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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Multi-domain AD risk burden and plasma biomarkers in cognitively unimpaired adults

Authors:
Li↗M. Y↗Tolosa-Tort↗Heston↗M. B↗Insel↗Andrews↗S. J↗

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology accumulates decades before symptom onset, yet how the cumulative effect of genetic, familial, and modifiable lifestyle risk burden jointly affects plasma biomarker levels and trajectories in cognitively unimpaired older adults remains unknown. Methods: We analyzed data from 261 participants in the PREVENT-AD cohort. A composite risk score integrating APOE e4 status, polygenic score, family history, and modifiable/lifestyle risk was examined against six plasma biomarkers using linear regression and linear mixed-effects models. Results: APOE e4 was the strongest predictor of plasma biomarker levels. Higher composite risk burden was associated with elevated ptau181, ptau217, ptau217/Ab42, and GFAP levels, and lower Ab42/40 levels. A higher risk burden was predictive of accelerated ptau181 accumulation. Discussion: Cumulative AD risk burden is broadly associated with plasma biomarker levels and specifically predicts accelerated ptau181 accumulation in cognitively unimpaired older adults, supporting structured composite risk profiling as a framework for AD risk stratification.

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02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Timestamp-Aware Spatio-Temporal Graph Contrastive Learning for Network Intrusion Detection

Authors:
Jianli Dai↗Guangwei Wu↗Jiacheng Li↗Weiping Wang↗An He↗Xinjun Xiao↗

arXiv:2606.17109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Given their effectiveness in modeling the relational structure among network traffic flows, graph neural networks (GNNs) have been widely adopted in network intrusion detection systems (NIDSs). However, most existing GNN-based NIDS approaches focus on the relational structure of traffic flows, and treat them as temporally independent, which limits their ability to cope with evolving attack behaviors. Moreover, their reliance on supervised or semi-supervised learning often restricts generalization to unseen attacks. To address these limitations, we propose a novel self-supervised GNN-based framework. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed model is among the first self-supervised GNN-based NIDS models to explicitly leverage real timestamps, which provides faithful temporal dependencies for representation learning. We first construct a series of temporal graphs from network traffic flows according to their timestamps, and then employ an E-GraphSAGE and LSTM based encoder to fully extract temporal information and spatial dependencies of network traffic, without introducing time-costly attention mechanisms. A multi-view graph contrastive learning (GCL) scheme is introduced, where temporal, spatial, and feature contrasts are jointly performed to capture temporal continuity, preserve structural consistency, and improve the generalization and robustness of the learned representations, respectively. In addition, a gradient-norm-based adaptive weighting strategy is designed to optimize the contrastive loss weights. Experimental results on four representative NIDS datasets with real timestamps demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing self-supervised approaches and achieves performance comparable to the supervised state-of-the-art GNN method, while maintaining high computational efficiency.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

The Long Tail, Not the Front Page: Cold-Start Prediction of Crowd Highlight Salience

Authors:
Kazuki Nakayashiki↗Keisuke Watanabe↗

A social highlighter's most useful signal – which passages a crowd of readers marks – exists only for documents people have already read. Can the aggregate crowd salience of a document be predicted from its text before its marks accumulate? Prior work on this data found that zero-shot language models recover highlight locations worse than a trivial lead (position) baseline, so we ask whether a model trained on the highlight corpus can beat that baseline. Using a pre-registered ladder of models and a by-document cluster bootstrap, we find a small but robust edge: a logistic ranker over sentence embeddings and positional/contextual features beats the lead baseline by +0.044 average precision (95% CI [+0.029, +0.058]; clears a pre-registered margin delta=0.03 in 97% of resamples, and stable across pipeline re-runs). Two unsupervised extractive baselines (centroid, LexRank-style centrality) lose to lead, and the trained model beats them by +0.108, so the edge is not recovered by generic unsupervised proxies – it reflects learning from real reader marks. In product terms, precision@3 rises from 0.25 to 0.39 (+55% relative) and the model beats lead on 69% of documents. An ablation attributes the edge to the raw embedding (+0.014) and training augmentation (+0.010), each with a positive CI. The edge is not a temporal-generalization failure, and we find no evidence that content drift or near-duplicate leakage explains it. A standardized regression shows the advantage is governed mainly by document popularity (lower popularity, larger edge) and by label reliability. It nearly vanishes only on the most popular content; there it is the lead baseline that strengthens, not the model that weakens. Because our evaluation conditions on documents that eventually accumulated readers, these results are a retrospective cold-start simulation.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Latent Gaussian Splatting for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking

Authors:
Maximilian Luz↗Rohit Mohan↗Thomas N\"urnberg↗Yakov Miron↗Daniele Cattaneo↗Abhinav Valada↗

arXiv:2602.23172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Capturing 4D spatiotemporal scene structure is crucial for the safe and reliable operation of robots in dynamic environments. However, existing approaches typically address only part of the problem: they either provide coarse geometric tracking via bounding boxes or detailed 3D occupancy estimates that lack explicit temporal association and instance-level reasoning. In this work, we present Latent Gaussian Splatting (LaGS) for 4D Panoptic Occupancy Tracking (4D-POT). We revisit the underlying representation and model 3D features as a sparse set of feature-bearing Gaussians. These act as dynamic, volume-oriented keypoints that enable spatially continuous, distance-weighted aggregation of multi-view features before being splatted into a voxel grid for decoding. This point-centric formulation enables flexible, data-dependent receptive fields and long-range spatial interactions that are difficult to capture with local and dense voxel-based operators. A hierarchical Gaussian representation further enables multi-scale reasoning by combining global context from coarse super-points with fine-grained detail from higher-resolution streams. Extensive experiments on Occ3D nuScenes and Waymo demonstrate state-of-the-art performance for 4D-POT. We provide code and models at https://lags.cs.uni-freiburg.de/.

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05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Reaching out-of-school girls with HPV vaccination: A qualitative evaluation in six low- and middle-income countries using the RE-AIM framework

Authors:
Zhang↗Rosser↗Wysong↗M. D↗Surkan↗P. J↗Rosen↗J. G↗Limaye↗R. J↗Park↗

Background Infection with human papillomavirus (HPV), the primary cause of cervical cancer, disproportionately affects women in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). While school-based vaccination of adolescent girls against HPV is highly effective, this strategy systematically excludes out-of-school (OOS) girls. Using the RE-AIM framework, we explored strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination across six African and Asian LMICs. Methods We conducted semi-structured key informant interviews with 32 vaccination program stakeholders from Cambodia, Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Uganda between May and September 2024. Interviews explored countries implementation successes, challenges, and strategies to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination and sustainability considerations. Data were analyzed using a hybrid team-based thematic analysis approach guided by the RE-AIM framework. Results Community outreach-based strategies, typically integrated into routine immunization outreach, were identified as the most effective approach to reach OOS girls with HPV vaccination. Targeted strategies, such as locating outreach clinics in community venues frequented by OOS girls (e.g., churches, markets) enhanced implementation. Perceived effectiveness of these strategies varied across participants, and formal assessment of effectiveness was constrained by the absence of disaggregated vaccination coverage data by school enrollment status. Some subpopulations of OOS girls (i.e., girls in nomadic or migrant communities, urban OOS girls) were not readily reached through standard outreach approaches, prompting implementation of adapted and tailored strategies for these subpopulations. Costs associated with conducting outreach in harder-to-reach areas were major barriers to reaching OOS girls, presenting challenges to the sustainability and cost-effectiveness of these approaches. Conclusions Routine community outreach platforms were widely perceived as most effective for reaching OOS girls. Strengthening disaggregated monitoring systems, adapting outreach for harder-to-reach subpopulations of OOS girls, and financing delivery models for tailored outreach strategies will be critical to improving equitable HPV vaccine coverage among OOS girls.

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

Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory

Authors:
Shiqi He↗Yue Cui↗Xinyu Ma↗Yaliang Li↗Bolin Ding↗Mosharaf Chowdhury↗

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Verifiable Environments Are LEGO Bricks: Recursive Composition for Reasoning Generalization

Authors:
Hao Xiang↗Qiaoyu Tang↗Le Yu↗Yaojie Lu↗Xianpei Han↗Ben He↗Le Sun↗Bowen Yu↗Peng Wang↗Hongyu Lin↗Dayiheng Liu↗

Reinforcement Learning (RL) with verifiable environments has emerged as a powerful approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior research demonstrates that scaling environment quantity improves RL performance, existing manual or individual construction methods suffer from linear scaling limits, thereby hindering scalable reasoning generalization. This paper introduces RACES (Recursive Automated Composition for Environment Scaling), a framework that conceptualizes verifiable environments as composable building blocks that can be recursively assembled. The key insight is that when the codomain (output type) of one environment matches the domain (input type) of another, they can be automatically fused into a new verifiable environment, enabling recursive composition. RACES is implemented with 300 individual environments and defines a set of composition operators (\textsc{SEQUENTIAL}, \textsc{PARALLEL}, \textsc{SORT}, and \textsc{SELECT}) that induce diverse reasoning patterns. Extensive experiments show that RL training on these composite environments consistently enhances reasoning generalization. Specifically, RACES improves DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B by an average of 3.1 points (from 48.2 to 51.3) and boosts Qwen3-14B performance from 58.8 to 61.1 on six benchmarks, which are unseen during the construction of training environments. Moreover, RACES achieves performance comparable to training on 300 individual environments using only 50 base environments, demonstrating significant efficiency in environment utilization.

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08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

ARIADNE: Agnostic Routing for Inference-time Adapter DyNamic sElection

Authors:
Enrico Cassano↗Micha{\l} Brzozowski↗Zuzanna Dubanowska↗Paolo Mandica↗Neo Christopher Chung↗

arXiv:2606.19079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The increasing deployment of parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has led to model ecosystems in which a single backbone is paired with many task-specialized adapters. In this setting, inference-time queries often arrive without task labels, requiring the system to automatically select the most appropriate adapter from a growing and heterogeneous adapter pool. Existing routing methods either depend on access to adapter internals, such as weight decompositions or gradient-based statistics, or require additional router training, which limits scalability and portability as new adapters are added. We introduce ARIADNE, a training-free, adapter-agnostic routing framework for dynamic adapter selection at inference time. ARIADNE represents each adapter through a set of centroids computed from embeddings of its training set, capturing the data distribution associated with that adapter. Given an unlabeled input, it selects an adapter by measuring proximity to these centroids in latent space. Because routing is performed entirely in the input embedding space, ARIADNE is compatible with arbitrary PEFT methods and requires no modification to the adapters or training procedures. Primarily evaluated with Llama 3.2 1B Instruct on 23 diverse NLP tasks, ARIADNE recovers 97.44% of the upper bound performance. Scaling to 44 tasks, it achieves 89.7% average selection accuracy, without additional training or access to adapter internals.

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09.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-18

Daily briefing: The proteins that protect us from deadly mutations

Authors:
Flora Graham↗

Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States. Proteins that ‘buffer’ the effects of mutations could help to treat diseases such as cancers. Plus, goats can follow human voices and the battle over a key ocean observatory project in the United States.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Markovianity-based ultrasensitive parameter estimation

Authors:
Olli Siltanen↗

arXiv:2211.05142v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate parameter estimation is a central task in quantum metrology and sensing, where quantum resources can provide precision beyond classical limits. In realistic settings, however, system-environment interactions lead to decoherence, reducing these strategies to their classical counterparts. Noise is typically classified as Markovian or non-Markovian, with the latter often preserving quantum coherence longer and thus supporting better metrological performance. Still, the absence of noise is generally considered ideal. In this work, we uncover a striking reversal: certain non-Markovian environments not only outperform Markovian ones - including their quantum Cramér-Rao bounds - but can also surpass the entirely noiseless case. We demonstrate these findings numerically for an all-optical setup, which is experimentally feasible and can be extended to other physical platforms. In general, our results open new avenues for noise-assisted quantum metrology beyond conventional limits.

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11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Testing the problem of time with cold atoms

Authors:
Giovanni Barontini↗

arXiv:2509.07745v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We realize a cold-atom system to quantitatively test relational constructions of time. A well-isolated atomic Bose-Einstein condensate evolves in a conservative trap that is partitioned by a thin optical barrier into an observed and unobserved sector, with negligible dissipation on the experimental timescale. Motivated by relational-time approaches discussed in the Wheeler-DeWitt framework, we ask whether the dynamics of the observed sector can be ordered using only internal degrees of freedom. To this end, we construct an entropic time from an experimentally defined coarse-grained entropy, and demonstrate that it can robustly order the events in the observed sector across repeated cycles of expansion and recollapse. We finally derive an effective Schroedinger equation parameterized by this internal time and show that it is able to reproduce the measured evolution. These results establish a controlled experimental setting in which relational-time constructions can be quantitatively tested.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Quantile Transfer for Reliable Operating Point Selection in Visual Place Recognition

Authors:
Dhyey Manish Rajani↗Michael Milford↗Tobias Fischer↗

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is a key component for localisation in Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environments, but its performance critically depends on selecting an image matching threshold (operating point) that balances precision and recall. Thresholds are typically hand-tuned offline for a specific environment and fixed during deployment, leading to degraded performance under environmental change. We propose a method that automatically selects the operating point of a VPR system to maximise recall at 100% precision. The method uses a small calibration traversal with known correspondences and transfers thresholds to deployment via quantile normalisation of similarity score distributions. This quantile transfer ensures that thresholds remain stable across calibration sizes and query subsets. Experiments with seven state-of-the-art VPR techniques across five benchmark datasets demonstrate that our proposed approach consistently outperforms existing baselines, enabling the underlying VPR technique to operate at 100% precision in approximately twice as many deployment scenarios (median improvement), while retrieving up to 29% more correct matches at that precision. The method eliminates manual tuning by adapting to new environments and generalising across operating conditions. Our code is available at https://github.com/DhyeyR-007/Quantile-Transfer-for-Reliable-VPR.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Distilling Drifting Transformers with Representation Autoencoders

Authors:
Jiawei Zhang↗Mengfei Xia↗Gen Li↗Yuantao Gu↗

arXiv:2606.15553v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Representation Autoencoders (RAEs) have improved diffusion and flow models by semantically richer latent space owing to the strongly label-wise clustered DINO features in the pretrained encoders. Yet in the distillation stage, the severe anisotropy and large curvatures caused by the rich semantic representations would hinder the convergence and performance, making the trajectory-based distillation unstable. In this work, we argue that the RAE latent space is compatible with distillation via the newly proposed Drifting Models. We first quantitatively study the curvatures and isotropy statistics across different autoencoders, and theoretically reveal that Drifting Model itself is highly likely to fail on extremely scattered spaces like reconstruction-based VAEs. These motivate us to apply the drifting paradigm directly to representation autoencoders. Our proposed method, Drift-RAE, distills pretrained flow models in RAE latent spaces using Drifting, together with insightful modifications that improve training stability by thereotically aligning drifting fields with other frameworks. Regarding the experimental evidences, we achieve 1.77 FID on ImageNet 256 dataset using only 10k distillation steps, surpassing state-of-the-art RAE distillation methods and appearing comparative with the original Drifting Model without requiring an auxiliary MAE feature extractor. The code will be made publicly available.

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

Adaptive Inference-Time Scaling via Early-Step Latent Verification for Image Editing

Authors:
Yue Yu↗Yang Jiao↗Jiayu Wang↗Qi Dai↗Jingjing Chen↗

Instruction-based image editing has made notable progress with recent advances in generative models. However, the quality of the edited result is still influenced by the randomly sampled initial noise, particularly in complex editing scenarios. An unsuitable initial noise may lead to unsatisfactory editing results. Recent inference-time scaling methods address this issue by sampling multiple initial noises and selecting better candidates. Nevertheless, most of them follow a decode-then-verify scheme which introduces an efficiency-accuracy trade-off. When decoding is performed after limited inference steps, the decoded images often remain too noisy for reliable assessment, whereas sufficiently denoised images require much higher computational cost. To address this issue, we propose VeriLatent, a plug-and-play adaptive inference-time scaling framework with early-step latent verification for image editing. Specifically, we propose a novel verifier that scores each initial noise through a latent-space editing activation map at an early stage. It identifies promising candidates by assessing whether they can induce an effective edit in the correct region. This enables efficient early pruning without decoding latents into images. Building on this, we further develop an adaptive search strategy for inference-time scaling. It allocates inference budgets according to editing difficulty, thereby reducing the number of function evaluations (NFE). Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks and different base models demonstrate that VeriLatent consistently improves both editing performance and inference-time scaling efficiency.

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15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Non-Gaussian Phase Transition and Cascade of Instabilities in the Dissipative Quantum Rabi Model

Authors:
Mingyu Kang↗Yikang Zhang↗Kenneth R. Brown↗Thomas Barthel↗

arXiv:2507.07092v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The open quantum Rabi model describes a two-level system coupled to a harmonic oscillator. A Gaussian phase transition for the nonequilibrium steady states has been predicted when the bosonic mode is soft and subject to damping. We show that oscillator dephasing is a relevant perturbation, which leads to a non-Gaussian phase transition and an intriguing cascade of instabilities for $k$-th order bosonic operators, as well as a jump in the steady-state qubit polarization. For the soft-mode limit, the equations of motion form a closed hierarchy and spectral properties can be efficiently studied. To this purpose, we establish a fruitful connection to non-Hermitian Hamiltonians. The results for the phase diagram, stability boundaries, and relevant observables are based on mean-field analysis, exact diagonalization, perturbation theory, and Keldysh field theory.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

IVIE: A Neuro-symbolic Approach to Incremental and Validated Generation of Interactive Fiction Worlds

Authors:
Micaela Vaucher↗Santiago Silveira↗Santiago G\'ongora↗Luis Chiruzzo↗

Computational creativity in Interactive Fiction faces a fundamental tension: Large Language Models (LLM) may produce creative narratives but struggle with world coherence, while symbolic systems ensure consistency but lack creative flexibility. We present IVIE (Incremental & Validated Interactive Experiences), a neuro-symbolic approach to generating complete and playable interactive fiction worlds from scratch. Building upon PAYADOR's neuro-symbolic framework, IVIE implements a four-stage incremental generation pipeline that delegates creative decisions–setting and character creation, puzzle design–to LLMs while grounding the world state through symbolic validation. The system generates worlds with interconnected locations, functional items, non-player characters, and coherent puzzles, all structured around a central goal-oriented architecture. Human evaluation shows the approach generates immersive, thematically coherent worlds with high player engagement. Results seem to indicate that the neuro-symbolic approach successfully balances flexibility with narrative coherence: symbolic validation grounds LLM generation without eliminating generative freedom. However, challenges remain: LLM inconsistencies occasionally bypass puzzle constraints, and objective validation gaps allow some structurally impossible goals. We identify key design considerations for future neurosymbolic interactive storytelling systems, particularly regarding LLM capabilities and their limitations.

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

Quantum Routers: A Switching-Fabric Framework for Quantum-Native Forwarding

Authors:
Jessica Illiano↗Caterina De Risi↗Angela Sara Cacciapuoti↗Marcello Caleffi↗

arXiv:2606.17773v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Forwarding in quantum networks cannot be realized by directly transposing classical switching fabrics, since the no-cloning theorem and the quantum measurement postulate constrain the direct relay of quantum information while ruling out copy-based buffering and inspection. In this paper, we propose a switching-fabric framework for quantum routers based on multipartite entanglement. Specifically, we formalize the notion of an entanglement-based switching fabric, in which a graph state acts as the forwarding resource and entanglement forwarding is realized through local Pauli measurements. We translate the classical notions of blocking and non-blocking operation into structural conditions for entanglement-based fabrics, by deriving the edge-controlled (EC) design principle for non-blocking operation. We instantiate this principle through a monolithic EC crossbar and a modular Clos-type EC fabric, for which we characterize resource scaling and identify the regime where the modular design becomes more resource-efficient than the monolithic one. Finally, a forwarding-latency analysis establishes a fundamental distinction between matching-oblivious and matching-driven forwarding: the proposed EC fabrics realize all requested input-output entanglement links with constant forwarding depth under sufficient measurement parallelism, whereas matching-driven EPR-based fabrics exhibit latency that scales with the number of requested connections. The proposed framework provides a hardware-agnostic foundation for quantum-router switching fabrics.

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

UrbanWell: Benchmarking Multimodal Large Language Models for Spatio-Temporal Urban Wellbeing Analytics

Authors:
Yanxin Xi↗Xiang Su↗Jie Feng↗Yu Liu↗Sasu Tarkoma↗Pan Hui↗

arXiv:2606.15890v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding urban wellbeing from multimodal data requires integrating heterogeneous spatial and temporal signals, posing significant challenges for current multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We introduce UrbanWell, a large-scale benchmark designed to systematically evaluate the spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities of MLLMs for urban wellbeing analytics through joint modeling of satellite and street view imagery. UrbanWell spans 38 cities across multiple years and includes diverse indicators covering (1) environmental conditions (CO$_2$, NO$_2$, PM${2.5}$, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index), (2) spatial accessibility (minimum distance to supermarkets and restaurants), (3) urban form (road length, road density, and land use), (4) urban vitality (population, economic activity diversity, and land use diversity), and (5) subjective perception attributes (e.g., safety, beauty, liveliness, wealth, and quietness). All indicators are aligned at grid level to enable standardized evaluation. Beyond static prediction, UrbanWell defines temporal reasoning tasks, including future value forecasting from historical observations and temporal trend classification. We benchmark 15 state-of-the-art representative MLLMs in a zero-shot setting, providing a comprehensive comparative evaluation across spatial and temporal dimensions. Experimental results indicate that while MLLMs capture salient spatial and perceptual cues, their performance varies substantially across heterogeneous urban indicators spanning environment and subjective perception. UrbanWell serves as a unified benchmark for evaluating multimodal spatial and temporal reasoning in urban wellbeing analytics, offering a standardized testbed for systematic assessment and future research on multimodal urban intelligence. Our codes and datasets are accessible via https://github.com/axin1301/UrbanWell-Benchmark.

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19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Inflationary branch decoherence and the cosmological arrow of time

Authors:
Ali Nayeri↗

arXiv:2602.21263v3 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We analyze branch decoherence in inflationary quantum cosmology by computing reduced density matrices and branch-overlap factors for long-wavelength perturbations. The Hartle-Hawking no-boundary state is real in the semiclassical regime and contains both expanding and contracting WKB components, whereas the tunneling state is selected as an outgoing complex WKB branch; expanding-contracting decoherence is therefore central for the former and mainly diagnostic for the latter. Using the influence-functional formalism, we derive the noise kernel for a light spectator environment and evaluate decoherence under horizon-based and EFT-motivated coarse grainings. We then compute the single-mode branch overlap directly from the Bunch-Davies mode functions, obtaining $|\mathcal{D}_k(z)|=[z^2/(z^2+1)]^{1/4}$ in the massless limit and $|\mathcal{D}_k(z)|\sim z^\nu$ on superhorizon scales for massive fields, where $z=-k\eta$ is the dimensionless wavenumber with $\eta$ the conformal time. In the massless case, the accumulated geometric branch functional is evaluated in closed form, with a leading cutoff-sensitive phase-space term and a universal subleading contribution. The calculation provides an explicit quantitative bridge between quantum-cosmological boundary conditions, inflationary squeezing, and the emergence of effectively classical cosmological histories.

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20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality for causal order

Authors:
Yu Guo↗Hao Tang↗Bo-Xuan Wang↗Min-Yu Lv↗Jia-Wen↗Fan↗Xiao-Min Hu↗Yun-Feng Huang↗Chuan-Feng Liu↗Guang-Can Guo↗Giulio Chiribella↗Bi-Heng Liu↗…

arXiv:2506.20516v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum mechanics is compatible with scenarios where physical processes happen in an indefinite order. In theory, this feature could be detected through violations of inequalities on the observed correlations, analogous to Bell inequalities. However, experimental demonstrations of such violations have been missing until recently due to the complexity of the required setup. Here we report an experimental violation of a Bell-like inequality involving the correlations of four parties, one of which is spacelike separated from the others. Our demonstration employs 3 km fiber spools to simulate spacelike separation, and achieves high-speed operations in photonic time-bin encoding, nanosecond synchronization, and accurate temperature stabilization. These experimental advances enable a violation by 5.7 standard deviations and open a path towards a certification of indefinite order in conditions that guarantee spacelike separation with existing state-of-the-art devices. However, the certification is not device-independent, as it relies on knowledge about the setup to exclude bidirectional signaling–a loophole inherent to implementations in classical acyclic spacetimes, which may be resolved in future quantum-spacetime tests.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Protein-Based Fish Species Identification: Dataset, Models, and Insights from Native Bangladeshi Fish

Authors:
Md Nasiat Hasan Fahim↗Md. Abid Ullah Muhib↗Mohammad Shahidur Rahman↗

arXiv:2606.18302v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Correct identification of fish species is highly significant for food security, economic development, and climate resilience in Bangladesh. Protein sequences directly reflect functional and evolutionary constraints which are important for species authentication and biodiversity monitoring. Yet there exists no benchmark for native Bangladeshi fish species identification from protein sequence. In this study, we addressed this gap by introducing the first curated dataset for nine native Bangladeshi fish species of 2845 high quality protein sequences. We also established the first protein sequence classification baseline for this domain through a systematic benchmarking of seven architectural paradigms. Moreover, we propose a realistic deployable novel hybrid architecture of MotifCNN and Transformer with Terminal-Aware Positional-Encoding (MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE). Our novel architecture achieves 79.80% accuracy with macro-F1 of 0.80. The highest 83.04% accuracy is achieved by finetuned protein language model ProtBERT that has 420M parameters and requires dual 16GB GPUs for inference. According to McNemar's test, ProtBERT's 3.24% accuracy gain over our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is statistically insignificant (p = 0.1120). Our novel architecture beats it among six of the nine classes in per class identification. Also our MotifCNN-Transformer+TA-PE is approximately 5x faster, 42x smaller, and supports 16x larger batch size than ProtBERT and has GPU free inference, making it more practical for deployment in resources constrained areas such as rural Bangladesh. Beyond this, our foundational work shows effects of phylogenetic relationships on sequence similarity and establishes pathways for fisheries management, food authentication and biodiversity conservation in South Asia's protein dependent economy.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Intrinsic preservation of plasticity in continual quantum learning

Authors:
Yu-Qin Chen↗Shi-Xin Zhang↗

arXiv:2511.17228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments requires the capacity for continual learning. However, standard deep learning suffers from a fundamental issue: loss of plasticity, in which networks gradually lose their ability to learn from new data. Here we show that quantum learning models naturally overcome this limitation, preserving plasticity over long timescales. We demonstrate this advantage systematically across a broad spectrum of tasks from multiple learning paradigms, including supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and diverse data modalities, from classical high-dimensional images to quantum-native datasets. Although classical models exhibit performance degradation correlated with unbounded weight and gradient growth, quantum neural networks maintain consistent learning capabilities regardless of the data or task. We identify the origin of the advantage as the intrinsic physical constraints of quantum models. Unlike classical networks where unbounded weight growth leads to landscape ruggedness or saturation, the unitary constraints confine the optimization to a compact manifold. Our results suggest that the utility of quantum computing in machine learning extends beyond potential speedups, offering a robust pathway for building adaptive artificial intelligence and lifelong learners.

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23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

APEX: Automated Prompt Engineering eXpert with Dynamic Data Selection

Authors:
Fei Wang↗Si Si↗Cho-Jui Hsieh↗Inderjit S. Dhillon↗

Large Language Models are highly sensitive to prompt formulation, necessitating automatic prompt optimization to unlock their full potential. While evolutionary algorithms have emerged as the dominant paradigm, they suffer from a critical bottleneck: data efficiency. Current methods treat the development dataset as a static benchmark, wasting significant compute budget on uninformative data. In this work, we introduce APEX (Automatic Prompt Engineering eXpert), a novel framework that optimizes the data usage alongside the prompt search. APEX dynamically stratifies the dataset into Easy, Hard, and Mixed tiers based on the optimization lineage. By prioritizing the Mixed tier, which identifies the data where the LLM has mixed performance, we identify two high-leverage subsets: the addressable frontier for generating informative mutations and the rank-sensitive frontier for distinguishing candidate quality. We evaluate APEX across three diverse benchmarks: IFBench, SimpleQA Verified, and FACTS Grounding. Under a fixed budget of 5,000 evaluation calls, due to its data efficiency, APEX outperforms the initial prompt by an average of 11.2% on Gemini 2.5 Flash and 6.8% on Gemma 3 27B, demonstrating that a data-centric approach is key to efficient and effective prompt optimization.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Disentangling Confounders from Pathology in Long-COVID Trajectory Prediction for Women: An Interpretable Large-Language-Model Approach

Authors:
Wang↗Galis↗Zhang↗Luo↗Sra↗Niu↗Shen↗Xie↗Weiss↗J. C↗

Objective. Post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC, "Long COVID") dispropor- tionately affects women, in whom hallmark symptoms–insomnia, fatigue, palpitations, cogni- tive difficulty–overlap with comorbidities and hormonal transitions such as menopause. This diagnostic overlap is a confounding problem: models that forecast future symptom severity risk attributing baseline physiological noise to viral pathology. We ask whether an interpretable, causally disentangled language model can separate true pathological signal from such con- founders while remaining competitive with strong predictors of future PASC severity

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25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Brick-DICL: Dynamic In-Context Learning for Automated Brick Schema Classification

Authors:
Yiyue Qian↗Shinan Zhang↗Huan Song↗Negin Sokhandan↗Hannah Marlowe↗Diego Socolinsky↗

arXiv:2606.17637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Building Management Systems (BMS) are essential for optimizing energy efficiency and operational performance in modern buildings. However, the lack of standardization across BMS points from different manufacturers creates significant barriers to integration and data utilization. While the Brick schema offers a standardized ontology for building systems, mapping BMS points to appropriate Brick classes presents three critical challenges: (i) the extensive number of Brick classes (936 in the latest version), (ii) limited domain-specific knowledge in large language models (LLMs), and (iii) substantial manual effort required for verification. To address these challenges, we propose Brick-DICL, a two-stage dynamic in-context learning framework for automated Brick schema classification. Brick-DICL consists of two primary components: metadata-RAG, which retrieves relevant examples to enhance LLMs' domain knowledge, and class-RAG, which narrows down potential Brick classes to address the large classification space. Additionally, we implement a multi-LLM filtering mechanism that compares predictions across multiple models, flagging low-confidence classifications for human review. As a result: (i) General: Brick-DICL is applicable to any building management system regardless of manufacturer or metadata format; (ii) Novel and Powerful: as the first dynamic in-context learning approach for Brick schema classification, Brick-DICL achieves significant classification accuracy improvements on building datasets, outperforming existing methods; (iii) Efficient: our multi-LLM filtering strategy reduces manual verification effort, enabling rapid digital building onboarding. Extensive experiments demonstrate Brick-DICL's effectiveness across diverse building datasets, accelerating the path toward standardized, interoperable building management systems.

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