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

An Ontology-Guided Multi-Anchor Graph Retrieval Framework for Traffic Legal Liability Determination

Traffic law liability determination is critical for assigning legal penalties, requiring the simultaneous identification of interdependent statutory provisions across multiple legal dimensions. However, existing retrieval-augmented generation methods suffer from a multi-dimensional retrieval bottleneck: single axis architectures compress complex legal queries into a single pathway, causing interdependent statutory dimensions to be overlooked. To address this, we propose OMAGR, an ontology-guided framework that decomposes queries into ontology-aligned anchors and executes parallel graph retrieval across each dimension, ensuring independent retrieval across dimensions before fusion. To evaluate the proposed method, we created the TrafficLaw-QA dataset, an expert-validated benchmark dataset containing 200 questions and 527 legal provisions. Results show that TrafficOmni-RAG outperforms baselines on Context Precision and Faithfulness metrics. The findings demonstrate that parallel multi-anchor retrieval effectively resolves the multi-dimensional retrieval bottleneck, offering a promising direction for traffic law liability determination research.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Optimal Hidden-Target Learning for Online Inventory Optimization on General Convex Sets

arXiv:2606.14679v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Online inventory optimization (OIO) is online convex optimization with physical memory: inventory carryover makes the feasible action set depend on the past. A natural principle, used in stochastic inventory learning and recently in OIO under a single linear capacity constraint, is to maintain a hidden target chosen by an online learner and implement its projection onto the currently feasible order-up-to set. We prove that this simple principle is optimal for OIO on arbitrary bounded convex capacity sets. With online gradient descent as the base learner, the method improves the best known regret guarantee for OIO on general convex sets from inverse to inverse-square-root dependence on the common-demand probability, and we prove a matching lower bound. The same principle gives the first polylogarithmic regret guarantee for strongly convex losses and the first dynamic regret guarantee adapting to Euclidean path variation on general convex capacity sets. The analysis introduces a norm alignment principle: the right state variable is the distance from the hidden target to the feasible set, measured in the same norm as the projection. Under norm alignment, this distance evolves pathwise as a scalar queue, with target movement as arrival and common demand as service. This reduction to one-dimensional queue control resolves the state dependence and extends the guarantees to general convex capacity sets, beyond the reach of prior productwise approaches. Experiments on synthetic and real-world inventory data corroborate the theory.

03.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-16

Scaling Limits of Bivariate Nearly-Unstable Hawkes Processes and Applications to Rough Volatility

arXiv:2605.03703v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study a pair of nearly-unstable Hawkes processes coupled through a one-directional, or triangular, cross-excitation: the first component evolves autonomously and excites the second, but not conversely. Each component is self-exciting through a heavy-tailed memory kernel, and the two kernels are allowed to have different tail indices, so that the limiting components exhibit genuinely different degrees of roughness. As the system approaches criticality, we prove that the suitably rescaled intensity vector converges weakly to the unique solution of a coupled system of stochastic Volterra equations of rough-volatility type. The first limiting component is autonomous, while the second is driven both by its own noise and by an inherited noise transmitted from the first component through an effective cross-kernel. This cross-kernel is the convolution of the two limiting Mittag-Leffler kernels and therefore combines the two memory structures. As a consequence, we obtain a short-time cross-decorrelation law: although the two components are coupled, their functional correlation vanishes at small time scales at an explicit polynomial rate. This time-dependent correlation distinguishes the limit from independent rough processes and from classical bivariate rough models with constant Brownian correlation.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AVIS: Adaptive Test-Time Scaling for Vision-Language Models

Modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) benefit from chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling, but these gains often come with prohibitive inference cost due to large visual contexts and long decoding chains. We view this cost through two coupled axes: Visual Context Scaling (VCS), which controls how much visual evidence is passed to the language model, and Visual Reasoning Scaling (VRS), which controls how much inference-time reasoning search is performed. Existing methods typically optimize one axis at a time, leaving the joint allocation of compute across these axes underexplored. We introduce Adaptive Visual Inference Scaling (AVIS), a lightweight policy that adapts both VCS and VRS per query. AVIS realizes VCS through Key Diversity Visual (KDV) pruning, a training-free $O(N)$ key-based rule for removing redundant visual tokens before prefilling, and realizes VRS through adaptive self-consistency, using a learned difficulty predictor to select the number of reasoning rollouts. AVIS is deployment-friendly and compatible with shared-prefill inference, where all rollouts reuse a single prefilling pass and KV cache. Across diverse image and video reasoning benchmarks, AVIS improves the accuracy–compute trade-off relative to VCS-only and VRS-only baselines, and remains effective on top of RL post-trained VLMs while keeping compute and latency low.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Agentic Symbolic Search: Characterizing PDEs Beyond Hand-crafted Expressions, Meshes, and Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.20467v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mathematicians understand a PDE solution through mathematical structures rather than tables of computed values. Historically, this has been the product of mathematical analysis, carried out by hand for each problem individually. Neither numerical simulation nor neural networks produce those structures directly. We propose Agentic Symbolic Search (ASYS), a prior-guided framework in which an agent translates PDE theory, public problem constraints, and accumulated search experience into testable differentiable symbolic programs. The mathematical forms are refined under evolutionary search, while their continuous parameters are fit by gradient-based optimization. This makes the search an automated form of inductive-bias injection rather than blind symbolic regression. For problems with known analytical forms, ASYS recovers these forms naturally; for other problems, ASYS constructs analytical approximations which can guide mathematicians toward further analysis. In our experiments, across five problems spanning bounded dynamics, finite-time blow-up, and free-boundary focusing, ASYS produces interpretable representations, including a geometric interface formula for Allen-Cahn 2D dynamics and a nine-parameter contraction law for Keller-Segel chemotactic blow-up, in settings where no closed-form description was previously available. ASYS shows the possibility of a new paradigm for characterizing PDE solutions, beyond handcrafted analytical solutions, mesh-based numerical solutions, and neural network approximations.

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

Many-body spectral transitions through the lens of the variable-range SYK2 model

arXiv:2412.14280v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model is a cornerstone in the study of quantum chaos and holographic quantum matter. Real-world implementations, however, deviate from the idealized all-to-all connectivity, raising questions about the robustness of its chaotic properties. In this work, we investigate a quadratic SYK model with distance-dependent interactions governed by a power-law decay. By analytically and numerically studying the spectral form factor (SFF), we uncover how transitions present in the single-particle limit carry over to the many-body system. Non-trivial cancellations in the one-loop contributions lead to a robustness of the SFF under a considerable reduction of the interaction range. Further suppression leads to a breakdown of perturbation theory around the infinite-range path-integral saddle and the appearance of new spectral regimes, marked by a higher dip and the emergence of a secondary plateau. Our results highlight the interplay between single-particle criticality and many-body dynamics, offering new insights into the quantum chaos-to-localization transition and its reflection in spectral statistics.

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

Auditing Reward Hackability in Code RL Training Environments

arXiv:2606.16062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We measure the rate at which code RL environments accept incorrect solutions as correct. On a 49-task sample of SWE-bench Verified, 28.5% of tasks have test suites weak enough that a Docker-verified incorrect patch passes them. On 20 R2E-Gym tasks across 6 repositories, the same pipeline at single-shot exploit generation yields 25.0%. A random-effects meta-analysis over 134 frontier model submissions to SWE-bench Verified finds, within the same human-rated difficulty stratum, model Pass@1 is +14.14 percentage points higher on flagged-hackable tasks than on robust ones (95% CI [+11.80, +16.48]; one-sided p < 10^-6; I^2 = 0%; 123 of 134 models positive). We then describe a procedure for hardening the broken tasks. An inline LLM judge with a Docker gold-sanity gate runs each generated test against the gold solution before the judge is consulted. On the 11 broken tasks in the audit, the gate flags 65 of 105 decisive LLM-generated tests as failing on the gold patch itself, a 61.9% per-augmentation defect rate the LLM judge alone misses. With diversity-biased retry, the loop converges 9 of 11 tasks to a gated upgrade.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quality Improvement Based Implementation and Evaluation of a Decision Aid for Patients with Nephrolithiasis

Introduction Patients with nephrolithiasis face challenges in making a high-quality, preference sensitive decision. Our prior work established feasibility and patient acceptance of a software-based decision aid (DA). The objectives for this study were to identify implementation strategies for the DA in routine care and determine whether DA implementation enhances decisional quality for patients. Methods New nephrolithiasis patients were recruited from the institution Medical Center from June 2018 to April 2024 to receive a software-based pre-visit DA that measured care preferences and used decision analysis to rank treatments. The RE-AIM framework and Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles were used to improve implementation outcomes. Patients completed survey instruments evaluating decisional conflict, shared decision-making, care satisfaction, and treatment choice following their provider visit. These metrics were compared in the DA cohort (n=81) to those in a usual care cohort (n=78) with Wilcoxon rank-sum and Chi-square (or Fishers exact) tests. Results Implementation data revealed sustained reach and progressive improvement in fidelity. The DA cohort reported higher decisional quality relative to controls (p=0.003) and reported greater support/advice to make a choice (p=0.005). The DA cohort more often discussed options with their doctor (87.5% vs 69.2%, p=0.005) and were more likely to be promoters of their provider (p

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

Can Scale Save Us From Plasticity Loss in Large Language Models?

arXiv:2606.24752v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The loss of plasticity - the ability of a network to learn new information after having already learned older information - is a fundamental challenge in creating artificial neural networks capable of continual learning. Although this phenomenon has been known for decades, it has mostly been studied in older, relatively small architectures and rarely in natural-language domains. To determine whether loss of plasticity remains a problem in the modern transformer-based LLM paradigm, we study plasticity loss in GPT-style Transformer models trained on a multilingual continual learning problem. Consistent with prior work, we find evidence of plasticity loss across models ranging from 5M to 314M non-embedding parameters, as measured by deterioration on a held-out Vietnamese probing task. We further find that the onset of plasticity loss follows a predictable scaling law, growing sublinearly with model size. These results suggest that larger models may delay the measurable effects of plasticity loss, but that increasing parameter count alone is likely to be insufficient to completely prevent it. We also find evidence of plasticity loss under stationary multilingual training, challenging the view that the phenomenon is exclusive to continual learning with abrupt task changes. Overall, our results suggest that even large Transformer language models trained on natural-language will eventually lose the ability to efficiently adapt to new data after sufficiently long training, in both continual and stationary settings.

11.
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.

12.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15

Reaffirming a Challenge to Bohmian Mechanics

arXiv:2509.06584v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In our recent work, we reported the first measurement of the speed of tunnelling particles using a coupled waveguide system. The measured speed is operationally defined through a comparison of two orthogonal motions in a coupled waveguide system, is compatible with the standard definition of dwell time and with the Büttiker-Landauer tunnelling time, and does not presuppose a trajectory picture. Here we respond to objections raised in comments, referee reports, preprints, and articles. We distinguish two questions that are often conflated: whether Bohmian mechanics reproduces the measured density, and whether the standard guiding equation assigns the correct state of motion to the particles. The first point follows under the usual quantum equilibrium assumptions. The second is a separate physical assumption, since the standard guiding equation does not follow from the Schrödinger equation alone. We argue that, in the evanescent regime, the state of motion assigned by the standard guiding equation is in disagreement with the measured speed. To make the distinction explicit, we also present a bidirectional Bohmian model that reproduces the same stationary density while assigning finite speeds compatible with the speed inferred in the evanescent regime.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-20

SAbDab2: The structural antibody database in the age of machine learning

The Structural Antibody Database (SAbDab) is a publicly available repository of experimentally determined antibody structures, first released in 2013. Explicit support for single-domain antibodies was added in 2021, with SAbDab-nano. Recently, increasing interest in antibodies has led to a proliferation of novel antibody formats, while simultaneous advances in machine learning have increased demand for standardised, high-quality structure data. Here, we present SAbDab2, re-engineered for the machine-learning age. It introduces support for a variety of new formats, and makes it easy to retrieve and compare all known structures of a given antibody. In addition, SAbDab2 provides ready access to ML-grade structures of antibody and antibody–antigen-complexes, with standardised, versioned train/test splits. These will be updated every six months going forward, and are available at https://zenodo.org/records/20083995. SAbDab2 itself is updated weekly and is freely available at https://sabdab2.opig.stats.ox.ac.uk.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Coercivity and Local Convergence of Physical Learning in Linear Circuits

arXiv:2606.15443v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical learning methods train physical networks to perform computational tasks using only local update rules, exploiting the physics of the system to handle the global transfer of information. We provide the first local convergence analysis of three such methods – Equilibrium Propagation (EP), Coupled Learning (CL), and a new method we call Adjoint Coupled Learning (AL) – for linear circuits, in the limit of small-nudging for both discrete and continuous time. EP and AL perform gradient descent on a natural loss function, while CL follows modified dynamics with an additional cubic correction. Assuming the existence of a solution, we identify a coercivity condition, expressed as a rank condition on a matrix built from the network's incidence structure, under which the training loss decays exponentially and the parameters converge to the solution manifold. We show that coercivity can fail by exhibiting a kite circuit in which a symmetry causes the coercivity constant to degenerate on the solution manifold, but prove using Sard's theorem that such degeneracies are non-generic: coercivity holds at every point of the solution manifold for almost every choice of desired output.

15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Interaction geometry and ground-state properties of sparse quantum lattice models

arXiv:2606.20387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how interaction geometry shapes the low-energy phases of sparse tunable long-range quantum models. We focus on a class of graphs whose degree grows logarithmically with system size, and show how symmetry and frustration in graph connectivity can drive, suppress, and reshape ground-state phase transitions. The central examples are power-of-$p$ graphs, where even and odd values of $p$ exhibit qualitatively distinct behaviour: even-$p$ graphs inherit the rich phase structure of the power-of-two model, while odd-$p$ graphs are governed by geometric frustration. Fibonacci graphs provide a contrasting case, lacking the discrete self-similarity of the power-of-$p$ family but exhibiting a direct geometric mapping between the short- and long-range limits. Across our models, we find that phase structure and criticality are governed by the same effective-geometry principle, unifying our framework for experimentally motivated long-range quantum systems.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Practical Tests and Witnesses of Fermionic non-Gaussianity

arXiv:2605.26218v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fermionic Gaussian states describe free fermions and underlie the mean-field picture of matter, from metals to superconductors; they are also efficiently simulable on classical computers. Departures from Gaussianity – the correlations produced by interactions – are therefore what make a fermionic system hard to simulate classically and useful for quantum computation, analogous to the role of magic in stabilizer-based quantum computation. Yet detecting and quantifying such non-Gaussianity at scale has remained challenging. Here we introduce practical tests and witnesses of fermionic non-Gaussianity built on fermionic antiflatness, a measure derived from the two-point covariance matrix. We estimate it with two protocols – a two-copy Bell measurement and a single-copy scheme using commuting Majorana bilinears – that determine whether a state is Gaussian or far from it at lower measurement cost than existing approaches, using only operations native to fault-tolerant hardware. For mixed states, a purity-corrected witness certifies non-Gaussianity and remains robust under strong noise; running it on the IQM quantum processor, we find that noise can both reduce and enhance non-Gaussianity. Finally, we show that preparing pseudorandom fermionic states requires extensive non-Gaussianity. Together, these tools enable the study and certification of non-Gaussian fermionic resources on present-day quantum devices.

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

Reasoning as Intersection: Consensus-Frame Alignment for Visual Focus in Video-MLLMs

Reinforcement learning has improved the reasoning ability of large language models, but applying outcome-only rewards to video multimodal large language models (Video-MLLMs) provides limited guidance on which visual evidence should support the answer. Inspired by multisensory integration, where consistent cues can enhance the salience and reliability of perceptual estimates, we introduce Consensus Frame GRPO (CF-GRPO), a temporal-annotation-free process-level reward framework for evidence-aware video reasoning. CF-GRPO constructs a consensus frame prior from intrinsic video cues, including temporal coverage, scene-transition cues, and query-conditioned visual relevance. It then computes a model-side frame-use score from visual and response representations and optimizes their agreement through the Consensus Frame Reward (CFR). With salience-aware sparse aggregation and distribution sharpening, CFR provides a high-contrast reward signal without requiring human temporal annotations. Experiments show that VideoCFR achieves competitive performance across complex video reasoning benchmarks and improves several metrics over representative Video-MLLM and RL baselines, while the consensus prior provides an interpretable view of the evidence frames emphasized during training. The implementation is available at https://github.com/1Pansy/VideoCFR.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

segSHAPE: RNA secondary structure prediction from nanopore direct RNA sequencing

RNAs adopt complex structures that regulate key biological processes, making accurate structure prediction essential. Chemical probing coupled with Nanopore direct RNA sequencing (DRS) offers a route to single-molecule structural inference, but current tools are limited by inaccurate signal-to-sequence alignment, which degrades modification-rate estimation and downstream structure prediction. Here we introduce segSHAPE for RNA secondary structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data (both RNA002 and RNA004 chemistries), a probe-agnostic framework that improves signal alignment using prior information of basecalling and per-read signal baseline shift correction, learns position-specific k-mer raw signal parameters, and estimates per-nucleotide modification rates with an unsupervised anomaly detector. On three public RNA002 DRS datasets spanning different chemical probes (AcIm, NAI-N3) and RNAs from 421 to 1552 nt, segSHAPE achieves the highest F1 score and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) on all RNAs, exceeding the strongest baseline by 3.4 to 5.8 percentage points in MCC. It additionally captures the ligand-induced conformational change of the thiamine pyrophosphate (TPP) riboswitch RNA directly from RNA002 DRS data using the DEPC probe. On a public RNA004 DRS dataset, segSHAPE improves over the sm-PORE-cupine baseline by 17 ROC-AUC points in modification rate estimation and by 6.7 MCC points in structure prediction. These results establish segSHAPE as a unified, probe-agnostic pipeline for RNA structure prediction from Nanopore DRS data.

19.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Towards Conversational AI for Disease Management

While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in diagnostic dialogue1, their capabilities for effective management reasoning—including disease progression, therapeutic response, and safe medication prescription—remain under-explored. We advance the previously demonstrated diagnostic capabilities of the Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE)1−3 through a new LLM-based agentic system optimized for multi-visit clinical management and dialogue. To ground its reasoning in authoritative clinical knowledge, AMIE leverages Gemini’s long-context capabilities4, combining in-context retrieval with structured reasoning to align its output with up-to-date clinical practice guidelines and drug formularies. In a randomized, blinded virtual Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) study, AMIE was compared to 21 primary care physicians (PCPs) across 100 multi-visit case scenarios designed to reflect UK NICE Guidance and BMJ Best Practice guidelines. AMIE was non-inferior to PCPs in management reasoning as assessed by specialists and scored better in both preciseness of treatments and investigations, and in its alignment with and grounding in clinical guidelines. To benchmark medication reasoning, we developed RxQA, a multiple-choice question benchmark derived from two national drug formularies (US, UK) and validated by board-certified pharmacists. Though AMIE and PCPs both benefited from the ability to access external drug information, AMIE outperformed PCPs on higher difficulty questions. While further research would be needed before real-world translation, AMIE’s strong performance across evaluations marks a significant step towards conversational AI as a tool in disease management.

20.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-25

Quantum conditional mutual information and channel capacity

Authors:

arXiv:2606.25264v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Information measures acquire operational meaning through coding theorems. The quantum conditional mutual information (QCMI) is nonnegative due to strong subadditivity, yet a direct connection with channel coding has remained elusive. In this work, we propose a quantum communication task-conditional quantum communication-that fills this gap. We show that the optimal rate for establishing quantum correlation between two parties, assisted by a third system, is given by half the QCMI. This result naturally extends the classical key generation capacity of Csiszár and Ahlswede to the quantum domain. We place our model within the family tree of quantum protocols and compute the conditional capacity for several example channels. Our results provide new insights for code design in reliable quantum information processing.

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

Compositional Reasoning Depth Predicts Clinical AI Failure: Empirical Evidence Consistent with Transformer Compositionality Limits in Electronic Health Record Question Answering

Authors:

Aggregate accuracy benchmarks conceal a systematic structure in how large language models fail at electronic health record (EHR) question answering: questions requiring more inferential steps produce disproportionately more errors. Motivated by theoretical results on transformer compositionality limits, we introduce a pre-specified hop-count taxonomy – the number of distinct reasoning steps required to answer a clinical question from an EHR – as a principled predictor of model failure. We annotate 313 clinician-generated MedAlign EHR question-answer pairs across four hop levels and evaluate 301 questions in a within-model ablation (claude-sonnet-4-6, zero-shot vs. extended thinking) and cross-architecture replications (gpt-4o and gpt-5.4-2026-03-05, zero-shot). All three models, spanning two providers and two OpenAI generations (GPT-4 and GPT-5), show monotone accuracy decline with hop count: Claude Sonnet zero-shot falls from 30.6% (hop=1) to 17.6% (hop=4) (Cochran-Armitage z=-2.30, p=0.011; OR per hop 0.72, 95% CI [0.56,0.92], p=0.008); GPT-4o replicates this (37.8% to 14.7%; OR 0.58 [0.45,0.75], p

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

From Tokens to Regions: CUDA-Sensitive Instruction Tuning for GPU Kernel Generation

arXiv:2606.16231v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: High-performance CUDA kernels are essential for scalable AI systems, while Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle to generate correct kernels due to strict and implicit execution constraints. Existing LLM-based approaches either rely on costly agentic or reinforcement-learning (RL) pipelines, or adopt supervised fine-tuning (SFT) objectives that fail to explicitly model CUDA sensitivity, namely code tokens or regions tightly coupled with execution constraints. In this work, we investigate CUDA sensitivity from the perspective of token confidence patterns, showing that CUDA sensitivity appears at both token and region levels, where most CUDA-sensitive tokens are predicted with high confidence, while a smaller low-confidence subset forms regions corresponding to execution-critical structures. These findings suggest that effective CUDA kernel generation should both leverage high-confidence CUDA-sensitive tokens and preserve low-confidence CUDA-sensitive regions. Building on these insights, we propose \underline{CUDA-\underline{Se}nsitive Instruction \underline{T}uning (CuSeT)}, a low-cost post-training method within a simple SFT framework. CuSeT follows the principle of ``from tokens to regions'' by combining adaptive token-level masking with region-aware sample reweighting. Experiments show that CuSeT consistently improves functional correctness across multiple model families and scales, outperforming standard SFT and advanced SFT variants, while achieving competitive performance against frontier CUDA kernel generation models with substantially lower inference cost.

23.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-24

InVitroGap: an open-source tool for automated quantification of wound closure in the in vitro scratch assay

Abstract Background and Objective: Scratch assays are widely used to study wound closure in vitro, but quantitative image analysis remains constrained by manual variability, proprietary workflows, and tools requiring programming expertise. We developed InVitroGap, a Python-based application with a browser-accessible interface for automated quantification of scratch assay closure from sequential microscopy images. Methods: RCC-ER and Renca cells were seeded in 96-well ImageLock plates and scratched using a WoundMaker device for uniform linear wounds or a 200 uL pipette tip for crisscross wounds. Phase-contrast time-lapse images acquired at 0, 24, and 48 h with an IncuCyte SX5 system were independently analyzed using IncuCyte 2023A Rev2 and InVitroGap. The InVitroGap pipeline combines Gaussian smoothing, gradient-based texture mapping, adaptive percentile thresholding, and morphological post-processing to quantify wound confluence and relative wound density (RWD). Agreement was evaluated using paired comparisons, Pearson and Spearman correlations, Bland-Altman analysis, and mean absolute error (MAE). Results: InVitroGap measurements closely tracked IncuCyte outputs across both cell lines, with no significant between-method differences (p > 0.05), strong pooled correlations (R square = 0.964 for RWD; R square = 0.983 for wound confluence), and small mean biases (absolute bias [&le;] 1.64%). The tool successfully processed crisscross wounds from brightfield image series, and a complete four-timepoint series was analyzed in approximately 10 seconds, with robust performance across distinct cell morphologies and wound geometries. Conclusions: InVitroGap provides a transparent, computationally efficient, and platform-independent alternative for scratch assay analysis, delivering performance comparable to commercial systems while remaining freely accessible at https://invitrogap.vercel.app/.

24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

The impact of changes in age-based eligibility criteria on seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in England between 2019 and 2024: A retrospective cohort study

Objectives: To examine changes in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake among clinical risk groups over periods of differing age-based eligibility. Design: Retrospective cohort study. Setting: Individuals in England registered in the Clinical Practice Research Datalink Aurum. Participants: Between 1,239,802 (2019/20) and 1,289,330 (2023/24) individuals aged 40-69 years in clinical risk groups. Interventions: Natural experiment involving temporary expansion of age-based eligibility for influenza vaccination to include 50-64-year-olds from 2020/21 to 2022/23. Main outcome measures: Influenza vaccine uptake from 1st September to 28th February, incidence rate ratio (IRR) of vaccine uptake across consecutive seasons within age groups, and the ratio of IRRs between age groups. Results: Influenza vaccine uptake increased in all age groups in 2020/21 relative to 2019/20. The increase was larger in individuals aged 50-64 years (13.3%; IRR 1.50, 95% CI 1.50-1.51) compared with those aged 40-49 years (8.3%; IRR 1.35, 95% CI 1.34-1.35) and 65-69 years (6.8%; IRR 1.34, 95% CI 1.33-1.35). From 2020/21 to 2022/23, vaccine uptake decreased, with a more pronounced decline among those aged 40-49 years (-5.4%) compared with age-eligible groups (50-64 years: -3.0%; 65-69 years: -3.1%). The reversion of age eligibility in 2023/24 was associated with a larger decrease in uptake among those aged 50-64 years (-9.6% vs 2022/23; IRR 0.79, 95% CI: 0.79-0.79) compared with those aged 40-49 years (-4.9%; IRR 0.87, 95% CI: 0.87-0.88) and 65-69 years (-3.3%; IRR 0.97, 95% CI: 0.96-0.97). Patterns were broadly consistent across clinical risk groups. Conclusions: The COVID-19 pandemic saw a general increase in seasonal influenza vaccine uptake in clinical risk groups. This increase was larger and more sustained in 50-64 year-olds who had also become eligible based on age. Our findings highlight the potential gains in vaccine coverage among clinical risk groups based on expanded age-based eligibility.

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

Breaking the Ice: Analyzing Cold Start Latency in vLLM

arXiv:2606.07362v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As scalable inference services become popular, the cold start latency of an inference engine becomes important. Today, vLLM has evolved into the de facto inference engine of choice for many inference workloads. Although popular, due to its complexity and rapid evolution, there has not been a systematic study of its startup latency. With major architectural innovations such as the V1 API and the introduction of torch.compile, this paper presents the first detailed performance characterization of vLLM startup latency. We break down the startup process into six foundational steps and demonstrate that it is predominantly CPU bound. Each step exhibits consistent and interpretable scaling trends with respect to model-level and system-level parameters, enabling fine-grained attribution of latency sources. Building on these insights, we develop a lightweight analytical model that accurately predicts vLLM startup latency for a given hardware configuration, providing actionable guidance for resource planning in large-scale inference environments. All benchmarking datasets, analysis tools, and prediction scripts are open sourced at https://github.com/upb-cn/vllm-startup-profiler.