Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16 DOI: HASH:993ce74f5160ecb490cfcfed44f57917

Risk beliefs, intensive digital information and demand for a new preventative health product in public clinics: Evidence from an experiment in Zimbabwe.

Authors:

Thomas↗Galizzi↗M. M↗Moorhouse↗Mandizvidza↗Dzamatira↗Gregson↗

Demand for preventative health care is weak in low-income settings. In a field experiment in a low-income, high-risk setting, we evaluated whether demand for a new bio-medical preventative health product, offered free at public health clinics, responds to digital feedback-based intensive information on health risks and benefits of prevention along with a clinic referral enabling access to the product. In our sample of women aged 18-24 years, we find a large correction in risk beliefs sustained six months after the intervention. Against a background of very low baseline usage, within six months we find a 5.8 percentage point increase in take up of the prevention method, a level of uptake which is very large relative to the control group. Reassuringly, there is no meaningful difference in up-take amongst baseline high- risk and low-risk individuals.

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02.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15869

Metis: A Generalizable and Efficient World-Action Model for Autonomous Driving and Urban Navigation

Authors:

Jingyu Li↗Zhe Liu↗Dongnan Hu↗Junjie Wu↗Zipei Ma↗Wenxiao Wu↗Chao Han↗Zhihui Hao↗Zhikang Liu↗Kun Zhan↗Jiankang Deng↗Xiatian Zhu↗…

World action models~(WAMs) have shown great promise for autonomous driving and urban navigation. Built upon Vision-Language-Action models or video generation models, existing approaches suffer key limitations: (1) High inference latency due to future observation prediction at test time, and (2) tightly coupled video and action modeling leading to representational mismatch and degraded generalization. To address both issues, we propose Metis, an end-to-end WAM framework that decouples video generation and action prediction. Specifically, Metis employs a Mixture-of-Transformers architecture with dedicated experts for video generation and action prediction, preserving the intrinsic distributional properties of each task. To enhance efficiency, we introduce an asymmetric attention mask that enables joint training of both experts while allowing the action model to bypass explicit video generation during inference. This design ensures training-inference consistency and significantly reduces computational costs without compromising planning performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on the NAVSIM navhard and navtest benchmarks and the CityWalker navigation benchmark, validating both the generalizability and efficiency across diverse tasks. Real-robot deployments further confirm the practical feasibility of our approach.

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03.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.06834

The Dark Regulome: Disentangling Predictability from Regulation in Genomic Foundation Models

Authors:

Chahat Baranwal↗Aaditya Baranwal↗Lakshya Nitin Tandon↗

High-grade gliomas integrate into neural circuits through functional synapses with neurons, raising the question of which noncoding elements shape synaptogenic gene expression in tumor cells. The regulatory program written across the dark genome, what we call the $dark regulome$, is the natural substrate to probe, and sequence foundation models offer a zero-shot route through in-silico mutagenesis (ISM); yet likelihood-based scoring is tautologically coupled to local sequence predictability, leaving the regulatory interpretation underdetermined. Across three architecturally distinct foundation models (Caduceus-Ph, HyenaDNA, Enformer) and 30,448 dark genome elements at 92 glioma-relevant loci, we introduce a residualization-and-permutation diagnostic that separates predictability-driven from regulation-driven RIS variance. A sharp 10kb proximal-regulatory horizon survives every control we apply, but the LM-derived element-class hierarchy does not: a six-feature linear baseline matches Caduceus top-decile membership at AUC $= 0.985$. Cross-architecture decomposition cleanly separates a sequence-predictability layer (the two language models co-rank long well-predicted transposable elements) from a regulatory-output layer (Enformer alone retains residual cCRE-discriminative signal), with literally zero overlap between the two top-100 lists. Conservation, brain cis-eQTL, and STRING-PPI cross-checks then anchor what biology survives: top-100 elements across all three models are $3.3\times$ enriched per model for matching brain eQTLs ($p_\mathrm{emp} < 5\times 10^{-3}$), while a tempting transposable-element regulatory layer and a striking NRXN1+NLGN1 protein-pair convergence both fail proper permutation tests once those tests are constructed. We deliver the diagnostic as a general methodological tool for any ISM-based regulatory study.

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04.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.04998

Empirical Study of Pop and Jazz Mix Ratios for Genre-Adaptive Chord Generation

Authors:

Jinju Lee↗

arXiv:2605.04998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This revision updates a pop-to-jazz chord-generation rehearsal study. Best-epoch metrics still show that modest pop rehearsal preserves pop accuracy while improving jazz prediction, but v2 corrects released-checkpoint selection: the released F1 equals Phase 0, F2 had a transcription error, and ft-pop80-v2 restores a hash-distinct jazz-adapted F1 across 3 seeds.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19240

Seeing Through Occlusion: Deterministic Arm Kinematic Correction for Robot Teleoperation

Authors:

Thomas M. Kwok↗Nicholas Koenig↗Yue Hu↗

Markerless, single-RGB-D-camera motion capture provides a low-cost and non-invasive alternative to conventional marker-based systems for robot teleoperation; however, depth estimation often degrades in the presence of self-occlusion, particularly during upper-limb motion. This paper presents an Arm Kinematic Correction (AKC) method that improves depth estimation by enforcing geometric constraints based on constant arm lengths. The proposed approach reconstructs occluded joint depths by leveraging wrist positions and predefined arm lengths via a deterministic formulation based on the Pythagorean theorem, thereby avoiding the need for complex probabilistic modeling or parameter tuning. Experimental validation against a Vicon reference system demonstrates reliable performance for both static and dynamic joint motions, evaluated using root-mean-square error (RMSE) and Pearson correlation. Furthermore, motion-mapping teleoperation is successfully demonstrated in both simulated and physical robot environments. The results show that AKC enhances robustness and preserves anatomical consistency under long-duration, severe self-occlusion, even when paired with less reliable temporal filters, highlighting its practicality for real-time applications such as robot teleoperation and human-robot interaction.

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06.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13901

SpikF-GO: Spiking Fourier Graph Operators for Multivariate Time Series Forecasting

Authors:

Jafar Bakhshaliyev↗Niels Landwehr↗

arXiv:2606.13901v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have emerged as an energy-efficient alternative to conventional neural networks, demonstrating strong performance in computer vision and robotics. More recently, SNNs have been applied to time series forecasting (TSF), with methods exploring spiking temporal backbones, spike-compatible positional encodings, Fourier-domain processing, and redesigned neuron dynamics. However, existing SNN forecasting approaches process variables independently, lacking explicit mechanisms for modeling inter-variable dependencies. This is a critical limitation in multivariate settings, where cross-variable correlations carry substantial predictive information. We propose Spiking Fourier Graph Operators (SpikF-GO), which addresses this gap by combining a hypervariate graph formulation in which every scalar observation becomes a graph node with spike-driven spectral processing. SpikF-GO introduces a Hard Concrete frequency gate for learnable sparse frequency selection and a Complex LIF gate that applies independent spiking neurons to real and imaginary Fourier components, preserving binary, event-driven computation throughout the spectral domain. We further present a variant incorporating Central Pattern Generator-based positional encodings for stronger long-range temporal modeling. Evaluated on eight benchmarks under a unified experimental protocol, SpikF-GO achieves the best average rank among all SNN methods and outperforms its ANN counterpart, FourierGNN, at reduced energy cost. SpikF-GO maintains competitive accuracy even at substantially smaller embedding dimensions, thereby achieving significant energy reductions. To our knowledge, this is among the first works to bring graph-based multivariate modeling into the spiking domain for TSF and the first to provide a unified comparison across SNN forecasting architectures under a common experimental protocol.

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07.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-19 DOI: HASH:1314a73deb95b83732dbf2271ee99952

Tox21mer, A transformer foundation model for Tox21 high-throughput concentration-response curves data

Authors:

Li↗Hwang↗Shockley↗Motsinger-Reif↗Hsieh↗J.-H↗Auerbach↗S. S↗Reif↗

The U.S. Tox21 collaboration has generated a large reference library of high-throughput concentration-response assays. Here we present Tox21mer, a 43.5-million-parameter transformer that encodes each Tox21 concentration-response curve together with assay metadata into a 768-dimensional representation. Tox21mer was pretrained on ~2.5 million curves from 102 assay protocols and 6,727 compounds using masked-response reconstruction as the primary objective, with low-weight auxiliary supervision on assay outcome and AC50. To evaluate the learned representation, we trained lightweight probes on frozen embeddings from concentration-response curves of held-out compounds. The representation supported a macro-F1 of 0.985 for three-class outcome prediction (agonist, antagonist, inactive), a binary F1 of 0.994 for active/inactive prediction, and an R2 of 0.87 for log10(AC50). The learned embeddings formed coherent groupings by curve-class category. A masked-only pretraining variant retained near-baseline probe performance, indicating that the representation is learned largely from the self-supervised objective rather than from auxiliary labels. Ablation analyses further showed that predictive performance depends mainly on curve-level response-value distributions conditioned on assay context, with limited reliance on detailed within-curve ordering. Tox21mer thus provides a reusable foundation representation for Tox21 concentration-response data that can support extrapolation to untested compounds through integration with chemical features or distillation into chemistry-only student models for large-scale external screening.

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08.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.08090

Fast LLM-Based Semantic Filtering: From a Unified Framework to an Adaptive Two-Phase Method

Authors:

Kyoungmin Kim↗Martin Catheland↗Anastasia Ailamaki↗

arXiv:2606.08090v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating a natural-language yes/no predicate over a document corpus under an accuracy target - the semantic filter - is a cornerstone of LLM-based data processing. Calling the LLM on every document (the oracle) is prohibitive, so cascades pair the oracle with a fast proxy. As deployed today, they leave four limitations on the table. (1) Each cascade family - model-free clustering, prebuilt small-LLM proxies, online-trained proxies - commits to a single representation and pipeline, and wins on only a narrow query regime. (2) The strongest online proxy invests in a custom training scheme on a bi-encoder over dense embeddings, missing the token-level evidence richer predicates require. (3) The proxy is trained against binary yes/no labels, wasting the LLM's per-document confidence at the boundary documents it most needs to learn. (4) Existing calibrations add a uniform safety margin, conflating genuine proxy uncertainty with small-sample noise and inflating cascade cost. We address these by (1) composing families adaptively - model-free clustering first, online proxy only when needed, with oracle calls shared across phases; (2) replacing the cosine bi-encoder with a hybrid of off-the-shelf token-aware models; (3) training the proxy with the oracle's per-document confidence as a soft label; and (4) a calibration that adds the safety margin only where the labeled sample is sparse. We are also the first to use the oracle's per-document confidence for three purposes: a query-level difficulty compass, a lower bound on the minimum oracle calls any proxy-based cascade can make, and the proxy's soft training label. At a 90% accuracy target on three 10K-document corpora, our methods are 1.6-2.0x faster than the best prior method per corpus and meet the target on 95% of queries; the BER-derived lower bound indicates a further ~4-20x of headroom for future work.

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09.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:6037ee13009de8596f815533feae4a59

Evaluation of AI-Generated Synthetic Data for Clinical Research in Secondary Cardiovascular Prevention among Dyslipidemia Patients

Authors:

Bonomi↗Werba↗J. P↗Saccani↗Lu↗L. L↗Coser↗Franchi↗Valsecchi↗Teruzzi↗Terragni↗Centenaro↗…

Background: Access to high-quality clinical data is essential for advancing medical research and developing effective medical statistical and Artificial Intelligence models. However, privacy regulations and logistical barriers often hinder timely access to real-world data. Synthetic data offer a promising solution, preserving the statistical characteristics of original datasets while protecting patient privacy. Objectives: This study investigates the use of synthetic data for secondary cardiovascular prevention in patients with dyslipidemia, using two real-world datasets from Centro Cardiologico Monzino. Methods: Given the high dimensionality and limited sample size of the datasets, we employed a custom generative framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Pre-trained LLMs were fine-tuned on original clinical records to synthesize tabular data replicating source-data distributions. Fine-tuning was performed within the Centro Cardiologico Monzino's secure infrastructure to ensure data sovereignty. We evaluate clinical utility and privacy using fidelity and privacy metrics, identifying the optimal generative model and benchmarking against traditional anonymization methods. Results: Synthetic data achieved a superior trade-off than classically anonymized datasets. Real and synthetic datasets showed strong agreement, with significant distributional differences limited to few variables. Models trained on synthetic data replicated key associations from the original dataset, including therapy modification and creatine phosphokinase as predictors of SAMS, and pharmacological intensity as the main driver of LDL-C reduction. Conclusions: Results support the feasibility of using synthetic data as a proxy for real-world datasets in exploratory analyses and model development. Despite slight attenuation of some effect sizes, preserved clinical relationships reinforce the validity of synthetic data in medical research.

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10.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2604.24357

DPRM: A Plug-in Doob h transform-induced Token-Ordering Module for Diffusion Language Models

Authors:

Dake Bu↗Wei Huang↗Andi Han↗Hau-San Wong↗Qingfu Zhang↗Taiji Suzuki↗Atsushi Nitanda↗

arXiv:2604.24357v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, leaving token ordering as a central algorithmic choice. Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering, which respectively suffer from train–test mismatch and myopic exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob -transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module that keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and modifies only the ordering policy. DPRM starts from confidence-driven ordering and gradually shifts to process-reward-guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove convergence of its stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates, and establish a sample-complexity advantage under tractable optimization assumptions. Across nine hosts covering language reasoning, test-time scaling, protein, single-cell, molecular, DNA, text-to-image generation, and VQA, DPRM order variants improve several language, DNA, and multimodal settings while also identifying boundary cases where confidence-only ordering or task-specific utilities are preferable. Code is available at: https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12841

TimeROME-DLM: Temporal Causal Tracing and Low-Rank Inference-Time Knowledge Editing for Masked Diffusion Language Models

Authors:

Zhengtao Yao↗Liuyang Song↗Hongbo Zhang↗Chenhao Wei↗Haoyan Xu↗Guang Yang↗Siheng Wang↗

arXiv:2606.12841v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) such as LLaDA now rival autoregressive (AR) LLMs, but every existing knowledge-editing and unlearning method (ROME, MEMIT, etc.) targets AR transformers and either makes assumptions that fail under iterative denoising, or requires gradient updates whose backward-pass activations cost tens of GB of extra VRAM and which collapse MDLMs at standard learning rates. We introduce TimeROME-DLM, the first training-free, gradient-free, inference-time knowledge-editing framework for MDLMs. It couples two components: a Temporal Indirect Effect (TIE) causal-tracing protocol that identifies, for each fact, the coordinate whose intervention most strongly drives the object prediction at later denoising steps; and a closed-form, low-rank residual edit memory that aggregates subject keys and target deltas across all forget facts and applies a single ridge-regularised update at that coordinate at every diffusion forward, with sparsification to limit utility spillover. Backbone weights stay frozen; only three hyperparameters (alpha, lambda, q) are tuned on a small validation split. On TOFU forget01 with TOFU-finetuned LLaDA-8B-Base, TimeROME-DLM cuts forget-set log-probability by roughly 83 nats. The same configuration transfers to LLaDA-8B-Instruct, Dream-7B, MMaDA-8B, DiffuLLaMA-7B, and LLaDA-MoE-1.4B. It keeps retain-set log-probability nearly flat (within ~1 nat at the utility-safe operating point) across 50 sequentially inserted facts, delivers a four- to fourteen-fold wall-clock speedup with zero additional VRAM over the strongest converged training-time baseline, and scales sub-linearly to 400 facts. TimeROME-DLM closes the locate-then-edit gap between AR LLMs and MDLMs at a fraction of the computational cost.

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12.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11424

SOMA-SQL: Resolving Multi-Source Ambiguity in NL-to-SQL via Synthetic Log and Execution Probing

Authors:

Sai Ashish Somayajula↗Marianne Menglin Liu↗Chuan Lei↗Fjona Parllaku↗Daniel Garcia↗Rongguang Wang↗Syed Fahad Allam Shah↗Ankan Bansal↗Sujeeth Bharadwaj↗Tao Sheng↗Sujith Ravi↗Dan Roth↗…

Natural language interfaces to databases aim to translate user questions into executable SQL, yet remain brittle in real-world settings where questions are underspecified and schemas are large and ambiguous. Ambiguity across user questions, database schemas, and model interpretations are central failure modes in NL2SQL, leading to misaligned intent, incorrect schema grounding, and erroneous SQL generation. Existing approaches rely on human clarification or treat ambiguity as a schema representation problem, but these do not scale nor resolve ambiguity autonomously. We propose SOMA-SQL to automatically resolve ambiguity via targeted synthetic query log and ambiguity-driven probing. SOMA-SQL constructs synthetic query log to ground schema interpretation and guide candidate SQL generation; it then executes targeted probing queries, driven by a structured ambiguity taxonomy and candidate disagreements, to produce disambiguation evidence for final SQL selection and repair. This active approach to ambiguity discovery and resolution generalizes across unseen schemas and query distributions without human-in-the-loop. Experiments on six public benchmarks demonstrate that SOMA-SQL improves execution accuracy by 13.0% on average over state-of-the-art baselines, with gains of up to 16.7% on ambiguous questions.

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13.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2605.12191

Sure-almost-sure and Sure-limit-sure Window Mean Payoff in Markov Decision Processes

Authors:

Pranshu Gaba↗Shibashis Guha↗

arXiv:2605.12191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given rationals $\alpha$ and $\beta$, the sure-almost-sure problem for a threshold Boolean objective $\varphi$ in a Markov decision process (MDP) asks if one can simultaneously ensure that all outcomes of the MDP have $\varphi$-value at least $\alpha$ (i.e. sure $\alpha$ satisfaction) and with probability $1$ the outcome has $\varphi$-value at least $\beta$ (i.e. almost-sure $\beta$ satisfaction). The sure-limit-sure problem asks if for all $\varepsilon > 0$ one can simultaneously ensure that all outcomes have $\varphi$-value at least $\alpha$ and with probability at least $1 - \varepsilon$ the outcome has $\varphi$-value at least $\beta$. Moreover, if simultaneous satisfaction of objectives is possible, then one would also like to construct a strategy (for sure-almost-sure) or a family of strategies (for sure-limit-sure) that achieves this. In this paper, we solve the sure-almost-sure and sure-limit-sure problems for window mean-payoff objectives. The window mean-payoff objective strengthens the standard mean-payoff objective by requiring that eventually, from every point in the infinite run, the average payoff becomes greater than a given threshold within a finite window length. We study two variants of window mean payoff: in the fixed variant, the window length $\ell$ is given, while in the bounded variant, the length is not given but is required to be bounded throughout the run. We show that the sure-almost-sure problem and the sure-limit-sure problem are both in P for the fixed variant (if $\ell$ is given in unary) and are both in NP $\cap$ coNP for the bounded variant, matching the computational complexity of sure satisfaction and almost-sure satisfaction when considered separately for these objectives. We also give bounds for the memory requirement of winning strategies for all considered problems.

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14.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2603.03971

No Certificate, No Categorical Speech Act: A Brouwerian Assertibility Constraint for Public Reason

Authors:

Michael J\"ulich↗

arXiv:2603.03971v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Generative AI can convert uncertainty into authoritative-seeming verdicts, intensifying the hypersuasive force of automated speech and displacing the justificatory work on which democratic epistemic agency depends. As a corrective, I propose a Brouwer-inspired assertibility constraint for responsible AI: in high-stakes domains, systems may assert or deny claims only if they can provide a publicly inspectable and contestable certificate of entitlement; otherwise they must return Undetermined. This constraint yields a three-status interface semantics (Asserted, Denied, Undetermined) in which statuses mark entitlement to categorical speech rather than truth values of the underlying world-claim. The semantics cleanly separates internal entitlement from public standing while connecting them via the certificate as a boundary object. It also produces a time-indexed entitlement profile that is stable under numerical refinement yet revisable as the public record changes. I operationalize the constraint through decision-layer gating of threshold and argmax decisions, using internal witnesses (e.g., sound bounds or separation margins where available, and contestable surrogates otherwise) and an output contract with reason-coded abstentions. A design lemma shows that any total, certificate-sound binary interface yields witnessed decidability of the deployed predicate on its declared scope, so Undetermined is not a tunable reject option but a mandatory status whenever no adequate forcing witness is available. By making outputs answerable to challengeable warrants rather than confidence alone, the paper aims to preserve epistemic agency against the persuasive pull of automated speech in public justification.

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15.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12467

Theoretical Study for Generating Optical GKP State via a Single-Photon-Added Squeezed Vacuum

Authors:

Deriyan Senjaya↗

arXiv:2606.12467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A theoretical framework is developed to analyze the generation of the optical GKP state using a single-photon-added squeezed vacuum. This state, defined by the squeezing parameter $r$, is injected into a 50:50 beam splitter, and the optical GKP state is obtained through conditional measurement at one output port. The single-photon-added squeezed vacuum is especially prominent in this context because it provides a simpler and more experimentally accessible ingredient than Schrodinger cat states, while conditional measurement ensures projection onto a state that closely approximates the finite-energy GKP form. Fidelity is employed to quantify this closeness, and the analysis demonstrates that the scheme achieves a maximum fidelity of 85% at a squeezing level of $3.76 \ dB$. This performance surpasses approaches based on squeezed optical odd Schrodinger cat states, underscoring the single-photon-added squeezed vacuum as a practical and effective pathway toward fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing.

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16.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2604.03744

How Events Separated by a Timelike Interval Can Help Us Understand Quantum Nonlocality

Authors:

Luiz Carlos Ryff↗

arXiv:2604.03744v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum entanglement plays a fundamental role in quantum cryptography and computation. An important example of quantum entanglement can be found in the correlations of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR). However, despite the plethora of articles related to the topic, different interpretations of the EPR correlations coexist, and a consensus has not yet been reached. In this article, we seek to demonstrate, through the simple and direct application of quantum formalism, how events separated by timelike intervals can, strangely enough, help us better understand some aspects of the so-called "quantum nonlocality" associated with EPR correlations.

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17.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13767

Beyond LoRA: Is Sparsity-Induced Adaptation Better?

Authors:

Elijah Cadenhead↗Cristian McGee↗Xin Li↗El Houcine Bergou↗Aritra Dutta↗

arXiv:2606.13767v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants provide a memory- and compute-efficient alternative to full fine-tuning of pre-trained models. However, questions remain about the comparative generalizability of these approaches and how the structural restrictions on low-rank updates preserve effective adaptation performance. We present a historical framing, covering the past (full fine-tuning and original LoRA), the present (different variants of LoRA), and propose simpler, cheaper, parameter-efficient extensions by inducing sparsity within existing LoRA variants: Cheap LoRA (cLA), training a single low-rank factor with the other fixed (deterministically or, in its randomized variant, stochastically), and the chained circulant variant, ${c}^3$LA. We frame cLA as a structured instance of asymmetric LoRA, serving as a controlled column-subspace restriction of full fine-tuning. We derive information-theoretic generalization error bounds for these variants, marking one of the first endeavors in this area. Empirically, we evaluate 11 fine-tuning methods across 10 pre-trained models and 14 datasets, analyzing the fine-tuned models' performance and generalization using tools such as loss landscapes and spectral analysis. Despite the sensitivity of fine-tuned models to the pre-trained model, datasets, and other factors, our study suggests that restricting LoRA-based PEFT methods' adaptation to a sparse, structured column space remains competitive across tasks with their parameter-matched baselines while reducing up to 10% training time and peak GPU memory up to 15%, even with a naïve, non-optimized, sparse implementation. Our theoretical and empirical generalization measures provide a more consistent and principled approach to their cost-effective adaptation than commonly used analytical tools. Overview and code are available at: https://elicaden.github.io/Beyond_LoRA/.

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18.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23766

Machine Learning and Deep Learning for Exoplanet Detection and Atmospheric Characterization with JWST and the Upcoming Ariel Mission

Authors:

Muallim Yakubu↗Vwavware Oruaode Jude↗

arXiv:2606.23766v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The detection and atmospheric characterization of exoplanets have entered a new data-intensive era driven by the James Webb Space Telescope and the upcoming Ariel mission. Modern surveys produce millions of light curves and high-resolution spectra that overwhelm traditional pipelines, motivating the rapid integration of Machine Learning and Deep Learning methods into the exoplanet workflow. This review synthesizes the latest progress in applying ML/DL techniques to exoplanet detection (transit identification, candidate vetting, false-positive rejection) and atmospheric characterization (retrieval, detrending, cross-correlation, surrogate modelling) in the context of JWST and Ariel. We start with classical algorithms such as Random Forests and Convolutional Neural Networks, move through Transformers and Recurrent architectures, then survey modern simulation-based inference using Neural Posterior Estimation and Flow Matching Posterior Estimation with normalizing or continuous normalizing flows. We discuss benchmark efforts, including the Ariel Machine Learning Data Challenges (2019 to 2025) hosted with NeurIPS, and key JWST case studies such as the WASP-39b Early Release Science programme. Results indicate that DL approaches consistently match or exceed traditional pipelines in both speed and accuracy, while ML-driven retrievals reduce inference time from CPU-hours to seconds and can accelerate nested-sampling retrievals by factors of 3-8 without compromising Bayesian evidence. We identify outstanding challenges interpretability, calibration of uncertainties under noisy data, hybrid modelling, and the generalization of models across instruments and planet populations and outline a research roadmap spanning the JWST era and beyond into Ariel's launch in 2029.

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17445

Toward Controllable Catalyst Inverse Design via Large-Scale Autoregressive Pretraining

Authors:

Dong Hyeon Mok↗Jonggeol Na↗Seoin Back↗

arXiv:2606.17445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inverse design of heterogeneous catalysts remains challenging because catalyst surfaces exhibit substantial structural complexity with coupled surface-adsorbate interactions across a vast chemical space that is difficult to explore efficiently through conventional screening alone. Although machine learning-based high-throughput screening has accelerated catalyst discovery, its efficiency inevitably declines as the search space grows, motivating the development of generative models that can directly construct catalysts with target properties. Here, we present a conditional catalyst generative model based on the Generative Pretrained Transformer architecture with a numerical embedding layer that enables the generation of catalyst structures conditioned on both categorical and continuous properties within a single autoregressive framework. The model was pretrained on 133 million catalyst structures and subsequently fine-tuned on approximately 460,000 optimized structures with associated categorical properties and binding energies for conditional generation. The resulting model achieved 98% structural validity, 95% optimization validity, and high categorical condition fidelity, with a 93 % joint match rate for adsorbate type and composition. For binding energy conditioning, the match rate of approximately 20% represents a four-fold improvement over the baseline training distribution, and the generated distributions shift systematically toward the target values, enabling a 1.5 to 4-fold improvement in screening efficiency for reaction-targeted catalyst discovery without additional fine-tuning. These results show that large-scale autoregressive pre-training, combined with explicit property conditioning, provides a practical route toward controllable catalyst generation and accelerated catalysts discovery.

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20.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18728

LegalWorld: A Life-Cycle Interactive Environment for Legal Agents

Authors:

Songhan Zuo↗Shengbin Yue↗Tao Chiang↗Guanying Li↗Yun Song↗Xuanjing Huang↗Zhongyu Wei↗

Civil litigation is inherently a life-cycle process: what a lawyer drafts on day one constrains what unfolds at trial months later. Yet existing legal benchmarks evaluate isolated subtasks, and prior legal-agent simulators reinitialize each scenario from shared ground truth, leaving cross-stage causal dependencies unmodeled. We present LegalWorld, a life-cycle interactive environment that models Chinese civil litigation as a causally connected state chain of five stages (seven sub-scenarios), grounded in 75,309 paired Chinese civil judgments. We pair it with reusable infrastructure (local memory, global case memory, a Skill/Tool library) that keeps each dispute consistent across its full life cycle. Building on this environment, we construct LongJud-Bench to evaluate agent capability across all five connected stages. 18,992 ratings from 217 legal-background evaluators confirm that LegalWorld trajectories are procedurally faithful and role-consistent; and a capability-level cross-model evaluation reveals sharp divergences that aggregate scores cannot expose, with no single backbone leading across consultation, drafting, and courtroom advocacy. Detailed resources will be released publicly.

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21.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.23751

Challenges in Barren Plateau Mitigation with Dynamic Parameterized Quantum Circuits

Authors:

Sumeet Shirgure↗Efekan K\"okc\"u↗Siyuan Niu↗

arXiv:2606.23751v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Variational quantum algorithms (VQAs) are a promising paradigm for quantum advantage, yet their trainability is severely hampered by barren plateaus (BPs). Several works have proposed using dynamic parameterized quantum circuits (DPQCs) which intersperse unitary layers with parameterized CPTP maps (e.g. engineered dissipation, feedforward gadgets, or periodic resets), as a potential route around BPs. We unite this class of circuits into a formalization for DPQCs. We identify constraints on the nature and the structure of DPQCs if they are to prevent a significant number of parameters from becoming untrainable. We further show via purification and Pauli path analysis, a mechanism with which cost function anti-concentrates in DPQCs while still suffering from untrainability of a significant number of parameters. Our analysis reveals ways to design DPQCs that do not have an exponentially concentrated cost function, and our results suggest that BP mitigation via DPQCs is at least as hard as designing BP-free unitaries.

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22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2603.26551

Beyond MACs: Hardware Efficient Architecture Design for Vision Backbones

Authors:

Moritz Nottebaum↗Matteo Dunnhofer↗Christian Micheloni↗

Vision backbone networks play a central role in modern computer vision. Enhancing their efficiency directly benefits a wide range of downstream applications. To measure efficiency, many publications rely on MACs (Multiply Accumulate operations) as a predictor of execution time. In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate the shortcomings of such a metric, especially in the context of edge devices. By contrasting the MAC count and execution time of common architectural design elements, we identify key factors for efficient execution and provide insights to optimize backbone design. Based on these insights, we present LowFormer, a novel vision backbone family. LowFormer features a streamlined macro and micro design that includes Lowtention, a lightweight alternative to Multi-Head Self-Attention. Lowtention not only proves more efficient, but also enables superior results on ImageNet. Additionally, we present an edge GPU version of LowFormer, that can further improve upon its baseline's speed on edge GPU and desktop GPU. We demonstrate LowFormer's wide applicability by evaluating it on smaller image classification datasets, as well as adapting it to several downstream tasks, such as object detection, semantic segmentation, image retrieval, and visual object tracking. LowFormer models consistently achieve remarkable speed-ups across various hardware platforms compared to recent state-of-the-art backbones. Code and models are available at https://github.com/altair199797/LowFormer/blob/main/Beyond_MACs.md.

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23.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18 DOI: HASH:e965746e9225c6ac6b16b6f44fdf4ba6

The relationship between serotonin transporter occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentration is hyperbolic, not linear: implications for safely tapering antidepressants

Authors:

Cohrs↗Shapiro↗

Background: Hyperbolic tapering is an increasingly recognized approach for discontinuing serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) antidepressants that involves non-linear dose reductions with equal stepwise reductions in serotonin transporter (SERT) occupancy to mitigate withdrawal symptoms. Its theoretical basis is the hyperbolic relationship between SRI dose and SERT occupancy reported in radioligand imaging studies. Hyperbolic tapering implicitly assumes that changes in SERT occupancy approximate changes in biologic effect and withdrawal risk. Because SERT occupancy plateaus across the therapeutic dose range of SRIs, this framework predicts relatively small biologic effects and withdrawal risk within this range. However, SERT occupancy influences serotonergic activity only indirectly via its effects on extracellular serotonin concentrations, and the relationship between these two variables is poorly characterized. Methods: We developed a two-pathway clearance model derived from mass-action kinetics to evaluate the steady-state relationship between SERT occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentrations under chronic SRI treatment. Results: Our analysis indicates that serotonin concentrations increase hyperbolically as transporter occupancy increases, suggesting that biologically meaningful differences in serotonergic signaling persist across the therapeutic dose range of SRIs despite plateauing occupancy. Conclusions: Our model predicts a hyperbolic relationship between SERT occupancy and extracellular serotonin concentrations, suggesting that changes in occupancy may not map proportionally onto serotonergic effect. These findings provide a potential mechanistic explanation for dose-dependent clinical effects of SRIs despite plateauing transporter occupancy and generate testable hypotheses regarding antidepressant tapering strategies. Empirical validation is warranted.

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2511.01650

EngTrace: A Symbolic Benchmark for Verifiable Process Supervision of Engineering Reasoning

Authors:

Ayesha Gull↗Muhammad Usman Safder↗Rania Elbadry↗Fan Zhang↗Veselin Stoyanov↗Preslav Nakov↗Zhuohan Xie↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly entering specialized, safety-critical engineering workflows governed by strict quantitative standards and immutable physical laws, making rigorous evaluation of their reasoning capabilities imperative. However, existing benchmarks such as MMLU, MATH, and HumanEval assess isolated cognitive skills, failing to capture the physically grounded reasoning central to engineering, where scientific principles, quantitative modeling, and practical constraints must converge. To enable verifiable process supervision in engineering, we introduce EngTrace, a symbolic benchmark built on 90 parameterized templates, each generating unique, contamination-resistant problem instances, spanning three major engineering branches, nine core domains, and 20 distinct areas, yielding 1,350 test cases that stress-test generalization across diverse physical scenarios. Moving beyond outcome matching, we introduce a verifiable two-stage evaluation framework that uses a tiered protocol to validate intermediate reasoning traces alongside final answers through automated procedural checks and a heterogeneous AI Tribunal. Our evaluation of 27 leading LLMs reveals a distinct trade-off between numeric precision and trace fidelity, identifying a complexity cliff where abstract mathematical pre-training fails to translate into the integrative reasoning required for advanced engineering tasks.

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25.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17825

Engineering entanglement and transport in interacting quantum walks with tailored potentials

Authors:

Gaia Forghieri↗Matteo G. A. Paris↗

arXiv:2606.17825v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Controlling the interplay between particle propagation and quantum correlation generation is a central challenge in quantum transport. Here, we investigate two distinguishable continuous-time quantum walkers evolving on parallel one-dimensional lattices, interacting via distance-dependent potentials. While on-site interactions reproduce the typical bosonic behaviour, extending the interaction to a linear potential over multiple neighbors introduces controlled Bloch-like oscillations and shifts the bound-pair regime to stronger couplings. More generally, we explore a Coulomb-like interaction parameterized by strength, spatial scaling, and decay rate. This reveals a rich phase diagram including four distinct dynamical regimes: (i) a high-entropy, oscillatory regime akin to a linear potential; (ii) a strongly localized, bound-pair regime; (iii) a novel intermediate regime combining near-ballistic spreading with strong correlations; and (iv) a weakly interacting, free-propagation regime. Notably, regime (iii) achieves concurrent optimization of transport efficiency and entanglement, offering a sweet spot for correlated quantum dynamics. Our results provide a tool for designing interaction-engineered quantum walks with potential applications in quantum information processing and simulations.

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