Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

01.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

MFEN:Multi-Frequency Expert Network for Visible-Infrared Person Re-ID

Visible-infrared person re-identification (VI-ReID) is challenging due to the large modality discrepancy between visible and infrared images. We contend that this discrepancy is largely related to differing lighting conditions, including differences in light wavelength and light source type. Recently, frequency-based VI-ReID approaches have achieved notable success because frequency information can better extract identity-relevant contours and details while excluding irrelevant lighting and color. However, existing methods either do not distinguish different frequency bands or focus on only one band, which is insufficient under diverse lighting conditions. To perform comprehensive frequency domain learning, we propose a Multi-Frequency Expert Network (MFEN) that enables multi-frequency modulation and adaptively combines different bands through a mixture-of-experts design. We further introduce Random Frequency Augmentation (RFA) and Frequency Auxiliary Optimization (FAO) to better train MFEN. The three modules are complementary and jointly capture critical frequency-domain details for robust representation learning. Extensive experiments on three VI-ReID datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

03.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Accelerated Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency quantum memory via shortcuts to adiabaticity

arXiv:2603.18399v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) enables coherent light-matter storage, forming the basis of photonic quantum memories that are essential for scalable quantum networks and distributed quantum computing. However, accelerating the storage process violates the adiabatic condition, resulting in the excitation of the lossy intermediate state and a reduction in writing efficiency. We propose and numerically investigate a high-speed, high-fidelity quantum storage scheme by incorporating a shortcut-to-adiabaticity (STA) technique based on counter-diabatic (CD) driving. By introducing a precisely engineered auxiliary field into a conventional EIT system, our protocol significantly shortens the writing time beyond the conventional adiabatic limit while effectively suppressing the transient population of the lossy intermediate state. Furthermore, our scheme demonstrates strong flexibility in pulse design, remaining effective across different temporal profiles of both the control and signal fields. It also exhibits robustness against imperfections in the CD drive. Even with imperfect single-photon writing and non-ideal Rydberg blockade, the scheme retains clear advantages, maintaining high storage performance and overcoming the intrinsic speed-fidelity trade-off of traditional EIT protocols. These features pave the way for fast and robust quantum devices suitable for high-throughput quantum repeaters and advanced quantum information processing.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

SplatPainter: Interactive Authoring of 3D Gaussians from 2D Edits via Test-Time Training

The rise of 3D Gaussian Splatting has revolutionized photorealistic 3D asset creation, yet a critical gap remains for their interactive refinement and editing. Existing approaches based on diffusion or optimization are ill-suited for this task, as they are often prohibitively slow, destructive to the original asset's identity, or lack the precision for fine-grained control. To address this, we introduce SplatPainter, a state-aware feedforward model that enables continuous editing of 3D Gaussian assets from user-provided 2D view(s). Our method directly predicts updates to the attributes of a compact, feature-rich Gaussian representation and leverages Test-Time Training to create a state-aware, iterative workflow. The versatility of our approach allows a single architecture to perform diverse tasks, including high-fidelity local detail refinement, local paint-over, and consistent global recoloring, all at interactive speeds, paving the way for fluid and intuitive 3D content authoring.

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

Chronological Blindness: Benchmarking Temporal Reasoning in Vision-Language Models with CHRONOSIGHT

Human perception of visual scenes is inherently temporal. We instinctively recognise whether a fruit is ripening or rotting, whether construction is progressing or being demolished, and approximately how much time separates two photographs of the same subject. Whether large vision-language models (VLMs) share this competence remains an open and practically important question. We introduce CHRONOSIGHT, a rigorously controlled benchmark evaluating five dimensions of visual temporal reasoning: CHRONORANK (chronological ordering of image sequences), CHRONOLOCATE (ordinal stage localisation from a single image), CHRONODELTA (estimation of time elapsed between two images on a logarithmic scale), CHRONOREVERSE (detection of temporally reversed sequences), and CHRONOODD (identification of a temporal outlier within a set). The benchmark comprises 1{,}000 items across eight process families (biological growth, food transformation, physical weathering, construction, environmental change, human ageing, astronomical phenomena, and urban dynamics) spanning timescales from minutes to millennia. We evaluate eight open-source VLMs (500 M to 19 B parameters) under two prompting regimes and collect human performance baselines. Human performance averages 0.89 across tasks; the best open model (Qwen2.5-VL-7B) reaches 0.40 under direct prompting, a gap we term chronological blindness. Lightweight LoRA fine-tuning on 151 examples raises CHRONODELTA accuracy from near-zero to 0.43, transferring zero-shot to related tasks (CHRONOODD: 0.37; CHRONOREVERSE: 0.64)suggesting the bottleneck is partly instruction following rather than visual perception. Benchmark, code, and predictions will be released upon acceptance.

06.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

NIM4-ASR: Towards Efficient, Robust, and Customizable Real-Time LLM-Based ASR

Integrating large language models (LLMs) into automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a mainstream paradigm in recent years. Although existing LLM-based ASR models demonstrate impressive performance on public benchmarks, their training remains predominantly data-driven, leaving key practical challenges insufficiently addressed – particularly limited downward scalability in resource-constrained deployments and hallucinations under acoustically challenging conditions. To address these issues, we present NIM4-ASR, a production-oriented LLM-based ASR framework optimized for both efficiency and robustness. Grounded in a principled delineation of functional roles between the encoder and the LLM, we redesign the multi-stage training paradigm to align each module with its intended capability boundary. Specifically, we reformulate the pre-training architecture and objective to mitigate the modality gap and improve parameter efficiency; introduce an iterative asynchronous SFT stage to preserve acoustic fidelity and constrain representation drift; and design an ASR-specialized reinforcement learning stage to further enhance recognition quality and robustness. We additionally incorporate a suite of production-oriented optimizations, including robustness under noisy and silent conditions, real-time streaming inference, and hotword customization via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Experiments show that NIM4-ASR achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple public benchmarks with merely 2.3B parameters, while substantially outperforming larger-scale competitors on internal benchmarks – particularly in entity-intensive real-world scenarios. NIM4-ASR further supports million-scale hotword customization via RAG with sub-millisecond retrieval latency, enabling efficient adaptation to emerging entities and personalized user requirements.

07.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Entropy-Gradient Inversion: Moving Toward Internal Mechanism of Large Reasoning Models

The advancement of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has catalyzed a paradigm shift from reactive ``fast thinking'' text generation to systematic, step-by-step ``slow thinking'' reasoning, unlocking state-of-the-art performance in complex mathematical and logical tasks. However, the field faces the fundamental gap between token-level behavioral analysis and internal reasoning mechanisms, and the instability of reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning optimization relying on costly external verifiers. We identify and formally define Entropy-Gradient Inversion, a robust negative correlation between token entropy and logit gradients that acts as a definitive geometric fingerprint for LRM reasoning capability. Building on this, we propose Correlation-Regularized Group Policy Optimization (CorR-PO), which embeds this inversion signature into RL reward regularization. Extensive experiments on various reasoning benchmarks across multiple model scales show CorR-PO consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, confirming that stronger inversion directly correlates with superior reasoning performance.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Insulin4RL: Real-Time Insulin Management in the Intensive Care Unit for Offline Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606.19481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning (ORL) offers the potential to improve the quality of clinical decision-making using historical electronic health record (EHR) data. Current training and evaluative practices in this field rely heavily on EHR datasets that have been temporally discretised into fixed, regular time intervals. Discretisation creates fictional representations of complex clinical scenarios and compromises the generalisability of retrospective model evaluations. In this paper, we introduce Insulin4RL, a healthcare ORL dataset featuring naturally irregular inputs and actions from real clinical trajectories. Derived from MIMIC-IV, Insulin4RL comprises over 375,000 labelled decisions across 12,209 patients requiring insulin infusion titration in the Intensive Care Unit. The dataset can thus be used for research into ORL model performance under realistic clinical sampling assumptions. We provide a description of the dataset's structure and characteristics, baseline performance metrics using model-free offline reinforcement learning, and a standardised evaluation protocol using fitted Q-evaluation. We conclude with suggested areas for future research that could be addressed using this resource.

09.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Agentic AI for Bilevel Long-Term Optimization of Policy-Driven Physical Layer Systems

arXiv:2606.24416v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Network operators' changing policies, service requirements, and stringent real-time constraints render existing methods designed with fixed objectives and constraints ineffective. This paper presents Agentic long-term performance optimization (Agentic-LTPO), a nested bilevel optimization framework that can be applied to adaptive physical layer problem configuration. The key idea is to employ agentic AI to generate upper-level configurations in a bilevel optimization structure, where evolving operator policies, environment summaries, and historical experiences are translated into structured lower-level optimization problem configurations. The lower level solves the problems with updated configurations for real-time physical-layer decisions. Considering cell-free MIMO beamforming as a use case, we embody Agentic-LTPO by designing a new multi-agent decision process with retrieval-augmented experience-based verification in the upper level, together with a closed-form beamformer in the lower level. Experiments demonstrate that Agentic-LTPO exhibits strong adaptability to dynamic operator policies and effectively enhances the system's long-term performance by 57.2% compared to traditional methods.

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

PVminerLLM2: Improving Structured Extraction of Patient Voice via Preference Optimization

Motivation: Patient-generated text contains critical information on patients' lived experiences, social context, and care engagement, but remains largely unstructured, limiting its use in patient-centered outcomes research. Prior work introduced the PV-Miner benchmark and PVMinerLLM models for structured extraction. However, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) alone struggles with rare, fine-grained, and unevenly distributed errors, particularly in token-critical structured outputs. Results: We present PVminerLLM2, an improved set of LLMs for structured patient voice extraction that applies preference optimization to address token-critical errors beyond the reach of supervised fine-tuning. Our method introduces (i) a preference objective with token-level gated stabilization term that prevents degradation of absolute token likelihood under preference optimization, and (ii) confusion-aware preference pair construction to better capture low-separation distinctions. We further incorporate token-importance weighting and inverse-frequency reweighing to address token imbalance and class skew. Across multiple model sizes, PVMinerLLM2 consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving gains of up to 4.43% (Code), 3.50% (Sub-code), and 1.55% (Span), and outperforms baseline LLM trained with existing preference optimization methods. Availability and Implementation: The supplementary material, code, evaluation scripts, and trained models for PVminerLLM2 are publicly available at: https://github.com/Data-Mining-Lab-Yale/PVminerLLM2

11.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

PRISM: Feed-Forward Single-Image 3D Reconstruction via Geometric Warp-Residual Modeling

Reconstructing 3D scenes from a single image is a fundamental challenge in computer vision, with broad applications in virtual reality, robotics, and content creation. Recent methods achieve outstanding performance by leveraging camera-controlled video diffusion models, but rely on iterative diffusion sampling, which greatly limits their practical deployment. We observe that geometric forward warping alone can cover the majority of a target view directly from the input image, with only a compact residual left for the encoder to correct. Motivated by this observation, we propose PRISM, a feed-forward framework that decomposes multi-view latent prediction into a parameter-free geometric prior and a learned residual correction, with no diffusion sampling required at inference. To enable generalization from purely synthetic training data, we devise a two-stage training strategy combining latents supervised distillation for geometric generalization and perceptual fine-tuning for appearance quality optimization. Extensive experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that PRISM achieves competitive reconstruction quality compared with diffusion-based methods, while reducing inference time dramatically to only 36 seconds per scene.

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

Rethinking Scaffolding in LLM Tutors: The Interactional Mismatch Between Benchmarks and Real-World Deployments

arXiv:2606.15766v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A central pedagogical value evaluated in AI tutor benchmarks is scaffolding: guiding students through graduated steps toward a solution. Alignment and evaluation methods for embedding scaffolding behaviour into chatbots, however, rest on an implicit assumption: that students will take up the scaffolding and engage in the conversation. To examine whether this assumption holds, we introduce an evaluation pipeline around two metrics - Chatbot Scaffolding and Student Uptake - and apply them across nine datasets of 9,490 chats, spanning AI tutor benchmarks and real-world deployments of educational chatbots. Our analysis reveals that while benchmarks assume a high-scaffolding, high-student-uptake environment, students in real-world settings exhibit lower levels of uptake overall - frequently bypassing the chatbot's pedagogical framing to drive the interaction toward their own learning goals at little interpersonal cost. We argue that bypassing scaffolding is not necessarily detrimental; rather, it frequently highlights a mismatch between a chatbot's pedagogical framing and the student's learning goals. To meaningfully evaluate the effectiveness of a chatbot's assistance, future benchmarks must move beyond the assumption that students will simply take up the scaffolding, and instead evaluate how these chatbots navigate diverse learning contexts and student-driven interaction patterns.

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

UST-GNN: A Unified Spatial–Topological Graph Neural Network Framework for Urban Analytics–Demonstrated through a Case Study on Urban Health Prediction

arXiv:2504.04739v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding how social, demographic, environmental, and spatial factors jointly shape urban outcomes is essential for sustainable urban development and evidence-based policy. Traditional statistical approaches often struggle to capture complex non-linear relationships, while many machine learning methods overlook the joint roles of spatial autocorrelation and network topology in urban systems. Recent advances in GeoAI have addressed these challenges only partially, often treating spatial effects, graph structure, evaluation, and interpretability separately. We present UST-GNN, a unified spatial–topological graph neural network framework that integrates neighbourhood connectivity, heterogeneous urban features, and positional/locational embeddings into a single representation. Using the MedSAT dataset, which contains over 150 environmental and socio-demographic variables and six prescription outcomes across 4,835 neighbourhoods in Greater London, UST-GNN outperforms strong statistical, geographically enhanced, and graph Machine Learning baselines, improving out-of-sample $R^2$ by 8.4–13.2\% under strict spatial cross-validation. We further introduce a lightweight principal-component module to interpret learned node embeddings geographically and relate them to policy-relevant covariates. The resulting analyses recover established patterns, offer new perspectives on debated associations, and reveal novel predictors warranting further causal investigation. Together, these findings demonstrate the value of graph-based spatial machine learning for urban health analytics, environmental inequality assessment, and evidence-based urban policy. Beyond predictive gains, UST-GNN provides a unified GeoAI analytical pipeline that can be embedded into urban digital twin workflows for scenario testing, monitoring, and data-informed decision-making for healthier, more sustainable cities.

14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Beyond Entropy: Learning from Token-Level Distributional Deviations for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2606.19771v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has significantly advanced Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning; however, it faces a fundamental optimization instability: uniform token updates precipitate entropy collapse, leading to premature convergence to suboptimal strategies, whereas excessive Shannon Entropy maximization can cause entropy explosion, driving blind exploration toward incoherent reasoning chains. To resolve this dichotomy, we introduce the Independent Combinatorial Tokens (ICT) framework, which shifts the optimization focus from scalar uncertainty to the distributional properties of token logits. By leveraging the Jensen-Shannon (JS) divergence between token logits distributions, ICT identifies tokens with distinctive distributional patterns as critical branching points for guiding effective exploration in LLM reasoning. Our theoretical analysis, grounded in both Shannon and second-order Rényi entropy, proves that selectively updating on these tokens regulates policy concentration: it reduces the overall distribution uncertainty measured by Shannon entropy, while controlling probability concentration captured by second-order Rényi entropy. This dual effect prevents over-concentrated token generation from weakening exploration and effectively stabilizes the training landscape. Empirical results demonstrate that updating only the top 10% of unique tokens on Qwen2.5 (0.5B/1.5B/7B) models yields an average pass@4 improvement of 4.58%, with a maximum gain of 14.9%, over GRPO, 20-Entropy, and STAPO baselines across seven benchmarks spanning math, commonsense, and Olympiad-level problems.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-23

Intrapartum Oxytocin and Maternal Outcomes Following Vaginal and Unscheduled Cesarean Delivery

Objective To examine whether intrapartum synthetic oxytocin exposure for labor induction or augmentation is associated with breastfeeding and postpartum depressive and traumatic stress symptoms. Methods We studied 1,296 postpartum women who delivered at a single tertiary care center, with assessments from the third trimester through approximately two months postpartum. Intrapartum oxytocin exposure was obtained from electronic medical records. Outcomes included exclusive breastfeeding, postpartum depression, and childbirth-related traumatic stress. Analyses were stratified by delivery mode and adjusted for key maternal and obstetric covariates. Results Overall, 63.3% of participants received intrapartum oxytocin. Among participants with vaginal delivery, oxytocin exposure was associated with lower exclusive breastfeeding at two months after adjustment (58.2% vs 70.3%; adjusted RR 0.86, 95% CI 0.76- 0.97; p = 0.02), but not with postpartum mental health outcomes. Among participants with unscheduled cesarean delivery, oxytocin exposure was independently associated with higher immediate postpartum depressive symptoms (F = 4.97, p = 0.03), acute childbirth-related stress (F = 4.56, p = 0.03), and two-month childbirth-related posttraumatic stress symptoms (F = 4.30, p = 0.04), but not two-month depressive symptoms. Conclusion Intrapartum oxytocin exposure was associated with lower exclusive breastfeeding after vaginal delivery and modestly higher childbirth-related distress after unscheduled cesarean delivery. These findings suggest that oxytocin exposure may mark or contribute to postpartum vulnerability in specific delivery contexts.

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

Learning QoE from Packet-Level Measurements in Encrypted Video Conferencing Traffic

The quality of the user experience has become one of the most important aspects in todays world, as it directly influences individuals willingness to continue using or abandon a product or service. In this context, video conferencing applications (VCAs), which experienced widespread adoption following the COVID-19 pandemic, must deliver excellent performance to remain competitive in an increasingly crowded market. Although content providers (CPs) such as Zoom, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Meet can assess conversation quality by comparing transmitted and received data. The widespread use of end-to-end encryption in VCAs makes quality-of-experience (QoE) evaluation by internet service providers (ISPs) far more challenging. Since ISPs do not have access to the encrypted content, they must rely on passive measurements of unencrypted traffic characteristics on the data path. In this work, we present a simple yet effective QoE prediction framework based on an almost stock convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture that uses only the packet sizes extracted from the communication between two participants in a video conferencing (VC) call to predict two QoE metrics: BRISQUE and MOS. The proposed framework is simple, easy to implement, and does not require high-end computational resources, yet it provides superior prediction performance, as shown in our experiments on two custom datasets collected from WhatsApp and Zoom, which achieve substantial improvements over previous models for the QoE prediction task.

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

Implicit vs. Explicit Prompting Strategies for LVLMs in Referential Communication

Two recent studies (Jones et al. (2026); Zeng et al. (2026)) reach apparently contradictory conclusions about whether LVLMs can coordinate on efficient referring expressions. We control for task differences between the studies while directly comparing their prompting styles. We replicate the finding that models can coordinate efficient referring expressions when explicitly prompted to do so, suggesting that other task differences are not responsible for divergent results. However, we also find that the same models fail to infer the need for communicative efficiency from a more implicit prompt, highlighting critical differences between how humans and AI systems communicate.

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

Reducing Learner Redundancy in Boosting via Residual Orthogonalization

arXiv:2606.17567v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While sequential residual fitting is the bedrock of standard boosting frameworks, it inherently breeds learner redundancy by repeatedly revisiting correlated error components. To address this bottleneck, we propose a shift from residual fitting to residual orthogonalization and introduce SCBoost. Our framework tackles redundancy through two complementary mechanisms: Spectral Residual Projection (SRP) and Covariance-Regularized Weighting (CRW). During training, SRP projects each residual target onto the orthogonal complement of the historical prediction subspace, forcing successive learners to capture only novel empirical innovations. During aggregation, CRW optimizes ensemble weights on a validation set with an explicit covariance penalty to mitigate remaining correlations. Theoretically, we provide a finite-sample geometric characterization proving that SRP yields an exact additive residual-energy decomposition. Furthermore, under an isotropic-noise assumption, we rigorously establish the conditions under which this projection improves the effective Signal-to-Noise Ratio. Extensive experiments across ten benchmark datasets demonstrate that SCBoost delivers strong out-of-the-box performance, particularly in accuracy and F1 score. This work reinterprets boosting through a geometric lens, suggesting that explicit redundancy control is a principled and necessary step toward more efficient ensemble architectures.

19.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

$\alpha$-fair heterogeneous agent reinforcement learning

arXiv:2606.13076v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cooperation in multi-agent systems is typically optimized through utilitarian objectives that maximize overall efficiency but fail to account for reward distribution, often resulting in inequitable "leader-follower" dynamics. While fairness-based approaches encourage pro-social behaviors where every agent benefits from cooperation, many current algorithms - including those utilizing reward shaping - break the stationarity of Markov Games or lack rigorous theoretical guarantees. This creates a critical gap between fair objective methods and theoretically safe learning frameworks. We propose a novel framework that bridges $\alpha$-fairness with Heterogeneous-Agent Trust Region Learning (HATRL), ensuring monotonic improvement and convergence toward Nash Equilibria. Our approach leverages a fair advantage function that dynamically weights agent utilities based on their expected returns, allowing the global objective to transition from purely utilitarian efficiency to $\alpha$-fairness welfare based on the parameter $\alpha$. We introduce two practical algorithms, $\alpha$-fair HATRPO and $\alpha$-fair HAPPO, and demonstrate through experiments in sequential social dilemmas like CleanUp and CommonHarvest that they perform better than HATRL's algorithms from a utilitarian point of view while achieving socially higher outcomes.

20.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-04

CIPHER: An end-to-end framework for designing optimized aggregated spatial transcriptomics experiments

by Zachary Hemminger, Haley De Ocampo, Fangming Xie, Zhiqian Zhai, Jingyi Jessica Li, Roy Wollman Motivation Most imaging-based spatial transcriptomics methods measure individual genes, which limits scalability and typically requires integration with scRNA-seq to recover full cellular states. Recent approaches such as CISI, FISHnCHIPs, and ATLAS address this limitation by measuring aggregate transcriptional signatures, where multiple genes are pooled into each channel to increase throughput. While aggregate measurements improve scalability, they shift the problem from gene selection to feature design. For effective integration with scRNA-seq, these signatures must be not only discriminative in transcriptional space but also straightforward to measure, with balanced signal, sufficient dynamic range, and robustness to experimental noise. By optimizing decoding accuracy in isolation, existing methods leave substantial performance on the table. Results We present CIPHER (Cell Identity Projection using Hybridization Encoding Rules), a neural-network framework that jointly optimizes the experimental encoding matrix, i.e., the way that genes are aggregated to signatures, and the downstream cell embedding. CIPHER integrates the physical limits of imaging assays directly into its loss function, shaping the latent space to maximize discriminability while maintaining robustness to measurement noise and signal constraints. Using a large-scale mouse brain scRNA-seq reference, we show that CIPHER-designed encodings yield latent spaces with improved cell-type separability, uniform signal utilization, and greater resilience to hybridization variability, resulting in higher decoding accuracy from both simulated and experimental data. Conclusion CIPHER formulates aggregate signature design as a joint optimization problem over decoding accuracy and experimental measurability. This enables systematic, scRNA-seq-aligned feature design for scalable spatial transcriptomics based on aggregate measurements. Availability Code and documentation are available at https://github.com/wollmanlab/Design/.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Study partner profile effects on CDR-SB change in anti-amyloid therapy evaluation

INTRODUCTION: The Clinical Dementia Rating Sum of Boxes (CDR-SB), a primary outcome in anti-amyloid therapy (AAT) trials, integrates information from participants and study partners. CDR-SB scores may vary by study partner characteristics, but their impact on 18-month change interpretation remains unclear. METHODS: Using the NACC Uniform Data Set, we fitted linear mixed-effects calibration models in an Alzheimer's disease (AD)-primary early symptomatic cohort and propagated study partner-associated coefficients through Monte Carlo simulations. We estimated components of 18-month CDR-SB change under observed profile changes, simulated follow-up imbalance in a common female living-with profile, and tipping-point scenarios. Analyses were repeated in amyloid-positive and trial-like cohorts. RESULTS: The AD-primary cohort included 15,061 participants and 7,683 baseline-to-18-month pairs. Observed profile changes generated a negligible cohort-level component (mean 0.0014 points, 95% simulation interval 0.0006 to 0.0022). Simulated follow-up imbalance generated differences of 0.014 to 0.071 points across 10% to 50% reassignment. Under the primary calibration model, generating a 0.45-point difference, equal to the reported Clarity AD CDR-SB group difference, required median net imbalance >100% and was feasible in 48% of iterations. Amyloid-positive and trial-like cohorts had lower median tipping points but wider intervals, reflecting coefficient imprecision. DISCUSSION: In the large AD-primary cohort, observed study partner profile changes and simulated follow-up imbalance generated CDR-SB differences that were small relative to the 0.45-point Clarity AD benchmark. Biomarker-confirmed estimates were less stable because of coefficient imprecision. These findings suggest limited impact under typical AD-primary conditions but support systematic study partner profile collection and sensitivity analyses in observational and external-comparator CDR-SB studies for AAT evaluation.

22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

LingxiDiagBench: A Multi-Agent Framework for Benchmarking LLMs in Chinese Psychiatric Consultation and Diagnosis

Mental disorders are highly prevalent worldwide, but the shortage of psychiatrists and the inherent subjectivity of interview-based diagnosis create substantial barriers to timely and consistent mental-health assessment. Progress in AI-assisted psychiatric diagnosis is constrained by the absence of benchmarks that simultaneously provide realistic patient simulation, clinician-verified diagnostic labels, and support for dynamic multi-turn consultation. We present LingxiDiagBench, a large-scale multi-agent benchmark that evaluates LLMs on both static diagnostic inference and dynamic multi-turn psychiatric consultation in Chinese. At its core is LingxiDiag-16K, a dataset of 16,000 EMR-aligned synthetic consultation dialogues designed to reproduce real clinical demographic and diagnostic distributions across 12 ICD-10 psychiatric categories. Through extensive experiments across state-of-the-art LLMs, we establish key findings: (1) although LLMs achieve high accuracy on binary depression–anxiety classification (up to 92.3%), performance deteriorates substantially for depression–anxiety comorbidity recognition (43.0%) and 12-way differential diagnosis (28.5%); (2) dynamic consultation often underperforms static evaluation, indicating that ineffective information-gathering strategies significantly impair downstream diagnostic reasoning; (3) consultation quality assessed by LLM-as-a-Judge shows only moderate correlation with diagnostic accuracy, suggesting that well-structured questioning alone does not ensure correct diagnostic decisions. We release LingxiDiag-16K and the full evaluation framework to support reproducible research at https://github.com/Lingxi-mental-health/LingxiDiagBench.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cardiologists perspectives on sociocultural and structural factors shaping cardiovascular genetic testing

Introduction: Genetic testing is increasingly central to the diagnosis and management of cardiovascular genetic conditions. However, use and follow-through vary across patient populations. Examining clinician perspectives on sociocultural and structural factors influencing testing is important for understanding these differences and informing public health genomics research and implementation efforts. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 cardiologists from health systems across the United States who have integrated cardiogenetics in their practice. Interviews explored experiences diagnosing cardiovascular genetic conditions among patients from underrepresented backgrounds, as well as approaches to incorporating social and contextual information into care. Data were coded thematically and analyzed using a framework analysis guided by the Health Equity Implementation Framework and Social Determinants of Health domains. Results: Clinicians described multi-level factors shaping genetic testing practices, including patient-provider interactions, clinical workflows, health system infrastructure, and broader policy contexts. Key themes included challenges communicating complex genetic information across language and literacy differences; patient trust shaped by prior healthcare experiences; fragmented insurance coverage separating genetic testing from genetic counseling; and challenges interpreting variants of uncertain significance, particularly for populations underrepresented in genomic reference databases. Clinicians also described adaptive strategies, such as interdisciplinary collaboration, telehealth, and patient assistance programs, that supported testing in some settings but were often inconsistent or resource-dependent. Conclusion: Among cardiologists using genetic testing, system-level and sociocultural factors shape the feasibility and downstream use of cardiovascular genetic testing. Findings highlight considerations for public health-informed genomic infrastructure that accounts for social context, supports communication, and reduces reliance on individual clinician workarounds, with implications for clinical decision support and related public health genomics initiatives.

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

Sat2City v2: Native 3D City Asset Generation from a Single Satellite Image

Generating explicit 3D city assets from a single satellite image is important for digital twins, urban simulation, and geospatial intelligence. Unlike satellite-to-street-view synthesis, the task requires a reusable textured mesh with plausible geometry and controllable appearance rather than a 3D proxy optimized only for rendering a small set of images or videos. The ICCV Sat2City framework made a first step by conditioning cascaded sparse-voxel latent diffusion on satellite-derived height maps, but its appearance was random, its training data were synthetic, and its task-specific VAE did not scale well to noisy real-world reconstructions. We present Sat2City v2, a journal extension that adapts a pretrained native structured-latent 3D foundation model to weakly aligned satellite images and textured meshes. We build a real-world dataset with 16,241 satellite-mesh pairs across 24 regions in 9 cities. Instead of learning a 3D representation from noisy city meshes, Sat2City v2 encodes each mesh into a pretrained native 3D latent space, fine-tunes a satellite-conditioned geometry flow, and uses the decoded shape to anchor satellite-conditioned texturing. This retains Sat2City's geometry-to-appearance cascade while enabling appearance-controllable generation from the satellite input. Experiments on metric-scale DSM reconstruction and generative city-asset benchmarks for geometry and appearance show that Sat2City v2 achieves the best overall performance among evaluated baselines. Overall, Sat2City v2 advances satellite-to-city generation from rendering-oriented 3D proxies to explicit textured mesh assets, supported by, to the best of our knowledge, the first documented satellite-mesh paired dataset collected from matched geographic crops for this asset-level task. Project page: https://ai4city-hkust.github.io/Sat2City-v2/

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Precision Recall Controllable Radiology Report Generation via Hybrid Natural Language and Clinical Reward Learning

Automated radiology report generation (RRG) has gained increasing attention because it can reduce the heavy workload of clinical report writing. However, most existing methods mainly optimize for natural language generation (NLG) metrics that focus on language fluency, while providing little control over clinically important factors such as precision and recall. As consequence, generated reports may be fluent but not well aligned with different clinical needs. To address this challenge, we propose a reinforcement learning framework for precision recall controllable RRG, where a control parameter explicitly adjusts the trade-off between clinical precision and recall during inference. This design allows the model to flexibly generate reports according to different clinical requirements. To ensure clinical correctness, we introduce a clinical reward into the training objective, which helps improve clinical efficacy (CE) beyond standard language-based optimization. In addition, we apply a group-relative training strategy that normalizes rewards within each training group, reducing reward variance and improving training stability. Extensive experiments on the MIMIC-CXR dataset show that our method consistently outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in both NLG and CE evaluation metrics, while providing reliable control over the CE precision recall trade-off.