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01.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Association of circulating endothelial progenitor cell count and functional outcome in patients with acute ischemic stroke due to intracranial large vessel occlusion

Background: Circulating endothelial progenitor cells (cEPCs) contribute to vascular repair following an ischemic stroke. The aim of the study was to evaluate the association between cEPCs and functional outcomes in patients with acute ischemic stroke (AIS) due to large vessel occlusion (LVO) who received endovascular therapy (EVT). Methods: Prospective study of patients with LVO-AIS who received EVT. Blood samples were obtained within 24 +- 12 hours and on day 7+-1 from stroke onset. cEPCs were detected using flow cytometry (CD34+/VEGFR2+/CD133+). The primary endpoint was a favourable functional outcome (modified Rankin Scale 0-2) at three months of follow-up. Secondary endpoints include baseline to 24 hours/day 7 changes in the National Institutes of Health Stroke Scale (NIHSS) score and collateral circulation (CC) status. Bivariate and multivariable logistic regression analyses were performed. Results: Included were 90 patients (73.2+-12.7 years, 41.1% women) in 42 of whom (46.7%) cEPCs were detected at 24 hours. On day 7, cEPCs were detected in 27 (43.6%) of 62 patients for which this information was available. Atrial fibrillation, prior anticoagulant treatment and stroke onset-to-door time

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

EFIQA: Explainable Fundus Image Quality Assessment via Anatomical Priors

arXiv:2606.20108v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Image quality control is vital for a wide range of downstream applications. Deep learning-based image quality assessment methods typically train classifiers on dataset-specific quality labels, inheriting two limitations: (1) generalization is tied to the labeling criteria of the training set and (2) these methods cannot provide spatial feedback on where the quality is degraded, lacking explainability. In this work, we propose EFIQA, a framework that requires no quality-related supervision and produces spatial quality maps by design. Rather than learning ``what is degradation" from human-annotated labels, EFIQA learns ``what should be there" by leveraging anatomical priors. For fundus photography, we instantiate this as a two-stage approach, by first training an unsupervised anomaly detector via masked anatomical inpainting to identify regions of missing vasculature, and then distilling this prior knowledge into a shallow adapter mapping features of a frozen foundation model to precise quality maps. External-dataset evaluation demonstrates that this label-free approach with minimal adaptation achieves better performance and explainability compared with supervised methods across benchmarks with different quality criteria, highlighting its potential for real-world applications.

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

RepWAM: World Action Modeling with Representation Visual-Action Tokenizers

This work presents RepWAM, a representation-centric world action model (WAM) built on representation visual-action tokenizers. Existing WAMs typically inherit reconstruction-oriented video tokenizers from pretrained video generation models. Although these tokenizers preserve visual fidelity, pixel reconstruction alone provides limited guidance for learning instruction-following dynamics that connect future prediction with robot control. To address this, we explore a semantic visual-action latent space for representation-centric world action modeling. Specifically, we train a representation visual-action tokenizer that maps visual inputs into aligned visual and latent action tokens. We then pretrain our WAM to jointly model future visual states and the latent actions that connect them under language instructions, followed by adaptation to real robot trajectories for closed-loop manipulation. Experiments on real-world manipulation tasks and simulation benchmarks show that RepWAM delivers strong performance across diverse manipulation settings, while ablations highlight the value of semantic visual-action tokenization over reconstruction-oriented alternatives. These results establish representation visual-action tokenization as a promising foundation for world action models and a step toward generalist robot policies. Code and weights will be available at https://github.com/wdrink/RepWAM.

04.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-01

On real-time calibrated prediction for complex model-based decision support in pandemics: Part 2

by Trevelyan J. McKinley, Daniel B. Williamson, Xiaoyu Xiong, James M. Salter, Robert Challen, Leon Danon, Ben Youngman, Doug McNeall Calibration of complex stochastic infectious disease models is challenging. These often have high-dimensional input and output spaces, with the models exhibiting complex, non-linear dynamics. Coupled with a paucity of necessary data, this results in a large number of non-ignorable hidden states that must be handled by the inference routine. Likelihood-based approaches to this missing data problem are very flexible, but challenging to scale, due to having to monitor and update these hidden states. Methods based on simulating the hidden states directly from the model-of-interest have an advantage that they are often more straightforward to code, and thus are easier to implement and adapt in real-time. However, these often require evaluating very large numbers of simulations, rendering them infeasible for many large-scale problems. We present a framework for using emulation-based methods to calibrate a large-scale, stochastic, age-structured, spatial meta-population model of COVID-19 transmission in England and Wales. By embedding a model discrepancy process into the simulation model, and combining this with particle filtering, we show that it is possible to calibrate complex models to high-dimensional data by emulating the log-likelihood surface instead of individual data points. The use of embedded model discrepancy also helps to alleviate other key challenges, such as the introduction of infection across space and time. We conclude with a discussion of major challenges remaining and key areas for future work.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Runtime Enforcement of Hybrid System Properties

arXiv:2606.12022v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime enforcement has emerged as a promising approach for ensuring the safety of autonomous and cyber-physical systems operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. Unlike traditional runtime verification, runtime enforcement actively intervenes during execution to prevent property violations by modifying unsafe system behaviors. Existing enforcement frameworks primarily focus on untimed or discrete-time specifications and are often limited to delaying or suppressing events, making them inadequate for reactive systems exhibiting complex continuous dynamics. In this paper, we propose a runtime enforcement framework where safety requirements are modeled using Hybrid Automata (HA). The framework combines discrete-event editing with continuous-time monitoring to support enforcement actions such as suppression, delay, and insertion of events at arbitrary time instants. Upon observing environmental inputs, the automaton is initialized, and runtime reachability analysis is used to synthesize safe corrective actions. We formally define the enforcement problem for safety hybrid automata, establish enforceability conditions, and present an online enforcement algorithm for reactive systems. A detailed case study on an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed approach in maintaining safety properties under unsafe controller behaviors. Experimental results show that the framework introduces minimal computational overhead while ensuring continuous compliance with safety requirements in real time.

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

Two-Layer Linear Auto-Regressive Models Estimate Latent States

arXiv:2606.12691v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Auto-regressive models have emerged as powerful tools for sequential data, from language to video. Understanding how and why these models learn latent representations remains an open theoretical question. In this work, we demonstrate that when trained by empirical risk minimization on data from partially observed linear dynamical systems, two-layer linear auto-regressive models naturally learn to approximate Kalman filtering. In particular, we show that the learned hidden representation coincides, up to a similarity transformation, with the state estimates produced by the optimal (Kalman) filter, even though the model has no explicit knowledge of the underlying dynamics or state. The result follows from three main insights. First, we establish that the Kalman filter is well approximated by an auto-regressive model with bounded truncation error. Second, we show that despite non-convexity, the two-layer optimization landscape is benign, i.e., all stationary points are either strict saddles or global minima. Finally, as our main contributions, we provide finite-sample guarantees on prediction error, parameter estimation error, and latent state recovery. Numerical simulations support the theoretical results and demonstrate that the latent representations of auto-regressive models recover state estimates.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

Provable Recovery of Locally Important Signed Features and Interactions from Random Forest

arXiv:2512.11081v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Feature and Interaction Importance (FII) methods are essential in supervised learning for assessing the relevance of input variables and their interactions in complex prediction models. In many domains, such as personalized medicine, local interpretations for individual predictions are often required, rather than global scores summarizing overall feature importance. Random Forests (RFs) are widely used in these settings, and existing interpretability methods typically exploit tree structures and split statistics to provide model-specific insights. However, theoretical understanding of local FII methods for RF remains limited, making it unclear how to interpret high importance scores for individual predictions. We propose a novel, local, model-specific FII method that identifies frequent co-occurrences of features along decision paths, combining global patterns with those observed on paths specific to a given test point. We prove that our method consistently recovers the true local signal features and their interactions under a Locally Spike Sparse (LSS) model and also identifies whether large or small feature values drive a prediction. We illustrate the usefulness of our method and theoretical results through simulation studies and a real-world data example.

08.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Exposure Bias as Epistemic Underidentification in Recursive Forecasting

arXiv:2606.12990v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recursive multi-step forecasting is usually framed as distribution shift: models are trained on observed histories but deployed on their own predictions. We show this framing is incomplete by proving that, under partial observability or state truncation, recursive rollout is also an epistemic underidentification problem. Even with deterministic latent dynamics, one-step Bayes supervision identifies behavior only on observed contexts and need not identify the deployed recursive predictor once rollout queries self-generated induced states whose correct local targets are not determined by numeric state alone. We formalize this with induced states $Z$ and provenance variables $P$, and derive a decomposition of induced-state error into teacher-forcing/rollout mismatch, representation–class approximation, and provenance information gaps. Empirically, we show that rollout enters a distinct induced-state regime, that fixed induced states define a distinct local corrective task, and that closed-loop gains arise not only from local adaptation but also from changing the induced states visited during rollout. Using a simple binary provenance encoding, provenance-aware correction can further improve performance, though gains are conditional rather than uniform. These results recast exposure bias as reasoning under self-induced epistemic uncertainty.

09.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Dark state spectroscopy in nonlinear waveguide quantum electrodynamics

arXiv:2606.11997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum systems face a fundamental trade-off: they must remain decoupled from the environment to maintain long coherence times, yet they require interactions with the environment to be accessible for measurement. As a prime example, emitter arrays coupled to waveguides facilitate collective modes that, owing to interference, can suppress radiation into the waveguide. While complete destructive interference creates perfectly dark states with infinite lifetimes, their inherent decoupling makes them unmeasurable in standard waveguide quantum electrodynamics. Consequently, current approaches must rely on system non-idealities that permit measurement but limit the coherence times. In this work, we lift this limitation by proposing the use of weakly squeezed light generated in \{chi}(2) nonlinear waveguides for the spectroscopy of completely dark states. We show that the fluorescence spectrum probes transitions between the dressed dark states of the emitter array. This work paves the way towards the measurement and control of dark states, with applications for robust quantum memories, computation, and communication.

10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-11

Consistent Evaluation of Operators Involving the Position Operator in the Bloch Representation: Application to the Orbital Moment

arXiv:2606.11679v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The position operator plays a central role in condensed-matter observables such as velocity, orbital moment, and electric polarization. In solid-state physics, the evaluation of operators incorporating the position operator has not reached a consensus, as observed in the operator-level discrepancy between the local circulation of Wannier functions and the self-rotation of wave packets. Here, to achieve a consistent evaluation of such operators, we propose three rules for evaluating operators involving the position operator in the Bloch representation. The rules are devised to satisfy physical conditions: independence from the choice of unit cell, preservation of Hermitian conjugacy for the product of operators, and recovery of the correct intraband velocity. We further address the gauge dependence of the position operator and introduce a scheme termed gauge filtration, which systematically removes gauge-dependent contributions from the operators containing the position operator. This methodology ensures that the quantities obtained from the operator evaluation correspond to observable physical phenomena. By applying our framework, we reconcile the results concerning the self-rotation of the wave packet and the local circulation of the Wannier function. We expect our proposal to establish a consistent framework for evaluating operators involving the position operator.

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

Learning from Biased and Costly Data Sources: Minimax-optimal Data Collection under a Budget

arXiv:2602.17894v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Data collection is a critical component of modern statistical and machine learning pipelines, particularly when data must be gathered from multiple heterogeneous sources to study a target population of interest. In many use cases, such as medical studies or political polling, different sources incur different sampling costs. Observations often have associated group identities - for example, health markers, demographics, or political affiliations - and the relative composition of these groups may differ substantially, both among the source populations and between sources and target population. In this work, we study multi-source data collection under a fixed budget, focusing on the estimation of population means and group-conditional means. We show that naive data collection strategies (e.g. attempting to "match" the target distribution) or relying on standard estimators (e.g. sample mean) can be highly suboptimal. Instead, we develop a sampling plan which maximizes the effective sample size - the total sample size divided by $D_{\chi^2}(q\mid\mid\overline{p}) + 1$, where $q$ is the target distribution, $\overline{p}$ is the aggregated source distribution, and $D_{\chi^2}$ is the $\chi^2$-divergence. We pair this sampling plan with a classical post-stratification estimator and upper bound its risk. We provide matching lower bounds, establishing that our approach achieves the budgeted minimax optimal risk. Our techniques also extend to prediction problems when minimizing the excess risk, providing a principled approach to multi-source learning with costly and heterogeneous data sources.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Adaptively secure unitary designs with constant non-Clifford cost

arXiv:2510.08129v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Randomness is a fundamental resource in quantum information, with crucial applications in cryptography, algorithms, and error correction. A central challenge is to construct unitary $k$-designs that closely approximate Haar-random unitaries while minimizing the costly use of non-Clifford operations. In this work, we present a protocol able to generate unitary $k$-designs on $n$ qubits, secure against any adversarial quantum measurement, with a system-size-independent number of non-Clifford gates. Our construction applies a $k$-design only to a subsystem of size $\Theta(k)$, independent of $n$. This ``seed'' design is then ``diluted'' across the entire $n$-qubit system by sandwiching it between two random Clifford operators. The resulting ensemble forms an $\varepsilon$-approximate unitary $k$-design on $n$ qubits. We prove that this construction achieves full quantum security against adaptive adversaries using only $\tilde{O}(k^2 \log\varepsilon^{-1})$ non-Clifford gates. If one requires security only against polynomial-time adaptive adversaries, the non-Clifford cost decreases to $\tilde{O}(k + \log^{1+c} \varepsilon^{-1})$. This is optimal, since we show that at least $\Omega(k)$ non-Clifford gates are required in this setting. Compared to existing approaches, our method significantly reduces non-Clifford overhead while strengthening security guarantees to adaptive security as well as removing artificial assumptions between $n$ and $k$. These results make high-order unitary designs practically attainable in near-term fault-tolerant quantum architectures.

13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Action with Visual Primitives

arXiv:2605.22183v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm for generalist robotic manipulation. A common design in current architectures maps language instructions and visual observations to actions in a single forward pass. While conceptually simple, this formulation entangles instruction comprehension, spatial scene understanding, and motor control within a single learning objective. As a result, the action expert must implicitly relearn cognitive and perceptual capabilities already present in the pretrained VLM, which can limit both learning efficiency and generalization. We introduce AVP (Action with Visual Primitives), an end-to-end architecture that implements this visual-primitive-centric interface: the VLM infers the next-stage target and emits visual-primitive tokens that condition a flow-matching action expert, with supervision derived from end-effector kinematics. Real-robot experiments on general pick-and-place tasks show that AVP improves the success rate by 37.04% over pi_0.5 and outperforms other recent methods, with consistent gains in data efficiency, spatial-compositional generalization, and object-level transfer.

14.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Output Vector Editing for Memorization Mitigation in Large Language Models

Large language models memorize and reproduce sequences from their training data, creating privacy, copyright, and security risks. Existing neuron-level mitigation methods equate editing with zeroing out neuron activations, but the activation only controls whether a neuron engages; the output vector is what writes to the residual stream and, through superposition, encodes multiple features. We propose output vector editing, a constrained-optimization weight edit that locates a small set of MLP neurons responsible for a memorized continuation and minimally modifies their output vectors to introduce a distractor in vocabulary space, redirecting their residual-stream contributions while leaving activations unchanged. Evaluating on four models from 360M to 7B parameters (SmolLM-360M, OLMo-1B, OLMo-7B, Llama2-7B), we center on OLMo-7B (whose open weights and pretraining corpus enable systematic mining) and mine 6831 memorized sequences, achieving up to 87.9% suppression. The 2.7$\times$ gap over zero ablation on the same located neurons shows the suppression comes from the output-vector edit, not localization alone. Four edit modes span a spectrum from aggressive suppression to minimal redirection; in ensemble they cover 96.5% of memorized sequences, while our recommended single-mode configuration reaches 81.5% with no catastrophic locality failures. We further identify a mechanistic boundary at ${\sim}14%$ of sequences unreachable by MLP-only editing; while these failures are not attention-driven overall, ablating the top contributing attention heads recovers 60–64% of them, with stronger recovery on continuations that copy tokens from the prefix, positioning attention as a complementary fallback rather than a primary mechanism. Edit mode ordering and the success-locality trade-off transfer across all four models, with success rates scaling with model size rather than family.

15.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

The Value Axis: Language Models Encode Whether They're on the Right Track

We investigate whether language models internally track the value of their current trajectory, defined as the likelihood that their ongoing strategy will achieve their goals. Using synthetic, in-context reinforcement learning data, we construct a "value" axis for Qwen3-8B. We find that activations along this axis distinguish between high vs. low verbalized confidence, rollouts without and with backtracking, and correct vs. corrupted code. Steering towards high value causally suppresses self-correction and reduces explanatory verbosity, while steering towards low value induces backtracking and exploration. We demonstrate that direct preference optimization (DPO) can increase the internal value of rewarded behaviors (e.g. use a certain word), causing the model to act more confidently after exhibiting them. Finally, we apply the value axis to study in-the-wild settings. For example, we find that Qwen assigns low value to politically sensitive chat queries after post-training and that supervised fine-tuning increases internal confidence within the training domain. Our results suggest that language models linearly encode an estimate of expected goal success that modulates their confidence in pursuing a direction.

16.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

fuzzyfold: a high-performance framework for stochastic RNA folding kinetics

Authors:

The analysis of nucleic acid secondary structures is overwhelmingly dominated by methods that analyze the thermodynamic equilibrium distribution and which ignore all dynamic aspects of nucleic acid folding. Yet, there are numerous popular examples of nucleic acid folding that rely on kinetic models, such as RNA riboswitches or DNA strand displacement systems. Here, I am presenting fuzzyfold, a Rust-based software package for nucleic acid secondary structure analysis with an explicit focus on stochastic modeling. The framework introduces three-way and four-way shift moves with a biophysically motivated rate-model parameterization, and it is developed with an emphasis on both model flexibility and performance, e.g. allowing for the generation of single co-transcriptional trajectories for thousand-nucleotide long RNA molecules in just a few minutes. The main strength of the fuzzyfold package, however, is its focus on user and developer interfaces for long-term development. It provides easily installable command-line interfaces, e.g. for aggregating data from multiple parallel trajectories efficiently into an ensemble-level dynamic analysis. For developers, the code-base supports straight-forward substitution of thermodynamic and kinetic free-energy models, and a flexible library interface with Python bindings, enabling integration of individual components into custom computational workflows.

17.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-22

<b>PROTEUS trial heralds perioperative therapy for prostate cancer</b>

Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer. Perioperative androgen-deprivation therapy plus apalutamide could represent a new treatment option for patients with high-risk, localized prostate cancer.

18.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-09

Multi-stable oscillations in cortical networks with two classes of inhibition

by Arnab Dey Sarkar, Bard Ermentrout In the classical view of cortical rhythms, interactions between excitatory pyramidal neurons (E) and inhibitory parvalbumin-expressing interneurons (I) are sufficient to generate gamma- and beta-band oscillations. However, it is now well established that multiple inhibitory interneuron subtypes exist and that they play important roles in the generation and modulation of these rhythms. In this paper, we develop a spiking network model consisting of populations of E, I, and an additional interneuron type, somatostatin-expressing neurons (S), which receive excitation from the E cells and inhibit both the E and I populations. The S cells are further modulated by a third inhibitory subtype, vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) neurons, which receive inputs from other cortical areas. We reduce the spiking network to a system of nine differential equations that describe the mean membrane potential, firing rate, and synaptic conductance for each population. Using this reduced model, we identify a wide range of parameters that exhibit multiple coexisting rhythms. Employing tools from nonlinear dynamics, we then explore the roles of the two classes of inhibition, as well as VIP modulation, in shaping the properties of these rhythms.

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

Whose hotel does the AI recommend? An algorithm audit of reputation signals in LLM-assisted hotel selection

Travelers increasingly ask large language model (LLM) assistants which hotel to book, making these systems gatekeepers of property visibility – yet what moves their recommendations is undocumented. We conduct a pre-specified algorithm audit using a randomized choice-based conjoint: across personas, prompt templates, and twelve open-weight and proprietary models, assistants choose among five hotels whose guest rating, review volume and recency, management response, chain affiliation, price, eco-certification, and list position are independently randomized. We estimate the average marginal component effect of each signal on the probability of recommendation. Guest rating and price dominate (a top rating raises selection by 31.6 percentage points; a high price lowers it by 30.0), reproducing human valence-and-price primacy but over-weighting eco-certification and ignoring management response. List position – a content-free artifact – shifts recommendations causally, worth about \$12 per night. Stated reasons track revealed weights imperfectly. The findings ground generative engine optimization and the accountability of AI infomediaries in causal evidence.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Frames2LoRA: Parametric Video Internalization for Vision-Language Models

Processing video in vision-language models is expensive: each frame occupies hundreds of tokens, and inference cost scales with every frame and every repeated query. We introduce Frames2LoRA, a method for parametric video internalization. A perceiver hypernetwork reads the intermediate representations produced layer-by-layer as a frozen VLM encodes a video, and generates a Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter in a single forward pass. Unlike standard LoRA fine-tuning, which requires iterative gradient updates, Frames2LoRA predicts these weights directly from the video. Trained for SmolVLM2 500M and 2.2B on video summarization and captioning, Frames2LoRA enables the same frozen VLM to answer queries from the adapter alone, with zero visual tokens in its context at query time. Frames2LoRA is statistically non-inferior and equivalent to direct video-in-context inference across all five captioning benchmarks at both model scales, and across seven of eight video question answering benchmark-scale pairings. Although trained only on 12 frames at 384px, it remains stable up to 1,024 frames and 1024px, where direct video-in-context inference often degenerates. Across this sweep, it reduces answer-time visual-token load by up to 1,500x and query TTFT by 6-80x, while preserving video-faithful outputs. We also find that independently generated adapters for non-overlapping video segments can compose in rank space, suggesting a path toward chunked long-video internalization.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Discovery under Hypothesis Redundancy: A Geometric Theory of Discovery Bottlenecks

arXiv:2606.14386v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific discovery saturates when new hypotheses cease to provide independent information, even if the nominal hypothesis space remains large. We study hybrid discovery systems that combine structured local search with LLM-generated non-local proposals and pose the Search Compression Hypothesis: non-local exploration helps only when three geometric conditions co-occur: spectral compression, orthogonal escape from the explored span, and residual signal alignment with the target. We formalize these conditions, derive necessary conditions for hybrid advantage, and test the mechanism in controlled synthetic environments, large-scale A-share factor discovery, and symbolic-regression benchmarks; a public tabular operational sanity check tests the associated budget-allocation implication. Signal-planting and directed-versus-random experiments show that novelty alone is insufficient: random orthogonal jumps expand coverage but do not improve yield without predictive alignment. Across compression sweeps, real factor archives, and LLM-SRBench tasks, hybrid gains concentrate in weakly represented but target-bearing directions and vanish as the hypothesis space approaches full rank. The framework turns LLM-guided discovery from generic novelty search into a diagnostic procedure for deciding when directed non-local exploration is warranted.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

A Human-in-the-Loop Label Error Detection Framework Applied to Arabic-Script HTR Datasets

Despite recent advances, Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for Arabic-script languages still lags behind Latin-script HTR. Part of the problem is dataset quality. To help closing this gap, we propose a two-stage framework (CER-HV) for detecting label errors. Stage 1 (CER) is a Character-Error-Rate-based noise detector built on a Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) architecture. Stage 2 (HV) is the Human-In-The-Loop (HITL) Verification of noisy samples detected by the first stage. Applying the CER-HV framework on multiple Arabic-script datasets can identify samples with label errors including transcription, segmentation, orientation, and non-text content errors that can markedly affect HTR performance. These errors were identified by the first stage of the framework with up to 90percent (top-50) precision. We also show that our CRNN achieves state-of-the-art performance across five of the six evaluated datasets, reaching 8.46 percent Character Error Rate (CER) on KHATT (Arabic), 8.22 percent on PHTI (Pashto), 10.59 percent on Ajami, and 10.11% on Muharaf (Arabic), all without any data cleaning. We establish a new baseline of 11.3 percent CER on the PHTD (Persian) dataset. Applying CER-HV improves evaluation CER by up to 1.8 percentage points after dataset cleaning and retraining. Although our experiments focus on documents written in an Arabic-script language, the framework is general and can be applied to other text recognition datasets

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Identification of environmental factors and growth stages in the prediction of fibre yield and fibre quality traits in rain-grown cotton

Context Understanding how and when environmental conditions influence overall crop performance is crucial for optimising the development of genotypes to a specific breeding target environment. We focused on economically important traits of Australian rain-grown cotton including fibre yield and quality traits, which have not been investigated comprehensively. The aim of the study was to identify relevant environmental factors, and the timing and extent of their impact on rain-grown cotton production. Methods We used a data driven approach to analyse the relationship between ten climate related environmental factors across various plant growth stages and eight fibre yield and quality traits, using a large-scale field dataset of 9,283 records collected over 23 years at 4 locations, with 53 unique year-location combinations. We applied eight complementary statistical models including stepwise, penalised and Bayesian linear regression, regression-tree based ensemble methods and deep learning frameworks to (1) select the most essential environmental covariates affecting rain-grown cotton production, and (2) evaluate the predictive performance of these models. Results The environmental impacts on rain-grown cotton production were trait and growth-stage specific. Number of rainy days and solar radiation were identified as the most influential environmental factors for fibre yield traits, vapour pressure deficit at maximum daily temperature was the most influential factor for majority of fibre quality traits. However, each analysed trait was influenced by multiple environmental factors across multiple growth stages (rather than a single factor or a single growth stage). These influential covariates explained a wide range of variation in the traits, accounting for 5.8% to 68.2%. Using the best-fit random forest model, our findings revealed non-linear relationships between key environmental covariates and the traits. Conclusions Environmental factors at different rain-grown cotton growth stages are key determinants for the performance of end-of-season fibre yield and fibre quality parameters. These findings highlight the need to account for environment conditions when developing cotton varieties optimised for rain-grown production systems. Potential strategies are proposed whereby these key environmental factors can be used to increase the rate of genetic gain in rain-grown cotton production systems. Implications The results of this study will be crucial for future genetic evaluations and analyses of genotype-by-environment interaction effects in rain-grown cotton, which must account for the influence of the environment on plant performance. Furthermore, these methods can be applied to other species to identify critical growth stages and environmental factors which most influence crop performance.

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

Gumbel-BEARD: Automatic Layer Selection for Self-Supervised Adaptation of Whisper in Low-Resource Domains

Speech foundation models often struggle in low-resource domains due to domain mismatch and data scarcity. We propose Gumbel-BEARD, a domain adaptation framework that automates Whisper encoder layer selection via an end-to-end trainable hard Gumbel-Softmax selector. It enables self-supervised adaptation with a BEST-RQ objective that dynamically adapts to target acoustic characteristics without manual tuning. Experiments on the MyST child speech corpus demonstrate efficiency and scalability: with 10 h of labeled data for fine-tuning, our method matches a fully supervised baseline trained on the complete 133 h labeled set. We establish new state-of-the-art word error rates (WERs) of 8.21% using Whisper-medium on MyST and 11.06% using Whisper-small on the OGI Spontaneous dataset. Evaluation on CORAAL further confirms robustness to adult dialectal domain shifts, with up to 6% relative WER reduction, highlighting the generalizability of our approach to diverse low-resource conditions.

25.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12

Small LLMs for Biomedical Claim Verification: Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning, Structural Dataset Shortcuts, and Cross-Domain Generalization

Authors:

Large Language Models such as GPT-4o and GPT-5 achieve strong zero-shot performance on biomedical claim verification, but cost and opacity limit scalable use. We fine-tune three small LLMs: Phi-3-mini (3.8B), Qwen2.5-3B, and Mistral-7B, via QLoRA on SciFact and HealthVer, providing the first study of QLoRA models against GPT-4o and fine-tuned BioLinkBERT encoders. Mistral-7B QLoRA surpasses both GPT-4o and GPT-5 (up to 12% F1 gain) at a fractional cost using just 1,008 training examples. We conduct extensive in-domain and cross-domain evaluation: models trained on SciFact tested on HealthVer and vice versa, at matched sizes to isolate dataset structure from data quantity. We identify a previously unreported structural artifact in SciFact that inflates in-domain scores, and show through bidirectional out-of-domain evaluation that training on structurally sound data enables robust cross-domain transfer. We plan to release all code and adapter checkpoints.