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

EChO-Agent: Evidence Chain Orchestration Agent for Audio Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15141v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While LALMs show promise on audio question answering, they fail to focus on question-relevant segments of audio and provide a clear, checkable reasoning process when dealing with complex audio reasoning. Reinforcement learning and tool-augmented prompting can help models better relate questions to audio but lack a reliable way to understand, integrate, and self-verify audio segments. To address this gap, we present EChO-Agent, a modular agent framework that reformulates complex audio QA as a planning, tool execution, evidence integration, and answer verification workflow. Experiments on MMAR benchmark show EChO-Agent improves both accuracy and rubric scores over baseline and ablation studies show evidence integration is the key factor.

02.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Spatial distribution of the proteome in the human body and in cancers

Authors:

A detailed, spatially resolved quantitative map of the human proteome is essential for a deeper understanding of human biology and disease1–4. Here we present a comprehensive human proteomic landscape, generated by profiling more than 13,000 proteins across 2,856 samples using data-independent acquisition mass spectrometry. The dataset spans 58 major tissue types, 251 specific tissue subtypes and 25 distinct carcinomas. This resource enables the depiction of spatially resolved proteome trajectories across tissue types and physiological states, including fetal, tumour, adjacent non-tumour and healthy adult tissue, thereby providing insight into both developmental processes and oncogenic progression. Furthermore, quantitative proteomics comparisons across diverse tissue types and states facilitate the indication of organ-specific toxicity, the identification of repurposable anticancer drug candidates and the prioritization of therapeutic targets for cancers. This study establishes a quantitative resource for navigating the proteome in the human body and in common cancers. A spatially resolved map of the human proteome across a variety of healthy tissues and cancers provides wide-ranging insights in developmental biology and oncology, and could aid the identification of therapeutic targets and development of treatments for cancer.

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

Towards Effective Waste Segmentation for Automated Waste Recycling in Cluttered Background

Rapid expansion of urban areas and population growth is causing an immense increase in waste production, which demands the need for efficient and automated waste management. In this scenario, automated waste recycling (AWR) using deep learning methods can assist humans in optimal waste management. Recent deep learning approaches for AWR provide promising waste segmentation performance, however, these methods rely on large backbone networks that are inefficient for AWR systems and suffer from performance deterioration in cluttered scenes. To this end, an optimal waste segmentation network is introduced which effectively utilizes the spatial domain to capture localized structural dependencies and the spectral domain to efficiently extract global contextual relationships. This cascaded design allows the network to progressively leverage both local and global representations across complementary domains to highlight the semantic information necessary for effective segmentation of various waste objects. Furthermore, auxiliary feature enhancement module (AFEM) is introduced to enhance the target objects' boundaries and blob amplification for better segmentation in cluttered scenarios. Extensive experimentation on ZeroWaste-aug, ZeroWaste-f and SpectralWaste datasets reveals the merits of the proposed method.

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

Near-Optimal Regret for Distributed Adversarial Bandits: A Black-Box Approach

arXiv:2602.06404v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study distributed adversarial bandits, where $N$ agents cooperate to minimize the global average loss while observing only their own local losses. We show that the minimax regret for this problem is $\tilde{\Theta}(\sqrt{(\rho^{-1/2}+K/N)T})$, where $T$ is the horizon, $K$ is the number of actions, and $\rho$ is the spectral gap of the communication matrix. Our algorithm, based on a novel black-box reduction to bandits with delayed feedback, requires agents to communicate only through gossip. It achieves an upper bound that significantly improves over the previous best bound $\tilde{O}(\rho^{-1/3}(KT)^{2/3})$ of Yi and Vojnovic (2023). We complement this result with a matching lower bound, showing that the problem's difficulty decomposes into a communication cost $\rho^{-1/4}\sqrt{T}$ and a bandit cost $\sqrt{KT/N}$. We further demonstrate the versatility of our approach by deriving first-order and best-of-both-worlds bounds in the distributed adversarial setting. Finally, we extend our framework to distributed linear bandits in $R^d$, obtaining a regret bound of $\tilde{O}(\sqrt{(\rho^{-1/2}+1/N)dT})$, achieved with only $O(d)$ communication cost per agent and per round via a volumetric spanner.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines: TRUST

arXiv:2606.18832v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Counterfactual explanations are widely used to provide algorithmic recourse in high-stakes decision-making systems. Most existing methods seek the smallest change to an input that flips a model's decision. However, decision-makers often rely not only on predicted labels but also on confidence thresholds and risk margins. Counterfactuals that barely cross a decision boundary can be fragile and unstable under noise or model variation. In this paper, we propose Target-confidence Recourse Using tSeTlin machines (TRUST), a framework in which users explicitly specify the desired prediction confidence for recourse. Rather than generating counterfactuals and evaluating confidence afterward, TRUST directly searches for minimal changes that satisfy a user-defined confidence target, enabling comparison of recourse options in terms of cost, confidence, and robustness. We instantiate TRUST using a Probabilistic Tsetlin Machine (PTM) combined with Bayesian optimization. The probabilistic clause-based structure of PTM links prediction confidence to the stability of decision rules. We show that counterfactuals satisfying the same rules can still differ substantially in reliability depending on how securely they satisfy those rules, revealing whether decisions are supported by robust or fragile clause activations. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that target-confidence counterfactuals produce more robust and interpretable recourse than conventional boundary-based approaches. Across multiple benchmarks, TRUST achieves perfect robustness while maintaining low recourse cost, including an L2 distance of 0.10 on the Haberman dataset at 0.92 confidence. By explicitly controlling confidence and exposing rule-level stability, TRUST provides actionable recourse for high-stakes decision support.

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

MemToolAgent: Leveraging Memory for Tool Using Agents Based on Environment and User Feedback

Modern large language model (LLM) agents can use external tools to help users solve complex tasks. However, for problems that require learning from long-term historical events or from previous agent-environment interactions, LLM agents are required to use memory mechanisms to store and retrieve experiences. While sophisticated memory systems exist for dialogue agents, few studies have empirically examined how to improve agents' tool-using capabilities through past user-agent conversations. We propose MemToolAgent, a framework that improves tool use through memory management. Our approach contains a memory extraction module that processes past experiences into structured memory entries, and a retrieval module that dynamically selects a subset of the stored memory entries. This enables more personalized and accurate responses aligned with user preferences and feedback without requiring LLM fine-tuning. In summary, this work has three main contributions: (1) a unified memory entry format that improves both general-purpose and personalized tool use without LLM fine-tuning, (2) a reflection-based memory extraction that uses environment and user feedback to distill wrong executions into critiques to store, and (3) a retrieval module that chooses how many past experiences to use based on the memory similarity distribution. MemToolAgent achieves 29%, 80%, and 17% relative improvements compared to strong baselines on the WorkBench, NESTFUL, and PEToolBench benchmarks, respectively.

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

Taming Curvature: Architecture Warm-Up for Stable Transformer Training

arXiv:2606.16768v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training billion-parameter Transformers is often brittle, with transient loss spikes and divergence that waste compute. Even though the recently developed Edge of Stability (EoS) theory provides a powerful tool to understand and control the stability of optimization methods via the (preconditioned) curvature, these curvature-controlling methods are not popular in large-scale Transformer training due to the complexity of curvature estimation. To this end, we first introduce a fast online estimator of the largest (preconditioned) Hessian eigenvalue (i.e., curvature) based on a warm-started variant for power iteration with Hessian-vector products. We show theoretically, and verify empirically, that the proposed method makes per-iteration curvature tracking feasible at billion parameter scale while being more accurate. Using this tool, we find that training instabilities coincide with surges in preconditioned curvature and that curvature grows with depth. Motivated by these observations, we propose architecture warm-up: progressively growing network depth to carefully control the preconditioned Hessian and stabilize training. Experiments on large Transformers validate that our approach enables efficient curvature tracking and reduces instabilities compared to existing state-of-the-art stabilization techniques without slowing down convergence.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

OBCache: Optimal Brain KV Cache Pruning for Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference

Large language models (LLMs) with extended context windows enable powerful applications but impose significant memory overhead, as caching all key-value (KV) states scales linearly with sequence length and batch size. Existing cache eviction methods address this by exploiting attention sparsity, yet they typically rank tokens heuristically using accumulated attention weights without considering their true impact on attention outputs. We propose Optimal Brain Cache (OBCache), a principled framework that formulates cache eviction as a layer-wise structured pruning problem. Building upon the Optimal Brain Damage (OBD) theory, OBCache quantifies token saliency by measuring the perturbation in attention outputs induced by pruning tokens, with closed-form scores derived for isolated keys, isolated values, and joint key-value pairs. Our scores account not only for attention weights but also for information from value states and attention outputs, thereby enhancing existing eviction strategies with output-aware signals. Experiments on LLaMA and Qwen models demonstrate that replacing the heuristic scores in existing works, which estimate token saliency across different query positions, with OBCache's output-aware scores consistently improves long-context accuracy. Code is available at https://github.com/DreamSoul-AI/OBCache.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-25

BCoughBench: Benchmarking Respiratory Acoustic Foundation Models Under Body-Coupled Wearable Sensor Conditions

arXiv:2606.25116v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Respiratory acoustic foundation models (FMs) are benchmarked exclusively on smartphone recordings, yet clinical deployment increasingly targets body-coupled (BC) wearables whose sensors attenuate high-frequency content through tissue and bone, leaving FM reliability uncharacterised. We introduce BCoughBench, evaluating five FMs (OPERA-CT/CE/GT, HeAR, M2D+Resp) on nine classification tasks (AUROC, sensitivity at 95% specificity, Expected Calibration Error) and three age regression tasks (MAE vs. a mean-predictor baseline) across five EBEN-simulated BC sensor conditions on five labeled cough datasets. Mean AUROC declines from 0.785 (smartphone) to 0.689-0.723, degrading most under temple vibration pickup ($\Delta$ = -0.096) and least under the soft in-ear ($\Delta$ = -0.062). No FM meets the clinical sensitivity threshold (Se@Sp95 $\geq$ 0.20) on most disease tasks under any BC sensor. Sex classification on the CIDRZ cohort collapses (AUROC 0.954 to 0.596-0.628, $\Delta$ = -0.341) while COVID detection is nearly unaffected ($\Delta$ = -0.004). Age regression is robust, improving under the forehead accelerometer on CoughVID (MAE 9.61 to 8.97 yr); HeAR leads on regression and demographic tasks, M2D+Resp on disease and characteristic tasks. BCoughBench provides a reproducible framework for FM evaluation under wearable conditions.

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

AutoSpecNER: A Fine-Grained Named Entity Recognition Dataset for Vehicle Specification Extraction

Vehicle advertisements contain rich specification information, but automotive NER resources remain limited. We introduce AutoSpecNER, an expert-annotated dataset for fine-grained entity recognition in vehicle listings. The dataset includes 659 advertisements from a popular car-selling website, with over 10,000 entities annotated across 15 categories, including MODEL, ENGINE_SPEC, and BATTERY_CAPACITY. Annotation quality was validated through inter-annotator agreement, achieving an average score of 91.5%. We benchmark rule-based extraction, fine-tuned transformer encoders, and large language models. DeBERTa achieves the best performance with a 90% micro-F1 score, outperforming the rule-based baseline (43%) and the strongest large language model (77.8%).

11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

See-and-Reach: Precise Vision-Language Navigation for UAVs within the Field of View

arXiv:2606.20045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: UAV Vision-Language Navigation (UAV-VLN) is typically formulated as a holistic search-and-reach problem, where long-range target discovery and final target approach are optimized and evaluated jointly. This formulation makes it difficult to assess a critical capability of aerial embodied agents, namely whether a UAV can accurately ground a visible target and translate vision-language evidence into precise 3D motion once the target enters its field of view. To address this limitation, we introduce UAV-VLN-FOV, a target-visible navigation task that isolates the see-and-reach stage and enables a more diagnostic evaluation of terminal reaching ability. We further propose 3DG-VLN, a vision-language waypoint prediction framework guided by dynamic 3D direction cues to enhance fine-grained visual grounding and spatial direction alignment for precise target reaching. Specifically, 3DG-VLN adaptively processes high-resolution front-view and downward-view observations to preserve fine-grained visual and geometric details for target grounding. It also updates the target-relative direction online during closed-loop navigation, allowing the agent to maintain spatial alignment with the target and reduce accumulated direction drift. To support this task, we construct a dedicated high-resolution benchmark which contains 2,717 trajectories with target-oriented high-level instructions, high-resolution front-view and downward-view egocentric observations, and continuous 3D waypoint annotations. Experiments show that 3DG-VLN outperforms competitive UAV-VLN baselines, achieving a 13.82\% improvement in success rate. Real-world trials further demonstrate the potential of 3DG-VLN for practical see-and-reach navigation. The source code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/xuefanfu/3DG-VLN.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Quantum Correlations of Neutrinos in the Kerr-Newman Space-time

arXiv:2605.10424v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Quantum phases provide a connection between gravitation and quantum information, which proposes a novel avenue to explore the properties of space-time. In this paper, we investigate the quantum correlations (QCs) of neutrinos in the Kerr–Newman space-time. Both radial and non-radial propagations are considered under the weak-field approximation. The results show that, for inward propagations, the oscillation probabilities and QCs differ significantly from those obtained in the Schwarzschild metric. In the case of radial outward propagation, the larger angular momentum $a$ increases the oscillation period of the survival probability $P_{ee}$, entanglement, and monogamy of nonlocality, whereas the larger charge $Q$ decreases the corresponding periods. For non-radial propagations, $M$ and $a$ can noticeably modulate the amplitudes of the considered QCs, which is not observed in the case of radial propagations. Furthermore, we find that, despite differences in their variation ranges, entanglement and coherence exhibit highly consistent oscillation behaviors in both radial and non-radial propagation cases. These findings provide a comprehensive understanding for the neutrinos-based relativistic quantum information.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Does VLA Even Know the Basics? Measuring Commonsense and World Knowledge Retention in Vision-Language-Action Models

arXiv:2606.19297v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Embodied Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are typically obtained by fine-tuning powerful pretrained VLMs on robotics data, yet it is unclear how much commonsense and factual knowledge they retain after adaptation. Failures on knowledge-sensitive tasks are ambiguous, conflating missing knowledge with poor generalization of low-level control. We introduce Act2Answer, a lightweight protocol that adapts VLM knowledge benchmarks to VLA evaluation by requiring agents to answer through action. Each question becomes a short tabletop episode where the agent performs a single object-placement action to select among candidate answers, yielding an action-grounded success rate with reduced control confounds. We curate a test suite of such environments across diverse commonsense and world-knowledge categories and introduce layerwise intent probing to localize answer-relevant information across the VLM backbone and action head. In a large-scale study of 7 VLA models and 9 VLM baselines, we systematically rank models across categories, finding that VLAs show solid performance on simple concepts while exhibiting larger gaps on richer semantic categories relative to their source VLMs, that VQA co-training is associated with better knowledge retention, and that answer-relevant signals peak in middle VLA layers but attenuate in upper layers. Act2Answer is available at https://tttonyalpha.github.io/act2answer/.

14.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-17

Optional Stopping for Superhedging Supermartingales

arXiv:2606.17452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Superhedging supermartingales, introduced by the authors in previous work, are non-probabilistic processes defined via subadditive outer integrals that carry a purely financial interpretation in terms of superhedging cost. Building on the Leinert-König theory of non-lattice integration, the present paper establishes several results that are classical in probability theory but whose non-probabilistic proofs require fundamentally new arguments: (i) a tower inequality for the conditional outer integral \overline{\sigma}_j applied at stopping times, reducing to equality when the integrand is conditionally integrable; (ii) three versions of Doob's optional stopping theorem, organised by the class of supermartingale and the range of the stopping times; and (iii) Dubins' upcrossing inequality in both finite- and infinite-time horizons. A key structural result, property (K)-a.e., identifies conditions under which the two superhedging operators \overline{\sigma}_j and \overline{I}_j coincide on non-negative functions, extending the scope of all preceding results to the positive operator \overline{I}_j. None of the proofs invoke classical measure-theoretic tools; in particular, (classical) integrability and measurability are not assumed. The analogues of classical stochastic results acquire a purely financial interpretation and, in this way, gain depth and generality by providing a context that is independent of any a priori probabilistic structure.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Looked but didn't see: inattentional blindness and yes-bias confabulation in vision-language models

Previous work showed that many participants fail to notice a gorilla in a video of people playing basketball. Another study found that 83% of trained radiologists failed to report a gorilla figure inserted into a chest CT nodule-search task, even though eye-tracking revealed that most observers had foveated the figure. We ask whether a similar phenomenon exists in contemporary vision-language models (VLMs). We find that (i) VLMs are capable of spotting the gorilla in both still-frame images and videos of lung CT scans; (ii) models display inattentional blindness, which varies according to model generation and type of stimulus presented; (iii) Gemini-3.1-Pro outperforms most other flagship and open-weight VLMs at identifying the presence or absence of the gorilla. We additionally ran a segmentation experiment utilizing two different model classes: a generalist (SAM 3), which found the gorilla but produced little to no results for anatomy-based prompts; a medical specialist (BiomedParse), which produced more promising anatomy-based results but flagged "gorilla" on gorilla-free control videos on 82% of frames. The behavioral signature of inattentional blindness reproduces in VLMs, but a unique confabulation failure mode means that any "did the model see X" claim requires signal-detection analysis with a matched-control false-alarm baseline.

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-24

Full-resolution MLPs Empower Medical Dense Prediction

Dense prediction is a fundamental requirement for many medical vision tasks such as medical image restoration, registration, and segmentation. The most popular vision model, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), has reached bottlenecks due to the intrinsic locality of convolution operations. Recently, transformers have been widely adopted for dense prediction for their capability to capture long-range visual dependence. However, due to the high computational complexity and large memory consumption of self-attention operations, transformers are usually used at downsampled feature resolutions. Such usage cannot effectively leverage the tissue-level textural information available only at the full image resolution. This textural information is crucial for medical dense prediction as it can differentiate the subtle human anatomy in medical images. In this study, we hypothesize that Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are superior alternatives to transformers in medical dense prediction where tissue-level details dominate the performance, as MLPs enable long-range dependence at the full image resolution. To validate our hypothesis, we develop a full-resolution hierarchical MLP framework that uses MLPs beginning from the full image resolution. We evaluate this framework with various MLP blocks on a wide range of medical dense prediction tasks including restoration, registration, and segmentation. Extensive experiments on six public well-benchmarked datasets show that, by simply using MLPs at full resolution, our framework outperforms its CNN and transformer counterparts and achieves state-of-the-art performance on various medical dense prediction tasks.

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

Quantum statistical enhancement of collective behaviour in a bosonic active Ising model

arXiv:2606.18091v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collective behaviour such as flocking (the collective motion of a spontaneously formed group along a common direction) or aster formation (the binding of opposing flocks, inhibiting each others motion) are intriguing emergent phenomena in active systems with local alignment rules. Until recently, their occurrence was mainly studied for classical systems, a prime example being the active Ising model (AIM), which translates the main ingredients of flocking and aster formation (i.e., alignment and self-propulsion) to a lattice framework. Here we introduce and study a one-dimensional (1D) quantum lattice variant of the AIM, based on ideal bosons with a spin degree of freedom. We find that both the collective behaviours of the 1D classical model, flocking and aster formation, are markedly enhanced by the bosonic quantum statistics. This contrasts with a recent quantum generalization of the AIM based onto hard-core bosons [Khasseh et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 135, 248302 (2025)], where flocking, but neither its quantum-statistical stabilization nor aster states were observed as a consequence of interactions. Moreover, we investigate the competition of this quantum statistical stabilization of collective phases with their suppression by the quantum fluctuations induced by a transverse external magnetic field.

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

On Local Population-Risk Certificates

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19147v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops local certificates for population-risk increments around a current model. For a local candidate set \(\mathcal D\), the certificate is a two-sided confidence band for \(P({\ell_{\theta+v}-\ell_\theta})\) over \(v\in\mathcal D\). As an application, the upper endpoint of this band yields a risk-controlled update rule: an update is accepted only when its certified upper endpoint is nonpositive; otherwise the current model is retained.

19.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for Antibody Sequence-Structure Design

Antibodies specifically recognize antigens and play a central role in therapeutic discovery. Designing antibodies for a given antigen remains challenging because antigen-antibody complex data are limited, whereas the sequence and conformational spaces of complementarity-determining regions (CDRs) are large. Retrieved CDR templates from databases or candidate libraries can narrow the design space and improve controllability, but retrieval for novel antigens is often sparse and imperfect; treating retrieved templates as hard conditions can bias the denoising process and cause negative transfer. To address this problem, we propose Robust Conditional Diffusion with Noisy Templates for antibody sequence-structure design (NT-ABDiff), a joint diffusion framework that treats candidate CDR-only templates as optional and potentially unreliable conditions. NT-ABDiff uses reliability-aware template modulation to estimate the context-conditioned usefulness of each candidate and to adaptively reweight and fuse multiple templates during conditioning. We further train the model with mixed-quality and corrupted templates as conditional perturbation regularization, encouraging the denoiser to exploit informative templates while remaining stable when templates are uninformative. Experiments under controlled template shifts and a train-set retrieval evaluation show that NT-ABDiff improves CDR-H3 sequence recovery and structural accuracy over strong baselines, while retaining robustness to missing, mismatched, and corrupted templates. Under a stringent random-template CDR-H3 evaluation, NT-ABDiff improves amino-acid recovery (AAR) from 30.03% to 39.47% and reduces RMSD from 3.160 to 2.915A; with train-set retrieval candidates, it achieves 39.50% AAR and 2.76 {ring} A RMSD. Code, processed splits, {ring} configuration files, and evaluation scripts are available at https://github.com/ShiDeng7rz/NT-ABDiff.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Lattice surgery for near-term experimental logical qubit entanglement creation in planar architectures

arXiv:2606.15190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In the era of early fault-tolerant quantum computing, basic demonstrations of entanglement operations between a few logical qubits are at the frontier of recent developments in quantum computing. In this work, we describe in detail, at both the logical and physical qubit levels, a logical teleportation protocol between two surface code logical qubits based on lattice surgery. We address several aspects of the teleportation protocol pertinent to superconducting qubit architectures. We explore the modularity constraints in the number and location of stabilizer readouts and compare variants of the teleportation protocol in this regard. Additionally, we investigate potential performance improvements related to in-sequence decision logic and the optimal size of the interface region between two surface code patches on a superconducting chip. Based on our simulations, we show possible near-term improvements in lattice surgery protocols that facilitate fault-tolerant quantum computing in superconducting circuit architectures.

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

VGGHeads: 3D Multi Head Alignment with a Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset

Human head detection, keypoint estimation, and 3D head model fitting are essential tasks with many applications. However, traditional real-world datasets often suffer from bias, privacy, and ethical concerns, and they have been recorded in laboratory environments, which makes it difficult for trained models to generalize. Here, we introduce \method – a large-scale synthetic dataset generated with diffusion models for human head detection and 3D mesh estimation. Our dataset comprises over 1 million high-resolution images, each annotated with detailed 3D head meshes, facial landmarks, and bounding boxes. Using this dataset, we introduce a new model architecture capable of simultaneous head detection and head mesh reconstruction from a single image in a single step. Through extensive experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that models trained on our synthetic data achieve strong performance on real images. Furthermore, the versatility of our dataset makes it applicable across a broad spectrum of tasks, offering a general and comprehensive representation of human heads.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Reform of the intermediate level of the health system in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Adaptations and limits in the stabilization of the personnel of the Provincial Health Division: A cohort study.

Background: Human resources are one of the pillars of health systems. Since the World Health Organization's report on human resources issues, several countries have integrated this component into the various reforms aimed at strengthening their health systems. This study aims to explore the effects of reforming the intermediate level of a health system operating in a fragile state context. Methodology Our study was conducted in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). It was a cohort study of the staff of the 14 Provincial Health Divisions (PHD) out of the 26 existing in the DRC. We established a database of the staff of these 14 PHD from 2016, just after the implementation of the intermediate level reform and the allocation of this staff by the Ministry of Health. We did a recall in 2021, in each of these PHD to survey this staff through a structured questionnaire and supplemented by the files of the agents available in each PHD. Sociodemographic, economic and academic variables were collected and analyzed. Data were entered into an Excel 2016 database and processed with SPSS software version 25. The chi-square test was used for comparison of proportions with a statistical significance level of p < 0.05. Risk ratios ratios (RR) and their 95% confidence intervals were calculated as measures of association. The error threshold was set at 5%. Results A total of 657 agents with an average age of 45.2 years had been identified in 2016 at the start of the survey and in 2021, 118 or 18% of them were no longer part of the PHD agents. Among the causes of absence noted: 48% of agents placed on leave, 16% promoted to other functions within the health system, 16% desertion and dismissal and 11% cases of death. 19.8% of absentees are executives, 19.5% men against 10.3% women; 22.3% of absentees in unstable provinces against 16.6% in stable ones. The factors associated with the absence of agents in the PHD remain the reaching of retirement age [RR (95% CI) = 5.5 (1.2-24.9) ]and male agents [RR (95% CI) = 3.2 (1.3-7.9)]. Among the agents who remained, 92% kept their initial position, 6% were subject to an internal permutation accompanied by a promotion. The factors associated with the stability of human resources at the level of the Provincial Health Division are: female gender, manager with experience or seniority > 5 years, Age > 35 years, Stable province, Presence of a partner bonus. Conclusion Even in a crisis and fragile context, health system reform is possible. It is possible to organize staff recruitment through a selection process independent of the political authorities of the Ministry of Health and supported by the technical services of the Ministry and partners . Experience and the presence of a financial bonus are motivating factors for staff stability. The involvement of Technical and Financial Support Partners in the recruitment process helped the Ministry of Health to minimize political influence in the recruitment of middle-level executives.

23.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Learning User Simulators with Turing Rewards

Learning to simulate human users in interactive settings could advance the training of agent assistants, evaluation of personalization systems, research in the social sciences, and more. Existing approaches generally do so by training a large language model (LLM) to match a single ground truth response, either by maximizing the log probability or by using a similarity reward. We instead propose {Turing-RL}: a Turing-Test-based reinforcement learning approach for training user simulator models. {Turing-RL} uses a discriminative Turing reward with an LLM judge to score how indistinguishable a generated response is from the real user's given the user's history, and the user simulator LLM learns to produce responses indistinguishable from what the user could have said with such rewards. Across two different domains–conversational chat and Reddit forum discussion–we find that {Turing-RL} consistently outperforms baseline methods on both LLM and human evaluation metrics. Our study suggests that optimizing for indistinguishability, rather than response matching, is effective for learning user simulators.

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

Let's Ask Gauss: Improved One-Run Privacy Auditing

arXiv:2606.12733v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Privacy auditing provides an important safeguard by estimating the actual information leaked by a model, thus ensuring that theoretical privacy guarantees hold in practice. We study empirical privacy auditing for differentially private (DP) machine learning, focusing on efficient one-run methods for mechanisms such as DP-SGD. Prior one-run approaches threshold training examples or "canaries" into binary membership guesses, which discards useful information. We show that, in the white-box DP-SGD setting, canary-aligned signals naturally form a sequence of random variables whose normalized sum is asymptotically Gaussian. Leveraging this distributional perspective, we develop a DP-auditing framework that leads to tighter privacy lower bounds from a single training run.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Microbial-based yeast protein is similar to whey protein and greater than collagen hydrolysate in supporting whole-body protein synthesis as determined by the indicatory amino acid oxidation method: a randomized controlled trial

Background: Yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) is a model organism in agricultural and industrial fermentation with nutritional benefits, yet less is understood about its nutritional value for supporting whole-body protein synthesis in vivo, and its comparison to animal-based protein. Objective: This study aimed to determine the effect of microbial-based protein (yeast) compared to a high (whey) and low (collagen) quality animal-based protein on the ability to support whole-body protein synthesis using the indicator amino acid oxidation technique. Methods: Thirteen healthy participants (M: n=6, 24{+/-}4 yr; F: n=7, 27{+/-}7 yr) consumed eight hourly yeast (Y), whey (W), or collagen (CH) protein beverages at 0.9 g{middle dot}kg-1{middle dot}d-1 supplemented with L-[1-13C]phenylalanine in a randomized, cross-over, counterbalanced design. Breath and urine were collected to measure fraction of expired 13CO2 (F13CO2) and [1-13C]Phe oxidation (PheOx) as inverse correlates of whole-body protein synthesis. An a priori 20% noninferiority margin was used to determine equivalency between protein sources. A Visual Analog Scale (VAS) was provided to assess fullness and hunger by protein sources. Results: Protein source had no effect on F13CO2 (P=0.15) or PheRa (P=0.10). PheOx was greater in CH compared to both Y (14.94{+/-}2.16 vs. 12.93{+/-}2.80 mol{middle dot}kg BM-1{middle dot}h-1, P