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

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

Long-term mortality rates after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) remain elevated due to post-EVAR rupture caused by loss of seal in stent graft sealing zones. Structured CT review using centerline measurements improves detection, but current workflows require manual centerline editing and expert operators. We propose a transformer framework for automated, protocol-driven sealing zone assessment that combines 3D centerline tracking with embedding-based geometric prediction. Two state-of-the-art image-to-graph models are evaluated for aorto-iliac centerline extraction from follow-up CT and for measurement of stent position, vessel diameters, and seal lengths according to EVAR4C protocol. Across the full test set and a challenging no-contrast subset, the proposed fully automatic method outperforms the commercial semi-automatic workflow.

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

Cross-modal Identity Mapping: Minimizing Information Loss in Modality Conversion via Reinforcement Learning

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) often omit or misrepresent critical visual content in generated image captions. Minimizing such information loss will force LVLMs to focus on image details to generate precise descriptions. However, measuring information loss during modality conversion is inherently challenging due to the modal gap between visual content and text output. In this paper, we argue that the quality of an image caption is positively correlated with the similarity between images retrieved via text search using that caption. Based on this insight, we further propose Cross-modal Identity Mapping (CIM), a reinforcement learning framework that enhances image captioning without requiring additional annotations. Specifically, the method quantitatively evaluates the information loss from two perspectives: Gallery Representation Consistency and Query-gallery Image Relevance. Supervised under these metrics, LVLM minimizes information loss and aims to achieve identity mapping from images to captions. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our method in image captioning, even when compared with Supervised Fine-Tuning. Particularly, on the COCO-LN500 benchmark, CIM achieves a 20% improvement in relation reasoning on Qwen2.5-VL-7B.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Prob-BBDM: a Probabilistic Brownian Bridge Diffusion Model for MRI sequence image-to-image translation

arXiv:2606.24313v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI-driven image-to-image synthesis is rapidly advancing, with growing applications in medical imaging. Multi-modal image analysis plays a crucial role in optimizing examination quality, yet acquiring multiple imaging modalities in clinical settings remains resource-intensive and time-consuming, especially for 3D imaging. To address this challenge, we propose a novel image-to-image translation model based on Brownian Bridge Diffusion Models (BBDM), which synthesizes magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sequences from 2D axial slices. Our approach integrates a variational encoder-guided diffusion mechanism, leveraging probabilistic image distributions to enhance synthesis quality. Evaluated on the BraTS 2021 dataset, our Probabilistic-BBDM (Prob-BBDM) achieves superior performance across multiple translation tasks, reaching up to 88.46% SSIM and 26.09 dB PSNR, with consistent improvements over baselines. Notably, our diffusion process requires only 4 steps, making it computationally efficient while maintaining high-quality synthesis. To further validate generalizability, we test Prob-BBDM on an external third-party dataset, demonstrating consistent performance across domains. Additionally, we assess the clinical utility of the synthesized slices by using them as input to a pre-trained segmentation model. Tumor segmentation yields a Dice score of 88.71% and an HD95 of 3.49 mm, confirming that the synthesized slices preserve critical diagnostic information. These results highlight the potential of Prob-BBDM for high-quality, efficient, and generalizable MRI synthesis, offering a promising step toward improved medical image translation.

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

FlowState: Sampling-Rate-Equivariant Time-Series Forecasting

arXiv:2508.05287v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing time series foundation models (TSFMs), often based on transformer variants, lack adaptability to different sampling rates, struggle with generalization across varying context and target lengths, and are computationally inefficient. We introduce FlowState, a novel TSFM architecture that achieves sampling-rate-equivariant forecasting through a unified design that pairs a state space model (SSM) encoder with a functional basis decoder (FBD). This design enables continuous-time modeling and dynamic time-scale adjustment, allowing FlowState to inherently generalize across all possible temporal resolutions, and dynamically adjust the forecasting horizons without retraining. We further propose an efficient pretraining strategy that improves robustness and accelerates training. Despite being one of the smallest TSFMs, FlowState achieves state-of-the-art results on the widely used GIFT-Eval benchmark, while demonstrating superior adaptability to unseen sampling rates. Our detailed analyses confirm the effectiveness of its components, and we demonstrate its unique ability to adapt to varying input sampling rates.

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

An Integrable Token Mixing Layer from the Generalized Yang Baxter Equation

arXiv:2606.15085v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The YB Mixer is a sequence token mixing layer derived from free fermion and generalized Yang Baxter structures. It applies a core principle from integrable systems where a local algebraic constraint guarantees global computational stability. By using the Ising exchange algebra the mixer creates a free fermionic structure that acts as an exactly norm preserving orthogonal map. This algebra also produces commuting transfer matrices which allow inference to be order free and adaptable to any variable budget. To ensure the model can generalize to longer sequence lengths it uses a spectral circulant generator. This generator maintains the crucial orthogonal and commuting properties of the system. The result is a highly stable and mathematically grounded architecture for sequence processing.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

A Drug-Specific, Half-Life-Adjusted Framework for Classifying CNS-Active Systemic Therapy Exposure During and After Radiotherapy

Clinical oncology datasets often store systemic therapy as a regimen label with a start date and an end date. Those records are clinically recognizable but can be analytically incomplete when the research question concerns whether a patient was exposed to a concurrent CNS-active drug (cCNS-aD) or an adjuvant CNS-active drug (aCNS-aD) around radiotherapy. Contemporary CNS-oncology studies usually define CNS activity by empiric drug lists and define concurrency by fixed calendar windows, although the literature shows substantial heterogeneity across both concepts. This paper proposes a generalizable framework for converting raw systemic therapy records into reproducible cCNS-aD and aCNS-aD variables, useful in subgrouping for clinical studies. The framework uses a transparent CNS scoring model based on three clinical evidence components: intracranial objective response rate, consensus CNS endorsement, and intrathecal route of administration. It then defines a pharmacokinetic exposure proxy as the recorded end date plus five half-lives. Concurrent exposure is classified by overlap with the radiotherapy interval, while post-radiotherapy exposure is classified by overlap with a prespecified post-RT attribution window. The framework separately identifies post-RT pharmacokinetic persistence and post-RT treatment initiation, allowing investigators to distinguish continued exposure from true adjuvant initiation. This is a methodological framework and reference implementation. Implementation audits and endpoint-specific sensitivity analyses remain necessary before use as a definitive exposure classifier

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Degeneracy Cannot Violate the Quantum Hamming Bound

arXiv:2606.15558v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The quantum Hamming bound is the standard finite-length sphere-packing bound for exact correction of arbitrary qubit errors. Whether degeneracy can evade this bound has remained unresolved in full generality for nearly three decades: distinct correctable errors may act identically on the code space, so the usual disjoint-sphere argument breaks down. We prove that every exact binary quantum subspace code with $K>1$ obeys the bound, without assuming either nondegeneracy or additivity. Our proof turns the Li–Xing linear-programming polynomial into an exact intersection count for quaternary Hamming balls. Monotonicity in block length and in ball-center separation then reduces the problem to a local node–edge charging inequality at the shortest admissible length. Thus degeneracy can merge correctable error sectors, but cannot enlarge the finite-length binary Hamming bound.

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

Quantum enhancement and Doppler suppression of Kasevich-Chu atom interferometer with motional squeezing states

arXiv:2606.16632v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Hybridization of internal and external atomic degrees of freedom in a Kasevich-Chu interferometer enables the possibility to enhance the sensitivity significantly even under quantum-standard limit. By introducing motional squeezing state as an input, we systematically derive the computational framework of quantum and classical Fisher information of two measurement protocols for arbitrary strength of Doppler effects. Through maximizing the corresponding classical Fisher information, we obtain the optimal control parameters and the corresponding quantum Fisher information. For population measurement, the largest sensitivity can be as large as four times than the semi-classical limit through enlarging the atom coherence length. For joint measurement of population and position, the competition between quantum enhancement and Doppler suppression induces two three behaviors, in one regime, the quantum enhancement dominates even in presence of strong Doppler broadening effects where the sensitivity is significantly enhanced; while in another regime, an optimal squeezing parameter is observed where the classical Fisher information reaches the maximum. Our results clearly demonstrate the robustness of external quantum enhancement against Doppler suppression. Our proposal can be readily applied to gravimeter of mobile platform where decoherence from noise will damage the many-body entanglement of internal spin squeezing.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

CONCORD: Asynchronous Sparse Aggregation for Device-Cloud RAG under Document Isolation

arXiv:2606.15179v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a pivotal technique for improving language models by incorporating external knowledge at inference time. As device-cloud collaborative inference makes it feasible to deploy small language models on edge devices, a new setting arises in which private documents remain on the device and public knowledge resides in the cloud. Privacy and policy constraints often forbid raw document exchange, creating a document-isolated dual-end RAG setting. However, existing methods rely on frequent remote synchronization and dense evidence transfer, limiting throughput under realistic latency and bandwidth conditions. To address this issue, we propose CONCORD, an asynchronous sparse aggregation framework for dual-end RAG under document isolation. CONCORD treats the cloud as an asynchronously arriving evidence source rather than a continuously synchronized co-generator. Specifically, we introduce waiting debt control to decide whether each decoding step should continue waiting for remote participation based on the observed return of waiting. We also design a certificate-guided minimal supplementation mechanism that requests only the remote evidence needed to determine the current greedy decision. Steps that consult the cloud preserve the same greedy token as dense dual-end aggregation, while the remaining steps commit locally without remote evidence. Experiments on Natural Questions and WikiText-2 show that CONCORD improves end-to-end throughput over baselines by $1.66\times$ and $2.15\times$, respectively, while reducing per-token communication by over two orders of magnitude and maintaining comparable answer quality and perplexity.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Does Mixture-of-Experts Actually Help Inference on Consumer and Edge Hardware? An Empirical Study

arXiv:2606.21428v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models are often described as ideal for resource-constrained inference. Each token activates only a small subset of experts, so the per-token compute cost, in floating-point operations (FLOPs), resembles that of a much smaller dense model. Whether that FLOP advantage survives in practice is far less clear. We ask whether MoE models actually run faster and cheaper than comparable dense models on consumer-grade and edge hardware. We benchmark OLMoE-1B-7B (1.3 B active of 6.9 B total) against three dense baselines on an Apple M2 Pro and an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano 8 GB through \texttt{llama.cpp}, measuring throughput, memory, and on-device energy. The answer is device-dependent: OLMoE's active-parameter advantage is only partly realised on the laptop (~10% behind the same-active Llama-3.2-1B) and erodes on the edge device (~31% behind, at 2.1$\times$ the energy per token, with peak memory at the 8 GB ceiling). Patching \texttt{llama.cpp} to time the decode graph node-by-node shows routing accounts for under 9% of MoE-block compute on the cleaner edge backend, so the gap reflects total-parameter memory footprint, expert dispatch, and KV-cache pressure rather than routing. The implication is that on bandwidth-bound edge hardware, inference cost tracks total parameters, not active ones, and sparse activation does not buy back what the device is constrained on. These findings are bounded to one MoE model at this parameter scale and two devices, and we release the full measurement harness and per-run data.

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

A Controlled Benchmark of Quantum-Latent GAN Augmentation for Brain MRI

Medical image classification is often constrained by limited labeled data, motivating generative augmentation; recently, quantum generative models have been proposed for this purpose, frequently reporting accuracy gains. However, such claims are typically based on single training runs, do not match the parameter budgets of the quantum and classical generators, and do not characterize the data regime in which any benefit appears. We present a controlled benchmark that isolates the contribution of a quantum generator to brain-MRI augmentation. Images are encoded into a KL-regularized latent space in which a conditional Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty is trained using either a variational quantum generator or a classical generator of near-identical parameter count (1648 vs. 1632). Synthetic samples are decoded and used to augment a pretrained classifier across labeled data fractions from 5% to 100%, evaluated over eight random seeds with paired significance testing (with multiple-comparison correction) and with intraset diversity and latent-distribution analyses. Across all fractions, no augmentation variant significantly outperforms real-data-only training, and the quantum and classical generators are statistically indistinguishable. Any low-data benefit behaves as regularization rather than faithful data expansion:synthetic samples are off distribution and severely mode collapsed precisely where data is scarce, and the quantum generator is no more diverse thanits classical counterpart. We release the protocol as a testbed for rigorous evaluation of quantum generative augmentation in medical imaging.

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

Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Solutions

arXiv:2606.23760v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Engineering reliable autonomous systems is an important and growing topic in computer science. As autonomous systems become more prevalent, easy-to-use techniques for building them reliably are increasingly important. This workshop report captures and expands on the discussions at the Lorentz Center Workshop "Engineering Reliable Autonomous Systems" (ERAS), held from 10 to 14 June 2024. The workshop was co-organised by the organisers of the Workshop on Formal Methods for Autonomous Systems (FMAS) and the Workshop on Agents and Robots for reliable Engineered Autonomy (AREA). It brought together members of the FMAS and AREA communities, industry practitioners, and representatives from sectors where autonomous systems pose distinctive engineering challenges. The workshop focused on three main research topics: techniques for verification and validation of autonomous systems; engineering real-world autonomous systems; and software architectures for safe autonomous systems. Its main outcome is a catalogue of challenges in these areas and, most importantly, a pathway to solutions. Some challenges can already be tackled by techniques that are well known in academia but have not yet become regularly used in practice. Other challenges remain unresolved and require further research. This roadmap is intended to support future research and industrial collaboration.

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

TAPIOCA: Why Task- Aware Pruning Improves OOD model Capability

arXiv:2605.14738v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has promoted task-aware layer pruning as a way to improve model performance on particular tasks, as shown by TALE. In this paper, we investigate when such improvements occur and why. We show first that, across controlled polynomial regression tasks and large language models, such pruning yields no benefit on in-distribution (ID) data but consistently improves out-of-distribution (OOD) accuracy. We further show empirically that OOD inputs induce layerwise norm and pairwise-distance profiles that deviate from the corresponding ID profiles. This leads to a geometric explanation of task-aware pruning: each task induces a task-adapted geometry, characterized empirically by the representation profiles observed on ID inputs. OOD inputs can introduce a distorted version of the task-adapted geometry. Task-aware pruning identifies layers that create or amplify this distortion; by removing them, it shifts OOD representational norms and pairwise distances toward those observed on the adapted distribution. This realigns OOD inputs with the model's task-adapted geometry and improves performance. We provide causal evidence through controlled distribution shifts and residual-scaling interventions, and demonstrate consistent behavior across model scales.

14.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Cosmological Pseudo-Entropy

arXiv:2606.15227v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study pseudo entropy $\mathcal{S}$, a recent generalization of entanglement entropy, for scalar cosmological perturbations in de Sitter space with sound speed $0.024 \leq c_s \leq 1$, and in expanding and contracting FLRW backgrounds with varying equation-of-state parameter $w$. In de Sitter space, $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ grows after horizon exit while $c_s$ controls its onset and saturates at late times. A similar saturation occurs in expanding-accelerating and contracting-decelerating backgrounds. In contrast, expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds show large early-time $\mathrm{Re}(\mathcal{S})$ followed by oscillations after horizon re-entry. This happens because while the squeezing freezes, the squeezing angle doesn't. Unlike entanglement entropy, pseudo entropy possesses an imaginary part, $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$, as well, which can encode the relative phase. $\mathrm{Im}(\mathcal{S})$ decays to zero in de Sitter and expanding-accelerating cases, but forms dense sub-Hubble oscillation bands in expanding-decelerating and contracting-accelerating backgrounds. Compared with entanglement entropy, Krylov complexity, and Nielsen circuit complexity, pseudo entropy captures otherwise hidden phase information; in the unsaturated regime, its slope is $\sqrt{2}$ times that of Nielsen complexity. Unlike circuit complexity, whose saturation bound is $w$-independent, pseudo entropy is sensitive to $w$ during the transition regime, making it a finer information theoretic diagnostic of cosmological dynamics.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Amortized Probabilistic Retrieval of Atmospheric CO2 from OCO-2 Spectra Using Deep Learning with Laplace Approximations and Normalizing Flows

arXiv:2606.17413v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Space-based monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential for constraining the global carbon budget. NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) estimates column-averaged dry-air mole fractions of CO2 (XCO2) using high-resolution spectra. However, current operational retrieval algorithms are computationally expensive and do not properly quantify uncertainties. We present a novel deep learning framework that addresses these challenges. Due to the difficulties of ground-truth data for real satellite observations, we develop and validate our approach using a high-fidelity simulation dataset. This dataset, created to support OCO-2 uncertainty quantification (UQ), incorporates realistic forward model errors. Our architecture encodes spectral bands using a multi-branch neural network and estimates posteriors of the full CO2 column or desired summaries thereof using two scalable UQ methods: Laplace approximations and normalizing flows. Our approach has five key advantages relative to operational "full-physics" solvers: (1) Amortization: Inference is orders of magnitude faster, enabling real-time processing of massive data streams; (2) Model error robustness: By training on simulations that explicitly include model discrepancies, our method accounts for systematic errors often neglected by standard inversions; (3) Point estimate accuracy: We achieve superior predictive accuracy compared to baseline methods; (4) Improved UQ: The probabilistic outputs yield better-calibrated uncertainty estimates; and (5) Non-Gaussian posteriors: When utilizing normalizing flows, our framework successfully models complex, asymmetric posterior distributions, overcoming the limitations of the Gaussian assumption. These results suggest that simulation-based deep learning is a viable path toward next-generation operational processing systems.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM: Element-Level Assessment of Randomized Controlled Trial Reporting Using Large Language Models

Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) play a central role in assessing the benefits and harms of interventions. Incomplete reporting in RCT publications can compromise the verifiability and usefulness of RCTs. SPIRIT and CONSORT reporting guidelines aim to improve the completeness of RCT protocols and results publications, respectively. However, many RCTs are not reported completely. Checking manuscripts automatically could help authors improve the completeness of reports prior to publication. We previously annotated SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, a corpus of 200 articles (comprising 100 protocol-results publication pairs) using 83 checklist items drawn from SPIRIT 2013 and CONSORT 2010. We also trained machine learning models to automatically assess reporting at the item level. Each checklist item can include multiple constituent elements (i.e., specific details required for that item), and an item might be considered fully reported when all of its elements are present. However, prior work does not explicitly capture or evaluate reporting at the element level. To address this gap, we extended SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM by incorporating element-level annotations and using them to assess reporting completeness (SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM). We formulated element-level assessment as a machine reading comprehension task, operationalized through 119 questions, where each question targets a specific reporting element within a checklist item. Using the 200 articles included in SPIRIT-CONSORT-TM, two annotators independently answered 119 questions for 50 articles (25 protocol-results pairs) and resolved any discrepancies through discussion; the remaining 150 articles (75 protocol-results pairs) were assessed by a single annotator. We then developed an automated pipeline for element-level assessment using SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM. The pipeline first applies a PubMedBERT-based model to identify sentences containing item-level reporting information, then it uses a generative large language model (LLM; GPT-5) with chain-of-thought reasoning to answer element-level questions based on the retrieved evidence. Agreement between the two annotators was high (Gwet's AC1: 0.782) and our pipeline achieved high accuracy in identifying element-level reporting evidence (F1: 0.822, Gwet's AC1: 0.796). Ablation studies indicate that chain-of-thought reasoning and the inclusion of illustrative in-context examples modestly improve LLM performance on the machine reading comprehension task. SPIRIT-CONSORT-ELM provides a benchmark for evaluating reporting guideline completeness at the element level, enabling assessment of RCT transparency beyond the simple presence or absence of checklist items and is publicly available at https://osf.io/kznx4/. The automated pipeline establishes a robust baseline for assessing RCT reporting and demonstrates potential as a practical aid for authors, reviewers, and editors to identify and address gaps in completeness and transparency of RCT reports.

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

Semantic search for 100M+ galaxy images using AI-generated captions

Finding scientifically interesting phenomena through slow manual labeling campaigns severely limits our ability to explore the billions of galaxy images produced by telescopes. In this work, we develop a pipeline to create a semantic search engine from completely unlabeled image data. Our method leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to generate descriptions for galaxy images, then contrastively aligns a pre-trained astronomy foundation model with these embedded descriptions to produce searchable embeddings at scale. We find that current VLMs provide descriptions that are sufficiently informative to train a semantic search model that outperforms direct image similarity search. Our model, AION-Search, achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on finding rare phenomena despite training on randomly selected images with no deliberate curation for rare cases. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based re-ranking method that nearly doubles the recall for our most challenging targets in the top-100 results. For the first time, AION-Search enables flexible semantic search for over 100 million galaxy images, enabling discovery from previously infeasible searches, including the identification of 36 new extragalactic stellar stream candidates. More broadly, our work provides an approach for making large, unlabeled scientific image archives semantically searchable, expanding data exploration capabilities in fields from Earth observation to microscopy. The code, data, and app are publicly available at https://github.com/NolanKoblischke/AION-Search

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

On the Benefits of Weight Normalization for Overparameterized Matrix Sensing

arXiv:2510.01175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While normalization techniques are widely used in deep learning, their theoretical understanding remains relatively limited. In this work, we establish the benefits of (generalized) weight normalization (WN) applied to the overparameterized matrix sensing problem. We prove that WN with Riemannian optimization achieves linear convergence, yielding an exponential speedup over standard methods that do not use WN. Our analysis further demonstrates that both iteration and sample complexity improve polynomially as the level of overparameterization increases. To the best of our knowledge, this work provides the first characterization of how WN leverages overparameterization for faster convergence in matrix sensing.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-14

Somatic variant detection in normal tissues from single-cell sequencing data

A crucial advantage of single-cell sequencing (SCS) is its ability to identify somatic variants in individual cells, enabling phylogenetic analysis of cellular populations within bulk tissues. While identifying somatic variants in tumor tissues via SCS has become a common practice, doing so in normal tissues remains challenging due to the rarity of somatic variants in normal cells. To evaluate the feasibility of somatic variant calling from widely available single-nucleus RNA-seq (snRNA-seq) and single-nucleus ATAC-seq (snATAC-seq) data, we profiled a Cell-line mix of six HapMap samples prepared by the SMaHT consortium using 10x Genomics 5' snRNA-seq (12k cells with 36k mean reads per cell) and snATAC-seq (11k cells with 14k median high-quality fragments per cell) for variant calling. PacBio long-read whole genome sequencing (WGS) data (109x) generated from individual cell lines were used as ground truth. Two computational tools, Monopogen and SComatic, were used for somatic variant calling from the SCS data. Monopogen achieved single nucleotide variant (SNV) detection accuracies of 93.30% in the snRNA-seq and 99.64% in the snATAC-seq data, both of which outperformed SComatic (74.35% and 94.29%, respectively). Monopogen also consistently detected somatic SNVs at cellular fractions as low as 0.5% (2.54% in snRNA and 0.81% in snATAC) in individual samples. Notably, snATAC-seq exhibited higher genomic coverage breadth and larger number of variants detected than snRNA-seq. While the SCS data have lower overall genome coverage than that of the bulk WGS, the single-cell level variant resolution allows Monopogen to assign variants to their cells of origin with over 80% accuracy in both RNA and ATAC modalities, thereby facilitating studies of clonal evolution and cell-type-specific mutagenesis. Other benchmarking methods were also evaluated (DeepVariant, Cellsnp-lite and Mutect2) for comparison. In conclusion, our study demonstrated the feasibility of performing reliable single-cell somatic mutation calling in a cell-line mixture and discussed the strengths and limitations of current computational methods when applied to normal tissues.

20.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Improving Code-Switching ASR with Code-Mixing Guided Synthetic Speech

arXiv:2606.19381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Code-switch (CS) Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains challenging due to limited availability of high quality CS text-speech pairs for training. Although synthetic data augmentation via Text-to-speech (TTS) has been explored, existing CS TTS approaches primarily optimise reconstruction fidelity and do not explicitly enforce language-boundary consistency, thereby limiting their effectiveness for CS ASR augmentation. This paper proposes a code-mixing guided preference-learning framework that steers synthetic speech generation toward improved code-switching fidelity using the Code Mixing Index (CMI). Experiments on the SEAME Mandarin-English conversational corpus demonstrate that the proposed method enhances the utility of synthetic data for ASR fine-tuning. Specifically, when fine-tuning Whisper Large, the proposed approach reduces Mixed Error Rate (MER) from 12.1%/17.8% to 8.9%/14.2% on the DevMAN and DevSGE sets, respectively.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Fair Cognitive Impairment Detection Through Unlearning

Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is a medical condition characterized by a noticeable decline in memory, language, or thinking abilities. MCI detection from spontaneous speech is promising for scalable screening. However, learned models often exploit demographic cues correlated with labels, resulting in a large performance gap across subgroups. We present a multimodal framework that combines (i) cross-model fusion between modalities (speech, text, and image), and (ii) unlearning using gradient reversal that discourages the shared embedding from encoding task-irrelevant demographic attributes. Evaluated on the multilingual benchmarks TAUKADIAL and PREPARE, our method outperforms the state-of-the-art multilingual and multimodal baseline in MCI classification while substantially reducing the performance gap across patient subgroups (sex and language). We further analyze transfer across datasets, showing that demographic unlearning helps learn more robust representations for MCI detection.

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

A Fast and Effective Method for Euclidean Anticlustering: The Assignment-Based-Anticlustering Algorithm

arXiv:2601.06351v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Anticlustering is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that consists of partitioning a set of objects into equal-sized groups called anticlusters such that the objects in the same anticluster are as dissimilar as possible and thereby representative of the entire set of objects. Here we study the case where the dissimilarity metric is the squared Euclidean distance between the respective feature vectors. Applications of Euclidean anticlustering include social studies, cross-validation, creating mini-batches for stochastic gradient descent, and finding balanced K-cut partitions. In particular, machine-learning applications such as mini-batch generation involve million-scale datasets and very large values of K, making scalable anticlustering algorithms essential. We propose a new algorithm, the Assignment-Based Anticlustering (ABA) algorithm, that scales to instances with millions of objects and hundreds of thousands of anticlusters within seconds to minutes, which is far beyond what existing anticlustering methods can manage. We demonstrate here, via an extensive computational study, that our algorithm outperforms existing anticlustering methods in both solution quality and running time. This is so also for anticlustering with categories. For the related problem of balanced K-cut partitioning, our algorithm is superior to the well-known METIS method. The code of our algorithm is available on GitHub.

24.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Bridging the Modality Gap in Forensic Image Retrieval

Automated image retrieval plays an increasingly critical role in modern forensic analysis, supporting investigative workflows that rely on efficient comparison of visual evidence. While prior work has focused primarily on developing and optimizing multimodal retrieval systems, limited attention has been paid to evaluating the forensic applicability of these technologies across diverse real-world scenarios. In this study, we present a unified retrieval framework adapted to four key forensic tasks: (1) tattoo image retrieval given a tattoo query image; (2) tattoo retrieval guided by human-expert textual descriptions, modelling the common situation where a witness verbally describes a tattoo; (3) tattoo retrieval from hand-drawn sketches; and (4) face retrieval from forensic face sketches. Our system leverages a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to automatically generate structured textual descriptions for all queries and gallery images, followed by sentence-transformer embedding for text-based comparison. We evaluate retrieval using visual-only embeddings, text-only embeddings and a multimodal fusion strategy that combines text- and image-based similarity scores derived from state-of-the-art visual feature extractors relevant to each task. The fusion of modalities consistently improves retrieval precision and robustness, especially in scenarios where visual information is limited or noisy (e.g., sketches, partial tattoos, or fragmented witness statements). This work highlights the forensic value of a unified multimodal retrieval pipeline and demonstrates how modern MLLMs can operationalize challenging forensic tasks that traditionally rely on manual expert analysis. Our results position multimodal retrieval as a promising tool for supporting investigative workflows involving tattoos, facial composites, and witness descriptions.

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

Hybrid Diffusion Transformer for Instruction-Guided Audio Editing via Rectified Flow

arXiv:2606.20101v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio editing aims to modify specific content in an existing audio clip according to a natural language instruction while preserving the remaining acoustic content. Despite the remarkable progress of diffusion models, existing training-based editing methods mainly rely on the local inductive biases and cross-attention interaction in convolutional U-Net backbones, which often hinder long-range semantic alignment and precise understanding and localization of instructions. In contrast, diffusion transformers provide stronger global modeling and multimodal fusion, but existing editing architectures usually adopt a simple stack of MMDiT and DiT blocks. Applying joint attention over concatenated audio and text tokens in all blocks results in quadratic complexity with respect to token length. To balance editing performance and efficiency, we propose a hybrid two-stage diffusion transformer architecture for instruction-guided audio editing based on rectified flow matching. It performs joint attention over audio and text tokens to establish coarse semantic alignment at low-resolution stage, then switches to alternating joint-attention and cross-attention blocks to refine editing details at high-resolution stage. This coarse-to-fine strategy enables efficient and accurate instruction-guided audio editing. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves notable performance gains on challenging editing tasks involving overlapping audio events and complex instructions, while substantially improving editing efficiency with a compact model.