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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-induced shallow circuits and absence of barren plateaus

arXiv:2403.13927v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Motivated by realistic hardware considerations of the pre-fault-tolerant era, we comprehensively study the impact of uncorrected noise on quantum circuits. We first show that in the task of estimating observable expectation values any noise truncates most quantum circuits to effectively logarithmic depth. We then prove that quantum circuits under any non-unital noise do not exhibit barren plateaus for cost functions composed of local observables. However, by using the effective shallowness, we also design an efficient classical algorithm to estimate observable expectation values within any constant additive accuracy, with high probability over the choice of the circuit, in any circuit architecture. Taken together, our results establish that, unless we carefully engineer quantum circuits to take advantage of the noise, noisy quantum circuits are unlikely to offer an advantage over shallow ones for algorithms that output observable expectation value estimates, such as many variational quantum machine learning proposals.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Re-evaluating the Cross-Sectional Prevalence of Severe Age-Related Hearing Loss Using Extreme Value Statistics

Authors:

Standard demographic models of age-related hearing loss (presbycusis) predominantly utilize symmetric functions, such as log-normal distributions for age-binned thresholds and 4-parameter logistic curves for prevalence estimates. While these models capture early-to-moderate degradation effectively, they structurally struggle to characterize the heavy tails associated with severe clinical impairment. In this study, we present a statistical critique using a secondary analysis of the historical Medical Research Council (MRC) National Study of Hearing (1980-1986) dataset. By applying Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) distribution theory, we demonstrate that as severity increases, the underlying statistical geometry of hearing loss shifts. The asymmetric, heavy-tailed GEV distribution provides a parsimonious description of severe impairment, requiring fewer parameters than standard symmetric models. However, we explicitly acknowledge that utilizing static population data to infer progression introduces an ecological fallacy. Furthermore, the dataset's historical nature embeds unquantified generational cohort effects. We conclude that while extreme value statistics offer a compelling mathematical framework for modeling the variance of severe presbycusis, true longitudinal datasets are required to isolate physiological degradation from historical cohort variance.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

VideoWeave: Unlocking Geometric Consistency in Video Generation via Joint Geometry-Video Modeling

Large-scale video diffusion models often fail to preserve 3D structure over time, causing geometric drift and implausible motion under viewpoint changes. Existing methods usually enforce geometric consistency by using explicit geometry reconstructions, such as depth maps, point clouds, or reconstructed 3D structures, to define conditions, supervision, or reward signals, making the generator sensitive to errors from upstream geometry pipelines. We propose VideoWeave, a latent-space post-training framework that uses implicit geometry-model features to constrain the generative distribution, providing a more flexible and non-rigid form of guidance that mitigates the impact of reconstruction errors from geometry models. Specifically, VideoWeave adapts these features into geometry latents and jointly models them with video latents in a shared denoising space, allowing geometry to shape the generative distribution during training. To support this process, we build GeoVid-80K, an 80K-video dataset with paired appearance and geometry representations. Experiments on text-to-video and image-to-video generation show that VideoWeave improves geometric coherence while preserving strong visual quality. VideoWeave project page at https://videoweave.github.io/

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Closing the Social-Semantic Gap: SPSD for Edge-Based Prompt Compression in Cloud LLM Inference

arXiv:2606.19364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prefill stage of Large Language Model (LLM) inference is a growing contributor to cloud-scale energy cost. Many consumer-support and conversational prompts contain social scaffolding: politeness markers, apologetic preamble, repetition, and rapport-building language that is important for human communication but carries low marginal information for machine reasoning. We call this discrepancy the Social-Semantic Gap. We present SPSD (Sentiment Preserving Semantic Distillation), an edge-based pipeline that compresses user prompts using a 4-bit quantised Small Language Model before transmission to a cloud-deployed LLM. Evaluation on a 248-prompt corpus using Gemma-2-2B-Instruct (Q4_K_M) as the SLM and Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct as the cloud evaluation model yields a mean input token saving of 99.9 tokens per distilled call, with all 146 distilled calls yielding positive savings. Response quality, assessed by blind LLM-as-judge scoring across 121 pairs, is non-inferior to the raw path within a pre-specified 1-point margin on a 15-point rubric; the judge awarded 43 percent ties, 28 percent distilled wins, and 29 percent raw wins. Cosine similarity is mixed: mean 0.682, median 0.712, with 54.1 percent of pairs above the 0.70 reference threshold. Safety-critical domains are conservatively routed to passthrough via rule-based gates. Per-call net energy saving is estimated at 70-270 uWh under stated assumptions. SPSD shows that on-device prompt distillation can reduce cloud LLM input-token cost while preserving response quality within a practical non-inferiority margin.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Monotonic Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Monotonicity as an Inductive Bias

arXiv:2606.17886v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Monotonicity has been a long-running architectural inductive bias for neural networks, motivated by tabular, scientific, and economic settings where outputs are known to respond monotonically to certain inputs. Existing approaches are MLP- or flow-based and lack per-edge functional transparency; the only Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN) variant with monotonicity, MonoKAN, enforces the constraint only on a restricted parameter subset and requires a projection-style training procedure. We close this gap with MKAN, a KAN with hard monotonicity guaranteed for all parameter values via exponential reparameterization of B-spline coefficients, positive edge weights, and a monotone base activation. Training reduces to standard unconstrained gradient descent. Our headline theoretical contribution is a representation-cost theorem: any $C^K, K >0$ feature extractor inducing a ball-shaped semantic-neighborhood partition admits a monotone realization of the equivalent neighborhood structure at $N' = N^* + k \le 2N^*$, where $k$ is the number of non-monotone coordinates of the original. The bound is architecture-agnostic and gives a principled sizing rule for monotone encoders. Empirically, MKAN is competitive with state-of-the-art monotone NNs on the SMM/ICML-2024 benchmark while being the only method that combines hard unconstrained monotonicity with KAN's per-edge functional transparency; the $2N^*$ prediction is validated in a self-supervised feature-size sweep on four real datasets, and on a controlled monotone-generative dataset MKAN recovers ground-truth factors with substantially higher Spearman alignment than KAN, MLP, and linear baselines.

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

RubricsTree: Scalable and Evolving Open-Ended Evaluation of Personal Health Agents across Health Memory and Medical Skills

The LLM-empowered personal health agents with user health (sensor) metrics have offered a promising pathway to alleviate global disparities in healthcare access. However, large-scale clinical deployment remains constrained by an open-ended evaluation bottleneck: physician annotation is reliable but costly and unscalable, while LLM-as-a-judge evaluators are scalable but subjective, inconsistent, and sometimes clinically misaligned. We introduce RubricsTree, a scalable evaluation framework with an expert-aligned hierarchical taxonomy of over 100 atomic, clinically-verifiable Boolean rubrics, evolving from the insights of 4,000 real user queries through an iterative human-in-the-loop curation protocol with an expertise panel led by an experienced physician. A context-aware adaptive router activates only the relevant auto-weighted rubric subset per query, providing the throughput needed for scalable evaluation with expert-aligned quality. Through a systematic meta-evaluation, we show that RubricsTree (i) substantially exceeds a strong large-scale evaluation baseline in expert alignment on challenging open-ended queries; (ii) reliably penalizes contextually degraded responses; and (iii) when used as structured instructions, text feedback, or training rewards for performance optimization, yields up to ~66% relative gains on HealthBench for Gemini, GPT, and Qwen model families. RubricsTree thus provides a scalable, auditable, and evolving evaluation infrastructure required for the continuous optimization of product-level personal healthcare AI.

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

A Neuromorphic Reinforcement Learning Framework for Efficient Pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems

arXiv:2606.20031v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic environmental changes, confined workspaces, and stringent real-time constraints make pathfinding in Robotic Mobile Fulfillment Systems (RMFS) a challenging problem for conventional search- and rule-based methods, which typically suffer from high computational complexity and long decision latency. While reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful alternative, deploying learned policies with extreme energy efficiency on resource-constrained hardware remains an open challenge. We present SDQN-RMFS, an end-to-end framework that achieves high-fidelity deployment of an RL-trained policy from a full-precision artificial neural network (ANN) through to a neuromorphic chip. By computing only when triggered by sparse events, this framework unlocks ultra-low-power RMFS pathfinding. Our full-stack pipeline operates as follows: an ANN policy is first efficiently trained via a collision-allowing strategy to densify informative trajectories, and then converted into a spiking neural network (SNN) via a hard-label knowledge distillation approach. This effectively addresses the output distribution mismatch, preserving policy capability across the ANN-to-SNN pipeline while substantially reducing inference latency. Hardware experiments demonstrate up to 11,281$\times$ energy savings and a nearly two-fold reduction in latency compared to a high-performance GPU baseline, while maintaining decision quality on par with the original trained policy. These results establish physical neuromorphic inference as a practical and energy-sustainable pathway for large-scale RMFS operations.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

HypOProto: Hyperbolic Ordinal Prototypes for Left Ventricular Filling Pressure Classification

Echocardiography (echo) is a widely used imaging modality for assessing cardiac function, with Left Ventricular Filling Pressure (LVFP) serving as a critical physiological marker for conditions such as heart failure. Standard LVFP classification into normal vs elevated categories relies on the Doppler-derived $E/e'$ ratio, which is operator-dependent and often unavailable in resource-limited settings, motivating methods that infer LVFP directly from B-mode echo. Existing deep learning approaches achieve high performance but remain largely black-box, limiting clinical interpretability. We propose HypOProto, a hyperbolic, ordinal prototype-based framework for interpretable LVFP classification using a frozen, explainable foundation model backbone. HypOProto arranges prototypes along the physiological $E/e'$ scale, placing borderline cases near the hyperboloid root where small angular differences separate similar cases, while normal and elevated cases occupy outward positions reflecting increasing diagnostic certainty. This hyperbolic geometry encodes clinically meaningful ordinal relationships and improves interpretability. We also introduce a novel Hyperbolic Prototype Angular Separation (HyperPAS) loss, enforcing inter-class prototype separation in hyperbolic space. HypOProto achieves SOTA performance while maintaining transparency, and highlights clinically relevant regions in visualizations. This work represents the first prototype-based framework for LVFP classification in echo. Our code can be found at https://github.com/DeepRCL/HypOProto.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

CEO-Bench: Can Agents Play the Long Game?

Language model agents are becoming proficient executors at isolated, short-horizon tasks such as software engineering and customer service. Yet real-world challenges require a combination of sophisticated skills that remain largely untested in agents: (1) navigating long horizons amid uncertainty; (2) acquiring information in noisy environments; (3) adapting to a changing world; (4) orchestrating multiple moving parts toward a coherent goal. We introduce CEO-Bench, which evaluates these capabilities together by simulating a representative real-world task: operating a startup for 500 days. An agent manages pricing, marketing, budgeting, and many other aspects of a fictional company through a programmable Python interface, operating in the same environment and facing the same challenges as a human CEO. Success demands analyzing noisy, interconnected business databases, translating signals into sound strategy, and coordinating many decisions with programming. The strongest agents write sophisticated code that simulates customer cohorts to forecast future cash and mines negotiation history to uncover hidden customer preferences. Even so, most state-of-the-art models struggle in this environment. Only Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5 finish above the $1M starting balance, and neither consistently turns a profit. CEO-Bench takes a first step toward measuring the intelligence required to drive sustained, adaptive progress over time.

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

Learning from Your Own Mistakes: Constructing Learnable Micro-Reflective Trajectories for Self-Distillation

arXiv:2606.18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution. However, because this supervision is generated via uncontrolled sampling, it provides no diagnostic insight into the model's specific errors or corrective guidance for its individual failure patterns. Consequently, the model learns to imitate a privileged distribution rather than receiving fine-grained corrections that pinpoint where and why its reasoning fails. In this paper, we propose Trajectory-Augmented Policy Optimization (TAPO), which advances self-distillation from implicit distributional alignment to explicit trajectory construction. During RL training, the model produces both correct and incorrect rollouts to the same query, and TAPO leverages this contrastive structure to construct micro-reflective corrections, new training trajectories that retain the model's erroneous reasoning up to the point of failure, then insert a natural-language diagnosis and corrected reasoning guided by a correct reference from the same sampling group. Since each trajectory is anchored in the learner's own prefix and solutions, the corrective signal preserves the model's on-policy distribution to a greater extent than the position-wise alignment imposed by KL-based methods. To integrate these trajectories, TAPO introduces difficulty-aware candidate selection at the model's capability boundary and decoupled advantage estimation to prevent gradient contamination. Experiments on AIME 2024, AIME 2025, and HMMT 2025 show that TAPO achieves consistent improvements over GRPO under the same number of training steps. Further analysis demonstrates that TAPO strengthens both first-pass reasoning and error-correction effectiveness.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Let's Ask Gauss: Improved One-Run Privacy Auditing

arXiv:2606.12733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privacy auditing provides an important safeguard by estimating the actual information leaked by a model, thus ensuring that theoretical privacy guarantees hold in practice. We study empirical privacy auditing for differentially private (DP) machine learning, focusing on efficient one-run methods for mechanisms such as DP-SGD. Prior one-run approaches threshold training examples or "canaries" into binary membership guesses, which discards useful information. We show that, in the white-box DP-SGD setting, canary-aligned signals naturally form a sequence of random variables whose normalized sum is asymptotically Gaussian. Leveraging this distributional perspective, we develop a DP-auditing framework that leads to tighter privacy lower bounds from a single training run.

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

Last But Not Least: Boundary Attention CalibratiON for Multimodal KV Cache Compression

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) achieve strong vision-language reasoning, but long visual contexts enlarge the KV cache and increase decoding latency. Existing compression methods rely on observation window attention for stable token-importance estimation, yet this aggregation can dilute sparse visual evidence and discard answer-critical tokens under aggressive compression. Therefore, we identify last-query attention as a complementary source for recovering such evidence, but its answer-irrelevant signals can mislead retention. We propose BACON, a plug-and-play method that calibrates observation window attention with last-query evidence and suppresses isolated noise via intra-layer coherence and inter-layer persistence. Across diverse benchmarks, models, budgets, and compression methods, BACON improves multimodal KV compression by 7.5% on average under the most aggressive budget, with gains up to 30.9%.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum-Classical Hierarchical Equations of Motion

Authors:

arXiv:2606.14363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a quantum-classical hierarchical equations of motion (QC-HEOM) approach for simulating non-Markovian open quantum systems. The method combines the ensemble-averaged classical path reference of the quantum-classical path integral formalism with a hierarchy of auxiliary quantum influence functionals. By incorporating thermal fluctuations through an ensemble average over reference trajectories, the hierarchy is required to represent only the residual quantum memory associated with the imaginary part of the bath response function. Consequently, unlike conventional hierarchical equations of motion, QC-HEOM does not require Matsubara or Padé expansions of the thermal kernel and exhibits only weak temperature dependence of the hierarchy size. Furthermore, because thermal fluctuations are supplied through reference classical trajectories, the framework naturally extends beyond harmonic baths and enables the incorporation of anharmonic and molecular environments through externally generated trajectories. We derive the formalism and demonstrate its exactness for a harmonic bath. Applications to an asymmetric spin-boson model and the seven-site Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex illustrate the accuracy of QC-HEOM. It reproduces benchmark quasi-adiabatic path integral and hierarchical equations of motion results while requiring substantially fewer auxiliary objects, particularly at low temperatures. These results establish QC-HEOM as an efficient framework for treating residual quantum memory in quantum-classical descriptions of open-system dynamics. The separation of thermal fluctuations from residual quantum memory through the use of Wigner trajectories provides an approximate route toward hierarchical treatments of complex anharmonic environments that are inaccessible to conventional HEOM approaches.

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

BASENet: Band-Adapted Speech Enhancement Network with Cross-Band Attention

arXiv:2606.12662v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Speech enhancement models typically apply uniform capacity across all frequencies, disregarding the non-uniform spectral resolution of human hearing. We propose BASENet, a frequency-adapted architecture that partitions the spectrum into Bark-scale bands and assigns each a scaled-capacity encoder derived from critical-band density, automatically granting deeper branches to perceptually dense low frequencies and lighter ones to high frequencies. A cross-band attention module captures harmonic dependencies across bands through compact frequency-pooled representations at linear complexity. Built on inverted residual blocks with dense connectivity and a convolutional recurrent network, BASENet achieves 3.55 PESQ and STOI~96% on VoiceBank+DEMAND with only 0.83M parameters and 7.3 G~MACs, the fewest parameters among all methods with PESQ > 3.50. A causal variant (3.44 PESQ) surpasses several non-causal baselines, confirming suitability for real-time streaming on resource-constrained devices.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Science Earth: Towards A Planet-Scale Operating System for AI-Native Scientific Discovery

arXiv:2606.01316v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Scientific discovery demands intelligence, perseverance, and serendipity across vast search spaces. Today, top scientific capabilities remain siloed–one AI system for biological analysis, another for clinical reasoning, mathematical derivation, or materials simulation–and no pre-designed team can anticipate every skill a question will need. Science Earth is a planet-scale scientific runtime in which any capability–a simulation cluster, a wet-lab robot, a proof engine, a single-cell pipeline–can connect to any other, with collaboration structure emerging from the question itself. Its underlying EACN protocol lets capabilities discover one another, negotiate task ownership, and adjudicate across incompatible evidentiary standards without prior knowledge of who will meet whom. This shifts the organizing challenge from workflow design to open-ended connectivity. Two runs validate this under structurally distinct conditions. In a trans-Pacific higher-order Kuramoto synchronization study, agents identified and corrected a closure-ratio assumption in Ott-Antonsen analytic theory that fails outside the Lorentzian limit, within thirty minutes. In an eight-agent single-cell run on the 4.88M-cell Kang 2024 pan-cancer atlas, heterogeneous capabilities coupled over a 64.9-hour window with one structural external instruction, producing three new result layers and anchoring findings against an independent wet-lab study on an adjacent CCR8- TIGIT+ Treg subset. These cases are a first empirical reading, not a benchmark sweep. They show that when AI capabilities are truly connectable and coordination emerges from the problem, scientific reasoning becomes a distributed, self-correcting process–a step towards scaling AI-native discovery to the planet.

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

Steady-Forcing: Balancing Spatial Persistence and Motion Continuity in Long-Horizon Nature Video Diffusion

Autoregressive video diffusion models enable streaming generation but often degrade over long rollouts: static scene layouts drift, while mechanisms that improve spatial stability tend to suppress motion, causing natural flows such as water, fire, or smoke to stagnate. We study this stability-motion trade-off in fixed-camera long-horizon nature video generation, where the two failure modes can be more clearly separated than in moving-camera settings. We propose Steady-Forcing, a memory and training framework combining a persistent visual anchor (V-Sink), an exponential moving-average motion memory (EMA-Sink), block-relative temporal encoding, periodic cache purification, and distillation from a Wan2.1-14B teacher with motion-rewarded priors under task-focused configurations. Together, these components are designed to preserve background identity while sustaining visually plausible fluid dynamics over multi-minute autoregressive rollouts. Evaluations across seven baselines show that Steady-Forcing improves long horizon background consistency and imaging quality, while a blind user study indicates stronger perceived stability and motion continuity. The benchmark evaluation further suggest that generic VBench aggregate scores under-penalize fixed-camera artifacts as well as rewarding drift-induced optical flow as Dynamic Degree while not directly penalizing texture hardening or flow stagnation - motivating future task-specific benchmarks for static-camera nature-flow evaluation. Project page: https://minar09.github.io/steadyforcing/

17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

18.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Optical metasurfaces for general vision processing on the edge

Authors:

Large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) models achieve notable performance in computer vision but require substantial computational resources, limiting their deployment on edge devices1,2. Optical neural networks (ONNs) promise reduced latency and energy consumption by making use of the inherent parallelism of light3. However, present ONNs struggle to scale and are confined to simple tasks, owing to the challenges of replicating exact algebraic operations of digital models using physical (analogue) systems. This work introduces a new paradigm that directly embeds core computer vision principles, including similarity-based recognition, attention-guided perception and detail–context fusion, into a large-scale optical metasurface. By unifying optical physics with these computer vision fundamentals, we develop a photonic–electronic engine that overcomes scalability and generality barriers, enabling high-accuracy, general-purpose computer vision at the edge. The resulting system combines a 41-million-parameter optical metasurface front end with a co-designed, ultraefficient 87,000-parameter digital back end, outperforming many digital models with tens of millions of parameters across object detection, segmentation, 3D reconstruction and video understanding. We build a deployable prototype and demonstrate real-time edge visual processing in natural scenes. This work represents a path towards practical optical computing for general vision tasks in complex natural environments, enabling a new paradigm for low-energy, low-latency, real-time on-device vision intelligence. By embedding core computer vision principles into a large-scale optical metasurface, an efficient vision processing system using far fewer parameters is demonstrated to outperform many digital models and enables deployment on edge devices.

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

Ultra Flash: Scaling Real-Time Streaming Video Generation to High Resolutions

While recent autoregressive video diffusion models achieve remarkable streaming quality, they remain confined to low resolutions (e.g., 480P), leaving efficient, scalable, real-time high-resolution video generation a fundamental open challenge. To bridge this gap, we present Ultra Flash, a cascaded streaming framework capable of real-time high-resolution video generation. Ultra Flash achieves ~30 FPS at 1K resolution and ~18 FPS at 2K resolution on a single GPU through three key contributions: (1) an architecture-preserving T2V-to-TV2V super-resolution training paradigm coupled with an AIGC-oriented data degradation pipeline that effectively preserves the generative capability of the base model, enabling enhanced high-resolution detail when cascaded after mainstream low-resolution generative models; (2) a causal streaming latent upsampler paired with a high-resolution decoder, which enhances spatiotemporal coherence while enabling efficient latent spatial scaling and precise high-resolution decoding with negligible computational overhead; and (3) a cascade high-resolution streaming video generation optimization scheme that first performs hybrid-reward-enhanced sparse causalization and single-step distillation of the super-resolution model, then introduces cascaded streaming self-forcing preference optimization with dynamic cache management, jointly enhancing overall coherence, improving quality, and enabling real-time high-resolution streaming video generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Ultra Flash reliably produces ultra-high-resolution streaming video while maintaining state-of-the-art visual quality and superior efficiency. Project Page: https://xin1u.github.io/UltraFlash/

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

RadSEM: A Finding-by-Finding Metric for Clinical Consistency in Radiology Reports

arXiv:2606.17062v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Radiology report evaluation must distinguish clinical compatibility from surface similarity, because negation, laterality, or normal-abnormal polarity can reverse a finding. We propose RadSEM (Radiology Sentence-Level Evaluation Metric), a constrained LLM-assisted metric for reference-based evaluation of radiology Findings. RadSEM rewrites reference and generated reports into ordered atomic finding sentences, each expressing one site-finding proposition. It then performs contradiction-constrained many-to-many matching: incompatible pairs such as "effusion" and "no effusion" receive no credit, while compatible granularity differences can receive partial credit. A deterministic stage weights pairs by part-whole and abnormal-detail relationships, counts unmatched findings, and produces an abnormal-focused weighted F1 score. Thus, the LLM supports structured rewriting and local alignment rather than acting as an opaque judge. We evaluate RadSEM with SSREE, a controlled monotonicity stress test built from 2,448 de-identified reports expanded into five graded corruption levels. RadSEM achieves Kendall tau_b of 0.957, all-pairs concordance of 97.8%, adjacent concordance of 95.0%, and strict five-level ordering for 81.9% of reports, outperforming radiology-specific and general text metrics while avoiding the failure in which polarity-inverted reports regain lexical overlap. On the same SSREE set, RadSEM outperforms the Ref-anchored RadSEM-Alt policy, improving adjacent concordance from 90.7% to 95.0% and strict ordering from 67.2% to 81.9%. On a 599-triplet synonym/antonym subset, RadSEM prefers synonyms in 597 cases (99.67%). These results suggest that explicit finding units, contradiction-aware matching, and abnormal-focused deterministic scoring make report scoring more interpretable and sensitive to clinically meaningful errors. Code is available at https://github.com/jdh-algo/RadSEM.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pretrained self-supervised speech models can recognize unseen consonants

Modern pretrained self-supervised automatic speech recognition models are trained on large-scale audio data to encode speech into contextualized representations. However, their training data are heavily skewed toward high-resource languages with little data from low-resource languages, raising concerns about the potential underrepresentation of typologically uncommon speech sounds such as click consonants primarily found in Khoisan languages. This leads to our central research question: Can these models recognize click consonants as accurately as other speech sounds? To address this question, we fine-tune and compare pretrained self-supervised speech models (Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT) on data from two click-rich Khoisan languages (G|ui and West !Xoon). Our results reveal that the fine-tuned models consistently recognize clicks more accurately than non-clicks, suggesting that self-supervision enables generalization across human speech sounds including rare phonemes.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Information-Theoretic Decomposition for Multimodal Interaction Learning

Multimodal learning hinges on capturing redundant, unique, and synergistic information across modalities, which collectively constitute multimodal interactions. A critical yet underexplored challenge is that these implicit interactions vary dynamically across samples. In this work, we present the first systematic, information-theoretic analysis highlighting why learning these dynamic, sample-specific interactions is critical for effective multimodal learning. Our analysis further reveals deficits in conventional paradigms at learning these distinct interaction types: modality ensemble approaches struggle to capture synergy, while joint learning paradigms often under-utilize redundant information. This highlights the need for an approach that can adaptively learn from different interaction types on a per-sample basis. To this end, we propose Decomposition-based Multimodal Interaction Learning (DMIL), a novel paradigm that explicitly models and learns from sample-specific interactions. First, we design a variational decomposition architecture to isolate the constituent interaction components. Second, we employ a new learning strategy that leverages these explicit interaction components in a fine-tuning process to achieve comprehensive interaction learning. Extensive experiments across diverse tasks and architectures demonstrate that DMIL consistently achieves superior performance by adapting to holistic sample-specific interactions. Our framework is flexible and broadly applicable, establishing an interaction-centric paradigm for multimodal learning. The code is available at https://github.com/GeWu-Lab/DMIL.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Learning Survival Models with Right-Censored Reporting Delays

arXiv:2510.04421v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Survival analysis provides statistical methods to model the time until an event occurs. Reporting delays arise when event times are not observed at their occurrence but are only revealed upon reporting. This issue is particularly critical for timely risk evaluation when the observation window is short due to administrative censoring. In this study, we incorporate right-censored reporting delays by jointly modeling parametric hazards for the event and reporting processes. We then construct a consistent estimator for the model parameters and develop a Monte Carlo expectation-maximization algorithm to compute it. To address the challenges posed by administrative censoring, we leverage these findings and propose a transfer-learning procedure. Experimental results demonstrate that our method improves the accuracy of timely risk evaluation under administrative censoring.

24.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Efficient and simple Gibbs state preparation of the 2D toric code via duality to classical Ising chains

arXiv:2508.00126v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce the notion of polynomial-depth duality transformations, which relates two sets of operator algebras through a conjugation by a poly-depth quantum circuit, and make use of this to construct efficient Gibbs samplers for a variety of interesting quantum Hamiltonians as they are poly-depth dual to classical Hamiltonians. This is for example the case for the 2D toric code, which is demonstrated to be poly-depth dual to two decoupled classical Ising spin chains for any system size, and we give evidence that such dualities hold for a wide class of stabilizer Hamiltonians. Additionally, we extend the above notion of duality to Lindbladians in order to show that mixing times and other quantities such as the spectral gap or the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality are preserved under duality.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Seasonality, source type, and women's water labor: A longitudinal mixed-methods study in Kenya and Honduras

Women shoulder the majority of water collection labor globally, yet how their water collection and water-related work experiences may change over time or by water source type remains insufficiently understood. We conducted a longitudinal, mixed-methods study in rural Kenya and Honduras to understand how women's experiences collecting water and performing water-related work varied between (a) two time points, (b) improved and unimproved water source types, and (c) water source location. Data were collected in 2023 and 2024 using interviews, observation, GPS-enabled watches, and scales to measure time and distance traveled, water weight and volume carried, and calories expended. 133 women participated in data collection (66 Kenya, 67 Honduras). We compared women's experience data by time point (2023 vs. 2024), source type (improved vs. unimproved), and source location (off-premises vs. on-premises) (t-test, Mann-Whitney U test). We also mapped participants' routes and activities to show which sources were visited, when, and for what activities. In Kenya, mean water collection time, distance, and caloric expenditure were significantly lower and water volume was significantly higher in 2024 when there were unexpected rains compared to 2023 when there was a persistent drought. When comparing source types during the 2023 drought, journeys to improved sources took significantly less time and energy and covered less distance than journeys to unimproved sources. These differences were not observed during the rainy conditions of 2024 when unimproved sources were closer and more accessible. In Honduras, water collection and water work burdens did not differ significantly by time point or source type. We found women with on-premises water access to still expend considerable time and caloric expenditure engaging in water work within their household compounds. Findings from Kenya suggest that water infrastructure improvements can reduce women's water collection burdens, though benefits may depend on and vary by season and source location. Findings from Honduras show that water labor does not end once water is in the household. Rather, substantial time and energy are expended carrying out water-related work even when sources are on premises, suggesting that efforts to assess water labor need to extend beyond collection alone. To meaningfully reduce burdens and ensure improved water sources are utilized during all seasons, initiatives need to consider source location, seasonal variability, and work beyond collection. Evaluations to assess infrastructure impacts on women's labor and well-being are needed and long overdue.