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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Agentic Large Language Models for Automated Structural Analysis of 3D Frame Systems

arXiv:2606.06525v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful foundation models with strong reasoning capabilities across domains. Beyond reactive text generation, agentic LLMs enable autonomous workflow execution through modular task decomposition and coordinated tool use. In structural engineering, recent efforts have developed agentic LLMs for automated analysis of plane frames. However, their extension to 3D frames remains underexplored due to challenges in irregular geometric representation, topological consistency, and long-horizon reasoning. This paper proposes an agentic LLM framework for automated structural analysis of 3D frames from natural language inputs. Irregular 3D frames are represented by projection onto a 2D plan, where orthogonal gridlines define spatial coordinates and a matrix of number of stories encodes vertical extrusion of each grid cell. Building on this representation, the framework establishes a multi-agent pipeline: a problem analysis agent parses input into structured JSON; a floor decomposition agent derives the spatial layout of each floor; the 3D geometry is assembled by node, girder, slab, and column agents; support and load agents assign boundary and loading conditions, and code translation agents generate executable SAP2000 script. Evaluated on ten representative 3D frames, the proposed framework achieves an average accuracy of 90% across repeated trials, demonstrating consistent and reliable performance.

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

GD$^2$PO: Mitigating Multi-Reward Conflicts via Group-Dynamic reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization

arXiv:2606.16771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLMs advance, post-training reinforcement learning (RL) increasingly relies on multi-dimensional rewards to cultivate comprehensive capabilities. This shift demands new algorithms capable of optimizing diverse and potentially competing objectives simultaneously. To address this, existing methods such as Group reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization (GDPO) decompose the overall score into independent reward groups, then compute the RL loss separately within each group. However, this strategy still encounters multi-reward conflicts: a single rollout can yield positive advantages on certain reward dimensions but negative ones on others, causing opposing signals to cancel each other out during aggregation, further hindering RL training efficiency. Inspired by Dynamic sAmpling Policy Optimization (DAPO), which improves RL training efficiency by filtering out ineffective rollouts with near-zero advantages, we propose Group-Dynamic reward-Decoupled Policy Optimization (GD$^2$PO). Specifically, GD$^2$PO employs a conflict-aware filtering mechanism to mask out rollouts suffering from severe reward-wise disagreement. By preventing conflicting signals from canceling each other out, this masking strategy preserves and enhances the magnitude of effective RL advantages, thereby significantly accelerating learning efficiency. Furthermore, we introduce query-level reweighting to dynamically adjust the update intensity of each query based on its overall reward consensus. Experiments on various multi-reward scenarios, including tool calling and human preference alignment, demonstrate that GD$^2$PO consistently and significantly outperforms existing baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/Qwen-Applications/GD2PO.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Surpassing Scale by Efficiency: A Compact 135M Parameter Foundational LLM Natively Adapted for the Bangla Language

While the NLP landscape is dominated by multi-billion parameter architectures, their deployment in low-resource, non-Latin scripts remains computationally prohibitive for edge configurations, mobile systems, and decentralized local hardware. This paper presents bangla-smollm-135m, a highly compact 135-million parameter decoder-only foundational model engineered explicitly for high-efficiency language modeling in the Bangla script. By leveraging a deterministic intersect-and-append token merging strategy between TituLLMs and SmolLM2-135M, the model overcomes subword script fragmentation without destabilizing early pretrained parameter states. In zero-shot multi-task benchmark evaluations (PIQA_bn, OpenBookQA_bn, CommonsenseQA_bn, and Bangla_MMLU), bangla-smollm-135m matches or outperforms models twice its size (Gemma-3-270m) and achieves parity with models in the 1B parameter tier. The model is available at rnnandi/bangla-smollm-135m

04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Deep-Tissue Hemodynamic Sensing: Comparing Impedance and Photoplethysmography for Wearable Blood Pressure Estimation

The pursuit of continuous, cuffless blood pressure (BP) monitoring is constrained by the superficial sensing depth of photoplethysmography (PPG). Impedance plethysmography (IPG) offers deeper tissue penetration, but its comparative value over PPG remains unquantified at scale. In this comparative study of 261 participants (130 hypertensive, 131 non-hypertensive), we utilized a custom dual-modality wearable prototype to capture simultaneous IPG and PPG signals. Over 150,000 cardiac cycles were analyzed using an unsupervised archetype discovery pipeline to quantify beat-to-beat morphological heterogeneity. IPG resolved up to three distinct morphological modes per participant, whereas co-located PPG converged into highly conserved, uniform profiles. IPG captured specific signatures of pathological arterial remodeling and physiological habitus; ventral forearm IPG pulse amplitude exhibited a significant main effect for BP status (p = 0.024), a relationship absent in the co-located PPG signal. Furthermore, increasing body mass index (BMI) significantly attenuated the prevalence of steep-upstroke archetypes in IPG (p = 0.035), quantifying a likely damping effect of adipose tissue. Deep-tissue bioimpedance captures rich, heterogeneous hemodynamic signatures including arterial-dominant morphologies that are invisible to optical sensors. Transitioning from optical pulse wave analysis to bioimpedance-based models may offer a promising pathway for accurate wearable cardiovascular monitoring.

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

TetherCache: Stabilizing Autoregressive Long-Form Video Generation with Gated Recall and Trusted Alignment

Autoregressive video diffusion models provide a natural formulation for streaming and variable-length video generation by conditioning newly generated frames on previously generated content. However, extending these models to minute-level generation remains challenging: the limited KV-cache budget prevents the model from retaining the full history, while repeatedly conditioning on self-generated frames induces a context distribution shift that accumulates over time, leading to visual artifacts, quality degradation, and temporal drift. In this paper, we propose TetherCache, a training-free and plug-and-play cache management strategy for drift-resistant long video generation. TetherCache organizes the cache into sink, memory, and recent regions, and introduces two complementary mechanisms. First, GRAB (Gated Recall with Attention-Diversity Balancing) selects long-range memory frames using a gated score that combines attention-based relevance with temporal diversity, preserving informative yet diverse historical context under a fixed cache budget. Second, TAME (Trusted Alignment via Memory Editing) lightly edits newly recalled memory tokens by aligning their statistics to a trusted context distribution, reducing the pollution caused by drifted historical features. Built on Self-Forcing, TetherCache consistently improves long-video generation quality on VBench-Long across 30s, 60s, and 240s settings. In particular, for 240s generation, it substantially improves overall and semantic scores while reducing quality drift from 7.84 to 1.33, demonstrating its effectiveness for stable long-horizon autoregressive video diffusion.

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

Least-Action-Guided Diffusion for Physical Extrapolation

arXiv:2606.11277v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable extrapolation remains a central challenge for generative models in computational physics, because models trained over finite ranges of time, parameters, or geometries may produce physically inconsistent predictions outside the training distribution. We introduce a least-action-principle-guided diffusion, LAPG, a framework that promotes physical consistency during inference rather than relying solely on constraints imposed during training. The method combines a conditional score-based diffusion model with an action-derived physical guidance score. In the first stage, the learned score model generates an in-distribution proposal; in the second, an action-based variational prior refines this proposal toward the target out-of-distribution condition. This formulation turns the principle of least action into a differentiable inference-time correction mechanism and provides an alternative to pointwise residual penalties that often require empirical loss balancing. We evaluate LAPG on representative ordinary- and partial-differential-equation systems, including free fall, conservative and dissipative spring-mass dynamics, interacting point vortices, and potential flow over parameterized airfoils. In temporal, parameter, and geometric extrapolation tests, LAPG reduces phase drift, preserves dissipative decay, captures vortex motion, and improves the lift response of airfoil flows compared with training-time physics-informed baselines.

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

Scaling Generative Foundation Models for Chest Radiography with Rectified Flow Transformers

arXiv:2606.19460v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the first generative foundation model for chest radiograph synthesis trained from scratch at the billion-parameter scale. Existing radiographic AI models often suffer from poor generalisation across patient subpopulations, institutions, and acquisition settings, resulting in limited real-world clinical utility. Controlled, high-fidelity synthesis of chest radiographs is a promising path toward diversifying clinical datasets and evaluating the robustness of diagnostic models. Therefore, we present the largest specialist generative foundation model for chest radiographs to date, with over 1.3B parameters, trained for 1.6T tokens on a curated, heterogeneous dataset comprising 1.2M radiographs and clinical expert-guided metadata. Our model supports controllable radiograph generation and editing across multiple demographic subgroups, acquisition views, and a dozen pathologies. Moreover, we significantly advance the state of the art in radiograph synthesis fidelity, producing images that are indistinguishable from real radiographs to clinical experts.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Interpretable Alzheimer's Diagnosis via Multimodal Fusion of Regional Brain Experts

Accurate and early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease (AD) is critical for effective intervention and requires integrating complementary information from multimodal neuroimaging data. However, conventional fusion approaches often rely on simple concatenation of features, which cannot adaptively balance the contributions of biomarkers such as amyloid PET and MRI across brain regions. In this work, we propose MREF-AD, a Multimodal Regional Expert Fusion model for AD diagnosis. It is a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework that models mesoscopic brain regions within each modality as independent experts and employs a gating network to learn subject-specific fusion weights. Utilizing tabular neuroimaging and demographic information from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), MREF-AD achieves competitive performance over strong classic and deep baselines while providing interpretable, modality- and region-level insight into how structural and molecular imaging jointly contribute to AD diagnosis. The source code is available at https://github.com/PennShenLab/mref-ad.

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

Schattor: Schatten-family methods for deep learning optimization

arXiv:2606.15702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep learning optimization features heterogeneous parameter structures, noisy gradients, and highly nonconvex landscapes, posing significant challenges for both algorithm design and theoretical analysis. Motivated by the limitations of SGD and the success of adaptive optimizers, we propose {\it Schattor}, a family of adaptive first-order methods based on Schatten norms. Schattor unifies SGD and the recently proposed matrix-variate adaptive optimizer Muon within a single Schatten-norm-based framework. We establish dimension-free stationarity guarantees for methods in the Schattor family for stochastic matrix optimization problems via a novel matrix martingale moment bound. We also develop multi-block extensions that adaptively balance block-wise optimization progress and prove dimension-free stationarity guarantees in this more general setting.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Structured Noise Adaptation for Sequential Bayesian Filtering with Embedded Latent Transfer Operators

arXiv:2606.14195v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Kalman filters based on the Embedded Latent Transfer Operators (ELTO) emerge as novel statistical tools for sequential state estimation. However, a critical limitation stems from their use of simplified noise models, which fail to dynamically adapt to non-stationary processes. To address this limitation, we introduce an ELTO-based Bayesian filtering approach with a new structured parameterization for the filter's noise model. This parameterization enables structured noise adaptation, which couples the data-driven learning of an optimal time-invariant noise model with dynamic parameter adaptation that responds to changes in dynamics within non-stationary processes. Empirical results show that our structured noise adaptation improves the filter's dynamic state estimation performance in noisy, time-varying environments.

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

Closing the Approximation Gap in Simulation-free Latent SDEs

arXiv:2606.16138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recovering dynamical systems from noisy observations is a recurring challenge across scientific domains, including neuroscience and physics. Latent stochastic differential equations (SDEs) address this by modeling the system as an unobserved state that evolves according to a learnable SDE and generates the observations. Variational inference (VI) provides a tractable objective for fitting latent SDEs. Traditional VI algorithms evaluate this objective by numerical simulation over a time discretization, trading fidelity for computational cost. A recent class of algorithms, simulation-free VI, sidesteps this tradeoff by parameterizing the posterior through its instantaneous marginals rather than its drift. In this work, we show that the efficiency of existing simulation-free VI algorithms comes at a price: their parameterizations restrict the approximate posterior to a subset of the SDEs available to simulation-based methods, degrading posterior inference and parameter learning. We propose Helmholtz-SDE, a simulation-free VI algorithm that closes this gap by optimizing over path laws compatible with a prescribed collection of marginals. Helmholtz-SDE recovers dynamics more faithfully than prior simulation-free methods, with the largest gains under high posterior uncertainty. It further matches the performance of simulation-based VI at a fraction of the runtime.

12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

A data-driven rediscovery of the specificity-conferring code of adenylation domains in nonribosomal peptide synthetases

Nonribosomal peptide synthetases (NRPSs) are large modular enzymes that assemble structurally diverse peptides, many of pharmacological importance, including antibiotics and immunosuppressants. Within each NRPS module, the adenylation (A) domain selects the substrate to be incorporated, a choice governed by a small set of residues lining the binding pocket. For two decades, computational prediction of A-domain substrate specificity has relied on residue sets - most prominently the Stachelhaus code and the 34-residue "8 Angstrom code" - that were defined by spatial proximity to the substrate rather than by demonstrated predictive value. Here we revisit which residues govern substrate specificity from a purely data-driven perspective. We assembled a non-redundant dataset of 5,366 A-domain sequences (4,693 bacterial and 673 fungal) and used information-theoretic measures to rank alignment positions by their statistical association with substrate identity, without restricting candidate positions to any predefined structural shell. This procedure yielded two compact, kingdom-specific codes: IG15B (15 positions) for bacterial and IG13F (13 positions) for fungal A-domains. Both match or exceed the predictive accuracy of the 34-residue 8 Angstrom code while using fewer than half its positions, and both independently recover the majority of the classical Stachelhaus positions. Notably, our analysis identifies four positions (242, 280, 281, and 284) that lie outside all conventional codes yet carry non-redundant specificity information and co-localize with classical determinants on two helices flanking the binding pocket. These positions provide new candidate sites for the rational engineering of A-domain specificity.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

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

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

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

A Context-Aware Dataset for Stance Detection in Bioethical Controversies on Reddit

Bioethical debates increasingly unfold on social media, yet stance detection research lacks large-scale, domain-specific resources for modeling such context-dependent discourse. We present BioStance, a context-aware dataset of 39,600 annotated Post-Comment pairs from Reddit bioethical discussions. BioStance covers six controversial targets across three dimensions of bioethical controversy: fundamental value conflicts, individual liberty versus collective responsibility, and technological uncertainty. Each instance preserves hierarchical conversational context and is labeled by three independent annotators using a three-class stance scheme: Favor, Against, and None. The annotations achieve a mean Krippendorff's $\alpha$ of 0.82, indicating substantial reliability. By combining thematic diversity, conversational structure, and high-quality human annotation, BioStance supports research on context-aware stance detection, argument mining, and computational analysis of bioethical discourse.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-16

Phylogenetic tree inference using generative models

Accurate inference of phylogenetic trees is fundamental to evolutionary biology, yet existing methods rely on complex pipelines involving multiple sequence alignment, explicit evolutionary models, and computationally intensive tree search procedures. Here, we present BetaInfer, a generative framework that reformulates phylogenetic tree inference as a sequence transduction problem. BetaInfer leverages hybrid transformer-based architectures to directly map sets of unaligned sequences to phylogenetic trees represented in Newick format. Trained on large-scale simulated evolutionary data with known ground truth, BetaInfer learns to capture complex evolutionary signals directly from sequence data. Ensemble-based generation of multiple candidate trees further improves robustness, reducing reconstruction error by over 30% relative to single predictions. Across extensive evaluations on both simulated and empirical datasets, BetaInfer achieves competitive performance relative to state-of-the-art phylogenetic pipelines, matching, and in some cases exceeding, the accuracy of established likelihood-based and distance-based methods under a wide range of conditions. Interpretability analyses reveal that BetaInfer leverages internal pairwise-distance computations to synthesize evolutionary relationships into an integrated, global representation that supports direct tree generation. Together, these results demonstrate that generative models can serve as a viable and scalable alternative to standard phylogenetic pipelines.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Stochastic signal sensing with finite energy and dead time at the fundamental quantum limit

arXiv:2606.18133v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: State preparation, measurement, and reset operations take finite time and use finite energy in realistic experiments, yet the impact of this on optimal quantum metrological protocols is not properly understood. We study the effect on sensing a stochastic signal, relevant for the detection of ultralight dark matter and other searches for fundamental physics. We prove that two-mode squeezed vacuum is the optimal probe state given a finite mean-energy constraint for a family of incoherent sensing problems, including noise sensing and quantum illumination. For estimating a gain independent of a loss, we show that entanglement is a required resource to achieve the fundamental quantum limit and observe a non-Gaussian to Gaussian transition in the optimal unentangled state as the dead time increases. We apply our results to bulk acoustic wave resonators.

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

All-Mem: Agentic Lifelong Memory via Dynamic Topology Evolution

Lifelong interactive agents are expected to assist users over months or years, which requires continually writing long term memories while retrieving the right evidence for each new query under fixed context and latency budgets. Existing memory systems often degrade as histories grow, yielding redundant, outdated, or noisy retrieved contexts. We present All-Mem, an online/offline lifelong memory framework that maintains a topology structured memory bank via explicit, non destructive consolidation, avoiding the irreversible information loss typical of summarization based compression. In online operation, it anchors retrieval on a bounded visible surface to keep coarse search cost bounded. Periodically offline, an LLM diagnoser proposes confidence scored topology edits executed with gating using three operators: Split, Merge, and Update, while preserving immutable evidence for traceability. At query time, typed links enable hop bounded, budgeted expansion from active anchors to archived evidence when needed. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval-s show improved retrieval and QA over representative baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/LvCan926/All-Mem.

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

Architectural Bias in Face Presentation Attack Detection: A Comparative Study of Vision Transformers and Convolutional Neural Networks

Face Presentation Attack Detection (PAD) systems constitute a critical security layer in biometric authentication; however, existing approaches exhibit systematic performance disparities across demographic groups, disproportionately affecting individuals with darker skin tones. This paper presents a comparative empirical investigation of whether Vision Transformer architectures reduce demographic bias in face PAD systems relative to convolutional baselines. Experiments are conducted on the CASIA-SURF Cross-Ethnicity Face Anti-Spoofing (CeFA) dataset. Three architectures are evaluated: a Multimodal ViT-Tiny trained from scratch, a ResNet18 CNN baseline, and a pretrained DeiT-S fine-tuned on CeFA across African, East Asian, and zero-shot Central Asian demographic groups. DeiT-S achieves the highest overall accuracy of 97.27% and the lowest EER of 0.86%, outperforming ResNet18 at 90.15% accuracy. In terms of fairness, DeiT-S reduces the inter-ethnic ACER gap between African and East Asian subjects to 0.13%, compared to 0.75% reported in an LBP-based work [6], representing an 83% reduction. Most notably, while ResNet18 records a BPCER of 10.44% on zero-shot Central Asian subjects, DeiT-S maintains 2.89% on the same unseen group, demonstrating a 3.6x generalization advantage. These results suggest that pretrained Vision Transformers achieve superior PAD accuracy, produce smaller demographic performance gaps, and generalize more equitably across unseen demographic groups, indicating that cross-demographic fairness in PAD may partly be influenced by architectural design.

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

Ultrafast On-chip Online Learning via Spline Locality in Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

arXiv:2602.02056v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ultrafast online learning is essential for high-frequency systems, such as controls for quantum computing and nuclear fusion, where adaptation must occur on sub-microsecond timescales. Meeting these requirements demands low-latency, fixed-precision computation under strict memory constraints, a regime in which conventional Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are both inefficient and numerically unstable. We identify key properties of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) that align with these constraints. Specifically, we show that: (i) KAN updates exploiting B-spline locality are sparse, enabling superior on-chip resource scaling, and (ii) KANs are inherently robust to fixed-point quantization. By implementing fixed-point online training on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), a representative platform for on-chip computation, we demonstrate that KAN-based online learners are significantly more efficient and expressive than MLPs across a range of low-latency and resource-constrained tasks. To our knowledge, this work is the first to demonstrate model-free online learning at sub-microsecond latencies.

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

SupraBench: A Benchmark for Supramolecular Chemistry

Supramolecular chemistry, which includes the study of non-covalent host-guest assemblies, has advanced various applications. However, designing host-guest systems remains time-consuming, requiring days of dry-lab verification per candidate pair. Although LLMs have emerged as a fast alternative with strong performance on molecular binding tasks, no benchmark currently systematically evaluates LLMs for host-guest reasoning across fundamental supramolecular chemistry tasks, e.g., binding affinity prediction. To this end, we collaborate with domain experts to release the first Supramolecular Benchmark, called SupraBench, to evaluate LLMs in chemistry reasoning. Specifically, we design four fundamental tasks, i.e., binding affinity prediction, top-binder selection, solvent identification, and host-guest description, plus an auxiliary vision-based task for molecular identification. We also release SupraPMC, a curated 16M-token corpus of Supramolecular chemistry articles distilled from Europe PMC, to support the adaptation to the supramolecular domain. We benchmark a broad range of open and proprietary LLMs and find that LLMs leave substantial headroom across all tasks. Domain adaptation pretraining over SupraPMC transfers cleanly to in-distribution regression but trades off against strict letter-format output. Moreover, the difficulty profile differs sharply across task families, revealing distinct failure modes that indicate specific gaps in current supramolecular chemistry reasoning. Our source codes and benchmark datasets are available at https://github.com/Tianyi-Billy-Ma/SupraBench.

21.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp freezing time estimates for the subcritical Facilitated Exclusion Process

arXiv:2606.15233v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the exact transience time of the Facilitated Exclusion Process (FEP) on the one-dimensional torus with $N$ sites. The FEP exhibits an active/inactive phase transition at critical density $1/2$, such that in the subcritical density regime $(0,1/2)$, it becomes frozen after a finite time period – the transience time or freezing time. We first show that for the FEP starting from a Bernoulli product measure of marginal density $\rho \in (0,1/2)$, the transience time has exactly the scale of $\Theta(\log^3 N)$. Secondly, we prove that in the near-critical case $\rho \simeq 1/2 - N^{-\alpha}$ for $\alpha \in (0,1)$, the transience time is polynomial and has a scale of $N^{1 \wedge (2\alpha)}$. The key idea is to estimate the typical size of locally supercritical intervals of the initial distribution, which has order $\log N$ in the subcritical case and $N^{1 \wedge (2\alpha)}$ in the near-critical case. In the subcritical case this is enough, whereas in the near-critical case we need additional dynamical decorrelation inequalities to apply this static result to estimate the freezing time.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Provable quantum speedups for computing persistence in topological data analysis

arXiv:2410.21258v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Topological data analysis (TDA) aims to extract noise-robust features from a data set by examining the number and persistence of holes in its topology. We provide an efficient quantum algorithm for a computational problem closely related to a core task in TDA – determining whether a given hole persists across different length scales. Further, we prove the problem itself is $\mathsf{BQP}_1$-hard, implying that a classical solution is extremely unlikely; this stands in contrast to all previous quantum approaches to TDA, where the problems were also intractable for quantum computers, or where a rigorous proof of classical hardness still remains open. This result implies an {exponential} quantum speedup for this problem under standard complexity-theoretic assumptions. Our approach relies on encoding the persistence of a hole in a variant of the guided sparse Hamiltonian problem, where the guiding state is constructed from a harmonic representative of the hole.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Perceptions of aging well among older adults with heart failure: insights from a qualitative study

Background: Heart failure (HF) is a prevalent and often debilitating cardiovascular condition among older adults, frequently accompanied by multimorbidity, functional limitations, and the need to age in place. Traditional models of successful aging emphasize disease absence and preserved function, yet most individuals with HF live with ongoing symptoms and chronic health challenges. How older adults with HF define aging well, particularly across different socioeconomic contexts, remains underexplored. Objectives: To explore how older adults with HF conceptualize aging well and to identify perceived facilitators and barriers across more and less resourced New York City neighborhoods. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 adults diagnosed with HF residing in Manhattan and Brooklyn neighborhoods classified by 2019 United States Census data. Interviews were guided by Rowe and Kahn's model. Transcripts were analyzed using an inductive-deductive thematic approach and interpreted in alignment with the Healthy People 2030 framework. Results: Participants had a mean age of 69 years; 50% identified as Black and 50% were women. Despite functional limitations, 65% reported aging well. Five themes emerged: maintaining physical function, maintaining cognitive function, sustaining social relationships, avoiding pain, and promoting overall well-being. Avoiding pain and promoting well-being extended beyond traditional models. Neighborhood context shaped priorities, with financial stability emphasized in more affluent areas and social cohesion prioritized in less affluent communities. Conclusions: Older adults with HF frequently perceive themselves as aging well despite chronic illness, reframing successful aging beyond disease avoidance. These findings support a patient-centered, place-informed model of aging well with implications for healthcare delivery and policy.

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

A2SG:Adaptive and Asymmetric Surrogate Gradients for Training Deep Spiking Neural Networks

Training deep spiking neural networks (SNNs) remains challenging due to sharp loss landscapes and temporal inconsistency caused by surrogate gradients. To address these challenges, we propose a unified framework: adaptive and asymmetric surrogate gradients A2SG. The adaptive gradients adjust an effective window for spatio-temporal adaptation, reducing spatial gradient variation and maintaining directional consistency of gradients over time. The asymmetric gradients reflect neuronal dynamics by assigning larger gradients to neurons with higher membrane potentials, and we prove that they yield lower variation than symmetric surrogates. Our analysis further establishes a direct connection between local gradient variation and the curvature of the loss landscape, providing a principled explanation for how A2SG promotes convergence to flatter minima and improves generalization. We conduct extensive experiments on diverse models, including CNN-based and Transformer-based SNNs, across various tasks such as image classification using both static and neuromorphic datasets, as well as segmentation. The results demonstrate that A2SG consistently improves accuracy and energy efficiency, establishing it as a general and reliable solution for training deep SNNs. Our code is available at https://github.com/KIST-NCL/A2SG.git.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Doctors, Wellness Influencers, and Probiotic Gummies: A Cross-Sectional Analysis of Gut Health Claims and Financial Conflicts on TikTok

TikTok has emerged as a major source of health information, yet concerns persist regarding the accuracy of content and influence of financial conflicts. Gut health content is particularly vulnerable to misinformation. This study examined the relationship between creator profession ("medical" versus "non-medical") and the quality of gut health claims and the presence of financial conflicts on TikTok. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 412 TikTok creator accounts identified using the search terms "guthealth," "gutcleansing," and "digestion." One video per creator was analyzed. Creator profession was categorized as medical or non-medical. Health claim quality was coded as high, moderate, or poor. Financial conflicts (Showcase, Subscription, external links) were assessed. Modified Poisson regression was used to estimate prevalence ratios (PRs) of health claim quality (high versus poor- or moderate-quality) and financial conflicts between medical and non-medical creators, and negative binomial regression was used to evaluate associations between claim quality and number of video likes. Non-medical creators were more likely than medical creators to present poor- or moderate-quality health claims (adjusted PR: 2.33; 95% CI: 1.50-3.62). Most creators (92%) exhibited at least one financial conflict, and Showcase use was greater among non-medical creators (adjusted PR: 1.57; 95% CI: 1.02-2.42). Videos containing moderate- and poor-quality health claims received three times as many likes as videos containing high-quality claims. Non-medical creators disproportionately produced lower-quality gut health content on TikTok, and misleading claims received greater engagement. These findings highlight a misalignment between information quality and visibility, emphasizing the need for interventions promoting evidence-based health communication.