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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Burden of Cardiovascular Disease in Brazil, 1996-2023: A Retrospective Descriptive Study of the Epidemiology and Impact on Public Healthcare with Emphasis on Acute Myocardial Infarction

Background Cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the leading cause of death worldwide, and their epidemiology is correlated with genetic predisposition, exposure to risk factors, sex, age, access to medical care, and other sociodemographic characteristics. Brazil is a developing country with a vast territory, which leads to structural inequalities. Estimates of CVD in Brazil, in its regions, and in its population are poorly evaluated and analysed. Methods We obtained CVD-related data from the Brazilian Unified Health System (SUS) and analysed mortality and morbidity from 1996 to 2023 by sex, race/ethnicity, age, and region. We calculated the risk of death from the most prevalent diseases, the average length of hospital stay, and the costs associated with heart transplantation. Findings In Brazil, acute myocardial infarction was the pathology that led to the highest number of deaths across all variables analysed during the evaluated period. Other CVD were also related to causes of death and morbidity, such as hypertensive diseases and heart failure. Interpretation Brazil presents a serious challenge to the public health system due to the high number of deaths and the progressive mortality rate. This study represents a fundamental contribution to the basis for formulating public health policies aimed at reducing the growing impact associated with these diseases. Funding CNPq, CAPES, FAPEMIG, INCT

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

WHAR Arena: Benchmarking the State of the Art in Efficient Wearable Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2606.13194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep learning has become the dominant paradigm in Wearable Human Activity Recognition (WHAR), yet progress is obscured by a comparability crisis. Results are often reported using inconsistent datasets, custom data processing, and varying evaluation protocols, making state-of-the-art claims fragile. We address this with a large-scale, open-source benchmark that integrates 30 diverse datasets under standardized processing, unified model interfaces, and a shared cross-subject evaluation protocol. Evaluating 17 representative architectures across 4760 training runs, we jointly measure predictive performance alongside on-device latency, peak memory, and model size on an Android reference device. Our results reveal that the WHAR state of the art is distributed rather than dominated by a single architecture. While CNN-HAR achieves the highest mean macro-F1, top-performing models cluster tightly, indicating contemporary architectures have converged near a predictive performance ceiling. When accounting for deployment efficiency, compact neural models, such as TinierHAR, and classical Random Forests define the practically relevant Pareto frontier, whereas larger recurrent and hybrid models incur high hardware costs without corresponding performance gains. Consequently, while predictive performance has plateaued, substantial potential for future progress remains in optimizing deployment efficiency and improving adaptation to domain shifts. We release our full framework to support transparent reuse and extension.

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

APCyc: Property-Informed Design of Cyclic Peptides via Automated Cyclization

arXiv:2606.12991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cyclic peptides represent a promising class of therapeutic compounds in modern drug discovery, often offering improved stability and binding affinity. However, the de novo design of cyclic peptides remains challenging because methods must identify pocket-adaptive cyclization patterns and linkage sites while simultaneously controlling drug-relevant properties. This challenge is particularly pronounced for recent generative models trained predominantly on linear peptide data, which may fail to capture cyclization-specific constraints. To address the limitation, we introduce APCyc, a target-aware de novo cyclic peptide generation framework that explicitly models cyclization and jointly optimizes multiple essential physicochemical properties. By using an expanded residue vocabulary and explicitly encoding cyclization-site and linkage-type information, APCyc learns cyclization-aware representations and leverages Bayesian posterior guidance to steer sampling toward cyclic peptides satisfying multiple property objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that our model learns target-dependent cyclization preferences, and enables effective and controllable multi-property optimization for cyclic peptide design. The source code of this paper is available at https://github.com/HKUSTGZ-ML4Health-Lab/APCyc.

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

AUTOGATE: Automated Clock Gating via Toggling-Aware LLM-based RTL Rewriting

arXiv:2606.17461v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-grain clock gating (FGCG) is among the most effective techniques for reducing dynamic power, yet current FGCG optimization flows remain largely manual. Recent LLM-based RTL optimization approaches remain limited by two key drawbacks: (1) the inability to process long waveform traces spanning millions of cycles, and (2) the difficulty of scaling optimization to large hierarchical codebases while preserving correctness. In this work, we present AUTOGATE, the first agentic framework for industry-grade RTL power optimization, enabling workload-aware clock-gating optimization across large hierarchical codebases. AUTOGATE introduces a Machine Learning (ML)-LLM co-design that bridges waveform-level analysis and RTL rewriting. Specifically, we design an ML-based clustering algorithm that distills raw toggling traces into compact, structured representations that guide LLM-based RTL rewriting. This enables accurate identification and application of clock-gating opportunities without requiring LLMs to directly process raw waveform data. To enhance scalability, AUTOGATE employs a hierarchical multi-agent architecture that decomposes large designs into independently optimizable modules, enabling coordinated optimization across deep design hierarchies. We evaluate AUTOGATE on a diverse set of designs ranging from small RTL designs to large industrial-grade codebases. Experimental results show that AUTOGATE consistently reduces dynamic power relative to baselines. Across the small-design suite, AUTOGATE reduces dynamic power by 49.31% on average. On industry-scale designs, it achieves 19.34% and 7.96% dynamic power reductions on NVDLA and BlackParrot, respectively, and up to 6.86% on highly optimized proprietary production designs.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

NARRAS: Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference for CSI-Based Localization in Vehicular IoT Networks

arXiv:2606.11914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: CSI-based localization with spatially distributed antenna arrays exposes a basic resource trade-off. Each array can provide a rich view of the channel, but forwarding observations from all arrays to a fusion center is wasteful when only a few carry useful information, and the shared uplink supports only a limited number of simultaneous transmissions. We let each array decide locally whether its current observation is worth reporting, subject to a budget on the average number of active transmitters. We refer to this abstraction as Edge-Triggered Distributed Inference (ETDI). It captures a broader class of task-oriented communication problems where resource-constrained devices share an access channel for a common inference task. We instantiate ETDI for CSI-based localization, a common scenario in vehicular IoT networks. Spatially distributed remote antenna arrays (RAAs) encode local channel state information (CSI) from user equipment (UE) transmissions into latent features, and the fusion center estimates the UE position from the subset of reported features. We propose NARRAS, a decentralized reporting policy in which each RAA combines a recurrent summary of its recent observations with a memory of the last latent it transmitted. Training controls an explicit activity budget through differentiable activity penalties and validation-calibrated deterministic thresholds, and uses channel-chart regularization to shape the latent geometry. Experiments show that, at comparable uplink activity, NARRAS improves localization accuracy over learned and heuristic sparse-reporting strategies, while dense full-report models remain useful budget-free references. In low-activity regimes, chart regularization further reduces high-percentile localization errors, suggesting that geometry-aware latent representations are more robust under sparse reporting.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Poly-Social Risk for Hypertension Among Black and Latina Women

Background: Hypertension is a leading modifiable cardiovascular risk factor prominently influenced by health-related social needs (HRSN). Whether detailed information on HRSN can improve identification of hypertension among minoritized women is unknown. Methods: Black and Latina women aged 18-65 years completed the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Accountable Health Communities Screening Tool, assessing 13 HRSN domains. Hypertension was ascertained by a validated EHR-based algorithm or self-report of hypertension. Logistic regression tested associations of HRSN with hypertension. LASSO regression with 10-fold cross-validation was used to derive a poly-social risk score in the training set (random 70%) and tested in the validation set (30%) against a sociodemographic model (age, race, income, education). Results: Among 1302 participants (mean [SD] age 40.1 [11.3] years, 70.4% Black, 44.3% Latina), higher cumulative burden of HRSN was associated with increased odds of hypertension (adjusted odds ratio [aOR] for each additional domain of HRSN: 1.07 [95% CI 1.01-1.14], P=0.02). Food insecurity (aOR 2.30 [1.37-3.87], P= 0.002), lapse in utilities (aOR 1.44 [1.04-1.96], P=0.02), poor concentration (aOR 1.57 [1.13-2.17], P=0.007), and social isolation (aOR 1.77 [1.14-2.73], P=0.01) were associated with hypertension. In the validation set, the poly-social risk score did not improve discrimination for hypertension vs. the sociodemographic model (AUC 0.76 [95% CI 0.71-0.81] vs. AUC 0.80 [0.75-0.85]). Conclusion: In this cross-sectional analysis of Black and Latina women, greater cumulative social disadvantage was associated with hypertension. While inclusion of HRSN did not improve hypertension prediction beyond conventional sociodemographic indices, findings may inform targeted interventions among minorities at cardiometabolic risk.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

BALTO: Balanced Token-Level Policy Optimization for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucinations remain a major obstacle to deploying large language models (LLMs) in knowledge-intensive settings, where generated responses must be faithfully grounded in provided evidence. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising direction for hallucination mitigation, but response-level faithfulness rewards suffer from a granularity mismatch: localized hallucinations can cause supported content to receive spurious penalties. Although recent work introduces fine-grained feedback such as claim-level verification and token-level rewards, unbalanced credit assignment can still induce length, verbosity, or optimization-noise biases. We propose BALTO, a Balanced Token-level Policy Optimization framework for hallucination mitigation. BALTO extracts checkable factual claims, verifies them against the reference context, and projects claim-level judgments to token-level labels. A balanced token-level credit assignment mechanism is introduced into the framework. This design redistributes probability mass from unsupported content toward faithful content, rather than suppressing the entire response. We systematically analyze the limitations of response-level rewards from a theoretical standpoint, and prove BALTO's advantages in training stability and optimization efficiency for hallucination mitigation. Experiments on ConFiQA, RAGTruth, and FinLLM-Eval show that BALTO achieves the highest faithfulness across all six model–benchmark settings and consistently outperforms existing post-training baselines in Q-Score, demonstrating a stronger faithfulness–informativeness trade-off.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

PermDoRA – Understanding Adapter Interference in Language Models: Limits of Parameter-Space Geometry

arXiv:2606.11262v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Access control in large language models (LLMs) requires modular mechanisms to enable domain-specific behavior without retraining or cross-domain interference. A common hypothesis is that interference during adapter composition arises from overlap in linear parameter updates, suggesting that enforcing orthogonality or directional independence should improve multi-domain performance. We test this hypothesis using DoRA-RBAC, a hierarchical adapter composition framework based on weight-decomposed low-rank adaptation. We compare conventional Euclidean merging with a geometry-aware Riemannian-inspired merging strategy that approximates the Frechet mean via normalized directional averaging across multiple QA benchmarks (GPQA, PubMedQA, SimpleQA, WMDP) on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Mistral-7B. Our results show that while single-domain performance matches LoRA, geometry-aware merging provides no consistent advantage over standard averaging in multi-domain settings.Diagnostic analysis further reveals that angular alignment and orthogonality of adapter updates are weak predictors of composition performance. These findings suggest that adapter interference is not governed primarily by parameter-space geometry, but is instead consistent with interactions in shared nonlinear representations.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SLUM-i: Semi-supervised Learning for Urban Mapping of Informal Settlements and Data Quality Benchmarking

Rapid urban expansion has fueled the growth of informal settlements in major cities of low- and middle-income countries, with Lahore and Karachi in Pakistan and Mumbai in India serving as prominent examples. However, large-scale mapping of these settlements is severely constrained not only by the scarcity of annotations but by inherent data quality challenges, specifically high spectral ambiguity between formal and informal structures and significant annotation noise. We address this by introducing a benchmark dataset for Lahore, constructed from scratch, along with companion datasets for Karachi and Mumbai, which were derived from verified administrative boundaries, totaling approximately 900 $km^2$ of urban area. This collection is supplemented by four cities from prior literature across Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, with comprehensive data quality assessments provided for each city. We also propose a semi-supervised segmentation framework designed to mitigate the class imbalance and distribution mismatch inherent in standard semi-supervised learning pipelines. Our method integrates a Class-Aware Adaptive Thresholding mechanism that dynamically adjusts confidence thresholds to prevent minority class suppression, and a DINOv2-based unlabeled pool filter that removes out-of-distribution tiles prior to training to reduce covariate shift. Extensive experiments across seven cities spanning three continents, repeated over five random seeds, demonstrate gains of up to +5.9 pp mIoU over state-of-the-art semi-supervised baselines, with both components being architecture-agnostic and adding no inference overhead.

11.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Enhancing LLM Safety Through a Theoretical Minimax Game Lens

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) necessitates effective mechanisms to ensure their responsible deployment by accurately distinguishing unsafe content from benign content. While substantial safety datasets are available in English, multilingual safety modeling remains underexplored due to limited open-source safety datasets in other languages. Even within English datasets, safe yet sensitive corner-case content is scarce, leading to shortcut learning by models and non-trivial false-positive rates. To mitigate these issues, we introduce a novel minimax reinforcement learning (RL) framework wherein a data generator and a classifier model co-evolve, facilitating the production of high-quality synthetic multilingual safety data. We theoretically formalize this interaction as a minimax game and rigorously demonstrate convergence to a Nash equilibrium. Empirical evaluations confirm that our synthetic data generation method significantly enhances the classifier model performance, enabling a substantially smaller model to surpass the state-of-the-art by nearly 10% on English benchmarks while achieving 4.5x faster inference speed. These results establish a scalable and efficient methodology for synthetic data generation, advancing the development of safer and more robust multilingual LLM deployments.

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

From Overload to Convergence: Supporting Multi-Issue Human-AI Negotiation with Bayesian Visualization

arXiv:2603.22766v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As AI systems increasingly mediate negotiations, understanding how the number of negotiated issues impacts human performance is crucial for maintaining human agency. We designed a human-AI negotiation case study in a realistic property rental scenario, varying the number of negotiated issues; empirical findings show that without support, performance stays stable up to three issues but declines as additional issues increase cognitive load. To address this, we introduce a novel uncertainty-based visualization driven by Bayesian estimation of agreement probability. It shows how the space of mutually acceptable agreements narrows as negotiation progresses, helping users identify promising options. In a within-subjects experiment (N=32), it improved human outcomes and efficiency, preserved human control, and avoided redistributing value. Our findings surface practical limits on the complexity people can manage in human-AI negotiation, advance theory on human performance in complex negotiations, and offer validated design guidance for interactive systems.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Context-aware Modality-Topology Co-Alignment for Multimodal Attributed Graphs

Multimodal Attributed Graphs (MAGs) model real-world entities by coupling graph topology with heterogeneous attributes such as text and images. They support graph-centric tasks requiring structural and class-discriminative representations, and modality-centric tasks requiring fine-grained cross-modal correspondence. However, existing MAG methods often rely on fixed graph contexts or uniformly fused representations, causing task-agnostic propagation and over-compressed fusion that hinder diverse task requirements and modality-specific evidence preservation. To address this, we propose CoMAG, a unified MAG backbone that learns task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment within them. CoMAG first conducts Reliable Context Learning by estimating edge reliability from multimodal semantic consistency, complementing raw topology with semantic neighbors, and selecting context components through a task-aware gate. It then performs Modality-preserving Hop-token Alignment by maintaining modality-specific multi-hop trajectories, matching modality-hop tokens across modalities, and decoupling shared and private representations. Thus, CoMAG produces graph and modality representations from one forward pass while retaining modality-specific cues. We further analyze stable propagation, over-smoothing mitigation, and modality-collapse control. Experiments on nine OpenMAG datasets compare CoMAG with feature-only, graph-only, multimodal, and unified MAG baselines across graph-level prediction, modality matching, and graph-conditioned generation. Results show that CoMAG achieves the best reported performance, demonstrating that task-adaptive reliable contexts and modality-preserving alignment improve structural prediction, cross-modal matching, and graph-conditioned generation while retaining sparse edge-linear complexity.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

When Does Trajectory-Level Supervision Permit Efficient Offline Reinforcement Learning?

arXiv:2606.18531v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning is typically analyzed under process-level reward supervision, yet many sequential decision datasets record only trajectory-level outcomes. We develop a statistical theory for offline policy optimization from such outcome-level supervision. We first study the canonical setting where the target remains the expected cumulative reward, but each offline trajectory provides only a scalar label whose conditional mean is the cumulative return. We propose OPAC, a pessimistic actor-critic algorithm that learns a latent reward model and optimizes a policy from trajectory-level labels. We prove a high-probability guarantee of order $\widetilde O(H^2\sqrt{C_{sa}(\pi^\star)/n})$ and a matching lower bound, characterizing the sharp statistical cost of replacing process-level rewards with one trajectory-level label. We then extend the principle to preference-based feedback, preserving the leading horizon and concentrability dependence up to preference-model constants. Finally, we study generalized outcome-based offline RL, where both the supervision and the objective are trajectory-level quantities induced by a nonlinear aggregation of latent per-step rewards. This problem is not learnable in general: for all-success objectives, any offline learner may require $\Omega(2^H)$ trajectories even with deterministic transitions and constant concentrability. We then identify a tractable regime through two structural coefficients, $\kappa_\mu(\sigma)$ and $\chi_\mu(\sigma)$, capturing information loss in outcome aggregation and generalized Bellman updates, under which generalized OPAC achieves polynomial sample complexity. Together, our results delineate when outcome-level supervision enables sample-efficient offline control and when missing process-level rewards create fundamental statistical barriers.

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

Rethinking Cross-lingual Gaps from a Statistical Viewpoint

Any piece of knowledge is usually expressed in one or a handful of natural languages on the web or in any large corpus. Large Language Models (LLMs) act as a bridge by acquiring knowledge from a source language and making it accessible when queried using target languages. A cross-lingual gap is a drop in accuracy incurred when querying knowledge in a target language rather than the source language. Existing research focused on modeling or training failures leading to cross-lingual gaps. In this work, we take an alternative view to characterize the nature of cross-lingual error, and hypothesize that the variance of responses in the target language is a key cause of this gap. For the first time, we formalize the cross-lingual gap in terms of biased and unbiased errors. We empirically validate our hypothesis through multiple inference-time interventions that control variance and reduce the cross-lingual gap. We demonstrate a few test-time ensemble methods that reduce response variance, and thereby improve source-target transfer scores by up to 12 absolute points yielding relative gains of 8% to over 50% across various LLMs.

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

Learning to Prompt: Improving Student Engagement with Adaptive LLM-based High-School Tutoring

LLMs can personalize education, although current static-prompt tutoring systems struggle to adapt to diverse academic disciplines. We develop and test a system with subject-aware prompting, based on 14 pedagogical features (e.g., tutor scaffolding, student understanding) extracted from raw transcripts. We first train a prompt routing model in a simulation environment, and then deploy it for online adaptation with actual high-school students. The simulation benchmark shows the router outperforming two static baselines ($0.694$ vs. $0.647$ and $0.64$, $p

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

Ensembling Sparse Autoencoders

arXiv:2505.16077v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are used to decompose neural network activations into human-interpretable features. Typically, features learned by a single SAE are used for downstream applications. However, it has recently been shown that a single SAE captures only a limited subset of features that can be extracted from the activation space. Motivated by this limitation, we introduce and formalize SAE ensembles. Furthermore, we propose to ensemble multiple SAEs through naive bagging and boosting. In naive bagging, SAEs trained with different weight initializations are ensembled, whereas in boosting SAEs sequentially trained to minimize the residual error are ensembled. Theoretically, naive bagging and boosting are justified as approaches to reduce reconstruction error. Empirically, we evaluate our ensemble approaches with three settings of language models and SAE architectures. Our empirical results demonstrate that, compared to an expanded SAE that matches the number of features in the ensemble, ensembling SAEs improves the reconstruction of language model activations along with SAE stability. Additionally, on downstream tasks such as concept detection and spurious correlation removal, SAE ensembles achieve better performance, showing improved practical utility.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Cellfm-datasets: A Unified Data Infrastructure for Single-Cell and Spatial Transcriptomics Foundation Model Pretraining

Large-scale cell foundation models are increasingly limited not only by model architecture, but also by the data infrastructure required to repeatedly sample sparse transcriptomic profiles from out-of-core cohorts. AnnData/H5AD has become a standard exchange format for single-cell and spatial omics analysis, yet its HDF5-backed layout is not designed for high-frequency random mini-batch loading under multi-worker and distributed pretraining. We present Cellfm-datasets, a data infrastructure artifact that converts H5AD cohorts into a self-describing compressed sparse row (CSR) memmap layout and exposes the resulting corpus through Hugging Face Dataset and IterableDataset interfaces. The artifact stores a shared gene vocabulary, per-sample metadata, optional spatial coordinates, observation metadata, manifests, and checksums, and reconstructs sparse cell or group records at runtime without dense expansion. A unified sampling abstraction supports random-cell groups, manifest-defined biological regions, and coordinate-based spatial blocks, with deterministic sharding across distributed ranks and data-loader workers. Spatial demonstrations on P14 mouse brain transcriptomics sections illustrate region- and block-level sampling over real anatomical structures. In controlled benchmarks on a public heterogeneous ModelScope scRNA-seq subset, Cellfm-datasets reached 60,571 +/- 1,734 samples/s in single-core random loading, scaled to approximately 160,000 samples/s with eight workers, and maintained near-constant process-private memory while reading up to one million cells. By moving sparse single-cell and spatial corpora from model-specific loader code into reusable, validated, and framework-native dataset artifacts, this design may reduce the engineering burden of reproducible cell foundation model pretraining and make repeated training runs, model comparisons, and mixed-modality data reuse easier to standardize.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Diagnostic Concordance of Immediate Versus 1-Hour Technetium-99m Hydroxydiphosphonate Scintigraphy in Suspected Transthyretin Amyloid Cardiomyopathy

Background Bone-avid tracer myocardial scintigraphy for the diagnosis of transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy (ATTR-CM) has traditionally employed imaging at one or 3-hour intervals. Technetium-99m hydroxydiphosphonate (99mTc-HDP) has unique characteristics that may enable earlier imaging. We investigated the diagnostic concordance of immediate versus 1-hour acquisitions. Methods Consecutive patients with suspected ATTR-CM underwent planar imaging and SPECT/CT immediately and at 1-hour following the administration of 99mTc-HDP. Perugini grades and heart to contralateral lung (H/CL) ratios were assessed. Target-to-background ratios (TBRs) were calculated on the SPECT/CT acquisitions using the left ventricular (LV) septum and three background regions: aorta, LV blood-pool, and vertebrae. We assessed diagnostic concordance using Cohen's Kappa ({kappa}), temporal stability using paired t-tests, and correlation between timepoints using Pearson's coefficient (r). The 1-hour SPECT/CT interpretation served as the protocol reference standard. Results Forty-eight patients (83% male; median age, 80 [73-85] years) were evaluated. One-hour SPECT/CT identified 19 positive and 29 negative cases. Immediate SPECT/CT demonstrated 100% diagnostic concordance with the 1-hour reference standard ({kappa} = 1.000; 95% CI: 1.00 to 1.00; p < 0.001). The LV septum/LV Blood-Pool TBR showed the highest correlation (r = 0.956; 95% CI: 0.922 to 0.975; p < 0.001). The LV Septum/Aorta TBR demonstrated high correlation (r = 0.918; 95% CI: 0.857 to 0.953; p < 0.001) and remained stable in the ATTR-negative cohort (-0.02; 95% CI: -0.08 to 0.04; p = 0.54). Significant decrease in the LV Septum/Vertebrae TBR in the ATTR-negative (-0.55; 95% CI: -0.64 to -0.47; p < 0.001) and ATTR-positive cohorts (-1.14; 95% CI: -1.39 to -0.89; p < 0.001) was observed. Conclusions Immediate 99mTc-HDP SPECT/CT is diagnostically concordant with standard 1-hour protocols. By leveraging SPECT/CT and the favorable kinetics of 99mTc-HDP, immediate-phase imaging can accurately reproduce 1-hour acquisitions in cases of suspected ATTR-CM. This expedited approach may improve nuclear laboratory throughput and patient satisfaction.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Query Channel: Information-Theoretic Limits of Masking-Based Explanations

arXiv:2604.16689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Masking-based post-hoc explanation methods, such as KernelSHAP and LIME, estimate local feature importance by querying a black-box model under randomized perturbations. This paper formulates this procedure as communication over a query channel, where the latent explanation acts as a message and each masked evaluation is a channel use. Within this framework, the complexity of the explanation is captured by the entropy of the hypothesis class, while the query interface supplies information at a rate determined by an identification capacity per query. We derive a strong converse showing that, if the explanation rate exceeds this capacity, the probability of exact recovery necessarily converges to one in error for any sequence of explainers and decoders. We also prove an achievability result establishing that a sparse maximum-likelihood decoder attains reliable recovery when the rate lies below capacity. A Monte Carlo estimator of mutual information yields a non-asymptotic query benchmark that we use to compare optimal decoding with Lasso- and OLS-based procedures that mirror LIME and KernelSHAP. Experiments reveal a range of query budgets where information theory permits reliable explanations but standard convex surrogates still fail. Finally, we interpret super-pixel resolution and tokenization for neural language models as a source-coding choice that sets the entropy of the explanation and show how Gaussian noise and nonlinear curvature degrade the query channel, induce waterfall and error-floor behavior, and render high-resolution explanations unattainable.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Free Energy Heuristics: Fast-And-Frugal Cognition as Active Inference Under Uncertain Precision

Authors:

Chain-of-thought (CoT) improves large language models' performance in math and symbolic reasoning. But on planning, contested ethics, and tasks where the model cannot check itself, more reasoning makes things worse. Both effects are documented; what has been missing is a principled account of which property decides the outcome. We argue it is meta-uncertainty: how unsure the model is about the reliability of its own evidence. When that uncertainty is high, extra reasoning stops adding signal and starts manufacturing false confidence. We prove that the policy minimizing expected free energy under uncertain precision stops integrating cues after a finite number of high-validity ones when the precision prior is heavy-tailed (Theorem 2.6.1), and under a Descending Dominance condition, is sample-wise identical to take-the-best (Theorem 2.7.4). Fast-and-frugal heuristics and active inference are, then, two descriptions of the same computation. The prediction is that on high-meta-uncertainty items, longer CoT should degrade accuracy. We score the regime per item (simulate-and-recover rho > 0.96), build FEH-79, a benchmark of Knightian frames with matched controls, and run a pre-registered study across seven models (five open-weight 3B-32B, two frontier), five CoT lengths, and 7,875 responses. The gate, fixed before any data, required a negative interaction with posterior probability above 0.95 and an accuracy drop of more than 6 points. It held. The high-regime drop is 17.3 points (95% CI [7.7, 25.5]); matched items with definite answers show no cost. The effect is regime-dependent: decisive in capable mid-to-large models, directional in the two frontier systems, absent-to-reversed in the weakest. The framework answers when CoT helps and unifies the Bayesian and fast-and-frugal traditions: less-is-more effects are evidence about the meta-uncertainty regime, not against Bayesian cognition.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Weak continuous measurements require more work than strong ones

arXiv:2502.09732v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding the energy cost of quantum measurement process and its connection to the measurement performance faces the challenge of modeling the objectification process. The latter, turns the measurement result into an objective fact, available to independent observers, and is responsible for the measurement irreversibility. To address this issue, we propose and analyze a dynamical model of quantum measurement, able to capture nonideal (weak and inefficient) measurements. In this model, the objectification is induced by a contact with a macroscopic reservoir at equilibrium which is responsible for the redundant broadcast of the measurement outcome (producing a Spectrum Broadcast Structure (SBS) state) while inducing decoherence in the pointer basis, in the line of the theory of quantum Darwinism. We analyze the performance of the obtained measurement process by introducing figures of merit to quantify the strength of the measurement and its efficiency. We also derive and a lower bound on the measurement work cost that we can relate to the measurement quality. We take as an illustration the readout of a qubit via its coupling to a harmonic oscillator. We investigate the long sequences of extremely short and weak measurements (a.k.a continuous measurements), to find under which conditions they converge to an ideal (projective) measurement and analyze their work cost. Surprisingly, we find that a sequence converging to projective measurement has a much larger work cost than an equivalent strong measurement obtained from a single intense interaction with the apparatus. We extend this result to a large class of models owing to scaling arguments. Our analysis offers new insights into the trade-offs between measurement strength, energy consumption, and information extraction in quantum measurement protocols.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Data Manifold under the Microscope

arXiv:2606.15760v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A significant gap exists between theory and practice in deep learning. Generalization and approximation error bounds are often derived for simplified models or are too loose to be informative. Many rely on the manifold hypothesis and on geometric regularity such as intrinsic dimension, curvature, and reach. Progress requires insight into data-manifold geometry and suitable benchmarks, yet existing options are polarized: analytic manifolds with known geometry but limited applicability, or real-world datasets where geometry is only coarsely estimable. We introduce a benchmarking framework for studying data geometry. We repurpose and extend dSprites and COIL-20 with additional transformation dimensions and dense, axis-aligned sampling, and pair them with finite-difference estimators that recover curvature, reach, and volume at near-ground-truth accuracy in a regime where general-purpose estimators are unreliable or difficult to deploy. The framework is intended as a controlled testbed, useful as a calibration environment for geometric estimators and a sandbox for probing theoretical assumptions. To illustrate its use, we present two application studies, namely assessing the scaling behavior of the bounds of Genovese et al. and Fefferman et al., and tracking the layer-wise geometry of a $\beta$-VAE, highlighting the behavior of current bounds and the value of controlled benchmarks for guiding and validating future theory. A reference implementation is available at https://github.com/koulakis/manifold-microscope.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Purely unrectifiable sets, fractal percolation and graphs of functions

arXiv:2606.15745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper contains a survey of some of the results of the author related to unrectifiablity and is an extended version of the author's talk given at the Second Winter School Geometric Measure Theory Rectifiability vs. Pure Unrectifiability in Hanghzou, China. These results include irregular/purely unrectifiable $1$-sets on the graphs of continuous functions like the Takagi, the Weierstrass-Cellerier and the typical (in the sense of Baire) continuous function. It is also discussed that there exists $ {\alpha}_{0}\alpha_0$. The background of the $1$-unrectifiability is discussed in more detail.