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01.
arXiv (math.PR) 2026-06-15

Stability of Synthetic Ricci Curvature Lower Bounds for Inverse Limit Extended Metric Measure Spaces

arXiv:2606.14322v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that every Polish extended metric measure space arises as an inverse limit of metric measure spaces up to isomorphism. We then prove that synthetic Ricci curvature lower bounds and several functional inequalities, including the log-Sobolev, Talagrand, Poincaré, and dimension-free Harnack inequalities are stable under inverse limit. We discuss applications to infinite-dimensional spaces, including abstract Wiener spaces and their quotient spaces.

02.
Nature Medicine 2026-06-15

Plasma proteomic signatures of cellular aging predict human disease

Authors:

Aging is asynchronous across cells and organs. Here we tested whether plasma proteomics can be used to analyze cell type-specific aging. From analyses of over 7,000 plasma proteins measured in 60,542 individuals, we developed machine learning models to estimate the biological age of over 40 cell types spanning neuronal, immune, glial, endocrine, epithelial and musculoskeletal origins. We observed that 20–25% of individuals exhibited accelerated aging in a single cell type and 1–3% in 10 or more cell types. Cellular aging signatures were associated with disease status and predicted incident disease and mortality over 15 years of follow-up. Individuals with the APOE4 genotype showed older astrocytes but younger macrophages compared to APOE3 carriers, whereas the APOE2 genotype had inverse associations. Moreover, extreme astrocyte aging tripled the risk of incident Alzheimer’s Disease in individuals with two APOE4 alleles, while youthful astrocytes reduced risk. Individuals with extremely aged compared to youthful skeletal myocytes exhibited a 12.7-fold higher risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. In individuals who smoked, extreme respiratory epithelial cell aging was associated with a 58% higher lung cancer risk compared to smoking alone. Specific cellular vulnerabilities and cumulative cellular aging burden influenced survival, with youthful immune and neuronal cell types conferring protective effects. Finally, we developed a polycellular aging risk score that stratified mortality risk across cohorts and proteomics platforms. These findings establish a framework for quantifying human physiology at cellular resolution, revealing heterogeneous aging trajectories and their impact on disease susceptibility and resilience. The biological age of individual cell types can be evaluated using plasma proteomics, revealing diverse aging profiles across more than 40 cell types and links between the accelerated aging of specific cell types and disease.

03.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Knowledge-Graph Grounding Helps LLMs Only for Out-of-Training Knowledge: A Controlled Study on Clinical Question Answering

A recent Nature Medicine study reports that general-purpose frontier LLMs outperform specialized retrieval-augmented clinical tools on medical benchmarks, and that retrieval can hurt strong models. We ask the natural follow-up: does structured knowledge-graph (KG) grounding change this, and when does grounding help at all? We contribute two results. First, a reproduction: the study's headline HealthBench score (~88) is the Consensus variant, not full HealthBench, where frontier models and ideal completions both score ~46-47 under a physician-calibrated grader (agreement 82.5%); we reproduce GPT-5.2 Consensus =90.9 and flag a score-deflating grader bug. Second, a knowledge-boundary result. Using a graph+vector engine (samyama-graph) over the public biomedical KG PrimeKG, neither naive triple retrieval nor an agentic natural-language-to-Cypher loop (82% successful queries) improves MedQA across a weak-to-strong model ladder (all |Delta|

04.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

PCR-CA: Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment for Multiple-Category App Recommendation

arXiv:2508.18166v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern app store recommender systems struggle with multiple-category apps, as traditional taxonomies fail to capture overlapping semantics, leading to suboptimal personalization. We propose PCR-CA (Parallel Codebook Representations with Contrastive Alignment), an end-to-end framework for improved CTR prediction. PCR-CA first extracts compact multimodal embeddings from app text, then introduces a Parallel Codebook VQ-AE module that learns discrete semantic representations across multiple codebooks in parallel – unlike hierarchical residual quantization (RQ-VAE). This design enables independent encoding of diverse aspects (e.g., gameplay, art style), better modeling multiple-category semantics. To bridge semantic and collaborative signals, we employ a contrastive alignment loss at both the user and item levels, enhancing representation learning for long-tail items. Additionally, a dual-attention fusion mechanism combines ID-based and semantic features to capture user interests, especially for long-tail apps. Experiments on a large-scale dataset show PCR-CA achieves a +0.76% AUC improvement over strong baselines, with +2.15% AUC gains for long-tail apps. Online A/B testing further validates our approach, showing a +10.52% lift in CTR and a +16.30% improvement in CVR, demonstrating PCR-CA's effectiveness in real-world deployment. The new framework has now been fully deployed on the Microsoft Store.

05.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-18

CAPRA: Scaling Feedback on Software Architecture Deliverables with a Multi-Agent LLM System

arXiv:2606.18976v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated assessment in software engineering education has advanced significantly for code grading and essay scoring. However, reviewing software architecture deliverables, which requires analyzing structural completeness and requirements traceability, has not yet been fully automated. Applying Large Language Models (LLMs) to this task requires robust architectures to ensure technical feedback is accurate and reliable for students. This paper presents CAPRA (Configurable Architecture Proficiency Report Assessment), a multi-agent LLM system that analyzes software architecture deliverables to generate personalized, template-compliant LaTeX feedback. As a core design choice, CAPRA coordinates multiple specialized agents and employs a Python-based microservice for multi-modal document extraction, utilizing PyMuPDF and vision-enabled LLMs (specifically gpt-4o) to parse text and UML diagrams. To ensure educational reliability and mitigate hallucinations, CAPRA introduces a deterministic Evidence Anchoring step using fuzzy matching via normalized Levenshtein distance, along with a ConsistencyManager agent that cross-verifies, deduplicates, and merges findings. System performance is assessed using a structured eight-criterion binary evaluation taxonomy covering: (i) extraction completeness, (ii) feature validation, (iii) issue grounding and severity detection, (iv) recommendation specificity and traceability, and (v) template and tone compliance. A preliminary empirical evaluation on 10 student reports shows that CAPRA satisfied 88.8% of the evaluated criteria under a strict two-rater aggregation rule, achieved moderate inter-rater agreement with human evaluators (kappa = 0.582), and processed each report in slightly over 4 minutes. While these results support the viability of LLM-supported architectural feedback, human oversight remains essential for subjective assessment dimensions.

06.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-18

Distinct Neuronal, Proliferative, and Secretory Pathways are Perturbed in Cancer Survivors with Depressive Symptoms

Introduction Depression is highly prevalent among cancer survivors and may be biologically distinct, although clinical studies investigating these mechanisms remain limited. Thus, the aims of this study were to (1) identify perturbed biological pathways associated with depressive symptom severity in cancer survivors, and (2) investigate whether these pathways are common or distinct to those perturbed in an age-matched non-cancer cohort. Methods We analyzed cross-sectional self-reported and transcriptomic data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (PHD #39341). Cancer survivors and an age-matched non-cancer cohort (target ratio 1:2) were identified. The 20-item Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) was used to split participants into low (CES-D

07.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

GPO: Learning from Critical Steps to Improve LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2509.16456v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in various domains, showing impressive potential on different tasks. Recently, reasoning LLMs have been proposed to improve the reasoning or thinking capabilities of LLMs to solve complex problems. Despite the promising results of reasoning LLMs, enhancing the multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs still remains a significant challenge. While existing optimization methods have advanced the LLM reasoning capabilities, they often treat reasoning trajectories as a whole, without considering the underlying critical steps within the trajectory. In this paper, we introduce Guided Pivotal Optimization (GPO), a novel fine-tuning strategy that dives into the reasoning process to enable more effective improvements. GPO first identifies the `critical step' within a reasoning trajectory - a point that the model must carefully proceed to succeed at the problem. We locate the critical step by estimating the advantage function. GPO then resets the policy to the critical step, samples the new rollout and prioritizes the learning process on those rollouts. This focus allows the model to learn more effectively from pivotal moments within the reasoning process to improve the reasoning performance. We demonstrate that GPO is a general strategy that can be integrated with various optimization methods to improve reasoning performance. Besides theoretical analysis, our experiments across challenging reasoning benchmarks show that GPO can consistently and significantly enhance the performance of existing optimization methods, showcasing its effectiveness and generalizability in improving LLM reasoning by concentrating on pivotal moments within the generation process.

08.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-24

Qwen-AgentWorld: Language World Models for General Agents

A world model predicts environment dynamics based on current observations and actions, serving as a core cognitive mechanism for reasoning and planning. In this work, we investigate how world modeling based on language models can further push the boundaries of general agents. (i) We first focus on building foundation models for agentic environment simulation. We introduce Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B and Qwen-AgentWorld-397B-A17B, the first language world models capable of simulating agentic environments covering 7 domains via long chain-of-thought reasoning. Leveraging more than 10M environment interaction trajectories of 7 domains in real-world environments, we develop Qwen-AgentWorld through a three-stage training pipeline: CPT injects general-purpose world modeling capabilities from the state transition dynamics and augmented professional corpora, SFT activates next-state-prediction reasoning, and RL sharpens simulation fidelity through a tailored framework with hybrid rubric-and-rule rewards. To evaluate language world models, we present AgentWorldBench, a comprehensive benchmark constructed from real-world interactions of 5 frontier models on 9 established benchmarks. Empirical results demonstrate that Qwen-AgentWorld significantly outperforms existing frontier models. (ii) Beyond foundation models, we further investigate two complementary paradigms through which world modeling enhances general agents. First, as a decoupled environment simulator, Qwen-AgentWorld supports scalable and controllable simulation of thousands of real-world environments for agentic RL, yielding gains that surpass real-environment training alone. Second, as a unified agent foundation model, world-model training acts as a highly effective warm-up that improves downstream performance across 7 agentic benchmarks. Code: https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen-AgentWorld

09.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-16

ttda704 at SemEval-2026 Task 4: Modeling Narrative Structures via Pseudonymization and Multi-View Sentence Alignment

We present our approach to SemEval 2026 Task 4: Narrative Story Similarity and Narrative Representation Learning. Our solution uses contrastive learning with fine-tuned sentence transformers to capture narrative similarity across abstract themes, course of action, and outcomes. We develop two pipelines: (Track A) a single-view method that encodes full narratives with smart layer freezing to reduce overfitting, and (Track B) a multi-view method that models theme, plot, and outcome with view-specific projection heads and self-supervised alignment. Both pipelines build on sentence-transformers models and are trained with contrastive loss on synthetic data. The code is available at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/dinhthienan33/SemEval2026-Task4-ttda704.

10.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

MolSight: Molecular Property Prediction with Images

Every molecule ever synthesised can be drawn as a 2D skeletal diagram, yet in modern property prediction this universally available representation has received less focus in favour of molecular graphs, 3D conformers, or billion-parameter language models, each imposing its own computational and data-engineering overhead. We present $MolSight$, the first systematic large-scale study of vision-based Molecular Property Prediction (MPP). Using 10 vision architectures, 7 pre-training strategies, and $2\,M$ molecule images, we evaluate performance across 10 downstream tasks spanning physical-property regression, drug-discovery classification, and quantum-chemistry prediction. To account for the wide variation in structural complexity across pre-training molecules, we further propose a $chemistry-informed curriculum$: five structural complexity descriptors partition the corpus into five tiers of increasing chemical difficulty, consistently outperforming non-curriculum baselines. We show that a single rendered bond-line image, processed by a vision encoder, is sufficient for competitive molecular property prediction, i.e. $chemical insight from sight alone$. The best curriculum-trained configuration achieves the top result on $5 of 10$ benchmarks and top two on $all 10$, at $$80$\times$ lower$$ FLOPs than the nearest multi-modal competitor.

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

LUCID: Learned Undersampling-Adaptive Consistency-Guided Inference with Deterministic Flow Matching for Sparse-View CT Reconstruction

Sparse-view CT reduces radiation dose and scanning time by acquiring fewer projection views, but angular undersampling makes reconstruction severely ill-posed, causing streak artifacts, structural blurring, and loss of fine details. Existing supervised methods are often tied to specific sampling settings, whereas generative methods may introduce anatomically inconsistent hallucination-like structures under severe undersampling. We propose Lucid, a sparsity-adaptive, consistency-guided reconstruction framework based on a Flow Matching generative prior for sparse-view CT. Lucid is trained only on high-quality CT images to learn a continuous transport between a Gaussian distribution and the high-quality CT image distribution, independent of view sampling. During inference, the sampling sparsity level is explicitly incorporated to adapt the generative trajectory of a single pretrained model. Specifically, Lucid constructs a degradation-matched initial state by sparsity-weighted fusion of the sparse-view FBP image and Gaussian noise, performs sparsity-modulated Flow Matching updates, and applies projection-domain data-consistency correction after each prior update. Experiments under multiple sparse-view settings show that Lucid achieves stable reconstruction performance across different sampling densities, improves image quality and structural fidelity, and reduces the risk of hallucination-like structures in generative sparse-view CT reconstruction.

12.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

The Tao of Agency: Autotelic AI, Embedded Agency and Dissolution of the Self

Authors:

arXiv:2606.19924v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Most artificial intelligence systems are built on the assumption that goals are exogenous and specified by the designer. Exploring what happens when an agent begins generating its own goals opens the field of autotelic AI. Agents are expected not merely to pursue objectives but to discover them. In this article, we trace its consequences through intrinsic motivation, resource-driven priors, causal-interventional learning, homeostasis, and embeddedness; the last of which is found to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for autotelic agency. Embeddedness individuates the agent at the cost of revealing that the individuation is non-unique, such that the same dynamics admit many valid partitions, each defining a different candidate self. The deepest problem with autotelic AI is therefore not how the agent generates goals, but how it generates and relativizes the self to which the goals are assigned. The agent must believe in its own boundary in order to act, and see through that boundary in order to understand. We consolidate these developments into a single framework and extend it along three directions: a quantum formulation in which the agent-environment cut becomes physical, a philosophical reading against non-dual contemplative traditions, and a concrete LLM-based agentic instantiation.

13.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

A Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion Instrument for Measuring Regional Human Mobility: The Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE)

arXiv:2603.21639v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Accurately estimating human mobility in peripheral regional economies presents a fundamental measurement challenge: physical ground-truth sensors are sparse, behavioral intent signals are heterogeneous, and environmental friction introduces systematic bias into demand inference. We introduce the Distributed Human Data Engine (DHDE), a multi-modal sensor fusion architecture that addresses this challenge by integrating physical instrumentation (Edge-AI cameras), digital intent signals (route search impression metrics), behavioral records (90,350 spending records, 97,719 standardized survey responses), and meteorological data across four geographically distributed nodes in Fukui, Japan. The primary measurement-science contribution is the design, deployment, and cross-node validation of the DHDE as a sparse-sensor compensation instrument: a heterogeneous sensor fusion architecture that anchors non-stationary digital intent signals to concurrent physical ground-truth counts, correcting for systematic bias introduced by meteorological planning friction. The instrument is implemented as an ensemble inference pipeline (Random Forest and Ordinary Least Squares with Newey-West robust inference), calibrated across 397 daily observations and validated by chronological holdout replication across four geographically distinct node types. The primary OLS specification achieved an in-sample explanatory power of R2 = 0.810 and a chronological out-of-sample predictive performance of R2 = 0.683. Results identify an Under-Vibrancy Paradox where macro-regional visitor satisfaction correlates positively with crowd density (Spearman rank correlation rs = +0.150, p = 0.002). We estimate an annual proxy gap of 865,917 intent-implied visits, corresponding to JPY 11.96 billion (USD 72.6 million) in foregone revenue.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

PCA-Enhanced Adaptive NVAR Framework for High-Resolution Sea Surface Temperature Forecasting in the East Sea

arXiv:2606.12141v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Accurate forecasting of sea surface temperature (SST) in regional seas such as the East Sea is crucial for monitoring marine ecosystems, assessing climate risks, managing fisheries, and conducting naval operations. Traditional numerical ocean models provide reliable predictions but are computationally expensive and often unsuitable for real-time forecasting. Many deep learning methods also struggle with high-dimensional spatiotemporal ocean data and experience error accumulation over longer forecasting periods. This study builds on our previously proposed Adaptive Next-Generation Reservoir Computing (Adaptive NVAR) framework, initially introduced and tested on synthetic dynamical systems, and extends it to ocean forecasting. We present a reduced-order forecasting framework that combines Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) with Adaptive NVAR to predict SST dynamics in the East Sea. SST fields are compressed into a low-dimensional representation using SVD, which extracts dominant modes of ocean variability. Adaptive NVAR models the temporal evolution of these latent states, and the predicted states are reconstructed into SST forecasts. We evaluate the framework using regional ocean datasets and compare it with the standard NG-RC/NVAR. Results show that Adaptive NVAR consistently achieves lower forecasting errors across multiple prediction horizons. In addition, SVD reduces computational complexity, resulting in a fast and scalable framework suitable for real-time ocean forecasting.

15.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

CEVAR: Centerline Embedding Extraction for Endovascular Aneurysm Repair

Long-term mortality rates after endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) remain elevated due to post-EVAR rupture caused by loss of seal in stent graft sealing zones. Structured CT review using centerline measurements improves detection, but current workflows require manual centerline editing and expert operators. We propose a transformer framework for automated, protocol-driven sealing zone assessment that combines 3D centerline tracking with embedding-based geometric prediction. Two state-of-the-art image-to-graph models are evaluated for aorto-iliac centerline extraction from follow-up CT and for measurement of stent position, vessel diameters, and seal lengths according to EVAR4C protocol. Across the full test set and a challenging no-contrast subset, the proposed fully automatic method outperforms the commercial semi-automatic workflow.

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

Worst-case depth hierarchy for shallow quantum circuits

arXiv:2606.16425v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Circuit depth is a central resource in complexity theory. While bounded-depth classical circuits admit well-understood hierarchy theorems, the internal structure of constant-depth quantum computation remains comparatively unexplored. We prove an explicit depth hierarchy theorem for $\mathsf{QNC}^0$. For each $d\ge 12$, we construct a family of two-round interactive problems on which no depth-$(d-1)$ quantum circuit can achieve near-perfect success, regardless of gate set, circuit size, or ancillary qubits. In contrast, we prove that our construction admits realizations by simple bounded fan-in quantum circuits of depth larger than $d$ by a small constant factor. Moreover, all bounded fan-in classical circuits of sublogarithmic depth (in the input size) fail to achieve perfect success on these tasks for every $d$, yielding a hierarchy of problems that show unconditional quantum advantage of $\mathsf{QNC}^0$ over $\mathsf{NC}^0$. A key obstacle is the scarcity of lower bound techniques for quantum circuits. To address this, we develop methods to analyze how depth affects a circuit's ability to realize nonlocal correlations amongst its output qubits in a fine-grained manner. Our approach exploits the correspondence between constraint systems and nonlocal games, translating group-theoretic constructions into rigid operator-valued constraint systems and then into non-local games. In particular, we construct constraint systems whose unique faithful operator-valued solutions require every perfect strategy, and every near-perfect strategy to a fixed precision, to implement multi-controlled phase operations. This reduces to a nonlocal unitary-synthesis problem, yielding depth lower bounds for both shallow quantum and classical circuits. These results show that increasing depth strictly increases computational power within $\mathsf{QNC}^0$, establishing a genuinely quantum hierarchy.

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

Beyond Benchmarks: Continuous Edge Inference for Fine-Grained Roadside Perception

Continuous AI inference on resource-constrained edge hardware introduces deployment effects that are largely invisible to conventional benchmark evaluation, including temporal instability in streaming video, thermal throttling under sustained load, and workload-dependent performance variability. We present Edge-TSR, a deployment-oriented continuous edge inference system for sustained roadside perception on the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano. Edge-TSR integrates detection, tracking, fine-grained classification, and a lightweight track-aware temporal stabilization mechanism that improves streaming inference consistency with negligible computational overhead. Our central finding is that benchmark-centric evaluation systematically overstates deployed edge inference performance. Across three state-of-the-art baselines, we observe consistent 20-30% relative degradation when transitioning from static-image evaluation to real-world streaming deployment. Edge-TSR addresses this gap through temporal inference stabilization, recovering up to 10.16% classification accuracy over per-frame inference baselines while maintaining sustained real-time performance under continuous operation. We evaluate the complete system under diverse real-world deployment conditions, jointly characterizing inference quality, latency, throughput, and thermal behavior during long-duration operation. A 55-minute vehicular deployment over a 26 km route demonstrates sustained operation at 16.18 FPS within safe thermal limits on a single embedded device without cloud offload. Our findings show that deployment-aware evaluation and temporal inference stabilization are necessary components of continuously operating edge AI systems intended for real-world sensing deployments. We release a sample annotated streaming video evaluation dataset and full system implementation to support reproducible deployment-centric evaluation.

18.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

ERN-Net : Evolving Reason Node-Net for Document Binarization

This paper presents ERN-Net, an Evolving Reason Node-Net for efficient document image binarization. ERN-Net enhances degradation-sensitive regions, such as faint strokes, broken characters, and noisy backgrounds, through evolving reason nodes and multi-scale reasoning. We further compare ResNet-101, ConvNeXt-Tiny, and ConvNeXt-Base, and find that ConvNeXt-Tiny provides the best practical trade-off between accuracy and memory usage. In addition, DIBCO-based pretraining improves binarization performance without increasing model memory consumption, requiring only about 1.5 additional training hours. Experiments on DIBCO-style benchmarks show that ERN-Net is effective under low-data and low-memory settings.

19.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-17

Functional Equivalence in Attention: A Comprehensive Study with Applications to Linear Mode Connectivity

arXiv:2606.17830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural network parameter spaces are inherently non-injective, as distinct parameter configurations can realize identical functions through functional equivalence. While this symmetry is well understood in classical fully connected and convolutional models, it becomes substantially more intricate in modern attention-based architectures. Existing analyses of multihead attention have largely focused on the vanilla formulation, overlooking positional encodings that fundamentally reshape architectural symmetries. In this work, we provide a formal study of functional equivalence in Transformers with positional encodings. Focusing on the two most widely used variants–sinusoidal and rotary positional encodings (RoPE)–we show that sinusoidal encodings preserve the equivalence structure of vanilla attention, whereas rotary encodings significantly reduce the symmetry group, thereby enhancing expressivity. This offers a principled explanation for the growing prominence of RoPE in practice. We further examine how positional encodings affect linear mode connectivity, and through an alignment algorithm, empirically demonstrate that the presence and variability of connectivity across Transformer settings crucially depend on the positional encoding.

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

Shrinkage priors for Bayesian Substitute Confounders

arXiv:2606.18535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-cause observational studies contain information about unmeasured confounding through the dependence structure among causes. However, literal imputation of the unobserved confounder is often more complex than learning a lower-dimensional substitute score that preserves the shared assignment variation needed for stable causal adjustment. The deconfounder (Wang and Blei, 2019) and related substitute confounder methods exploit this idea, but flexible assignment models can fit the joint distribution of the causes while producing scores that over-encode the treatment vector, collapse overlap, or capture single-cause variation. We develop a Bayesian factor assignment framework for learning sparse substitute confounders that retain coarse multi-cause dependence with shrinkage priors. The theory is stated at the level of posterior concentration, factor score contraction, and overlap-preserving assignment geometry and therefore does not rely on a particular shrinkage prior. Under these conditions, the proposed regression-adjusted estimators are consistent for mean potential outcomes when the corresponding latent variable identification assumptions hold. Shrinkage priors provide a natural tool for latent structural learning: they favour low-dimensional factors supported by multiple causes, discourage effectively single-cause factors, and induce an ordering of the latent factors through progressive shrinkage. Synthetic experiments illustrate the roles of signal strength, outcome validity, and geometry-aware regularization. In an Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) baseline analysis, sparse substitute scores recover much of the adjustment obtained by directly conditioning on invasive cerebrospinal-fluid biomarkers, while collapse diagnostics identify when fitted factors reduce to individual observed measurements.

21.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-19

Prompt, Plan, Extract: Zero-Shot Agentic LLMs Workflows for Lung Pathology Extraction from Clinical Narratives

Information extraction from pathology reports is essential for cancer staging, tumor registry population. Yet key data remains embedded in narrative reports, making manual extraction labor-intensive and error-prone. Traditional supervised Natural Language Processing pipelines address this through fully supervised Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction, but require expensive manual annotation and suffer cascading failures when upstream entities are missed. In this study, we developed a zero-shot, agentic workflow, and evaluated five open-source generative Large Language Models (LLMs) to populate 13 College of American Pathologists synoptic fields from lung resection pathology reports. We compared them against a state-of-the-art supervised GatorTron NER-RE baseline using a novel, registry-aligned evaluation framework. The baseline achieved Micro-F1of 0.960, while the best zero-shot model (GPT-OSS-20B) achieved Micro-F1 of 0.893 (recall: 0.949), accurately extracting complex relations like Pathologic Stage without task-specific training. These results suggest that open-source, zero-shot agentic LLMs are a low-cost solution for extracting lung pathology information.

22.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-15

Position: Align AI to Our Aspirations, Not Our Flaws

arXiv:2606.13755v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue that aligning AI to aggregated human preferences is the wrong target. With current technology, one can train AIs to share the values of a Silicon Valley techno-optimist, a degrowth environmentalist, a national-conservative culture warrior, a single-party state cadre, or a devout religious traditionalist. We should not. Human values produce societies that thrive or fail on the merits of those values - from failed states and extreme inequality to declining happiness, political polarization, and government dysfunction in the world's wealthiest democracies. The pluralistic-alignment program correctly diagnoses that there is no single "humanity" to align with, but is dangerous if taken as the main directive. We argue that AI should be trained to a non-negotiable floor of objective alignment goals - competence, bounded by the constraints of factual accuracy, honesty, and lawfulness and that pluralism belongs at the surface (language, register, conventions, missing-context defaults) and across the wide band of legitimate value tradeoffs that respect the floor, but not at the level of values that violate it. We highlight the empirical reality of unfiltered pluralistic values, propose four commitments as a constructive alternative, and engage six credible objections: commercial pressure and practical feasibility, democratic legitimacy, regulatory compliance, over-reliance on institutionalist explanations, the charge that the floor itself is culturally laden, and the limits of Coherent Extrapolated Volition.

23.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

HilDA: Hierarchical Distillation with Diffusion for Advancing Self-Supervised LiDAR Pre-trainin

arXiv:2606.20189v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leveraging Vision Foundation Models (VFMs) for camera-to-LiDAR knowledge distillation offers a promising solution to the scarcity of annotated data needed to represent the immense geometric and kinematic diversity of real-world autonomous driving (AD). However, current approaches typically treat VFMs as black-box teachers, relying exclusively on frame-wise feature similarity. Consequently, they do not fully exploit the teacher's layer-wise semantic structure and global context, as well as the rich spatiotemporal information inherent in LiDAR sequences. We propose HilDA, a self-supervised pretraining framework for LiDAR backbones that better captures the semantic what and geometric where needed for driving tasks. HilDA combines hierarchical distillation comprising multi-layer distillation for progressive semantic alignment and global context distillation for scene-level semantics, with a temporal occupancy diffusion objective promoting spatiotemporal consistency. Models pre-trained with HilDA achieve state-of-the-art results on cross-modal distillation benchmarks and outperform models trained via prior distillation approaches on 3D object detection, scene flow, and semantic occupancy prediction. Code available at: https://maxiuw.github.io/hilda.

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

Evaluation of EEG Foundation Models for Event-Based Burst-Suppression Detection in ICU

arXiv:2606.20074v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Burst suppression (BS) is a clinically relevant electroencephalographic (EEG) pattern used to monitor sedation depth and brain activity in critically ill patients, particularly during induced coma in Intensive Care Units (ICUs). Automatic burst detection remains challenging because BS patterns vary substantially between patients and annotated datasets are scarce. Recently, EEG Foundation Models (FMs) have shown promise across several downstream EEG applications, but their usefulness for BS detection remains unexplored. We present the first study to evaluate EEG FMs for burst detection in reduced-montage ICU EEG without patient-specific calibration. We compare REVE-base, LUNA-large and LuMamba-Tiny with an adaptive thresholding baseline and a task-specific EEGNet baseline. Additionally, we complement conventional EEG window-based classification with event-based burst detection evaluation. This helps assessing clinically whether burst episodes are correctly detected, reducing the impact of expected annotation variability. The best model, REVE-base, achieved the highest event-based F1-score ($0.868 \pm 0.167$) and reduced burst-per-minute error by 52.1% and 36.2% compared to EEGNet and adaptive thresholding respectively, supporting FMs for scalable EEG monitoring in ICU. Ablation experiments showed that full fine-tuning was the most effective adaptation strategy with respect to frozen-backbone training, two-step fine-tuning, and LoRA-based adaptation, improving event-based F1-score over frozen-backbone training by up to $+0.102$ for LUNA-large. With reduced labeled datasets, pretrained REVE-base outperformed random initialization by $+0.723$ event-based F1 points at 25% of the cohort, demonstrating the benefit of pretraining FM representations when adapted to burst detection with limited labeled data.

25.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-24

Compressed Quantum Operators and Roots of Hermite Polynomials

arXiv:2606.24792v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The fundamental position and momentum operators of quantum mechanics are unbounded, but finite rank compressions of the operators can be considered to obtain partial information on the operators and their properties. Motivated by problems in photonic quantum computing, we bring together results from quantum theory and the theory of orthogonal polynomials to show that a natural finite rank compression of the position and momentum operator representation on Fock space Hilbert space has eigenvalues given by roots of the classical Hermite polynomials. We discuss the corresponding compressed displacement operators and potential applications in approximate quantum error correction.