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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Calibrated Helstrom geometry on the Bloch ball via Connes spectral distance

arXiv:2606.13824v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We show that the equal-prior Helstrom trace-distance geometry of qubit states is recovered from Connes spectral distance in a finite scalar-qubit-scalar model. The two scalar reference sectors couple isotropically to the qubit block through identity Dirac links, so that the full Bloch ball, including mixed states, inherits its standard chordal trace-distance geometry from the finite spectral metric. The scalar-sector distances serve a distinct calibration role: they determine the individual link lengths, satisfy a Pythagorean consistency relation, and reconstruct the middle-sector scale.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Rethinking Psychometric Evaluation of LLMs: When and Why Self-Reports Predict Behavior

Anticipating LLM behavioral tendencies from low-cost psychometric probes is critical for safe deployment, but only if self-reports (SR) reliably predict behavior. Recent work documented substantial SR-behavior dissociation in LLMs, but relied on broad personality traits (Big 5) that predict specific behaviors weakly, even in humans. Furthermore, the isolation of conversational sessions combined with weak context matching left open whether LLMs truly lack coherence or whether the conditions needed to detect such coherence were not met. We contrast Big 5 with the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), which measures intention targeted to a specific behavior and predicts human behavior substantially better than broad traits. We run experiments across four behavioral tasks and 11 frontier LLMs, while also varying session context and identity induction. We find that SR-behavior coherence exists but is selective. 1) Within a shared conversation, the Theory of Planned Behavior reaches human-level coherence; Big 5 does not. 2) Across separate conversations, coherence survives only for behaviors anchored outside the immediate prompt, such as implicit bias shaped by training, and collapses when behavior is strongly primed by context, as with sycophancy. 3) Persona prompting makes self-reports more consistent across conversations, but does not bring behavior into alignment. These findings suggest that coarse personality frameworks, such as Big 5 may not be the best tools for testing deployment behavior. More task- and behavior-specific instruments are needed, and even these must be evaluated across tasks and contexts.

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

SAIGuard: Communication-State Simulation for Proactive Defense of LLM Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2606.12474v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based multi-agent systems (MAS) solve complex tasks through inter-agent collaboration, but their communication-driven nature also allows security risks to spread across agents and trigger system-wide failures. Existing MAS defenses mainly follow a reactive paradigm after execution by detecting and isolating harmful agents, which may cause irreversible damage and degrade collaborative utility. To address this, we propose a proactive defense framework for MAS security, namely a Simulation-aware Interception Guard (SAIGuard). SAIGuard performs communication-state simulation over the MAS interaction graph, estimates the impact of incoming messages on local agent states and the global MAS state, and detects risky messages via reconstruction deviations from benign communication patterns. Instead of isolating agents, SAIGuard sanitizes or regenerates suspicious messages before it propagation into system. Experiments across diverse topologies and attack scenarios show that SAIGuard reduces attack success rates while maintaining MAS utility, outperforming reactive defenses.

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

Federated Medical Image Segmentation under Real-World Label Noise: A Benchmark Suite for Noisy Label Learning Method Selection

While federated learning (FL) enables collaborative medical image segmentation without centralizing sensitive data, real-world deployment is frequently complicated by cross-site label imperfections such as contour disagreement, missing or additional structures, and confused labels. Federated noisy label learning (FNLL) aims to mitigate these effects, yet remains underused in practice as existing evidence is largely based on synthetic noise, simplified settings, and limited real-world noisy evaluation. We address this gap by introducing a benchmark suite that combines diverse real-world noisy datasets, deployment-relevant client-noise scenarios, and label-noise-targeted evaluation to support systematic FNLL assessment and informed method selection. The suite combines curated real-world noisy medical image segmentation datasets from diverse sources with a comprehensive federated segmentation framework including various client-noise scenarios and noise-targeted evaluation. The presented suite provides a realistic and discriminative basis for FNLL evaluation in medical image segmentation and establishes a reusable foundation for fair benchmarking, dataset-specific label-noise characterization, and future method development under realistic federated settings. Code is available at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/FedSegNoiseBench.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-12

A mathematical study of the excess growth rate

arXiv:2510.25740v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The excess growth rate, defined as the gap in Jensen's inequality for the logarithm, is a fundamental functional in portfolio theory. In this paper, we present a mathematical study motivated by information theory. We begin by establishing its properties and showing that it has rich connections with information theoretic concepts such as the Helmholtz free energy, L. Campbell's measure of average code length and large deviations. Our main results consist of three axiomatic characterization theorems of the excess growth rate, in terms of (i) the relative entropy, (ii) the gap in Jensen's inequality, and (iii) the logarithmic divergence that generalizes the Bregman divergence. Furthermore, we study maximization of the excess growth rate and compare it with the growth optimal portfolio. Our results not only provide theoretical justifications of the significance of the excess growth rate, but also establish new connections between information theory and quantitative finance.

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

Path superposition activating perfect quantum teleportation ability for separable states

arXiv:2505.11398v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum teleportation is a quintessential quantum communication protocol that enables the transmission of an arbitrary quantum state between two distant parties without physically transmitting the state with the help of shared entanglement and limited classical communication. We show that it is possible to relax the entanglement requirement in quantum teleportation if we have access to a certain strain of superposition of quantum processes. Two types of superposition of quantum processes are generally considered in the literature: superposition of paths identified with quantum maps and superposition of indefinite causal orders of the maps. We find that when superposition of paths is incorporated in the protocol, quantum teleportation with unit fidelity becomes possible with nonzero probability of 1/4 even when the two parties share certain classes of separable states, including pure product states. In contrast, the assistance of superposition of indefinite causal order of quantum maps in teleportation protocol does not enable any quantum advantage for shared pure product states. Furthermore, we show that separable Werner states can also yield quantum advantage in quantum teleportation assisted by the superposition of paths. Finally, we establish that the presence of quantum coherence in the control qubit is both necessary and sufficient to achieve quantum advantage in quantum teleportation assisted with superposition of paths. The results potentially uncover yet another role of quantum superposition, in general, in teleportation versus entanglement.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Accelerated Convex Optimization via Hamiltonian Dynamics with Deterministic Integration Time

arXiv:2606.17260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop Hamiltonian dynamics-based algorithms for smooth convex optimization that achieve accelerated rates of convergence. By exploiting contraction of averaged Hamiltonian flow trajectories rather than requiring contraction at trajectory endpoints, we show that Hamiltonian dynamics-based optimization methods admit deterministic and accelerated convergence guarantees, extending prior work that is limited to quadratic objectives or holds only in expectation. We analyze an idealized continuous-time algorithm and derive practical discrete-time implementations with optimal first-order complexity, thereby establishing Hamiltonian dynamics as a useful algorithmic primitive for deterministic accelerated convex optimization.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Transformer-Guided Graph Attention for Direct Cardiac Mesh Reconstruction: A Structural Digital Twin Framework

Building patient-specific cardiac models sits at the heart of precision cardiology, yet getting those models into clinical use keeps running into the same wall: mesh generation is slow, messy, and frustrating. The standard workflow – segmenting the image, running Marching Cubes, and then manually cleaning up the result – is time-consuming, inconsistent across operators, and demands specialist knowledge most clinical teams do not have. We take a fundamentally different approach. Instead of treating segmentation and mesh generation as two separate problems, we train a single end-to-end network that goes directly from a raw 3D medical image to a smooth, simulation-ready cardiac surface mesh. The core is a 3D Swin Transformer encoder-decoder that extracts volumetric features from CT or MRI volumes, paired with a Graph Attention Network (GAT) head that iteratively deforms a template mesh to fit the patient's cardiac boundary. We tested on the MM-WHS 2017 benchmark using both CT and MRI. Segmentation scores were competitive (Dice of 0.84 on CT, 0.83 on MRI), but the primary focus is mesh quality: mean Chamfer distance of 1.8 mm, with 95th-percentile surface distance below 5 mm. Every mesh is produced in a single forward pass – no Marching Cubes, no smoothing filters, no manual cleanup. We argue that for cardiac digital twin pipelines, geometric fidelity and topological correctness matter more than pixel-level Dice scores. By removing the post-processing bottleneck, this approach makes patient-specific cardiac simulation substantially more accessible for clinical use.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum Entanglement of Bethe States

arXiv:2606.14140v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We investigate the quantum entanglement of Bethe states across a family of integrable spin chains, including the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ model, its higher-spin generalizations (XXX$_s$), and the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain. For on-shell eigenstates, we perform a comprehensive scan of the bipartite entanglement entropy across the entire spectrum of finite chains with periodic boundary conditions, and identify the Bethe solutions that minimize and maximize the entanglement. These extremal solutions follow systematic, spin-dependent patterns in the Bethe quantum numbers. In the XXX$_{\frac{1}{2}}$ spin chain, for the antiferromagnetic chain, the state with minimal entropy always coincides with the lowest-energy state (the ground state) within a given fixed-magnon sector. For the higher-spin XXX$_s$ model, however, the lowest-entropy state is not always identical to the ground state, and can even be the state of highest energy. By contrast, the Bethe roots that maximize entropy exhibit considerably more intricate structure. Our analysis further reveals how special Bethe root configurations, such as singular and strange solutions, affect entanglement, and it uncovers characteristic entanglement features in the non-compact $SL(2,\mathbb{R})$ chain that are absent from compact spin chains. For off-shell Bethe states, we develop an optimization algorithm that extremizes the entanglement entropy over rapidity distributions, enabling us to explore the maximum entanglement achievable by a Bethe state without imposing the Bethe ansatz equations.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Learning to Distort: Weakly-Supervised Image Quality Transfer for Prostate DWI Correction

Single-shot echo-planar prostate diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is frequently complicated by geometric distortions, which impact the ability to derive reliable diagnoses from such images. Developing automated correction methods is challenged by the absence of paired distorted and undistorted clinical scans. In this paper, we first propose a novel weakly-supervised image quality transfer (IQT) framework from undistorted to distorted images that utilizes image quality assessment (IQA) signals to supervise the transfer process. Unlike traditional methods that require expensive, voxel-wise paired data or resort to developing unpaired algorithms, our approach utilizes image-level quality labels (here, distorted vs. undistorted) to establish latent quality prototypes within a pre-trained feature space. Recognizing that simulating realistic distortions is more reliable than direct unpaired correction, we describe a weakly-supervised prototype flow matching algorithm to explicitly regularize generative trajectories towards distorted prototypes, producing realistic susceptibility artifacts that mimic clinical degradations. By synthesizing these realistic pairs, we enable a second IQT model to be trained in the forward direction for distortion correction. Experimental results demonstrate that our generated images successfully mimic the diagnostic interference of real-world artifacts, which leads to more capable distortion correction IQT models. In addition to qualitative comparisons, we also conduct exhaustive quantitative evaluations that compare our approach with existing unpaired approaches (e.g., CycleGAN, UNIT-DDPM, and OT-FM) - as either forward or reverse alternatives - by assessing clinical downstream task performance in PI-RADS and Gleason score classification, using both in-distribution and external data sets.

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

Scene-Adaptive Nonlinear Tone Curves for Pseudo Ground-Truth Generation in Low-Light 3D Gaussian Splatting

Low-light novel view synthesis is challenging because dark multi-view images contain noise, weak structural detail, and compressed dynamic range. Recent 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) methods address these challenges by generating pseudo ground-truth (pseudo-GT) images as supervision targets when paired normal-light references are unavailable. Existing pseudo-GT methods apply a uniform linear gain to all pixels, which clips bright regions while providing insufficient enhancement in dark regions, limiting reconstruction quality. We observe that nonlinear tone mappings, long established in 2D low-light enhancement, have not been explored for pseudo-GT generation in 3D reconstruction. Accordingly, we propose a scene-adaptive nonlinear tone-curve framework that replaces linear pseudo-GT with nonlinear alternatives. The framework introduces percentile-based normalisation for scene-agnostic curve application, a scene-adaptive offset for automatic black-level adjustment, and two complementary curves: Adaptive SoftExp (ASE), a bounded exponential curve, and Adaptive Poly3 (AP3), a data-driven cubic polynomial. The module changes only the pseudo-GT computation and leaves the 3DGS backbone unchanged. Experiments on three benchmarks covering 21 scenes show that both curves consistently outperform the linear baseline with PSNR improvements up to +4.34 dB on LOM and +3.25 dB on RealX3D. Both curves achieve similar performance despite their different mathematical forms, suggesting the improvement is curve-agnostic. Code is available at https://github.com/lvmingzhe/adaptiveToneCurve

12.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human genetic evidence links serine biosynthesis to diabetic peripheral neuropathy

Diabetic peripheral neuropathy (DPN) is a common and disabling condition for which no disease-modifying therapies are available. Glycemic and metabolic drivers do not fully explain why only a subset of individuals with diabetes develop DPN, and genetic contributors remain poorly defined. We aimed to perform a multi-population genome-wide association study (GWAS) of DPN to highlight potential new etiological pathways and therapeutic targets. Methods We performed a multi-population GWAS of neuropathy in people with and without diabetes using the VA Million Veteran Program and UK Biobank, followed by replication in the All of Us Research Program (AoU), and gene-based and gene-set analyses to identify implicated pathways. Causal relationships between circulating serine levels and DPN were further tested using two sample Mendelian randomization. To further evaluate pathogenic potential, we analyzed rare, high impact variants in GWAS implicated genes among individuals with unresolved inherited neuropathies using the GENESIS platform. Findings Among individuals with type 2 diabetes, we identified seven genome wide significant loci (p

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Generalizable Light Transport 3D Embedding for Global Illumination

Global illumination (GI) is essential for realistic rendering but remains computationally expensive due to the complexity of simulating indirect light transport. Recent neural methods have mainly relied on per-scene optimization, sometimes extended to handle changes in camera or geometry. Efforts toward cross-scene generalization have largely stayed in 2D screen space, such as neural denoising or G-buffer based GI prediction, which often suffer from view inconsistency and limited spatial understanding. We propose a generalizable 3D light transport embedding that approximates global illumination directly from 3D scene configurations, without using rasterized or path-traced cues. Each scene is represented as a point cloud with geometric and material features. A scalable transformer models global point-to-point interactions to encode these features into neural primitives. At render time, each query point retrieves nearby primitives via nearest-neighbor search and aggregates their latent features through cross-attention to predict the desired rendering quantity. We demonstrate results on diffuse global illumination prediction across diverse indoor scenes with varying layouts, geometry, and materials. The embedding trained for irradiance estimation can be quickly adapted to new rendering tasks with limited fine-tuning. We also present preliminary results for spatial-directional radiance field estimation for glossy materials and show how the normalized field can accelerate unbiased path guiding. This approach highlights a path toward integrating learned priors into rendering pipelines without explicit ray-traced illumination cues.

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

Intelligent Skin Cancer Detection Using a Multispectral Metasurface and a Hybrid

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent malignancies worldwiAdbe satnradcitts early detection is essential for improving patient survival and reducing treatment costs Conventional dermoscopic and visual imaging techniques are primarily limited to the visible spectrum and often fail to capture subtle spectral signatures associated with early stage malignancies This study proposes an innovative framework that integrates a multispectral metasurface for imaging with a hybrid deep learning architecture based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers The designed metasurface enables noninvasive acquisition of rich spectral information highly sensitive to tissue alterations while the hybrid CNN ViT model simultaneously extracts local and global features to robustly classify skin lesions Simulation-based evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves approximately 98 accuracy 95 percentages sensitivity and 99 perentage specificity surpassing conventional RGB-based and single-architecture approaches Qualitative analyses using attention maps reveal that the model focuses on clinically relevant lesion regions improving interpretability Overall the results indicate that combining metasurface based multispectral imaging with hybrid deep learning can introduce a new generation of diagnostic tools in dermatology and pave the way for portable fast and highly accurate clinical systems

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

PCRAgent: A Multi-Agent Framework for Transforming Noisy clinical conversations into Structured Pre-Consultation Medical Records and Reusable Clinical Data Resources

In primary care and outpatient settings, clinically important patient information is often embedded in fragmented, ambiguous, repetitive, and noisy communication between physicians and patients. This limits physicians ability to obtain a clear preconsultation overview of symptoms, history of present illness, and visit intent, while also preventing real world clinical dialogues from being reused in hospital information systems and medical artificial intelligence applications. To address this challenge, we developed PCRAgent, a centrally coordinated multi agent framework for preconsultation clinical information organization. Guided by physician inquiry logic, PCRAgent identifies, extracts, corrects, and standardizes patient-reported information from noisy consultations. Its coordinated modules including error detection, semantic editing, output control, contextual memory, and intent recognition enable robust parallel handling of spelling errors, repetitions, grammatical inconsistencies, medical ambiguities, and non-medical interference. A traceable edit list records intermediate corrections and context, allowing iterative refinement without redundant modifications. PCRAgent generates two complementary outputs. One is a PreConsultation Clinical Report for rapid physician review. The other is a Structured Clinical Conversation Dataset for hospital data construction and downstream AI applications. In evaluations using 220000 strongly perturbed consultations, PCRAgent maintained high robustness, achieving a clinical information accuracy of 4.99 out of 5 and key element completeness of 5 out of 5, outperforming GPT4o. Expert review of Chinese and English dialogues confirmed high clinical accuracy of 4.85 out of 5 and high safety of 4.79 out of 5. Multicenter validation in real-world outpatient workflows further demonstrated practical utility. These findings indicate that PCRAgent can efficiently transform noisy and unstructured consultations into physician ready reports and AI ready structured data, improving outpatient efficiency, reducing cognitive burden, ensuring information completeness, supporting precise decision-making, and enabling high-quality reuse of clinical data.

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

Link-Free Multi-Node Timing Synchronization for Scalable Quantum Networking

arXiv:2606.14077v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Precise timing synchronization is essential for distributed quantum networking, enabling entanglement distribution, quantum teleportation, and entanglement swapping across remote nodes. Existing synchronization architectures rely on dedicated timing-distribution infrastructure, most notably White Rabbit networks, which constrain topology, scalability, and deployment in free-space and satellite environments. Here we demonstrate link-free synchronization of quantum network nodes using independently operating miniature rubidium atomic clocks and computational post-processing. We validate the approach on a deployed metropolitan-scale telecom fiber network spanning three geographically separated nodes. Following drift correction, atomic-clock-based synchronization achieves timing performance approaching that of a White Rabbit benchmark and remains stable over continuous 8-hour operation. As a stringent test of quantum-network functionality, we observe Hong-Ou-Mandel interference across spatially separated nodes with visibility exceeding 70%, statistically equivalent to that obtained using dedicated White Rabbit timing links. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first observation of quantum interference across a deployed metropolitan-scale telecom fiber network synchronized entirely without dedicated timing-transfer infrastructure. These results establish atomic-clock-based synchronization as a scalable, topology-independent alternative to conventional timing-distribution architectures and a practical pathway toward terrestrial, airborne, and space-based quantum networks where dedicated timing links are unavailable.

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

CMIP-Forge: An Agentic System that Retrieves, Computes, and Self-Reviews Climate Science

arXiv:2606.17076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) has generated thousands of peer-reviewed publications documenting model configurations, evaluation procedures, emergent constraints, and projection uncertainties. As the community transitions toward CMIP7, efficiently extracting and operationalizing this unstructured knowledge alongside live data analysis represents a critical bottleneck. Here we present CMIP-Forge, a hybrid retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and autonomous analysis system that bridges the gap between scientific literature and Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) data archives. The system pairs a curated corpus of 6,581 CMIP6-related open-access publications (101,828 indexed chunks) with an agentic pipeline in which a tool-augmented worker plans and executes Python workflows over live climate data, while a panel of independent reviewer models audits its methodology end to end. CMIP-Forge introduces a multi-layered Defense-in-Depth architecture that enforces physical and methodological invariants through executable mechanisms: Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) static analysis, audited scientific primitives, and an autonomous adversarial peer-review protocol. We demonstrate the system's capabilities through end-to-end autonomous research pipelines spanning atmospheric teleconnections, ocean dynamics, regional extremes, and global warming projections. An agentic analysis system grounded in peer-reviewed literature, constrained by automated code guardrails, and audited by an independent adversarial review loop can complete complex climate-research workflows autonomously. The same experiments expose concrete failure modes of the review loop (sycophantic regression, REVISE verdicts that are never resolved, and the submission of stub code for review), each diagnosable from the immutable telemetry and provenance record released with the article.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

SciR: A Controllable Benchmark for Scientific Reasoning in LLMs

arXiv:2606.13020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Three paradigmatic forms of inference recur across scientific reasoning: deduction, induction, and causal abduction. Reliably evaluating LLMs on these in scientific settings is currently out of reach: scientific benchmarks built on human annotations are costly and lack mechanistic ground truth, while synthetic logical-reasoning benchmarks do not resemble real scientific documents. We introduce SciR, a benchmark that combines multi-paradigm reasoning with controllable scientific rendering, anchored on three paradigmatic scientific problems. Tasks are generated from formal objects (deduction tree, inductive rule hypothesis, causal graph) to guarantee verifiable answers, then rendered into multi-document scientific discourse via per-track domain-tuned genres. The construction lets us independently vary two difficulty axes: how hard it is to extract the key information needed for inference, and how hard the principled inference itself is. We test six models. Both axes hurt every model, and their effects compound. The rendering even hurts neurosymbolic pipelines, which hand inference to a verified solver. The two axes yield a per-model extraction-vs-inference profile: for instance, reasoning models like deepseek-r1 mostly surpass non-reasoning instruct models on the inference axis. To our knowledge, SciR is the first multi-paradigm scientific-reasoning benchmark with parametric control on both extraction and inference difficulty.

19.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-11

Clinical Profile and Genomic Characterization of the 2026 Bundibugyo Virus Index Case in Uganda

Bundibugyo virus disease (BVD) remains a high-consequence threat in Eastern and Central Africa, where cross-border mobility, nonspecific early symptoms, and delayed recognition can obscure transmission. In this case report, we describe Uganda’s 2026 BVD index case: a male patient who traveled from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Uganda and was admitted to a private hospital in Kampala on 11 May 2026 after more than two weeks of vomiting and diarrhea, with epigastric pain, weakness, and hiccups. He deteriorated rapidly, developing acute kidney injury, pulmonary edema, hepatic dysfunction, hypoxemia, delirium, atrial flutter, possible disseminated intravascular coagulation, and multiorgan failure, and died on 14 May. A posthumous EDTA whole-blood specimen tested at the Central Emergency Response and Surveillance Laboratory was positive for orthoebolavirus RNA and confirmed as Bundibugyo virus (BDBV) by RT-qPCR. Sequencing achieved 99% genome coverage at ≥100× depth. The 2026 BDBV genome formed a distinct lineage approximately equidistant from the 2007–2008 Butalya and 2012 Isiro variants, differing by 216–227 nucleotides (~1.2% sequence divergence). Here, we demonstrate the value of fatality surveillance, private-sector surveillance, diagnostic optimization through national specimen referral, and rapid molecular-genomic diagnostics for early detection, transmission chain interruption, and public health response coordination.

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

LLM-Powered Virtual Population for Demand Simulation and Pricing

We develop an LLM-powered virtual population model that simulates demand for pricing decisions, in settings where products are described by rich unstructured information, such as text descriptions and images, and where decision makers need not only mean-demand predictions but also uncertainty estimates for counterfactual prices. Our model represents exposed customers as draws from a finite mixture of customer personas. For each persona, product, and candidate price, an LLM elicits a persona-level purchase probability using both structured persona information and unstructured product information. These probabilities are aggregated through calibrated mixture weights to form a predictive distribution of aggregate demand. The resulting simulator can evaluate counterfactual prices under various pricing objectives, including expected revenue and risk-aware criteria such as conditional value at risk. We test the framework on an online H&M fashion dataset with product descriptions and images. The calibrated LLM-based simulator achieves the best overall predictive performance among the models considered, and supports sample-efficient pricing decisions. Our framework provides a practical way to use LLMs as demand simulators for products with limited historical demand data but rich product information. By producing a full predictive demand distribution rather than only a point forecast, it enables managers to compare candidate prices, quantify demand uncertainty, and choose prices that target either average-case revenue or risk-aware objectives.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Gated QKAN-FWP: Scalable Quantum-inspired Sequence Learning

arXiv:2605.06734v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Fast Weight Programmers (FWPs) encode temporal dependencies through dynamically updated parameters rather than recurrent hidden states. Quantum FWPs (QFWPs) extend this idea with variational quantum circuits (VQCs), but existing implementations rely on multi-qubit architectures that are difficult to scale on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) devices and expensive to simulate classically. We propose gated QKAN-FWP, a fast-weight framework that integrates FWP with Quantum-inspired Kolmogorov-Arnold Network (QKAN) using single-qubit data re-uploading circuits as learnable nonlinear activation, known as DatA Re-Uploading ActivatioN (DARUAN). We further introduce a scalar-gated fast-weight update rule that stabilizes parameter evolution, supported by a theoretical analysis of its adaptive memory kernel, geometric boundedness, and parallelizable gradient paths. We evaluate the framework across time-series benchmarks, MiniGrid reinforcement learning, and highlight real-world solar cycle forecasting as our main practical result. In the long-horizon setting with 528-month input window and 132-month forecast horizon, our 12.5k-parameter model achieves lower scaled Mean Square Error (MSE), peak amplitude error, and peak timing error than a suite of classical recurrent baselines with up to 13x more parameters, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks (25.9k-89.1k parameters), WaveNet-LSTM (167k), Vanilla recurrent neural network (11.5k), and a Modified Echo State Network (132k). To validate NISQ compatibility, we further deploy the trained fast programmer on IonQ and IBM Quantum processors, recovering forecasting accuracy within 0.1% relative MSE of the noiseless simulator at 1024 shots. These results position gated QKAN-FWP as a scalable, parameter-efficient, and NISQ-compatible approach to quantum-inspired sequence modeling.

22.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-09

Adjuvanted inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus vaccine in healthy adults: a phase 1 trial

Lassa fever causes substantial morbidity and mortality in West Africa, and no licensed vaccine is available. We evaluated LASSARAB, an inactivated rabies virus-vectored Lassa virus (Josiah strain) glycoprotein complex vaccine. We conducted a randomized, controlled, dose-escalation phase 1 trial. Participants (total n = 54) received two intramuscular doses of LASSARAB containing 700 (n = 15), 1,400 (n = 15) or 2,800 (n = 14) relative units of antigen formulated with the TLR-4 agonist 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE adjuvant, or licensed rabies vaccine control (n = 10), administered 28 days apart. This protocol-defined interim analysis reports the primary safety evaluation and secondary immunogenicity assessments through day 61. There were no prespecified hypotheses or formal power calculations. All primary safety end points demonstrated an acceptable safety profile. After dose 1, local solicited adverse events occurred in 86.7–100.0% of LASSARAB groups and 80% of controls; systemic events in 33.3–71.4% and 60.0% of controls. After dose 2, local solicited adverse events occurred in 66.7–86.7% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls; systemic events in 53.3–71.4% of LASSARAB groups and 55.6% of controls. Events were predominantly mild and self-limited. Unsolicited adverse events occurred in 28.6–60.0% of LASSARAB groups and 20.0% of controls. No serious adverse event, immune-mediated condition or sensorineural hearing loss occurred. Safety laboratory abnormalities occurred in 13.3–66.7% of LASSARAB groups and 30.0% of controls (14 mild, 6 moderate and none severe). After two doses, Lassa virus GPC IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) was achieved in 100.0% (44 of 44) of LASSARAB recipients and 0.0% (0 of 10) of controls. Rabies glycoprotein IgG ELISA seroconversion (≥fourfold rise) and neutralizing antibody by rapid fluorescent focus inhibition test (RFFIT) seroprotection (≥0.5 IU ml−1) were also 100% across all groups, including controls. LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl phosphorylated hexaacyl disaccharide (PHAD)-SE demonstrated a favorable safety profile and immunogenicity against Lassa and rabies viruses. The per-protocol final study report will include safety and durability through day 394. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT06546709 . An interim report of a first-in-human phase 1 trial found an adjuvanted, combination inactivated rabies-vectored, Lassa fever vaccine (LASSARAB + 3D-6-acyl PHAD-SE) to be safe and induced immunogenicity to both Lassa and rabies viruses in healthy participants.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Learning High Coverage Discriminative Parsimonious Rulesets

arXiv:2606.14156v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Learning systems based on IF-THEN rule representations readily offer interpretability, making them a crucial focus in contemporary AI research. A key objective for such rule sets is to achieve both high discriminative power and interpretability. While existing state-of-the-art algorithms implicitly prioritize predictive accuracy, they often fall short on one or more quality metrics that ensure interpretability, such as coverage and parsimony of rule sets. Motivated by this, this paper propose the development of CDPR, which aims to create highly accurate and interpretable rule sets for classification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this represents the first attempt to establish such an approach. In this study, we introduce two algorithms rooted in submodular maximization, which not only provide provable guarantees on coverage but also yield rule sets that are both discriminative and parsimonious. We empirically demonstrate that rule sets learned through our approaches achieve higher accuracy and interpretability and has more than a 2.5-fold improvement in average coverage rates when compared to the next best algorithm.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optimal Impulse Control for Cyber Risk Management

arXiv:2410.17706v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We explore an optimal impulse control problem wherein an electronic device owner strategically calibrates protection levels against cyber attacks. Utilizing epidemiological compartment models, we qualitatively characterize the dynamics of cyber attacks within the network. We determine the optimal protective measures against effective hacking by formulating and solving a stochastic control problem with optimal switching. We demonstrate that the value function for the cluster owner constitutes a viscosity solution to a system of coupled variational inequalities associated with a fully coupled reflected backward stochastic differential equation (BSDE). Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive algorithm alongside a verification procedure to ascertain the optimal timing for network protection across various cyber attack scenarios. Our findings are illustrated through numerical approximations employing deep Galerkin methods for partial differential equations (PDEs). We visualize the optimal protection strategies in the context of two distinct attack scenarios: (1) a constant cyber attack, (2) an exogenous cyber attack strategy modeled with a Poisson process.