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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Developing and Evaluating an Online Educational Program for Falls Prevention Care in Community Optometric Primary Care Settings: A Pilot Study

Introduction Globally, falls are the leading cause of injury hospitalisation, with vision being a significant falls risk factor. Community optometrists, as primary eye care professionals, are well positioned to contribute to falls prevention care. However, scant studies have evaluated if education could enable optometrists to incorporate falls prevention care into practice. This two-phase pilot study aimed to design and develop an online education program for community optometrists to deliver primary falls prevention care and to evaluate optometrists reaction to, and learning from, the education. Methods In phase one, an education program was designed by optometrists and falls experts and published online. In phase two, community optometrists were recruited through convenience sampling to undertake the education. Guided by the New World Kirkpatrick model(R) of training evaluation, reaction and learning were evaluated using pre/post surveys. Quantitative data were analysed using Wilcoxon sign-rank tests and McNemar Exact Tests and qualitative responses using inductive content analysis. Results Participants (n=13) reported high levels of satisfaction and engagement with the online education and unanimously endorsed its relevance to clinical practice. Participants demonstrated significantly improved knowledge and awareness of falls prevention post-education, compared to pre-education and were significantly more confident to enact falls prevention care. Perceived enablers to providing falls prevention care included having access to practical resources and ongoing education. Time constraints during consultation and cost to patients for further care if subsequent referrals were made were identified as possible barriers to providing falls prevention care. Conclusion Online education improved community optometrists knowledge and confidence to provide falls prevention care. Further research that evaluates the effectiveness of continuing education for optometrists to enact falls prevention care into practice is required.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

ViTexQA: A Multi-Frame Temporal Perception Dataset for Video Text Question Answering

Despite remarkable progress in multimodal understanding, current MLLMs still exhibit limitations in video text understanding, particularly when semantics emerge through the integration of temporally distributed textual cues across multiple frames. This perception challenge fundamentally differs from static image text understanding, yet existing datasets fail to capture: the vast majority of questions remain answerable from single frames, inadequately reflecting real-world video text comprehension demands. To address this, we present ViTexQA, a large-scale video-text QA dataset, and FrameThinker for robust multi-frame temporal reasoning. We build ViTexQA via a quality-controlled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) annotation pipeline boosted with temporal constraints; all its QA pairs demand cross-frame text fusion to solve, enforcing true temporal reliance. FrameThinker adopts two-stage training for explicit temporal modeling: CoT-Guided Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) generates frame-aware reasoning chains, followed by Temporally-grounded Reinforcement Learning (RL) optimized with multi-frame coherence rewards. Evaluations show our method outperforms SOTA baselines on ViTexQA, lifting ROUGE-L by 6.3%.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

OBCache: Optimal Brain KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size. Existing cache eviction methods address this by exploiting attention sparsity, yet they typically rank tokens heuristically using accumulated attention weights without considering their true impact on attention outputs. We propose Optimal Brain Cache (OBCache), a principled framework that formulates cache eviction as a layer-wise structured pruning problem. Building upon the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) theory, OBCache quantifies token saliency by measuring the perturbation in attention outputs induced by pruning tokens, with closed-form scores derived for isolated keys, isolated values, and joint key-value pairs. Our scores account not only for attention weights but also for information from value states and attention outputs, thereby enhancing existing eviction strategies with output-aware signals. Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that replacing the heuristic scores in existing works, which estimate token saliency across different query positions, with OBCache's output-aware scores consistently improves long-context accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamSoul-AI/OBCache.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

D3Seg: Dependency-Aware Diffusion for Brain Tumor Segmentation with Missing Modalities

Accurate brain tumor segmentation using multi-parametric MRI is critical for effective treatment planning. However, in clinical settings, complete acquisition of all MRI sequences is not always possible. The absence of certain MRI modalities results in substantial performance degradation in existing segmentation methods, which typically rely on naive feature concatenation or direct fusion strategies. To address this limitation, we propose a novel segmentation model D3Seg which is designed to maintain stable performance under missing-modality settings. D3Seg introduces Multi-hop Modality Graph Fusion (MMGF) to model higher-order inter-modality dependencies, a lightweight diffusion-based imputation mechanism to compensate for missing T1ce and FLAIR feature representations in latent space, and probability-space decision refinement to mitigate dominant-class overconfidence and improve delineation of underrepresented tumor subregions. We evaluate the proposed D3Seg model on BraTS 2023 Glioma as the primary benchmark and further test it on a subset of the external BraTS 2023 Meningioma cohort to assess generalization across tumor pathologies. The results are compared with the state-of-the-art models under different missing-modality conditions. The proposed model achieves approximately 1.5-2.0% Dice improvement on enhancing tumor (ET) and around 1.0% on tumor core (TC) across multiple missing-modality configurations compared to the current state-of-the-art model on BraTS Glioma dataset. Cross-cohort evaluation on BraTS Meningioma dataset demonstrates the generalizability of the proposed model, showing consistent improvements in the challenging TC and ET regions, with approximately 1.5-3.0% and 1.5-6.5% gains respectively across several missing-modality configurations.

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

SAMark: A Self-Anchored Text Watermarking with Paragraph-Level Paraphrase Robustness

Semantic-level watermarking (SWM) improves robustness against text modifications by treating sentences as the basic unit. However, robustness to paragraph-level paraphrasing remains difficult because such attacks globally disrupt watermark signals by changing sentence order. In this work, we propose SAMark, a self-anchored watermarking framework that removes the dependency on sentence order by establishing a step-independent green region in semantic space. To improve detectability, we introduce a multi-channel hyperbolic scoring mechanism that amplifies watermark signals while suppressing noise from weakly aligned candidates. We further propose a diversity-aware filtering strategy that combines hard filtering with soft regularization, extending beyond simple n-gram repetition filters to address semantic redundancy. Experimental results show that SAMark achieves up to 90.2% TP@FP1% under typical paragraph-level paraphrasing attacks, outperforming the strongest prior baseline by more than 30% on average, while maintaining generation quality competitive with unwatermarked text and breaking the robustness-quality trade-off that limits prior methods.

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

HULFSynth : An INR based Super-Resolution and Ultra Low-Field MRI Synthesis via Contrast factor estimation

We present an unsupervised single image bidirectional Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) synthesizer that synthesizes an Ultra-Low Field (ULF) like image from a High-Field (HF) magnitude image and vice-versa. Unlike existing MRI synthesis models, our approach is inspired by the physics that drives contrast changes between HF and ULF MRIs. Our forward model simulates a HF to ULF transformation by estimating the tissue-type Signal-to-Noise ratio (SNR) values based on target contrast values. For the Super-Resolution task, we used an Implicit Neural Representation (INR) network to synthesize HF image by simultaneously predicting tissue-type segmentations and image intensity without observed HF data. The proposed method is evaluated using synthetic ULF-like data from generated from standard 3T T$_1$-weighted images for qualitative assessments and paired 3T-64mT T$_1$-weighted images for validation experiments. WM-GM contrast improved by 52% in synthetic ULF-like images and 37% in 64mT images. Sensitivity experiments demonstrated the robustness of our forward model to variations in target contrast, noise and initial seeding.

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

ARMOR-MAD: Adaptive Routing for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Debate in Large Language Model Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13197v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent debate (MAD) can improve large language model reasoning, but fixed debate pipelines often waste computation and can amplify correlated errors among similar agents. We propose ARMOR-MAD, a training-free heterogeneous MAD framework that treats debate as conditional computation. ARMOR-MAD combines three components: Pre-debate Agreement Routing (PAR) decides whether independently generated Round-0 answers require debate; Early Agreement Stopping Evaluator (EASE) stops debate after convergence; and Semantic Outlier Detection (SOD) down-weights abnormal final answers during aggregation. Across MATH Level 5, GSM8K, MMLU, and MMLU-Pro, ARMOR-MAD consistently improves over fixed-round heterogeneous debate with the same model pool, reaching 65.5\%, 96.5\%, 90.0\%, and 81.5\% accuracy, respectively. The results suggest that genuine model heterogeneity and agreement-based control are both important for making MAD more accurate and efficient.

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Securing the Future of IoMT in the Post-Quantum Era: An Edge-Native Federated Learning Approach

arXiv:2606.14515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices operate under strict resource constraints while handling highly sensitive health data, making security and privacy critical concerns. Federated learning (FL) further complicates this landscape, as model updates exchanged during training may unintentionally expose private medical information. Emerging quantum computing capabilities threaten the long-term viability of conventional lightweight cryptographic mechanisms, motivating the integration of Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) into IoMT systems. This article discusses key enabling technologies for quantum-resilient IoMT, including post-quantum key establishment, lightweight encryption, and edge-native orchestration. We propose a scalable Kubernetes-based framework that integrates PQC into FL-enabled IoMT environments and validate it on a Raspberry Pi testbed. Results demonstrate that distributed cryptographic processing significantly reduces latency compared to sequential designs while maintaining feasible resource overhead. The primary contribution of this work lies in the design and validation of a secure orchestration and communication framework for FL-enabled IoMT systems. We conclude by outlining future directions toward energy-aware architectures, intelligent security optimization, and resilient next-generation Intelligent Internet of Medical Things (IIoMT) ecosystems.

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

Comparing Human Gaze and Vision-Language Model Attention in Safety-Relevant Environments

Human visual attention plays an important role in how people perceive and respond to environments containing potential risks. This study investigates whether large vision-language models can identify the same regions of a scene that attract human attention in safety-relevant environments. Eye-tracking data were collected from ten participants viewing 33 scene images representing environments with varying levels of potential risk using Pupil Invisible wearable glasses. Gaze coordinates were mapped onto stimulus images to generate population-averaged human gaze heatmaps. In parallel, GPT-4o was prompted through the OpenAI Vision Application Programming Interface (API) to generate spatial predictions of visual attention, which were converted into saliency maps for comparison with human gaze patterns. Spatial alignment between human gaze heatmaps and model-generated saliency maps was evaluated using four complementary metrics: Pearson correlation (r = 0.515 +- 0.117), Normalised Scanpath Saliency (NSS = 0.988 +- 0.323), Kullback-Leibler divergence (KL = 1.766 +- 0.844), and Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic Curve using the Judd formulation (AUC-Judd = 0.806 +- 0.076). A cross-model comparison with Gemini Pro, Gemini Flash, and Claude showed that all models exceeded the AUC-Judd chance baseline of 0.5 and achieved positive NSS scores. Gemini Pro demonstrated the strongest spatial localisation according to three of the four metrics, whereas GPT-4o produced the closest distributional match to human attention as measured by KL divergence. These findings suggest that large vision-language models can identify regions that broadly correspond to where humans direct visual attention in safety-relevant scenes without requiring eye-tracking training data. The results highlight the potential of vision-language models as a scalable tool for approximating human attentional patterns.

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

Multi-View In-Cabin Monitoring System for Public Transport Vehicles

We introduce a multi-view in-cabin monitoring dataset for public transportation with synchronized RGB and depth images from four inward-facing cameras and a rotating LiDAR covering the vehicle interior of a digitalized and partly automated German city bus. The dataset contains 9.136 synchronized samples with annotations and is accompanied by a calibration and pseudo-labeling pipeline that generates 3D human pose estimates and oriented 3D bounding boxes for occupants. We further provide a nuScenes-format conversion and benchmark representative multi-view 3D detection models (e.g., Lift-Splat-Shoot and BEVFusion), supporting comparative evaluation and small-scale training of multi-view in-cabin perception models. The dataset and tools are available at https://github.com/EvgenyGorelik/multiview_incabin_dataset.

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

Constraining the outputs of ReLU neural networks

arXiv:2508.03867v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce a class of algebraic varieties naturally associated with ReLU neural networks, arising from the piecewise linear structure of their outputs across activation regions in input space, and the piecewise multilinear structure in parameter space. By analyzing the rank constraints on the network outputs within each activation region, we derive polynomial equations that characterize the functions representable by the network. We further investigate conditions under which these varieties attain their expected dimension, providing insight into the expressive and structural properties of ReLU networks.

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

NeuroShield: A Device-Agnostic Foundation Model for EEG Authentication

A central challenge in EEG authentication is that models are typically tied to the acquisition settings in which they are trained. In particular, variations in headset hardware, channel layout, and signal duration create heterogeneous recordings that existing models are not designed to handle, causing each new headset or dataset to be treated as a separate model-development problem. This fragmentation limits multi-dataset learning, hinders knowledge transfer, and reduces model reusability. To address this limitation, we present NeuroShield, a reusable foundation model for EEG authentication that learns identity-discriminative embeddings from variable-channel and variable-length EEG recordings through a dual-stage transformer architecture. We pretrain NeuroShield on three public EEG datasets comprising 15{,}762 subjects and 28{,}116 sessions, and evaluate transfer on two unseen downstream datasets. Our evaluations show that, after fine-tuning, NeuroShield reduces equal error rate by 0.44–8.06 percentage points relative to the state of the art. NeuroShield further generalizes to segments longer than those seen during training and operates across channel layouts not encountered during pretraining. These results establish NeuroShield as a reusable and adaptable EEG identity encoder across heterogeneous recording settings. We release NeuroShield as open source to support reproducibility and community adoption.

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

Robust Privacy: Inference-Stage Privacy through Certified Robustness

arXiv:2601.17360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adversary observing a model's released prediction can infer sensitive attributes of the queried input, or even reconstruct representatives of the model's training data. The inference interface thus acts as a side channel for privacy leakage. We introduce Robust Privacy (RP), an inference-stage privacy notion inspired by certified robustness: if a model's prediction is provably invariant within a radius-R neighborhood around an input x with confidence at least $1-\alpha$, then x enjoys $(R,\alpha)$-Robust Privacy, under which we prove that any adversary observing the released prediction has at most $\alpha/2$ advantage in distinguishing x from any input within distance R of x. Building on RP, we formalize Robust Attribute Privacy (RAP), an attribute-level privacy notion that characterizes the set of sensitive-attribute values that remain compatible with a released prediction. On a classification task, RP increases the median length of the RAP-compatible inference interval from 23.50 to 29.96, reducing attribute-inference precision. Model inversion attacks, often treated as a training-stage threat, in fact rely on fine-grained signals leaked through the inference interface; RP masks these signals at the inference stage, reducing attack success rate (ASR) from 73% to 4% on a black-box inversion attack. This direct targeting of the leakage channel enables RP to dominate DP-SGD and randomized response in the privacy-utility tradeoff space: RP retains 98.4% accuracy at 21% ASR, whereas DP-SGD must drop accuracy to 61.7% to reach a comparable ASR. Across both experiments, increasing the smoothing sample size N strengthens privacy and improves utility together. Finally, we examine model distillation as a scope boundary and show that RP mitigates attribute-level and instance-level inference-stage privacy leakage, but not function-level extraction through model distillation.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Data Scale, Not Latency, Shapes Cross-Lingual Encoder Transfer in Streaming ASR

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Adapting a streaming speech recognition model to a new language requires choosing between two plausible warm starts: a multilingual (ML) encoder or an English-only (EN) encoder. The common intuition is that the multilingual encoder should help most at low data, but it is unclear how long that advantage persists, whether tight streaming latency amplifies it, and whether it survives deployment quantization. We answer these questions with a controlled sweep of a 0.6 B-parameter cache-aware FastConformer transducer across eight European languages, up to five target-language data scales (100 h to 2500 h), three streaming tiers plus offline decoding, and up to four public test sets. The main result is that multilingual initialization is a data-limited advantage, not a latency-limited one. On FLEURS at 160 ms, the mean EN-ML word error rate (WER) gap falls from +4.21 percentage points (pp) at 100 h to +0.20 pp at 2500 h; a power-law fit summarizes this decay, with each doubling of target-language data roughly halving the remaining advantage. Across the three streaming tiers, the across-language mean EN-ML gap is approximately stable at each scale from 100 to 1000 h, and is near zero by 2500 h. Finally, 4-bit weight-only encoder quantization at the matched 560 ms streaming tier reduces the encoder footprint by about 3x, with an average FLEURS WER increase of about 0.5 pp. The resulting guideline is simple: use multilingual initialization in low-data regimes, treat the choice as effectively irrelevant at large data, and make latency and quantization decisions independently.

15.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Reentrant value fields as delayed coupled reaction-diffusion systems on finite graphs

arXiv:2605.03940v4 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We describe a dynamical system in which a symbolic field is coupled to a geometric field via a bipartite Hilbert-Schmidt kernel. The system is fully described by a retarded functional differential equation (RFDE) on the history space, subject to Lipschitz and small gain conditions. We show that the RFDE is well-posed under constant input and that it admits a compact global attractor. The principal subsystem $(H_L, X_R, P)$, which is comprised of the two primary fields as well as an executive field, is shown to be globally stable independent of delay, provided that the interfield coupling satisfies $C_{\mathcal{K}}^2

16.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Structured Representation Learning with Locally Linear Embeddings and Adaptive Feature Fusion

arXiv:2606.18469v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neuroscientific research has revealed that the brain encodes complex behaviors by leveraging structured, low-dimensional manifolds and dynamically fusing multiple sources of information through adaptive gating mechanisms. Inspired by these principles, we propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that encourages the disentanglement of dynamics-specific and reward-specific features, drawing direct parallels to how neural circuits separate and integrate information for efficient decision-making. Our approach leverages locally linear embeddings (LLEs) to capture the intrinsic, locally linear structure inherent in many environments, mirroring the local smoothness observed in neural population activity, while concurrently deriving reward-specific features through the standard RL objective. An attention mechanism, analogous to cortical gating, adaptively fuses these complementary representations on a per-state basis. Experimental results on benchmark tasks demonstrate that our method, grounded in neuroscientific principles, improves learning efficiency and overall performance compared to conventional RL approaches, highlighting the benefits of explicitly modeling local state structures and adaptive feature selection as observed in biological systems.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

Neglected Free Lunch from Post-training: Progress Advantage for LLM Agents

arXiv:2606.26080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Process reward models enable fine-grained, step-level evaluation of LLMs, yet building them for agentic settings remains prohibitively difficult: long-horizon interactions, irreversible actions, and stochastic environment feedback make both human annotation and Monte Carlo estimation infeasible at scale. In this work, we show that reinforcement learning (RL) post-training already provides the ingredients for effective step-level scoring, eliminating the need for dedicated reward model training altogether. Concretely, we derive an implicit advantage under a general stochastic Markov decision process, which we term progress advantage – log-probability ratio between the RL-trained policy and its reference policy exactly recovers the optimal advantage function. This formulation makes the resulting signal annotation-free, domain-agnostic, and available as a byproduct of the standard RL post-training pipeline. We validate the effectiveness of the progress advantage across three different applications: test-time scaling, uncertainty quantification, and failure attribution on five benchmarks and four model families. Across all settings, it consistently outperforms confidence-based baselines and, despite requiring no task-specific training, surpasses dedicated trained reward models. We complement these results with deeper analyses on characteristics of progress advantage, offering practical guidance for adoption in real-world agentic systems.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Concept Removal for Frontier Image Generative Models

Image generative models are trained on massive, largely uncurated internet-scale datasets that contain undesirable visual concepts. Efficiently removing such concepts from the model generations without degrading the quality of output images remains challenging. We introduce a novel concept removal method for frontier diffusion and image autoregressive models, such as SD3.5, Flux, and Infinity. Our intervention replaces the internal bottleneck layer present in all these modern models with a transcoder that is trained to replicate the original layer while structuring it into distinct activation features. This in-place substitution creates an integrated filter through which concept-specific signals can be selectively disabled while preserving the rest of the model's behavior. Since the intervention modifies the model backbone rather than attaching an external component, it remains persistent under white-box access. Empirically, the approach achieves state-of-the-art concept removal performance across modern diffusion and autoregressive models, maintains visual generation quality, provides robustness against adversarial prompts, and supports sequential removal of diverse concepts. This positions our method as a practical approach for concept removal in frontier image generative models.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Fidelity-Derived Quantum Dissimilarity-Enhanced k-Nearest Neighbor Algorithm for Arterial Hypertension Prediction

We present a quantum-enhanced version of the classic k-Nearest Neighbors (kNN) classification algorithm, applied to the prediction of arterial hypertension. The traditional Euclidean distance metric of the kNN algorithm is replaced with a Fidelity-derived quantum dissimilarity measure to evaluate the similarity between data samples. We map classical real-world clinical and ECG-derived data features into quantum states via the Dense-Angle Encoding, which efficiently utilizes parameterized rotation gates to pack multiple features into minimal qubits while maintaining pure states. We evaluate the performance of the dissimilarity measure using both the noiseless state vector Simulator and the IBM Qiskit Estimator primitives. The quantum circuit demonstrates robust predictive capabilities comparable to the classical model. While it does not claim computational supremacy over the classical baseline, the framework proves that fidelity-based similarity is a physically meaningful and efficient approach for hybrid quantum classical classification.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Constraint-Aware Quantum Optimization of Defect Configurations in Doped ZrO2: XY-Mixer QAOA and Grover Adaptive Search

Authors:

arXiv:2606.24922v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum optimization offers a route to searching the large defect-configuration spaces that arise in materials design. We develop an end-to-end, constraint-aware quantum optimization workflow for composition-defect search in a doped ZrO2 thermal-barrier-coating (TBC) material system, using a MACE-MPA-0 energy dataset to fit a 24-variable QUBO over 8 cation-occupation and 16 oxygen-vacancy variables with exactly two rare-earth substitutions and one oxygen vacancy, yielding 448 feasible configurations. The QUBO surrogate reproduces the MACE energies with held-out R2 = 0.997 (full-data R2 = 0.999, RMSE = 17 meV). We validate two complementary quantum pathways against exact enumeration: a constraint-preserving XY-mixer QAOA that confines sampling to the feasible subspace and places 86% of probability mass within 1 meV of the MACE optimum at depth p = 3, and a fault-tolerant constrained Grover Adaptive Search oracle with explicit fixed-point arithmetic, branch-safe comparison, feasibility checking, and phase kickback. Across threshold cases, the validated oracle uses 324 high-level logical qubits, or 352 to 358 with conservative clean-ancilla v-chain accounting, and requires 3.6 to 4.3 x 104 Toffoli gates per Grover (GAS) iteration. An idealized feasible-space amplification estimate suggests up to a 240x reduction in total Toffoli cost relative to the full 224 occupation space, providing a resource-estimation bridge between materials-informed QUBO modeling, constraint-aware QAOA, and fault-tolerant threshold search.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Predicting brain tumour enhancement from non-contrast MR imaging with artificial intelligence: a multi-cohort retrospective diagnostic accuracy study

Brain tumour MRI typically requires both pre- and post-contrast imaging, but gadolinium is not always desirable (frequent follow-up, renal impairment, allergy, paediatric patients). We developed and validated a deep learning model to predict tumour contrast enhancement from non-contrast MRI alone. We assembled 11,089 brain MRI studies (2006-2024) from 10 datasets across four countries and three continents, spanning adult and paediatric populations with glioma, meningioma, metastases, and post-resection appearances. Three architectures were trained to detect and segment enhancing tumour from T1w, T2w and FLAIR alone. Performance was assessed in a 1,109-study held-out test set (primary endpoint: patient-level enhancement detection; secondary: voxel-level Dice). Eleven expert radiologists attempted the same task on a 564-case subset (100 cases each), blinded to history, prior imaging, and referral. The best model, nnU-Net, achieved 83.0% balanced accuracy (95% CI 79.1-87.2; sensitivity 91.5%, specificity 74.4%) for detection, with R2 = 0.859 for enhancement volume. Of enhancing cases, 76.8% reached Dice >= 0.3, 67.5% >= 0.5, and 50.2% >= 0.7. Under blinded conditions, radiologists' majority vote was lower (71.7% balanced accuracy; sensitivity 77.6%, specificity 65.8%). The proportion reaching Dice >= 0.3 varied by pathology (meningioma 93%, presurgical glioma 76%, metastases 74%, postoperative glioma 74%) and was lowest for paediatric cases (45%). Deep learning can identify contrast-enhancing brain tumours from non-contrast MRI. These models show promise as a triage or decision-support adjunct, such as in flagging studies likely to enhance so that contrast can be added to a non-contrast protocol, and may reduce gadolinium dependence in neuro-oncology imaging. Future work should optimise these models with radiologists.

22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

QuantKAN: A Unified Quantization Framework for Kolmogorov Arnold Networks

arXiv:2511.18689v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks (KANs) replace linear weights with spline-based functions, offering strong expressivity but posing challenges for low-precision deployment due to heterogeneous parameter distributions. We introduce QuantKAN, the first unified framework for quantization-aware training (QAT) and post-training quantization (PTQ) of KANs. The framework employs branch-aware quantizers for base and spline parameters and extends modern QAT and PTQ methods to spline-based layers across EfficientKAN, FastKAN, PyKAN, and KAGN. Experiments on MNIST, CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet provide the first unified QAT/PTQ KAN benchmarks and show that DSQ is the most robust QAT method at aggressive low-bit settings, while GPTQ is the strongest PTQ method at moderate precision. Sensitivity analyses reveal architecture-specific failure modes: spline/basis parameters dominate in FastKAN, while base or scaling parameters dominate in EfficientKAN, GRAM, and PyKAN. Vivado HLS estimates on a Xilinx UltraScale+ device further suggest up to 3.32$\times$ throughput and 7.7$\times$ lower estimated dynamic energy per inference under W4A4, exposing a residual basis-evaluation tax that motivates basis-aware microarchitecture. QuantKAN is available at https://github.com/OSU-STARLAB/QuantKAN/.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Selective Rotary Position Embedding

Position information is essential for language modeling. In softmax transformers, Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) encode positions through fixed-angle rotations, while in linear transformers, order is handled via input-dependent (selective) gating that decays past key-value associations. Selectivity has generally been shown to improve language-related tasks. Inspired by this, we introduce Selective RoPE, an input-dependent rotary embedding mechanism, that generalizes RoPE, and enables rotation in arbitrary angles for both linear and softmax transformers. We show that softmax attention already performs a hidden form of these rotations on query-key pairs, uncovering an implicit positional structure. We further show that in state-space models and gated linear transformers, the real part manages forgetting while the imaginary part encodes positions through rotations. We validate our method by equipping gated transformers with Selective RoPE, demonstrating that its input-dependent rotations improve performance in language modeling and on difficult sequence tasks like copying, state tracking, and retrieval.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

A Private Approximation of the 2nd-Moment Matrix of Any Subsamplable Input

arXiv:2505.14251v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study the problem of differentially private second moment estimation and present a new algorithm that achieve strong privacy-utility trade-offs even for worst-case inputs under subsamplability assumptions on the data. We call an input $(m,\alpha,\beta)$-subsamplable if a random subsample of size $m$ (or larger) preserves w.p $\geq 1-\beta$ the spectral structure of the original second moment matrix up to a multiplicative factor of $1\pm \alpha$. Building upon subsamplability, we give a recursive algorithmic framework similar to Kamath et al 2019, that abides zero-Concentrated Differential Privacy (zCDP) while preserving w.h.p. the accuracy of the second moment estimation upto an arbitrary factor of $(1\pm\gamma)$. We then show how to apply our algorithm to approximate the second moment matrix of a distribution $\mathcal{D}$, even when a noticeable fraction of the input are outliers.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Bright Emission from Dark Sources in Hyperbolic Media

arXiv:2606.16071v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hyperbolic media enable ultra-strong light-matter interactions through their extreme field localization and small mode volumes, but low-loss realizations are fundamentally limited to the mid-infrared, owing to the long lifetimes of optical phonons in high-quality crystals. Here we show that bright emitters operating at visible or near-infrared frequencies can be used to generate radiation in this regime by inducing mid-infrared population dynamics, thereby creating a source in the hyperbolic frequency band without a corresponding dipole transition. We demonstrate that even a source with vanishing dipole and higher multipole moments - strictly non-radiating in any isotropic medium - becomes radiatively active in a hyperbolic environment. This enables visible and near-infrared control of light-matter interactions in polaritonic hyperbolic materials, establishing a new low-loss solid-state quantum optics platform.