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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Prevalence and epidemiological patterns of <i>Neisseria gonorrhoeae</i> infection in sub-Saharan Africa, 1964–2025: Systematic review, meta-analyses, and meta-regressions

Authors:
Aisha Osman↗

by Aisha Osman, Hina Akram, Bayan Alemrayat, Sumaya Al-Maraghi, Manale Harfouche, Laith J. Abu-Raddad Background Neisseria gonorrhoeae (NG) infection is a global health concern because of its morbidity and increasing antimicrobial resistance. Sub-Saharan Africa is believed to carry a disproportionately high burden of NG infection, but the epidemiology of NG infection in this region has not been comprehensively synthesized. This study systematically reviewed and analyzed NG prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa to characterize prevalence patterns and identify populations at risk. Methods and findings A systematic review was conducted and reported following PRISMA guidelines. Embase, PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science were searched from inception to June 4, 2025. Eligible studies reported NG prevalence in sub-Saharan Africa. Random-effects meta-analyses generated pooled prevalence estimates, and random-effects meta-regression analyses identified associations and sources of heterogeneity.Nine hundred fifty publications contributed 1,604 prevalence measures spanning 1964–2025. In the general population, pooled urogenital prevalence was 3.2% (95% confidence interval (CI): 2.9–3.5), with substantial between-study heterogeneity and a wide prediction interval, indicating considerable variation in prevalence across settings. Prevalence was high in key populations: among female sex workers, 11.5% (95% CI: 9.9–13.2) for urogenital and 2.0% (95% CI: 0.4–4.5) for anorectal infection; and among men who have sex with men, 2.8% (95% CI: 2.4–3.3) for urogenital, 8.3% (95% CI: 5.8–11.0) for anorectal, and 5.7% (95% CI: 3.6–8.3) for oropharyngeal infection. Symptomatic men exhibited high urogenital prevalence (51.5%; 95% CI: 47.5–55.5), and symptomatic women showed 9.0% (95% CI: 7.7–10.4). Among women with adverse pregnancy or birth outcomes, urogenital prevalence was 8.6% (95% CI: 5.3–12.6). Meta-regression analyses explained over half of the variability in prevalence, showing a long-term decline of 1% per year, a clear population type gradient, subregional differences, and decreasing prevalence with increasing age, but no variation by sex. These findings may be affected by variability in data availability across countries, anatomical sites, and population groups, as well as heterogeneity across included studies. Conclusions NG prevalence remains markedly high in this region but has declined over time. These findings highlight the need for strengthened surveillance, expanded prevention and diagnostic strategies, and continued monitoring of gonococcal antimicrobial resistance to support effective control efforts in sub-Saharan Africa.

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02.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Systematic Construction of Time-Dependent Hamiltonians for Microwave-Driven Josephson Circuits

Authors:
Yao Lu↗Tianpu Zhao↗Andr\'e Valli\`eres↗Kevin C. Smith↗Daniel Weiss↗Xinyuan You↗Yaxing Zhang↗Suhas Ganjam↗Aniket Maiti↗John W. O. Garmon↗Shantanu Mundhada↗Ziwen Huang↗…

arXiv:2512.20743v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Time-dependent electromagnetic drives are fundamental for controlling complex quantum systems, including superconducting Josephson circuits. In these devices, accurate time-dependent Hamiltonian models are imperative for predicting their dynamics and designing high-fidelity quantum operations. Existing numerical methods, such as black-box quantization (BBQ) and energy-participation ratio (EPR), excel at modeling the static Hamiltonians of Josephson circuits. However, these techniques do not fully capture the behavior of driven circuits stimulated by external microwave drives, nor do they include a generalized approach to account for the inevitable noise and dissipation that enter through microwave ports. Here, we introduce numerical techniques that leverage classical microwave simulations, efficiently executable in finite-element solvers, to obtain the time-dependent Hamiltonian of microwave-driven superconducting circuits with arbitrary geometries under charge, flux, or mixed electromagnetic modulation. Importantly, our techniques do not rely on a lumped-element description of the superconducting circuit, in contrast to previous approaches to tackling this problem. We demonstrate the versatility of our approach by characterizing the driven properties of realistic circuit devices in complex electromagnetic environments, including coherent dynamics due to charge and flux modulation, as well as drive-induced relaxation and dephasing. Our techniques offer a powerful toolbox for optimizing circuit designs and advancing practical applications in superconducting quantum computing.

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03.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

FORGE: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings

Authors:
Zohair Shafi↗Serdar Kadioglu↗

arXiv:2508.20330v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Combinatorial optimization problems are ubiquitous in science and engineering. Still, learning-based approaches to accelerate combinatorial optimization often require solving a large number of difficult instances to collect training data, incurring significant computational cost. Existing learning-based methods require training dedicated models for each problem distribution, for each downstream task, severely limiting their scalability and generalization. We introduce Forge: Foundational Optimization Representations from Graph Embeddings, a framework that pre-trains a vector-quantized graph autoencoder on a large, diverse collection of mixed-integer programming (MIP) instances in an unsupervised manner, without relying on optimization solvers or optimal solutions. Vector quantization produces discrete code assignments that serve as a vocabulary for representing optimization instances. We evaluate Forge in both unsupervised and supervised settings. In the unsupervised setting, Forge embeddings effectively cluster unseen instances across problem domains and sizes. In the supervised setting, we fine-tune Forge embeddings and show that a single pre-trained model helps predicting both the integrality gap for cut-generation and variable hints for search guidance across multiple problem and size distributions. In both tasks, we improve the performance of a commercial optimization solver and outperform state-of-the-art learning-based methods. Finally, we open-source our training code, pre-trained Forge weights, and embeddings for multiple MIP distributions to foster further research in representation learning for optimization problems https://skadio.github.io/forge/

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04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Numbers Already Carry Their Own Embeddings

Authors:
Suhyun Bae↗Donghun Lee↗

arXiv:2606.14108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce Adelic operation-preserved embeddings (AOE), a training-free representation that captures both a number's real value and its modular (p-adic) signatures. This construction preserves additive and multiplicative structure by design, turning numerical input into embeddings that "speak in the language of mathematics." Unlike prior approaches that rely on task-specific retraining, AOE is plug-and-play and drops seamlessly into existing architectures. On algebraic combinatorics benchmarks, it delivers consistent gains including the first-ever perfect accuracy on the Weaving Pattern task-while suggesting a principled path forward for overcoming the long-standing "number problem" in AI.

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05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

All about quantum error correction: distillation, mitigation, self-correction and beyond

Authors:
D. -S. Wang↗

arXiv:2606.14034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this work, it is shown that many quantum error-manipulating techniques, such as distillation, error mitigation, and dynamical decoupling, are special cases of the most general framework for quantum error correction. This unifying perspective is achieved by extending quantum error correction to include state-adaptive and channel-adaptive settings, as well as multi-stage coding scenarios. Based on this insight, a model of self-correcting quantum memory is also proposed. This work clarifies the relationship among these techniques and illustrates, through explicit constructions, how the unified perspective can guide the design of reliable quantum information systems.

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

UBP2: Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning for Efficient Preference-based Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Mohamed Nabail↗Leo Cheng↗Jingmin Wang↗Nicholas Rhinehart↗

arXiv:2606.19328v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Preference-based RL provides an approach to learning reward models from pairwise comparisons of behaviors, bypassing the need for explicit reward design. However, existing methods typically rely on passive data collection and suffer from poor sample efficiency, especially during the early stages of learning. We introduce a model-based approach that actively directs exploration by jointly reasoning over uncertainties in the reward, dynamics, and value functions. Our method, Uncertainty-Balanced Preference Planning (UBP2), uses ensembles of reward, dynamics, and value function models to evaluate candidate trajectories according to a unified score that combines expected reward, terminal value, and epistemic uncertainty. Planning under this objective yields an explicit tradeoff between exploitation and information acquisition without requiring ad hoc exploration heuristics. Under standard regularity assumptions, we establish sublinear regret guarantees for both finite-horizon and infinite-horizon settings. Empirically, experiments on the Meta-World benchmark show UBP2 achieves substantially higher sample efficiency than model-free preference-based methods and non-optimistic model-based baselines.

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

PlaceRep: Geospatial Place Representation Learning from Large-Scale Point-of-Interest Data

Authors:
Mohammad Hashemi↗Hossein Amiri↗Andreas Zufle↗

arXiv:2507.02921v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning effective representations of urban environments requires capturing spatial structure beyond fixed administrative boundaries. Existing geospatial representation learning approaches typically aggregate Points of Interest (POIs) into pre-defined administrative regions such as census units or ZIP code areas, assigning a single embedding to each region. However, POIs often form semantically meaningful groups that extend across, within, or beyond these boundaries, defining places that better reflect human activity and urban function. To address this limitation, we propose PlaceRep, a geospatial representation learning method that constructs place-level representations by clustering spatially and semantically related POIs. PlaceRep summarizes large-scale POI graphs from U.S. Foursquare data to produce general-purpose urban region embeddings while automatically identifying places across multiple spatial scales. By eliminating model pre-training, PlaceRep provides a scalable and efficient solution for multi-granular geospatial analysis. Experiments using the tasks of population density estimation and housing price prediction as downstream tasks show that PlaceRep outperforms most state-of-the-art graph-based geospatial representation learning methods and achieves up to a x100 speedup in generating region-level representations on large-scale POI graphs. The implementation of PlaceRep is available at https://github.com/mohammadhashemii/PlaceRep.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

CUPID: Reconstructing UV Texture Maps for Interpretable Person-of-Interest Deepfake Detection

Authors:
Giovanni Affatato↗Sara Mandelli↗Edoardo Daniele Cannas↗Paolo Bestagini↗Stefano Tubaro↗

Deepfakes targeting a high-profile individual, known as Person-of-Interest (POI), are a threat to modern democracies and societies. Current POI deepfake detection methods still struggle to combine robustness to post-processing, efficiency and interpretability, focal aspects of modern deepfake detectors. In this paper we propose CUPID, a POI video deepfake detector that combines UV texture maps, a facial appearance representation derived from 3D face reconstructions, with the representation learning capabilities of the Masked Autoencoder (MAE). Our method does not require any deepfake videos in its training phase. Moreover, it does not even require to include a specific POI in the training set: the combination of UV texture maps extracted from real video frames and the MAE context-guided reconstruction yields a latent space that captures rich and discriminative facial features also for identities unseen during training. In the testing phase, the embeddings extracted from a query video depicting the POI can be matched against pristine reference videos to assess the video authenticity. Furthermore, operating in the UV space naturally provides an additional layer of interpretability. Specifically, we can extract decoded residual maps that highlight which facial regions of a test video deviate most from the identity representation of the corresponding POI. Experiments on four deepfake datasets show that CUPID outperforms current state of the art on most datasets and achieves the best overall robustness against strong downscaling and compression, providing also substantially faster inference. Our experimental code will be released at https://github.com/polimi-ispl/CUPID.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume: Complementary Scalable Benchmarks for Quantum Computers

Authors:
Attila Portik↗Orsolya K\'alm\'an↗Thomas Monz↗Zolt\'an Zimbor\'as↗

arXiv:2512.19413v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As quantum computing advances toward the late-NISQ and early fault-tolerant eras, scalable and platform-independent benchmarks are essential for quantifying computational capacity in a classically verifiable manner. We introduce two volumetric benchmarks, Clifford Volume and Free Fermion Volume, that assess quantum hardware by testing the execution of random Clifford and free fermion operations. These two groups of unitaries possess a combination of properties that make them ideal for benchmarking: (i) each is individually efficient to simulate classically, enabling verification at scale; (ii) together they form a universal gate set; (iii) they serve as essential algorithmic primitives in practical applications (including shadow tomography and quantum chemistry); and (iv) their definitions are formulated abstractly, without explicit reference to hardware-specific features such as qubit connectivity or native gate sets. This framework thus enables scalable and fair cross-platform comparisons and tracks meaningful computational advancement. We demonstrate the practical feasibility of these benchmarks through extensive numerical simulations across realistic noise parameters and through experimental validation on Quantinuum's H2-1 trapped-ion quantum computer, which achieves a Clifford Volume of 34.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Quantum thermodynamics, quantum correlations and quantum coherence in accelerating Unruh-DeWitt detectors in both steady and dynamical state

Authors:
Omar Bachain↗Mohamed Amazioug↗Rachid Ahl Laamara↗Kottakkaran Sooppy Nisar↗Mohammed Zakarya↗Gamal M. Ismail↗Abdel-Haleem Abdel-Aty↗

arXiv:2512.18123v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the interplay between quantum thermodynamics, quantum correlations, and quantum coherence within the framework of the Unruh-DeWitt (UdW) detector model. By analyzing both the steady and dynamical states of various quantum resources (including steerability, entanglement, quantum discord, and coherence), we study how these resources evolve under Markovian and non-Markovian environments. Furthermore, we investigate the impact of both the Unruh temperature and the energy levels on three key quantum phenomena: thermodynamic evolution, quantum correlations, and quantum coherence, considering different initial state preparations. The hierarchical structure relating quantum correlations and quantum coherence is determined. We further examine the thermodynamic performance of a quantum heat engine, highlighting the influence of memory effects and classical correlations on heat exchange, work extraction, and efficiency. Our results reveal that non-Markovian dynamics can enhance the preservation of quantum correlations and improve the engine's efficiency compared to purely Markovian regime. These findings provide insights into the role of quantum correlations and quantum coherence in quantum thermodynamic processes and open avenues for optimizing quantum devices operating in relativistic or open-system settings.

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11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11

Mean-field theory via dissociated arrays for particle systems interacting through noisy weights

Authors:
Nicolas Fournier↗Datong Zhou↗

arXiv:2606.12135v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study a mean-field limit for a $N$-particle system in which each particle follows a diffusion and interacts with other particles through a weight on each directed edge. Each weight evolves according to its own nonlinear SDE driven by a Brownian motion, with coefficients involving the states of the two endpoint particles of the edge. The initial vertex and edge variables are assumed to have a dissociated Aldous–Hoover form. We construct the limiting nonlinear SDE by averaging the interaction over an independent neighbor and an edge input, prove its well-posedness, and show that the dissociated vertex-edge structure is propagated by the dynamics. This propagation property is an analogue of propagation of chaos in the case where the weight of each edge may remain correlated with the states of the two endpoint particles. Under either a bounded-observable assumption or a sub-Gaussian edge-input condition, the finite system converges to this limit through quantitative coupling estimates for a typical particle and a typical edge. We also prove the convergence of the empirical measure of particle's state pairs and their interaction weights.

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

Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting (MoFore) for Self-Supervised Video Representation Learning

Authors:
Qinwu Xu↗

Self-supervised video representation learning has recently advanced through contrastive learning, masked reconstruction, and predictive representation learning. Reconstruction-based approaches such as MAE and VideoMAE learn representations by recovering masked visual content [he2022mae,tong2022videomae], while contrastive methods such as CLIP learn semantically meaningful embedding spaces through representation alignment [radford2021clip]. In this work, we introduce a Momentum-Guided Semantic Forecasting framework (MoFore) for self-supervised video representation learning. Instead of optimizing for pixel-level reconstruction or task-specific semantic alignment, the proposed method learns temporally predictive video representations by forecasting future latent embeddings from temporally distant context clips. To improve robustness across temporal scales, we further introduce randomized temporal-gap forecasting during training. The framework combines predictive latent forecasting with contrastive regularization to encourage temporal consistency while preventing representation collapse. Experiments on the UCF101 dataset demonstrate that the proposed framework learns temporally consistent and semantically meaningful video representations without using action labels during training. Quantitative analysis shows strong temporal stability and emergent category-level structure in the learned embedding space, while qualitative retrieval experiments reveal motion-aware organization across related activities. Overall, the results suggest that long-range latent forecasting provides an effective and computationally efficient approach for self-supervised video representation learning without relying on reconstruction-based objectives.

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13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

InstructTime++: Time Series Classification with Multimodal Language Modeling via Implicit Feature Enhancement

Authors:
Mingyue Cheng↗Xiaoyu Tao↗Huajian Zhang↗Qi Liu↗Zhiding Liu↗Yucong Luo↗Yiheng Chen↗Enhong Chen↗

arXiv:2601.14968v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Most existing time series classification methods adopt a discriminative paradigm that maps input sequences directly to one-hot encoded class labels. While effective, this paradigm struggles to incorporate contextual features and fails to capture semantic relationships among classes. To address these limitations, we propose InstructTime, a novel framework that reformulates time series classification as a multimodal generative task. Specifically, continuous numerical sequences, contextual textual features, and task instructions are treated as multimodal inputs, while class labels are generated as textual outputs by tuned language models. To bridge the modality gap, InstructTime introduces a time series discretization module that converts continuous sequences into discrete temporal tokens, together with an alignment projection layer and a generative self-supervised pre-training strategy to enhance cross-modal representation alignment. Building upon this framework, we further propose InstructTime++, which extends InstructTime by incorporating implicit feature modeling to compensate for the limited inductive bias of language models. InstructTime++ leverages specialized toolkits to mine informative implicit patterns from raw time series and contextual inputs, including statistical feature extraction and vision-language-based image captioning, and translates them into textual descriptions for seamless integration. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of InstructTime++.

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

Teaching Values to Machines: Simulating Human-Like Behavior in LLMs

Authors:
Asaf Yehudai↗Naama Rozen↗Ariel Gera↗

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate a remarkable capacity to adopt different personas and roles; however, it remains unclear whether they can manifest behavior that adheres to a coherent, human-like value structure. In this work, we draw on established psychological value theory to induce human-like values in LLMs and assess their alignment with patterns observed in human studies. Using validated psychological questionnaires, we conduct large-scale experiments – over 5 million questions – to evaluate value structures and value-behavior relationships in leading LLMs and compare them to humans. Our findings reveal strong agreement between value-prompted LLMs and humans across both dimensions. Moreover, incorporating human value distributions enhances population-level simulations with value-induced LLMs. These findings highlight the potential of value-induced LLMs as effective, psychologically grounded tools for simulating human behavior.

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15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models

Authors:
Haoxuan You↗Rui Sun↗Zhecan Wang↗Long Chen↗Gengyu Wang↗Hammad A. Ayyubi↗Kai-Wei Chang↗Shih-Fu Chang↗

The field of vision-and-language (VL) understanding has made unprecedented progress with end-to-end large pre-trained VL models (VLMs). However, they still fall short in zero-shot reasoning tasks that require multi-step inferencing. To achieve this goal, previous works resort to a divide-and-conquer pipeline. In this paper, we argue that previous efforts have several inherent shortcomings: 1) They rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. 2) They force models to predict the final answer even if the sub-questions or sub-answers provide insufficient information. We address these limitations via IdealGPT, a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, IdealGPT utilizes an LLM to generate sub-questions, a VLM to provide corresponding sub-answers, and another LLM to reason to achieve the final answer. These three modules perform the divide-and-conquer procedure iteratively until the model is confident about the final answer to the main question. We evaluate IdealGPT on multiple challenging VL reasoning tasks under a zero-shot setting. In particular, our IdealGPT outperforms the best existing GPT-4-like models by an absolute 10% on VCR and 15% on SNLI-VE. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/IdealGPT

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16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Qwen-AgentWorld: Language World Models for General Agents

Authors:
Yuxin Zuo↗Zikai Xiao↗Li Sheng↗Fei Huang↗Jianhong Tu↗Yuxuan Liu↗Tianyi Tang↗Xiaomeng Hu↗Yang Su↗Qingfeng Lan↗Yantao Liu↗Qin Zhu↗…

A world model predicts environment dynamics based on current observations and actions, serving as a core cognitive mechanism for reasoning and planning. In this work, we investigate how world modeling based on language models can further push the boundaries of general agents. (i) We first focus on building foundation models for agentic environment simulation. We introduce Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B and Qwen-AgentWorld-397B-A17B, the first language world models capable of simulating agentic environments covering 7 domains via long chain-of-thought reasoning. Leveraging more than 10M environment interaction trajectories of 7 domains in real-world environments, we develop Qwen-AgentWorld through a three-stage training pipeline: CPT injects general-purpose world modeling capabilities from the state transition dynamics and augmented professional corpora, SFT activates next-state-prediction reasoning, and RL sharpens simulation fidelity through a tailored framework with hybrid rubric-and-rule rewards. To evaluate language world models, we present AgentWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from real-world interactions of 5 frontier models on 9 established benchmarks. Empirical results demonstrate that Qwen-AgentWorld significantly outperforms existing frontier models. (ii) Beyond foundation models, we further investigate two complementary paradigms through which world modeling enhances general agents. First, as a decoupled environment simulator, Qwen-AgentWorld supports scalable and controllable simulation of thousands of real-world environments for agentic RL, yielding gains that surpass real-environment training alone. Second, as a unified agent foundation model, world-model training acts as a highly effective warm-up that improves downstream performance across 7 agentic benchmarks. Code: https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-AgentWorld

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

The interaction between chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) in a diverse central London population

Authors:
Martyn↗Mullender↗Ogunnaike↗Kemper↗Ghosh↗Peppa↗Tsochatzis↗Gilson↗Flanagan↗Copas↗MacDonald↗Arenas-Pinto↗…

Introduction: The overlap between chronic hepatitis B (CHB) and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) is an emerging global health challenge. We investigated the impact of MASLD and metabolic comorbidity in a diverse London viral hepatitis clinic. Methods: This retrospective cross-sectional study (May 2018-Feb 2024) included adults with CHB having controlled attenuation parameter (CAP) measurements. MASLD was defined as CAP >264 dB/m plus [&ge;]1 cardiometabolic factor (CMF). We used univariable and multivariable models to examine MASLD's relationship with liver stiffness and hepatitis B viral load (HBV VL). Results: Among 323 individuals (67% male, median age 36), most were from Black (35%) or non-white British/Irish (29%) backgrounds. Overall, 64% had [&ge;]1 CMF, and 20% had MASLD. The CHB/MASLD group was significantly older (median 43 vs 35 years, p

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18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Fed-FBD: Federated Functional Block Diversification for Isolation, Privacy, and Surgical Unlearning

Authors:
Weijie Chen↗Alan B. McMillan↗

arXiv:2606.12679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative model training without sharing raw patient data, but standard approaches such as FedAvg treat each client as a black box and provide no mechanism for isolating an adversarial contributor, auditing per-client influence, or honoring a departed participant's right to be forgotten. We present Fed-FBD (Federated Functional Block Diversification), a modular federated architecture that decomposes a ResNet backbone into six functional blocks (the stem, four residual groups, and the classification head) and maintains a warehouse of N color variants, each assembled from independently tracked and contributor-stamped blocks. Fed-FBD provides three capabilities absent in FedAvg: (i) architecturally guaranteed block-level isolation, so that an adversarial or mislabelled client cannot contaminate the clean colous; (ii) privacy-by-design, where membership inference advantage is already indistinguishable from chance before any privacy mechanism is applied; and (iii) surgical machine unlearning of a departed participant's contribution at sub-second cost and without retraining. Experiments on six MedMNIST-2D datasets, PathMNIST at 224x224, and CIFAR-10 show that Fed-FBD trades a modest 0.3%-3.1% IID accuracy gap on the adequately sized datasets for these guarantees, remains within 0.8%-4.0% of FedAvg at Dirichlet alpha=1.0 on three of four datasets, and confines all six adversarial attacks we study to the poisoned client's own blocks with at most +/-0.01 AUC drift on the clean colors.

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19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

A Cross-Model VLM-Judge Protocol for Single-Image 3D Mesh Quality (and Why Cheap Proxies Fall Short)

Authors:
Ali Asaria↗Tony Salomone↗Deep Gandhi↗

arXiv:2606.18451v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-image-to-3D generators are improving quickly, but there is no agreed, human-free way to tell whether one generated mesh is better than another. Practitioners commonly rely on cheap automatic proxies (render-space CLIP similarity and mesh geometry-validity statistics), yet how well these track perceived quality is unestablished. We make two contributions. First, we propose and validate a reproducible VLM-judge evaluation protocol: a fixed 24-view headless render rig, two independent vision-language judge families, and a mandatory position-bias correction that queries both presentation orders and keeps only order-consistent verdicts. The two judge families agree substantially with each other (Cohen's kappa = 0.66), well above the chance-agreement floor. Second, using this protocol as the reference, we show the cheap proxies do not substitute for it. Geometry validity is only a weak signal on average (because, as we show, it is bimodal) and stays below our pre-registered target, while render-CLIP is at chance. A learned Bradley-Terry head collapses onto a single manifoldness statistic (giving render-CLIP a negative weight) and matches geometry-only exactly, so learning the feature weights buys nothing. The proxy is also bimodal: it is significantly above chance on contrasts with visible geometric defects but at chance on ambiguous contrasts, consistent with geometry validity tracking the judge only when the defect is visually salient. We therefore recommend the VLM-judge protocol as a reliable, reproducible evaluator under the conditions tested (two feed-forward generators on Google Scanned Objects, with a face-drop degradation regime) and advise against geometry/CLIP proxies as optimization targets.

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

V2P-Manip: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Monocular Human Videos

Authors:
Kaihan Chen↗Yanming Shao↗Haifeng Ji↗Xiaokang Yang↗Yao Mu↗

Achieving autonomous robotic dexterous manipulation requires precise, human-like action sequences at scale. As a scalable supplement to costly teleoperation data, extracting trajectories with both visual fidelity and physical plausibility from monocular videos represents a promising frontier in embodied AI. To this end, we introduce V2P-Manip, an efficient framework designed to learn dexterous manipulation policies directly from human demonstration videos. We establish an efficient, integrated pipeline encompassing 3D asset acquisition, trajectory estimation, and dexterous policy learning. To bridge the gap between visual perception and physical constraints, we introduce a two-stage refinement process to enforce spatial alignment and physical consistency. Evaluations on the TACO and OakInk benchmarks demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms previous methods in pose accuracy, adaptability to unstructured environments, and training efficiency. Ultimately, experimental results confirm an average success rate of over 75% across multiple synthetic manipulation tasks and validate the adaptability of the extracted manipulation priors across diverse dexterous hand embodiments.

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21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Tight $L_\infty$ Sample Complexity for Low-Degree and Sparse Boolean Polynomials

Authors:
Jasper van Doornmalen↗Mathieu Molina↗Victor Verdugo↗Jos\'e Verschae↗

arXiv:2606.17319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Motivated by the optimization of bounded binary black-box functions, we study the problem of learning polynomial surrogates over the Boolean hypercube. To ensure that optimizing the surrogate yields good solutions for the underlying objective, we require uniform $L_\infty$-error guarantees rather than the usual $L_2$-type guarantees. We characterize the minimax sample complexity of uniform estimation under subgaussian noise for two classes of bounded polynomials. First, for polynomials of degree at most $d$ on $n$ variables, the sample complexity scales as $n^{d+1}$. Second, for $s$-sparse Fourier-Walsh polynomials with $s \leq n$, it scales as $ns^2$. These rates differ structurally from the noiseless setting, where uniform exact recovery scales as $n^d$ and $ns$, respectively. Our lower bounds hold even for arbitrary adaptive learners, showing that the additional factors are intrinsic to the noisy cases. Standard Fourier-analysis tools for the $L_2$-norm do not naturally extend to the $L_\infty$-setting in a way that yields uniform guarantees. Our proofs overcome this difficulty by relying on suitably chosen auxiliary norms that serve as proxies for controlling the $L_\infty$-error. Together, our results provide a tight characterization of the sample complexity of learning optimization-safe polynomial surrogates.

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22.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

NetCause: Counterfactual Learning for Root Cause Analysis in Large-Scale Networks

Authors:
Fabien Chraim↗Jian Zhang↗Dominik Janzing↗Xiang Song↗Christos Faloutsos↗John Evans↗

arXiv:2606.13543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Can a learned model capture how faults propagate through a large-scale network and use this knowledge to causally attribute customer impact to its underlying root cause? Existing root cause analysis techniques often rely on static rules, correlation heuristics, or topology-local reasoning, which struggle to generalize in dynamic environments where faults propagate across complex physical and logical dependencies. We present NetCause, a self-supervised learning-based framework that models network incidents as graph-temporal processes and uses counterfactual simulation to rank candidate root causes. This approach produces an interpretable ranking of root cause hypotheses and integrates naturally with operator-defined mitigation and remediation actions. We train the model on over 1,500 incidents collected over six months from a leading cloud provider's production network and evaluate it on 31 expert-labeled incidents. NetCause consistently improves root cause ranking quality in the regime most relevant to operational decision-making, achieving a 16.1% accuracy improvement over a rule-based heuristic baseline. While training is computationally intensive, inference is lightweight, requiring only seconds of GPU runtime per incident (well below typical telemetry collection latencies).

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Mirror Descent on Riemannian Manifolds

Authors:
Jiaxin Jiang↗Lei Shi↗Jiyuan Tan↗

arXiv:2603.17527v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mirror Descent (MD) is a scalable first-order method widely used in large-scale optimization, with applications in image processing, policy optimization, and neural network training. This paper generalizes MD to optimization on Riemannian manifolds. In particular, we develop a Riemannian Mirror Descent (RMD) framework via reparameterization and further propose a stochastic variant of RMD. We also establish non-asymptotic convergence guarantees for both RMD and stochastic RMD. As an application to the Stiefel manifold, our RMD framework reduces to the Curvilinear Gradient Descent (CGD) method proposed in [26]. Moreover, when specializing the stochastic RMD framework to the Stiefel setting, we obtain a stochastic extension of CGD, which effectively addresses large-scale manifold optimization problems.

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

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

Authors:
Bar Mahpud↗Or Sheffet↗

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.

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25.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

Heterogeneous suppressive effect of <i>Wolbachia</i> incompatible insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique across time and historical <i>Ae. aegypti</i> abundance - using distributional synthetic controls

Authors:
Yichen Zhai↗

by Yichen Zhai, Chia-Chen Chang, Zhiyong Xi, Cheong Huat Tan, Lee Ching Ng, Jue Tao Lim Background Biological control tools such as Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique, are a promising class of interventions to modify and suppress Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to reduce risk of Aedes-borne diseases. Due to the spatial nature of the intervention, intervention effects can be spatio-temporally heterogeneous. Yet, most evaluations of field-based technologies rely on average treatment effects, which preclude characterization and understanding of treatment effect heterogeneities and the factors influencing it. Methods Here, we developed a causal inference framework using distributional synthetic controls to explicitly account for spatio-temporal trap-level mosquito abundance data to ascertain the entomological efficacy of Wolbachia in suppressing Ae. aegypti abundance. This method is able to construct counterfactual distributions of intervened areas, provide detailed comparisons to actual distributions and quantify treatment effects of the intervention on mosquito abundance over different quantiles. By employing our framework to trap-level mosquito abundance data from 57,990 unique mosquito traps routinely maintained and measured twice a week, and a large-scale field trial of Wolbachia incompatible-insect technique coupled with sterile insect technique (IIT-SIT) in Singapore, we (1) quantified heterogeneous treatment effects for IIT-SIT across the time-since-intervention, over the traps’ historical mosquito abundance, over calendar time, (2) quantified whether elimination of wild-type Aedes aegypti was possible in intervention locations and (3) addressed if suppressive effects in spillover locations adjacent to directly intervened locations were heterogeneous. Results IIT-SIT interventions led to a strong suppressive effect on adult Aedes aegypti abundance. From the onset of intervention in directly treated locations, sector-specific intervention effectiveness (IE) ranged from 24.04% in the earliest treatment period, and reached 86.08% in the latest treatment period. Raw reductions in aegypti abundance were also found to increase over time as sectors were intervened over longer time periods. In spillover sectors, IE was lower in magnitude and more variable, but average IE reached a maximum of 78.08% in 2-years post-treatment. Wolbachia interventions also led to an increase in the percentage of traps recording no mosquitoes from 6.8% at the start of intervention to 33.01% 124-weeks post-intervention. We found that IE was higher in sectors with lower historical mosquito abundance. However, IE converged across sectors with different historical mosquito abundance as intervention time increased. Conclusion This study revealed spatial heterogeneities in suppressing wild-type female Ae. aegypti by IIT-SIT and provided strong evidence that IIT-SIT can drastically suppress wild-type Ae. aegypti populations despite heterogeneous treatment effects over time.

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