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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Demonstration of Exponential Quantum Speedup with Constant-Depth Compiled Circuits for Simon's Problem

arXiv:2604.27457v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate exponential algorithmic quantum speedup for a restricted-Hamming-weight version of Simon's problem, in which the hidden string $b$ is promised to satisfy $HW(b)\le w$ for a Hamming-weight cutoff $w$, on present-day superconducting quantum processors. We introduce a hardware-aware compilation strategy that reduces the quantum part of each Simon query circuit to constant depth. The resulting compiled circuits have $O(1)$ depth, require only linear nearest-neighbor connectivity, map directly onto common device layouts, and avoid additional routing and SWAP overhead. Implemented on IBM's $156$-qubit Boston and $120$-qubit Miami processors, these circuits achieve sufficient fidelity to exhibit algorithmic quantum speedup without error suppression. Using the number-of-queries-to-solution (NTS) metric, we observe exponential speedup over the classical lower-bound benchmark for all restricted-Hamming-weight cutoffs $w\ge 4$ on Boston and across low-to-intermediate Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami; at higher Hamming-weight cutoffs on Miami, we still observe polynomial speedup. The same construction also enables unrestricted instances of Simon's problem, corresponding to $w=n$ for problem size $n$, over the finite problem-size ranges for which our NTS computation is feasible; in this regime, the observed scaling advantage is not limited to the restricted-Hamming-weight setting. These results show that careful hardware-aware compilation can make quantum speedup experimentally accessible for a canonical hidden-subgroup problem in the NISQ regime.

02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum correlations in QBism's reconstruction program

arXiv:2606.07485v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: QBism recasts quantum theory as a normative framework for an agent's probability assignments, with the Born rule taking the form of a consistency condition known as the Urgleichung. Motivated by this perspective, qplex theories provide a broader class of probabilistic models in which the sets of valid states and measurements are constrained by QBist-inspired geometric conditions. While qplexes have been extensively studied for single systems, their implications for bipartite correlations remain largely unexplored. In this work, we investigate bipartite correlations in qplex theories by expressing joint expectation values as inner products between suitably defined $C$-vectors. This geometric formulation allows Bell-type inequalities to be studied as optimization problems over qplex-compatible probability assignments. We first analyze the CHSH scenario and show that the shared inner-product structure of the $C$-vectors restricts the maximal value to the Tsirelson bound $2\sqrt{2}$. We then turn to the three-outcome CGLMP inequality $I_{2233}$ and find that the same qplex-derived norm and inner-product constraints allow a violation of up to $\leq 2+2\sqrt(3)/3 \approx 3.1547$ versus the quantum maximum of $\approx 2.8729$, thereby exhibiting super-quantum correlations. These results show that qplex geometry captures enough structure to reproduce an important quantum bound in the two-outcome case, but not enough to recover the full set of quantum correlation constraints. The analysis therefore suggests that additional principles are needed to complete the QBist reconstruction of quantum theory.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

High-efficiency telecom conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets

arXiv:2603.09824v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We demonstrate high-efficiency telecom frequency conversion of heralded atomic biphoton wavepackets using a diamond-type atomic ensemble. By placing a 2.5 MHz heralded-photon spectrum within the high-efficiency region of the converter response, we achieve a conversion efficiency of 79.4(2.6)% while maintaining strong time-resolved correlations and well-defined temporal wavepackets. For a broader 17.4 MHz input bandwidth, the conversion efficiency is reduced to about 55%, whereas the temporal waveform remains largely preserved. This behavior reflects the nearly flat central response of the converter, which mainly causes spectral-edge loss rather than temporal-mode distortion. These results identify spectral matching as an effective route to efficient and low-distortion telecom conversion of narrowband quantum light from atomic systems.

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

Occ-VLM: Occupancy Grounded Vision Language Model for Indoor Scene Understanding

Recently, vision-language models (VLMs) have made significant progress in 3D scene understanding, driving advances in applications such as embodied intelligence and robotic vision. However, existing approaches typically either rely directly on explicit 3D inputs (e.g., point clouds or RGB-D sequences), or introduce an additional 3D geometry encoder to derive 3D-aware visual tokens from 2D images. Such designs structurally decouple 3D geometric perception from the rich 2D semantics learned via vision-language pre-training, hindering the development of a unified 3D vision-language representation. In this work, we propose Occ-VLM, a novel framework for 3D scene understanding that operates purely on posed RGB images and employs a single 2D vision encoder. Specifically, Occ-VLM reconstructs 3D scene occupancy as an auxiliary geometric prior, which is utilized to spatially associate foreground 2D tokens with 3D space. These tokens are then decoded by a Large Language Model (LLM) for unified scene understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Occ-VLM achieves both accurate geometric perception and robust vision-language reasoning: it attains state-of-the-art performance on multi-view occupancy prediction, while performing on par with 3D-input VLMs on 3D Visual Question Answering (VQA) and 3D dense captioning benchmarks.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Entanglement transition in unitary system-bath dynamics

arXiv:2512.06081v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The evolution of a system coupled to baths is commonly described by a master equation that, in the long-time limit, yields a steady-state density matrix. However, when the same evolution is unraveled into quantum trajectories, it is possible to observe a transition in the scaling of entanglement within the system as the system-bath coupling increases - a phenomenon that is invisible in the trajectory-averaged reduced density matrix of the system. Here, we go beyond the paradigm of trajectories from master equations and explore whether a qualitatively analogous entanglement-scaling transition emerges in a single unitary evolution of the combined system-bath setup, without monitoring the dynamics of the system. We investigate the scaling of entanglement in a unitary quantum setup composed of a two-dimensional lattice of free fermions, where each site is coupled to a fermionic bath. As the system-bath coupling increases, the logarithmic fermionic negativity reveals an entanglement transition from logarithmic-law to area-law scaling. This occurs while the system's steady-state properties are trivial, highlighting that the signatures of these different scalings are within the bath-bath correlations. Evidence of the transition is also found in the mutual information and the correlations of the full system-bath setup, suggesting that the entanglement transition is underpinned by a change in the spatial structure of quantum information.

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

Adaptable Method for Crystal Design across Diverse Constraints and Objectives with Pretrained Property Predictors

arXiv:2410.08562v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Advanced crystal design can accelerate materials discovery across applications from photovoltaics to spintronics. Practical design must satisfy multiple properties and physical constraints, yet existing machine-learning-based approaches to such design often depend on large datasets, retraining, or task-specific generators. Here, we show that direct predictor-guided gradient optimization enables data-efficient, constraint-rich crystal design by combining off-the-shelf predictors with site-wise element masks, template initialization, and task-specific losses. In perovskites, it outperformed generative and Bayesian baselines under three targets – band gap, formation energy, and tolerance factor – and two hard constraints. DFT assessment further showed band-gap targeting competitive with a leading generative model despite using predictors trained on roughly one-tenth of the data. By flexibly combining pretrained predictors with application-oriented masks and custom losses, the same framework supported half-metal design. Such modularity could help researchers and engineers translate diverse application requirements directly into optimized candidate crystals with minimal computational cost.

07.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Model Validation of Agentic AI Systems: A POMDP-Based Framework for Belief-State, Forecast, and Policy Validation

arXiv:2606.17383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic artificial intelligence systems introduce a new class of model risk. Unlike traditional predictive models, autonomous agents continuously acquire information, form beliefs regarding latent states of the environment, generate forecasts, select actions, and adapt their behavior over time. Existing validation methodologies focus primarily on predictive accuracy and therefore provide limited insight into the quality of the underlying decision process. This paper proposes a model validation framework for agentic AI based on Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs). The framework decomposes autonomous decision making into information, beliefs, forecasts, actions, and utility, allowing each component to be validated independently. Large language models (LLMs) are formalized as approximate Bayesian filtering operators, and a model-risk taxonomy is developed encompassing state-space, filtering, forecast, policy, utility-specification, and parameter risks. The model risk validation methodology is demonstrated through a portfolio-management case study in which an agent infers latent market regimes from market and macroeconomic information, generates belief-conditioned forecasts, and constructs portfolios using a Black–Litterman framework. Empirical validation combines performance analysis, belief calibration diagnostics, coverage tests, ablation studies, and parameter-sensitivity analysis. The results indicate that latent-state inference contributes independently to decision quality and that the principal conclusions remain robust across a broad range of parameter values. The principal contribution of the paper is a practical framework for extending established model risk management concepts to autonomous AI systems and providing a rigorous foundation for their validation, governance, and monitoring.

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

Physics-IQ Verified

Video generative models ( VGMs) have become a new frontier that can be used not just for video generation but for a multitude of downstream tasks, including world modeling. To advance these tasks, a good video model must understand the physical reality of the world. Evaluating this understanding is an emerging field and has led to the Physics-IQ benchmark, which quantifies this explicitly by comparing model-generated videos to real-world videos of physical experiments. In this work, we present a systematic audit of the Physics-IQ benchmark, expose shortcomings and propose three solutions that sharpen how we can measure physical understanding of VGMs. Specifically, we improve prompt and ground-truth quality to reduce the influence of confounding factors and further introduce a sample-level scoring system that weights each sample and metric equally. Our resulting benchmark, Physics-IQ Verified, refines 57.6\% of all samples and improves over 34.8\% of prompts. In a comparison study using six image-to-video generative models, we observe moderate but meaningful ranking changes (Kendall's $\tau = 0.46$). We hope Physics-IQ Verified advances the community by providing a more reliable signal toward physically accurate VGMs. The code for the benchmark can be accessed at https://github.com/google-deepmind/physics-iq-benchmark

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Learning a Sampling-Free Variational DNN Plugin from Tiny Training Sets to Refine OOD Segmentation With Uncertainty Estimation

Deep neural networks (DNNs) frequently fail to generalize to out-of-distribution (OOD) medical images because of variations in scanners and acquisition protocols. Retraining DNN models to address these distribution shifts is often impractical due to the high cost of acquiring and annotating new medical datasets. To address this, we introduce VarDeepPCA, a novel lightweight variational DNN framework designed to restore/refine degraded segmentation maps by leveraging intrinsic geometric priors. Unlike existing approaches that require target-domain data or extensive pre-training, our VarDeepPCA explicitly learns a distribution of valid anatomical geometries using only small in-distribution (ID) datasets. Theoretically, our novel variational learning framework leverages a reinterpretation of the softmax mapping to implicitly perform exact distribution modeling, thereby enabling computationally efficient, sampling-free learning and inference. This also enables VarDeepPCA to provide uncertainty estimates associated with its restored segmentation maps. We empirically validate our framework across 4 distinct clinical applications, using 14 publicly available datasets, involving segmentation of the myocardium, neuroretinal rim, prostate, and fetal head. Comparisons against 15 existing methods demonstrate that VarDeepPCA consistently restores segmentation maps produced by the existing methods on OOD data to (i) significantly improve anatomical plausibility of geometries and clinical utility of the segmentations, and (ii) significantly reduce errors, without needing any more training data than that used by existing methods.

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

{\alpha}-Fair Insurance Pricing: A Fairness Continuum

arXiv:2606.14898v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Fairness in insurance pricing remains a long-standing and deeply debated puzzle. On one hand, insurers, driven by profitability considerations, set premiums that differentiate across individual risks to achieve actuarial fairness. On the other hand, insurance serves a critical societal function by pooling risks across a population, motivating cross-subsidization among groups to promote solidarity fairness. The tension between these two competing notions of fairness makes insurance pricing inherently complex, particularly in modern settings where granular data allow for increasingly fine risk differentiation and regulators face growing pressure to protect vulnerable groups. To address this challenge, we propose an $\alpha$-Fair Individual Solvent Premium ($\alpha$-FISP) framework for insurance pricing that explicitly captures the trade-off between actuarial and solidarity fairness while guaranteeing solvency, a fundamental requirement in insurance operations. We formulate the pricing problem as a constrained optimization task, where actuarially fair premiums are adjusted subject to budget constraints on cross-subsidization within each risk class. This formulation naturally yields a family of solutions parameterized by $\alpha$, tracing a continuum between purely actuarial and purely solidarity-based pricing and enabling decision-makers to select an operating point along this fairness spectrum. We derive theoretical guarantees for the proposed framework. Numerical experiments show that $\alpha$-FISP is computationally tractable and aligns well with the U.S. regulatory regimes featuring heterogeneous state-level fairness requirements.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Personal Care Utility: Health as Everyday Infrastructure

Healthcare is essential, expert, and episodic by design - built around the roughly one hour per year a person spends with a clinician. The 8,759 hours outside clinical settings, where eating, sleeping, movement, medication, and stress actually shape long-term health, have no comparable infrastructure. The bottleneck for personalized health is not raw data or reasoning capability; it is the absence of that infrastructure layer. This paper introduces the Personal Care Utility (PCU): a layered, event-driven architecture proposed as the missing utility for everyday health, in the way that payments, networks, and power are utilities for their domains. PCU organizes continuous personal signals into semantically meaningful life events through a Personicle, estimates dynamic health state against personal baselines, reasons about cause and context, and routes guidance through an orchestrator that separates clinical decision logic, behavioral strategy selection, and natural-language expression. This separation lets large language models support reasoning and communication while keeping safety-critical clinical decisions grounded in validated evidence. We instantiate PCU for Type 2 Diabetes - turning CGM, meal, activity, medication, sleep, stress, and clinical data into glycemic events, individualized state estimates, causal explanations, and knowledge-grounded interventions. A day-in-the-life scenario shows the same infrastructure producing real-time nudges, weekly summaries, medication check-ins, silence, or deterministic safety alerts depending on context and risk. We close with how PCU generalizes to other chronic conditions and the governance questions any always-on personal health utility must address. The result is a blueprint that treats personalization not as a final messaging layer, but as an architectural property of everyday health guidance.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Broadband High-Level Squeezed Light using Waveguide Optical Parametric Amplifiers with External Dispersion Compensation

arXiv:2606.17422v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We demonstrate broadband phase-sensitive amplification (PSA) measurement of squeezed light generated by a waveguide optical parametric amplifier (OPA) with external dispersion compensation. In broadband systems, group velocity dispersion (GVD) induces a frequency-dependent rotation of the squeezing axis, which limits the observable bandwidth in PSA measurements. To overcome this limitation, we introduce external dispersion compensation between two OPAs and suppress the quadrature rotation over a wide frequency range. As a result, we observe a maximum squeezing of 5.9 dB near the carrier frequency and more than 5 dB of squeezing up to a frequency offset of 4.5 THz from the carrier. Furthermore, squeezing below the shot-noise level is confirmed up to a frequency offset of 6 THz from the carrier, corresponding to the accessible phase-matching bandwidth of the waveguide OPA. Our results establish a practical method for broadband characterization of squeezed light and provide a key step toward ultrafast continuous-variable quantum information processing.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A Cryogenic Uniaxial Strain Cell for Quantum Devices

arXiv:2606.11485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mechanical strain is a powerful resource for tuning quantum systems, but existing piezoelectric strain cells are generally optimized for fragile, high-aspect-ratio single crystals rather than the thick, square-profile chips typical of semiconductor quantum devices. Furthermore, adapting these cells for qubits requires accommodating dense RF and DC wiring while maintaining strict electrical isolation from high-voltage piezo actuators. Here, we present a piezoelectric uniaxial strain cell designed to homogeneously strain thick, square-profile substrates. We introduce a highly symmetric dual-chip loading configuration that effectively suppresses flexural deformation and shear stress. The cell integrates a high-density RF/DC interposer to support standard wire bonding and encloses the actuators in a grounded Faraday cage to prevent unwanted Stark shifts in the device layer. Finite element simulations confirm that combining stiff actuators with this symmetric mounting drastically improves strain homogeneity. Finally, we validate the apparatus experimentally by applying uniaxial strain to a 200 $\mu$m thick silicon die. Surface strain measurements demonstrate an applied strain of 215 $\mu\epsilon$ for 200 V applied piezo bias.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Mach's principle in atomic transitions

arXiv:2606.11608v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate the atomic transition probabilities in atom-mirror set-ups that are in circular motion. In one scenario, the atom is in circular motion inside a static cylindrical mirror. In the other scenario, the cylindrical mirror rotates around its central axis while the atom remains static. We report structural similarity in the atomic transition probabilities between these two cases – these probabilities are equivalent upon interchanging the field frequencies between the two scenarios. We interpret such an observation as a semi-classical phenomenon analogous to the classical Mach's principle.

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

Where a Quantum Reservoir Works: A Transferable Operating Band

arXiv:2606.13284v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In quantum reservoir computing, a fixed quantum system transforms an input signal, while learning reduces to training a simple linear readout on its measured outputs. Since the quantum dynamics themselves are never optimized, the method is well suited to today's hardware. Yet these dynamics must still be chosen carefully, because their settings remain fixed throughout training and inference. It therefore remains an open question where, in its control space, a fixed quantum system learns well. We address this question for a dissipative reservoir by mapping performance over three central physical controls: the strength of the input drive, the coupling between neighboring qubits, and the rate of dissipation. Good performance concentrates in a single, well-defined operating region of this control space. This region transfers across tasks and reservoir initializations, and the same memory-defined regime persists under architectural changes. It is also mechanistically grounded, since it disappears whenever any of the mechanisms that create it is removed. Finally, the region can be located cheaply before any task is run, using a simple memory diagnostic.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Sovereign Assurance Boundary: Certificate-Bound Admission for Agentic Infrastructure

arXiv:2606.11632v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic infrastructure introduces a critical control-plane authorization problem: non-deterministic reasoning systems can propose high-stakes mutations to production resources, yet existing security mechanisms – such as identity and access management (IAM), policy engines, consensus protocols, and audit logs – either enforce static, context-unaware permissions or merely record actions post-execution. This paper introduces the Sovereign Assurance Boundary (SAB), a certificate-bound runtime admission layer for autonomous execution authority. SAB intercepts agent proposals at an assurance airlock, compiles them into typed execution contracts $C$, and binds these contracts to cryptographic evidence digests $H(E)$ and policy versions. The contracts are then routed through consequence-aware certification paths. Upon successful admission, the system emits a signed Sovereign Assurance Certificate ($\Omega$) that is strictly scoped to a specific execution identity, revocation epoch, and validity window. Finally, a sovereign execution broker verifies $\Omega$ and performs fresh pre-execution revocation and drift checks before invoking infrastructure APIs. We detail the airlock-broker architecture, formalize its admission and revocation invariants, and report preliminary feasibility measurements from a Go prototype evaluated over 2,500 admission attempts. Ultimately, this broker-enforced model prevents autonomous reasoning from directly mutating state, transforming delegated execution authority into a cryptographically verifiable, evidence-bound, revocable, and replayable runtime artifact.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-12

An innovative technology boosts image quality for protein structures

After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins. After years of effort, two research teams have developed ‘laser phase plate’ systems that could help cryo-electron-microscopy users to generate high-quality structures for a broad range of proteins.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Bridging Data Gaps in Structural Fragility Modeling through Transfer Learning: Methodology and Case Studies

arXiv:2606.18567v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper presents a methodology-centered transfer learning framework for fragility adaptation under domain shift, class imbalance, and scarce target labels while preserving engineering interpretability and supporting decision-making under uncertainty. Four transfer learning strategies (instance-based, parameter-based, hierarchical Bayesian, and multi-source) are demonstrated through three complementary case studies: (i) instance-based transfer learning via importance weighting, demonstrated on coastal bridge fragility using Hurricane Katrina observations; (ii) parameter-based transfer learning together with hierarchical Bayesian transfer learning, enabling partial pooling across strata and posterior uncertainty quantification, demonstrated on residential building fragility using Hurricane Ian observations; and (iii) multi-source transfer learning that fuses multiple analytical fragility models with learned source weights and regularized target-domain adaptation, demonstrated on seismic bridge fragility using observations from the 2001 Nisqually earthquake. Across these case studies, direct transfer of source models (i.e. using existing state-of-the-art models) fails under domain shift and severe class imbalance, while targeted adaptation substantially improves failure detection and predictive stability in low-data regimes. These findings highlight the need for systematic guidance on diagnostics, strategy selection, and uncertainty reporting when developing and adapting fragility models.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Menopausal symptoms in peri- and postmenopausal women: systematic review and meta-analysis of prevalence, incidence, comorbidities, and clinical outcomes

Introduction: The global epidemiology of menopausal symptoms among middle-aged and elderly women remains unclear. Methods: Data on prevalence, comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms published up until March 1st 2019 were searched in PubMed, Embase and Cochrane databases. We used a random-effects model to compute point estimates of prevalence for 24 types of menopausal symptoms. We narratively summarized the patterns of the comorbidities, incidence and outcomes of menopausal symptoms due to limited data. Results: A total of 239 studies (n{approx}2.5 million middle-aged and elderly women) from 56 countries and regions were included in the analysis. The global pooled prevalence analysis revealed that hot flashes (48%) and night sweats (30%) were highly prevalent, alongside psychological symptoms like insomnia (47%), irritability (46%), anxiety (39%), and depression (30%). Physical symptoms including joint aches/pain (50%), backache (47%), and tiredness (61%) were also commonly reported. Heat intolerance showed the highest prevalence (76%), while symptoms like urinary incontinence (24%) and poor appetite (8%) were less frequent. These findings highlight the diverse and widespread impact of menopause on women globally, with significant variations across symptom types. Africa showed the highest pooled prevalence across a series of symptoms, compared with other continents. We observed high prevalence in developing countries, especially for psychological and physical symptoms; significant intra-Asian variation in vasomotor symptoms; hypertension and obesity as the most common comorbidities; joint pain, urinary incontinence, and vasomotor symptoms as the most incident complaints; and positive associations with cardiovascular disease in the psychological (depression and insomnia) and physical (joint pain) domains. Conclusion: This study highlights the global burden of menopausal symptoms, with significant differences across continents. The findings call for more inclusive research on underrepresented groups (particularly in Africa) and further investigation into drivers of this marked global heterogeneity in prevalence of menopausal symptoms and their comorbidities, incidence and outcomes.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Reliable Neural-Codec Text-to-Speech by ASR Self-Verification and Distillation: Near-Zero Catastrophic Failures Across Models and Codecs

arXiv:2606.18323v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Open autoregressive neural-codec text-to-speech (TTS) models sound excellent on typical inputs yet suffer stochastic catastrophic failures: on a meaningful fraction of utterances they emit silence, terminate early, or collapse into repetitive or hallucinated content. We show this failure mode is cheap to remove. Under a single format-robust metric (a catastrophic-failure rate via an ASR round-trip), best-of-N ASR self-verification drives failures to near-zero: no observed failures remain by N=2 on a standard corpus (LibriSpeech) and by N=4 on a hard prompt set. This is not an artifact of one model: the reduction replicates across four open codec-TTS systems and three neural codecs (XCodec2, SNAC, Mimi), reaching the near-zero floor by N=2 on three of the four. We then make the fix free at inference time by distilling the self-verified behaviour into the model, which recovers much of the robustness in single-shot decoding, closing ~52-58% of the failure mass on hard inputs at no test-time cost. The distillation gain concentrates where it is needed (hard inputs); on already-reliable prose there is no headroom and no detectable change. A controlled comparison adds a clean negative: offline direct preference optimization (DPO/IPO) does not beat plain supervised distillation, and an online iterative variant is promising but not statistically separable at our evaluation size. We report honestly the one model that resists (a larger Llasa where scale did not obviously help) and a rare-word capability ceiling that no self-distillation method overcomes

23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

MCR-VQGAN: A Scalable and Cost-Effective Tau PET Synthesis Approach for Alzheimer's Disease Imaging

Tau positron emission tomography (PET) is a critical diagnostic modality for Alzheimer's disease (AD), but its widespread clinical adoption is hindered by radiation exposure, limited availability, high clinical workload, and substantial financial costs. To address these limitations, we propose the Multi-scale CBAM Residual Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network (MCR-VQGAN) to synthesize high-fidelity tau PET images from structural T1-weighted MRI. MCR-VQGAN advances the standard VQGAN architecture through three enhancements: multi-scale convolutions, ResNet blocks, and Convolutional Block Attention Modules (CBAM), which collectively improve the capture of local and global features. Using 222 paired T1-weighted MRI and tau PET scans from the ADNI database, we trained and compared MCR-VQGAN against cGAN, WGAN-GP, CycleGAN, and baseline VQGAN. MCR-VQGAN achieved superior image synthesis performance across all metrics (MSE = 0.0056 +/- 0.0061, PSNR = 30.65 +/- 4.47 dB, SSIM = 0.9263 +/- 0.0469). A CNN-based AD classifier trained on real tau PET achieved comparable accuracy on real (63.64%) and synthetic (65.91%) images, indicating that diagnostically relevant features are preserved. Regional SUVR-equivalent analysis across Braak-defined ROIs further indicated strong agreement between real and synthetic tau PET (Pearson r = 0.78-0.88; ICC = 0.71-0.84), with the strongest agreement in Braak V/VI (ICC = 0.838). Together, these results suggest that MCR-VQGAN offers a promising and scalable surrogate for conventional tau PET imaging, potentially improving the accessibility of tau biomarkers for AD research and clinical workflows.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [≥]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

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

Hierarchical Successor Representation for Robust Transfer

arXiv:2602.12753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The successor representation (SR) provides a powerful framework for decoupling predictive dynamics from rewards, enabling rapid generalisation across reward configurations. However, the classical SR is limited by its inherent policy dependence: policies change due to ongoing learning, environmental non-stationarities, and changes in task demands, making established predictive representations obsolete. Furthermore, in topologically complex environments, SRs suffer from spectral diffusion, leading to dense and overlapping features that scale poorly. Here we propose the Hierarchical Successor Representation (HSR) for overcoming these limitations. By incorporating temporal abstractions into the construction of predictive representations, HSR learns stable state features which are robust to task-induced policy changes. Applying non-negative matrix factorisation (NMF) to the HSR yields a sparse, low-rank state representation that facilitates highly sample-efficient transfer to novel tasks in multi-compartmental environments. Further analysis reveals that HSR-NMF discovers interpretable topological structures, providing a policy-agnostic hierarchical map that effectively bridges model-free optimality and model-based flexibility. Beyond providing a useful basis for task-transfer, we show that HSR's temporally extended predictive structure can also be leveraged to drive efficient exploration, effectively scaling to large, procedurally generated environments.