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01.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

A Training-Free Mixture-of-Agents Framework for Multi-Document Summarization using LLMs and Knowledge Graphs

Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) plays a critical role in distilling essential information from collections of textual data. Existing approaches often struggle to capture complex inter-document relationships, rely heavily on large amounts of labeled data for supervised training, or exhibit limited generalization across domains and languages. To address these limitations, we present a training-free mixture-of-agents framework for MDS that leverages the complementary strengths of large language models (LLMs) and knowledge graphs. Our approach decomposes summarization into specialized agent tasks: extractive selection, knowledge-aware abstraction, and iterative refinement, each operating without task-specific fine-tuning. We unify their outputs using a multi-perspective consistency mechanism guided by LLMs. Experiments across four datasets in English and Vietnamese demonstrate state-of-the-art or competitive performance, validating the effectiveness and adaptability of our modular design.

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Efficacy of a Gamified Digital Platform for Substance Use Education and Overdose Prevention Among College Students: a Pilot and Feasibility Study

Background: For US young adults aged 18-25 in the 2018-2024 period, fentanyl was involved in 78.2% of the 44,020 unintentional or undetermined-intent overdose deaths, most often co-involving stimulants and other non-opioid substances. While fatal overdose rates in this age group have fallen to their lowest recorded level, emergency medical services-attended non-fatal overdose events have reached record highs, shifting the decisive variable toward bystander recognition and response. College students report near-universal alcohol education but minimal education on the substances actually driving overdose mortality. Methods: We conducted a single-group pre-post evaluation of the DopaGE Portal, a gamified, mastery-based digital platform covering cocaine, MDMA, benzodiazepines, and opioid overdose response, deployed at a public university (UNL) and a multi-campus volunteer network (TACO). Paired pre/post surveys (N=42) measured self-efficacy (7 items; primary), behavioral intentions, risk perception, and knowledge/attitudes on 5-point scales, plus four factual knowledge questions. Paired t-tests, exact McNemar tests, and Benjamini-Hochberg correction across eight primary tests were applied. Institutional naloxone distribution at UNL was tracked as an ecological behavioral outcome. A mandated high-school cohort (N=94) provided supplementary acceptability data. Results: Self-efficacy increased from 2.82 to 4.46 (d=2.00, 95% CI 1.46-2.55; adjusted p

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification for Weakly Supervised Histopathology Segmentation

Existing weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) methods in computational pathology rely on a multi-stage paradigm: class activation map (CAM) generation, offline pseudo-mask refinement, and fully supervised retraining. While established, this decoupled approach presents fundamental limitations. The multi-stage process not only incurs high computational training costs but also suffers from error propagation: local texture biases in shallow CNN layers generate false-positive artifacts that subsequent refinement steps often fail to correct. To address these persistent challenges through a simple yet highly effective approach, we propose the Single-Stage Hierarchical Rectification (SSHR) framework. Rather than passively refining CAMs post-hoc, our method proactively purifies intermediate feature representations during the forward pass. We introduce a Hierarchical Feature Rectification Module (HFRM) that utilizes deep global semantic context to filter out local anomalies in shallow layers. This mechanism generates high-fidelity activation maps directly within a single training loop. Experiments on the LUAD-HistoSeg and BCSS datasets demonstrate that SSHR outperforms state-of-the-art multi-stage methods. Furthermore, SSHR reduces training duration by 2 to 5 times. This efficiency minimizes computational overhead and accelerates clinical translation for large-scale histopathology workflows. The code is available at: https://github.com/trongduc-nguyen/SSHR

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

EERLoss: A Novel Loss Function for Training Deep Biometric Models. A Case Study in Keystroke Dynamics

Deep learning approaches to biometric verification are commonly trained by optimizing indirect objectives, creating a misalignment between the optimization process and the primary evaluation metric, typically the Equal Error Rate (EER). This paper introduces EERLoss: a subdifferentiable, arbitrarily accurate approximation to EER for training deep biometric models. Furthermore, this framework has the potential to be adapted to optimize any specific operating point on the DET curve, enhancing its generalizability. To validate this approach, EERLoss is evaluated on a particularly demanding behavioral biometric modality: keystroke dynamics verification. This task is characterized by its high intra-class and low inter-class variability. Experiments are conducted on the large-scale KVC-onGoing benchmark, incorporating data from over 185,000 subjects across different scenarios. A comprehensive ablation study initially demonstrates the superiority of EERLoss in comparison to existing state-of-the-art loss functions. It also converges substantially faster compared to other losses, reducing the overall training cost. Additionally, a comparison is made between the proposed loss and the KVC-winning architecture by re-training it with EERLoss, demonstrating that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the original SoTA, achieving a relative EER reduction of up to approx. 30\%. This improvement on a challenging, large-scale benchmark validates the effectiveness of EERLoss as a task-aligned training objective specifically suited for high-variance biometric traits.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Multi-omics data fusion reveals divergent molecular signatures of intra-articular micro-fragmented adipose tissue and hyaluronic acid treatment in inflammatory-phenotype knee osteoarthritis

Knee osteoarthritis (KOA) affects an estimated 374 million people worldwide and has no approved disease-modifying treatment. Intra-articular micro-fragmented adipose tissue (MFAT) outperformed hyaluronic acid (HA) on patient-reported outcomes in our recent double-blind randomized trial (ISRCTN88966184), yet the molecular basis of this differential efficacy is unknown, and the two interventions have not previously been compared at the level of their in vivo molecular response in human KOA. Here we apply an interpretable artificial-intelligence data-fusion framework, based on non-negative matrix tri-factorization, to longitudinally collected plasma from this cohort, integrating proteomics, N-glycomics, miRNA transcriptomics and patient genetics with prior protein-protein and miRNA-gene regulatory networks at baseline, one and six months. The framework jointly decomposes all data modalities at each timepoint into shared, interpretable factors, from which we derive data-driven pathways of genes and of miRNAs and recover new patient-gene and patient-miRNA associations. These pathways were biologically coherent, showing significant enrichment in Gene Ontology Biological Process and Reactome Pathway annotations. By six months, the two treatments left clearly distinct molecular signatures: HA remained dominated by canonical OA pathogenic processes, including cartilage-degrading effectors such as MMP13 and LIMK2 and markers of synovial inflammation, whereas MFAT shifted the systemic landscape toward chondroprotection, anti-inflammatory signalling and bone-cartilage homeostasis, with prioritized effectors including SIRT7 and NDUFC1. To our knowledge, these are the first systems-level molecular data directly comparing the in vivo response to the two treatments in human KOA, providing initial evidence that MFAT acts as a disease-modifying intervention and demonstrating the value of interpretable data fusion for uncovering treatment mechanisms in small translational cohorts.

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

A Quantum Algorithm for Random Number Generation

arXiv:2606.13034v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a quantum algorithm for random number generation that achieves a provable quadratic speedup over classical Markov chain mixing, building on the Diaconis-Shahshahani Fourier analysis of the top-to-random card shuffle. The algorithm integrates three quantum primitives into a unified mixing circuit: the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT), which diagonalizes the Markov transition operator; controlled phase rotations, which encode the shuffle eigenvalue spectrum; and the Grover diffusion operator, which acts as a quantum analogue of the Aldous-Diaconis strong uniform stopping time by reflecting amplitudes about their mean at each iteration. For an n-qubit register, the mixing time is O(\sqrt{n \log n}) iterations. Extending to m qudits of local dimension d reduces this to O(\sqrt{\log_d N}) iterations, where N = d^m, compared to the classical O(n \log n) bound. The qudit formulation further reduces QFT circuit depth from O(\log^2 N) to O(\log_d^2 N) gates per layer by encoding the same N-state space using m = \log_d N subsystems instead of \log_2 N qubits. We validate both variants on IBM superconducting hardware.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Sakana Fugu Technical Report

arXiv:2606.21228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The capabilities of frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance, with different providers increasingly specializing in distinct domains. This raises a natural next objective: how to combine the individual specializations of various LLMs into a collectively intelligent system. To this end, we report the development of Sakana Fugu, a family of orchestrator models that harness and amplify the capabilities of an LLM agent team. Fugu models are themselves language models trained to understand user queries and dynamically devise agentic scaffolds to solve them. Through these adaptive scaffolds, Fugu accesses performance beyond any individual LLM agent, achieving state-of-the-art results compared to other publicly accessible models across a range of challenging tasks, including SWE-Bench Pro, Terminal Bench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond, Humanity's Last Exam, and CharXiv Reasoning. We release two models: Fugu, which balances performance with latency for everyday use, and Fugu-Ultra, which prioritizes answer quality on the hardest problems. We describe our training paradigm, which encompasses large-scale fine-tuning, evolutionary algorithms, and reinforcement learning approaches, along with the infrastructure and core design principles that turn these methods into a production system. We hope this report encourages further research into multi-agent systems and dynamic, query-adaptive agentic scaffolds as a path toward the next frontier of AI capabilities, accessed through collective intelligence.

08.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Large deviation principle for friendship-biases in Galton–Watson trees

arXiv:2606.17381v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper we consider the friendship-bias of the vertices in an infinite rooted Galton–Watson tree. The friendship-bias of a vertex is the difference between the average degree of the neighbours of the vertex and the degree of the vertex itself. A vertex is said to be of type $\chi \in S$, with $S = \{-,0,+\}$, when its friendship-bias is, respectively, strictly negative, zero or strictly positive. We consider the fractions $f_l^\chi$ of vertices of type $\chi \in S$ along a random downward path up to branching depth $l \in \mathbb{N}$ and derive a large deviation principle (LDP) for the triple $(f_l^\chi)_{\chi \in S}$ as $l\to\infty$. The branching depth of a vertex counts the number of branchings that occur along the path that connects the vertex to the root of the tree. The rate in the LDP is $l$, while the rate function in the LDP is identified in terms of a variational formula minimising a relative entropy under a linear constraint. We focus on the case of binary branching, for which the rate function is already quite involved. We identify the qualitative properties of the rate function and show how it can be computed numerically. We briefly indicate how to proceed for more general branching and for vertex types along a tree consisting of a finite number of random downward paths. Our paper is the first to consider large deviations of vertex types.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TileFuse: A Fused Mixed-Precision Kernel Library for Efficient Quantized LLM Inference on AMD NPUs

arXiv:2606.11357v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the growing demand for on-device LLM inference, edge SoCs increasingly integrate NPUs to improve performance and energy efficiency under tight power and thermal budgets. However, practical LLM deployment on current client NPUs remains difficult: widely used quantization formats such as AWQ do not map cleanly onto many existing NPU software stacks, which are often proprietary and expose limited low-level control. In this work, we present TileFuse, a close-to-metal mixed-precision kernel library for AMD XDNA2 NPUs that targets transformer linear layers in quantized LLM inference. TileFuse brings practical low-bit formats such as AWQ-style W4A16 and W8A16 directly onto XDNA2, rather than forcing the model to be reshaped around an NPU-specific quantization scheme. TileFuse co-designs weight layout, metadata placement, mixed-precision microkernels, and array-level dataflow. Specifically, it fuses unpacking, dequantization, and GEMM/GEMV execution into a single kernel flow, introduces an interleaved pre-tiling layout that supports GEMM dimensions up to 32K, and redesigns GEMV dataflow to utilize the full 4x8 AIE array. Across kernel-level evaluations, TileFuse improves performance by up to 121.6% for GEMM and 281% for GEMV over full-precision baselines, while delivering more than 2x performance and energy-efficiency gains over strong iGPU baselines on GEMM. In end-to-end LLM experiments on Ryzen AI laptops, TileFuse achieves up to 2.0x lower prefilling latency with more than 64.6% lower energy consumption. Together, these results show that XDNA2 is a practical target for AWQ-style edge LLM inference and that native NPU support for off-the-shelf quantization can make NPUs substantially more usable in real client deployments.

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

Evaluative Judgement in Teaching AI-based Translation: A Class-room Case Study of AI-Mediated Translation and Post-Editing

Authors:

Drawing on 23 anonymized student pro-jects from a fourth-year Machine Transla-tion and Post-editing course in a BA-level translation programme, this paper exam-ines how structured comparison of gen-eral-purpose LLMs and online MT sys-tems can elicit evaluative judgement in AI-mediated translation. Students translat-ed short specialised English Wikipedia texts into Catalan or Spanish, generated four system outputs, evaluated them using automatic metrics and human adequa-cy/fluency assessment, selected one output for post-editing, and justified their deci-sion in written reports. Descriptive counts are reported for all 23 projects, while qualitative interpretation is based on the 22 cases accompanied by written reports. Results show that students did not treat automatic metrics as final authority: final post-editing selections often diverged from metric rankings and were justified through adequacy, fluency, terminology, naturalness, and expected post-editing ef-fort. The study therefore does not bench-mark systems under controlled conditions; it analyses how students justified system choice within an authentic classroom as-signment.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Direction-Conditioned Policies via Compositional Subgoal Scoring for Online Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.16515v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman theory implies that the optimal goal-conditioned action depends on the goal only through the gradient of the goal-reaching distance at the current state, yet standard online GCRL still conditions the actor on the raw goal – a signal that is geometrically uninformative when the goal is far from the data distribution. We propose Direction-Conditioned Policies (DCP), a fully online method that decomposes goal-reaching into two components sharing one InfoNCE representation $\psi$: a subgoal-scoring step that selects a visited state $z_t$ aligned with the final goal $g$ in $\psi_g$, and a direction-conditioned actor that consumes the unit direction $d_t$ and magnitude $r_t$ from $\psi(s_t)$ to $\psi(z_t)$. The two components train jointly, factor cleanly at deployment (subgoal scoring is removed, while direction conditioning remains with $g$ in place of $z_t$), and admit independent modification at the same $(d_t,r_t)$ interface. We prove three results. First, direction sufficiency under HJB: the optimal action under control-affine dynamics depends on the goal only through the value gradient. Second, a quantitative bound showing that, under mild conditions on the learned representation and assuming the scoring rule returns an on-path $z_t$, the actor's conditioning input at training and at deployment coincide up to representation error and geodesic slack. Third, a controllable-subspace characterization of when directional conditioning fails. Across nine environments, DCP improves over Contrastive RL on most final metrics, with the largest gains on manipulation and obstacle-interaction tasks; a qualitative analysis of the learned $\psi$-distance landscape shows the contrastive representation behaves as an online quasimetric encoding environment topology, and the single failure case (AntSoccer) localizes to a learned-gradient pathology that the theory anticipates.

12.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Persistence diagrams of random triangular matrices over finite fields

arXiv:2606.17895v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Let us consider a random infinite lower triangular matrix, where the entries on and below the diagonal are i.i.d. uniform random elements of a fixed finite field. We investigate the evolution of the span of the first $n$ rows of this matrix as $n$ grows. Many properties of this evolving subspace can be captured with the help of the verbose persistence diagram, which is a standard tool in stochastic topology and topological data analysis. We give an explicit formula for the distribution of the persistence diagram. We prove a law of large numbers for the distribution of lifetimes. We also describe the fluctuations of the persistent Betti numbers.

13.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

UtVAA: Ultra-tiny Vision Transformer with Affix Attention for Mobile Image Classification

Vision Transformers (ViTs) have demonstrated strong representation capability in image classification. However, their quadratic self-attention complexity and large parameter counts limit deployment on resource-constrained mobile and edge devices. This paper introduces UtVAA, an ultra-tiny Vision Transformer architecture designed for efficient visual recognition under strict computational budgets. It incorporates a novel Affix Attention block that combines depthwise-pointwise local feature extraction, linear self-attention, coordinate attention for spatial dependency modelling, and a lightweight ternary fusion strategy to integrate local and global representations. In addition, Dilated Bottleneck blocks expand the receptive field using dilated depthwise separable convolutions while maintaining low FLOPs and stable optimisation through residual connections. UtVAA is implemented in scalable Tiny, Medium, and Large variants, with the smallest model containing 204.67K parameters and 53.95M FLOPs. Experimental results on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, PlantVillage-Tomato and SLIF-Tomato datasets show that UtVAA achieves competitive accuracy within a sub-million-parameter regime. Overall, the results demonstrate that transformer-based vision models can be redesigned into ultra-tiny architectures without significant loss in discriminative performance, making UtVAA suitable for mobile and edge deployment. Code is available at https://github.com/romiyal/UtVAA

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Optimizing Incomplete, Large-Scale and Sparse Multi-Graph Matching in Bioimaging

Multi-graph matching is a fundamental problem in computer vision. Our work is motivated by a challenging application in bioimaging, where dozens or even hundreds of 3D microscopy images of worms must be brought into correspondence. Existing datasets do not cover this large-scale regime, and virtually all existing methods are inapplicable because they assume a complete or dense problem setting. To support further research, our first contribution is a new large-scale dataset based on problem instances from bioimaging. Our second contribution is a comprehensive analysis of the two main multi-graph matching paradigms: direct and permutation synchronization-based formulations. We argue, in part by proof, that practical large-scale methods must explicitly address problem sparsity and incompleteness. Since standard permutation synchronization approaches fail in this setting, we further introduce a sparse permutation synchronization paradigm. Our final contribution is GREEDA, a general method for sparse and incomplete problems that can be instantiated across cost orders and paradigms. While our paper focuses on objective functions up to quadratic order, GREEDA is inherently generalizable to arbitrary orders. On larger, sparse instances, GREEDA outperforms competing methods in both objective value and runtime. For example, for moderately-sized problems based on 30 worm images GREEDA produces a high-quality solution within 2 minutes, whereas competitors require at least half an hour and yield far worse results. On smaller dense problems, GREEDA remains on par with leading methods while being an order of magnitude faster.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DenseControl: Instance-Level Controllable Synthesis of Dense Crowd Image

In this paper, we introduce DenseControl, a novel pipeline for generating dense crowd images. Specifically, DenseControl meticulously positions and sizes each generated instance to align precisely with the predefined coordinates and scales. Based on this, we further allow for control over the background, style, and attributes of instances. The motivation behind DenseControl stems from the observation of two main challenges in synthesizing crowd images: controlling signal embedding and maintaining topological integrity when imparting instance scale guidance. To address these, we first introduce the Isolated Object Embedding (IOE) map, a novel representation that facilitates spatial location control while mitigating the difficulties associated with learning projections for model. Secondly, we propose an Implicit Scale Embedding (ISE) strategy that seamlessly integrates with the IOE map to encode precise scale information. To further enhance the efficacy of combining ISE with the IOE map, we incorporate a Position Shortcut mechanism that enhances cross-attention to alleviate projection challenges. We evaluate DenseControl through two lenses: synthesis quality and applicability in latent applications. Experiments across different control conditions demonstrate DenseControl achieves state-of-the-art results in dense crowd image synthesis. Furthermore, we showcase applications in augmenting crowd analysis under data scarcity, transfer learning, and weather generalization scenes, to highlight the practical utility of DenseControl. The codebase will be released.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Age as a moderator of a brief alcohol intervention among injury patients in Northern Tanzania

Background: Alcohol use is a leading modifiable risk factor for injury in sub-Saharan Africa. In Tanzania, young people ([≤]24 years) experience greater alcohol-related harm despite drinking less frequently than adults. Punguza Pombe kwa Afya Yako (PPKAY) is a culturally adapted, brief intervention for injury patients in Tanzania. This study examined whether age moderates its effectiveness. Methods: We conducted an exploratory secondary analysis of baseline and 3-month data from the PPKAY randomized trial among injury patients aged [≥]18 years at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre, Tanzania. Eligible participants reporting alcohol use before injury, AUDIT [≥]8, or positive breathalyzer were randomized to usual care or PPKAY with SMS boosters. The primary outcome was binge drinking days. Count outcomes were analyzed using negative binomial regression with robust SEs and continuous outcomes using mixed-effects models. Effect modification was assessed using a three-way interaction (Time x intervention x Age). Results: Among 543 participants (mean age 36.8 years; 16.2% aged 18–24), age moderated the intervention effect for drinking days (IRR = 0.27, 95% CI 0.07 – 0.98; p = 0.046) and drinks consumed (IRR = 0.17, 95% CI 0.04 – 0.77; p = 0.021). The intervention reduced 4 drinking days (95% CI -7.1 to -0.8) and 27.5 drinks (95% CI -42.8 to -12.2) among young people, while adults showed reductions in both arms, without intervention-specific effect. Conclusion: The effects of ED-based brief alcohol interventions are not uniform, varying across both age groups and alcohol-related outcomes. We found a greater responsiveness in drinking frequency and quantity reported among young people.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

The Machine Learning Approach to Moment Closure Relations for Plasma: A Review

arXiv:2511.22486v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The requirement for large-scale global simulations of plasma is an ongoing challenge in both space and laboratory plasma physics. Any simulation based on a fluid model inherently requires a closure relation for the high order plasma moments. This review compiles and analyses the recent surge of machine learning approaches developing improved plasma closure models capable of capturing kinetic phenomena within plasma fluid models. We survey two methodological families: neural-network surrogates (from multilayer perceptrons to Fourier neural operators, the latter recently reproducing both linear and non-linear Landau damping online within a fluid solver) and equation-discovery methods such as sparse regression; and organise the studies by whether they are tested offline against reference data or online within a time-evolving solver. We outline the challenges associated with machine-learning closures, including off-diagonal pressure-tensor accuracy, generalisation beyond the training distribution, and stable integration into large-scale simulations, and the directions future research might take to address them.

18.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Agent trajectories as programs: fingerprinting and programming coding-agent behavior

arXiv:2606.16988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark scores tell you what an agent got right; they do not tell you how it got there. In this work, we introduce methods for comparing agents procedurally in different contexts, where the model, tasks, and approaches vary. We compare ten agents and find that they are identifiable by their behavioral habits, which we define as fingerprints: a probe over these procedural signatures attributes an unseen trajectory to the correct agent at 85.7% accuracy, controlling for leakage across tasks. We develop procedural representations for agent problem-solving procedures with an emergent vocabulary induction technique that is meant to be maximally compressive to avoid surface-level variation while being expressive enough to unveil the quirks of the models' patterns. We apply our framework to the software engineering evaluation dataset SWE-Bench to study the structural distinctness of agent trajectories and find that behavior is most similar between models from similar release periods and those that are distilled from one another (e.g., a distilled student model and its teacher have a Jensen-Shannon divergence of 0.25, about half the distance between other model pairs). As more models saturate evaluations, we believe that it will be important to probe model behavior along more holistic dimensions than success rates alone. We introduce ProcGrep, a library for auditing and evaluating agents for how they approach tasks at a procedural level given their traces in a top-down fashion. We believe this work has a range of applications to help developers work with and program coding agents, such as task-aware model routing, agent monitoring, and finer-grained cost analysis.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-24

Asymptotic Signal Subspace Recovery in Softmax Attention Models

Authors:

arXiv:2606.22406v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Attention mechanisms have demonstrated remarkable empirical success in identifying relevant information from large collections of tokens, yet the theoretical principles underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. We study a stylized softmax-attention model in which a query vector is learned by stochastic gradient ascent from a collection of informative and nuisance tokens. Exploiting the symmetry of the model, we derive a population objective and characterize the limiting ordinary differential equation governing the learning dynamics. Using tools from stochastic approximation and dynamical systems theory, we establish a rigorous connection between the stochastic learning algorithm and its deterministic limit. Our main result shows that, under suitable high-dimensional scaling assumptions and standard step-size conditions, the learned query converges almost surely to the one-dimensional signal subspace spanned by the latent informative direction. Equivalently, the query asymptotically recovers the latent signal up to the intrinsic sign ambiguity. These results provide a rigorous theoretical foundation for understanding attention mechanisms as signal extraction procedures in high-dimensional noisy environments and offer a dynamical-systems perspective on how attention discovers relevant information in the presence of substantial noise.

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

Rethinking Scaffolding in LLM Tutors: The Interactional Mismatch Between Benchmarks and Real-World Deployments

arXiv:2606.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central pedagogical value evaluated in AI tutor benchmarks is scaffolding: guiding students through graduated steps toward a solution. Alignment and evaluation methods for embedding scaffolding behaviour into chatbots, however, rest on an implicit assumption: that students will take up the scaffolding and engage in the conversation. To examine whether this assumption holds, we introduce an evaluation pipeline around two metrics - Chatbot Scaffolding and Student Uptake - and apply them across nine datasets of 9,490 chats, spanning AI tutor benchmarks and real-world deployments of educational chatbots. Our analysis reveals that while benchmarks assume a high-scaffolding, high-student-uptake environment, students in real-world settings exhibit lower levels of uptake overall - frequently bypassing the chatbot's pedagogical framing to drive the interaction toward their own learning goals at little interpersonal cost. We argue that bypassing scaffolding is not necessarily detrimental; rather, it frequently highlights a mismatch between a chatbot's pedagogical framing and the student's learning goals. To meaningfully evaluate the effectiveness of a chatbot's assistance, future benchmarks must move beyond the assumption that students will simply take up the scaffolding, and instead evaluate how these chatbots navigate diverse learning contexts and student-driven interaction patterns.

21.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-03

IsoPepTracker: An interactive web application for peptide-driven isoform analysis

Authors:

by Araf Mahmud, Chen Huang Alternative splicing affects 95% of multi-exon genes, generating protein isoforms with distinct functions. While current alternative splicing analyses effectively identify splice events at the RNA level, they provide limited protein-level insight. To address this gap, we developed IsoPepTracker (https://www.isopeptracker.org), a user-friendly web application for analyzing and visualizing differential peptides across canonical and novel isoforms that are theoretically detectable by shotgun mass spectrometry-based proteomics. IsoPepTracker features four modules: Canonical Isoform Analysis, Novel Isoform Discovery, Peptide Sequence Search, and Alternative Splicing Analysis. Each module is tailored for distinct and complementary proteogenomics analyses. Users can input genes, novel cDNA sequences, peptides, or alternative splicing results to pinpoint peptides of interest and identify their associations with target genes or isoforms. We demonstrate the straightforward application of IsoPepTracker in proteogenomics through case studies. IsoPepTracker not only provides informative peptide signatures to understand the protein-level consequences of alternative splicing but also supplies peptide candidates for validation in shotgun proteomics.

22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Prediction of parsimonious and temporally sensitive sets of cell fate engineering transcription factors with IMCell

Transcription factor (TF) cocktails used in cell identity reprogramming protocols have largely been developed from experimental approaches. A handful of computational approaches have been reported, though have not been widely adopted by the scientific community. To standardize their use and assess their performance, we built CompForce, a platform that integrates these tools. Using CompForce, we found that existing computational methods offer modest improvements over differential expression on both synthetic and literature-curated data, and that their lackluster and inconsistent performance could be attributed to a reliance on local centrality metrics. To improve upon these methods, we developed IMCell, a prediction method that is inspired by the influence maximization problem. Unlike existing tools, IMCell returns optimized TF sets rather than ranked TF lists. We demonstrate that IMCell vastly out-performs existing tools, and further extend it to dynamic, stepwise contexts. The tools presented here are available in the R packages CompForce and IMCell.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Breaking Shortcut Learning for Cross-Trial EEG-Guided Target Speech Extraction via Two-Stage Training

arXiv:2606.24164v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent end-to-end models for EEG-guided target speech extraction report impressive results, underscoring potential for neuro-steered hearing technologies. However, our analysis reveals that high within-trial performance can be driven by trial-specific EEG structure that acts as shortcuts for target selection, leading to poor generalization on unseen trials. To overcome this gap, we propose TRUST-TSE, a two-stage framework to mitigate shortcut learning. By introducing contrastive pretraining with attended-speaker negative sampling, we encourage the EEG encoder to capture fine-grained EEG–speech alignment while suppressing trial-identity cues. We also employ a confidence-weighted extraction objective based on EEG–source similarity to guide extraction using the learned representations. Experiments on KUL and DTU datasets show that TRUST-TSE outperforms end-to-end baselines under strict cross-trial protocols, addressing a key reliability bottleneck of existing approaches.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Corticospinal tract risk modifies motor recovery after minimally invasive surgery for intracerebral hemorrhage: a secondary analysis of MISTIE-III

Objective: Outcome after surgical hematoma evacuation for intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) depends on hematoma location. As corticospinal tract (CST) integrity affects motor recovery after stroke, we hypothesized that CST integrity drives heterogeneity in surgical outcomes and investigated this in a secondary analysis of MISTIE-III participants. Methods: Risk of CST injury was categorized into four levels, based on the interaction between the CST, the hematoma, and perihematomal edema (PHE) on automatically segmented stability CT: no risk, PHE infiltration, hematoma infiltration, and complete interruption of the CST. Associations with outcome were tested using multivariable linear regression for motor National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) at day 180 and ordinal regression for modified Rankin Scale (mRS) at day 365, introducing an interaction term between CST risk and treatment group. Results: Day 180 motor NIHSS was significantly lower for 'no risk' ({beta}:-3.77, [95% confidence interval [CI]: -5.8 to -1.70], p=0.0003) and 'PHE infiltration' ({beta}:-2.3, [95%CI: -3.5 to -1.1]; p=0.0002) vs. 'complete interruption'. Surgery was associated with lower Day 180 motor NIHSS in participants with hematoma infiltration ({beta}:-2.07, [95%CI: -3.8 to -0.4], p=0.016). Compared to complete interruption, 'no risk' (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]:0.27, [95%CI: 0.10 to 0.74], p=0.01) and 'PHE infiltration' (aOR:0.41, [95%CI: 0.23 to 0.74]; p=0.003) were associated with lower odds of unfavorable day 365 mRS. Surgery was associated with lower mRS in participants with no risk (aOR:0.23, [95%CI: 0.05 to 0.97, p=0.045). Interpretation: Increasing CST risk is associated with worse motor recovery (day 180) and disability (day 365). CST risk modifies the effect of the MISTIE-III procedure on motor recovery and disability.

25.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

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

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