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01.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Noise-Adaptive Predictive Dynamical Decoupling

arXiv:2606.15769v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protecting quantum coherence against realistic environmental noise remains one of the fundamental obstacles to scalable quantum technologies. We develop a noise-adaptive dynamical decoupling framework that combines analytical open-quantum-system modeling with machine-learning-based forecasting for a qubit interacting with random telegraph noise. Unlike conventional dynamical decoupling protocols based on fixed pulse schedules, the proposed approach continuously forecasts short-time coherence evolution and adaptively applies control pulses according to the instantaneous noise dynamics. We investigate stationary and non-stationary environments spanning both Markovian and non-Markovian regimes. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the machine-learning-assisted adaptive control strategy substantially outperforms conventional periodic dynamical decoupling while using a comparable number of control pulses. The improvement becomes particularly pronounced in non-Markovian and non-stationary regimes, where memory effects, coherence revivals, and temporally evolving noise strongly limit the effectiveness of static pulse protocols. These results establish predictive machine-learning-assisted dynamical decoupling as a promising and scalable framework for adaptive quantum control in realistic noisy quantum devices.

02.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Using Reinforcement Learning to Optimize the Global and Local Crossing Number

arXiv:2509.06108v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Graph drawing concerns the algorithmic visualization of graphs. A good drawing of a graph is easy to read and facilitates solving tasks on the graph. Several properties have been identified to occur in good drawings of graphs. Such properties include a low number of crossings, large angles between edges, short edges, and depicting symmetries. Many of these properties are explicitly measurable metrics. This brings us to the insight that graph drawing can be seen as a game. In this paper, we study a single-player optimization game in which the player iteratively moves vertices of a straight-line graph drawing to reduce edge crossings. This game arose naturally from the automatic track of the Graph Drawing Challenge, where solutions are obtained by repeatedly performing local vertex movements. We formalize this process as a game with full information and investigate whether reinforcement learning can discover effective strategies for playing it. Our reinforcement-learning agent observes the local geometric and structural context of a vertex and selects a movement direction with the goal of reducing either the global or the local crossing number, that is, the total number of crossings or the maximum number of crossings per edge. We compare the resulting strategies to existing methods and established crossing-minimization heuristics on standard benchmark graphs. While our approach does not out-compete state-of-the-art methods for minimizing the global crossing number, it is competitive and often superior for minimizing the local crossing number.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

From Construction to Injection: Edit-Based Fingerprints for Large Language Models

Reliable model fingerprints are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs) against unauthorized redistribution and commercial misuse. In black-box deployment, verification is hindered by defensive filtering of suspected fingerprint queries, as well as by downstream model modifications that may weaken embedded ownership evidence. These risks require fingerprints to be robust in both construction and injection. For construction, prior paradigms face an imperceptibility trade-off: natural-language fingerprints may be accidentally activated, whereas garbled fingerprints are statistically exposed and easier to filter. For injection, existing methods struggle to preserve persistent trigger–target behaviors under model modification. We propose an end-to-end injected fingerprinting framework to address these challenges. Code-mixing Fingerprints (CF) use lowest-perplexity code-mixing under a high-complexity constraint to mitigate this two-sided imperceptibility trade-off. Multi-Candidate Editing (MCEdit) constructs structurally redundant, margin-separated trigger–target mappings to enable graceful degradation under model modification. Extensive evaluations on imperceptibility, detectability, and harmlessness demonstrate robust ownership verification with negligible impact on utility.

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-19

Evaluating deep learning models for fault diagnosis of a rotating machinery with epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty

arXiv:2412.18980v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Uncertainty-aware deep learning (DL) models recently gained attention in fault diagnosis as a way to promote the reliable detection of faults when out-of-distribution (OOD) data arise from unseen faults (epistemic uncertainty) or the presence of noise (aleatoric uncertainty). In this paper, we present the first comprehensive comparative study of state-of-the-art uncertainty-aware DL architectures for fault diagnosis in rotating machinery, where different scenarios affected by epistemic uncertainty and different types of aleatoric uncertainty are investigated. The selected architectures include sampling by dropout, Bayesian neural networks, and deep ensembles. Moreover, to distinguish between in-distribution and OOD data in the different scenarios two uncertainty thresholds, one of which is introduced in this paper, are alternatively applied. Our empirical findings offer guidance to practitioners and researchers who have to deploy real-world uncertainty-aware fault diagnosis systems. In particular, they reveal that, in the presence of epistemic uncertainty, all DL models are capable of effectively detecting, on average, a substantial portion of OOD data across all the scenarios. However, deep ensemble models show superior performance, independently of the uncertainty threshold used for discrimination. In the presence of aleatoric uncertainty, the noise level plays an important role. Specifically, low noise levels hinder the models' ability to effectively detect OOD data. Even in this case, however, deep ensemble models exhibit a milder degradation in performance, dominating the others. These achievements, combined with their shorter inference time, make deep ensemble architectures the preferred choice.

05.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Viral Proteins Reveal Geometry of Protein Language Models

arXiv:2606.12609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models are trained on highly imbalanced datasets, raising the question of how they represent underrepresented biological sequences. Using viral proteins as a case study across ESM model families, we identify a dominant nativeness axis in embedding space, aligned with masked reconstruction perplexity, that orders sequences from well-modeled cellular proteins through viral proteins to shuffled and random sequences. Scaling contracts this axis unevenly across viral families. Despite this, protein language model embeddings retain viral-specific signal: viral proteins remain linearly separable beyond zero-shot perplexity and shallow sequence features. Together, these results suggest that pLM representations are structured by a general notion of nativeness while preserving information specific to distinct biological groups.

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

The Information-Theoretic Benefit of Shared Representations under Orthogonality Constraints

arXiv:2606.16028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern deep learning architectures are increasingly multi-task and multi-modal, using a pretrained foundation model combined with task-specific, fine-tuned models. Empirically, exploiting similarity across different problems, instead of solving them individually, can significantly improve overall performance. While the generalization and sample complexity properties of multitask learning have been widely studied, the parametric complexity of joint approximation in comparison to separate approximation remains less well understood. The question is particularly relevant in modern deep learning, where models are increasingly required to satisfy structural constraints such as equivariance, conservation laws, or orthogonality. We prove lower and upper bounds on the description-length for separate and joint approximation classes, respectively, in uniform norm. We build a class of orthogonal functions by composing a shared hard feature, realized by a Rademacher-Haar wavelet series, with Sawtooth-Walsh readouts to enforce orthogonality of output coordinates. The dyadic tree structure of the Rademacher-Haar wavelet concentrates the approximation hardness in the common feature component, while the readouts act as task-specific heads. Using an information-theoretic framework, we obtain a sharp gap between the optimal approximation rates achievable by joint and separate coding. Finally, we realize this separation in a neural network model using Heaviside activations via reduction to triangle-wave approximation. Our results show that even under an orthogonality constraint joint approximation requires strictly fewer bits in compositional architectures, provided the tasks share a latent hard feature. This provides theoretical insight into the description-length-efficiency of compositional multi-output architectures and clarifies how neural networks can retain expressivity under geometric constraints.

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Towards Leveraging AutoML for Sustainable Deep Learning: A Multi-Objective HPO Approach on Deep Shift Neural Networks

arXiv:2404.01965v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep Learning (DL) has advanced various fields by extracting complex patterns from large datasets. However, the computational demands of DL models pose environmental and resource challenges. Deep shift neural networks (DSNNs) offer a solution by leveraging shift operations to reduce computational complexity at inference. Following the insights from standard DNNs, we are interested in leveraging the full potential of DSNNs by means of AutoML techniques. We study the impact of hyperparameter optimization (HPO) to maximize DSNN performance while minimizing resource consumption. Since this combines multi-objective (MO) optimization with accuracy and energy consumption as potentially complementary objectives, we propose to combine state-of-the-art multi-fidelity (MF) HPO with multi-objective optimization. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, resulting in models with over 80\% in accuracy and low computational cost. Overall, our method accelerates efficient model development while enabling sustainable AI applications.

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

CT-VDETR: Semi-supervised 3D Trauma Detection in Computed Tomography (CT) scans using Dense Vertex Relative Position Encoding

Accurate detection and localization of traumatic injuries in abdominal CT remain challenging because voxel-level annotations are limited and expensive to obtain. We present a label-efficient framework for 3D abdominal trauma detection that combines self-supervised pretraining with semi-supervised transformer-based detection. First, we use Masked Image Modeling (MIM) on 1098 CT volumes to pretrain a 3D U-Net encoder for anatomical representation learning. Next, we adapt V-DETR to dense volumetric CT through a feature adapter that converts the encoder feature grid into a compact token sequence for transformer decoding. The pretrained encoder is then integrated with V-DETR and 3D Vertex Relative Position Encoding (3D V-RPE) to improve the localization of irregularly shaped injuries. Finally, semi-supervised teacher-student consistency regularization leverages 2,000 additional unlabeled volumes during detector training. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of a 3D DETR-style detector to the RSNA abdominal trauma detection task. On this benchmark, the proposed method achieves 31.33% test mAP@0.50 using only 78 labeled training volumes, corresponding to a 1.53x improvement over supervised-only training. These results show that combining medical-domain pretraining with semi-supervised learning is an effective strategy for label-scarce 3D medical detection.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

Clinically Aligned Geometry Constraints for Robust IVUS Vessel Boundary Segmentation

Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) lumen and external elastic membrane (EEM) segmentation is important for quantitative coronary plaque burden assessment. Errors in lumen or EEM delineation directly propagate to plaque area, plaque burden and geometric measurements. However, standard methods prioritising overlap scores often suffer from boundary drift and topology errors, leading to inaccurate clinical measurements. We present GeoCat, a geometry-consistent network that processes 5-frame IVUS clips using dual Cartesian-polar encoders with cross-domain attention and temporal fusion. A differentiable geometry consistency loss directly supervises clinically relevant descriptors including diameters, orientations, and cross-sectional areas. The model is trained on 12,242 annotated frames from 146 patients acquired with two commercial IVUS systems. We evaluate performance using both segmentation accuracy and plaque-relevant clinical metrics, including Dice/IoU, boundary measures(95HD (mm), ASSD), topology violation rate, and clinical geometry errors (dmax/dmin, angles, and areas). On our dataset, GeoCat achieves a Dice of 0.93, reduces 95HD to 0.14 mm, and lowers topology violations to 1.0%. Importantly, it significantly improves geometric fidelity, yielding diameter errors of 0.13-0.16 mm and angular errors of ~8 degrees, supporting reliable plaque burden quantification.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-17

Reasoning Text-to-Video Retrieval for Operating Room Clips via Action-Driven Digital Twins

Text-to-video retrieval in operating rooms (OR) is an enabling technology for OR safety, as it allows stakeholders to retrieve and inspect recordings of specific events. However, because the most safety-critical events may not follow the common structure, to unlock its full potential text-to-video retrieval must be able to handle implicit queries that require reasoning to identify the right video (e.g., the step right before clipping). However, existing methods rely on global embeddings that cannot reason over such queries. We propose OR3, a text-to-video retrieval method that converts clips into action-driven digital twins (ActDTs), grouping concurrent subject-action-object triplets under non-overlapping temporal intervals. Moreover, rather than cross-modal matching through paired encoders, OR3 performs imagination-based retrieval where an LLM generates hypothetical ActDTs from queries. This enables intra-modal matching via a single encoder trained with ActDT-tailored hard negatives. Finally, evidence-grounded refinement revises imagined ActDTs based on discrepancies with top candidates to capture procedure-specific patterns. We construct a benchmark from MM-OR with 276 implicit queries across four reasoning categories over 386 clips from robotic knee procedures. OR3 achieves 57.6 R@1 and 77.3 R@5, outperforming the strongest baseline. These results demonstrate that OR3 enables fine-grained discrimination between visually similar OR video clips through temporal action reasoning.

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

LaQual: An Automated Framework for LLM App Quality Evaluation

arXiv:2508.18636v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Representing a new paradigm in software distribution, LLM app stores are rapidly emerging, offering users diverse choices for content generation, coding assistance, education, and more. However, current ranking and recommendation mechanisms in LLM app stores predominantly rely on static metrics, such as user interactions and favorites, making it challenging for users to efficiently identify high-quality apps. At the same time, current academic research focuses on specific vertical fields and lacks a general, automated evaluation framework applicable to the diverse LLM app ecosystem. To address the above challenges, we present LaQual, an automated framework for LLM app quality evaluation. LaQual integrates three key stages: (1) LLM app labeling and hierarchical classification for precise scenario mapping; (2) static indicator evaluation using time-weighted user engagement and functional capability indicators to filter low-quality apps; and (3) dynamic scenario-adapted evaluation, where an LLM generates scenario-specific evaluation metrics, scoring criteria, and tasks for comprehensive quality evaluation. Experiments on a mainstream LLM app store demonstrate the effectiveness of LaQual. Its automated scores show high consistency with human judgments. Through effective screening, LaQual can reduce the candidate LLM app pool by 66.7% to 81.3%. User studies further validate its significant outperformance over baseline systems, particularly in comparison efficiency (mean 5.45 vs. 3.30) and value of explanatory information (4.75 vs. 2.25). These results demonstrate that LaQual provides a scalable, objective, and user-centric solution for high-quality discovery and recommendation of LLM apps in real-world scenarios.

13.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Magic transfer in quantum spin chains

arXiv:2606.14855v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantum communication protocols based on spin chains have been extensively studied, yet their ability to transmit nonstabilizer resources has not been systematically addressed. We investigate the transport of quantum magic in spin chains through the natural dynamics of systems initialized in nonstabilizer states, and quantify the transported resource via the stabilizer norm. We analyze three experimentally feasible state-transfer protocols, ranging from noisy to (quasi-)perfect transfer, including one realizable in trapped-ion platforms. We find that the geometry of the injected state strongly influences transport: states in the lower Bloch hemisphere achieve higher transfer quality, whereas states in the upper hemisphere give rise to an efficient magic transport only beyond a threshold value of the parameter controlling the tendency towards perfect transfer. These features are robust across all protocols and identify the Hamiltonian and state properties that favor high-quality transfer. Moreover, we identify a parameter region, relevant to the initial state preparation, in which the transported magic exceeds the initial encoding, indicating that such spin systems can act as magic-amplification channels. Our results establish the conditions for efficient transport of nonstabilizer resources and demonstrate quantum magic as a sensitive probe of quantum transport beyond population dynamics.

14.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-24

An ECG biomarker for sudden cardiac death discovered with deep learning

Sudden cardiac death is, in theory, preventable with defibrillators. But every year, many patients die without defibrillators because doctors fail to predict their risk1. The only predictive biomarker in wide use, cardiac left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), misses most sudden cardiac deaths2, and flags many low-risk patients for futile defibrillators that never fire3,4. Here we apply deep learning to a dataset linking all electrocardiograms (ECGs) in a Swedish region to death certificates. The resulting model isolates a high-risk group (2.2% of the sample) with a 7.0% annual rate of sudden cardiac death, higher than those with reduced LVEF (1.9% of the sample; 4.6% annual rate). Notably, 86.1% of the model’s high-risk patients were not flagged by LVEF. High-risk ECG patients with defibrillators implanted were 54.4% less likely to die than expected, suggesting a mortality benefit. We externally validate the model in a US health system, in which it predicts ventricular arrhythmias that cause sudden death; and a Taiwanese hospital registry, in which it specifically predicts future arrhythmic cardiac arrests. To visualize the waveform morphology ‘discovered’ by the predictive model, we pair it with a generative model of the ECG waveform. Together, they reveal a biomarker that is easily visible and robustly predicts sudden cardiac death, but has not to our knowledge been previously described. Tying the biomarker’s shape to electrophysiological first principles, we form and preliminarily test a new hypothesis on the mechanism of sudden cardiac death. A deep-learning model trained on electrocardiogram (ECG) waveforms identifies an easily visible biomarker that predicts sudden cardiac death more accurately than the current clinical state of the art.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-18

UniTemp: Unlocking Video Generation in Any Temporal Order via Bidirectional Distillation

Autoregressive video diffusion models have emerged as a promising approach for long video generation, achieving strong performance in streaming settings. However, existing methods are restricted to forward temporal generation, whereas practical video creation often requires flexible generation order, e.g., conditioning on future context to extend backward, or on both past and future context for inbetween generation. We bridge this gap by training an autoregressive model that supports generation in arbitrary temporal directions. A key technical challenge arises from the Causal 3D VAE widely used in video diffusion models, which encodes latents strictly conditioned on past context. While suited for forward generation, this causal structure causes inter-block discontinuities when generation proceeds backward. To address this, we introduce blockwise anchor latents, a set of auxiliary latents that restore the missing past context at block boundaries during backward generation. Built on this design, we propose UniTemp, a bidirectional distillation framework that trains a single autoregressive student model for any-direction video generation. At inference time, UniTemp conditions on arbitrary past and/or future frames, improving controllability for both bidirectional and inbetween generation. Experiments show that UniTemp maintains competitive performance on short and long video generation compared to forward-only methods, while enabling diverse workflows such as bidirectional video extension, inbetween generation, looping video generation, scene transition, and visual story generation. Project website: https://lzhangbj.github.io/projects/unitemp/

16.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-25

Chorus II: Cross-Request Sparsity Reuse for Efficient Image-to-Video Generation

Serving diffusion models for image-to-video generation is computationally expensive, posing significant challenges for large-scale deployment. Real I2V workloads often contain similar requests, such as repeated effect templates, related subjects, and recurring shot layouts. Existing cross-request acceleration methods mainly exploit this redundancy through feature reuse. We observe that similar I2V requests also share highly consistent sparse attention patterns, enabling historical sparse masks to serve as request-conditioned priors with almost no online mask-prediction overhead. We propose a cross-request reuse framework centered on sparsity reuse, with feature reuse as an optional extension safeguarded by a lightweight guidance enhancement. Our sparsity reuse is implemented as shared sparse mask reuse, which reuses high-quality sparse masks from similar historical requests to avoid per-request online mask prediction. Optional feature reuse applies downsampled computation to highly redundant spatiotemporal regions, mitigating boundary artifacts while preserving efficiency gains. Guidance enhancement reinforces image/text conditioning after reuse, mitigating semantic drift and condition-adherence issues. Experiments show that default sparsity reuse configuration preserves generation quality with a 2.16$\times$ speedup.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-25

A Probabilistic Framework for LLM-Based Model Discovery

arXiv:2602.18266v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Automated methods for discovering mechanistic simulator models from observational data offer a promising path toward accelerating scientific progress. Such methods often take the form of agentic-style iterative workflows that repeatedly propose and revise candidate models by imitating human discovery processes. However, existing LLM-based approaches typically implement such workflows via hand-crafted heuristic procedures, without an explicit probabilistic formulation. We recast model discovery as probabilistic inference, i.e., as sampling from an unknown distribution over mechanistic models capable of explaining the data. This perspective provides a unified way to reason about model proposal, refinement, and selection within a single inference framework. As a concrete instantiation of this view, we introduce ModelSMC, an algorithm based on Sequential Monte Carlo sampling. ModelSMC represents candidate models as particles which are iteratively proposed and refined by an LLM, and weighted using likelihood-based criteria. Experiments on real-world scientific systems illustrate that this formulation discovers models with interpretable mechanisms and improves posterior predictive checks. More broadly, this perspective provides a probabilistic lens for understanding and developing LLM-based approaches to model discovery.

18.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-11

DLDN-Bench: A Benchmark Framework for Deep Learning de Novo Peptide Sequencing in Proteomics

De novo peptide sequencing is an essential approach for analyzing mass spectrometry data because it enables the identification of novel peptides without relying on protein sequence databases. Recent advances in deep learning have substantially improved the performance of de novo sequencing methods, but the rapid emergence of new models has led to heterogeneous evaluation practices and limited comparability. To address this, we introduce DLDN-Bench, a benchmark framework including a set of benchmark datasets derived from human muscle biopsy mass spectrometry data retrieved from PRIDE and annotated through consensus across multiple widely used database search engines. Using these datasets, we systematically benchmark recent deep learning-based de novo sequencing tools alongside traditional approaches. Performance is assessed using established metrics, including precision and coverage relative to a pseudo-ground truth defined by cross-engine agreement. To demonstrate the utility of DLDN-Bench, we benchmark four recent deep learning models and make all results publicly available. This benchmark framework provides a standardized basis for comparing state-of-the-art methods and offers an extensible resource for evaluating future tools in de novo peptide sequencing.

19.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-12

Statistical Mechanics and Symmetries of Non-Abelian Anyon Proliferation: From Deformation to Decoherence

arXiv:2606.12527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Topological quantum computation relies on braiding non-Abelian anyons, but requires the underlying topological order to survive imperfect state preparation and environmental noise. We show that the instability of topological order to wavefunction deformations and to decoherence, with the latter probed by syndrome distributions, are generically captured by stat-mech models whose symmetries naturally expose the corrupting anyonic excitations. As an example, we combine this framework with Monte-Carlo simulations to resolve the stability of $D_4$ topological order under deformations and quantum channels that proliferate multiple non-Abelian anyon species that individually are unable to condense. We show that beyond a finite threshold, proliferation of two non-Abelian anyon species parasitically condenses a shared Abelian-anyon fusion outcome, destroying the topological order. Our symmetry-based approach sharply differentiates the resulting trivial phase from that obtained by condensing all Abelian charges; in other words, the trivial phase "remembers" which anyons condensed. This framework provides a first step into identifying the relevant symmetry for optimal decoders, conditioned on syndrome measurements, of non-Abelian topological order.

20.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Allostatic load modifies neuropsychiatric risk following traumatic brain injury

Importance: Outcomes following traumatic brain injury (TBI) vary substantially, with a subset of individuals experiencing neuropsychiatric morbidity and worse prognosis. Exposure to psychosocial and environmental stressors may be an important, yet understudied, modifier of TBI trajectory. Allostatic load (AL) represents the cumulative physiological burden of chronic stress and provides a useful framework for evaluating pre-injury vulnerability. Objective: To assess the relationship between pre-injury AL burden and risk of mortality and incident neuropsychiatric diagnosis following TBI. Design, Setting, and Participants: This cohort study leveraged electronic health record, survey, and laboratory data from the All of Us Research Program, version 8. Participants aged 18 years or older enrolled between May 6, 2018, and October 1, 2023, were queried for TBI diagnosis using clinical diagnostic codes. Data were analyzed between November 11, 2024, and January 7, 2026. Exposure: The physiological burden of pre-injury chronic stress exposure was estimated using an AL index (pALI) derived from anthropometric and laboratory biomarkers collected before index TBI. Main Outcomes and Measures: Post-TBI mortality and incident neuropsychiatric diagnosis clusters. Mortality risk was assessed using Cox proportional hazards models (hazard ratio [HR] with 95% CI), and risk of incident neuropsychiatric diagnosis was modeled using competing-risk regression with death as a competing event (sub-distribution HR with 95% CI). Results: The primary cohort included 4,552 individuals with an established TBI diagnosis and sufficient biomarker data to estimate pALI. The pALI measure differed across sociodemographic groups and was positively correlated with perceived stress (r=.08, p=.002). Higher pALI was associated with increased post-TBI mortality risk (adjusted HR=1.71; 95%CI, 1.36-2.14). Elevated pALI was also associated with greater risk of incident post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; adjusted HR=1.28; 95%CI, 1.10-1.50) and sleep disorder (adjusted HR=1.42 95%CI, 1.29-1.57) diagnoses. Conclusions and Relevance: Higher pre-injury ALI was associated with increased risk of mortality and select neuropsychiatric outcomes following TBI, suggesting that AL burden may shape post-injury trajectories. Pre-injury chronic stress exposure and underlying stress biology may represent underrecognized determinants of vulnerability and resilience in brain injury recovery.

21.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-12

Iterative Tool Usage Exploration for Multimodal Agents via Step-wise Preference Tuning

Multimodal agents, which integrate a controller e.g., a vision language model) with external tools, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tackling complex multimodal tasks. Existing approaches for training these agents, both supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, depend on extensive human-annotated task-answer pairs and tool trajectories. However, for complex multimodal tasks, such annotations are prohibitively expensive or impractical to obtain. In this paper, we propose an iterative tool usage exploration method for multimodal agents without any pre-collected data, namely SPORT, via step-wise preference optimization to refine the trajectories of tool usage. Our method enables multimodal agents to autonomously discover effective tool usage strategies through self-exploration and optimization, eliminating the bottleneck of human annotation. SPORT has four iterative components: task synthesis, step sampling, step verification, and preference tuning. We first synthesize multimodal tasks using language models. Then, we introduce a novel trajectory exploration scheme, where step sampling and step verification are executed alternately to solve synthesized tasks. In step sampling, the agent tries different tools and obtains corresponding results. In step verification, we employ a verifier to provide AI feedback to construct step-wise preference data. The data is subsequently used to update the controller for tool usage through preference tuning, producing a SPORT agent. By interacting with real environments, the SPORT agent gradually evolves into a more refined and capable system. Evaluation in the GTA and GAIA benchmarks shows that the SPORT agent achieves 6.41% and 3.64% improvements, underscoring the generalization and effectiveness introduced by our method. The project page is https://SPORT-Agents.github.io.

22.
PLOS Medicine 2026-06-23

Comparisons of core component delivery in cardiac rehabilitation programs by country income classification and decade based on the 2025 Global Audit Update: A survey study

by Gabriela Lima de Melo Ghisi, Rachael P. Carson, Karam Turk Adawi, Rongjing Ding, Warner M. Mampuya, Mariya P. Jiandani, Jimena Martinez, Monserrat Cruz Rivero, Claudia V. Anchique, Dinah L. van Schalkwijk, Jonathan Gallagher, Buket Akinci, Dion Candelaria, Jirapa Champaiboon, Daniel F. Quesada-Chaves, Tone M. Norekvål, Iwona Szadkowska, Borut Jug, Evangelia Kouidi, Marta Supervia, Won-Seok Kim, Chamila Mettananda, Lilian Mbau, Gulsim T. Aimakova, Sherry L. Grace, on behalf of the ICCPR Global Cardiac Rehabilitation Audit Update Investigators Background Cardiovascular disease (CVD) remains a leading global health burden. Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is essential to reducing morbidity and improving patient outcomes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, CR delivery worldwide has evolved, yet these changes have not been systematically charactemkjrized. The objective of this study was to characterize globally: (1) the delivery of core CR components, including risk factors assessed, patient education practices, and program resources; (2) differences in these elements by country income classification and relative to the initial 2016 Global CR Audit. Methods and findings A cross-sectional Audit update was conducted. Program-level data were collected from May 1st to September 1st 2025 using a REDCap survey adapted from previous Audits. Eligible respondents were leads of phase II/post-discharge CR programs providing at least an initial assessment, structured aerobic exercise, and ≥1 additional core component. ICCPR associations and local leaders supported program identification. Main outcomes were core components delivered (10 assessed), risk factors assessed (14 assessed), patient education dose (hours/patient/program), and program resources (17 assessed). Generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) tested differences by income classification and (when applicable) changes since 2016. Of 7,025 programs identified globally, 1,505 (62% median country response rate) initiated a survey from 90/113 (80%) countries with CR. The median number of core components offered was 8/program (p25, p75 = 6, 10), with upper-middle income countries offering significantly more components overall (median = 9), and also high-income countries offering more than low-income countries (8 versus 6, p 

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-22

MinderCare: protocol for a mixed-methods evaluation of a digitally enabled dementia care service.

Introduction and aims Dementia is a growing public health challenge affecting millions of people worldwide. It is a progressive condition that increases the risk of infections, falls, hospital admissions, dependence in activities of daily living, safety issues such as wandering, care home transfers, and death. New ways of supporting people living with dementia (PLWD) at home are urgently needed. We describe the MinderCare study which evaluates a digitally enabled care model that integrates low-burden sensor-based remote monitoring within a nurse-led clinical service. Methods and analysis In this mixed-methods study, we will recruit 100 people with confirmed or suspected dementia living at home and deploy the Minder remote monitoring system for at least 12 months. A detailed characterisation of the cohort will be obtained, including cognition, frailty, participant and carer wellbeing, functioning, and quality of life. The feasibility, acceptability, sustainability, and resource requirements of the service will also be assessed. Low-cost sensors provide information about behaviour, environment and physiology from the home. Machine-learning algorithms have been used to develop digital biomarkers of infection, sleep, night-time behaviours, daily activities and routines, and the effects of clinical events and treatment. These will be assessed through clinical reports of sensor-derived data that include anomaly alerts provided to the clinical teams. Algorithms will be assessed for their clinical utility and acceptability. The comparative-effectiveness component will be designed as a target trial emulation using linked electronic health-record data to construct a time-indexed external usual-care control cohort. The primary comparative outcome will be Days Alive and Out of Hospital (DAOH) over 12 months from the activation-index date, with healthcare utilisation, costs, institutionalisation and mortality assessed as secondary outcomes. DAOH and estimated MinderCare effects will also be examined across prespecified strata of baseline inpatient utilisation. Ethics and dissemination Ethical approval has been granted by the North East Newcastle and North Tyneside 2 Research Ethics Committee, and the study has received confirmation of capacity and capability by the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Study findings will be disseminated to patients, health and social care professionals, and policymakers through peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations. Study registration number: ISRCTN14997677 and NIHR portfolio CPMSID 63023.

24.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-15

Did You Forget What I Asked? Prospective Memory Failures in Large Language Models

Authors:

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled paradigm that combines verifiable formatting constraints with benchmark tasks of increasing complexity. Across three model families and over 8,000 prompts, compliance drops by 2-21% under concurrent task load. Vulnerability is highly type-dependent: terminal constraints (requiring action at the response boundary) degrade most, with drops up to 50%, while avoidance constraints remain comparatively robust. A salience-enhanced format (explicit instruction framing plus a trailing reminder) recovers much of the lost compliance, restoring performance to 90-100% in many settings. Interference is bidirectional: formatting constraints can also reduce task accuracy, with one model's GSM8K accuracy dropping from 93% to 27%. In additional stacking experiments, joint compliance declines sharply as constraints accumulate. All results use deterministic programmatic checkers without an LLM-as-judge component on publicly available datasets.

25.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Tackling GNARLy Problems: Graph Neural Algorithmic Reasoning Reimagined through Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2509.18930v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Neural algorithmic reasoning (NAR) is a paradigm that trains neural networks to execute classic algorithms by supervised learning. Despite its successes, important limitations remain: inability to construct valid solutions without post-processing and to reason about multiple correct ones, poor performance on combinatorial NP-hard problems, and inapplicability to problems for which strong algorithms are not yet known. To address these limitations, we reframe the problem of learning algorithm trajectories as a Markov decision process, which imposes structure on the solution construction procedure and unlocks the powerful tools of imitation and reinforcement learning (RL). We propose the GNARL framework, encompassing the methodology to translate problem formulations from NAR to RL and a learning architecture suitable for a wide range of graph-based problems. We achieve very high graph accuracy results on several CLRS-30 problems, performance matching or exceeding much narrower NAR approaches for NP-hard problems and, remarkably, applicability even when lacking an expert algorithm.