中 EN
Sign In Register

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.

Sign In Register
01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Differential Determinants of Past Behavior and Future Intention Regarding Voluntary Blood Donation: A Cross-Sectional Study of Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices in Qingdao, China

Authors:
cheng↗zhang↗Wang↗Dai↗

Background A persistent gap between motivation and action threatens voluntary blood supply. This study examined the publics knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) regarding blood donation, with a particular focus on identifying the different determinants of past blood donation behavior and future willingness to donate. Methods Convenience sampling was used to conduct a cross-sectional survey among 1,058 eligible people in Qingdao, China, between July and November 2025. Data were collected via a self-designed KAP questionnaire. To find independent characteristics linked to previous behavior and future intention, respectively, multivariable binary logistic regression was used. Results Overall, 37.0% of participants (n=391) had a lifetime donation history, while 39.2% (n=415) intended to donate in the next 12 months. Past behavior was positively associated with older age (36-45 years: OR=6.84; 95% CI: 3.21-14.58), higher education (OR=2.06; 95% CI: 1.33-3.17), and interpersonal interaction channels (OR=1.45; 95% CI: 1.01-2.09) but hindered by safety concerns (OR=0.23; 95% CI: 0.16-0.34). Conversely, future intention was positively correlated with male sex (OR=1.69; 95% CI: 1.24-2.29), prior donation history (OR=2.69; 95% CI: 1.87-3.86), having family members or friends in need of blood (OR=2.75; 95% CI: 1.96-3.85), and traditional media exposure (OR=3.33; 95% CI: 2.18-5.10). Higher education was adversely correlated with future intention (OR=0.55; 95% CI: 0.38-0.79). Conclusion There is a substantial disparity between donation motivation and action. The determinants of past behavior and future intention are asymmetric, suggesting that stage-specific interventions are required, using social mobilization for initiating first-time donations, while employing family reciprocity and authoritative communication to sustain long-term engagement.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Graph Instance Landscapes: When Structural Similarity Does (Not) Reflect Shortest-Path Performance

Authors:
Maryam Gholami Shiri↗Ivana Krminac↗Marko Djukanovi\'c↗Sa\v{s}o D\v{z}eroski↗Eva Tuba↗Tome Eftimov↗

arXiv:2606.18267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmarking shortest-path algorithms is commonly based on aggregate performance over heterogeneous graph sets, which limits insight into how different search paradigms react to instance structure. We adopt an instance-landscape view of graph benchmarking by embedding graphs into a low-cost structural feature space and clustering them into regions of similar structure. Three benchmark suites are studied: weighted Erdős–Rényi graphs, random geometric (wireless) graphs, and real-world road networks. We evaluate four representative shortest-path solvers spanning uninformed exact search (Dijkstra), bidirectional exact search (bidirectional Dijkstra), heuristic-guided exact search (A$^{*}$), and deque-based strategies (DEQ). Clustering robustness is analyzed under multiple feature-selection schemes, and runtime distributions are compared across landscape regions using non-parametric tests. While generator parameters induce stable structural regions, we find that feature-space similarity does not necessarily imply performance similarity: significant runtime shifts are frequently observed even within the same landscape region. A merged-suite analysis further shows that different benchmark families occupy largely disjoint regions. These results highlight both the potential and the limits of structural landscapes for the structure-aware benchmarking of shortest-path algorithms.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

A quantum implementation of high-order power method for estimating geometric entanglement of pure states

Authors:
Andrii Semenov↗Niall Murphy↗Simone Patscheider↗Alessandra Bernardi↗Elena Blokhina↗

arXiv:2405.19134v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Entanglement is one of the fundamental properties of a quantum state and is a crucial differentiator between classical and quantum computation. There are many ways to define entanglement and its measure, depending on the problem or application under consideration. Each of these measures may be computed or approximated by multiple methods. However, hardly any of these methods can be run on near-term quantum hardware. This work presents a quantum adaptation of the iterative high-order power method for estimating the geometric measure of entanglement of multi-qubit pure states using rank-1 tensor approximation. This method is executable on early fault-tolerant (hybrid) quantum hardware and does not depend on quantum memory. We simulate this algorithm and mitigate the effects of noise on the results of the computation using a theoretical model based on a known mitigation approach, which assumes a global depolarising noise channel.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

RCEM: Robust Conversational Search EMbedder in Distributional Shift

Authors:
Kilho Son↗Paul Hsu↗Cha Zhang↗Dinei Florencio↗

We propose RCEM, a Robust Conversational search EMbedder that is additionally equipped with LLM's query reformulation capability without losing base model's generalization. Unlike prior conversational dense retrieval approaches that learn direct conversation-to-passage matching, RCEM aligns conversations, prepended by special token, to LLM-rewritten queries, while preserving the original embedding space. The unchanged embedding space automatically maps the rewritten-query to the relevant passages. As a result, RCEM (1) reduces overfitting by simplifying the alignment task from long passages to shorter rewritten queries, (2) eliminates the need for conversation-to-passage relevance labels for training, and (3) maintains its original embedding space that allows conversational queries against indexes built by original embedder without rebuilding them. Extensive experiments show that RCEM consistently outperforms prior approaches, achieving up to 30% improvement under distributional shift.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Compact Geometric Representations of Hierarchies

Authors:
Prashant Gokhale↗Piotr Indyk↗Yuhao Liu↗Sandeep Silwal↗Tony Chang Wang↗Haike Xu↗

Computing geometric representations of data is a cornerstone of modern machine learning, typically achieved by training dual encoders which map queries and documents into a shared embedding space. Recent work of You et al. [NeurIPS '25] has extended this approach to hierarchical retrieval, where relevance is determined by the ancestor-descendant relationships in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). While previous work has shown that valid embeddings exist when the number of descendants is small, these bounds degrade significantly for deep hierarchies, requiring dimensions as large as the total number of nodes. In this paper, we investigate compact reachability embeddings for more general graph classes and provide theoretical guarantees for representing hierarchies using embeddings whose dimension depends on structural graph parameters. We prove that for any directed tree, there exists a reachability embedding in constant dimension 3, independent of the tree's size or depth. We generalize this result to graphs characterized by treewidth $t$, constructing embeddings of dimension $O(t \log n)$, where $n$ is the number of nodes. Complementing these upper bounds, we provide matching or near-matching lower bounds, showing that dimension $\Omega(n)$ is necessary for general DAGs and $\Omega(t/\log(n/t))$ is required for graphs of treewidth $t$. We also obtain upper and lower bounds parameterized by the number of cross-edges in the DAG. We additionally show that our embeddings can be constructed on real world datasets, and that they give much smaller dimensions in high recall regimes compared to prior embeddings with theoretical guarantees.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

Authors:
Xiaowen Ma↗Yunpu Ma↗Chenyang Lin↗Sikuan Yan↗Jinhe Bi↗Zixuan Cao↗Yijun Tian↗Volker Tresp↗Hinrich Schuetze↗

arXiv:2506.09046v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. Our framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, our work surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Automating Geometry-Intensive Compliance Checking in BIM: Graph-Based Semantic Reasoning Framework

Authors:
Zixuan Xiao↗Pei Troh Koh↗Jun Ma↗Jack C. P. Cheng↗

arXiv:2606.12065v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automating compliance check for geometry-intensive regulations remains a significant technical bottleneck in Building Information Modeling (BIM), primarily due to the semantic disparity between high-level regulatory logic and structured IFC data. Existing methods, often reliant on static rule templates, struggle to traverse multi-hop reasoning chains or resolve latent spatial dependencies across multiple building entities. To address these challenges, a Spatial-Geometric Reasoning System for Building Information Modeling (SGR-BIM) is proposed as an integrative graph-driven reasoning framework. SGR-BIM dynamically constructs a cross-modal knowledge graph that aligns user intent, regulatory semantics, and BIM geometry, enabling interpretable reasoning without rigid hard-coding. Validated on 679 expert-verified queries from fire safety codes, the framework achieves 84.3% accuracy, representing an 8.6% improvement over enhanced-tool single-agent baselines. This research provides a graph-based semantic reasoning paradigm, enhancing the transparency and flexibility of automated geometric compliance check workflows in the Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) industry.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Towards Responsibly Non-Compliant Machines

Authors:
Marija Slavkovik↗Marie Farrell↗Louise Dennis↗Michael Fisher↗Simon Kolker↗Emily C. Collins↗

arXiv:2606.12147v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider the problem of engineering autonomous intelligent agents that are capable to responsibly not comply with user requests. We argue that machine non-compliance comes in many different forms, and sketch the issues we should pursue on the road of accomplishing responsibly non-compliant intelligent machines. We anchor responsible non-compliance in justifications for task refusal, pathways to override the non-compliance, as well as careful tracking of security risks and liability transfers.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Generating Natural and Expressive Robot Gestures through Iterative Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback using LLMs

Authors:
Chris Lee↗Flora Salim↗Benjamin Tag↗Francisco Cruz↗

arXiv:2606.18747v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Expressive gestures are essential for natural and effective communication, complementing speech when verbal cues alone are insufficient (e.g., pointing). For social robots such as the humanoid Pepper, producing natural and expressive movements is critical for improving human-robot interaction (HRI) and long-term acceptance. However, generating gestures remains challenging due to reliance on expert-authored animations, resulting in rigid behaviors that are impractical for dynamic and diverse environments. Alternatively, machine learning approaches often struggle to capture perceived naturalness, becoming increasingly challenging with more degrees of freedom. Consequently, producing expressive robot gestures requires a system that can adapt to the environment while adhering to social norms and physical constraints. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable dynamic code generation, offering new opportunities for runtime gesture synthesis from natural language. In this paper, we integrate ChatGPT into the humanoid robot Pepper to generate co-speech gestures aligned with conversational output. While this baseline enables flexible gesture generation, the resulting motions are often perceived as stiff and unnatural. To address this limitation, we introduce an iterative reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) system that finetunes gesture generation based on user evaluations, leveraging an iterative user study to compare Pepper's generated gestures. Our results show that RLHF improved the LLM's co-speech generative capabilities, producing more expressive, relevant and fluid movements.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum coherence and Leggett-Garg inequality

Authors:
A. Jalal↗S. M. Fazeli↗M. M. Ettefaghi↗

arXiv:2606.15717v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we attempt to establish the relationship between quantum coherence and the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality. In particular, employing the Lindblad equation, we obtain the pseudo-density matrix for a damping system to study the effect of environment interaction on the violation of this inequality in a two-state quantum system. It is shown that the violation of the Leggett-Garg inequality can be observed as long as temporal evolution does not induce decoherence. This statement is independent of the initial state of the system. Furthermore, similar to the Horodecki criterion for the CHSH inequality (R. Horodecki et al. Phys. Lett. {\bf A200}, 340), we study necessary and sufficient conditions for violating the Leggett-Garg inequality. Hereby, under the circumstance that the inequality violation occurs, an upper bound for the time interval between consecutive measurements with respect to the time scale of interaction with the environment (the relaxation time) is obtained.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module

Authors:
Rishabh Sabharwal↗Ram Samarth B B↗Parikshit Singh Rathore↗Punit Rathore↗

Channel and spatial attention mechanisms introduced in earlier work enhance the representational capabilities of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) but often increase parameter and computational costs. While recent approaches focus solely on efficient feature context modeling for channel attention, we aim to model both channel and spatial attention comprehensively with minimal parameters and reduced computation. Leveraging the principles of relational modeling in graphs, we introduce a constant-parameter module, STEAM: Squeeze and Transform Enhanced Attention Module, which integrates channel and spatial attention to enhance the representation power of CNNs. To our knowledge, we are the first to propose a graph-based approach for modeling both channel and spatial attention, utilizing concepts from multi-head graph transformers. Additionally, we introduce Output Guided Pooling (OGP), which efficiently captures spatial context to further enhance spatial attention. We extensively evaluate STEAM for large-scale image classification, object detection and instance segmentation on standard benchmark datasets. STEAM achieves a \(2\%\) increase in accuracy over the standard ResNet-50 model with only a meager increase in GFLOPs. Furthermore, STEAM outperforms the leading modules, ECA and GCT, in terms of accuracy while achieving a threefold reduction in GFLOPs. The code will be made available upon acceptance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Layer-wise Geometric Approximation Rates for Deep Networks

Authors:
Shijun Zhang↗Zuowei Shen↗Yuesheng Xu↗

arXiv:2604.20219v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Depth is widely viewed as a central contributor to the success of deep neural networks, whereas standard neural network approximation theory typically provides guarantees only for the final output and leaves the role of intermediate layers largely unclear. We address this gap by developing a quantitative framework in which depth admits a precise scale-dependent interpretation. Specifically, we design a single shared mixed-activation architecture of fixed width $2dN+d+2$ and any prescribed finite depth such that each intermediate readout $\Phi_\ell$ is itself an approximant to the target function $f$. For $f\in L^p([0,1]^d)$ with $p\in [1,\infty)$, the approximation error of $\Phi_\ell$ is controlled by $(2d+1)$ times the $L^p$ modulus of continuity at the geometric scale $N^{-\ell}$ for all $\ell$. The estimate reduces to the geometric rate $(2d+1)N^{-\ell}$ if $f$ is $1$-Lipschitz. Our network design is inspired by multigrade deep learning, where depth serves as a progressive refinement mechanism. For every prescribed terminal depth, the construction yields a finite nested family of prefix readouts whose earlier correction terms remain embedded in later readouts. Thus the approximation may be truncated within the prescribed depth range once the desired certified accuracy is reached.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Does the Judge Prefer English? Evaluating Language-Switching Invariance in LLM-as-a-Judge

Authors:
Shaojie Yin↗

Large language models (LLMs) are now widely used as automatic judges for open-ended instruction-following evaluation. This practice is convenient, scalable, and often more semantically aware than reference-based metrics, but it also introduces a new reliability question: does a judge evaluate the quality of an answer, or does it also react to the language in which the comparison is presented? We propose Judge-LS, a lightweight meta-evaluation protocol that transforms LLMBar response-pair items into English, Chinese, and Chinese-English language-switched variants. A reliable judge should preserve its preference under label-preserving language transformations and should not prefer a language when two answers are translation-equivalent. We evaluate four API-accessible judges on the full 419-item LLMBar benchmark, producing 13,408 successful pairwise judgments. Across models, Chinese and language-switched presentations induce 10.7–14.4% preference flips relative to English, and all judges achieve their highest accuracy in English. However, translation-equivalent tie probes do not reveal a systematic English preference: most probes are judged as ties, and non-tie decisions more often favor Chinese. We add confidence intervals, paired significance tests, and an automatic transformation audit with a sensitivity analysis that excludes mechanically flagged high-risk variants. The experiment requires no model training, uses only API calls, and is feasible on modest local hardware.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Vision-language models for chest radiography do not always need the image

Authors:
Mahshad Lotfinia↗Sebastian Ziegelmayer↗Lisa Adams↗Daniel Truhn↗Andreas Maier↗Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh↗

Medical vision-language models report strong chest radiograph accuracy, and this is increasingly read as evidence that they use the image. That inference is unsafe: a model exploiting finding-name priors scores like one that reads the scan, and no standard benchmark separates them. We introduce a causal audit that intervenes on the image, occluding the relevant region, occluding an irrelevant one, and swapping in another patient's same-label scan, and combines three behavioral metrics to test whether a correct answer depends on the image. Across nine systems, a text-only model with no image access reaches within 5.7 accuracy points of the best multimodal one, and a 119-billion-parameter multimodal model is statistically indistinguishable from a 7-billion text-only baseline. The audit splits the cohort into three models that ignore the image, one that is unstable, and five that use it selectively, for a subset of findings; the categories hold across a second dataset, resolution, and prompt phrasing. Against board-certified radiologists, a text-only model is statistically indistinguishable from a radiologist's accuracy while grounding at zero, whereas the image-using models ground at radiologist-comparable rates. Reported confidence flags ungrounded answers only when a model uses the image. Grounding audits, not accuracy, should gate clinical deployment.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-19

Rumination as a cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement: evidence from the CARING study

Authors:
Ravaldi↗Mosconi↗Raduzzi↗Olmi↗Neri↗Cocchi↗Vannacci↗

Purpose. Perinatal loss is associated with a high risk of persistent psychological distress, including prolonged grief, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress symptoms. Cognitive processes such as rumination may play a crucial role in maintaining and amplifying distress following loss, yet their specific contribution in perinatal bereavement remains underexplored. Methods. The CARING (Cognitive Analysis and Rumination INvestigation in perinatal Grief) study employed a cross-sectional design involving 298 parents who experienced perinatal loss within the previous five years. Participants completed an anonymous online survey including measures of depressive rumination (Ruminative Response Scale, RRS), angry rumination (Anger Rumination Scale, ARS), perinatal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale, PGS), general psychopathology (SCL-90), and post-traumatic stress symptoms (NSESSS). Non-parametric analyses were conducted to examine associations between rumination patterns and psychological outcomes. Results. Higher levels of rumination were significantly associated with greater perinatal grief, depressive and anxiety symptoms, and post-traumatic stress. Depressive rumination showed consistently stronger associations with all outcomes compared to angry rumination. Participants presenting both depressive and angry rumination exhibited the highest levels of grief intensity, psychological distress, and PTSD symptoms, suggesting a graded relationship between rumination patterns and severity of distress. Rumination levels were not significantly associated with gestational age at loss or with having received psychological support. Conclusions. Rumination, particularly in its depressive form, appears to function as a transdiagnostic cognitive vulnerability factor in perinatal bereavement. These findings highlight rumination as a potential target for early screening and tailored psychological interventions aimed at reducing long-term distress following perinatal loss.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Early-life nutritional environment is associated with late-life cognition in the Health and Retirement Study, a pellagra epidemic natural experiment

Authors:
Vasiljevic↗Schmitz↗L. L↗Engelman↗C. D↗

Early-life exposures are important to several late-life health outcomes. We sought to study the effect of an in utero nutritional environment and its interaction with Alzheimer's disease (AD) genetic risk on late-life cognitive function. We used a natural experiment created by the pellagra epidemic, a nutritional disease caused by a vitamin B3 deficiency, to evaluate the association between in utero pellagra epidemic exposure and late-life cognitive function in the Health and Retirement Study (N = 18,285). We also evaluated whether the in utero exposure could modify the AD polygenic score's (PGS) effect on cognition. In utero pellagra epidemic exposure was significantly associated with cognition ({beta} = -0.025). However, these effects were not isolated to the prenatal period as exposure during childhood periods also had an effect. The interaction between the in utero exposure and the AD PGS was significant, where the genetic effect on cognition was amplified with increasing (progressively worse) in utero exposure levels. These associations imply that the early-life nutritional environment affects late-life cognitive function and that these effects can modify genetic risk.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

StreamKL: Fast and Memory-Efficient KL Divergence for Boosting Attention Distillation

Authors:
Guangda Liu↗Yiquan Wang↗Chengwei Li↗Wenhao Chen↗Jing Lin↗Yiwu Yao↗Danning Ke↗Wenchao Ding↗Jieru Zhao↗

arXiv:2606.20005v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Attention distillation, which trains one attention distribution to match another by minimizing their Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence, is widely used in knowledge distillation, model compression, continual learning, and sparse-attention LLM training. However, existing approaches materialize both attention distributions before computing the KL reduction, incurring $O(N_QN_K)$ memory and IO costs that become prohibitive at long context lengths. We present StreamKL, the first fused GPU primitive for attention KL divergence that eliminates this quadratic materialization. StreamKL derives a novel online formulation for the coupled two-distribution KL reduction, enabling a single one-pass forward kernel that streams query-key tiles through on-chip SRAM. For the backward pass, StreamKL recomputes attention probabilities tile-by-tile, avoiding storage of quadratic intermediates. We further design and implement efficient GPU kernels with dedicated optimizations. Experiments show StreamKL delivers up to $43\times$ and $14\times$ speedups over baseline methods in the forward and backward passes, respectively. Most importantly, StreamKL reduces the extra HBM footprint of attention distillation from $O(N_QN_K)$ to $O(1)$, enabling long-context distillation on a single GPU.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Evaluating Synthetic Data Generation for Domain Generalization in Fetal Brain MRI Segmentation

Authors:
Vladyslav Zalevskyi↗Thomas Sanchez↗Margaux Roulet↗Busra Bulut↗H\'el\`ene Lajous↗Jordina Aviles Verdera↗Sara Neves Silva↗Georg Langs↗Gregor Kasprian↗Roxane Licandro↗Jana Hutter↗Hamza Kebiri↗…

Fetal brain tissue segmentation from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is crucial for studying neurodevelopment, but remains challenging due to data heterogeneity and limited annotations. Domain randomization (DR) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for single-source domain generalization by synthesizing training images with randomized artifacts, contrast, and resolution. In this work, we investigate how to maximize the out-of-domain (OOD) generalization of DR-based methods. We evaluate several synthetic data generation strategies for DR, with a particular focus on our recently proposed framework, FetalSynthSeg. We show that simple Gaussian mixture-based intensity modeling outperforms more complex physics-based simulations, and that intensity clustering (subdividing tissue classes based on intensity) improves OOD robustness. Evaluated on 348 fetal subjects from four sites spanning 0.55-3T and both T1w and T2w contrasts, FetalSynthSeg reaches state-of-the-art performance on several FeTA 2024 testing datasets (80-85 Dice score) and, for the first time, offers robust segmentation on modalities other than T2w for fetal brain segmentation (80 Dice on dHCP-T1w dataset). Compared with state-of-the-art methods such as BOUNTI, nnU-Net ensemble, and the FeTA 2024 winner, FetalSynthSeg delivers comparable or superior accuracy while maintaining strong robustness across domain shifts. Our code, model weights, and Docker image ready for easy inference are available at https://hub.docker.com/r/vzalevskyi/fetalsynthseg.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

Authors:
Baohao Liao↗Hanze Dong↗Yuhui Xu↗Doyen Sahoo↗Christof Monz↗Junnan Li↗Caiming Xiong↗

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its extension, Long CoT, improve accuracy by generating rich intermediate reasoning trajectories, but these approaches incur substantial token costs that impede their deployment in latency-sensitive settings. In this work, we first show that truncated CoT, which stops reasoning before completion and directly generates the final answer, often matches the full CoT sampling while using dramatically fewer tokens. Building on this insight, we introduce Fractured Sampling, a unified inference-time strategy that interpolates between full CoT and solution-only sampling along three orthogonal axes: (1) the number of reasoning trajectories, (2) the number of final solutions per trajectory, and (3) the depth at which reasoning traces are truncated. Through extensive experiments on five diverse reasoning benchmarks and several model scales, we demonstrate that Fractured Sampling consistently achieves superior accuracy-cost trade-offs, yielding steep log-linear scaling gains in Pass@k versus token budget. Our analysis reveals how to allocate computation across these dimensions to maximize performance, paving the way for more efficient and scalable LLM reasoning. Code is available at https://github.com/BaohaoLiao/frac-cot.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

EquiDexFlow: Contact-Grounded SE(3)-Equivariant Dexterous Grasp Generative Flows

Authors:
Clinton Enwerem↗John S. Baras↗Calin Belta↗

Most learned dexterous grasp generators relegate contact forces to a downstream verification step, so a kinematically-plausible pose can still violate the conditions for a stable physical grasp. We address this with EquiDexFlow, an SE(3)-equivariant flow-matching model that jointly predicts wrist pose, joint angles, fingertip contacts, surface normals, and contact forces from an object point cloud. Our architecture projects contacts onto the object surface and forces into the Coulomb friction cone by construction, so placement and friction compliance hold without loss penalties. We prove end-to-end SE(3) equivariance and verify it empirically over 200 rotations, with wrist residuals below $0.04^\circ$ and exactly zero joint deviation. Trained on 8,100 force-closure grasps across 81 objects for the 16-DoF Allegro Hand, our model achieves zero friction violations, the best composite score, and the lowest wrench residual among all ablation variants. We retarget decoded fingertip contacts to a 16-DoF LEAP Hand via per-finger inverse kinematics, and our hardware-feasible refinement places every joint at least 5% inside its actuator envelope while preserving wrench balance. On the physical robot, retargeted EquiDexFlow-decoded grasps complete open-loop pick-and-hold trials on all six test objects, with every asymmetric object succeeding at both the canonical pose and a $120^\circ$ co-rotation. Videos, code, and checkpoints are available at https://equidexflow.github.io.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Beyond IGO-Flow: Toward Convergence Analysis of IGO in Continuous Spaces

Authors:
Ryosuke Kimura↗Youhei Akimoto↗

arXiv:2606.17523v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Information-Geometric Optimization (IGO) provides a unified framework for black-box optimization by interpreting the adaptation of a search distribution as a natural gradient update. Despite its conceptual importance, the convergence theory of IGO remains limited: most existing results concern continuous-time idealizations such as the IGO flow, rather than discrete-time updates with non-infinitesimal learning rates. In this paper, we study discrete-time IGO in continuous spaces, formulated as natural gradient updates in the expectation-parameter coordinates of an exponential family. In particular, we analyze IGO over the multivariate Gaussian family on strongly convex quadratic objective functions. Our analysis covers a setting that simultaneously incorporates full covariance adaptation, a fixed positive learning rate, and quantile-based weights. In this setting, we prove that the covariance matrix converges to the zero matrix. We further show that the mean vector converges to the global optimum, provided that the condition number of the appropriately scaled covariance matrix is bounded at sufficiently frequent iterations. These results advance the convergence theory of IGO and help bridge the gap between the mathematical theory of IGO and practical covariance-adaptive search methods such as CMA-ES.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A blinded, counterbalanced rater design for evaluating AI-assisted summarisation of tertiary clinical genomics reports: methodology of the QNOMX-VHIR-CPSP-001 Phase 1 study

Authors:
Creeden↗Olivecrona↗Soriano↗

Background. Tertiary clinical genomics reports condense layered molecular findings into documents that treating oncologists must read, translate, and act upon; manual summarisation of these reports is time-consuming and variable. Tools that assist summarisation and translation into local languages are emerging, yet the field lacks an agreed methodology for evaluating such tools before any downstream clinical use. The appropriate first endpoint is fidelity of the generated summary to its source report, assessed by qualified human raters under blinded scoring, not downstream variant classification. Methods. QNOMX-VHIR-CPSP-001 Phase 1 is a single-site, non-interventional clinical performance study conducted at Vall d'Hebron Institut de Recerca (VHIR) under ISO 20916:2019 as a Clinical Performance Study Protocol. De-identified tertiary cancer genomics reports from pediatric oncology cases are summarised by the AI-assisted summarisation system under evaluation and, in parallel, by the standard manual workflow. Qualified raters score both summary types against the source genomics report using the Quality Summary Index (QSI), a six-dimension, five-point rubric adapted from the Provider Documentation Summarization Quality Instrument, under a blinded, counterbalanced, two-period crossover with a minimum fourteen-day washout. Two co-primary composite endpoints, content and presentation, are analysed for non-inferiority under a Bayesian hierarchical model, with a frequentist linear mixed model as the convergence check. Inter-rater reliability is reported as Krippendorff's ; a Monte-Carlo power analysis of the fixed clustered design is pre-specified. Discussion. The design isolates summarisation quality from clinical decision-making by scoring both summary types against the same source report under blinding, counterbalancing, and a fourteen-day washout. Conclusion. The QSI rubric, the counterbalanced crossover, and the pre-specified Bayesian primary with frequentist convergence check define a replicable protocol for early-stage evaluation of AI-assisted summarisation in tertiary genomics reporting; observed variance components will inform sample-size determination for Phase 2.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

LLM-Based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for Assessing the Explainability of Facial Skin Disease Classification Models

Authors:
Gyuyeon Na↗

This study proposes a domain-specific LLM-based Visual Explanation Evaluation Framework for assessing Grad-CAM explanations in facial skin disease diagnosis models. While previous studies have primarily focused on improving classification performance through data augmentation techniques, relatively few studies have systematically examined whether model explanations are grounded in clinically relevant lesion regions. In this study, geometric augmentation, color-based augmentation, and mixed augmentation strategies were applied to facial skin disease classification models based on EfficientNet-B0, MobileNetV3, and ResNet18. Grad-CAM was employed to generate visual explanations representing the models' decision-making processes. Furthermore, an LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation framework was designed using GPT-5.5, Gemini 3.5 Flash, and Claude Sonnet 4.6 to assess Grad-CAM explanations from the perspectives of lesion localization and explanation trustworthiness. To improve evaluation consistency and clinical grounding, a progressive prompt engineering strategy was introduced, incorporating evaluation rubrics, clinical knowledge, penalty rules, and structured output formats.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

QoS-Aware Token Scheduling and Private Data Valuation for Multi-Modal Agentic Networks

Authors:
Yao Du↗Jing Liu↗Pengfei Xu↗Zehua Wang↗Victor C. M. Leung↗Cyril Leung↗Victoria Lemieux↗

arXiv:2606.15573v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In agentic systems, human-generated data records anchor the value of AI services. Yet cloud compute pipelines centralize processing on remote servers. Data centralization reduces personal data sovereignty and may potentially degrade the quality of service (QoS). Meanwhile, user contributions are diverse in quantity and quality: decentralized records can be biased, noisy, and heterogeneously distributed. To address the data challenge, we study fair token allocation and private data valuation for decentralized and resource-constrained agentic systems. Our approach embeds multi-modal representations in a shared semantic space and releases differentially private (DP) prototypes to preserve utility while reducing semantic leakage. With the DP guarantee, we design a fair token allocation scheme that rewards effective contributions and remains robust to data heterogeneity and AI resource scarcity. Extensive simulations demonstrate improved contribution-based fairness and QoS compared to standard benchmarks. The improved resistance to image reconstruction attacks indicates enhanced privacy for multi-modal personal data.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

AgentLeak: A Benchmark for Internal-Channel Privacy Leakage in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Authors:
Faouzi El Yagoubi↗Godwin Badu-Marfo↗Ranwa Al Mallah↗

arXiv:2602.11510v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent Large Language Model (LLM) systems create privacy risks that current output-only benchmarks cannot measure. When agents coordinate on tasks, sensitive data may pass through inter-agent messages, shared memory, and tool arguments, all pathways that final-output audits typically do not inspect. We introduce AgentLeak, a benchmark for evaluating internal-channel privacy leakage in multi-agent LLM systems. AgentLeak instruments seven privacy-relevant communication pathways and provides a large-scale empirical evaluation focused on final outputs, inter-agent messages, and shared memory. Across 1,000 scenarios spanning healthcare, finance, legal, and corporate domains, five production LLMs (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Mistral Large, and Llama 3.3 70B), and 4,979 validated execution traces, we find that multi-agent configurations reduce final-output leakage (C1: 27.2% vs 43.2% in single-agent mode) compared with single-agent baselines but introduce internal channels that raise total system exposure to 68.9% (aggregated across C1, C2, C5). Inter-agent messages (C2) leak at 68.8%, compared with 27.2% for final outputs (C1), meaning that output-only audits miss 41.7% of violations. Across all five models and four domains, the pattern C2 $\geq$ C1 holds consistently. These results suggest, within the evaluated coordinator-worker setting, that privacy risk in multi-agent systems is strongly shaped by architectural coordination channels rather than final-output behavior alone: it arises from internal channels that remain invisible to standard output-level defenses.

Read & Discuss → View Source →