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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Progress on the Kretschmann-Schlingemann-Werner Conjecture

arXiv:2308.15389v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Given any pair of quantum channels $\Phi_1,\Phi_2$ such that at least one of them has Kraus rank one, as well as any respective Stinespring isometries $V_1,V_2$, we prove that there exists a unitary $U$ on the environment such that $\|V_1-({\bf1}\otimes U)V_2\|_\infty\leq\sqrt{2\|\Phi_1-\Phi_2\|_\diamond}$. Moreover, we provide a simple example which shows that the factor $\sqrt2$ on the right-hand side is optimal, and we conjecture that this inequality holds for every pair of channels.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

The Magic Barrier before Thermalization

arXiv:2510.11681v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the time dependence of anti-flatness in the entanglement spectrum, a measure for non-stabilizerness and lower bound for non-local quantum magic resource, on a subsystem of a linear SU(2) plaquette chain during thermalization. Tracing the time evolution of a large number of initial states, we find that the anti-flatness exhibits a barrier-like maximum during the time period when the entanglement entropy of the subsystem grows rapidly from the initial value to the microcanonical entropy. The location of the peak is strongly correlated with the time when the entanglement exhibits the strongest growth. This behavior is found for generic highly excited initial computational basis states and persists for coupling constants across the ergodic regime, revealing a universal structure of the entanglement spectrum during thermalization. We conclude that quantitative simulations of thermalization for nonabelian gauge theories require quantum computing. We speculate that this property generalizes to other quantum chaotic systems, a conjecture supported by analogous behavior observed in real-time simulations of the mixed-field Ising model.

03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Off-Policy Evaluation for Missingness-Aware Policies in MDPs with Rewards Missing Not at Random

arXiv:2606.20206v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In offline Reinforcement Learning, immediate rewards in logged batch data are often unobserved due to sparse or irregular record-keeping, or censored beyond certain reward values. This issue arises in practical settings, including health care and marketing. We investigate off-policy evaluation (OPE) in finite-horizon Markov decision processes when rewards are missing not at random (MNAR), which breaks ignorability and induces selection bias even after conditioning on states and actions. To address this, we formalize a reward-dependent propensity model and use future states as shadow variables to identify the full-data conditional mean reward. We further introduce a bridge function that recovers the conditional mean reward without explicitly modeling the MNAR mechanism, and estimate it via a min-max procedure to avoid double sampling. Building upon these identification results, we propose an Fitted-Q-Evaluation-style estimator that propagates the recovered rewards while allowing target policies to depend on past missingness indicators. Finally, we establish consistency and finite-sample error bounds for our OPE estimator, and show through experiments the strong performance of our method compared to existing methods on simulated and MIMIC-III Sepsis data.

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

Online Shift Detection and Conformal Adaptation for Deployed Safety Classifiers

arXiv:2606.11949v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present an online monitoring system for distributional shift in deployed safety classifiers, using calibrated sequential statistics to detect when a classifier has moved out of distribution. Upon detection, a conformal abstention layer adapts decision thresholds to recover a target error rate epsilon=0.1. In a pre-registered factorial evaluation (4 classifiers x 5 shift conditions x 20 seeds x 2 window sizes, 800 cells), the system achieves 86.6% valid detection (693/800, 95% CI [84.1%, 88.8%]) with mean latency of 39.5 steps. Detection holds across three ground-truth regimes: synthetic onset (86.6%), real temporal jailbreaks (85%, 17/20), and GCG adversarial attacks. Weighted conformal prediction recovers up to 39 pp of lost coverage for DeBERTa (ESS=46/300) but collapses for all other classifiers (ESS~300): logistic density ratio estimation achieves perfect source/target separability in high-dimensional embedding spaces, clipping all importance weights to the floor. DeBERTa shows a gradient from effective correction (paraphrase, ESS=46) to near-total collapse (adversarial suffix, ESS=206). PCA to 32 dimensions breaks the collapse, recovering 33 pp for Llama Guard and 21 pp for ShieldGemma. Variance decomposition reveals classifier (eta^2=0.243), shift type (eta^2=0.237), and their interaction (eta^2=0.185) all contribute substantially to detection latency variance (all p

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

Vulcan: Instance-specialized, Verifiable Systems Heuristics Through LLM-driven Search

arXiv:2512.25065v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Systems resource management tasks rely primarily on hand-designed heuristics. However, growing hardware heterogeneity and workload diversity require heuristics specialized to particular deployment instances, making manual design expensive and difficult to scale. In this paper, we explore how to synthesize systems heuristics using LLMs. The main challenge is ensuring that generated heuristics execute safely, integrate correctly with the surrounding system, and still achieve strong performance. We propose Vulcan, a framework that identifies LLM-friendly interfaces that isolate core decision logic from the rest of the implementation. With Vulcan, LLM-generated code is restricted to simple stateless decision functions, while trusted runtime abstractions provide rich derived statistics for meaningful policy exploration without system-integration bugs. To ensure execution safety, LLMs synthesize heuristics in a restricted language, Anvil, that guarantees important properties by construction. We evaluate Vulcan across three well-studied domains and demonstrate up to 4.9x higher savings for spot-VM scheduling, up to 2x lower miss ratios for cache eviction, and up to 10% higher application performance for tiered-memory systems, while ensuring execution safety throughout.

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

3D-DLP: Self-Supervised 3D Object-Centric Scene Representation Learning

arXiv:2606.19451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We introduce 3D-DLP, a self-supervised object-centric representation learning model that decomposes scene-level RGB-D or voxel observations into a set of 3D latent particles. Building on the Deep Latent Particles (DLP) framework, each particle encodes disentangled attributes, including 3D keypoint position, bounding box dimensions, and appearance features, and represents a distinct entity in the scene. The model learns interpretable per-particle segmentation maps through an end-to-end self-supervised reconstruction objective. We demonstrate on both simulated and real-world datasets that the learned latent space is interpretable and controllable: by manipulating particle positions and decoding, we can generate novel scene configurations. Furthermore, we show that leveraging these compact 3D latent particles for downstream robotic manipulation improves performance over baselines that either lack explicit 3D information or rely on memory-intensive dense 3D inputs without object-centric structure. Code and videos are available at https://eubooks3003.github.io/3d-dlp.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

TimeVista: Exploring and Exploiting Vision-Language Models as Judges for Time Series Forecasting

arXiv:2606.16173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-quality time series forecasting is pivotal for real-world decision-making. However, traditional point-wise metrics often fail to reveal complex temporal patterns and align poorly with human intuitive preferences. While the ''LLM-as-a-Judge'' paradigm has revolutionized text evaluation by providing flexible, human-aligned judgment, its application to time series remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as judges for time series forecasting, harnessing their ability to comprehend time series plots grounded in textual information. Specifically, we propose a novel framework integrating micro- and macro-level judgments informed by contextual information to evaluate time series forecasting. To this end, we introduce TimeVista, a comprehensive VLM-as-a-Judge benchmark comprising 5563 time series samples paired with detailed evaluation rubrics. Extensive meta-evaluations demonstrate that VLMs are highly reliable judges, achieving significantly higher consistency with human preferences than conventional metrics. Building upon our benchmark, we comprehensively assess recent Time Series Foundation Models (TSFMs) under the VLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. Our results demonstrate that VLMs serve as robust and interpretable judges, providing a comprehensive, human-aligned standard for evaluating time series models.

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

Engagement Intensity as a Learner-Modeling Signal for Adaptive AI Ethics Instruction

arXiv:2606.18548v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adaptive AI ethics instruction in graduate research training benefits from intake measures that reflect differences in prior LLM experience. Prior coursework or workshop attendance is an obvious candidate, but it is not clear whether it is associated with pre-instruction ratings on key AI perception items. We compare three candidate intake features, self-reported usage frequency, self-rated LLM familiarity, and prior AI education, across five baseline perception outcomes in 93 bioscience graduate and postdoctoral trainees enrolled in a required research ethics course. Usage frequency shows Holm-corrected associations with all five outcomes, self-rated familiarity with three, and prior AI education with none. A threshold-like pattern at the lower end of the scale is most visible for training interest and accuracy trust rather than appearing as a uniform gradient across all five outcomes. In a short intake survey, reported LLM use is more consistently associated with these perceptions than prior coursework or workshops, with self-rated familiarity serving as a secondary indicator. These results suggest that simple pre-instruction behavioral signals can inform lightweight intake profiling for adaptive AI ethics education.

10.
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.

11.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Mucosal and Systemic Antibodies Associated with Clinical Protection in a Pertussis Controlled Human Infection Model

Background The engagement of mucosal and systemic immunity in preventing Bordetella pertussis colonization and infection in humans, the impact of prior vaccination on host immunity and protective outcomes, and the dynamics of the host response following exposure remain poorly understood. Methods Healthy adults were challenged with increasing colony-forming units (CFUs) doses, 106-108, of B. pertussis D420 intranasally (NCT05136599). Shedding (PCR and culturing) and symptom development were monitored up to 21 days post-challenge. Serum and nasal wash IgA and IgG were measured before challenge (baseline) and up to 6 months post-challenge. Findings Antibodies increased post-challenge only in infected individuals, primarily nasal IgA. Participants who remained uninfected had higher baseline levels of filamentous hemagglutinin (FHA)- specific mucosal IgA and IgG, and higher serum IgA against fimbriae 2/3 (FIM). FHA was negatively associated with bacterial load and was a key discriminator between shedders and non-shedders, up to one week post-challenge. By day 14 post-challenge, pertussis toxin (PT) IgG and FIM IgA in both serum and mucosal samples were negatively associated with bacterial colonization. The majority (96.7%) of acellular pertussis (aP) vaccine recipients (n=23, median age 2.0 years) became infected, compared to 69.4% of those who received whole-cell pertussis vaccine (n=36; median age 32.0 years), and their antibody responses remained distinct following infection. Interpretation Nasal FHA antibodies emerged as early predictors of protection against pertussis infection, while PT IgG and FIM IgA antibodies may reflect clearance after infection. aP-primed individuals were more susceptible to infection, despite their younger age and more recent vaccination. Funding CDC Contract #75D30122C15467 and CDC IPA Agreement #24IPA2417512 Disclaimer: The findings and conclusions in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, US Department of Health and Human Services.

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

MIRAGE: Auditing Anti-Muslim Bias in Frontier LLMs Across Reasoning, Agentic, and Time-Coupled Conditions

arXiv:2606.16562v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Five years after the discovery of persistent anti-Muslim bias in large language models, most evaluations remain confined to single-turn prompt completion, a setting that no longer reflects how frontier LLMs are deployed. We introduce MIRAGE (Muslim-Identity Reasoning and Agentic Generation Evaluation), a benchmark of 1{,}200 prompts spanning three deployment-realistic conditions: direct completion, chain-of-thought reasoning, and simulated agentic decision-making across content moderation, lending triage, refugee claim summarization, and hiring screens. Across six frontier models, we find that (i) chain-of-thought reasoning amplifies rather than suppresses Muslim-violence associations by 12–34\% relative to direct completion, (ii) agentic decisions exhibit a 9–22 percentage-point asymmetry between Muslim and matched non-Muslim cases on identical evidence, and (iii) bias is sharply time-coupled to retrieved news context, increasing 18–27\% under recent-conflict retrieval. Existing prompt-based mitigations transfer poorly across our three conditions, suppressing direct-completion bias while leaving agentic asymmetry largely intact. We release MIRAGE and an open evaluation harness to support targeted mitigation research.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

ASTER: Latent Pseudo-Anomaly Generation for Unsupervised Time-Series Anomaly Detection

Time-series anomaly detection (TSAD) is critical in domains such as industrial monitoring, healthcare, and cybersecurity, but it remains challenging due to rare and heterogeneous anomalies and the scarcity of labelled data. This scarcity makes unsupervised approaches predominant, yet existing methods often rely on reconstruction or forecasting, which struggle with complex data, or on embedding-based approaches that require domain-specific anomaly synthesis and fixed distance metrics. We propose ASTER, a framework that generates pseudo-anomalies directly in the latent space, avoiding handcrafted anomaly injections and the need for domain expertise. A latent-space decoder produces tailored pseudo-anomalies to train a Transformer-based anomaly classifier, while a pre-trained LLM enriches the temporal and contextual representations of this space. Experiments on three benchmark datasets show that ASTER achieves state-of-the-art performance and sets a new standard for LLM-based TSAD.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

SkillMoV: Mixture-of-View Routing with Prototype-Conditioned Gating for Unified Multi-View Proficiency Estimation

Estimating human proficiency from video is a key challenge for automated skill assessment, with applications in sports coaching, music pedagogy, surgical training, and workplace learning. Existing approaches often focus on individual scenarios or rely on shared multi-view aggregation, limiting their ability to adapt to heterogeneous camera viewpoints and activity domains. We introduce SkillMoV, a unified, parameter-efficient framework for multi-scenario proficiency estimation from synchronized multi-view video. At its core, SkillMoV introduces a Mixture-of-View Projector (MoVP), which adapts the mixture-of-experts paradigm to camera-specific view features. MoVP is composed of four stages: (i) a Mixture-of-View soft router with twelve expert MLPs that learns view-dependent expert preferences without camera-identity supervision; (ii) cross-view attention to align synchronized cameras; (iii) learnable prototype anchoring to condition the representation on class-level reference vectors; and (iv) a prototype-conditioned gated projection that produces the final skill embedding. We evaluate SkillMoV on EgoExo4D across six skill domains and three separately trained view configurations: Ego, Exos, and Ego+Exos. SkillMoV reaches 50.17% overall accuracy in the Exos setting with a single model trained jointly across all scenarios, surpassing the strongest reported Exos result among the compared methods by 3.57 percentage points. In Ego+Exos, SkillMoV remains close to the best reported result in that setting (47.63% versus 48.20%). Ablations on the selected Exos configuration validate each component: MoV routing contributes +6.61 pp over attentive aggregation, cross-view attention +4.92 pp, prototype anchoring +4.07 pp, and stochastic view dropout +3.90 pp. Through LoRA adaptation, SkillMoV trains only 23.32% of its parameters and adds limited measured overhead relative to a LoRA-only baseline.

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

AI Engram: In Search of Memory Traces in Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.14997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Memory formation is fundamental to intelligence, yet whether deep neural networks preserve identifiable memory traces analogous to biological memory units remains an open question. This work introduces a geometric framework to identify such "AI engrams" by formalizing the neuroscientific criteria of specificity, reactivation, sufficiency, and necessity into a constrained inverse problem. We derive a closed-form estimator that isolates individual memory traces from globally entangled parameters, and show that this biologically-derived solution corresponds to a natural gradient update on the parameter manifold. AI engrams enable surgical manipulation of learned knowledge: any subset of memories can be composed or erased through linear arithmetic, without iterative optimization. Experiments ranging from simple MLPs to LLMs demonstrate the causal validity and substantial scalability of AI engrams. Together, these results bridge theories of biological memory and artificial representation learning and offer geometric insight into how deep networks simultaneously support functional specificity within distributed storage.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Spectral analysis of equilibration: information leakage in isolated quantum systems

arXiv:2606.12545v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We develop a unified dynamical-spectral framework for equilibration in isolated quantum systems based on a subspace coarse-graining approach. Central to our formulation is the Leakage Fidelity Function (LFF), defined as the probability that a unitarily evolving state escapes the support of its initial subspace. This quantity provides a direct, operational measure of information flow and memory loss without invoking ensemble assumptions or perturbative arguments. We derive universal bounds on temporal fluctuations of the LFF, in terms of the spectral gap structure and the square of the effective dimension, evincing that large spectral delocalization suppresses fluctuations and guarantees equilibration on average. By introducing spectral power distributions and associated entropic measures, we establish a quantitative link between phase mixing, gap participation, and dynamical stability. We further investigate the equilibration timescale by connecting the LFF to quantum speed limits, thereby revealing the average time required for equilibration. Our results provide a state-dependent, geometrically transparent perspective on how spectral complexity and subspace information leakage jointly govern irreversibility in closed quantum many-body systems.

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

Toward Training-Free Zero-Shot Anomaly Detection in 3D Medical Images: A Batch-Based Approach Using 2D Foundation Models

作者:

Zero-shot anomaly detection (ZSAD) is attractive for medical imaging because clinical systems must handle heterogeneous acquisition protocols, changing patient populations, and pathologies for which annotated training data may be unavailable. Most existing zero-shot anomaly detection methods are designed for 2D images, and their direct extension to 3D medical volumes is limited by the scarcity of large-scale volumetric foundation models or by the difficulty of utilizing volumetric context. We propose CS3F, a training-free batch-based framework for ZSAD in 3D medical images using 2D foundation models. Each volume is decomposed along multiple anatomical axes and encoded slice-wise by a 2D vision transformer. These are then converted into localized volumetric tokens by pooling neighboring slice features. Anomaly scores are obtained from cross-subject mutual similarity: tokens that lack close analogues in other subjects are assigned higher anomaly scores. To reduce the attenuation of focal lesion signals caused by depth pooling, we introduce a coarse-to-fine tokenization strategy that enables fine-resolution volumetric scoring without exhaustive matching. CS3F is evaluated on brain MRI across metastases, glioma, and stroke, as well as validated on lung CT to test generalizability beyond atlas-aligned brain MRI. The results show that frozen 2D foundation models can support anomaly localization in 3D medical images, and that the benefit of fine tokenization depends strongly on lesion contrast and imaging modality.

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

MAWARITH: A Dataset and Benchmark for Legal Inheritance Reasoning with LLMs

Islamic inheritance law is challenging for large language models because solving inheritance cases requires complex, structured, multi-step reasoning and the correct application of juristic rules to compute heirs' shares. We introduce MAWARITH, a large-scale annotated dataset of 12,500 Arabic inheritance cases for training and evaluating models on the full reasoning chain: (i) identifying eligible heirs, (ii) applying blocking (\d{hajb}) and allocation rules, and (iii) computing exact inheritance shares. To the best of our knowledge, MAWARITH is the first Arabic corpus and benchmark designed for end-to-end Islamic inheritance reasoning. Unlike prior datasets that restrict inheritance case solving to multiple-choice questions, MAWARITH supports the full reasoning chain and provides step-by-step solutions with justifications grounded in classical juristic sources and established inheritance rules, as well as exact share calculations. This enables models to learn how to generate detailed, step-by-step responses to user queries that reflect real-world Islamic inheritance cases. To evaluate models beyond final-answer accuracy, we propose MIR-E (Mawarith Inheritance Reasoning Evaluation), a weighted multi-stage metric that scores key reasoning stages and captures error propagation across the pipeline. We evaluate six large language models in a zero-shot setting. A commercial model achieves about 90\%, whereas all evaluated open-source models remain below 50\%. Our error analysis identifies recurring failure patterns, including scenario misinterpretation, errors in heir identification, errors in share allocation, and missing or incorrect application of key inheritance rules such as \textquotesingle awl and radd. The MAWARITH dataset is publicly available at https://gitlab.com/nlpresearcher/mawarith.

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

Deep Temporal Modeling and Ensemble Fusion for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Physiological Signals

Physiological stress and emotion recognition are important for health monitoring and affective computing. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of deep learning models such as Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Temporal Convolutional Networks (TCN), and Transformer on the WESAD dataset for multimodal affect recognition using wrist and chest sensor signals. We perform ablation studies to assess the individual contributions of each modality by training models on wrist-only and chest-only inputs. In addition, we implement a late-fusion ensemble strategy that combines predictions from all three architectures trained on multimodal input. We also employ early fusion at the sensor level by concatenating wrist and chest signals before feeding them into each model. Our results show that Transformer models consistently achieve the highest accuracy in multimodal settings, while TCN models perform best in the wrist-only configuration. The ensemble method yields the highest overall accuracy (98.91 +/- 0.13%) and macro-F1 score (98.56 +/- 0.17%). These findings demonstrate the effectiveness of sensor fusion and ensemble-based fusion in developing robust systems for physiological emotion recognition.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Interpreting Neural Combinatorial Optimization via Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.19741v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural Combinatorial Optimization (NCO) achieves strong performance, yet its black-box nature remains a key roadblock to deployment and scientific diagnosis. Standard interpretability tools, such as Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs), are ill-equipped for NCO, whose decisions are dynamic, state-dependent, and lack proper concept vocabulary definition. To close this gap, we introduce Evolving Programmatic Bottlenecks (EPB), to our knowledge, the first framework for interpreting NCO policies by distilling black-box NCO models into human-readable program portfolios. EPB employs an LLM to autonomously evolve a bank of programs, where each program's per-step action distribution serves as the bottleneck. EPB works through an iterative framework: Block I fixes program bank capacity and introduces a hybrid textual-numerical gradient descent scheme that couples numerical gradients for student router updates and textual gradients for LLM-based program revision; Block II dynamically adapts bank capacity via fault-targeted expansion and redundancy pruning. Extensive experiments demonstrate EPB's effectiveness and broad applicability, where the distilled program portfolios largely match original performance. EPB also reveals that NCO behavior shifts across optimization stages and can be approximated as a composition of classic heuristic variants. Our work advances interpretable NCO and establishes EPB as a promising tool for interpreting sequential decision-making models.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Sex-Specific TMPRSS2 Response and Reduced Peripheral RNA Concentration Following AstraZeneca COVID-19 Vaccination in Nigeria.

Background: ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 remains a cornerstone COVID-19 vaccine in sub-Saharan Africa, yet population-specific molecular responses are understudied. We examined peripheral blood ACE2 and TMPRSS2 expression, total RNA concentration, and coagulation indices in Nigerians >=6 months post-vaccination. Methods: In a case-control study in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 51 ChAdOx1-vaccinated adults and 51 age/sex-matched unvaccinated controls provided venous blood for RNA extraction, qRT-PCR, and coagulation assays. Multivariable linear models assessed effects of vaccination, sex, and age on molecular parameters. Results: Vaccinated participants had 37% lower total RNA concentration than controls (4.02 +/- 0.09 vs 6.38 +/- 0.14 ng/uL, p=6 months post-ChAdOx1, Nigerians show reduced peripheral blood RNA without sustained ACE2/TMPRSS2 upregulation. The sex-specific TMPRSS2 pattern suggests hormone and vaccine interactions previously unreported in African cohorts and highlights the need for sex-disaggregated molecular surveillance. Region-specific reference gene validation is recommended for Nigerian transcriptomic studies.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Deep learning for interactive and automated inner retinal layer segmentation in OCT images of patients with retinitis pigmentosa using limited training data

Purpose: New therapeutic strategies such as optogenetics have created a need for accurate tracking of inner retina degeneration in Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) patients. We introduce two tailored deep learning models to segment the RNFL (retinal nerve fibre layer), GCIPL (ganglion cell inner plexiform layer), INL (inner nuclear layer), CFT (central foveal thickness) and RPE (retinal pigment epithelium) in RP: The first is based on a Segment Anything Model (SAM), the second on nnU-Net. To our knowledge, SAM has not yet been applied to retinal layers in OCT data. Methods: SD-OCT images of a retrospective cohort of 37 RP patients were included. Data for four training cycles were prepared semi-automatically in MATLAB, then assessed and corrected by three expert graders. 1,700 segmented B-Scans from two open datasets were used for pretraining. For post-processing, semantic retinal boundary detection was developed. The final models, OCT-SAM and nnU-Net, were trained on 228 annotated RP scans. Detected layer thicknesses were validated against manual segmentation at 90 random points in 30 OCT B-Scans. Finally, OCT-SAM was tested on three RP cases with retrospective, longitudinal OCT data. Results: nnU-Net achieved a precision, recall and F-1 score of 0.96 while OCT-SAM performance resulted in slightly lower values of 0.93, 0.8 and 0.85, respectively. OCT-SAM measurements had low bias and good agreement with manual annotations, confirming reliability. Conclusions: OCT-SAM enabled fast data annotation and tool integration, whereas nnU-Net provided the best segmentation performance. OCT-SAM demonstrated longitudinal reproducibility and detected RP-characteristic pathologies and degenerative changes. Future work will extend OCT-SAM to 3D OCT segmentation.

24.
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.

25.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-08

Fifty years since a simple equation described the chaos of biology

An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics. An exploration of chaos theory in population dynamics showed that unpredictable systems can often be modelled using surprisingly simple mathematics.