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

A Survey on Evaluating Quality and Trustworthiness in LLM-Generated Data

arXiv:2601.17717v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for generating data across various modalities. By transforming data from a scarce resource into a controllable asset, LLMs mitigate the bottlenecks imposed by the acquisition costs of real-world data for model training, evaluation, and system iteration. However, ensuring the high quality of LLM-generated synthetic data remains a critical challenge. Existing research primarily focuses on generation methodologies, with limited direct attention to the quality of the resulting data. Furthermore, most studies are restricted to single modalities, lacking a unified perspective across different data types. To bridge this gap, we propose the LLM Data Auditor framework. In this framework, we first describe how LLMs are utilized to generate data across six distinct modalities. More importantly, we systematically categorize intrinsic metrics for evaluating synthetic data from two dimensions: quality and trustworthiness. This approach shifts the focus from extrinsic evaluation, which relies on downstream task performance, to the inherent properties of the data itself. Using this evaluation system, we analyze the experimental evaluations of representative generation methods for each modality and identify substantial deficiencies in current evaluation practices. Based on these findings, we offer concrete recommendations for the community to improve the evaluation of data generation. Finally, the framework outlines methodologies for the practical application of synthetic data across different modalities.

02.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-25

Security and Privacy in Retrieval-Augmented Generation: Architectures, Threats, Defenses, and Future Directions for Building Trustworthy Systems

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has emerged as a dominant paradigm for enhancing large language models with external knowledge. By coupling retrieval mechanisms with generative models, RAG systems improve factual grounding and adaptability across domains. However, integrating retrieval pipelines introduces new security and privacy risks that extend beyond conventional language modeling threats. Sensitive information may be exposed through retrieval indices, query logs, context construction, or federated updates, while adversarial manipulation of knowledge bases can undermine trust in generated outputs. This survey provides a comprehensive examination of privacy and security challenges across RAG systems deployed in centralized, on-device (Micro-RAG), federated, and hybrid paradigms. We present a unified taxonomy of threat surfaces spanning the retrieval, context construction, and generation stages and systematically analyze attack classes, including membership inference, index inference, poisoning, gradient leakage, and collusion. We further review architectural, algorithmic, and cryptographic defenses, highlighting privacy-utility trade-offs and deployment considerations. Finally, we outline open research challenges toward building trustworthy, secure, and resilient RAG systems for real-world applications.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

MUZZLE: Adaptive Agentic Red-Teaming of Web Agents Against Indirect Prompt Injection Attacks

arXiv:2602.09222v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) based web agents are increasingly deployed to automate complex online tasks by directly interacting with web sites and performing actions on users' behalf. While these agents offer powerful capabilities, their design exposes them to indirect prompt injection attacks embedded in untrusted web content, enabling adversaries to hijack agent behavior and violate user intent. Despite growing awareness of this threat, existing evaluations rely on fixed attack templates, manually selected injection surfaces, or narrowly scoped scenarios, limiting their ability to capture realistic, adaptive attacks encountered in practice. We present MUZZLE, an automated agentic framework for evaluating the security of web agents against indirect prompt injection attacks. MUZZLE utilizes the agent's trajectories to automatically identify high-salience injection surfaces, and adaptively generate context-aware malicious instructions that target violations of confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Unlike prior approaches, MUZZLE adapts its attack strategy based on the agent's observed execution trajectory and iteratively refines attacks using feedback from failed executions. We evaluate MUZZLE across diverse web applications, user tasks, and agent configurations, demonstrating its ability to automatically and adaptively assess the security of web agents with minimal human intervention. Our results show that MUZZLE effectively discovers 44 new attacks on 4 web applications with 10 adversarial objectives that violate confidentiality, availability, or privacy properties across different LLMs and agent scaffolds. MUZZLE also identifies novel attack strategies, including 3 cross-application prompt injection attacks and an agent-tailored phishing scenario.

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

Statistical Properties of Training & Generalization

arXiv:2606.20299v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deep learning has managed to evade numerous intuitions from classical statistics to achieve unprecedented performance on a number of real-world tasks. In this article, we investigate the key features and surprises of deep learning from a physics-informed perspective, taking care to point out and justify where possible the many choices inherent in constructing a deep learning model. In particular, we review the phenomenon of neural scaling laws and discuss their interplay with the constraints and inductive biases which may be present when applying machine learning to problems in physics.

05.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-15

FEMOT: Multi-Object Tracking using Frame and Event Cameras

Conventional RGB cameras have been widely used in multi-object tracking due to their ability to capture rich appearance and semantic information. However, their performance is often degraded under complex real-world challenges, such as motion blur, low illumination, and overexposure. Bio-inspired event cameras offer high temporal resolution and high dynamic range, providing complementary cues under extreme scenarios. Nevertheless, RGB-event multi-object tracking remains underexplored due to the lack of large-scale and well-annotated datasets. To address this issue, we propose FEMOT, a large-scale RGB-event multi-object tracking dataset that covers diverse real-world scenarios and 14 challenging attributes. With both RGB and event data as well as high-quality annotations, FEMOT provides a reliable platform for systematically evaluating RGB-event multi-object tracking methods. Based on FEMOT, we retrain and evaluate over ten strong trackers, thereby establishing a comprehensive benchmark for future research. Furthermore, we propose FEMOTR, a multimodal tracking framework that decouples RGB and event features and fuses them in the frequency domain, thereby effectively exploiting their complementary characteristics for robust object localization and identity association. Extensive experiments on FEMOT and DSEC-MOT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The source code and benchmark dataset have been released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/FEMOT.

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

Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits

arXiv:2602.17315v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Flickering Multi-Armed Bandits (FMAB) to model sequential decision-making in environments with changing action availability, where accessibility of the next action is restricted to a subset dependent on the agent's current choice. We formalize these constraints through stochastically evolving graphs where actions are limited to local neighborhoods. This mobility-constrained structure imposes a dual challenge: the statistical requirement of information acquisition and the physical overhead of navigation. We analyze FMAB under i.i.d. Erdős–R'enyi and Edge-Markovian process, proposing a two-phase lazy random walk algorithm for robust exploration. We establish high-probability sublinear regret bounds and prove near-optimality via a matching information-theoretic lower bound. Our results characterize the intrinsic cost of learning under local-move constraints, complemented by a robotic disaster-response simulation.

07.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Accelerated Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency quantum memory via shortcuts to adiabaticity

arXiv:2603.18399v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) enables coherent light-matter storage, forming the basis of photonic quantum memories that are essential for scalable quantum networks and distributed quantum computing. However, accelerating the storage process violates the adiabatic condition, resulting in the excitation of the lossy intermediate state and a reduction in writing efficiency. We propose and numerically investigate a high-speed, high-fidelity quantum storage scheme by incorporating a shortcut-to-adiabaticity (STA) technique based on counter-diabatic (CD) driving. By introducing a precisely engineered auxiliary field into a conventional EIT system, our protocol significantly shortens the writing time beyond the conventional adiabatic limit while effectively suppressing the transient population of the lossy intermediate state. Furthermore, our scheme demonstrates strong flexibility in pulse design, remaining effective across different temporal profiles of both the control and signal fields. It also exhibits robustness against imperfections in the CD drive. Even with imperfect single-photon writing and non-ideal Rydberg blockade, the scheme retains clear advantages, maintaining high storage performance and overcoming the intrinsic speed-fidelity trade-off of traditional EIT protocols. These features pave the way for fast and robust quantum devices suitable for high-throughput quantum repeaters and advanced quantum information processing.

08.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-22

HTS-Oracle X: AI-Guided Prospective Discovery of Small Molecule Immune Checkpoint Binders

Targeting immune checkpoint protein-protein interactions (PPIs) using small molecules remains limited by the shallow, featureless binding surfaces of co-stimulatory and co-inhibitory receptors and the characteristically low hit rates of conventional high-throughput screening against these interfaces. Here we report HTS-Oracle X, a multimodal deep learning platform that integrates bidirectional cross-attention fusion of ChemBERTa SMILES embeddings with extended RDKit descriptors, trains on continuous biophysical binding signals rather than binary labels, and employs Monte Carlo Dropout uncertainty quantification for uncertainty-adjusted compound selection. Trained on 45,760 Dianthus TRIC-screened compounds per target under scaffold-aware cross-validation, HTS-Oracle X was applied prospectively to a 100,160-compound Enamine library against CD28, TIM-3, and VISTA. From 150 model-selected compounds, 45 dose-response confirmed binders were identified (30.0% overall hit rate), yielding enrichment factors of 234-408x over experimentally established random prospective baselines and 16 sub-micromolar hits. The top hits, HX-CD28-1 (KD = 233 nM), HX-TIM3-1 (KD = 249 nM), and HX-VISTA-1 (KD = 345 nM), demonstrated on-target functional activity in immune cell and tumor co-culture assays. HTS-Oracle X represents a scalable AI-guided framework for small molecule discovery against non-enzymatic immune checkpoint targets.

09.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

A Custom Global Screening Array for Integrated Familial Hypercholesterolemia Detection and Polygenic Risk Assessment in a Multi-Ethnic New Zealand Population

Background: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality in New Zealand, with significant inequities affecting M[a]ori and Pacific peoples. Familial hypercholesterolaemia (FH) affects approximately 1 in 313 individuals globally, yet over 90% remain undiagnosed. Standard polygenic risk scores (PRS) derived from European cohorts may not be portable to diverse ancestries. We developed the HoloQ Omniscan Waka Te Ira, a custom Illumina Global Screening Array (GSA) v3 enriched with FH mutations, coronary artery disease (CAD) PRS markers, and network medicine-derived content. Methods: We customised the GSA v3 by adding 43,437 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) targeting FH and CAD. Content included 6,717 unique variants in primary FH genes; 14,005 pathogenic or likely pathogenic cardiovascular and pharmacogene variants; and 5,845 copy number variant probes. We further incorporated 5,232 network medicine derived CAD SNPs, 14,806 rare variants for a multiancestry PRS, and 407 globally diverse and population-specific variants. The final design comprised 47,027 target SNPs. Validation utilised large-scale genotype and whole-genome sequencing (WGS) datasets with PRS benchmarking. Results: In a large European-ancestry dataset, we observed high recovery for common PRS loci but low recovery for population-specific founder variants. The array captured 938 (84%) of all pathogenic or likely pathogenic FH variants catalogued in ClinVar, representing a 26.4% expansion beyond the standard backbone array. WGS validation identified additional carriers of rare high impact variants present only in the custom content. The selected CAD PRS model achieved an adjusted area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.786. Conclusion: The HoloQ Omniscan Waka Te Ira enhances detection of clinically relevant FH variants and provides robust PRS coverage. The low recovery of population-specific alleles underscores the necessity of this custom array for equitable genomic medicine in New Zealand's multi-ethnic population.

10.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-18

The Wrong Kind of Right: Quantifying and Localizing Misfired Alignment in LLMs

Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment. Instead, this paper highlights the need for principled approaches to more advanced alignment. Alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave safely and reliably, including by avoiding unsafe inferences. However, we show that such safety-oriented behaviors can misfire: models may reject warranted conclusions even when they are explicitly supported by context. We call this failure mode misfired alignment, where alignment-induced changes cause LLMs to override explicit evidence. To quantify this phenomenon, specifically on stereotype-related alignment, we introduce VETO, a benchmark consisting of 2,032 BBQ-derived contrastive pairs, and define a new metric, Misfired Alignment Rate (MAR), which measures on a 0 to 100 scale how often a model fails on a stereotype-related question but succeeds on its contrastive counterpart. We benchmark 25 LLMs on VETO, and show that all LLMs, including the most recent ones, exhibit non-trivial (4.7 to 18.9%) MARs while all human participants achieve 0.0% MAR. Controlled priming experiments further show that alignment-induced cues can substantially amplify MAR across LLMs, indicating that these failures are not merely artifacts of individual examples but can be induced by safety-related framing. Mechanistic analyses on open-weight LLMs reveal late-layer suppression of evidence-supported answers, and comparisons between instruct and base LLMs suggest that this suppression emerges after instruction training. These findings show that current alignment methods can overgeneralize surface-level safety cues, to the point of overriding objective evidence, motivating more work on alignment objectives that better preserve contextual grounding.

11.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Formalizing and Mitigating Structural Distortion in LLM Attention for Zero-Shot Graph Reasoning

arXiv:2606.15633v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise for reasoning over Text-Attributed Graphs (TAGs). However, applying LLMs to graphs requires linearizing their structure into sequences, introducing distortion rooted in the graph bandwidth problem. While this distortion has been shown to degrade performance, it is often attributed to prompt design or model scale, leaving the underlying mechanism unclear. In this work, we show how rotary positional embeddings turn graph linearization into bandwidth-dependent attention decay, suppressing attention between graph-adjacent nodes that are forced far apart in the serialized sequence. This shifts the focus of LLM-based graph reasoning from prompt engineering and scaling toward correcting attention misalignment. Motivated by this analysis, we propose Graph-aligned Language Attention (GaLA), a lightweight, inference-time modification for LLMs. GaLA biases attention toward graph-adjacent nodes while preserving the LLM's sequential inductive biases. Across TAG benchmarks, GaLA improves performance with negligible overhead, demonstrating that distortion is a correctable bottleneck in LLM-based graph reasoning.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

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

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

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

The Reservoir Attention Network: Cross-Pass State in Pretrained Transformers via Content-Addressable Reservoir Injection

Authors:

arXiv:2606.15678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A feasibility and dynamics study of the Reservoir Attention Network (RAN), an architecture that injects a fixed, randomly-initialized reservoir into the mid-layer attention of a pretrained transformer to carry state across forward passes. Experiments span GPT-2 (124M, 355M) to Qwen2.5 (0.5B, 1.5B) on a single consumer GPU. The tasks are minimal probes chosen to isolate individual mechanisms; the broader always-alive agent vision is treated throughout as compute-limited future work, not a claim of this paper. The reservoir is left untrained (fixed random) by design: this isolates whether untrained recurrent dynamics alone suffice to carry usable cross-pass state, leaving trained recurrence as a complementary, more expensive direction.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-12

Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees for Stratified Classification

arXiv:2606.13295v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In the era of Explainable Artificial Intelligence, there is a renewed focus on single trees for their ease of interpretation. This paper introduces Simultaneous Latent Budget Trees, a probabilistic machine learning framework for classification trees in the presence of a stratification factor such as a temporal, spatial, or demographic variable, acting as a control variable or potential confounder. Standard tree growth procedures are not designed to optimize a conditional split rule. A model-based split rule is proposed in which child nodes are interpreted as latent components of a simultaneous mixture model, such as the Simultaneous Latent Budget Model and its constrained versions, fitted to the parent node. Mixing parameters drive the observations, differently for each group, to the child nodes whereas latent budgets parameters update the response classes profile of each level of the control variable. Parameters are estimated by least squares considering a neural network perspective of the model. An informative tree structure can be interactively visualized with interpretation aids on the node and the paths, including visual pruning and decision tree selection procedure. Suitable measures are proposed to handle an unbalanced response class distribution. The proposed methodology is applied to investigate gender-related differences in disease progression of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. The SLBT library with the various tree-based algorithms is available in the linked GitHub repository.

15.
PLOS Computational Biology 2026-06-22

pyhgf: A neural network library for predictive coding

by Nicolas Legrand, Lilian Weber, Peter Thestrup Waade, Anna Hedvig Møller Daugaard, Mojtaba Khodadadi, Nace Mikuš, Christoph Mathys Bayesian models of cognition have gained considerable traction in computational neuroscience and psychiatry. Their scopes are now expected to expand rapidly to artificial intelligence, providing general inference frameworks to support embodied, adaptable, and energy-efficient autonomous agents. A central theory in this domain is predictive coding, which posits that learning and behaviour are driven by hierarchical probabilistic inferences about the causes of sensory inputs. Biological realism constrains these networks to rely on simple local computations in the form of precision-weighted predictions and prediction errors. This can make this framework highly efficient, but its implementation comes with unique challenges on the software development side. Embedding such models in standard neural network libraries often becomes limiting, as these libraries’ compilation and differentiation backends can force a conceptual separation between optimization algorithms and the systems being optimized. This critically departs from other biological principles such as self-monitoring, self-organisation, cellular growth, and functional plasticity. In this paper, we introduce pyhgf: a Python package backed by JAX and Rust for creating, manipulating, and sampling dynamic networks for predictive coding. We improve over other frameworks by enclosing the network components as transparent, modular, and malleable variables in the message-passing steps. The resulting graphs can implement arbitrary algorithms as belief propagation. Moreover, the transparency of core variables can also translate into inference processes that leverage self-organisation principles and express structure learning, meta-learning, or causal discovery as the consequence of network structural adaptation to surprising inputs. The main functions of the library are differentiable and seamlessly integrate into sampling or optimization workflows. Additionally, we offer generalized Bayesian filtering and the hierarchical Gaussian filter as key examples of dynamic networks implemented in our library. The source code, tutorials, and documentation are hosted under the main repository at https://github.com/ComputationalPsychiatry/pyhgf.

16.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cardiologists perspectives on sociocultural and structural factors shaping cardiovascular genetic testing

Introduction: Genetic testing is increasingly central to the diagnosis and management of cardiovascular genetic conditions. However, use and follow-through vary across patient populations. Examining clinician perspectives on sociocultural and structural factors influencing testing is important for understanding these differences and informing public health genomics research and implementation efforts. Methods: We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 cardiologists from health systems across the United States who have integrated cardiogenetics in their practice. Interviews explored experiences diagnosing cardiovascular genetic conditions among patients from underrepresented backgrounds, as well as approaches to incorporating social and contextual information into care. Data were coded thematically and analyzed using a framework analysis guided by the Health Equity Implementation Framework and Social Determinants of Health domains. Results: Clinicians described multi-level factors shaping genetic testing practices, including patient-provider interactions, clinical workflows, health system infrastructure, and broader policy contexts. Key themes included challenges communicating complex genetic information across language and literacy differences; patient trust shaped by prior healthcare experiences; fragmented insurance coverage separating genetic testing from genetic counseling; and challenges interpreting variants of uncertain significance, particularly for populations underrepresented in genomic reference databases. Clinicians also described adaptive strategies, such as interdisciplinary collaboration, telehealth, and patient assistance programs, that supported testing in some settings but were often inconsistent or resource-dependent. Conclusion: Among cardiologists using genetic testing, system-level and sociocultural factors shape the feasibility and downstream use of cardiovascular genetic testing. Findings highlight considerations for public health-informed genomic infrastructure that accounts for social context, supports communication, and reduces reliance on individual clinician workarounds, with implications for clinical decision support and related public health genomics initiatives.

17.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Anomaly Detection via Mean Shift Density Enhancement

arXiv:2602.03293v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Unsupervised anomaly detection stands as an important problem in machine learning. Existing unsupervised anomaly detection algorithms rarely perform well across different anomaly types, often excelling only under specific structural assumptions. This lack of robustness also becomes particularly evident under noisy settings. We propose Mean Shift Density Enhancement (MSDE), a fully unsupervised framework that detects anomalies through their geometric response to density-driven manifold evolution. MSDE is designed as a general purpose anomaly detection framework, based on the principle that normal samples, being well supported by local density, remain stable under iterative density enhancement, whereas anomalous samples undergo large cumulative displacements as they are attracted toward nearby density modes. To operationalize this idea, MSDE employs a weighted mean-shift procedure with adaptive, sample-specific density weights derived from a manifold learning-based fuzzy neighborhood graph. We evaluate MSDE on an anomaly detection benchmark comprising 46 real-world tabular datasets, four realistic anomaly generation mechanisms, and six noise levels. Compared to 13 established unsupervised baselines, MSDE achieves consistently strong, balanced and robust performance for several standard classification metrics, at several noise levels and on average over several types of anomalies. These results demonstrate that displacement-based scoring provides a robust alternative to the existing state-of-the-art for unsupervised anomaly detection.

18.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

A polynomial-time approximation scheme for minimum-weight decoding of topological codes

arXiv:2606.18145v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Two-dimensional topological translationally invariant (2D TTI) stabilizer codes lie at the heart of fault-tolerant quantum computation, but using them requires solving the decoding problem. Minimum-weight decoding of these codes was recently shown to be NP-hard, even in basic settings, such as the color code with Pauli $Z$ errors and the toric code with Pauli $X$, $Y$ and $Z$ errors. Here, we prove that minimum-weight decoding of 2D TTI codes nonetheless admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS), i.e., for any constant $\varepsilon>0$, a recovery operator of weight within a multiplicative factor of $1+\varepsilon$ of the minimum can be found in polynomial time. Our approach builds on Arora's PTAS for Euclidean problems, such as the traveling salesman problem, and applies when decoding can be cast in terms of point-like excitations connected by string-like errors. It therefore extends beyond two dimensions, covering certain higher-dimensional topological codes and quantum memories, including the toric code with phenomenological or circuit-level noise.

19.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-11

Association between depressive symptoms and physical function among participants with heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic And Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study.

Background: Depression and heart disease frequently co-occur in the aging population and are associated with functional decline and poor health outcomes. Understanding how depressive symptoms relate to different aspects of physical function among adults with heart disease may help identify high-risk subgroups. Objective: To examine the association of depressive symptoms with self-reported and observed physical function measures among participants with heart disease in the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke (REGARDS) study and assess whether associations differ by sex and race?sex groups. Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional analysis using data from REGARDS study second in-home visit (2013?2016). Depressive symptoms were measured with the 10-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression scale (CES D 10), considering scores ?10 as clinically significant. Physical function measures were instrumental activities of daily living (IADL), activities of daily living (ADL), chair stand time (5 repetitions), and gait speed. Linear regression models estimated associations of depressive symptoms with function, adjusting for sociodemographic, health behavior, antidepressant medications, body mass index, and social support. Effect modification by sex and race?sex group was evaluated. Results: Among 3,055 participants, 11.7% had CES D 10 ?10. Compared to CES-D-10 scores

20.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

HiMPO: Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization for Less-Entangled Credit in Long-Horizon Agents

Long-horizon agents rely on memory mechanisms to compress interaction history, but optimizing memory writing faces a distinct credit assignment challenge: a memory update may be rewarded or penalized due to downstream tool failures, noisy observations, or reasoning errors rather than its own contribution. This causally entangled credit can lead agents to discard useful evidence or preserve irrelevant information. We propose HiMPO, a Hindsight-Informed Memory Policy Optimization framework for assigning less-entangled credit to memory-writing actions in long-horizon agents. HiMPO first estimates the local utility of a memory update by comparing the task-relevant information recoverable from the previous and updated memories under the same pre-write state. It then uses hindsight relevance as a bounded retrospective filter that attenuates memory credit when local utility is not supported by the target outcome. The resulting memory-specific advantage is applied only to memory tokens, while trajectory-level rewards optimize the rest of the agent behavior. Across judge-based open-domain tasks and objective compressive-memory QA, HiMPO improves over strong memory-based and RL-based baselines while preserving compressed-context efficiency. Controlled interventions further show that HiMPO reduces blame leakage from tool-induced errors and improves attribution fidelity of memory updates.

21.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-17

Non-Medical COVID-19 Impacts and Hearing Status: A Global Study of Differential Health Impact Among Deaf, Hard of Hearing, and Hearing Populations

Background: Deaf and hard of hearing (HoH) experienced complex challenges during the COVID19 pandemic, including obscured visual communication from mask mandates, inaccessible public health messaging, and inadequate interpreter availability. We examined whether hearing status predicted nonmedical COVID19 impact on a global level. Methods: We conducted a nested cross-sectional analysis within a global study collecting data across two waves (April to May 2020 and July to August 2022) from 184 countries. Participants (N=7,998) were categorized as Deaf (n=304), Hard of Hearing (HoH; n=951), or Hearing (n=6,743). The primary outcome was a composite COVID-related non-medical Personal Impact TScore derived from 14 items across employment, resource access, and healthcare domains. Multinomial logistic regression models progressively adjusted for demographic, structural, and psychosocial variables. Results: Deaf participants reported substantially higher rates of pandemic-related job loss (28.9% vs. 9.6% hearing), healthcare cancellations (39.9% vs. 24.6%), and inability to obtain basic supplies. Over half (55.9%) of Deaf participants scored above the median composite impact index, compared to 39.2% of hearing participants. In the fully adjusted model, Deaf status remained an independent predictor of high non-medical impact (aOR=1.6, 95% CI: 1.1 to 2.4). HoH status showed no statistically significant difference from hearing participants in any model. Conclusions: People identifying as Deaf experienced significant disparities during COVID19 when compared with HoH or hearing people, driven by language access barriers and institutional exclusion rather than hearing loss per se. These experiences underscore the importance for systemic interventions centering on accessible communication, Deaf-centered needs, and reducing audism in Deaf-hearing interaction.

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

Federated Bilevel Performative Prediction

arXiv:2606.19734v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Federated bilevel optimization is widely used for nested learning problems across distributed clients, such as federated hyperparameter tuning and meta-learning under privacy and communication constraints. Most existing formulations assume fixed client data distributions, which can be violated by performativity, where deployed decisions reshape client behavior and data collection, inducing client-specific, decision-dependent distribution shift. We study federated bilevel performative prediction, where both upper-level (UL) and lower-level (LL) objectives are evaluated under client-dependent, decision-dependent distributions. We formalize the federated bilevel performatively stable (FBPS) point under a decoupled-risk perspective and provide sufficient conditions for its existence and uniqueness. We then develop two federated methods to compute the FBPS solution: FBi-RRM, which converges linearly under a contraction condition, and FBi-SGD, a communication-efficient stochastic method based on federated hypergradient estimation with convergence guarantees under diminishing step sizes when sensitivities are sufficiently small. Experiments on strategic regression and meta strategic classification validate the predicted stability thresholds and demonstrate improved meta-generalization over non-performative baselines, and CNN-based classification further demonstrates the practical effectiveness of the proposed methods in nonconvex neural network settings.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-24

Cortisol Stress Response is Associated with Iron Status in Pregnancy

Background: Iron deficiency (ID) affects up to 40% of pregnant women in the third trimester, even in highly resourced and iron-supplemented populations, with adverse consequences for maternal health and long-term offspring development. Psychological stress may compromise iron status through hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis dysregulation and inflammation, but no study has directly examined cortisol in relation to iron status across human pregnancy. Objective: This longitudinal study examined associations between HPA function and maternal iron status across pregnancy and tested whether IL-6 and CRP mediated the relationship between cortisol and ferritin across gestation. Methods: One hundred sixty-eight pregnant Black women with Medicaid insurance completed up to four laboratory assessments across pregnancy. Salivary cortisol was measured before and in response to the Trier Social Stress Test, yielding basal and reactive cortisol indices. Serum ferritin, IL-6, and CRP were collected at each visit. Trimester-specific regression models examined cortisol reactivity in relation to ferritin; linear mixed-effects models with moderated mediation tested whether basal cortisol predicted ferritin via inflammation. Results: Higher cortisol reactivity was associated with lower ferritin specifically in the third trimester (std. {beta} = -0.197, p = .004). Higher basal cortisol predicted a steeper IL-6 rise across gestation (p = .002), and IL-6 was positively associated with ferritin (b = 0.236, p = .006), consistent with inflammatory iron sequestration. The indirect effect of basal cortisol on ferritin via IL-6 was statistically significant, and higher basal cortisol was negatively associated with cortisol reactivity in the third trimester. No pathway was observed through CRP. Conclusion: Greater cortisol reactivity predicted lower third-trimester ferritin, a pattern that suggests cumulative iron depletion, atypically sustained HPA reactivity in late pregnancy, or both. To our knowledge, this is the first prospective study linking cortisol reactivity to iron status across human pregnancy, identifying maternal stress physiology as a novel target for understanding and addressing gestational iron deficiency.

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

HEad and neCK TumOR (HECKTOR) 2025: Benchmark of Segmentation, Diagnosis, and Prognosis in Multimodal PET/CT

Head and neck cancers (HNC) represent a significant global health burden, with accurate tumor delineation being essential for effective radiotherapy planning. The complexity of the oropharyngeal anatomy, combined with the heterogeneous appearance of tumors on imaging, makes manual segmentation time-intensive and subject to inter-observer variability. Beyond segmentation, predicting long-term clinical outcomes, such as recurrence-free survival (RFS), and determining human papillomavirus (HPV) status from noninvasive imaging, remain challenging yet clinically valuable goals. The HECKTOR 2025 challenge addresses these needs by establishing a comprehensive benchmark for automated HNC analysis using multimodal PET/CT imaging and electronic health records. Building on previous editions (2020-2022), this challenge features an expanded multi-institutional dataset comprising over 1,100 patients from 10 centers worldwide. Participants were tasked with three complementary objectives: (1) segmenting primary gross tumor volumes (GTVp) and metastatic lymph nodes (GTVn), (2) predicting recurrence-free survival, and (3) classifying HPV status. The challenge attracted 35 registered teams, with 15 final submissions evaluated on a held-out test set. Top-performing algorithms achieved a mean Dice similarity coefficient of 0.75 for segmentation, a concordance index of 0.66 for survival prediction, and a balanced accuracy of 0.56 for HPV classification. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of the submitted methodologies, evaluates their performance across different lesion characteristics, and discusses their implications for clinical translation in automated oncology workflows and decision support systems.

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

HaineiFRDM: Structure-Preserving Diffusion for Film Restoration under Fast Motion and Diverse Defects

Existing film-restoration methods frequently fail under fast motion, producing limb disappearance and structural distortion due to inaccurate motion modeling. Moreover, high-resolution restoration under spatially-persistent and mixed defects remains insufficiently studied. We propose HaineiFRDM, a Film Restoration Diffusion Model that leverages the content modeling capability of diffusion models for content-aware restoration, removing defects while preserving scene structure.To enable scalable high-resolution restoration, we adopt a patch-wise strategy with position-aware global fusion modules to maintain cross-patch coherence. We further introduce a frequency-based module to enhance texture consistency and a patch-consistent inference framework to alleviate blocking artifacts introduced by patch-based processing.We also construct a film restoration dataset comprising categorized defect templates, professionally restored films, and realistic synthetic degradations.Extensive experiments demonstrate our superior restoration quality with strong structural consistency. Our design also reduces memory requirements, enabling high-resolution restoration on a single 24GB-VRAM GPU.Code and the dataset will be released at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/HaineiFRDM.