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01.
PLOS Medicine 2026-05-20

Prescribed hormonal contraceptive use trends in the Estonian Biobank: A longitudinal observational study

by Jelisaveta Džigurski, Märt Möls, Kristi Läll, Hannah Currant, Mall Eltermaa, Estonian Biobank Research Team , Reedik Mägi, Lili Milani, Triin Laisk Background Hormonal contraceptives (HCs) are widely used and have well-documented population-level statistics. Previous studies with short follow-ups have focussed on individual HC use and side effects. However, the same aspects over longer periods, HC formulation switching, and the impact of genetic factors on HC side effects remain understudied due to the limited availability of suitable datasets. We investigated whether the Estonian Biobank (EstBB) is suitable for studying genetic risk for HC side effects. Methods and findings This is a longitudinal descriptive study combining prescribed HC purchase data collected from 2004 to 2022 with genetic and health data from 73,071 female EstBB HC users aged 15–55 at the time of purchase. HC usage was defined by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes G02B, G03A, and G03HB01. Methods included calculating age-stratified annual user prevalence, inferring usage periods from purchases, assessing formulation switching, identifying the International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision (ICD-10)-based side effect-related diagnoses and thromboembolism risk factors, and assessing carrier status for Factor V Leiden (FVL, rs6025) and prothrombin G20210A (PTM, rs1799963) genetic variants as proof-of-concept. Over 19 years, 20 HC formulations with five administration routes (oral pills, transdermal patches, vaginal rings, subdermal implants, intrauterine devices) were used. In the EstBB, combined HCs were the most commonly used among users aged 15–29, while progestin-only HC use increased with age and over time, comparable to the Estonian population. Overall, 64.2% (n = 46,920) of users switched formulations at least once, with 17.7% (n = 12,929) being rapid switchers. Side effect-related diagnoses were observed in 23.1% (n = 2,982) of rapid switchers, with excessive/irregular menstrual bleeding being the most common. Genetic analysis revealed that 5.3% (n = 3,886) of users carried at least one variant previously associated with increased thrombosis risk (3.5% (n = 2,556) carried FVL only, 1.8% (n = 1,276) PTM only, and 0.07% (n = 54) both). Carriers of thrombosis-associated variants had a significantly higher percentage of thrombosis (6.5%) than non-carriers (4.2%; OR = 1.61, 95% CI [1.40, 1.84], p 

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Physics-Driven Spatiotemporal Modeling for AI-Generated Video Detection

AI-generated videos have achieved near-perfect visual realism (e.g., Sora), urgently necessitating reliable detection mechanisms. However, detecting such videos faces significant challenges in modeling high-dimensional spatiotemporal dynamics and identifying subtle anomalies that violate physical laws. In this paper, we propose the first physics-driven AI-generated video detection paradigm based on probability flow conservation principles. Specifically, we propose a statistic called Normalized Spatiotemporal Gradient (NSG), which quantifies the ratio of spatial probability gradients to temporal density changes, explicitly capturing deviations from natural video dynamics. Leveraging pre-trained diffusion models, we develop an NSG estimator through spatial gradients approximation and motion-aware temporal modeling without complex motion decomposition while preserving physical constraints. Building on this, we propose an NSG-based video detection method (NSG-VD) that computes the Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) between NSG features of the test and real videos as a detection metric. Last, we derive an upper bound of NSG feature distances between real and generated videos, proving that generated videos exhibit amplified discrepancies due to distributional shifts. Extensive experiments confirm that NSG-VD outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by 16.00% in Recall and 10.75% in F1-Score, validating the superior performance of NSG-VD. The source code is available at https://github.com/ZSHsh98/NSG-VD.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

DPC-VQA: Decoupling Quality Perception and Residual Calibration for Video Quality Assessment

Recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising performance on video quality assessment (VQA) tasks. However, adapting them to new scenarios remains expensive due to large-scale retraining and costly mean opinion score (MOS) annotations. In this paper, we argue that a pretrained MLLM already provides a useful perceptual prior for VQA, and that the main challenge is to efficiently calibrate this prior to the target MOS space. Based on this insight, we propose DPC-VQA, a decoupling perception and calibration framework for video quality assessment. Specifically, DPC-VQA uses a frozen MLLM to provide a base quality estimate and perceptual prior, and employs a lightweight calibration branch to predict a residual correction for target-scenario adaptation. This design avoids costly end-to-end retraining while maintaining reliable performance with lower training and data costs. Extensive experiments on both user-generated content (UGC) and AI-generated content (AIGC) benchmarks show that DPC-VQA achieves competitive performance against representative baselines, while using less than 2% of the trainable parameters of conventional MLLM-based VQA methods and remaining effective with only 20% of MOS labels. The code will be released upon publication.

04.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

The Internet of Agentic AI: Communication, Coordination, and Collective Intelligence at Scale

Authors:

arXiv:2606.12835v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid emergence of autonomous AI agents is transforming artificial intelligence from isolated model inference into distributed systems of reasoning, communication, and action. This paper develops the vision of the Internet of Agentic AI (IoAI): an open ecosystem in which heterogeneous agents discover one another, negotiate responsibilities, exchange context, invoke tools, and execute workflows across cloud, edge, device, organizational, and cyber-physical environments. We synthesize foundations from single-agent agentic AI, multi-agent systems, distributed computing, communication networks, game theory, and security engineering to characterize the architectures and mechanisms required for scalable agent ecosystems. The paper examines agent deployment models, workflow lifecycles, communication protocols, interoperability layers, resource-management challenges, and trust architectures, with case studies in adaptive manufacturing and distributed operational coordination. The resulting framework highlights the central research challenges of controlled emergence, semantic interoperability, secure identity, incentive-compatible coordination, resource-aware orchestration, and governance for large-scale networks of autonomous agents.

05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Assessment of the accuracy of lung lesions diagnosis in adolescents with osteosarcoma using artificial intelligence

Background. Lung metastases in osteosarcoma (OS) are the main cause of the death. The accuracy of the diagnosis of nodules by computed tomography (CT) of the lungs is critically important for determining the disseminated stage of the disease and planning surgical treatment. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the search for lung nodules increases the accuracy of diagnosis and reduces the chance of missing metastases. Objective: to evaluate the accuracy of lung nodules diagnosis in adolescents with OS using AI. Methods. A retrospective assessment of CT scans of adolescents with OS was performed. A pathological nodule with an average size of [≥]4 mm was considered a target finding. The diagnostic accuracy of an AI algorithm previously trained on an adult dataset was evaluated, and the number of false positives (FP) and false negatives (FN) was determined. Sensitivity, specificity, accuracy, area under the ROC curve (AUC), positive predictive value, negative predictive value, and F1-measure were calculated. Based on the obtained results, the effectiveness of the algorithm was assessed. Results. 248 CT scans of adolescents with OS were evaluated. The following results were obtained: in 5 cases, the AI algorithm showed a FP result (2.02%), in 34 cases, it showed a FN result (13.71%), and in 209 cases, a correct result (both true positive and true negative) (84.27%). The diagnostic accuracy of the algorithm was 0.843 (95% CI 0.794-0.887). The application of the AI algorithm in the practice of an X-ray doctor in a specific clinical task would allow to increase the sensitivity from 0.805 to 0.891, while ensuring an absolute decrease in the number of FN results by 8.59% and a relative decrease by 44%. Conclusion. The obtained results confirm the practical value of the application of the AI algorithm and justify the implementation of AI-assisted systems in the diagnostic protocols for lung metastases in adolescents with OS.

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

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.18132v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% – 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.

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

When Cognitive Graphs Meet LLMs: BDEI Cognitive Pathways for Panic Emotional Arousal Prediction

Predicting individual panic emotional arousal timing before manifestation is essential for proactive emergency intervention. Existing methods incorporate cognitive elements but none explicitly model the emotional arousal process, making them ill-suited for emotional arousal timing prediction. We argue that grounding prediction in appraisal emotion theory is necessary because it explicitly models this process, but three problems must be solved. (1) Appraisal theory posits that emotion arises from simultaneous evaluation across multiple threat dimensions, yet no prior work fuses these inputs into risk perception. (2) Existing cognitive models lack an Emotion node, decoupling threat appraisal from emotional arousal and forcing emotions to be inferred indirectly from behaviors. (3) Given their generalizable cognitive reasoning, current approaches adopt LLMs as the primary decision-maker, yet overlook the fragility and hallucination-proneness of their outputs. To address these issues, we introduce PanicCognitivePath (PCP), a framework that addresses all three. A Psychological Safety Distance (PSD) model, grounded in psychological distance theory, maps four-domain signals into a unified risk metric as the entry condition for subsequent cognitive reasoning. An explicit Emotion node grounded in appraisal emotion theory is introduced into BDI, forming a Belief-Desire-Emotion-Intention (BDEI) pathway. Agents whose risk metric exceeds the PSD threshold enter this pathway, coupling threat appraisal directly to emotional arousal. The BDEI pathway governs all state transitions while the LLM is confined to parameter estimation for the Belief-to-Desire transition, confining hallucinations to a single step and preventing error propagation. Experiments on Hurricane Sandy show PCP improves arousal timing accuracy by 10.68% over baselines, reduces peak count error to 7.07%.

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

Causal Emotion Recognition in Conversation: Context Saturation and Discourse-Marker Evidence

We address two persistent gaps in Emotion Recognition in Conversation: which modeling choices materially affect performance, and how recognition findings connect to interpretable discourse-level patterns. We study both through a systematic investigation on IEMOCAP with cross-dataset validation on MELD. For recognition, we run controlled ablations with 10 random seeds and paired significance tests with multiple-comparisons correction, yielding three findings. First, conversational context is the dominant factor, but performance saturates quickly: roughly 90% of the gain is captured within the most recent 10-30 preceding turns, depending on the label set. Second, hierarchical sentence representations help most in utterance-only settings and show a clear advantage on MELD, but their benefit disappears once turn-level context is available, suggesting that conversational history subsumes much of the intra-utterance structure. Third, integrating an external affective lexicon does not improve results, consistent with pretrained encoders already capturing most of the affective signal needed for ERC. Under a strictly causal setting, our simple models achieve strong performance (82.69% 4-way; 67.07% 6-way weighted F1), showing that competitive accuracy is achievable without future turns. For linguistic analysis, we examine 5,286 discourse-marker occurrences and find a reliable association between emotion and marker position (p < .0001). Sad utterances show reduced left-periphery marker usage (21.9%) relative to other emotions (28-32%), consistent with accounts linking left-periphery markers to active discourse management. This aligns with our recognition results, where Sad benefits most from conversational context (+22 percentage points), suggesting sadness may be more context-dependent than emotions with stronger local pragmatic cues.

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

An Agentic Retrieval Framework for Autonomous Context-Aware Data Quality Assessment

arXiv:2606.13692v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Data quality assessment is a critical prerequisite for effective data analytics and data-driven decision-making, yet it remains a challenging task due to the inherently context-dependent nature of data quality. Existing approaches often rely on static rules or manual assessment strategies, limiting their adaptability to diverse usage scenarios and constraining automation at scale. Recent advances in artificial intelligence, particularly large language models, offer new opportunities for automating data quality assessment, but raise concerns related to reliability, grounding, and execution safety. In this paper, we propose a unified agentic-retrieval framework for autonomous context-aware data quality assessment. The framework interprets natural-language descriptions of intended data usage, derives context-aware assessment strategies, and generates executable validation logic through a multi-agent workflow. To ensure operational reliability, the framework introduces a feasibility validation stage that evaluates the realism and executability of generated assessment specifications before execution, enabling iterative refinement when necessary. Accepted validation logic is executed deterministically to guarantee reproducible and auditable results. We implement the proposed framework as an end-to-end prototype and evaluate it across multiple usage scenarios applied to the same dataset. The results demonstrate that assessment outcomes adapt meaningfully to different intended uses, while feasibility-gated execution reduces unrealistic or non-executable rule generation. The proposed approach provides a practical foundation for deploying autonomous yet controlled data quality assessment in modern data-driven environments.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

From Period Finding to Lattice Sampling: Experimental Insights into Shor's and Regev's Factoring Algorithms

arXiv:2606.17647v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum algorithms for integer factorization represent one of the most prominent applications of quantum computation, with far-reaching implications for modern cryptography. While Shor's algorithm provides a polynomial-time solution in the ideal quantum model, its practical implementation is severely constrained by the limitations of current noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. These constraints have motivated the exploration of alternative factoring algorithms with different structural and resource trade-offs. In this work, we present an experimental study of Regev's quantum factoring algorithm, implemented on real quantum hardware, and compare its behavior with that of Shor's algorithm under analogous conditions. Focusing on the case N = 15, we execute both algorithms on the QMIO quantum computer at the Centro de Supercomputacion de Galicia (CESGA) and contrast the results with one of IBM's open-access quantum computers and ideal simulations. This parallel execution enables a low-level comparison of the two algorithms, highlighting how their respective quantum implementations interact with hardware noise, limited circuit depth, and finite sampling. Our analysis emphasizes the different ways in which Shor's and Regev's algorithms encode arithmetic structure into quantum states through Fourier sampling in one and higher dimensions, respectively, and how these differences manifest in experimental outcomes. Although neither algorithm demonstrates a practical advantage in the small N regime, the results provide insight into their relative robustness and failure modes on contemporary quantum devices. This study illustrates the value of experimental benchmarking of alternative quantum factoring algorithms as a means of understanding the practical implications of algorithmic design choices in the NISQ era.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Extensible Fluxonium Architecture Using Tunable Couplers with Low Shunt Capacitance

arXiv:2606.01647v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fluxonium qubits have demonstrated high-fidelity operations and long coherence times in small-scale systems, highlighting their promise for quantum computing. However, large-scale integration into a high-performance two-dimensional (2D) qubit array remains the central challenge for practical applications. In this work, we introduce an extensible architecture for scaling up fluxonium qubits in 2D grids. To address the key challenges, namely achieving controllable strong interaction and high connectivity for qubits featuring small shunting capacitors (footprints), we propose using low-shunt-capacitance couplers to enable tunable interactions between fluxonium qubits. When embedded into 2D square lattices, large couplings can be achieved even with relatively small coupling capacitances, thus enabling multiple connections with sufficient capacitance budget. We further propose coupler realizations based on generalized flux qubit circuits, specifically the quarton and the fluxonium, and demonstrate that both enable fast, high-fidelity gates with low spectator errors, while supporting multiple connections on 2D grids.

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

Scalable anomaly detection via a univariate Christoffel function

arXiv:2606.12483v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Anomaly detection plays a critical role in identifying unusual patterns across domains such as fraud detection, network intrusion, and system fault diagnosis. Recently, Christoffel function-based methods, rooted in polynomial optimization, have emerged as promising alternatives to deep learning due to their strong mathematical foundations and computational frugality. However, their practical applicability is hindered by the need to invert a matrix whose size grows exponentially with the data dimension, rendering the method intractable even for moderate-dimensional datasets. This paper addresses the dimensionality limitations of Christoffel function-based anomaly detection while preserving its key theoretical properties, i.e., the on-off support dichotomy behavior and the accurate support shape capture. We introduce UCF, a univariate Christoffel function which is based on the squared distance between the query point and the support points. Extensive experiments on the ADBench benchmark demonstrate that UCF consistently outperforms 14 state-of-the-art baselines in terms of Average Precision. By resolving the scalability bottleneck of the Christoffel Function, this work expands the toolkit of anomaly detection methods with a robust, theoretically grounded, and universally applicable approach.

13.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

VarEx: A Large Language Model Pipeline for Automated Extraction of Exposures, Outcomes, and Covariates from Epidemiologic Studies

Objective: Observational studies are essential for investigating risk factors for Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD), but inconsistent reporting and selection of covariates can contribute to residual confounding, omitted-variable bias, and reduced reproducibility. We developed and evaluated VAREX (Variable Extraction), a large language model (LLM)-based information extraction framework designed to automatically identify exposures, outcomes, and covariates from epidemiologic studies and populate structured evidence repositories. Materials and Methods: VAREX combines retrieval-augmented generation, biomedical language-model embeddings, semantic chunking, cross-encoder reranking, and prompt-engineered LLM workflows to extract epidemiologic variables from full-text biomedical articles. The framework was evaluated using a reference-standard corpus of observational studies examining blood pressure variability (BPV) and Alzheimer's disease-related dementias (ADRD), together with external validation datasets involving other exposure-outcome relationships. Extracted variables were compared with independently curated human reference standards using semantic matching and one-to-one assignment procedures. Covariates were additionally classified into ten epidemiologically relevant semantic categories. Results: In the primary BPV[-&gt;]ADRD corpus (10 studies), VAREX achieved a precision of 0.91, recall of 0.84, and F1-score of 0.87 for variable extraction. Covariate classification accuracy was 0.90, yielding a strict extraction-and-classification F1-score of 0.78. External validation datasets demonstrated comparable performance across diverse epidemiologic domains, with extraction F1-scores ranging from 0.73 to 0.85. Category-level performance was strongest for health behaviors (F1=0.96), sociodemographic variables (F1=0.90), and medication exposures (F1=0.89). Compared with published estimates of manual systematic-review effort, VAREX reduced processing time from approximately 61 minutes to 9 minutes per article, representing an 85.7% reduction in review time. Discussion: These findings demonstrate that LLM-based information extraction can accurately identify and classify epidemiologic variables across heterogeneous observational-study designs. Automated extraction enables scalable construction of structured repositories of exposures, outcomes, and covariates while substantially reducing the labor required for evidence synthesis and systematic reviews. Conclusion: VAREX provides an effective framework for automated extraction and classification of epidemiologic variables from the biomedical literature. By supporting large-scale evidence synthesis and structured knowledge resource development, VAREX may facilitate more rigorous observational research, improved confounder identification, and enhanced reproducibility in epidemiology.

14.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Transformer-Guided Graph Attention for Direct Cardiac Mesh Reconstruction: A Structural Digital Twin Framework

Building patient-specific cardiac models sits at the heart of precision cardiology, yet getting those models into clinical use keeps running into the same wall: mesh generation is slow, messy, and frustrating. The standard workflow – segmenting the image, running Marching Cubes, and then manually cleaning up the result – is time-consuming, inconsistent across operators, and demands specialist knowledge most clinical teams do not have. We take a fundamentally different approach. Instead of treating segmentation and mesh generation as two separate problems, we train a single end-to-end network that goes directly from a raw 3D medical image to a smooth, simulation-ready cardiac surface mesh. The core is a 3D Swin Transformer encoder-decoder that extracts volumetric features from CT or MRI volumes, paired with a Graph Attention Network (GAT) head that iteratively deforms a template mesh to fit the patient's cardiac boundary. We tested on the MM-WHS 2017 benchmark using both CT and MRI. Segmentation scores were competitive (Dice of 0.84 on CT, 0.83 on MRI), but the primary focus is mesh quality: mean Chamfer distance of 1.8 mm, with 95th-percentile surface distance below 5 mm. Every mesh is produced in a single forward pass – no Marching Cubes, no smoothing filters, no manual cleanup. We argue that for cardiac digital twin pipelines, geometric fidelity and topological correctness matter more than pixel-level Dice scores. By removing the post-processing bottleneck, this approach makes patient-specific cardiac simulation substantially more accessible for clinical use.

15.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Context-Aware Optimization of Follow-Up Intervals for Type 2 Diabetes Care Using Markov Decision Processes

arXiv:2606.19092v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chronic disease management relies on regular patient-provider interactions to follow-up on disease progression and control. For Type 2 Diabetes (T2D), current guidelines prescribe fixed time intervals between subsequent primary care visits for all patients, overlooking heterogeneity in clinical trajectories and patient characteristics. This study introduces a Contextual Markov Decision Process (CMDP) model to optimize subpopulation-specific follow-up interval decisions using Electronic Health Record (EHR) data from 22,154 T2D patients across 10 primary care clinics. Contexts are identified by: i) dimensionality reduction of variables representing the individual health trajectories utilizing Principal Component Analysis, and ii) assigning patients to contexts via principal components and additional patient-level features using clustering. Two distinct contexts emerged, representing a lower- and a higher-risk subpopulation. CMDP-derived policies recommend: (i) follow-up within 1 month if lab value at current visit is unmeasured; (ii) up to 3 months for elevated lab values or recent hospitalizations; and (iii) 6 to 12 months for sustained glycemic control, with shorter follow-up intervals for patients in high-risk context. The optimal policies achieved lower expected cumulative cost than benchmarks (e.g., in the higher-comorbidity context, the CMDP policy reduced cost by about 34.8%, and in the lower-comorbidity context by about 6.4%, relative to an American Diabetes Association-like fixed interval follow-up policy. These findings demonstrate how context-aware approaches can inform adaptive follow-up strategies, and have the potential to advance chronic care management in primary care by synthesizing machine learning and probabilistic decision models.

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

X-MADAM-RAG: Diagnosing and Handling Chinese-English Evidence Conflict in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems may receive evidence that is not merely noisy but mutually contradictory. This issue becomes particularly salient in multilingual settings, where retrieved Chinese and English evidence may support incompatible answer candidates. We study this problem through X-RAMDocs-ZHEN, a controlled Chinese-English benchmark derived from RAMDocs for diagnosing evidence conflict in RAG. The benchmark contains 300 examples across six balanced conditions, including monolingual support, bilingual agreement, reversed conflict directions, and conflict with optional noise. We further examine X-MADAM-RAG, an interpretable pipeline that decomposes evidence handling into per-document candidate extraction, visible-evidence repair, deterministic candidate grouping, and conflict-aware aggregation. On the original controlled benchmark with Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, X-MADAM-RAG achieves 0.9667 strict accuracy and 0.9767 conflict-aware success, outperforming an evidence-normalized single-call baseline. However, a zero-call rule-only extractor reaches 1.0000 on the same benchmark, revealing strong template regularity. To probe this limitation, we construct a deterministic naturalized stress test that removes explicit answer templates while preserving candidate strings. On its 100-sample subset, rule-only extraction falls to 0.0000, but X-MADAM-RAG also drops to 0.3000 strict accuracy, below both naive and evidence-normalized baselines. A privileged oracle remains perfect, indicating that document-level extraction is the main bottleneck. These findings position X-RAMDocs-ZHEN and X-MADAM-RAG as diagnostic tools for controlled evidence conflict rather than as evidence of general hallucination detection or robustness to natural retrieval.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

HRIR-Former: Grid-Free Time-Domain Reconstruction of Head-Related Impulse Responses with a Spatially Encoded Transformer

arXiv:2603.27998v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Individualized head-related impulse responses (HRIRs) enable binaural rendering, but dense per-listener measurements are costly. We address HRIR spatial up-sampling from sparse per-listener measurements: given a few measured HRIRs for a listener, predict HRIRs at unmeasured target directions. Prior learning methods often work in the frequency domain, rely on minimum-phase assumptions or separate timing models, and use a fixed direction grid, which can degrade temporal fidelity and spatial continuity. We propose HRIR-Former, a time-domain, grid-free binaural Transformer for reconstructing HRIRs at arbitrary directions from sparse inputs. It uses sinusoidal spatial features, a Conv1D refinement module, and auxiliary interaural time difference (ITD) and interaural level difference (ILD) heads. On SONICOM, it improves normalized mean squared error (NMSE), cosine distance, and ITD/ILD errors over prior methods; ablations validate modules and show minimum-phase preprocessing is unnecessary.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

Optimizing Rank for High-Fidelity Implicit Neural Representations

Implicit Neural Representations (INRs) based on vanilla Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) are widely believed to be incapable of representing high-frequency content. This has directed research efforts towards architectural interventions, such as coordinate embeddings or specialized activation functions, to represent high-frequency signals. In this paper, we challenge the notion that the low-frequency bias of vanilla MLPs is an intrinsic, architectural limitation to learn high-frequency content, but instead a symptom of stable rank degradation during training. We empirically demonstrate that regulating the network's rank during training substantially improves the fidelity of the learned signal, rendering even simple MLP architectures expressive. Extensive experiments show that using optimizers like Muon, with high-rank, near-orthogonal updates, consistently enhances INR architectures even beyond simple ReLU MLPs. These substantial improvements hold across a diverse range of domains, including natural and medical images and novel view synthesis, with up to +9 dB PSNR over the same architecture. Code is available at (https://rank-inrs.github.io).

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Why drinking episodes escalate differently: Event-level pathways linking hazardous alcohol consumption and sexual risk

Background: Alcohol-involved drinking episodes vary in whether they involve hazardous alcohol consumption alone, near-miss sexual risk, or sexual risk behavior, but the within-event mechanisms underlying this variability remain unclear. Methods: Guided by syndemic theory, we conducted a qualitative event-level analysis using modified grounded theory among adults in the San Francisco Bay Area who reported hazardous alcohol consumption, defined as an Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test score [&ge;]16. In-depth interviews elicited narratives of recent heavy drinking episodes and yielded 64 discrete drinking events across 22 participants. We focused on 35 events with evidence of within-event interaction between biopsychosocial and contextual factors. Using constant comparison, we identified escalation pathways, characterized interruption, and examined how events diverge into three outcomes: hazardous alcohol consumption only, hazardous alcohol consumption with near-miss sexual risk (when risk was plausible but not enacted), and hazardous alcohol consumption with sexual risk behavior. Results: Two primary escalation pathways emerged. Dose-driven escalation involved cumulative alcohol or substance exposure that progressively impaired awareness and self-regulation. Meaning-driven escalation involved prioritizing connection, intimacy, or belonging despite awareness of risk. Time-driven continuation extended exposure across contexts and amplified both pathways. Hazardous alcohol consumption-only events more often followed dose-driven pathways, whereas events involving sexual risk behavior more often followed meaning-driven pathways. Near-miss events occurred across both pathways and illustrated how interruption before the escalation constraint point, when the capacity to modify behavior became reduced, could redirect escalation before sexual risk behavior occurred. Across events with similar levels of intoxication narratives, outcomes diverged according to when the interruption occurred and whether it altered escalation. Conclusion: Hazardous drinking episodes diverge into different outcomes based on escalation pathways and the timing and effectiveness of interruption. Early and effective interruption before the escalation constraint point may represent a key target for harm-reduction strategies to prevent progression to sexual risk behavior.

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

Vision-Reasoning-Guided Occlusion Removal from Light Fields

Occlusion-robust scene recovery remains a major challenge in computational imaging, particularly in natural environments where dense foreground vegetation severely limits visibility. We propose a vision-reasoning-guided light field occlusion removal framework that combines the visibility recovery capability of light field integration (LFI) with the semantic reasoning capacity of vision-language models (VLMs). Multi-view observations are first integrated via LFI to suppress foreground occlusions and produce an initial visibility-enhanced representation. A VLM is then incorporated as a conditional semantic prior to restore degraded structures and recover fine details, guided by the observed measurements. To improve recovery consistency and reduce hallucination artifacts, we introduce a multi-sample fusion strategy that aggregates multiple generated hypotheses into a unified estimate. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, achieving the highest average SSIM across four synthetic light field benchmark scenes (4-Syn) and strong generalization across structured and unstructured acquisition settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of combining physical imaging constraints with vision-language reasoning for robust perception under severe occlusion, with applicability to search-and-rescue and exploratory robotic navigation.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MNet++: Extended 2D/3D Networks for Anisotropic Medical Image Segmentation

This work demonstrates a full reproduction and extension of MNet, a hybrid 2D/3D convolutional network designed for anisotropic medical image segmentation. The original architecture was re-implemented within the nnU-Net framework to verify its reported performance and robustness to variable voxel spacing, known as anisotropy. Experiments were conducted on PROMISE prostate MRI and a controlled subset of LiTS liver CT under matched preprocessing and compute constraints. The reproduced MNet achieved a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 89.0 +/- 0.9% on PROMISE, within 0.8% of the published result, and 94.3 +/- 1.9% / 54.6 +/- 3.1% for liver and tumor segmentation on LiTS, respectively. Two lightweight extensions were further introduced: (1) a learned Fusion Gating mechanism enabling adaptive 2D-3D feature blending, and (2) a VMamba state-space module for efficient long-range depth modelling. The Spatial Gating variant improved DSC by +0.8% with less than 3% inference overhead, while VMamba improved performance consistency, reducing PROMISE Dice variation to +/- 0.7% and achieving the strongest LiTS liver performance at 95.8% Dice. Both extensions preserved MNet robustness to anisotropy, with delta Dice = 1.5% across 1-4 mm voxel spacing. Overall, the study confirms MNet reproducibility and demonstrates that adaptive fusion and state-space modelling have the potential to further strengthen segmentation reliability under anisotropic conditions. However, further tests are required to provide definitive conclusions.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17

Structural Role Injection in Handlebars-Templated LLM Prompts: Triple-Brace Interpolation, Delimiter Family, and the Limits of HTML Auto-Escaping

Large language model applications build prompts from templates, and Handlebars is a widely used templating engine and the default prompt-template format in Microsoft Semantic Kernel. Its double-brace {{x}} expression HTML-escapes the interpolated value and is documented as the safe default; its triple-brace {{{x}}} expression inserts the value raw. We show that this choice silently governs an application's exposure to structural role injection, where attacker-controlled data carries chat role delimiters that forge a higher-privilege turn. A model-free analysis establishes the mechanism: Handlebars escaping rewrites angle brackets but not square brackets, colons, or Markdown hashes, so it neutralises ChatML, Llama-3, and XML role delimiters (survival rate 0.00) while leaving Llama-2 [INST], legacy Human:/Assistant:, and Markdown ### delimiters intact (survival rate 1.00 for the last two). We then run 5760 trials across seven delimiter families, two attack objectives, and four models (GPT-3.5 Turbo, GPT-4o mini, GPT-4.1 mini, Claude Haiku 4.5) at a combined API cost of 1.63 USD. GPT-3.5 Turbo follows the task-hijack instruction in 97% of raw and 91% of escaped trials, with the escaping protection concentrated in the angle-bracket families and absent for the colon- and Markdown-based families; the harder secret-exfiltration objective, which does not saturate, exposes the same family interaction more cleanly. Claude Haiku 4.5 resists both objectives almost entirely. The escaped default protects only the delimiter schemes whose characters HTML escaping happens to cover, gives no protection for the rest, and cannot substitute for a structural separation of instruction and data.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

SorryDB: Can AI Provers Complete Real-World Lean Theorems?

arXiv:2603.02668v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We present SorryDB, a dynamically-updating benchmark of open Lean tasks drawn from 78 real world formalization projects on GitHub. Unlike existing static benchmarks, often composed of competition problems, hillclimbing the SorryDB benchmark will yield tools that are aligned to the community needs, more usable by mathematicians, and more capable of understanding complex dependencies. Moreover, by providing a continuously updated stream of tasks, SorryDB mitigates test-set contamination and offers a robust metric for an agent's ability to contribute to novel formal mathematics projects. We evaluate a collection of approaches, including generalist large language models, agentic approaches, and specialized symbolic provers, over a selected snapshot of 1000 tasks from SorryDB. We show that current approaches are complementary: even though an agentic approach based on Gemini Flash is the most performant, it is not strictly better than other off-the-shelf large-language models, specialized provers, or even a curated list of Lean tactics.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Beyond a Single Explanation of the Adam–SGD Gap

arXiv:2606.14259v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has identified several factors that can contribute to the performance gap between Adam and SGD, spanning data aspects, architecture design, and optimization properties. Yet these explanations are often studied in isolation, leaving their relative importance unclear. In this work, we revisit these hypotheses through a controlled empirical study across vision, language, genomics, and graph tasks, spanning modern and classical architectures, and carefully designed training setups. Our results suggest that no single factor consistently explains the Adam–SGD gap. For instance, the Adam advantage can (1) persist under a uniform vocabulary distribution yet nearly disappear under a heavy-tailed one; (2) reverse in favor of SGD in softmax-attention models; and (3) become larger under soft architectural modifications, e.g., when ReLU is replaced by a GeLU nonlinearity. This suggests that the gap arises from nontrivial data and architecture interactions, rather than from a single common factor. Yet, we observe a pattern across our settings: a crossover batch size at which the relative advantage shifts from SGD to Adam as the batch size scales. These empirical results are captured by our theoretical gap model, which predicts this batch-size-dependent crossover. Our perspective helps reconcile several existing hypotheses while offering practical insights across domains.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

IUU+DB: Tracking Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated Fishing, Seafood Fraud, and Labor Abuse through LLM-driven Information Extraction

arXiv:2606.18181v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing (IUU) traditionally refers to fishing activities that violate applicable laws or occur in areas that lack applicable laws. We propose the term IUU+ to capture a broader suite of fisheries sector environmental and associated supply chain trade-related crimes and behaviors. Although IUU+ activity is widely recognized as a serious threat to marine ecosystems, markets, and livelihoods, a quantitative understanding of these incidents, e.g., their frequency, geography, species, actors, and patterns in the type of illicit activity, remains difficult to obtain. We propose IUU+DB, a large language model driven system for building a global incident database of IUU+ activity. The system ingests heterogeneous documents, classifies whether they describe relevant incidents, extracts key data elements such as actors, locations, species, vessels, violations, and enforcement outcomes, and supports deduplication and trend analysis. Case studies and validation results show that IUU+DB can help organize fragmented evidence, surface geographic and behavioral hotspots, support fisheries-domain specific research in academia and non-government organizations, assist source and species risk assessments for industry, and provide support for policy implementation and targeted enforcement efforts to government agencies.