Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

探索全球前沿学术脉络

AcademicHub 汇聚顶级期刊与预印本平台的实时文献。定制您的专属科研雷达,利用大语言模型自动生成交叉领域文献分析简报。

01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Approximating optimal decoding of quantum LDPC codes with narrow frontiers

arXiv:2606.20513v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the Frontier decoder, a pruned dynamic-programming decoder for sparse quantum decoding problems. Frontier processes error variables in a chosen order, merges prefixes with the same residual syndrome and logical label, and approximates logical-coset posterior masses by retaining only a narrow scored frontier. Without pruning, the recursion is exact ordered inference with exponential complexity. In the code-capacity setting, the decoder reaches thresholds close to optimal for the surface code and the color code. In the circuit-level noise model, it achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small average retained list size: less than 100 for the gross code $[[144,12,12]]$ at a physical error rate of $0.001$. When the list size is constant, the decoder has linear complexity, suggesting the possibility of low-latency implementations.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Mapping molecular polariton transport via pump-probe microscopy

arXiv:2504.15501v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate how the transport properties of molecular polaritons in optical cavities can be extracted from a microscopic modeling of pump-probe spectroscopy. Our approach combines a mean-field treatment of the light-matter Hamiltonian with a perturbative expansion of both light and matter components, along with spatial coarse-graining. This approach extends semiclassical cavity spectroscopy to multimode light-matter interactions, providing full access to spatially resolved transient spectra. By simulating a microscopy experiment with counter-propagating pump and probe pulses, we compute the differential transmission and show how molecular dephasing and persistent dark exciton populations drive sub-group-velocity transport of the root-mean-square displacement. We analyze transport across the polariton dispersion, showing how velocity renormalization correlates with excitonic weight, consistent with experimental observations, and further its dependence on the rate of molecular dephasing. Our results highlight the need to consider measured spectroscopic observables when characterizing transport in polaritonic systems.

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

Constructing Evaluation Datasets for Procedural Reasoning: Balancing Naturalness, Grounding, and Multi-Hop Coverage

arXiv:2606.12767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating procedural reasoning in AI-supported learning systems requires question-answer datasets that are both learner-like and grounded in the instructional knowledge the system is expected to use. We study how TMK-based question generation strategies affect dataset quality for procedural and multi-hop reasoning. We compare three strategies: strict generation from Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) models, transcript-first generation with post-hoc TMK filtering, and TMK-aware generation that combines transcripts with structured guidance. To evaluate generated items, we introduce a grounding validation framework based on closed-set evidence units extracted from TMK models. The framework measures whether answers are supported by the underlying representation, whether questions are self-contained, and whether they target multi-hop procedural reasoning. Across 23 instructional topics and 690 generated question-answer pairs, strict TMK generation achieves the strongest overall quality, with 96.5% grounded questions and 92.6% usable questions. Transcript-first generation produces more learner-like questions but more context-dependent or weakly grounded items, while TMK-aware generation yields high raw multi-hop coverage but lower grounding. These results show that procedural richness and natural phrasing do not guarantee representational grounding, motivating explicit representation-aware validation for evaluation datasets in AI-supported learning.

04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Less is More: Improving LLM Reasoning with Minimal Test-Time Intervention

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet underexplored phenomenon: reasoning uncertainty is highly localized-only a small subset of high-entropy tokens dominantly affects output correctness. Motivated by this, we propose Minimal Test-Time Intervention (MTI), a training-free framework that enhances reasoning accuracy and stability with minimal overhead. MTI includes: (i) Selective CFG intervention, applying classifier-free guidance only at uncertain positions; and (ii) Lightweight negative-prompt guidance, reusing the main model's KV cache to approximate unconditional decoding efficiently. MTI yields consistent gains across general, coding, and STEM tasks-e.g., +9.28% average improvement on six benchmarks for DeepSeek-R1-7B and +11.25% on AIME2024 using Ling-mini-2.0-while remaining highly efficient.

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

State-Grounded Multi-Agent Synthetic Data Generation for Tool-Augmented LLMs

Training tool-augmented LLM agents requires large corpora of multi-turn, tool-grounded conversational data that is expensive to annotate, privacy-constrained in production settings, and largely absent from public datasets. We present StateGen, a synthetic data generation platform that produces scored, reasoning-trace-rich training conversations by orchestrating a four-role LLM loop: a persona-conditioned user simulator, an agent under test, a state-grounded tool simulator, and a multi-axis LLM judge. The key architectural contribution is an authoritative state manager that maintains a structured world-state object across turns, enforcing a backend-is-truth invariant that eliminates the dominant class of tool-call hallucinations by construction. StateGen extends naturally to hierarchical multi-agent settings by declaring sub-agents as tools, all sharing a single state object. We report results on 64,698 evaluated conversations across three production corpora: tool-call hallucination scores reach 9.66/10, the system supports persona-driven variation via a 23-dimensional trait vector, and a cleanly separated train and golden evaluation set split confirms the data is not memorization bait (per-criterion gap analysis). Comparison with eight external systems shows that no single publicly available platform combines multi-turn generation, state-grounded tool simulation, hierarchical multi-agent support, and built-in judge scoring.

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

Grid-state deformation in a no-jump non-Hermitian bosonic dimer

arXiv:2606.17036v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the no-jump evolution of ideal grid states in a lossy bosonic dimer with differential decay. The effective non-Hermitian quadratic dynamics induces a complex symplectic flow in phase space that deforms both the primitive lattice vectors and the origin seed. The average decay rate controls common attenuation, while coherent hopping and differential decay control the reduced dimer deformation. The reduced sector contains elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic regimes with imaginary spectra, an exceptional point, and real spectra, producing oscillatory, linear, and exponential lattice deformations. Although projected lattice areas can change, the deformation comes from a determinant-one complex symplectic flow on the full four-dimensional phase space. For a Gaussian regularization of the origin seed, we derive the associated complex width matrix and identify the positivity conditions that preserve Gaussian form. For an initial two-mode qunaught product state, the lossless limit recovers the standard beam-splitter generation of a square GKP$+$ Bell pair, while the no-jump dynamics produces its non-Hermitian deformation with a postselection cost set by the no-jump probability.

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

CRANE: Constrained Reasoning Injection for Code Agents via Nullspace Editing

Code agents must both reason over long-horizon repository state and obey strict tool-use protocols. In paired Instruct/Thinking checkpoints, these capabilities are complementary but misaligned. The Instruct model is concise and tool-disciplined, whereas the Thinking model offers stronger planning and recovery behavior but often over-deliberates and degrades agent performance. We present CRANE (Constrained Reasoning Injection for Code Agents via Nullspace Editing), a training-free parameter-editing method that treats the Thinking-Instruct delta as a directional pool of candidate reasoning edits for the Instruct backbone. CRANE combines magnitude thresholding to denoise the delta, a Conservative Taylor Gate to retain edits that are jointly beneficial for reasoning transfer and tool-use preservation, and Graduated Sigmoidal Projection to suppress format-critical update directions. By merging paired Instruct and Thinking checkpoints, CRANE delivers strong gains over either individual model while preserving Instruct-level efficiency: on Roo-Eval it achieves pass1 of 66.2% (+19.5%) for Qwen3-30B-A3B and 81.5% (+8.7%) for Qwen3-Next-80B-A3B; on SWE-bench-Verified it resolves up to 14 additional instances at both scales (122/500 and 180/500); and on Terminal-Bench v2 it improves pass1/pass5 by up to 2.3%/7.8%, reaching 7.6%/17.9% and 14.8%/30.3%, respectively, consistently outperforming alternative merging strategies across all three benchmarks.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

MedLatentDx: Latent Multi-Agent Communication for Cross-Hospital Rare-Disease Diagnosis

Rare diseases affect over $300$ million patients across more than $7{,}000$ conditions, yet no single hospital encounters enough cases of any one condition for reliable diagnosis. Cross-hospital collaboration could help by allowing a diagnosing institution to use distributed, case-specific diagnostic evidence, but privacy regulations restrict the transmission of identifiable clinical text across institutional boundaries. This setting raises two challenges: existing medical agent systems often rely on textual evidence exchange, while raw latent states such as hidden states and KV caches may still reveal prompt-derived clinical content. We introduce MedLatentDx, a latent multi-agent communication framework in which hospital agents keep private clinical records and retrieved cases local, and send compact latent KV blocks to a host agent for rare-disease diagnosis. MedLatentDx supports two deployment settings: same-backbone hospital agents use latent KV distillation, while hospitals with different LLM backbones use cross-family latent alignment. On CrossRare-Bench, a self-built large-scale rare-disease benchmark with hospital-level partitions, MedLatentDx improves cross-hospital diagnostic performance while reducing reconstructable clinical content relative to raw-latent communication baselines.

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

WorkflowPerturb: Calibrated Stress Tests for Evaluating Multi-Agent Workflow Metrics

arXiv:2602.17990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems that generate structured workflows from natural-language requests are now deployed in production across cloud automation, DevOps, and enterprise process orchestration. Operating such systems exposes a recurring change-management problem. Routine updates, such as re-running the same input, swapping the underlying LLM, or refactoring an agent's prompt or orchestration code, frequently produce workflows that differ substantially from previously validated references. Engineers are then left without a principled way to decide whether a change is safe to ship. Automatic workflow evaluation is the natural tool for answering this question. In practice, however, metric scores are poorly calibrated, and a numeric change rarely communicates the severity of the underlying degradation. We introduce WorkflowPerturb, a controlled benchmark for studying workflow evaluation metrics by applying realistic, graded perturbations to golden workflows. WorkflowPerturb contains 4,973 golden workflows and 44,757 perturbed variants across three perturbation types (Missing Steps, Compressed Steps, and Description Changes), each applied at severity levels of 10%, 30%, and 50%. We benchmark multiple metric families and analyze their sensitivity and calibration using expected score trajectories and residuals. Our results characterize systematic differences across metric families and support severity-aware interpretation of workflow evaluation scores in change-management settings. Our dataset will be released upon acceptance.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Optimal Decoding of Small Codes by Density Matrix Propagation

arXiv:2606.14455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate and efficient decoding is a crucial component for achieving fault-tolerant quantum computing. Realistic circuit-level noise introduces temporal correlations and degeneracy, making optimal (maximum-likelihood) decoding computationally intractable in general. As a result, practical decoders rely on heuristic approximations, and it is generally difficult to quantify how suboptimal they are, as this strongly depends on the code and noise model considered. In this work, we study the accuracy of practical decoding algorithms under circuit-level noise by comparing them against a maximum likelihood decoding benchmark. Our approach propagates the density matrix through the full memory experiment and computes the optimal decoding decision for each syndrome history. We introduce pruning techniques with rigorous bounds, allowing us to access larger numbers of syndrome-extraction rounds. We apply this framework to small instances of the repetition code and a cellular automaton code, and benchmark minimum-weight perfect matching (MWPM), belief propagation with ordered statistics decoding (BP+OSD), Tesseract, and Planar decoders against optimal decoding. While standard decoders remain close to optimal for the repetition code, we find significant deviations for the cellular automaton code, with BP+OSD deteriorating already in experimentally relevant noise regimes. Moreover, the pruning method developed here highlights that, at low physical error rates, only a narrow fraction of syndrome histories contributes significantly to the logical error rate.

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

Fine-tuning LLMs for Passive Depression Severity Estimation from AI Mental Health Dialogue

Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and early detection of symptom change is essential for timely intervention. Validated instruments such as the Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) support symptom monitoring at scale, but real-world completion rates are low, introducing response bias and systematic missingness. Passive approaches that infer severity from routinely generated data could close this gap. We address this by predicting PHQ-9 total scores directly from transcripts of conversations between users and an AI mental health application, requiring only conversation text and no additional clinical data. We fine-tune a Qwen3.5-27B backbone with a regression head, augment 3,111 ground-truth labels with pseudolabels generated by a reasoning model (Claude Opus) and iteratively trained intermediate models, for a combined dataset of 6,283 users. On a held-out test set of 842 users, our best model achieves MAE = 2.6, RMSE = 4.0, Pearson r = 0.80, and AUC = 0.91 at the PHQ-9 >= 10 clinical threshold. We also find AUC > 0.87 at every severity threshold from PHQ-9 >= 3 to PHQ-9 >= 24, demonstrating that the model captures depression severity across the full clinical spectrum. This work opens the door to passive, continuous symptom monitoring in AI mental health platforms, without requiring users to complete self-report measures.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Through the PRISM: Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Video Diffusion Models

Evaluating video generation with clean, pixel-based reward models disconnects evaluation from the noisy diffusion process and incurs massive VAE decoding costs. In this paper, we challenge this paradigm by asking a fundamental question: Can a powerful video generator inherently discriminate preferences directly from noisy latents? To answer this, we introduce PRISM (Preference Representation in Intermediate States of Diffusion Models). PRISM employs a lightweight Query-based Aggregation head with a frozen video diffusion backbone to decode preference signals from noisy latents. Surprisingly, PRISM not only achieves SOTA preference accuracy but also unlocks strong noise-robustness, which enables early-stage Best-of-$N$ sampling. This allows for filtering suboptimal candidates at the very beginning of denoising, drastically reducing computation while boosting video quality. We also reveal a strong positive correlation between a backbone's generative performance and its inherent evaluative power, enabling self-improving video backbones.

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

When Rules Learn: A Self-Evolving Agent for Legal Case Retrieval

arXiv:2606.17220v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Legal case retrieval remains challenging due to the complexity of legal language and the need for precise lexical alignment between queries and relevant cases. Although dense retrieval models have achieved notable progress, empirical studies show that BM25 continues to serve as a strong baseline in this domain. It motivates us to propose a self-evolving framework for rule-driven query rewriting that enhances BM25 without any parameter training. The framework equips an LLM-based agent with an automatic evaluation environment, enabling it to iteratively create rewriting rules, plan validation experiments over rule combinations, and eliminate ineffective rules based on historical feedbacks. We evaluate our method on the Chinese legal case retrieval benchmark LeCaRD-v2. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework outperforms non-evolutionary baselines, including human-designed rules and greedy rule selection, particularly when powered by a highcapacity core LLM. We also conduct detailed analyses to investigate the mechanisms underlying self-evolution. Our findings reveal that LLM's capabilities to leverage previous experimental results and its intrinsic knowledge of rule elimination play critical roles in refining the rule set via self-evolution.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Entropic order parameters and topological holography

arXiv:2512.24225v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We show that the symmetry topological field theory (SymTFT) construction, also known as the topological holography, provides a natural and intuitive framework for the entropic order parameter characterising phases with (partially) broken symmetries. Various examples of group and non-invertible symmetries are studied. In particular, the origin of the distinguishability of the vacua resulting from spontaneously broken non-invertible symmetries is made manifest with an information-theoretic perspective, where certain operators in the SymTFT are excluded from observation.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

From Paper Letters to an Integrated Digital Workflow: Improving Efficiency, Reliability, and Engagement in Health Guidance

Background: Post-checkup health guidance in Japan has traditionally relied on paper-based communication and manual administrative processes. These workflows are time-consuming, prone to transcription errors, and can delay timely engagement with health guidance recipients. Objective: To assess whether replacing a paper-based workflow with an integrated digital system using Microsoft Access, robotic process automation (RPA), and web-based responses could improve administrative efficiency, operational reliability, and engagement among health guidance recipients. Methods: This single-site quality improvement initiative redesigned the existing letter-based workflow. Access served as a central interface for managing recipients and generating guidance letters. RPA (EzRobot) automated repetitive clerical and billing-related tasks. A web form accessed via a QR code enabled recipients to respond digitally. Outcomes included manual administrative handling time per case, occurrence of transcription-related errors, health guidance completion rate, and guidance duration distribution. Results: Following implementation, staff active handling time per case decreased from approximately 10 minutes to less than 1 minute (approximately 30 seconds), while automated RPA execution typically required about 4-5 minutes per case without staff input. No transcription-related errors were detected during the post-implementation observation period. Health guidance completion rates improved from 28.3% to 39.2% (chi-square test, P=200 days decreased from 30.5% to 20.9% and cases with >=240 days decreased from 13.6% to 8.9% (R4 n=59, R5 n=158). Conclusion: An integrated Access-RPA-Web workflow was associated with improvements in administrative efficiency and operational reliability in post-checkup health guidance while retaining human verification and exception handling. This pragmatic, non-AI-dependent approach may offer a useful model for process-level improvement in preventive care settings.

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

Polyp-D2ATL: Deep Domain-Adaptive Transfer Learning for Colorectal Polyp Classification under Label Distribution Shift

Early and highly accurate prediction of colorectal polyps, as an important sign of one of the most dangerous types of cancer, will result in saving more lives. Despite the advancements in colorectal polyp classification, many challenges remain in obtaining an automated polyp prediction system that is able to diagnose the difficult-to-predict polyps accompanied by different features in real scenarios, where the model can handle imbalanced data, label distribution shift, and cross-modality generalization successfully. In this study, we propose Polyp-D2ATL, a novel framework accompanied by a specific training strategy, which mitigates these limitations and effectively predicts the different classes of polyps belonging to the NICE classification. Our extensive experiments on the PICCOLO validation and test sets demonstrate that the proposed Polyp-D2ATL significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art models across various reliable metrics, achieving an accuracy of 82.38%, a Macro-F1 of 77.49%, and a specificity of 87.47% on the validation set, alongside consistent improvements on the held-out test set which demonstrates the generalization capacity and clinical applicability of the proposed approach.

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

Scale-Invariant Neural Network Optimization: Norm Geometry and Heavy-Tailed Noise

arXiv:2605.18528v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A growing lesson from neural network optimization is that optimizer design should respect how the model is parametrized. The layerwise input-output structure of neural networks motivates scale-invariant optimizers, such as Muon and Scion, whose updates also support hyperparameter transfer. At the same time, stochastic gradient noise in deep learning is often far from sub-Gaussian and may exhibit heavy tails. These observations have shaped recent algorithmic principles for training neural networks, yet their joint theoretical consequences are underexplored. In particular, it remains unclear what dimension dependence is unavoidable for gradient-based methods given the problem class is defined by input-output norm and under heavy-tailed noise, and whether higher-order smoothness can accelerate training. We study these questions through nonconvex smooth stochastic optimization over $\mathbb R^{m\times n}$ equipped with general norms and under $p^\mathrm{th}$-moment heavy-tailed noise, where the goal is to achieve an $\epsilon$-stationary point in the dual norm. Our first contribution is a dimension-dependent lower bound: when $\frac{\max\{m,n\}}{(\min\{m,n\})^2}$ is large enough, any gradient-based method requires $\Omega(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$ oracles for the problem class defined by the spectral norm, which is a common input-output norm. We prove that a scale-invariant Scion method with the spectral norm can achieve the matching upper bound of $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{3p-2}{p-1}})$. To exploit higher-order smoothness, we propose a transported Scion method and improve the bound to $O(\min\{m, n\}\epsilon^{-\frac{5p-3}{2p-2}})$ when the Hessian is Lipschitz. Finally, we incorporate heuristics into our transported method and evaluate it across multiple architectures and model sizes, demonstrating its flexibility and compatibility with neural network training.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

FreshRetailNet-LT: A Stockout-Annotated Censored Demand Dataset for Latent Demand Recovery and Forecasting in Fresh Retail

arXiv:2505.16319v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Accurate demand estimation is critical for the retail business in guiding the inventory and pricing policies of perishable products. However, it faces fundamental challenges from censored sales data during stockouts, where unobserved demand creates systemic policy biases. Existing datasets lack the temporal resolution and annotations needed to address this censoring effect. To fill this gap, we present FreshRetailNet-50K, the first large-scale benchmark for censored demand estimation. It comprises 50,000 store-product time series of detailed hourly sales data from 898 stores in 18 major cities, encompassing 863 perishable SKUs meticulously annotated for stockout events. The hourly stock status records unique to this dataset, combined with rich contextual covariates, including promotional discounts, precipitation, and temporal features, enable innovative research beyond existing solutions. We demonstrate one such use case of two-stage demand modeling: first, we reconstruct the latent demand during stockouts using precise hourly annotations. We then leverage the recovered demand to train robust demand forecasting models in the second stage. Experimental results show that this approach achieves a 2.73% improvement in prediction accuracy while reducing the systematic demand underestimation from 7.37% to near-zero bias. With unprecedented temporal granularity and comprehensive real-world information, FreshRetailNet-50K opens new research directions in demand imputation, perishable inventory optimization, and causal retail analytics. The unique annotation quality and scale of the dataset address long-standing limitations in retail AI, providing immediate solutions and a platform for future methodological innovation. The data (https://huggingface.co/datasets/Dingdong-Inc/FreshRetailNet-50K) and code (https://github.com/Dingdong-Inc/frn-50k-baseline}) are openly released.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Fast Speech Foundation Model Distillation Using Interleaved Stacking

Distilling a large speech foundation model (SFM) into an efficient student model has been successfully applied to low-resource environments. Although distillation reduces inference latency, it requires an additional student model training. However, the training efficiency of SFM distillation remains underexplored. In this work, we explore training acceleration of SFM distillation to speed up model deployment. We examine the potential of stacking, in which the model depth is progressively increased through training until the target model depth is reached. While existing stacking methods improve training speed, they suffer from performance degradation. To handle this limitation, we propose interleaved stacking, a novel stacking method that consistently preserves layer position throughout the stacking process. This property is particularly critical in SFMs, in which each layer encodes distinct layer-specific knowledge. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on SUPERB.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

EverydayGPT: Confidence-Gated Routing for Efficient and Safe Hybrid GPT-RAG Conversational QA

Standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines route every query through retrieval and generation unconditionally, incurring unnecessary computation and propagating low-quality context to the generator. We introduce EverydayGPT, a lightweight conversational QA system built around a Confidence-Gated Routing (CGR) mechanism that formalises the routing decision as a joint policy over retrieval distance and extraction adequacy. The backbone is a 205M-parameter GPT trained from scratch on 10B tokens of FineWeb-Edu. CGR avoids invoking the costly GPT pathway (~5.9s) for 85 percent of queries by resolving them via fast RAG extraction (~45 ms), yielding over 120x latency reduction on the majority of queries while maintaining answer quality. On a 500-question in-domain benchmark, the system achieves F1 = 0.226 +/- 0.004 compared to 0.171 for GPT-only and 0.210 for unconditional RAG. Gains over strong baselines are modest but consistent, while efficiency improvements are substantial (6.3x mean latency reduction). A structured grounding audit finds no unsupported claims in the sampled set, with explicit scope limitations. We position this work as a study of routing strategies under resource constraints rather than a claim of state-of-the-art performance.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Direct Fisher Score Estimation for Likelihood Maximization

arXiv:2506.06542v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the problem of likelihood maximization when the likelihood function is intractable but model simulations are readily available. We propose a sequential, gradient-based optimization method that directly models the Fisher score based on a local score matching technique which uses simulations from a localized region around each parameter iterate. By employing a linear parameterization to the surrogate score model, our technique admits a closed-form, least-squares solution. This approach yields a fast, flexible, and efficient approximation to the Fisher score, effectively smoothing the likelihood objective and mitigating the challenges posed by complex likelihood landscapes. We provide theoretical guarantees for our score estimator, including bounds on the bias introduced by the smoothing. Empirical results on a range of synthetic and real-world problems demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared to existing benchmarks.

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

LoRDO: Distributed Low-Rank Optimization with Infrequent Communication

arXiv:2602.04396v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distributed training of foundation models via $\texttt{DDP}$ is limited by interconnect bandwidth. While infrequent communication strategies reduce synchronization frequency, they remain bottlenecked by the memory and communication requirements of optimizer states. Low-rank optimizers can alleviate these constraints; however, in the local-update regime, workers lack access to the full-batch gradients required to compute low-rank projections, which degrades performance. We propose $\texttt{LoRDO}$, a principled framework unifying low-rank optimization with infrequent synchronization. We first demonstrate that, while global projections based on pseudo-gradients are theoretically superior, they permanently restrict the optimization trajectory to a low-rank subspace. To restore subspace exploration, we introduce a full-rank quasi-hyperbolic update. $\texttt{LoRDO}$ achieves near-parity with low-rank $\texttt{DDP}$ in language modeling and downstream tasks at model scales of $125$M–$720$M, while reducing communication by $\approx 10 \times$. Finally, we show that $\texttt{LoRDO}$ improves performance even more in very low-memory settings with small rank/batch size.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Computational regimes in matrix-product-state-based quantum trajectory simulations

arXiv:2606.13779v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Efficient simulation of open quantum systems is central to modeling noisy quantum hardware and many-body dynamics. In trajectory-based tensor network methods, cost is often associated with trajectory-level quantities such as entanglement growth or bond dimension. However, the total cost of a fixed-accuracy simulation also depends on statistical sampling, and the interplay between per-trajectory complexity and sampling effort remains poorly understood. Here we introduce a cost-resolved framework for matrix product state (MPS)-based quantum trajectory simulations that decomposes total cost into memory per trajectory, runtime per trajectory, and sampling effort. We show that physically equivalent stochastic unravelings of the same Lindblad dynamics do not necessarily reduce total cost, but instead redistribute cost between trajectory complexity and statistical convergence. This trade-off is quantified by two dimensionless inflation factors: a bond dimension inflation $\alpha$ and a sampling inflation $\kappa$, which together determine the preferred unraveling under hardware-dependent memory and parallelism constraints. We provide a practical protocol for extracting $(\alpha,\kappa)$ from modest pilot simulations and demonstrate it using benchmarks across multiple noise channels. The resulting decision maps show that the computationally favorable unraveling can change with noise strength, time-step resolution, system size, and available parallelism. These results establish unraveling choice as a hardware-aware simulation design problem rather than an intrinsic optimization of trajectory entanglement alone.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Leishmaniasis on YouTube: a critical appraisal of the quality, reliability, and transparency of educational content

Background: Leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of significant global public health importance, for which accurate information is essential to support prevention and early care-seeking, particularly in endemic, resource-limited settings. YouTube is a widely used source of health information, but the quality and reliability of leishmaniasis-related content have not been evaluated. We aimed to assess the quality, reliability, and transparency of English-language YouTube videos on leishmaniasis. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis of YouTube videos retrieved via the YouTube Data API on 15 June 2026 using the terms "leishmaniasis," "cutaneous leishmaniasis," and "visceral leishmaniasis." After applying eligibility criteria and screening the 150 most-viewed eligible videos, 48 videos were included. Two reviewers independently assessed each video using the modified DISCERN (mDISCERN) tool, the Global Quality Score (GQS), and the JAMA benchmark criteria, with disagreements resolved by consensus. Inter-rater agreement was assessed using the intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC), and associations were examined using Spearman's rank correlation. Results: Of 402 videos retrieved, 48 met the inclusion criteria. The median GQS was 3.00 (IQR 2.00-4.00) and median mDISCERN was 3.00 (IQR 2.38-4.50), indicating moderate quality and reliability, while the median JAMA score was 2.00 (IQR 1.00-2.00), reflecting limited transparency; no video met all four JAMA criteria. The overwhelming majority of videos (47/48, 97.9%) were of professional or institutional origin. Inter-rater agreement was good to excellent (ICC 0.883 for GQS, 0.896 for mDISCERN, 1.000 for JAMA). The instruments were strongly inter-correlated (mDISCERN-GQS rho = 0.841, p < 0.001). Quality scores did not correlate positively with views, likes, or video duration; comments correlated weakly and negatively with mDISCERN (rho = -0.337, p = 0.031) and JAMA (rho = -0.381, p = 0.014). Conclusions: YouTube videos on leishmaniasis are of moderate quality and reliability but limited transparency, and are produced almost exclusively by professional sources. Video popularity, length, and age were not indicators of quality. There is a need for experts and institutions to produce clearly authored, well-sourced, and transparent educational content on this neglected tropical disease.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Evidence of an Emergent "Self" in Continual Robot Learning

arXiv:2603.24350v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A key challenge to understanding self-awareness has been a principled way of quantifying whether an intelligent system has a concept of a "self", and if so how to differentiate the "self" from other cognitive structures. We propose that the "self" can be isolated by seeking the invariant portion of cognitive process that changes relatively little compared to more rapidly acquired cognitive skills - because our self is the most persistent aspect of our experiences. We used this principle to analyze the cognitive structure of robots under two conditions: One robot learns a constant task, while a second undergoes continual learning under variable tasks. We find that robots subjected to continual learning develop an invariant subnetwork that is significantly more stable (p < 0.001) compared to the control, and that this subnetwork is also functionally important: preserving it aids adaptation while damaging it impairs performance. We validate this pattern across three different robots spanning locomotion and manipulation.