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.CL) 2026-06-24

Meet UD_Czech-PDTC: A Large and Genre-Rich Treebank in Universal Dependencies

Czech has been part of Universal Dependencies since its first release in 2015. It has also been one of the best represented languages, with the Prague Dependency Treebank being order of magnitude larger than most other UD treebanks. More recently, three other datasets from the Prague family were added and the annotations thoroughly revisited, forming the "Prague Dependency Treebank-Consolidated" (PDT-C). In comparison to the original PDT, PDT-C is more than twice as large, but it is also much more diverse in terms of genres and domains. In this paper, we describe the conversion of the new resource to Universal Dependencies. While the two annotation schemes are relatively similar at the first sight, there are numerous small differences in topology of the dependency structures and in granularity of the POS and relation type inventories. We demonstrate a selection of such differences on examples, discuss the diverging motivations, as well as ways to overcome the differences during conversion. We argue that while PDT is less "universal" and more tightly bound to one language, its multi-layer annotation is rich and provides all information needed for basic UD trees, and much more.

02.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Multi-Sensor Fusion for UAV Classification Based on Feature Maps of Image and Radar Data

arXiv:2410.16089v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The unique cost, flexibility, speed, and efficiency of modern UAVs make them an attractive choice in many applications in contemporary society. This, however, causes an ever-increasing number of reported malicious or accidental incidents, rendering the need for the development of UAV detection and classification mechanisms essential. We propose a methodology for developing a system that fuses already processed multi-sensor data into a new Deep Neural Network to increase its classification accuracy towards UAV detection. The DNN model fuses high-level features extracted from individual object detection and classification models associated with thermal, optronic, and radar data. Additionally, emphasis is given to the model's Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based architecture that combines the features of the three sensor modalities by stacking the extracted image features of the thermal and optronic sensor achieving higher classification accuracy than each sensor alone.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

OracleScreen-LILRB4: Machine Learning-Guided Discovery of Myeloid Immune Checkpoint Binders Validated in Patient-Derived Cells

The identification of small molecule modulators of immune checkpoint proteins remains a significant challenge in drug discovery due to the flat, featureless nature of protein-protein interaction interfaces and the characteristically low hit rates observed in conventional high-throughput screening campaigns. Here we report OracleScreen-LILRB4, an ensemble machine learning framework trained on quantitative biophysical screening data from two structurally diverse compound libraries (19,800 compounds total) screened against the myeloid immune checkpoint leukocyte immunoglobulin-like receptor B4 (LILRB4/ILT3). By formulating binding prediction as a regression task targeting continuous {Delta}Fnorm values rather than binary hit classifications, OracleScreen-LILRB4 achieved a mean Spearman R of 0.61 and ROC-AUC of 0.86 under scaffold-aware cross-validation. Prospective virtual screening of a 45,760-member compound library and experimental validation of the top 200 predictions yielded a 28.5% hit rate, representing a 15.0-fold enrichment over baseline, with 16 compounds demonstrating nanomolar-affinity LILRB4 (ILT3) engagement. Lead compounds ORS-22 and ORS-14 restored anti-tumor immune activity across patient-derived colorectal cancer and acute myeloid leukemia co-culture systems, reversing SCG2-mediated immunosuppression and recovering cytotoxic T-cell function. These findings establish OracleScreen-LILRB4 as an effective computational framework for accelerating small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

04.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Kerr-induced nonreciprocal transparency and group delay in a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system

arXiv:2606.13412v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We propose a scheme for realizing nonreciprocal transparency, Fano resonances, and slow/fast light in a hybrid cavity magnomechanical system containing two YIG spheres and a mechanical resonator. The nonreciprocal behavior originates from the magnon Kerr nonlinearity, which induces direction-dependent frequency shifts and modifies the interference pathways among cavity photons, magnons, and phonons. We show that the hybrid system supports multiple transparency windows arising from magnon- and magnomechanical-induced interference processes. The Kerr interaction strongly reshapes these transparency features, producing asymmetric Fano line shapes and enabling controllable nonreciprocal transmission. Furthermore, the associated dispersion exhibits pronounced directional asymmetry, leading to giant differences in the group delay for opposite propagation directions and allowing reversible switching between slow- and fast-light regimes. We investigate the roles of hybrid coupling strengths and dissipation channels and identify parameter regimes where the nonreciprocal response is maximized. These findings establish Kerr-engineered magnomechanical systems as promising platforms for integrated nonreciprocal microwave photonics and quantum information technologies.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Average Rankings Mask Per-Subject Optimality: A Friedman-Nemenyi Benchmark of EEG Motor-Imagery BCI Decoders

arXiv:2606.24394v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is the dominant non-invasive modality for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), yet reliable decoding of motor imagery is hampered by inter- and intra-individual variability. A recurring claim is that one decoding pipeline, most often a spatial or Riemannian method, is broadly preferable. We test the weakest version of that claim under the most favourable conditions. Using the Mother of All BCI Benchmarks (MOABB) framework, we evaluated 1,056 decoding configurations (feature extractor x scaler x classifier), >340,000 subject-level model fits, across three public left-versus-right motor-imagery datasets (PhysionetMI, 109 participants; Cho2017, 52; Zhou2016, 4) and two frequency bands (8-15 Hz, 8-30 Hz). Every model is fit and tested within a single session of a single participant, the easiest regime, giving every pipeline its best chance. We apply the statistics standard for multi-classifier comparison: Friedman omnibus tests, Nemenyi critical-difference analysis and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests with effect sizes. Covariance tangent-space projection (cov-tgsp) and Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) are the strongest families, but their ordering is dataset-dependent and, on the largest and most heterogeneous cohort (PhysionetMI), statistically indistinguishable (Nemenyi p = 0.27; Kendall's W = 0.11). At the individual level the single best pipeline is optimal for only 35% of PhysionetMI participants, and nonlinear descriptors are best for roughly one third; matching pipeline to participant adds about seven accuracy points over the best fixed choice. The ranking is not an artefact of dimensionality, and classifier and scaler choices are secondary to the feature representation. Even in the easiest regime, no single pipeline dominates: a lower bound on the personalization problem and a quantitative case for participant-aware model selection rather than a universal decoder.

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

Taxonomy of integrable and ground-state solvable models: Jastrow wave functions on graphs and parent Hamiltonians

arXiv:2602.22315v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a family of many-body systems of distinguishable continuous-variable particles in which interparticle interactions are set by the adjacency matrix of a graph. The ground-state wave function of such systems is of a generalized Jastrow form involving the product of pair-correlation functions over the edge set of the graph. These systems describe quantum fluids when the graph is complete, and the pair function has a well-defined permutation symmetry. In general, they provide the continuous-variable generalization of spin systems on graphs, with broken permutation symmetry. The corresponding parent Hamiltonian is shown to include (a) two-body interactions determined by the graph adjacency matrix and (b) three-body interactions over all possible 2-paths on the graph. Employing elements of graph theory, we chart the landscape of models, recovering known instances in the literature and providing numerous new examples of ground-state solvable models for which the system Hamiltonian, ground-state wave function, and corresponding energy eigenvalue are specified.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Binary Tracking for Spatial QA and Navigation with Open Vision-Language Models

arXiv:2606.16902v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This work addresses spatial question answering for service robots traversing long egocentric routes. Given a query such as "where can I find a dry cleaner on the way back home?", the system returns a metric coordinate that downstream navigation components can act on. Prior Spatial Question Answering approaches leverage retrieval-augmented agents built on closed-source models such as GPT-4o for path exploration. However, robots operating in the real world often cannot reliably depend on online closed-source models due to network instability, communication latency, and deployment cost. It creates a need for open-source based Spatial Question Answering approaches that can run onboard the robot, yet prior research in this direction remains limited. This work proposes BinTrack, a simple yet effective, fully open-source spatial-localization agent that leverages the temporal ordering of a robot's trajectory. BinTrack performs a binary search over the trajectory segments between two anchor landmarks identified from a query. It improves overall accuracy by up to 22.8% over other open-source implementations and even matches the reported closed-source model result on the global category of the SpaceLocQA benchmark, the most challenging setting that has so far required strong reasoning agents such as GPT-4o. Furthermore, its optimized inference strategy consistently yields more than a 1.5x inference speedup over previous approaches. Finally, this work releases GangnamLoop, a novel and practical multi-trip outdoor benchmark collected by deploying a real quadruped robot on public streets with the anonymization policy. It revisits the same locations under different outdoor conditions and pairs the robot's low viewpoint with the human owner's. The source codes and datasets are publicly available at https://github.com/ndb796/BinaryTracking

08.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

GeoNatureAgent Benchmark: Benchmarking LLM Agents for Environmental Geospatial Analysis Across Frontier and Open-Weight Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Environmental scientists spend disproportionate effort on data wrangling rather than analysis, and AI agents that automate geospatial workflows remain unvalidated: no benchmark evaluates agents operating through structured tool calling against real APIs. We introduce the GeoNatureAgent Benchmark, the first benchmark for environmental analysis agents that operate via structured tool calls to a production-style geospatial API. It comprises 93 tasks across 18 categories, covering municipality analysis, multi-turn conversation, spatial reasoning, cross-indicator synthesis, error handling and recovery, ranking, comparison, multilingual understanding, habitat analysis, and task rejection. Tasks are evaluated against an open, self-hostable API serving three environmental indicators across Spain and Portugal via sixteen tools. We evaluate seven LLMs (Claude Sonnet 4, DeepSeek V3.2, GLM-5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Qwen3-235B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama 4 Scout) under three temperature-1.0 seeds, reporting capability and per-case cost as orthogonal axes. We find: (1) Claude Sonnet 4 leads at 60.8% +/- 0.8%, followed by DeepSeek V3.2 at 56.3% +/- 3.1%, with no other model above 51%; (2) the cost-accuracy Pareto frontier is occupied mostly by open-weight models, with DeepSeek V3.2 offering 93% of Claude's capability at 11x lower cost ($0.011/case); (3) comparison tasks remain universally unsolved (0% on close-value comparisons), exposing systematic reasoning limits; and (4) structured tool calling against a real API is more discriminative than general-purpose GIS benchmarks, with accuracies 25-35 points lower. We further show extensibility by integrating BigEarthNet V2 land cover for Portugal alongside Spanish CO2 and erosion indicators. The benchmark, harness, and self-hostable API are publicly available.

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

MixSD: Mixed Contextual Self-Distillation for Knowledge Injection

Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is widely used to inject new knowledge into language models, but it often degrades pretrained capabilities such as reasoning and general-domain performance. We argue this forgetting arises because fine-tuning targets from humans or external systems diverge from the model's autoregressive distribution, forcing the optimizer to imitate low-probability token sequences. To address this problem, we propose MixSD, a simple external-teacher-free method for distribution-aligned knowledge injection. Instead of training on fixed targets, MixSD constructs supervision dynamically by mixing tokens from two conditionals of the base model itself: an expert conditional that observes the injected fact in context, and a naive conditional that reflects the model's original prior. The resulting supervision sequences preserve the factual learning signal while remaining substantially closer to the base model's distribution. We evaluate MixSD on two synthetic corpora that we construct to study factual recall and arithmetic function acquisition in a controlled setting, together with established benchmarks for open-domain factual question answering and knowledge editing. Across multiple model scales and settings, MixSD consistently achieves a better memorization-retention trade-off compared to SFT and on-policy self distillation baselines, retaining up to 100% of the base model's held-out capability while maintaining near-perfect training accuracy, whereas standard SFT retains as little as 1%. We further show that MixSD produces substantially lower-NLL supervision targets under the base model and reduces harmful movement along Fisher-sensitive parameter directions. These results suggest that aligning supervision with the model's native generation distribution is a simple and effective principle for knowledge injection that mitigates catastrophic forgetting.

10.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Q-Learning with Fine-Grained Gap-Dependent Regret

arXiv:2510.06647v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for model-free reinforcement learning in episodic tabular Markov Decision Processes. Existing model-free algorithms achieve minimax worst-case regret, but their gap-dependent bounds remain coarse and fail to fully capture the structure of suboptimality gaps. We address this limitation by establishing fine-grained gap-dependent regret bounds for both UCB-based and non-UCB-based algorithms. In the UCB-based setting, we develop a novel analytical framework that explicitly separates the analysis of optimal and suboptimal state-action pairs, yielding the first fine-grained regret upper bound for UCB-Hoeffding (Jin et al., 2018). To highlight the generality of this framework, we introduce ULCB-Hoeffding, a new UCB-based algorithm inspired by AMB (Xu et al.,2021) but with a simplified structure, which enjoys fine-grained regret guarantees and empirically outperforms AMB. In the non-UCB-based setting, we revisit the only known algorithm AMB, and identify two key issues in its algorithm design and analysis: improper truncation in the $Q$-updates and violation of the martingale difference condition in its concentration argument. We propose a refined version of AMB that addresses these issues, establishing the first rigorous fine-grained gap-dependent regret for a non-UCB-based method, with experiments demonstrating improved performance over AMB.

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

ECM Contracts: Contract-Aware, Versioned, and Governable Capability Interfaces for Embodied Agents

arXiv:2604.13097v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Embodied agents increasingly rely on modular capabilities that are installed, upgraded, composed, and governed at runtime, yet the interfaces between these modules are specified only at the level of message types, so integration failures surface only during execution. We present ECM Contracts, a contract-based interface model for embodied capability modules. Unlike conventional interfaces that specify only input and output types, ECM Contracts encode six dimensions of embodied execution: functional signature, behavioral assumptions, resource requirements, permission boundaries, recovery semantics, and version compatibility. On this model we build a compatibility framework that checks installation, composition, and upgrade before deployment, and a release discipline of version-aware compatibility classes and upgrade gates. We evaluate the prototype by predicting real, independently documented integration failures in the ROS ecosystem: contracts are reconstructed blind from each module's published interface, scored by a checker frozen before reconstruction against bugs from third-party datasets, and confirmed in live runtime execution. Contract checking predicts 56% and 72% of these documented failures across two substrates, against at most 17% for the strongest type and quality-of-service baselines, with the advantage statistically significant and zero false positives on matched-good controls. The resource and version dimensions carry most of this margin; the behavioral dimension adds little beyond the middleware's quality-of-service check, and we report the permission and recovery dimensions as forward-looking. Stable embodied software ecosystems require not just modular packaging but explicit contracts connecting composition, governance, and evolution.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

IndustryBench-MIPU: Benchmarking Multi-Image Attribute Value Extraction for Industrial Products

Industrial products such as valves and circuit breakers are defined by dense technical specifications that govern procurement, compatibility, and safety across supply chains. These specifications are scattered across multiple heterogeneous product images, including specification tables, nameplates, and technical drawings, yet whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can reliably recover them remains underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce IndustryBench-MIPU, the first large-scale benchmark for multi-image industrial product understanding, built around structured attribute extraction – recovering property-value pairs from product images. This task jointly probes text recognition on specification tables and nameplates, visual reasoning over technical drawings, domain knowledge to decode industrial terminology, and cross-image evidence integration to assemble scattered specifications. Concretely, the benchmark comprises 4,559 products across 27,652 images with 103,703 annotations spanning 18 industrial categories, constructed through multi-model consensus and three-tier quality assurance. Evaluating nine MLLMs under both single-image and product-level multi-image settings reveals a stark completeness gap: models achieve high precision (86–94%) but the best recovers only 49.9% of product-level attributes; moving from single-image to multi-image extraction costs 15–34 percentage points of recall. Multi-image completeness, not single-image accuracy, is the core bottleneck. Dataset and code are publicly available.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Auto-Configured Explainable Graph Neural Networks for Multi-Site Pollution Prediction

arXiv:2606.24978v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate particulate matter (PM) prediction is crucial for mitigating air pollution. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) effectively model spatiotemporal dependencies, but predefined graphs limit adaptability, and some datasets complicate learning. This study introduces a graph construction method based on a confusion matrix from a supervised learning process to dynamically capture inter-class relationships. Additionally, a hybrid loss function that combines energy distance and Huber loss is applied to address the vanishing gradient problem and improve learning stability. The approach is evaluated using air pollution data from the University of Utah AirU Pollution Monitoring Network in Salt Lake City, UT, with five GNN models: Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs), Simple Graph Convolutional Networks (SGConv), Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs), Graph Attention Networks (GATs), and GraphSage. The experimental results of single- and multistep predictions confirm that GraphSage achieves the highest accuracy in predicting the concentrations of PM${1}$, PM${10}$, and PM$_{2.5}$ over different time horizons. Furthermore, {\color{black} GNNExplainer (Graph Neural Network Explainer) and PGExplainer (Probabilistic Graph Explainer)} are applied to interpret feature importance and graph structure, ensuring model transparency. Results show improved prediction accuracy, with GNN models outperforming traditional machine learning \textcolor{black}{and deep learning models (i.e., Prophet, Long short-term memory, Gated recurrent units} in air pollution forecasting.

15.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

TopoMIL: Topology Improves Multiple Instance Learning in Diagnostic Microscopic Images

Microscopic images of cells and tissues are central to disease diagnosis. In computational pathology, multiple instance learning (MIL) has emerged as a key paradigm for analyzing numerous images within a single patient sample. While the representative distribution of cells in a sample is important for diagnosis, existing MIL frameworks largely overlook it. We introduce TopoMIL, a framework that extracts the representative topological structure of the sample and integrates it into the MIL classifier. Three topological representations are assessed, each with distinct advantages and computational costs. We evaluate TopoMIL on four histopathology and cytomorphology datasets, each presenting unique challenges. Integrating the sample's topological information into MIL enhances classification across average, max, attention-based, and transformer pooling, yielding AUCROC gains of 3.3%, 4.2%, 5.9%, and 0.5%, respectively, with moderate computational cost. Our work underscores the potential of TopoMIL as a scalable extension to existing morphology-based models in computational pathology.

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

REALM: A Unified Red-Teaming Benchmark for Physical-World VLMs

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly used as perception-reasoning backbones for embodied intelligence in safety-critical physical systems, where perception or reasoning errors can lead to unsafe decisions or actions. Although many red-teaming methods have been developed to probe VLM vulnerabilities, their evaluation remains fragmented across datasets, metrics, and threat models, making direct comparison difficult and obscuring whether observed differences arise from stronger attacks, more vulnerable models, or incompatible evaluation settings. Existing chatbot-centric red-teaming benchmarks mainly standardize jailbreak and content-safety evaluation, but they do not systematically capture physically grounded functional failures or cover red-teaming methods that target physical-world VLMs. This raises the key challenge of comparing diverse attack methods under a unified protocol while targeting the same scenario-specific failures. We introduce REALM, to our knowledge the first unified red-teaming benchmark for physical-world VLMs. REALM integrates 12 red-teaming methods, 3 model-agnostic defenses, and 13 VLMs under a practical black-box threat model with shared datasets and metrics. To align adversarial objectives across attack families, REALM introduces an agentic target-generation pipeline that constructs shared, scenario-specific, and physically grounded attack objectives for each scene, enabling fair comparison of diverse red-teaming methods under aligned adversarial goals. Our evaluation shows that text and typographic injection attacks induce the most failures, multimodal co-optimization yields the strongest visual-perturbation transfer, single-pass attacks approach iterative methods at much lower cost, and model scale alone does not confer adversarial robustness. Code is available at https://github.com/UCF-ML-Research/REALM.

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

Mixtures Closest to a Given Measure: A Semidefinite Programming Approach

arXiv:2509.22879v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture models, such as Gaussian mixture models, are widely used in machine learning to represent complex data distributions. A key challenge, especially in high-dimensional settings, is to determine the mixture order and estimate the mixture parameters. We study the problem of approximating a target measure, available only through finitely many of its moments, by a mixture of distributions from a parametric family (e.g., Gaussian, exponential, Poisson), with approximation quality measured by the 2-Wasserstein or the total variation distance. Unlike many existing approaches, the parameter set is not assumed to be finite; it is modeled as a compact basic semi-algebraic set. We introduce a hierarchy of semidefinite relaxations with asymptotic convergence to the desired optimal value. In addition, when a certain rank condition is satisfied, the convergence is even finite and recovery of an optimal mixing measure is obtained. We also present an application to clustering, where our framework serves either as a stand-alone method or as a preprocessing step that yields both the number of clusters and strong initial parameter estimates, thereby accelerating convergence of standard (local) clustering algorithms.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Catastrophic Compositional Generation: Why Vanilla Diffusion Models Fail to Extrapolate

arXiv:2606.23920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The task of compositional generation involves using a conditional generative model, trained only on a subset of the possible conditions, to produce samples from compositionally-defined target distributions such as a geometric combination of the source distributions. In this work, we argue that this task is often infeasible for vanilla conditional diffusion models: we conjecture that no inference-time technique can efficiently produce samples from the target distribution in certain well-motivated settings. This idea is supported by theory-guided generalization arguments and carefully-designed experiments on both synthetic and realistic data. In particular, while recent methods such as Feynman-Kac correction reduce inference-time approximation error, our results show that score estimation error has a more catastrophic effect on performance when the target distribution is out-of-distribution with respect to the sources, highlighting the need for a different approach to this task.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Clinically Aligned Geometry Constraints for Robust IVUS Vessel Boundary Segmentation

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) lumen and external elastic membrane (EEM) segmentation is important for quantitative coronary plaque burden assessment. Errors in lumen or EEM delineation directly propagate to plaque area, plaque burden and geometric measurements. However, standard methods prioritising overlap scores often suffer from boundary drift and topology errors, leading to inaccurate clinical measurements. We present GeoCat, a geometry-consistent network that processes 5-frame IVUS clips using dual Cartesian-polar encoders with cross-domain attention and temporal fusion. A differentiable geometry consistency loss directly supervises clinically relevant descriptors including diameters, orientations, and cross-sectional areas. The model is trained on 12,242 annotated frames from 146 patients acquired with two commercial IVUS systems. We evaluate performance using both segmentation accuracy and plaque-relevant clinical metrics, including Dice/IoU, boundary measures(95HD (mm), ASSD), topology violation rate, and clinical geometry errors (dmax/dmin, angles, and areas). On our dataset, GeoCat achieves a Dice of 0.93, reduces 95HD to 0.14 mm, and lowers topology violations to 1.0%. Importantly, it significantly improves geometric fidelity, yielding diameter errors of 0.13-0.16 mm and angular errors of ~8 degrees, supporting reliable plaque burden quantification.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

ControlMap: Controllable High-Definition Map Generation for Traffic Scenario Simulation

arXiv:2606.15930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Simulation is central to validating autonomous driving systems, yet current pipelines are limited by insufficient scenario diversity due to costly High Definition (HD) map creation. Scaling HD maps requires expensive data collection and manual processing. Moreover, existing generative models lack the fine-grained control necessary to target specific road topologies during generation. This paper presents a data-driven pipeline for controllable HD map generation using latent diffusion and ControlNet for spatial conditioning. To our knowledge, we are the first to inject spatial guidance signals into a diffusion model for HD map synthesis. Furthermore, our model supports adjustable conditioning strength through classifier-free guidance and city-level style transfer via city label conditioning. To complement existing metrics, we introduce two novel metrics to evaluate adherence to the control signal and similarity to ground-truth maps. Experiments demonstrate that our model generates realistic HD maps that faithfully follow input road topologies while accurately preserving city-specific details.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Adherence to Red Reflex and Vision Screening Recommendations: A Deep Dive into Primary Care Implementation Gaps

Introduction: Early childhood vision screening is critical for detecting amblyopia and other vision-threatening conditions. Despite screening recommendations during well-child visits, rates remain low. Red reflex assessment is recommended to identify serious ocular pathology, yet its use in primary care is not well described. We examined rates and drivers of vision screening in pediatric primary care. Methods: We conducted a retrospective review of electronic health records for children 3 to 5 years attending well-child visits in 2022 in one of three representative primary care clinics within a university health system. Outcomes were documented red reflex and functional vision tests. We evaluated associations with patient demographics and clinic site using multivariable logistic regression Results: Among 1,003 visits, 21.1% (n=212) had a documented red reflex assessment, and 60.8% (n=610) a functional vision test. Younger children (ages 3 and 4 vs. 5 years) had higher odds of red reflex assessment [adjusted odds ratio (aOR) 9.00 and 8.64], and lower odds of a functional vision (aOR 0.47 and 0.59) test. Females had higher odds of red reflex assessment (aOR 1.53). Other/Multiracial children had lower odds of red reflex assessment than Non-Hispanic White children (aOR 0.48). Screening rates varied significantly by clinic site Conclusions: Visual function and red reflex assessment are inconsistently performed in pediatric primary care, with particularly low rates of red reflex documentation. Screening rates varied between clinics and were affected by age. These findings highlight missed opportunities for early detection of vision-threatening conditions and identify targets for improving adherence to pediatric vision screening recommendations

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Probing, Fusion, and Trustworthiness: A Systematic Evaluation of Foundation Model Representations for Multimodal Cancer Analysis

arXiv:2606.17115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Foundation models (FMs) have emerged as powerful representation extractors for medical data, yet their generalizability to datasets under distribution shift remains underexplored. This work systematically evaluates FM-based representations on a suite of computational pathology tasks across two real-world commercial cohorts, IH-BC and IH-NSCLC, drawn from the licensed in-house (IH) oncology dataset. The analysis focuses on two modalities, whole-slide images and transcriptomic profiles, drawn from the IH multimodal data. We first benchmark unimodal probing performance across five FMs on eight downstream classification tasks, and find that image and omics representations carry complementary predictive signals. Then we investigate whether multimodal fusion can yield additional gains over unimodal baselines by comparing three image-omics fusion strategies built on paired representations. The trustworthiness of selected unimodal and multimodal pipelines is further assessed through conformal prediction. Our results show that FM representations achieve competitive performance on out-of-distribution data and that multimodal fusion helps mainly when no single modality dominates the signal. Conformal prediction reveals that in the majority of cases where a point prediction fails, the true diagnosis remains recoverable within the prediction set, reinforcing the value of uncertainty-aware inference for clinical support.

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

Urban Heat MiniCubes: An AI-Ready dataset for urban heat research

arXiv:2606.11534v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Urban heat is amplified by impermeable surfaces and heterogeneous built environments, yet street-level variability remains difficult to quantify because multi-sensor observations are rarely available in consistent, analysis-ready form at the necessary spatiotemporal scales. We present "Urban Heat MiniCubes," a publicly available, FAIR-oriented dataset designed for machine learning applications in urban heat research. The dataset provides harmonized 90 x 90 km gridded data cubes for 48 cities in the Western Hemisphere spanning 2022-2023, with variables reprojected and collocated to a common grid to reduce preprocessing (e.g., reprojection, resampling, and spatiotemporal alignment). Urban Heat MiniCubes includes two complementary modalities: (i) higher-spatial-resolution, lower-frequency observations from Landsat 8/9 (e.g., surface reflectances) and Sentinel-1 (e.g., synthetic aperture radar backscatter), and (ii) higher-temporal-frequency, coarser observations from GOES-R (e.g., longwave infrared brightness temperatures) and a microwave land surface temperature product. We document variables and metadata and provide technical assessment using inter-variable analyses and autoencoder-based reconstruction-error summaries across pixel classes (e.g., water and cloud). Potential use cases and limitations are also discussed.

24.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-19

Critical parameters of germ-monotone families of branching random walks

arXiv:2602.21062v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a broad class of families of branching random walks on a countable set $X$, which we refer to as germ-monotone branching random walks (GMBRWs). The processes in each family are parametrized by a positive parameter $\lambda>0$, which controls the overall reproductive speed, and they are monotonically increasing in $\lambda$ with respect to the germ order, a notion that extends classical stochastic domination. This framework encompasses a wide range of models, including classical continuous-time branching random walks, as well as discrete-time counterparts of certain non-Markovian processes such as ageing branching random walks. We define a general notion of critical parameter $\lambda(A)$ associated with each subset $A \subseteq X$, which serves as a threshold separating almost sure extinction in $A$ from positive probability of survival in $A$. This unifies and extends the classical global and local critical parameters $\lambda_w$ and $\lambda_s$, which can be recovered as special cases. We then investigate how modifications of the reproduction laws, either on a finite set or on a more general subset of $X$, affect these critical parameters. Our results extend earlier contributions in the literature.

25.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Experimentation for Different Scheduling Policies on Queues: Mixed Differences-in-Q Estimators Based on Little's Law

arXiv:2605.29641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In data centers, tasks are dispatched to various servers to evenly distribute the workload. When a data center considers implementing a new scheduling algorithm, it typically conducts an A/B test prior to deployment to assess the real-world impact of this new method. However, a straightforward A/B test might be interfered with so-called ``Markovian'' interference. We utilized the Differences-in-Q estimator, as developed by Farias et al. (2022), and introduced mixed Differences-in-Q estimators grounded in Little's Law. We show that our A/B testing methods significantly reduce bias and variance when testing various scheduling policies. Extensive simulations were conducted under scenarios like non-stationary arrival rates, heterogeneous service rates, and communication delays. These simulations highlight the robustness and efficacy of our A/B testing approach.