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01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Moebius: 0.2B Lightweight Image Inpainting Framework with 10B-Level Performance

While 10B-level industrial foundation models have pushed the boundaries of image inpainting, their prohibitive computational costs severely hinder practical deployment. Constructing a highly optimized task-specific specialist offers a promising solution; however, extreme structural compression inevitably triggers a severe representation bottleneck. To conquer this, we propose Moebius, a highly efficient lightweight inpainting framework. We systematically reconstruct the diffusion backbone by introducing the Local-$\lambda$ Mix Interaction ($L\lambda MI$) block. Comprising Local-$\lambda$ and Interactive-$\lambda$ modules, it elegantly summarizes spatial contexts and global semantic priors into fixed-size linear matrices, preserving complex latent interactions while drastically shedding parameters. Furthermore, to unlock the full representational capacity of this highly compact architecture, we synergistically pair it with an adaptive multi-granularity distillation strategy. Operating strictly within the latent space to avoid expensive pixel-space decoding, this strategy dynamically balances multiple gradient-based losses to achieve high-fidelity alignment. Extensive experiments across natural and portrait benchmarks demonstrate that this optimal synergy enables Moebius to rival or even surpass the generation quality of the 10B-level industrial generalist FLUX.1-Fill-Dev. Remarkably, Moebius achieves this using less than 2\% of the parameters (0.22B vs. 11.9B) while delivering a $>15\times$ acceleration in total inference time, setting a new efficiency standard for high-fidelity inpainting. Project page at https://hustvl.github.io/Moebius.

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

Multi-objective design of photon blockade for bright single-photon sources

arXiv:2606.20160v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality single-photon sources, realized through saturable emitters, photon blockade, or heralded pair generation, are indispensable building blocks for photonic quantum platforms. Although these mechanisms suppress multiphoton emission through distinct principles typically captured by analytical models, their practical implementation is constrained by conflicting requirements for purity, brightness, and indistinguishability, which must be balanced within high-dimensional design landscapes. Here, we propose a computational framework for optimizing competing metrics of single-photon sources. Building on a Liouville-space adjoint formulation that efficiently evaluates multiple objectives in Markovian open quantum systems, we develop a Jacobian-based update, which ensures first-order monotonic reduction of multi-objective costs. By incorporating simulated annealing to escape gradient-vanishing plateaus, our framework achieves a design success rate of nearly 60 % for photon blockade with g2(0) smaller than 0.1 and theoretically bounded brightness across a broad parameter space, without any analytical guidance. This framework provides a general recipe for multi-objective design of open quantum systems.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

OQMD: Single-Qubit Rotation Control Improves Low-CNOT Multiclass Quantum Classification

arXiv:2606.14088v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Near-term variational classifiers incur substantial error and latency from two-qubit gates, yet practitioners often assume that additional entangling depth is the default route to higher accuracy. This work studies Optimal Quantum Measurement Decoding (OQMD): optimizing how quantum outcomes are mapped to classical labels by training a readout layer before measurement, jointly with the variational circuit, without adding CNOTs. Experiments use trainable triple single-qubit rotations as one concrete, hardware-native realization of OQMD; other single-qubit parametrizations fit the same classical outer loop. On the Iris benchmark with a 30-point stratified test split, the best observed 0-CNOT configuration with OQMD reaches 83.33\% accuracy, with a 96\% at 9 CNOTs, exceeding the best 18-CNOT controls (56.67\%) and the best 18-CNOT configuration with OQMD (66.67\%) under a common protocol. A six-point CNOT-depth series from 0 to 18 (fixed optimizer, iteration budget, random-seed count, and ZXZ readout) shows that the highest raw scores need not occur at the largest template, so aggregate complexity is not summarized by CNOT count alone. Because run-level accuracies are discrete and non-Gaussian, we emphasize best-observed scores and, where a global comparison of pooled runs is required, Mann–Whitney $U$ tests rather than parametric tests on means. Across architectures, OQMD shows statistically consistent but magnitude-dependent gains: large peak lifts on minimal circuits coexist with a small pooled mean shift on complex 18-CNOT runs ($p\approx 0.03$) that is not ``universal'' in the sense of uniformly large practical effects.%

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

PATCH: Action-Chunk-Conditioned Latent Patch Innovation Monitoring for Robot Manipulation

Learning-based manipulation policies have made substantial progress in real-world robot manipulation, particularly for short-horizon action generation. However, deployment in open workspaces remains fragile under unexpected local scene dynamics, such as moving objects, transient occlusions, or disturbances near the intended motion. Existing runtime monitors often rely on global observation anomalies, policy uncertainty, or frame-level visual changes, and struggle to distinguish task-relevant execution risk from benign visual variation. We introduce PATCH, an action-chunk-conditioned latent patch innovation monitor for deployment-time intervention. Given the active action chunk, PATCH defines a projected execution corridor, predicts latent patch evolution inside it, and accumulates persistent residuals unexplained by the robot's own motion. These residuals form a localized intervention signal that allows PATCH-Router to pause execution, select an available recovery source, and resume the original policy once localized innovation subsides. Experiments on real robot rollout data show that PATCH produces more stable and context-relevant triggers than competing runtime monitors. Real-robot deployment further demonstrates monitor-driven intervention and policy resumption for disturbance-aware manipulation. Project Page: https://yananzhou5555.github.io/PATCH/.

05.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-15

Maternal BMI and Placental Transcriptomic Changes: A Meta-Analysis of Gene Expression at the Maternal-Fetal Interface

Objective: Maternal body mass index (BMI) is often used as a measure of metabolic status and increased or decreased maternal BMI is associated with a heightened risk of cardiometabolic diseases across generations. The placenta mediates these maternal metabolic cues; however, its genome wide transcriptional adaptations in response to maternal BMI remain incompletely defined. Methods: To delineate placental genes, pathways, and interaction clusters whose transcript abundance varies with maternal prepregnancy BMI through a genome wide meta analysis of human placental RNA sequencing datasets. Placental RNA seq reads from four publicly available cohorts (n=146) were mapped to the GRCh38 reference genome and differentially expressed genes were identified. An independent microarray cohort (n=19) was reanalysed separately to facilitate cross platform comparison. Functional enrichment employed GO, KEGG, and STRING protein interaction resources. Results: Meta-analysis of 146 RNA seq samples identified eight genes with genome-wide significance in placentae from underweight pregnancies including inflammatory signaling gene MAP4K1 and metabolic enzyme PSPH, while overweight and obese categories revealed nominally significant differential expression. KEGG analysis demonstrated significant downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation with increasing maternal BMI, and protein-protein interaction networks revealed inflammatory mediators as central nodes in overweight and obese groups. Independent microarray validation corroborated key findings, including consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation in obesity. Conclusion: Maternal BMI is associated with placental transcriptomic signatures involving inflammatory, metabolic, and hormonal pathways, with consistent downregulation of oxidative phosphorylation across platforms. This genome-wide meta-analysis provides a reproducible catalogue of BMI-responsive placental transcripts that may contribute to developmental programming of offspring health.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Care Delivery Gap framework: a proof-of-concept patient-reported measure of guideline-referenced care-process omissions in sickle cell disease

Abstract Background:Sickle cell disease (SCD) is concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, where delivery of guideline-referenced care remains challenging. Current evaluation approaches rely largely on access indicators and clinical outcomes, which do not directly measure care delivery. We developed the Care Delivery Gap (CDG) framework, a patient-reported approach for identifying care-process omissions, and conducted a proof-of-concept study to assess feasibility and explore variation across income strata. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional framework-development study involving a proof-of-concept sample of 52 individuals with SCD or caregivers recruited through clinics and moderated SCD communities across Africa, North America, and Europe between June 2025 and March 2026. The CDG framework assessed patient-reported omissions in specialist involvement, follow-up continuity, cardiovascular screening, and biochemical surveillance. Analyses were descriptive. Results: Substantial multi-domain care-process omissions were identified despite high reported healthcare engagement. Across geographic income strata, cardiovascular screening was reported by 4/35 (11%) LMIC versus 16/17 (94%) HIC participants, and regular follow-up within the preceding 12 months by 14/35 (40%) versus 16/17 (94%), respectively. High CDG scores, representing 1 omissions across three or four domains, occurred in 20/35 (57%) LMIC compared with 1/17 (6%) HIC participants. Similar disparities were observed across specialist review and vitamin B12 surveillance domains. Conclusion: A structured patient-reported framework identified multi-domain omissions in guideline-referenced SCD care, including among individuals reporting healthcare access. The divergence between access indicators and reported care delivery suggests that service contact alone may not reflect care quality. The framework provides a feasible foundation for future process-level quality measurement in high-burden settings.

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

FlowFake: Liquid Networks for Audio Deepfake Detection

arXiv:2606.19579v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio deepfakes generated by neural text-to-speech and voice-cloning systems threaten speaker verification and public discourse at scale. The core challenge is cross-dataset generalization: detectors trained on one synthesis pipeline collapse on unseen forgeries. We argue that this failure is primarily because of structural synthetic speech artifacts which are multi-timescale trajectory anomalies. Though every existing detector aggregates a fixed-window frame statistics, this misaligns the architecture with the signal. We propose FlowFake, a Liquid Time-Constant (LTC) architecture whose hidden state evolves via a learned ODE, with per-neuron adaptive time constants simultaneously resolving spectral (10ms) and prosodic (2s) cues. At only 34K parameters FlowFake achieves formal BIBO stability and O(dt^4) integration error. On a four-dataset cross domain benchmark (ASVspoof2019-LA, FakeOrReal, InTheWild, MLAAD), FlowFake reaches 75.29% on ASVspoof2019 trained only on FakeOrReal and 79.97% trained only on MLAAD. It outperforms RawGAT-ST and Whisper-DF on every evaluated pair and matching SSL Wav2vec2 (300x larger) at 0.01% of its parameter count. The source code is available on : https://github.com/GhostRider2023/FlowFake

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Marked random graphs with given degree sequence: large deviations on the local topology

arXiv:2401.00351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the behavior of the empirical neighborhood distribution of marked graphs in the framework of local weak convergence. Here we extend known results by considering uniform random graphs with given degree sequences and i.i.d. marks on half-edges and vertices. We establish a large deviation principle for such families of empirical measures. The proof builds on Bordenave and Caputo's seminal 2015 paper, and Delgosha and Anantharam's 2019 introduction of BC entropy, relying on combinatorial lemmas that allow one to construct suitable approximations of measures supported on marked trees. Possible applications of these results are in the study of interacting diffusions on top of random graphs.

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

Adaptive Multi-Resolution Procedural Knowledge Compression for Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to tackle complex tasks with autonomous workflows. Recently, reusable natural language skills have emerged as a popular paradigm to inject procedural knowledge into LLM applications. Since popular skills are often invoked repeatedly, placing their full text in every context significantly increases prefill cost and latency. While text compression techniques have the potential to solve this problem, most existing methods are designed to compress factual knowledge in documents instead of procedural knowledge, making them insufficient for skill compression. In this paper, we argue that an effective skill compression method should: 1) preserve logical dependencies among workflows and tool protocols, 2) enable lightweight, offline compression for frequently updated community skills, and 3) be adaptable to varying complexities across skills. To address this, we present SKIM (SKIll coMpression), an adaptive multi-resolution soft token compression framework for procedural skills. Depending on the complexity of each skill, SKIM creates different numbers of soft tokens that not only improve the efficiency of LLM inference, but also preserve the effectiveness of skill usage. Experiments indicate that SKIM compresses skills to 30 to 60 percent of their original token length while preserving task performance better than existing compression methods.We have released our code at https://github.com/bebr2/SKIM .

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

HRDX: A Large-Scale Vector HD-Map Dataset

Reliable autonomous driving requires vectorized HD maps that are geometrically accurate, semantically rich, and scalable to long-horizon driving. However, existing public HD map datasets are limited in scale, provide sparse semantic attributes, and lack modalities such as aerial imagery that could enable new research directions. We present HRDX, a large-scale dataset for vector HD-map construction, spanning about 40 hours (1,400 km) of minimally overlapping drives, which is several times larger than prior public HD map datasets. Data is captured using six synchronized surround cameras, a 128-beam LiDAR, and centimeter-level RTK GNSS/IMU, and is further complemented by precisely aligned aerial orthoimagery. Annotations cover 10 vector map classes, complemented with over 20 semantic and topological attributes. To evaluate this richer ontology, we introduce the Composite Score (CS) to jointly assess geometric fidelity and attribute correctness. Benchmark experiments show that HRDX's scale improves online vector-map construction, and that aligned aerial imagery provides a useful structural prior: using aerial imagery at training and/or inference improves geometric map quality, while aerial-augmented teachers can transfer part of this benefit to camera-only students without increasing inference-time sensor requirements. HRDX is intended to support reproducible research on large-scale HD-map learning, multimodal BEV fusion, and training-time privileged information. HRDX dataset and benchmarks are available at https://github.com/honda-research-institute/HRDX

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

Faster Completion, Less Learning: Generative AI Reduced Study Time on Math Problems and the Knowledge They Build

arXiv:2605.21629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much have students' ordinary learning processes shifted in response to generative AI, and how does that affect their durable learning outcomes? Self-report surveys show little change, while small-scale behavioral studies report widespread AI use without the scale or duration to measure learning consequences. We address both questions using a ten-year panel of $3.2$ million ALEKS learning interactions for investigating time-on-task, complemented by ALEKS PPL placement-assessment data for examining proctoring and learning outcomes, with a quasi-experimental design exploiting variation in tasks that are more susceptible to AI (text-based word problems) and less susceptible to AI (interactive graph-based problems). Learning time on AI-susceptible problems declines $2.8\%$ per quarter among college students after ChatGPT's release, cumulating to $26.9\%$ over eleven quarters; high-schoolers show $31.3\%$, middle-schoolers $9.0\%$, and Grade 5 students no detectable change. Among college students, the post-ChatGPT divergence vanishes entirely under proctoring, ruling out broad efficiency gains as the likely explanation. Logistic fixed-effects models on randomly assigned proctored retention items yield a $25\%$ cumulative decline in odds of correct response; the same estimator on non-proctored assessment produces a large opposite-signed increase – inconsistent with any platform, cohort, or curriculum explanation. These results are among the first large-scale behavioral and outcome evidence that generative AI has altered how students study and the knowledge they build – the population-level indicator of cognitive surrender, with direct implications for educational research, assessment governance, and AI policy.

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

MVOFormer: Flow-Semantic Transformer for Robust Monocular Visual Odometry

Monocular visual odometry (MVO) is foundational to autonomous navigation and robotic localization. However, existing learning-based MVO approaches often struggle with either a lack of interpretable, complementary features or overly complex multi-stage architectures. These limitations inherently restrict their robustness and cross-domain generalization. In this work, we propose MVOFormer, a novel transformer framework for robust monocular visual odometry. Our architecture features a Flow-Semantic Dual Branch Encoder that synergizes dense geometric motion cues with object-centric semantic priors, explicitly distinguishing static structures from dynamic distractors. These representations are then fused by an Iterative Multimodal Decoder, enabling coarse-to-fine pose refinement while dynamically suppressing attention on unreliable regions. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that, without any target-domain fine-tuning, MVOFormer achieves superior zero-shot generalization and robustness, significantly outperforming prior learning-based frame-to-frame methods across diverse benchmarks including TartanAir, KITTI, TUM-RGBD, and ETH3D-SLAM.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

On Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Automated Log Parsing

Context: Log parsing is a critical standard operating procedure in software systems, enabling monitoring, anomaly detection, and failure diagnosis. However, automated log parsing remains challenging due to heterogeneous log formats, distribution shifts between training and deployment data, and the brittleness of rule-based approaches. Objectives: This study aims to systematically evaluate how sequence modelling architecture, representation choice, sequence length, and training data availability influence automated log parsing performance and computational cost. Methods: We conduct a controlled empirical study comparing four sequence modelling architectures: Transformer, Mamba state-space, monodirectional LSTM, and bidirectional LSTM models. In total, 396 models are trained across multiple dataset configurations and evaluated using relative Levenshtein edit distance with statistical significance testing. Results: Transformer achieves the lowest mean relative edit distance (0.111), followed by Mamba (0.145), mono-LSTM (0.186), and bi-LSTM (0.265), where lower values are better. Mamba provides competitive accuracy with substantially lower computational cost. Character-level tokenization generally improves performance, sequence length has negligible practical impact on Transformer accuracy, and both Mamba and Transformer demonstrate stronger sample efficiency than recurrent models. Conclusion: Overall, Transformers reduce parsing error by 23.4%, while Mamba is a strong alternative under data or compute constraints. These results also clarify the roles of representation choice, sequence length, and sample efficiency, providing practical guidance for researchers and practitioners.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

To Intervene or Not: Guiding Inference-time Alignment with Probabilistic Model Blending

The wide deployment of LLMs has made model alignment necessary to make newly trained models safely and effectively respond to user instructions. Among different methods, inference-time alignment is often cheaper as it intervenes (i.e., offers guidances) only during output generation. Existing proposals apply guidances extracted from certain aligned models without properly assessing their reliability. Nonetheless, our systematic evaluation reveals that guidance effectiveness varies drastically across models; since ineffective guidances lead to further confusion and thus further interventions, the resulting excessive interventions typically indicate poor performance. To make interventions more effective and thus more efficient, we introduce BlendIn, an inference-time alignment framework that shifts from binary decisions to creating hybrid distributions integrating both models' knowledge. BlendIn stabilizes inference-time alignment by performing quality-aware alignment and proportionally weighting each model's contribution based on reliability. Compared with existing works, it preserves beneficial guidance while downweighting unreliable suggestions. BlendIn provides both diagnostic signals and mitigation strategies for misaligned guidance, achieving consistent and up to 50% performance improvement on challenging model pairs. Our code is available at: https://github.com/DecayingSeart/BlendIn.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Towards Interpretability of Neural Quantum States

arXiv:2508.14152v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural quantum states (NQS) have emerged as a powerful variational ansatz for representing quantum many-body wave functions. Their internal mechanisms, however, remain poorly understood. We investigate the role of correlations for NQS-like quantum state representation by employing a correlation-based interpretable neural network architecture and then proving our observations using Boolean function theory. The correlator neural network demonstrates that, even for simple product states, up to all system-size correlation orders in the chosen computational basis are required to represent a quantum state faithfully. We explain these observations using Fourier expansion, which reveals the correlator basis as the effective basis of the internal NQS structure, the resulting necessity for high-order correlations that is supported by an entanglement bound that scales with the correlation order, consequences of linear dependencies in constrained Hilbert spaces for correlation requirements, and connections between spin basis rotations and the correlator basis. Furthermore, we analyze how neural networks achieve high correlation orders by increasing the magnitude of the network weights, which can be compensated by increasing the network depth. Lastly, we discuss how activation functions, network architectures, and choice of reference basis influence correlation requirements. Our results provide new insights and a better understanding of the internal structure and requirements of NQS, enabling a more systematic use of NQS in future research.

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

Simulation of Non-Markovian Quantum Accelerated Dynamics via Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation

arXiv:2606.20024v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The Time-Fractional Schrödinger Equation (TFSE) is an effective tool for simulating the dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems. The Quantum Speed Limit (QSL) time characterizes the minimum time required for the evolution of a non-Markovian quantum system. In this paper, Wei's TFSE is employed to simulate the non-Markovian quantum accelerated evolution process in the Resonant Dissipative Jaynes-Cummings (RDJC) model. By solving the QSL time of a time-fractional single-qubit open system, the enhancement mechanism of the system evolution speed induced by the non-Markovian memory effects of the environment is revealed. Further studies show that the optimized acceleration of the system evolution can be achieved by jointly regulating the fractional order, coupling strength, and photon number. Comparative analyses indicate that Wei's TFSE can accurately capture the non-Markovian accelerated dynamical features of the system over the entire fractional order range, whereas Naber's TFSE is applicable only within a limited fractional order interval. In addition, the comparisons of the average simulation time for calculating the dynamical trajectory of the excited-state probability demonstrate that Wei's TFSE has a significant simulation advantage in computational efficiency. Therefore, Wei's TFSE is more accurate and efficient for simulating the accelerated dynamics of non-Markovian quantum systems.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Development and Initial Validation of the Quality of life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST) Assessment

Individuals with NF2-related schwannomatosis (NF2-SWN) experience a complex constellation of physical, emotional, and social symptoms that substantially impact quality of life (QoL). Although disease-specific patient-reported outcome measures are increasingly important for evaluating treatment benefit in clinical trials, existing NF2-SWN QoL measures have limitations in content coverage and sensitivity to change. This study describes the development and initial validation a new disease-specific QoL assessment – the Quality of Life Evaluation in NF2-related Schwannomatosis Trials (QUEST). Using a three-phase, mixed-methods approach, items were generated through concept elicitation interviews with individuals with NF2-SWN and clinicians, prioritized via patient survey data, and refined through iterative cognitive debriefing procedures. The resulting 21-item QUEST assesses the extent to which NF2-SWN has negatively impacted a persons daily life over the past seven days. Initial psychometric evaluation was conducted in an international sample of 174 individuals with NF2-SWN aged 15 years and older (117 women (67%), 158 White individuals (89%)). Exploratory factor analysis supported a four-factor structure, and the total score demonstrated excellent internal consistency and strong test-retest reliability. Evidence of construct validity was demonstrated through hypothesized associations with disease-specific, generic, and domain-specific QoL measures, as well as known-groups validity based on self-reported disease severity and number of prior surgeries. Incremental validity analyses indicated that QUEST explained unique variance beyond existing measures. Together, findings support the QUEST as a reliable and valid disease-specific QoL measure with strong content validity and feasibility for use as a clinical trial endpoint in NF2-SWN.

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

Nonslop: A Gamified Experiment in Human-AI Collaborative Writing

arXiv:2606.12350v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) raises critical questions about human creativity and individual expression in an era of AI-assisted creation. When do humans adopt AI suggestions, and what are the implications for individual voice? This study examines these questions through a gamified writing exercise where 74 participants (214 responses) replied to prompts while AI-generated word suggestions were available as they wrote. The game simulates a dystopian future in which an AI is attempting to learn from what remains of human individuality, and disincentivizes AI-like writing. In doing so, it attempts to create conditions that reveal authentic user preferences rather than default behaviors, such as accepting a readily available AI-generated suggestion. Note that this is a deliberate inversion of the "helpful assistant" design pattern; the system is explicitly forbidding you from accepting AI suggestions. We analyze user behavior patterns across different task types, user behaviors, and response characteristics to understand the factors influencing human-AI interaction in creative tasks. The study focuses on when users choose to maintain creative autonomy versus violating the rules of the game and accepting AI assistance. It also explores how these choices relate to response patterns, task characteristics, and user behavior. This gamified approach offers both a framework for studying authentic human-AI interaction and a provocative lens for understanding the tension between efficiency and authenticity in AI-augmented creativity.

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

Beyond Weights and Gradients: A Taxonomy of Federated Learning Messages

arXiv:2606.16891v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning is rapidly evolving beyond the exchange of traditional model weights and gradients, yet existing definitions fail to capture the full scope of modern payloads like synthetic data and federated analytics. This paper addresses the gap by proposing a formal mathematical definition of a federated message that accounts for both utility and privacy. We introduce a taxonomy that organizes these exchanges into three categories: model structures, statistical summaries, and data-conditioned representations. By evaluating these groups based on computational demands, communication costs, and privacy risks, we provide a clearer understanding of the trade-offs involved in decentralized training. Our review of 202 recent publications highlights a significant shift since 2021 toward diverse messaging paradigms, signaling a move away from standard deep learning updates toward more specialized information sharing. This framework provides a structured path for future research to optimize federated systems for varying hardware and security requirements.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Usability testing with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT)

Involving end-users in the development of an AI tool is an important facilitator to its implementation. Usability testing was therefore conducted with a prototype user interface of an Artificial Intelligence driven air-Safety Tool (AISaT) to capture the perspectives and user experiences of AISaT from 10 staff members across two hospitals working within estates, infection prevention and control, and clinical areas, to inform the development of next iterations of AISaT. The perspectives shared could be grouped under improvements to the understand-ability; content; navigation; visibility; usability; workflow; ownership; and frequency of use of the tool. There were key areas that can and will be easily improved within AISaT, however there were areas that required a deeper level of critical reflection, such as incorporating data on more existing variables in a room (i.e., existing ventilation) and whether all patients should be assumed as infectious and breathing heavily. The research team must consider if the target audience of end users and recommended frequency of AISaT use will be pre-defined by the tool developers, or whether this level of detail should be left to each individual hospital to decide.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Zero-Inflated Gaussian Distributions Enable Parameter-Space Sparsity in Estimation-of-Distribution Algorithms

arXiv:2606.19369v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Estimation-of-distribution algorithms (EDAs) are a powerful class of evolutionary methods for black-box optimization, especially when little is known about the structure of the objective. Whereas classical evolutionary algorithms rely on hand-designed mutation and crossover operators, hard to devise for unknown problem structures, and a source of bias, EDAs sidestep operator design entirely: they fit a probability distribution to the best individuals and sample the next generation from it. EDAs are well established on continuous parameter spaces, but they have not previously been generalized to sparse ones, in which most coefficients of a good solution are exactly zero. Existing sparse black-box optimizers therefore reintroduce exactly what EDAs were designed to avoid: hand-crafted sparsity operators, bi-level schemes alternating between support set and active values, zeroing thresholds, and other baked-in assumptions. We close this gap by proposing multivariate zero-inflated Gaussian (ZIG) distributions as EDA sampling laws. A latent Gaussian model with separate indicator and value dimensions represents sparsity patterns, correlations among active parameters, and the interactions between the two, so sparsity patterns and active values are optimized jointly, hierarchy-free. We show that the latent parameters of this model are identifiable from observed samples, unlike in the missing-data settings where related constructions originate, and introduce practical amortized inversion-based estimators for them. The estimators accurately recover latent correlation structures, and on the Lunar Lander benchmark the resulting ZIG-EDA converges faster and reaches higher final returns than a dense Gaussian EDA, a hand-crafted sparse evolutionary algorithm, and an ad-hoc sparse EDA, while finding controllers with only a small fraction of parameters active.

22.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

A 5.3-million-year-old deep-sea whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone

Whale falls are biodiversity oases at seabeds1–6, yet their record from the oceans has remained sparse and fragmentary6,7. Here we report the discovery of a vast whale necropolis in the Diamantina Zone (4,616- to 7,001-m depth), extending about 1,200 km along the sea floor of the southeastern Indian Ocean. This area has a deep and extensive accumulation comprising five modern natural whale-fall communities and 476 fossil cetaceans recorded. We show that carcasses host specialized communities dominated by brittle stars, bone-boring worms and chemosynthesis-based bivalves and that the fossil record in this area comprises both extant and extinct deep-diving beaked whales. Isotopic dating shows that whale falls in this region have occurred since at least 5.3 million years ago. These findings reshape the understanding of the limits and biogeography of whale-fall ecosystems and establish some deep sea floors as a fossil archive for tracing cetacean evolution over geological time. Researchers uncovered an enormous deep-sea accumulation of whale remains in the southeastern Indian Ocean, showing long-term, specialized ecosystems and an extensive fossil record that offers new insight into deep-ocean biodiversity and whale evolutionary history.

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

How Seemingly Inconsequential Design Choices Dictate Performance of LLMs in Pathology

General-purpose large language models (LLMs) are routinely used as baselines when evaluating specialized pathology models on whole-slide images (WSIs). Because WSIs exceed contemporary model context limits, LLM baselines routinely use small, high-magnification patches processed independently via majority voting, without systematic evaluation of seemingly inconsequential design choices such as patch size, patch count, and magnification. Generalist LLMs have consistently underperformed specialized systems, reinforcing the perception that domain-specific training or architectural adaptation is necessary for pathology tasks involving WSIs. Here, we conduct a systematic factorial analysis of four input design factors: inference mode, patch size, magnification, and patch count. We demonstrate that prior studies have overstated the gap between specialized models and general-purpose LLMs by choosing non-optimized input configurations. On the MultiPathQA benchmark, switching to a single balanced configuration (large patches at lower magnification, processed jointly) raises GPT-5 from 15.1% to 39.5% on cancer-type classification (TCGA) and from 38.1% to 62.9% on organ classification (GTEx). Per-task optimization yields further gains up to 43.9% (TCGA) and 71.6% (GTEx). The same configuration generalizes to two other models and to a fully held-out CPTAC cohort, where it improves Gemini 3 Flash by 23.4 percentage points without any task-specific tuning.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

CD-RCM: Generalizable Continuous-Depth Novel View Synthesis for Reflectance Confocal Microscopy

Reflectance confocal microscopy (RCM) provides noninvasive, cellular-resolution "optical biopsies" of human skin in vivo by acquiring en-face images at successive depths, forming a sparse z-stack. Due to optical limitations, these stacks are anisotropic 3D volumes with lateral resolution (0.5 $\mu$m) $\sim$6 times higher compared to axial resolution, which is defined by the optical sectioning (3 $\mu$m), limiting the interpretation of tissue. Our goal is to provide continuous-depth visualization by interpolating intermediate sections and making the 3D volume isotropic. Such a representation permits arbitrary-direction sectioning, including histopathology-like cross-sectional examination, without requiring per-patient optimization. To that end, we introduce the first RCM-specific novel-view synthesis (NVS) approach, CD-RCM, a feedforward model that predicts realistic, unseen depths from sparsely sampled RCM stacks. Classical neural rendering methods focus on reconstruction from surface-level multi-view observations. In contrast to surface-level camera views, RCM can acquire optically sectioned en-face images of tissue beyond the surface up to 200 $\mu$m. However, during visualization of the RCM stacks, observations of the shallower sections (towards the surface) obscure the deeper ones. This unique axial imaging geometry and layer-dependent anatomical organization motivated our development of a tailored architectural and training framework that explicitly accounts for RCM's depth-resolved, occlusive imaging physics. Experiments demonstrate that CD-RCM achieves high-fidelity novel-view synthesis with sub-second inference time.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

On Rate-Optimal Partitioning Classification from Observable and from Privatised Data

arXiv:2312.14889v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper we revisit the classical method of partitioning classification and prove novel convergence rates under relaxed conditions, both for observable (non-privatised) and for privatised data. We consider the problem of classification in a $d$ dimensional Euclidean space. Previous results on the partitioning classifier worked with the strong density assumption (SDA), which is restrictive, as we demonstrate through simple examples. Here, we study the problem under much milder assumptions. We presuppose that the distribution of the inputs is a mixture of an absolutely continuous and a discrete distribution, such that the absolutely continuous component is concentrated on a $d_a$ dimensional subspace. In addition to the standard Lipschitz and margin conditions, a novel characteristic of the absolutely continuous component is introduced, by which the convergence rate of the classification error probability is computed, both for the binary and for the multi-class cases. This bound can reach the minimax optimal convergence rate achievable using SDA, but under much milder distributional assumptions. Interestingly, this convergence rate depends only on the intrinsic dimension of the continuous inputs, $d_a$, and not on $d$. Under privacy constraints, the data cannot be directly observed, and the constructed classifiers are functions of the randomised outcome of a suitable local differential privacy mechanism. In this paper we add Laplace distributed noises to the discretisations of all possible locations of the feature vector and to its label. Again, tight upper bounds on the convergence rate of the classification error probability can be derived, without using SDA, such that this rate depends on $2d_a$.