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

No classical particle limit for massless quanta

arXiv:2606.14632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate whether relativistic massless classical particles may emerge as the classical limit of massless quanta. To address this question independently of any specific dynamics, environment, or pointer basis, we develop an axiomatic and purely kinematical framework for the coarse-graining approach. In this formulation, a candidate classical phase space is taken as the outcome space of a POVM subject only to minimal classicality and covariance under the relevant spacetime symmetry group. Applying this framework to the Poincaré group, we prove a no-go theorem for massless particles: the covariance requirement is incompatible with the operational conditions for classicality. The theorem leaves open field-like limits of massless quanta, for example the emergence of electromagnetic or gravitational fields, while ruling out classical massless particles, such as classical photons or gravitons.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MLT-Dedup: Efficient Large-Scale Online Video Deduplication via Multi-Level Representations and Spatial-Temporal Matching

The explosive growth of user-generated video content on online platforms is accompanied by the emergence of numerous near-duplicate videos–videos that are identical or highly similar but differ by partial edits. These duplicates degrade user experience and increase storage and bandwidth costs, making large-scale video deduplication a critical task. Existing video deduplication frameworks face a fundamental challenge in retrieving sufficient high-quality candidates under a limited index budget, as well as trade-offs between efficiency and precision. To address these issues, we propose MLT-Dedup, an efficient large-scale online video deduplication framework with Multi-Level representations and spatial-Temporal matching. Our approach employs a Multi-Level Video Encoder (ML-VE) to extract both fine-grained frame-level and sparse clip-level embeddings: sparse embeddings support efficient candidate retrieval, while fine-grained embeddings are loaded for precise pairwise matching. During matching, we introduce DiF-SiM, a Differential Feature-enhanced Similarity Module capable of locating duplicated temporal segments and providing reliable similarity evidence to support policy-driven deduplication decisions. Extensive experiments on a real-world large-scale platform demonstrate that MLT-Dedup reduces online repetition rates by 91% at 90% precision. Furthermore, our sparse retrieval design achieves a 5x increase in indexing capacity, enabling broader candidate coverage in real-world deployment.

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

A General Framework for Decision Trees via Bregman Divergences

arXiv:2606.13984v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Decision trees are one of the fundamental tools in statistical learning due to their interpretability, flexibility, and their ability to adapt to nonlinear structures. Among them, the Classification and Regression Trees, introduced by Breiman, Friedman, Olshen, and Stone in 1984, became one of the most influential algorithms and remains one of the most widely used methods for classification and regression problems. On the other hand, Bregman divergences, introduced by Lev Bregman in 1967 in the context of convex optimization, provide a broad family of loss functions that naturally generalize the squared Euclidean distance. This family includes, among others, the Kullback-Leibler divergence, the Poisson divergence, and the Itakura-Saito divergence, as well as several losses associated with distributions belonging to the exponential family. Moreover, Bregman divergences possess a rich geometric structure and deep connections with convex analysis and information geometry. In this work, we propose a generalization of the CART paradigm based on Bregman divergences, thereby obtaining a broader family of decision trees adapted to different statistical models and underlying geometries. Although algorithms such as CART or classical implementations such as rpart incorporate different impurity criteria, these are usually introduced in an ad hoc manner for each specific model. In contrast, the Bregman divergence approach provides a unified framework that allows these criteria to be derived and interpreted from common convex and geometric principles. Beyond the algorithmic construction, we also investigate theoretical properties of these trees. In particular, we study how properties of the generating convex function – such as strong convexity or smoothness – influence impurity gains between parent and child nodes, as well as stability and consistency properties of the estimator.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Fabless Quantum Chip Design and Commercial Production

arXiv:2606.17956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This paper proposes a fabless quantum-chip design and production architecture for superconducting quantum computing, centered on the SPICE-Q multiphysics simulation framework. The proposed ecosystem connects process-certified quantum PDKs, parameterized device cells, traceable model cards, SPICE-Q physical modeling languages, unified Q-EDA flows, foundry sign-off rules, cryogenic test feedback, and reusable quantum IP. In this model, design firms do not merely outsource fabrication; they prepare verified tape-outs under standardized process constraints and calibrated physical models. Its economic value lies in reducing repetitive device debugging, process exploration, and low-level layout effort, while its feasibility depends on PDK maturity, foundry yield, cryogenic test throughput, model-prediction accuracy, data-feedback mechanisms, and IP licensing boundaries. We argue that superconducting quantum chips can move from the current largely vertically integrated development model toward a fabless-foundry ecosystem only when hardware design is supported by standardized, verifiable, and reusable software and process interfaces. The required pillars are certified PDKs, PCell-based parameterized design, SPICE-Q cross-physics simulation, end-to-end Q-EDA automation, and a tradable quantum-IP market. By adapting lessons from the classical semiconductor industry to quantum hardware, this framework defines a path toward scalable, manufacturable, and commercially reusable superconducting quantum-chip design.

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

Circuit Tracing in Autoregressive Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.16044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (pLMs) can generate novel protein sequences with properties beyond those observed in nature, yet the mechanisms underlying protein generation remain poorly understood. Existing mechanistic interpretability methods based on sparse autoencoders and transcoders primarily focus on protein representation learning models and do not capture the computation required for autoregressive generation. Here, we introduce ProGenMech, a mechanistic interpretability framework for generative protein language models that extends cross-layer transcoders (CLTs) to ProGen3, a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model trained for both causal generation and span infilling. Unlike per-layer approaches, CLTs reconstruct each layer using sparse latent variables from all preceding layers, enabling faithful recovery of inter-layer generative computation. We further develop a zero-shot circuit discovery framework to identify sparse latent circuits responsible for protein generation and fitness prediction. In causal generation and zero-shot fitness estimation tasks, ProGenMech outperforms local transcoder baselines in recovering ProGen3's probability distribution and functional scoring behavior, while matching the original model's generative distribution in span infilling tasks. Moreover, the recovered circuits reveal biologically meaningful motifs and functional regions associated with conserved sequence patterns and protein fitness landscapes, establishing a foundation for interpretable and steerable protein generation.

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

From ASR to ASP: Evaluating Prompt Attack Vulnerabilities Against Open-Source LLMs

Recent studies demonstrate that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to attacks that generate harmful or sensitive outputs. As open-source LLMs are increasingly adopted in high-impact applications such as finance, law, and healthcare, systematically investigating their security risks is becoming increasingly important towards trustworthy LLM era. This paper comprehensively studies effective prompt injection attacks against 14 widely used open-source and three closed-source LLMs on five attack benchmarks. Moreover, existing evaluation metrics mostly only consider the attack success rate, overlooking uncertainty in model responses. Our proposed Attack Success Probability (ASP) additionally captures uncertain behaviors for evaluation, where the model may initially refuse a harmful request but subsequently provide harmful guidance or vice versa, reflecting inconsistency and ambiguity in attack feasibility. By systematically analyzing the effectiveness of prompt injection attacks, we propose a straightforward and effective hypnotism attack; results show that this attack causes aligned language models, including Stablelm2, Mistral, Openchat, and Vicuna, to generate objectionable behaviors, achieving around 90% ASP. They also indicate that ignore prefix attacks can break all 14 open-source LLMs, achieving over 60% ASP on a multi-categorical dataset. We find that moderately well-known LLMs exhibit higher vulnerability to prompt injection attacks, highlighting the need to raise public awareness and prioritize efficient mitigation strategies.

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

Creativity Reconsidered: Generative AI and the Problem of Intentional Agency

arXiv:2601.15797v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many theorists maintain that conscious intentional agency is a necessary condition of creativity. We argue that this requirement, which we call the Intentional Agency Condition (IAC), should be abandoned. We motivate this by highlighting the problems this criterion encounters in the face of recent advances in generative AI, which is ostensibly creative despite being incapable of intentional agency. We present two corpus analyses to illustrate the rapidly increasing tendency of people to predicate creativity to generative AI. In response to this predicament, theorists of creativity have proposed a range of conflicting solutions, which we critically evaluate. We find that none of these satisfyingly resolves the initial predicament, and we therefore propose a novel approach. Our claim is that ascriptions of creativity are dependent on what we call creative ability. This solution explains why intentional agency is important for judgements of creativity, without being a necessary condition. Our approach thereby accommodates AI creativity without dismissing the intuition that perceived intentions are of key importance for ascriptions of creativity.

08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Symmetry-Accelerated Classical Simulation of Clifford-Dominated Circuits

arXiv:2510.18977v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Classical simulation of quantum circuits plays a crucial role in validating quantum hardware and delineating the boundaries of quantum advantage. Among the most effective simulation techniques are those based on the stabilizer extent, which quantifies the overhead of representing non-Clifford operations as linear combinations of Clifford unitaries. However, finding optimal decompositions rapidly becomes intractable as it constitutes a superexponentially large optimization problem. In this work, we exploit symmetries in the computation of the stabilizer extent, proving that for real, diagonal, and real-diagonal unitaries, the optimization can be restricted to the corresponding subgroups of the Clifford group without loss of optimality. This ``strong symmetry reduction'' drastically reduces computational cost, enabling optimal decompositions of unitaries on up to seven qubits using a standard laptop – far beyond previous two-qubit limits. Additionally, we employ a ``weak symmetry reduction'' method that leverages additional invariances to shrink the search space further. Applying these results, we demonstrate exponential runtime improvements in classical simulations of quantum Fourier transform circuits and measurement-based quantum computations on the Union Jack lattice, as well as new insights into the nonstabilizer properties of multicontrolled phase gates and unitaries generating hypergraph states. Our findings establish symmetry exploitation as a powerful route to scale classical simulation techniques and deepen the resource-theoretic understanding of quantum advantage.

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

E-VAds: An E-commerce Short Videos Understanding Benchmark for MLLMs

E-commerce short videos represent a high-revenue segment of the online video industry characterized by a goal-driven format and dense multi-modal signals. Current models often struggle with these videos because existing benchmarks focus primarily on general-purpose tasks and neglect the reasoning of commercial intent. In this work, we first propose a multi-modal information density assessment framework to quantify the complexity of this domain. Our evaluation reveals that e-commerce content exhibits substantially higher density across visual, audio, and textual modalities compared to mainstream datasets, establishing a more challenging frontier for video understanding. To address this gap, we introduce E-commerce Video Ads Benchmark, which is the first benchmark specifically designed for e-commerce short video understanding. We curated 3,961 high-quality videos from Taobao covering a wide range of product categories and used a multi-agent system to generate 19,785 open-ended Q&A pairs, which consist of five distinct tasks. Finally, we develop E-VAds-R1, an RL-based reasoning model featuring a multi-grained reward design called MG-GRPO. This strategy provides smooth guidance for early exploration while creating a non-linear incentive for expert-level precision. Experimental results demonstrate that E-VAds-R1 achieves a 109.2% performance gain in commercial intent reasoning with only a few hundred training samples. Data is available at https://github.com/TaobaoTmall-AlgorithmProducts/E-VAds_Benchmark.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Multi-Agent Reasoning with Adaptive Worker Allocation for Stance Detection

Stance detection requires identifying an author's position toward a target, often from short-form texts where stance is implicit, indirect, or rhetorically framed. Although large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on this task, single-pass prompting can be brittle when multiple interpretations are plausible. Existing aggregation strategies, such as majority voting or self-consistency, improve robustness by combining labels, but they discard the intermediate reasoning needed to resolve conflicting interpretations. We introduce a multi-agent reasoning framework with adaptive worker allocation for stance detection that shifts aggregation from label-level voting to reasoning-level synthesis. The framework employs a Manager-Worker architecture in which a Manager adaptively allocates a variable number of Worker agents based on input complexity. Each Worker analyzes the input from a distinct perspective and produces a reasoning-only explanation without emitting a stance label; the Manager then synthesizes these explanations to produce the final prediction. We evaluate the proposed framework on SemEval-2016, P-Stance, and COVID-19 Stance using Llama, Mistral, and Gemini. Results show that the framework yields the largest gains on implicit and context-dependent stance cases, achieving 86.07 Macro-F1 on COVID-19 and 82.90 on SemEval-2016, while remaining competitive on more explicit stance datasets such as P-Stance. These findings suggest that adaptive reasoning-level aggregation is most beneficial when stance cannot be reliably inferred from surface cues alone.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Looked but didn't see: inattentional blindness and yes-bias confabulation in vision-language models

Previous work showed that many participants fail to notice a gorilla in a video of people playing basketball. Another study found that 83% of trained radiologists failed to report a gorilla figure inserted into a chest CT nodule-search task, even though eye-tracking revealed that most observers had foveated the figure. We ask whether a similar phenomenon exists in contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). We find that (i) VLMs are capable of spotting the gorilla in both still-frame images and videos of lung CT scans; (ii) models display inattentional blindness, which varies according to model generation and type of stimulus presented; (iii) Gemini-3.1-Pro outperforms most other flagship and open-weight VLMs at identifying the presence or absence of the gorilla. We additionally ran a segmentation experiment utilizing two different model classes: a generalist (SAM 3), which found the gorilla but produced little to no results for anatomy-based prompts; a medical specialist (BiomedParse), which produced more promising anatomy-based results but flagged "gorilla" on gorilla-free control videos on 82% of frames. The behavioral signature of inattentional blindness reproduces in VLMs, but a unique confabulation failure mode means that any "did the model see X" claim requires signal-detection analysis with a matched-control false-alarm baseline.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Quantum sensing through bosonic-fermionic Bell-state transitions in two-photon interference

arXiv:2606.14408v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hong-Ou-Mandel (HOM) interference has become a central resource for quantum sensing and metrology owing to its sensitivity to temporal delay and photon indistinguishability. However, existing HOM-based sensing schemes generally rely on inserting a sample into one arm of the interferometer, making the measurement vulnerable to optical loss, alignment instability, and bandwidth-dependent distortion of the interference profile. Here, we demonstrate a symmetry-controlled quantum sensing scheme based on continuous transitions between symmetric (bosonic-like) and antisymmetric (fermionic-like) Bell states in two-photon interference. By imprinting a geometric phase onto the classical pump beam and transferring it to polarization-entangled photons generated via spontaneous parametric down-conversion, we coherently tune the exchange symmetry of the entangled state without altering the temporal or spectral indistinguishability of the photons. The HOM response evolves continuously from bunching to antibunching with a sine square phase dependence, producing a coincidence modulation of approximately 10 * 10^4 counts s^-1 counts/s. In contrast to conventional HOM sensing, the phase-modulation linewidth remains fixed at pi/2, independent of photon bandwidth. Using a birefringent crystal placed directly in the pump beam, we measure thermo-dispersive birefringence with a resolution of the order of 10^{-6} over a broad temperature range. Our results establish exchange symmetry as a controllable resource for robust quantum sensing and symmetry-engineered photonic quantum information processing.

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

Semantic Grading of Written Answers in Low-Resource Language Bangla Using a Fine-Tuned Lightweight Language Model

Bangla is among the world's most widely spoken languages, yet it remains underserved in educational NLP research. In many remote and rural regions, access to qualified subject teachers is limited, and written answers are consequently graded largely by hand, restricting timely and consistent feedback. Automatic assessment is challenging because semantically correct responses can vary substantially in surface form. We present a bilingual (Bangla-English) evaluation system designed for low-resource educational settings that prioritizes semantic correctness over lexical overlap. Our approach fine-tunes a lightweight language model to grade each response using the question, reference answer, and student answer, producing a numeric score and concise, context-grounded feedback suitable for classroom deployment. We also construct a synthetic bilingual dataset to enable controlled training and evaluation. Across proprietary and open-source LLMs evaluated under a unified protocol, our QLoRA-tuned Qwen3-8B confirms consistent improvement by producing the most leakage-resistant feedback (RoRa = 0.819) in synthetic evaluation and the strongest agreement with human scores (rho = 0.936, MAE = 0.725) in a dedicated human study.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantifying Coherence-to-Entanglement Conversion Efficiency under Noisy Operations

arXiv:2606.16916v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the noise-limited conversion of local quantum coherence into bipartite entanglement in a minimal two-qubit protocol comprising a coherent single-qubit input, an incoherent ancilla, an ideal CNOT operation, and subsequent environmental noise. Employing the $l_1$-norm of coherence and the entanglement negativity as resource quantifiers, we establish an exact closed-form correspondence between local single-qubit input coherence and the two-qubit entanglement generated in the noiseless limit, showing that the output negativity is precisely one half of the initial $l_1$-coherence. We then derive analytic expressions for the surviving entanglement and the associated coherence-to-entanglement conversion efficiency under two representative noise mechanisms: independent phase damping and global two-qubit depolarizing noise. The two channels exhibit qualitatively distinct degradation behavior. Phase damping induces a universal multiplicative suppression of the generated entanglement, yielding a coherence-independent conversion efficiency and no finite-noise entanglement sudden death. In contrast, global depolarization introduces an isotropic mixing contribution that shifts the partial-transpose spectrum, producing coherence-dependent degradation and a finite sudden-death threshold. We show that maximally coherent inputs not only maximize the entanglement generated by the CNOT protocol but also optimize its robustness against depolarizing noise. Direct density-matrix simulations validate the analytic results to numerical precision. These findings provide a compact analytic benchmark for assessing how different noise mechanisms constrain coherence-to-entanglement conversion in elementary quantum-information protocols and near-term quantum devices.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Clin-JEPA: A Multi-Phase Co-Training Framework for Joint-Embedding Predictive Pretraining on EHR Patient Trajectories

arXiv:2605.10840v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Clin-JEPA, a multi-phase co-training framework for joint-embedding predictive (JEPA) pretraining on EHR patient trajectories. JEPA architectures have enabled latent-space planning in robotics and high-quality representation learning in vision, but extending the paradigm to EHR data – to obtain a single backbone that simultaneously forecasts patient trajectories and serves diverse downstream risk-prediction tasks without per-task fine-tuning – remains an open challenge. Existing JEPA frameworks either discard the predictor after pretraining (I-JEPA, V-JEPA) or train it on a frozen pretrained encoder (V-JEPA 2-AC), leaving the encoder unaware of the rollout signal that the retained predictor must use at inference; co-training the encoder and predictor under a shared JEPA prediction objective would supply this grounding, but naïve co-training is unstable, with representation collapse and online/target drift causing autoregressive rollout to diverge. Clin-JEPA's five-phase pretraining curriculum – predictor warmup, joint refinement, EMA target alignment, hard sync, and predictor finalization – addresses each failure mode by phase, stably co-training a Qwen3-8B-based encoder and a 92M-parameter latent trajectory predictor. On MIMIC-IV ICU data, three independent evaluations support the framework: (1) latent $\ell_1$ rollout drift uniquely converges ($-$15.7%) over 48-hour horizons while baselines and ablations diverge (+3% to +4951%); (2) the encoder learns a clinically discriminative latent geometry (deteriorating-patient cohorts displace 4.83$\times$ further than stable patients in latent space, vs $\leq$2.62$\times$ for baseline encoders); (3) a single backbone outperforms strong tabular and sequence baselines on multi-task downstream evaluation. Clin-JEPA achieves mean AUROC 0.851 on ICareFM EEP and 0.883 on 8 binary risk tasks (+0.038 and +0.041 vs baseline average).

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

Zero-Shot Captioning for Cultural Heritage: Automated Image Analysis of Traditional Indonesian Clothing

This paper presents Custom ZeroCLIP, a retrieval-augmented vision-language framework for zero-shot captioning of Indonesian traditional garments. The dataset contains 3,800 expert-annotated images from all 38 Indonesian provinces. Using a province-level inductive zero-shot protocol, the model is trained on 24 seen provinces, validated on 6 seen provinces, and evaluated on 8 unseen provinces. The framework combines a frozen CLIP ViT-B/32 image encoder, a CLIP text encoder, a BERT text encoder, and an LSTM caption decoder. During inference, unseen-province labels and captions are unavailable, and retrieval uses only captions from training provinces. No unseen-province image, label, or caption is used during training, validation, or retrieval-bank construction. Custom ZeroCLIP achieves a CLIPScore of 0.8536, BLEU-4 of 0.3342, and METEOR of 0.4859, outperforming existing baselines. Ablation results show that retrieval improves cultural vocabulary recovery with a 19.3\% METEOR gain, while human evaluation confirms stronger cultural accuracy and fluency. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of retrieval-augmented domain adaptation for culturally grounded caption generation in low-resource heritage settings. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/AnugrahAidinYotolembah/Traditional-Indonesian-Clothing-Captioning-Dataset.

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

When Agent Automation Becomes Profitable: Quantifying and Insuring Autonomous AI Risk through Trace-Economic Underwriting

arXiv:2606.16465v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI agents can now take irreversible actions in operational systems, but agent-caused losses are still not clearly assigned, priced, or transferred. Providers often disclaim consequential damages, users are left with uncompensated losses, and default human review limits the efficiency gains of automation. We ask when autonomous AI deployment can become economically acceptable despite failure risk. Our answer is to quantify risk at the customer-task-trace episode level and transfer it through insurance. Automation is acceptable when its expected benefit exceeds the premium, control cost, and remaining risk. This requires a defined role with bounded permissions and comparable traces. We introduce trace-economic underwriting, which maps tool-use traces to customer exposure and claimable loss, then uses this representation for pricing, control, and risk transfer. It uses deterministic economic labels rather than an LLM judge. In our trace-to-loss testbed, trace-economic pricing reduces pricing MAE from $17.7K to $569 and removes regressive cross-subsidy. A 300-trace expert audit accepts 295 labels unchanged. On 1,000 real SWE-smith traces, trace-conditioned controls reduce CVaR95 by 72%. Theorem~1 gives a finite-sample scope condition. We release code, labels, and audit sheets.

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

From Values to Tokens: An LLM-Driven Framework for Context-aware Time Series Forecasting via Symbolic Discretization

arXiv:2508.09191v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Time series forecasting plays a vital role in supporting decision-making across a wide range of critical applications, including energy, healthcare, and finance. Despite recent advances, forecasting accuracy remains limited due to the challenge of integrating historical numerical sequences with contextual features, which often comprise unstructured textual data. To address this challenge, we propose TokenCast, a large language model (LLM) driven framework that leverages language-based symbolic representations as a unified intermediary for context-aware time series forecasting. Specifically, TokenCast employs a discrete tokenizer to transform continuous numerical sequences into temporal tokens, enabling structural alignment with language-based inputs. To effectively bridge the semantic gap between modalities, both temporal and contextual tokens are embedded into a shared representation space via a pre-trained LLM, further optimized with generative objectives. Building upon this unified semantic space, the aligned LLM is subsequently fine-tuned in a supervised manner to predict future temporal tokens, which are then decoded back into the original numerical space. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework and highlight its potential as a generative framework for context-aware time series forecasting. The code is available at https://github.com/Xiaoyu-Tao/TokenCast.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Space-time duality approach to (inhomogeneous) integrable quenches

arXiv:2606.20445v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Characterising the universal aspects of non-equilibrium quantum many-body dynamics is one of the key goals of this century's physics research. Progress, however, is hindered by the lack of general theoretical frameworks for studying interacting quantum matter far from equilibrium. A recent breakthrough has been the realization that several key non-equilibrium quantities, such as the rate of growth of entanglement or the fluctuations of conserved charges within finite subsystems, can be related to equilibrium properties through a space-time duality that effectively exchanges the roles of space and time. This observation effectively enables the study of non-equilibrium phenomena using tools and concepts borrowed from equilibrium statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. A first proof of principle of this framework, dubbed space-time duality approach (SDA), was provided by interacting integrable systems, where thermodynamic properties can often be characterized exactly, while dynamical quantities typically remain beyond analytical reach. Subsequent developments, however, revealed that the SDA suffered from an intrinsic ambiguity, restricting its applicability to homogeneous quenches and to charge fluctuations arising from symmetric initial states. Here we resolve this ambiguity from first principles and derive closed-form predictions for entanglement growth and charge fluctuations after general quantum quenches. We benchmark our results against the exact analytical solution of the Rule 54 quantum cellular automaton and extensive TEBD simulations of the XXZ chain. Moreover we show that, when specialised to the entanglement entropy, our framework naturally reproduces the predictions of the quasiparticle picture.

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

The Third Challenge on Image Denoising at NTIRE 2026: Methods and Results

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Image Denoising, specifically focusing on the high-noise regime ($\sigma = 50$). The competition investigates advanced neural architectures designed to restore high-fidelity details from images corrupted by additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). Unlike constrained benchmarks, this track emphasizes peak quantitative performance, measured by Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), without limitations on parameter count or computational overhead. By synthesizing contributions from 20 finalist teams out of 116 registrants, this report benchmarks the latest technical innovations and provides a comprehensive snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in unconstrained image restoration.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Non-invasive Detection of Fasciculation Using Surface EMG with a Wavelet-Based Analytical Method (DEWCS)

Objective: Needle electromyography (nEMG) is essential for diagnosing neuromuscular disorders but is invasive and often painful. We employed single-channel bipolar surface EMG (sEMG) analyzed with a novel wavelet-based analytical approach, Detecting and Extracting Elemental Wave Components based on a Wavelet Coefficient Set (DEWCS) and investigated whether fasciculation-related activity could be identified. Methods: In this prospective study, 28 patients undergoing nEMG for suspected neuromuscular disorders and 13 healthy controls were included. Resting-state sEMG was recorded from selected muscles using single-channel bipolar active electrodes at a high sampling rate. DEWCS was used to extract indices reflecting fast- and slow-type motor unit (MU)-related activity. These standardized indices were evaluated against nEMG-detected fasciculation potentials using generalized estimating equation logistic regression to account for within-subject clustering. Diagnostic performance was assessed by receiver operating characteristic analysis. Results: A total of 67 muscles from 38 participants were analyzed. Indices of fast- and slow-type MU-related activity were significantly associated with fasciculation potentials (slow: OR 5.10, p = 0.0041; fast: OR 2.38, p = 0.0162). The combined model showed excellent discrimination (area under the curve = 0.97), outperforming either index alone. Muscle region had no significant effect. Conclusions: A single-channel bipolar sEMG setup combined with DEWCS detected fasciculation-related activity with promising accuracy. This method may serve as a non-invasive surrogate marker of lower motor neuron involvement. Further validation in larger cohorts is warranted. Significance: This non-invasive sEMG approach may help detect fasciculation-related activity and complement nEMG in neuromuscular diagnostics.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Looking beyond stereotyped neuron structures reveals links between beading and morphological rearrangements in aging phenotypes.

Understanding how neuronal morphology changes during aging and acute stress is essential for elucidating mechanisms of neurodegeneration. The highly branched PVD neuron of Caenorhabditis elegans provides a powerful model for studying dendritic remodeling and degeneration-associated phenotypes such as dendritic beading. However, the complexity of this arbor presents substantial challenges for automated segmentation and quantitative analysis. In this study, we adapted a convolutional neural network (CNN)-guided region growing framework for automated dendrite tracing, coupled with two topology-based algorithms for categorizing dendritic segments by branching degree. The segmentation algorithm achieved high accuracy relative to manual tracing, with a median Dice coefficient of 0.82, while reducing analysis time by approximately tenfold. Automated dendrite categorization demonstrated strong agreement with manual annotations across branching orders, though position-based mapping performance declined with age due to progressive morphological distortion. Leveraging this platform, we investigated mechanistic differences in dendritic beading patterns observed during aging and cold shock. Consistent with prior work, aging was associated with decreased inter-bead spacing, whereas cold shock produced increased bead dispersion with stress severity. Structural analysis revealed that these trends were not driven by dendritic pruning or reduced arbor complexity. Instead, while a traditional anatomically unflexible paradigm falsely implicated lower-degree dendrites as highly vulnerable, our branching-informed framework revealed that age-dependent beading is fundamentally dictated by a segments history of successive branching events. Conversely, acute cold shock triggered systemic beading that expanded across all dendritic orders in a severity-dependent manner. Together, these findings demonstrate that chronic aging and acute stress engage distinct degenerative pathways (compartment-specific lineage vulnerability versus global architectural collapse) rather than gross morphological loss, as well as highlighting the need for paradigms that enable reliable analysis of changing morphologies.

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

Using Cognitive Models to Improve Language Model Simulation of Human Persuasion Games

arXiv:2606.17657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: People make decisions differently in strategic interactions. Some update beliefs like a Bayesian; others exhibit biases like motivated reasoning. Although creators of large language models use simulated humans for safety evaluations and training, they often fail to cover this breadth of human behavior. We argue that cognitive science and economics provide a convenient tool for doing so, making use of mathematical models of human decision-making. We propose an approach that we call Equation-to-Behavior Prompting for guiding large language models to match cognitive models, and evaluate this approach on persuasion games based on legal decision-making. We find that large models can approximate equation-based specifications – Bayesian updating, affine distortion, motivated updating, and Grether's $\alpha$-$\beta$ model – using prompting, but small models fail to do so. However, training small models with reinforcement learning to adhere to mathematical rules, Equation-to-Behavior RL, reduces belief error by 26.5% in out-of-distribution parameterizations. We show that these simulations can help create diverse training environments; training small models to consider different kinds of decision-makers improves average belief change by 2.5%–12% over Bayesian-only training, even when persuading GPT-5-mini. Our work could improve human simulations for training and evaluation in increasingly realistic settings, and could also enable novel research into more complicated mathematical models of human decision-making.

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

First, do NOHARM: towards clinically safe large language models

arXiv:2512.01241v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are routinely used by physicians and patients for medical advice, yet their clinical safety profiles remain poorly characterized. We present NOHARM (Numerous Options Harm Assessment for Risk in Medicine), a 1,100-task benchmark of primary care-to-specialist consultation cases to measure the frequency and severity of harm from LLM-generated medical recommendations. NOHARM covers 10 specialties, with 12,747 expert annotations for 4,249 clinical management options. Across 28 LLMs, recommendations carried the potential for severe harm in up to 22.6% of cases, with errors of omission accounting for more than 80% of severe errors. In a randomized trial of 101 generalist physicians, human benchmark performance significantly improved with AI assistance, yet physicians remained far from realizing the potential of AI tools, frequently ignoring essential advice surfaced by AI. Safety performance tracked general-intelligence and medical-knowledge benchmarks across the full range of models but decoupled at the frontier. Despite strong performance on existing evaluations, widely used AI models can produce medical advice with the potential for severe harm at non-trivial rates, highlighting the importance of explicit measurement of clinical safety.

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

BrainDINO: A Brain MRI Foundation Model for Generalizable Clinical Representation Learning

Brain MRI underpins a wide range of neuroscientific and clinical applications, yet most learning-based methods remain task-specific and require substantial labeled data. Here we show that a single self-supervised representation can generalize across heterogeneous brain MRI endpoints. We trained BrainDINO, a self-distilled foundation model, on approximately 6.6 million unlabeled axial slices from 20 datasets encompassing broad variation in population, disease, and acquisition setting. Using a frozen encoder with lightweight task heads, BrainDINO supported transfer across tumor segmentation, neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental conditions classification, brain age estimation, post-stroke temporal prediction, molecular status prediction, MRI sequence classification, and survival modeling. Across tasks and supervision regimes, BrainDINO consistently equaled or exceeded natural-image and MRI-specific self-supervised baselines, with particularly strong advantages under label scarcity. Representation analyses further showed anatomically organized and pathology-sensitive feature structure in the absence of task-specific supervision. Our findings indicate that large-scale slice-wise self-supervised learning can yield a unified brain MRI representation that supports diverse neuroimaging tasks without volumetric pretraining or full-network fine-tuning, establishing a scalable foundation for robust and data-efficient brain imaging analysis. Code is available at https://github.com/mclwu22/BrainDINO