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

Trusted Multi-View Deep Learning Classification of Fetal Congenital Heart Disease with Feature-level and Decision-level Fusion

Congenital heart disease (CHD) refers to the abnormal anatomical structure caused by the abnormal development of the heart and great vessels during embryonic development. Traditional diagnostics often fail to achieve high accuracy and efficiency, especially given the complexity of cardiac anatomy. This study presents a specialized multi-view deep learning framework for CHD binary classification using echocardiographic images. A large-scale CHD dataset, including five views, was used to train the model, enabling it to integrate multi-angle image data. The framework utilizes advanced feature extraction and attention mechanisms to improve diagnostic precision and reliability. An uncertainty-based decision-making component is also integrated to handle low-quality images, enhancing diagnostic outcomes. Experimental results show that this method achieves top-tier performance on our dataset and provides a robust tool for early CHD detection, underscoring its potential for clinical use. The dataset and source code will be released upon paper acceptance.

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

Z-Plane Neural Networks: Bounded Geometric Activation Replaces ReLU and LayerNorm

arXiv:2606.15669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern deep neural networks rely on Euclidean scalar activations (e.g., ReLU) and global normalization techniques (e.g., LayerNorm) to prevent gradient instability in deep architectures. However, these mechanisms inherently cause dead neurons, discard critical directional information, and destroy the orthogonality of feature representations. Inspired by the frequency-modulation transmission of biological axons, we propose the Z-Plane Neural Network, which maps hidden states into 2D phasor bundles on a hypersphere. We introduce a novel geometric activation function, Radial Bounding($\mathbf{x} / \max(1, \|\mathbf{x}\|_2)$), which limits the energy magnitude while preserving the phase (direction). We demonstrate mathematically that this isotropic activation maintains 1-Lipschitz continuity and prevents gradient vanishing by preserving tangential gradients. Empirically, a 100-layer Z-Plane Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP)-entirely devoid of ReLU and LayerNorm-successfully converges on the MNIST dataset with 98.34% accuracy and absolute numerical stability, proving that bounded geometric activation alone is sufficient for stable deep learning.

03.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-10

Efficient and accurate neural-field reconstruction using resistive memory

Authors:

Applications such as medical imaging, augmented and virtual reality, and embodied artificial intelligence (AI) depend on the ability to reconstruct complex signals from sparse observations. These applications are characterized by incomplete measurements and limited computational resources. Traditional approaches to digital hardware face the following challenges: explicit signal representations require heavy sampling and storage, data movement across the von Neumann bottleneck dominates energy and latency, and CMOS (complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor)-based circuits offer limited parallel efficiency. Here we present a software–hardware co-optimization framework for sparse-input signal reconstruction. At the software level, we use neural fields1 to implicitly represent signals using neural networks, which are further compressed by low-rank decomposition and structured pruning. At the hardware level, we design a resistive-memory-based computing-in-memory platform, featuring a Gaussian encoder and a multi-layer perceptron processing engine. The Gaussian encoder leverages the intrinsic stochasticity of resistive memory for efficient encoding, whereas the processing engine enables precise weight mapping through a hardware-aware quantization circuit. On a 40-nm 256 Kb resistive-memory macro, the system delivers 23.5×, 21.0× and 32.3× gains in projected energy efficiency, together with 10.8×, 38.8× and 6.2× gains in projected parallelism, for three-dimensional computed tomography sparse reconstruction, novel view synthesis and dynamic-scene novel view synthesis, without compromising on reconstruction quality. This work advances AI-driven signal reconstruction technology and paves the way for future efficient and robust medical AI and three-dimensional vision applications. A co-optimized AI hardware–software system using resistive-memory computing improves energy efficiency and parallelism for sparse signal reconstruction in imaging and three-dimensional vision applications.

04.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Steady-State Approximation Error of Heterogeneous Mean-Field Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.09022v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper studies heterogeneous mean-field models in which agent parameters are sampled from a population distribution. We establish an $O(1/M)$ bound on the steady-state mean-square error between the occupancy measure of the $M$-agent system and the corresponding annealed mean-field equilibrium. The analysis extends Stein's method for homogeneous mean-field models and reveals a fundamental difference between homogeneous and heterogeneous systems. While stability of the mean-field dynamics is sufficient in the homogeneous setting, heterogeneous systems further require uniform robustness of the occupancy dynamics with respect to perturbations of the initial condition. The results are illustrated through a heterogeneous SIS epidemic model.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Leveraging Energy Features for Surface Classification with Deep Learning: A Comparative Analysis Across Three Independent Datasets

arXiv:2606.18698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The energy-based method remains a comparatively underexamined approach for surface classification in mobile robotics, despite promising results in constrained environments. This study evaluated the viability of using energy-derived features as either a standalone classification modality or as supplementary input to inertial data. A comprehensive evaluation was conducted across three publicly available datasets, comparing the performance of modern deep learning architectures including recurrent neural networks, convolutional neural networks, encoder-only transformers, and Mamba state-space models, under automated hyperparameter tuning and input sequence length optimization. The models achieved higher accuracy than previously reported values on all evaluated datasets, with the convolutional neural network yielding the highest overall performance. When relying exclusively on energy-based features, the models attained classification accuracies in the range of 85-90%, approximately 5-10% lower than those achieved when combined with inertial features (96-99%). Augmenting inertial data with energy features resulted in a consistent mean accuracy improvement of 1-2%. These findings indicate that classifiers relying solely on energy features offer sufficient accuracy for standalone deployment, while also providing a consistent gain when used in combination with other sensing modalities.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Efficient Graph State Purification with Factorized Graph-Preserving Operations across Local Clifford Orbits

arXiv:2606.23809v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Graph states form a broad class of multipartite entangled states underlying measurement-based quantum computation, quantum networks, and stabilizer codes. However, systematic entanglement distillation for arbitrary graph states remains challenging because the circuit design space grows rapidly with the number of parties. We introduce a group of Clifford operations that we call "factorized graph-preserving". It enables us to efficiently enumerate and optimize graph-state purification circuits at finite size for realistic noisy hardware. These operations map products of graph-basis states to products of graph-basis states, so their action can be represented as permutations of graph-basis labels. Moreover, this useful gate set admits a compact factorized description determined by simple graph-theoretic features. This structure also allows, after some initial cached precomputation, drastically lower computational complexity for simulating a gate. We further organize these operations over local-complementation (LC) orbits using minimum-edge representatives (MERs), which let us design purification circuits that apply to all locally equivalent graph states (up to a basis change). Using this framework, we optimize noisy finite-size multipartite distillation circuits for several graph-state families. Numerical results show that the resulting graph-preserving circuits can outperform standard recurrence-based purification protocols under realistic gate and measurement noise. Our results establish LC-orbit structure and factorized graph-preserving operations as practical tools for scalable, topology-aware and hardware-constrained graph-state distillation protocol design. Our work can also be interpreted as a graph-based heuristic for finding transversal gates.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Local correlations in long-range dual-unitary kicked Hamiltonian chains

arXiv:2606.13857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many-body Floquet models with exact space–time symmetry, such as the kicked Ising spin chain (KIC), provide natural examples of systems with dual-unitary dynamics. The requirement of exact space–time symmetry is, however, highly restrictive, as it permits only nearest-neighbor interactions. Based on a pair of Hadamard matrices, we construct a wide family of dual-unitary kicked spin chains with long-range interactions. We show that local two-point correlations in such models propagate along the light-cone edges \( |n| = r|t| \), where \(r\) is the interaction range, and can be derived analytically for operators with local support. This approach is illustrated using the example of a kicked Ising spin chain with next-to-next-neighbor interactions.

08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Mordal: Automated Pretrained Model Selection for Vision Language Models

Incorporating multiple modalities into large language models (LLMs) is a powerful way to enhance their understanding of non-textual data, enabling them to perform multimodal tasks. Vision language models (VLMs) form the fastest growing category of multimodal models because of their many practical use cases, including in healthcare, robotics, and accessibility. Unfortunately, even though different VLMs in the literature demonstrate impressive visual capabilities in different benchmarks, they are handcrafted by human experts; there is no automated framework to create task-specific multimodal models. We introduce Mordal, an automated multimodal model search framework that efficiently finds the best VLM for a user-defined task without manual intervention. Mordal achieves this both by reducing the number of candidates to consider during the search process and by minimizing the time required to evaluate each remaining candidate. Our evaluation shows that Mordal can find the best VLM for a given problem using $8.9\times$–$11.6\times$ lower GPU hours than grid search. We have also discovered that Mordal achieves about 69\% higher weighted Kendall's $\tau$ on average than the state-of-the-art model selection method across diverse tasks.

09.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

STITCH links cellular morphology and gene expression in spatial transcriptomics

In situ spatial (ISS) sequencing can uncover co-variation between cellular morphology and gene expression in vivo. However, a principled and interpretable mathematical representation of morphology has not yet been applied in this context. In particular, current deep learning-based representations of cell images confound a cell's shape with its size. We present an interpretable representation of cellular boundary contours, based on tangent principal component analysis (TPCA) in a Kendall shape manifold, that captures size-independent contour shape features. This approach successfully recovers shape-perturbing genes in an RNAi screen than a previous metric geometry-based approach. We build on TPCA to develop STITCH (Shape-TranscriptomIc Correlation and Harmonization), an approach to reveal covariation between cell morphology with gene expression in ISS datasets. In a Xenium dataset, STITCH outperforms a deep learning-based approach in both recovering the layered organization of keratinocytes and a spatial gradient in nuclear eccentricity. Across samples in a melanoma CosMx dataset, STITCH reproducibly associates elongated and triangular fibroblasts with proximity to malignant cells and myofibroblast-like transcriptional program. Finally, STITCH independently recovers a known link between mesenchymal-like malignant cell states and increased cell area in two melanoma cohorts. STITCH can thus yield interpretable morphology-transcriptome relationships across cell types, patients, and spatial transcriptomics platforms.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently – a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion – measuring how much sampled answers differ – but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness – consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive – while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Hilbert-Geo: Solving Solid Geometric Problems by Neural-Symbolic Reasoning

Geometric problem solving, as a typical multimodal reasoning problem, has attracted much attention and made great progress recently, however most of works focus on plane geometry while usually fail in solid geometry due to 3D spatial diagrams and complex reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce Hilbert-Geo, the first unified formal language framework for solid geometry, including an extensive predicate library and a dedicated theorem bank. Based on this framework, we propose a Parse2Reason method containing two steps of first parsing then reasoning. In the parsing step, we utilize conditional description language (CDL), a formalized language composed of predicates specifically designed to construct geometric conditions, to represent both problem description (natural text) and solid diagrams (visual image). In the reasoning step, we leverage those formal CDL and the theorem bank to perform relational inference and algebraic computation, generating strictly correct, verifiable, and human-readable reasoning processes. Notably, our proposed Hilbert-Geo is also applicable to plane geometry. To advance geometric reasoning, we curate two expert-annotated dataset SolidFGeo2k and PlaneFGeo3k, which are furnished with geometric formal language annotations, solutions and answers. Extensive experiments show that our proposed method achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance 77.3% in SolidFGeo2k and 84.1% in MathVerse-Solid (one small subset in MathVerse dedicated to solid geometry), substantially outperforming leading MLLMs, such as Gemini-2.5-pro (54.2% on SolidFGeo2k) and GPT-5 (62.9% on MathVerse-Solid). In addition, our method achieves the SOTA accuracy 80.2% in PlaneFGeo3k, demonstrating the generality of the Hilbert-Geo in geometric reasoning. Our code and datasets are released at https://github.com/PremiLab-Math/Hilbert-Geo.

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

Select and Improve: Understanding the Mechanics of Post-Training for Reasoning

arXiv:2606.13125v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning has rapidly emerged as a key component in the training of reasoning and coding models, yet it remains poorly understood from a mechanistic perspective. We study how and through what underlying processes capabilities are acquired or enhanced via reinforcement learning post-training. Our analysis, based on controlled math reasoning experiments with Qwen-2.5-1.5B, reveals two core mechanisms: strategy selection and strategy improvement. Our results highlight the role of SFT data and reinforcement learning data in activating these mechanisms, in particular showing how supervising the model on diverse reasoning strategies can enable strategy selection and how increasing difficulty in reinforcement learning data can enable strategy improvement. Taken together, our results provide mechanistic insight into RL training and suggest practical interventions to continue scaling reasoning capabilities.

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

Conformal Bayes under Label Shift: Post-Hoc Calibration vs. In-Training Adaptation

Authors:

arXiv:2606.11865v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conformal Bayes combines Bayesian posterior predictives with conformal calibration to produce prediction sets that are both statistically valid and geometrically efficient. We study conformal Bayes under label shift from a unified perspective, identifying two complementary approaches that restore nominal target-domain coverage through importance-weighted conformal calibration but operate through independent mechanisms. Post-hoc calibration tilts the posterior predictive toward the target domain and corrects the conformal threshold via an importance-weighted quantile, leaving the parameter posterior unchanged. In-training adaptation tilts the parameter posterior itself to the target domain, producing a corrected predictive whose highest predictive density region serves as the highest predictive density (HPD) based prediction set under the fitted target predictive; efficiency is model-dependent and does not imply finite-sample conditional optimality. Two controlled experiments show that in an unbiased training regime both strategies achieve valid coverage equally, while in a lead-optimization regime in-training adaptation acts as a debiasing operator, reducing interval width at unchanged coverage.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

On the convex hull of a planar Brownian bridge with a random Gaussian endpoint

arXiv:2606.24485v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We consider a one-parameter family of isotropic planar Gaussian processes \[ X_\sigma(t) =B_t+\sigma t Z,\qquad 0\le t\le 1,\quad 0\le \sigma\le 1, \] where $B$ is a standard ($0$-to-$0$) planar Brownian bridge on $[0,1]$, and $Z\sim \mathrm N(0,I)$ is a standard Gaussian random vector independent of $B$. The family interpolates between standard planar Brownian bridge ($\sigma=0$) and standard planar Brownian motion ($\sigma=1$). As the main result of the paper we compute the expected perimeter and area of the convex hull of the random set $\left\{X_\sigma(t) \colon 0\le t\le 1\right\}$ as closed formulas in terms of $\sigma$, and recover the classical Brownian bridge and Brownian motion values at $\sigma=0$ and $\sigma=1$. We also consider the convex hull spanned by multiple independent processes of this type and the possibilities for closed formulas in special cases. The key observation in our argument is that the isotropy property reduces the expected perimeter and area to one-dimensional quantities through the support function and Cauchy's formulas.

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

CARE: Controlling LLM-Generated Policies through Auditable Review of Evidence in Scientific Experimentation

arXiv:2606.14581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Granting LLMs direct control over costly, irreversible scientific experiments leads to unsafe exploration and unstable performance, but discarding LLM creativity entirely sacrifices significant optimization potential. We introduce CARE (Controlling LLM-Generated Policies through Auditable Review of Evidence in Scientific Experimentation), an auditable controller for high-throughput experimentation (HTE) optimization that keeps a non-LLM incumbent optimizer as the default action path while using LLMs to revise challenger ranking policies. Before each outcome is revealed, a public-evidence intervention gate compares the challenger with the incumbent. It authorizes the challenger's selection only when the evidence available before selection supports the change, with the decision recorded in the audit log. CARE outperforms all other evaluated methods on Minerva/Olympus and ChemLex benchmarks, with final-best improving from 80.0 to 88.5 on Minerva/Olympus and from 83.9 to 92.1 on ChemLex, relative to the public incumbent. Our experiments indicate that LLM self-evolution is more reliable when it expands the proposal space under an auditable controller, rather than directly choosing experiments.

16.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Context Compression Is Not One Thing: Readable Symbolic Re-expression vs. Coherent Summary at Matched Budget

We study context compression for multi-hop question answering with small language models. We propose Telegraph English, a readable symbolic format that rewrites retrieved passages into structured entity-relation statements, preserving reasoning evidence at lower token cost. In controlled experiments on MuSiQue, TwoWiki, and HotpotQA, Telegraph English outperforms three matched-budget compression baselines (character-level deletion, truncation, and random sub-sampling) on every dataset, with gains of 13 to 20 F1 percentage point. It also outperforms a coherent prose summary produced by the same encoder on the hardest dataset. A pre-registered depth-interaction hypothesis is null: the advantage does not grow with reasoning depth within datasets. We interpret these results as evidence that readable symbolic re-expression preserves entity content more densely than either natural language or coherent summarization at matched token budget.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Federated continual learning: A comprehensive survey on lifelong and privacy-preserving learning over distributed and non-stationary data

arXiv:2606.11272v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative and privacy-preserving model training across distributed clients, but most existing FL systems implicitly assume data stationarity. In real-world settings-such as healthcare, industrial IoT (IIOT), cybersecurity, and smart cities-data streams are inherently non-stationary, leading classical FL methods to suffer from performance degradation, instability, and catastrophic forgetting. Continual Learning (CL) addresses learning under evolving data distributions but has been largely studied in centralized settings, overlooking key constraints of federated systems, including privacy, limited communication, and client heterogeneity. Federated Continual Learning (FCL) emerges at the intersection of FL and CL, aiming to support lifelong, adaptive, and privacy-aware learning over distributed and non-stationary data. This survey provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of FCL. We first present a formal definition of the FCL problem and clarify its distinctive characteristics. We then analyze the limitations of classical FL under non-stationary conditions, highlighting how CL principles support long-term adaptation. To organize the rapidly growing literature, we propose a multi-dimensional taxonomy of FCL approaches. Furthermore, we review representative application domains and data modalities, summarize commonly used evaluation metrics, and discuss experimental perspectives for assessing long-term performance and forgetting. Finally, we highlight key open challenges, including handling extreme heterogeneity under temporal drift, designing scalable and privacy-preserving memory mechanisms, and establishing standardized benchmarks. This survey aims to serve as a reference and a roadmap for advancing FCL toward robust and deployable real-world systems.

18.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Study protocol: Feasibility and clinical implications of real-time cerebral autoregulation monitoring in major noncardiac surgery with the Medtronic Cotrending algorithm (AUTOREGULATE-NONCARDIAC-COTRENDING)

Background: Perioperative hypotension is associated with postoperative organ injury. However, trials of hypotension avoidance have not found meaningful improvements in postoperative cardiovascular, renal, neurological or functional outcomes. One possible explanation is that organ perfusion depends on patients individual autoregulatory ranges. Hence, technology enabling monitoring of the autoregulatory status of vital organs, e.g. the brain, could provide a physiologic basis for personalising of blood pressure targets. However, current established methodologies for monitoring cerebral autoregulation in noncardiac surgery, e.g. the cerebral oximetry index (COx), are limited by performance and usability. The Medtronic Cotrending algorithm has been developed to provide automated, near real-time assessment of cerebral autoregulation. While feasibility was demonstrated in cardiac surgery, its applicability in major noncardiac surgery remains unknown. This study aims to evaluate the technical feasibility and clinical implications of Cotrending-based cerebral autoregulation monitoring in major noncardiac surgery. Objectives: Primary objective: To evaluate the technical feasibility of using the Medtronic Cotrending algorithm to monitor intraoperative cerebral autoregulation in real-time during major noncardiac surgery, drawing comparisons to the COx algorithm. Secondary objectives: to investigate the potential clinical implications of Cotrending-based cerebral autoregulation monitoring. Design: Single-centre, prospective cohort study. Setting: Swiss tertiary care centre Patients: Patients enrolled in AUTOREGULATE-NONCARDIAC who were monitored intraoperatively with the Medtronic INVOS(TM) 5100 near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) system. Outcomes: Technical feasibility outcomes include success rate of determination of the lower limit of cerebral autoregulation, intraoperative uptime, time to first estimate of the lower limit of cerebral autoregulation, sensitivity to external factors and to data artefacts; agreement of Cotrending-derived lower limit of cerebral autoregulation with COx-derived lower limit of cerebral autoregulation. Conclusions: N/A Trial registration: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT07630129

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

VideoMDM: Towards 3D Human Motion Generation From 2D Supervision

We introduce VideoMDM, a diffusion-based framework that trains 3D human motion priors directly from accurate 2D poses extracted from monocular videos, without any 3D ground truth. A pretrained 2D-to-3D lifter provides approximate 3D pose sequences that serve as a noisy teacher: these are diffused, denoised by the model in 3D, and supervised in 2D by reprojecting the prediction and comparing against accurate keypoints. We show that, under mild assumptions, a depth-weighted 2D reprojection loss is equivalent in expectation to direct 3D supervision, and we adapt standard 3D motion regularizers - velocity consistency and over-parameterized representation alignment - to this 2D setting. Unlike methods that lift 2D to 3D only at inference, VideoMDM learns a coherent 3D motion manifold during training. On HumanML3D it nearly closes the gap to fully 3D-supervised MDM (FID 0.88 vs 0.54); On real video datasets Fit3D and NBA the method learns to generate motions consistently preferred by humans, with strong quantitative results.

20.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

NeuroSonic: Conditional Flow Matching for EEG-to-Speech Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.24087v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reconstructing continuous speech from scalp electroencephalography (EEG) remains fundamentally challenging. EEG provides a weak, spatially diffuse, and highly variable measurement of distributed cortical activity, whereas speech is organized as a coherent acoustic trajectory with strong harmonic and temporal structure. The resulting mismatch makes waveform regression unstable and causes stochastic multi-step generation to be sensitive to artifact-dependent conditioning and subject variability. We introduce NeuroSonic, a conditional flow-matching framework for EEG-to-speech reconstruction. Instead of predicting waveforms directly or refining them through stochastic denoising, NeuroSonic learns a deterministic probability-flow velocity field that transports a noise-corrupted acoustic state toward clean speech under EEG conditioning. EEG and audio are embedded into a shared token space and processed by a time-conditioned gated Transformer that parameterizes the transport ordinary differential equation. This formulation models trajectory evolution explicitly while avoiding iterative stochastic sampling. We evaluate NeuroSonic on the CineBrain and EAV benchmarks under cross-subject evaluation. Across both datasets, the proposed method improves distributional realism, spectral fidelity, and perceptual quality over representative GAN-, diffusion-, and mean-flow baselines, with up to a 26.3\% gain in overall perceptual quality. The performance gap is most evident in artifact-heavy segments, where conditioning variability is strongest. These findings indicate that deterministic conditional transport provides a stable and effective formulation for EEG-driven speech reconstruction. Code is available at https://github.com/Y-Research-SBU/NeuroSonic/ .

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Impatient Bandits: Optimizing for the Long-Term Without Delay

arXiv:2501.07761v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Increasingly, recommender systems are tasked with improving users' long-term satisfaction. In this context, we study a content exploration task, which we formalize as a bandit problem with delayed rewards. There is an apparent trade-off in choosing the learning signal: waiting for the full reward to become available might take several weeks, slowing the rate of learning, whereas using short-term proxy rewards reflects the actual long-term goal only imperfectly. First, we develop a predictive model of delayed rewards that incorporates all information obtained to date. Rewards as well as shorter-term surrogate outcomes are combined through a Bayesian filter to obtain a probabilistic belief. Second, we devise a bandit algorithm that quickly learns to identify content aligned with long-term success using this new predictive model. We prove a regret bound for our algorithm that depends on the Value of Progressive Feedback, an information-theoretic metric that captures the quality of short-term leading indicators that are observed prior to the long-term reward. We apply our approach to a podcast recommendation problem, where we seek to recommend shows that users engage with repeatedly over two months. We empirically validate that our approach significantly outperforms methods that optimize for short-term proxies or rely solely on delayed rewards, as demonstrated by an A/B test in a recommendation system that serves hundreds of millions of users.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

How knowledge shapes community stigma and social support for women seeking abortion in the Democratic Republic of Congo: A cross-sectional study.

Background The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) bears one of the highest maternal mortality ratios globally (746 per 100,000 live births), with nearly 11% of deaths attributable to complications of unsafe abortion. Despite ratification of the Maputo Protocol and related national policies, access to safe abortion remains limited, largely due to entrenched stigma. Social support, encompassing emotional, informational, and instrumental assistance, is critical in shaping womens abortion-seeking behaviors and health outcomes. This study examines the influence of community-level knowledge on stigma and social support for women seeking abortion care. Methods A cross-sectional survey was conducted from May 2024 to June 2024 among 1,715 adults in Kinshasa and North Kivu provinces. Analyses focused on a sub-sample of 574 respondents reporting familiarity with women who had undergone abortion. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was applied to estimate direct and indirect pathways linking community knowledge, stigma, and social support. Results Two core knowledge indicators, recognition of abortion as a safe medical procedure and awareness of legal conditions for access, were significantly associated with outcomes. A one-unit increase in knowledge corresponded to a 0.39-point increase in social support and a 0.19-point reduction in stigma. Enhanced knowledge promoted empathetic attitudes, reinforced practical support, and mitigated moralizing judgments toward women seeking abortion. Conclusions Strengthening community knowledge emerges as a strategic lever to reduce abortion-related stigma and enhance social support in the DRC. These findings underscore the importance of integrating stigma-reduction and knowledge-enhancement interventions into reproductive health programs to improve womens access to safe and dignified abortion care.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

The Effectiveness of aromatherapy and its supportive Interventions on anxiety and pain among breast cancer patients: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Introduction: Breast cancer treatments are often associated with pain and anxiety, which can hinder physical functioning and overall quality of life, even after treatment. Complementary therapies, such as aromatherapy, can be used to alleviate pain and reduce anxiety in breast cancer patients. This project aimed to synthesize current global evidence on the effectiveness of aromatherapy. Method: This systematic review followed the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, with a comprehensive, systematic search conducted in PubMed, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, and SCOPUS for randomized controlled trials (RCTS) published from 2015 to 2025. Eligible studies included adult women breast cancer surgery patients who received aromatherapy during various periods of breast cancer. Where possible, data from the included studies were pooled using meta-analysis. GRADE approach was used to assess certainty of findings. Results: The search yielded 84 studies. Out of these, six were included in this review. On average, aromatherapy reduces pain and anxiety scores by 0.79 (standard mean difference (SMD)=-0.79, 95% CI -1.42, -0.16) and 0.53 (SMD=-0.53, 95 CI=-0.90, -0.16) units, respectively, compared to control condition [Low-quality of evidence]. The combination of aromatherapy with music reduces pain and anxiety by 1.26 (SMD= -1.26, 95 CI=-1.65, -0.87) and 1.08 (SMD = -1.08, 95 % CI: -1.45, -0.70) units respectively compared to standard care [Low-quality of evidence]. Conclusion: There is a potential role for the use of aromatherapy and music therapy, to alleviate anxiety and pain, especially for non-preoperative anxiety and pain. Further research is needed to inform the integration of aromatherapy into the management of anxiety and pain.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Exposing the Unsaid: Visualizing Hidden LLM Bias through Stochastic Path Aggregation

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit representational and syntactic biases that are difficult to evaluate due to the stochastic nature of text generation. Standard auditing methods rely on a single output inspection or static automated metrics. These approaches obscure the underlying probability distributions and fail to capture biases hidden in lower-probability generation branches. This paper introduces TreeTracer, a visual analytics tool designed to evaluate LLM bias through aggregated comparison. Using a systematic perturbation analysis pipeline, the tool replaces ontology-defined terms in each input prompt, aggregates hundreds of stochastic generations into a syntax-aligned hierarchical structure, and then performs classification-aware node merging with an auxiliary language model. The resulting structure is visualized through a custom Sankey diagram. By juxtaposing two ontology-driven trees, the workspace enables direct comparison between semantic contexts and supports systematic bias detection. Because any visualization reflects only a subset of the model's learned behavior, the system further applies contrastive inference to compute and directly display counterfactual token probabilities across contexts, reducing the risk of misinterpreting the presence of bias. We validate the workspace through case studies comparing an unaligned baseline model GPT-2 XL against the constitutionally aligned Apertus models. The visual aggregation successfully exposes hidden representational harms, such as counterfactual pronoun suppression and conversational marginalization of individuals. A preliminary user study confirms that the aggregated comparative interface reduces cognitive load and effectively supports analysts in detecting systemic biases.