$ and $C$ by $C\vee2$, $M_{r,k}(P,C)\le \exp!\left(O_{r,k}\bigl((P+2+\log(C\vee2))^2\bigr)\right),$ and consequently the same conclusion holds throughout the quasi-polynomial range $e(G)\le \exp\bigl(C_0(\log\chi(G))^a\bigr),\ 1 < a < 3/2,$ for all sufficiently large $\chi(G)$. In each fixed polynomial-density regime we also obtain $f_{P,C}(k,r)\le k^{O_{r,P,C}(1)}.$ The proof combines a chromatic-defect random extraction lemma, compact and near-quadratic sparse-core bases, and a peeling/thinning bootstrap increasing the admissible edge exponent by $1/(r-1)$. We also prove structural saturation results for possible counterexamples, including Moore-strength exact-cycle packings and quadratic saturation in projected colour-pair space. Finally, writing $h_r^{\mathrm f}(G)=\max{\chi_{\mathrm f}(H):H\subseteq G,\operatorname{girth}(H)\ge r},$ we develop a fractional random-extraction framework based on Mohar-Wu preservation. We prove sufficient cheap-cycle-killing criteria and verify them for several structured families, including clique-organised families, line graphs of incidence graphs of equal-order generalized quadrangles and generalized hexagons, and the Bohman-Keevash tracking-time triangle-free-process graph. We also isolate a density-free obstruction that any proof using this fractional surgery route must overcome.

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17.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14526

Dissipation-induced superradiance in matter coupled to a self-interacting cavity

Authors:

Sebastian Schmid↗Matteo Soriente↗Oded Zilberberg↗Javier del Pino↗

arXiv:2606.14526v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Light-matter interactions are often modeled via the Dicke model, namely, by two-level systems coupled to a cavity mode. Alas, the threshold for superradiance is often experimentally inaccessible or hindered by light's diamagnetic term. Here, within the Dicke setting, we consider self-interacting light in a cavity, modeled by a photonic Kerr nonlinearity. We show that negative Kerr nonlinearity gives rise to a low-threshold superradiant phase with spin inversion. While unstable in a closed system, cavity dissipation stabilizes this lit phase, opening avenues for lasing and bath-engineered phases.

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18.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12685

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

Authors:

Jo\~ao Pedro Gama D'Elia↗Irene D'Amico↗Thereza Paiva↗

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.

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19.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.05692

Benchmarking Counterfactual Prediction in Epidemic Time Series with Time-Varying Interventions

Authors:

Wenhao Mu↗Facundo Yan↗Anik Mumssen↗Marisa Eisenberg↗Alexander Rodr\'iguez↗

arXiv:2606.05692v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning has enabled significant advances in time-series causal inference, yet progress remains constrained by the lack of realistic benchmarks with observable counterfactual outcomes. Existing datasets either rely on real-world observations without ground-truth counterfactuals or on simplified simulations that fail to capture complex causal dynamics. To address this gap, we develop a large-scale benchmark for counterfactual prediction in epidemic time series under dynamic interventions. Unlike existing benchmarks, it supports static and time-varying treatments, as well as both single-policy and multi-policy intervention settings, enabling evaluation of causal inference methods across a broad range of causal inference scenarios. Leveraging a calibrated agent-based model grounded in real-world demographic, mobility, epidemiological, and policy data, we generate realistic counterfactual trajectories across more than 150 U.S. counties. Using this benchmark, we evaluate widely used and state-of-the-art causal inference methods, revealing substantial performance differences and highlighting the challenges of realistic time-series causal reasoning.

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20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17657

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

Authors:

Zirui Cheng↗Zeyu Shen↗Thomas L. Griffiths↗Peter Henderson↗

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17283

ARVO: Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities for Open-Source Software

Authors:

Xiang Mei↗Jordi Del Castillo↗Pulkit Singh Singaria↗Haoran Xi↗Abdelouahab Benchikh↗Tiffany Bao↗Ruoyu Wang↗Yan Shoshitaishvili↗Adam Doup\'e↗Hammond Pearce↗Brendan Dolan-Gavitt↗

arXiv:2606.17283v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Achieving reproducibility, quantity, and diversity in vulnerability datasets has long been viewed as an inherent three-way trade-off, where improving one dimension often comes at the cost of the others. In practice, reproducibility has been the dimension most often neglected. This has limited what can be automatically extracted from historical bug datasets, and has reduced their utility for downstream security research. In this work, we propose a method to produce a new security dataset which ensures reproducibility for diverse vulnerabilities at scale by identifying the key obstacles to large-scale bug reproduction and addressing them with general solutions. Using this method, we introduce full reproducibility to the largest open source software vulnerability dataset (OSS-Fuzz) and construct the ARVO dataset (an Atlas of Reproducible Vulnerabilities in Open-source software). ARVO is a large-scale dataset consisting of over 6,100 real-world vulnerabilities across 311 projects. Focusing on reproducibility, ARVO differs from existing datasets by providing each vulnerability in a form that can be consistently rebuilt, triggered, and analyzed across versions. Reproducibility also enables automatic identification of the corresponding patch for each vulnerability and supports direct interaction with vulnerabilities after code changes, capabilities that existing large-scale datasets do not provide. In our evaluation, ARVO successfully reproduces 81% of vulnerabilities and achieves 89.4% accuracy on the located patches. We also discuss ARVO's influence on both upstream practices and downstream security research.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2605.08116

The Safety-Aware Denoiser for Text Diffusion Models

Authors:

Amman Yusuf↗Zhejun Jiang↗Mijung Park↗

arXiv:2605.08116v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on text diffusion models offers a promising alternative to autoregressive generation, but controlling their safety remains underexplored. Existing safety approaches are geared toward autoregressive models and typically rely on post-hoc filtering or inference-time interventions. These are inadequate for effectively addressing safety risks in text diffusion models. We propose the Safety-Aware Denoiser (SAD), a safety-guidance framework in text diffusion models. The SAD modifies the iterative denoising process such that the text sample at the final denoising step is steered toward provably safe regions of the text space. This inference-time method can integrate safety constraints into the denoiser, avoiding computationally expensive retraining of the underlying diffusion model and enabling flexible, lightweight safety guidance. We evaluate the safety of the generated text using the SAD, with respect to hazard taxonomy, memorization, and jailbreak. Experimental results show that SAD substantially reduces unsafe generations while preserving generation quality, diversity, and fluency, outperforming existing methods. These results demonstrate that our safety guidance during denoising provides an effective and scalable mechanism for enforcing safety in text diffusion models.

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23.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2410.09226

Resourcefulness of non-classical continuous-variable quantum gates

Authors:

Massimo Frigerio↗Antoine Debray↗Nicolas Treps↗Mattia Walschaers↗

arXiv:2410.09226v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In continuous-variable quantum computation, identifying key elements that enable a quantum computational advantage is a long-standing issue. Starting from the standard results on the necessity of Wigner negativity, we develop a comprehensive and versatile approach in which the techniques of $(s)$-ordered quasiprobabilities are exploited to provide rigorous statements on the simulability of photonic quantum circuits consisting of previously characterized gates and thereby identifying the contribution of each quantum gate to the potential achievement of quantum computational advantage. This is achieved by means of an analysis of the so-called transfer function, allowing us to highlight the resourcefulness of a gate set. As such this technique can be straightforwardly applied to current continuous-variables quantum circuits, while also constraining the tolerable amount of losses above which any potential quantum advantage can be ruled out. We use $(s)$-ordered quasiprobability distributions on phase-space to capture the non-classical features in the protocol, and focus our technique entirely on the ordering parameter $s$. This allows us to highlight the resourcefulness and robustness to loss of a universal set of unitary gates comprising three distinct Gaussian gates and any non-Gaussian unitary gate, providing important insight on the role of non-Gaussianity.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2509.03647

Breaking the Mirror: Activation-Based Mitigation of Self-Preference in LLM Evaluators

Authors:

Dani Roytburg↗Matthew Bozoukov↗Matthew Nguyen↗Jou Barzdukas↗Simon Fu↗Narmeen Oozeer↗

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in evaluation pipelines, particularly for tasks like preference tuning and model routing. We investigate whether lightweight steering vectors can mitigate this problem at inference time without retraining. We introduce a curated dataset that distinguishes self-preference bias into justified examples of self-preference and unjustified examples of self-preference, and we construct steering vectors using two methods: Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA) and an optimization-based approach. Our results show that steering vectors can reduce unjustified self-preference bias by up to 97\%, substantially outperforming prompting and direct preference optimization baselines. Yet steering vectors are unstable on legitimate self-preference and unbiased agreement, implying self-preference spans multiple or nonlinear directions. This underscores both their promise and limits as safeguards for LLM-as-judges and motivates more robust interventions.

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25.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.02506

Question-Aware Evidence Ledgers for Video Relational Reasoning

Authors:

Yilin Ou↗Mengshi Qi↗Huadong Ma↗

The VRR-QA challenge evaluates visual relational reasoning in videos, where answers often depend on implicit spatial relations, event boundaries, target identity, and dialogue context rather than a single salient frame. We present a test-time reasoning pipeline built around a strong GPT-5.5 video QA solver and a set of question-aware evidence ledgers. The initial solver answers each question from a uniform video representation, while routed ledgers are prompted to make the required targets, count units, reference frames, and temporal or spatial scope explicit for counting, spatial, endpoint, viewpoint, and dialogue reasoning. External tools such as open-vocabulary detection, depth cues, pair crops, ASR, and scene-graph ledgers are used only as evidence sources. A conservative gate keeps the current answer unless independent evidence uniquely supports a different option. The final evidence-gated pipeline achieves 92.95% overall accuracy and 93.79% macro accuracy on the challenge test split.

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