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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

SwitchBraidNet: Quantisation-Aware Lightweight Architecture for Hybrid Brain-Computer Interface

arXiv:2606.18816v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hybrid brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that integrate motor imagery (MI) and steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) provide high-dimensional neural decoding but typically exceed the computational limits of embedded hardware. To address this, we propose SwitchBraidNet, a compact EEG classification architecture designed for low-power deployment. The model employs a dual-path temporal braid to extract multiscale oscillatory features, an adaptive squeeze-and-excitation spatial switch for electrode gating, and a log-variance readout layer for direct band-power encoding. Furthermore, through systematic quantisation-aware training on the OpenBMI dataset, we compared SwitchBraidNet against four established baselines across FP32, FP16, and INT8 precisions. Experimental results demonstrate superior efficiency and performance, achieving MI accuracy of 69.49% (FP16), SSVEP accuracy of 93.48% (FP32), and a hybrid information transfer rate of 64.82 bits/min (FP16). With an INT8 footprint of only 3.03 KB, SwitchBraidNet maintains high accuracy across varying numerical precisions, demonstrating its suitability for low-power embedded BCI deployment.

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

Beyond Predefined Schemas: TRACE-KG for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graph Generation

arXiv:2604.03496v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Knowledge graph generation typically relies either on predefined ontologies or on schema-free extraction. Ontology-driven pipelines enforce consistent typing but require costly schema design and maintenance, whereas schema-free methods often produce fragmented graphs with weak global organization, especially in long technical documents with dense, context-dependent information. We propose TRACE-KG (Text-dRiven schemA for Context-Enriched Knowledge Graphs), a framework that jointly constructs a context-enriched knowledge graph and an induced schema without assuming a predefined ontology. TRACE-KG captures conditional relations through structured qualifiers and organizes entities and relations using a data-driven schema that serves as a reusable semantic scaffold while preserving full traceability to the source evidence. Experiments show that TRACE-KG produces structurally coherent, traceable knowledge graphs and offers a practical alternative to both ontology-driven and schema-free construction pipelines.

03.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-23

Systematic benchmarking of zero-shot utility and robustness in single-cell transcriptomic foundation models

Single-cell foundation models (scFMs) have been proposed as reusable representations for transcriptomic analysis, yet their practical utility and robustness when applied without task-specific fine-tuning remain incompletely characterized. Here, we systematically evaluated single-cell transcriptomic representations in zero-shot settings across 20 methods, 6 downstream tasks and 1,607 datasets comprising nearly 21.8 million cells. We characterized model behavior along three complementary dimensions: baseline utility, structural robustness, and dataset-level drivers of performance variability. Our large-scale analysis reveals a decoupling between utility and robustness: methods ranking highly on standard benchmarks often show marked instability under shifts in dataset structure. Furthermore, no single model performs uniformly well across tasks. In several tasks, classical statistical representations based on highly variable genes remain competitive under zero-shot conditions. Together, these results define the practical boundaries of zero-shot use in scFMs and provide a large-scale benchmark and decision framework for representation selection in single-cell genomics.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Half a Link can Be Enough to Predict a Whole Link: Understanding Generalization in Knowledge Graph Foundation Models

arXiv:2606.18001v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge graph (KG) foundation models (KGFMs) are zero-shot generalizers: trained once, they can predict links on unseen graphs without retraining. However, understanding when and how they can robustly generalize across KGs is still an open question. In this paper, we shed some light on their generalization mechanisms highlighting how their performance on unseen KGs is not uniform when it comes to partially seen links, which we call half-links. In fact, we show that to predict a test triple $(h,r,t)$ it might suffice in practice to have observed the half-link $(h,r)$ or $(r,t)$ in the inference graph. This yields a taxonomy of four scenarios when combinations of these half-links are observed or not. In a rigorous stratified analysis over these scenarios, we reveal that SoTA KGFMs use seen half links for predictions, while unseen half-links pose different challenges. As such, our finer-grained taxonomy can be a diagnostic protocol for robust KGFM generalization and highlights where novel KGFMs can improve.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

TreeSeeker: Tree-Structured Trial, Error, and Return in Deep Search

arXiv:2606.11662v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep search requires agents to answer complex questions through multi-step web search, browsing, evidence comparison, and synthesis. A central challenge is deciding how to search when several directions look plausible but only some will later lead to reliable evidence. If an agent greedily follows the current best-looking direction, it may keep extending a weak continuation. If it explores without discipline, it may waste budget on disconnected trials. We propose TreeSeeker, an inference-time framework for controlled trial-and-error in deep search. TreeSeeker organizes search as branch-and-return search over tree-structured states, where each branch is a tentative direction for a sub-goal. At each round, TreeSearch reads all sub-goal trees, identifies active goals, and uses textual UCB signals of value, uncertainty, and risk to select among exploiting a promising branch, exploring an uncertain alternative, or pruning an unproductive continuation and returning to an earlier branch point. TreeMem supports this control loop by keeping evidence, uncertainty, conflicts, progress, and failure cues attached to the branches that produced them, so trial outcomes can guide later decisions. Experiments on XBench-DeepSearch, BrowseComp, and BrowseComp-ZH show that TreeSeeker consistently outperforms strong open-source baselines, suggesting that explicit branch-and-return control complements stronger reasoning and tool execution.

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

Temporal modulation as a resource: enhanced frequency estimation in continuous variable systems

arXiv:2606.15108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Frequency estimation, a cornerstone of quantum metrology, has been significantly enhanced by advanced quantum sensing strategies. However, most protocols rely either on static or time-independent encoding mechanisms, inherently limiting their achievable precision scaling, or on control strategies requiring changing the Hamiltonian and/or implementing feedback mechanisms. To overcome this, we investigate a simpler dynamical encoding protocol where the quantum oscillator is driven by a general continuous temporal frequency modulation $\Omega(t) = \omega_0 f(t)$. We analytically demonstrate that for a given modulation profile $f(t)$ and its corresponding time-integral $F(t)$, the quantum Fisher information (QFI) scales as $\mathcal{O}(F(t)^2)$. This enhancement stems from the fact that temporal encoding fundamentally alters the mechanism of dynamical phase accumulation. Crucially, when evaluated under the energy and evolution-time constraints, this framework reveals a genuine precision enhancement over the conventional time-independent baseline. By analyzing explicit polynomial and exponential modulations, we establish that arbitrary precision scaling can be deterministically engineered, with ultimate bounds that are asymptotically saturable via optimal homodyne detection. Our framework provides a universal paradigm for exploiting time-dependent quantum control in next-generation sensors.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

DIPHINE: Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator

arXiv:2606.18997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uncovering the true informational architecture of real-world complex systems requires disentangling how their components uniquely store, redundantly share, and synergistically integrate information over time. Integrated Information Decomposition ($\Phi$ID) is a framework for decomposing the information dynamics of multivariate systems into sixteen non-overlapping atoms that characterize redundant, unique, and synergistic modes of information storage, transfer, and integration. Existing methods to compute $\Phi$ID are restricted to Gaussian or discrete systems, preventing its application to continuous non-Gaussian dynamical systems. We address this limitation by proposing DIPHINE (Diffusion-based $\Phi$-ID Neural Estimator), the first neural estimator that leverages score-based diffusion models to jointly estimate all the mutual information terms required by $\Phi$ID from a single amortized network, recovering the sixteen atoms through Möbius inversion. We provide a theoretical analysis of error propagation through the inversion, showing that the Jacobian of the mapping from mutual informations to atoms is integer-valued and that the synergy-to-synergy atom is provably the hardest to estimate. We demonstrate accurate recovery of ground-truth atoms on synthetic benchmarks, superior performance compared to established mutual information estimators, and the ability to extract physiologically interpretable information-dynamic structure on an application involving real data without any distributional assumptions.

08.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-02

Linking reduced prefrontal microcircuit inhibition in schizophrenia to EEG biomarkers in silico

by Sana Rosanally, Frank Mazza, Heng Kang Yao, Faraz Moghbel, Hannah Seo, Etay Hay Reduced cortical inhibition by parvalbumin-expressing (PV) interneurons in schizophrenia is thought to be associated with impaired processing in the prefrontal cortex and altered EEG signals such as oddball mismatch negativity (MMN). Recent studies also suggest loss of somatostatin (SST) interneuron inhibition. However, establishing the link between reduced interneuron inhibition and reduced MMN experimentally in humans is currently not possible. To overcome these challenges, we simulated spiking activity and EEG during baseline and oddball response in detailed models of human prefrontal microcircuits in health and schizophrenia, with reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition as constrained by postmortem patient data. We showed that reduced PV interneuron inhibition can account for the decreased MMN amplitude seen in schizophrenia, with a threshold below which the amplitude effect was low as seen in at-risk patients. In contrast, reduced SST interneuron inhibition did not affect the MMN amplitude. We further showed that both types of inhibition loss were necessary to account for changes in resting EEG in schizophrenia, with reduced SST interneuron inhibition increasing broadband power, and reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition both leading to a right shift from alpha to beta frequencies. Our study thus links reduced PV and SST interneuron inhibition in schizophrenia to distinct EEG biomarkers that can serve to improve stratification and early detection using non-invasive brain signals.

09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

A Statistical and Machine Learning Framework for Operational Threshold Detection and Deployable Dispatch Controller Development in Hydrogen Multi-Energy Systems

arXiv:2606.14601v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: This study presents a statistical and machine learning framework for characterizing a hydrogen-based multi-energy system (H-MES) using one year of high-resolution operational data. Statistical analysis revealed a binary operation driven by renewable surplus, with solar irradiance explaining 45.7% of rank-based variance in hydrogen production, a large effect by conventional standards. Only high-irradiance periods triggered meaningful electrolyzer engagement, while electricity demand exerted a weaker inverse suppression effect ($\epsilon^2 = 0.126$). Multiple regression confirmed electrolyzer power as the dominant linear predictor, with a synergistic solar-wind interaction. Notably, Random Forest analysis ranked wind output first in predictive importance despite its weak bivariate correlation (r = 0.167), revealing non-linear dynamics invisible to parametric methods. A sequence model exploited strong 24-hour autocorrelation (r = 0.845) for operational forecasting, while a reinforcement learning agent optimized hydrogen revenue dispatch. The core contribution is demonstrating that statistical and machine learning approaches are complementary for H-MES modeling and control.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Triangle Splatting SLAM

We present a dense RGB-D SLAM system using differentiable triangles as the 3D map representation. While 3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as the leading method for novel-view synthesis, triangles remain the standard primitive for traditional rendering hardware, game engines, and downstream tasks requiring explicit geometry such as simulation, collision, and editing. Recent offline methods have demonstrated that an unstructured 'triangle soup' can be optimised into a photorealistic mesh via Delaunay triangulation across a set of posed images. Building upon this insight, we present the first dense SLAM system to employ Triangle Splatting to perform both tracking and mapping through online differentiable rendering of a triangle soup. The map can be converted into a connected mesh on-the-fly via restricted Delaunay triangulation, enabling new online capabilities such as mesh deformation and collision checking. On Replica and TUM-RGBD, our system outperforms baselines on 3D geometry, matches the camera-tracking accuracy, and enables online mesh-based scene editing.

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

ChildGuard: A Specialized Dataset for Combatting Child-Targeted Hate Speech

Mental health industry faces growing concerns regarding hate speech directed at children's on social media, as exposure to such content can contribute to adverse psychological outcomes during critical stages of development. Current hate speech datasets and detection systems provide limited support for child-focused applications because they are primarily designed for adults and lack dedicated representations of age-specific characteristics associated with hate speech directed at children's. To address this gap, we introduce ChildGuard, a large-scale English dataset for child-targeted hate speech containing 351,877 annotated instances collected from X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and YouTube. The dataset covers three age groups such as younger children's (under 11), pre-teens (11-12), and teens (13-17). ChildGuard contains two subsets such as a contextual subset (157K) and a lexical subset (194K). Evaluation using recent transformer-based models and LLMs achieves a best Macro-F1 of 82.07%, decreasing to 79.41%, 79.24%, 76.04%, and 74.88% on younger children's, contextual, implicit hate, and cross-subset settings, respectively.

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

Toward Instructions-as-Code: Understanding the Impact of Instruction Files on Agentic Pull Requests

arXiv:2606.13449v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: AI-agents (e.g., GitHub Copilot) collaborate as teammates in different software engineering tasks, including code generation proposed through pull requests (Agentic-PRs). For better agent efficiency, developers create instruction files that guide the AI-agents, including how to navigate the project, locate the right components, run tests, respect best practices, and more. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between the creation of these instructions and the performance of AI-agents in creating better pull requests, which have a higher chance of success (i.e., the merge rate), address more complex tasks (e.g., code churn), and require less effort to be merged (e.g., time to merge). To this end, we analyze 15,549 agentic PRs from 148 projects in the AIDev dataset. Using the three dimensions, we compare each project before and after the creation of the instruction files. We find that specifying instructions for AI-agents does not necessarily lead to better results. With the instruction files, 27.7\% of the projects increased their merge rate by at least 20\%, while 26.35\% decreased it. The same observation is seen with the amount of changes (e.g., code churn, number of modified files) and with the efforts to merge an agentic PR (e.g., merge time and number of comments). From a first exploration, we find that projects that managed to increase their merge rate have substantially longer instruction files, which are also well structured into a higher number of sections and sub-sections. Our results motivate the need for research to assist practitioners in framing the development of instruction files as a software engineering activity (aka, Instructions-as-Code).

13.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Order Is Not Control

AI alignment, interpretability, steering, and neural perturbation studies identify order-inducing objects. We argue that order is not control. Control requires a receiver-gated response law: a denominator-indexed operator mapping material state, action/drive, bath, and receiver state to response displacement, sinks, effort, and basin projection. We identify it across biological, LLM, adapter, and stochastic-operator panels. The laws are local: an intervention can be admitted, saturated, sign-changing, leaky, or overdriven depending on medium, bath, receiver state, action port, and comparator. Control is assigned when finite effort moves a target or outcome-readout class under the same denominator while damage, null/evasive, invalid format, overdrive, and unnecessary effort stay bounded. Mouse ALM, C. elegans, and zebrafish panels provide physical response-operator evidence while excluding coordinate identity and controller conclusions. LLM panels show generated-output response laws: across four material conditions, response vectors are predictable at 72.8-73.7% component-sign accuracy, rising to 84.3-84.8% on nonzero components; held-out observers predict system-effect and target/oracle families at 93.6% and 91.7% accuracy. Constitution-conditioned adapters reshape susceptibility as prepared media, and stochastic-operator panels separate measured opportunity from deployable action policies. This gives a driven-dissipative response-system account at the mesoscopic control level: drives act through prepared media, baths, and receivers, producing admitted movement, impedance, sinks, or overdrive. The evidence supports local admitted control and measurable stochastic response operators, while leaving deployable pre-generation control, hidden/logit causal sufficiency, biological-to-LLM coordinate identity, and literal thermodynamic quantities outside scope.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

Anything Goes? A Crosslinguistic Study of (Im)possible Language Learning in LMs

Do language models (LMs) offer insights into human language learning? A common argument against this idea is that because their architecture and training paradigm are so vastly different from humans, LMs can learn arbitrary inputs as easily as natural languages. We test this claim by training LMs to model impossible and typologically unattested languages. Unlike previous work, which has focused exclusively on English, we conduct experiments on 12 languages from 4 language families with two newly constructed parallel corpora. Our results show that while GPT-2 small can largely distinguish attested languages from their impossible counterparts, it does not achieve perfect separation between all the attested languages and all the impossible ones. We further test whether GPT-2 small distinguishes typologically attested from unattested languages with different NP orders by manipulating word order based on Greenberg's Universal 20. We find that the model's perplexity scores do not distinguish attested vs. unattested word orders, while its performance on the generalization test does. These findings suggest that LMs exhibit some human-like inductive biases, though these biases are weaker than those found in human learners.

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

Nemotron 3 Ultra: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning

We introduce Nemotron 3 Ultra, a 550 billion total and 55 billion active parameter Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Attention language model. We pre-trained Nemotron 3 Ultra on 20 trillion text tokens, then extended the context length to 1M tokens, and post-trained using Supervised Fine Tuning (SFT), Reinforcement Learning (RL), and Multi-teacher On-Policy Distillation (MOPD). Nemotron 3 Ultra is our most capable model yet, employing multiple key technologies - LatentMoE, Multi Token Prediction (MTP), NVFP4 pre-training, multi-environment RLVR, MOPD, and reasoning budget control. Nemotron 3 Ultra achieves up to ~6x higher inference throughput as compared to state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs while attaining on-par accuracy. The state-of-the-art accuracy, high inference throughput, and 1M token context length make Nemotron 3 Ultra ideal for long-running autonomous agentic tasks. We open-source the base, post-trained, and quantized checkpoints, along with the training data and recipe on HuggingFace.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Tungsten Germanide Superconducting Nanowire Single-Photon Detectors with Saturated Internal Detection Efficiency at Wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m

arXiv:2511.20868v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors (SNSPDs) are among the most sensitive single-photon detectors available and have the potential to transform fields ranging from infrared astrophysics to molecular spectroscopy. However, extending their performance into the mid-infrared spectral region - crucial for applications such as exoplanet transit spectroscopy and vibrational fingerprinting of molecules - has remained a major challenge, primarily due to material limitations and scalability constraints. Here, we report on the development of SNSPDs based on tungsten germanide, a novel material system that combines high mid-infrared sensitivity with compatibility for large-scale fabrication. Our detectors exhibit saturated internal detection efficiency at wavelengths up to 29 {\mu}m, while using 2.7x thicker films (8 nm vs 3 nm) and up to 4.5x wider nanowires (360 nm vs 80 nm) compared to mid-infrared-optimized SNSPDs fabricated from tungsten silicide. This advance will enable scalable, high-performance single-photon detection in a spectral region that was previously inaccessible, opening new frontiers in remote sensing, thermal imaging, environmental monitoring, molecular physics, and astronomy.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems via Textual Backpropagation

arXiv:2506.09046v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Leveraging multiple Large Language Models (LLMs) has proven effective for addressing complex, high-dimensional tasks, but current approaches often rely on static, manually engineered multi-agent configurations. To overcome these constraints, we present the Agentic Neural Network (ANN), a framework that conceptualizes multi-agent collaboration as a layered neural network architecture. In this design, each agent operates as a node, and each layer forms a cooperative team focused on a specific subtask. Our framework follows a two-phase optimization strategy: (1) Forward Phase - Drawing inspiration from neural network forward passes, tasks are dynamically decomposed into subtasks, and cooperative agent teams with suitable aggregation methods are constructed layer by layer. (2) Backward Phase - Mirroring backpropagation, we refine both global and local collaboration through iterative feedback, allowing agents to self-evolve their roles, prompts, and coordination. This neuro-symbolic approach enables our framework to create new or specialized agent teams post-training, delivering notable gains in accuracy and adaptability. Across seven benchmark datasets, our work surpasses leading multi-agent baselines under the same configurations, showing consistent performance improvements.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dynamically Optimal Unraveling Schemes for Simulating Lindblad Equations

arXiv:2509.19887v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic unraveling schemes are powerful computational tools for simulating Lindblad equations, offering significant reductions in memory requirements. However, this advantage is accompanied by increased stochastic uncertainty, and the question of optimal unraveling remains open. In this work, we investigate unraveling schemes driven by Brownian motion or Poisson processes and present a comprehensive parametric characterization of these approaches. For the case of a single Lindblad operator and one noise term, this parametric family provides a complete description for unraveling scheme with pathwise norm-preservation. We further analytically derive dynamically optimal quantum state diffusion (DO-QSD) and dynamically optimal quantum jump process (DO-QJP) that minimize the growth rate of the variance of an observable locally in time. Compared to jump process ansatz, DO-QSD offers two notable advantages: firstly, the variance for DO-QSD can be rigorously shown not to exceed that of any jump-process ansatz locally in time; secondly, it has very simple expressions. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed DO-QSD scheme may achieve substantial reductions in the variance of observables and the resulting simulation error.

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

Tangram: Unlocking Non-Uniform KV Cache Compression for Efficient Multi-turn LLM Serving

arXiv:2606.06302v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-turn LLM serving accumulates dialogue history whose Key-Value (KV) cache grows with every turn and every user, quickly exceeding the model weights themselves and making memory – not compute – the binding constraint on throughput. Non-uniform KV compression, which allocates heterogeneous budgets across attention heads, preserves accuracy far better than uniform schemes, yet remains impractical: modern serving stacks assume identical KV lengths across heads, so heterogeneity traps freed memory as page fragmentation, spends up to 25% of prefill time reclaiming scattered pages, and skews GPU workloads that inflate decode latency by up to $1.7\times$ or burn 15–20% of each decode step on re-planning. We observe that this heterogeneity need not be discovered at runtime: head-wise retention follows a two-level structural regularity – an input-invariant head ranking with narrowly bounded per-head ratios – that can be calibrated offline from as few as 50 samples. Building on this insight, we present Tangram, a serving framework that statically resolves what prior systems handle dynamically: Budget Reservation fixes each head's post-compression footprint at scheduling time, eliminating page reclamation; Ragged Paging clusters similar-budget heads into independent page tables, turning fragmentation into reclaimable memory; and Ahead-of-Time Load Balancing precomputes balanced GPU partitions with zero runtime planning. Implemented on vLLM, Tangram serves as a drop-in substrate for existing non-uniform compression methods, matching their accuracy while improving end-to-end throughput by up to $2.6\times$ over the full-KV baseline. Our implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/aiha-lab/TANGRAM.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Theoretical Study for Generating Optical GKP State via a Single-Photon-Added Squeezed Vacuum

arXiv:2606.12467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A theoretical framework is developed to analyze the generation of the optical GKP state using a single-photon-added squeezed vacuum. This state, defined by the squeezing parameter $r$, is injected into a 50:50 beam splitter, and the optical GKP state is obtained through conditional measurement at one output port. The single-photon-added squeezed vacuum is especially prominent in this context because it provides a simpler and more experimentally accessible ingredient than Schrodinger cat states, while conditional measurement ensures projection onto a state that closely approximates the finite-energy GKP form. Fidelity is employed to quantify this closeness, and the analysis demonstrates that the scheme achieves a maximum fidelity of 85% at a squeezing level of $3.76 \ dB$. This performance surpasses approaches based on squeezed optical odd Schrodinger cat states, underscoring the single-photon-added squeezed vacuum as a practical and effective pathway toward fault-tolerant photonic quantum computing.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Multimodal Brain Tumour Classification Using Feature Fusion

Clinicians diagnose brain tumors by synthesizing patient symptoms, medical history, and quantitative imaging data from modalities such as MRI and CT scans into a unified clinical judgement. However, most deep learning models rely on MRI/CT images alone, failing to replicate the clinicians multimodal reasoning. We explore a two-branch multimodal network combining raw MRI scans with 91 extracted radiomic features (intensity, texture, shape, and boundary descriptors) to classify brain tumors into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no-tumor. A pre-trained CNN backbone encodes the image stream, whereas a dedicated MLP encodes the radiomic stream. Both streams are fused via concatenation, gated, or bidirectional cross-modal attention strategies. Across nine experimental runs on a balanced 7,200 image dataset, all multimodal configurations outperform unimodal baselines with gated fusion achieving the best accuracy of 96.13%.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Non-Medical COVID-19 Impacts and Hearing Status: A Global Study of Differential Health Impact Among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Populations

Background: Deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) experienced complex challenges during the COVID19 pandemic, including obscured visual communication from mask mandates, inaccessible public health messaging, and inadequate interpreter availability. We examined whether hearing status predicted nonmedical COVID19 impact on a global level. Methods: We conducted a nested cross-sectional analysis within a global study collecting data across two waves (April to May 2020 and July to August 2022) from 184 countries. Participants (N=7,998) were categorized as Deaf (n=304), Hard of Hearing (HoH; n=951), or Hearing (n=6,743). The primary outcome was a composite COVID-related non-medical Personal Impact TScore derived from 14 items across employment, resource access, and healthcare domains. Multinomial logistic regression models progressively adjusted for demographic, structural, and psychosocial variables. Results: Deaf participants reported substantially higher rates of pandemic-related job loss (28.9% vs. 9.6% hearing), healthcare cancellations (39.9% vs. 24.6%), and inability to obtain basic supplies. Over half (55.9%) of Deaf participants scored above the median composite impact index, compared to 39.2% of hearing participants. In the fully adjusted model, Deaf status remained an independent predictor of high non-medical impact (aOR=1.6, 95% CI: 1.1 to 2.4). HoH status showed no statistically significant difference from hearing participants in any model. Conclusions: People identifying as Deaf experienced significant disparities during COVID19 when compared with HoH or hearing people, driven by language access barriers and institutional exclusion rather than hearing loss per se. These experiences underscore the importance for systemic interventions centering on accessible communication, Deaf-centered needs, and reducing audism in Deaf-hearing interaction.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Contagion Networks: Evaluator Bias Propagation in Multi-Agent LLM Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.20493v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When large language models serve as evaluators in multi-agent systems, their systematic evaluation biases propagate through the agent network. We introduce Contagion Networks, a formal framework for measuring how evaluator biases spread across interacting LLM agents. In a controlled 3-agent experiment using DeepSeek-chat with three distinct evaluator bias profiles (structured, balanced, evidence-based), we measure the Cross-Agent Contagion Matrix Gamma_3 and find that evaluator biases consistently propagate between agents (gamma in [0.157, 0.352]), even within the same underlying model. We identify three propagation regimes governed by the spectral radius rho(Gamma_N), and demonstrate that homogeneous-model agents produce contagion coefficients 3-5x weaker than cross-model coefficients observed in prior work (MM-EPC: gamma approx 0.85-1.3), placing them in the suppression regime. We show that increasing evaluator committee size from k=1 to k=3 reduces effective contagion by 72.4%, providing an actionable mitigation strategy. We release the open-source Contagion Network experimental framework.

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

Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network for Multimodal CT-PET Synthesis

We present a Dual-Domain Equivariant Generative Adversarial Network (DDE-GAN) for multimodal CT-PET image synthesis. Traditional GAN-based approaches often operate solely in the spatial domain and ignore geometric consistency, resulting in limited structural fidelity. DDE-GAN addresses these challenges by jointly learning from both spatial and frequency (Fourier) domains, capturing complementary anatomical and spectral information. Furthermore, rotational equivariance embedded in the physics of the CT and PET measurements are integrated into the loss of both the generator and discriminator to ensure consistent responses under rotations, improving anatomical accuracy. A hierarchical dual-domain training strategy enforces intra- and inter-domain consistency through multi-stage loss functions. Evaluated on the HECKTOR 2022 CT-PET dataset, DDE-GAN achieves superior synthesis quality over baseline models for CT-PET image synthesis. The results demonstrate that combining dual-domain learning with geometric equivariance substantially enhances multimodal image synthesis accuracy and robustness, enabling practical applications in PET completion and data augmentation.

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

When Calibration Fails the Vulnerable Hospital: Federated Conformal Risk Control via Risk-Curve Shrinkage

arXiv:2606.20115v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees on segmentation quality by calibrating a prediction-set threshold on held-out data. In federated deployments, the standard approach pools calibration scores across sites into a single threshold. We provide the first quantification, on real multi-institutional brain tumor data (FeTS-2022, 1,251 subjects, 20 institutions), showing that this naive pooled CRC protects the average hospital but violates coverage at 40% of individual institutions, with the worst site exceeding the target false-negative rate by 7.8 percentage points. The naive alternative, per-site local CRC, largely restores coverage but inflates prediction sets by 83x, rendering them clinically useless. We propose a shrinkage-based federated CRC protocol: each site transmits only its empirical risk curve (G scalars) to a server, which computes a shrinkage-regularized threshold per site. A single hyperparameter n0 smoothly trades worst-case coverage for prediction-set efficiency; leave-one-site-out sensitivity analysis identifies n0=19, achieving 2.7/20 violations at 2.0x stretch. We further show that direct Lagrangian optimization of coverage budgets fails, concentrating risk on vulnerable hospitals, and that the finite-sample correction term is essential: removing it triples violations. The marginal CRC guarantee is preserved by construction under the stated site-mixture assumption; per-site coverage is validated across four targets with three seeds. No patient-level images, masks, or per-volume scores leave any site.