Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

01.

Nature (Science) 2026-06-17 DOI: HASH:1442e906dfae67d22d5761b29abf5ca8

Reimagining machine vision with optical computing

Authors: Unknown Author

A general-purpose artificial-intelligence vision system for use in image-sensing devices has been developed by embedding fundamentals of core computer-vision operations into a light-manipulating planar material called an optical metasurface. A prototype enables accurate, real-time perception and processing across diverse tasks, suggesting that this could be a solution for rapid, low-energy, on-device vision intelligence. A specialized ‘metasurface’ can preprocess incoming scene information on image-generating devices.

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02.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2510.22397

NetBurst: Event-Centric Forecasting of Bursty, Intermittent Time Series

Authors:

Satyandra Guthula↗Jaber Daneshamooz↗Charles Fleming↗Kesheng Wu↗Walter Willinger↗Arpit Gupta↗

arXiv:2510.22397v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Network operators monitor their infrastructure by collecting telemetry data such as packet counts, byte rates, or flow volumes, yet answering the questions that effective operations demand – forecasting future load, diagnosing and characterizing anomalies, and searching for and retrieving historical precedents – requires more than raw measurements. Bridging this gap calls for learned representations: compact per-entity summaries that capture temporal dynamics from each entity's univariate time series. Time-series foundation models are the natural starting point, but they are designed for dense, periodic benchmark datasets – the mild statistical regime. However, network telemetry data inhabits the wild regime: operationally relevant events are rare, separated by variable-length stretches of low or no activity (``ebbs''), with intermittent bursts of heavy-tailed extremes (``tides''). We present NetBurst, an event-centric pipeline that collapses ebbs, separates each time series into a stream of burst timings and a stream of burst magnitudes, and learns a single representation serving all three operational tasks. Compared to the strongest competitors among eight baselines – including Amazon's Chronos-2 and Datadog's Toto – and across nine production telemetry configurations, NetBurst reduces median forecasting error by $1.3$–$116\times$ on wild-regime data with a $1.0$–$7.5\times$ better match to the true burst distribution, and matches baselines on mild-regime benchmarks. For characterizing anomalies, NetBurst produces balanced, well-spread clusters that are $16\times$ more describable in operator-familiar terms under a novel interpretability score, and cluster-filtered search delivers $7.5\times$ faster end-to-end retrieval.

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03.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.19172

User as Engram: Internalizing Per-User Memory as Local Parametric Edits

Authors:

Bojie Li↗

arXiv:2606.19172v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personal memory in a language model is two problems: content and reasoning skill. The brain keeps the two apart (a sparse, local engram in the hippocampus for each episode, a slow neocortex for the shared skills that interpret it), so a new fact need not overwrite everything else. Most personalization today keeps a user's facts outside the weights, in a natural-language memory file or a retrieval index. When facts are written into the model instead, the standard recipe is the per-user LoRA adapter, which does the opposite of the brain, folding content and skill into one global weight delta. Writing a user's facts as a LoRA contaminates text unrelated to them; writing the same facts as local Engram rows leaves it mathematically untouched, resulting in a roughly 33,000x smaller memory footprint. We therefore propose User as Engram: store a user's content as surgical edits to the hash-keyed memory table of an Engram model, and carry the reasoning skill in one shared adapter. This layered design matches per-user LoRA's direct recall while delivering 5.6x higher indirect-reasoning accuracy on average, and never makes a single user worse at reasoning than the untouched base. The edit is a glass box: writing a fact switches on its lookup at exactly the trigger, adds the value the answer needs, leaves every other position unchanged to the last bit, and fails if written into the wrong layer. Because different users' facts land in disjoint hash slots, their edits compose: many users live in one shared table at once, stacking additively and losslessly, where a per-user LoRA, a single global weight delta, admits only one. Upon retrieval, a per-user Engram table does not grow with the population the retriever must search, so past ~100 facts it overtakes a retrieval pipeline on a 2.5x larger model.

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04.

arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.14519

Extending Covariant Fluctuation Theorems into Quantum Regime through Quasiprobability Approach

Authors:

Ji-Hui Pei↗Tingzhang Shi↗Jin-Fu Chen↗H. T. Quan↗

arXiv:2606.14519v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The covariant formulation of stochastic thermodynamics requires treating the stochastic work as a 4-vector, posing significant challenges for quantum systems due to the non-commutativity. We introduce a new quasiprobability distribution for the work 4-vector, which combines the Wigner and Margenau-Hill quasiprobabilities. This extends the covariant fluctuation theorems from classical to quantum regime. We illustrate our findings with a scalar field driven by classical particles with a generalized version of trace formula. Our work establishes a quasiprobability approach to studying relativistic quantum thermodynamics in a covariant way.

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05.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.19817

Training-Free Metrics for Synthetic Object Detection Data: A Proxy for Detector Performance

Authors:

Myeongseok Nam↗Donghoon Yeo↗Seungwook Kim↗

With the recent advent of image generative models, synthetic data are increasingly being used to supplement limited real datasets for training computer vision models. However, not all synthetic datasets improve performance equally, and their effectiveness can only be assessed by training a downstream model, which is computationally expensive and time-consuming. This problem is pronounced in the task of object detection, where the required annotations are much more dense due to bounding boxes. In this paper, we propose a pre-computable metric family, dubbed Conditional-Composition Domain Match (CCDM), which serves as a proxy for the relative utility of candidate synthetic training sets for downstream detection. Experiments on the VisDrone-DET dataset show that the CCDM metric families achieve a Spearman correlation of 1.0 with the downstream performance of YOLOv8, clearly outperforming existing metrics for synthetic image evaluation.

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06.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13910

PMOF: A Dataset and Benchmark for Passenger Monitoring Using Overhead Fisheye Cameras

Authors:

Stella Katharina Wermuth↗Qazi Arbab Ahmed↗Klaus Neumann↗Thorsten Jungeblut↗

Autonomous staff-free public transport requires reliable in-vehicle passenger monitoring. However, perception inside moving vehicles is challenged by confined spaces, variable illumination, motion-induced background variation, occlusion, and limited viewpoints. To mitigate these spatial constraints, ceiling-mounted fisheye cameras provide full-scene coverage from a single viewpoint. Yet existing public overhead fisheye datasets are recorded in static environments and do not capture the domain shift introduced by vehicle motion. To fill this gap, we introduce PMOF, Passenger Monitoring using Overhead Fisheye cameras, the first public dataset of top-view fisheye imagery captured inside a moving vehicle, comprising over 19k manually annotated frames. PMOF provides rotated bounding boxes, tracking identifiers, and action labels, supporting object detection, tracking, and action recognition. We benchmark PMOF using YOLO26m-obb models fine-tuned under multiple dataset configurations that combine PMOF with existing overhead fisheye datasets. Cross-domain fine-tuning with custom rotation-aware augmentation achieves 94.8% AP50 on PMOF and 96.5% AP50 on an unseen overhead fisheye dataset from a different domain. Our results highlight the domain gap between static and moving environments and show that incorporating PMOF improves detection performance and advances generalization beyond passenger monitoring to broader fisheye-based person detection tasks. The dataset and code are available at https://swermuth.github.io/pmof/.

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07.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.13464

Ontology Memory-Augmented ASR Correction for Long Text-Speech Interleaved Conversations

Authors:

Xinxin Li↗Huiyao Chen↗Meishan Zhang↗Yunxin Li↗Zulong Chen↗Zhibo Ren↗Xiaoqing Dong Baotian Hu↗Min Zhang↗

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) correction has traditionally focused on isolated utterances or short local contexts. However, as text and speech become increasingly interleaved in long interactions, ASR correction requires conversation-level contextual evidence. Existing ASR correction methods often rely on the current hypothesis or concatenate raw dialogue history. In such contexts, sparse correction evidence can be difficult to locate amid redundancy and noise. Addressing these challenges, we propose an ontology memory-augmented ASR correction framework for long text-speech interleaved conversations. The framework organizes preceding interaction history into a dynamically updatable ontology memory, where entities, terminology, surface variants, potential ASR confusions, and semantic relations are stored as retrievable nodes for context-grounded correction. To evaluate this setting, we construct RAMC-Corr, a dataset derived from MAGIC-RAMC for long-range ASR correction with grounded context. Experiments on RAMC-Corr show that our method improves over direct correction in 9 out of 10 paired backbone-setting combinations and encourages more selective and evidence-grounded corrections for context-dependent ASR errors.

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08.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.17037

The Importance of Phase in Neural Representations: An Internal Oppenheim-Lim Test of Image Classifiers

Authors:

Alper Y{\i}ld{\i}r{\i}m↗

Oppenheim and Lim (1981) showed that natural images stay recognizable when reconstructed from their Fourier phase alone, while the magnitude carries little of their identity. We ask whether trained image classifiers reproduce this asymmetry inside their hidden layers, and we test it causally: given two images, we transplant the phase of one onto the magnitude of the other at a chosen layer and record which image the prediction follows. In PRISM2D, GFNet, and ViT-B/16 the prediction follows the phase or sign donor, and deleting all image-specific magnitude barely moves accuracy, so identity rides on phase while image-specific magnitude is largely dispensable to the readout. ResNet-50 at first seems to break the pattern, because transplanting sign after its ReLUs does nothing; a fair intervention before the ReLU reveals a strong latent sign code in the late blocks, and a DC-only control shows the readout consumes a channel-wise spatial average. Controls rule out the trivial case in which magnitude simply stops depending on the image. The architectures therefore share a phase/sign identity code but expose it in different bases, set by rectification and readout geometry, which gives a mechanistic account of the texture–shape gap between CNNs and attention models.

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09.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20118

Pose6DAug: Physically Plausible Multi-view Object Swapping for Robot Data Augmentation

Authors:

Jonghoon Lee↗Seong Hyeon Park↗Byungwoo Jeon↗Minha Lee↗Jinwoo Shin↗

arXiv:2606.20118v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies have shown strong potential for general-purpose manipulation, yet they often fail on novel, out-of-distribution objects whose appearance or geometry deviates from the training distribution. The standard remedy is to collect multi-view teleoperation data for every failure case, but this scales poorly in both cost and time. We introduce Pose6DAug, a failure-driven data augmentation framework that turns a policy's own successful episodes into targeted demonstrations for its failure modes, without any new data collection. Our key insight is that each successful episode already encodes a physically valid action trajectory together with calibrated multi-view observations. By swapping only the manipulated object while preserving this trajectory, we obtain new and physically grounded demonstrations. However, naive 2D video editing breaks multi-view consistency and physical plausibility, particularly under heavy occlusion and egocentric viewpoints. Our method instead operates directly in 3D, anchoring the target object with an explicit mesh driven by a temporally coherent 6D pose trajectory, ensuring geometrically consistent renderings across all camera views. Fine-tuning a VLA on data augmented by our method improves success rates by 16.5% relative to the state-of-the-art baseline on novel objects, while preserving in-distribution performance. These results show that multi-view and physically consistent augmentation is a practical path to scalable VLA generalization.

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10.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.14795

Position: The Systemic Lack of Agency in Visual Reasoning

Authors:

Yizhao Huang↗Haoyang Chen↗Shiqin Wang↗Pohsun Huang↗Jiayuan Li↗Haoyuan Du↗Yandong Shi↗Zheng Wang↗Zhixiang Wang↗

This paper argues that a systemic lack of Agency constrains the implicit reasoning capabilities of current Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Implicit reasoning refers to the ability to autonomously discover and utilize hidden visual evidence to bridge information gaps, rather than merely relying on explicitly specified targets. This capacity underlies human visual understanding and everyday reasoning. We argue that this limitation arises from a tendency to approach visual reasoning primarily as passive semantic retrieval, rather than as active, situated reasoning that depends on autonomous visual exploration. As a result, most existing benchmarks primarily assess Passive Capacity, leaving this aspect of reasoning largely unmeasured. To address this gap, we introduce the Visual Implicit Reasoning Diagnosing Benchmark (V-IRD), which targets this missing quadrant by requiring models to derive answers strictly through autonomous visual analysis. Our results show that, despite strong retrieval abilities, prominent VLMs struggle to utilize reference objects and to attend to visual evidence that requires self-directed inquiry. Simply put, strong semantic recognition does not equate to active visual exploration, revealing a critical gap in current VLMs. More information can be found at https://haoychen.github.io/Implicit-Reasoning/

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11.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19 DOI: arXiv:2606.20373

AutoPass: Evidence-Guided LLM Agents for Compiler Performance Tuning

Authors:

Zepeng Li↗Jie Ren↗Zhanyong Tang↗Jie Zheng↗Zheng Wang↗

arXiv:2606.20373v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise for code compilation tasks, but applying them to runtime performance tuning is difficult due to complex microarchitectural effects and noisy runtime measurements. We present AutoPass, a multi-agent framework for compiler performance tuning that uses compiler and runtime evidence to guide LLM-generated optimization decisions. Rather than treating the compiler as a black box like prior auto-tuning schemes, AutoPass opens up the compiler to the LLM, enabling it to query compiler-internal optimization states and analyze the intermediate representation to orchestrate compiler options. The search process iteratively refines optimization configurations using measured runtime feedback to diagnose regressions and guide latency-improving edits. AutoPass operates in an inference-only, training-free setting and requires no offline training or task-specific fine-tuning, making it readily applicable to new benchmarks and platforms. We implement AutoPass on the LLVM compiler and evaluate it on server-grade x86-64 and embedded ARM64 systems. AutoPass outperforms expert-tuned heuristics and classical autotuning methods, achieving geometric-mean speedups of 1.043x and 1.117x over LLVM -O3 on x86-64 and ARM64, respectively.

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12.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.17924

PearlVLA: Progressive Embodied Action-Plan Refinement in Latent Space

Authors:

Bochen Yang↗Lianlei Shan↗

arXiv:2606.17924v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models face a trade-off between efficient action generation and explicit deliberation. Directly decoding actions from vision-language backbone representations enables low-latency control, whereas explicit reasoning through textual chains, pixel-level subgoals, or action search can improve planning but incurs substantial latency and computational cost. We propose PearlVLA, a VLA framework that moves deliberation into the latent space of a vision-language model (VLM). PearlVLA separates VLM meta-query representations into a fixed visual grounding branch and an iterative latent plan branch. At each refinement round, a plan-conditioned world query probes a lightweight frozen latent world model for an action-free future observation latent, which is fed back to guide plan refinement. A future-guided RefineNet then applies scheduled residual updates to progressively refine a coarse semantic draft into a fine-grained latent action plan. The refined plan after K rounds is then decoded in parallel into an action chunk for low-latency execution. We further introduce Causal Refinement-Grouped Process-Reward RL to optimize the latent refinement process with rewards from longer-horizon imagined futures induced by latent plan edits. Empirical evaluations on the LIBERO benchmark demonstrate that PearlVLA achieves state-of-the-art performance among existing methods.

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13.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2605.01961

Multi-User Dueling Bandits: A Fair Approach using Nash Social Welfare

Authors:

Maheed H. Ahmed↗Mahsa Ghasemi↗

arXiv:2605.01961v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from human preference data is becoming a useful tool, from fine-tuning large language models to training reinforcement learning agents. However, in most scenarios, the model is trained on the average preference of all human evaluators, which, under large variations of preferences, can be unfair to minority groups. In this work, we consider fairness in dueling bandits, a standard framework for online learning from preference data. We assume that each user has a (potentially distinct) Condorcet winner, which is an arm preferred to every other arm. Using these user-specific Condorcet winners as reference points, we evaluate and score arms according to their performance relative to the corresponding winner. To promote fairness across heterogeneous users, we adopt the well-established Nash Social Welfare objective, which maximizes the product of user utilities, thereby inherently penalizing inequality and preventing the marginalization of any single user. Within this framework, we construct a hard instance to establish a regret lower bound of $\Omega(T^{2/3}\min(K,D)^\frac{1}{3})$ for a time horizon $T$, $K$ arms, and $D$ users, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first result quantifying the cost of fairness in dueling bandits with heterogeneous preferences. We then present the Fair-Explore-Then-Commit and Fair-$\epsilon$-Greedy algorithms with a Condorcet winner identification phase. We further derive their regret upper bounds that match the lower-bound dependence on $T$ up to logarithmic factors.

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14.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11363

NSVQ: Mitigating Codebook Collapse by Stabilizing Encoder Drift in Vector Quantization

Authors:

Hao Lu↗Yongxin Guo↗Onur Koyun↗Zhengjie Zhu↗Abbas Alili↗Metin N. Gurcan↗

Vector quantization is central to modern generative modeling pipelines, but large-codebook VQ models often suffer from codebook collapse. We identify encoder drift as a key driver of this failure: as the encoder moves the latent distribution, sparsely updated code vectors can lag behind, lose assignments, and increase quantization error, creating a feedback loop through the straight-through estimator. We propose NSVQ, a non-stationary-aware VQ training strategy that combines a dense non-stationary embedding loss, codebook replacement, and stage-wise encoder freezing. NSVQ first helps the codebook track encoder drift during early training, then freezes the encoder to consolidate the codebook under a fixed latent geometry, and finally reintroduces adversarial refinement. Experiments on ImageNet-1k show that NSVQ improves reconstruction quality while maintaining full codebook utilization. On ImageNet-1k at 128$\times$128 with 65,536 codes, NSVQ reduces rFID from 2.39 to 2.10 compared with SimVQ, while both methods maintain 100\% utilization. Additional latent diffusion experiments show that NSVQ also improves downstream ImageNet generation FID.

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15.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.18203

RubricsTree: Scalable and Evolving Open-Ended Evaluation of Personal Health Agents across Health Memory and Medical Skills

Authors:

Weizhi Zhang↗Zechen Li↗Hamid Palangi↗Ben Graef↗A. Ali Heydari↗Simon A. Lee↗Salman Rahman↗Ray Luo↗Zeinab Esmaeilpour↗Erik Schenck↗Chloe Zhang↗Yamin Li↗…

The LLM-empowered personal health agents with user health (sensor) metrics have offered a promising pathway to alleviate global disparities in healthcare access. However, large-scale clinical deployment remains constrained by an open-ended evaluation bottleneck: physician annotation is reliable but costly and unscalable, while LLM-as-a-judge evaluators are scalable but subjective, inconsistent, and sometimes clinically misaligned. We introduce RubricsTree, a scalable evaluation framework with an expert-aligned hierarchical taxonomy of over 100 atomic, clinically-verifiable Boolean rubrics, evolving from the insights of 4,000 real user queries through an iterative human-in-the-loop curation protocol with an expertise panel led by an experienced physician. A context-aware adaptive router activates only the relevant auto-weighted rubric subset per query, providing the throughput needed for scalable evaluation with expert-aligned quality. Through a systematic meta-evaluation, we show that RubricsTree (i) substantially exceeds a strong large-scale evaluation baseline in expert alignment on challenging open-ended queries; (ii) reliably penalizes contextually degraded responses; and (iii) when used as structured instructions, text feedback, or training rewards for performance optimization, yields up to ~66% relative gains on HealthBench for Gemini, GPT, and Qwen model families. RubricsTree thus provides a scalable, auditable, and evolving evaluation infrastructure required for the continuous optimization of product-level personal healthcare AI.

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16.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2204.14224

Investigation of Neural Network Methods for Reconstruction and Classification of Texture Images Under Conditions of Incomplete Information

Authors:

Galymzhan Abdimanap↗Kairat Bostanbekov↗Abdelrahman Abdallah↗Anel Alimova↗Darkhan Kurmangaliyev↗Daniyar Nurseitov↗Tatyana Dedova↗Larissa Balakay↗Serik Nurakynov↗

The automated analysis of heterogeneous natural textures is frequently hindered by physical damage and data loss, presenting a significant challenge to computer vision. While deep learning has shown success in controlled environments, its application to complex geological materials under conditions of incomplete information remains underexplored. This study presents an integrated framework for the inpainting and classification of high-resolution core sample images. We propose an end-to-end pipeline that utilizes object detection for sample segmentation, followed by image inpainting using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) with Contextual Residual Aggregation (CRA) to reconstruct missing high-frequency details. Subsequently, we evaluate the performance of modern Transformer-based (Swin, ViT) and CNN architectures on the reconstructed data. Our experiments revealed a critical divergence between reconstruction quality and downstream utility: despite high structural fidelity (PSNR 28.7~dB, FID 74.01), classification accuracy plateaued at 53\%. To improve minority-class detection, we propose a confidence-based hybrid ensemble that raises MCA from 48\% to 58\%. These results highlight the limitations of current state-of-the-art generative models, which may produce visually plausible but semantically ambiguous features ("hallucinations") that confound classifiers. This work provides insights into the dependencies between image reconstruction quality and classification performance, offering a reproducible baseline for future research in non-destructive testing and material science. Given that cross-well accuracy remains in the 49–53\% range, we position the resulting system as a decision-support and screening tool for lithofacies interpretation rather than as a fully autonomous classifier. The code is available at https://github.com/GalymzhanAbdimanap/Lithology_recognition

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17.

medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15 DOI: HASH:c7a2eec04b04b62c6da4391414adc1f8

Unveiling the Awareness of Private Health Insurance Coverage among Healthcare Professionals in Freetown, Sierra Leone: Insights Extracted from Their Perspectives.

Authors:

Gary↗L. P↗Kamara↗A. N↗Jimmy↗A. I↗Lebbie↗A. P↗

Our study is an assessment of the knowledge, personal coverage, and related determinants of private health insurance as revealed by healthcare professionals in Freetown, the urban capital of Sierra Leone. This study stands as a precursor for Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), like Sierra Leone, seeking to establish Universal Health Coverage (UHC) to provide healthcare access and coverage through publicly arranged risk pooling, designed to help protect against unmanageable medical costs. In parallel, such countries face significant challenges with achieving sustainable universal coverage due to limited public resources, inefficient allocation systems, uneasy reliance on out-of-pocket payments, and large struggling populations. Our research sheds particular light on how healthcare professionals view their own participation with private healthcare options. A cross-sectional, analytical study was conducted, openly recruiting individuals from various facilities in Freetown. Using the Yamane Formula, a sample size of 109 participants was calculated. STATA 14.0 was used for data analysis. Our findings revealed that 96 (88.9%) participants did not have private health insurance, while 12 (11.1%) did have private coverage. However, 105 (97.2%) reported other modes of health insurance, with only 3 (2.8%) uninsured. Notably, 97.2% expressed willingness to join a private health insurance scheme. Our study found no statistically significant associations between selected indicators (demographic or socioeconomic fac tors) and current insurance coverage among study participants. These results highlight a low prevalence and understanding of private health insurance among healthcare professionals in a representative urban center in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), while acknowledging high willingness to enroll. The lack of any significant determinants suggests other unexamined factors, such as cost, accessibility, or awareness, capable of influencing the adoption and implementation of a universal health program.

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18.

arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.12036

Vision Transformers for Face Recognition Need More Registers

Authors:

Tahar Chettaoui↗Guray Ozgur↗Eduarda Caldeira↗Naser Damer↗Fadi Boutros↗

Recent advances in Vision Transformers (ViTs) for face recognition (FR) have moved beyond the standard CLS-token paradigm. In this paradigm, a special classification token (CLS) is prepended to the patch embeddings and used as a representation of the input for downstream tasks. An alternative approach, Concatenated Patch Embeddings (CPE), instead leverages all patch tokens by concatenating them into a single vector, which is then projected into a compact face representation. CPE has been shown to improve recognition performance in comparison to CLS-based ones, but our qualitative analysis of attention maps showed the presence of artifacts that limit their interpretability. To address this issue, we incorporate register tokens, learnable tokens concatenated to the initial patch embeddings, and processed jointly through the ViT encoder blocks. This mechanism has been shown to produce more structured and interpretable attention maps compared to baseline ViT. We empirically demonstrate that these artifacts consistently appear across various ViT backbones, including small and large models, and that introducing register tokens effectively mitigates them. Adding four or eight registers significantly enhances interpretability, with eight registers providing the highest verification accuracies and smoothest attention structures. Our resulting model, ViT-8R, corresponds to a CPE-based ViT-B architecture augmented with eight register tokens achieves state-of-the-art performance among ViT-based FR models on large-scale IJB-B and IJB-C benchmarks. Also, ViT-8R produces substantially clearer attention maps compared with the baseline model, which offer deeper insight into the model's attention behavior (https://github.com/TaharChettaoui/ViT-FR-Registers)

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19.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2606.18281

A Guide to Estimating Conditional Average Treatment Effects in Competing Risks Settings

Authors:

Daniel Klippert↗Sarah Friedrich↗Markus Pauly↗

arXiv:2606.18281v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) are central to treatment decision-making in personalized medicine. In competing risks settings, estimating CATEs from survival data allows for patient-specific assessments of treatment effectiveness for a specific event of interest while properly accounting for alternative event types. This distinction is essential in the presence of comorbidities, where competing causes of death may otherwise confound the therapeutic benefit. Focusing on right-censored survival times with binary treatment, we examine CATEs defined as covariate-conditional differences in the absolute risk for the event of interest at a fixed time. To this end, we study meta-learners which adapt machine learning algorithms for CATE estimation in competing risks scenarios. We systematically compare six meta-learners, combining Cox regression or random survival forests for risk modeling with elastic net regression or random forests for direct CATE modeling. To provide practical guidance on model selection, we evaluate their performance in multiple simulation settings, that differ in hazard complexity, treatment heterogeneity, treatment assignment, event type distribution and censoring. To facilitate applied use, we provide the R package, crsurvlearners, which implements all considered approaches.

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20.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12 DOI: arXiv:2606.12763

Adaptive Weighted Averaging

Authors:

Aditya Bhaskara↗Ashok Cutkosky↗Ravi Kumar↗Manish Purohit↗

arXiv:2606.12763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study the problem of selecting the largest among $n$ unknown values $x_1,\dots,x_n$ given only a single unbiased estimate $y_i$ for each $x_i$. We design strategies that are simultaneously admissible (not uniformly dominated by any other strategy) and also never worse than a given baseline such as uniform random selection. We provide an application to stochastic optimization, where we obtain online-to-batch conversion bounds with a desirable "no-compromise" guarantee: they are never worse than standard random iterate selection, and yet can be significantly better in benign settings.

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21.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18 DOI: arXiv:2604.13082

The Long Delay to Arithmetic Generalization: When Learned Representations Outrun Behavior

Authors:

Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez↗

arXiv:2604.13082v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Grokking in transformers trained on algorithmic tasks is characterized by a long delay between training-set fit and abrupt generalization, but the source of that delay remains poorly understood. In encoder-decoder arithmetic models, we argue that this delay reflects limited access to already learned structure rather than failure to acquire that structure in the first place. We study one-step Collatz prediction and find that the encoder organizes parity and residue structure within the first few thousand training steps, while output accuracy remains near chance for tens of thousands more. Causal interventions support the decoder bottleneck hypothesis. Transplanting a trained encoder into a fresh model accelerates grokking by 2.75 times, while transplanting a trained decoder actively hurts. Freezing a converged encoder and retraining only the decoder eliminates the plateau entirely and yields 97.6% accuracy, compared to 86.1% for joint training. What makes the decoder's job harder or easier depends on numeral representation. Across 15 bases, those whose factorization aligns with the Collatz map's arithmetic (e.g., base 24) reach 99.8% accuracy, while binary fails completely because its representations collapse and never recover. The choice of base acts as an inductive bias that controls how much local digit structure the decoder can exploit, producing large differences in learnability from the same underlying task.

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22.

arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17 DOI: arXiv:2606.06523

Lean4Agent: Formal Modeling and Verification for Agent Workflow and Trajectory

Authors:

Ruida Wang↗Jerry Huang↗Pengcheng Wang↗Xuanqing Liu↗Luyang Kong↗Tong Zhang↗

arXiv:2606.06523v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) to execute reliable multi-step workflows has become a central challenge in artificial intelligence. Despite recent advances in LLMs' agentic capabilities, most agent systems still lack formal methods for specifying, verifying, and debugging their workflow and execution trajectories. This challenge mirrors a long-standing problem in mathematics, where the ambiguity of natural languages (NLs) motivates the development of formal languages (FLs). Inspired by this paradigm, we propose **Lean4Agent**, to the best of our knowledge, the first framework that uses Lean4, a dependent-type FL to model and verify agent behavior. **Lean4Agent** launches **FormalAgentLib**, an extensible Lean4 library for formally modeling and verifying agent workflows' semantic consistency under explicit assumptions, and enabling localization of execution-time failures revealed by trajectories. Building on **FormalAgentLib**, we further develop **LeanEvolve**, which applies results in **FormalAgentLib** to revise workflows to enhance its capability. Extensive experiments on a hard problem subset of SWE-Bench-Verified and a subset of ELAIP-Bench across 5 leading LLMs indicate that the verification-passing workflows outperform the failing ones by an average of **11.94%**, and **LeanEvolve** further improves SWE performance by **7.47%** on average. Furthermore, **Lean4Agent** establishes a foundation for a new field of using expressive dependent-type FL to formally model and verify agent behavior.

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23.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16 DOI: arXiv:2606.16599

TreeGRNG: Binary Tree Gaussian Random Number Generator for Efficient Probabilistic AI Hardware

Authors:

Jonas Crols↗Guilherme Paim↗Shirui Zhao↗Marian Verhelst↗

arXiv:2606.16599v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) offer opportunities for greatly enhancing the trustworthiness of conventional neural networks by monitoring the uncertainties in decision-making. A significant drawback for BNN inference at the extreme edge, however, is the imperative need to incorporate Gaussian Random Number Generators (GRNG) within each neuron. State-of-the-art GRNG algorithms heavily depend on multiple arithmetic operations and the use of extensive look-up tables, posing significant implementation challenges for ultra-low power hardware implementations. To overcome this, this paper presents an innovative binary tree random number generator (TreeGRNG) allowing the use of ultra-low-cost constant comparators instead of arithmetic units. We further enhance the TreeGRNG proposal with a set of hardware-aware optimizations exploiting the Gaussian properties. The optimized TreeGRNG surpasses the State-of-the-Art (SoTA) in terms of distribution accuracy while achieving a 3.7$\times$ reduction in energy per sample and boosting the throughput per unit area by 5.8$\times$. Moreover, our TreeGRNG proposal possesses a distinct advantage over the current SoTA in terms of flexibility, as it easily enables designers to adjust the shape of the sampled probability distribution, extending beyond the capabilities of traditional GRNGs, opening the horizon towards future probabilistic AI designs. The TreeGRNG design is available open-source in the link

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24.

arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15 DOI: arXiv:2606.13940

Can Post-Training Turn LLMs into Good Medical Coders? An Empirical Study of Generative ICD Coding

Authors:

Ziqing Wang↗Weihao Li↗Shijie Chen↗Yuan Luo↗Kaize Ding↗

Automated International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding is a core medical-coding task for billing, epidemiology, and clinical decision support. Generative large language models (LLMs) are often reported as weak medical coders, but this finding mainly comes from inference-time settings such as prompting, retrieval, reranking, or tool use, leaving the role of task-specific post-training underexplored. We present a controlled empirical study of post-training for generative ICD coding, comparing discriminative baselines with LLM coders across prompting, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning under a common protocol and metric set. To our knowledge, this is the first study to evaluate RL-based post-training for generative LLM coders in ICD coding. We further introduce PHI, a diagnostic curriculum that extends GRPO to refine missed-code cases. Our results show that prompting-only evaluation substantially underestimates the potential of LLMs for ICD coding. SFT provides the main capability jump, GRPO further improves code-set prediction beyond SFT, and PHI provides targeted gains on macro-level performance. These findings suggest that the main bottleneck is not the generative formulation alone, but how the model is adapted and optimized for full-taxonomy recall. We release our code, data splits, and checkpoints at https://github.com/AlexandreWANG915/LLM4ICD.

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25.

arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11 DOI: arXiv:2606.11474

Mahalanobis-Guided Latent OOD Detection for Hybrid ES-DRL Control in Time-Varying Systems

Authors:

Shaifalee Saxena↗Alexander Scheinker↗

arXiv:2606.11474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In this paper, we study Mahalanobis-guided latent out-of-distribution (OOD) detection for test-time RL controller switching in nonlinear time-varying systems. RL controllers can quickly control high-dimensional systems within the training distribution, but their performance can degrade when time-varying dynamics produce unseen observations. We consider a combined ES–DRL controller, where RL provides fast in-distribution actions and bounded extremum seeking (ES) provides robust model-independent control under OOD operation. The key challenge is deciding when to switch. We train a variational autoencoder (VAE) on in-distribution beam-profile observations and use Mahalanobis distance in the VAE latent space to detect OOD beam profiles at test time. This OOD decision sets a binary switch that selects either the RL controller or the ES controller. We evaluate the approach in safety-critical particle accelerator control. In this setting, spatial magnet motion creates OOD beam profiles that were not seen during RL training. Visualization of the VAE latent space shows that the proposed method identifies this OOD scenario and provides an interpretable signal for switching between RL and ES in the combined controller.

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