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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Mitigating Content Shift and Hallucination in GenAI Image Editing via Structural Refinement

Generative AI (GenAI) image editors, such as Nano Banana, produce visually compelling results for retouching tasks, enabling non-experts to edit images through text prompts alone. However, the generative nature of these models often introduces spatial misalignment, texture distortion, and content hallucination, all of which are detrimental to downstream workflows that require pixel-level fidelity. We identify a problem setting we call "structure-preserving GenAI fusion" for black-box GenAI image retouching: retain the perceptual enhancements of a GenAI output while enforcing structural faithfulness to the original input image. To address this problem, we propose a post-processing framework that fuses an input image with its GenAI-enhanced counterpart by first establishing coarse spatial and photometric correspondences, then performing a fusion stage that transfers desired enhancements while suppressing hallucinated content. In the absence of direct prior work in this setting, we evaluate our framework against representative methods from photorealistic style transfer and image fusion. Our experiments demonstrate that our method better preserves aesthetic quality while maintaining pixel-level structural consistency and the input resolution.

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

Beyond Scalars: Evaluating and Understanding LLM Reasoning via Geometric Progress and Stability

arXiv:2603.10384v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating LLM reliability via scalar probabilities often fails to capture the structural dynamics of reasoning. We introduce TRACED, a framework that assesses reasoning quality through theoretically grounded geometric kinematics. By decomposing reasoning traces into Progress (displacement) and Stability (curvature), we reveal a distinct topological divergence: correct reasoning manifests as high-progress, stable trajectories, whereas hallucinations are characterized by low-progress, unstable patterns (stalled displacement with high curvature fluctuations). Leveraging these signatures, our probabilistic framework achieves competitive performance and superior robustness across diverse benchmarks. Crucially, TRACED bridges geometry and cognition by mapping high curvature to ''Hesitation Loops'' and displacement to ''Certainty Accumulation'', offering a physical lens to decode the internal dynamics of machine thought.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Clustering Node Attributed Networks with Graph Neural Networks and Self Learning

arXiv:2606.13444v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph clustering - partitioning the node set of a graph into disjoint subsets that reflect some latent information - is a fundamental problem as it finds applications in a myriad of different scenarios. While this classic problem has been tackled for decades by different communities, a recent variation of the problem driven by real data considers the scenario where nodes have attributes that are also informative. This has triggered novel methods that simultaneously leverage network information (edges) and node information (attributed) in the design of novel clustering algorithms. This work proposes a novel framework that builds on prior works that have applied graph neural networks (GNN) to graph clustering. The proposed framework operates in rounds of self learning in a fully unsupervised setting. In each round, a GNN generates representations for nodes that are used to cluster the nodes. This clustering influences the graph used to generate the node representation in the next round. Moreover, a context graph built in each round using the original graph is used to generate the node representations. Empirical results show that the proposed methodology extracts information from both network edges and node attributes in synthetic data, outperforming algorithms focused solely on the network or attributes when neither are very informative. Multiple rounds of learning also improve the performance and always outperforms a long single round of training (i.e., classic GNN graph clustering). When considering real datasets, empirical results indicate that the proposed methodology is competitive to state-of-the-art methods when cluster sizes are balanced.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

TextMesh4D: Zero-shot Text-to-4D Mesh Generation

Large-scale, high-quality dynamic 3D (4D) assets are essential for learning physically grounded representations, but remain costly to capture and annotate at scale. This limits the viability of supervised 4D learning and motivates zero-shot text-to-4D generation leveraging pretrained diffusion priors. To model complex dynamics, prior methods typically adopt implicit 3D representations (e.g., NeRFs or 3DGS) for their deformation capacity. However, their implicit nature provides limited control over surface topology, which hinders high-fidelity geometry and makes temporally coherent surface reconstruction challenging. To address these limitations, we explore zero-shot text-to-4D mesh generation. However, a structural mismatch arises when combining diffusion-based guidance with topology-constrained meshes: the guidance is noisy and spatially inconsistent, while meshes impose severe topological constraints, making direct vertex-level deformation unstable. In this paper, we introduce TextMesh4D, the first zero-shot framework for text-to-4D that directly generates dynamic meshes by addressing the above challenge at two complementary levels. Geometrically, we shift deformation modeling from vertices to faces via a Jacobian Deformation Field (JDF), enabling topology-aware surface reconstruction through an integrability-enforcing integration formulation. Semantically, we propose a Local-Global Semantic Regularizer (LGSR) that preserves identity over time by jointly constraining local deformation plausibility and global shape consistency. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art temporal consistency, structural fidelity, and visual quality, while remaining efficient on a single 24GB GPU.

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

Rethinking the Role of Efficient Attention in Hybrid Architectures

Modern language models increasingly adopt hybrid architectures that combine full attention with efficient attention modules, such as sliding-window attention (SWA) and recurrent sequence mixers. However, how these efficient modules shape model capabilities remains poorly understood. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic analysis across hybrid architectures from three perspectives: scaling behavior, mechanism analysis, and architecture design. First, from a scaling perspective, we find that efficient-attention design primarily affects how fast long-context capability emerges, while different hybrids eventually converge to comparable long-context performance under sufficient training. Second, mechanistically, we show that long-range retrieval is mainly carried by full attention, whereas efficient attention shapes its optimization trajectory. This explains a counter-intuitive phenomenon we call Large-Window Laziness: larger SWA windows can delay the formation of retrieval heads in full-attention layers. Third, guided by this mechanism, we show that applying NoPE to only the full-attention layers of a small-window SWA hybrid substantially improves long-context performance with negligible impact on short-context performance.

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

Beer-Lambert Guided Representation Learning for Unsupervised Anomaly Detection in Sub-THz Food Inspection Images

Food manufacturing requires reliable inspection systems to detect foreign material contamination and maintain product safety. Sub-THz transmission imaging provides material-dependent attenuation characteristics that are useful for detecting low-density contaminants in food products. However, existing unsupervised anomaly detection methods mainly rely on RGB-pretrained visual representations, which may not adequately capture the transmission behavior of Sub-THz images. This paper proposes a Beer-Lambert guided representation learning framework for unsupervised anomaly detection in Sub-THz food inspection images. The proposed method introduces an attenuation decomposition module as an auxiliary regularization module that constrains student representations through attenuation reconstruction during training. In addition to the conventional one-class setting, we introduce a Leave-One-Food-Out protocol to evaluate generalization capability under unseen food categories. Experimental results on the Inline-Food-Inspection-THz dataset show that the proposed method improves overall anomaly detection performance over the baseline method.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Distinguishing quantum processes with bounded coherent memory

arXiv:2606.19511v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distinguishing multi-time quantum processes is a fundamental task underlying the diagnosis, benchmarking, and learning of temporally correlated quantum dynamics. The standard benchmark for distinguishing two processes is the strategy-norm distance, which optimizes over arbitrary adaptive probing strategies but can require large coherent memory and time-dependent control. We introduce machines for autonomous distinction~($\mathsf{MAD}$s): probing strategies that apply the same quantum instrument at each time step, retain the full classical outcome record, and carry a coherent memory of dimension $d_A$. Optimizing over these strategies defines a memory-parametrized distinguishability measure, $d^{(N)}_{\mathsf{MAD}}(\mathbf{P}^N,\mathbf{Q}^N;d_A)$. We show that the resulting hierarchy is monotone in coherent memory and complete at finite times. Specifically, any admissible $N$-step probing strategy can be compiled into a single $\mathsf{MAD}$ with an internal counter and sufficiently large coherent memory, so the hierarchy saturates the strategy-norm benchmark. For recurrent processes generated by repeated system–environment interactions, we derive a single-step description that separates the generation of new distinguishing information from the propagation and decay of information generated at earlier times. Numerical results in a repeated-interaction model show that increasing coherent memory systematically improves the $\mathsf{MAD}$ success probability and closes the gap to the strategy-norm distance while remaining substantially more tractable to evaluate. $\mathsf{MAD}$ distinguishability therefore provides an operational and scalable framework for quantifying what can be learned about genuinely multi-time quantum processes with bounded coherent memory.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

AI4SE and SE4AI Exploration: A Decade Looking Back and Forward

arXiv:2606.19630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The March 2020 INCOSE INSIGHT special issue on AI and Systems Engineering (SE) became the most downloaded issue in the publication's history and launched a research community that now draws over 250 registrants to its annual workshop. In this article, we trace the progress in AI and SE across three phases (labeled here foundational, applied, and LLM inflection) based on the authors' reading of the field's core papers, and describe our opinions of where the community has converged and where critical gaps remain. Separately, a human-AI agreement literature review leveraging both human expertise and six AI models was performed to assess the relevance of 1,712 INCOSE INSIGHT articles and 889 SERC publications. The results identify five critical research gaps and offer guidance for practitioners navigating AI adoption, assurance, and workforce transformation in SE. We share the agreement data and the AI4SE/SE4AI Explorer web application so readers can compare their own relevance judgments with the human and AI raters.

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

Multimodal Evaluator Preference Collapse: Cross-Modal Contagion in Self-Evolving Agents

Authors:

When AI agents use language models to evaluate their own outputs in a feedback loop, systematic biases emerge. We show that Evaluator Preference Collapse (EPC) is dramatically amplified in multimodal settings. Using GPT-4o to evaluate DeepSeek-chat across text and visual tasks, we find that a single strategy (step_by_step) absorbs 48.4% of all weight – 3.2x the collapse observed in text-only self-evaluation – while three visual-domain strategies receive only 9.1% combined weight. We then demonstrate a novel phenomenon we term cross-modal contagion: evaluator preferences acquired on one modality transfer to and corrupt strategy selection on another. Through a four-phase isolation training paradigm, we measure contagion coefficients and document strategy inversion – the optimal strategy for a modality reverses after cross-modal exposure. A Phase 3 statistical validation across four evaluator configurations (N=53 total independent repetitions, 15,592 API calls) reveals a clear hierarchy: cross-model evaluation (GPT-4o, N=8) produces strong but symmetric bidirectional contagion (mean gamma_{T->V}=1.176, gamma_{V->T}=1.089, Delta=-0.088, p=0.575, Cohen's d=0.29); high round counts (DashScope, 50 rounds) cause collapse to single-strategy dominance (70% zero contagion); and self-evaluation provides near-complete immunity – 97% of runs (N=30, DeepSeek-chat) yield exactly zero contagion (mean gamma=0.033, 95% CI [-0.031, 0.010], p=0.642, d=0.07). No evaluator condition shows statistically significant directional asymmetry. We introduce the contagion matrix indexed by evaluator identity, release the MM-EPC experimental framework, and identify cross-model evaluator architecture as the primary risk factor for preference contagion.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Reference-Driven Multi-Speaker Audio Scene Generation from In-the-Wild Priors

Existing multi-speaker dialogue systems bind speakers to utterances through structured supervision: per-turn tags, multi-stream transcriptions, or learnable speaker embeddings. These systems operate within speech-only pipelines that produce clean vocal sequences without the ambient texture of real conversations. We take a different approach. Our method, ScenA, conditions a text-to-audio flow-matching foundation model, pretrained on large-scale in-the-wild data, directly on multiple reference voices and a free-form natural language prompt that describes an entire multi-speaker audio scene. Leveraging such a foundational model allows us to inherit its capacity for natural, non-studio audio: background noise, room acoustics, overlapping dialogue, and spontaneous paralinguistic events, while adding multi-speaker control without any per-turn structure. Concretely, reference latents are concatenated into the model's token sequence and distinguished by lightweight identity-aware positional encodings. However, we identify a critical obstacle to this approach: the Reference Shortcut. During training under standard noise schedules, the model can identify the matching reference by acoustic similarity to the noisy target, bypassing the text prompt entirely. We address this with a high-noise-biased timestep distribution that forces the model to rely on the text prompt for speaker assignment. We evaluate ScenA on the CoVoMix2-Dialogue benchmark, showing that it outperforms existing multi-speaker systems on speaker-binding metrics while generating rich conversational audio with overlapping speech, emotional vocalizations, and ambient sound. Our results demonstrate the advantage of using a general-purpose audio model conditioned on a free-form scene description, rather than passing structured dialog scripts through a speech-only pipeline.

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

Large Language Models for Agentic NetOps and AIOps: Architectures, Evaluation, and Safety

arXiv:2605.12729v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly being used to support network operations (NetOps) and artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), including incident investigation, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, and limited self-healing. In both NetOps and AIOps, this shift is changing how tasks are managed. Agent-based operations work as workflows, from gathering evidence to taking action, following permissions, policies, and checks, and providing rollback options when necessary. This is crucial because operational decisions can have instant impacts. To make the argument concrete, we organise the relevant literature around the hierarchy of autonomy, tool scope, evidence traces, and assurance contracts. These contracts define what an agent may observe, propose, and execute. They also define the checks that must pass before any action is allowed. A consistent pattern appears across work on telemetry query recommendation, diagnosis, root-cause analysis, configuration synthesis, change planning, and limited self-healing. Operational reliability does not come chiefly from the model itself. It depends on the machinery around the model. We also argue that evaluation should go beyond static question answering. Agentic NetOps and AIOps systems require workflow-centred evaluation, including trace quality, bounded tool use, safe proposal generation, replay in sandboxed environments, and canary trials with rollback-aware scoring. Without these measures, a system may appear robust yet remain too fragile. Finally, we examine security, privacy, and governance risks that become acute when agents sit close to operational control surfaces. Taken together, the survey concludes that progress in intelligent NetOps and AIOps will depend on treating autonomy as a constrained operational control problem, whose outputs must be reliable, auditable, and securely deployable.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Online LLM Selection via Constrained Bandits with Time-Varying Demand

arXiv:2606.17489v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in edge-cloud inference systems to handle diverse user tasks with heterogeneous accuracy, latency, and cost profiles. Selecting the appropriate LLM for each incoming task is critical for ensuring service quality and efficient resource utilization. However, model heterogeneity, stochastic and unknown performance characteristics, and time-varying task demands make static selection strategies inadequate. Real-world deployments often impose hard resource budgets such as monetary expenditure limits, along with soft service-level requirements such as latency guarantees. These constraints introduce additional challenges for online decision-making. We formulate this problem as a constrained stochastic bandit learning task, where the learner sequentially selects models under both packing-type (hard) and covering-type (soft) constraints, while adapting to time-varying task demand. The learner operates without access to the underlying reward, cost, or latency distributions and must rely on partial feedback. We develop a novel online learning algorithm that leverages confidence-bound estimates and demand predictions to balance reward maximization with long-term constraint satisfaction. We provide theoretical guarantees showing sublinear regret and sublinear covering constraint violations compared to an offline benchmark with full information. Experimental results on synthetic workloads demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in dynamic, resource-constrained environments.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

From Brewing to Resolution: Tracing the Internal Lifecycle of Code Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Standard accuracy metrics cannot explain why LLMs handle variable tracking but fail on semantically equivalent loops. We study an internal lifecycle of code reasoning in which models first brew the answer, making it linearly recoverable many layers before it becomes self-decodable, and then diverge into one of four resolution outcomes: Resolved, Overprocessed, Misresolved, or Unresolved. Understanding this lifecycle matters because similar task accuracies can mask fundamentally different failure modes that surface-level evaluation cannot detect. We introduce a dual diagnostic framework pairing layer-wise linear probing with Context-Stripped Decoding (CSD) and apply it to six code-reasoning task families across 16 models spanning Qwen, Llama, and DeepSeek architectures. All four outcomes carry substantial mass in every task family: overall Resolved is only 41.5%, with multiple tasks below 30%. Controlled sweeps over structure, depth, and operators expose task-specific failure bottlenecks: Function Call Resolved plunges from 61.1% to 2.5% as call depth increases from one to three. Across architectures and scales, the brewing scaffold remains stable, with normalized brewing duration 24-42% across all 16 models, while resolution success varies with capability. This indicates that the scaffold is a stable empirical regularity across the tested decoder-only Transformer families, whereas resolution success covaries with capability, scale, and training. Code: https://github.com/euyis1019/llm-brewing

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

Probing PbTe-Pb nanowire devices with radio-frequency reflectometry

arXiv:2606.04544v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We report the implementation of radio-frequency (rf) reflectometry on selective-area-grown PbTe-Pb nanowire devices on a CdTe substrate. These nanowires are predicted to host Majorana zero modes. We demonstrate the compatibility of the rf technique, including both resistive and capacitive sensing, with these nanowires. The effect of dielectric loss from the CdTe substrate is quantitatively characterized. Furthermore, the feasibility of rf reflectometry is verified under finite magnetic fields where zero-energy modes can emerge. Our results establish the fast control of PbTe quantum devices, paving the way for their applications in topological quantum computation.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Conformal Candidate Certification for Offline Model-Based Optimization

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline model-based optimization (MBO) proposes candidates by optimizing a surrogate trained on a fixed historical dataset. Because candidates are deliberately out-of-distribution, surrogate rankings are least reliable exactly where the optimizer is most aggressive, yet existing methods provide no per-candidate statistical certificate that a design meets a target threshold. We propose Conformal Candidate Certification (CCC), a post-hoc wrapper that attaches a calibrated one-sided lower bound to each candidate and advances only those whose bound exceeds the target. We show that entropy-regularized surrogate maximization induces a Gibbs-tilted proposal, so the same surrogate supplies importance weights for weighted conformal prediction without a separate density-ratio estimation step. In a controlled synthetic study, CCC certifies $16.7\%$ of an aggressive proposal pool with empirical coverage 0.990 at nominal 0.90, while standard conformal prediction ignoring the covariate shift collapses to 0.416 coverage.

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

EmoFSM: A Finite State Machine for Emotional Support Conversation

Emotional support conversation (ESC) aims to alleviate people's emotional distress through effective conversations. Although large language models (LLMs) have made remarkable progress in ESC, most of these studies may not define the diagram from a state-model perspective, thereby providing a suboptimal solution for long-term satisfaction. To address such an issue, we leverage the Finite State Machine (FSM) on LLMs, and propose a framework called EmoFSM. Our framework allows a single LLM to bootstrap the planning during ESC, and self-reason the seeker's emotion, support strategy, and the final response upon each conversation turn. Substantial experiments in ESC datasets suggest that EmoFSM outperforms many baselines, including direct inference, self-fine, chain of thought, finetuning, and externally supported methods, even those with many more parameters.

17.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

X-OPD: Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation for Capability Alignment in Speech LLMs

While the shift from cascaded dialogue systems to end-to-end (E2E) speech Large Language Models (LLMs) improves latency and paralinguistic modeling, E2E models often exhibit a significant performance degradation compared to their text-based counterparts. The standard Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) training methods fail to close this gap. To address this, we propose X-OPD, a novel Cross-Modal On-Policy Distillation framework designed to systematically align the capabilities of Speech LLMs to their text-based counterparts. X-OPD enables the Speech LLM to explore its own distribution via on-policy rollouts, where a text-based teacher model evaluates these trajectories and provides token-level feedback, effectively distilling teacher's capabilities into student's multi-modal representations. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that X-OPD significantly narrows the gap in complex tasks while preserving the model's inherent capabilities.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

RAID: Semantic Graph Diffusion for True Cold-Start and Cross-Lingual Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16925v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Time-series foundation models show strong transfer performance when given a non-empty history window. However, true cold-start scenarios, where a new item has no prior observations, violate this assumption. We propose RAID (Retrieval-Augmented Iterative Diffusion) a framework, which replaces history-based correlation learning with metadata-driven semantic retrieval and graph-conditioned diffusion. RAID maps textual metadata into a shared semantic space using a frozen multilingual embedding model and constructs an inductive retrieval graph that extends naturally to unseen items. It first forms a base forecast by aggregating information from semantically related neighbors, then refines this forecast with a gated diffusion module to model residual uncertainty. Under a strict true cold-start protocol, RAID outperforms strong foundation models and competitive baselines on both forecasting accuracy and prediction interval coverage, while reducing inference latency by an order of magnitude through non-autoregressive decoding. The shared semantic space also enables zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, allowing a model trained on English descriptions to generalize to items described in other languages without direct supervision.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

CacheMuon: Using Temporal Preconditioning To Approximate Polar Factor

arXiv:2606.16371v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Muon is an optimizer that computes updates using the polar factor of the momentum matrix and has shown strong empirical performance across a range of training settings. A key component of Muon is the Newton-Schulz iteration used to compute this polar factor. Although this avoids the cost of an exact singular value decomposition, it remains expensive in practice because it is applied at every optimization step. At the same time, the momentum matrix changes smoothly over training, suggesting strong temporal correlation in the corresponding polar factors. In this paper, we exploit this structure and propose CacheMuon, a temporal preconditioning method that reuses information from previous optimization steps to approximate the polar factor at the current step. This reduces redundant orthogonalization computation across iterations. We analyze CacheMuon as an inexact Muon update, with error controlled by fresh-solver error and cache staleness. Empirically, CacheMuon provides a controllable quality-efficiency frontier: conservative thresholds closely match fresh Muon on language-model and vision training while reducing orthogonalization FLOPs, whereas more aggressive thresholds yield larger arithmetic savings at the cost of modest validation-quality degradation.

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

Variational Network with Wavelet-based UNET in Accelerated MRI Reconstruction from Under Sampled K-space Data

Fully sampled MRI requires dense k-space acquisition, leading to long scan times, reduced clinical throughput, and increased sensitivity to patient motion. Accelerated MRI addresses this by acquiring undersampled k-space data and reconstructing the missing information computationally. However, reconstruction from undersampled measurements is highly ill-posed and can introduce aliasing artifacts, noise amplification, and loss of anatomical detail. Although conventional parallel imaging and compressed sensing methods mitigate these issues, and deep learning methods have further improved reconstruction quality, preserving high-frequency structures under aggressive undersampling remains challenging. In this work, we propose a Variational Network with a Wavelet-based U-Net (W-UNet) for accelerated MRI reconstruction. The framework combines physics-guided iterative reconstruction with learnable multi-scale frequency representations. Standard pooling operations are replaced with Discrete Wavelet Transform and Inverse Wavelet Transform modules, enabling lossless downsampling while preserving low-frequency structure and high-frequency edge details. Integrated into the refinement and sensitivity map estimation stages, the proposed design improves artifact suppression, feature preservation, and reconstruction fidelity in both single-coil and multi-coil settings. Experiments on fastMRI knee and M4Raw brain datasets show state-of-the-art performance. Ablation studies further confirm the effectiveness of wavelet-based feature decomposition for accelerated MRI reconstruction.

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

Petrov-Galerkin Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network Framework for Two-Dimensional Singularly Perturbed Problems

arXiv:2606.16510v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This study proposes a Petrov-Galerkin based Variational Physics-Informed Neural Network (VPINN) for efficiently solving two-dimensional singularly perturbed problems (SPPs) with one and two small perturbation parameters. The approach employs neural networks to construct the trial solution space, while tensor-product hat functions are adopted as test functions to enforce the variational form. To accurately resolve of sharp boundary layers, the variational form is implemented using a Petrov-Galerkin formulation. Dirichlet boundary conditions are imposed directly, while the source terms are computed using automatic differentiation. Computational experiments on standard two-dimensional problems demonstrate that the proposed method achieves high accuracy in both the maximum and L_2 norms. These results confirm the efficiency and robustness of the Petrov-Galerkin VPINN approach in accurately capturing the multiscale features of two-dimensional SPPs.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Artificial Intelligence-Based Detection of Airway Mucus Plugs on CT and Associations With Clinical Outcomes in COPDGene

RATIONALE: Airway mucus plugging is a clinically relevant manifestation of airway pathology in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and is associated with increased mortality even in early disease; however, visual computed tomography (CT) assessment is subjective and labor intensive. OBJECTIVES: To develop an AI-based quantitative CT method for automated detection of airway mucus plugging and evaluate associations with physiologic impairment and clinical outcomes. METHODS: Inspiratory CT scans from 8,971 COPDGene Phase 1 (GOLD 0-4 and PRISm) participants were analyzed. An AI-based framework combining 3D airway segmentation discontinuities and convolutional neural network classification identified mucus plug obstructions, yielding mucus plug burden (total plug count). Associations with outcomes were evaluated using covariate-adjusted models. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS : Higher mucus plug burden was associated with lower post-bronchodilator FEV % predicted ({rho} = -0.41; P < 0.001), greater air trapping (LAA < -856 HU; {rho} = 0.33; P < 0.001), worse health status (SGRQ; {rho} = 0.31; P < 0.001), and shorter 6-minute walk distance ({rho} = -0.26; P < 0.001). Among GOLD 1-4 participants, mucus plug presence was independently associated with increased all-cause mortality (adjusted hazard ratio, 1.28; P < 0.005) and exacerbation frequency (adjusted incidence rate ratio, 1.32; P < 0.005). Plug presence was also associated with increased respiratory mortality across GOLD categories and cardiovascular mortality in GOLD 1-2. CONCLUSIONS: AI-based quantitative CT assessment of airway mucus plugging provides a scalable, reproducible measure associated with physiologic impairment and adverse outcomes in COPD, supporting its role in risk stratification and future therapeutic studies.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Nearest-neighbour gates are all you need: High-rate quantum low-density parity-check codes on a planar grid

arXiv:2606.19482v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-performance quantum low-density parity-check codes promise substantial reductions in the overhead of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but most constructions require long-range connectivity or qubit shuttling, both of which are difficult to realise in superconducting architectures. Here we introduce a family of quantum low-density parity-check codes that, for the first time, combines planar open-boundary layouts, finite-size advantages over surface codes, and syndrome extraction using only nearest-neighbour gates on a square grid of qubits. The key idea is to generate check-data connectivity dynamically: nearest-neighbour iSWAP walks both define the stabiliser supports and implement their measurement, avoiding the need for a long-range hardware graph. The resulting circuits achieve optimal constant-depth stabiliser measurement, independent of code size, and naturally remove leakage from the system by exchanging the role of check and data qubits at each syndrome extraction round. We find finite-size instances such as a [[323,14,15]] code, whose code-efficiency ratio is nearly an order of magnitude larger than that of rotated surface-code patches. At around 30 circuit qubits per logical qubit, the best directional tile-code layouts reduce the per-logical per-round logical error rate by up to a factor of 1000 relative to rotated surface-code memories. These results show that the advantages of quantum low-density parity-check codes can survive compilation into strictly planar nearest-neighbour circuits, bringing low-overhead fault-tolerant memories closer to near-term hardware.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Model-Predictive Control of a Soft Continuum Robot Using a Physics-Informed Neural Network Based on Cosserat Rod Theory

arXiv:2508.12681v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Dynamic control of soft continuum robots (SCRs) holds great potential for expanding their applications, but remains a challenging problem due to the high computational demands of accurate dynamic models. While data-driven approaches like Koopman-operator-based methods have been proposed, they typically lack adaptability and cannot reconstruct the full robot shape, limiting their applicability. This work introduces a real-time-capable nonlinear model-predictive control (MPC) framework for SCRs based on a domain-decoupled physics-informed neural network (DD-PINN) with adaptable bending stiffness. The DD-PINN serves as a surrogate for the dynamic Cosserat rod model with a speed-up factor of up to 44,000. It is also used within an unscented Kalman filter for estimating the model states and bending compliance from end-effector position measurements. We implement a nonlinear evolutionary MPC running at 70 Hz on the GPU. In simulation, it demonstrates accurate tracking of dynamic trajectories and setpoint control with end-effector position errors below 3 mm (2.3\% of the actuator's length). In real-world experiments, the controller achieves similar accuracy and accelerations up to 3.55 m/s2.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

Averaging principles for nonautonomous multiscale McKean-Vlasov stochastic systems

arXiv:2606.12820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper investigates a class of nonautonomous multiscale McKean-Vlasov stochastic systems. By leveraging the nonautonomous Poisson equation, we rigorously establish both strong and weak averaging principles, accompanied by explicit convergence rates. Notably, the coefficients of the averaging equations derived in the general case retain dependence on the scaling parameter $\varepsilon$. However, under the additional assumptions that the fast-scale coefficients are either asymptotically convergent or time-periodic, we demonstrate that the slow component converges, in the strong or weak sense, to averaging equations with coefficients independent of $\varepsilon$.