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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Large-Scale OD Matrix Estimation with A Deep Learning Method

arXiv:2310.05753v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The estimation of origin-destination (OD) matrices is a crucial aspect of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). It involves adjusting an initial OD matrix by regressing the current observations like traffic counts of road sections (e.g., using least squares). However, the OD estimation problem lacks sufficient constraints and is mathematically underdetermined. To alleviate this problem, some researchers incorporate a prior OD matrix as a target in the regression to provide more structural constraints. However, this approach is highly dependent on the existing prior matrix, which may be outdated. Others add structural constraints through sensor data, such as vehicle trajectory and speed, which can reflect more current structural constraints in real-time. Our proposed method integrates deep learning and numerical optimization algorithms to infer matrix structure and guide numerical optimization. This approach combines the advantages of both deep learning and numerical optimization algorithms. The neural network(NN) learns to infer structural constraints from probe traffic flows, eliminating dependence on prior information and providing real-time performance. Additionally, due to the generalization capability of NN, this method is economical in engineering. We conducted tests to demonstrate the good generalization performance of our method on a large-scale synthetic dataset. Subsequently, we verified the stability of our method on real traffic data. Our experiments provided confirmation of the benefits of combining NN and numerical optimization.

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

Lung-SRAD: Spectral-Aware Regularized Audio DASS with Dual-Axis Patch-Mix Contrastive Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent respiratory sound classification (RSC) studies largely rely on CLS-token driven self-attention architectures such as the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST). While effective at modeling global context, recent analyses suggest a low-pass filtering behavior that may reduce sensitivity to localized abnormal patterns. In this work, we investigate State Space Models (SSMs) as an alternative backbone for RSC. Using the Distilled Audio State Space model, we analyze intermediate representations through spectral response curves and observe stronger preservation of mid-to-high spatial-frequency components. Based on these observations, we introduce spectral-aware layer regularization using Gaussian convolution applied to selected layers. We further propose Dual-Axis Patch-Mix contrastive learning tailored to SSM-based audio models for robust representation learning. Experiments on the ICBHI benchmark show that our approach achieves 64.48% score, outperforming the AST baseline by 5%. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/Lung-SRAD.

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

MemBoost: A Memory-Boosted Framework for Cost-Aware LLM Inference

Large Language Models (LLMs) deliver strong performance but incur high inference cost in real-world services, especially under workloads with repeated or near-duplicate queries across users and sessions. In this work, we propose MemBoost, a memory-boosted LLM serving framework that enables a lightweight model to reuse previously generated answers and retrieve relevant supporting information for cheap inference, while selectively escalating difficult or uncertain queries to a stronger model. Unlike standard retrieval-augmented generation, which primarily grounds a single response, MemBoost is designed for interactive settings by supporting answer reuse, continual memory growth, and cost-aware routing. Experiments across multiple models under simulated workloads show that MemBoost substantially reduces expensive large-model invocations and overall inference cost, while maintaining high answer quality comparable to the strong model baseline.

04.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Benchmarking gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent representations

Single-cell transcriptomics is typically modeled in low-dimensional latent representations that improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the data. Such representations underpin data integration, cell state discovery, and perturbation prediction, with applications ranging from large-scale organ atlases to latent trajectory modeling. Recent virtual cell approaches further leverage these representations to predict cellular responses as distributional shifts in latent space. Each of these applications ultimately requires faithful gene expression reconstruction from latent spaces for biological interpretation, enabling gene-level analysis of predicted perturbed or batch-corrected cells. Yet representation choice is typically treated as an implementation detail rather than a primary modeling decision, with no systematic evaluation of how well latent representations support gene expression reconstruction. Here, we introduce ReconEval, a benchmark for evaluating gene expression reconstruction from single-cell latent spaces. We benchmark two classes of latent representations: end-to-end trained models such as PCA, autoencoders, and variational autoencoders, and pretrained single-cell foundation model embeddings coupled to newly trained decoders. Reconstruction is evaluated both directly and after latent-space perturbation prediction. Across perturbational and observational datasets totaling over 100 million cells, our metric suite quantifies statistical fidelity; biological signal preservation, including differential expression, coexpression, cell-cycle structure, cytokine response and pathway activity; and perturbation-specific effects. We find that autoencoders achieve the strongest stand-alone reconstruction at low dimensionality, while variational regularization does not improve generalization in reconstruction. Frozen foundation model embeddings retain recoverable gene-level information, with reconstruction quality depending strongly on decoder architecture and pretraining objective. In latent perturbation modeling, high-dimensional PCA matches foundation model embeddings, while low-dimensional AE embeddings are optimal for flow-based generative models. Overall, reconstruction depends critically on the interplay between representation and downstream model, and simpler representations can outperform complex alternatives given appropriate capacity. Our benchmark establishes reconstruction as a critical evaluation axis for single-cell foundation models. We envision it improving the biological interpretability of latent-space modeling, a prerequisite for future virtual cell models to be validated by domain experts and grounded in biology.

05.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Sharp connectivity bounds for the vacant set of random interlacements

arXiv:2504.02777v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements at intensity $u$ in dimensions three and higher, and derive lower bounds on the truncated two-point function for all values of $u>0$. These bounds are sharp up to principal exponential order for all $u$ in dimension three and all $u \neq u_\ast$ in higher dimensions, where $u_*$ refers to the critical parameter of the model, and they match the upper bounds derived in the article arXiv:2503.14497. In dimension three, our results further imply that the truncated two-point function grows at large distances $x$ at a rate that depends on $x$ only through its Euclidean norm, which offers a glimpse of the expected (Euclidean) invariance of the scaling limit at criticality. The rate function is atypical, it incurs a logarithmic correction and comes with an explicit pre-factor that converges to $0$ as the parameter $u$ approaches the critical point $u_*$ from either side. A particular challenge stems from the combined effects of lack of monotonicity due to the truncation in the super-critical phase, and the precise (rotationally invariant) controls we seek, that measure the effects of a certain "harmonic humpback" function. Among others, their derivation relies on rather fine estimates for hitting probabilities of the random walk in arbitrary direction $e$, which witness this invariance at the discrete level, and preclude straightforward applications of projection arguments.

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

Multi-Token Residual Prediction

arXiv:2605.18817v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) generate text by iteratively denoising masked token sequences, offering a tradeoff between parallelism and quality compared to autoregressive models. In current practice, the number of tokens decoded per step is controlled by a confidence threshold, and quality degrades monotonically as more tokens are denoised per step. We introduce Multi-token Residual Prediction (MRP), a lightweight module that enables dependency-aware multi-token denoising within a single backbone forward pass. MRP exploits a key property of the denoising process: the logit distributions at adjacent denoising steps are remarkably similar. Rather than running the backbone a second time to obtain the next-step logits, MRP predicts the residual between steps from the backbone's hidden states, effectively denoising more tokens per backbone forward at a fraction of the cost. We apply MRP across the two operating regimes of DLM decoding. In the high-quality-low-throughput static denoising regime, MRP serves as a drafter for speculative decoding: its proposals are verified against the backbone, yielding lossless acceleration of up to 1.4x in SGLang. In the low-quality-high-throughput dynamic denoising regime, MRP instead drives a remasking scheme that revokes over-eager reveals, recovering most of the accuracy lost to aggressive low-threshold decoding and improving accuracy by up to 22.6 points on code generation task HumanEval and 17.7 points on reasoning task GSM8K.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Pre-AF 13: An Interpretable Atrial Fibrillation Risk Score Mined from Discharge Reports

Background. Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most prevalent cardiac arrhythmia and a major determinant of prognosis. Established AF risk scores rely on factors (older age, hypertension) nearly ubiquitous among patients with cardiovascular disease (CVD), offering limited stratification in this high-risk group. Most target long-term (5-10 year) rather than medium-term prediction. We developed interpretable ML models predicting AF risk over a 24-month and entire follow-up horizon in CVD patients using routinely collected hospital data. Methods. Single-center retrospective study of electronic health records from the National Research Cardiology Center (Russia) for patients aged >=18 with CVD but without pre-existing AF, hospitalized more than once between January 2012 and May 2019. A custom NLP pipeline transformed unstructured discharge reports into 73 structured features, combining a rule-based parser with transformer-based NER. Using LightAutoML we built a full model (73 features), a simple model (reduced subset), and a linear model for a bedside risk score. Performance was assessed by ROC AUC, compared with CHARGE-AF, C2HEST, MHS, and HAVOC, and interpreted via SHAP. Results. Of 80,576 records from 45,000 patients, 17,562 met inclusion criteria; 1,438 (8.19%) developed AF. The full model reached ROC AUC 0.735 (24-month) and 0.696 (entire follow-up); the simple model was nearly identical (0.725, 0.696). All non-linear models outperformed the four clinical risk scores (ROC AUC 0.53-0.64). The simple model uses 13 features and is named Pre-AF 13. SHAP identified age and left atrial volume as dominant predictors. A linear risk score (Pre-AF 9) stratified observed 24-month AF incidence from ~7% to 36%. Conclusion. Interpretable ML models built from routinely collected EHR data identify high-AF-risk CVD patients, outperforming established clinical risk scores.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

TextHOI-3D: Text-to-3D Hand-Object Interaction via Discrete Multi-View Generation and Joint Mesh Optimization

Text-conditioned 3D generation has progressed rapidly for images and isolated objects, but producing a hand-object mesh remains challenging: the output must preserve language semantics, cross-view consistency, object geometry, articulated hand shape, and physically plausible contact. We present TextHOI-3D, a staged framework that uses generated multi-view observations as an explicit interface between text-conditioned visual generation and geometry-aware hand-object recovery. TextHOI-3D learns a compact VQ token space for fixed-camera hand-object observations, predicts multi-view visual tokens from text with a CLIP-conditioned visual autoregressive model, and recovers a unified hand-object mesh through prior initialization, multi-view joint optimization, and anti-penetration refinement. The design separates semantic generation from geometric recovery while keeping both stages connected by a discrete multi-view representation. On HO3D-derived evaluations, the multi-view setting reduces object CD from 17.26 mm to 4.92 mm and penetration volume from 5.3721 cm^3 to 0.2193 cm^3 compared with a single-view counterpart, while improving hand errors and surface F-scores. These results support multi-view visual tokens as an effective intermediate representation for text-driven 3D hand-object mesh creation.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Stab-QRAM: A Clifford-Only Quantum Oracle for Affine Boolean Data

arXiv:2509.26494v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Oracle-based quantum algorithms require coherent evaluation of classical functions on superposed inputs, and in fault-tolerant architectures this cost is dominated by non-Clifford gates: generic lookup constructions incur $T$-counts that grow with the data size. Here we show that affine Boolean functions $f(\mathbf{x})=A\mathbf{x}+\mathbf{b}$ over $\mathbb{F}_2$ – the algebraic core of parity checks, linear feedback shift registers, and cipher linear layers – are exactly the functions admitting computational-basis-preserving Clifford oracles, and we develop this correspondence into Stab-QRAM, a compiler mapping a specification $(A,\mathbf{b})$ to an ancilla-free circuit of CNOT and $X$ gates with zero $T$-count. Via K\"{o}nig's edge-coloring theorem, the compiled schedule provably attains the minimum depth for its gate set. Case studies spanning Simon-type oracles, block-encodings of $X$-type coset operators, and syndrome extraction for CSS codes show one compiler serving the algorithm, primitive, and error-correction layers of the quantum stack.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Frontier: Towards Comprehensive and Accurate LLM Inference Simulation

arXiv:2605.21312v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern LLM serving is no longer homogeneous or monolithic. Production systems now combine disaggregated execution, complex parallelism, runtime optimizations, and stateful workloads such as reasoning, agents, and RL rollouts. Simulation is attractive for exploring this growing design space, yet existing simulators lack the architectural completeness and decision-grade fidelity it demands. Their monolithic-replica abstractions are ill-suited to disaggregated serving, while average-case analytical proxies can distort SLA predictions and even reverse optimization conclusions. We present Frontier, a discrete-event simulator for modern LLM inference serving. Frontier features a disaggregated abstraction. It captures the structure and dynamics of modern serving systems by modeling co-location, Prefill-Decode Disaggregation (PDD), and Attention-FFN Disaggregation (AFD) with role-specific cluster workers, incorporating key runtime optimizations (e.g., CUDA Graphs, speculative decoding) within the scheduler-batch-engine loop, and supporting stateful requests for emerging workloads. It further provides accurate and generalizable predictions of computation, communication, and memory costs across diverse serving scenarios with complex workload compositions. On 16-H800 GPU testbed, Frontier achieves an average throughput error below 4%. Compared with state-of-the-art simulators, it reduces end-to-end latency error from 44.9% to 6.4% under co-location and from 51.7% to 2.6% under disaggregation. It scales to over 1K GPUs on commodity CPUs and enables new use cases such as SLA-dependent Pareto frontier exploration, heterogeneous disaggregated allocation, agentic reasoning scheduling validation, and RL post-training reconfiguration. We release Frontier at https://github.com/NetX-lab/Frontier.

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

SAGE: Scalable AI Governance & Evaluation

arXiv:2602.07840v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating relevance in large-scale search systems is fundamentally constrained by the governance gap between nuanced, resource-constrained human oversight and the high-throughput requirements of production systems. While traditional approaches rely on engagement proxies or sparse manual review, these methods often fail to capture the full scope of high-impact relevance failures. We present SAGE (Scalable AI Governance \& Evaluation), a framework that operationalizes high-quality human product judgment as a scalable evaluation signal. At the core of SAGE is a bidirectional calibration loop where natural-language Policy, curated Precedent, and an LLM Surrogate Judge co-evolve. SAGE systematically resolves semantic ambiguities and misalignments, transforming subjective relevance judgment into an executable, multi-dimensional rubric with near human-level agreement. To bridge the gap between frontier model reasoning and industrial-scale inference, we apply teacher-student distillation to transfer high-fidelity judgments into compact student surrogates at 92$\times$ lower cost. Deployed within LinkedIn Search ecosystems, SAGE guided model iteration through simulation-driven development, distilling policy-aligned models for online serving and enabling rapid offline evaluation. In production, it powered policy oversight that measured ramped model variants and detected regressions invisible to engagement metrics. Collectively, these drove a 0.25\% lift in LinkedIn daily active users.

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

MOSAIC: Modality-Specific Adaptation for Incremental Continual Learning in Parkinson's Disease Gait Assessment

arXiv:2606.13258v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Gait-based Parkinson's disease assessment increasingly relies on heterogeneous sensors, but clinical systems rarely collect all modalities simultaneously. New sensors may arrive through device upgrades, protocol changes, or multi-center deployment, while historical patient data are often unavailable because of privacy and storage constraints. This modality-incremental setting faces three challenges: unreliable cross-modal distillation, modality-specific statistical shifts, and reduced plasticity after preservation. We propose MOSAIC, a compact continual learning framework. First, we identify the Toxic Teacher phenomenon and introduce Modality-Specific Warm-Up to stabilize newly learned modality representations before distillation. Second, we propose a statistics-decoupled MSBN architecture that isolates sensor statistics while maintaining a shared semantic backbone. Third, we design a curriculum-guided repulsive objective for Plasticity Recovery, preserving legacy knowledge while recovering modality-specific capacity. Experiments on three multimodal Parkinson's gait datasets show that MOSAIC improves final performance and mitigates forgetting. Project code is available at: https://github.com/minlinzeng/MOSAIC_Modality-Specific-Adaptation-for-Incremental-Continual-Learning-in-PD-Gait-Assessment.git

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

NavWAM: A Navigation World Action Model for Goal-Conditioned Visual Navigation

Goal-conditioned visual navigation requires a robot to act under partial observability by anticipating how its motion will change the future egocentric view and whether that change brings it closer to the goal. Navigation world models provide such visual foresight, but they remain prediction modules that require an external planner to convert predicted futures into closed-loop control. We propose Navigation World Action Model (NavWAM), a diffusion-transformer policy that turns navigation world-model prediction into executable action by representing future observations, goal-progress values, and action chunks in a shared latent sequence. By learning future prediction jointly with the action and value targets that determine closed-loop behavior, NavWAM makes visual foresight directly usable for robot control. We build NavWAM through simulation pretraining and real-robot adaptation, and evaluate it on image-goal navigation against planning-based world models and a representative direct navigation policy. Across offline benchmarks and closed-loop real-robot deployment, NavWAM improves over planning-based world-model baselines in our evaluations while using the default policy mode without CEM-style action search. Project page: https://dachii-azm.github.io/navwam/

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

TWLA: Achieving Ternary Weights and Low-Bit Activations for LLMs via Post-Training Quantization

arXiv:2606.13054v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit exceptional general language processing capabilities, but their memory and compute costs hinder deployment. Ternarization has emerged as a promising compression technique, offering significant reductions in model size and inference complexity. However, existing methods struggle with heavy-tailed activation distributions and therefore keep activations in high precision, fundamentally limiting end-to-end inference acceleration. To overcome this limitation, we propose TWLA, a post-training quantization (PTQ) framework that achieves 1.58-bit weight compression and 4-bit activation quantization while maintaining high accuracy. TWLA comprises three components: (1) Euclidean-to-Manifold Asymmetric Ternary Quantizer (E2M-ATQ) minimizes layer-output error under weight ternarization via a two-stage optimization from Euclidean initialization to manifold relocation; (2) Kronecker Orthogonal Tri-Modal Shaping (KOTMS) applies a Kronecker-structured orthogonal rotation to reshape weights into ternary-friendly tri-modal distributions, while the shared rotation statistically suppresses activation outliers; and (3) Inter-Layer Aware Activation Mixed Precision (ILA-AMP) explicitly introduces adjacent-layer second-order interaction costs in bit allocation and jointly optimizes for the layer-wise disparity of activation quantization gains induced by the shared orthogonal transform, preventing cascades triggered by a few weak layers. Extensive experiments demonstrate that TWLA maintains high accuracy under W1.58A4, while delivering significant inference acceleration. The code is available at .

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Development of an Open-Access Action Observation Video Library for Upper Limb Motor Rehabilitation

Background: Occupational therapists can improve stroke survivors hand and arm movement and participation in daily activities through action observation (AO). AO involves watching another persons hand or arm complete a movement or task. While research generally supports the use of AO with stroke survivors, there are limited AO videos are available to occupational therapists which makes applying AO challenging. Objective: The purpose of this work is to develop structured and widely accessible tool to support access to AO for stroke survivors, occupational therapists, and researchers. Methods: To develop an AO video library for stroke rehabilitation, functional and non-functional upper limb task deficits were first identified through clinical observations and clinician interviews to establish a prioritized list of daily activities. In collaboration with media production specialists, healthy adult volunteers were recruited and filmed performing these tasks from both first- and third-person perspectives. The recorded videos were then systematically edited, enhanced with instructional title slides, and distributed via a public YouTube channel for clinical application and a categorized digital repository for research purposes. Results: Initial assessments revealed a complete lack of familiarity, awareness, and utilization of AO resources among local occupational therapists, despite high perceived clinical utility. To address this gap, a final library of 150 tasks was established, resulting in the production of 419 finalized, standardized videos featuring six healthy volunteers. For clinical application, these videos were hosted on a free, public YouTube channel organized into 18 functional playlists, while a parallel set was structured into distinct movement categories for research repository storage. Conclusion: By providing a structured and highly accessible tool, this repository enables clinicians, researchers, and caregivers to readily implement evidence-based action observation interventions in both clinical and home settings.

16.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

In situ nanocrystal confinement for efficient blue perovskite LEDs

Authors:

Metal halide perovskites have emerged as promising semiconductors for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) owing to their excellent luminescence properties1. However, their performance remains limited, primarily owing to the inherent contradiction between ‘high crystallinity’ and ‘small size’ in the in situ synthesis of perovskite nanocrystals on substrates. Here we report efficient blue perovskite LEDs (PeLEDs) achieved via in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement to synthesize perovskite films composed of high-quality nanocrystals. The in situ-formed polymer network imposes nanoscale spatial constraints during perovskite nanocrystal growth, enabling nanocrystals with small sizes and a high photoluminescence quantum yield of 83%. Furthermore, polymerizable monomers with sufficient coordination sites allow a prolonged lattice rearrangement of perovskite clusters, promoting the crystallinity of the nanocrystals. The synthesized perovskite nanocrystals are utilized in the fabrication of PeLEDs, resulting in an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% at 491 nm, which is among the highest performances in blue PeLEDs. This work simultaneously controls the thermal dynamics of perovskite crystallization and organic ligand reactions, which helps to advance understanding of the effect of ligand engineering on nanocrystal synthesis, benefiting the development of efficient PeLEDs and other optoelectronic technologies. Efficient blue perovskite light-emitting diodes with an external quantum efficiency of 21.8% are achieved through in situ polymerization-driven nanocrystal confinement.

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

Concrete Subspace Learning based Interference Elimination for Multi-task Model Fusion

arXiv:2312.06173v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Merging models fine-tuned from a common, extensively pre-trained large model but specialized for different tasks has been demonstrated as a cheap and scalable strategy to construct a multi-task model that performs well across diverse tasks. Recent research, exemplified by task arithmetic, highlights that this multi-task model can be derived through arithmetic operations on task vectors. Nevertheless, current merging techniques frequently resolve potential conflicts among parameters from task-specific models by evaluating individual attributes, such as the parameters' magnitude or sign, overlooking their collective impact on the overall functionality of the model. In this work, we propose the CONtinuous relaxation of disCRETE (Concrete) subspace learning method to identify a common low-dimensional subspace and utilize its shared information to track the interference problem without sacrificing much performance. Specifically, we model the problem as a bi-level optimization problem and introduce a meta-learning framework to find the Concrete subspace mask through gradient-based techniques. At the upper level, we focus on learning a shared Concrete mask to identify the subspace, while at the inner level, model merging is performed to maximize the performance of the merged model. We conduct extensive experiments on both vision domain and language domain, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code is available at https://github.com/tanganke/subspace_fusion

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Sex-specific multimorbidity clusters and all-cause mortality in relatively healthy older adults: findings from the ASPREE cohort

Background: Multimorbidity is common in older adults, but sex differences in chronic condition clustering remain unclear. This study explored multimorbidity clusters and their associations with all-cause mortality among community-dwelling adults aged 70 years and over. Methods: This was a secondary analysis of data from 16,095 Australian ASPREE participants aged at least 70 years without prior dementia or cardiovascular disease. Fifteen baseline chronic conditions were grouped using latent class analysis (LCA). Observed-to-expected (O/E) ratios characterised conditions over-represented within clusters, and Cox proportional hazards models assessed associations with all-cause mortality. Results: Among 16,095 participants (mean age 74 years), 88.3% had multimorbidity at baseline; 4,217 deaths occurred over a median follow-up of 10.85 years. Five clusters were identified overall: hypertension and dyslipidemia (52.1%), gout and metabolic (14.4%), depressive symptoms, osteoporosis and frailty (10.0%), anaemia and kidney disease (10.2%), and hypotension, thyroid disorder and past cancer (13.3%). Sex-stratified analyses revealed three clusters in males and four in females. The frailty, depressive symptoms and osteoporosis cluster was associated with higher mortality in both sexes (aHR 1.56 [95% CI 1.40-1.73] in males; 1.68 [1.49-1.89] in females). Higher mortality was also observed for the metabolic, gout and kidney disease cluster in males (aHR 1.63 [1.47-1.81]) and the gout, anaemia and kidney disease cluster in females (aHR 1.96 [1.74-2.21]). Conclusions: Distinct multimorbidity clusters differed by sex and were associated with increased all-cause mortality. These findings may support risk stratification, targeted screening, and more person-centred management of older adults with multimorbidity.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Generalized Sinkhorn Algorithm for Mean-Field Schrödinger Bridge

arXiv:2604.06531v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The mean-field Schrödinger bridge (MFSB) problem concerns designing a minimum-effort controller that guides a diffusion process with nonlocal interaction to reach a given distribution from another by a fixed deadline. Unlike the standard Schrödinger bridge, the dynamical constraint for MFSB is the mean-field limit of a population of interacting agents with controls. It serves as a natural model for large-scale multi-agent systems. The MFSB is computationally challenging because the nonlocal interaction makes the problem nonconvex. We propose a generalization of the Hopf-Cole transform for MFSB and, building on it, design a Sinkhorn-type recursive algorithm to solve the associated system of integro-PDEs. Under mild assumptions on the interaction potential, we discuss convergence guarantees for the proposed algorithm. We present numerical examples with repulsive and attractive interactions to illustrate the theoretical contributions.

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

Self-CTRL: Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users. This paper describes Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning (Self-CTRL), a method that optimizes for consistency between a LM's self-explanations and behavior on related inputs by updating explanations to better predict behavior or updating behavior to better match explanations. We apply our method in two domains. First, we study a formal probabilistic reasoning task in which LMs must learn to imitate a family of biased samplers and evaluated on their ability to report the associated biases. We find that consistency training improves the correlation between self-reported and behaviorally-measured latent biases from $R^2=0.24$ to $R^2=0.64$ on a set of held-out distributions, matching the generalization of direct ground-truth supervision. Second, we study a constitutional AI domain in which LMs must describe when they will refuse or comply with user requests. Here, Self-CTRL produces rules that faithfully describe the model's behavior on held-out requests, improving the refusal predictions of a third-party auditor model from $36\%$ to $92\%$. In the other direction, behavior updates improve alignment, reducing HarmBench failure rate from $15.0\%$ to $0.5\%$ without substantially increasing refusal on harmless prompts. By aligning explanations and behavior, our work provides a general recipe for training AI models to be safer, more transparent, and more controllable.

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

Provably Efficient Regularized Online RLHF with Generalized Bilinear Preferences

arXiv:2602.23116v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We consider the problem of regularized best-response max-regret minimization in online RLHF under general preferences and bandit feedback. While various regularizers are utilized to robustify alignment, known polylogarithmic regret guarantees remain heavily specific to KL. To investigate whether such fast rates extend beyond KL, we adopt the Generalized Bilinear Preference Model (GBPM) – capturing intransitive preferences over $d$-dimensional item-wise features via a rank-$2r$ skew-symmetric matrix – to isolate the impact of generic regularization. Crucially, under GBPM, we prove that the dual gap of any greedy policy is bounded by the squared estimation error, derived using only strong convexity and skew-symmetry. Under a feature coverage assumption, we establish a generic polylogarithmic regret of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(\eta d^4 C_{\min}^{-1} (\log T)^2 \wedge d^2 C_{\min}^{-1/2} \sqrt{T})$ with Greedy Sampling, and a dimension-wise improved regret (for well-conditioned arm-sets) of $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}(C_{\min}^{-2} \sqrt{\eta r T} \wedge r^{1/3} C_{\min}^{-4/3} T^{2/3})$ with Explore-Then-Commit, where $\eta^{-1}$ is the regularization coefficient, $T$ is the time horizon, and $C_{\min}$ is an arm-set dependent quantity. This demonstrates that ``fast'' regrets are not KL-specific, but rather a fundamental consequence of generic strongly convex geometry.

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

SING: Synthetic Intention Graph for Scalable Active Tool Discovery in LLM Agents

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on agent harnesses that manage context, tools, and multi-turn execution, making tools a central interface for acting in realistic digital environments. As harness-connected tool ecosystems expand to hundreds or thousands of APIs, services, and task-specific skills, exhaustive tool schema injection becomes costly and imposes a closed-world assumption that limits agents to a predefined static inventory. Retrieval-augmented tool selection offers a natural alternative, but existing one-shot retrieval methods often fail to align isolated tool descriptions with the agent's true task intention, especially in long-horizon tasks where required capabilities emerge through decomposition, observations, and newly induced subgoals. We propose SING, an intention-aware active tool discovery framework that builds an intention-tool graph linking user intentions, tool capabilities, and tool collaboration patterns, and dynamically retrieves tools according to evolving task states. Using a unified corpus of 7,471 tools, we evaluate SING on three real-world tool-use benchmarks. SING improves Global Recall@5 by up to 59.8% and downstream success rate by up to 28.9% over baselines, while reducing full-corpus tool-schema exposure by 99.8%, demonstrating that intention-aware graph structure enables more accurate and context-efficient tool discovery in large-scale agentic ecosystems.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Beyond Third-Person Audits: Situated Interaction Auditing for User-Centered LLM Bias Research

Research on bias in large language models (LLMs) has predominantly focused on third-person audits, which study how models represent or evaluate demographic groups as external subjects. However, this paradigm overlooks a structural blind spot because the user is absent from the audit. In practice, LLMs are used in open-ended, personal interactions, during which the model implicitly represents the user and adjusts its responses accordingly. When identical requests yield different responses depending on who is asking, bias manifests not in how the model describes others but in how it treats its interlocutor. We propose Situated Interaction Auditing (SIA), a user-centered framework for studying how user profile signals – implicit sociodemographic markers, writing style, and stated identity – systematically shape LLM response quality, content, and tone. We demonstrate the framework through a case study that intersects gender and socioeconomic status signals across multiple task domains and outline a research agenda for SIA as a new mission for natural language processing.

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

Thinking with Visual Grounding

arXiv:2606.16122v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual thinking should not only sound right; it should show its evidence. While recent vision-language models (VLMs) can produce natural-language reasoning traces, these traces often leave the supporting image regions implicit, making them hard to verify and difficult to supervise. We introduce visually grounded thinking, a reasoning process in which models interleave natural-language thoughts with explicit point or box groundings of the visual evidence used at each step. This lets the model express intermediate reasoning in language while grounding key objects in the image regions they refer to. To train this behavior, we construct a scalable synthesis pipeline that distills correct visual reasoning traces, extracts the visual objects required by the traces, grounds them with a SAM3-based agent, and derives aligned point and box supervision from the resulting masks. We further propose grounding-aware reinforcement learning, which combines answer correctness rewards with dense grounding rewards that score whether generated object references match the correct image evidence. Across two counting benchmarks and four spatial reasoning benchmarks, adding visually grounded thinking to Gemma3-4B-IT consistently improves performance over the original model and the non-grounded thinking baseline. On spatial reasoning, the visually grounded thinking 4B models match, and in some cases surpass, Gemma3-27B-IT from the same model family. Our analysis shows that point grounding is well suited to counting, while box grounding benefits most from explicit grounding rewards on spatial tasks. Overall, our results show that VLMs think better when their intermediate thoughts are tied to the image regions that make them true.

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medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Food Colorings in Child-Targeted Ultra-Processed Foods in Brazil: Market Prevalence and Parental Perceptions

Child-targeted marketing on packaged foods can shape children's food preferences and parents' purchasing decisions, yet many products with child-targeted marketing are ultra-processed foods (UPFs) and contain cosmetic additives such as food colorings, which have raised concerns about adverse effects on children's health and behavior. This mixed-methods study examined the prevalence of food colorings in child-directed UPFs and explored parents' perceptions and knowledge of these additives in beverages commonly consumed by children. Quantitative data were obtained from the Mintel Global New Products Database to identify child-directed products launched in Brazil between 2018 and 2021, measured as having at least one child-targeted marketing strategy in the food package, and whether they contained food colorings. Qualitative data came from seven focus groups with parents of children aged 2-5 and 6-11 years in Brazil, alongside a brief survey assessing participants' ability to identify food colorings on product labels. Among 5,078 UPFs launched during the study period, 23.0% contained child-targeted marketing, and 40.3% of these had food colorings. The highest prevalence was observed in carbonated beverages, candies, and ice creams, in which more than half of products contained food colorings. Parents generally understood that food colorings are used to make products more attractive to children and associated them with potential health risks, but reported difficulties avoiding them. These findings highlight the widespread presence of food colorings in child-targeted UPFs in Brazil and underscore the need for stronger regulatory measures to restrict the use of food colorings and improve labelling on food packages.