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

AnonShield: Scalable On-Premise Pseudonymization for CSIRT Vulnerability Data

Authors:
Cristhian Kapelinski↗Douglas Lautert↗Beatriz Machado↗Diego Kreutz↗Isadora Garcia Ferr\~ao↗

arXiv:2606.15650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present AnonShield, a high-throughput, on-premise pseudonymization system that combines GPU-accelerated NER, streaming processing, caching, and schema-aware configuration. Evaluated on datasets up to 550 MB (70,951 records), AnonShield reduces processing time from over 92 hours to under 10 minutes (up to 738x speedup) while achieving up to 94.2% F1-score and 96.7% recall. Our results show that scalable pseudonymization of vulnerability data is feasible without sacrificing analytical utility, enabling compliant data sharing in operational CSIRT environments.

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02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

A prototype differential atom interferometer for fundamental physics

Authors:
C. F. A. Baynham↗

Gravitational waves and ultralight dark matter are among the most compelling frontiers in fundamental physics, motivating proposals for very-long-baseline atom interferometerssuch as AION1, MAGIS2, AICE3 and AEDGE4 that aim to detect at frequencies at which ground-based5 and space-borne6 laser interferometers lose sensitivity. Very-long-baseline atom interferometers look for signals by comparing the quantum phase evolution of widely separated atomic ensembles interrogated by a common laser. However, their performance depends critically on suppressing noise sources, particularly laser phase noise. The experimental validation of such noise rejection remains an important challenge. Here we demonstrate a prototype differential atom interferometer based on the single-photon clock transition of fermionic 87Sr. Thus, we obtain a gradiometer configuration with a species intrinsically suited to kilometre-scale and space-baseline operation. The instrument operates at the standard quantum limit7 with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise. The differential configuration maintains quantum-limited sensitivity in the presence of several radians of artificially injected laser phase noise per shot, which emulates the conditions expected in a very-long-baseline atom interferometer. We also demonstrate the recovery of coherent oscillatory signals across a broad frequency range under fully phase-randomized conditions, a capability that is inaccessible to a single interferometer operating in the same regime. These results provide an experimental validation of the noise-immune measurement principle underlying very-long-baseline atom interferometers and mark an important step towards next-generation quantum sensors for gravitational-wave detection and searches for ultralight dark matter8,9. A prototype differential atom interferometer operates at the standard quantum limit with no excess noise beyond atom shot noise, achieving performance in line with the specifications for future long-baseline atom interferometers.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Toward Accessible Psychotherapy Training Using AI-Driven Interactive Patient Avatars

Authors:
Pascal Riachi↗Sofie Kamber↗Stella Brogna↗Andrew Gloster↗Rafael Wampfler↗

Training psychotherapists in evidence-based interventions such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) requires repeated practice with meaningful feedback, yet opportunities for safe, standardized training are limited by ethical, logistical, and resource constraints. We introduce a system designed to support ACT-oriented psychotherapy training through spoken dialogue with an embodied virtual patient. The system uses large language models to simulate patient behavior conditioned on profiles derived from real therapy sessions and configurable clinical scenarios, while a separate automated evaluator provides turn-by-turn feedback on therapist responses based on established ACT fidelity criteria. Rather than aiming to replace supervision, the system is intended to support deliberate practice by enabling experimentation, reflection, and immediate feedback in low-risk settings. Expert evaluation with practicing psychologists confirmed high realism in patient behavior and demonstrated that immediate turn-by-turn ACT feedback increased therapists' awareness of intervention choices and enabled effective experimentation with alternative responses. Quantitative evaluation across 49 therapy transcripts identified GPT-4o-mini as the optimal feedback model, achieving the lowest mean absolute error (MAE = 6.12) in replicating human supervisor ACT fidelity ratings with statistically significant agreement. This work demonstrates the potential of fidelity-aware simulated patients as a scalable complement to psychotherapy training.

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

A Link between Shock-wave Theory and Symmetry-reduced Stochastic Gradient Descent for Artificial Neural Networks

Authors:
Taiki Miyagawa↗

arXiv:2606.18303v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We develop a mathematically explicit link between shock-wave theory and the symmetry-quotiented learning dynamics of stochastic gradient descent, drawing on differential geometry, Lie group theory, and fluid mechanics. Specifically, after quotienting parameter symmetries and applying local-entropy coarse-graining, the effective dynamics satisfy a viscous Hamilton–Jacobi equation on the quotient manifold. Moreover, under the assumption that the raw parameter dynamics can be summarized by a gradient field on the quotiented space, the gradient of the coarse-grained loss function obeys a Burgers-type equation, and shock formation can be established rigorously. We apply our theory to multilayer perceptrons, convolutional neural networks, Transformers, and mean-field networks, and show that they obey the Hamilton–Jacobi or Burgers-type equations. We conjecture that this framework also yields practical diagnostics for deep learning. In architectures such as Transformers, raw parameter norms are often distorted by symmetry redundancy and may therefore be misleading, whereas symmetry-corrected quotient observables provide a principled basis for monitoring, forecasting, and controlling training-phase transitions.

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05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

SceneCraft: Interactive System for Image Editing via Scene Graph

Authors:
Duc-Manh Phan↗Ngoc-Dai Tran↗Duy-Khang Do↗Tam V. Nguyen↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

Recent advances in generative AI have enabled natural language-driven image editing, yet existing systems often fail in complex scenes with multiple interacting objects because they rely heavily on users crafting precise text prompts. To address the absence of structured control, we propose SceneCraft, a novel interactive framework that bridges user intent and model execution by representing images as editable scene graphs. Instead of guessing text prompts through trial and error, users interact directly with a visual graph to perform complex spatial and relational operations. These graph modifications are automatically translated into precise, context-aware editing prompts, effectively eliminating linguistic ambiguity. To ensure robust and diverse results, structured prompts are dispatched to multiple state-of-the-art generative models. Evaluations across diverse editing scenarios show that SceneCraft provides a more intuitive control mechanism, significantly reducing the cognitive burden of manual prompt engineering while generating outputs that users consistently rate as higher in quality and fidelity.

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

Machine Learning for Biomedical Raman Spectroscopy: From Spectral Acquisition to Clinical Translation

Authors:
Bogdan Oancea↗Ana Maria Seciu-Grama↗Nicoleta Siminea↗Laura Mihaela Stefan↗Alice Stoica↗Joel Sjoberg↗Marian Necula↗Ana-Maria Prelipcean↗Corneliu Ovidiu Vrancianu↗Eduard Milea↗Andrei P\u{a}un↗Ion Petre↗…

arXiv:2606.14169v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Raman spectroscopy provides label-free, chemically specific characterization of biological systems and has become an important tool for cancer diagnosis, molecular subtyping, microbiological identification, and intraoperative decision support. Biomedical Raman spectra are, however, high-dimensional, noisy, and affected by fluorescence background, acquisition variability, and biological heterogeneity, making robust computational analysis essential. This review examines the role of machine learning across the biomedical Raman spectroscopy pipeline, from preprocessing and signal correction to unsupervised structure discovery, supervised diagnosis and molecular stratification, representation and transfer learning, explainability, biomarker discovery, and multimodal integration with imaging, pathology, and molecular profiling. Emphasis is placed on the use of machine learning not only for diagnostic classification, but also for biologically interpretable and clinically actionable analysis. We also discuss the main barriers to clinical translation, including limited dataset sizes, inter-instrument variability, inconsistent preprocessing, insufficient external validation, reproducibility concerns, and limited sharing of software, data, and metadata. We argue that progress will require methodological advances together with standardization, robust validation, explainability, and deployment-ready analytical frameworks. By integrating methodological, biomedical, and translational perspectives, this review outlines key directions for developing reliable and clinically deployable Raman-AI systems.

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

Multimodal Evaluator Preference Collapse: Cross-Modal Contagion in Self-Evolving Agents

Authors:
Zewen Liu↗

When AI agents use language models to evaluate their own outputs in a feedback loop, systematic biases emerge. We show that Evaluator Preference Collapse (EPC) is dramatically amplified in multimodal settings. Using GPT-4o to evaluate DeepSeek-chat across text and visual tasks, we find that a single strategy (step_by_step) absorbs 48.4% of all weight – 3.2x the collapse observed in text-only self-evaluation – while three visual-domain strategies receive only 9.1% combined weight. We then demonstrate a novel phenomenon we term cross-modal contagion: evaluator preferences acquired on one modality transfer to and corrupt strategy selection on another. Through a four-phase isolation training paradigm, we measure contagion coefficients and document strategy inversion – the optimal strategy for a modality reverses after cross-modal exposure. A Phase 3 statistical validation across four evaluator configurations (N=53 total independent repetitions, 15,592 API calls) reveals a clear hierarchy: cross-model evaluation (GPT-4o, N=8) produces strong but symmetric bidirectional contagion (mean gamma_{T->V}=1.176, gamma_{V->T}=1.089, Delta=-0.088, p=0.575, Cohen's d=0.29); high round counts (DashScope, 50 rounds) cause collapse to single-strategy dominance (70% zero contagion); and self-evaluation provides near-complete immunity – 97% of runs (N=30, DeepSeek-chat) yield exactly zero contagion (mean gamma=0.033, 95% CI [-0.031, 0.010], p=0.642, d=0.07). No evaluator condition shows statistically significant directional asymmetry. We introduce the contagion matrix indexed by evaluator identity, release the MM-EPC experimental framework, and identify cross-model evaluator architecture as the primary risk factor for preference contagion.

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08.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Intrinsic preservation of plasticity in continual quantum learning

Authors:
Yu-Qin Chen↗Shi-Xin Zhang↗

arXiv:2511.17228v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Artificial intelligence in dynamic, real-world environments requires the capacity for continual learning. However, standard deep learning suffers from a fundamental issue: loss of plasticity, in which networks gradually lose their ability to learn from new data. Here we show that quantum learning models naturally overcome this limitation, preserving plasticity over long timescales. We demonstrate this advantage systematically across a broad spectrum of tasks from multiple learning paradigms, including supervised learning and reinforcement learning, and diverse data modalities, from classical high-dimensional images to quantum-native datasets. Although classical models exhibit performance degradation correlated with unbounded weight and gradient growth, quantum neural networks maintain consistent learning capabilities regardless of the data or task. We identify the origin of the advantage as the intrinsic physical constraints of quantum models. Unlike classical networks where unbounded weight growth leads to landscape ruggedness or saturation, the unitary constraints confine the optimization to a compact manifold. Our results suggest that the utility of quantum computing in machine learning extends beyond potential speedups, offering a robust pathway for building adaptive artificial intelligence and lifelong learners.

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09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Resolving problems with the continuum limit in coherent-state path integrals

Authors:
Oliwier Urba\'nski↗

arXiv:2602.02466v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The paper solves the problem of continuum limit in bosonic thermal coherent-state path integrals. For this purpose, exact discrete versions of the path integral are constructed for three different orderings of the Hamiltonian: normal, anti-normal and symmetric (Weyl order). Subsequently, their different continuum versions are checked on the harmonic oscillator, to choose the symmetric ordering as a possibly correct choice for all polynomial Hamiltonians. Spotted mathematical subtleties in the simple case serve as a clue to the general solution. Finally, a general justification for the symmetric order is provided by deriving the continuum path integral starting from the exact discrete case using a renormalization procedure in the imaginary time frequency domain. While the role of Weyl order has already been found, the paper provides the missing proof of its suitability for every polynomial Hamiltonian and simplifies the previously established construction by referring only to creation and annihilation operators (without position and momentum operators).

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10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

ForecastBench-Sim: A Simulated-World Forecasting Benchmark

Authors:
Jaeho Lee↗Nick Merrill↗Ezra Karger↗

Forecasting benchmarks for general-purpose AI systems usually inherit the constraints of the real world: outcomes resolve slowly, tail events are rare, and counterfactual questions are difficult to score. We introduce ForecastBench-Sim, a simulated-world forecasting benchmark built on game rollouts from Freeciv, a turn-based strategy game modelled on the Civilization series. Forecasters receive a fixed world report (a structured snapshot of the current game state) and answer questions about hidden future states; the benchmark then continues the simulation and scores forecasts. Because the world is simulated, the same setup can generate continuous or binary forecasting questions at arbitrary time horizons, paired intervention worlds for conditional or causal questions, and resolved examples of rare or disruptive outcomes. We describe the benchmark pipeline, question families, scoring protocol, and release artifacts, and report validation slices from model evaluations and an anonymized human pilot. ForecastBench-Sim is intended to complement real-world forecasting benchmarks by providing controlled, immediately resolvable tasks for studying probabilistic reasoning under dynamic world states.

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

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Modeling Narrative Structures via Pseudonymization and Multi-View Sentence Alignment

Authors:
Tai Tran Tan↗An Dinh Thien↗

We present our approach to SemEval 2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Our solution uses contrastive learning with fine-tuned sentence transformers to capture narrative similarity across abstract themes, course of action, and outcomes. We develop two pipelines: (Track A) a single-view method that encodes full narratives with smart layer freezing to reduce overfitting, and (Track B) a multi-view method that models theme, plot, and outcome with view-specific projection heads and self-supervised alignment. Both pipelines build on sentence-transformers models and are trained with contrastive loss on synthetic data. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/dinhthienan33/SemEval2026-Task4-ttda704.

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12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Theoretical Grounding of Out-Of-Distribution Detection With Reinforcement Learning Optimizer

Authors:
Salimeh Sekeh↗Xin Zhang↗

Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection in dynamic open-world environments requires a model to continually adapt to evolving data distributions while generalizing to covariate-shifted inputs and rejecting semantic-shifted OOD examples. Most existing OOD detection methods optimize only the current-step objective and do not explicitly account for how post-deployment environment changes affect future OOD behavior. In this paper, we establish a theoretical grounding for dynamic OOD detection using a reinforcement learning (RL)-guided optimizer that explicitly favors updates that reduce the semantic OOD false positive rate over time. We develop a novel augmented optimizer that uses an RL-guided correction term on top of standard gradient descent (GD) and show its improvement over both future-domain generalization and semantic-OOD rejection. We analyze temporal error decomposition in terms of model-change and environment-change generalization errors and develop a new theoretical framework for comparing the generalization errors under both GD and RL-guided optimizers.

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

K-Forcing: Joint Next-K-Token Decoding via Push-Forward Language Modeling

Authors:
Zhiwei Tang↗Yuanyu He↗Yizheng Han↗Wangbo Zhao↗Jiasheng Tang↗Fan Wang↗Bohan Zhuang↗

Autoregressive (AR) language modeling is the dominant paradigm for text generation, yet its sequential token-by-token decoding makes inference memory-bound and inefficient. Existing acceleration approaches, such as speculative decoding and diffusion language models, can yield speedups under certain conditions but do not directly address high-load batch serving–the scenario most critical for industrial-scale deployment. We introduce K-Forcing, a push-forward language modeling paradigm for joint next-k-token decoding. K-Forcing distills an existing AR model into a conditional push-forward mapping–one that transforms independent uniform noise variables into a joint sample of multiple future tokens in a single forward pass. This design preserves fixed-length outputs, reuses the AR teacher backbone, and remains compatible with standard AR serving infrastructure. We train this mapping via progressive self-forcing distillation, which gradually expands the prediction window while enabling the student to closely match the sequence distribution of the AR teacher. We evaluate K-Forcing on LM1B and OpenWebText using a standard causal Transformer backbone. When aggressively configured to generate k = 4 tokens per forward pass, K-Forcing delivers approximately 2.4-3.5x speedup across different batch sizes, while incurring modest quality degradation relative to its AR teacher. As inference increasingly dominates the lifetime compute cost of modern LLMs, K-Forcing offers a promising route toward accelerating AR generation under real-world high-load deployment.

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14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Quantum deformations of $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$. Part I: Fidelity and experimental benchmarking

Authors:
V. Mariscal↗J. J. Relancio↗L. Santamar\'ia-Sanz↗

arXiv:2606.19462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This work explores the effects of both the standard quantum $q$-deformation and the non-standard $h$-deformation of the Hopf algebra $\mathcal{U}(\mathfrak{sl}(2, \mathbb{R}))$ on multi-qubit systems. By constructing the states of a Hilbert space of $N$ qubits through the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients associated with the deformed algebras, we show that these states naturally coincide with the eigenstates of the Hamiltonian of the $q$- and $h$-deformed Kittel-Shore models. We compare the resulting deformed states with those typically targeted in quantum information experiments, providing a bridge between algebraic constructions and experimentally relevant quantum resources. Fidelities with respect to the undeformed states are computed to establish how the quantum correlations are affected, both for few-qubit systems (including Dicke and non-Dicke states), and in the macroscopic limit ($N \to \infty$) through closed-form formulas derived for arbitrary Dicke states. The results reveal different behaviors between the two deformations. The $q$-deformation smoothly modifies the states and maintains a residual overlap with the original configurations, while the $h$-deformation rapidly makes the states orthogonal to their undeformed counterparts. Both models demand a standard $N^{-1}$ rescaling to preserve fidelity stability in the macroscopic limit.

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

Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation

Authors:
Shinnosuke Matsuo↗

Few-shot font generation aims to synthesize the remaining glyphs of a font given one or a few reference glyphs while preserving stylistic consistency, thereby supporting font designers in efficiently completing a typeface. Existing methods primarily focus on improving generation quality given a fixed reference set. However, when the current reference glyphs are insufficient to represent the target style, few-shot font generation may fail to produce satisfactory results. In practical scenarios, additional reference glyphs can often be obtained from the designer when necessary. Accordingly, we propose a new framework, Active Reference Acquisition in Few-Shot Font Generation, in which the model sequentially decides which character to acquire next as an additional reference. Furthermore, we propose a reference part-coverage-based acquisition function to efficiently query the designer. Motivated by the observation that font styles are well characterized by local structural parts, we represent each glyph using a histogram of local features and select query characters that maximize the expected part coverage of the reference set. By prioritizing characters that contain parts not yet covered by the current references, the proposed method progressively expands the diversity of visual parts in the reference set. As a result, generation quality is improved with fewer queries. Experiments on the Google Fonts dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves higher generation quality than random querying and reference-agnostic baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/matsuo-shinnosuke/ActiveRef-FontGen.

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16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

DuET: Dual Expert Trajectories for Diffusion Image Editing

Authors:
Lidia Troeshestova↗Alexander Ustyuzhanin↗Sergey Kastryulin↗

Recent diffusion editors perform diverse instruction-based edits while conditioning on the source image at every denoising step. Yet persistent source-image conditioning can limit how fully an edit is executed and how natural the result appears, especially when the target scene diverges substantially from the input. We introduce DuET (Dual Expert Trajectories), a training-free inference method that temporarily relaxes source-image conditioning by transitioning through a text-to-image phase before returning to edit mode, allowing the denoising trajectory to move toward the target distribution while retaining the structural benefits of image-conditioned editing. Without modifying model weights or increasing sampling cost, DuET consistently improves instruction relevance, semantic fidelity, and perceptual quality across diverse models and benchmarks. In some cases, these gains come with a modest reduction in source-image preservation, revealing a predictable trade-off between source preservation and edit fidelity.

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17.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Higher Population Coverage with Typhoid Conjugate Vaccine is Needed to Induce Herd Protection: Evidence from a Cluster-Randomized Trial in Urban Bangladesh

Authors:
Ahmmed↗khanam↗Islam↗Park↗S. E↗Ongadi↗Im↗Zhang↗Khan↗A. I↗Aziz↗A. B↗…

Introduction: A cluster randomized trial (CRT) in Bangladesh found that Vi-tetanus toxoid (Vi-TT) vaccine conferred 85% protection to vaccinees at 18 months of follow-up; however, it failed to confer significant herd protection to non-vaccinees. Methods: In the CRT, children aged 9 months to

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18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Quantum Global Variational Learning for Quantum Error Correction

Authors:
Shun Ryuzaki↗Hideo Mukai↗

arXiv:2606.08592v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Efficient quantum error correction is essential for the advancement of quantum computing. We propose a quantum neural network with a global structure that reduces the number of unitary matrices required in quantum circuits. This approach resulted in a 97% reduction in training time and up to a 25% improvement in the training completion rate, ultimately achieving a 100% success rate in training while surpassing the error correction performance reported in previous studies. In addition, we demonstrated the enhanced robustness of quantum error correction against internal network noise. Moreover, the fidelity of quantum error correction under internal network noise increased by up to 15% due to the reduced computational load.

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19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Nightjar: Dynamic Adaptive Speculative Decoding for Large Language Models Serving

Authors:
Rui Li↗Zhaoning Zhang↗Libo Zhang↗Huaimin Wang↗Xiang Fu↗Zhiquan Lai↗

arXiv:2512.22420v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Speculative decoding (SD) accelerates LLM inference by verifying draft tokens in parallel. However, this method presents a critical trade-off: it improves throughput in low-load, memory-bound systems but degrades performance in high-load, compute-bound environments due to verification overhead. Existing speculative decoding methods use fixed lengths and cannot adapt to workload changes or decide when to stop speculation. The cost of restarting speculative inference also remains unquantified. Under high load, the benefit of speculation diminishes, while retaining the draft model reduces KV cache capacity, limiting batch size and degrading throughput. To overcome this, we propose Nightjar, a resource-aware adaptive speculative framework. It first adjusts to the request load by dynamically selecting the optimal speculative length for different batch sizes. Crucially, Nightjar proactively disables speculative decoding when the MAB planner determines that speculation is no longer beneficial, and during the disabled phase, offloads the draft model to the CPU only under GPU memory pressure. This reclaims memory for the KV cache, thereby facilitating larger batch sizes and maximizing overall system throughput. Experiments show that Nightjar achieves up to 14.76% higher throughput than standard speculative decoding and up to 20.18% lower latency in the main benchmark suite under dynamic request arrival rates for real-time LLM serving scenarios.

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20.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Robust integration of weakly anchored spatial multi-omics

Authors:
Wang↗Liu↗Sun↗Li↗Chen↗Zou↗Daoliang↗Hu↗Du↗Qian↗Feng↗Yuan↗…

Spatial multi-omics holds great promise for dissecting complex biological processes, though inherent technical constraints continue to limit its widespread adoption. Currently, most studies therefore measure distinct omics features on separate tissue sections, necessitating spatial diagonal integration. An emerging practical solution is to leverage hematoxylin and eosin (H&E) images as an integration anchor, given their ubiquity, low cost, and compatibility across tissue preparations. However, this anchor is frequently compromised in real-world settings by variations in H&E staining style, absence of reliable histological landmarks, and mismatches in spatial resolutions across omics modalities. To address this, we introduce SpaWeaver, a computational framework that couples a pathology foundation model with a graph Transformer and a latent feature aligner module, providing a highly robust solution for weakly anchored spatial omics data diagonal integration. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpaWeaver exhibits superior robustness against isolated or synergistic weak-anchoring factors. The spatial multi-omics profiles generated by SpaWeaver link molecular features originally separated on two sections, unlocking diverse downstream analyses once exclusive to co-assayed spatial multi-omics data, including niche-aware cell-cell communication inference and multi-omics resolved cell state. In this study, it unveils tumor-distance-dependent fibroblast-CD4+ T-cell signaling in human colon adenocarcinoma and identifies a hypoxic glycolytic tumor state with pyknotic nuclei in human ovarian cancer. Overall, our approach bridges readily accessible single-omics measurements across weakly anchored tissue sections, enabling unified spatial multi-omics characterization and system-level tissue analysis.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Parent-Generated Framework of Early Connection: Findings from a CBPR Qualitative Study

Authors:
Fuller↗Duby↗More↗Winter↗Lanoff↗Loveless↗Mejias↗Smalls↗Solomon↗Srinivasavaradan↗Thibert↗Vargas↗…

Background: Early relational health (ERH) constructs are derived fromresearch observations rather than lived experiences. This study foregrounds diverse parent voices to examine how they describeconnectionwith their young children. Methods: Usingcommunity-based participatory research (CBPR),this study was co-designed withparent leadersfromReach Out and Read. A semi-structured interview guidewas co-designed,and parent leaderssubsequentlyconducted and transcribed 18 interviews with parents from their networks.Researchersanalyzed transcripts using Reflexive Thematic Analysis.Member checking sessions with parent leadersinformedthe analytic framework. Results:Sixorganizing principleswereidentified.(1) Parent-child connection begins with an instinctual sense of responsibility.(2)Connectionebbs and flows as parent and child adapt to one another through dailyactivities.(3) Family circumstances, including family structure, cultural expectations, and intergenerational values, directly shape this connection. (4) Parents' own upbringings and past relationships indirectly shape how they connect with their child. (5) Forconnectionto grow, parents must show up physically and emotionally for their children despite competing demands. (6) Parentsgrow through engaged parenting, and that growth feeds back into the connection, creating a self-sustaining cycle of relational health.Conclusions:Our analysis generated twoconstructs underspecified in ERH frameworks.Parents described their sense of responsibility as immediate and instinctual, preceding an emotional bond.Parentsdemonstratedtheir agency in deciding what to carry forward from their relational histories, a pattern this study termsrelational legacy. Integrating parent-generated language into ERH measurementresearchmay shape a more comprehensive picture of ERHreflectinghow families experience connection.

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22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Re-feeding Is Not Replaying: Measuring Replay Noise in Counterfactual Token-Credit Estimation

Authors:
Nils Matteson↗

Per-token counterfactual credit estimation asks which token in a language-model rollout caused the final answer to be right or wrong: cut the transcript at a pivot, substitute an alternative token, replay continuations, and compare outcomes. Published methods re-feed the transcript prefix as a fresh prompt, assuming this reproduces the state the model passed through during generation. We measure what that assumption costs on a stock inference engine, with a three-pass design: continuations resumed from the verified decode-time KV state, an identical second exact pass (a replica noise floor), and a re-feed pass. Across six configurations and three models (including a GRPO-trained checkpoint), at low-margin decision tokens, re-feeding changes the credit estimate at rates 14-28 percentage points above the replica floor (7-21pp under a treatment-independent conditioning; problem-clustered t = 2.9-6.4). Most changes are zero-boundary crossings of the quantized estimator rather than polarity reversals, and the perturbation is consistent with mean-zero, so averaged quantities are largely safe; but selection is not: a critical-token set chosen by thresholding $|\hat{A}_t|$ under re-feed overlaps the exact-resume selection at Jaccard 0.34-0.90, versus a 0.63-0.96 replica ceiling. A causal confirmation closes the loop: under vLLM's batch-invariant kernels all three passes are identical on every measured channel, with both disagreement rates exactly zero. Replica passes themselves disagree on 9-23% of eligible estimates: single-sample credit measurements at decision tokens are unreliable under any replay. Settings were fixed in advance; exact-pass cache hits in the second campaign are instrumented (100% hit rate, 3,434 pivots); total compute was under 10 USD. We recommend that counterfactual credit studies resume decoder state or use batch-invariant kernels, and report a replica floor.

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23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Characterisation of disease progression in hantavirus haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome

Authors:
Armstrong↗Rus↗Knap↗Drousiotis↗Eyers↗Buchan↗I. E↗Avsic-Zupanc↗Hiscox↗J. A↗Korva↗

Hantaviruses can cause haemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS). This is a clinically variable disease in which severe outcomes are hypothesized to arise from dysregulated host responses. To characterise this, longitudinal, label-free plasma proteomics was used to compare disease progression in a unique well-defined cohort of patients infected with either Dobrava virus (DOBV) or Puumala virus (PUUV) hantaviruses. Patients were stratified by clinical severity. The average viral load in the first available sample from hospitalized patients was higher in those who went on to have severe infection, and higher in patients infected with DOBV. There was marked separation of infected patients from controls across early, mid and late disease, including after viral RNA clearance, suggesting a sustained systemic host-response signature. Proteomic signatures were consistent with a strong acute-phase response in both mild and severe disease. There was evidence of activation of the adaptive humoral response at later stages. Hierarchical clustering identified severity-associated pathways linked to endothelial dysfunction, thrombocytopenia, vascular leakage and renal injury. These findings define a durable plasma proteomic signature of hantavirus disease and support a model in which severe HFRS is driven by persistent inflammatory, complement and platelet/coagulation pathway activation rather than viral burden alone.

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24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Bridging Modal Isolation in Interleaved Thinking: Supervising Modality Transitions via Stepwise Reinforcement

Authors:
Tingyu Li↗Le Zhou↗Siyuan Li↗Yujun Wu↗Xinglong Xu↗Jingxuan Wei↗Conghui He↗Cheng Tan↗

Interleaved thinking, where a unified multimodal model alternates between textual reasoning and visual generation, has shown promise on spatial and physical tasks. However, in complex long-chain scenarios, we identify a fundamental failure mode: generated images diverge from the textual context while subsequent text ignores the visual evidence, causing the two modalities to alternate without genuinely informing each other. We term this Modal Isolation and attribute it to compounding information loss at modality boundaries. We decompose each reasoning cycle into atomic operations and define modality transition loss, quantifying cross-modal hallucination (text-to-image) and visual utilization deficit (image-to-text) at each boundary. We propose MoTiF (Modality Tiransition Fidelity), a two-stage training framework that directly optimizes these transitions: Reflective SFT trains the model to detect and recover from erroneous visual outputs; Flow-GRPO improves image generation fidelity via reinforcement learning. All training signals in MoTiF derive from transition-level fidelity rather than end-task accuracy. Across four visual puzzle benchmarks, this transition-level supervision substantially improves both cross-modal coherence and final task accuracy. The results demonstrate that effective interleaved reasoning requires explicit structural supervision at modality boundaries, not merely scaling or end-task optimization.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Performance of five risk stratification tools for paediatric pneumonia against WHO scores using data from the PediCAP trial in sub-Saharan Africa

Authors:
Nalwanga↗Clements↗Musiime↗Mulenga↗Mujuru↗H. A↗Sidat↗Buck↗W. C↗Madhi↗Bielicki↗J. A↗…

Background Risk stratification tools for childhood pneumonia have been proposed to improve identification of children at highest risk of death, particularly in low-resource settings. However, their added value over the WHO Integrated Management of Childhood Illness (IMCI) criteria and danger signs remains uncertain. Methods We conducted a secondary analysis of a multi-country randomised controlled trial of children without HIV hospitalised with pneumonia in Mozambique, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. We evaluated the performance of five published risk scores alongside WHO IMCI severity classification and danger signs. Discrimination for (1) in-hospital mortality, (2) 28-day mortality, and (3) 28-day readmission or death was assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Comparative performance and clinical utility were examined. Results Of the 1010 participants, 18 (1.8%) died in hospital, 22 (2.2%) died in hospital or in the 7 days post-discharge, and 63 (6.2%) died or were readmitted by day 28. Univariate case-fatality rates were highest for variables associated with malnutrition, convulsions, and hypoxaemia. All risk scores demonstrated moderate discrimination for in-hospital and in-hospital+7-day mortality (AUC range approximately 0.75-0.84), with no meaningful differences between models, and performed similarly to the WHO danger signs and IMCI severity classification. In contrast, all approaches performed poorly in predicting 28-day readmission or death (AUC approximately 0.54-0.58). No risk score consistently outperformed simple clinical criteria. Conclusions In this multi-country dataset, we found no evidence that published paediatric pneumonia risk scores meaningfully outperform WHO IMCI-based clinical assessment for predicting mortality. The relatively small number of mortality events limits precision, and modest differences cannot be excluded. These findings suggest that, in low-resource settings, strengthening implementation of existing WHO clinical criteria may be more effective than adopting more complex prediction tools.

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