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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Global and local genetic overlap among ME/CFS, irritable bowel syndrome and psychiatric traits: a hypothesis-generating analysis

作者:

Background. Myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) frequently co-occur following infection, yet shared genetic architecture at the locus level has not been systematically characterised. Aims. To estimate global and local genetic correlations between ME/CFS (including infection-onset subgroup), IBS, major depressive disorder (MDD) and loneliness/isolation, and characterise ME/CFS cell-type heritability enrichment. Method. GWAS summary statistics: DecodeME (15,579 ME/CFS; 9,738 infection-onset), FinnGen R9 (9,296 IBS), PGC MDD Wave 2 (45,396) and UK Biobank loneliness (N=455,364). LDSC for global correlations; LAVA for local correlations across 2,495 loci; MAGMA for cell-type enrichment (Descartes Human atlas); coloc.abf for colocalisation. Results. All pairwise global correlations were significant after Bonferroni correction, including ME/CFS-all-MDD (rg=0.598, 95% CI 0.46-0.74) and ME/CFS-all-IBS (rg=0.573, 0.39-0.75). Of 4,232 local tests, 16 reached FDR

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

CmdNeedle: Measuring the Incompleteness of Command Denylists for AI Agents

arXiv:2606.15549v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The adoption of AI agents is increasing rapidly. Terminal AI agents, i.e., AI agents that run in terminal environments, are a widely used type of AI agents. Terminal AI agents rely heavily on shell command execution to interact with the host systems. They adopt a three-list command-gating mechanism to mitigate security risks introduced by command execution, with denylists serving as the load-bearing component. However, modern operating systems often ship a large, ever-expanding set of shell commands with complex functionalities. Our observation is that even a built-in denylist of Claude Code, well-maintained by its developers, can overlook bypass commands that invalidate its effectiveness. Such negligence leads to fragile command denylists that cannot even block operations that practitioners expect them to block. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of command denylist fragility in terminal AI agents. The paper formalizes the command denylist fragility problem and proposes an LLM-driven pipeline, CmdNeedle, to detect such fragility. It prompts the LLM to propose possible bypasses and iteratively repairs them using feedback from a validator that executes them in a sandbox. In the evaluation, we applied CmdNeedle to 1,709 real-world command denylists (containing 13,332 denylist rules) collected from GitHub. The evaluation shows several key findings, including that 69.0–98.6% of the denylists are fragile, that this fragility occurs consistently across projects and agents, and the validity of several possible root causes for this fragility. Our pipeline and findings will hopefully facilitate future research and practice regarding the command denylists used by AI agents.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Learning Instance-Adaptive Low-Rank Orthogonal Subspaces for Clothes-Changing Person Re-Identification

Clothes-changing person re-identification (CC-ReID) aims to recognize individuals despite drastic appearance changes caused by clothing variation. While existing methods rely on adversarial learning to disentangle clothing features, we propose Ortho-ReID, which explicitly models a low-rank clothing subspace from VLM text descriptions and extracts clothing-invariant representations via direct geometric constraints. A critical component is our transformer-based Basis Maker, which refines a shared, low-dimensional clothing prior into an instance-adaptive low-rank subspace through cross-attention with image patches, enabling robust clothing feature extraction even under varying visibility conditions. This instance-adaptive subspace is supervised via alignment with clothing text embeddings, while identity features are extracted via a learnable projection head and geometrically constrained to be strictly orthogonal to it. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on PRCC (+5.9% top-1), Celeb-reID-light (+3.5%), and LaST (+5.3%), with competitive results on LTCC.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

SkillJuror: Measuring How Agent Skill Organization Changes Runtime Behavior

arXiv:2606.11543v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent Skills augment large language model (LLM) agents with procedural knowledge at inference time, but current benchmarks rarely distinguish what a Skill says from how it is organized. We study this distinction through Progressive Disclosure, where a concise root file points agents to supporting resources on demand, and compare it with a normalized flat baseline. We present SkillJuror, a framework for evaluating Skill writing paradigms through semantically controlled variants, matched multi-trial evaluations, and trajectory evidence while holding task knowledge fixed. In an 82-task SkillsBench study, Progressive Disclosure changes runtime behavior before aggregate outcomes: distinct Skill resources touched per trajectory rise from 1.18 to 3.85, and effective uptake events rise from 1.33 to 3.92. It also yields 17 additional verifier-passing trials out of 410 matched trials (+4.1%) over the normalized flat baseline. The benefit is task-dependent. Progressive Disclosure helps when supporting resources guide implementation, checking, or repair, but is weaker when success hinges on exact output conventions, numerical thresholds, or long artifact-generation pipelines. These results show that Skill organization is not mere presentation: it can change how agents search and apply procedural knowledge, while outcome gains depend on whether the exposed resources are actionable for the task. Code is available at https://github.com/zhiyuchen-ai/skill-juror.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

TreeGRNG: Binary Tree Gaussian Random Number Generator for Efficient Probabilistic AI Hardware

arXiv:2606.16599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer opportunities for greatly enhancing the trustworthiness of conventional neural networks by monitoring the uncertainties in decision-making. A significant drawback for BNN inference at the extreme edge, however, is the imperative need to incorporate Gaussian Random Number Generators (GRNG) within each neuron. State-of-the-art GRNG algorithms heavily depend on multiple arithmetic operations and the use of extensive look-up tables, posing significant implementation challenges for ultra-low power hardware implementations. To overcome this, this paper presents an innovative binary tree random number generator (TreeGRNG) allowing the use of ultra-low-cost constant comparators instead of arithmetic units. We further enhance the TreeGRNG proposal with a set of hardware-aware optimizations exploiting the Gaussian properties. The optimized TreeGRNG surpasses the State-of-the-Art (SoTA) in terms of distribution accuracy while achieving a 3.7$\times$ reduction in energy per sample and boosting the throughput per unit area by 5.8$\times$. Moreover, our TreeGRNG proposal possesses a distinct advantage over the current SoTA in terms of flexibility, as it easily enables designers to adjust the shape of the sampled probability distribution, extending beyond the capabilities of traditional GRNGs, opening the horizon towards future probabilistic AI designs. The TreeGRNG design is available open-source in the link

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

Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model for Standard View Classification of Echocardiographic Videos

Automated classification of standard echocardiographic views is crucial for efficient clinical workflow but faces three main challenges. First, publicly available datasets are scarce and limited in scale and view coverage. Second, the performance of some modern video-level architectures for echocardiographic view classification remains underexplored. Third, some view categories exhibit highly similar spatial appearances, making single-frame features insufficient for discrimination, while heterogeneous frame quality complicates robust temporal information fusion. To address these challenges, we release the Echocardiographic Videos of Nine Views (EV9V) dataset, comprising 5,138 videos, 910,579 frames, and 9 standard views, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the largest publicly available echocardiography video dataset. Using EV9V, we systematically benchmark representative video classification architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), and Transformers. Furthermore, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model (STFM), an efficient dual-stream CNN-LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) framework that jointly captures spatial anatomical structures and temporal cardiac dynamics. The proposed framework leverages uncertainty-aware learning to preferentially sample representative video segments during training and evidence-based fusion during inference, improving robustness to variations in frame quality across echocardiographic videos. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive performance across diverse video classification models, validating the effectiveness of uncertainty-aware spatio-temporal learning for echocardiographic view classification. The code is available at https://github.com/bgx666/stfm.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

QueryOcc: Query-based Self-Supervision for 3D Semantic Occupancy

Learning 3D scene geometry and semantics from images is a core challenge in computer vision and a key capability for autonomous driving. Since large-scale 3D annotation is prohibitively expensive, recent work explores self-supervised learning directly from sensor data without manual labels. Existing approaches either rely on 2D rendering consistency, where 3D structure emerges only implicitly, or on discretized voxel grids from accumulated lidar point clouds, limiting spatial precision and scalability. We introduce QueryOcc, a query-based self-supervised framework that learns continuous 3D semantic occupancy directly through independent 4D spatio-temporal queries sampled across adjacent frames. The framework supports supervision from either pseudo-point clouds derived from vision foundation models or raw lidar data. To enable long-range supervision and reasoning under constant memory, we introduce a contractive scene representation that preserves near-field detail while smoothly compressing distant regions. QueryOcc surpasses previous camera-based methods by 26% in semantic RayIoU on the self-supervised Occ3D-nuScenes benchmark while running at 11.6 FPS, demonstrating that direct 4D query supervision enables strong self-supervised occupancy learning. https://research.zenseact.com/publications/queryocc/

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

Evaluation of AutoML Frameworks for IDS under Imbalanced Data Conditions of the NSL-KDD Dataset

arXiv:2606.12611v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work investigates the impact of severe class imbalance on the performance of automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks for multiclass network intrusion detection using the NSL-KDD dataset. Unlike previous studies that simplify the problem through binary classification or minority-class removal, we preserve the original five-class distribution, including highly underrepresented attacks such as R2L and U2R, enabling a realistic evaluation of imbalance-sensitive learning behavior. Nine open-source AutoML frameworks were analyzed under a unified and reproducible experimental protocol, considering differences in architectural design, ensemble strategies, validation procedures, hyperparameter optimization, and imbalance-handling mechanisms. The results demonstrate that frameworks incorporating ensemble learning and imbalance-aware optimization achieve better minority-class discrimination. PyCaret obtained the best overall performance, reaching 66\% macro-F1, followed by AutoGluon with 55\%, whereas frameworks lacking native balancing support exhibited significant degradation in minority-class detection capability. The analysis further shows that accuracy-oriented optimization alone is insufficient for highly imbalanced IDS scenarios, since high-weighted metrics may coexist with poor generalization on rare attack categories. As a contribution, this work establishes a standardized benchmark for AutoML-based intrusion detection under severe multiclass imbalance, highlighting current architectural limitations and the need for native integration of imbalance-aware optimization, resampling, and stratified evaluation strategies into automated learning pipelines. The source code is publicly available.

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

Multi-Agent Framework for Audit Risk Assessment with Explicit Uncertainty and Evidence Conflict Modeling

arXiv:2606.15640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Audit risk assessment increasingly benefits from combining heterogeneous evidence sources, yet existing approaches typically produce point predictions without quantifying how well different evidence streams agree. We propose UMAR (Uncertainty-Aware Multi-Agent Risk Assessment), a framework that employs three specialized agents: an MD&A Text Agent, a Financial Ratio Agent, and a CAM Agent, each producing independent risk scores with calibrated uncertainty estimates. An Uncertainty Aggregator based on Dempster-Shafer evidence theory fuses these scores while explicitly measuring inter-agent conflict. We evaluate UMAR on a U.S. dataset of 3,200 firm-year observations from SEC 10-K filings (2019-2023), with financial restatement as the target label. Experimental results show that UMAR achieves an AUROC of 0.782 and a PR-AUC of 0.341, outperforming logistic regression, XGBoost, FinBERT, and single-agent and dual-agent LLM baselines. UMAR attains the lowest expected calibration error (ECE = 0.052) among all methods and identifies evidence-conflict patterns that correlate with actual restatement risk, offering auditors potentially actionable and interpretable risk signals.

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

Testing For Distribution Shifts with Conditional Conformal Test Martingales

arXiv:2602.13848v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a sequential test for detecting arbitrary distribution shifts that allows conformal test martingales (CTMs) to work under a fixed, reference-conditional setting. Existing CTM detectors construct test martingales by continually growing a reference set with each incoming sample, using it to assess how atypical the new sample is relative to past observations. While this design yields anytime-valid type-I error control, it suffers from test-time contamination: after a change, post-shift observations enter the reference set and dilute the evidence for distribution shift, increasing detection delay and reducing power. In contrast, our method avoids contamination by design by comparing each new sample to a fixed null reference dataset. Our main technical contribution is a robust martingale construction that remains valid conditional on the null reference data, achieved by explicitly accounting for the estimation error in the reference distribution induced by the finite reference set. This yields anytime-valid type-I error control together with guarantees of asymptotic power one and bounded expected detection delay. Empirically, our method detects shifts faster than standard CTMs, providing a powerful and reliable distribution-shift detector.

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

Anomalies in Multivariate Time Series Benchmarks Are Mostly Univariate

arXiv:2606.02670v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many recent multivariate time series anomaly detection (MTSAD) models incorporate cross-channel modeling, under the implicit assumption that the structure of anomalies may be spread across multiple channels. We evaluate this assumption on eight widely used public benchmarks by introducing a per-segment diagnostic framework that flags, for each labeled anomaly, whether at least one channel deviates individually from its normal history, whether the cross-channel correlation structure changes, or both. The framework shows that no cross-channel rupture occurs without an accompanying univariate deviation across a range of reasonable thresholds. A complementary metric also reveals that on six of the eight benchmarks, at least half of the labeled anomaly segments deviate univariately on 89% to 100% of their timesteps, reaching 100% on three of these datasets. To verify that our framework captures cross-channel structure when present, we construct synthetic data of phase-shifted sinusoidal channels with shared noise. Each anomalous segment is altered through one of two channel-wise corruptions that preserve the per-channel marginal distribution while breaking cross-channel structure, and our framework correctly characterizes these segments as cross-channel-only. On these data, channel-dependent (CD) models successfully exploit the cross-channel signal whereas channel-independent (CI) ones fail. The CI/CD comparison of a recent SOTA detector on real benchmarks further confirms that CD modeling brings no measurable gain. We conclude that current MTSAD benchmarks are unsuitable for validating cross-channel modeling capabilities, and we call for the development of more structurally diverse evaluation sets. The code for this study is publicly available.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

AI-assisted continuous-time modelling of metastatic breast cancer reveals subtype-specific spatiotemporal organ interactions

Metastatic breast cancer is one of the leading causes of premature mortality among women worldwide. A major barrier to optimal care is the marked heterogeneity in both the temporal dynamics of metastatic spread and the organ-specific spatial distribution of metastases. Existing analyses do not adequately capture this complexity, as they either neglect temporal dependencies or assume independence between metastasic sites. As a result, it remains unclear how established metastases influence subsequent organ-specific dissemination. We address this question using patient-level longitudinal trajectories from a large multicentre real-world metastatic breast cancer registry, combined with an AI-assisted disease-progression modelling framework based on continuous-time Markov chains that represent combinations of metastatic sites and the non-uniform and practice-driven timing of radiologic response assessments, as encountered in routine clinical care. We present a stochastic model determined by progression rates, which are parameterised to capture baseline organ-specific transition risks, patient-level covariates, and pairwise inter-organ interaction effects. High-dimensional treatment information is incorporated using an large language model based encoding. We find that metastatic spread follows non-independent, subtype-specific spatiotemporal patterns, with subtype-specific inter-organ interaction patterns that shape progression. Visceral metastases, particularly lung and liver metastasis, are associated with an increased hazard of subsequent brain metastasis, with effects varying across hormone receptor-positive, HER2-positive, and triple-negative subtypes. Together, these findings define a clinically relevant spatiotemporal architecture of metastatic progression in breast cancer. This framework enables refined mechanism-informed risk stratification and provides a data-driven rationale for targeted and risk-adapted – rather than symptom-triggered – surveillance strategies.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

HawkesNest: A Multi-Axis Synthetic Benchmark for Spatiotemporal Pattern Complexity

arXiv:2606.16863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluation of spatiotemporal point process (STPP) models relies heavily on opaque real-world datasets, where latent generative structure is unknown and model failures are difficult to attribute. We introduce HawkesNest, a generator-aligned benchmark for controlled spatiotemporal pattern complexity built on a multivariate Hawkes backbone. HawkesNest defines four complexity axes: space–time entanglement, background heterogeneity, cross-type interaction, and domain topology. Each axis is associated with a deterministic index computed from the latent data-generating mechanism. By varying these axes while holding global rate, stability, and simulation budget fixed, HawkesNest enables diagnostic stress tests of STPP models under known structural difficulty. We verify that the indices are monotone and nearly orthogonal under controlled sweeps. We illustrate its use by showing that Hawkes-family baselines degrade under joint heterogeneity–entanglement complexity, even though they are structurally aligned with the Hawkes data-generating backbone. We further show that HawkesNest exposes neural-model sensitivity: AutoSTPP remains vulnerable under isolated increases in space–time entanglement. Code. Available at https://github.com/YahyaAalaila/HawkesNest

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Safe Exploration via Policy Priors

arXiv:2601.19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.g. simulated) environments. In this work, we tackle this challenge by utilizing suboptimal yet conservative policies (e.g., obtained from offline data or simulators) as priors. Our approach, SOOPER, uses probabilistic dynamics models to optimistically explore, yet pessimistically fall back to the conservative policy prior if needed. We prove that SOOPER guarantees safety throughout learning, and establish convergence to an optimal policy by bounding its cumulative regret. Extensive experiments on key safe RL benchmarks and real-world hardware demonstrate that SOOPER is scalable, outperforms the state-of-the-art and validate our theoretical guarantees in practice.

16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Approximation Properties of Evolutionary Dynamics in Continuous-Time Finite State Space Games

arXiv:2606.11193v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This thesis studies the convergence of finite-population stochastic evolutionary dynamics to their deterministic mean-field limit in continuous-time finite state space games. We first develop refined ergodic theorems for Markov chains with a single positive-recurrent class, guaranteeing the existence of a unique invariant distribution and almost-sure convergence of time averages. Next, we prove that the mean-field model, described by a system of Lipschitz-continuous ordinary differential equations, admits a unique solution that depends continuously on its initial condition and that constitutes the almost-sure limit for the empirical distributions with fixed policy. Furthermore, we show that every Mixed Stationary Nash Equilibrium of the mean-field game is approximated by a Nash equilibrium of the corresponding $N$-player game within an error $\epsilon$ for sufficiently large $N$. We finally demonstrate, by Kurtz's theorem, that the empirical state-policy distribution converges in probability to the mean-field trajectory. Numerical simulations conducted in MATLAB confirm the theoretical $\mathcal{O}(N^{-1/2})$ convergence rate in both models across a range of population sizes.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FinP: Fairness-in-Privacy in Federated Learning by Addressing Disparities in Privacy Risk

arXiv:2502.17748v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) inherently mitigates mass data centralization risks; however, its privacy protections are not equally distributed - leaving vulnerable individuals disproportionately exposed to sophisticated privacy attacks. Crucially, statistical heterogeneity in human-centric FL environments often results in an inequitable distribution of privacy risks, particularly affecting those whose sensitive attributes or behaviors make them outliers. To address this critical gap, we introduce FinP, a novel framework designed to formalize and enforce fairness-in-privacy by mitigating disproportionate client vulnerability to Source Inference Attacks (SIA). FinP operationalizes a two-pronged defense strategy that tackles both the symptoms and root causes of privacy disparity, ensuring that no group of clients bears an excessive privacy burden. It combines a server-side adaptive aggregation mechanism, which dynamically weights client contributions based on their estimated privacy risk, with a client-side regularization technique to curb localized overfitting that drives unique data memorization. Extensive empirical evaluations on FEMNIST, Human Activity Recognition (HAR), and CIFAR-10 datasets demonstrate that FinP effectively aligns privacy fairness with primary task utility. Notably, FinP successfully mitigates SIA risks and reduces disparities in privacy exposure, establishing that strong fairness-in-privacy guarantees need not compromise model utility. Ultimately, FinP establishes equitable privacy protections by reducing vulnerability disparities by up to 57.14%, while preserving global model utility within a marginal +/- 1.75% of standard federated baselines.

18.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

The systole of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds

arXiv:2406.11783v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the systole of a model of random hyperbolic 3-manifolds introduced by Petri and Raimbault, answering a question posed in that same article. These are compact manifolds with boundary constructed by randomly gluing truncated tetrahedra along their faces. We prove that the limit, as the volume tends to infinity, of the expected value of their systole exists and we give a closed formula of it. Moreover, we compute a numerical approximation of this value.

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

Universal Image Restoration via Internalized Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Image restoration seeks to recover high-quality images from degraded inputs but becomes highly ill-posed under complex, mixed degradations. While unified all-in-one models are common, their performance declines as degradation complexity increases. Recent works adopt Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning for multi-round restoration using specialized modules. However, this approach faces two key limitations: (i) increased computational cost due to multi-step processing, and (ii) weak modeling of interactions between degradations during stepwise inference. We introduce CoTIR, a universal image restoration framework that internalizes CoT reasoning within a single model. Concretely, we view image restoration as a specialized subtask of image editing, which implies that a large-scale pre-trained editing model provides a more favorable optimization starting point. Building on this, we fine-tune the model for restoration and further encode structured CoT-style reasoning into the learning objective via a differentiable formulation inspired by Lagrangian optimization, enabling holistic restoration without chaining specialized restorers. To facilitate training and evaluation, we further present CoTIR-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising 5.2 million samples with CoT-style reasoning traces. Extensive experiments on CoTIR-Bench and broad real composite degradation scenes show that CoTIR achieves stronger perceptual quality and more competitive fidelity than both all-in-one models and multi-round restoration methods. The source code is available at https://github.com/gy65896/CoTIR.

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

Statistical Foundations of LLM-based A/B Testing: A Surrogacy Framework for Human Causal Inference

arXiv:2606.17165v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Organizations and researchers show increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) in place of human participants in A/B tests, in the hope of experimenting faster and at lower cost. We study when a treatment effect estimated on LLM outcomes recovers the effect that would have been measured on the human population of interest. Distributional equivalence between LLM and human outcomes would make any standard estimator valid but is unrealistic. We therefore develop a statistical framework that adapts surrogate endpoint theory to LLMs. The framework shows that calibrating LLM outcomes to human outcomes identifies the average treatment effect under surrogacy and comparability conditions that are jointly weaker than distributional equivalence. When these conditions fail, the effect of interest is only partially identified, and we provide diagnostics that can falsify surrogacy on historical experiments together with a bound on the worst-case bias from limited overlap. We further show that the stochasticity inherent to LLMs introduces both bias and variance, but using an average of multiple draws as the surrogate mitigates both. We illustrate the methods and theory in simulations and an application to A/B tests on Upworthy headlines. A central takeaway from our work is that the validity of LLM outcomes as surrogates can only be falsified for past treatments and never verified for new ones, so human experiments remain indispensable for novel interventions. We discuss the role of LLM choice, prompting, and temperature as design variables, and how to size human experiments for validation.

21.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A polynomial-time approximation scheme for minimum-weight decoding of topological codes

arXiv:2606.18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two-dimensional topological translationally invariant (2D TTI) stabilizer codes lie at the heart of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but using them requires solving the decoding problem. Minimum-weight decoding of these codes was recently shown to be NP-hard, even in basic settings, such as the color code with Pauli $Z$ errors and the toric code with Pauli $X$, $Y$ and $Z$ errors. Here, we prove that minimum-weight decoding of 2D TTI codes nonetheless admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS), i.e., for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, a recovery operator of weight within a multiplicative factor of $1+\varepsilon$ of the minimum can be found in polynomial time. Our approach builds on Arora's PTAS for Euclidean problems, such as the traveling salesman problem, and applies when decoding can be cast in terms of point-like excitations connected by string-like errors. It therefore extends beyond two dimensions, covering certain higher-dimensional topological codes and quantum memories, including the toric code with phenomenological or circuit-level noise.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Adjusted Cup-Product Neural Layer

arXiv:2606.13568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many important observables in physics and geometry are cup products of cochains. The adjusted cup product neural layer has been introduced in this paper. It is a neural primitive that hard wires the cup product with an adjustment term from higher gauge theory. This creates a readout that is gauge invariant by design. Their main theoretical result shows that on a closed cycle the output relies entirely on the adjustment coefficient. Setting this coefficient to zero removes the output completely regardless of other parameters. Thus the adjustment is the only source of gauge invariant signal. They prove this observable is a nonzero quadratic form and is exactly invariant under one and two gauge transformations.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

High coverage, persistent gaps: quality of Antenatal Care and its determinants in Zambia based on the 2024 Demographic and Health Survey.

Abstract Background Evaluating antenatal care (ANC) quality is critical to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. In Zambia, despite high basic ANC attendance, comprehensive national evidence on the clinical content and quality of services remains limited. This study assessed the coverage of WHO-recommended ANC interventions and identified factors associated with care quality using the latest national data. Methods A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data from the 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey. The final analytic sample comprised 4,829 women aged 15-49 with a live birth in the preceding 5 years. A composite index of 15 selected, equally weighted WHO-recommended components evaluated clinical assessment, counseling/screening, preventive interventions, and utilization. Survey-weighted Poisson regression estimated adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRRs) for the count of ANC components received. Results The mean ANC quality score was 12.5 out of 15 (95% CI: 12.4-12.6), and 78.5% (95% CI: 77.0-80.0) of women achieved adequate ANC ([≥] 12/15 components). While individual clinical and counseling coverage generally exceeded 90%, only 47.2% (95% CI: 45.3-49.0) of women initiated care during the first trimester, and just 4.8% (95% CI: 4.1-5.6) achieved [≥] 8 ANC contacts. Maternal education was the strongest and most stable predictor of quality across all models. Compared to no education, higher education was associated with an 8.0% higher expected quality score (aIRR = 1.080, 95% CI: 1.051-1.110). Lower ANC quality was significantly associated with unwanted pregnancies (aIRR = 0.970, 95% CI: 0.956-0.993) and with residence in Western (aIRR = 0.923, 95% CI: 0.897-0.951) and North Western (aIRR = 0.966, 95% CI: 0.937-0.996) provinces. Absence of distance barriers and residence in Eastern, Luapula, and Copperbelt provinces were associated with higher quality scores. Conclusion While average ANC component coverage in Zambia is high, critical gaps persist in early initiation and total contact frequency. Care adequacy is strongly influenced by maternal education, relationship status, pregnancy intention, and regional inequities. These findings underscore the need for interventions targeted at uneducated women, preventing unintended pregnancies, and underserved regions such as Western and North Western Provinces. Keywords: Antenatal care quality, ANC content, Zambia, maternal education.

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

Perceptual compensation for tonal context in self-supervised speech models

This study examines the extent to which the wav2vec2.0 architecture exhibits evidence of compensation for phonological context. We conducted a pseudo-replication of a perceptional compensation experiment on Mandarin Chinese tones, and compared the embedding similarities and probing classifier outputs between a purely self-supervised pre-trained model and a model fine-tuned for Mandarin ASR. No evidence of compensation was found in the embedding similarities of the purely pre-trained model. Probing classifiers showed some evidence of compensation in addition to the expected layer-wise improvements in categorization, but failed to replicate human performance on isolated test syllables. Our findings contrast with previous reports of sensitivity to phonological structure emerging through pre-training alone, and suggest that supervised objectives may be necessary to encourage the abstraction of at least some types of phonological regularities.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The AI Legal Specialist: A Juridically Autonomous Professional Profile for AI Governance

arXiv:2606.12415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid global expansion of artificial intelligence regulation has generated, across multiple jurisdictions, a demand for legal expertise dedicated to AI that the market has addressed in a fragmented manner. Data protection officers extend their remit beyond data protection law; privacy lawyers reposition themselves toward AI; compliance officers add AI chapters to their existing manuals. This paper argues that none of these adaptive responses adequately covers the professional space opened by the emerging global AI regulatory landscape, of which the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689) is the most comprehensive instance, alongside the Council of Europe Framework Convention on AI, the United States executive and sectoral framework, and analogous initiatives in the United Kingdom, Canada, Brazil, China, Japan, Singapore, and beyond. A distinct professional profile is required: the AI Legal Specialist, conceived as a jurist – understood broadly to encompass any professional with advanced legal training – operating at the intersection of legal interpretation and AI governance. The profile is juridically autonomous: it derives its existence from the structure of regulatory obligations generated wherever AI is subject to substantive regulation, rather than from any technical standard or the extension of adjacent roles. The paper provides a juridically grounded definition of the profile, argues for its autonomy from adjacent figures and international standards, proposes a reference competence architecture aligned with the European e-Competence Framework (e-CF, EN 16234-1) as a methodological choice, and articulates the conditions for its operational measurement through key performance indicators. The contribution is intended as a foundation for international standardization of the profile and as a reference for practice, curricula, and adoption across jurisdictions.