Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22 DOI: HASH:b2cce93cef44ad8418b925c87efc88bb

Genetic and Shared Environmental Influences on Cancer Risk and Cross-Cancer Associations in Nordic Twins

Authors:

Harris↗J. R↗Clemmensen↗S. B↗Adami↗H.-O↗Mucci↗L. A↗Kaprio↗Hjelmborg↗J. v. B↗

The relative contributions of genetic and shared environmental influences to cancer risk and cross-cancer associations remain poorly understood. We analyzed data from 222,530 same-sex twins from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the Nordic Twin Study of Cancer, including 43,060 incident cancers over a median follow-up of 41.6 years. Using a target trial framework, biometric modeling, and competing-risk adjustment, we estimated familial risk, heritability, and shared environmental contributions across 35 cancer sites. Lifetime cancer risk was 36.5%, increasing to 51.4% in monozygotic (MZ) twins and 45.3% in dizygotic (DZ) twins with an affected co-twin. Overall cancer risk was explained by heritable (28%) and shared environmental (40%) influences. Heritability was highest for prostate (42%), non-melanoma skin (24%), and breast (18%) cancers. Cross-cancer analyses revealed extensive overlap in the genetic and shared environmental factors across sites, consistent with widespread pleiotropy and shared environmental susceptibility. Prostate cancer exhibited the strongest genetic overlap with rectum/anus (12%) and kidney (11%) cancers, whereas co-shared environmental influences were most pronounced for breast-lung (11%), prostate-bladder (11%), and prostate-lung (12%) cancers. These findings show pervasive genetic overlap across cancers at different sites and emphasize the importance of incorporating familial shared environmental exposures into cancer risk prediction and prevention strategies.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

02.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2604.03744

How Events Separated by a Timelike Interval Can Help Us Understand Quantum Nonlocality

Authors:

Luiz Carlos Ryff↗

arXiv:2604.03744v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantum entanglement plays a fundamental role in quantum cryptography and computation. An important example of quantum entanglement can be found in the correlations of Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen (EPR). However, despite the plethora of articles related to the topic, different interpretations of the EPR correlations coexist, and a consensus has not yet been reached. In this article, we seek to demonstrate, through the simple and direct application of quantum formalism, how events separated by timelike intervals can, strangely enough, help us better understand some aspects of the so-called "quantum nonlocality" associated with EPR correlations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

03.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.11085

Geometric obstructions to Lipschitz transport between weighted Hessian $\mathrm{CD}(\kappa,\infty)$ manifolds

Authors:

William Dudarov↗Dan Mikulincer↗

arXiv:2606.11085v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We construct a weighted Riemannian manifold $(\mathbb R^2,g,\mu)$ satisfying $\mathrm{CD}(1/2,\infty)$, the curvature-dimension condition, with the following property: if $\gamma$ denotes a centered Gaussian measure on $\mathbb R^2$, then there is no Lipschitz map $T:(\mathbb R^2,\|\cdot\|) \to (\mathbb R^2,g)$ satisfying $T_\#\gamma=\mu$. Building on this, we prove a Weyl-type asymptotic law for the eigenvalues of the weighted Laplacian $-\Delta_{g,\mu}$ and show that they are asymptotically negligible when compared to the eigenvalues of $-\Delta_{\gamma}$. These results give strong counterexamples to two questions of E. Milman and complement the recent counterexample of Aryan.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

04.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24281

CALIBER: Calibrating Confidence Before and After Reasoning in Language Models

Authors:

Conor Finlay↗Joshua Kurien↗Saurabh Dash↗Marzieh Fadaee↗Beyza Ermis↗

Reasoning language models are increasingly asked not only to answer difficult questions, but also to estimate their likelihood of success. Existing methods typically elicit confidence only once: either before thinking or after answering. We argue that confidence in reasoning models is state-dependent: before thinking, confidence should estimate the chance of the model correctly solving the prompt, while after thinking it should predict whether the realized answer is likely to be correct. This distinction determines the appropriate supervision target: prompt-level success should supervise confidence estimates made after seeing the prompt, while individual answer-level correctness should supervise confidence estimates made after answering. We introduce CALIBER (Calibration Before and After Reasoning), which elicits both estimates and supervises each with the target matched to its information state. Under this unified protocol, CALIBER reduces Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by 52.5% over the strongest single-confidence baseline on BigMathDigits for the 7B model, while achieving the best Brier score and AUROC, and remains within 2.1 points of the best accuracy. Further, on a larger 30B model, CALIBER achieves the best ECE on BigMathDigits while remaining competitive in Brier score and AUROC. Out of distribution, it achieves the best ECE and Brier score on GPQA and TriviaQA, and remains competitive on SimpleQA. Ablations further show that this position-target alignment is most beneficial under distribution shift where it consistently reduces calibration error across all out-of-distribution benchmarks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

05.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14079

Deep Spectral Learning of Embedded Latent Transfer Operators for Stochastic Dynamical Systems

Authors:

Ryogo Tanaka↗Yoshinobu Kawahara↗

arXiv:2606.14079v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a spectral learning method for stochastic nonlinear dynamical systems represented with embedded latent transfer operators in deep feature spaces. We instantiate the method as Deep Spectral Encoder (DSE), an operator-based latent state-space model in which a time-invariant neural encoder implements learnable nonlinear feature maps from observations, and these features define Markovian latent states whose temporal evolution and observation mapping are described by the transfer and observation operators, respectively. Functional canonical correlation analysis in a learnable Galerkin-projected feature space provides state coordinates from past and future observations, and the two linear operators are estimated on the state coordinates as ridge-regularized closed-form solutions that coincide with Galerkin projections of the associated covariance operators. On this representation, we generalize sequential Bayesian filtering and Koopman spectral mode decomposition in feature space. Experiments on several scenarios show stable and superior performance with sequential Bayesian filtering and dynamic mode decomposition baselines even under noise and partial observability.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

06.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11 DOI: HASH:03615a25e240bb488a251dfce7e87201

Impact of Out-Migration and Remittances on Food Consumption Outcomes among Rural Households in Tigray, Ethiopia

Authors:

Weldu↗T. T↗

This study examines the effects of rural out-migration and remittance inflows on food consumption outcomes among rural households in the Tigray region of Ethiopia. Utilizing household survey data collected from 521 rural households across three distinct Weredas (districts) (Tahtay Maichew, Kola Tembien, and Kilte-awlaelo). A Binary Probit model was employed to identify factors influencing migration decisions, while an Endogenous Switching Regression (ESR) model was used to estimate the impact of migration on food consumption outcomes while controlling for selection bias and unobserved heterogeneity. Food security was measured using the Food Consumption Score (FCS) and dietary diversity indicators. The empirical results reveal that severe food insecurity is widespread, with over 60% of all surveyed households falling into the "Poor" food consumption category. Descriptive baseline comparisons show that migration and remittance transfers marginally shift the raw average FCS upward from 23.86 to 25.48. However, this impact is profoundly nuanced: remittances serve as an immediate consumption-smoothing safety net but run parallel to a "labor-lost" constraint that reduces own-production capacities, forcing households to rely increasingly on market purchases for staple foods. The findings reveal that migration creates short-term labor shortages in agricultural production; however, remittance inflows substantially improve household food consumption frequencies, particularly for pulses, vegetables, and other nutrient-rich foods. After accounting for self-selection bias and unobserved traits, the rigorous ESR estimates indicate that migration increases the Food Consumption Score of participating households by an average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATT) of 10.75 points, shifting them into more secure dietary tiers. Moreover, remittances help households mitigate the adverse effects of drought and other shocks by relaxing liquidity constraints and supporting both food purchases and agricultural investments. The study recommends establishing target food security safety nets for non-remittance households, promoting scale-appropriate labor-saving agricultural technologies, expanding traditional communal labor-sharing innovations, and boosting irrigation and agricultural input support programs to enhance rural food security and livelihood resilience.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

07.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11553

APEX: A Network-Native Time-Series Foundation Model for Forecasting and Anomaly Detection for Wireless Edge Operations

Authors:

Swadhin Pradhan↗Niloo Bahadori↗Peiman Amini↗

arXiv:2606.11553v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Generic time-series foundation models transfer poorly to wireless network telemetry whose signals are bursty, zero-inflated, and coupled across protocol layers. We present APEX, a network-native, decoder-only transformer for forecasting enterprise AP telemetry, and evaluate it on DHCP degradation as a representative network task. APEX is pre-trained on 10-channel multivariate telemetry from ~4,500 production wireless networks (~100K AP time series, 34 metrics per AP), and is available as APEX-Large (269M, cloud) and APEX-Edge (10.5M, edge). On a 192-step (4-day) DHCP degradation benchmark, APEX-Large reduces MAE by 18% over the strongest foundation-model baseline (Toto) and 38% over SARIMA, with anomaly-detection F1 = 0.93, while APEX-Edge enables sub-second, privacy-preserving inference on AP-class edge hardware. These results suggest network-native pre-training is a practical foundation for proactive wireless operations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

08.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13003

The Illusion of Multi-Agent Advantage

Authors:

Prathyusha Jwalapuram↗Hehai Lin↗Chuyuan Li↗Fangkai Jiao↗Sudong Wang↗Yifei Ming↗Zixuan Ke↗Chengwei Qin↗Giuseppe Carenini↗Shafiq Joty↗

Prevailing wisdom posits that Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) are superior to Single-Agent Systems (SAS), citing advantages like context protection, parallel processing and distributed decision-making. However, empirical support for this claim relies primarily on comparisons with SAS baselines using benchmarks that prioritize isolated reasoning tasks, which do not adequately assess these advantages. Focusing on automatically generated MAS that are designed for enhanced generalizability over manually-designed counterparts, we perform a rigorous, systematic evaluation against SAS, specifically Chain-of-Thought with Self-Consistency (CoT-SC). Across traditional reasoning datasets and tasks with interactive multi-step workflows (e.g., BrowseComp-Plus), we demonstrate that automatic MAS consistently underperform CoT-SC despite being up to 10x more expensive. To isolate these failures from limitations inherent to task structure, we introduce a diagnostic synthetic dataset tailored for MAS featuring explicit task decomposition, context separation and parallelization potential. We show that expert-architected MAS consistently outperforms automatically generated architectures in both raw performance and cost-efficiency on this dataset, demonstrating that existing evaluation frameworks mask critical architectural gaps and inefficiencies of complex MAS by failing to account for the marginal utility of increased computational cost. Critically, systematic deconstruction of the generated MAS architectures reveals that current automated design paradigms produce architectural bloat that prioritizes superficial complexity which does not translate into functional utility, exposing a fundamental misalignment with multi-agent principles.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

09.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2603.09377

SinGeo: Unlock Single Model's Potential for Robust Cross-View Geo-Localization

Authors:

Yang Chen↗Xieyuanli Chen↗Junxiang Li↗Jie Tang↗Tao Wu↗

Robust cross-view geo-localization (CVGL) remains challenging despite the surge in recent progress. Existing methods still rely on field-of-view (FoV)-specific training paradigms, where models are optimized under a fixed FoV but collapse when tested on unseen FoVs and unknown orientations. This limitation necessitates deploying multiple models to cover diverse variations. Although studies have explored dynamic FoV training by simply randomizing FoVs, they failed to achieve robustness across diverse conditions – implicitly assuming all FoVs are equally difficult. To address this gap, we present SinGeo, a simple yet powerful framework that enables a single model to realize robust cross-view geo-localization without additional modules or explicit transformations. SinGeo employs a dual discriminative learning architecture that enhances intra-view discriminability within both ground and satellite branches, and is the first to introduce a curriculum learning strategy to achieve robust CVGL. Extensive evaluations on four benchmark datasets reveal that SinGeo sets state-of-the-art (SOTA) results under diverse conditions, and notably outperforms methods specifically trained for extreme FoVs. Beyond superior performance, SinGeo also exhibits cross-architecture transferability. Furthermore, we propose a consistency evaluation method to quantitatively assess model stability under varying views, providing an explainable perspective for understanding and advancing robustness in future CVGL research. Codes will be available upon acceptance.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

10.

bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21 DOI: HASH:a695b92b4ca59305ea82e54f31897717

Machine learning evaluation of gene expression-based ALS subtypes across brain and blood tissues

Authors:

Gomez↗E. A↗Al Khleifat↗Troakes↗Al-Chalabi↗Iacoangeli↗

The clinical and molecular heterogeneity observed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) presents a challenge for diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. RNA sequencing of post-mortem brain samples from ALS patients has identified several subtypes with distinct molecular signatures. We sought to evaluate these subtypes across diverse tissues and datasets and assess the feasibility of supervised machine learning models for sample classification. Unsupervised clustering and pathway analysis were performed to confirm the presence of ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples. Three machine learning strategies were then used to create models based on post-mortem motor cortex expression data of 112 people with ALS from the London Neurodegenerative Diseases Brain Bank. These models were subsequently improved through feature selection and evaluated in independent cohorts from motor cortex (n = 257, NYGC ALS Consortium) and blood (n = 96, Macquarie University Neurodegenerative Disease Biobank) samples. Multi-class linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models were then used for subtype classification. Clustering of ALS post-mortem motor cortex samples confirmed the presence of three subtypes: neuroinflammation (ALS-Neu), extracellular matrix organisation and muscle contraction (ALS-OxA), and synaptic and neuropeptide signalling (ALS-SNs). Among all machine learning strategies, random forests produced the most accurate and stable models for binary classification (~93% accuracy across the three subtypes). After feature selection, random forest models were able to classify samples from an independent post-mortem motor cortex cohort in their respective subtypes (AUC of ~0.98 across the three subtypes). When these models were evaluated in blood using LDA, we found consistent clustering patterns, with samples aligning in the same subtype regions of the post-mortem motor cortex samples, with ALS-SNs being the subtype in which samples were classified with the highest confidence (LDA class probability ~86%). Moreover, classification for this subtype improved when blood samples were collected closer to death. Our findings support the presence of three gene expression-based ALS subtypes in motor cortex samples and the utility of machine learning strategies for subtype classification. We also observed that the subtypes identified in the brain partially match those in the blood, with samples from the late stages of the disease more likely to be correctly predicted into the ALS-SNs cluster. This suggests a longitudinal effect in subtype identification that requires further investigation.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

11.

arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11237

A Hybrid LSMC-PDE Method for Bermudan Option Pricing under the Gatheral Double Mean-Reverting Model

Authors:

Mara Kalicanin Dimitrov↗Ying Ni↗

arXiv:2606.11237v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Bermudan option pricing under the Gatheral Double Mean-Reverting (GDMR) stochastic volatility model. The model features a variance process together with a stochastic long-run mean variance process and allows Constant Elasticity of Variance (CEV)-type exponents in the diffusion coefficients. This model is attractive since it provides a flexible specification for volatility dynamics. However, the pricing of early-exercise derivatives under the GDMR model remains largely unexplored in the literature. To address this challenge, we adapt a Hybrid Least-Squares Monte Carlo-Partial Differential Equation (LSMC-PDE) framework to the GDMR model and provide a detailed model-specific implementation. Conditioning on simulated variance paths, the pricing problem reduces to a one-dimensional problem in the asset price, which is solved by a Fourier-based approach, while the remaining dependence on the variance variables is approximated by least-squares regression. Our numerical experiments demonstrate that the Hybrid LSMC-PDE approach yields accurate pricing estimates and often lower pricing errors than plain LSMC, particularly for low and moderate numbers of simulation paths, showing the benefit of using the model structure in early-exercise option pricing.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

12.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17471

ReRAM-aware Model Finetuning addressing I-V Non-linearity and Retention Errors

Authors:

Ching-Yi Lin↗Shamik Kundu↗Arnab Raha↗Sahil Shah↗

arXiv:2606.17471v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Traditional CPU, GPU, and NPU architectures are increasingly limited by the von Neumann bottleneck. While In-Memory Computing (IMC) using ReRAM crossbar arrays offers a high-density, energy-efficient alternative, its practical deployment is constrained through their non-idealities. Existing hardware-aware training frameworks often require training from scratch, which is computationally prohibitive for modern large-scale models. In this work, we propose a finetuning-based hardware-aware training algorithm that enables robust DNN deployment on ReRAM with minimal training overhead. Our approach mitigates I-V non-linearity by applying a range-shrunk sinh transformation and incorporates retention errors directly into a regularization loss during the finetuning process. We evaluate our framework across models and tasks such as image classification and question-answering (QA). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves similar accuracy on large-scale models like ResNet18 and DeiT-Tiny as the base model. In-case of ImageNet for MobileNetV3 families the technique has only less than 2% accuracy degradation. Further, applying the technique on the SQuAD v2 dataset results in only 1 point degradation of F-1 score.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

13.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15110

Physics-Driven Zero-Shot MRI Reconstruction with Non-local Image Priors

Authors:

Lingtong Zhang↗Wenlei Li↗Mu He↗Li Xiao↗Yang Ji↗

Zero-Shot Self-Supervised Learning (ZS-SSL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for accelerated Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) reconstruction, eliminating the reliance on fully-sampled external datasets. However, learning solely from a single under-sampled scan suffers from supervision scarcity and optimization instability, often leading to overfitting or artifacts. To address these challenges, we propose a robust physics-driven ZS-SSL framework that synergizes physical consistency with image-domain non-local priors. Our method introduces three core innovations: (1) a Coil Sensitivity Map (CSM)-Guided Dynamic Repository, which stabilizes the training trajectory by filtering physically inconsistent artifacts based on coil sensitivity constraints; (2) a SPIRiT-based regularization, which enforces k-space self-consistency via a learned correlation kernel and stochastic masking; (3) a Non-Local Self-Similarity (NSS) Pixel Bank, which leverages the high-fidelity reference established by the former modules to explicitly mine non-local anatomical similarities, thereby augmenting supervision in the image domain. Extensive experiments on the FastMRI dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, particularly under high acceleration factors, effectively bridging the gap between zero-shot learning and supervised methods. The code is available at https://github.com/Zolento/NS-SSL.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

14.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12623

Estimating Individualized Treatment Effects in Acute Ischemic Stroke with Causal Transformation Models (TRAM-DAG): A Multi-Centre Observational Study with External RCT Validation

Authors:

Oliver D\"urr↗Lisa Herzog↗Pascal B\"uhler↗Susanne Wegener↗Beate Sick↗

arXiv:2606.12623v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Personalized medicine in acute ischemic stroke requires moving beyond average treatment effects (ATE) to individualized treatment effect (ITE) estimates to support treatment decisions. In acute ischemic stroke, mechanical thrombectomy has been shown to be more effective on average than lysis in randomized controlled trials (RCTs), such as the MR CLEAN study. We aim to identify which individual patients benefit most from mechanical thrombectomy compared to lysis. The outcome of interest is the modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at three months, an ordinal measure of functional disability (0: no symptoms, 6: death). We demonstrate that causal transformation models on directed acyclic graphs (TRAM-DAG) can be used for ITE estimation after being fitted on observational MAGIC multi-center stroke patient data. To ensure comparability with the MR CLEAN population, which we use for validation, we train the TRAM-DAG on a MAGIC sub-population with NIHSS at admission >= 6, corresponding to one inclusion criterion of MR CLEAN. The fitted model is then used to estimate ITEs for stroke patients in the MR CLEAN population. While these ITE estimates cannot be confirmed experimentally, we show that their average is consistent with the trial's reported ATE. Furthermore, the ITE estimates correctly rank trial patients by their observed frequency of a good outcome (mRS at three months

Read & Discuss → View Source →

15.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2507.19712

Oranits: Mission Assignment and Task Offloading in Open RAN-based ITS using Metaheuristic and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors:

Ngoc Hung Nguyen↗Nguyen Van Thieu↗Quang-Trung Luu↗Anh Tuan Nguyen↗Senura Wanasekara↗Nguyen Cong Luong↗Fatemeh Kavehmadavani↗Van-Dinh Nguyen↗

arXiv:2507.19712v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, we explore mission assignment and task offloading in an Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN)-based intelligent transportation system (ITS), where autonomous vehicles leverage mobile edge computing for efficient processing. Existing studies often overlook the intricate interdependencies between missions and the costs associated with offloading tasks to edge servers, leading to suboptimal decision-making. To bridge this gap, we introduce Oranits, a novel system model that explicitly accounts for mission dependencies and offloading costs while optimizing performance through vehicle cooperation. To achieve this, we propose a twofold optimization approach. First, we develop a metaheuristic-based evolutionary computing algorithm, namely the Chaotic Gaussian-based Global ARO (CGG-ARO), serving as a baseline for one-slot optimization. Second, we design an enhanced reward-based deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework, referred to as the Multi-agent Double Deep Q-Network (MA-DDQN), that integrates both multi-agent coordination and multi-action selection mechanisms, significantly reducing mission assignment time and improving adaptability over baseline methods. Extensive simulations reveal that CGG-ARO improves the number of completed missions and overall benefit by approximately 7.1% and 7.7%, respectively. Meanwhile, MA-DDQN achieves even greater improvements of 11.0% in terms of mission completions and 12.5% in terms of the overall benefit. These results highlight the effectiveness of Oranits in enabling faster, more adaptive, and more efficient task processing in dynamic ITS environments.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

16.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2402.17750

Arbitrary control over multimode wave propagation for machine learning

Authors:

Tatsuhiro Onodera↗Martin M. Stein↗Benjamin A. Ash↗Mandar M. Sohoni↗Melissa Bosch↗Ryotatsu Yanagimoto↗Marc Jankowski↗Timothy P. McKenna↗Tianyu Wang↗Gennady Shvets↗Maxim R. Shcherbakov↗Logan G. Wright↗…

arXiv:2402.17750v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Controlled multimode wave propagation can enable more space-efficient photonic processors than architectures based on discrete components connected by single-mode waveguides. Instead of defining discrete elements, one can sculpt the continuous substrate of a photonic processor to perform computations through multimode interference in two dimensions. Here we designed and demonstrated a device with a refractive index that can be rapidly reprogrammed across space, allowing arbitrary control of wave propagation. The device, a two-dimensional programmable waveguide, uses parallel electro-optic modulation of the refractive index of a slab waveguide with about $10^4$ programmable spatial degrees of freedom. We implemented neural network inference on benchmark tasks with up to $49$-dimensional vectors in a single pass, without digital pre-processing or post-processing. Theoretical and numerical analyses further indicated that two-dimensional programmable waveguides may offer not only a constant-factor reduction in device area but also a scaling benefit, with the area required growing as $N^{1.5}$ rather than $N^2$.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

17.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19646

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

Authors:

Ayush Dwivedi↗Qixin Wang↗Ashvi Soni↗Ruoteng Wang↗Han Li↗Animesh Mahapatra↗Neeraj Agrawal↗Xintao Wu↗

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.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

18.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20074

Evaluation of EEG Foundation Models for Event-Based Burst-Suppression Detection in ICU

Authors:

Elisa Vasta↗Thorir Mar Ingolfsson↗Andrea Cossettini↗Luca Benini↗Tilman Beck↗Emanuela Keller↗Una Pale↗

arXiv:2606.20074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Burst suppression (BS) is a clinically relevant electroencephalographic (EEG) pattern used to monitor sedation depth and brain activity in critically ill patients, particularly during induced coma in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Automatic burst detection remains challenging because BS patterns vary substantially between patients and annotated datasets are scarce. Recently, EEG Foundation Models (FMs) have shown promise across several downstream EEG applications, but their usefulness for BS detection remains unexplored. We present the first study to evaluate EEG FMs for burst detection in reduced-montage ICU EEG without patient-specific calibration. We compare REVE-base, LUNA-large and LuMamba-Tiny with an adaptive thresholding baseline and a task-specific EEGNet baseline. Additionally, we complement conventional EEG window-based classification with event-based burst detection evaluation. This helps assessing clinically whether burst episodes are correctly detected, reducing the impact of expected annotation variability. The best model, REVE-base, achieved the highest event-based F1-score ($0.868 \pm 0.167$) and reduced burst-per-minute error by 52.1% and 36.2% compared to EEGNet and adaptive thresholding respectively, supporting FMs for scalable EEG monitoring in ICU. Ablation experiments showed that full fine-tuning was the most effective adaptation strategy with respect to frozen-backbone training, two-step fine-tuning, and LoRA-based adaptation, improving event-based F1-score over frozen-backbone training by up to $+0.102$ for LUNA-large. With reduced labeled datasets, pretrained REVE-base outperformed random initialization by $+0.723$ event-based F1 points at 25% of the cohort, demonstrating the benefit of pretraining FM representations when adapted to burst detection with limited labeled data.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

19.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2501.01908

Training-Free Adversarial Robustness in Computational MRI

Authors:

Mahdi Saberi↗Chi Zhang↗Mehmet Ak\c{c}akaya↗

Deep learning (DL) methods have become the state-of-the-art for reconstructing sub-sampled magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. However, studies have shown that these methods are susceptible to small adversarial input perturbations, resulting in major distortions in the output images. Various strategies have been proposed to reduce the effects of these attacks, but they require retraining. In this work, we propose a novel approach for mitigating adversarial attacks on MRI reconstruction models without any retraining. Based on the idea of cyclic measurement consistency, we devise a novel mitigation objective that is minimized in a small ball around the attack input. Results show that our method substantially reduces the impact of adversarial perturbations across different datasets, attack types/strengths and PD-DL networks, and qualitatively and quantitatively outperforms conventional mitigation methods. We also introduce a practically relevant scenario for small adversarial perturbations that models impulse noise in raw data, which relates to herringbone artifacts, and show the applicability of our approach in this setting. Finally, we show our mitigation approach remains effective in two realistic extension scenarios: a blind setup, where the attack strength or algorithm is not known to the user; and an adaptive attack setup, where the attacker has full knowledge of the defense strategy.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

20.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24 DOI: arXiv:2606.24839

Grading the Grader: Lessons from Evaluating an Agentic Data Analysis System

Authors:

Tian Zheng↗Kai-Tai Hsu↗

arXiv:2606.24839v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agentic data analysis systems produce rich outputs, including code, numerical results, and verbal diagnostics. This makes them more challenging to evaluate than single-turn LLM responses. It is therefore necessary to distinguish genuine disagreement between an agent's output and a ground-truth answer from grading artifacts. We investigate how reliably automated graders assess such a system and what strategies improve grading quality by applying LAMBDA, a multi-agent data-analysis system, on 153 numerical QRData tasks from DSGym. We develop and evaluate a three-layer human-AI grading cascade: strict regex matching, LLM-based lenient grading, and snippet-based human inspection, which combines non-GenAI and GenAI strategies with different failure profiles. Both automated graders achieve 100% observed precision (0/70 false positives). The lenient grader's recall is 97% against human labels. A keyword-anchored extraction pipeline raises the strict grader's recall by 60 percentage points over a last-number heuristic; the lenient grader is architecturally parser-independent. An iterative nudge mechanism raises grading run success from 36% to 97% and lenient-pass rates from 16% to 46%; comparing nudging with and without original-question re-injection shows that re-injection offers no benefit, confirming the nudge as an answer template cue. We further observe in this case study that variable type is the task metadata field most consistently associated with grading pipeline dynamics and observed outcome grades.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

21.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2605.24609

Catching magnetic resonance imaging outliers in artificial intelligence-supported radiotherapy workflows: unsupervised detection and localization of image anomalies using deep learning

Authors:

Mustafa Kadhim↗Viktor Rogowski↗Emilia Persson↗Camila Gonzalez↗Andr\'e Haraldsson↗Sofie Ceberg↗Mikael Nilsson↗Malin K\"ugele↗Sven B\"ack↗Christian Jamtheim Gustafsson↗

Artificial intelligence is increasingly integrated into radiotherapy workflows, yet such pipelines remain vulnerable to out-of-distribution image data that may introduce unexpected behavior in clinical tasks. Deep learning-based anomaly detection for pelvic magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) remains largely unexplored, and transparent evaluation of its feasibility for full automation is limited. We developed and evaluated a fully automated, unsupervised anomaly-detection framework for pelvic and brain MRI. A two-stage framework was trained on reference images from public datasets: LUND-PROBE for pelvic MRI, and IXI, fastMRI, and fastMRI+ for brain MRI. In the first stage, MRI slices were compressed into discrete tokens; in the second, the distribution of normal tokens was modeled. Anomaly evidence was estimated by combining perceptual image differences with token-surprisal scores based on negative log-likelihood. Automated detection was evaluated on pelvic MRI with synthetic global and real clinical anomalies, and on brain MRI with clinically annotated fastMRI+ abnormalities. Sensitivity, specificity, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), and false-positive behavior in held-out normal cases were assessed. The framework achieved robust detection across hidden evaluation cohorts, with AUCs of 0.97 (95% CI, 0.95-0.98) and 0.81 (95% CI, 0.74-0.87) for pelvic and brain MRI, respectively. Heatmap analysis showed strong spatial agreement between detected anomalies and ground-truth locations, supporting localization accuracy and interpretability. These results support the potential of unsupervised anomaly detection as an automated MRI quality-control layer for radiotherapy workflows, with transparent visualization of image regions likely to compromise downstream AI-based tasks.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

22.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15198

City landscape in sight: A crowdsourced framework for unlocking urban-scale window view perceptions from real estate imagery

Authors:

Chucai Peng↗Sijie Yang↗Ang Liu↗Yang Xiang↗Zhixiang Zhou↗Filip Biljecki↗

City landscapes viewed through home windows influence quality of life, yet perceptions of actual window views at the urban scale remain understudied. This study presents an approach for large-scale mapping of perceptions using 12,334 window view images (WVIs) collected from actual residential properties listed on real estate platforms in Wuhan, China, representing a rarely explored form of urban view imagery that offers advantages over the rendered or simulated window views commonly examined in previous studies. Through a non-immersive virtual reality platform, we collected 27,477 pairwise comparisons across six perceptual dimensions (e.g.\ Vivid) from 304 participants based on 499 WVIs. A hybrid neural network model was trained to predict human perceptions of all crowdsourced WVIs and map their spatial distribution. Results reveal significant spatial autocorrelation with distinct hot and cold spots across the whole city. Floor level strongly influences human perceptions: while higher floors offer more preferred and extensive window views, lower-floor windows provide residents with quiet and vivid views. An inference model further shows that window view composition matters considerably: high ratios of sky, trees, and low-rise buildings enhance people's preferences and perceptions of vividness, whereas high ratios of high-rise buildings increase perceptions of monotony and oppression. Importantly, these effects are non-linear: the excessive presence of certain elements can alter their impact on human perception. This work advances urban-scale understanding of residents' visual experiences and provides evidence-based guidance for human-centric urban planning and real estate to optimise visual landscapes from windows.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

23.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19658

Denoising Implicit Feedback for Cold-start Recommendation

Authors:

Gaode Chen↗Shicheng Wang↗Shikun Li↗Rui Huang↗Xinghua Zhang↗Yunze Luo↗Shipeng Li↗Shiming Ge↗Ruina Sun↗Yinjie Jiang↗Jun Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.19658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Implicit feedback is widely used in recommender systems due to its accessibility and generality, yet it usually presents noisy samples (e.g., clickbait, position bias). Meanwhile, recommenders inevitably face the item cold-start problem due to the continuous influx of new items. We identify that cold items are more prone to noisy samples due to the aforementioned factors, and researchers often overlook the significance of denoising implicit feedback for cold items. Previous denoising studies usually identify noisy samples based on heuristic patterns, such as higher loss values, and mitigate noise through sample selection or re-weighting. However, these methods have limited adaptability and are ineffective in cold-start scenarios. To achieve denoising implicit feedback for cold-start recommendation, we propose a model-agnostic denoising method called DIF. First, user preferences for content remain stable, which allows us to infer pseudo-labels indicating whether a user is interested in a cold item through content-similar warm items. Furthermore, to improve pseudo-label accuracy, we model the confidence of pseudo-labels based on the content similarity between the cold item and warm items, and then aggregate multiple pseudo-labels for each sample. Finally, we explicitly estimate the uncertainty of the noisy sample label by considering its relative entropy and the cold-start status of the item, which adaptively guides the role of pseudo-labels to correct the noisy labels at the sample level. DIF's superiority is supported by both theoretical justification and extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The method has been deployed on a billion-user scale short video application Kuaishou and has significantly improved various commercial metrics within cold-start scenarios.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

24.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.15598

Integrating Reasoning and Generalization in Text-to-SQL via Self-Enhanced Fine-Tuning

Authors:

Feng Lyu↗Jinfeng Cen↗Sijing Duan↗Hao Wu↗Shucheng Li↗Weixu Zhang↗Haolun Wu↗

arXiv:2606.15598v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-to-SQL aims to translate natural language questions into executable SQL queries over structured databases, enabling non-expert users to access data intuitively. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in this task, existing LLM-based approaches often struggle to strike a balance between strong reasoning capabilities and robust generalization. To address these limitations, we propose CoTE-SQL to enhance the LLM-based text-to-SQL generation with three key innovations: (i) self-enhanced reasoning traces distilled from LLMs without human annotation, (ii) structured chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting with modular decomposition and examples retrieval, and (iii) error-aware revision based on SQL execution feedback. Extensive experiments on the Spider and Bird benchmarks demonstrate that CoTE-SQL achieves new state-of-the-art performance among methods built on open-source LLMs with comparable model sizes on Bird (53.39% EX / 59.02 VES) and strong results on Spider (79.60% EX / 77.19 VES), with especially significant gains on complex queries. Results highlight the effectiveness of combining self-enhancement, structured reasoning, and execution-time feedback within an LLM-based framework for text-to-SQL design.

Read & Discuss → View Source →

25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13637

The Stable Recovery Manifold: Geometric Principles Governing Recoverability in Continual Learning

Authors:

Ayushman Trivedi↗Bhavika Melwani↗

arXiv:2606.13637v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting is often viewed as the destruction of previously learned knowledge during sequential learning. Building on the Accessibility Collapse framework, we investigate the geometric structure of recoverability in continual learning. Using Split CIFAR-100 and a sequentially trained ResNet-18, we analyze recoverability, representational drift, and recovery complexity across ten tasks. We introduce Recovery Subspace Dimensionality (k_t), a measure of the minimum number of singular directions required to preserve 90 percent of full probe performance. Contrary to our Recoverability Diffusion hypothesis, recovery dimensionality remains stable throughout training (mean k_t = 8.0) despite substantial representational drift. Principal-angle drift strongly predicts recoverability (r = -0.862), and a simple geometric model explains 82.2 percent of recoverability variance. These findings support the Stable Recovery Manifold hypothesis, suggesting that forgotten knowledge remains compactly decodable despite representational reorganization. The results indicate that catastrophic forgetting is primarily an accessibility and manifold-alignment problem rather than information destruction.

Read & Discuss → View Source →