Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Polynomial-Time Mistake-Bounded Language Generation

arXiv:2606.16077v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this note, we introduce a polynomial-time version of the mistake-bounded language generation (MBLG) framework due to Kleinberg, Peale, and Reingold (2026). We observe that the family of parities of variables, and the family of conjunctions of literals, are polynomial-time MBLG. Our main result states that the family of monotone Boolean functions with polynomially-many maxterms is polynomial-time MBLG. This family includes all monotone Boolean functions, computable by polynomial-size decision trees. Our technique can be presented as a new combinatorial game about writing numbers on a board.

02.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

A Cycle Walk for Sampling Measures on Spanning Forests for Redistricting

arXiv:2509.08629v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce the Cycle Walk, a new Markov chain Monte Carlo method for sampling distributions on balanced graph partitions, motivated by applications in political redistricting. The method operates on spanning forests and combines two types of updates: local "cycle" moves within districts and global moves that exchange population between adjacent districts while preserving balance constraints. This construction enables efficient Metropolis–Hastings correction while allowing proposals at multiple spatial scales. We show that the Cycle Walk naturally interpolates between existing approaches based on local updates and a class of global update methods derived from recombination (RECOM). Through a range of numerical experiments on synthetic graphs and real-world precinct data, we demonstrate that the Cycle Walk exhibits improved empirical convergence diagnostics for distributions that place weaker weight on spanning-tree counts, a regime that is challenging for existing methods. In particular, the algorithm remains effective when incorporating alternative compactness measures that more closely reflect policy-relevant criteria. These results suggest that the Cycle Walk provides a flexible and computationally efficient framework for sampling from a broader class of redistricting distributions than previously accessible with MCMC techniques.

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

Latent Space Reinforcement Learning for Inverse Material Estimation in Food Fracture Simulation

Realistic visual simulation of food manipulation requires accurate material parameters, yet these are difficult to measure directly and vary across the heterogeneous regions of a single food item. We address the inverse problem of estimating material parameters from a target description of fracture behavior in a non-differentiable continuum damage mechanics simulator. Using orange peeling as a test case, we train a neural surrogate on 2,000 forward simulations and compare Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES, a gradient-free evolutionary optimizer) with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO, a reinforcement learning algorithm) across the original 9-dimensional parameter space and two learned 4-dimensional latent representations. Since different oranges have different material properties, a practical inverse system must handle arbitrary targets without retraining. We train a goal-conditioned PPO policy that learns a general inverse mapping: given any target description of peeling behavior, the policy produces a material parameter estimate in a single forward pass (8 surrogate evaluations, approximately 10ms). Operating in a normalizing flow latent space with a shared surrogate evaluator, the goal-conditioned policy achieves 0.642 actual recovery when validated through the simulator, outperforming the original parameter space by 23%. A warm-start extension that initializes CMA-ES refinement from the policy's output further improves recovery to 0.828 with 540 evaluations. These findings provide a practical framework for inverse food physics and lay groundwork for vision-driven material identification from video observations of food manipulation.

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

A graph neural network surrogate model for mesh-based crashworthiness prediction of vehicle panel components

arXiv:2503.17386v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Crashworthiness is a key performance measure in the design of safety-critical vehicle panel components such as B-pillars. Finite element (FE) simulations are widely used to evaluate crash responses but remain computationally expensive for large-scale, nonlinear impact scenarios, particularly when integrated into iterative design and optimisation processes. Although machine learning-based surrogate models have been developed for rapid crashworthiness analysis, they exhibit limitations in detailed representation of complex 3-dimensional components. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as a promising solution for processing data with complex structures. However, existing GNN models often lack sufficient accuracy and computational efficiency to meet industrial demands. This paper proposes Recurrent Graph U-Net (ReGUNet), a graph-based surrogate model for crashworthiness analysis of vehicle panel components. By representing FE meshes in graph form, the model naturally accommodates complex irregular structural geometries. Its hierarchical architecture improves computational efficiency and accuracy, while the introduction of recurrence enhances stability of temporal predictions over multiple time steps. A side-impact case study of hot-stamped steel B-pillars with varying geometries is used to generate training dataset. The trained model demonstrates high accuracy in predicting the dynamic deformation behaviour and crashworthiness indicators of previously unseen component designs. ReGUNet achieves over a 52% reduction in the average deformation prediction error relative to baseline methods, together with markedly improved computational efficiency. ReGUNet provides rapid and reliable crashworthiness assessments, which in turn accelerates the design cycle of vehicle panel components.

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

Dual-Network PINNs for Optimal Control: A Reproducible Benchmark on the Mass-Spring-Damper System

arXiv:2606.15271v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work presents a transparent and reproducible benchmark study of a direct dual-network Physics-Informed Neural Network (PINN) formulation for the optimal control of a mass-spring-damper system. The classical linear-quadratic optimal control problem is solved by two independent classical methods – Pontryagin's Minimum Principle with single shooting, and direct transcription through trapezoidal collocation – and recast as a constrained optimization problem solved by two feedforward neural networks: a state network whose boundary conditions are enforced exactly through a composite cubic-and-mask ansatz, and an unconstrained control network. The composite loss combines the physics residual at the collocation points with a trapezoidal approximation of the cost functional, weighted by a single scalar hyperparameter. On the benchmark considered, the PINN reproduces the classical optimal cost to four significant digits, satisfies the terminal state constraints exactly by construction, and produces pointwise state and control errors that fall within the spread of the two classical references. Training is approximately two orders of magnitude slower than classical shooting on this benchmark, which is honestly reported. The contribution is methodological clarity rather than methodological novelty: the formulation and the accompanying Google Colab implementation are intended to lower the barrier to entry for practitioners exploring PINN-based optimal control without prior exposure to adjoint methods or two-point boundary value problems.

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

SAERec: Constructing Fine-grained Interpretable Intents Priors via Sparse Autoencoders for Recommendation

arXiv:2606.18897v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intent-based recommender systems have gained significant attention for improving accuracy and interpretability by modeling the underlying motivations behind user behaviors. Most existing models derive intents directly from user sequences via clustering or prototype learning. However, they are sensitive to sequence quality, require presetting the number of intents, and lack explicit semantic grounding. These issues lead to an incomplete and coarse intent set and limit the effectiveness of recommendation. In this paper, we propose the Sparse Autoencoder for intent-based recommendation (SAERec), a novel recommender that automatically constructs a fine-grained and interpretable intent space from a textual corpus to guide recommendation. Rather than treating texts as side signals, SAERec leverages them as high information density evidence for intent construction. Specifically, we first extract a comprehensive set of fine-grained interpretable intents from the latent space of large language models (LLMs) by using a sparse autoencoder (SAE) to disentangle and interpret text embeddings, which isolates intent-related semantics from textual noise. Then, for each user, we retrieve relevant intents from this set as priors to guide recommendation. It contains personal intents matching a user's current interests and public intents capturing general item patterns shared across users (e.g., quality, price). Finally, to integrate retrieved intents into sequence modeling, we propose a multi-branch attention mechanism that captures temporal dependencies and injects both personal and public intent signals, followed by an adaptive fusion layer to construct the final user representation for recommendation. Extensive experiments on public datasets demonstrate the superiority of SAERec, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines while providing human-understandable explanations.

07.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Plasma protein prioritisation in rheumatoid arthritis reveals druggable targets and shared biology with cardiovascular diseases

Abstract Background Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is an autoimmune inflammatory disease with complex and incompletely understood molecular mechanisms. Understanding circulating proteins associated with RA may improve understanding of disease biology and clarify its pathological links with cardiometabolic comorbidities. Methods A proteome-wide two-sample Mendelian randomisation (MR) drug target analysis was conducted using plasma proteins measured in 54,219 participants from the UK Biobank Pharma Proteomics Project as exposures and RA and cardiometabolic diseases as the outcomes. Summary statistics for RA included 53,663 cases and 1,070,200 controls. Colocalisation analysis was performed to confirm shared single causal variants and prioritise RA proteins supported by both MR and colocalisation. The prioritised proteins were then evaluated in the Accelerating Medicines Partnership RA Phase II synovial single-cell dataset for cell-type expression patterns. Druggability was then assessed followed by analysis of genetic overlap between RA-associated proteins and cardiometabolic diseases. Results 37 plasma proteins had a causal effect on RA risk, supported by combined evidence from MR and conditional colocalisation. In synovial tissue, TPPP3, RARRES2, AKAP12, and GGT5 were predominantly expressed in stromal and endothelial cell clusters. Druggability assessment identified IFNGR2, IL6R, CD40, and FCGR2B as Tier 1 targets. However, several biologically relevant proteins, including RARRES2, AKAP12, TPPP3, and SNX2, had limited available druggability data. Genetic overlap analysis demonstrated shared protein signals between RA and cardiovascular diseases, including overlap of RARRES2 and TPPP3 with coronary artery disease (CAD) and FCGR2B with atrial fibrillation (AF). To approximate the therapeutic effect of target inhibition, the direction of effect estimates for proteins showing overlap between RA-CAD and RA-AF was reversed. Conclusion This study identified circulating proteins involved in RA pathogenesis and reveals shared mechanisms between RA and cardiovascular diseases. While some proteins showed clear translational potential targets, several prioritised proteins had limited available druggability information and could not be confidently classified. Addressing these gaps may help identify new targets relevant to RA management. Future work should also use phenome-wide MR studies to evaluate potential on-target adverse effects of protein inhibition across RA-CAD and RA-AF.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

GEOAgent: An AI-driven Autonomous Framework for Intelligent GEO Data Retrieval and Standardized Preprocessing

Datasets in the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) remain difficult to reuse at scale because sample annotations are heterogeneous and raw sequencing data require assay-specific preprocessing. We present GEOAgent, an AI-driven autonomous framework designed for intelligent dataset retrieval and standardized preprocessing by coupling autonomous semantic governance with an automated Nextflow pipeline named bioStream. Metadata from 181,760 sequencing series and 84,756 associated PubMed records were organized in a relational database and semantic index to support natural-language dataset retrieval. The framework automatically determines assay modalities, resolves experimental design pairings, and standardizes sample naming to minimize manual curation overhead. Based on these parsed attributes, the framework generates deployment-ready manifests to automatically execute containerized workflows across bulk and single-cell omics modalities. In expert-curated benchmarks, the workflow achieved 96% retrieval precision alongside 100% accuracy in assay classification and sample relationship resolution. The web platform is publicly accessible, while the source code and associated databases are openly available via GitHub and Zenodo.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

LLM-as-Judge in Education: A Curriculum-Grounded Marking Pipeline

arXiv:2606.17507v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generative AI and large language models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to question generation and automated assessment. However, deploying LLMs in preparation for high-stakes exams requires more than prompt engineering; it demands software pipelines that systematically ground model outputs in authorised curriculum artefacts and marking guidelines issued by education authorities. This paper presents a curriculum-grounded, configurable LLM-as-Judge pipeline for question-level marking, co-developed with an industrial partner, to support exam preparation for university admission. The pipeline identifies the relevant topics, subtopics, and cognitive demand of a question, and assembles verifiable and authorised context to support LLM judgement. Curriculum intent is operationalised through concrete syllabus artefacts, including prescribed verbs and outcomes, performance band descriptors, glossary definitions, and marking-guideline principles. A staged LLM workflow is employed to first generate question-specific rubrics, capturing structured expectations of performance, and then derive and evaluate marking criteria used to allocate marks to student responses. This design improves consistency, transparency, and alignment with official marking practices. Preliminary evaluation shows that the proposed LLM-as-Judge pipeline delivers marking outcomes comparable to human tutors, while yielding justifications that are more traceable to authorised curriculum artefacts and marking standards. The pipeline has also been integrated into an online study platform, where early deployment data provide initial insights into operational usage and manual overrides.

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

Diffusing to Coordinate: Efficient Online Multi-Agent Diffusion Policies

arXiv:2602.18291v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) is a prominent framework for efficient agent coordination. Crucially, enhancing policy expressiveness is pivotal for achieving superior performance. Diffusion-based generative models are well-positioned to meet this demand, having demonstrated remarkable expressiveness and multimodal representation in image generation and offline settings. Yet, their potential in online MARL remains largely under-explored. A major obstacle is that the intractable likelihoods of diffusion models impede entropy-based exploration and coordination. To tackle this challenge, we propose among the first \underline{O}nline off-policy \underline{MA}RL framework using \underline{D}iffusion policies (OMAD) to orchestrate coordination. Our key innovation is a relaxed policy objective that maximizes scaled joint entropy, facilitating effective exploration without relying on tractable likelihood. Complementing this, within the centralized training with decentralized execution (CTDE) paradigm, we employ a joint distributional value function to optimize decentralized diffusion policies. It leverages tractable entropy-augmented targets to guide the simultaneous updates of diffusion policies, thereby ensuring stable coordination. Extensive evaluations on MPE and MAMuJoCo establish our method as the new state-of-the-art across $10$ diverse tasks, demonstrating a remarkable $2.5\times$ to $5\times$ improvement in sample efficiency.

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

TVIR: Building Deep Research Agents Towards Text-Visual Interleaved Report Generation

Deep Research Agents have shown strong capability in multi-step information retrieval, reasoning, and long-form report generation, but existing benchmarks and systems remain predominantly text-centric, with limited evaluation of whether visual elements are factually reliable and well aligned with the surrounding analysis. To address this gap, we introduce TVIR (Text-Visual Interleaved Report Generation), which includes TVIR-Bench, a benchmark of 100 expert-curated multimodal deep research tasks that require visual elements to serve specific analytical sub-goals, and TVIR-Agent, a hierarchical multi-agent framework that serves as a strong baseline for constructing outlines, retrieving images, generating charts with traceable sources, and composing reports through context-aware sequential writing. We further develop a dual-path evaluation framework that combines Textual Assessment and Visual Assessment. Experiments across nine deep research systems show that TVIR-Agent achieves strong overall performance, underscoring the importance of explicit multimodal design and evaluation for evidence-driven report generation.

12.
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.

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

GateMem: Benchmarking Memory Governance in Multi-Principal Shared-Memory Agents

Memory benchmarks for LLM agents largely assume single-user settings, leaving shared assistants for hospitals, workplaces, campuses, and households understudied. In these deployments, multiple principals write to a common memory pool and query it under different roles, scopes, and relationships, so memory quality requires governance as well as recall. We introduce GateMem, a benchmark for multi-principal shared-memory agents. GateMem jointly evaluates utility for legitimate long-horizon requests with state updates, access control across contextual authorization boundaries, and agent-facing active forgetting after explicit deletion requests. It spans medical, office, education, and household domains, with long-form multi-party episodes, incremental memory injection, hidden checkpoints, structured judging, and leak-target annotations. Across diverse baselines and backbone models, no method simultaneously achieves strong utility, robust access control, and reliable forgetting. Long-context prompting often yields the best governance score at high token cost, while retrieval-based and external-memory methods reduce cost yet still leak unauthorized or deleted information. These results show current memory agents remain far from reliable shared institutional deployment.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

VEPHand: View-Efficient Photometric Hand Performance Capture at Scale

Robust, high-fidelity 3D hand capture, while fundamental to digital human creation, remains challenging with practical multi-view systems that balance rich photometry with the geometric ambiguities of reconstruction arising from limited viewpoint density. This paper presents an end-to-end pipeline for dynamic hand performance capture and registration, specifically designed for view-efficient setups ($\sim$20 views). We address key challenges with two primary innovations. First, to overcome reconstruction difficulties like limited view overlap and background clutter, our mask-free neural method robustly extracts detailed hand geometry and appearance from unmasked images using scene parameterization and scenario-specific density regularization. Second, addressing registration challenges such as accurately capturing non-linear skin deformations and ensuring plausible results during severe self-contact, we propose a physics-inspired framework. It aligns reconstructions to a personalized hand model by optimizing intrinsic volumetric offsets within its canonical tetrahedral mesh, alongside pose parameters. This approach, supported by robust losses and optimization, captures fine surface deformations, ensures plausible results under severe articulation and self-contact, and demonstrates strong tolerance to input noise. We demonstrate the scalability and robustness of our automated pipeline on an extensive dataset of over 12,000 sequences, from which we also derive a large-scale, high-quality synthetic 2D/3D hand dataset for training downstream tasks. This showcases its effectiveness for single hands, intricate two-hand interactions, and natural hand-object manipulations. Our method achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction fidelity in view-efficient, unmasked scenarios and highly accurate registration. Our project page are available at https://zyshen021.github.io/VEPHand/.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-10

Interpreting higher-order dependence in multimorbidity using cohort data: A partial information decomposition approach

by Cillian Hourican, Geeske Peeters, René J. F. Melis, Almar Kok, Natasja M. van Schoor, Sandra Wezeman, Mike Lees, Marcel G. M. Olde Rikkert, Rick Quax In the context of multimorbidity, clinical features seldom act in isolation: symptoms, signs and behaviours form interdependent systems in which joint effects on function can be demonstrated only when features are considered together. We introduce an open, reusable workflow that detects and interprets these “together-only” interactions using bivariate Partial Information Decomposition (PID; two sources to one target), linking synergy-based dependence to the broader network of clinical variables rather than to a single target. The workflow estimates synergy with small-sample bias correction and summarises each pair in a Breadth–Uniformity–Synergy–Total (BUST) map: breadth of synergy across target variables (broad “generalist” vs narrow “specialist” patterns), cross-stratum uniformity across age, sex and multimorbidity (uniform vs subgroup-specific), synergy strength, and total shared information. Simple diagnostics contrast observed targets with additive expectations, revealing the specific joint configurations through which non-additive effects arise. Applied to data from the Longitudinal Ageing Study Amsterdam, we treated all health-related variables—covering symptoms, clinical signs, behaviours, lifestyle factors, and self-rated health indicators—as both sources and targets in the PID framework. This symmetric design permits synergy to be quantified for every pair of variables with respect to every other variable. The workflow identifies synergistic constellations that additive models miss. Multidomain cliques involving subjective health, pain, cognition and grip strength showed multiple non-additive configurations, whereas pairs such as alcohol use with grip strength exhibited focused, narrow but uniform synergy. Notably, the pairs with the strongest synergistic contributions were largely distinct from those with the highest total mutual information, indicating that synergy captures dependency structure overlooked by conventional association measures. Rather than a new measure, this work provides a bias-aware workflow that makes higher-order dependence visible and transferable. Our results support synergy-aware mapping as a practical complement to conventional multimorbidity analyses: it highlights specific combinations of routinely assessed features whose joint states may be especially informative across multiple health targets and therefore candidates for prioritised joint assessment and future multi-domain intervention studies.

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

LongWebBench: Evaluating Structural and Functional Webpage Generation in Long-Horizon Settings

arXiv:2606.17727v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent vision-language models (VLMs) have shown promising progress in generating webpages from visual inputs, yet existing evaluations mainly focus on short, single-screen, and largely static webpages. We introduce LongWebBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-horizon webpage generation from both structural and functional perspectives. LongWebBench contains 490 real-world long webpages for structural fidelity evaluation and 507 goal-oriented interaction tasks over 129 webpages for functional evaluation. It employs two complementary protocols: a multi-dimensional VLM-based metric for assessing long-range structural coherence, and a DOM-augmented agent-based pipeline for end-to-end functional verification. We further examine the automatic evaluation protocols through human agreement analysis. Experiments with state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary VLMs under single-image and multi-image settings reveal that structural fidelity degrades as webpage length increases, while visually plausible generations often fail to support executable multi-step interactions. These results highlight the need to evaluate long webpage generation beyond visual similarity, with executable interaction as a core criterion. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zheny2751-dotcom/LongWebBench.

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

Learn Temporal Consistency For Robust Satellite Video Detector

Satellite video object detection (SVOD) for oriented and fine-grained objects plays an important role in satellite applications. Most existing SVOD methods only focus on one or a few coarse-grained categories of moving objects and represent objects with horizontal bounding boxes. They have difficulty extracting complete, accurate, and consistent information about objects in whole satellite videos. In this paper, we propose a satellite video object detection framework based on Temporal Consistency Learning (TCL). TCL adeptly detects oriented and fine-grained objects by leveraging the rich temporal contexts within satellite videos. The framework integrates three key modules: temporal and fine-grained feature aggregation (TFA), structure encoding (SE), and temporal consistency constraint (TCC). TFA and TCC modules facilitate consistent representation learning across frames, while the SE module encodes both appearance and structural information for precise fine-grained recognition. Experimental results on the SAT-MTB benchmark dataset demonstrate TCL's superior performance, achieving a new state-of-the-art oriented and fine-grained detection accuracy of 47.7% mAP–a 4.8% improvement over the baseline. Furthermore, our TCL framework readily accommodates existing image-based detectors, leading to enhanced detection accuracies.

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

Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning for Single-shot Test-time Ultrasound Image Denoising

The inherent electronic and speckle noise complicates clinical interpretation of ultrasound images. Conventional denoising methods rely on explicit noise assumptions whose validity diminishes under composite noise conditions. Learning-based methods are usually pretrained in a limited image domain using a labeled dataset, which implies inevitable domain shift in complex in vivo environments. This study proposes a Pyramid Self-Contrastive Learning (PSCL) framework for test-time ultrasound image denoising without pretraining. Given multiple noisy samples from only one-shot imaging, PSCL disentangles anatomical similarity and noise randomness into separate pyramid latent spaces. The clean image is then decoded from the anatomy space while discarding the noise space. We first apply PSCL to synthetic aperture ultrasound (SAU), where an Aperture-to-Aperture loop serves as a self-supervised proxy task to ensure denoising fidelity. Simulation experiments, including noise levels from 0 to 30 dB and inclusion geometries from simple to complex, demonstrated improvements of 69.3% in SNR and 34.4% in CNR. The in vivo results showed 84.8% SNR and 25.7% CNR gains using only two aperture data of the heart in six echocardiographic views, liver, and kidney. PSCL delivers clear images across diverse imaging targets and configurations, paving the way for more reliable anatomical visualization without domain shift and pretraining costs.

19.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-02

Prognostic value of cervical length for spontaneous preterm birth in asymptomatic women with singleton pregnancy: An individual participant data meta-analysis

Authors:

by Kelly Hughes, David Nguyen, Mason Aberoumand, Heather Ford, Erin Clarke, Nuria Banos Lopez, Margaret Dziadosz, Richard Fischer, Renato T. Souza, Jose Guilherme Cecatti, Kelly Orzechowski, Courtney Olson-Chen, Alberto Borges Peixoto, Vorapong Phupong, Joshua Rosenbloom, Moeun Son, Athena Souka, Liu Du, Michael Sean Esplin, Roberta Granese, Simi Gupta, Brenda Kazemier, Lindsay Kindinger, Pihla Kuusela, Jeanine Van der Ven, Omer Weitzner, Evelyn Minis, Alba Farras Llobet, Heather Frey, Rashmi Bagga, Siddhidatri Mishra, Elizabeth Patberg, Philip Bennett, Megan Hall, Andrew Shennan, Shaun Brennecke, Shakila Thangaratinam, Anna Lene Seidler, Ben Willem Mol, Rui Wang Background Spontaneous preterm birth (SPTB) is the leading cause of perinatal and early childhood mortality worldwide. Studies have generally suggested that mid-trimester transvaginal sonographic cervical length

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Steering the Noise: Turning Random Perturbations into Effective Descent for Memory-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) achieves strong performance but is often limited by the memory overhead of backpropagation. Zeroth-order (ZO) optimization avoids this overhead by estimating gradients through forward passes alone, yet it typically converges slowly because random Gaussian perturbations yield high-variance gradient estimates in high-dimensional parameter spaces. In this paper, we propose a plug-and-play framework that turns random perturbations into more effective descent directions. The key idea is to draw a small pool of candidate perturbations, evaluate their loss values, and then select or combine those that are best aligned with the optimization objective. We develop two instantiations of this idea: MeZO-GV, which forms a guiding vector from the contrast between low-loss and high-loss perturbation groups, and MeZO-Greedy, which keeps the single best perturbation within a fixed evaluation budget. We theoretically show that both strategies yield a larger per-step reduction in the objective than standard ZO estimation, leading to improved convergence rates. Experiments on LLMs of different scales and architectures confirm that the proposed methods integrate naturally with existing ZO optimizers and consistently improve convergence speed and task accuracy. On OPT-13B, our approach outperforms all ZO baselines across 11 benchmarks and exceeds gradient-based methods on 9 of them, while retaining the memory efficiency of forward-only optimization.

21.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Adaptive deep brain stimulation for dynamic gait control in Parkinson’s disease: a randomized feasibility trial

A randomized crossover study of five patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) demonstrates that gait-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared with continuous stimulation. Gait dysfunction in PD is a major source of disability and is often insufficiently treated by continuous deep brain stimulation (cDBS). Although adaptive DBS (aDBS) has shown efficacy for other motor symptoms using β-based, state-driven neural signals, gait is a dynamic, cyclical behavior that may require temporally precise modulation. Here we evaluated a behavior-contingent aDBS approach that synchronizes stimulation to gait phase. We reported a single-center, blinded, randomized, crossover study evaluating the feasibility of identifying patient-specific biomarkers to drive aDBS. The primary outcome was feasibility of successful identification of gait-phase biomarkers to implement aDBS. Five participants with PD undergoing pallidal DBS and subdural electrode paddle implantation were enrolled. We successfully identified personalized gait-phase biomarkers from cortical or pallidal field potentials in all five patients and embedded them into a bidirectional neurostimulator. During acute in-clinic testing, aDBS improved step variability and step symmetry versus cDBS. Three participants subsequently completed a double-blinded, multi-day crossover phase. In this setting, aDBS maintained general motor symptom control, reduced falls and yielded patient-specific gait improvements. No adverse events occurred and aDBS was well tolerated. These findings establish the feasibility of biomarker-driven, movement-synchronized neuromodulation and support the development of a larger randomized trial to determine clinical efficacy. ClinicalTrial.gov registration: NCT04675398 . A randomized crossover study shows that gait-phase-synchronized adaptive deep brain stimulation is feasible and safe, and reduces falls compared to continuous stimulation in Parkinson’s disease.

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

A Survey on 3D Skeleton Based Person Re-Identification: Taxonomy, Advances, Challenges, and Interdisciplinary Prospects

Person re-identification via 3D skeletons is an important emerging research area that attracts increasing attention within the pattern recognition community. With distinctive advantages across various application scenarios, numerous 3D skeleton based person re-identification (SRID) methods with diverse skeleton modeling and learning paradigms have been proposed in recent years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review and analysis of recent SRID advances. First of all, we define the SRID task and provide an overview of its origin and major advancements. Secondly, we formulate a systematic taxonomy that organizes existing methods into three categories centered on hand-crafted, sequence-based, and graph-based modeling. Then, we elaborate on the representative models along these three types with an illustration of foundational mechanisms. Meanwhile, we provide an overview of mainstream supervised, self-supervised, and unsupervised SRID learning paradigms and corresponding common methods. A thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art SRID methods is further conducted over various types of benchmarks and protocols to compare their effectiveness, efficiency, and key properties. Finally, we present the key challenges and prospects to advance future research, and highlight interdisciplinary applications of SRID with a case study.

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

MB-Loc: Multi-planar Bird's-eye-view Localization in outdoor LiDAR scenes

Global LiDAR localization is a fundamental task for autonomous navigation systems. Recent methods perform Scene Coordinate Regression (SCR) and achieve superior accuracy over Absolute Pose Regression (APR) solutions by predicting dense 3D world coordinates. However, SCR approaches introduce two major bottlenecks: severe computational inefficiency from processing raw 3D geometries and significant performance degradation under varying sensor viewpoints. To address these limitations, we present MB-Loc, a lightweight and viewpoint-robust SCR framework. Instead of relying on heavy 3D convolutions, we project the input LiDAR scan into a 2.5D Multi-planar Bird's-Eye View (BEV) representation. By slicing the point-cloud along the Z-axis and mapping signed depths into discrete 2D planes, MB-Loc retains essential 3D geometric structures while exploiting the computational tractability of standard 2D CNNs. To handle the inherent sparsity of outdoor LiDAR, we introduce a KL-regularized latent bottleneck that explicitly models spatial uncertainty without injecting stochastic noise. Finally, to ensure rotation robustness, we apply 3D spatial augmentations prior to planar projection, forcing the network to implicitly learn viewpoint-invariant features. We perform extensive experiments on the publicly available NCLT dataset and demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art. Operating at real-time inference speeds, MB-Loc significantly outperforms traditional 3D-SCR architectures in computational efficiency.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Nothing from Something: Can a Language Model Discover 0?

AI systems based on artificial neural networks are being developed with aspirations of pushing the boundary of human mathematical knowledge. A key question for these systems is how much they can reach beyond their training data. Mathematical discovery requires a strong form of out of distribution generalization; the ability to hypothesize genuinely new - and potentially logically more powerful - mathematical structures. It has been hypothesized that language abilities support such generalizations in human cognition. In this work, we use simple arithmetic as a case study for examining how modern AI models could expand their mathematical horizons, evaluating whether these models can independently discover the concept of "zero". We show that We show that (1) language models of a GPT-2 size are unable to perform this generalization at test time regardless of language pretraining, but (2) models can improve substantially after training on tens or hundreds of examples of zero. Additionally, we find that language pretraining reduces the number of required examples by approximately $50\%$, showing that language abilities can scaffold mathematical discovery in neural models.

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

Real-space spectral functions of three-dimensional billion-size topological non-Hermitian matter with tensor networks

arXiv:2606.16424v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Non-Hermitian systems host a wide range of unconventional topological phenomena while large-scale simulations in finite three dimensional systems remain challenging because of the rapidly growing number of sites. In particular, higher-order topological corner modes are often studied only in small lattices, where strong finite-size effects can mask their intrinsic behavior. Here, we develop a tensor-network framework that combines quantics tensor cross interpolation with the kernel polynomial method, enabling compact representations of large non-Hermitian tight-binding Hamiltonians and direct calculations of real-space spectral functions for systems exceeding one billion lattice sites. Using this approach, we investigate three-dimensional non-Hermitian higher-order topological insulators with with structured real-space geometries. The unprecedented system size enables direct access to the macroscopic regime and allows corner-mode spectral responses to be resolved in genuinely three-dimensional systems.By tuning the loss strength, we identify distinct in-gap corner modes across weak- and strong-loss regimes.Our results establish tensor-network algorithms as a powerful strategy to perform real-space spectral calculations in exceptionally large non-Hermitian systems.