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) 2026-06-19

A deep learning framework for jointly solving transient Fokker-Planck equations with arbitrary parameters and initial distributions

arXiv:2604.06001v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficiently solving the Fokker-Planck equation (FPE) is central to analyzing complex parameterized stochastic systems. However, current numerical methods lack parallel computation capabilities across varying conditions, severely limiting comprehensive parameter exploration and transient analysis. This paper introduces a deep learning-based pseudo-analytical probability solution (PAPS) that, via a single training process, simultaneously resolves transient FPE solutions for arbitrary multi-modal initial distributions, system parameters, and time points. The core idea is to unify initial, transient, and stationary distributions via Gaussian mixture distributions (GMDs) and develop a constraint-preserving autoencoder that bijectively maps constrained GMD parameters to unconstrained, low-dimensional latent representations. In this representation space, the panoramic transient dynamics across varying initial conditions and system parameters can be modeled by a single evolution network. Extensive experiments on paradigmatic systems demonstrate that the proposed PAPS maintains high accuracy while achieving inference speeds four orders of magnitude faster than GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulations. This efficiency leap enables previously intractable real-time parameter sweeps and systematic investigations of stochastic bifurcations. By decoupling representation learning from physics-informed transient dynamics, our work establishes a scalable paradigm for probabilistic modeling of multi-dimensional, parameterized stochastic systems.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

From Drift to Coherence: Stabilizing Beliefs in LLMs

arXiv:2606.17832v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are often hypothesized to perform implicit Bayesian inference, yet a key coherence condition, the martingale property of predictive beliefs, has been shown to fail in controlled synthetic in-context learning settings. We revisit this question in a more typical usage regime: generic multiple-choice question answering. Exploiting the discrete answer space, we compute exact predictive distributions and study belief dynamics induced by autoregressive answer resampling. We introduce prompted predictive resampling (PPR), where an LLM generates a sequence of answers to the same question. Empirically, PPR reveals early-stage belief drift, indicating martingale violations. However, after sufficient resampling steps, the belief process self-stabilizes and converges to a coherent predictive distribution. Based on this observation, we further propose (i) a seed-answer prompting strategy to accelerate stabilization, and (ii) a self-consistency loss that amortizes early-stage drift into the model via fine-tuning. Experiments on multiple-choice QA benchmarks show that our methods substantially reduce belief drift and improve predictive coherence without sacrificing accuracy.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Exclusion Statistics as a Thermodynamic Resource in Quantum Heat Engines

arXiv:2606.19310v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The maximum power extractable from a quantum thermoelectric heat engine operating with free fermion carriers is bounded by the universal Whitney limit, $P_{fermion}^{\max} \simeq 0.0321\pi^2 k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$. We demonstrate that this bound is not fundamental to quantum heat engines but is instead an artifact of fermionic statistics. Within the nonlinear Landauer-B\"{u}ttiker framework, a bosonic working medium yields a strictly enhanced universal maximum power, $P_{boson}^{\max} = (\ln 2)^2\, k_B^2(T_L-T_R)^2/h$, exceeding the fermionic limit by a factor of $(\ln 2)^2/(0.0321\pi^2) \approx 1.52$. We propose magnon transport through a ferromagnetic spin chain as an experimentally viable bosonic realization. Incorporating Haldane fractional exclusion statistics with parameter $g$ provides a continuous interpolation between the bosonic ($g = 0$) and fermionic ($g = 1$) limits, revealing a monotonic enhancement of maximum power for $g < 1$ at reduced bias cost. These results establish quantum statistical exclusion as a previously unrecognized and independently tunable thermodynamic resource, opening performance regimes inaccessible to conventional carrier-engineering approaches.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Bridging Creative Intent and Visual Quality: Creator-Driven Recurrent Video Generation with Agentic Feedback Loops

Generative AI has made content creation increasingly accessible, but many AI-generated videos lack narrative coherence and creative direction, issues that become more substantial at longer durations. Unlike coding, where AI generation benefits from reliable feedback and techniques such as recurrent self-improvement, video generation requires subjective feedback about plot, scenes, and narrative, which naturally motivates approaches that incorporate human creative direction. We introduce CHIEF, a human-AI co-creation video generation framework that places the creator at the center of human-in-the-loop iterative video refinement, and supports them by providing automatic subjective feedback. The creator incorporates their creative direction by driving each iteration, while their revisions are incorporated by a specialized refiner agent. The feedback loop is generated by persona-conditioned multimodal LLMs that watch generated videos and produce subjective critique from the audience perspectives, providing feedback that self-evaluation alone cannot capture. To test the effectiveness of our proposed framework, we work with high school and college students with no prior filmmaking experience to create videos, from short 1-minute videos to a complete short 10-minute film with a complicated plot.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

CareTransition-Audit: A Benchmark to Audit Discharge Summaries for Efficient Care Transitions

arXiv:2604.05435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Incomplete or inconsistent discharge documentation drives care fragmentation and avoidable readmissions. Despite its critical role in patient safety, auditing discharge summaries relies on manual review and does not scale. We propose an automated framework for auditing discharge summaries using large language models (LLMs). Our approach operationalizes the DISCHARGED framework into a checklist of 46 questions. Using 50 summaries from the MIMIC-IV database, with clinician ground-truth labels, we benchmark 11 LLMs. Model-assessed mean documentation completeness ranges from 54.9% to 74.2%, and the best-performing models achieve a Cohen's kappa values around 0.5 against clinician labels, indicating moderate agreement. All models struggle to identify ambiguous documentation (Unclear), highlighting a key gap in current automated auditing. This work provides a clinician-validated benchmark and zero-shot baselines for systematic quality improvement in clinical documentation.

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

From Spatial to Spectral: An Efficient, Frequency-Guided Feature Representation Learner for Small Object Detection

arXiv:2606.23825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Efficient small object detection is bottlenecked by the inherent feature scarcity of tiny targets, which is further aggravated by operations of spatial-domain detectors that indiscriminately discard critical high-frequency details. Recovering these fragile cues within the spatial domain is notoriously difficult, as it often requires computationally expensive architectural upscaling that inadvertently amplifies background noise. To bridge this gap, we propose a paradigm shift from spatial to spectral feature processing, introducing a holistic solution with the following novelty: (1) A versatile Frequency-Guided Feature Representation framework that generalizes across diverse detector architectures (both CNN and Transformer-based), offering a robust alternative to spatial-only feature extraction; (2) The unified Decompose–Enhance–Reconstruct (DER) operator, instantiated via three lightweight, plug-and-play modules – Wavelet-Difference Gate (WDG), Log-Gabor Enhancer (LGE), and Frequency-Driven Head (FDHead) – to systematically inject frequency-aware modulation into the backbone, neck, and head. This mechanism decouples feature modeling from resolution reduction, capturing discriminative high-frequency components to enable accurate localization with significantly reduced parameter redundancy; (3) Extensive validation on multi-domain benchmarks (VisDrone2019, UAVDT, TinyPerson, DOTAv1) demonstrating consistent gains. Notably, our proposed DERNet series outperforms YOLOv11 models under the same scale while requiring only 1/6 of the parameters, backed by rigorous spectral diagnostics and error decomposition analysis.

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

Arbor: Tree Search as a Cognition Layer for Autonomous Agents

arXiv:2606.12563v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Arbor is a multi-agent framework that introduces structured tree search as a cognition layer for autonomous agents operating in large, stateful action spaces. Prior autonomous optimization systems operate on isolated targets with stateless evaluation. Arbor instead maintains an explicit search tree of scored hypotheses that serves as the shared working memory across agents, evolving with every measurement, treating failures as diagnostic signal that reshapes subsequent exploration, and expanding as prior successes shift the bottleneck distribution. We validate Arbor on full-stack LLM inference optimization, a domain where achieving peak performance has historically required coordinated effort from engineering teams across the application, framework, compiler, kernel, and hardware stack. Arbor pairs an Orchestrator agent, which drives optimization by delegating to Domain Specialists across the inference stack, with a Critic agent that safeguards stability through root-cause analysis, introspection, and measurement validation – a checks-and-balances architecture where neither agent can unilaterally drive the system. Agent capabilities are decomposed into hard skills (domain expertise) and soft skills (coordination protocols that determine how contributions compose), enabling fully autonomous multi-day campaigns. Arbor achieves up to 193% inference throughput-latency Pareto improvement over vendor-optimized baselines, while a single agent without the harness plateaus at +33% throughput improvement and crashes irrecoverably within hours. Arbor generalizes to multiple generations of hardware platform, and run-to-run variance is within 2 percentage points demonstrating that the method is hardware-agnostic and reproducible.

08.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Blood signatures of cell type-specific aging forecast disease risk and resilience

Authors: Unknown Author

By measuring thousands of proteins in blood samples from over 60,000 people, we built molecular ‘clocks’ to estimate how fast cells age. Our analyses show that cell types age at different rates within the same person. Accelerated aging of specific cell types is associated with increased disease risk, whereas slower aging of others is linked to protection and improved survival.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Exactly Solvable Quantum Model with Spin-Dependent Coulomb Interaction

arXiv:2501.05103v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In this work, we report an exactly solvable quantum model featuring a spin-dependent Coulomb interaction, described by the spin vector potential \(\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2\) together with a Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\varphi = \kappa / r\) . The model is governed by the Schrödinger-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_S = \vec{\Pi}^2 / (2M) + q \varphi\) in nonrelativistic quantum mechanics and by the Dirac-type Hamiltonian \(\mathcal{H}_D = c \vec{\alpha} \cdot \vec{\Pi} + \beta M c^2 + q \varphi\) in relativistic quantum mechanics, where \(\vec{\Pi} = \vec{p} - (q/c)\vec{\mathcal{A}}\) is the canonical momentum. We demonstrate two main results: (i) Just as the Coulomb-type scalar potential \(\mathcal{S}_Maxwell = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = 0,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) is a local exact solution of Maxwell's equations on $r\neq0$, the gauge potential \(\mathcal{S}_YM = \{\vec{\mathcal{A}} = k (\vec{r} \times \vec{S}) / r^2,\ \varphi = \kappa / r\}\) constitutes a local exact solution of the Yang–Mills equations on the punctured region $r\neq0$. (ii) Both Hamiltonians \(\mathcal{H}_S\) and \(\mathcal{H}_D\) can be solved exactly in the presence of this spin-dependent Coulomb interaction. The resulting energy spectra are derived, and they naturally reduce to those of the ordinary hydrogen atom when the spin-dependent terms are neglected. Finally, we clarify the quantization conditions and the fixed-background interpretation of the model.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Ensemble Feature Selection and Harris Hawks Optimization for Explainable Mental Health Risk Prediction in Female Sex Workers

arXiv:2606.24047v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: One of the significant mental health issues affecting female sex workers (FSWs) is mental disorders, especially depression. Exposure to violence, stigma, and economic hardship further increases their psychological risk. Current machine learning (ML) models are typically ineffective at capturing the high-dimensional and complex risk patterns that exist in this marginalized group. This paper suggests a hybrid predictive model that merges an ensemble feature selection strategy using ANOVA and mutual information and Harris Hawks optimization-tuned logistic regression and represents a new application of swarm intelligence to predict mental health in vulnerable groups. The explainable AI (XAI) methods can be used to understand the factors of trauma associated with model predictions. When applied to a group of 3,005 FSWs, it can be seen that the proposed model is more effective than traditional classifiers, with an accuracy of 95.78%, an F1 score of 95.77%, and an AUC of 0.96, and identifying post-traumatic stress, client-related violence, and occupational factors as major contributors to depression. This work bridges the gaps between conventional and ML approaches to develop an XAI tool that enables vulnerable groups to receive early assistance, evidence-based targeted psychosocial care, and health planning.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SAFE-Cascade: Cost-Adaptive Vision-Language Routing for Chart Question Answering

Vision-language models (VLMs) are powerful for chart question answering, but invoking a VLM for every query can be unnecessarily expensive when many questions are answerable from OCR text and lightweight language reasoning. We demonstrate SAFE-Cascade, an interactive system for cost-adaptive chart question answering. Given a chart image and a natural-language question, SAFE-Cascade first extracts chart text with OCR, obtains a provisional answer from a text-only language model, and then uses a learned router to decide whether to accept the text answer or escalate to a VLM. The demo exposes this decision process to users: OCR evidence, text-only answer, routing probability, escalation decision, final answer, estimated cost, and estimated latency are shown side by side. SAFE-Cascade is designed as a transparent interface for understanding when visual grounding is actually needed. Users can upload or select charts, ask questions, inspect the evidence used by each pathway, compare text-only and VLM answers, and adjust the escalation threshold to explore the accuracy-cost frontier. The system is implemented with Azure Document Intelligence for OCR, gpt-5-mini as the text-only model, gemini-2.5-flash-image as the VLM, and a Random Forest router trained on inference-time features. On a held-out ChartQA test split of 375 examples from a 2,500-example experiment, SAFE-Cascade achieves 69.1% unified accuracy with 73.1% VLM invocation, compared with 67.7% accuracy and 100% VLM invocation for the full-VLM baseline. The observed +1.4 percentage-point difference is statistically uncertain, so we interpret SAFE-Cascade as matching full-VLM performance while reducing VLM calls by 26.9% and estimated cost by 9.3%. The demonstration shows how selective modality routing can make multimodal knowledge systems more transparent, tunable, and cost-aware.

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

EA-WM: Event-Aware World Models with Task-Specification Grounding for Long-Horizon Manipulation

arXiv:2606.13053v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pretrained-feature world models provide a useful substrate for robot imagination, but visual or latent prediction alone does not determine whether an imagined future satisfies task-relevant events. Long-horizon manipulation requires progress signals that are relational, predicate-level, and physically grounded: whether an object has moved, whether a drawer or contact state has changed, whether a placement predicate is satisfied, and whether a candidate future is reliable enough for execution. We introduce EA-WM, an event-aware world-model framework that augments frozen visual-feature dynamics with task-specification-grounded event prediction and verification. EA-WM rolls out candidate futures in pretrained visual-feature space, decodes them into structured event states, and scores them using task-progress, semantic-consistency, physical-feasibility, and uncertainty terms. The verifier guides sampling-based planning, gates candidate actions, and, in the contact-sensitive LIBERO wine-rack setting, selects among PPOgenerated proposals. Across navigation, deformable-object, wall-constrained, and languagedescribed manipulation studies, EA-WM shows that event-aware verification can make featurespace world models more interpretable and better aligned with task progress.

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Energy-Efficient On-Device RAG on a Mobile NPU: System Design and Benchmark on Snapdragon X Elite

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines are compute-intensive, combining embedding, retrieval, reranking, and large language model (LLM) generation. Running them entirely on-device benefits privacy, latency, and offline use, but the energy cost of CPU inference is a major barrier. We present what is, to our knowledge, the first end-to-end RAG pipeline that runs all neural stages – embedding, reranking, and LLM generation – on the Qualcomm Hexagon NPU of the Snapdragon X Elite. Profiling on a Dell XPS 13 laptop, we compare NPU-accelerated RAG against CPU and OpenCL/Adreno GPU baselines on indexing and query workloads. On indexing, the NPU achieves 9.1x higher embedding throughput and 12.3x less system energy. On a 120-query Wikipedia-passage benchmark, it delivers 18.1x faster LLM prefilling, 4.0x lower end-to-end query latency, and 4.0x less system energy than the CPU baseline; the same workload on the integrated GPU is 1.7x slower than CPU and uses 6.5x more energy than the NPU. A GPT-4.1 LLM-as-judge evaluation finds NPU answer quality on par with CPU and GPU within evaluator noise (mean 9.32 vs. 8.95 vs. 9.03 on a 1-10 rubric), with 86.7% of queries scoring identically across all three backends. On the Snapdragon X Elite / Hexagon class of laptop SoC, the NPU thus enables practical, energy-efficient on-device RAG without quality regression – a sustainable path toward green edge intelligence that we expect to generalize to comparable mobile NPUs (Apple Neural Engine, Intel NPU, MediaTek APU) as their software stacks mature.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Towards Conditional Feature Alignment for Cross-Domain Counting

Object counting models often degrade under cross-domain deployment because density composition varies across domains and is itself task-relevant. Standard feature alignment methods tend to suppress such variation by encouraging global domain invariance, which can be harmful when source and target domains contain different proportions of background, sparse foreground, and dense foreground. We propose Conditional Feature Alignment (CFA), a cross-domain counting framework that aligns representations within label-induced conditions rather than across full marginal feature distributions. Given density annotations or pseudo-density predictions, CFA constructs foreground/background or density-level conditions and aligns only features belonging to matching conditions. We formalise this idea through a conditional divergence perspective, showing that conditional alignment removes within-condition discrepancy while preserving condition-marginal density shift. For unsupervised domain adaptation, CFA estimates source conditions from annotations and target conditions from detached pseudo-density maps, then performs condition-wise adversarial alignment with full-image consistency regularisation. For source-domain generalisation, we instantiate the same principle with MPCount by enforcing condition-wise memory-consistency between generated source-domain views. Experiments on crowd and cell counting benchmarks show competitive or improved performance across diverse UDA and DG settings. For example, on JHU-CROWD++ FH$\rightarrow$SN, CFA-DG reduces MAE/RMSE from MPCount's 216.3/421.4 to 90.5/169.9, indicating that condition-wise alignment is especially effective under large weather- and density-induced shifts. These results suggest that condition-wise alignment is a promising design principle for domain-adaptive counting.

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

An Analysis of the Coordination Gap between Joint and Modular Learning for Job Shop Scheduling with Transportation Resources

arXiv:2604.24117v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Efficient job-shop scheduling with transportation resources is critical for high-performance manufacturing. With the rise of "decentralized factories", multi-agent reinforcement learning has emerged as a promising approach for the combined scheduling of production and transportation tasks. Prior work has largely focused on developing novel cooperative architectures while overlooking the question of when joint training is necessary. Joint training denotes the simultaneous training of job and automatic guided vehicle scheduling agents, whereas modular training involves independently training each agent followed by post-hoc integration. In this study, we systematically investigate the conditions under which joint training is essential for optimal performance in the job-shop scheduling problem with transportation resources. Through a rigorous sensitivity analysis of resource scarcity and temporal dominance, we quantify the coordination gap – the performance difference between these two training modalities. In our evaluation, joint training outperforms the majority of dispatching rule combinations and modular training approaches. However, the coordination gap advantage diminishes in bottleneck environments, particularly under severe transport and processing constraints. These findings indicate that modular training represents a viable alternative in environments where a single scheduling task dominates. Overall, our work provides practical guidance for selecting between training modalities based on environmental conditions, enabling decision-makers to optimize reinforcement learning-based scheduling performance.

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

Which Spaces can be Embedded in $L_p$-type Reproducing Kernel Banach Space? A Characterization via Metric Entropy

arXiv:2410.11116v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we establish a novel connection between the metric entropy growth and the embeddability of function spaces into reproducing kernel Hilbert/Banach spaces. Metric entropy characterizes the information complexity of function spaces and has implications for their approximability and learnability. Classical results show that embedding a function space into a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) implies a bound on its metric entropy growth. Surprisingly, we prove a converse: a bound on the metric entropy growth of a function space allows its embedding to a $L_p-$type Reproducing Kernel Banach Space (RKBS). This shows that the ${L}_p-$type RKBS provides a broad modeling framework for learnable function classes with controlled metric entropies. Our results shed new light on the power and limitations of kernel methods for learning complex function spaces.

17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Microbial-based yeast protein is similar to whey protein and greater than collagen hydrolysate in supporting whole-body protein synthesis as determined by the indicatory amino acid oxidation method: a randomized controlled trial

Background: Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is a model organism in agricultural and industrial fermentation with nutritional benefits, yet less is understood about its nutritional value for supporting whole-body protein synthesis in vivo, and its comparison to animal-based protein. Objective: This study aimed to determine the effect of microbial-based protein (yeast) compared to a high (whey) and low (collagen) quality animal-based protein on the ability to support whole-body protein synthesis using the indicator amino acid oxidation technique. Methods: Thirteen healthy participants (M: n=6, 24{+/-}4 yr; F: n=7, 27{+/-}7 yr) consumed eight hourly yeast (Y), whey (W), or collagen (CH) protein beverages at 0.9 g{middle dot}kg-1{middle dot}d-1 supplemented with L-[1-13C]phenylalanine in a randomized, cross-over, counterbalanced design. Breath and urine were collected to measure fraction of expired 13CO2 (F13CO2) and [1-13C]Phe oxidation (PheOx) as inverse correlates of whole-body protein synthesis. An a priori 20% noninferiority margin was used to determine equivalency between protein sources. A Visual Analog Scale (VAS) was provided to assess fullness and hunger by protein sources. Results: Protein source had no effect on F13CO2 (P=0.15) or PheRa (P=0.10). PheOx was greater in CH compared to both Y (14.94{+/-}2.16 vs. 12.93{+/-}2.80 mol{middle dot}kg BM-1{middle dot}h-1, P

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Computing noise-canceling observables via Pauli propagation

arXiv:2606.20441v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The pursuit of quantum advantage is driving the co-evolution of quantum processors and classical simulation methods. Despite advances in scale and quality, the accuracy of quantum simulation is ultimately limited by error rates and sampling overheads. Similarly, while classical simulation methods such as Pauli propagation have made remarkable progress, their accuracy is ultimately limited by the exponential growth of operator paths and the truncations needed to control memory and runtime. Here we show that these complementary limitations can be mitigated by embedding Pauli propagation within a hybrid error-mitigation framework that reduces quantum sampling overhead while achieving lower truncation errors with fewer classical resources than traditional Pauli propagation alone. In this framework, a target observable is classically propagated through noise-canceling inverse channels, producing a modified observable that is measured directly on a quantum processor. We prototype two implementations and benchmark their performance numerically on canonical models that challenge traditional Pauli propagation. We also perform experiments on a quantum processor using 56 superconducting qubits, revealing the tradeoffs of their respective truncation strategies. These results illustrate how classical and quantum resources can be orchestrated to extend observable estimation beyond the limits of either approach alone, providing a foundation for quantum-centric supercomputing and future demonstrations of quantum advantage.

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

Patients With Personality: Realistic Patient Simulation through Controlled Diversity and Selective Disclosure

arXiv:2606.17441v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulating realistic patient interactions is a key requirement to testing clinical applications of LLMs at scale without time-consuming and expensive user studies. However, existing approaches often lack realism and controllability, often oversharing information unprompted, and failing to capture the wide variability of patient behavior. Here, we introduce PatientsWithPersonality (PWP), a patient simulation framework that generates realistic yet diverse virtual patient responses through explicit personality parametrization over a latent patient state. Grounded in HEXACO, a six-dimensional personality space used to quantify and parameterize human behavioral traits, our approach enables fine-grained control over conversational style, cooperativeness, and information disclosure within a unified framework. In a clinician evaluation, PWP is judged nearly as realistic as recorded human actors and clearly ahead of prior simulators, while being flagged as "too informative" far less often. Conditioning on HEXACO axes yields personas whose configured traits are recoverable by both clinicians and an autorater, span a substantially wider behavioral footprint than the closest baseline, and prevent oversharing. Altogether, our framework paves the way for more accurate and informative LLM benchmarking through our realistic and steerable patient simulator.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Critical Percolation as a Synthetic Data Model for Interpretability

arXiv:2606.20347v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks learn features that reflect the hierarchical, multi-scale structure of natural data. Synthetic datasets used to evaluate interpretability methods typically lack this structure, limiting their value as realistic toy models. To close this gap, we introduce a family of synthetic datasets consisting of hierarchical functions defined on critical mean-field percolation clusters embedded in a high-dimensional data space. The percolation data consists of sparse, low-dimensional fractal clusters with a power-law size distribution. Latent variables modeling a taxonomic hierarchy generate each data point's target value. The data model is analytically tractable with known critical exponents that fix its properties without requiring hyperparameter tuning. We leverage a mapping between percolation clusters, random trees, and additive coalescence to propose an almost linear-time algorithm to jointly sample a random tree and its hierarchical latent decomposition, enabling data generation at arbitrary scale. Using probing experiments, we find that the model's ground-truth latent variables can be linearly decoded from neural network activations. Together, sparsity, self-similarity, power-law statistics, and analytical tractability make critical percolation a principled testbed for interpretability research.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Real-Time Interactive Music Generation via Data-Free Streaming Consistency Distillation

arXiv:2606.24307v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interactive music and live performance relies on real-time human expression, but modern generative music AI remains largely absent from this domain due to its prohibitive inference latency and offline rendering paradigm. To provide pioneer musicians with a novel medium for interactive composition, we should fundamentally change these static models into dynamic, playable instruments. In this paper, we propose a framework that bridges this gap. To achieve the low latency required for live interaction without sacrificing structural coherence, we formulate distillation within a streaming autoregressive latent space. Our approach gets rid of the need for expensive paired audio-latent datasets by utilizing prompt-only inputs to synthesize teacher-guided, chunk-wise trajectories on the fly. Because live instruments require high acoustic fidelity, we introduce music-aware consistency objectives, which combine latent, spectral, and temporal-difference losses, to preserve crucial qualities like timbre, transients, and rhythmic stability during accelerated single-step streaming generation. Implemented via parameter-efficient adaptation, our distillation reduces generation steps to achieve a low real-time factor. Crucially, by operating as a continuous autoregressive stream, the system can seamlessly assimilate dynamic human inputs on the fly, allowing users to instantly steer the musical trajectory without interrupting the audio flow. Ultimately, this work recontextualizes generative text-to-music models not as passive prompt-and-wait systems, but as responsive instruments, opening new frontiers for live human-AI musical co-creation.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Clinical care site data integration reveals heterogeneity in EHR phenotyping and healthcare utilization patterns

Objective: Genomic research using electronic health record (EHR)-linked biobanks is influenced by heterogeneity in the clinical settings (care sites) where encounters occur. We developed two methods leveraging care site data: ClinicScan identifies where phenotype documentation occurs, and ClinicWAS identifies specialty utilization patterns associated with a risk factor. Materials and Methods: We extracted care sites for each clinical encounter at an academic medical center and mapped each to a clinical specialty. ClinicScan summarizes the specialty distribution of a user-specified diagnosis; ClinicWAS fits a logistic regression for each care site to identify specialty encounters associated with a user-specified risk factor. We applied ClinicScan to depression to test whether requiring a psychiatry encounter strengthened the association between a polygenic risk score (PRS) and a depression phenotype, and ClinicWAS to a coronary heart disease (CHD) PRS to identify sites enriched for high-risk patients. Results: Across 64,983,257 encounters, 2,544 care sites mapped to 57 specialties. Most depression diagnoses occurred in primary care (30.3%) and psychiatry (19.8%). Requiring a psychiatry encounter strengthened the PRS-phenotype association (OR=1.30, 95% CI 1.26-1.35) versus two or more diagnosis codes alone (OR=1.21, 95% CI 1.19-1.24). CHD ClinicWAS identified 19 associated care sites, including 5 catheterization labs. Men and women with high genetic risk (PRS[&ge;]95th percentile) underwent catheterization for CHD 3.1 (1.5-4.6) and 4.6 (2.5-6.7) years earlier than normal-risk participants, respectively. Discussion: Care site data capture phenotype heterogeneity that otherwise distorts EHR-based phenotypes and obscures high-risk subpopulations. Conclusion: Clinical care site data are an under-utilized resource in EHR-linked biobanks.

23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Longitudinal Attribute-Conditioned Neural Network for Modeling Health-State Transition Probabilities in Temporally Irregular Data: The LANTERN Framework

arXiv:2606.13880v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate estimation of long-term care transition probabilities is central to disability insurance pricing, reserving, and solvency assessment. Classical actuarial multi-state models commonly rely on Markov, semi-Markov, or proportional-hazard specifications, which provide a direct connection to cohort projection but may be restrictive for irregular longitudinal health data with nonlinear aging patterns and heterogeneous covariate histories. This paper develops a well-calibrated estimator of multi-state transition probabilities for irregular longitudinal health data. The model learns from individual health history, incorporates the time elapsed between observations, and conditions transition probabilities on demographic and socioeconomic attributes. It produces a valid probability distribution over the next observed health state, with four possible states: healthy, mild disability, severe disability, and death. Individual probabilities are aggregated by age group and origin state to form transition matrices compatible with actuarial cohort projection. Using longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study, we compare the proposed estimator with logistic regression, gradient-boosted trees, a recurrent neural network, and a last-state persistence benchmark. The evaluation considers probabilistic accuracy, endpoint discrimination and calibration for severe disability and death, risk concentration, and transition matrix error after aggregation. The proposed estimator improves severe disability discrimination relative to logistic regression and gradient-boosted tree benchmarks, maintains strong calibration, and yields the lowest transition matrix error among the evaluated models in the held-out test analysis. Results show that a structured machine learning estimator can support long-term care transition modeling when judged by calibration and projection fidelity, beyond discrimination.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Preventing postpartum depression through mitigating breastfeeding grief: A convergent parallel mixed methods study

Background: Women who did not meet their breastfeeding goals often experience breastfeeding grief (BG) and may be likely to have postpartum depression (PD). Furthermore, PD is nearly twice as common in African American (AA) women as in Non-Hispanic White women. No research exists on BG and its role in PD. This study examined the BG experiences of AA women and its possible contributions to PD symptoms. Methods: A convergent parallel mixed methods design was used. A purposive sample of 16 AA women with children aged 6 months to 2 years with BG participated in individual semi-structured interviews about their experiences of BG and completed an online survey including the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and descriptive statistics, respectively. Both data were integrated using joint display of data and side-by-side comparison. Results: The mean age of participants was 29.5 years. Four meaning-based themes about BG were generated including: We looked forward to breastfeeding, But it did not go as expected, So we grieve, and These would have helped. From quantitative results, 87.5% of participants reported a history of PD symptoms and almost 44% had EPDS scores >11. All participants reported that experiencing BG contributed to their PD symptoms. Findings suggest that BG influenced PD symptoms in AA women without prior diagnosis of depression. Conclusions: Qualitative and quantitative findings from this novel exploratory study revealed an overlap that AA women with BG report PD symptoms. Clinicians should support women to achieve their breastfeeding goals to prevent BG and PD. Keywords: African American; Breastfeeding grief; Mental health; Mixed methods; Postpartum depression

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

FreqKD: Frequency-Decoupled Cross-Modal Knowledge Distillation for Infrared Object Detection

Transfer learning from large-scale RGB foundation models to infrared (IR) imagery through knowledge distillation (KD) remains challenging due to fundamental differences in image formation physics. We investigate the spectral structure of the RGB–IR modality gap and observe that feature divergence is not uniform across spatial frequencies: low-frequency components (shape, layout) show greater cross-modal alignment than high-frequency components (texture, fine edges), which reflect modality-specific characteristics. Based on this analysis, we propose FreqKD, a frequency-decoupled distillation framework that applies asymmetric supervision adapted to each band's cross-modal consistency. The method employs strict mean squared error (MSE) on the low-frequency band to preserve shared structural information and a relaxed log-MSE loss (weighted at 0.1) on the high-frequency band to provide edge guidance while tolerating texture differences. Spectral divergence analysis on 500 paired samples shows that high-frequency divergence exceeds low-frequency divergence by a factor of 2.4x on average across all analysed transformer layers. On KAIST multispectral pedestrian detection, FreqKD achieves 64.1 mAP50, improving 2.4 points over the DINOv2 baseline. The learned representation transfers across datasets (FLIR ADAS, +2.1 mAP50), tasks (MFNet segmentation, +1.85 mean intersection-over-union), and architectures (ResNet-50, +1.0 mAP50). Code is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/freq_decoupled_kd-5E5A