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

Acoustic Prompting via Stage-wise Modulation for Few-Shot Learning in Audio Language Models

Authors:
Hyebin Cho↗Jaehyuk Jang↗Changick Kim↗Joon Son Chung↗

arXiv:2606.15751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Audio-Language Models (ALMs) have shown remarkable success in zero-shot audio classification by aligning audio waveforms with text. Recent efforts to improve downstream performance focus on learning optimal text prompts. However, previous approaches focus on the text encoder, leaving the potential of learnable prompts within the audio encoder unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that introduces trainable prompts into the audio encoder to capture task-specific acoustic features. We demonstrate that integrating audio-side prompt learning with existing text-side approaches enhances few-shot adaptation. Through extensive experiments across 11 datasets show that integrating our method as a plug-and-play module alongside existing text prompt tuning generally leads to performance improvements. These findings suggest that explicitly modulating the audio representation space effectively complements text-only prompting approaches. The code is available at https://github.com/hyebin-c/aspl.

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02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

OR-Action: Multi-Role Video Understanding with Fine-Grained Actions

Authors:
Felix Tristram↗Ege \"Ozsoy↗Christian Benz↗Marcel Walch↗Ghazal Ghazaei↗Nassir Navab↗

Fine-grained understanding of operating room (OR) activity could enable workflow-aware assistance, yet remains difficult due to clutter, occlusions, and limited sensing. The prevailing approach to model this environment is scene graphs as an interpretable representation of OR interactions. Converting their frame-wise relational predictions into temporally extended, fine-grained actions however, is challenging without explicit temporal modeling. To enable a principled temporal evaluation of current OR understanding methods, we introduce the first action-centric benchmark built on a publicly available ego-exocentric OR dataset by defining a fine-grained, multi-role action taxonomy and generating dense action segments via distillation from ground-truth scene graph state changes. Experiments on this benchmark show that current scene graph prediction methods struggle to model temporal structure, even when adding explicit modeling through Graph Neural Networks. We therefore introduce a vision-only temporal model that outperforms graph-based methods significantly when using all available egocentric video as input. Building on this model we also introduce a novel multi- to single-view feature alignment strategy that improves single-view performance on multi-role action recognition, mitigating the need for extensive egocentric video capture. Benchmark and code will be released upon acceptance.

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

Evaluating Open-Source LLMs for Multi-Label ATT&CK Technique Classification on CTI Reports

Authors:
Ahmed Ryan↗Saad Sakib Noor↗Md Erfan↗Shaswata Mitra↗Sudip Mittal↗Md Rayhanur Rahman↗

arXiv:2606.18166v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Classifying Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) using MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK) is essential for proactive defense, but historically required extensive human effort. Pre-Large Language Model (LLM) automation sped up this process, but could not resolve the complex language and multi-step attack patterns found in unstructured CTI reports. LLMs addressed previous limitations by using contextual reasoning to understand unstructured text. However, current evaluations rely on simplified, single-technique sentences that ignore the complexity of real-world CTI reports, which often leads to inflated performance results. Consequently, the baseline performance of open-source LLMs on complex unstructured CTI reports remains unevaluated. To address this gap, we constructed a ground-truth dataset of 2,076 human-annotated sentences (1,281 technique-positive, 795 negative) from 83 complex unstructured CTI reports. These sentences were mapped to 114 unique ATT&CK techniques using a six-phase annotation process, achieving \k{appa} = 0.68 inter-annotator agreement. Using this dataset, we evaluated seven open-source LLMs ranging from 8B to 236B parameters across prompt strategy and temperature configurations. The highest-performing LLM achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.22, establishing the empirical baseline for multi-label ATT&CK classification on complex unstructured CTI. Parameter size showed a statistically significant positive correlation with F1 score. Prompt strategy and temperature produced no statistically significant gains across model configurations. These results indicate that current open-source LLMs are insufficient for production-grade ATT&CK classification. The dataset, benchmark, and findings provide a reproducible foundation for future CTI research.

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04.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Wearable-Grade Lead Reduction Disproportionately Degrades ECG AI Performance in Elderly Patients: Evidence from PTB-XL and MIT-BIH

Authors:
Tiruwa↗K. R↗Ghimire↗

Consumer wearable devices increasingly use single-lead electrocardiograms (ECGs) for cardiac monitoring, but these signals contain substantially less spatial information than the clinical 12-lead standard. Whether this reduction dispro- portionately affects older adults, who often present with more complex cardiac conditions, remains poorly understood. In this study, we evaluated the impact of lead reduction on AI-ECG diagnostic performance across age groups. A 1D resid- ual neural network was trained on 21,091 PTB-XL ECG recordings spanning five diagnostic superclasses and assessed using 12-, 6-, 2-, and 1-lead configurations. Under the full 12-lead setting, model accuracy declined from 84.5% in patients younger than 40 years to 66.2% in patients aged 75 years or older. Progressive lead reduction further widened this gap. Under the 1-lead configuration, accuracy decreased by 14.1 percentage points in the 75+ group but by only 0.4 percent- age points in the

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05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Branch-and-Browse: Efficient and Controllable Web Exploration with Tree-Structured Reasoning and Action Memory

Authors:
Shiqi He↗Yue Cui↗Xinyu Ma↗Yaliang Li↗Bolin Ding↗Mosharaf Chowdhury↗

Autonomous web agents powered by large language models (LLMs) show strong potential for performing goal-oriented tasks such as information retrieval, report generation, and online transactions. These agents mark a key step toward practical embodied reasoning in open web environments. However, existing approaches remain limited in reasoning depth and efficiency: vanilla linear methods fail at multi-step reasoning and lack effective backtracking, while other search strategies are coarse-grained and computationally costly. We introduce Branch-and-Browse, a fine-grained web agent framework that unifies structured reasoning-acting, contextual memory, and efficient execution. It (i) employs explicit subtask management with tree-structured exploration for controllable multi-branch reasoning, (ii) bootstraps exploration through efficient web state replay with background reasoning, and (iii) leverages a page action memory to share explored actions within and across sessions. On the WebArena benchmark, Branch-and-Browse achieves a task success rate of 35.8\% and reduces execution time by up to 40.4\% relative to state-of-the-art methods. These results demonstrate that Branch-and-Browse is a reliable and efficient framework for LLM-based web agents.

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

An Improved Generative Adversarial Network for Micro-Resistivity Imaging Logging Restoration

Authors:
Ahmed Faizul Haque↗S. M. Riaz Rahman Antu↗Saif Ahmed↗Asadullah Hil Galib↗Souvik Pramanik↗Mohammad Ashrafuzzaman Khan↗Mohammad Abdul Qayum↗Mohsin Sajjad↗

An improved GAN-based imaging logging image restoration method is presented in this paper for solving the problem of partially missing micro-resistivity imaging logging images. The method uses FCN as the generative network infrastructure and adds a depth-separable convolutional residual block to learn and retain more effective pixel and semantic information; an Inception module is added to increase the multi-scale perceptual field of the network and reduce the number of parameters in the network; and a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block are added to combine the channel attention. The multi-scale module adds a multi-scale feature extraction module and a spatial attention residual block, which combine the channel attention mechanism and the residual block to achieve multi-scale feature extraction. The global discriminative network and the local discriminative network are designed to gradually improve the content and semantic structure coherence between the restored parts and the whole image by playing off each other and the generative network. According to the experimental results, the average structural similarity measure of the five sets of imaged logging images with different sizes of missing regions in the test set is 0.903, which is an improvement of about 0.3 compared with other similar methods. It is shown that the method in this study can be used for the restoration of micro-resistivity imaging log images with good improvement in semantic structural coherence and texture details, thus providing a new deep learning method to ensure the smooth advancement of the subsequent interpretation of micro-resistivity imaging log images.

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07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Fragile Knowledge, Robust Instruction-Following: The Width Pruning Dichotomy in Llama-3.2

Authors:
Pere Martra↗

Structured width pruning of GLU-MLP layers in Llama-3.2 models, guided by the Peak-to-Peak Magnitude (PPM) criterion, reveals a systematic dichotomy in how reducing the expansion ratio affects different model capabilities. While performance on tasks relying on parametric knowledge (e.g., MMLU, GSM8K) and perplexity metrics degrades predictably with decreasing expansion ratios, instruction-following capabilities improve at the 2.4x equilibrium ratio (IFEval: +4.8 points / +46% in Llama-3.2-1B and +3.7 points / +39% in Llama-3.2-3B), and multi-step reasoning remains robust (MUSR). This pattern, observed consistently across both evaluated model sizes, challenges the prevailing assumption in compression research that pruning induces uniform degradation. To investigate this, we evaluated seven expansion ratio configurations using comprehensive benchmark suites that assess factual knowledge, mathematical reasoning, language comprehension, instruction-following, and truthfulness. Our analysis identifies the expansion ratio as a critical architectural parameter that selectively reshapes the model's task performance profile, rather than merely serving as a compression metric.

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08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

STARE: Surprisal-Guided Token-Level Advantage Reweighting for Policy Entropy Stability

Authors:
Haipeng Luo↗Qingfeng Sun↗Songli Wu↗Can Xu↗Wenfeng Deng↗Han Hu↗Yansong Tang↗

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards algorithms like GRPO have emerged as the dominant post-training paradigm for complex reasoning in LLMs, yet commonly suffer from policy entropy collapse during training. We conduct a first-order gradient analysis of token-level entropy dynamics under GRPO and identify a token-level credit assignment mismatch: the per-token entropy variation decomposes into the product of the trajectory-level advantage and an entropy sensitivity function over the next-token distribution, yielding an advantage-surprisal four-quadrant structure and a near-criticality property. Motivated by it, we propose STARE (Surprisal-guided Token-level Advantage Reweighting for policy Entropy stability), which identifies entropy-critical token subsets via batch-internal surprisal quantiles, selectively reweights their effective advantages, and incorporates a target-entropy closed-loop gate for stable entropy regulation. Across model scales from 1.5B to 32B and three task families (Short CoT, Long CoT, and Multi-Turn Tool Use), STARE sustains stable RL training over thousands of steps while maintaining policy entropy within the target band. On AIME24 and AIME25, STARE outperforms DAPO and other competitive baselines by 4%-8% in average accuracy, with reflection tokens and response length growing in tandem, indicating sustained exploration-exploitation balance that further unlocks RL training potential.Code is available at https://github.com/hp-luo/STARE.

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09.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-11

Catecholamine precursor modulation of human exploration: Evidence from a large gender-balanced sample

Authors:
Angela Mariele Brands↗

by Angela Mariele Brands, Kilian Knauth, David Mathar, Tim Roedder, Kerstin Lisner, Jan Peters The catecholamine precursor Tyrosine has been linked to improved cognitive performance, but investigations into decision-making and reinforcement learning processes known to be under catecholamine control are sparse. We examined the impact of a single dose of Tyrosine (2g) on reinforcement learning and exploration in a large (n = 63) gender-balanced sample in a within-subjects preregistered study. Reinforcement learning performance was significantly improved under Tyrosine. Based on previous work, we preregistered the hypotheses that Tyrosine would reduce directed exploration, response times, and physiological arousal. However, neither response times nor physiological arousal revealed the predicted reductions. Computational modelling using an established pre-registered reinforcement learning model revealed that the performance improvement under Tyrosine was due to an increase value-driven exploitation, without affecting directed exploration. Non-preregistered modelling analyses then revealed that accounting for higher-order perseveration substantially improved model fit, and substantiated the observation of increased value-driven exploitation under Tyrosine. Furthermore, it revealed reliable reductions in directed exploration and value-independent perseveration under Tyrosine. Tyrosine thus improved reinforcement learning performance by stabilizing choice patterns in the service of optimizing reward accumulation, modulating several computational mechanisms thought to be under catecholamine control.

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

A Text Recognition Dataset from Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts

Authors:
Fabio Quattrini↗Carmine Zaccagnino↗Costanza Bianchi↗Silvia Cascianelli↗Rita Cucchiara↗

In this work, we target Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) in low-resource scenarios, which arise from underrepresented languages, rare scripts, and degraded visual conditions typical of historical documents. We introduce SCAM (Sahidic Coptic Ancient Manuscripts), a new line-level dataset built from digitized ancient manuscripts written in the extinct Sahidic Coptic dialect. The dataset reflects a realistic and challenging setting, as it combines heterogeneous acquisition conditions across libraries with typical manuscript degradations such as ink fading, bleed-through, and material deterioration. In addition to visual complexity, SCAM poses significant linguistic challenges due to the scarcity of resources for Sahidic Coptic, its uncommon alphabet, and dialect-specific diacritics. To support research in low-resource HTR, we benchmark several state-of-the-art approaches based on different paradigms, highlighting their limitations and strengths in this setting. Our results underline the gap between current HTR performance on well-resourced modern scripts and historically grounded, low-resource scenarios, thus providing a reference point for future developments.

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11.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Sim-to-Real Betting on the E-Process: Bringing "simulators" to anytime-valid confidence sequences

Authors:
Yujia Chen↗Bowen Weng↗

arXiv:2606.24038v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This note describes an integration of the sim-to-real performance estimate with betting (from Chen et al.) and the safe anytime-valid inference (from Ramdas et al.). Using the scaled simulators. The method produces efficient, reliable certificates for the mean estimate, an approach that is especially valuable in robot performance testing. This note gives a primary, self-contained account of the construction; preliminaries of the respective methods are kept at a minimum, and one shall refer to the original works for full detail. Some synthetic examples demonstrating the proposed algorithm can be found at https://github.com/ISUSAIL/Bet4Sim2Real-EProcess.

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

Haiku to Opus in Just 10 bits: LLMs Unlock Large Compression Gains

Authors:
Roy Rinberg↗Annabelle Michael Carrell↗Simon Henniger↗Nicholas Carlini↗Keri Warr↗

arXiv:2604.02343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study the compression of LLM-generated text across lossless and lossy regimes, characterizing a compression-compute frontier where more compression is possible at the cost of more compute. For lossless compression, domain-adapted LoRA adapters can improve LLM-based arithmetic coding by 2x over compression with the base LLM alone. For lossy compression, prompting a model for a succinct rewrite then applying arithmetic coding can achieve compression ratios of approximately 0.03, a 2x improvement over compressing the original response. We further introduce Question-Asking compression (QA), an interactive lossy protocol inspired by the game 'Twenty Questions'. A small model iteratively refines its response by asking yes/no questions to a stronger model, transferring exactly one bit per answer. On 8 benchmarks spanning math, science, and code, 10 binary questions recover 23% to 72% of the capability gap between a small and large model on standard benchmarks and 7% to 38% on harder benchmarks, achieving compression ratios of 0.0006 to 0.004. This is over 100x smaller than prior LLM-based compression (Deletang et al., 2024), suggesting that interactive protocols can transfer knowledge far more efficiently than transmitting full responses.

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

LLMs+Graphs: Toward Graph-Native, Synergistic AI Systems

Authors:
Arijit Khan↗Longxu Sun↗Xin Huang↗

arXiv:2606.11560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced rapidly, but their limitations in structured and multi-hop reasoning underscore the need for graph-native, synergistic artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Graph-structured data underpins critical applications across social, biological, financial, transportation, web, and knowledge domains, making it essential to understand how LLMs can leverage graph computation for grounded, context-rich inference. Three complementary synergies are emerging: LLMs augmented with graph computation for retrieval and reasoning; bidirectional integration between LLMs and knowledge graphs (KGs), where LLMs support KG construction and curation while KGs enforce semantic constraints and factual consistency; and AI agents strengthened by graph algorithms for planning, decision making, and multi-step reasoning. In parallel, LLMs introduce new capabilities for graph data management and graph machine learning (ML) through natural language interfaces and hybrid LLM-graph neural network (GNN) pipelines. This tutorial synthesizes the algorithms, systems, and design principles driving these converging directions, offering data science and data mining researchers a unified perspective on integrating LLMs, graph data management, graph mining, graph ML, and agentic computation into next-generation graph-native AI systems.

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14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Less is More: Quality-Aware Training Data Selection for Scientific Summarization

Authors:
Maria Nefeli Paraskevopoulou↗Tatiana Passali↗Grigorios Tsoumakas↗

Scientific long-document summarization datasets commonly treat author-written abstracts as gold reference summaries, although their quality and alignment with the source article vary. At the same time, publicly available scientific summarization datasets remain limited in scale and structure for modern long-context models. In this work, we address both challenges by a) constructing and releasing one of the largest biomedical and life science datasets for long-document summarization, containing 1.88 million PMC articles, and b) analyzing the reference quality of author-written abstracts with source-grounded and model-based metrics. We show that author-written abstracts vary in their alignment with the full article and that these quality signals can guide training-data selection. Training on selected high-quality subsets outperforms random sampling at matched training sizes and can match or exceed larger random subsets on factuality-oriented metrics. Our findings suggest that reference quality is an important factor in scientific summarization and that quality-aware data selection can improve training efficiency.

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

Rendering-Aware Sparse Sampling for BRDF Acquisition

Authors:
W. Cao↗D. J\"onsson↗Z. Huang↗J. Unger↗

Accurate BRDF acquisition is essential for realistic rendering, but dense gonioreflectometer measurements are slow and expensive. We study how to select a small set of BRDF measurements that is most informative for reconstructing material appearance under a learned BRDF prior. Existing sparse-acquisition methods often optimize samples for BRDF-space reconstruction for all materials, while the perceptual importance of a adaptive measurement ultimately depends on its effect on each rendered appearance. We therefore formulate sparse adaptive acquisition as a rendering-aware optimization problem. Our method combines a set encoder for sparse coordinate–value observations, a pretrained hypernetwork-based/PCA-based BRDF reconstructor, and a differentiable renderer. During sampler training, the reconstructor remains fixed, and gradients from a rendered-image loss optimize the measurement locations. This separates acquisition design from prior fitting and encourages the sampler to choose directions that are informative under the learned material distribution. To make the comparison controlled, we evaluate the uniform baseline, meta-learning method, HyperBRDF method, and our learned sampler under matched sample numbers, train/test split, rendering scene, object mask, image mapping, and metrics. Our central claim: rendering-aware sampling improves extremely sparse BRDF acquisition when final rendered appearance is the target. BRDF-space and combined losses are reported only as ablations, together with joint refinement and image-only latent fitting for unseen materials.

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16.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

Autoregressive Processes on Riemannian Manifolds

Authors:
Meshal Abuqrais↗Davide Pigoli↗

arXiv:2606.24771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper introduces a Riemannian autoregressive (R-AR) model of order one, generalising classical discrete-time stochastic processes to manifold-valued data. The model is based on two parameters, a parameter $\mu$ representing the intrinsic central tendency as the Fréchet mean and an autoregressive parameter $\phi$ controlling the stationarity and ergodic properties. Due to the inherent dependence structure of the R-AR process, the estimation procedure for these parameters necessitates new asymptotic results for dependent processes on manifolds. Thus, we establish a strong law of large numbers for the sample Fréchet mean set of ergodic Markov chains in proper metric spaces. By proving this general consistency result, we move beyond the limitations of classical i.i.d. theory to provide the mathematical foundation required for the strong consistency of our proposed estimators. The framework is validated through numerical simulations in the hyperbolic plane and an application to aerosol size distributions on the Fisher-Rao manifold, demonstrating how the proposed model can characterise mean-reverting dynamics in nonlinear geometries.

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

Quantized Evolution Strategies: High-precision Fine-tuning of Quantized LLMs at Low-precision Cost

Authors:
Yinggan Xu↗Kajetan Schweighofer↗Risto Miikkulainen↗Xin Qiu↗

arXiv:2602.03120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-Training Quantization (PTQ) is essential for deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) on memory-constrained devices, yet it renders models static and difficult to fine-tune. Standard fine-tuning paradigms, including Reinforcement Learning (RL), fundamentally rely on backpropagation and continuous weights to compute gradients. Thus they cannot be used on quantized models, where the parameter space is discrete and non-differentiable. While Evolution Strategies (ES) offer a backpropagation-free alternative, optimization of the quantized parameters can still fail due to vanishing or inaccurate gradient estimation. This paper introduces Quantized Evolution Strategies (QES), an optimization paradigm that performs full-parameter fine-tuning directly in the quantized space. QES is based on two innovations: (1) it integrates accumulated error feedback to preserve high-precision weight updating signals, and (2) it utilizes a stateless seed replay to reduce memory usage to low-precision inference levels. QES significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art zeroth-order fine-tuning methods on a variety of tasks, making direct fine-tuning for quantized models possible. It therefore opens up the possibility for scaling up LLMs entirely in the quantized space. The source code is available at https://github.com/dibbla/Quantized-Evolution-Strategies .

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18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

DeepBD: A Grounded Agentic Workflow for Variant Prioritization and Diagnosis of Genetic Birth Defects

Authors:
Shiyu Li↗Ziqi Yan↗Zhihao Wu↗Jielong Lu↗Weiran Liao↗Jiajun Yu↗Genjie Li↗Zeyu Chu↗Jiajun Bu↗Haishuai Wang↗

arXiv:2606.24779v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Birth defects are a major cause of fetal loss, neonatal morbidity and long-term disability. In the subset with suspected genetic etiologies, exome and genome sequencing have moved many cases from variant detection to post-sequencing interpretation: clinicians must rank patient-specific candidate variants under incomplete fetal or infant phenotypes and heterogeneous evidence from population genetics, variant-effect prediction, gene-disease validity, phenotype ontologies, cellular and pathway context, protein structure and clinical literature. We present DeepBD, a grounded agentic workflow for variant prioritization and diagnostic interpretation of genetic birth defects. DeepBD organizes the workflow into LLM-assisted case structuring, a pretrained evidence engine, specialist evidence modules and a grounded diagnostic review layer. The evidence engine learns patient-specific variant scores from structured rule evidence, sequence and variant-effect representations and phenotype-conditioned biological context, whereas specialist modules and the agentic layer provide tool-based refinement, candidate-pool review and diagnosis-oriented synthesis from ranked candidates. Developed using an in-house fetal and infant cohort comprising 18,622 cases, DeepBD achieved Recall@1/3/5/10 of 0.658/0.882/0.912/0.929 on an internal held-out solved-case benchmark, outperforming standalone Exomiser, DeepRare and prompted LLM reranking baselines evaluated on Exomiser-derived top-20 candidate variants. Ablation and overlap analyses show that rule evidence, mechanistic context, and specialist refinement provide complementary signals. These findings support a grounded agentic workflow that separates evidence integration, tool-based refinement, and LLM-assisted diagnostic review for retrospective variant prioritization in genetic birth defects.

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

HanDyVQA: A Video QA Benchmark for Fine-Grained Hand-Object Interaction Dynamics

Authors:
Masatoshi Tateno↗Gido Kato↗Hirokatsu Kataoka↗Yoichi Sato↗Takuma Yagi↗

Hand-object interaction (HOI) inherently involves dynamics where human manipulations produce distinct spatio-temporal effects on objects. However, existing semantic HOI benchmarks focused either on manipulation or on the resulting effects at a coarse level, lacking fine-grained spatio-temporal reasoning to capture the underlying dynamics in HOI. We introduce HanDyVQA, a fine-grained video question-answering benchmark that comprehensively covers both the manipulation and effect aspects of HOI. HanDyVQA comprises six complementary question types (Action, Process, Objects, Location, State Change, and Object Parts), totalling 11.1K multiple-choice QA pairs. Collected QA pairs recognizing manipulation styles, hand/object motions, and part-level state changes. HanDyVQA also includes 10.3K segmentation masks for Objects and Object Parts questions, enabling the evaluation of object/part-level reasoning in video object segmentation. We evaluated recent video foundation models on our benchmark and found that even the best-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, reached only 73% average accuracy, which is far from human performance (97%). Further analysis shows the remaining challenges in spatial relationship, motion, and part-level geometric understanding. We also found that integrating explicit HOI-related cues into visual features improves performance, offering insights for developing future models with a deeper understanding of HOI dynamics.

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20.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Upper tails for irregular graphs beyond the mean-field regime

Authors:
Asaf Cohen Antonir↗Matan Harel↗Frank Mousset↗Wojciech Samotij↗

arXiv:2606.14564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Let $G_{n,p}$ be the binomial random graph of density $p$ and let $X_H$ be the number of copies of a fixed graph $H$ in $G_{n,p}$. We prove asymptotically tight bounds on the logarithmic upper-tail probability of $X_H$ whenever $H$ is a connected, irregular graph with maximum degree $\Delta \ge 2$ and $p \ge n^{-1/\Delta - \varepsilon_H} (\log n)^{\omega(1)}$ for an explicit $\varepsilon_H >0$. These bounds are expressed in terms of a new variational problem that generalises the combinatorial optimisation problem arising from the naïve mean-field approximation. This new variational problem includes an entropy term that corresponds to the large number of embeddings of certain highly structured graphs in $K_n$. For a certain class of irregular graphs $H$ that we call stable, we show that this description of the upper-tail probability is valid in a range of densities that is optimal up to a poly($\log\log n$) factor. For a further subclass of stable graphs, which includes all irregular complete bipartite graphs, we show that this range of densities is optimal up to a multiplicative constant.

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21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Novel loci and multi-omics risk models for rheumatoid arthritis through a million-participant genome-wide association meta-analysis

Authors:
Velazquez Silva↗G. L↗Dzigurski↗Vosa↗Taba↗Märtson↗Tootsi↗Ulst↗Müller↗Estonian Biobank Research Team↗Org↗Laisk↗…

Rheumatoid arthritis (RA) remains incompletely understood, limiting targeted prevention. In this work, genome-wide association study meta-analyses were performed for RA and seropositive RA, comprising approximately one million participants of European ancestry. Eight and six novel genomic risk loci were defined for RA and seropositive RA, and candidate causal genes were identified, highlighting relevant biological pathways, including established immune pathways and estrogen metabolism. Novel disease-specific polygenic risk scores (PRSs) were constructed, enhancing predictive performance over clinical risk factors (incremental C-statistics of 2.7 and 5.1 for RA and seropositive RA, respectively). In parallel, integrating metabolomic data into high-dimensional models enhanced risk stratification over models based on clinical risk factors and genomics, particularly for seropositive RA, where the hazard ratio of the highest decile increased from 4.869 to 5.697. These findings expand the understanding of genetic factors underlying RA and support the value of including PRSs in risk assessment, while suggesting metabolomic integration may further enhance risk stratification, particularly for seropositive RA.

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22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Comparisons of core component delivery in cardiac rehabilitation programs by country income classification and decade based on the 2025 Global Audit Update: A survey study

Authors:
Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi↗

by Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi, Rachael P. Carson, Karam Turk Adawi, Rongjing Ding, Warner M. Mampuya, Mariya P. Jiandani, Jimena Martinez, Monserrat Cruz Rivero, Claudia V. Anchique, Dinah L. van Schalkwijk, Jonathan Gallagher, Buket Akinci, Dion Candelaria, Jirapa Champaiboon, Daniel F. Quesada-Chaves, Tone M. Norekvål, Iwona Szadkowska, Borut Jug, Evangelia Kouidi, Marta Supervia, Won-Seok Kim, Chamila Mettananda, Lilian Mbau, Gulsim T. Aimakova, Sherry L. Grace, on behalf of the ICCPR Global Cardiac Rehabilitation Audit Update Investigators Background Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a leading global health burden. Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is essential to reducing morbidity and improving patient outcomes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, CR delivery worldwide has evolved, yet these changes have not been systematically charactemkjrized. The objective of this study was to characterize globally: (1) the delivery of core CR components, including risk factors assessed, patient education practices, and program resources; (2) differences in these elements by country income classification and relative to the initial 2016 Global CR Audit. Methods and findings A cross-sectional Audit update was conducted. Program-level data were collected from May 1st to September 1st 2025 using a REDCap survey adapted from previous Audits. Eligible respondents were leads of phase II/post-discharge CR programs providing at least an initial assessment, structured aerobic exercise, and ≥1 additional core component. ICCPR associations and local leaders supported program identification. Main outcomes were core components delivered (10 assessed), risk factors assessed (14 assessed), patient education dose (hours/patient/program), and program resources (17 assessed). Generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) tested differences by income classification and (when applicable) changes since 2016. Of 7,025 programs identified globally, 1,505 (62% median country response rate) initiated a survey from 90/113 (80%) countries with CR. The median number of core components offered was 8/program (p25, p75 = 6, 10), with upper-middle income countries offering significantly more components overall (median = 9), and also high-income countries offering more than low-income countries (8 versus 6, p 

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23.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Decoupled Latent Optimization of Diffusion Models for Full Waveform Inversion

Authors:
Chen Min↗Zheng Ma↗

arXiv:2606.14139v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Full waveform inversion (FWI) recovers subsurface velocity from seismic recordings by solving a severely ill-posed, nonconvex PDE-constrained optimization. Classical regularizers stabilize the inversion but fail to reproduce realistic geological structures; recent diffusion-prior methods improve realism at the cost of a fragile trade-off between data fidelity and prior consistency. We propose Decoupled Latent Optimization (DLO), which relaxes the standard latent-optimization formulation into a quadratic-penalty objective over an auxiliary physical variable and a latent variable. The data-fidelity gradient acts in physical space, the diffusion sampler contributes only through a decoded prior sample, and the standard smoothed-velocity initialization of classical FWI is preserved. On the OpenFWI benchmark, DLO outperforms classical regularizers and existing diffusion-based methods under clean, noisy, and missing-trace acquisitions. The prior, trained on 70*70 OpenFWI models, transfers directly to the Marmousi and Overthrust benchmarks, where DLO recovers intricate fault structures and remains robust to initialization smoothing and measurement noise.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Associations of Chemical Exposures with Psychological Distress and Depression Diagnosis among Waste Pickers in Brasilia, Brazil: A Cross-Sectional Study

Authors:
King Stone↗K. L↗Maia Pelagalli↗Melanson↗Steelman↗Cruvinel↗V. R. N↗Pintas↗C. P↗Macena↗Thygerson↗Thacker↗…

Introduction: Waste pickers face chemical exposures. We evaluated whether chemical exposure is associated with psychological distress and depression. Methods: A 2017 cross-sectional survey included 1,141 waste pickers working in the Estrutural open dump in Brasilia, Brazil. Participants self-reported occupational exposure to 11 chemical categories, 17 psychological distress symptoms, and depression diagnoses. Associations of chemical exposure with mean psychological distress scores and depression prevalence were assessed, adjusted for age, sex, marital status, and income. Results: Mean psychological distress score was higher among those exposed to any chemical (mean of 8.1 vs 6.1; adjusted mean difference [aMD]: 1.8 [0.9, 2.7]) and higher among those exposed to each of 11 chemical categories, for example, smoke (aMD: 1.2 [0.6, 1.7]), batteries (aMD: 1.5 [1.0, 1.9], and oils (aMD: 1.3 [0.9, 1.8]). Depression was more prevalent among those exposed to oils (16.6% vs 10.6%; adjusted prevalence difference [aPD]: 6.3% [95% CI: 2.3, 10.2]), cleaning products (aPD: 5.4% [1.2, 9.5]), medications (aPD: 4.7% [0.6, 8.8]), and aerosols (aPD: 5.3% [1.3, 9.3]) but, not smoke, batteries, greases, insecticides, solvents, paints, chemical containers, or any chemical. Conclusion: These associations highlight the need to consider policy level protections for waste pickers to reduce chemical exposure and guard against psychological distress. Further research is necessary to explore which specific chemicals, within broad chemical categories, are associated with psychological distress and depression.

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

YTClickbait21K: Human-Annotated Multimodal Dataset for YouTube Clickbait Detection Across Diverse Channels and Content Categories

Authors:
Md. Minhazul Islam↗Md. Tanbeer Jubaer↗Amith Khandakar↗Shovon Sarker↗Sumaiya Rahman↗Md. Masum Mia↗Mohamed Arselene Ayari↗Hamed Noori↗

Clickbait content on video-sharing platforms poses a significant challenge to information reliability, yet progress in automated detection has been constrained by the lack of large-scale, high-quality multimodal datasets. We present YTClickbait21K, a human-annotated YouTube clickbait dataset comprising 21,238 videos collected from 40 channels across 29 countries, covering diverse content categories such as news, entertainment, education, and gaming. Each sample includes structured metadata (title, description, engagement statistics) along with associated thumbnail images, enabling comprehensive multimodal analysis. To ensure annotation quality, every video was independently labeled by three annotators using a standardized decision framework that incorporates textual, visual, and cross-modal consistency cues, with final labels determined through majority voting. The dataset exhibits substantial inter-annotator agreement (k=0.65), confirming reliable labeling despite the inherent subjectivity of clickbait detection. By combining scale, annotation rigor, and multimodal richness, this dataset provides a robust benchmark for developing and evaluating machine learning models, facilitating research in cross-modal semantic understanding, and advancing automated content moderation systems.

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