中 EN
Sign In Register

Academic Intelligence · Curated Daily

Explore the Frontier of Global Academia

AcademicHub aggregates real-time literature from top journals and preprint platforms. Build your personal research radar and let large language models compile cross-disciplinary analysis briefings automatically.

Sign In Register
02.
Science (Express) 2026-06-04

Long-range extended chains arising from polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly | Science

Authors: Unknown Author

A central challenge for conjugated polymers is to achieve long-range order while remaining solution-processable, which is essential for matching the electrical performance of their counterparts of crystalline inorganic semiconductors. Here we show that n-doped poly(benzodifurandione) (n-PBDF) can undergo polymerization-driven spontaneous assembly (PSA), in which chain growth, chemical doping, and structural ordering are intrinsically coupled, yielding long-range chain extension over hundreds of nanometers. We reveal that the spontaneously formed n-PBDF nanoribbons arise from a self-initiated, convergent growth mechanism driven by cooperative monomer–polymer interactions and stabilized by proton-coupled duplex chains and the polymer’s intrinsic polyelectrolyte character. With long-range extended chains in the nanoribbons, the aligned n-PBDF thin films demonstrate metallic-level conductivity (>10 4 Siemens per centimeter).

Read & Discuss → View Source →
03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Steerable Cultural Preference Optimization of Reward Models

Authors:
Minsik Oh↗Advit Deepak↗Sophie Wu↗Douwe Kiela↗Ekaterina Shutova↗

It is essential for large language model (LLM) technology to serve many different cultural sub-communities in a manner that is acceptable to each community. However, research on LLM alignment has so far predominantly focused on predicting a unified response preference of annotators from certain regions. This paper aims to advance the development of alignment models with a more global outlook, that are able to accurately represent the preferences of subcommunities and do not exhibit excessive bias towards any of them. We focus on the development of reward models for this purpose and present a novel reward model training algorithm (SCPO) that can incorporate diverse cultural preferences in a balanced manner. Our method results in performance increases of the minority reward model of up to 7 points over the baseline model across two datasets, PRISM and GlobalOpinionQA, and across 7 countries. SCPO is up to 280% more training data-efficient than full-data finetuning of reward models. In addition, we perform analysis of bias by separately evaluating on the preference of subcommunities and show that excessive bias is mitigated via our weighting method. Our code is available at https://github.com/minsik-ai/Steerable-Cultural-Preference

Read & Discuss → View Source →
04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

AerialClaw: An Open-Source Framework for LLM-Driven Autonomous Aerial Agents

Authors:
Ke Li↗Jianfei Yang↗Luyao Zhang↗Guo Yu↗Chengwei Yan↗Yuan Ding↗Di Wang↗Nan Luo↗Gang Liu↗Xiao Gao↗Quan Wang↗

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used in inspection, search and rescue, environmental monitoring, and emergency response. However, most UAV applications still rely on pre-defined command sequences or task-specific pipelines, where developers manually connect perception, planning, flight control, simulation, logging, and safety modules. This limits the flexibility, reproducibility, and extensibility of autonomous aerial systems. This paper presents AerialClaw, an open-source software framework that enables UAVs to operate as decision-making aerial agents rather than merely command-following platforms. Given a natural-language mission, AerialClaw allows an LLM-based agent to understand the task, maintain context, invoke executable aerial skills, observe perception and runtime feedback, and iteratively update its decisions in a closed loop. The framework adopts a modular brain-skill-runtime architecture, combining hard skills for atomic UAV operations, Markdown-based soft skills for reusable task strategies, document-driven agent state and capability boundaries, memory-driven reflection, safety-oriented runtime validation, and platform-agnostic execution adapters. AerialClaw supports lightweight mock execution, PX4 SITL with Gazebo, and AirSim-based simulation, together with a web console, pluggable model backends, example missions, simulation assets, and staged deployment scripts. By combining standardized aerial skills, document-driven agent state, memory, and closed-loop LLM decision-making, AerialClaw provides a reproducible and extensible open-source framework for building UAV systems that can interpret missions, make decisions, execute skills, and adapt their behavior from feedback.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
05.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

Exploring the association of Obesity on Cold and Warm Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia in San Joaquin Valley: A Retrospective Cross-Sectional Study

Authors:
Dao↗K. T↗Sharma↗Hariprasad↗Indrawes↗Montana↗W. N↗

The relationship between obesity and specific autoimmune diseases haas been well-established, specifically due to obesity's role in promoting pro-inflammatory states. Although not much literature has been documented regarding obesity association with AIHA. As such, this study aims to assess any correlations in patients with elevated body mass index (BMI) and autoimmune hemolytic anemia (AIHA). Here we present a retrospective cross-sectional study conducted over a four-year period, across four medical centers during which a new electronic medical record was implemented. The study included 25 patients who had a previously documented history of AIHA from another facility, DAT positive with indicators of hemolysis, or DAT positive with monomer specific antisera. The patients BMI was recorded at the time of presentation to the hospital. However, for patients with a prior history of AIHA or those transferred from another facility, the BMI that was closest to the time period of when the patient was diagnosed with AIHA was used as an adjunct. Our results show that there is an association of patients with elevated BMI (>25) and AIHA; however, various other confounding variables should be taken into consideration, and further research should be done to establish a causal relationship.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
06.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-18

Bayesian modeling of longitudinal metatranscriptomes of broiler meat spoilage microbiomes shows shared predictive signature associated with spoilage at refrigerated temperatures

Authors:
Nushi↗Manninen↗Johansson↗Honkela↗Björkroth↗

Microbial spoilage of packaged meat is driven by complex microbial succession and related metabolic activity, yet conventional shelf-life assessment is mainly based on shelf-life studies relying on culturing and sensory analysis. In routine quality assurance, results are obtained retrospectively, and they are only indirectly linked to the metabolic activity related to sensory deterioration. Functional, time informative approaches that capture the active metabolic state of the spoilage microbiome and predict the rate of spoilage are lacking. We developed a censoring-aware Gaussian process (CAGP) framework to model longitudinal pathway expression profiles from broiler meat metatranscriptomes collected over consecutive storage days at 4 or 6{degrees}C. Samples were annotated using odor-based sensory scores defining fresh, early-spoilage, and late-spoilage phases. Because observed zeros in pathway-level data may reflect non-detection rather than true absence, the model treats low values as left-censored observations below a detection threshold while estimating smooth temporal trajectories with uncertainty. In leave-one-out prediction within the 4{degrees}C time series, predicted sampling days differed from the true days by an average of 0.43 days, and predicted spoilage phases agreed with the sensory classification. Trajectories learned at 4{degrees}C also transferred to an independent 6{degrees}C time series at the spoilage-phase level, suggesting that shared functional spoilage programs are preserved despite temperature-dependent changes in spoilage rate. Cross-entropy ranking further identified pathway modules carrying time- and phase-informative signals across temperatures. Overall, this framework provides a probabilistic approach for linking metatranscriptomic functional dynamics to sensory spoilage progression, supporting shelf-life assessment beyond retrospective microbial enumeration.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
07.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-18

Phase transitions for contact processes on sparse random graphs via metastability and local limits

Authors:
Benedikt Jahnel↗Lukas L\"uchtrath↗Christian M\"onch↗

arXiv:2505.22471v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We propose a new perspective on the asymptotic regimes of fast and slow extinction in the contact process on locally converging sequences of sparse finite graphs. We characterise the phase boundary by the existence of a metastable density, which makes the study of the phase transition particularly amenable to local-convergence techniques. We use this approach to derive general conditions for the coincidence of the critical threshold with the survival/extinction threshold in the local limit. We further argue that the correct time scale to separate fast extinction from slow extinction in sparse graphs is, in general, the exponential scale, by showing that fast extinction may occur on stretched exponential time scales in sparse scale-free spatial networks. Together with {the results of} Nam, Nguyen and Sly (Trans.\ Am.\ Math.\ Soc.\ 375, 2022), our methods can be applied to deduce that the fast/slow threshold in sparse configuration models coincides with the survival/extinction threshold on the limiting Galton-Watson tree.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
08.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Neural Phase Correlation

Authors:
Cole Reynolds↗

Correspondence is fundamentally relational: it seeks the unknown transformation between two observations of a common scene, not the content of either. Yet the dominant learning-based methods do not represent the transformation as a first-class object in the architecture. They encode each image independently and let a learned similarity function or a deep decoder discover the mapping implicitly. Phase correlation is the canonical exception, measuring the inter-image relationship directly in the Fourier domain, but the rigidity of its fixed basis confines it to global translation. We introduce a learned generalization of phase correlation that lifts this restriction by learning the basis on which the transformation decomposes. The same algebraic primitive extends to dense non-rigid deformations and to unitary dynamics. On the ACDC cardiac-MRI benchmark the framework matches or exceeds prior published baselines on both registration directions. On CAMUS echocardiography it matches state-of-the-art without auxiliary scoring or adaptive-smoothness mechanisms. Applied to time-evolved wavefunction pairs of the 1-D quantum harmonic oscillator, the same framework recovers the Hermite-function eigenstates and the quantized energy levels of the unknown Hamiltonian from observation pairs alone.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
09.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-04

Beyond associations: Navigating the safety of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) in early pregnancy

Authors:
Andrew S. C. Yuen↗

by Andrew S. C. Yuen, Kenneth K. C. Man Pain and fever in pregnancy require treatment, but fetal safety concerns complicate analgesic choice. A recent PLOS Medicine study presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but interpreting findings across studies is challenging. In this Perspective, Kenneth Man and Andrew Yuen highlight a recent PLOS Medicine study that presents new evidence on the safety of first-trimester NSAID use and congenital malformation risk, but discuss why interpreting findings across studies is challenging.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Texture-Shape Bias Balancing for Robust Synthetic-to-Real Semantic Segmentation in Automotive NIR Imagery

Authors:
Felix Stillger↗Ben Hamscher↗Lukas Hahn↗Annika M\"utze↗Tobias Meisen↗Kira Maag↗

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental component of visual perception in modern automotive systems, enabling pixel-level scene understanding. Near-Infrared imaging (NIR) offers stable detection under difficult illumination conditions, but the development of domain-specific semantic segmentation models remains challenging due to the lack of high-quality annotated data from real-world scenarios. Synthetic datasets offer a scalable alternative, but models trained on synthetic images often suffer performance degradation when transferred to real domains. We present the first systematic study on synthetic to real domain adaptation for semantic segmentation in NIR images in the automotive domain. We propose a generative augmentation framework that transforms synthetic images into realistic NIR-style variants via our introduced target style adaptation (TSA). TSA fine-tunes a latent diffusion model via low-rank adaptation on a small curated set of real NIR images and applies it to synthetic training data using structure-preserving multi-signal conditioning. To reduce texture bias and improve segmentation robustness, we further apply a Voronoi-based style diversification strategy (VSD) that modifies the original textures while preserving scene geometry. Experiments with multiple model architectures on NIR data from vehicle interiors and street scenes show that balancing inductive bias during training leads to noticeably more robust semantic segmentation and effectively reduces the domain gap in our real-world scenarios by up to 63.6% on exterior and 28.4% on interior data. The code is available at GitHub.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
11.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Beyond Scalars: Evaluating and Understanding LLM Reasoning via Geometric Progress and Stability

Authors:
Xinyan Jiang↗Ninghao Liu↗Di Wang↗Lijie Hu↗

arXiv:2603.10384v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating LLM reliability via scalar probabilities often fails to capture the structural dynamics of reasoning. We introduce TRACED, a framework that assesses reasoning quality through theoretically grounded geometric kinematics. By decomposing reasoning traces into Progress (displacement) and Stability (curvature), we reveal a distinct topological divergence: correct reasoning manifests as high-progress, stable trajectories, whereas hallucinations are characterized by low-progress, unstable patterns (stalled displacement with high curvature fluctuations). Leveraging these signatures, our probabilistic framework achieves competitive performance and superior robustness across diverse benchmarks. Crucially, TRACED bridges geometry and cognition by mapping high curvature to ''Hesitation Loops'' and displacement to ''Certainty Accumulation'', offering a physical lens to decode the internal dynamics of machine thought.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
12.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Conditional Score-Based Modeling of Effective Langevin Dynamics

Authors:
Ludovico T. Giorgini↗

arXiv:2604.23952v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Stochastic reduced-order models are widely used to represent the effective dynamics of complex systems, but estimating their drift and diffusion coefficients from data remains challenging. Standard approaches often rely on short-time trajectory increments, state-space partitioning, or repeated simulation of candidate models, which become unreliable or computationally expensive for high-dimensional systems, coarse temporal sampling, or unevenly sampled data. We introduce a data-driven calibration method based on a novel relationship between the coefficients of a stochastic reduced model and the conditional score of the finite-time transition density, defined as the gradient of the logarithm of the transition density with respect to the initial state. The resulting identity expresses derivatives of lagged correlation functions as stationary expectations over observed lagged pairs involving this conditional score and the unknown model coefficients. This formulation allows the drift and diffusion structure to be constrained directly from finite-lag statistics, without differentiating trajectories, partitioning state space, or repeatedly integrating candidate reduced models during calibration, yielding a least-squares fitting problem over stationary lagged pairs. We validate the approach on three systems of increasing complexity: an analytically tractable Cox–Ingersoll–Ross diffusion, a two-dimensional nonequilibrium diffusion with affine multiplicative noise, and a periodic soft-spin stochastic Landau–Lifshitz chain. Across these tests, the inferred models preserve the invariant statistics while reproducing finite-lag dynamical correlations. The framework provides a scalable route for learning stochastic reduced-order models from data that reproduce prescribed statistical and dynamical properties.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
13.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

TerraMind: Large-Scale Generative Multimodality for Earth Observation

Authors:
Johannes Jakubik↗Felix Yang↗Benedikt Blumenstiel↗Erik Scheurer↗Rocco Sedona↗Stefano Maurogiovanni↗Jente Bosmans↗Nikolaos Dionelis↗Valerio Marsocci↗Niklas Kopp↗Rahul Ramachandran↗Paolo Fraccaro↗…

arXiv:2504.11171v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present TerraMind, the first any-to-any generative, multimodal foundation model for Earth observation (EO). Unlike other multimodal models, TerraMind is pretrained on dual-scale representations combining both token-level and pixel-level data across modalities. On a token level, TerraMind encodes high-level contextual information to learn cross-modal relationships, while on a pixel level, TerraMind leverages fine-grained representations to capture critical spatial nuances. We pretrained TerraMind on nine geospatial modalities of a global, large-scale dataset. In this paper, we demonstrate that (i) TerraMind's dual-scale early fusion approach unlocks a range of zero-shot and few-shot applications for Earth observation, (ii) TerraMind introduces "Thinking-in-Modalities" (TiM) – the capability of generating additional artificial data during finetuning and inference to improve the model output – and (iii) TerraMind achieves beyond state-of-the-art performance in community-standard benchmarks for EO like PANGAEA. The pretraining dataset, the model weights, and our code are open-sourced under a permissive license.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
14.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

The Perils of Agency: How Developers Perceive, Prioritize, and Address Risks in Agentic AI Products

Authors:
Hao-Ping Lee↗Jessica He↗David Piorkowski↗Thomas Serban von Davier↗Jodi Forlizzi↗Sauvik Das↗

arXiv:2606.15485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agentic AI systems act autonomously, use tools, adapt to context, and operate in complex real-world environments. However, these same characteristics can create or exacerbate product risks. We studied how industry developers (n=35) perceive, prioritize, and address the risks in their agentic AI products. We found that developers' perceptions of risk were closely tied to the qualities that made the product agentic, such as autonomy, tool use, and usage in a real-world context. Developers prioritized product and business risks before considering downstream societal risks like job displacement and end-user privacy. This prioritization also impacted developers' ability and motivation to mitigate agentic risks. Finally, developers lacked mature controls for containing agentic risks, often relying on constraining the same characteristics that make agents useful: e.g., autonomy and goal complexity. These findings reveal a capability vs. risk control tension in agentic AI development: developers need to address risks that emerge from agentic capabilities, yet they currently have limited support for doing so without constraining agentic functionality.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
15.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Topological entanglement and number theory

Authors:
Siddharth Dwivedi↗

arXiv:2410.01492v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The recent developments in the study of topological multi-boundary entanglement in the context of 3d Chern-Simons theory (with gauge group $G$ and level $k$) suggest a strong interplay between entanglement measures and number theory. The purpose of this note is twofold. First, we introduce a $q$-deformed version of the Witten zeta function using the Chern-Simons theory at level $k$. We analyze the large $k$ limit of this function and show that it converges to an integer multiple of the classical Witten zeta function of $G$, where the integer multiple is precisely the order of the center of the group. This analysis provides an alternative way to compute the classical zeta functions, and we present some examples. Next, we study the quantum state associated with the $S^3$ complement of torus links of type $T_{p,p}$ and show that we can write the Rényi entropies at finite $k$ in terms of $q$-deformed Witten zeta functions. Using our first result, we obtain the $k \to \infty$ limit of the Rényi entropies and find that the entropies converge to finite values, which can be written in terms of the classical Witten zeta functions evaluated at positive integers. Since Witten zeta functions naturally appear in the symplectic volumes of moduli spaces of flat connections on Riemann surfaces, we give a geometric interpretation of the $k \to \infty$ limit of the Rényi and entanglement entropies in terms of these volumes. The results of this paper reveal an intriguing connection between topological entanglement, number-theoretic structures arising from Witten zeta functions, and the geometry of moduli spaces.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Appearance-Invariant Detection of Suggestive Motion via Laban Movement Descriptors

Authors:
Jaehoon Ahn↗Jeonghan Kong↗Moon-Ryul Jung↗

Content moderation in online multiplayer 3D virtual environments is increasingly automated, yet detection has focused on images, video, and audio, leaving suggestive motion a blind spot. We present a motion-only classification pipeline that detects suggestive and explicit movement from SMPL skeleton trajectories using Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) descriptors. On a dataset spanning everyday, artistic, suggestive, and explicit movement (17+ hours of video), a logistic regression trained on 61-feature LMA descriptors reaches 68% binary SFW/NSFW accuracy (70% random forest) under a leak-free evaluation protocol. At this level, our descriptor performs comparably to a learned video model trained on the same motion re-rendered as appearance-free video, a gray figure with no clothing, skin, or scene. The indirectness (tortuosity) of each joint's trajectory, measured as the ratio of the joint's path length to its net displacement, peaks at the suggestive tier, showing that the Direct-to-Indirect polarity of Laban's Space factor provides an interpretable marker of the shift from functional to suggestive motion. Ultimately, Laban-based kinematic descriptors offer a lightweight, interpretable approach to suggestive-motion detection: every decision decomposes into named, theory-grounded features. Because the classifier operates on pose trajectories alone, moderation can run directly on avatar poses in virtual environments, with no appearance data.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
17.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Training LLMs with Reinforcement Learning over Digital Twin Representations for Reasoning-Intensive Surgical VideoQA

Authors:
Yiqing Shen↗Han Zhang↗Mathias Unberath↗

Surgical video question answering requires multi-step reasoning across semantic, spatial, and temporal dimensions. Existing methods architecturally compress videos into discrete token representations and couple visual perception with reasoning. This approach fragments continuous spatial-temporal relationships and has been shown to restrict multi-step reasoning capabilities. We introduce a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that trains large language models (LLMs) to decouple perception from reasoning by operating over digital twin representations constructed from surgical foundation models. Additionally, we introduce hierarchical representations across frame, temporal window, and procedure levels with probabilistic uncertainty estimates. Finally, we propose a novel reward that combines format validation with accuracy assessment through clinical plausibility evaluation and uncertainty-aware calibration for training. To demonstrate the capabilities of this approach, we introduce REAL-Colon-Reason, a colonoscopic benchmark with 2000 question-answer pairs across three complexity levels. We achieve state-of-the-art performance on REAL-Colon-Reason and two existing surgical VideoQA benchmarks REAL-Colon-VQA and EndoVis18-VQA.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Efficient classical representation and quantum state preparation of complete active space wavefunctions

Authors:
Hamza Jnane↗

arXiv:2606.19457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum computers promise to solve the electronic structure problem for a large class of molecules. However, the performance of relevant quantum algorithms hinges on preparing initial states with substantial overlap with the target eigenvector. For classically challenging molecules with strong electron correlation, starting from multi-reference states, such as complete active space (CAS) wavefunctions is necessary. Unfortunately, the most advanced state preparation protocols applied to such states result in a gate complexity that scales exponentially with the active space size $d$. In fact, even encoding a CAS state classically is traditionally believed to be intractable for chemically relevant systems. Here, we draw insights from the recently introduced Quantum Paldus Transform (QPT) to show that there exists an efficient classical representation of CAS states and to design a new state preparation routine outperforming previous ones. The QPT represents a transformation from the Fock basis to a friendlier symmetry-adapted basis. Our main contribution consists in showing that CAS states expanded in this basis can efficiently be represented as a matrix product state (MPS) with a bond dimension scaling as $O(d^2)$. One can then efficiently load the MPS on a quantum computer and use the inverse QPT to transform the state to the Fock basis. Moreover, our method can easily be extended to the efficient preparation of CAS states in first quantisation with similar complexity. Crucially, we demonstrate that the complexity of both state preparation protocols only grows polynomially as $O(d^3)$ , which constitutes to the best of our knowledge an exponential improvement over the state of the art.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Hantavirus Disease in Uruguay: Trends and Mortality Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Authors:
criscuolo↗Blanco↗Ferrara↗Ciaccio↗Gomez Carassale↗Gonzalez Reyes↗Machado Rivero↗Sosa Dias↗Facal Castro↗J. A↗

Introduction: Hantavirus disease is an emerging and potentially severe zoonosis of global distribution. In Uruguay, it is transmitted by rodents inhabiting peridomestic, suburban, and rural areas. Global incidence is estimated at 150,000 to 200,000 cases per year, with up to 300 annual cases in the Americas. Since 1997, Uruguay's Ministry of Public Health (MPH) has monitored Hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome (HCPS), the most common clinical presentation in the region. By 2019, a total of 271 cases had been identified in the country, with an estimated mortality rate of nearly 50%. Objectives: To describe the clinical, epidemiological, and occupational characteristics of patients with Hantavirus disease in Uruguay during the pre-pandemic (2018-2019) and pandemic (2020-2021) periods. Methods: A descriptive, cross-sectional, observational study was conducted, including all serologically confirmed cases of Hantavirus infection reported to the MPH between 2018 and 2021. Clinical and demographic data were extracted from the mandatory reporting form for zoonotic diseases. Incidence and case fatality rates were calculated, and factors associated with fatal outcomes were analyzed. Results: A total of 58 confirmed cases were identified between 2018 and 2021. Most patients were male (62%), with a mean age of 36.5 years (SD 16). A decline in incidence was observed during 2020-2021, with no significant change in case fatality. Direct rodent exposure was the most frequently associated risk factor. Montevideo and Canelones were the most affected departments. Renal and pulmonary involvement were significantly associated with mortality. Conclusion: Hantavirus remains a relevant public health concern in Uruguay. Although a decrease in incidence was observed during the COVID-19 pandemic years, case fatality rates remained high. The findings underscore the need for sustained surveillance and early recognition, particularly in urbanizing regions.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Neuron-based Personality Trait Induction in Large Language Models

Authors:
Jia Deng↗Tianyi Tang↗Yanbin Yin↗Wenhao Yang↗Wayne Xin Zhao↗Ji-Rong Wen↗

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly proficient at simulating various personality traits, an important capability for supporting related applications (e.g., role-playing). To further improve this capacity, in this paper, we present a neuron-based approach for personality trait induction in LLMs, with three major technical contributions. First, we construct PersonalityBench, a large-scale dataset for identifying and evaluating personality traits in LLMs. This dataset is grounded in the Big Five personality traits from psychology and is designed to assess the generative capabilities of LLMs towards specific personality traits. Second, by leveraging PersonalityBench, we propose an efficient method for identifying personality-related neurons within LLMs by examining the opposite aspects of a given trait. Third, we develop a simple yet effective induction method that manipulates the values of these identified personality-related neurons. This method enables fine-grained control over the traits exhibited by LLMs without training and modifying model parameters. Extensive experiments validate the efficacy of our neuron identification and trait induction methods. Notably, our approach achieves comparable performance as fine-tuned models, offering a more efficient and flexible solution for personality trait induction in LLMs. We provide access to all the mentioned resources at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/NPTI.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Who funds stroke trials in Europe? A survey of funding sources for randomised controlled stroke trials by the European Stroke Organisation Trials Alliance (ESOTA) network

Authors:
Agarwal↗Olivot↗J. M↗Roffe↗Knoflach↗

Abstract Aims and scope Evidence from randomised controlled trials (RCTs) has transformed stroke care. There are no systematically collected data on the amount of public funding, critical to delivering trials, going into stroke RCTs. To understand the extent of stroke RCT funding by national and EU funding bodies across Europe, the European Stroke Organisation Trials Alliance (ESOTA) conducted a survey of its member nations. Methods This is an observational study of research funding in Europe. The ESOTA steering group sent an electronic survey to the leads of the 16 participating national networks from 14 countries. Structured survey questions included who the funding bodies were in each country, the number of RCT applications put forward for public national or EU funding, the number of successful and failed applications, and the amount of funding granted between 01/01/2022 and 31/12/2023. Results Responses were received from 13 of 14 participating countries. There was significant variation in the number of grant applications submitted by individual countries, ranging from 0-17 during the 24-month survey period. The median number of funded studies per country was 1 (IQR 3, range 0-9) representing a median success rate of 47.1 % (IQR 21.1-59.4%), with no RCTs granted joint European funding. Conclusions Our survey highlights significant inequities in stroke trial funding across Europe. Given the encouraging rate of successful applications overall, it is important for all member networks to submit proposals. This is particularly pertinent for multicentre trials, given the evolution of evidence base in stroke towards large trials, across diverse populations.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
22.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

MedSynth: Realistic, Synthetic Medical Dialogue-Note Pairs

Authors:
Ahmad Rezaie Mianroodi↗Amirali Rezaie↗Niko Grisel Todorov↗Nadine A. Friedrich↗Maria P Mogollon↗Alexander Hernandez-Tirado↗Guillermo Lopez Garcia↗Cyril Rakovski↗Frank Rudzicz↗

Physicians spend significant time documenting clinical encounters, a burden that contributes to professional burnout. To address this, robust automation tools for medical documentation are crucial. We introduce MedSynth – a novel dataset of synthetic medical dialogues and notes designed to advance the Dialogue-to-Note (Dial-2-Note) and Note-to-Dialogue (Note-2-Dial) tasks. Informed by an extensive analysis of disease distributions, this dataset includes over 10,000 dialogue-note pairs covering over 2000 ICD-10 codes. We demonstrate that our dataset markedly enhances the performance of models in generating medical notes from dialogues, and dialogues from medical notes. The dataset provides a valuable resource in a field where open-access, privacy-compliant, and diverse training data are scarce. Code is available at https://github.com/ahmadrezarm/MedSynth/tree/main and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/Ahmad0067/MedSynth.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
23.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-17

General-purpose chatbots outperform clinical AI tools on physicians’ real-world questions

Authors: Unknown Author

Specialized clinical AI tools are entering medical practice with little independent testing. In a head-to-head evaluation across two public benchmarks and real questions from physicians, three general-purpose frontier large language models outperformed two leading clinical AI tools, which performed no better than Google search AI overview.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

Want Better Synthetic Data? Steer It: Activation Steering for Low-Resource Language Generation

Authors:
Jan Cegin↗Daniil Gurgurov↗Yusser Al Ghussin↗Simon Ostermann↗

Large language models (LLMs) have become an effective tool for synthetic data generation, including for low-resource languages, where generated data can improve downstream task performance. Current best-performing approaches typically rely on few-shot prompting with target-language examples, which increases inference costs and may reduce diversity through lexical anchoring. In this work, we investigate activation steering as an alternative for low-resource synthetic data generation. We study two steering strategies: Language Steering, which targets the linguistic identity of a language, and Quality Steering, which captures well-formedness by contrasting human-written and backtranslated text representations. We evaluate these methods across four open-source LLMs, multiple layers, and 11 typologically diverse languages by generating sentiment and topic classification data and finetuning smaller classifiers. Steering is applied in both zero-shot and few-shot prompting settings and compared against non-steered counterparts. Our results show that steering on early layers consistently improves the diversity of generated data while often yielding stronger downstream model performance, particularly for low-resource languages.

Read & Discuss → View Source →
25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-24

Minimisation of Quasar-Convex Functions Using Random Zeroth-Order Oracles

Authors:
Amir Ali Farzin↗Yuen-Man Pun↗Philipp Braun↗Iman Shames↗

arXiv:2505.02281v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: This paper explores the performance of a random Gaussian smoothing zeroth-order (ZO) scheme for minimising quasar-convex (QC) and strongly quasar-convex (SQC) functions in both unconstrained and constrained settings. For the unconstrained problem, we establish the ZO algorithm's convergence to a global minimum along with its complexity when applied to both QC and SQC functions. For the constrained problem, we introduce the new notion of proximal-quasar-convexity and prove analogous results to the unconstrained case. Specifically, we derive complexity bounds and prove convergence of the algorithm to a neighbourhood of a global minimum whose size can be controlled under a variance reduction scheme. Beyond the theoretical guarantees, we demonstrate the practical implications of our results on several machine learning problems where quasar-convexity naturally arises, including linear dynamical system identification and generalised linear models.

Read & Discuss → View Source →