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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Vibrato Expression Control for Singing Voice Conversion with Improving Independent Control

arXiv:2606.17126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Singing style is a crucial aspect of a natural and expressive singing voice. Singers utilize singing styles to convey the feeling or emotion of the songs. Several works have been proposed to control singing style for making the more expressive singing voice. Recently, VibE-SVC successfully controls vibrato by predicting high-frequency F0 contour. In this paper, we introduce a singing voice conversion framework, called VibE-SVC2, to improve singing style conversion performance and controllability. The model offers control over two types of singing styles: a pitch style and a timbre style. For the pitch style, to resolve the pitch-energy entanglement issue that is unresolved in our previous work, we introduce a novel Energy Style Converter to address remaining style information in the energy contour. In addition, we propose a Zero-shot Pitch Style Converter, which mimics the pitch style of reference audio. To expand the controllability of the model, we propose vibrato rate scaling that is an independent control of vibrato extent, which is unavailable in VibE-SVC. For the timbre style, we extend the model to handle a variety of phonation styles. However, addressing specific styles such as vocal fry poses a challenge, as conventional F0 extraction often fails due to their inherent subharmonic characteristics, which degrades the conversion quality. To address this, we propose a novel Subharmonic Correction algorithm to refine the F0 contour for more natural timbre conversion. Through comprehensive objective and subjective evaluations, we demonstrate that VibE-SVC2 provides fine-grained, independent control over two types of singing styles, outperforming existing methods.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Maternal-Fetal immune networks and viral signatures in the healthy amniotic cavity

The intrauterine environment has traditionally been viewed as a privileged site protected by the placental barrier. However, emerging evidence suggests that early in utero microbial exposure may prime the developing fetal immune system. Here, using target-enriched metagenomics and high-dimensional proteomics, we characterized the intra-amniotic viral landscape and immune networks in 114 healthy pregnancies including both normal and anomalous fetuses. We identify a sparse yet heterogeneous human viral signature in 26% of samples, predominantly composed of Herpesviridae, Polyomaviridae, and Picornaviridae. Although viral reads abundance was associated with fetal abnormalities, viral detection generally did not induce overt inflammatory activation, supporting a state of immune homeostasis within the amniotic cavity. Instead, viral presence was associated with subtle and selective immune modulation, including altered inducible antimicrobial peptide expression (HBD-2 and HBD-3), coupled with an attenuation of regulatory cytokines. Our results further reveal that the amniotic immune environment is primarily governed by gestational age, transitioning from a Th1-predominant "alert" phase to innate-readiness preceding parturition. These findings suggest that fragments of viral genetic material within the amniotic cavity may contribute to fetal immune instruction without triggering overt inflammation, providing a foundational framework for understanding how "silent" viral-exposure during gestation influences the developmental origins of neonatal immunity.

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

The Challenges of Balancing AI Compliance and Technological Innovations in Critical Sectors: A Systematic Literature Review

arXiv:2606.12423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into critical infrastructure including healthcare, finance, energy, and defense, offers transformative benefits but also conflicts with evolving regulatory and governance frameworks. This paper presents a systematic literature review (SLR) to examine the challenges of balancing AI compliance and technological innovation across critical infrastructure sectors. The review follows established SLR guidelines to extract and synthesize insights from peer-reviewed articles, report, and institutional sources published between 2020-2025. The study identifies three interrelated challenges: fragmented regulations, excessive compliance burdens for smaller to medium enterprises (SMEs), and misaligned governance models. To address these challenges, the study highlights practical governance strategies, including risk-tiered regulation, compliance by design, and explainable AI, to support scalable and trustworthy AI deployment in critical sectors. Key contributions include a concise mapping of core AI-governance challenges and a conceptual diagram illustrating their overlap, as well as actionable strategies for policymakers and practitioner to harmonize oversight with innovation.

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

Million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy with expert-guided foundation models

Automated pollen identification from microscopy remains a bottleneck in aerobiology, palaeoecology and biodiversity monitoring, because scalable systems must generalise across specimen preparation, scanner settings and geographic origins while retaining palynological interpretability. To address this gap, we present a million-scale multimodal pollen microscopy resource, Pollen AI Atlas, assembled from pure-species whole-slide bright-field images spanning four geographic origins, four scanner settings and 46 taxon labels across 31 botanical families. Seeded by one manually selected exemplar per source slide, token-level mining and filtering produced 1,511,390 released grain detections with 99.6\% proposal precision in expert-curated test regions. Each detection was paired with machine-generated grain-level morphological captions from five open-weight vision-language models, guided by expert-verified palynological anchors, yielding structured descriptions of aperture systems, wall ornamentation, shape and size. Among the evaluated models, Gemma4 provided the most controlled primary caption set, combining tight length control, no leakage and the strongest text-retrieval performance. Baseline benchmarks with frozen visual features reached 88.16\% top-1 accuracy, while cross-regional retrieval showed that caption-derived text embeddings remained robust when image similarity degraded (mAP@20 0.811 versus 0.262). Released data, annotations, captions, splits, code, and weights provide a benchmark for pollen recognition, cross-regional domain adaptation and domain-specific multimodal microscopy learning.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Orbital-optimized spin-adapted multistate contracted VQE for excited states and properties on quantum hardware

arXiv:2606.15489v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce the orbital-optimized multistate contracted variational quantum eigensolver (oo-MC-VQE) method with spin-adapted operators for the computation of ground and excited states, as well as state-specific and transition properties. The use of spin-adapted operators ensures that the spin symmetry of the reference states is conserved throughout the VQE optimization. In multistate variational approaches, achieving a balanced description of an increasing number of electronic states places growing demands on the expressibility of the underlying ansatz, thereby introducing a fundamental trade-off between accuracy and circuit complexity. We consider the effects of this trade-off explicitly and find that the number of circuit parameters required to obtain accurate results is reported to scale approximately linearly in the number of states. We further present an explicit quantum-circuit implementation of the oo-MC-VQE method and demonstrate its integration with quantum error mitigation techniques. Finally, we execute the method on real quantum devices to compute absorption spectra for two benchmark molecular systems.

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

Stitching and dimensionality effects on large artificially generated volume datasets

Generating large images via deep learning requires patching input data to accommodate hardware memory limitations, then assembling output patches, a process that can introduce stitching artifacts when neighboring patches do not align at borders. While these artifacts are known to affect segmentation tasks, their impact on generative models for style-transfer remains poorly understood. We investigated three stitching approaches and two patch dimensionalities (2D vs 3D) using cycleGAN models trained on cryo-electron microscopy datasets. We evaluated both perceptual quality and performance on downstream mitochondria segmentation. Our key findings reveal that: (1) FID scores fail to detect subtle stitching artifacts that significantly impact downstream segmentation performance, (2) 3D models with artifact-free stitching marginally outperform 2D models on downstream tasks, though the improvement barely justifies the computational cost, and (3) 2D models train more stably due to larger batch sizes. Additionally, we demonstrate that ensembling predictions from three orthogonal directions can improve low-quality volumes but provides no benefit for high-quality outputs. These results demonstrate that maximizing generative model performance on large scientific datasets requires careful consideration and mitigation of stitching artifacts, and that perceptual metrics alone are insufficient for evaluating domain adaptation quality in biomedical imaging.

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

Neural ensemble Kalman filter: Data assimilation for compressible flows with shocks

arXiv:2602.23461v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data assimilation (DA) for compressible flows with shocks is challenging because many classical DA methods generate spurious oscillations and nonphysical features near uncertain shocks. We focus here on the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). We show that the poor performance of the EnKF may be attributed to the bimodal forecast distribution that can arise in the vicinity of an uncertain shock location; this violates the assumptions underpinning the EnKF, which assume a forecast which is close to Gaussian. To address this issue we introduce the new neural EnKF. The basic idea is to systematically embed neural function approximations within ensemble DA by mapping the forecast ensemble of shocked flows to the parameter space (weights and biases) of a deep neural network (NN) and to subsequently perform DA in that space. The nonlinear mapping encodes sharp and smooth flow features in an ensemble of NN parameters. Neural EnKF updates are therefore well-behaved only if the NN parameters vary smoothly within the neural representation of the forecast ensemble. We show that such a smooth variation of network parameters can be enforced via physics-informed transfer learning, and demonstrate that in so-doing the neural EnKF avoids the spurious oscillations and nonphysical features that plague the EnKF. The applicability of the neural EnKF is demonstrated through a series of systematic numerical experiments with the inviscid Burgers' equation, the Sod shock tube, and a two-dimensional blast wave.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Real-time pseudo entropy and modular-Hamiltonian correlations

arXiv:2606.14208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pseudo entropy is a complex-valued generalization of entanglement entropy defined from a reduced transition matrix. We study the pseudo entropy associated with a real-time transition matrix between an initial pure state and its unitary time evolution. For a subsystem $A$, we show that the short-time behavior of real-time pseudo entropy is governed by the correlation between the physical Hamiltonian $H$ and the modular Hamiltonian $K_A=-\log\rho_A$ of the initial reduced state, $ S_A(t,0)=S_A(0)-it \langle K_A(H-\langle H\rangle)\rangle + \mathcal{O}(t^2)$. For Hermitian dynamics, the initial imaginary response is controlled by the symmetrized covariance of $H$ and $K_A$ with an overall minus sign, while the initial real response is governed by their commutator. Thus the imaginary part of real-time pseudo entropy is not merely a branch artifact: it is a time-oriented modular response generated by the correlation between microscopic time evolution and subsystem coarse graining. We clarify the relation of this result to the known first law of pseudo entropy, derive an all-order expression in a Schmidt-diagonal model, recover thermal pseudo entropy as a special case, illustrate the covariance/commutator decomposition in a two-qubit model, and confirm the covariance response in transverse-field Ising-chain quenches, including a finite-size study of a modular susceptibility near the Ising critical region. We discuss how this amplitude-level oriented response can be related to ordinary entropy production, and also give a concrete $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric toy-model illustration of the non-Hermitian extension.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Language fMRI lateralization success and head motion in pediatric epilepsy patients with ADHD, and improvements based on fMRI task training

Introduction Language functional MRI (fMRI) is a valuable tool for presurgical planning in epilepsy. Functional MRI can be challenging in children, and head motion can compromise its utility. The candidacy of patients with ADHD for fMRI is sometimes queried regarding concerns about possible head motion. In 2020, we implemented an fMRI task training program, via telehealth and/or mock MRI. We aimed to determine whether training increased language lateralisation success and/or reduced head motion in all patients, and in those with ADHD. We also aimed to determine whether patients with ADHD exhibited more head motion during fMRI than those without ADHD. Methods We retrospectively identified 223 epilepsy (85%) and other neurosurgery patients, (241 scans including repeats) with language fMRI at Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, 2016-2024. There were 24 individuals with ADHD listed in the Electronic Medical Record, five of whom had diagnoses of both ADHD and autism; and nine with autism. Language lateralisation success was determined by clinician description recorded as left/right/bilateral in the medical record. 99 patients were provided the training including fMRI task practise. Head motion was quantified by maximum Framewise Displacement (FDmax; mm). Results ADHD was associated with lower language lateralisation success. Training was associated with greater language lateralisation success, across all patients, and in those with ADHD. Regarding ADHD and head motion, outliers in FDmax were seen in 5 young patients with ADHD. Data were trimmed to allow separate investigation of FDmax for the sample with and without extremes of head motion. In untrimmed data, FDmax was significantly higher in patients with ADHD than in those without. In trimmed data, FDmax was on average lower in patients with ADHD than those without, however this was not statistically supported. Regarding training and head motion, across all patients, FDmax was significantly lower for scans with training than without. In patients with ADHD, FDmax was on average lower for scans with training, however training was not associated with FDmax. Conclusions Language fMRI training was associated with higher language lateralization success, particularly in patients with ADHD. Training was associated with reduced head motion across all patients. Although some young patients with ADHD had substantial head motion, most in our sample did not move more than those without ADHD. We conclude that the training program increases success of language fMRI, and that an ADHD diagnosis should not be a contraindication to language fMRI.

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

DuET: Dual Expert Trajectories for Diffusion Image Editing

Recent diffusion editors perform diverse instruction-based edits while conditioning on the source image at every denoising step. Yet persistent source-image conditioning can limit how fully an edit is executed and how natural the result appears, especially when the target scene diverges substantially from the input. We introduce DuET (Dual Expert Trajectories), a training-free inference method that temporarily relaxes source-image conditioning by transitioning through a text-to-image phase before returning to edit mode, allowing the denoising trajectory to move toward the target distribution while retaining the structural benefits of image-conditioned editing. Without modifying model weights or increasing sampling cost, DuET consistently improves instruction relevance, semantic fidelity, and perceptual quality across diverse models and benchmarks. In some cases, these gains come with a modest reduction in source-image preservation, revealing a predictable trade-off between source preservation and edit fidelity.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

OmniVideo-100K: A Dataset for Audio-Visual Reasoning through Structured Scripts and Evidence Chains

Current automated pipelines for audio-visual Question Answering (QA) generally adopt a ``video-caption-QA'' paradigm. However, these methods typically segment videos into short clips and generate separate descriptions for audio and visual modalities. This decoupled processing severs inherent associations between sounds and their visual sources, while independent clip processing often causes inconsistent descriptions of the same entity across segments. Furthermore, coupling long-text comprehension and QA synthesis into a single step often restricts models to localized events, yielding questions lacking long-term temporal connections and deep cross-modal reasoning. To address these issues, we propose an automated data engine featuring two mechanisms: (1) Entity-Anchored Video Scripting transforms videos into structured scripts, comprising summaries, main entity lists, and segment-wise audio-visual descriptions. The entity list serves as a global prior to ensure cross-segment referential consistency and reconstruct audio-visual associations. (2) Clue-Guided QA Generation prompts models to first mine cross-segment, multimodal clues from the script, and subsequently generate QA pairs based on these high-value clues. Leveraging this pipeline, we construct the instruction-tuning dataset OmniVideo-100K and a human-verified test set, OmniVideo-Test. Fine-tuning VITA-1.5, Qwen2.5-Omni-7B and Qwen3-Omni-30B on OmniVideo-100K yields performance gains of up to 20.59% on OmniVideo-Test, demonstrating strong generalization (up to 12.64% improvements) across established benchmarks like Daily-Omni and JointAVBench.

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

A controlled human infection model for symptomatic pertussis in North America using the pertactin-producing clinical isolate D420

Background Despite widespread vaccination, pertussis remains a poorly controlled disease globally and results in substantial annual morbidity and mortality, particularly in young children. Controlled human infection models (CHIMs) using the causative agent Bordetella pertussis are promising systems to enable the study of pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and to rapidly assess vaccines and therapeutics. While a pertussis CHIM that produces asymptomatic infection has been established in Europe, the development of a CHIM that leads to symptomatic illness would be advantageous for evaluating vaccine efficacy against both infection and disease. Methods Healthy participants 18-40 years of age were inoculated intranasally with one of eight doses (ranging from 104 to 108 colony forming units (CFU)) of the pertactin-producing B. pertussis isolate D420 at the challenge facility within the Canadian Center for Vaccinology (Nova Scotia, Canada). The study occurred in two stages. In stage one, the B. pertussis dose was escalated in cohort groups of five to six participants until reaching an endpoint where 70-90% of participants exhibited mild (non-severe, Grade 1 or 2) symptomatic infection, defined as the Human Infectious Dose 70-90 (HID70-90). In stage two, additional challenges were conducted for doses below, at, and above the identified HID70-90 to characterize the emerging pertussis model. For all challenge doses, participants were closely monitored during an inpatient stay of up to 24 days and post-discharge for laboratory-confirmed infection, pertussis symptoms, safety, and IgG antibody responses to four B. pertussis antigens including pertussis toxin, filamentous hemagglutinin, fimbriae, and pertactin. All participants received a five-day course of azithromycin, where timing of initiation depended on B. pertussis testing and symptoms. The study was conducted between July 4, 2022 and March 19, 2025. Findings Seventy-five participants were inoculated with one of the eight B. pertussis D420 challenge doses and completed the inpatient stay. From the stage-one dose escalation, we found that 107 CFU of B. pertussis D420 was the lowest dose that achieved the HID70-90, where 9 of 12 participants (75.0%) exhibited mild symptomatic infection. Following stage-two challenges, 16 of 22 total participants at 107 CFU (72.7%) developed mild symptomatic infection, thus verifying the HID70-90. The symptomatic infection rate below the HID70-90 at 5x106 CFU of D420 was 20.0% and above the HID70-90 at 5x107 and 108 CFU were 58.3% and 55.6%, respectively. Symptoms with elevated frequency for symptomatic infection (relative to background symptoms in non-infected) included nasal congestion, runny nose, fatigue, malaise, and cough. At the HID70-90, 50% of symptomatic infections included cough. Serological analyses of the four highest (stage-two) challenge doses (5x106, 107, 5x107, 108 CFU) revealed that antibody titres increased over time post-challenge. Seroconversion for at least one of the four studied antibodies was nearly twice as common for symptomatic (70.0%) than asymptomatic (35.7%) infection and was absent (0%) for non-infected. All infections were cleared following azithromycin treatment (100%) and there were no study-related serious adverse events. Interpretation A safe and reproducible symptomatic pertussis CHIM was achieved, providing a model for research on pertussis disease pathogenesis and immunology and for assessing vaccines and therapeutics. (Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT05136599).

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Arbitrarily Configurable Wavefunctions via Imaginary Gauge Phase Imprint in Non-Hermitian Lattices

arXiv:2603.28153v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a general framework, termed the imaginary gauge phase imprint (IGPI), which enables engineering arbitrarily configurable wavefunctions with exact solutions and self-organization dynamics in any-dimensional non-Hermitian lattices under imaginary gauge fields. Using this method, we uncover a novel phase with exact critical wavefunctions, dubbed the skin critical phase (SCP), which is marked by unconventional localization, topological-skin, and dynamical characteristics. Furthermore, we validate the IGPI by imprinting and visualizing complex fractal states with Sierpinski-carpet and Koch-snowflake profiles, as well as exotic super-moire and 3D-moire states in regular lattices. Our work not only offers fresh insights into non-Hermitian critical and fractal physics, but also provides a rigorous paradigm for controlling and visualizing wavefunction patterns using the IGPI in engineered non-Hermitian systems.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

From 50K to 8.2 Million in 24 Hours: Vozinha's Algorithmic Consecration and the Multilingual Making of World Cup Visibility

We present a multilingual computational discourse analysis of how language constructed the algorithmic consecration of Vozinha, the 40-year-old Cape Verde goalkeeper, after Spain 0-0 Cape Verde at the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The study contributes a multilingual corpus in Portuguese, Spanish, English, and French; a nine-frame narrative taxonomy with cue-based frame annotation; a reproducible annotation pipeline combining LLM-assisted suggestion with human validation; and an analysis of cross-lingual narrative diffusion across discourse phases. We treat the platform follower count itself, narrated as "50k to 8M", as a linguistic object: a circulating and narratable proof of visibility rather than a mere measurement. The follower-growth timeline is used only as contextual metadata: we reconstruct a conservative phase structure, not a continuous API-native series, and type every datapoint by value class, confidence, and evidence type. The only exact primary scraper anchor is 8,235,652 followers at 2026-06-16 15:47 UTC; all other figures are reported as estimated ranges or thresholds, including an estimated pre-match baseline of 45k-56k. Findings suggest that distinct languages carried distinct frames: Portuguese mobilization, Spanish crisis, English nation-making, and a shared platform-metric spectacle through which peripheral athletic performance became globally visible. As a v0.1 pilot, the paper releases the corpus schema, frame taxonomy, annotation guidelines, hashed visual-evidence log, and typed timeline, while flagging full double annotation and inter-annotator agreement as planned work.

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

Decomposing one-class support vector machine into an ensemble of one-data support vector machines

arXiv:2606.16002v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One-class classification (OCC) is a classification problem in which the training data contains only one class. The one-class support vector machine (OCSVM) is one of the most competitive OCC algorithms. However, OCSVM has scalability issues with large-scale datasets. This paper proposes the acceleration strategy of OCSVM. The idea is to decompose the dataset into samples and train OCSVM models for single data points. Subsequently, ensemble learning is applied to combine all models to compute the OCSVM model for the dataset. In addition, further acceleration is achieved through a data-reduction strategy with an OCSVM model trained on the average of the training samples. The experiment compared the proposal and traditional OCSVM using the Python package. The proposed strategy is faster than traditional OCSVM, while achieving similar classification results. Moreover, the proposed strategy can create one-to-one correspondence between samples and models. Source code is uploaded at https://github.com/ToshiHayashi/ODSVM

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

Bayesian 3D Steerable CNNs: Enabling Equivariance and Uncertainty Quantification Simultaneously

arXiv:2606.15479v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steerable convolutional neural networks (Steerable-CNNs) guarantee SE(3)-equivariance by parameterizing kernels as linear combinations of steerable basis functions, but their deterministic nature precludes uncertainty quantification - limiting their use in settings where confidence estimates are essential. We propose a Bayesian Steerable-CNN that places posterior distributions over the basis coefficients, yielding stochastic kernels while preserving equivariance exactly. The loss function of the model is obtained via variational inference and minimized by Bayes-by-Backpropagation. The framework admits a decomposition of predictive uncertainty into epistemic and aleatoric components. Empirically, the model attains competitive classification accuracy alongside an expected calibration error of 0.0263 and outperforms its deterministic counterpart by up to 6.17% under distributional shift induced by additive Gaussian noise. Furthermore, we leverage the model's uncertainty estimates to enhance its performance significantly, achieving a notable gain - approximately 4% higher accuracy across 84% of the test dataset. A statistically significant negative correlation between epistemic uncertainty and prediction error confirms that the learned posterior variance is semantically meaningful. The framework unifies Bayesian uncertainty quantification with the inductive bias of equivariant CNNs.

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

Leveraging Physiological Signals to Predict Exam Outcomes with Machine Learning

arXiv:2606.14960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study investigates the application of machine learning models to predict exam outcomes using physiological data collected during examination sessions. Physiological stress indicators, including electrodermal activity, heart rate, and skin temperature, were analyzed to uncover their association with academic performance. A variety of machine learning approaches were employed, ranging from standard models like logistic regression, random forest, and support vector machines to more advanced architectures, including transformers, long short-term memory (LSTM), and gated recurrent unit (GRU) models. This diversity aimed to capture the complex interactions within the data effectively. A key focus was assessing the adaptability of transformers in processing numerical data and evaluating their performance in this novel context. Standard performance metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, were used to compare model efficacy. The experimental results demonstrate that while deep learning models generally excel at capturing complex relationships in physiological data, simpler models like random forests can sometimes achieve superior performance while offering computational efficiency and interpretability. Furthermore, transformers demonstrated notable versatility, showcasing performances comparable to those of the LSTM and GRU models. This research underscores the importance of experimenting with a broad class of models that align with the objectives of the problem at hand, balancing precision, efficiency, and interpretability. By elucidating the relationships between physiological signals and academic performance, this study contributes to understanding stressors affecting students' mental health. It further promotes leveraging physiological data to enhance student well-being and academic outcomes.

19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Enhancing Decision-Making with Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Fictitious Play

Large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MAS) have demonstrated great potential in solving tasks with execution complexity, by distributing subtasks across cooperative agents. However, this divide-and-conquer paradigm falls short on decision-making tasks that are also prevalent in the real world. These tasks require simultaneous reasoning from the stances of all involved stakeholders whose decisions are mutually dependent and thus cannot be solved in isolation. We characterize this challenge as stance entanglement, a form of decision complexity distinct from execution complexity. To address it, we propose Multi-Agent Fictitious Play (MAFP), a novel MAS paradigm that represents stakeholder stances as agents and formulates decision-making as an equilibrium-seeking process. Built on the game-theoretic principle of fictitious play, MAFP iteratively updates each agent's decision by best responding to the empirical mixture of other agents' past decisions. This enables agents to expose and address one another's weaknesses, progressively improving decision quality and robustness. We evaluate MAFP on challenging decision-making tasks that test the capability of deciding strategies for competitive scenarios prior to acting. MAFP outperforms both single-round and multi-round baselines on two complementary metrics, tournament strength and robustness, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing stance entanglement.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Universal Design and Physical Applications of Non-Uniform Cellular Automata on Translationally Invariant Lattices

arXiv:2605.13379v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by recent theoretical and experimental advances, hyperbolic lattices have emerged as a paradigmatic setting in which geometry becomes an active organizing principle of quantum systems. Their negative curvature, exponential volume growth, and non-Abelian translation symmetry make them fundamentally distinct from Euclidean lattices and give rise to rich geometry-dependent physics, but also hinder the direct application of well-established analytical and computational approaches originally developed for physical systems defined on Euclidean lattices. To establish a unified framework for geometry-dependent physics on Euclidean and hyperbolic lattices, we develop higher-order non-uniform cellular automata (NUCA) as a local-to-global construction for translationally invariant regular lattices. This construction derives geometry-dependent update rules through a lattice-deforming procedure that embeds hyperbolic lattices into a Euclidean square lattice, thereby encoding hyperbolic geometry while preserving physical locality. It thus provides a systematic route toward quantum and classical physics on hyperbolic lattices. We demonstrate the framework in three applications ranging from quantum many-body physics to non-equilibrium statistical physics. First, on the hyperbolic $\{5,4\}$ lattice, a linear NUCA generates exactly solvable subsystem symmetry-protected topological (SSPT) models and spontaneous subsystem symmetry-breaking models. Second, as a quantum generalization, we construct non-uniform Clifford quantum cellular automata (CQCA) for the hyperbolic cluster state. Third, we formulate a probabilistic NUCA for directed percolation (DP) on the hyperbolic lattice.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Optimisation of steatotic liver disease screening algorithm for resource-poor settings using machine learning

Background The European Association for the Study of the Liver (ESAL) - Steatotic Liver Disease (SLD) screening algorithm involves two steps; initial screening with FIB-4 followed by referral for vibration-controlled transient elastography (VCTE) in patients likely to have significant fibrosis (SF). However, VCTE is not widely available in resource-limited settings. Aim To optimise the EASL SLD screening algorithm for resource-poor settings using machine learning (ML). Methods We analysed data from 964 adults aged [≥]35 years who underwent VCTE at a tertiary referral centre in Sri Lanka between November 2024 and 2025. Multiple ML models using different methods and variable combinations were trained on 80% of the dataset and tested on the remaining 20%. Best models were selected based on performance and externally validated using data from 430 patients who underwent VCTE before November 2024. Model performance was compared with the FIB-4 using confusion matrices. Results A Random Forest model incorporating age, AST, ALT, and platelet count separately, rather than using FIB-4, outperformed. The all-variable ML model showed the best predictive performance for SF, with accuracy of 77.2%, recall of 0.762, precision of 0.778, and AUC-ROC of 0.818. The variables used in the model, in descending order of feature importance, were AST, platelet count, BMI, ALT, age, diabetes mellitus, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, sex, family history, hypothyroidism, diabetes complication and smoking. External validation demonstrated 75.1% accuracy and an AUC of 0.779. When used as the first step of the SLD screening algorithm, the all-variable ML model identified 37 (17.1%) additional true positives and reduced false-negative diagnoses by 50% compared with FIB-4. Conclusions ML-based models were more effective than the FIB-4 score as the first-line screening tool for VCTE referral, substantially improving the identification of patients with significant fibrosis in this South Asian cohort.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

23.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study

by Jelisaveta Džigurski, Märt Möls, Kristi Läll, Hannah Currant, Mall Eltermaa, Estonian Biobank Research Team , Reedik Mägi, Lili Milani, Triin Laisk Background Hormonal contraceptives (HCs) are widely used and have well-documented population-level statistics. Previous studies with short follow-ups have focussed on individual HC use and side effects. However, the same aspects over longer periods, HC formulation switching, and the impact of genetic factors on HC side effects remain understudied due to the limited availability of suitable datasets. We investigated whether the Estonian Biobank (EstBB) is suitable for studying genetic risk for HC side effects. Methods and findings This is a longitudinal descriptive study combining prescribed HC purchase data collected from 2004 to 2022 with genetic and health data from 73,071 female EstBB HC users aged 15–55 at the time of purchase. HC usage was defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes G02B, G03A, and G03HB01. Methods included calculating age-stratified annual user prevalence, inferring usage periods from purchases, assessing formulation switching, identifying the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10)-based side effect-related diagnoses and thromboembolism risk factors, and assessing carrier status for Factor V Leiden (FVL, rs6025) and prothrombin G20210A (PTM, rs1799963) genetic variants as proof-of-concept. Over 19 years, 20 HC formulations with five administration routes (oral pills, transdermal patches, vaginal rings, subdermal implants, intrauterine devices) were used. In the EstBB, combined HCs were the most commonly used among users aged 15–29, while progestin-only HC use increased with age and over time, comparable to the Estonian population. Overall, 64.2% (n = 46,920) of users switched formulations at least once, with 17.7% (n = 12,929) being rapid switchers. Side effect-related diagnoses were observed in 23.1% (n = 2,982) of rapid switchers, with excessive/irregular menstrual bleeding being the most common. Genetic analysis revealed that 5.3% (n = 3,886) of users carried at least one variant previously associated with increased thrombosis risk (3.5% (n = 2,556) carried FVL only, 1.8% (n = 1,276) PTM only, and 0.07% (n = 54) both). Carriers of thrombosis-associated variants had a significantly higher percentage of thrombosis (6.5%) than non-carriers (4.2%; OR = 1.61, 95% CI [1.40, 1.84], p 

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Critique of World Model: A Generative Latent Prediction Architecture for World Modeling

World Model, the algorithmic simulator of the real-world environment which biological agents experience and act upon, has been an emerging topic in recent years due to the rising need to develop virtual agents with artificial (general) intelligence. There has been much discussion on what a world model really is, how to build it, how to use it, and how to evaluate it. In this essay, starting from the imagination in the famed Sci-Fi classic Dune, and drawing inspiration from the concept of ``hypothetical thinking'' in psychology literature, we argue the primary goal of a world model to be {\it simulating all actionable possibilities of the real world for purposeful reasoning and acting}. We examine the key design dimensions of world modeling: data, representation, architecture, learning objective, and usage, surveying existing approaches and analyzing their tradeoffs. Building on this examination, we propose a new Generative Latent Prediction (GLP) architecture for a general-purpose world model, based on stateful, hierarchical, multi-level, and mixed continuous/discrete representations, and a generative and self-supervised learning framework, with an outlook of a Physical, Agentic, and Nested (PAN) AGI system enabled by such a model.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Frozen elephant trunk repair in heritable thoracic aortic disease: Impact of genetic aortopathy on long-term outcomes - A multicenter analysis

Aims This multicenter study aims to compare outcomes of total aortic arch replacement (TAR) using the frozen elephant trunk (FET) technique in patients with and without heritable thoracic aortic disease (HTAD) and to assess whether HTAD influences postprocedural adverse aortic events (AAEs). Methods From 06/2007 to 05/2024, aortic databases from 13 European centers were screened for HTAD patients undergoing TAR with FET. All consecutive dissection and aneurysm non-HTAD patients from the four core centers served as comparator. The primary outcome was AAE, a composite of diameter progression, distal stent graft induced new entry (dSINE), malperfusion, rupture and pseudoaneurysm at 5 years after FET implantation. Results Of 2739 FET patients, 196 (7.2%) were diagnosed with HTAD. The control group consisted of 867 non-HTAD FET patients. Marfan syndrome was the most common condition (72%), followed by Loeys-Dietz syndrome (11%), vascular Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (5.6%) and Turner syndrome (2.0%). Seventeen (8.8%) patients were diagnosed with ns-HTAD. At 5 years 46 (24%) AAEs occurred in the HTAD group, 169 (20%) in the non-HTAD group (p=0.2). Diameter progression was the most common event (10% vs. 12%; p=0.6), followed by dSINE (5.8% vs. 4.5%; p=0.5), malperfusion (4.2% vs. 3.3%; p=0.5), rupture (2.1% vs. 0.7%; p=0.09) and pseudoaneurysm (0.5% vs. 0.2%; p=0.5). Conclusions The FET technique appears safe and effective for acute and chronic aortic disease in HTAD patients, with outcomes comparable to non-HTAD cases and no increase in graft-related complications, challenging traditional concerns about stent graft use in genetically mediated aortic disease.