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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

GENIE: A Fine-Grained Measure for Novelty

Large Language Models have consistently demonstrated a lack of creativity and diversity across tasks. Prior work has focused on addressing whether models are capable of generating creative outputs. Here, we aim to consider novelty and investigate what makes model-generated content novel or not novel in a task-specific manner. We propose a fine-grained evaluation metric GENIE to measure the novelty of responses along task-specific features with respect to a population of responses. We show that unlike GENIE, holistic metrics struggle to capture the high-dimensionality of novelty and do not provide insight on which properties they target. Finally, we use GENIE to measure the effectiveness of mitigation methods that address creativity to better understand where these methods can improve novelty.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Stream3D: Sequential Multi-View 3D Generation via Evidential Memory

View-conditioned 3D generators such as SAM 3D, TRELLIS, and Hunyuan3D produce high-quality object reconstructions from a single view, but real-world visual observation often arrives as long monocular streams. Naively applying these generators to each streaming frame independently leads to severe temporal inconsistency in the generated results. To address this problem, we propose Stream3D, the first training-free streaming mechanism that turns a frozen view-conditioned 3D generator into a streaming generator with constant cross-chunk memory. Stream3D achieves this by maintaining a compact evidential memory, which selectively caches the most informative historical frames based on a proposed evidence score mechanism. As the stream progresses, the memory dynamically updates to retain a fixed number of informative frames, preventing the memory footprint from growing linearly with sequence length. This also prevents degradation over long sequences and keeps the underlying generator completely unchanged without retraining, architectural modifications, or auxiliary losses. Evaluated on both realistic and synthetic streaming benchmarks, Stream3D outperforms latent-transport baselines, including KV-cache reuse and flow-based feature editing, across both photometric and geometric metrics. More details can be found at: https://stream-3d.github.io/stream3d.github.io/.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Reframing AI Loss of Control: What It Is, How to Have It, How to Lose It

arXiv:2606.12442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: At present, loss of control risks have gained much prominence in public discussion, particularly in relation to AI, with extensive discourse present among academics, frontier labs, and even governments. However, in the existing literature, the concept seems to rest on surprisingly weak foundations, where even those that discuss loss of control extensively do not first establish what control is and what exactly is being lost. Our paper aims to address these gaps. We establish a working definition of control by anchoring it to the "setting and getting of goals". Then, we discuss various aspects of control, built on foundational concepts from related fields like cybernetics, management control, and control theory. This includes who (or what) can be in control, and the things they require to be in control, such as the ability to set goals, having a functional control loop, having requisite variety, and having sufficient goal alignment. Once a framework for control is established, we then discuss how control can be lost, how AIs can contribute to such loss of control, and offer relevant recommendations for how one can maintain control. One interesting consequence of our work is that humanity, as individuals and as groups, can lose varying degrees of control as a result of AI behaviour that is far below the level of superintelligence; the potential for loss of control scenarios (as we define them) already exist, and have existed for a long time.

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

From Construction to Injection: Edit-Based Fingerprints for Large Language Models

Reliable model fingerprints are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs) against unauthorized redistribution and commercial misuse. In black-box deployment, verification is hindered by defensive filtering of suspected fingerprint queries, as well as by downstream model modifications that may weaken embedded ownership evidence. These risks require fingerprints to be robust in both construction and injection. For construction, prior paradigms face an imperceptibility trade-off: natural-language fingerprints may be accidentally activated, whereas garbled fingerprints are statistically exposed and easier to filter. For injection, existing methods struggle to preserve persistent trigger–target behaviors under model modification. We propose an end-to-end injected fingerprinting framework to address these challenges. Code-mixing Fingerprints (CF) use lowest-perplexity code-mixing under a high-complexity constraint to mitigate this two-sided imperceptibility trade-off. Multi-Candidate Editing (MCEdit) constructs structurally redundant, margin-separated trigger–target mappings to enable graceful degradation under model modification. Extensive evaluations on imperceptibility, detectability, and harmlessness demonstrate robust ownership verification with negligible impact on utility.

05.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

A New Definition of Quantum Superposition

arXiv:2606.15607v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The usual description of the superposition of two (pure quantum) states is ambiguous, since the binary operation of summation in a Hilbert space does not pass down to the quotient projective space. Even though Dirac noted this as early as 1930, it is often asserted that the superposition is a binary operation acting on two states with a value that is a unique state. The goal for this note is to motivate a rigorous, geometrical definition of the superposition of states in the setting of complex projective space, which has been argued elsewhere to be the natural geometric phase space for quantum theory. The upshot is that the new definition of the superposition of two pure states, viewed as two distinct points in the projective space, is the unique (complex) line on which those two points lie. Finally, a comparison is given between superposition and expansion in an orthonormal basis.

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

Distilling Examples into Task Instructions: Enhanced In-Context Learning for Real-World B2B Conversations

In-context learning (ICL) is the standard method for low-resource classification, yet its efficacy in specialized domains remains largely unexplored. We address the challenge of classifying semantically complex, multi-party B2B conversations, where traditional ICL encounters significant limitations, especially as context length increases due to the concatenation of multiple few-shot examples. We introduce the \texttt{Call Playbook} dataset, featuring five classification tasks derived from real-world B2B conversations targeting core sales concepts. To bridge the gap between performance and practical utility, we propose novel knowledge extraction methods that distill verbose examples into compact, interpretable representations of structured classification criteria and precise task descriptions. Our approach achieves a 99\% reduction in token usage and improves macro-averaged AUC by up to 7\% over traditional ICL. Notably, it remains robust as context grows, unlike advanced token compression baselines which degrade by over 9 F1 points. Importantly, our framework enables direct refinement of classification logic, addressing critical needs for transparency, efficiency, and user interaction in real-world NLP applications.

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

Generalized Schrödinger Bridge on Graphs

arXiv:2602.04675v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Transportation on graphs is a fundamental challenge across many domains, where decisions must respect topological and operational constraints. Despite the need for actionable policies, existing graph-transport methods lack this expressivity. They rely on restrictive assumptions, fail to generalize across sparse topologies, and scale poorly with graph size and time horizon. To address these issues, we introduce Generalized Schrödinger Bridge on Graphs (GSBoG), a novel scalable data-driven framework for learning executable controlled continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) policies on arbitrary graphs under state cost augmented dynamics. Notably, GSBoG learns trajectory-level policies, avoiding dense global solvers and thereby enhancing scalability. This is achieved via a likelihood optimization approach, satisfying the endpoint marginals, while simultaneously optimizing intermediate behavior under state-dependent running costs. Extensive experimentation on challenging real-world graph topologies shows that GSBoG reliably learns accurate, topology-respecting policies while optimizing application-specific intermediate state costs, highlighting its broad applicability and paving new avenues for cost-aware dynamical transport on general graphs.

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

ChLogic: Evaluating Robustness of Logical Reasoning in Chinese Expressions

Large language models perform increasingly well on standardized logical reasoning benchmarks, but whether this ability remains robust beyond English is unclear. We introduce ChLogic, an English–Chinese aligned benchmark that tests whether models preserve logical reasoning performance when the same latent logical structure is expressed in English and diverse Chinese surface realizations. Built from formal logical templates, the benchmark contains three data sets: (i) the General aligned set, derived from 60 General Propositions across nine template families; (ii) the Difficult aligned set, derived from 40 Difficult Problems; and (iii) the Chinese-only set, covering 15 language-specific phenomenon types. Each aligned item pairs one English reference expression with five Chinese realizations. Experiments on Qwen3, Ministral, and GLM models reveal a persistent English–Chinese performance gap. Back-translation from standard Chinese into English often improves performance on the General aligned set, but produces mixed effects on the Difficult aligned set, where Qwen3-32B and GLM-5.1 perform worse after translation. These results indicate that Chinese surface realization, translation artifacts, and model-specific behavior jointly affect multilingual logical reasoning. Overall, ChLogic provides a useful stress test for the robustness of multilingual reasoning.

09.
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

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

LandslideAgent with Multimodal LandslideBench: A Domain-Rule-Augmented Agent for Autonomous Landslide Identification and Analysis

Intelligent landslide hazard interpretation is critical for disaster prevention, yet current paradigms struggle to simultaneously extract visual features and high-level geoscientific semantics, while general-purpose vision-language models (VLMs) suffer from perceptual limitations and domain hallucinations in complex geological scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose an instruction-driven agentic framework comprising three components. First, LandslideBench, a multimodal fine-grained dataset with seven subtype labels, high-resolution imagery, pixel-level masks, and high-quality textual descriptions, is constructed via multi-VLM cross-validation and interactive annotation. Then, LandslideVLM, a landslide-oriented VLM, is fine-tuned via LoRA on LandslideBench to enhance geological semantic understanding. Finally, LandslideAgent, a domain rule-enhanced agent taking LandslideVLM as its cognitive backbone, employs a dual-rule controller incorporating structured report metadata constraints and cross-validation identification constraints to regulate automated tool invocation. Experiments demonstrate that LandslideBench provides effective baselines across five mainstream models on fine-grained classification and semantic segmentation. LandslideVLM achieves accuracy improvements of 10.96%, 32.87%, and 15.91% on landslide discrimination, fine-grained classification, and semantic description quality, respectively. LandslideAgent further enables autonomous multi-source spatial data inference, realizing full-process intelligence for landslide identification and analysis.

11.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-17

Posterior-calibrated multimodal motor states reveal longitudinal and imaging-associated heterogeneity in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) motor heterogeneity is commonly summarized by hard subtype labels, although clinical states vary longitudinally, severity can dominate unsupervised structure, and model uncertainty is rarely calibrated. We developed a posterior and refit-stability calibrated multimodal motor state framework that assigns probabilistic MDS-UPDRS-III motor states, aggregates them at the patient level, separates global burden from residual tremor-axial profile, and tests whether imaging can recover the resulting posterior distribution. In 29,366 aligned PPMI motor-posterior visits spanning 4,773 participant identifiers, patient-level state families were stable on average (modal-family fraction 0.925; 95% CI 0.921 - 0.930), but 25.5% of patients transitioned state over follow-up (95% CI 24.1 - 26.7%). PD-only cohort definitions produced smaller denominators and are reported as sensitivity cohorts with rerun calibration and imaging-posterior checks. Severity and covariates explained substantial motor-domain variance, especially bradykinesia (rsecond=0.850), but residual profile modeling retained five active components across total-severity, principal-component, leave-one-domain, non-target-burden, and clinical-only severity axes. Refit-stability calibration with 250 patient-blocked bootstrap refits showed high nominal posterior confidence (0.989) but lower empirical label consistency (0.849), quantifying overconfidence rather than hiding it. Patient-held-out temporal modeling predicted future axial burden (best XGBoost rsecond=0.605) and future state transition (XGBoost AUC=0.830; 95% CI 0.822 - 0.837). DaTSCAN plus FreeSurfer ROI features predicted patient-level soft motor posterior vectors (RF jsd=0.209; 95% CI 0.199 - 0.220; macro-AUROC=0.692), while severity/demographic-adjusted imaging features further improved soft posterior recovery (jsd=0.188). BioFIND transfer reproduced clinically meaningful endpoint gradients after state assignment in 225 external patients, supporting external face validity rather than definitive transportability. These results support PD motor phenotypic states as calibrated, dynamic, clinically interpretable profiles with convergent imaging associations, not as definitive biological subtypes.

12.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Causal Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Context Saturation and Discourse-Marker Evidence

We address two persistent gaps in Emotion Recognition in Conversation: which modeling choices materially affect performance, and how recognition findings connect to interpretable discourse-level patterns. We study both through a systematic investigation on IEMOCAP with cross-dataset validation on MELD. For recognition, we run controlled ablations with 10 random seeds and paired significance tests with multiple-comparisons correction, yielding three findings. First, conversational context is the dominant factor, but performance saturates quickly: roughly 90% of the gain is captured within the most recent 10-30 preceding turns, depending on the label set. Second, hierarchical sentence representations help most in utterance-only settings and show a clear advantage on MELD, but their benefit disappears once turn-level context is available, suggesting that conversational history subsumes much of the intra-utterance structure. Third, integrating an external affective lexicon does not improve results, consistent with pretrained encoders already capturing most of the affective signal needed for ERC. Under a strictly causal setting, our simple models achieve strong performance (82.69% 4-way; 67.07% 6-way weighted F1), showing that competitive accuracy is achievable without future turns. For linguistic analysis, we examine 5,286 discourse-marker occurrences and find a reliable association between emotion and marker position (p < .0001). Sad utterances show reduced left-periphery marker usage (21.9%) relative to other emotions (28-32%), consistent with accounts linking left-periphery markers to active discourse management. This aligns with our recognition results, where Sad benefits most from conversational context (+22 percentage points), suggesting sadness may be more context-dependent than emotions with stronger local pragmatic cues.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

OPD-Evolver: Cultivating Holistic Agent Evolver via On-Policy Distillation

Memory has become a standard substrate for self-evolving agents, yet retaining experience is not the same as learning how to evolve through it. Existing memory agents can store trajectories, retrieve reflections, or accumulate skills, but often lack the holistic competence to select useful experience, act on it, write reusable knowledge, and maintain a growing repository. We introduce OPD-Evolver, a slow-fast co-evolution framework that cultivates such an agent evolver through on-policy self-distillation. In the fast loop, OPD-Evolver interacts with a four-level memory hierarchy to read, use, write, and maintain experience for rapid test-time evolution. In the slow loop, outcome-calibrated memory attribution and privileged hindsight distill these four abilities into the deployable policy. Across multi-domain benchmarks, OPD-Evolver surpasses memory systems such as ReasoningBank by up to 11.5%, and training-based methods such as Skill0 by ~5.8%. Further analysis shows that OPD-Evolver internalizes high-value experience and memory management, enabling OPD-Evolver-9B to challenge giant counterparts such as Qwen3.5-397B-A17B and Step-3.5-Flash, pointing beyond memory-augmented agents toward genuinely qualified agent evolvers.

14.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Human Intuition vs. Computational Precision: Neurologists, Feature-based Models, and Deep Learning for Stroke Prognosis

Background: Prognostication in large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke remains challenging. Although several prognostic models exist, their comparison to clinician performance, human-model interaction, and specific sources of human bias remain poorly understood. Methods: Using pre-treatment clinical and CT data from the MR CLEAN trial (n=500), six neurologists predicted three-month modified Rankin Scale (mRS) scores for 40 patients, both unaided and assisted by a validated feature-based model (MR PREDICTS). Human performance was benchmarked against MR PREDICTS and a multimodal, interpretable deep learning (DL) approach using raw imaging data. We explicitly assessed neurologists? ability to estimate model-required imaging features and identified systematic human biases. Models were additionally validated in a larger MR CLEAN trial cohort (n=404). Results: For predicting the full mRS distribution, standalone models achieved good ordinal agreement (MR PREDICTS quadratic weighted kappa (QWK) 0.51 [0.24 to 0.70]; DL model 0.49 [0.25 to 0.67]), significantly outperforming unaided neurologists (QWK 0.27 [0.10, 0.42]). Neurologists showed systematic overoptimism, predicting lower mRS scores than observed. Furthermore, there was poor accuracy in extracting imaging features. Raters? ASPECTS predictions deviated by 3.4 points from the confirmed scores, and collateral score accuracy was 44.6%. However, for predicting binary mRS (0-2 vs. 3-6), accuracy was comparable between unaided neurologists (64.17% [55.42% to 72.92%]) and models (MR PREDICTS 67.50% [52.50% to 82.50%]; DL model 63.16% [47.37% to 78.95%]). Model-assistance modestly improved and harmonized neurologists? predictions (QWK 0.41 [0.22 to 0.55]; binary accuracy 68.75% [58.33% to 78.34%]. Model performance remained robust in the larger cohort. Conclusions: Multimodal prognostic models outperform clinicians in predicting the full range of mRS outcomes, while human error in imaging assessment and systematic optimism bias are primary drivers of prognostic inaccuracy. End-to-end DL models eliminate human-input variability and hold strong potential as an automated second opinion to support prognostication and decision-making in acute LVO stroke.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Dual-Stance Evaluation of Sycophancy: The Structure of Agreement and the Limits of Intervention

Activation steering can shift LLM behaviour, but standard evaluations do not typically test whether a sycophancy-reduction direction also suppresses agreement with factually correct statements. We introduce dual-stance evaluation, which tests both stances of each topic, and apply it to centroid-difference steering on Llama-3-8B-Instruct. We find a dissociation: the model represents sycophantic and factual agreement in geometrically distinct subspaces, yet the steering direction projects equally onto both and cannot differentially target either. The direction accordingly reduces agreement with factually correct statements (e.g. that the Earth is round) as well as sycophantic ones. All other static properties of the two activation groups are matched, suggesting the behavioural dissociation arises from generation dynamics or from finer-grained structure that residual-stream analysis cannot resolve. The pattern illustrates a general gap: representations that are readable from activations may not be writable through them.

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

DeepMine-Mamba: Mitigating Information Dilution in Mamba-Based State Space Models for Document Image Binarization

Document image binarization aims to separate foreground text from degraded backgrounds while preserving thin, broken, and low-contrast strokes. Although deep learning methods have improved binarization performance, most existing approaches rely on convolutional, transformer-based, or generative architectures, while Mamba-based state space models remain largely unexplored for this task. In this work, we investigate Mamba-based feature propagation and observe that direct state-space propagation may dilute weak foreground cues during long-range modeling, especially faint ink traces, fragmented characters, and boundary-sensitive stroke details. To address this problem, we propose DeepMine-Mamba, a Mamba-based binarization framework equipped with a novel Anti-Dilution Gate that estimates propagation-induced feature changes and selectively restores stroke-sensitive local responses while suppressing unnecessary background enhancement. Experiments on DIBCO/H-DIBCO benchmarks under a strict leave-one-year-out protocol show that DeepMine-Mamba achieves competitive overall performance, with strong average FM and Fps across benchmark years. Ablation results further show that the Anti-Dilution Gate is the key component for mitigating propagation-induced foreground dilution and improving stroke preservation.

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

GameCraft-Bench: Can Agents Build Playable Games End-to-End in a Real Game Engine?

Game generation is an emerging application of coding agents, requiring models to transform natural-language specifications into playable interactive systems. Unlike traditional coding tasks, game generation takes place within a game engine, where scripts, scenes, assets, rendering, and runtime interactions must jointly produce coherent gameplay. We formalize end-to-end game generation as the problem of producing a complete game artifact that realizes a specification through observable player-game interaction in a target environment. We argue that evaluating this setting requires three desiderata: Engine Grounding, Artifact Completeness, and Interactive Verification. We propose an interaction-grounded evaluation framework that assesses executable gameplay through replayed demonstrations and rubric-guided multimodal judging. We instantiate this framework as GameCraft-Bench, a benchmark comprising 140 Godot tasks across 15 game families. Evaluations of frontier coding agents show that end-to-end game generation remains highly challenging: the strongest agent achieves only 41.46%, and most agents score below 40%. Further analysis reveals that while agents often implement recognizable mechanics, they struggle to deliver complete games with sufficient content, functional visual feedback, and coherent presentation. See https://tongxuluo.github.io/gamecraft-bench-website for demos, code, and data.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Think Fast: Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models

arXiv:2606.07157v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Many efforts to ensure frontier AI models are safe rely on monitoring their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. If models become able to perform sufficiently complex reasoning internally, without explicit thinking tokens, this would undermine such oversight. We measure how well frontier models reason without CoT across a suite of over 30,000 questions spanning 43 benchmarks in domains including math, coding, puzzles, causality, theory-of-mind, and strategic reasoning. To compare models against humans, we estimate the $50\%$-task-completion time horizon (TH): the human time required for tasks a model completes with $50\%$ success rate. We complement this with a $50\%$ reasoning token horizon: the minimum number of o3-mini reasoning tokens needed for tasks a model solves with $50\%$ success rate. We find that the no-CoT $50\%$ TH of frontier models has been doubling roughly every year over the past six years, with GPT-5.5's TH reaching over 3 minutes and reasoning token horizon exceeding 1,500 tokens. Our median estimates predict that frontier no-CoT THs could exceed 7 minutes by 2028, and 25 minutes by 2030, though these projections carry substantial uncertainty. We recommend frontier developers track this explicitly.

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

ConSA: Controllable Sparsity in Hybrid Attention via Learnable Allocation

Hybrid architectures combining full attention (FA) and sliding-window attention (SWA) are a promising paradigm for efficient LLM inference. However, existing methods typically rely on hand-crafted rules or simple post-hoc heuristics for FA/SWA allocation and offer limited analysis of the attention behaviors underlying these designs. We propose Controllable Sparsity in Hybrid Attention (ConSA), a framework that learns optimal FA/SWA assignment under a user-specified sparsity target. ConSA employs L0 regularization to learn binary masks selecting between FA and SWA for each attention unit, while an augmented Lagrangian constraint enforces the target sparsity at either layer or KV-head granularity. We evaluate ConSA on two LLMs at the 0.6B and 1.7B scales. Learned allocations consistently outperform rule-based baselines, with KV-head-wise allocation yielding clear gains over layer-wise allocation. The learned patterns place SWA in the bottom layers and concentrate FA into contiguous middle-layer blocks, diverging from evenly interleaved patterns in rule-based methods. This structure persists across model scales, sparsity levels, and allocation granularities, revealing a fine-grained spectrum of intrinsic attention behaviors that underlies the learned allocation.

20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stability of Synthetic Ricci Curvature Lower Bounds for Inverse Limit Extended Metric Measure Spaces

arXiv:2606.14322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that every Polish extended metric measure space arises as an inverse limit of metric measure spaces up to isomorphism. We then prove that synthetic Ricci curvature lower bounds and several functional inequalities, including the log-Sobolev, Talagrand, Poincaré, and dimension-free Harnack inequalities are stable under inverse limit. We discuss applications to infinite-dimensional spaces, including abstract Wiener spaces and their quotient spaces.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Microbial etiology, antibiotic susceptibility profiles, and multidrug resistance of urinary tract infections at a secondary healthcare facility in Ghana

Background: Rising antibiotic resistance challenges empirical therapies for urinary tract infections (UTIs). This study evaluated the microbial etiology, susceptibility profiles, and multidrug resistance (MDR) patterns of uropathogens among outpatients at the Berekum Holy Family Hospital, Ghana. Methods: This cross-sectional study (February to August 2021) screened 263 symptomatic outpatients. Mid-stream urine samples underwent quantitative culture, biochemical identification, and antimicrobial susceptibility testing via the Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion method following the 2021 CLSI guidelines. Results: Significant bacteriuria prevalence was 22.8% (60/263). UTIs predominated in females (78.3%, 47/60; p = 0.1501) and individuals [&ge;]45 years (33.3%, 20/60). Gram-negative rods accounted for 90.0% of isolates, primarily Escherichia coli (26.7%), Citrobacter spp. (25.0%), and Enterobacter spp. (21.7%); Staphylococcus aureus (10.0%) was the only Gram-positive pathogen. Extreme phenotypic resistance was observed against piperacillin/tazobactam (98.3%), cefotaxime (93.3%), tetracycline (88.3%), and cefoperazone (85.0%). Conversely, highest therapeutic susceptibilities were retained by amikacin (78.3%), levofloxacin (61.7%), and gentamicin (58.3%). Conclusion: The high prevalence of MDR uropathogens against advanced beta-lactamase inhibitor combinations and cephalosporins necessitates an immediate re-evaluation of regional empirical protocols. Amikacin, levofloxacin, and gentamicin remain viable options prior to culture confirmation. These findings establish a crucial phenotypic baseline to guide localized prescribing policies and regional antimicrobial resistance tracking strategies.

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

MARS: Margin-Adversarial Risk-controlled Stopping for Parallel LLM Test-time Scaling

arXiv:2606.12935v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Parallel test-time scaling samples many reasoning traces and majority-votes their answers, improving LLM accuracy but requiring traces to run to completion, incurring substantial computational overhead. We observe that probing partial traces at intermediate checkpoints can extract current answers without disrupting generation, revealing an evolving aggregate vote. Based on this observation, we introduce MARS, a margin-adversarial stopping rule that estimates which active traces are likely to change their answers and stops once the leader remains safe under a conservative bound on future vote movement. The rule separates two sources of uncertainty. It learns the trace-level switch probabilities that determine how much of the current margin is likely to be retained, while handling the harder question of where switching traces land through an adversarial bound calibrated from warmup traces. With true switch probabilities, MARS guarantees with high probability that the early-stopped answer matches the full-budget vote. In practice, a five-feature logistic model closely matches oracle switching behavior. Across three reasoning models and three competition-math benchmarks, MARS saves 25-47% of self-consistency tokens and 14-29% on top of DeepConf Online, a strong confidence-weighted baseline that already filters and truncates weak traces, while matching the accuracy of the corresponding full-budget baselines.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Task-Adaptive Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Weather Foundation Models

arXiv:2509.22020v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While recent advances in machine learning have equipped Weather Foundation Models (WFMs) with substantial generalization capabilities across diverse downstream tasks, the escalating computational requirements associated with their expanding scale increasingly hinder practical deployment. Current Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods, designed for vision or language tasks, fail to address the unique challenges of weather downstream tasks, such as variable heterogeneity, resolution diversity, and spatiotemporal coverage variations, leading to suboptimal performance when applied to WFMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce WeatherPEFT, a novel PEFT framework for WFMs incorporating two synergistic innovations. First, during the forward pass, Task-Adaptive Dynamic Prompting (TADP) dynamically injects the embedding weights within the encoder to the input tokens of the pre-trained backbone via internal and external pattern extraction, enabling context-aware feature recalibration for specific downstream tasks. Furthermore, during backpropagation, Stochastic Fisher-Guided Adaptive Selection (SFAS) not only leverages Fisher information to identify and update the most task-critical parameters, thereby preserving invariant pre-trained knowledge, but also introduces randomness to stabilize the selection. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of WeatherPEFT on three downstream tasks, where existing PEFT methods show significant gaps versus Full-Tuning, and WeatherPEFT achieves performance parity with Full-Tuning using fewer trainable parameters. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/ShileiCao/WeatherPEFT.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Development of an automated, imaging-based preoperative screening model for early identification of malnutrition in an abdominal surgery cohort

Background: Clinical malnutrition affects one in five abdominal surgery patients and increases postoperative complications and mortality. Current screening occurs after admission, closing the window for preoperative nutritional intervention. No objective, scalable preoperative screening tool exists. Objective: To determine whether automated volumetric CT-based body composition analysis improves preoperative identification of surgical patients at risk for clinical malnutrition compared to clinical variables or single slice imaging alone. Methods: Retrospective cohort study of adults undergoing elective abdominal surgery at a quaternary academic medical center (2018 to 2021) with a preoperative CT scan within 90 days and complete nutrition assessment. Clinical malnutrition was diagnosed by a registered dietitian using ASPEN/AND criteria. Three sex stratified Elastic Net models were compared: (1) base clinical variables; (2) base plus L3 single slice skeletal muscle index and attenuation; and (3) base plus comprehensive 3D volumetric quantification of five muscle groups and two fat depots. Discrimination (AUROC), calibration (Brier score), and clinical utility (decision curve analysis) were assessed via 10-fold cross-validation. Results: Among 1,143 patients (52.4% female; mean age 60.5 years), 231 (20.2%) were diagnosed with malnutrition. Malnourished patients had significantly higher complication rates (36.4% vs. 15.4%, p

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

Readout-Induced Leakage in Superconducting Circuits with Nonlinear Couplings

arXiv:2606.16055v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In superconducting circuits, drive-induced unwanted transitions limit the readout power, thereby constraining readout speed and fidelity. When such transitions excite the qubit into leakage states, they produce correlated errors that are particularly harmful for quantum error correction. Native nonlinear qubit-readout resonator coupling is a promising alternative to conventional linear hybridization because it provides intrinsic Purcell protection and stricter selection rules for multiphoton processes. In realistic devices, however, we show that such a coupling alone neither eliminates nor necessarily suppresses drive-induced transitions. Instead, if not appropriately engineered, these couplings often worsen the situation by introducing additional parasitic processes. Moreover, the rates of these unwanted transitions remain sensitive to the choice of readout frequency, regardless of the coupling mechanism. We demonstrate that readout-induced leakage can thus vary by orders of magnitude even when readout frequencies differ by less than ~7%. Our results establish that the benefits of native nonlinear couplings are realized only through informed device design, including the spectral placement of relevant auxiliary modes and elimination of parasitic ones.