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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

GMN4AD: Graph Matching Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis with Test-Time Domain Adaptation using Multi-centered Structure Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects millions of older adults, with prevalence expected to rise significantly in the coming years. Early diagnosis, particularly during the mild cognitive impairment (MCI) stage, is critical for timely intervention. Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI) has emerged as a key modality for detecting AD-related brain changes, but traditional graph-based approaches often struggle with modality and inter-site heterogeneity, limiting diagnostic performance. In this paper, we propose Graph Matching Network for Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis (GMN4AD), designed to model interactions between heterogeneous brain graphs derived from neuroimaging data. Unlike conventional methods that treat each brain graph independently, GMN4AD leverages graph matching to capture cross-graph relationships, enhancing diagnostic precision. Furthermore, we introduce a test-time domain adaptation strategy that combines contrastive learning to mitigate domain shifts during inference. Extensive experiments on three public AD datasets demonstrate that GMN4AD achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods, offering a robust and generalizable solution for AD diagnosis.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Higher order PCA-like rotation-invariant features for detailed shape descriptors modulo rotation

Authors:

PCA can be used for rotation invariant features, describing a shape with its $p_{ab}=E[(x_i-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])]$ covariance matrix approximating shape by ellipsoid, allowing for rotation invariants like its traces of powers. However, real shapes are usually much more complicated, hence there is proposed its extension to e.g. $p_{abc}=E[(x_a-E[x_a])(x_b-E[x_b])(x_c-E[x_c])]$ order-3 or higher tensors describing central moments, or polynomial times Gaussian allowing decodable shape descriptors of arbitrarily high accuracy, and their analogous rotation invariants. Its practical applications could be rotation-invariant features to include shape modulo rotation e.g. for molecular shape descriptors, or for up to rotation object recognition in 2D images/3D scans maybe also for 3D scene understanding, or shape similarity metric allowing inexpensive comparison of objects modulo rotation avoiding costly optimization over rotations.

03.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Virtual Responsive Neurostimulation Implantation: From Intracranial Connectivity to Optimized Lead Placement

Responsive neurostimulation (RNS) is an implanted device that delivers direct brain stimulation for drug-resistant focal epilepsy. Individual responses are highly variable, and no validated framework exists to predict outcome or guide lead placement before implantation. We hypothesized that this variability is partly explained by lead placement in relation to patterns of functional connectivity in brain networks. Fourty-nine patients with drug-resistant focal epilepsy who underwent pre-implantation intracranial EEG (iEEG) and RNS implantation across three independent epilepsy centers were retrospectively studied. We developed a composite functional connectivity score, based on simple Spearman correlation, combining the standard deviation and kurtosis of interictal iEEG connectivity distributions to predict the response outcome in a training cohort (HUP, n=18) and validated in two independent cohorts (NYU, n=17; UCSF, n=14). We accounted for a spatial mismatch between iEEG and RNS electrodes with a distance-based correction. The score was extended to generate patient-specific 3D maps of predicted RNS efficacy across 200 simulated, or virtual RNS, lead configurations. Accuracy of the score in predicting clinical outcome was 72% at the group level, 61% at the individual patient level, and, after distance-based optimization, 100% in patients with RNS electrodes placed close to location of iEEG electrodes. Applied to the validation cohort, the same score reached 68% accuracy (71% balanced accuracy, 55% sensitivity, 88% specificity). The spatial combination of the scores at different SEEG contacts localization gives a spatial score for each patient. Responders showed significantly higher spatial scores than non-responders, supporting that actual RNS lead placement in responders was located in map-identified favorable regions. Interictal iEEG functional connectivity predicts individual RNS response across independent epilepsy centers, and patient-specific 3D maps derived from this biomarker could prospectively guide lead implantation toward favorable network regions, opening a promising avenue toward network-informed RNS surgical planning.

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

Automated ultrasound doppler angle estimation using deep learning

arXiv:2508.04243v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Angle estimation is an important step in the Doppler ultrasound clinical workflow to measure blood velocity. It is widely recognized that incorrect angle estimation is a leading cause of error in Doppler-based blood velocity measurements. In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based approach for automated Doppler angle estimation. The approach was developed using 2100 human carotid ultrasound images including image augmentation. Five pre-trained models were used to extract images features, and these features were passed to a custom shallow network for Doppler angle estimation. Independently, measurements were obtained by a human observer reviewing the images for comparison. The mean absolute error (MAE) between the automated and manual angle estimates ranged from 3.9{\deg} to 9.4{\deg} for the models evaluated. Furthermore, the MAE for the best performing model was less than the acceptable clinical Doppler angle error threshold thus avoiding misclassification of normal velocity values as a stenosis. The results demonstrate potential for applying a deep-learning based technique for automated ultrasound Doppler angle estimation. Such a technique could potentially be implemented within the imaging software on commercial ultrasound scanners.

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

Cross-Layer Discrete Concept Discovery for Interpreting Language Models

Interpreting language models remains challenging due to the existence of residual stream, which linearly mixes and duplicates features across adjacent layers, causing single-layer analyses to miss this cross-layer structure. Cross-layer sparse autoencoders (SAEs) address layer mixing but operate in continuous space, where concepts split across many neurons without clear boundaries. We introduce Cross-Layer Vector Quantized-Variational Autoencoder (CLVQ-VAE), a novel framework which maps representations from a lower layer to a higher layer through a discrete vector-quantization bottleneck, collapsing duplicated residual-stream features into compact, interpretable concept vectors. Our approach combines top-k temperature-based sampling with exponential moving average (EMA) codebook updates, providing controlled exploration of the discrete latent space while maintaining codebook diversity. Across both encoder- and decoder-based models on ERASER-Movie, Jigsaw, and AGNews, CLVQ-VAE outperforms clustering, single-layer vector quantized-variational autoencoder (VQ-VAE), and sparse autoencoder (SAE) baselines across three evaluation axes: removing identified concepts drops model accuracy by up to 93%, LLM judges rank our concepts first in 66.7% of comparisons, and human annotators recover model predictions from our visualizations with 78% accuracy versus 54% for clustering.

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

JetFlow: Breaking the Scaling Ceiling of Speculative Decoding with Parallel Tree Drafting

Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) by drafting multiple tokens and verifying them in parallel, but it faces a scaling limitation: increasing the draft budget improves speed only when acceptance remains high and drafting overhead stays low. This ceiling has been difficult to break because prior head-based SD methods face a causality-efficiency dilemma. Autoregressive drafters produce path-conditioned candidates that are effective for tree speculative decoding with higher acceptance length, but their drafting cost grows with tree depth. Bidirectional block-diffusion drafters generate all positions in one pass, but their branch-agnostic marginals can form individually plausible yet mutually inconsistent trees, wasting budget and reducing acceptance. We propose JetFlow, a head-based SD framework that combines one-forward drafting efficiency with branch-wise causal conditioning. JetFlow trains a causal parallel draft head over fused hidden states from the frozen target model, producing candidate trees whose scores align with the target model's autoregressive factorization. This enables JetFlow to convert larger draft budgets into longer accepted prefixes and higher end-to-end speedup. Across math, coding, and chat benchmarks on dense and MoE Qwen3 models, JetFlow consistently outperforms bidirectional-head and tree-based SD baselines. On H100 GPUs, JetFlow achieves up to 9.64x speedup on MATH-500 and 4.58x on open-ended conversational workloads, with further latency gains demonstrated through vLLM integration under realistic serving loads. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/hao-ai-lab/JetFlow.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Non-Medical COVID-19 Impacts and Hearing Status: A Global Study of Differential Health Impact Among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Populations

Background: Deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) experienced complex challenges during the COVID19 pandemic, including obscured visual communication from mask mandates, inaccessible public health messaging, and inadequate interpreter availability. We examined whether hearing status predicted nonmedical COVID19 impact on a global level. Methods: We conducted a nested cross-sectional analysis within a global study collecting data across two waves (April to May 2020 and July to August 2022) from 184 countries. Participants (N=7,998) were categorized as Deaf (n=304), Hard of Hearing (HoH; n=951), or Hearing (n=6,743). The primary outcome was a composite COVID-related non-medical Personal Impact TScore derived from 14 items across employment, resource access, and healthcare domains. Multinomial logistic regression models progressively adjusted for demographic, structural, and psychosocial variables. Results: Deaf participants reported substantially higher rates of pandemic-related job loss (28.9% vs. 9.6% hearing), healthcare cancellations (39.9% vs. 24.6%), and inability to obtain basic supplies. Over half (55.9%) of Deaf participants scored above the median composite impact index, compared to 39.2% of hearing participants. In the fully adjusted model, Deaf status remained an independent predictor of high non-medical impact (aOR=1.6, 95% CI: 1.1 to 2.4). HoH status showed no statistically significant difference from hearing participants in any model. Conclusions: People identifying as Deaf experienced significant disparities during COVID19 when compared with HoH or hearing people, driven by language access barriers and institutional exclusion rather than hearing loss per se. These experiences underscore the importance for systemic interventions centering on accessible communication, Deaf-centered needs, and reducing audism in Deaf-hearing interaction.

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

Pushing the Boundaries of Natural Reasoning: Interleaved Bonus from Formal-Logic Verification

arXiv:2601.22642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, yet their stochastic next-token prediction creates logical inconsistencies and reward hacking that formal symbolic systems avoid. To bridge this gap, we introduce a formal logic verification-guided framework that dynamically interleaves formal symbolic verification with the natural language generation process, providing real-time feedback to detect and rectify errors as they occur. Distinguished from previous neuro-symbolic methods limited by passive post-hoc validation, our approach actively penalizes intermediate fallacies during the reasoning chain. We operationalize this framework via a novel two-stage training pipeline that synergizes formal logic verification-guided supervised fine-tuning and policy optimization. Extensive evaluation on six benchmarks spanning mathematical, logical, and general reasoning demonstrates that our 7B and 14B models outperform state-of-the-art baselines by average margins of 10.4% and 14.2%, respectively. These results validate that formal verification can serve as a scalable mechanism to significantly push the performance boundaries of advanced LLM reasoning.

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

PACUTE: Phonology-, Affix-, and Character-level Understanding of Tokens for Filipino

Large language models (LLMs) process text as sequences of subword tokens, which can obscure the character-level and morphological structure that underlies word formation. This limitation is most acute for languages with non-concatenative morphology, where standard tokenizers systematically misalign token boundaries with morpheme boundaries. We introduce PACUTE, a diagnostic benchmark of 4,600 tasks designed to evaluate morphological understanding in Filipino, a language characterized by productive infixation, reduplication, and diacritic-driven lexical distinctions that are typically absent from written text. PACUTE includes a hierarchical diagnostic framework of six compositional levels that localizes where morphological understanding breaks down. Evaluating open-weight LLMs and frontier commercial models, we find that open-weight models perform near chance on morpheme decomposition regardless of scale. Frontier models perform much better, often recovering individual affixes under contains-match scoring, but remain far below their character-level ceilings on compositional tasks of morpheme transformations and syllabification. These results identify productive morphological composition, rather than character access alone, as the persistent bottleneck for Filipino word-structure understanding.

10.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A blastoporal organizer in a ctenophore

In an iconic experiment in 1924, Hilde Mangold and Hans Spemann established that the dorsal blastopore lip of amphibian embryos functions as an organizer and induces a secondary body axis when transplanted into a host embryo1. This discovery demonstrated that specific embryonic regions can regulate embryonic patterning and lead to the establishment of an entire body axis. Subsequent studies have revealed that cnidarians, the sister group to Bilateria, also possess a blastoporal embryonic organizer2,3. However, the evolutionary origin of the organizer remains unclear. Here we report that the blastopore lip of the ctenophore Mnemiopsis leidyi, a member of the evolutionary sister group to all other metazoans4,5, exhibits organizer activity. We show that transplanted fragments of blastopore lip tissue from M. leidyi gastrula induce secondary pharynx and mouth formation. Moreover, transphyletic transplantation experiments show that the blastopore lip of M. leidyi leads to the generation of a secondary body axis in embryos of the cnidarian Nematostella vectensis. Organizer function in M. leidyi requires both β-catenin and TGFβ signalling, and the TGFβ-family ligands probably provide this inductive capacity. These findings reveal the deep homology of the blastoporal organizer in ctenophores, cnidarians and vertebrates, implying the ancestral organizer role of the blastopore lip. We propose that the emergence of the organizer was an essential innovation that facilitated the change from the temporal cell differentiation of unicellular relatives to the spatial cell differentiation of the first multicellular embryo. Experiments using the comb jelly Mnemiopsis leidyi and the sea anemone Nematostella vectensis reveal that the emergence of a core signalling pathway may have been a key innovation enabling the transition to multicellularity in animals.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Hierarchical Attention via Domain Decomposition

arXiv:2606.18525v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a hierarchical attention mechanism based on two-level overlapping Schwarz domain decomposition. The method is motivated by the observation that two-level Schwarz domain decomposition methods combine local subdomain corrections with a coarse level that communicates global, long-range information. We test its usefulness in the context of finite-dimensional operator learning using a simple, one-dimensional diffusion problem with homogeneous Dirichlet boundary conditions. Although elementary, this problem provides a controlled sequence-to-sequence setting in which the exact nonlocal solution operator is known. After discretization, learning the solution operator amounts to approximating the inverse of a symmetric positive definite matrix. As a baseline, we use a global softmax-free low-rank attention operator of the form $QK^T$. The proposed construction replaces this dense global factorization by a two-level additive structure: local low-rank attention blocks on overlapping subdomains are combined with a coarse attention block. The resulting operator has the form $$M_{\theta}^{-1} = \Phi Q_0 K_0^T \Phi^T + \sum_{i=1}^{N} R_i^T D_i^{1/2} Q_i K_i^T D_i^{1/2} R_i.$$ Here $R_i$ restricts to an overlapping subdomain, $D_i$ is a partition-of-unity weight, and $\Phi$ is a coarse interpolation (or prolongation) matrix. Numerical experiments for synthetic Fourier right-hand sides indicate that the domain-decomposition attention operator is able to train faster and can give more accurate approximations than a global low-rank attention baseline while using significantly fewer parameters.

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

HOLO-MPPI: Multi-Scenario Motion Planning via Hierarchical Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning. End-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) can generalize across scenarios but often becomes brittle under distribution shift, reward misspecification, and stochastic interactions. Model predictive path integral (MPPI) control enables strong real-time refinement without gradients, but its performance depends on a well-shaped sampling prior, while manually designing the priors does not scale to multi-scenario deployment. We present HOLO-MPPI (High-level Offline, Low-level Online MPPI), a multi-scenario motion planning framework that combines high-level policy learning with low-level stochastic optimal control. Offline, we learn a high-level policy that proposes scenario-robust plans in an abstract action space, with a learned world model for online rollout. Online, the policy serves as a data-driven prior generator that parameterizes MPPI's sampling distribution conditioned on the current observation and goal. MPPI then optimizes low-level control sequences around this prior in real time to adapt to local disturbances. We instantiate HOLO-MPPI in autonomous driving by designing an effective high-level action space and tailored model architectures. Our evaluation across diverse driving scenarios shows that HOLO-MPPI improves upon MPPI and end-to-end RL baselines while maintaining real-time control.

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

Quantum Enchanced Multi-Scale CNN with Bi-directional Mamba for Crop Field Analysis

Hyperspectral image (HSI) crop analysis is essential for precision agriculture because it captures rich spectral and spatial information for accurate crop monitoring and assessment. However, HSI classification remains challenging due to high spectral dimensionality, spatial complexity, class imbalance, and limited labeled samples. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a BiSpectral Mamba-based framework that combines multi-scale convolutional feature extraction, spectral attention, bidirectional state-space modeling, and quantum-inspired learning. A multi-scale CNN backbone first extracts hierarchical spatial-spectral representations through feature fusion across multiple resolutions. A spectral attention mechanism then emphasizes informative bands while suppressing redundant and noisy channels. The refined features are processed by a BiSpectral Mamba module that captures long-range dependencies in both forward and backward directions by modeling hyperspectral feature maps as sequential tokens. In addition, class-weighted optimization and feature fusion strategies are incorporated to improve training stability and mitigate class imbalance. Experimental evaluation on the UAVHSI-Crop dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed framework, achieving an overall accuracy of 84.83%. The results show that integrating convolutional, attention-based, and state-space modeling components enables robust spatial-spectral feature learning for crop classification. The proposed framework also shows potential for broader agricultural and remote sensing applications, including crop disease detection, yield prediction, and soil moisture estimation, while highlighting the effectiveness of structured state-space and quantum-inspired architectures for hyperspectral image analysis.

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

EmoMind: Decoding Affective Captions from Human Brain fMRI

Decoding visual experience from brain activity has advanced substantially, but current brain-to-text systems largely recover semantic content while discarding affect. Additionally, language models can generate emotional text when prompted with categorical labels, but such labels collapse rich inter-subject variability into coarse discrete bins. We present EmoMind, the first end-to-end pipeline for decoding affective captions directly from fMRI signals. EmoMind first retrieves a semantically grounded neutral scene description from brain-decoded visual features, then rewrites it using a continuous 34-dimensional emotion vector decoded from the same fMRI recording. To control the balance between content preservation and affective expression, we train the rewriter with classifier-free guidance against an identity-preserving null branch, enabling smooth interpolation between semantic fidelity and affective expressivity. We evaluate affective caption generation with a three-axis validation framework spanning subject-specificity, structural geometry, and causal control. We further augment this framework with a synthetic-brain substitution test that probes robustness to the measurement apparatus, and we benchmark each axis against GPT-4 prompted with brain-decoded top-5 emotion labels as a strong discrete baseline. Across two independent emotion fMRI datasets, EmoMind significantly outperforms label-prompted GPT-4 on all three axes, with the largest gains on metrics that require person-specific affective structure rather than population-level emotion aggregation. These results establish continuous brain-decoded affect as a viable control signal for individualized affective caption generation and open new directions for studying individual affective brain organisation.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Variants of the Quantum Phase Operator for the Harmonic Oscillator

arXiv:2606.24913v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce and study quantum phase operators associated with the Quantum Harmonic Oscillator (QHO). We show that these operators are trace-class perturbations of the Susskind-Glogower operators and examine their mathematical and physical properties. The construction is motivated by the physically relevant two-phase case.

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

Do We Still Need Humans in the Loop? Comparing Human and LLM Annotation in Active Learning for Hostility Detection

Instruction-tuned LLMs can annotate thousands of instances at low cost. This raises two questions for active learning (AL): can LLM labels replace human labels within the AL loop, and does AL remain necessary when entire corpora can be cheaply labeled? We investigate both on a new dataset of 277,902 German political TikTok comments (25,974 LLM-labeled, 5,000 human-annotated), comparing LLM and human annotation across seven conditions, four encoders, and 10 random seeds. Under a two-question interface that mirrors the human annotation task, LLM annotation at scale outperforms human-supervised classifiers at roughly one-tenth the cost (\$28 for GPT-5.2 Batch API vs. \$316 for Prolific). The advantage holds for both a closed-source (GPT-5.2) and an open-weight (Qwen3.5-122B-10B) LLM, is robust under soft-label evaluation, and is unlocked specifically by the two-question decomposition; a holistic single-prompt baseline only ties with human supervision. AL provides no reliable advantage over random sampling under either LLM annotator. However, error structure varies sharply: only GPT-5.2 under the two-question interface produces classifiers with near-human FP/FN balance, while other LLM variants over-flag border-control and economic competition discourse. We release the dataset and code.

17.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Bacterial-Selective Membrane-Active Compounds Reveals Mechanistic Bias in Antibiotic Training Datasets

The rise of antibiotic resistance necessitates the discovery of antibacterial compounds with novel mechanisms of action (MoAs). Recent machine learning approaches have shown promise in antibacterial compound discovery, but often identify derivatives of known antibiotic classes rather than mechanistically novel compounds. Previous approaches applied Tanimoto similarity filters at the end of screening pipelines, but this method has substantial drawbacks: Tanimoto similarity can be misleading in chemical space, and post-hoc filtering does not influence what activity models learn to prioritize. Here, we present a machine learning pipeline that addresses chemical novelty upfront by employing an XGBoost-based MoA classifier to explicitly prioritize compounds predicted to have mechanisms distinct from known antibiotic classes, combined with graph neural networks for antibacterial activity and toxicity prediction. Applied to the Zinc20 database, our approach successfully identified non-toxic antibacterial compounds structurally distinct from known antibiotics. Notably, the majority of these hits exhibited membrane-targeting activity with selectivity for bacterial cells over mammalian cells, suggesting potential for next-generation membrane-active antibiotics. However, we did not identify compounds with novel protein targets. Systematic analysis revealed that this limitation stems from mechanistic bias in training data rather than model architecture. Specifically, our activity model learned to preferentially score compounds similar to specific groups in the training data, thus overrepresenting certain MoA classes including membrane-active compounds. Even substantial model architecture and training data enhancements did not overcome this constraint. Our findings demonstrate that the primary bottleneck for discovering mechanistically novel antibiotics is the scarcity of diverse, mechanistically-annotated training data. This work provides both a methodological framework for mechanism-aware screening and critical insights into data requirements for genuinely novel antibiotic discovery.

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

Open-World Video Segmentation

While video segmentation has advanced rapidly on short clips and closed-set benchmarks, open-world video segmentation remains largely unexplored. The challenge is twofold: (1) existing methods are not designed to support object discovery and identity maintenance in long videos of dynamic ego-motion, and (2) existing evaluation protocols rely on a rigid 1:1 matching that unfairly penalizes semantically valid predictions with mismatched granularity. To address both gaps, we introduce Savvy, a practical and strong system for zero-shot open-world long-horizon video segmentation. Savvy combines hierarchical mask discovery, deferred admission, and track consolidation to support persistent object discovery, safe track promotion, and stable long-range identity maintenance. We further propose OGA, a granularity-aware evaluation suite for open-world video segmentation. Built on a Granularity-Agnostic (GA) matching protocol, OGA relaxes conventional 1:1 matching to an n:1 mapping, but still enforces temporal rigor by detecting support discontinuities through sever points and scoring each reference object through its dominant coherent fragment. This prevents fragmented or flickering support from being over-rewarded while enabling GA-adapted metrics and structural diagnostics: identity persistence (IP), and identity concentration (IC). On VIPSeg, we show that standard 1:1 evaluation substantially underestimates open-world methods, whereas GA evaluation recovers much of their suppressed performance. On the more realistic long-horizon benchmarks: ScanNet and HM3D, Savvy consistently outperforms strong baselines across both classical and proposed metrics, including STQ, VPQ$_\infty$, IP and IC. Together, these results establish a practical benchmark and a strong baseline for open-world long-horizon video segmentation.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Controlled Human Malaria Infection model for relapsing Plasmodium vivax

Background Plasmodium vivax malaria relapses are a major source of morbidity and onward transmission of infection. The underlying mechanisms are poorly understood and current therapies sub-optimal. We examined the safety and feasibility of a controlled human malaria infection (CHMI) model for relapsing P. vivax. Methods We conducted an open-label, proof-of-concept, CHMI study of relapsing P. vivax. Healthy, malaria-naive, Duffy-positive adults aged 18-45 years with extensive CYP2D6 metaboliser phenotype and normal blood glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) levels were recruited in Oxford, UK. Mosquito-bite CHMI was performed in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, using Anopheles stephensi mosquitoes infected with PvW1, a clonal isolate of P. vivax from Thailand. All follow-up visits were conducted in Oxford, UK. Primary P. vivax infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine (80mg/480mg at 8, 24, 36, 48 and 60 hours). From Day 28 following CHMI, participants attended a fortnightly clinic for clinical review and qPCR blood sampling, with additional assessments performed for any reported symptoms. P. vivax relapse infections (qPCR > 500 genome copies/mL) were treated with artemether-lumefantrine as per primary infection. Definitive anti-malarial treatment with atovaquone-proguanil (1000mg/400mg once daily for three days) and primaquine (0{middle dot}5 mg/kg/day for 14 days) was administered six months following CHMI, regardless of parasitaemia or symptoms. The primary objective was to assess the safety, feasibility and frequency of relapsing P. vivax after CHMI. Remote follow-up (5 years) is ongoing. The study is registered with ISRCTN registry (ISRCTN48625883). Findings 20 participants were screened for eligibility from 21 January 2025. Five participants (median age 22 years) underwent CHMI (five infected mosquitoes per participant) on 15 April 2025. All participants developed primary P. vivax infection and experienced at least one relapse infection. Two participants experienced a second relapse. Overall incidence rate was 3{middle dot}6 relapse infections per person-year. Solicited adverse events were mild or moderate and there were no serious adverse events. Definitive anti-malarial treatment was administered to all participants. One participant experienced primaquine-induced methaemoglobinaemia, resolving with early discontinuation of treatment (total dose 5{middle dot}3 mg/kg). To date, more than six months after primaquine treatment, no further relapses have been recorded. Interpretation CHMI of relapsing P. vivax is safe and feasible, allowing exploration of the mechanisms underlying relapse infections and providing a platform for future anti-relapse efficacy studies. Funding European Union Horizon Europe programme and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) via OptiVivax consortium; UK National Institute for Health and Care Research Biomedical Research Centre: Oxford; and UK Medical Research Council.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

AuAu: A Benchmark for Auditing Authoritarian Alignment in Large Language Models

The worldwide surge of authoritarianism, combined with the increasing central role in users' everyday lives, raises the question of to what extent specific models exhibit or promote authoritarian attitudes and characteristics. We introduce AuAu, a comprehensive benchmark that aims to assess the risk of LLMs generating responses with authoritarian tendencies. This benchmark combines three evaluation approaches: (i) psychometric questions from an extensive pool of 15 human validated instruments; (ii) contextual behavior vignettes probing intended actions in concrete situations; and (iii) responses to realistic user prompts. Unlike prior work, AuAu evaluates not only a general closeness towards authoritarianism but also the established sub-concepts Authoritarian Aggression, Authoritarian Submission, and Conventionalism. Evaluating 17 models from China, the EU, Russia, and the USA, we find that all tested models exhibit substantial authoritarian response rates under the psychometric evaluation, though rates drop significantly in increasingly more realistic downstream task. We further find that an authoritarian system prompt easily manipulates 15 out of 17 models to promote increased authoritarianism. Our results underscore the need for continued, systematic auditing of LLM-based AI systems to detect and ultimately mitigate undesired authoritarian tendencies in generated output. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/andreaseinwiller/AuAu

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Longitudinal brain structural changes during clozapine treatment: associations with neuroreceptor architecture and clinical response

In treatment-resistant schizophrenia, clozapine treatment has been associated with longitudinal reductions in subcortical volumes, ventricular enlargement, and widespread cortical thinning. However, it is unknown how these structural changes relate to clozapines pharmacological profile and clinical efficacy. We combined five longitudinal datasets with MRI acquired before and on average 5 months after clozapine initiation in 143 individuals to quantify brain structural changes and their association with normative maps relating to neuroreceptor architecture and physiological systems, and improvement in symptom severity. Clozapine treatment was associated with grey matter volume reductions across multiple subcortical regions (including the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, caudate, putamen and nucleus accumbens), increases in pallidal volume, ventricular enlargement, and widespread cortical thinning. Cortical regions showing the greatest magnitude of thinning corresponded to areas with higher normative densities of serotonergic 5-HT1A, 5-HT2A and 5-HT4 receptors. Changes in subcortical volume or cortical thickness during clozapine treatment were not associated with changes in total or positive symptom severity. In addition, baseline subcortical volume, cortical thickness, or gyrification prior to starting clozapine did not predict subsequent symptom improvement. Cortical thinning may partly reflect clozapines activity at serotonergic receptors, which have been implicated in cortical network stabilisation and neuroplasticity, however structural remodelling during clozapine treatment may reflect a process independent from its clinical efficacy in improving core symptoms of psychosis.

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

Optimizing resource allocation for accuracy in noisy variational quantum algorithms

arXiv:2606.20153v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For quantum algorithms to achieve their full potential, we need methodologies to optimize them, such as reaching a given output accuracy with minimal resource costs. Here, we develop such a methodology for a class of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) algorithms. We leverage simulations of a Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) to propose a phenomenological model of such algorithms that captures the complex relationship between algorithmic accuracy, algorithmic resource costs, and the noise that exists in realistic quantum hardware. For this, we take the algorithmic resource cost to be the total number of quantum gate-operations in the algorithm; minimizing this cost typically makes the algorithm faster and more energy-efficient. We consider the subtle trade-off between quantum circuit size (small circuits are too imprecise, but large ones are too noisy), and the number of iterations of that quantum circuit for the full algorithm to sufficiently converge. Using a noise-metric-resource methodology, we identify the sweet spot (of circuit size versus iterations) that minimizes the algorithmic resource costs for a desired algorithm accuracy. It also gives the circuit size that maximizes algorithm accuracy for a fixed resource cost. Our methodology provides a practical guideline for near-term deployment of variational algorithms on realistic noisy hardware, including hardware that uses error mitigation.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Bistable by Construction: Wall-Clock-Calibrated State Monitors Have No Moment-Detection Regime at Agent Cadence

arXiv:2606.19386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime monitors for autonomous agents commonly threshold an accumulated internal state - a behavioural baseline, a drift statistic, or, in our prior work, a modelled affective state. We previously reported a State Saturation Trap: threshold-on-state triggers over a continuous affect engine become near-constant alarms on SWE-bench debugging agents (Modgil 2026). A post-release audit found the engine received dt=0 between actions, so its exponential decay never operated: the published trap is a pure-accumulator result. We correct the record (erratum, v2) and treat the flaw as an experiment. The key variable it exposes is whether a monitor's dynamics are calibrated in sample time (per observation, as in CUSUM) or wall-clock time (half-lives in seconds, as in affect models and EMA baselines). On fixed-rate streams these coincide; on agent streams, where inter-action time varies by orders of magnitude, they do not. A pre-registered sweep over uniform intervals (dt in {0..600}s) on 20 trajectories shows the wall-clock level trigger has two regimes: at dt=60s silent. Every critical dt lies in (1,30]s. Real agent runs measure latency at median 1.53s (p90 2.33s); real coding cadence sits inside the trap regime, vindicating the empirical finding under a corrected mechanism. The structure is a property of the calibration class, not the engine: a minimal wall-clock accumulator over the raw error stream reproduces the same cliff, while a sample-time CUSUM over the identical stream is exactly dt-invariant (20/20). A rising-edge trigger with hysteresis fires 0-3 times per trajectory in every condition. We conclude that wall-clock-calibrated leaky-integrator monitors admit no regime in which they act as moment detectors on agent streams; transition detection escapes the trap at every cadence, but does not recover human intervention timing.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Simplicity Suffices for Parameter Noise Injection in Stochastic Gradient Descent

arXiv:2606.12054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Injecting noise into the optimization process is a well-established technique for improving the training and generalization of deep neural networks. Yet, despite the breadth of existing approaches, it remains unclear which design choices truly matter in practice. In this work, we investigate parameter noise injection for stochastic gradient descent, focusing on two key questions: how to efficiently pair each training example with its own perturbation in mini-batch training, and whether sophisticated noise parameterizations or multi-sample gradient averaging yield meaningful gains over simpler alternatives. To address the first question, we leverage a distributional identity for linear layers that allows per-example noise injection without breaking batched computation. To address the second, we systematically compare several diagonal Gaussian parameterizations against an isotropic baseline across varying noise levels on CIFAR100. Our results consistently show that simple, lightweight strategies, isotropic noise with a single perturbed forward pass per update step, recover most of the benefit of more complex schemes. These findings suggest that simplicity suffices for parameter noise injection, and that practitioners need not resort to elaborate perturbation designs to reap the optimization and generalization benefits of noisy SGD.

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

SVHighlights: Towards Extremely Long Sport Video Highlight Detection

While highlight detection for long-form videos is of great practical importance, most existing methods remain limited to short-form content, largely due to the absence of a suitable benchmark. To bridge this gap, we introduce SVHighlights, to the best of our knowledge, the first benchmark for highlight detection in extremely long sports videos, each exceeding one hour in duration, across multiple sports categories. SVHighlights is constructed from pairs of full-length sports videos and their corresponding official highlight videos using a dataset generation pipeline, enabling scalable label generation without conventional per-clip saliency annotation. The benchmark comprises 320 videos with an average duration of 2.00 hours and a total of 640.18 hours, substantially exceeding previous datasets. Existing methods also face fundamental challenges on long videos: models trained on short clips fail to generalize to hour-long content, and their clip-level scoring lacks the broader context needed to identify highlights. To address this and provide a strong baseline, we present TF-SELECTOR, a training-free segment-based approach that divides each video into context-aware segments by merging adjacent shots sharing the same semantic content, and predicts segment-level saliency scores using a large language model with multimodal inputs including visual captions, transcripts, and audio volume. Experiments demonstrate that TF-SELECTOR achieves superior performance across most metrics compared to Video Temporal Grounding (VTG)-tuned baselines, with improvements of +2.50 in HIT@1, +4.04 in HIT@K, and +2.95 in IoU. These results establish SVHighlights as a challenging testbed for long-form highlight detection and demonstrate that a simple segment-based strategy can effectively scale to hour-long videos.