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

Local controllability of heralded quantum linear optics

Authors:
Tommaso Francalanci↗Nicol\`o Spagnolo↗Mario Sigalotti↗Eliott Z. Mamon↗Ulysse Chabaud↗Fabio Sciarrino↗

arXiv:2606.19470v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Photonic linear optical networks provide a versatile platform for quantum information processing and quantum state engineering. However, the set of states that can be generated using passive linear optics alone is fundamentally constrained by bosonic symmetries. Heralding, based on conditional measurements on auxiliary modes, is a widely used technique to overcome these limitations and effectively enlarge the set of accessible states. Despite the widespread use of heralding, it is often unclear how specific ancillary resources impact the overall reachability of the target space. In this work, we investigate the local controllability of photonic states in linear optical networks by analyzing the rank of the Jacobian of the output state with respect to the underlying unitary circuit, which provides a quantitative measure of the dimension of the accessible tangent space at a given configuration. Our analysis ranges from passive linear optics to heralded linear optics, where auxiliary resources and conditional measurements are included. Within this framework, we quantify how different resources enlarge the locally accessible state space beyond that of passive linear optics and determine the resources required for the Jacobian rank to reach its maximal value, thereby achieving full local controllability. As maximal local rank is a necessary condition for global reachability, our framework offers a systematic tool to assess and compare the accessible state space of measurement-based photonic architectures, and to establish practical criteria for the resources needed in high-dimensional quantum state engineering.

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

Through-Foliage Surface-Temperature Reconstruction for Early Wildfire Detection

Authors:
Mohamed Youssef↗Lukas Brunner↗Klaus Rundhammer↗Gerald Czech↗Oliver Bimber↗

We present a method to reconstruct surface temperatures through forest vegetation by combining signal processing and machine learning, enabling fully automated aerial wildfire monitoring with drones for early fire detection. Synthetic aperture (SA) sensing reduces canopy occlusion but introduces thermal blur. To overcome this, we train a visual state space model to recover subtle thermal signals of partially occluded soil and fire hotspots from blurred data. To address limited real-world training data, we generate realistic surface temperature simulations using a latent diffusion model, temperature augmentation, and procedural thermal forest modeling. On simulated datasets, our method reduces RMSE by 2-2.5 versus conventional thermal and uncorrected SA imaging; in field experiments on hotspots, RMSE improved by 12.8-fold and 2.6-fold, respectively. Our approach also generalizes to other thermal signals, including human signatures, capturing morphology and extent – critical where simple thresholding fails – while conventional imaging struggles with partial occlusion.

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03.
Science (Express) 2026-05-07

Induction of broadly neutralizing HIV antibodies by a two-step mechanism informs vaccine design | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A major obstacle confronting HIV-1 vaccine and cure research is the lack of an outbred animal model for rapid and consistent induction of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs). We designed an epitope-focused simian-human immunodeficiency virus (SHIV.5MUT) that elicited broad and potent V3-glycan-targeted antibodies within a year of infection in 14 of 22 macaques compared with 0 of 14 control animals. SHIV.5MUT elicited bNAbs by a two-step mechanism, inducing an initial wave of V1-directed antibodies that selected for Envs with shortened, hypoglycosylated V1 loops, which in turn primed V3-glycan bNAb precursors. Rhesus bNAbs were immunogenetically and structurally diverse, closely resembling human V3-glycan bNAbs. Env-bNAb coevolution revealed a diverse repertoire of bNAb precursors and the Env variants that matured them, yielding a molecular blueprint for vaccine design.

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Korzhinskii-Net: Physics-Informed Neural Network for Sub-Surface Mineral Prospectivity Modelling

Authors:
Boris Kriuk↗

arXiv:2606.13695v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mineral prospectivity modelling (MPM) underpins exploration economics, yet most operational pipelines reduce to data-driven classifiers trained on shallow surface proxies. Such models are blind to the subsurface physics that actually localises ore: heat advection, fluid flow, and lithology-dependent precipitation. We present Korzhinskii-Net, a 2-D radial physics-informed neural network (PINN) that couples Darcy flow, advective-diffusive heat transport, and a softplus-saturated reaction rate into a single differentiable forward model, weakly supervised by surface and remote-sensing proxies. The network is named after Dmitri S. Korzhinskii (1899-1985), whose theory of infiltration metasomatism provides the physical scaffold. We evaluate Korzhinskii-Net on five ore provinces spanning four commodity classes – Norilsk (Ni-Cu-PGE), Pechenga (Ni-Cu sulphide), Udokan (sandstone-hosted Cu), Sukhoi Log (orogenic Au), and Mirny (kimberlitic diamond) – under a fair, leakage-controlled 5-fold cross-validation protocol with hard ring-shaped negatives. Korzhinskii-Net attains a mean PR-AUC of 0.885 versus 0.281 for the strongest classical baseline (gradient boosting), and a mean fractional rank of 0.019 versus 0.413. The improvement is consistent across all five provinces and four commodity systems, suggesting that physics-informed differentiable simulators, even when constrained only by global open-data proxies, can recover localisation patterns that pure feature-based learners systematically miss. We release the full pipeline and evaluation harness as open source.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Deep Learning-based Algebraic Reynolds Stress Closures for RANS Simulations of Turbulent Flows

Authors:
Daniel Dehtyriov↗Jonathan F. MacArt↗Justin Sirignano↗

arXiv:2605.26358v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Turbulence is ubiquitous in engineering and science, yet direct simulation is prohibitively expensive. The Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations provide savings exceeding ten orders of magnitude but introduce unclosed terms (the closure problem). Offline-trained machine-learning (ML) closures suffer distribution shift in predictive simulations, while ML methods that bypass the governing equations struggle to generalise from scarce high-fidelity data. We develop a physics-derived deep learning closure model for RANS, the Deep Algebraic Reynolds Stress Model (DARSM), which can be trained on small datasets and accurately generalise across Reynolds numbers, to unseen geometries, and to different flow regimes. A neural network maps flow invariants to empirical parameters in an implicit algebraic Reynolds stress equation, derived from the Reynolds stress transport equations under the weak-equilibrium assumption, imposing physics-based structure on the ML closure. End-to-end optimisation through the governing PDEs and the coupled implicit closure eliminates distribution shift, but both unrolled and implicit automatic differentiation fail on the stiff coupled solver. We derive adjoint equations that exploit the solver's implicit-explicit structure for efficient optimisation. On canonical square-duct and periodic-hill benchmarks, DARSM reduces average test velocity error over baseline RANS by $2$-$4\times$ across Reynolds number, geometries, and flow regimes, with peak case-level reductions of $12\times$. The model trained on attached, anisotropy-dominated flows (square duct) accurately generalises without retraining to separated flows (periodic hills), a regime change in the underlying physics. DARSM also outperforms five established ML methods: offline training, tensor-basis neural networks, field-inversion machine learning, DeepONets, and physics-informed neural networks.

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

Two-Stage Fine-Tuning of ResNet50 for High-Sensitivity Melanoma Detection on Dermoscopic Images

Authors:
Aryan Bhagat↗

Melanoma is the most dangerous form of skin cancer with five-year survival rates exceeding 99% when detected early but falling sharply once the disease spreads. This paper proposes and evaluates a two-stage fine-tuning approach for ResNet50 applied to binary melanoma classification on dermoscopic images. The core challenges addressed are class imbalance and suboptimal transfer learning from single-stage fine-tuning. After stratified train/validation/test splitting, random oversampling was applied exclusively to the training set to achieve a 1:1 class balance. Stage 1 trained only the classification head with the ResNet50 base frozen, while Stage 2 fine-tuned all layers jointly at a low learning rate of 1e-5 to prevent catastrophic forgetting of learned visual features. On an independent test set of 3,826 images, the model achieved an AUC-ROC of 0.9559, accuracy of 88.34%, sensitivity of 87.56%, specificity of 89.13%, and F1-score of 88.29%. An ablation study confirms the two-stage protocol significantly outperforms single-stage fine-tuning, with sensitivity gains of over 4%. Grad-CAM visualizations demonstrate correct lesion localization. A fully deployable Streamlit detection application is provided alongside all training code.

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

Contactless 3D Human Body Measurement Using Depth Cameras for Smart Health Monitoring

Authors:
Martha Asare↗Xuan Wang↗Juan Lopez Alvarenga↗Lois Akosua Serwaa↗Jinghao Yang↗

Contactless body measurement technologies are becoming increasingly significant for smart health monitoring, digital health applications, and remote patient assessment. Traditional anthropometric measurements typically necessitate physical contact and trained personnel, which may constrain scalability in remote healthcare settings. In this study, we introduce a depth camera-based framework for estimating human body measurements utilizing 3D point cloud data. An Orbbec Astra 2 depth camera was employed to capture RGB images, depth maps, and 3D point clouds of participants. The captured point cloud was processed using Python-based tools, including Open3D, NumPy, and OpenCV, to segment the human body from the background. Key anthropometric measurements, such as height and arm span, were computed. The measurements were obtained through a combination of spatial filtering and landmark selection on the 3D point cloud, followed by the projection of the computed measurements onto the corresponding RGB image using camera intrinsic parameters. In addition to linear measurements, the approximate body volume and visible surface area were estimated using voxel-based occupancy analysis and mesh-based surface reconstruction methods. The experimental results from a single depth capture demonstrated that accurate body measurements and geometric estimates could be obtained from depth camera data without physical contact. This study provides a foundation for future real-time systems that integrate depth sensing with intelligent health monitoring and generative AI models for smart healthcare applications.

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

FasterPy: An LLM-based Code Execution Efficiency Optimization Framework

Authors:
Yue Wu↗Minghao Han↗Ruiyin Li↗Peng Liang↗Amjed Tahir↗Zengyang Li↗Qiong Feng↗Mojtaba Shahin↗

arXiv:2512.22827v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Code often suffers from performance bugs. These bugs necessitate the research and practice of code optimization. Traditional rule-based methods rely on manually designing and maintaining rules for specific performance bugs (e.g., redundant loops, repeated computations), making them labor-intensive and limited in applicability. In recent years, machine learning and deep learning-based methods have emerged as promising alternatives by learning optimization heuristics from annotated code corpora and performance measurements. However, these approaches usually depend on specific program representations and meticulously crafted training datasets, making them costly to develop and difficult to scale. With the booming of Large Language Models (LLMs), their remarkable capabilities in code generation have opened new avenues for automated code optimization. In this work, we proposed FasterPy, a low-cost and efficient framework that adapts LLMs to optimize the execution efficiency of Python code. FasterPy combines Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), supported by a knowledge base constructed from existing performance-improving code pairs and corresponding performance measurements, with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to enhance code optimization performance. Our experimental results on the Performance Improving Code Edits (PIE) benchmark demonstrate that our method outperforms existing models on multiple metrics. The FasterPy tool and the experimental results are available at https://github.com/WuYue22/fasterpy.

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

Task-Aligned Stability Analysis of Vision-Language Models for Autonomous Driving Hazard Detection

Authors:
Everett Richards↗

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used for scene understanding in autonomous driving, but robustness analysis often relies on task-agnostic embedding stability alone. We study whether corruption-induced embedding drift predicts changes in a task-aligned hazard score derived from CLIP image-text similarities. Using controlled corruptions on BDD100K road scenes, we compare embedding drift against margin drift, defined as the change in hazard score under perturbation. The relationship is highly corruption-dependent: some families exhibit strong coupling between representation drift and decision drift, while others induce hazardous decision instability despite relatively modest embedding change. Furthermore, corruption families differ in failure direction: most suppress hazard detections via false negatives, while occlusion instead triggers false alarms, suggesting that benchmark design should account for asymmetric failure modes, not just overall instability rates. These results suggest that robustness benchmarks should include task-aligned stability measures in addition to embedding-level perturbation statistics.

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10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Will AI Agents Free Us From Meaningless Work? A Human-Centered Analysis

Authors:
Davide Ghia↗Jaspreet Ranjit↗Tania Cerquitelli↗Daniele Quercia↗

arXiv:2606.12430v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Some claim that AI agents will free workers from the boring parts of their jobs, yet little is known about how workers themselves identify which tasks should be automated. Prior research focuses on occupations, overlooking that workers experience varying levels of meaning across tasks within the same role. We address this gap with a task-level analysis grounded in Graeber's theory of bullshit jobs. Using ratings from 202 workers on 171 workplace tasks, we (1) validate a five-item scale of perceived bullshitness, (2) show that perceived bullshitness strongly predicts desire for AI delegation, and (3) find that such tasks are also seen as requiring less human oversight. Together, these findings suggest that tasks perceived as bullshit are natural candidates for AI delegation, aligning worker preferences with perceived feasibility.

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

Deep-Unfolded Coordination

Authors:
Hunter Kuperman↗Minchan Jung↗Rahul V. Ghosh↗Alex Oshin↗Evangelos A. Theodorou↗

arXiv:2606.19920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Distributed optimization is a highly scalable and structurally transparent technique to solve multi-agent robotics problems; however, such methods often suffer from the need for highly-specialized, problem-specific hyperparameter tunings. In this work, we propose Deep Coordinator, a deep-unfolding framework that learns to dynamically adjust the hyperparameters of ADMM-DDP, a popular distributed solver for robotics tasks, at solve-time in response to optimizer performance. Our architecture consists of unrolling a fixed number of ADMM-DDP iterations into a neural network with learnable functions between layers mapping the optimizer state to the next hyperparameters. To the best of our knowledge, Deep Coordinator is the first deep-unfolding framework to adapt the penalty parameters of a non-convex optimizer at solve-time; we show that the mainstream supervised approach can yield degenerate solutions when training such models, and propose an unsupervised learning scheme. On simulations with fleets of cars and quadrotors, Deep Coordinator produces trajectories of comparable quality 6.18-9.44x faster than conventional solvers. Furthermore, Deep Coordinator retains its performance benefits when deployed to systems up to 8x larger than trained on.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Layer-Isolated Evaluation: Gating the Deterministic Scaffold of a Production LLM Agent with a No-LLM, Regression-Locked Test Harness

Authors:
Sawyer Zhang↗Alexander Wang↗Sophie Lei↗

End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode. The pure suite (238 cases across 23 slices; 225 run in 2.39 s, ~10 ms/case) runs in CI on every change against a locked per-slice baseline. We validate by controlled regression injection, degrading one layer at a time across seven non-safety layers. The effect we did not design in is masking: the aggregate pass-rate barely moves (-1.7 to -5.9 pp for six local regressions), while the matching slice craters (-25 to -91 pp). A layer's slice reacting to its own fault is partly by construction; the measured results are (i) the aggregate masking and (ii) that damage stays off the other slices: the injected layer's slice is the single worst-hit in 5 of 7 cases and top-3 in 7 of 7 (mean rank 1.29 of 19). Localization replicates on a second, structurally different tenant (Starbucks SG): all seven matching slices crater, so it is not a single-catalog artifact. We position it as a concrete, deterministic instantiation of the component-level evaluation EDDOps prescribes but leaves unimplemented, with CheckList as ancestor and as the deterministic mirror image of whole-workflow stochastic mutation testing. Our contributions: (a) a fully decomposed, sub-second, no-LLM per-layer harness for a production agent, (b) a coverage-honesty test-adequacy criterion that refuses to score an unexercised layer, and (c) the regression-injection demonstration that per-slice baseline-locked gates localize regressions an aggregate metric masks.

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13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

ChronoSurv: A Clinical Pathway-Guided Graph Framework for Multimodal Survival Analysis

Authors:
Hugo Miccinilli↗Theo Di Piazza↗

arXiv:2606.19140v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate survival prediction is essential for personalized treatment planning in head and neck cancer, yet remains challenging due to the heterogeneous and high-dimensional nature of multimodal clinical data. While deep survival models have improved predictive performance over classical statistical approaches, existing methods typically rely on static fusion strategies or temporally agnostic modeling, limiting their ability to capture structured clinical workflows. In this work, we propose ChronoSurv, a heterogeneous hierarchical directed graph framework for multimodal survival analysis. ChronoSurv represents patient care as a progression-aware clinical trajectory using directed graphs aligned with key diagnostic steps. A hierarchical topology incorporates fine-grained, coarse, and global representations, further supporting flexible adaptation to missing modalities, while heterogeneous message passing models complex and asymmetric relationships across modalities and clinical steps. Experimental results on two public datasets demonstrate that ChronoSurv achieves state-of-the-art discriminative performance while maintaining statistically reliable calibration. Comprehensive ablation studies further confirm the contribution of each architectural component, highlighting the potential of trajectory-aware graph modeling for multimodal survival prediction.

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

Direction-Conditioned Policies via Compositional Subgoal Scoring for Online Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Swaminathan S K↗Damiya Gondha↗Theyanesh Eswaramoorthy Rajahkrishnan↗Aritra Hazra↗

arXiv:2606.16515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory implies that the optimal goal-conditioned action depends on the goal only through the gradient of the goal-reaching distance at the current state, yet standard online GCRL still conditions the actor on the raw goal – a signal that is geometrically uninformative when the goal is far from the data distribution. We propose Direction-Conditioned Policies (DCP), a fully online method that decomposes goal-reaching into two components sharing one InfoNCE representation $\psi$: a subgoal-scoring step that selects a visited state $z_t$ aligned with the final goal $g$ in $\psi_g$, and a direction-conditioned actor that consumes the unit direction $d_t$ and magnitude $r_t$ from $\psi(s_t)$ to $\psi(z_t)$. The two components train jointly, factor cleanly at deployment (subgoal scoring is removed, while direction conditioning remains with $g$ in place of $z_t$), and admit independent modification at the same $(d_t,r_t)$ interface. We prove three results. First, direction sufficiency under HJB: the optimal action under control-affine dynamics depends on the goal only through the value gradient. Second, a quantitative bound showing that, under mild conditions on the learned representation and assuming the scoring rule returns an on-path $z_t$, the actor's conditioning input at training and at deployment coincide up to representation error and geodesic slack. Third, a controllable-subspace characterization of when directional conditioning fails. Across nine environments, DCP improves over Contrastive RL on most final metrics, with the largest gains on manipulation and obstacle-interaction tasks; a qualitative analysis of the learned $\psi$-distance landscape shows the contrastive representation behaves as an online quasimetric encoding environment topology, and the single failure case (AntSoccer) localizes to a learned-gradient pathology that the theory anticipates.

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15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bid Farewell to Seesaw: Towards Accurate Long-tail Session-based Recommendation via Dual Constraints of Hybrid Intents

Authors:
Xiao Wang↗Ke Qin↗Dongyang Zhang↗Xiurui Xie↗Shuang Liang↗

arXiv:2511.08378v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Session-based recommendation (SBR) aims to predict anonymous users' next interaction based on their interaction sessions. In the practical recommendation scenario, low-exposure items constitute the majority of interactions, creating a long-tail distribution that severely compromises recommendation diversity. Existing approaches attempt to address this issue by promoting tail items but incur accuracy degradation, exhibiting a "see-saw" effect between long-tail and accuracy performance. We attribute such conflict to session-irrelevant noise within the tail items, which existing long-tail approaches fail to identify and constrain effectively. To resolve this fundamental conflict, we propose HID (Hybrid Intent-based Dual Constraint Framework), a plug-and-play framework that transforms the conventional "see-saw" into "win-win" through introducing the hybrid intent-based dual constraints for both long-tail and accuracy. Two key innovations are incorporated in this framework: (i) Hybrid Intent Learning, where we reformulate the intent extraction strategies by employing attribute-aware spectral clustering to reconstruct the item-to-intent mapping. Furthermore, discrimination of session-irrelevant noise is achieved through the assignment of the target and noise intents to each session. (ii) Intent Constraint Loss, which incorporates two novel constraint paradigms regarding the diversity and accuracy to regulate the representation learning process of both items and sessions. These two objectives are unified into a single training loss through rigorous theoretical derivation. Extensive experiments across multiple SBR models and datasets demonstrate that HID can enhance both long-tail performance and recommendation accuracy, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in long-tail recommender systems.

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

Mana: Dexterous Manipulation of Articulated Tools

Authors:
Zhao-Heng Yin↗Guanya Shi↗Pieter Abbeel↗C. Karen Liu↗

Articulated tool manipulation remains a major challenge in dexterous robotics due to the need to coordinate internal degrees of freedom and contact-rich interactions. While prior work has largely focused on rigid objects, articulated tool use remains underexplored because of its physical complexity and the difficulty of learning functional grasping and manipulation policies. We present Mana (Manipulation Animator), a general sim-to-real framework that reinterprets dexterous manipulation as an animation problem. Inspired by computer animation, Mana employs a coarse-to-fine pipeline that transforms procedurally-generated grasp keyframes into manipulation trajectories through motion planning and reinforcement learning. The data generation process is largely automatic, requiring only a few mouse clicks to specify functional affordances (

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17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CalTennis: Large Multi-View Tennis Video Dataset and Benchmark of Monocular-to-3D Pose Estimation

Authors:
Ilona Demler↗Xinran Xie↗Blake Werner↗Anna Szczuka↗Pietro Perona↗

The Caltech Tennis Dataset (CalTennis) is a large-scale video benchmark for evaluating monocular-to-3D pose estimation in the wild. CalTennis comprises over 11 million frames (51 hours) of tennis practice and match play from 40 players, captured with 2-6 synchronized cameras at 60 Hz. It is 10 times larger than existing in-the-wild human motion video datasets and 3 times larger than existing MOCAP-ground-truthed datasets, and it is the first large-scale benchmark to provide synchronized multi-view recordings of expert athletic motion. The multi-view setup enables inexpensive, label-free evaluation of monocular-to-3D pose estimation algorithms. We describe a simple, standardized protocol that enables data collection without specialized equipment or expertise, along with fully automated video calibration and synchronization. Benchmarking state-of-the-art monocular-to-3D pose methods on CalTennis, we find that while 3D joint angle recovery is now quite accurate, all models struggle to estimate depth and foot contact consistently. We further propose two novel performance metrics, footwork and stability, as well as qualitatively study body shape inconsistency. These metrics expose previously underexplored failure modes and point to concrete opportunities for improvement in pose estimation and action analysis.

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18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Using wastewater surveillance to explore community-level dietary intake in sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa

Authors:
Holm↗R. H↗Chigwechokha↗Kaponda↗Stephens↗Limbong↗Ercumen↗Hart↗Workman↗C. L↗de los Reyes↗F. L↗…

Wastewater can be used to measure biomarkers that reflect population-level dietary intake and diversity; however, how this approach may apply in a low-income country remains a knowledge gap. This study aims to evaluate whether select dietary-related metabolites can be detected in wastewater and environmental surveillance (WES) samples from both sewered and non-sewered sanitation systems in Malawi, Africa. Fourteen WES samples were collected and analyzed from two university campuses in Mzuzu and Thyolo, Malawi. Four targets were analyzed: N-methyl-2-pyridone-5-carboxamide (2PY; a biomarker of vitamin B3), 4-pyridoxic acid (4-PA; a biomarker of vitamin B6), as well as enterodiol and enterolactone (biomarkers of dietary fiber and polyphenol consumption). An 18-question survey, paired spatiotemporally with the WES measurements, assessed self-reported daily dietary intake, food insecurity, and nutrient deficiency symptoms among 500 respondents. Among the 14 WES samples, 2PY, 4-PA, and enterolactone were detected, while enterodiol was not detected above the method limit (

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

Stronger Entanglement Dies Faster: Quantum Mpemba Effect in Dissipative Qubits

Authors:
Zhilong Liu↗Zehua Tian↗Jieci Wang↗

arXiv:2605.23197v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classical thermodynamics, the Mpemba effect refers to the counterintuitive observation that hot water can freeze faster than cold water, manifesting as an anomalous crossing of dynamical trajectories. While analogues of this phenomenon have been explored in open quantum systems and spin-chain entanglement asymmetry, its connection to the finite-time decoupling of quantum correlations remains elusive. In this work, we report a distinct Mpemba effect for quantum entanglement in a dissipative quantum system associated with entanglement sudden death (ESD). By analyzing two qubits interacting with local amplitude damping reservoirs, we demonstrate that a more strongly entangled initial state can experience a faster collapse into a separable state than a more weakly entangled state. This anomalous decay stems from the competition between initial coherence and excited-state population, where the latter acts as a catalyst for ESD. We provide exact analytical derivations for the trajectory crossover and ESD time, and map the phase diagram to precisely identify the parameter regime where the effect occurs. Our results offer a new strategy for controlling the lifetime of quantum resources in dissipative environments.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

A Unified Spatial AI Framework for Cross-Domain Tissue-State Analysis in Trauma, Oral, and Cardiovascular Pathology

Authors:
Pham↗T. D↗

Objective: To develop a cross-domain spatial AI framework for identifying conserved tissue-state organisation across trauma, oral disease, and cardiovascular tissue using spatial transcriptomic data. Methods: Four public spatial transcriptomic datasets spanning wound healing, periodontitis, oral squamous cell carcinoma, and cardiac tissue were integrated using recurrence modelling, graph-based spatial learning, fuzzy tissue-state analysis, and tensor decomposition. Cross-domain coupling, spatial fragmentation, recurrence structure, and permutation-based topological validation were evaluated. Results: Six conserved fuzzy tissue states were identified, dominated by extracellular matrix remodelling, fibroblast/stromal activation, endothelial signalling, and inflammatory pathways. Latent embedding analysis demonstrated strong overlap between trauma and oral domains, while cardiovascular tissue exhibited more compact spatial organisation. Oral inflammatory tissue showed the highest fragmentation, whereas cardiovascular tissue demonstrated greater recurrence coherence. Tensor decomposition identified conserved stromal-remodelling programmes across domains. Permutation testing confirmed significantly elevated graph modularity and reduced spatial entropy relative to null distributions. Conclusion: The proposed framework identified conserved spatial tissue-state architecture linking wound healing, oral pathology, and cardiovascular tissue despite differences in tissue origin, pathology, and acquisition technology. Significance: These findings demonstrate the potential of spatial AI for investigating conserved stromal and inflammatory microenvironmental organisation across clinically related disease systems and may support spatial biology research in trauma–oral–systemic health.

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21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

An integrated ultrahigh vacuum cluster tool for diamond surface science and single nitrogen-vacancy center measurements

Authors:
Zhiyang Yuan↗Sorawis Sangtawesin↗Lila V. H. Rodgers↗Kalliope Zervas↗James J. Allred↗Jared Rovny↗Patryk Gumann↗Nathalie P. de Leon↗

arXiv:2606.13961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a custom-designed ultrahigh vacuum (UHV) cluster tool developed for studying shallow nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, enabling in situ diamond surface preparation, characterization, and single NV center dynamics measurements within a single connected platform. The system combines a surface science chamber for controlled surface modification and analysis with a cryogenic confocal microscope chamber dedicated to NV spin and optical measurements. This integrated approach enables a direct correlation between diamond surface chemistry and the resulting NV spin and charge properties. The instrument provides a versatile platform for systematic studies of surface-induced decoherence mechanisms and charge dynamics for shallow NV centers, and establishes a pathway toward reproducible surface engineering for quantum sensing applications.

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22.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Optimal Shadow Estimation with Minimal Measurement Settings

Authors:
Zhiyao Yang↗Datong Chen↗Huangjun Zhu↗

arXiv:2606.20003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shadow estimation is a powerful framework for predicting quantum properties from randomized measurements. While $3$-design protocols achieve optimal worst-case performance, the minimal number of measurement bases required for such optimality has remained open. Here we prove that $\Theta(d^2)$ measurement bases are both necessary and sufficient for worst-case optimal shadow estimation and construct an explicit basis family. In stark contrast, any state $2$-design already suffices for average-case optimality: the mean squared shadow norm of normalized observables is bounded by a universal constant, and we prove strong concentration for Haar-random states, yielding constant sample complexity for generic pure-state fidelity estimation. Easily implementable $2$-designs – from mutually unbiased bases, cyclic measurements, or shallow $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$-depth circuits – enable optimal average-case protocols with remarkably simple measurement strategies. Our results establish a fundamental complexity separation: worst-case estimation requires $\Theta(d^2)$ bases, whereas average-case performance requires only $\Theta(d)$ bases, with broad implications for quantum information theory and near-term experiments.

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

Can News Predict the Market? Limits of Zero-Shot Financial NLP and the Role of Explainable AI

Authors:
Ali M Karaoglu↗Shreyank N Gowda↗

Can financial news reliably predict short-term stock movements? Despite advances in large language models, this question remains unresolved. We revisit this problem using a zero-shot natural language processing framework, investigating whether models can extract actionable signals from financial news without domain-specific training. We design a structured pipeline that combines zero-shot natural language inference with temporal aggregation, explicitly modelling recency and event-dependent impact horizons when integrating information across articles. To address the need for transparency in high-stakes settings, we introduce a multi-layered explainability framework that links predictions to token-level, article-level, and aggregate evidence, and produces grounded natural language rationales. Across multiple models and prediction horizons, we find that zero-shot approaches consistently fail to outperform simple baselines, with particularly weak performance on negative movements, suggesting deeper structural limitations in mapping news sentiment to short-term price dynamics. However, explainability signals reliably distinguish between trustworthy and unreliable predictions, offering practical value even when accuracy is limited. These findings highlight the limits of zero-shot financial NLP and motivate a shift toward decision-support systems that prioritise transparency and uncertainty awareness. Code: https://github.com/alimert05/zero-shot-stock-xai

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24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Listening with Attention: Entropy-Guided Explainability for Transformer-Based Audio Models

Authors:
Ravi Ranjan↗Utkarsh Grover↗Xiaomin Lin↗Agoritsa Polyzou↗

arXiv:2606.14647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Transformer-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) models such as Whisper are highly accurate, but their predictions remain difficult to interpret. Existing explainable AI (XAI) methods often lack faithfulness and precise temporal grounding. We propose Listening with Entropy-guided Attention for Faithful explainability (LEAF-X), a model-intrinsic XAI framework for transformer-based ASR. LEAF-X combines entropy-guided attention weighting, multi-layer attention rollout, and optional causal ablations to identify low-entropy, high-impact heads and layers, producing sparse token-to-frame attributions. Unlike perturbation-based explainers or raw attention maps, LEAF-X exploits the internal structure of encoder-decoder and speech-augmented decoder-only models to generate explanations that better reflect model computation. Results show 32% improved faithfulness, 35-39% stronger locality/sparsity, and the most stable attributions, supporting more transparent and auditable ASR.

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25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

As Easy as Rocket Science: Assessing the Ability of Large Language Models to Interpret Negation in Figurative Language

Authors:
Jasmine Owers↗Edwin Simpson↗Martha Lewis↗

Figurative language and negation are two areas that challenge current language models, however, both are widely used throughout written and spoken language. Large language models (LLMs) are also widely used in everyday contexts where they cannot necessarily be tuned for a specific dataset. It is therefore essential to understand the ability of LLMs to correctly interpret text that includes both negation and figurative language. To investigate this, we develop a set of new annotations to an existing dataset of figurative language, and test a range of language models on the dataset. We find that the combination of negation and figurativeness can present a particular challenge, and that performance overall and across different negation types is particularly dependent on the prompt style used.

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