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

Intelligent Skin Cancer Detection Using a Multispectral Metasurface and a Hybrid

Skin cancer is among the most prevalent malignancies worldwiAdbe satnradcitts early detection is essential for improving patient survival and reducing treatment costs Conventional dermoscopic and visual imaging techniques are primarily limited to the visible spectrum and often fail to capture subtle spectral signatures associated with early stage malignancies This study proposes an innovative framework that integrates a multispectral metasurface for imaging with a hybrid deep learning architecture based on Convolutional Neural Networks and Vision Transformers The designed metasurface enables noninvasive acquisition of rich spectral information highly sensitive to tissue alterations while the hybrid CNN ViT model simultaneously extracts local and global features to robustly classify skin lesions Simulation-based evaluations demonstrate that the proposed method achieves approximately 98 accuracy 95 percentages sensitivity and 99 perentage specificity surpassing conventional RGB-based and single-architecture approaches Qualitative analyses using attention maps reveal that the model focuses on clinically relevant lesion regions improving interpretability Overall the results indicate that combining metasurface based multispectral imaging with hybrid deep learning can introduce a new generation of diagnostic tools in dermatology and pave the way for portable fast and highly accurate clinical systems

02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Frequency-dependent cognitive effects of Deep Brain Stimulation in Parkinson's Disease: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background: Subthalamic nucleus deep brain stimulation (STN-DBS) improves levodopa-induced motor complications and cardinal motor symptoms of Parkinson's disease (PD), but stimulation frequency may differentially shape outcomes. This is evident for axial and gait symptoms, which may respond differently to lower-frequency stimulation. Whether frequency-dependent effects extend to cognition remains unclear. Objective: To investigate the cognitive effects of DBS at distinct frequencies in PD. Methods: We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis (PROSPERO - CRD42024618253). PubMed, Web of Science, and EMBASE were searched for studies assessing cognitive outcomes under different stimulation frequencies. Eight cognitive domains were defined: verbal fluency, cognitive flexibility, executive control, working memory, attention, processing speed, episodic memory, and time processing. Multilevel random-effects meta-analyses were performed, with effect sizes expressed as Hedges' g. Results: Forty-three studies met the inclusion criteria, the majority (n = 31) involving STN-DBS. Twenty-one STN-DBS studies, including 355 patients, were included in the meta-analysis. Compared with HFS ([≥] 130 Hz), lower frequencies (4-80 Hz) were associated with better verbal fluency (g = 0.27) and cognitive flexibility (g = 0.38), with consistent effects across sensitivity and leave-one-out analyses. Accuracy-based executive control measures also favored lower-frequency stimulation. OFF-stimulation comparisons showed a concordant pattern. Evidence for other targets (PPN and NBM) was limited. Conclusions: Lower-frequency STN-DBS was associated with modest benefits in specific cognitive domains compared with HFS. These findings highlight the need for future research to determine how frequency interacts with stimulation location and symptom-specific networks to shape cognitive and cognitive-motor outcomes in PD.

03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Rethinking the Pointer Loss in Table Structure Recognition: Geometry-Aware Pointer Loss for Spatial Locality

Table Structure Recognition (TSR) using a pointer network achieves impressive results by predicting HTML sequences while aligning tags to detected text (or cell) regions. However, our analysis reveals that when pointer networks fail, 79.6% of errors occur between spatially adjacent cells (Manhattan distance

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

Short Chains, Deep Thoughts: Balancing Reasoning Efficiency and Intra-Segment Capability via Split-Merge Optimization

While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving complex tasks through the generation of long reasoning chains, this reliance on verbose generation results in significant latency and computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose CoSMo (Consistency-Guided Split-Merge Optimization), a framework designed to eliminate structural redundancy rather than indiscriminately restricting token volume. Specifically, CoSMo utilizes a split-merge algorithm that dynamically refines reasoning chains by merging redundant segments and splitting logical gaps to ensure coherence. We then employ structure-aligned reinforcement learning with a novel segment-level budget to supervise the model in maintaining efficient reasoning structures throughout training. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks and backbones demonstrate that CoSMo achieves superior performance, improving accuracy by 3.3 points while reducing segment usage by 28.7\% on average compared to reasoning efficiency baselines.

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

Systematic Study of Dysarthric Speech Recognition: Spectral Features and Acoustic Models

arXiv:2606.19793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The challenge associated with recognizing dysarthric speech primarily arises from pronounced acoustic variability attributed to impaired articulatory precision. Past research has demonstrated improved recognition through the use of hybrid DNN/HMM sequence discriminative training. This paper presents a comprehensive investigation of various combinations of acoustic features tailored to different Acoustic Models, offering suitable feature selections for each. The incorporation of Pitch features notably improved recognition performance, especially for sentence recognition tasks involving dysarthric speech. Through a systematic examination of the TORGO database, we have demonstrated the potential to enhance the performance of the state-of-the-art Factorized Time Delay Neural Network (F-TDNN) model for recognizing dysarthric speech. Our methods, implemented with the F-TDNN model, resulted in a 4.65\% relative improvement in isolated word recognition and a 4.63\% relative improvement in sentence recognition for dysarthric speech, compared to previous research. This improvement effectively compensates for speech variability, attributable to our deliberate selection of the number of overlapping frames between consecutive training example chunks.

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

The Personalization Trap: How User Memory Alters Emotional Reasoning in LLMs

When an AI assistant remembers that Sarah is a single mother working two jobs, does it interpret her stress differently than if she were a wealthy executive? As personalized AI systems increasingly incorporate long-term user memory, understanding how this memory shapes emotional reasoning is critical. We investigate how user memory affects emotional intelligence in large language models (LLMs) by evaluating 15 models on human-validated emotional intelligence tests. We find that identical scenarios paired with different user profiles produce systematically divergent emotional interpretations. Across validated user-independent emotional scenarios and diverse user profiles, systematic biases emerged in several high-performing LLMs where advantaged profiles received more accurate emotional interpretations. Moreover, LLMs demonstrate significant disparities across demographic factors in emotion reasoning and supportive recommendations tasks, indicating that personalization mechanisms can embed social hierarchies into models' emotional reasoning. These results highlight a key challenge for memory-enhanced AI: systems designed for personalization may reinforce social inequalities. To mitigate these disparities, we curate a general-purpose preference dataset designed to reduce demographic profiles' influence on emotional understanding.

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

XRDiff: Crystal Structure Prediction from Powder X-Ray Diffraction Data Using Diffusion Models

arXiv:2606.14003v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Determining the crystal structure of a material from its powder X-ray diffraction (PXRD) pattern is a central challenge in materials science. PXRD is an accessible and widely used characterization technique, yet recovering the atomic structure from diffraction data requires solving an underdetermined inverse problem due to the loss of phase information. Generative modeling can provide a prior over atomic structure and learn the mapping from PXRD patterns to crystal structures via simulated structure-spectrum pairs. We present XRDiff, a diffusion model that recovers crystal structures from PXRD given either the stoichiometry or, in a more challenging setting, the elemental constituents and total number of atoms in the unit cell. We evaluate on datasets where each stoichiometry has multiple polymorphs and all polymorphs of a given composition are held out together, ensuring that high performance reflects genuine use of the diffraction signal. XRDiff achieves strong structure recovery rates on simulated benchmarks, indicating that the model learns a spectrum-to-structure mapping precise enough to differentiate between polymorphs. To address generalization to experimental data, we compare a full-spectrum encoding against an encoding based on peak descriptors. The peak-based encoding generalizes substantially better, outperforming even a model trained on full spectra with augmentations fitted to the experimental noise distribution. These results demonstrate that representations robust to the noise and artifacts present in real-world PXRD offer a practical and scalable path toward closing the simulation-to-experiment gap, enabling zero-shot crystal structure solution from experimental PXRD with full or partial chemical composition input.

08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Opportunistic CKD Screening in Hospitalized Patients

Background. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects 10-13% of adults worldwide but remains largely undiagnosed until advanced stages. Hospitalization provides an opportunity for early detection through opportunistic urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (UACR) measurement. Methods. We conducted a prospective three-arm study of opportunistic CKD screening in general internal medicine wards at Hadassah Mt. Scopus (MS), Hadassah Ein Kerem (EK), and Shaare Zedek Medical Center (SZMC) in Jerusalem (Protocol HMO-23-0300). Adult inpatients without known CKD or recent UACR were enrolled. Pathological UACR was defined as [≥]30 mg/g. Confirmed CKD required two pathological measurements [≥]90 days apart (KDIGO-compatible). eGFR was computed using the 2021 CKD-EPI race-free equation. Pooled proportions were estimated by fixed-effects logit meta-analysis; odds ratios by DerSimonian-Laird random-effects models. Results. A total of 158 patients were enrolled (MS n=50, EK n=57, SZMC n=51). Pathological first UACR was identified in 43/158 patients (27.2%; 95% CI 21.3-34.1%; I2=0% across centers). Of 24 patients with a second UACR available, 14 (58%) confirmed CKD, yielding a pooled confirmed-CKD rate of 8.9% of all screened patients. In-hospital mortality was significantly higher among patients with pathological UACR (9.3% vs ~2%; Fisher's exact p=0.012). In per-center multivariate logistic regression, three predictors reached pooled significance: BUN (OR 1.10 per mg/dL, 95% CI 1.04-1.17, p=0.002, I2=0%), heart failure (OR 3.21, 95% CI 1.34-7.70, p=0.009, I2=0%), and diabetes mellitus (OR 2.54, 95% CI 1.11-5.82, p=0.028, I2=17%). Cardiac/vascular admissions had the highest pathological UACR rate (~42%); GI/hepatic admissions had 0%. Conclusions. Opportunistic inpatient UACR screening identifies previously unrecognized CKD in approximately 9% of general internal medicine patients, with consistent results across three independent centers. BUN elevation, heart failure, and diabetes are the strongest independent predictors. Pathological UACR carries significant short-term mortality risk, supporting integration of routine screening into inpatient care pathways.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Time-Conditioned and Multi-Time Survival Prediction from 2D PET/CT Projections in Lung Cancer

Accurate prediction of overall survival (OS) from positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) can support personalized treatment and follow-up strategies in oncology. However, the impact of temporal modeling on imaging-based survival prediction remains insufficiently explored. We investigate how different temporal formulations influence survival prediction by developing two complementary approaches: Attention-guided Time-Conditioned Survival (ATCS) and Multi-Time Survival (MTS). We retrospectively analyzed pre-treatment PET/CT images from 848 patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), including 556 for model development and 292 for held-out testing. A previously proposed Time-Conditioned Survival (TCS) model was used as a baseline. Models were trained using 5-fold cross-validation and evaluated on the test set using time-dependent area under the curve (AUC) at 6-month intervals from 0.5 to 5 years. Both ATCS and MTS outperformed the baseline TCS model, achieving mean AUCs of 0.794 and 0.793, respectively, compared to 0.767. ATCS performed better at earlier time points (0.5-3 years), whereas MTS performed better at later intervals (3.5-5 years). Combining tumor-specific and tissue-wise PET/CT features improved performance over either input alone. Finer temporal discretization improved short-term prediction, while coarser intervals provided more stable long-term estimates. These findings demonstrate that temporal modeling and input design influence PET/CT-based survival prediction. The proposed approaches enable time-specific survival estimation from pre-treatment imaging and may support improved risk stratification and clinical decision-making.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Measuring Curriculum Alignment across Topical Coverage, Competency, and Cognitive Depth: A Longitudinal Framework Applied to CS2013 and CS2023

arXiv:2606.19469v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Undergraduate computer science is governed by international curricular guidelines revised about once a decade, yet programs lack a reliable, reproducible way to measure how completely they cover the current guidelines and how that coverage shifts when the guidelines are restructured. We address this with a human-in-the-loop pipeline that measures a program's coverage of an external body of knowledge, applied longitudinally to one accredited BSc in Computer Science against Computer Science Curricula 2013 (CS2013) and 2023 (CS2023). The pipeline represents the program and each guideline as structured corpora, generates candidate course-to-knowledge-unit matches by semantic retrieval, and confirms them through human judgment under an explicit coverage definition. Of seven benchmarked retrievers, a reciprocal-rank-fusion ensemble was strongest, and a reputed long-context model underperformed a small sentence model, so retriever choice must be measured. Both maps were validated by an independent second rater (Cohen's kappa 0.64 for CS2023, 0.69 for CS2013). The program covers 49.7% of CS2023 and 50.9% of CS2013 knowledge units, near-constant across a decade. Extending the same retrieve-then-confirm design to competency articulation and cognitive depth shows that the program articulates the competency for ~88% of covered units under each guideline, yet delivers it at the recommended depth for 76% of present units under CS2023 against 95% under CS2013, a gap reflecting the newer guideline's raised expectations, not the program. The longitudinal comparison separates persistent structural gaps (parallel and distributed computing, foundations of programming languages, systems fundamentals), uncovered against both guidelines and ABET, from differences that reflect the standard's evolution. The instrument is reusable and available from the authors on request.

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

Composing Linear Layers from Irreducibles

arXiv:2507.11688v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Contemporary large models often exhibit behaviors suggesting the presence of low-level primitives that compose into modules with richer functionality, but these fundamental building blocks remain poorly understood. We investigate this compositional structure in linear layers by asking: can we identify/synthesize linear transformations from a minimal set of geometric primitives? Using Clifford algebra, we show that linear layers can be expressed as compositions of bivectors – geometric objects encoding oriented planes – and introduce a differentiable algorithm that decomposes them into products of rotors. This construction uses only O(log^2 d) parameters, versus O(d^2) required by dense matrices. Applied to the key, query, and value projections in LLM attention layers, our rotor-based layers match the performance of strong baselines such as block-Hadamard and low-rank approximations. Our findings provide an algebraic perspective on how these geometric primitives can compose into higher-level functions within deep models.

12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

A Diffusion Approximation for Temporal-Difference Learning with Linear Features under Markovian Noise

arXiv:2606.18183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Temporal difference (TD) learning with linear function approximation is a core method for policy evaluation. Its classical continuous-time description is an ordinary differential equation (ODE), which captures the asymptotic mean dynamics but neglects stochastic fluctuations determining the error floor. We introduce a stochastic differential equation (SDE) approximation for linear TD(0) under Markovian noise. The resulting model distinguishes the contraction dynamics governed by the projected Bellman operator from the influence of Markovian sampling. As a consequence, the model explains the constant-stepsize error floor through the interaction between Markovian long-run covariance and the contraction geometry of the projected Bellman operator.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Dense Supervision, Sparse Updates: On the Sparsity and Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

arXiv:2606.13657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (\textsc{OPD}) has recently become a prominent post-training recipe as it combines two desirable ingredients: on-policy student trajectories and dense teacher supervision, yet how this hybrid changes a model's parameters remains unclear. Across several language and vision-language model pairs and use cases, our analysis yields two main findings. On sparsity, \textsc{OPD}-style updates are small and coordinate-sparse. They are distributed across layers and are usually FFN-heavy. This sparse structure is operationally useful: training only the discovered subnetwork recovers nearly the same performance as full \textsc{OPD}. However, the sparsity-inducing SGD optimizer underperforms AdamW in our optimizer ablation, likely because dense teacher supervision preserves heterogeneous coordinate-wise gradient scales where AdamW's adaptive scaling remains useful. On geometry, the updates are numerically full-rank but spectrally concentrated; they lie mostly away from the principal singular subspaces of the source weights and fall disproportionately on coordinates where the source weights are close to zero. These findings suggest that dense teacher supervision does not turn \textsc{OPD} into ordinary dense parameter rewriting; instead, \textsc{OPD} retains important geometric signatures of on-policy post-training.

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

Random Erasing vs. Model Inversion: A Promising Defense or a False Hope?

Model Inversion (MI) attacks pose a significant privacy threat by reconstructing private training data from machine learning models. While existing defenses primarily concentrate on model-centric approaches, the impact of data on MI robustness remains largely unexplored. In this work, we explore Random Erasing (RE), a technique traditionally used for improving model generalization under occlusion, and uncover its surprising effectiveness as a defense against MI attacks. Specifically, our novel feature space analysis shows that models trained with RE-images introduce a significant discrepancy between the features of MI-reconstructed images and those of the private data. At the same time, features of private images remain distinct from other classes and well-separated from different classification regions. These effects collectively degrade MI reconstruction quality and attack accuracy while maintaining reasonable natural accuracy. Furthermore, we explore two critical properties of RE including Partial Erasure and Random Location. Partial Erasure prevents the model from observing entire objects during training. We find this has a significant impact on MI, which aims to reconstruct the entire objects. Random Location of erasure plays a crucial role in achieving a strong privacy-utility trade-off. Our findings highlight RE as a simple yet effective defense mechanism that can be easily integrated with existing privacy-preserving techniques. Extensive experiments across 37 setups demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the privacy-utility trade-off. The results consistently demonstrate the superiority of our defense over existing methods across different MI attacks, network architectures, and attack configurations. For the first time, we achieve a significant degradation in attack accuracy without a decrease in utility for some configurations.

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

FeedEval: Pedagogically Aligned Evaluation of LLM-Generated Essay Feedback

Going beyond the prediction of numerical scores, recent research in automated essay scoring has increasingly emphasized the generation of high-quality feedback that provides justification and actionable guidance. To mitigate the high cost of expert annotation, prior work has commonly relied on LLM-generated feedback to train essay assessment models. However, such feedback is often incorporated without explicit quality validation, resulting in the propagation of noise in downstream applications. To address this limitation, we propose FeedEval, an LLM-based framework for evaluating LLM-generated essay feedback along three pedagogically grounded dimensions: specificity, helpfulness, and validity. FeedEval employs dimension-specialized LLM evaluators trained on datasets curated in this study to assess multiple feedback candidates and select high-quality feedback for downstream use. Experiments on the ASAP++ benchmark show that FeedEval closely aligns with human expert judgments and that essay scoring models trained with FeedEval-filtered high-quality feedback achieve superior scoring performance. Furthermore, revision experiments using small LLMs show that the high-quality feedback identified by FeedEval leads to more effective essay revisions. We release our code and curated datasets at: https://github.com/BBeeChu/FeedEval.git.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Immunologically Optimized Zmp1 Peptides Reveal a Translational Serological Biomarker Platform for Tuberculosis Diagnosis Across Disease Manifestations

Tuberculosis (TB) diagnosis remains challenging, particularly for extrapulmonary TB (EPTB), where invasive sampling, low bacillary burden, and suboptimal sensitivity of nucleic acid-based tests in peripheral specimens hinder timely detection. Here, we report an immunology-driven strategy for biomarker discovery and development of a peptide-based serological assay targeting Mycobacterium tuberculosis zinc metalloprotease-1 (Zmp1). Leveraging fundamental principles of adaptive immunity that antigenic regions containing overlapping B-cell and CD4 T-helper cell epitopes would preferentially generate high antibody titers through linked recognition and cognate T-cell help, we used an immunoinformatics pipeline to identify two nested immunodominant peptide regions within Zmp1 (Mtb-Zp-NT and Mtb-Zp-CT) enriched for overlapping B- and T-cell epitopes. The diagnostic potential of these peptides was evaluated through ELISA-based serological assays. A blinded pilot study (N=137) demonstrated a clear discrimination between active TB and TB-recovered individuals. The assay was subsequently validated in an expanded cohort (N=875) by screening 6,086 individuals, which identified 457 TB-positive cases. The cohort included pulmonary TB (PTB), EPTB, TB-recovered individuals, household contacts, non-specific infections, and healthy controls. Receiver operating characteristic analyses, supported by DeLong and bootstrap comparisons, revealed superior diagnostic performance of the peptide-based assays relative to full-length Zmp1. Mtb-Zp-CT exhibited the highest accuracy (AUC=0.93; specificity >90%), while Mtb-Zp-NT also demonstrated strong discriminatory power (AUC{approx}0.89). These findings establish that the immunologically optimized Zmp1 peptides are highly promising serological biomarkers for TB and EPTB. More broadly, they demonstrate how mechanistically informed epitope selection can accelerate translation of pathogen-specific immune signatures into sensitive, minimally invasive, and potentially point-of-care diagnostic platforms for resource-limited settings.

17.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-12

Constructing Evaluation Datasets for Procedural Reasoning: Balancing Naturalness, Grounding, and Multi-Hop Coverage

arXiv:2606.12767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating procedural reasoning in AI-supported learning systems requires question-answer datasets that are both learner-like and grounded in the instructional knowledge the system is expected to use. We study how TMK-based question generation strategies affect dataset quality for procedural and multi-hop reasoning. We compare three strategies: strict generation from Task-Method-Knowledge (TMK) models, transcript-first generation with post-hoc TMK filtering, and TMK-aware generation that combines transcripts with structured guidance. To evaluate generated items, we introduce a grounding validation framework based on closed-set evidence units extracted from TMK models. The framework measures whether answers are supported by the underlying representation, whether questions are self-contained, and whether they target multi-hop procedural reasoning. Across 23 instructional topics and 690 generated question-answer pairs, strict TMK generation achieves the strongest overall quality, with 96.5% grounded questions and 92.6% usable questions. Transcript-first generation produces more learner-like questions but more context-dependent or weakly grounded items, while TMK-aware generation yields high raw multi-hop coverage but lower grounding. These results show that procedural richness and natural phrasing do not guarantee representational grounding, motivating explicit representation-aware validation for evaluation datasets in AI-supported learning.

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

A Knowledge Theory of Capital:The Value of Natural and Artificial Intelligence

arXiv:2606.18288v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Q-Fold: Query-Aware Focus-Context Spatio-Temporal Folding for Long Video Understanding

Long-video understanding remains challenging for multimodal large language models, because temporally extended videos often contain thousands of frames and are therefore expensive to process exhaustively. Existing methods usually construct compact visual inputs from long videos under a limited visual budget. However, most of them still follow a frame-centric paradigm and apply similar representations to retained content regardless of its importance. This makes it difficult to preserve both high-fidelity visual evidence and broad temporal coverage. To address this issue, we propose Q-Fold, a training-free input construction framework for long-video understanding. Instead of treating isolated frames as the basic modeling unit, Q-Fold operates on contiguous temporal segments and constructs a heterogeneous Focus–Context representation under query guidance. Query-relevant segments are preserved as high-fidelity Focus Frames, while less relevant segments are folded into chronology-preserving contextual layouts. In this way, Q-Fold preserves critical visual evidence and broad temporal coverage, while better maintaining local temporal continuity within short segments. Experiments on four long-video benchmarks with multiple Video-MLLMs show that Q-Fold consistently improves performance without increasing the input budget. Notably, it achieves gains of up to 9.1 percentage points on an ultra-long video benchmark. Code will be made publicly available.

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

Reinforcement Learning with Action-Triggered Observations

arXiv:2510.02149v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We introduce Action-Triggered Sporadically Traceable Markov Decision Processes (ATST-MDPs), a reinforcement learning framework for partial observability in which full state observations occur stochastically at each step, with probability determined by the chosen action. We derive Bellman equations tailored to this setting and establish the existence of an optimal policy. Exploiting the fact that sporadic observations reveal the full state, we provide an equivalent formulation in which agents commit to action-sequences between consecutive observations. Under the linear MDP assumption, we show that the value function over such action-sequences admits a linear representation in a finite-dimensional feature map, enabling standard regression-based methods. As an application, we derive ATST-LSVI-UCB, an optimistic algorithm achieving regret $\widetilde{O}(\sqrt{Kd^3(1-\gamma)^{-3}})$ for episodic learning with geometrically distributed horizons, where $K$ is the number of episodes, $d$ the feature dimension, and $\gamma$ the discount factor (episode continuation probability), matching the known rate for linear MDPs with full observability.

21.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

Lung-SRAD: Spectral-Aware Regularized Audio DASS with Dual-Axis Patch-Mix Contrastive Learning for Respiratory Sound Classification

arXiv:2606.11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent respiratory sound classification (RSC) studies largely rely on CLS-token driven self-attention architectures such as the Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST). While effective at modeling global context, recent analyses suggest a low-pass filtering behavior that may reduce sensitivity to localized abnormal patterns. In this work, we investigate State Space Models (SSMs) as an alternative backbone for RSC. Using the Distilled Audio State Space model, we analyze intermediate representations through spectral response curves and observe stronger preservation of mid-to-high spatial-frequency components. Based on these observations, we introduce spectral-aware layer regularization using Gaussian convolution applied to selected layers. We further propose Dual-Axis Patch-Mix contrastive learning tailored to SSM-based audio models for robust representation learning. Experiments on the ICBHI benchmark show that our approach achieves 64.48% score, outperforming the AST baseline by 5%. Code is available at https://github.com/RSC-Toolkit/Lung-SRAD.

22.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

Current World Models Lack a Persistent State Core

World models are increasingly regarded as a decisive step toward artificial general intelligence, yet modeling the physical world demands more than rendering convincing frames on demand: it requires an internal world state that keeps evolving over time, decoupled from observation, so that objects endure and events run to their conclusions whether or not a camera is watching, much as the moon holds to its orbit when no one is looking. This requirement is a blind spot of existing benchmarks, which reward surface properties such as fidelity, motion, and camera controllability while never asking whether a generated world keeps evolving once it is unobserved. We introduce WRBench, the first systematic diagnostic benchmark that treats camera motion as an intervention on observability and resolves evaluation into a human-calibrated chain that asks whether the camera executes the requested interaction, whether the scene stays continuous and identifiable while in view, and whether a returning target remains consistent with the event that was set in motion. Across 9{,}600 videos from 23 models spanning four control paradigms, one finding proves stubborn: current systems maintain the observed world as a tracking shot, resuming a returning target in the state at which it was abandoned rather than advancing the event while it went unseen. Because this failure recurs across control paradigms, model families, and increments of scale, robust world-state evolution does not follow from cleaner imagery, tighter control, richer geometric priors, or sheer parameter count We therefore argue that the stability of the physical state kernel and the consistency of worldlines under viewpoint intervention should become first-class objectives of world-model design, so that a world model captures how the world will unfold rather than how the next frame appears.

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

Lect\=uraAgents: A Multi-Agent Framework for Adaptive Personalized AI-Assisted Learning and Embodied Teaching

Effective personalized AI-assisted learning demands systems that can not only generate accurate learner-specific educational materials, but also dynamically adapt their instruction to diverse learners. However, existing educational agents have primarily focused on lecture content automation and simulations, which often fall short of modelling multimodal and embodied instructional methods tailored for the individual learner. To this end, we propose Lect\=uraAgents - a multi-agent framework that enables personalized learning through end-to-end adaptive embodied teaching. At its core, Lect\=uraAgents mirrors a professor-student relationship, in which a ProfessorAgent leads a collaborative team of specialized subordinate agents through research, planning, review, and embodied delivery of lecture contents that adapt to a learner's needs. The framework offers three main contributions: (1) a hierarchical multi-agent architecture for end-to-end personalized learning; (2) an adaptive embodied teaching mechanism, wherein the ProfessorAgent executes visible and pedagogically motivated teaching actions (e.g., handwrite, highlight, underline, etc.) over contents in a teaching environment; and (3) a Teaching Action-Speech Alignment (TASA) algorithm that employs salience-based heuristics and temporal semantic segmentation to generate coherent teaching action sequences aligned with learner profiles. We evaluate Lect\=uraAgents on diverse courses at high school, undergraduate, and graduate levels using sample-specific rubric-based analysis; with generated lecture materials and teaching actions assessed and validated by expert educators. Experimental results show consistent gains in lecture content quality, embodied teaching quality, assessment, and personalization over existing approaches, positioning Lect\=uraAgents as a pedagogically well-grounded framework for personalized learning at scale.

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

Fix Initial Programs and Iteratively Refine Repair Instructions Toward Non-Elimination Multi-Turn Program Correction

arXiv:2604.23989v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work on large language models (LLMs) has emphasized the importance of scaling inference compute. From this perspective, the state-of-the-art method Scattered Forest Search (SFS) has been proposed, employing Monte Carlo Tree Search with carefully crafted initial seeds and textual optimization for multi-turn program correction. However, its complexity makes it unclear what factors contribute to improvements in inference performance. To address this problem, we analyze SFS and propose a simpler method, \textsc{Iterative Refinement of Repair Instructions} (IRRI), which fixes initial programs and iteratively refines repair instructions. Because of the simplicity of IRRI, we theoretically establish the non-elimination of IRRI using Oracle-Guided Inductive Synthesis (OGIS). Experiments on several program generation benchmarks suggest that IRRI achieves inference performance comparable to state-of-the-art methods. These results indicate that, even without complex search structures, refining initial programs with high-quality repair instructions alone can effectively improve inference performance.

25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Rare Coding Variants Reveal Distinct Genetic Architectures Across Multidimensional Sleep Phenotypes

Sleep and circadian traits have been widely studied using common variants, but the contribution of rare coding variation remains unclear. We analyzed rare coding variants in 397,065 whole-exome sequenced UK Biobank participants across 36 sleep phenotypes from self-report, diagnoses, sleep medication use and accelerometry, and meta-analyzed results with 171,536 whole-genome sequenced All of Us participants of diverse ancestries, with replication in the Mass General Brigham Biobank (N = 31,275). We identified 260 genes associated with sleep phenotypes, including novel associations with sleep medication use in 29 genes and 24 out of 29 have not previously been reported with any sleep phenotypes. We observed modest but significant rare variant heritability and strong genetic correlations between sleep medication use, insomnia and fatigue. Temporal gene expression trajectory analyses indicate that genes associated with self-reported sleep traits show constant high prenatal expression, whereas genes linked to sleep medication phenotypes exhibit peak expression in the late prenatal period. These findings highlight distinct biological mechanisms captured by different measurement sources of sleep phenotypes and reveal rare-variant-informed targets for therapeutic discovery.