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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-24

On the convergence of doubly stochastic Markov chains

Authors:
Ludovick Bouthat↗Nicolas Doyon↗Javad Mashreghi↗Fr\'ed\'eric Morneau-Gu\'erin↗

arXiv:2606.24584v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We characterize the asymptotic behavior of time-homogeneous doubly stochastic Markov chains. Our investigation revolves around understanding the dynamics of products of doubly stochastic matrices, which in turn allows us to fully characterize three distinct behaviors: cyclicity, convergence towards a special equilibrium matrix, and divergence. Notably, we introduce a novel and comprehensive sufficient condition for the convergence of an infinite product of doubly stochastic matrices.

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02.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Deleterious mitochondrial heteroplasmy drives high-risk clonal hematopoiesis and hematological malignancy

Authors:
Arking↗D. E↗McDonald↗Shi↗Puiu↗J. V↗Pasca↗Hong↗Y. S↗Gondek↗

Abstract Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) heteroplasmy, the coexistence of multiple mtDNA variants within cells, accumulates with age and is associated with hematological malignancies and mortality. However, whether predicted deleterious heteroplasmies causally contribute to cancer or merely represent passenger mutations remains unresolved. Here, leveraging ~36,000 first-degree relative pairs from the UK Biobank and All of Us Research Program cohorts, we deconvolute overall heteroplasmy metrics into those that are shared across family members (representing inherited variants) and those that are not (representing de novo variants) to establish a Mendelian randomization framework for assessing causality. We show that shared heteroplasmies exhibit strong purifying selection, with reduced predicted deleteriousness compared to not shared variants, and that 90% of an individual's deleterious heteroplasmy burden is somatically acquired. Critically, shared deleterious heteroplasmy burden, fixed at conception and thus temporally upstream of potential confounders, is significantly associated with hematological malignancies (RR=2.81, 95% CI 1.29-6.13), with effect sizes concordant with the not shared heteroplasmy burden. Furthermore, shared deleterious heteroplasmy specifically associates with high-risk clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP), particularly spliceosome mutations, suggesting mitochondrial dysfunction promotes clonal expansion of specific CHIP subtypes. Finally, we identify ultra-rare individual mtDNA variants associated with hematological malignancies, a hallmark of driver mutations. These findings establish mtDNA heteroplasmies, including inherited variants, as causal contributors to hematological malignancy risk and demonstrate that most disease-relevant burden is acquired during life, identifying potential opportunities for prevention and therapeutic intervention in individuals at elevated risk for hematological cancer, particularly of myeloid origin.

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03.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

State Space Models Meet Remote Sensing: A Survey

Authors:
Qinzhe Yang↗Chenyang Liu↗Jia Xu↗Zhenwei Shi↗Zhengxia Zou↗

State Space Models (SSMs), designed for long-range modeling, offer linear computational complexity and strong capabilities in capturing long-range dependencies. In the field of remote sensing, SSMs have gained popularity due to their effectiveness in addressing unique challenges such as dense visual predictions, multi-modal remote sensing data, and temporal remote sensing data, which have also yielded significant advancements in customized architectures. This paper presents a comprehensive review of SSM-based approaches in remote sensing, covering most of the relevant studies since SSMs were first introduced to the field. We offer a multi-dimensional analysis examining SSM applications in remote sensing tasks and discussing advancements in architecture design. This paper not only synthesizes the rapid progress in SSM-based research but also identifies key challenges and future opportunities. By providing a detailed perspective, this paper aims to serve as a foundational resource for remote sensing researchers, offering actionable insights to foster further advancements in this evolving domain. We will keep tracing related works at https://github.com/QinzheYang/Awesome-RS-State-Space-Model.

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04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Continual Backdoor Training in IoT/CPS

Authors:
Oxana Salish↗Kuniyilh S↗

arXiv:2606.14987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-physical systems (CPS) increasingly rely on continual learning (CL) to adapt to evolving environments, device heterogeneity, and concept drift, thereby improving overall utility. While continual adaptation is essential for long-lived IoT deployments where data patterns evolve, it also introduces new security vulnerabilities. In particular, backdoor attacks can exploit incremental updates, replay buffers, and representation reuse to implant persistent malicious behaviors that remain dormant during normal operation but activate upon specific triggers. In this paper, we present a backdoor attack in continual learning used in IoT/CPS systems. To this end, we formalize an IoT/CPS-specific threat model, analyze why continual learning amplifies backdoor persistence in IoT pipelines, and evaluate our technique under varying conditions. Our analysis highlights critical open challenges in securing lifelong learning in IoT/CPS and industrial IoT (IIoT) environments, as well as the need for heightened security controls.

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05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

Bridging Spherical Black-Box Optimizers

Authors:
Johannes Ackermann↗Stefano Peluchetti↗

arXiv:2606.25761v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When gradient information is unavailable, black-box optimization (BBO) methods provide a practical alternative. While Evolution Strategies (ES), Consensus-Based Optimization (CBO), Optimization via Integration (OVI), and related methods have each been studied independently, their connections remain underexplored. We unify these approaches within a common theoretical framework, revealing that they differ primarily in two design choices: fitness aggregation (controlling sharpness preference) and consensus scope (controlling modality). Leveraging these insights, we introduce hybrid optimizers that interpolate between existing methods. Our ES-OVI hybrid allows explicit control over the preference for flat minima, enabling a trade-off between performance and robustness in continuous control tasks. Our CBO-OVI hybrids combine the higher-dimensional efficiency of parametric methods with the multimodal capabilities of particle-based approaches, achieving competitive results on language model merging under limited evaluation budgets. We validate our methods on standard BBO benchmarks and higher-dimensional locomotion tasks, demonstrating that the hybrid methods can outperform their constituent algorithms.

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

From spectral structure to sensing limits in quantum thermometry

Authors:
Youssef Aiache↗Simone Cavazzoni↗Abderrahim El Allati↗Paolo Bordone↗Matteo G. A. Paris↗

arXiv:2606.25933v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The precision of a quantum thermometer is fundamentally constrained by the spectral structure of the probe itself, and a systematic mapping between the configurations of energy levels and thermometric performance provides relevant information to design optimized devices. In this work, we establish such a mapping by analyzing a broad class of quantum systems, ranging from finite spin ensembles and degenerate atoms to confining potentials, quantum walks, and continuous-spectrum models. We derive exact scaling laws for the quantum Fisher information, revealing two distinct high-temperature universality classes: finite-spectrum probes exhibit a $T^{-4}$ decay, while unbounded or continuous spectra yield a slower $T^{-2}$ decay. At low temperatures, we show that sensitivity, though universally exponentially suppressed, can be enhanced arbitrarily by engineering degenerate excited states or a quantum walk on a fully connected topology. By contrast, specific quantum walk topologies provide a distinct enhancement mechanism based on gap engineering, whereby an optimal network size yields an optimized $T^{-2}$ low-temperature scaling. Furthermore, power-law spectra enable tunable scaling of thermometric performance with system size, offering a design principle for optimal probes in specific temperature windows. Our results contribute to transform spectral information into a resource for quantum thermometry, providing both fundamental bounds and practical guidelines to tailored temperature sensing.

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07.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-25

Metabolic determinants of cancer immunotherapy outcomes identified by plasma profiling

Authors:
Déborah Suissa↗

Immune-checkpoint inhibitors benefit a subset of patients with advanced cancer, and the metabolic determinants of response remain unclear. Here, using targeted metabolomics and metagenomics, we profiled 4,336 plasma samples from 1,714 patients across five tumor types and 16 cohorts spanning Europe and North America, longitudinally sampled during five immune-checkpoint inhibitor-based treatment modalities, including fecal microbiota transplantation. A multimodal machine-learning framework integrating 154 metabolites with clinical variables identified five metabolites, age, body mass index and renal function as predictors of 12-month progression-free survival. The model achieved areas under the curve of 0.88 in training and 0.73 in validation cohorts of 105 and 30 patients, respectively and generalized across seven external cohorts. Histidine was a favorable prognostic feature of survival, whereas long-chain fatty acids and succinate were negatively associated with outcome. Histidine supplementation enhanced antitumor immunity in mice. Histidine-rich diets improved progression-free survival in patients lacking dysbiotic microbiome signatures associated with histidine catabolism. Mass-spectrometry-based metabolomic analysis of plasma samples from multiple cohorts of patients treated with immunotherapy across five distinct tumor types, followed by machine learning enabled identification of metabolic signatures, as well as functional exploration, reveals association of increased plasma histidine levels with prolonged survival and its potential for therapeutic intervention.

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08.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-16

Language fMRI lateralization success and head motion in pediatric epilepsy patients with ADHD, and improvements based on fMRI task training

Authors:
Alexander↗Santamaria↗Genc↗Barton↗Kean↗Wray↗Maixner↗Macdonald-Laurs↗Yang↗J. Y. Y.- M↗

Introduction Language functional MRI (fMRI) is a valuable tool for presurgical planning in epilepsy. Functional MRI can be challenging in children, and head motion can compromise its utility. The candidacy of patients with ADHD for fMRI is sometimes queried regarding concerns about possible head motion. In 2020, we implemented an fMRI task training program, via telehealth and/or mock MRI. We aimed to determine whether training increased language lateralisation success and/or reduced head motion in all patients, and in those with ADHD. We also aimed to determine whether patients with ADHD exhibited more head motion during fMRI than those without ADHD. Methods We retrospectively identified 223 epilepsy (85%) and other neurosurgery patients, (241 scans including repeats) with language fMRI at Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, Australia, 2016-2024. There were 24 individuals with ADHD listed in the Electronic Medical Record, five of whom had diagnoses of both ADHD and autism; and nine with autism. Language lateralisation success was determined by clinician description recorded as left/right/bilateral in the medical record. 99 patients were provided the training including fMRI task practise. Head motion was quantified by maximum Framewise Displacement (FDmax; mm). Results ADHD was associated with lower language lateralisation success. Training was associated with greater language lateralisation success, across all patients, and in those with ADHD. Regarding ADHD and head motion, outliers in FDmax were seen in 5 young patients with ADHD. Data were trimmed to allow separate investigation of FDmax for the sample with and without extremes of head motion. In untrimmed data, FDmax was significantly higher in patients with ADHD than in those without. In trimmed data, FDmax was on average lower in patients with ADHD than those without, however this was not statistically supported. Regarding training and head motion, across all patients, FDmax was significantly lower for scans with training than without. In patients with ADHD, FDmax was on average lower for scans with training, however training was not associated with FDmax. Conclusions Language fMRI training was associated with higher language lateralization success, particularly in patients with ADHD. Training was associated with reduced head motion across all patients. Although some young patients with ADHD had substantial head motion, most in our sample did not move more than those without ADHD. We conclude that the training program increases success of language fMRI, and that an ADHD diagnosis should not be a contraindication to language fMRI.

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09.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Individual Control Barrier Functions-Guided Diffusion Model for Safe Offline Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Qingyun Guo↗Junyi Shi↗Jianuo Huang↗Tianyu Shi↗

arXiv:2606.12640v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning allows control policies to be learned directly from data without online interaction, making it suitable for safety-critical tasks. Recent studies have applied diffusion models to offline reinforcement learning to leverage their strong capacity for modeling complex data distributions. However, existing approaches primarily focus on single-agent settings, leaving the safety challenges in multi-agent environments largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a safe offline multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithm that embeds neural individual control barrier functions into the diffusion model to enhance safety during trajectory generation, with control policies recovered through inverse dynamics. We evaluate our algorithm across diverse benchmarks, demonstrating substantial safety improvements while maintaining competitive rewards.

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10.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Analyzing Initialization Strategies for the Local Unitary Cluster Jastrow Ansatz within the Quantum-Centric Supercomputing Framework

Authors:
Grier M. Jones↗Maforikan J. Amoussou↗Maximilian O. Leach↗Hans-Arno Jacobsen↗

arXiv:2606.14933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this study, we analyze the choice of local unitary cluster Jastrow (LUCJ) ansatz initialization and sensitivity of the sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD) algorithm within the quantum-centric supercomputing (QCSC) framework. We examine six initialization strategies, including those based on coupled-cluster singles and doubles (CCSD), M{\o}ller-Plesset second-order perturbation theory (MP2), data-driven coupled-cluster (DDCC), and trivial (zeroes and random) initializations, across twelve molecular systems and three basis sets (STO-3G, cc-pVDZ, and aug-cc-pVDZ). We find that while the mean absolute percentage errors (MAPEs) between the alternative and CCSD-initialized t2-amplitudes span many orders of magnitude, the resulting SQD energies are largely insensitive to this variation. In particular, most initializations recover energies within chemical accuracy (+/-1.6 mEh) of the CCSD reference, with convergence improving as the basis set size increases. Notably, random initialization achieves performance competitive with CCSD across all basis sets, while zeroes initialization, despite having smaller deviations from CCSD, yields the worst energy agreement. Our results highlight that the proximity to the CCSD initialization is not a reliable predictor of the quality of electronic energies. These findings establish that configuration recovery within SQD, rather than circuit initialization, is the dominant factor governing energy accuracy, and suggest that computationally cheaper initialization strategies are viable alternatives to CCSD for QCSC workflows

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

Overview of HIPE-2026: Person-Place Relation Extraction from Multilingual Historical Texts

Authors:
Juri Opitz↗Maud Ehrmann↗Corina Racl\'e↗Andrianos Michail↗Matteo Romanello↗Simon Clematide↗

Was this person ever at that place, and if so, when? Answering such questions from noisy, multilingual historical documents is the central challenge of HIPE-2026, the third edition of the HIPE evaluation series. Moving from named entity recognition and linking (HIPE-2020, HIPE-2022) to reasoning about relationships between entities, HIPE-2026 targets two temporally grounded relation types: $at$, indicating that a person was present at a location at some point prior to a document's publication date, and $isAt$, indicating presence contemporaneous with that date. This paper presents the results of the evaluation campaign, which confronted 17 participating teams with the challenges of historical language variation, OCR noise, and indirect contextual cues across three languages: French, German, and English. The datasets include historical newspaper text from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as a surprise-domain generalization set drawn from early modern French literary texts. A distinctive feature of HIPE-2026 is its three-fold evaluation framework, which assesses predictive accuracy, computational efficiency, and cross-domain generalization, reflecting the practical demands of large-scale historical document processing in the cultural heritage domain. Across more than 40 submitted runs, results reveal a wide range of strategies, from state-of-the-art large language models to lightweight task-specific classifiers, and highlight the trade-offs between accuracy, efficiency, and robustness inherent to historical relation extraction at corpus scale. System descriptions, datasets, and findings are presented and discussed, offering a detailed picture of the current state of temporally grounded relation extraction for historical documents.

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12.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-10

APOSM: Pairwise preference learning improves generative small-molecule design

Authors:
Dreisler↗M. W↗Michael↗Hatzakis↗N. S↗Boomsma↗

Small-molecule lead refinement is constrained by the cost of synthesizing and assaying candidates, making the surrogate models that prioritize compounds for experimental testing central to the design process. The reliability of such surrogates is limited by the noise and sparsity of screening measurements. We show that training the surrogate on pairwise comparisons between candidate molecules, rather than on absolute predicted scores, yields a substantially more reliable signal for active candidate selection in this regime. We develop APOSM, an active-learning algorithm that combines a fragment-based generator, a pairwise message-passing graph neural network surrogate, and probabilistic ranking inside a batched acquisition loop. On the Practical Molecular Optimization benchmark and a GPCR ligand rediscovery task, APOSM improves target attainment and sampling efficiency over unguided fragment-based optimization, the Graph-GA genetic algorithm, and a pointwise-regression ablation, with the largest gains on tasks where absolute scores are hardest to calibrate.

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

RQUL-UIE: Revitalizing Quality-Unstable Labels for Underwater Image Enhancement via In-Dataset Self-Supervision

Authors:
Haochen Hu↗Yanrui Bin↗Chih-yung Wen↗Bing Wang↗

Underwater Image Enhancement (UIE) is essential for mitigating degradations caused by water medium. Although learning-based methods have advanced significantly, most rely on paired datasets with unstable label quality, which bottlenecks model performance. This paper proposes a diffusion-based, in-dataset self-supervised learning strategy designed to exploit the quality distribution of training labels. Specifically, we evaluate label quality via semantic perception embeddings from a pre-trained diffusion model in a training-free manner. These quality scores are subsequently quantized into noise-level indices, guiding a multi-step denoising process for level-wise supervision. This mechanism prevents low-quality labels from degrading the model while maximizing their utility during training. Furthermore, a Fourier-based refinement network is incorporated to explicitly reconstruct high-frequency components. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms SOTA approaches in restoration quality. The code and pre-trained model will be available once accepted in link.

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14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

When Life Gives You BC, Make Q-functions: Extracting Q-values from Behavior Cloning for On-Robot Reinforcement Learning

Authors:
Lakshita Dodeja↗Ondrej Biza↗Shivam Vats↗Stephen Hart↗Stefanie Tellex↗Robin Walters↗Karl Schmeckpeper↗Thomas Weng↗

arXiv:2605.05172v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods often cause policies to replace previously learned good actions due to a distribution mismatch between offline data and online learning. In this work, we propose Q2RL, Q-Estimation and Q-Gating from BC for Reinforcement Learning, an algorithm for efficient offline-to-online learning. Our method consists of two parts: (1) Q-Estimation extracts a Q-function from a BC policy using a few interaction steps with the environment, followed by online RL with (2) Q-Gating, which switches between BC and RL policy actions based on their respective Q-values to collect samples for RL policy training. Across manipulation tasks from D4RL and robomimic benchmarks, Q2RL outperforms SOTA offline-to-online learning baselines on success rate and time to convergence. Q2RL is efficient enough to be applied in an on-robot RL setting, learning robust policies for contact-rich and high precision manipulation tasks such as pipe assembly and kitting, in 1-2 hours of online interaction, achieving success rates of up to 100% and up to 3.75x improvement against the original BC policy. Code and video are available at https://pages.rai-inst.com/q2rl_website/

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

Simultaneous Estimation of Partial-Transpose Moments with Active Memory Independent of the Moment Order

Authors:
Junxiang Huang↗Xiaoyang Wang↗Xiao Yuan↗Yukun Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.14204v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the simultaneous estimation of partial-transpose moments $p_j(\rho_{AB})=\mathrm{Tr}[(\rho_{AB}^{T_B})^j]$, $j=2,\ldots,K$, of an unknown bipartite $n$-qubit state from independent copies under an explicit active-memory constraint. We give a sequential qubit-reuse realization of the partial-transpose permutation that uses at most $2n+1$ active qubits, independent of $K$, and estimates all moments $p_2,\ldots,p_K$ to uniform additive error $\epsilon$ with total copy complexity $O(K\log K/\epsilon^2)$. We also prove two converse bounds. First, any uniformly accurate simultaneous estimator requires $\Omega(K/\epsilon^2)$ copies in the worst case. Second, the same scaling holds on an explicit isospectral two-qubit negative-partial-transpose (NPT) family whose ordinary moments are constant while the partial-transpose moments vary. These results characterize the copy complexity of the partial-transpose moment hierarchy up to a logarithmic factor and extend simultaneous nonlinear-functional estimation from ordinary state powers to partial-transpose spectral data under active quantum memory independent of the target moment order.

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

Does Traversal Order Matter? A Systematic Study of Tree Traversal Methods in Transformer Grammars

Authors:
Zongru Liu↗Pengyu Ji↗Pengcheng Wang↗Kewei Tu↗

Transformer Grammars (TGs) enhance language modeling by incorporating syntactic tree structures. Despite the potentially significant impact on model performance of how syntactic trees are linearized in TGs, existing studies rely solely on Depth-First Traversal (DFT) for linearization. In this paper, we expand the traversal design space by exploring Breadth-First Traversal (BFT) and a novel hybrid traversal strategy, Production-Rule Traversal (PRT), which combines the structural lookahead of BFT with the early lexical generation of DFT. We integrate these traversal methods with varying tree configurations and masking strategies, and empirically evaluate their performance on language modeling, syntactic generalization and summarization. We reveal the inherent trade-offs between nested composition and global lookahead, providing actionable recommendations for designing task-aware Transformer Grammars.

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

Tensor-based second-order causal discovery

Authors:
Nathan Ouyang↗Kexin Wan↗Anna Seigal↗

arXiv:2606.18074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Causal discovery seeks to uncover the causal dependencies among variables. For this purpose, we propose an algorithm called Tensor-based Second-order Causal Discovery (TSCD). Its input is a tensor obtained from the covariance matrices of observational and interventional data. Assuming the causal dependencies follow a linear structural equation model on a directed acyclic graph (DAG), TSCD outputs the DAG and the functions on its edges, requiring only that the noise variables are uncorrelated. We also implement a version of the approach for nonlinear models. Our focus on second-order statistics (via the covariance matrices) is motivated by their statistical and computational efficiency relative to higher-order moments, their identifiability relative to first-order statistics, and that they work regardless of whether the variables are Gaussian. We show that TSCD has identifiable causal order and parameters from a number of interventions that is logarithmic in the number of variables. Experiments show that TSCD is robust to noise, competitive with existing methods, and scales to hundreds of variables.

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18.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

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

Authors:
Yuan Xie↗Jiaqi Song↗Guang Qiu↗Xianliang Wang↗Kai Qiao↗Junfeng Yuan↗Shengqing Liu↗Yi Zhang↗Bowen Chen↗Ming Lei↗Jie Gao↗Jie Wu↗…

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

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19.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Measuring User's Mental Models of Speech Translation in Human-AI Collaboration

Authors:
HyoJung Han↗Nishant Balepur↗Jordan Boyd-Graber↗Marine Carpuat↗

Millions of people use machine translation (MT) tools daily, yet little is known about their perception of what systems can and cannot do. This paper studies users' mental models of speech translation systems through a new framework based on cross-lingual question answering, where users either accept MT output or request professional re-translation to answer questions based on the information presented in a foreign language. By analyzing user behavior and accuracy trends across varying translation qualities, we examine to what extent they can predict where the system is likely to be wrong, and how this mental model evolves. Users develop stronger mental models with practice, especially when they have some knowledge of the source language, primarily by relying on surface-level error cues. Moreover, providing speech transcriptions can help users develop better mental models. Our results show the promise of cross-lingual question answering as a downstream task for studying MT mental models and advancing our understanding of human-AI collaboration.

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20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Rethinking Text-to-Image as Semantic-Aware Data Augmentation for Indoor Scene Recognition

Authors:
Trong-Vu Hoang↗Quang-Binh Nguyen↗Dinh-Khoi Vo↗Hoai-Danh Vo↗Minh-Triet Tran↗Trung-Nghia Le↗

In the realm of computer vision, indoor image recognition presents challenges due to the intricate interplay of lighting conditions, occlusions, and diverse object arrangements within confined spaces. To address the lacks of training indoor images, we introduce a novel approach leveraging Stable Diffusion (SD) for the generation of synthetic images, which serve as a powerful data augmentation tool. The utilization of SD offers a principled framework for synthesizing diverse and realistic indoor scenes, thereby enriching the training data pool for robust indoor image recognition models. Experimental findings on the MIT Indoor Scene dataset reveal the potential of our proposed approach in enhancing the training of deep models when authentic data is limited. Furthermore, to prevent the misuse of SD synthetic images, we introduce a counter measure based on DIffusion Reconstruction Error (DIRE). The powerful DIRE presentation enables training robust classifiers only using lightweight deep models. Experiments show that our approach can perfectly recognize SD generated images with the accuracy of 100% using MobilenetV3.

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

Towards Physically Realizable Adversarial Attenuation Patch against SAR Object Detection

Authors:
Yiming Zhang↗Weibo Qin↗Feng Wang↗

Deep neural networks have demonstrated excellent performance in SAR target detection tasks but remain susceptible to adversarial attacks. Existing SAR-specific attack methods can effectively deceive detectors; however, they often introduce noticeable perturbations and are largely confined to digital domain, neglecting physical implementation constrains for attacking SAR systems. In this paper, a novel Adversarial Attenuation Patch (AAP) method is proposed that employs energy-constrained optimization strategy coupled with an attenuation-based deployment framework to achieve a seamless balance between attack effectiveness and stealthiness. More importantly, AAP exhibits strong potential for physical realization by aligning with signal-level electronic jamming mechanisms. Experimental results show that AAP effectively degrades detection performance while preserving high imperceptibility, and shows favorable transferability across different models. This study provides a physical grounded perspective for adversarial attacks on SAR target detection systems and facilitates the design of more covert and practically deployable attack strategies. The source code is made available at https://github.com/boremycin/SAAP.

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22.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

Sequence-Based Therapeutic Peptide Classification with Augmented Negative Sampling

Authors:
Ellerbrock↗Valentini↗Paul↗A. C↗Mukhopadhyay↗Perelshtein↗M. R↗

Therapeutic peptides offer high target specificity, low toxicity, and the ability to modulate protein-protein interactions, yet experimental functional characterization remains costly and slow. Computational prediction of therapeutic function directly from sequence could accelerate peptide screening and enable generative design pipelines, but requires reliable discrimination between therapeutic and non-therapeutic peptides. Existing multi-label predictors cover few functions, rely on limited datasets, and exhibit high glspl{fpr}, limiting their practical utility. We present a lightweight CNN classifier trained on the most comprehensive therapeutic peptide database to date (54,655 peptides, 48 functional categories). A key contribution is a statistically motivated negative sampling strategy using Markov models to generate diverse synthetic decoys at multiple difficulty levels. When evaluated on this controlled decoy benchmark, the FRP is reduced from over 60% for previous models to 2.1% for our approach. Our fine-tuned five-model ensemble achieves 78.9% Micro F1 and 54.6% Macro F1 while requiring only amino acid sequences as inputs. Analysis using a sparse L1-constrained variant of our model shows that convolutional filters capture conserved functional motifs and statistically improbable non-therapeutic patterns, with downstream layers combining these signals, providing mechanistic evidence that the network learns biologically meaningful structure. In a generalization task on the TPpred-LE benchmark, our model achieves 55.3% Micro F1 and 38.6% Macro F1, comparable to TPpred-LE trained on its native dataset (57.9%/38.1%) while predicting four times more therapeutic functions with four times fewer parameters. Code and models will be made available at https://github.com/terra-quantum-public/tq-therapep-ai.

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

StarOR: Synergizing Tree Search and Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for Optimization Modeling

Authors:
Jiajun Li↗Yu Ding↗Shisi Guan↗Ran Hou↗Wanyuan Wang↗

arXiv:2606.15197v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optimization modeling is inherently hierarchical, requiring a precise sequence of symbolic commitments. Traditional learning-based automated optimization modeling methods improve modeling policies through large-scale annotated or curated training data, but are costly to adapt to new problem distributions. Meanwhile, one-shot generation remains brittle in hierarchical modeling, where early symbolic errors can propagate into invalid formulations. Test-time scaling offers a promising alternative by enabling structural exploration with additional instance-level computation; however, existing search-based methods typically rely on a fixed policy, causing repeated rollouts to inherit similar modeling biases and providing limited credit assignment for intermediate decisions. To address these limitations, we propose StarOR, a synergistic search-and-adaptation framework that couples MCTS with Test-Time Reinforcement Learning for optimization modeling. StarOR decomposes the modeling process into four stages and updates a transient LoRA adapter via GRPO at each non-terminal node. By using MCTS-generated siblings as local comparison sets, StarOR transforms search-time exploration into instance-specific policy refinement. Moreover, an unsupervised multi-faceted reward system provides fine-grained feedback for intermediate formulation decisions without ground-truth labels. Experiments across five optimization benchmarks show that StarOR achieves state-of-the-art performance even with a 4B backbone, outperforming existing methods and the frontier LLMs.

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24.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Towards a Robust cell-free DNA Isolation Protocol for NGS Applications in a Clinical Molecular Diagnostics Setting

Authors:
Apweiler↗Broche↗Loitz↗Hackenbruch↗Ossowski↗Schroeder↗Schmit↗K. J↗

Cell-free DNA (cfDNA), released from apoptotic and necrotic cells into body fluids, represents a non-invasive source of genetic information for disease prediction, diagnosis, and monitoring. However, its low physiological abundance makes cfDNA highly susceptible to pre-analytical influences. In particular, genomic DNA (gDNA) released from lysed white blood cells (WBCs) can contaminate plasma and compromise downstream cfDNA analyses. This study evaluated the impact of different blood collection tubes and isolation methods on cfDNA stability and yield. Blood samples from 13 healthy donors were collected using cfDNA-stabilizing tubes (Cell-Free DNA BCT, Streck; S-Monovette cfDNA Exact, Sarstedt) and stored at room temperature for 1, 5, or 10 days before plasma isolation. CfDNA was extracted using either a magnetic bead-based method or a silica column-based approach. DNA quantity and quality were assessed by fluorometric quantification, automated fragment analysis, and gene-specific quantitative PCR. Streck-based workflows maintained stable cfDNA yields and characteristic mononucleosomal fragmentation profiles across all storage times. In contrast, Sarstedt tubes showed reduced cfDNA concentrations after 5 days and a pronounced increase at 10 Days, accompanied by high-molecular weight DNA patterns consistent with WBC lysis. These trends were largely independent of the extraction method. Overall, the results demonstrate that blood collection tube chemistry critically influences cfDNA integrity during delayed processing. Streck tubes, particularly when combined with QIAamp, provided the most robust and reproducible workflow for routine molecular diagnostics, whereas Sarstedt tubes produced physiologically implausible results after extended storage.

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25.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

Heterogeneity of Treatment Effect of Aspirin and Clinically Significant Bleeding in Older Adults

Authors:
Tzimas↗Tchoua↗R. B↗Vanghelof↗J. C↗Wolfe↗R. C↗Cloud↗Mahady↗Du↗Ernst↗M. E↗…

Aim: The global population of older adults is growing, and older age is linked to higher bleeding risk. Although guidelines discourage aspirin for primary prevention in healthy older adults due to bleeding harms outweighing benefits, many continue taking it without a clear indication. It remains unclear whether all older adults face uniform aspirin-related bleeding risk or if certain subgroups are more vulnerable. Methods: We analyzed data from 19,114 ASPREE trial participants to develop machine learning models using 116 baseline variables. Random forest (RF) and random survival forest (RSF) models predicted 5-year bleeding risk, and participants were stratified into low, intermediate, and high-risk groups based on the 20th and 80th percentiles of predicted risk. We assessed heterogeneity of treatment effect (HTE) by testing treatment-by-risk group interactions on the relative scale using Fine-Gray models, and on the absolute scale using observed 5-year cumulative incidence rates. Results: Over a median follow-up of 4.7 years, 626 major bleeding events occurred. The RF model had moderate discrimination (AUC = 0.65, 95% CI: 0.63-0.67) and good calibration (Brier = 0.032, 95% CI: 0.029-0.034). Statistically significant HTE was observed on the relative scale, with the greatest relative increase in bleeding risk seen in the low-risk group (subdistribution hazard ratio = 2.26, 95% CI: 1.27-4.01). On the absolute scale, low-risk participants experienced higher bleeding with aspirin (absolute risk difference (ARD) = 1.17%, 95% CI: 0.37-1.95), but heterogeneity in ARDs was not statistically significant (Cochran's Q p > 0.45). Similar findings were observed when using the RSF model. Conclusion: Participants at lowest baseline bleeding risk experienced the greatest relative increase in bleeding risk with aspirin therapy. We found statistically significant heterogeneity in treatment effects on the relative but not absolute scale. These findings support an individualized, risk-based approach to aspirin therapy decision-making in older adults.

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