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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

EPEdit: Redefining Image Editing with Generative AI and User-Centric Design

The demand for image manipulation has seen a significant increase recently. Traditional tools like Photoshop and Capture One, while powerful, require considerable expertise to use effectively. Generative AI has introduced alternative platforms, such as Luminar Neo, Pixlr X, and Canva. However, many of these solutions, including resource-heavy models like Stable Diffusion, often require substantial retraining and fine-tuning, leading to high costs for users. To address these challenges, we introduce Efficient Photo Editor (EPEdit), an application that integrates a robust backend framework with a user-friendly front-end interface. EPEdit supports a wide range of creative image editing tasks, including image generation, object replacement, object removal, background modification, changes in object pose or perspective, region-specific editing, and thematic collection design, all guided by masks and prompts. Users can interact with the system through simple text commands or by marking areas for precise adjustments, making it accessible even to those without technical expertise. At its core, EPEdit leverages zero-shot image editing algorithms based on Stable Diffusion model, removing the need for additional fine-tuning. This approach enables efficient image manipulation and thematic collection creation. User evaluations for tasks of image editing, thematic design, and overall system performance demonstrate that EPEdit outperforms existing solutions, offering a user-friendly, cost-effective solution for comprehensive image editing.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

International Consensus Guideline on Management of Genitourinary Adverse Events Associated with Prostate Cancer Radiotherapy

Purpose/Objective: Genitourinary (GU) adverse events (AEs) are common during and after pelvic radiation therapy (RT) for prostate cancer and can substantially impact quality of life. We convened an international committee to establish consensus in the prevention, mitigation, and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs, as there are no relevant evidence-based consensus guidelines to inform treating providers. Materials/Methods: A systematic evidence review focused on mitigation and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs was performed in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane. The following topics were addressed: management of acute GU AEs in the intact and post-operative settings; RT techniques; bladder outlet obstruction procedures; and indications for urology referral or hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO). Evidence-based consensus recommendations were developed using a Delphi process. We highlight the current state of evidence and evidence gaps worthy of future study. Results: Consensus was reached for 31 key questions. For management of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), most evidence comes from trials in patients without cancer and not undergoing RT. A consensus algorithm for medical management of acute GU AEs was developed with the following highlights: (a) alpha blockers as 1st-line for obstructive symptoms in the intact setting, (b) anti-spasmodics as 1st -line for irritative symptoms in the intact setting, and (c) anti-spasmodics as 1st -line in the post-operative setting. The consensus algorithm provides an ordered list of medications to offer if 1st -line options afford inadequate relief. For RT fractionation, randomized clinical trial (RCT) data are available. 40% of panelists rarely or never use standard fractionation over moderate hypofractionation for patients with baseline LUTS, but most consider moderate hypofractionation over SBRT for AUA IPSS > 15. For patients with severe obstructive LUTS (most commonly AUA IPSS >20), the panel recommends a prophylactic bladder outlet obstruction procedure and, if obstructive symptoms improve, consideration of moderate hypofractionation or SBRT, based on retrospective data. There is one RCT supporting use of HBO for late radiation cystitis. Conclusions: The consensus guideline synthesizes available evidence and expert opinion across key clinical decision points to provide practical guidance in the prevention, mitigation, and management of radiation-related acute and late GU AEs in prostate cancer RT. Envisioned as a living document with periodic updates, this guideline serves as a resource for practicing radiation oncologists by outlining expert-derived consensus recommendations of evidence-based care in areas where high-quality data is limited.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Discovering Novel intracranial EEG Biomarkers of Seizure Generating Tissue through Time-Frequency Analysis

Objective: EEG biomarkers for seizure-generating tissue have historically been identified visually, which lacks objectivity and limits utility of automated approaches. For example, high frequency oscillations and interictal epileptiform discharges were promising markers to improve surgical outcomes for refractory epilepsy, but low specificity has hindered clinical implementation, and automated algorithms have not improved this. Methods: We developed Intracranial EEG Pattern Identification and Categorization, an automated, data-driven time-frequency framework for EEG biomarker discovery. It detects transient high-power intracranial EEG waveforms (1-500 Hz) and characterizes them using eight features. In seizure-free patients, waveforms occurring predominantly in resected intracranial EEG channels are candidate biomarkers. Results: In retrospective data from 14 seizure-free post-surgical patients from University of California, Los Angeles, we identified 9 waveform categories strongly associated with resected intracranial EEG channels. These included beta, gamma, and ripple band bursts, sometimes co-occurring with interictal epileptiform discharges; however, many were visually imperceptible in the broadband EEG. Using a support vector machine, we generated a unified classification metric based on these waveforms and tested it on 87 seizure-free subjects from Detroit Medical Center. This metric achieved higher area under the precision-recall curve than six state-of-the-art benchmark algorithms (p

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

EERLoss: A Novel Loss Function for Training Deep Biometric Models. A Case Study in Keystroke Dynamics

Deep learning approaches to biometric verification are commonly trained by optimizing indirect objectives, creating a misalignment between the optimization process and the primary evaluation metric, typically the Equal Error Rate (EER). This paper introduces EERLoss: a subdifferentiable, arbitrarily accurate approximation to EER for training deep biometric models. Furthermore, this framework has the potential to be adapted to optimize any specific operating point on the DET curve, enhancing its generalizability. To validate this approach, EERLoss is evaluated on a particularly demanding behavioral biometric modality: keystroke dynamics verification. This task is characterized by its high intra-class and low inter-class variability. Experiments are conducted on the large-scale KVC-onGoing benchmark, incorporating data from over 185,000 subjects across different scenarios. A comprehensive ablation study initially demonstrates the superiority of EERLoss in comparison to existing state-of-the-art loss functions. It also converges substantially faster compared to other losses, reducing the overall training cost. Additionally, a comparison is made between the proposed loss and the KVC-winning architecture by re-training it with EERLoss, demonstrating that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the original SoTA, achieving a relative EER reduction of up to approx. 30\%. This improvement on a challenging, large-scale benchmark validates the effectiveness of EERLoss as a task-aligned training objective specifically suited for high-variance biometric traits.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Domain-Validity-Gated Metamorphic Testing of Scientific ML Surrogates

arXiv:2606.17529v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific machine-learning (SciML) surrogates approximate expensive simulations, but exact expected outputs for arbitrary inputs are unavailable (the oracle problem). Metamorphic testing checks relations across executions, yet a candidate relation is not automatically valid: its preconditions, output mapping, and the numerical floor of the scoring operator determine whether a violation is meaningful. We study how candidate metamorphic relations (MRs) can be screened for domain validity and turned into executable, oracle-free test assets for SciML surrogates. We propose (i) a domain-validity rubric that admits a candidate only when its tolerance dominates the operator's numerical floor and its preconditions hold; (ii) an MR-card executable-asset format recording source cases, transformations, metrics, tolerances, and typed relation-level verdicts; and (iii) a case-study protocol on MeshGraphNets cylinder-flow surrogates, with a claim ledger binding every result to a tracked artifact. On a MeshGraphNets checkpoint, node permutation holds to machine precision, mirror-y is a bounded out-of-distribution stress finding rather than an exact symmetry, and absolute conservation stays deferred while a reference-relative guard passes. The same readings hold across held-out trajectories, a checkpoint roster, three further architectures, and PhysicsNeMo. On a second CFD task (compressible airfoil) the predicate instead rejects incompressible continuity on physical grounds, showing it reasons about domain validity rather than running a fixed checklist. On a second PDE family, FNO Burgers and heat surrogates run full admit/reject/execute verdicts. The evidence spans two CFD tasks and a second PDE family, supporting a validity-aware bridge from candidate MRs to auditable SciML test assets that separates model-level violations from out-of-domain applications.

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

Quantum Simulation of Spin-Dependent Electron Transfer in a Synthetic Chiral Lattice with a Trapped Ion

arXiv:2606.13930v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Electron transfer through chiral structures can exhibit spin asymmetry, known as the chiral-induced spin selectivity effect, whose microscopic origin remains an open question. While path-interference within the chiral moiety has been proposed as a key mechanism, its experimental validation requires precise and versatile tunability of system parameters. Here we implement a programmable quantum simulation of spin-dependent electron transfer in a donor–chiral-bridge–acceptor model using a trapped ion. The bridge is encoded in internal states of the ion with tunable nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor couplings, while donor and acceptor states are coupled via a spectator bosonic motional mode. We observe spin-dependent interference within the bridge, and further reveal spin-dependence in donor-to-acceptor transfer dynamics, controlled by amplitude and phase of the coupling parameter. Our results identify interference among spin-dependent pathways as a microscopic origin of spin-dependent transfer, and open a route toward quantum simulations of complex chiral lattices with multi-level and bosonic degrees of freedom.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Neural Additive and Basis Models with Feature Selection and Interactions

arXiv:2606.19850v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep neural networks (DNNs) exhibit attractive performance in various fields but often suffer from low interpretability. The neural additive model (NAM) and its variant called the neural basis model (NBM) use neural networks (NNs) as nonlinear shape functions in generalized additive models (GAMs). Both models are highly interpretable and exhibit good performance and flexibility for NN training. NAM and NBM can provide and visualize the contribution of each feature to the prediction owing to GAM-based architectures. However, when using two-input NNs to consider feature interactions or when applying them to high-dimensional datasets, training NAM and NBM becomes intractable due to the increase in the computational resources required. This paper proposes incorporating the feature selection mechanism into NAM and NBM to resolve computational bottlenecks. We introduce the feature selection layer in both models and update the selection weights during training. Our method is simple and can reduce computational costs and model sizes compared to vanilla NAM and NBM. In addition, it enables us to use two-input NNs even in high-dimensional datasets and capture feature interactions. We demonstrate that the proposed models are computationally efficient compared to vanilla NAM and NBM, and they exhibit better or comparable performance with state-of-the-art GAMs.

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

Quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold networks for PDEs

arXiv:2606.20326v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop QCPIKAN, the first quantum-classical physics-informed Kolmogorov-Arnold network designed to solve partial differential equations (PDEs). Built upon Chebyshev-polynomial KAN layers and parameterized quantum circuits, this hybrid framework embeds physical constraints into the training loss to enforce physical consistency. Our theoretical investigations grounded in approximation theory prove that this design accelerates high-frequency error convergence to an exponential rate and effectively mitigates numerical dispersion. We validate the framework across three typical seepage scenarios in porous media, including single-phase flow, component transport and two-phase flow. Compared with existing quantum-classical physics-informed neural networks, QCPIKAN achieves superior performance in global prediction accuracy, local error control, dynamic evolution tracking and displacement front localization. This work provides a robust and efficient alternative for solving complex PDEs.

09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

Histology-informed spatial domain identification through multi-view graph convolutional networks

作者:

by Huihui Zhang, Jiaxing Chang, Zirong Li, Yue Sun, Pinli Hu, Haoxiu Wang, Hang Yang, Yonglin Ren, Xingtan Zhang, Zehua Chen, Kok Wai Wong, Haojing Shao Identifying spatial domains is crucial in spatial transcriptomics, yet effectively integrating gene expression, spatial location, and histology remains challenging. We present STESH, a Spatial Transcriptomics clustering method that combines Expression, Spatial information and Histology. STESH extracts histological features using a convolutional neural network and generates expression, histology, spatial, and collaborative convolution modules for a multi-view graph convolutional network with a decoder and attention mechanism. We evaluated STESH on multiple tissue types and technology platforms. STESH consistently outperformed ten state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior clustering accuracy with the highest scores in adjusted Rand index, normalized mutual information, and Fowlkes-Mallows index.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Fast formation to reinforce lithium-rich cathodes

作者:

Formation in lithium-ion battery manufacturing typically involves low-rate charge–discharge cycles to establish stable electrode–electrolyte interfaces—a time-consuming process1–4. Here, our findings on lithium-rich layered oxide cathodes challenge the necessity of conventional formation, which can even shorten battery lifespan. Fast formation, on the other hand, reduces production cost and enhances capacity and stability. Multiscale synchrotron-based techniques show that residual lithium ions after the initial charge are critical for subsequent structural evolution and cycling performance. Deep lithium de-intercalation causes severe structural degradation and capacity loss due to the inherently fragile lithium-deficient matrix. By contrast, the residual lithium ions from fast formation enhance reversibility through a self-pinning effect, preventing pernicious lattice deformation and reinforcing the ion-storage framework. Adjusting the initial charge current density from 0.2 C to 2 C improves reversible capacity by 20% and extends cycle life by more than 36%. This approach can also be extended to other electrode systems, providing insights for more-efficient battery production. Fast formation in lithium-ion batteries outperforms conventional slow formation, lowering costs and improving battery capacity, stability and cycle life, offering broader application to electrode systems.

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

BioMamba: Domain-Adaptive Biomedical Language Models

Background. Biomedical language models should improve performance on biomedical text while retaining general-language-modeling fluency. For Mamba-based models, this trade-off has not been systematically studied across biomedical literature and clinical text. Methods. We developed BioMamba, a family of biomedical Mamba2 models at five scales obtained by continued pretraining of released public Mamba2 checkpoints on a balanced 80%/10%/10% mixture of PubMed abstracts, the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus (C4), and Wikipedia. The contribution is the adaptation recipe and the accompanying open-weight checkpoints. Results. Across five scales, BioMamba consistently lowered PubMed perplexity, improved Wikipedia-style held-out perplexity by 1.46-4.72 PPL, and left C4 perplexity essentially unchanged. On six out-of-domain multiple-choice benchmarks, BioMamba stayed within +/-3 percentage points of Mamba2 with no systematic regression. After supervised fine-tuning, BioMamba+SFT matched or exceeded Mamba2+SFT on MIMIC-IV note completion and discharge summary generation at every evaluated scale, and improved PubMedQA at every scale. The strongest model (BioMamba-2.7B) reached a PubMed perplexity of 5.28 and accuracies of 90.24% and 73.00% on BioASQ and PubMedQA, respectively. Conclusions. A balanced domain-adaptive continued pretraining recipe strengthens Mamba2 language models on biomedical literature and clinical text while preserving general-language-modeling fluency.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Biomedical Capacity, Governance, and Health Security: A Dominican Republic Research Analysis of Stakeholder Perspectives

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities in globally concentrated biomedical supply chains and accelerated interest in nearshoring and hemispheric health-security strategies. The Dominican Republic, already the third-largest medical device exporter in Latin America, occupies a strategically significant but institutionally constrained position within this realignment. This study evaluates stakeholder perceptions of the principal opportunities and barriers affecting biomedical ecosystem development in the Dominican Republic, with particular attention to governance, workforce capacity, and value-chain upgrading pathways. Methods. A concurrent mixed-methods design was employed, integrating a cross-sectional electronic survey of 142 purposively sampled domain experts (administered September-December 2025) with a qualitative executive consultation with senior government and industry leaders. Survey analyses combined descriptive statistics, one-sample t-tests against the scale neutral midpoint, chi-square goodness-of-fit tests, Friedman non-parametric ranking, Spearman rank correlations, and exploratory linear and logistic multivariable regression. Qualitative responses were analyzed using a framework approach grounded in the Triple Helix model of innovation systems. Results. Perceived government support was significantly below neutral (mean = 2.67, SD = 1.12; p = 0.034). Workforce shortages (83.3%) and weak academia-industry collaboration (71.4%) were the most frequently endorsed barriers ({chi}2(5) = 18.7, p = 0.002). Regulatory modernization (88.1%) and workforce development (85.7%) ranked as the highest-priority policy levers (Friedman p = 0.005). Clinical trials and contract research organization services were the dominant sub-sector priority (76.2%, binomial p < 0.001). In multivariable analysis, perceived government support, talent availability, and confidence in IP protection jointly explained 46% of the variance in sector competitiveness (R2 = 0.46, p < 0.001). Strong majority support existed for a formal public-private biomedical coordination authority (73.8%, p < 0.001).Conclusion. Institutional credibility and advanced human capital–rather than geography or market access–are the perceived binding constraints on the Dominican Republics biomedical trajectory. Regulatory modernization, targeted workforce investment, and the establishment of a national biomedical coordination authority represent the highest-leverage interventions for positioning the country as a hemispheric hub for biomedical manufacturing, clinical research, and health security.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Multiple Topological Haldane Phases for Symmetry-Protected Quantum Information Processing

arXiv:2606.12685v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Symmetry-protected topological phases have attracted significant interest at the fundamental level and as a potential platform for quantum information processing, owing to their protected edge states and resilience to perturbations. Applying these features for practical and efficient quantum computation is highly desirable, but remains an open challenge. Here, we demonstrate the partitioning into multiple independent Haldane phase subsystems of a single spin-1/2 ladder system and propose this as a scalable architecture for gate-based quantum computation, which takes advantage of the symmetry-protected topological order. We encode qubits in the two topological states of the $S^{z}=0$ sector of each subsystem. Finite-size effects, typically viewed as detrimental, instead provide a controllable energy splitting that enables single-qubit rotations using only local magnetic fields. An Ising-type interaction between neighboring subsystem edges generates entangling gates, enabling universal quantum computation driven by two control parameters that are easily accessible experimentally. Our results demonstrate how symmetry-protected topological phases can be directly harnessed for circuit-model quantum computation in realistic systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Every Eval Ever: A Unifying Schema and Community Repository for AI Evaluation Results

AI evaluations are widely used for testing and understanding progress. However, the diverse evaluators bring with them inconsistencies that challenge analysis and comparison. First, results are saved in incompatible formats, scattered across leaderboards, papers, blog posts, evaluation harness logs, and custom repositories. Second, results are created by different evaluation frameworks, which produce divergent scores for nominally identical evaluations and record metadata inconsistently, hindering comparison, cross-community evaluation science, cost reduction, and reuse. We introduce Every Eval Ever, the first shared schema and community-crowdsourced repository for AI evaluation results. The schema standardizes how evaluations are represented in a unified, single JSON document. It is source-agnostic by design, ingesting results from evaluation harnesses and papers alike, and optionally stores per-instance outputs for fine-grained analysis. We contribute: (i) a community-governed metadata schema with a companion instance-level schema, the first standardization effort of its kind; (ii) automatic converters from popular formats, evaluation harnesses, and leaderboards to the unified schema; and (iii) a crowdsourced community database hosted on Hugging Face, currently spanning to date 22,235 models, 2,273 unique benchmarks, and 31 evaluation formats.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Antimicrobial-resistant E. coli in human, animal and environmental reservoirs in rural Bangladeshi households with young children

In low-income countries, ESBL-producing Escherichia coli (ESBL-EC) is frequently detected in humans, animals and household environments, indicating widespread exposure to antimicrobial resistance (AMR). Established risk factors such as antibiotic use do not explain the high community carriage of AMR in all settings; identifying the dominant exposure pathways can inform interventions against AMR. We aimed to investigate (i) animal-human-environment sharing of AMR by assessing associations between the abundance of ESBL-EC in the household environment, domestic animal feces and young children's stool and (ii) household factors associated with ESBL-EC abundance in these reservoirs. We enrolled 112 households from the CRADLE trial in rural Bangladesh. We enumerated ESBL-EC in drinking water, food, child hand rinses, outdoor soil, indoor floor swabs, chicken and cow feces, and stool from children aged 6 months. We recorded indicators of sanitation, animal ownership/management, human and animal antibiotic use, and child exposure behaviors using structured questionnaires and spot checks. The highest prevalence of ESBL-EC was in child stool (95.6%) and animal feces (82.3-96.9%), followed by soil (48.2%) and floors (36.6%); < 10% of food, child hands and drinking water harbored ESBL-EC. The abundance of ESBL-EC in child stool was not associated with its abundance in any sampled matrix; the abundance in chicken but not cow feces showed positive correlations with soil, floors, child hands, and drinking water (correlation coefficients: 0.19-0.39, p-values < 0.05). Higher-quality latrines (improved, pour-flush, with slab) were associated with lower ESBL-EC abundance across matrices; unsafe animal management (animals roaming or spending the night inside the home) was associated with higher abundance. Child antibiotic use and exposure behaviors (soil ingestion, time spent on floor) were not associated with ESBL-EC abundance in child stool. We observed high AMR colonization among young children and domestic animals in rural Bangladesh not explained by traditional fecal-oral exposure pathways. Future studies should explore additional pathways and assess whether sanitation and animal management improvements can reduce AMR.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

MinderCare: protocol for a mixed-methods evaluation of a digitally enabled dementia care service.

Introduction and aims Dementia is a growing public health challenge affecting millions of people worldwide. It is a progressive condition that increases the risk of infections, falls, hospital admissions, dependence in activities of daily living, safety issues such as wandering, care home transfers, and death. New ways of supporting people living with dementia (PLWD) at home are urgently needed. We describe the MinderCare study which evaluates a digitally enabled care model that integrates low-burden sensor-based remote monitoring within a nurse-led clinical service. Methods and analysis In this mixed-methods study, we will recruit 100 people with confirmed or suspected dementia living at home and deploy the Minder remote monitoring system for at least 12 months. A detailed characterisation of the cohort will be obtained, including cognition, frailty, participant and carer wellbeing, functioning, and quality of life. The feasibility, acceptability, sustainability, and resource requirements of the service will also be assessed. Low-cost sensors provide information about behaviour, environment and physiology from the home. Machine-learning algorithms have been used to develop digital biomarkers of infection, sleep, night-time behaviours, daily activities and routines, and the effects of clinical events and treatment. These will be assessed through clinical reports of sensor-derived data that include anomaly alerts provided to the clinical teams. Algorithms will be assessed for their clinical utility and acceptability. The comparative-effectiveness component will be designed as a target trial emulation using linked electronic health-record data to construct a time-indexed external usual-care control cohort. The primary comparative outcome will be Days Alive and Out of Hospital (DAOH) over 12 months from the activation-index date, with healthcare utilisation, costs, institutionalisation and mortality assessed as secondary outcomes. DAOH and estimated MinderCare effects will also be examined across prespecified strata of baseline inpatient utilisation. Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval has been granted by the North East Newcastle and North Tyneside 2 Research Ethics Committee, and the study has received confirmation of capacity and capability by the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Study findings will be disseminated to patients, health and social care professionals, and policymakers through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. Study registration number: ISRCTN14997677 and NIHR portfolio CPMSID 63023.

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

Discovering Functionally Selective Brain Regions with a Deep Topographic Multimodal Model

arXiv:2606.09770v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Nearby neurons in cortex share similar response profiles, producing systematic spatial organization across sensory and cognitive systems. Recent topographic models reproduce aspects of this structure but remain unimodal and spatially constrain each layer separately, yielding fragmented maps that capture neither the contiguity of cortical processing streams nor their integration across modalities. We introduce Topo-Omni, a topographic multimodal model in which visual, auditory, and language/cognitive processing share a single contiguous in-silico sheet. Built by fine-tuning a pretrained foundation model with a spatial smoothness objective, this architecture develops clusters across modalities that are consistent with human neuroimaging, from sensory to cognitive systems. Driving or suppressing a cluster selectively biases or impairs perception, paralleling human intervention studies. Finally, we use our model to screen for novel clusters in-silico and discover new natural landscape and animal networks which we validate in human data. A single spatial principle thus organizes representations across modalities and processing stages, yielding testable hypotheses about cortical organization.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A thalamus–brainstem attractor network drives history-biased decisions

作者:

Natural environments often change gradually, making it adaptive to bias decisions on the basis of the recent past — a phenomenon known as serial dependence1–3. Large-scale recordings during behaviour have identified that serial dependence is a common motif for decision-making, with neural representations of past experiences found throughout the brain4–11. However, it remains unclear whether this bias arises from dedicated neural circuits with history-specific computations. Using whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging in zebrafish performing memory-guided evasive manoeuvres12–14, we identified a hierarchical circuit that maintains past information and biases future choices. Discrete attractors in the dorsal thalamus encoded the position of the most recent obstacle, maintaining a categorical memory via persistent activity lasting 10–20 s. Optogenetic manipulation of the dorsal thalamus abolished or imposed serial bias. A downstream hindbrain integrator received input from the thalamus and combined it with current sensory cues to produce graded responses reflecting multi-trial history. Leveraging a comprehensive brain atlas in zebrafish15, we constructed a whole-brain computational model that recapitulated behaviour and also predicted a key role for heterogeneous inhibitory subtypes in enabling flexible state transitions. This attractor–integrator architecture reveals a hierarchical and modular computation that unifies robust memory retention with flexible sensory integration, providing a general principle for history-biased decisions. Whole-brain, cellular-resolution imaging reveals a hierarchical thalamus–brainstem attractor network that encodes recent history and shapes behavioural bias in zebrafish.

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

cAPM: Continual AI-Assisted Pace-Mapping with Active Learning

arXiv:2606.19373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ventricular tachycardia is a life-threatening rhythm disorder and a major cause of sudden cardiac death. Pace-mapping is a clinical procedure for identifying the intervention target during catheter ablation of VT. It requires clinicians to pace different sites in the ventricles and rapidly interpret the resulting electrocardiograms to determine where to pace next or whether a target site has been identified. Active learning AI models have been proposed to guide clinicians to the next pacing site, showing promise in reducing the number of pacing sites and improving the efficiency of pace-mapping. Existing methods require retraining each target without the ability to transfer knowledge across multiple VTs within the same patient or across patients. We introduce cAPM for continuous AI-assisted pace-mapping to capture and transfer knowledge accumulated from past pace-mapping data to reduce the number of pace-mapping data needed for future target VTs. This is made possible by a task-agnostic surrogate neural network that learns the mapping from pacing sites to 12-lead ECG morphology, an active-learning strategy that refines this surrogate model by selecting the most informative pacing site for each target, and a continual learning strategy to do so sequentially while retaining knowledge from prior targets. Evaluated on an in-silico testbed consisting of sequentially-presented localization tasks across different physiological conditions and ventricular geometries, cAPM with and without replay of past data samples achieved an 81% probability of localizing within clinical tolerance (5 mm accuracy) using 4.5 pace-mapping sites, compared to the state-of-the-art active-learning method achieving 38% probability using 13.7 pacing sites. These results provide a strong basis for preparing cAPM towards in-vivo preclinical and clinical studies where it can be used to guide pace-mapping.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

ASALT: Adaptive State Alignment for Lateral Transfer in Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.24601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) addresses the problem of training multiple agents that pursue collaborative, competitive, or mixed objectives. Prior work has investigated transfer learning between source and target domains in MARL; however, the majority of existing approaches impose the constraint that the dimensionalities of the observation space and the global state space must be identical across domains. In this paper, we introduce a method that explicitly accommodates mismatched state-space dimensionalities between source and target domains. The proposed approach, ASALT, incorporates both observation-level and state-level adapters that map the target-domain observations and global states into a shared embedding space, thereby enabling more effective transfer of knowledge across both actors and critics. These adapters can generate embeddings that support efficient strategy transfer across heterogeneous domains. Experimental results on multiple configurations in standard benchmark environments demonstrate that ASALT surpasses existing baselines in terms of sample efficiency and global return in cooperative settings, but its effectiveness depends on the degree of mismatch between source and target domains. Furthermore, our findings indicate that ASALT mitigates negative transfer, which frequently constitutes a major obstacle when transferring policies between domains with differing observation and action spaces.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

FedSteer: Taming Extreme Gradient Staleness in Federated Learning with Corrective Projections and Caching

arXiv:2606.10124v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Federated learning (FL) is often subject to aggregation variance if clients do not consistently participate in training rounds. While reusing stale model updates from inactive clients is a common technique to reduce this variance, we find that with skewed client participation, the resulting update staleness can become severe enough to destabilize training. To remedy this, we propose FedSteer, a novel method that constructs a gradient subspace from a cache of recent client gradients to serve as a low-dimensional representation of the current optimization landscape. FedSteer projects an active client's true gradient onto this subspace to find a set of optimal coordinates. For an inactive client, FedSteer reuses these coordinates with the now-evolved subspace drifted by other active clients. This process effectively "steers" outdated gradients toward the current global objective. This is complemented by a selective caching strategy that identifies a representative client subset to form the subspace, reducing server memory. Experiments demonstrate that FedSteer significantly outperforms baselines, preventing performance collapse in challenging scenarios while delivering accuracy gains of over 7% in others.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Modeling Complex Behaviors: Multi-Personality Composition and Dynamic Switching in Vision-Language Models

With the widespread deployment of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in social interaction, understanding and controlling their behavior under complex personality conditions is essential. This paper introduces explicit personality conditioning and establishes a systematic evaluation framework encompassing single-personality induction, multi-personality induction, and personality switching. Experiments show that personality induction improves image captioning performance but can impair performance on tasks requiring precise reasoning, such as visual question answering (VQA). Balancing and residual effects are observed during multi-trait composition and dynamic switching, indicating that model behavior is co-modulated by both previous and current personality constraints. Existing prompt-based personality induction methods show limited transferability to multimodal settings. Our work reveals the dynamic and complex nature of personality modeling in MLLMs and underscores the need for robust, tailored methods for personality induction and evaluation. The code will be released when the paper is accepted.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Evaluation Metrics as Averaged Outcomes of Fair Gambles

arXiv:2401.14483v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In the current practices of machine learning, the evaluation of forecasts has become a cornerstone of scientific progress. A multitude of evaluation metrics have been suggested and used to qualify "good" forecasts. What do those metrics share? How are they related? In this work, we use a protocol borrowed from game-theoretic probability to show that a large part of evaluation metrics can be viewed as averaged outcomes of fair gambles. Intuitively, a fair gambler is one which a forecaster would expect to fail. Hence, the gambler's ability to gain disproves the quality of the forecast. Standard evaluation metrics are then variants of choices of such fair gambles. In particular, this choice is structured along two dimensions, one of which separates calibration-type and regret-type metrics. In particular, this framework sheds light on the relationship of calibration and regret showing a theoretical equivalence in their ability to evaluate when being scaled appropriately, but the incomparability of obtained scores.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Intrinsic Pointer Basis and Irreversible Classicality from Coherence Contraction

arXiv:2604.23304v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work analyzes an operational route to classical behavior for reduced quantum states using the intrinsic reference basis (IRB). Relative to a fixed physical conjugation, the IRB separates intrinsic populations from a real antisymmetric cohesion sector. A globally bounded cohesion index is defined and its exponential contraction is proved for phase-free dephasing dynamics aligned with the IRB; for general aligned dephasing, the corresponding modulus-based coherence functional contracts at the same computable rates. The results provide distance bounds to the IRB-diagonal description and a logarithmic upper bound on the time required to reach a prescribed experimental tolerance. The IRB projectors constitute state-derived candidate pointer sectors, and they become dynamically stable pointer sectors when the effective dephasing generator is aligned with them and damps the relevant inter-sector coherences. Degenerate population sectors lead naturally to block-classicality and protected intra-block coherence. In a two-level active sector, the cohesion index equals fringe visibility, giving a direct interferometric test of the contraction law. The construction is independent of any spacetime- or unification-emergence hypothesis and is intended as a channel-level complement to environment-induced einselection.

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arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Avoiding Exponential Blow-Up in Distributive Lattice Submodular Minimization

作者:

Submodular function minimization has gained a lot of interest in recent years. They are highly applicable in the area of Computer Vision and Machine Learning. Often such applications require to work with submodular functions defined on distributive lattice. Current best way of dealing with it is using a transformation which extrapolates the submodular function for the respective boolean lattice. It makes optimization system too inefficient due to enlargement of the working space. Quantitatively, the expanded space has additional exponential (in set size) number of elements. We propose a generic framework for dealing with distributive lattice which only works within distributive lattice. Our framework allows one to use already established submodular function minimization algorithms for boolean lattice. In our experiment, we show the huge improvement in terms of running time over tranditional methods for handling distributive lattice.