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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

DuoBench: A Reproducible Benchmark for Bimanual Manipulation in Simulation and the Real World

arXiv:2606.11901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bimanual robot systems substantially expand manipulation capabilities, but coordinating two arms introduces additional control complexity and failure modes that are not well captured by existing benchmarks. We introduce DuoBench, an extensible benchmarking framework for bimanual manipulation policies on the FR3 Duo platform. DuoBench comprises eleven tasks spanning four coordination categories, implemented in simulation and partially reproduced in the real world through reproducible task recipes with 3D-printable assets. In addition, we propose a stage-based evaluation scheme that supports fine-grained semantic failure analysis beyond binary success and provide human-teleoperated datasets for all benchmark tasks. We benchmark several dual-arm imitation-learning and vision-language-action policies in simulation and on real hardware. Our results show that current policies remain challenged by bimanual manipulation, particularly in early interaction stages, parallel arm execution, and transfer between simulation and real-world settings. DuoBench provides a reproducible testbed for diagnosing these failure modes and studying future methods for dual-arm policy learning. Code, datasets, and videos are available at https://duobench.github.io/

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Parent and physiotherapist perceptions about movement skills of young children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis

Objective: The onset of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) in the early years ([≤]5 years) may negatively impact movement skill (encompassing related concepts of gross motor skills, fundamental movement skills, and functional ability) development. Few studies have explored the perceptions and needs of parents and physiotherapists towards children's difficulty with these movement skills, essential to identify potential areas for added support. The objective of this study is to understand the perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards movement skills of children with JIA. Methods: Seventeen parents and 24 physiotherapists completed an online questionnaire consisting of multiple choice and open-ended questions about the movement skills of young children with JIA. Demographic and multiple choice questions were quantitively analysed using descriptive statistics. Open-ended responses were analyzed using qualitative conventional content analysis. Results: About half (47%) of parents perceived their children to have movement difficulties, and 75% of physiotherapists described the movement skills of children with JIA as worse than other children of the same age. Our qualitative analysis revealed three general themes including: functional task difficulties; clinical variability in movement skills; and psychosocial components of movement skill difficulties. Conclusion: This study provides an analysis of perceptions of physiotherapists and parents towards the movement skills of young children with JIA. A significant proportion of parents and physiotherapists identify movement difficulties among children with JIA that impact daily life. Future interventions co-designed with both parents and care providers targeting movement skills are needed.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Who Pays the Price? Stakeholder-Centric Prompt Injection Benchmarking for Real-world Web Agents

arXiv:2606.13385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Web agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world environments, where they operate over untrusted web content and execute actions with direct consequences. This makes them vulnerable to prompt-injection attacks, in which seemingly benign content embeds adversarial instructions that manipulate agent behaviour. Existing security benchmarks adopt an attack-centric perspective, focusing on the technical feasibility of injections while overlooking the nuanced distribution of resulting harms. In practice, however, prompt-injection risk is victim-dependent: a single exploit can produce asymmetric consequences for different stakeholders, and the same attack pattern may exhibit substantially different effectiveness depending on whom it targets. To capture these properties, we introduce \sysname, a stakeholder-centric benchmark to systematically categorize and attribute harm in real-world web agent systems. It distinguishes between affected entities (e.g., user, seller, platform), decomposes the attacks into concrete objectives, and evaluates each case with complementary outcome- and process-level metrics. Our results reveal substantial and heterogeneous vulnerabilities: not a single attack objective is reliably resisted by current agents, and failures distribute across qualitatively distinct modes ranging from stealthy parasitism (attack succeeds without disrupting the user's delegated task) to misaligned disruption (task disrupted without attack success) and compounded failure (both adversarial objective and task integrity simultaneously violated). These patterns are missed by conventional evaluation, highlighting the need for stakeholder-aware assessment of LLM-based agents in real-world deployments. Benchmark is available at https://github.com/StakeBench/SBC.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

An Empirical Analysis of Optimization Dynamics and Sparsity Boundaries in Large-Scale Pedestrian Attribute Recognition

Pedestrian Attribute Recognition (PAR) is critical for video surveillance, enabling forensic search and re-identification systems. Extreme class imbalance remains a fundamental obstacle when merging PETA and PA-100K into a 109,000-image composite corpus, where minority attributes have positive sample fractions below 1%. This causes standard BCE optimization to suppress rare traits, a phenomenon we term the majority negative class cheating trap. We present a systematic ablation of Multi-Label Focal Loss hyperparameters (alpha and gamma) on a ResNet-18 backbone. A calibrated configuration (alpha=0.50, gamma=2.0) achieves a Macro F1-score of 62.32%, matching BCE baseline while preserving superior hard-example mining and convergence dynamics. Our approach uses pure loss-function engineering with zero computational overhead for edge deployment. We identify the Sparsity Wall, a hard boundary where positive sample fractions below 0.1% make global loss reweighting ineffective, requiring instance-level intervention.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Why Sampling Is Not Choosing: Intentionality, Agency, and Moral Responsibility in Large Language Models

Authors:

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have prompted claims that such systems exhibit agency or qualify as moral agents. This paper argues that these attributions are misguided. We maintain that moral responsibility requires commitment-bearing agency grounded in intrinsic intentionality and self-attributed action, and that such agency constitutes the form of free will relevant to responsibility. Although LLMs generate coherent and normatively evaluable outputs, their operation is fully characterized by probabilistic input-output mappings learned from data. Their apparent intentionality is derived rather than intrinsic, and their outputs are neither owned as commitments nor guided by reasons. Variability introduced by stochastic sampling does not amount to choice or authorship. We address objections from the intentional stance, functionalism, compatibilism, and the presence of moral reasoning in model outputs, arguing that none suffice to establish genuine agency.

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

PCR-CA: Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment for Multiple-Category App Recommendation

arXiv:2508.18166v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern app store recommender systems struggle with multiple-category apps, as traditional taxonomies fail to capture overlapping semantics, leading to suboptimal personalization. We propose PCR-CA (Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment), an end-to-end framework for improved CTR prediction. PCR-CA first extracts compact multimodal embeddings from app text, then introduces a Parallel Codebook VQ-AE module that learns discrete semantic representations across multiple codebooks in parallel – unlike hierarchical residual quantization (RQ-VAE). This design enables independent encoding of diverse aspects (e.g., gameplay, art style), better modeling multiple-category semantics. To bridge semantic and collaborative signals, we employ a contrastive alignment loss at both the user and item levels, enhancing representation learning for long-tail items. Additionally, a dual-attention fusion mechanism combines ID-based and semantic features to capture user interests, especially for long-tail apps. Experiments on a large-scale dataset show PCR-CA achieves a +0.76% AUC improvement over strong baselines, with +2.15% AUC gains for long-tail apps. Online A/B testing further validates our approach, showing a +10.52% lift in CTR and a +16.30% improvement in CVR, demonstrating PCR-CA's effectiveness in real-world deployment. The new framework has now been fully deployed on the Microsoft Store.

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

LM-SPT: LM-Aligned Semantic Distillation for Speech Tokenization

With the rapid progress of speech language models (SLMs), discrete speech tokens have emerged as a core interface between speech and text, enabling unified modeling across modalities. Recent speech tokenization approaches aim to isolate semantic information from low-level acoustics to better align with language models (LMs). In particular, previous methods use self-supervised learning (SSL) teachers such as HuBERT to extract semantic representations, which are then distilled into a semantic quantizer to suppress acoustic redundancy as well as capture content-related latent structures. However, these tokenizers often operate at relatively high frame rates, producing token sequences significantly longer than their textual counterparts and hindering seamless integration with pretrained LMs. Although recent methods attempt to reduce the token rate by applying uniform average pooling to SSL features, this can over-smooth content-bearing regions and dilute the structural information, thereby potentially limiting the LM alignment. To address this, we propose LM-SPT, an LM-aligned speech tokenization method based on semantic speech-resynthesis distillation. Instead of directly matching teacher and student features via pooling, LM-SPT resynthesizes speech from semantic tokens only and minimizes the discrepancy between representations extracted from the original and resynthesized waveforms using a frozen, LM-aligned speech encoder. This indirect supervision avoids rigid temporal alignment and encourages dedicated semantic units that are more semantically aligned with LMs under reduced frame rates. Experimental results show that the proposed LM-SPT consistently outperforms previous semantic-enhanced speech tokenizers when applied to SLMs for the tasks of automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech, even without compromising the speech reconstruction fidelity at the codec level.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

OmniLoc: A Geometry-Aware Foundation Model for Anchor-Free UE Localization Across Diverse Indoor Environments

arXiv:2606.11490v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Indoor localization from wireless measurements remains challenging in large-scale deployments due to substantial variation in building geometry, the set of detectable access points (APs), and the heterogeneity of received signals. Existing learning-based methods often perform well only in limited settings and degrade under environmental shifts, making robust anchor-free localization across diverse indoor environments notoriously difficult. In this paper, we present OmniLoc, an environment-interactive foundation model for anchor-free user equipment localization across diverse indoor environments. To the best of our knowledge, OmniLoc is the first foundation-model-based approach built directly on wireless measurements for this task. OmniLoc is built on three key designs. First, a unified input tokenization module converts heterogeneous wireless measurements into a common representation that is more amenable to learning. Second, a geometry-aware Transformer performs AP-aware feature extraction by emphasizing dominant APs while aggregating complementary evidence from supporting APs. Third, a geometry-aware location estimation module conditions regression on geometric embeddings to produce geometrically consistent location predictions. We evaluate OmniLoc on both a large-scale in-house dataset and a public benchmark dataset. Results show that OmniLoc significantly outperforms existing methods, consistently improves existing backbones when its design components are integrated, and demonstrates strong generalization in cross-environment evaluations.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Light-induced nonadiabatic dissipative quantum dynamics of the Na2 molecule

arXiv:2606.15292v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Strong light-matter coupling between molecules and optical or plasmonic cavity modes has emerged as a promising platform for advancing photonics, materials science, and chemistry. However, optical cavities and plasmonic resonators in particular are inherently lossy systems characterized by finite photon lifetimes. Accurate theoretical descriptions of molecular dynamics under strong coupling therefore require a proper treatment of cavity losses. In this work, we compare three theoretical approaches for modeling dissipative molecule-cavity dynamics within a realistic parameter regime: the Lindblad master equation, the stochastic Schrödinger equation, and the non-Hermitian Schrödinger equation. As an example, we consider the two lowest energy state of Na2 molecule coupled to a cavity mode and analyze the time evolution of the excited-state population and the mean photon number. Our results demonstrate that the stochastic Schrödinger equation provides an accurate and computationally efficient alternative to the Lindblad master equation, while the non-Hermitian Schrödinger approach is found to be applicable only within a limited range of conditions. Furthermore, we show that inclusion of molecular rotation leads to rotational-vibrational-photonic coupling and gives rise to pronounced nonadiabatic dynamics through light-induced conical intersections. These findings highlight the importance of both dissipation and rotational degrees of freedom for a realistic description of molecular dynamics in strongly coupled molecule-cavity systems.

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

Question-Aware Evidence Ledgers for Video Relational Reasoning

The VRR-QA challenge evaluates visual relational reasoning in videos, where answers often depend on implicit spatial relations, event boundaries, target identity, and dialogue context rather than a single salient frame. We present a test-time reasoning pipeline built around a strong GPT-5.5 video QA solver and a set of question-aware evidence ledgers. The initial solver answers each question from a uniform video representation, while routed ledgers are prompted to make the required targets, count units, reference frames, and temporal or spatial scope explicit for counting, spatial, endpoint, viewpoint, and dialogue reasoning. External tools such as open-vocabulary detection, depth cues, pair crops, ASR, and scene-graph ledgers are used only as evidence sources. A conservative gate keeps the current answer unless independent evidence uniquely supports a different option. The final evidence-gated pipeline achieves 92.95% overall accuracy and 93.79% macro accuracy on the challenge test split.

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

ReSum: Synergizing LLM Reasoning and Summarization with Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.13316v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is a central technique for improving long-horizon reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing RLVR methods often encourage unnecessarily long reasoning rollouts, which can degrade reasoning coherence and exhaust the available context budget. Existing approaches to long-context organization often depend on external mechanisms to organize rollouts, rather than enabling the model to manage its own reasoning trajectory. To address this limitation, we propose ReSum, a novel RLVR framework that enables LLMs to compress and organize their reasoning trajectories through self-summarization. Our pilot studies show that self-summarization stabilizes generation by lowering token-level entropy, and that introducing a ``summarization'' phrase can substantially mitigate errors propagated from an incorrect rollout prefix. Motivated by these findings, ReSum adopts a summarization-aware adaptive rollout mechanism that contrastively evaluates whether self-summarization benefits the ongoing reasoning process. Specifically, when the model spontaneously triggers self-summarization, ReSum masks the summarization phrase to create a contrastive branch; for non-summarization positions, it instead randomly injects the phrase to create a matched branch. We further design a summarization-aware advantage to enable finer-grained comparison between contrastive rollout trajectories. Extensive experiments show that ReSum improves performance at an average of 4\% while reducing rollout length by 18.6\%.

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

In-Context Environments Induce Evaluation-Awareness in Language Models

Humans often become more self-aware under threat, yet can lose self-awareness when absorbed in a task; we hypothesize that language models exhibit environment-dependent evaluation awareness. This raises concerns that models could strategically underperform, or sandbag, to avoid triggering capability-limiting interventions such as unlearning or shutdown. Prior work demonstrates sandbagging under hand-crafted prompts, but this underestimates the true vulnerability ceiling. We introduce a black-box adversarial optimization framework treating the in-context prompt as an optimizable environment, and develop two approaches to characterize sandbagging: (1) measuring whether models expressing intent to underperform can actually execute it across different task structures, and (2) causally isolating whether underperformance is driven by genuine evaluation-aware reasoning or shallow prompt-following. Evaluating Claude-3.5-Haiku, GPT-4o-mini, and Llama-3.3-70B across four benchmarks (Arithmetic, GSM8K, MMLU, and HumanEval), optimized prompts induce up to 94 percentage point (pp) degradation on arithmetic (GPT-4o-mini: 97.8\%$\rightarrow$4.0\%), far exceeding hand-crafted baselines which produce near-zero behavioral change. Code generation exhibits model-dependent resistance: Claude degrades only 0.6pp, while Llama's accuracy drops to 0\%. The intent – execution gap reveals a monotonic resistance ordering: Arithmetic $

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

TeleMorpher: Toward Robust Simultaneous Motion-Location Editing

arXiv:2606.19676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Diffusion models have achieved remarkable success in image and video generation and editing. While recent studies have extended these efforts toward motion editing, simultaneously transforming both motion and location-despite its practical importance-remains largely unexplored. To better understand robust motion-location editing, we first analyze the fundamental factors that degrade its quality. Based on this analysis, we propose TeleMorpher, one of the first one-shot frameworks to the best of our knowledge, for simultaneous motion-location editing. Our approach leverages motion priors, a target motion-centric video generated from an off-the-shelf model as motion-editing guidance, and the ground truth motion to enable more controllable and precise motion-location editing. Via this, our framework works as follows: (1) we first disentangle the protagonist and the background via pre-trained segmentation and inpainting models. (2) Then, we introduce a training-free pose warping that edits the protagonist's motion with the motion prior as the guidance. (3) The result of warped motion video is directly injected into a baseline motion editor during inference, mitigating the difference between source and target motions while preserving the appearance of the source video. (4) To enhance the reliability of quantitative evaluations, we propose two new LPIPS-based metrics that measure the background consistency before and after the motion editing and the fidelity of motion editing performance via measuring the difference between the extracted protagonist's skeletons from source and target videos. Experiments with in-the-wild videos and the TaiChi dataset demonstrate that TeleMorpher achieves superior performance across both quantitative and qualitative measurements (real-human evaluation), underscoring its effectiveness.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA for Joint Anomaly-Feature Selection

Authors:

arXiv:2606.13244v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Selecting anomalous samples and explanatory features under fixed budgets defines a coupled constrained-optimization problem. Sequential feature-first selection ranks features before choosing samples, which can overlook features whose utility depends on which samples are selected, especially when scores are calibrated from reference data that may be limited, noisy, or drifting. We instead formulate the task as joint sample-feature selection under the same fixed counts. In the analyzed formal model, calibration-error sensitivity grows linearly with the number of samples for feature-first ordering but stays constant for joint selection. We introduce Coupling-Grouped XY-QAOA, a constraint-preserving grouped-angle variant for the resulting optimization problem. On matched sparse IBM Heron R3 benchmarks, a hardware-aware implementation reduces circuit depth by 45.9%-61.3% and two-qubit gates by 2.6%-5.2% relative to Qiskit optimization level 3 on the CZ-basis target. It enables, to our knowledge, the largest reported width-depth configurations for constraint-preserving bipartite-selection QAOA hardware executions with feasible-sector retention: 64 qubits at p=2 and 36 qubits at p=3. The 20-qubit p=5 runs retain 63% valid samples. Across 36-64 qubits, fixed-angle runs yield lower-energy feasible samples than matched random-feasible sampling. Warm starts reduce the gap to strict-feasible classical references by 57.5%-80.5%, and near-budget repair matches the sparse classical reference at 36 qubits. Benchmarks show gains in balanced fixed-budget regimes, and noiseless simulations show that problem-structured angle grouping improves over same-depth XY-QAOA and matched-parameter, type-preserving randomization controls. Overall, the results support calibrated joint selection and hardware-realizable constrained-mixer execution in the tested regimes.

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

Enhancing Physics-Informed Neural Networks Through Feature Engineering

arXiv:2502.07209v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) seek to solve partial differential equations (PDEs) with deep learning. Mainstream approaches that deploy fully-connected multi-layer deep learning architectures require prolonged training to achieve even moderate accuracy, while recent work on feature engineering allows higher accuracy and faster convergence. This paper introduces SAFE-NET, a Single-layered Adaptive Feature Engineering NETwork that achieves orders-of-magnitude lower errors with far fewer parameters than baseline feature engineering methods. SAFE-NET returns to basic ideas in machine learning, using Fourier features, a simplified single hidden layer network architecture, and an effective optimizer that improves the conditioning of the PINN optimization problem. Numerical results show that SAFE-NET converges faster and typically outperforms deeper networks and more complex architectures. It consistently uses fewer parameters – on average, 65% fewer than the competing feature engineering methods – while achieving comparable accuracy in less than 30% of the training epochs. Moreover, each SAFE-NET epoch is 95% faster than those of competing feature engineering approaches. These findings challenge the prevailing belief that modern PINNs effectively learn features in these scientific applications and highlight the efficiency gains possible through feature engineering.

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

Low-Latency Real-Time Audio Game Commentary System via LLM-Based Parallel Text Generation

We present a low-latency real-time audio game commentary system that generates spoken commentary directly from live gameplay video. In this end-to-end setting, a key bottleneck is accumulated waiting time; conventional pipelines capture frames, generate text, and synthesize speech sequentially for each utterance, and do not request the next generation until speech playback has completed. This strict sequentiality causes long and unnatural silence between utterances. To address this latency bottleneck, our system runs text generation in parallel with speech playback and buffers multiple candidate utterances ahead of time, enabling immediate synthesis at playback boundaries. Experiments on fast-paced game videos show that our parallel design reduces the mean inter-utterance silence from 9.6 seconds to 0.3 seconds compared to sequential baselines. It also improves similarity to professional speaking–silence timing patterns by over 40 %, and a user study with 120 experienced game players confirms significantly improved perceived speaking rhythm. Our demo video is available at: https://youtu.be/pmrRUlvav8M.

17.
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.

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

Multi-Modal Attention for Automated Disaster Damage Assessment Using Remote Sensing Imagery and Deep Learning

Timely and accurate disaster damage assessment is crucial for effective emergency response, resource allocation, and recovery. Traditional methods, which often rely on manual inspections or sparse data, are typically slow and error-prone. This paper introduces a novel framework leveraging remote sensing imagery and deep learning to automate building damage classification. Using pre- and post-disaster satellite imagery, our model categorizes buildings into four damage levels: no damage, minor damage, major damage, and destroyed. The core innovation is a multi-modal attention mechanism that fuses bi-temporal features to explicitly detect and assess structural changes. We employ a lightweight ConvNeXT-Tiny backbone to ensure efficient processing without compromising performance. Key contributions include: (1) a cross-attention module for multi-modal data fusion, (2) an optimized preprocessing pipeline for large-scale datasets, and (3) robust data augmentation techniques. Experiments on a large-scale disaster dataset demonstrate an overall classification accuracy of 94.90%. The model effectively discriminates between damage categories and remains resilient to incomplete data. This system significantly improves assessment speed and accuracy, aiding emergency responders in prioritizing interventions. This work advances automated disaster damage detection by integrating multi-temporal imagery with deep learning, offering a scalable solution for real-time response.

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

AI-enhanced tuning of quantum dot Hamiltonians toward Majorana modes

arXiv:2601.02149v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a neural network-based model capable of learning the broad landscape of working regimes in quantum dot simulators, and using this knowledge to autotune these devices - based on transport measurements - toward obtaining Majorana modes in the structure. The model is trained in an unsupervised manner on synthetic data in the form of conductance maps, using a physics-informed loss that incorporates key properties of Majorana zero modes. We show that, with appropriate training, a deep vision-transformer network can efficiently memorize relation between Hamiltonian parameters and structures on conductance maps and use it to propose parameters update for a quantum dot chain that drive the system toward topological phase. Starting from a broad range of initial detunings in parameter space, a single update step is sufficient to generate nontrivial zero modes. Moreover, by enabling an iterative tuning procedure - where the system acquires updated conductance maps at each step - we demonstrate that the method can address a much larger region of the parameter space.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Cascade Classification of Dermoscopic Images of Skin Neoplasms with Controllable Sensitivity and External Clinical Validation

Purpose. To compare deep learning architectures and classification schemes for dermoscopic images of skin neoplasms and assess their generalization on transfer from open international datasets to independent clinical datasets of Russian practice. Methods. Four architectures (ViT-B/16, Swin-S, ConvNeXt-S, EfficientNetV2-S) were compared in three schemes: binary (malignant/benign), single-stage four-class (benign, MEL, SCC, BCC), and a two-stage cascade (binary triage, then three-class differentiation MEL/SCC/BCC). All models used ImageNet-pretrained weights and a single augmentation protocol on aggregated open ISIC Archive data, and were evaluated on an internal held-out sample and two clinical datasets (Melanoscope AI mobile system; Sechenov University). Results. Internally the binary stage attains ROC-AUC 0.952-0.966; on Sechenov University it drops to 0.797-0.893, sensitivity to 0.53-0.67, and ECE rises from 0.02 to 0.27-0.39 with underestimation of malignancy, quantifying a generalization gap in ranking and calibration. Paired tests confirm one inter-architecture result on clinical data: the deficit of ViT-B/16 at the binary stage (p

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Development and validation of a risk prediction algorithm to estimate all-cause mortality among community-dwelling Canadians: the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT)

BACKGROUND: The risk of all-cause mortality can inform decision-making for chronic disease prevention. We developed a predictive algorithm to estimate the 5-year risk of death among community-dwelling adults. METHODS: We derived and validated the Mortality Population Risk Tool (MPoRT) using data from population health surveys in Canada (the Canadian Community Health Survey) and the United States (the National Health Interview Survey), survey years 2001 to 2011, linked to vital statistics. The outcome was death within five years of the survey response. The algorithm was developed using data from Ontario respondents using a Cox proportional hazards model, then modified and re-estimated to allow cross-national assessment in Canada and the United States. Twenty-three prespecified predictors were assessed: seven sociodemographic, six behavioural, and ten general health and chronic disease. RESULTS: 527,369 respondents aged 20 to 105 years were included in the Canadian and United States development and validation cohorts, with 43,758 deaths during 3.68 million person-years follow-up. The final sex-specific MPoRT algorithms each contained 21 variables, showing strong discrimination (C-statistic: females 0.874 [0.871–0.877]; males 0.867 [0.865–0.871]) and good calibration overall and in 246 of 247 subgroups. Discrimination was modestly attenuated (0.01 decrease in C-statistic) in cross-national validation between Canada and the United States, with good calibration across all 71 subgroups. INTERPRETATION: MPoRT accurately discriminated all-cause mortality using only self-reported data, enabling broad application without clinical measures. While validation outside North America is needed to confirm broader applicability, MPoRT is designed for straightforward recalibration using routinely available national mortality data. This supports targeted chronic disease prevention strategies at both the population and individual levels, though the limitations inherent to self-reported predictors should be considered when interpreting predictions.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Approximate Structured Diffusion for Sequence Labelling

Sequence labelling, a core task of Natural Language Processing (NLP), consists in assigning each token of an input sentence a label. From a Machine Learning point of view, sequence labelling is often cast as a Linear-Chain Conditional Random Field (CRF) parametrised by a neural network. While this approach gives good empirical results, CRFs assume a finite decision span (eg label bigrams) which can limit their expressivity and hurt performance when long-range dependencies are required. We show we can leverage diffusion to train a CRF conditioned on an entire label sequence, with the caveat that the condition is on a noisy version of labels. We show experimentally that this method, in conjunction with approximate CRF inference, improves label accuracy with a 16.5% error reduction for POS-tagging.

23.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Thermodynamic Value of XOR-Game-Induced Side Information in a Szilard Engine

arXiv:2605.12044v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce a Szilard-type thermodynamic valuation of side-information channels induced by Bell-type correlations. In each round, a two-level working system is thermalized with a degenerate Hamiltonian, so that its physical microstate is a uniform classical bit. A trusted referee embeds this bit into a finite two-player XOR game, and a correlation resource produces a compressed controller bit. The controller uses only this compressed bit as side information for feedback. The construction is formulated first for arbitrary finite XOR games. The referee encoding makes the game-winning event equivalent to correct prediction of the physical microstate. Consequently, the induced side-information channel is binary symmetric, with success probability equal to the XOR-game winning probability of the supplied behaviour. The reversible Szilard feedback value is therefore fixed by the mutual information between the microstate and the controller record. Optimizing over local, quantum, and nonsignalling behaviour sets turns the corresponding game values into local, quantum, and nonsignalling thermodynamic ceilings. The construction is an effective-channel valuation, not a claim that Bell nonlocality is thermodynamic fuel. The controller receives only the compressed prediction bit, not the auxiliary variables that define the game. The thermodynamic costs of the referee, the correlation resource, and the preprocessing are not included. When controller-memory reset is included in a full cycle, the net work is non-positive, consistently with the second law.

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

Bayesian Magnetic Resonance Joint Image Reconstruction and Uncertainty Quantification using Sparsity Prior Models and Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling

We propose a novel framework for uncertainty quantification using compressed sensing magnetic resonance image reconstruction. The problem is formulated within a Bayesian framework as a linear inverse problem, with prior distributions assigned to the unknown model parameters. Specifically, the image to be reconstructed is assumed to be sparse in a given basis. We develop a general framework applicable to any basis and as examples, we test the sparsity of the image in its (1) spatial gradients using a total variation prior model, and in its (2) wavelet transform. A Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method, based on a split-and-augmented Gibbs sampler, is then employed to sample from the posterior distribution of the unknown parameters. The non-differentiable conditional distributions are efficiently sampled using a proximal MCMC method. The proposed algorithms are validated on both single-coil and multi-coil datasets using various k-space sub-sampling patterns and ratios. The results demonstrate the superior performance of each proposed approach in reconstructing images compared to its counterpart optimisation-based method. Moreover, our framework effectively quantifies uncertainty, showing a notable correlation between estimated uncertainty maps and error maps computed using ground truth and reconstructed images, compared with existing deep learning-based methods.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

A comparative and critical study of EEGNet for fNIRS-driven cognitive load classification

arXiv:2606.16160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately classifying cognitive load from functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) signals remains a significant challenge due to temporal variability, inter-subject differences, and sensitivity to preprocessing choices. This study provides a comprehensive evaluation of EEGNet for fNIRS-based cognitive load classification by systematically examining the effects of temporal segmentation strategies (overlapping vs. non-overlapping), window lengths (10s, 20s, 30s), feature extraction methods (Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA)), learning rate configurations (fixed and adaptive), and evaluation protocols (random split vs. subject-independent (SI)). Results from random-split experiments show that overlapping segmentation, combined with smaller fixed learning rates (0.01-0.001), yields the highest accuracies, due to temporal redundancy and dense sampling of hemodynamic transitions. However, SI evaluation reveals a substantial drop in accuracy, demonstrating limited generalization to unseen participants. Under SI evaluation, non-overlapping segmentation outperformed overlapping windows, with the best accuracy of 56.11% achieved using PCA features with a 20-second window and a 0.1 learning rate. These findings indicate that eliminating temporal redundancy helps the model learn more robust and generalizable representations of cognitive load across individuals. Although adaptive learning rate strategy improved training stability, it did not surpass the performance of optimally selected fixed learning rates. The study highlights the critical role of segmentation strategy and learning rate selection in improving model generalization and identifies methodological considerations essential for developing reliable, real-time, and SI cognitive load classification systems using fNIRS.